The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  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.

  But I could hurt Keith—the other Devrie—and I had. That was why he disturbed me all out of proportion. That was the bond. My face, my pain, my fault.

  Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. But what nonsense. I was not a believer, and the comforts of superstitious absolution could not touch me. What shit. Like all nonbelievers, I stood alone.

  It came to me then that there was something absurd in thinking all this while leaning against a bathroom door. Grimly absurd, but absurd. The toilet as confessional. I ran the cold water, splashed some on my face, and left. How long had I left Keith alone in the living room?

  When I returned, he was standing by the mailnet. He had punched in the command to replay my outgoing postal messages, and displayed on the monitor was Devrie’s address at the Institute of the Biological Hope.

  “What is it?” Keith said. “A hospital?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “I can find out, Seena. Knowing this much, I can find out. Tell me.”

  Tell me. “Not a hospital. It’s a research laboratory. Devrie is a voluntary subject.”

  “Research on what? I will find out, Seena.”

  “Brain perception.”

  “Perception of what?”

  “Perception of God,” I said, torn among weariness, anger, and a sudden gritty exasperation, irritating as sand. Why not just leave him to Devrie’s persuasions, and her to mystic starvation? But I knew I would not. I still, despite all of it, wanted her out of there.

  Keith frowned. “What do you mean, ‘perception of God’?”

  I told him. I made it sound as ridiculous as possible, and as dangerous. I described the anorexia, the massive use of largely untested drugs that would have made the Institute illegal in the United States, the skepticism of most of the scientific community, the psychoses and death that had followed twin-trance research fifteen years earlier. Keith did not remember that—he had been eight years old—and I did not tell him that I had been one of the researchers. I did not tell him about the tapes of the shadowy third presence in Bohentin’s holotanks. In every way I could, with every verbal subtlety at my use, I made the Institute sound crackpot, and dangerous, and ugly. As I spoke, I watched Keith’s face, and sometimes it was mine, and sometimes the expression altered it into Devrie’s. I saw bewilderment at her having chosen to enter the Institute, but not what I had hoped to see. Not scorn, not disgust.

  When I had finished, he said, “But why did she think that I might want to enter such a place as a twin subject?”

  I had saved this for last. “Money. She’d buy you.”

  His hand, his third Scotch, went rigid. “Buy me.”

  “It’s the most accurate way to put it.”

  “What the hell made her think—” He mastered himself, not without effort. Not all the discussion of bodily risk had affected him as much as this mention of Devrie’s money. He had a poor man’s touchy pride. “She thinks of me as something to be bought.”

  I was carefully quiet.

  “Damn her,” he said. “Damn her.” Then, roughly, “And I was actually considering—”

  I caught my breath. “Considering the Institute? After what I’ve just told you? How in hell could you? And you said, I remember, that your background was not religious!”

  “It’s not. But I…I’ve wondered.” And in the sudden turn of his head away from me so that I wouldn’t see the sudden rapt hopelessness in his eyes, in the defiant set of his shoulders, I read more than in his banal words, and more than he could know. Devrie’s look, Devrie’s wishfulness, feeding on air. The weariness and anger, checked before, flooded me again and I lashed out at him.

  “Then go ahead and fly to Dominica to enter the Institute yourself!”

  He said nothing. But from something—his expression as he stared into his glass, the shifting of his body—I suddenly knew that he could not afford the trip.

  I said, “So you fancy yourself as a believer?”

  “No. A believer manqué.” From the way he said it, I knew that he had said it before, perhaps often, and that the phrase stirred some hidden place in his imagination.

  “What is wrong with you,” I said, “with people like you, that the human world is not enough?”

  “What is wrong with people like you, that it is?” he said, and this time he laughed and raised his eyebrows in a little mockery that shut me out from this place beyond reason, this glittering escape. I knew then that somehow or other, sometime or other, despite all I had said, Keith would go to Dominica.

  I poured him another Scotch. As deftly as I could, I led the conversation into other, lighter directions. I asked about his childhood. At first stiffly, then more easily as time and Scotch loosened him, he talked about growing up in the Berkshire Hills. He became more light-hearted, and under my interest turned both shrewd and funny, with a keen sense of humor. His thick brown hair fell over his forehead. I laughed with him, and broke out a bottle of good port. He talked about amateur plays he had acted in; his enthusiasm increased as his coherence decreased. Enthusiasm, humor, thick brown hair. I smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Far into the night I pulled the drapes back from the window and we stood together and looked at the lights of the dying city ten stories below. Fog rolled in from the sea. Keith insisted we open the doors and stand on the balcony; he had never smelled fog tinged with the ocean. We smelled the night, and dran
k some more, and talked, and laughed.

  And then I led him again to the sofa.

  “Seena?” Keith said. He covered my hand, laid upon his thigh, with his own, and turned his head to look at me questioningly. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his, barely in contact, for a long moment. He drew back, and his hand tried to lift mine. I tightened my fingers.

  “Seena, no…”

  “Why not?” I put my mouth back on his, very lightly. He had to draw back to answer, and I could feel that he did not want to draw back. Under my lips he frowned slightly; still, despite his drunkenness—so much more than mine—he groped for the word.

  “Incest…”

  “No. We two have never shared a womb.”

  He frowned again, under my mouth. I drew back to smile at him, and shifted my hand. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Keith. Not in New York. But even if it did—I am not your sister, not really. You said so yourself—remember? Not a family. Just…here.”

  “Not family,” he repeated, and I saw in his eyes the second before he closed them the flash of pain, the greed of a young man’s desire, and even the crafty evasions of the good port. Then his arms closed around me.

  He was very strong, and more than a little violent. I guessed from what confusions the violence flowed but still I enjoyed it, that overwhelming rush from that beautiful male-Devrie body. I wanted him to be violent with me, as long as I knew there was no real danger. No real danger, no real brother, no real child. Keith was not my child but Devrie was my child-sister, and I had to stop her from destroying herself, no matter how…didn’t I? “The pull of blood.” But this was necessary, was justified…was a necessary gamble. For Devrie.

  So I told myself. Then I stopped telling myself anything at all, and surrendered to the warm tides of pleasure.

  But at dawn I woke and thought—with Keith sleeping heavily across me and the sky cold at the window—what the hell am I doing?

  When I came out of the shower, Keith was sitting rigidly against the pillows. Sitting next to him on the very edge of the bed, I pulled a sheet around my nakedness and reached for his hand. He snatched it away.

  “Keith. It’s all right. Truly it is.”