Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  I was out walking alone early one morning in the small park of Elio’s apartment building when Michael frightened me by jumping down beside me out of the linden tree. He was lonesome and had come looking for me in Amsterdam. I explained how important it was for him to stay hidden until it was time for us to go home, but throughout the day he kept showing up wherever I went. I was concerned that he’d be recognized because, though he looked and dressed like a human, his skin was cool and, except for his hands, smooth like the skin on a frog’s belly, and I knew implicitly that he would respond oddly in social settings—too gently, too kindly. Additionally, he had no passport or other form of identification.

  It was dark and rainy that night when Elio, Michael, and I arrived at the Red Dog, where we were to meet some of Elio’s friends. As Michael stepped through the door an alarm sounded, and immediately the three of us were being chased. Thick muddy water and huge, entangling plants that resembled the genetically modified plants my parents had seen in the Four Seasons resort on the moon rose up menacingly in the streets—had a levee broken?—making it difficult to run or even walk, and police boats and helicopters were closing in—

  “No! Stop! Stop!” Michael’s shrieking and his vigorous shaking of my arm woke me.

  I immediately took both of his soft, sensitive hands in mine and we kissed. We stayed like that—hand in hand and lips on lips—until he calmed down.

  The next day, the state legislature ratified the amendment.

  First Brother

  Sara and the dog are within 10 meters of a predicted debarkation on a narrow, gravelly boat landing on the river’s north shore, across the estuary from the western edge of Penny Island. The dog stands at the prow, its front legs up on the convex edge of the raft, its nose turned windward. It sniffs.

  The raft continues toward the landing. Pebbles grate on the bottom of the raft. To propel them forward, she applies force through the length of the paddle’s shaft to the edge of the blade, which is sunk into the river’s bottom. The dog walks on and around her legs, trips, then stumbles against her ventral trunk.

  It is midday plus 1 hour, 4 minutes, 10 seconds.

  Sara

  After making my way through Customs at Schiphol the next summer, I saw Elio standing among a throng of people, waving. My chest filled with brightness, and I rushed into his arms. He seemed again to be the energetic, happy Elio I’d known and loved for ten years, though this summer he didn’t hold my hand or kiss me on the way home.

  For the next four days we biked along the IJsselmeer through Volendam and Edam, once reaching as far north as Hoorn. Aunt Lynh insisted that we return home every evening, so each day we relied on ferries, buses, and trains to take us part of the way. On Friday morning, the morning of my sixteenth birthday, I heard a knocking on my bedroom door.

  “Happy birthday!” Elio said, opening the door. “I made breakfast. Come see.”

  Laid out on the kitchen table were waffles covered with maple syrup and almond butter, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and minced almonds, then topped with pralines-and-cream ice cream. Surprised and delighted by this unusual breakfast, I ruffled his hair with my fingers and sat down to eat.

  Our conversation broke off when I noticed he was staring at me. He extended his hand and interwove his fingers with mine. He smiled wanly, then said, “I’m really happy you’re here.”

  “Thanks. I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about my visit, especially since last summer.”

  I’d resolved not to mention the prior summer, but the problem that had surfaced then seemed to be returning, whether I mentioned it or not. Elio had appeared happy and relaxed when I’d arrived five days earlier, but increasingly as the days passed I’d caught him staring despondently into the distance or watching me with a look that seemed full of pain.

  He looked toward the cupboards, seemingly lost in thought. I kept silent, waiting, hoping he would share with me whatever was troubling him. Finally, he pulled his fingers from mine and said, “I can’t stay here right now. Let’s walk to the gym and go swimming.”

  As soon as we got to the gym, he again seemed energetic and sociable, chatting and laughing with people he knew. He and I swam awhile, and when he pulled himself up out of the pool and sat on the edge of the deck, my gaze flowed, as did rivulets of water, over his chest and stomach, their beautiful rippled muscles heaving with each breath. I desperately wanted to glide my fingers over those muscles and hug him. But Grandpa had cautioned me to respect Elio’s privacy and not force a resolution of whatever was troubling him.

  We had a snack at the gym café, then walked back home in a light rain. He became quiet and withdrawn as we approached his apartment building. I followed him into his bedroom. He went to the window, parted the thin, white curtain, and stared out. I waited, filled with hushed expectancy, feeling certain that he wanted to take us somewhere new but was hesitant to make the turn—would it be right or left?—into the remainder of our lives.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you something for a long time,” he finally said, still looking through the rain-spotted window, “but I’ve been so afraid. I can’t lose you. No matter what, I can’t lose you.” He pulled the curtain shut, though he continued facing it. “I thought I had it all under control after last summer. But then I saw you come out of Customs, and you hugged—”

  He seemed to choke. I wanted, wanted so very much, to run to him, put my arms around him, and say, Tell me.

  Then he turned slowly away from the gray window streaked with rain and, appearing strangely determined, walked toward me. As he neared, I raised my arms up over his shoulders and around his neck.

  He caressed my back. I felt drawn to him, as if every cell of my body were being tugged toward him, with the cumulative effect being irresistible. He pressed the side of his head against the side of mine and said, “I love you.”

  I felt myself melting into him. He softly kissed my lips. A wave of joy and excitement rushed through me with such force that I seemed to lose my bearings, and I shuddered as the nearly invisible hairs on my arms and legs became erect.

  Evidently misinterpreting my shudder, he let loose his arms, saying, “I’m sorry.”

  “I love you, too,” I said, holding on to him. “I’ve felt my love for you growing for years. Now, I know you love me the same way.”

  He looked confused.

  “Do you want me to take off my clothes?” I asked.

  His face brightened, and he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled my body firmly against his. He licked my lips, and when I laughed with pleasure, his tongue darted into and playfully searched inside my mouth. Again, the strange, new feeling of weakness came over me, as if my body had become the wavering image of itself on an undulating surface of a pool.

  His hands seemed to know their way inside my clothes, where, like a cat pressing itself wavelike into a petting hand, my body moved instinctively and appreciatively to greet his caresses.

  He took off my shirt, then his, and we again embraced. Nothing had ever felt as good to me as his skin felt then against mine. I felt happy and free. His erection pressed against my pelvis, where a strange, warm luster was spreading, and there was dampness, as if from sweat, between my legs. Then, kissing my open mouth while holding us firmly together, he pressed us over to and onto his bed.

  My body arched to stay in touch with his, but as he finished undressing us, my consciousness flittered briefly away. I saw Grandpa’s face. He was in his study. It was the morning he’d devoted to my sex education. I heard him say “floods of neuromodulators,” “reprogramming,” “acquire new interests.” A brief panic raced through me and burst into consciousness as a question: Will I lose my love for Grandpa? Michael? My studies?

  “I love you. I need you,” Elio whispered as he kissed and caressed me. He rolled onto his side, and I followed, pushing him onto his back, then eagerly exploring his body, once a familiar boy’s, now hard and fragrant and thrillingly strange.

  He rolled me over onto my back and
positioned himself directly on top of me—his arms stretching mine to the sides, our fingers interlocking, his mouth and mine becoming one. Then he parted my legs and sat up between them. He caressed the insides of my thighs; then he raised my knees up along his sides and looked at me, breathing heavily.

  “I want you so much,” he said.

  He lowered himself down and kissed me. “Please let me make love to you. I’ll make it feel real good for you, I promise.”

  “I’ll enjoy anything that makes you happy,” I said.

  He kissed me and raised himself back up. He guided his penis to my vagina and pushed, going only part way in. He withdrew slightly, then pushed in a little farther, withdrew slightly, over and over. It felt as though something I didn’t control resisted him, but then, accompanied by a brief sharp pain, opened, a border no longer, and he slipped in all the way and smiled; and I moaned with a new kind of pleasure.

  He bent over and gently kissed me. I gazed up into his eager, intense eyes, which gazed into me. I felt myself opening to him like a poppy to the sun.

  “Is this okay?” he whispered.

  “Oh, yes.”

  He raised himself up, looking down into me, and as he moved in and out, in and out, my mind and senses flowed over him, enthralled by his beauty and by the feeling that I was blossoming beneath him.

  “Look into my eyes,” he said, pumping faster, faster. “Look into my eyes when it happens.”

  I looked, and during the rising frequency of his insistent pulses, I was astonished—“Elio! Elio!!”—by the overwhelming bliss of union.

  The morning after we first made love, I woke as Elio was kissing me. He smiled, but there was concern in his face.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “We can’t say anything about this to Ma. She’s hyper about anything that might take me back to America—like my loving you. That was the trouble last summer: We fought about you before you arrived. She wanted me to treat you like a sister, you know. She said she’d never let you visit again if she found out I thought of you otherwise. That’s why I was so upset. She’ll try anything to keep us apart, but we can’t let her. You make me happier than I ever thought I could be. I want us to be together, always.” Tears welled in his eyes.

  “I want us to be together always, too,” I said, overjoyed at hearing that he was thinking of coming to live with me.

  “And there’s something else,” he said. “I don’t want us to keep secrets from each other any longer.”

  A spark of panic flashed through me. What about my secret, my hidden love? How could I tell Elio about Michael? Grandpa had repeatedly warned me about artificial insects and birds and other sophisticated monitoring devices. I’d grown up used to the idea that, outside the security of Michael’s rooms, even in our own kitchen, each gesture I made and each word I spoke might be transmitted beyond the intended recipient.

  “I should have told you,” Elio continued, “about my friends and me a long time ago.”

  I wouldn’t have asked him about his past sexual experiences, preferring, as I did, the soft light and shadows of early morning and late afternoon to the harsh brightness of the midday sun, but I didn’t interrupt his story. I wasn’t prepared yet to tell my own.

  He told me how he and Luuk had goofed around as kids, seeing whose penis was longer or thicker, or how many words they could write in the snow in one pee. Later, they’d snuck into virtual-sex cubicles near Centraal Station and had gone through a period of experimenting with each other, doing things they saw and experienced in the cubicles. “It was fun,” Elio said, “as though we were playing a game—like football.”

  He also told me about his sexual relationships with several other classmates, about how he’d picked up guys and even a girl now and then at clubs like the Red Dog and, finally, about how, enduring threats from his mother, he’d struggled against his growing affection for me. He’d promised her after his return from Brussels the previous summer that he’d put his sexual feelings for me out of his mind forever.

  “The strange thing is,” he said, “I really believed I could do that. I believed it right up to when I saw you at the airport a week ago and you came running to me and hugged me.”

  “But I’ve told you many times that I always wanted to be with you.”

  “I know,” he said, wiping at his teary eyes. “But we didn’t know then everything those words meant. Now, I know they mean I want to live with you. I want to care for you. I want it to be as if we’re married.”

  “I do, too.”

  He excitedly kissed me, then said, “Remember last winter when I got my SAT and Advanced Placement scores? Well, your grandpa called to congratulate me. He said I undoubtedly could get into any university I wanted. We talked then about Cambridge in England, and Harvard.”

  He took a deep breath. “But I want to go to Berkeley, so I can live with you. I’ll commute back and forth. And I don’t want to wait another year to graduate. I want to go right away this fall. What do you think about that?”

  “That would be wonderful!” But immediately Aunt Lynh and Michael forced their way into my consciousness. I nearly asked: What about your ma’s not wanting you to go back to America? The words were formed and on their way, but he was so happy and excited that I resolved to keep them suppressed awhile longer.

  We made love, napped, played in the shower, talked about our dreams of our future life together, and all the while, I did my best to filter out the insistent internal whispers about Michael and Aunt Lynh. Finally, with a plan forming in my mind, I suggested we take a bike ride, this time following the A9 to Haarlem.

  Before we set off, I asked to stop at the convenience store in the apartment complex. There, we purchased chocolate bars, nuts, dried fruit, two bottles of water, a roll of aluminum foil, a roll of duct tape, a pen, a notepad, and some matches. I could have found several of those items in the apartment, but if we were being monitored, anything in the apartment might have been contaminated with microsensors.

  “What’s with the tape and matches and stuff?” Elio asked as we stood in line at the sales counter.

  “I have an interesting game to show you,” I replied—to him and to all who might have had us under surveillance.

  As we neared the northeastern tip of Schiphol Airfield I took the lead and turned south toward Aalsmeer.

  “Hey!” Elio shouted from behind me. “That’s the wrong way.”

  I rode on until I saw he was following me. I stopped, and as he rode up beside me I said, “I changed my mind. Let me lead the way today, okay?”

  I pulled off the bike path at one end of a row of hedges and glanced around, fearing that tiny volant robots might have been tracking my semblance or scent. But I saw nothing suspicious. Then I walked between the hedge and airfield fence until I found a spot somewhat secluded from the path and the road.

  “I like it here,” Elio said, laying his bike next to mine. “I’ve been thinking about Ma. How do I tell her? She gets crazy when it comes to America, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t say crazy.”

  “Oh, ja, crazy.” He sat down cross-legged and patted the grass in front of him, inviting me to sit, knee-to-knee, facing him—our long-established discussion position. “Remember a few years ago when the U.S. and China invaded several countries and destroyed their android military facilities?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ma was fixing breakfast when she turned on the news and heard about the invasion. She went into a rage, screaming and swearing and crying. Completely crazy, I’m telling you. And then she was depressed and wouldn’t speak or eat for days. She hates America. After you go home, I’ll tell her we’re lovers, but I don’t know how to tell her I’m going to go to America to be with you.”

  “Maybe I should ask Grandpa for advice. He seems to know her quite well.”

  “That’s a good idea. Hopefully, he’ll know how to handle it. Hey, let’s move over there and get you out of the sun.”

  We moved to a
n area of shade under and between two shrubs. Then I said, “I have something interesting to show you. But for me to show you, you have to do exactly as I say without asking any questions, okay?”

  “What’s the big secret?”

  “There’s no secret.” As I said that, I hoped it would be the last lie I’d ever tell him. “First, I’m going to make a little something with the notepad and aluminum foil.”

  He nodded, took off his shirt, and watched as I taped two layers of aluminum foil along the sides and top of the notepad, forming over it an aluminum dome with an opening through which we could write and read. I placed the domed notepad under a shrub, and concerned about what might be hiding in the brim or collar, I took off my hat and shirt and lay on my stomach, trying to capture as much shade as possible over my shoulders and arms. Pen in hand, I reached into the dome and, with seldom-practiced (and poor) penmanship, wrote:

  “Please don’t appear concerned as you read this. Try to pretend that it’s an interesting game. I’ll write a few paragraphs and then take my hand out of the dome to let you read. If you want to write something, ask for the pen; if not, say ‘Give me another hint,’ and I’ll continue.

  “There is a secret I must tell you, a dangerous secret, one that can’t be discussed or even alluded to on Vidtel, in your apartment, or even out here except in this secret manner because there exist robotic insects and birds capable of monitoring us.

  “The life of someone I love, a biologically modified android, depends on your never revealing this secret. I didn’t tell you before because, when I was eight and this secret began, I promised Grandpa I wouldn’t. He asked me to wait until you went to university to tell you, but if you’re coming to live with us, I can’t wait any longer.”