by Nancy Kress
When I can move again, I stumble toward Sally’s cabin. If a blue beam were going to take me, it would have done so already. And I have to know. From this angle I can’t see Sally’s body on her porch, raised above the mud and water. I have to know.
When I climb the porch steps, the body is gone. There is not even a stain on the weathered wood. Nothing on Earth can do that, not any of it.
Through the screen door I see the brightly lit interior, with its metal tub positioned under grow-lights. I go inside. The tub holds a gelatinous mass, speckled with black spots. Eggs, toad or frog or one of the snakes that does not give live birth. I don’t touch it. This mass, plus whatever booby trap remains on the roof, are the only proofs of what I will have to tell the cops.
Who probably will not believe me. There are no bodies; I have a psychiatric history; possibly nobody but me ever saw Silas. How many crazy people go to the authorities every year claiming to have met aliens? But I must try, because what Silas said made actual sense to me. Or maybe it was what Sally said: “Childs, not like parents, no?”
There are no deformed frogs, and way too many normal frogs, in this swamp because this is the end result of Sally’s people’s experimentation with swamps. This is where they got the ingredients right, the correct mix to nurture their strange young without damaging further what humans have already done to wetlands ecology. This is where Silas’s people, whoever they are, tried to stop it. Maybe they’re cops, with a good cop’s firm ideas about not taking other people’s property. How would I know?
I turn off all the lights and head toward my cabin for the car keys. But something makes me turn around to look over my shoulder. In the slanting red light of the setting sun, there is a brief sparkle from Sally’s steps.
The gelatinous mass of eggs is moving. From this distance, I can barely see it. It inches down the concrete-block steps, falls the height of the last, steepest one onto the mud, then slowly begins to move again. There is maybe fifty yards between it and the non-creek.
I wrap my arms around myself, despite the heat, and whimper. I tell myself that the eggs will die in the swamp, an environment never intended for them. Or that the larvae—tadpoles, nymphs, whatever—will die or be eaten by turtles or snakes or frogs.
I tell myself that no more ships will come, because the deaths of both Silas and Sally will have proved that Earth is not a good choice for them.
I tell myself that aliens, too, can be crazy, and these two were just outliers, not proof of anything, not the advance guard of a civilization—or civilizations—capable of using an entire planet as a petri dish to create just the ecology they want.
But then I think of all the frog extinctions from diseases that scientists have never seen before and cannot explain. I think of how different this swamp—and only this swamp—is, at least according to the FrogWatch data. I think of the hidden lake behind the rushes and cattails, deeper than the swamp, maybe deep enough to shelter growth.
I think of real-estate developers, killing off native species as they take their habitats.
But most of all, I think of what grows within me, that I didn’t even know existed until a few weeks ago. That I talk to when I’m alone, that I’ve already named, given up Scotch and coffee for, done my back taxes for, resumed eating regular meals for. The books from the library say that Jason Jr., conceived the night before his father was shot, is now tadpole-shaped, amphibious, a secret swimmer in my secret sea.
The mass of alien eggs must have moved faster than before. By the time I have run home to my cabin, grabbed plastic garbage bags, and pulled on my waders, the mass is gone. But it has left a trail of slime, into the creek, out the other side, and into the reeds. It is much larger than the few inches of water that covers the mud; it will stick up above it. I have a powerful flashlight, and soon the moon will rise.
Around me frogs croak and sing and grunt and click and trill.
I head into the swamp.
2014
THE COMMON GOOD
Nancy Kress is the Hugo-and Nebula-winning author of thirty-one books, most recently After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon Press). “The Common Good” grew out of her general bemusement at how differently Republicans and Democrats envision what might be good for the United States, which led to an even more general bemusement at how people often have completely opposite ideas of what is in the best interests of humanity. The aliens are extra. This story is a sort of sequel set seventy years after a 2008 tale called “The Kindness of Strangers.”
I: Outside
The final fight between Zed and his father was about the aliens. It followed the same pattern as the other fights, those about weeding or water fetching or deer hunting, because none of the arguments were about their ostensible subject. Zed was seventeen. His parents were nearing sixty and had lived all their lives in the mountains of what had been western Massachusetts, and maybe still was. That became part of the fight.
“You don’t know anything because you won’t go anywhere!” Zed yelled, his strong, long legs planted apart on the worn kitchen floor. “You just stay on this fucking farm and rot!”
“Zed, please . . .” his mother whispered at the same moment that his father shouted, “I know enough to recognize a piss-dumb moron when I see one! Now get outside and chop that wood!”
“No,” Zed said.
It was a first. His mother gaped at him, a tooth missing in the front of her mouth. His father stood, face purple with rage. When he took off his belt and advanced on Zed, Zed punched him in the stomach. He hadn’t planned on it; the act sprouted all at once, an instant oak whose roots stretched and intertwined deep underground.
“Oh my dear God,” his mother said. And then to Zed, “Go! Go!”
Zed, looking down at his father gasping for air on the cabin floor, didn’t know if she meant go chop the wood or go to his room or go away from the farm. The uncertainty created a space for action. He raced upstairs, threw a few things into his pillowcase, grabbed his.22, and flew back down the stairwell. His father sat doubled-over on a chair, his mother fluttering around him. When Zed yanked open the kitchen door, the lantern on the table flickered in the sudden draft.
A lantern. Chopping wood. Chickens squawking in their pen. Zed slammed the butt of his rifle against the wire. His parents lived—which meant Zed had to live—his entire pathetic life on this hardscrabble farm, in fear that “it” might happen again. Neither one would so much as say aloud the words “June thirtieth.” And they lived like it was 1870, not 2070. His father had even taught himself to pour his own bullets for the antique rif le he didn’t even need. You could buy bullets down in Carlsville. If his father had had his way, Zed wouldn’t have even gone to Carlsville Elementary or known that anything else existed! For that alone, the old man deserved that punch.
Zed couldn’t go back. Not after that. He was free.
Only—
He stood at the head of the trail, gnawing at his fingernails, pillowcase at his feet. Around him the sweet-smelling June dusk gathered in deep folds. The western sky faded from pink to silver and the first stars came out, Altair and Deneb and Vega. In an hour or so the full moon would rise. Zed had never gone the full ten miles to the village in the dark, but after the first few miles there would be the road, cracked and impassable to vehicles but a clear marker. He could do it. He could also live almost indefinitely in the woods, but he’d had more than enough of that. No, he would go to the only place he could go—Jonathan’s. They would take him in.
Wouldn’t they?
A sound came to him, faint on the twilight. It might have been his mother, calling his name in her thin, ineffectual voice.
He slung his pillowcase, made of cheap flowered cotton in what used to be China, over his shoulder and started down the mountain.
Electric lights. Music. A summer dance. Figures swaying on the empty parking lot beside the courthouse. All the things Zed had been denied his whole life. He stood, sweaty and resentful and shy, in th
e shadow of trees and watched the dancers even though he knew that Jonathan wouldn’t be among them, not in a million years. The parking lot was newly paved since Zed had last attended school, just before spring planting started. They must have gotten the asphalt factory on-line again.
Not that Zed had ever experienced being “on-line.” The village had a few working computers, but he had never used one. Jonathan had. Jonathan’s family owned one.
What was he going to do if they wouldn’t take him in? They had to. Synergy, right?
He made his way past the dark school, past the trading market and the scrip stores, the truck depot with its precious store of parts, the armory. There, he paused to put two fingers into bullet holes from the ‘15 attacks on Carlsville. The old brick felt soft on his bitten nails. It was so long ago.
Jonathan’s house stood large at the far end of town, shaded by two huge maples, gleaming with fresh paint. Lights shone both downstairs and in an upstairs room that Zed hoped was Jonathan’s. The window stood open. Zed stood under it and called softly, “Jonathan! Jonathan! It’s me, Zed Larch!”
Jonathan’s head, silhouetted, stuck itself out the window at the same moment that the front door opened and a woman’s voice said sharply, “Who’s there? Do you need the doctor?”
“No, ma’am!” Zed hated that his voice shook. These people might be rich and educated and all, but Jonathan was his friend and anyway they were no better than he was. Except—he didn’t believe it. None of it. He almost turned to flee back into the darkness.
“Hey,” Jonathan said, “Zed. Well. Come in, I guess.”
“So I wondered if I can stay here a while, working of course, I’m a hard worker and I can farm and chop wood and . . .” He trailed off, miserable. The Bellinghams didn’t farm. They didn’t need wood chopped; they had an an electric stove—there it sat, right in front of the kitchen table around which the four of them sat, Dr. Bellingham and his wife and Jonathan, who didn’t look as welcoming as Zed had hoped.
They only knew each other from school. Zack was in a much lower classroom since he’d only started school at age eleven when the sheriff had discovered Zed existed, hiked up the mountain, and threatened Zed’s father with jail for child neglect. Boys in Jonathan’s class picked on him, skinny and short and too smart and too rich. Zed had thrashed a few of them, and so he and Jonathan had taken to eating lunch together, and sometimes Zed had walked Jonathan safely home. It wasn’t much of a friendship, but Zed didn’t know that. Jonathan did.
Mrs. Bellingham said, “Your parents will miss you.”
“No, ma’am, they won’t.” How could she be a mother? Zed’s mother, who seldom spoke and who grew thinner and grayer and more faded every year, was nothing like Mrs. Bellingham. Dark-haired, with skin smooth as cream, she didn’t look much older than Jonathan. Zed’s parents, cautious and solitary and taciturn, had not married until they were both forty, and Zed had been a late and, he’d always thought, unpleasant surprise.
Jonathan said sarcastically, “They’ll miss Zed? Because any mother would miss a child who stayed away overnight? Is that what you mean, Mom?”
Mrs. Bellingham glanced over at him, then down. Zed perceived complex emotions he didn’t understand.
Dr. Bellingham spoke for the first time. Almost as big as Zed, imposing even sitting down, his words seemed to descend from the sky. “Of course the boy can stay here for a while. Synergy, Beth. It’s all we have, really—the common good.”
It seemed to Zed they had a lot more than that. Many of the things he gazed at were old: the wooden kitchen table, the rug he had glimpsed through an archway leading to the living room, maybe the pictures on the walls in their heavy gold-colored frames. But that stove looked new, which meant somebody somewhere was making stoves again, and a cup of coffee sat on the table in front of him. Zed had taken only one sip and he didn’t like it, but he knew what coffee was and he knew it had come from a long way away, from some hot country. In school they’d sung a song every morning: “The world reborn/in our own hands/syner-gee-ey never torn.”
Not my hands, he thought, and again resentment against his father rose up in him like vomit.
He said to Dr. Bellingham, “Thank you, sir. I’ll do anything you ask!”
“We’ll need to find you a job in the village. No shortage of those. You can get work on road repair if nothing else. But what are your long-term plans, son?”
He had no long-term plans. Zed stared miserably at the doctor, this sophisticated man who had a profession, a house, a grasp of what the world was like now. All Zed had was life on a shit-poor farm, the little he’d learned at on-again-off-again school attendance, and his father’s rants about June 30th, repeated over and over and over. The only long-term plan you could make out of those things was the life Zed had just left.
Jonathan said, “I’m going off to college in the fall, you know, Zed. I won’t be here.”
“Yes. You told me. Dartmouth College.” Hanover had been just barely small enough to escape June 30th. Zed couldn’t imagine it.
“Jonathan will be an engineer,” his mother said, with pride. “There is nothing we need more.”
“Well, a doctor isn’t such a bad thing to be, Ava,” the doctor said, and his smile glittered dangerously.
“Probably,” Jonathan said in a lazy drawl, “it was a better thing to be when there were real hospitals and real medical research.”
Zed looked from one to the other, confused. He knew there was anger here, and resentment, but he didn’t understand why. Didn’t these people have everything?
“In fifty-six years,” the doctor said, his eyes stinging as hail, “we have regained nearly all of medicine lost on June 30th. Now we can again go forward into the kind of research that—”
“Oh,” Jonathan said in that same lazy drawl, “I didn’t know that anyone was manufacturing MRI scanners again! Or cancer radiation machines! Why didn’t you guys inform me?”
Mrs. Bellingham said sharply, “That’s enough, Jonathan.”
The doctor turned on Zed, who didn’t know why he was the sudden target of anger. “Do you even know what happened fifty-six years ago on June 30th? Jonathan said you’d been raised in some sort of survivalist cult that refuses Synergy.”
“I—” A cult? What was that? But then, with sudden dignity, Zed said, “Of course I know what happened on June 30th.”
“We must never forget,” Mrs. Bellingham said, putting her hands together in the Synergy gesture and bending her head. The hands, Zed noted, were soft and white. On the top of her head, her dark hair fell in short shining folds from a part like a white road to somewhere unimaginable.
“No chance of that with you assholes yammering on and on about it,” another voice said, and Zed turned in his chair. A girl stood leaning against the archway to the living room, one hip thrust out insolently, her boots shedding mud on the rug. Mrs. Bellingham’s head jerked up and she stood so fast that her chair fell over.
“Isobel! Where have you been for the past two days!”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” the girl said.
“Go upstairs right now!”
The girl ignored her. “Who’s this?”
“I’m . . . Zed.” He could hardly speak. He hadn’t known girls could look like this, not apart from pictures in books or in fantasies when he lay alone in bed. Long shining dark hair, red lips, breasts high and mostly exposed in a tunic that dipped low in front and high in back, glittering with tiny sewn-in bits of mirror or glass or mica.
Isobel drawled, “Hello, Zed.”
Dr. Bellingham thundered, “You heard your mother! Get upstairs right now, Isobel, and wait for me!”
She gave a contemptuous little salute and sauntered out. Jonathan rolled his eyes. Mrs. Bellingham’s face was so distorted that her prettiness, which Zed had admired until he saw Isobel, was completely gone. Zed felt as if he were drowning in things he did not understand; they filled his lungs and dragged at his feet.
Jonathan sa
id, “Welcome to the family, Zed.” And laughed.
On June 30, 2014, the alien ship had gone into orbit around Earth. Every developed nation had known for a week that it was coming, moving in with amazing speed from the direction of the constellation Leo. The ship had answered none of the communications aimed at it in various languages, verbal and mathematical and musical. China had attempted to shoot it down. The nuclear missile had simply vanished. And then, one by one, so had the major cities of Earth. First, greater Bombay and Karachi, vanishing at 2:16 P.M. No explosion, no dust, no blinding light. One moment, reported dazed observers by satellite, the great cities and their vast suburbs had existed and the next they were gone, leaving bare ground that ended in roads sheared off as neatly as if by a very sharp knife, in halves of temples on the shear line, in bisected holy cows. The ground was not even scorched. People standing beyond the vanishing point saw nothing happen.
Fifteen minutes later it was Delhi, Shanghai, and Moscow.
Fifteen minutes after that, Seoul, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Lima, and Mexico City.
Then Jakarta, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Cairo, Tehran, and Riyad.
By this time the hysterical media had figured out that cities were vanishing in order of size, and by a progression of prime numbers. At 3:16 P.M. (London, Bogotá, Lagos, Baghdad, Bangkok, Lahore, Dacca, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Wuhan, and Tientsin), the panicked evacuations began. Most people were vaporized (except that no vapor remained) long before they reached the end of the murderous city traffic jams.
Canton, Toronto, Jiddah, Abidjan, Chongqing, Santiago, Calcutta, Singapore, Chennai, St. Petersburg, Shenyang, Los Angeles, Ahmadabad.
Seven nations had fired at the ship, which continued to orbit serenely.
Pusan, Alexandria, Hyderabad, Ankara, Pyongyang, Yokohama, Montreal, Casablanca, Ho Chi Minh City, Berlin, Nanjing, Addis Ababa, Poona, Medellin, Kano.
