Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I said quickly, “Leave her alone. She doesn’t know how to do anything, she won’t be any fun for you. If you leave her alone, I’ll let you both do me. I won’t even fight. I’d be a lot more fun for you.” My gorge rose and I tasted vomit.

  The two men looked at each other. Finally “Kenny” shrugged and said, “The fat one’s ugly, anyway.”

  The other one nodded and his piggy eyes gleamed. Noise—the important thing was no noise. I got down on the floor and unzipped my jeans. Oh, God—but no noise, no noise to wake the kids, and I had to protect Kitty, God, fifteen . . ..

  My head exploded.

  No, not my head, the head leering above me. Blood and brains splattered over me. Then there was a second shot and the other man went down. I staggered up, puked, and heard Will and Kimee screaming. When I could see again, the kids stood in the doorway, clinging together, and Kitty still sat on the sofa, the gun in her hand.

  She was the calmest one there, at least on the outside. “I stole it to use on my stepfather if I had to, just before you said I could live here. Carol—” Then she started shaking.

  “It’s okay,” I said stupidly and, my own hand trembling, picked up the phone to call the cops.

  I got a recording at 911. “I’m sorry, but due to reduced manpower, your call may have to wait. Please stay on the line until—” I hung up and called Barry Anderson’s cell.

  It was turned off. When he finally got there, three hours later, he said it was the only sleep he’d had in two days. His deputy quit last week and left for Florida. By that time I’d gotten the kids back to sleep, the room and myself cleaned up, and Kitty to stop shaking.

  The next day, Hal Bellingham moved us all out to the farm.

  By spring, there were fifty-four of us on the farm, plus ten kids. And in the spring, Jack came back.

  I was coming out of the lamb barn with Will, who saw Jack first. He cried, “Daddy!” and my heart froze. Then Will was running across the muddy yard and throwing himself into Jack’s arms. I trailed slowly behind.

  “How’d you get past the guards?” I said.

  “Bellingham let me in. What kind of set-up you got going here, anyway?”

  I didn’t answer, just stared at him. He looked good. Well-fed, well-dressed, maybe a little heavier but still the handsomest man ever to come out of Clifford Falls. This was how Will, beaming in his daddy’s arms, would look in twenty years.

  Jack reddened slightly. “Why are you living here, Carol? Don’t tell me you and old Bellingham . . .”

  “That would be what you’d think. The answer is no.”

  Did he look relieved? “Then why—”

  “Mommy’s my teacher!” Will shouted. “And I can write whole sentences!”

  “Good for you,” Jack said. To me he suddenly blurted, “Carol, I don’t know how to say this, but I’m so sorry, I—”

  “Where’s Chrissie? You get tired of her the way you did of me?”

  “No, she . . . who the hell is that?”

  His eyes almost bugged out of his head, and well they might. Denny Bonohan strolled out of the house, dressed in one of his costumes. Denny’s gay, which was hard enough for me to take, but he’s also an actor, which is even worse because he strolls out to do his share of guard duty dressed in outlandish things he and the other two actors brought with them. Now he wore tights with a bright tunic almost as long as a dress, all in shades of gold. Hal is amused by him but I think Denny’s loony and I won’t let the kids be alone with him. My right, Hal says in his quiet way, and what Hal says goes.

  I said, “That’s my new boyfriend.” I said it to make Jack mad but instead he threw back his head and laughed, his white teeth gleaming in the sunshine.

  “Not you, Carol. Never. I know you that much, anyways.”

  “What are you doing here, Jack?”

  “I want to see my kids. And I want . . . I want you, Carol. I miss you. I was wrong, as wrong as a man can be. Please take me back.”

  Jack apologizing was always hard to resist, although it’s not like he ever did all that much of it. Will clung hard to his father’s neck. Also, an old sweet feeling was slipping into me, along with the anger. I wanted to hit him, I wanted to hug him. I wanted to curl up inside him again.

  “It’s up to the Council if you can stay here.”

  “Here?”

  “We aren’t leaving, the kids and me.”

  He took a deep breath. “What’s the Council? What do I have to do?”

  “You have to start by talking to Hal. If Denny’s on guard duty, Hal’s probably coming off.”

  “Guard duty?” Jack said, bewildered.

  “Yeah, Jack. You’re back in the army now. Only this time, we all enlisted.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Come on,” I said roughly. “It’s up to a vote of the Council. For my part, I don’t give a damn what you do.”

  “You’re lying,” he said softly, in that special voice we used between us, and I damned him all over again because it was true.

  July again, and we are eighty-seven people now. Word spreads. About half are people who fled nano, like me. The other half embraced it because it lets them do whatever they’d wanted to do before. Some of those ones have their own nanomachines, little ones, made of course by other nanomachines. Hal allows them to use nano to produce things for their jobs, but not to make food or clothing or shelter or anything else we all need to survive, except for some medicines, and we’re working on that.

  The two kinds of people here don’t always get along very well. We have five actors, Amelia the geneticist, and two other scientists, one of them studying something about the stars. We have a man writing fiction, an inventor, and, finally, a real teacher. Also two organic farmers, a sculptor, a man who carves and puts together furniture all without nails, and, of all things, the United States chess champion, who can’t find anyone good enough to play with and so plays against our old computer.

  He also farms and does guard duty and lays pipe and cleans and cans and cooks, of course. Like all the rest of us. The things that the chess player didn’t know how to do, which was everything, we taught him. Just like Hal, who was a Marine once, taught us all to shoot.

  It’s pretty bad out there now, although the TV says it’s getting better as “society adjusts to this most cataclysmic of social changes.” I don’t know if that’s true or not. I guess it varies. There was a lot of rioting and disease and fires. Some places have some government left, some places don’t, some are like us now, mostly our own government, although Hal and two educated women keep our taxes filed and all that. One of the women told me that we don’t have to actually pay taxes because the farm shows a consistent loss. She was a lawyer, but a religious lawyer. She says nano is Satan’s work.

  Amelia Parsons says nano is a gift from God.

  Me, I think something different. I think nano is a sorter. The old sorting used to put the people with money and education and nice things in one pile and the rest of us in another. But nano sorts out two different piles: the ones who like to work because work is what you do, and the ones who don’t.

  It was kind of like everybody won the lottery all at once. I saw a TV show about lottery winners once, a show that followed them around for a year or two after they won real big money. By that time, most of them were worse off than before they won that money: miserable and broke again and with all their relatives mad at them. But some used the money to make nicer lives. And some just gave nearly all of it away to charity and went back to taking care of themselves.

  Jack lasted two months on the farm. Then he was gone again.

  I get email from him every once in a while. Mostly he asks after the kids. He never says where he is or what he’s doing instead of working. He never says who he’s with, or if he’s happy. I guess he is, or he’d come back here. People usually end up doing what makes them happiest, if they can.

  A month ago I went with Hal and some others down to the lake to catch fish. A house stoo
d there, burned to the ground, weeds already growing over the blue brick fireplace. In the ashes I found one diamond earring. Which I left there.

  Now Kimee is in the garden, waiting for me to pick peas. I’m going to show her how to shell them, too, and how to separate the good pods from the bad ones. She’s only five, but it’s never too early to learn.

  2007

  SAFEGUARD

  Four innocent children may hold the key to our survival, or total annihilation, in this powerful and riveting new tale.

  The uniformed military aide appeared at her elbow just as Katherine Taney rose from her gilded chair to enter the Oval Office. “The president will see you now,” his secretary said simultaneously with the aide’s statement, “Wait a moment, Katie.”

  She turned to stare at him. Keep the president waiting? But his face told. For a moment vertigo nearly took her, a swooping blackness, but only for a moment. She said quietly to the aide, “Another one?”

  “Two more. Possibly three.”

  Dear God.

  “Ma’am,” chided the secretary, “the president is ready.”

  She straightened her aging back, thought a quick prayer, and went to brief the commander-in-chief. No, not really to brief—to plead, with the war-battered United States government, for compassion in the face of the unthinkable.

  In the beginning, Li remembered, there had been big faceless people, white as cartoons. These memories were quick and slippery, like dreams. The other children didn’t have them at all. Since that time, there had been only the real cartoons, the world, and Taney.

  He had realized a long time ago that Taney was a person inside a white cartoon covering, and that he himself was a person inside the world, another covering. The world must also have an outside because when Taney left after each visit, she couldn’t have stayed for days in the space behind the leaving door. The space was too small, not even room to lie down to sleep. And what would she eat or drink in there until she came back? And where did she get the fried cakes and other things she brought them?

  “There’s another door, isn’t there, Taney?” he said yet again as the five of them sat around the feeder in the Grove. The feeder had just brought up bowls of food, but no one except Sudie was eating them because Taney had brought a lot of fried cakes in a white bag. Sudie, always greedy, had eaten three fried cakes and half a bowl of stew and now slumped happily against a palm tree, her naked belly round and her lips greasy. Jana sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her thin arms clasped around her legs. Kim stared at nothing.

  Li repeated, “Another door. You go out of the world through another door, don’t you?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Taney said, as always. The girls didn’t even glance at her. Li didn’t expect them to; he was the only one who ever questioned Taney.

  But tonight Jana, still gazing over her clasped knees at the shadow of trees against the sky, said, “Why can’t you answer, Taney?”

  Taney’s head swiveled toward Jana. It was hard to see Taney’s eyes through the faceplate on her white covering; you had to get very close and squint. The cartoons covered like Taney didn’t even have eyes, no matter how much you squinted at them.

  There hadn’t been any new cartoons for a long while.

  Taney finally said, “I can’t answer you, Jana, because the world keeps you safe.”

  The old answer, the one they’d heard all their lives from Taney, from the cartoons. For the first time, Li challenged it. “How, Taney? How does the world keep us safe? Sudie still fell over that stone and you had to come and fix her arm. Jana ate that flower and all her food came out of her mouth.” The next day, all of that kind of flower, all over the world, had disappeared.

  Taney merely repeated, “The world keeps you safe.”

  Sudie said suddenly from her place against the tree, “Your voice is sad, Taney.”

  Jana said, “When will we get new cartoons?”

  But Taney was already getting to her feet, slow and heavy in her white covering. Even Kim knew what that meant. Kim climbed onto Taney’s lap and started to lick frantically at Taney’s face, and it took both Sudie and Li to pull her back. Kim was tall and strong. Taney said, as always, “Be well, dear hearts,” and started away.

  Li, clutching the screaming Kim, watched Taney walk the path between the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. The leaving door was in a big pink rock at the small end of the world, near the pond. Maybe tomorrow they would splash in the pond. That might be fun.

  Except that nothing was as much fun as it used to be. Li didn’t know why, but it was true.

  Eventually Kim stopped screaming and they let her go. Jana folded and refolded the white paper bag Taney had left her, making pretty shapes. The sky overhead and beside the Grove darkened. The feeder with its three untouched bowls and one empty one sank into the ground. The blankets rose, clean even though last night Kim had shit hers again.

  The four children wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down on the grass. Within minutes all were asleep in the circling grove of antiseptic palm trees that produced no fruit, and whose fronds never rustled in the motionless air.

  “Two-and-a-half enclosed acres. Double-built dome construction, translucent and virtually impenetrable. Negative air pressure with triple filters. Inside, semi-tropical flora, no fauna, monitors throughout. Life-maintenance machinery to be concentrated by the east wall within a circle of trees, including the input screen. All instructional programs to feature only cartoon characters in biohazard suits, to minimize curiosity about other people.”

  Katherine said, “Two-and-a-half acres isn’t sufficient for a self-sustaining biosphere.”

  “Of course not, ma’am,” the high-clearance, DOD engineer said, barely concealing his impatience. “An outside computer will control all plant-maintenance and atmospheric functions.”

  “And personnel?”

  “Once the biosphere is up and running, it will need little human oversight. Both functional and contact personnel will be your agency’s responsibility. Our involvement extends only to the construction and maintenance of the cage.”

  “Don’t call it that!”

  The engineer, whom Katherine knew she should be thanking instead of reprimanding, merely shrugged. His blue eyes glittered with dislike. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”

  Three days later, Taney didn’t come.

  It was her day. But lunch came up on the feeder, and then dinner, and then the sky got dark, and the leaving door never opened. Kim sat staring at it the whole day, her mouth hanging open until Jana pressed it closed. Kim couldn’t talk or do much of anything, but somehow she always knew when it was Taney’s day. So she sat, while the others splashed in the pond and pretended to have fun.

  All at once the water in the pond gave a small hiccup and sloshed gently onto the sandy beach.

  “Did you feel that?” Sudie said. “The ground moved!”

  “Ground can’t move,” Li said, because he was the leader. But it had. He waited for the ground to do something else but it just lay there, ground under water. Li got out of the pond.

  “Where are you going?” Jana said.

  “Feeder time,” Li said, although it wasn’t.

  They pulled Kim to her feet and ran. By the time they reached the grove, their naked bodies were dry. Li could feel his hair, which Taney sometimes cut, curling wetly on the back of his neck. Jana’s hair, shorter than his, stood up in yellow fluff that Li liked. Maybe Jana would want to play bodies with him tonight.

  They sat in a circle under the trees, hungry and pleasantly tired from splashing in the pond. Sudie studied the keypad under the screen, each with a little picture on it, and chose the cartoon about four children helping each other to make sand paintings. Li was tired of that cartoon, although when it first appeared, they’d all loved it. Days and days had been spent making sand paintings with the many-colored sands on the beach by the pond.

  The cartoon played, but only Kim really watched it. The feeder rose an
d—

  “The bowls are empty!” Jana cried.

  Li leaped up and examined the four wooden bowls. Empty. How could that be? Why would the feeder bring empty bowls?

  The ground moved gently beneath them.

  “The feeder is broken!” Sudie jumped up and ran to the keypad. Each of its buttons had a picture of a cartoon showing the right thing to do for eating, for playing, for cleaning themselves, for fixing bloody scratches if they fell, for not using up all their kindness if they got angry with each other. But nothing for a broken feeder, a thing that couldn’t happen because the feeder was part of the world. But if there was an inside to the covering that was the world and therefore an outside then maybe—Li had never thought this before—maybe the feeder, like Taney, went outside and things could break there?

  Cold slid along Li’s neck. Kim started licking everyone’s face, running from one to another. Li let her because Kim was stronger than he was and anyway he was used to it.

  “I’m calling Taney,” Sudie said, but she looked questioningly at Li. Calling Taney was, they had all been told over and over, very serious. The only times they’d ever called her was when Sudie broke her arm and when Jana ate the bad flower and all her food came back up through her mouth. Only twice.

  “Do it,” Li said, and Sudie pushed at the exact same time both buttons with Taney’s picture.

  Katherine sat very erect, the back of her best suit not touching the back of her chair, her face stone. A secret congressional hearing didn’t scare her, veteran of far too many. But what this particular committee might decide, did.

  “Dr. Taney, are they, in your expert opinion, the result of deliberate genetic experimentation?”

  “Of course they are, Mr. Chairman.”

  “And intended by the enemy for use as a covert terrorist weapon against the United States?”