Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Kenin dropped her arms and looked at Mia. Her whole demeanor changed, relaxation into fortress. “Mia . . . I’ve already polled everyone privately. And run the computer sims. We’ll meet, but the decision is going to be to extend no cure. The phantoms are a biologically based cultural difference.”

  “The hell they are! These people are dying out!”

  “No, they’re not. If they were heading for extinction, it’d be a different situation. But the satellite imagery and population equations, based on data left by the generation that had the plague, show they’re increasing. Slowly, but a definite population gain significant to the point-oh-one level of confidence.”

  “Kenin—”

  “I’m exhausted, Mia. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

  Plan on it, Mia thought grimly. She stored the data on the dying toddler’s matrilineage in her handheld.

  A week in base, and Mia could convince no one, not separately nor in a group. Medicians typically had tolerant psychological profiles, with higher-than-average acceptance of the unusual, divergent, and eccentric. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have joined the Corps.

  On the third day, to keep herself busy, Mia joined the junior medicians working on refining the cure for what was now verified as “limbic seizures with impaired sensory input causing Charles Bonnet syndrome.” Over the next few weeks it became clear to Mia what Kenin had meant; this treatment, if they had to use it, would be brutally hard on the brain. What was that old ditty? ”Cured last night of my disease, I died today of my physician.” Well, it still happened enough in the Corps. Another reason behind the board’s decision.

  She felt a curious reluctance to go back to Esefeb. Or, as the words kept running through her mind, Mia ek etej Esefeb efef. God, it was a tongue twister. These people didn’t just need help with parasites, they needed an infusion of new consonants. It was a relief to be back at base, to be working with her mind, solving technical problems alongside rational scientists. Still, she couldn’t shake a feeling of being alone, being lonely: Mia eket.

  Or maybe the feeling was more like futility.

  “Lolimel’s back,” Jamal said. He’d come up behind her as she sat at dusk on her favorite stone bench, facing the city. At this time of day the ruins looked romantic, infused with history. The sweet scents of that night-blooming flower, which Mia still hadn’t identified, wafted around her.

  “I think you should come now,” Jamal said, and this time Mia heard his tone. She spun around. In the alien shadows Jamal’s face was set as ice.

  “He’s contracted it,” Mia said, knowing beyond doubt that it was true. The virus wasn’t just fetally transmitted, it wasn’t a slow-acting retrovirus, and if Lolimel had slept with Esefeb . . . But he wouldn’t be that stupid. He was a medician, he’d been warned . . .

  “We don’t really know anything solid about the goddamn thing!” Jamal burst out.

  “We never do,” Mia said, and the words cracked her dry lips like salt.

  Lolimel stood in the center of the ruined atrium, giggling at something only he could see. Kenin, who could have proceeded without Mia, nodded at her. Mia understood; Kenin acknowledged the special bond Mia had with the young medician. The cure was untested, probably brutal, no more really than dumping a selection of poisons in the right areas of the brain, in itself problematical with the blood-brain barrier.

  Mia made herself walk calmly up to Lolimel. “What’s so funny, Lolimel?”

  “All those sandwigs crawling in straight lines over the floor. I never saw blue ones before.”

  Sandwigs. Lolimel, she remembered, had been born on New Carthage. Sandwigs were always red.

  Lolimel said, “But why is there a tree growing out of your head, Mia?”

  “Strong fertilizer,” she said. “Lolimel, did you have sex with Esefeb?”

  He looked genuinely shocked. “No!”

  “All right.” He might or might not be lying.

  Jamal whispered, “A chance to study the hallucinations in someone who can fully articulate—”

  “No,” Kenin said. “Time matters with this . . .” Mia saw that she couldn’t bring herself to say “cure.”

  Realization dawned on Lolimel’s face. “Me? You’re going to . . . me? There’s nothing wrong with me!”

  “Lolimel, dear heart . . .” Mia said.

  “I don’t have it!”

  “And the floor doesn’t have sandwigs. Lolimel—”

  “No!”

  The guards had been alerted. Lolimel didn’t make it out of the atrium. They held him, flailing and yelling, while Kenin deftly slapped on a tranq patch. In ten seconds he was out.

  “Tie him down securely,” Kenin said, breathing hard. “Daniel, get the brain bore started as soon as he’s prepped. Everyone else, start packing up, and impose quarantine. We can’t risk this for anyone else here. I’m calling a Section Eleven.”

  Section Eleven: If the MedCorps officer in charge deems the risk to Corps members to exceed the gain to colonists by a factor of three or more, the officer may pull the Corps off-planet.

  It was the first time Mia had ever seen Kenin make a unilateral decision.

  Twenty-four hours later, Mia sat beside Lolimel as dusk crept over the city. The shuttle had already carried up most personnel and equipment. Lolimel was in the last shift because, as Kenin did not need to say aloud, if he died, his body would be left behind. But Lolimel had not died. He had thrashed in unconscious seizures, had distorted his features in silent grimaces of pain until Mia would not have recognized him, had suffered malfunctions in alimentary, lymphatic, endocrine, and parasympathetic nervous systems, all recorded on the monitors. But he would live. The others didn’t know it, but Mia did.

  “We’re ready for him, Mia,” the young tech said. “Are you on this shuttle, too?”

  “No, the last one. Move him carefully. We don’t know how much pain he’s actually feeling through the meds.”

  She watched the gurney slide out of the room, its monitors looming over Lolimel like cliffs over a raging river. When he’d gone, Mia slipped into the next building, and then the next. Such beautiful buildings: spacious atria, beautifully proportioned rooms, one structure flowing into another.

  Eight buildings away, she picked up the pack she’d left there. It was heavy, even though it didn’t contain everything she had cached around the city. It was so easy to take things when a base was being hastily withdrawn. Everyone was preoccupied, everyone assumed anything not readily visible was already packed, inventories were neglected and the deebees not cross-checked. No time. Historically, war had always provided great opportunities for profiteers.

  Was that what she was? Yes, but not a profit measured in money. Measure it, rather, in lives saved, or restored to dignity, or enhanced.”Why did you first enter the Corps?” Because I’m a medician, Lolimel. Not an anthropologist.

  They would notice, of course, that Mia herself wasn’t aboard the last shuttle. But Kenin, at least, would realize that searching from her would be a waste of valuable resources when Mia didn’t want to be found. And Mia was so old. Surely the old should be allowed to make their own decisions.

  Although she would miss them, these Corps members who had been her family since the last assignment shuffle, eighteen months ago and decades ago, depending on whose time you counted by. Especially she would miss Lolimel. But this was the right way to end her life, in service to these colonists’ health. She was a medician.

  It went better than Mia could have hoped. When the ship had gone—she’d seen it leave orbit, a fleeting stream of light—Mia went to Esefeb.

  “Mia etej efef,” Esefeb said with her rosy smile. Mia come home. Mia walked toward her, hugged the girl, and slapped the tranq patch on her neck.

  For the next week, Mia barely slept. After the makeshift surgery, she tended Esefeb through the seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, pain. On the morning the girl woke up, herself again, Esefeb was there to bathe the feeble body, feed it, nurse Esefeb. She recovered very fast;
the cure was violent on the body but not as debilitating as everyone had feared. And afterwards Esefeb was quieter, meeker, and surprisingly intelligent as Mia taught her the rudiments of water purification, sanitation, safe food storage, health care. By the time Mia moved on to Esefeb’s mother’s house, Esefeb was free of most parasites, and Mia was working on the rest. Esefeb never mentioned her former hallucinations. It was possible she didn’t remember them.

  “Esefeb ekebet,” Mia said as she hefted her pack to leave. Esefeb be well.

  Esefeb nodded. She stood quietly as Mia trudged away, and when Mia turned to wave at her, Esefeb waved back.

  Mia shifted the pack on her shoulders. It seemed heavier than before. Or maybe Mia was just older. Two weeks older, merely, but two weeks could make a big difference. An enormous difference.

  Two weeks could start to save a civilization.

  Night fell. Esefeb sat on the stairs to her bed, clutching the blue-green sheet of plastic in both hands. She sobbed and shivered, her clean face contorted. Around her, the unpopulated shadows grew thicker and darker. Eventually, she wailed aloud to the empty night.

  “Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es . . . etej efef! O, etej efef!”

  2004

  SHIVA IN SHADOW

  Nancy Kress, who lives in upstate New York, is the author of twenty- one books, most recently Nothing Human and Crossfire. Both are about humanity ’s future—but with far different premises and outcomes. She is the winner of three Nebulas and one Hugo for her short fiction. In previous lives she was a calendar model, a fourth-grade teacher, a college instructor, and an advertising copywriter. Her "Shiva in Shadow" is that unusual thing, a hard-science sciencefiction story that manages also to be a rich, deep study of fully realized characters under stress in a far-future situation.

  1: SHIP

  I WATCHED THE probe launch from the Kepler’s top-deck observatory, where the entire Schaad hull is clear to the stars. I stood between Ajit and Kane. The observatory, which is also the ship’s garden, bloomed wildly with my exotics, bursting into flower in such exuberant profusion that even to see the probe go, we had to squeeze between a seven-foot-high bed of comoralias and the hull.

  “God, Tirzah, can’t you prune these things?” Kane said. He pressed his nose to the nearly invisible hull, like a small child. Something streaked briefly across the sky. “There it goes. Not that there’s much to see.”

  I turned to stare at him. Not much to see! Beyond the Kepler lay the most violent and dramatic part of the galaxy, in all its murderous glory. True, the Kepler had stopped a hundred light years from the core, for human safety, and dust-and-gas clouds muffled the view somewhat. But, on the other hand, we were far enough away for a panoramic view.

  The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the lethal heart of the galaxy, shone gauzily with the heated gases it was sucking downward into oblivion. Around Sag A* circled Sagittarius West, a three-armed spiral of hot plasma ten light years across, radiating furiously as it cooled. Around that, Sagittarius East, a huge shell left over from some catastrophic explosion within the last 100,000 years, expanded outward. I saw thousands of stars, including the blazing blue-hot stars of IRS16, hovering dangerously close to the hole, and giving off a stellar wind fierce enough to blow a long fiery tail off the nearby red giant star. Everything was racing, radiating, colliding, ripping apart, screaming across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All set against the sweet, light scent of my brief-lived flowers.

  Nothing going on. But Kane had never been interested in spectacle.

  Ajit said in his musical accent, “No, not much to see. But much to pray for. There go we.”

  Kane snapped, “I don’t pray.”

  “I did not mean ‘pray’ in the religious sense,” Ajit said calmly. He is always calm. “I mean hope. It is a miraculous thing, yes? There go we.”

  He was right, of course. The probe contained the Ajit-analogue, the Kane-analogue, the Tirzah-analogue, all uploaded into a crystal computer no bigger than a comoralia bloom. “We” would go into that stellar violence at the core, where our fragile human bodies could not go. “We” would observe, and measure, and try to find answers to scientific questions in that roiling heart of galactic spacetime. Ninety percent of the probe’s mass was shielding for the computer. Ninety percent of the rest was shielding for the three mini-capsules that the probe would fire back to us with recorded and analyzed data. There was no way besides the mini-caps to get information out of that bath of frenzied radiation.

  Just as there was no way to know exactly what questions Ajit and Kane would need to ask until they were close to Sag A*. The analogues would know. They knew everything Ajit and Kane and I knew, right up until the moment we were uploaded.

  “Shiva, dancing,” Ajit said.

  “What?” Kane said.

  “Nothing. You would not appreciate the reference. Come with me, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

  I stopped straining to see the probe, unzoomed my eyes, and smiled at Ajit. “Of course.”

  This is why I am here.

  Ajit’s skin is softer than Kane’s, less muscled. Kane works out every day in ship’s gym, scowling like a demon. Ajit rolled off me and laid his hand on my glowing, satisfied crotch.

  “You are so beautiful, Tirzah.”

  I laughed. “We are all beautiful. Why would anyone effect a genetic alteration that wasn’t?”

  “People will do strange things sometimes.”

  “So I just noticed,” I teased him.

  “Sometimes I think so much of what Kane and I do is strange to you. I see you sitting at the table, listening to us, and I know you cannot follow our physics. It makes me sad for you.”

  I laid my hand on top of his, pushing down my irritation with the skill of long practice. It does irritate me, this calm sensitivity of Ajit’s. It’s lovely in bed—he is gentler and more considerate, always, than Kane—but then there comes the other side, this faint condescension. “I feel sad for you.” Sad for me! Because I’m not also a scientist! I am the captain of this expedition, with master status in ship control and a first-class license as a Nurturer. On the Kepler, my word is law, with virtually no limits. I have over fifty standard-years’ experience, specializing in the nurture of scientists. I have never lost an expedition, and I need no one’s pity.

  Naturally, I showed none of this to Ajit. I massaged his hand with mine, which meant that his hand massaged my crotch, and purred softly. “I’m glad you decided to show me this.”

  “Actually, that is not what I wanted to show you.”

  “No?”

  “No. Wait here, Tirzah.”

  He got up and padded, naked, to his personal locker. Beautiful, beautiful body, brown and smooth, like a slim polished tree. I could see him clearly; Ajit always makes love with the bunk lights on full, as if in sunlight. We lay in his bunk, not mine. I never take either him or Kane to my bunk. My bunk contained various concealed items that they don’t, and won’t, know about, from duplicate surveillance equipment to rarely-used subdermal trackers. Precautions, only. I am a captain.

  From his small storage locker, Ajit pulled a statue and turned shyly, even proudly, to show it to me. I sat up, surprised.

  The statue was big, big enough so that it must have taken up practically his entire allotment of personal space. Heavy, too, from the way Ajit balanced it before his naked body. It was some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.

  “This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”

  “Ajit—”

  “No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods—thousands—but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three.” />
  This explanation sounded weak to me—a holo of Shiva would have accomplished the same thing, without using up nearly all of Ajit’s weight allotment. Before I could say this, Ajit said, “This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to my scientific questions.”

  I don’t understand Ajit’s scientific concerns very well—or Kane’s—but I know down to my bones how much they matter to him. It is my job to know. Ajit carries within his beautiful body a terrible coursing ambition, a river fed by the longings of a poor family who have sacrificed what little they had gained on New Bombay for this favored son. Ajit is the receptacle into which they have poured so much hope, so much sacrifice, so much selfishness. The strain on that vessel is what makes Ajit’s love-making so gentle. He cannot afford to crack.

  “You’ll bring the Shiva statue back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”

  In his hands, with the bright lighting, the bronze statue cast a dancing shadow on his naked body.

  I found Kane at his terminal, so deep in thought that he didn’t know I was there until I squeezed his shoulder. Then he jumped, cursed, and dragged his eyes from his displays.

  “How does it progress, Kane?”

  “It doesn’t. How could it? I need more data!”

  “It will come. Be patient,” I said.

  He rubbed his left ear, a constant habit when he’s irritated, which is much of the time. When he’s happily excited, Kane runs his left hand through his coarse red hair until it stands up like flames. Now he smiled ruefully. “I’m not much known for patience.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “But you’re right, Tirzah. The data will come. It’s just hard waiting for the first mini-cap. I wish to hell we could have more than three. Goddamn cheap bureaucrats! At an acceleration of—”

  “Don’t give me the figures again,” I said. I wound my fingers in his hair and pulled playfully. “Kane, I came to ask you a favor.”