Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I don’t know,” he says, and of course he doesn’t. He offers not out of usefulness but out of empathy, knowing how the ugly little scene in the torchlight depresses me.

  Do we all so easily understand depression?

  Rachel dances by with someone I don’t know, a still-faced older man. She throws a worried glance over his shoulder: now Jennie is dancing with Peter. I can’t see Peter’s face. But I see Jennie’s. She looks directly at no one, but then she doesn’t have to. The message she’s sending is clear: I forbade her to come to the dance with McHabe, but I didn’t forbid her to dance with Peter and so she is, even though she doesn’t want to, even though it’s clear from her face that this tiny act of defiance terrifies her. Peter tightens his arm and she jerks backward against it, smiling hard.

  Kara Desmond and Rob Cottrell come up to me, blocking my view of the dancers. They’ve been here as long as I. Kara has an infant great-grandchild, one of the rare babies born already disfigured by the disease. Kara’s dress, which she wears over jeans for warmth, is torn at the hem; her voice is soft. “Sarah. It’s great to see you out.” Rob says nothing. He’s put on weight in the few years since I saw him last. In the flickering torchlight his jowly face shines with the serenity of a diseased Buddha.

  It’s two more dances before I realize that Jennie has disappeared.

  I look around for Rachel. She’s pouring sumac tea for the band. Peter dances by with a woman not wearing jeans under her dress; the woman is shivering and smiling. So it isn’t Peter that Jennie left with . . .

  “Rob, will you walk me home? In case I stumble?” The cold is getting to my arthritis.

  Rob nods, incurious. Kara says, “I’ll come, too,” and we leave Jack Stevenson on his stool, waiting for his turn at hot tea. Kara chatters happily as we walk along as fast as I can go, which isn’t as fast as I want to go. The Moon has set. The ground is uneven and the street dark except for the stars and fitful lights in barracks windows. Candles. Oil lamps. Once, a single powerful glow from what I guess to be a donated stored-solar light, the only one I’ve seen in a long time.

  Korean, Tom said.

  “You’re shivering,” Kara says. “Here, take my coat.” I shake my head.

  I make them leave me outside our barracks and they do. unquestioning. Quietly I open the door to our dark kitchen. The stove has gone out. The door to the back bedroom stands half open, voices coming from the darkness. I shiver again, and Kara’s coat wouldn’t have helped.

  But I am wrong. The voices aren’t Jennie and Tom.

  “—not what I wanted to talk about just now,” Mamie says.

  “But it’s what I want to talk about.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  I stand listening to the rise and fall of their voices, to the petulance in Mamie’s, the eagerness in McHabe’s.

  “Jennie is your ward, isn’t she?”

  “Oh. Jennie. Yes. For another year.”

  “Then she’ll listen to you, even if your mother . . . the decision is yours. And hers.”

  “I guess so. But I want to think about it. I need more information.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you ask.”

  “Will you? Are you married. Dr. Thomas McHabe?”

  Silence. Then his voice, different. “Don’t do that.”

  “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Really, really sure? That you want me to stop?”

  I cross the kitchen, hitting my knee against an unseen chair. In the open doorway a sky full of stars moves into view through the termite hole in the wall.

  “Ow!”

  “I said to stop it, Mrs. Wilson. Now please think about what I said about Jennie. I’ll come back tomorrow morning and you can—”

  “You can go straight to hell!” Mamie shouts. And then, in a different voice, strangely calm, “Is it because I’m diseased? And you’re not? And Jennie is not?”

  “No. I swear it, no. But I didn’t come here for this.”

  “No,” Mamie says in that same chill voice, and I realize that I have never heard it from her before, never, “You came to help us. To bring a cure. To bring the Outside. But not for everybody. Only for the few who aren’t too far gone, who aren’t too ugly—who you can use.”

  “It isn’t like that—”

  “A few who you can rescue. Leaving all the rest of us here to rot. like we did before.”

  “In time, research on the—”

  “Time! What do you think time matters Inside? Time matters shit here! Time only matters when someone like you comes in from the Outside, showing off your healthy skin and making it even worse than it was before with your new whole clothing and your working wrist-watch and your shiny hair and your . . . your. . .” She is sobbing. I step into the room.

  “All right, Mamie. All right.”

  Neither of them reacts to seeing me. McHabe just stands there until I wave him towards the door and he goes, not saying a word. I put my arms around Mamie and she leans against my breast and cries. My daughter. Even through my coat I feet the thick ropy skin of her cheek pressing against me, and all I can think of is that I never noticed at all that McHabe wears a wristwatch.

  Late that night, after Mamie has fallen into damp exhausted sleep and I have lain awake tossing for hours, Rachel creeps into our room to say that Jennie and Hal Stevenson have both been injected with an experimental disease cure by Tom McHabe. She’s cold and trembling, defiant in her fear, afraid of all their terrible defiance. I hold her until she, too, sleeps, and I remember Jack Stevenson as a young man, classroom lights glossy on his thick hair, spiritedly arguing in favor of the sacrifice of one civilization for another.

  Mamie leaves the barracks early the next morning. Her eyelids are still swollen and shiny from last night’s crying. I guess that she’s going to hunt up Peter, and I say nothing. We sit at the table, Rachel and I, eating our oatmeal, not looking at each other. It’s an effort to even lift the spoon. Mamie is gone a long time.

  Later, I picture it. Later, when Jennie and Hal and McHabe have come and gone, I can’t stop picturing it: Mamie walking with her swollen eyelids down the muddy streets between the barracks, across the unpaved squares with their comer vegetable gardens of rickety bean poles and the yellow-green tops of carrots. Past the depositories with their donated Chinese and Japanese and Korean wool and wood stoves and sheets of alloys and unguarded medicines. Past the chicken runs and goat pens. Past Central Administration, that dusty cinder-block building where people stopped keeping records maybe a decade ago because why would you need to prove you’d been born or had changed barracks? Past the last of the communal wells, reaching deep into a common and plentiful water table. Mamie walking, until she reaches the Rim, and is stopped, and says what she came to say.

  They come a few hours later, dressed in full sani-suits and armed with automatic weapons that don’t look American-made. I can see their faces through the clear shatter-proof plastic of their helmets. Three of them stare frankly at my face, at Rachel’s, at Hal Stevenson’s hands. The other two won’t look directly at any of us, as if viruses could be transmitted over locked gazes.

  They grab Tom McHabe from his chair at the kitchen table, pulling him up so hard he stumbles, and throw him against the wall. They are gentler with Rachel and Hal. One of them stares curiously at Jennie, frozen on the opposite side of the table. They don’t let McHabe make any of the passionate explanations he had been trying to make to me. When he tries, the leader hits him across the face.

  Rachel—Rachel—throws herself at the man. She wraps her strong young arms and legs around him from behind, screaming. “Stop it! Stop it!” The man shrugs her off like a fly. A second soldier pushes her into a chair. When he looks at her face he shudders. Rachel goes on yelling, sound without words.

  Jennie doesn’t even scream. She dives across the table and clings to McHabe’s shoulder, and whatever is on her face is hidden by the fall of her yellow hai
r.

  “Shut you fucking ‘doctors’ down once and for all!” the leader yells, over Rachel’s noise. The words come through his helmet as clearly as if he weren’t wearing one. “Think you can just go on coming Inside and Outside and diseasing us all?”

  “I—” McHabe says.

  “Fuck it!” the leader says, and shoots him.

  McHabe slumps against the wall. Jennie grabs him. desperately trying to haul him upright again. The soldier fires again. The bullet hits Jennie’s wrist, shattering the bone. A third shot, and McHabe slides to the floor.

  The soldiers leave. There is little blood, only two small holes where the bullets went in and stayed in. We didn’t know. Inside, that they have guns like that now. We didn’t know bullets could do that. We didn’t know.

  “You did it.” Rachel says.

  “I did it for you.” Mamie says. “I did!” They stand across the kitchen from each other. Mamie pinned against the door she just closed behind her when she finally came home. Rachel standing in front of the wall where Tom died. Jennie lies sedated in the bedroom. Hal Stevenson, his young face anguished because he had been useless against five armed soldiers, had run for the doctor who lived in Barracks J. who had been found setting the leg of a goat.

  “You did it. You.” Her voice is dull, heavy. Scream, I want to say. Rachel, scream.

  “I did it so you would be safe!”

  “You did it so I would be trapped Inside. Like you.”

  “You never thought it was a trap!” Mamie cries. “You were the one who was happy here!”

  “And you never will be. Never. Not here, not anyplace else.”

  I close my eyes, to not see the terrible maturity on my Rachel’s face. But the next moment she’s a child again, pushing past me to the bedroom with a furious sob, slamming the door behind her.

  I face Mamie. “Why?”

  But she doesn’t answer. And I see that it doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t have believed her anyway. Her mind is not her own. It is depressed, ill. I have to believe that now. She’s my daughter, and her mind has been affected by the ugly ropes of skin that disfigure her. She is the victim of disease, and nothing she says can change anything at all.

  It’s almost morning. Rachel stands in the narrow aisle between the bed and the wall, folding clothes. The bedspread still bears the imprint of Jennie’s sleeping shape; Jennie herself was carried by Hal Stevenson to her own barracks, where she won’t have to see Mamie when she wakes up. On the crude shelf beside Rachel the oil lamp burns, throwing shadows on the newly-whole wall that smells of termite exterminator.

  She has few enough clothes to pack. A pair of blue tights, old and clumsily darned: a sweater with pulled threads; two more pairs of socks; her other skirt, the one she wore to the Block dance. Everything else she already has on.

  “Rachel,” I say. She doesn’t answer, but I see what silence costs her. Even such a small defiance, even now. Yet she is going. Using McHabe’s contacts to go outside, leaving to find the underground medical research outfit. If they have developed the next stage of the cure, the one for people already disfigured, she will take it. Perhaps even if they have not. And as she goes, she will contaminate as much as she can with her disease, depressive and non-aggressive. Communicable.

  She thinks she has to go. Because of Jennie, because of Mamie, because of McHabe. She is sixteen years old, and she believes—even growing up Inside, she believes this—that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.

  She has no real idea of Outside. She has never watched television, never stood in a bread line, never seen a crack den or a slasher movie. She cannot define napalm, or political torture, or neutron bomb, or gang rape. To her. Mamie, with her confused and self-justifying fear, represents the height of cruelty and betrayal: Peter, with his shambling embarrassed lewdness, the epitome of danger; the theft of a chicken, the last word in criminality. She has never heard of Auschwitz, Cawnpore, the Inquisition, gladitorial games, Nat Turner, Pol Pot. Stalingrad, Ted Bundy. Hiroshima. My-Lai, Wounded Knee. Babi Yar. Bloody Sunday. Dresden or Dachau. Raised with a kind of mental inertia, she knows nothing of the savage inertia of destruction, that once set in motion a civilization is as hard to stop as a disease.

  I don’t think she can find the underground researchers, no matter how much McHabe told her. I don’t think her passage Outside will spread enough infection to make any difference at all. I don’t think it’s possible that she can get very far before she is picked up and either returned Inside or killed. She cannot change the world. It’s too old, too entrenched, too vicious, too there. She will fail. There is no force stronger than destructive inertia.

  I get my things ready to go with her.

  TOUCHDOWN

  One of the author’s most recent stories for IAsfm, “The Price of Oranges” (April 1989), is now a finalist for the Hugo award. Her latest novel, Brain Rose—a near-future science fiction thriller involving reincarnation, Gaea theory, and memory formation—was recently released in hardcover by William Morrow.

  Maria told me that Team B had found Troy. It took me a moment to find the right answer (all we had found was Tokyo), and in that moment there was no way to tell how unprotected my expression had been. But I did find the answer. “That’s impossible. Troy was early.”

  “Nonetheless, Team B found it. Excavated ruins.”

  “It wouldn’t be big enough to carry any points!”

  “It’s on the exception list.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Maria shrugged, watching (what had my face shown?) “So access the channel.”

  “But there wasn’t anything there.”

  “There were enough exposed excavations or whatever to be on the list. Three hundred points. Leader just made the official acceptance.” She smiled at me sweetly. “He said he was pleased.”

  Bitch. She knew I didn’t access the open channel as often as she did; I work best with uninterrupted team-channel access. She also knew that Team B Leader had been my second husband. Her background psych research was always thorough. I toggled my ’plant to “record” and made a note to bid for her next season.

  Tokyo was worth only forty-five points. Anybody can identify Tokyo, even starting from a fucking Pacific Island.

  My Team Leader’s voice buzzed in my ’plant. “Time’s up, Cazie. Come on in.”

  “We have another four hours!”

  “Touchdown city by Team A. Quarter’s over.”

  Maria smirked; she was on Team A. Her ’plant had of course already told her about the touchdown. No appeal; someone on Team A had actually done it, gone out and touched an artifact from one of their cities. I turned away from her and pretended to study my console, my face under careful control. She’ll say it, my ’plant said, programmed for this. The programming had been expensive, but worth it: No point in giving away rage if you can be warned those few seconds in advance that let you get your reactions under control. A few times the ’plant had even been wrong, audio context analysis being as uncertain as it is. A few times no one had even said it.

  Maria said it.

  “Don’t be too upset. After all, Cazie—it’s just a game.”

  Flying back is the part I hate the worst. Going out for the first quarter, of course, you can’t see anything. The portholes are opaqued; even a loose chair strap could disqualify you in case it might let you glimpse something. During actual play, you’re concentrating on the console readings, the team chatter as it comes over your ‘plant, the hunches about where to search next, the feints to keep your flyer-mate off-balance. Especially the feints. You hardly notice the actual planet at all, even when you play in what passes for daylight.

  But flying back to base, the quarter’s over, the tension’s broken, and there’s nothing much going on over the ’plant to distract you from the place. And God, it was depressing. Even Maria felt it, she of the alloy sensitivity. We had been playing a day game in Tok
yo; the computer flew us west, into the dying lights Ocean choked with slime or else just degree after degree of gray water, followed by great barren dusty plains howled over by winds of unbreathable air. Continents’ worth of bare plains. Nothing hard, nothing bright or shiny, nothing cozy and compact. Just the bare huge emptiness. And overhead, the constant thick clouds that make it impossible to even guess where the sun is.

  Once I told Ari—now Team Leader B—I wasn’t sure the game was worth the aftermath, it was so depressing. He stared at me a long time and then asked, in that sweet voice that meant attack, whether the openness frightened me? And we were still married at the time. I said of course it didn’t frighten me, what was there about such a dead world that was frightening? I kept my voice bored and disdainful. But he went on watching me anyway. And that was when we were even still married.

  “Nothing,” Maria said. She stood deliberately staring out the porthole as we whizzed over some dead plain. Showing off. Thinking she was’ out- psyching me. She even made a little song of it: “No-thing, no-thing, nothing.”

  I didn’t look at her. Maria smiled.

  At the base we all gathered in the dome while the computer reffed the first quarter. The four members of Team A had found Sydney, Newcastle, Wollangong, Capetown, Oudtshoorn, Port Elizabeth, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. The touchdown was for Sydney, but it was only a piece of bent metal, not a whole artifact, so it wasn’t worth a lot of points. They had a lot of cities but the team had concentrated on coastal cities, which aren’t worth as much overall because they’re easier to find and to identify (although they did get extra points for Hong Kong, because it had sunk so deep).

  Team B found Troy, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, New York, Yonkers, Greenwich, Stamford, Norwalk, Edmonton, Calgary, and Chikon: high initial points but a big loss after reffing because the North American cities were so close together and because they had misidentified Chikon—twice. I watched while the computer announced the adjusted score, but Maria went on smiling and her face gave away nothing. Neither did Ari’s, damn him.