Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I said, “My head is clear.”

  It wasn’t my head he was interested in. “Can you walk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out.” He left, abrupt and unsmiling. Cold slid down my spine.

  Junie arrived a few minutes later, breathless with running, carrying Davey. “Oh, Nurse, be you better?”

  “Yes. Send Bonnie to me.”

  “I don’t know where she be! I wanted her a while ago to give Jaden something for that teething, she fusses so, Lula said maybe Bonnie give her something to calm her down but—”

  Junie prattled on while I put one palm flat against the wall and tried to stand. I could do so, but only barely.

  “Junie, how long have I been here?”

  “Be . . . let me think . . . be a month? More?”

  More than a month. Drugged for more than a month for the pain of a torn kneecap.

  I said, “Find Bonnie and send her to me.”

  “I will. But, Nurse, Joe says—no, Tony, he be back and he—”

  “Tony?” Tony had gone on the joint hunting trip with Mike and Keither’s pack. I looked more closely at Junie, and now I saw the fear on her face. Davey felt it, too; his fat little hands clutched her body. I said, “Is Mike dead?”

  “Tony says not when he ran off. Tony, he escaped. They got ambushed two days out—Nurse, Keither’s pack be big, he lied, most of them not at the hotel when our men went there. They going to trade Mike for somebody, I forget who or why, and Tony escaped and Joe says we move out tomorrow morning! It ain’t safe here no more. Oh, Nurse, can you walk?”

  “Find Jemmy. Tell him to cut me a stick—this long—to lean on. Tell him I want it this minute.”

  “But you told me to find Bonnie and—”

  “Not Bonnie. Jemmy. Now.”

  By the time Jemmy arrived with the stick, I’d eased my weight onto my leg, fallen, discovered the splint would hold, and gotten up again. Bonnie’s splint was heavy; the cane balanced it. Leaning on Jemmy’s shoulder, I got myself into the corridor without injuring anything further. In the women’s room, the girls worked frantically even though the pack would not move until dawn and there was little enough to gather up. Anything taken must be carried. Each girl had her backpack, and the mothers had baby slings. The pockets of winter coats were stuffed with food. The coats themselves must be worn, no matter how hot the day, because we couldn’t afford to lose them. In the morning, blankets would be rolled up with cooking utensils and strapped to Rick, eight years old and not ready to fight, and to whichever of the other men Joe chose.

  Outside the building, the first stars shone faintly in a deep blue sky, although on the western horizon clouds mounted high. The air smelled of rain to come and the trees swayed. The Met loomed dark against the cobalt sky. 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.

  Somewhere a dog bayed, then another. A pack, hunting.

  I said to Jemmy, “Take me to them.”

  Shadows beside the Vivian Beaumont, shadows in the sloping underground corridor. Jemmy wedged open the door with a rock so that I could hear if the guards started shooting. Inside the theater, more shadows.

  They didn’t see me. The barre had been pushed to the back of the stage, out of the way. Guy, barefoot, was stripped to the waist. Kara, also barefoot, wore white tights and something filmy and clinging and dotted with holes, unearthed from who knows what ancient storage area. Music played. It wasn’t the thin, slightly tinny music of the piano that played for “class.” This was the full, glorious sound of the music from the other recording, The Four Temperaments. And I realized what Guy had done.

  While he arranged steps and combinations for him and Kara, he had held Paul Hindemith’s music in his mind. Their dancing perfectly matched the music, blended with it, was it. In that blending, Guy’s and Kara’s inexperience became less important, in part because he had chosen so well movements that they could perform with grace. From studying the ballet books, I could even name some of them: bourrées, pas de chat, battements.

  The names were unimportant. What mattered was the dancing. They never touched, but Kara’s young body, on demi-pointe, bent toward his with sorrow, with loss, with longing, without ever reaching him. He yearned toward her but I knew it was not her he yearned for, nor she for him. The sorrow was for the dancing itself, so briefly embraced, lost tomorrow. The loss was of all the beauty they once might have had, were the world different. Guy raised his leg, extended his arm, and balanced in a perfect arabesque. In the soft glow of lantern light, the dancing figures were liquid gold, and they lit up the bare stage with heartbreaking regret for vanished beauty.

  But it was Bonnie who stunned me.

  She stood to one side of the stage: chaperone, guard, and something more. Never had I imagined that her homely face could look like that. She was not just alive; she shone with the ferocity of the angel guarding the gate to Eden. I had not known, not even suspected.

  “Bonnie,” I said. It came out a whisper, heard only by Jemmy. Before I could find a louder voice, the door behind me jerked open and a man roared, “What the fuck!”

  Mike.

  I turned. Blood caked the left side of his face, matted his beard. His left arm was in a crude sling. Behind him crowded three or four men. Mike pushed past me and ran toward the stage.

  I lurched after him as fast as I could, pushing through the pain in my knee. “Wait! Wait! Don’t—”

  The men rammed past me. Mike stood below the stage, on which Kara and Guy had frozen.

  “—do anything!” I yelled. “Bonnie was here the whole time, they were never alone!”

  One of the other men—his back to me, I couldn’t see who—raised a second lantern high in the air beside Mike, and I saw what Mike saw: the blood on Kara’s thighs, brilliant red on the white tights. She had Begun.

  I grabbed Mike’s good arm. “Never alone! Do you understand, they were never alone! He never touched her!”

  If it had been Joe, he might have shot Guy right there on the stage. If it had been Lew, he might have shot them both. Mike gave Guy a look of profound disgust: at his bare chest, at the arabesque Mike had interrupted, at everything about Guy that Mike would never understand. To me, apparently not even noticing my leg, Mike growled, “Take them girls to where they belong.”

  Someone fired a rifle at the teevee screen, and the music stopped.

  Bonnie would answer none of my questions. She sat, silent and wooden, in the sickroom until Mike had time to send for her. “What did you give me?” I demanded. “In what dosage? And, Bonnie—why?”

  She said nothing.

  Lincoln Kirstein, Grandmother once told me, got this place built. He used his own money and made others donate money and founded a great ballet company. He wasn’t a dancer or a choreographer or a musician. He didn’t make ballets, but he made ballet happen.

  Kara was not with us. She had been sent to the women’s room. In a week or so, when she stopped bleeding, she would be sent to Mike’s bed, to Joe’s, to Karl’s, to every man who might prove her fertile. Even shrieking, she would be sent.

  A few hours later, Mike sent for me. Two men carried me between them to a room at the end of the corridor. Small, with concrete walls, it still held the twisted and rusted remains of those big machines that once gave out food and drink in exchange for coins. There was an ancient sofa nested by rats, a sagging table, a few chairs. I could picture dancers coming here from the practice rooms, throwing themselves across the sofa, resting for a moment with a candy bar or soda.

  Mike’s men sat me in a mostly intact chair and he said, “Why, Nurse?”

  The same question I had asked Bonnie. My concern now was to shield her as much as I could. “They wanted to dance, Mike, that’s all. They were never alone and he never—”

  “You don’t know that. You be unconscious the who
le time.” He eyed my leg. Someone had cleaned up the blood from his eye and beard.

  “Yes, that’s true, but if Bonnie says she was always with them, then she was. She obeys orders, Mike. I told her that I’d given Kara and Guy permission to dance and that she must stay with them.”

  “You? You gave permission?”

  “Yes, me. I mean, you know Bonnie—does she seem the type of person interested in dancing?”

  Mike frowned; he was not used to considering what “type of person” a woman might be. “You did this, Nurse? Not Bonnie?”

  “Not Bonnie. And she’s a good Nurse, Mike. She can make medicines just as well as I did. And do everything else, too.”

  Finally his gaze lifted from my bandaged knee to my face. He said simply, “Do you want to be shot or left behind?”

  Shooting would be kinder. But I said, “Left behind.”

  He shrugged, losing interest. He still had a Nurse; Kara had not been touched; there were fighting tactics to occupy his mind. Into that indifference I dared to ask, “Guy?”

  Mike scowled. To his men he said, “Take her wherever she wants to be left, and bring me the new Nurse.” He strode from the room, having already forgotten me.

  Mike’s men left me under the Vivian Beaumont, just inside the first door, at the top of the sloping corridor. In the dark I groped in my pocket for the candle and matches. It wasn’t easy to keep one hand on the wall, hold the candle and my cane in the other, and hobble my painful way down the corridor and through the second door. By the time I reached the shallow steps at the far side of the stage, I was crawling.

  My five ballet books lay neatly stacked in a corner, where Guy had studied them who knew how many nights while I lay drugged and Kara, locked in the women’s room, flexed and pointed her toes and dreamed of pointe shoes. I opened The Story of Giselle and turned the pages by candlelight until I found a photograph of a dancer in a long, filmy skirt held impossibly high by her partner, soaring in an exquisite arc above him. There are worse ways to die than gazing at beauty. From my pocket, I drew my packet of distilled monkshood leaves. Fairly quick, and not as painful as most.

  Something moaned somewhere behind me.

  They had beaten him bloody and chained him to a concrete column in one of the tiny dressing rooms behind the stage. Guy breathed as if in pain, but I could find no broken bones. Mike had not wanted him to die too quickly. He would either starve or be found by Keither’s pack when they came looking for revenge, or for our women, or just for war.

  “Guy?”

  He moaned again. I searched the room but found no key to his chains. Sitting beside him, I held in one hand that packet of monkshood that did not contain enough for both of us, and in the other The Story of Giselle. And then, because I am old and had broken my knee and had lain inactive for over a month while Guy and Kara reinvented the dangers of ballet, I fell asleep.

  “Nurse? Nurse?” And then: “Susan!”

  The candle had gone out. But the dressing room was lit by a lantern—two lanterns. Bonnie and Kara stood there, dressed in men’s clothing and backpacks, and both carried semiautomatic machine guns. On Kara, it looked like a butterfly equipped with a machete. In the sudden light, Guy’s eyelids fluttered open.

  “Oh!” Kara said, one hand flying to her mouth. The gun wobbled.

  Bonnie snapped, “Don’t you dare fuss!” and I was startled at her tone, which was my own. Had been my own. “Nurse, can you—”

  “No,” I said.

  Bonnie didn’t argue. She dropped to her knees and ran her hands impersonally over Guy.

  “I already did that,” I said. “Nothing broken.”

  “Then he can walk. Kara, pull Nurse out of here, back to the stage. Guy, pull yourself as far from the post as you can.”

  He did, closing his swollen and blood-crusted eyes. Kara tugged me away. Even from the stage, the sound of Bonnie’s gun—not the semiautomatic—was loud as she shot at the chain. Even the ricochets—surely dangerous!—made my ears ring. After a few moments Guy and Bonnie emerged, he leaning on her and dragging lengths of chain on both ankles. But he was able to bend and scoop them off the floor. I caught at Bonnie’s knee.

  “Bonnie—how—”

  “In their stew. Kara and I were serving.”

  “Dead?”

  “I don’t know. Some, maybe.”

  “What did you use? Pokeweed? Cowbane? Snakeroot?”

  “Skyweed. The seeds.”

  Kara said suddenly, “Not the other girls, though. We wouldn’t do that.” And then: “But I won’t bed anybody!”

  Bonnie said, “And you have to dance.”

  I gaped at her. Kara wanted to dance, Guy wanted to dance, but it was Bonnie who was determined that they would dance. Slowly I said, “Where will you go?”

  “North. Away from the city. It’s going to rain hard, and that will cover our tracks before the pack revives.”

  “Try to find a farm community. Or, if you can, places called ‘Ithaca’ or ‘Endicott’ or ‘Bath.’ I’m not sure they exist, but they might. Have you got that map I found? And my medicine sack?”

  “Yes. Do you have—”

  “Yes.”

  “We have to go now, Nurse. Jemmy is with us, too.”

  Jemmy. Perhaps they would find a generator. Bonnie extracted the two recording cubes, The Four Temperaments and Taking Class on Video, from the blasted teevee. Kara was helping Guy dress in warm coat, boots, a rain poncho. He swayed on his feet but remained upright. She handed him her rifle, which actually seemed to steady him. Kara turned to me and her lips trembled.

  “Don’t,” I said in my harshest tone. Kara, not understanding, looked hurt. But Bonnie knew.

  “Good-bye, Nurse,” she said, without painful sentiment, and grasped the other two to lead them away.

  I waited until the sound of their boots crossed the stage, until the door to the theater closed, until they had had enough time to leave camp. Then I crawled out of the Vivian Beaumont. The rain had just started, sweet on the summer night air. The cookfires on the plaza sputtered and hissed. Beside them lay the men. Farther out would be the perimeter, and then the guards who had gone from their hearty dinner to the outposts on nearby streets or rooftops.

  Two of the men by the fire were already dead. I thought most of the others, including Mike, might recover, but skyweed seeds are tricky. So much depends on how they are dried, pounded, leached, and stored. Bonnie knew a lot, but not as much as I did. I gathered up the men’s guns, made a pile of them under a rain poncho, and sat beside it under another poncho, a loaded semiautomatic beside me.

  This could happen several ways. If Keither’s pack showed up soon, the kindest thing would be to shoot Mike and the others before they revived. Keither’s pack would claim the girls, who would be no better nor worse off than they were now. Fertile women were precious.

  If Mike and the others revived after I judged Bonnie to be far enough away, I would swallow my packet of monkshood and let Mike take on Keither.

  But . . . with skyweed, more of these men should have vomited before their paralysis. If Bonnie had misjudged her preparation or dosages, and the pack regained their senses and strength soon enough to follow her, I would do what was necessary.

  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. Every five years the seats were replaced. 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!

  No, I can’t. No more than I can imagine what will happen to Guy, and Kara, and ballet. No more than I could have imagined Bonnie caught in an enchantment she had never expected: the en
chantment of the lost past, rising from ruin like a dancer rising into arabesque. Had that storm lain in her all along, needing only something to passionately love?

  There are all kinds of storms, and all kinds of performances. Under the poncho, I hold my gun, and listen to the rain falling on Lincoln Center, and wait.

  FROG WATCH

  Nancy Kress is the author of thirty books and over a hundred short stories, many of which have appeared in Asimov’s. Her most recent work includes a novella "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall," which just won the Nebula and is currently nominated for the Hugo. Ideas for her latest tale first surfaced when she learned about Frog Watch two years ago. “I have wanted to write about it ever since. All the facts about amphibian die-offs and deformities in the story are, alas, true. I would become a volunteer except that my neighborhood in urban Seattle has no frogs. About aliens I’m not so sure. . . .”

  There are two kinds of crazy: the funny kind and the terrible kind. The funny kind is what my high school English teacher, who was a Brit, called “eccentric.” The terrible kind is what I was the first weeks after Jason was killed in the line of duty. Maybe I still am. Certainly my sister thinks so.

  “Megs, you can’t live out there all by yourself,” Hannah says on the phone. “It’s creepy.”

  It is creepy, the house I found to rent on the edge of the Marshall G. Portwell III Wetlands Preserve, which despite its fancy name is your basic swamp: mosquitoes, mud, frogs, snakes, marsh gas. Creepy, but also isolated, and that’s what I want right now. Isolation. People are too hard to bear. How are you doing dear we were so sorry to hear he was such a brave hero if I can do anything for you, anything at all . . .

  They don’t want to hear how I’m really doing because somebody else’s loss inevitably reminds them of their own to come someday. They were sorry to hear, but within fifteen minutes are back to their own lives. Jason never considered his police work heroic: “It’s my goddamn job, don’t romanticize it.” And the only thing I want anybody to do for me is to bring him back.