Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  That night, for the first time ever, I dream about Precious. She’s sitting in her high chair, dressed in pink over alls, laughing. Whatever she’s laughing at is behind me, and when I try to turn around, I’m frozen in place. Frantically I twist my body, but no muscles will move. Precious goes on laughing.

  Donna and Jim bring home a chair. They’ve been saving to buy it. It’s bright screaming green, and it gives off eight different scents, including sex pheromones. They spend ten minutes trying to decide where to put it.

  “In this corner, sweetie,” Donna says.

  “In the bedroom would be better.” Jim leers.

  “Carol Ann, what do you think?”

  I think it’s the ugliest piece of furniture I’ve ever seen. “I don’t care.”

  “About anything,” Jim says under his breath. I pretend not to hear him. He’s getting a little impatient with me living here so long. But he won’t say anything, because it’s what Donna wants. Donna says, “Okay, the bedroom,” and she and Jim look at each other in a way that says I should leave the apartment for an hour or so.

  I leave for three, walking the streets more or less aimlessly.

  When Bent tells me who the bastards are who sold Daddy the sleepless dogs . . . Daddy’s gun is one thing he hasn’t sold for whiskey. I know because I buried it before I left, well oiled, behind the place the dog pens used to be. Ammunition doesn’t cost that much. It can be ordered off the Subnet, no questions asked, no records kept. (Right.)

  I would recognize the Arrowgene scientist anywhere. His appearance, his voice, his supercilious manner with people who are ignorant. Scientists aren’t cops. They don’t go around armed.

  They don’t walk wary. I’m not a good shot, but with this gun, I don’t need to be.

  It’s not what I’d prefer, of course. I’d prefer to get him somewhere isolated, tie him up, smear him with blood from a freshly killed rabbit. Let loose a pack of dogs that have been starved for a week . . .

  These imaginings fill up three hours. They’ve filled up whole nights, weeks, months. I walk until the sun starts to set, and then I go back to Donna’s apartment building. Outside sit two police aircars. A stretcher bot rolls out beside an orderly.

  “Jim! What—”

  But his stretcher rolls on past. A cop moves in beside me.

  “Who are you, miss?”

  “I live here! He’s . . . where’s my sister?”

  Donna isn’t inside. She’s already gone to work. The cop tells me they’ve sent for her, she’s on her way, she’s safe. “Jim . . .”

  “The medic says he’ll be all right. Just roughed up some. Now you tell me, miss. Is anything missing?”

  I look around Donna’s apartment. Drawers have been pulled out, furniture turned over, the bed flung apart. I pretend to study the mess, but I already know. Everything’s still here except five blue plastic cards, and the next time I try to find Bent on the Subnet, it’ll be gone.

  Arrowgene must not’ve been a small underground lab after all. It must’ve been part of a bigger organization, with terminaltrace programs. With enforcers. With the idea of protecting their truckers and scientists and anonymity.

  “Miss?”

  There was no way I could fight that sort of organization.

  Nobody could, not even the government, or the FBI would have shut it down by now. Nobody with enough power and information . . . except maybe one other organization.

  “Miss, I asked you if you notice anything missing.”

  “No,” I say. “Everything here is just the way it always was.”

  Tony Indivino was already living in Sanctuary when he visited us last spring. We didn’t know that then. We didn’t care, then.

  Sanctuary is nearly completed by the time I arrive there. It’s huge, half of a rural New York State county circled by a Y-field. Most of the Sleepless in the United States are moving inside, where they feel safe. They trade with the rest of the world, information and inventions and money deals I don’t understand. Mostly they trade data, but you can also find a few tangible Sleepless products on the Net. The ones on the Subnet are fakes.

  I stand at the front gate of Sanctuary in a crowd of tourists who’ve gotten off bus after bus. They mutter and glare.

  “Walling themselves in, and us out.”

  “They better stay the fuck in there if they know what’s good for them.”

  “A monument to genemod narcissism.”

  I look at the man who says that. He looks genemod himself, handsome and well dressed, but apparently not a Sleepless. And just as resentful as the rest of the haters who still spent their good money to travel here to a place full of people they’re jealous of. Go figure.

  On the front of the gate is a big screen with the Sleepless, Inc. logo on it: an open eye. Some kids throw rocks at it, big ones, but the screen doesn’t waver. Protected by a Y-field. It says quietly, over and over, “To leave a message for Sanctuary, Incorporated, or for any individual inside, please speak clearly into one of the five recorders below. Thank you. To leave a message for Sanctuary, Incorporated—”

  People are lined up to leave messages, mostly nasty. I can guess how this works. A smart system sorts through the messages, flagging them by key word, choosing the ones that actually get delivered. If any do. People with real business with Sanctuary don’t use this channel.

  Except that I have real business with Sanctuary.

  When it’s my turn, I speak quietly, so the jerks behind me can’t hear.

  “This is a message for Tony Indivino, from Carol Benson. You came to our house in Forager County, Pennsylvania, last March to warn us about the genemod dogs my Daddy bought on the Subnet. They were Sleepless embryos implanted in a mongrel bitch, bought from a company called Arrowgene. You were right about the dogs, and now I need to talk with you. Just for a minute. Please see me.” And then, after I could get the words up my throat, “My baby sister was killed by one of those sleepless dogs.”

  I wait. Nothing happens. The man in line behind me finally says, “I think it’s my turn now.” When he repeats it, I step aside.

  How long does the smart program take? And what if Tony Indivino isn’t inside Sanctuary? He must leave sometime; he came to us.

  Five minutes later the large screen flashes a different icon: my name. It says, “Will Ms. Carol Benson please step into the elevator.” And there it is, a sudden dimple in the gate like a small elevator, complete with wood-paneled walls. Before the surprised people around me can react, I dart inside. The “door” closes. I touch it, and the walls, too; they’re pure force field, with holos of wooden paneling. The whole thing doesn’t move at all. It just “opens” on the other side, into a real room with white foamcast walls, clean-lined white sofas, and a wall screen which says, “Please wait, Ms. Benson, a few minutes longer.”

  I want to try the door at the far end of the room, to see if it’s real. To see if it’s locked. To see if I can really go into Sanctuary, where sleepers aren’t allowed. But I don’t dare. I’m a beggar here.

  The door opens and a woman walks in, alone. Tall, with long black hair, dressed in jeans and sweater. She is more beautiful, and more exotic, for real than on vid.

  “Ms. Benson, I’m Jennifer Sharifi, Tony Indivino’s associate. Tony cannot come himself. Please tell me what happened with the sleepless dogs.”

  She’s nothing like Tony Indivino. He was friendly. She’s cold, like some queen talking to a grubby peasant. But there’s a weird nervousness to her, too. She keeps pushing back that long black hair, even when it’s not in her face. I don’t like her. But I need her.

  I say, “My father ordered the embryos on the Subnet, from Arrowgene. The dogs were engineered to not—”

  “I know all that,” Jennifer Sharifi interrupts. “Tony told me about his visit to you. What happened subsequently?”

  Does she remember everything “Tony” ever told her? Maybe she does. She’s genemod for every ability possible. Suddenly I remember a story Mama read to D
onna and me when we were small. “Sleeping Beauty.” Fairy-blessed at her christening with beauty, intelligence, grace, talent, fortune . . .

  “How did your sister die?” Jennifer Sharifi asks, and pushes back her long hair. “Did a Sleepless dog kill her?”

  “Yes. No. Not deliberately. Precious—she was two—was bothering the dog while it ate, and it just cuffed her and she fell and she hit the ground at an angle where her neck . . .” I can’t finish.

  “Had the dogs been acting out of character before that?”

  “Yes. My sister—my other sister—couldn’t get them trained right. She said they were more like cats. They just didn’t . . . want to be trained.”

  She was silent so long I finally said, “Ms. Sharifi, I came here to—”

  “Biological systems are very complex,” she says. “And species are not identical in their neural inheritance, even when structures seem completely analogous. A dog is not a human being, and sleeplessness doesn’t affect both equally.”

  “I already know that!” I snap. It’s what Tony Indivino said last March, in easier words. “Tell me now what killed my sister! If you know!”

  “We know,” she says, precisely. But her hand goes again to her long dark hair. “We keep track of all research worldwide on sleeplessness, even that not yet published on the Net. A Danish institute is doing work on canine sleeplessness. The key is dreaming.”

  “Dreaming?” I don’t expect this.

  “Yes. Let me try to explain it in terms you can understand.” She thinks a minute, and I see she doesn’t know how she sounds. Or else she doesn’t care.

  “One facet of the human brain is its ability to imagine different realities. Today I don’t have a cake. I picture the cake I want, and tomorrow I construct it. Or a house, or a concerto, or a city. That’s one way the brain uses its ability to imagine alternate realities. Another way is to think up fantasies that never will or could be, like stories about magic. Another way is through dreaming, asleep at night. Are you following me?”

  I’m not stupid. But all I say is, “Yes.”

  “We Sleepless don’t dream, obviously. But we do all the other methods of imagining alternate reality. Better, in fact, than you do. So the basic ability gets ample exercise.

  “Now consider canine species. They evolved from wolves, but they’re not wolves. They’ve been domesticated by humans for at least twenty thousand years. During that time—did you hear something?”

  “No,” I say. Her eyes dart toward the door, then the wallscreen. She pushes her hair back.

  She’s waiting for something, and jumpy as a cat. But she goes on.

  “During the time the dog was domesticated, it developed the ability to do as humans do, and visualize an altered reality. To some undefined extent, anyway. A dog doesn’t just remember its master. And it doesn’t just respond to Pavlovian conditioning, either. There’s evidence from advanced neurological imagining that parts of a dog’s brain activate when the animal interacts with humans. When, for instance, a human pets a dog, the dog actually pictures itself in an alternate reality with the human. Maybe at home in front of a fire. Maybe rolling around on the ground playing. There’s no way to deduce specifics, but the chemical, electromagnetic, and cerebral imaging evidence is all quite strong.”

  I nod, listening hard, making sure I understand it all.

  “And there’s one more piece of research that’s relevant here. These same brain functions go on during REM sleep, when dogs dream. That, too, is an imaging of alternate reality, as I already said.”

  She looks at me like she thinks I don’t remember. I nod, hating her, to show I do. Tony Indivino wasn’t like this.

  “Here is the crucial piece. In sleepless canines, there’s no REM sleep. When that’s removed, so is dreaming. And when dogs don’t dream, the alternate-reality imagining slowly disappears from their brain scans. The function is still there when they’re born, but over the next several months it fades. Without reinforcement from dreaming, imagination—as humans know the term—disappears. Without imagination, the bond with man weakens and the older limbic behavior takes over. Dreaming made all the difference. Its absence is what killed your sister.”

  I struggle to understand. “You mean . . . because the dog couldn’t imagine people and dogs together in ways that weren’t happening at just that minute. . . it wouldn’t take its training and it didn’t care about Precious? She died because Leisha’s pup couldn’t dream—”

  “What?” Jennifer says sharply. “Who couldn’t dream?”

  I remember that she and Leisha Camden, who Donna named the pup after, are enemies. They have different dreams for the Sleepless. Jennifer wants them all in Sanctuary; Leisha wants them to live outside in the real world with us, the inferior animals.

  “The dog,” I stumble on, “my sister named the pups, my other sister, not me—”

  “That’s all I have to tell you, Ms. Benson,” Jennifer Sharifi says. She stands crisply. “I hope the information explains what happened. Sanctuary is sorry for your loss. If you’ll step back into the security elevator—”

  “No, wait! You didn’t tell me what I have to know!”

  “I’ve told you all I can. Good-bye.”

  “But I need to know the name and location of the company that sold Daddy the embryos! They were called Arrowgene then, but now I can’t track them on the Subnet, they’ve changed their name or shut down . . . but I have their truckers’ business records! Only they’re in code and I don’t know anybody else who could figure out—”

  “I can’t give you that information. Good-bye, Ms. Benson.”

  I spring toward her. It’s a mistake. I hit an invisible barrier that’s apparently been there the whole time, unseen. It doesn’t hurt me, but I can’t move any farther toward Jennifer Sharifi.

  She turns. “If you don’t get into the elevator, Ms. Benson, the field will carefully push you into it. And don’t bother leaving any more messages for Tony. He’s not here, and if he were, he would tell you that Sanctuary is about survival. Not revenge.”

  She leaves. The Y-field pushes me into the security box and then opens on the other side, and I’m back in the Allegheny hills.

  Later that day, on a bus going home, I hear on vid that Sleepless activist Tony Indivino has been arrested. The FBI linked him to a kidnapping four years earlier. He abducted a four-yearold boy named Timmy DeMarzo, a Sleepless child whose normal parents had beaten him for disturbing them in the middle of the night nearly every night. Tony Indivino had hidden the kid with people who had taken much better care of him. But now he’s been caught and arraigned, and is being held without bail in the Conewango County jail.

  There must be other ways beside the Subnet to find an underground genemod lab. But I don’t know what they are. I’ve done everything I can think of to do. But how can I give up the search for Precious’s killer? If I give up the search . . .

  Outside the bus windows, the road climbs higher into the mountains. Already it’s June. The woods are in full leaf, although they’re not yet deep green but instead that tender yellow-green you see only a week or ten days every year. The sunny roadside bursts with daisies and butter-cups and Queen Anne’s lace. Creeks rush; streams burble.

  If I lose my anger, there won’t be anything of me left. For just a second I look into a black place so deep and cold that my breath freezes. Then it’s gone and the bus keeps on climbing the mountain road.

  It lets me off in Kellsville and I walk the rest of the way up the mountain, which takes until sunset. Daddy’s yard looks just the same. Straggly grass, deep ruts, sagging porch. But it’s not Daddy sitting on the porch. It’s Donna.

  “I thought you’d come here,” she says, not standing up. “Or did you go by my place first?”

  “No.” In the shadows I can’t see her face.

  “Did you go by the hospital to see how Jim’s doing?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘No.’ ‘Course not. He don’t concern you, does he?” I
ignore this. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Asleep. No—passed out. Let’s be honest for once, okay, Carol Ann?”

  But it was always Donna who wasn’t honest. Who insisted on being sunny in a world where the sun only really shines on the rich. I don’t say this.

  She continues, “You’re the reason Jim got hurt, aren’t you? And the reason my place got trashed. You’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, and somebody important don’t like it.”

  “It’s none of your business, Donna.”

  “ ‘None of my business.’ ” She stands up then, in the porch shadows. “ ‘None of my business!’ Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me what’s my business and what isn’t? How much more family do you think I got to lose?”

  This isn’t Donna. This is somebody else. I climb the porch steps and turn her face toward the sunset. She hasn’t been crying, but in the red light she starts to shake all over with a fury I never in a million years thought she was capable of.

  “You stupid fuck—what do you think you’re doing? You got Jim hurt and you’re going to get yourself hurt next, or Daddy, or me! Whatever you’re doing, it isn’t going to bring Precious back, and it isn’t going to get even because there isn’t no ‘even.’ Don’t you even know that? You can’t beat those people; all you can do is try and stay away from them, and when you do brush up against them you get out quick and forget anything you learned or they’ll wreck whatever you got left of your life!”

  “Donna, you don’t know—”

  “No, it’s you who don’t know! You don’t know nothing about how the world works! You’re supposed to be the smart one, and I’m supposed to be dumb as a bucket of hair, poor old dumb Donna, but I know you can’t fight them and win. You can only lose more’n you already did and I’m not going to do that—I’m not going to lose everything else I got left. And you’re not going to lose it for me neither, Carol Ann. Promise me right here and now, on Precious’s grave, that you’ll leave this alone.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Promise me.”