Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Martin paused. He lowered his voice. “Or, XAL meant Og could dismember another man from a different tribe without being distracted by thoughts and memories of what pain felt like.”

  They didn’t react. The young, respectful eyes went on gazing at him. What did they think about what he had just said? Did it sound to them like cheap melodrama? Or was it that their real political passion—wherever they kept it—would treat anything he said with this fucking guarded respect?

  He and Fran, all of them, had been so angry. In 1968, in 1970, in 1973.

  “We can change things,” Martin said, too abruptly, and the four young faces nodded, eyes and mouths motionless in their smooth skin.

  The plane landed nearly four hours late in Washington. Martin caught the superrail from Stars and Stripes International—still a mass of girders and mud lots, there was no domestic budget anymore to speak of—to the city. He sat across the aisle from two soldiers, a boy and a girl, dressed in khaki but absorbed in lust. As the train hurtled along its superconductor monorail at 250 mph, the boy slipped his hand between the brass buttons of the girl’s jacket. She turned sideways toward him, and Martin saw that her dark hair grew in a peak down her forehead. She leaned into the boy and made a soft, sighing sound like wind in trees.

  “XAL is neither hard nor easy to synthesize,” Martin said. He got up from the table to pace as he lectured. “Neither is the inhibitor that neutralizes XAL. You will probably never learn where we make it or who does the actual work. It’s safer that way. As you already know—or maybe you don’t—the FBI maintains extensive electronic surveillance of anyone they even suspect is connected to us. Not all the information they get is bogus.” He waited for questions. There were none.

  “So XAL is essentially a compartmentalizer. People with large amounts of it in their brain chemistry find it easy to move from one activity to another without distraction. And without a lot of stress. They just shut out anything not directly in front of them. People low on XAL, on the other hand, find it hard to compartmentalize. Thoughts distract them. Related memories intrude on their mind. One experience flows into the next. At the most extreme, people with abnormally low XAL become psychotic. They just rave. For this reason, modem medicine has put all its research efforts into increasing levels of XAL in the brain.”

  Abruptly Martin whirled toward the table, spread his palms flat, and leaned forward into the scarred surface. He caught each pair of eyes in turn, held it, moved on. Only one recruit changed expression, a boy with the thin, hollow cheeks and lush hair that thirty years ago would have made him a focus for the TV cameras. Martin concentrated on him, pouring everything he had into the way he held the boy’s gaze, probing for the need that had to be there somewhere beneath the bullshit respect and the untested belief.

  “Medical research wants to increase XAL. We want to decrease it. And we do. Illegally. Experimentally. Selectively.” He paused. “In order to save the world.”

  In Washington he picked up a car where the local cell had left it for him. It was an ancient blue Ford Escort, the body rusted clear through on the fenders and doors. The inside smelled of piss. The keys were buried under a mound of jagged glass at the base of a telephone pole ten feet away. Martin put the package concealing the syringe under the sagging bucket seat.

  Oh god a wet diaper, Fran had said. Don’t you guys know when enough is enough already? The drama, Martin—the goddamn drama. Give it a rest.

  Her eyes looked scared. They had never screamed at each other like this, never. His house had been what his parents’ had not, a solid center, a core where beliefs mattered more than money. When the cops had broken his hip on the Washington Mall, it had been Fran who called his family—pleading for the insurance number that would get him help, herself bleeding from a fall during the tear gassing. “Let him rot,” his father said, and hung up.

  Fran, Martin had said Saturday night, his voice one he didn’t even recognize, his duffel bag in one hand and the diaper in the other. Packing. Again. Fran! But one of the kids had started yelling in another part of the house. She had turned her back and walked out of the room.

  Martin started the car. On the expressway, flashing red lights suddenly leapt toward him. He made himself drive normally, slowly, until they had passed him by.

  “Consider,” Martin said to the boy with the thin cheeks. “Consider carefully. A Nazi guard at Auschwitz herds naked men, women, and children into a gas chamber. He closes the door. Later, when it opens, he sees what lies inside. Later still, he goes home, sits down to dinner with his family, reads his son a bedtime story, makes tender love to his wife.

  “Or consider this: A scientist works right here, at the university, under a chemical warfare research grant that his colleagues think is for genetically altered fungi resisters. He works on a toxin to destroy human memory cells. Then he gets into his car and drives to the gym for a game of squash before dinner.

  “Or consider this one.” Martin sank back into his chair. He dropped his voice so low that the boy had to lean forward to hear him. “Yes—do consider this one. A Washington politician has served in Vietnam. He knows what it was like: the blood, the dying, the agonizing uncertainty. The futility. But he sits in a legislative committee and signs a resolution that moves us an inch closer to war. Or he stands in front of his constituents at home and makes a rousing hawkish speech about the ‘situation in South America.’ Or he votes to send more troops, more young men and women who won’t leam what he’s learned about war until it’s too late.

  “How can he do it?

  “He can do it because he’s walled off those other memories, those other considerations. He can do it because he’s capable of evolutionarily valuable compartmentalization. He can do it because he has normal—normal!—amounts of XAL in his brain for a Washington politician who will personally never need to face the guns again.”

  Martin looked up. The boy with the lush hair looked fiercely triumphant—although he had of course as yet done nothing, said nothing, become nothing to look fiercely triumphant about.

  Martin smiled at him.

  The car turned off the wooded road into the discreetly unmarked driveway. Martin killed the lights. From here on in he depended on Paul, and on his unknown counterparts in Washington security. They had better be good. Even now, even after all this time, his palms still felt as cold as they had in Boston, in Chicago, on the Washington Mall.

  The electronic gate collapsed in response to his signal. The sensor bumps in the driveway nudged his wheels but stayed dark and quiet. Martin pictured his car moving in a small pocket of electronic calm, like the eye of an information hurricane. Ahead the house loomed against the night sky.

  You hype them, Fran had shouted. Peace hype is still just hype, delusions are delusions, theatrics are theatrics! And human experimentation is human experimentation. No matter who the hell does it.

  The side door was open. The Washington people were good. The box of diapers on the living room sofa was the same brand he now held loose in his hand, Pampers, toddler size. Martin found the stairs. Halfway up, a sound made him freeze, the wet diaper held suspended over the banister and ready to drop down onto the hall table beside the container of Wet Ones. But the sound didn’t repeat.

  He continued up the stairs, found the bedroom. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee lay heavily asleep, breathing through his mouth. What had they used to dope him? Martin would probably never know.

  “Quite simply,” Martin finished quietly, “we found that words were not enough. Not ever enough. Not against guns, not against missiles, not against toxins. And not against ingrained, through-to-the-bone, immovable evolution. The kind of evolution that starts wars because a soldier or a camp guard or a politician can wall off in his mind what he’s doing from the other human beings he’s doing it to. Because he can compartmentalize too well. Too often. Too fatally.”

  He scanned their faces. The back of his shirt stuck to his neck with sweat.

  “The w
orld is at stake. Literally. We have learned—slowly, painfully, over the last thirty years—that if we rely on words alone, there will be war. Again and again. If we rely on words alone.

  “So—we don’t.”

  Martin pulled the syringe from the damp lining of the diaper. It smelled like the inside of the car. The needle slid without trouble into the base of the fleshy neck; the senator didn’t even stir.

  Martin slipped back down the stairs. At the same step, the same noise sounded—it must be something in the structure of the house, some loose joint or uneven weight. He locked the side door and made his way across the dark lawn to the car. From somewhere to his left came the damp, formal smell of roses. He fitted the key into the ignition. His palms felt frozen.

  But it’s working he pleaded with Fran, declaimed to the young faces around the table. Three years of intensive XAL-inhibitor distribution. A 31 percent drop in proconflict resolutions presented to both Houses. A 16 percent rise in peace-promoting statements made publicly to back-home constituents. A 7 percent reduction in lives lost worldwide, even adjusting for other variables. It’s fucking working.

  Fran’s shoulders shuddered. She walked out of the room. The thin-cheeked boy’s eyes shone.

  Martin started the car. His hip ached. He felt exhausted. The driveway in front of him shuddered along with Fran’s shoulders. He pushed the image away and concentrated on the drive back to the airport.

  AND WILD FOR TO HOLD

  The author’s short story, “Touchdown” (October 1990), has been turned into an SF planetarium show, that premiers in June at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, NY. Ms. Kress is currently working on a novel that has grown out of her stunning tale of “Beggars in Spain” (April 1991). She returns to our pages with a new story that brilliantly depicts a willful Anne Boleyn forcibly taken to a the future.

  The demon came to her first in the long gallery at Hever Castle. She had gone there to watch Henry ride away, magnificent on his huge charger, the horse’s legs barely visible through the summer dust raised by the King’s entourage. But Henry himself was visible. He rose in his stirrups to half-turn his gaze back to the manor house, searching its sun- glazed windows to see if she watched. The spurned lover, riding off, watching over his shoulder the effect he himself made. She knew just how his eyes would look, small blue eyes under the curling red-gold hair. Mournful. Shrewd. Undeterred.

  Anne Boleyn was not moved. Let him ride. She had not wanted him at Hever in the first place.

  As she turned from the gallery window a glint of light in the far corner caught her eye, and there for the first time was the demon.

  It was made all of light, which did not surprise her. Was not Satan himself called Lucifer? The light was square, a perfectly square box such as no light had ever been before. Anne crossed herself and stepped forward. The box of light brightened, then winked out.

  Anne stood perfectly still. She was not afraid; very little made her afraid. But nonetheless she crossed herself again and uttered a prayer. It would be unfortunate if a demon took residence at Hever. Demons could be dangerous.

  Like kings.

  Lambert half-turned from her console towards Culhane, working across the room. “Culhane—they said she was a witch.”

  “Yes? So?” Culhane said. “In the 1500s they said any powerful woman was a witch.”

  “No, it was more. They said it before she became powerful.” Culhane didn’t answer. After a moment Lambert said quietly, “The Rahvoli equations keep flagging her.”

  Culhane grew very still. Finally he said, “Let me see.”

  He crossed the bare small room to Lambert’s console. She steadied the picture on the central Square. At the moment the console appeared in this location as a series of interlocking Squares mounting from floor to ceiling. Some of the Squares were solid real-time alloys; some were holo-simulations; some were not there at all, neither in space nor time, although they appeared to be. The Project Focus Square, which was there, said:

  TIME RESCUE PROJECT

  UNITED FEDERATION OF UPPER SLIB, EARTH

  FOCUS: ANNE BOLEYN

  HEVER CASTLE, KENT ENGLAND, EUROPE

  1525: 645:89:3

  CHURCH OF THE HOLY HOSTAGE TEMPORARY PERMIT

  #4592

  In the time-jump square was framed a young girl, dark hair just visible below her coif, her hand arrested at her long, slender neck in the act of signing the cross.

  Lambert said, as if to herself, “She considered herself a good Catholic.”

  Culhane stared at the image. His head had been freshly shaved, in honor of his promotion to Project Head. He wore, Lambert thought, his new importance as if it were a fragile implant, liable to be rejected. She found that touching.

  Lambert said, “The Rahvoli probability is .798. She’s a definite key.”

  Culhane sucked in his cheeks. The dye on them had barely dried. He said, “So is the other. I think we should talk to Brill.”

  The serving women had finally left. The priests had left, the doctors, the courtiers, the nurses, taking with them the baby. Even Henry had left, gone. . . where? To play cards with Harry Norris? To his latest mistress? Never mind—they had all at last left her alone.

  A girl.

  Anne rolled over in her bed and pounded her fists on the pillow. A girl. Not a prince, not the son that England needed, that she needed . . . a girl. And Henry growing colder every day, she could feel it, he no longer desired her, no longer loved her. He would bed with her—oh, that, most certainly, if it would get him his boy, but her power was going. Was gone. That power she had hated, despised, but had used nonetheless because it was there and Henry should feel it, as he had made her feel his power over and over again . . . her power was going. She was Queen of England but her power was slipping away like the Thames at ebb tide, and she just as helpless to stop it as to stop the tide itself. The only thing that could have preserved her power was a son. And she had borne a girl. Strong, lusty, with Henry’s own red curling hair . . . but a girl.

  Anne rolled over on her back, painfully. Elizabeth was already a month old but everything in Anne hurt. She had contracted white-leg, so much less dreaded than childbed fever but still weakening, and for the whole month had not left her bed chamber. Servants and ladies and musicians came and went, while Anne lay feverish, trying to plan . . . Henry had as yet made no move. He had even seemed to take the baby’s sex well: “She seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good shape.” But Anne knew. She always knew. She had known when Henry’s eye first fell upon her. Had known to a shade the exact intensity of his longing during the nine years she had kept him. waiting: nine years of celibacy, of denial. She had known the exact moment when that hard mind behind the small blue eyes had decided: It is worth it. I will divorce Catherine and make her Queen. Anne had known before he did when he decided it had all been a mistake. The price for making her queen had been too high. She was not worth it. Unless she gave him a son.

  And if she did not . . .

  In the darkness Anne squeezed her eyes shut. This was but an attack of childbed vapors, it signified nothing. She was never afraid, not she. This was only a night terror, and when she opened her eyes it would pass, because it must. She must go on fighting, must get herself heavy with son, must safeguard her crown. And her daughter. There was no one else to do it for her, and there was no way out.

  When she opened her eyes a demon, shaped like a square of light, glowed in the corner of the curtained bedchamber.

  Lambert dipped her head respectfully as the High Priest passed.

  She was tall, and wore no external augments. Eyes, arms, ears, shaved head, legs under the gray-green ceremonial robe—all were her own, as required by the Charter of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Lambert had heard a rumor that before her election to High Priest she had had brilliant violet augmented eyes and gamma-strength arms, but on her election had had both removed and the originals restored. The free representative of all the
Hostages in the solar system could not walk around enjoying high-maintenance augments. Hostages could, of course, but the person in charge of their spiritual and material welfare must appear human to any hostage she chose to visit. A four-handed Spacer held in a free-fall chamber on Mars must find the High Priest as human as did a genetically altered flyer of Ipsu being held hostage by the New Trien Republic. The only way to do that was to forego external augments.

  Internals, of course, were a different thing.

  Beside the High Priest walked the Director of the Time Research Institute, Toshio Brill. No ban on externals for him: Brill wore gold-plated sensors in his shaved black head, a display Lambert found slightly ostentatious. Also puzzling: Brill was not ordinarily a flamboyant man. Perhaps he was differentiating himself from Her Holiness. Behind Brill his Project Heads, including Culhane, stood silent, not speaking unless spoken to. Culhane looked nervous: He was ambitious, Lambert knew. She sometimes wondered why she was not.

  “So far I am impressed,” the High Priest said. “Impeccable Hostage conditions on the material side.”

  Brill murmured, “Of course, the spiritual is difficult. The three Hostages are so different from each other, and even for culture specialists and historians. . . the Hostages arrive here very upset.”

  “As would you or I,” the High Priest said, not smiling, “in similar circumstances.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  “And now you wish to add a fourth Hostage, from a fourth time stream.”

  “Yes.”

  The High Priest looked slowly around at the main console; Lambert noticed that she looked right past the time-jump Square itself. Not trained in peripheral vision techniques. But she looked a long time at the stasis Square. They all did; outsiders were unduly fascinated by the idea that the whole building existed between time streams. Or maybe Her Holiness merely objected to the fact that the Time Research Institute, like some larger but hardly richer institutions, was exempt from the allworld taxation that supported the Church. Real estate outside time was also outside taxation.