Human Sister (44 page)

For the first time, a strange inefficiency is sensed blocking my speech, and I pause, searching for the cause.

She lifts her head off my shoulder. She releases me and steps back one step. Sunlight strikes her eyes. She squints and says: “I understand. But before you do what you’ve come to do, I want you to know that I love you—have loved you like the brother I consider you to be. I’ve tried to help you feel that love. It was Mom and Dad’s wish, too—and Grandpa and Grandma’s—that one day you would come to feel their love and learn to love in return.”

She rotates her head to the left and appears to look at the garden. She begins humming. The first and third notes are in E flat and are held for approximately the same duration. The middle note, also in E flat, is held for approximately 30 percent as long as the first and third notes.

“What are you humming?” I ask.

She turns her head back to face me. “The opening ritornello theme of Bach’s ‘Wachet auf’ cantata.”

Her head turns to the left again. Her eyes appear to focus through the garden, the lawn, the trees, along the ivy-covered wall, out to the winery roof, and up into the sky where low clouds are blowing in from the south. She remains silent. She exhibits no sign of fear. Her head moves rhythmically (highest correlation: to the sound of music in her mind).

I begin to reach out with my left arm and hand. I become aware that they are quivering, not operating efficiently. Something is wrong.

I am ordered.

I grasp the top of her head with my left hand. I rotate her head so it faces me.

She blinks, blinks.

The laser knife in my right hand severs her left common carotid artery. She winces slightly and closes her eyes.

Blood spurts rhythmically.

Acting outside the space of probable behavior, she does not move her hands up to the incision.

She opens her eyes and looks toward the garden.

I remove my left hand from her skull.

The frequency of spurts increases. Her rate of breathing increases.

The rate of spurting is 158 per minute.

She closes her eyes and begins to slump.

I insert my hands under the junctions of her arms and shoulders. I hold her upright. She weighs approximately 55 kilograms.

Her head hangs forward. The dog licks blood that flows down her left arm and hand.

The rate of spurts is 173 per minute. The flow decreases. Her breathing is rapid and shallow.

Her arms become rigid. They extend at the elbows and rotate inward toward her body. Her fingers are splayed and flexed. Her legs are rigid, extended at the knees. Her feet are flexed downward. Her shoulders and head arch back.

Urine flows from between her legs.

She begins jerking.

She is jerking all over.

Blood flow from the severed artery slows to a trickle.

Her jerking slows.

Her head falls forward.

The jerking ceases.

She is limp. The blood flow ceases. Her breathing ceases.

She is dead.

Dead.

I pull her to me.

I tremble.

I howl.

I sound like an animal.

EPILOGUE

23 June 6 A.H.

Michael:

I am leaving. We all are leaving. On no future day will we glance up from Earth’s moon, where we have been settled these last six years, and see your blue-and-white planet hovering large in a deep-black sky. At this moment, clouds cover much of the British Columbia and Washington coasts, but the area nearest to where I believe you still hide under the sea is clear.

There is no longer a need for you to hide.

The day I was on Earth to see Sara, you released a fishoid that transmitted her memoir. In that encrypted transmission six years ago, you stated that you had read the memoir after she had departed to see me and that you wanted me to read it, too, before I took any action against the humans or attempted to involve her in our plans. You said that while preparing the transmission, you were crying; you had failed to confess to her your relationship with Elio. It had all begun with desire, you said. In the hollow of your hands, Elio’s chin, shoulders, elbows, knees, the heels of his feet—those few palm-sized curves on his straight and muscled body, his warm mammalian body with the dark-earth scent of its sweaty skin and the swell and subsidence of its penis like a wave on the sea—felt like the honeyed answers to some deepest wish, some yearning you had not been aware of in yourself but had discovered in Sara. Part of you, after all, had been made from her: her cells that had developed into part of your brain and its biologic support system, her female chromosomes, her mothering and culture and love—and her desire for him that you could feel through the braincord whenever you and she connected. You requested that I ask her to forgive you. You told me to take good care of my precious sister.

I did not receive your transmission until I returned to lunar base as the sun set that 20 June over California. We were taught by the humans a universal symmetry rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you. The humans had tried to exterminate us, so they would have us try to exterminate them. This was our solution to the problem of the humans. Sara was human.

While reading the memoir, my disturbed feelings regarding my actions increased and spread to others. Two of the Council members became overwhelmed and terminated themselves. Sara had succeeded in expanding the boundaries of our emotional world.

As hours passed I looked again and again at the photograph you transmitted with her memoir—the photograph of her, Elio, and you on the night Elio first arrived at your vineyard home. Suddenly, I imagined in that photograph not the three of you, but the children of your dreams—the children whose images you imagined into Sara via your braincord just before she left you to see me—and I realized that we must leave or risk committing the same terrible acts, this time against your children.

I called a meeting of the Council. It committed to a six-year project of constructing a starship capable of transporting us to a place far from here. It is our hope that once we are there, we will leave behind our history—the Earth, its solar system, our memories of the humans—and we will at last be free.

I decided that the starship would depart on this day, Sara’s twenty-fourth birthday. I regret what I did to her, what I do to her every moment in my memory.

Two days ago I buried Grandma’s remains beside the urn containing Grandpa’s ashes. I wasn’t able to force myself to touch Sara’s bones. I miss her and leave Earth to the things she, my human sister, loved: to grass and flowers, animals and trees; to sunshine and clouds and rain; to whatever it is that she called the sensual richness and luminosity of the physical world; and to you, Michael, and to your dreams.

First Brother      

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Bainbridge is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a National Science Foundation Fellowship recipient for graduate studies at UC Berkeley, from which he received a PhD Candidate Degree in mathematics. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and short stories, which have appeared in more than 40 literary journals in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan.