The Best of Nancy Kress (61 page)

Disciple Arlbeni, Grid 743.9, 2999: As we approach this millennium marker, rejoice that humanity has passed beyond both spiritual superstition and spiritual denial. We have a faith built on physical truth, on living genetics, on human need. We have, at long last, given our souls not to a formless Deity but to the science of life itself. We are safe, and we are blessed
.

Micah said suddenly, “It’s a trick.”

The other adults stared at hirs. Harrah had been hastily reconfigured for sleep. Someone—Ling, most likely—had dissolved the floating baktors and blanked the wall displays, and only the empty transmission field added color to the room. That, and the cold stars beyond.

“Yes,” Micah continued, “a trick. Not malicious, of course. But we programmed them to learn, and they did. They had some seismic event, or some interwarfare, and it made them wary of anything unusual. They learned that the unusual can be deadly. And the most unusual thing they know of is us, set to return at 3,000. So they created a transmission program designed to repel us. Xenophobia, in a stimulus-response learning program suited to this environment. You said it yourself, Ling, the learning components are built on human genes. And we have xenophobia as an evolved survival response!”

Cal jack-knifed across the room. Tension turned hirs ungraceful. “No. That sounds appealing, but nothing we gave Seeding 140 would let them evolve defenses that sophisticated. And there was no seismic event for the initial stimulus.”

Micah said eagerly, “We’re the stimulus! Our anticipated return! Don’t you see…we’re the ‘others’!”

Kabil said, “But they call us ‘mother’…They were thrilled to see us. They’re not xenophobic to
us
.”

Deb spoke so softly the others could barely hear. “Then it’s a computer malfunction. Cosmic bombardment of their sensory equipment. Or at least, of the unit that was ‘dying.’ Malfunctioning before the end. All that sensory data about oxygen poisoning is compromised.”

“Of course!” Ling said. But hirs was always honest. “At least…no, compromised data isn’t that coherent, the pieces don’t fit together so well biochemically…”

“And so non-terrestrially,” Cal said, and at the jagged edge in his voice, Micah exploded.

“California, these are not native life! There is no native life in the galaxy except on Earth!”

“I know that, Micah,” Cal said, with dignity. “But I also know this data does not match anything in the d-bees.”

“Then the d-bees are incomplete!”

“Possibly.”

Ling put hirs hands together. They were long, slender hands, with very long nails, created just yesterday.
I want to grab the new millennium with both hands,
Ling had laughed before the party,
and hold it firm.
“Spores. Panspermia.”

“I won’t listen to this!” Micah said.

“An old theory,” Ling went on, gasping a little. “Seeding 140 said the others weren’t there for their first hundred years. But if spores blew in from space on the solar wind, and the environment was right for them to germinate—”

Deb said quickly, “Spores aren’t really life. Wherever they came from, they’re not alive.”

“Yes, they are,” Kabil said. “Don’t quibble. They’re alive.”

Micah said loudly, “I’ve given my entire
life
to the Great Mission. I was on the original drop for this very planet.”

“They’re alive,” Ling said, “and they’re not ours.”

“My entire life!” Micah said. Hirs looked at each of them in turn, hirs face stony, and something terrible glinted behind the beautiful deep-green eyes.

“The main thing is Harrah, after all,” Kabil said. Hirs sat slumped on the floor. They had been talking so long.

“A child needs secure knowledge. Purpose. Faith,” Cal said.

Ling said wearily, “A child needs truth.”

“Harrah,” Deb crooned softly. “Harrah, made of all of us, future of our genes, small heart Harrah…”

“Stop it, Debaron,” Cal said. “Please.”

Micah said, “Those things down there are not real. They are not. Test it, Micah. I’ve said so already. Test it. Send down a probe, and try to bring back samples. There’s nothing there.”

“You don’t know that, Micah.”

“I know,” Micah said, and was subtly revitalized. Hirs sprang up. “Test it!”

Ling said, “A probe isn’t necessary. We have the transmitted data and—”

“Not reliable!” Micah said.

“—and the rising oxygen content. Data from our own sensors.”

“Outgassing!”

“Micah, that’s ridiculous. And a probe—”

“A probe might come back contaminated,” Cal said.

“Don’t risk contamination,” Kabil said suddenly, urgently. “Not with Harrah here.”

“Harrah, made of us all…” Deb had turned hirs back on the rest now, and lay almost curled into a ball, lost in hirs powerful imagination. Deb!

Kabil said, almost pleadingly, to Ling, “Harrah’s safety should come first.”

“Harrah’s safety lies in facing truth,” Ling said. But hirs was not strong enough to sustain it alone. They were all so close, so knotted together, a family. Knotted by Harrah and by the Great Mission, to which Ling, no less than the others, had given his life.

“Harrah, small heart,” sang Deb.

Kabil said, “It isn’t as if we have proof about these ‘others.’ Not real proof. We don’t actually
know
.”

“
I
know,” Micah said.

Cal looked bleakly at Kabil. “No. And it is wrong to sacrifice a child to a supposition, to a packet of compromised data, to a…a superstition of creations so much less than we are. You know that’s true, even though we none of us never admit it. But I’m a biologist. The creations are limited DNA, with no ability to self-modify. Also strictly regulated nano, and AI only within careful parameters. Yes, of course they’re life forms deserving respect on their own terms, of course, I would never deny that—”

“None of us would,” Kabil said.

“—but they’re not
us
. Not ever us.”

A long silence, broken only by Deb’s singing.

“Leave orbit, Micah,” Cal finally said, “before Harrah wakes up.”

Disciple Arlbeni, Grid 743.9, 2999: We are not gods, never gods, no matter what the powers evolution and technology have given us, and we do not delude ourselves that we are gods, as other cultures have done at other millennia. We are human. Our salvation is that we know it, and do not pretend otherwise
.

Afterword to “My Mother, Dancing”

This story is one of the few I have ever set in the very far future. Usually I prefer near-future, on-Earth stories; there is less setting to invent and more concrete details I can plunder from reality. However, some stories need far-flung space travel, radically altered human biology, and a much different culture.

Every human culture we know of has had some form of religion. One function of religion is to explain creation. Another is to locate humans in that creation, including our purpose for existence. And all religions eventually face challenges from our growing body of scientific knowledge. Some incorporate new scientific facts; some do not; some do both at different times. The Catholic Church punished Galileo for heliocentrism, but it accepts evolution.

I enjoyed creating both the empty-universe religion of this story and the non-DNA-organism challenge to that religion. My characters, faced with their spiritual crisis, do not behave very well. Perhaps the next ship to come along will show more flexibility, and more courage.

At first I didn’t recognize Devrie.

Devrie—I didn’t recognize
Devrie
. Astonished at myself, I studied the wasted figure standing in the middle of the bare reception room: arms like wires, clavicle sharply outlined, head shaved, dressed in that ugly long tent of light-weight gray. God knew what her legs looked like under it. Then she smiled, and it was Devrie.

“You look like shit.”

“Hello, Seena. Come on in.”

“I am in.”

“Barely. It’s not catching, you know.”

“Stupidity fortunately isn’t,” I said and closed the door behind me. The small room was too hot; Devrie would need the heat, of course, with almost no fat left to insulate her bones and organs. Next to her I felt huge, although I am not. Huge, hairy, sloppy-breasted.

“Thank you for not wearing bright colors. They do affect me.”

“Anything for a sister,” I said, mocking the old childhood formula, the old sentiment. But Devrie was too quick to think it was only mockery; in that, at least, she had not changed. She clutched my arm and her fingers felt like chains, or talons.

“You found him. Seena, you found him.”

“I found him.”

“Tell me,” she whispered.

“Sit down first, before you fall over. God, Devrie, don’t you eat at all?”

“Tell me,” she said. So I did.

Devrie Caroline Konig had admitted herself to the Institute of the Biological Hope on the Caribbean island of Dominica eleven months ago, in late November of 2017, when her age was 23 years and 4 months. I am precise about this because it is all I can be sure of. I need the precision. The Institute of the Biological Hope is not precise; it is a mongrel, part research laboratory in brain sciences, part monastery, part school for training in the discipline of the mind. That made my baby sister guinea pig, postulant, freshman. She had always been those things, but, until now, sequentially. Apparently so had many other people, for when eccentric Nobel Prize winner James Arthur Bohentin had founded his Institute, he had been able to fund it, although precariously. But in that it did not differ from most private scientific research centers.

Or most monasteries.

I wanted Devrie out of the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“It’s located on Dominica,” I had said sensibly—what an ass I had been—to an unwasted Devrie a year ago, “because the research procedures there fall outside United States laws concerning the safety of research subjects. Doesn’t that tell you something, Devrie? Doesn’t that at least give you pause? In New York, it would be illegal to do to anyone what Bohentin does to his people.”

“Do you know him?” she had asked.

“I have met him. Once.”

“What is he like?”

“Like stone.”

Devrie shrugged, and smiled. “All the participants in the Institute are willing. Eager.”

“That doesn’t make it ethical for Bohentin to destroy them. Ethical or legal.”

“It’s legal on Dominica. And in thinking you know better than the participants what they should risk their own lives for, aren’t you playing God?”

“Better me than some untrained fanatic who offers himself up like an exalted Viking hero, expecting Valhalla.”

“You’re an intellectual snob, Seena.”

“I never denied it.”

“Are you sure you aren’t really objecting not to the Institute’s dangers but to its purpose? Isn’t the ‘Hope’ part what really bothers you?”

“I don’t think scientific method and pseudo-religious mush mix, no. I never did. I don’t think it leads to a perception of God.”

“The holotank tapes indicate it leads to a perception of
something
the brain hasn’t encountered before,” Devrie said, and for a moment I was silent.

I was once, almost, a biologist. I was aware of the legitimate studies that formed the basis for Bohentin’s megalomania: the brain wave changes that accompany anorexia nervosa, sensory deprivation, biological feedback, and neurotransmitter stimulants. I have read the historical accounts, some merely pathetic but some disturbingly not, of the Christian mystics who achieved rapture through the mortification of the flesh and the Eastern mystics who achieved anesthesia through the control of the mind, of the faith healers who succeeded, of the carcinomas shrunk through trained will. I knew of the research on focused clairvoyance during orgasm, and of what happens when neurotransmitter number and speed are increased chemically.

And I knew all that was known about the twin trance.

Fifteen years earlier, as a doctoral student in biology, I had spent one summer replicating Sunderwirth’s pioneering study of drug-enhanced telepathy in identical twins. My results were positive, except that within six months all eight of my research subjects had died. So had Sunderwirth’s. Twin-trance research became the cloning controversy of the new decade, with the same panicky cycle of public outcry, legal restrictions, religious misunderstandings, fear, and demagoguery. When I received the phone call that the last of my subjects was dead—cardiac arrest, no history of heart disease, forty-three Goddamn years old—I locked myself in my apartment, with the lights off and my father’s papers clutched in my hand, for three days. Then I resigned from the neurology department and became an entomologist. There is no pain in classifying dead insects.

“There is something there,” Devrie had repeated. She was holding the letter sent to our father, whom someone at the Institute had not heard was dead. “It says the holotank tapes—’’

“So there’s something there,” I said. “So the tanks are picking up some strange radiation. Why call it ‘God’?”

“Why not call it God?”

“Why not call it Rover? Even if I grant you that the tape pattern looks like a presence—which I don’t—you have no way of knowing that Bohentin’s phantom isn’t, say, some totally ungodlike alien being.”

“But neither do I know that it is.”

“Devrie—”

She had smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. She had—has, has always had—a very sweet smile. “Seena. Think. If the Institute can prove rationally that God exists—can prove it to the intellectual mind, the doubting Thomases who need something concrete to study…faith that doesn’t need to be taken on faith…”

She wore her mystical face, a glowing softness that made me want to shake the silliness out of her. Instead I made some clever riposte, some sarcasm I no longer remember, and reached out to ruffle her hair. Big-sisterly, patronizing, thinking I could deflate her rapturous interest with the pin-prick of ridicule. God, I was an ass. It hurts to remember how big an ass I was.

A month and a half later Devrie committed herself and half her considerable inheritance to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

“Tell me,” Devrie whispered. The Institute had no windows; outside I had seen grass, palm trees, butterflies floating in the sunshine, but inside here in the bare gray room there was nowhere to look but at her face.

“He’s a student in a Master’s program at a third-rate college in New Hampshire. He was adopted when he was two, nearly three, in March of 1997. Before that he was in a government-run children’s home. In Boston, of course. The adopting family, as far as I can discover, never was told he was anything but one more toddler given up by somebody for adoption.”

“Wait a minute,” Devrie said. “I need…a minute.”

She had turned paler, and her hands trembled. I had recited the information as if it were no more than an exhibit listing at my museum. Of course she was rattled. I wanted her rattled. I wanted her out.

Lowering herself to the floor, Devrie sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. Concentration spread over her face, but a concentration so serene it barely deserved that name. Her breathing slowed, her color freshened, and when she opened her eyes, they had the rested energy of a person who has just slept eight hours in mountain air. Her face even looked plumper, and an EEG, I guessed, would show damn near alpha waves. In her year at the Institute she must have mastered quite an array of biofeedback techniques to do that, so fast and with such a malnourished body.

“Very impressive,” I said sourly.

“Seena—have you seen him?”

“No. All this is from sealed records.”

“How did you get into the records?”

“Medical and governmental friends.”

“Who?”

“What do you care, as long as I found out what you wanted to know?”

She was silent. I knew she would never ask me if I had obtained her information legally or illegally; it would not occur to her to ask. Devrie, being Devrie, would assume it had all been generously offered by my modest museum connections and our dead father’s immodest research connections. She would be wrong.

“How old is he now?”

“Twenty-four years last month. They must have used your two-month tissue sample.”

“Do you think Daddy knew where the…baby went?”

“Yes. Look at the timing—the child was normal and healthy, yet he wasn’t adopted until he was nearly three. The researchers kept track of him, all right; they kept all six clones in a government-controlled home where they could monitor their development as long as humanely possible. The same-sex clones were released for adoption after a year, but they hung onto the cross-sex ones until they reached an age where they would become harder to adopt. They undoubtedly wanted to study them as long as they could. And even after the kids were released for adoption, the researchers held off publishing until all six were placed and the records sealed. Dad’s group didn’t publish until April, 1998, remember. By the time the storm broke, the babies were out of its path, and anonymous.”

“And the last,” Devrie said.

“And the last,” I agreed, although of course the researchers hadn’t foreseen that. So few in the scientific community had foreseen that. Offense against God and man, Satan’s work, natter natter. Watching my father’s suddenly stooped shoulders and stricken eyes, I had thought how ugly public revulsion could be and had nobly resolved—how had I thought of it then? So long ago—resolved to snatch the banner of pure science from my fallen father’s hand. Another time that I had been an ass. Five years later, when it had been my turn to feel the ugly scorching of public revulsion, I had broken, left neurological research, and fled down the road that led to the Museum of Natural History, where I was the curator of ants fossilized in amber and moths pinned securely under permaplex.

“The other four clones,” Devrie said, “the ones from that university in California that published almost simultaneously with Daddy—”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even try to ask. It was hard enough in Cambridge.”

“Me,” Devrie said wonderingly. “He’s me.”

“Oh, for—Devrie, he’s your twin. No more than that. No—actually less than that. He shares your genetic material exactly as an identical twin would, except for the Y chromosome, but he shares none of the congenital or environmental influences that shaped your personality. There’s no mystical replication of spirit in cloning. He’s merely a twin who got born eleven months late!”

She looked at me with luminous amusement. I didn’t like the look. On that fleshless face, the skin stretched so taut that the delicate bones beneath were as visible as the veins of a moth wing, her amusement looked ironic. Yet Devrie was never ironic. Gentle, passionate, trusting, a little stupid, she was not capable of irony. It was beyond her, just as it was beyond her to wonder why I, who had fought her entering the Institute of the Biological Hope, had brought her this information now. Her amusement was one-layered, and trusting.

God’s fools, the Middle Ages had called them.

“Devrie,” I said, and heard my own voice unexpectedly break, “leave here. It’s physically not safe. What are you down to, ten percent body fat? Eight? Look at yourself, you can’t hold body heat, your palms are dry, you can’t move quickly without getting dizzy. Hypotension. What’s your heartbeat? Do you still menstruate? It’s insane.”

She went on smiling at me. God’s fools don’t need menstruation. “Come with me, Seena. I want to show you the Institute.”

“I don’t want to see it.”