The Starry Rift Part 15

Kathleen Ann Goonan.

Most of our brain is dedicated to vision. Did you know that?

My big brother Sam told me that. Before he died. He was a secret kite scout somewhere in the Middle East.

Right now, my name is Sundiver Day. I live in Key West. I just turned sixteen. Ever since Sam died-or disappeared- last March, I have to get out on the water a lot.

My father died when I was ten. We still have his parrots, the brilliant Esmeralda and the shy Evylyn and the really cranky Ed. They live practically forever. I used to go around Key West with one or the other on my shoulder, usually Esmeralda. So my other name, the name my friends call me, is Parrot Girl. And I have cloned a parrot, little Alouicious, who also lives in the backyard with the others. Alouicious is what made me famous. Wow, they all said. All the adults, anyway. I was in the Key West Citizen and Science News and won a science prize.

But I'm tired of being Parrot Girl. I have a new name now, although I haven't told anyone. It's n.o.body's business. They used to make fun of me and call me "Miss Smarty," but I beat up the ringleader of that crowd, Marcy Phipps, when I was fourteen, and after that n.o.body bothered me. Sam taught me how to fight. It seems childish now, but it was worth it at the time. And Parrot Girl is better than Eelie.

People say my mother is eccentric, but she's not. She studies orchids and has to go all over the world and leaves me with my aunt Cicily, who has a Cafe Cubano shop, even though she's not Cuban but originally from Iowa. She's my mother's twin. She was a biologist and did cloning things. Famous cloning things. Things people got mad at her for doing. Even her husband, who divorced her. So now she has Cafe Cubano. Her work is on the Internet. I've been reading it a lot lately. She would be surprised at what I know.

We live in an old house. The wide front porch is decorated with wiggly white gingerbread. They call old houses "Conch houses" here, and they call the people who have lived in the Keys a long time Conchs. I guess we're Conchs, although my dad was a hippie, too, and got thrown in jail a lot when he was young, in places like Chicago and Washington, D.C. My mother said they came down here because it was cheap and because she grew up here, in this house, and because people wouldn't talk about them taking experimental life-extension drugs. Everybody takes them now; they've been FDA approved, and Key West isn't cheap anymore. Our neighbor Millie, who is a real estate agent, keeps wanting to list our house. "It's worth well over a million now, Hannah," I heard her telling my mom one night in the living room. "Eelie needs a better place to grow up. A place where she can use her intellectual talents. She's turning into a wild girl."

I kind of liked hearing that. Wild girl, that's me. My mother says, of course, that I need as normal a life as possible and it's pretty normal here, and Millie laughs.

But Eelie? That's what they call me. The adults. Short for Elendilia. They said that I called myself Eelie when I was a baby. It's not quite fair. I had no idea what I was doing. It's no wonder I haven't really settled on a suitable name just yet.

After Sam disappeared I started using his Zodiac boat and found my own secret creek hidden in the mangroves, where gray snappers flock beneath the sea roots, silent-colored like wolves, brushing over and around one another in slow light.

They say he's missing in action, but Mom says that we have to accept that he's dead. It's been eight months now. She only said that once, and really quietly at night when she came into my room and tucked me in, like she hadn't done since I was little, and then kissed me, and then went away fast because she was crying.

Sometimes I think I see my brother up in the sky, drifting past, red hair streaming out, his eyes two blue stars and one of them winks at me.

Sometimes I hope, sometimes I think, that the whole world is his wink to me, his way of saying, "I'm still here, sis." And that's when I'm glad that most of my brain is for vision, because then it's full of Sam.

If I didn't think that, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I can barely move a finger. I've tried thinking that the world isn't Sam's wink, his way of staying with me always. I am much too heavy to move then, even though my mother worries and calls me her Thin Stick, and Louisa the Cuban therapist says that I have to find new ways of thinking.

They say his wings failed. That's how they described it. But it wasn't "they." It was just one tall black woman wearing a uniform.

Most people when they walk up to our house from the street hesitate because the front yard is a private jungle and it's hard to see the house, and it looks kind of haunted to my friends. A ghost lived here one time, a German ghost, my friend Janet, who is a true Conch, says, but I don't believe it. This is a friendly house with big square rooms, tall wavy windows, and tilted wood floors.

And there are no ghosts.

Lobster claw h.e.l.liconias drop down their yellow-orange flowers, hard and triangular like the claws they're named for. White birds-of-paradise thrust their beaks between elephant ears as big as the front window. That morning our jungle was cool and dripping from the shower that usually pa.s.ses over the island just before dawn, when the sky is the color between night and day; the color of no. Nautical twilight is that color, when you can't tell a white thread from a black thread, when you have to start worrying about whether or not you will be able to see, and turn on your mast light if you are in a sailboat at anchor.

So I am sitting on a rocker on the front porch reading my messages and I glimpse her at the gate, looking worried. I think she is lost and yell, "Can I help you?"

"Is this the Wheeler residence?"

My father never liked to tell anybody anything; he said that if they didn't know they shouldn't be there, and maybe they were trying to serve a warrant or something. But I just say, "Yes, it is."

"Is your mother home?" She unhooks the crooked wire gate, and Alpha, who is a very old dog, wakes up from under the cool plants and whoofs her way to the woman's knees.

"She won't hurt you."

"h.e.l.lo?" Mom comes out the door carrying her big straw bag stuffed with papers and her computer and who knows what, ready for cla.s.s. She's teaching this semester; then she's going to Bali.

Mom is pretty, but she needs help. She has long flyaway reddish hair and blue eyes and laughed and laughed when I gave her some expensive wrinkle pills with hormones in them one Christmas. Go figure. And I went all the way to Miami on the bus to get them so that she wouldn't see them come in the mail, like she would have if I had ordered them online. She could use them. She needs a good haircut, too, and she needs to dress up more. Right now she's wearing thrift-store jeans, a tie-dye T-shirt, and zoris. Sometimes I'm embarra.s.sed to be around her. All the mothers of my friends dress like they're on a permanent cruise. Their hair is perfect and their high heels are tall even when they're grocery shopping; their clothes are never wrinkled, and little diamonds wink at their neck.

The woman looks at me as she says to Mom, "I have something to tell you. In private."

Mom looks like she is going to melt. She blinks, puts her bag down on the dark green porch floor, and says, "Come in." The screen door shuts, and I go over and listen while the woman tells Mom that Sam is missing in action.

He is some kind of scout. The Third Middle East War has lasted for five years now, and he was-he is-a kitesurfer, a champion kite-surfer, and that's why he was picked for the special flying division. They wear nanotech camouflage and fly through the mountains silent as the air on solar wings that change with the terrain and sky. The scouts record everything with cameras in their eyes. He enlisted, and Mom was very, very angry and said that his father would be very disappointed in him, and he said that he wanted to get the implants and the training and be able to earn a living now, not after years and years of college. It sounded very sensible to me. Our mother is not that sensible, I must say. I am trying to think of something sensible to do myself, but the only thing that comes to mind is cloning Sam like Aunt Cicily cloned the famous Mitisent Baby.

It's not really sensible. And it's against the law. Plus, he would be a baby and not Sam at all. He'd just look like Sam. It wouldn't be fair to expect him to be anything like Sam. That's what Aunt Cicily told me when I suggested it. I think I started to scream at one point and that's when she hugged me so tight that I couldn't breathe. I'm sorry I mentioned it to her in the first place. She said, with tears in her eyes and so fiercely that I thought she was mad at me at first, "Do you think I haven't thought of that myself?"

I'm over that now. I would love him like himself. I wouldn't even call him Sam. I could just look at him, though, and see Sam, a little Sam I never knew. I would take care of him. I would never, never let him go to war.

Later I asked Mom why they couldn't find him, if where he went that night wasn't on the GPS or transmitted by his eye-camera, and she said she wondered that too and was trying to find out, but that it was all a big f-word secret. She says the f-word when she gets very angry, which is about once a year.

"Oh G.o.d, honey," she said. "I didn't mean to say that." She shook her head and wandered into the kitchen to eat ice cream. That's all she eats anymore. Mint chocolate chip. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And talk about thin. If I'm a thin stick then she's a fragile baby twig about to break. I heard her start to play the grand piano that sits in the living room. A Bach two-piece invention, one that I used to love to play too. Now it sounds like dust. It sounds like no.

I do want to get better. I think that little Sam-little not-Sam, will help. He will help us all.

Today I wake from the dream of Sam smashing into sharp dry mountain peaks and there is n.o.body in the kitchen; Mom has left for work, and Aunt Cicily is getting dressed. I eat half an oatmeal m.u.f.fin and some almonds.

I am supposed to be in school today, but instead I grab some c.o.kes from the refrigerator and climb into Sam's Zodiac boat, a big puffy inflatable that's good for getting into small, shallow s.p.a.ces, and untie it from the dock cleats. It has a tiny two-stroke solar Honda; the whole boat is a solar collector, and I move quietly down the green ca.n.a.l while Aunt Cicily runs out into the backyard and yells at me until her voice gets little. They will give me a hard time, but I will tell them that I was working on my science project. I am cloning fish now. There's a big market for perfect cloned fish. I am looking for something rare-at least, that's what I tell them. Doctor Harris is helping me with the project. Her son would like me to come over to their house, but I can't stand him. I used to think I loved Jim Johnson, who is also a Conch and a great sailor and has gorgeous green eyes, but he doesn't have a clue. I used to walk past his house and stare at his window, but I don't have time for that kind of stuff anymore.

Now I just meet Doctor Harris at the lab. She's a fertility doctor and does research. I'm getting college credits for my work. The adults like it. They say it's "keeping me busy."

I am very busy. Cloning Sam is a big project.

There are a lot of famous clones. The Tred-Bleck quintet. A Britney Spears, a Marilyn Monroe, many Elvises, and other more mundane clones, all cloned before it was illegal in the U.S. The Britney Spears was cloned by the original Britney, and she's kind of a Britney slave, bringing in money for the first one. She's trade-marked, and they have some kind of contract. Mom says there are probably lots of clones that n.o.body even knows about, and that all the things that Aunt Cicily went through aren't fair, and that if she wanted to move to Sweden she'd be able to work again.

I'm not sure how I'll get him into my uterus, the clone of Sam. It's actually pretty weird when I think about it. I guess I'd have to steal the fertility drugs from Dr. Harris's lab, which bothers me. But I'll figure something out. Maybe some woman who can't have a baby would want him. Maybe I can pay someone to do it. A surrogate mother. That might be the best idea. I'm not allowed to make money from fish cloning, because it's research through the college, but I've got a lot of babysitting money saved up. I've been babysitting forever. I could run an ad in the Key West Citizen. It would be better, I think, if Mom would consent to carrying him, but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't. She would raise holy h.e.l.l if she knew. Besides, even though she takes the longevity drug, she's old. She's probably too tired to have a baby.

I don't care what they say. I don't care if they arrest me. In fact, I'd like to see the trial. "Gifted Girl Clones Brother; Government Confesses That He Is Still Alive." The article would talk about how I could have been a prize-winning piano player but was driven to give it up by the biological research I had to do. That's what Mom and Aunt Cicily and Luisa the Cuban therapist, who I've had since I was ten and Dad died, complain about-I don't play the piano anymore because I'm obsessed with science. Then the government would tell us the truth, wouldn't they? I know Sam is still alive. My friends think I'm crazy, so I just don't talk to them anymore. They don't know anything. They're all dating and talking about their boyfriends and getting nanotech communication implants put in without their parents' permission, which is easy if you just go to Cuba on the hydro ferry for a day. I'd rather be alone.

Babies are a lot of work. I know this. Sometimes when I think about this plan, I see little Melanie Eddleson, four months old and screaming with something that turned out to be an earache, when I finally got hold of her mother and she rushed home and took her to the doctor. I felt completely helpless as she lay there kicking and punching, her little face bright red, and even scared that she might die suddenly and it would all be my fault. I know about morning sickness. I know about changing diapers. But would it be the same if I couldn't leave? I would be the one crazy with worry, calling the doctor. And I might have to put off college, for a little while, anyway.

It doesn't really matter. I have to do it.

I can't go very fast on the ca.n.a.l because you're not supposed to cause a wake-plus, there might be manatees. I slowly pa.s.s Double Ace, Toad Hall, Windly. You could cruise all the way to Africa in any one of them. White monsters. They each hold a thousand gallons of gas. After I leave Aunt Cicily behind, I pa.s.s Pieces of Eight and John Kred's little sailboat Sly Skimmer and all the regular-sized weekender fishing boats with puns in their names like Reel Incredible. I pa.s.s Jane Alberson's house and whistle to her potbellied Vietnamese pig snuffling around in the yard, and he raises his head and looks at me with his smart little eyes. Mr. Albert waves to me from his backyard where he's watering his bromeliads and then I'm out into the bay. I put on my CoolBrite sungla.s.ses and polarize the world into brilliant greens and blues.

The bay is flat as a single diamond facet because there is no wind today. And enormous, like the sky, and filled with mangrove islands. It never gets deep. In most places it is about a foot, and it's easy to run aground, unless you're in a little boat like mine. It is also very easy to get lost. All the islands look the same, low and gray and floating today on a lime green band that divides the bay from the sky.

I speed up, fast as flying, and the wind pushes back my hair. I go through Toilet Seat Cut, where people have decorated toilet seats by painting and writing on them and stuck them on posts. Sam has one here. I cross the Intracoastal Waterway where the big boats roar from marker to marker, on their way to somewhere as fast as they can go.

Five minutes later I pa.s.s the boundary sign that says EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, mounted on a metal post sticking up out of the water. I turn northwest, sixty degrees, and head for a white stick I pounded into the mud a while back. I can't see it yet but I know where it is. When I get an implant, when I'm eighteen (my mom won't give permission for anything, even if, as I tell her, it might save my life), it's not going to be for cosmetic purposes. It will be a global positioning system. I don't want to put this spot into a handheld GPS right now. If they got their hands on the GPS they could find me. And I don't want to be found.

I skim over the shallow water, blue and green like a liquid quilt, so clear I can see the seagra.s.s below, pulled like long hair across the bottom by the outgoing tide rushing through narrow channels to the Atlantic. There are low gray islands everywhere, and they all look alike, kind of fluffy and very small. You can't land on them because they are park. A fishhawk flies overhead, and a pair of white egrets, and doves making their weird, low dinosaur cry. Gulls chase me for a moment, hoping for food, then drop back.

I'm surrounded by islands now, and sandbars, and I can't see Key West anymore. If a boat with a bigger draft wandered into this mile-wide basin, they'd have a hard time finding their way back out. They'd run aground and have to call Sea Tow. Golden brown sandbars glimmer in strips around me. Out on the water it's hard to tell how far away anything is. When I reach my white stick, I turn the boat at a precise angle, and suddenly a channel, two feet deep and brilliant green, appears before me. If you aren't headed right into it, you can't see it at all. That's the thing about the bay. You really have to know what you're doing, and I do. This is where Sam and I grew up, on the water, with Dad teaching us where to go and how to survive, and then just us two after he died.

The mouth of my little creek is hidden by mangroves. I look around before I go in, but I see no one except a flats fisherman way, way off. I duck beneath the branches and the leaves scratch my face. Then I'm in the creek.

It's only about ten feet wide, with a sandy bottom over which snapper and bonefish phantoms glide. A few yellow mangrove leaves drift past on the surface. I can see every pebble, every branch that has fallen into the water. It's a crystal place, and utterly quiet except for birds. Sometimes porpoises come into the ca.n.a.l, hunting. They make a snorting sound with their airholes, like hogs, and come up to the boat and look at me.

Mangroves are peculiar plants. Their roots drop down into the water, looking like gray scribbles, but when you look at a single tree carefully, you can see that the roots arch out, dive straight down, then split at a precise angle. My mother could tell you the angle. The water flows through their roots. There are three kinds of mangroves-red, white, and black. They mostly look the same, though, except for subtle differences. This is a black mangrove hammock.

I turn off the engine and float but don't throw in the anchor. It is hot and damp and still.

There's a lot to think about out here. You can think about waves that pa.s.s through a medium. Like light through the air, like motion through the water. Ripples draw reflections into bands of straight colored lines-green, silver, blue, like their edges were drawn with a ruler. A pelican dives straight down into the water with a big loud smash and surfaces, swimming. He didn't catch anything. Light wavers and twists on the creek bottom in a diamond pattern.

You can think about cells, and zygotes, but I don't feel like it right now. I think about circles. Have you ever noticed how people are always telling you about how things like light and sound are organized in circles? If you paint, there is the color wheel. If you play the piano, you have to learn the circle of fifths so you can transpose like mad, change anything into any other key right away.

I do like to transpose. I want to transpose the whole world. I want to transpose it to the world where Sam is, to take all the light and dive into it and see him there, where he always calls me Sun-diver. It's his name for me. But it's only his. The Day part, the last name, is mine. Making Sam again would be like a circle, wouldn't it? A new Sam, in a new time.

I take off all my clothes and sit naked in the hot sun because, as I now realize, I didn't have time to grab my bathing suit. I pull my snorkel on over my head and get my neon green flippers out from under the seat.

I look up and the sky is no longer blue. It is the color of no. A cloud covers the sun.

Sometimes when I am very sad, a face cries inside me. Tears flow there. But they do not flow outside, anymore.

Then sunlight shoots out and the world winks back at me. I fall into the other world below me, a sundiver. Sam is the triangles of light. He is the color wheel. He is the universe of transposed notes, winking at me.

He is colors I don't yet know. I am inventing them. I am giving him a new self.

If anybody found out, they'd kill me.

Millicent Swartz, our neighbor, is a real estate agent, as I mentioned before. She sits in the living room now, wearing a red, vaguely Western hat from which shimmering things dangle, shaking whenever she moves her head, which is often because that's how she talks. Her hands dance around; she just can't sit still, and she's tiny, like a human flea with wild, frizzy black hair. She gives belly-dancing lessons on the side, and I took some last year. It was fun. She has a big mirror in her living room, and you have to do a lot of exercises. She's drinking a cold Cuban beer. My mother, wearing shorts and a halter top, sits in a leather club chair with her long brown legs stretched out on an ottoman. She is drinking red wine from a gla.s.s etched with palm trees.

I'm in the dining room, working on my computer at the table of my grandparents. It is mahogany, heavy and showy and brilliantly shining where it is not scratched. I think it got here on a Spanish galleon or something. Key West was once the largest city in Florida, back in the 1860s. I'm not kidding. The whole rest of Florida was impenetrable jungle (excpet for a few places) full of gators and wild pigs and mosquitoes. The land turned the people back big-time. But Key West has a great harbor.

Actually, I'm not working at all. I'm just listening to them talk. There's a heavy wind out of the southwest today, so their words are interlaced with the thrashing of the palm trees right outside the window and cranky Ed croaking, "Up against the wall! Up against the wall!" He used to say, "Up against the wall, mother f-word," but Mom made Dad train it out of him.

"I had them this close!" says Millicent, hat jewels shimmering. She holds up a finger and a thumb to indicate a quarter inch. "This close! But that a.s.shole just didn't want to close the deal. Two weeks wasted."

Mom nods and sips her wine. She looks tired, as usual. I'm afraid that she's sick or something. Alpha snoozes on the tattered Tibetan rug next to her chair. Her muzzle is gray. Mom and I have had arguments about giving her the longevity drug. I don't see why anyone has to die, even dogs.

"I think I'm going to get out of this business." She says this once a week. Then she makes a big haul, closes a huge deal. It's like fishing. You never know what you're going to catch. "One of those Argentineans at the closing last week pulled a gun on us."

"Really."

"Of course, Bob took his own out of his desk drawer, and it was a draw." Millecent laughs. "It's hard to outgun Southernmost Realty. We should put that in our ad!" She intones, "It's Hard to Outgun Southernmost Realty. We've Got Your Deal in Our Sights."

She hoots. Sometimes Millicent snorts, sometimes she hoots, sometimes she guffaws. One thing about Millicent, she is always really, really amused by just about everything.

Mom says that Alfred, her broker, made all his money by smuggling drugs back in the teens. Endorphins, I think. "Oh, it's probably better to ambush everyone, wouldn't you say?"

I roll up my tiny computer, which is just a piece of nanocrystal as thin as paper. Rolling it up turns it off. I tuck it under my arm. It's time to go to the lab.

As I pa.s.s through the living room, I say, "Hi."

"Hi, honey," says Millicent. "Why don't you play something for us?"

For a moment I am struck by how strange the idea seems to me. There is no music in me. Doesn't anyone understand?

My computer slips lightly to the floor as I slide onto the piano bench, wrench open the top, and smash my fingers onto the keys, fierce and hard. Dunn dun da dun/Dun ta dun ta dun ta dun, the big minor chords and slow cadence of the death march.

Mom is out of her seat in a flash, her wine aslosh and her eyes very, very angry, like scary angry. "You apologize to Millie immediately, young lady! Do you understand?"

I turn to Millie. She looks like I punched her in the stomach. I know she was just trying to make me feel better. "I'm sorry." And I am. I have to stop saying and doing what I think. I lean down and give her a tight hug around her neck.

"It's okay," she says, and pats my back. "It's okay."

A powerful gray-black cloud is being pushed across the sky by the wind, a dark ribbon winding across the blue sky behind. A cold front is coming and evidently is almost here. Each gust of wind has some cold air in it, like an ice cube in a drink. I wish I was wearing jeans instead of shorts.

Mike Sledge is coming up Caroline Street now. The sidewalks are tilty, no good for skating, crazed with cracks and heaved slabs. He's wearing the usual: a muscle shirt with something about fish on it; teeny shorts. He has a scruffy gray beard, kind of long, and somehow he finds the energy to shave his head, which is as darkly tanned as the rest of his skinny self. He wears no shoes. Raises his hand in greeting. "Hey, little girl. Howzit going?"

I stop for a moment to talk. "Not bad, Mike."

"Hear about Sam?"

"Nothing new. Still missing." No matter what Mom says, I will never say he's dead until they show me a body. And that might be never.

"Ah. He's a good kid. Smart. He'll turn up. Don't you worry now, missy."

Mike does two things: drinks, and fixes houses. He is very much in demand-not because he's dependable, which he isn't, but because he does such an incredible job when he's there. I've decided that he's an obsessive, which is what drove him to drink and fine carpentry. I'm an obsessive myself. I'm so obsessive that sometimes I'm afraid to start something because it will have to be absolutely perfect and will take forever and everybody will get mad at me for falling into some detail that gets bigger and bigger until it's all I can see.

Biology is perfect, though. It's already here. We just have to tweak it, which is easy, because it's always changing anyway. It's called evolution.

"Your mom ready for that new kitchen yet?" His seamed, dried-up face, half-hidden with beard, is the face of a lot of people in Key West. Except for the mothers of my former friends. Unlike Mike, who wouldn't do it anyway, they can afford all kinds of treatments to deal with the results of their perpetual tans. I think the latest is just growing a new face at a spa in Cuba.

"I don't know. She's going to Bali next month."

"Oh, perfect time, perfect time. It'd drive her nuts to have the work done while she's living there."

"I'll be living there. Aunt Cicily will be living there."

"Oh my G.o.d, not you two!" He rolls his eyes. "It'll never happen." He ambles off down the tilted sidewalk, on his way to the infinite happy hour on Duval Street.

Mike used to be a commercial fisherman, until the IRS took his boat. He used to take Sam and me out, showed us the secret places and the ways to catch certain fish. He might drink a lot, but funny thing, he's always there when you need him, just knows and shows up somehow, and never gets mean like some people do. I mean, I've never seen him staggering across the street at three in the afternoon, and he's always sweet.

Mike's all right.

Cold raindrops flick over me, and I run the last two blocks to the lab.

Mothertime Clinic is in a big old mansion. I like going up the walk to the broad steps. Cushioned garden chairs and chaises sit on brick pads here and there in the garden. I wave to a clearly pregnant man lying on one, covered with a blanket and reading. He's been in the Key West Citizen. Famous, like me, ha ha.

Up the big steps, through the gla.s.s doors, past the plush waiting rooms where some decorator managed to cover everything from the sofas to the lampshades with images of palm trees. This was the Kingsley Mansion; they made their fortune in the eighteen hundreds by salvaging from wrecked ships.

I climb the wide mahogany staircase and look at a spot next to the door frame. The retina scan opens the door to the smooth, shiny lab.

It's not hard. Cloning. You just take an egg and suck out the nucleus with a pipette, which is a little gla.s.s straw, and put in the DNA of choice. In this case, it is DNA from Sam's hair.