Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  And Kyra believed they had a “special” romantic relationship?

  Incredibly, it seemed she did. As she talked about their meeting, about her life with Chou, I saw no trace of irony, of doubt, of simple confusion. Certainly not of anything approaching shame. I did detect anger, and that was the most intriguing thing about her demeanor. Who was she angry with? Chou? Her mother, that straight-laced paragon who had rejected her? The aliens? Fate?

  She deflected all political questions. “Kyra, do you approve of the way the Chinese-American alliance is developing?”

  “I approve of the way my life is developing.” Tinkly laugh, undercut with anger.

  We toured the villa, and she let me photograph everything, even their bedroom. Huge canopied bed, carved chests, jars of plum blossoms. Chou, or some PR spinner, had decided that a Chinese political partner should appear neither too austere nor too American. China’s past was honored in her present, even as she looked toward the future—that was clearly the message I was to get out. I recorded everything. Kyra said nothing as we toured, usually not even looking at me. She combed her hair in front of her ornate carved mirror, fiddled with objects, sat in deep reverie. It was as if she’d forgotten I was there.

  Kyra’s silence broke only as she escorted me to the gate. Abruptly she said, “Amy . . . do you remember Carter Falls High? The V-R Gala?”

  “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “You and I and our dates were in the jungle room. There was a virtual coconut fight. I tossed a coconut at you, it hit, and you pretended you didn’t even see it.”

  “Yes,” I said. Out of all the shunning I’d done to her in those horrible, terrified, cruel teenage years, she picked that to recall!

  “But you did see it. You knew I was there.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Kyra.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, with such a glittering smile that all at once I knew who her anger was directed at. She had given me this interview out of old family ties, or a desire to show off the superiority of our relative positions, or something, but she was angry at me. And always would be.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, with spectacular inadequacy. Kyra didn’t answer, merely turned and walked back toward her tiny Forbidden City.

  My story was a great success. The Times ran it in flat-screen, 3-D, and V-R, and its access rate went off the charts. It was the first time anyone had been inside the Chou compound, had met the American girlfriend of an enigmatic general, had seen that particular lifestyle up close. Kyra’s mysterious encounter with aliens sixteen years ago gave it a unique edge. Even those who hated the story—and there were many, calling it exploitative, immoral, decadent, symptomatic of this or that—noticed it. My message system nearly collapsed under the weight of congratulations, condemnations, job offers.

  The next day, Kyra Lunden called a press conference. She denied everything. I had been admitted to the Chou villa, yes, but only as a relative, for tea. Our agreement had been no recorders. I had violated that, had recorded secretly, and furthermore had endangered Chinese-American relations. Kyra had tears in her eyes. The Chinese Embassy issued an angry denunciation. The State Department was not pleased.

  The Times fired me.

  Standing in my apartment, still surrounded by the masses of flowers that had arrived yesterday, I stared at nothing. The sickeningly sweet fragrances made me queasy. Wild ideas, stupid ideas, rioted in my head. I could sue. I could kill myself. Kyra really had been altered by the aliens. She was no longer human, but a V-R-thriller simulacrum of a human, and it was my duty to expose her.

  All stupid. Only one idea was true.

  Kyra had, after all these years, found a way to get even.

  2027

  In the second year of the war, the aliens came back.

  David told me while I was bathing the baby in the kitchen sink. The twins, Lucy and Lem, were shrieking around the tiny apartment like a pair of banshees. It was a crummy apartment, but it wasn’t too far from David’s job, and we were lucky to get it. There was a war on.

  “The Blanding telescope has picked up an alien ship heading for Earth.” David spoke the amazing sentence flatly, the way he speaks everything to me now. It was the first time he’d initiated conversation in two weeks.

  I tightened my grip on Robin, a wriggler slippery with soap, and stared at him. “When . . . how . . .”

  “It would be good, Amy, if you could ever finish a sentence,” David said, with the dispassionate hypercriticism he brings these days to everything I say. It wasn’t always like this. David wasn’t always like this. Depression, his doctor told me, unfortunately not responding to available medications. Well, great, so David’s depressed. The whole country’s depressed. Also frightened and poor and gray-faced with anxiety about this unpredictable war’s bio-attacks and Q-bomb attacks and EMP attacks, all seemingly random. We’re all depressed, but not all of us take it out on the people we live with.

  I said with great deliberation, “When did the Blanding pick up the aliens, and do the scientists believe they’re the same aliens that came here in July of 2002?”

  “Yesterday. Yes. You should either bathe Robin or not bathe him, instead of suspending a vital parental job in the middle like that.” He left the room.

  I rinsed Robin, wrapped him in a large, gray-from-age towel, and laid him on the floor. He smiled at me; such a sweet-natured child. I gave Lucy and Lem, too frenetic for sweetness, a hoarded cookie each, and turned on the Internet. The Trumpeter avatar, whom someone had designed to subtly remind viewers of Honest Abe Lincoln, was in the middle of the story, complete with what must have been hastily assembled archival footage from obsolete media.

  There was the little pewter-colored spaceship in my Uncle John’s cow field twenty-five years ago, and Kyra walking out with a dazed look on her small face. God—she’d been only a few years older than Lucy and Lem. There was the ship lifting straight up, passing the Army helicopter. That time, no watching telescopes or satellites had detected a larger ship, coming or going . . . either our technology was better now, or the aliens had a different game plan. Now the screen showed pictures from the Blanding, which looked like nothing but a dot in space until computers enhanced it, surrounded it with graphics, and “artistically rendered” various imaginary appearances and routes and speculations. In the midst of the hype given somberly in Abraham Lincoln’s “voice,” I gathered that the ship’s trajectory would intersect with the same cow pasture as last time—unless, of course, it didn’t—and would arrive at Earth in thirteen hours and seven minutes.

  A Chinese general appeared on-screen, announcing in translation that China was prepared to shoot the intruder down.

  “Mommy!” Lucy shrieked. “My cookie’s gone!”

  “Not now, honey.”

  “But Lem gots some of his cookie and he won’t share!”

  “In a minute!”

  “But Mommy—”

  The Internet abruptly cut out. The Internet.

  Into the shocking, eerie silence came Lem’s voice, marginally quieter than his sister’s. “Mommy. I hear some sirens.”

  Three days of chaos. I had never believed panic—old-style Roman rioting in the streets, totally out of control, murderous panic—could happen in the United States, in gray cities like Rochester, New York. Yes, there were periodic race riots in Atlanta and looting spells in New York or war hysteria in San Francisco, but the National Guard quickly contained them in neighborhoods where violence was a way of life anyway. But this panic took over the whole city—Rochester—in a cold February and watching on the Internet, when a given site’s coverage was up anyway, was to know a surreal horror. This was supposed to be America.

  People were publicly beheaded on the lawns of the art museum, their breath frozen on the winter air a second before the blood leapt from their severed heads toward the camera. No one could say why they were being executed, or even if there was a reason. Buildings that the National Guard had protected from being bombed by
Chinese terrorists were bombed by crazed Americans. Anyone Chinese-American, or appearing Chinese-American, or rumored to be Chinese-American, was so savagely assaulted that the fourteenth century would have been disgusted. A dead, mangled baby was thrown onto our fourth-floor fire escape, where it lay for the entire three days, pecked at by crows.

  I kept the children huddled in the bathroom, which had no windows to shatter. Or see out of. The electricity went off, then on, then off for good. The heat ceased. David stayed by the living room window in case the building caught fire and we had no choice but to evacuate. Even during this horror he belittled and criticized: “If you’d had more food stockpiled, Amy, maybe the kids wouldn’t have to have cereal again.”

  “You never were any good at keeping them soothed and quiet.”

  Soothed and quiet. The crows on the fire escape had plucked out the dead infant’s eyes.

  Whenever Lucy, Lem, and Robin were finally asleep, I turned on the radio. The riots were coming under control. No, they weren’t. The President was dead. No, he wasn’t. The President had declared martial law. Massive bio-weapons had been unleashed in New York. No, in London. No, in Peking. The Chinese were behind these attacks. No, the Chinese were having worse riots than we were, their present chaos merging with their previous chaos of civil war. It was that civil war that had broken the American-Chinese alliance three years ago. And then during their civil upheavals, the Chinese had attacked Alaska. Maybe. Not even the international intelligence network was completely sure who’d released the bubonic-plague-carrying rats in Anchorage. But, announced the White House, the excesses of China had become too much for the Western world to stomach.

  I didn’t see how those excesses could be worse than this.

  And then it was over. The Army prevailed. Or maybe the chaos, self-limiting as some plagues, just ran its course. Everyone left alive was immune. After another week, David and I—but not the kids—emerged from our building into the rubble to start rebuilding some sort of economic and communal existence. We never left the children alone, but even so David had found an isolated moment to say, resentment in every line of his body, “You’re the one who wanted to have children. I don’t know how much longer I can go on paying for your bad judgment.”

  It was then that I got the e-mail from Kyra.

  “Why did you come?” Kyra asked me.

  We faced each other in a federal prison in the Catskill Mountains northeast of New York City. The prison, built in 2022, was state-of-the-art. Nothing could break in or out, including bacteria, viruses, and some radiation. The Kyra sitting opposite me, this frightened woman, was actually two miles away, locked in some cell that probably looked nothing like the hologram of her I faced in the Visitors’ Center.

  I said slowly, “I can’t say why I came.” This was the truth. Or, rather, I could say but only with so much mixed motive that she would never understand. Because I had to get away from David for these two days. Because the childhood she and I shared, no matter how embittered by events, nonetheless looked to me now like Arcadia. Because I wanted to see Kyra humbled, in pain, as she had once put me. Because I had some insane idea, as crazy as the chaos we had lived through two weeks ago, that she might hold a key to understanding the inexplicable. Because.

  She said, “Did you come to gloat?”

  “In part.”

  “All right, you’re entitled. Just help me!”

  “To tell the truth, Kyra, you don’t look like you need all that much help. You look well-fed, and bathed, and safe enough behind these walls.” All more than my children were. “When did you land in here, anyway?”

  “They put me in the second the alien ship was spotted.” Her voice was bitter.

  “On what charges?”

  “No charges. I’m a detainee for the good of the state.”

  I said levelly, “Because of the alien ship or because you slept with the Chinese enemy?”

  “They weren’t the enemy then!” she said angrily, and I saw that my goading was pushing her to the point where she wanted to tell me to fuck off. But she didn’t dare.

  She didn’t look bad. Well-fed, bathed, as I’d said. No longer pretty, however. Well, it had been nine hard years since I’d seen her. That delicate skin had coarsened and wrinkled much more than mine, as if she’d spent a lot of time in the sun. The hair, once blazingly blonde, was a dull brown streaked with gray. My Aunt Julie, her mother, had died five years ago in a traffic accident.

  “Amy,” she said, visibly controlling herself, “I’m afraid they’ll just quietly keep me here forever. I don’t have any ties with the Chinese anymore, and I don’t know anything about or from that alien ship. I was just living quietly, under an alias, and then they broke in to my apartment in the middle of the night and cuffed me and brought me here.”

  “Why don’t you contact General Chou?” I said cruelly.

  Kyra only looked at me with such despair that I despised her. She was, had always been, a sentimentalist. I remembered how she’d actually thought that military monster loved her.

  “Tell me what happened since 2018,” I said, and watched her seize on this with desperate hope.

  “After your news story came out and—I’m sorry, Amy, I . . .”

  “Don’t,” I said harshly, and she knew enough to stop.

  “I left Chun’fu, or rather he threw me out. It hit me hard, although I guess I was pretty much a fool not to think he’d react that way, not to anticipate—” She looked away, old pain fresh on her face. I thought that “fool” didn’t begin to cover it.

  “Anyway, I had some old friends who helped me. Most people wanted nothing to do with me, but a few loyal ones got me a new identity and a job on a lobster farm on Cape Cod. You know, I liked it. I’d forgotten how good it can feel to work outdoors. It was different from my father’s dairy farm, of course, but the wind and the rain and the sea . . .” She trailed off, remembering things I’d never seen.

  “I met a lobster farmer named Daniel and we lived together. I never told him my real name. We had a daughter, Jane . . .”

  I thought I’d seen pain on her face before. I’d been wrong.

  I said, and it came out gentle, “Where are Daniel and Jane now?”

  “Dead. A bio-virus attack. I didn’t think I could go on after that, but of course I did. People do. Are you married, Amy?”

  “Yes. I hate him.” I hadn’t planned on saying that. Something in her pain drew out my own. Kyra didn’t look shocked.

  “Kids?”

  “Three wonderful ones. Five-year-old twins and a six-month-old.”

  She leaned forward, like a plant hungry for sun. “What are their names?”

  “Lucy. Lem. Robin. Kyra . . . how do you think I can help you?”

  “Write about me. You’re a journalist.”

  “No, I’m not. You ended my career.” Did Kyra really not know that?

  “Then call a press conference. Send data to the news outlets. Write letters to Congress. Just don’t let me rot here indefinitely because they don’t know what to do with me!”

  She really had no idea how things worked. Still an innocent. I wasn’t ready yet to tell her that all her anguish was silly. Instead I said, “Did the aliens communicate with you from their ship in some way?”

  “Of course not!”

  “The ship left, you know.”

  From her face, it was clear she didn’t know. “They left?”

  “Two weeks ago. Came no closer than the moon. If we had any sort of decent space program left, if anyone did, we might have tried to contact them. But they just observed us, or whatever, from that distance, then took off again.”

  “Fuck them to bloody hell! I wish we had shot them down!”

  She had surprised me, with both the language—Kyra had always been a bit prissy, despite her sexual adventures—and the hatred. My surprise must have shown on my face.

  “Amy,” Kyra said, “they ruined my life. Without that abduction—” the word didn’t really seem appro
priate—“when I was ten, my parents would never have divorced. I wouldn’t have been an outcast in school. I never would have met Chou, or behaved like . . . and I certainly wouldn’t be in this fucking prison now! They came here to ruin my life and they succeeded!”

  “You take no responsibility for anything,” I said evenly.

  Kyra glared at me. “Don’t you dare judge me, Amy. You with your beautiful living children and your life free of any suspicion that you’re somehow deformed and dangerous because of a few childhood hours you can’t even remember—”

  “ ‘Can’t remember’ ? What about the helmet and the flickering images and the observing aliens? Did you make those all up, Kyra?”

  Enraged, she lunged forward to slap me. There was nothing there, of course. We were only virtually together. I stood to leave my half of the farce.

  “Please, Amy . . . please! Say you’ll help me!”

  “You’re a fool, Kyra. You learn nothing. Do you think the prison officials would be letting you have this ‘meeting’ with me if they were going to keep you here hidden away for good? Do you think you’d even have been permitted to send me e-mail? You’re as good as out already. And when you are, try this time to behave as if you weren’t still ten years old.”

  We parted in contempt and anger. I hoped to never see or hear from her again.

  2047

  The next time the aliens returned, they landed.

  I was at JungleTime Playland with my granddaughter, Lehani. She loved JungleTime Playland. I was amused by it; in the long, long rebuilding after the war, V-R had finally reached the commercial level that Robin and Lucy and Lem, Lehani’s father, had also played in. Of course, government applications of V-R and holo and AI were another matter, but I had nothing to do with those. I led a very small, contented life.

  “I go Yung Lan,’ ” Lehani said, looking up at me with the shining, wholehearted hope of the young on her small face. Every wish granted is paradise, every wish crushed is eternal disappointment.