Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Ash blew southeast on a cold wind, toward Ontario and Quebec.

  APRIL 2014

  Julie sat in the Starbucks on K Street. Linda had just left, full of plans for her family, Julie, and the baby to take a cottage together in August on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “The baby’ll be nearly four months by then, and it’ll be such fun!” Julie wasn’t sure about that—two weeks with Linda’s noisy kids and noisier dogs? On the other hand, two weeks with Linda and Ted would be fun. Or two weeks in separate, side-by-side cottages. Or two weeks someplace else.

  She frowned at the out-of-town newspaper she’d bought at World Wide News. The headlines were all about air traffic hopelessly snarled in Canada by blowing and drifting ash, but that was not what she stared at. Was it or wasn’t it? Then, wryly: I sound like a Clairol commercial. And not even a current commercial. She was showing her age.

  Again she read the short, not-very-informative article about the burglary in a small town in western Massachusetts, which was one of the projected paths of her original algorithm. A family-owned department store, one of the few left in the country, had been robbed of a collection of miscellaneous objects, primarily blankets, rugs, and cookware. Also a shopping cart, which was considered “an unusual theft for this kind of burglary.” Julie wasn’t sure what “kind of burglary” the small-town news stringer meant, but she knew what she was looking at. Shopping cart, no forced entry. This time, however, the store had had a guard dog, which had not been harmed. Drops of blood on the floor indicated that the “perpetrator” might have been harmed, but the police had as yet made no arrests.

  Whose blood?

  “May I sit here? There don’t seem to be any free tables.”

  He was tall, attractive, dressed in a suit and tie. He carried the Wall Street Journal, folded to show the headline: FINANCIAL IMPACT OF COMING FRESH WATER SHORTAGES. Glancing at her ringless left hand, he smiled and sat down without waiting for an invitation. Julie stood, and as soon as the curve of her belly under her open coat came into view, his smile vanished.

  Julie grinned. “Sure, the table’s all yours.”

  Relief on that handsome face.

  She buttoned her coat and waddled out. The OB had said she was gaining too much weight, once she’d stopped throwing up, but that otherwise everything was “progressing swimmingly,” a phrase she had liked instantly. Little Alicia, swimming in her secret sea. The baby now had fully developed toenails. Her body could store calcium and phosphorus. She had begun to show the brain waves of REM sleep. What will you dream of, my darling?

  Julie left Starbucks. Walking was supposed to be good for her, so she walked even though she had piles of work at home. Consulting work for a high-resolution space imagery firm, for a professor doing research on microbes, even for the Bureau, in a division different from Gordon’s. Everybody, it seemed, needed well-recommended and high-priced mathematical insight. Things were working out well.

  The air was crisp and cold, unusually cold for March. Julie walked briskly. Some kids who probably should have been in school ran frantically in the pocket park across the street, trying to get a kite aloft. Daffodils and tulips splotched the park with color.

  Whose blood had been on the floor of that department store in western Massachusetts?

  2035

  The DIGITAL FOTO FRAME held pictures that moved out of the frame so the next one could come in. Pete had never imagined anything like it. It was even better than the drawings in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales or Goodnight Moon because these pictures looked far more real. There were three, and Pete never tired of looking at them. He wouldn’t let any others of the Six look at them, and for once McAllister did not insist that he share.

  One of the pictures was of two children playing with a dog. This didn’t look anything like the dog that had attacked Pete in the store. This dog was reddish and happy-looking, but Pete didn’t like it anyway and sometimes he closed his eyes when that picture appeared. The other two were glorious. One was a beach like the place where he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara, but with mountains across the water, colored gold by a setting sun. The other showed a forest filled with trees and flowers. Pete had never seen mountains or sunset, but on Grabs he’d seen sunrise, several trees, and some flowers, and now it was wonderful to sit and gaze at them without the fear and tension of a Grab.

  “Why aren’t there more pictures?” he asked Eduardo. He was avoiding McAllister. It was a complaint, not a real question, but Eduardo had a real answer.

  “There could be more if we had them to upload,” he said in his soft accent. “These are just demonstration photos. You understand that the battery will run out eventually?”

  “Of course,” Pete said scornfully. Some of the children’s toys from Jenna’s famous Grab had used batteries, which all died.

  “The more you use it, the less long it will last.”

  “I know.” But he couldn’t stop gazing at the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME.

  He held it, clutched in one hand, during Xiaobo’s funeral. The funeral room, located off the central corridor across from the Grab room, was yet another featureless white-metal room. There was absolutely nothing in it except the outline of the slot on the far wall, close to the floor, and the button set high on the opposite wall, by the door. Caity, Eduardo, Terrell, McAllister, Darlene, Ravi, and Pete attended the funeral. Also Tommy, now that he was nearly eight. Jenna and Paolo stayed with the Grab children.

  It was Tommy’s first funeral and he held tight to McAllister’s hand, although to Pete he looked more interested than scared. Tommy was tough. Well, good. He’d have an easier time of it than some of the children. Kara still screamed every time she saw Pete.

  Ravi, another tough one, stared down at Xiaobo’s body, wrapped in their oldest blanket. On top of the body, as was the custom, lay one small thing that the dead person had cherished. For Xiaobo, it was a little stone statue of a fat smiling man that Xiaobo had had with him all the way back when the Tesslies put him in the Shell. Bridget had gone with a lock of hair from a baby of hers that had been stillborn.

  Ravi’s face remained blank. Caity and Terrell leaned against the wall, tearful. Darlene, Eduardo, and McAllister, the last of the Survivors, had so many feelings on their faces that Pete could barely look at them.

  His own feelings troubled him, because there didn’t seem to be enough of them. He’d known Xiaobo his whole life, had worked beside him, eaten with him, probably been diapered by him when Pete was a baby. They hadn’t talked much, given Xiaobo’s limited English, but he’d always been kind to Pete, to everyone. Right up until this last illness, Xiaobo had been a hard worker. And all Pete felt was that he should feel more, along with a vague curiosity about what it felt like to be dead. Darlene said that the ghosts of billions murdered by the Tesslies haunted the Shell. But Pete had never seen a ghost at all, and anyway where in the Shell could you fit billions of them? He wasn’t exactly sure how much a “billion” was, but it sounded large.

  Eduardo said in his musical voice, “As for man, his days are like grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” That was what he always said at funerals, and Pete always hated it. It sounded sad, and anyway it was stupid. Xiaobo wasn’t grass—people were made of skin and bones and blood. There was no wind inside the Shell. And this place certainly would remember Xiaobo. Pete would, and so would the other Six and Darlene and Eduardo and, of course, McAllister.

  Her words made more sense. “To the Earth we commit the body of our friend and family, Lung Xiaobo. His bones and tissues and heart will enrich the land and help to make it one to which humanity will, someday, return. Go with our gratitude, Xiaobo, and our love.”

  Darlene began to sing, another of her awful scratchy songs with words Pete didn’t understand. There were so many things he didn’t understand, starting with how McAllister could bear to have sex with Ravi. He hated him, he hated her, he hated everything. He clutched his DIGITAL F
OTO FRAME tighter.

  Darlene howled, “ ‘Abide with me, ’tis eventide . . . ’ ”

  When the song was finished, McAllister pressed the funeral button. A section of the wall opened, a slot near the floor three feet wide and two high. Xiaobo didn’t need that much room. Some unseen force pulled him into the wall. Tommy squatted to peer inside, just as Pete had done when he was little. Now, after being present at three funerals for Survivors and six for miscarriages, Pete knew there was nothing to see. The slot opened into a small bare featureless space, and the other side wouldn’t open to deposit Xiaobo’s body Outside until the first wall closed up.

  Darlene bawled another song, this one about the land being beautiful with spacious skies and a lot of grain, but Pete wasn’t listening. He watched Ravi, who had turned his gaze to McAllister. Ravi looked the way he used to when there was a treat Grabbed from a store—oh, those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!—and Ravi had tried to figure a way to get a bite of another child’s share. Pete’s hand tightened on the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He wanted to throw it at Ravi, to get his hands around Ravi’s neck and squeeze . . . No, he didn’t. Ravi was his half-brother. Yes, he did—Ravi had sex with McAllister, he was going to have more sex with McAllister, Pete wanted to kill him—

  Ravi caught Pete’s look and glared back.

  The funeral was over. People moved away, returning to their duties. Caity stomped off, covering whatever softer feelings she had with vague bad temper. Pete lingered, and Tommy stayed with him. When they were the only two left in the funeral room, Tommy demanded, “How does McAllister know that the fucking bastard Tesslies will really put Xiaobo’s body Outside to help grass to come back?”

  Tommy must have been listening to Darlene. “McAllister knows.”

  “But how?”

  Pete looked down at the intense little face. “Well, you didn’t see any other bodies in there, did you? We’ve had a lot of funerals—you know that from learning circles. If the bodies weren’t dumped out, they would just pile up in there.”

  Tommy considered. “Maybe the Tesslies just put them in a fertilizer machine. Like shit. And then we spread them on the farm.”

  Pete had never thought of this. He could see that Tommy wished he hadn’t thought of it, either. He knelt beside Tommy and said firmly, “No, that doesn’t happen. The Tesslies told McAllister.”

  “I thought she never talked to them.”

  “Well, then they got her to understand some other way, like they got her to understand to press the funeral button, and how the fertilizer machine works and the Grab machinery and everything else.” Actually, Pete wasn’t sure how any of that had happened. Maybe the Survivors just figured everything out by themselves.

  “All right,” Tommy said. “But why do we believe the Tesslies?”

  A good question. But not one that Pete wanted troubling Tommy. “We believe McAllister. You know how smart she is, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then there you have it, laddie.” One of Bridget’s favorite expressions.

  “Okay.” And then, “But I have another question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you and Ravi mad at each other?”

  Pete stood. This he was not going to discuss with Tommy.

  “It’s because Ravi had sex with McAllister, right? But you have sex with Caity. And when he wasn’t sick, Terrell tried to have sex with Jenna, only she said he was still too young. And—”

  Was there anything the kid didn’t know? Pete said, “I want privacy on this.” Those were words they all learned young, and learned to respect. A necessity in such a small, closed family, McAllister often said.

  Tommy said, “Can I see the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME? Please, Pete, please please please?”

  “All right.” He turned it on, let the pictures move through the frame once each. Tommy watched, rapt. He reached out one finger to touch the mountain range. When Pete turned off the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, Tommy sighed the same way he did right after Jenna finished reading aloud a fairy tale.

  “Now go back to the children’s room,” Pete said.

  Tommy said importantly, “I have farm duty.”

  “Oh. Then go do that.”

  Tommy left the funeral room, said, “Oh, hi,” to someone in the corridor, and ran off. Pete tensed. If that was Ravi out there, waiting for him . . .

  It was McAllister. “Pete, I want to talk with you.”

  “I want privacy on this,” Pete said, with as much coldness as he could.

  She smiled. “You don’t even know what ‘this’ is yet, so how can you want privacy on it?”

  He gazed sullenly at the wall behind her.

  “What I wanted to say was thank you for being so good with Tommy. He’s more unsure inside than he shows. Jenna says sometimes in bed he still cries for his mother. But he adores you and looks up to you, and you’re such a good influence on him.”

  Pete glared at her. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to make me feel good so I won’t fight Ravi. Well, he’s the one who wants to fight me. Didn’t you see him smirk at me during the funeral?”

  “I saw you smirking and glaring at each other. That has to stop. Pete, there is a statement from Before, said by a very smart and wise man, that the biggest threat to any society is its own young males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Do you understand what that means?”

  “No.”

  “It means—”

  “I want privacy on this,” Pete said and walked away. Whether or not the words fit—who the fuck cared, anyway?

  APRIL 2014

  In the complex network of faults in the Pacific Seismic Network, a thrust fault two hundred miles off the shore of Japan abruptly moved, as had happened before. The seabed deformed, vertically displacing an enormous volume of water. A huge wave rose on the ocean, long and low enough that an oil tanker barely noticed when it passed beneath its hull. As the wave raced toward shore, the shallower water both slowed and raised it. By the time the tsunami broke on Tokyo, the highest wave crested at ninety-four feet of water, smashing and inundating the city as well as the country far inland.

  This had been predicted for a long time as a possibility for Tokyo. Only a few years earlier, it had happened south of that ancient city, with devastating results. Not the prediction, not the unfairness of being struck twice within a few years, not Japan’s excellent tsunami-warning system—none of it lessened the horrific destruction.

  2035

  Pete sat crossed-legged in his secret room by the Shell wall, gazing out. The room wasn’t all that secret anymore; McAllister knew where it was, and Tommy had followed him here. Since Xiaobo’s funeral, Pete had had unhappy sex with Caity here. Twice. The second time she’d bitten his ear; she was always rougher than he was. He wasn’t going to do it with her anymore. He’d just masturbate.

  The DIGITAL FOTO FRAME was in his hand, but Pete wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at a miracle.

  Crouched against the clear impenetrable wall, head wobbling as he craned his neck as far left as it would go, Pete saw a flash of green. A piece of grass. Several blades of grass, or something like grass, pushed out of the ground. “Volcanic rock,” McAllister had once called it: “I think we’re on the collapsed lip of a caldera.” Pete didn’t know what that meant, but he knew what the grasses meant.

  The Earth was coming back. And he was the first to see it.

  He didn’t want to tell anyone. Or rather he did, he wanted to speak the incredible words out loud, but he also didn’t want anyone else to know the secret. Maybe Darlene was right: he was “a wild one.” But that’s what he wanted. He crept from the room, through the maze of tiny rooms at this end of the Shell, and along the corridor to the children’s room.

  It was so early that the kids lay asleep on blankets, some in diapers and some in little clothes that happened to fit at the moment. Karim, who didn’t like clothes, slept naked, clutching a stuffed toy. The non-walking babies lay behind their bucket wall, with Je
nna on duty. She was asleep, too. Pete knelt beside Petra and scooped her up with his good arm.

  Petra didn’t wake. Pete started around the bucket wall, then turned back. He didn’t want to worry Jenna if she woke and found Petra gone. So he laid the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME on Petra’s nest of blankets.

  In the larger area, Tommy woke. Instantly he was on his feet, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. His hair stood up in all directions. “Where are you going? Can I come, too?”

  “SSShhhh! No. You stay here.”

  The boy’s face, still puffy with sleep, went sad. Pete whispered, “You stay here now, Tommy, and later I’ll take you on a big adventure.”

  “Really? What?”

  Pete had no idea. But he couldn’t think of anything else to deter Tommy. So he just shook his head and repeated, “You’ll see. Stay here.”

  Tommy stayed. Pete carried Petra, who grew heavier with each step, to the secret room. She woke when he put her on the floor by the window.

  “See, Petra—see the grass? The Earth is coming back!”

  The baby screwed up her face and whimpered.

  Ridiculously disappointed, Pete gazed alone at the grasses, jiggling Petra to quiet her. This didn’t work. She whimpered louder, wailed a few times, and worked herself up to full, hungry screaming. Why were babies so much trouble? There should be a better way to restart humanity!

  Since there wasn’t, Pete crossly scooped up Petra to return her to Jenna, who would probably want him to stay to help with the children. At least he could get his DIGITAL FOTO FRAME back. He could trust Jenna not to touch it, but maybe not Tommy.

  He had just left the maze, carrying the wailing Petra, when Tommy ran toward him. “Pete, you gotta come—McAllister’s sick!”