Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t forget to close the door,” Michael said, releasing his hug and smiling.

  I set the scenescreen over our bed to display one of my favorite full-moon skies, then dove in beside Elio. He seemed so familiar, so perfectly where he should be—his body over my body, his mouth over my mouth, his hands all over me. Then he entered into the warm, moist yearnings between my legs, fitting himself perfectly inside me. He sighed, then softly kissed me and murmured, “Now, at last, I’m truly home.”

  One night several years earlier at 0237, a full moon, together with patches of gray-white clouds scudding southeastward and a sky not black but luminous, dark grayish blue, had been recorded by a camera on the deck directly above Grandpa and Grandma’s bedroom. At 0237 of this night that was Elio’s first night in his new home, I opened my eyes to the same moon, clouds, and sky. My post-celebration bladder was full. I slowly disentangled myself from Elio so as not to wake him and made the journey past Michael, who was sleeping curled up beside Amy, his amaryllis—then with two buds tumescent and six blossoms uninhibitedly trumpeting their red lust—through Gatekeeper, to the bathroom, and back.

  Upon reentering our bedroom and closing the door behind me, I was struck by how heavily the musky-sweaty scent of love and the stale breath of our sleep seemed to weigh in the air. Had Michael and I correctly calculated Elio’s added consumption of the oxygen-rich exhalation of our hydroponic plants? The thought that an alarm might sense some gas out of permissible range and disturb our sleep sent me back to reopen the door halfway.

  As I returned to our bed, my bare feet quiet on the warm ceramic floor, I became enthralled by the sight of Elio, who had rolled over onto my absence. Above the blanket lay a dusky arm, its oils and sweat lambent under the full moon. His lush ebony hair, a few strands silvered by moonlight, flowed for the first time over my pillowcase and covered from my view much of his face, except for a dark eyebrow over a single slanting eye shut in sleep, a handsome broad nose, and those warm, pillowy lips.

  He was so fragrant, earthy, and warm, so real, so unlike my pallid image then appearing in the bedside mirror as an anthropomorphic patch of Russian River fog or a fey white Schrödinger cat, only possibly there, in the pale white light of the moon.

  As I slowly descended toward the bed through the still night air, I noticed my moon shadow drawing near to my dreams’ desire, and in his face I saw that special contented radiance it often acquired during sleep. Smiling dreamily, he reached up toward something wispy between my shadow and the moonlight, and, creating me, pulled me down into his embrace, wrapping himself around me, as he had since we were children: his head on my shoulder, his brow against my cheek, his arm across my chest, his leg between my legs.

  He mumbled that I should never again leave him, and then, with a familiar jolt, departed back into sleep, where he lay quietly for a while before his arm and leg around me stirred and he wordlessly moaned as he woke inside a dream. I wondered what it would be like to accompany him there, to his dreams, as Michael sometimes accompanied me to mine—and so wondering, I drifted off to sleep.

  Later that night, as the moon winked through clouds, their edges glowing brightly in the dark indigo sky, I woke feeling warm and comfortable in Elio’s embrace. His breath moved softly over my breast. His hair exuded its sensual aroma. His heart measured time for our world.

  Sara

  The sky here in Anzen is bright, but no warmth or comfort radiates from it. How huge the terrestrial sky seems to me now, in memory, compared to this tiny, low sky. I wonder what Michael’s children will experience, what thrills, when they leave here—they’ll have to someday, won’t they?—and rise from these dark depths up into the great arching candied-blue dome, where for the first time they will smell, feel, taste the fleshy air.

  And what will they think of the birds and animals, of the amorality of nature—which abounds with infanticide and cannibalism, even the killing of mates in some instances—the unremitting slaughter, the slow painful butchering of prey? Here, they will have the garden dome with its center a fragrant orchard of miniature fruit trees and its walls overflowing with roses, lilies, and marigolds; carrots, beans, and tomatoes; cilantro, basil, and parsley. But in this artificial world where all of their food will be supplied by plants and nutriosynthesizers, where they will not so much as ever see a spider eat a bug, how will they, these strange children from alien depths, respond when they first see a hawk swoop down and moments later hear a small animal’s talon-engendered cry, or when they witness, as I once did, a dog chase and devour a rabbit?

  I was five years old when Lily, fully grown by then but still vivacious as a puppy, went out with me to play in the vineyard. The air was breezy, clear, and cool as we ran through white clover and wild mustard growing between rows of trellised vines. In the midst of play, I lay down for a moment on the aromatic ground. The fields, trees, and hills displayed the pastel pinks, yellows, and greens of spring, and cirrus clouds swirled into the deep blue sky reminded me of blueberries and cream.

  Lily was wild with spring, eager to move on, to swim in what for her must have been an invigorating ocean of feral fumes oozing from the ground. She ran in circles around me, licked my face, leaned back, her front legs set and ready to spring forward, and barked.

  “Yes!” I answered, and jumped up and chased her. Our noisy frolicking frightened a rabbit from its hiding. Lily dashed after it.

  “No! Lily, come back!” I shouted as I ran. When I caught up, heaving for breath, I wanted to scream and push her away from the rabbit, but I remembered her bringing me a dead bird and Grandpa wiping my tears. “It’s natural for Lily,” he’d said, “part of what she is. The great and joyful and terrible mysteries of the world cannot be denied.”

  Lily lay on her stomach, holding the rabbit in her paws, pulling and tearing sinewy flesh with her teeth. I touched her side. She growled as she turned her head toward me. Her tongue dripped reddish saliva, and grayish white fur clung to her nose and the edges of her bloody jaws.

  As I lay on my stomach and pressed my face to her warm, panting side, the stink of rabbit innards seeped through her fur, hollowness grew in my chest, and darkness passed over me, as if I’d been grazed by a black feather.

  Licking my face, Lily fetched me back to consciousness. A mangled mass of rabbit lay beside me, and I sensed, without yet knowing, how intermingled all living creatures are, how they caress and devour each other, just as the Earth I live on and love waits patiently to ingest me.

  Tearful, I headed back home. Lily romped in the mustard along the way.

  When we returned to Michael’s area after Elio had finished his first breakfast in his new home, Elio asked whether he could see Michael and me connect through our braincord.

  Michael nodded eagerly. “It’s wonderful being brainjoined with Sara,” he said. “The connection allows me to feel her sensations and conscious experiences. When we’re connected, I’m no longer cut off from her feelings, as others are through the multiple translations of the language of her neurons into English, then English into the language of their neurons. Much is lost in such translations. I have a sense of occupying her body, just as you have a sense, I imagine, of occupying your body. And hers is a wonderful body to occupy. Her interpretations of experiences and memories, how she thinks and feels, fill me with awe and joy.”

  Elio looked bewildered, so I took one of his hands in mine. “Let me give you an example, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. “An example would be good.”

  “Suppose you are unable to smell due to a defect in the olfactory nerves in your nose, but the olfactory interpretation areas of your brain are in perfect condition. Suppose further that you and I walk into Grandma’s kitchen, and my olfactory system senses a pattern consistent with past experiences of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven.”

  “Sara says chocolate chip cookies are your favorites,” Michael added. “I love them, too.”

  “In my brain,”
I continued, “this neural recognition of a pattern consistent with the aroma of chocolate chip cookies engenders conscious associations with my unique history of experiencing such cookies. These conscious feelings might be translated into English, so that I might think to myself or say to you, ‘Mmm, I smell chocolate chip cookies baking.’

  “Two serious communication problems are highlighted by this example. First, the essence of my feeling of sensing and recognizing chocolate chip cookies is lost in translating from my neural language to English. This points out why speech is inherently unsatisfactory: words, being nothing more than components of instructions to guide the reader’s or listener’s imagination toward the targeted feelings, images, or thoughts, expose only themselves; our feelings remain locked inside, never to be felt directly by another. That is the general rule. But because of the braincord, I have become a part of Michael as no one has ever become a part of anyone else before, though our braincord system only pushes back the solipsistic problem by one. Now, it is Michael and I together, as a unit, that is like everyone else: a being that feels but cannot be felt. The drive to overcome this experiential disconnection is undoubtedly the foundation of our desire for love, for literature and other forms of art, and for the infinity that it would take to succeed.

  “The second communication problem this example exposes is that under the circumstances we have hypothesized, you would have no way of translating my English utterance about chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven into something experientially meaningful to you, since you would never have had the experience of smelling anything.

  “However, if we could directly connect my olfactory nerves to yours at a place beyond the defects in the nerves of your nose, then, after some amazingly new and wonderful experiences for you in which you would learn about the world of smell, we could, so connected, walk into the kitchen when Grandma’s baking chocolate chip cookies, and you would sense the aroma along with me. Then it might be you who would exclaim, ‘How wonderful! My favorite—chocolate chip!’”

  I looked at Elio for a response, but he just stared at me blankly.

  “So, what do you think of that?” I asked.

  “I think I just arrived yesterday, and because of jetlag my head feels clogged with wool. Most of what you just said sailed right over me.”

  First Brother

  She takes hold of the doorknob and pushes the door farther open. The dog tries to enter by squeezing in between her left leg and the door. She catches the dog’s collar with her left hand. “No, Rusty. Sit. Good boy. Now, stay. Stay. I’ll be right back.”

  She enters through the door and closes it behind her. The dog sits for 12 seconds, gets up, walks to a shrub nearby, sniffs, lifts its right hind leg, and urinates.

  The dog looks toward the door. The door opens. She rushes out through the door with her gloved right hand over her mouth. The dog runs in front of her, collides with her right leg, and yelps. She stumbles but catches her balance. She pulls her hand from her mouth, bends over, and regurgitates. She coughs and spits, then steps over the regurgitated material and falls, wailing, facedown onto the variegated grass.

  Sara

  The day after Elio arrived, he noticed our two-person sea kayak hanging in the garage, and the next morning he and I were on the Russian River, a river he quickly grew to love: otters playing; harbor seals basking in the sun; ospreys mounting the air with silver flesh wriggling in their talons; magnificent redwoods and Douglas firs exuding their resinous perfumes; and, protruding from the ocean near river’s end, huge sea stacks, around the craggy edges of which waves splash and swirl, pound and roil, as gulls, like sleek white kites, dive and soar in the salty air.

  The first weekend of November, when the vineyards were draped in sunlit autumn colors, we put in upstream a little before noon Saturday and pitched our tent in time for dinner on a secluded private beach that was little more than a tiny patch of sand on the river’s edge. It was my job to prepare the meal, and as I did I enjoyed watching Elio bustle about, setting up what he proudly called our home: tent, sleeping bag, air mattress, thermal unit. As we ate, the air was cool and clear; the river chuckled softly; and though our cups and plates were made of plain white paper, the sky was Wedgwood blue.

  After dinner, we sat together on the sand and watched the sun ignite a flocculent canopy of pastels as it settled behind the tops of distant trees, above which a cloud, half-bruised, half-bright, appeared impaled on a pink contrail. Later, we snuggled together in our sleeping bag and gazed out of the open tent flap at a clear night sky. Elio said the stars seemed more numerous and closer than they had appeared to him in Amsterdam, as though somehow we had been elevated into the heavens.

  In the morning, light fog muted the previous day’s bright vibrancy, but we found the misty view romantic and several times pulled our kayak up onto the shore to walk the hills and roll around in musty leaves.

  We made it to river’s end in time to watch the sun puff itself up and slide, liquefying into the sea, while pastel pink clouds floated in vaporous milky blue.

  “But I like pastels,” he objected to my sighing over a dashed wish for a wild vermilion sunset that would stun the ocean, the evening sky, and him. “My favorite picture is full of pastels.”

  “What picture is that?”

  “Pale blue eyes, white-blonde hair, rice-paper skin flushed from exercise—you know the picture.”

  We laughed and hugged, and when I next looked up, the sun was gone.

  In early December, after making plans for the upcoming winter holiday vacation, Elio and I called Mom and Dad. I planned, as had become usual over the years, to stay with them through the holidays, but Elio had a reservation to depart about three hours after our arrival in Calgary. He would be flying on to visit his mother and friends in Amsterdam.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Mom said, looking with mock sternness at Elio. “We want more than just to see you. After all, we can see you right now. We want to get you in our arms and squeeze you and kiss you, eat meals with you, throw snowballs at you. You’re part of the family now. You have to give us two days, minimum.”

  “Yes, two days,” Dad chimed in. “It would mean a lot to Mary and me to have both of you in our home for at least a couple of days.”

  I thought I saw tears begin to well in Dad’s eyes and was surprised and pleased at the interest he and Mom were showing in Elio and me, seemingly out of the blue.

  When Elio and I arrived in Calgary midway through a bright afternoon, I again was surprised by apparent changes in both Mom and Dad. Mom’s fingers were no longer stained yellow, and her breath was fresh, not smoky and stale. She had sworn off cigarettes. Dad appeared to have shed some of his reserve, hugging both of us enthusiastically, even giving me a warm full kiss on my lips. And that night over dinner, he told stories of happy days in university when he and Elio’s father had been close friends.

  The next morning, however, the warm feelings became strained when, during breakfast, Dad announced that my brothers were interested in Elio and wanted to see him. “We’ve made arrangements for you and Sara to visit them this morning at the lab.”

  Elio glanced at me nervously before answering Dad: “I’d like to meet Sara’s brothers. I feel they are, in a way, my brothers, too.” Elio again glanced at me. “But I promised Grandpa before we left that I wouldn’t.”

  “What?” Mom said. “Why did you do that?”

  “Grandpa says it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to have knowledge of androids.”

  “What about Sara?” Mom asked. “She knows.”

  “I’ve known about my brothers since I was a little girl,” I said. “We can’t change that. But we can protect Elio from the risk.”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other. I was aware that I’d already acquired a quiet, comforting knowledge by which I knew much of what Elio thought even before he said a word, knowledge gleaned from such subtle signals as nods, shifts of body posture, frowns, blinks, or murmurs so slight that it was unlikely a
nyone else even noticed. And I was aware that he was becoming similarly attuned to me, so that a twin of each of our thoughts and feelings often seemed spontaneously to emerge and resonate in the other. Now, as I watched Mom and Dad look at each other, I wondered how much more of such implicit communication they shared after having been together for so many years.

  “Well, if you promised,” Mom finally said, “I guess there’s nothing we can do. But First Brother is going to be disappointed. I don’t know how many times he’s told me not to forget to bring Elio in to see him.”

  I was puzzled by First Brother’s interest in Elio, but I didn’t ask about it because I felt that my question might be perceived as envy: why the interest in Elio but not in me?

  The next morning, as we sat around the table after finishing breakfast, Mom reached out one hand to me, the other to Elio, who sat across from me. Dad did the same, resulting in the four of us being joined in a circle around the table. Mom and Dad seemed to exude unusual intensity in this joining of hands. Weeks later, Elio would tell me that for an instant he’d had the feeling we were about to embark on a séance.

  How could we have surmised then that it would be an ending?

  “I want to start,” Mom said, “by saying how much I love both of you, and how happy I am you came here to see us, Elio. Your father meant a great deal to both of us. He was a remarkable man, and Karl and I are so grateful that your relationship with Sara has brought you closer to us.”

  Elio smiled, but there was a look of longing on his face.

  Mom then turned to me. “I understand from your grandma that you and Elio had a private marriage ceremony alone near the airport in Amsterdam. We’d like it very much if you’d share that moment with us now.”

  She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out two bimetallic rings, yellow gold and white platinum, and placed them side-by-side in the middle of the table.