Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Not that Calyx looks the same, either. A new artist received the design privilege when Bej and Camy’s franchise ended. His name is Kiibceroti, and he has made of Calyx a serene, spare city. Gone are the gorgeous lush flowers, replaced by gentle curves of sand in soft pastels, with perhaps one dark rock placed precisely at the edge of the curve and a single tall fern. I don’t much like the ferns, or the overall design. But I admit that it’s beautiful in its own way. There is something melancholy about it, something of grief. Someone told me that Kiibceroti lost a brother-self in the Mori Core, but I don’t know if that’s true. I could ask QUENTIAM, but I ask QUENTIAM very little these days.

  One good thing about Kiibceroti’s city: All that low-key tranquility is good for dreaming. I dream now, nearly every night. Last night I dreamed of Bej and Camy.

  I dreamed they had joined the settlement of prisoners on ˄17843, somehow making peace with them, finding companionship and working together to create whatever good exists on that pulpy moon. Bej and Camy cut their arms and shared the nanomeds from their bodies, and the fungi disappeared from everyone’s heads and feet. None of them would die.

  Then I saw Bej and Camy walking on a seashore with their friends, all approaching some large object in the distance. In the dream, I walked with them. As we neared the object, I saw that it was a great boulder thrown up by the sea millennia ago. Camy and Bej had painstakingly chipped away at it over vast amounts of time, using other sharp stones and their own artistic talent. They had polished the stone with sand and the statue shone in the sunlight with bits of mica and quartz. It was Haradil, smiling and happy, solid by the blue sea for as long as the waves permitted the sculpture to last.

  “Alo?” Seliku said sleepily beside me.

  I laid my tentacles protectively across her body and moved slightly to nestle closer to her. “I’m here, sister-self. Go back to sleep. We’re still here.”

  2006

  PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

  Switch off, tune out, and clean up.

  “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever seen,” the vice-president for marketing said, but so softly that only his neighbour heard. “What is the Old Man thinking?”

  “Dunno,” VP Sales whispered back. “But he loves it. Look at him.”

  The chief executive of Veritronics Telecommunications smiled at the head of the vast teak table in the vast corporate boardroom. Beside him fidgeted the head of R&D, a small pinch-faced man with the glowing maniacal eyes of a feverish gerbil. On R&D’s palm rested a black plastic cube, featureless except for a simple red toggle switch.

  “This model affects an area of radius 20 feet,” R&D said fervently, “but we plan to create a whole range of models to cover homes and facilities of different sizes, maybe even different shapes. It’ll make Veritronics a fortune!”

  “Demonstrate it for them, Lucius,” the CEO said.

  R&D toggled the switch.

  Instantly the wall panels, which had been displaying a fractal composition by revered holo-artist Cameron Mbutu, went dark. Every handheld in the room stopped functioning, marooning VP Accounting, who’d been surreptitiously playing Alien Attack, on level 184. All personal receivers ceased operation, cutting off VP Sales from the field reports reciting softly in her ear; VP Admin from the London Philharmonic’s performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 104; and Veritronics’ General Counsel from the weather report for Cancun, where he was going on holiday. All cell phones stopped vibrating in all pockets. In the middle of the immense table, the electronic news screen blanked, along with the second-by-second stock reports from six cities and the lunch menu. Only the lights and heat stayed on.

  VP Marketing and VP Sales glanced at each other. VP Sales was braver.

  “Sir . . . why do you think anyone would want to jam their own home telecommunications? And—with all due respect, sir—why would we want them to?”

  The CEO smiled. “Lucius, show them the tape.”

  R&D did something under the table. A single wall panel glowed. “This is a composite of the data from 146 beta-test trials. It has no margin of error.”

  A middle-class living room. “Jimmy!” a harried woman screeched. “Did you do your homework? Jimmy! Alia, I told you to watch the baby! Paul, I need help here!” Jimmy, oblivious, beat time on the sofa arm to his personal receiver. Alia hunched over a video game, her fingers flying. Paul spoke rapidly into his handheld. The baby tumbled down a short flight of steps, its wailing nearly lost in the TV blare.

  The woman snatched up the screaming baby, glared at her family, and reached into her pocket. CLOSE-UP as she toggled a red switch on a black box.

  “Hey!” Jimmy cried. Alia continued to work her dead controls. Paul jumped up wildly. “Mia, what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Mia said innocently. “Must be a power outage.”

  “The lights are still on!”

  “Well . . . I don’t know. I’ll get cards and make popcorn, okay?” She smiled quietly.

  VP Sales whispered: “Told you so. The Old Man’s lost it.”

  VP Marketing didn’t reply. Sweat banded his forehead and he clenched his hands tightly below the table.

  The screen flashed TWO HOURS LATER. The family sat slumped over a card game. Paul snapped: “Mia, I told you and told you to not trump my ace.”

  “Well, I’m sorry! If you didn’t always . . . Jimmy, stop kicking me!”

  “I can’t help it,” Jimmy whined.

  “You know he’s ADD,” Paul said in disgust. “Why are you always riding him?”

  “If you’d ever discipline him to.”

  “I’m bored,” Alia said. “And I’m s’posed to call Tara! It’s important!”

  “Tara can wait,” Paul said.

  “You never let me do anything! I wish I had different parents!”

  Mia looked stricken. Paul said heatedly, “You liked us well enough when we all went on that VR safari last month!”

  “Yeah . . . but that was fun. Jimmy, stop kicking me!”

  Jimmy threw his cards at Alia. Paul glared at Mia. “Great idea this was, genius!”

  “Don’t start with me, Paul. I’m as smart as you are even if not everybody can go to Harvard.”

  Alia burst into tears, waking the baby. “Don’t start all that fighting again! Why don’t you two just get divorced! I hate you!” She stomped from the room. Paul followed, slamming the door. Jimmy slunk under the table, kicking its legs. Mia looked around helplessly, then slipped her hand into her pocket.

  “That’s enough, Lucius,” the CEO said. The wall went dark. “This family lasted

  two hours and three minutes before all their sublimated resentments and group tensions broke out. That’s 16 minutes longer than average.”

  “But . . .” VP Sales began, then stopped. Her heart beat too hard and her left temple twitched. “Within the next five hours,” the

  CEO continued, “this family purchased four new electronic products, two of them from Veritronics.”

  VP Marketing dug the nails of one hand into the flesh of the other. Sweat slimed his forehead: “No.no margin of error, sir?”

  “None. Every single test case exhibited the same behaviour.”

  “The same,” croaked R&D. His foot beat a ragged staccato on the floor.

  “Four new sales in five hours,” General Counsel repeated. His face had paled to the unhealthy colour of sourdough.

  The CEO toggled the red switch. Instantly the wall panels shone with gorgeous art. The table screens resumed their ceaseless supply of data. Haydn, Alien Attack and field reports all played. Cell phones vibrated. Handhelds glowed. There were 23 lunch options.

  VP Marketing felt his breathing steady, his heart slow, his sweat evaporate. “I propose accelerated development and launch of the Veritronics Home Electronic Jamming Saviour, sir. Put it on immediate fast track!”

  The vote was unanimous.

  JQ211F, AND HOLDING

  “Death by misadventure in a hostile environment” is a verdict that might
be rendered on any one of the planets in this book but there are even worse things waiting for the hapless scientific team that investigates JQ211F. In spite of this tale’s core of utterly hard science; it stirred recollections in me of Cordwainer Smith’s story, “A Planet Named Shayol,” a Dante-influenced Hell-world, as well as the similarly inclined Walt Disney film The Black Hole.

  Nancy Kress is the author of eleven SF and three fantasy novels, two thrillers, three collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the Sleepless trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain and continued with Beggars and Choosers and Beggars Ride. In 1996, Kress temporarily switched genres to write Oaths and Miracles, a thriller about Mafia penetration of the biotech industry. Her most recent books are Nothing Human (2003), which concerns the long-term consequences of global warming, and the duology” Crossfire and Crucible (2003; 2004).

  In addition to writing fiction, Kress teaches regularly at various places, including the East (Michigan State) and West (Seattle) locations of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She is the monthly “Fiction” columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine. She lives in Rochester, New York.

  “MY GOD, LOOK at it,” Captain McAuliffe said “Just look at it.”

  It was a naïve thing to say, but then the captain was not a scientist. We all stared at the planet below, devoured it with our eyes. Serena looked as if she wanted to eat it. It isn’t every working day that one sees a planet that does not exist.

  “How soon until we go down?” Serena demanded.

  McAuliffe said, “No one is going down.”

  “I am,” she said, and now her gave did leave the planet to lock angrily with his. I had to look away; sometimes her intensity scares me a little, although it is one of the things I love about her.

  “Paul,” she said over her shoulder to me, “you’re going down with me, aren’t you?”

  I looked from Serena Wambugu—no one had ever looked less “serene”—to Captain McAuliffe, and a small part of my mind noticed, yet again, how well they matched physically. Well, that was to be expected. They were the only two of the ten aboard the Feynmann who were genemod. Serena and McAuliffe dazzled, and the rest of us crept carefully through their luminous shadows. Which was only fitting, since Captain Robert McAuliffe commanded the Feynmann and Dr. Serena Wambugu led the scientific team that was the ship’s reason for being here.

  I, of course, had another reason for being dazzled.

  I shifted from one foot to the other, gazing around the bridge, playing for time. The Feynmann, a Sohdariat United Space Navy non-combat ship, was grudgingly on special assignment for the Science Academy. Small and tidy, she had no wasted space. Nine people were a tight fit on the compact bridge, and my left elbow almost touched one of the two dozen display screens, visual and data, that the crew monitored so efficiently.

  “Paul?” Serena demanded. “Aren’t we going down?”

  I chose the safe answer, opposing neither of them. “I think the protocol is to send a second probe.” I hoped I had the words in the right order; English was not my first language. It wasn’t Serena’s, either, but then she spoke five fluently.

  “A second probe?” she said impatiently. “Why, when we obtained no data from the first one?”

  Since you got no data from the first probe,” Captain McAuliffe said dryly, “the destruction of a second one makes no sense. Nor does the destruction of your scientific team, Dr. Wambugu. Not even you could wish that.”

  “I don’t wish it,” she snapped back. “I wish for answers! The greatest scientific discovery since space tunnels and you ‘wish’ to just look at it? The military mind at work!”

  If Serena got started on her version of “the military mind,” Captain McAuliffe wouldn’t let anyone go anywhere. Usually she was more cautious around him, since as commander he made the ultimate decisions on ship’s movements, and she on scientific matters. Both were jealous of their turf. This had led to a very strained trip out, although in the beginning they had at least been polite.

  Once more I slipped between them as a buffer. “We certainly do need answers, including what happened to the first probe. But at least now we know the planet exists. Why does it register on the ship’s sensors now when it didn’t before?”

  McAuliffe smiled at me, He knew exactly what I was doing. But he spoke to Carin. “That’s your area, isn’t it, Dr. Dziwalski? You’re the physicist. I suggest you retire with your team to discuss it. The wardroom is at your disposal.”

  The tips of Carin Dziwalski’s ears reddened. I knew what she was thinking: “her” team! This was Serena’s team, completely, even if my own work was the reason we had come here. Neither Carin nor I could ever have gotten funding from the Academy. But Serena didn’t like any undermining of her authority. I felt my stomach tighten, and Carin’s plain features creased painfully.

  However, Serena surprised me, as she often does. She said coolly, “A good suggestion. Carin, get the print-outs and join Paul and me in the wardroom. I don’t think Captain McAuliffe would be able to follow our discussions, anyway.” She swept out

  Carin scurried to obey. I followed Serena to the wardroom after one last look at the planet on the bridge’s real-time display.

  It had as yet no catalogue designation but was informally called “JQ211F,” a bloodless name for the most important place in the galaxy. About one-third the size of Terra but denser, it had just enough mass to hold an atmosphere. Thick dark clouds covered the entire globe, but I knew from the sensor data what we would find below: poisonous atmosphere high in methane and hydrogen sulfide, acid seas, enormous volcanic and lightning activity. A young world in the throes of early, one-celled life.

  Which, according to my calculations, was older than any other planet in the galaxy.

  “Let’s go over it again,” Serena said, “just to be sure we haven’t missed anything. Paul? Does anything we’ve learned so far affect your initial calculations?”

  The three of us sat alone in the wardroom. The largest continually pressurized area aboard ship, it looked as if it belonged on a different, much larger vessel. The Feynmann, Carin had told me, occasionally ferried dignitaries and diplomats. The wardroom served as state reception area, conference room, dining room, and off-duty lounge for officers. It was luxurious, even ceremonial, with dark paneling on the bulkheads, dark green plush, chairs, and an enormous polished table of real wood. Finely detailed holoscapes of half a dozen planets glowed on the walls.

  But despite the size of the table, we three scientists had managed to fill it with print-outs—or maybe it was Serena’s outsize presence that filled the room. Six feet tall, full-breasted, with smooth skin the color of caramels, she wore one of her long, flame-colored robes. Her black eyes gleamed with excitement barely restrained by a scientist’s disciplined intelligence. Beside her, in gray tunic and pants, drab Carin Dziwalski looked like a squirrel scampering to keep up with a tiger.

  I said, “Nothing we’ve learned so far affects my initial calculations. This is the place where life originated in the galaxy.”

  Serena smiled at me. “I like your certainty.”

  “I am certain,” I said, not only to please her—Serena liked certainty, always—but because it was true. I had spent six years gathering and analyzing data on every life-bearing planet that humanity had discovered since the Perkins-Valachev equations had first given us access to the stars through space tunnels. Some planets, like Terra, had evolved advanced sentients. Some had gotten only as far as non-flowering plants; some had evolved multicellular sea life; some merely had proto-cells. All were DNA-based. And my math was clear: graphing complexity levels against spore-dispersal mechanisms pointed indisputably to panspermia, drifting clouds of spores originating here, at the nexus. Here, on this planet orbiting an undistinguished yellow sun. Here, on this oldest of all planets.

  Which somehow displayed all the characteristics of a young planet orbiting a fourth-g
eneration star.

  Carin said timidly, “We need to know what happened to the probe.”

  “We need to know more than that,” Serena said. “Why didn’t the planet register on ship’s sensors until we parked ourselves in orbit? And the probe-it should have reached the surface, no matter how noxious or acidic the atmosphere. Of course, it might have just malfunctioned. They do that. Carin, any specific reasons you can think of why the probe might have failed?”

  Carin licked her lips. “Well . . . its instruments could have been wiped out on entry by an electromagnetic impulse of some sort. There’s a lot of lightning activity going on down there A burst of several million volts in the upper atmosphere just as the probe entered, that could do it. Lightning discharges like that also create temporary gamma-ray bursts when stray electrons get propelled upward at almost c. If an electron then hits a heavier particle, the kinetic energy of the electron’s sudden deceleration is cast off as a photon. If that’s happening a lot, a strong gamma-ray burst could have destroyed the probe’s telemetry.”

  Serena nodded. But that sort of coincidence probably wouldn’t happen twice. If we sent a second probe, we’d get real data. That cloud cover is just too particle-dense for anything but the most basic data.”

  Carin ventured, “Captain McAuliffe—”

  “Does not make probe decisions. I do. But if we can explain to him—in terms even he can understand—just why the first probe failed, that it was a chance occurrence unlikely to happen again, then he’d be obligated to allow shuttle descent. I want to look at what’s down there.”