Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction)

by Michael Brotherton

  Rollie has switched off the current and is floating face-up at the other end, manifestly silent.

  She continues, “I am sorry that I shouted at you, but you do know, Rolland, that I was, as they had put it, gathering joys too. Not just sorrows. The Gatherer of Sorrows was just a catchy name the media invented. If it bleeds it leads. The Gatherer of Joys does not have the same ring to it, does it. The Gatherer of Sorrows on the other hand is not only catchy but smacks of something subtly sociopathic. The truth, Rolland, and you know it, is that every person who donated blood for our project did so voluntarily, was fully informed, expected no personal gain or health benefit, and believed that in the long run this would move the science forward. We went to people who self-identified and were questionnaire-identified as living in a Life is Good state. To a newlywed couple in their honeymoon. To a grandpa making friends with his first granddaughter. To a long-time cancer patient who has learned she is in full and lasting remission. We went to successful and accomplished and happy people. And — yes, we also went to those who thought they’d failed and made nothing of themselves. Who were in a Life is Bad state. To a fifty-five-year-old family man, fired from his job and now unemployable. To an artist who’s never won any recognition for her work. To a man trapped in a woman’s body. To a vet with PTSD… Do you know, Rolland, have I ever told you that I too donated a blood sample to my own project? As a Life is Good person?”

  Silence is the answer, at first. Water reflections are playing on the ceiling, meditative. Then the still floating Rollie says, “ ‘Course you are my mother. Your egg, you the mom.”

  Did he hear a word of what she’d said just now? Rollie continues: “And yes you did experiment on humans — on my father and uncle. Don’t deny it.”

  Another twinge of pain in her stomach. “It was their idea. I was against it but I could not stop them. They would have done it with me or without me.”

  “I don’t really mind human experimentation,” Rollie goes on, musingly. “Just not in the name of science. And not by the government.”

  This is the Rollie that scares the bejesus out of her. She feels tired and feeble-minded. She’s fooling herself thinking she can — no, forget fix, just — slow him down, hold him back. Just look at him! And yet… he is the one who summons her here. He needs her. She begins to climb the stairs out of the pool, clenching the rails too hard. Water drains out of her clothes, making them cling, weighing her down. Rollie must be watching. She knows he won’t come to help her up the stairs and hates to look like she needs help. When he gets like this she needs to look strong. She tries to at least sound strong. “Really, Roland. You ARE government.”

  “What? I am not.” His voice is still coming from a pool’s length away and sounds like he is yawning, or stretching. Yet there is also a cold, sharp edge to it when he adds, “A certain Robert LeFevre said, way back when, ‘Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.’ I am the cure masquerading as government.”

  ***

  January 5, 2022. A lodge in Aspen, CO, fire crackling in a stone hearth. The twins had gone on snowboarding while Leni had called it quits, frostbitten and outmatched. She was sitting by the fire, wrapped in a plush blanket and sipping a steaming espresso with Bailey’s when the twins stomped in — covered in snow, flushed, wind-blown. “We have an idea and a plan,” Paul announced while Yric stepped out of his Gortex and toppled onto the couch so hard, his body bounced.

  “Like in 2019 — remember? — you need a gold-standard proof. Right? A transfer of a message-in-a-bottle from human to human. Let’s do it!”

  By then the LIBs and LIGs project has yielded a handful of messages-in-a-bottle that had to mean Life is Good, and a few that had to belong to Life is Bad category. More so, Leni could now synthesize these messages in whatever quantities, and encapsulate them in exosomal bubbles just like the ones from which the original messages had come. She could feed these bubbles to human cultured cells and observe the effects. Yet Leni did not get it at first that Paul was talking about the LIBs and LIGs. She glanced at Yric, who had shored his eyes behind Smart-glasses. His lips moved as if he was reading to himself off the screen. “Yric?” she called. “Yes?” he said absent-mindedly.

  “Does Paul really say you want human volunteers to be injected with LIB or LIG exosome preparations? Am I hearing it right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She jumped to her feet, she paced. She shook her head, no, no, no. She insisted they were not yet in the right place to even consider a human trial of this sort.

  They argued for a better part of the night. Paul appealed to her scientific curiosity and her high standards of proof. Paul said she was stonewalling. Then Yric said, how could she have the knowledge of something and refuse to apply it? Leni shouted that the very discussion was so wrong on so many levels; that she was fine with just knowing, not applying; that she was no goddamn Dr. Strangelove, she was a woman-scientist, and as a woman she’d never lose sight of a human aspect of any of it in pursuit of some brain-itching puerile cockamamie intellectual victory! Which words precipitated mutual accusations of sexism between her and Paul, then back-pedaling to square one, with a thickening air of sourness and irresolution. And then Yric said calmly, “If Paul and I volunteer as trial subjects, you cannot say no to us. Legally. Your work belongs to the Benes Institute.”

  This — and they had to have decided on it already — so utterly and completely knocked all polemic wind out of her, that a forlorn, all-encompassing “Why?” was the only word that escaped her throat.

  “Intellectual curiosity,” Yric said. She’d never forget his smile: half self-mockery, half a gentle reproach to her that there was something she’d never understand.

  She should have resigned from the Benes Institute right then. But she felt a responsibility to stay and yes, an attachment to the work of her life. The design of the trial too, was Paul and Yric’s. There was no placebo control, instead, one of the twins would receive a LIG into his bloodstream, the other — a LIB. They even devised protocols for their own regular physical and psychological evaluations. Leni’s only input was that everyone involved had to be blinded as to which of the twins got what — that was to be revealed in five years after the start of the trial or if the trial was aborted early. The only way to avoid anticipation biases, she said, and the twins agreed to it.

  A year into the trial, Leni heard that the twins were considering having kids. Making some kind of “arrangements” for that, rumors had it. She wasn’t privy to the firsthand information now that they’d had their disagreement. For a while she thought ‘the arrangements’ meant nuptials, and it made her even more furious because she knew what the twins were after. The gold-standard proof. Transgenerational inheritance of the messages-in-a-bottle they were receiving in monthly injections. She sent them a 25-page manifesto on why this was risky and unethical but for all she knew, they went on with their plans.

  And then Yric was found dead.

  A suicide, but maybe a murder. There was an investigation, which ended with nothing. And then another kind of investigation, when the fact of the twins’ experiment came into the light, dragging out on its tail the whole LIBs and LIGs project.

  She grieved.

  She resigned.

  She testified in a hearing.

  She did not say what Paul’s lawyers were coaching her to say. So they cut her loose.

  She never denied her responsibility. She felt guilty for letting the twins run away with her science.

  She was nicknamed The Gatherer of Sorrows. The Benes Institute was vandalized. Her image was used to frighten little children with science and scientists and the research in human genetics in particular.

  Paul Benes fought back. It was ironic, that his defense had become a foundation for the most restrictive policy ever toward studies in human biology. Paul’s lawyers had managed to argue that all human DNA and all RNA — the metaphorical book and messages, law and its practice, all that genome and the many ways of its express
ion — was free speech, which the government had no right therefore to regulate, change, and improve directly or by sponsoring scientific research.

  Only private citizens could do it — on their own accord and with themselves or with free and willing other private citizens as experimental subjects. Corporations were private citizens.

  Ah, the changes this had precipitated. Not for the LIBs and LIGs, which had been scuttled, but elsewhere. Everywhere.

  ***

  Lenora succeeds in climbing out of the pool, picks up some towels off the floor and swaddles herself. The damp towels hardly provide any warmth. Her hands, her chin are shaking. “I was against it,” she repeats, staring at Rollie.

  He stares back, idly treading water. The towel that has slipped off his middle is floating nearby, its corners spread out like for an embrace. “They played you like a fiddle,” he says and blows bubbles. She shakes her head, “It’s not like that.”

  He says, “So who got what? Who got a LIG and who — a LIB?”

  The million-dollar question, asked again, asked at last. “Haven’t I told you? The sample ID key was lost when the Institute was vandalized. So I do not know but my conclusion is Paul got a LIG, which means, you got a LIG. From Paul, your father. Assuming it ever worked, which is uncertain.” She knows to look straight into Rollie’s eyes when she says this. The angle must be funny though, because she suddenly sees traces of — she wants to say — Yric in him, even as she insists that there is absolutely no reason she should be thinking this way, because Yric and Paul had absolutely identical, clonal features. And then she finally understands. She understands Yric, and maybe Yric and Paul both. Maybe all they’d ever wanted was to become different from each other. To diverge, evolve. To become opposites rather than copies. To part like scissors’ blades, to hate or love each other — just not to feel that innate, umbilical oneness. They had wanted it so badly that they were ready to absorb thousand-fold concentrated, weaponized sum-totals of other people’s life’s evolutions for that.

  LIBs and LIGs.

  If only she’d known. She could have told Yric they already were different, and she didn’t need to be an epigeneticist to know that, that she’d always singled him out, that there was never a doubt in her mind from that very first meeting and the elevator ride, that Yric was Yric and Paul was Paul.

  Had she said it. Had he listened. Had any of them known what the fallout of their personal quests would be.

  She hears Rollie say something and it takes her awhile to tune back in because her mind has traveled so far, far away, but then comes the brutal reverse, the dreaded, “Explain to me then, mother, why do I feel like a monster?”

  She frantically casts about for a reply. Then it comes, a straw. “Rolland, listen to me. Just hear me out, all right? Yes, I am your mother, but not because you come from my egg, or not so much because of it. Here is something you don’t know yet. Back then, the Benes Institute had started a program for female employees: cryopreservation of eggs. As a deputy director, I had to lead the troops by example. So I did it. Now, when I resigned I was supposed to take my eggs with me. Unlike my science, they were my lawful property, but when I made the request, it appeared they had been lost or destroyed. I thought it happened during the break-ins. But then I started to suspect it was earlier than that. I managed to reach Paul and I confronted him. He confessed… To put it simply, he and Yric had stolen my eggs to… to make you. To tell you the truth… I was livid, I really was. But then Paul introduced me to you. You were four. Your surrogate mother who’d borne you, was not in the picture. And so we… made friends. And spent time together. We have our memories, you and I. Good memories. Remember our Sunday sandwich, the sundwich? And the bicycle fairy? That is why I am your mother.”

  Rollie silently heaves himself out of the water. He picks up, wraps around his waistline and tucks in a towel. He goes to the bar and pours himself a drink so haphazardly, half the bourbon tsunamies onto the counter.

  “Can I have a dry towel, please?” Lenora says.

  Rollie slides out a drawer, picks three up between his fingers and tosses them in Lenora’s lap. She makes a cocoon around herself. Rollie drinks, silent, holding the glass near his mouth. “Stolen, huh.” He studies her. “So what are you saying?”

  Looking up at Rollie, Lenora says, “You said you are angry at someone in the Senate. That someone is making a stand against you. You are deciding on what to do about it… about that man, aren’t you? Please don’t do anything… irreversible. Anything that you will regret later. I am asking you as your mother. I was just as angry back then as you are now but I… did not act on my anger.”

  Rollie chuckles, shaking his head. “You old bird,” he says almost softly.

  Lenora takes it as a good sign.

  She thinks — hopes — that this will be the end of it for today, and she can go home. But the next moment Rollie’s stare stiffens, goes distant. He is thinking. Calculating. “Stolen. You could have sued. Could’ve pulled the rug straight from under daddy’s feet. Right that very moment… Obviously you didn’t… Hmm. He paid you off… He paid you off, didn’t he?” He stares into Lenora’s face trying to pry out an answer. “No. It was about custody. No? … Visitation rights. No? Okay. If you’d pressed charges, there would have been a maternity test… a test on me from which you would have learned that —

  “— Christ, you could have run this test on me at any time! And maybe you did. You can run it now if I make you, and it will tell you which message-in-a-bottle had been there because you know where to look and what to expect —”

  He is close. So close that her heart freezes like a little girl on the cold floor of her diaphragm as her stomach goes berserk below. She can barely take a breath, almost seeing how Rollie’s mind spins faster and faster behind his eyes. “— unless… unless you already knew. You knew! There had been no break-ins at the Institute. You’d gone in after uncle’s death and you unsealed the key to sample IDs… Didn’t you? You are lying to me! My old man, daddy Paul, now says he is Yric. So tell me now, is he senile and deluded or senile and blabbering out the truth, at long last —”

  So close.

  She is so terrified. But she needs to look strong. Stronger. She can do it. She straightens her back, sits taller. She sees Rollie’s mind, grinding yet faster, she realizes that it is darting up and down, right and left over that imaginary eight-way table of all possibilities that could have been, that still can be — he is discovering this very moment — the case. Rollie’s face grows strangely pinched, he looks like a kid who is trying to give a right answer to his math teacher — and is failing. A LIG? Or a LIB for Paul. Paul? Or Yric as a survivor. A suicide? Or a fratricide. Whose son is he, and what does it mean? He is working, calculating all the scenarios and all their multiplying implications, trying to figure out his mother’s game, her angle, whatever she has on him, because she must have something! But he will never — she can see it so clearly now — grasp the full truth. It will evade him because he’s got no sensory organ for trust, or forgiveness, or penitence, no calculus for knowing everything there is to know and not taking advantage of it. Nor will he understand her science, he just doesn’t have the education.

  And this gives her hope. She breathes in and repeats her half-lie one more time, speaking slowly and distinctly, tip-toeing carefully between her two worst fears. Her twin fears. “Paul, your father, must have received a LIG, Rolland. It could not have happened any other way.”

  Rollie takes a swig of his bourbon. She thinks: he can’t compel her to test him, because — well, because she is at that wonderful age when she’ll keel over before she’d do anything she really does not want to do. She thinks: he is nowhere near restarting the LIGs and LIBs experimentation. Not yet. Still not. She relaxes a coil of her arms around her stomach. She repeats, “A LIG. Paul’s life was good, Rolland. My life was good. What you feel, what burns inside you, the rage, the scorn — they are your responsibility, they are not forced upon you by your origin, by
something that was done to you before you were even born. You should be a good man who does not hurt people.”

  Rollie grins. “And if not?”

  “Then there is no transgenerational inheritance.”

  She frees herself from the towels and gets up. Gingerly, she approaches Rollie and wraps her arms around his waist, feeling how her son, her joy and sorrow, her gold-standard proof, tenses up, then relaxes. For a brief moment, she presses her cheek to his sternum, and his heart booms into her ear. Pulling away, she adds, “But you still have your parents. An old decrepit dad and an old bird mom; I know we are not much to speak of anymore but we are still around and we wish you well. And we are like that stretch of earth between you and the precipice where there is erosion. For as long as we hang on — you are away from the edge.”

  Rollie is gazing at the floor. His shoulders are slumped. She takes it as a good sign.

  ***

  The pteroglider deposits Lenora in the yard of her school, as she asked. She’s decided against being dropped off at her house — lest she’ll find that vodka bottle and drink it up. The machine lifts and zooms away. She enters the school building, dark, and follows the nightlights to her classroom. She sits down at her desk, clasping her head between her palms. Something moves under the kids’ desks.