Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Ruhan said instead, “So how are the private lessons going? With C7?”

  They sat on a huge rock a few feet from shore. The day was cloudy and the sea choppy. Occasionally waves washed up the side of the rock and over Zed’s bare, extended feet. His mouth was filled with cake made of honey and rice and algae. “Mmmfff.”

  “Going that well, huh? Zed, what is C7 teaching you to do? There’s a lot of speculation.”

  Zed swallowed. “To far-see.”

  Ruhan gave a low whistle. Zed, who could not seem to learn to whistle, felt a silly stab of envy. “And can you far-see yet?”

  “No. Look at that big fish out there!”

  “Big, all right.” Ruhan shot him a complicated look.

  Zed was uncomfortably aware that he had not been entirely truthful. He could not far-see, not really, but sometimes he had flashes of . . . something. Images would suddenly click into place in his brain and he would see connections among them, configurations like those in chess, as if the future were a vast chessboard with a vast number of squares and a game had already started. There were so many possible ways the game could go, and yet only one most likely outcome, lost in the thousands of patterns the images suggested. No, not really lost, it was there. Somewhere. And he didn’t really “see” the patterns, either—it was more like he felt them, palpable rocks in a field he was clearing. Or something.

  Since none of this could be explained to Ruhan, or even to himself, Zed didn’t try. This was why he saw so little of Ruhan, of Leah, of Delia and June and Paul, these days. He didn’t belong, not anywhere. But, then, when had he ever belonged? He was relieved to see Ethan and his little brother, Peter, climbing over the rocks toward them. A distraction.

  Ethan had not threatened anyone with a knife in the month that he had been Inside, nor caused any other harm. Neither had he made any friends. J4 had set the boys to tending the goat herd, and they did that well enough. With good food, Ethan had filled out a little. Peter had not. Peter never spoke, never left his brother’s side, never looked less frightened than when he’d arrived.

  Ethan said, “This is our place. You go.”

  Ruhan frowned. Zed said, “We were just leaving anyway.”

  On shore, Ruhan said, “You shouldn’t let him talk to us that way. That’s not how we treat each other Inside.”

  Zed said, “Ruhan, why did you come Inside?”

  Ruhan stopped walking. “You never asked me that before. Not in all these months.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to.”

  “Yes. So your parents brought you here because it was a great opportunity and one girl had already left but said that no one was harmed Inside and the aliens were teaching advanced science and so your family decided all together that it would be okay.”

  “If you already heard my story from somebody else,” Ruhan said irritably, “why did you ask?”

  “Because Ethan and Peter didn’t get brought here by a family in order to learn physics. Those kids have been beaten and hurt and they’re escaping. Inside might kill them, but that was better than what they had Outside.”

  “How do you know all that? Did Ethan talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  Zed said, “I looked at them.”

  Ruhan, the young scientist, persisted. “But how do you know the—” “I just do. Let’s not talk anymore.”

  Ruhan was offended. Zed didn’t know how to make it right between them. They parted in confusion and unhappiness.

  That night, alone on the beach under a cold sky—it was late September—Zed finally opened Isobel’s note from months ago. In the moonlight he could just make out her blocky, all-capitals handwriting, written so hard in black ink that the letters nearly went through the paper.

  ASK THE ALIENS IF THEY WOULD DO JUNE 30th AGAIN. IF THEY WILL DESTROY AGAIN IF WE GET LIKE WE WERE, AGAIN.

  Dawn. Zed fell into a restless sleep just as the rest of his dorm was wakening. No one disturbed him. Nor did they walk or talk any more quietly than usual beyond the thin walls of his cubicle. All of them had their own projects to go to. Goop Guys, carpenter team, Wave Wonders, bread baking and rice-vat tending and lessons in the physics and biology and ecology that were supposed to create a better world.

  Zed slept again. Just before he woke, he dreamed: not of Karachi or New York or Beijing or Los Angeles vaporized, not this time. Instead he dreamed of Ethan and Peter. They stood in the middle of a street that was so featureless that, although it had shadowy shapes of buildings and other people, everything was so blurry that this could be any large city, anywhere. Only the two boys stood out clearly, every detail of their faces clear as water from a mountain spring. Ethan scowled. Peter turned his head and clutched at his brother. Something large was running toward them, someone with a stick to beat them with. Ethan turned his head again, to look straight into Zed’s sleeping eyes. Then, silently and in a burst of light, the boys were vaporized.

  Zed woke, sweating, clutching at the blanket. Not a city gone, not many cities gone. Only two lives, real and individual and separate as pebbles on the beach.

  And then it happened, just as C7 had said it would, after sleep. The vague configurations superimposed in messy semi-patterns in his mind—they all resolved. The sensation was as distinct as the click of a door opening, or the checkmate move in chess. Clear, inevitable, final. Zed was far-seeing.

  He threw on his clothes and went outside. Autumn sunlight streamed down, mellow and golden. A sweet salty breeze blew in from the sea. He walked along the path, gravel and sand, toward C7’s building. If C7 had called him on his link, Zed didn’t know it. He’d left the link on the beach at midnight, weighting down Isobel’s note.

  C7 said, “Good morning, Zed. You are late. What is that for?”

  “Yes,” Zed said. He raised the pickax he’d taken from the carpenter team’s tool shed and brought it down hard on C7. The remote’s words from last June rang in his mind: “It is alive, an extension of myself, like an arm would be for you . . . pain and the equivalent of armlessness.”

  The remote shattered. Without a second’s hesitation, Zed ran to the section of wall that brightened whenever the screen appeared, and brought the pickax down in the grid of tiny squares beneath it. The screen leapt into life to show the dome wall just as Zed’s savage blows destroyed the machinery that maintained it. On the screen, the high, dark wall around The Resort disappeared. Like Karachi, like New York, like Beijing.

  Only it wasn’t cities that had disappeared. He knew that now, knew it through to his marrow. It was individual lives—gone, along with all they might have been. Again and again he swung the pickax, the wall much easier to destroy than he’d expected. He was smashing the smashers of the world, smashing the shadowy person who had beaten Ethan and Peter, smashing his own father. What harm can the boy do in here?

  Screams outside. No, Inside, which had now become part of Outside. Zed stood, panting, watching the screen, ragged and broken at the bottom but still transmitting. It showed the camp that Isobel had said were Earthers trying to keep people away from aliens and Ruhan said were guards ensuring they could get in. Ruhan had been right; Isobel had pretended to be what she was not; none of that mattered now. In the camp, people stopped whatever they were doing to stare, cry out, rush forward. Some snatched up guns or even bigger weapons Zed could not identify.

  Delia rushed into the room and gasped at the pieces of C7 scattered around. She screamed, “What have you done?”

  “They will do it again,” Zed said. “Isobel was right. It all will happen again. We build the world again the same terrible ways as we did before, and then they do it again.” And then, “I far-saw.”

  “You’re a monster!” Delia cried and launched herself at him.

  Zed had expected to die—why wasn’t he dead already?—but from aliens, not a human girl. Delia was strong and a fighter. She gouged his eyes, kicked his balls, scratched at his face. But he outweighed he
r by sixty pounds and had a man’s muscles. He got her in a hold she could not break, not hurting her, and maintained it.

  “Let me go!”

  The screen changed to the inside of a ship, a sight so startling that Zed released Delia and they both stood, gaping. Zed knew it was the inside of the ship, although he didn’t understand how he knew. A long narrow room with unknowable machinery, and beings standing or sitting. Now he would be vaporized.

  He wasn’t. One being moved closer and said simply, “Why?” Delia cried. “He did it! Zed! Not us!”

  “Why?” the woman repeated. Because it was a woman. Human, or so close as to make little difference: cousin to humans. She had gray eyes, larger than humans’ eyes, and two flat nostrils instead of a nose. Her voice was C7’s.

  Zed said, “I far-saw.”

  C7 stared at him for a long time. There was no room around Zed, no Delia, no shattered robotic emissary. Only Zed and the woman, who finally said, “You are not ready. Your whole race is not ready.”

  “Go home,” Zed said.

  The screen blanked.

  III. Inside/Outside

  He doesn’t know how long he stood there, staring at nothing, before he moved again. Two men from Outside, that was now Inside, rushed in. They were dressed like soldiers. They seized Zed, who didn’t resist. “Come with us!”

  He went. Soldiers were rounding up the 119 people in The Resort and bringing them to the gazebo. People rushed here and there, carrying weapons or Resort projects or links or babies. Somehow in the melee Isobel spotted Zed.

  “Zed! Did you bring down the wall? A woman with a scar said it was you!”

  “Yes.” She was flushed and wide-eyed and beautiful. Zed felt nothing.

  She cried, “All the creepy aliens vanished! These traitors had no idea that you—I had no idea! Why didn’t you tell me you’re an Earther? You got our revenge!”

  “I’m not,” Zed said, “and it wasn’t revenge. Where is my mother?”

  “She died, Zed. Last month.”

  He nodded. Somehow, he’d known that. Part of far-seeing? He wasn’t sure, just as he wasn’t sure, and never would be, if the aliens who had changed the world had or had not been human.

  They had felt responsible for humanity’s fate and the long-term consequences of its actions: “So why is that your problem?” “I cannot tell you that yet.”

  They had come from very far away to stop what looked to them like self-destruction.

  They knew so much about the human mind—and yet not enough to understand what they had turned Zed into. Nor to understand that they could not really change the course of human history. Only humans could do that.

  “Isobel,” he said urgently, “tell the soldiers not to destroy anything. There are projects here that can—tell them the aliens are gone but the people here know how to—Isobel—”

  “What?”

  He said slowly, “Tell them that what the people here know, the knowledge in their heads, can make you all rich. Very, very rich.”

  The soldiers slightly loosened their grip on Zed’s arms. Isobel’s eyes gleamed.

  “I’ll tell Gary, who will tell the Commander. You’re a hero, Zed.”

  A hero. Already it was starting again: heroes, riches, rivalries. That was what Zed had to work with. Well, he would use whatever he had, to create change from the inside, not imposed from without. Although no one—certainly not Isobel—would understand that his act had not been revenge, no more than June 30th had been war.

  Already the far-seeing pattern in his mind was shifting, growing blurry. Did that mean it could be changed? He didn’t know, but he had to try.

  For the common good.

  PRETTY SOON THE FOUR HORSEMEN ARE GOING TO COME RIDING THROUGH

  The school hallway smells of chalk and Lysol and little kids. That smell don’t never change. What’s changed is that this time I’m called to school and missing time I can’t afford from my job ’cause of Carrie, not Sophie. Which don’t really make sense. What kind of trouble can a kindergartner get into?

  “Ms. Drucker? I’m Olivia Steffens,” Carrie’s teacher says. “We met at the Parents’ Open House.”

  We did, but we didn’t talk much. She was the property of the moms with sunglasses on top of their heads and highlights in their hair. I moved to this school district so’s my girls don’t have to go to that rat-ridden disgrace on Pelmar Street, but that don’t mean I really belong. I shake her hand, the nails manicured pink but one broken off. That helps a little bit.

  We sit in tiny chairs that she fits into better than I do. Slim, pretty, she can’t be any older than me—but then, I had Sophie at sixteen. I face a row of cut-out paper pumpkins on the wall. It’s October.

  Ms. Steffens says, “I’m so glad you could come today. There’s been an incident on the playground involving Carrie.”

  “What kind of incident?” If it was Sophie who’d made trouble, I’d already know. Fighting, taking lunch money—kid is on my mind all the time. Last Sunday I lit a candle to St. Pancras that we didn’t move here too late for Sophie to outgrow all the shit she learned at Pelmar Street.

  Ms. Steffens says, “Some older girls caught Carrie and another child, Tommy Winfield, on the playground at recess. The girls taunted them, and, well, two of the girls pulled Tommy’s and Carrie’s underwear off. I only learned about this when Tommy’s mother called me, quite upset.”

  And I didn’t learn about it at all. Little bastards. I keep my face rigid—you don’t never give people that sort of edge over you. “Is that all?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Carrie went through the rest of the day, apparently, with no underwear, but your older daughter is in the perpetrators’ fourth-grade classroom.”

  So this is about Sophie after all. I might of known.

  “She found them laughing about the state of the underwear and has threatened to ‘get even.’ Her teacher would have been at this conference, too, but she’s quite ill and the class had a substitute that day, who is now out of town. Carrie—”

  “Why wasn’t these kids being supervised on the playground?”

  “They were, of course, but apparently not adequately. The same illness that hit Sophie’s teacher has kept us really short-staffed for a week.”

  “You still got an obligation to protect my kids!”

  “I know that.” Ms. Steffens’s voice gets colder. “The girls responsible will be punished. But Carrie didn’t fight back, which is what I want to talk to you about. She did whatever they told her to, without even a protest. And when James LeBlanc hit her two weeks ago—the principal called you about that, I know—she also didn’t fight back. She just stood there and would have let him hit her again if the lunch lady hadn’t intervened.”

  I say, “What about the state of the underwear?”

  “What?”

  “You said the girls were laughing about the state of the underwear. What about it?”

  Ms. Steffens looks like she said too much, which she did. She don’t answer.

  I say, “Never mind.” The panties was probably ragged. Carrie needs new underwear, but Sophie’s shoes came first because you can see shoes and not underwear. Supposedly. “So what do you want me to do about it?”

  “Two things.” Ms. Steffens is tougher than she looks. “First, talk to Sophie—we cannot have revenge violence in this school. Second, consider having Carrie see someone about her passivity, which does not seem entirely normal. The school counselor, Dr. Parker, is—”

  “No.” I stand up. “Carrie don’t need no therapy. I’ll handle this.”

  “But—”

  “Thanks for letting me know.” I walk out, past the rows of pumpkins with crayoned-on faces, all grinning at me like demons.

  • • • •

  When the volcano blew up, I was three months pregnant with Carrie. It was one of the worst times in my life. Jim had just disappeared, no forwarding address, no ways for the Legal Aid lawyer to get me any child support. They never did find him
. Sophie’s daddy was in prison—still is—so no help there.

  I got lousy taste in men. Since Carrie was born, I just stay clear of all of them. Safer that way.

  So I wouldn’t of paid any attention to the volcano, except that nobody could not pay attention to it. It was everywhere, first on the news and then in the air. Even though it blew up somewhere in Indonesia, killing I don’t know how many people, the ash blew all over the world. Somebody at work told me that’s why the sunsets and sunrises were so gorgeous, red and orange, like the sky itself was on fire.

  • • • •

  I pick up Sophie from school and Carrie from after-school daycare. Carrie gives me her sweet smile. Two like her and my troubles would be over. But instead I got Sophie.

  “Carrie,” I say in the car, which is making that clunking noise again, “did some older girls pull off your underwear on the playground?”

  “Y . . . e . . . ss.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You weren’t there, you were at work,” she says, with five-year-old logic. Actually, she’s just barely five, the youngest kid in her class. I probably should of held her back to start kindergarten next year, but it’s a lot cheaper to pay for just after-school care.

  “Why didn’t you fight back?”

  Carrie just looks at me, her little face wrinkled, and I sigh. Sophie is, weirdly, easier to talk to.