Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Annabel sat rigidly in her seat. The man who’d been shot first rose to his feet; he wore some kind of thin, impenetrable body armor under his jacket. The jackets of all three bore the same SLA symbol Annabel had seen just a few hours ago on the news: a confusion of angel wings on a sort of Buddha surrounded by a serpent.

  The SLA soldier held an automatic weapon on the car, while the other two moved down the aisle, their own weapons drawn, scrutinizing each face. Did they think they could tell which were demons just by looking? Evidentlythey could. When they came to Annabel, one put his hand under her chin and raised her eyes to his. She saw that he was only a few years older than she was, and younger than Hannah. The boy’s eyes were deep blue, and something in their depths was frightening. Annabel felt warmth surge through her face, then recede, and hated herself for blushing. Something her father used to say when she was very small popped into her mind: The eyes are the window of the soul. But whatever the boy saw in Annabel’s eyes, he released her chin and passed on.

  No one else in the car was a demon.

  They were all ordered off the train, which then started up again and disappeared. Standing beside the tracks, her suitcase in one hand and purse in the other, Annabel heard a man say, “They took the train for the war effort. To pick up more soldiers between here and Boston for the battle on the Commons. This could be the big one.” His voice held satisfaction.

  Annabel had no idea how far they still were from Boston. Could she walk along the track until she got there? Would she be in time for Hannah’s graduation?

  Other people had started to walk. Annabel, rolling her little suitcase over the rough gravel and weeds, followed them. Three miles later, buses sent by the United States Army picked them all up and took them to a high school being used as a temporary shelter. Boston was under quarantine until the violence could be brought under control. Nobody in, nobody out.

  Control didn’t take long. The SLA, equipped with Uzis and fanaticism, were nonetheless no match for the army. By evening, the Battle of Boston Commons was over. Nearly six hundred were dead: witches, warlocks, mystics, SLA “soldiers,” BPD cops, Hare Krishna, angels and demons and onlookers. Boston remained in quarantine for another two days, until all the dead had been identified. Mr. Brywood drove to the shelter and brought Annabel home. Hannah never did get a graduation ceremony.

  * * *

  “Now they have martyrs,” Hannah said to Annabel. Her sister’s taut, beautiful face—more beautiful than Annabel would ever be—was so clear on the 3-D Internet connection that she seemed to be in Annabel’s bedroom. “Both sides have martyrs. The entire nation will end up even more polarized than before, and more lunatic.”

  Annabel nodded. She sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in her winter bathrobe and a blanket, even though it was May.

  “Annie, are you okay?”

  “Yes. Just cold. I think I caught a bug or something on the train.”

  “Well, take care of yourself. Hydrate. God, when I think of you caught in that insane event. . .” Hannah smacked her fist on something that Annabel couldn’t see, then changed her tone. “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “You always were a poor liar. She’s hiding out and weeping, isn’t she? Filled with guilt over not being with you on the train, which is a great excuse to keep herself immobilized.”

  Annabel said nothing. She felt so cold.

  “Annabel, listen to me. You know I start as a junior D.A. tomorrow. I want to use the full power of the law to prosecute these nutjobs. I also want you to come live with me. I have a little apartment in a safe neighborhood—well, as safe as anything is now—and you could finish school here. You shouldn’t bury yourself in that geriatric cul-de-sac. Now don’t tell me you can’t leave Mom. If you’re not there to baby her, she’ll have to take care of herself. This is what is best for everybody. If you’ll come, I’ll bring you here myself.”

  Annabel opened her mouth to say no. She knew, without words, that Hannah believed what she was saying, but also that it wasn’t the whole truth. Forces worked in Hannah that went beyond reason: her protectiveness of Annabel, her resentment of her mother’s weaknesses, her need to be in control. And in Annabel herself, she already knew at fourteen, was a lack of fire, a driftiness reminiscent of her mother, that could all too easily let Hannah dictate the rest of her life. Annabel was not a combative person; in any daily conflict with Hannah, she would lose. She opened her mouth to say no.

  Then something happened, which was and wasn’t the same something that had happened at the train station. Her body froze for a long moment. Then it was restored to her and it was all she could do to remain sitting upright on the edge of the bed. But this time an image filled her mind, dreamlike and surreal, but also so sharp it seemed she could smell it. Babies.

  The image vanished.

  “Yes,” she told Hannah. “I’ll come.”

  * * *

  V: July, 2027

  Paul Apley sat in his tiny, cramped office in Cambridge and frowned at the data displayed on his laptop.

  The office wasn’t actually his. It was an unused storeroom on the MIT campus, on loan to the CDC along with the use of any labs Paul might need. Paul knew that the Dean hoped no labs would be required; college resources were tight enough already, now that so many science buildings had been shut down and so much of the university budget went to Security. But Paul doubted he would need an on-site lab. Neither a field epidemiologist, those wild adventurers, nor a lab man, he worked in data, not gene sequencers.

  Something odd had shown up in the weekly data for Boston/Cambridge.

  The CDC was extremely sensitive to oddities in data. The big fear, of course, was an epidemic, either natural or bio-engineered. With half the country convinced that it could fight infection through exorcism, prayer, spells, or miracles, the United States was vulnerable. Funding for public health had dropped precipitously as the new culture elected more and more anti-science law-makers. China, the Arab world, and Europe were watching. Global warming, although proceeding much more slowly than originally feared, was still bringing tropical diseases farther and farther north. There was dengue fever in New York City.

  However, Paul wasn’t looking at a tropical disease, or a plague, or a bio-weapon. He was looking at data on babies.

  Infant mortality had dropped in the US, as midwives and home births increasingly replaced deliveries in the microbe-prone and drug-resistant environment of hospitals. But it was not childbirth data that Paul was concerned with.

  In the last year, twenty-three children in Boston had been taken to area hospitals after falling into unexplained comas. All were under two years old. Twenty-one of them had had no previous health issues. In each case, doctors had been able to find no cause for the coma. In each case, the infants had spontaneously emerged from coma in three to five weeks. CAT scans, MRIs, and blood work had all come back negative for any known pathogen. Spinal fluid taps had turned up some odd proteins, but as far as could be determined, no identifiable pathogens.

  A new and terrible bioweapon?

  Toxins from environmental pollution?

  A mutated meningitis?

  Something hiding in tissues where only an autopsy could identify it, as malaria hid in the human liver during part of its life cycle?

  Like most CDC non-field epidemiologists, Paul was focused, orderly, still. Carefully he examined the hospital data available on each child—address, age, weight, ethnicity, medical history—looking for patterns. He didn’t expect to find them in this meager supply of information, but knowing what he already had would lead him to what to investigate next. Each of these parents would need to be interviewed. They lived in different areas of the city, worked at different jobs, professed different religions, came from different ethnic backgrounds. Each of these babies was enmeshed in a complex network of relatives, friends, neighbors, caretakers, bus drivers, pets, cleaning products, doctors, and dozens of other factors. But somewhere there was a common thr
ead. He just hoped it wasn’t some nutcase voodoo, or cult practice, or brewed-at-home tea guaranteed to bring up memories of past lives. With any luck, none of these parents would have seen the Virgin Mary in a toaster pastry. With any luck.

  * * *

  Annabel put the flimsie down next to her coffee cup and sighed. She would never, ever be able to write like Hannah. Even if she’d stayed in school, which she’d never been outstanding at, she wouldn’t have been able to write like that.

  Not that she was jealous of Hannah—she wasn’t. Her sister struck Annabel as completely admirable, but also a little crazy. The hours she worked! She never relaxed, never stopped to gaze for ten minutes at a sunset, never read a novel, never laughed out loud at a comedian on the Internet. Annabel, who did all these things plus talk to everyone in the neighborhood, felt no envy of Hannah. Also, Annabel loved her job. Jobs, actually, since they kept moving as Hannah’s dizzying successes at work brought her more promotions, more high-profile cases, even a little more money when most government salaries were frozen. Now, three years after the Battle of Boston Commons, Hannah was litigating against the SLA appeal of their convictions under the RICO statutes.

  And she found time to write for news sites!

  Sitting at the kitchen table in their modest apartment, her coffee cooling, Annabel read again Hannah’s guest editorial for the Boston Globe, which she’d printed onto the flimsie:

  * * *

  SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND MONEY

  by Hannah Sevley

  * * *

  Walk down any street in Boston in this hot July and everything looks normal for whatever neighborhood you’re in: women watering lawns, men carrying home canvas sacks from the grocery store, children running in and out of the spray from an opened fire hydrant, holo-ads springing up from the sidewalk, homeless relocating yet another tent city in yet another temporary park. And in another sense, our current cultural situation is also normal.

  A definition of normal: “In accordance with behavioral norms.”

  Here are two human behavioral norms that have prevailed throughout most of history. First, when science and culture clash, science loses. Thus, Galileo repudiates the Earth’s motion; Dr. Semmelweis is so reviled for believing in germs that he kills himself; evolution is still not taught as established fact, or else not taught at all.

  Second norm, in the words of Nobel Laureate Gary Becker: “When culture runs up against economic trends, usually economics win out.” Or, for those of you who require graphics to grasp a concept:

  SCIENCE < CULTURE < MONEY

  Our current sorry state, however, is a perfect storm of culture and economics united to drown science, law, and other rational pursuits. For over fifty years, the United States has been losing manufacturing, industrial, and agricultural jobs, and replacing them with jobs based on information, consumer acquisition, and services such as health and government. These jobs respond to cultural shifts in a way that, say, the manufacture of steel did not. A car needs to be drivable for anyone to buy it. A turnip needs to be planted and harvested. A bra needs to hold up the ta-ta’s. But a service economy, less pragmatically defined, responds to whatever services or information are requested. So does government, in order to secure votes. The health sector never guaranteed that all would be cured, or even substantially helped.

  This means that right now, money is unusually responsive to popular culture. Popular culture, perhaps in response to the worldwide depression, has gone non-rational. Thus the proliferation of psychic fairs, exorcisms, curse-lifting boutiques, miracle workers, covens, faith healing, séances, “wars” against demons, potion shops, agencies locating guardian angels or personal totems or sacred lakes, and psychologists willing to help you remember that in a past life you were Cleopatra. Science, the reasoning goes, has failed to either give us our daily bread or to deliver us from spiritual meaninglessness. So we look elsewhere for help.

  With what results?

  Productivity per capita has fallen to its lowest point in a hundred years.

  Courts are clogged with cases that judges once would have dismissed as frivolous, if not insane.

  Child Protection agencies are so overburdened with allegations of cult practices endangering children, some true but most merely filed by competing cultish believers, that investigators are swamped. Tens of thousands of legitimate abuse or neglect cases therefore go uninvestigated.

  Academic achievement in our high schools, slipping for decades in comparison with other developed countries, is now surpassed by most of the Third World.

  The American political process has become so balkanized by third-party factions that few state legislatures can get anything productive accomplished at all. This US Congress has passed the least amount of legislation of any congress ever.

  This is not to say that there may not be some truth in the Age of Imagination—in the larger concept, not in the violent cults. Perhaps there is more “out there” besides the rational world. Perhaps unseen forces do exist in the universe. I wouldn’t know. But this I do know:

  Too many have mistaken a piece of the truth for the whole. And we are all suffering the consequences.

  * * *

  Hannah rushed through her bedroom door into the kitchen, dropping her tablet case on the table and shrugging herself into the jacket of her summer-weight business suit. She glanced at Annabel. “News flash: Nobody reads editorials anymore. Especially not ones with a snotty attitude and dependent clauses.”

  “News flash,” Annabel said. “I do. It’s good, Hannah. Do you want some coffee?”

  “If it’s ready right now. I have to be at a town meeting in twenty minutes.”

  “It’s only six-thirty in the morning!”

  “I know. Aren’t you going to be late for school? No, wait—you dropped out of school.”

  “Don’t start,” Annabel warned.

  “I would start if I had time. You’re drifting, Annabel.”

  “What’s the town meeting about?”

  “Zoning,” Hannah said, standing as she gulped her coffee.

  “Zoning for what?”

  “You won’t believe it. Some idiot wants to build a past-life discovery center in a residential district, and the even greater idiots on the board want to let him.”

  Annabel didn’t ask why this was a bad idea; she didn’t want to set Hannah off on a rant. She also didn’t want to open any discussion of what she was going to do today on her day off. Fortunately, Hannah had no time to ask.

  Annabel reheated her coffee, dressed, and puttered around the kitchen. A two-bedroom in a secure neighborhood, it was cheerful with the yellow curtains she had hung, redolent with the meals she cooked. Hannah said that Annabel had the skills and temperament of a different historical era, when they would have been more valued in a woman. Annabel thought this was probably true but not very comforting. She’d spent much of her life wanting to be someone else: Hannah, her friend Becca, her father, Keith.

  Don’t think about Keith.

  She walked to the train station. It was only 7:30, but the sun beat down. On the platform, sweating in her thin dress, she saw a boy about her age, SLA patch on his shoulder, walk slowly toward her with a dog on a choke chain. The commuters, fewer each month, stepped away from him.

  Were dogs allowed on the train? Annabel didn’t know. This dog was big, a Doberman or Great Dane or something, with a deep muscular chest. Brown fur, brown eyes, brownish teeth: a monochromatic shadow, pacing slow and stately beside the boy. But at least the dog’s eyes looked normal. The boy’s eyes scared her. His head, shaved, was bare—no N-cap. Was he on a street drug?

  They stopped beside an old woman sitting on a bench, canvas shopping bag at her feet, a loaf of Italian bread peeking from the top. The dog ignored the bread. He sniffed at the old woman, then paced on. Behind them, she spat on the platform floor.

  The dog must be sniffing for drugs or explosives. But that boy was no cop.

  They reached Annabel. Up close, the boy’s fac
e looked even scarier, as if it were made of wood, not flesh. When his eyes fell on Annabel, however, his gaze softened slightly. Even through her anxiety, that surprised her—it was usually Hannah, not Annabel, who provoked that look from males.

  The dog sniffed at her. Annabel’s heart began to swell and thump, but the dog paced on.

  Farther up the platform, the dog sniffed at a woman talking into her wrister. The dog went as rigid as the boy’s face, snarled, and lunged. It didn’t reach the woman; the boy pulled hard on the choke chain and the dog jerked backward. But it kept snarling, the woman screamed, and five young people exploded from the stairway down to the platform. All wore SLA patches. They surrounded the woman and began jabbering at her, crowding her, thrusting pamphlets at her. Annabel heard the words “demon” and “cleanse” before the train screeched into the station and stopped. Two men farther down the platform rushed to the woman, knocking aside the girl who was closest to the woman, almost on top of her, yelling and waving a pamphlet. The train door opened and Annabel got on, feeling as if she had been the one assaulted.

  The SLA followers hadn’t hurt the woman, hadn’t even touched her. Still. . .and a dog “trained” to sniff out supposed demons! Was that possible? Were demons possible?

  Annabel had tried, often, to think about this, to think about anything not rational, a task made more difficult because of Hannah’s uber-contempt and Annabel’s innate fairness. The best she could come up with was that irrational phenomena couldn’t be proved but couldn’t be disproved either, so the verdict wasn’t in yet. She knew that this wishy-washy conclusion would satisfy nobody, certainly not Hannah. It didn’t even satisfy Annabel. But she could live with an ambiguity that, apparently, most people could not. Her solution, also not really satisfying, was mostly to not think about it, which was her solution to most difficulties.

  Hannah’s voice in her head: “You’re drifting, Annabel.”

  Well, she wasn’t drifting this morning. She had a destination.

  The little house on Barlow Street looked even worse than last week. Grass and weeds were higher, a shutter had come off its hinges on one side, and some kid had bashed in the light over the front steps, raining shards onto the stoop. Annabel unlocked the door and went in.