Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  Silverstein hesitated. Finally he said, “Yes, there are others. Two more.”

  “So far. Doctor, I will sign anything you like attesting to the fact that I will not sue the clinic. That’s not my aim. I just have to know what happened. Lillie is my niece, my legal ward since her mother died. Anything I can learn, from anyone, might help her physician to understand her condition better, and that of the other three children, too. I’m in a much better position than you to run a discreet investigation, believe me. And I’m prepared to supply you with all sorts of references so you can check me out first.”

  Silverstein was shaking his head. “Not necessary. I cannot tell you the names, and I wish you could believe that it wouldn’t help your niece if I could. I’m sorry.”

  Keith tried another approach, and then another. Nothing worked, and Silverstein was becoming annoyed. Finally Keith left his card.

  So it would have to be an investigation without help. More expensive, longer. But certainly possible. He flew back to New York.

  October 2011

  During the year after the July Fourth picnic, Keith saw Lillie often. Barbara married Bill Brown, who turned out to be an ordinary, noncriminal, reasonably solvent guy whom Keith didn’t like very much. He was handsome in a thuggish sort of way, with deep-set blue eyes and a heavy beard. Barbara seemed crazy about him. She and Lillie moved into Bill’s West Side apartment and Lillie began exploring the city by subway.

  “She’s too young,” Barbara said, running her hand through her short hair and making it stand up in spikes. Barbara had lost even more weight since moving back to New York. “She’s only eleven years old!”

  “Kids that age go all over by subway,” Keith said, “and Lillie’s a sensible girl. I’ll teach her the ropes.”

  He did. They went to the Museum of National History, to the ballet at Lincoln Center, for walks in the Park, to overpriced little restaurants in SoHo. Lillie was fun, enough of a child to be impressed by everything and enough of an adult to provide actual companionship. One Saturday just before Halloween they met at an Irish pub for a plowman’s lunch. Lately Lillie had insisted on meeting him at their excursion destinations, rather than his picking her up at home. “I like to study the people on the subway,” she said. “I’m going to be a film-maker when I grow up, you know.”

  “Last week it was a diplomat.”

  She remained unperturbed. “I have lots of time to decide. Uncle Keith, do you believe in angels?”

  “No.”

  “How about ghosts?”

  “No.”

  “Space aliens?”

  “Could be. But there’s no evidence either way.”

  “Demons?”

  “No. Lillie, what’s this all about?”

  “Oh,” she said, turning her head away, “Mom’s on a new kick.”

  He looked at her harder. “What sort of new kick?”

  “She thinks the apartment is haunted.”

  Keith groaned inwardly. That was all Barbara needed — a “haunting.” He said to Lillie, “What does Bill say?”

  Lillie’s face tightened. “He’s not there much anymore.”

  After barely a year. Keith ran over his schedule: He could maybe go see Barbara Monday night. It was too late today, he had a date tonight. And all day tomorrow he had to work. He took his niece’s hand across the wooden table. “Lillie, are you all right? With their … their marriage problems?”

  “I have to be,” she said pragmatically, and with no trace of self-pity. But clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. “Uncle Keith, tell me again about SkyPower.”

  “Well, it’s a nuclear reactor in stable orbit, as you know. When it’s finished it will generate enormous amounts of energy that will be beamed down to Earth as microwaves. We’ll get all the benefits of nuclear power without the contamination risks.”

  “You mean the owners of it will,” Lillie said, and Keith laughed. He enjoyed her shrewdness. She’d pulled her hand away from his; she was getting old enough to feel self-conscious about touching. The day was cold and she wore a bright red jacket. Sometime, he hadn’t noticed when, she’d had her ears pierced. Two tiny red hearts nestled in her ear lobes.

  She said, “And you’re the lawyer for SkyPower.”

  “Well, one of them.” His firm had only recently been named corporate counsel: a coup.

  “If anything goes wrong, you defend the company.”

  “So far nothing has gone wrong. Knock on wood.”

  She did, rapping on the pub table and saying, “Hello? Come in?” She laughed uproariously. Keith did, too, not because it was funny but because it was so good to see her throw back her head and guffaw. A second later, however, she glanced at the watch he’d given her. “I gotta go. Thanks for lunch!”

  “Don’t you want dessert?”

  “I can’t. Mom’s getting home soon. Thanks again!”

  Home from where? Keith wondered, but Lillie was gone, whirling out the door in a swirl of red. He must call Barbara tomorrow, not wait until Monday, find out what the current crisis was.

  But Sunday he had a casual, non-involving date. Monday turned out to be spent putting down brush fires. By the time he called his sister, it was too late.

  April 2013

  “The same clinic that did your sister did the little boy’s mother,” Jamal said, “the ChildGive IVF Institute in Croton-on-Hudson. It went out of business in January 2001. Started in May 1999. Eighteen months, and we’re looking at some very weird stuff, boss.”

  Keith nodded. He wasn’t going to tell Jamal yet again that Keith disliked being called the semi-mocking “boss.” Most investigators were good at one thing: leg work or computer hacking or underworld informants or turning a tiny site clue into an entire trail of reeking spores. Jamal Mahjoub did it all, or at least got it all done by somebody, and if he wanted to call Keith “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” he could. Jamal was small, with dark curly hair, glasses, and a face that looked about sixteen.

  “The clinic had four employees: a secretary, two nurses, and the doctor. The secretary and nurses check out, working types who just found other jobs when the clinic ‘went bankrupt.’ The doctor is something else. His name was Timothy—”

  “Was?” Keith interrupted.

  “He’s dead. Coming to that in a moment. Timothy Allen Miller. Born in 1970 and grew up in Siller, Ohio, a small town, mostly farming. Never fit in, the high school yearbook is full of little snide jokes about him. Valedictorian, went to Harvard, did brilliantly in premed but not popular there, either. Arrogant, but also weird in ways other arrogant pre-docs didn’t like. Full of conspiracy theories about everything, from the JFK assassination to secret Jewish banking cartels to some sort of black-Catholic alliance to overthrow the government.”

  “I can see why nobody liked him.”

  “Big time. He was brilliant at Harvard Med, intern and resident at Mass General, and then they didn’t want him on staff. Neither did anybody else.”

  Keith looked out the window. Ten floors below, two yellow cabs had run into each other on Madison. The drivers stood nose to nose, waving their fists.

  “So Miller joins a group practice, and that lasts two years. Then he opens up solo, and in a year he files for bankruptcy. He takes a job as a lab technician in Poughkeepsie.”

  “Quite a comedown,” Keith said.

  “And he felt it. Now Miller is bitter as well as arrogant. One of his coworkers said she thought he was the kind of guy who was someday going to come into work with an AK-47 and blow everybody away.”

  “But he doesn’t,” Keith said. You had to let Jamal tell it his own way, and he liked audience participation.

  “No. Instead, he channels all his weirdness into the Roswell thing. Aliens coming to Earth, all that.”

  Oh, God. Spare me the nuts. “Roswell is a long way from Poughkeepsie.”

  “Yeah. But Miller makes the trip, several times. He goes to meetings where UFO types huddle on the highway, waiting to be picked up.
And then one night, he is.”

  Keith grimaced and Jamal laughed.

  “Well, all right, he says he is. Comes into work and says he has important work to do, aliens have anointed him, blah blah. That same coworker is so creeped out she decides to quit, but the boss saves her the trouble by firing Miller. Miller had been AWOL for a solid month, no word, no excuse.”

  “Can’t blame the boss,” Keith said, keeping up his end. His hands felt like ice. Sometime in Jamais rambling tale, this lunatic medico was going to connect with Lillie.

  “No. But Miller just laughs at being fired—my informant was standing right there—and he saunters out, cocky as spaniels. A month later he opens ChildGive in Croton-on-Hudson. Big glossy offices, state-of-the-art equipment, competent personnel.”

  “Where’d the money come from?” Keith asked.

  “Don’t know. I couldn’t find the trail. But he pays his people well. Even so, none of them like their new boss. He’s a son of a bitch to work for. But he’s apparently good at what he does. He gets hundreds of couples pregnant in vitro, some with the parents’ egg and sperm, some with donors. But no shady stuff… every time he uses a donor, the parents agree, and all the paperwork dots the legal i’s and crosses the legal t’s.”

  “A model citizen.”

  “Yep. Not only that, but by this time enough genes for hereditary diseases have been identified that Miller picks and chooses his embryos and everybody gets as healthy a kid as possible. No complaints filed with any officials, scores of glowing thank-you letters, money coming in hand over fist. And then, eighteen months later, Miller closes shop.”

  “Why?”

  “He never said. Not to anybody. He waves his hand to make the whole thing go away, and it does. Then Miller himself disappears. No tax returns, no credit cards, no e-mail address, nothing.”

  “Murdered?”

  “You watch too much TV, boss. No, he was alive, but he changed his name, moved to New Mexico, and worked under the table in a restaurant. For two years, the waiters and restaurant owner and busboys and customers say he’s the happiest person they ever met. The original sunshine kid. Then he’s killed by a drunk driver while crossing Main Street.”

  “Did you―”

  “Of course. It really was an accident. Fifteen-year-old redneck kid without a license, been arrested for it before, drunk out of his mind. He’s still doing time in juvie for vehicular manslaughter. But now hold on, boss. Here it comes.”

  Keith waited.

  “In the last three months, twenty of Miller’s test-tube babies have gone into trances like your niece’s. They’re starting to find each other. I have the names, and one of the parents is a doctor. He’s actually a stepparent who married the mother of a girl like Lillie years after the kid was born, and he’s not a, what do you call it, a geneticist, but he knows enough to know what he’s looking at. And he’s mad as hell. His name is Dr. Dennis Reeder, and here’s his address in Troy, New York. He wouldn’t say much to me, but he’s raring to talk to you. A physician no less. Doctor, lawyer … all you need is an Indian chief.”

  Keith didn’t hire Jamal for his sensitivity. He took the card Jamal handed him and wrote the investigator a large check, plus bonus.

  He was going to find out what had been done to Lillie, and why.

  CHAPTER 3

  October 2012

  Barbara hung herself in the bathroom of her apartment the day before Halloween, three days after Bill Brown moved out. Lillie found her. She called 911, then the police, then Keith. By the time he tore over to the West Side, the cops and EMTs were there, filling up the messy space. Lillie had been sent to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, and the stoic resignation on her young face broke his heart. “Uncle Keith, I …”

  He sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder.

  “… I was too late to stop her. I stayed at the library too long.”

  All the anger at Barbara that he’d never expressed tsunamied over him. Barbara’s irresponsibility, her selfish throwing of all her problems onto other people whenever things got tough, her obstinate refusal to consider Lillie instead of making Lillie consider her … The strength of his anger frightened Keith. He fought to hold himself steady to Lillie’s need.

  “Honey, it isn’t your fault, not one little part of it is your fault. Your mother was mentally ill, she must have been to do this. Depressed. You aren’t to blame, Lillie.”

  “I should have come home earlier from the library. But it wasn’t … good here.” She closed her lips tightly together and Keith saw that this was all he was ever going to learn about living with Barbara during the last weeks.

  Damn her, damn her … God, his sister. Babs …

  He said shakily, “You’ll come live with me now, honey. I’ve got a spare room. We’ll move your furniture and things.” His mind raced over practicalities, glad to consider moving trucks and dressers instead of considering Babs. Whom he’d failed as badly as Barbara had failed Lillie.

  “Thank you,” Lillie said. “I think the police want to talk to me before we go.”

  They did. Awaiting his turn at interrogation, Keith walked out into the hallway, turned a corner, and pounded his fists on the wall. It didn’t help.

  He arranged for cremation of the body. He moved Lillie into his spare room, first throwing out the treadmill (no space) and emptying the closet of junk he didn’t even know he had. Through Lillie’s school he found a grief counselor whom Lillie saw every week. He informed Lillie’s school and pediatrician and the state of New York that he was now her legal guardian. The paperwork began its slow drift through various bureaucracies.

  Lillie turned quieter, more somber. But she didn’t collapse into hysterics or start doing crack or run wild in the streets. Keith discovered that it was pleasant, when he turned the key in his lock after work at seven or eight or nine o’clock, to be greeted by Lillie’s smile and a warmed-up casserole. On Saturdays (but not Sundays) he conscientiously refrained from work and took her places, unless she was going out with friends. He met her friends. She met the women he casually dated. Gradually they created a routine that satisfied them both.

  Quite abruptly, it seemed, Lillie’s body went into overdrive. One day she was almost as skinny as Barbara had been. The next day, she was wearing tight jeans and a midriff-baring top over a figure that made him blink. He found a box of tampons in the bathroom and pretended to not see them. Thirteen—was that early or late? There was no one he could ask. And Lillie seemed to be doing fine with her new body. Lipstick tubes appeared on the ornamental shelf under the foyer mirror, tubes with fantastic names: Peach Passion and Ruby Madness and Jelly Slicker. The names amused him.

  And then on March 10, 2013, Keith came home and found Lillie lying on the sofa, staring into space, and no amount of shouting or shaking or anything else could bring her out of it. An ambulance arrived within ten minutes, and as the medics carried Lillie on a stretcher out of the apartment, they bumped into the shelves and all the lipsticks clattered to the floor.

  April 2013

  Troy was an amazingly ugly city enjoying a huge economic boom because of technology invented at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and manufactured not far from the campus. Part of that manufactury, Keith knew, was parts for SkyPower, now being assembled in geosynchronous orbit. The Hudson River, a peculiar shade of sludge, flowed through the center of Troy.

  Dr. Dennis Reeder lived in a far suburb, away from the factories, surrounded by semi-open fields. Keith had forgotten how beautiful spring could be away from New York. Tulips and daffodils and even daisies foamed around the Reeder house; everything bloomed earlier now that summers had become so long and hot. The driveway where he parked his rented car was littered with plastic toys. A powerscooter, unchained and unlocked, leaned against the garage.

  “We keep our daughter at home with us,” Reeder told Keith. “My wife is a nurse. She quit working when this … happened to Hannah, and we’ve also
hired an aide. Would you like a drink, Mr. Anderson?”

  “Keith. Yes, please. Scotch, if you have it.”

  Reeder did. The large, comfortable house seemed equipped with everything. Hannah’s mother, a strikingly pretty blond woman with tired eyes, joined them in the living room but drank nothing.

  “Lillie is hospitalized,” Keith said. “I’m her only family.”

  Reeder said bluntly, “You’re an attorney. Are you considering some sort of class-action suit?”

  “No one to sue. If Miller were still alive, we’d pursue criminal charges. No, I’m here just as a parent.”

  “So are the rest of us. There are twenty-one kids like Hannah, that we know of so far. We’ve set up a list serve with — “

  “I’d like to be on it.”

  “Certainly. With a flag program to scan the entire Net continually for news articles, medical references, personal letters, anything that relates to this situation. One of our parents is a programmer. We come from all segments of society, since Miller offered his services nearly free as part of a ‘clinical trial.’ “

  Keith saw Barbara standing sideways, proudly showing off her non-existent stomach bulge. “This clinic is on a sliding income scale, very cheap. It’s because they’re part of some test.”

  Reeder continued, “The families are wildly different, and so are the kids. Were, I mean. Male, female, good kids, troublemakers, academics, jocks, dropouts, everything. But every single one has that same quiescent growth in the frontal lobe and that same increase in cerebral neurons of as much as twenty percent and the same PLI firing patterns. Plus, of course, all those unknown genes on chromosome six.”

  “Are they completely unknown? Don’t we know what proteins they code for?”

  “Yes, in that codons only make twenty amino acids all together,” Reeder said patiently. Keith could tell he’d given this speech to non-scientists before. “But how those twenty then combine and fold—folding is the crucial part—can result in thousands of different proteins. Also, multiple alleles at multiple loci can influence gene expression. Hannah’s extra genes don’t seem to be making any proteins at all at the moment, or none that we can detect in her bloodstream.