Free Human Sister by Jim Bainbridge Page B

head had been produced by a Japanese company, but it hadn’t occurred to me before that his Asian facial features were remarkably handsome. In the soft glow of sedatives, I felt radiantly confident that he would perform the operation perfectly. As soon as Grandpa, Grandma, Mom, and Dad finished their tea (Grandpa had said he wanted everything to appear perfectly normal in the front parts of the house, where security wasn’t so good), cells to generate the biological components of my new brother, Michael, would be extracted from me.
    I placed my hand on First Brother’s hand. “I’ll miss you when you go to live in Canada.”
    “Why?” he replied without looking away from the systems monitor.
    “You’re my brother. I like playing games with you. Grandpa says you’ve worked hard preparing for this operation.”
    “The operation will not be difficult,” he replied, still looking away. “I was chosen to perform it because my hands and brain function rapidly, steadily, and accurately. There is minimal risk that you will come to harm. You are to remain calm.”
    “I’m so calm I feel I could melt right into this table.”
    “Your blood pressure and brain activity rise when you talk.”
    “Will you miss me when you’re in Canada?”
    He turned to me, the saccade of his eyes over my face and arms reminding me again—though now my imagination was heightened by drugs—of dragonflies, their micaceous wings aflutter. “No,” he answered. “Grandpa will take care of you. You will not need me. I will not need you.”
    I looked away. First Brother could be so difficult at times. In the nearly five years since we’d met, he and I had played with Lily; we’d listened to Grandpa’s favorite music (by Bach, Beethoven, or Zwilich); we’d talked about many things, especially my studies (actually, I’d done nearly all of the talking); and once we’d even baked cookies with Grandma, and then he and I had pretended that he’d come to have afternoon tea with me in my house when we were older and that he’d been able to eat the cookies and drink the tea. I’d learned to enjoy his company—most of the time, that is—if he seemed to give me at least a modicum of attention. But often, when his eyes stubbornly remained focused elsewhere, I had to imagine that he had another pair of eyes in the side of his head and that those eyes focused only on me.
    “What time is it?” I asked.
    “The time is 1611. We will begin in nineteen minutes.”
    It’s night already in Amsterdam, I thought, and Elio will be asleep. If I were there, he would have wrapped himself around me, his skin feeling so good next to mine.
    With a start, I heard the air filter motors rev, groaning under the strain of maintaining positive pressure as the operation tent door zipped open.
    “How’s my brave and wonderful girl?” Mom asked as she entered. Dad and Grandpa followed. Their hair and faces were wrapped in white.
    “I’m ready,” I answered.
    “All systems and functions are acceptable,” First Brother said.
    Grandpa adjusted the IV. “Please count slowly for me, honey—down from ten.”
    “Ten, nine,” I felt something cool spreading through my arm, “eight—”

First Brother

    “W hat a beautiful day to see you,” she says.
    The smiling and the stroking on the dorsal structure of the pigeonoid continue.
    “You’re looking very well.”
    A lighter stroking, now of the forward ventral structure, commences.
    “Do you have a message for me?”
    The stroking of the ventral structure ceases. She holds her palm up and open, displaying its pattern of furrows that map where her palm and fingers fold in on themselves. Six seconds pass. She retracts her hand.
    “No? Just along for the ride, then? Well, I’m glad to have the company.”
    She extends her legs, pushing the dorsal side of her torso against the edge of the raft at one pole of the major axis of the cavity. She puts the removed glove back on her right hand, pats her right thigh