The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “You’re my sister.”

  “But nothing will come of it. No child, no repetitions. It’s not all that uncommon, dear heart.”

  “It is where I come from.”

  “Yes. I know. But not here.”

  He didn’t answer, his face troubled.

  “Do you want breakfast?”

  “No. No thank you.”

  I could feel his need to get away from me; it was almost palpable. Snatching my bodysuit off the floor, I went into the kitchen, which was chilly. The servant would not arrive for another hour. I turned up the heat, pulled on my bodysuit—standing on the cold floor first on one foot and then on the other, like some extinct species of water fowl—and made coffee. Through the handle of one cup I stuck two folded large bills. He came into the kitchen, dressed even to the torn jacket.

  “Coffee.”

  “Thanks.”

  His fingers closed on the handle of the cup, and his eyes widened. Pure, naked shock, uncushioned by any defenses whatsoever: the whole soul, betrayed, pinned in the eyes.

  “Oh God, no, Keith—how can you even think so? It’s for the trip back to Indian Falls! A gift!”

  An endless pause, while we stared at each other. Then he said, very low, “I’m sorry. I should have…seen what it’s for.” But his cup trembled in his hand, and a few drops sloshed onto the floor. It was those few drops that undid me, flooding me with shame. Keith had a right to his shock, and to the anguish in his/my/Devrie’s face. She wanted him for her mystic purposes, I for their prevention. Fanatic and saboteur, we were both better defended against each other than Keith, without money nor religion nor years, was against either of us. If I could have seen any other way than the gamble I had taken…but I could not. Nonetheless, I was ashamed.

  “Keith. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did we? Why did we?”

  I could have said: We didn’t; I did. But that might have made it worse for him. He was male, and so young.

  Impulsively I blurted, “Don’t go to Dominica!” But of course he was beyond listening to me now. His face closed. He set down the coffee cup and looked at me from eyes much harder than they had been a minute ago. Was he thinking that because of our night together I expected to influence him directly? I was not that young. He could not foresee that I was trying to guess much farther ahead than that, for which I could not blame him. I could not blame him for anything. But I did regret how clumsily I had handled the money. That had been stupid.

  Nonetheless, when he left a few moments later, the handle of the coffee cup was bare. He had taken the money.

  The Madagascar exhibits were complete. They opened to much press interest, and there were both favorable reviews and celebrations. I could not bring myself to feel that it mattered. Ten times a day I went through the deadening exercise of willing an interest that had deserted me, and when I looked at the moths, ashy white wings outstretched forever, I could feel my body recoil in a way I could not name.

  The image of the moths went home with me. One night in November I actually thought I heard wings beating against the window where I had stood with Keith. I yanked open the drapes and then the doors, but of course there was nothing there. For a long time I stared at the nothingness, smelling the fog, before typing yet another message, urgent-priority personal, to Devrie. The mailnet did not bring any answer.

  I contacted the mailnet computer at the college at Indian Falls. My fingers trembled as they typed a request to leave an urgent-priority personal message for a student, Keith Torellen. The mailnet typed back:

  TORELLEN, KEITH ROBERT. 64830016. ON MEDICAL LEAVE OF ABSENCE. TIME OF LEAVE: INDEFINITE. NO FORWARDING MAILNET NUMBER. END.

  The sound came again at the window. Whirling, I scanned the dark glass, but there was nothing there, no moths, no wings, just the lights of the decaying city flung randomly across the blackness and the sound, faint and very far away, of a siren wailing out somebody else’s disaster.

  I shivered. Putting on a sweater and turning up the heat made me no warmer. Then the mail slot chimed softly and I turned in time to see the letter fall from the pneumatic tube from the lobby, the apartment house sticker clearly visible, assuring me that it had been processed and found free of both poison and explosives. Also visible was the envelope’s logo: institute of the biological hope, all the O’s radiant golden suns. But Devrie never wrote paper mail. She preferred the mailnet.

  The note was from Keith, not Devrie. A short note, scrawled on a torn scrap of paper in nearly indecipherable handwriting. I had seen Keith’s handwriting in Indian Falls, across his student notebooks; this was a wildly out-of-control version of it, almost psychotic in the variations of spacing and letter formation that signal identity. I guessed that he had written the note under the influence of a drug, or several drugs, his mind racing much faster than he could write. There was neither punctuation nor paragraphing.

  Dear Seena I’m going to do it I have to know my parents are angry but I have to know I have to all the confusion is gone xxxxxx Seena Keith

  There was a word crossed out between “gone” and “Seena,” scratched out with erratic lines of ink. I held the paper up to the light, tilting it this way and that. The crossed-out word was “mother.”

  all the confusion is gone mother

  Mother.

  Slowly I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. The first emotion was pity, for Keith, even though I had intended this. We had done a job on him, Devrie and I. Mother, sister, self. And when he and Devrie artificially drove upward the number and speed of the neurotransmitters in the brain, generated the twin trance, and then Keith’s pre-cloning Freudian-still mind reached for Devrie to add sexual energy to all the other brain energies fueling Bohentin’s holotanks—

  Mother. Sister. Self.

  All was fair in love and war. A voice inside my head jeered: And which is this? But I was ready for the voice. This was both. I didn’t think it would be long before Devrie left the Institute to storm to New York.

  It was nearly another month, in which the snow began to fall and the city to deck itself in the tired gilt fallacies of Christmas. I felt fine. Humming, I catalogued the Madagascar moths, remounting the best specimens in exhibit cases and sealing them under permaplex, where their fragile wings and delicate antennae could lie safe. The mutant strains had the thinnest wings, unnaturally tenuous and up to twenty-five centimeters each, all of pale ivory, as if a ghostly delicacy were the natural evolutionary response to the glowing landscape of nuclear genocide. I catalogued each carefully.

  “Why?” Devrie said. “Why?”

  “You look like hell.”

  “Why?”

  “I think you already know,” I said. She sagged on my white velvet sofa, alone, the PGs that I suspected acted as much as nurses as guards, dismissed from the apartment. Tears of anger and exhaustion collected in her sunken eye sockets but did not fall. Only with effort was she keeping herself in a sitting position, and the effort was costing her energy she did not have. Her skin, except for two red spots of fury high on each cheekbone, was the color of old eggs. Looking at her, I had to keep my hands twisted in my lap to keep myself from weeping.

  “Are you telling me you planned it, Seena? Are you telling me you located Keith and slept with him because you knew that would make him impotent with me?”

  “Of course not. I know sexuality isn’t that simple. So do you.”

  “But you gambled on it. You gambled that it would be one way to ruin the experiment.”

  “I gambled that it would…complicate Keith’s responses.”

  “Complicate them past the point where he knew who the hell he was with!”

  “He’d be able to know if you weren’t making him glow out of his mind with neurotransmitter kickers! He’s not stupid. But he’s not ready for whatever mystic hoops you’ve tried to make him jump through—if anybody ever can be said to be ready for that!—and no, I’m not surprised that he can’t handle libidinal energies on top of all the other
artificial energies you’re racing through his brain. Something was bound to snap.”

  “You caused it, Seena. As cold-bloodedly as that.”

  A sudden shiver of memory brought the feel of Keith’s hands on my breasts. No, not as cold-bloodedly as that. No. But I could not say so to Devrie.

  “I trusted you,’’ she said. “‘Anything for a sister’— God!”

  “You were right to trust me. To trust me to get you out of that place before you’re dead.”

  “Listen to yourself! Smug, all-knowing, self-righteous…do you know how close we were at the Institute? Do you have any idea what you’ve destroyed?”

  I laughed coldly. I couldn’t help it. “If contact with God can be destroyed because one confused kid can’t get it up, what does that say about God?’’

  Devrie stared at me. A long moment passed, and in the moment the two red spots on her cheeks faded and her eyes narrowed. “Why, Seena?”

  “I told you. I wanted you safe, out of there. And you are.”

  “No. No. There’s something else, something more going on here. Going on with you.”

  “Don’t make it more complicated than it is, Devrie. You’re my sister, and my only family. Is it so odd that I would try to protect you?”

  “Keith is your brother.”

  “Well, then, protect both of you. Whatever derails that experiment protects Keith, too.”

  She said softly, “Did you want him so much?”

  We stared at each other across the living room, sisters, I standing by the mailnet and she supported by the sofa, needing its support, weak and implacable as any legendary martyr to the faith. Her weakness hurt me in some nameless place; as a child Devrie’s body had been so strong. The hurt twisted in me, so that I answered her with truth. “Not so much. Not at first, not until we…no, that’s not true. I wanted him. But that was not the reason, Devrie—it was not a rationalization for lust, nor any lapse in self-control.”

  She went on staring at me, until I turned to the sideboard and poured myself a Scotch. My hand trembled.

  Behind me Devrie said, “Not lust. And not protection either. Something else, Seena. You’re afraid.”

  I turned, smiling tightly. “Of you?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “This is your theory, not mine.”

  She closed her eyes. The tears, shining all this time over her anger, finally fell. Head flung back against the pale sofa, arms limp at her side, she looked the picture of desolation, and so weak that I was frightened. I brought her a glass of milk from the kitchen and held it to her mouth, and I was a little surprised when she drank it off without protest.

  “Devrie. You can’t go on like this. In this physical state.”

  “No,” she agreed, in a voice so firm and prompt that I was startled further. It was the voice of decision, not surrender. She straightened herself on the sofa. “Even Bohentin says I can’t go on like this. I weigh less than he wants, and I’m right at the edge of not having the physical resources to control the twin trance. I’m having racking withdrawal symptoms even being on this trip, and at this very minute there is a doctor sitting at Father’s desk in your study, in case I need him. Also, I’ve had my lawyers make over most of my remaining inheritance to Keith. I don’t think you knew that. What’s left has all been transferred to a bank on Dominica, and if I die it goes to the Institute. You won’t be able to touch it, nor touch Keith’s portion either, not even if I die. And I will die, Seena, soon, if I don’t start eating and stop taking the program’s drugs. I’ll just burn out body and brain both. You’ve guessed that I’m close to that, but you haven’t guessed how close. Now I’m telling you. I can’t handle the stresses of the twin trance much longer.’’

  I just went on holding her glass, arm extended, unable to move.

  “You gambled that you could destroy one component in the chain of my experiment at the Institute by confusing my twin sexually. Well, you won. Now I’m making a gamble. I’m gambling my life that you can undo what you did with Keith, and without his knowing that I made you. You said he’s not stupid and his impotency comes from being unable to handle the drug program; perhaps you’re partly right. But he is me—me, Seena—and I know you’ve thought I was stupid all my life, because I wanted things you don’t understand. Now Keith wants them, too—it was inevitable that he would—and you’re going to undo whatever is standing in his way. I had to fight myself free all my life of your bullying, but Keith doesn’t have that kind of time. Because if you don’t undo what you caused, I’m going to go ahead with the twin trance anyway—the twin trance, Seena—without the sexual component and without letting Bohentin know just how much greater the strain is in trance than he thinks it is. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t have a twin, and neither do the doctors. But I know, and if I push it much farther I’m going to eventually die at it. Soon eventually. When I do, all your scheming to get me out of there really will have failed and you’ll be alone with whatever it is you’re so afraid of. But I don’t think you’ll let that happen.

  “I think that instead you’ll undo what you did to Keith, so that the experiment can have one last real chance. And in return, after that one chance, I’ll agree to come home, to Boston or here to New York, for one year.

  “That’s my gamble.”

  She was looking at me from eyes empty of all tears, a Devrie I had not ever seen before. She meant it, every demented word, and she would do it. I wanted to scream at her, to scream a jumble of suicide and moral blackmail and warped perceptions and outrage, but the words that came out of my mouth came out in a whisper.

  “What in God’s name is worth that?”

  Shockingly, she laughed, a laugh of more power than her wasted frame could have contained. Her face glowed, and the glow looked both exalted and insane. “You said it, Seena—in God’s name. To finally know. To know, beyond the fogginess of faith, that we’re not alone in the universe…Faith should not mean fogginess.” She laughed again, this time defensively, as if she knew how she sounded to me. “You’ll do it, Seena.” It was not a question. She took my hand.

  “You would kill yourself?”

  “No. I would die trying to reach God. It’s not the same thing.”

  “I never bullied you, Devrie.”

  She dropped my hand. “All my life, Seena. And on into now. But all of your bullying and your scorn would look rather stupid, wouldn’t it, if there really can be proved to exist a rational basis for what you laughed at all those years!’’

  We looked at each other, sisters, across the abyss of the pale sofa, and then suddenly away. Neither of us dared speak.

  My plane landed on Dominica by night. Devrie had gone two days before me, returning with her doctor and guards on the same day she had left, as I had on my previous visit. I had never seen the island at night. The tropical greenery, lush with that faintly menacing suggestion of plant life gone wild, seemed to close in on me. The velvety darkness seemed to smell of ginger, and flowers, and the sea—all too strong, too blandly sensual, like an overdone perfume ad. At the hotel it was better; my room was on the second floor, above the dark foliage, and did not face the sea. Nonetheless, I stayed inside all that evening, all that darkness, until I could go the next day to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

  “Hello, Seena.”

  “Keith. You look—”

  “Rotten,” he finished, and waited. He did not smile. Although he had lost some weight, he was nowhere near as skeletal as Devrie, and it gave me a pang I did not analyze to see his still-healthy body in the small gray room where last I had seen hers. His head was shaved, and without the curling brown hair he looked sterner, prematurely middle-aged. That, too, gave me a strange emotion, although it was not why he looked rotten. The worst was his eyes. Red-veined, watery, the sockets already a little sunken, they held the sheen of a man who was not forgiving somebody for something. Me? Himself? Devrie? I ha
d lain awake all night, schooling myself for this insane interview, and still I did not know what to say. What does one say to persuade a man to sexual potency with one’s sister so that her life might be saved? I felt ridiculous, and frightened, and—I suddenly realized the name of my strange emotion—humiliated. How could I even start to slog toward what I was supposed to reach?

  “How goes the Great Experiment?”

  “Not as you described it,” he said, and we were there already. I looked at him evenly.

  “You can’t understand why I presented the Institute in the worst possible light.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Then you can’t understand why I bedded you, knowing about Bohentin’s experiment.”

  “I can also understand that.”

  Something was wrong. Keith answered me easily, without restraint, but with conflict gritty beneath his voice, like sand beneath blowing grass. I stepped closer, and he flinched. But his expression did not change.

  “Keith. What is this about? What am I doing here? Devrie said you couldn’t…that you were impotent with her, confused enough about who and what…” I trailed off. He still had not changed expression.

  I said quietly, “It was a simplistic idea in the first place. Only someone as simplistic as Devrie…” Only someone as simplistic as Devrie would think you could straighten out impotency by talking about it for a few hours. I turned to go, and I had gotten as far as laying my hand on the doorknob before Keith grasped my arm. Back to him, I squeezed my eyes shut. What in God would I have done if he had not stopped me?

  “It’s not what Devrie thinks!” With my back to him, not able to see his middle-aged baldness but only to hear the anguish in his voice, he again seemed young, uncertain, the boy I had bought coffee for in Indian Falls. I kept my back to him, and my voice carefully toneless.

  “What is it, then, Keith? If not what Devrie thinks?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “But you do know what it’s not? It’s not being confused about who is your sister and who your mother and who you’re willing to have sex with in front of a room full of researchers?”