Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Carlo was still fussy when Lisa picked him up. She fed him dinner, tried to play with him. But his usually sunny nature was in eclipse, and his forehead felt warm.

  “Oh, sweetie, don’t get sick now. Not now, honey!”

  He whimpered, lolling heavily against her breast. She put him to bed with baby aspirin. He breathed easily, not congested. It was nothing; kids got minor infections all the time, and threw them off just as quickly. Carlo had done it before.

  Lisa went into the kitchenette and washed three days’ accumulation of dishes. It was only nine o’clock, and she had overslept that morning, but she was running a sleep deficit. Ten hours of unconsciousness suddenly seemed to her the most tantalizing idea she’d ever had. She drew the blinds, put on her pajamas, and hauled open the sofabed.

  An envelope was taped to the center of the mattress.

  LISA AGLIPAY.

  She had never been Lisa Aglipay, never married Danilo, never used his name. She opened the envelope.

  A single line of type: “Don’t go into work so early, Lisa.”

  She stood very still. EarthAction. Suspected in half a dozen environmental bombings. A pesticide factory in Mexico, a supermarket in Germany that refused to remove genetically modified foods from its shelves . . . “Worse, nobody knows the long-term effects of introducing organisms into the environment that didn’t develop there naturally . . .”

  No. Kenton was a wildlife preserve. A research facility for pure science, not an industrial lab. And there was no way EarthAction could know about the alien animals. Danilo was just trying to do what he had always done, control her through scaring her. He wanted the last word.

  The young soldiers, going in and out of Flaherty’s bar in town, more of them all the time as security was increased and then increased again. Were they all as stupid as the scientists thought? As much unthinking robots as the military thought? Danilo could have talked to any of them. Danilo was good at talking.

  No.

  She crumpled the piece of paper in her hand and threw it at the wall. In the other room, Carlo coughed.

  Lisa, hands shaking, put on the TV to distract herself.

  “. . . earlier. The truck was found abandoned near Douglas, Arizona, the site of major and continual border skirmishes between local ranchers and illegal aliens from Mexico crossing into the United States.

  United States Border Patrol agents found the windowless truck locked from the outside. Inside were the bodies of thirty-two Mexican men, women, and children, dead of heat and dehydration. A spokesperson for the Border Patrol said it is not uncommon for Mexican citizens to pay large sums of money for transport into the United States and then be cheated by receiving no transport. However, this tragedy . . .”

  The visuals were horrendous. Lisa turned off the television.

  Don’t go into work so early, Lisa.

  She dressed swiftly, checked on Carlo, and left him heavily asleep. She had never left him alone before, but it wasn’t, she thought grimly, as if he were going to wander out into the street. Carlo was never going to wander anywhere without help.

  It started to rain, first lightly, and then a hard driving torrent. The roads were shiny and slick. At Kenton she pulled out her ID for the guard, who came out of his tiny shanty wrapped in a bright yellow poncho.

  She looked at him hard. He looked like all the others.

  “Lisa,” Stephanie said somberly in the main lab, “back to work more? What about your son?”

  It was the first time Stephanie had ever asked. Lisa said, “He’s visiting my mother.”

  “Good timing, given the workload here,” Stephanie said.

  “Yes. Who else is in?”

  “Nobody. Even Paul went home to see his kids for a change, mirabile dictu.”

  How long would Stephanie stay? No way to tell. Lisa set to work on some water samples.

  Stephanie left at midnight. “You know the locking codes, Lisa?”

  “Of course.”

  Five minutes, seven. Stephanie wasn’t coming back. Lisa punched in the codes for the back door.

  Heavily laden, she made her way along the dock in the dark. A cool wind blew the rain against her body.

  In a few minutes her jeans and sweater were soaked.

  She turned on her huge flashlight, set it at the end of the dock, and untied the boat. Pushing off from the dock, she rowed into the swamp, but not very far; she wasn’t that good a boatman. It didn’t have to be far. A little ways out lay a half-submerged fallen tree. Its branches encircled a sort of pond-within-the-swamp, rich with algae and the chemicals of decay, exactly what the scientists had determined to be primary breeding grounds. Once there, Lisa leaned over the side of the boat and filled all the plastic containers she’d brought from her apartment. Two empty margarine tubs. Two pieces of Mrs. Belling’s Tupperware. A milk jug she’d hastily emptied. A covered pail that had come full of oversized crayons Danny could grasp with his toes. A gallon ice cream container. All of them, tightly lidded, just fit into her canvas gym bag.

  The flashlight guided her back to the dock. Only half an hour had elapsed. Ten minutes more and she’d have Kenton locked, the gym bag in the car, herself driving out past the Army’s “perimeter.”

  When would they detonate a bomb? Probably not for hours yet, just before dawn.

  Don’t go into work so early, Lisa.

  Or maybe she was wrong. Maybe EarthAction would do nothing. Maybe it would be the government.

  Hal, grim in the flat-bottomed boat among the peaceful reeds and rushes. Probably poison the entire ecosystem . . . “Too many unknowns in allowing unknown organisms to propagate in human environments, with totally unknown effects.”

  She wondered if Danilo would have found it funny that Washington and EarthAction actually agreed.

  Probably not.

  She drove carefully through the rain, aware of her cargo. The microorganisms wouldn’t last too long in those closed containers; they had evolved (so rapidly!) in sunlight. Tomorrow she would call in sick, bundle Carlo into the back seat, drive like hell. Where? Not all in one place. Better to diversify.

  There were freshwater wetlands on the other side of the Allegheny Mountains, five hours’ drive to the south. Wetlands in Maryland, the huge Dismal Swamp in Virginia. In West Virginia there were places so remote the post-snakers might not be discovered for years. And the post-post-snakers, and whatever came after that. Twelve hours’ drive. Maybe Carlo would sleep a lot of the way.

  Danilo, Hal, Washington . . . they were all wrong. It wasn’t about what humans were doing to the environment, terrible as that was. Concentrating on the rain-slicked road, what Lisa saw reflected in its shiny surface wasn’t deforestation or global warming. It was a garbage dump in Manila, crashing down in all its sickening rottenness to bury and burn ninety-six people who had nowhere else to live. A locked truck where human beings left thirty-two men, women, and children to die slowly and horribly. The factory in her childhood home, pumping sludge into the groundwater even after scientific studies had linked that water to cancers and birth defects. Carlo, one of those birth defects but also a happy and precious child, from whom Danilo had walked away with as little sense of responsibility as if Carlo had been an organically grown vegetable that had nonetheless developed an inexplicable blight. The images scalded her. Why didn’t they maim everyone else as well?

  Somehow, for some reason, they didn’t. So they happened again and again and again.

  It isn’t, she thought slowly and painfully, what humans do to the Earth. It’s what we do, have done, will do to each other. Maybe the aliens, when they were done evolving into whatever they had been designed to become, would do better. It seemed to her they could hardly do worse.

  She wondered what they would be like.

  ARMS AND THE WOMAN

  The hour after the third-year class in Advanced History of Armor Styles was supposed to be my research time, but a tyro knight had asked to see me, and of course tyros are so sacred that we mere l
oremasters must drop everything and counsel them, no matter what valuable papers might miss the Loremaster Quarterly deadline. To make it worse, the apprentice turned out to be Tyro Marigold. I have little patience with stupid people; it is my only fault. Marigold is the stupidest apprentice that Castle Olansa has ever had. By far.

  “Loremaster Gwillam, I’m being haunted,” she said, sitting on the edge of the wooden bench in my study, her blue eyes perfectly round. The emblem on her breastplate was upside down. I reached over and twisted it to its locked and upright position.

  “If you’re being haunted, then go get a spell from Father Martin.”

  “I can’t, because—”

  “Don’t tell me you ‘can’t.’ You know tyros are exempt from hauntings during all of training except vigil week.” Although probably she didn’t know. Certainly I hadn’t been able to teach her much about chivalric lore. Why should Father Martin have been any more successful teaching her about death duty?

  “I can’t see Father Martin about this because—”

  “Don’t tell me ‘can’t,’ girl! Just do it!”

  “—the ghost is my aunt, First Dame Cecilie of Castle Thlevin!”

  That, of course, put a different cast on the situation. I leaned forward and scrutinized Marigold carefully. No, she wasn’t lying. Her pop-eyed blue gaze looked genuinely baffled, and genuinely frightened. Besides, she was too stupid to lie.

  Which was what made the situation interesting. Ghosts almost never choose relatives to haunt for their tuitions. Obviously an unstilled ghost has to haunt someone to learn whatever lessons it failed to learn in life, but usually relatives are part of the reason they didn’t learn the lesson in the first place. Wisdom deficits tend to run in families.

  Most ghosts need to go outside the family to discover the principles they didn’t see illustrated in life. So why was a First Dame haunting her own niece?

  And why Marigold? What could a tyro this stupid—she was dead last in the lists for jousting, hunting, arcana, military strategy, fencing, astrology, and heraldry—possibly teach anybody? The only award Marigold had ever won, in three years at Castle Olansa, was Miss Congeniality, and I suspect that was a pity vote by the other tyros. The tyromistress is constantly trying to eradicate their sentimentality, but with thirty-three teenage girls in the tyro class alone, it’s difficult.

  Marigold squirmed under my close inspection, looked away, looked back, nervously fiddled with her armor emblem, which again ended up upside-down. No, she wasn’t lying.

  “Tyro, when did you last see the ghost of First Dame Cecilie?”

  “Last night! At midnight, Loremaster. Oh, she was so awful! She wore full armor—breastplate, tace, tasset, pauldron, all of it—and was smeared with blood! And she had no . . . no right arm!” The young voice was filled with horror. The right arm, the sword arm.

  “All right,” I said. “You may go.”

  “G-go? But . . . but what should I do?”

  “Nothing, until I send for you again. That will be this evening. I need to think.”

  At the mention of thinking, Marigold nodded reverently, in homage to a foreign activity. She tiptoed out, so as not to disturb my thinking, her armor clanking on the stone threshold. When she’d clanked out of sight, I closed the door to my study and posted a watchraven. I needed to use everything at my disposal, both scrolls and spells, to learn what I could about First Dame Cecilie of Castle Thlevin.

  “What did he say? What did he tell you?” The tyros crowded around Marigold in the Third Bedchamber. They had just come in from strength training and the smell of strong healthy sweat perfumed the summer air. “What’s he going to do, Marigold?”

  “He’s going to think.”

  The other residents of the Third Bedchamber nodded sagely, but Tyro Anna frowned.

  She was first bed in the First Bedchamber, top of the lists, and wouldn’t have ventured this far near the bottom for anything less momentous than haunting by a relative.

  Anna was tough, smart, and much resented, although this did not save her from Loremaster Gwillam’s sarcasm. Some of the other girls turned to stare at her coldly.

  Anna said, “ ‘Think‘? That’s it? What action is he going to take on your behalf, Marigold?”

  “He’s going to send for me this evening,” Marigold said. She smiled, glad to have been able to produce information for Anna, whom she admired. It was a smile of exceptional sweetness; Marigold possessed neither jealousy nor malice.

  Anna said, “That’s not action, that’s postponement of action. Did he say anything else? Try to remember!”

  Obediently Marigold racked her mind. “Nooo . . . that was all.”

  “Then keep me informed of your next visit to him,” Anna ordered, and swept out of the room.

  Catherine muttered, “That one will be having to haunt somebody herself, someday.

  To study humility.”

  “Oh, never mind her,” Elizabeth said. “Tell us again about the ghost, Mar!”

  Obligingly Marigold described yet again the terrible armless figure in the long red robe, while the Third Bedchamber shivered and squealed.

  After six hours of scrolls and spells so intense that my head hurt, I knew much more about First Dame Cecilie than she would have liked me to know. Or anyone else, either. I poured myself an ale, watched the glory the sinking sun made of my small stained-glass window, and pondered amid the litter of my small library.

  First Dame Cecilie had been born into an undistinguished yeoman family—Marigold’s family—in West Riding, forty-seven years ago. She had been tested in the usual way at her woman-ceremony, and, astonishingly, had proved to have ability in knighthood, lore, war counsel, and barter. Only at childlove and housewifery had she scored low. Several castles had made her a bid, and her proud parents had chosen knighthood at Castle Treffin, very ivy-rank. Cecilie had easily become first bed in the First Bedchamber, and at class knighting she’d won every honor open to her. She’d left Treffin to join Princess Margaret’s army, then invading the Sixth Kingdom, and distinguished herself in several battles. She’d married a beautiful and wealthy landowner, Duke Michael of Kern, and had done such a superb job of reorganizing and leading his household forces that no one had dared challenge the duke’s army.

  That had apparently been the problem.

  Cecilie had had nothing more to do. There was no war to fight. She’d borne Michael twins, beautiful daughters, but she had no talent for housewifery or childlove, and her daughters did not fill her days. The house steward, a woman just as formidable as Cecilie, successfully resisted Cecilie’s efforts to take over the household barter. Cecilie grew more idle, more bitter, and more desperate. Michael did not understand. They got separate bedchambers.

  Finally Cecilie took to pretending she had a lover. This gave her an excuse to go away for a week at a time. Away from the estate, she disguised herself as a foreign knight and entered second-rate tournaments where credentials weren’t checked too closely. Naturally, she won them all. She was too good, and someone traced her real identity. There was a scandal, and Cecelie was disgraced. Michael divorced her. She was disarmored by the Parfait Gentle Knights Association. Her birth family disowned her.

  But there was more. After a few years, Cecilie tried the foreign-disguised-knight routine again, and again she was exposed. After that, she holed up for a few months in an abandoned monastery in the wilds of North Riding. Naturally I couldn’t summon up what had happened there; even the lingering-spirit-of-a-place was thick with spells.

  But no one else entered during Cecilie’s stay there. I am sure of that. And when she emerged, she had only one arm.

  She entered the second-rate lists a third time, was not recognized, fought badly (she had, after all, only one arm), and was killed in her second tournament. She was buried, an anonymous knight, in a greave yard.

  I’d brought my watchraven inside my library when I’d finished working. Now I raised my goblet to it.

  “The most major scrol
l of my career, raven. Perhaps of any loremaster career!”

  The raven stared at me from his shiny flat black eyes.

  “There are only two possibilities, you know. Cecilie was completely unable to bend with fate. Marigold bends with everything anyone asks of her. Marigold is too close a relative for haunting under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, which always means that no one else’s actions have ever matched so closely the dead ghost’s mistakes, nor ever will. There are hundreds of people that Cecilie could have observed in order to learn ordinary flexibility. No, it’s an extraordinary event. And there are only two possibilities, raven!”

  It stared at me impassively.

  “Either Tyro Marigold, too, will cut off her own arm, in some way that will teach Cecilie her death lesson. Or—listen to this!—we have here an example of the rarest of all death tuitions. There hasn’t been even one in the last century. If Marigold doesn’t cut off her own arm—then the haunting is a reversal! It won’t be Cecilie who learns from Marigold, but Marigold who learns from Cecilie! And either way, I can write the scroll before it happens, and have it ready to go! I will be famous, you stupid bird! I will be called to Queen Eleanor’s court! I will be revered and consulted and rich and never see this dump of a training castle again! What do you think of that?”

  A mistake. If I hadn’t been so exhausted and jubilant and ale-wild, I would never have asked a raven a direct question. They have a limited vocabulary, all of it irritating.

  “Clever bore.”

  “Oh, shut up. What do you know? You’re as stupid as Marigold and the rest of the giggling tyros!”

  The raven stared at me, unblinking.

  Marigold and her best friend, Tyro Catherine, stood outside the loremaster’s chamber, clutching hands. Catherine had come to lend Marigold spiritual support, even though both girls understood that only Marigold would be summoned into the chamber. They awaited that summons now. Both wore full dress armor except for helmets, in honor of the solemnity of the occasion. Their fidgeting clanked on the stone floor.