Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  But for only a few precious seconds.

  Now the mother rushed forward. Pete dodged behind the low bed, nearly slipping on a pillow that had fallen to the floor. Both of them sprang again, the man’s face contorted with pain, and clutched at their children. Pete fired the laser but his hold on the child had knocked the wrister slightly sideways and he missed. Frantically he began firing, the beams hitting the wall and then Pete’s own foot. The pain was astonishing. He screamed; the children screamed; the mother screamed and lunged.

  Five seconds.

  The father tore the little girl from Pete. Pete jerked out his bad arm, now in as much pain as his foot, as much pain as the man’s must be, and twined his fingers in the child’s hair. The mother slipped on a throw rug patterned with princesses and went down. But the father held on to the toddler and so did Pete, and—

  Grab.

  All four of them went through in a blaze of noise, of light, of stinking diapers and roasted flesh, of shoulder pain so intense that Pete had to struggle to stay conscious. He did, but not for long. Once under the Shell, he collapsed to the metal floor. The father, of course, was dead. The last thing Pete heard was both children, still wailing as if their world had ended.

  It had. From now on, they were with him and McAllister and the others. From now on, poor little devastated parentless miracles.

  MARCH 2014

  On the high plateau of the Brazilian state of Paraná, the arabica trees rustled in a gentle rain. Drops pattered off dark green, lance-shaped leaves, cascading down until they touched the soil. The coffee berries were small, not ready for harvest until the dry season, months away. At the far edge of the vast field, a fertilizer drove slowly among the rows of short, bushy trees, some of them fifty years old. A rabbit raced ahead of the advancing machinery.

  Deep underground, something happened.

  Nonmotile, rod-shaped bacteria clung to the roots of the coffee trees, as they had for millennia. The bacteria stuck to the roots by exuding a slime layer, where it fed on and decomposed plant matter into nutrients. In the surrounding soil other bacteria also flourished, carrying on their usual life processes. One of these was mitosis. During the reproductive division, plasmids were swapped between organisms, as widely promiscuous as all of their kind.

  A new bacterium appeared.

  Eventually it, too, began to divide, not too rapidly in the dry soil. By and by, another plasmid exchange took place, with a different bacterium. And so on, in an intricate chain, ending up with a plasmid swap with the nonmotile, rod-shaped root dweller. A mutation now existed that had never existed before. Such a thing happened all the time in nature—but not like this.

  Above ground, thunder rumbled, and the rain began to fall harder.

  NOVEMBER 2013

  The woman was hysterical. As she had every right to be, Julie thought. Julie laid her hand across her own belly, caught herself doing it, and removed the hand. Quickly she glanced around. No one had noticed. They all watched the woman, and all of them, even the female uniform, had the expressions that cops wore in the presence of hysterical victims: a mixture of stern pity and impatient disgust.

  “Ma’am . . . ma’am . . . if you could just calm down enough to tell us what happened . . .”

  “I told you! I told you!” The woman’s voice rose to a shriek. She wore a gaping bathrobe over a flimsy white nightdress, and her hair was so wild it looked as if she had torn out patches by the roots, like some grieving Biblical figure. Perhaps she had. A verse from Julie’s unwilling Temple childhood rose, unbidden, in her mind: “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were no more.”

  “Ma’am . . . shit. Get a doctor here with a sedative,” the “detective” said. He was a captain in this seaside town’s police. Julie had picked up from Gordon an FBI agent’s contempt for local law enforcement; she would have to rid herself of that, or else turn into as much of a machine as Gordon could be. She stepped forward.

  “May I try?”

  “No.” The captain glared; he hadn’t wanted her along in the first place. They never did. Julie stepped back into the shadows. Gordon would be here soon.

  The woman continued to wail and tear her hair. A uniform phoned for a doctor. In the bedroom the forensics team worked busily, and through the window Julie could see men fanning out across the beach, looking for clues. Had this mother drowned her infants? Buried them? Hidden them safe in baskets of bulrushes, a crazy latter-day Jochebed with two female versions of Moses? Julie knew better. She studied the room around her.

  Simple, classic North Atlantic beach cottage: white duck covers on the wicker furniture, sisal mats on the floor, light wood and pale colors. But the house had central heating and storm windows already in place; evidently the family lived here year-round. Bright toys spilled from a colorful box. Beside the sofa, a basket of magazines, TIME shouting: CAN THE PRESIDENT CONTROL CONGRESS? and THE DESERTIFICATION OF AFRICA. On the counter separating the kitchen from the living area, a homemade pie under a glass dome, next to a pile of fresh tomatoes, onions, zucchini. Everything orderly, prosperous, caring.

  Gordon strode through the door and went unerringly to the detective. “Captain Parsons? I’m Special Agent in Charge Gordon Fairford. We spoke on the phone.”

  Parsons said sourly, “No change from what I told.” On the sofa, the woman let out another air-splitting wail.

  “What do you think happened, Captain?” Gordon said. Whatever his private opinion, Gordon was always outwardly tactful with locals, who always resented both the tact and the FBI involvement. The eternal verities.

  Parsons said, “The husband took the kids, of course. Or they disposed of them together and he took a powder.”

  “Any signs of his leaving, with or without them?”

  “No,” Parsons said, with dislike.

  Nor would there be, Julie thought. Gordon went on extracting as much information from Parsons as he could, simultaneously smoothing over as much as possible of the inevitable turf war. Julie stopped listening. She waited until Parsons moved off and Gordon turned to her.

  He said, “This time your location forecast was closer.”

  “Not close enough.” If it had been, Gordon would have been at the beach house before the kids’ disappearance happened. As it was, he and she had only managed to be in the next town over. Not enough, not nearly enough.

  The woman on the couch had quieted slightly. Gordon said softly to Julie, “Go.”

  This was never supposed to be part of her job. She was the math wizard, the creator of algorithms, the transformer of raw data into useful predictions. But she and Gordon had been working closely together for over six months now, and he had discovered her other uses.

  No, no, not what I meant!

  Julie sat next to the sobbing woman, without touching her. “Mrs. Carter, I’m Julie Kahn. And I know you’re telling the truth about what happened to your husband and children.”

  The woman jerked as if she had been shot and fastened both hands on Julie’s arm. Her nails dug in, and her eyes bored silently into Julie’s face, wider and wilder than any eyes Julie had ever seen. She tried not to flinch.

  Julie said, “There was a flash of light when they were taken, wasn’t there? Very bright. Almost blinding.”

  “Yes!”

  “Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

  “Can you get them back? Can you? Can you?”

  No. “I don’t know.”

  “You must get them back!”

  “We’ll do what we can. Was it a short teenage boy with a wobbling head, as if the head were too big for his neck? Or was it a girl?”

  Mrs. Carter shuddered. “It was a demon!”

  Oh. It was going to be like that.

  “A demon from Hell and he has Jenny and Kara!” She began to wail again and tear her hair.

  Slowly, painfully, Julie extracted the story. It wasn’t much
different from the others, except that this time there had been two children, and the husband had disappeared, too. Apparently he had been hanging onto one of the kids. Was that significant?

  How did you know what was significant when it was all unthinkable?

  Eight other children in the last year, all vanished without a trace, each taken from a different town on the Atlantic coast. Only three of the abductions had been witnessed, however, and one of those had not succeeded. The mother had beaten off the kidnapper—a young girl—before the perp vanished in a dazzlingly bright light. Or so the mother said. But children disappeared all the time, which is why the press had not yet gotten the larger story. But even the unwitnessed disappearances followed a pattern, and patterns were what Julie did. There were other incidents, too: mostly thefts from locked stores. She was less sure those fitted, and her algorithms had to weight for that. But the geographical pattern was there, if bizarrely nonlinear, and what kind of kidnapper was both smart enough to plan ten flawless abductions and stupid enough to leave any signature at all in their geography?

  Julie was not law enforcement. Gordon was, and they had discussed the question endlessly over the last months. Gordon’s answer: A psycho who wants to be caught.

  Julie had no answers. Only terrible fears.

  “It was a demon! A demon!” Mrs. Carter suddenly shrieked. “I want Ed and my kids back!” She tore out of the dune cottage, robe flapping and hair whipping around her ravaged face, as if she could find her husband and children on the cold beach. A cop leaped after her; she was of course a suspect.

  Julie wiped the blood off her arm where Mrs. Carter’s nails had pierced the skin. Did that mean she needed a tetanus shot? Was a tetanus shot even safe for her now?

  She crossed her arms over her belly and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Gordon stood watching her.

  APRIL 2014

  The sun rose above the salt marsh on the Connecticut coast. The tide flowed gently out, toward the barrier island that sheltered the land. A light breeze ruffled the cordgrass, although the breeze was not strong enough to cause waves on the pearly water. A blue heron did disturb the water, landing on a mudflat to dip its long bill, searching for breakfast. A sea-pink bloomed on a raised hummock, turning its dome-shaped cluster of flowers toward the sun.

  In the mud beside the heron’s long thin toes, something changed.

  Bacteria sliming the roots of cordgrass swapped plasmids with another species, the result of a long and intricate chain of such exchanges. The new bacteria began to feed. Abruptly, it died, unable in this mutated form to tolerate the high salt content of brackish marsh.

  The heron rose and flew away into the dawn.

  2035

  It took Pete days and days to recover from the laser burn on his foot, which became infected. McAllister was out of her special medicine—“antibiotics,” Pete thought it was called—because one of the Grab kids had needed the last dose. Sometimes McAllister sat beside Pete, sometimes Paolo and once Caity, but usually no one tended him. No one could be spared.

  He came to loathe his tiny, bare “bedroom” with no bed, just a pile of blankets on the floor and a shit bucket in the corner. Why hadn’t he taped something to the wall like Caity did in her room—something, anything to look at? They still had some tape left. Caity had taped up a picture that one of the children tore out of a precious book, a girl riding a big black horse, and beside it a bright piece of patterned cloth from an old Grab. All Pete had to look at was white Tesslie-metal walls, white Tesslie-metal ceiling, white Tesslie-metal floor.

  He drifted in and out of sleep that never refreshed him. When his fever rose high enough he thought he saw other rooms around him: The impossibly gorgeous, rich bedroom from which he’d taken the round-headed baby that Bridget had named Kathleen. The ugly city apartment with stained and crumbling walls where he’d found Tina, alone in her bed except for the rat attracted by the milk around her unwiped little mouth. The strange house, decorated only with bright pillows and low, silver-inlaid tables where he’d snatched dark, curly-haired Karim, whose name he knew only because his mother had screamed it just before Pete pushed her down that short flight of stairs to get away. Those other rooms rose around him, shimmered on the air like the world he’d seen only in snatches on Grabs, and then collapsed into so much rubble.

  “Sleep, Pete.” McAllister, a cool hand on his forehead. Or maybe not, because McAllister collapsed, too, but into a shimmer of golden sparks. Like the Tesslie that McAllister described in learning circles! Pete struggled to sit up.

  “No! No . . . not you . . . Tessl . . . .”

  “Sleep.”

  When he woke for the last time from fever and delirium, he was alone.

  Cautiously he got himself up off the pallet of blankets. Pete recognized them; he’d brought them back himself, from his first store Grab. They needed washing. Everything needed washing, including himself. But that could wait.

  He lurched dizzily to the door. A Grab was supposed to be painless, and usually it was. But you weren’t supposed to shoot your own foot! Still, everyone took risks during Grabs, or at least everyone who could still go. Look what had happened to Caity on her last Grab: that mother had beat Caity off, breaking her arm, and Caity hadn’t even been strong enough to keep the child. McAllister was thinking of taking Caity off Grab duty, which would leave just Pete, Ravi, and Paolo to do them all, at least until Terrell turned twelve. Anyway, it was better than shit-bucket duty.

  Pete’s room opened onto the corridor that ran the whole half-mile length of the egg-shaped Shell. Each end of the corridor branched into maybe a hundred of these tiny rooms. The Survivors and the Six used some of them at the living end as bedrooms, and McAllister had designated a few more as storage or work areas. None of the rooms at the far end of the Shell were used at all. In the center was the important stuff.

  Such a long way to hobble. Below Pete’s halting feet, one painful enough that finally he just hopped on the other and leaned against the wall for support, stretched the same featureless white metal as his room. Above curved the ceiling of the Shell, three times his height. On either side were doors, some open and some closed, leading to more tiny rooms, white metal walls. Tesslie stuff, all of it. Stuff preserving his life. Pete hated it.

  Another hundred yards to the farm, the children’s room, the Grab room.

  All at once he didn’t want to go to any of them. The children’s room, spacious and always busy, would be cheerful with toys, learning circles, babies cooing or wailing. Caity or Jenna or Terrell would be there, whoever was on duty. Someone would also be on duty with Darlene in the farm. Someone else would be watching—endlessly, boringly—the Grab machinery. Pete was sick of all of it. This time it had nearly gotten him killed. The only person he would have liked to see was McAllister, and he’d been sick so long that he’d lost track of the duty roster and had no idea where McAllister, or anybody else, might be now.

  Miraculously unnoticed, Pete crept past the wide archways which opened on one side of the corridor to the children’s room and on the other to the farm. From the farm came the smell of dirt and the fall of water in the disinfecting and clean-water streams. Also the clank of buckets; someone was on duty at the fertilizer machine. From the children’s room came the usual babble, the playing and crying and talking of eight—no, now ten!—small children.

  Head wobbling on his thin neck, he hopped past the smaller, doorless openings to the rooms holding Tesslie machinery and entered the maze of tiny, unused rooms at the far end of the Shell. His foot, wrapped in pieces of torn blanket, still hurt. “Stupid fucking foot!” McAllister had forbidden that word, but Pete—all of the Six—had learned a rich cursing vocabulary from Darlene. Her only useful contribution, in Pete’s opinion, to life in the Shell. Mean old woman.

  Finally he reached a small, low chamber at the very tip of the Shell. Here part of the outer wall was, for some reason, clear. Why had the Tesslies done that? But, then, why had they destroyed the
world nearly twenty-one years ago and then chosen to imprison a handful of survivors? Nobody knew why the fucking bastards did anything. Pete sank to the metal floor and looked out.

  There wasn’t much to see: just a strip of land between him and where the ground curved abruptly away. That strip was a uniform expanse of empty black rock, once smooth but now starting to split in places. The rock had a name, and so did the thing the Shell sat on, but Pete didn’t remember them. Basil? No, that was a prince in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Balit? Basalt? He’d never been good at learning such stuff, not like Jenna or Paolo. They were the smart ones. What Pete was good at was the Grab.

  And hatred. He was terrific at hatred. So he gazed out at his tiny view of the vast dead world the Tesslies had killed, and thought about the beauty of the shore cottage where he had Grabbed the two children, and he hated.

  APRIL 2014

  Deep beneath the ice pack of the Canadian glacier, the earth shifted. Basalt magma flowed into a chamber heavy with silica and the two mingled. From below, more magma pushed upward, exerting pressure. Above, glacial ice tens of thousands of years old but already thinned by global warming, gleamed under a cold spring sky.

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Gordon stood at one end of the table that was really two tables pushed together, one moved from the bedroom of the motel “suite.” Julie stood at the other end, willing him to leave. The rest of the task force had already gone to their own rooms for the night, leaving Styrofoam cups with the remnants of cold coffee, empty pizza boxes, crumpled paper napkins, half-crushed beer cans. On the desk Julie’s industrial-strength laptop, in sleep mode, glowed with a blue light.

  It had been a bad idea to hold the team meeting in her room, but Gordon’s wife, impelled by some marital crisis Julie wanted no part of, kept phoning his room after she’d been told not to call his cell. Maybe that was why he hadn’t left yet; Deborah was a weeper. Or so Julie had been told. She didn’t want to know for sure. If Gordon tried to talk personally with her now . . .