Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Elizabeth said skeptically, “And they know this how?”

  “Because two of their colony planets lay in the path of the cloud and were already exposed. Both populations were completely destroyed. The Denebs have recordings. Then they sent unmanned probes to capture samples, which they brought with them. They say the samples are a virus, or something like a virus, but encapsulated in a coating that isn’t like anything viruses can usually make. Together, aliens and humans are going to find a vaccine or a cure.”

  More silence. Then all three of her children spoke together, but in such different tones that they might have been discussing entirely different topics.

  Ryan: “In ten months? A vaccine or cure for an unknown pathogen in ten months? It took the CDC six months just to fully identify the bacterium in Legionnaires’ disease!”

  Elizabeth: “If they’re so technologically superior, they don’t need us to develop any sort of ‘cure’ !”

  Noah: “What do the spores do to people?”

  Marianne answered Noah first, because his question was the simplest. “They act like viruses, taking over cellular machinery to reproduce. They invade the lungs and multiply and then . . . then victims can’t breathe. It only takes a few days.” A terrible, painful death. A sudden horror came into her mind: her three children gasping for breath as their lungs were swamped with fluid, until they literally drowned. All of them.

  “Mom,” Ryan said gently, “are you all right? Elizabeth, do you have any wine or anything?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t drink. Marianne suddenly, ridiculously, clung to that fact, as if it could right the world: Her two-fisted cop daughter, whose martial-arts training enabled her to take down a two-hundred-fifty-pound attacker, had a Victorian lady’s fastidiousness about alcohol. Stereotypes didn’t hold. The world was more complicated than that. The unexpected existed—a Border Patrol section chief did not drink!—and therefore an unexpected solution could be found to this unexpected problem. Yes.

  She wasn’t making sense, and knew it, and didn’t care. Right now, she needed hope more than sense. The Denebs, with technology an order of magnitude beyond humans, couldn’t deal with the spore cloud, but Elizabeth didn’t drink and, therefore, together Marianne and Smith and—throw in the president and WHO and the CDC and USAMRIID, why not—could defeat mindless space-floating dormant viruses.

  Noah said curiously, “What are you smiling about, Mom?”

  “Nothing.” She could never explain.

  Elizabeth blurted, “So even if all this shit is true, what the fuck makes the Dennies think that we can help them?”

  Elizabeth didn’t drink like a cop, but she swore like one. Marianne said, “They don’t know that we can. But their biological sciences aren’t much more advanced than ours, unlike their physical sciences. And the spore cloud hits Earth next September. The Denebs have twenty-five years.”

  “Do you believe that their biological sciences aren’t as advanced as their physics and engineering?”

  “I have no reason to disbelieve it.”

  “If it’s true, then we’re their lab rats! They’ll test whatever they come up with on us, and then they’ll sit back in orbit or somewhere to see if it works before taking it home to their own planet!”

  “That’s one way to think of it,” Marianne said, knowing that this was exactly how a large part of the media would think of it. “Or you could think of it as a rescue mission. They’re trying to help us while there’s time, if not much time.”

  Ryan said, “Why do they want you? You’re not a virologist.”

  “I don’t know,” Marianne said.

  Elizabeth erupted once more, leaping up to pace around the room and punch at the air. “I don’t believe it. Not any of it, including the so-called ‘cloud.’ There are things they aren’t telling us. But you, Mom—you just swallow whole anything they say! You’re unbelievable!”

  Before Marianne could answer, Noah said, “I believe you, Mom,” and gave her his absolutely enchanting smile. He had never really become aware of the power of that smile. It conferred acceptance, forgiveness, trust, the sweet sadness of fading sunlight. “All of us believe everything you said.

  “We just don’t want to.”

  MARIANNE

  Noah was right. Ryan was right. Elizabeth was wrong.

  The spore cloud existed. Although technically not spores, that was the word the Deneb translator gave out, and the word stuck among astronomers because it was a term they already knew. As soon as the clouds’ coordinates, composition, and speed were given by the Denebs to the UN, astronomers around the globe found it through spectral analysis and the dimming of stars behind it. Actually, they had known of its existence all along but had assumed it was just another dust cloud too small and too cool to be incubating stars. Its trajectory would bring it in contact with Earth when the Denebs said, in approximately ten months.

  Noah was right in saying that people did not want to believe this. The media erupted into three factions. The most radical declared the “spore cloud” to be just harmless dust and the Denebs plotting, in conspiracy with the UN and possibly several governments, to take over Earth for various evil and sometimes inventive purposes. The second faction believed that the spore threat might be real but that, echoing Elizabeth, humanity would become “lab rats” in alien experiments to find some sort of solution, without benefit to Earth. The third group, the most scientifically literate, focused on a more immediate issue: They did not want the spore samples brought to Earth for research, calling them the real danger.

  Marianne suspected the samples were already here. NASA had never detected shuttles or other craft going between the ship in orbit around the moon and the Embassy. Whatever the aliens wanted here, probably already was.

  Teams of scientists descended on New York. Data was presented to the UN, the only body that Smith would deal with directly. Everyone kept saying that time was of the essence. Marianne, prevented from resuming teaching duties by the insistent reporters clinging to her like lint, stayed in Elizabeth’s apartment and waited. Smith had given her a private communication device, which no one except the UN Special Mission knew about. Sometimes as she watched TV or cleaned Elizabeth’s messy apartment, Marianne pondered this: An alien had given her his phone number and asked her to wait. It was almost like dating again.

  Time is of the essence! Time is of the essence! A few weeks went by in negotiations she knew nothing of. Marianne reflected on the word “essence.” Elizabeth worked incredible hours; the Border Patrol had been called in to help keep “undesirables” away from the Harbor, assisting the Coast Guard, INS, NYPD, and whoever else the city deemed pertinent. Noah had left again and did not call.

  Evan was with her at the apartment when the Deneb communication device rang. “What’s that?” he said off-handedly, wiping his mouth. He had brought department gossip and bags of sushi. The kitchen table was littered with tuna tataki, cucumber wraps, and hotategai.

  Marianne said, “It’s a phone call from the Deneb ambassador.”

  Evan stopped wiping and, paper napkin suspended, stared at her.

  She put the tiny device on the table, as instructed, and spoke the code word. A mechanical voice said, “Dr. Marianne Jenner?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Ambassador Smith. We have reached an agreement with your UN to proceed, and will be expanding our facilities immediately. I would like you to head one part of the research.”

  “Ambassador, I am not an epidemiologist, not an immunologist, not a physician. There are many others who—”

  “Yes. We don’t want you to work on pathogens or with patients. We want you to identify human volunteers who belong to the haplogroup you discovered, L7.”

  Something icy slid along Marianne’s spine. “Why? There hasn’t been very much genetic drift between our . . . ah . . . groups of humans in just 150,000 years. And mitochondrial differentiation should play no part in—”

  “This is unconnected wit
h the spores.”

  “What is it connected with?” Eugenics, master race, Nazis . . .

  “This is purely a family matter.”

  Marianne glanced at Evan, who was writing furiously on the white paper bag the sushi had come in: GO! ACCEPT! ARE YOU DAFT? CHANCE OF A LIFETIME!

  She said, “A family matter?”

  “Yes. Family matters to us very much. Our whole society is organized around ancestral loyalty.”

  To Marianne’s knowledge, this was the first time the ambassador had ever said anything, to anyone, about how Deneb society was organized. Evan, who’d been holding the paper bag six inches from her face, snatched it back and wrote CHANCE OF SIX THOUSAND LIFETIMES!

  The number of generations since Mitochondrial Eve.

  Smith continued, “I would like you to put together a small team of three or four people. Lab facilities will be provided, and volunteers will provide tissue samples. The UN has been very helpful. Please assemble your team on Tuesday at your current location and someone will come to escort you. Do you accept this post?”

  “Tuesday? That’s only—”

  “Do you accept this post?”

  “I . . . yes.”

  “Good. Good-bye.”

  Evan said, “Marianne—”

  “Yes, of course, you’re part of the ‘team.’ God, none of this real.”

  “Thank you, thank you!”

  “Don’t burble, Evan. We need two lab techs. How can they have facilities ready by Tuesday? It isn’t possible.”

  “Or so we think,” Evan said.

  NOAH

  It hadn’t been possible to stay in the apartment. His mother had the TV on non-stop, every last news show, no matter how demented, that discussed the aliens or their science. Elizabeth burst in and out again, perpetually angry at everything she didn’t like in the world, which included the Denebs. The two women argued at the top of their lungs, which didn’t seem to bother either of them on anything but an intellectual level, but which left Noah unable to eat anything without nausea or sleep without nightmares or walk around without knots in his guts.

  He found a room in a cheap boardinghouse, and a job washing dishes that paid under the counter, in a taco place. Even though the tacos came filmed with grease, he could digest better here than at Elizabeth’s, and anyway he didn’t eat much. His wages went on sugarcane.

  He became, in turn, an observant child, a tough loner, a pensive loner, a friendly panhandler. Sugarcane made him, variously, mute or extroverted or gloomy or awed or confident. But none of it was as satisfying as it once had been. Even when he was someone else, he was still aware of being Noah. That had not happened before. The door out of himself stayed ajar. Increasing the dose didn’t help.

  Two weeks after he’d left Elizabeth’s, he strolled on his afternoon off down to Battery Park. The late October afternoon was unseasonably warm, lightly overcast, filled with autumn leaves and chrysanthemums and balloon sellers. Tourists strolled the park, sitting on the benches lining the promenade, feeding the pigeons, touring Clinton Castle. Noah stood for a long time leaning on the railing above the harbor, and so witnessed the miracle.

  “It’s happening! Now!” someone shouted.

  What was happening? Noah didn’t know, but evidently someone did because people came running from all directions. Noah would have been jostled and squeezed from his place at the railing if he hadn’t gripped it with both hands. People stood on the benches; teenagers shimmied up the lamp poles. Figures appeared on top of the Castle. A man began frantically selling telescopes and binoculars evidently hoarded for this occasion. Noah bought a pair with money he’d been going to use for sugarcane.

  “Move that damn car!” someone screamed as a Ford honked its way through the crowd, into what was supposed to be a pedestrian area. Shouts, cries, more people rushing from cars to the railings.

  Far out in the harbor, the Deneb Embassy, its energy shield dull under the cloudy sky, began to glow. Through his binoculars Noah saw the many-faceted dome shudder—not just shake but shudder in a rippling wave, as if alive. Was it alive? Did his mother know?

  “Aaaahhhhh,” the crowd went.

  The energy shield began to spread. Either it had thinned or changed composition, because for a long moment—maybe ninety seconds—Noah could almost see through it. A suggestion of floor, walls, machinery . . . then opaque again. But the “floor” was growing, reaching out to cover more territory, sprouting tentacles of material and energy.

  Someone on the bridge screamed, “They’re taking over!”

  All at once, signs were hauled out, people leaped onto the roofs of cars that should not have been in the park, chanting began. But not much chanting or many people. Most crowded the railings, peering out to sea.

  In ten minutes, the Embassy grew and grew laterally, silently spreading across the calm water like a speeded-up version of an algae bloom. When it hardened again—that’s how it looked to Noah, like molten glass hardening as it cooled—the structure was six times its previous size. The tentacles had become docks, a huge one toward the city and several smaller ones to one side. By now even the chanters had fallen silent, absorbed in the silent, aweing, monstrous feat of unimaginable construction. When it was finished, no one spoke.

  Then an outraged voice demanded, “Did those bastards get a city permit for that?”

  It broke the silence. Chanting, argument, exclaiming, pushing all resumed. A few motorists gunned their engines, futilely, since it was impossible to move vehicles. The first of the motorcycle cops arrived: NYPD, then Special Border Patrol, then chaos.

  Noah slipped deftly through the mess, back toward the streets north of the Battery. He had to be at work in an hour. The Embassy had nothing to do with him.

  MARIANNE

  A spore cloud doesn’t look like anything at all.

  A darker patch in dark space, or the slightest of veils barely dimming starlight shining behind it. Earth’s astronomers could not accurately say how large it was, or how deep. They relied on Deneb measurements, except for the one fact that mattered most, which human satellites in deep space and human ingenuity at a hundred observatories was able to verify: The cloud was coming. The path of its closest edge would intersect Earth’s path through space at the time the Denebs had said: early September.

  Marianne knew that almost immediately following the UN announcement, madness and stupidity raged across the planet. Shelters were dug or sold or built, none of which would be effective. If air could get in, so could spores. In Kentucky, some company began equipping deep caves with air circulation, food for a year, and high-priced sleeping berths: reverting to Paleolithic caveman. She paid no more attention to this entrepreneurial survivalism than to the televised protests, destructive mobs, peaceful marches, or lurid artist depictions of the cloud and its presumed effects. She had a job to do.

  On Tuesday she, Evan, and two lab assistants were taken to the submarine bay at UN Special Mission Headquarters. In the sub, Max and Gina huddled in front of the porthole, or maybe it was a porthole-like viewscreen, watching underwater fish. Maybe fish were what calmed them. Although they probably didn’t need calming: Marianne, who had worked with both before, had chosen them as much for their even temperaments as for their competence. Government authorities had vetted Max and Gina for, presumably, both crime-free backgrounds and pro-alien attitudes. Max, only twenty-nine, was the computer whiz. Gina, in her mid-thirties and the despair of her Italian mother because Gina hadn’t yet married, made the fewest errors Marianne had ever seen in sample preparation, amplification, and sequencing.

  Evan said to Marianne, “Children all sorted out?”

  “Never. Elizabeth won’t leave New York, of course.” (“Leave? Don’t you realize I have a job to do, protecting citizens from your aliens?” Somehow they had become Marianne’s aliens.) “Ryan took Connie to her parents’ place in Vermont and he went back to his purple loosestrife in Canada.”

  “And Noah?” Evan said gently. He knew all abo
ut Noah; why, Marianne wondered yet again, did she confide in this twenty-eight-year-old gay man as if he were her age, and not Noah’s? Never mind; she needed Evan.

  She shook her head. Noah had again disappeared.

  “He’ll be fine, then, Marianne. He always is.”

  “I know.”

  “Look, we’re docking.”

  They disembarked from the sub to the underside of the Embassy. Whatever the structure’s new docks topside were for, it wasn’t the transfer of medical personnel. Evan said admiringly, “Shipping above us hasn’t even been disrupted. Dead easy.”

  “Oh, those considerate aliens,” Marianne murmured, too low for the sub captain, still in full-dress uniform, to hear. Her and Evan’s usual semi-sarcastic banter helped to steady her: the real toad in the hallucinatory garden.

  The chamber beyond the airlock had not changed, although this time they were met by a different alien. Female, she wore the same faint shimmer of energy-shield protection over her plain tunic and pants. Tall, coppery-skinned, with those preternaturally huge dark eyes, she looked about thirty, but how could you tell? Did the Denebs have plastic surgery? Why not? They had everything else.

  Except a cure for spore disease.

  The Deneb introduced herself (“Scientist Jones”), went through the so-glad-you’re-here speech coming disconcertingly from the ceiling. She conducted them to the lab, then left immediately. Plastic surgery or no, Marianne was grateful for alien technology when she saw her lab. Nothing in it was unfamiliar, but all of it was state-of-the-art. Did they create it as they had created the Embassy, or order it wholesale? Must be the latter—the state-of-the-art gene sequencer still bore the label ILLUMINA. The equipment must have been ordered, shipped, paid for (with what?) either over the previous months of negotiation, or as the world’s fastest rush shipping.