reason beyond curiosity, I was quite willing to look and quite willing to presume upon Daddy’s position in the Ship to make it possible for me to look.
“Are you sure?” the librarian said. “They’re not very interesting, you know, and I’m not sure that you really ought to be allowed . . .”
I swear that I didn’t exactly say that Daddy, Miles Havero, Ship’s Chairman, had told me that I could and was willing to discuss the point at length with the librarian if he insisted, but I think if you talked to him the librarian might have had an impression that I had said it. In any case, I got to look at the Records.
As I’ve said, I found some twenty-year-old eugenics recommendations that gave me pause, but it wasn’t until I looked up me, or more properly, Mother and Daddy, that I discovered something that really rocked me. I had a brother!
That was a shock. I switched off the vid and it faded away, and then I turned to my bed and just lay huddled there for a long while, thinking. I didn’t know why I hadn’t been told. I remembered that somebody had once asked me or talked to me or tickled me into wondering about brothers and sisters, but I couldn’t place the memory and I never had done anything about it.
Finally I went back to the vid and I found out about my brother. His name had been Joe—José. He had been nearly forty years older than I and dead for more than fifteen years.
I dug around and found out more. Apparently, he had been as conscious as I of the lack of creative writing in the Ship. He had written a novel, something I would never do, particularly after I read his. It was not just bad, it was terrible, and it gave me some reason to think that perhaps the Ship just isn’t a viable topic for fiction.
In other respects, Joe was much more competent. He’d been regarded as quite a comer in his branch of physics. His death had been the result of a grotesque and totally unnecessary accident not of his own making. He had not been discovered immediately, and when he was it was too late to revive him. His death had apparently bothered my mother greatly.
Now that I knew, I didn’t know what to do about it. Finally, in a quiet moment, I approached Daddy and as impersonally as I could I asked him about it.
He looked puzzled. “You know all about Joe,” he said. “You haven’t asked about him in a long time, but I’ve told you twenty times.”
I said, “I didn’t even know he existed until a week ago.”
“Mia,” he said seriously, “when you were three you used to beg for stories about Joe.”
“Well, I don’t remember now,” I said. “Will you tell me?”
So Daddy told me about my brother. He even said that we were a lot alike in looks and personality.
I didn’t talk to Mother because I didn’t know what I could say about it. I cannot really talk to her. The only person besides Daddy that I talked to was Jimmy and he made a comment that was perceptive, whether or not it was accurate. He said that maybe I hadn’t remembered because I hadn’t wanted to, at least until now, and that “finding” the record of my brother wasn’t as much of an accident as I thought. To tell you the truth, that got me mad at first, and it was my getting mad that later made me think that there might have been some truth to it. The cost was that Jimmy and I didn’t speak for two days.
Thinking in psychological terms got me to thinking about my mother, about her keeping me at arm’s length, and about her becoming unhappy when I was nice to her. I finally came to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t me, Mia, the individual, that bothered her, but just me, the physical fact, and I proceeded on that basis. I can’t say that I liked her any better, but we did manage to deal together more pleasantly after that.
Something else changed that winter—what I thought I wanted from life. It came as a direct result of the papers on ethics that Jimmy and I did.
We met in Mr. Mbele’s apartment and talked about our conclusions over the usual refreshments provided by Mrs. Mbele. She was a very comfortable person to have around. Very nice. It