Human Sister

faces appeared full of happiness and peace. They held out their arms, beckoning me; but though I desired to, I was unable to speak or lift my feet to walk toward them.
    Feeling this paralysis, I panicked and lost the image.
    Michael held me until I calmed; then he asked me to look again. Now, I was in the pavilion of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. The taste and feel of warm green tea was on my lips. It must have been early spring, for bright azaleas bloomed, and white and pink petals dappled the grass beneath neatly pruned saucer magnolia trees.
    Children played on the grass in the clear, fragrant air. The couple I’d seen before sat together. I watched them talk and smile and sip their tea.
    Then I heard Michael’s voice inside my head say that the children I’d just seen, genetic mixtures of Elio and me and some people Grandpa had admired, would all carry the peculiar, perhaps protective, alterations in their genome that had been made in mine by my brothers.
    I felt our braincord begin to withdraw. “Thank you for those beautiful visions,” I said, “those beautiful dreams. I hope you can make them come true.”
    “Please don’t go to see First Brother tomorrow,” Michael said. “Our children will need you here. I need you here. You’ll be loved here.”
    “I love you, Michael,” I said, picking up his cold hands. “I’ll always be with you even if we’re apart. But please try to understand that I wasn’t raised confined to a couple of rooms, as you were. More and more each day I feel empty here. I need air, fresh air, and sunshine. I need to see the clouds and feel the wind. I need to walk on land, walk with animals, stand with trees. I need to see Grandma again; she’s getting old. I need to hold her and cry with her over Grandpa and Elio. And I need to help First Brother; it’s what Grandpa and my parents would have wanted. I’m sorry, but I need those things. I’m so sorry that I need those things. I know you have the power, and probably the right, to keep me here; but I ask you, please, relinquish both and let me go.”
    He hugged me and cried with me. He said that henceforth his name would be Michael Sara Elio Jensen. An hour or so before I depart, he will try to harvest a few more eggs and ovarian stem cells from me. And right before I leave, a reflux of the sea, he’ll give me medication to make me sleep in the submersible until it nears land, thus ensuring that I will not learn Anzen’s location. I wonder whether, before I drift off into that medicated sleep, he will finally tell me about Elio. I hope he does. I want to forgive him. I want to forgive both of them—completely.
    A big part of me would like to stay and help raise the children. But I’m not doing well here. If only we weren’t living so deep, the surroundings so dark and cold; if only I could look up and see the agitated blue-green weave of light near the surface, and a few sparkling silver fish now and then. But in this seamount cave can be found no light, no air, no seasons, no hydrothermal vents nearby, no bison drawn in ocher on the walls. I try to be brave, but I miss Elio and Grandpa and Grandma and Lily. I miss home. I feel closed in. Sometimes, to halt a mounting fear that the walls of the module are collapsing, I have to shut my eyes, breathe deeply, and think of the grape leaf floating in a cirrus-feathered sky. I’m not as flexible as is my shadow, always so quick to adapt to any surface on which it lands.
    And there is the gnawing question: What more should I have done? Perhaps I should have been more like a sister to Elio—should have cared for him more than desired him—and he would still be living happily and safely in his beautiful country. Perhaps I should have given Grandpa the love of criticism rather than just blindly following him. And undoubtedly I should have done more for First Brother. I wasn’t a good sister for him. I let him slip away.
    Yes, I need to do more. I need to go back up into the world, no matter what that world has become, and do more, especially for First Brother. Probably, I’ll never be the heroine for him that I once imagined becoming, teaching him to laugh and love. But I can be a sister. Here, all I’ve accomplished in five months has been to walk, more distantly than a shadow, many steps behind my life.

First Brother

    S he rises to her feet. She appears to be a normal young adult human female. She walks toward me and slides her arms under my arms and