Sisters of the Revolution

by Ann VanderMeer

  I shrugged. “Who cares? The house works.” It did. It worked so well that this new guy wanted to move in. He was a friend of one of the others, and another premed. Not bad looking.

  “So do I get in or don’t I?” he asked.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you do,” I said. I did what his friend should have done—introduced him around, then, after he left, talked to the others to make sure nobody had any real objections. He seemed to fit right in. He forgot to clean the toilet or mow the lawn, just like the others. His name was Alan Chi. I thought Chi was a Chinese name, and I wondered. But he told me his father was Nigerian and that in Ibo the word meant a kind of guardian angel or personal God. He said his own personal God hadn’t been looking out for him very well to let him be born to two DGD parents. Him too.

  I don’t think it was much more than that similarity that drew us together at first. Sure, I liked the way he looked, but I was used to liking someone’s looks and having him run like hell when he found out what I was. It took me a while to get used to the fact that Alan wasn’t going anywhere.

  I told him about my visit to the DGD ward when I was fifteen—and my suicide attempt afterward. I had never told anyone else. I was surprised at how relieved it made me feel to tell him. And somehow his reaction didn’t surprise me.

  “Why didn’t you try again?” he asked. We were alone in the living room.

  “At first, because of my parents,” I said. “My father in particular. I couldn’t do that to him again.”

  “And after him?”

  “Fear. Inertia.”

  He nodded. “When I do it, there’ll be no half measures. No being rescued, no waking up in a hospital later.”

  “You mean to do it?”

  “The day I realize I’ve started to drift. Thank God we get some warning.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Yes, we do. I’ve done a lot of reading. Even talked to a couple of doctors. Don’t believe the rumors non-DGDs invent.”

  I looked away, stared into the scarred, empty fireplace. I told him exactly how my father had died—something else I’d never voluntarily told anyone.

  He sighed. “Jesus!”

  We looked at each other.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He extended a dark, square hand, and I took it and moved closer to him. He was a dark, square man my height, half again my weight, and none of it fat. He was so bitter sometimes, he scared me.

  “My mother started to drift when I was three,” he said. “My father only lasted a few months longer. I heard he died a couple of years after he went into the hospital. If the two of them had had any sense, they would have had me aborted the minute my mother realized she was pregnant. But she wanted a kid no matter what. And she was Catholic.” He shook his head. “Hell, they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us.”

  “They?” I said.

  “You want kids?”

  “No, but—”

  “More like us to wind up chewing their fingers off in some DGD ward.”

  “I don’t want kids, but I don’t want someone else telling me I can’t have any.”

  He stared at me until I began to feel stupid and defensive. I moved away from him.

  “Do you want someone else telling you what to do with your body?” I asked.

  “No need,” he said. “I had that taken care of as soon as I was old enough.”

  This left me staring. I’d thought about sterilization. What DGD hasn’t? But I didn’t know anyone else our age who had actually gone through with it. That would be like killing part of yourself—even though it wasn’t a part you intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead.

  “The damned disease could be wiped out in one generation,” he said, “but people are still animals when it comes to breeding. Still following mindless urges, like dogs and cats.”

  My impulse was to get up and go away, leave him to wallow in his bitterness and depression alone. But I stayed. He seemed to want to live even less than I did. I wondered how he’d made it this far.

  “Are you looking forward to doing research?” I probed. “Do you believe you’ll be able to—”

  “No.”

  I blinked. The word was as cold and dead a sound as I’d ever heard.

  “I don’t believe in anything,” he said.

  I took him to bed. He was the only other double DGD I had ever met, and if nobody did anything for him, he wouldn’t last much longer. I couldn’t just let him slip away. For a while, maybe we could be each other’s reasons for staying alive.

  He was a good student—for the same reason I was. And he seemed to shed some of his bitterness as time passed. Being around him helped me understand why, against all sanity, two DGDs would lock in on each other and start talking about marriage. Who else would have us?

  We probably wouldn’t last very long, anyway. These days, most DGDs make it to forty, at least. But then, most of them don’t have two DGD parents. As bright as Alan was, he might not get into medical school because of his double inheritance. No one would tell him his bad genes were keeping him out, of course, but we both knew what his chances were. Better to train doctors who were likely to live long enough to put their training to use.

  Alan’s mother had been sent to Dilg. He hadn’t seen her or been able to get any information about her from his grandparents while he was at home. By the time he left for college, he’d stopped asking questions. Maybe it was hearing about my parents that made him start again. I was with him when he called Dilg. Until that moment, he hadn’t even known whether his mother was still alive. Surprisingly, she was.

  “Dilg must be good,” I said when he hung up. “People don’t usually … I mean …”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “People don’t usually live long once they’re out of control. Dilg is different.” We had gone to my room, where he turned a chair backward and sat down. “Dilg is what the others ought to be, if you can believe the literature.”

  “Dilg is a giant DGD ward,” I said. “It’s richer—probably better at sucking in the donations—and it’s run by people who can expect to become patients eventually. Apart from that, what’s different?”

  “I’ve read about it,” he said. “So should you. They’ve got some new treatment. They don’t just shut people away to die the way the others do.”

  “What else is there to do with them? With us.”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like they have some kind of … sheltered workshop. They’ve got patients doing things.”

  “A new drug to control the self-destructiveness?”

  “I don’t think so. We would have heard about that.”

  “What else could it be?”

  “I’m going up to find out. Will you come with me?”

  “You’re going up to see your mother.”

  He took a ragged breath. “Yeah. Will you come with me?”

  I went to one of my windows and stared out at the weeds. We let them thrive in the backyard. In the front we mowed them, along with the few patches of grass.

  “I told you my DGD-ward experience.”

  “You’re not fifteen now. And Dilg isn’t some zoo of a ward.”

  “It’s got to be, no matter what they tell the public. And I’m not sure I can stand it.”

  He got up, came to stand next to me. “Will you try?”

  I didn’t say anything. I focused on our reflections in the window glass—the two of us together. It looked right, felt right. He put his arm around me, and I leaned back against him. Our being together had been as good for me as it seemed to have been for him. It had given me something to go on besides inertia and fear. I knew I would go with him. It felt like the right thing to do.

  “I can’t say how I’ll act when we get there,” I said.

  “I can’t say how I’ll act, either,” he admitted. “Especially … when I see her.”

  He made the appointment for
the next Saturday afternoon. You make appointments to go to Dilg unless you’re a government inspector of some kind. That is the custom, and Dilg gets away with it.

  We left L.A. in the rain early Saturday morning. Rain followed us off and on up the coast as far as Santa Barbara. Dilg was hidden away in the hills not far from San Jose. We could have reached it faster by driving up I-5, but neither of us were in the mood for all that bleakness. As it was, we arrived at one P.M. to be met by two armed gate guards. One of these phoned the main building and verified our appointment. Then the other took the wheel from Alan.

  “Sorry,” he said. “But no one is permitted inside without an escort. We’ll meet your guide at the garage.”

  None of this surprised me. Dilg is a place where not only the patients but much of the staff has DGD. A maximum security prison wouldn’t have been as potentially dangerous. On the other hand, I’d never heard of anyone getting chewed up here. Hospitals and rest homes had accidents. Dilg didn’t. It was beautiful—an old estate. One that didn’t make sense in these days of high taxes. It had been owned by the Dilg family. Oil, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. Ironically, they had even owned part of the late, unlamented Hedeon Laboratories. They’d had a briefly profitable interest in Hedeonco: the magic bullet, the cure for a large percentage of the world’s cancer and a number of serious viral diseases—and the cause of Duryea-Gode disease. If one of your parents was treated with Hedeonco and you were conceived after the treatments, you had DGD. If you had kids, you passed it on to them. Not everyone was equally affected. They didn’t all commit suicide or murder, but they all mutilated themselves to some degree if they could. And they all drifted—went off into a world of their own and stopped responding to their surroundings.

  Anyway, the only Dilg son of his generation had had his life saved by Hedeonco. Then he had watched four of his children die before Doctors Kenneth Duryea and Jan Gode came up with a decent understanding of the problem and a partial solution: the diet. They gave Richard Dilg a way of keeping his next two children alive. He gave the big, cumbersome estate over to the care of DGD patients.

  So the main building was an elaborate old mansion. There were other, newer buildings, more like guest houses than institutional buildings. And there were wooded hills all around. Nice country. Green. The ocean wasn’t far away. There was an old garage and a small parking lot. Waiting in the lot was a tall, old woman. Our guard pulled up near her, let us out, then parked the car in the half-empty garage.

  “Hello,” the woman said, extending her hand. “I’m Beatrice Alcantara.” The hand was cool and dry and startlingly strong. I thought the woman was DGD, but her age threw me. She appeared to be about sixty, and I had never seen a DGD that old. I wasn’t sure why I thought she was DGD. If she was, she must have been an experimental model—one of the first to survive.

  “Is it Doctor or Ms.?” Alan asked.

  “It’s Beatrice,” she said. “I am a doctor, but we don’t use titles much here.”

  I glanced at Alan, was surprised to see him smiling at her. He tended to go a long time between smiles. I looked at Beatrice and couldn’t see anything to smile about. As we introduced ourselves, I realized I didn’t like her. I couldn’t see any reason for that either, but my feelings were my feelings. I didn’t like her.

  “I assume neither of you have been here before,” she said, smiling down at us. She was at least six feet tall, and straight.

  We shook our heads. “Let’s go in the front way, then. I want to prepare you for what we do here. I don’t want you to believe you’ve come to a hospital.”

  I frowned at her, wondering what else there was to believe. Dilg was called a retreat, but what difference did names make?

  The house close up looked like one of the old-style public buildings—massive, baroque front with a single domed tower reaching three stories above the three-story house. Wings of the house stretched for some distance to the right and left of the tower, then cornered and stretched back twice as far. The front doors were huge—one set of wrought iron and one of heavy wood. Neither appeared to be locked. Beatrice pulled open the iron door, pushed the wooden one, and gestured us in.

  Inside, the house was an art museum—huge, high-ceilinged, tile floored. There were marble columns and niches in which sculptures stood or paintings hung. There were other sculptures displayed around the rooms. At one end of the rooms there was a broad staircase leading up to a gallery that went around the rooms. There more art was displayed. “All this was made here,” Beatrice said. “Some of it is even sold from here. Most goes to galleries in the Bay Area or down around L.A. Our only problem is turning out too much of it.”

  “You mean the patients do this?” I asked.

  The old woman nodded. “This and much more. Our people work instead of tearing at themselves or staring into space. One of them invented the p.v. locks that protect this place. Though I almost wish he hadn’t. It’s gotten us more government attention than we like.”

  “What kind of locks?” I asked.

  “Sorry. Palmprint-voiceprint. The first and the best. We have the patent.” She looked at Alan. “Would you like to see what your mother does?”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re telling us out-of-control DGDs create art and invent things?”

  “And that lock,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. I didn’t even see a lock.”

  “The lock is new,” she said. “There have been a few news stories about it. It’s not the kind of thing most people would buy for their homes. Too expensive. So it’s of limited interest. People tend to look at what’s done at Dilg in the way they look at the efforts of idiot savants. Interesting, incomprehensible, but not really important. Those likely to be interested in the lock and able to afford it know about it.” She took a deep breath, faced Alan again. “Oh, yes, DGDs create things. At least they do here.”

  “Out-of-control DGDs.”

  “Yes.”

  “I expected to find them weaving baskets or something—at best. I know what DGD wards are like.”

  “So do I,” she said. “I know what they’re like in hospitals, and I know what it’s like here.” She waved a hand toward an abstract painting that looked like a photo I had once seen of the Orion Nebula. Darkness broken by a great cloud of light and color. “Here we can help them channel their energies. They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don’t destroy.”

  “Why?” Alan demanded. “It can’t be some drug. We would have heard.”

  “It’s not a drug.”

  “Then what is it? Why haven’t other hospitals—?”

  “Alan,” she said. “Wait.”

  He stood frowning at her.

  “Do you want to see your mother?”

  “Of course I want to see her!”

  “Good. Come with me. Things will sort themselves out.”

  She led us to a corridor past offices where people talked to one another, waved to Beatrice, worked with computers … They could have been anywhere. I wondered how many of them were controlled DGDs. I also wondered what kind of game the old woman was playing with her secrets. We passed through rooms so beautiful and perfectly kept it was obvious they were rarely used. Then at a broad, heavy door, she stopped us.

  “Look at anything you like as we go on,” she said. “But don’t touch anything or anyone. And remember that some of the people you’ll see injured themselves before they came to us. They still bear the scars of those injuries. Some of those scars may be difficult to look at, but you’ll be in no danger. Keep that in mind. No one here will harm you.” She pushed the door open and gestured us in.

  Scars didn’t bother me much. Disability didn’t bother me. It was the act of self-mutilation that scared me. It was someone attacking her own arm as though it were a wild animal. It was someone who had torn at himself and been restrained or drugged off and on for so long that he barely had a recognizable human feature left, but he was still tryin
g with what he did have to dig into his own flesh. Those are a couple of the things I saw at the DGD ward when I was fifteen. Even then I could have stood it better if I hadn’t felt I was looking into a kind of temporal mirror.

  I wasn’t aware of walking through that doorway. I wouldn’t have thought I could do it. The old woman said something, though, and I found myself on the other side of the door with the door closing behind me. I turned to stare at her.

  She put her hand on my arm. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “That door looks like a wall to a great many people.”

  I backed away from her, out of her reach, repelled by her touch. Shaking hands had been enough, for God’s sake.

  Something in her seemed to come to attention as she watched me. It made her even straighter. Deliberately, but for no apparent reason, she stepped toward Alan, touched him the way people do sometimes when they brush past—a kind of tactile “Excuse me.” In that wide, empty corridor, it was totally unnecessary. For some reason, she wanted to touch him and wanted me to see. What did she think she was doing? Flirting at her age? I glared at her, found myself suppressing an irrational urge to shove her away from him. The violence of the urge amazed me.

  Beatrice smiled and turned away. “This way,” she said. Alan put his arm around me and tried to lead me after her.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, not moving.

  Beatrice glanced around.

  “What just happened?” I asked. I was ready for her to lie—to say nothing happened, pretend not to know what I was talking about.

  “Are you planning to study medicine?” she asked.

  “What? What does that have to do—?”

  “Study medicine. You may be able to do a great deal of good.” She strode away, taking long steps so that we had to hurry to keep up. She led us through a room in which some people worked at computer terminals and others with pencils and paper. It would have been an ordinary scene except that some people had half their faces ruined or had only one hand or leg or had other obvious scars. But they were all in control now. They were working. They were intent but not intent on self-destruction. Not one was digging into or tearing away flesh. When we had passed through this room and into a small, ornate sitting room, Alan grasped Beatrice’s arm.