Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I’m not sick, Carol,” Ted said. Emma blushed. I was really confused. This was a Tuesday morning.

  “I quit the factory,” Ted said. “No need to kill myself working now.”

  “But . . . the mortgage . . ..”

  “The nano’s making us a house,” Emma said proudly.

  “A house? A whole house?”

  “One part of a room at a time,” Ted said. “Em and I are both using all our picks for it. We’ll put it on that piece of land my daddy left me by the lake, and the whole house’ll finish just before the bank forecloses on this one. I got it all figured out.”

  “But . . .” My brain wasn’t working right. I just couldn’t take it in, somehow.

  “The food nano is making all our meals now,” Emma said. “Just churning ‘em out like sausages. Here, Carol, taste this.” She darted into the kitchen, earrings swinging, and came back with a bowl of small round things like smooth nuts.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But it tastes good. The food nano can’t make like, you know, real meats or anything, but it does pretty good delivering things that look and taste like fruits and veggies and bread, and this stuff is the protein.”

  I picked up one of the round things and nibbled. It did taste good, sort of like cold spicy chicken. But something in me recoiled anyway. Maybe it was the texture, sort of bland and mushy. I palmed the rest of the ball. “Mmmmmmmmm.”

  “Told you so,” Emma said triumphantly, like the round balls were things she’d baked herself. “Oh, here’s Kitty.”

  Kitty Svenson hauled herself up the steps. Fat and acne-covered and dirt poor, she was the sweetest girl in town, and every time I saw her my heart ached. She liked Tom DeCarno, who lived down the street from me and was the starting quarterback on the football team at the consolidated high school in Remington. He’d notice Kitty on the day that Hell got a hockey franchise.

  It was obvious what Emma in her sexy new dress and Tom in his bathrobe were going to be doing, so I dragged the protesting Will and we went home. I saw things I hadn’t noticed on the way to Em’s: a new playhouse in the backyard of the big house on the corner. Fresh chain-link fence around the Alghren place. The Connors’ pick-up in their driveway, which meant that Eddie hadn’t gone to work at the factory, either. Across the street, a woman I thought I didn’t know, dressed up like a city girl in a ruffled suit and high heels, until I realized it was Sue Merkelson, the pharmacist’s wife.

  At home I took the kids into the backyard and weeded the tomatoes, which were nearly strangled with ten days’ worth of weeds. Jack used to do at least some of the weeding. But that was before, and this was now, and I kept at it until the job was done.

  By late August the factory in Minneonta had closed. Most of the men in town who didn’t farm were out of work, but nobody seemed to mind much. The Crow Bar was full all the time, groups playing cards and laughing at TV. I saw them spilling out onto the street the one time I went to the supermarket to buy Pampers and milk.

  Emma told me on the phone that Mayor Johnson, Barry Anderson, and Anderson’s deputy had the nanomachines on a regular schedule. Every morning people lined up to pick up whatever their food order’d been from the previous day, enough food for all that day’s meals plus a little over to store. Another machine made whatever clothes you picked out of a catalogue, in whatever size matched after you gave in your measurements. It made blankets and curtains and tablecloths, too, anything out of cloth. The last two machines, including the big one, turned out everything else, picked from a different catalogue, turn by turn.

  The county’s corn, ready to harvest, sat in the fields. Nobody wanted to buy it, and except for the farm owners, nobody hired on to harvest it.

  Nearly every family in town drove a new car, from six different models that our nanos were programmed to make. There was a lot of red and gold vehicles in our streets.

  “I want a playhouse, Mommy,” Will whined. “Caddie Alghren gots a new playhouse! I want one, too!”

  I looked at him, standing there in his rumpled little pajamas with trains on them, looking like his best friend just died. His hair fell over his forehead just like Jack’s used to do.

  “How do you know Caddie’s got a new playhouse?”

  “I saw it! From my window!”

  “You can’t see into Caddie’s yard from your window. Did you climb out up onto the roof again, Will?”

  He hung his head and twisted the sleeves of his pajamas into crumpled balls.

  “I told you that going up on that roof is dangerous! You could fall and break your neck!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, raising his little face up to me, and I melted even though I knew he wasn’t sorry at all and would do it again. “I’m sorry, Mommy. Can’t we get a playhouse? We been inside all summer, feels like!”

  He was right. I’d only taken the kids outside our yard a few times. I’d hardly been out myself. I told myself that it was because I didn’t want to see everybody’s pitying looks. (“Jack run off with that sexy girl from the hardware store, Chrissie Somebody, just left Carol and those kids without so much as a backward glance.“) But it wasn’t just that.

  The big freezer downstairs was almost empty. I’d used up everything I could. I run out of Tide last Thursday and the laundry was piling up. Worse, the Pampers were nearly gone. I had to keep the checking account, the half of it that Jack left, to pay the rent and the phone as long as I could. After that . . . I didn’t know yet. Not yet.

  So I guessed it was time. I didn’t understand why I didn’t want to go before, didn’t understand why I didn’t want to go now. But it was time.

  “Okay, honey, we’ll get you a playhouse,” I said. “Find your sneakers.”

  When I had Jackie changed and fed, Will and Kimee dressed, the stroller packed with diapers and water, we set off outside. Will was good, holding onto the side of the stroller and not running ahead. Kimee stood on the back bar and whimpered a little; she gets prickly heat in the summer. But when we turned the corner toward the town square, she stopped fussing and stared, just like me and Will. The whole place was full of garbage cans. Clean, blue, plastic garbage cans, hundreds of them, stacked and thrown and lying on their sides, not a single one of them holding any garbage. People milled around, talking angrily. I saw my neighbor.

  “Bob, what on Earth—”

  He was too angry even to leer at me. “That Beasor kid! The one that won the state technology contest a few years ago—that kid’s too smart-ass for his own good, I said so then! He hacked into the Big Gray somehow and now all it’ll make is garbage cans, no matter what you tell it!”

  I craned my neck to see the big metal box under its awning. Sure enough, another garbage can popped out. A bubble of something started in my belly and started to rise up in me. “Is . . . is . . .”

  “The kid left town! Anderson’s got an APB out on him. You haven’t seen Danny Beasor, have you, Carol?”

  “I haven’t seen anybody,” I said. The bubble rose higher and now I knew what it was: laughter. I turned my face away from Bob.

  “If that kid knows what’s good for him, he’ll keep on running,” Bob said. He was really upset. “Now the mayor’s shut down the other nanomachines, except the food one, until the repair guys get out here from the city. You get your food today, Carol?”

  “No, but I’ll come back later,” I managed to say, without laughing in Bob’s face. “K-Kimee’s not feeling well.”

  “Okay,” he said, not really interested. “Hey, Earl! Wait!” He pushed through the garbage cans toward Earl Bickel across the square.

  Will somehow understood that there would be no playhouse today. He screwed up his face, but before he could start to howl, I said, “Will! Look at all these great cans! We can make the best playhouse ever out of them!”

  His face cleared. “Cool!”

  So we nested and dragged home four garbage cans, with a little help from the teenage Parker boys, who are nice kids and who seemed glad to
have something to do. They found some boards in the basement, plus a hammer and nails, and spent all afternoon making a playhouse with four garbage-can rooms. Will was in seventh heaven. I couldn’t pay them, but I unfroze and toasted the last of my home-made banana bread, and they gobbled it down happily. Will and Kimee, her itching forgotten, played in the garbage cans until dark.

  The next day all the nanomachines were working again, and I put in a daily food order. But I left the kids at home with Kitty Svenson when I picked up my order, and I started canning all the squash, beans, peppers, corn, and melons in the garden.

  School opened. Will was in first grade. I walked him there the first day and he seemed to like his teacher.

  By the third week of school, she’d quit.

  By the fifth week, so had the teacher who replaced her, along with a few other faculty.

  “They just don’t want to work when they don’t have to, and why should they?” Emma said. She sat in my kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee and wearing a strange hat that sloped down to cover half her face. I suppose she picked it out of the nano-catalogues—it must be what they were wearing in the city. The color was pretty, though, a warm peach. It was practically the first morning she’d made time for me in weeks. “With nano, nobody has to work if they don’t want to.”

  “Did the twins’ teacher quit, too?”

  “No. It’s old Mrs. Cameron. She’s been teaching so long she probably can’t even imagine doing anything else after she gets up in the morning. Carol, look at this place. How come you let it get so shabby?”

  I said mildly, “There isn’t too much money since Jack left. Just enough for the rent.”

  “That asshole . . . but that’s not what I meant and you know it. Why haven’t you replaced those old curtains and sofa with nano ones? And that TV! You could get a real big one, with an unbelievable picture.”

  I put my elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “I’ll tell you the truth, Em: I don’t know. I get nano food and diapers, and I got some school clothes for Will, but anything else . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’re just being an idiot!” she said. She almost shouted it—way too angry for just my saggy sofa. I reached out and pulled off the sloping hat. Emma’s eye was swollen nearly shut, and every color of squash in my garden.

  All at once she started sobbing. “Ted . . . he never done anything like that before . . . it’s terrible on men, being laid off ! They get so bored and mad—”

  “He wasn’t laid off, he quit,” I said, but gently.

  “Same thing! He just scowls himself around the house, yells at the kids—they’re glad to be back in school, let me tell you!—and criticizes everything I do, or he orders Scotch from the nano—did order it until Mayor Johnson outlawed any nano liquor and—”

  “He did? The mayor did?” I said, startled.

  “Yeah. And so last Thursday, Ted and I had this big fight, and . . . and . . .” Suddenly she changed tone. “You don’t know anything, Carol! You sit here safe and alone, thinking you’re so superior to nano, just like you always acted so superior to poor Jack—oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that!”

  “Probably you did,” I said evenly, “but it’s all right. Really it is, Em.”

  All at once she got defiant. “You’re thinking I’m just dumping on you because Ted hit me. Well, I’m not. It was only that once, most of the time he’s a good husband. Our new house by the lake will be done in a few more weeks and then everything’ll be better!”

  I didn’t see how, but all I said was, “I’ll bet the house is pretty.”

  “It’s gorgeous! It’s got a blue-brick fireplace in the living room—blue bricks! And it’s equipped with just everything, all those robo-appliances like you see on TV—I won’t have to do hardly anything!”

  “I can’t wait to see it,” I said.

  “You’ll love it,” she said, put her hat back on so it covered her eye, and stared at me with triumph and fear.

  I pulled Will out of school to home-school him. He didn’t mind once I got the Bellingham grandkids to school at my place, and then Caddie Alghren. The Bellinghams were farmers going bust. Mr. Bellingham was still doing dairy, though, even while his crops rotted in the fields. Mrs. Bellingham’s always been sickly and she never struck me as real smart. But Hal Bellingham is smart, and he looked at me real sharp when I said I would home-school his grandkids because the teachers were all quitting.

  “Not all, Carol.”

  “No, not yet. And some won’t quit. But the government’s not getting much tax money because nobody’s earning and the TV says that the government is taking itself apart bit by bit.” I didn’t understand that, but Mr. Bellingham looked like he might. “How many teachers’ll stay when they can’t get paid at all?”

  “That time’s a ways off.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What makes you think you can teach my grandkids? Begging your pardon, but you don’t look or sound like a college graduate.”

  “I’m not. But I did good in high school, and I guess I can teach first- and second-graders. At any rate, in my living room they’ll be safe from the kinds of vandalism you see all around town now.”

  “What’ll you use for books?”

  “We have some kids’ books, I’ll get more out of the library as long as it lasts, and we’ll make books, the kids and me. It’s fun to write your own stories, and they can read each other’s.”

  “You aren’t going to get books from the nanomachinery?”

  “No.” I said it flat out, and we looked at each other, sitting there in the Bellinghams’ big farm kitchen with its old-fashioned microwave.

  He said, “Who’s going to watch your two little ones while you teach?”

  “Kitty Svenson.”

  “What’s she get out of it?”

  “That’s between me and her.”

  “And what do you want in return?”

  “Milk, and a share of the spring calves you might have sent to market, slaughtered and with the meat dressed. You aren’t going to be able to get in enough hay to feed them anyway.”

  He got up, walked in his farm boots around his kitchen, and looked at me again. “Do you watch the news, Carol?”

  “Not much. Little kids take a lot out of you.”

  “You should watch. Vandalism isn’t limited to what we got in Clifford Falls.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “All right, the kids will be home-schooled by you. But here, not at your place. I’ll clear out the big back bedroom for you, and Kitty can use the kitchen. Mattie’ll like the company. But before you agree, there’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  “Who?”

  “Suspicious little thing, aren’t you? Come with me.”

  We went out to the barn. The cows were in the pasture, and the hayloft half empty. In an old tack room that the Bellinghams had turned into an apartment for a long-ago cattle manager, a pretty young woman sat in front of a metal table. I blinked.

  The whole room was full of strange equipment, along with freezers and other stuff I recognized. The woman wore a white lab coat, like doctors on TV. She stood and smiled at us.

  “This is Amelia Parsons,” Bellingham said. “She used to work for Camry Biotech, which just went out of business. She’s a crop geneticist.”

  “Hello,” she said, holding out her hand. Women like her make me nervous. Too polished, too educated. They all had it too easy. But I shook her hand; I’m not rude.

  “Amelia’s working on creating an apomictic corn plant. That’s corn that doesn’t need pollination, that can produce its own seeds asexually, like non-hybrid varieties once did, and like blackberries and mangos and some roses do now. Apomictic corn would keep all the good traits of hybrid corn, maybe even with added benefits, but farmers wouldn’t have to buy seed every year.”

  “I couldn’t work on this very much at Camry,” Amelia said to me. Her pretty face glowed. Her red hair was cut in one of those complicated city cuts. “Even though apomi
xis was my doctoral thesis. The biotech company wanted us to work on things that were more immediately profitable. But now that I don’t need to earn a salary, that oversight agencies are pretty much dismantling, and that I can get the equipment I need from nano . . . well, nano makes it possible for me to do some real work!”

  I smiled at her again, because I didn’t have anything to say. There was a baby-food stain on my jeans and I moved my hand to cover it.

  “Thanks, Amelia,” Hal Bellingham said. “See you later.”

  On the way back to the house, he said quietly, “I just wanted you to see the other side, Carol.”

  I didn’t answer.

  My little school started on Monday. Caddie Alghren, whose mother had been killed by a drunk driver last spring, clung to me at first, but Will and she were friends and as long as she could sit next to him, she was all right. The three Bellingham kids were well-behaved and smart. Kitty watched Kimee and Jackie in the kitchen and helped Mattie Bellingham. At night Kitty went home with me, because her stepfather had started to come into her room at night. Nothing real bad had happened yet, but she hated him and was glad to babysit for her keep.

  After the kids finally got to sleep each night, Kitty and I watched the TV, like Hal said, and saw what was happening in the cities. A lot of people won’t work if they don’t have to. But a lot of people not working means a lot of broken things don’t get fixed. Nano can make water pipes and schoolbooks and buses and toilets. It can’t install them or tech them or drive them. The cities were getting to be pretty scary places.

  Clifford Falls wasn’t that bad. But it wasn’t all that far out from the city, either. Kitty and I were watching TV one night, the kids in bed, when the door burst open and two men rushed in.

  “Look at this—not just the one, two of them,” one man said, while I was already reaching for the phone. He got there first and knocked it out of my hand. “Not that it would help you, lady. Not a lot of police left. Kenny, I’ll take this one and you take the fat girl.”

  Kitty had shrunk back against the sofa. I tried to think fast. The kids—if I could just keep any noise from waking the kids, the men might not even know they were there. Then no matter what happened to us, the kids would be safe. But if Will saw either of their faces, if he could identify them . . . and Kitty, Kitty was only fifteen . . ..