Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Of course, Lisa knew, Stephanie and Hal had been thinking mostly of protecting the whole internship program rather than her specifically. Lisa was still grateful. She just wished that gratitude didn’t make her feel so constrained.

  “The latest results,” Stephanie repeated after Paul, and an alert shiver ran over Lisa. Stephanie, decisive and taciturn, never repeated others’ words, said anything unnecessary. And Stephanie’s eyes gleamed in her weather-burned face that had spent thirty years in the outdoors studying how the environment and everything in it worked together to sustain life.

  Paul was always more flamboyant than Stephanie. It was Paul, of course, who would eventually announce to the media, standing side by side with the president in the Oval Office. “Do you want to sit down, Lisa? It’s big.”

  “What is it?” she said, wishing he wouldn’t play games, knowing she was reacting to his game with the strangled breathlessness he expected.

  “The genetic structure is not DNA-based.”

  She felt her mouth open, her eyes widen, even though the statement wasn’t unexpected. Ever since she’d seen the animal brought in by a man illegally duck-hunting in the Preserve, she’d wondered. They all had.

  It was the spacecraft that made them take the animal so seriously, rather than writing it off as just one more deformity caused by pollution. NASA had come up from Washington, run tests on the blackened outside and mysterious inside of the half-submerged object, and verified the structure as a spacecraft.

  Immediately it had been carted off to somewhere classified.

  But Paul Lambeth had fought to keep research into the animal, and the other animals soon found exactly like it, as a joint project between Kenton and Washington’s hand-picked labs. Paul had won, but not because Kenton was such a well-equipped research lab (although it was; John C. Kenton had left an endowment so generous it was the envy of even places like Harvard). Kenton had kept primary research responsibility because that’s where the wetlands were, and who knew what else had come off that spacecraft? The Kenton Preserve, immediately quarantined, had become the mountain toward which the eminent scientific Mohammeds went, since the entire wetlands ecosystem could not go to them. So Kenton did the in situ research, and the CDC, Harvard, and Cold Harbor did the genetics and zoological work.

  Non–DNA-based. Alien.

  “What . . .” Lisa was annoyed to find her voice coming out too high. “. . . what will they do with it?”

  “Nothing, yet,” Paul said, and even in his slick media-loving voice she heard the hidden awe. “We’re not done searching the ecosystem, even. Did you finish those water sample tests?”

  “Not yet,” Lisa said. Yes, work, that’s what she needed, routine methodical work. To ground her. But she couldn’t do it. “Can I see the report?”

  “Sure,” Paul said, smiling, and there was that condescension again, that egotistical pleasure in his own generosity at sharing this historic moment with such a very junior colleague. Lisa pushed the perception away. She darted for the report and began to read hungrily, wanting to know everything, to gulp it down all at once.

  Non–DNA-based. Alien.

  From the stars.

  After the initial elation came the questions. The animal was not DNA-based, yet it was eating DNA-based plants. Lisa could see one of the snakers (the catchy name was Paul’s) in the oversized cage, munching contentedly on sedges. How was it metabolizing plant food it had not evolved to metabolize? And how had such fully developed animals—warm-blooded, multi-stomached, large if unfathomable brain tissue—survived the trip through space? They might have been in some sort of cold sleep; Lisa had not seen the inside of their small craft. So small! How many had made the journey?

  They couldn’t have been here more than a few years, at the most. Someone would have seen them before now. The twenty-square-mile Kenton Preserve was supposedly off-limits to hunters and bird watchers, but in fact both seeped in all the time, at least on the vast wetland’s edges.

  The CDC/Harvard report said the genetic material seemed to be concentrated not in the cell nucleus but rather scattered throughout the cell. That was characteristic of very simple organisms like prokaryotes, but not of complex ones. The cells themselves were full of structures. Some had already been catalogued, at least in a preliminary survey, as analogous to ribosomes or mitochondria or receptors. They broke down molecules for energy, they utilized oxygen, they received chemical signals from other cells. Some were total mysteries.

  Lisa read the report once, twice. Then she went to stare at the snakers’ cage, which was a mini-ecology twelve feet by five, equipped with marsh areas, a pool, a dry hummock, stands of cattails and bulrushes, aquatic plants and rocks and insects. Two of the three captive snakers had disappeared into the foliage.

  The third one raised its head and looked back at her from a side-facing eye. Lisa stood gazing for a long time.

  “Lisa?” Stephanie said. “We’re going out this afternoon on the boat to survey another sector. Want to come?”

  “Yes!” The Preserve had not been so thoroughly surveyed in years, now that everyone wanted to know exactly how many of the alien creatures existed. A lot, it seemed. They bred quickly. Lisa went to finish her water sample runs as quickly as possible so she would be able to go out on the boat.

  When she finally got home, muddy and exhausted and smelling of swamp, Danilo was there.

  “How did you get in? The door was locked.”

  “Jimmied a window,” he said in his liquid Filipino accent. “Not hard. God, Lissy, you look like a drowned rat.”

  Lissy. His pet name for her. Which he goddamn well had no right to use. He lounged at the table in her kitchen, which was also her living room and dining room, having helped himself to Raisin Bran and English muffins. She said sourly, “You better be careful. That food probably has genetically modified foodstuffs in it. You could sully your ideological purity.”

  “Same old Lissy.” He sat up straighter, and the gleam of white teeth disappeared from his sunbrowned face. Despite the heat, he wore jeans and heavy boots, the old uniform. A knapsack rested on the floor.

  His trim body looked fit and rested, which only irritated her more. It had been so long since she’d had a good night’s sleep. Too much to do, always.

  Danilo said quietly, “I want to see him.”

  “You don’t have the right.”

  “I know. But I want to anyway. Carlo is my son.”

  “Only biologically. A hyena is a better father than you’ve been,” Lisa said, and they were off again, the same old track, sickening her even before they really got rolling.

  “Only because I had a more urgent job,” Danilo said, apparently willing to go over it all yet once more.

  Lisa wasn’t. He’d made his choices, and at the time Lisa had even seen why he’d made them, or thought she had. The fate of the planet over the fate of a single child, the human race itself at stake, global warming, depleted oceans, dangerous genetically engineered organisms released into the environment, deforestation, pollution, nuclear radiation, blah blah blah. Or, rather, not blah blah blah; she was preparing herself to work for the same ends, through scientific ecology. But it all looked different somehow when you had that actual single child with you day and night, dependent on you, needing your care and interrupting your sleep and clamoring for your love. You realized that there was no more urgent job.

  There was no way to tell that to Danilo, no way that he would hear. Lisa said only, “I’ll get Carlo. The woman next door takes care of him while I’m at work.”

  “Is she . . . can she . . .”

  “She’s had experience with disabled children.” And then, cruelly, “She costs most of my grant and all of my scholarship, of course, between daycare and physical therapy. Nothing left to donate to good causes.”

  Danilo didn’t answer. Lisa went next door to get Carlo.

  It was one of his good days. He laughed and reached up for her, and she knelt by the wheelchair and hugged him
. Undoing all the harnesses that kept him comfortable was a major undertaking. “Mommy! I drawed a picture!”

  “He did, Lisa. Look,” Mrs. Belling said, and held up a childish picture of a blue tree, green sun, and red structure that might have been a house or a car. “He’s getting really good with his right foot, aren’t you, Carlo?”

  “I’m good,” Carlo said, with such innocent grandiosity that Lisa wanted to weep. He was almost five.

  Next year he would start school. How long would he keep that pride around other people, people less kind than Mrs. Belling or Lisa’s colleagues? Carlo was intelligent, happy, severely deformed. Both arms hung truncated at his sides, devoid of any nerves to transmit muscle impulses. His head lolled to one side.

  He would never walk. His radiant smile nightly filled her with fear for his future.

  Danilo had left her, joined first Students Against Toxins and later Greenpeace, the day Carlo had been born. Carlo’s father blamed the baby’s condition on contaminated groundwater in the factory town where Lisa had grown up. Perhaps he was right. Lisa had gone into shock that Danilo could leave her now,leave her with a deformed infant, leave her unmarried and about to start graduate school and all but broke. Selfish! She had screamed at him. Necessary, he had replied, so more Carlos aren’t born like this,and more, and more. She was the selfish one not to see that. It was no different than going off to war. He was disappointed in her that she couldn’t see that.

  The horrible thing was, she could. But she was still the one left with Carlo. Whom, now, she wouldn’t trade for anything on Earth.

  “Carlo,” she said, after lavishing praise on his picture, “Uncle Danilo’s here.” Her one condition for letting Danilo see him at all: unclehood, not fatherhood. Fatherhood was something you did, and Danilo never had.

  “Uncle Danilo?” The child frowned, trying to remember. It had been over a year since Danilo’s last will-o’-the-wisp appearance.

  “Yes, your Uncle Danilo. You’ll remember him when you see him. Let’s go, sweetie.”

  “Bye, Mrs. Belling!” Carlo called. “See you tomorrow!”

  Lisa watched Danilo flinch when she wheeled in Carlo. Revulsion, or guilt? She hoped it was guilt.

  “Carlo, this is Uncle Danilo.”

  “Hi, Carlo.”

  “Hi! Mommy, he gots a bord!”

  “A ‘beard,’ sweetie. He has a beard.”

  “Can I touch the beard?”

  Danilo knelt by Carlo’s chair. Lisa moved away, unwilling to stand that close to Danilo. But on the warm air she caught the scent of him anyway, bringing such a rush of visceral memory that she turned abruptly away. God, how long had it been for her . . . and never like with Danilo.

  Lisa Jackson and Danilo Aglipay. Salty working-class American and wealthy cultured Filipino.

  Ideological purists, committed activists, the sexual envy of an entire campus, with her blonde small-boned beauty and his exotic dark intensity. Except that the working-class salt-of-the-earth parents shoved Lisa out of the family when she took up with a “gook,” and the wealthy Filipino swore he would never go home to the father who made his money exploiting the planet, and the blonde beauty swelled with pregnancy that ruined the activist plans so much that Danilo left, spouting speeches.

  And out of that wreck I made a life, Lisa reminded herself fiercely. Graduate school, Carlo, the internship at Kenton. The alien animals. Talk about world-changing events! If Danilo knew about the aliens . . . but he wouldn’t. It was her knowledge, her life, and no whiff of masculine pheromones would ruin it for her.

  Not now, not ever.

  “The beard feels strangey,” Carlo said. It was his latest pet word.

  “Oh, it’s strangey, all right,” Lisa said, and Danilo looked at her.

  She fed Carlo and Danilo too (inescapable), read Carlo a story, put him to bed. Danilo watched silently from his chair at the table. After Lisa closed the bedroom door, she said, “Now go. I have work to do.”

  “Work? Now?”

  “All the time, Danilo.”

  “And you think it does anybody any good, this work? This studying minute details of ecosystems even as the exploiters destroy them out from under you?”

  “Probably as much actual good as your ‘non-violent confrontations’ at Greenpeace.”

  “I’m not with Greenpeace any more,” he said, and something grim in his tone, coming through despite the soft accent, made Lisa look directly at him.

  “You’re not?”

  “No. You’re right—non-violent confrontations accomplish nothing substantial. I am with EarthAction now.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “You will,” he said, and that tone was there again. “Lissy, I don’t have anyplace to stay.”

  “You’re not staying here. See that sofa? That unfolds to create my bedroom, and in another few hours I’ll be using it. Bye, Danilo.”

  He didn’t argue. Picking up the knapsack, he moved with his fluid gait toward the door. Watching him, Lisa suddenly remembered that she still had dried mud in her hair from the boat survey, still smelled of swamp and lab. Well, she’d shower later; the reports in her briefcase were too exciting too wait.

  She’d already started to work by the time Danilo closed the apartment door.

  “Washington wants even tighter security,” Paul said to the assembled Kenton staff, plus the visiting scientists, Washington representatives, and whoever those others were that Lisa couldn’t identify. “That’s why we have an increased guard. I know all the checkpoints are inconvenient, people, but consider the benefits. We’re getting another month of study before any announcement is made and we’re overrun with outsiders.”

  Hal said bluntly, “Could have fooled me. There are already far too many outsiders in the Preserve. It’s starting to look like O’Hare Airport out there. At this rate we’re going to irreparably damage the ecosystem.”

  Paul looked embarrassed. People shifted on their chairs, crowded uncomfortably into the too-small break room. Nobody looked directly at the visiting scientists.

  “Hal, we appreciate your concerns, but we have to be practical here as well. This is perhaps the single most important event in the history of humankind. You can’t really expect it to stay confined to a bunch of academic swamp rats like us.”

  People laughed obligingly, but the tension wasn’t broken.

  Paul continued, “We have a full agenda this morning, and a very exciting one, so let’s—”

  “If you’re really trying for tight security,” Hal persisted doggedly, “then all these soldiers and checkpoints and cars going in and out isn’t exactly the best way to get it. Don’t you think the locals, including the local journalists, are going to notice?”

  Lisa had to agree with him. Just last night she’d heard two women at the grocery store speculating about what could be going on “down to the Preserve, with all them crazy tree-huggers.” And the off-duty soldiers went in and out of Flaherty’s, the town’s most popular bar. She’d seen them.

  “I think we can leave security to the professionals whose job it is,” Paul said smoothly, “and get on with our own job. First, a really exciting report from Dr. Mary Clark of Harvard.”

  “Thanks, Paul,” Dr. Clark said. “Hang onto your hats, guys. We’ve finished the water analyses. Our alien footed snakes are not the only extraterrestrials in the Preserve.”

  Gasps, chatter, shouted questions. Dr. Clark held up her hand, eyes gleaming at the sensation she’d produced. “There are one-celled organisms with the same non-DNA genetic structure out there in the swamp water. There are also multi-celled organisms and some primitive worms.”

  Over the fresh buzz, someone called out, “Nothing in between? In evolutionary terms?”

  “No,” Dr. Clark said, “and of course we still don’t understand that.”

  No one did. It was the central mystery about the alien snakers—how had whoever sent them known what environment they would find when the craft landed? Had the snaker
s been chosen because,

  miraculously, they were perfectly adapted to a swamp environment at this latitude? That could be true only if their planet of origin were very similar to Earth, which seemed too much of an unlikely coincidence. (In fact, as the NASA rep had said, the odds against it were so high that the possibility was meaningless.)

  Had the snakers been engineered for this environment? But that argued a detailed knowledge of an Earth swamp ecosystem, and how could the genetic engineers have that unless they’d been here? If they had, why not just appear themselves? Why send these non-sentient but apparently harmless creatures as forerunners?

  And now these much more primitive non-DNA creatures. Too primitive to serve as food for the snakers, which in any case were eating sedges and Lemna minor just fine. And that brought the questions full circle to the central issue: How could the snakers be metabolizing food they had not evolved to metabolize?

  The rest of the meeting produced no answer. The Harvard geneticist gave a long and detailed progress report of the research into the peculiar, scattered genetic structures in the alien cells. Lisa listened intently.

  After forty-five minutes she discerned the central point: Nobody knew anything definitive.

  There were other reports and what promised to be an intense give-and-take, but she couldn’t stay. Shehad to get Carlo from Mrs. Belling. Paul turned his head as she went out the door, and she saw him frown.

  But, then, Paul had a wife looking after his children.

  Danilo showed up while she was feeding Carlo. He opened the apartment door, walked in, and dropped his knapsack on the floor. Carlo sang out, “Hi, Uncle Danilo!” and Lisa was stuck being semi-polite.