The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “So there’s something there,” I said. “So the tanks are picking up some strange radiation. Why call it ‘God’?”

  “Why not call it God?”

  “Why not call it Rover? Even if I grant you that the tape pattern looks like a presence—which I don’t—you have no way of knowing that Bohentin’s phantom isn’t, say, some totally ungodlike alien being.”

  “But neither do I know that it is.”

  “Devrie—”

  She had smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. She had—has, has always had—a very sweet smile. “Seena. Think. If the Institute can prove rationally that God exists—can prove it to the intellectual mind, the doubting Thomases who need something concrete to study…faith that doesn’t need to be taken on faith…”

  She wore her mystical face, a glowing softness that made me want to shake the silliness out of her. Instead I made some clever riposte, some sarcasm I no longer remember, and reached out to ruffle her hair. Big-sisterly, patronizing, thinking I could deflate her rapturous interest with the pin-prick of ridicule. God, I was an ass. It hurts to remember how big an ass I was.

  A month and a half later Devrie committed herself and half her considerable inheritance to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

  “Tell me,” Devrie whispered. The Institute had no windows; outside I had seen grass, palm trees, butterflies floating in the sunshine, but inside here in the bare gray room there was nowhere to look but at her face.

  “He’s a student in a Master’s program at a third-rate college in New Hampshire. He was adopted when he was two, nearly three, in March of 1997. Before that he was in a government-run children’s home. In Boston, of course. The adopting family, as far as I can discover, never was told he was anything but one more toddler given up by somebody for adoption.”

  “Wait a minute,” Devrie said. “I need…a minute.”

  She had turned paler, and her hands trembled. I had recited the information as if it were no more than an exhibit listing at my museum. Of course she was rattled. I wanted her rattled. I wanted her out.

  Lowering herself to the floor, Devrie sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. Concentration spread over her face, but a concentration so serene it barely deserved that name. Her breathing slowed, her color freshened, and when she opened her eyes, they had the rested energy of a person who has just slept eight hours in mountain air. Her face even looked plumper, and an EEG, I guessed, would show damn near alpha waves. In her year at the Institute she must have mastered quite an array of biofeedback techniques to do that, so fast and with such a malnourished body.

  “Very impressive,” I said sourly.

  “Seena—have you seen him?”

  “No. All this is from sealed records.”

  “How did you get into the records?”

  “Medical and governmental friends.”

  “Who?”

  “What do you care, as long as I found out what you wanted to know?”

  She was silent. I knew she would never ask me if I had obtained her information legally or illegally; it would not occur to her to ask. Devrie, being Devrie, would assume it had all been generously offered by my modest museum connections and our dead father’s immodest research connections. She would be wrong.

  “How old is he now?”

  “Twenty-four years last month. They must have used your two-month tissue sample.”

  “Do you think Daddy knew where the…baby went?”

  “Yes. Look at the timing—the child was normal and healthy, yet he wasn’t adopted until he was nearly three. The researchers kept track of him, all right; they kept all six clones in a government-controlled home where they could monitor their development as long as humanely possible. The same-sex clones were released for adoption after a year, but they hung onto the cross-sex ones until they reached an age where they would become harder to adopt. They undoubtedly wanted to study them as long as they could. And even after the kids were released for adoption, the researchers held off publishing until all six were placed and the records sealed. Dad’s group didn’t publish until April, 1998, remember. By the time the storm broke, the babies were out of its path, and anonymous.”

  “And the last,” Devrie said.

  “And the last,” I agreed, although of course the researchers hadn’t foreseen that. So few in the scientific community had foreseen that. Offense against God and man, Satan’s work, natter natter. Watching my father’s suddenly stooped shoulders and stricken eyes, I had thought how ugly public revulsion could be and had nobly resolved—how had I thought of it then? So long ago—resolved to snatch the banner of pure science from my fallen father’s hand. Another time that I had been an ass. Five years later, when it had been my turn to feel the ugly scorching of public revulsion, I had broken, left neurological research, and fled down the road that led to the Museum of Natural History, where I was the curator of ants fossilized in amber and moths pinned securely under permaplex.

  “The other four clones,” Devrie said, “the ones from that university in California that published almost simultaneously with Daddy—”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even try to ask. It was hard enough in Cambridge.”

  “Me,” Devrie said wonderingly. “He’s me.”

  “Oh, for—Devrie, he’s your twin. No more than that. No—actually less than that. He shares your genetic material exactly as an identical twin would, except for the Y chromosome, but he shares none of the congenital or environmental influences that shaped your personality. There’s no mystical replication of spirit in cloning. He’s merely a twin who got born eleven months late!”

  She looked at me with luminous amusement. I didn’t like the look. On that fleshless face, the skin stretched so taut that the delicate bones beneath were as visible as the veins of a moth wing, her amusement looked ironic. Yet Devrie was never ironic. Gentle, passionate, trusting, a little stupid, she was not capable of irony. It was beyond her, just as it was beyond her to wonder why I, who had fought her entering the Institute of the Biological Hope, had brought her this information now. Her amusement was one-layered, and trusting.

  God’s fools, the Middle Ages had called them.

  “Devrie,” I said, and heard my own voice unexpectedly break, “leave here. It’s physically not safe. What are you down to, ten percent body fat? Eight? Look at yourself, you can’t hold body heat, your palms are dry, you can’t move quickly without getting dizzy. Hypotension. What’s your heartbeat? Do you still menstruate? It’s insane.”

  She went on smiling at me. God’s fools don’t need menstruation. “Come with me, Seena. I want to show you the Institute.”

  “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Yes. This visit you should see it.”

  “Why this visit?”

  “Because you are going to help me get my clone to come here, aren’t you? Or else why did you go to all the trouble of locating him?”

  I didn’t answer. She still didn’t see it.

  Devrie said, “‘Anything for a sister.’ But you were always more like a mother to me than a sister.” She took my hand and pulled herself off the floor. So had I pulled her up to take her first steps, the day after our mother died in a plane crash at Orly. Now Devrie’s hand felt cold. I imprisoned it and counted the pulse.

  “Bradycardia.”

  But she wasn’t listening.

  The Institute was a shock. I had anticipated the laboratories: monotonous gray walls, dim light, heavy soundproofing, minimal fixtures in the ones used for sensory dampening; high-contrast textures and colors, strobe lights, quite good sound equipment in those for sensory arousal. There was much that Devrie, as subject rather than researcher, didn’t have authority to show me, but I deduced much from what I did see. The dormitories, divided by sex, were on the sensory-dampening side. The subjects slept in small cells, ascetic and chaste, that reminded me of an abandoned Carmelite convent I had once toured in Belgium. That was the shock: the physical plant felt scientific, but the atmosphere did
not.

  There hung in the gray corridors a wordless peace, a feeling so palpable I could feel it clogging my lungs. No. “Peace” was the wrong word. Say “peace” and the picture is pastoral, lazy sunshine and dreaming woods. This was not like that at all. The research subjects—students? postulants?—lounged in the corridors outside closed labs, waiting for the next step in their routine. Both men and women were anorexic, both wore gray bodysuits or caftans, both were fined down to an otherworldly ethereality when seen from a distance and a malnourished asexuality when seen up close. They talked among themselves in low voices, sitting with backs against the wall or stretched full-length on the carpeted floor, and on all their faces I saw the same luminous patience, the same certainty of being very near to something exciting that they nonetheless could wait for calmly, as long as necessary.

  “They look,” I said to Devrie, “as if they’re waiting to take an exam they already know they’ll ace.”

  She smiled. “Do you think so? I always think of us as travelers waiting for a plane, boarding passes stamped for Eternity.”

  She was actually serious. But she didn’t in fact wear the same expression as the others; hers was far more intense. If they were travelers, she wanted to pilot.

  The lab door opened and the students brought themselves to their feet. Despite their languid movements, they looked sharp: sharp protruding clavicles, bony chins, angular unpadded elbows that could chisel stone.

  “This is my hour for biofeedback manipulation of drug effects,” Devrie said. “Please come watch.”

  “I’d sooner watch you whip yourself in a twelfth-century monastery.”

  Devrie’s eyes widened, then again lightened with that luminous amusement. “It’s for the same end, isn’t it? But they had such unsystematic means. Poor struggling God-searchers. I wonder how many of them made it.’’

  I wanted to strike her. “Devrie—’’

  “If not biofeedback, what would you like to see?”

  “You out of here.”

  “What else?”

  There was only one thing: the holotanks. I struggled with the temptation, and lost. The two tanks stood in the middle of a roomy lab carpeted with thick gray matting and completely enclosed in a Faraday cage. That Devrie had a key to the lab was my first clue that my errand for her had been known, and discussed, by someone higher in the Institute. Research subjects do not carry keys to the most delicate brain-perception equipment in the world. For this equipment Bohentin had received his Nobel.

  The two tanks, independent systems, stood as high as my shoulder. The ones I had used fifteen years ago had been smaller. Each of these was a cube, opaque on its bottom half, which held the sensing apparatus, computerized simulators, and recording equipment; clear on its top half, which was filled with the transparent fluid out of whose molecules the simulations would form. A separate sim would form for each subject, as the machine sorted and mapped all the electromagnetic radiation received and processed by each brain. All that each brain perceived, not only the visuals; the holograph equipment was capable of picking up all wavelengths that the brain did, and of displaying their brain-processed analogues as three-dimensional images floating in a clear womb. When all other possible sources of radiation were filtered out except for the emanations from the two subjects themselves, what the sims showed was what kinds of activity were coming from—and hence going on in—the other’s brain. That was why it worked best with identical twins in twin trance: no structural brain differences to adjust for. In a rawer version of this holotank, a rawer version of myself had pioneered the recording of twin trances. The UCIC, we had called it then: What you see, I see.

  What I had seen was eight autopsy reports.

  “We’re so close,” Devrie said. “Mona and Marlene”—she waved a hand toward the corridor but Mona and Marlene, whichever two they had been, had gone—“had taken KX3, that’s the drug that—”

  “I know what it is,” I said, too harshly. KX3 reacts with one of the hormones overproduced in an anorectic body. The combination is readily absorbed by body fat, but in a body without fat, much of it is absorbed by the brain.

  Devrie continued, her hand tight on my arm. “Mona and Marlene were controlling the neural reactions with biofeedback, pushing the twin trance higher and higher, working it. Dr. Bohentin was monitoring the holotanks. The sims were incredibly detailed—everything each twin perceived in the perceptions of the other, in all wavelengths. Mona and Marlene forced their neurotransmission level even higher and then, in the tanks”—Devrie’s face glowed, the mystic-rapture look—“a completely third sim formed. Completely separate. A third presence.”

  I stared at her.

  “It was recorded in both tanks. It was shadowy, yes, but it was there. A third presence that can’t be perceived except through another human’s electromagnetic presence, and then only with every drug and trained reaction and arousal mode and the twin trance all pushing the brain into a supraheightened state. A third presence!”

  “Isotropic radiation. Bohentin fluffed the pre-screening program and the computer hadn’t cleared the background microradiation—” I said, but even as I spoke I knew how stupid that was. Bohentin didn’t make mistakes like that, and isotropic radiation simulates nowhere close to the way a presence does. Devrie didn’t even bother to answer me.

  This, then, was what the rumors had been about, the rumors leaking for the last year out of the Institute and through the scientific community, mostly still scoffed at, not yet picked up by the popular press. This. A verifiable, replicable third presence being picked up by holography. Against all reason, a long shiver went over me from neck to that cold place at the base of the spine.

  “There’s more,” Devrie said feverishly. “They felt it. Mona and Marlene. Both said afterwards that they could feel it, a huge presence filled with light, but they couldn’t quite reach it. Damn—they couldn’t reach it, Seena! They weren’t playing off each other enough, weren’t close enough. Weren’t, despite the twin trance, melded enough.”

  “Sex,” I said.

  “They tried it. The subjects are all basically heterosexual. They inhibit.”

  “So go find some homosexual God-yearning anorexic incestuous twins!”

  Devrie looked at me straight. “I need him. Here. He is me.”

  I exploded, right there in the holotank lab. No one came running in to find out if the shouting was dangerous to the tanks, which was my second clue that the Institute knew very well why Devrie had brought me there. “Damn it to hell, he’s a human being, not some chemical you can just order up because you need it for an experiment! You don’t have the right to expect him to come here, you didn’t even have the right to tell anyone that he exists, but that didn’t stop you, did it? There are still anti-bioengineering groups out there in the real world, religious split-brains who—how dare you put him in any danger? How dare you even presume he’d be interested in this insane mush?”

  “He’ll come,” Devrie said. She had not changed expression.

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “He’s me. And I want God. He will, too.”

  I scowled at her. A fragment of one of her poems, a thing she had written when she was fifteen, came to me: “Two human species/Never one—/One aching for God/One never.” But she had been fifteen then. I had assumed that the sentiment, as adolescent as the poetry, would pass.

  I said, “What does Bohentin think of this idea of importing your clone?”

  For the first time she hesitated. Bohentin, then, was dubious. “He thinks it’s rather a long shot.”

  “You could phrase it that way.”

  “But I know he’ll want to come. Some things you just know, Seena, beyond rationality. And besides—” She hesitated again, and then went on. “I have left half my inheritance from Daddy, and the income on the trust from Mummy.”

  “Devrie. God, Devrie—you’d buy him?”

  For the first time she looked angry. “The money would be just to get hi
m here, to see what is involved. Once he sees, he’ll want this as much as I do, at any price! What price can you put on God? I’m not ‘buying’ his life—I’m offering him the way to find life. What good is breathing, existing, if there’s no purpose to it? Don’t you realize how many centuries, in how many ways, people have looked for that light-filled presence and never been able to be sure!? And now we’re almost there, Seena, I’ve seen it for myself—almost there. With verifiable, scientifically-controlled means. Not subjective faith this time—scientific data, the same as for any other actual phenomenon. This research stands now where research into the atom stood fifty years ago. Can you touch a quark? But it’s there! And my clone can be a part of it, can be it, how can you talk about the money buying him under circumstances like that!”

  I said slowly, “How do you know that whatever you’re so close to is God?” But that was sophomoric, of course, and she was ready for it. She smiled warmly.

  “What does it matter what we call it? Pick another label if it will make you more comfortable.”

  I took a piece of paper from my pocket. “His name is Keith Torellen. He lives in Indian Falls, New Hampshire. Address and mailnet number here. Good luck, Devrie.” I turned to go.

  “Seena! I can’t go!”

  She couldn’t, of course. That was the point. She barely had the strength in that starved, drug-battered body to get through the day, let alone to New Hampshire. She needed the sensory-controlled environment, the artificial heat, the chemical monitoring. “Then send someone from the Institute. Perhaps Bohentin will go.”

  “Bohentin,” she said, and I knew that was impossible; Bohentin had to remain officially ignorant of this sort of recruiting. Too many U.S. laws were involved. In addition, Bohentin had no persuasive skills; people as persons and not neurologies did not interest him. They were too far above chemicals and too far below God.

  Devrie looked at me with a kind of level fury. “This is really why you found him, isn’t it? So I would have to stop the drug program long enough to leave here and go get him. You think that once I’ve gone back out into the world either the build-up effects in the brain will be interrupted or else the spell will be broken and I’ll have doubts about coming back here!”