Authors: Nothing Human
Nancy Kress (3 page)
“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.
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.
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.
“But remember, Keith, that if the brain cells are making proteins to induce the trance Hannah and Lillie are in, the proteins or neurotransmitters or whatever is responsible may be found only in the brain, contained by the blood-brain barrier. Sixty percent of all messenger RNAs are expressed in the brain at some point. However, there’s nothing odd that we could detect in Hannah’s cerebrospinal fluid, either.”
Keith sat quietly, trying to absorb it all.
Reeder poured himself a second drink. “But of course genes do other things as well, including form the fetus. Presumably some of those extra genes are responsible for the anomalies in Hannah’s and Lillie’s brains.”
“So Miller, when he was doing the
in vitro
fertilization, did he―”
“No. Not possible,” Reeder said, and that made the third doctor who had said that to Keith. Yet here the impossibilities were, in the form of twenty-one children.
“Inserting specific genes in specific places in the human genome is really difficult,” Reeder said. “And thirteen years ago we knew even less. The inserted genes have a way of splicing themselves into unsuitable locations, disrupting other working genes. Also, the transpons and retroviruses that were the means of delivering genes into an embryo twelve years ago could never have carried as big a gene load as this. That Miller could have accomplished that—not to mention designing the genes in the first place!—with identical results for at least twenty-one babies, isn’t possible. I don’t care how much of a genius he was. The techniques just didn’t, and don’t, exist.”
Keith knew he was going to make a fool of himself. “What if it wasn’t Miller’s science? What if he got it, spelled out step by step, from elsewhere?”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
Reeder frowned. “No other country is that far ahead of us, if that’s what you’re thinking. Genetic information is shared internationally.”
“Not another country.”
Linda Reeder spoke for the first time. “What are you hinting at?”
“I’m not hinting, only speculating. Somebody knew a lot more genetics than we do. Aliens?”
They both stared at him. Linda rose abruptly. “I better check on Hannah.” She strode from the room, every line of her body scornful.
“I know how that sounds,” Keith said. “I’m not saying I believe it myself. But Miller did tell people he’d been abducted, and he was missing for a month. My investigator, who’s the best there is, verified that.”
Reeder finished his second drink. “I prefer to stick to facts. There’s only one more I haven’t given you. In every case I’ve tested, it looks as if the trance state began with the onset of puberty. There are numerous genes that switch on then, and it’s possible they also switched on whatever of the inserted genes are active in the children’s brains.”
Puberty. Lillie’s blossoming body, the box of tampons, the lipsticks clattering to the floor. “I see.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything more I can tell you,” Reeder said. “If you give me your e-mail address, I’ll—”
Someone screamed.
Reeder tore out of the room. Keith followed, not caring that it wasn’t his house. Reeder ran up a flight of stairs, down a hall to a bedroom.
Linda Reeder stood by a pink-covered bed, her hand to her mouth, eyes wide. On the bed sat a young girl in pink pajamas, looking puzzled and a little scared.
“Mom? What’s wrong? What did I say? Dad, what’s wrong with Mom?”
Hannah. Looking like a normal thirteen-year-old girl, long blond hair parted in the middle, music cube on the night stand, holographic poster of rock star Jude Careful above the bed. A window framed by white curtains was open to the warm April air.
“Mom? All I said was, the pribir are coming. Well, they are. Mom?
“Dad?”
By the time Keith drove back to New York, doing ninety miles an hour on Route 87, Lillie had been awake three hours. He’d given Iris permission over the phone for Dr. Asrani to run whatever tests she wanted as long as Lillie agreed and didn’t seem too upset. He could not, in this context, have defined “too upset.”
“Uncle Keith!” Lillie said. He hugged her hard, until, blushing, she pushed him away. She was never physically demonstrative. Maybe it reminded her too much of Barbara. Her beautiful gold-flecked eyes looked clear and alert.
“How do you feel?” Such banal, ordinary words! As if she’d had a head cold, or the flu.
“Okay. That doctor said it’s April 28 and I’ve been knocked out for
weeks.
Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“How come? Did I get hit by a car or something?”
Shoba Asrani must have told her all this, but he saw that she wanted to hear it from him. “No. You just sort of collapsed in the living room, and I called 911.”
“A heart attack?”
“No, sweetie. Nobody knows why you collapsed.” God, how much was he supposed to tell her about the extra DNA, the brain structures, Miller, the other kids? How did you discuss what utterly baffled everyone?
“Well, can I go home now?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask. Look, I’m going to talk to Dr. Asrani. You get back in bed and wait for me.”
“I don’t want to get into bed. I’m not tired.”
“Then sit in that chair.”
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Is there a vending machine? In the hall, maybe?”
The sheer normalcy was eerie. Keith gave her money. He found Dr. Asrani in her office, apparently waiting for him. She looked as unsettled as he felt, too unsettled for small talk.
“Keith. We ran tests. The structure in Lillie’s frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli is now active. The PLI isn’t like anything we’ve seen, a totally new firing pattern. Usually neurons fire at intervals of―”
He wasn’t yet interested in details. “Is she in danger? Is the growth harming her in any way?”
“Not that we can tell. She checks out fine, and she says she feels fine. Of course, we want to keep her several days to run — “
“No. She wants to go
home.”
Asrani took a step forward, waving one arm. “No, we need to — “
“I’m taking her home. I’ll bring her in here every day, if you want and she agrees, or someone will — ” How long could he be away from the SkyPower legal work? “—but right now I’m checking her out of the hospital.”
Asrani looked extremely unhappy. But she had no legal ground for keeping Lillie, and she and Keith both knew it.
He said, “Something important, doctor. When she woke up, did she say to you, or to anybody, anything peculiar?”
“Peculiar how?”
“Did she happen to mention the word ‘pribir’?”
“No. What’s a pribir?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Start the paperwork for me to take her home, doctor.”
He found Lillie back in her room, looking out the sealed window at a parking lot and eating a bag of corn chips. Two candy bars lay on the windowsill. She’d already found her jeans and sweater in a closet and changed from the hospital gown. “Uncle Keith, I can’t find my shoes. Somebody might have stole them.”
“We’ll get you new ones.”
“They were
Kleesons,”
she said. “And I had them all broken in just right.”
He couldn’t think of anything to answer. The situation was too surreal.
The paperwork took longer than Keith thought necessary. Why didn’t a modern, on-line hospital have more streamlined systems? Lillie, barefoot, slouched in a chair and read an old movie magazine. The air smelled of chemicals and food and cleaning solvents, a typical hospital smell, but despite the “increased activity in her frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli,” Lillie didn’t react.
Finally they walked out of a side entrance toward the car. The sun had just set, replacing the afternoon’s warmth with a cool breeze. Warmth didn’t last in April, not even an April as hot as this one. Keith shivered and put an arm around Lillie, dressed in her cotton sweater.
She pulled away. “Can we stop at McDonald’s on the way home? I’m still hungry.”
“Yes, if you want to.”
“Good. And oh, Uncle Keith — “
“What?” He was trying to remember where, in his headlong blind haste, he’d parked the car, and if it had been a legal spot.
“The pribir are coming.”