Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I said I can’t!”

  We stare at each other in the dying light, and I see that we’re never going to agree, never going to understand each other. We’re made too different. She lives in a world where when you get slammed hard, you pick yourself up and go on. I don’t live in that world. I don’t want to. That’s what makes all the difference.

  But it’s her that crumbles first. “All right, Carol,” she says wearily, not meaning it. “All right.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, not meaning it either.

  We don’t say anything more. The sun goes down, and somewhere down the mountain, a dog barks.

  I move back to the city, and go back to work at my old housecleaning company. Whenever I can I sign up for double shifts, houses in the day and offices at night. It makes me tired enough to sleep. Donna visits me once. I cook her dinner, we go to a vid, she takes the gravtrain back the next day. The whole time, she chats and laughs and hugs me. The guy in the apartment next door watches her like she’s a vid star.

  I’m hanging on. Trying not to think. Not to feel. Waiting, although I don’t know for what. The days are frozen and the nights dreamless.

  It’s not that way for the rest of the country. Every day something else happens. A Sleepless teenager dies in a car crash in Seattle, and doctors take apart his body and brain. They find that every bit of tissue is perfect. Not just in good shape—he’s only seventeen—but perfect. Sleepless tissue regenerates. The Sleepless won’t age. An unexpected side effect, the scientists say.

  A county in New York says Sleepless can’t serve on juries because they aren’t “peers” of everybody else.

  A scientist in Illinois publishes a study on sparrows made to be sleepless. Their metabolism is so high they can’t eat enough to keep themselves alive. They die, eating and eating, of starvation.

  Pollux, Pennsylvania, votes a law that Sleepless can be refused apartment rentals. They’re awake too much, which would run up landlords’ utility bills.

  Some institute in Boston proves that sleepless mice are unable to contract or carry hantoviruses.

  A vid preacher declares Jennifer Sharifi the Antichrist, sent to Earth to represent ultimate evil just before the final Armageddon.

  The New York Times prints an editorial that says, essentially, that everybody should take a deep breath and calm down about sleeplessness.

  And in July, the inmates of the Conewango County Jail kill Tony Indivino in the recreation yard. They beat him to death with a lead pipe.

  I learn this on the eleven o’clock news, drinking a beer and cleaning my own apartment. The terminal is a cheap standard wallscreen, rimmed in black plastic. The news has no pictures of the death.

  “. . . promised a full investigation of the incident, which occurred at twelve-twenty this afternoon Eastern Standard Time. The inspector general of the New York State Correctional System—”

  If they knew the exact time the “incident” was occurring, why didn’t somebody stop it?

  I stand there, staring at the screen, a glass of beer in one hand and a cleaning rag in the other. The red message light on the side of the terminal blinks. These cheap systems can’t split the screen. I choose the message, and the Sanctuary logo fills the black rim.

  “Message for Carol A. Benson,” says a pleasant computer voice, “from Jennifer Sharifi of Sanctuary, Incorporated, New York State. This message is shielded to Class One-A. It will not record on any system and will repeat only once. The message is: Arrowgene operating as Mountview Bionetics, Sarahela, Pennsylvania. Chief scientist is Dr. Tyler Robert Wells, 419 Harpercrest Lane. End message.”

  The screen blanks.

  If Tony Indivino were here, he would tell you that Sanctuary is about survival. Not revenge.

  Not anymore.

  I fiddle with the terminal for half an hour, but the computer voice was accurate. The message hasn’t been recorded. There’s no trace of it anywhere, in my system or in the retrievables off the parent system. I’m the only one who will ever hear it.

  Daddy’s gun is where I left it, and in the same condition. So is he.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  It takes him a minute to focus. “Carol Ann.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Welcome home.” Suddenly he smiles, and I see a flash of what he was, the old cheerful sweetness, before it sinks under the heavy smell of whiskey. “You here? Long?”

  “No,” I say. “Just overnight.”

  “Well, ‘night. Sleep tight.” It’s seven o’clock in the evening.

  “Sure, Daddy. You, too.”

  “Gonna sit up. Little longer.”

  “You do that.”

  The next morning, I’m gone by five. The gun comes apart, and it’s in my duffel bag. I wear jeans and good shoes. By seven I’m in Kellsville. The bus south leaves at eight. I drink a cup of coffee and watch the headlines circle the news kiosk.

  NO SUSPECTS IDENTIFIED IN INDIVINO MURDER

  “NO ONE IS TALKING,” SAYS CONEWANGO WARDEN (STORY 1—click here)

  FBI RECEIVES ANON CALL TO BOMB SANCTUARY (STORY 2)

  INDIVINO DEATH CALLED NATIONAL DISGRACE (STORY 3)

  RAIN PUMMELS SOUTHEAST (STORY 4)

  FRANCE CALLS FOR MAJOR EUROCREDIT REFORM (STORY 5)

  SCIENTISTS CREATE GENEMOD ALGAE. POTENTIAL FOR FEEDING THE WORLD

  IS ENORMOUS, SAYS NOBELIST (STORY 6)

  I put in a credit chip and press button six. The flimsy prints out, but there’s not time to read it before my bus leaves. I shove the flimsy in my duffel and sleep all the way to Sarahela, Pennsylvania.

  Four-nineteen Harpercrest Lane is in a shielded community. From beyond the gate I can see streets running down to a river park. The houses are tall, narrow, and stuck together in fours and fives. There are trees, small playgrounds, beds of perfect genemod flowers. The river, which I don’t know the name of, sparkles blue.

  It’s the kind of community that cooperates, that relies on word of mouth. A single day of loitering outside the gate gives me the name of the most commonly used residential cleaning company: Silver’s Polish. The next day I’m hired. They’re glad to have such an experienced cleaning tech.

  The Dr. Tyler Wellses have a tech come every Thursday. On my second week I trade shifts with another worker, two for one, telling him I need Wednesday off to see a doctor. By eight o’clock I’m in the house. I set the vacuuming bot to snuffling around the kitchen floor and spray the sink with organic-molecule-eating foam. Four littered places on the breakfast table. I go through the rest of the house.

  Two kids’ rooms, toys and small clothing. They’ve already left for school.

  A woman singing in the master-bedroom shower.

  Nobody else is home. I go back down the stairs. Halfway down, on a landing with a sculpture of a Greek wrestler below a cool blue-tinted window, I see him come out of a backyard shed, carrying a trowel and wearing gloves.

  Short, skinny, slightly balding. Dr. Tyler Robert Wells, scientist, gardens by hand, without bots.

  I slip the gun from my cleaning kit, push the parts together, and raise it to the window. Once he’s in the crosshair, I tell the chip to take over, keeping centered on his head. It’s in his head, the knowledge that genemods animals to kill other people’s children. I sit the gun on the wide polished windowsill, where it follows Wells’s every move on its all-directional swivel. I programmed it to my voice, within a five-foot radius. All I have to do is say “Fire.”

  “Don’t,” a voice says.

  I look up, expecting to see the woman from the shower standing above me. But she’s still singing in a distant room. The female voice is below, a much older woman dressed like a bodyguard. Her gun is the handheld kind. “Carol, don’t say it. Listen first.”

  A bodyguard shouldn’t know my name. And I shouldn’t take time to listen. She’s too late to stop my verbal command to my gun, and that’s all that matters. It never mattered whether or not I got out.

  “Don’t say your gun codeword
because we’re going to get him anyway. The government is. Yes, we know who you are, ever since you tried to use Bent to decode Red Goldfish Trucking. We went back and put it together then. We’ll get Wells, I promise you. But if you kill him now, there’s a lot of information we won’t get. Don’t say the codeword. Just come down the stairs and I’ll deprogram the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Carol, if you kill him we’ll prosecute you. We’ll have to. But if you leave, I’ll get immunity for you. And your father, too, about the sleepless dog embryos. Come down.”

  “No.”

  “I know about your little sister. But our chances of getting the right evidence against Wells are stronger if we have more time with him. It will make all the difference to our case.”

  “Fire,” I say to the gun, and close my eyes.

  Nothing happens.

  My eyes fly open. The gun still sits on the windowsill, swiveling to follow the back of Wells’s head. The FBI agent has climbed the stairs between us. She puts a hand on my arm. I feel the biometal joints augmenting her grip. Her eyes are sad. “I gave you the chance to get out. Now please come quietly.”

  “What . . . how . . .”

  “We have counterfields you couldn’t possibly know about. Don’t you realize you’re way over your head? Weapons get more complex every day. And you’re not even a pro.”

  I let her lead me quietly out of the house, into an aircar marked BLAISEDELL BODYGUARDS, INCORPORATED. Nobody pays any attention to us. As we lift above Harpercrest Lane, the last two things I notice are Wells, bent happily over his garden, and a dog, a collie, lying on the bright green genemod grass on somebody’s front lawn, asleep.

  The FBI agent turns out not to be an FBI agent after all. She works for something called the United States Genetic Standards Enforcement Agency, something new, something created because of the eruption of genemod, legal and illegal. The GSEA is going to prosecute me. They have to, my new lawyer says. But they’ll do it slowly, to give themselves more time to nail Wells and Mountview Bionetics and Bent and all the other companies woven together with underground labs. The government will get Wells eventually, my lawyer says. The GSEA agent was right about that.

  But she was wrong about something else. Every day I sit in my cell, on the edge of my cot, and think about how wrong she was.

  Nothing makes all the difference. To anything. The systems are too complex. You genemod dogs for sleeplessness and you destroy their imagination. You genemod people for sleeplessness and you get super-people, who can imagine everything and invent anything. But Tony Indivino was killed by the lowest scum there is, and Jennifer Sharifi is taking Sanctuary from purposes of safety to purposes of revenge. Donna chooses to deny anything that makes her unhappy, but the deep black frozen place is in her just as much as in me. Daddy survives his wife’s death but breaks down at his daughter’s. Sleepless mice have great immune systems; sleepless sparrows starve to death; Sleepless humans regenerate tissue. Genemod algae will end world hunger. Dogs genemod for IQ go catatonic, and guard dogs with the best training in the world will revert to pack pecking order if the omega animal smells right.

  No one factor can make all the difference. There are too many different factors, now. Maybe there always were.

  So I’ll let my lawyer, who is a Sleepless named Irving Lewis, defend me. He wants the case for what he calls “the eventual chance to set significant Constitutional precedents.” Except for court appearances, he does most of his work inside Sanctuary.

  Maybe he can get me off, maybe he can’t. Either way, I don’t know what will happen next. Not to me, not to anything. I can only try to make things come out my way: get a job, make up with Donna, go to college. Someday I’d like to work for the GSEA. That wouldn’t make up for Precious, or for anything else. But maybe it might make a small, slight, necessary difference.

  2000

  SAVIOUR

  The author’s latest book, Probability Moon, is just out from Tor. It’s set on the same world as her Nebula award winning novelette, “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” (Asimov’s, October 1996), and is her first off-world novel since 1985. Her latest tale for us ponders whether a bit of off-worldliness that has plummeted to Earth could really be the . . .

  I: 2007

  The object’s arrival was no surprise; it came down preceded, accompanied, and followed by all the attention in the world.

  The craft—if it was a craft—had been picked up on an October Saturday morning by the Hubble, while it was still beyond the orbit of Mars. A few hours later Houston, Langley, and Arecibo knew its trajectory, and a few hours after that so did every major observatory in the world. The press got the story in time for the Sunday papers. The United States Army evacuated and surrounded twenty square miles around the projected Minnesota landing site, some of which lay over the Canadian border in Ontario.

  “It’s still a shock,” Dr. Ann Pettie said to her colleague Jim Cowell. “I mean, you look and listen for decades, you scan the skies, you read all the arguments for and against other intelligent life out there, you despair over Fermi’s paradox—”

  “I never despaired over Fermi’s paradox,” Cowell answered, pulling his coat closer around his skinny body. It was cold at 3:00 A.M. in a northern Minnesota cornfield, and he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. The cornfield was as close as he and Ann had been allowed to get. It wasn’t very close, despite a day on the phone pulling every string he could to get on the official Going-In Committee. That’s what they were calling it: “the Going-In Committee.” Not welcoming, not belligerent, not too alarmed. Not too anything, “until we know what we have here.” The words were the president’s, who was also not on the Going-In Committee, although in his case presumably by choice.

  Ann said, “You never despaired over Fermi’s Paradox? You thought all along that aliens would show up eventually, they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet?”

  ‘Yes,” Cowell said, and didn’t look at her directly. How to explain? It wasn’t belief so much as desire, nor desire so much as life-long need. Very adolescent, and he wouldn’t have admitted it except he was cold and exhausted and exhilarated and scared, and the best he could hope for, jammed in with other “visiting scientists” two miles away from the landing site, was a possible glimpse of the object as it streaked down over the treeline.

  “Jim, that sounds so . . . so . . .”

  “A man has to believe in something,” he said in a gruff voice, quoting a recent bad movie, swaggering a little to point up the joke. It fell flat. Ann went on staring at him in the harsh glare of the floodlights until someone said, “Bitte? Ein Kaffee, Ann?”

  “Hans!” Ann said, and she and Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt rattled merrily away in German. Cowell knew no German. He knew Kleinschmidt only slightly, from those inevitable scientific conferences featuring one important paper, ten badly attended minor ones, and three nights of drinking to bridge over the language difficulties.

  What language would the aliens speak? Would they have learned English from our second-hand radio and TV broadcasts, as pundits had been predicting for the last thirty-six hours and writers for the last seventy years? Well, it was true they had chosen to land on the American-Canadian border, so maybe they would.

  So far, of course, they hadn’t said anything at all. No signal had come from the oval-shaped object hurtling toward Earth.

  “Coffee,” Ann said, thrusting it at Cowell. Kleinschmidt had apparently brought a tray of Styrofoam cups from the emergency station at the edge of the field. Cowell uncapped his and drank it gratefully, not caring that it was lukewarm or that he didn’t take sugar. It was caffeine.

  “Twenty minutes more,” someone said behind him.

  It was a well-behaved crowd, mostly scientists and second-tier politicians. Nobody tried to cross the rope that soldiers had strung between hastily driven stakes a few hours earlier. Cowell guessed that the unruly types, the press and first-rank space fans and maverick businessmen with large campaign contrib
utions, had all been herded together elsewhere, under the watchful eyes of many more soldiers than were assigned to this cornfield. Still more were probably assigned unobtrusively—Cowell hoped it was unobtrusively—to the Going-In Committee, waiting somewhere in a sheltered bunker to greet the aliens. Very sheltered. Nobody knew what kind of drive the craft might have, or not have. For all they knew, it was set to take out both Minnesota and Ontario.

  Cowell didn’t think so.

  Hans Kleinschmidt had moved away. Abruptly Cowell said to Ann, “Didn’t you ever stare at the night sky and just will them to be there? When you were a kid, or even a grad student in astronomy?”

  She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Well, sure. Then. But I never thought. . . I just never thought. Since.” She shrugged, but something in her tone made Cowell turn full face and peer into her eyes.

  “Yes, you did.”

  She answered him only indirectly. “Jim . . . there could be nobody aboard.”

  “Probably there isn’t,” he said, and knew that his voice betrayed him. Not belief so much as desire, not desire so much as need. And he was thirty-four goddamn years old, goddamn it!

  “Look!” someone yelled, and every head swiveled up, desperately searching a clear, star-jeweled sky.

  Cowell couldn’t see anything. Then he could: a faint pinprick of light, marginally moving. As he watched, it moved faster and then it flared, entering the atmosphere. He caught his breath.

  “Oh my God, it’s swerving off course!” somebody shouted from his left, where unofficial jerry-rigged tracking equipment had been assembled in a ramshackle group effort. “Impossible!” someone else shouted, although the only reason for this was that the object hadn’t swerved off a steady course before now. So what? Cowell felt a strange mood grip him, and stranger words flowed through his mind: Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.

  “A tenth of a degree northwest . . . no, wait . . .”

  Cowell’s mood intensified. With one part of his mind, he recognized that the mood was born of fatigue and strain, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sense of inevitability grew on him, and he wasn’t surprised when Ann cried, “It’s landing here! Run!” Cowell didn’t move as the others scattered. He watched calmly, holding his half-filled Styrofoam cup of too-sweet coffee, face tilted to the sky.