Fictions

by Nancy Kress

“Yes. You sound funny. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. No. Stay there, I’ll get a cab, but it may be a few hours yet.”

  “But where—”

  The phone went dead. Ryan and Elizabeth stared at each other. Into the silence, Noah said, “Oh yeah, Mom. Noah’s here, too.”

  MARIANNE

  “You are surprised,” Ambassador Smith had said, unnecessarily.

  Courtesy had been swamped in shock. “You’re human? From Earth?”

  “Yes. We think so.”

  “Your mitochondrial DNA matches the L7 sequence? No, wait—your whole biology matches ours?”

  “There are some differences, of course. We—”

  The Russian delegate stood up so quickly her chair fell over. She spat something which her translator gave as a milder, “ ‘I do not understand how this is possible.’ ”

  “I will explain,” Smith said. “Please sit down.”

  Ekaterina Zaytsev did not sit. All at once Marianne wondered if the energy field enveloping Smith was weaponized.

  Smith said, “We have known for millennia that we did not originate on World. There is no fossil record of us going back more than 150,000 Earth years. The life forms native to World are DNA-based, but there is no direct genetic link. We know that someone took us from somewhere else and—”

  “Why?” Marianne blurted. “Why would they do that? And who is ‘they’ ?”

  Before Smith could answer, Zaytsev said, “Why should your planet’s native life-forms be DNA-based at all? If this story is not a collection of lies?”

  “Panspermia,” Smith said. “And we don’t know why we were seeded from Earth to World. An experiment, perhaps, by a race now gone. We—”

  The Chinese ambassador was murmuring to his translator. The translator, American and too upset to observe protocol, interrupted Smith.

  “Mr. Zhu asks how, if you are from Earth, you progressed to space travel so much faster than we have? If your brains are the same as ours?”

  “Our evolution was different.”

  Marianne darted in with, “How? Why? A hundred fifty thousand years is not enough for more than superficial evolutionary changes!”

  “Which we have,” Smith said, still in that mechanical voice that Marianne suddenly hated. Its very detachment sounded condescending. “World’s gravity, for instance, is one-tenth less than Earth’s, and our internal organs and skeletons have adjusted. World is warmer than Earth, and you can see that we carry little body fat. Our eyes are much larger than yours—we needed to gather all the light we can on a planet dimmer than yours. Most plants on World are dark, to gather as many photons as possible. We are dazzled by the colors on Earth.”

  He smiled, and Marianne remembered that all human cultures share certain facial expressions: happiness, disgust, anger.

  Smith continued, “But when I said that our evolution differed from yours, I was referring to social evolution. World is a more benign planet than Earth. Little axial tilt, many easy-to-domesticate grains, much food, few predators. We had no Ice Age. We settled into agriculture over a hundred thousand years before you did.”

  Over a hundred thousand years more of settled communities, of cities, with their greater specialization and intellectual cross-fertilization. While Marianne’s ancestors fifteen thousand years ago had still been hunting mastodons and gathering berries, these cousins across the galaxy might have been exploring quantum physics. But—

  She said, “Then with such an environment, you must have had an overpopulation problem. All easy ecological niches rapidly become overpopulated!”

  “Yes. But we had one more advantage.” Smith paused; he was giving the translators time to catch up, and she guessed what that meant even before he spoke again.

  “The group of us seeded on World—and we estimate it was no more than a thousand—were all closely related. Most likely they were all brought from one place. Our gene pool does not show as much diversity as yours. More important, the exiles—or at least a large number of them—happened to be unusually mild-natured and cooperative. You might say, ‘sensitive to other’s suffering.’ We have had wars, but not very many, and not early on. We were able to control the population problem, once we saw it coming, with voluntary measures. And, of course, those sub-groups that worked together best, made the earliest scientific advances and flourished most.”

  “You replaced evolution of the fittest with evolution of the most cooperative,” Marianne said, and thought: There goes Darwin.

  “You may say that.”

  “I not say this,” Zaytsev said, without waiting for her translator. Her face twisted. “How you know you come from Earth? And how know where is Earth?”

  “Whoever took us to World left titanium tablets, practically indestructible, with diagrams. Eventually we learned enough astronomy to interpret them.”

  Moses on the mountain, Marianne thought. How conveniently neat! Profound distrust swamped her, followed by profound belief. Because, after all, here the aliens were, having arrived in a starship, and they certainly looked human. Although—

  She said abruptly, “Will you give us blood samples? Tissue? Permit medical scans?”

  “Yes.”

  The agreement was given so simply, so completely, that everyone fell silent. Marianne’s dazed mind tried to find the scam in this, the possible nefarious treachery, and failed. It was quiet Zhu Feng who, through his translator, finally broke the silence.

  “Tell us, please, honored envoy, why you are here at all?”

  Again Smith answered simply. “To save you all from destruction.”

  NOAH

  Noah slipped out of the apartment feeling terrible but not terrible enough to stay. First transgression: If Mom returned earlier than she’d said, he wouldn’t be there when she arrived. Second transgression: He’d taken twenty dollars from Elizabeth’s purse. Third transgression: He was going to buy sugarcane.

  But he’d left Elizabeth and Ryan arguing yet again about isolationism, the same argument in the same words as when he’d seen them last, four months ago. Elizabeth pulled out statistics showing that the United States’ only option for survival, including avoiding revolution, was to retain and regain jobs within its borders, impose huge tariffs on imports, and rebuild infrastructure. Ryan trotted out different statistics proving that only globalization could, after a period of disruption, bring economic benefits in the long run, including a fresh flow of workers into a graying America. They had gotten to the point of hurtling words at each other like “Fascist” and “sloppy thinker,” when Noah left.

  He walked the three blocks to Broadway. It was, as always, brightly lit, but the gyro places and electronics shops and restaurants, their outside tables empty and chained in the cold dusk, looked shabbier than he remembered. Some stores were not just shielded by grills but boarded up. He kept walking east, toward Central Park.

  The dealer huddled in a doorway. He wasn’t more than fifteen. Sugarcane was a low-cost, low-profit drug, not worth the gangs’ time, let alone that of organized crime. The kid was a freelance amateur, and God knows what the sugarcane was cut with.

  Noah bought it anyway. In the nearest Greek place he bought a gyro as the price of the key to the bathroom and locked himself in. The room was windowless but surprisingly clean. The testing set that Noah carried everywhere showed him the unexpected: The sugarcane was cut only with actual sugar, and only by about fifty percent.

  “Thank you, Lord,” he said to the toilet, snorted twice his usual dose, and went back to his table to eat the cooling gyro and wait.

  The drug took him quickly, as it always did. First came a smooth feeling, as if the synapses of his brain were filling with rich, thick cream. Then: One moment he was Noah Jenner, misfit, and the next he wasn’t. He felt like a prosperous small businessman of some type, a shop owner maybe, financially secure and blissfully uncomplicated. A contented, centered person who never questioned who he was or where he was going, who fit in wherever he happened to be.
The sort of man who could eat his gyro and gaze out the window without a confusing thought in his head.

  Which he did, munching away, the juicy meat and mild spices satisfying in his mouth, for a quiet half hour.

  Except—something was happening on the street.

  A group of people streamed down Broadway. A parade. No, a mob. They carried torches, of all things, and something larger on fire, carried high . . . Now Noah could hear shouting. The thing carried high was an effigy made of straw and rags, looking like the alien in a hundred bad movies: big blank head, huge eyes, spindly body of pale green. It stood in a small metal tub atop a board. Someone touched a torch to the straw and set the effigy on fire.

  Why? As far as Noah could see, the aliens weren’t bothering anybody. They were even good for business. It was just an excuse for people floundering in a bad economy to vent their anger—

  Were these his thoughts? Noah’s? Who was he now?

  Police sirens screamed farther down the street. Cops appeared on foot, in riot gear. A public-address system blared, its words audible even through the shop window: “Disperse now! Open flame is not allowed on the streets! You do not have a parade permit! Disperse now!”

  Someone threw something heavy, and the other window of the gyro place shattered.

  Glass rained down on the empty tables in that corner. Noah jerked upright and raced to the back of the tiny restaurant, away from the windows. The cook was shouting in Greek. People left the parade, or joined it from side streets, and began to hurl rocks and bottles at the police. The cops retreated to the walls and doorways across Broadway and took out grenades of tear gas.

  On the sidewalk outside, a small child stumbled by, crying and bleeding and terrified.

  The person who Noah was now didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He ran out into the street, grabbed the child, and ran back into the restaurant. He wasn’t quite fast enough to escape the spreading gas. His nose and eyes shrieked in agony, even as he held his breath and thrust the child’s head under his jacket.

  Into the tiny kitchen, following the fleeing cook and waiter, and out the back door to an alley of overflowing garbage cans. Noah kept running, even though his agonized vision was blurring. Store owners had all locked their doors. But he had outrun the tear gas, and now a woman was leaning out of the window of her second-floor apartment, craning her neck to see through brick walls to the action two streets away. Gunfire sounded. Over its echo off the steel and stone canyons, Noah shouted up, “A child got gassed! Please—throw down a bottle of water!”

  She nodded and disappeared. To his surprise, she actually appeared on the street to help a stranger, carrying a water bottle and a towel. “I’m a nurse, let me have him . . . Aahh.” Expertly she bathed the child’s eyes, and then Noah’s, just as if a battle wasn’t going on within hearing if not within sight.

  “Thank you,” Noah gasped. “It was. . .” He stopped.

  Something was happening in his head, and it wasn’t due to the sugarcane. He felt an immediate and powerful kinship with this woman. How was that possible? He’d never seen her before. Nor was the attraction romantic—she was in late middle age, with graying hair and a drooping belly. But when she smiled at him and said, “You don’t need the ER,” something turned over in Noah’s heart. What the fuck?

  It must be the sugarcane.

  But the feeling didn’t have the creamy, slightly unreal feel of sugarcane.

  She was still talking. “You probably couldn’t get into any ER anyway, they’ll all be jammed. I know—I was an ER nurse. But this kid’ll be fine. He got almost none of the gas. Just take him home and calm him down.”

  “Who . . . who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” And she was gone, backing into the vestibule of her apartment building, the door locking automatically behind her. Restoring the anonymity of New York.

  Whatever sense of weird recognition and bonding Noah had felt with her, it obviously had not been mutual. He tried to shake off the feeling and concentrate on the kid, who was wailing like a hurricane. The effortless competence bestowed by the sugarcane was slipping away. Noah knew nothing about children. He made a few ineffective soothing noises and picked up the child, who kicked him.

  More police sirens in the distance. Eventually he found a precinct station, staffed only by a scared-looking civilian desk clerk; probably everyone else was at the riot. Noah left the kid there. Somebody would be looking for him. Noah walked back to West End Avenue, crossed it, and headed northeast to Elizabeth’s apartment. His eyes still stung, but not too badly. He had escaped the worst of the gas cloud.

  Elizabeth answered the door. “Where the hell did you go? Damn it, Noah, Mom’s arriving any minute! She texted!”

  “Well, I’m here now, right?”

  “Yes, you’re here now, but of all the shit-brained times to go out for a stroll! How did you tear your jacket?”

  “Dunno.” Neither his sister nor his brother seemed aware that eight blocks away there had been—maybe still was—an anti-alien riot going on. Noah didn’t feel like informing them.

  Ryan held his phone. “She’s here. She texted. I’ll go down.”

  Elizabeth said, “Ryan, she can probably pay off a cab and take an elevator by herself.”

  Ryan went anyway. He had always been their mother’s favorite, Noah thought wearily. Except around Elizabeth, Ryan was affable, smooth, easy to get along with. His wife was charming, in an exaggeratedly feminine sort of way. They were going to give Marianne a grandchild.

  It was an effort to focus on his family. His mind kept going back to that odd, unprecedented feeling of kinship with a person he had never seen before and probably had nothing whatsoever in common with. What was that all about?

  “Elizabeth,” his mother said. “And Noah! I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve got . . . I’ve got a lot to tell you all. I—”

  And his mother, who was always equal to anything, abruptly turned pale and fainted.

  MARIANNE

  Stupid, stupid—she never passed out! To the three faces clustered above her like balloons on sticks she said irritably, “It’s nothing—just hypoglycemia. I haven’t eaten since this morning. Elizabeth, if you have some juice or something. . .”

  Juice was produced, crackers, slightly moldy cheese.

  Marianne ate. Ryan said, “I didn’t know you were hypoglycemic, Mom.”

  “I’m fine. Just not all that young anymore.” She put down her glass and regarded her three children.

  Elizabeth, scowling, looked so much like Kyle—was that why Marianne and Elizabeth had never gotten along? Her gorgeous alcoholic husband, the mistake of Marianne’s life, had been dead for fifteen years. Yet here he was again, ready to poke holes in anything Marianne said.

  Ryan, plain next to his beautiful sister but so much easier to love. Everybody loved Ryan, except Elizabeth.

  And Noah, problem child, she and Kyle’s last-ditch effort to save their doomed marriage. Noah was drifting and, she knew without being able to help, profoundly unhappy.

  Were all three of them, and everybody else on the planet, going to die, unless humans and Denebs together could prevent it?

  She hadn’t fainted from hypoglycemia, which she didn’t have. She had fainted from sheer delayed, maternal terror at the idea that her children might all perish. But she was not going to say that to her kids. And the fainting wasn’t going to happen again.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said unnecessarily. But how to begin something like this? “I’ve been talking to the aliens. In the Embassy.”

  “We know, Evan told us,” Noah said, at the same moment that Elizabeth, quicker, said sharply, “Inside?”

  “Yes. The Deneb ambassador requested me.”

  “Requested you? Why?”

  “Because of the paper I just published. The aliens— Did any of you read the copies of my paper I emailed you?”

  “I did,” Ryan said. Elizabeth and Noah said nothing. Well, Ryan was the scientist.

/>   “It was about tracing human genetic diversity through mitochondrial evolution. Thirty mitochondrial haplogroups had been discovered. I found the thirty-first. That wouldn’t really be a big deal, except that—in a few days this will be common knowledge, but you must keep it among ourselves until the ambassador announces—the aliens belong to the thirty-first group, L7. They’re human.”

  Silence.

  “Didn’t you understand what I just—”

  Elizabeth and Ryan erupted with questions, expressions of disbelief, arm waving. Only Noah sat quietly, clearly puzzled. Marianne explained what Ambassador Smith—impossible name!—had told her. When she got to the part about the race that had taken humans to “World” also leaving titanium tablets engraved with astronomical diagrams, Elizabeth exploded. “Come on, Mom, this fandango makes no sense!”

  “The Denebs are here,” Marianne pointed out. “They did find us. And the Denebs are going to give tissue samples. Under our strict human supervision. They’re expanding the Embassy and allowing in humans. Lots of humans, to examine their biology and to work with our scientists.”

  “Work on what?” Ryan said gently. “Mom, this can’t be good. They’re an invasive species.”

  “Didn’t you hear a word I said?” Marianne said. God, if Ryan, the scientist, could not accept truth, how would humanity as a whole? “They’re not ‘invasive,’ or at least not if our testing confirms the ambassador’s story. They’re native to Earth.”

  “An invasive species is native to Earth. It’s just not in the ecological niche it evolved for.”

  Elizabeth said, “Ryan, if you bring up purple loosestrife, I swear I’m going to clip you one. Mom, did anybody think to ask this ambassador the basic question of why they’re here in the first place?”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot. Of course we did. There’s a—” She stopped and bit her lip, knowing how this would sound. “You all know what panspermia is?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth.

  “Of course.” Ryan.

  “No.” Noah.

  “It’s the idea that original life in the galaxy”—whatever that actually was, all the textbooks would now need to be rewritten—“came from drifting clouds of organic molecules. We know that such molecules exist inside meteors and comets and that they can, under some circumstances, survive entry into atmospheres. Some scientists, like Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking, have even endorsed the idea that new biomolecules are still being carried down to Earth. The Denebs say that there is a huge, drifting cloud of spores—well, they’re technically not spores, but I’ll come to that in a minute—drifting toward Earth. Or, rather, we’re speeding toward it, since the solar system rotates around the center of the galaxy and the entire galaxy moves through space relative to the cosmic microwave background. Anyway, in ten months from now, Earth and this spore cloud meet. And the spores are deadly to humans.”