Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Five minutes gone.

  The sea below him lay smooth as the mirror Caity had Grabbed long ago. Sunlight reflected off it, enveloping everything in a silver-blue glow. Pete wasted precious seconds staring at the beauty; it made good fuel for his hatred. When he and Ravi eventually found Tesslies . . .

  No time now for revenge pictures.

  The house had long since lost all its paint to the salt winds. A window, small and too high for Pete to peer into, stood open, but he heard no sounds coming from within. Cautiously he rounded the corner of the house.

  It stood on a point jutting above the ocean, and now he had a new angle on the path down to the beach below. Two figures walked there, away from the house, holding hands. They stopped briefly to kiss, then moved on. Pete moved to the front door of the cottage.

  It stood open. The screen door, with a metal screen so old and soft that it felt like cloth under his hands, was unlocked. Pete slipped into a tiny hallway, cool after the bright sun outside. He could see clear through to the back of the house, which was all glass with yet another view of the sea. All the rooms were small, to fit the house on the narrow point. To his left was a kitchen, to the right a steep staircase. Pete climbed it.

  Two little bedrooms, both with slanted walls and windows set into alcoves. One room held a double bed and a long, low dresser. Crowded into the other were a crib and a single bed, both occupied.

  She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, more beautiful even than McAllister. Pete gaped at her long red hair—he hadn’t known hair could be that color!—her smooth golden skin, her sweetly curved body and long legs. She wore a thin white top and panties, and nearly everything was on display. Something about her attitude suggested that she had only recently flung herself onto the bed and had fallen instantly asleep. It was a few moments before he could even look into the crib.

  When he did, he found a miniature of the girl. Not plump and smooth like Petra, this child looked delicate, graceful, like the fairies in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. When Pete lifted her, he scarcely felt her weight, not even on his weak arm. Neither the baby nor her gorgeous sister woke.

  Could he bring the older girl back, too? Pete gazed down at her. The rules of the Grab were strict, except that no one knew what they were. Everyone above a certain age died going through the Grab—but what age? Robert had died going through, at thirty-nine, Seth at forty-two. Petra’s father had died, at who knew what age. Pete could still go through at fifteen. Where between fifteen and thirty-nine was the death age? How old was this girl?

  Pete couldn’t risk it. A lingering look at the redhead and he crept downstairs with the baby.

  Twelve minutes had passed. If he had the same twenty-two minutes as Ravi, then he had to wait ten more minutes. But maybe he didn’t have ten more—who knew what the Tesslies would do? Other than watch humans squirm and struggle to survive. When he and Ravi caught one—not if, when—they would—

  Chime chime chime . . .

  The doorbell! Pete looked frantically around for somewhere to hide. But it wasn’t the doorbell, it was a clock sitting on a table made of tree branches painted white. Chime chime chime . . .

  The girl upstairs screamed.

  Pete looked frantically around. Nothing to hide behind, or under . . . He sprinted for the hall. Before he could reach the front door, the girl came tearing down the stairs. Pete ran into the kitchen. A door stood open and he darted inside, closing it behind him. The girl went on screaming, an incoherent mix of words; if she was calling the baby’s name, Pete couldn’t decipher it.

  Through all of this, the baby hadn’t awakened. Pete couldn’t see his wrister in the darkness of the pantry. But he could smell food all around him. Cautiously he shifted the baby to his shoulder and felt around with his free hand. When it closed on a package of something, he clasped it to the baby and felt for another.

  Now the door slammed; the girl had gone outside. A moment later she was back, tearing upstairs and then down again, still screaming but this time as if talking to someone. “My sister my baby sister Susie she’s gone! I was asleep—I can’t calm down don’t you understand you moron Susie is gone! Taken! I was—they’re walking the beach and—1437 Beachside Way and—yes I’m sure some fucking bastard took her!”

  Pete heard McAllister’s voice in his head, “Not that language, Pete. I know Darlene uses it but it’s not a good example for the kids.” Fucking bastard. The beautiful, beautiful girl was talking about Pete with the same words Pete talked about Tesslies.

  For the first time, he thought about the people left behind when he took their children. How they must feel.

  Why hadn’t he ever thought about that before? Why hadn’t McAllister made him think about it? Did Caity or Ravi or Jenna or Terrell? Maybe Jenna did. But Pete had only thought about getting back home safely with the Grabbed kids, about how important it was to restart humanity.

  Well, it was! And that was how McAllister always said it. Restarting humanity and saving the Grab children from the Tesslie destruction of the Earth. It was a heroic thing to do, and Pete was a hero for doing it.

  The girl on the other side of the pantry door threw something hard against the kitchen wall and again slammed the screen door, screaming, “Mom! Dad! Where the fuck are you!”

  Still the baby slept. Pete felt around again on the pantry shelves. He found another package of something, then yet another. Then the Grab caught him, and he was back on the platform with the slumbering baby, two packages of penne pasta, and a loaf of whole wheat bread with rosemary and dill.

  “Oh!” Tommy cried. “A baby!”

  Everyone clustered around the platform to greet him and take the infant, and even Caity smiled at him. Even Darlene. Pete smiled back. Jauntily he jumped down and handed the baby to McAllister.

  Behind him, the Grab platform brightened again.

  JULY 2014

  Just past midnight Julie, seated in front of her computer, put her hands to her face and pulled at the skin hard, trying to fully wake herself up. Today—no, yesterday—was her thirty-ninth birthday. Jake had called from Wyoming. Linda, in the midst of packing her family for Winnipeg, had dashed over with a chocolate cake with a mini-forest of candles. It had been a good day and Julie should have been in bed reliving it in dreams, but instead she’d sat at her computer for four and a half hours, flipping between news sites and screens full of data.

  She almost had it, the right algorithm.

  She could smell it, tantalizing as apples in October. But this was not autumn and this particular apple evoked Snow White’s Wicked Witch, Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced fruit, the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

  God, she was beyond tired, or her thoughts wouldn’t turn so metaphorical. It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough to fear without figurative exaggeration.

  Three more data points. One she felt certain about: the kidnapping in Vermont on the night Alicia was born. A three-year-old boy had vanished from his bedroom while his parents were out at a party. Local cops had his babysitter, a Dominican woman who barely spoke English, in custody. She swore she had been asleep on the living room sofa when the abduction occurred; undoubtedly they assumed she was lying. Julie knew she was not.

  The other two data points were more uncertain. A break-in in a garden shop in Massachusetts, no forced entry, the cash box untouched. The usual bizarre collection of goods had been taken: rakes, seeds, wind chimes. And yesterday’s incident, the kidnapping of a Maine infant who was supposedly being watched by her teenage sister while the parents strolled on the beach. No trace of the baby girl had been found, but the whole thing so closely resembled a set-up that even the local cops were suspicious, regarding the sister as either a suspect or a scapegoat; Julie couldn’t tell which. Could be a significant, could not. The location fit with her current algorithm, but not so closely if she didn’t include it as a data point to create the algorithm in the first place, which was the kind of thinking that drove mathematicians crazy. And when had she sta
rted thinking of a lost child as a “data point” ?

  She had to go to bed. Just one more scan of breaking news. And there it was:

  SCIENTIST ARRESTED FOR SECURITY BREACH

  Dr. Geoffrey Fanshaw, Biologist,

  Believed Connected to

  Unspecified Terrorist Activity

  The article said nothing much. It didn’t have to. Julie, all exhaustion banished, ran into her bedroom and started packing.

  2035

  Two Grabs right in a row, then nothing for a few days, then another Grab for Caity.

  They’re playing fucking games, ain’t they,” Darlene said. “With our lives!”

  “Not yours,” Caity answered spitefully. “You never have to go.” She was disappointed with the results of her Grab. She’d found herself in a strange, small store for twenty-two minutes and had not known what to do. There were no shopping carts, and anyway she was afraid of this store. She hadn’t said that, not even later, but then Caity didn’t ever admit fear. Still, Pete knew that’s what she’d felt. She hadn’t wanted to touch anything, but neither did she want to come back empty-handed and anyway, she said later and in a strong temper, “Who knew what the fuck McAllister was going to want?” So she yanked some zippered carrying-bags off a shelf and made herself stuff things into them.

  “Gerbils?” Eduardo said, astonished. He and Tommy happened to walk by the Grab room just as Caity returned.

  “That’s what they had!” Caity was near tears. “Get McAllister! Never mind, I’ll go myself!”

  “Wow, a puppy!” Tommy cried, unzipping a bag with mesh sides.

  The Six had never seen gerbils before. Only Terrell, Jenna, and Pete had seen dogs during Grabs, and the one Pete saw had tried to kill him. He didn’t much like the puppy, a small brown-and-white creature with floppy ears. It barked and shit everywhere and chewed up any shoes left on the floor. But everyone else thought it was wonderful, cute and cuddly. Tommy named it Fuzz Ball.

  The gerbils were kept in their own room, with an old blanket that McAllister wearily ordered to be torn into strips. The gerbils then finished the job. Unlike the puppy, which had to be coaxed to eat mashed-up soy and only did so when it got hungry enough, the gerbils ate the vegetable crops happily. But their room smelled and had to be cleaned out every day, and Pete couldn’t see the point of them.

  “Wait,” McAllister said. “Something is going to happen, I think.”

  “What?” Pete said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it because of what I saw?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  She didn’t seem to know much. And once, Pete had thought she knew everything!

  Two of the gerbils died the day after Caity brought them back. Pete hoped the rest would die, too, and maybe even the puppy, but they didn’t. The gerbils ate and smelled, the puppy raced around and barked and chewed, the babies wailed.

  “A regular madhouse, this,” Darlene muttered.

  Ravi went on a Grab and returned with yet another large load of objects on yet another large rolling cart. “Look! Look what I got!”

  Bundles of tough, heavy cloth that Pete thought would be poor blankets: too uncomfortable. However, it turned out they were not blankets at all. Eduardo let out a whoop such as Pete had never before heard the quiet man make. Eduardo sat on the floor and did things to one of the bundles and it sprang into a little cloth room.

  “A tent!” Tommy cried, and crawled inside.

  McAllister leaned against the wall, her hand on her belly, and stared at the “tent.”

  Eduardo said to McAllister, “Five-pole four-season Storm King. An earlier generation of these is what we used to use on field expeditions in the mountains, when I was a grad student in botany.” Pete didn’t know what a botany or a grad student were, and he didn’t ask. He was too jealous.

  There were more tents, plus a lot of rope, a sharp “axe” that McAllister immediately took away someplace, and many metal things Pete didn’t understand the use of. McAllister directed it all to be stowed back on the rolling cart—no playing with this one—and pulled into the room next to the gerbils.

  But the most interesting thing, McAllister didn’t see at all. Ravi said quietly to Pete, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  “I can’t leave the Grab room. I’m next.” Pete already wore the wrister.

  “Then wait until everybody leaves.”

  Pete nodded, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to see anything from Ravi. Pete regarded it as a private triumph that when he masturbated he no longer thought of McAllister; now he imagined the beautiful red-haired girl that had been Susie’s big sister. He’d already calculated how many years before Susie herself would be ready for sex. Still, every time he saw the growing curve of McAllister’s belly, the old animosity toward Ravi stirred.

  At the same time, he and Ravi were now allies. Together they were going to get revenge for Earth. The first Tesslie they saw—and one had to show up eventually, after all he’d seen one when he’d gone Outside!—they were going to kill. They spent a lot of time in Pete’s clear-walled secret room, gazing out at the growing grasses in the black rock and planning ways to accomplish this. If the Tesslie was an alien inside a bucket-case they could hit the case with something until it cracked open, drag the alien out, and stomp on it. If it was a robot, they would find the batteries and pull them out.

  “Look,” Ravi said when everyone else had left the Grab room. He reached under his tunic, made from a thick blanket folded and sewn to create pockets. Ravi pulled out something encased in leather. The leather slipped off and there was the knife, long and gleaming and, Pete knew without testing it, really sharp. Then another one.

  “They had a lot of knives in the store and I put some on the rolling cart. But these two are for us.”

  “Yes,” Pete said. He took one. Just holding it made him feel strange: powerful and bad, both. But he liked the feeling.

  “Yes,” he said again.

  JULY 2014

  Julie tried to be at running and hiding, but most of the time she felt like a fool. After all, she didn’t even know if whichever agency had arrested Fanshaw would come for her. And what if they did? All she had done was work on data he had given her.

  Data that she knew had been obtained illegally, which made her at the very least an accessory to crime. Data that might, in fact, constitute a terrorist risk.

  So why hadn’t she reported Fanshaw? Because he must have gotten the data from some government agency, which meant they were already aware of the threat. She couldn’t have helped any, and she might have endangered herself. Material witnesses could be detained by the FBI or CIA indefinitely, in secret and without filed charges. If that had happened, who would have cared for Alicia? Linda had her hands full with her job and her own family; Jake was out of the question.

  It was because of Alicia that Julie was trying to plan responsibly now. At first light she packed the car carefully. She stopped at the bank as soon as it opened and withdrew $3,000 in cash. She turned off her cell phone. Then she drove north from D.C. on I-270. In Pennsylvania, just over the border from Maryland, she found a seedy motel that looked like it would accept cash. It did. The bored clerk behind a shield of bullet-proof glass didn’t check the parking lot to see if the false license number she put down matched the one on her car. If the clerk was surprised to see a woman with a baby walk in to his establishment, which usually catered to an entirely different sort of trade, he didn’t show it.

  Locking the motel door behind her, Julie had a moment of panic. What was she doing? Her life had been going so well, had felt so sweet—

  She was doing what she had to do.

  After feeding Alicia, Julie drove to the nearest library and used their Internet connection until the library closed. It helped that Alicia, an unusually good baby now that the first bouts of colic were over, slept peacefully in her infant seat or stared calmly at whatever crossed her vision. Back in her motel room, Julie worked
on her own laptop, which couldn’t have accessed the Internet if she’d wanted to; this was not the sort of place with Wi-Fi.

  When she couldn’t go any further with the data she had, she watched the TV. It only got three channels, but that was enough. Through the thin walls came first loud music and then louder laughter, followed by a lot of sexual moaning. Sleep came late and hard. Julie upped the volume on the TV, flipping channels to find what she sought.

  “Dead zones” were increasing in the world’s oceans. No fish, no algae, no life.

  The Nile was threatened by industrial pollution. No fish, no algae, no life.

  CO2 levels in the atmosphere were creeping upward.

  Overfishing was causing starvation in Southeast Asian islands.

  The noise from adjoining rooms grew louder. A door slammed, hard. Julie’s gun, a snub-nosed .38, lay on the floor beside her bed. Julie was licensed to carry, and a reasonably good shot. She didn’t expect to have to use the gun, but it was comforting to know she had it.

  2035

  Pete sat in the Grab room, waiting for the platform to brighten. He had been there each day for a week now, relieved from duty only to sleep, and he was terrifically bored. Darlene had brought him onions and peppers to slice and chop. Eduardo had brought him sewing. Tommy popped in and out, too restless to stay very long. Caity had strolled in, nonchalantly offering sex, and had stalked out, her back stiff, when Pete said no. Jenna brought Petra, both of them trundled in on the rolling cart by Terrell. Petra was just learning to walk. Pete and Jenna sat a few paces apart and set the baby to waddling happily between them until she got tired and went to sleep.

  But most of the time he was bored. Of the Shell’s six books, two of them too hard for Pete, and he’d read the others over and over. He knew all about the Cat in the Hat, the fairy tales with all the princes and horses and swords, the moon you said good-night to, and Animals in the Friendly Zoo. Why didn’t the fucking Grab machinery brighten?