Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I am a physicist. I think in terms of quantum phenomena, for that’s the stuff we, and all else, are made of. I know you’re a biologist, Paul, and so it’s natural to you to think in terms of evolution, growth, constant change, increasing complexity. Fundamental particles, however, can inhabit states that no respirating organism ever could. Fundamental particles can simultaneously be both waves and particles, be here and there, exist and not exist.

  You explained your central problem so clearly to Captain McAuliffe. How did we get the first living proto-cells, the things from which natural selection might select? Science has never, in two hundred years, succeeded in creating a proto-cell. Nor will we. That’s God’s domain, although I know you don’t accept that. So let me stick to things you will accept.

  At the level you are talking about, the pre-cellular, life itself is a quantum phenomenon. You already know that; single electrons often start, and determine the course of, chemical reactions in a cell. Single electrons initiate nerve impulses. Even larger molecules may exhibit quantum behaviors: we’ve known a long time that a sixty-atom molecule, C. fullerene, will behave as both a wave and a particle, passing simultaneously through two separate small slits in a barrier. These particles exist in a state of uncertainty, a state of quantum superposition, in which they simultaneously inhabit all possible states. Living cells, complex and organic wholes, do not.

  Except on the planet we just left.

  Do you know what happens when you measure an electron, or a photon, or even as large a molecule as C60 fullerene? Of course you do. You “collapse the wave” and it becomes either a wave or a particle, one thing or another. Until then, it is neither. The act of measurement creates the ensuing reality.

  You want desperately to know why JQ211F did not register on ship’s sensors until we’d penetrated its atmosphere. You want desperately to know why the first probe disappeared. You want desperately to know why our landing samples turned out to be nothing but non-living gunk. And of course you want desperately to know why the spores won’t germinate. Yet my sense is that you will reject the answers to all these questions, which is one and the same answer.

  JQ211F existed in a unique state of living quantum superposition, in which all states exist simultaneously. That’s how come you got proto-cells there and nowhere else. You yourself told me that a gradual evolution couldn’t make a replicator; the metabolic pathways, to work at all, had to emerge all at once. Only a state in which all possible chemical reactions, in all possible chains, can simultaneously exist without collapsing, will produce enough viable possibilities to evolve the first life. I’ve done the math. The probability of putting together a string of thirty-two proto-molecules all at once, in the right order to make those spores, is close to zero. To be exact, it’s 1/1041. That means there were 1041 ways to put together that string, and only one would work, and it never would have happened unless the occurrence took place in a state of quantum superposition.

  JQ211F had that. If you want a scientific analogy, it was like a quantum computer, that theoretical possibility, but real, and running a program that created life.

  Until we sent down a probe, made a measurement, and collapsed the wave.

  We destroyed that planet, Paul. Measurements make reality, and different measurements make different realities. We, if you want to put it this way, allowed the rest of the molecules of the universe to interact with the quantum, computer and so destroyed its integrity. I would put it a different way. We killed God.

  That’s why I called the planet “Hell.” Not because of the brimstone and other superficial volcanic activity. But because Hell is the absence of God, and that’s what our clumsy attempts to measure Him have made real. There will be no more new life in the galaxy. We’re left alone with whatever is already here

  Not even Robert, although a Christian, agrees with me on this. He authorized the shuttle landings because he, like me, couldn’t not know. But now that I’ve given him the answer, he rejects it Too painful. But I know what we did down there. We tried, and failed, to measure God, and so created a reality without Him. I know it is so, and I cannot, cannot, cannot bear it.

  Carin

  My first thought was Poor girl, the stress drove her over the edge. Only after that self-righteous and dismissive pity did I stop to consider the content of what she’d said.

  I rejected her science. No evidence existed that living cells, even in their most primitive proto-versions, might obey the laws of quantum superposition. The very idea was fantastic. Not only fantastic, but untestable, which—Carin was right on this—removed it from science.

  Untestable.

  Preposterous.

  Childish, even, in its longing for a Super Being that had the universe firmly in hand.

  But how else could I account for the planet unseen by ship’s sensors until we penetrated the atmosphere, for the vanished probe, for the gunky organic tar in the planetary samples, for the inert spores?

  No other way. I could not account for these things. But that didn’t mean that I had to accept some unscientific, mystical “explanation.” I had not descended to that.

  I don’t know how long I sat in Carin’s room, motionless on the edge of her bunk, barefoot and with her letter in my two hands. A long time, I think. But eventually I stood, shaking my legs a little to relieve their cramp.

  Their I reached over and extinguished the flames on the two candles beside the pot of over-scented flowers, and left the room.

  The Feynmann returned to the Academy on Terra, deposited me there like so much spent fuel, and went on to its next assignment, whatever that was. Presumably Carin was ferried somewhere else and awakened. I don t know; she was still in cold sleep when the Feynmann left orbit.

  I filed my disappointing report with the Academy. In eighty-four pages plus data tables it essentially said: Sorry, no evidence of life on JQ211F. I attended in holoform the brief, arid official inquiry on Serena Wambugu’s death. Somewhere I have a copy of the verdict: Death by misadventure in a hostile environment.

  Somewhere, too, I have Carin Dziwalski’s letter, even all these decades later. I think of it occasionally as I stumble across campus in the driving rain to teach my third-rate physics students at my third-rate university. If I asked my wife, a very organized person, to find the letter in our ramshackle house, she might have been able to do so. I don’t ask her to find it; I remember every word.

  Carin was both wrong and right. Wrong about the planet and about “God”—although there has never been another expedition to JQ211F to see what is going on there. Nonetheless, I know she was wrong, because nothing she posited was really based on science, which alone can answer our cosmic questions.

  Or is that as stubborn a faith as hers?

  I push away such questions and think, instead, about the way that Carin was right. We do measure reality, and different measurements make different realities. Serena measured me, defined me to herself, and so created a reality that first embraced and then rejected me. Had she measured differently, I might have gone down toJQ211F with her, and either been able to save her or else died with her and Telin Eyer. Different realities, both.

  And I measured the results of panspermia, gambled my scientific reputation on my hypothesis, and lost Had I not caused a fruitless and expensive expedition, I might now be teaching at a better place. I might have occupied the position of intriguing positer of an as-yet-untested theory, instead of being the slightly embarrassing survivor of a failed one. On such measurements are careers made.

  Carin, of course, made the most drastic measurement of all. Carin, mousy and drab and timid. In her own mind, she measured God, and found Him and His design for the universe collapsed by man. Or by woman, if you blame Serena, as you probably must. Carin’s measurement created, for her, the worst reality of all.

  But in fact, every one of us measures the universe every minute. Collapsing the wave, erasing uncertainty in at least our own minds. Creating different realities.

  None
of these thoughts are useful, I pull the hood of my rain jacket farther over my face and, head down, keep my eyes on the mud and puddles as I trudge along to class.

  NANO COMES TO CLIFFORD FALLS

  Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-three books. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages, including—to the author’s bemusement—Klingon, Nancy is currently working on a medical thriller. Her last story for us, “My Mother, Dancing” (June 2004) is a current finalist for the Nebula Award.

  I was weeding the garden when nanotech came to my town. The city got it a month earlier, but I haven’t been to the city since last year. Some of my neighbors went—Angie Myers and Emma Karlson and that widow, Mrs. Blanston, from church. They brought back souvenirs, things made in the nanomachine, and the scarf Angie showed me was really cute. But with three little kids, I don’t get out much.

  That day was hot, with the July sun hanging overhead like it wasn’t ever going to move. Bob McPhee from next door stuck his head over the fence. His Rottweiler snarled through the chain links. I don’t like that dog, and Kimee, my middle one, is afraid of it.

  “Hey, Carol, don’t you know you don’t have to do that no more?” Bob said. “The nanomachinery will make you all the tomatoes and peas you want.”

  “Hey, Bob,” I said. I went on weeding, swiping at the sweat on my forehead with the back of my hand. Jackie watched me from the shade of the garage. I’d laid him on a blanket dressed in just his diaper and he was having a fine time kicking away and then stopping to eat his toes.

  “They’re giving Clifford Falls four of ‘em,” Bob said. Since he retired from the fire department, he don’t have enough to do all day. “I saw it on TV. The mayor’s getting ‘em installed in the town hall.”

  “That’s good,” I said, to say something. I could hear Will and Kimee inside the kitchen, fighting over some toy.

  “Mayor’ll run the machinery. One for food, one for clothing, the other two he’s taking requests. I already put in mine, for a sports car.”

  That got my attention. “A car? A whole car?”

  “Sure, why not? Nano can make anything. The town is starting with one request from each person, first come first served. Then after that . . . I dunno. I guess Mayor Johnson’ll work it out. Hey, gorgeous, stop that weeding and come have a beer with me. Pretty gal like you shouldn’t be getting all hot and sweaty at weeding.”

  He leered at me, but he don’t mean anything by it. At least, I don’t think he does. Bob’s over fifty but still looks pretty good, and he knows it, but he also knows I’m not that kind. Jack might’ve took off two months ago, but I don’t need anyone like Bob, a married man, for temporary fun and games.

  “I like the taste of home-grown tomatoes,” I tell him. “Ones at the Safeway taste like wallpaper.”

  “But nano won’t make tomatoes that taste processed,” he says in that way that men like to correct women. “That machinery will make the best tomatoes this town ever tasted.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right.” Then Will and Kimee spilled their fight out through the screen door into the back yard, and Jackie started whimpering on his blanket, and I didn’t have no time for any nanomachinery.

  Still, I was curious, so in the late afternoon, when it wasn’t quite so hot, I packed up the stroller and the kids and I went downtown.

  Clifford Falls isn’t much of a town. We’re so far out on the plains that all we got is a single square ringed with dusty pick-ups and the teenagers’ scooters. There’s about two dozen stores, the little brick town hall with traffic court and Barry Anderson’s police room and such, the elementary school, Baptist and Methodist churches, Kate’s Lunchroom, and the Crow Bar. Down by the tracks is the grain elevator and warehouses. That’s about it. Once a movie was filmed here because the movie people wanted some place that looked like it might be fifty or sixty years ago.

  Soon as I turned the corner I could see where the nanomachinery must be. People milled around the patch of faded grass in front of the town hall, people who probably should have still been to work on a Wednesday afternoon. A big awning stretched across the front of the building with a huge metal box under it, nearly big as my bedroom. To one side the mayor, who retired two years ago from the factory in Minneonta, stood on a crate right there in the broiling sun without so much as a hat on his bald head, making a speech.

  “—greatest innovation since supercheap energy to raise our way of life to—”

  “What’s getting made in that box?” I asked Emma Karlson. She had her twins in a fancy new stroller. Just after Jack left me, her Ted got taken on at the factory.

  “A dais,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “A thing for the mayor to stand on instead of that apple crate. It’s supposed to be done in a few minutes.”

  What a dumb thing to make—Mr. Johnson could just as well have gotten a good stepladder from Bickel’s Hardware. But I suppose the dais was by way of demonstration.

  And I have to admit it was impressive when it come out of the box. Four men had to move it, a big fancy platform with a top like a gazebo and steps carved on their sides in fancy shapes. After the men set it down, there was this moment of electric silence, like a downed power line run through the crowd, and then everybody started shouting.

  “Make me a rocking chair!”

  “Tell it to grow a table!”

  “I need a new rug for the dining room!”

  “Make a good bottle of booze!”

  Emma turned to me. Her eyes were big and shining. “Some people are so ignorant. That big nanomachine don’t make anything to eat or drink—the ones inside do that. Three little ones, for food and clothes and small quick stuff. Mayor Johnson already explained all that, but some people just can’t listen.”

  The crowd was pressing closer to the new dais, and a few men started to climb the fancy steps. Kimee was getting restless, pulling on my hand, but Will said suddenly, “Mommy, tell the machine to make me a dog!”

  Emma laughed. “It can’t do that, Will. Nobody but God can make a living thing.”

  I said, “Then how can it make a tomato? A tomato’s living.”

  Emma said, “No, it’s not. It’s dead after you pick it.”

  “But it was living.”

  Emma got that look in her eyes that I seen there ever since the third grade: Don’t argue with me because you’ll regret it. Will jumped up and down screaming, “A dog! A dog! I want a dog!” The people around the dais were pushed back by Barry Anderson and his deputy, but they didn’t stop shouting at Mayor Johnson. I grabbed Will, smiled hard at Emma, and started home.

  Nanotech wasn’t going to put Kimee down for a nap or breast-feed Jackie. And it sure as hell wasn’t going to get my bastard husband back to help me do those things.

  Not that I wanted him.

  I waited for nano to make Clifford Falls look like the places in the TV shows. What surprised me was that it did.

  I didn’t see anything for a few weeks because both Kimee and Will came down with some sort of bug. Diarrhea and cramps. The doctor I got on the computer told me which chemicals to squirt over samples of their shit and when I told him what colors the shit turned, he said it wasn’t serious but I should keep the kids in, make them drink a lot of water, and keep them away from the baby. In a two-bedroom rented house, that alone took a lot of my time. But we managed. Emma bought the medicine I needed at Merkelson’s and left it on the doorstep. She left three casseroles, too, and some chocolate-chip cookies.

  Ten days later, when they were better, I baked Emma a sponge cake to thank her. After the kids were dressed and the stroller packed up, we went outside and I had to blink hard.

  “Wow!” Will said. “Mommy, look at that!”

  Parked in Bob McPhee’s driveway was the reddest car I ever seen, low and smooth and shiny. It looked fast. Will ran over to it and I called, “Don’t touch, Will!”

  “Oh, he can’t hurt it,” Bob said with a sort of fake casualness. He was bursting with
pride. “And if he did hurt it, I’ll just wait until my turn comes up on the Big Gray and order me another one.”

  The Big Gray—that must be what they were calling the largest nanomachine. Stupid name. It sounded like a sway-backed horse.

  Bob leered at me. “Wanna go for a ride, baby?”

  “Why don’t you take your wife?” I said, but I smiled when I said it because I’m a wuss who likes to stay on good terms with my neighbors.

  “Oh, I did,” Bob said, waving his hand airily, “but there’s always room for one more, if you know what I mean.”

  “A ride! A ride!” Will shouted.

  “Not today, Will, we’re gong to see Jon and Don.” That distracted him; Emma’s twins are his best friends.

  Emma met me at the door dressed in a gorgeous yellow sundress with a low neck and full skirt. Emma was always pretty, even when we were thirteen, but I’d never seen her look like this. She’d done things to live up to the dress, fixed her hair and put on make-up and even had on rhinestone earrings.

  “God, you look amazing!” I said, in my old jeans with baby puke on my T-shirt. Emma touched her earrings.

  “Real diamonds, Carol! Ted used his second pick at the nanomachine to choose these!”

  I gaped at her. The nanomachine could make real diamonds? Will barreled past me toward Don and Jon and I saw that all three of them jumped onto a new blue sofa covered with the nicest material I’d ever seen.

  All I could think of to say was, “I brought you a sponge cake. A thank-you for all you done when the kids were sick.”

  “Well, aren’t you the sweetest thing. Thank you. I’d offer you a piece now but, well, Kitty’ll be here in a few minutes to take the twins.”

  Kitty Svenson was the teenager who babysat for everybody. She was saving up for secretarial school. Ted came out from the bedroom dressed in a bathrobe.

  “Oh, God, Ted, have you got this diarrhea-thing, too? I’m sorry, it’s a bitch. Come on, Will, let’s go. Em, I can take the twins while Ted’s sick.”