Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Funny, isn’t it,” she emailed her mother, “to feel lonesome when I’m inhabited by a whole colony?”

  No. Delete the message. Her mother was already upset at Annabel’s condition (only vaguely explained to her as “chronic infection”), but not upset enough to fight her agoraphobia and visit. Hannah was openly scornful of this. For Annabel, her mother’s absence, her sister’s absence, her general isolation, fueled a growing and bewildered rage.

  Why this? Why me?

  She spent hours telling herself there was no answer to this question. Random chance hit everybody; the parasites were not bothering her; Paul would find a way to cure her. She didn’t believe any of it. She was nineteen years old, she felt isolated and angry, and her mother wouldn’t even come to visit. Although was it her mother she wanted to see again, or was it that open field where under starlight she had experienced her one and only approach to a mystic, other-worldly, holy experience?

  And had the experience actually been hers, or the parasites’ within her?

  Her “termites.” She was a house with termites all through it, hidden deep in the walls and floors and roof beams. Her whole life Annabel had wanted to be somebody else, and now she was, and it still wasn’t really her. In some moods that struck her as funny, but not very often.

  She taught herself to meditate, following tablet presentations by Buddhist monks, hoping to experience again what had happened in that snowy field. Meditation never even brought her close.

  It would have been better, she knew, if she left the apartment more often, made friends, took some classes. The monitor she wore would let her do that, with some restrictions. But she mostly hadn’t, not for over a year and a half, because of the babies. Now and then she and Hannah went to plays, movies, restaurants, hiking trips, whenever Hannah had time. She’d even gone out a few times with Emily, Paul’s research assistant, whom Annabel didn’t really like. But mostly she stayed home alone, fighting her growing fury, because of the babies.

  There went one now.

  Three stories below, two women pushed a high-wheeled, expensive-looking English pram along the street. Annabel had watched them before: Jane and Melissa with their daughter Pia. Jane was the biological mother. The women had married two years ago; Pia was nine months old. Melissa had recently joined a coven and Jane didn’t like that. Sometimes they argued over money. Annabel had listened to them, watched them, all winter, staring hungrily at Pia.

  She must never hold a baby again. It wasn’t even her who wanted to hold it, it was the termites inside her—

  Angry tears sprang to her eyes. Annabel dashed them away. She watched Pia’s pram turn the corner, resisting the urge to drop a flowerpot down onto the sidewalk just to hear it shatter. She’d done that once before. It only meant going outside to clean it up, to apologize to old Mrs. Lucurcio on the ground floor, to either buy a new pot or do with one fewer of the few bright, colorful things in her stupid life.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Annabel rattled around the kitchen, making herself a cup of herbal tea she didn’t really want. Soothing feelings began to take her, and she didn’t want that, either. Paul had tested the air around Annabel when she got upset. The parasites gave off some kind of weird pheromones that calmed everybody down, including Annabel. Fuck that! Sometimes all she wanted was for the whole thing to be over.

  The doorbell rang.

  Annabel stopped rattling the teakettle. Hannah never rang; Paul and Emily always called before they came over. Mrs. Lucurcio? Cops? There had been another SLA flash mob on the street the night before, mostly peaceful except for some shoving and shouting, but maybe the police were asking questions anyway. Or it might, finally, be the press.

  That Paul had kept Annabel and the other children out of the press was a sort of miracle. It had taken a deftly wielded combination of cajolery, promises, and threats. The threats, legal in nature, had come from Hannah. She had joined with him in pointing out to the parents of the twenty-three children Annabel had infected the realities of the situation. No siblings had been infected; Paul theorized that they were too old. If this infestation could stop here, with the parasite not passed on to any other children, the babies could stay with their parents. Otherwise, the Public Health Service was prepared to quarantine them. The responsible press, should it learn of this, would put a permanent lock on the quarantine (“Quarantine Only Weapon To Halt Spread Of Parasites, Doctors Say”). The irresponsible press would put everyone’s lives at risk (Plague! Demon Possession! Witch Spawn! Foals of the Apocalypse!). Public reaction could be terrible; the continuing depression meant all it took to ignite riots was a suspicion of demons, witchcraft, or whatever else people could frame as scapegoats. Annabel sometimes felt she was living in the Dark Ages, but with Internet and tea bags.

  Although maybe these Dark Ages had begun earlier than this century. Supposedly Annabel’s first-cousin-once-removed, Paula, who had died of a fever in 1995 while doing humanitarian work in Nicaragua, had encountered something in the jungle that she had described as “a spirit of pure violence, born of human violence.” And Cousin Paula had been a scientist.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Annabel peered through the peephole. A man stood there. She didn’t recognize him, until she did. Keith.

  Annabel undid the bolts and locks, flung open the door. They stared at each other.

  The emaciated, mewling, addicted creature she had last seen in his bedroom had vanished. Keith, a year older than she, had grown taller and filled out. His skin was smooth around the little mustache, his eyes clear and bright.

  “Don’t look at my hair like that,” Keith said, his voice thick. “There’s no N-cap there. There never will be again.”

  “Come in,” Annabel said.

  He did, smelling of spring air, never taking his eyes off her. She took his jacket. They settled into the living room. Neither of them knew what to say.

  When the teakettle shrilled, it got better. Annabel made them both tea and they sat at the kitchen table, as they used to do as children eating peanut butter on toast. She said, “You got clean.”

  “Yes. That last time, when you found me. . .I nearly died. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have. I wanted to thank you in person. Your mother gave me your address.”

  “She came to the door?”

  “No. I emailed her. You mean she doesn’t open the door? Agoraphobia?”

  Annabel nodded. He’d always been quick, much smarter than she was, and he knew her family as well as her own. Once, nobody had known her as well as Keith had, not even Hannah.

  “How did you get clean?”

  “An amazing doctor. He got me into a fancy rehab place. I don’t know what strings he pulled or why he thought I was worth it. After I got out, he got me to test for a new program at BU to train engineers and mathematicians. Not enough of them are getting trained, too many people are relying on magical thinking instead.”

  “So you’re at college?”

  “Not really. This program goes through BU but it’s separate, funded directly by Carlos Riguerrez.” Keith said this casually, but Annabel saw the pride underneath.

  “Really? The software guy? Who invented the three-D holo software?”

  “That’s him. He’s a gazillionaire and he invests in what he calls ‘science of the future.’”

  “Keith—you’ve met him?”

  “Several times, it’s part of the BU program. Riguerrez is amazing. You know that the second you meet him. The last time, he took us all down to tour the spaceport he’s building in Pennsylvania.”

  They were talking more easily now, almost like the old days. Both cups of tea, half drunk, were growing cold.

  Keith said, “What about you, Annie? You’re living here with Hannah, right? Why was your mother so reluctant to give me your address until I bullied it out of her? Was it because she thinks I’m low-life scum?”

  Annabel didn’t want to lie to him. She had never lied to Keith, not even when he’d been ly
ing to her. And it would be such a relief to tell somebody else the truth. But Hannah, and maybe even Paul, would kill her. So—let them! Whose life was this, anyway?

  The answer to that was so complicated that Annabel’s lip curled in derision. Keith saw it.

  “What is it, Annabel? What’s wrong?” He reached for her hand.

  Annabel snatched it back; Paul had emphasized that even though so far she seemed to have infected only small children with skin-to-skin contact, they didn’t really know. Hurt came into Keith’s eyes. Annabel couldn’t bear that.

  “Keith—it’s not what you think.”

  “You don’t want me to touch you. I understand.” He started to stand.

  “No, you don’t! I might be contagious!”

  He paused halfway out of his chair. “Contagious with what?”

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  “I want to hear it.”

  Annabel took a deep breath. But before she could begin, Keith said, “Only—have you got some coffee instead of this goddamn tea? It tastes like weeds.”

  * * *

  No need for defenses right now. The other large organism could not be a host—far too old—but was not a danger, either. The entity knew that because none of the host’s own defense hormones circulated in its body. In fact, new and different hormones had appeared, and were affecting those parts of the host connected with reproduction. The entity was cautiously interested.

  * * *

  “Wow,” Keith said, when Annabel had finished.

  “So now you run screaming into the night, right? To escape the infected and demonic woman?”

  Keith grinned. “Well, it’s mid-afternoon, so I guess I’ll have to hang around for a while.”

  She put her elbows on the table, beside the drained coffee mugs, and leaned forward. “Keith, aren’t you repulsed by me?”

  “Were you repulsed when you found me with that N-cap?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed, painfully. “Well, you were right to be repulsed. But this is different. You didn’t choose it. And Annabel, for whatever it’s worth, I don’t think these so-called parasites have really changed you. You seem just the way I remember you. Just Annabel.”

  Nothing he could have said would have pleased her more. She grasped his hand, his fingers strong and warm. Keith’s eyes darkened. He got up, pulled her to her feet, and kissed her.

  When the kisses were done, and the cuddling on Annabel’s bed—they didn’t go farther than that, not yet—and the murmuring in the dark, Annabel said, “Keith, will you take me someplace? Now?”

  “Sure. You mean to dinner? I’m afraid I haven’t got very much money but—”

  “Not to dinner. Out to your old house.”

  “I sold it, Annie. As partial payment for rehab.”

  “I don’t want to actually go to your house. Or mine. I want to go to that field down the block where we used to play soccer.”

  He raised himself on one elbow to peer at her. “Why?”

  She told him, adding, “Only you can’t let me try to hold any little kids we see. Okay?” With Keith, she would feel as safe as with Hannah.

  “Okay. But dress warm—it’s getting dark out and it’s still cold when the sun goes down.”

  They left the apartment, holding hands, to take the train to Boston. They never got there.

  * * *

  In eighteen months Paul Apley had learned a lot about the parasites. The trouble was, none of it made sense.

  Carbon-based organisms that nonetheless were not DNA-based could only have developed on a separate evolutionary path, sequestered from the main history of life on Earth (deep in the mountain?), and non-competitive with it. But then why was it using humans as hosts? The only other explanation that had occurred to Paul had been immediately rejected. He wasn’t going to join the legions of nutcases who believed that space aliens were—pick one—(a) here to join the angels in saving humanity, (b) here to join the demons in corrupting humanity, (c) here as updated familiars for witches, or (d) here as left-overs after they built the pyramids and Stonehenge and the ruins at Chichen Itza.

  On the other hand, some very respectable scientists, including Francis Crick and Stephen Hawking, had believed that both panspermia and pangenesis were possible: clouds of spores coming in from space on comets that had either started or influenced early life in the primordial seas. If so, Annabel’s organisms might predate the evolutionary development of DNA. Or, these might be latecomer spores. But in either case, Annabel was an unlikely host; they wouldn’t have evolved to colonize her.

  There were other puzzles. Usually, hosts suffered most when a parasite—virus, bacterium, protist, worm, or fungus—first crossed over to a new species. Unadapted to the host, the parasite usually caused massive damage, destroying tissue and creating agonizingly painful inflammation. Yet Annabel was fine.

  In humans, IgE antibodies fought parasites. Annabel had none.

  Moreover, transmission seemed to require much more than momentary skin-to-skin contact. Not an efficient mode of spreading the infection.

  Paul and his team—there were now three of them, housed in a building the CDC had equipped for them on the decaying Boston waterfront, plus Emily doing field work—had made some progress. If they didn’t know why Annabel could be a host for the parasites, they knew a lot more about how. Some of the mechanisms were analogues for how known parasites operated.

  Like Schistosoma mansoni, the parasites released chemicals that softened tough human skin, letting the organism plunge into its host.

  Like Plasmodium, which causes malaria, it then immediately hid inside tissue, where macrophages from the immune system had more trouble finding it. Malaria hid in the liver; this organism in and on nerve cells and theirmyelin sheaths. Ordinarily cells would slice up their unwanted penetrators and then present pieces of DNA on the cell surface for the immune system to tailor T-cells to destroy it. But there was no DNA to present.

  Also like Plasmodium, once outside nerve cells, this organism continued to elude the immune system by constantly changing the molecules in its outer coat. As soon as macrophages developed means to identify the invaders, the parasites became somebody else, like a truly clever spy changing identities.

  Like Trichinella, Annabel’s parasites could commandeer internal cell machinery to produce more of whatever it needed.

  Like some blood flukes (although not the eggs), they didn’t seem to be causing trouble in Annabel’s tissues.

  And so on. But what were the organisms doing in Annabel in the first place? And how could they be removed? The immune system made its own deadly toxins to attack invaders, and enough of these would kill not only them but the host. Somehow the parasites were circumventing that immune-system response, and Paul could not figure out how. Nor could he be sure that some disgruntled parents weren’t breaking the voluntary isolation of their children. The oldest of them was already being home schooled, out of necessity. How long could that be enforced for twenty-three kids?

  How long before the press got the story?

  What if there were more than twenty-three infected kids?

  April, his lab parasitologist, came through from the lab, stripping off her gloves and shaking her head. “No luck with the test.”

  “Damn.”

  “There’s something else I’d like to try, but I need absolutely fresh samples from Annabel. Can you get her in here tomorrow?”

  “Probably.” Annabel had been less cooperative lately, which was another worry. Well, who could blame her? She was nineteen years old; she should be out drinking and partying and whatever else nineteen-year-olds did these days. Paul, forty-three, felt about a hundred. But, then, he’d never been much of a partyer.

  April frowned. “She—”

  His wrister rang, the dedicated sound for an emergency. Paul said, “Annabel?”

  “Oh, come quick! The SLA stopped the train and came aboard! And I. . .I think I killed someone!”

  * * *


  Annabel and Keith had caught the T in Boston to the station and then a train to Framingham, where most of the commuters had gotten off. There weren’t very many; the economy had somehow gotten even worse over the last few months. Something to do with a collapse in China, which had torpedoed currency in Europe and South America—Annabel didn’t really understand it. The train, so old that the metal floor had been worn into slight indentations by generations of feet, continued past Framingham to the rural stops.

  Then it had lurched to a halt. Keith and she were in the second car behind the engine. He said, “Did you hear that? It sounded like a gunshot!”

  She had heard it. Not again. She, like the other six people left in the train, raised her wrister and called the cops. But this time was not like five years ago.

  Three men burst through the door leading from the first car to the second. They carried guns and wore what had evolved from a shoulder patch to an entire SLA soldier uniform: lightweight body armor, belts with weapons, the confused blue emblem of wings, Buddha, and serpent. “Everybody! Off the train now! This transport is requisitioned for the holy war!”

  The other six passengers scrambled out the door and into a field of wildflowers. Two of the men raced through the car and into the next one of the train. The third man stood waving his gun at Keith and Annabel. “You! Go!”His voice was deep and his beard streaked with gray. As Annabel looked into his eyes, so full of hate, something happened to her.

  “Annabel, come on!” Keith pulled her in the direction of the door.

  It happened fast. Rage flooded her, along with the superhuman knowledge that she could do anything, anything at all—she was invincible. She sprang forward, opened her mouth, and spat full in the “soldier’s” face at the same time she punched him so hard in the neck that he went down.

  Caught by surprise, he had fired but the shot went wide, ricocheting off the train walls as an echo had once ricocheted off a mountain meadow: ME me me. . . .

  The boy, his face smeared with a huge amount of saliva, dropped to his knees, screaming and clawing at his face. A moment later, he was dead.