Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Seena gasps, “I know this place! That’s Carson Island, this is where the Blackwater hits Suwaquahua Creek—we’re in Suwaquahua! But where’s the factory? Mallory’s? The Old Blue? They’re all gone—what the fuck happened here?”

  She doesn’t remember what she told Josh and Caitlin earlier, before Josh re-medicated her. But she will remember, and so will Caitlin, and then—how much time do they have? Time—it’s all about time.

  Caitlin goes still. She can’t do this.

  Yes. She can. She has to.

  “Come on, Seena. Down to the river.”

  “What the fuck—”

  “Just do it!”

  The river is still and gray, a dawn mirror. Caitlin lowers herself to the very edge and peers down. Different people are there, people she hasn’t seen before, wandering in and out of the gray mist: black men in nothing but rough brown loin cloths, men in red or green British regimentals, an Indian in deerskin, one woman in a white muslin hoop skirt and another in a fringed knee-length dress with long ropes of beads. That one, laughing, waves a cigarette holder. Her lips are painted scarlet. She steps daintily away from the river, as if onto a dock, in her high heels.

  “Seena, what do you see in the river?”

  “Have you gone—”

  “What? Tell me!”

  “Nothing. No fish, no garbage, nothing. Just water.”

  “Where did you see your people? Not the ones you made up for Jensen and Covell—the real ones?”

  Seena squats beside her. Her tone is unexpectedly gentle. “You’ve flipped out, you know that?”

  Caitlin hauls her gaze away from the river just as the boy in purple garbage bags shows up. She grasps Seena’s bony wrist. “Please, Seena, it’s important. Who did you see and where did you see them?”

  Seena looks away, says, “Only in other people’s eyes. The old lady in the rocking chair, the two kids dressed mega-retro, the guy with the shovel. And a few dudes in even weirder stuff . . . why?”

  “Dudes in weirder stuff ? Like purple garbage bags with lighted wires?”

  “Yeah—how did you know?”

  “Look in my eyes now. Tell me what you see.”

  Seena clearly does not want to do this. But she doesn’t pull her wrist away from Caitlin, and after a moment she leans close. She smells of sweat, sex, and the spicy mold of this new jungle.

  “Oh my God!” Seena jerks away so fast she nearly tumbles into the river. The boy in purple garbage bags looks up, annoyed. And behind him, materializing from the mist, is what Caitlin knows Seena has just seen in Caitlin’s eyes: the jungle-pale creature with pink eyes, no nose, and a horn on its head.

  “What’s that?” Seena demands. “Caitie . . .”

  “I think it’s part of this jungle. Or will be.” She can hardly believe she is saying this.

  “Make sense!” Seena, who always becomes angry when she’s frightened, is getting furious now. Caitlin doesn’t want that anger turned against her. Seena’s hands are balled into spiny fists.

  “I think we see the past, Seena. Ever since the . . . since Before ended. That’s why all the hoop skirts and slaves and British soldiers and 1940’s dress and all of it. Whatever destroyed the human city also changed the minds of everybody left alive, everybody underground at the time—it changed the electrical field or something . . ..” This sounds totally inadequate, but Caitlin has no time to relate to Seena her analogy of consciousness folding and warping, the way spacetime folds and warps in physics. “Anyway, we see the past that lived on this spot. This place was probably a river town for a long time.”

  “You’re full of shit! That’s impossible!”

  “In physics I once learned . . . no, please, Seena, don’t go, just listen to me for a minute . . . spacetime is like a loaf of bread.” At the mere mention of bread Caitlin’s stomach growls, but at least Seena is listening. The river shines silvery as the sun rises.

  “You can think of each minute as we experience it like a slice of bread. Everything that happens at, say, six in the morning on February 10 is on one slice. But the whole loaf is there all the time, past and present and future. Now imagine slicing the loaf at an angle.” Caitlin illustrates this with gestures in the air. Her stomach growls again. “The slices are all different. Our six in the morning on February 10 is on the same slice as, maybe, 1784 or 1942.”

  Seena says suddenly, “Suwaquahua was founded in 1787.”

  Caitlin hadn’t expected Seena to know anything like that. “Yeah. And Mr. Armstead—” the name jumps out of nowhere into her mind “—my physics teacher, he said there might be other dimensions, too, and time might run even more different there.”

  “So I’m seeing people from other times and other dimensions just fucking popping up in your eyes? Get real, Caitlin!”

  “Well, you come up with a better explanation!” Caitlin shouts.

  “I can’t! Shit . . .” Seena sinks onto the riverbank. “What if you’re right? Then what’s that thing I just saw?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But what do you think it is? You’re the brain, I’m just a dumb ho that—”

  “No, you’re not.” All at once Caitlin starts to cry. It’s too much, and she’s so scared, and hunger gnaws at her insides like a rat. She unscrews the end of Josh’s flashlight to see the tiny flask of yellow powder. That’s all that kept Seena from going catatonic when she remembered Suwaquahua crumbling into powder. And memory was now returning to them both. How much powder to keep their minds here, in the present? And how long would the flask last?

  “Stop crying,” Seena says, “or I’ll pound you to jelly. I mean it.”

  She does mean it. Caitlin checks her sobs. The sun rises above the far end of the river.

  “So aliens are slicing our bread differently,” Seena says. Her voice has the high, rapid breathiness of someone fighting panic. “And after they did this jungle-shit to Suwaquahua, we can see that. Shit, that’s why we were in the Institute . . . the government wants to know what we see and why we see it. To figure out the future. But why not just ask us? Why the drugs and ‘Cathcart Syndrome’ and all those lies?”

  “I don’t know,” Caitlin says.

  “I know. Because the doctors are shithead assholes.” This answer satisfies Seena, who moves on to her next anger. “But the aliens—why did they do it? Why wreck Suwaquahua and make this creepy jungle? No, don’t tell me—they want to live here themselves. This is their idea of, say, a luxury condo, and the hell with humans. Hey!” she suddenly screams at the top of her voice, “Hey, shitheads, we were here first! It’s our place! Ours!”

  “Not like that,” Caitlin says, and gets to her feet. All at once she understands, and gasps aloud. “Not like that.”

  “Not like what? Caitlin, what are you—”

  “They don’t know.”

  Caitlin wades into the river. For a moment she thinks her legs won’t hold up, but they have to, just as she has to finally take the risk of action instead of thought. The water is warm as a bathtub. Ripples move away from her in concentric circles but they settle as she stands very still, waist deep. Overhead, a helicopter drones into view.

  Seena says, “They’re looking for us!”

  More likely, Caitlin realizes, belatedly, they’re responding to some sort of tracker on Josh’s flashlight. But she has no time for that.

  “The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things—”

  As the water returns to glassy smoothness, the people reappear. There are a surprising number of them to have ever stood in or on three feet of water; maybe the river has shifted over time. Caitlin ignores them, as they once ignored her, until the alien form again appears out of the mist. She fixes her gaze on it, says, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”

  Nothing.

  She gazes harder, silent now but bending her mind forward, concentrating it on that one spot in the water, that one point on a slice of time that includes both her and this strange creature who wants her plan
et.

  No response.

  “Seena, get in here and look in my eyes!”

  Seena does. Something about Caitlin has compelled her, although Caitlin cannot imagine what. She has never been compelling. But here Seena is, and after the water settles she squats down to look up into Caitlin’s eyes as Caitlin looks down into the water. Now there are two of them taking action.

  Seena makes a soft noise, undecipherable.

  I’m here, I’m here, I’m here . . .

  Slowly the creature mirrored in the river turns its head. Its eyes move in some strange way, and the horn on its head waves in some unknowable pattern, and then it is standing on the river bank not five feet from them and Caitlin can feel its astonishment as if it were her own.

  I’m here.

  We didn’t know.

  No, not that, because there were no words. But Caitlin feels it, even as she feels her body start to go rigid and her mind slide away from her. She fumbles for Josh’s flashlight but it’s gone, maybe dropped into the river. But that’s okay. The creature does something and there are more of them on the bank. Something is lifting Caitlin and pulling her gently, invisibly, to the shore. The helicopter sounds closer. Seena is thrashing in the river, screaming, “Caitlin! Caitlin!”

  But she is not Caitlin. Her name is Amanda, and she was visiting aunt Jane in Suwaquahua when—but none of that matters. Amanda knows she will be all right. She knows because nothing is what she thought, not Josh nor herself nor the future. But there will be humans in the future, in Suwaquahua, because nobody in the past or present dresses in purple garbage bags wired with tiny lights. That boy will stand on this place one day, alongside whoever else will be/is/was there, alien or human. And with them will be/was/is Amanda, because that bad-tempered boy in purple has—except for his artificially blue eyes—her face, her gestures, her lank hair the same color as Amanda’s when she was his age. Son, grandson, clone . . . it doesn’t matter. He will stand on the banks of the Suwaquahua along with—

  “Time heals all wounds . . .”

  —the aliens who have remade it, and—

  “Hot time in the old town tonight . . .”

  —so will she, because she saw it in the mirror, timeless, the same place she saw the image of Caitlin/Amanda. Herself, who can do whatever she has to.

  FIRST RITES

  One: Haihong

  She sat rigid on the narrow seat of the plane, as if her slightest movement might bring the Boeing 777 down over the Pacific. No one noticed. Pregnant women often sat still, and this one was very pregnant. Only the flight attendant, motherly and inquisitive, bent over the motionless figure.

  “Can I bring you anything, ma’am?”

  The girl’s head jerked up as if shot. “No . . . no.” And then, in nearly unaccented English, “Wait. Yes. A Scotch and soda.”

  The flight attendant’s mouth narrowed, but she brought the drink. These girls today—you’d think this one would know better. Although maybe she came from some backward area of China without prenatal care. In her plain brown maternity smock and sandals, it was hard to tell. The girl wasn’t pretty and wore no wedding ring. Well, maybe that was why the poor thing was so nervous. An uneducated provincial going home to face the music. Still, she shouldn’t drink. In fact, at this late stage, she shouldn’t even be flying. What if she went into labor on the plane?

  Deng Haihong, one chapter short of her Ph.D. thesis at U.C. San Diego, gulped the Scotch and closed her eyes, waiting for its warmth to reach her brain. Another three hours to Shanghai, two-and-a-half to Chengdu, and perhaps two hours on the bus to Auntie’s. If no one questioned her at the airports. If she wasn’t yet on any official radar. If she could find Auntie.

  If . . .

  Eyes still closed, Haihong laid both hands on her bulging belly, and shuddered.

  Shuangliu Airport in Chengdu had changed in four years. When Haihong had left, it had been the glossy, bustling gateway to the prosperous southwest and then on to Tibet, and Chengdu had been China’s fifth largest city. Now, since half of Sichuan province had been under quarantine, only seven people deplaned from an aircraft so old that it had no live TV-feed. Five of the seven already wore pathogen masks. Haihong pulled on hers, not because she thought any deadly pathogens from the war still lingered here—she knew better—but because it made her more inconspicuous. Her stomach roiled as she approached Immigration.

  Let it be just one more bored official . . .

  It was not. “Passport and Declaration Card?”

  Haihong handed them over, inserted her finger into the reader, and tried to smile. The woman took forever to scrutinize her papers and biological results. The screen at her elbow scrolled but Haihong couldn’t see what it said . . . For a long terrible moment she thought she might faint.

  Then the woman smiled. “Welcome home. You have come home to have your child here, in the province of your ancestors?”

  “Yes,” Haihong managed.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” Emily’s curious American phrase jumped into her mind: I would give my soul for a drink right now.

  Too bad Haihong had already sold her soul.

  Chengdu had finished the Metro just before the quarantine, and it was still operating. Everyone wore the useless paper pathogen masks. In California, Emily had laughed at the idea that the flimsy things would protect against any pathogens that had mutated around their terminator genes, and she and Haihong had had their one and only fight. “The people are just trying to survive!” Haihong had yelled, and Emily had gone all round-eyed and as red as only those blonde Americans could, and said apologetically, “I suppose that whatever makes them feel better . . .” Haihong had stormed out of the crummy apartment she shared with Emily and Tess only because it saved money.

  It had been Emily who told her about the clinic in the first place.

  As Haihong pulled her rolling suitcase toward Customs, her belly lurched hard. She stopped, terror washing through her: Not here, not here! But after that one hard kick, the baby calmed down. Haihong made it though Customs, the pills intact in the lining of her dress. She made it onto the Metro, off at the bus station.

  The terror abated. Not departed—it would never do that, she realized bleakly. But at least the chance of detection was over. In the bus station, crowded as Shuangliu had not been, she was just one more Chinese girl in inexpensive cotton clothing that had probably been made in Guangdong province before being exported to the U.S. Only the poorest Chinese remained in Sichuan; everyone who could afford to had gone through bio-decon and fled. Chengdu had been the place that North Korea chose to bio-attack to bring the huge Chinese dragon to its knees. Sichuan had been the sacrifice, and rather than have the attack continued on Guangdong’s export factories or Bejing’s government or Shanghai’s soaring foreign tourism, China had not retaliated toward its ancient enemy, at least not with weapons. Politics had been more effective, aided by the world’s outrage. Now North Korea was castrated, full of U.N. peace-keeping forces and bio-inspectors and very angry Chinese administrators. Both of Haihong’s parents had died in the brief war.

  “Be careful, Little Sister.” An ancient man, gnarled as an old tree, took Haihong’s elbow to help her onto the bus. The small kindness nearly made her cry. Pregnant women cried so easily. The trip had been so long, so draining . . . she wanted a drink.

  “Shie-shie,” she said, and watched his face to see if he frowned at her accent. She had spoken only English for so long. But his expression didn’t change.

  The bus, nearly as ancient as the kind grandfather, smelled of unwashed bodies and urine. Haihong fell asleep, mercifully without dreams. When she woke, it was night in the mountains and the baby was kicking hard. Her stomach growled with hunger. A different passenger sat beside her, a boy of maybe six or seven, with his mother snoring across the aisle. He ducked his head and said shyly, “Do you wish for a boy or a girl?”

  The baby was a boy. Ben, shaken, had analyzed with Haihong the enti
re genome from amnio tissue. Haihong knew the baby’s eye and hair color, prospective height, blood type, probable IQ, degree of far future baldness. She knew the father was Mexican. She knew the fetus’s polymorphic alleles.

  She smiled at the boy and said softly, “Whatever Heaven sends.”

  Haihong’s screams shattered the night. The midwife, back in prominence after the doctor left and the village clinic closed, murmured gently from her position beside the squatting Haihong. The smell of burning incense didn’t mask the earthy odor of her spilt waters. Auntie held a kerosene lamp above the midwife’s waiting hands. Auntie’s face had not unclenched, not once, since Haihong had finally found her living in a hut at the edge of a vast vineyard in which she, like everyone else, toiled endlessly. The workers’ huts had running water but no electricity. Outside, more women had gathered to wait.

  Haihong cried, “I will die!”

  “You will not die,” the midwife soothed. Through the haze of pain, Haihong realized that the woman thought she feared death. If only it were that simple . . . But Haihong had done all she could. Had explained to Auntie, who was not her aunt but her old amah and therefore much harder to trace directly to Haihong, about the pills. She had explained, but would the old woman understand? O, to have come this far and not succeed, not save her son . . .

  Her body split in two, and the child was born. His wail filled the hut. Haihong, battered from within, gasped, “Give . . . me!”

  They laid the bloody infant in her arms. Auntie remembered what had been rehearsed, drilled into her, for the past nine days. Her obedience had made her an ideal amah when Haihong had been young. Her obedience, and her instinctive love. Her eyes never left the crying baby, but wordlessly she held out to Haihong the prepared dish holding pulverized green powder.

  With the last of her strength, Haihong transferred three grains of powder to her fingertip and touched the baby’s tongue. The grains dissolved. The baby went on wailing and all at once Haihong was sick of him, sick of the chance she had taken and the sacrifice she had made, sick of it all, necessary as it had been. She said, “Take him,” and Auntie greedily grabbed the baby from her arms. Haihong tried to shut her ears against his crying. She wanted nothing now but sleep. Sleep, and the drink that, surrounded as they were by vineyards, would be possible soon, today, tomorrow, all the days left in her utterly ruined life.