Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

“You lined up good expert witnesses?”

“The best. Did you know that the Brazil nut, technically called Bertholletia excelsa, is related to the anchovy pear, which makes good pickles?”

“I didn’t know that,” Cal said.

“Or that the Brazil nut meat is exceptionally rich in oil?”

“I didn’t know that either,” Cal said, starting to edge away down the hall.

“Or that less than half the people allergic to nuts in general are allergic to tree nuts like the Brazil nut?”

“Keith…”

“The point is,” Keith said quietly, “that the genetically engineered soya bean would probably only kill about ten people a year worldwide and would save hundreds of thousands of people from starving. Conservative estimate.”

Cal stopped edging down the hall and looked lawyerly alert. “You can’t put that in your summation. If you say that even ten people will die, the jury will turn against your client.”

“I know. But weigh it out, Cal—ten quick deaths or hundreds of thousands of slow ones? Maybe, over time, millions.”

“Too coldly calculating for a jury to respond to.”

“I know,” Keith said again. “But if it were me, I’d vote in favor of the engineered nut. Ten people is a fair sacrifice to aid millions. What is it, Denise?”

His secretary said apologetically, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but your sister is on the phone and she says it’s urgent.”

Keith sprinted to his office. “Barbara? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said tremulously, “I’m not. Keith, I’m sorry to bother you but I can’t… I can’t do it. I can’t!”

“Do what?”

“Any of it! I just can’t anymore!” She burst into hysterical weeping.

Keith closed his eyes, calculating rapidly. It wasn’t a day heavy with appointments. On the other hand, it was raining hard. Taxis would be hard to get. “Babs, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just sit down and wait for me to… where’s Lillie? Is she all right?”

“I can’t do it anymore!” Barbara cried, and now Keith heard Lillie yelling lustily in the background, screams of rage rather than pain.

“I’ll be right over. Just sit down and don’t do anything. All right?”

“All… right…”

At her apartment he found Barbara sobbing on the sofa. Lillie, seventeen months, sat and played with a pile of what looked like broken toys. The apartment reeked. Lillie, dressed in only a diaper and food-stained bib, reeked more. Every surface including the floor was covered with unwashed dishes, baby clothes, pizza cartons, and unopened mail.

Lillie looked up and gave him a beatific smile. Her eyes were gray, flecked with tiny spots of gold.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Barbara sobbed. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

But somebody had to do it. That much was clear. Keith, well aware that he hadn’t the faintest idea how, picked up the phone. Within an hour he had a very expensive Puerto Rican woman from a very expensive temp agency bathing Lillie, clucking disapprovingly at the apartment and murmuring comments in Spanish.

Barbara ignored the cup of tea he made her. “I’m just no good at being a mother, Keith! It’s terrible, I’m a complete failure, poor Lillie…”

“You’re not a failure,” Keith said. Was she? He really didn’t know if this was normal. He could easily see how it might get overwhelming, a job and a child… . But didn’t thousands of women all over the city do it every day without collapsing like this? Impatience warred with compassion, both flavored with guilt that he, Keith Anderson, did not have to face this every day.

“I hit her,” Barbara said despairingly. “I can’t believe it, but Lillie wouldn’t stop crying, she wouldn’t…”

“Drink your tea, Babs, while it’s hot.”

“I can’t believe I hit her!”

He stayed until Mrs. Perez had left and Babs was asleep. Then he carried Lillie from her crib in her tiny, stuffy bedroom into the newly cleaned living room. Clumsily Keith undressed his niece. She stirred but didn’t wake. He examined Lillie carefully. No bruises, no burns, nothing that looked either painful or suspicious. Grateful, he redressed Lillie and put her back to bed.

He had just returned to the living room when Barbara came out, calmer now, in rumpled blue pajamas. “I’m so sorry, Keith.”

“You can’t help it, honey,” Keith said, not knowing if this was true or not. “It will be easier now. I’ve hired Mrs. Perez to come twice a week to clean and cook and just sort of take care that things are going smoothly.”

“You’re so good to me,” she said, sitting in a corner of the sagging sofa and tucking her feet under her. Her voice had a softer purr. So this was what she needed: someone to shift the burden onto. She had never been strong enough to carry her life alone, even when that life had been less complicated than it was now.

“So what kind of big case are you working on?” Barbara asked. He heard the envy in her voice. “I know it must be something exciting.”

Keith thought of BioHope. Of the genuinely struggling, starving mothers and children the engineered soya bean was supposed to save. Of the American volunteer who had died eating the bean. “Ten people is a fair sacrifice to aid millions,” he’d told Cal. But what if one of the ten were Barbara, leaving him with Lillie?

“Keith? What is your case about?”

“Nuts,” he said.

April 2013

Dr. Asrani’s office was small as a paralegal’s cubicle. Keith knew that she had another, more spacious office in the physicians’ building adjourning the hospital; this one must be some sort of waystation, a place to leave papers or close her eyes for a moment or talk to patients’ relatives in privacy. He sat on the edge of a gray upholstered chair and waited.

“The article was posted by a physician in Pittsburgh,” Dr. Asrani said. She had a very faint, musical accent. “He describes a semi-active trance state with no external communication, like Lillie’s. And the brain specs… here, look.”

She hiked her chair closer to Keith’s and spread the printout on the arm of his chair. He could see that she took reassurance from the charts and graphs: so verifiable, so unambiguous. She would not have made a good lawyer.

“See, here is the PLI of the Pittsburgh patient, a twelve-year-old boy. Here, in this dark area, is the same anomalous thick growth of nerve cells that Lillie has at the base of the frontal lobe. It’s right against the glomeruli, which processes olfactory signals and relays them all over the brain to centers involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses —pretty much everything important except muscular control.

“Now here on this page is the boy’s neural firing pattern for that region. It is like Lillie’s, which is to say, minimal activity in the entire area. Nothing going on in this complex structure. Very odd.”

And that was the understatement of the year, Keith thought. An inert, non-malignant, non-functioning but very substantial growth squeezed into Lillie’s skull and this boy’s, doing nothing.

Dr. Asrani shuffled her printouts. “Now, the DNA chart shows many differences between Lillie and the boy, of course. They have entirely different genetic inheritances. See, Lillie carries the allele for Type AB blood and the boy is A. Lillie has E2 and E3 alleles in her APO genes, and the boy has two E4—a risk of heart disease there in later life. And so on. But look here, Mr. Anderson, on chromosome six. Both children have this very long—almost two million base pairs!—sequence of genes that is utterly unknown. No one has ever seen this in any other human genome. Not ever.”

“Of course,” Keith said, grasping at a vagrant straw, “you haven’t exactly examined every other human genome in the entire world.”