Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “No,” Tartell gasped. “There’s a terminator gene built in. It’ll only cover the deserts.”

  “You can’t do this! Public opinion alone—”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  The DiSartos’ guests had adjourned to the poker table. Beer, chips, hearty camaraderie to cover the awkward moments in the living room. Ron had even left the TV on; Maddie Lomax liked to hear Wheel of Fortune.

  “Raise you a quarter,” Jim said.

  “I fold,” from Brenda.

  “See you and call,” Ted said. “Read ‘em and weep.”

  “Your pot,” Ron said. “Does anybody want—”

  “—interrupt this program for breaking news!” trumpeted the TV. “According to satellite photos just released, a strange phenomenon is spreading over portions of deserts in Asia, South America, and . . . Preliminary reports say that a blinding white organic cover—”

  “Aliens!” gasped Maddie, just as the newscast was overridden by the Compassion Channel logo.

  “Hey, it’s not time for that again,” Ted said.

  “Look at this,” the voice-over urged, showing the same bright, white field as the newscast. “It’s like seashells, made by tiny desert-living animals. But it reflects like ice. You can see that, can’t you? It’s reflecting heat back into space, so that the Earth’s deserts won’t advance any more. This white coating is saving Saya’s life in Kenya.

  “And Ahmed’s in Morocco.” Close-up.

  “And Miguel’s in Argentina.

  “And Ekaterina’s in Uzbekistan.

  “And Ah Par’s in Myanmar.

  “And yours. Because with this reflecting shield to replace Earth’s lost ice sheets, maybe—just maybe—we all will have a chance to avoid the disaster you saw earlier.” Replay, eerie in its soundlessness, of the horror of a nuked Washington, D.C.

  “Is this white cover a risk? In some ways, maybe, like all new technology. Is it an unauthorized risk we have to take? Yes. It breaks the rules, but desperate times call for radical action. We need to do this—for the children.

  “Tell your leaders that.”

  The broadcast then repeated, word-for-word and image-for-image. As the third repetition began, Ron rose and abruptly clicked off the television.

  Maddie shrugged. “So . . . not aliens. Sue me.”

  “I want to know more about this so-called ‘white cover,’ ” Jim said. “Where the hell did it come from?”

  “Well, at least somebody’s doing something,” Karen said.

  “But without any proper authority! You heard them—nobody authorized this! It’s against law and order!”

  Ted said, “Who could authorize something like that?”

  No one knew.

  “Why?” Carmody said, softly. His first anger had passed, morphing into the pragmatism that had made his career what it was. This was happening; it would have to be dealt with. Hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. StarCorps would need business strategies, scientists, spin masters, all of it, and need it fast. Carmody had urgent calls to make. But he delayed a few precious seconds, because he felt genuine curiosity. “Why, Glenn? This wasn’t how you lived your life. Wasn’t ever among your goals.”

  “No.” The old man was visibly weaker as the stimulants both wore off and took their toll.

  “Then why?”

  Sister Hélène-Marie started the long walk back to Nakmu, a few bits of the bright-white clutched in her fingers. She still didn’t know what the bits were, or what they might be for. Undoubtedly government officials would, in the Lord’s good time, tell her. She would listen—but only to a point. They knew much, these government officials. But on one critical matter they were wrong, very wrong. They thought that each man’s destiny depended on what happened to the Earth.

  When, in Jesus’ truth, it was the other way around.

  “Pirate broadcast signal has ceased again,” the WRKC chief engineer said wearily. “Resume regularly scheduled programming.”

  Hah, thought the equally weary tech. The chief should know better. Nothing was regular about any of this. But maybe that was . . . a good thing? “Regular” hadn’t been working well so far. Not even a little bit.

  He could still see, in his mind’s eye, the radiating white cover on the dead desert.

  “Law and order,” Jim repeated, nodding vigorously.

  Brenda glanced at Ron, then gazed at the closed door of the baby’s tiny bedroom. Ron knew what she was thinking, just as if she’d spoken aloud. Those other kids were on her mind, the kids with the weird foreign names. Ron was surprised to realize that he remembered them all: Saya. Ahmed. Ekaterina. Miguel. Ah Par.

  Brenda said hesitantly, “Maybe you do have to have law and order. Yes. But . . . if those particles really can send a lot of heat back into space . . . really can save lives. . .” She stopped, embarrassed. Brenda didn’t like to antagonize anybody. But her chin rose.

  Ron had always trusted Brenda’s instincts. Not an intellectual, his sweet wife, but sound. That was the word. Sound.

  “Well,” Ron said defiantly, looking from the blank TV to Jim. Desperate times call for radical action. “Well, I think it’s a good idea, too. And I’m going to call my congressman in the morning.”

  Jim said, “Do you even know who he is?”

  Ron didn’t. But he would find out.

  “Why, Glenn?” Carmody said.

  Tartell was having trouble breathing. “Because . . . life isn’t . . . same as . . . death. Different . . . rules.”

  “Sentimental claptrap.”

  Tartell smiled. “Wait . . . until you . . . get there.”

  Carmody didn’t even bother to answer that one. He saw himself out, not stopping even when alarm bells started behind him and people again rushed into the room that he’d just left. Carmody vacated the dim house, cell phone already in hand, and strode rapidly toward the car, watching for the moment the phone picked up a tower.

  But for just a second, as the too bright sunlight struck his face and the CO2-clogged air hit his lungs, a shiver ran over him. His own death—what would be the “rules” for that? The goals? For just a moment it seemed that it already surrounded him, that inevitable moment that comes to everyone, anticipated or not. The ultimate desert.

  He shrugged off the moment and started making business calls.

  2008

  SEX AND VIOLENCE

  Nancy Kress show us why we can’t live without . . .

  “The central problem of evolution is this,” Dr. Shearing said, chalk poised before the blackboard. Bio 101 slouched, sprawled, and yawned in its collective seats. “Natural selection works fine once you have organisms to select from. But how did that first self-replicating organism get itself assembled? In fifty years of lab experiments—fifty years!—we haven’t succeeding in infusing life into any ‘primordial-soup’ chemicals. Let alone in joining the minimum thirty-two amino acids needed for a self-replicating proto-cell.” He paused dramatically. “So where did that first natural-selection candidate come from? Where?”

  Ordered on eBay, Jim Dunn text-messaged to Emily McLean across the aisle. She giggled.

  “Of course,” Dr. Shearing continued, “There’s always the theory that life on Earth was seeded from the stars, by a cloud of drifting spores called panspermia—”

  Canned sperm, ya? Emily texted, giggling harder.

  “—and that we descendents of alien spores in fact are, after three and a half billion years of evolution, aliens to Earth.”

  HE’S pretty alien, Jim texted. Wanna get coffee?

  “They test how?” [Mghzl] [said] to [his] [lab assistant].

  “Matter-based, which is strange enough, but . . . look.” The other displayed all the relevant data on the [not translatable] of a [also not translatable].

  “Sugar-phosphate double helix and amino acid pairs? You’re sure?”

  The [lab assistant] [nodded]. The fabric of space-time rippled slightly.

  “When?”

  �
�Forty point sixteen [time units] ago. It could have been an accidental escape or . . .”

  “Or a deliberate release,” [Mghzl] [said] bitterly. “I suspect . . . you know what I suspect. What have they evolved into?”

  The [lab assistant] displayed an image on [his] [not translatable]. [Mghzl] recoiled. The energy of the recoil, traveling in all directions, made a tiny tear in space-time which immediately underwent a flop transition into a new orientation within one six-dimensional Calabi-Yau space. “They look like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have they spread beyond the one planet?”

  “Not yet.”

  [Mghzl] [sighed]. “Begin an [official investigation] into the spore release. And send an [exterminator/cleanser/cover-up team]. We can’t have uncontrolled [vermin-like beings] infesting that part of the galaxy.”

  The [lab assistant] hesitated. “I would like . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I would like to . . . to study them.”

  [Mghzl] [blinked]. “Why?”

  “For my [hopelessly untranslatable term]. They . . . I know this is incredible, but currently they’re evolving through mating by direct physical joining with direct exchange of bodily tissues.”

  [Mghzl] [shuddered]. Space-time warped in several dimensions. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “How could evolution . . . oh, all right. Study them. But only for one [long unit of time], and only if there’s no spread of the infestation.”

  “Agreed.”

  “After that, the [exterminator/cleanser/cover-up team].”

  “Yes. Thank you, [honorific involving terms not only untranslatable but capable of undermining human civilization].”

  “Thirty-two modules to make a proto-cell,” Emily recited, squinting at her notes.

  “I think it’s ‘molecules,’ ” Jim said. God, she had such a body.

  “Do you think it’ll be on the test?”

  “Dunno.”

  “We should study together—your notes are better than mine.” She smiled at him and tossed her hair. One strand fell into her coffee cup. Neither of them noticed.

  He said, “Yeah, let’s study together . . . you taking Bio 102 next semester?”

  “No, I’m a business major. But I have to pass this or I’m toast.”

  “I’ll help you pass.” Their eyes locked. Pheromones shot out energetically. [Notes] were [recorded]. The college cafeteria grew warmer.

  She said huskily, “What’s an amino acid?”

  Jim and Emily lay in bed, smiling at each other. Her long hair spread in silky tentacles across the pillow. She didn’t yet know it, but one of Jim’s sperm had just found one of her eggs and was burrowing inward with ferocious violence.

  “We’ll miss the exam,” she said.

  “Screw the exam.”

  They smiled at each other. This post-coital glow, so strong, must be love. The attraction between them grew even more intense. [Notes] were [recorded] at an even more furious pace. Energy from the [recording process], unprecedented in this star system, reached a critical mass and flowed outward through all seventeen dimensions of space-time, forward and backward, at the speed of light. Through space, through time.

  Sol grew .00001 degree hotter (Kelvin). The Van Allen Belt shivered. Thirteen tiny flop transitions occurred in the blink of an eye.

  And in the early Precambrian, thirty-two molecules jolted and joined.

  CALL BACK YESTERDAY

  Nancy Kress has three books appearing in 2008: Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, a collection from Golden Gryphon; and two novels, Dogs (Tachyon) and Steal Across the Sky (Tor). All of those concern genetic engineering in one way or another, but the following story deals with a much older and more mysterious idea: what changes time can, and cannot, make in human lives.

  This morning the bathroom mirror shows only a lone person—besides Caitlin herself, of course. Caitlin’s hair is dirty and there’s no time to wash it before Group, which starts in seven minutes. Time is always a problem for Caitlin; she’s not good at it. She washes her face, brushes her teeth, and tries the effect of pinning her dirty hair on top of her head. She looks like a dork. More of a dork.

  The woman in the mirror ignores Caitlin. Another person, the pre-adolescent boy, wanders out of the gray mist from wherever they live when they’re not in her mirror. The woman and the boy also ignore each other. They always do.

  “Fuck off,” Caitlin says experimentally. They don’t look at her, but the woman frowns and the boy grins at empty space. That’s the most that Caitlin has ever been able to affect any of them: the odd cuss word or the funny one-liner. Not that she’s any good at jokes, or at cussing. She will never be Seena.

  Usually Caitlin avoids looking in mirrors at all in the morning because a crowd of people that early is just too hard to take. But two people seem . . . if not manageable, at least bearable. She studies them both through the toothpaste flecks.

  The woman is maybe thirty-five. Too heavy but not really fat, dressed in wide-leg khaki pants and a yellow sweater. She carries an infant on one arm and may or may not be pregnant with another. Her hair is cut in a 1940’s style, side-parted with a wave falling over one eye. The boy wears what appears to be purple garbage bags strung with tiny glowing wires. His eyes are startlingly, aggressively blue, bluer than any sky Caitlin has ever seen. Otherwise, he looks like—

  “Group in five minutes,” calls Hardin, rumbling down the hall like a snow plow. “Josh, Caitlin, Seena, five minutes.”

  “Screw you,” Seena calls back from her room. That’ll lose her ten points, maybe even risk a session in the time-out room, but Seena won’t care. Caitlin drags the comb once more through her hair and tries tucking it behind her ears. No better.

  “Four minutes,” Hardin brays, plowing back in the other direction.

  Time. “Had we world enough and time . . .” “Time is money.” “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Quotations slide through Caitlin’s head, like pearls on a string. Where do they come from? How does she know all this stuff ?

  She scrubs a spot of toothpaste off her sweater and picks at a hangnail. Briefly, for just a second, the woman with the baby on her hip looks outward and her gaze meets Caitlin’s. The woman shows no recognition. The boy in the purple garbage bags has disappeared, but a man in a silver brocade waistcoat, knee breeches, and elaborately tied white cravat strolls into the mirror, calling over his shoulder to someone hidden in mist.

  “Caitlin!” Hardin bellows.

  “Coming!”

  She turns her back on the mirror just as the maternal woman and the knee-breeched man pass through each other like ghosts.

  “Let’s review what we know about Cathcart Syndrome,” Dr. Jensen says, and everybody groans.

  “Again?” Josh says. “Like we don’t already have this stuff coming out of our asses?”

  “Language,” Dr. Jensen says mildly. She’s a tiny, middle-aged woman in a white doctor coat. Caitlin, lying in bed at night, can somehow never picture Dr. Jensen’s features. Along with so much else she can’t picture.

  Josh drawls, “Are you asking what language ‘ass’ is?”

  Dr. Jensen ignores this, saying, “Let’s review the information for Seth,” and everybody looks at Seth, who blushes.

  Caitlin feels sorry for him. He can’t be more than thirteen, skinny and pimply and scared, with ears that stick out like mailboxes. He only arrived on their floor yesterday, when Michael was transferred to another ward, and Caitlin knows what lies ahead for him. Roth, that fat prick, is already sharpening his talons. To make it worse, Seth is sitting next to Josh, blond and green-eyed Josh, who is probably the hottest guy Caitlin has ever seen. The contrast is painful.

  Dr. Jensen says, “Who wants to start the review?”

  “I will,” Pam says. Of course. Seena rolls her eyes: Suck-up. Caitlin grins.

  Group is held in the lounge, a light-green room as windowless as all the others in the M
anhattan Institute for Adolescent Behavior. A glass wall separates the room from the corridor where Hardin, three hundred pounds of fat and muscle, lounges on duty. Dr. Jensen perches on the edge of a chair as if she’s about to take flight. Her head tilts to one side. The eight teenage patients—four of each sex, Seena said once, like we’re going to hold a fucking prom—sprawl on sofas and arm chairs whose stuffing peeks from various slashes. Seena sits on the floor, her bones jutting sharply from her shoulders, wrists, cheeks. Caitlin wishes she looked like Seena, but the only way she could get that slim would be to vomit up absolutely everything she eats, and she can’t even bring herself to stick her fingers down her throat. Also the staff might hear her puking and put her in time-out, and she can’t take that chance.

  Pam, her eyes feverish with the desire for praise, recites carefully. “Cathcart is a brain disorder. People think they see reflections of people who aren’t really there, who may be projects of—”

  “ ‘Projections of,’ ” Dr. Jensen corrects gently.

  “Yeah, projections of parts of the person’s personality. Parts that they, uh, like are rejecting.”

  Seth looks even more scared. Dr. Jensen says, “Very good, Pam.” Seena mimes barfing.

  Roth sneers, “It would be even better if she had the slightest idea what any of that means.”

  “I know what it means!” Pam says. Her face reddens.

  “Yeah? What?” Roth gives her the nastiest smile Caitlin has ever seen from him, which is saying something. Roth is a pig, but he’s smart. “Explain narcissistic projection to us, Pam.”

  “That’s enough, Roth,” Dr. Jensen says.

  “Yeah, Crotch, that’s enough,” Seena says. She’s told Caitlin that her goal is to get Roth to blow up in Group so that Hardin will take him down. So far this has not happened.

  Roth says to Seena, “Your attempt at wordplay is pathetic beyond belief.”

  “Better than your crotch play.” Just last week, Seena caught Roth masturbating. “Now that was pathetic.”