Fictions

by Nancy Kress

Before I can answer, the red globe goes out. In my hand, it changes from bright red shining in the sunlight to the color of wet stone, gray and dull. The brother and I stare at it, too surprised to move, until the brother points behind me, gibbering. I turn slowly, and in the great slowness I suddenly feel as if I am falling. But it is another red globe, a huge one, that is falling, falling above the trees more slowly than anything can fall. It cannot fall that slowly, but it does, until it touches the ground near the hut and the red goes out and then there are two ralum-alloy huts in the clearing, side by side. The brother whimpers, and drops to his knees. The door of one of the huts opens and two figures come out, a man and a woman. In the sunlight, the woman’s breasts cast little bobbing shadows, but it is at the man that I stare so hard my eyes blur and the two huts fuse into one. But the man is blond, his face round and hairless.

  “Karen,” he says. “My God—Karen.”

  “No, Carl,” the woman says. “Look how young she is. It can’t be.”

  “No, of course not,” the man says shakily. He passes a hand over his eyes. “Of course not. Harol? Davey?”

  Inside my ears is a rushing sound, a clean bright roar like a high wind. Karen—he is looking for Karen. He knows the mother when she is being Karen. He must be from the City, he must know the green-lit room, he must know—

  “The shot,” he says unsteadily, and points to the dull globe in my hand. The brother, still on his knees, draws behind me.

  “Carl, you’re scaring them,” the woman says. She bends down and looks at the brother. “Don’t be frightened, either of you. We won’t hurt you. We’re just looking for someone, three someones, and we sent out scattershot large-life signals days ago”—she points to the now-dull globe—“to see if they might be on this island. I’m Tina O’Connell and this is Carl Biscardi. He’s looking for his sister Karen and her two children. They—”

  Suddenly I laugh. I cannot help it—they are here! They have come for us! They will take us back to the City, to the black-bearded man and the green room. They know who all of us are being, the mother and the brother and I. They know. I pull on the brother’s arm and step forward, laughing again. Tears fill my eyes, and I cannot help them either. Holding out the globe—the “shot”—I drag the brother to his feet and toward the man being the mother’s brother.

  “Alea! I am Alea! This is the brother, Alea’s brother! And Alea’s mother is asleep there, in the hut!” And I laugh because for a single flying moment I cannot remember which hut she is in, which hut was here first, of the two that look so much the same. The clear bright rushing sings in my ears like water. But the man Carl is frowning. “The girl twin—”

  “Carl, listen,” the woman being Tina says. “Their mother is in the hut. You check there.”

  He starts for a hut, but suddenly the brother is there first, whistling open the door. Through it I see him, standing protectively over the mother while the man Carl enters. The door closes.

  “Is she—” the woman Tina asks, but then she stops; I see her looking for words. “Is your mother—does she always know who she is?”

  “Oh yes,” I say, and laugh again, the laugh tumbling out on top of the words. It is easy to laugh, easy to talk, after so many days of silence. “She’s Hwang Ho or Uba or Gianelli or Karen or Colette or Maria Torres or Abdul. She always knows.” The woman draws a deep breath. “And then you—”

  “I am Alea.” Around us the sunlight shimmers and sparkles, and in the pause of the woman’s voice I hear the sea. It is singing, laughing: Alea, Alea, Alea. The woman takes my hand. Her voice is gentle.

  “What can you remember . . . Alea, from before your mother brought you to live here? Do you remember New Roanoke? Do you remember your Uncle Carl at all?”

  “No. But I remember a room filled with green light, and I remember—” But I stop, suddenly shy. My precious little Alea.

  “Listen. I’m going to try to tell you what I know, what Carl told me. I don’t know how much of it you’ll understand, but I’ll try.” She pushes her hands up through her hair, frowning. “You and your brother are twins—two babies born at the same time. Carl and Karen, your mother, were partners in a mining survey team. That means that you go to other . . . other worlds and look for certain very rare metals, for ore—”

  “Ore,” I repeat. One of the strange words the mother said on the cliffs. The woman being Tina stops and waits, but I say nothing.

  “When Karen became pregnant with you twins, she decided to stay here—not this place, but on this world, in the city of New Roanoke—for the birth, and I became Carl’s partner looking for ore. Now this part is a little hard. There is a time difference. Only a little while passed on our ship, but it’s been ten years here. Do you understand? When Carl and I went offworld, you and Davey were just walking. But when he got back, we found out that Karen had had herself eternalized. That means—” The woman stops and turns her hands palms up, looking at me helplessly.

  “It’s hard to explain to you. Karen had been to so many worlds, looking for ore . . . not just different places like the city, Alea: different worlds. She and Carl stayed together, but everyone else they had known, their parents and friends and everyone, was not only worlds away but centuries away, because of the time differences on ship that I just told you about. Karen had been prospecting for years, but on all the worlds she landed, time had gone by much faster. Everyone she knew, everywhere, was dead. Do you see, Alea? Karen didn’t belong anywhere, anytime. She began to have bad periods of depression, and to cry a lot, and her pregnancy seemed to make both of those worse. She didn’t know where she fit, and after a while that made her wonder even who she was. Worlds changed, time changed; Karen felt she couldn’t be sure of anything, and she wanted something to hang onto. Can you understand that?”

  The woman peers at me closely. I will not look at her. Inside my chest, my heart thuds so hard I am afraid she can hear it. Something to hang onto.

  She sighs and goes on. “The thing that Karen wanted had to be big, big enough to take in all those worlds and all that time. A secure sense of identity big enough to dwarf all that she had already lost. So she had herself eternalized. That means she had an operation—had something done to her head—so that now she remembers all the people she ever was. In other lives. She remembers her entire past. Only it was a new operation, and a dangerous one, and Karen was one of the first. Carl and I found out when we got back that she had been eternalized and that she was one of the ones who can’t deal with all that past. Some people can, but a few, already disoriented, just can’t. The past is supposed to be merely memories, but instead Karen gets—she gets lost in it, in her mind, like getting lost in the forest. There’s too much of it for her. Do you understand?”

  “Eternalized.” Somewhere I hear the word in the mother’s voice, with sobs and tears. She is grabbing my shoulder and begging me to understand, to . . . But the picture is gone, scattered like the reflection of Big Moon in the creek. I cross my arms across my chest; the wind from the sea is suddenly cold.

  “When Carl and I got back, Karen had taken you and your brother away from the city, no one knew where. At the hospital, they said she took a reconnaissance ship equipped with a Colonizer and just vanished. We’ve been looking for months, sending out the scattershot signals, but God it’s a big continent, and . . . Do you understand at all what I’m trying to say, Harol? Your mother is supposed to be just one person all the time, just Karen. Only what’s in this life is supposed to be real to her. We can take her back to New Roanoke and have the eternalizing blocked again, and she’ll be one person, Karen, all the time.”

  One person all the time. She would not run for the cliffs, or plant shoots by the creek, or nuzzle the brother and me in the hot sunshine while picking bugs from our hair. She would not be Colette, she would not try to—only Karen. And I would not be los perros or Hwang Lan or Andre. I would be Alea, only Alea. But—

  “Why did you call me ‘Harol’ ?”

  The door of the hut
opens and the mother comes out, with the brother on one side and the man being Carl on the other. The mother is Uba: she walks bent over, jaw gaping, grunting softly. One hand brushes the ground; the other is fastened in the brother’s hair. Tears lie on Carl’s cheeks.

  “She’s very bad. Tina, get Harol and Davey into the ship.”

  “Carl—”

  “She’s become just—God!” He takes the mother’s hand and pulls her gently toward the ship. She ambles slowly, without protest, blinking in the sunlight. The brother presses against her, his eyes round and frightened. Beside me the woman Tina moves forward and touches my shoulder.

  Something is wrong, something without words, without names. The woman Tina’s face, and the man being Carl who keeps calling me ‘Harol,’—Suddenly, for no reason, I think of the talp I had tracked for days, the talp I had killed for being the wrong one.

  “I am Alea,” I say loudly and slowly. Even Carl stops and turns. “I am Alea. There was a room filled with green light that is not sunlight. The floor is soft and green, like talp fur. A man picked me up and threw me in the air. A big, dark man. His face had black, prickly hair on it. He threw me up and caught me. He said, ‘Alea, my precious little daughter Alea.’ That is what he said. I am Alea.”

  The four of them look at me, silent. The brother looks the way he does when the mother begins to be someone new, someone he has not seen before. The man Carl does not really see me; even looking straight at me, he see the mother, and the interruption I am making getting the mother into the “ship.” The woman being Tina stares at me with so many shades in her face that suddenly I am afraid of her most of all.

  “I am Alea!”

  Beneath me my legs tremble. I make the trembling legs carry me up to the mother, and I push my face close to hers, to the dull eyes that blink at me in confusion.

  “I am Alea!”

  The mother does not speak. She tips her head to one side and studies me, then lets go of the brother and raises her arm. I see it come up slowly, as slowly as the hut falling out of the sky. She puts her hand on my head; the woman being Tina breathes in sharply. For a moment, something gleams deep in the mother’s eyes and I almost think she is someone else, not Uba at all, someone who remembers herself all the way through and so me as well. Then the mother’s hand parts my hair and begins looking through it for grubs to eat.

  Savagely I knock the hand away. “Alea!” I scream, and hit the mother in the face. She crumples to the ground. Carl grabs me and shakes me so hard my teeth rattle.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? She’s sick, goddammit, and I won’t have some—You lay a hand again on—is this what the two of you—you do that again and I’ll whip you so hard you won’t sit down for a week! She’s your mother, dammit! And your name is Harol, not this ‘Alea’ rot, and you can just learn it! Harol! And your father died before you were born, so you can just forget this black-bearded stuff—”

  “Carl!” Tina cries. “Don’t!”

  “—and help your mother get well instead of feeding her more lies! Your father was blond, and you never laid eyes on him! And if you ever again—just who the hell do you think you are, young lady, hitting your mother when she’s—just who the hell do you think you are? Who?”

  Who-who-who goes the bright hard wind, rushing past my ears as I run for the forest. The trees close around me, blind, and I cannot see any of the shouting people any more.

  I see the City, far below. It shades from sea wave to cale leaf to wet moss, and the light of Big Moon slides over it with water. Someone tosses me into the air, and then I am falling, falling down through the city made of green talp fur, bloody and mangled with its foul scent choking my mouth, and I keep falling through the bloody fur and falling and falling . . . until I am caught by the voice of the man being Carl, rising up from the clearing below.

  “Listen! What was that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Like a cry. No, a sort of choking,” the man Carl says. They are far below me, two heads bobbing in the sea of green bushes. I lean against the trunk of the cale tree, pushing away the dream. The branch under me shudders, but the man being Carl and the woman being Tina do not look up. In a day and night of searching, they have not looked up. I shake my head to clear it; the leaves around me dance and blur, as if in a high wind. I have not eaten since yesterday, and my head feels shivery as the cale leaves.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” the woman Tina repeats.

  Carl raises both his hands to his mouth and shouts, “A-leee-a!!” I hold my breath.

  “Damn it, where is she? Don’t look at me like that, Tina!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it’s all my fault!”

  “It is all your fault,” Tina says coldly. They never look up. “How’s Karen?”

  “Still out. I gave her another hypodermic. I gave one to Davey, too. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her.”

  “She needs hospitalization,” Carl says, and his voice sounds like a branch ready to snap. “Now. And that brat—”

  “She’s not a brat,” Tina says. “She doesn’t know what she is.”

  I have never shot my sling straight down before. I reach for it carefully, rustling no leaves, and fit in a stone. Their heads below look like two pelts, blond and silky.

  “You of all people ought to understand her,” Tina says. “She’s just like Karen.”

  “Karen’s sick! She had that damn operation! Harol didn’t!”

  “Alea, not Harol. And what made Karen have the operation in the first place? She wanted to know who she was. She wanted some anchor to the past, some secure identity. She wanted—”

  “I don’t think you know her that well,” Carl says coldly, and turns his back to her. I pull back the sling. Tina grabs Carl’s shoulder and yanks him around.

  “I know you that well! You charge in here and bluster and cry to try to make everything with Karen exactly the way it was when we left ten years ago. Karen wallowed and brooded and finally hooked her mind to a bunch of wires and chemicals. Well, Alea invents. She’s invented herself a past and a father and a name. You’re all the same, all three of you—all trying to find some sure way to control the world, so that you can define yourself by it. Did you think that just because Alea grew up in this primitive camp that she wouldn’t feel that need, too? Or didn’t you think at all? God, Carl, at least try to see past Karen and look at Alea for a minute. She’s looking for some anchor in time. But the past won’t help! It can’t, because our relationship to it is too damn complicated to pin down that easily!”

  The man being Carl walks away from her. I try to pull back my sling but my hand shakes; the tree under me is riddled and trembly, as if it might snap. Not even when the mother was being Colette did she say such terrible things; not even when she was Maria Torres was she so terrifying. “Inventing . . . the past won’t help . . .” Terrible, dangerous things, mangled things. I will not listen to them, I do not want to look at them. They will not let me be Alea, not even the woman being Tina would let me be Alea, she said I invented . . . I pull back my sling. She would not let me be Alea. I would have to be Harol, someone I do not know. They would smash Alea forever, just as they would smash Hwang Ho and Uba and Gianelli and Maria Torres. They would smash Alea. I aim the sling.

  The rushing fills my ears. Around me the leaves spin, scrambling and crying. I slip sideways and grab at the cale trunk. The stone falls out of the sling and bounces down the tree, hitting branches and leaves until it falls to the ground, and the man and woman look up.

  “There she is!” the man cries. He starts toward the tree, his face tilted upward, faintly green in the light sifted through the trees. I stand up, steadying myself with one hand on the trunk. Below, the forest floor is green, shading from sea water to cale leaf to wet moss. The leaves jiggle and dance. The man below strides toward me, his arm raised. He is directly under me, waiting. He is not the mother or the brother. His face tips up, calling to me, calling somethi
ng I cannot hear in the rush of wind, in the strange light. I jump forward, laughing, onto the air and the waiting arms below, and the floor rushes toward me, full of green light.

  Big Moon rises over the City. I watch it from my window, every night when there are no clouds. In the next room, the mother is cooking. She is being Karen. Across the room the brother, practicing reading on his tutor, is being Davey. Every once in a while, he glances at me over the top of his machinery, his face creased, and I think for a moment that he is going to warn me away from the cliffs.

  I have sat here every night for months now.

  Tomorrow Tina O’Connell will come to see us again, but this next visit will be different. She will bring Carl home from the hospital. That is why the brother gives me those worried looks. He is afraid that when I see Carl being a man who had to get new legs because I smashed the old ones, it will make me cry the way I did before. But the brother doesn’t know about the paper.

  I found it in the park. I cannot read very well yet—although I read better than the brother—but the paper has only three long words, and one of them I could hardly mistake. The paper is in the pocket of my jumpsuit while I watch Big Moon. The tutor calls Big Moon “Ramses,” but of course it does not matter what they call it. It is still Big Moon. The paper crackles when I move, like wind in trees.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  Do you know, REALLY?

  Most of us do not, thanks to outdated and repressive laws that kill new discoveries. But you can know who you are, who you have always been. Eternalizing can give you a whole new sense of yourself—your real, whole self.

  Join those of us who know . . .

  “The past never helps anyway!” Tina O’Connell screamed when she lifted me off Carl’s legs. But that is stupid. It is now that doesn’t help. Now I do not know who the mother is when she is being Karen. She makes up Karen every day. She is never Uba or Gianelli or Hwang Ho or Maria Torres. She is never the people I knew all my life. Those people are gone. Karen found her past and then she gave it back, but she gave back mine, too. I do not know her.