First Rites

Written by Nancy Kress

 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 todayyou’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 hereshe knew betterbut 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 departedit 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 picnicthat 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 strongand 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 soonrumors.

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 choicesboth of themso 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 naďve. She’d grown up in some backwater village that was decades behind the gloss and snap of Shanghai or Beijing. Ben was not naďve. 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 diggingmost of it not within the scope of his grant and some of it blatant favor-tradingfinally 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 fieldBen’s fieldhad 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 maybemaybehe 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 himwhat 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 everythingthe whole universewas 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 manhow 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 somethinghe didn’t even know whatbut 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, tooXiao’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 iPodsthey 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 surprisedwhy 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 grassCixin could just see this out of the corner of his eyeand 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 tellI 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 sunspot 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 passedthree, 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 at how much effort she put into her students, how many endless extra hours working with them on the sunspot project. And Cixin was eleven; in seven more years he’d be off onto his own life.

Other times he knew that he’d lied to Renata, that Cixin was not an easy-to-accept or lovable child, and that his arrival would make Ben’s world fall apart. At such times, his desperation made him moody. Renata usually laughed him out of it. But still he didn’t tell her.

Then, in August, Uncle James called from Washington. His voice was jubilant.

“I just got the final approval, Ben. You can go get your cousin any time now. You’re a daddy! And send me a big cigarit’s a boy!”

Ben clutched his cell so tight that all blood left his fingers. “Thanks,” he said.

****

“Tell me how it works,” Renata said. They were the first words she’d spoken in fifteen long minutes, all of which Ben had spent talking. Her dangerous calm reminded him of Haihong, all those years ago.

They were in his apartment, which had effectively if not officially become hers as well. His half-packed suitcase lay open on the bed. Ben stood helplessly beside the suitcase, a pair of rolled-up socks in his hand. Renata sat in a green brocade chair that had been a gift from his mother and Ben knew that if he approached that chair, she would explode.

He took refuge in science. “It’s an alteration in the genes that create functional transporter proteins. Those are the amines that get neurotransmitters across synapses to the appropriate brain-cell receptors. The mechanisms are well understoodin fact, there are polymorphic alleles. If you have one gene, your body makes more transporters; with the other version, you get less.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It affects mood and behavior. Less serotonin, for example, is connected to depression, irritability, aggression, inflexibility.”

“And this alleged genemod in your cousin gave him less serotonin?”

“No.” Alleged genemod. Ben dragged his hand through his hair. “He probably does have less serotonin, but that’s a side effect. The genemod affected other proteins that in turn affected others … it’s a cascade. Everything’s interconnected in the brain. But the functional result in Cixin would be a flood of transporters and neurotransmitters in two brain regions, the superior parietal lobes and the tempoparietal region.”

“I don’t want jargon, Ben. I want explanations.”

“I’m trying to give them to you. I’m doing the best I can to”

“Then do better! Six months we’ve been together and you never mention that you’re adopting a child … what is the effect of the extra transporters on those parts of the brain?”

“Without the inhibiting drug I designed for him, near-total catatonia.”

“That doesn’t make sense! Nobody would deliberately design genes to do that!”

“They didn’t.” Suddenly tired, he sat on the edge of the bed. His flight to Shanghai left in six hours. “Those brain areas orient the body in space and differentiate between self and others. The research company was trying to develop heightened awareness, perception of others’ movements, and reactions to muscular shifting .”

She got it. “Better fighting machines.”

“Yes.”

“Then why”

“They were rogue geneticists, Renata. They didn’t have access to all the most recent research. They screwed up. They’re all in jail now.”

“And the Neuroscience Institute”

His patience gave way. “Of course the Institute wasn’t involved! I told youwe helped shut the whole thing down.”

“Except for your little part in supplying this kid with home-made inhibitors. His other problems you mentioned, the restlessness and aggression”

“Most likely side-effects of the inhibitor,” Ben said wearily. “You can’t alter the ratio of neurotransmitters in the brain without a lot of side effects. Cixin’s body is under huge stress and his behavior is consistent with fluctuating neurotransmitters and high concentrations of cortisol and other stress hormones.”

She said nothing.

“Renata, I promise you”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen what your words are worth.” She got up from the green chair and walked around him, toward the door. He knew better than to try to stop her. “If you’d told me about Cixin from the beginningeven only that he was coming here to live with youthat would be one thing. I could have accepted it. I meanthat poor kid. It’s not his fault, and I understand family ties as well as you Chinese, or part-Chinese, or whatever you’re calling yourself now. But, Ben, I asked you. I said after our first week or so, ‘Do you see yourself ever wanting children in your life?’ And you said no. And now you tell me” She broke off.

All this time he’d been holding the socks. Carefully, as if they were made of glass, he laid them into his suitcase. A small part of his chaotic mind registered that, like most socks nowadays, they had probably been exported from China. He said, “Will you still be here when I get back?”

“I don’t know.”

They looked at each other.

“I don’t know, Ben,” she repeated. “I don’t know who you really are.”

****

It was the rainy season in Sichuan and over ninety degrees. Ben’s clothing stuck to his body as he waited in the bus station in Chengdu; Cixin’s village still had no maglev service. The station looked cleaner and more prosperous than when he’d come to China two years ago. Children in blue-and-white school uniforms marched past, carrying pictures of giant pandas. Ben had emailed Cixin to ask Auntie to bring him to Chengdu, but Cixin got off the bus alone.

He hadn’t grown much. At elevenalmost twelvehe was a small, weedy boy with suspicious dark eyes, thin cheeks, and an unruly shock of black hair falling over his forehead. A large greenish bruise on one cheek. He carried a small backpack, nothing else. He didn’t smile.

Ben locked his knees against a tide of conflicting emotions. Apprehension. Pity. Resentment. Longing for Renata. But he tried. He said, “Hey, buddy” and put a hand on Cixin’s shoulder. Cixin flinched and Ben removed the hand.

He tried again. “Hello, Cixin. It’s good to see you. Now let’s go to America.”

****

 7: Cixin 

He didn’t know who he really was.

Not now, in these strange and bewildering places. Cixin had never been out of his village. He’d assumed the videos on his laptop had been made-up lies, like Mama telling him about Tibet. But here was Chengdu, full of cars and pedicabs and scooters and huge buildings like mountains and buildings partly fallen down and signs that sprang up from the ground but dissolved when you walked through them and flashing lights and millions of people and men with big guns … . Cixin, who just last week had beaten up three village boys at once and thought of himself secretly as “The Tiger,” clutched Ben’s hand and didn’t know what this world was, what he himself was anymore.

“It’s all right, buddy,” Ben said and Cixin glared at him and dropped the hand, angry because Ben wasn’t afraid.

They sat together in the back of the plane to Shanghai. For a while Cixin was content to stare out the window as the ground fell away and they rose into cloudsup into clouds! But eventually he couldn’t stay still.

“I’m getting up,” he told Ben.

“Toilet’s just behind us,” Ben said.

Cixin didn’t need a toilet, he needed to run. Space between the rows of seat was narrow but he barreled down it, waving his arms. A boy a few years older walked in the opposite directionon Cixin’s aisle! The boy didn’t step aside. Cixin shoved him away and kept running. The boy staggered up and started after Cixin but was stopped by a shout in Chinese from a man seated nearby. Cixin ran the length of the aisle, cut across the plane, ran back down a different aisle, where Ben grabbed him by the arm.

“Sit, Cixin. Sit. You can’t run in here.”

“Why? Will they throw me off?” This was funnythey were on a plane!and Cixin laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. A man in a blue uniform moved purposefully toward them. Cixin stopped laughingwhat if it was a soldier with a hidden gun? He cowered into his seat and tried to make himself very small.

The maybe-soldier and Cousin Ben talked softly. Ben sat down and shook a yellow pill from a plastic bottle. “Take this with your bottled water.”

“That’s not my once-a-week!” The once-a-week, for reasons Cixin didn’t understand, had to be left behind at Auntie’s. Too risky for Customs, Ben said, especially for me. Which made no sense because Ben didn’t take the once-a-week, only Cixin did.

“No, it’s not your once-a-week,” Ben said, “but take it anyway. Now!”

Cixin recognized anger. Ben might have a gun, too. In the videos, all Americans had guns. He took the pill, tapped on the window, kicked the back of the seat until the woman in it turned around and said something sharply in Chinese.

Cixin wasn’t clear on what it was. A slow languor had fallen over the plane. Then sleep slid into him as softly as the fog by the river, as calmly as something … something right at the edge of memory … a pine tree and a gray boulder and …

He slept.

Another airport Stumbling through it half awake. Shouting, people surging, a wait in a locked room … maybe it was a dream. Ben’s face tired and white as old snow. Then another plane, or maybe not … yes. Another plane. More sleep. When he woke truly and for real, he lay in a small room with blue walls and red cloth at the windows, four stacked houses up into the sky, in San Diego, America.

****

Cixin ran. Waves pounded the shore, the wind whistled hardwhoosh! whoosh!and sand blew against his bare legs, his pumping arms, his face. He laughed and swallowed sand. He ran.

Ben waited where the deserted beach met the parking lot, the hood of his jacket pulled up, his face red and angry. “Cixin! Get in the car!”

Cixin, exhausted and dripping and happyas happy as he ever got hereclimbed into the front seat of Ben’s Saab. Rain pounded the windshield. Ben shouted, “You ran away from your tutor again!”

Cixin nodded. His tutor was stupid. The man had been telling him that rainstorms like this were rare and due to the Earth getting hotter. But with his own body Cixin had experienced many rainstorms, every summer of his life, and they all were hot. So he ran away from the stupid tutor, and from the even stupider girl who was supposed to come take care of him after the tutor left and before Ben came home from work. He ran the seven streets from Ben’s house-in-the-sky to the beach because the beach was the only place in America that he liked. And because he wanted to run in the rain.

“You can’t just leave the condo by yourself,” Ben said. “And I pay that tutor to bring you up to speed before school starts in September, even thoughyou can’t just go down to the beach during a typhoon! And I had to leave the lab in the middle of”

There was more, but Cixin didn’t listen. He’d only been in America ten days but already he knew that Ben wouldn’t beat him. Still, Ben was very angry, and Ben was good to him, and Ben had showed him the wonderful beach in the first place. So Cixin hung his head and studied the sand stuck to his knees, but he didn’t actually listen. That much was not necessary.

“adjust your dosage,” Ben finished. Cixin said nothing, respectfully. Ben sighed and started the car, his silly red hair stuck to his head.

When they were nearly back at the houses-stacked-in-the-sky, Cixin said, “You look sick, Cousin Ben.”

“I’m fine,” Ben said shortly.

“You don’t eat.”

“I eat enough. But, Cixin, you’re driving me crazy.”

“Yes.” It seemed polite to agree. “But you don’t eat and you look sick and sad. Are you sad?”

Ben glanced over, rain dripping off his collar. “You surprise me sometimes, buddy.”

That was not a polite answer. Cixin scowled and stared out the window at the “typhoon” and tapped his sandy sneaker on the sodden floor of the car. He wanted to run again.

And Ben was too sad.

In the “condo,” instead of the stupid tutor, a woman sat on the sofa. How did she get in? A robber! Cixin rushed to the phone, shouting, “911! 911!” Ben had taught him that. Robbershow exciting!

But Ben called, “It’s all right, Cixin.” His voice sounded so strange that Cixin stopped his mad dash and, curious, looked at him.

“Renata,” Ben said thickly.

“I couldn’t stay away after all,” the woman said, and then they were hugging. Cixin turned away, embarrassed. Chinese people did not behave like that. And the woman was ugly, too tall and too pale, like a slug. Not pretty like Xiao. The way Ben was holding her … Cixin hated the woman already. She was evil. She was not necessary.

He rushed into his room and slammed the door.

But at dinnertime the woman was still there. She tried to talk to Cixin, who refused to talk back.

“Answer Renata,” Ben said, his voice dangerously quiet.

“What did you say?” Cixin made his voice high and silly, to insult her.

“I asked if you found any sand dollars on the beach.”

He looked at her then. “Dollars made of sand?”

“No. They’re the shells of ocean creatures. Here.” She put something on the table beside his plate. “I found this one last week. I’ll bet you can’t find one bigger than this.”

“Yes! I can!” Cixin shouted. “I’m going now!”

“No, you’re not,” Ben said, pulling him back into his chair. But Ben was smiling. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll all go.”

“And if we go in the evening and if the clouds have lifted, there should be something interesting to see in the sky,” Renata said. “But I won’t tell you what, Cixin. It’s a surprise.”

****

Cixin couldn’t wait until Saturday evening. He woke very early. Ben and Renata were still asleep in Ben’s bedshe must be a whore even if she wasn’t as ugly as he thought at firstand here it was morning. A little morning, pale gray in a corner of the sky. The rainstorm was all gone.

He dressed, slipped out of the house-in-the-sky, and ran to the beach. No one was there. The air was calm now and the water had stopped pounding and something strange was happening to the sky over the water. Ribbons of colorgreen, white, greenwaved in the sky like ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts! Frightened, Cixin turned his back, facing the part of the sky where the sun would come up and chase the ghosts away. But then he couldn’t see the water. He turned back and ran and ran along the cool sand. To his left, in San Diego, sirens started to sound. Cixin ignored them.

Finally, exhausted, he plopped down. The sun was up now and the sky ghosts gone. Nobody else came out on the beach. Cixin watched the nearest tiny waves kissing the sand.

Something happened.

A soft, calm feeling stole through him, calm as the water. He didn’t even want to run any more. He sat cross-legged, half hidden by a sand drift, dreamily watching the ocean, and all at once he was the ocean. Was the sand, was the sky, was the whole universe and they were him.

Cixin. Come. Cixin.

Voices, everywhere and nowhere, but Cixin didn’t have to answer because they already knew the answer. They were him and he was them.

Peace. Belonging. Everything. Time and no time.

And then Ben was forcing open his mouth, putting in something that melted on his tongue, and it all went away.

But this time memory lingered. It had happened. It was real.

****

 8: Ben 

“I’d dropped the dosage to try to mitigate the side effects,” Ben said. He ran his hand through his filthy hair. Cixin lay asleep in his room, sunburned and exhausted. God only knew how long he’d been gone before Ben found his empty bed.

Renata pulled her eyes from CNN. The solar flare, the largest ever recorded and much more powerful than anticipated, had played havoc with radio communications from Denver to Beijing. Two planes had crashed. The aurora borealis was visible as far south as Cuba. Renata said, “Ben, you can’t go on fiddling with his dosage and giving him sleeping pills when you get it wrong. You’re not even an M.D., and yet you’re playing God with that child’s life!”

“And what do you think I should do?” Ben shouted. It was a relief to shout, even as he feared driving her away again. “Should I let him go catatonic? You didn’t see him two years ago in ChinaI did! He’d been in a vegetative state for two days and he would have died if I hadn’t found him! Is that what you think should happen?”

“No. You should get him medical help. You wouldn’t have to say anything about the genemods or”

“The hell I wouldn’t! What happens when they ask me what meds Cixin takes? If I didn’t tell them, he could die. If I do, I go to jail. And how long do you think it would take a medical team to find drug traces in his body? Inhibitors have a long half-life. And even if I explain everything, and if I’m believed, what happens to Cixin then? He’s not even on my medical insurance until the adoption is final! So he’d be warehoused, catatonic, in some horrifying state hospital, and I’d be standing trial. Is that what you want?”

“No. Wait. I don’t know.” She wasn’t yelling at him now; her voice held sorrow and compassion. CNN announced that a total of 312 people had died in the two air disasters. “But, sweetheart, the situation as it stands isn’t good for you or Cixin, either. What are you going to do?”

“What can I do? He just isn’t anything like a normalCixin!”

The boy stood in the doorway, his shock of black hair stiff from salt air, his eyes puffy from sleep. He suddenly looked much older.

“Benwhat does the once-a-week do to me?”

Renata drew a long breath.

“It’s complicated,” Ben said finally.

“I need to know.”

Cixin wasn’t fidgeting, or yelling, or running. Something had happened on the beach, something besides sunburn and dehydration. Ben’s tired mind stabbed around for a way to explain things to a nearly illiterate eleven-year-old. Nothing occurred to him.

Renata switched off the television and said quietly, “Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

“Butt out, Renata!”

“No. And don’t you ever try to bully me. You’ll lose.”

He had already lost. Shooting a single furious glance at her, Ben turned to Cixin. “You have a … a sickness. A rare disease. If you don’t take the once-a-week, you will die like your mother said, but first you go all stiff and empty. Like this.” Ben, feeling like a fool, sat on the rug and made his body rigid and his face blank.

“Empty?”

“Yes. No thoughts, nothing. No Cixin. That’s how you were on the beach, like that for a long time, which is why you’re so sunburned.” And maybe more than sunburned. A big solar flare came with a proton storm, and those could cause long-term biochemical damage. Ben couldn’t cope with that just now, not on top of everything else. “Do you understand, Cixin? You went empty. Like a … a Coke can all drunk up.”

“Empty,” Cixin repeated. All at once he smiled, a smile so enigmatic and complicated that Ben was startled. Then the boy went back into his room and closed the door.

“Spooky,” Ben said inadequately. He struggled up from the rug. “How do you think he took it?”

“I don’t know.” Renata seemed as disconcerted as Ben. “I only know what I would be thinking if I were him.”

“What would you be thinking?” All at once he desperately wanted to know.

“I would be wondering who I really was. Wondering where the pills ended and I, Cixin, began.”

“He’s eleven,” Ben said scornfully. Scorn was a relief. “He doesn’t have sophisticated thoughts like that.”

****

September. Cixin started school, the oldest kid in the fourth grade. Fortunately, he was small enough to sort of fit in and large enough to not be picked on by his classmates. He could not read at grade level, could not concentrate on his worksheets, could not sit still during lessons. After one week, his teacher called Ben to school for an “instructional team meeting.” The team recommended Special Ed.

After two weeks, Cixin had another episode of catatonia. Again Ben found him at the beach, sitting half in the water, motionless amid frolicking children and splashing teens and sunbathing adults. A small boy with a sand pail said conversationally, “That kid dead.”

“He’s not dead,” Ben snapped. Wearily he forced a dose of inhibitor onto Cixin’s tongue. It melted, and he came to and stared at Ben from dark, enigmatic eyes that slowly turned resentful.

“Go away, Ben.”

“I can’t, damn it!”

Cixin said, “You don’t understand.”

In his khakis and loafersthe school had called him at work to report Cixin’s absenceBen lowered himself to sit on the wet sand. The blue Pacific rolled in, frothy at the whitecaps and serene beyond. The sun shone brightly. Ben said, “Make me understand.”

“I can’t.”

“Try. Why do you do it, Cixin? What happens when you go empty?”

“It’s not empty.”

“Then what is it?” He willed himself to patience. This was a child, after all.

Cixin took a long time answering. Finally he said, “I see. Everything.”

“What kind of everything?”

“Everything. And it talks to me.”

Ben went as still as Cixin had been. He hadn’t even realized … .hadn’t even thought of that. He’d thought of neurotransmitter ratios, neural architecture plasticity, blood flow changes, synaptic miscues. And somehow he’d missed this. It talks to me.

Cixin leapt up. “I’m not going back to Special Ed!” he yelled and raced away down the sand, his school papers streaming out of the unzipped backpack flapping on his skinny shoulders.

****

“Temporal lobe epilepsy?” Renata said doubtfully. “But … he doesn’t have seizures?”

“It’s not grand mal,” Ben said. They sat in Grogan’s. Ben had drugged Cixin again with Dozarin, hating himself for doing it but needing, beyond all reason, to escape his apartment for a few hours. “With petit mal, seizures can go completely unnoticed. And obviously it’s not the only aberration going on in his brain, but I think it’s a factor.”

“But … if he’s hearing voices, isn’t that more likely to be schizophrenia or something like that?”

“I’m no doctor, as you’re constantly telling me, but temporal-lobe epilepsy is a very well documented source of religious transports. Joan of Arc, Hildegaard of Bingen, maybe even Saul on the road to Damascus.”

“But why does your inhibitor work on him at all? Isn’t epilepsy a thing about electrical firing of”

“I don’t know why it works!” Ben said. He drained his gin and tonic and set the glass, harder the necessary, onto the table between them. “Don’t you get it, Renata? I don’t know anything except that I’m reaching the end of my rope!”

“I can see that,” Renata said. “Have you considered that Cixin might be telling the truth?’

“Of course he’s ‘telling the truth,’ as he experiences it. Temporal-lobe seizures can produce visual and auditory hallucinations that seem completely real.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

Renata fiddled with the rim of her glass. “Maybe the voices Cixin hears are real.”

Ben stared at her. You think you know someone … “Renata, you teach science. Since when do you dabble in mysticism?”

“Since always. I just don’t advertise it to everybody.”

That hurt. “I’m hardly ‘everybody.’ Or at least I thought I wasn’t.”

“You’re taking it wrong. I just meant that I haven’t closed the door on the possibility of other worlds besides this one, other levels of being. Spirits, aliens, gods and angels, parallel universes that bleed through … I don’t know. But there’s never been a human society, ever, that didn’t believe in some sort of mystery beyond the veil.”

He didn’t know any more who she was. Ben motioned to the waiter for another gin and tonic. When his thoughts were at least partly collected, he said, “You can’t”

“What I can or cannot do doesn’t matter. The point is, what are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to have an implant inserted under Cixin’s skin that will deliver the correct dose of inhibitor automatically.”

“Really.” Her tone was dangerous. “And who will perform this surgery? You?”

“Of course not. It can be done in Mexico.”

“Do you know what you’re saying, Ben? You’re piling one criminal offense on top of another, and you’re treating that boy like a lab rat.”

“He’s sick and I’m trying to make him better!” God, why wouldn’t she understand?

“Are you going to at least explain all that to him?”

“No. He wouldn’t understand.”

She finished her wine, stood, and looked down at him with the fearlessness he both admired and disliked in her. The light from behind the bar glinted on her glasses. “Tell Cixin what you’re going to do. Or I will.”

“It’s none of your business! I’m his guardian!”

“You’ve made it my business. And even if you were fully his legal guardianwhich you’re not, yetyou’re not being his friend. Not until you can consider his mind as well as his brain.”

“There’s no difference, Renata,”

“The hell there isn’t. Tell him, Ben. Or I will.”

****

He took a day to think about it, a day during which he was furious with Renata, and longed for her, and addressed angry arguments to her in his mind. Then, reluctantly, he left work in the middle of the afternoon (his boss was beginning to grumble about all the absences) to pick up Cixin at school.

Cixin wasn’t there.

****

 9: Cixin 

The voices came to him as he colored a map of the neighborhood around his school. All week they’d been working on maps, which wasn’t as stupid as the other schoolwork. Cixin sat at his desk and vigorously wielded crayons. Playground, 7-11, houses, maglev stop, school building. North, west, legend to tell what the little drawings were. Blue, red, green …

Cixin.

He froze, his hand holding the green crayon suspended above his desk.

Cixin.

The voice was faintbut it was there. He looked wildly around the room. He knew the room was there, the other kids were there, he was there. In this school room, not on the beach, and not in that other place where even the beach disappeared and he could feel the Earth and sky breathe. So how could he be hearing …

Cix … in …

“Where are you?” he cried.

“I’m right here,” the teacher’s aide said. She hurried to Cixin’s desk and put a hand on his shoulder.

Cixin …

“Come back!” He jumped up, scattering the crayons and knocking away the teacher’s hand.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” she said soothingly. “I’m right here, dear. What do you need?”

Standing, he could see out the classroom window to the parking lot. Ben’s white car pulled in and parked.

Ben was coming for him. Cixin didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew. Ben didn’t like the voices. Ben was very smart and very American and he knew how to do things, get things, make things happen. Ben was coming for Cixin and Ben was going to make the voices go away forever.

Cixin’s mind raced. Ben would have to pass front-door security, go to the school office, get a pass, come down the hall… . . Cixin didn’t hesitate. He ran.

“Cixin!” his teacher called. The other children began shouting. The aide tried to grab Cixin but he twisted away, ran out of the room and down the hall, zigged left, dashed toward the door to the playground. The school doors were locked from the outside but not the inside; Cixin burst through and kept running. Across the playground, over the fence, behind houses to the street … run, fen noon nan hi …

Eventually he had to stop, panting hard, leaning over with his hands on his knees. The houses here were small and didn’t go up into the sky like Ben’s house. Beyond were stores and eating houses and a gas station. Cixin walked behind a place with the good smell of pizza coming from it. Except for the beach, pizza was the best thing about America. Back here no one in a white car could see him. There was a big metal box with an opening high up.

Climbing on a broken chair, Cixin peered inside the big metal box. Some garbage, not much, and a bad smell, not too bad. He hauled himself up and tumbled inside. The garbage included a lot of pizza boxes, some with half-eaten pizzas inside. And no one could find him.

Many things were clear to him now. Ben saying to Renata, “I’ll have to adjust the dosage. He’s growing.” The way to hear the voices, to go to that other place where he saw everything and breathed with the sky, was by having no once-a-week, and by waiting until the one he took before wasn’t in his head anymore. Ben had made him swallow the last once-a-week last Wednesday. This was Tuesday, and already the voices, faint, were there.

He curled up in a corner of the dumpster to wait.

****

 10: Ben 

He looked everywhere, the beach first. The day was warm and the sands choked with people who didn’t have to be at work, as well as teenagers who probably should have been in school, but no Cixin. Ben raced back to the apartment: nothing. He called the school again, which advised him to call the police. Instead he called Renata’s cell; she had no classes Tuesday afternoon.

“I’m very worried about”

“How did you hear so fast?” she demanded.

“What?”

“You’re inside, aren’t you? Was the TV on at the lab? If there’s a basement in your building go there but stay away from the power connections and make sure you can get out easily if there’s a fire. We put the bulletin out on campus, but who knows how many won’t hear ittwenty minutes! God!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The flare! The solar flare!” And then, “What are you talking about?”

“Cixin’s missing. He ran away.”

“Shit!” And then, very rapidly, “Listen, Ben, another solar flare’s been detected, a huge one, I mean really huge. Word just came down from the Hinode. It’s bigger than the 1859 superflare and that onejust listen. There’s an associated proton storm and nobody knows exactly when it will hit but the one in 2005 accelerated to almost a third of light speed. Best estimate is twenty minutes. There’s going to be fires and power outages and communication disruptions but also proton storms that have biological consequences to living tissue thatyou can’t go down to the beach to look for him now!”

“I’ve already been. He’s not there.”

“Then where”

“I don’t know!” Ben shouted. “But I’ve got to look!”

“Where?” she asked, and her practicality only enraged him more.

“I don’t know! But he’s out there alone and if there are fires” The phone went dead.

He stood holding it, this dead and useless piece of technology, listening to the sirens start outside and mount to a frenzied wail. Where could Cixin have gone? Ben knew no place else to look, no place else that Cixin ever went. Although he had liked that V-R arcade Ben had once taken him to …

He tore out of the apartment, raced down the stairs, and stopped, frozen.

In the bright sunlight, lights were going out. Traffic lights, the neon window sign at Rosella’s Café. They sparked in a glowing electrical arc and went dead. Smoke poured from the windows of a gas station a block over. People stopped, stared, and turned to their cell phones. Ben saw their faces when they realized the cells were all dead.

The sirens grew louder, then all at once stopped.

“What is it?” a young Hispanic woman asked him, clutching his arm. She wore shorts and a green halter top and she wheeled a pram with a fat, gurgling baby.

Ben shook off her hand. “A solar flare, get inside and stay away from windows and appliances!” She let out a great cry of horrified non-understanding but he was already gone, running the several blocks to the V-R arcade.

It took him ten minutes. Cixin wasn’t there. The doors yawned crazily open, and a machine in one of the cubicles had shorted and begun to burn.

The city couldn’t survive this. The country couldn’t survive this. Panic, no communications, fires, the grid gone … and the radiation of a proton storm. Ten more minutes.

He found a corner of the arcade farthest from the booths, near the refreshment counter, and crawled under the largest table. It wouldn’t help, of course, and it didn’t make him feel better. But it was all he could do: wait for the beginning of the end under a wooden picnic table whose underside was stuck with wads of gum from children that might or might not be alive by tomorrow.

****

 11: Cixin 

Cixin.

“I’m here,” he said aloud, to the empty pizza boxes in the dumpster. That was kind of funny because the voices didn’t speak out loud; they didn’t really have words at all. Just a feeling inside his head, and the feeling was him, Cixin. And then a picture:

The whole world, out in space, but covered with such a big gray fog that he couldn’t even see the planet. But Cixin knew it was under the fog, and knew too that the voices hadn’t known it. Not before. But now they did, because they knew Cixin was here. He was them and they were him and both were everything. It was all the way it should be, and he was calm and safehe would always be safe now.

Hi, he said and it might have been out loud or not, it was all the same thing.

****

 12: Ben 

No other V-R booth shorted and caught fire, although the first one was still smoking. Ben crawled out from under the table. He’d been there half an hourhow long did a proton storm last? He had no idea.

In his pocket, his cell rang.

Ben pulled it out and stared at it incredulously. How … After a moment he had the wits to answer.

“Ben! Are you all right?”

Renata. “Yes. No. I don’t know, I didn’t find Cixin … How come this thing works?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded bewildered. “Mine came on, so I called you … Some communications are back. Not where the grid is out or the satellites destroyed, of course, but the radio stations that didn’t get hit are coming through clear now andit isn’t possible!”

For the first and only time ever, he heard hysteria in her voice. In Renata’s voice. “The solar radiation. It … it isn’t reaching Earth any more.”

“It missed us?”

“No! I mean, yes, apparently … before the Hinode burned out, it  that’s the Japanese spacecraft designed especially to monitor the sun, I told you about itthe data showsthe coronal mass ejection”

“Renata, you’re not making sense.” Perversely, her panic steadied him. “Where are you?”

“I’m home. I have a radio. I’m notit isn’t”

“Stay there. I’ll get to you somehow. How much of the city is on fire?”

“Not enough!” she cried, which made no sense. “Did you find Cixin?”

“No.” He’d told her that already. Pain scorched his heart. “Stay where you are. I’ll call the cops about Cixin and then come.”

“You won’t get through to the police,” she said, her voice still high with that un-Renata-like hysteria.

“I know,” he said.

****

It took him over an hour to walk to her place. He kept trying the cops on his cell until the battery went dead. He skirted fires, looting, police cars, crying people in knots on the sidewalk, but Renata was right: This was not enough damage compared to what he had seen starting in the first few minutes of the solar storm. What the fuck had happened?

“It was deflected,” Renata said when he finally got to her apartment. She’d calmed down. The power was off but bright sunlight poured into the window; the battery-powered radio was turned to the federal emergency station; beside the radio lay a gun that Ben had no idea Renata even owned. He stared at the gun while she said, “Cixin?”

“Still no idea.”

She locked the door and put her arms around him. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s nothing, a fuss with some homeless guy thatwhat does the radio say?”

“Not much.” She let him go and turned the volume lower. “The satellites are mostly knocked out, but not all because a few were in high orbit nightside and didn’t get here until it … stopped.”

“What stopped?”

“All of it,” she said simply. “The radiation, including the proton storm, just curved around the Van Allen Belt and was deflected off into space.”

He was no physicist. “That’s good, right? Isn’t that what the Van Allen is supposed to do? Only … only why did the radiation start for a while and then stop?”

“Bingo.” Abruptly she sat down hard on the sofa. Ben joined her, surprised at how much his legs hurt. “What happened can’t happen, Ben. Radiation just doesn’t deflect that way by itself. And the magnetic fields contained in the coronal mass ejection were not only really intense, they were in direct opposition with Earth’s magnetic field. We should have taken a hit like … like nothing ever before. Far, far worse than the superstorm of 1859. And we didn’t. In fact, protons should still be entering the atmosphere. And they aren’t.”

He tried to understand, despite the anxiety swamping him for Cixin. “Why isn’t that all happening?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Well, what does the radio say?”

She flung out her hands. “Unknown quantum forces. Angels. Aliens. God. Secret government shields. Don’t you understand … nobody knows. This just can’t be happening.”

But it was. Ben said wearily, “Where do you think I should look next for Cixin?”

****

They found him two days later. It took that long for basic city services to begin to resume and for anyone to approach the dumpster. Cixin was catatonic, dehydrated, bitten by rats. He was taken to the overburdened hospital. Ben was called when a nurse discovered Cixin’s name and phone number sewn into the waistband of his jeansRenata’s idea. He found Cixin rigid on a gurney parked in a hallway jammed with more patients. He had an IV, a catheter, and multiple bandages. His eyes were empty.

Ben put the inhibitor on Cixin’s tongue. Slowly Cixin woke up, his dark eyes over sunken cheeks turning reproachful. Ben yelled for a doctor, but no one came.

“Cixin.”

“They … didn’t … know,” he croaked.

“It’s okay, buddy, I’m here now, it’s okay … Who didn’t know what?”

But painfully Cixin turned his face to the wall and would say no more.

The staff wanted to do a psych evaluation. Ben argued. They turned stubborn. Eventually he said they could get a court order if they wanted to but for right now he was taking his boy home as soon as the treatment for dehydration was completed. The harassed hospital official said several harsh things and promised legal action. A day later Ben signed out Cixin AMA, against medical advice, and drove him home through streets returning to normal much faster than anyone had thought possible.

There was a dreary familiarity to the scene: Cixin asleep in his room, Ben and Renata with drinks in the living room, talking about him. How many times in the last few months had they done this? How many more to come?

Renata had just come from the small bedroom. She’d asked to talk to Cixin alone. “He won’t tell you anything,” Ben had warned, but she’d gone in anyway. Now she sat, pale and purse-lipped, on Ben’s sofa, holding her drink as if it were an alien object.

“Did he tell you anything?” Ben said tiredly. He stood by the window, facing her.

“Yes. No. Just what he told you‘They didn’t know’ and ‘Let me go back.’ Plus one other thing.”

“What?” Jealousy, perverse and ridiculous, prodded him: Cixin had talked more freely to her than to him.

“He said there was a big explosion, a long time ago.”

“A big explosion?”

“A long time ago.”

That hardly seemed useful. Ben said, “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”

Renata hesitated. “Ben … do you remember when we met? At Grogan’s?”

“Yes, of coursewhy wouldn’t I? Why bring that up now?”

“I was correcting papers, remember? My students were supposed to answer questions about Wheeler’s two-slit experiments.”

Ben stared at her. She was very pale and her expression was strange, both hesitant and wide-eyed, completely unlike Renata. “I remember,” he said. “So?”

“The original 1927 two-slit experiment showed that a photon could be seen as both a wave and a particle that”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Ben snapped, and wondered at whom his nasty tone was aimed. He tried again. “Of course I know that. And your students were writing about Wheeler’s demonstration that observation determines the outcome of which one a photon registers as.”

“The presence or absence of observation also determines the results of a whole slew of other physics experiments,” she said. “All right, you know all that. But why?”

“Feynmann’s probability wave equations”

“Explain exactly nothing! They describe the phenomena, they quantify it, but they don’t explain why observation, which essentially means human consciousness, should be so woven into the very fabric of the universe at its most basic level. Until humans observe anything fundamental, in a very real sense it doesn’t exist. It’s only a smear of unresolved probability. So why does consciousness give form to the entire universe?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I don’t know either. But I think Cixin does.”

Ben stared at her.

Renata looked down at the drink in her hand. Her shoulders trembled. “The explosion Cixin said he saw in his mindhe said, ‘It made everything.’ I think he was talking about the Big Bang. I think he feels a presence of some kind when he’s in his catatonic state. That whatever genemods he has, they’ve somehow opened up parts of his mind that in the rest of us are closed.”

Ben put his glass down carefully on the coffee table and sat beside her on the sofa. “Renata, he does feel a presence. He’s experiencing decreased blood flow in the posterior superior parietal lobes, which define body borders. He loses those borders when he goes into his trance. And very rapid firing in the tempoparietal region can lead to the sense of an ‘other’ or presence in the brain. Cixin’s consciousness gets caught in neural feedback loops in both those areas  which are, incidentally, the same areas of the brain that SPECT images highlight in Buddhist monks who are meditating. What Cixin feels is real to himbut that doesn’t make it real in the cosmos. Doesn’t make it a … a …”

“Overmind,” she said. “Cosmic consciousness. I don’t know what to call it. But I think it’s there, and I think it’s woven into the universe at some deeply fundamental level, and I think Cixin was accidentally given a heightened ability to be in contact with it.”

Ben said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just think about it. I’m going home now, Ben. I can’t take any more tonight.”

Neither could he. He was flabbergasted, dismayed, even horrified by what she’d said. How could she believe such mystical bullshit? He didn’t know who she was any more.

It wasn’t until hours later that, unable to sleep, he realized that Renata also thought her “cosmic consciousness” had diverted the solar flare radiation away from Earth in order to protect Cixin.

****

 13: Cixin 

Cixin sat in his bedroom, cross-legged on the bed. His iPod lay beside him, but he wasn’t listening to it, hadn’t listened to it for the past week. Nor had he gone to school, played video games, or sent email to Xiao. He was just waiting.

Xiaohe would miss her. Ben had been very good to him, and so had Renata, but he knew he wouldn’t miss them. That was bad, maybe, but it was true.

Maybe Xiao would come one day, too. After all, if the voices were everything, and they were him, then they should be Xiao, too, right? But Xiao couldn’t hear them. Ben couldn’t hear them. Renata couldn’t hear them. Only Cixin could, and probably not until tomorrow. And this time …

The nurse hired to watch him while he was “sick” looked up from her magazine, smiled, and turned another page. Cixin didn’t hate her. He was surprised he didn’t hate her, but she couldn’t help being stupid. Any more than Ben could help it, or Renata, or Xiao. They didn’t know.

Cixin knew.

And when he felt the calm steal over him, felt himself expand outward, he knew the voices would be early and that was so good!

Cixin.

Yes, he said, but only inside his mind, where the nurse couldn’t hear.

Come.

Yes, he thought, because that was right, that was where he belonged. With the voices. But there was something to do first.

He made a picture in his mind, the same picture he’d seen once before, the whole Earth wrapped in a gray fog. He made the sun shining brightly, and a ray gun shooting from the sun to the Earth, the way Renata had described it to him. The picture said POW!! Like a video game. Then he made the ray gun go away.

Yes, formed in his mind. We’ll watch over them.

Cixin sighed happily. Then he became everything and went home, to where he knew, beyond any need to race around or yell at people or be fen noon nan hi, who he really was.

He never heard the nurse cry out.

****

 14: Ben 

She came to him through the bright sunshine, hurrying down the cement path, her dirty blond curls hidden by a black hat. The black dress made her look out of place. This was Southern California; people wore black only for gala parties, not for funerals. But Renata, his numb and weary mind irrelevantly remembered, came originally from Ohio.

Ben turned his back on her.

She wasn’t fooled. Somehow she knew that he hadn’t turned away from not wanting her there, but from wanting her there too much. No one else stood beside the grave. Ben hadn’t told his family about Cixin’s death, and he’d discouraged his few friends from attending. And they, bewildered to learn only after the death that anti-social Ben had been adopting a child, nodded and murmured empty consolations. And then, of course, there were the sunspots. A second coronal mass ejection had occurred just yesterday, and everyone was jumpy.

“Ben, I just heard and I’m so sorry,” Renata said. From her, the words didn’t sound so empty. Her eyes held tears, and the hand she put on his arm held a tenderness he badly needed but wouldn’t allow himself to take.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly. If she even alluded to all that other nonsense … . And of course, being Renata, she did. “I know you loved him. And you did the best you could for himI know that, too. But maybe he’s where he wanted to be.”

“Can it, Renata.”

“All right. Will you come have coffee with me now?”

He looked down. So small a coffin. Two cemetery employees waited, trying not to look impatient, to lower the coffin into its hole, cover it up, and get back inside. To their eyes, this was a non-funeral: no mourners, no minister or priest or rabbi, only this one dour man reading from a book that wasn’t even holy.

“Please,” Renata said. “You shouldn’t stay here, love.”

He let himself be led away. Behind him the men began to work with feverish speed.

“They’re afraid,” he said. “Idiots.”

“Not everybody can understand science, Ben.” Then, shockingly, she laughed. He knew why, but she clapped one hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

“Forget it.”

Not everybody could understand science, no. In Ben’s experience, almost nobody even tried. Half the population still equated evolution with the devil. But the president had made a speech on TV last night and another one this morning: The new solar flare presents no danger. There will be no repeat of last week’s crisis. The radiation is not reaching Earth. Wisely, she had not tried to say why the radiation was not reaching Earth. Nor why the astronauts on Hope of Heaven, the Chinese space shuttle, had not been fried in orbit. No danger was as far as the president could go. It was already like crossing into Wonderland.

Ben and Renata walked to his Saab. If she’d parked her own car somewhere in the cemetery, as she must have, she seemed willing to leave it. Gently she took the book from his hands and studied the cover.

“I’m not giving in,” he said, too harshly.

“I know.”

“If there really were … ‘more,’ were really something that could be reached, contacted, by more or different brain connections  then what evolutionary gain could have made humanity lose it? Was it too distracting, interfering with survival? Too calming? Too what?’

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Ben said. “And if it really were genetic, really were that the rest of us aren’t making enough of some chemicals or connective tissues or … I just can’t believe it, Renata.”

“I know.”

He wished she would stop saying that. She handed back to him James Behren’s Quantum Physics and Consciousness, but he knew she’d already seen the page he’d dog-eared and underlined. She already knew that over the grave of Cixin, who could barely decipher any language, Ben had read aloud about two-slit and delayed-choice and particle-detector experiments. Renata knew, always, everything.

“Maybe,” she said after a long silence, “if they know now that the rest of us possess consciousness, however rudimentary, not just Cixin … if they know that, then maybe someday … “

She could never just leave anything alone. That’s who she was. Ben shifted the book to his other hand and put an arm around her.

“No,” he said. “Not possible.”

This time she didn’t answer. But she leaned against him and they walked out of the cemetery together, under the bright blue empty sky.

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