The Starry Rift Part 16

When I'm ready, I'll have to get an ovum from somewhere. Of course, the lab is full of them; in fact, Dr. Harris subscribes to a bank and orders them whenever she needs them. I could probably find out all the codes and go online and order some myself. Although that doesn't really seem right. I mean, Dr. Harris trusts me, and she would get in a lot of trouble if anyone found out about that, or if anyone found out about Sam. Which they would. It's hard to hide a baby.

That's one of the problems I have. It's not that it can't be done. It's that everything has to be a secret. I'm not sure if that's a good idea, or even possible. Sometimes it scares me.

But then I think of Sam. The world winks, like it does now. It winks from the cold machines and from the lab gla.s.s and from the tall locked cabinets, and Sam is there saying, It's the right thing, sis, through all of the colors and the shapes around me.

And so, I have to.

Dr. Harris comes in. "Hi, Eelie. I didn't know if I'd see you today."

"Hi, Dr. Harris."

She has a little frown on her freckled face. Her frizzy blonde hair is not very long, but long enough to pull back in a bun. She is tall and reminds me of a sailboat mast. It holds the sail and has a light at the top. It's the most important part of a sailboat.

"I heard you missed school the other day."

"I was looking for wra.s.ses."

"Look for them on Sat.u.r.day." She opens a refrigerator door- there are lots of refrigerators in the lab-and pulls out a bottle of spring water, and the lid makes a slight snapping sound as she twists it off. She leans back against the counter and takes a swig. "Look, Eelie, I do have some responsibilities here. I'm supervising you." She looks at me with serious blue eyes between white eyelashes and pale blonde eyebrows and somehow I think that maybe she knows what I'm up to, which is impossible. I haven't told a soul.

I am running through the rain. Running, running, running, down Duval Street, dodging slow, oblivious, probably drunk tourists. I hear my feet pound; they glance at me from beneath parrot-colored umbrellas because my long hair and all of me is soaked and because I must look so glad and they are all p.i.s.sed because it's a cold front and they've spent big bucks to come down here in winter and bask in hot subtropical sunlight. I feel water stream from my face because my very speed, my ecstatic celebratory speed, pushes it backward almost as if I were taking flight myself, Flying Girl, Sundiver Day, my arms pushed against my side as I leave the ground and fly out over the Everglades. But my feet still touch the sidewalk. Breathless, I round a corner and the center of my chest is a bright, glowing sun, and I run past the World-Famous Oyster Bar and the absurdly expensive Frank's and onto the concrete dock past millionaires' yachts and then pound onto the narrow wooden extension where Sam and I used to meet, him in the Zodiac and me just out of school, and thread through the harbor full of anch.o.r.ed sailboats, pa.s.s the Glittering Isle of Incredible Wealth, and speed out into the Everlasting Everglades.

"I did it!" I stop (if I had wheels they would screech) at the end of the dock, wavering, almost pitching forward into the cold water. Again, I shout, "I did it I did it I did it I did it!" My breath comes from way down deep, from running. A gust of cold wind sprays wavelet salt over me. "You did it, Sam." I am whispering now, and s.h.i.+vering, and my tears surprise me. "It's you. You're going to be born again. In eight months."

And then I really do fly off the end of the dock, up into the drizzle, and circle over the yachts and the Magic Penny Water Taxi making its way across the harbor, and then it takes off too and I know I'm dreaming and wake up.

Moonlight filters through the Bahama shutters on my windows, and a breeze flits through the room. Palm fronds move languidly outside, and their shadows modulate shadow and light into even thinner slivers. The sweet smell of night-blooming jasmine is heavy in the air. Esmeralda moves back and forth on her perch, squawks, ruffles her feathers, dozes off again.

I get up and open the top drawer of my dresser, paw away the underwear, get out the kit.

Now that I have it, I am afraid.

I got it from a sales rep. Phizer-Wellbourne-Merce, whose sample fertility kits the rep carried with her in a large leather case, had probably paid to have her face regrown, and her right eyebrow was a tiny bit lower than her left. She looked very striking, though, with her hard blue eyes, black eyebrows (one crooked), and smooth, smooth, smooth blonde hair. She wore a green tropical suit and lots of gold and the highest heels I'd ever seen. Dr. Harris had gone to a meeting for a week and so the rep pitched to me.

"Just for practice," she said, grinning.

"I'm Dr. Harris's research a.s.sistant." In case she thought I was a kid doing cleaning work, despite the crisp lab coat I wore with my name sewn in blue above the pocket.

She looked skeptical. I slouched back against a soapstone lab table and crossed my arms. "We use the Bathfeldt Xygote Kit. It is extremely dependable and our birth rate is the highest in the world, for what we do."

"Oh. Really." She arched her highest eyebrow at me. "Well, this kit is a breakthrough."

"In what way?"

"I'm not sure you'd understand, but these hormones help the zygote implant in the womb at a much higher rate."

By the time she was gone, I had convinced her to leave four sample kits. They were off the record, unlike everything else in the lab, which was all meticulously accounted for down to the last Chinese nano-suture kit, which knits incisions seamlessly, and, probably, the last lowly, old-fas.h.i.+oned aspirin.

I felt a little bit sick, then, alone in the s.h.i.+ning lab with my wra.s.ses languidly swimming in their aquarium and Sam-in-the-Hair-Shaft, whom I had the power to make into two cells, then four, then eight. . . .

I stuffed one of the kits into my pack and ran home. Without changing, I jumped into my Zodiac and sped through the ca.n.a.l, ignoring Mr. Albert in bathing suit and fish tank top, brandis.h.i.+ng a beer can and yelling, "For G.o.d's sake, Eelie! Slow down!" as my wake smacked into neighbors' docks, making their boats buck and test their lines like wild ponies bent on escape. The day seemed way too sunny and bright, the bay too stunningly blue and green, the mangrove islands too filled with white herons.

When I got to my creek, I was soaked from spray. I threw my lab coat into a corner, crumpled up and getting engine grease on it, and wondered why I wanted to stomp on it.

I sat there in the stillness, waiting for the world to wink.

It didn't.

I saw the same mangroves and snappers and the same brilliant sky with clouds teetering on the edge of green-hued crystal that he had seen. But it did not move. It might have been painted there. I sat within a postcard of our past.

Then a pelican plummeted, far off, and the world resumed.

I have to do this, I told myself, I have to.

If I don't do it, I am killing Sam. He'll die.

Completely and for always.

They wouldn't put me in jail-after all, I was way too young to know what I was doing. Wasn't I? Of course, they might put my mother in jail. Or Dr. Harris.

And who was Sam, anyway?

My big brother. Sitting across from me in the bow on this day's twin sister, taking pictures with his eyes that he would later download by pressing his index finger onto his photo touchpad. He could zoom, adjust the f-stop, perform any function of the fanciest digital camera by touching one or another of his fingers to his thumb in a particular cadence. Staring and staring. I hadn't known that he was playing with war toys. I hadn't known that he had already been recruited. Neither had Mom.

But oh, he wanted to go. He wanted the fanciest and most powerful enhancements available. Binocular eyes, night-vision eyes, nanotech cells with memory, everlasting life. "Look, sis!" Pulling his screen from his s.h.i.+rt pocket and snapping it open as we sat on shaded benches in the park. "Look at what humans can be now!"

I peered at the tiny images. "That's in the future, Sam."

He looked at me with serious eyes. "No, Sundiver. This is the present. But the only people who can use them are the people who go to war. It's military stuff. That's the way this happens. It's who pays for this stuff, how it is developed."

I bent over the screen, watching a tiny figure metamorph from human to man-bird, from man-bird to man-fish.

"Where are the girls?" Woman into fishhawk, woman into dolphin and back again to woman, that's what I longed to see. My grown-up self diving into sky and diving into sea and diving back into air. Swimming in all mediums. Collecting information with my new eyes, clacking my beak in cadence, squeaking commands to my onboard organic computers.

He ran through the options. "Good point. They aren't here, are they? Girls can do all this, though. Maybe they give a different one to female recruits."

"I'm going to do it too."

His tight hug squeezed me sideways for an instant, then he let go. "You'll do it for science, Sunny. For fun. Not for war."

"But you're-"

He furled his screen and stuck it in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. "This is from the army. I shouldn't be showing it to you. Right now this is all experimental. It could be dangerous. No one really knows what will happen to people yet. It's like genetic engineering, this bio-nanotech stuff. You know something about that, eh? How will the smallest, most beneficial-seeming change affect us down the line?"

"Machines 'R' us."

"R you R." He poked me with his elbow.

"R we ever what we seem?" I was thinking of all those unexpressed genes, everywhere, waiting.

We had this conversation for two months, and finally he told Mom what he'd done. She just said sadly, "Oh, Sam." She bowed her head. Tears flowed down her face, but it was the oddest kind of crying, because her face didn't move, she was so stunned. My chest squeezed in pain. I had to go out on the porch, with my parrots.

Ed greeted me. "Up against the wall. Up against the wall."

"I think so," I told Ed. "I guess you're right after all."

We were at the harbor. "Once I get back, Sundiver, I'll be able to fly. You'll be underwater with gills, and I'll be in the air, your mirror. We'll speed." He told me this on the dock before his transport s.h.i.+p pulled out and got tiny on the horizon and then vanished. He hugged me tight. He was eighteen, old and wise and stupid and young. "Bye, Sundiver."

Bye.

"Mom, have you ever thought of having another baby?"

She whirls in the kitchen in the morning sunlight, which dapples the old, tall gla.s.s-door cupboards, the twentieth-century porcelain sink, the Art Deco light fixture that always reminds me of speed, velocity. Coffee sloshes over the edge of her cup, and she makes an odd sound, kind of like laughing but kind of like choking. Then she gets serious.

"Honey, I'm pretty old."

"Not really. I mean, you could have one if you wanted, couldn't you?"

"I guess. Let's sit down for a while."

The kitchen table is an old wooden one, painted white, covered with a vintage tablecloth. Gigantic pink hibiscus wave outside the screen door, their huge faces impa.s.sive. I take a slice of coffee cake from the platter and slather it with b.u.t.ter. Mom rests her arms on the table, leaning forward, holding her coffee cup in both hands. Earnest. She bows her head, thinking, then looks at me levelly. "I'm a little worried about you, Eelie."

"I'm okay." I take a bite of coffee cake and drop crumbs everywhere.

"Dr. Harris says that-"

I leap out of my chair like a spring toy, dropping the coffee cake on the floor, shouting, "What is she doing? Spying on me for you?"

"Sit down, sit down. Of course not."

I don't sit down. "It looks like it to me."

"We can't bring Sam back."

"Yes we can!" Suddenly I am, like, five years old. I want to fling myself on the floor and scream. "We can!"

"Technically, yes. Of course we can. We can clone him." Her tone of voice is so reasonable. "It's a possibility."

I stare at her.

"I clone orchids all the time. It's easy. But they aren't as complicated as humans. They have no emotions. They have no brain. Not only do we have a brain, we have frontal lobes. We think. We grieve. We feel joy. We have memory."

"Find Sam then! Take his memory back! The one the army gave him!" I am screaming, furious, and suddenly my tears are on the outside, hot on my face. "Put it in the new Sam!"

She looks amused, which makes me even angrier. "Does that seem quite fair to you?" She quirks her head sideways. "How about we find it and put it in you?"

"No! I'm not Sam! I'm Sundiver Day!"

"You're my fierce Eelie." She gets up and hugs me, tight. "My wonderful, beautiful, brilliant girl. Think about what you just said." She takes her cup of coffee and steps out the back door into the garden, shutting the screen door behind her so gently it only makes a slight clunk.

I get out the hormone kit and leave it on my nightstand.

Mom seems to take a few days to notice it, but I'm sure she noticed it the first morning. She picks it up, turns it over, and reads the back of the package. "I hear these are really good." Then she sets it back down and kisses my forehead. "It's your choice, honey. I'll support you whatever you do."

When she leaves, it is as if the sun is huge and golden, infusing the entire room. Alouicious and Esmeralda lock beaks as they perch on the back of a chair, making funny little squawks, and the red and blue and green and yellow of them are astonis.h.i.+ngly bright, so bright that it hurts my eyes and the rainbow vision swims in tears. A warm gust of wind blows through the room, and outside my little balcony the tops of palm trees dance their clicking tango, fronds flung this way and that like the long hair of little girls. The plumeria tree is in bloom, and rich perfume flows inside for just a second before it is borne away by the antic bright wind, the loud, tropical jubilation of the day.

The possibility of Sam sits there, and I can use it whenever I want.

It's funny. Just knowing that seems to be the most important thing.

They do find him, a few months later, and his memory. They give us back the uncla.s.sified pictures and movies. There are lots and lots of me.

I'm a stranger to myself, seeing me through his eyes. In one movie we're out on the reef, snorkeling. I laugh and argue about something, I can't quite hear my words because it's so loud out there, with the wind and the waves. I look very, very young. I fling back my head and dive sideways into the sun's reflection on the water.

"I love you, Sundiver!" he shouts when I surface out at the reef after swirling to look at a vast ray, its wingspan at least twenty feet long, and flip to swim with it for a few feet. I remember how fast it was, and how I managed to touch its speckled wingtip, unafraid of its legendary stinging tail. "Don't be mad!"

I see myself, and it's odd, my face still covered with the mask, treading water. I spit out my snorkel mouthpiece. "It's so beautiful," I shout back, my voice small in the roar of the wind and the sound of waves slapping the boat.

As I watch these pictures, sometimes in the garden, sometimes at night when I wake up at three, and the only thing I see is the glowing screen in my hands, the world does slowly wink again, and deepens somehow, and Ed stirs on his perch and sometimes flies to my shoulder to watch with me. "Sammy," he croaks. "Sammy."

The world brims with tears, and I feel them all. It's a miracle. I don't know how it happened.

KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN has been a packer for a moving company, a vagabond, a madrigal singer, a painter of watercolors, and is a fiercely omnivorous reader. She has a degree in English and a.s.sociation Montessori Internationale certification. After teaching for thirteen years, ten of them in her own one-hundred-student school, she began writing. She has published over twenty short stories in venues such as Omni, Asimov's, F&SF, Interzone, scifi.com, and a host of others. Her Nanotech Quartet includes Queen City Jazz, Mississippi Blues, Crescent City Rhapsody, and Light Music; the latter two were both shortlisted for the Nebula Award. The Bones of Time, shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, is set in Hawaii. Her most recent novel is In War Times. Her novels and short stories have been published in France, Poland, Russia, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, and j.a.pan. "Literature, Consciousness, and Science Fiction" recently appeared in the Iowa Review online journal. She speaks frequently at various universities about nanotechnology and literature.

Her Web site is www.goonan.com.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

I have lived in the Florida Keys for the past fifteen years. "Sundiver Day" is an outgrowth of a YA novel I have been working on, The Water Rats, in which four teenaged girls of various backgrounds, living in the Florida Keys, have access to stunningly beautiful, sometimes treacherous Florida Bay, which they explore at every opportunity in their own small boat. This life on the water exposes them to danger and mysteries and magnifies their own ever-changing relations.h.i.+p to each other, to the world around them, and to the adult world, which they soon must enter. At sixteen, Eelie is utterly devastated by her brother's death; "Sundiver Day" is essentially a story about dealing with the fact of death and newly available choices in a world that is becoming increasingly science fictional.

THE DUST a.s.sa.s.sIN.

Ian McDonald.

When I was a small, a steel monkey would come into my room. My ayah put me to bed early, because a growing girl needed sleep, big sleep. I hated sleep. The world I heard beyond the carved stone jali screens of my verandah was too full of things for sleep. My ayah would set the wards, but the steel monkey was one of my own security robots and invisible to them. As I lay on my side in the warmth and perfume of dusk, I would see first its little head, then one hand, then two appear over the lip of my balcony, then all of it. It would crouch there for a whole minute, then slip down into the night shadows filling up my room. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I would see it watching me, turning its head from one side to the other. It was a handsome thing, metal sh.e.l.l burnished as soft as skin (for in time it came close enough for me to slip a hand through my mosquito nets to stroke it) and adorned with the symbol of my family and its make and serial number. It was not very intelligent, less smart than the real monkeys that squabbled and fought on the rooftops, but clever enough to climb and hunt the a.s.sa.s.sin robots of the Azads along the ledges and turrets and carvings of the Jodhra Palace. And in the morning I would see the steel monkeys lining the ledges and rooftops with their solar cowls raised, and then they did not seem to me like monkeys at all, but cousins of the sculpted G.o.ds and demons among which they sheltered, giving salutation to the sun.

You never think your life is special. Your life is just your life, your world is just your world, even lived in a Rajput Palace defended by machine monkeys against an implacable rival family. Even when you are a weapon.

Those four words are my memory of my father: his face filling my sight like the Marwar moon, his lips, full as pomegranates, saying down to me, You are a weapon, Padmini, our revenge against the Azads. I never see my mother's face there: I never knew her. She lived in seclusion in the zenana, the women's quarters. The only woman I ever saw was my ayah, mad Harpal, who every morning drank a steaming gla.s.s of her own p.i.s.s. Otherwise, only men. And Heer, the khidmutgar, our steward. Not man, not woman: other. A nute. As I said, you always think your life is normal.

Every night, the monkey-robot watched me, turning its head this way, that way. Then one night it slipped away on its little plastic paws and I slid out of my nets in my silk pajamas after it. It jumped up on the balcony, then in two leaps it was up the vine that climbed around my window. Its eyes glittered in the full moon. I seized two handfuls of tough, twisted vine, thick as my thigh, and was up after it. Why did I follow the steel monkey? Maybe because of that moon on its t.i.tanium sh.e.l.l. Maybe because that was the moon of the great kite festival, which we always observed by flying a huge kite in the shape of a man with a bird's tail and outstretched wings for arms.

My father kept all the festivals and rituals, the feasts of the G.o.ds. It was what made us different from, better than, the Azads. That man with wings for arms, flying up out of the courtyard in front of my apartment with the sun in his face, could see higher and farther than I, the only daughter of the Jodhras, ever could.