She actually had the whole thing charted out. We were having lunch at a Loop pizzeria the day Denise told me what she wanted to do. She spread out a group of elaborate charts; one was marked HOME, one FATHER, one SCHOOL, all in her too-neat artist’s script. The whole time she showed me, her hands were shaking as if they were trying to fly away from her. I’d never seen anyone shake like that until then, watching Denise’s fingers bounce like rubber with so much excitement and fervor. The shaking scared me more than her plans and charts.
“Neecy, please wait,” I told her.
“If I wait, I might change my mind,” Denise said, as if this were a logical argument for going forward rather than just the opposite. She still hadn’t learned that doubt was a signal to stop and think, not to plow ahead with her eyes covered, bracing for a crash.
But that was just Denise. That’s just the way she is. Maybe that’s who she is.
Denise’s living room was so pristine when I arrived, it was hard to believe it had witnessed a trauma. I noticed the empty shelves on the music rack and the spaces where two picture frames had been removed from their hooks on the wall; but the wooden floors gleamed, the walls were scrubbed white, and I could smell fresh lilac that might be artificial or real, couldn’t tell which. Denise’s house reminded me of the sitting room of the bed and breakfast I stayed in overnight during my last trip to London, simultaneously welcoming and wholly artificial. A perfect movie set, hurriedly dusted and freshened as soon as visitors were gone.
Denise looked like a vagrant in her own home. As soon as I got there, I knew why she hadn’t wanted me to see her on the phone; she was half dressed in a torn T-shirt, her hair wasn’t combed, and the skin beneath her eyes looked so discolored that I had to wonder, for a moment, if Sean might have been hitting her. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been in an abusive relationship. But then I stared into the deep mud of my friend’s irises before she shuffled away from me, and I knew better. No, she wasn’t being beaten; she wouldn’t have tolerated that with Neecy in the house. Instead, my friend was probably having a nervous breakdown.
“Did he say why he left?” I asked gently, stalling. I didn’t see little Neecy anywhere, and I didn’t want to ask about her yet. I wished I didn’t have to see her at all.
Answering with a grunt rather than spoken words, Denise flung her arm toward the polished rosewood dining room table. There, I saw a single piece of paper laid in the center, a typewritten note. As sterile as everything else. In the shining wood, I could also see my own reflection standing over it.
“Haven’t you read it?” I asked her.
“Neecy’s in the back,” Denise said, as if in response.
“Shhh. Just a second. Let’s at least read what the man said.” My heart had just somersaulted, and then I knew how much I didn’t want to be there at all. I didn’t want to think about that child. I picked a random point midway through the note and began reading aloud in the tone I might have used for a eulogy: “… You squeeze so hard, it chokes me. You’re looking for more than a father for her, more than a home. It isn’t natural, between you and her—”
“Stop it,” Denise hissed. She sank down to the sofa, tunneling beneath a blanket and pulling it up to her chin.
I sighed. I could have written that note myself. Poor Sean. I walked to the sofa and sat beside my friend. My hand felt leaden as I rested it on the blanket where I believed Denise’s shoulder must be. “So you two fought about it. You never told me that,” I said.
“There’s a lot I didn’t tell you,” Denise said, and I felt her shivering beneath the blanket. “He didn’t understand. Never. I thought he’d come around. I thought—”
“You could change him?”
“Shut up,” Denise said, sounding more weary than angry.
Yes, I felt weary, too. I’d had this conversation with Denise, or similar ones, countless times before. Denise had met Sean through a video personal on the Internet where all she said was, “I want a good husband and father. Let’s make a home.” Sean was a nice enough guy, but I had known their marriage was based more on practical considerations than commitment. They both wanted a family. They both had pieces missing and were tired of failing. Neither of them had learned, after two divorces, that people can’t be applied to wounds like gauze.
And, of course, then there was little Neecy. What was the poor guy supposed to do?
“She’s in her room. I already packed her things. Please take her, Paige. Take her.” Denise was whimpering by now.
I brushed a dead-looking clump of hair from Denise’s face. Denise’s eyes, those unseeing eyes, would be impossible to reach. But I tried anyway, in hopes of saving all of us. “This is crazy. Take her where? What am I going to do with a kid?”
“You promised.”
Okay, Mama. I will.
“What?”
“You promised. At the church. At the christening. You’re her godmother. If anything happened to me, you said you would.”
I thought of the beautiful baby girl, a goddess dressed in white, her soft black curls crowned with lace—gurgling, happy, and agreeable despite the tedium of the long ceremony. Holding her child, Denise had been glowing in a way she had not at her wedding, as if she’d just discovered her entire reason for living.
Tears found my eyes for the first time since I’d arrived. “Denise, what’s this going to mean to her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t … care,” Denise said, her voice shattered until she sounded like a mute struggling to form words. “Look at me. I can’t stand to be near her. I vomit every time I look at her. It’s all ruined. Everything. Oh, God—” She nearly sobbed, but there was only silence from her open mouth. “I can’t. Not again. No more. Take her, Paige.”
I saw a movement in my peripheral vision, and I glanced toward the hallway in time to see a shadow disappear from the wall. My God, I realized, the kid must have been standing where she could hear every hurtful word. I knew I had to get Neecy out of the house, at least for now. Denise was right. She was not fit, at this moment, to be a mother. Anything was better than leaving Neecy here, even getting her to a hotel. Maybe just for a day or two.
I couldn’t take care of both of them now. I had to choose the child.
“Neecy?” The bedroom door was open only a crack, and I pressed my palm against it to nudge it open. “Sweetheart, are you in here?”
What struck me first was the books. Shelves filled with the colorful spines of children’s books reached the ceiling of the crowded room, so high that even an adult would need a stepladder. Every other space was occupied by so many toys—costumed dolls, clowns, stuffed animals—that I thought of the time my parents took me to F.A.O. Schwarz when I was a kid, the way every square foot was filled with a different kind of magic.
The bed was piled high with dresses. There must have been dozens of them, many of them formal, old-fashioned tea dresses. They were the kind of dresses mothers hated to wear when they were young, and yet love to adorn their little girls with; made of stiff, uncomfortable fabrics and bright, precious colors. Somewhere beneath that heaping pile of clothes, I saw a suitcase yawning open, struggling uselessly to swallow them all.
“Neecy?”
The closet. I heard a sound from the closet, a child’s wet sniffle.
Neecy, why are you in the closet? Did your daddy beat you again?
She was there, inside a closet stripped of everything except a few wire hangers swinging lazily from the rack above her head. I couldn’t help it; my face fell slack when I saw her. I felt as if my veins had been drained of blood, flushed with ice water instead.
Over the years, I’d talked to little Neecy on the telephone at least once a month, whenever I called Denise. I was her godmother, after all.
Neecy was old enough now that she usually answered the phone, and she chatted obligingly about school and her piano, acting and computer lessons, before saying, Want to talk to Mommy? And the child always sounded so prim, so full of private-school self-
assuredness, free of any traces of Denise’s hushed, halting—the word, really, was fearful—way of speaking. It wasn’t so strange on the phone, with the image so blurry on the face screen. Not at all.
But being here, seeing her in person, was something else.
Neecy’s hair was parted into two neat, shiny pigtails that coiled around the back of her neck, her nose had a tiny bulb at the end, and her molasses-brown eyes were set apart just like I remembered them. If the girl had been grinning instead of crying right now, she would look exactly as she’d looked in the photograph someone had taken of us at my sixth birthday party, the one where Mama hired a clown to do magic tricks and pull cards out of thin air, and we’d both believed the magic was real.
Denise was in the closet. She was six years old again, reborn.
I’d known what to expect the whole time, but I couldn’t have been prepared for how it would feel to see her again. I hadn’t known how the years would melt from my mind like vapors, how it would fill my stomach with stones to end up staring at my childhood’s biggest heartache eye-to-eye.
Somehow, I found a voice in my dry, burning throat. “Hey, sweetie. It’s Aunt Paige. From California.”
“What’s wrong with my mommy?” A brave whisper.
“She’s just very upset right now, Neecy.” Saying the name, my veins thrilled again.
“Where’d Daddy go?”
I knelt so that I could literally stare her in the eye, and I was reminded of how, twenty-five years ago, Neecy’s eyelids always puffed when she cried, narrowing her eyes into slits. China-girl, I used to tease her to try to make her laugh. Here was my China-girl.
I clasped the child’s tiny, damp hands; the mere act of touching her caused the skin on my arms to harden into gooseflesh. “I’m not sure where your daddy is, sweetie. He’ll come back.”
Hey, Neecy, don’t cry. He’ll come back.
Staring into Neecy’s anguish, for the first time, I understood everything.
I understood what a glistening opportunity had stirred Denise’s soul when she’d realized her salvation had arrived courtesy of science: a legal procedure to extract a nucleus from a single cell, implant it into an egg, and enable her to give new birth to any living person who consented—even to herself. She could take an inventory of everything that had gone wrong, systematically fix it all, and see what would blossom this time. See what might have been.
And now, gazing into Neecy’s eyes—the same eyes, except younger, not worn to sludge like the Neecy quivering under a blanket in the living room—I understood why Denise was possibly insane by now. She’d probably been insane longer than I wanted to admit.
“Listen,” I said. “Your mom told me to take you to get some pizza. And then she wants us to go to my hotel for a couple of days, until she feels better.”
“Will she be okay?” Neecy asked. Her teary eyes were sharp and focused.
Yes, I realized, it was these tears ripping Denise’s psyche to shreds. This was what Denise could not bear to look at, what was making her physically ill. She was not ready to watch her child, herself, taken apart hurt by hurt. Again.
Neecy was dressed in a lemon-colored party dress as if it were her birthday, or Easter Sunday. Did Denise dress her like this every day? Did she wake Neecy up in the mornings and smile on herself while she reclaimed that piece, too? Of course. Oh, yes, she did. Suddenly, I swooned. I felt myself sway with a near-religious euphoria, my spirit filling up with something I couldn’t name. I only kept my balance by clinging to the puffed shoulders of the child’s taffeta dress, as if I’d made a clumsy attempt to hug her.
“Neecy? It’s all right this time,” I heard myself tell her in a breathless whisper. “I promise I’ll watch out for you. Just like I said. It’s all right now, Neecy. Okay? I promise.”
I clasped my best friend’s hand, rubbing her small knuckles back and forth beneath my chin like a salve. With my hand squeezing her thumb, I could feel the lively, pulsing throbbing of Neecy’s other heart.
© 2000 by Tananarive Due.
Originally published in Dark Matter,
edited by Sheree R. Thomas.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Tananarive Due is a winner of the American Book Award and a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. Her novels include the My Soul to Keep series, The Between, The Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost. Her short fiction has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in anthologies such as Dark Delicacies II, Voices from the Other Side, Dark Dreams, Dark Matter, and Mojo: Conjure Stories. She is a frequent collaborator with SF writer Steven Barnes: they’ve produced film scripts, short stories, and three Tennyson Hardwick detective novels, the latest of which (written with actor Blair Underwood) is From Cape Town With Love. (They also collaborate in another way: They’re married.)
The Great Loneliness
Maria Romasco Moore
I am in the cactus room checking on the womb when I hear my third daughter Verdana calling to me from upstairs.
“The picture’s coming through. There’s water! Lots of it.”
The womb is fine. I am only here because I don’t want to be up there, watching, like everyone else in the world.
It is safe to say that these days. No danger of hyperbole. There are only a few thousand of us.
I pick up the womb from the shelf and move it over to the coffee table. I run my hand across its silver skin. How warm it must be in there, how quiet and dark.
“Come on, Mom,” Verdana shouts. “You can’t miss this.”
Inside the womb it is exactly as warm as I made it. It is precisely as dark as I programmed it to be.
• • •
Upstairs, Verdana is soaking in one of the hydroponic tubs, watching a screen on the ceiling.
“You shouldn’t spend so much time in there,” I tell her. “You’ll wilt.”
She rolls her eyes at me from under the water, but I can’t help it. I am a mother and I worry. Verdana has had fifty-seven surgeries in her life so far and I have performed every one of them. Her heart is made of metal now and half her veins are plastic tubes.
And she is growing. New leaves almost every day. Buds forming at her fingertips.
Verdana waves her hand and the screen floats down to my eye level. The picture is grainy and colorless. What it shows, if you know how to decode the pattern of light and dark, is a landscape seen from above. There is indeed water, a slick gray smear of it near the bottom of the image. Symbols flash down the sides of the screen—a full battery of readings and diagnostics—but these are a mystery to me.
Verdana waves her hand again and the picture breaks into pieces. Now there are fifty-some tiny landscapes. Verdana sits up, drops of water falling from the forked white tendrils of her hair.
“There’s supposed to be a hundred,” she says. She’s been reading up on this for weeks now. “One hundred spider babies per target planet.”
“Maybe they rusted,” I say. The CHLT-IV is an old scout. The ones sent out within the last few centuries are much better, technically speaking, but the antiques are much farther away and it is to these we pin our dearest, most fragile hopes.
“Don’t be stupid,” says Verdana. “Nothing rusts in space.”
• • •
It was a very quiet apocalypse. No asteroids. No atomic bombs. The people died of natural causes. Fire. Water. Mountains. Lowlands.
I only know about this from stories, of course. It was long before my time. All I can say for sure is that some people did survive, holed up in bunkers and domes, reproducing through means both natural and artificial.
Those must have been exciting times. Dire, sure, and uncomfortable, but terribly exciting. There must have been a sense of urgency, of desperation, of a simple and overriding purpose: Don’t die.
In the centuries between those times and these, the urgency has diminished. It has become clear that we might very well keep going forever. What has become less clear is why we should both
er. What precisely is the point of surviving? And who would miss us if we stopped?
• • •
Onscreen the spider babies are falling slowly. As they fall, they record their surroundings as thoroughly and intimately as their outdated technology allows. They are designed to send those recordings out in a pulse of light before they hit the ground. Years later or right this second, depending on your perspective, the few of us left on earth will receive that pulse.
When the first of the unmanned scouts were sent out, it was by people looking for a new home. There are hundreds of scouts out there now. Some of them, like the CHLT-IV, are calibrated to seek out and investigate planets of a certain size, orbiting stars of a certain type within a certain range of distances—Goldilocks planets, they call them. Not too cold. Not too hot. Plenty of porridge.
We could go to these planets. We’ve got the technology. There are blueprints for long-term preservation. For canning people up like homemade jam, use-by date a hundred years hence. There are plans that utilize hopscotch clones. A self-sustaining population of one, copy after copy after copy until the ink fades to nothing.
But we do not go to these planets. What would be the point? When we got there, we’d still be alone.
There are other scouts out there now that act as receivers, scanning unceasingly for sound waves with a modicum of rhythm. A hint of soul. Still others hurtle through space shouting, as it were, mechanical travel agents broadcasting our coordinates to anyone who will listen, gushing about our formerly lush forests, our once pristine beaches.
We aren’t looking for a home anymore. We’re looking for a friend. Or a neighbor. A pen pal.
Even an enemy would be fine. We’re not picky.
• • •
The feed from the door to the orchid room pops up in front of the spider baby screen. We have a visitor.
“It’s Marjorie,” says Verdana.
I go downstairs and answer the door, but it isn’t Marjorie; it’s her Brain. I know it immediately. Out of all of them, Marjorie’s Brain does look the most like her, but I’ve known Marjorie all my life and I can always tell the original from the spares.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 22
