Human Sister (12 page)

“He would, Grandpa! How can you not trust Elio?”

Grandpa became silent again, waiting for my emotional intensity to subside.

“I know he would,” I said more calmly.

Grandpa remained silent.

I searched his face and found that he was no longer simply waiting for me to calm down; he appeared perplexed and deep in thought. He raised one of my hands to his lips and kissed it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t consider the seriousness of this problem. I am, of course, aware that you and Elio have become close friends. I believe I can appreciate how painful it must be for you to keep an important secret from him.”

Grandpa sighed and tapped his fingers lightly on his desk. “I want to tell you about an experience I had with someone who was a close friend when he and I were both medical students at Stanford. We shared many interests. We double-dated. Even after we graduated and went our separate ways, we stayed in close contact with each other. But then seminars and protests led by a coalition of social egalitarians and religious conservatives began to spring up around the world. These activities culminated in the United Nations passing the International Human Genome Protection Act. I felt it was foolish to think humans were the pinnacle of the wonderful process of evolution, which had been going on for billions of years and would continue for billions more, whether we tried to stop it or not. I believed then and I believe now that we will either be a dead end or a stepping-stone to new beings better capable than we in dealing with a world of ever-increasing complexity.”

“What about your friend?”

“Along with most other people, he felt it was wrong to genetically enhance human offspring to make them super-intelligent, super-strong, or super-anything. Alterations to make a fetus healthy and normal were acceptable, but anything else was proclaimed to be a crime against humanity. I thought, and still think, that the law is a crime against nature—a nature of which man, his aspirations, and the products of his toil are as much a part as are bees and their drive for nectar and the building of hives. But I was wrong when I failed then to appreciate that intelligent and good people disagree on this law and on many other significant issues.”

“Is he your friend again?”

“I see him a couple of times each year at seminars where we make a point of having lunch or tea together, but that’s all. It has never been the same between us.”

“I don’t want that to happen to Elio and me.”

“Exactly. I told you about my old friend for two reasons: first, so you won’t make the all-too-common mistake of thinking that people who disagree with you on issues you take to be important are necessarily less intelligent or less good than you are. Take the Human Genome Protection Act, for example. I have no doubt that without it, significant changes and stresses would have already been introduced into our civilization. Wealthier people would have, generation after generation, produced more intelligent, better-looking, stronger children. They could have and would have produced super-basketball players, super-musicians, super-mathematicians. But until our techniques became inexpensive and generally available, the vast majority of people could only have had children who were normal humans.”

“Did you ever break the law?”

“No. I disagreed with it. I think the law is a travesty that will be unable to hold back the forces of human curiosity and greed and the desire for better children, but I never broke it. The penalties for violating the Genome Act are severe. All babies are tested at birth, and any proved to have been genetically enhanced without prior authorization are sterilized if the modification extends to the germ line. The parents and all co-conspirators are given minimum ten-year prison sentences, and all of their personal property is confiscated. You were tested when you were born, as were your father and mother when they were born.

“I have always abided by the Genome Act, but I can’t believe that everyone everywhere has. Genetic enhancement technology will take root somewhere, and when it does we will have a choice: mass extermination of an incipient super-race or a mass stampede to jump aboard the evolution bullet train.

“But that’s a discussion for another day. Today, we’re concerned about whether we should keep everything about Michael secret from Elio—which brings me to my second reason for telling you about my friend. There is no doubt in my mind that he was and is an intelligent and fine man. There is no doubt in my mind, or in yours, I’m sure, that Elio is an intelligent and good boy. I’m happy that the two of you are close friends, and I don’t want to do anything to harm your relationship. But here’s the problem: Let’s suppose I’d violated the Genome Act, and suppose further that my friend had found out. Would he have turned me in?”

“I don’t know.”

Grandpa sighed. “Nor do I. But my guess is that he would have, for he believed that much death, misery, and destruction would result from violations of the law.”

“But what about Elio?”

“As I’ve said, I fully expect that he’ll grow up to be a wise and good person, but we can’t deduce from that that he’ll agree with our views on androids or on religion or on a thousand other issues. You see, honey, regardless of how close you and Elio become, there will always be some mysterious core of a wonderful other about him. Like all of us, he is too complex to ever fully understand. And one of the things we cannot know is whether he’ll become one who feels that androids are thinking, feeling, conscious beings who should be treated with love and respect, or whether he’ll feel otherwise. In either case, I hope he’ll love you and you’ll love him, but because we can’t know now what he’ll feel about the android issue, I’m afraid this secret about Michael is an unfortunate pain you will have to accept until Elio becomes more mature.”

“When will that be? When may I tell him?”

“Probably not until he goes to university and experiences nonhuman conscious intelligences, if there still are any around then. In the meanwhile, you can be as close to him as you want. But remember, you’ll always be a marvelous mystery to him, too, no matter how close you and he become. This secret about Michael simply will be part of that mystery for a while.”

Except for a slight irritation that seemed lodged in my sinuses, I woke feeling good the morning after my operation. Cartoon images no longer appeared and evaporated like little clouds on the roof of the tent above me. The air filter motors were silent, and Grandpa was sitting beside me. He told me the operation had gone extremely well: I was in excellent condition; enough cells extracted from every location were viable, so no part of the operation would have to be repeated; and the braincord junction implant looked good. First Brother had been an excellent surgeon.

As usual, Elio called on Vidtel when he got home from school, shortly after I’d finished breakfast.

As soon as I spoke, he asked, “Do you have an allergy?”

It’s started, I thought. “No,” I answered.

“You sound like you do. Is there anything you’re allergic to?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Have you been crying?”

“No.”

Mercifully, he moved on to tell me about his day at school.

“Never lie, but never reveal the truth” is the old Roman maxim Grandpa had suggested I apply in conversations with Elio whenever anything related to Michael came up. But applying the maxim left me feeling estranged; and Elio, who’d become sensitive to my feelings, cut short our conversation, saying that he knew I had an allergy or something and wasn’t feeling good. When he exited Vidtel, I turned away from the image platform and cried into the back of the chair, thinking how very, very long it would be until he went to university.

Two weeks after the operation, First Brother came to visit me. It was the day before Mom and Dad packed him and Second Brother into separate crates and shipped them, along with crates of fruits and vegetables, to Calgary, Alberta. First Brother examined me and concurred with Grandpa that bone and tissue around the braincord junctions had attached to the junctions and had healed perfectly. I was ready to begin the Focused Magnetic Driver (FMD) sessions, which, over a six-month period, would create neural pathways connecting the braincord junctions with every area of my brain.

Grandpa had reminded me earlier in the day that outside of level 3, I couldn’t say anything about, couldn’t even allude to, the operation, the braincord, or Michael—and that though proper export papers and bills of sale had been drawn up allowing First Brother to be sent to Canada, I shouldn’t cry or say good-bye to First Brother or speak about his leaving; for if we were being spied on, it would be by a much more sophisticated and dangerous group of people than those who supervise the low-level expert systems that, in turn, supervise the movement of products being traded between the U.S. and Canada. Furthermore, to avoid suspicion being directed toward our home, which would be Michael’s home too in a few months, I would not be able to communicate with First Brother after this day, not by Vidtel or otherwise.

The confluence of several distressing developments made that day, the last day I saw First Brother in California, the saddest of my childhood. His imminent departure was one such development, and it, together with my need to suppress any emotion related to his departure, served to catalyze other dark clouds in my mind: Mom and Dad probably also would emigrate to Canada; I had to stay on guard and hide the truth for many years to come whenever I spoke with Elio; there had been an ominous tone to Grandpa’s voice whenever he’d spoken about the ERP’s seemingly unstoppable rise to power; Grandpa had been spending less time with me and more time working on matters related to Michael; and finally, I was committed to spending four hours each day for the next six months strapped in the FMD.

All that day, from the time Grandpa cautioned me in the morning until after First Brother left that evening, I suffered a foreboding that my happy childhood was ending, to be replaced by what I was unprepared for: the deceptions, losses, and responsibilities of adulthood.

As First Brother was about to get into the car with Mom and Dad, I broke away from Grandpa’s hand, ran to First Brother, and, reaching up, said, “I want to hug you.”

In my memories, I keep searching for the place where things went wrong, for where I might have done something that would have avoided or righted the coming events. But all I find is an ineluctable tide of circumstances well beyond the abilities of a little girl to hold back. I’d desired to become the heroine who would have succeeded—where Grandpa, Mom, and Dad had failed—in helping First Brother acquire a richer emotional life. But I’d not known what to do other than to accept First Brother as a unique individual with interests different from my own, and to fantasize that when I became older and more learned, I would be able to teach him to laugh and love. I’d thought I had plenty of time. Now, I was eight years old, and First Brother had never laughed—or loved, as far as I could tell—and he was leaving, taking away with him my dream of being a heroine for him.

First Brother bent over and picked me up. I held him tightly, consciously desiring to retain my every sense of him. He was tall, strong, and firm; his hair was soft and black; his skin olive brown; eyes hazel; lips full, but tightly closed and still. His clothes smelled laundry fresh. Times that we’d been together flashed through my mind. Except for Elio during two weeks of each of the three prior summers, First Brother had been my only childhood playmate.

Holding back tears, I caressed his smooth face, kissed his cool cheek, and said, “I love you, First Brother.”

He stiffened, as he always had in response to my emotion, and put me down.

As the car disappeared beyond the perimeter gate I turned and ran back to the house, where I requested Gatekeeper 1 to let me in. I ran to the entrance to the bedroom area and requested Gatekeeper 2 to let me in. I ran to the entrance to Grandpa’s study and, barely able to choke back tears, requested Gatekeeper 3 to let me in. Then I dove onto Grandpa’s sofa, where I cried and cried, no longer even conscious of what I was crying about, and cried on until Grandpa came and held me.

“Shhh… shhh,” he whispered, stirring up in me images and sounds of the ocean breathing on the shore. “Shhh… Everything is all right. You were a good and brave girl.”

First Brother