The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella (The Expanse) (2 page)

Alberto kissed my temple and brushed his lips along my hairline to the cup of my ear. “Don’t kill him. They’ll catch you.”

I shifted. In the darkness, I couldn’t see more than a limn of his face, floating over me. My heart beat faster and the coppery taste of fear flooded my mouth. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

When he answered, his tone was soft and melancholy. “You’re from
research
.”

I wasn’t always the thing I became. Before I was
research,
I was a scientist who had educated himself into too fine a specialty. Before that, a student at Tel Aviv Autonomous University, caught between investing in a future I couldn’t imagine and losing myself in a grief I couldn’t fully encompass. Before that, I was a boy watching his mother die. I was all of those men before I was a researcher for Protogen corporation based on Thoth Station. But it is also true that I remember many of those former selves with a distance that is more than time. I tell myself that remove allows me to trace the path from one to another, but I’m not sure that this is true.

My mother—a heart-shaped face above a pear-shaped body who rained love on me as if I were the only one in the world who mattered—lived on basic most of her life, sharing a room in a UN housing complex at Londrina. She wasn’t educated, though I understand she was a good enough musician when she was younger to play in some local underground bands. If there were recordings of her on the network, I never found them. She was a woman of few ambitions and tepid passions until she reached thirty-two. Then, to hear her tell it, God had come to her in her sleep and told her to have a baby.

She woke up, marched to the training center, and applied for any program that would earn her enough money to legally go off contraception. It took her three years of fourteen-hour days, but she managed it. Enough money for both a licensed child and the donation of germ plasm that would help begin my life. She said that it was her choice to purchase sperm from a trading house that gave me my intelligence and drive, that the only fertile men in the housing complex were criminals and thugs too far outside of civilization to be on the basic rolls, and that I couldn’t have gotten it from her because she was lazy and stupid.

As a child, growing up, I used to fight back on the last point: She was smart and she was beautiful and anything good about me surely had its roots in her. I believe now she used to denigrate herself in front of me in order to hear praise from someone, even if it was only a beloved child. I don’t resent the manipulation. If intellect and focus were indeed the legacies of my invisible father, emotional manipulation was my mother’s true gift, and it was as valuable. As important.

Because I was an adolescent when it began, I did not notice her symptoms until they were fairly advanced. My time was largely spent out of the house by then, playing football at a dirt-and-weed pitch south of the housing complex, running badly designed experiments with some garage-level makers and artists, exploring my own sexuality and the limits of the young men of my cohort. My days were filled with the smell of the city, the heat of the sun, and the promise that something joyous—a football win, a good project, a transporting affair—might come at any moment. I was a street rat living on basic, but the discovery of life was so rich and dramatic and profound that I wasn’t concerned with my status in the larger culture. My social microenvironment seemed to stretch to the horizon, and the conflicts within it—whether Tomás or Carla would be goalie, whether Sabina could tweak off-the-shelf bacterial cultures to produce her own party drugs, whether Didi was homosexual and how to find out without courting humiliation and rejection—were profound dramas that would resonate through the ages. When, later, my project lead said
There is a period of developmental sociopathy in every life,
this is the time I thought of.

And then my mother dropped a glass. It was a good one, with thick, beveled sides and a lip like a jelly jar, and when it shattered, it sounded like a gunshot. Or that’s how I remember it. Moments of significance can make maintaining objectivity difficult, but that is my memory of it: a thick, sturdy drinking glass catching the light as it fell from her hands, twirling in the air, and detonating on our kitchen floor. She cursed mildly and went to fetch the broom to sweep up the shards. She walked awkwardly and fumbled with the dustpan. I sat at the table, an espresso growing cold in my hands while I watched her try to clean up after herself for five minutes. I felt horror at the time, an overwhelming sense of something wrong. The metaphor that came to me in the moment was my mother was being run remotely by someone who didn’t understand the controls very well. The worst of it was her confusion when I asked her what was wrong. She had no idea what I was talking about.

After that, I began paying attention, checking in on her through the day. How long it had been going on, I couldn’t say. The trouble she had finding words, especially early in the morning or late at night. The loss of coordination. The moments of confusion. They were little things, I told myself. The products of too little sleep or too much. She spent whole days watching the entertainment feeds out of Beijing, and then stayed up all night rearranging the pantry or washing her clothes in the sink for hours on end, her hands growing red and chapped from the soap as her mind was trapped, it seemed, by minor details. Her skin took on an ashen tone and a slackness came to her cheeks. The slow way her eyes moved reminded me of fish, and I began having the recurring nightmare that the sea had come to take her, and she was drowning there at the breakfast table with me sitting beside her powerless to help.

But whenever I talked about it, I only confused her. Nothing was wrong with her. She was just the same as she had ever been. She didn’t have any trouble doing her chores. She wasn’t uncoordinated. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Even as her words choked her on their way out, she didn’t know what I meant. Even as she listed like a drunk from her bed to the toilet, she experienced nothing out of the ordinary. And worse, she believed it. She genuinely thought I was saying these things to hurt her, and she didn’t understand why I would. The sense that I was betraying her through my fear, that I was the cause of her distress rather than only a witness to something deeply wrong, left me weeping on the couch. She wasn’t interested in going to the clinic; the lines there were always so long and there was no reason.

I got her to go the day before Ash Wednesday. We arrived early, and I had packed a lunch of roast chicken and barley bread. We made it to the intake nurse even before we ate, and then sat in the waiting area with its fake bamboo chairs and worn green carpet. A man just older than my mother sat across from us, his hands in fists on his knees as he struggled not to cough. The woman beside me, my age or younger, stared straight ahead, her hand on her belly like she was trying to hold in her guts. A child wailed behind us. I remember wondering why anyone who could afford to have a child would bring it to a basic clinic. My mother held my hand, then. For hours we sat together, her fingers woven with mine. For a time I told her everything would be all right.

The doctor was a thin-faced woman with earrings made of shell. I remember that her first name was the same as my mother’s, that she smelled of rose water, and that her eyes had the shallow deadness of someone in shock. She didn’t wait for me to finish telling her why we’d come in. The expert system had already pulled the records, told her what to expect. Type C Huntington’s. The same, she told me (though my mother never had), that had killed my grandfather. Basic would cover palliative care, including psychoactives. She’d make the notation in the profile. The prescriptions would be delivered starting next week and would continue as long as they were needed. The doctor took my mother’s hands, urged her in a rote and practiced tone to be brave, and left. Off to the next exam room, hopefully to someone whose life she might be able to save. My mother wobbled at me, her eyes finding me only slowly.

“What happened?” she asked, and I didn’t know what to tell her.

It took my mother three more years to die. I have heard it said that how you spend your day is how you spend your life, and my days changed then. The football games, the late night parties, the flirtation with the other young men in my circle: all of it ended. I divided myself into three different young men: one a nurse to his failing mother, one a fierce student on a quest to understand the disease that was defining his life, and the last a victim of depression so profound it made bathing or eating food a challenge. My own room was a cell just wide enough for my cot, with a frosted glass window that opened on an airshaft. My mother slept in a chair in front of the entertainment screen. Above us, a family of immigrants from the Balkan Shared Interest Zone clomped and shouted and fought, each footfall a reminder of the overwhelming density of humanity around us. I gave her ramen soup and a collection of government pills that were the most brightly colored things in the apartment. She grew impulsive, irritable, and slowly lost her ability to use language, though I think she understood me almost to the end.

I didn’t see it at the time, but my options were to weave myself a lifeline from what I had at hand, abandon my mother in her final decline, or else die. I would not leave her, and I did not die. Instead I took her illness and made it my salvation. I read everything there was on type C Huntington’s, the mechanism as it was understood, the research that was being done with it, the treatments that might someday manage it. When I didn’t understand something, I found tutorials. I sent letters to the outreach programs of medical care centers and hospitals as far as Mars and Ganymede. I tracked down the biomakers I had known and drilled them with question—What was cytoplasmic regulation delay? How did mRNA inhibitor proteins address phenotypic expressions of primary DNA sequences? What did the Lynch-Noyon synthesis mean in respect to regrown neural tissues?—until it was clear they didn’t understand what I was saying. I dove into a world of complexity so deep even the research watsons couldn’t encompass it all.

What astounded me was that the cutting edge of human knowledge was so close. Before I educated myself, I assumed that there was a great depth of science, that every question of importance had been cataloged, studied, that all the answers were there, if only someone could query the datasets the right way. And for some things, that was true.

But for others—for things that I would have thought so important and simple that everyone would have known—the data simply wasn’t there. How does the body flush plaque precursors out of cerebrospinal fluid? There were two papers: one seventy years out of date that relied on assumptions about spinal circulation that had since been disproved, and one that drew all its data from seven Polynesian infants who had suffered brain injuries from anoxia or drug exposure or trauma.

There were explanations, of course, for this dearth of information: Human studies required human subjects, and ethical guidelines made rigorous studies next to impossible. One didn’t give healthy babies a series of monthly spinal taps just because it would have been a good experimental design. I understood that, but to come to science expecting the great source of intellectual light and step so quickly into darkness was sobering. I began to keep a book of ignorance: questions that existing information could not answer and my amateurish, half-educated thoughts about how answers might be found.

Officially, my mother died of pneumonia. I had learned enough to understand what each of her drugs did, to read her fate from the pills that arrived. I knew by their shapes and colors and the cryptic letters pressed into their sides when the vast bureaucracy that administered basic health care had moved her from palliative care to full hospice. In the end, she was on little more than sedatives and antivirulence drugs. I gave them to her because it was what I had to give her. The night she died, I sat at her feet, my head resting on the red wool blanket that covered her wasted lap. Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards. She moved beyond pain or distress, and I told myself the worst was over.

The notification from basic came the next day. With my change in status, the rooms we had been in were no longer appropriate. I would be reassigned to a shared dormitory, but should be prepared to relocate to São Paulo or Bogotá, depending on availability. I thought—mistakenly, as it turned out—that I wasn’t ready to leave Londrina. I moved in with a friend and former lover. He treated me gently, making coffee in the mornings and playing cards through the empty afternoons. He suggested that it might be less that I needed to stay in the city of my birth, the city of my mother, and more that I needed some control over the terms of my departure.

I applied to apprentice programs at London, Gdansk, and Luna and was rejected by all of them. I was competing against people who had years of formal schooling, political connections, and wealth. I lowered my expectations, searching for uplift programs that aimed specifically for autodidacts who had been living on basic, and six months later, I arrived in Tel Aviv and met Aaron, a former Talmudic scholar who had researched his way to atheism and was now my dorm mate.

The third night, we sat together on our little balcony looking out over the city. It was sunset, and we were both a little high on marijuana and wine. He asked me what my ambitions were.

“I want to understand,” I told him.

He shrugged only his left shoulder. “Understand what, Paolo? The mind of God? The reason for suffering?”

“Just how things work,” I said.

It became clear immediately that Brown had become the most important person not only among the nanoinformatics group or even research in general, but in the entire room. Over the following days, Fong, who had never treated anyone in research as better than suspicious, deferred to him when the guards brought food. Drexler sat near him before lights-out, laughing at anything he said that might pass for a joke. When Sujai and Ma fell into one of their singing mock competitions, they invited Brown in, though he demurred.