Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Your mother is dead,” the rat-girl said calmly. “She died a fortnight ago, of fire in the belly.”

  “Good riddance,” I said harshly. “Will you do as I ask? In exchange for your freedom?”

  The rat-girl didn’t change expression. “Your son’s true name would do you no good. The blood is so hectic, so tainted”—she twitched her nose in contempt—“that it would give you no power over him. They keep the old names just for ritual.”

  Ritual. One more gaudy emptiness in place of the real thing. One more hope gone. “Then just tell me the name of the Old One who taught me to spin gold!”

  “I would sooner die,” she said.

  And then I said it. Spare me, God, I said it, unthinking of anything but my own need: “Do it or you will die a slow and painful death.”

  The rat-girl didn’t answer. She looked at me with bone-white understanding in her pale eyes.

  I staggered to my feet and left the room.

  It was as if I couldn’t see; I stumbled blindly toward my husband’s Council Chamber. This, then, was how it happened. You spun enough straw into gold, and the power to do that did not change you. But when that power was threatened, weakened by circumstance—that changed you. You turned cruel, to protect not what you had, but what you might not have.

  For the first time, I understood why my mother lied.

  The prince was at his desk, surrounded by his councillors. I swept in, the only one in the room whose clothes were not embroidered with threads of gold. He looked up coldly.

  “This girl who can spin diamonds,” I said. “When does she arrive?”

  He scowled. The councillors all became very busy with papers and quills. “Escort the princess from the Council Chamber,” my prince said. “She isn’t feeling well.”

  Three guards sprang forward. Their armor cover was woven of gold thread.

  I couldn’t find the young page of three years ago, who at any rate was a page no longer. But in the stable I found the stablemaster’s boy, a slim youth about my height, dressed in plain, warm clothing he probably thought was rags. “In my chamber, there is a rat. If you come with me I will give it to you wrapped in a cloth. You will take it through the courtyard gate and into the forest. I will watch you do this from the highest tower. When you’re done, I’ll give you doublet and hose and slippers all embroidered with skeins of gold.”

  His eyes shone with greed, and his color flushed high.

  “If you kill the rat, I’ll know. I have ways to know,” I told him, lying.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, lying.

  He didn’t. I know because when he came to my chambers from the forest, he was shaken and almost pale. He handed me a stone, clean and smooth and light as a single word. He didn’t look at me.

  But nonetheless he took the gold-embroidered clothes.

  That night, I woke from the old dream. It was just before dawn. The two pale stones lay side by side on my crimson-and-gold coverlet, and on each was writing, the letters not curlicued and ornate but simple straight lines that soothed the mind, eased it, like lying on warm rock in the elemental sunshine.

  I couldn’t read them. It didn’t matter. I knew what they said. The words were in my mind, my breath, my bone, as if they had always been there. As they had: rampel, the real; stillskin, with quiet skin.

  The forest disappeared, copse by copse, tree by tree. The ground rose, and Dirk and I rode over low hills covered with grass. I dismounted and touched some stalks. It was tough-fibered, low, dull green. The kind of grass you can scythe but never kill off, not even by burning.

  Beyond the hills the forest resumed, the trees squat but thick-bodied, moss growing at their base, fungus on their sides. They looked as if they had been there forever. Sometimes pale fire moved over the ground, as no-colored as mist but with a dull glow, looking very old. I shuddered; fire should not be old. This was not a place for the daughter of a washerwoman. Dirk squirmed and fretted in front of me on the saddle.

  “You’re going to learn, Dirk,” I said to him. “To be still. To know the power of quiet. To portion your words and your makings to what is real.”

  As my mother had not. Nor the prince, nor his councillors, nor anyone but the rat-boy and rat-girl, who, I now knew, crept back into the corrupted palace because the Old Ones didn’t ever let go of what was theirs. Nor claim what was not. To do either would be to name the real as unreal.

  Dirk couldn’t have understood me, but he twisted to scowl at me. His dark brows rushed together. His vivid blue eyes under thick dark lashes blinked furiously.

  “In the real, first design is the power, Dirk.”

  And when I finished those words he was there, sitting quietly on a gnarled root, his pale eyes steady. “No,” he said. “We don’t teach children with fevered and corrupted blood.”

  For just a second I clutched Dirk to me. I didn’t want to give him up, not even to his own good. He was better off with me, I was his mother, I could hide him and teach him, work for him, cheat and steal and lie for him . . .

  I couldn’t save my son. I had no powers but the tiny, disposable ones, like turning straw into gold.

  “This time you will teach such a child,” I said.

  “I will not.” The Old One rose. Pale fire sprang around him, rising from the solid earth. Dirk whimpered.

  “Yes, you will,” I said, and closed my eyes against what I was about to do: Become less real myself. Less powerful. For Dirk. “I can force you to take him. Rampel stillskin is your name.”

  The Old One looked at me, sadness in his pale eyes. Then Dirk was no longer in my arms. He stood on the ground beside the boy, already quieter, his fidgeting gone. The pale fire moved up from the ground and onto my fingers, charring them to stumps. A vision burned in my head. I screamed, but only from pain: Dirk was saved, and I didn’t care that I would never spin again, nor that every gold thread in the kingdom had suddenly become stone, pale, and smooth and ordinary as a true word.

  MARGIN OF ERROR

  Paula came back in a blaze of glory, her institute uniform with its pseudo-military medals crisp and bright, her spine straight as an engineered diamond-fiber rod. I heard her heels clicking on the sidewalk and I looked up from the bottom porch step, a child on my lap. Paula’s face was genemod now, the blemishes gone, the skin fine pored, the cheekbones chiseled under green eyes. But I would have known that face anywhere. No matter what she did to it.

  “Karen?” Her voice held disbelieve.

  “Paula,” I said.

  “Karen?”

  This time I didn’t answer. The child, my oldest, twisted in my arms to eye the visitor.

  It was the kind of neighborhood where women sat all morning on porches or stoops, watching children play on the sidewalk. Steps sagged; paint peeled, small front lawns were scraped bare by feet and tricycles and plastic wading pools. Women lived a few doors down from their mothers, both of them growing heavier every year. There were few men. The ones there were didn’t seem to stay long.

  I said, “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” Paula said, and I knew she didn’t understand my smile. Of course it wasn’t hard. I had never intended it should be. This was undoubtedly the first time in nearly five years that Paula had looked.

  She lowered her perfect body onto the porch steps. My little girl, Collie, gazed at her from my lap. Then Lollie opened her cupped hands arid smiled, “See my frog, lady?”

  “Very nice,” Paula said. She was trying hard to hide her contempt, but I could see it. For the sad imprisoned frog, for Lollie’s dirty face, for the worn yard, for the way I looked.

  “Karen,” Paula said. “I’m here because there’s a problem with the project. More specifically, with the initial formulas, we think. With a portion of the nanoassembler code from five years ago. When you were still with us.”

  “A problem,” I repeated. Inside the house, a baby wailed. “Just a minute.”

  I set Lollie down and went inside. Lori cried i
n her crib. Her diaper reeked. I put a pacifier in her mouth and cradled her in my left arm. With the right arm I scooped Timmy from his crib. When he didn’t wake, I jostled him a little. I carried both babies back to the porch, deposited Timmy in the portacrib and sat down next to Paula.

  “Lollie, get me a diaper, honey. And wipes. You can carry your frog inside to get them.”

  Lollie went; she’s a sweet-natured kid. Paula stared incredulously at the twins. I unwrapped Lori’s diaper and Paula grimaced and slid farther away.

  “Karen . . . are you listening to me? This is important.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The nanocomputer instructions are off somehow. The major results check out obviously . . .” Obviously. The media had spent five years exclaiming over the major results . . . but there are some odd foldings in the proteins of the twelfth-generation nanoassemblers. Twelfth generation. The nanocomputer attached to each assembler replicates itself every six months. That was one of the project’s checks and balances on the margin of error. It had been five and a half years. Twelfth generation was about right.

  “Also,” Paula continued, and I heard the strain in her voice, “there are some unforeseen macrolevel developments. We’re not sure yet that they’re tied to the nanocomputer protein folds. What we’re trying to do now is cover all the variables.”

  “You must be working on fairly remote variables if you’re reduced to asking me.”

  “Well, yes, we are. Karen, do you have to do that now?”

  “Yes.” I scraped the shit off Lori with one edge of the soiled diaper. Lollie danced out of the house with a clean one. She sat beside me, whispering to her frog. Paula said, “What I need . . . what the project needs . . .”

  I said, “Do you remember the summer we collected frogs? We were maybe eight and ten. You’d become fascinated reading about that experiment where they threw a frog in boiling water but it jumped out, and then they put a frog in cool water and gradually increased the temperature to boiling until the stupid frog just sat there and died. Remember?”

  “Karen . . .”

  “I collected sixteen frogs for you, and when I found out what you were going to do with them, I cried and tried to let them go. But you boiled eight of them anyway. The other eight were controls. I’ll give you that—proper scientific method. To reduce the margin of error, you said.”

  “Karen . . . we were just kids . . .”

  I put the clean diaper on Lori. “Not all kids behave like that. Lollie doesn’t. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Nobody in your set has children. You should have had a baby, Paula.” She barely hid her shudder. But, then, most’ of the people we knew felt the same way. She said, “What the project needs is for you to come back and work on the same small area you did originally. Looking for something—anything—you might have missed in the protein-coded instructions to successive generations of nanoassemblers.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s not really a matter of choice. The macrolevel problems—I’ll be frank, Karen. It looks like a new form of cancer. Unregulated replication of some very weird cells.”

  “So take the cellular nanomachinery out.” I crumpled the stinking diaper and set it out of the baby’s reach. Closer to Paula.

  “You know we can’t do that! The project’s irreversible!”

  “Many things are irreversible,” I said. Lori started to fuss. I picked her up, opened my blouse, and gave her the breast. She sucked greedily. Paula glanced away. She has had nanomachinery in her perfect body, making it perfect, for five years now. Her breasts will never look swollen, blue-veined, sagging.

  “Karen, listen . . .”

  “No. . . you listen.” I said quietly. “Eight years ago you convinced Zweigler I was only a minor member of the research team, included only because I was your sister. I’ve always wondered, by the way, how you did that—were you sleeping with him, too? Seven years ago you got me shunted off into the minor area of the project’s effect on female gametes—which nobody cared about because it was already clear there was no way around sterility as a side effect. Nobody thought it was too high a price for a perfect, self-repairing body, did they? Except me.” Paula didn’t answer. Lollie carried her frog to the wading pool and set it carefully in the water. I said, “I didn’t mind working on female gametes, even if it was a backwater, even if you got star billing. I was used to it, after all. As kids, you were always the cowboy; I got to be the horse. You were the astronaut, I was the alien you conquered. Remember? One Christmas you used up all the chemicals in your first chemistry set and then stole mine.”

  “I don’t think trivial childhood incidents matter in . . .”

  “Of course you don’t. And I never minded. But I did mind when five years ago you made copies of all my notes and presented them as yours, while I was so sick during my pregnancy with Lollie. You claimed my work. Stole it. Just like the chemistry set. And then you eased me off the project.”

  “What you did was so minor . . .”

  “If it was so minor, why are you here asking for my help now? And why would you imagine for half a second I’d give it to you?” She stared at me, calculating. I stared back coolly. Paula wasn’t used to me cool. I’d always been the excitable one. Excitable, flighty, unstable—that’s what she told Zweigler. A security risk.

  Timmy fussed in his portacrib. I stood up, still nursing Lori, and scooped him up with my free arm. Back on the steps, I juggled Timmy to lie across Lori on my lap, pulled back my blouse, and gave him the other breast. This time Paula didn’t permit herself a grimace.

  She said, “Karen, what I did was wrong. I know that now. But for the sake of the project, not for me, you have to . . .”

  “You are the project. You have been from the first moment you grabbed the headlines away from Zweigler and the others who gave their life to that work. ‘Lovely Young Scientist Injects Self With Perfect-Cell Drug!’ ‘No Sacrifice Too Great To Circumvent FDA Shortsightedness, Heroic Researcher Declares.’ ”

  Paula said flatly, “You’re jealous. You’re obscure and I’m famous. You’re a mess and I’m beautiful. You’re . . .”

  “A milk cow? While you’re a brilliant researcher? Then solve your own research problems.”

  “This was your area . . .”

  “Oh, Paula, they were all my areas. I did more of the basic research than you did, and you know it. But you knew how to position yourself with Zweigler, to present key findings at key moments, to cultivate the right connections. And, of course, I was still under the delusion we were partners. I just didn’t realize it was a barracuda partnering a goldfish.”

  From the wading pool Lollie watched us with big eyes. “Mommy . . .”

  “It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s not mad at you. Look, better catch your frog-he’s hopping away.”

  She shrieked happily and dove for the frog. Paula said softly, “I had no idea you were so angry after all this time. You’ve changed, Karen.”

  “But I’m not angry. Not any more. And you never knew what I was like before. You never bothered to know.”

  “I knew you never wanted a scientific life. Not the way I did. You always wanted kids. Wanted . . . this.” She waved her arm around the shabby yard. David left eighteen months ago. He sends money. It’s never enough.

  “I wanted a scientific establishment that would let me have both. And I wanted credit for my work. I wanted what was mine. How did you do it, Paula—end up with what was yours and what was mine, too?”

  “Because you were distracted by baby shit and frogs!” Paula yelled, and I saw how scared she really was. Paula didn’t make admissions like that. A tactical error. I watched her stab desperately for a way to retain the advantage. A way to seize the offensive. I seized it first. “You should have left David alone. You already had Zweigler; you should have left me David. Our marriage was never the same after that.”

  She said, “I’m dying, Karen.”

  I turned my head from the nursing babies to loo
k at her.

  “It’s true. My cellular machinery is running wild. The nanoassemblers are creating weird structures, destructive enzymes. For five years they replicated perfectly and now. . . . For five years it all performed exactly as it was programmed to. . .”

  I said, “It still does.”

  Paula sat very still. Lori had fallen asleep. I juggled her into the portacrib and nestled Timmy more comfortably on my lap. Lollie chased her frog around the wading pool. I squinted to see if Lollie’s lips were blue!

  Paula choked out, “You programmed the assembler machinery in the ovaries to . . .”

  “Nobody, much cares about women’s ovaries. Only fourteen percent of college-educated women want to muck up their lives with kids. Recent survey result. Less than one percent margin of error.”

  “. . . you actually sabotaged . . . hundreds of women have been injected by now, maybe thousands . . .”

  “Oh, there’s a reverser enzyme,” I said. “Completely effective if you take it before the twelfth-generation replication. You’re the only person that’s been injected that long. I just discovered the reverser a few months ago, tinkering with my old notes for something to do in what your friends probably call my idle domestic prison. That’s provable, incidentally. All my notes are computer-dated.”

  Paula whispered, “Scientists don’t do this . . .”

  “Too bad you wouldn’t let me be one.”

  “Karen . . .”

  “Don’t you want to know what the reverser is, Paula? It’s engineered from human chorionic gonadotropin. The pregnancy hormone. Too bad you never wanted a baby.”

  She went on staring at me. Lollie shrieked and splashed with her frog. Her lips were turning blue. I stood up, laid Timmy next to Lori in the portacrib, and buttoned my blouse.

  “You made an experimental error twenty-five years ago,” I said to Paula. “Too small a sample population. Sometimes a frog jumps out.”

  I went to lift my daughter from the wading pool.