by Nancy Kress
His voice sounded hollow. He was lying to her.
Cazie said, “Nothing was stolen. Maybe they didn’t even intend to steal anything but Change syringes. They knew Jackson was a doctor. Other medical types were breached, too. The cops will take care of the whole thing. Nobody was hurt.”
“But there were arms and legs all over the floor!” Theresa cried. She could see them, horrible detached limbs…she shuddered and gasped. “And my arms and legs—”
“Easy, Tess,” Cazie said. “It’s all right now. There weren’t any arms and legs on the floor, and yours are all right, too. It was just the system biodefense. Why didn’t you put on your mask when you activated it?”
“You’re upsetting her,” Jackson said. “She didn’t know. Tess, it’s all right now, we’re right here. You don’t need to think about it anymore.”
“But…” Theresa said. Her fingers tightened and loosened on Jackson’s, tightened and loosened. “But tell me…what did I breathe in? Please tell me, Jackson.”
Jackson said reluctantly, “It was a gas that acts directly on the parietal cortices, inducing anosognosia. The parietal cortices control how the mind perceives the sensations and movements of the body. In anosognosia the mind is incapable of recognizing its own limbs, and also incapable of recognizing that anything is wrong. So the victim invents elaborate scenarios to explain the perceived limb paralysis. It makes a good security method to incapacitate without increasing the anger and panic that can lead to reckless response. And it doesn’t harm anyone.”
“The arms and legs on the floor were your own,” Cazie said. “The Livers never got past the foyer.”
Jackson said, “You just breathed a temporary neuropharm. Even without the Cell Cleaner, it doesn’t last long. You might have a tingling in your limbs for a while, but it’s not harmful.”
A neuropharm. She had breathed in a neuropharm, and become a different person. A person without arms and legs, a person who thought other people’s arms and legs cluttered the floor, a person who hadn’t been upset by that but rather had planned a calm list of ways to deal with it. Not Theresa. Someone else entirely.
She looked up at Jackson, and for the first time she could remember, Theresa didn’t want him close. “You…you made me somebody else.”
“No, I didn’t, the house system—”
“But you want me to take neuropharms always. To be somebody different from me.”
“Theresa, you can’t compare—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“That’s not the answer. I don’t know what is, but not that.” She let go of Jackson’s hand and struggled to stand.
Cazie said, “Tess, honey, you’re not really being fair to Jack. He just—”
“I know what he just,” Theresa said, and somehow she left them there, Jackson looking stricken and Cazie rueful. Staggered to her room really, her walk was so unsteady, her arms and legs did tingle and once she thought they might buckle under her.
But at least they were her own.
The building sat on the side of a mountain high in the Adirondacks. Theresa landed the car, which of course flew on automatic, on an artificially flat stretch of nanopaved ground that she assumed was a parking lot, although no other cars rested on it. Then she stood for a long time in the cold just gazing up at the Sisters of Merciful Heaven.
The convent, not foamcast but built of genuine stone, blended into the mountain. Gray rock, scantily covered with withered ivy vines that matched the withered winter vegetation growing at angles on the steep ground. It was the first donkey building Theresa could remember ever seeing, even in newsgrids, that wasn’t surrounded by the faint shimmering bubble of a Y-shield. Only snow, heaped in clean drifts. A little wind skirled the light powder around Theresa’s legs, and she shivered. She started toward the door.
It was opened by a middle-aged woman, not a security system or a ’bot. A woman—a sister?—dressed in a straight gray robe of what looked like cotton. Cotton. A consumable. The sight almost overcame Theresa’s usual shrinking from strangers. She clutched her two hands tightly together and forced herself not to step back.
“I’m…Theresa Aranow. I called…”
“Come in, Ms. Aranow. I’m Sister Anne.” She smiled, but Theresa couldn’t smile back. Her face felt too tight. “I’m the one you talked to on comlink. Come with me to where we can talk.”
She led Theresa through a gloomy stone foyer and opened a heavy wooden door. Sound flowed out.
“Oh! What…What is it?”
“The sisters, singing vespers.”
Theresa stopped, transfixed. She had never heard singing like that. Not from any sound system, ever. A glorious outpouring of sound, without instruments—just human voices, every one genemod for musical ability, raised in fervent ardor. She couldn’t make out the words, but the words didn’t matter…it was the passion that mattered. Passion for something unseen but—but what? Felt. The passion…
Sister Anne said gently, “You said on comlink you were not raised Catholic. Have you heard vespers sung before?”
“Never!”
“Well, neither have most Catholics. Or what passes for Catholics now. Come in here, where we can talk.”
Theresa followed her into a small, white-walled room furnished only with a desk, terminal, and three chairs. Wooden chairs. She blurted, “You’re not Changed. Any of you.”
“No,” Sister Anne said, smiling. “We must eat, and drink, and depend on our own efforts and His grace for our daily bread.”
“Is it…is it…” She was trembling. But she made herself get the words out, because they were so important to her. “Is it a spiritual discipline?”
“It is. Suppose, Ms. Aranow, you start by telling me why you’re here.”
“Why I’m here.” Theresa looked at the nun. Theresa had had Thomas do background. Sister Anne was fifty-one years old, had entered this semi-cloistered order at seventeen, was one of only eight hundred forty-nine Sisters of Merciful Heaven left in the world. Born Anne Grenville Hart in Wichita, Kansas, she had inherited three million dollars from her mother, cofounder of a bakery franchise, Proust’s Madeleines. The entire three million had been donated to the order. Why was Anne Grenville Hart here? But Theresa couldn’t ask that. Obediently, she tried to answer the sister’s question, knowing even before she began that the answer would be inadequate, wouldn’t really say at all what Theresa could never find words for in the first place.
“I’m here because I…I’m looking for something.” And waited to be asked what. The unanswerable question, which would only lead to stammering and muddled words and puzzled looks from the sister, growing more impatient, until Theresa collapsed into hopeless silence.
But Sister Anne said, “And you’ve looked everywhere else you could think of, couldn’t find it, and so have tried here, in desperation. Even though you can’t begin to define what you’re looking for, and are afraid it isn’t the Catholic conception of God at all.”
“Yes!” Theresa gasped. “How…how did you know?”
“You’re not the first to come to us,” Sister Anne said serenely, “and you won’t be the last. But I think you may be different from most. Ms. Aranow, why aren’t you Changed?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t? You mean, there is some physical difficulty?”
“No, no, I mean I just…can’t.”
“You’re afraid of making your own life too automatic. In physical need, you think, begins spiritual questing. Its roots and wellspring.”
“Yes!” Theresa gasped. “Oh, yes! Only…”
“Only what, Ms. Aranow?” Sister Anne leaned forward on her chair, a chair of hard mellowed natural wood that her unChanged body would not consume molecule by molecule until the solid had been turned into a holed skeleton of itself. Sister Anne’s chair would stay a chair. Sister Anne’s expression was as warm as Jackson’s and Cazie’s but different somehow, not…not what? Not careful with Theresa, not pitying, not condescending. Sister Anne didn�
�t think that Theresa Aranow was weak, or crazy.
The words spilled out. Looking at the calm, understanding face, Theresa’s fear of strangers somehow disappeared and the words tumbled out, tidal-waved out, unstoppable.
“I’ve always wanted something, looked for something, my whole life…only I don’t have any idea what it is! And nobody else has ever seemed to need it, or to even know what I’m talking about, even good people that I know are good people. People I love. They look at me like I’m crazy…actually, I am crazy. I’m depressed, agoraphobic, and severely neurologically inhibited. I haven’t left our apartment in over a year except once and that was—nobody else I know feels like this. I want there to be something…large. Larger than myself. Something in the universe to hang on to, to give my life some kind of meaning…I’m a fraud, you know, agreeing with you that I’m unChanged because I don’t want things too automatic. They are automatic for me. I’m rich, and I have a loving brother who stands between me and the world, and I never have to worry or struggle for anything, certainly not my daily bread, which is delivered and cooked and served by ’bots that—while most of the people in this country are out there without safety or enough Y-cones or medical care for their children who are born without enough Change syringes…Not that I think the Change is a good—I’m confused about the Change. I know it. But the reason I’ve always been different is that I want something nobody can have—Jackson says nobody can have it because it doesn’t exist. I want the truth! The truth that is real and solid and you can use to help you figure out how to live your life and what that life is supposed to mean. Oh, I know there’s no such thing as that kind of truth—absolute truth—and it’s stupid and naive to go looking for it…but I did. I tried to, anyway. I had Thomas help me search through Christianity and Zen and Yagaiism and Hinduism and the Text of the Scientific Change…I’m not very smart, Sister, something may have gone wrong with my in vitro fertilization and maybe I don’t understand much of what Thomas brought me. But I did try. And it seems to me that those beliefs all contradict each other, all say different things, and if so, how can they all be true? And then they also contradict themselves internally, with different parts of their own beliefs that don’t fit with each other, or don’t fit with what I see all around me in the world, so how can any of them be true? They’re not! But then I’m left with nothing except this longing, and nobody else I know seems to feel it so I end up so alone I think I’ll die. I’ve seriously thought of suicide. But what that would do to Jackson, who already feels so responsible for me…I can’t. I can’t. It wouldn’t be right. Only…how do I know what’s ‘right’ if I can’t find out what’s true? And so I go on living in this…this void, and sometimes the emptiness is so big and dark and thick I feel that I’ll suffocate, or that I’m so lost I can’t ever be found…can’t find myself, I mean, except that myself isn’t what I want! It’s too small, to find nothing but myself!”
Theresa stopped, gasping. What had she been saying? Pouring out all that to this stranger, this poised woman whom she didn’t even know, like some sort of whining baby…
“You are right in your search,” Sister Anne said, “but wrong in your conclusions.”
She spoke with utter conviction. And yet Theresa felt confused; she didn’t think she’d stated any conclusions, hadn’t been able to come to any. Wasn’t that the problem?
“I don’t understand, Sister.”
“How old are you, Ms. Aranow?”
“Eighteen,” she said, and waited for the smile. It didn’t come.
“You say the beliefs you’ve examined—from Yagaiism to Zen—all contradict each other, as well as being either internally inconsistent or inconsistent with your observed experience, and therefore all cannot be true. That is your error.”
“What?” Theresa cried. “What’s my error?”
“They are all true. Every last one of every belief you named. Plus atheism, Druidism, cannibalism, and devil worship.”
Theresa gaped at her.
“The fact is, my lost child, that truth is not so simple. It is solid, and large, and bright enough to banish the darkness—but it is not simple.”
“I don’t understand,” Theresa faltered. She had a sudden picture of Cazie watching Sister Anne from the corner of the white-walled room: Cazie with her head tilted, her golden eyes scornfully bright, smiling at them both. Always smiling. Irony, Tessie. Don’t lose your irony.
“Everything is true, under difference circumstances. Men are good, and men are sinful. God is all-powerful, and God cannot choose for each soul. Love is greater than justice, and justice greater than love. How else could the Church have changed over more than two millennia, and still be the Church? Sometimes heretics must be rooted out and destroyed, and sometimes heretics must be embraced, and sometimes heretics are we ourselves. All of it is true. But humankind cannot see all of truth at once, and so in each age we see what we can. There are fashions in truth, as in all else. And under the fashions, the largeness abides.”
“But, Sister…but if everything is true…”
“Then the task of the searcher is to set aside the egotism of perception and see as much of God as each can.”
The egotism of perception. Theresa struggled with the concept. “You mean…we can’t see it all, so we must trust the rest is there? On faith?”
“That’s part of it. But there’s more involved. We must literally set aside the smallness of our perceptions—the limits of our perceptions—and see what was hidden to us before.”
“But how?” And then, more quietly, “How?”
Sister Anne stood and walked to the door. She opened it and the glorious sound swept back into the room: thirty, fifty voices raised in song, ardent and pure, a rush as heady and perfumed as the smell of summer nights. Theresa closed her eyes and leaned forward, as if the singing were a physical stream and she lowering herself into it.
“Like that,” Sister Anne said.
Irony is always the best defense against self-delusion, Cazie said.
“It’s also the best defense against the risk of any genuine feeling,” Sister Anne said quietly, and Theresa’s eyes flew open and her heart sped, until she realized she must have spoken Cazie’s words aloud.
Theresa stood, too, although she couldn’t have said why. Vespers rose and fell around her, a sea of sweet sound, palpable and powerful as a rush of fresh water. Again her heart sped, but this time without any risk of an attack. Her breathing was calm and deep. Yes, something said inside a deep part of her mind. Yes yes yes!
The nun watched her closely. “Very few people actually belong in this order, Ms. Aranow.”
Theresa said, “I do,” and it seemed to her she had never spoken with such confidence in her life. It was over, then: the uncertainty, the lostness, the tremendous fear. Above all, the fear. Of the strange, the alien, the different. Over. She was home.
Sister Anne smiled; to Theresa, her smile blended with the glory of the music, was the music. “I think maybe you do. Would you like to have the preliminary blood and cerebral-spinal tests now?”
Theresa smiled back. “Tests?”
“To use as an eventual base for your customized neuropharms.”
“My…what?”
“We customize the mix for each postulant, of course. Our lab, which we share with the Jesuits in Saranac Lake, is as advanced at this work as any in the world. Your mix will match anything available in Boston or Copenhagen or Brasilia, for any purpose.”
Theresa said woodenly, “I don’t take neuropharms.”
“You have never taken any like these, certainly. For this purpose, with this result. Not yet.”
“I don’t take them at all.” Dizziness rushed over her, displacing the music. She reached for the back of the chair with both hands.
“I see,” Sister Anne said. “Just as you are unChanged. But, Theresa, they are not the same thing. Neuropharms for the greater glory of God…What did you think I meant when I said we set aside the egotism of perception?
That’s a cortical-thalamic function.”
“I don’t know what I thought,” Theresa mumbled. The dizziness grew worse. She clutched the back of the chair.
“Our neuropharms modify activities in the mammillothalamic tract, cortical association areas, and dorsomedial nucleus—no different from modifying biochemistry through fasting or frenzied prayer in other ages. We merely break down the neural barriers to increased levels of attention, perception, and integration of various conscious states. To better know and glorify God.”
“I have to leave now,” Theresa gasped. The room whirled, and her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe. There was no air…
“But, my child—”
“I have…to go! I’m…sorry!”
She stumbled through the open door of the room. Vespers rose around her, stronger as she staggered blindly along the corridor: glorious, fervent, heartbreaking. Theresa yanked at the convent door; it wouldn’t open. She couldn’t talk to order it open. Gasping, she beat on the wood, until someone she couldn’t see through the whirling confusion, someone behind her, opened the door for her and she fell through.
The door closed, cutting off the music.
When she could breathe again, Theresa sat for a long time in her car. Then she lifted it and flew south.
The first tribe she came to had housed itself for the winter in the remains of a pre-Change-Wars Liver town. The three undestroyed buildings were Liver colors: fuchsia, mint, and bright red. Behind the red building stretched a huge sheet of heavy plastic over churned-up earth: a feeding ground. Beyond it lay a pile of broken machines, scooters and ’bots and what looked like water pipes. People, made small and nonthreatening by the aircar’s height, stopped moving and looked up, hands shading their eyes against the cold winter sun. Theresa couldn’t see their faces.
She didn’t try to go down to them, or even to lower her altitude. Instead she powered down the window and dropped out the package of Change syringes. Sixteen of them, all that Jackson had had left in the house safe. The syringes were wrapped in nonconsumable flowered dress cloth. The cloth might tear when it landed, but nothing could shatter Miranda Sharifi’s Change syringes.
