Origin (7 page)

He puts a hand around her waist and pulls her close. Laughing, she changes the position of his hands so that
she’s
leading them across the floor. When she dances, I must admit, she’s not klutzy at all. I go to the table and fill a cup up with punch, then lean against the Brazil nut tree, watching them as they dance circles around everyone else. The freckly lab assistant Owens is sitting a few feet away from me, and he stammers something that sounds like an invitation to dance, but I wrinkle my nose at him and shake my head. Dance with
Owens
? I’ve seen him pick his nose when he thought no one was looking, and there’s no way I’m letting those hands touch me.

He turns red and finds something fascinating to fiddle with on the radio.

Uncle Antonio and Dr. Klutz dance like twin fires. I’m not at all sure I like him dancing with her, but all the same, they’re enchanting to watch. I notice a few other people admiring them too. There is something between them I can’t name, a light in their eyes when they look at each other. It’s not a light I see in my mother’s eyes when she looks at my father. I think of Alex and Marian and wonder if this could be love.

Love is not something that Uncle Paolo or the other scientists encourage, though even they can’t stop the flirting that goes on among some of the younger members of Little Cam. I remember something Uncle Paolo said to me about love: “It’s a phenomenon, Pia, but it’s dangerous. Look at Alex and Marian, for example. Love makes you weak. It distracts you from the important things. It can make you lose sight of the objective.”

“What objective?” I asked.

“The new race. That’s what it’s all about, Pia. That’s all it can ever be about for you and me. The others…they can play at love and romance. But you and I have work to do, and we can’t let ourselves be distracted.”

I wondered then if that was why there were no boys my age in Little Cam. Owens is probably the youngest person here besides me, and he has to be near thirty. He came to Little Cam when he was just a toddler with his father, Jakob Owens, one of our biologists, and all I’ve ever seen him as is the skinny, freckled, nose-picking guy who spends most of his time playing poker with the guards. No danger of distraction there.

As I watch Uncle Antonio and Dr. Klutz dance and laugh, I wonder if they might be in love. The thought makes me strangely sad…and a little envious.
Strange
. Love is nothing more than elevated levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and other chemicals. But the way Uncle Antonio’s face lights up as they dance…I wonder what it would be like to feel that. To let the chemicals of romance take over for just a little while.

Then I remember that I’m immortal and that my body doesn’t work like everyone else’s. Who knows if I even
can
feel love?

As I stare at the dancing people, I wish the night could go on forever. They all seem infected with a vivaciousness that isn’t common in our compound, and there are more smiles on their faces than I’ve ever seen at once. And yet as I watch them, I feel more intensely than ever the knowledge that I’m not one of them. For these mortal humans, birthdays are a kind of countdown to the end, the ticking clock of a dwindling life. For me, birthdays are notches on an infinite timeline.
Will I grow tired of parties one day? Will my birthday become meaningless? I imagine myself centuries from now, maybe at my three-hundredth birthday, looking all the way back to my seventeenth. How will I possibly be happy, remembering the light in my mother’s eyes? The swiftness of Uncle Antonio’s steps as he dances? The way my father stands on the edge of the courtyard, smiling in that vague, absent way of his?

The scene shifts and blurs in my imagination. As if brushed away by some invisible broom, these people whom I’ve known my entire life disappear. The courtyard is empty and bare, covered in decaying leaves. I imagine Little Cam deserted, with everyone dead and gone and only me left in the shadows.

Forever.

No
. It won’t be that way. I’ll never be alone, because I’ll have my other immortals. I’ll have someone who will look at me the way Uncle Antonio looks at Harriet Fields, only he’ll look at me that way for eternity. My abdomen tightens with longing. I want to run to Uncle Paolo and demand that he tell me the secret to Immortis, beg him to start the process of creating my Mr. Perfect. I think of the five generations it will take before he’s born, and I want to scream. I want someone
now
. I want someone who will look into my eyes and understand everything behind them.

To distract myself, I go hunting for more punch. No one is at the food table; they are all on the dance floor. I find an empty cup and fill it up and then hang back. I consider trying to join the dancing again, but my earlier excitement has vanished, replaced by a melancholy that I cannot seem to shake.

No one seems to notice I’m not dancing. I abruptly set down my cup and slip away. I make my way through the
gardens to the menagerie. My long dress catches on the flowers I pass, so I scoop up the fabric around my knees.

The menagerie is dark, and I don’t want to wake up the Grouch and start him howling, so I fumble around until I find the small electric lantern Uncle Jonas keeps on top of the barrel of macaw feed.

Following the circle of light cast by the lantern, I pass the cages silently. A few birds twitter at me, and the pregnant ocelot Jinx peeps down from the high branch where she likes to sleep, her eyes two yellow lanterns of their own.

Alai is awake, as if he was expecting me. I open the door of his cage and slip in, leaving it open behind me. After hanging the lantern on a hook on the wall, I sink down beside the jaguar and wrap an arm around his neck. He rubs his head against me, enjoying the smoothness of the silk.

“There you are,” says a voice from the darkness.

I
t’s Dr. Klutz. She walks right into the cage and plops down across from me. She groans as she yanks off her heels and then crosses her ankles. “I don’t know what idiot decided we had to choose between beauty and comfort, but I’d like to drive this heel through his eye.”

I say nothing, but watch her as warily as a mouse eyes an ocelot.

“Then again, I guess not all of us have to make that choice. You’d look great in a couple of palm fronds held together with duct tape, I imagine.” She makes a pouty face. “Not fair at all. Most of us have to work for our looks.”

“What are you doing here?”

She raises her brows. “Hey. Easy. I just wanted to give you your present.”

I notice then the small package she’s holding. “Oh, yeah. Presents.”

“If there’s one thing you should never, ever forget about,
it’s the presents.” She tosses it to me. Anyone else might have missed, but my hands leap up automatically and snatch it from the air.

“I didn’t
forget
,” I tell her as I turn the package over in my hands. “What is it?”

“It’s not a viper or a poison dart frog, if that’s what you’re asking. Good lord, child, just open it, will you? Before someone finds us.”

“Why? Is it a secret?”

She bites her lip before answering. “Yes…of sorts. That is, you probably wouldn’t want your
Uncle
Paolo finding you with it.”

That catches my interest. The package is wrapped with plain white paper and tied with string, and it only takes a few seconds to unwrap. Inside is a large piece of paper that’s been folded many times over. “What is it?” I ask again.

“Better not unfold it here; it takes hours to get it back down to that size. And whatever you do, don’t open it in front of everyone. I’ll lose my contract, my career, and my pretty salary if that gets traced back to me. So my life is pretty much in your hands, missy. I’ll thank you not to throw it into the nearest trash bin.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“For starters, don’t go brandishing it around in public.” I look around, then hide it in the straw where Alai sleeps. “Good,” she says. “Now, you going to skip out on your own party or what? From the grumbling I heard, this whole place bent over backward putting this thing together for you. It’d be a crying shame for you to throw it all back in their faces. A downright tragedy.”

Something in her tone makes me ask, “What would
you
do, if you were me?”

She shrugs and tweaks Alai’s tail, which he thrashes irritably at her. “Me? I’d leave the whole lot of ’em to their terrible dancing and worse small talk—honestly, that plumber thought I
wanted
to hear about the alarming increase in blocked toilets around here—and I’d find myself a quiet, secluded corner in which to study my totally wicked birthday present from an equally awesome redheaded biomedical engineer.” Then she sighs and shakes her head. “But yes, you should probably go back to your party and open the rest of your presents.”

“I guess you’re right.” I open the door and step outside, Dr. Klutz behind me. Just before I reach the door of the menagerie, I pause.

“About Uncle Antonio…” I start.

“Yes?” She looks genuinely intrigued. “Do tell.”

“He’s my favorite uncle, you know,” I finish clumsily. “I just…he—”

“Don’t worry, kid,” she says gently. “I’m not going to break any hearts.”

“Right. Yeah.” I shuffle a bit, wondering what to add, then give it up and flee.

Hours later, after the party finally ends, I stop by the menagerie on the pretense of bringing Alai with me to my room, where he often sleeps. Dr. Klutz’s mysterious paper, which I slipped down the front of my dress, seems to burn through my skin, and I can’t wait to open it. Back in my room, I turn on a small lamp by my bed and kneel on the floor, pulling the paper from my dress. Alai pads softly to the chair in the
corner, where he usually sleeps, and loses all interest in me and my contraband.

As I start unfolding the paper, my heart begins to race. Could it be…?

It
is
.

I gasp and rise to my feet, staring wide-eyed at the paper. It’s so large it covers most of my bed. With trembling hands, I turn and shove a chair against the door, since there’s no lock. This could get me—and Dr. Klutz—in more than just trouble. I don’t know what Uncle Paolo would do if he found out, but I know it would be awful. As if sensing my agitation, a bristling Alai ghosts to my side.

“It’s all right, boy,” I whisper.

Still hardly believing my eyes, I force myself to kneel again and spread my hands over the paper, smoothing the creases.

“It’s a map of the world, Alai.” He’s already lost interest, but I’m completely enthralled.

I’ve never seen one before. There’s not a single map in all of Little Cam that isn’t locked away from view, except for the one hanging in plastic in the maintenance building, but it just shows the area inside the fence.

This
map shows continents and oceans and countries and mountains, an entire world.
The
world. My world.

My fingers trace the outline of the land masses. Europe. Africa. Australia. Asia. Beautiful names, mysterious names. I know there must be millions of other words behind those names—people, places, stories.

I’m overwhelmed by a strange new thirst, as if I’ve been dehydrated my whole life and am only now starting to realize it. With all my heart and soul I long to know the words and
names and stories, to know everything. I want to leave right now, this very minute, and scour every inch of this map with my own eyes, to feel the soil and trees with my own hands and taste the air of every corner of the planet.

I wonder where I am right now. Little Cam wouldn’t be marked; Uncle Paolo would never allow that. My eyes sift through the names that
are
there: New Guinea. Sudan. India. Alaska. More oceans and seas than I can count. There are dozens, no, scores of areas outlined in black. Cities? Countries? I want to run through Little Cam screaming for Dr. Klutz to come and teach me.

Looking at the map, I’m struck by how little I know. Which is alarming, because I feel like I’ve learned so much. I can quote the periodic table backward. Show me an animal and I can tell you its kingdom, its species, and everything in between. I know the name of every plant in the rainforest and how they can be used. Give me a disease, I’ll tell you how to treat it.

But ask me to name five countries, and I draw a blank. Ask me where the supplies Uncle Timothy brings are manufactured, and I couldn’t tell you. I can point to the west, but I don’t know what ocean lies in that direction or how far away it is. I know what lions and kangaroos and grizzly bears are, but I don’t know where they live.

The more I learn about the world, the less I seem to know.

I raise my left hand to see what it’s covering, and my eye catches some words that I can tell were drawn with a pen. I bend closer, squinting to read the tiny handwriting.
Little Cambridge, Amazon
.

My stomach twists; it feels like a flock of butterflies are
trying to flutter up my throat and out my mouth. Little Cam.
My
Little Cam.

It’s little.
Very
little. Dr. Fields didn’t outline a large area. She didn’t even make a fat dot. Instead, she drew a tiny,
tiny
little speck of red. I blink at it. Surely that’s not Little Cam. Maybe the speck was an accident, a brief brush of the pen to paper without meaning.

Surely Little Cam is not
that
small.

I circle the little speck with my finger, then start making bigger circles. My finger spirals outward from Little Cam, and it’s only three loops before I reach other dots. These ones have names. Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia. A network of blue lines spiderweb across all of these, and each of them is connected to one main squiggle.
River
, my mind tells me. I have to squint again to read the words printed above it.
Amazon Rainforest. South America
.

“Amazon,” I say very softly. Then, a little louder, making Alai flick his ears at me, “Amazon.”

I realize I’ve heard this word before. I realize it in the way you might realize there is a spot on your shirt: you see it every time you pass a mirror, but until you really
look
, it doesn’t register in your brain. I’ve heard of this
Amazon
in the whispers of the maintenance men at dinner. I’ve heard it slip from the tongue of a careless scientist. I’ve seen it scratched on different research documents, field notes, and labels on jars of specimens.
Amazon
.