Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  She said, “I don’t care if you hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you, Belinda.” Said hopelessly; I couldn’t hide from her.

  “I hate you, too.”

  I took my coffee outside. Leila hadn’t removed the low bench in front of the cabin, from which there was a breath-taking panorama of mountains and valleys, a pristine Eden that, when I’d lived here those nine months, had filled me with despair. Eden is no longer Eden if you’ve been exiled from it. The ghost of those bad feelings seemed to linger around the bench, but I didn’t go back inside. Presently Jane and Bridget came puffing up the dirt road, Bridget clutching a mess of buttercups and daisies.

  “Hi, Barry,” the child said unhappily. She’d been crying. Immediately I braced myself and there it was: the soft desire to reassure her, help her, kiss the boo-boo and make it all better. God damn it to hell.

  Jane sat on the bench beside me. “Go put the flowers in water, Bridget.” When she’d gone, I said, “We need to know what’s happening in LA. There’s a library in Dunhill, at the base of the mountain. If you wrap up your hair and wear sunglasses and—oh, I don’t know, act—do you think you can go in there unnoticed and use the Link? I know I can’t.” She looked at the mountain road, which has no guard rails and, in places, pretty steep fall-offs. Jane doesn’t like heights. She said, “Yes. I can do it.”

  “Don’t stay long, and don’t talk to anybody. Not one word. Your voice is memorable.”

  “Only if you’d heard it more recently than ten years ago. And in a better picture than my last one. Should I go now?” Again she looked at the road.

  Before I could answer, the twins started shouting inside the cabin. Jane rose to her feet as the girls raced outside. Bridget cried, “Belinda, don’t!”

  Belinda said, “If you don’t take us home this very minute, I’m going to tell everybody that you touched me in my private place and you’ll go to jail forever and ever and ever!”

  “No, you will not, young lady,” Jane said severely. “You just come inside with me this very minute.”

  Belinda looked astonished. Probably Frieda had never spoken to her daughter that way. I reflected that “maternal behavior” could include discipline. Belinda followed Jane inside.

  Had Frieda felt too intimidated by her daughters to reprimand them? Too proud? Too guilty? Had she been too terrified of what they might in turn say to her? I could imagine any of those scenarios, with a child so different from you, so strange, so eerily knowing.

  What kind of discipline had Leila given, or not given, to Ethan?

  Jane returned from Dunhill in a state of restrained anxiety. Nobody, she said, had recognized her at the library. She’d accessed the Link, watched the news, hardcopied the headlines. It was all even worse than I’d expected.

  BIOWEAPON RELEASED IN CALIFORNIA

  ARLEN’S WAS ONLY THE FIRST STEP

  —NOW THEY’RE SPREADING MUTATIONS!

  ACTRESS A PART OF BIOCONSPIRACY SPREADING EPIDEMIC

  CALL FOR IMMEDIATE QUARANTINE OF L.A.

  RUN ON GAS MASKS, RIOTS, CAUSE DEATHS OF FOUR

  MUTANTS NOW AMONG US—YOU COULD BE ONE!

  JANE SNOW AND MANAGER MISSING SINCE LAST NIGHT

  “They’re calling it treason,” Jane said.

  “It is treason. Or something.” Bioweapon terrorism. Invasion of bodily privacy. Violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Medical malpractice.

  “What next, Barry?”

  “I’m not sure. I need to think.” But all I could think about was what might have happened if I hadn’t gotten Jane away, if Ms. Resentful hadn’t called me. Riots cause death of four. And that was without the rioters’ zeroing in on a specific target.

  “What did the twins do while I was gone?”

  “Nothing.” They’d played inside and I’d sat outside, pretending they weren’t there. Jane went into the cabin.

  A minute later she was back. “They’re making cookies.”

  “Fine. Just so long as they don’t burn down the cabin.”

  “We won’t,” Bridget said, and there they were beside us, having silently followed Jane. Belinda had a picturesque smudge of chocolate on her nose. I did not think that she looked adorable. Bridget added, “Why are you scared, Jane?”

  Jane knew better than to deny. “I went down to a town where I could get the news, and some people in LA are very angry at another group of people there. It could get violent.” Belinda said, “But why does that mean we can’t go home?”

  Bridget said, “They’re mad at us, too, aren’t they? You’re scared for us. Why? We didn’t do anything!” Belinda said, “Don’t be stupid, Brid. People get mad at us all the time when we didn’t do anything.” She looked at me. “Like Barry is mad at us.”

  Bridget scowled, making her suddenly look more like her sister. “Yeah. Why are you mad at us, Barry?”

  “Because I didn’t want to have to bring you here. But if I hadn’t, you might both have been attacked by a mob now.”

  Bridget looked scared, but Belinda said, “Naw, we got really good security at home. Nobody can get through. I want to go home!”

  “And I want you to,” I said, which was nothing less than total truth—even as I felt the treacherous desire to comfort little frightened Bridget . . . oxytorin.

  Belinda did not look frightened. She was working up to a towering tantrum. “Then take us home! Take us home now!”

  Jane said soothingly, “We can’t, Belinda. It’s not safe. The—”

  “It is safe! Daddy’s estate is safe! I want to go home!”

  Bridget said, with heart-breaking hopelessness, “Belinda—”

  Belinda kicked her sister, who screamed and fell to the ground. Then she kicked Jane, who made a grab for her. Belinda was quicker, squirming away, tears of rage on her grimy face.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me! I hate you, you go around feeling sorry for everybody who isn’t you! You feel sorry for Barry ‘cause he’s all twisted and short, and you feel sorry for Brid and me ‘cause you think we’re so different, just like you feel sorry for Catalina and the pilot and everybody who’s not pretty like you! Well, you’re not so pretty anymore either, ‘cause you’re old and you know it and you’re scared nobody’s going to like you any more if you’re not pretty and if you don’t do that fucking movie about us! And you know what—you’re right! Nobody will like you just like I hate you!

  “ ‘Cause you’re old and not pretty any more and you’ll be alone all the rest of your life! And—” Jane stood still, looking dazed. Looking stripped naked. But now Bridget was up off the ground and barreling into her sister head first, a battering ram to the belly. “Don’t you kick me!” Belinda screamed and the two girls went down, rolling in the scrub grass in front of the cabin, punching and pulling hair and scratching. Jane sprang forward, trying to pull them off each other. The sound of a motor made her, and me, freeze.

  And Leila’s car roared into sight and jerked to a stop, with her and Ethan inside.

  Empathy means you understand another’s feelings. It doesn’t mean you sympathize with them, or respect them. Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, Joséph Goebbels, understood perfectly what the German people were feeling in the 1920s and 30s: insecurity, rage, fear, resentment at the punishments for WWI. He used that knowledge to manipulate their emotions, creating the brilliant PR campaigns that put Hitler in power and kept him there.

  The Group must have realized too late that Arlen’s Syndrome was not, after all, a guarantee that the world would change for the better. So they’d created the virus that increases oxytorin receptors. Correcting a genetic-engineering change with another genetic-engineering change. I could have told them that does not work.

  Ethan got out of the car first, from the passenger side. Both Bridget and Belinda stopped fighting, got up off the ground, and stared. Ethan’s right eye was blackened, and his left arm was in a sling. He scowled ferociously at them, at me, at the world.

  He was utter
ly beautiful.

  Auburn hair falling over his forehead, blue eyes, a body that Michelangelo could have used as the model for his David. More than that, Ethan had the same quality that Jane did: an innate and unconscious sexuality so blatant that it was like a slap in the face, a challenge: Come and get me. If you can. His photos had not captured that quality. Bridget and Belinda were eleven years old, and yet I saw that they felt it, Bridget blushing and looking confused, Belinda scowling back, but with surprise behind her gray eyes. Jane’s back was to me. Leila got out of the car and called desperately, “Ethan!” He ignored her and kept walking. It was me he was moving toward. I stood up from my bench, my heart hammering. Ethan stopped in front of me. I came up to slightly higher than his waist.

  “You’re my father,” he said, with utter contempt. “You.”

  Leila was running from the car, but Jane was closer. She threw herself between us just as Ethan’s fist shot out, and the blow intended for my face hit her in the chest.

  “I don’t think any of her ribs are broken,” Leila said wearily. “She said it doesn’t hurt when she breathes, which is a good sign.”

  Leila and I sat in her car, a three-year-old Ford, each of us holding steaming mugs of fresh coffee. Mine trembled in numb fingers. Jane slept, courtesy of a pain patch, in the bedroom. The twins, subdued now, had been ordered back to their cookie-making, and had actually gone. Ethan had stalked away into the woods, and I was sickened to realize that I hoped he’d stay away. I was afraid of my son.

  “Leila, I didn’t realize . . . I know you’d said, but . . . Of course, behavior is a complex genetic and environmental phenomenon, and when you interfere with—”

  “Don’t. Don’t go informational and theoretical on me like you always do. Just don’t!”

  “All right.”

  She turned her face to look at me. “That’s the first time I think you’ve actually heard me when I’ve said that.”

  Maybe it was. Information and theory were good hiding places. “And Ethan gets like this—”

  “Unpredictably. The psychologist says he has poor impulse control. When he gets upset, there’s a major neural highjacking. You’ve seen the brain scans with all the irregularities in his amygdalas and hippocampus. He gets swamped with rage, and sometimes he can’t even remember what he’s done. Not always, but sometimes.”

  “And you’ve dealt with this alone for—”

  “Since he was a toddler. But you knew all this, Barry. I told you.” She had. But I hadn’t really heard her, hadn’t wanted to hear her. I’d preferred to blame her, as she blamed me.

  Leila continued, “When he comes back from the woods, he’ll be different. Until the next time. But now that he’s old enough to run away . . . and looking like he does . . .” She didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew what LA could be for a fifteen-year-old who looked like Ethan.

  I said, “Did you two just happen to come up here today?”

  “No. Jane called me.”

  I spilled my coffee. “Jane?”

  “Yes. She did what you should have done.” Now Leila’s anger was back. Anger and blame. “Or didn’t you bother to think that Ethan might be in danger once the witch hunt down there fingered you? Which it has, by the way, according to the car radio while I could still get reception on the way up here. Didn’t you bother to think that your son might make a good substitute target?”

  “I didn’t think anyone would trace you and Ethan to me.”

  “Jane obviously did!”

  And probably used a private detective to do it. How long ago? Why?

  “I’m sorry, Leila. I didn’t think you’d be in any danger. I didn’t think the media—” I stopped. She knew what I meant.

  However nasty the daily world is to dwarfs, there is only one Official Story about us allowed in mainstream media. That’s the happytalk Big-Hearts-in-Little-Bodies slant. Dwarfs making good, doing good, being good. Thus is the daily nastiness offset and balance restored to the universe. That the media in LA had now abandoned the formula was a strong measure of how much fear the Group had engineered along with their virus.

  I said, “This whole thing . . . God knows I didn’t want these twins here, either.”

  “Where are their parents? Or are you guilty of kidnapping, along with everything else?” Yes. No. “Their parents know the kids are here. They’re on their way home from Europe.”

  “The Barrington twins, of all kids. God, Barry, you really can screw up royally.” Like I needed to be told that. But I pushed down my anger. This was maybe the only chance I was going to get, and I had to say it right. “Listen, Leila. I want to say something. I know I’ve been negligent, and I know that Ethan is. . . I know I had a lot to do with this, because of what I insisted on before he was born. But I want to say three things, and I want you to really consider them. You don’t have to, but I’d really like it if you would. First, what I said before is true, even though I picked a stupid time to say it. Behavior is genetically complex, and Ethan’s . . . problems, his brain irregularities, could have happened even if I hadn’t insisted on the in utero genemod. We’ll never know.” Leila made a sudden motion, but I kept on, afraid to stop. “Second, just consider—please consider!—that I tried to help with Ethan and you pushed me away. You were so angry that you . . . I don’t say you weren’t justified. But you did push me away, and left me, and refused to let me see him, and I think it’s unfair that I then get blamed for not seeing him.”

  “I wasn’t—” she said hotly. I put my hand on her arm.

  “Please. Just one more thing. It’s not too late. I want to help, want to do whatever I can, whatever you and he will let me do. If we can get past this anger at each other, finally, and cooperate, that has to be better for Ethan!”

  She shook my hand off her arm, but she didn’t get out of the car. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I held my breath.

  Finally Leila spoke in a different voice. “I don’t know if I can. I’ve hated you for so long . . . I think . . . I think I might need to hate you. In order to go on.”

  I knew enough to be quiet.

  “Oh, God, I don’t want to be that person!” Leila cried. “Barry—”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t want to be the person I am, either.” She blindsided me then. “Do you love her very much?”

  Only honesty would do now. “Yes.”

  “I’m seeing somebody,” Leila said. “That’s part of why Ethan’s so angry. He hasn’t ever had to share me.”

  “I’m glad for you, Leila.” But I had to ask. “Is he a dwarf?”

  “Yes. We met last year at the LPA convention. He lives in Oregon. He’s in insurance.” She was smiling, despite herself. I found myself hoping that it worked out for her. She deserved a little insurance. But then, didn’t we all.

  “I didn’t get a chance to tell you before,” Leila said. “I brought a satellite TV. It’s in the trunk.”

  Riots had started in South Central LA. Ostensibly the “mutation plague,” which was what the media was calling the Group’s virus, was the cause of the riots. But they quickly took on life of their own, with all the usual looting, car burning, rock throwing. The LAPD used microwaves and tanglefoam on the rioters, who then regrouped at different locations and started over again. The press, having been the actual cause of the turmoil with its inflamed reporting, now took on its next role in the inevitable sequence, which was The Voice of Reason trying to calm things down. Talking heads appeared on TV, on the Link, on wallscreens, in holos projected over the city. They explained that the virus was not airborne, needed contact with bodily fluids to survive, and did not cause cancer or suicide or nerve decay or zombie-ism. Nobody listened.

  A rumor started that the Group leadership was headquartered in a warehouse by the waterfront. A mob torched it, and strong winds carried the fire westward. The governor ordered out the National Guard.

  KILL THE MUTANT MAKERS said the improvised placards.

  Jane was hanged in effigy. />
  Frieda and John Barrington landed at LAX and were besieged by robocams; Jane’s picture with the twins had been everywhere in recent weeks. Their flyer finally took off but airspace over the city had been shut down and the flyer returned to the airport.

  By nightfall the rioting had subsided, damped down by rumors that “muties” were secretly roaming the streets, infecting everyone. People fled inside. In several hours of watching the Link, not once did I hear a single reporter or avatar refer to what the virus actually did: increase the desire to nurture. People cared that they had been fucked with, not how.

  That was the part of the whole reaction that I most understood.

  “Barry,” Jane said, “come eat something.”

  She and Leila had prepared a meal from the canned goods in the cabin. Leila had made a fire in the fireplace. Ethan, who had returned sullen from the woods and stayed sullen ever since, sat at the table with the twins. He’d spent most of the afternoon outside, smoking God-knows-what, while the twins circled him like disintegrating stars around a black hole. Bridget seemed afraid to speak to him at all, but Belinda and he had several long, low conversations during which Ethan scowled a lot. Leila and Jane moved back and forth between table and kitchen, elaborately and artificially polite to each other. I didn’t need Bridget or Belinda to tell me what everybody felt. Nobody wanted to be here with these other five people, and there was nowhere else any of us could go.

  “Barry,” Jane said again.

  Belinda said, “He doesn’t like you to act like his mother.”

  I said, “Shut up, kid, or you’ll wish you had.”

  Bridget, wide-eyed, said, “He means it, Belinda.”

  She shut up, glaring at me. Leila glanced my way, puzzled. Ethan raised his head, and I would have given anything for just one moment’s of Arlen’s Syndrome so I could tell what my son was thinking then. Bridget said, “I don’t like it here with you guys.” Her eyes welled, and immediately Jane’s arms went around her. “It’s okay, Bridget, you girls are just tired. I think you should go to bed right after you eat, sweetheart. Everything will look better in the morning.”