by Nancy Kress
And then, finally, he realized the noise was his own screaming, and he stopped.
Into the silence MAIP said, “You were very angry, Ethan. I hope you feel better now.”
He gave a little gasp, first at MAIP’s words and then because he wasn’t alone. Jamie stood beside him with Laura Avery.
She said gently, “Are you all right?” And when Ethan didn’t answer, she added, “Jamie called me. After I called him, I mean. I saw you carrying something into Building 6 and—”
Jamie interrupted. “When did you input your data into Maip?”
Ethan said nothing. The tarry cold mist had receded. No—it had vanished. He felt limp, drained, bruised, as if he had fallen off a cliff and somehow survived. You were very angry. I hope you feel better now.
“You didn’t, did you?” Jamie demanded. “You never gave your baseline data to Maip! She did a cold reading on you, extrapolating from free-form observation! We didn’t teach her to do that!”
“Be quiet,” Laura said. “Jamie, for God’s sake—not now.”
MAIP said, “Ethan, I’m glad you feel better. You were both angry and sad before. You were sad even when you smiled.”
Jamie drew a sharp, whistling breath. “Detection of social pretense! I’m sorry, Ethan, I know you’re upset and I said some things I shouldn’t have, but—detection of social pretense! From cold readings! She’s taken a huge step forward—she knows you!”
Ethan said, not to Jamie but to the complexity of machinery and electrons that was MAIP, “You don’t know me. You’re a nonlinear statistical modeling tool.”
Laura said, “But I’m not.” She put a tentative hand on his arm.
Jamie said, “Maip’s not, either. Not anymore. She learned, Ethan. She did!”
Ethan looked at the flight simulator, which flashed the total number of jets he had crashed. He looked at MAIP. He saw the mannequin, a pathetic lump of plastic that he had left in Building 6.
Ethan rose. He had to steady himself with one hand on the game console. Laura’s hand on his arm felt warm through his damp shirt. He didn’t, he realized, know any of them, not really: not Laura, not MAIP, not Jamie. Not himself. Especially not himself.
He would have to learn everything all over again, reassess everything, forge new algorithms. Starting with this moment, here, now, to the sound of rain on the roof of the building.
Acclaimed for her skill at bringing a deep human dimension to complex science concepts, Nancy Kress has a shelf full of the top awards in science fiction, including Nebulas for Best Short Story (for 1986’s “Out of All Them Bright Stars”), Best Novelette (for 1998’s “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and Best Novella (for 2015’s Yesterday’s Kin, her fourth win in the category) and Hugos for Best Novella (including 2009’s The Edrmann Nexus). Her novella Beggars in Spain, later expanded into a novel, won both the Hugo and Nebula in 1991, thanks to its dramatic and affecting examination of genetic engineering. Beggars in Spain kicked off the Sleepless series, just as “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” was expanded into the Probability series; together they make up just a small part of the more than two dozen novels Kress has published. The Best of Nancy Kress, published by Subterranean Press in September 2015, collects her best short work from over thirty years.
2016
BELIEF
Nancy Kress’s latest collection is The Best of Nancy Kress (Subterranean, September 2015), featuring twenty-one of her favorite stories. Not content to rest on her laurels, she offers us this new tale that explores the complex connections between science and faith.
THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME
“YOU CAN’T GO,” ANDREA SAID.
“Why not?” Natalie got her mutinous look.
“Because it’s stupid. And also maybe dangerous since you don’t know who else will be there. But definitely stupid.”
“You don’t know that!”
Andrea held on to her patience. Fifteen-year-olds needed freedom to explore, an open mind was a good thing, she had always encouraged her daughter to think outside the box . . . bullshit. This was stupid. Nonetheless, she tried a conciliatory tone.
“Natalie, sweetheart, I do know that. How could it be anything but stupid? Talking to spirits is—”
“Not talking. Only trying to contact the—”
“—a return to nineteenth-century séances. Only this time it costs a hundred and fifty dollars to hear the Fox sisters’ toes.” There—maybe Natalie would be sidetracked by the historical reference she wouldn’t understand and they could talk about that instead.
“The Flanagans aren’t charlatans claiming their toe-cracking is spiritual contact. They’re researchers!”
Patience slipped its leash. “Don’t use that word in connection with irrational nonsense!”
“How do you know it’s nonsense if you won’t even check it out!”
“I know it’s nonsense because it’s not scientific, no matter what claims your quackish so-called ‘researchers’ make!”
Natalie rose from the table with something like dignity. She picked up her backpack, cell, iPod, subway pass—all the things brought to her by technology, which in turn had been brought by science. Microfibers in the backpack, electricity, transistors. . . . Andrea was right, knew she was right. But by losing her temper, she had lost the argument. Triumph gleamed in Natalie’s eyes, a creamy sheen. She smiled.
“I thought science had to remain open to new ideas or die. I thought they had to actually test those ideas before dismissing them. Isn’t that what you told me the Catholic Church should have done with Galileo?”
“It isn’t—”
“You shouldn’t make a, like, stone idol of science. Bye. Have a good day.”
* * *
She had done it! Fuck, she’d really done it! Bested her mother in a logical argument!
Natalie ran down the steps of their brownstone, skimming along as if she could fly. That settled it—right after school she was going to sign up for the iarrthóir course. She had that check her father had sent from Arizona, the check her mother didn’t know about. Guilt money from Dad for not calling on her birthday—again—but so what? It wasn’t him that Natalie wanted to hear from, anyway.
What did iarrthóir mean? And how did you pronounce it?
No matter—she’d done it! Out-logicked her mother! And Lexington Avenue was pure with a light snowfall, and she was fifteen, and it was all good.
THOU SHALT NOT MAKE IDOLS OF STUDIES THAT MAY BE PREMATURE OR FAULTY OR REPLACED BY OTHER STUDIES NEXT MONTH
Andrea, still annoyed four hours after her breakfast conversation with Natalie, contemplated lunch. Send out for a salad or round up Michael for a restaurant meal? Before she could decide, Michael burst into her lab, his gray hair wild, his eyes aglow, his socks mismatched. He was the only gay man she knew who could not dress himself properly. Although she suspected this was deliberate, an attempt to model himself on Einstein. The leonine, unkempt hair seemed to prove it.
“Andrea! I’ve got it!”
She half-rose from her lab stool, caught between hope and skepticism. “It? The real it?”
“Yes! The gene for Larrimer’s Disease! On chromosome eleven, right where I thought that fucker was hiding!” He did an uncoordinated little happy dance, right in the middle of the laboratory, while three technicians looked up from sequencers and autoclaves in sheer amazement.
“Let me see!”
Andrea followed Michael to his own lab, hurrying along to keep up. The Parminter Institute for Biological Studies favored corridors lined with reverent portraits of geneticists. The door to Michael’s lab was flanked by a framed print of Oswald Avery and a dispenser of industrial-strength hand sanitizer. Inside, Michael thrust at her a page of notes. This alone was a major departure; Michael was usually the most secretive of researchers, protected by the Institute’s liberal philosophy of requiring only semiannual reviews of progress with the director.
It would take a long time, of course, to review the stu
dy properly, but if these notes were accurate, it looked as if Michael had done it: identified a gene directly connected to. . . . And . . . oh God, no, don’t let it be. . . .
“Michael,” Andrea said slowly, “did you see the current issue of Science ? The one that went online yesterday?”
“Not yet, I—” He saw her face and he knew. He let out a howl of pure rage. It echoed through the lab, leapt down the corridor. ” Who ?”
“Ramstetter and Ching, at Princeton. But . . . maybe . . . it looks like they used a different method. . . . ”
“They’re wrong! I was first! Only I waited to double-check the results to— what method ?”
Andrea told him, trying to remember details. Maybe Michael’s method was better. Maybe his study would replace theirs. Maybe the Princeton study had design flaws or data-analysis problems. Maybe—
Publishing first counted so much in science. Who thought of Alfred Russel Wallace before Charles Darwin?
“My method is better,” Michael said. ” I’m better. Ramstetter! A second-rater . . . I knew him at Yale! No! My study will replace his!”
“Of course it will,” Andrea said loyally. “Let’s go to lunch to celebrate.”
She would buy him a drink. Strong.
“If this is true,” Michael said, with a ghastly attempt at a joking smile, “there goes two years of work. I might just kill myself.”
Several drinks. Very strong.
THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN VAIN
After school, Natalie took the Metro-North uptown. Way, way uptown, until she was out of the Bronx and maybe even out of New York.
She fingered the locket she wore under her sweater. She never took it off, not even in the shower, not even during make-out sessions with Paul. She never wore tops cut low enough for the locket to show, not even in summer. And she never showed it to anyone, not even her mother. Especially not her mother, although that was the one person who might have recognized it. Or not.
Made of cheap tin, the locket was an irregular and battered circle, welded shut. Inside was something, but no one knew what, only that the locket had belonged to Natalie’s great-grandmother. Natalie had never met her great-grandmother, who came from Ireland in, like, the absolute Dark Ages, but Ellen Maloney had passed the locket to her daughter, who had passed it to Natalie, wisely skipping Andrea, who would have just thrown it away. Natalie’s grandmother said the locket had come to Ellen Maloney from her mother, whose name nobody remembered and who Natalie hadn’t been able to find any records of online, not even on the Mormon site. But Grandma knew the word that Ellen Maloney’s mother had been—or maybe it was somebody farther back—in Ireland: iarrthóir .
It meant, Google translator said, “seeker.”
Natalie took the printout from her backpack and studied it. The train car was emptying now, disgorging other students with backpacks, women with shopping bags, two nuns with tote bags full of books. The printout, from the Iarrthóir Studies website, described the course, gave the address and fee, and that was it. No grandiose claims, no lurid illustrations. Had Natalie thought that tasteful starkness would sway her mother? It had not. Her mother, after all, had not voted in the last presidential election because both candidates professed a religious faith and “that alone is proof of their irrationality. I won’t support anyone that irrational for leader of the Western world.”
A boy in the seat across the aisle caught her studying the printout. She folded it up and shoved it in her pocket.
The Iarrthóir building was just an ordinary house. Natalie almost turned back: what if this was worse than a scam? What if she was kidnapped for ransom or sold into sexual slavery or something?
A girl walked past her, started to climb the steps, then turned. “Hey—you here for the four o’clock class?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
The girl laughed. A few years older than Natalie, she had a plain, open face and kind eyes. “And you’re nervous. So was I. But come on in, it’s awesome once you get going.”
“Going where?”
“Into other realms.”
Oh. Faery, ghosts, mediums . . . Disappointment washed over Natalie.
“No, not like that,” the girl said. “No golden bridges or enchanted animals. It’s a journey into other realms of consciousness. Kelly and Donald will explain it all. There are scientific studies that show this stuff works.”
“Scientific studies?” Natalie said. And then, the words coming from some layer of consciousness she didn’t know she had, “That’s a perversion of the term ‘science’!”
“No, it’s not,” the girl said seriously. She came back down the steps. “The studies have to do with the effects of iarrthóir on brain function. MRIs, things like that. Why are you so negative when you don’t even know yet what it’s about?”
Natalie was silent. Wasn’t that what she’d accused her mother of?
“Just come on in,” the girl said. “Then you can decide for yourself. I’m Elise, by the way.”
“Natalie,” she mumbled. She went in.
THOU SHALT KEEP HOLY THE EXPERIMENT
Andrea and Michael sat in the back booth of O’Malley’s Irish Pub, the only booth with enough light to read by. The light came from the kitchen beyond, along with the smell of fishcakes and cheese. The pub came from Hollywood’s idea of Ireland, featuring bales of peat, fake stone walls, and servers in Celtic costume. The drink glasses came from the bar, and there were a lot of them.
Andrea and Michael had two printouts of the Ramstetter/Ching study spread out on the table and were scrutinizing it like forensic experts with the Shroud of Turin. It would, of course, take more than semidrunken readings of these few pages to validate the study’s methodology. Genomic association research was a big-data project, involving thousands of DNA variants in tens of thousands of people and generating so many pieces of information that computers were needed to sort it all out. The wrong analysis program could skew everything. So could a dozen other problems.
“Remember that issue at the Sanger Institute in England?” Michael said hopefully. “When the reagent kits used in the DNA extraction were contaminated with significant amounts of bacterial DNA?”
“I remember,” Andrea said. Michael looked terrible. His face sagged, his eyes sagged, even his usually hectic hair somehow looked saggy. This mattered so much to him—well, it would to any scientist, but maybe even more to Michael, who’d always been both obsessive and volatile. Worried about him, she resigned herself to not getting back to the lab this afternoon.
He said, “And remember that University of Illinois group whose facility was by a freeway and car fumes were degrading the red dye in the microarrays they used to measure gene activity?”
“I remember.”
“And remember the—”
“Michael,” Andrea said firmly, ” stop . We both know that data is messy, methodology provides a lot of choices, contamination is possible, analysis can be faulty, and half a dozen other things. There may or may not be errors in this study, and we can’t go any farther here and now in finding them. It will take time. Meanwhile, you should eat something.”
Michael stared at her. In the kitchen light, his stare was so intense that it looked demonic. “I just want the science to be right . Mine or theirs.”
But mostly yours . Gently, she put a hand on his arm. “I know you do, Michael. I know that. It’s what we all want. Now, will you eat something? Maybe just a ploughman’s lunch?”
Michael groaned and stared at the printout.
THOU SHALT HONOR THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE YOU
Natalie settled into a hard chair in the back row of what had been, and still looked like, a living room. The house was old, with rough places in the wooden floors and wavery glass in some of the windowpanes. Green curtains at the bay window, two long sofas along the side walls, ten folding chairs atop a green-flowered rug in the center space. A card table near the door held a coffee urn and mugs. In front was a st
urdier wooden table with nothing on it. Some sort of pagan altar?
Five or six people sat in the chairs. More came in before a man entered from the corridor beyond and sat on the table.
So—not an altar.
“Welcome,” he said. About forty, nice-looking if you were into old guys, dressed in jeans and a sweater. “I’m Donald Flanagan. Unfortunately, my wife Kelly is ill today, but she’ll be joining us for subsequent sessions. As you probably know from our website, this is an introductory session to see if iarrthóir is for you. If it’s not, then of course there’s no charge, and we wish you well on whatever other spiritual journey you choose.”
Natalie, alert as a hunting cat, watched his every expression, every movement. She wasn’t afraid any longer, but if he started talking really stupid, she was out of here. What she really wanted was to hear about the MRI studies that Elise had mentioned outside, but she felt too self-conscious to ask. Maybe he would talk about them anyway.
He didn’t.
“The word ‘ iarrthóir ‘ means ‘seeker.’ From at least the Paleolithic on, humans have sought for more than the tangible world. People have a built-in—or, more accurately, ‘wired in’—desire to know more than meets their five senses. To touch a deeper reality.”
Natalie leaned forward on her uncomfortable chair, her lips parted. How did he know? All her life she’d hungered for . . . what? Well, meaning , lame as that sounded. She’d invented imaginary friends, hoped for ghosts, tried to find fairies in moonlight, ventured into three churches. She was past all that now, but sometimes it seemed she could almost feel it, the “more” that was out there—or was she just feeling her own desire for there to be more?
“Over time, people have codified that desire,” Donald said. “Tried to pin it down, give it a specific shape, make it as tangible as results in a test tube. If that’s what you’ve come here for, ghosts and fairies and séances, then you will be disappointed.”