Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “You got allergies, hon?” Sally said. “Never mind, I don’t expect you to know. Jack, you making any progress in there?”

  “Just over a million hits on ‘Taney,’ is all,” Jack said, which made no sense. Nobody was hitting anybody. “This ain’t going to be easy.”

  Li’s throat felt strange, and not in a good way. Jana kept making strange noises in her throat. Li must have slept, because when he woke it was night again, and very dark. Something glowed in a far corner of the room, and at first that scared Li. He lay on the ground, watching to see if the glowing thing moved. It didn’t. Slowly he crawled toward it, until he could see that it was a tiny ball of morning, like the big one in the sky of the big world, but not so bright. Li touched it, and snatched back his finger. The tiny morning was hot.

  Carefully he studied it. It was a made thing, like the pretty folded things Jana made from Taney’s paper bags. Li’s breath came faster. All these things were made: the feeder and the bowls and the blanket-covered rocks—”chairs” Sally had called them—to sit on, and maybe even the sky of this world.

  Of any world.

  Li’s mind raced. He never got back to sleep. All the rest of the night he either crawled around, touching things and trying to figure out how they’d been made, or else lying still, thinking. His throat still hurt but he ignored it. Made things. Other people. Worlds within worlds.

  When morning—the big morning—returned, the girls still lay sleeping on the ground. All of them breathed too heavily. Li stood, stretched, and went to look around the parts of sky that touched the ground for Jack and Sally.

  Jack sat slumped over a small screen, which still glowed. Sally lay on the floor. Both of them were dead.

  Not here.

  Katherine made another, equally futile tour of the biosphere, stumping heavily, leaning on her cane. She’d fallen two days ago, twisting her knee, which had led her to put off her visit to the children. Then had come the first quake, which had made her fall again as she hobbled across her living room. No one had predicted the second, massive quake.

  She called again, knowing it was pointless. She’d seen the blood on the crack in the supposedly shatter-proof dome. The children had squeezed themselves through and set off, probably looking for her. They wouldn’t get far, naked in the desert, without water. There was, by design, nothing within fifty miles of the biosphere. Scavengers, of air or ground, would get the bodies.

  Tears welled in her eyes, behind the faceplate. Stupid. This was one solution, maybe the only solution, to a problem that could only grow as years passed. Katherine was nearly seventy—what would have happened after she could no longer carry on this long, painful fight? Some days she felt ninety. Some days she felt already dead, even as the world slowly revived itself from the bad years of the war.

  Li, with his dark expressive eyes and quick mind . . . delicate Jana, who in another world would have been a startling beauty . . . funny emotional Sudie. . . even Kim, afflicted with both Down’s and autism . . . even Kim she would miss. Her children. She’d had no other.

  Katherine put herself through detox, leaving her biohazard suit behind, even as she doubted that detox was any longer necessary. She hobbled toward her car. The AC felt blessedly cool. Fifty miles to the village of Las Verdes, where a group of Native American descendents eked out a subsistence existence, survivors of past injustices just as the children had been of a future one. A mile outside Las Verdes, Katherine had built a house, which was now a pile of debris. The Indians would rebuild it for her; they were good at starting over. Although now there was no reason for her to stay.

  Li. Jana. Sudie. Kim.

  She drove home through a desert wavery with heat and tears.

  “Why don’t the buttons have cartoon pictures on them?” Jana said.

  “It isn’t for cartoons,” Li said slowly. They stood around the little screen where Jack had died. Li and Sudie had pulled him off the chair and laid him on the floor beside Sally, and Jana had covered the people with a blanket. Li didn’t know why she’d done that, but it seemed a good thing to do.

  The children had examined this world. It had four places, two with faucet springs. In those two places a lot of things were broken, and sharp pieces of clear sky had fallen down. Jana cut her foot on one piece, but it only bled a little. One of the places had more of the strange food, but not very much of it. They’d eaten it all.

  “If the screen isn’t for cartoons, what is it for?” Sudie said. She stood behind Li, breathing heavily into his neck, and her voice sounded . . . thick, somehow. Like food was stuck in her throat, although she said it wasn’t.

  “I don’t know what it’s for,” Li said. “But we can’t take it with us because it’s tied to where this sky touches the ground.”

  “Take it with us? Where are we going?” Sudie sounded frightened and Kim began to lick her face.

  Jana said, “We can’t just walk like yesterday, Li.”

  “We’re not going to walk. I watched Jack make the car go. I think I can do that.”

  “But where?”

  “We’ll go along the big path. There’s no more food here, Jana. Maybe the path will take us to Taney.”

  Jana considered. “Okay. You’re right, we can’t stay here. We have to find Taney. But first fill those white bowls with water from the faucet spring.”

  They went out the leaving door and climbed into the car, lugging blankets and water. Sudie had untied the blanket from her body, but Li made her put it back on. “People here are different,” he said. “They use up their kindness faster if you don’t have blankets around you. Oh—wait!”

  He went back inside and brought out a big armful of the blankets behind another leaving door in the biggest place. They were like the blankets around Jack and Sally, all shaped like bodies and fastened together with tiny little strings or hard bumps that Li had examined in great detail. “Put these coverings on you,” he told the girls.

  “Like Taney has,” Sudie said happily, even though none of Jack’s and Sally’s coverings were slippery like Taney’s. But some were white, and Sudie picked one of those.

  Li turned the thing that Jack had turned to make the car go, and it started making noises. But it wouldn’t go forward until he pushed down with his feet on the flat things on the car’s ground. Then the car stopped.

  “It’s dead,” Sudie said.

  Li made it start again, and pushed the flat things. The car stopped. “maybe I should just push one.”

  The car raced away so fast that Sudie screamed, even Jana gasped, and Kim started licking everyone frantically. Li pushed on the other flat thing and the car stopped.

  Eventually he figured out how to make it go-stop-go-stop-go-stop, and they started down the wide dusty path, under the hot ball of morning high in the sky, to look for Taney.

  “—eight point one on the Richter scale, slightly higher than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The president has declared southern California a federal disaster area, and the Department of Domestic Rescue is mobilizing to—” Katherine turned off the car radio.

  She drove past the village. Las Verdes—a bitter joke of a name, if there ever was one—had gotten off fairly lightly because when all buildings were one-story adobe brick, collapse was quick and clean. No fires, no burst gas mains, no floods. The underground spring, the only reason this village existed at all, was still there, although the well-house had crumbled. The wind mills and lone cell tower lay on their sides; TV satellite dishes littered the rubble; somewhere a woman wailed, a high keening borne on the thin wind.

  Katherine’s house was a pile of dirt, but the shed in the backyard still stood. Under its deceptive façade of cheap plastic was a reinforced steel frame, thief-proof and, unlike the biosphere dome, far too small to crack. She let herself inside with the key around her neck. A generator-powered computer running encrypted, military-grade software sat on a table that nearly filled the small space. It had a direct uplink to a military satellite.

  TOP S
ECRET

  CODE WORD ACCESS ONLY

  NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

  CASE NO. 254987-A

  CODE NAME: ACHILLES

  DATE: 6/12/28

  AGENT IN CHARGE: SIGMA INVESTIGATOR K. M. TANEY

  SUBJECT: DEATH OF GM JUVENILE AGENTS

  She typed swiftly, sent the report, and turned off the computer. With a second key, Katherine turned a small lock set into the machine’s side. She closed the door, hobbled back to the car, and drove several hundred feet away. Five minutes later, the shed exploded.

  Now there was nothing to keep her here at all.

  Nonetheless, she drove toward Las Verdes. The village had regarded Katherine with neither kindness nor suspicion. Mostly it had let her be: one more crazy white inexplicably in love with the inhospitable desert, wasting her time making bad paintings of rocks and sunsets, supported by means beyond their world. Still, the trunk of her car held medical supplies, among other things; perhaps she could help.

  The car stopped going and Li couldn’t make it start again no matter what he did. “Is it broken?” Sudie said. “Like the feeder and the world?”

  “Yes,” Li said. He opened the door; it was getting very hot inside. It was hot outside, too. The four children got out and sat in the brief shade on one side of the dead car, trying to not touch its burning side.

  Jana started to say something, stopped, took Li’s hand.

  He gazed out across the big world, glanced briefly at the hot ball of morning in the big sky, and anger grew in him. All this—all this had been out here all the time, and Taney had never let them have it. All this, and now that they had found it, they were going to die here. Li knew it, and he guessed that Jana knew it, too. Sudie and Kim did not. But Kim might have known something, deep in her different head, because she crawled over Sudie and began to lick Li’s face.

  He pushed her away and dropped Jana’s hand. His kindness, he knew, was all used up. He didn’t want to die.

  “I’m so thirsty,” Sudie said. No one answered.

  A long time later Sudie said, “Look at those big birds up there. Flying around and around in circles. Why are they doing that, Li?”

  “I don’t know,” Li said.

  Jana said, “Something is coming on the big path. There.” She pointed.

  Li strained his eyes. Finally he saw a sort of wiggle in the air—how could Jana see so far?—with a black dot in it. The dot got bigger and bigger and then it turned into another “car” but big, enormous, so that Sudie whimpered and tried to hide behind Li. The car stopped and a person got out.

  “What the . . . what happened here, son?”

  “This car stopped,” Li said. He stood. The man didn’t have hair on his face like Jack, and his voice sounded more like Taney’s.

  “You were driving? Where’s your folks?”

  Li didn’t know what “folks” might be; everything in this world was so strange. He said, “We have to find Taney.”

  “But your parents . . . hell, get out of the sun, first. We can help you, son. We’re Department of Domestic Rescue. Climb in.”

  Inside the big car was another little world, with chairs and blankets and a feeder. A woman gave them water and said, “Baker, where did they come from?”

  Baker sat at another of the little screens and did something to it. “They said ‘Taney,’ but GPS isn’t giving me anything like that.”

  “Well, we’re due in Las Verdes like, now. Shall I drive? And while you’re online, is there any more email on why we’re being diverted to an ass-end hole like Las Verdes when real population centers are screaming for help?”

  “No. Presumably Las Verdes got an emergency situation.”

  “Two states have got an emergency situation, Baker. Why the priority-one diversion to Las Verdes?”

  “Ann, ‘ours is not to reason why—’ ”

  “Oh, roast it. I’ll drive.”

  Baker gave them all food, and Li fell asleep on the moving ground of the car. When he woke, Baker and Ann were leaving the big car. “You stay here, Li,” Baker said. “Safest and coolest inside, and we’ve got work to do. We’ll get you sorted out tonight, I promise. Okay, buddy?”

  There was kindness in Baker’s voice, so Li said, “Yes.”

  “You could maybe . . . I know! Here.”

  Baker did something to the car’s sky, and all at once a screen came down, glowed, and made cartoons. Sudie squealed with joy. A cartoon bird—how could cartoons have birds, not just people?—flew toward the hot ball of morning in the sky, chased by a person. Sudie, Kim, and Jana crowded close.

  Li watched through the clear place in the car’s sky as Baker and Ann walked toward piles of dirt and crying people. He watched for a long time. The hot ball of morning sunk down into the ground (how did it do that?) and the sky turned wonderful colors, purple and red and yellow. Baker and Ann came in and out, carrying things out with them. On one coming in, Ann touched a place on the wall and morning came inside the car’s world, although not in the big world outside. The girls watched the cartoons, too absorbed to even laugh. Li looked outside.

  Figures moved in and out of houses made of blankets, some of which Ann had folded. Little bits of morning lighted the blanket houses. And by that light, as he peered out of the car with his nose pushed flat against it, Li saw her.

  “Taney!”

  Her back ached. She had moved too much, lifted too much, grown too old for this sort of field work. For any sort of field work. But everything was done that could be done tonight. Under the capable direction of the DDR agents, Ann Lionti and Baker Tully, the wounded had been treated, the homeless housed in evac inflatables, the spring water tested and found safe. Everyone had been fed. Tomorrow the dead would be buried. Katherine looked up and saw a ghost at the window of the DDR mobile.

  No. Not possible.

  But there he was.

  Li waved his arms and Katherine, dazed, half lifted her hand before she let it drop. How . . . But it didn’t matter how. What mattered was that Lionti and Tully, that everyone here, that Katherine herself, was already dead.

  The leaving door wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t open, no matter how Li pushed it. He cried out in frustration and shoved Sudie, who was making everything harder by pushing the door in a different direction from Li. But then he got the door open and tumbled down the square rocks made of sky material and he was with Taney, throwing his arms around her waist, Sudie and Jana and Kim right behind him. Kim started licking Taney’s face, jumping up in mute excitement.

  “Taney! Taney!”

  “You found us!”

  “You lost your covering! I can touch you!”

  “Taney, the world broke and we came out! It broke!”

  “Taney! Taney!”

  “You know these kids?” Baker said behind Taney. She turned, Li and Sudie still clinging to her, and Baker said in a different voice, “Doctor—what is it?”

  “We . . . they . . . Kim, stop!”

  They had never heard that voice from her before. Li, startled, stepped back. But then Taney’s kindness was back, although she sounded very sad.

  “Li, take the others back inside the trailer. I promise I’ll come in just a little while, okay? Just everybody go inside.”

  They went, of course; this was Taney. Jana and Li stared at each other. Sudie went back to watching the cartoons still showing on the screen. Kim pressed her nose against the clear sky-metal to watch Taney, mutely following her every tiny movement in the gathering dark. Li joined Kim.

  A woman ran up to Taney and Baker, waving her arms and shouting.

  “Experiments?” Baker Tully said, bewildered and angry and, Katherine could see, terrified. As well he should be. “Bioweaponry experiments?”

  “From the very end of the war,” Katherine said. “Intelligence discovered the operation and we sent in two entire battle groups five days before the surrender.”

  “And Ann—” He couldn’t say it. It had been hard to pull him away from Ann Lionti’s body,
lying crumpled between a DDR inflatable and the ruins of an adobe house. Beside her, incongruously, lay an unbroken planter filled with carefully watered dahlias. Now Katherine and Baker stood behind the huge mobile, away from the others. She looked at his young, suddenly ravaged face, dimly lit by a rising gibbous moon, and she thought, I can’t do this.

  He had courage. He got out, “How long? For me, I mean?”

  “I don’t know for sure. The only tests we could run, obviously, were on animals. When did you and Ann first pick up the children?”

  “About six hours ago. Give it to me straight, doctor. Please. I have to know.”

  She saw what he was doing: looking desperately for a way out. All his training, like hers, had taught him that the way out of anything was information, knowledge, reasoning. But not this time.

  I can’t do this.

  She said, “I have to sit down, I’m sorry . . . knee injury.” She eased herself onto the ground, partly cutting off the illumination from the floodlamps, so that they sat in shadowed darkness. That should have made it easier, but didn’t.

  “A virus in their breath gets into the bloodstream from the victim’s lungs and makes a targeted, cytopathic toxin. When the virus has replicated enough for the toxin to reach a critical level, it stops the heart. And the virus is highly contagious, passed from person to person.”

  “So everyone here—”

  “Yes,” Katherine said quietly.

  “I don’t understand!” All at once he sounded like a child, like Li. Simultaneously Katherine shuddered and put a hand on his arm. Baker shook it off. “I just don’t understand. If that’s all true, the virus would spread through the whole country, killing everybody—”

  “The—”

  “—and then the whole world! The enemy would have killed themselves, too!”

  “No,” Katherine said. Her knee began to throb painfully. “There are racial differences among genomes. Small differences, and not very many, but enough. Think of genetic diseases: Tay-Sachs among Jews, sickle-cell anemia among Blacks. We’ve found more, and much more subtle. This virus exploits a tiny difference in genetic structure, and so in cellular functioning, in anyone with certain Caucasian-heritage genes. Tully—”