Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  “No,” she said tremulously, “I’m not. Keith, I’m sorry to bother you but I can’t… I can’t do it. I can’t!”

  “Do what?”

  “Any of it! I just can’t anymore!” She burst into hysterical weeping.

  Keith closed his eyes, calculating rapidly. It wasn’t a day heavy with appointments. On the other hand, it was raining hard. Taxis would be hard to get. “Babs, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just sit down and wait for me to … where’s Lillie? Is she all right?”

  “I can’t do it anymore!” Barbara cried, and now Keith heard Lillie yelling lustily in the background, screams of rage rather than pain.

  “I’ll be right over. Just sit down and don’t do anything. All right?”

  “All … right…”

  At her apartment he found Barbara sobbing on the sofa. Lillie, seventeen months, sat and played with a pile of what looked like broken toys. The apartment reeked. Lillie, dressed in only a diaper and food-stained bib, reeked more. Every surface including the floor was covered with unwashed dishes, baby clothes, pizza cartons, and unopened mail.

  Lillie looked up and gave him a beatific smile. Her eyes were gray, flecked with tiny spots of gold.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Barbara sobbed. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

  But somebody had to do it. That much was clear. Keith, well aware that he hadn’t the faintest idea how, picked up the phone. Within an hour he had a very expensive Puerto Rican woman from a very expensive temp agency bathing Lillie, clucking disapprovingly at the apartment and murmuring comments in Spanish.

  Barbara ignored the cup of tea he made her. “I’m just no good at being a mother, Keith! It’s terrible, I’m a complete failure, poor Lillie …”

  “You’re not a failure,” Keith said. Was she? He really didn’t know if this was normal. He could easily see how it might get overwhelming, a job and a child… . But didn’t thousands of women all over the city do it every day without collapsing like this? Impatience warred with compassion, both flavored with guilt that he, Keith Anderson, did not have to face this every day.

  “I hit her,” Barbara said despairingly. “I can’t believe it, but Lillie wouldn’t stop crying, she wouldn’t…”

  “Drink your tea, Babs, while it’s hot.”

  “I can’t believe I hit her!”

  He stayed until Mrs. Perez had left and Babs was asleep. Then he carried Lillie from her crib in her tiny, stuffy bedroom into the newly cleaned living room. Clumsily Keith undressed his niece. She stirred but didn’t wake. He examined Lillie carefully. No bruises, no burns, nothing that looked either painful or suspicious. Grateful, he redressed Lillie and put her back to bed.

  He had just returned to the living room when Barbara came out, calmer now, in rumpled blue pajamas. “I’m so sorry, Keith.”

  “You can’t help it, honey,” Keith said, not knowing if this was true or not. “It will be easier now. I’ve hired Mrs. Perez to come twice a week to clean and cook and just sort of take care that things are going smoothly.”

  “You’re so good to me,” she said, sitting in a corner of the sagging sofa and tucking her feet under her. Her voice had a softer purr. So this was what she needed: someone to shift the burden onto. She had never been strong enough to carry her life alone, even when that life had been less complicated than it was now.

  “So what kind of big case are you working on?” Barbara asked. He heard the envy in her voice. “I know it must be something exciting.”

  Keith thought of BioHope. Of the genuinely struggling, starving mothers and children the engineered soya bean was supposed to save. Of the American volunteer who had died eating the bean. “Ten people is a fair sacrifice to aid millions,” he’d told Cal. But what if one of the ten were Barbara, leaving him with Lillie?

  “Keith? What is your case about?”

  “Nuts,” he said.

  April 2013

  Dr. Asrani’s office was small as a paralegal’s cubicle. Keith knew that she had another, more spacious office in the physicians’ building adjourning the hospital; this one must be some sort of waystation, a place to leave papers or close her eyes for a moment or talk to patients’ relatives in privacy. He sat on the edge of a gray upholstered chair and waited.

  “The article was posted by a physician in Pittsburgh,” Dr. Asrani said. She had a very faint, musical accent. “He describes a semi-active trance state with no external communication, like Lillie’s. And the brain specs … here, look.”

  She hiked her chair closer to Keith’s and spread the printout on the arm of his chair. He could see that she took reassurance from the charts and graphs: so verifiable, so unambiguous. She would not have made a good lawyer.

  “See, here is the PLI of the Pittsburgh patient, a twelve-year-old boy. Here, in this dark area, is the same anomalous thick growth of nerve cells that Lillie has at the base of the frontal lobe. It’s right against the glomeruli, which processes olfactory signals and relays them all over the brain to centers involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses —pretty much everything important except muscular control.

  “Now here on this page is the boy’s neural firing pattern for that region. It is like Lillie’s, which is to say, minimal activity in the entire area. Nothing going on in this complex structure. Very odd.”

  And that was the understatement of the year, Keith thought. An inert, non-malignant, non-functioning but very substantial growth squeezed into Lillie’s skull and this boy’s, doing nothing.

  Dr. Asrani shuffled her printouts. “Now, the DNA chart shows many differences between Lillie and the boy, of course. They have entirely different genetic inheritances. See, Lillie carries the allele for Type AB blood and the boy is A. Lillie has E2 and E3 alleles in her APO genes, and the boy has two E4—a risk of heart disease there in later life. And so on. But look here, Mr. Anderson, on chromosome six. Both children have this very long—almost two million base pairs!—sequence of genes that is utterly unknown. No one has ever seen this in any other human genome. Not ever.”

  “Of course,” Keith said, grasping at a vagrant straw, “you haven’t exactly examined every other human genome in the entire world.”

  Dr. Asrani peered at him as if she thought he might be joking. “Hardly. Genome sequencing is only thirteen years old, after all. There is still much we don’t know. In fact, we know hardly anything.”

  Much as Keith liked her honesty, it didn’t help him clarify any feelings about Lillie’s genetic anomaly. Which now she apparently shared with an unknown twelve-year-old boy somewhere in Pittsburgh. He gazed helplessly at the abbreviated version of the kid’s genetic chart, full of esoteric symbols and swooping lines.

  “There is one thing more,” Dr. Asrani said, and at her tone he raised his gaze from the printout. “I almost was not going to mention it because it may sound so misleading. But I will say it, after all. Both Lillie and this boy are the products of in vitro fertilization.”

  Keith’s mind blanked, then raced. “Where? What clinic?”

  “Mr. Anderson, I cannot tell you that. I don’t even know it, as the publishing physician has naturally respected patient confidentiality and not included even the boy’s name in his article. But I want to caution you that this coincidence is not meaningful. No one thirteen years ago — or even today! — could have deliberately altered a fetal genome to somehow lead to Lillie’s condition. It is simply not possible. We are far, far too ignorant.”

  “May I have that printout?” Keith asked, and held out his hand.

  She hesitated only a moment. “Of course.”

  “Thank you,” Keith said. “Is there anything more, or shall I return to Lillie?”

  She watched him go, her face apprehensive and helpless. She knew what he was going to do: extremely perceptive, Shoba Asrani. She might have made a decent lawyer after all.

  CHAPTER 2

  July 4, 2010

  It was too hot for upstate New York in early July, especially for early eve
ning, especially if you didn’t want to be there in the first place. Keith knew he had no right to grumble; summers everywhere were getting hotter and the newspapers said New York City was broiling in its own juices. He longed for his cool sleek apartment on East Sixty-third, acquired only six months ago. He was moving up.

  Barbara and Lillie, meanwhile, had moved upstate to Utica. “Beginning a new life,” she’d told Keith. “Starting over.” To Keith her new life looked quite a bit like the old one.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Barbara said.- “It’s so good to see you again, Keith! Lillie, don’t go any closer to the water, you hear me?”

  Lillie, ten years old, made a face but stopped obediently short of the park “pond” thirty feet across and probably all of two feet deep. Children sailed boats in it. However, since there was no wind moving the sticky, heavy air, this was a losers’ game. On her skinny, bony body Lillie wore a halter top and shorts of violent orange. Her dark brown hair hung in sticky tangles.

  Barbara and Keith sat on an old blanket spread under a maple tree dying of some slow blight. They’d finished dinner, deli sandwiches and fruit and homemade brownies. At least Barbara hadn’t expected him to grill anything. The air was thick with a weird soup of barbecue smoke, portable microwave beeps, pagers, cell phones, Net music, and e-harness alarms shrieking from toddlers or dogs.

  “Welcome to a state of nature,” Keith said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Keith, I’ve got something to tell you.” Barbara lowered her lashes. She looked much as she had when Lillie was born. A forty-six-year-old pixie. “Something I hope you’ll be glad to hear.”

  “Yes?” Keith said neutrally. Her expression, glimpsed through the gathering dusk, made him uneasy.

  “It’s wonderful, really. A wonder I didn’t expect again.”

  “Spit it out, Babs.”

  Lillie had come up beside them. She blurted, “Mom is going to get married!”

  Barbara looked briefly vexed that Lillie had become the news-giver, but then vexation vanished in enthusiasm. “Yes, and he’s the most terrific man in the world! Kind, generous, sexy as hell, fun to be with — “

  “You’ve only been with him three times,” Lillie said judiciously, not upset, merely pointing out the facts. “So you don’t know if he’s all those things.”

  “I know he’s kind because he was so good to you, Miss Smarty Pants,” Barbara retorted. “And he’s generous because he paid for both our plane tickets to visit him — all three times! And I know he’s fun because we laugh a lot, and — “

  “You left out ‘sexy as hell,’” Lillie said, still without bias.

  “Barbara,” Keith managed to get out, “how long have you known this guy? And where did you meet him?”

  “She met him on-line,” Lillie said.

  “And what if I did? You can tell a lot about a person on-line, now that I have that live-video feed. Keith, we talk every night, for hours and hours. I’ve never felt I knew anyone so well, not even you. Bill is the most wonderful — “

  Keith interrupted her. “How long ago did you meet on-line?”

  “Six weeks and three days ago. And already he’s brought Lillie and me to New York three times … that’s one of the best parts! He lives in Manhattan, in a great old apartment on West End Avenue, bonus witchy, so we’ll be near you again!”

  Bonus witchy. Keith hated it when his sister used teenage slang. But, then, he hated everything about this setup. Still, he kept his reactions in check, saying carefully, “What does Bill do?”

  “Graphic designer for the Net.”

  Which could mean anything. Barbara rushed on, burbling away about Bill’s apartment, the wonderful restaurant he’d taken them to, how he’d consulted Lillie and shown every concern for her opinion, what a great time they’d had. Keith let her run down while he figured out what to say first.

  “Barbara, what’s Bill’s address? West End is long, and pretty varied.”

  “He’s near Seventieth,” she said, which also could mean anything. A very mixed neighborhood. “What’s his last name?”

  She laughed. “Checking out his ethnicity? It’s Brown. Go ahead, counselor, derive clues from that!”

  He smiled. “When do I meet him?”

  “Whenever you like. We’ll be in New York again next week for the wedding, so ―”

  “Next week?”

  “Yes, we … is that your phone?”

  It was. Keith wouldn’t have taken the call except it was his investigator’s number, with the priority they’d agreed to use only if Jamal found the big evidence they were looking for. The case was complicated. His client was an alternative-energy company who’d lost two workers to an accident that simply wasn’t foreseeable. Jamal had indeed found what he was looking for, and Keith’s mood climbed as they discussed it.

  By the time he’d finished, the fireworks had started. “Oh, look!” Barbara cried as a silver and green pinwheel exploded in the sky. “Isn’t it beautiful! Come on, Keith, move out from under the tree so we can see better!”

  She hopped forward and plunked herself, laughing, beside the pond. Keith stayed where he was. He was a little surprised that Lillie remained seated sedately beside him.

  “Uncle Keith, was that phone call about the trial you told us about? With the new kinds of energy?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Our teacher told us about people trying to make new kinds of energy. Safe fusion and solar energy and even that nuclear reactor they’re building way out in space. Is your law company connected with that?”

  “No. I wish we were.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, lots of money, for one thing. But also it’s a fascinating project.”

  “I think so, too,” she said, sounding so grown-up that Keith wanted to laugh. A Roman candle exploded above them. Lillie ignored it.

  “Uncle Keith, you said that two people died on your energy case.”

  “Yes, they did.” He was curious to see where this was going.

  “Was it worth it? Two people dead, and everybody else gets lots of energy?”

  “We don’t look at it like that,” Keith said, startled by the starkness of her viewpoint. “Although unfortunately new technologies always seem to cost lives at first. Railroads, air travel, heart transplants. Probably even the discovery of fire. Still, it’s more a question of whether the energy company could have anticipated that the accidents might happen.” Did she know the word “anticipate”? He had no idea what vocabulary a ten-year-old might have.

  “I see,” she said primly. And then, “I think two deaths is worth it.”

  He was strangely shocked. Was that normal for a little girl? Weren’t children supposed to be sentimental? Peering at Lillie’s face through the gloom, he saw her expression: sad and thoughtful. Her gold-flecked gray eyes gave back a reflection of his own face.

  “But,” she added, “the energy company should give the families of the dead people a lot of money. And medals, too. Hero’s medals. Uncle Keith, you’re going to have that man you were talking to on the phone, that Jamal, investigate Bill, aren’t you?”

  “Why, Lillie ―”

  “That’s why you really wanted Bill’s name and address.”

  “I―”

  “It’s a good idea,” Lillie said. “Mom doesn’t know him very well. But, Uncle Keith, you shouldn’t worry too hard. Because I look out for Mom, you know.”

  It was that moment, a decade after her birth, that Keith fell in love with his niece. Her serious, half-seen little face, intermittently lit by fireworks, gazed at him with everything Barbara had never had: judgment, reason, sense. She was an amazing little girl. More, she moved at that moment from being an abstract—“my niece”—to being a real, living, individual person. Herself.

  But all he said was, “How did you know I was going to have Bill Brown investigated?”

  “Because that’s what they do in the movies,” she said, grinning with te
n-year-old glee, and his capture was complete.

  “Hey!” Barbara called, ducking under the maple, “come out and watch the fireworks, you two! You’re missing everything good!”

  April 2013

  The Pittsburgh physician’s name was Samuel Silverstein. Keith flew to Pittsburgh International and took a cab for the long ride to Silverstein’s office. The office was neither shabby nor luxurious, a solid, reassuring setting located in a new medical building. The door greeted him respectfully by name when he pushed it open, even though he was half an hour early.

  “I’m told this is not a medical appointment, Mr. Anderson,” Silverstein said. His schedule ran right on time. Silverstein was short, overweight, with intelligent brown eyes.

  “No, doctor. I read the article you posted on CaseNet and — “

  “You are not a physician.”

  “No. It was shown to me by my niece’s physician, Dr. Shoba Asrani at New York-Presbyterian. My niece Lillie has exactly the same condition as your patient, and exactly the same PLI and DNA charts.” He passed Lillie’s printouts to Silverstein.

  The doctor studied them intently, paging through the stack of papers with methodical attention. When he looked up, Keith said, “Lillie was also the result of in vitro fertilization. Like your patient. I would like to know if her fertilization was done at a place called the ChildGive IVF Institute. I don’t know where the Institute was located, and no records are available.” Barbara had lost all the paperwork. All she had remembered about the location was “some town north of the city.”

  Silverstein looked at Keith a long time. Then he said quietly, “Give it up, Mr. Anderson. It isn’t possible.”

  “So I’m told,” Keith said grimly.

  “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  Silverstein ignored that question, answering instead one that Keith hadn’t asked yet. “It is against patient confidentiality for me to identify the clinic. Or the patient.”

  “Can you at least tell me if there are any others? Besides Lillie and this boy?”