Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  By midnight, when the ship moved out of orbit, all extended urban areas were gone and with them, 54 percent of the global population. In the United States, it was nearly 80 percent. All of Singapore had vanished, 99 percent of the people of Belgium, 93 percent of Israel, 86 percent of Japan, 80 percent of Canada. In places like Papua New Guinea and Burundi, less than 15 percent of the population vanished, but the government centers had disappeared, as they had everywhere in the world, along with their major medical facilities, research areas, universities, financial and corporate centers, transportation hubs, energy sources, and factories. Houston’s oil refineries, Silicon Valley’s tech companies, Seattle’s Boeing facilities, Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Cal Tech, Wall Street, North Carolina’s research triangle, Three Mile Island—all gone. Niagara Falls remained, but the power plant and the tourist city were gone.

  People grieved and screamed and panicked and prayed. For a year or so there was some rioting, some senseless destruction, but not as much as people like Zed’s parents expected. In the small towns and countryside, with its 20 percent of Americans still alive, there still stood intact the sheriffs’ offices, the farms, the cars and wood stoves and doctors’ offices, and churches. There were no dead to bury, no rubble to clear away, no enemy to attack. Food was everywhere, too much food, food raised to feed a population that no longer existed. It was summer. No one froze before they could build, with their neighbors’ help, a fireplace or wood stove. Some people hoarded, and some barricaded themselves in mountain cabins. But most aided each other with digging wells, canning produce, making trading forays to other towns, butchering cows. There were lots of cows. They taught each other whatever skills they had, and the doctors and engineers and professors and physicists who had survived either took apprentices or passed on what they knew in the small-town colleges that had not been vaporized.

  A barter system developed, eventually replaced for local transactions with less cumbersome ones based on scrip. However, much of the mutual help grew from something less self-interested than barter. It was clear to even the most libertarian that if any kind of advanced civilization was going to survive, they needed each other. Synergy was born, first a necessity and then a belief and finally almost a religion. Like all religions, it had followers who ardently believed, followers who half believed, proselytizers and heretics and lip-service “faithful” who laid wreaths every June 30th and carried on with their personal concerns the other 364 days.

  In fifty-six years, through cooperation and determination and the occasional but not common local war, the daily living had climbed back to where it had been in approximately 1945, minus any meaningful central government. The new historians, few but devout, predicted that the rate of change was about to accelerate dramatically.

  The huge vacant areas where cities stood apparently had not been irradiated; no one developed radiation poisoning. Within a month the enormous bare stretches began to grow grass. Within a year there were bushes, flowers, saplings. The year Zed was born, Boston and New York and Seattle were virgin forests. Chicago was prairie, rich and fertile. New Orleans was a wetlands, thick with plant and animal life. The oceans, no longer over-fished and over-polluted, once again teemed with fish.

  When Zed was eleven, the aliens returned.

  Mrs. Bellingham, her mouth a thin tight line and her chin wrinkled in fury, led Zed to a small upstairs room with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and a rocking chair whose paint was cracked and peeling. A small bathroom lay beyond. She swept out of the room, ignoring his stammered thanks.

  Should he go? They didn’t want him here. He could survive in the woods, of course—what else had he been doing his whole life? But the Bellinghams were his only gateway out of that life, into . . . he didn’t know what. He couldn’t go to college like Jonathan, couldn’t become anything important. But Dr. Bellingham had said there were plenty of jobs. Road repair, well digging, wind-turbine tending. And when he could, Zed would build himself a cabin of his own. Did you have to buy the land first? From whom?

  He knew nothing, nothing. His parents had let him grow up knowing nothing.

  Still, a job and a cabin were a plan, and a reason to stay on at the Bellinghams’. And all those reasons, he knew, were the purest bullshit.

  He used the toilet (where did the shit go? The Larches had a privy) and washed himself with rusty water from what must be a seldom-used sink. All the while Zed practically groaned with desire. Images of Isobel filled his mind so completely that it took enormous concentration to pull his belongings from his soiled pillowcase and put them away in the chest, to check his rifle as he had done every night for five years, to lie under the musty quilt, his big body filling the narrow bed and making the old springs groan. Masturbation did not help. Exhausted, he nonetheless could not sleep.

  But he must have, because the room was colder and the moon had moved, no longer shedding silver light through the window, when Zed woke to a hand on his shoulder.

  His reflexes had been honed by nights in the woods. In a millisecond he was on his feet, rifle in hand, moving to keep the wall at his back. All reflexes failed him the moment he heard Isobel’s voice, “Hey, don’t shoot, Primitive Boy. That’s not the kind of violence I want.”

  As his eyes adjusted, he made out her outline, and was she . . . naked? Was that possible?

  It was. Zed’s erection swelled at the same moment that she moved to press against him and her lips found his. After that, he lost all awareness, or maybe just all later memory of an awareness so heightened that he didn’t know where she ended and he started. He came to himself on the bed, Isobel on top of him, her long hair dripping into his mouth, her voice in the darkness both scornful and amused.

  “And that’s it? What about me?”

  He had no idea what she meant.

  She chuckled and showed him. He was astonished. He’d never touched a woman’s body before, only seen one in pictures, and no pictures in his father’s house showed that. They went through the entire sequence twice, and then, spent, he lay with her in his arms and thought that if he died at this moment, it would be of sheer happiness. He didn’t know that the thought was banal. But when he said it aloud to Isobel, she only chuckled again.

  “I love you, Isobel!”

  “Whoa, Primitive Boy. We’re not there yet.”

  “But we—”

  “Tell me what you know about the aliens.”

  What? Utterly confused, Zed tried to peer at her face, but she lay with her head against his shoulder and he couldn’t see her expression. Her voice had lost its amused chuckle.

  “I mean it, Zed. Tell me what you know about the aliens.”

  It was the first time she’d used his name. He stumbled forward, wanting to please. “Well, they . . . they came in 2014 and—”

  “Not history. What you know about them now.”

  “They’re back, right? They live on the coast, under some sort of energy dome, in what used to be . . . umm, Providence.”

  “Boston. That’s it? That’s all you know?”

  His father had ranted against the aliens every night. Mrs. Bellingham had bent her head and said, “We must never forget.” What else was there to know? Stupid, stupid—he was so stupid!

  He said humbly, “That’s all I know.”

  “You didn’t hear that they’re taking in some humans to work in the energy dome?” No, he most definitely had not heard that! He started so violently that the springs on the old bed shrilled like trapped rabbits. Zed said, “What do you mean, ‘work’ ? Are they doing experiments on people?” It was one of his father’s rants: Goddamn aliens probably kidnapping human children and torturing them to learn how we’re made, all the better to enslave us!

  “Experiments? No. Why would they?”

  It was a question that had occurred to Zed during his father’s rants, but he had never asked it.

  Isobel continued, “They can cross interstellar space! They can destroy entire cities! Why would they need to torture us to
learn anything, and why would they need humans for slaves?”

  There was something wrong with Isobel’s argument, but Zed was too sated, and too enthralled, to figure out what. He said humbly, humility so natural to him anyway, “I don’t know. Why do you think they’re here?”

  “They like the place. They’re having a vacation. The human workers who have come out from the dome say—”

  “Wait! You mean humans can go in and out?”

  “That’s what I heard. I mean, not every day, they live there, but I heard about one girl who decided to quit her job and they just opened a gate in the energy dome and out she went. Didn’t you hear that?”

  Zed never heard anything, but he’d had time to find the flaw in her argument. “If they have so much technology that they don’t need slaves, then why do they need human workers?”

  “Ah, that’s the big question. One of them, anyway. The other is what happened to the girl who came out of the dome. She disappeared.”

  “The aliens killed her?”

  “No. God, you really are an innocent, aren’t you? She lived in one of the towns closest to the dome, and when she went home, the Earthers killed her. For fraternizing.”

  Zed did know about the Earthers. They were the underground resistance movement, dedicated to revenging the cities and driving the aliens from Earth. So far, they had accomplished zero toward either goal.

  Isobel said, “Wouldn’t you think that almost sixty years would be enough to get over June 30th? Sixty years after World War II we were allies with Japan even though we dropped atom bombs on them. Hell, thirty years later we were allies! Plus with Germany, and all that.”

  Zed had barely heard of World War II—was that back when those “Romans” built a great city? He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Isobel detached herself from his arms and rose up on one elbow. Again the bed groaned. “Zed, do you hate the aliens?”

  Did he? Until this bewildering evening, he assumed that he had. But what Isobel said had made sense. His grandfather, Zed knew, had once fought in a place called Iraq, someplace across the ocean, and been killed there. His mother had said so, mourning that long ago in her soft, tired voice. Yet his mother hadn’t mentioned hating any Iraq people. Well, she never mentioned them at all except for that once, but didn’t that mean that she didn’t hate them? His father mentioned things he hated all the time: the aliens, the “illegitimate government” that made Zed attend school, the storekeeper in Carlsville who charged ten scrip for a bag of sugar, the aliens, raccoons that ate the fruit crop, the aliens . . .

  The one thing Zed was surest of was that he did not want to be his father.

  “No,” he said slowly, “I guess I don’t hate the aliens.”

  “It’s a complex subject because—”

  Zed never heard why it was a complex subject because Isobel fell off the bed. She’d shifted her weight too far to the left and slipped off, and she must have landed on something sharp because she screamed: loud, piercing, high. She went on screaming and Zed leapt off the other side of the bed and called out something, he wasn’t sure what. Before he could reach Isobel, or the light switch, or his wits, the door was flung open, light flooded the room, and Dr. Bellingham stood there in a vast pair of loose cotton pants, his face already turning purple.

  “What the—oh, my God!”

  Isobel had started to cry. “It hurts, oh it hurts . . ..”

  Zed cupped his hands over his penis, which helped not at all. Both of them naked, Isobel hurt and sobbing, the Bellinghams would think Zed had raped her—

  They didn’t. Mrs. Bellingham appeared behind the doctor and hissed at Isobel, “You little slut!” Dr. Bellingham flung the blanket over Isobel’s nakedness and began reaching carefully under it to examine her back. Jonathan appeared in the doorway behind his mother. Zed pulled the sheet off the bed and draped it around him, his heart pumping so hard that no words would rise up past it.

  Dr. Bellingham said, without looking up from Isobel, “Go, you. Go!”

  Just what his mother had said to him yesterday. Zed pulled his things from the chest of drawers and frantically stuffed them into his dirty pillowcase. He grabbed his rifle. Still wearing the sheet, not looking at any of them, he sprinted down the stairs and outside. Behind a clump of bushes on the lawn, he dressed as fast as he could and ran down the empty street in the direction the street lamps ceased. He didn’t know if Dr. Bellingham or Jonathan—well, no, not Jonathan, not that spindly intelligent body—would come after him with a gun. Still, it wasn’t fear that drove him, but shame.

  And loss. Once he was again in the familiar environment of a forest, Zed sank to his knees and put his head in his hands. He’d fucked up. He’d lost her. Isobel, Isobel, Isobel . . .

  Dawn rose behind him, red and gold, and the stars faded slowly from sight.

  He headed south until he came to another town, bigger than Carlsville but not by much. Zed found a cornfield, maybe two acres, with too many weeds between the calf-high plants. He offered to weed in exchange for food and a place to sleep a few nights. The farmer, a middle-aged woman with a face like an old boot and kind eyes, looked him over and agreed. He worked until evening. She brought him lunch in the field and he had dinner with her family, three half-grown sons and a little girl. No husband. The family prayed before eating. No one mentioned aliens.

  He slept, fitfully, in the barn, to the soft lowing of cows. He’d thought he might dream of Isobel, but instead he dreamed of his mother. He was a little boy again and she sat with him in summer woods beside their spring, teaching him the names of wildflowers: Queen Anne’s lace, buttercup, Indian paintbrush. Abruptly the memory changed to terror as something huge and formless and black swarmed up the mountainside. His mother put herself between Zed and the horror, as she had never done with his father, but it made no difference: the sticky black goo drowned them both.

  He worked the whole next morning, and she asked him to stay on for the summer. “I can’t, ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s someplace you need to be?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She studied him. “All right. But it don’t look good to me. You got a transparent face, boy.”

  “Can you tell me which way the alien domes are?”

  She didn’t change expression. A long silence, followed by, “Don’t do it.”

  “Don’t—”

  “Don’t go near them aliens. You know what they done.”

  “Ma’am . . . it was sixty years ago.”

  “Don’t matter if it was six hundred years ago. My grandparents died in Worcester, leaving my mother and uncle orphans.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t go there. You seem like a nice kid. Stay away.”

  He shook his head. She packed up some food for him. Just when Zed had decided she’d cut off all conversation, she said, “Take the road south till you get to Route 90. The signs are gone but you’ll know it, it’s the old highway. It goes east all the way to Boston, where the dome is. Be careful, there’s stretches where the old cities used to be that are pretty lawless.”

  “I will. And thank you.”

  He was not a “nice kid,” Zed reflected as he walked the road under the bright noon sun. He was rotten with lust, hollowed out by it like a fallen log by termites. He ached for Isobel. The only thing big enough and spectacular enough to get her out of him would be aliens.

  Isobel, Isobel, Isobel . . .

  And then, when he reached Route 90 in the early evening, she was there.

  The old interstate Thruway was in places a mass of cracked and broken pavement. In other places, near or between towns, two lanes had been kept in repair by local governments. At greater Springfield, Sturbridge, and Worcester, the road was nearly impassable. At first the people in nearby towns were too busy grieving and surviving to go to the sites of the lost cities. Then some were too superstitious. Sturbridge, in particular, was rumored to be haunted. Trees grew up through the roadway. As
trade between towns flourished, a well-worn dirt road, hard-packed, paralleled Route 90.

  Both the United States and Massachusetts had nominal governments, but mostly because people wanted to keep the American traditions alive. Neither government had any power. The old saw from a hundred years earlier was reality: All politics were local. Law worked best in small locales, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, or in huge ones, where the vanished cities had been populous enough to afford a small army of police, courts, lawyers, legislators, and prison guards.

  Isobel, ghostly in the dusk, walked out of a clump of trees where the road from Carlsville met Route 90. At first Zed thought she was unreal, something he’d conjured up in his tired mind. Then she spoke. “I thought you’d never get here, Primitive Boy.”

  “Isobel . . . how . . .?”

  “You think you’re the only one who can leave home? Or wants to?” She walked close and pressed her body into his. “Did you miss me?”

  He grabbed her and kissed her all over her face and hair and neck and shoulders. He thought he might cry. Her shoulders were knotted with tension, but her tone was all light sarcasm.

  “Now, now, save it for later. We got to make a safe camp.”

  “How—”

  “C’mon. Off the road.”

  She showed him the dirt bike she’d stolen from someone. He was shocked but said nothing. She showed him scrip (also stolen? He didn’t ask), a lightweight tent, dried food, a handgun, and ammunition. He’d seen such things only in shop windows. They made camp, made a small fire, made love. Her back must have healed really quickly. When Isobel finally told him they could be at the dome in two or three days if the weather and the dirt bike held out, Zed didn’t ask how she knew where he was going. He was too happy, and his entire life had taught him to not ask questions of stronger personalities than his own. You never got any answers.

  Just before sleep, Isobel said, “You’re sweet. Maybe the sweetest person I ever met.”

  “You, too,” he mumbled, too sleepy to ask about the unfamiliar tone in her voice: reluctant regret.