Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “The Indians here . . .”

  She peered at his face, shrouded in night, and loved him. She had just told him he was going to die, and he had a soul generous enough to think of others. She started to say, “Depends on whether any of their ancestors intermarried with—” when his rage overcame his generosity.

  “You’re a fucking geneticist! You and the entire United States government couldn’t come up with an antidote or vaccine or something!”

  “No. Do you think we didn’t try?”

  “Why didn’t you kill them all as soon as you found them?”

  Katherine didn’t answer. Either he hadn’t meant the question, or he had. If it had been just more terrified rage, she certainly didn’t blame him. If he meant it, nothing she could say would make it clear to him.

  He said bitterly, “There were political considerations, right? Ten years ago it was fucking President DuBois, working so hard to undo the wrongs of the previous screw-ups, ending the war with compassion, re-establishing our fucking position as the so-called moral leader of the world, and so now Ann is dead and I have to . . .” Abruptly his anger ran out.

  She waited a long moment and then uttered what she knew to be, the moment she said it, the stupidest, most futile statement of her entire life. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t hear it. She sat dreading his reply, and it was a full minute, more, before she realized there wouldn’t ever be one. Tully Baker still sat with his head thrown back in fury and anguish against the mobile’s rear wheel, but when she felt for his wrist, there was no pulse.

  Six hours, then, from the time of initial exposure.

  He was too heavy for her to move, but nobody would find him there before morning. She returned to the tent where the villagers had laid Ann Lionti’s body and told everyone that Baker was mourning alone, in the trailer. Katherine checked on the patients in the medical tent, issued instructions, and drank coffee to stay awake for the few hours until everyone else slept. Then she removed the distributor caps from the three working vehicles in the small camp and carried them with her inside the DDR mobile, where the children waited.

  “Why doesn’t she come? Why doesn’t she come? Why doesn’t she come?” Sudie made the words into a song, and it made Li’s face itch. But he didn’t let his kindness get used up. Maybe the song helped Sudie wait.

  Eventually, however, she fell asleep, and so did Kim. Jana and Li waited. In the light from the car’s sky, Jana’s hair looked yellow as the big morning. She smelled bad because none of them had splashed in a pool since the first world broke, but Li put his arms around her anyway, just to feel her warmth.

  Finally—finally!—the door opened and Taney came in. This time Li really looked at her, at Taney without her covering. Her face was wrinkled. Her eyes sagged. She walked as if something was broken, pulling herself up the square sky-metal rocks by holding onto the edge of the leaving door. Slowly she sat on a chair. Li’s heart filled with love.

  “Taney,” Jana said softly, breaking free of Li’s arms and climbing onto Taney’s lap. “I knew we’d find you.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Li said. He sat on the ground at Taney’s feet. “Taney, I have a lot of questions.”

  “I’m sure you have, dear heart,” Taney said, and there was something wrong with her voice. “So do I. Let me ask mine first.”

  So Li and Jana told them about the break in the world, and Jack and Sally, and sitting beside the broken car on the wide hot path when Ann and Baker came along. Sudie snored and Kim whuffled in her sleep.

  “Taney, why were we in that world and not this one?” Li said.

  “Tell you what, I’ll answer all your questions in the morning,” Taney said. “I’m very tired right now and so are you. Look, Jana’s almost asleep! You lie down here and sleep. I’m going to see about the other people once more.”

  “Okay,” Li said, because he was sleepy.

  Taney kissed them all, covered them with blankets, and left. Li heard the leaving door make a noise behind her.

  A voice in Katherine’s head said, Even the most passionate minds are capable of trivial thoughts during tragedy.

  Standing there in the dark, it took her a long moment to identify the speaker: Some professor back in college, droning on about some Shakespearian play. Why had that random memory come to her now? She even recalled the next thing he said: that only third-rate dramatists put children in peril to create emotion, which was one reason Shakespeare was infinitely superior to Thomas Hardy.

  That professor had been an ass. Children were always the first ones put in peril by upheavals in the world. But not like this . . . not like this.

  She unscrewed the gas cap of the DDR mobile and drew the lighter from her pocket. Used for starting campfires at the center of the kindling, it could flick out a long projection that generated a shower of sparks. The village’s distributor caps were inside the mobile. Baker’s body lay beside it. Everybody else, marooned here, would be dead by morning, except those with no European ancestry in their genes. And although she’d spent the ten years in Las Verdes mostly keeping to herself, Katherine was pretty sure no such Indians existed in the small village. If they did, they might conceivably be turned into carriers, like Li and Jana and Kim and Sudie, but Katherine didn’t think so. The children had been designed to be carriers. Their genomes showed many little-understood variations. The enemy, free from laws against genetic experimentation, had done so with vengeance.

  When all hosts died, so did their viruses.

  She clicked the lighter and the projection snaked out, already glowing. Her hand moved toward the fuel tank, then drew back.

  I can’t.

  But what were the alternatives? Let the children, locked inside, die of starvation. Or, either if they were picked up by other people or if Li somehow learned to drive the mobile as he had Jack’s car, to let them infect more people, who would infect still others, until the airborne virus with a 100 percent kill rate had, at a minimum, wiped out two continents. Who in hell could decide among those three choices?

  Katherine had fought for these children’s lives, had tended them for ten years, had loved them as her own. What mother would choose the deaths of her children over the fate of the world?

  What rational human being would not?

  Hail Mary, Mother of God . . . More useless words, rising out of her distant past like subterranean rocks in an earthquake. Her hand again moved toward the fuel tank, again drew back.

  She couldn’t do it. It was physically impossible, like suddenly flying up into the air. And in less than a few hours she, too, would be dead, and none of this would matter to her any longer. That, too, was a choice: to do nothing.

  From beyond the ruined village came wailing, many voices at once. So everyone hadn’t gone to sleep, after all. The Indians were holding a ritual mourning for the three dead in the quake. Sudden light flared in the darkess: a bonfire.

  Katherine clicked off the lighter and sank hopelessly to the ground. In a moment she would do it, in just another moment. The explosion would be violent and instantaneous; the children would not suffer . . . in just a moment. There was no other choice. Light found its way to her eyes, and she closed them because in such a world there should not be even the flickering light of the bonfire, let alone the steady lying beauty of the silver moon in the wide desert sky.

  She woke at dawn. Cold, stiff, shivering—but alive.

  With enormous effort, Katherine got to her feet. Limping, she made her way to the medical tent. Everyone in it was dead. So were villagers in the emergency inflatables, and an old man lying beside the ashes of the bonfire. Only Katherine lived.

  Trembling, she hobbled back to the mobile, climbed the steps, and unlocked the door. Only Kim was awake, tearing at a loaf of bread with her small sharp teeth. She took one look at Katherine, dropped the bread, and began to lick Katherine’s face. Katherine, stretched almost to breaking, started to shove Kim away . . . and stopped.

  No. Not possible.

/>   Li woke. “Taney!” he said, rubbing his dark eyes. “I was sleeping.”

  “Yes.” It was a croak. Li noticed . . . those dark eyes, that quick little mind, missed nothing.

  “You said you will answer my questions today.”

  “Yes.” Her arms were tight around Kim, so tight the child squirmed. When had Katherine put her arms around Kim, who usually had to be shoved away? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think . . . She got out, “Li, when does Kim lick people’s faces?”

  “When she thinks they’re sad or angry or hurt. Taney, you said it was my turn to ask questions today.”

  “Yes.”

  He crowded close to her, smelling terrible. “You said the first world was to keep us safe. But the feeder broke and we were hungry and then the first world broke, Taney, it broke, and all this other world was out here. Why did you say the first world would keep us safe?”

  “A safeguard,” Katherine said, and wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Oh, the bastards—an antidotal safeguard for the first researchers. In her saliva.”

  “What?”

  “Thousands of compounds in saliva. We couldn’t possibly have tested them all.”

  “What—”

  “Taney,” Jana said sternly from the floor, “stop crying. There’s nothing to cry about. We found you . . . . Stop it, please, Taney, stop it before my kindness gets all used up.”

  The real fight was just beginning, she knew that. It would rage on so many fronts: medical, military, political, even journalistic if they drove her to that. So much energy would be required, so much strategy. She had won ten years ago but she was older now, and much more tired.

  Nonetheless, her mind was already marshalling arguments. The enemy’s research division had been thoroughly destroyed, and so had its personnel. But there was no guarantee that the bombs had actually gotten them all; there had never been any guarantee. The enemy was supposedly our ally now, but if the world situation changed again . . . and things always changed. A biological antidote was the first step toward a vaccine . . . No, Mr. President, tissue samples cannot provide the same mechanisms as a living organism . . .

  Katherine, driving the DDR mobile across the Mojave, glanced back over her shoulder at Kim, the only ugly and unappealing child of the four. Kim, erratic about controlling her bowels, screaming like a stuck siren, forever licking the faces of people she loved. A child no one would want, a child likely to have been stuck in the back ward of some institution somewhere, while the other three babies would have been adopted, cuddled, loved. Kim, now the most important child on the planet.

  “It’s my turn now!” Jana said.

  “In a minute,” Li answered, just as the computer said, “Cat. ‘Cat’ starts with ‘c.’ Say ‘kuh’ for ‘c.’ ”

  “Kuh,” Li and Jana said simultaneously, and the computer broke into congratulatory song. Li and Jana laughed with excitement.

  Sudie suddenly appeared beside the driver’s seat. “Taney,” she said seriously, “Now that the real world got broke, are you going to keep us safe?”

  Medical fights, military fights, political fights, journalistic fights. Katherine’s knee throbbed. The desert shimmered in front of her, murderous with heat, the earthquake disaster behind. Katherine was nearly seventy years old, and her knee hurt.

  “Yes, dear heart, I am,” she said, and drove on across the desert, toward the next world.

  END GAME

  Focusing on a single gambit can lead to an unsettling . . .

  “I’m an Asimov’s veteran. My second published story appeared in the January/February 1978 issue, and the bulk of my short work has appeared in Asimov’s ever since, including one Hugo- and two Nebula-Award winning stories. I’ve published with five editors and countless format changes, and I’m still thrilled to be here.”

  —Nancy Kress

  Allen Dodson was sitting in seventh-grade math class, staring at the back of Peggy Corcoran’s head, when he had the insight that changed the world. First his own world and then, eventually, like dominos toppling in predestined rhythm, everybody else’s, until nothing could ever be the same again. Although we didn’t, of course, know that back then.

  The source of the insight was Peggy Corcoran. Allen had sat behind her since third grade (Anderson, Blake, Corcoran, Dodson, DuQuesne . . .) and never thought her remarkable. Nor was she. It was 1982 and Peggy wore a David Bowie T-shirt and straggly brown braids. But now, staring at the back of her mousy hair, Allen suddenly realized that Peggy’s head must be a sloppy mess of skittering thoughts and contradictory feelings and half-buried longings—just as his was. Nobody was what they seemed to be!

  The realization actually made his stomach roil. In books and movies, characters had one thought at a time: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” “An offer he couldn’t refuse.” “Beam me up, Scotty!” But Allen’s own mind, when he tried to watch it, was different. Ten more minutes of class I’m hungry gotta pee the answer is x+6 you moron what would it be like to kiss Linda Wilson M*A*S*H on tonight really gotta pee locker stuck today Linda eight more minutes do the first sixteen problems baseball after school—

  No. Not even close. He would have to include his mind watching those thoughts and then his thoughts about the watching thoughts and then—

  And Peggy Corcoran was doing all that, too.

  And Linda Wilson.

  And Jeff Gallagher.

  And Mr. Henderson, standing at the front of math class.

  And everyone in the world, all with thoughts zooming through their heads fast as electricity, thoughts bumping into each other and fighting each other and blotting each other out, a mess inside every mind on the whole Earth, nothing sensible or orderly or predictable . . . Why, right this minute Mr. Henderson could be thinking terrible things even as he assigned the first sixteen problems on page 145, terrible things about Allen even or Mr. Henderson could be thinking about his lunch or hating teaching or planning a murder . . . You could never know. No one was settled or simple, nothing could be counted on . . .

  Allen had to be carried, screaming, from math class.

  I didn’t learn any of this until decades later, of course. Allen and I weren’t friends, even though we sat across the aisle from each other (Edwards, Farr, Fitzgerald, Gallagher . . .). And after the screaming fit, I thought he was just as weird as everyone else thought. I never taunted Allen like some of the boys, or laughed at him like the girls, and a part of me was actually interested in the strange things he sometimes said in class, always looking as if he had no idea how peculiar he sounded. But I wasn’t strong enough to go against the herd and make friends with such a loser.

  The summer before Allen went off to Harvard, we did become—if not friends—then chess companions. “You play rotten, Jeff,” Allen said to me with his characteristic, oblivious candor, “but nobody else plays at all.” So two or three times a week we sat on his parents’ screened porch and battled it out on the chess board. I never won. Time after time I slammed out of the house in frustration and shame, vowing not to return. After all, unlike wimpy Allen, I had better things to do with my time: girls, cars, James Bond movies. But I always went back.

  Allen’s parents were, I thought even back then, a little frightened by their son’s intensity. Mild, hard-working people fond of golf, they pretty much left Allen alone from his fifteenth birthday on. As we moved rooks and knights around the chess board in the gathering darkness of the porch, Allen’s mother would timidly offer a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. She treated both of us with an uneasy respect that, in turn, made me uneasy. That wasn’t how parents were supposed to behave.

  Harvard was a close thing for Allen, despite his astronomical SATs. His grades were spotty because he only did the work in courses he was interested in, and his medical history was even spottier: bouts of depression when he didn’t attend school, two brief hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward. Allen would get absorbed by something—chess, quantum physics, Buddhism—to the point where he couldn�
��t stop, until all at once his interest vanished as if it had never existed. Harvard had, I thought in my eighteen-year-old wisdom, every reason to be wary. But Allen was a National Merit scholar, and when he won the Westinghouse science competition for his work on cranial structures in voles, Harvard took him.

  The night before he left, we had our last chess match. Allen opened with the conservative Italian game, which told me he was slightly distracted. Twelve moves in, he suddenly said, “Jeff, what if you could tidy up your thoughts, the way you tidy up your room every night?”

  “Do what?” My mother “tidied up” my room, and what kind of weirdo used words like that, anyway?

  He ignored me. “It’s sort of like static, isn’t it? All those stray thoughts in a mind, interfering with a clear broadcast. Yeah, that’s the right analogy. Without the static, we could all think clearer. Cleaner. We could see farther before the signal gets lost in uncontrolled noise.”

  In the gloom of the porch, I could barely see his pale, broad-cheeked face. But I had a sudden insight, rare for me that summer. “Allen—is that what happened to you that time in seventh grade? Too much . . . static?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t seem embarrassed, unlike anybody normal. It was as if embarrassment was too insignificant for this subject. “That was the first time I saw it. For a long time I thought if I could learn to meditate—you know, like Buddhist monks—I could get rid of the static. But meditation doesn’t go far enough. The static is still there, you’re just not paying attention to it anymore. But it’s still there.” He moved his bishop.

  “What exactly happened in the seventh grade?” I found myself intensely curious, which I covered by staring at the board and making a move.

  He told me, still unembarrassed, in exhaustive detail. Then he added, “It should be possible to adjust brain chemicals to eliminate the static. To unclutter the mind. It should!”