by Nancy Kress
“I love you, Maggie.”
“Uhmmmmmmm … oh, yes, Nick, just like that.”
She always knew what she wanted. For fifty-one years, I’ve been grateful it was me.
Afterward, the wrister rang again. Maggie dozed, one leg flung over mine, a stray white curl tickling my nose. I must have slept, too; morning light filtered through the curtains. Maggie woke and shifted. “Damn it, why can’t they let you sleep? Don’t answer it; it’s probably just a tingling in Paula Schaeffer’s other leg.”
“Unlike what’s tingling on you,” I teased.
“Don’t answer it, Nick.”
“Reception,” I said to the wrister.
“Probably a tingling in Paula Schaeffer’s eyelashes.”
But it wasn’t. It was Jan Suleiman, clerk for the Committee, and a long-time friend. Often Jan made sure I heard things some people would prefer I not hear. I listened, and slowly sat up, staring into the darkness across our bedroom.
“Nick?” Maggie said. “What is it?”
When the call was finished, I told her. I always told Maggie everything, even things I should not. She was absolutely trustworthy. I told her about my remaining patients, about the economic struggles of the Doctors for Humanity Volunteer MedCenter, about the political struggles at the Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises. There was only one thing I hadn’t told her yet, and I would, when the time was right. So now I repeated to her what had been allegedly seen yesterday, in the maglev explosion northeast of the city, in Lanham. Then I held her for a long minute before getting up, and dressing, and calling a car for the ride from Bethesda to the Hill.
* * *
The permanent Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises met in an anonymous and unpretentious office building. There were good reasons for this. First, there were so many Congressional Advisory Committees in these days of perpetual crisis that the government buildings were always full of anxious huddles of legislators, scientists, lobbyists, military officers, bureaucrats, toxicologists, industrialists, educators, doctors, economists, and activists. But an anonymous office building was also less likely to be watched by the press, whose involvement would be premature at this point. Everybody thought so, except me. I thought the press was long overdue.
Still, I could see the other committee members’ point: much of the press still dealt in inflammation and hysteria, especially about the aftermath of the Tipping Point. They had a lot to answer for, although they probably never will.
But the main reason for the anonymous office building was the secret tunnel system from the anonymous parking garage two blocks away.
They built for secrecy a decade ago, when they could afford to build at all. Well, they had to. It was right in the middle of the Tipping Point, when the looming financial crisis of the US government wasn’t merely looming any more, and the slow worldwide decline in viable sperm suddenly wasn’t slow anymore, and the backlash against genetic engineering weren’t just theoretical anymore, and the coming bankruptcy of elderly entitlements wasn’t just coming anymore: it was all here. Along with the riots and the tax rebellions and the genetic laws and the entire destructive chaos of the Tipping Point, those two painful years before the president used martial law to restore order. A lot of otherwise unreticent people don’t say what they did during those two years. In Washington, some of them used secret tunnels to do it.
A few blocks before the parking garage, I saw the child. This wasn’t a good part of Washington, which had so few good parts left. Litter blew between the buildings, some of which had burned down, more of which were boarded up. The May night had been mild, and old people slept on sidewalks and fire escapes and in doorways, wrapped in coats and blankets. It was a city of the elderly—like practically every other city.
One in four Americans was over seventy. There were only 1.4 taxpaying workers to support each “retiree,” even with the wretched non-living-level subsidies most elderly received. The number of “very senior citizens,” those over eighty-five, had quadrupled in the last fifty years. The global birthrate was less than twenty percent of what it had been a century ago. In some countries it had dropped to five percent. In the relative absence of children, the world had grown old.
We drove past the huddled sleeping forms. Past the holosigns, the most visible aspect of Project Patriot, bright cavorting shadows whose captions urged SHARED RESPONSIBILITY and THE SOCIAL CONTRACT = YOUR GUARANTEE OF A GOOD FUTURE! Past the broken bottles and drug discards and human shit—the usual. Plus, of course, the rats, bolder and more aggressive than rats had ever been in the entire history of man. I knew why, but the committee wouldn’t let me tell them.
And in the middle of the early-morning street, dressed only in a pink tunic, a brown-skinned toddler with huge dark eyes and long black hair topped with a crisp pink ribbon.
“Stop the car,” I said to the driver, who was already screeching to a halt, as startled as I was. This did not happen. Washington was at the bottom of America’s regional variation curves in sperm count—the bottom for motility and normalcy and volume—and thus for birth rate. Artificial conception, in all its varieties, was still too expensive for most couples, now that the health insurance industry had crashed. And cloning, which had once seemed the hope of the world, had turned into a bitter joke.
You could clone worms, frogs, sheep, elephants. But not humans. A cloned, unfertilized human egg obediently divided five times, into thirty-two cells. And then it went on dividing, instead of first gastrulating in the first of the many crucial folds that lead to cell differentiation. In cloned eggs, no cell differentiation occurred. Ever. You ended up not with bone cells and skin cells and muscle cells but with a monstrous ball of cells all the same, the homogenous mass growing more and more huge until somebody killed it. Researchers attributed this to subtle disruption of the embryo’s chemical polarity gradients, although nobody had yet figured out the exact mechanism. They only knew the results. Cloning could not provide the infants the world craved.
And so children were scarce and precious; they were not allowed to turn up half-naked and alone in the middle of filthy streets. Especially not children with no visible birth defects. There were a great many infertile couples who would kill for this little girl.
She looked up at me without fear, and put two fingers in her mouth.
“Hello,” I said, through the powered-down window. Beside me, the driver drew his gun. Children as bait were not unknown to the truly desperate. “What’s your name?”
“Rosaria,” she said around the two fingers, and started to cry. I got out of the car.
“Why are you crying, Rosaria?”
“Abuela didn’t dress me.” She lifted the edge of her tunic to show me her naked legs and genitals. Hastily I pushed the cloth back down again. If this got caught on robocam … HILL SCIENTIST CAUGHT MOLESTING CHILD.
“Where’s Abuela now, Rosaria?”
She pointed down a side street. The driver said, “Sir … I can call Child Protection.…”
“Do that. And the cops.” But meanwhile Rosaria was tugging on my hand and crying. “Rosaria, we have to wait for some people to come before we find Abuela.”
“Abuela fall on the floor!”
I was a doctor. I went with her.
She led me a short way down the nearest side street. SHARE RESPONSIBILITY advised the building graffiti, along with FUCK RESPONSIBILITY! My driver stayed behind, talking on his wrister. I held the child’s small hand as we climbed filthy, crumbling steps, through an apartment-house door half off its hinges, up a flight of stairs reeking of garlic and despair. The staircase wasn’t equipped with even common reinforced railings and non-skid treads, let alone the aid-summoning sensory monitors that were guardian angels to the elderly rich. At the top of the stairs were three apartment doors, one wide open. Inside, an elderly Hispanic woman lay on the clean floor, between two carefully darned chairs that had once been bright red. One look at her and I knew I was too late. Myocardial infa
rction, or burst aneurysm, or any of a dozen other causes of death common to the very old. In her hand she held Rosaria’s pink tights.
I knelt before the child. “Rosaria … Abuela’s dead. She’s not in that body anymore. Do you understand?”
She nodded, although of course she couldn’t understand. But she had stopped crying. Her big dark eyes were very soft, like the fur of black kittens. From behind the red chair she plucked a Grandma Ann doll, one of the toys distributed as part of Project Patriot. The young must be taught early to embrace the old. Rosaria clutched the doll tightly.
“Sweetheart, who else lives with—”
“Aaeeehhhaaaeeee!” A cry of anguish from a huge Hispanic woman hurtling through the door. “Abuelita! Aaeeehhhaaaeee!”
I stood up and stepped back.
The woman, who looked in only her early twenties, collapsed beside her dead grandmother and began wailing. She wore factory coveralls, stitched DONOVAN ELECTRONICS. After a few moments, I put a hand on her shoulder. “Ma’am…”
To my surprise, she leapt up from the body and whirled on me.
“Who you? What you doing here?”
“I’m a doctor. I found Rosaria wandering in the street; she said her abuela had been dressing her.…”
“In the street? You took her in the street?”
“No, I … she came out by herself. After your grandmother—great-grandmother?—collapsed, I presume. I was—”
“You wasn’t doing nothing! You hear me? We’re just fine without no Child Protection!”
“I’m not from Child Protection. I—”
“You just leave us alone!”
She took a step toward me. Her eyes blazed with hatred. She was as tall as I was, twenty pounds heavier, and fifty years younger. I stepped back.
“I find somebody else to watch my Rosaria. You ain’t going to take her away to give to some rich bitch whose husband’s balls empty and whose test-tube fucking don’t take. Bad enough I got to work two jobs to support you old white farts, you ain’t getting my child too!”
“Ma’am, you are—” I was going to say, blocking my pathway to the door. I don’t know what she thought I was going to say. Her face suddenly crinkled horribly and she swung on me. Caught off balance, I went down, wildly thrusting out my left hand to arrest my fall. My fingers slammed into the floor. I felt two of them break.
Only one punch. She stood there, panting, horror at what she’d just done creeping slowly into her eyes, while Rosaria wailed and neighbors boiled into the hall and the scream of police flyers approached outside.
We looked at each other across the din—of noise, of my hand, of her dead grandmother who was Rosaria’s sole caregiver, of her desperate fight to keep and care for her child from the affluent so hungry for it. Affluent for the most part as white as the old people this woman subsidized with nearly fifty percent of her paycheck. The essentially bankrupt government protected children, but did not fund day care. Kids should be cared for by their families, was the national mood. That was the responsible way. And if families couldn’t, or wouldn’t, care for their children—then give the kids to the rich white couples panting for them.
Still on the floor, I examined my fingers. Although I couldn’t be sure without an X ray, I guessed they were simple fractures. The siren stopped outside. I said softly, “Pick up Rosaria. And let me go tell the cops everything is under control.”
She did. Out of fear, or hope, or maybe just not knowing what else to do. She stepped aside and picked up her daughter, who buried her head in her mother’s neck and clung hard. I pushed past the scowling neighbors to greet the police, letting my hand dangle casually as if nothing were wrong with it, planning how to tell the cops there was a body here but no foul play. How to tell the Child Protection that, yes, Rosaria had no one to raise her while her overworked, overtaxed mother put in six ten-hour factory shifts a week because she needed the overtime—but that everything was under control, nothing here needed official intervention.
Everything was just fine.
3
CAMERON ATULI
There are only forty-two people in the world, and I know all of them.
Nobody looks at me any differently as I hurry from the boys’ wing through the corridors of Aldani House, late again to morning class. “Say,” Nathan calls, perky even at this hour, damn his beautiful eyes. Melita nods formally: “Good morning, Cameron.” Shoes in hand, I fly pass Yong and Belissa, who smile. I might never have been away. I might never have had significant portions of my brain deliberately, selectively, expensively walled away.
What was in those memories? You will ask yourself a thousand thousand times, Dr. Newell told me, her gray curls bobbing, and each time will be the first.
“Cameron,” Rebecca, our ballet mistress, says severely as I rush to my place at the barre. “We would have been thrilled to see you fifteen minutes ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and resist the impulse to add, What do you expect of a delete brain? What Rebecca expects is for everyone to be on time at her class, or at least everyone in the company who’s currently dancing. Thirty-one dancers. I take my place at the barre.
“Plié,” Rebecca calls. “And one and two and…”
Thirty-one dancers, including the students in the Aldani School who are too young to join the company officially. Plus Rebecca, Dr. Newell, my nurses Anna and Saul, Aldani House security technician Yong, Nathan and Joe and Belissa on staff, and Melita, our business manager. And of course Mr. C, artistic director and choreographer, who’s famous all over the world. Forty-two, in all. Everyone in the whole world.
Who else lived in those deleted memories? You will ask yourself a thousand thousand times.
“Left side,” Rebecca calls. “And one and two…”
I’ve missed warm-up, and my muscles are cold. I take the barre exercises in half-time until my muscles warm. The main practice room at Aldani House is long and narrow, lined with barres and mirrors on both sides. On the shorter south wall, open windows overlook the front gardens. Delicious fragrances drift inside: roses and lilac and other flowers that would be wonderful to gaze on if Rebecca ever gave us a second to look at them. She doesn’t.
“Battement tondu … good, good … now into the adage … Sarah, don’t distort your hip line, keep the turn-out … Joaquim, higher. Higher!”
I have been away for two months, back for one. That’s what they told me. You can’t be away from dancing for three months without losing some technique. But I am flexible and strong, and the technique is returning. I can feel it.
I am twenty-two years old. My name is Cameron Atuli. What could I have done, or been done to, that I would elect memory deletion? And that Aldani House, perpetually stretching its endowed budget, would pay for it?
My body gives me no clues, except … but I don’t want to think about that. And anyway I don’t really want to know why my memory was wiped. I can still dance. Nothing else matters.
* * *
The first dream comes a few days later, early in the morning just before I wake. I am running, pumping my legs as fast as I can, so scared I can’t see straight. Something is chasing me. I can feel it draw closer, closer. I stumble, and turn around, arms thrown up to shield my face. I can hear myself screaming. And what leaps on me is … a cat. A pet kitty, licking my arm and purring while I cower and scream. I wake in terror.
Is this a memory? Did I have a pet cat, once? But memories from before the operation aren’t supposed to be able to get through to me, none of them. And why would I be so afraid of a memory of a pet cat?
I lie in bed alone, shivering. And why am I in bed alone, anyway? Did I have a lover, before? Who?
I speak three languages. English, French, some Cajun. How do I know these languages? The answer—all the personal answers from before my operation—are blocked forever from my conscious access. All “autobiographical memory retrieval” is coordinated by something called the Gereon node, in the right temporal cortex. My Gereon node ha
s been “deactivated.”
I remember factual knowledge (Two plus two is four; Gerard Michael Combes is president; Aldani House is named for its founder and endower, a billionaire who loved ballet). Skills, too, are all there. I can speak, read, dance, because apparently those things are stored in a different way in my brain. What we have given you, the doctors said, is an induced retrograde amnesia—a sort of Alzheimer’s in reverse. I don’t know what Alzheimer’s is but I don’t really care. I can still dance, and perhaps one of the boys in the company will become my lover.
The dream can’t hurt me.
I spring out of bed and stretch. It feels good, it feels wonderful. Today I’ll do an extra barre. We’re rehearsing Prodigal Son; I’m dancing the lead. I’ll do my barre next to Rob, who is quiet and gentle, with marvelously expressive arm movements. He also has beautiful blue eyes.
I pull on my practice clothes and go down to the kitchen for coffee.
* * *
We are doing grands battements at the barre when I smile at Rob. Rebecca is not in a very good mood this morning, and she snaps out the combinations: front, back side, plié. Repeat. Turn. During the turn Rob smiles back at me, a little uncertain, very appealing. Playfully, I touch my extended leg to his ass. Rebecca notices—she notices everything, she runs a very good class—and yells at me. “Cameron! Stay in place!”
I am in my place. I am happy.
“Would you like to go for a walk?” I say to Rob, after class. He has slung a towel around his neck, the same blue as his eyes. Sweat mats his hair and darkens his practice clothes. He nods, smiling.
We clatter down the back stairs and out into the garden of Aldani House. The area inside its nine-foot foamcast wall is about four acres. I don’t know how I know this. The main building sits close to the front gate, which is just as solid and high and opaque as the wall. Between the House and the gate bloom the front gardens; off to one side are a security building for Yong and the maintenance sheds. Behind the House are a stretch of lawn with plastic tables and chairs and a volleyball net, then the vegetable garden where the School’s small pupils are sent to work when they misbehave, and then a little wood with paths and benches and thickly leaved trees. Rob and I walk there. The air is cool on my warmed muscles, and the air smells of pine needles and cherry blossoms and strawberries.
