Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

First Rites

Written by Nancy Kress

Illustrated by Jennifer Miller

— 1: Haihong —

She sat rigid on the narrow seat of the plane, as if her slightest movement might bring the Boeing 777 down over the Pacific. No one noticed. Pregnant women often sat still, and this one was very pregnant. Only the flight attendant, motherly and inquisitive, bent over the motionless figure.

"Can I bring you anything, ma'am?"

The girl's head jerked up as if shot. "No . . . no." And then, in nearly unaccented English, "Wait. Yes. A Scotch and soda."

The flight attendant's mouth narrowed, but she brought the drink. These girls today—you'd think this one would know better. Although maybe she came from some backward area of China without prenatal care. In her plain brown maternity smock and sandals, it was hard to tell. The girl wasn't pretty and wore no wedding ring. Well, maybe that was why the poor thing was so nervous. An uneducated provincial going home to face the music. Still, she shouldn't drink. In fact, at this late stage, she shouldn't even be flying. What if she went into labor on the plane?

Deng Haihong, one chapter short of her Ph.D. thesis at U.C. San Diego, gulped the Scotch and closed her eyes, waiting for its warmth to reach her brain. Another three hours to Shanghai, two-and-a-half to Chengdu, and perhaps two hours on the bus to Auntie's. If no one questioned her at the airports. If she wasn't yet on any official radar. If she could find Auntie.

If . . .

Eyes still closed, Haihong laid both hands on her bulging belly, and shuddered.

****

Shuangliu Airport in Chengdu had changed in four years. When Haihong had left, it had been the glossy, bustling gateway to the prosperous southwest and then on to Tibet, and Chengdu had been China's fifth largest city. Now, since half of Sichuan province had been under quarantine, only seven people deplaned from an aircraft so old that it had no live TV-feed. Five of the seven already wore pathogen masks. Haihong pulled on hers, not because she thought any deadly pathogens from the war still lingered here—she knew better—but because it made her more inconspicuous. Her stomach roiled as she approached Immigration.

Let it be just one more bored official . . .

It was not. "Passport and Declaration Card?"

Haihong handed them over, inserted her finger into the reader, and tried to smile. The woman took forever to scrutinize her papers and biological results. The screen at her elbow scrolled but Haihong couldn't see what it said . . . For a long terrible moment she thought she might faint.

Then the woman smiled. "Welcome home. You have come home to have your child here, in the province of your ancestors?"

"Yes," Haihong managed.

"Congratulations."

"Thank you." Emily's curious American phrase jumped into her mind: I would give my soul for a drink right now.

Too bad Haihong had already sold her soul.

Chengdu had finished the Metro just before the quarantine, and it was still operating. Everyone wore the useless paper pathogen masks. In California, Emily had laughed at the idea that the flimsy things would protect against any pathogens that had mutated around their terminator genes, and she and Haihong had had their one and only fight. "The people are just trying to survive!" Haihong had yelled, and Emily had gone all round-eyed and as red as only those blonde Americans could, and said apologetically, "I suppose that whatever makes them feel better . . . " Haihong had stormed out of the crummy apartment she shared with Emily and Tess only because it saved money.

It had been Emily who told her about the clinic in the first place.

As Haihong pulled her rolling suitcase toward Customs, her belly lurched hard. She stopped, terror washing through her: Not here, not here! But after that one hard kick, the baby calmed down. Haihong made it though Customs, the pills intact in the lining of her dress. She made it onto the Metro, off at the bus station.

The terror abated. Not departed—it would never do that, she realized bleakly. But at least the chance of detection was over. In the bus station, crowded as Shuangliu had not been, she was just one more Chinese girl in inexpensive cotton clothing that had probably been made in Guangdong province before being exported to the U.S. Only the poorest Chinese remained in Sichuan; everyone who could afford to had gone through bio-decon and fled. Chengdu had been the place that North Korea chose to bio-attack to bring the huge Chinese dragon to its knees. Sichuan had been the sacrifice, and rather than have the attack continued on Guangdong's export factories or Beijing's government or Shanghai's soaring foreign tourism, China had not retaliated toward its ancient enemy, at least not with weapons. Politics had been more effective, aided by the world's outrage. Now North Korea was castrated, full of U.N. peace-keeping forces and bio-inspectors and very angry Chinese administrators. Both of Haihong's parents had died in the brief war.

"Be careful, Little Sister." An ancient man, gnarled as an old tree, took Haihong's elbow to help her onto the bus. The small kindness nearly made her cry. Pregnant women cried so easily. The trip had been so long, so draining . . . she wanted a drink.

"Shie-shie," she said, and watched his face to see if he frowned at her accent. She had spoken only English for so long. But his expression didn't change.

The bus, nearly as ancient as the kind grandfather, smelled of unwashed bodies and urine. Haihong fell asleep, mercifully without dreams. When she woke, it was night in the mountains and the baby was kicking hard. Her stomach growled with hunger. A different passenger sat beside her, a boy of maybe six or seven, with his mother snoring across the aisle. He ducked his head and said shyly, "Do you wish for a boy or a girl?"

The baby was a boy. Ben, shaken, had analyzed with Haihong the entire genome from amnio tissue. Haihong knew the baby's eye and hair color, prospective height, blood type, probable IQ, degree of far future baldness. She knew the father was Mexican. She knew the fetus's polymorphic alleles.

She smiled at the boy and said softly, "Whatever Heaven sends."

****

Haihong's screams shattered the night. The midwife, back in prominence after the doctor left and the village clinic closed, murmured gently from her position beside the squatting Haihong. The smell of burning incense didn't mask the earthy odor of her spilt waters. Auntie held a kerosene lamp above the midwife's waiting hands. Auntie's face had not unclenched, not once, since Haihong had finally found her living in a hut at the edge of a vast vineyard in which she, like everyone else, toiled endlessly. The workers' huts had running water but no electricity. Outside, more women had gathered to wait.

Haihong cried, "I will die!"

"You will not die," the midwife soothed. Through the haze of pain, Haihong realized that the woman thought she feared death. If only it were that simple . . . But Haihong had done all she could. Had explained to Auntie, who was not her aunt but her old amah and therefore much harder to trace directly to Haihong, about the pills. She had explained, but would the old woman understand? O, to have come this far and not succeed, not save her son . . .

Her body split in two, and the child was born. His wail filled the hut. Haihong, battered from within, gasped, "Give . . . me!"

They laid the bloody infant in her arms. Auntie remembered what had been rehearsed, drilled into her, for the past nine days. Her obedience had made her an ideal amah when Haihong had been young. Her obedience, and her instinctive love. Her eyes never left the crying baby, but wordlessly she held out to Haihong the prepared dish holding pulverized green powder.

With the last of her strength, Haihong transferred three grains of powder to her fingertip and touched the baby's tongue. The grains dissolved. The baby went on wailing and all at once Haihong was sick of him, sick of the chance she had taken and the sacrifice she had made, sick of it all, necessary as it had been. She said, "Take him," and Auntie greedily grabbed the baby from her arms. Haihong tried to shut her ears against his crying. She wanted nothing now but sleep. Sleep, and the drink that, surrounded as they were by vineyards, would be possible soon, today, tomorrow, all the days left in her utterly ruined life.

****

— 2: Cixin —

Deng Cixin was in love with the mountains. Unlike anything else, they made him feel calm inside, like still water.

"Sit still, bow bei'r," Auntie said many times each day. "Be calm!" But Cixin could not sit still. He raced out the door, scattering the chickens, through the neat rows of grapes tied to their stakes, into the village. He scooped up handfuls of pebbles and hurled them at the other children, provoking cries of, "Fen noon an hi!" Angry boy. He was always angry, never knowing at what, always running, always wanting to be someplace else. Except when he was in the mountains.

His mother took him there once every week. She put him into his seat on her bicycle, sometimes pedaling hard with sweat coming out in interesting little globes on the back of her neck, and sometimes walking the bicycle. They covered several miles. After he turned four, Cixin walked part of the way. He liked to run in circles around his mother until he got too tired and she scooped him back onto the bicycle seat. The ride back down was thrilling, too: a headlong dash like the wind. Cixin urged her on: Faster! Faster! If he could just go fast enough, they might leave the ground forever and he would never have to go back to the village.

The best part, however, was in the mountains. Mama brought a picnic—that was a word from the secret language, the one he and his mother always used when not even Auntie was around. Nobody else knew about the secret language. It was for the two of them alone. The picnic had all the things Cixin liked best: congee with chicken and sweetened bean curd and orange juice. Although the orange juice was only for him; Mama had wine or beer.

As they ascended higher and higher, Cixin would feel his shoulders and knees and stomach loosen. He didn't run around up here; he didn't have to run around. The air grew sharp and clean. The mountains stood, firm and tall and strong—and how long they stood there! Millions of years, Mama said. Cixin liked thinking about that. You couldn't be angry at something so strong and old. You could rest in it.

"Tell me again," Cixin would say, sitting on the edge of Mama's blanket. "Where do the mountains go?"

"All the way to Tibet, bow bei'r."

"And Tibet is the highest place in the world."

"The very highest."

After a while Mama would fall asleep, thin and pale on her blanket, her short dark hair flopping sideways. Even then Cixin didn't feel the need to run around. He sat and looked at the mountains, and his mind seemed to drift among the clouds, until sometimes he couldn't tell which was clouds and which was himself. Sometimes a small animal or bird would sit on the ground only meters away, and Cixin would let it rest, too.

When Mama awoke, it was time for the once-a-week. That was a word from the secret language, too.

The once-a-week was tiny little green specks that Mama counted carefully. They melted on Cixin's tongue and tasted faintly sour. Mama always said the same words, every time, and he had to answer the same words, every time.

"You must swallow the once-a-week, Cixin."

"I must swallow the once-a-week."

"Every week."

"Every week."

"If you do not swallow it, you will die."

"I will die." Dead birds, dead rats, a mangy dog dead in the road. Cixin could picture himself like that. The picture terrified him.

"And you must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week. Ever."

"I must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week ever."

"Promise me, bow bei'r."

"I promise." And then, for the first time, "Where does the once-a-week come from?"

"Ah." Mama looked sad. "From very far away."

"From Tibet?"

"No. Not Tibet."

"Where?" He had a sudden idea, fueled by the stories Auntie told him of dragons and ghost warriors. "From a land of magic?"

"There is no magic." Mama's voice sounded even sadder. "Only science."

"Is science a kind of magic?"

She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. "Yes, I suppose it is. Black magic, sometimes. Now fold the blanket; we must go back."

Cixin forget about science and magic and the once-a-week at the exciting thought of the wild bicycle dash down the mountain.

****

Twice a year Mama took the bus to Chengdu, another far away land of black magic. For days before she left, Auntie spent extra time kneeling at the household shrine. Cixin, five, eight, nine years old, raced around even more than usual. Mama snapped at him.

"Sit still!"

"Ah, he's wild today, that one," Auntie said, but unlike Mama, she was smiling. Auntie was very old. She didn't work in the vineyards any more, but Mama did. Some nights Mama didn't come home. Some nights she came home very late, falling down and either giggling or crying. Then she and Auntie argued when they thought Cixin could not hear.

"I said sit still!" Mama slapped him.

Cixin raced out the door, tried to kick the neighbor's dog, did not connect. He kept running in circles until he was exhausted and his heart was too tired to hurt so much and he saw Xiao sitting by the irrigation ditch with her ancient iPod. Cixin, panting, dropped down beside her.

"Let me see, Xiao."

She handed over the iPod. A year younger than Cixin and the daughter of the vineyard foreman, Xiao had possessions that the other village children could only dream of. Sweet-natured and docile, she always shared.

Cixin put the iPod to his ear but was too restless to listen to the music. But instead of hurling it into the ditch, as he might have done with anybody else, he handed it carefully back to Xiao. With her, he always tried to be careful.

"My mother is going to a magic land. To Chengdu."

Xiao laughed. She was the only person that Cixin allowed to laugh at him. Her laugh reminded him of flowers. She said, "Chengdu isn't a magic land. It's a city. I went there."

"You went there? When?"

"Last year. My father took me on the bus. Look, there's your mother waiting for the bus. She—" Xiao dropped her eyes.

Cixin spat. "She's drunk."

"I know." Xiao was always truthful.

"I don't care!" Cixin shouted. He wanted to leap up and race around again, he wanted to sit beside Xiao and ask about Chengdu, he didn't know what he wanted. The bus stopped and Mama lurched on. "I hope she never comes back!"

"You don't mean that," Xiao said. She took his hand. Cixin jerked his whole body to face her.

"Kiss me!"

"No!" Shocked, she dropped his hand and got to her feet.

He jumped up. "Don't go, Xiao! You don't have to kiss me!" Just saying the words desolated him. "You don't ever have to kiss me. Nobody ever has to kiss me."

She studied him from her beautiful dark eyes. "You're very strange, Cixin."

"I am not." But he knew he was.

A band of boys emerged from between the rows of grapes. When they saw Cixin, they began to yell. "Fen noon an hi! Ben dan!"

Cixin knew he was an angry boy but not a stupid one. He grabbed a rock from the irrigation ditch and hurled it at the boys. It fell short but they swarmed around him, careful not to touch Xiao.

Cixin broke free and raced off. They shouted after him: "Half breed! Son of a whore!" He was faster than all of them, even among the trees that began on the other side of the village, even when the ground began to slope upward toward the mountains. He and his mother never went there any more. So now Cixin would go by himself. He would run higher and higher, all the way to Tibet, and maybe he would go live with the monks and maybe he would die on the way and it didn't matter which. No one would care. His mother was a drunk and a whore, his Auntie was old and would die soon anyway, Xiao was so rich and she had an iPod and she would never ever kiss him.

He leaned against a tree until his breath was strong again. Then he again started up the mountain, walking to Tibet.

****

— 3: Ben —

Ben Malloy brought his coffee to the farthest booth of the San Diego cybershop and closed the door. The booth smelled of urine and semen. Public booths, used only by the desperately poor or desperately criminal or deeply paranoid, were always unsavory. He shouldn't have brought coffee but he'd been up all night, working when the lab was quiet and deserted, and he needed the caffeine.

He accessed the untraceable account, encrypted through remixers in Finland and God-knew-where-else, and her email was there.

B—

Your package arrived. Thank you. Still no breakthrough. Symptoms unchanged. I suspect elevated CRF and cortisol, serotonin fluctuations, maybe neuron damage. Akathesia, short REM latency. Sichuan quarantine may lift soon—rumors.

H

I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

Akathesia. Short REM latency. Ben had taught her those terms, so far from her own field. Haihong had always been a quick study.

He closed his eyes and let the guilt wash over him. She'd made the choices—both of them—so why was the guilt his? All he'd done was break several laws and risk his professional future to try to save her.

The guilt was because he'd failed.

Also because he'd misunderstood so much. He had thought of Haihong as an American. Taking her California Ph.D. in English literature, going out for hamburgers at Burger King and dancing to pellet rock and loving strappy high-heeled shoes. A girl with more brains than sense, to whom he'd attributed American attitudes and expediencies. And he'd been wrong. Underneath the California-casual-cum-grad-student-intensity-cum-sexually-liberated woman, Haihong had been foreign to him in ways he had not understood. Ben Jinkang Molloy's grandmother and father had both married Americans; his father and Ben himself had been born here. He didn't even speak Chinese.

His father had called him, all those years ago, from Florida. "Ben, your second cousin is coming from China to study in San Diego."

"My second cousin? What second cousin?"

"Her name is Deng Haihong. She's my cousin Deng Song's daughter, from near Chengdu. You need to look out for her."

Ben, busy with his first post-doc, had been faintly irritated with this intrusion into his life. "Does she even speak English?"

"Well, I should hope so. She's studying for a doctorate in English literature. Listen, buddy, she's an orphan. Both parents were casualties of that stupid savagery in Sichuan. She has nobody."

His father knew how to push Ben's buttons. Solitary by nature, Ben was nonetheless a sucker for stray kittens, homeless beggars, lost causes. He could picture his father, tanned and relaxed in the retirement condo in West Palm Beach, counting on this trait in Ben.

He said resignedly, "When does she arrive?"

"Tuesday. You'll meet her plane, won't you?"

"Yes," Ben had said, not realizing that the single syllable would commit him to four years of mentorship, of playing big brother, of pleasure and exasperation, all culminating in the disastrous conversation that had been the beginning of the end.

He and Haihong had sat across from each other in a dark booth at a favorite campus bar, Fillion's.

"I'm pregnant," Haihong said abruptly. "No beer for me tonight."

He had stiffened. Oh God, that arrogant bastard Scott, he'd warned her the guy was no good, why did women always go for the bad-boy jerks . . .

Haihong laughed. "No, it's not Scott's. You're always so suspicious, Ben."

"Then who—"

"It's nobody's. I'm a surrogate."

He peered at her, struggling to take it in, and saw the bravado behind her smile. She was defiant, and scared, and determined, all at once. Haihong's determination could crack granite. It had to be, for her to have come this far from where she'd been born. He said stupidly, "A surrogate?"

Again that brittle laugh. "You sound as if you never heard the word before. What kind of geneticist are you?"

"Haihong, if you needed money . . ."

"It's not that. I just want to help some infertile couple."

She was lying, and not well. Haihong, he'd learned, lied often, usually to cover up what she perceived as her own inadequacies. And she was fiercely proud. Look at the way she always leapt to the defense of her two friends and roommates, slutty Tess and brainless Emily. If Ben castigated Haihong now, if he was anything other than supportive, she would never trust him again.

But something here didn't smell right.

He said carefully, "I know another woman who acted as a surrogate, and it took a year for her to complete the medical surveillance and background checks. Have you been planning this for a whole year?"

"No, this is different. The clinic is in Mexico. American restrictions don't apply."

Alarms sounded in Ben's head. Haihong, despite her intelligence, could be very naïve. She'd grown up in some backwater village that was decades behind the gloss and snap of Shanghai or Beijing. Ben was not naïve. His post-doc had been at a cutting-edge big-pharm; he was now a promising researcher at the San Diego Neuroscience Institute. A lot of companies found it convenient to have easy access to Mexico for drug testing. FDA approval required endless and elaborate clinical trials, but the starving Mexican provinces allowed a lot more latitude as long as there was "full disclosure to all participants." As if an ignorant and desperate day laborer could, or would, understand the medical jargon thrown at him in return for use of his body. Congress had been conducting hearings on the issue for years, with no effect whatsoever. Any procedure or drug experimented with in Mexico would, of course, then have to be re-tested in the U.S. But ninety percent of all new drugs failed. Mexico made a cheap winnowing ground.

And, of course, there were always rumors of totally banned procedures available there for a price. But no big pharm or rogue genetics outfit would actually use a legitimate fertility clinic for experimentation . . . would they?

"Haihong, what's the name of the clinic?"

"Why?"

Their drinks came, Dos Equis for him and Diet Coke for her. After the waitress left, Ben said casually, "I may be able to find out stuff for you. Their usual pay rate for surrogates, for instance. Make sure you're not getting ripped off." Unlike Haihong, Ben was a good liar.

Haihong nodded. So it was the money. "Okay. The clinic is called Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes."

He'd never heard of it. "How did you learn about this place?"

"Emily." She was watching him warily now, ready to resent any criticism of her friend.

He said only, "Okay, I'll get on it. How did your meeting with your thesis advisor go yesterday?"

He saw her relax. She launched into a technical discussion of semiotics that he didn't even try to follow. Instead he tried to find traces of his family's faces in hers. Around the eyes, maybe, and the nose . . . but he and his brothers stood six feet, his hair was red, and he had the spare tire of most sedentary Americans. She was tiny, fragilely made. And fragile in other ways, too, capable of an hysterical emotionalism kept in check only by her relentless drive to accomplishment. Ben had seen her drunk once, it was not pretty, and she'd never let him see her that way again. Haihong was a mass of contradictions, this cousin of his, and he groped through his emotions to find one that fit how he felt about her. He didn't find it.

Abruptly he said, interrupting something about F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Is the egg yours or a donor's?"

Anger darkened her delicate features. "None of your business!"

So the egg was hers, and she was more uneasy about the whole business than she pretended. All at once he remembered a stray statistic: Twenty-one percent of surrogate mothers changed their mind about giving up their babies.

"Sorry," he said. "Now what was that again about Fitzgerald?"

****

She was eight months along before he cracked Dispensario de las Colinas Verdes.

His work at the Neuroscience Institute was with genetically modified proteins that packaged different monoamines into secretory vesicles, the biological storage and delivery system for signal molecules. Ben specialized in brain neurotransmitters. This allowed him access to work-in-progress by the Institute's commercial and academic partners. Colinas Verdes was not among them.

However, months of digging—most of it not within the scope of his grant and some of it blatant favor-trading—finally turned up that one of the Institute's partners had a partner. That small company, which had already been fined twice by the FDA, had buried in its restricted on-line sites a single reference to the Mexican clinic. It was enough. Ben was good at follow-through.

Haihong was huge. She waddled around campus, looking as if she'd swallowed a basketball, her stick legs in their little sandals looking unable to support her belly. The final chapter of her dissertation had been approved in draft form by her advisor. The date for her oral defense had been set. She beamed at strangers; she fell into periods of vegetable lassitude; she snapped at friends; she applied feverishly for teaching posts. Sometimes she cried and then, ten minutes later, laughed hysterically. Ben watched her take her vitamins, do her exercises, resolutely avoid alcohol. He couldn't bring himself to tell her anything.

The day in her fourth month that she said to him, awe in her voice, "Right now he's growing eyelashes," Ben was sure. She was going to keep the baby.

Twenty-one percent.

He went himself to Mexico, presenting his passport at the border, driving his Saab through the dusty countryside. Two hours from Tijuana he reached the windowless brick building that was not the bright and convenient clinic Haihong had gone to. This was the clinic's research headquarters, its controlling brain. Ben went in armed with the names and forged references of the partner company, with his formidable knowledge of cutting-edge genetics, with pretty good Spanish, with American status and bluster. He spent an hour with the Mexican researchers on site, and left before he was exposed. He obtained names and then checked them out in the closed deebees at the Institute. Previous publications, conference appearances, chatter on the e-lists that post-docs, in self-defense, create to swap information that might impact their collective futures. It took all his knowledge to fill in the gaps, complete the big picture.

Then he sat with his head in his hands, anxiety battering him in waves, and wondered how he was ever going to tell Haihong.

****

He waited another week, working eighteen hours a day, sleeping in his lab on a cot, neglecting the job he was paid to do and cutting off both his technicians and his superiors. The latter decided to indulge him; they all thought he was brilliant. Every few hours Ben picked up the phone to call the FBI, the FDA, the USBP, anyone in the alphabet soup of law enforcement who could have shut it all down. But each time he put down the phone. Not until he had the inhibitor, which no one would have permitted him to cobble together had they known. Let alone permit giving it to Haihong.

A lot had been known about neurotransmitters for over seventy years, ever since the first classes of antidepressants. Only the link with genetics was new, and in the last five years, that field—Ben's field—had exploded. He had the fetus's genome. The genetics were new, but the countermeasures for the manifested behaviors were not. Ben knew enough about brain chemistry and cerebral structures.

What he hadn't known enough about was Haihong.

"An inhibitor," she said at the end of his long, lurching explanation, and her calm should have alerted him. An eerie, dangerous calm, like the absence of ocean sucked away from the beach just before the tsunami rolls in. He should have recognized it. But he'd been awake for twenty-two hours straight. He was so tired.

"Yes, an inhibitor," he echoed. "And it will work."

"You're sure."

Nothing like this was ever sure, but he said, "Yes. As sure as I can be." He tried to put an arm around her but she pushed him away.

"An inhibitor calibrated to body weight."

"Yes. Increasing in direct proportion."

"For his entire life."

"Yes. I think so. Haihong—"

"Side effects?" Still that eerie calm.

Ben ran his hand through his red hair, making it all stand up. "I don't know. How can I know?" He wanted to be reassuring, but the brain contained a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand or so branches. That was ten-to-the-hundred-trillionth power of possible neural connections. He was pretty sure what neurotransmitters the genemods on the baby would increase production of, and pretty sure he could inhibit it. But the side effects? Anybody's guess. Even aspirin affected different people differently.

Haihong said, "A six-month shelf life and a one-week half-life in the body."

She echoed his terminology perfectly, still in that quiet, mechanical voice. Ben put out his hand to touch her again, drew it back. "Yes. Haihong, we need to call the FDA, now that I have something to use as an emergency drug, and let them take over the—"

"Give me the first batch."

He did. This was why he'd made it, because he'd known months ago what she had never told him in words. Twenty-one percent.

He agreed to put off calling the authorities for one more day. "Just give me time to assimilate it all, Ben. A little time. Okay?"

He'd agreed. It was her life, her child. Not his.

The next day she'd been gone.

In the foul public cyberbooth, nine years later, Ben deleted Haihong's email. Rumors, she'd written, Sichuan quarantine may lift soon. Interred in her remote village, which the most modern of technologies had forced back into the near primitive, she hadn't even heard the news. The quarantine had always been as much political as anything else, or it wouldn't have been in force so long. It was to be lifted today and even now, right there in Chengdu from which she must have sent her email, she still seemed oblivious. I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

What exactly did that mean?

He left his coffee untouched in the filthy booth. Outside, in the fresh air under California's blue sky, he pulled out his handheld and booked a flight to China.

****

—4: Haihong —

She left the People's Internet Building at dusk. Usually she spent several hours on-line, as long as she could afford, in an orgy of catching up on news, on the academic world, on anything outside the quarantine. She only had the opportunity every six months.

This time, she left as soon as she'd emailed Ben, uploading onto him her bi-annual report, her gratitude, her despair. Unfair, of course, but how could it matter? Ben, in California, had everything; he could add a little despair to his riches. To Haihong nothing mattered any longer, nothing except Cixin, the unruly child who did not love her and for whom she'd given her future. A fruitless sacrifice, since Cixin had no future, either. Everything barren, everything a waste.

She clutched the package in her hand, the precious six-month supply of inhibitor of proteins in the posterior superior parietal lobes. The pills were sewn inside a gift for Cixin, a stuffed toy he was too old for. Ben had not done any further work on the side-effects. Maybe he had no way to measure them, eight thousand miles away from his research subject. Maybe he had lost interest. So Cixin would go on being irritable, restless, underweight, over-stressed. He would—

Outside, Haihong blinked. The sparse and rotting skeleton left of Chengdu seemed to have gone mad! Gongs sounded, sirens blared, people poured out of the dilapidated buildings, more people than she had known were left in the city. They were shouting something, something about the quarantine . . .

Starting forward, she didn't even see the pedicab speeding around the corner, racing along the nearly trafficless street. The driver, a strong and large man, saw her too late. He yelled and braked, but Haihong had already gone flying. Her tiny and malnourished body struck the ground head first. Bleeding from her mouth, unable to feel any of her body below the neck, her last thought was a wordless prayer for her son.

****

— 5: Cixin —

By afternoon Cixin was exhausted from walking away from the village, up into the mountains. His legs ached and his empty stomach moaned. Worse, he was afraid he was lost.

He had been careful to follow the path where Mama used to ride her bicycle, and it had led him to their old picnic place. Cixin had stopped and rested there, but the usual calm had not come over him. Should he try to worship, like Auntie did when she bowed in front of her little shrine? Mama said, in the secret language, that worship was nonsense. But nothing Mama said could be trusted. She was a drunk and a whore.

Cixin swiped a tear from his dusty cheek. It was stupid to cry. And he wasn't really lost. After the picnic place, the path had become narrower and harder to see, and maybe—maybe—he had lost it, but he was still climbing uphill. Tibet was uphill, at the top of the mountains. He was all right.

But so thirsty! If he just had some water . . .

An hour later he came to a stream. It was shallow and muddy, but he lay on his belly and lapped at the water. That helped a little. Cixin staggered up on his aching legs and resumed climbing.

An hour after that, it began to get dark.

Now fear took him. He'd been sure he would reach Tibet before nightfall . . . after all, look how far he'd come! There should be monks coming out to greet him, taking him into a warm place with water and beancurd and congee . . . Nothing was right.

"Stupid monks!" he screamed as loud as he could, but then stopped because what if the monks were on their way to get him and they heard him and turned back? So he yelled, "I didn't mean it!"

But still no monks came.

Darkness fell swiftly. Cixin huddled at the base of a pine tree, arms wrapped around his body and legs drawn up for warmth. It didn't help. He didn't want to race around, not on his hurting legs and not in the dark, and yet it was hard to sit still and do nothing. Every noise terrified him—what if a tiger came? Mama said the tigers were all gone from China but Mama was a drunk and a whore.

Shivering, he eventually slept.

In the morning the sun returned, warming him, but everything else was even worse. His belly ached more than his legs. Somehow his tongue had swollen so that it seemed to fill his entire dry mouth. Should he go back to the place where the water had been? But he didn't remember how to get there. All the pine trees, all the larches, all the gray boulders, looked the same.

Cixin whimpered and started climbing. Surely Tibet couldn't be much farther. There'd been a map of China in the village school he'd attended until his inability to sit still made him leave, and on the map Tibet looked very close to Sichuan. He was almost there.

The second nightfall found him no longer able to move. He collapsed beside a boulder, too exhausted even to cry. The picture of the dead dog in the road filled his mind, filled his fitful dreams. When he woke, he was covered with small, stinging bites from something. His cry came out as a hoarse, frustrated whimper. The rising sun filled his eyes, blinding him, and he turned away and tried to sit up.

Then it happened.

Cixin knew.

He was lifted out of his body. Thirst and hunger and insect bites vanished. He was not Cixin, and everything—the whole universe—was Cixin. He was woven into the universe, breathed with it, was one with it, and it spoke to him wordlessly and sang to him without music. Everything was him, and he was everything. He was the gray boulder and the yellow sun rising and the rustling pine trees and the hard ground. He was them and he felt them, it, all, and the mountains reverberated with surprise and with his name: Cixin.

Come.

Cixin.

The child sat on the parched ground, expressionless, and was still and calm.

****

"Cixin!"

A sour, familiar taste melting on his tongue, a big hand in his mouth. Then, after a measureless time that was not time, water forced down his throat.

"Cixin!"

Cixin blinked. Then he cried out and would have toppled over had not the big man—how big he was! How pale!—steadied him. More water touched Cixin's lips.

"Not too much, buddy, not at first," the big man said, and he spoke the secret language that only Cixin and Mama knew. How could that be? All at once everything on Cixin hurt, his belly and neck and swollen legs and most of all his head. And the big man had red hair standing up all over his head like an attacking rooster. Cixin started to cry.

The big man lifted him in his arms and put him over his shoulder. Cixin just glimpsed the two other men, one from his village and one a stranger, their faces rigid with something that Cixin didn't understand. Then he fainted.

When he came to, he lay on his bed at Auntie's house. The big man was there, and the stranger, but the village man was not. The big man was saying, very slowly, some words in the secret language to the stranger, and he was repeating them in real words to Auntie. Cixin tried to say something—he didn't even know what—but only a croak came out.

Auntie rushed over to him. She had been crying. Auntie never cried, and fear of this made Cixin wail. Something terrible had happened, and it had happened to Mama. How did Cixin know this? He knew.

And underneath: that other knowing, half memory and half dream, already faded and yet somehow more real even than Auntie's tears or the big man's strange red hair:

Cixin. Come. Cixin.

****

The big man was Cousin Benjamin Jinkang Molloy. Cixin tasted the ridiculous name on his tongue. Despite the red hair, Cousin Ben sometimes looked Chinese, but mostly he did not. That made no sense, but then neither did anything else.

Auntie didn't like Cousin Ben. She didn't say so, but she wouldn't look at him, didn't offer him tea, frowned when his back was turned and she wasn't crying or at her shrine. Ben visited every day, at first with his "translator" and then, when he saw how well Cixin spoke the secret language, alone. He paid money to Xiao's father to sleep at Xiao's house. Xiao was not allowed to visit Cixin at his bed.

He said, "Why can you talk Mama's secret words?"

"It's English. Where I live, everybody speaks English."

"Do you live in Tibet?" That would be exciting!

"No. I live in America."

Cixin considered this. America might be exciting, too—Xiao's iPod came from there. Sudden tears pricked Cixin's eyes. He wanted to see Xiao. He wanted Mama, who was as dead as the dog in the road. He wanted an iPod. He wanted to get out of bed and race around but his body hurt and anyway Auntie wouldn't let him get up.

Ben said carefully, "Cixin, what happened to you up on the mountain?"

"I got lost."

"I know. I found you, remember? But what happened before that?"

"Nothing." Cixin closed his lips tight. He didn't actually remember what had happened on the mountain, only that something had. But whatever it was, he wasn't going to share it with some strange red-headed cousin who wasn't even from Tibet. It was his. Maybe if Mama hadn't got dead . . .

The tears came then and Cixin, ashamed, turned his face toward the wall. Gently Ben turned it back.

"I know you miss your mother, buddy. But my time here is short and I need you to pay attention."

That was just stupid. People needed food and water and clothes and iPods—they didn't "need" Cixin's attention. He scowled.

Ben said, "Listen to me. It's very important that you go on taking the pills your mother was giving you."

"You mean the once-a-week?"

"Yes. I'm going to show you exactly how much to take, and you must do it every single week."

"I know. Or I will die."

Ben shut his eyes, then opened them again. "Is that what she told you?"

"Yes." Something inside him trembled, like a tremor deep in the earth. "Is it true?"

"Yes. It's true. In a very important way."

"Okay." All at once Cixin liked speaking the secret language again. It made Mama seem closer, and it made Cixin special. Suddenly he had a thought that made him jerk upright in bed, rattling his head. "Are you really from America?"

"Yes."

"And Mama was, too?"

"She lived there for a while, yes."

"She liked it there?"

"Yes, I think she did."

"Take me to America with you!"

Ben didn't look surprised—why not? Cixin himself was surprised by his thought: surprised, delighted, frightened. In America he would be away from the village boys, away from the school that threw him out. In America he could have an iPod. "Please, Cousin Ben, please please please!"

"Cixin, I can't. Auntie is your closest relative and she—"

"She's not really my Auntie! She was Mama's amah, is all! You're my elder cousin!"

Ben said gently, "She loves you."

Cixin fell back on his bed, hurting his head even more. Love. Mama loved him and she died and left him. Auntie loved him and she was keeping him from going to America. Cousin Ben didn't love him or he would take him away from this evil village. Love was terrible and ugly. Cixin glared savagely at this horrible cousin. "Then after you go I won't take my once-a-week and I will die!"

Ben stood. "I will not be blackmailed by a nine-year-old."

Cixin didn't know what "blackmail" was, but it sounded evil. Everywhere he was surrounded by evil. Better to die. Again he turned his face to the wall.

Later, he would always think that had made the difference. His silence, his turning away. If he had fought back, Ben would have said more about blackmail and gone away, angry. But instead he ran his hand through his red hair until it stood up like bristly grass—Cixin could just see this out of the corner of his eye—and then put his hand over his face.

"All right, Cixin. I'll take you to America. But I warn you, it may take a long, long time to arrange."

****

— 6: BEN —

It took nearly two years.

If Ben hadn't had family contacts at the State Department, it would have been even longer, might have been impossible. The Chinese were discouraging foreign adoptions; Cixin was from within formerly-quarantined Sichuan; the death certificate for Haihong needed to be obtained from a glacially slow bureaucracy and presented in triplicate. But on the other hand, Chinese-American relations were in a positive phase. Ben could prove Haihong had been his second cousin. Ben had received a Citizens' Commendation from the FBI for exposing the surrogate-ring of American girls exploited by a sleazy Mexican fertility clinic. And Uncle James was on the State desk for East Asia.

During those two years, Ben sent Auntie money and Cixin presents. An iPod, which seemed to be a critical object. Jeans and sneakers. Later, a laptop, to be used at the vineyard foreman's house to communicate with Ben. They exchanged email, and Cixin's troubled Ben. Fluent in spoken English, Cixin was barely literate in any language, and he didn't seem to be learning much from the school software Ben supplied.

Cuzin Ben this is Cixin. Wen r yu comin 4 me. Anty is sik agen. Evrybuddy hates me. I hate it hear. Com soon or I wil die.

Cixin

Cixin—

I am making plans to bring you here as fast as I can. Please be patient.

Could Cixin read that word? Maybe not. The backward connection at the foreman's house didn't permit even such a basic tool as a camlink.

Please wait without fuss.

Haihong saying during her pregnancy, "Ben, please don't fuss at me!"

Take your once-a-week, use your school software, and be good.

What else? How did you write to a child you'd barely met?

You will like America. Soon, I hope.

Ben

Soon, I hope. But did he? Cixin would be an enormous responsibility, and Ben would bear it mostly alone. His parents, old when Ben had been born, lived in failing health in Florida, his sisters in Des Moines and Buffalo. Ben worked long hours in his lab. What was he going to do with a illegally genemod, barely literate, ADH adolescent who shared less than three percent of Ben's genetic heritage and nothing of his cultural one?

And then, because complications always attracted more complications, he met Renata.

A group from his department at the Institute went out for Friday Happy Hour. Ordinarily Ben avoided these gatherings. People drank too much, barriers were lowered that might better have stayed raised, flirtations started that proved embarrassing on Monday morning. But Ben knew he was getting a reputation as standoffish, if not downright snobbish, and he had to work with these people. So he went to Happy Hour.

They settled into a long table, scientists and technicians and secretaries. Dan Silverstein, a capable researcher fifteen years Ben's senior, talked about his work with envelope proteins. Susie, the intern whom somebody really should do something about, shot Ben smoldering glances across the table. Ben spotted Renata at the bar.

She sat alone. Tall, a mop of dirty blonde curls, glasses. Pretty enough but nothing remarkable about her except the intensity with which she was both consuming beer and marking on a sheaf of papers. At Grogan's during a Friday Happy Hour? Then she looked up, pure delight on her face, and laughed out loud at something on the papers.

Ben excused himself to go to the men's room. Taking the long way back, he peered over her shoulders. School tests of some kind—

"Do I know you?" She'd caught him. Her tone was cool but not belligerent, looking for neither a fight nor a connection. Self-sufficient.

"No, we've never met." And then, because she was turning back to her papers, dismissing him, "Are you a teacher? What was so funny?"

She turned back, considering. The set of her mouth said, This better not be a stupid pick-up line, but there was a small smile in her eyes. "I teach physics at a community college."

"And physics is funny?"

"Are you at all familiar with John Wheeler's experiments?"

She flung the question at him like a challenge, and all at once Ben was enjoying himself. "The 1980 delayed-choice experiment?"

The smile reached her mouth, giving him full marks. "Yes. Listen to this. The question is, 'Describe what Wheeler found when he used particle detectors with photon beams.' And the answer should be . . . " She looked at Ben, the challenge more friendly now.

"That the presence or absence of a detector, no matter how far down the photon's path, and even if the detector is switched on after the photon passes the beam splitter, affects the outcome. The detector's presence or absence determines whether the photon registers as a wave or a particle."

"Correct. This kid wrote, 'Wheeler's particles and his detectors acted weird. I think both were actually broken. Either that or it was a miracle.'" She laughed again.

"And it's funny when your students don't learn anything?"

"Oh, he's learned something. He's learned that when you haven't got the vaguest idea, give it a stab anyway." She looked fondly at the paper. "I like this kid. I'm going to fail him, but I like him."

Something turned over in Ben's chest. It was her laugh, or her cheerful pragmatism, or . . . He didn't know what. He stuck out his hand. "I'm Ben Molloy. I work at the Neuroscience Institute."

"Renata Williams." She shook hands, her head tipped slightly to one side, the bar light glinting on her glasses. "I've always had a thing for scientists. All that arcane knowledge."

"Not so arcane."

"Says you. Sit down, Ben."

They talked until long after his department had left Grogan's. Ben found himself telling her things he'd never told anyone else, incidents from his childhood that were scary or funny or puzzling, dreams from his adolescence. She listened intently, her glasses on top of her head, her chin tilted to one side. Renata was more reticent about her own past ("Not much to tell—I was a goody-goody grind"), but she loved teaching and became enthusiastic about her students. They were carrying out some elaborate science project involving the data from solar flares; this was an active sun-spot year. Renata pulled out her students' sunspot charts and explained them in the dim light from the bar. Eventually the weary bartender stopped shooting them meaningful glances and flatly told them, "Leave, already!"

Ben drove to her apartment. They left her car in the parking lot of the bar until the next day. In bed she was different: more vulnerable, less sure of herself. Softer. She slept with one hand all night on Ben's hip, as if to make sure he was still actually there. Ben lay awake and felt, irrationally but definitely, that he had come home.

Renata worked long hours, teaching five courses ("Community colleges are the sweatshops of academe"), but with a difference. When she wasn't working, she had a life. She saw friends, she kick-boxed, she played in a chess league, she went to movies. Ben, who did none of these things, felt both envious and left-out. Renata just laughed at him.

"If you really wanted to kick-box, you'd take a class in it. People generally end up doing what they want to do, if they can. My hermit." She kissed him on the nose.

If they can. Ben didn't tell Renata about Cixin. The first month, he assured himself, they were just getting to know each other. (A lie: he'd known her, recognized her, that first night at Grogan's.) Then, as each month passed—three, four, six — it got harder to explain why he'd delayed. How would Renata react? She was kind but she was also honest, valuing openness and sincerity, and she had a temper.

I'm adopting a Chinese boy for whom I've broken several laws that could still send me to jail, including practicing medicine without a license and administering untested drugs that induce socially disabling side-effects. Perfect. Nothing added to romance like felony charges. Unless it was medical experimentation on a child.

Sometimes Ben looked at Renata, sleepy after sex or squinting at her computer, glasses on top of her curly head, and thought, It will be all right. Renata would understand. She came from a large family, and although she didn't want kids herself, she would accept Cixin. Look