Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “The data is only partial,” Seeding 140 said. “We were nearly destroyed when it was sent to us. But there is one data packet until the last few minutes of life.”

  The cheerful, dancing oysters had vanished from the holocube. In their place were the fronds of a tall, thin plant, waving slightly in the thick air. It was stark, unadorned, elemental. A multicellular organism rooted in the rocky ground, doing nothing.

  No one on the ship spoke.

  The holocube changed perspective, to a wide scan. Now there were whole stands of fronds, acres of them, filling huge sections of the rift. Plant after plant, drab olive green, blowing in the unseen wind.

  After the long silence, Seeding 140 said, “Our mother? The Others were not there for ninety-two years. Then they came. They replicate much faster than we do, and we die. Our mother, can you do what is necessary?”

  Still no one spoke, until Harrah, frightened, said, “What is it?”

  Micah answered, hirs voice clipped and precise. “According to the data packet, it is an aerobic organism, using a process analogous to photosynthesis to create energy, giving off oxygen as a byproduct. The data includes a specimen analysis, broken off very abruptly as if the AI failed. The specimen is non-carbon-based, non-DNA. The energy sources sealed in Seeding 140 are anaerobic.”

  Ling said sharply, “Present oxygen content of the rift atmosphere?”

  Cal said, “Seven point six two percent.” Hirs paused. “The oxygen created by these . . . these ‘Others’ is poisoning the seeding.”

  “But,” Deb said, bewildered, “why did the original drop include such a thing?”

  “It didn’t,” Micah said. “There is no match for this structure in the gene banks. It is not from Earth.”

  “Our mother?” Seeding 140 said, over the motionless fronds in the holocube. “Are you still there?”

  Disciple Arlbeni, Grid 743.9, 2999: As we approach this millennium marker, rejoice that humanity has passed both beyond superstition and spiritual denial. We have a faith built on physical truth, on living genetics, on human need. We have, at long last, given our souls not to a formless Deity, but to the science of life itself. We are safe, and we are blessed.

  Micah said suddenly, “It’s a trick.”

  The other adults stared at hirs. Harrah had been hastily reconfigured for sleep. Someone—Ling, most likely—had dissolved the floating baktons and blanked the wall displays, and only the empty transmission field added color to the room. That, and the cold stars beyond.

  “Yes,” Micah continued, “a trick. Not malicious, of course. But we programmed them to learn, and they did. They had some seismic event, or some interwarfare, and it made them wary of anything unusual. They learned that the unusual can be deadly. And the most unusual thing they know of is us, set to return at 3000. So they created a transmission program designed to repel us. Xenophobia, in a stimulus-response learning environment. You said it yourself, Ling, the learning components are built on human genes. And we have xenophobia as an evolved survival response!”

  Cal jack-knifed across the room. Tension turned hirs ungraceful. “No. That sounds appealing, but nothing we gave Seeding 140 would let them evolve defenses that sophisticated. And there was no seismic event for the internal stimulus.”

  Micah said eagerly, “We’re the stimulus! Our anticipated return! Don’t you see. . . we’re the ‘Others’ !”

  Kabil said, “But they call us ‘mother’ . . . They were thrilled to see us. They’re not xenophobic to us.”

  Deb spoke so softly the others could barely hear, “Then it’s a computer malfunction. Cosmic bombardment of their sensory equipment. Or at least, of the unit that was ‘dying.’ Malfunctioning before the end. All that sensory data about oxygen poisoning is compromised.”

  “Of course!” Ling said. But hirs was always honest. “At least . . . no, compromised data isn’t that coherent, the pieces don’t fit together so well biochemically . . .”

  “And non-terrestrially,” Cal said, and at the jagged edge in his voice, Micah exploded.

  “California, these are not native life! There is no native life in the galaxy except on Earth!”

  “I know that, Micah,” Cal said, with dignity. “But I also know this data does not match anything in the d-bees.”

  “Then the d-bees are incomplete!”

  “Possibly.”

  Ling put hirs hands together. They were long, slender hands with very long nails, created just yesterday. I want to grab the new millennium with both hands, Ling had laughed before the party, and hold it firm. “Spores. Panspermia.”

  “I won’t listen to this!” Micah said.

  “An old theory,” Ling went on, gasping a little. “Seeding 140 said the Others weren’t there for their first hundred years. But if the spores blew in from space on the solar wind and the environment was right for them to germinate—”

  Deb said quickly, “Spores aren’t really life. Wherever they came from, they’re not alive.”

  “Yes, they are,” said Kabil. “Don’t quibble. They’re alive.”

  Micah said loudly, “I’ve given my entire life to the Great Mission. I was on the original drop for this very planet.”

  “They’re alive,” Ling said, “and they’re not ours.”

  “My entire life!” Micah said. Hirs looked at each of them in turn, hirs face stony, and something terrible glinted behind the beautiful deep-green eyes.

  Our mother does not answer. Has our mother gone away?

  Our mother would not go away without helping us. It must be that they are still dancing.

  We can wait.

  “The main thing is Harrah, after all,” Kabil said. Hirs sat slumped on the floor. They had been talking so long.

  “A child needs secure knowledge. Purpose. Faith,” Cal said.

  Ling said wearily, “A child needs truth.”

  “Harrah,” Deb crooned softly. “Harrah, made of all of us, future of our genes, small heart Harrah . . .”

  “Stop it, Debaron,” Cal said. “Please.”

  Micah said, “Those things down there are not real. They are not. Test it, Cal. I’ve said so already. Test it. Send down a probe, try to bring back samples. There’s nothing there.”

  “You don’t know that, Micah.”

  “I know!” Micah said, and was subtly revitalized. Hirs sprang up. “Test it!”

  Ling said, “A probe isn’t necessary. We have the transmitted data and—”

  “Not reliable!” Micah said.

  “—and the rising oxygen content. Data from our own sensors.”

  “Outgassing!”

  “Micah, that’s ridiculous. And a probe—”

  “A probe might come back contaminated,” Cal said.

  “Don’t risk contamination,” Kabil said suddenly. “Not with Harrah here.”

  “Harrah, made of us all . . .” Deb had turned hirs back on the rest now, and lay almost curled into a ball, lost in hirs powerful imagination. Deb!

  Kabil said, almost pleadingly, to Ling, “Harrah’s safety should come first.”

  “Harrah’s safety lies in facing the truth,” Ling said. But hirs was not strong enough to sustain it alone. They were all so close, so knotted together, a family. Knotted by Harrah and by the Great Mission, to which Ling, no less than all the others, had given hirs life.

  “Harrah, small heart,” sang Deb.

  Kabil said, “It isn’t as if we have proof about these ‘Others.’ Not real proof. We don’t actually know.”

  “I know,” Micah said.

  Cal looked bleakly at Kabil. “No. And it is wrong to sacrifice a child to a supposition, to a packet of compromised data, to a . . . a superstition of creations so much less than we are. You know that’s true, even though we none of us ever admit it. But I’m a biologist. The creations are limited DNA, with no ability to self-modify. Also strictly regulated nano, and AI only within careful parameters. Yes, of course they’re life forms deserving respect on their own terms, of course of
course I would never deny that—”

  “None of us would,” Kabil said.

  “—but they’re no us. Not ever us.”

  A long silence, broken only by Deb’s singing.

  “Leave orbit, Micah,” Cal finally said, “before Harrah wakes up.”

  Disciple Arlbeni, Grid 743.9, 2999: We are not gods, never gods, no matter what the powers evolution and technology have given us, and we do not delude ourselves that we are gods, as other cultures have done at other millennia. We are human. Our salvation is that we know it, and do not pretend otherwise.

  Our mother? Are you there? We need you to save us from the Others, to do what is necessary. Are you there?

  Are you still dancing?

  COMPUTER VIRUS

  Nancy Kress’s most recent book, Probability Moon (July 2000), will soon be followed by its sequel. Probability Sun (June 2001). Both are set in the world of her Nebula-winning novelette, “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” which first appeared in Asimov’s October/November 1996 issue.

  “It’s out!” someone said, a tech probably, although later McTaggart could never remember who spoke first. “It’s out!”

  “It can’t be!” someone else cried, and then the whole room was roiling, running, frantic with activity that never left the workstations. Running in place.

  “It’s not supposed to be this way,” Elya blurted. Instantly she regretted it. The hard, flat eyes of her sister-in-law Cassie met hers, and Elya flinched away from that look.

  “And how is it supposed to be, Elya?” Cassie said. “Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. I only meant that . . . that no matter how much you loved Vlad, mourning gets . . . lighter. Not lighter, but less . . . withdrawn. Cass, you can’t just wall up yourself and the kids in this place! For one thing, it’s not good for them. You’ll make them terrified to face real life.”

  “I hope so,” Cassie said, “for their sake. Now let me show you the rest of the castle.”

  Cassie was being ironic, Elya thought miserably, but “castle” was still the right word. Fortress, keep, bastion . . . Elya hated it. Vlad would have hated it. And now she’d provoked Cassie to exaggerate every protective, self-sufficient, isolating feature of the multi-million-dollar pile that had cost Cass every penny she had, including the future income from the lucrative patents that had gotten Vlad murdered.

  “This is the kitchen,” Cassie said. “House, do we have any milk?”

  “Yes,” said the impersonal voice of the house system. At least Cassie hadn’t named it, or given it one of those annoying visual avatars. The room-screen remained blank. “There is one carton of soymilk and one of cow milk on the third shelf.”

  “It reads the active tags on the cartons,” Cassie said. “House, how many of Donnie’s allergy pills are left in the master-bath medicine cabinet?”

  “Sixty pills remain,” House said, “and three more refills on the prescription.”

  “Donnie’s allergic to ragweed, and it’s mid-August,” Cassie said.

  “Well, he isn’t going to smell any ragweed inside this mausoleum,” Elya retorted, and immediately winced at her choice of words. But Cassie didn’t react. She walked on through the house, unstoppable, narrating in that hard, flat voice she had developed since Vlad’s death.

  “All the appliances communicate with House through narrow-band wireless radio frequencies. House reaches the Internet the same way. All electricity comes from a generator in the basement, with massive geothermal feeds and storage capacitors. In fact, there are two generators, one for backup. I’m not willing to use battery back-up, for the obvious reason.”

  It wasn’t obvious to Elya. She must have looked bewildered because Cassie added, “Batteries can only back-up for a limited time. Redundant generators are more reliable.”

  “Oh.”

  “The only actual cables coming into the house are the VNM fiber-optic cables I need for computing power. If they cut those, we’ll still be fully functional.”

  If who cuts those? Elya thought, but she already knew the answer. Except that it didn’t make sense. Vlad had been killed by econuts because his work was—had been—so controversial. Cassie and the kids weren’t likely to be a target now that Vlad was dead. Elya didn’t say this. She trailed behind Cassie through the living room, bedrooms, hallways. Every one had a room-screen for House, even the hallways, and multiple sensors in the ceilings to detect and identify intruders. Elya had had to pocket an emitter at the front door, presumably so House wouldn’t . . . do what? What did it do if there was an intruder? She was afraid to ask.

  “Come downstairs,” Cassie said, leading the way through an e-locked door (of course) down a long flight of steps. “The computer uses three-dimensional laser microprocessors with optical transistors. It can manage twenty million billion calculations per second.”

  Startled, Elya said, “What on earth do you need that sort of power for?”

  “I’ll show you.” They approached another door, reinforced steel from the look of it. “Open,” Cassie said, and it swung inward. Elya stared at a windowless, fully equipped genetics lab.

  “Oh, no, Cassie . . . you’re not going to work here, too!”

  “Yes, I am. I resigned from MedGene last week. I’m a consultant now.”

  Elya gazed helplessly at the lab, which seemed to be a mixture of shining new equipment plus Vlad’s old stuff from his auxiliary home lab. Vlad’s refrigerator and storage cabinet, his centrifuge, were all these things really used in common between Vlad’s work in ecoremediation and Cassie’s in medical genetics? Must be. The old refrigerator had a new dent in its side, probably the result of a badly programmed ’bot belonging to the moving company. Elya recognized a new gene synthesizer, gleaming expensively, along with other machines that she, not a scientist, couldn’t identify. Through a half-open door, she saw a small bathroom. It all must have cost enormously. Cassie had better work hard as a consultant.

  And now she could do so without ever leaving this self-imposed prison. Design her medical micros, send the data encrypted over the Net to the client. If it weren’t for Jane and Donnie . . . Elya grasped at this. There were Janey and Donnie, and Janey would need to be picked up at school very shortly now. At least the kids would get Cassie out of this place periodically.

  Cassie was still defining her imprisonment, in that brittle voice. “There’s a Faraday cage around the entire house, of course, embedded in the walls. No EMP can take us out. The walls are reinforced foamcast concrete, the windows virtually unbreakable polymers. We have enough food stored for a year. The water supply is from a well under the house, part of the geothermal system. It’s cool, sweet water. Want a glass?”

  “No,” Elya said. “Cassi e . . . you act as if you expect full-scale warfare. Vlad was killed by an individual nutcase.”

  “And there are a lot of nutcases out there,” Cassie said crisply. “I lost Vlad. I’m not going to lose Janey and Donnie . . . hey! There you are, pumpkin!”

  “I came downstairs!” Donnie said importantly, and flung himself into his mother’s arms. “Annie said!”

  Cassie smiled over her son’s head at his young nanny, Anne Millius. The smile changed her whole face, Elya thought, dissolved her brittle shell, made her once more the Cassie that Vlad had loved. A whole year. Cassie completely unreconciled, wanting only what was gone forever. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Or was it that she, Elya, wasn’t capable of the kind of love Cassie had for Vlad? Elya had been married twice, and divorced twice, and had gotten over both men. Was that better or worse than Cassie’s stubborn, unchippable grief?

  She sighed, and Cassie said to Donnie, “Here’s Aunt Elya. Give her a big kiss!”

  The three-year-old detached himself from his mother and rushed to Elya. God, he looked like Vlad. Curly light brown hair, huge dark eyes. Snot ran from his nose and smeared on Elya’s cheek.

  “Sorry,” Cassie said, grinning.

  “Allergies?”

  “Yes. Although . . . does he
feel warm to you?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Elya, who had no children. She released Donnie. Maybe he did feel a bit hot in her arms, and his face was flushed a bit. But his full-lipped smile—Vlad again—and shining eyes didn’t look sick.

  “God, look at the time, I’ve got to go get Janey,” Cassie said. “Want to come along, Elya?”

  “Sure.” She was glad to leave the lab, leave the basement, leave the “castle.” Beyond the confines of the Faraday-embedded concrete walls, she took deep breaths of fresh air. Although of course the air inside had been just as fresh. In fact, the air inside was recycled in the most sanitary, technologically advanced way to avoid bringing in pathogens or gases deliberately released from outside. It was much safer than any fresh air outside. Cassie had told her so.

  No one understood, not even Elya.

  Her sister-in-law thought Cassie didn’t hear herself, didn’t see herself in the mirror every morning, didn’t know what she’d become. Elya was wrong. Cassie heard the brittleness in her voice, saw the stoniness in her face for everyone but the kids and sometimes, God help her, even for them. Felt herself recoiling from everyone because they weren’t Vlad, because Vlad was dead and they were not. What Elya didn’t understand was that Cassie couldn’t help it.

  Elya didn’t know about the dimness that had come over the world, the sense of everything being enveloped in a gray fog: people and trees and furniture and lab beakers. Elya didn’t know, hadn’t experienced, the frightening anger that still seized Cassie with undiminished force, even a year later, so that she thought if she didn’t smash something, kill something as Vlad had been killed, she’d go insane. Insaner. Worse, Elya didn’t know about the longing for Vlad that would rise, unbidden and unexpected, throughout Cassie’s entire body, leaving her unable to catch her breath.

  If Vlad had died of a disease, Cassie sometimes thought, even a disease for which she couldn’t put together a genetic solution, it would have been much easier on her. Or if he’d died in an accident, the kind of freak chance that could befall anybody. What made it so hard was the murder. That somebody had deliberately decided to snuff out this valuable life, this precious living soul, not for anything evil Vlad did but for the good he accomplished.