Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

  My girls can never see the differences. I have to point them out. Heart is more muscular, as are Kidneys and Blood. The Skin Graft Twins have a certain glow to them which speaks of a strict moisturizing regimen. Liver, it is generally agreed, is actually prettier than her originator. There is something about the eyes, the twist of the mouth. Eyes herself doesn’t go out much.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask Marjorie’s Brain, because something is obviously wrong. The fact that she is here instead of with Marjorie is proof enough of that.

  “Can I come in?”

  Although I fear the worst—Marjorie is dead, irreversibly—I step aside and invite her into the cactus room, which is also the living room.

  My daughters and I live in the greenhouse. It stretches all the way around the house in a ring, though less than a third of it is still up and running. I’ve made a home for us in the small suite of rooms devoted to inedible plants, those which Marjorie’s father cultivated primarily for amusement or decoration.

  Marjorie lives in the very center of the house, in what used to be her father’s private rooms. The hundred or so other rooms in the house—the laboratories and dormitories and dining halls—are empty now.

  I make Marjorie’s Brain some tea and sit beside her on the couch while she sips it slowly.

  “Why aren’t you watching?” I ask. I don’t need to be more specific.

  “Why aren’t you?”

  • • •

  Marjorie’s father was a rich man. By the time he was born all the truly poor men were already dead, of course, but even by the standards of the day he was considered wealthy. He’d inherited a fortune—his great-grandfather had invented the first mechanized womb—and he was a genius in his own right. He employed many of the best and brightest scientists of his age to assist him in his research, and when they proved insufficient, he manufactured better and brighter ones.

  He intended to live forever. No doubt he would have done it, too, if Marjorie hadn’t killed him.

  Before Marjorie killed her father, I had many sisters. Genetically speaking, Marjorie’s father was our father as well, although we did not think of him this way. From his perspective, I am sure, we were no more than expensive pieces of biological equipment. We were born in batches, engineered to work for the man who had made us. Our mother cells were anonymous, pulled from the banks.

  Marjorie was, in his heart, the only daughter her father had. She’d come first, of course. And she’d been born the old-fashioned way, of a woman. Marjorie was her father’s heir and he protected his interest by creating backups for every little piece of her, just in case.

  Some of my sisters resented Marjorie and her privilege, but I always felt that the burden she carried was far heavier than ours. We were our father’s creations; she was his child.

  • • •

  Marjorie’s Brain and I sit without speaking for some time. I am afraid to ask her why she is here. In the corner, the womb hums softly. Marjorie’s Brain finishes her tea.

  “We’re the dinosaurs,” she says, finally, setting her teacup down and turning to me.

  “Ah,” I say. I have heard these exact words once before. Marjorie and I sat together in the greenhouse, in one of the protein rooms, watching the gardeners buzz in and out of the meat flowers. That was three days before she killed her father. In retrospect, her words may have been a warning, but at the time I didn’t understand.

  “We’re not the birds,” says Marjorie’s Brain. “We’re not the crocodiles or the coelacanths.”

  “More tea?” I ask, but she shakes her head. I pour myself a cup instead.

  “We should have bowed out gracefully when we had a chance.”

  • • •

  The instant I left the womb I began learning two languages—the language of my de facto forefathers’ now-dissolved homeland and the language of the body. I learned to read the genome like a poem. The acids and the alkalines. The adenines and the guanines. I memorized it, rote, and then I lingered over each line, exploring it as one might explore the body of a lover. It was everyone’s body, the sum of our flesh, the catalogue of our corporeal form.

  A friend of mine—genetically, a sister—used to say it was a lot like a recipe. “And once you know the recipe by heart you can start to experiment in the kitchen,” she would say, smiling wickedly, spooning a colony of C. elegans into her double-shot espresso.

  She and I came from the same batch. We had the same X and the same Y, and now every time I catch my reflection by accident, in the glass of Perpetua’s tanks or the walls of the greenhouse itself, I am always startled, just for a moment, to see her again.

  • • •

  Verdana shrieks upstairs. I drop my teacup. It smashes and disintegrates and then reforms but I am already halfway up the steps.

  I run into Verdana on the landing. She is damp and naked, but unharmed. The screen comes sailing after her like a faithful dog.

  “Look,” she shrieks, “look!”

  She jumps up and down and at the tip of her left ring finger a small pink flower blooms.

  The screen is zoomed to one spider baby’s view, the surface of the alien planet growing closer by degrees. On the surface there is a grid. It is too far yet to tell what it is made of—Rocks? Vegetation?—but it is a grid no doubt. Straight and true as a game of tic-tac-toe.

  “It’s probably just a crystal formation,” I say, though hope swells unwelcome in my chest. There is an old saying: Hope is a thing with feathers. If that’s true it must be a hawk, with talons to rip out your heart and a sharp beak to pierce it through.

  Tiny screens begin popping up all around me, calls from our friends on the floating cities. There is also a call from Marjorie. I answer.

  “Where is my mind?” she demands.

  “Don’t worry, she’s here. I’ll send her over.”

  • • •

  My second daughter, Kartika, is asleep in the kitchen, curled up in the cupboard beneath the sink. With her face tucked into the crook of her arm, she is almost indistinguishable from the shadows. She is my softest daughter, covered from head to toe in fine black down. I give her a gentle prod, but she doesn’t stir. She only comes out at night, so she will have to see this later.

  My first daughter, Perpetua, is in her room, leaning over one of her testing tanks. Her veins pulse with the light of her blood. Her skin is as translucent as that of a glass catfish, which is one of the things I love about her. I can see right through to her heart. I can make sure it is still beating. She has the spider baby feed up on a screen behind her, but she isn’t watching it.

  “Check it out,” she says when I come in, “I’ve made it so these danios luminesce in the presence of liars.”

  “Bullshit,” I say, and the little fish light up like Christmas.

  “Oh mother,” she says, “You are supposed to be encouraging me.”

  She is on her second adolescence and it is proving more difficult than the first. Genetically she is one-third hydrozoa—Turntopsis nutricula—and so she doesn’t age the way I do. She repeats.

  “Turn around,” I tell her.

  I zoom Perpetua’s screen to the grid. The baby picking it up is even closer to the surface now, still falling, and the lines of the grid show up sharper, easier to differentiate from the mottled gray of the land around them.

  Verdana comes rushing in from the landing. She’s dried herself off a bit, at my urging, and put on a dress—although in her haste she put it on backwards and didn’t bother with the buttons.

  “Oh, Pet,” she cries, “isn’t it amazing?”

  Perpetua scowls, but she doesn’t look away from her screen.

  When I created my daughters, I intended for them to be independent creatures. Perpetua and Kartika are modest successes in this regard, but Verdana was something of a step back. Her fragility has made her clingy. She waves her screen bigger until it takes up the whole wall, each pixel of the strange image nearly an inch across.

  I tell Verdana and Perpet
ua I’ll be back in a bit, but I don’t think they hear me. They are leaning together, shoulder to shoulder, watching the transmission. Verdana sways slightly in the breeze of the air conditioner.

  “I love you both more than anything,” I whisper and then look quickly to the tank at my left. Perpetua’s fish remain unlit.

  • • •

  Marjorie says now that she spared me, out of all the people in her father’s household, because I was her favorite. It might be true. I probably spent more time in Marjorie’s presence than any of my batch mates did.

  But I believe it was an accident.

  I wasn’t in the house when she sealed the doors and cut the oxygen. I should have been, but over the years I had developed an unfortunate defect of character—one that I took pains to conceal.

  Marjorie’s father created me and my sisters to be scientists. He intended for our every in-breath to be a hypothesis; our every out-breath a confirmation of the prevailing theories. I did my best, but the truth is I was never a scientist. I’m still not one. I can ask all the right questions, but I’ve never much cared about the answers.

  On that day, as on many unremarkable days before it, I had nicked a submarine and snuck out to visit the museum. Marjorie’s father didn’t have a copy of the museum, but I knew a man who did. His name was Frank and he lived at the bottom of the sea.

  I visited Frank every day for months, but I only saw a fraction of the place. I would sit on his couch for hours and I would walk through the halls of the museum: past the skeletons of Australopithecus in front of Guernica, past the Pietà in the corner of a room from the Temple of Heaven, past the restrooms from the Louvre that someone had labeled “late eighteenth-century romanticism.” Frank said that the pyramids and Central Park were somewhere in the basement. I preferred the paintings, those framed windows hung on walls that had long since burnt down or washed away. I found these pictures made by the dead as full of life as any well-tended petri dish.

  I am not a scientist. I am an artist.

  • • •

  It takes me almost ten minutes to reach Marjorie’s wing of the house. There used to be a system of shuttle cars, but in the last few decades Marjorie has allowed it to fall into a state of disrepair. I walk along the old tracks and count the closed doors.

  I find Marjorie sitting in her father’s old wingback chair, with her spares arranged behind her like bridesmaids in an antique photograph.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  Marjorie smiles at me. She is still as beautiful as she always was. The years do not show on her face.

  “Plastic,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “A high-density polyvinyl chloride polymer,” says Marjorie’s Brain. I didn’t notice her when I first came in. She is sitting off to one side, her face half obscured by a flotilla of glimmering screens.

  Her eyes meet mine through one of the screens. The screen is showing the spider baby feed, and the lines of the grid cut her face into sections: a dozen neat squares marked off by longitude and latitude, every single one of them an alien planet.

  I understand. Someone must have managed to translate the non-visual data being sent back by the spider baby. The grid is synthetic.

  “The Icarii are organizing an expedition already,” says Marjorie.

  This doesn’t surprise me. The Icarii believe that the sun will supernova tomorrow. They always believe that, have been believing it now for decades. Eventually, they are bound to be right.

  What Marjorie says next, however, does surprise me.

  “We’re going, too.”

  • • •

  When I returned that day from under the sea, the hatch I’d used to leave the house was locked. I thought I’d been found out, so I confessed. I rang the doorbell frequency. After what felt like an eon, the hatch slid open.

  Inside, I found everyone sleeping. It was the middle of the day. They were sleeping at their desks. They were sleeping on the floors. I walked through the house for a long time but in every room it was the same.

  Finally in one of the bathrooms I found Marjorie’s Eyes and she was awake and she was alive and she was crying.

  “I saw them die,” she said when I asked her what had happened. “I watched so she wouldn’t have to.”

  I never speak of that day, certainly, to my daughters or anyone else. There is not much to say. Marjorie’s Eyes took me to Marjorie, who took me to her father. His eyes were open. His throat was cut.

  His Eyes, too, and His Throat. Not a one of them was stirring.

  “Why?” I asked, though I didn’t really need to.

  “It is a cruel gift to give,” said Marjorie. “The gift of life. The gift I gave was kinder.”

  I left the house. I went back to Frank and told him there had been an accident. We lived together for some time, just the two of us, at the bottom of the sea. He used me to satisfy certain ingrained biological urges and I used him for Bosch’s garden of delights.

  I returned after Marjorie tried to finish what she started. Frank had heard about it from one of the Pope’s attendants who had heard it from one of the Icarii who had heard it from a girl on the floating city of New Dubai who had heard it from Eyes. The new Eyes, that is, who was only five. I don’t know for sure what happened to the old one.

  Marjorie had gone outside. She was out for less than a minute but still it was bad enough that most of her had to be replaced. It took all of Lungs and Nerves and bits of several of the others to make her whole again. It is something that confounds me to this day—that they gave of themselves so willingly.

  It was what they were created to do, certainly, but the one who created them for this purpose was gone. I had long since abandoned the tasks for which I had been created.

  Once Marjorie was stable, I moved into the greenhouse. The rest of the house held too many memories. Shortly after that, I began to make my art.

  • • •

  “Will you come with us?” asks Marjorie.

  I should be happy. We found what we were looking for.

  “It could still be nothing,” I say.

  “It isn’t nothing.”

  “It could be a mistake.”

  “It isn’t a mistake.”

  “It could be us.”

  There have been manned expeditions sent out before. Some we have records of, but there were probably more. Some failed before they reached the edge of the galaxy. Others failed farther out. Sometimes we receive a message sent to a ground control long gone. An SOS or a suicide note, it amounts to the same.

  But some of them must still be out there. The LDS fleet, perhaps, which set out in search of the three heavenly kingdoms. Or Voyager XXIII, with the naked man and the naked woman and the hundred thousand human zygotes sealed in glass.

  Could it be we’re going in circles? Chasing our own tails? And all of us just like mice running scared in the big black fields of space while hope sharpens its talons and swoops toward us, yellow eyes gleaming even in the dark.

  “It isn’t us,” says Marjorie. She turns and stares at the screen. “And even if it were, it would be better than nothing.”

  “I’m not going,” I say. I am surprised to hear myself say this, but the moment the words leave my lips I know them to be true.

  “Everyone will go,” says Marjorie. “You’ll be the only one left.”

  She sounds like a child trying to coerce a playmate. I am much younger than her in years, but in this moment I feel much older. Though she is surrounded by her spares, she is nonetheless alone, because they are just her, reflected.

  “I’ve been the only one left before,” I say. “I’m used to it now.”

  Marjorie has no answer for that, but Marjorie’s Brain has begun to sing. It is an old song. It must be. I don’t recognize the tune.

  “When the earth quakes, the engines will stall,” she sings, voice barely above a whisper, “and down will go baby, cradle and all.”

  The screen showing the spider baby feed goes black.
The transmission is over. Marjorie’s Brain plays back the last seconds for those of us who missed it—the ground rushing forward and then static and then nothing.

  • • •

  Museums were made so that future generations could enjoy the works of generations that had gone before. But these days, future generations are no longer a given. Thus my works act as both subject and object. Art and audience. The problem and the solution all in one.

  Perpetua isn’t really my first daughter, although I call her that. There were hundreds before her, maybe thousands. But these daughters were just the preliminary sketches. Limbless or gutless or eyes in their stomachs and hearts in their throats. Some with skin but nothing inside of it, others with all that should be except skin. They did not live long, if they lived at all. Art can be messy.

  Perpetua is a finished piece.

  I consider my daughters collages. Mixed-media assemblages. They are complicated and fragile and I hope that, like many great works of art, they will live on long after I am gone.

  • • •

  In the evening I ask Verdana if she wants to go off in search of the grid planet. She tells me her roots are here. Space frightens her. Too dark.

  Later, I ask Kartika the same thing. She is curled up in my lap and I am filing her incisors. If I don’t do that once a week at least, they grow and grow until they are larger than she is. Kartika growls low in her throat and bites my hand, gently, between the thumb and the forefinger, which means no.

  I worry, as any mother would worry, that I have made my daughters too timid, too attached, too like myself. And it is true that their human ingredients all come from me. An artist needs a signature.

  But Perpetua wants to go. I tell her she can go if she wants to. I tell her it is up to her. She’s not satisfied with that. She says we all have to go together. I tell her that isn’t going to happen. She screams at me. Calls me selfish. She seems to think the gift I gave her was a cruel one. At the end of it all she storms off and locks her door.

  But late that night she pads softly into my room and tells me she had a nightmare and can she sleep in my bed just this once even though she is too old for it and I say of course and the next morning when I wake up she is three.