The Best of Nancy Kress (64 page)

He sat quietly, his gaze turned inward. A long moment passed in silence.

“Your cell?”

“No. My—our sister’s. Our sister Devrie.”

Another long silence. He did not panic. Then he said softly, “Tell me.”

Devrie’s phrase.

“There isn’t much to tell, Keith. If you’ve seen the media accounts, you know the story, and also what was made of it. The issue then becomes how you feel about what you saw. Do you believe that cloning is meddling with things man should best leave alone?’’

“No. I don’t.”

I let out my breath, although I hadn’t known I’d been holding it. “It’s actually no more than delayed twinning, followed by surrogate implantation. A zygote—”

“I know all that,” he said with some harshness, and held up his hand to silence me. I didn’t think he knew that he did it. The harshness did not sound like Devrie. To my ears, it sounded like myself. He sat thinking, remote and troubled, and I did not try to touch him.

Finally he said, “Do my parents know?”

He meant his adoptive parents. “No.”

“Why are you telling me now? Why did you come?”

“Devrie asked me to.”

“She needs something, right? A kidney? Something like that?”

I had not foreseen that question. He did not move in a class where spare organs were easily purchasable. “No. Not a kidney, not any kind of biological donation.” A voice in my mind jeered at that, but I was not going to give him any clues that would lead to Devrie. “She just wanted me to find you.”

“Why didn’t she find me herself? She’s my age, right?”

“Yes. She’s ill just now and couldn’t come.”

“Is she dying?”

“No!”

Again he sat quietly, finally saying, “No one could tell me anything. For two years I’ve been searching for my mother, and not one of the adoptee-search agencies could find a single trace. Not one. Now I see why. Who covered the trail so well?”

“My father.”

“I want to meet Devrie.”

I said evenly, “That might not be possible.”

“Why not?”

“She’s in a foreign hospital. Out of the country. I’m sorry.”

“When does she come home?”

“No one is sure.”

“What disease does she have?”

She’s sick for God
, I thought, but aloud I said, not thinking it through, “A brain disease.”

Instantly I saw my own cruelty. Keith paled, and I cried, “No, no, nothing you could have as well! Truly, Keith, it’s not—she took a bad fall. From her hunter.”

“Her hunter,” he said. For the first time, his gaze flickered over my clothing and jewelry. But would he even recognize how expensive they were? I doubted it. He wore a synthetic, deep-pile jacket with a tear at one shoulder and a cheap wool hat, dark blue, shapeless with age. From long experience I recognized his gaze: uneasy, furtive, the expression of a man glimpsing the financial gulf between what he had assumed were equals. But it wouldn’t matter. Adopted children have no legal claim on the estates of their biological parents. I had checked.

Keith said uneasily, “Do you have a picture of Devrie?”

“No,” I lied.

“Why did she want you to find me? You still haven’t said.”

I shrugged. “The same reason, I suppose, that you looked for your biological family. The pull of blood.”

“Then she wants me to write to her?”

“Write to me instead.”

He frowned. “Why? Why not to Devrie?”

What to say to that? I hadn’t bargained on so much intensity from him. “Write in care of me, and I’ll forward it to Devrie.”

“Why not to her directly?”

“Her doctors might not think it advisable,” I said coldly, and he backed off—either from the mention of doctors or from the coldness.

“Then give me your address, Seena. Please.”

I did. I could see no harm in his writing me. It might even be pleasant. Coming home from the museum, another wintry day among the exhibits, to find on the mailnet a letter I could answer when and how I chose, without being taken by surprise. I liked the idea.

But no more difficult questions now. I stood. “I have to leave, Keith.”

He looked alarmed. “So soon?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I have to return to work.”

He stood, too. He was taller than Devrie. “Seena,” he said, all earnestness, “just a few more questions. How did you find me?”

“Medical connections.”

“Yours?”

“Our father’s. I’m not a scientist.” Evidently his journalism class had not studied twin-trance sensationalism.

“What do you do?”

‘‘Museum curator. Arthropods.’’

“What does Devrie do?”

“She’s too ill to work. I must go, Keith.”

“One more. Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

“It would be wise, Keith, if you were careful whom you spoke with about all of this. I hadn’t intended to say so much.”

“I’m not going to tell my parents. Not about being—not about all of it.”

“I think that’s best, yes.”

“Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

A little of my first, strange emotion returned with his intensity. “A little, yes. But more like me. Sex variance is a tricky thing.”

Unexpectedly, he held my coat for me. As I slipped into it, he said from behind, “Thank you, Seena,” and let his hands rest on my shoulders.

I did not turn around. I felt my face flame, and self-disgust flooded through me, followed by a desire to laugh. It was all so transparent. This man was an attractive stranger, was Devrie, was youth, was myself, was the work not of my father’s loins but of his mind. Of course I was aroused by him. Freud outlasts cloning: a note for a research study, I told myself grimly, and inwardly I did laugh.

But that didn’t help either.

In New York, winter came early. Cold winds whipped whitecaps on harbor and river, and the trees in the Park stood bare even before October had ended. The crumbling outer boroughs of the shrinking city crumbled a little more and talked of the days when New York had been important. Manhattan battened down for snow, hired the seasonal increases in personal guards, and talked of Albuquerque. Each night museum security hunted up and evicted the drifters trying to sleep behind exhibits, drifters as chilled and pale as the moths under permaplex, and, it seemed to me, as detached from the blood of their own age. All of New York seemed detached to me that October, and cold. Often I stood in front of the cases of
Noctuidae
, staring at them for so long that my staff began to glance at each other covertly. I would catch their glances when I jerked free of my trance. No one asked me about it.

Still no message came from Devrie. When I contacted the Institute on the mailnet, she did not call back.

No letter came from Keith Torellen.

Then one night, after I had worked late and was hurrying through the chilly gloom toward my building, he was there, bulking from the shadows so quickly that the guard I had taken for the walk from the museum sprang forward in attack position.

“No! It’s all right! I know him!”

The guard retreated, without expression. Keith stared after him, and then at me, his face unreadable.

“Keith, what are you doing here? Come inside!”

He followed me into the lobby without a word. Nor did he say anything during the metal scanning and ID procedure. I took him up to my apartment, studying him in the elevator.

He wore the same jacket and cheap wool hat as in Indian Falls, his hair wanted cutting, and the tip of his nose was red from waiting in the cold. How long had he waited there? He badly needed a shave.

In the apartment he scanned the rugs, the paintings, my grandmother’s ridiculously ornate, ugly silver, and turned his back on them to face me.

“Seena, I want to know where Devrie is.”

“Why? Keith, what has happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” he said, removing his jacket but not laying it anywhere. “Only that I’ve left school and spent two days hitching here. It’s no good, Seena. To say that cloning is just like twinning: it’s no good. I want to see Devrie.”

His voice was hard. Bulking in my living room, unshaven, that hat pulled down over his ears, he looked older and less malleable than the last time I had seen him. Alarm—not physical fear, I was not afraid of him, but a subtler and deeper fear—sounded through me.

“Why do you want to see Devrie?”

“Because she cheated me.”

“Of what, for God’s sake?”

“Can I have a drink? Or a smoke?”

I poured him a Scotch. If he drank, he might talk. I had to know what he wanted, why such a desperate air clung to him, how to keep him from Devrie. I had not seen her like this. She was strong-willed, but always with a blitheness, a trust that eventually her will would prevail. Desperate forcefulness of the sort in Keith’s manner was not her style. But of course Devrie had always had silent money to back her will; perhaps money could buy trust as well as style.

Keith drank off his Scotch and held out his glass for another. “It was freezing out there. They wouldn’t let me in the lobby to wait for you.”

“Of course not.”

“You didn’t tell me your family was rich.”

I was a little taken aback at his bluntness, but at the same time it pleased me; I don’t know why.

“You didn’t ask.”

“That’s shit, Seena.”

“Keith. Why are you here?”

“I told you. I want to see Devrie.”

“What is it you’ve decided she cheated you of? Money?”

He looked so honestly surprised that again I was startled, this time by his resemblance to Devrie. She too would not have thought of financial considerations first, if there were emotional ones possible. One moment Keith was Devrie, one moment he was not. Now he scowled with sudden anger.

“Is that what you think—that fortune hunting brought me hitching from New Hampshire? God, Seena, I didn’t even know how much you had until this very—I still don’t know!”

I said levelly, “Then what is it you’re feeling so cheated of?”

Now he was rattled. Again that quick, half-furtive scan of my apartment, pausing a millisecond too long at the Caravaggio, subtly lit by its frame. When his gaze returned to mine it was troubled, a little defensive. Ready to justify. Of course I had put him on the defensive deliberately, but the calculation of my trick did not prepare me for the staggering naiveté of his explanation. Once more it was Devrie complete, reducing the impersonal greatness of science to a personal and emotional loss.

“Ever since I knew that I was adopted, at five or six years old, I wondered about my biological family. Nothing strange in that—I think all adoptees do. I used to make up stories, kid stuff, about how they were really royalty, or lunar colonists, or survivors of the African Horror. Exotic things. I thought especially about my mother, imagining this whole scene of her holding me once before she released me for adoption, crying over me, loving me so much she could barely let me go but had to for some reason. Sentimental shit.” He laughed, trying to make light of what was not, and drank off his Scotch to avoid my gaze.

“But Devrie—the fact of her—destroyed all that. I never had a mother who hated to give me up. I never had a mother at all. What I had was a cell cut from Devrie’s fingertip or someplace, something discardable, and she doesn’t even know what I look like. But she’s damn well going to.”

“Why?” I said evenly. “What could you expect to gain from her knowing what you look like?”

But he didn’t answer me directly. “That first moment I saw you, Seena, in the theater at school, I thought you were my mother.”

“I know you did.”

“And you hated the idea. Why?”

I thought of the child I would never bear, the marriage, like so many other things of sweet promise, gone sour. But self-pity is a fool’s game. “None of your business.”

“Isn’t it? Didn’t you hate the idea because of the way I was made? Coldly. An experiment. Weren’t you a little bit insulted at being called the mother of a discardable cell from Devrie’s fingertip?”

“What the hell have you been reading? An experiment—what is any child but an experiment? A random egg, a random sperm. Don’t talk like one of those anti-science religious split-brains!”

He studied me levelly. Then he said, “Is Devrie religious? Is that why you’re so afraid of her?”

I got to my feet, and pointed at the sideboard. “Help yourself to another drink if you wish. I want to wash my hands. I’ve been handling specimens all afternoon.” Stupid, clumsy lie—nobody would believe such a lie.

In the bathroom I leaned against the closed door, shut my eyes, and willed myself to calm. Why should I be so disturbed by the angry lashing-out of a confused boy? I was handy to lash out against: my father, whom Keith was really angry at, was not. It was all so predictable, so earnestly adolescent, that even over the hurting in my chest I smiled. But the smile, which should have reduced Keith’s ranting to the tantrum of a child—there, there, when you grow up you’ll find out that no one really knows who he is—did not diminish Keith. His losses were real—mother, father, natural place in the natural sequence of life and birth. And suddenly, with a clutch at the pit of my stomach, I knew why I had told him all that I had about his origins. It was not from any ethic of fidelity to “the truth.” I had told him he was a clone because I, too, had had real losses—research, marriage, motherhood— and Devrie could never have shared them with me. Luminous, mystical Devrie, too occupied with God to be much hurt by man. Leave me alone! Can’t you ever leave me alone!
All my life you’ve been dragging behind me—why don’t you die and finally leave me alone!
And Devrie had smiled tolerantly, patted my head, and left me alone, closing the door softly so as not to disturb my grief. My words had not hurt her. I could not hurt her.