Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “How did you know where to look for this new group?”

  “I didn’t. I came across the first sample by chance and then sampled her relatives.”

  “Is it very different, then, from the others?”

  “No,” Marianne said. “It’s just a branch of the L haplogroup.”

  “Why wasn’t it discovered before?”

  “It seems to be rare. The line must have mostly died out over time. It’s a very old line, one of the first divergences from Mitochondrial Eve.”

  “So there is nothing remarkable about your finding?”

  “Not in the least. There may even be more haplogroups out there that we just haven’t discovered yet.” She felt a perfect fool. They all looked at her as if expecting answers—Look! A blinding scientific light illuminates all!—and she had none. She was a workman scientist who had delivered a workmanlike job of fairly routine halotyping.

  “Sir, we have arrived,” said a junior officer. Marianne saw that his dress blues were buttoned wrong. They must have been donned in great haste. The tiny, human mishap made her feel better.

  Desai drew a deep, audible breath. Even he, who had lived through war and revolution, was nervous. Commands flew through the air from invisible people. The submarine door opened.

  Marianne stepped out into the alien ship.

  NOAH

  “Where’s Mom? Did you call her?” Elizabeth demanded.

  “Not yet,” Noah said.

  “Does she even know you’re in New York?”

  “Not yet.” He wanted to tell his sister to stop hammering at him, but he was her guest and so he couldn’t. Not that he’d ever been able to stand up to either of his siblings. His usual ploy had been to get them battering on each other and leave him alone. Maybe he could do that now. Or maybe not.

  “Noah, how long have you been in the city?”

  “A while.”

  “How long a while?”

  Noah put his hand in front of his face. “Lizzie, I’m really hungry. I didn’t eat today. Do you think you could—”

  “Don’t start your whining-and-helpless routine with me, Noah. It doesn’t work anymore.”

  Had it ever? Noah didn’t think so, not with Elizabeth. He tried to pull himself together. “Elizabeth, I haven’t called Mom yet and I am hungry. Please, could we defer this fight until I eat something? Anything, crackers or toast or—”

  “There’s sandwich stuff in the fridge. Help yourself. I’m going to call Mom, since at least one of us should let her know the prodigal son has deigned to turn up again. She’s been out of her mind with worry about you.”

  Noah doubted that. His mother was the strongest person he knew, followed by Elizabeth and Ryan. Together, the three could have toppled empires. Of course, they seldom were together, since they fought almost every time they met. Odd that they would go on meeting so often, when it produced such bitterness, and all over such inconsequential things. Politics, religion, funding for the arts, isolationism . . . He rummaged in Elizabeth’s messy refrigerator, full of plastic containers with their lids half off, some with dabs of rotting food stuck to the bottom. God, this one was growing mold. But he found bread, cheese, and some salsa that seemed all right.

  Elizabeth’s one-bedroom apartment echoed her fridge, which was another reason she and Mom fought. Unmade bed, dusty stacks of journals and newspapers, a vase of dead flowers probably sent by one of the boyfriends Elizabeth never fell in love with. Mom’s house north of the city, and Ryan and Connie’s near hers, were neat and bright. Housecleaners came weekly; food was bought from careful lists; possessions were replaced whenever they got shabby. Noah had no possessions, or at least as few as he could manage.

  Elizabeth clutched the phone. She dressed like a female FBI agent—short hair, dark pantsuit, no makeup—and was beautiful without trying. “Come on, Mom, pick up,” she muttered, “it’s a cell, it’s supposed to be portable.”

  “Maybe she’s in class,” Noah said. “Or a meeting.”

  “It’s Friday night, Noah.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “I’ll try the landline. She still has one.”

  Someone answered the landline on the first ring; Noah heard the chime stop from where he sat munching his sandwich. Then silence.

  “Hello? Hello? Mom?” Elizabeth said.

  The receiver on the other end clicked.

  “That’s odd,” Elizabeth said.

  “You probably got a wrong number.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full. I’m going to try again.”

  This time no one answered. Elizabeth scowled. “I don’t like that. Someone is there. I’m going to call Ryan.”

  Wasn’t Ryan somewhere in Canada doing field work? Or maybe Noah had the dates wrong. He’d only glanced at the e-mail from Ryan, accessed on a terminal at the public library. That day he’d been on sugarcane, and the temporary identity had been impatient and brusque.

  “Ryan? This is Elizabeth. Do you know where Mom is?. . . If I knew her schedule I wouldn’t be calling, would I?. . . Wait, wait, will you listen for a minute? I called her house and someone picked up and then clicked off, and when I called back a second later, it just rang. Will you go over there just to check it out?. . . Okay, yes, we’ll wait. Oh, Noah’s here . . . No, I’m not going to discuss with you right now the . . . Ryan. For chrissake, go check Mom’s house!” She clicked off.

  Noah wished he were someplace else. He wished he were somebody else. He wished he had some sugarcane.

  Elizabeth flounced into a chair and picked up a book. Tariffs, Borders, and the Survival of the United States, Noah read upside-down. Elizabeth was a passionate defender of isolationism. How many desperate people trying to crash the United States borders had she arrested today? Noah didn’t want to think about it.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ryan called back. Elizabeth put the call on speaker phone. “Liz, there are cop cars around Mom’s house. They wouldn’t let me in. A guy came out and said Mom isn’t dead or hurt or in trouble, and he couldn’t tell me any more than that.”

  “Okay.” Elizabeth wore her focused look, the one with which she directed border patrols. “I’ll try the college.”

  “I did. I reached Evan. He said that three men claiming to be FBI came and escorted her to the UN Special Mission Headquarters in Manhattan.”

  “That doesn’t make sense!”

  “I know. Listen, I’m coming over to your place.”

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “No! Don’t! Not until I get there and we decide what to do.”

  Noah listened to them argue, which went on until Ryan hung up. Of course Elizabeth, who worked for a quasi-military organization, wanted to call the cops. Of course Ryan, who worked for a wildlife organization that thought the government had completely messed up regulations on invasive botanical species, would shun the cops. Meanwhile Mom was probably just doing something connected with her college, a UN fundraiser or something, and that geek Evan had gotten it all wrong. Noah didn’t like Evan, who was only a few years older than he was. Evan was everything that Noah’s family thought Noah should be: smart, smooth, able to fit in anyplace, even into a country that wasn’t his own. And how come Elizabeth’s border patrols hadn’t kept out Evan Blanford?

  Never mind; Noah knew the answer.

  He said, “Can I do anything?”

  Elizabeth didn’t even answer him.

  MARIANNE

  She had seen many pictures of the Embassy. From the outside, the floating pavilion was beautiful in a stark sort of way. Hemispherical, multifaceted like a buckeyball (Had the Denebs learned that structure from humans or was it a mathematical universal?), the Embassy floated on a broad platform of some unknowable material. Facets and platform were blue but coated with the energy shield, which reflected sunlight so much that it glinted, a beacon of sorts. The aliens had certainly not tried to mask their presence. But there must be hidden machinery underneath, in the part known (maybe) only to Navy divers, since th
e entire huge structure had landed without a splash in the harbor. Plus, of course, the hidden passage through which the sub had come, presumably entailing a momentary interruption of the energy shield. Marianne knew she’d never find out the details.

  The room into which she and the others stepped from the submarine was featureless except for the bed of water upon which their sub floated, droplets sliding off its sleek sides. No windows or furniture, one door. A strange smell permeated the air: Disinfectant? Perfume? Alien body odor? Marianne’s heart began to beat oddly, too hard and too loud, with abrupt painful skips. Her breathing quickened.

  The door opened and a Deneb came out. At first, she couldn’t see it clearly; it was clouded by the same glittery energy shield that covered the Embassy. When her eyes adjusted, she gasped. The others also made sounds: a quick indrawn breath, a clicking of the tongue, what sounded like an actual whimper. The Russian translator whispered, “Bozhe moi!”

  The alien looked almost human. Almost, not quite. Tall, maybe six-two, the man—it was clearly male—had long, thin arms and legs, a deep chest, a human face but much larger eyes. His skin was coppery and his hair, long and tied back, was dark brown. Most striking were his eyes: larger than humans’, with huge dark pupils in a large expanse of white. He wore dark green clothing, a simple tunic top over loose, short trousers that exposed his spindly calves. His feet were bare, and perhaps the biggest shock of all was his feet, five-toed and broad, the nails cut short and square. Those feet looked so much like hers that she thought wildly: He could wear my shoes.

  “Hello,” the alien said, and it was not his voice but the mechanical one of the radio broadcasts, coming from the ceiling.

  “Hello,” Desai said, and bowed from the waist. “We are glad to finally meet. I am Secretary General Desai of the United Nations.”

  “Yes,” the alien “said,” and then added some trilling and clicking sounds in which his mouth did move. Immediately the ceiling said, “I welcome you in our own language.”

  Secretary Desai made the rest of the introductions with admirable calm. Marianne tried to fight her growing sense of unreality by recalling what she had read about the Denebs’ planet. She wished she’d paid more attention to the astronomy. The popular press had said that the alien star was a K-something (K zero? K two? She couldn’t remember). The alien home world had both less gravity and less light than Earth, at different wavelengths . . . orange, yes. The sun was an orange dwarf. Was this Deneb so tall because the gravity was less? Or maybe he was just a basketball player—

  Get a grip, Marianne.

  She did. The alien had said his name, an impossible collection of trilled phonemes, and immediately said, “Call me Ambassador Smith.” How had he chosen that—from a computer-generated list of English names? When Marianne had been in Beijing to give a paper, some Chinese translators had done that: “Call me Dan.” She had assumed the translators doubted her ability to pronounce their actual names correctly, and they had probably been right. But “Smith” for a starfarer . . .

  “You are Dr. Jenner?”

  “Yes, Ambassador.”

  “We wanted to talk with you, in particular. Will you please come this way, all of you?”

  They did, trailing like baby ducklings after the tall alien. The room beyond the single door had been fitted up like the waiting room of a very expensive medical specialist. Did they order the upholstered chairs and patterned rug on the Internet? Or manufacture them with some advanced nanotech deep in the bowels of the Embassy? The wall pictures were of famous skylines: New York, Shanghai, Dubai, Paris. Nothing in the room suggested alienness. Deliberate? Of course it was. Nobody here but us chickens.

  Marianne sat, digging the nails of one hand into the palm of the other to quiet her insane desire to giggle.

  “I would like to know of your recent publication, Dr. Jenner,” the ceiling said, while Ambassador Smith looked at her from his disconcertingly large eyes.

  “Certainly,” Marianne said, wondering where to begin. Where to begin? How much did they know about human genetics?

  Quite a lot, as it turned out. For the next twenty minutes Marianne explained, gestured, answered questions. The others listened silently except for the low murmur of the Chinese and Russian translators. Everyone, human and alien, looked attentive and courteous, although Marianne detected the slightly pursed lips of Ekaterina Zaytsev’s envy.

  Slowly it became clear that Smith already knew much of what Marianne was saying. His questions centered on where she had gotten her DNA samples.

  “They were volunteers,” Marianne said. “Collection booths were set up in an open-air market in India, because I happened to have a colleague working there, in a train station in London, and on my college campus in the United States. At each place, a nominal fee was paid for a quick scraping of tissue from the inside of the cheek. After we found the first L7 DNA in a sample from an American student from Indiana, we went to her relatives to ask for samples. They were very cooperative.”

  “This L7 sample, according to your paper, comes from a mutation that marks the strain of one of the oldest of mitochondrial groups.”

  Desai made a quick, startled shift on his chair.

  “That’s right,” Marianne said. “Evidence says that ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ had at least two daughters, and the line of one of them was L0 whereas the other line developed a mutation that became—” All at once she saw it, what Desai had already realized. She blinked at Smith and felt her mouth fall open, just as if she had no control over her jaw muscles, just as if the universe had been turned inside out, like a sock.

  NOAH

  An hour later, Ryan arrived at Elizabeth’s apartment. Repeated calls to their mother’s cell and landline had produced nothing. Ryan and Elizabeth sat on the sagging sofa, conferring quietly, their usual belligerence with each other replaced by shared concern. Noah sat across the room, listening.

  His brother had been short-changed in the looks department. Elizabeth was beautiful in a severe way and Noah knew he’d gotten the best of his parents’ genes: his dead father’s height and athletic build, his mother’s light-gray eyes flecked with gold. In contrast, Ryan was built like a fire hydrant: short, muscular, thickening into cylindricalness since his marriage; Connie was a good cook. At thirty, he was already balding. Ryan was smart, slow to change, humorless.

  Elizabeth said, “Tell me exactly what Evan said about the FBI taking her away. Word for word.”

  Ryan did, adding, “What about this—we call the FBI and ask them directly where she is and what’s going on.”

  “I tried that. The local field office said they didn’t know anything about it, but they’d make inquiries and get back to me. They haven’t.”

  “Of course not. We have to give them a reason to give out information, and on the way over I thought of two. We can say either that we’re going to the press, or that we need to reach her for a medical emergency.”

  Elizabeth said, “I don’t like the idea of threatening the feds—too potentially messy. The medical emergency might be better. We could say Connie’s developed a problem with her pregnancy. First grandchild, life-threatening complications—”

  Noah, startled, said, “Connie’s pregnant?”

  “Four months,” Ryan said. “If you ever read the emails everybody sends you, you might have gotten the news. You’re going to be an uncle.” His gaze said that Noah would make just as rotten an uncle as he did a son.

  Elizabeth said, “You need to make the phone call, Ryan. You’re the prospective father.”

  Ryan pulled out his cell, which looked as if it could contact deep space. The FBI office was closed. He left a message. FBI Headquarters in D.C. was also closed. He left another message. Before Ryan could say, “They’ll never get back to us” and so begin another argument with Elizabeth over governmental inefficiency, Noah said, “Did the Wildlife Society give you that cell for your job?”

  “It’s the International Wildlife Federation and yes, the phone has to
p-priority connections for the loosestrife invasion.”

  Noah ducked his head to hide his grin.

  Elizabeth guffawed. “Ryan, do you know how pretentious that sounds? An emergency hotline for weeds?”

  “Do you know how ignorant you sound? Purple loosestrife is taking over wetlands, which for your information are the most biologically diverse and productive ecologies on Earth. They’re being choked by this invasive species, with an economic impact of millions of dollars that—”

  “As if you cared about the United States economy! You’d open us up again to competition from cheap foreign sweatshop labor, just let American jobs go to—”

  “You can’t shut out the world, Elizabeth, not even if you get the aliens to give you the tech for their energy shields. I know that’s what you ‘border-defense’ types want—”

  “Yes, it is! Our economic survival is at stake, which makes border patrol a lot more important than a bunch of creeping flowers!”

  “Great, just great. Wall us off by keeping out new blood, new ideas, new trade partners. But let in invasive botanicals that encroach on farmland, so that eventually we can’t even feed everyone who would be imprisoned in your imported alien energy fields.”

  “Protected, not imprisoned. The way we’re protecting you now by keeping the Denebs off-shore.”

  “Oh, you’re doing that, are you? That was the aliens’ decision. Do you think that if they had wanted to plop their pavilion in the middle of Times Square that your Border Patrol could have stopped them? They’re a starfaring race, for chrissake!”

  “Nobody said the—”

  Noah shouted, which was the only way to get their attention, “Elizabeth, your cell is ringing! It says it’s Mom!”

  They both stared at the cell as if at a bomb, and then Elizabeth lunged for the phone. “Mom?”

  “It’s me. You called but—”

  “Where have you been? What happened? What was the FBI—”

  “I’ll tell you everything. Are you and Ryan still at your place?”