Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I can get a court order. You know that. Now, more easily than ever.”

  He could. Maybe he should. No, this was Annabel, who’d already tried so hard to comply with science, who’d stayed at home, bored and out of the work force, for over a year, who’d given everything—

  The lab door burst open and April rushed in. Paul turned on her. “I said not to interrupt us!”

  “I’m sorry but I had to. Keith Brywood just called me when he couldn’t reach you. Why did you block the lab communications? It’s Annabel. . .she’s gone! They took her!”

  Hannah seized April’s wrist. “Took her? Who?”

  “Keith doesn’t know! He’s in the hospital, they hit him hard and he just now came to—he called right away!”

  For the first and last time in his life, a hunch came over Paul, a completely unbidden, uncultivated, coming-from-somewhere-else feeling. Later he would analyze this until he’d made it rational: he’d had all the data before, his mind had finally put it together, it was the creative unconscious working in the same way that scientists and novelists “got ideas” when they weren’t looking for them. But right now, it felt like knowledge delivered to him by some supernatural force.

  He said, “Where’s Emily?”

  * * *

  They had violated Annabel’s isolation strictures and gone to the waterfront. Near pier four, a carnival had been set up, a tawdry traveling affair quick to take advantage of the lifting of martial law since the SLA had gone so quiet. Annabel and Keith didn’t care that the carnival was tawdry. Giddy with the shiny new declaration of love and their richly imagined future, they felt invulnerable. They were going to be together forever. They were going to marry and go live at Riguerrez spaceport in Pennsylvania. They were going, someday, to go to space. Right now, they were going to go to the carnival.

  They bought greasy French fries, rode on the Ferris wheel, threw rubber rings at bottles and won a cheap stuffed dolphin with a vaguely malevolent grin. Annabel hung onto Keith’s arm and felt happier than she could remember. Her termites were almost forgotten. She was merged not with them but with Keith, and every time she looked into his eyes, she felt she was drowning in their beloved depths.

  “Tired, Annie?”

  “A little.” It was nearly midnight and the carnival was closing down, locking up rides and booths, turning off lights. The air had turned cooler. Arms around each other’s waists, Annabel and Keith started toward the nearest T station.

  The black van barreled along the street and jolted to a stop. Men jumped from the back. Keith had no time to fight, nor Annabel to spit. They hit him with something hard; they clamped an evil-smelling cloth over her mouth and nose. The drug took almost instant effect. She was thrown into the back of the van, and as it sped away, the world went dark.

  * * *

  No time to react, and no response from the host!

  * * *

  Annabel woke tied to a bed. Her mouth was bound with duct tape. The entire small room, which held nothing except the bed, rocked rhythmically. Dim light came from a recessed overhead fluorescent, and an old-fashioned keypad was wired to the door.

  A boat. She was on some sort of boat. That round window high on the opposite wall was a porthole, painted black. Were they—oh god, no—out on the ocean somewhere?

  Keith. He had cried out, and she hadn’t seen what happened then alongside the van. Was he dead?

  She lay there for a long time, or what seemed a long time, consumed by dread. Nothing happened, but she decided that the boat wasn’t moving; the rocking was too even, like being buffeted at anchor or something (she had seldom been on boats), instead of the pitch and roll of real waves. So was she still in Boston? How long had she been knocked out? Was Keith dead?

  The cabin door opened. A person entered, the last kind of person Annabel had expected to see: an old woman, hunched over, dressed in some fantastic cross between a sari and a Halloween costume. Rich patterned silk draped the bent old body, ending at bare feet yellowed and studded with calluses. Around her wrinkled neck hung a thin chain dangling a cross, a pentacle, and a yin/yang circle. Gray hair straggled from a medieval gable hood, like ladies wore in Tudor England, its black veil of coarsely woven cotton. She carried a big wicker basket.

  Her accent was pure South Boston, incongruous with a bastardized and intermittent version of Shakespearean English. “Awake, I see. Prithee, how be you?”

  Annabel couldn’t speak for the duct tape, but she glared.

  “I be Mother Moran,” the woman said, not without dignity. “They tell me you be not a believer.”

  In what?

  “Some souls be stubborn, verily. You shall learn, or the universe shall teach you. You smell bad—okay, let us get you bathed.”

  Annabel had just wet herself. She’d done it deliberately, aware of the fullness of her bladder, hoping to lure the old woman closer. If her termites would react as they had in the train, flooding her with strength enough to break her ropes. . .

  They didn’t. Annabel lay helpless as the old woman, with surprising deftness, cut off her jeans and underpants, then turned her this way and that to strip off the sheet and to wash her with soap and a bottle of warm water from the basket. She put a clean sheet on the bed and another over Annabel, now naked from the waist down. Annabel could not work herself free, nor summon any superhuman strength. The old woman was not arousing enough fear.

  She was a talker. “Aye, soon enough the universe will teach you the necessity of belief. The old ways be dead, you know, and a pox upon them. Science, the false god, brought us to this sorry state. Belief in the old ways, in the Great Unseen, shall restore us. All through history the Old Souls have glimpsed part of it, and were burnt or hung or drowned for their wisdom. But now imagination shall be the path to the Great Unseen, and the good times shall come to the Earth, with the Way and the Path a shining light beckoning us all to enlightenment.”

  She finished with both Annabel and her prayerful mish-mash, gave Annabel a smile of surprising sweetness, and repacked her basket. Her sari-draped body hid the keypad from Annabel as she tapped in the code to open the door.

  Alone again, Annabel struggled against her bonds. Nothing. If she were Hannah or Keith or her father, someone resourceful, maybe she could have figured out a way to escape. But she was only Annabel, stupid and ineffective, infested with equally ineffective termites.

  But the boat’s slight rocking didn’t change. At least they had not yet left for wherever they (who?) were taking her.

  It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

  * * *

  “Where is Emily?” Paul said.

  April, the most focused and steady lab pathologist Paul had ever seen, tended to scatteredness outside the lab. She flapped her free hand pointlessly and said, “Emily?”

  Hannah still held April’s other wrist. Paul could see Hannah forcing calm on herself. She said, “Call Keith back on your wrister. His won’t work inside Mass General but yours has whatever hospital number he called from.”

  April called, setting the wrister on loudspeaker. A man answered: “Yes?”

  Hannah said, “Keith Brywood, please.”

  “Who is calling?”

  “This is Mr. Brywood’s lawyer. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Special Agent David Goldberg, FBI. What is your name, please?”

  “Hannah Sevley. Please let me speak to my client.”

  “They took him down to X-ray. Were you with your sister and Mr. Brywood last night, Ms. Sevley?”

  “I was not. I’m leaving for Mass General right now and will be there in twenty minutes. No additional conversation with my client until I arrive, Agent Goldberg.”

  “Got it.” He broke the link.

  April said, “Why can’t Keith talk to the FBI? He’s not a suspect!”

  “Of course he is. He was the last person to see her.” But then Hannah’s composure broke and her face trembled. April, quick to compassion, put a sympathetic arm around Hannah, wh
o shrugged it off and said, “I’m going now. Paul, are you coming?”

  “Yes. But, April—where’s Emily?”

  Hannah finally caught it. She said sharply, “Why do you want Emily? What does she know?”

  He didn’t answer, not having anything rational to say. But something must have shown on his face because Hannah said even more sharply, “What has Emily done?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. I don’t have any reason to—April, has she been in this morning?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Has Todd?”

  “This is Todd’s day off.”

  Paul raised his wrister and called Emily. No one answered. He left a message to call him back immediately. To April he said, “Find Emily and tell her to call me. Call her every five minutes until you get her. If you can’t, go to her apartment.”

  “All right,” April said, looking scared.

  Racing together out of the building to catch a cab, Hannah said, “What do you suspect about Emily? Tell me, Paul.”

  Hannah was a lawyer. She could injure Emily, could perhaps bring legal actions that Paul only vaguely understood, and he didn’t really have anything to go on. But Hannah was also Annabel’s sister. He weighed truth against compassion and compromised. “I don’t have any reason to suspect Emily of anything. But she’s been jumpy the last few days, and. . .and that’s it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s all I have, Hannah.” Except that Emily disliked Annabel and, more profoundly, disapproved of her. Annabel, idle (although through no fault of her own!), supported by her sister, pretty and appealing and uneducated. Whereas Emily, intelligent and plain and fiercely ambitious, worked like a slave for the paltry salary of a post-doc in a culture that now publicly scorned science. But that didn’t mean that Emily was guilty of anything more than bitterness mixed with envy.

  Nonetheless, the irrational feeling wouldn’t leave him.

  At the hospital, Keith was not yet back from X-ray. Agent Goldberg began to question Hannah about Annabel’s routine, movements, contacts, Internet activity, finances. “Do you know of any circumstances that might give someone a reason to abduct Annabel?”

  And Hannah hesitated.

  Agent Goldberg’s gaze sharpened.

  This was it, then. They were going public, or at least going beyond the CDC, and this wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. Paul was supposed to have the Director with him, and CDC lawyers, and graphs and lab results and an orchestrated press conference. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

  Hannah said, “This is Dr. Paul Apley, Annabel’s physician. She has a condition that may or may not have bearing on finding her. Dr. Apley will explain.”

  “Annabel,” Paul began. “Annabel—” is a symbiote, possibly the next step in human evolution, who could kill you with her spit, lift a car off you in her rage, produce surges of dopamine in her brain that would keep her giggling with pleasure without the aid of street drugs or N-caps or—

  The realization of what Emily had done, and why, lit his mind like a solar flare. Instantly he rejected it. She was a scientist, for chrissake, that meant something—

  Half the spies who had betrayed the United States had been intelligence agents. Half the dirty arms dealers had been Army weapons experts. Half the talent working on deadly bioweapons in Asia or the Middle East had been trained in the United States, and all of them were scientists. He was naïve, and knew he was naïve, and Annabel’s life might be at stake. Although if he was right, they would certainly not kill her.

  “Dr. Apley?” Goldberg said sharply.

  Paul said, “Annabel has a medically exploitable condition. I’ll explain to you what it is and how I think that N-cap makers could use it. But first I think you should alert your colleagues—the law enforcement agencies, I mean—to search for Dr. Emily Jane Zimmer.”

  * * *

  The host was in a state of anxiety but didn’t seem in immediate danger. The molecules associated with acute fear were not circulating in the host’s body. The entity didn’t understand why the host was restrained, but the restraints in no way threatened its own functioning, so it did nothing. Its energies served its own life processes, its continuing evolution, and the constant maneuvers to outwit the host’s immune system.

  More hosts would be welcome. But no babies, with their undeveloped and very plastic neural systems, had come along in a long time.

  Meanwhile, the organism dissolved certain vesicles on the edges of synapses in Annabel’s brain. Serotonin molecules were released, to be taken up by receptors on the cells across her synapses. The entity added certainnatural endorphins. That would help keep the host happy.

  * * *

  Annabel felt calmer, more focused. The boat had not, as far as she could tell, moved yet. When the old woman returned, carrying her enormous basket, Annabel twisted her fingers to point to her mouth and moved her jaw to indicate hunger.

  “Aye, you be hungry,” the woman said, in her ridiculous fake-archaic speech. If she started using “thee” and “thou,” Annabel was going to seriously lose it.

  From the basket the woman removed a sort of clear globe that looked like a fishbowl with a huge hole cut out of the back. She put this on her head, while Annabel stared in shock.

  Her abductors knew she could spit toxins.

  The only people who knew that were Hannah, Keith, Paul, and his team. Had they tortured Keith until he told? Fear and rage gripped her then, but weirdly muted, as if she somehow could only get so angry, no more. Although maybe that was a good thing. She needed to question this old horror and learn what she could.

  The woman took a bottle of water and a lidded bowl from her basket. When she removed the lid, the aroma of curry widened Annabel’s nostrils.

  “Now sit up, my dear, as much as you can. That’s it, just wiggle against the bed a bit, and I’ll adjust your pillows. There. Now, I’ll take off this tape, but no tricks, now. Wouldn’t do you any good if you tried.”

  She ripped the duct tape from Annabel’s mouth. It hurt but she didn’t cry out. The old woman produced a spoon and began to feed her.

  Annabel swallowed—the curry was delicious—and said, “Why wouldn’t any ‘tricks’ do me any good?” If the cabin was under surveillance, she wanted to know. She didn’t see any cameras, but that meant nothing.

  The woman cackled. “Oh, you do be ignorant, don’t you, dear? I be Mother Moran. I’ve got spells and charms girding this whole boat. Ones proven effective, too, or else why would they have me in charge of you?”

  Annabel swallowed another mouthful. “Spells and charms? You can do that?”

  “I can. I have, for all my lifetimes.”

  “So you work for the SLA?” Is that who has me?

  “I work for the Great Unseen, my dear. The SLA is but a means to bring about universal enlightenment, though most of them cannot yet see that. Thinking of only their immediate aims, as be you. But Mother Moran sees much farther than that, and the best part of their imagination knows it. They would not go forward without my blessing, and they dasn’t disobey me. They know how dangerous that would be.”

  Annabel tried to sort this out, even as she said, “Go forward where? Where are they taking me?”

  “Toward enlightenment. Do you want some water?”

  Annabel drank, the woman holding the water bottle. Up close, her eyes looked filmy. How well did she see? Her skin was light brown; she might have been part Black, or Arab, or Indian. Darker brown spots dotted thecrevasses of her wrinkles. One lower front tooth was missing on the left side.

  Kindness shone in the rheumy eyes. This was not a bad person, nor did she even seem mentally ill like the homeless who walked around Boston talking to themselves or ranting at passers-by. Mother Moran merely believed, with every brain cell she had, that she was a powerful sorceress. What had happened to her over her life? Had it been so disappointing that she had, at some point, decided to imagine a different version o
f herself, and then believed in it? And was that so different from more conventional religions?

  Was it so different from Annabel, believing that she had somehow transcended herself—twice now—as she looked up at stars? Because that transcendence had not been her termites, it had not—

  “What does the SLA want with me?”

  “Money,” Mother Moran said, succinctly and unexpectedly.

  “How? Ransom?”

  “I don’t know. It is not my concern, my dear—that be for lesser souls to arrange. My trust be to safeguard this ship, and you.”

  “The ship has spells and charms on it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where are we going?” Annabel didn’t really expect an answer, but she got one. Evidently enlightenment required truth.

  “To the big ship first, and then east, where all enlightenment began.”

  “How far east? India? China?”

  “Eat, child. Eat.”

  Annabel ate. But as Mother Moran packed up her basket and pulled out a roll of duct tape, Annabel tried one more question. “Why haven’t we left yet? Aren’t the signs right or something?”

  The old face broke into a smile. “See—you begin already to learn. No, the signs be not right. Also, we wait for him to arrive from California.”

  “Him? Him who?”

  But Mother Moran retaped Annabel’s mouth, picked up her basket, and left.

  To the big ship first. Boston Harbor had small boats coming and going all the time. Hannah, when she had been working on a smuggling case, had told her that although the Harbor Master had filings of which boats held berths in the various marinas, it was impossible to know who was on what boat or what was carried in and out by sea. The Coast Guard did spot inspections of papers, but organized crime always had the right papers. No one would know that this boat held a bound girl in a small locked room somewhere below deck.

  But these people had learned about her before the attack. Which meant that Keith hadn’t been tortured for information. So how had the SLA learned about her?

  Annabel had no answer, and anyway the answer to that question wasn’t what she needed. She needed to get out of here. Mother Moran was her only hope. But that crazy old woman wasn’t going to help; her beliefs were all focused in another direction. Annabel had nobody but herself to rely on.