Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  § § §

  The mist hung in dark gray curtains into the oblong hole, filling it, asserting first rights over the kirilwood box that would soon take its place. Wade stood a little apart from the rest, numb with guilt and unexpected grief, isolated less by any action of the others than by his own frozen immobility. A baby whimpered in its mother’s arms, was impatiently hushed, and quieted.

  Thomas, now the eldest colonist, stepped forward and began the service. He recited it haltingly, hesitating often, and when Wade realized why the man had to rely on his uncertain memory, he moaned softly, an inarticularte keening, unaware that he did so. Thekla put out her hand and gently touched his arm.

  “As for man, his days are as grass . . . and . . . as a flower of the field, so he . . . flourisheth.”

  His mother, dry-eyed, watched Wade anxiously. It began to drizzle.

  “For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and . . . and . . . the place thereof shall know it no more.”

  The light rain fell on Wade’s face, fragrant with the smell of new grass and wet slate. The frozen immobility cracked a little, began to break up.

  Eighty-three years. ‘He’s not well, Wade. It can’t be long.’ And time passing, relentless as the squalling clouds, in the unimaginable light-years among those stars he only half-believed in, anyway. ‘As a flower of the field.’

  But there were no field flowers here, he thought haltingly. None of those garish, over-colored daisies or zinnias or roses in the Impressionist paintings that now existed nowhere in the world. And the wind never passed over anything; it got tangled in the mist and the clouds and made beautiful shifting shapes of its own.

  Wade unclenched his fists and surreptitiously flexed his hands; the right one began to curve gently. There must be someone, he thought, either among these 48 or yet to come, who could see words as purely as he could see colors. Someone who could write a new funeral service—as well as sonnets, plays, celebrations, all of it—to fit here, and now, on Keedaithen.

  1979

  AND WHETHER PIGS HAVE WINGS

  She tried to rekindle that sense of wonder, of enigma . . . of shoes, ships and sealing wax.

  Three men are walking on the beach below; one of them will be mine.

  I stand at the top of the dune, my feet a little apart, braced against the wind. Gritty sand seeps into my leather sandals, and my long blond hair whips around my face, covering my eyes, then uncovering them. I know how I look to the men below, in this bikini-clad body the color of fresh toast.

  Soon.

  The first man jogs toward me. He is perhaps 30, tall, dressed in jeans and a bulky red sweater with the knotty bumps of inexpert hand knitting. He moves easily in loose, even lopes that smooth out the rocky ground underfoot, humming an aria off key I know he will not do. I look away and he jogs by with only one regretful look back over his shoulder.

  As the second man comes closer, I see that he is quite young, still half child, and that he is so absorbed in the book he is reading as he walks that he hasn’t noticed me at all. He holds the book with both hands, fingers and thumbs splayed to keep the wind from turning the pages. Over the top of the garish dust jacket, an artist’s inventive misconception of a spaceship, the boy’s eyes are wide, pale blue, the pupils dilated as they move intently back and forth over the page, I can’t keep from smiling—certainly not him!

  The third man approaches slowly, from the opposite direction. He is quite far away; I wait patiently the bracelet on my arm glowing not entirely in reflection of the sunset over the ocean. He is looking not at the sunset but down at his feet, picking his way over the rocks, avoiding wetting his shoes in the tide pools.

  Even I can tell they are expensive shoes—Italian?—and that they have been carefully chosen to match his gray slacks and open-neck silk shirt. He frowns at the rocks, lips together, his jowls a bit too heavy and his eyes a bit too red. I touch my bracelet and start down the dune, angling toward the line of high rocks he will cross next. When he is on top of them he sees me coming toward him, stops, waits.

  “I wonder if I might borrow a cigarette.”

  My voice is husky low—what I think of as a purple voice. Such men always have cigarettes.

  He hands me the cigarette wordlessly his eyes appraising. They are light gray startlingly pale against his tan, and very hard. I take the unlit cigarette and drop it, grind it on the rock beneath my sandal and start to run, already changing. By the lime I am halfway down the line of rocks, perhaps 30 feet away from him, the scales have already begun to appear on my legs and rump, bright green scales the color of new grass. I dive from the end of the rocks, an impossibly high dive for my starting position, curving in a high arch and hanging there, suspended against the sunset as dancers of ballet—the most beautiful thing I have seen here—seem to hang suspended before the downward plunge from their crackling leaps. By the top of the dive, my legs have already fused to tail, silver green in its backward flip over my bare breasts. I hit the water in a cloud of golden spray, then up again for my hair to writhe around me in the foam. I just catch his face in the nanosecond of change from shock to fear, and then I dive again, my tail breaking surface, clear against the flaming sky. This dive is deep, cold, and strong, only the glow from the bracelet guiding me, until I surface in the power room, aboard ship, beyond the moon.

  • • •

  “Good morning, Mr. Carruthers, sir. Twenty-sixth floor?”

  “Please, Jerry.”

  “Good morning, sir. How nice to see you back!”

  “Morning, Louise. This the mail? I’ll take it in with me.”

  “Welcome back, Mr. Carruthers. Did you enjoy your vacation away from the office?”

  “Very nice. David, see if Mr. Poole can see me, right away in my office.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “Louise, coffee for two.”

  “Right away, sir.

  “Al—good to have you back! So how was the action at the Cape? Lots of sun?”

  “Lots, Josh, what’s this report I got from Sam Lister on the oil deal? Who the hell came up with those cock-eyed figures on the new shoreline rigging method, and why were they leaked to the press without checking with me?”

  “I can explain about that, Al.”

  “I hope so. I certainly hope so.”

  “Let’s go into your office. Can we—oh, here comes the coffee already Right on top of it, as always! Now, about the oil figures . . . the strategy was—”

  • • •

  The child is not quite three. He stands behind the tarpaper shack, barefoot on the dusty ground, sucking his thumb. Small night noises, crickets and rabbits and the sloughing of wind in pine, are drowned out by the screaming coming from the shack.

  “Lousy bitch!”

  “No. no, Lew—God, Lew no!”

  “Lousy fucking bitch!”

  The child looks over his shoulder at the shack. There is a sore on the shoulder, oozing pus the color of rotted peaches. The dull nonexpression on the child’s face. In his dark dead eyes, doesn’t change until another sound comes from the shack, the thud of fist on flesh and bone, followed by a keening wail that dies away in more thuds.

  The child yanks his thumb from his mouth and starts to run, legs pumping and the babyish curve of his belly swaying from side to side, until he reaches the dark edge of the wood. He runs info a blackberry thicket, starts to yell, and then abruptly stops, staring back at the shack. The blackberry thorns grab his cotton shirt and wet diaper, draw blood that trickles down his arms and dusty feet in thick, sticky trails. The child makes a low whuffling sound, eeehhh eeehhh, without hope. His dull face still has not changed expression.

  I hop from a clump of ragweed. In the random moonlight my fur is white, except for pink nose and ears and the glowing bracelet where my paws become tiny pink hands. I can feel the absurd white cottontail twitching behind me, rising with each hop and then falling as I sit up on my haunches and use my hands to free the child from the blackberry thorns. He
gazes at me and puts his thumb in his mouth. The shack behind us is silent.

  I twitch my nose at him, then my ears, I cover my eyes with my hands and peek at him through the fingers. Slowly, reluctantly, as if it is being dragged from him and he will regret it later, the child smiles. His milk teeth gleam in his dark little face. I twitch my nose again, pick a blackberry, and hold it out to him. It is hard and sour, not yet ripe, but he eats it. In the warm darkness his wondering gurgle carries clearly, sharp as a sword.

  • • •

  “It’s the environmentalist lobby, Al, that’s the real stickler. Bunch of bleeding hearts, but they’re organized, and they’ve got their votes. Danchell, tor one—he needs the support or it’s no-go next election, after that Medicaid fiasco in his district. We can get our voles, too, of course—no problem, Cranston’s in Washington now—but not cheap. You gotta remember that with the new process the whole shoreline is going to end up a real mess, and everybody’s holding out for enough time to ride out the public yelling, I carried those figures here, which is why the total might look a little high to you, but I fixed it so it wouldn’t to the audit boys, if, it comes to that.”

  “How much shoreline are we talking about, Josh? Exactly.”

  “Twenty point six miles. On your map—from here to here. Mostly US Seacoast Wildlife Preserve—a few small fry. No problem.”

  • • •

  Picture three successive circles, interlocking but not by much. In the first lies the immediate sensory world—or what you think is the immediate sensory world. The warm rain on your bare arm, the elusive smell of lilacs, the bitter aspirin dissolving on your hung-over tongue. Your child in your womb, your woman in your arms, your feces in your bowels pushing downward.

  In the second circle lie the systems of your mind. Social constructs for creating necessary order. The Town Line Road, Swiss franc, Holy Mother Church, matriarchal lineage, Napoleonic Code, Monarchy, democracy dictatorship, oligarchy, communism, socialism. Freemasons, Dow Chemical Company Boy Scouts, Black Hand. Created order, as opposed to, say a2 + b2 = c2, which is merely discovered.

  In the third circle lie the ambiguities, the questions without answers, the lonely province of poets and mystics. You wake in the night with the warm wind blowing the curtains in the open window and turn over in the darkness. For a second you are aware of the blood in your veins, warm and full, and the strong beat of your heart against the sheet, and you think: Yes, but why? before sleep ebbs back in long waves, and the question is forgotten. Forgotten, sometimes, until the very end, when it seems too late to ask it after all. Why here? Why me?

  Why now? And after now—what? What before?

  And how? Misty questions, changing shape even as you look at them, like the bright swirls of color on your inner eyelids that come only from closing your eyes too hard. The questions children ask—some children, the children who pause in the baseball game at dusk, chewing on the soiled thumb of their fielder’s mitts, to watch the stars come out and wonder. The third circle is fluid, shifting the “real” so treacherously underfoot that it becomes dangerous to move, and the best recourse is to stand still and wonder, letting the believed and the unknown dissolve into each other. The circle itself may not even be round.

  • • •

  “Tyler estimates maybe four months, five at the outside. He’ll put the money through Mexico, no problem there. But it would be best to be underway by October, if possible, because OPEC may be shifting its policy then, according to what Mahjoub has been feeding us.”

  Carruthers leaned back in his chair. It was a wing chair, one of a pair, hand-embroidered in the rich, discreet patterns of Jacobean crewel. With one finger he traced the 20.6 miles of shoreline on Poole’s map.

  Rocky most of it, and wild—he’d been there once on vacation.

  “Josh, you ever have something completely inexplicable happen to you, something you couldn’t account for any way at all?”

  Poole lit a cigarette, gaining time while he assessed the question. IE could be an oblique reference to some mistake Carruthers had once made—as a prelude to one of Poole’s? The press leak? But he had already pointed out . . . or was the question something else entirely some subtle way of maneuvering, of throwing him off balance so Carruthers could probe for any hidden intentions, weaknesses, overlooked threats? Or was it an invitation, a first step toward an alliance against some coalition Poole hadn’t yet seen forming but Carruthers had? But a man who needed an ally was a second choice to be one himself.

  Always try to ally yourself with the already unshakable.

  Finally Poole said cautiously “How do you mean ‘inexplicable,’ Al? Did something happen up at the Cape?”

  • • •

  The boys play at the edge of the moor. Behind them stretches a plain of heather, before them a rainy pasture, tingling with green all alive-o. Between heather and pasture is a crumbling stone wall, two feet high, that was ancient five centuries before.

  “Bang!” shouts one of the boys, waving a plastic machine gun in the general direction of the other young boy. “Got ya!”

  “Did not!”

  “Did too!”

  “Did not!”

  “Bloody well did too! Lie down, you have to be dead!”

  “Won’t!”

  “Will!”

  “Won’t!”

  “Well, you got too! Them’s the rules!”

  “Won’t! You missed!”

  “Did not!”

  “Did too!”

  I come around the end of the wall, wheeling a barrow full of iron ore. I am only as tall as the wall itself, and almost as old. Knotted gray beard, pointed brown cap, jerkin and breeches covered with earth from the mines. Only the bracelet glows brightly—that and my eyes, fiercely blue in the wrinkled sea of my ancient face. I stop pushing the barrow—the rocks clink together softly in protest—and stare at the boys, who look back at me without wonder.

  “Bang!” shouts the first boy “You’re dead!”

  It is a forbidden indulgence to despair.

  • • •

  Carruthers ignored Poole’s counterquestion.

  “Just ‘inexplicable’—in any sense we’re used to dealing with. Beyond the way things usually behave.”

  Poole had had time to make a decision.

  They didn’t come any tougher than Carruthers, any more ruthless; anything Poole revealed about past mistaken perceptions, past misjudged deals, would be too risky He put down his cigarette and lifted the coffee mug, aware even through his tension of its heft. It’s expensive solidity.

  “No,” Poole said over the rim. “I can’t really say that I have, Al. Usually I can find the explanation for pretty near everything.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  • • •

  I swoop down over the near-desert, reaching the lowest point of my wide parabola over a ranch house, then rising again over the heads of dusty unnoticing sheep. People run out of the open barn, their heads tipped back toward the night sky.

  “Did you see it, Dad? Did you? What was it?”

  The man spits into the dust. “Lighlnin’, most likely Heat lightnin’.”

  “Sure,” the woman says, relieved. “Hotter ‘n hell tonight.”

  “No, it wasn’t, Dad! It was too . . . too shaped. Like a silvery oval. It looked more like . . . like a ship.”

  The man snorts. “Too much comics, boy!”

  “Heat lightnin’,” the woman says.

  “But you saw it had—”

  “That’s enough,” the man says sharply. “We got work to do.” He spits again, turns, and walks back to the barn. The other two follow, but I see the boy look back over his shoulder at the starry sky his face lighted by doubt and longing and a suspicious astonishment, and I am satisfied. The Others will complain—no, never complain, but point out with gentle, relentless clarity—that the power drain for this son of thing is enormous, but I am satisfied. It is worth it.

  • • •

&
nbsp; “So we have two options, then,” Carruthers said crisply, once more all business.

  “We can go ahead with the shoreline project and make damn sure Cranston gets the Washington boys to shove the right papers around, or we can let this one go to the environmentalists with lots of hue and cry and rack up brownie points, cash, and voting positions for the big push on the Yukon deal.”

  Poole blinked. “But I didn’t think it was ever a question of—

  “Those are the two options, Josh. And I’m the one who makes the final decision, right, Josh?” His eyes chilled the room, light-gray ice.

  Poole put down his coffee mug; a few drops spilled over the edge, onto the teak table. “Of course. Al!” he said.

  “So you better get on the phone, Josh, and plug your little press leak. The paper will need a retraction.”

  “Yes. Right away.”

  “I hope it won’t damage your network. Or anything.”

  “Not at all, Al,” Poole said genially backing from the room. He backed into the door.

  “You didn’t make any premature personal investments in the land without telling me, did you. Josh? Of course not.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. Get on it right away then,” Carruthers said.

  • • •

  Always the third circle slides down into the second. The mysteries of faith harden into the certainties of dogma; the revolution becomes the new government; the scientific theory habituates into the factual limits showing why something else can’t be done. Wondrous, theoretical, possible, probable, factual, expected, mandatory.

  I point this out, yet again, to the Others.

  They want something more dramatic and definite, I can tell; something more like last time. Not this guerrilla warfare; hit and run, hiding under this world’s own debunked mysteries to rekindle that sense of wonder; of enigma, of things not absolutely complacently unarguably certain; that it so desperately needs.