Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  It looked festive, a homecoming celebration. Abruptly she poured the coffee into thick brown mugs and shoved everything else, napkins and all, into the sink.

  Duncan was kneeling at the fireplace, his blue eyes warm in his fire-flushed face. “It’s good to be home.”

  “It’s a lot colder here than in Utah.”

  “Just tonight; Weather Central says it’s going to warm up again.”

  “That’s good.”

  They sipped their coffee in silence. The fire crackled, the flames randomly highlighting familiar objects in the comfortable room. The books on the shelves opposite the fireplace brightened and then darkened, mocking human knowledge in transit. The ancient brass andirons shone steadily.

  “Oh, I meant to tell you, Mai a videoed while you were in the shower. She said to tell you there’s a meeting of your alianthus committee tomorrow at ten at the Center and they really need you there.” He grinned. “She looked very harried. Are you nearing a crisis?”

  “I don’t know. Not when I left.” Alianthus. Tree of Heaven. In the old after-life myth were there alianthi in heaven? Soon there wouldn’t be any anywhere if the government wouldn’t fund additional research on Dodderson’s blight. She wasn’t usually a Joiner of Causes, but this one was different. The tiny park in the ugly, swarming city of her childhood had been graced with alianthi, and their long feathery leaves were tangled in all her girlhood memories. Even now she could feel the mild autumn sunlight sifting through the scarlet waving branches and dappling her bare arms.

  Were there alianthi on Sirius V? “Will you go to the meeting then?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “I asked Jerry and Katia to come by tomorrow night. You know how eager they always are to escape their labs and rusticate.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll want to know all about how it went, of course. They’ve always thought so much of Susan.”

  “Yes, they have.”

  Another long silence. The fire hissed and cracked.

  “Rachel, you seem so . . . remote. Don’t shut me out.”

  “I’m not shutting you out.”

  “Yes, you are. Don’t you know it? Can you tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “What do you think I’m thinking?” she said in irritation. “I miss Susan.”

  “I know, although it isn’t as though we’re used to having her living in this house. But it seems to be something more. Can’t I help?”

  “There’s nothing else,” she snapped, feeling vaguely that she might be lying.

  He hesitated, concern becoming edged with exasperation. “Well, I don’t want to sound as if I’m trying to force you to talk to me, Rachel. But you know how it’s usually been—you feel better after you’ve talked things out and found a label for whatever it is you’re feeling.”

  “Mental Health Rule Number 17,” she jeered. He stiffened and she regretted her words; what he had said, after all, was true. She knew that she should apologize but that he wouldn’t insist on it. She took advantage of his generosity by staying spitefully mute. However, after a moment she reached for his hand and held it. Limply.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the window, “Look how bright the stars are tonight.”

  Even through the plastic they were spectacular. The last of the moon had melted away and the stars flung themselves across the sky unrivaled. From where she sat she could see the Dipper, the North Star, the jaunty W of Cassiopeia. Not diamonds, she thought, they had more life than the cool hardness of diamonds, they pulsed and throbbed and beckoned, more beautiful than jewels, more bewitching than anything on Earth . . .

  Abruptly she jumped up and jerked the blinds closed.

  Duncan stared down at his empty cup. “I’m going to bed. Coming?”

  He was looking at her compassionately, and suddenly she hated that. “No, not now. I’m not tired. You go without me.” He moved toward her but she retreated, putting the coffee table between them. “No, Duncan, don’t. Just let me be.”

  After a moment he nodded and left, his shoulders dropping helplessly. She was tempted to call him back but the something growing in her wouldn’t let her and she watched with hard eyes as he reluctantly climbed the stairs. Then she sat on the sofa, not thinking, watching clinically as the fire sputtered and sank. Little flames darted vainly at the ashy wood, finally settling for conserving themselves in subdued coals that gave off comfortable heat but no soaring leaps of color. Like me, she thought bitterly, even as another part of her mind warned her not to be so melodramatic. She sat there a long time, fighting sleep, wanting obscurely to stay awake for her whole night of mourning, but her body clamored for its rights and finally, head thrown back and arms dangling at her sides, she slept.

  * * *

  It was almost morning. Gingerly, pampering her stiff neck and aching back, she creaked to a standing position, grunting a little as she did so. Well, what do you expect when you sleep sitting up, she scolded. Your mouth is foul, go brush your teeth. No.

  Restless, she wandered from the living room to the study and turned on the night light. It glowed feebly, giving the room unaccustomed shadows and adding to the chill, impersonal look of early morning. On the desk was an open book and she glanced at it idly: Weston’s Astronomical Compendium. It was open to “Sirius: planets of.”

  With an unexpected jab of intuition she knew that Duncan had sat here last night before making the fire, reading over yet once more the information which both of them knew by heart already, anesthesizing the grief he wouldn’t admit to with injections of pure knowledge, trying to pave the light-years to Sirius V with statistics.

  That damn well figures; he always did feel safer with facts than emotions! She knew she was sneering unfairly but the thing growing inside her, the hard knot of something she could not yet name, didn’t care. It drove her to pace fitfully, as she had paced during those long nights when she was carrying Susan and her unborn baby’s fierce kicking had banished sleep.

  Here was Susan’s telescope, the good one that they had bought her for her eighteenth birthday. There was no room for it on Susan’s great adventure and so it had been shipped home and left here. Like me, she thought again.

  She touched the telescope with one finger. The lens covers were carefully in place but the long gray tube and the adjustment knobs were powdery with dust. I’ll have to wash it tomorrow, she thought; something so beautiful shouldn’t be neglected. And Susan had loved it.

  Photographs hung above the telescope. Susan at six months, round and wide-eyed. Susan at three years. (“Sing, Mommy.” “All right, ‘Ma-ry had a little lamb, little—’ ” “No, no! My song!” “Twinkle, twinkle, lit-tle star . . .”) Here was Susan, selfconsciously stiff, at her college graduation. Bachelor of Science in Astronomical Physics. By the time she had her Ph.D. she had refused to pose anymore, but by then there had been Kevin . . .

  Hastily she moved on, touching the photographs, as she had the telescope, with one tentative finger; an archeologist trying to brush clear an inscription from the distant past without crumbling it. Here were herself and Duncan on their wedding day. And here was Susan on the beach the summer she was thirteen, the summer they rented the public vacation unit at Lime Lake . . .

  “It’s so beautiful here, isn’t it, Susan? Just look at that sunset!” They were walking along the beach, just the two of them, out on a mother-daughter stroll she had contrived because she had begun to feel uneasy with this long-legged stranger who had replaced her plump, volatile little girl. Lately Susan was given to thoughtful silences, inexplicable frowns, and a slow withdrawal that made Rachel ache even as she recognized its rightness.

  “Look at that water! Don’t you wish you could paint those colors!” Susan obediently looked. “It’s pretty, I guess.”

  “You guess!”

  “What I mean is . . . yes, it’s pretty enough. But sunsets on water have been painted an awful lot, haven’t they? If I were going to paint something I’d want it to be so
mething different, something new enough to be really exciting.”

  They had walked on in silence, the wet sand squishing under their bare toes. Suddenly Susan said animatedly, “Look, there’s the first star! You can just see it in the east there, above that headland.” She squinted at the pale silver sky. “It’s Altair, I think . . .”

  There was a mirror hanging among the photographs, a small wood-framed square just large enough to show her face. Rachel peered at it reluctantly. Her hair, tangled from sleeping, hung lankly around her face, the black streaked with gray. Three deep furrows across her forehead were the legacy from years of neglecting to wear her lenses. Her skin was still smooth on the surface but had begun to sag curiously downward just beneath it, like a pie cooling. Her eyes were bleary.

  Old, she decreed mercilessly, even while making a mental note to buy hair coloring. I’m old and I had better get used to it. When Susan reaches Sirius V she’ll still be thirty and I’ll be seventy-four, and even if they turned right around and came back I’d probably be dead by the time they got here.

  Abruptly she stooped down and began to pry the lens covers off the telescope. They clanked jarringly as she dropped them to the floor. Awkwardly she dragged the telescope across the room to the window and yanked open the blinds.

  It was that cold hour between night and dawn, when the shadows have been drained from the world and color has not yet been put in by the rising sun. The grass, the rose bushes, the old maple tree, all looked monotonously gray, unformed blobs without even the potential of becoming anything unexpected. Rachel groaned softly and her fists clenched. Then light exploded in the room and she whirled wildly around to see Duncan blinking in the doorway, bemused in rumpled pajamas.

  “Rachel! It’s 4:30 in the morning!”

  “Damn Susan!” she cried, the words spewing venom. “Why should she go to the stars and leave us here on this damned Earth! It’s stale and insipid and . . . tame! There’s not an inch of it left we don’t know everything about, and I hate it!”

  She listened wide-eyed to the echoes of the futile, unsuspected jealously that called itself grief, and then she began to drown it in hopeless tears.

  * * *

  Rachel and Katia strolled down the country road in the blue twilight, their talk as aimless as their direction. She had recounted to Katia the details of Susan’s leaving in a calm, detached voice that warned her friend to offer no sympathy. Katia picked daisies; they would look so pretty, she said, in her lab. She had just the vase for them, a very old silver and crystal one that had belonged to her great-great-grandmother. Rachel gave Katia the recipe for the fish chowder. They discussed Katia’s research project.

  Suddenly Katia said, “How is your committee going? The one to fund research on the alianthus blight?”

  “We met today. It looks as though with just a little more pressure the government might come through after all.”

  “That’s fine. Tell me,” she blurted. “Are there alianthi or something similar on Sirius V?”

  “I don’t know.” Rachel took one of Katia’s daisies and stared at it grimly. “But there will be on Earth.”

  They ambled on quietly. Behind them, sitting on the lawn in dilapidated canvas chairs, the men also fell silent. The night air was rich with the life of all the small secret things of summer: rhythmical scrapings of crickets, the mysterious disembodied cry of an unseen owl, a sudden flash of white as a rabbit hurtled across the lawn and dived into the safety of the hedge. The scent of late roses wafted through the warm, heavy air.

  “You were picked for early astronaut training, weren’t you, Duncan?” Jerry asked suddenly. “Back when you were in the Service Corps? I had forgotten that until just now.” He paused. “Why’d you turn that down?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It was so long ago. I guess I didn’t want that kind of rootless life.”

  “It’s funny, though. You turned it down, but then your daughter goes off to colonize a planet. It almost makes it seem . . .” he stopped, searching for the right word.

  Duncan knocked the ash from his pipe. The sparks fanned out, swirling to the sweet-scented grass in graceful arcs, glowing like miniature stars in the velvety darkness.

  “I know what you mean,” he agreed quietly. “Inevitable.”

  1978

  A DELICATE SHADE OF KIPNEY

  Ms. Kress is 29; she holds a Master’s degree in education. She used to teach the fourth grade; her current occupation is a juggling act, involving a typewriter and two small sons. She reports that the one time that she met Dr. Asimov—at a pot-luck dinner when he was lecturing at a local college—he was more impressed in the brownies she had prepared than in her interest in writing science fiction.

  Sullen gray clouds lay heavily on the low sky, and below them gray fog shrouded the land. It had just finished drizzling, or was about to drizzle, or perhaps even was drizzling with fine clammy droplets that were indistinguishable from the ever-present mist. In the East the lowering clouds were paling almost imperceptibly, and the stunted kiril trees that dotted the plain hastily turned their gray-green leaves toward the thin light before any of it should be wasted.

  A boy sat on the hill that poked abruptly from one side of the plain, just before it broke into irregular rocky ravines. His already muscular arms were clasped around knees that, child-like, were scraped from falls. Under his coarse, dull-colored tunic, his bare buttocks pressed against the damp, straggly grass. He sat unmoving, absorbed, staring raptly toward the drab eastern sky.

  “Wade?”

  The boy turned without getting up, and peered through the shifting fog. It was difficult to see clearly more than a few yards.

  “Wade! Are you there?”

  “Oh, it’s you, Thekla. I’m over here.”

  “Who else did you think it would be?” Spectrally his sister materialized from the fog, her gray tunic blending with it at the edges, her younger child astride one hip. The baby stared at Wade with round solemn eyes.

  “I thought I’d find you here. How was it today?”

  Wade shook his head, inarticulate. “Really beautiful. Much brighter than the sunset ever is. Thekla, look at this color.” He held out a leaf. The underside was a delicate gray, lightly shined with silver.

  “Mmmm, what a pretty shade of tlem.”

  “It’s the exact color I need for the painting. If only I could figure out a way to mix it!” He gazed hopefully at Thekla, only four years his senior but always so much more deft at the endless foraging and fashioning of supplies. “Got any ideas?”

  “No, but I’ll think about it. Wade, you’d better come down to breakfast now. Mother sent me to get you. She’s almost ready to serve.”

  The cords in Wade’s neck grew taut. “I thought it was earlier than that.”

  “It is. I mean, we’re having breakfast earlier this morning because Brian woke us up when he was news-spreading. Jenny had her baby last night, it’s a girl, and they’re both all right!” Thekla smiled, and he saw that it was still the dazzling, comradely smile which had made the toddler Wade follow her everywhere, stumbling gaily after her through the wet mist, and which lately had become so rare. But now it somehow—jarred with her too-thin face, and with the awkward way she stood, one shoulder hoisted a little higher than the other. Something had gone wrong with one hip when the last baby had been born; they hadn’t told Wade just what. Painfully he looked away, watching instead the perfect, disembodied fog.

  “I’m glad. I was thinking about Jenny.” He added, after a pause, “Maybe that will put him in a good mood, too. Forty-nine now.”

  They both looked down from the hill, down to the plain, where the small stone cabins huddled around the lifeless hulk of the ship. The fog shifted, and for a moment they could see her clearly, the long, grotesquely mangled wreckage barnacled with rust, and, at a sharp angle to the rest, the rear observation section, miraculously snapped free and preserved whole by the inexorable vectors of chance. Then the fog closed once more.

  Th
e pause lengthened, broken only by the soft cry of a small creature shrouded somewhere in the formless gray mist: “Kee-day! Kee-day!”

  “Well, come on then,” Wade said heavily. “I guess we have to go down.”

  § § §

  The inside of the small cabin fairly vibrated with color.

  Every wall was covered with pictures, glossy prints carefully torn from an art book and cemented to the walls in close rows, as though to blot out as much of the native stone as possible. Masterpieces from several centuries elbowed each other crazily, with no regard to chronology, all seemingly chosen only for their glowing colors and pure, hard lines. Picasso, Van Eyck, Miro, Vermeer, Grunewald, Reznicki.

  In the center of the wall opposite the fireplace was a group of landscapes done on split kirilwood boards. The drawing showed obvious skill, but the colors were garish, larger than life, put on with a lavish desperate hand by an almost-artist who had forgotten that nature could be subtle. The Grand Canyon at sunset screamed orange and red and acid yellow; a kelly green forest grew lushly under a turquoise sky; Victoria Falls threw up a lurid, brassy rainbow.

  The others were already seated at the long table. Wade slid into his place, glanced once at Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie on the wall opposite him, and shuddered. He dropped his eyes quickly to his plate, thinking of his own paintings prudently stored in the sleeping loft, dwelling on their soft, almost imperceptible shadings; the last one carried the blending right to the edge of what the eye could discern, he was pretty sure. Now if he could only mix that shade of tlem, the one you only saw when the light had just—

  “Wade, Jenny had her baby last night,” his mother said in her soft voice. “A little girl, thank God.”

  “Thekla told me,” Wade said. He looked at his mother’s worn face with affection. “They’re both all right. That’s wonderful.”

  “Forty-nine, by God!” his grandfather cackled. “Forty-nine, and two more pregnant right this minute—Cathy, and Tom’s youngest girl, what’s-her-name—Suja. We’ll make it yet!”