Fictions

by Nancy Kress

He isn’t fazed. “Because you’re one of the oldest survivors of the disease. Because you had a strong education Outside. Because your daughter’s husband died of axoperidine.”

  At the same moment that I realize what McHabe is going to say next. I realize, too, that Rachel and Jennie have already heard it. They listen to him with the slightly-open-mouthed intensity of children hearing a marvelous but familiar tale. But do they understand? Rachel wasn’t present when her father finally died, gasping for air his lungs couldn’t use.

  McHabe. watching me, says, “There’s been a lot of research on the disease since those deaths. Mrs. Pratt.”

  “No. There hasn’t. Too risky, your government said.”

  I see that he caught the pronoun. “Actual administration of any cures is illegal, yes. To minimize contact with communicables.”

  “So how has this ‘research’ been carried on?”

  “By doctors willing to go Inside and not come out again. Data is transmitted out by laser. In code.”

  “What clean doctor would be willing to go Inside and not come out again?” McHabe smiles; again I’m struck by that quality of spontaneous energy. “Oh. you’d be surprised. We had three doctors inside the Pennsylvania colony. One past retirement age. Another, an old-style Catholic, who dedicated his research to God. A third nobody could figure out, a dour persistent guy who was a brilliant researcher.”

  Way. “And you.”

  “No,” McHabe says quietly. “I go in and out.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “They’re dead.” He makes a brief aborted movement with his right hand and I realized that he is, or was, a smoker. How long since I had reached like that for a non-existent cigarette? Nearly two decades. Cigarettes are not among the things people donate; they’re too valuable. Yet I recognize the movement still. “Two of the three doctors caught the disease. They worked on themselves as well as volunteers. Then one day the government intercepted the relayed data and went in and destroyed everything.”

  “Why?” Jennie asks.

  “Research on the disease is illegal. Everyone Outside is afraid of a leak: a virus somehow getting out on a mosquito, a bird, even as a spore.”

  “Nothing has gotten out in all these years,” Rachel says.

  “No. But the government is afraid that if researchers start splicing and intercutting genes, it could make viruses more viable. You don’t understand the Outside, Rachel. Everything is illegal. This is the most repressive period in American history. Everyone’s afraid.”

  “You’re not,” Jennie says, so softly I barely hear her. McHabe gives her a smile that twists my heart.

  “Some of us haven’t given up. Research goes on. But it’s all underground, all theoretical. And we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that the virus doesn’t just affect the skin. There are—”

  “Be quiet,” I say, because I see that he’s about to say something important. “Be quiet a minute. Let me think.” McHabe waits. Jennie and Rachel look at me, that glow of suppressed excitement on them both. Eventually I find it. “You want something, Dr. McHabe. All this research wants something from us besides pure scientific joy. With things Outside as bad as you say, there must be plenty of diseases Outside you could research without killing yourself, plenty of need among your own people—” he nods, his eyes gleaming “—but you’re here. Inside. Why? We don’t have any more new or interesting symptoms, we barely survive, the Outside stopped caring what happened to us a long time ago. We have nothing. So why are you here?”

  “You’re wrong, Mrs. Pratt. You do have something interesting going on here. You have survived. Your society has regressed, but not collapsed. You’re functioning under conditions where you shouldn’t have.”

  The same old crap. I raise my eyebrows at him. He stares into the fire and says quietly, “To say Washington is rioting says nothing. You have to see a twelve-year-old hurl a homemade bomb, a man sliced open from neck to crotch because he still had a job to go to and his neighbor doesn’t, a three-year-old left to starve because someone abandoned her like an unwanted kitten . . . You don’t know. It doesn’t happen Inside.”

  “We’re better than they are,” Rachel says. I look at my grandchild. She says it simply, without self-aggrandizement, but with a kind of wonder. In the firelight the thickened gray ropes of skin across her cheek glow dull maroon.

  McHabe says, “Perhaps you are. I started to say earlier that we’ve learned that the virus doesn’t affect just the skin.

  It alters neurotransmitter receptor sites in the brain as well. It’s a relatively slow transformation, which is why the flurry of research in the early years of the disease missed it. But it’s real, as real as the faster site-capacity transformations brought about by, say, cocaine. Are you following me, Mrs. Pratt?”

  I nod. Jennie and Rachel don’t look lost, although they don’t know any of this vocabulary, and I realize that McHabe must have explained all this to them, earlier, in some other terms.

  “As the disease progresses to the brain, the receptors which receive excitory transmitters slowly become harder to engage, and the receptors which receive inhibiting transmitters become easier to engage.”

  “You mean that we become stupider.”

  “Oh. no! Intelligence is not affected at all. The results are emotional and behavioral, not intellectual. You become—all of you—calmer. Disinclined to action or innovation. Mildly but definitely depressed.”

  The fire bums down. I pick up the poker, bent slightly where someone once tried to use it as a crowbar, and poke at the log, which is a perfectly shaped molded-pulp synthetic stamped “Donated by Weyerhauser-Seyyed.”

  “I don’t feel depressed, young man.”

  “It’s a depression of the nervous system, but a new kind—without the hopelessness usually associated with clinical depression.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Really? With all due courtesy, when was the last time you—or any of the older Block leaders—pushed for any significant change in how you do things Inside?”

  “Sometimes things cannot be constructively changed. Only accepted. That’s not chemistry, it’s reality.”

  “Not Outside,” McHabe says grimly. “Outside they don’t change constructively or accept. They get violent. Inside. you’ve had almost no violence since the early years, even when your resources tightened again and again. When was the last time you tasted butter. Mrs. Pratt, or smoked a cigarette, or had a new pair of jeans? Do you know what happens Outside when consumer goods become unavailable and there are no police in a given area? But Inside you just distribute whatever you have as fairly as you can. or make do without. No looting, no rioting, no cancerous envy. No one Outside knew why. Now we do.”

  “We have envy.”

  “But it doesn’t erupt into anger.” Each time one of us speaks. Jennie and Rachel turn their heads to watch, like rapt spectators at tennis. Which neither of them has ever seen. Jennie’s skin glows like pearl.

  “Our young people aren’t violent either, and the disease hasn’t advanced very far in some of them.”

  “They learn how to behave from their ciders—just like kids everywhere else.”

  “I don’t feel depressed.”

  “Do you feel energetic?”

  “I have arthritis.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean. Doctor?” Again that restless furtive reach for a nonexistent cigarette. But his voice is quiet. “How long did it take you to get around to applying that insecticide I got Rachel for the termites? She told me you forbade her to do it. and I think you were right; it’s dangerous stuff. How many days went by before you or your daughter spread it around?”

  The chemical is still in its can.

  “How much anger are you feeling now. “Mrs. Pratt?” he goes on. “Because I think we understand each other, you and I. and that you guess now why I’m here. But you aren’t shouting or ordering me out of here or even telling me what you th
ink of me. You’re listening, and you’re doing it calmly, and you’re accepting what I tell you even though you know what I want you to—”

  The door opens and he breaks off. Mamie flounces in. followed by Peter. She scowls and stamps her foot. “Where were you, Rachel? We’ve been standing outside waiting for you all for ten minutes now! The dance has already started!”

  “A few more minutes. Mama. We’re talking.”

  “Talking? About what? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” McHabe says. “I was just asking your mother some questions about life Inside. I’m sorry we took so long.”

  “You never ask me questions about life Inside. And besides. I want to dance!”

  McHabe says, “If you and Peter want to go ahead. I’ll bring Rachel and Jennie.”

  Mamie chews her bottom lip. I suddenly know that she wants to walk up the street to the dance between Peter and McHabe, an arm linked with each, the girls trailing behind. McHabe meets her eyes steadily.

  “Well, if that’s what you want,” she says pettishly. “Come on. Pete!” She closes the door hard.

  I look at McHabe. unwilling to voice the question in front of Rachel, trusting him to know the argument I want to make. He does. “In clinical depression, there’s always been a small percentage for whom the illness is manifested not as passivity, but as irritability. It may be the same. We don’t know.”

  “Gram,” Rachel says, as if she can’t contain herself any longer, “he has a cure.”

  “For the skin manifestation only.” McHabe says quickly, and I see that he wouldn’t have chosen to blurt it out that way. “Not for the effects on the brain.” I say, despite myself. “How can you cure one without the other?”

  He runs his hand through his hair. Thick, brown hair. I watch Jennie watch his hand. “Skin tissue and brain tissue aren’t alike, Mrs. Pratt. The virus reaches both the skin and the brain at the same time, but the changes to brain tissue, which is much more complex, take much longer to detect. And they can’t be reversed—nerve tissue is non-regenerative. If you cut your fingertip, it will eventually break down and replace the damaged cells to heal itself. Shit, if you’re young enough, you can grow an entire new fingertip. Something like that is what we think our cure will stimulate the skin to do.

  “But if you damage your cortex, those cells are gone forever. And unless another part of the brain can learn to compensate, whatever behavior those cells governed is also changed forever.”

  “Changed into depression, you mean.”

  “Into calmness. Into restraint of action . . . The country desperately needs restraint, Mrs. Pratt.”

  “And so you want to take some of us Outside, cure the skin ropes, and let the ‘depression’ spread: the ‘restraint,’ the ‘slowness to act . . .”

  “We have enough action out there. And no one can control it—it’s all the wrong kind. What we need now is to slow everything down a little—before there’s nothing left to slow down.”

  “You’d infect a whole population—”

  “Slowly. Gently. For their own good—”

  “Is that up to you to decide?”

  “Considering the alternative, yes. Because it works. The colonies work, despite all your deprivations. And they work because of the disease!”

  “Each new case would have skin ropes—”

  “Which we’ll then cure.”

  “Does your cure work, Doctor? Rachel’s father died of a cure like yours!”

  “Not like ours,” he says, and I hear in his voice the utter conviction of the young. Of the energetic. Of the Outside. “This is new, and medically completely different. This is the right strain.”

  “And you want me to try this new right strain as your guinea pig.”

  There is a moment of electric silence. Eyes shift: gray, blue, brown. Even before Rachel rises from her stool or McHabe says, “We think the ones with the best chances to avoid scarring are young people without heavy skin manifestations,” I know. Rachel puts her arms around me. And Jennie—Jennie with the red ribbon woven in her hair, sitting on her broken chair as on a throne, Jennie who never heard of neurotransmitters or slow viruses or risk calculations—says simply, “It has to be me,” and looks at McHabe with eyes shining with love.

  I say no. I send McHabe away and say no. I reason with both girls and say no. They look unhappily at each other, and I wonder how long it will be before they realize they can act without permission, without obedience. But they never have.

  We argue for nearly an hour, and then I insist they go on to the dance, and that I go with them. The night is cold. Jennie puts on her sweater, a heavy hand-knitted garment that covers her shapelessly from neck to knees. Rachel drags on her donated coat, black synthetic frayed at cuffs and hem. As we go out the door, she stops me with a hand on my arm.

  “Gram—why did you say no?”

  “Why? Honey, I’ve been telling you for an hour. The risk, the danger . . .”

  “Is it that? Or—” I can feel her in the darkness of the hall, gathering herself together “—or is it—don’t be mad, Gram, please don’t be mad at me—is it because the cure is a new thing, a change? A . . . different thing you don’t want because it’s exciting? Like Tom said?”

  “No, it isn’t that,” I say, and feel her tense beside me, and for the first time in her life I don’t know what the tensing means.

  We go down the street towards Block B. There’s a Moon and stars, tiny high pinpoints of cold light. Block B is further lit by kerosene lamps and by torches stuck in the ground in front of the peeling barracks walls that form the cheerless square. Or does it only seem cheerless because of what McHabe said? Could we have done better than this blank utilitarianism, this subdued bleakness—this peace?

  Before tonight, I wouldn’t have asked.

  I stand in the darkness at the head of the street, just beyond the square, with Rachel and Jennie. The band plays across from me, a violin, guitar, and trumpet with one valve that keeps sticking. People bundled in all the clothes they own ring the square, clustering in the circles of light around the torches, talking in quiet voices. Six or seven couples dance slowly in the middle of the barren earth, holding each other loosely and shuffling to a plaintive version of “Starships and Roses.” The song was a hit the year I got the disease, and then had a revival a decade later, the year the first manned expedition left for Mars. The expedition was supposed to set up a colony.

  Are they still there?

  We had written no new songs.

  Peter and Mamie circle among the other couples. “Starships and Roses” ends and the band begins “Yesterday.” A turn brings Mamie’s face briefly into full torchlight: It’s clenched and tight, streaked with tears.

  “You should sit down, Gram,” Rachel says. This is the first time she’s spoken to me since we left the barracks. Her voice is heavy, but not angry, and there is no anger in Jennie’s arm as she sets down the three-legged stool she carried for me. Neither of them is ever really angry.

  Under my weight the stool sinks unevenly into the ground. A boy, twelve or thirteen years old, comes up to Jennie and wordlessly holds out his hand. They join the dancing couples. Jack Stevenson. much more arthritic than I. hobbles towards me with his grandson Hal by his side.

  “Hello, Sarah. Been a long time.”

  “Hello, Jack.” Thick disease ridges cross both his cheeks and snake down his nose. Once, long ago, we were at Yale together.

  “Hal, go dance with Rachel,” Jack says. “Give me that stool first.” Hal, obedient, exchanges the stool for Rachel, and Jack lowers himself to sit beside me. “Big doings, Sarah.”

  “So I hear.”

  “McHabe told you? All of it? He said he’d been to see you just before me.”

  “He told me.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He wants Hal to try the cure.”

  Hal. I hadn’t thought. The boy’s face is smooth and clear, the only visible sk
in ridges on his right hand.

  I say, “Jennie, too.”

  Jack nods, apparently unsurprised. “Hal said no.”

  “Hal did?”

  “You mean Jennie didn’t?” He stares at me. “She’d even consider something as dangerous as an untried cure—not to mention this alleged passing Outside?” I don’t answer. Peter and Mamie dance from behind the other couples, disappear again. The song they dance to is slow, sad, and old.

  “Jack—could we have done better here? With the colony?”

  Jack watches the dancers. Finally he says, “We don’t kill each other. We don’t burn things down. We don’t steal, or at least not much and not cripplingly. We don’t hoard. It seems to me we’ve done better than anyone ever hoped. Including us.” His eyes search the dancers for Hal. “He’s the best thing in my life, that boy.”

  Another rare flash of memory: Jack debating in some long-forgotten political science class at Yale, a young man on fire. He stands braced lightly on the balls of his feet, leaning forward like a fighter or a dancer, the electric lights brilliant on his glossy black hair. Young women watch him with their hands quiet on their open textbooks. He has the pro side of the debating question: Resolved: Fomenting first-strike third-world wars is an effective method of deterring nuclear conflict among super-powers.

  Abruptly the band stops playing. In the center of the square Peter and Mamie shout at each other.

  “—saw the way you touched her! You bastard, you faithless prick!”

  “For God’s sake, Mamie, not here!”

  “Why not here? You didn’t mind dancing with her here, touching her back here, and her ass and . . . and . . .” She starts to cry. People look away, embarrassed. A woman I don’t know steps forward and puts a hesitant hand on Mamie’s shoulder. Mamie shakes it off, her hands to her face, and rushes away from the square. Peter stands there dumbly a moment before saying to no one in particular, “I’m sorry. Please dance.” He walks towards the band who begin, raggedly, to play “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” The song is at least twenty-five years old. Jack Stevenson says, “Can I help, Sarah? With your girl?”

  “How?”