Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Mr. Felder! You don’t have on your surgical mask! This baby is going straight to the high-security nursery!”

  “Nuts,” Brad said. “This little darling has a press conference to go to.” He reached for the baby with both hands. The nurse held it tighter.

  Cherlyn reached up from the wheelchair, grimacing with pain and fury. “Give me that baby! I had that baby!”

  I leaped forward to—what? Add two more hands to the ones pulling the baby? Brad, being the strongest, won. He wrenched the blanketed bundle from the nurse and pushed her hard enough so she staggered back against the corridor wall. Somewhere in the distance I heard a low rumble, like an advancing horde of barbarians.

  “Brad!” Cherlyn shrieked. “Give me that baby!” She began to pound at his knees.

  Brad hesitated. One nurse huddled, wild-eyed, against the wall. The other, made of sterner stuff, suddenly sprinted down the corridor in the unblocked direction, probably going for help. That seemed to decide him. He turned on his blinding grin and lowered the baby—tenderly, tenderly—into its mother’s arms.

  “There, Cherlyn, darling—don’t fret, you’ve been through hell, poor darling. Here she is. You have her now, everything’s all right, here she is.”

  Cherlyn clutched the baby, shooting him a look of pure hatred. “You were going without me!”

  “No, no, never, darling, you misunderstood. God, look at you, look at both of you!” Overcome by the sight of so much maternity, Brad passed his hand in front of his eyes.

  Cherlyn glared at him. “That nurse will have doctors here to take her to the nursery in a minute. If we’re going to hit the press, let’s go!”

  “In one second. Just after Mother sees the baby. Your first grandchild, Mother—God, I remember how important Grammy was to me growing up! I would have known a real and profound loss if that special grandparent-grandchild bond had ever been interfered with!”

  There were tears in his eyes. Until he was six, Grammy had thought his name was Rod.

  Brad took my arm and led me over to the wheelchair. At the other end of the corridor, doors were flung open. I saw a long look pass between Cherlyn and Brad, and then I forgot them both because Cherlyn was peeling the pink blanket back from the quiet bundle.

  The baby opened her eyes.

  I looked at little Angela Dawn and stepped back. The room faded, righted itself. There were people in it: doctors ordering, Cherlyn shouting, Brad. Brad, my son. He was looking at me levelly, for the moment giving me his whole attention, that treasure all children are supposed to want from their parents. Backwards, backwards. It’s always been clear who holds the treasure, who is the thief that risks being torn apart to approach it. Who is the predator that feeds on whose human hearts.

  Brad said softly, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “Yes,” I said. She was.

  He went on, “You wouldn’t wreck her future, would you, Mother? You wouldn’t let her little life start with her grandmother suing her father?”

  I said nothing, but he knew. With a satisfied smile he kissed me and went back to fighting off the doctors who would interfere with his press conference for such a trivial purpose as the baby’s health. I slipped away in the other direction, past the elevators, down corridors till I found an empty waiting room and sat down.

  He didn’t know. Being Brad, he might not know for a long time. Being Brad, he might never know. But I knew. The second I saw the baby, I knew.

  The unseen risks, the unseen connections. I started to laugh. Poor Brad—and he might never even really know. And neither would anyone else unless Cherlyn related her dream, which I doubted she could even remember. Probably not even Angela Dawn, beautiful little Angela Dawn, would ever know. Only I. Unless one day, in a fit of grandmotherly affection, I held her firmly from rising up off my lap and told her. I would tell her about the moment I first knew: the moment she opened her beautiful eyes.

  They were black, not the blue of most newborns but black: night-black, ancient-black. Silky black curls spiraled over her soft head. Babies are not supposed to see well, but it seemed to me that she saw me, saw us all with those dark fierce predator’s eyes fixed on her parents’ faces.

  Someone rushed into the little room, jabbered at me, and turned on the TV. I didn’t stay. I didn’t need to see the press conference for this little genetically engineered living marvel. I had seen Angela Dawn’s eyes.

  I didn’t need to see the wings.

  1990

  INERTIA

  “Success” can be relative—and hard to recognize.

  At dusk the back of the bedroom falls off. One minute it’s a wall, exposed studs and cracked blue drywall, and the next it’s snapped—off two-by-fours and an irregular fence as high as my waist, the edges both jagged and furry, as if they were covered with powder. Through the hole a sickly tree pokes upward in the narrow space between the back of our barracks and the back of a barracks in E Block. I try to get out of bed for a closer look, but today my arthritis is too bad, which is why I’m in bed in the first place. Rachel rushes into the bedroom.

  “What happened, Gram? Are you all right?”

  I nod and point. Rachel bends into the hole, her hair haloed by California twilight. The bedroom is hers, too; her mattress lies stored under my scarred four-poster. “Termites! Damn. I didn’t know we had them. You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine. I was all the way across the room, honey. I’m fine.”

  “Well—we’ll have to get Mom to get somebody to fix it.”

  I say nothing. Rachel straightens, throws me a quick glance, looks away. Still I say nothing about Mamie, but in a sudden flicker from my oil lamp I look directly at Rachel, just because she is so good to look at. Not pretty, not even here Inside, although so far the disease has affected only the left side of her face. The ridge of thickened, ropy skin, coarse as old hemp, isn’t visible at all when she stands in right profile. But her nose is large, her eyebrows heavy and low, her chin a bony knob. An honest nose, expressive brows, direct gray eyes, chin that juts forward when she tilts her head in intelligent listening—to a grandmother’s eye, Rachel is good to look at. They wouldn’t think so, Outside. But they would be wrong.

  Rachel says, “Maybe I could trade a lottery card for more drywall and nails, and patch it myself.”

  “The termites will still be there.”

  “Well, yes, but we have to do something.” I don’t contradict her. She is sixteen years old. “Feel that air coming in—you’ll freeze at night this time of year. It’ll be terrible for your arthritis. Come in the kitchen now, Gram—I’ve built up the fire.”

  She helps me into the kitchen, where the metal wood-burning stove throws a rosy warmth that feels good on my joints. The stove was donated to the colony a year ago by who-knows-what charity or special interest group for, I suppose, whatever tax breaks still hold for that sort of thing. If any do. Rachel tells me that we still get newspapers, and once or twice I’ve wrapped vegetables from our patch in some fairly new-looking ones. She even says that the young Stevenson boy works a donated computer news net in the Block community hall, but I no longer follow Outside tax regulations. Nor do I ask why Mamie was the one to get the wood-burning stove when it wasn’t a lottery month.

  The light from the stove is stronger than the oil flame in the bedroom; I see that beneath her concern for our dead bedroom wall, Rachel’s face is flushed with excitement. Her young skin glows right from intelligent chin to the ropy ridge of disease, which of course never changes colour. I smile at her. Sixteen is so easy to excite. A new hair ribbon from the donations repository, a glance from a boy, a secret with her cousin Jennie.

  “Gram,” she says, kneeling beside my chair, her hands restless on the battered wooden arm, “Gram—there’s a visitor. From Outside. Jennie saw him.”

  I go on smiling. Rachel—nor Jennie, either—can’t remember when disease colonies had lots of visitors. First bulky figures in contamination suits, then a few years later, slee
ker figures in the sani-suits that took their place. People were still being interred from Outside, and for years the checkpoints at the Rim had traffic flowing both ways. But of course Rachel doesn’t remember all that; she wasn’t born. Mamie was only twelve when we were interred here. To Rachel, a visitor might well be a great event. I put out one hand and stroke her hair.

  “Jennie said he wants to talk to the oldest people in the colony, the ones who were brought here with the disease. Hal Stevenson told her.”

  “Did he, sweetheart?” Her hair is soft and silky. Mamie’s hair had been the same at Rachel’s age.

  “He might want to talk to you!”

  “Well, here I am.”

  “But aren’t you excited? What do you suppose he wants?”

  I’m saved from answering her because Mamie comes in, her boyfriend Peter Malone following with a string-bag of groceries from the repository.

  At the first sound of the doorknob turning, Rachel gets up from beside my chair and pokes at the fire. Her face goes completely blank, although I know that part is only temporary. Mamie cries, “Here we are!” in her high, doll-baby voice, cold air from the hall swirling around her like bright water. “Mama darling—how are you feeling? And Rachel! You’ll never guess, Pete had extra depository cards and he got us some chicken! I’m going to make a stew!”

  “The back wall fell off the bedroom,” Rachel says flatly. She doesn’t look at Peter with his string-crossed chicken, but I do. He grins his patient, wolfish grin. I guess that he won the depository cards at poker. His fingernails are dirty. The part of the newspaper I can see says ESIDENT CONFISCATES C.

  Mamie says, “What do you mean, Tell off?’ ” Rachel shrugs. “Just fell off. Termites.”

  Mamie looks helplessly at Peter, whose grin widens. I can see how it will be: They will have a scene later, not completely for our benefit, although it will take place in the kitchen for us to watch. Mamie will beg prettily for Peter to fix the wall. He will demur, grinning. She will offer various smirking hints about barter, each hint becoming more explicit. He will agree to fix the wall. Rachel and I, having no other warm room to go to, will watch the fire or the floor or our shoes until Mamie and Peter retire ostentatiously to her room. It’s the ostentation that embarrasses us. Mamie has always needed witnesses to her desirability.

  But Peter is watching Rachel, not Mamie. “The chicken isn’t from Outside, Rachel. It’s from that chicken-yard in Block B. I heard you say how clean they are.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel says shortly, gracelessly.

  Mamie rolls her eyes. “Say ‘thank you,’ darling. Pete went to a lot of trouble to get this chicken.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can’t you say it like you mean it?” Mamie’s voice goes shrill.

  “Thanks,” Rachel says. She heads towards our three-walled bedroom. Peter, still watching her closely, shifts the chicken from one hand to the other. The pressure of the string bag cuts lines across the chicken’s yellowish skin.

  “Rachel Anne Wilson—”

  “Let her go,” Peter says softly.

  “No,” Mamie says. Between the five crisscrossing lines of disease, her face sets in unlovely lines. “She can at least learn some manners. And I want her to hear our announcement! Rachel, you just come right back out here this minute!”

  Rachel returns from the bedroom; I’ve never known her to disobey her mother. She pauses by the open bedroom door, waiting. Two empty candle scones, both blackened by old smoke, frame her head. It has been since at least last winter that we’ve had candies for them. Mamie, her forehead creased in irritation, smiles brightly.

  “This is a special dinner, all of you. Pete and I have an announcement. We’re going to get married.”

  “That’s right,” Peter says. “Congratulate us.”

  Rachel, already motionless, somehow goes even stiller. Peter watches her carefully. Mamie casts down her eyes, blushing, and I feel a stab of impatient pity for my daughter, propping up mid-thirties girlishness on such a slender reed as Peter Malone. I stare at him hard. If he ever touches Rachel . . . but I don’t really think he would. Things like that don’t happen anymore. Not Inside.

  “Congratulations,” Rachel mumbles. She crosses the room and embraces her mother, who hugs her back with theatrical fervour. In another minute, Mamie will start to cry. Over her shoulder I glimpse Rachel’s face, momentarily sorrowing and loving, and I drop my eyes.

  “Well! This calls for a toast!” Mamie cries gaily. She winks, makes a clumsy pirouette, and pulls a bottle from the back shelf of the cupboard Rachel got at the last donations lottery. The cupboard looks strange in our kitchen: gleaming white lacquer, vaguely Oriental-looking, amid the wobbly chairs and scarred table with the broken drawer no one has ever gotten around to mending. Mamie flourishes the bottle, which I didn’t know was there. It’s champagne.

  What had they been thinking, the Outsiders who donated champagne to a disease colony? Poor devils, even if they never have anything to celebrate . . . Or here’s something they won’t know what to do with . . . Or better them than me—as long as the sickies stay Inside . . . It doesn’t really matter.

  “I just love champagne!” Mamie cries feverishly; I think she has drunk it once. “And oh look—here’s someone else to help us celebrate! Come in, Jennie—come in and have some champagne!”

  Jennie comes in, smiling. I see the same eager excitement that animated Rachel before her mother’s announcement. It glows on Jennie’s face, which is beautiful. She has no disease on her hands or her face. She must have it somewhere, she was born Inside, but one doesn’t ask that. Probably Rachel knows. The two girls are inseparable. Jennie, the daughter of Mamie’s dead husband’s brother, is Rachel’s cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian. But no one pays attention to such things anymore, and Jennie lives with some people in a barracks in the next Block, although Rachel and I asked her to live here. She shook her head, the beautiful hair so blonde it’s almost white bouncing on her shoulders, and blushed in embarrassment, painfully not looking at Mamie.

  “I’m getting married, Jennie,” Mamie says, again casting down her eyes bashfully. I wonder what she did, and with whom, to get the champagne.

  “Congratulations!” Jennie says warmly. “You, too, Peter.”

  “Call me Pete,” he says, as he has said before. I catch his hungry look at Jennie. She doesn’t, but some sixth sense—even here, even Inside—makes her step slightly backwards. I know she will go on calling him “Peter.”

  Mamie says to Jennie, “Have some more champagne. Stay for dinner.”

  With her eyes Jennie measures the amount of champagne in the bottle, the size of the chicken bleeding slightly on the table. She measures unobtrusively, and then of course she lies. “I’m sorry, I can’t—we ate our meal at noon today. I just wanted to ask if I could bring someone over to see you later, Gram. A visitor.” Her voice drops to a hush, and the glow is back. “From Outside.”

  I look at her sparkling blue eyes, at Rachel’s face, and I don’t have the heart to refuse. Even though I can guess, as the two girls cannot, how the visit will be. I am not Jennie’s grandmother, but she has called me that since she was three. “All right.”

  “Oh, thank you!” Jennie cries, and she and Rachel look at each other with delight. “I’m so glad you said yes, or else we might never get to talk to a visitor up close at all!”

  “You’re welcome,” I say. They are so young. Mamie looks petulant; her announcement has been upstaged. Peter watches Jennie as she impulsively hugs Rachel. Suddenly I know that he too is wondering where Jennie’s body is diseased, and how much. He catches my eye and looks at the floor, his dark eyes lidded, half-ashamed. But only half. A log cackles in the wooden stove, and for a brief moment the fire flares.

  The next afternoon Jennie brings the visitor. He surprises me immediately: he isn’t wearing a sani-suit, and he isn’t a sociologist.

  In the years following the internments, the disease colonies had a lot of
visitors. Doctors still hopeful of a cure for the thick gray ridges of skin that spread slowly over a human body—or didn’t, nobody knew why. Disfiguring. Ugly. Maybe eventually fatal. And communicable. That was the biggie: communicable. So doctors in sani-suits came looking for causes or cures. Journalists in sani-suits came looking for stories with four-color photo spreads. Legislative fact-finding committees in sani-suits came looking for facts, at least until Congress took away the power of colonies to vote, pressured by taxpayers who, increasingly pressured themselves, resented our dollar-dependent status. And the sociologists came in droves, minicams in hand, ready to record the collapse of the ill-organized and ill colonies into street-gang, dog-eat-dog anarchy.

  Later, when this did not happen, different sociologists came in later-model sani-suits to record the reasons why the colonies were not collapsing on schedule. All these groups went away dissatisfied. There was no cure, no cause, no story, no collapse, no reasons.

  The sociologists hung on longer than anybody else. Journalists have to be timely and interesting, but sociologists merely have to publish. Besides, everything in their cultural tradition told them that Inside must sooner or later degenerate into war zones: Deprive people of electricity (power became expensive), of municipal police (who refused to go Inside), of freedom to leave, of political clout, of jobs, of freeways and movie theatres and federal judges and state administered elementary school accreditation—and you get unrestrained violence to just survive. Everything in the culture said so. Bombed-out inner cities. Lord of the Flies. The Chicago projects. Western movies. Prison memoirs. The Bronx. East L.A. Thomas Hobbes. The sociologists knew.

  Only it didn’t happen.

  The sociologists waited. And Inside we learned to grow vegetables and raise chickens who, we learned, will eat anything. Those of us with computer knowledge worked real jobs over modems for a few years—maybes it was as long as a decade—before the equipment became too obsolete and unreplaced. Those who had been teachers organized classes among the children, although the curriculum, I think, must have gotten simpler every year: Rachel and Jennie don’t seem to have much knowledge of history or science. Doctors practiced with medicines donated by corporations for the tax write-offs, and after a decade or so they began to train apprentices. For a while—it might have been a long while—we listened to radios and watched TV. Maybe some people still do, if we have any working ones donated from Outside.