Human Sister by Jim Bainbridge Page B

birthday Grandpa was taking me to visit my only cousin, Elio, who had moved to the Netherlands about half a year earlier with his mother after his father had been shot and killed by a policeman in New York City. The city’s chief medical examiner had determined that the shooting had been an accident: Uncle Marcus had been running away from a homosexual assignation in Central Park, and the policeman chasing him had stumbled and fallen, accidentally discharging his gun. But Grandpa believed that what lay behind the unusual surveillance and pursuit of Uncle was Uncle’s continuing involvement with the creation of androids for the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The circumstances of Uncle’s death had been told to me matter-of-factly by Grandpa—after, that is, he’d secured my promise not to tell Elio; Aunt Lynh wanted my cousin to believe that his father had died in a car accident.
    Before they moved to the Netherlands, I had seen Aunt Lynh and Elio on Vidtel a few times each year, usually on one of our birthdays. Uncle Marcus, Mom’s stepbrother, had been Dad’s roommate in college and one of Grandpa’s favorite students. During the years I’d known him, he’d spoken with Grandpa on Vidtel about once each week, usually about evolutionary organic nanoneuralnets. I didn’t understand much of what they said, but I knew what they were talking about had something to do with my brothers; and each time they spoke, I listened carefully, trying to pick up a few words and concepts I would later ask Grandpa to explain—and he would, in language appropriate for a student much more advanced than I. Unlike Grandma, Mom, and Dad, Grandpa refused to speak to me in what he called parentese.
    Uncle, who was seventeen days younger than Mom and was not biologically related to her through either his mother or father, was tall and handsome, with dark brown skin and wavy black hair. Aunt Lynh had beautiful, shiny, straight black hair, light brown skin, and an oval face with Asian eyes. She never said much on those early Vidtel calls, preferring, it seemed, to gaze admiringly at Uncle while he spoke.
    Elio was a year and thirty-three days older than I. Like his mother, he never said much when they called, usually just “Hi” when Uncle nudged him. He’d inherited Uncle’s dark skin, but his jet-black hair was straight, his face was round, and his chocolate irises—so dark I could hardly distinguish them from his pupils—were set, as were his mother’s, in enchantingly beautiful, acutely angled frames of skin that seemed drawn back toward his ears, especially when he smiled. His hair was parted in the middle and fell in thick fronds over his forehead and eyes.
    I found him both fascinating and disconcerting, for unlike First Brother, he usually appeared to be staring at me, though slightly askance, his strange eyes studying me from behind shafts of tousled hair. I was immensely curious about what he was like, what he was thinking, and what he was so studiously observing in me; but his appearance never failed to shock me into silence, so that I, like him, said little more than “Hi” whenever he appeared on Vidtel.
    About two months after Uncle’s ashes were buried in Grandma’s garden (I was told that he’d thought it was the most beautiful and peaceful place he’d ever seen), Vidtel announced a call from Aunt Lynh in Amsterdam. I was reading a story to Grandpa at the time, and when the call came he nodded, his gaze moving in an arc from me to the door. I hurried out of the room. Grandpa had told me that Aunt Lynh was depressed and was seeking his advice (he had been trained as a medical doctor at Stanford), so their conversations were strictly confidential. She had been so depressed, in fact, that she hadn’t even come to California to attend Uncle’s burial.
    After his call, Grandpa told me that Aunt Lynh and Elio were in trouble and needed his help. “Lynh’s parents and only sister were killed