Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Yes, you can go into JungleLand, but we have to wait our turn, dear heart.”

  So she stood in line beside me, hopping from foot to foot, holding my hand. Nobody ever told me grandmotherhood was going to be this sweet.

  When we finally reached the head of the line, I registered her, put the tag on her neck that would keep me informed of her every move as well as the most minute changes in her skin conductivity. If she got scared or inattentive, I would know it. No adults are allowed in Jungle Playland; that would spoil the thrill. Lehani grinned and ran through the virtual curtain. I accepted the map tuned to her tag and sat at a table in the lobby, surrounded by lines of older children registering for the other V-R playlands.

  Sipping tea, I was checking my e-mail when the big lobby screen abruptly came on.

  “News! News! An alien ship has been sighted moving toward Earth. Government sources say it resembles the ship that landed in Minnesota in 2002 and traveled as far as lunar orbit in 2027 but so far no—”

  People erupted all around me. Buzzing, signaling for their children, and, in the case of one stupid woman, pointless shrieking. Under cover of the noise I comlinked Central, before the site was hopelessly jammed.

  “Library,” I keyed in. “Public Records, State of Maine. Data search.”

  “Search ready,” the tiny screen said.

  “Death certificate, first name Daniel, same date as death certificate, first name Jane, years 2020 through 2026.”

  “Searching.”

  Children began to pour out of the playlands, most resentful at having their V-R time interrupted. Kyra had never told me Daniel’s last name. Nor did I have any idea what name she was using now. But if she simply wanted to pass unnoticed among ordinary people, his name would do, and Kyra had always been sentimental. The government, of course, would know exactly where she was, but they would know that no matter what name she used or what paper trails she falsified. Her DNA was on record. The press, too, could track her down if they decided to take the trouble. The alien landing meant they would take the trouble.

  My handheld displayed, “Daniel Ethan Parmani, died June 16, 2025, age forty-two, and Jane Julia Parmani, died June 16, 2025, age three.”

  “Second search. United States. Locate Kyra Parmani, ages—” What age might Kyra think she could pass for? In prison, twenty years ago, she had looked far older than she was. “Ages fifty through seventy.”

  “Searching.”

  Lehani appeared at the JungleLand door, looking furious. She spied me and ran over. “Lady sayed I can’t play!”

  “I know, sweetie. Come sit on Grandma’s lap.”

  She climbed onto me, buried her head in my shoulder, and burst into angry tears. I peered around her to see the handheld.

  “Six matches.” It displayed them. Six? With a name like “Parmani” coupled with one like “Kyra” ? I sighed and shifted Lehani’s weight.

  “Call each of them in turn.”

  Kyra was the second match. She answered the call herself, her voice unconcerned. She hadn’t heard. “Hello?”

  “Kyra. It’s Amy, your cousin. Listen, they’ve just spotted an alien ship coming in. They’ll be looking for you again.” Silence on the other end. “Kyra?”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Lucky guesswork. But if you want to hide, from the feds or the press . . .” They might put her in jail again, and who knew this time when she would get out? At the very least, the press would make her life, whatever it was now, a misery. I said, “Do you have somewhere to go? Some not-too-close-but-perfectly-trusted friend’s back bedroom or strange structure in a cowfield?”

  She didn’t laugh. Kyra never had had much of a sense of humor. Not that this was an especially good time for joking.

  “Yes, Amy. I do. Why are you warning me?”

  “Oh, God, Kyra, how do I answer that?”

  Maybe she understood. Maybe not. She merely said, “All right. And thanks. Amy . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting married again. I’m happy.”

  That was certainly like her: blurting out the personal that no one had asked about. For a second I, too, was the old Amy, bitter and jealous. I had not remarried since my terrible divorce from David, had not even loved any one again. I suspected I never would. But the moment passed. I had Robin and Lem and Lehani and, intermittently when she was in the country, Lucy.

  “Congratulations, Kyra. Now get going. They can find you in about forty seconds if they want to, you know.”

  “I know. I’ll call you when this is all over, Amy. Where are you?”

  “Prince George’s County, Maryland. Amy Suiter Parker. Bye, Kyra.” I broke the link.

  “Who on link?” Lehani demanded, apparently having decided her tears were not accomplishing anything.

  “Somebody Grandma knew a long time ago, dear heart. Come on, let’s go home, and you can play with Mr. Grindle’s cat.”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  It is always so easy to distract the uncorrupted.

  The alien ship parked itself in lunar orbit for the better part of three days. Naturally we had no one up there; not a single nation on Earth had anything you could call a space program anymore. But there were satellites. Maybe we communicated with the aliens, or they with us, or maybe we tried to destroy them, or entice them, or threaten them. Or all of the above, by different nations with different satellites. Ordinary citizens like me were not told. And of course the aliens could have been doing anything with their ship: sampling broadcasts, scrambling military signals, seeding clouds, sending messages to true believers’ back teeth. How would I know?

  On the second day, three agents from People’s Safety Commission, the latest political reincarnation of that office, showed up to ask me about Kyra’s whereabouts. I said, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen her in twenty years and had no idea where she was now. They thanked me politely and left. News cams staked out her house, a modest foamcast building in a small Pennsylvania town, and they dissected her current life, but they never actually found her, so it made a pretty lackluster story.

  After three days of lunar orbit, a small alien craft landed on the upland savanna of East Africa.

  Somehow it sneaked past whatever surveillance we had as if it didn’t exist. The ship set down just beyond sight of a Kikuyu village. Two small boys herding goats spotted it, and one of them went inside.

  By the time the world learned of this, from a call made on the village’s only comlink, the child was already inside the alien ship. News people and government people raced to the scene. East Africa was in its usual state of confused civil war, incipient drought, and raging disease. The borders were theoretically sealed. This made no difference whatsoever. Gunfire erupted, disinformation spread, ultimata were issued. The robocams went on recording.

  “Does it look the same as the ship you saw?” Lem said softly, watching the news beside me. His wife Amalie was in the kitchen with Lehani. I could hear them laughing.

  “It looks the same.” Forty-five years fell away and I stood in Uncle John’s cow field, watching Kyra walk into the pewter-colored ship and walk out the most famous little girl in the world.

  Lem said, “What do you think they want?”

  I stared at him. “Don’t you think I’ve wondered that for four and a half decades? That everyone has wondered that?”

  Lem was silent.

  A helicopter appeared in the sky over the alien craft. That, too, was familiar—until it set down and I grasped its huge size. Troops began pouring out, guns were leveled, and orders barked. A newsman, maybe live but probably virtual, said, “We’re being ordered to shut down all reporting on this—” He disappeared.

  A black cloud emanated from the helicopter, but not before a robocam had shown more equipment being off-loaded. Lem said, “My God, I think that’s a bombcase!” Through the black cloud ripped more gunfire.

  Then no news came through at all.

  The stories conflicted wildly, of cours
e. At least six different agencies, in three different countries, were blamed. A hundred and three people died at the scene, and uncounted more in the senseless riots that followed. One of the dead was the second little boy that had witnessed the landing.

  The first child went up with the ship. It was the only picture that emerged after the government erected visual and electronic blockage: the small craft rising unharmed above the black cloud, ascending into the sky and disappearing into the bright African sunlight.

  The Kikuyu boy was released about a hundred miles away, near another village, but it was a long time before ordinary people learned that.

  Kyra never called me after the furor had died down. I searched for her, but she was more savvy about choosing her aliases. If the government located her, and I assumed they did, no one informed me.

  Why would they?

  Sometimes the world you want comes too late.

  It was not really the world anyone wanted, of course. Third world countries, especially but not exclusively in Africa, were still essentially ungovernable. Fetid urban slums, disease, and terror from local warlords. Daily want, brutality, and suffering, all made orders of magnitude worse by the lunatic compulsion to genocide. Much of the globe lives like this, with little hope of foreseeable change.

  But inside the United States’s tightly guarded, expensively defended borders, a miracle had occurred. Loaves from fishes, something for nothing, the free lunch there ain’t supposed to be one of. Nanotechnology.

  It was still an embryonic industry. But it had brought burgeoning prosperity. And with prosperity came the things that aren’t supposed to cost money but always do: peace, generosity, civility. And one more thing: a space program, the cause of all the news agitation I was pointedly not watching.

  “It’s not fair to say that nano brought civility,” Lucy protested. She was back from a journalism assignment in Sudan that had left her gaunt and limping, with half her hair fallen out. Lucy didn’t volunteer details and I didn’t ask. From the look in her haunted eyes, I didn’t think I could bear to hear her answers.

  “Civility is a by-product of money,” I said. “Starving people are not civil to each other.”

  “Sometimes they are,” she said, looking at some painful memory I could not imagine.

  “Often?” I pressed.

  “No. Not often.” Abruptly Lucy left the room.

  I have learned to wait serenely until she’s ready to return to me, just as she has learned to wait, less serenely, until she is ready to return to those parts of the world where she makes her living. My daughter is too old for what she does, but she cannot, somehow, leave it alone. Injured, diseased, half bald, she always goes back.

  But Lucy is partly right. It isn’t just America’s present riches that have led to her present civility. This decade’s culture—optimistic, tolerant, fairly formal—is also a simple backlash to what went before. Pendulums swing. They cannot not swing.

  While I waited for Lucy, I returned to my needlepoint. Now that nano has begun to easily make us anything, things that are hard to make are back in fashion. My eyes are too old for embroidery or even petit point, but gros point I can do. Under my fingers, roses bloomed on a pair of slippers. A bird flew to the tree beside me, lit on a branch, and watched me solemnly.

  I’m still not used to birds in the house. But, then, I’m not used to this house of my son’s, either. All the rooms open into an open central courtyard two stories high. Atop the courtyard is some sort of invisible shield that I don’t understand. It keeps out cold and insects, and it can be adjusted to let rain in or keep it out. The shield keeps in the birds who live here. What Lem has is a miniature, climate-controlled, carefully landscaped, indoor Eden. The bird watching me was bright red with an extravagant gold tail, undoubtedly genetically engineered for health and long life. Other birds glow in the dark. One has what looks like blue fur.

  “Go away,” I told it. I like the fresh air; the genemod birds give me the creeps.

  When Lucy returned, someone was with her. I put down my needlework, pasted on a smile, and prepared to be civil. The visitor used a walker, moving very slowly. She had sparse gray hair. I let out a little cry.

  I hadn’t even known Kyra was still alive.

  “Mom, guess who’s here! Your cousin Kyra!”

  “Hello, Amy,” Kyra said, and her voice hadn’t changed, still low and husky.

  “Where . . . how did you . . .”

  “Oh, you were always easy to find, remember? I was the difficult one to locate.”

  Lucy said, “Are they looking for you now, Kyra?”

  Kyra. Lucy was born too soon for the new civil formality. Lem’s and Robin’s children would have called her Ms. Lunden, or ma’am.

  “Oh, probably,” Kyra said. “But if they show up, child, just tell them my hearing implant failed again.” She lowered herself into a chair, which obligingly curved itself around her. That still gives me the creeps, too, but Kyra didn’t seem to mind.

  We stared at each other, two ancient ladies in comfortable baggy clothing, and I suddenly saw the twenty-six-year-old she had been, gaudily dressed mistress to an enemy general. Every detail was sharp as winter air: her blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front, her asymmetrical hair the color of gold-leaf. That happens to me more and more. The past is so much clearer than the present.

  Lucy said, “I’ll go make some tea, all right?”

  “Yes, dear, please,” I said.

  Kyra smiled. “She seems like a good person.”

  “Too good,” I said, without explanation. “Kyra, why are you here? Do you need to hide again? This probably isn’t the best place.”

  “No, I’m not hiding. They’re either looking for me or they’re not, but I think not. They’ve got their hands full, after all, up at Celadon.”

  Celadon is the aggressively new international space station. When I first heard the name, I’d thought, why name a space station after a color? But it turns out that’s the name of some famous engineer who designed the nuclear devices that make it cheap to hoist things back and forth from Earth to orbit. They’ve hoisted a lot of things. The station is still growing, but it already houses one hundred seventy scientists, techies, and administrators. Plus, now, two aliens.

  They appeared in the solar system three months ago. The usual alarms went off, but there was no rioting, at least not in the United States. People watched their children more closely. But we had the space station now, a place for the aliens to contact, without actually coming to Earth. And maybe the New Civility (that’s how journalists write about it, with capital letters) made a difference as well. I couldn’t say. But the aliens spent a month or so communicating with Celadon, and then they came aboard, and a few selected humans went aboard their mother ship, and the whole thing began to resemble a tea party fortified with the security of a transnational bank vault.

  Kyra was watching me. “You aren’t paying any attention to the aliens’ return, are you, Amy?”

  “Not really.” I picked up my needlepoint and started to work.

  “That’s a switch, isn’t it? It used to be you who were interested in the political and me who wasn’t.”

  It seemed an odd thing to say, given her career, but I didn’t argue. “How are you, Kyra?”

  “Old.”

  “Ah, yes. I know that feeling.”

  “And your children?”

  I made myself go on stitching. “Robin is dead. Cross-fire victim. His ashes are buried there, under that lilac tree. Lucy you saw. Lem and his wife are fine, and their two kids, and my three great-grandchildren.”

  Kyra nodded, unsurprised. “I have three step-children, two step-grandchildren. Wonderful kids.”

  “You married again?”

  “Late. I was sixty-five, Bill sixty-seven. A pair of sagging gray arthritic honeymooners. But we had ten good years, and I’m grateful for them.”

  I knew what she meant. At the end, one was grateful for all the good year
s, no matter what their aftermath. I said, “Kyra, I still don’t know why you’re here. Not that you’re not welcome, of course, but why now?”

  “I told you. I wanted to hear what you thought of the aliens’ coming to Celadon.”

  “You could have comlinked.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. I stitched on. Lucy brought tea, poured it, and left again.

  “Amy, I really want to know what you think.”

  She was serious. It mattered to her. I put down my teacup. “All right. On Mondays I think they’re not on Celadon at all and the government made the whole thing up. On Tuesdays I think that they’re here to do just what it looks like: make contact with humans, and this is the first time it looks safe to them. The other three times we met them with soldiers and bombs and anger because they landed on our planet. Now there’s a place to interact without coming too close, and we aren’t screeching at them in panic, and they were waiting for that in order to establish trade and/or diplomatic relations. On Wednesdays I think they’re worming their way into our confidence, gathering knowledge about our technology, in order to enslave us or destroy us. On Thursdays I think that they’re aliens, so how can we ever hope to understand their reasons? They’re not human. On Fridays I hope, and on Saturdays I despair, and on Sundays I take a day of rest.”

  Kyra didn’t smile. I remembered that about her: she didn’t have much of a sense of humor. She said, “And why do you think they took me and that Kikuyu boy into their ships?”

  “On Mondays—”

  “I’m serious, Amy!”

  “Always. All right, I guess they just wanted to learn about us in person, so they picked out two growing specimens and knocked them out so they could garner all the secrets of our physical bodies for future use. They might even have taken some of your DNA, you know. You’d never miss it. There could be small culture-grown Kyras running around some distant planet. Or not so small, by now.”

  But Kyra wasn’t interested in the possibilities of genetic engineering. “I think I know why they came.”