Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Just before Thanksgiving, Hannah was surprised when her Domains of Experience professor sat next to her in the cafeteria. “Hello, Hannah. May I talk to you?”

  “Sure.” She closed her new tablet. Up close, Dr. Paluski smelled of some spicy aftershave that was disturbing.

  “I want to know why, after such excellent initial work, you’ve stopped coming to my class.”

  Jenna was staring at them, open-mouthed, from a nearby table. Hannah blurted, “It’s dangerous.”

  He smiled, and she realized she’d said the wrong thing. He said, “Challenging old beliefs, widening one’s mental horizons—those things are always dangerous.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He was still smiling, which both angered her and, obscurely, forced her to continue. “People twist the doctrine of different domains. They use it to justify all sorts of irrationality, even violent ones.”

  His smile vanished but his patronizing tone didn’t. “But, Hannah, that’s true of science as well. Both modes of experience are just tools. When cavemen discovered fire, the crime of arson became possible. Knowing the structure of the atom led to nuclear weapons, and decoding the human genome to the kind of biological weapons that wiped out so much of Pakistan. Similarly, imagination can be used for evil or for reaching truths not available to science. So—”

  Something snapped in her. “Truths, Dr. Paluski? Really? Look at this poll from today’s news.” She opened her tablet and the news avatars sprang into three-dimensional holo life off its surface. Hannah put their caperings, as well as the charts and graphs and illustrations that changed ceaselessly behind them, on mute. She said, “Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe there is a war going on between angels and demons and that both sides are now actively recruiting or possessing humans to fight it. Forty-three percent believe they have personally been contacted in this war. Fifty-two percent believe they know someone who has been cursed or has put an effective curse on someone else. Twenty-six percent believe levitation is possible, thirty-one percent that aliens directed evolution, another forty-two percent that evolution never happened, and fully eighty-two percent that ghosts regularly affect the affairs of the living. Eighty—”

  “Hannah, Hannah, this is all part of a transition to a wider world view. You’re studying history—how much turmoil attended the switch in the eighteenth century from the Age of Faith to the Enlightenment?”

  “Turmoil? You want turmoil?” Her voice had risen and students were turning from their tablets and wristers to look at her. “I’ll give you turmoil! Yesterday in Dallas a girl died during an exorcism. Two days ago a group of mothers in suburban Philadelphia—suburban mothers!—attacked a homeless man because they believed he was cursing their children. This morning the CDC released their weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report and they’ve added a new category to their list: ‘Nocebo-Caused Illness/Death.’ That means the causation of sickness or death purely by expecting it. Last week’s figure was higher than for influenza.”

  He said, “You’re a very smart girl, Hannah. But I repeat: the Enlightenment caused all kinds of turmoil, too. For instance, the American Revolution.”

  “We don’t need another one.”

  “Don’t stop attending my course. It’s required and you’ll wreck a potentially outstanding GPA.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, just as Jenna came up to them.

  “Hi, Hannah. You’re Dr. Paluski, aren’t you?” she cooed. “I really wish I’d been in your section of Domains of Experience. Hannah said that you’re just the most charismatic teacher ever.”

  Hannah laughed.

  * * *

  The boy who had grabbed Hannah came to trial, and she testified. The only evidence of her being assaulted was a faint bruise on one arm, photographed that night by the cops, but the prosecutor had something else in mind. He used the half-century-old RICO, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, to argue that the gang which attacked the college student was a “criminal enterprise,” and therefore Hannah’s attacker could be held responsible for the boy’s beating, too. Hannah, sitting on a hard, battered pew in the ancient courthouse, was enthralled. The prosecutor’s argument marched along in clean, straight lines. So did the defense attorney’s, although not as strongly.

  The boy, glaring at Hannah as he was led in cuffs from the courtroom, was convicted. Hannah had a sudden insight: Law was the only restraint against the abuses caused by a culture unrestrained by rationality. Science could not restrain the current madness—hadn’t some important scientist said once that “When culture and science clash, science always loses”? Too esoteric, specialized, and difficult, battered by recent economic and epidemiological events, science was losing now.

  She was going to become a lawyer.

  Three days later she went home for Christmas break, to find Annabel too thin and their mother drunk.

  * * *

  Annabel watched anxiously from the front door as the taxi pulled into the driveway and Hannah got out with her suitcase. “I’m glad you’re here,” Annabel said in a small voice after Hannah had come inside on a swoosh of cold air. “Maybe we can put up the Christmas tree?”

  She didn’t really want the Christmas tree. She only wanted things to go back to the way they’d been, before they got so awful. She hadn’t told Hannah how awful, not once during all the long time she was away, because Mom had said not to: Hannah was very busy studying and they shouldn’t worry her.

  “Where’s Mom?” Hannah said. She sniffed at the front hall, which smelled of vomit even though Annabel had tried to scrub it out of the rug.

  “Upstairs,” Annabel said.

  “And she can’t come down to greet me?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  Hannah took the stairs two at a time. Annabel raced after her, her belly churning. Maybe Mom wouldn’t be. . . .

  Mom was.

  Hannah looked around the room, filthy and malodorous, an empty bottle fallen from her mother’s slack hand. When Hannah shook her, Mom didn’t wake. Hannah turned to look at Annabel. Hannah was going to blame her! She should have taken better care of her mother, she should have—Annabel burst into tears.

  Hannah picked her up and carried her into her own room, untouched since she’d left for college. “Tell me, Annie,” she said gently. “Tell me everything.”

  “Mom drinks that bad stuff,” Annabel sobbed, “and Keith—” But she couldn’t tell about Keith. He’d get in trouble. “And I have bad dreams!”

  “Of course you do,” Hannah soothed. “Anybody would, living like this. But it’s going to be all right now. I promise.”

  “Are you going to call Daddy?”

  “Daddy? No.” Hannah’s lips tightened. “But it’s going to be all right. I promise, Annabel.”

  Hannah took all the bad bottles out of the house. She shouted at their mother. She put up the Christmas tree, and on Christmas morning there were presents. She made a lot of phone calls. Another taxi came and took Mom “to a hospital for a month, where she can get better.” Hannah was there for three weeks of the month, and then Aunt Judy came to stay for a while and take care of Annabel. When Mom came home, she was quiet and didn’t say much and went to a lot of meetings, but she didn’t drink anymore. Hannah had fixed everything.

  Except Keith, and the dreams.

  * * *

  The organisms’ first attempts at chemical signaling to each other were both slow and disastrous. The right chemicals were not available, and new ones had to be tried, discarded, tried again. Mindless trial-and-error, for without communication, the microbes were not yet a unified mind. Sometimes their attempts killed host cells. Sometimes they mobilized T-cells. Sometimes they triggered inadvertent firings of a neural network that bombarded Annabel’s brain stem as she slept.

  Then she dreamed, incoherently and too much.

  * * *

  IV: May, 2024

  Annabel and her mother were going to take the train to Boston for Hannah’s graduation from H
arvard Law. Mom had at first been hesitant because of the SLA flash mobs that often turned into riots, but Annabel had insisted. “I’m not going to miss this, and there’s no other way to get there!”

  “But if those people block the train, or the T. . .”

  Mom had become so hesitant, so fearful. She wasn’t drinking anymore, but she seldom left the house and seemed unable to make the smallest decisions. Annabel was more compassionate than Hannah. She said soothingly, “They won’t block the trains,” although of course they might. The SLA, which had grown in numbers as the depression ground on and on and mini-epidemics broke out in more and more cities, could decide that a train was cursed, or haunted, or just necessary to their war efforts. The war against the demons went well some days, not so well others, depending on—what? Annabel didn’t know, and didn’t greatly care. She’d grown up with the war. It was just there, like air, and like air quality, you coped with it and stayed inside when it got too bad. Law enforcement also tried to cope with it, but there were so many members of the SLA, and, linked by elaborate cell phone networks, they could appear and disappear like smoke.

  None of that was going to stop Annabel. She was going to Hannah’s graduation. Not because her father would be there; she’d long ago lost the desire to have a relationship with him or his new wife. No, she was going because it was Hannah, the person Annabel loved most in the world. Annabel would have given anything to be more like Hannah. Hannah had finished her B.A. in three years, been on the Harvard Law Review, graduated ninth in her class. Since Annabel wasn’t ever going to be as brilliant or energetic as Hannah, she pawned her grandmother’s wedding ring—at fourteen, she was getting good at pawning things—and bought two train tickets.

  The night before the trip to Boston, she steeled herself and went next door to see Keith.

  His mother had died six months ago during an eruption of drug-resistant meningitis. Mr. Brywood had just fallen apart. The death had been a grief to Keith, too, but also an excuse. Annabel braced herself for the coming argument. If he was wearing that thing. . .

  He wasn’t. Dressed in a loose bathrobe, he sat with his tablet but blanked it so fast when she opened the bedroom door that he’d probably been looking at porn. Well, porn was a step up. The blue light bulbs he still liked colored everything with eerie shadows. “Hey, Keith.”

  “Hey, Annabel.”

  “We’re going to Boston tomorrow for Hannah’s graduation and I wanted to say good-bye.”

  “Hannah’s graduating? Already?”

  She’d told him several times about the graduation, the trip, all of it. Anger started somewhere deep in her belly, a seed starting to push upward. “Have you been doing it?”

  “No.”

  Had he always been such a poor liar? “Give it to me.”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  “Don’t say that!” Annabel blurted.

  He jeered, “What, you afraid of a summoning?”

  She wasn’t, exactly. After all, she’d never actually seen the things that the SLA said could be summoned from hell: demons, ghosts, succubi, witches, loa, serpents that dissolved into a person and cursed them. But of course, that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. She’d never seen a black hole, either, or a virus. She said, “Where is it, Keith?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She might have believed him. His eyes were clear, he’d been looking at normal porn, and Hannah’s graduation might have just slipped his mind. But then an odor wafted toward her, and she flung open the closet door. It was all there: uneaten sandwiches, uneaten tacos, uneaten pizza, all crawling with bugs. Keith had smuggled the meals upstairs, or made his father bring them up here, and then consumed none of them.

  “You are doing it! Where is it?”

  “I told you—”

  Frenzy seized her. She began to tear open drawers on the dresser—but no, he’d have it closer to him. She barreled into Keith and easily knocked him off his chair. Underneath the voluminous bathrobe he was just a sack of bones. He’d been sitting on the N-cap. It was the newest Chinese model, illegal in every state of the union, capable of stimulating the pleasure center of the brain every few seconds until the wearer, ecstatic, starved to death, laughing with joy.

  Keith bawled, “Give that to me!”

  Annabel sprinted for the door, but desperation drove Keith and he was bigger and faster than he had been six years ago. He grabbed her ankles and pulled her down. In a moment he had the N-cap away from her. Annabel, recognizing that even in his weakened state he was taller and stronger, didn’t try to get it back. Tears sprang into her eyes.

  “Keith, you’re going to kill yourself.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes! I do!”

  “I think you should go,” he said. His fingers played restlessly over the mesh cap. He couldn’t wait to put it back on.

  Annabel stood. Reaching over to his tablet, she unblanked it. He hadn’t been watching porn, after all. He didn’t need porn. The Internet played a homework assignment from three weeks ago, a cover in case his father came upstairs. Annabel recognized it from history class. Keith had spoken none of the answers into the three-dimensional structure connecting historical events. The smartest boy in their year, he was failing every class.

  Tell Mr. Brywood? It wouldn’t help. He was destroyed by grief, he couldn’t watch Keith twenty-four hours a day, and there were no treatment centers left for the “differently imaginative.” None that the Brywood family could afford.

  “I’m not going to watch you die,” she said to Keith. “I’m never coming back here.”

  He didn’t answer, merely fingered the mesh cap hungrily. As Annabel closed the door, he was already fitting it onto his head.

  * * *

  Annabel’s mother didn’t go to Hannah’s graduation, after all. The morning news avatars reported a massive rally on Boston Commons. The Massachusetts Federation of Witches and Warlocks were defying the SLA, hoping to convince viewers that their own arts were white magic, not allied with demons. Men, women, and children, many wearing pentacle jewelry, sang and chanted peacefully. Boston PD in riot gear stood at the edges of the crowd and around the speaker’s dais, their crowd-dispersing sound machines beside them. But when the drone cams zoomed in on the cops’ faces, many looked sympathetically at the witches and warlocks. Just as many, however, had the hard-jawed look of people more than ready to attack.

  “We can’t go,” Mom said. “It’s too dangerous. Hannah will understand.”

  Annabel heard the relief in her mother’s voice, and said nothing.

  Her mother said defensively, “Hannah will understand. Annabel, did I ever tell you about my older cousin Paula, who actually encountered a demon in the jungles of Nicaragua?”

  “Yes, Mom. You did.” When her mother went into the bathroom, Annabel took her suitcase and train ticket and walked the mile to the station.

  The train was late. As she waited on the platform, a sagging wood-and-concrete structure that there was no municipal money to maintain, a woman walked by wheeling a baby carriage, and something happened to Annabel’s entire body. She froze. Then a deep shudder ran from her legs clear upward to the back of her neck. For a long moment she couldn’t move, not a muscle. Then the spasm was over and Annabel abruptly sank down to the platform.

  “Miss, are you all right?” a man said.

  “I. . .y. . .yes.” It was difficult to speak. What had just happened to her?

  The man helped her to her feet. The train sped around a curve of track. Annabel’s spasm passed, and she got on the train for Boston.

  * * *

  Seven more years, and the organisms, now all throughout Annabel’s sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, had mastered signaling to each other. Slowly a complex second network was evolving inside Annabel, a second ecosystem, using the chemicals and proteins already in her body, and made possible by the very rapid life cycle of the organism’s in
dividual units. The components of the network had their own differentiated functions.

  The entity had vastly increased its ability to learn about the host’s functions. Already it could intercept and interpret molecules coming from outside the host to its olfactory system.

  A new smell came to the entity. New, and old. The microbial network was electrified, literally. Chemical signaling prompted nerve firings. Another host! It smelled just like the current host, it was fresh and plastic and. . ..it was gone.

  Until the mother wheeled the baby carriage out of range, Annabel stood frozen, the microseizure in her limbic system paralyzing her motor control. Then the seizure ended.

  But the evolving entity, smaller than the hundred trillion synaptic connections of Annabel’s original brain but growing daily in both size and complexity, remembered.

  * * *

  Just before Framingham, the train jerked to a halt.

  Passengers looked at each other, then craned their necks alongside the windows. There was nothing to see except abandoned buildings, farm fields, and an apple orchard in spring bloom. “Get off,” a woman said urgently to her husband. “There’s going to be trouble.” They grabbed their things and hurried to the door, where the husband pressed the emergency button. Alarms sounded.

  Annabel clutched her purse, uncertain what to do. A half dozen people were already calling the police on their wristers. She looked again through the window. The escaping couple had reached the apple orchard.

  “Nobody move!” Three figures burst in from the next car, all holding guns.

  A man across the aisle from Annabel dropped to below the seat back in front of him, drew his own gun, and fired at the invaders. People screamed and one of the figures went down. A moment later the shooter exploded in a fountain of blood.

  “I said don’t move!” one of the remaining invaders, a woman, said. Her voice held righteous fury. “Any more demons on this train, and we’ll know it!”