Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  Grandma smiled approvingly, but Grandpa knelt down and, face-to-face with me, said, “You may keep Lily, but only if you promise me two things.”

  I nodded solemnly, reflecting the look on his face.

  “First, you must promise to feed her, clean up her messes, and exercise with her outside every day.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m serious about this. Grandma has enough with her vineyard and garden and greenhouse. She doesn’t need a dog to take care of on top of everything else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Second, I want you to promise that you will think of Lily not as something to be understood or a problem to be solved, but as a complete, indivisible living creature, full of mystery. Never think about how she might be put together, how her neurons work, and so on. Can you do that for your grandpa?”

  I nodded, though I liked to know about the kinds of things I heard Grandpa and Grandma talk about with Mom and Dad whenever they visited.

  “Good. You will discover with Lily that love is another way of knowing.”

  For the first few weeks my delicate, floppy-eared puppy was afraid to leave my presence. By whining, she even managed to secure a cozy place for herself beside me in my bed—for a while, that is, until Grandma objected to the messes. Then, despite my pleading and tears, a doghouse was installed beside our garage, and Lily was banished from the house. Too many microbots, I was told, could hide in her fur.

  I’ve had to ask Michael to make more paper. He thought I would fill the pages he’d initially given me; then he would scan them into the computer (and probably read them) before recycling them. But there are things I want to write that I don’t want him to see, not now, not until I’m finished, if ever. Jealousy is new to me. I need time to heal.

  It was spring, and although the garden and trees were full of blossoms and Lily seemed to enjoy romping in the wide-open spaces of the yard, I felt a growing emptiness; it had been weeks since I’d seen Mom and Dad, and I missed them.

  “When are Mommy and Daddy coming to see us again?” I asked Grandma late one afternoon while Lily and I were helping her find some weeds the gardenerbots had missed.

  She looked up at me. “I think you should speak with Grandpa about that.”

  I often wished she would, but Grandma never—I can’t think of a single instance—interfered with the way Grandpa taught me.

  She pulled another weed. “I think you should ask to see First Brother, too.”

  I turned to Lily and began telling her my words for the week and a story I’d composed using those words. While I spoke, she licked my hand and nibbled on one of my fingers, then rolled onto her back, inviting me to rub her tummy.

  I now know there is disagreement among experts as to how early a child develops a theory of mind. But I distinctly remember thinking—at least, I believe I do, remembering being a creative and therefore an unavoidably fictionalized process—that even though Lily’s internal world did not include my concern for numbers or words or stories, she nevertheless had a vibrant, happy life; and I loved her. Maybe First Brother liked different things, too, just as Lily did. Maybe he wasn’t bored with me, either. Maybe he was just waiting for me to do something such as play ball with him or rub his tummy—perhaps where the electricity went in.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Grandpa said when I asked him about an hour later if he could have Mom, Dad, and First Brother visit us again. “But I want you to think about how you can be more patient with your brother than you were the last time.”

  “I will.”

  “And I want you to think up some games you can play with him. He likes to play games. Can you do that?”

  By the next Saturday, I’d devised two games. Mom, Dad, and First Brother were scheduled to arrive just before afternoon tea, and although it would still be my sun-curfew time, Grandpa said I could take them out to meet Lily, provided I stayed in the shadow of the garage.

  As their arrival drew near, I waited anxiously beside Gatekeeper. Clunk, clunk, whoosh and there they were, standing hand in hand as before: Mom and Dad smiling at me, First Brother staring at the wall. Lily, who hadn’t yet thoroughly accepted that she wasn’t permitted into the house, squeezed in between their legs. I scooped her up in my arms. She was already getting heavy for me.

  “What a cute puppy,” Dad said. He freed his hand from First Brother’s and petted Lily before leaning down to hug and kiss me.

  “What kind of dog is she?” Mom asked. She, too, had freed her hand from First Brother’s and was stroking Lily.

  “A German shepherd,” I said. “Her name is Lily.”

  “Oh, my. She’ll be a big dog.” The expression on Mom’s face wasn’t altogether approving.

  I looked up and noticed that First Brother was still staring straight ahead. “Would you like to pet Lily?” I asked, lifting her slightly toward him.

  Though his gaze didn’t move from the blank white wall, his right hand rose and gently caressed Lily’s head and back. I was shocked by this apparent dissociation between his eyes and hands. Evidently, he was able to pay attention to something, perhaps even to me, without appearing to do so. Crowding out that thought was my growing concern that Grandma would appear and discover that Lily had again sneaked into the house.

  “Grandpa said we could play with Lily by the garage,” I said, stepping outside.

  I set Lily down and walked under the vine-covered arborway connecting the house with the garage. In front of the garage, in shade that time of day, I had left two of Lily’s squeaky chew toys, the implements of my first game, which was to see who was better at getting Lily to come.

  After explaining the rules of the game, I demonstrated both toys, cream-colored bones, by squeezing them, then handed one to First Brother. Dad, as instructed by me, carried Lily to the far side of the garage and set her down.

  “Come, Lily. Come here,” I said excitedly, while squeezing the squeaky toy. First Brother just stared at the toy in his hand. Lily came to me and received a reward of hugs and kisses.

  Mom showed First Brother how to squeeze the toy to make it squeak and instructed him to kneel down, squeeze the toy, and repeat, “Come, Lily. Come here.”

  Still, Lily came to me. Five times straight. What a good girl, I thought. You don’t prefer First Brother over me.

  Dad picked me up and hugged me. “Lily’s a nice dog,” he said. “I see she loves you very much.”

  I hugged Dad back, melting into his warmth and strength and earthy scent.

  “We should go in,” I heard Mom say. “They’re undoubtedly waiting for us for tea.” From her chilly voice, I sensed that she thought I’d just been naughty.

  The next game I’d devised was one for First Brother and me to play in the kitchen. Its object was to see who could name the most flowers rising in curly plumes of steam above freshly poured cups of tea. I quickly pointed out a marigold, then an iris, over Grandpa’s cup.

  “Don’t you see them?” I asked, turning to my brother, who’d said nothing. He slowly shook his head while keeping his gaze fixed on the steam. I glanced back to the tea, and just then, clear as day, the gentle swirl of a white arum lily appeared over the cup.

  “Arum lily!” I shouted, pointing at its outline as it evaporated.

  Then, for the first time, my brother looked at me—not just at my hands or feet, but at my face and into my eyes. I remember feeling a tingle, as if from a prickly net wrapped around my scalp, and thinking something to the effect that perhaps a little girl who could find phantom flowers with steamy stems wavering in the kitchen air held for him some of the interest of water swirling in a toilet bowl or of milk dispersing into tea. And then he smiled—not a broad happy smile, but a thin smile expressing interest, his eyes darting about like dragonflies over my face—and I felt for the first time that he was my brother.

  I smiled back, and saying, “I’m glad you’re my brother,” I put my hand on his hand, which still felt strangely cool and smooth. His smile evaporated, and his ga
ze turned back toward the curlicues of steam rising over the cup of tea.

  Grandpa then asked me to read aloud my list of new words for the week and the story I’d composed about Lily getting one of her paws stuck in chicken wire that Grandma had put up in the garden. I wasn’t excited about doing this, considering how bored with my new words First Brother had earlier appeared, but I did as Grandpa requested.

  Sure enough, all the while I read my list and my story, First Brother’s attention appeared to be directed toward something else—the purring of the biorecycler as near as I could tell—and my patience began to fray.

  “Brother, what were my new words for the week?” I asked, imitating the kind of question Grandpa would ask and the stern tone he would use whenever he sensed my attention waning.

  I was surprised when First Brother listed all twenty words without hesitation. And then I was struck with a realization: “You can think about more than one thing at a time, can’t you?”

  “I think about many things at once,” he replied, still staring at the recycler.

  “What else were you thinking about when I read you my new words?”

  He glanced at Mom, then looked back at the recycler. “Such things are not to be discussed with my sister.”

  When they left that day, I hugged and kissed Mom and Dad. First Brother extended his hand—to shake good-bye, I suppose—but I asked him to pick me up. He did, and I put my arms around his neck and hugged him and kissed his cool cheek.

  He became rigid, as if suddenly transformed to a statue.

  “I’ll think up a new game for the next time you come,” I whispered into his ear.

  He said nothing and, after a few inert seconds, set me down, leaving me, as he so often would in years to follow, with an empty, wanting feeling.

  First Brother

  Through the eyes of the pigeonoid, I see a submersible break through the surface of the ocean. Six seconds later its top hatch opens and a flotation device is ejected—at 784 meters west, 139 meters north of the center of the mouth of the Russian River on the northern California coast.

  The flotation device bobs for 18 seconds, then distends and flattens out to an elongated raft, in the middle of which Sara sits cross-legged. She wears soft-soled, blue-and-white striped cloth shoes; white socks; faded blue jeans; an item of clothing (highest correlation: sweater) gray in color, wrapped and tied around her waist; and a long-sleeved white shirt, on which each button, including the top, is buttoned. Goggles with lenses tinted dark gray cover her eyes. On her hands are white gloves. A white hat with neck drapes shelters her head. A white pack is attached to her back with straps that come over her shoulders and wrap under her arms. The wide brim of the hat casts a shadow down her face and ventral trunk. A cloth band tied under her chin secures the hat on her head.

  She is not decorated with any of the jewelry or skin enhancements of contemporary teenage female humans.

  It is midday minus 26 minutes, 11 seconds on 20 June.

  Sara

  “Air France-KLM flight number 1147 departing for Amsterdam is ready for boarding at gate number E73.” The announcement was made in a pleasant-sounding, probably artificial, woman’s voice, perfect in its soothing mellowness.

  It was the middle of June, and for my sixth birthday Grandpa was taking me to visit my only cousin, Elio, who had moved to the Netherlands about half a year earlier with his mother after his father had been shot and killed by a policeman in New York City. The city’s chief medical examiner had determined that the shooting had been an accident: Uncle Marcus had been running away from a homosexual assignation in Central Park, and the policeman chasing him had stumbled and fallen, accidentally discharging his gun. But Grandpa believed that what lay behind the unusual surveillance and pursuit of Uncle was Uncle’s continuing involvement with the creation of androids for the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The circumstances of Uncle’s death had been told to me matter-of-factly by Grandpa—after, that is, he’d secured my promise not to tell Elio; Aunt Lynh wanted my cousin to believe that his father had died in a car accident.

  Before they moved to the Netherlands, I had seen Aunt Lynh and Elio on Vidtel a few times each year, usually on one of our birthdays. Uncle Marcus, Mom’s stepbrother, had been Dad’s roommate in college and one of Grandpa’s favorite students. During the years I’d known him, he’d spoken with Grandpa on Vidtel about once each week, usually about evolutionary organic nanoneuralnets. I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I knew what they were talking about had something to do with my brothers; and each time they spoke, I listened carefully, trying to pick up a few words and concepts I would later ask Grandpa to explain—and he would, in language appropriate for a student much more advanced than I. Unlike Grandma, Mom, and Dad, Grandpa refused to speak to me in what he called parentese.

  Uncle, who was seventeen days younger than Mom and was not biologically related to her through either his mother or father, was tall and handsome, with dark brown skin and wavy black hair. Aunt Lynh had beautiful, shiny, straight black hair, light brown skin, and an oval face with Asian eyes. She never said much on those early Vidtel calls, preferring, it seemed, to gaze admiringly at Uncle while he spoke.

  Elio was a year and thirty-three days older than I. Like his mother, he never said much when they called, usually just “Hi” when Uncle nudged him. He’d inherited Uncle’s dark skin, but his jet-black hair was straight, his face was round, and his chocolate irises—so dark I could hardly distinguish them from his pupils—were set, as were his mother’s, in enchantingly beautiful, acutely angled frames of skin that seemed drawn back toward his ears, especially when he smiled. His hair was parted in the middle and fell in thick fronds over his forehead and eyes.

  I found him both fascinating and disconcerting, for unlike First Brother, he usually appeared to be staring at me, though slightly askance, his strange eyes studying me from behind shafts of tousled hair. I was immensely curious about what he was like, what he was thinking, and what he was so studiously observing in me; but his appearance never failed to shock me into silence, so that I, like him, said little more than “Hi” whenever he appeared on Vidtel.

  About two months after Uncle’s ashes were buried in Grandma’s garden (I was told that he’d thought it was the most beautiful and peaceful place he’d ever seen), Vidtel announced a call from Aunt Lynh in Amsterdam. I was reading a story to Grandpa at the time, and when the call came he nodded, his gaze moving in an arc from me to the door. I hurried out of the room. Grandpa had told me that Aunt Lynh was depressed and was seeking his advice (he had been trained as a medical doctor at Stanford), so their conversations were strictly confidential. She had been so depressed, in fact, that she hadn’t even come to California to attend Uncle’s burial.

  After his call, Grandpa told me that Aunt Lynh and Elio were in trouble and needed his help. “Lynh’s parents and only sister were killed in a car accident years ago, so with Marcus gone, we’re the only family she has. Neither she nor Elio speaks Dutch. She can’t find work. Elio isn’t in school. It’s a mess.”

  “So, why did she move to the Netherlands?” I asked. “Why did she take Elio there?”

  “She told me she wanted to raise Elio in a country that cherishes differences.”

  He departed for Amsterdam that evening. While he was gone, Grandma and I baked my favorite double chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies. We also worked in the garden and visited the winery, where Grandma tasted wines and talked with Carlos Hernandez, the vineyard manager, about things like fermenting and blending, while I shared the sweets we had made with the winery workers and the tasting-room guests.

  Grandma was soft to hug—Grandpa sometimes kidded her about liking her own cooking too much—and she always smelled of floral perfume, usually tea rose. She had thinning straight white hair, pale gray-blue eyes, and prominent Nordic cheekbones. In photos taken in her twenties and thirties, she appears slender, light blonde, and strikingly beautiful. I inhe
rited the cheekbones, the youthful slimness, and hair even lighter in color; but somehow it all failed to coalesce into what one would call beautiful.

  She seemed always to be content in the moment, radiating warmth and love. Through her I found happiness in natural things: flowers, clouds, trees, food—her salads, picked year-round from our garden and greenhouse, were so vibrant with reds, greens, and yellows that I sometimes imagined I was eating scenery from magnificent paintings. And each month, not wanting to miss a single return of the full moon, she and I would go out near sunset to watch the receding integument of light, then the moon, a marbled yellow blossom displaying silhouettes of bats and birds and of the seasonally eerie, naked branches of the old valley oak tree sentried alone on a nearby hill.

  Grandpa called on Vidtel at least once every day he was gone, and as the days passed he seemed increasingly satisfied that matters were improving for Aunt Lynh and Elio. He seemed especially pleased when he reported that he had secured enrollment for Elio at one of the finest private international schools in the world. Children from over fifty countries were in attendance there, and classes were taught in English, so Elio wouldn’t have a language problem. I felt a pang of envy.

  “You’re the best teacher, aren’t you, Grandpa? Better than any at Elio’s school.”

  “Yes, honey. I promise you that I’m the best teacher any little girl has ever had.”

  The next morning when Vidtel announced a call from Amsterdam, I ran to the communications room and pressed the Accept Video button. The screen lit up as though a large window suddenly opened in the wall, and there was my cousin, that alluring mystery, life-size in three dimensions, sitting in a chair a meter or so in front of a bed. At first he was as speechless as I (this was the first time we faced each other alone), but after a bit of squirming in his chair, this boy with chocolate skin and hair the color of a crow began telling me about his new school, his new friends, and his new room, the bedroom he was sitting in. He spoke as if we’d long been friends who were comfortable in each other’s presence. “I want you to stay with me here in my room next summer. Your grandpa is really nice. He takes us everywhere. He even played football with me and some kids in the park. He says you’re coming to visit me. He says I should call you every day with my homework. He’s going to bring you all my schoolbooks so you can follow along. It’ll be fun!”