Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

“So I should imagine.” Despite her tiredness, Marianne was fascinated. Between speeches she served as lab tech for Harrison, but as a theoretical geneticist, she had nothing like his polymath skill in biology. “What did the autopsy show?”

“Again, hard to be sure. But certain parts of the cortex seem enlarged. Sue is preparing slides. And the two surviving pups are just hanging on. They nurse, which is good, but they also seem agitated and edgy.”

“How does a tiny mouse seem agitated?”

Harrison smiled. “The same way Sissy does. Twitchy unfocused energy.”

This was unfair; Sissy’s great energy was very focused except when she didn’t have enough to do. Those times, she danced in place, snapped her fingers, sang off-key. Marianne had learned to keep her busy all the time. But she let Harrison’s remark go; he was genuinely upset.

She said gently, “Twitchy mice don’t mean that anything will be wrong with Sarah’s baby. Some kids are just born very reactive, like Connie’s youngest. How far along is Sarah? Has there been an ultrasound?”

“Four months, and yes. The ultrasound looks normal. I’m going to bed, Marianne. But I’m glad you’re back.” He drained his scotch and went into the bedroom.

“But I’m glad you’re back.” That “but” said it all: I’m glad you’re back, but I have too much on my mind for sex. Well, she already knew that.

She checked her e-mail, giving Harrison time to pretend to be asleep. Nothing interesting except the latest photo from Connie of Marianne’s two grandsons. They stood side by side in the backyard in their little red parkas, beside a bare-branched sapling no taller than Colin. Jason’s arm was around his little brother. Jason smiled; Colin looked ready to burst into tears. Only thirteen months apart—what had Connie been thinking? The boys didn’t look alike. Jason was slim and brown-eyed. Colin was a little Ryan, short and round, his two-year-old face pudgy around huge gray eyes.

Ryan pulling Noah on a sled, both of their faces red with cold and excitement: “Come on, let’s slide down again!” “Mommy, I love this so much!”

Marianne closed the e-mail and turned on the news. Tornados in Oklahoma and Kansas. Building of the US spaceship still halted; a conservative Congress had been arguing over funding for two years. The private firms trying to build spaceships did not give interviews, or release pictures, not since the NCWAK, No Contact with Alien Killers, had blown up Richard Branson’s effort. Starvation in Africa, war in northern China, dead zones in the ocean…

She turned off the wall screen, poured herself a glass of Harrison’s scotch, and picked up his tablet to read the article in Nature . She couldn’t concentrate. After a while she lay down on the sofa, put her hand between her legs, and tried to not think about Tim Saunders.

S plus 2.6 years

Some people had more smarts than sense. Not that Sissy Tate hadn’t known that before she went to work for Marianne.

Look at Marianne now, bent over her messy desk, reading yet again that printout about the kids that cried all the time. Sissy had tried to read it because her sister Jasmine had just had another kid. Not that Sissy wanted to ever see Jasmine again, but word about the baby had reached Sissy through Mama. The article had been full of statistics and equations and terms that Sissy didn’t understand—she’d only gone through a secretarial course—but she’d gotten the gist, which was that everybody was fucked all over again by the spore cloud. Babies cried, sure, but they only started crying all the time and never smiling if they’d been buns in the oven since the spore cloud hit.

Marianne understood the article, though. She typed some numbers from it into her computer, whose screen was already full of different numbers, and started running some program on them. The back of Marianne’s head showed gray hair along the roots—Sissy would need to nag her into another appointment at Subtle Beauty. Some people didn’t make the most of what they had without somebody else nagging at them all the time. Marianne was bat-shit lucky to have Sissy taking care of her.

Not that Sissy didn’t know that she herself was the lucky one. She had this job, which paid about as much as flipping burgers at McDonald’s but which actually accomplished something important in the world, something she could believe in. She had gotten out of the Bronx and got some education, even if (she knew this now, after visiting real colleges with Marianne) it wasn’t a very good education. She had sweet, sexy Tim. And she had Marianne, who’d turned out to feel more like family than her own family ever did. And fuck anybody who said different.

Sissy sat at her own desk, whose polished surface had on it one laptop and one piece of paper, and finished making the online travel arrangements for the next speech. They’d fly, and the sponsor was even paying for three round-trip airline tickets. Tim didn’t like the venue, a high-school football stadium, because it would be hard to keep Marianne safe. They expected a really big crowd. The sponsor wasn’t a college this time but a pro-spaceship lobbying organization, Going to the Stars. Sissy had investigated it online. It looked legit, and not too crazy.

Not that “crazy” would stop Marianne. She was going to give her speeches no matter what. She spent three days a week in this tiny office, writing and reading science. Ecology, mostly. Which was another thing that was fucked, pretty much everywhere, and not just because of the mice. Sissy’d been reading about all the droughts in the Midwest because everybody had mismanaged all the crops.

“Damn!” Marianne said.

“What?”

“Here’s an article—an autopsy report, actually—on a two-year-old who died in a car crash. The father donated the brain to—”

“He let somebody cut out his kid’s brain ?”

Marianne turned in her chair to look at Sissy and said gently, “The child was dead.”

“I don’t care! I wouldn’t let anybody cut up my dead kid!”

“Sissy, you’re a mass of contradictions. You admire science; this is how science advances. That father did a wonderful thing.”

Did he? Maybe. Sometimes Sissy couldn’t tell how the ideas from her old world and the ideas from her new world should line up in her mind. But the important thing was to learn all she could. Sometimes since she’d come to work for the Star Brotherhood Foundation, she felt like a flower opening up to the sun for the first time. Other days, new things felt like cold rain. She said belligerently, knowing that her belligerence was a cover for confusion, “What did the autopsy show?”

“Well, it’s more what it seems to show, which is either enlarged or deformed primary auditory cortex, with unusually dense neural connections to the midbrain and brain stem.”

Sissy seized on the part of this she could understand. “What do you mean, either that thing is enlarged or it’s deformed? Can’t they tell which?”

“Not really.” Marianne swiveled her computer chair to face Sissy. “We don’t know much about the parts of the brain that process sound. It’s really complex, and to make it more complex, no two human cortices are the same. This might mean nothing. But Harrison’s mice…”

“What about Harrison’s mice?”

“I don’t know yet. I just don’t—I need to do a lot more reading. What else is on my schedule for today?”

“Fund-raising dinner in Tribeca.”

“Damn. Can’t I—”

“No. You have to go. This lady has money and she’s willing to give us some.”

Marianne glanced at her computer screen, back at Sissy, back at the screen. “How much money?”