Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  * * *

  Warm. Yes. Although not as warm as it had been a short time ago. A host? Yes, if modifications were made. And warm.

  The tiny organisms shed the rest of their cyst coverings. The warmth accelerated their chemical signaling, making them collectively so much more than was each alone. They burrowed inward.

  * * *

  “My feet feel funny,” Annabel said.

  Hannah’s mother glanced fearfully at the doctor sitting next to her on a tarp beside the mouth of the crevasse. Around them drilling equipment screamed, breaking up rock slowly, delicately. “It’s important that we not do anything that would knock her further down,” the chief engineer had explained.

  The doctor chose her words carefully. These parents were both, understandably, overwrought. The father blustered and raged; the mother wept. “Hypothermia, most likely. But the heat lamp they snaked down there will prevent any real damage.”

  “The lamp can only reach as far as her shoulders! They block the rest of her body!”

  The doctor didn’t answer. She eyed the mother’s fingernails, torn and bloody from scrabbling at the rock before equipment arrived. Finally the doctor said the only thing she could say: “Keep talking to her.”

  * * *

  Strangeness. The right temperature, but such a different host. Carbon-based, yes, and with recognizable cells and chemical composition, but a completely foreign and unusable genetic system. Desperately the organisms began to reform, trying to conform to the environment, as they had so many times before, on so many other worlds. But such a strange host, where were useful tissues. . .

  Some organisms died. Some reconfigured, working against time and the host’s vicious attack cells. Some swapped reproductive information, trying to find an optimum combination for survival. All such activity drastically lessened the energy available for chemical signaling. The environment destroyed nearly all of the signal chemicals.

  The organism, scattered and diminished, fought to survive in the alien host.

  * * *

  Hannah’s mother told stories to Annabel. She sang until her voice was hoarse, all of Annabel’s favorites: “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Frog Went A-Courting” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.” Hannah’s father argued with the rescue director from the U.S. Mine Safety Administration, shouted orders that no one listened to, and spoke to the TV and Internet cameras kept at the far edge of the meadow by a cordon of police.

  “They’re drilling a parallel shaft to the one Annabel is trapped in,” Hannah’s father said, repeating what the rescue director had already told the reporters. They listened anyway, filming his haggard, blustering face. “She’s about twenty-seven inches down, and once they get below her, they’ll drill a horizontal drift over to her. They’re not using robotic drills because human operators can better judge how to use the jackhammers. They’re going down about an inch per hour but—”

  Hannah wasn’t listening, even though she could hear her father’s angry shouts over the equipment. Hear her father and mother argue night after night, smell the diesel fuel and wet rock and turned-up earth, feel the hard ground under her in the tent where she lay. The only thing she could not do was see. Her eyes were squeezed shut because if she couldn’t see Annabel, if she didn’t see Annabel come up alive and okay, she never wanted to see anything again.

  By the second day, Annabel had ceased to respond to her mother, not even with whimpers. Hannah’s mother was so hoarse that all she could do was gasp into the mic, “Breathe, Annabel, breathe. . .”

  * * *

  The host was weakening. Its central unit sounded slower and slower. The organism didn’t know enough to repair the central unit, especially not in the organism’s scattered state. But a few of its cells had at last found a mass of tissue where it could feed and rest and, most important, hide from the immune system. The host must live! Because now the organism had no chance of getting back to a place where it could again form cysts. And there had never been any point in getting back to the damaged ship.

  * * *

  “She’s coming up!” someone shouted.

  Hannah bolted from her tent. A flying drone cam, in defiance of the rules, sped over her head to photograph Annabel as she was lifted from her rocky prison. Annabel sprawled limp in an engineer’s arms, Hannah’s mother grabbing for her but restrained by workmen until the doctor could examine the small body for breaks and trauma. Hannah screamed, “Is she alive? Is she alive?”

  “Yes,” somebody said, and caught Hannah as she collapsed into grateful sobs.

  Annabel lay unconscious for nearly a month. Her third birthday came and went. Her parents, Hannah, and press from around the world haunted the hospital. MRI, CAT scan, blood tests—all negative. She had not even lost any toes to hypothermia. Her head showed no signs of trauma or concussion under any tests that modern medicine could devise. Her reflexes all looked normal, and her breathing was regular. No one understood.

  Then, after four weeks, Annabel opened her eyes, saw her mother, and said, “I fell down.”

  Hannah, sitting with her mother by Annabel’s hospital bed, ripped off the iPod with which she’d been trying to make life bearable, and started to cry. In that moment she vowed she would never yell at anybody again. It was a measure of something—guilt, remorse, love for her little sister—that she kept the vow for almost three whole weeks.

  MIRACLE GIRL, the press shrieked.

  * * *

  The surviving organisms began to emerge from their hiding place. Along and inside Annabel’s nerves, where the chicken-pox virus could hide for decades before emerging as shingles, the microbes struggled to survive. These alien cells furnished enough chemicals for the microbes to derive energy. The enemy was the soldiers of the host’s immune system: cells that engulfed and ate, or exuded deadly toxins, or drilled through the microbes’ outer membranes.

  The organisms fought back by changing the molecules displayed on their coats, incorporating as much of the host’s own tissue as possible in order to fool the immune system and escape detection. They produced chemicals to neutralize toxins. They hid inside cells. The battle was fierce, swift, and expensive, the goals both to survive and to avoid triggering such a massive attack from the immune system that the host died. When the battle was over, only a fraction of the organism remained, its cells too scattered to signal its mates, each alone in a vast alien ecology.

  * * *

  II: October, 2015

  “She looks fine, Mrs. Sevley,” the family doctor said. “How old are you now, Annabel?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said. “You’re the doctor!”

  “Annabel!” her mother said, but the doctor only laughed.

  “Of course I know. I know everything.”

  Annabel’s eyes grew round. “Really? Everything in the whole world?”

  “Everything except one thing. Do you like school?”

  “I do!” Annabel bounced on the edge of the examining table. “I’m in kindergarten! And I’m five!”

  “What’s your favorite part of school?”

  “Drawing.”

  “I used to like to draw, too, when I was in kindergarten.”

  The child looked doubtfully at the old man. “You were in kindergarten?”

  “A very long time ago.”

  “Annabel,” Julia Sevley said, “go sit with Hannah in the waiting room. I want to talk to the doctor.”

  “Okay.” She hopped down and ran out.

  Julia said, “Everything looks normal? All the blood work?”

  “No change at all from six months ago. Why?”

  “She has dreams. I don’t mean of the accident, she doesn’t remember that at all. But she has a lot of nightmares for a five-year-old, a lot more than Hannah did.”

  “Every child is different, Mrs. Sevley.”

  “I know. But she wakes whimpering almost every night. And some of her drawings are. . .disturbing.”

  “Disturbing how?”

  “I don’t know.
The colors are odd, and they aren’t of houses or people or anything. Just pages and pages of odd colors. It seems that, at her age, her pictures should be more detailed and sophisticated. Her best friend, a boy named Keith who’s Annabel’s age, seems far more advanced.”

  The old doctor was not a Freudian, a Jungian, or a child psychologist. He dealt mostly in ear infections, broken arms, and stomach flu, with very little patience for the kind of parent who considered their children to be competitors in some sort of developmental marathon. And Mrs. Sevley had always struck him as borderline paranoid. He said, “Her drawing will develop greater sophistication in time. Relax, Mrs. Sevley. Annabel is fine.”

  Julia tried to look relieved.

  In the waiting room Annabel jumped onto a chair beside her sister. Hannah sat staring at nothing. Annabel stood on her chair so she could see the top of Hannah’s head. Faint wires, the color of Hannah’s glossy black curls and almost invisible, were laced through her hair.

  “I know what that thing is and Mom said they’re bad! I heard her! She said it to Mrs. Brywood!”

  “It’s none of your effing business!”

  “And Mom said not to swear! I’m telling!”

  Hannah snatched off the mesh cap and stuffed it into her pocket. “If you tell Mom, I’ll tell her you stole two cookies this morning! I saw you!”

  “I don’t care,” Annabel said stoutly. “Taking cookies isn’t as bad as that thing.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it isn’t!” They glared at each other, the five-year-old with grubby fingers and the fifteen-year-old who had, all at once, become beautiful. Hannah’s eyes, however, were swollen and red under her too-thick black eyeliner. Annabel changed tactics. “If you let me try it on once, I won’t tell Mom you have it. Forever I won’t tell her. I won’t tell anybody, not even Keith.”

  Hannah hesitated. “Well. . .all right. But only for a minute, and not here.”

  “Okay!”

  “Come on, girls,” their mother said, emerging from the doctor’s office. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Hannah’s bedroom was hung with the new programmed posters of pop stars. Mutely the singers’ mouths opened and closed; Hannah had the sound off. Annabel liked better the pictures she herself drew. Those didn’t move but they had brighter colors, and these singers wore mostly black and sang against the dull black backgrounds Hannah had chosen. She was into black. However, Annabel said nothing about Hannah’s singers in case Hannah changed her mind about this thrilling adventure.

  “Han-Han—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Hannah, what’s this thing called?”

  “An N-cap. N for ‘neural.’”

  “What does it do? Where did it come from? Why doesn’t Mom want you to have it?”

  “It. . .how am I going to explain this to a dandelion like you? It comes from Asia, smuggled in on big ships. Mom doesn’t want me to have it because she’s so reactionary lame. It sends tiny electric signals to your brain that—”

  “Electric? Really? Like in the motor of the car?”

  “No. Yes. These are just tiny little sparks to the part of your brain that makes you feel happier and more energetic. Like when you eat too much sugar.”

  “Then why don’t you just eat sugar?”

  “I don’t want to get fat,” Hannah said. “Besides, it’s not exactly like that. It jolts your brain into making more dopamine.”

  “What is—”

  “Never mind! Do you want to try this or not?”

  “Yes.”

  Hannah settled the cap on Annabel’s head. “I’m going to keep the controller. See, it’s this tiny thing here, and it can go in any body part where I can squeeze the muscles and—”

  Annabel giggled. “I know! It can go between the cheeks of your ass! Ava at school told me!”

  “Then if you already know all about it, why are you bothering me?”

  “I’m sorry! Don’t take it off me, Hannah! Make it work!”

  Hannah gave a theatrical sigh and closed the fingers of one hand on the controller.

  Annabel’s mouth opened in a wide pink O. Her eyes opened so wide that their whites dwarfed the irises. She rose onto her tiptoes, her eyes crossed, and she fell onto the floor.

  “Annabel! Annabel!”

  The child stirred. She looked at Hannah as if at a goddess. “It was. . .it made me. . .”

  “It’s not supposed to make you fall over! Oh, God, are you all right?”

  “Yes. It gots. . .it gots. . .” Words failed her.

  “It’s too big a jolt for you! I should have realized, it’s not supposed to be for children, you don’t have enough body weight—are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes.” Annabel rubbed the top of her head.

  Curiosity replaced fear. “Did it make you feel happy?”

  “I don’t know,” Annabel said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “It gots—”

  “It ‘has,’” her sister corrected automatically.

  “It gots wrongness,” Annabel said.

  Hannah snatched the cap off Annabel’s head. “You don’t know anything. You’re just a dandelion.”

  Annabel ignored this, although ordinarily it would have started another argument. Her eyes had returned to normal. She said, “Hannah, does the N-cap make you happier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you not happy ’cause of that boy? Jonathan?”

  Hannah blinked. “Sometimes you see more than I think you do.”

  “Why doesn’t Mom want you to be happy in the N-cap?”

  “These stronger models can be addictive.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, never mind. I’m tired of talking to you, you’re such a baby!”

  Again Annabel ignored the fighting words. She said slowly, as if working something out in her mind, “The N-cap. . .I don’t like it. When it was on, I wasn’t. . .I wasn’t me.”

  “You don’t understand anything, after all,” Hannah said dismissively. “You’re too young.”

  A knock on the door. Hannah whisked the N-cap out of sight. Their mother’s voice said through the door, “Dinner’s ready, girls.”

  “Is Daddy home?” Annabel called.

  Hannah said bitterly, “Of course not. When is he ever? And remember—you promised to never, ever tell Mom!”

  * * *

  For years, the organisms struggled in their new environment. After they were adequately cloaked from the immune system, after they learned how much of the ambient chemicals they could take without harming the host’s functioning, had come the long attempt to reconnect. Separated from each other by the vast distances inside the host and by their individual adaptive strategies, they could not trade chemical signals.

  But they had been created with many resources, although none that allowed them to take over the genetic machinery of their host cells. The invaders had been intended to evolve and adapt. They developed new internal cellular machinery. Through trial and error, they looked for chemicals that would function with their adapting messaging system. Also through trial and error they learned about their host’s cells. And if their efforts sometimes disrupted Annabel’s nerve cells and sent strange electrochemical firings to her brain, the disturbances so far were minor. And silent.

  * * *

  “Now, Frank?” Mom whimpered. “You want a divorce now, with the economy tanking again and Annabel having strange dreams and these weird—”

  “Stop, Julia!” Daddy shouted. He was much louder than Mom. Annabel could hear him through the hallway wall, on her way back from the bathroom. “When would be a good time, tell me that? You see disaster at every day of every year, you always have, and I’m tired of living with someone who’s afraid of a crack in the sidewalk and can’t make up her mind about anything!”

  “You can’t just—”

  “I can,” Daddy said, “and I will.”

  “It’s your new dental
hygienist, isn’t it, the bimbo who—”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Daddy said, more quietly, “I’ll enjoy my new life, and you can enjoy your moral superiority to my new life, and we’ll both be happy.”

  “Annabel,” Hannah said, “what are you doing crouching there like that? Are you—oh.”

  Annabel hadn’t heard Hannah, still in her coat and boots, come up behind her, because Daddy was shouting again. Annabel said to Hannah, “Are they going to get a divorce?”

  “We can only hope so,” Hannah said, scooped up Annabel in her arms, and carried her back to bed. Annabel clung to her big sister. Hannah smelled of shampoo and the cold air from outside and safety. Behind them, Annabel could hear Mom crying, “Don’t leave me, Frank, don’t just leave us—”

  Hannah said, “I will never let a man reduce me to that. Never.”

  III: September, 2018

  Hannah stood surveying her room, mother, and sister. Tomorrow Hannah was leaving for college in Boston, forty miles away. She had stripped the walls of their art and boxed up all her books, wanting to leave no trace ofherself, but the floor looked like an explosion at Macy’s: clothes, pillows, electronics, suitcases, small appliances jumbled in piles. Eight-year-old Annabel rooted in the closet, ass outward, like a small burrowing animal.

  “Hannah,” she called over her shoulder, “Are you taking this old soccer ball? Can I have it?”

  “Sure.” Hannah held up a pair of jeans. “Mom, these are really irkly.”

  “Throw them away.”

  Instead, Hannah handed them to her mother. “No, they’re still whole. Will you start a donations bag? And take them to Goodwill after I go?” It was good to keep Mom busy. Since the divorce, she moped around a lot. Look at her now, sitting slumped over on the edge of the bed, fingering the jeans and unable to make a simple decision what to do with them. For years Dad had made all their lives miserable, he did them a favor by leaving, and yet all Mom could do was droop around like limp spaghetti. Pathetic!

  Hannah’s lip curled in the unforgiving contempt of eighteen.

  Annabel backed out of the closet, dust bunnies in her hair, something clutched in her fist, probably a broken necklace or old music cube. Well, let her have it. Hannah was starting a new life, and everything was going to be different.