Human Sister (40 page)

Sara

W
hen Grandpa returned from his meeting with General Renner, he told Michael and me that he had to go back to work on the Cinnamon Project the very next day. General Renner had told him there were people whom he loved who might get into trouble—big trouble. For example, illegal drugs might be discovered in their car or dorm room. Grandpa was also privy to classified secrets, secrets that might be found on one of Grandpa’s computers where they didn’t belong, a computer, say, that also harbored encrypted messages going to Chinese internet addresses. “You see, Professor Jensen,” Renner had concluded, “there are many things that can easily happen to you that are much worse than working for me.”

Grandpa then told us we should immediately begin preparing to go to a secure hiding place. He gave two reasons: First, he felt that Michael was no longer safe in the house. Several scientists associated with the Cinnamon Project had already had their homes searched—“secured from foreign spies” was what they had been told. Grandpa had influential friends in government, such as Senator Franklin, so he might be treated preferentially for a while, but for how long? Second, Grandpa continued to be “worried sick,” as he put it, that the androids might retaliate with biological weapons, and that though Michael and I might be protected, Elio wasn’t.

“Where would we go?” Michael asked.

“There are some deep-sea mining modules out in the Pacific that were secreted away by my father when he controlled Magnasea. Until he took me there about twenty years ago, only he and some pre-Sentiren robots that were long ago deactivated and left at the site knew of these modules. He was a survivalist who stashed away precious metals and other things for the Götterdämmerung he predicted but never lived to see.”

“How long can we live there?” Michael asked.

“Many years. Dad called the place Anzen, a Japanese word for safe. Of course, this assumes that everything there—food, fuel, and so on—has been well preserved. But at the near-freezing temperatures at the bottom of the ocean, my guess is that most everything is in nearly as good a condition now as it was the day it arrived. Additionally, we will be taking nutriosynthesizers and recyclers, so even if the foods stocked at Anzen have spoiled they can be broken down into feedstock molecules for the synthesizers.”

“You never told me about this place,” I said, wondering whether he’d known all along that it might come to this someday.

“It is not something one wants to contemplate—having to go into hiding in a dark, cold place under the sea. I didn’t want to lay such a burden on the imagination of a young girl. I was over seventy when your great-grandfather first told me about it and about some of the many circumstances that might force us to go into hiding there. It is one thing to know intellectually that terrible things can happen. It is quite another to see and feel the cold, cramped place into which one might be forced to retreat. The wars, the plagues—all the possible horrors—suddenly took on a new and terrifying reality for me.”

“How long will we have to stay there?” Michael asked.

“At least through the end of the military actions next fall. Perhaps longer.”

“When are we going to tell Elio?” I asked.

“When he comes home for his usual visit tomorrow night. But I want him to continue going to school right up to the time we leave. Everything we do outside of these rooms must appear perfectly normal.”

“You’ll be going, too, won’t you?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. If you and Elio disappear, certain people would want to know why and where to. I would be questioned, and we know I wouldn’t do well against the algetor.”

“What about Grandma?” I asked.

“She’s not healthy enough to endure the hardships we’re likely to face. We’ll simply tell her that we have to be gone for a while, and that it would be dangerous for her to know anything more. Fortunately, she’s been kept in the dark, so if she’s questioned, her interrogators would quickly determine that she’s not lying when she says she knows nothing about any of this. There would be no reason to subject her to the algetor. You don’t have to worry about Grandma. She and Carlos are close friends. He’ll take good care of her while we’re gone.”

Before Elio returned home the following evening, our plans were set. On the pretext that Grandpa had another engagement, the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Magnasea’s Mendocino fracture zone mining platform that had tentatively been scheduled to take place on Sunday, 26 January would be rescheduled for Sunday, 19 January.

On Monday, 13 January, one of Magnasea’s Lefcort XL cruisers would be sent from the Mendocino mining platform to our slip at the marina in Bodega Bay, where it would be loaded with four cases of champagne, thirty new seats for the mining platform’s auditorium, and the sofa and matching chairs from our living room. The sofa and chairs would replace an older sofa in the platform’s master suite, but the secret purpose in taking them was that Michael would hide inside the sofa as we smuggled him out of the house, onto our pickup, and from there onto the cruiser.

On Saturday, 18 January, Grandpa, Elio, and I, with Michael hidden on board, would set out to sea, ostensibly on our way to the Magnasea mining platform. Grandpa said that each of the Lefcort cruisers carried two small submersibles capable of carrying us to Anzen. As a countermeasure to spying on mining operations from the sky, each Lefcort had been designed so that the submersibles could be launched and recovered from the bottom of its hold.

By following only a slight deviation from a reasonably efficient route to the mining platform, we would stop briefly about 10 kilometers from Anzen, and Michael would take the first submersible down to be sure that Anzen was acceptably functional. As soon as Michael’s sub was launched, the rest of us would proceed as though we were headed to the mining platform, as planned. Two hours later, we would turn around and head back for a rendezvous with Michael. If everything was a go with Anzen, Grandpa would join Michael in the first sub while Elio and I would follow in the second.

“What if Anzen isn’t in acceptable condition?” I asked.

“There is another, older mining module farther out that we can try.”

“And if that one isn’t functional?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps we could find a remote place to hide along the Canadian northwest coast.”

There was a moment of silence while each of us tried to digest that last thought, then Grandpa explained that once at Anzen, our only means of receiving communications from the world above would be through an Andreev Underwater Acoustic Signal (AUAS) receiver and through fishoids that could be launched to the surface to receive or transmit messages. But since the fishoids might, if detected, be followed back to Anzen, and since AUAS transmissions were used exclusively for deep-sea commercial and scientific communications, we had to expect a near blackout of news all the while we remained in our hidden home.

I feared that Elio might be upset with our planned disruption of his life—his having to leave school, our going into hiding for an indefinite time—but he responded to the news with enthusiasm, as if we were about to embark on a great adventure. I didn’t have the heart, or the courage, to tell him—not yet; I needed time for it all to sink into my own mind—that our ability to have children might have been compromised.

Something did happen after dinner that evening that I should have recognized as being odd, though I didn’t at the time. Taking a break from his World Literature assignment, Elio got up from our study table and walked over to the scenescreen, which was displaying a recording of the prior afternoon when Lily and I had played fetch with an old tennis ball on the lawn in front of the garage. Elio sat on the sofa to rest. Michael went and sat beside him.

“Have you read Bashō’s poem,” Elio asked, “the one about a frog jumping into a pond? I’m supposed to write a short essay on it.”

Michael tilted his head—quizzically, a gesture that Elio had told me reminded him of how birds often cant their heads.

“Yes,” Michael answered. “‘The old pond/A frog jumps in/Sound of water.’”

“When I lived in Amsterdam,” Elio said, “the father of a Japanese friend of mine told me that a thing is what it is, not what it is in memory. Do you think that’s what Bashō was getting at?”

“No things but in memory,” Michael replied. “A pond, a frog, the resonant sound of a frog’s jumping into water—all of those things are complicated patterns constructed out of our collective experience and memory. Nothing in the present would seem like anything but for its being constructed out of this memory. It is memory that fills the present with meaning. It is memory that keeps each moment from being alone.”

And then Michael laid his head on Elio’s shoulder, and Elio leaned his head on Michael’s head, and for an instant I had the impression that they looked like lovers.  

Grandpa immediately began giving us a crash course in what we would need to know for our journey to, and our life in, Anzen. Because Elio had to continue attending his university courses, his training would be more superficial than Michael’s and mine.

Grandpa told Michael that we were entering a dangerous phase in our lives and that he, Michael, would have to begin acting more mature—no more hiding from difficulties behind his hands, no more crying and carrying on as a child. He would have to be as responsible for our care as we were for his. I felt certain that Michael would immediately adjust according to Grandpa’s instructions, and for a moment—a brief moment, because I knew that Grandpa was right—I felt I was losing a child who would from that day forward be a man.

Over and over, Michael and I simulated piloting the Lefcort cruiser, launching the submersibles, and docking at Anzen under varying conditions. During these simulations, Michael’s superior abilities became clear. It took me nearly three times as long as he to achieve a passing score on the simulations. While I struggled to keep up with Grandpa’s training schedule, Michael leapt ahead to study the design and maintenance of all systems in Anzen and the submersibles.

I had always felt that despite his greater gifts—in fact, because of them—Michael’s world probably would become even more challenging than mine. Now, as I watched him work, I was pleased and proud to see him reject coasting along by using his gifts simply to keep up with me. It was clear that he would use his talents to meet whatever challenges lay ahead.

Preparations for our descent to Anzen proceeded on schedule until Grandpa returned home early from work the next Wednesday afternoon. When he entered Michael’s area, he said he wanted to speak with Grandma privately. He told Michael to go to his bedroom, and he told me to go outside and wait.

A half-hour passed before Grandma came out. When she did, she shuffled by me without saying a word and went to lie on her bed. Frightened by her exhausted and defeated appearance, I ran to Gatekeeper.

Grandpa sat stoically at the study table. I hurried to him. “What’s wrong?”

He patted the chair beside him. “Please, sit. You’ve always risen appropriately to every occasion, and I’m certain you will do so now. Renner called a meeting this morning of everyone working on the project. Beginning immediately, each of our homes will be placed under guard around the clock. Nothing and no one will come or go without being searched. Furthermore, everyone working on the project except me is prohibited from going anywhere unless accompanied by a military guard.”

“Why not you?”

“I have opposed the project more openly than anyone else, so my special treatment is that I am to gather whatever personal belongings I want, have a quick dinner with my family, and leave here, escorted by the guard who is waiting for me outside, no later than 1930 this evening—just over three hours from now. I will not be permitted to leave the Livermore lab again until after the military operations are completed in September.”

He smiled at me. “Of course, under the circumstances, I cannot go with you to Anzen. Nor will we be able to smuggle Michael out the house door as planned. You will have to cut through the wall of your bedroom and dig up to the vineyard directly above. You should begin immediately after I leave. Work very quietly so as to avoid detection by any sensors that might be directed at the front of the house. Then the three of you will have to sneak to Bodega Bay and from there to Anzen.”