Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Two women at a table, both preternaturally beautiful, absorbed in each other under the furtive, envious gaze of several men. The blonde had four arms. The redhead’s movements were so quick that she had to have augmented muscles and reflexes, which might be why they could drink here without being bothered.

  The other people looked human standard, but of course most genemods didn’t show. That man ordering another beer, that couple laughing together, could have any number of physical or mental alterations. Lukas had read all he could, before leaving New Europe and Aunt Carrie, huddled on their living room floor between tears and rage, her gray hair as tangled as the explanations that Lukas would not, could not, give her.

  He didn’t want to think about Aunt Carrie.

  “Happen you going to actually drink that, boy?” said the big man beside him at the bar.

  Lukas tensed. This was why he’d come.

  “Yes, sir.” He took a tiny sip. “Buy you one?”

  “Why?”

  A mistake. The trapper’s blue eyes—for of course he was a trapper, with that fat-storing genemod build designed for endurance and insulation on the Ice—stared at him suspiciously. Lukas had read that suspicion was built into Freedom culture. With no laws, the only protection was personal vigilance.

  “I’d like to hear about the Ice,” Lukas said.

  It was evidently the right answer—direct, supplicatory, unthreatening—especially with Lukas’s slight build. An even trade, in a Libertarian society built on unrestricted trade. The trapper relaxed.

  “Buy me two,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “How many trips have you made onto the Ice?”

  “Eleven. Eight mating seasons in a row, skip two years, then three more.”

  “Did you capture many pupcats?”

  “Happen thirty-eight in all.”

  “A trip lasts four months, right?”

  “It do.” The trapper drained his first beer and set the mug back on the counter. “You think you want to go onto the Ice.”

  “Yes. I can—”

  “You can’t do nothing. You think I’d take an untrained whelp? And you think the pupcat trade happen make you rich? Nobody don’t get rich except the export company!”

  “I know,” Lukas said. “But I can do any grubby work you want. I’m stronger than I look, I can cook, I can haul, I have a lot of experience caring for baby pupcats.”

  “We don’t like liars on Freedom, whelp.”

  “I’m not lying. I was raised on New Europe, with pupcats as pets. Ask me anything about their care.” He did not say that, of course, both animals had died.

  “Pets! And you think that fits you for the Ice?” The trapper threw back his head and gave a huge laugh, both artificial and sour. Then he gulped his second beer, shot Lukas a look of utter contempt, and walked off.

  It was no more than Lukas had expected. So—back to the original plan.

  He bartered with the bar owner to scrub the whole place in return for meals, for two nights sleeping on the floor, and for two hours’ use of the owner’s wife’s Link. The next two days, he scrubbed. Everything was filthy, the bathrooms beyond disgusting. Lukas worked meticulously. In the evenings, ignoring aches in muscles unaccustomed to the postures of cleaning floors and toilets, he spent his last few coins in other bars, buying others beers, asking questions, and listening listening listening.

  By the time the bar shone like silky white fur, he had his information.

  Deoxy was full of tourists; the migration was due in a few days. Pupcats spent half of the year on the Ice. The other half, they migrated east to the terminator, feeding on fish and plants until their bodies grew round and waddley as the plush toys they so much resembled. Nourished, they migrated back onto the Ice to spawn. Trappers needed to take them as babies; the adults were impossible to domesticate, and the teeth in those adorable pink mouths were sharp and efficient. But if taken right after birth, the infants would imprint on humans.

  Lukas passed a roverbus of tourists about to set out for the pupcats’ feeding grounds. They were laughing and raucous, drinking redbeer, demanding from the driver to know if he was genemod—a seriously impolite question on Freedom but the other reason that tourists came at all. Lukas ignored them.

  He found the clinic on Galt Street, among warehouses and motor depots. Small, shabby, the kind of place used by poorer people who’d saved hard to modify one embryo for the one child they could afford. From the stories Lukas had heard the last two days, Theobald Garner produced reliable results but invented a certain number of non-existent expenses along the way. His patrons, having started the genemod process, could not afford to switch clinics halfway through and so were stuck.

  Lukas had heard other things, too. But, then, he’d already known them.

  He lurked outside as, one by one, techs left the building. The staff, according to his Link research, numbered five. They all left. Lukas knew what Theobald Garner looked like. As the man, whistling, turned to e-lock his door, Lukas tackled him.

  Garner was not genemod for strength, nor anything else. The attack bore him backwards into the clinic, and then Lukas straddled him, laser gun at his throat. “I want to talk to you. No, don’t move so much as a tendon.” The man might be able to summon private police, the only kind on Freedom.

  Garner was still.

  With his other hand, never taking his eyes from the man, Lukas undressed him down to his undershorts. If Garner had been braver, this would have been more difficult. He found the police call. “Does it activate if it’s away from skin? No, don’t wriggle—does it?”

  “Y-yes.”

  Lukas tucked it into his own shirt. He’d been afraid Garner might have had a biological call: a tooth-tuck, for instance, activated by a touch from his tongue. In that case, the game would be over. But evidently Garner was as cheap as he was unscrupulous.

  He gasped, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Lukas Busch. Oh—I see you remember it. Why would that be?”

  Garner began to babble. “It was an accident! I never intended—it was an accident, you must believe that!”

  Now that the moment was actually here, Lukas marveled at himself. How many years had he dreamed, planned, worked and saved for this? Sometimes his anger had threatened to immolate him. Sometimes his despair had. Through all the sicknesses, one each year, with first his parents and then Aunt Carrie nursing him, sure each time he would die. Sometimes he’d wanted to. Yet here he was, and all he felt was an icy control. No—one more thing: contempt. If Garner had denied his act, there was no way Lukas could have proved it. But the man was that thing despised even more on a pioneer world than on a settled one: He was a coward.

  Garner still babbled. “I was only experimenting, just to see if it could be done . . . DNA universal . . . scientists experiment, that’s what we do . . . panspermia . . . the wrong embryo implanted in the client . . . an accident I swear by everything that—”

  “Shut up,” Lukas said. All at once, Garner sickened him. He stood up to remove himself from the man.

  “How did you even get off-planet?” Garner said, still lying on the floor, not shutting up. “I mean you could get off Freedom, of course, nobody here checks anything, but to pass Purity Control anywhere else you—”

  “I was still in my mother’s belly. They’re both dead now, those clients you ‘accidentally’ cheated.”

  Garner switched to bluster, the other stupid weapon of stupid men. “But you’re alive! The genemod worked so nobody was cheated, and why are you complaining you’re here and alive and—”

  Lukas fired. He aimed at the floor next to Garner’s head, but even so, his finger had seemed to move of its own volition, which scared him. Garner’s eyes went so wide that the irises seemed to disappear.

  He whispered, “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Because I had no cho
ice. Because of you, I had no choice.”

  Garner’s eyes did the impossible and went even wider. In them crept a sly satisfaction (I did it!) that proved the greatest test yet to Lukas’s control. But he held both gun and voice steady.

  “You’re going to give me what I want. All of what I want.”

  “I can’t . . . You must know that a genemod done in vitro can’t be undone in adulthood!”

  “I do know that.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  Lukas told him.

  There was no way to hide the purchase of the three holo projectors on Garner’s credit. They arrived mid-morning the next day, MoonDay, the staff’s day off. Lukas waited all night with Garner until the truck delivered the projectors and Garner gave the trucker his thumbprint. She saw Lukas standing beside a nervous Garner, and there was no way to hide that either.

  “The export company will come after me!”

  “You know what to say,” Lukas said. “I forced you at gunpoint. Damn it, it’s the truth. For once in your miserable life, just tell the truth. But if you call them before tonight, I’ll tell them everything. They’ll do a scan on me and then the Genemod Clinic Association will deal with you for scaring off prospective customers and wrecking trade. Is that what you want?”

  Garner was too terrified to answer.

  Lukas briefly tested all three projectors. When he glimpsed the recording, Garner actually began to howl. Lukas gagged and tied him, securely enough for everyone to believe he hadn’t been able to get free till evening. After loading the three projectors onto a clinic dolly, Lukas threw a tarp over them and set off.

  The wind had shifted, bringing rare cold blasts from the Ice, and rain threatened. Lukas cursed and pushed the dolly faster. The projectors were heavy. He’d brought the recordings with him on the Far Princess, but the shuttle weight allowance could never have covered projectors, even if there had been a remote chance of his affording them.

  The poor, his mother had always said, had to take what they could get. She was a simple person, and Lukas had never pointed out to her the double meaning of “take.”

  He set up the first projector on the strut of a bridge over Deoxy’s small river. There was a lot of foot traffic here and many people would see the holo. He was less happy with the location of the second projector, behind a trash can on Keynes Street. Here, too, foot traffic was heavy, but the location was exposed enough that the machinery might be stolen before it was activated. But he was running out of time. With the third projector, he had a stroke of luck—a construction site right beside a glossy genemod clinic. The projector was easy to hide in the rubble. Someone had even scrawled a graffito on a half-finished wall: STOP THE PUPCAT TRADE!

  Perfect.

  Late afternoon, and the clinic closed for the day. All over Deoxy, workers were leaving their jobs and heading home, picking up their children at daycare, heading for restaurants and bars. Tourists in their roverbuses drove in from the pupcat feeding grounds, heading for their hotels. The evening was cold but the rain held off.

  Lukas pushed the buttons on the remotes, and all three projectors shot out high-quality holos ten feet high.

  A pupcat wearing a pink bow, outside a house in Kali City on the planet Lennox. Night, and Freedom’s red-dwarf star, only three light years away, hangs low on the horizon. The pupcat jumps toward the star, twisting and leaping, leaping and twisting, until it collapses in exhaustion. Quick dissolve to the same animal, thinner, its fur falling out in patches, still jumping toward the star. Another dissolve and the pupcat, emaciated and covered with sores, makes a final futile jump toward Freedom and dies.

  A pupcat on the terrace of a high-rise somewhere in the Orion Arm; the center of the galaxy arches overhead in a curve of stars. The pupcat faces the other way, in the direction of the unseen planet Freedom, and jumps toward the sky. Two more jumps and it hurls over the edge of the terrace and disappears.

  An exhausted, clearly dying pupcat, unable any longer to leap, raises one paw to claw toward the night sky. A child, crying, tries to comfort it. The pet bites the child. In the pupcat’s huge, non-human eyes is a very human despair.

  Two more vignettes and the holo began to recycle, silently shouting its visceral message. The electromagnetic beam from the remote was, of course, clearly detectable. At the far end of the construction site, Lukas sat down on a pile of foamcast bricks and waited for the Freedom Export Company thugs to arrive and kill him.

  They didn’t. Or if they did, they were too late. A flyer swept down from the sky; the door was flung open. A girl’s voice shouted, “Are you insane? Get in here, quick!”

  Lukas hesitated only a moment. He climbed into the flyer, and it raced off.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” the girl said.

  Her name, she’d said, was Marianne. Her mother, who’d been piloting the flyer, was Eva. The three of them sat in the kitchen of a small, expensive apartment overlooking the river, not far from the strip of glossy tourist hotels. Three redbeers sat on the stone tabletop, but only Eva was drinking. She gazed at Lukas steadily, an unblinking assessment that he found unnerving. Both women were beautiful, with masses of dark hair and golden skin. He had no idea what he was doing there.

  “I’m trying to stop the pupcat trade,” he said. “If people know what happens to the pupcats after they leave Freedom . . . You see, the migratory instinct is so strong, stronger than anything found genetically anywhere else in the galaxy, that the animals must obey it, and they die trying to get back to the Ice and—”

  “We know,” Marianne said. “Haven’t you seen the graffiti? We’ve been trying for a year to stop it!”

  “With graffiti? Are you insane? If you knew what happens to the pupcats off-world, why didn’t you just broadcast the recordings?”

  “You don’t understand,” Marianne said.

  Eva removed her gaze from Lukas to her handheld. “All three projectors destroyed. Thirty seconds, one minute, twenty-nine seconds.”

  Lukas said, “So hardly anybody saw the holos?”

  “No,” Eva said.

  He did reach for his redbeer then, groping over the table in blind fury, blind despair. To die for nothing at all . . .

  “You’re not going to die,” Eva said, and his startled eyes swung toward her. She said, “That is what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Yes, I’m sure they can trace you. But I don’t think anybody saw us snatch you up, and so nobody knows you’re here. It may be possible to get you safely off planet.”

  He said flatly, “I can’t go.”

  Marianne, who seemed much bossier than her mother, snapped, “Of course you can! But—what did you say your name was? Luke?”

  “Lukas.”

  “Lukas—” she leaned forward, painful intensity on her face—“are there copies?”

  “Of the recordings? Yes.”

  Eva let out a long, reverent breath. She looked at her daughter. “Then maybe we still have a chance.”

  Lukas said, “If you knew what happens to the pupcats, and if you think my recordings will help stop the trade, then why didn’t you just use them yourselves? I collected them off the Link—do you think someone like me has actually been to all those worlds? You have money—” he waved a hand around the apartment—“so are you just cowards? Afraid to risk your lives for something you say you believe in?”

  Marianne reached across the table and slapped him.

  Shock spread through him—no woman had ever hit him before. He was too surprised to be angry. At the look on his face, Eva smiled and said gently, “You really don’t understand, Lukas. Link transmission from off-world is tightly controlled by the Export Company. They own the equipment, so there’s nothing to stop them from doing what they like with it. Their techs are so good that most people on Freedom don’t even realize the Link is censored. The Company knows that pupcats all die trying to migrate back to the Ice, but practically no one else here knows. We few trying to stop it simply aren’t believed. I
t’s not a large group of people involved in the trade: a few hundred trappers and the Export company. If everyone else on Freedom knew, we might be able to sway public opinion to shut down the trade. In a Libertarian society, public opinion counts for a lot because it mobilizes strikes, boycotts, and maybe even violence. At least, it does if not too many people’s livelihoods are involved. We’re not cowards—we just had no proof. But if you have copies of the recordings—please tell me they’re on your person right now!”

  “Yes. But—”

  Marianne said fiercely, “If people off-world know that the pupcats die, why hasn’t the Coalition stopped the trade?”

  Lukas said, “It’s not that easy. The Company has sold only a few thousand pupcats, and they’re scattered over cities, over continents, over worlds. You have a pet, and it gets sick, and you take it to a vet. She says, ‘It’s an alien animal and I don’t know how to treat it.’ She Links to Freedom, and the Company denies knowledge of what’s wrong or how to cure the pupcat: ‘Could be something environmental where you are, could be an anomalous genetic defect, could be some sickness picked up that their immune system hasn’t evolved to handle.’ That sounds plausible, and the pupcat dies, and the case is closed. Nobody connects the dots. And when I did, nobody was interested in a crackpot kid with no medical credentials.”

  After a moment, Eva nodded. Now it was Lukas who turned fierce. “I still don’t understand. You could have gone off-world and collected the proof. You could—”

  Eva stared at him steadily, and then he understood.

  “You can’t go to other worlds,” he said slowly. “You’re genemod.”

  Marianne said, “I am.” She looked at her mother.

  Eva’s eyes filled with tears and she left the room.

  Lukas hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. The redbeer muddled his head. He’d experienced too many emotions, in too rapid a succession. He put his hand in front of his eyes and mumbled something, not even he knew what.

  Marianne’s voice suddenly turned as gentle as her mother’s. “Come with me, Lukas.” She tugged him from his chair and he stumbled after her to a bedroom. “Sleep,” she said, and he did.