Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  It was a relief of sorts to think bad words, so he said them again, this time aloud. “Why doesn’t the fucking Grab machinery brighten?”

  “Language, Pete,” McAllister said. She smiled at him from the doorway, walked heavily to his side, and braced one hand on the wall to lower herself beside him. Pete blushed, then scowled, conscious of the forbidden knife under his shirt. He had sounded out the words on its sheath: CAUTION: Carlton Hunting Knife. Very Sharp.

  “I came to keep you company,” McAllister said. “Are you very bored?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re doing a good job. You always do.”

  Pete looked away. He used to love McAllister’s praise, used to practically live for it. Now, however, he wondered if she really meant it, or if she just wanted him to keep on doing what she wished. Did she praise all the Six the same way? And the older Grab kids, too?

  McAllister watched him carefully. Finally she said, “You’re growing up, Pete.”

  “I am grown up! I’m fifteen!”

  “So you are.”

  Silence, which lengthened until Pete felt he had to say something. “How is the fetus?”

  To his surprise, McAllister smiled, and the smile had a tinge of sadness in it. “Doing fine. Do you know how odd it would have been for a fifteen-year-old to utter that sentence, in Before?”

  He didn’t know. He said belligerently, “I don’t see why. That fetus is important to us.”

  “You’re right. And you Six have all grown up knowing that. Language follows need. It was your father who taught me that, you know. He was studying to be a linguist.”

  Startlement shook Pete out of his belligerence. McAllister—none of the Survivors—talked much about the ones who had died, or about their own lives Before. When he’d been a child, Pete and the other Six had asked hundreds of questions, which always received the same answer: “Now is what counts, now and the future.” Caity had pointed out, years ago, that the Survivors must have made a pact to say that. Gradually everyone had stopped asking.

  Now Pete said carefully (CAUTION: Very Sharp.), “My father?”

  “Yes. Richard had been a student at the same university I was, although we didn’t know each other then.”

  “Where was that?” This flow of information was unprecedented. Pete didn’t want to ask anything complicated that might interrupt it.

  “The name of the university wouldn’t mean anything to you, and there’s no reason why it should. That’s all gone, and what matters is now and the future.”

  “Yes, of course, but how did my father get here, McAllister? How did you?”

  She sighed and shifted uncomfortably on the floor. Pete tried to imagine carrying something the size of a bucket inside you. McAllister said, “I was home from university for summer vacation when the Tesslie destruction began. They caused a megatsunami. That’s a . . . You’ve seen waves in the ocean when you’ve been on a Grab, right? A tsunami is a wave so huge it was higher than the whole Shell, and could wash it right away. Wash away whole cities. The Tesslies started the tsunami with an earthquake in the Canary Islands off the coast of Europe and it rolled west across the Atlantic.”

  Her face had changed. Pete thought: She’s talking to herself now, not me, but he didn’t mind as long as she kept talking. He’d never seen McAllister like this. Was it because she was pregnant? It had been a while since anyone in the Shell had been pregnant: at least six years, when Bridget had miscarried that last time. The Survivors were too old (or so everyone had thought) and the Grab kids too young. The Shell was awash in babies, but in the last years no pregnancies. Until now.

  McAllister kept talking, her back resting against the Grab room wall, her hands resting lightly on the mound of her belly. “We lived, my family and I, in the countryside of southern Maryland. Honeysuckle and mosquitoes. Dad had a little tobacco farm that had been in the family for generations. Ten acres, two barns, a house built by my great-grandfather. It wasn’t very profitable but he liked the life. We had no close neighbors. That day my parents drove my little brother to Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment, a specialist. Jimmy had had leukemia but he was recovering well. I woke up late and turned on the little TV in my room while I was getting dressed and I learned that by then the tsunami was forty-five minutes away. My parents might have been trying to call me but I’d forgotten to plug in my cell and the battery was dead.”

  The words made no sense to Pete but he didn’t interrupt her.

  “Mom and Dad had taken our only car—we didn’t have much money and I was at university on a merit scholarship. They were so proud of that. I ran out of the house and climbed the hill behind the barns. The hill wasn’t very high, not in coastal Virginia, but it was high enough to see the water coming. A huge wall of it, smashing everything, trees and houses and tobacco barns. Our house. I knew it was going to smash me.”

  Pete blurted, despite himself, “What did you do?”

  To his surprise, she chuckled. “I prayed. For the first time in a decade—I was a smart-ass college kid who thought she had outgrown all that hooey—I prayed to a god, any god, to save me. And then a Tesslie did. It materialized out of the air beside me in what looked like a shower of golden sparks—that’s why we called them Tesslies, you know. Ted Mgambe came up with the name. He said when they materialized through whatever unthinkable machinery they had, it looked just like the shower of sparks from Tesla’s famous experiments.”

  She had gone beyond Pete again. He didn’t interrupt.

  “The materializing was quite a trick, but the Tesslie was solid enough, a hard-shelled space suit, or perhaps a robot, with flexible long tentacles. It wrapped one around me but it really didn’t have to. The tsunami was almost on me, a wall of dirty raging water with trees and boards and pieces of cars and even a dead cow in it. I saw that cow and I clutched the Tesslie with every ounce of strength I had.”

  Silence. Pete said, “And then what? What?”

  McAllister shrugged. “I woke up in the Shell, along with twenty-five other people. All about my age, all intelligent, all healthy. You know their names. Everything was here except the Grab machinery, which just appeared twenty years later when it became evident that we were not going to be able to produce enough children to restart the human race. Too much genetic damage, Xiaobo thought, although nobody knew from what. All of us Survivors came from Maryland and Virginia, although we represented genetic diversity. Xiaobo was a Chinese exchange student, Eduardo was Hispanic, Ted was black, Darlene was plucked from up-country Piedmont. The diversity was probably deliberate. And we all happened to be in the open, high up, and alone when the tsunami hit.

  “When each of us regained consciousness, we explored the Shell, and we saw what Earth had become through the clear patch of wall in the unused maze—no, Pete, you weren’t the first to go there. And after the initial grief and rage, we made a pact that we would do whatever it took to restart humanity. Anything, anything at all, putting the good of the whole first and our individual selves second, if at all.”

  “Didn’t you hate them? The Tesslies, I mean?”

  “Of course we did. They wrecked the world. Even the brief hysterical newscast I saw that last day said that the tsunami wasn’t natural. It came from something—a quake, a volcano, I don’t remember exactly—that couldn’t have happened in that way by itself. And then the Tesslies saved us, like lab rats. We expected biological experimentation on us, those first years. It didn’t happen. The Tesslies left us alone until they gave us the Grab machinery, although no one saw them do it. Until you went Outside, I thought they’d probably left Earth for good. But they hadn’t, and I think now that they’re here for whatever happens next. Because something is happening, Pete. The grass is growing Outside. You breathed the air, even if it isn’t completely right yet. The Grabs have accelerated enormously. It’s possible more Tesslies will return soon.”

  “Before, did you—”

  She held out her hand. “Give me the knife, Pete. Or the gun,
or whatever you’ve got.”

  He jerked his head to face her. His body shifted away. “No.”

  “Please. You can’t do any good with it.”

  All at once fury swamped him in a big wave, like the tsunami she had spoken about but evidently didn’t understand. None of them understood anything, the wimpy Survivors! He shouted, “What’s wrong with you, McAllister? What? The Tesslies wrecked my future! Everybody’s future! And you want to just welcome them back because they gave us the Shell and the Grabs and—when the Grab machinery appeared it didn’t even have any learning circle to teach you that adults can’t go through and so we lost Robert and Seth until that day Ravi jumped on it during a game and it happened to brighten and he came back whole! And still you never blame the Tesslies, you never blame anybody for anything, you just talk about the good of the whole but to not blame the Tesslies—Fuck, fuck, fuck! Do you hear me? Fuck! We’re not . . . not gerbils!”

  “No. But you’re not thinking clearly, either. Survival—”

  “Blame the fucking Tesslies! Hate them! Kill them if you can!”

  “Pete—”

  The platform brightened.

  Pete pulled his knife, glared at the pregnant woman on the floor, and jumped into the Grab.

  JULY 2014

  The Yellowstone Caldera lifted upwards.

  For several years the surface land had been rising as much as three inches a year, but a few years ago the uplift had slowed and stopped. Now the ground inched upward again. A swarm of minor earthquakes followed, barely detectable at the surface. Tourists went on admiring the geysers and the bubbling, mud-laden hot springs. Rumbling at low sonic frequencies set off alarms at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory and the White Lake GPS station.

  Jacob Kahn rushed to his monitor. “Oh my God,” he said. It was not a prayer.

  JULY 2014

  Two more nights in cheap motels, one without AC in a sweltering July. Two more days on library Internet connections. On her own laptop Julie had run and rerun algorithms as new data became available. Her driving had taken her steadily north, along the coast. Now she was in Massachusetts, north of Salem. She knew where she was going. She had accumulated enough data points to be sure.

  The Eve’s Garden break-in in Connecticut.

  The baby snatched on the Massachusetts coast while her teenage sister slept in the same room.

  The Loving Pets burglary in New Hampshire.

  Thefts at REI in southern Maine and Whole Foods in Vermont.

  She was running out of money, and not all her news-watching had turned up the slightest hint that anyone was looking for her. On the other hand, neither had she turned up any more information on Dr. Fanshaw or mutated plant-killing bacteria. Both the glory hound and the deadly mutation seemed to have vanished, which was in itself scary. Still, she would have to go home soon. Or go somewhere.

  Alicia had a cold, probably from exposure to all the germs in all the libraries. Julie had a massive headache. Was she just being stupid, imagining herself some dramatic fugitive from a third-rate action movie? Maybe she was just as narcissistic as Geoffrey Fanshaw. The sensible thing was to make the observation, alert Gordon, and go home.

  At a Kmart she bought a camcorder. Alicia sneezed and fussed. Julie got them both back in the hot car and drove north on Route 1. The algorithm pinpointed a Maine town, Port Allington, for the next incident. Also a time: between 5:30 and 5:45 tomorrow afternoon. Which was odd, since all the other incidents had occurred in the middle of the night or in early morning. Google Earth showed the location to be in a retail area centered on a large Costco.

  She spent nearly the last of her money at a Ramada Inn, several steps up from the places she’d been staying. “You’re lucky to get a room at all,” the desk clerk told her. “It’s high season for tourists, you know. But we had a cancellation.”

  “Oh,” Julie said. She was tired, headachy, frightened. Alicia fussed in her car seat.

  “Tomorrow the Azalea Festival begins over in Cochranton. You here for the festival?”

  “No.”

  “You should go. My niece Meg is going to be crowned Miss Cochranton Azalea.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “You should give the festival a look-see.”

  It took Julie a long time to get to sleep. Her theory—fanciful, dumb, insane—kept spinning around in her head. When she finally slept, she dreamed that Miss Cochranton Azalea, dressed in a pink prom dress covered with blossoms, said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. I thought you were supposed to be a scientist!”

  The next morning she felt even worse. But today would end it. She fed Alicia, bathed her, had an overcooked breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s. It was after noon when she got on the road. Another sweltering day. During just the short walk from restaurant to car, sweat sprang out on Julie’s forehead and her sundress clung to her skin. Alicia, in just a diaper and thin yellow shirt, cried while Julie strapped her into her car seat. Julie turned on the AC and powered down the windows to flush the hot air from the car.

  Only a few hours to drive, and it would be over.

  All at once loneliness overtook her. She hadn’t talked to anyone but motel clerks, librarians, and waitresses in days, and you couldn’t call any of those things conversations. She felt near to tears. Ordinarily she despised weakness—she and Gordon had had that in common—but the way she’d been living wasn’t human. And what did it matter if she turned on her cell? In a few hours the camcorder would have her proof, and she doubted that the FBI or CIA or whoever—even if they were looking for her—could locate her that fast if she were on the road. She needed to talk to somebody. Not Linda, who would ask too many questions. She would call her brother. Not to say anything personal—she and Jake seldom did that—but just to hear his voice.

  The phone had nine voice mails waiting.

  Sitting in the Howard Johnson’s parking lot, the AC finally making the car bearable, Julie stared at the blinking “9.” Very few people had this number; she’d conducted her professional life on the more secure landline. Gordon? Had the investigation reopened?

  Her fingers shook as she keyed to voice mail.

  “Julie, this is Jake. Listen, are you due for vacation? If so, don’t travel out west. Nowhere near Yellowstone, do you hear me? I’ll call and explain more when I have a minute to think clearly.”

  A mechanical voice informed her that the message was dated days ago, the day Julie had left D.C. The next message was also from Jake, a day later: “Sorry to alarm you, Sis, but my warning still holds. Some weird shit is happening here, signs that the Yellowstone Caldera could blow. You remember, don’t you, I told you that for years now it’s been ranked ‘high threat’ ? Well, I guess it’ll rank that way a while longer since nothing seems to be happening even though there’s enough magma down there to blow up the entire state. Well, several states, actually. But as I said, it seems to have settled down. But don’t come out here until you hear from me.”

  The next message alternated between jocularity and exasperation. “Still no supervolcano at Yellowstone. Just call us at the U.S. Geological Survey a bunch of Cassandras. But why haven’t you phoned me? This is my third message.”

  Five of the other messages were from Linda, one from the hairdresser announcing that Julie had missed her appointment. Linda, calling first from home and then from Winnipeg, sounded increasingly frantic: “Where are you? It’s not like you to not call me back.” Her last message said she was calling the police.

  Julie keyed in Linda’s number, but it went to voice mail. Were the police already looking for her as a missing person? No, that last message was only an hour ago. Julie left Linda a voice mail saying she was fine, Alicia was fine, tell the police it was all a mistake, Julie would explain later.

  Almost she smiled, imagining that explanation.

  She pulled out and drove toward Port Allington.

  JULY 2014

  The Alarms came from the Canary Islands station, simultaneously s
ounding at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas offices in Madrid and Barcelona, and then around the world.

  “La Palma!” a graduate student in Barcelona exclaimed. “It’s breaking off!”

  “Not possible,” her superior said sharply. “That old computer model was disproved—you should know that! You mean El Teide!” He raced to the monitors.

  It was not El Teide, the world’s third-largest volcano, which had been smoldering on Tenerife for decades. It was the island of La Palma. A massive landslide of rock from Cumbre Vieja, itself already split in half and fissured from a 1949 earthquake, broke off the mountain. One and a half million cubic feet of rock fell into the Atlantic as the earth shook and split. The resulting tsunami crested at nearly 2,000 feet, engulfing the islands. The landslide continued underwater and a second quake followed. More crests and troughs were generated, creating a wave train.

  “Not possible,” the volcanologist choked out again. “The model—”

  The ground shook in Barcelona.

  The wave train sped west out to sea.

  JULY 2014

  It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light, until it was. Pete blinked. No Grab before had gone like this.

  He stood in a vast store, bigger than any he’d ever seen. WELCOME TO COSTCO! said a huge red sign. The lights were full on. The big doors just behind him stood wide open. But there were no people in the store, and none of the Before cars in what he could see of the parking lot. Everything was completely silent. A few tables had been tipped over, and half-full shopping carts stood everywhere.

  “Hello?” Pete said, but very softly. He held Ravi’s knife straight out in front of him. No one answered.

  Cold slid down Pete, from his crooked shoulder on down his spine right to the tops of his legs. But he wasn’t here to give in to fear, or to start conversations with weirdly absent people. He was here to Grab. He took one of the half-filled shopping carts—part of his job already done!—and pushed it past a display of round black tires. Not useful. Behind it were tables and tables of clothes, and behind those he could see furniture and food. What would McAllister want most?