I set my teeth and looked away. Let her work. She knew how to use this thing she and I both had. And for the moment, she was on my side.
I heard him make some effort with the door. The door didn’t even rattle. Beatrice took his hand from it, and with her own hand flat against what appeared to be a large brass knob, she pushed the door open.
“The man who created that lock is no one in particular,” she said. “He doesn’t have an unusually high I.Q., didn’t even finish college. But sometime in his life he read a science-fiction story in which palmprint locks were a given. He went that story one better by creating one that responded to voice or palm. It took him years, but we were able to give him those years. The people of Dilg are the problem solvers, Alan. Think of the problems you could solve!”
He looked as though he were beginning to think, beginning to understand. “I don’t see how biological research can be done that way,” he said. “Not with everyone acting on his own, not even aware of other researchers and their work.”
“It is being done,” she said, “and not in isolation. Our retreat in Colorado specializes in it and has—just barely—enough trained, controlled DGDs to see that no one really works in isolation. Our patients can still read and write—those who haven’t damaged themselves too badly. They can take each other’s work into account if reports are made available to them. And they can read material that comes in from the outside. They’re working, Alan. The disease hasn’t stopped them, won’t stop them.” He stared at her, seemed to be caught by her intensity—or her scent. He spoke as though his words were a strain, as though they hurt his throat. “I won’t be a Puppet. I won’t be controlled… by a goddam smell!”
“Alan—”
“I won’t be what my mother is. I’d rather be dead!”
“There’s no reason for you to become what your mother is.”
He drew back in obvious disbelief.
“Your mother is brain damaged—thanks to the three months she spent in that custodial-care toilet. She had no speech at all when I met her. She’s improved more than you can imagine. None of that has to happen to you. Work with us, and we’ll see that none of it happens to you.”
He hesitated, seemed less sure of himself. Even that much flexibility in him was surprising.
“I’ll be under your control or Lynn’s,” he said.
“Not even your mother is under my control. She’s aware of me. She’s able to take direction from me. She trusts me the way any blind person would trust her guide.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Not here. Not at any of our retreats.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then you don’t understand how much individuality our people retain. They know they need help, but they have minds of their own. If you want to see the abuse of power you’re worried about, go to a DGD ward.”
“You’re better than that,” I admitted. “Hell is probably better than that. But…”
“But you don’t trust us.”
He shrugged.
“You do, you know.” She smiled. “You don’t want to, but you do. That’s what worries you, and it leaves you with work to do. Look into what I’ve said. See for yourself. We offer DGDs a chance to live and do whatever they decide is important to them. What do you have, what can you realistically hope for that’s better than that?”
Silence. “I don’t know what to think,” he said finally.
“Go home,” she said. “Decide what to think. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”
He looked at me. I went to him, not sure how he’d react, not sure he’d want me no matter what he decided.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
The question startled me. “You have a choice,” I said. “I don’t. If she’s right… how could I not wind up running a retreat?”
“Do you want to?”
I swallowed. I hadn’t really faced that question yet. Did I want to spend my life in something that was basically a refined DGD ward? “No!”
“But you will.”
“Yes.” I thought for a moment, hunted for the right words. “You’d do it.”
“What?”
“If the pheromone were something only men had, you would do it.”
That silence again. After a time he took my hand, and we followed Beatrice out to the car. Before I could get in with him and our guard-escort, she caught my arm. I jerked away reflexively. By the time I caught myself, I had swung around as though I meant to hit her. Hell, I did mean to hit her, but I stopped myself in time. “Sorry,” I said with no attempt at sincerity.
She held out a card until I took it. “My private number,” she said. “Before seven or after nine, usually. You and I will communicate best by phone.”
I resisted the impulse to throw the card away. God, she brought out the child in me.
Inside the car, Alan said something to the guard. I couldn’t hear what it was, but the sound of his voice reminded me of him arguing with her—her logic and her scent. She had all but won him for me, and I couldn’t manage even token gratitude. I spoke to her, low voiced.
“He never really had a chance, did he?”
She looked surprised. “That’s up to you. You can keep him or drive him away. I assure you, you can drive him away.”
“How?”
“By imagining that he doesn’t have a chance.” She smiled faintly. “Phone me from your territory. We have a great deal to say to each other, and I’d rather we didn’t say it as enemies.”
She had lived with meeting people like me for decades. She had good control. I, on the other hand, was at the end of my control. All I could do was scramble into the car and floor my own phantom accelerator as the guard drove us to the gate. I couldn’t look back at her. Until we were well away from the house, until we’d left the guard at the gate and gone off the property, I couldn’t make myself look back. For long, irrational minutes, I was convinced that somehow if I turned, I would see myself standing there, gray and old, growing small in the distance, vanishing.
Afterword
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” grew from my ongoing fascinations with biology, medicine, and personal responsibility.
In particular, I began the story wondering how much of what we do is encouraged, discouraged, or otherwise guided by what we are genetically. This is one of my favorite questions, parent to several of my novels. It can be a dangerous question. All too often, when people ask it, they mean who has the biggest or the best or the most of whatever they see as desirable. Genetics as a board game, or worse, as an excuse for the social Darwinism that swings into popularity every few years. Nasty habit.
And yet the question itself is fascinating. And disease, as grim as it is, is one way to explore answers. Genetic disorders in particular may teach us much about who and what we are.
I built Duryea-Gode disease from elements of three genetic disorders. The first is Huntington’s disease—hereditary, dominant, and thus an inevitability if one has the gene for it. And it is caused by only one abnormal gene. Also Huntington’s does not usually show itself until its sufferers are middle-aged.
In addition to Huntington’s, I used phenylketonuria (PKU), a recessive genetic disorder that causes severe mental impairment unless the infant who has it is put on a special diet.
Finally, I used Lesh-Nyan disease, which causes both mental impairment and self-mutilation.
To elements of these disorders, I added on my own particular twists: a sensitivity to pheromones and the sufferers’ persistent delusion that they are trapped, imprisoned within their own flesh, and that that flesh is somehow not truly part of them. In that last, I took an idea familiar to us all—present in many religions and philosophies—and carried it to its terrible extreme.
We carry as many as fifty thousand different genes in each of the nuclei of our billions of cells. If one gene among the fifty thousand, the Huntington’s gene, for instance, can so gre
atly change our lives—what we can do, what we can become—then what are we?
What, indeed.
For readers who find this question as fascinating as I do, I offer a brief, unconventional reading list: The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior by Jane Goodall, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Judith L. Rapoport, Medical Detectives by Berton Roueché, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks.
Enjoy!
TWICE, AT ONCE, SEPARATED
Linda Addison
(2000)
The shamans came together to find a cure for the sickness in the people’s souls that caused children to be born sick. They changed into strong hekura—jaguar, ocelot, puma—and climbed the ladder of the earth to search for the soul-eater’s path. The only way to save their children’s souls was to leave the poisoned place, go beyond the sky layer. The people entered Ship to follow the path to the demon’s birthplace, where they will once again change into strong hekura and destroy the demon’s nest, releasing the captured souls so children can again be born strong and healthy.
—chant taught to every Yanomami shaman
The artificial sunlight of Ship drew sharp shadows around the men sitting in the dirt of the central plaza of Bataasi-teri village. The scent of roasted plantains, from the communal fire, filled the air. Xotama stood in the shade of the circular village and listened to the wedding contract play out. Mayomi, her grandmother, sat within listening distance, nodding at their shaman, Hurewa, when an acceptable number of valuable items was mentioned. They were haggling about woven baskets. Hurewa, with his usual calm, simply shook his head at the numbers they proposed.
Mayomi had spent a long time, the night before, talking to Xotama about the planned marriage. No matter what she said, Xotama felt sick inside. A restless night made her feel no better today. Her life was haunted by a sense of being splintered. She had gone through the cleansing ceremony to remove the pain left by her mother’s death, but no amount of meditation or rituals helped. Only her dreams gave her temporary comfort. Dreams of being with someone she didn’t know, someone whose face she never saw.
“Tutewa will be a good husband,” Rahimi, her best friend, said. “He’s generous and not bad to look at. He’s moving here to look after your grandmother, so we’ll still see each other.”
Xotama found his round face and deep brown eyes attractive. He had meticulously painted circles and bands of red ochre over his entire body.
She turned the slender white stick that pierced her nasal septum. “I know. It’s not him, it’s me. I’m not—” The expected path of her life caught in her throat.
Rahimi put her arm around Xotama’s waist. “Is it the dreams again?” she whispered.
Xotama nodded. “I’ve tried to forget them, but she came to me again last night. I can’t do this.” She pulled away from Rahimi and walked into the central plaza. The conversation stopped.
“What is this, does the bride need a closer look at her husband-to-be?” Tutewa’s father said. “Stand up, son, let her see how strong you are. There will be no empty bellies in your hammock. We are good hunters.” He prodded Tutewa.
He started to stand, but Xotama gestured for him to sit. “No, I’m sorry, this isn’t…” Her voice faded under their stares.
Mayomi rushed over to her. “Forgive my granddaughter. She’s not herself today.”
“She seems very much herself today, Grandmother,” Hurewa said. “What are you trying to say, Xotama?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not ready to marry,” Xotama said. She saw Rahimi put her hands over her mouth.
Everyone started shouting at once.
Above the shabonos and forest, beyond the sky created by technology, a meta-plasmic layer contained the neural web called Ship. A Watcher let her mind roam the forest quadrant of the hollowed-out, terra-formed asteroid where Xotama stood. Their minds touched through the bio-implants all Yanomami carried in their brains. The Watcher’s real body was in slow stasis, growing old a hundred times slower than those who inhabited the forests. Her mind lived in the virtual world sustained by Ship.
Today she worked in navigation, in the form of a green-furred monkey with four arms. Long fingers moved quickly over a multicolored ball of writhing vines, tapping any ends that snaked out. Each touch generated a bright spark of light, making the end flow back into the center of the vines. The echo of dreams shared with Xotama sang back at her, just as they haunted Xotama.
She drank in Xotama’s turmoil, smoothed it over her virtual face, breathing in the sharp, sweet flavor of discontent. There was a corresponding hunger in her, a breach. Though she knew more than Xotama, the knowledge did little to feed the unsettling emptiness.
… tell me, what troubles you?… Ship asked, a gentle whisper in her mind.
Talking with Ship was like floating underwater. She surrendered to the smothering, reminding herself there was no body to suffocate, just a sensation in the mind, to treat it like a dream and enter gently, as if falling asleep.
(I can not find the words) she thought to it.
… what does it look like?…
She let the hunger take shape: a dark circle broken in two, one jagged piece disappears, the other grows larger, one eye appears in the center, tears of light slowly fall from the eye, the dark half becomes a tattered sail, beating wildly in a firestorm that consumes the light, the eye begins to close.
… enough… Ship said, dissolving the images.
In navigation, tendrils of vine whipped through the air. She worked rapidly to get the vines back in control. An otter with orange skin and three pairs of arms swam into navigation. He licked her face, transmitting his genetic designation, and began to work over the vines.
… i have tasted your discomfort for a long time but hoped you would settle it on your own… Ship said.… she can not heal without you… you must find a way or you will both be lost…
She thought the word “home” and was in her virtual hammock, in the vast circular shabono that housed all the Watchers. A neighbor in the shape of a golden panther nudged her with his shoulder. His touch was like an early morning breeze. He asked, (why are you afraid?)
(I am broken and I don’t know how to become whole) she said.
Mayomi grabbed Xotama’s arm to pull her away. Hurewa stood and gently moved the grandmother aside. He cupped Xotama’s face in his hands, stared hard into her eyes. After caressing the moon-shaped birthmark on her left cheek, he clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention.
Xotama looked at Tutewa and felt a flutter of desire mixed with sadness.
“What is wrong with this girl?” Tutewa’s father said, pointing at her. “Does she think my son is not good enough?”
“Let her be, Father,” Tutewa said. “I want to hear what she has to say.”
Xotama fought back tears, wanting to give some explanation, but she didn’t know where to start.
“Let me tell you about a dream I had last night,” Hurewa said. “I saw Xotama’s birthmark on the beak of a golden toucan surrounded by other birds, with bright red and blue feathers, perched on white rocks. They rose into the sky as one, leaving the golden bird on the ground. A hekura in the shape of a young leopard crept into the circle of rocks. Its eyes glowed red. I recognized it as my hekura and stood in front of her as it leapt. I took it into my chest and saw her true form through its eyes. A young girl, staring at her shadow on the ground, drawn by bright moonlight. Her shadow stepped off the ground and stood next to her. The moon came closer until it was so bright I had to run into the forest.
“What do you see in your dreams, Xotama?”
She took a deep breath and said, “There is another in my dreams, someone I never see but can sense. She has shown me many things. Last night we flew high above a green forest, dotted sparsely with villages, brown circular pots, their edges stretched inward to a flickering cen
ter. I wasn’t afraid because she was with me. I don’t know who she is or what the dreams mean. When I wake I feel like half a person.
“I think only Ship can help me understand what these dreams mean.”
A young man from Tutewa’s village said, “Women are not allowed to talk to Ship.”
“There are women Watchers,” Xotama said. “There are stories of women shamans. I don’t think Ship cares that I have a womb.”
This started the yelling again. Hurewa had to bang two gourds to get everyone’s attention. “We live inside Ship, not unlike a womb. Without Ship we would spill into the airless trail we follow, our souls eaten by the Soul Killer. I’m not going to judge for Ship. Which of you think you can?” No one said a word.
“When I woke this morning, the air was full of big and small magic,” the shaman said. “Xotama must walk the path of the spirits before we have any more discussions of marriage. Important dreams have to be honored.”
Tutewa walked over to Xotama and spit on the ground in front of her to signify the path was clear between them. “I accept that you need to settle this storm inside. I will wait ten days for a message from you. If I hear nothing, I’ll consider our marriage bond dissolved.”
He walked away, followed by his father and the three other men from his shabono. They ducked out the narrow opening of the walled village, into the forest.
Part of her didn’t want him to go. If only she could push this pain away and be happy in her life. She balled up her fists. What was wrong with her?
Hurewa took Xotama’s hand and led her across the center court to a shaded area. Mayomi followed. They sat out of earshot of everyone else. More people drifted into the shabono. Men, women, and children gathered on the far side of the center fire, keeping a cautious distance between themselves and Xotama.
“A path of fire waits in front of you before your journey ends,” Hurewa said. “The end is the beginning. Enter the circle.”
“The circle?” Xotama asked.
“You’ll understand when the time comes. It will take all your courage to heal this breach. The flow of this day has been changed by your words and my dream messenger. It wouldn’t be wise to stop now. Are you ready to begin?”
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