Maximum Light

by Nancy Kress

  “Joshua Tymbal, please.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Tymbal is in a—”

  “Tell him it’s Nick Clementi calling, and it’s urgent.”

  “Just a moment…” and then, “Nick! How long has it been?”

  “Years. I keep up with you, though, through the Harvard Online Class Notes. It all sounds good, Josh.”

  “You haven’t done so bad yourself. But my program said it was urgent.…” He hadn’t changed since Harvard. Still impatient, just this side of rude, willing to cut social corners to get things his way. Which was why I was calling him now.

  “Josh, it is urgent. But it’s also a shot in the dark. My son is married now—”

  “Congratulations!” he boomed, as if this were news. John and Laurie have been married for three years, and Josh attended the wedding, which was full of important people he wanted to meet.

  “Thanks. Only they’ve been trying hard to conceive, and … Well, you know how it is. So we’re looking into adoption. They know—I know—how hard it is to even find a baby, and how many applicants there are for each one. I know that adoption is part of your legal practice.…”

  “Was,” he said heavily. “Not much business there nowadays.”

  “I know. But the family really wants this, and we’re willing to throw all our resources, which are considerable by now, behind the effort … all our resources.…”

  He understood. I knew it from his silence. But I had misjudged him—and why not? All I had to go on were old memories, a few meetings spread over fifty years, and reading between the carefully neutral lines of the Harvard alumni bulletins.

  “Nick … I think you have the wrong attorney. I haven’t been able to arrange adoptions, of any kind, for years now.”

  All very correct. He didn’t know my call was untraceable. And I didn’t know who had access to his records. I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Josh. It was just a hope. I’m trying every avenue I can, of course.”

  “Of course.” But then he said, “You might try Ted Panzardi. Do you remember him? Big guy, played hockey. He was All-Ivy one year.”

  “No. Is he is Washington?”

  “Baltimore, I think. I haven’t actually heard from him in years. But someone casually mentioned to me that he arranges … adoptions.”

  In the stuffy “phone booth,” I grinned. Tymbal was covering his ass. I hadn’t completely misremembered him after all; he might not do black-market adoptions himself, but he was in the loop.

  “Thanks, Josh,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “Of course,” he said lightly, but it wasn’t light. It was the whole point.

  * * *

  Ted Panzardi was cautious. But he knew who I was, and he talked to me long enough to set up a meeting at a public restaurant.

  I went on down my list, which was long. Scientific colleagues I’d always suspected of less-than-perfect ethics. Harvard alumni. People I’d met over the years in Washington. I had never done this before, but it turned out the wall between legitimate business and the black market, even in something as precious as human life, was thin, and riddled with passageways. Probably the lawyers and doctors didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. The babies, after all, ended up in affluent homes that desperately wanted them. The lawyers ended up well compensated. And the biological mothers … well, was a girl who was willing to conceive and sell a child fit to be a mother? I set up two more meetings on neutral turf, no promises, “Let’s just discuss your needs.”

  But under the self-protective, self-satisfied greed, I heard another note. An odd regret. Not the regret of morality, but the regret of a supplier without enough product to meet market demand.

  No one else wanted to use the “phone booth”—in fact, no one else seemed to be visiting the tourist village. At this rate, the place would never yield park revenues. The old didn’t want to be reminded of the past, and the young knew too strongly that they were the future. We’d told them so often enough. Let the dead bury the dead.…

  My eye hurt, the sore in my mouth was worse, and the headache was back.

  But I’d almost worked my way through my list of names. Next: Billy McCullough, whom I remembered as a scholarship kid from North Philadelphia that I’d felt constrained to be decent to because my classmates were not. Billy had flunked out our sophomore year. Still, with pathetic pride, he still sent in his yearly reports to the Class Notes, and they still posted them. He had finished college elsewhere, gone to a third-rate law school, opened a practice back in Philadelphia. I didn’t know that city well enough to tell if the address was a decent one. I hoped not.

  “Billy McCullough? This is Nick Clementi. We were at Harvard together. You probably don’t remember me—”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “How are you, Nick?”

  “Old. Like all of us. But I’m calling for a specific reason, Billy. I was hoping you could help me.…” I went through the whole spiel. My head pounded. Very soon I would have to take medication, lie down in a cab.

  “Yeah,” Billy McCullough said finally. “I can hear what you want. I can help you.”

  “You can?” His tone was definite, almost angry.

  “Yeah. Listen, I’m in a new office. Brand new; I just rented it this morning. Nobody knew I was going to, so nothing’s tapped or monitored. What about you? A public phone, right?”

  He knew the subroutines. I sat up straighter. “Right.”

  “Okay. I’m going to talk straight to you. You were always straight to me, and I know you’re sincere about what you want. You want a black market baby for your son. But I’m telling you, there aren’t any. Five years ago, even three … just maybe. But not now. Not enough of the girls we use here and abroad are getting pregnant, and it’s harder all the time to find new ones, at any price. You understand?”

  “Yes, I said. The girls we use here and abroad. What was I becoming a part of?

  “Okay. But a lot of women want babies. So sometimes we offer substitutes. They sound surprising at first, but take my word for it, women come to really love them. Sometimes they hardly know the difference, after a while. And a bonus: they’re a lot less expensive than a newborn. You interested?”

  I said slowly, “I don’t know. What exactly are we talking about, Billy?”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. But you got to reserve judgment when you first hear. You got to keep an open mind. That shouldn’t be hard for you, you’re a scientist. And you got to trust that I’ve done this before, I’ve seen how women react after the first shock, how they get to love their little substitutes. And why not—they look like toddlers, they walk like toddlers, they hold up their adorable little hands to be picked up, they respond to love. And they look completely human. You can believe me on this, Nick—dressed, they look completely human. With the intelligence of a year-old human baby. They color with crayons, they play with toys, you can feed ’em a bottle.”

  “And what are they in actuality?” It was difficult to get the words out.

  “Human. At least, human faces and hands. Completely, created by vivifacture.”

  “And put on … what?”

  “Purebred intelligent baby chimps. That, once they’re dressed in little human clothes and shoes, your daughter-in-law won’t be able to tell from any other baby. And after she spends time cuddling and feeding her little one, she won’t care. Believe me; I’ve seen it time and time again.”

  Time and time again. “You place a lot of these substitutes, Billy?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many. Or who some of the families are who adopt them. I can’t name names, of course—but your son will be in some very tony company. And the little one can even look like him. We have a selection. You were blond, I remember, Nick, northern Italian—is your son blond too? We have an adorable little girl, looks like a Saxon princess. And smart as Einstein.”

  “No … I … give me a minute, Billy. This is all so new.”

  “Course it is,” Billy said amiably. “But you’re making all the
right moves. I have your call traced, of course. FDR Village is good. Probably thousands of tourists through there every day, right?”

  I rested my head back against the cool glass. My headache made it difficult to think. How much longer before the coma?

  “Nick? You there?”

  “Yes. Billy, I don’t want blond. If we’re really going to do this … Laurie, my daughter-in-law, has a mixed background. Some French, some Hispanic, some black. It might help persuade her if you—if we—could show her a … a little one with something like her looks.” He hadn’t been invited to Laurie’s wedding; he wouldn’t know what she looked like.

  “Okay,” he said eagerly. “Describe her.”

  “It’s an unusual face. Dark hair, light brown skin, hazel eyes flecked with gold, full lips … she looks like she could be anything. People never guess her background. Last Halloween, she even put on a red wig and was convincing as an Irish leprechaun.”

  “Okay, Nick, I’ll phone around. There’s a supply network, of course. Let’s set up a meeting for a few days from now, and maybe I’ll even have holos to show you. I’ll come to Washington.”

  We chose a place and time. No money was mentioned; that would come later. Billy could have been a successful legitimate salesman, if, even over vidless phone, he weren’t so repulsive.

  I took my meds, phoned for a cab, and tried to think. I could have the cops with me at the meeting—but an FBI agent had talked a long time to Cameron Atuli, and Van Grant had lied to me about Atuli’s kidnapping. I didn’t know how far this coverup (of what?) extended, or why, or who was safe to confide in. So perhaps no cops. Not yet.

  I thought of bringing home to Laurie a chimp with Cameron Atuli’s face on it, and I shuddered. What was I doing? I’d planned only on buying a baby for Laurie, not on all this.… Everything looked different from this angle, so different from when I’d seen the artist’s drawing of Shana Walders’s chimps on the antiseptic wall screen of the Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises.

  Shana. Was she home yet from wherever she’d gone?

  I struggled out of the cab and up the sidewalk. The trees and grass around me kept wavering, swooping. It was better if I closed my right eye. But something was happening in my brain.…

  I leaned on the bell. Inside my house raucous music blared, which meant Shana was home. But she didn’t open the door, nor did Maggie. It was Sallie, standing there with her hair wild, saying in a bitter voice, “I’ve been fired. After fifteen years. They found my intrusion into the Atuli file—Dad? What’s wrong?”

  “Call … your mother.”

  “Dad! What is it! Mom!”

  The room went dark. I was conscious, but I couldn’t see. The mucor fibers had finally reached the optic canal. Strangely enough, the vertigo suddenly passed, and I felt a weird calm. But I didn’t know this new territory. I stepped forward and stumbled, and it was Maggie who caught me in her arms and led me, blind, to a chair I could feel but no longer see.

  * * *

  As deaths go, mucormycosis occupies a middle ground. Not as painful and prolonged as some of the vanquished cancers, not as swift and merciful as some cardiac events. I would have seizures, then a coma which would be far worse for Maggie than for me, who would know nothing of it.

  But for the moment, sitting in my hospital bed, I was only weak. Not in pain. My doctors had come and gone with their meds and scans and calibrations, which all of us knew made no difference whatsoever. I had, forcefully for my present condition, insisted that Maggie and Sallie go home to sleep. Reluctantly, to please me, they had.

  I could see. Only dimly, but from both eyes. That told me that the primary lesion was either at the optic chiasma or along the optic radiation. If it had been less far into my skull, at the retinal end of the optic nerve, I would still have intact vision in one eye. If it had been in the visual cortex, I’d have remained totally blind.

  As it was, the foot of my hospital bed was a metal blur. The curtains across the room looked like fuzzy patches. Something sat on the windowsill—flowers? water carafe?—but not even squinting told me what it was.

  Sound was suddenly more solid than sight. Beyond my window traffic hummed, even at this hour, the soothing subdued monotony of a remote waterfall. In the unseen hallway, footsteps stopped by my door, paused, padded on. I lay quietly, hearing them go.

  Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily. La Rochefoucauld.

  But I had tried. I had pushed away from myself the despairs, entreaties, angers of someone who cannot bear the thought of his individual mind gone from the universe. Not for me undignified fury against the inevitable. I would be different. Serene, accepting. Unafraid. And, in my own judgment, I had been.

  What I hadn’t realized, until now, was that it wasn’t fear that made dying so difficult. Nor fury. It wasn’t the fight to hold onto the tide that would, must, obey the dictates of the physical world and ebb forever. It wasn’t rage that a lifetime of self would just cease to exist, like a snuffed candle. The metaphors were all wrong, and far too grand.

  It was much more like having to leave a meeting before the whole agenda had been worked through.

  I could part with my life. I could even leave Maggie, whose own life, comparatively speaking, did not have that much longer to run without me. But how could I leave Laurie in the middle of her mind-cracking hunger for a child? How could I leave John before he’d finished growing up? How could I leave Sallie, newly fired from the CDC because of me? How could I even leave that little wretch Shana, dangerous to herself and everybody else, as she mucked around with forces orders of magnitude more powerful than she? How could I leave in the middle of the story, before I found out how it all came out?

  The middle of the story. Yes, it had begun to feel like that, a story in which only part of me participated, the rest already closing the pages, already elsewhere. But I still wanted the story to come out right.

  O death all eloquent, you only prove/What dust we dote on, when ’tis man we love. Pope.

  Just once, I’d like to have thought of something that hadn’t already been said infinitely better by the dead.

  Slowly I shifted against my pillow. Somewhere down the dim hall, someone moaned. Someone else, or perhaps just a nursing program, murmured softly. All this—strange thought, still, despite everything—would continue after I did not. But until that moment actually came, I had to think how to address the items left on the agenda, and help the people who could not go with me when I escaped the rest of the meeting.

  14

  SHANA WALDERS

  I can’t believe it. I blow weeks and money and a semi-good police record trying to get to Cameron Atuli, and then he walks into Nick’s house. Just walks in. Go figure.

  We’re alone in the dining room a long time. I turn on a music chip, real loud, so nobody can’t hear us talk. When we come out, Maggie’s already gone, which explains why Her Highness didn’t hammer on the dining room door while I grilled Atuli. Sallie, who’s up from Atlanta in a bloodboil about something, isn’t home neither. The front door even stands halfway open, like they left the house in a big hurry. That isn’t like neither of them. But I don’t have no time to think about this.

  “You sure he’ll be waiting there?” I ask Atuli.

  “He’ll be there,” he says, his handsome jaw set. It’s clear he don’t want to talk much, so I shut up during the train ride to D.C. Atuli’s a weird program—one minute he’s all quivery and upset, the next grim and angry. And he lets all of it show, which is just stupid. You have to shield yourself.

  I lead us on and off trains until I’m sure nobody isn’t following us. The Ocean Bar, in D.C, is a toilet pit trying to look like an aquarium. Holo mermaids swim through the air, and the table menus are shaped like shells. But at this hour the bar is empty—at least, in the public room—and the order program don’t keep pestering you about how long you sit without ordering more drinks. Radisson waits at a back table, looking even more quivery than Atuli. H
is voice is soft and tender.

  “Cameron?”

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Rob. So sorry.” Atuli reaches for his hand, and Radisson grabs on like he’s drowning. It’s like I don’t exist.

  “Okay, break it up,” I say, sitting down. “Not here, for fuck’s sake. Radisson, we got some questions for you, and they’re important.”

  Radisson looks at Atuli, who says, “This is Shana Walders. Yes, she’s the same one. She told me some things, Rob, about … before my operation. Things you already know, and some you don’t. Will you help us?”

  “Help you do what?” Radisson says, and I see he don’t like this. But Atuli’s on fire again, angry and hard, and Radisson don’t want to risk another spat now that he just got Atuli back. Rucky-fuckies.

  “Help him find out who mangled his nuts,” I say. I’m going to be in charge here. “Tell us everything you can remember.”

  Radisson hesitates and Atuli, his voice splintery, says, “Please.”

  “Last January nineteenth,” Radisson says in a low voice, “you left Aldani House to go shopping. You wouldn’t let me come with you because you were buying an anniversary present for me. And you just … disappeared.”

  “Did Aldani House call the cops?” I ask.

  “Not right away. They won’t come, you know, for a missing adult, only for missing kids. And Mr. C. knew that you and I had had a … a quarrel.”

  “Mr. C. knew that?” Atuli says, and I don’t get the anguish in his voice.

  “Who’s Mr. C.?”

  They both look at me like I turned purple. “Mr. Collelouri,” Radisson finally says. “The choreographer.”

  Like I’m supposed to know what one is. But I just nod and Radisson goes on.

  “Before we ever did call the cops, the FBI showed up. They said they’d found you in a raid on an illegal vivifacture lab in Baltimore. You were … badly hurt. Mr. C. and Melita went to the hospital, and I threw a fit until they took me, too.”