Human Sister (8 page)

He became rigid, as if suddenly transformed to a statue.

“I’ll think up a new game for the next time you come,” I whispered into his ear.

He said nothing and, after a few inert seconds, set me down, leaving me, as he so often would in years to follow, with an empty, wanting feeling.

First Brother

T
hrough the eyes of the pigeonoid, I see a submersible break through the surface of the ocean. Six seconds later its top hatch opens and a flotation device is ejected—at 784 meters west, 139 meters north of the center of the mouth of the Russian River on the northern California coast.

The flotation device bobs for 18 seconds, then distends and flattens out to an elongated raft, in the middle of which Sara sits cross-legged. She wears soft-soled, blue-and-white striped cloth shoes; white socks; faded blue jeans; an item of clothing (highest correlation: sweater) gray in color, wrapped and tied around her waist; and a long-sleeved white shirt, on which each button, including the top, is buttoned. Goggles with lenses tinted dark gray cover her eyes. On her hands are white gloves. A white hat with neck drapes shelters her head. A white pack is attached to her back with straps that come over her shoulders and wrap under her arms. The wide brim of the hat casts a shadow down her face and ventral trunk. A cloth band tied under her chin secures the hat on her head.

She is not decorated with any of the jewelry or skin enhancements of contemporary teenage female humans.

It is midday minus 26 minutes, 11 seconds on 20 June.

Sara

“A
ir France-KLM flight number 1147 departing for Amsterdam is ready for boarding at gate number E73.” The announcement was made in a pleasant-sounding, probably artificial, woman’s voice, perfect in its soothing mellowness.

It was the middle of June, and for my sixth birthday Grandpa was taking me to visit my only cousin, Elio, who had moved to the Netherlands about half a year earlier with his mother after his father had been shot and killed by a policeman in New York City. The city’s chief medical examiner had determined that the shooting had been an accident: Uncle Marcus had been running away from a homosexual assignation in Central Park, and the policeman chasing him had stumbled and fallen, accidentally discharging his gun. But Grandpa believed that what lay behind the unusual surveillance and pursuit of Uncle was Uncle’s continuing involvement with the creation of androids for the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The circumstances of Uncle’s death had been told to me matter-of-factly by Grandpa—after, that is, he’d secured my promise not to tell Elio; Aunt Lynh wanted my cousin to believe that his father had died in a car accident.

Before they moved to the Netherlands, I had seen Aunt Lynh and Elio on Vidtel a few times each year, usually on one of our birthdays. Uncle Marcus, Mom’s stepbrother, had been Dad’s roommate in college and one of Grandpa’s favorite students. During the years I’d known him, he’d spoken with Grandpa on Vidtel about once each week, usually about evolutionary organic nanoneuralnets. I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I knew what they were talking about had something to do with my brothers; and each time they spoke, I listened carefully, trying to pick up a few words and concepts I would later ask Grandpa to explain—and he would, in language appropriate for a student much more advanced than I. Unlike Grandma, Mom, and Dad, Grandpa refused to speak to me in what he called
parentese.

Uncle, who was seventeen days younger than Mom and was not biologically related to her through either his mother or father, was tall and handsome, with dark brown skin and wavy black hair. Aunt Lynh had beautiful, shiny, straight black hair, light brown skin, and an oval face with Asian eyes. She never said much on those early Vidtel calls, preferring, it seemed, to gaze admiringly at Uncle while he spoke.

Elio was a year and thirty-three days older than I. Like his mother, he never said much when they called, usually just “Hi” when Uncle nudged him. He’d inherited Uncle’s dark skin, but his jet-black hair was straight, his face was round, and his chocolate irises—so dark I could hardly distinguish them from his pupils—were set, as were his mother’s, in enchantingly beautiful, acutely angled frames of skin that seemed drawn back toward his ears, especially when he smiled. His hair was parted in the middle and fell in thick fronds over his forehead and eyes.

I found him both fascinating and disconcerting, for unlike First Brother, he usually appeared to be staring at me, though slightly askance, his strange eyes studying me from behind shafts of tousled hair. I was immensely curious about what he was like, what he was thinking, and what he was so studiously observing in me; but his appearance never failed to shock me into silence, so that I, like him, said little more than “Hi” whenever he appeared on Vidtel.

About two months after Uncle’s ashes were buried in Grandma’s garden (I was told that he’d thought it was the most beautiful and peaceful place he’d ever seen), Vidtel announced a call from Aunt Lynh in Amsterdam. I was reading a story to Grandpa at the time, and when the call came he nodded, his gaze moving in an arc from me to the door. I hurried out of the room. Grandpa had told me that Aunt Lynh was depressed and was seeking his advice (he had been trained as a medical doctor at Stanford), so their conversations were strictly confidential. She had been so depressed, in fact, that she hadn’t even come to California to attend Uncle’s burial.

After his call, Grandpa told me that Aunt Lynh and Elio were in trouble and needed his help. “Lynh’s parents and only sister were killed in a car accident years ago, so with Marcus gone, we’re the only family she has. Neither she nor Elio speaks Dutch. She can’t find work. Elio isn’t in school. It’s a mess.”

“So, why did she move to the Netherlands?” I asked. “Why did she take Elio there?”

“She told me she wanted to raise Elio in a country that cherishes differences.”

He departed for Amsterdam that evening. While he was gone, Grandma and I baked my favorite double chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies. We also worked in the garden and visited the winery, where Grandma tasted wines and talked with Carlos Hernandez, the vineyard manager, about things like fermenting and blending, while I shared the sweets we had made with the winery workers and the tasting-room guests.

Grandma was soft to hug—Grandpa sometimes kidded her about liking her own cooking too much—and she always smelled of floral perfume, usually tea rose. She had thinning straight white hair, pale gray-blue eyes, and prominent Nordic cheekbones. In photos taken in her twenties and thirties, she appears slender, light blonde, and strikingly beautiful. I inherited the cheekbones, the youthful slimness, and hair even lighter in color; but somehow it all failed to coalesce into what one would call beautiful.

 She seemed always to be content in the moment, radiating warmth and love. Through her I found happiness in natural things: flowers, clouds, trees, food—her salads, picked year-round from our garden and greenhouse, were so vibrant with reds, greens, and yellows that I sometimes imagined I was eating scenery from magnificent paintings. And each month, not wanting to miss a single return of the full moon, she and I would go out near sunset to watch the receding integument of light, then the moon, a marbled yellow blossom displaying silhouettes of bats and birds and of the seasonally eerie, naked branches of the old valley oak tree sentried alone on a nearby hill.

Grandpa called on Vidtel at least once every day he was gone, and as the days passed he seemed increasingly satisfied that matters were improving for Aunt Lynh and Elio. He seemed especially pleased when he reported that he had secured enrollment for Elio at one of the finest private international schools in the world. Children from over fifty countries were in attendance there, and classes were taught in English, so Elio wouldn’t have a language problem. I felt a pang of envy. 

“You’re the best teacher, aren’t you, Grandpa? Better than any at Elio’s school.”

“Yes, honey. I promise you that I’m the best teacher any little girl has ever had.”

The next morning when Vidtel announced a call from Amsterdam, I ran to the communications room and pressed the Accept Video button. The screen lit up as though a large window suddenly opened in the wall, and there was my cousin, that alluring mystery, life-size in three dimensions, sitting in a chair a meter or so in front of a bed. At first he was as speechless as I (this was the first time we faced each other alone), but after a bit of squirming in his chair, this boy with chocolate skin and hair the color of a crow began telling me about his new school, his new friends, and his new room, the bedroom he was sitting in. He spoke as if we’d long been friends who were comfortable in each other’s presence. “I want you to stay with me here in my room next summer. Your grandpa is really nice. He takes us everywhere. He even played football with me and some kids in the park. He says you’re coming to visit me. He says I should call you every day with my homework. He’s going to bring you all my schoolbooks so you can follow along. It’ll be fun!”

I had no doubt it would be. I’d never been so enchanted.

Grandpa returned two days later. I immediately asked about the schoolbooks. He pulled a little case out of his coat pocket. I opened it and found one chip inside.

“Is it all right if I read them?” I asked.

“Yes. You already know the math and science, but it’ll be good practice for you to read them. I think you’ll enjoy talking with Elio about his homework and about what he does at school. He’s an intelligent, nice young man. I hope you two can become friends. You live in very different worlds and can learn much from each other.”

One of the first things I learned from Elio was that the bright colored lights and decorations I’d seen a few weeks earlier while out shopping with Grandma in Healdsburg weren’t expressions of celebration for the winter solstice; they were part of a religious festival called Christmas. He whispered this information to me, adding that his ma had told him not to tell me about Christmas because it would make my ma mad. He further informed me that only babies called their mothers and fathers “Mommy” and “Daddy.” He had always, so he claimed, called his parents “Ma” and “Pa.”

As soon as that conversation ended, I called my mother, who told me that “Mom” and “Dad” would be appropriate names for them now that I was getting to be such a mature girl. I didn’t mention anything about Christmas.

Thereafter, for half an hour or so each day, I sat watching and listening as Elio invaded my cozy little world with new ideas. “Ma says your grandpa is filthy rich,” he said one day, “but he won’t buy you any toys or new clothes. And he won’t let anyone else give you any, either, not even your ma or pa. He won’t even let you watch movies or play games on the internet, or anything. It’s all pretty weird if you ask me.”

Of course, I defended Grandpa, saying that the internet was a huge, distracting ocean of information with “an almost vanishingly small signal-to-noise ratio.” Elio asked what a signal-to-noise ratio was. I didn’t know exactly, but I confidently answered that it meant I would waste a lot of time trying to find anything useful there.

Before those daily talks with Elio began, I hadn’t paid much attention to the sparse, simple furnishings of our house or to our nearly twenty-year-old Mercedes car; nor had I thought it odd that all my clothes were hand-me-downs from Carlos’s three grown boys—all, that is, except for my sunglasses, white gloves, and the white hat on which Grandma had sewn flaps to cover my neck and the sides of my face.

Late one afternoon as Grandma and I puttered in our garden, I confided in her that Elio thought it weird that I wasn’t allowed to watch movies or play on the internet, that all my toys were home-fabricated, and that my clothes were second hand from boys of “one of the workers,” a phrase Elio had used. After making sure I understood that Carlos was not “one of the workers,” that he was, in fact, much more important for the vineyard than she was, Grandma sweetened her voice and said, “Now, honey, about the clothes and toys and internet: Grandpa wants love and ideas and good music—culture—to fill you and give you a fertile mind. One of his greatest fears is that wealth will soften and corrupt you. He and I both want you to learn that you can have a wonderful life that is rich and fulfilling and overflowing with love, even though you consume few material things in the process. I’m confident you’ll understand this someday. But in the meanwhile, please know that Grandpa and I love you with all our hearts and are raising you the best way we know how. Aren’t your clothes comfortable?”