The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “No.” His voice had gone hard again, but his hand stayed on my arm. “At first, yes. The first time. But, Seena—I felt it. Almost. I almost felt the presence, and then all the rest of the confusion—it didn’t seem as important anymore. Not the confusion between you and Devrie.”

  I whirled to face him. “You mean God doesn’t care whom you fuck if it gets you closer to fucking with Him.”

  He looked at me hard then—at me, not at his own self-absorption. His reddened eyes widened a little. “Why, Seena—you care. You told me the brother-sister thing didn’t matter anymore—but you care.’’

  Did I? I didn’t even know anymore. I said, “But, then, I’m not deluding myself that it’s all for the old Kingdom and the Glory.”

  “Glory,” he repeated musingly, and finally let go of my arm. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “Keith. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “Where do you want to get?” he said in the same musing tone. “Where did any of you, starting with your father, want to get with me? Glory…glory.”

  Standing this close to him, seeing close up the pupils of his eyes and smelling close up the odor of his sweat, I finally realized what I should have seen all along: he was glowing. He was of course constantly on Bohentin’s program of neurotransmitter manipulation, but the same chemicals that made the experiments possible also raised the threshold of both frankness and suggestibility. I guessed it must be a little like the looseness of being drunk, and I wondered if perhaps Bohentin might have deliberately raised the dosage before letting this interview take place. But no, Bohentin wouldn’t be aware of the bargain Devrie and I had struck; she would not have told him. The whole bizarre situation was hers alone, and Keith’s drugged musings a fortunate side-effect I would have to capitalize on.

  “Where do you think my father wanted to get with you?” I asked him gently.

  “Immortality. Godhead. The man who created Adam without Eve.”

  He was becoming maudlin. “Hardly ‘the man,’” I pointed out. “My father was only one of a team of researchers. And the same results were being obtained independently in California.”

  “Results. I am a ‘result.’ What do you think he wanted, Seena?”

  “Scientific knowledge of cell development. An objective truth.”

  “That’s all Devrie wants.”

  “To compare bioengineering to some mystic quest—”

  “Ah, but if the mystic quest is given a laboratory answer? Then it, too, becomes a scientific truth. You really hate that idea, don’t you, Seena? You hate science validating anything you define as non-science.”

  I said stiffly, “That’s rather an oversimplification.”

  “Then what do you hate?”

  “I hate the risk to human bodies and human minds. To Devrie. To you.”

  “How nice of you to include me,” he said, smiling. “And what do you think Devrie wants?”

  “Sensation. Romantic religious emotion. To be all roiled up inside with delicious esoterica.”

  He considered this. “Maybe.”

  “And is that what you want as well, Keith? You’ve asked what everyone else wants. What do you want?”

  “I want to feel at home in the universe. As if I belonged in it. And I never have.”

  He said this simply, without self-consciousness, and the words themselves were predictable enough for his age—even banal. There was nothing in the words that could account for my eyes suddenly filling with tears. “And ‘scientifically’ reaching God would do that for you?”

  “How do I know until I try it? Don’t cry, Seena.”

  “I’m not!”

  “All right,” he agreed softly. “You’re not crying.” Then he added, without changing tone, “I am more like you than like Devrie.”

  “How so?”

  “I think that Devrie has always felt that she belongs in the universe. She only wants to find the…the coziest corner of it to curl up in. Like a cat. The coziest corner to curl up in is God’s lap. Aren’t you surprised that I should be more like you than like the person I was cloned from?”

  “No,” I said. “Harder upbringing than Devrie’s. I told you that first day: cloning is only delayed twinning.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, a sound that chilled my spine. Whatever his conflict was, we were moving closer.

  “Oh no, Seena. You’re so wrong. It’s more than delayed twinning, all right. You can’t buy a real twin. You either have one or you don’t. But you can buy yourself a clone. Bought, paid for, kept on the books along with all the rest of the glassware and holotanks and electron microscopes. You said so yourself, in your apartment, when you first told me about Devrie and the Institute. ‘Money. She’d buy you.’ And you were right, of course. Your father bought me, and she did, and you did. But of course you two women couldn’t have bought if I hadn’t been selling.”

  He was smiling still. Stupid—we had both been stupid, Devrie and I, we had both been looking in the wrong place, misled by our separate blinders—or by training in the laboratory brain. My training had been scientific, hers humanistic, and so I looked at Freud and she looked at Oedipus, and we were equally stupid. How did the world look to a man who did not deal in laboratory brains, a man raised in a grittier world in which limits were not what the mind was capable of but what the bank book would stand? “Your genes are too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar; your sisters are too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar; God is too expensive for you to claim except as a beggar.” To a less romantic man it would not have mattered, but a less romantic man would not have come to the Institute. What dark humiliations and resentments did Keith feel when he looked at Devrie, the self who was buyer and not bought?

  Change the light you shine onto a mind, and you see different neural patterns, different corridors, different forests of trees grown in soil you could not have imagined. Run that soil through your fingers and you discover different pebbles, different sand, different leaf mold from the decay of old growths. Devrie and I had been hacking through the wrong forest.

  Not Oedipus, but Marx.

  Quick lines of attack came to me. Say: Keith it’s a job like any other with high-hazard pay why can’t you look at it like that a very dangerous and well-paid job for which you’ve been hired by just one more eccentric member of the monied class. Say: You’re entitled to the wealth you’re our biological brother damn it consider it rationally as a kinship entitlement. Say: Don’t be so nicey-nice it’s a tough world out there and if Devrie’s giving it away take it don’t be an impractical chump.

  I said none of that. Instead I heard myself saying, coolly and with a calm cruelty, “You’re quite right. You were bought by Devrie, and she is now using her own purchase for her own ends. You’re a piece of equipment bought and paid for. Unfortunately, there’s no money in the account. It has all been a grand sham.”

  Keith jerked me to face him with such violence that my neck cracked. “What are you saying?”

  The words came as smoothly, as plausibly, as if I had rehearsed them. I didn’t even consciously plan them: how can you plan a lie you do not know you will need? I slashed through this forest blind, but the ground held under my feet.

  “Devrie told me that she has signed over most of her inheritance to you. What she didn’t know, because I haven’t yet told her, is that she doesn’t have control of her inheritance any longer. It’s not hers. I control it. I had her declared mentally incompetent on the grounds of violent suicidal tendencies and had myself made her legal guardian. She no longer has the legal right to control her fortune. A doctor observed her when she came to visit me in New York. So the transfer of her fortune to you is invalid.”

  “The lawyers who gave me the papers to sign—”

  “Will learn about the New York action this week,” I said smoothly. How much inheritance law did Keith know? Probably very little. Neither did I, and I invented furiously; it only needed to sound plausible. “The New Yor
k courts only handed down their decision recently, and Dominican judicial machinery, like everything else in the tropics, moves slowly. But the ruling will hold, Keith. Devrie does not control her own money, and you’re a pauper again. But I have something for you. Here. An airline ticket back to Indian Falls. You’re a free man. Poor, but free. The ticket is in your name, and there’s a check inside it—that’s from me. You’ve earned it, for at least trying to aid poor Devrie. But now you’re going to have to leave her to me. I’m now her legal guardian.”

  I held the ticket out to him. It was wrapped in its airline folder; my own name as passenger was hidden. Keith stared at it, and then at me.

  I said softly, “I’m sorry you were cheated. Devrie didn’t mean to. But she has no money, now, to offer you. You can go. Devrie’s my burden now.”

  His voice sounded strangled. “To remove from the Institute?”

  “I never made any secret of wanting her out. Although the legal papers for that will take a little time to filter through the Dominican courts. She wouldn’t go except by force, so force is what I’ll get. Here.”

  I thrust the ticket folder at him. He made no move to take it, and I saw from the hardening of his face—my face, Devrie’s face—the moment when Devrie shifted forests in his mind. Now she was without money, without legal control of her life, about to be torn from the passion she loved most. The helpless underdog. The orphaned woman, poor and cast out, in need of protection from the powerful who had seized her fortune.

  Not Marx, but Cervantes.

  “You would do that? To your own sister?”

  Anything for a sister. I said bitterly, “Of course I would.”

  “She’s not mentally incompetent!”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “No!”

  I shrugged. “The courts say she is.”

  Keith studied me, resolve hardening around him. I thought of certain shining crystals, that will harden around any stray piece of grit. Now that I was succeeding in convincing him, my lies hurt—or perhaps what hurt was how easily he believed them.

  “Are you sure, Seena,” he said, “that you aren’t just trying a grab for Devrie’s fortune?”

  I shrugged again, and tried to make my voice toneless. “I want her out of here. I don’t want her to die.”

  “Die? What makes you think she would die?”

  “She looks—”

  “She’s nowhere near dying,” Keith said angrily—his anger a release, so much that it hardly mattered at what. “Don’t you think I can tell in twin trance what her exact physical state is? And don’t you know how much control the trance gives each twin over the bodily processes of the other? Don’t you even know that? Devrie isn’t anywhere near dying. And I’d pull her out of trance if she were.” He paused, looking hard at me. “Keep your ticket, Seena.”

  I repeated mechanically, “You can leave now. There’s no money.” Devrie had lied to me.

  “That wouldn’t leave her with any protection at all, would it?” he said levelly. When he grasped the doorknob to leave, the tendons in his wrist stood out clearly, strong and taut. I did not try to stop his going.

  Devrie had lied to me. With her lie, she had blackmailed me into yet another lie to Keith. The twin trance granted control, in some unspecified way, to each twin’s body; the trance I had pioneered might have resulted in eight deaths unknowingly inflicted on each other out of who knows what dark forests in eight fumbling minds. Lies, blackmail, death, more lies.

  Out of these lies they were going to make scientific truth. Through these forests they were going to search for God.

  “Final clearance check of holotanks,” an assistant said formally. “Faraday cage?”

  “Optimum.”

  “External radiation?”

  “Cleared,” said the man seated at the console of the first tank.

  “Cleared,” said the woman seated at the console of the second.

  “Microradiation?”

  “Cleared.”

  “Cleared.”

  “Personnel radiation, Class A?”

  “Cleared.”

  “Cleared.”

  On it went, the whole tedious and crucial procedure, until both tanks had been cleared and focused, the fluid adjusted, tested, adjusted again, tested again. Bohentin listened patiently, without expression, but I, standing to the side of him and behind the tanks, saw the nerve at the base of his neck and just below the hairline pulse in some irregular rhythm of its own. Each time the nerve pulsed, the skin rose slightly from under his collar. I kept my eyes on that syncopated crawling of flesh, and felt tension prickle over my own skin like heat.

  Three-quarters of the lab, the portion where the holotanks and other machinery stood, was softly dark, lit mostly from the glow of console dials and the indirect track lighting focused on the tanks. Standing in the gloom were Bohentin, five other scientists, two medical doctors—and me. Bohentin had fought my being allowed there, but in the end he had had to give in. I had known too many threatening words not in generalities but in specifics: reporters’ names, drug names, cloning details, twin trance tragedy, anorexia symptoms, bio-engineering amendment. He was not a man who much noticed either public opinion or relatives’ threats, but no one else outside his Institute knew so many specific words—some people knew some of the words, but only I had them all. In the end he had focused on me his cold, brilliant eyes, and given permission for me to witness the experiment that involved my sister.

  I was going to hold Devrie to her bargain. I was not going to believe anything she told me without witnessing it for myself.

  Half the morning passed in technical preparation. Somewhere Devrie and Keith, the human components of this costly detection circuit, were separately being brought to the apex of brain activity. Drugs, biofeedback, tactile and auditory and kinesthetic stimulation—all carefully calculated for the maximum increase of both the number of neurotransmitters firing signals through the synapses of the brain and of the speed at which the signals raced. The more rapid the transmission through certain pathways, the more intense both perception and feeling. Some neurotransmitters, under this pressure, would alter molecular structure into natural hallucinogens; that reaction had to be controlled. Meanwhile other drugs, other biofeedback techniques, would depress the body’s natural enzymes designed to either reabsorb excess transmitters or to reduce the rate at which they fired. The number and speed of neurotransmitters in Keith’s and Devrie’s brains would mount, and mount, and mount, all natural chemical barriers removed. The two of them would enter the lab with their whole brains—rational cortex, emotional limbic, right and left brain functions—simultaneously aroused to an unimaginable degree. Simultaneously. They would be feeling as great a “rush” as a falling skydiver, as great a glow as a cocaine user, as great a mental clarity and receptivity as a da Vinci whose brush is guided by all the integrated visions of his unconscious mind. They would be white-hot.

  Then they would hit each other with the twin trance.

  The quarter of the lab which Keith and Devrie would use was softly and indirectly lit, though brighter than the rest. It consisted of a raised, luxuriantly padded platform, walls and textured pillows in a pink whose component wavelengths had been carefully calculated, temperature in a complex gradient producing precise convection flows over the skin. The man and woman in that womb-colored, flesh-stimulating environment would be able to see us observers standing in the gloom behind the holotanks only as vague shapes. When the two doors opened and Devrie and Keith moved onto the platform, I knew that they would not even try to distinguish who stood in the lab. Looking at their faces, that looked only at each other, I felt my heart clutch.

  They were naked except for the soft helmets that both attached hundreds of needles to nerve clumps just below the skin and also held the earphones through which Bohentin controlled the music that swelled the cathedrals of their skulls. “Cathedrals”—from their faces, transfigured to the ravished ecstasy found in paintings of medieval saints
, that was the right word. But here the ecstasy was controlled, understood, and I saw with a sudden rush of pain at old memories that I could recognize the exact moment when Keith and Devrie locked onto each other with the twin trance. I recognized it, with my own more bitter hyperclarity, in their eyes, as I recognized the cast of concentration that came over their features, and the intensity of their absorption. The twin trance. They clutched each other’s hands, faces inches apart, and suddenly I had to look away.

  Each holotank held two whorls of shifting colors, the outlines clearer and the textures more sharply delineated than any previous holographs in the history of science. Keith’s and Devrie’s perceptions of each other’s presence. The whorls went on clarifying themselves, separating into distinct and mappable layers, as on the platform Keith and Devrie remained frozen, all their energies focused on the telepathic trance. Seconds passed, and then minutes. And still, despite the clarity of the holographs in the tank, a clarity that fifteen years earlier I would have given my right hand for, I sensed that Keith and Devrie were holding back, were deliberately confining their unimaginable perceptiveness to each other’s radiant energy, in the same way that water is confined behind a dam to build power.

  But how could I be sensing that? From a subliminal “reading” of the mapped perceptions in the holotanks? Or from something else?

  More minutes passed. Keith and Devrie stayed frozen, facing each other, and over her skeletal body and his stronger one a flush began to spread, rosy and slow, like heat tide rising.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said one of the medical doctors, so low that only I, standing directly behind her, could have heard. It was not a curse, nor a prayer, but some third possibility, unnamable.

  Keith put one hand on Devrie’s thigh. She shuddered. He drew her down to the cushions on the platform and they began to caress each other, not frenzied, not in the exploring way of lovers but with a deliberation I have never experienced outside a research lab, a slow care that implied that worlds of interpretation hung on each movement. Yet the effect was not of coldness nor detachment but of intense involvement, of tremendous energy joyously used, of creating each other’s bodies right then, there under each other’s hands. They were working, and oblivious to all but their work. But if it was a kind of creative work, it was also a kind of primal innocent eroticism, and, watching, I felt my own heat begin to rise. “Innocent”—but if innocence is unknowingness, there was nothing innocent about it at all. Keith and Devrie knew and controlled each heartbeat, and I felt the exact moment when they let their sexual energies, added to all the other neural energies, burst the dam and flood outward in wave after wave, expanding the scope of each brain’s perceptions, inundating the artificially-walled world.