Maximum Light

by Nancy Kress

  So why attack what is hopeless to solve? Why publicize what you can’t, for ethical reasons, replicate in the laboratory? Why bother with controls impossible to justify, enforce, or drum up support for? Synthetic chemicals are in everything we touch every day. Why uselessly anger their manufacturers and users (no industry would remain untouched)? Why anger women (just one more thing mother can be blamed for)? There was, after all, no conclusive hard proof.

  “Dad?”

  After all, it’s not as if DNA were being tampered with. And the fall in sperm count is leveling off; maybe it will rebound. Mother Nature is resourceful. Human reproduction is infinitely resilient, infinitely adaptable.

  Yes. Right. As were the dinosaurs.

  “Dad?”

  Laurie stood beside me in front of the Wright Bar. She wore one of those new hats, a sort of abbreviated helmet with a holo veil that made even plain features look soft and mysterious. The veil was turned up full strength. I was shocked to see how much thinner she’d gotten. Taking her arm, I led her to the farthest corner of the bar, in shadows. Holos of Kitty Hawk planes swooped above us, disappeared before they hit the far wall.

  “Turn off your hat, Laurie. I don’t care if you’ve been crying.”

  Reluctantly, she blanked the holo. Laurie wasn’t pretty the same way Shana was pretty, and now she looked almost ugly. Too gaunt; she’d lost so much weight. Strong square jaw, splotchy skin, small eyes too close together and, now, red and swollen. But the expression in those eyes had always seemed to me the sweetest I’d ever seen. Laurie was that rarity, a completely good person, without pettiness or malice. Far above rubies is her price.… I took Laurie’s thin hand. “Tell me, sweetheart. What is it?”

  She just shook her head, the tears starting again.

  “John said you went to see your neighbors’ new baby.”

  “Yes,” she said, and I saw the Herculean effort to control herself. Laurie’s feelings ran deep. “I’m being a stewdee, Dad, I know. But I’ve tried and tried to accept that John and I will never have … I know millions of other couples are in the same boat. I know we’re nothing special. Only…”

  “You’ll always be special, Laurie.”

  “… only I can’t seem to stop crying.”

  “Would you consider medication, honey?”

  “I’ve already got patches for Serentil and Alixolin.”

  Both were strong and reliable neurotransmitter adjusters, and they weren’t helping. There are griefs that go beyond pharmacology. “Laurie, what can I—”

  “Find me a baby to adopt.”

  She might as well have asked for a mastodon to domesticate. Unless she meant …

  “Find a baby how, honey? Here, order something to drink, you’ll feel better.”

  She keyed in something on the table order pad; I don’t think she herself knew what. I ordered wine, even though it would upset my insulin bio-monitors. Mucor likes sugar-rich blood.

  “Find a baby how, Laurie? John told me you’d ransacked the adoption nets, and—”

  “On the black market. A baby on the black market.”

  Now that she’d actually said it, she suddenly calmed down. Making the decision had been wracking her. Laurie—like Sallie and Maggie—believed in law, in playing fair, in the social contract. I knew, as she did not, that she wouldn’t last a week on the black market.

  “Laurie, honey … even if I knew how to do that, and even if you were willing to risk the legal penalties, it’s unbelievably expensive, and besides—”

  “We’ll give everything. Every penny. We’ll pledge future earnings.” She leaned forward eagerly, the tears gone. “Anything at all!”

  “Does John agree with that?” I couldn’t see John, always so solicitous of his own comforts, going along with this.

  “He doesn’t know yet that I’m thinking about the … the black market. But when he does, I’m sure he’ll agree. He wants a child as much as I do. Oh, Dad, you don’t know how it is! I wake up in the morning, and I hear the Goldstone baby through the window, and my arms just curve around an empty space. I walk around with an empty place in my chest, all day, every day—a physical hole. I can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t concentrate. Sometimes it gets so bad that it physically hurts to move, to put one foot in front of the other and get on with it. And I can’t stop crying. I know not all women are like this, and I tell myself that nobody gets everything and I should be grateful for what I do have, and to forget all about motherhood, but … but I can’t. I can’t. And it feels like I never will!”

  I believed her. In some women, the maternal instinct is so strong that its thwarting creates a sorrow that never heals. Nothing in the human genome data justifies this in terms of DNA or proteins. But it is nonetheless so.

  “We’ll pay anything for a baby, Dad! Everything!”

  “Honey, your and John’s everything is still so much less than the really rich can pay, and there are so few babies even on the black market—”

  “But you’re a doctor! And you have contacts on the Hill, in the whole scientific world, everywhere! You can find us a child in ways no one else we know possibly could!”

  Her plain, honest face glowed with trust. I looked away.

  “Laurie, even if that were true—”

  “And you and Mom want a grandchild, I know you do. Oh, Dad, this means so much. To me it means everything. I don’t care about the risk of legal penalties. Please don’t say no. We’ve always depended on you, the whole family, to do everything, and I know it’s not fair to you, but for this…” Her voice broke. “Please try.”

  And I couldn’t refuse. Not Laurie. Not when I was going to leave them all so soon, without me to depend on any more. Hubris? Yes. Pride goeth… but pride didn’t exist any more, not officially. Only shared responsibility.

  “All right, honey,” I said. “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply, with a curious humble dignity, as if all the previous histrionics were somehow unworthy of the enormous pledge being given. I didn’t like that. It mattered to her so much; what if I failed?

  The table suddenly said pleasantly, “Final boarding call for Flight 164 to Atlanta. You are registered as a passenger on that flight.”

  I’d forgotten that I’d given the system my credit number to pay for our drinks. I stood, too suddenly, and then pretended to stretch in order to cover the trembling in my legs. “That’s my flight, Laurie.”

  “I’ll walk you to the gate,” she said, her face luminous now, so that despite her swollen red eyes, men turned to look after her as we passed. I tried to match her eager young stride, and hoped that when she made her way back out of the airport alone, the nursing mother would have already left.

  * * *

  Atlanta had rain, sheets of it, slabs of it. Before I could stop myself, I started ticking off all the synthetic, wind-borne disrupters that were probably coming down with each drop. Hexachlorobenzene, kelthane, octochlorostyrene, the alkyl phenols … I told myself to cut it out and pay attention to my reason for being here.

  Sallie met me at the airport. She was looking older—with a shock I realized that she was almost fifty. Born when Maggie, I, and the world had all seemed young.

  “Dad! You’re looking marvelous!”

  “Liar.”

  “Well, sort of marvelous.” She grinned. Neither of our daughters got Maggie’s looks—those all went to John. Alana, on Mars Colony Three for ten years now, looked like me. Sallie looked like herself: big, cheerful, noisy, direct. She’d been at the CDC for fifteen years, and loved her work, her husband, her life.

  “So what’s all the mystery about this visit?” she said as we pulled away from the airport. Sallie was an exciting driver; I steadied myself against the seat. Her car, I noted, was not driver-enhanced; it featured none of the expensive options to allow the aged rich to keep driving. No virtual reality screen to compensate for dimming vision. No augmented field of view for necks that could no longer swivel easily. No smart computer to assu
me decision making for slowed reaction times. Sallie’s car was just a car. But, then, Sallie was barely fifty.

  She said, “Why are you here for just a few hours? Richard will be sorry to miss you. And what’s so secret that you couldn’t tell me about it on the phone?”

  “A favor,” I said. “I need a large favor from you, Sallie. Head out to the CDC.”

  At my tone, she glanced sideways at me. Rain poured down the windshield. Sallie swerved from lane to lane. “Am I free to say no? Your tone doesn’t seem to allow much room for that.”

  “I hope you won’t say no.”

  “What is it?”

  I gathered myself together. “I need a list of CDC vivifacture cell donors, both voluntary and involuntary.”

  She said automatically, “You know I can’t do that.”

  “I know you can. I’m asking if you will.”

  We drove in silence for several minutes, rain pounding on the roof. Sallie has an expressive face. I watched her ethics wrestle with her curiosity, her family loyalty with her natural conformity. I didn’t interrupt. Finally she said, “Why?”

  The opening wedge. Once curiosity is uppermost, you can bargain to keep it there. “I can’t tell you that. But I guarantee that the information will not be used in any way that will compromise the CDC, or will be in any way traceable back to you. And I’m only looking for one specific name, if that makes it any easier for you to break security.”

  “It does,” she said, which of course I’d counted on. “Who?”

  “Cameron Atuli. A-T-U-L-I.” The name meant nothing to Sallie; she wasn’t a ballet type.

  “ID number?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s a male in his twenties, residing in Washington.”

  Sallie sighed. She didn’t like this. But if it was only one name, and only for her father, the most trustworthy of men … she was as transparent as air.

  As some air. Rain still streamed down, with its invisible burdens.

  “All right, Dad. I’ll look. But only because I know you won’t do anything wrong or unethical with the information.”

  “Thank you, Sallie.” I knew better than to ask her help with Laurie; Sallie might filch information but never babies.

  “Technically, the CDC doesn’t even have any interest in vivifacture,” Sallie said heavily. “We don’t keep deebees on it. We’re too busy with falling sperm count.”

  “I know,” I said, and we both smiled at the irony. Falling sperm count is not exactly a disease. No one is sick with it. The NIH and the national laboratories could work on fertility, of course, as part of their mandate into general research (they could also work on vivifacture). The FDA was supposed to investigate and certify all “cures” for low sperm count; that was one way Vanderbilt Grant exercised his considerable power. In theory, the CDC was supposed to confine itself to disease. In practice, the last twenty years had turned its “public health” mandate into the medical arm of the Justice Department, who otherwise could not combat esoteric medical crimes it didn’t remotely understand. The result was constant turf wars, made worse by constantly shrinking funding. Hard to believe that once, Congress routinely committed over a hundred billion dollars annually to science.

  And some CDC databases were completely unknown to almost everyone. Computers off the net, within shielded and secure rooms, available only to senior people with proper clearances. Like Sallie.

  “Stay in the car,” she said when we arrived at the CDC facility. “I’ll be about half an hour.”

  She was longer. Chatting with colleagues? Sallie was not a good poker player. I sat and watched the rain slacken, stop, start again harder than ever. Whenever it rained this hard in Bethesda, the stream behind my house overflowed. With the overflow came a sudden visibility of frogs. Frogs, spending much of their time in water, were like miners’ canaries: sensitive to environmental changes. My backyard overflow delivered frogs with one leg, frogs with withered legs, frogs with clubfoot-legs, frogs with no legs. A Frenchman would be gastronomically deprived next to my stream.

  Finally Sallie, dripping wet, climbed back into the car. She shook herself like a large, unhappy, faithful dog and didn’t look at me directly.

  “Well, Atuli’s there, all right. Dad, what is this about? You picked yourself a scary one.”

  “Scary?” I hadn’t expected that.

  “No, on second thought, I don’t want to know. I’ll tell you what I discovered, and then we won’t mention this at lunch, or ever again. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. Rain streamed off her hair onto her broad forehead. She swiped at it ineffectually.

  “Cameron Atuli’s cells are indeed in the library, as an involuntary donor. Stratum lucidum, stratum basale, dermis, sebaceous glands—all of it, everything needed to grow skin grafts. The source is listed as the FBI, which means they were seized during a raid on an illegal medical operation. You don’t look surprised.”

  “I guess I’m not,” I said. “But there’s more, isn’t there?”

  “There is indeed,” she said grimly. “No internal-organ cells are in the library—except one. Testicles.”

  “Testicles?”

  “Yes. And a note that the cells are fertile. Cameron Atuli has a sperm count of three hundred million per liter of semen.”

  Three hundred million. My God.

  “Or rather, had. After I found that, I cross-checked the deebee for government hospital admissions near the date of the cell donation. Atuli was a patient at Carter Memorial, and he was assigned heavy security. The operation was a testicular implant. That’s to simulate the appearance of testicles and scrotum when they’ve been horribly damaged, or when a child is born without. The operation—”

  “I know what it is,” I said, too irritably. Trying to assimilate it all. A testicular implant is, of course, infertile, although it can produce normal ejaculation.

  “I wasn’t going to explain the operation,” Sallie said, equally irritably. “To you? Come on. I was going to add that the testicular implant was followed by induced retrograde amnesia.”

  So young Cameron Atuli wouldn’t even remember his … what? Abduction, perhaps. Involuntarily cell donation. Hours immobile in the MOSS tank, terrified for his life, followed by castration … dancers, like all creative people, tended to be a little unstable to begin with. The induced amnesia was probably a mercy operation. Authorized by whom? Paid for by whom?

  “One more piece of information, because I know you’re going to ask,” Sallie said. She stared rigidly ahead. “Yes, I looked through all the deebees available to me. That’s what took so long. And no, the CDC does not possess Cameron Atuli’s fertile testicles. And now don’t ever ask me to do anything like this again, Dad.”

  She looked so miserable: wet, bedraggled, guilty, concerned. But Sallie was resilient—as the more vulnerable Laurie was not. “I won’t ask you ever again,” I promised.

  “Good. Now let’s go to lunch.”

  * * *

  On the flight home, I tried to think it through. The FBI had made a raid and interrupted an illegal vivifacture lab in the process of raping Cameron Atuli’s cells. At least part of the process, the MOSS tank readings and initial cultures, had been completed and some cells shipped to another location. I knew that because finished skin grafts later turned up on Shana’s chimps. Skin and related cell samples that remained in the illegal lab ended up at the CDC, as usual. But the severed testicles had not. Had they, too, been shipped to the warehouse in Lanham before the FBI raid, and had they been blown to smithereens in the train-wreck explosion? Or had the man that Shana had seen carrying the chimps also been carrying Cameron Atuli’s fertile balls?

  And where was Shana? Was that wretched little witch going to skip bail after all?

  Suddenly I was sick of thinking about it all. I was a physician, not a detective. A doctor who was dying. That’s where my energies should be going—into deciding how to tell Maggie and the children, into finishing my estate planning to leave them as comfortable a
s I could. Into doing the last thing well that I could do well. If I must die/ I will encounter darkness as a bride/ And hug it in my arms.… Shakespeare.

  We had flown above the storm. I stared out the window at the gray clouds below, and tried to think what to say to Maggie, due back tomorrow from her sister’s.

  But at home I was sidetracked again. There was a message from Van Grant, voice and visual both:

  “Sorry to take so long to get back to you, Nick, on that matter we discussed the other day. But I wanted to be as thorough as possible. I had my people check every government deebee in existence—all of them. No unusual activity for the person you mentioned, in any way, ever.”

  He spread his hands helplessly and smiled regretfully from the wall screen, the smile I’d known for fifty years: warm, sincere, trustworthy. “Sorry, Nick. But isn’t it nice to know that at least one citizen is leading a completely normal life? Wish I were.” An appealing chuckle. “Take care, Nick. My love to Maggie. Helen and I hope to see you two again real soon.”

  The screen blanked. My eye hurt, and my cheek; a sore was developing inside my mouth. And I was suddenly bone-weary—with age, with mucormycosis, with stress, with lies. All I wanted was to go to sleep, the sooner the better, and the only thing that kept me from bed at five in the afternoon was that I’d have to lie shivering there without Maggie, alone.

  11

  SHANA WALDERS

  New York is a dead town.

  I don’t mean there isn’t no action. There’s lots of action, if you don’t mind ending up pretty dead yourself. And at the other end, there’s lots of safe, high-toned, boring action: swank parties, thee-ay-ter, opera, charity balls. I know because from the minute I get off the train, I make it my business to know. But what New York don’t got is exciting-not-stupid middle action, for a gorgeous kid like me. Or at least I don’t find it. But then I think maybe that’s just as well, because that’s not what I’m here for anyway. And dressed like a dirty boy, with my hair stuffed under a helmet and my clothes droopy as an old dick, I don’t look so gorgeous anyway.