Khan Read online

  Khan

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  Seth rang the doorbell, and Justin opened the door, a baby on his shoulder. Justin was white and the baby was Asian; Seth did a double-take at that one, but figured the wife must just have a lot of dominant genes. “Seth! Welcome chez Weaver,” Justin said, smiling, “come in.”

  Seth stepped in. “It’s good to meet you in person, Justin,” he said. The house was fancy. Smooth stone tile, radiant heat coming up from underneath. Fancy, expensive-looking artwork on display, lit like museum pieces - an abstract painting here, a little table with a ceramic breaching dolphin next to a vase of flowers there. The walls were done in glossy slate blue paint, the molding in white.

  Justin took his hand off the baby’s back to shake Seth’s. “Good to meet you too. Sorry, I thought all the kids would be asleep by the time you arrived but Ming is doing the need-another-hug thing and wakes up when I put her down.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Seth assured him. “Is your wife home?”

  “Yes, she is - Mary?” Justin called.

  Mary stepped into the foyer. She was gorgeous, and she wasn’t Asian either, so the baby was adopted or babysat, and either one was fine with Seth. Mary smiled at him. “Hi - Seth, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Seth. “This is a lovely house. I bet the mortgage is a heck of a thing.”

  “Oh, it’s ours outright,” said Mary. “I inherited it from my parents, I grew up here - we would have gone with something more modest, but it would be such a wrench to sell it even if we don’t need all this space -”

  “How about that,” said Seth, “that’s lucky.”

  A timer went off with a soft ding in the kitchen. Mary ran to silence it, and Justin said, “That’s twenty minutes, Ming’s probably asleep for good now. I’ll go try to put her down and then we can have some cookies and chat, all right?”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Seth, helping himself to an armchair in the living room. There were a bunch of plastic miniature megafauna hiding in the long fibers of the rug, and a stray few Legos under the coffee table.

  “Great,” said Justin, swaying off to the nursery.

  “She’s a cute kid,” Seth commented to Mary. “You get her from… China?”

  “Yes,” said Mary. “And Ioana is from Romania, and Valeria is from Colombia.”

  “Can’t have kids?” asked Seth.

  Mary’s brow creased a little. “We don’t have any reason to believe we can’t, but there are so many children who need homes and families already, so we’ve chosen to adopt.” It had the air of a rehearsed statement.

  “Gotcha,” said Seth. “I haven’t found any biological nieces or nephews so far. Destiny’s gay, Darius is a teenager, and Justin’s the first one I found online.”

  “Well, hopefully you’ll get along all right with our girls regardless,” said Mary briskly.

  “I’m sure I will,” said Seth.

  Justin came back holding a plate of jam dots. “I think Ming’s down,” he said. “Seth, when I got your message, I was so surprised - I’d never had any idea that my dad wasn’t my biological dad. Weaver was his last name. I’m not sure whether to tell him - it doesn’t matter to me, but if it affected his memories of Mom, well, that wouldn’t do anyone any good. Is - our mutual father - is George still alive?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” said Seth, suddenly subdued. He took a jam dot anyway. “George died recently, actually. I think I was one of only a couple of the kids that he kept in touch with - and it kind of prompted me to go looking for others. I knew it couldn’t just be me and Destiny and Darius.”

  “What did he die of?” asked Mary. “If you don’t mind saying.”

  “I don’t mind, we weren’t close for all that he appeared in my life every year or two. It was violence, actually - Darius went after him - see, not everybody George had kids with was a hookup or a girlfriend, some of them were just -” Seth trailed off, made a vague gesture. “So Darius, he’s sixteen, and he was mad about what happened to his mother when he found out, and he knew where to get a gun.”

  “Oh, no,” breathed Mary, clutching Justin’s hand. Justin looked troubled, and patted his wife on the arm.

  “Yes. I can’t really blame Darius, that could have been me if I’d been in his shoes. I hope he makes out well when it comes time. He’s a good kid. Anyway. I’ve found a few of us on 23andMe, and that can’t be everyone, plenty of our siblings are going to be too young or too foreign to sign up or just not interested. Since George isn’t around to ask, I can’t be certain we’ll ever know them all. He’s been flying all over the country, and out of it, leaving children conceived this way and that, for the last forty-five years.”

  “I wish I could ask my mother,” Justin said. “I don’t know how I’d put it gently, but - I wish I could ask.”

  “What happened to her?” asked Seth.

  “Oh, she was older, when she had me, older than I am now. Old age, died in her sleep.”

  “And you’re how old now?”

  “Thirty-four,” said Justin.

  “I’m twenty-eight,” Seth said. “George kinda - he didn’t quit. Never caught for anything he did. Finding our whole family is going to be a major undertaking.” He raked his hands through his hair, disarraying it picturesquely. “But everybody I find is progress! So I’m really glad to be here tonight. What do you do, Justin?”

  “I’m a stay at home dad for our three, but before we adopted Ioana I was a sculptor, and I still am for small pieces when I can find time,” said Justin. “And Mary’s a pastor.”

  “And what about you?” Mary asked Seth.

  “I’m an attorney,” said Seth.

  “Prosecution or defense?” wondered Justin.

  “Defense. Right to representation and all that.”

  Justin nodded. There was a silence. Mary took a jam dot.

  “Justin,” said Seth, “there’s something I’d like to talk to you about alone - if that’s all right with you too, Mary,” he added, nodding in her direction.

  “Mary can hear anything I can hear,” said Justin.

  “And you can tell her later. I don’t mind. Just - it’s hard enough to spit it out when I’m only talking to my brother,” Seth said, turning pleading eyes on the couple. “Please.”

  Mary and Justin looked at each other dubiously. Finally Mary patted her husband on the shoulder, kissed his cheek, and disappeared to parts elsewhere.

  “She seems lovely,” Seth told Justin.

  “She is. Light of my life,” said Justin. “I was very lucky to find her. I assume that’s not the secret.”

  “It’s not,” acknowledged Seth. “You’re sure she wouldn’t be listening around corners?”

  “She’ll probably have gone to bed. We have a new baby, we’re tired.”

  “All right then.” Seth took a deep breath. “You need to get a vasectomy.”

  “- what?”

  “I was really glad when I found out your kids were all adopted. Adopt as many as you want. There shouldn’t be more of us.”

  “I don’t really hold with all that genetic supremacy nonsense - if George committed crimes in the course of siring us all, that reflects on him only, not -”

  “I’m not saying we’re genetically evil. It’s complicated, and I’m not sure you’ll believe me, but the upshot is don’t have biological kids.”

  “Am I a carrier for some disease -”

  “No. It’s the opposite, really. Can you let me explain without - I don’t know, calling an ambulance on me for being a loon? I’m not a loon and I can go through all the evidence for you, it’s just fundamentally kind of hard to swallow.”

  “- sure. Why not.”

  “Let’s start with what I can guess about you. When you met Mary, you were both in the
right mood and the right place in your lives to have exactly the kind of relationship you wanted out of life. Her parents left her the house - maybe by dying, maybe by retiring to Florida - right when you felt like it was time you and she had a house. You have found the adoption process to be smooth and swift and your daughters to adjust quickly to joining your family. They all get along with each other and if any of them are old enough to attend school they do well there. You have exactly enough minor complaints about their behavior that you don’t feel like an alien when you talk to other parents but no more. You don’t know what other people are talking about when they complain about long lines at the DMV. You have never gotten a parking ticket or a moving violation no matter how badly you drive, and no one has ever rear-ended you. You have never been stolen from, harassed, shouted at by a crazy person on the street, defrauded, or assaulted. You always get the nice seats in restaurants, the nice customer service agents on the phone, and the nice presents during any gimmicky present exchanges you participate in around Christmas. If you have in-laws, you get along with them. Your neighbors like you. When you were a kid, if you wanted to be picked from an audience to participate on stage, you got picked, every time.”

  “- horoscope stuff,” said Justin.

  “No. Most people don’t live like that,” said Seth. “People have ups and downs. And so do you - I didn’t say you never sprained an ankle, or that you never had a crisis of faith or whatever it is religious people have, or that you are beloved by every dog you meet. For all I know you fell off a cliff when you were twelve and spent a year in the hospital. But if you did, your nurses were good to you and your doctors put in their best work that day and your parents fussed over you just the right amount and your teachers helped you catch up.”

  “I didn’t fall off a cliff,” Justin muttered.

  “No? Stepped on a nail and got tetanus? Nah, you would have been vaccinated. If your parents were anti-vaxxers they would have changed their tune around the time you were conceived. But I can tell you it won’t have been something you picked up from being sneezed on. People don’t sneeze on you. Maybe you could get something off a doorknob.”

  “I broke my leg skiing once,” muttered Justin.

  “Ah! And: you were not invited onto a slope you couldn’t handle. Your instructor was not negligent. Your equipment was not poorly inspected. Nobody crashed into you. You just had an accident, entirely your own fault - stop me if I’m wrong.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Justin asked.

  “I’m the same way,” said Seth. “We aren’t all. I think it’s going turn out to be half. Mendelian genetics and all. But I knew you were in that half when I saw the house, saw the wife - she’s very pretty - heard you inherited the house, heard you were a sculptor - is the dolphin yours?”

  “Breaching III, yeah -”

  “It’s terrible. I mean, it’s recognizably a dolphin, I suppose you’ve practiced enough, but it’s not pretty, and it’s not unpretty in an interesting way. But everybody except me who you’ve ever gotten an opinion out of - even if they don’t have any reason to like you, even if they’re critics - they think it’s great.”

  “I -”

  “Because I’m immune,” said Seth. “Because I’m the same way.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said Justin. “You’re clearly having some kind of problem, and -”

  “George probably raped several hundred people,” Seth said flatly. “Let’s generously assume he picked up one new woman a week on average. I think it was more, but I don’t have enough birthdates to corroborate that. Let’s generously assume he only raped one in four and the other seventy five percent were hookers or looking for casual sex or willing to believe he was in love with them or whatever. He was running around for forty-five years, and under these assumptions that’s nearly six hundred girls he straight up raped. None of them went to the police, and we’re not talking about a man smart enough to use a fake ID and cash at the bar where he collected his lay for the night. Not one had a gun, or a scary boyfriend, or a protective brother. We’re not talking about a crooked cop who molests arrestees or a sketchy gynecologist here, he did this in dozens of different cities with no position of power to abuse. That’s how he used his gift. You’re using yours to have a pretty wife and a nice house and a career in the arts and an easy time adopting cute orphans, I admit I like your take on it better, but it’s the same damn thing.”

  “So - because we’re genetically predisposed to, to, what are you saying this is, is it mind control -”

  “It’s pretty lackluster mind control. You can’t use it like a comic book character. But people get out of your way, or they go your way, or just happen to be where they need to be in the mood they need to be in, the right place at the right time to make your life nice according to you. Nothing Earth-shatteringly weird. Nothing you couldn’t chalk up to being a likable and talented statistical irregularity. But take all of us together… have us interacting, weird exceptions to patterns we take for granted… and you notice.”

  “You don’t have any proof.”

  “It gets a little more overtly mind-controlly if you push it, but you can. Order a pizza, look into your pocket and apologetically pull out a ticket stub and some lint, say, ‘oh, uh, I’ll look under the couch, I’m so sorry to have wasted your time, I thought I had a twenty but’ - pizza guy will tell you not to worry about it. Kick a cop. He might arrest you but you’ll get off. Try to adopt a project kid, one with a drug problem or something, and you’ll just happen to get one who fits in really well here and doesn’t try to stab you in your sleep or sell your car for meth -”

  “That’s horrifying,” said Justin.

  “Look, if you want to prove it, you have to do something that gets people to arrange themselves and behave in ways that you know for a fact they wouldn’t. And you’re used to them being convenient when you act as you normally do, so you have to do something you normally wouldn’t, to get a real clear look. Otherwise you’ll think the cop you kicked just understood that you… objected to him hassling black teenagers and appreciated the reminder, if that’s normally what it would take to get you to kick a cop.”

  “I wouldn’t kick a cop no matter what he was doing!”

  “The black teenagers of the world will refrain from calling you a racist for your lack of interest in their relationships with the law. Because they’re affected too. And nobody has ever called you racist in your life.”

  “Well,” said Justin, “you, how did you - come to believe this?”

  “I have more examples to look at,” Seth said. “Also, there’s no way I’m as good a lawyer as my track record and my hourly fee suggest, but I picked a career that’s very malleable to what we’ve got. I don’t even have to churn out ugly dolphins for critics to nod at.”

  “You don’t like the sculpture, I get it. So you want me to get a vasectomy, just in case the birth control we’ve got doesn’t work, because we’re hurting people just by existing -”

  “No, that’s not it,” said Seth. “It’s a perfectly good reason and if that’s what gets you to go under the knife then I won’t nitpick. But that’s not why I’m asking. It’s because it’s no good if too many people have it. And I don’t mean that selfishly, I mean… Sure, George did a lot of damage, but think what happens if half the population has it. We don’t work on each other - suddenly we’re extracting everything we get from the other half. We can’t even help it. You like the lifestyle of the pious modest charity-minded pastor’s husband? Great, that doesn’t hurt anyone all by itself. When your lifestyle needs support, you can get it from hundreds of millions of people who don’t have our genes. No one person winds up going too far out of their way, except maybe Mary, and she seems happy, right? The kids you’re doing a favor! But the more and more of us there are, the worse it gets to be a have-not.”

  “You seem to think you know a lot about a - a mutation we’re second-generation carriers of -” Justin murmured.

  “Oh
, we have the most recent version. But my guess is it’s happened before. Probably a few times. It’s an insanely advantageous property to have! If a mutation can do this, it’ll happen now and then, and then it’ll spread, every time. I’m not a geneticist, I can’t tell you the details, but my guesses are somebody in Europe before it started colonizing everything, maybe. Probably Genghis Khan, who promptly smeared his version all over Asia. Maybe this is how we outcompeted the Neanderthals. Even if it didn’t affect the Neanderthals directly it’d rally people around one mutant leader to wipe them out whenever they got too close for comfort. I’m sure some people have fewer, or none - just didn’t get a copy, or they’ve got damaged versions that don’t work. And those people are not doing so hot. Those people are probably homeless. Because once everyone has it, it doesn’t matter, normal non-spooky effects dominate - unless you’re someone who doesn’t, and then it matters a lot.”

  There was a silence.

  Justin said, “I’ll get the vasectomy.”

  “Thank you. Will you help me find the rest of us - I don’t think he can reasonably have knocked up most of the women he slept with, he obviously didn’t care for condoms but some of them will have been wrong time of the month or on the pill. I’ve gotten ahold of his travel schedule from his credit card company, it’s annoying to pick through but not impossible. We can find them, especially if they have the gene. They’ll stand out if they have it, succeeding at anything they do that’s more subjective than weightlifting.”

  “Yeah. You’re right, this would hurt a lot of people, if it spread -”

  Seth nodded. “And doesn’t help anyone in the long run, just makes one more way to be below average.”

  “Thank you,” said Justin. “For telling me.”

  “Of course. I’m glad I found you first. I’m not expecting everyone who wants kids to want to adopt them, and it’ll go faster with more eyes on the project.”

  “Some of us might have them already.”

  “Even slowing the spread down for a few generations while science learns to identify the gene is worth our time,” Seth said firmly. “A few families doing unusually well, that’s nothing new, people accomplish that with money and genes for other useful traits all the time. We might miss someone. But we can make it less a Genghis Khan thing.”