Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Mom?”

  “Annabel! How nice to see you!”

  As if she didn’t see Annabel every Thursday. Unlike the outside of her house, Julia Sevley looked trim and neat. The living room was vacuumed, the breakfast dishes washed, the latest plastic container of delivery groceries in the process of being unpacked on the kitchen table. Every window in the house was covered with curtains, slatted blinds, or both. Although recovered from her divorce, Annabel’s mother had not left the house in two years. If she so much as approached the opened front door, she began to sweat, shake, and breathe so fast that Annabel had stopped trying to take her mother outside.

  They went through the Thursday ritual: breakfast, chat about nothing, two games of Scrabble on a board so old-fashioned that it used plastic tiles for the letters. Annabel reported that Hannah was fine, she herself was fine, the new apartment was fine. Anything else brought Julia to the brink of an anxiety too acute for Annabel to deal with. She knew; she’d tried.

  At noon they ate lunch, then Annabel left. Clouds had rolled in, piling into anvil-shaped thunderheads. The air felt sticky and thick, like walking through wet cotton. The train station was a mile away. Annabel sighed, started walking, and then stopped.

  A blue light shone from the upstairs window next door.

  Annabel blinked. Mr. Brywood had died less than a year after his wife of, perhaps, a broken heart. Keith had been sent away to live with an aunt in New York. But Hannah said that Keith had inherited the house and a modest trust had kept up the taxes and paid a service to keep the place in repair until Keith chose to sell it. Apparently he never had, and the house had stood empty for two years. Keith’s birthday was in July; he must be eighteen now.

  Annabel climbed the porch and rang the bell. It didn’t sound; the repair company must not be very good. She tried the doorknob. The door opened.

  Dust lay so thick on the floor, furniture, and stairs that they all looked covered with fine ash, as if Vesuvius had erupted in this old tract house. Annabel called, “Keith?” No answer. She climbed the stairs.

  * * *

  Danger. The organisms felt it in Annabel’s increased heart rate, skin moisture, adrenal output. In three years, they had made tremendous strides in both interpreting the behavior of their host and in controlling their own. However, the only part of Annabel that they had succeeded in controlling were the pheromones she gave off, which bore some resemblance to their own chemical signaling method.

  As Annabel mounted the stairs, they rushed to protect their host in the only way they could. Undetected by her, her skin began to give off clouds of pheromones. Fashioned more or less after molecules of oxytocin, they were designed to soothe and calm any human within olfactory range. This was the second time today the entity had activated the pheromones. That was unusual.

  Unusual was not good.

  * * *

  “Keith?” Annabel pushed open the bedroom door.

  He lay on his back on the floor in a pool of his own urine, giggling. All his bones were visible through the taut sack of his pasty skin. His collarbones, sharp as chisels, pointed at the ceiling. The neural cap, a heavy mesh that didn’t even try to look inconspicuous, covered most of his shaved head.

  Fury tore through Annabel. Gagging at the stench in the room, she tore the N-cap from Keith’s head, taking part of his skin with it. Unlike any version she’d ever seen before, this N-cap sunk tiny electrodes directly into the skull. Keith screamed and tried to focus his eyes. He couldn’t, and passed out.

  “Keith!” His breath came in irregular pants. His lips began to turn blue. Annabel raised her wrister and called Emergency. Then she crouched beside him—no pulse. Over and over she pressed on his chest, not knowing if CPR would save him or would crack his fragile, malnourished ribs.

  He was still alive when the medics took him away, after first slapping so many patches on him that he looked like an Amish quilt. Annabel answered as many questions as she could, which weren’t many, until the medics let her go.

  “You’re lucky we got here at all,” a woman in scrubs told her. “We happened to just be around the corner, called to a guy who didn’t make it. Otherwise, your friend would be a corpse.”

  “But—”

  “No ‘buts’ about it, kid. Too many emergencies. Too many stupid Keiths.” The woman shrugged and turned away.

  * * *

  Annabel took the train back to Boston. She needed to go somewhere that made sense, somewhere life wasn’t either agoraphobic or addicted, falsely cheerful or willfully suicidal. The Center would still be open for hours yet. At the train station she took the T to Canberra Street.

  “Annabel! Isn’t today your day off?”

  “Yes, but I got bored.”

  Roberta raised her eyebrows. She was a good day-care administrator, but not particularly good with children, nor particularly warm. Seth, Annabel’s co-worker, was. Annabel greeted him in the infants’ section, where he was diapering a shrieking six-month-old. She picked up an infant just starting to fuss in her crib. The baby quieted.

  “I don’t know how you do that,” Seth said. “They always turn so good the second you show up!” His child continued to shriek.

  “Here, let’s trade before Brandon wakes the whole room!”

  Seth traded gladly. Annabel finished cleaning Brandon, diapered him, and settled with him into a rocker. The baby quieted. He wore only the diaper; the AC had been turned off again for late payment of the bill, since half the parents who used the Canberra Street Center were late with their fees. If they had the money at all. This part of Boston was filled with working poor. Annabel had been here for three months; Hannah thought she still worked in the job Hannah had gotten her in the day care center at Harvard. But Annabel liked it better here. The children needed her more.

  She held the baby up on her shoulder, rocked him, and sang softly. Brandon’s eyelids began to droop. The sweet baby smell rose from the back of his neck. The soft skin of his powdered belly pressed against the exposed cleavage of Annabel’s summer dress.

  The baby fell asleep. Annabel rocked, and sang, and soothed herself as well as Brandon. But the horror of what Keith had become—had allowed himself to become, she wasn’t letting him off the hook on that—would not leave her mind.

  * * *

  Another host! But there was not much time; there never was. Special cells were sent racing toward the surface of the primary host. The entity was much more efficient at this now; it understood the environment and had evolved to utilize it. Unlike that first, dangerous time, transfer needed only about ten minutes.

  The transfer cells left Annabel’s skin through microtubules evolved for this purpose. They oozed from her and onto Brandon. There they exuded a lytic chemical that softened the epidermis, comparatively tough even on a baby, and began to burrow in.

  * * *

  VI: January, 2028

  Paul Apley didn’t like his research assistant.

  He supposed that he should be glad he had one at all. Months of solo legwork had begun to show enough results that the CDC, perpetually short-handed and underfunded, had grudgingly assigned him a post-doc. Emily Zimmer was bright, organized, and hard-working. She was also arrogant, although that alone wouldn’t have put Paul off. Arrogance was sometimes a useful trait in an epidemiologist; it indicated faith in one’s own work even if the results seemed weird. Sometimes arrogance could sustain a researcher through the inevitable unpopularity when those results upset other people’s theories, or budgets, or lives. During the Tashman Fever epidemic four years ago, only scientific arrogance had been enough to drive New York politicians to burn down three square blocks of hopelessly infected Brooklyn real estate.

  So arrogance wasn’t what bothered Paul about Emily. Rather, it was a kind of slipperiness, a slyness. Most post-docs were frank about their goals and ambitions. Emily always slid the conversation away from her own aspirations, plans, and beliefs. Post-docs were always submitting resumes, asking for recommendations, discussin
g permanent positions that they—sometimes unrealistically—hoped to land. Emily never did, and she thwarted all of Paul’s offers of help. Was it natural reticence, which he was being an asshole to try to breach? Or connections he didn’t know about, so that her future was already assured? Maybe. So why did it bother him? He knew she’d grown up desperately poor; that she was willing to talk about. Only scholarships and insanely ceaseless work had gotten her an education. Often she threw out barbs about “trust fund babies.”

  And yet much as she envied the rich, she also felt disdain for the poor people she interviewed, a disdain not evident while she was in the field (or she couldn’t have gotten so much good data), but expressed in remarks to Paul in their shared office, which was so small he couldn’t get away from her. “People end up at the socioeconomic level they deserve,” she’d once told Paul, and brushed aside his protests as soft-headed soft-heartedness.

  On a gray afternoon she came into their office and said, “I put the Joslyn data into the Link program.” Water puddled off her boots: Boston had had one of its increasingly rare snowfalls. Paul, born in Georgia, thought snow was too cold and too inconvenient. Emily, from Minnesota, barely noticed it. “I think we might actually have something, Paul.”

  He opened his laptop and brought up the Link program. A three-dimensional and infinitely more sophisticated version of a spreadsheet combined with a flow chart, it was an intricate, three-D holo with beams of light in different colors connecting different kinds of data points in different ways. Emily had added information from her latest interviews with the parents, doctors, relatives, and babysitters of Brandon Joslyn. Five months ago Brandon, then eight months old, had collapsed into a month-long coma and emerged, like all the rest of the babies, perfectly fine and with no discernible physical markers that might indicate the cause of the coma.

  For the first time, one of Link’s light beams had thickened past random chance.

  The children whose data glowed on Link all lived in different parts of Boston. One infant was the child of a Harvard professor, another of a heroin addict, a large number from parents who comprised the working poor. They were Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, witches, SLA, New Miraclists, atheists, reincarnationists, renegade Amish, and Church of the Expanded Holy Consciousness. Some would allow blood samples and access to medical records, some would not. Paul and Emily had spent a lot of time creating family charts, looking for a common genetic marker.

  They had been looking in the wrong places.

  The children had attended day care centers in Roxbury, Chelsea, Cambridge, Beacon Hill, downtown. Now it turned out that a single day-care provider had worked in all those places. She hadn’t been obvious at first because in some of the cases she had left her job as much as a month before a child went into a coma, and a month was a long time for incubation of infant diseases. And yet, there was Link, glowing out her name with a coefficient of significance higher than chance. Annabel Lee Sevley.

  “There’s more,” Emily said, closing the master and bringing up a link from news archives, “although it may not be significant. Our Annabel was once all over the news. She fell down a crevasse in the Rocky Mountains when she was not quite three, and there was a big splashy effort to save her.”

  Paul frowned. “I can’t see that that’s relevant.”

  “It could be. You don’t know.” Most conversations with Emily felt like low-level combats. “Maybe Annabel picked up some kind of virus down there, the way index-case Charles Monet picked up Ebola in Kitum Cave in 1980.”

  “Nobody’s even sure that’s the way it happened. But you’re right that this girl is someone of interest. Let’s go talk to her. I just hope she’s not a witch or an angel or something.”

  “I just hope she doesn’t smell bad,” Emily said. “So many of them do.”

  * * *

  Annabel had visited her mother, arriving in the afternoon—her new job gave her a new schedule—and staying for dinner. When she emerged from the shuttered, curtained house, snow was falling. The flakes were huge, each one a delicate, slowly drifting miracle that seemed to take an eon to reach the ground. Snow lay over the pavement, the dead weeds, the dreary little street. The cold air stung Annabel’s cheeks.

  She laughed out loud. The laugh died, replaced by something more solemn. It was so quiet, so fresh and innocent, especially after her mother’s stuffy house, where no windows or curtains were ever opened. Annabel started walking, her shoes leaving indentations in the snow. She walked not toward the train station but in the opposite direction. A few blocks away, an open field had never been developed by the company that bought it just before the world economy collapsed. As children, Annabel and Keith and their friends had played soccer here. The street lights had long since been vandalized and the field was unlit, but Annabel had a small flashlight in her purse. She made her way to the center of the field.

  It was an unbroken stretch of white, pristine and lovely. Gradually the snow stopped. In the east the clouds parted and a section of sky was visible, thick with bright winter stars: Rigel, Betelgeuse, Sirius, Aldebaran.

  Something came over Annabel that she had never before experienced: a feeling of holiness. It touched her, or she it. This, she thought, and didn’t know what she meant, until she did. This lovely, lovely world that is more than I know. More what? It didn’t matter. The feeling was enough.

  And then, it wasn’t. She felt the stars tug at her, and for a moment it was almost as if she could go there. If she just willed herself hard enough, if she just tried. . . She was part of that vast starry expanse and with every molecule of her being, she wanted to belong more closely to the mystery behind the veil, wanted. . .

  A car raced across the field, shattering the silence.

  Annabel switched off her flashlight, but she was too late. The teenagers had seen her. They piled out of the car, which was very old and painted with multi-colored zigzags. Two boys and two girls. No SLA patches.

  “Well, well,” one of the girls said, lurching out of the car and hanging onto the hood for support. “And who are you?”

  Should she run? They were clearly drunk. But the boys could still probably catch her, and anyway she couldn’t outrun the car. They might run her over.

  “My name is Annabel.” She tried to sound like Hannah, firm and authoritative, and knew she failed.

  “Nice boots, Annabel,” the girl said. “Give them to me.”

  The boys lounged against the fenders, enjoying this. The second girl circled behind Annabel.

  She took off her boots and threw them at the girl. Immediately snow drenched her socks. She shivered.

  “Well, thank you so much, Annabel,” the girl mocked. “Now give me your wallet.”

  She drew it from her purse and threw it.

  “Fine, just fucking fine. Now that pretty coat.”

  Annabel stripped it off. A strange impulse came to her: Walk toward them. She didn’t.

  One of the boys shifted his weight on the fender. The girl holding Annabel’s boots, wallet, and coat said silkily, “You want her, Tom?”

  The other girl spoke for the first time, her words slurred but her tone dangerous. “You screw her, Tom, and I’ll cut ’em off with a rusty spoon.”

  The first girl laughed. “How about you, Jed? She’s pretty enough.”

  The second boy, grinning, started toward Annabel. She started to scream and run. The second girl caught her and they both crashed to the snow. Jed straddled Annabel and put his hand on her breast.

  A second later he pulled it away. In the glow from the car’s headlights, he looked puzzled. For a long moment nobody spoke. Then the second girl got to her feet and moved away, and Jed also rose.

  “Fuck, she ain’t pretty enough after all.”

  “But—” said the first girl.

  “Shut your trap, Jasmine. This is boring. C’mon, let’s go.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I said let’s go!”

  The four climbed into the car, the fi
rst girl still arguing, and the car sped back across the field.

  Annabel leapt to her feet and ran toward the street, shivering and sobbing. It wasn’t until she’d reached her mother’s front porch that the question formed in her mind: What just happened there?

  Her mother peered through the peephole, flung open the front door, and immediately jumped away from it. “Annabel! What happened!”

  “Some kids. . .I’m all right, just cold. . .” She slammed the door.

  Her mother locked and double-bolted it before whirling to face her daughter. “Are you sure you’re all right? I’ll call the police! You’re frozen, take off those wet things, I’ll get towels and a blanket. . .”

  And then, in a mixture of despair and triumph, “I always told you girls it’s too dangerous to go outside!”

  * * *

  The chemical equivalent of panic spread among the network of cells that was the organism. Most still resided in or on Annabel’s nerve cells. Some had become organelles, fully as complex as those within the host’s own cells. Some were free-living in brain tissues. Chemical and electrical signaling flew among the components of the vast network.

  The host’s single defense had preserved her. But just barely. The attackers of the host had almost not been soothed enough by the cloud of pheromones the entity had released. And the host could not have outrun them or outfought them or harmed them. The entity was going to need more defenses, more under its own control.

  It had to further change Annabel.

  * * *

  Hannah answered her apartment door, expecting a pizza. No matter how psycho everything else got, she thought, the pizza business flourisheth, yea and verily.

  It wasn’t the pizza delivery. A man and woman stood there, snow melting onto the hallway. “Annabel Lee Sevley?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  The man showed her I.D. “We’re from the Centers for Disease Control. I’m Dr. Paul Apley, and this is Dr. Emily Zimmer. May we come in?”