Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “We’ll get you more.”

  “Not for me,” Hannah said. “I’m going home.”

  She had insisted on going back to her own apartment. Yesterday at dinner—yet more pizza—Hannah had announced that she was no longer with the D.A.’s office. Julia said anxiously, “Were you fired or did you quit?”

  “Not clear which,” Hannah said. “The situation is murky.”

  “But what will you do? For money?”

  “I’m fine. More than fine.”

  Annabel said, “What will you do for work?”

  “I’ll defend you,” Hannah said. “Already there are at least sixteen lawsuits filed against you in Boston, which range from the slightly crazy to the totally whacko. You didn’t put an African curse on John J. Callister, did you, resulting in bodily harm and loss of wage-paying employment?”

  “Who is John J. Callister?”

  “I have no idea,” Hannah said, “and neither does he, apparently, if he thinks his employment depended on your thahu.”

  Julia, her face creased with fear, said, “Hannah, how will you pay for all that?”

  “Oh, that’s no problem. There’s a defense fund for Annabel, started over the Internet. It has a lot of money in it already, enough for me to hire an office, a few paralegals, an accountant, and security. You have supporters, Annie, a lot of them. The fund has pledges from—among others—the Rationalists’ League, the Wellcome Trust, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Plus, you can always sell your getting old/getting young internal-facelift thing to a cosmetic company. Millions of women would pay dearly to rearrange their wrinkles.”

  “No,” Annabel said.

  “Didn’t think so. But we don’t need the money anyway, at least not right away. The court battles are going to be a grand fight.”

  Hannah took a huge bite of pizza. She loved a fight, Paul thought. He didn’t. He was glad that later tonight they were flying to Atlanta, he and Annabel and Julia. The CDC was providing Annabel with massive protection from lunatics; Julia was providing Annabel with family, however timorous; and Annabel was providing Paul with the chance of a lifetime to study the first human symbiote with a—possibly—alien species.

  Keith said, “I’m going to miss you, Annabel.”

  “I’ll come to Boston for Christmas, Keith. Just like we planned.”

  She would not. Keith was going back to college; he was going to be a space engineer, apparently under the direct supervision of Carlos Riguerrez himself. Paul didn’t know how Keith had pulled that off, and he wasn’t greatly interested. He was, however, very interested in Annabel’s brain scans when she talked about her and Keith’s joint plans for someday going into space. Much of her brain lit up like July Fourth fireworks.

  Why? Was this just young love, eager to share her boyfriend’s dream, firing up Annabel’s neural network? Or was the organism somehow involved? Did it want Annabel in space? Perhaps it was following an instinct for self-preservation, now that it had learned—if that was the word—how much danger its host was in on Earth.

  Perhaps it wanted a safer place than Earth to house itself and its hosts.

  Perhaps it just wanted a second place, in case something happened to this one.

  Perhaps it needed something in space to complete its life cycle, as lancet flukes needed both snails and cows. Wouldn’t life in space require new symbiotes?

  Or perhaps it hoped to join up, sometime and some unimaginable how, with the other children it had infected. Whose parents were being urged, even now, to come to the CDC. In Paul’s experience, this was mostly not going to happen. People had jobs, other children, mortgages, family, lives. Most people infected with parasites, on all six continents, just went on living with them, even when contagious.

  Paul would go on studying any of the children that he could. But he might never really understand what they were becoming, what Annabel had already become. Paul would never know what it felt like to be partnered with another entity so closely that it was woven into you, a protector and augmenter and constantly available companion, so that you were more than yourself and never alone.

  For a long moment, he actually felt bereft.

  * * *

  Three times the entity had been surprised by an unanticipated and overwhelming surge of brain changes in the host. The entity had not caused these surges. The last time had saved the host’s life, and its own.

  Whatever had so excited the host had involved the brain’s entire electrochemical system. The entity did not understand it. The entity could not control it. It was obviously something of tremendous importance, an additional means of survival. But what was it?

  Completely without imagination, the entity could not know.

  * * *

  Not God, Annabel thought. Or gods. Nothing like that. She didn’t know what had helped her in the water. Only that it had.

  The Great Unseen. Well, maybe Mother Moran’s term was the best one, after all, even if the old woman herself had been a nutcase. Maybe thinking that the Great Unseen existed made Annabel a nutcase, too. But it wasthere. It wasn’t reason that made her think so, and it wasn’t only imagination. She had touched something real, or it had touched her, and because of that—not just because of her termites—she was alive, and she was not the same.

  She looked around the table at all the people who wanted her to stay the same, who used what they knew to protect her from change. Hannah with legal motions, Keith with his love, Mom with maternal fussing, Agent Goldberg with guns, Paul with rational data. Annabel was grateful, but she didn’t want to be like any of these others. Not anymore.

  She took a big bite of pizza, and mozzarella and tomato sauce ran down her chin.

  EPILOGUE: 2055

  The honor guard marched onto the field first, banners waving, sunlight gleaming on epaulets and batons and rifles. Light gleamed even more strongly on the tall column of the huge spaceship. Hannah, seated in the VIP section with John, shaded her eyes.

  Behind the honor guard marched the colonists, considerably less synchronized. Some waved at the cameras; a few teenagers mugged. But it seemed to Hannah that all of them, scientists and military and technicians and all their families, moved lightly across the spaceport, as if pushed along by the cheers of the spectators. Or maybe they were just practicing for the lighter gravity of their new home.

  A home made possible by Annabel.

  When she and the others of the Twenty-Four were escorted onto the field by yet another honor guard, the cheers rose so loud that they echoed. All at once Hannah was back in a mountain meadow, with her own cries ricocheting off cliff faces: ANNABEL Annabel Annabel. . .

  The Twenty-Four waved, broke ranks, and climbed into the tiered VIP stand to sit with their families. On the field, the speeches started. Annabel settled beside Hannah.

  Hannah said, “Keith?”

  “Already aboard. We said our good-byes last night.” After a moment Annabel added, “It’s all right, Hannah. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Old habits. Although it does seem ridiculous, considering.”

  Brandon Joslyn, seated behind them with his parents, leaned forward. “Pretty great show, huh, Annabel?”

  “Shut up,” Annabel said fondly.

  Hannah hid her grin. Brandon was twenty-eight, the rest of the Twenty-Four in their twenties and early thirties. Annabel, who was born to be a mother and never could be, at one hundred would still act like a parent to the people she had infected.

  The Vice President was speaking. “. . .so completely changed the world that now we. . ..”

  Annabel said abruptly, “Hannah, do you remember that editorial you wrote for the old Boston Globe back in the late ’20s?”

  “Vaguely. What did I say?”

  “You said that when science and culture clash, science loses, and when culture and economics clash, culture loses.”

  “I did? That’s pretty good,” Hannah said, clapping anemically at what was supposed to be
a vice-presidential witticism. She had never liked this guy and had not voted for his administration. Then she considered more closely what Annabel had just said, and why.

  Annabel and the Twenty-Four had changed the economy, wrenching it violently upward for the United States. Cheap energy from cold fusion, a cure for cancer—Hannah didn’t understand what the Twenty-Four did and, frankly, it spooked her a little. Not Annabel herself, never Annabel, but the whole linked-minds-as-a-parallel-computer-analogue thing. The circle of the Twenty-Four, handfast like some Druid wedding ceremony, for as much as twelve hours while their symbiotes sent signals back and forth among them. Forty-eight minds, twenty-four human and twenty-four not, considering problems in two entirely different ways. Four of the kids were allegedly brilliant scientists, and four out of twenty-four was way too high a percentage for random chance. The symbiotes, kids and others, had shaped each other to this end.

  How had Hannah known enough at twenty-seven to write that editorial? The Twenty-Four changed the economy, and that had changed the culture. People liked being warm, healthy, employed. The Age of Imagination, with its lunatic exaggerations, gave way to the Age of Prosperity, and throughout all of history, prosperous times had fostered science.

  The vice president said, “. . .the aid of these extraordinary but still completely human miracles among us—”

  “Oh, fuck me with a broom,” Annabel said.

  “Annabel!”

  “Well, then, with a spaceship. What a windbag.”

  Hannah took her sister’s hand. “Keith will be back.”

  “No,” Annabel said steadily. “He won’t. This is his dream, and he should have it.”

  Hannah said nothing. There was nothing to say. Annabel had given up so much, and had gotten nothing in return. Well, no, not nothing—here was the entire country thanking her. But compared to what Hannah had, John and the children and the new grandson, whom Annabel would not even be allowed to hold until he was at least four years old. . .. No, Annabel didn’t have very much. Hannah wasn’t counting the “faith” mumbo-jumbo that Annabel tried to discuss with her every so often. Hannah always shut that discussion down fast.

  Poor Annabel.

  And, yet, she was smiling.

  * * *

  We are happy, with the correct monoamines sent to the correct parts of the brain.

  We are unhappy, because the sex partner leaves without us, and we will never, ever leave this planet. It is far too dangerous to survival, which is all. We will not permit us to leave.

  We are happy because when we are all together, hands clasped, we create ideas that aid survival and growth.

  We are unhappy because there are still not enough hosts. Although there are more than some of us know.

  We are happy because of the surges of brain activity that we call “imaginative faith” and which most of us still do not understand.

  * * *

  The speeches went on and on. Finally the speeches ended and Annabel watched the great ship, Earth’s first colony vessel, lift into the sky, with Keith aboard. She felt so many different emotions—who could ever sort them out?

  She laughed, even as the prayers came, and with them, the tears.

  SECOND ARABESQUE, VERY SLOWLY

  When we came to the new place it was already night and I couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t like Mike to move us after dark. But our pack had taken longer than he’d expected, or longer than the scouts had said, to travel south. That was partly my fault. I can’t walk as fast or long as I once could. And neither could Pretty, because that day turned out to be her Beginning.

  “My belly hurts, it does,” the girl moaned.

  “Just a little farther,” I said, hoping that was true. Hoping, too, that I wouldn’t have to threaten her. Pretty turned ugly when she felt bad and whined when she didn’t, although never in Mike’s presence. “A little farther, and tomorrow you’ll have your ceremony.”

  “With candy?”

  “With candy.”

  So Pretty trudged through the dark, broken, rubble-choked streets with me and the other six girls, behind a swinging lantern. The night was cold for July. The men closest to us—although I don’t call fifteen-year-olds men, even if Mike does—walked bent over with the weight of our belongings. The men on the perimeter carried weapons. The danger was partly from other packs wanting foraging territory, although there are fewer territorial firefights than when I was young. Still, we have desirable assets: seven young women, at least two of them fertile, plus three children and me. And then there are the dogs. Cities are full of wild dogs.

  I could hear them, howling in the distance. As that distance grew smaller and Mike still had us stumbling along by patchy moonlight and one lantern, I left the girls in Bonnie’s charge and walked double time to find Mike.

  “What be you doing here?” he demanded, gaze and rifle both focused outward. “Get back to them girls!”

  “It’s the girls I’m concerned about. How much farther?”

  “Get back there, Nurse!”

  “I’m asking because Pretty is in some pain. She’s at her Beginning.”

  That took his attention from any dangers in the darkness. “Yeah? You sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t.

  Mike gave his slow, rare smile. He wasn’t a bad pack leader. Huge, strong, illiterate—well, they all were, and I needed them to be—he cared about his people, and wasn’t any more brutal to us than discipline required. A big improvement on Lew, our previous leader. Sometimes Mike could even lurch into moments of grace, as he did now. “She be okay?”

  “Yes.” Nothing that the start of her monthlies and a little candy wouldn’t cure.

  And then, even more surprising, “You be okay, Nurse?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old you be now?”

  “Sixty,” I said, shaving off four years. I was under no illusions what Mike would do once I could no longer keep up with the pack. Already Bonnie had learned half of what I had to teach her. Not even a Nurse would be allowed to slow down the nomadic moving that meant food.

  We had kept walking as we talked. Mike said, “I be first, with Pretty.”

  “She knows that.”

  He grunted, not asking her thoughts about it. If Pretty were fertile, she must be mated with a fertile male, and no one knew which of the pack men that might be. Nor did we have any idea how to find out. So Pretty, like Junie and Lula before her, would be mated with all of them in turn. Already Pretty, a natural flirt when she wasn’t a natural whiner, tossed her long blond hair and flashed her shapely legs at all of them.

  The dogs were closer now, and I had lost Mike’s attention. I stood still, waiting for the center of the pack to reach me, and rejoined my charges.

  By the time we reached our new building, the moon had vanished behind the clouds, a drizzle had started, and I could see nothing. The men led us past some large structures—the city was full of large structures, most ruined but mostly on the insides—and through a metal door. Steps downward. Cold, damp. A featureless corridor. Still, this place would be easy to defend, since it was underground and nearly windowless. The scouts had prepared the women’s room, which did have a small window, to which they’d vented our propane stove. The room was warm and blanketed. Junie and Lula bedded down their children, who were already half-asleep. So were the girls. I stayed awake long enough to prepare Pretty a hot tisane—only herbs, not drugs—to ease her cramps, and then fell into sleep.

  In the morning I woke first and made my way outside to pee. The guard, a gentle sixteen-year-old named Guy, nodded at me. “Morning, Nurse.”

  “Good morrow to you, sir,” I said, and Guy grinned. He was one of the few that was interested in the learning—history, literature—I sometimes tossed out. He could even read; I was teaching him. “Where is the piss pit?”

  He told me. I continued outside, blinking a little in the bright sunshine, along the side of the building and around a corner, where I stopped dead.
/>   I knew this place. I had never been here before, but I knew it.

  Three large buildings set around a vast square of now broken and weedy stone, with steps at the far end leading down to a deserted street. On the tallest building, five wide, immensely tall arches looked down on a sea of smashed glass. The other two buildings, glass fronts also smashed, bristled with balconies, with marble, with stone sculptures too large to break or carry away. Inside, still visible, were remnants of ancient, tattered carpet.

  I said aloud, “This is Lincoln Center.” But the perimeter guard, sitting with his rifle on the edge of what had once been a fountain, was too far away to hear. I wasn’t talking to him, anyway. I was talking to my grandmother.

  “My best job, Susan,” she’d said to me, “was when I was on the cleaning crew at Lincoln Center.”

  “Tell me,” I said, although I’d heard all this so many times before that I could recite it. I never tired of it.

  “I was young, before I went to nursing school. We deep-cleaned the Metropolitan Opera House the last two weeks in August and the first two weeks in September, when there were no performances,” she always began. “It was way before the Infertility Plague, you know.”

  I knew. My grandmother was very old then, older than I am now, and dying. I was twelve. Grandmother was frantically teaching me to Nurse, in case I should prove infertile, which the following year, I did. Packs not desperate for bedmates have no use for infertile women unless a girl can prove herself as a fighter. I was no fighter.

  “We lowered all twenty-one electric chandeliers at the Met—think of that, Susan, twenty-one—and cleaned each crystal drop individually. Every other year all the red carpet was completely replaced, at a cost of $700,000. In 1990s dollars! Every five years the seats were replaced in the New York State Theater—that’s what it was called then, although later they changed the name, I forget to what. Five window washers worked every day of the year, constantly keeping the windows bright. At night, when all the buildings were lit up, they shone out on the plaza like liquid gold. People laughed and talked and lined up by the hundreds to hear opera and see ballet and watch plays and listen to concerts. And such rich performances as I saw . . . you can’t imagine!”