Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I had never seen his smooth diplomatic face look so grim. “Yes, she did it. She—”

  “See . . . her?”

  “She’s in custody, waiting deportation.”

  “See . . . her!”

  “No.”

  “Vid . . .” God, he better stop making me talk!

  “All right,” he said grudgingly. “That’s some niece you’ve got there. You have no idea how upset the Visitors were. The only reason the whole dance program didn’t end right there, with ripple-effect consequences throughout the entire range of human-Visitor relations, is those kids’ affection for you.”

  Affection? For me?

  Ten minutes later Sally’s face appeared on an interactive cube ponderously wheeled to my bedside by a disapproving medtech. Sally looked terrible. Her face had bloated from crying, her nose was red and raw, and words tumbled from her like a falling building.

  “Aunt Celia, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to injure you, I never thought you’d go on stage, it was just supposed to be a stupid prank. Oh, God, you’re the only one who’s ever cared what I did—”

  I had a sudden insight, completely unlike me. This was a rare moment. Sally was completely vulnerable, as I’d never seen her before and would probably never see her again, and she would answer truthfully whatever I asked her. Provided I asked her quick.

  “Sally . . . why?” The words hurt my burned esophagus.

  “You paid all that attention to them! I was . . . I was . . .”

  Jealous. She was jealous.

  “. . . but I never thought anyone would get hurt, not even them! I never thought I could hurt anything!”

  And there it was. She never thought she’d have any real impact. Just as she’d never had any true, deep effect on my workaholic brother, or on her selfish mother, or even on me. Yes, I cared what she did, but not as much as I cared about ballet. I wasn’t going to apologize for that, though. . . I couldn’t apologize for it. Ballet had been my life, was my life, gave my life shape and meaning. Even if that shape now had six arms instead of two and bouréed forward on suckers. It was still ballet, and it still made its exquisite impact. I’d just seen that.

  But this child . . . she didn’t believe she’d ever had any real impact on anything, or anyone. Until now.

  “Sally,” I croaked, “you did . . . very bad. Might . . . wreck . . . all human-Mollie. . . relations . . .”

  She looked scared, and horrified, and impressed. “Really?”

  “You . . . must . . .” I couldn’t get any more words out. One last huge effort. “Make . . . right . . .”

  “How?”

  I shook my head and cut off the link. Then I pressed the button for Randall.

  He arrived quickly, but I couldn’t talk anymore. I made him sit me up and get me a handheld. Everything in my body hurt. Nonetheless, I keyed in:

  . . . Tell Sally she nearly ruined all alien contact for good. Make this very important. Very! Let her think everything hinges on her apology, let her make it, and get her a community service job on Earth with kids who really need her. . .

  He snapped, “I’m not running a juvenile rehabilitation program, Celia!”

  I glared at him and picked up the handheld again.

  . . . Do it, or I quit as dance instructor . . .

  Then I fell back on my pillows and closed my eyes, the exhausted dictator.

  Would it work for Sally? I didn’t know. We don’t pick the things that define us—they pick us, which is a fucking random arrangement. But having an impact on something . . . yes. Even a negative impact was better than none. And a positive impact, however weird . . .

  Yes.

  When I had rested a bit, I’d call Randall again. I had to tell him he needed to reschedule my ballet students’ recital of Afternoon of a Faun.

  * * *

  Nancy Kress is the author of twenty books: twelve novels of science fiction or fantasy, one YA novel, two thrillers, three story collections, and two books on writing. Her most recent book is Probability Space, the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Probability Moon and Probability Sun. The trilogy concerns quantum physics, a space war, and the nature of reality. Kress’ short fiction has won her three Nebulas and a Hugo. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages, including Croatian and Hebrew. She writes a monthly “Fiction” column for Writer’s Digest magazine, and lives in Maryland.

  Ej-Es

  Jesse, come home

  There’s a hole in the bed

  where we slept

  Now it’s growing cold

  Hey Jesse, your face

  in the place where we lay

  by the hearth, all apart

  it hangs on my heart . . .

  Jesse, I’m lonely

  Come home.

  —“Jesse,” Janis Ian, 1972

  “Why did you first enter the Corps?” Lolimel asked her as they sat at the back of the shuttle, just before landing. Mia looked at the young man helplessly, because how could you answer a question like that? Especially when it was asked by the idealistic and worshipful new recruits, too ignorant to know what a waste of time worship was, let alone simplistic questions.

  “Many reasons,” Mia said gravely, vaguely. He looked like so many medicians she had worked with, for so many decades on so many planets . . . intense, thick-haired, genemod beautiful, a little insane. You had to be a little insane to leave Earth for the Corps, knowing that when (if) you ever returned, all you had known would have been dust for centuries.

  He was more persistent than most. “What reasons?”

  “The same as yours, Lolimel,” she said, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Now be quiet, please, we’re entering the atmosphere.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Be quiet.” Entry was so much easier on him than on her; he had not got bones weakened from decades in space. They did weaken, no matter what exercise one took or what supplements or what gene therapy. Mia leaned back in her shuttle chair and closed her eyes. Ten minutes, maybe, of aerobraking and descent; surely she could stand ten minutes. Or not.

  The heaviness began, abruptly increased. Worse on her eyeballs, as always; she didn’t have good eye-socket muscles, had never had them. Such an odd weakness. Well, not for long; this was her last flight. At the next station, she’d retire. She was already well over age, and her body felt it. Only her body? No, her mind, too. At the moment, for instance, she couldn’t remember the name of the planet they were hurtling toward. She recalled its catalogue number, but not whatever its colonists, who were not answering hails from ship, had called it.

  “Why did you join the Corps?”

  “Many reasons.”

  And so few of them fulfilled. But that was not a thing you told the young.

  The colony sat at the edge of a river, under an evening sky of breathable air set with three brilliant, fast-moving moons. Beds of glorious flowers dotted the settlement, somewhere in size between a large town and a small city. The buildings of foamcast embedded with glittering native stone were graceful, well-proportioned rooms set around open atria. Minimal furniture, as graceful as the buildings; even the machines blended unobtrusively into the lovely landscape. The colonists had taste and restraint and a sense of beauty. They were all dead.

  “A long time ago,” said Kenin. Officially she was Expedition Head, although titles and chains-of-command tended to erode near the galactic edge, and Kenin led more by consensus and natural calm than by rank. More than once the team had been grateful for Kenin’s calm. Lolimel looked shaken, although he was trying to hide it.

  Kenin studied the skeleton before them. “Look at those bones—completely clean.”

  Lolimel managed, “It might have been picked clean quickly by predators, or carnivorous insects, or . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “I already scanned it, Lolimel. No microscopic bone nicks. She decayed right there in bed, along with clothing and bedding.”

  The three of them looked at the bones lying on the indestructib
le mattress coils of some alloy Mia had once known the name of. Long clean bones, as neatly arranged as if for a first-year anatomy lesson. The bedroom door had been closed; the dehumidifying system had, astonishingly, not failed; the windows were intact. Nothing had disturbed the woman’s long rot in the dry air until nothing remained, not even the bacteria that had fed on her, not even the smell of decay.

  Kenin finished speaking to the other team. She turned to Mia and Lolimel, her beautiful brown eyes serene. “There are skeletons throughout the city, some in homes and some collapsed in what seem to be public spaces. Whatever the disease was, it struck fast. Jamal says their computer network is gone, but individual rec cubes might still work. Those things last forever.”

  Nothing lasts forever, Mia thought, but she started searching the cabinets for a cube. She said to Lolimel, to give him something to focus on, “How long ago was this colony founded, again?”

  “Three hundred sixty E-years,” Lolimel said. He joined the search.

  Three hundred sixty years since a colony ship left an established world with its hopeful burden, arrived at this deadly Eden, established a city, flourished, and died. How much of Mia’s lifetime, much of it spent traveling at just under c, did that represent? Once she had delighted in figuring out such equations, in wondering if she’d been born when a given worldful of colonists made planetfall. But by now there were too many expeditions, too many colonies, too many accelerations and decelerations, and she’d lost track.

  Lolimel said abruptly, “Here’s a rec cube.”

  “Play it,” Kenin said, and when he just went on staring at it in the palm of his smooth hand, she took the cube from him and played it herself.

  It was what she expected. A native plague of some kind, jumping DNA-based species (which included all species in the galaxy, thanks to panspermia). The plague had struck after the colonists thought they had vaccinated against all dangerous micros. Of course, they couldn’t really have thought that; even three hundred sixty years ago doctors had been familiar with alien species-crossers. Some were mildly irritating, some dangerous, some epidemically fatal. Colonies had been lost before, and would be again.

  “Complete medical data resides on green rec cubes,” the recorder had said in the curiously accented International of three centuries ago. Clearly dying, he gazed out from the cube with calm, sad eyes. A brave man. “Any future visitors to Good Fortune should be warned.”

  Good Fortune. That was the planet’s name.

  “All right,” Kenin said, “tell the guard to search for green cubes. Mia, get the emergency analysis lab set up and direct Jamal to look for burial sites. If they had time to inter some victims—if they interred at all, of course—we might be able to recover some micros to create vacs or cures. Lolimel, you assist me in—”

  One of the guards, carrying weapons that Mia could not have named, blurted, “Ma’am, how do we know we won’t get the same thing that killed the colonists?”

  Mia looked at her. Like Lolimel, she was very young. Like all of them, she would have her story about why she volunteered for the Corps.

  Now the young guard was blushing. “I mean, ma’am, before you can make a vaccination? How do we know we won’t get the disease, too?”

  Mia said gently, “We don’t.”

  No one, however, got sick. The colonists had had interment practices, they had had time to bury some of their dead in strong, water-tight coffins before everyone else died, and their customs didn’t include embalming. Much more than Mia had dared hope for. Good Fortune, indeed.

  In five days of tireless work they had the micro isolated, sequenced, and analyzed. It was a virus, or a virus analogue, that had somehow gained access to the brain and lodged near the limbic system, creating destruction and death. Like rabies, Mia thought, and hoped this virus hadn’t caused the terror and madness of that stubborn disease. Not even Earth had been able to eradicate rabies.

  Two more days yielded the vaccine. Kenin dispensed it outside the large building on the edge of the city, function unknown, which had become Corps headquarters. Mia applied her patch, noticing with the usual distaste the leathery, wrinkled skin of her forearm. Once she had had such beautiful skin, what was it that a long-ago lover had said to her, what had been his name . . . Ah, growing old was not for the gutless.

  Something moved at the edge of her vision.

  “Lolimel . . . did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Nothing.” Sometimes her aging eyes played tricks on her; she didn’t want Lolimel’s pity.

  The thing moved again.

  Casually Mia rose, brushing imaginary dirt from the seat of her uniform, strolling toward the bushes where she’d seen motion. From her pocket she pulled her gun. There were animals on this planet, of course, although the Corps had only glimpsed them from a distance, and rabies was transmitted by animal bite . . .

  It wasn’t an animal. It was a human child.

  No, not a child, Mia realized as she rounded the clump of bushes and, amazingly, the girl didn’t run. An adolescent, or perhaps older, but so short and thin that Mia’s mind had filled in “child.” A scrawny young woman with light brown skin and long, matted black hair, dressed carelessly in some sort of sarong-like wrap. Staring at Mia with a total lack of fear.

  “Hello,” Mia said gently.

  “Ej-es?” the girl said.

  Mia said into her wrister, “Kenin . . . we’ve got natives. Survivors.”

  The girl smiled. Her hair was patchy on one side, marked with small white rings. Fungus, Mia thought professionally, absurdly. The girl walked right toward Mia, not slowing, as if intending to walk through her. Instinctively Mia put out an arm. The girl walked into it, bonked herself on the forehead, and crumpled to the ground.

  “You’re not supposed to beat up the natives, Mia,” Kenin said. “God, she’s not afraid of us at all. How can that be? You nearly gave her a concussion.”

  Mia was as bewildered as Kenin, as all of them. She’d picked up the girl, who’d looked bewildered but not angry, and then Mia had backed off, expecting the girl to run. Instead she’d stood there rubbing her forehead and jabbering, and Mia had seen that her sarong was made of an uncut sheet of plastic, its colors faded to a mottled gray.

  Kenin, Lolimel, and two guards had come running. And still the girl wasn’t afraid. She chattered at them, occasionally pausing as if expecting them to answer. When no one did, she eventually turned and moved leisurely off.

  Mia said, “I’m going with her.”

  Instantly a guard said, “It’s not safe, ma’am,” and Kenin said, “Mia, you can’t just—”

  “You don’t need me here,” she said, too brusquely; suddenly there seemed nothing more important in the world than going with this girl. Where did that irrational impulse come from? “And I’ll be perfectly safe with a gun.”

  This was such a stunningly stupid remark that no one answered her. But Kenin didn’t order her to stay. Mia accepted the guard’s tanflefoam and Kenin’s vidcam and followed the girl.

  It was hard to keep up with her. “Wait!” Mia called, which produced no response. So she tried what the girl had said to her: “Ej-es!”

  Immediately the girl stopped and turned to her with glowing eyes and a smile that could have melted glaciers, had Good Fortune had such a thing. Gentle planet, gentle person, who was almost certainly a descendent of the original dead settlers. Or was she? InterGalactic had no record of any other registered ship leaving for this star system, but that didn’t mean anything. InterGalactic didn’t know everything. Sometimes, given the time dilation of space travel, Mia thought they knew nothing.

  “Ej-es,” the girl agreed, sprinted back to Mia, and took her hand. Slowing her youthful pace to match the older woman’s, she led Mia home.

  The houses were scattered, as though they couldn’t make up their mind to be a village or not. A hundred yards away, another native walked toward a distant house. The two ignored each other.

  Mia could
n’t stand the silence. She said, “I am Mia.”

  The girl stopped outside her hut and looked at her.

  Mia pointed to her chest. “Mia.”

  “Es-ef-eb,” the girl said, pointing to herself and giving that glorious smile.

  Not “ej-es,” which must mean something else. Mia pointed to the hut, a primitive affair of untrimmed logs, pieces of foamcast carried from the city, and sheets of faded plastic, all tacked crazily together.

  “Ef-ef,” said Esefeb, which evidently meant “home.” This language was going to be a bitch: degraded and confusing.

  Esefeb suddenly hopped to one side of the dirt path, laughed, and pointed at blank air. Then she took Mia’s hand and led her inside.

  More confusion, more degradation. The single room had an open fire with the simple venting system of a hole in the roof. The bed was high on stilts (why?) with a set of rickety steps made of rotting, untrimmed logs. One corner held a collection of huge pots in which grew greenery; Mia saw three unfired clay pots, one of them sagging sideways so far the soil had spilled onto the packed-dirt floor. Also a beautiful titanium vase and a cracked hydroponic vat. On one plant, almost the size of a small tree, hung a second sheet of plastic sarong, this one an unfaded blue-green. Dishes and tools littered the floor, the same mix as the pots of scavenged items and crude homemade ones. The hut smelled of decaying food and unwashed bedding. There was no light source and no machinery.

  Kenin’s voice sounded softly from her wrister. “Your vid is coming through fine. Even the most primitive human societies have some type of art work.”

  Mia didn’t reply. Her attention was riveted to Esefeb. The girl flung herself up the “stairs” and sat up in bed, facing the wall. What Mia had seen before could hardly be called a smile compared to the light, the sheer joy, that illuminated Esefeb’s face now. Esefeb shuddered in ecstasy, crooning to the empty wall.

  “Ej-es. Ej-es. Aaahhhh, Ej-es!”

  Mia turned away. She was a medician, but Esefeb’s emotion seemed too private to witness. It was the ecstasy of orgasm, or religious transfiguration, or madness.