Maximum Light Chapter Two Nick Clementi    It's the same dream. I sit beside my mother by the duck pond, throwing our lunch to the ducks. "See, Nicky, the babies swimming behind their mommies! If we were duckies, you'd swim right behind me and Jennifer and Allen." "I want to swim in front of Jen'ver and Allen!" I say, and my mother laughs. She is very young herself, and beautiful, sitting barefoot on the grass. The ducks fight over the bits of peanut-butter-and-jelly, and quack and shrill and shriek and become my wrister.    I rolled over in bed and said, "Reception."    "A call, Dr. Clementi," said the MedCenter computer in its pleasant, androgynous voice. "Code Four. Mrs. Paula Schaeffer. Complaints are tingling left leg, lethargy, irritability. Instructions, please?"    "Schedule a visit in the morning," I said, probably nothing. Lethargy, irritability -- Mrs. Schaeffer always had those, as far as I could see. She was eighty-seven years old, for God's sake, and it was two o'clock in the morning. Did she expect to be dancing a jig and planning a party? But they were all afraid everything meant a stroke.    The wrister had woken Maggie. "Nick? Do you have to go out?"    "No. Just another Fretful Fossil." Our private name for them -- even though we ourselves were both in our mid-seventies. Or maybe because. Joke about it, taste it, get used to it in small silly references to other people, and it will be easier to live with. Mithridates, he died old.    Maggie rolled to nestle, spoon-fashion, against my back. Buttons on her nightdress poked into my skin.    "Your clothing is attacking me again."    "Sorry, love." She shifted position.    "Not good enough. Take it off."    "You're a dirty old man, Nick." And then, "Nick?"    It was going to be a good one, a hard one. I could feel it.    She was light and sweet in my arms. In her forties and fifties Maggie had gained weight, a hot exciting cushion underneath me, but in her sixties and seventies it had come off again, and I could feel her delicate bones. And that fragrance -- Maggie always had a fragrance to her, a unique order, when she was ready. She was ready now. Her thin arms tightened around me, and I slid in, and it was indeed one of the good ones.    "Oh, nice, nice," Maggie said, as she had said for fifty-one years now.    "I love you, Magie."    "Uhmmmmmmmmm . . . oh, yes, Nick, just like that."    She always knew what she wanted. For fifty-one years, I've been grateful it was me.    Afterward, the wrister rang again. Maggie dozed, one leg flung over mine, a tray white curl tickling my nose. I must have slept, too; morning light filtered through the curtains. Maggie woke and shifted. "Damn it, why can't they let you sleep? Don't answer it; it's probably just a tingling in Paula Schaeffer's other leg."    "Unlike what's tingling on you," I teased.    "Don't answer it, Nick."    "Reception," I said to the wrister.    "Probably a tingling in Paula Schaeffer's eyelashes."    But it wasn't. It was Jan Suleiman, clerk for the Committee, and a long-time friend. Often Jan made sure I heard things some people would prefer I not hear. I listened, and slowly sat up, staring into the darkness across our bedroom.    "Nick? Maggie said. "What is it?"    When the call finished, I told her. I always told Maggie everything, even things I should not. She was absolutely trustworthy. I told her about my remaining patients, about the economic struggles of the Doctors for Humanity Volunteer MedCenter, about the political struggles at the Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises. There was only one thing I hadn't told her yet, and I would, when the time was right. So now I repeated to her what had been allegedly seen yesterday, in the maglev explosion northeast of the city, in Lanham. Then I held her for a long minute before getting up, and dressing, and calling a car for the ride from Bethesda to the Hill.         The permanent Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises met in an anonymous and unpretentious office building. There were good reasons for this. First, there were so many Congressional Advisory Committees in these days of perpetual crisis that the government building were always full of anxious huddles of legislators, scientists, lobbyists, military officers, bureaucrats, toxicologists, industrialists, educators, doctors, economists, and activists. But an anonymous office building was also less likely to be watched by the press, whose involvement would be premature at this point. Everybody thought so, except me. I thought the press was long overdue.    Still, I could see the other committee members' point: much of the press still dealt in inflammation and hysteria, especially about the aftermath of the Tipping Point. They had a lot to answer for, although they probably never will.    But the main reason for the anonymous office building was the secret tunnel system from the anonymous parking garage two blocks away.    They built for secrecy a decade ago, when they could afford to build at all. Well they had to. It was right in the middle of the Tipping Point, when the looming financial crisis of the US government wasn't merely looming anymore, and the slow worldwide decline in viable sperm suddenly wasn't slow anymore, and the backlash against genetic engineering weren't just theoretical anymore, and the coming bankruptcy of elderly entitlements wasn't just coming anymore: it was all here. Along with the riots and the tax rebellions and the genetic laws and the entire destructive chaos of the Tipping Point, those two painful years before the president used martial law to restore order. A lot of otherwise unreticent people don't say what they did during those two years. In Washington, some of them used secret tunnels to do it.    A few blocks before the parking garage, I saw the child. This wasn't a good part of Washington, which had so few good parts left. Litter blew between the buildings, some of which had been burned down, more of which were boarded up. The May night had been mild, and old people slept on sidewalks and fire escapes and in doorways, wrapped in coats and blankets. It was a city of the elderly -- like practically every other city.    One in four Americans was over seventy. There were only 1.4 taxpaying workers to support each "retiree," even with the wretched non-living-level subsidies most elderly received. The number of "very senior citizens," those over eight-five, had quadrupled in the last fifty years. The global birthrate was less than twenty percent of what it had been a century ago. In some countries it had dropped to five percent. In the relative absence of children, the world had grown old.    We drove past the huddled sleeping forms. Past the holosigns, the most visible aspect of Project Patriot, birght cavorting shadows whose captions urged SHARED RESPONSIBILITY and THE SOCIAL CONTRACT = YOUR GUARANTEE OF A GOOD FUTURE! Past the broken bottles and drug discards and human shit -- the usual. Plus, of course, the rats, bolder and more aggressive than rats had ever been during the entire history of man. I knew why, but the committee wouldn't let me tell them.    And in the middle of the early-morning street, dressed only in pink tunic, a brown-skinned toddler with huge dark eyes and long black hair topped with a crisp pink ribbon.    "Stop the car." I said to the driver, who was already screeching to a halt, as startled as I was. This did not happened. Washington was at the bottom of American's regional variation curves in sperm count -- the bottom for motility and normalcy and volume -- and thus for birth rate. Artificial conception, in all it varieties, was still too expensive for most couples, now that the health insurance industry had crashed. And cloning, which had once seemed the hope of the world, had turned into a bitter joke.    You could clone worms, frogs, sheep, elephants. But not humans. A cloned, unfertilized human egg obediently divided five times, into thirty-two cells. And then it went on dividing, instead of first gastrulating in the first of many crucial folds that lead to cell differentiation. In cloned eggs, no cell differentiation occurred. Ever. You ended up not with bones cells and skin cells and muscle cells but with a monstrous ball of cells all the same, the homogenous mass growing more and more huge until somebody killed it. Researchers attributed this to subtle disruption of the embryo's chemical polarity gradients, although nobody had yet figured out the exact mechanism. They only knew the results. Cloning could not provide the infants the world craved.    And so children were scarce and precious; they were not allowed to turn up half-naked and alone in the middle of filthy streets. Especially not children with no visible birth defects. There were a great many infertile couples who would kill for this little girl.    She looked up at me without fear, and put fingers in her mouth.    "Hello," I said, through the powered-down window. Beside me the driver drew his gun. Children as bait were not unknown to the truly desperate. "What's your name?"    "Rosaria," she said around the two fingers, and started to cry. I got out of the car.    "Why are you crying, Rosaria?"    "Abuela didn't dress me." She lifted the edge of her tunic to show me her naked legs and genitals. Hastily I pushed the cloth back down again. If this got caught on robocam . . . HIL SCIENTIST CAUGHT MOLESTING CHILD.    "Where's Abuela now, Rosaria?"    She pointed down a side street. The driver said, "Sir . . . I can call Child Protection. . . ."    "Do that. And the cops." But meanwhile Rosaria was tugging on my hand and crying. "Rosaria, we have to wait for some people to come before we can find Abuela."    "Abuela fall on the floor!"    I was a doctor, I went with her.    She led me a short way down the nearest side street. SHARE RESPSONSIBILITY advised the building graffiti, along with FUCK RESPONSIBILITY! My driver stayed behind, talking on his wrister. I held the child's small hand as we climbed filthy, crumbling steps, through an apartment house door half off it's hinges, up a flight of stars reeking of garlic and despair. The staircase wasn't equipped with even common reinforced railing and non-skid treads, let alone the aid-summoning sensory monitors that were the guardian angels to the elderly rich. At the top of the stairs were three apartment doors, one wide open. Inside, an elderly Hispanic woman lay on the clean floor, between two carefully darned chairs that had once been bright red. One look at her and I knew I was too late. Myocardial infarction, or burst aneurysm, or any of a dozen other causes of death to the very old. In her hand she held Rosaira's pnk tights.    I knelt before the child. "Rosaria . . . Abuela's dead. She's not in that body anymore. Do you understand?"    She nodded, although of course she couldn't understand. But she had stopped crying. Her big dark eyes were very soft, like the fur of black kittens. From behind the red chair she plucked a Grandma Ann doll, one of the toys distributed as part of Project Patriot. The young must be taught early to embrace the old. Rosaria clutched the doll tightly.    "Sweetheart, who else lives with --"    "Aaeehhhaaaeeee!" A cry of anguish from a huge Hispanic woman hurtling through the door. "Abuelita! Aaeeehhhaaaeee!"    I stood up and stepped back.    The woman, who looked in only her twenties, collapsed beside her dead grandmother and began wailing. She wore factory coveralls, stitched DONOVAN ELECTRONICS. After a few moments, I put a hand on her shoulder. "Ma'am . . ."    To my surprise, she leapt up from the body and whirled on me.    "Who you? What you doing here?"    "I'm a doctor. I found Rosaria wondering in the street; she said her abuela had been dressing her. . . "    "In the street? You took her in the street?"    "No, I . . . she came out by herself. After you grandmother -- great grandmother? Collapsed, I presume. I was --"    "You wasn't doing nothing! You hear me? We're just fine without no Child Protection. I --"    "You just leave us alone!"    She took a step toward me. Her eyes blazed with hatred. She was as tall as I was, twenty pounds heavier, and fifty years younger. I stepped back.    "I find somebody else to watch my Rosaria. You ain't going to take her away and give to some rich bitch whose husband's balls empty and whose test-tube fucking don't take. Bad enough I got to work two jobs to support you old white farts, you ain't getting my child too!"    "Ma'am, you are --" I was going to say, blocking my pathway to the door. I don't know what she thought I was going to say. Her face suddenly crinkled horribly and she swung on me. Caught off balance, I went down, wildly thrusting out my left hand to arrest my fall. My fingers slammed into the floor. I felt two of them break.    Only one punch. She stood there, panting, horror at what she'd just done creeping slowing into her eyes, while Rosaria wailed and neighbors boiled into the hall and the scream of police flyers approached outside.    We looked at each other across the din -- of noise, of my hand, of her dead grandmother who was Rosaria's sole caregiver, of her desperate fight to keep and care for her child from the affluent so hungry for it. Affluent for the most part as white as the old people this woman subsidized with nearly fifty percent of her paycheck. The essentially bankrupt government protected children, but did not fund day care. Kids should be cared for by their families, was the national mood. That was the responsible way. And if families couldn't, or wouldn't, care for their children -- then give the kids to rich white couples panting for them.    Still on the floor, I examined my fingers. Although I couldn't be sure without an X-ray, I guessed they were simple fractures. The siren stopped outside. I said softly, "Pick up Rosaria. And let me go tell the cops everything is under control."    She did. Out of fear, or hope, or maybe just not knowing what else to do. She stepped aside and picked up her daughter, who buried her head in her mother's neck and clung hard. I pushed past the scowling neighbors to greet the police, letting my hand dangle casually as if nothing was wrong with it, planning how to tell the cops there was a body here with no foul play. How to tell the Child Protection that, yes, Rosaria had no one to raise her while her overworked, overtaxed mother put in six ten-hour factory shifts a week because she needed overtime -- but that everything was under control, nothing here needed official intervention.    Everything was just fine.

Copyright ©1999 Nancy Kress