Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “You do?” Once she had told me that the aliens came just to destroy her life. But that kind of hubris was for the young.

  “Yes,” Kyra said. “I think they came without knowing the reason. They just came. After all, Amy, if I think about it, I can’t really say why I did half the things in my life. They just seemed the available course of action at the time, so I did them. Why should the aliens be any different? Can you say that you really know why you did all the things in your life?”

  Could I? I thought about it. “Yes, Kyra. I think I can, pretty much. That’s not to say my reasons were good. But they were understandable.”

  She shrugged. “Then you’re different from me. But I’ll tell you this: Any plan the government makes to deal with these aliens won’t work. You know why? Because it will be one plan, one set of attitudes and procedures, and pretty soon things will change on Earth or on Celadon or for the aliens, and then the plan won’t work anymore and still everybody will try desperately to make it work. They’ll try to stay in control, and nobody can control anything important.”

  She said this last with such intensity that I looked up from my needlepoint. She meant it, this banal and obvious insight that she was offering as if it were cutting edge knowledge.

  And yet, it was cutting edge, because each person had to acquire it painfully, in his or her own way, through loss and failure and births and plagues and war and victories and, sometimes, a life shaped by an hour in an alien spaceship. All fodder for the same trite, heart-breaking conclusion. Everything old is new again.

  And yet—

  Sudden tenderness washed over me for Kyra. We had spent most of our lives locked in pointless battle. I reached over to her, carefully so as not to aggravate my creaky joints, and took her hand.

  “Kyra, if you believe you can’t control anything, then you won’t try for control, which of course guarantees that you end up not controlling anything.”

  “Never in my whole life have I been able to make a difference to—what the fuck is that!”

  The furry blue bird had landed on her head, its feet tangling briefly in her hair. “It’s one of Lem’s genernod birds,” I said. “It’s been engineered to have no fear of humans.”

  “Well, that’s a stupid idea!” Kyra said, swatting at it with surprising vigor. The bird flew away. “If that thing lands on me again, I’ll strangle it!”

  “Yes,” I said, and laughed, and didn’t bother to explain why.

  2003

  THE WAR ON TREEMON

  The author’s latest science fiction novel, Crossfire, will be out from Tor next month. It’s about a human planetary colony caught in the crossfire of a war between two much more technologically advanced alien species. In her newest story for us, she takes a look at some disparate human cultures and how they cope with . . .

  I. CLAREE

  The third aka: Good is not corruption, Claree chanted, and it made no sense to her. Of course good wasn’t corruption; if it were corruption, it wouldn’t be good. She tried singing the aka, then speaking it conversationally, then muttering it darkly into the mirrored surface of her closed handheld. Nothing helped. Whatever depths the aka was supposed to reveal, she couldn’t see into them. And in half an hour she would face the Novitiate Master.

  Claree kicked a loose rock, then guiltily glanced around the dome. No one else had come in, thank the universe. The Quiet Dome, plunked down at the end of a long tunnel from the Novitiate like a shell in the tentacle of a one-armed octopus, was empty. It held only Claree, one of the Novitiate cats, and several hundred yellowish Parthia rocks that were supposed to make the Quiet Dome seem like outdoors. The clear pizoelectric walls seemed to disappear. In front of Claree was only the silent emptiness of Parthia stretching away to the horizon.

  Sighing, Claree cleared a small space of rocks and sat cross-legged. Good is not corruption. She filled her mind with specific images: rocks and cats and the people in the Novitiate, their faces and hands and rock carvings and computers and shampoo bottles. The real is concrete, said the second aka, and Claree had mastered that one. She could block out the abstract, the theoretical, the non-existent generalizations and let her mind brim with the glorious touchable world. But that didn’t help, either. No patterns formed from tangibles to turn Corruption is not good into anything other than a dumb tautology.

  The Novitiate cat crawled onto her lap. A gray tabby with green eyes, he was called Phantom by everybody else but Cat by Claree, striving for concreteness. He curled onto her legs and went to sleep in the weak sunshine.

  “At this rate, Cat, I’ll never become a Servant of Peace,” Claree said. The cat didn’t care.

  She sat still as long as she dared, not wanting to disturb the animal, whose soothing purr was supposed to help postulants concentrate. It didn’t, at least not Claree, but the cat felt good on her skinny thighs, warm and heavy. He felt so good that she waited too long before dumping him off and running along the tunnel to the Novitiate, smoothing her short dark hair with one hand as she ran. Nobody was late to see the Master. Especially not someone in such a precarious position as Claree.

  “Postulant, we have a difficulty with you,” the Master said.

  Claree dropped her eyes and didn’t answer.

  “You have been here two years last week, have you not?”

  She nodded.

  “And the third aka . . . nothing.”

  Dumbly, Claree shook her head. They were going to ask her to leave. Pressure built behind her eyelids, and she bit her lip hard to keep the swooping vertigo at bay.

  “That’s better,” the Master said quietly. “How badly do you want to become a Servant of Peace?”

  Claree raised her eyes in astonishment. How could he even ask that? She gazed at him, spare and competent in his black uniform with its tight gold neckband and blue service chips. The Master had advised on Celestia, New Earth, Juniper—he had been used in the Landing Day revolution at Dacha City! With the Orion Arm colonies having reached critical colonization mass, established colonies founding new colonies of their own, there was no better time to enter the service. Didn’t he know how Claree felt?

  She choked out, “I think it’s the most important job ever. To guide politicians toward peace, to become a professional whose job is to manage violence and whose client is the entire galaxy . . . without stable governments you cannot conserve any of the institutions that bring prosperity and—”

  “I didn’t ask you to recite the Ten Points, postulant,” the Master said dryly. “I asked how badly you want to become a Servant of Peace.”

  “With all my heart. I’ll do anything to qualify!”

  “Hmmmm.” He studied her, his face grave.

  “Please don’t . . . please don’t send me away, Master. I truly want to see the world according to the akas. I just . . . just . . .”

  He handed her a tissue. “You just can’t see why good is not corruption.”

  Shamed, she whispered, “No.”

  “Can you see Yuki? Visualize her concretely, in the Quiet Dome, beside Hans. What are they doing?”

  What was the Master doing? He was leading her toward a pattern. Not his role, and not in the rules. She was supposed to see the pattern, the meaning in each aka, for herself. Frantically she seized on the images of Yuki, of Hans, doing . . . what? Claree had never observed them doing anything together, and certainly not in the Quiet Dome.

  The Master said gently, “Mwakwambe is there, too.”

  Mwakwambe . . . Mwakwambe . . . Did Mwakwambe even know Yuki? Side by side by side their images were . . . nothing.

  “Master, I haven’t observed concretely enough.” It was a shameful confession: Observation is all, said the first aka.

  The Master shifted in his chair, and Claree waited miserably for her dismissal. Where would she go, what would she do? This was all she had wanted her entire life.

  “Claree,” he said, “I’m going to invoke an unusual measure. You’ve exceeded the allowed time to master the first
three akas, but, in rare situations, a postulant may be granted more time, if that time is served away from the Novitiate and under a Servant who is in an active order. This afternoon you will be on the train to Cramos.”

  “To . . . to the city?”

  “And from there to the spaceport, with passage to Treemon.”

  “You’re sending me . . . off-world?”

  “To Treemon. Someone will meet you there and you will be taken to a Servant named Benn Ko. You may or may not encounter other Servants and their operations before you reach him. Learn from everything you see.”

  “But—”

  “Pack lightly,” the Master said, gazing at her, considering her, while Claree tried to understand what was happening. It was no clearer than the third aka. She stumbled from the room, just as the gray cat slinked into it, confident and sleek.

  II. BRAK

  In the second year of the war, Brak left his village on Green River to go alone into the mountains. He’d begun to have doubts about the war, its rightness and conduct, and everyone he broached these concerns to reacted with either shock or anger. Didn’t he realize what these people were, what kind of world they wanted? Didn’t he care that Treemon had been attacked?

  Brak had no answers. He couldn’t even articulate his own doubts clearly. So he decided to do a wamu in the mountains to clear his head and detoxify his soul and examine the nature of his doubts as best he could. He was fifteen; it would be his first solo wamu.

  He traveled east, away from the beautiful populated valley, and away from the war far to the west. Brak was no athlete, and the climb upward was difficult in places for a spindly young man with a too-heavy shoulder pack. His mother had overloaded him with food and survival supplies. She’d also made him promise to do the casu wamu, the meditation without fasting, and to be home by dark of the fifth day. She hugged him good-bye without meeting his eyes.

  Late afternoon of the third day he reached a small grassy plateau in the foothills, where he made camp. Brak liked that from the plateau he couldn’t see civilization at all. While climbing the last three days, he’d had all of Greater Treemon laid out below him: the fertile valleys with their green fields and compost tanks, the eco forests restricted to no more visitors than the land could handle, the solar-powered plants where soy and high-protein vegetable bolin were made into tasty, nutritious food. It had all been beautiful, but Brak was obscurely glad to leave it behind for this hidden upland meadow bordered by exactly the kind of rock formations that promised caves.

  Not that he had time to explore caves, he thought with a little spurt of resentment. He’d have to leave tomorrow morning in order to keep his promise to his mother. Of course, he could call her and say he was staying away longer, but promises must be kept; they were the foundation of a trustful society. Anyway, using the comlink would break his wamu.

  Brak made a fire, ate dinner, and activated the electronic perimeter. The eastern mountains were famous for cave hyluts, and of course Brak would never carry a weapon. His family was opposed to guns for anyone but the army, about which Brak knew almost nothing.

  He tried to think about the army as the quick tropical darkness fell. Why did men and women join an army? How could you know your side was right? Was fighting always wrong unless you were attacked? Did thinking about these things mean that he, Brak, had a great soul, or did even wondering that about yourself mean your soul was petty and small?

  He heard a noise in the darkness.

  Nothing could get in across the perimeter, he reminded himself. Nonetheless, he moved a little closer to the fire, peering into the gloom.

  The noise came closer.

  “Hello?” Brak called uncertainly, because now the sound was definitely moving inside the perimeter. It took on a dark shape. Frantically he clawed through his backpack for the comlink. Before he could find it, the dark shape became a person, then the next second a girl, and then the neurostunner fired at him and he toppled sideways and out.

  When Brak woke, he lay inside a cave, listening to a baby cry.

  A baby?

  Incredible, but there in a basket beside the blanket on which Brak lay was a baby. A warmly wrapped, howling infant. Beyond the basket lay a little boy, asleep on a nest of blankets. As Brak sat up, a girl walked over to the baby and picked it up, patting and jiggling it with no effect whatsoever. It was the girl who had fired at him at his campsite. She wore heavy boots and a black uniform of some sort. Not Treemon Free Army, not enemy green.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” she said, smiling. “Good, because it’s almost time to go. Do you have a headache?”

  Brak shook his head, unable to speak. The baby screamed louder.

  “I’ll be right back,” the girl said. She was very pretty, with floating fair hair above the tight gold neckband of a black uniform. “Just let me give this kid to someone who actually knows about babies.” She walked away.

  Brak jerked himself to his feet and started to follow her. He was stopped by an invisible barrier through which she passed effortlessly. The girl disappeared behind a turning in the rock, and the baby’s cries grew fainter. Brak looked around helplessly. He now saw that in addition to the sleeping boy, two more children lay on blankets in this corner of the cave.

  The girl returned. “All right, we’re getting ready to go. Are you going to give us any trouble? We didn’t plan on you, you know. You’re really too old.”

  “For what?” Brak blurted. Fear arrived all at once, like a sudden downpour.

  “I’m not the proper person to explain that to you,” the girl said primly. “Incidentally, what’s your name?”

  Should he answer? Brak hesitated, finally gave his personal name but not his family name. “Brak.”

  “I’m Julu, private second class, Servants of Peace.” She smiled warmly. She was only a few years older than he was. Two men rounded the cave turning and headed toward the two little girls on the far blanket. Gently they picked up the children.

  Julu hoisted the sleeping boy in her arms. “Come on, Brak,” she said. “Yani doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  Yani? Waiting for what? Brak thought of refusing to follow her—but then what? What would that gain him? It might even look like cowardice, and he didn’t want this older, sophisticated girl to think he was a coward. Maybe it would be best to do what he was told until he understood what was going on.

  He followed Julu out of the cave.

  III. CLAREE

  Treemon City spaceport almost broke her nerve, until Claree scolded herself for cowardice. How could she benefit from this great service opportunity if she couldn’t face a few native guards with irrelevant machinery?

  The guards didn’t consider the machinery irrelevant, of course. Claree had studied in the ship’s library how wary Treemon was of outsiders, especially now that they were at war.

  “Step this way, ma’am,” the guard said. “Now, what you have to do is step into this decon booth, take off all your clothes, and push them through the slot in the opposite wall. Just press the button when you’re ready. When the shower’s over, the room will dry and biodegradable clothing will slide out for you. Your own clothes will be available when you come out, and the rest of your luggage will wait for you in the visitors’ hall.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s completely private, ma’am,” the female guard said warmly. “No surveillance equipment in decon booths. You have our word, ma’am. Your modesty is protected.”

  Claree hadn’t been worried about her modesty. Treemon, she’d read, was as sexually puritanical as it was fanatic about green technology. The two often went together: sanctity and inviolability of the planet, sanctity and inviolability of the body. Claree had gone through decon on the ship, but apparently that was not enough for Treemon. She smiled at the two guards and stepped into the booth.

  The next step was tissue samples, for DNA scan. A medtech asked her formally, as he drew blood and took cell scrapings, “You are not the product of genetic engineer
ing, are you, ma’am?”

  Claree possessed genemods, altered in vitro, to replace genes that might have eventually resulted in three inherited-tendency diseases. The gene replacements were undetectable, merely substitutions of healthy alleles for deformed ones. The Master had instructed her on what to say. “No, I have no genetic modifications.”

  “And you have no biological implants? Non-living implants like eye lenses or heart valves are fine. Even mechanical muscle augments are tolerated, just nothing living. We on Treemon respect biological integrity.”

  “I have no living symbiotes.” This they could check by Klein scan, and probably would.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Her small canvas bag had been irradiated. Her Klein scan, a tiresome procedure that took several hours, was negative. Freedom, she was cheerfully reminded by the official who entered her in the Treemon deebee, depended on secure, biologically protected borders. Although of course Treemon City was always happy to welcome journalists like herself; the more of the Orion Arm that knew of the workable utopia that had been created here, the better. Information must be free in a fully human society. Welcome to Treemon!

  “Thank you,” Claree said.

  She was disposed to be critical. No place that thought so well of itself could be that good. But, riding through the city in a solar bus, heading for the outlying valleys, Claree had to admit that Treemon looked pretty good. She took three buses more than necessary, wanting to see as much as possible. Housing in places was modest, but she saw no squalor, no real poverty. Trees grew everywhere. Factories were ecologically sound. Children looked safe. And, even though Treemon was at war with its neighbor to the east, Ignatus, there were no soldiers on the streets.

  Treemon kept the war on the enemy’s ground.

  As her fourth bus left the city, Claree was especially interested in the farms. Her journalist credentials gave her license to ask questions. She got off at a depot village, sauntered into the café (at least she hoped it was a saunter), and introduced herself as a journalist to two clean, intelligent-looking people with dirt on their boots.