Mom is out of her seat in a flash, her wine aslosh and her eyes very, very angry, like scary angry. “You apologize to Millie immediately, young lady! Do you understand?”
I turn to Millie. She looks like I punched her in the stomach. I know she was just trying to make me feel better. “I’m sorry.” And I am. I have to stop saying and doing what I think. I lean down and give her a tight hug around her neck.
“It’s okay,” she says, and pats my back. “It’s okay.”
A powerful gray-black cloud is being pushed across the sky by the wind, a dark ribbon winding across the blue sky behind. A cold front is coming and evidently is almost here. Each gust of wind has some cold air in it, like an ice cube in a drink. I wish I was wearing jeans instead of shorts.
Mike Sledge is coming up Caroline Street now. The sidewalks are tilty, no good for skating, crazed with cracks and heaved slabs. He’s wearing the usual: a muscle shirt with something about fish on it; teeny shorts. He has a scruffy gray beard, kind of long, and somehow he finds the energy to shave his head, which is as darkly tanned as the rest of his skinny self. He wears no shoes. Raises his hand in greeting. “Hey, little girl. Howzit going?”
I stop for a moment to talk. “Not bad, Mike.”
“Hear about Sam?”
“Nothing new. Still missing.” No matter what Mom says, I will never say he’s dead until they show me a body. And that might be never.
“Ah. He’s a good kid. Smart. He’ll turn up. Don’t you worry now, missy.”
Mike does two things: drinks, and fixes houses. He is very much in demand—not because he’s dependable, which he isn’t, but because he does such an incredible job when he’s there. I’ve decided that he’s an obsessive, which is what drove him to drink and fine carpentry. I’m an obsessive myself. I’m so obsessive that sometimes I’m afraid to start something because it will have to be absolutely perfect and will take forever and everybody will get mad at me for falling into some detail that gets bigger and bigger until it’s all I can see.
Biology is perfect, though. It’s already here. We just have to tweak it, which is easy, because it’s always changing anyway. It’s called evolution.
“Your mom ready for that new kitchen yet?” His seamed, dried-up face, half-hidden with beard, is the face of a lot of people in Key West. Except for the mothers of my former friends. Unlike Mike, who wouldn’t do it anyway, they can afford all kinds of treatments to deal with the results of their perpetual tans. I think the latest is just growing a new face at a spa in Cuba.
“I don’t know. She’s going to Bali next month.”
“Oh, perfect time, perfect time. It’d drive her nuts to have the work done while she’s living there.”
“I’ll be living there. Aunt Cicily will be living there.”
“Oh my God, not you two!” He rolls his eyes. “It’ll never happen.” He ambles off down the tilted sidewalk, on his way to the infinite happy hour on Duval Street.
Mike used to be a commercial fisherman, until the IRS took his boat. He used to take Sam and me out, showed us the secret places and the ways to catch certain fish. He might drink a lot, but funny thing, he’s always there when you need him, just knows and shows up somehow, and never gets mean like some people do. I mean, I’ve never seen him staggering across the street at three in the afternoon, and he’s always sweet.
Mike’s all right.
Cold raindrops flick over me, and I run the last two blocks to the lab.
Mothertime Clinic is in a big old mansion. I like going up the walk to the broad steps. Cushioned garden chairs and chaises sit on brick pads here and there in the garden. I wave to a clearly pregnant man lying on one, covered with a blanket and reading. He’s been in the Key West Citizen. Famous, like me, ha ha.
Up the big steps, through the glass doors, past the plush waiting rooms where some decorator managed to cover everything from the sofas to the lampshades with images of palm trees. This was the Kingsley Mansion; they made their fortune in the eighteen hundreds by salvaging from wrecked ships.
I climb the wide mahogany staircase and look at a spot next to the door frame. The retina scan opens the door to the smooth, shiny lab.
It’s not hard. Cloning. You just take an egg and suck out the nucleus with a pipette, which is a little glass straw, and put in the DNA of choice. In this case, it is DNA from Sam’s hair.
When I’m ready, I’ll have to get an ovum from somewhere. Of course, the lab is full of them; in fact, Dr. Harris subscribes to a bank and orders them whenever she needs them. I could probably find out all the codes and go online and order some myself. Although that doesn’t really seem right. I mean, Dr. Harris trusts me, and she would get in a lot of trouble if anyone found out about that, or if anyone found out about Sam. Which they would. It’s hard to hide a baby.
That’s one of the problems I have. It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s that everything has to be a secret. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, or even possible. Sometimes it scares me.
But then I think of Sam. The world winks, like it does now. It winks from the cold machines and from the lab glass and from the tall locked cabinets, and Sam is there saying, It’s the right thing, sis, through all of the colors and the shapes around me.
And so, I have to.
Dr. Harris comes in. “Hi, Eelie. I didn’t know if I’d see you today.”
“Hi, Dr. Harris.”
She has a little frown on her freckled face. Her frizzy blonde hair is not very long, but long enough to pull back in a bun. She is tall and reminds me of a sailboat mast. It holds the sail and has a light at the top. It’s the most important part of a sailboat.
“I heard you missed school the other day.”
“I was looking for wrasses.”
“Look for them on Saturday.” She opens a refrigerator door— there are lots of refrigerators in the lab—and pulls out a bottle of spring water, and the lid makes a slight snapping sound as she twists it off. She leans back against the counter and takes a swig. “Look, Eelie, I do have some responsibilities here. I’m supervising you.” She looks at me with serious blue eyes between white eyelashes and pale blonde eyebrows and somehow I think that maybe she knows what I’m up to, which is impossible. I haven’t told a soul.
I am running through the rain. Running, running, running, down Duval Street, dodging slow, oblivious, probably drunk tourists. I hear my feet pound; they glance at me from beneath parrot-colored umbrellas because my long hair and all of me is soaked and because I must look so glad and they are all pissed because it’s a cold front and they’ve spent big bucks to come down here in winter and bask in hot subtropical sunlight. I feel water stream from my face because my very speed, my ecstatic celebratory speed, pushes it backward almost as if I were taking flight myself, Flying Girl, Sundiver Day, my arms pushed against my side as I leave the ground and fly out over the Everglades. But my feet still touch the sidewalk. Breathless, I round a corner and the center of my chest is a bright, glowing sun, and I run past the World-Famous Oyster Bar and the absurdly expensive Frank’s and onto the concrete dock past millionaires’ yachts and then pound onto the narrow wooden extension where Sam and I used to meet, him in the Zodiac and me just out of school, and thread through the harbor full of anchored sailboats, pass the Glittering Isle of Incredible Wealth, and speed out into the Everlasting Everglades.
“I did it!” I stop (if I had wheels they would screech) at the end of the dock, wavering, almost pitching forward into the cold water. Again, I shout, “I did it I did it I did it I did it!” My breath comes from way down deep, from running. A gust of cold wind sprays wavelet salt over me. “You did it, Sam.” I am whispering now, and shivering, and my tears surprise me. “It’s you. You’re going to be born again. In eight months.”
And then I really do fly off the end of the dock, up into the drizzle, and circle over the yachts and the Magic Penny Water Taxi making its way across the harbor, and then it takes off too and I know I’m dreaming and wake
up.
Moonlight filters through the Bahama shutters on my windows, and a breeze flits through the room. Palm fronds move languidly outside, and their shadows modulate shadow and light into even thinner slivers. The sweet smell of night-blooming jasmine is heavy in the air. Esmeralda moves back and forth on her perch, squawks, ruffles her feathers, dozes off again.
I get up and open the top drawer of my dresser, paw away the underwear, get out the kit.
Now that I have it, I am afraid.
I got it from a sales rep. Phizer-Wellbourne-Merce, whose sample fertility kits the rep carried with her in a large leather case, had probably paid to have her face regrown, and her right eyebrow was a tiny bit lower than her left. She looked very striking, though, with her hard blue eyes, black eyebrows (one crooked), and smooth, smooth, smooth blonde hair. She wore a green tropical suit and lots of gold and the highest heels I’d ever seen. Dr. Harris had gone to a meeting for a week and so the rep pitched to me.
“Just for practice,” she said, grinning.
“I’m Dr. Harris’s research assistant.” In case she thought I was a kid doing cleaning work, despite the crisp lab coat I wore with my name sewn in blue above the pocket.
She looked skeptical. I slouched back against a soapstone lab table and crossed my arms. “We use the Bathfeldt Xygote Kit. It is extremely dependable and our birth rate is the highest in the world, for what we do.”
“Oh. Really.” She arched her highest eyebrow at me. “Well, this kit is a breakthrough.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not sure you’d understand, but these hormones help the zygote implant in the womb at a much higher rate.”
By the time she was gone, I had convinced her to leave four sample kits. They were off the record, unlike everything else in the lab, which was all meticulously accounted for down to the last Chinese nano-suture kit, which knits incisions seamlessly, and, probably, the last lowly, old-fashioned aspirin.
I felt a little bit sick, then, alone in the shining lab with my wrasses languidly swimming in their aquarium and Sam-in-the-Hair-Shaft, whom I had the power to make into two cells, then four, then eight. . . .
I stuffed one of the kits into my pack and ran home. Without changing, I jumped into my Zodiac and sped through the canal, ignoring Mr. Albert in bathing suit and fish tank top, brandishing a beer can and yelling, “For God’s sake, Eelie! Slow down!” as my wake smacked into neighbors’ docks, making their boats buck and test their lines like wild ponies bent on escape. The day seemed way too sunny and bright, the bay too stunningly blue and green, the mangrove islands too filled with white herons.
When I got to my creek, I was soaked from spray. I threw my lab coat into a corner, crumpled up and getting engine grease on it, and wondered why I wanted to stomp on it.
I sat there in the stillness, waiting for the world to wink.
It didn’t.
I saw the same mangroves and snappers and the same brilliant sky with clouds teetering on the edge of green-hued crystal that he had seen. But it did not move. It might have been painted there. I sat within a postcard of our past.
Then a pelican plummeted, far off, and the world resumed.
I have to do this, I told myself, I have to.
If I don’t do it, I am killing Sam. He’ll die.
Completely and for always.
They wouldn’t put me in jail—after all, I was way too young to know what I was doing. Wasn’t I? Of course, they might put my mother in jail. Or Dr. Harris.
And who was Sam, anyway?
My big brother. Sitting across from me in the bow on this day’s twin sister, taking pictures with his eyes that he would later download by pressing his index finger onto his photo touchpad. He could zoom, adjust the f-stop, perform any function of the fanciest digital camera by touching one or another of his fingers to his thumb in a particular cadence. Staring and staring. I hadn’t known that he was playing with war toys. I hadn’t known that he had already been recruited. Neither had Mom.
But oh, he wanted to go. He wanted the fanciest and most powerful enhancements available. Binocular eyes, night-vision eyes, nanotech cells with memory, everlasting life. “Look, sis!” Pulling his screen from his shirt pocket and snapping it open as we sat on shaded benches in the park. “Look at what humans can be now!”
I peered at the tiny images. “That’s in the future, Sam.”
He looked at me with serious eyes. “No, Sundiver. This is the present. But the only people who can use them are the people who go to war. It’s military stuff. That’s the way this happens. It’s who pays for this stuff, how it is developed.”
I bent over the screen, watching a tiny figure metamorph from human to man-bird, from man-bird to man-fish.
“Where are the girls?” Woman into fishhawk, woman into dolphin and back again to woman, that’s what I longed to see. My grown-up self diving into sky and diving into sea and diving back into air. Swimming in all mediums. Collecting information with my new eyes, clacking my beak in cadence, squeaking commands to my onboard organic computers.
He ran through the options. “Good point. They aren’t here, are they? Girls can do all this, though. Maybe they give a different one to female recruits.”
“I’m going to do it too.”
His tight hug squeezed me sideways for an instant, then he let go. “You’ll do it for science, Sunny. For fun. Not for war.”
“But you’re—”
He furled his screen and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “This is from the army. I shouldn’t be showing it to you. Right now this is all experimental. It could be dangerous. No one really knows what will happen to people yet. It’s like genetic engineering, this bio-nanotech stuff. You know something about that, eh? How will the smallest, most beneficial-seeming change affect us down the line?”
“Machines ‘R’ us.”
“R you R.” He poked me with his elbow.
“R we ever what we seem?” I was thinking of all those unexpressed genes, everywhere, waiting.
We had this conversation for two months, and finally he told Mom what he’d done. She just said sadly, “Oh, Sam.” She bowed her head. Tears flowed down her face, but it was the oddest kind of crying, because her face didn’t move, she was so stunned. My chest squeezed in pain. I had to go out on the porch, with my parrots.
Ed greeted me. “Up against the wall. Up against the wall.”
“I think so,” I told Ed. “I guess you’re right after all.”
We were at the harbor. “Once I get back, Sundiver, I’ll be able to fly. You’ll be underwater with gills, and I’ll be in the air, your mirror. We’ll speed.” He told me this on the dock before his transport ship pulled out and got tiny on the horizon and then vanished. He hugged me tight. He was eighteen, old and wise and stupid and young. “Bye, Sundiver.”
Bye.
“Mom, have you ever thought of having another baby?”
She whirls in the kitchen in the morning sunlight, which dapples the old, tall glass-door cupboards, the twentieth-century porcelain sink, the Art Deco light fixture that always reminds me of speed, velocity. Coffee sloshes over the edge of her cup, and she makes an odd sound, kind of like laughing but kind of like choking. Then she gets serious.
“Honey, I’m pretty old.”
“Not really. I mean, you could have one if you wanted, couldn’t you?”
“I guess. Let’s sit down for a while.”
The kitchen table is an old wooden one, painted white, covered with a vintage tablecloth. Gigantic pink hibiscus wave outside the screen door, their huge faces impassive. I take a slice of coffee cake from the platter and slather it with butter. Mom rests her arms on the table, leaning forward, holding her coffee cup in both hands. Earnest. She bows her head, thinking, then looks at me levelly. “I’m a little worried about you, Eelie.”
“I’m okay.” I take a bite of coffee cake and drop crumbs everywhere.
“Dr. Harris says that—”
I leap out of
my chair like a spring toy, dropping the coffee cake on the floor, shouting, “What is she doing? Spying on me for you?”
“Sit down, sit down. Of course not.”
I don’t sit down. “It looks like it to me.”
“We can’t bring Sam back.”
“Yes we can!” Suddenly I am, like, five years old. I want to fling myself on the floor and scream. “We can!”
“Technically, yes. Of course we can. We can clone him.” Her tone of voice is so reasonable. “It’s a possibility.”
I stare at her.
“I clone orchids all the time. It’s easy. But they aren’t as complicated as humans. They have no emotions. They have no brain. Not only do we have a brain, we have frontal lobes. We think. We grieve. We feel joy. We have memory.”
“Find Sam then! Take his memory back! The one the army gave him!” I am screaming, furious, and suddenly my tears are on the outside, hot on my face. “Put it in the new Sam!”
She looks amused, which makes me even angrier. “Does that seem quite fair to you?” She quirks her head sideways. “How about we find it and put it in you?”
“No! I’m not Sam! I’m Sundiver Day!”
“You’re my fierce Eelie.” She gets up and hugs me, tight. “My wonderful, beautiful, brilliant girl. Think about what you just said.” She takes her cup of coffee and steps out the back door into the garden, shutting the screen door behind her so gently it only makes a slight clunk.
I get out the hormone kit and leave it on my nightstand.
Mom seems to take a few days to notice it, but I’m sure she noticed it the first morning. She picks it up, turns it over, and reads the back of the package. “I hear these are really good.” Then she sets it back down and kisses my forehead. “It’s your choice, honey. I’ll support you whatever you do.”
When she leaves, it is as if the sun is huge and golden, infusing the entire room. Alouicious and Esmeralda lock beaks as they perch on the back of a chair, making funny little squawks, and the red and blue and green and yellow of them are astonishingly bright, so bright that it hurts my eyes and the rainbow vision swims in tears. A warm gust of wind blows through the room, and outside my little balcony the tops of palm trees dance their clicking tango, fronds flung this way and that like the long hair of little girls. The plumeria tree is in bloom, and rich perfume flows inside for just a second before it is borne away by the antic bright wind, the loud, tropical jubilation of the day.
The Starry Rift Page 20