Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The jungle vanished, and Zed was back in the white room with its doors opened to the clean salt air off the Atlantic.

  “Not genocide, Zed. Rescue. Sit down, you are hyperventilating.”

  Zed collapsed into a chair. In the midst of stunned wonder, of anger and fear, he found his question. “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because it is the truth.”

  “I don’t know that! Are you saying you could see the future?”

  “No. That was a simulation, of course, but based on totally accurate data. No one can see the future. Our problem with humanity is that you do not even try.”

  “That’s not so!”

  “Yes, it is. You look no farther ahead than your own short lives. Sometimes, but not often, you consider those of your children. No farther. You want energy and objects and profits so you take them, regardless of the long-term consequences to yourselves, your descendants, your planet.”

  “So why is that your problem?”

  “I cannot tell you that yet.”

  “How do I know you’re not just lying? Making up a story to excuse yourself for what you did?”

  “You don’t know. I cannot go into your skull and make you believe. But if you stay here, you will learn some of the science that the predictions are based on. Good science leads to good far-seeing.”

  “I don’t know enough to even know if the science you’d give me is lies!”

  C7 was silent. Mica flecks flickered inside quartz. Finally it said, “No human has ever said that to us before. In the admission of ignorance lies the start of far-seeing. I very much hope you will stay, Zed . . ..”

  “Then let Isobel in, too!”

  “No.”

  Zed put his face into his hands, immediately removed it. If he had shown such weakness with his father, there would have been a beating with the belt.

  C7 was not his father.

  Zed fought for calm. Eventually he managed, “If what you say is true, then why didn’t you just warn Earth in 2014? Show those . . . shows of the future, way back then?”

  “We did. The United Nations in New York was beamed everything you just saw, plus more. No one believed us. They had not believed humans telling them the same thing, your own scientists, for at least forty years.”

  “So you wiped out all the cities and just took off in your ship.”

  “We went home to wait.”

  “For what, for fucking sake?”

  “For you. Your generation. We thought that in two or three generations, the survivors—and we knew you would survive; humanity is among the toughest races we know—would understand why we acted as we did. Or, if you did not understand, that the generation who experienced ‘June 30th, would mostly be dead, and the new one willing to listen to us. Our knowledge of your history showed us many alliances with former enemies, some of whom had caused just as much local destruction and with much more cruelty.” C7 gave something that, if it had been human, would have been a sigh. “We were wrong. The people of Earth did not behave with us as you have with others in the past. And it seems that there is one area of behavior where you do practice far-seeing.

  “Revenge.”

  Zed stayed.

  Every day he asked himself why. Not for the science, which was too hard for him. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested enough. He listened to C7 or J3 or D1—they all looked alike to Zed, although Leah and Paul and Ruhan could tell them apart—and even during the simulations, three-dimensional and immersing, his thoughts would wander. His mind, imaginative but not analytical, left carbon-dioxide levels or cellular biology or Moore’s Law for what did interest him: The Question, or rather The Questions.

  Was it right to kill half the human race in order to save the other half?

  Was it right to break into a civilization, like an outlaw stealing cities, in order to force that civilization to slow down its technology before its own tech destroyed it?

  Was it right to live comfortably side-by-side with beings that had done that?

  The others were not disturbed by The Questions. Leah, gentle and frighteningly intelligent, thought that the aliens had made the ethical choice. She thought that and then forgot it, absorbed by the aliens’ versions of computers.

  Her brother Tim—over thirty, and hadn’t Isobel told Zed that only young people could enter the dome?—was absorbed in algae. He spent much of his time knee-deep in the ocean, experimenting with different sorts of algae that could be converted to nanocellulose, a “super material” he said would save the world.

  June, tall and gravelly voiced, worked with D5 to learn how to cure the human body of the copying errors that were cancer.

  Ruhan became Zed’s best friend. They had nothing whatsoever in common. Chinese-American, Ruhan was small and skinny. No amount of food could fill him up, and no amount of knowledge. He studied physics alone with J3 because none of the other humans could keep up with him. But unlike Zed’s other friends, Ruhan did not want to talk about what he was learning. To him it was as private and intense as sex. He was, however, the only one who would talk to Zed about The Questions. Ruhan agreed with Leah, but not as comfortably. He had read a lot of ethics; people Zed had never heard of: David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant. Most of what Ruhan said was either incomprehensible or disturbing, but Zed was nonetheless fascinated.

  “None of them,” Ruhan said, “really incorporated far-seeing into their philosophies.”

  “Is the right thing different if you look way ahead than if you look only to . . . to . . .”

  “To the immediate consequences,” Ruhan said. He often supplied words that Zed fumbled toward but couldn’t quite locate.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know,” Ruhan said. “It’s an important question.”

  No one, not in his entire life, had ever thought Zed’s questions important. Not even Isobel. He worried that this thought was disloyal to her. He worried that he was happy to have friends, that he wasn’t thinking hard enough about all the death and sorrow the aliens had caused. He worried that he wasn’t smart enough to ever understand anything. He worried that he spent too much time worrying.

  The one hundred seventeen people, all young, called the alien dome “The Resort.” The low, gray or green buildings were “dorms,” where each had a tiny sleeping cubicle, just as each alien had a low white building scattered around The Resort. The humans were fed communally from food grown either in big wettish tanks or in gardens they themselves worked. Anybody who got sick went to D5 and was cured. They studied and experimented and swam and made love. They were working fervently, Leah told him, “for the common good.”

  Six of the one hundred seventeen were babies born inside The Resort. J4 watched the babies in a big play area every day, as their mothers worked or studied nearby. J4, unlike the others, had grown a pair of creepy, skin-covered tentacles. She (impossible for Zed to think of J4 as other than female, although Leah reprimanded him for sexism, a term he’d never heard before) played with the babies. She changed their diapers. She rocked them to sleep. She talked to them, sometimes in English and sometimes in a trilling, bird-like language.

  Tim’s wife Anna said, “It’s like having Mary Poppins for the twins.”

  Zed, who didn’t know who Mary Poppins was, said, “It’s like having someone make sure your kids grow up trusting the aliens.”

  “Of course,” Anna said, giving him a strange look. “The kids will be cultural attachés. Interspecies bridges.”

  Zed shut up. He’d never heard the word “attaché,” and there was nothing he could say that the others hadn’t already thought of. He was a big dumb bear from the woods.

  But—

  Cities disappearing in an instant, everyone in them dead. Gone, just gone. Murdered.

  But—

  If the aliens hadn’t stepped in?

  Around and around, and nothing ever decided. Too hard. Too critical.

  The heart of everything here.

  At night, he dreamed. Par
is, as he’d seen it in C7’s history holos, wide stone squares filled with a thousand Parisian faces, which Zed imagined as smaller and prettier than American faces. Simultaneously the thousand faces tilted upward to look at the sky, blinked, and vanished forever.

  “No, no,” Ruhan said. “The t-test is for significance of the correlation, don’t you see? The confidence level means—”

  “I don’t see,” Zed said miserably. “It’s hard.”

  Ruhan, for whom this math was as easy as breathing, gazed at Zed with the same incomprehension that Zed gazed at his “homework.”

  The boys sat at a crude wooden table, in the shade of a gazebo built only yesterday by a group calling themselves “the carpenter team.” Now the team was constructing another gazebo closer to the water’s edge, a hundred yards away. Sawing and hammering filled the air. Zed longed to join them. He had worked on this gazebo, which smelled of raw wood and salt air. The carpenter group shouted and laughed.

  “See,” Ruhan said, trying again, “you start with two samples that each have a p-value above 0.05—”

  “I can’t get it! Why does C7 want me to study this stuff? I’m too dumb!”

  “You’re not dumb,” Ruhan said, without conviction. “You think about things.”

  This was true, although none of the things were math. Zed looked despairingly at the flat rectangular “link” that C7 had given him, which he was supposed to keep with him at all times. He said abruptly to Ruhan, “You entered The Resort last year, right? Was the Earther camp outside the entry point then? The soldiers trying to stop people from going in?”

  Ruhan’s thin, bony face wrinkled. “It’s not an Earther camp. Who told you that? The camp is on guard against Earthers, to make sure whoever wants to come Inside, can. They also keep known Earthers from more stupid attacks on the wall.”

  Isobel and her “cousins” kept out, not because they were too old, but because of the aliens’ brain-scan filter blocking anyone intending destruction. The coppery smell thick on the air—blood? Whose? Why? Were Gary and Luke and Dave known Earthers, and had they killed people to clear their way to the wall, so that Isobel could attack from inside? But that would mean Isobel was an Earther, too, with big, obedient, dumb Zed as her protector . . . Isobel, who had driven him out of her parents’ house with her hurt back, which never seemed to ache again . . ..

  No. She had not used him like that. Zed killed the thought before it could take full root. He waved at the ocean, blue and calm. “If the soldiers wanted to attack, why don’t they just sail around the edge of the wall and attack from the sea?”

  “An energy barrier there, too. It was even tried by some reconstituted military someplace, last year. The energy barrier uses radiation that—”

  Zed didn’t listen. Ruhan’s explanation got more and more complicated: dark energy, subatomic particles, something called gravitons. Zed held the link with the hopeless t-test problems and watched the carpenter team carry something toward them.

  “Okay, our turn at the shade and table,” said a dark-haired girl with muscled arms and a long scar running down one cheek into the left side of her upper lip. Her name was Delia, and Zed didn’t like her. “We’ve worked harder than you guys.”

  “Hey,” Ruhan said, “cool! Who made this?”

  “Joe, of course,” Delia said. “He’s the carver.”

  Joe, a black man almost as big as Zed, carried a flat piece of wood with alternating light and dark squares. On it were thirty-two carved bits of wood. Joe put them down on the table and the dark-haired girl began to line them up.

  Zed said, “What is it?”

  Delia sneered. “You’re teasing, right?”

  Ruhan, the only one who knew about Zed’s past, said gently, “It’s a game. Chess.”

  Delia said to him, “Do you play?”

  Ruhan said, “Badly.”

  “Well, nobody else will play me at all. Let’s have a game.”

  “If I can explain the moves to Zed while we play.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care. You won’t distract me. Or beat me.”

  He didn’t. Everyone else drifted off. Zed watched, enthralled. After five minutes he didn’t have to think about how the pieces each moved. The game made patterns. After ten minutes, he could see them. When Delia won, Zed said, “Again. Please.”

  Ruhan looked at him oddly. “I have things to do, Zed. And you’re supposed to do those t-test problems.”

  Delia said, “I’ll play you, Zed.” There was an unpleasant quirk in the unscarred side of her mouth. She expected to crush him as she’d crushed Ruhan, and savored the prospect.

  She won three games. By the end of the third one, the sun was low over the dome wall to the west, and the look in Delia’s eyes had changed to grudging respect.

  “You’re a natural.”

  Zed said, “It’s all patterns. Like . . . I don’t know like what. Like a dance.” She swept the pieces into a cloth bag. “Grandmasters think like that. But you’re no grandmaster.”

  The link C7 had given him, with the forgotten t-test problems, suddenly shrilled.

  Zed jumped; Delia didn’t. C7’s voice said, “Zed, may I see you now?”

  He was in trouble for not doing his homework. Zed got heavily to his feet. Delia smiled nastily. Zed trudged toward C7’s building, carrying the link. Would he be punished? How?

  C7, sparkly and slimy and unreadable, said, “So you have an aptitude for chess.” “How did you know I—”

  “You will not do any more math or physics or history, Zed. You will play chess.” Zed gaped at him.

  “Far-seeing is the manipulation of data to create high-probability predictions. But the predictions themselves are only recognitions of existing patterns. Usually such predictions are arrived at through logic and mathematics, but some people can do so instinctively. Savants, they were once called.

  “First, you will play chess.”

  He played on a different link, which C7 gave him. When he had won five games in a row, the machine made the game harder. Zed didn’t know how it did that and didn’t care, although Ruhan was fascinated. Zed also played Delia, but the third time he beat her, she overturned the board and stalked off.

  Zed played chess all day, every day, until his big body could no longer stand to sit still. Then he must join the carpenter team, or run for the entire three miles of beach front, over hard-packed sand and water-broken pebbles, around the occasional boulder jutting from the water. Seagulls, sandpipers, rabbits from the woods, fishing teams in small rowboats off shore. No large ships, ever.

  But his dreams were not of chess. He dreamed of Karachi as C7 had shown it to Zed on Zed’s first day at The Resort: streets jammed with people and cars and bicycles and carts and strange humped animals. Smells and smoke and noise. Then all at once, silence. Nothing. Gone.

  One dusk, C7 summoned him. “Tomorrow we begin to look at far-seeing data in patterns, not algorithms.”

  “I don’t understand,” Zed said. Despite the healthy food, he was losing weight.

  “Data can be considered in packets, like chess pieces. Patterns. I don’t know if you have this ability, but—”

  “Do you have it?” The question came out blunter than he intended. C7 did not seem to notice.

  “Some of us do.”

  “How do you know so much about human brains? When we intend destruction, the ways we play chess, how our math works?”

  “Tomorrow morning we will begin far-seeing with patterns.”

  Zed planted his feet apart. “Tomorrow morning is Tim’s big breakfast with the algae stuff. That he’s been working on. The . . . the stuff.” Zed had paid scant attention to Leah’s happy chatter, or to anyone’s.

  “Yes. It is. I will see you after the breakfast.”

  Why didn’t he want to study far-seeing patterns? Zed couldn’t have said. He just knew he didn’t want to. C7 knew more about Zed’s brain than Zed did.

  “I will see you tomorrow,” C7 said. “This is important.�
��

  “Okay,” Zed said.

  He dreamed of New York as his history lessons had shown it to him, ships going in and out of the harbor, buildings piercing the sky, nine million people hurrying and working and loving and creating and killing each other. An incandescent glow, somehow serene, and all that was left was bare and silent ground.

  Tim, brother to gentle Leah, hosted the breakfast, which took place at the new seaside gazebo. The ocean whispered rhythmically on the sand. All 117 humans attended. The mothers had brought their children, who slept or nursed or chased seagulls. No aliens were present, but Zed knew they were watching. They were always watching.

  Men and women sat on the grass around the gazebo, the remains of their breakfast on plates beside them. Fish, vat-grown rice, a new and spicy algae, sweet berries. Zed sat at the far edge of the circle, between Ruhan and Leah. She said, “Zed, you look . . . so tired.”

  “You look terrible,” Ruhan said, more frankly. “Bagsy eyes. Too much chess?”

  “That’s it,” Zed said. It wasn’t.

  Leah said, “Maybe you should—oh, Tim’s going to start.”

  Tim and the algae team, dubbed the Goop Guys, placed four boxes on the table under the gazebo. The boxes were made of some alien stuff, smooth white cubes used everywhere in the camp for storage, carrying, and—if turned upside down—portable stools. They were lightweight but indestructible. Everyone quieted expectantly. The Goop Guys, two men and two women, beamed like sunrays.

  Tim said, “As you know, we’ve been working with different strains of algae and bacteria to create nanocellulose. Cellulose is the wall of plant cells, including algae—forgive me if I’m telling you things you already know!—and it’s the most abundant long-chain molecule on Earth. We already eat some kinds of algae as well as grow other nutrients on it in the vats. But by combining it with the right kind of bacteria and other chemicals, we have got the algae to manufacture nanocellulose, and then we’ve made it into this.”

  From one of the boxes Tim lifted a thin, faintly green sheet of thin material. It rippled in the slight breeze from the ocean. He said, “It’s very strong, it can be layered to make this.”