Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Instantly, I wanted to leap through the lens and shove her away from my baby. Leave her alone, you bitch, she’s mine! Pam was pretty but not gorgeous, a girl-next-door type if the door happened to open on a Hamptons beach house. Sun-streaked hair, fine sun lines around brown eyes, no makeup, vintage Lululemon workout clothes. On the street I’d never have noticed her. Her body looked nicely curved but neither buxom nor model-elegant. What did she have that I didn’t?

  Becky spat applesauce at her and the view vibrated—she must have been giggling. Pam giggled back.

  Stop. Leave her alone! She’s mine!

  He’s mine.

  By Sunday afternoon, when Jake brought Becky back, I had slept a total of three hours. All weekend I’d sat by the screen, seldom eating, scarcely going to the bathroom. Becky might wake in the night; there might be something to see. It was, as I’d discovered online, a one-bedroom apartment. Did Jake wheel her crib out into the living room so he and Pam could have sex in the bedroom? Or did they do it with Becky asleep beside them?

  By order of the court, ever since that stupid misunderstanding two months ago, Jake and I had no contact when Becky was returned on Sunday. Jake brought his sister with him every single week. Linda brought Becky into my building, and the two of us did not exchange a word.

  I unwrapped Becky and studied every inch of her, looking for—what? Anything amiss, a bruise or a dirty diaper or ripped pj’s. There was nothing, of course. Jake had always been a terrific father.

  The baby was asleep by seven o’clock. I called Trevor to come over; my call went straight to voice mail. Felicity had a date. TV was boring. I roamed the house, unable to sit for even a moment.

  Until I stopped cold, feeling my own mouth open into an O. After checking on Becky one last time, I brought the small, dedicated computer into the living room and connected it to my wall system.

  Trevor had made his fortune with Holo-Shop. He invented it, patented it, and sold it for an exorbitant sum plus royalties to Microsoft.

  There had been other holographic conversion programs on the market, but they were quirky, experimental, difficult to use. Holo-Shop was none of those, and the results were sharper than anything before it. You brought up a flat image on a screen, set the parameters you wanted, and touched the H-S icon. The image sprang from the screen in holographic three dimensions. It could be small or large, although the larger you made it, and the farther away the hologram from the screen, the lower the resolution. A three-inch rose was a miracle of dense perfection; a room-sized puppy was insubstantial vapor.

  “I am not sane, I thought, which was my last sane thought.”

  Holo-Shop could not evoke moving images, not yet, although Microsoft was reportedly working on it. Meanwhile, advertisers and artists and retail outlets manipulated holograms to sometimes powerful effect, sometimes laughable kitsch. Ditto the millions of users who wanted the pyramids to decorate their trendy Egyptian-themed living room but to disappear when they needed to set up a card table for poker.

  I ran the camera images of Jake as Becky saw him until I found a good one: Jake crouching on the floor, smiling, green eyes alight, arms extended for the baby to crawl into them. I froze the image, projected it with H-S, and fooled with it for a while. When it was done, Jake sat life-size on my bedroom floor, ghostly enough to see the dresser behind him, arms outstretched. The dresser didn’t matter. I got down on the floor and moved to sit in the circle of his arms.

  The second weekend that Jake had Becky, Pam was there all weekend. I watched them every minute that Becky was awake. They kissed in the kitchen, took Becky to the park, watched something on TV while she crawled around the floor. Pam wore Carson Davies boots in calfskin, $800. When Trevor called with tickets to the hottest play in town, I told him I had the flu. By Sunday afternoon, when Linda handed Becky back to me, I was groggy from sleeplessness, reeking from not bathing. I didn’t look at Linda looking at me.

  I once saw a show about toxoplasmosis, a parasitic disease. When mice contract it, they lose their natural fear of cats, making it easier for cats to eat them and the parasite to get into the cat. There was some evidence from brain scans that the mice realized this lack of fear was stupid, but they couldn’t help themselves. They were compelled to let the cats see them.

  At work I accomplished nothing. I’d set the retransmitter to send the images of Jake and Pam to my wrister; the hell with what Trevor said. Whenever I could, I ducked into the ladies’ room and brought up images to study. Felicity went from warmly supportive (“You don’t feel well? Oh, I can finish that copy, Amanda”) to faintly resentful (“You haven’t even started on the McMahon account stuff? But we got it over a week ago”).

  On Thursday night, Trevor called. I told him I had the flu. On Friday night, he let himself into my apartment with his emergency key. I barely had time to dart out of the bedroom and close the door.

  “Trevor! I told you I’m sick!”

  “It’s not flu season, Mandy.” His handsome face looked strange without its habitual smile.

  “If I say I have the flu, then I have the flu!”

  “I don’t think you do. You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Two restraining orders and a court fine weren’t enough?”

  “I’m not. I’m not stalking Jake.”

  “Swear on pussy willows’ pussies?” Our childhood oath; at ten years old it had seemed hilarious.

  “Swear on pussy willows’ pussies.”

  “Then you’re obsessing over the Opti-Cam images.”

  “Isn’t that my business?”

  Trevor lost his temper, something even rarer than losing his smile. “Oh, Christ, Mandy, you’re my business! Don’t you know that if I were straight, you and I would have married and had three Beckys of our own? Don’t you know how much better I’d have been for you than Jake? I can handle your intensity, he couldn’t. And I know when you’re lying to me.”

  “Please go, Trevor. I’m not up to this right now, really I’m not—”

  He left, slamming the door behind him. Once, nothing in the world would have kept me from following him. Trevor, my best friend, my support and confidant . . .

  On the screen in the bedroom, Becky lay in her infant seat, studying her bare toes. She must have just woken up. On the rug, barely within the circle of her unknowing vision, Jake and Pam made love.

  Frantically I keyed in his cell number. Anything to disrupt them, anything! The call went to voice mail. “Stop!” I screamed. “Stop, stop, stop!” The cell must have been on silent; they didn’t stop.

  I am not sane, I thought, which was my last sane thought.

  I called in sick to work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I never left my bedroom. It began to smell: of Becky’s diapers, piled in the corner whenever I changed her. Of a pizza molding on the dresser. Of me.

  On Thursday morning, Trevor returned.

  “Mandy?”

  “Go away! Go away!” I’d waited all week for 10:00 a.m. on Thursday! Trevor was not going to spoil this!

  “Mandy . . . oh my God.” He stood in the door to my bedroom. Becky gurgled in her swing. She was dressed in her snowsuit; the window stood open to help with the stench.

  “Go away!” I barely glanced at him—it was 9:57!

  “Mandy, darling, whatever you’re going to do. . .don’t.”

  9:58.

  “Let me help you. You know we’ve always helped each other.”

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “I won’t. You know I won’t if you don’t want me to. I’m just going to pick up Becky, okay? Here we go, sweetheart, come to Uncle Trevor . . .”

  9:59.

  Jake’s law office was superefficient. The partners would be gathering in his spacious office for the regular Thursday morning meeting. His wall screen would be on, ready to bring up the week’s data. He didn’t know I had his office password; I’d stolen it right after he told me he was leaving me, but despite everything that had led to the restraining order I’d never used it. Until now.r />
  Trevor said, “Mandy, what are you doing? Put down your cell if you’re calling the cops. I’m not here to force you to do anything you don’t want to do, I promise. Put down the cell.”

  10:00.

  I pushed both buttons simultaneously, my cell and the “Send” button on the computer. The phone number bypassed Jake’s office answering system—a direct line for privileged clients who needed to reach their lawyer instantly for some legal emergency. Jake would not recognize the number of my new, throwaway cell. His voice said, “Hello?”

  Now it would happen. Now I would get what I had been trying for so long, what I needed more than food or water or even Becky: I would get a reaction from Jake. The image of him and Pam naked on the rug would burst from the wall screen in his office in all its color-saturated, three-dimensional luridness, and Jake would know I had done it. That he could not erase me.

  “Hello? Who is this?” Jake said, still calm. “Can I help you?”

  I waited.

  Nothing happened.

  No one in the background gasped or laughed or said, “What the hell—?” Nothing.

  Jake tried one last “Can I help you?” and then cut the connection.

  Trevor, patting Becky’s back, said softly, “Mandy . . .”

  I cried, “Why didn’t it work?”

  Trevor’s face changed. His gaze moved to the computer. He knew, then; he was always smarter than anybody else I knew. He said, “Because Jake knew you’d do something like that. He put a detailed blocker on his system.”

  “I just wanted him to acknowledge I exist!”

  “Oh, he acknowledges it,” Trevor said. “How do you think he knew what you’d do?”

  He held Becky, now squirming in her snowsuit, away from him and stared into her eyes, first the right and then the left, again the right, again the left. “The technology’s available to everyone. Including Jake.”

  I don’t like to lie to Trevor. Sometimes, however, you have to do certain things you might not want to do. He went with me to the clinic, but of course he couldn’t sign any papers; he is not related to Becky. I told him I’d had both Opti-Cams removed. I swore on pussy willows.

  Now I stand in my bedroom, which sparkles with cleanliness. Becky sits in her swing, gurgling at me. I lean closer to her. My hair, clean and shining, swings toward her. My makeup has been professionally done. My cleavage gets help from a $200 bra. I smile at my baby.

  Jake is watching.

  YESTERDAY’S KIN

  For Maura, my scientific advisor

  “We see in these facts some deep organic bond, prevailing throughout space and time . . . This bond, on my theory, is simple inheritance.”

  —Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

  I: S MINUS 10.5 MONTHS

  MARIANNE

  The publication party was held in the dean’s office, which was supposed to be an honor. Oak-paneled room, sherry in little glasses, small-paned windows facing the quad—the room was trying hard to be a Commons someplace like Oxford or Cambridge, a task for which it was several centuries too late. The party was trying hard to look festive. Marianne’s colleagues, except for Evan and the dean, were trying hard not to look too envious, or at their watches.

  “Stop it,” Evan said at her from behind the cover of his raised glass.

  “Stop what?”

  “Pretending you hate this.”

  “I hate this,” Marianne said.

  “You don’t.”

  He was half right. She didn’t like parties but she was proud of her paper, which had been achieved despite two years of gene sequencers that kept breaking down, inept graduate students who contaminated samples with their own DNA, murmurs of “Lucky find” from Baskell, with whom she’d never gotten along. Baskell, an old-guard physicist, saw her as a bitch who refused to defer to rank or back down gracefully in an argument. Many people, Marianne knew, saw her as some variant of this. The list included two of her three grown children.

  Outside the open casements, students lounged on the grass in the mellow October sunshine. Three girls in cut-off jeans played Frisbee, leaping at the blue flying saucer and checking to see if the boys sitting on the stone wall were watching. Feinberg and Davidson, from Physics, walked by, arguing amiably. Marianne wished she were with them instead of at her own party.

  “Oh God,” she said to Evan, “Curtis just walked in.”

  The president of the university made his ponderous way across the room. Once he had been an historian, which might be why he reminded Marianne of Henry VIII. Now he was a campus politician, as power-mad as Henry but stuck at a second-rate university where there wasn’t much power to be had. Marianne held against him not his personality but his mind; unlike Henry, he was not all that bright. And he spoke in clichés.

  “Dr. Jenner,” he said. “Congratulations. A feather in your cap, and a credit to us all.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Curtis,” Marianne said.

  “Oh, ‘Ed,’ please.”

  “Ed.” She didn’t offer her own first name, curious to see if he remembered it. He didn’t. Marianne sipped her sherry.

  Evan jumped into the awkward silence. “I’m Dr. Blanford, visiting post-doc,” he said in his plummy British accent. “We’re all so proud of Marianne’s work.”

  “Yes! And I’d love for you to explain to me your innovative process, ah, Marianne.”

  He didn’t have a clue. His secretary had probably reminded him that he had to put in an appearance at the party: Dean of Science’s office, 4:30 Friday, in honor of that publication by Dr. Jenner in—quick look at e-mail—in Nature, very prestigious, none of our scientists have published there before . . .

  “Oh,” Marianne said as Evan poked her discreetly in the side: Play nice! “it wasn’t so much an innovation in process as unexpected results from known procedures. My assistants and I discovered a new haplogroup of mitochondrial DNA. Previously it was thought that Homo sapiens consisted of thirty haplogroups, and we found a thirty-first.”

  “By sequencing a sample of contemporary genes, you know,” Evan said helpfully. “Sequencing and verifying.”

  Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent, and Dr. Curtis looked suitably impressed. “Of course, of course. Splendid results. A star in your crown.”

  “It’s yet another haplogroup descended,” Evan said with malicious helpfulness, “from humanity’s common female ancestor 150,000 years ago. ‘Mitochondrial Eve.’ ”

  Dr. Curtis brightened. There had been a TV program about Mitochondrial Eve, Marianne remembered, featuring a buxom actress in a leopard-skin sarong. “Oh, yes! Wasn’t that—”

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go in there!” someone shrilled in the corridor outside the room. All conversation ceased. Heads swiveled toward three men in dark suits pushing their way past the knot of graduate students by the door. The three men wore guns.

  Another school shooting, Marianne thought, where can I—

  “Dr. Marianne Jenner?” the tallest of the three men said, flashing a badge. “I’m Special Agent Douglas Katz of the F.B.I. We’d like you to come with us.”

  Marianne said, “Am I under arrest?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. We are acting under direct order of the president of the United States. We’re here to escort you to New York.”

  Evan had taken Marianne’s hand—she wasn’t sure just when. There was nothing romantic in the hand-clasp, nor anything sexual. Evan, twenty-five years her junior and discreetly gay, was a friend, an ally, the only other evolutionary biologist in the department and the only one who shared Marianne’s cynical sense of humor. “Or so we thought,” they said to each other whenever any hypothesis proved wrong. Or so we thought . . . His fingers felt warm and reassuring around her suddenly icy ones.

  “Why am I going to New York?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t tell you that. But it is a matter of national security.”

  “Me? What possible reason—?”

  Special A
gent Katz almost, but not quite, hid his impatience at her questions. “I wouldn’t know, ma’am. My orders are to escort you to UN Special Mission Headquarters in Manhattan.”

  Marianne looked at her gaping colleagues, at the wide-eyed grad students, at Dr. Curtis, who was already figuring how this could be turned to the advantage of the university. She freed her hand from Evan’s, and managed to keep her voice steady.

  “Please excuse me, Dr. Curtis, Dean. It seems I’m needed for something connected with . . . with the aliens.”

  NOAH

  One more time, Noah Jenner rattled the doorknob to the apartment. It felt greasy from too many unwashed palms, and it was still locked. But he knew that Emily was in there. That was the kind of thing he was always, somehow, right about. He was right about things that didn’t do him any good.

  “Emily,” he said softly through the door, “please open up.”

  Nothing.

  “Emily, I have nowhere else to go.”

  Nothing.

  “I’ll stop, I promise. I won’t do sugarcane ever again.”

  The door opened a crack, chain still in place, and Emily’s despairing face appeared. She wasn’t the kind of girl given to dramatic fury, but her quiet despair was even harder to bear. Not that Noah didn’t deserve it. He knew he did. Her fair hair hung limply on either side of her long, sad face. She wore the green bathrobe he liked, with the butterfly embroidered on the left shoulder.

  “You won’t stop,” Emily said. “You can’t. You’re an addict.”

  “It’s not an addictive drug. You know that.”

  “Not physically, maybe. But it is for you. You won’t give it up. I’ll never know who you really are.”

  “I—”

  “I’m sorry, Noah. But—go away.” She closed and relocked the door.

  Noah stood slumped against the dingy wall, waiting to see if anything else would happen. Nothing did. Eventually, as soon as he mustered the energy, he would have to go away.