Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Pete, did you really go—look at that!”

  Pete’s head snapped around. Outside the Shell, something streaked past, too fast for him to see. “What was it? What was it?”

  “I don’t know? Maybe . . . a cat!”

  “There are no cats, not in houses or stores,” Pete said, with an authority he didn’t feel. He’d never seen a cat except in the books. Why did Ravi and not him get to see the not-cat?

  “Something like a cat, then! I don’t know! But it was alive!”

  They both pressed their faces to the clear part of the Shell, but the thing didn’t reappear. Finally Pete said sulkily, “Yes, I went Outside—I told you! So let’s start on that funeral slot. You go get the flashlight and some rope and . . . and a bucket. A big one.”

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Ravi obeyed him, which made Pete feel a little better. Next time, he would see the not-cat.

  In the funeral room, Pete worked slowly. It was a pleasure to not have to hurry, hurry, hurry like on a Grab. He put the bucket close to the slot, the rope in his hand, the flashlight, usually stored in the children’s room for an emergency that had never come, in his teeth. Then he had to take it out again to explain to Ravi what was going to happen.

  “You press the button to open the slot, and I’ll go in. Then you jam the bucket in the slot so it can’t close up again. I’ll study the machinery above my head in the slot, and if I see something we want for a closer look, I’ll tie the rope around it and use that to yank it out.”

  “Why do you get to go? I want to go, too! The slot is big enough for both of us if we squeeze.”

  It was, although just barely. Although Pete didn’t like the idea of being jammed that close to Ravi.

  Ravi added, “It’s only fair that I get to go in the slot, too. You already had a turn! You went all the way Outside!”

  “I thought you didn’t even believe me about that! And stop whining!”

  “I’m not whining!”

  Glaring at each other, they got into position. Ravi pressed the button. Pete scooted in. Ravi jammed the bucket into the opening and then crawled past it so that he and Pete lay side by side on their backs. The flashlight was necessary because their bodies blocked nearly all the light coming from the funeral room. Pete swept the beam over the ceiling a foot above them.

  The Tesslie machinery wasn’t pipes after all, as he had originally thought. It was hard to say what it was. Rounded bumps, irregular indentations, two protrusions shaped vaguely like small bowls. These were easiest to tackle. Pete looped the rope around one. “I’m going to pull on this, just a little bit.”

  Ravi said, “I want to go Outside.”

  “Ravi! That’s not what we’re doing! Besides, I promised McAllister I wouldn’t do that again.”

  “I didn’t promise her that. And you had a turn Outside so it’s only fair that I do. How do I get the other door to open?”

  “Ravi, no, it won’t open until you—”

  Ravi kicked away the bucket.

  Pete tried to hit him but there was no room to swing his fist. Pete took a huge gulp of air, knowing what would come next: the air whooshing out of the slot, the outer door sliding open to push him and Ravi out on top of Xiaobo’s rotting body . . . Let Ravi get his own air!

  Nothing happened.

  The boys lay in the glow from the flashlight. The air did not leave the chamber; Pete could hear Ravi’s breathing. Finally Ravi said in a small voice, “When does it open?”

  “It isn’t going to, you fucker! The Tesslies must have changed the machine! We’re trapped!” All at once Pete, who had never minded small spaces before (but when had he ever been in one this small?) felt his heart speed up. Sweat sprang onto his forehead, his palms. Frantically he jostled Ravi, trying to get more space, get more air, get out . . .

  “Ow!” Ravi said. “Stop it! Hey, everybody in the Shell, we’re trapped inside the funeral slot! Terrell! Tommy! Caity! Hey!”

  Pete joined him in screaming. He yelled until his throat hurt. How thick was that slot wall? What if no one ever came?

  After what seemed days, weeks, Pete heard a voice on the other side of the wall: “Lord preserve us—ghosts!”

  “It’s Darlene,” Ravi whispered hoarsely.

  Darlene began to howl one of her songs. “ ‘Save us from ghosts and demons that—’ ”

  “Darlene! It’s not ghosts or demons, it’s Pete and Ravi! We’re trapped in here! Let us out!”

  The howling stopped. Darlene said, “Pete?”

  “Yes! Press the funeral button!”

  Silence. Then Darlene’s voice again but closer, as if she now squatted close to the low slot. “You want to come out?”

  “Yes!” Of course they wanted to come out—why did it have to be crazy Darlene that found them?

  She said, “I’ll let you out after you repent of your sins. You, Pete—you say you’re a sinner for sassing me and for disobedience and for setting yourself above your elders!”

  Pete’s teeth came together so fast and hard that he bit his lip. Ravi snapped, “Do it! Or she’ll never let us out!”

  He could wait for someone else, anyone else. But now that escape was at hand, the thought of waiting even one unnecessary minute longer in this place was intolerable. Pete snarled, “All right! I repent of my sins!”

  “Name them!” Darlene said.

  “I repent of sassing you and disobedience and setting myself up above my elders!”

  “Now you, Ravi. You repent of fornication with McAllister, who is another generation, and of sassing me and disobedience.”

  Ravi yelled, “I repent! Open the fucking slot!”

  “That ain’t true repentance, but I’ll take it. Now both of you sing with me a cleansing hymn of—”

  “What is going on here?”

  McAllister’s voice. Pete’s heart leapt and then sank, a reversal so quick it left him gasping. Ravi yelled, “McAllister, Pete and I are in here! Let us out!”

  The slot slid upwards. Pete and Ravi scuttled out on their backs. Pete felt dizzy. Blood streamed down his chin from his bitten lip. McAllister stared down at the flashlight in his hand, the rope trailing out behind him, the bucket on the floor. From this angle, her belly jutted out like a shelf. Pete had never seen that look on McAllister’s face. He felt four years old again, except that no adult but Darlene ever glared like that at a four-year-old.

  Ravi, the great lover, hung his head. In a tiny voice he said, “I saw a cat outside, McAllister, running past the Shell. Really. I did.”

  JUNE 2014

  Geoffrey Fanshaw did not get the notoriety he’d hoped for.

  Julie finished the analysis he wanted and sent it to him. She expected to hear back from him, but—nothing. On reflection, she decided she’d been dumb to expect acknowledgement. She had served her purpose to Fanshaw and he had discarded her; that was what narcissists did. She was left with his check and her own fears.

  At night she dreamed of plants dying, all over the world.

  Two more jobs came her way, and she took them both. Around the consulting work she fit a separate, obsessive routine: Wake at 5:00 a.m. Coffee, banishing the lingering night dreams with wake-up caffeine. Care for Alicia. Bundle the baby into her pram and, before the streets of D.C. got too hot, make the long walk to World Wide News to buy newspapers. The Washington Post, the New York Times: the on-line versions left too much out. Also a host of small-town papers. The rest of the day she stayed inside, bathed in the air conditioning that divided her and Alicia from the steaming D.C. summer. She worked and then she read, barely glancing at the wide variety of usual disasters available in the world:

  FOREST FIRES OUT OF CONTROL IN BRAZIL

  MAN KILLS WIFE, SELF

  ECOLOGICAL BALANCE SEVERLY THREATENED BY OVER-GRAZING

  ILLEGAL STRIP MINING CAUSES ARMED STAND-OFF WITH LAW

  She was looking for something unusual, and she would know it when she found it. No, not “it
”—“them.” She searched for two things, and on the first day of July she finally found one of them. Only a small item far inside the Times, bland and inoffensive:

  SCIENTISTS SOLVE PLANT MYSTERY

  A team of scientists led by Dr. Simon Langford of the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that the “mystery plague” affecting plants along the Connecticut shoreline has been stopped. “It was a random, natural mutation in one specific microbe,” Langford said, “but relatively easy to contain and kill off with appropriate chemicals. No mystery, really.”

  A section of shoreline in the Connecticut Wetlands Preserve has been closed to the public for several days while the botanical correction was carried out. Preserve officials announced that the wetlands will remain closed for the near future, “for further monitoring, as a purely precautionary measure.” Disappointed tourists were turned away by Security personnel but given free passes to other local attractions.

  “This sort of thing happens routinely,” Langford concluded. “We’re on top of it.”

  “Bullshit,” Julie said aloud to Alicia, who gurgled back.

  It was a cover-up—but why? And of what?

  Julie knew, or thought she knew, but she didn’t want to know. Not yet. She could be wrong, it was a fancifully dumb idea, in fact it skirted the edges of insanity. Just one of those stray ideas that crossed the mind but meant nothing . . . .

  She read the bland article again, then stared out her apartment window at a tree, carefully enclosed in a little wrought-iron fence, growing where a section of city sidewalk had been meticulously removed to accommodate it.

  2035

  All at once the Grab machinery went crazy.

  Ravi was on duty. He and Pete had been talked to by McAllister, a talk that left both of them near tears. She wasn’t angry, she was disappointed. Angry would have been better. Not even Ravi’s sighting of the not-cat outside had deterred McAllister from her disappointment. Pete wasn’t sure that McAllister even believed Ravi. Pete wasn’t sure he did, either. When McAllister was finished with them, Pete and Ravi avoided each other for a week—until Ravi was restored to puffed-up triumph by his amazing Grab.

  “I was all ready,” he later told everyone, although Pete had his doubts about that—why even bother to repeat it over and over unless it wasn’t true? And Ravi had a history of falling asleep during Grab-room duty. But whether he had leaped onto the platform at first brightening, or had just barely caught the Grab before it went away, it was irrefutable that Ravi had gone. He had gone close-mouthed both because of McAllister’s scolding and because he was embarrassed by the lack of the teeth that Pete had knocked out, but he returned smiling wide. His shout had reached both the children’s room and the farm. Pete, on crop duty with Darlene, had run toward the Grab room, along with everyone else.

  Ravi stood on the platform behind the biggest pile of stuff that Pete had ever seen. It almost hid Ravi; it spilled off the edges of the platform; it clanked and clattered as it fell. Pete couldn’t even identify half of it. How could even Ravi, the strongest of them all, load all this in ten minutes? And onto what?

  McAllister, running clumsily behind the bulk of her pregnancy, stopped in the doorway. She went still and white.

  “Look what I got!” Ravi shouted. “Look!”

  “What is it all?” Caity said. She held a child in each arm. “How did you bring it all?”

  “The Grab stayed open for more than ten minutes—for twenty-two minutes! It was a store Grab and I got this big rolling thing—see, it’s under all this—and just piled things on. There only was this kind of stuff, so that’s what I took. But look how much of it!” Ravi practically swelled with pride. Bloated, Pete thought. Like when someone was diseased in their belly.

  Why couldn’t Pete have been the one to bring back the big haul? Whatever it was.

  McAllister finally spoke. “Twenty-two minutes?”

  “I timed it,” Ravi said proudly.

  Caity repeated, “What is it all? What’s that thing with the skinny metal spikes coming out of it?”

  “A rake,” McAllister said. Then it seemed that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. “A rake, several hoes, bags of seed and fertilizer, trowels, flower seeds, hoses, flower pots, wind chimes—wind chimes!”

  Pete had never seen McAllister like this—wild-eyed, hysterical—not even when he and Ravi had gotten trapped in the funeral slot. Fear pricked him. But the next moment she had recovered herself.

  “You were in a garden store, Ravi. And you did well. Let’s get this stuff off the rolling cart so we can get the cart down off the platform. Caity, take Karim and Tina back to the children’s room, and on your way get Darlene to help Jenna with the children. She’ll have to do it because we need you here. Tommy, go wake up Eduardo. Terrell, you and Ravi and Pete start moving this stuff. We need that platform clear right away.”

  “Why?” Pete said.

  “I don’t know yet. Let’s just do it.”

  Caity ran down the corridor with the kids. Pete leaped forward to help unload the platform. If McAllister was ordering Darlene to help with the children, then something important was going on.

  They got all the stuff off the platform, including the long, heavy rolling cart. Immediately Terrell jumped on it and Ravi pushed him out the room and down the corridor. Terrell laughed delightedly. “I want a ride, too!” Caity cried, running after the cart.

  The platform glowed.

  Pete gaped at it. It never brightened again so soon after a Grab—never!

  McAllister said, in a voice somehow not her own, “Go.” She handed Pete the wrister that Ravi had turned over to her.

  Pete hopped onto the platform, the laughter from the corridor still ringing in his ears.

  JUNE 2014

  Julie continued to read the papers obsessively: “STARVATION REACHES CRITICAL POINT IN SOMALIA.” “OVERPOPULATION BIGGEST THREAT TO PLANET.” But nothing more was mentioned about the mutated bacteria, not anywhere in the world. Nor could she find anything on-line. If the story about K. planticola was being repressed, several countries must be cooperating in doing that, by every means available. The completeness of the suppression was almost as scary as the microbial mutation.

  Almost.

  Several times she picked up the phone to call Fanshaw’s office. Each time she laid it down again. If there was a cover-up going on, if there really were scientists and covert organizations and high officials in several countries working to keep this from the public, then Julie did not want to call any attention to herself. Fanshaw had probably, given his narcissism, erased any trace of help from anybody else in crafting the article he never got to publish. He would, of course, have preserved her nondisclosure agreement, and Julie could only hope he had it in a safe, secret place. But he had also written her a check “For professional services,” and she had cashed it.

  She Googled him. Until two weeks ago he had been all over the Net. Then his posts on Facebook ceased, as did his blog.

  “You seem preoccupied,” Linda said. They sat under an awning in her back yard, drinking cold lemonade and watching Linda’s three kids splash in the pool. Alicia lay asleep in her infant seat. The beach-cottage-in-August scheme had been dropped; Linda and Ted were taking the children to visit their grandmother in Winnipeg, where it was twenty-five degrees cooler.

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said.

  “Everything all right? The consulting?”

  “Going better than I’d dared hope. And I’m making a lot more money than I was teaching.”

  “Well, I can see that Alicia’s all right. So . . . Ju, is it Gordon? I know he called the night Alicia was born. You were on the floor with Jake, I burst in, and Gordon’s voice was coming from your answering machine.”

  Linda had never mentioned this before. It had been two days before Julie even listened to Gordon’s message: “We’ve had another kidnapping. A three-year-old boy taken from his bed in southern Vermont.”

  She said to Linda, “He
called about the work project. You know I can’t discuss it with you.”

  “I know. Spook stuff. But that wasn’t all he said. At the end his voice changed completely when he said, ‘Are you all right?’ Have you seen him since? Do you miss him? Is that why you seem so . . . not here?”

  Julie put her hand, cold from the lemonade glass, over her friend’s. “No, I haven’t seen him. And no, I don’t miss him. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, like it proves I’m a shallow person.”

  Linda grinned. “You’re not that. Still waters, brackish but deep.”

  “Thanks. I think.” And then, before she knew she was going to say it, “Linda, did you ever read James Lovelock?”

  “No. Who’s he?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you believe . . . do you think there are things about the universe that we can’t explain? Things that lie so far beyond science they’re something else entirely?”

  “I lapsed from Catholicism when I was fourteen,” Linda said, “and never saw any reason to unlapse. Ju, have you suddenly got religion?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. It’s not anything, really. Just the heat.”

  “Yeah, I can’t wait until we leave for—Colin! If you do that one more time you’re getting out of the pool, do you hear me?”

  Alicia woke. Colin did that one more time. Normal life, routine and mundane as precious as the propagation of plants.

  JULY 2014

  It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t. Then he was through and the ocean lay to his right, just as it had all those months ago when he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara. But this beach was smaller than the other, a strip of stony ground jammed between sea and a sort of little cliff. Big rocks jutting out of the water as well as the land. Also, the air was warmer and lighter. In fact, for the first time ever, the Grab seemed to be happening in full daylight. The sun shone brightly halfway above the horizon—so brightly that Pete blinked at it, momentarily patterning his vision with weird dots.

  When they cleared, he saw the little house on the top of the cliff above him. There seemed to be no path up. Cursing, Pete climbed, hands and feet seeking holds in the rock, some of which crumbled under his grip. Once he nearly fell. But he made it to the top and stood, his back against the house, to look at his wrister.