by Moira Crone
I was alarmed by what I saw, behind her, in the two windows on either side of the bedstead. There was supposed to be a period of calm, another six hours before Isis approached. But crests of foam were marching forward toward the outside decks. She continued: “For me it was all still in the realm of theory—apparently not with Lazarus—I never doubted the Promise of the Reveal. Now you may think I may have—but my investigations were about keeping the Promise—I was looking in the wrong place, however. And you saved me. I am grateful.”
“Well, he is gone now,” I said and pulled away. She couldn’t see what Camille saw, what losing him had meant to me.
“There used to be some saying among the Gramercy Nats—‘don’t speak ill of the so-longed,’ something like that. The ones who worked at the Curing Tower. I guess you would know,” she said. “I heard from Klamath about your exploits among the Gramercy girls. There was no way not to hear about that—went to jail with Serio? This girl—was it that fat thumb who used to work at the Curing Towers? Never mind. Of course it doesn’t matter. You know who you are, after all.”
She stretched out her long, newly plumped and fattened arm. The prodermis was slightly thicker than the one she had before. She explained women were being minted, as it was said in Memphis, slightly thicker these days. She wanted me to notice. She went on. “Lazarus didn’t get over that yearning, that Nat thing—that his life should mean something, have a purpose, that gnawing, you think can be satisfied, really satisfied—that’s what he failed to overcome.” Then she smiled. “It’s an absurd proclivity, actually. What broke him? The truth! That it doesn’t. That Chotchko thinks she has isolated, chemically—there is a way it might be obliterated. It’s a trace of end-consciousness. It comes from having a deep imprint about the end, the foreknowledge there will be an end, when things will have their final meaning—this fallacy. In fact, she’s trying something out on me, and I think it works very well. But you never had the problem. Grandiosity. It’s a late form of grandiosity. In that you are lucky—except for your promise to me, your life hasn’t had that impulse, to see a system, a shape, into which you might fit. You have controlled the impulse, haven’t you? Once you told me, What if its meaning is that it doesn’t end? Well you were right. Indeed, for a Not Yet you have done such a wonderful job of managing mostly all of your impulses, I’ve never said this before, have I? I think you are going to be a marvelous Heir, very apt, certain to fit in. In this floating world. I was taken in by some hope for a grand theory, but I went too far,” she said. “You brought me back. I am so grateful. I mean, why go after the unknowable? Futility. Futility. Nothing is fixed. You kept me on the right path. You broke the strat rules, you knew that all rules can be broken—they are fluid like everything else—” She leaned over to me and kissed me—it wasn’t what I’d thought. She was soft and cool, like cotton, that softness. She said, “Thank you. ”
I winced. I worried when she saw this. “You aren’t going to look for the conduit anymore? You aren’t going to try to help the Chronics that way?” I asked. “Chart the territory?” I had to change the subject.
“I think that other purpose—the grandiose purpose—of finding the way out while in the body, is too ambitious. And probably dangerous. Even the mystics back there, the ancient Nat mystics, said most who ascend will come back mad. Look at our Chronics. Lunatics, half of them, certainly without Chotchko’s serums. I was going mad. And you saved me. Your love!” Her features crumpled, and flopped, into a sentimental expression I’d never seen on her before. Very awkward, even ugly. She put her hands into my hands, humbling herself, and mouthed, “I love you.”
I missed her old hands. These were recast. Hands speak of the person, say things the eyes and the face do not reveal, say things about the person’s instrument, the person’s interior, her capacity, her sensibility, what means she has been given to get through life, what tactics. Weakness and beauty, technique and roughness, sheer power, rapacious desires—these were things hands could announce. The proclivities of the body, the capacities—an artist’s hands, a musician’s hands, a mason’s hands, a wrestler’s hands. Even in Heirs these proclivities could be announced. I thought these things while she made me hold her newly-designed hands. She told me she chose from an array of one hundred and ninety-eight patterns. She explained the new ones were formed with nanotech cartilege fibers, which grew in her own bones like crystals might grow, amazing—this was done to lengthen the tips. Her fingers were so long that the tip past the final joint seemed to have been designed by some ancient, expressionist painter, like the long slender wisps of lily stalks, of iris leaves. But more and more, I missed her emaciated, blue-white body, that we found when we flayed her. Her actual, vulnerable, self. I had cared for her when she was that.
Then, with enormous relief, I thought of Camille’s wide, supple hands, fingers thick and each one round as a child’s sturdy pencil, all full of strength, and flexibility as well, and ready for rapid-working.
“I thought you might like them,” Lydia said and then she showed me her ears. “I got these new at the same time. I was tired of the old ones,” she said. “Soon as we leave, we can both go in and be redesigned. You will have to get a new ear, anyhow, up in Memphis. You can’t have that scar. We don’t have to always be the same lovers—we can change—you can be Hercules, and also Malcolm, and I can be Venus or Mona Lisa or Cinderella, or—we can do it every few decades. The prices are coming down.”
She could see I was put off.
“Of course we can remain who we are if that is what you would like—Lydia and Malcolm and Malcolm and Lydia.” And she kissed me full and dry on the mouth, again. I did not respond. She did not feel real.
“What is it?” she asked.
“You should go,” I said. “Get ready to go—WELLVAC wants you out of here. Klamath said—”
“There’s time,” she said. “Besides—I don’t really, believe in the hurricane, or whatever it is. I have never believed in these storms. These images they have of the past, of the wind, the risings tides, these promises of the doom—they never pan out. It just will not happen—I know this—these calamities they promise never do. Klamath was always claiming the house was going to flood. It never—”
“We shored it up for you two times,” I said. “We raised it at least a foot, altogether, so you could stay here—Klamath and Serio and I, we spent months—when you were in retreat.”
“Is that what you were doing?” she asked blankly.
“We used jacks, special ones, for fixing pilings underwater—don’t you remember?”
“So many things have happened,” she said, with a laugh. “You and the staff, your little escapades—out here in the country. I thought, after I get you back from Memphis, we will go to civilization. Back to the Towers. I would like to return, rework my opus—I don’t think the gossips will be that bad. My lover, a Nuovo, that will just be the way it is. We will overcome. They will just have to get used to it.” She kissed me again.
“What is wrong?” she asked. “You miss that madman? Things you have seen on your journey? Forget them. Chotchko has wonderful protocols for forgetting. Everything will be so obvious when you are Treated. I’ve called in all sorts of favors. They will take you within the year. They will. Isn’t that wonderful?”
I did not want to disappoint her. It was a small thing, a thread—this not wanting to hurt her—and also, something more, possibly, held me back.
I didn’t answer. She said, “Oh darling, don’t be so shy. You have always been so shy. Be bold.”
But I wasn’t bold.
*
Later we were puttering around in the kitchen—she’d taken up the notion that I needed coffee, and then she had taken up the even stranger notion that she was going to prepare it for me. It was oddly charming, to see her in her elegant gown and her elaborate head job, and her new pin-point thin fingers trying to negotiate around a Nat kitchen, trying to do something for her “lover.” To please me. I wondered if she’d seen
my face when she’d referred to Camille, called her a fat thumb. Of course Lydia was pitiful at making coffee. While I was watching her, it came to me to tell her—about Ariel and his quest. And the Mo Lion episode in Mississippi. As a way of working around to my subject, the thing I had to tell her that I hadn’t been able to tell her yet. Would I be able to? She asked several questions, which seemed to me casual. When she finally put something in front of me in a dark glass cup—something that came from a coffee press, something mixed with half a can of Mexican canned milk, the same thickness and color as river mud, I finished the Ariel story, and briefly outlined the Mo Lion story. I thought of taking out the letter to show her, but then, I remembered I was keeping it, taking it with me—wasn’t I?
She was dipping her finger into the mud, taking a taste. She was cheating, of course—brosias only is the rule for the newly returned from the Re-job, any hint of Nat food could hurt the newly worked stomachs. But she was taking the risk, in order to share something.
Her interest reminded me of the days last summer before we had persuaded her to go, when she insisted we sit outside. She would slurp down bits of shrimp and broth out of my bowl. When she wanted things she couldn’t have—it was her yearning, that had attracted me, her curiosity, her bravery—for an Heir, she was very brave. I saw.
“Did I show the charm? What Ariel based his belief on?” I asked.
“What charm?” she asked
“I have it,” I said. I pulled it from my pocket, as I had done for Mo Lion.
She picked it up and put it right down. As if handling it were a hazard. Her shoulders crunched, moved up toward her new tiny ears, and then she was consciously trying to lower them, trying to push down on the thin cords of her neck, or elongate her spine so they wouldn’t show as much.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Now, you say, he went to these Gaists and they had the birth records for the West Florida Federation—including the rebels? The ones that clung to the idea of a new state? Who followed John of Pensacola?”
“You have heard of this?” I asked. “But then, you knew some of them earlier, didn’t you?” I remembered her big books with the pictures.
Something complicated was going on behind her eyes. “The John I knew became the radical, John of Pensacola. I knew him in his youth. Didn’t I show you his picture?” Some new struggle, a smaller version of the dance in the cords of her neck. It was odd, to see such a reaction in an Heir. Prodermises were like full body masks. “So you know, then? Ariel saw the records of these births?”
“That was the scientist you were with? Yes, I see,” I said. But I didn’t see.
“So you know, I knew it would be all right, I never bothered, really, once I realized—” she said. “This was ninety-some years ago. It’s practically as if the statute of limitations. The ownership, the—then he did things to them, to their genes,” she backtracked. “And Ariel has made some connection between these infants born at the West Florida Federation, all during the time the place was under blockade—and these others born earlier—”
“He says we were born from surrogates, who received the frozen embryos. John had lost most of his followers, so he was breeding more. Something like that,” I said. “They call them Salamanders, there are myths about them. Apparently they are revered, by those who believe in the West Florida cause, and others—they have gifts, he says—”
She nodded quietly, timidly, almost. “Well then you don’t know,” she said.
“He says he and I were two more—”
She told me to shush.
“It is true, the history, the embargo, the raids, the torpedo boats, the sham of help from Spain—some of the refugees washed up on Haiti. Others, on Cuba. One small group fled into the Alabama hills. I thought perhaps you’d come from them. There were always rumors there were more than Jude and Neil.” She rubbed her plump new cheek with her long spidery hands. As if she were wiping something away. Her face was thick and hard to read.
She took a long time, not speaking. “So do you know? Or not,” she said, finally. Then she took a deep breath. “Remember I used to ask you questions, what you thought about a past life? I thought you were second generation somehow, a descendent.” Then she looked out the slender window by the kitchen table, to avoid me.
“What?”
“They are called second-born. That was what John named them, when he saw how they developed—”
I looked out there, too. The whitecaps tumbling over each other, as before, perhaps speeding up. As if a film had been put on double-time, now. She looked back, straightening her spine. She smiled her smile that meant love, which made me feel rather sick inside. I didn’t like feeling sorry for her. “What is it?” I asked.
She said, “First, my part. I will tell you. You should know. I suppose. It has to do with your root self. I felt I owed him this small thing. He’d been my helpmeet—steadfast. Like you. So like you—always close. For his part, he saw the best in me, which is my intellect. I thought it would be a good thing, to sacrifice. Sacrifice is always a mistake—you know that, don’t you? We are better than such impulses, they are based on a false premise—that we are part of something more than ourselves. A false premise, terribly powerful. But I will never believe it again.” She shook her decorated head. “And how many perspectives can one woman afford? Even if she is intelligent? But I was under its spell in those days. And then he gave me that drug, which I couldn’t stand. It was part of the procedure. I was past forty, still a Nat. I felt for several days as if I were swimming in my own hot milk. Femininity, breeding—there’s a terrible side to it. I felt awful things—sadness, remorse, slogging through these mammal feelings, so good when they are gone—you have no idea, and you won’t, you are male. None of the things you yearn for ripen so readily into pain.”
Yes they do, I thought to myself. For I yearned to leave her, and I felt all the pain of it.
The waves were rising even more now, one broke over the outside pier. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Perhaps by then, I did know, but I didn’t let myself. I just felt queasy. As if we were on a boat that was rocking.
“Pain in your belly, this sense of something being drawn down and then in, this yearning one has to give everything away—to turn oneself inside out—to want this—can you imagine, wanting this? Never mind. He put me on a table, and in the stirrups like a cow, just like a cow. With a tiny tube, a miniscule straw, sip-sip-sip, ova, ova, and then I was altered. It was illegal. For me, the Procreation Laws had gone into effect, technically, at that point. It was after I’d won the Albers Prize. I was a Not Yet. I couldn’t reproduce! ‘Prizewinners,’ he said, ‘high quality,’ he said. He flattered me. He took the eggs, and he went in and worked on them. He fertilized them himself. He was younger than me. I was almost forty.” Her face came right into mine, not even inches away. “In fact, I saw that the first moment I laid eyes on you, but I didn’t want to believe it. It was only later, when I saw how you did on your tests, then when I’d read his old letters, what he said about the malformation of the mouth. Albers had made it clear that genes couldn’t work. Not for our extension. Not for our perpetuation. Our descendants, yes, perhaps, but they were not us, so what was the point? And John said that was short sighted, we could change the whole next generation. The whole race, not just the elite. He said he’d found the genes, the ones for aging, the ones that program death—but he hadn’t. Evolving. That thing John always believed in, evolving. But honestly, why evolve?” She looked at me as if I understood. As if I already knew. Or perhaps she hoped it, so she wouldn’t have to tell me. “When they matured, the children, whom he called the second-borns, it was clear they would age—so he hadn’t succeeded as he had expected: instead, they had a certain vision. He said, ‘I’ve not cured them of death. I’ve cured them of fearing it. It’s amazing. It’s how they perceive, what they perceive! They don’t live only in this time and place. They are immortal in another way—as if in the moment. It’s a flaw, how w
e see time. They don’t have that flaw!’ Whatever that means. He made sure they were protected, kept out of the public eye in Cuba, so they could develop, undisturbed. But then, they attracted people around them. He described to me, particularly, what they said about the experience of being formed, entering the tiny body of a baby—he said they had told him what it was like—a condensation, a pressure—they remembered death, they knew. He said I should be proud, to be their—donor was not the word he used. He wrote in great detail about their descriptions of the ‘voyage’ over there, on the other side of this, as he put it—quite a geography, as he put it—mystical clap trap, you know, the kind of thing I was under the sway of.” She pouted.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“I’m not proud to have brought such sufferers into the world, who don’t have the good genes to find a bearable desirable amnesia. Who are starting, for Alber’s sake, some kind of movement, cult. It’s disgraceful, actually.”
“Was this, that John wrote you, was this why you wanted to go find that way, that conduit? That passage? That’s why you took up that research?”
“I suppose,” she shrugged. “But I certainly didn’t want anyone descended from me to feel any pain, to suffer, to know death—or any who are here now.”
“So there were others?” I asked. “He harvested eggs from lots of women? This was a program?”
She didn’t answer. “So you really don’t know?”
Then it came to me. Finally, it came to me, consciously. Came at me from behind, like an attack. I was stunned, numb.
“Well, I didn’t bear you. I was nearly a hundred when you were born—I was an Heir when you were born. So it doesn’t count. But it turns out I’m actually, technically—but it’s just an artifact, I thought grandmother, possibly, even great—but of course he froze them, kept them,” she said. “An anomalous, irritating fact, which doesn’t make a bit of difference.” She wagged her head, and backed away, as if something in my gaze had set her back. “It doesn’t make any difference to our love, except to seal it,” she said. “In fact perhaps it is one of the reasons I consented to your offer. There is a clarity about it, a symmetry, something mysterious, we have met—somehow—if you want that to be romantic, I suppose it is.”