Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Startled, Marianne gazed at him. The vaguely racist reference was uncharacteristic of Evan, and had been said with some bitterness. She realized all over again how little Evan gave away about his past. When had he lived in the Philippines? What had happened between him and some apparently not forgiven houseboy? A former lover? Evan’s sexual orientation was also something they never discussed, although of course she was aware of it. From his grim face, he wasn’t going to discuss it now, either.

  She said, “I’m going to ask Smith what the Denebs intend.”

  Evan’s smooth grin had returned. “Good luck. The UN can’t get information from him, the project’s chief scientists can’t get information from him, and you and I never see him. Just minor roadblocks to your plan.”

  “We really are lab rats,” she said. And then, abruptly, “Let’s go. We need to get back to work.”

  “Evan said slowly, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

  “What?”

  “The origin of viruses. How they didn’t evolve from a single entity and don’t have a common ancestor. About the theory that their individual origins were pieces of DNA or RNA that broke off from cells and learned to spread to other cells.”

  Marianne frowned. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

  “I don’t either, actually.”

  “Then—”

  “I don’t know,” Evan said. And again, “I just don’t know.”

  NOAH

  Noah was somebody else.

  He’d spent his blood-for-the-Denebs money on sugarcane, and it turned out to be one of the really good transformations. He was a nameless soldier from a nameless army: brave and commanding and sure of himself. Underneath he knew it was an illusion (but he never used to know that!). However, it didn’t matter. He stood on a big rock at the south end of Central Park, rain and discarded plastic bags blowing around him, and felt completely, if temporarily, happy. He was on top of the world, or at least seven feet above it, and nothing seemed impossible.

  The alien token in his pocket began to chime, a strange syncopated rhythm, atonal as no iPhone ever sounded. Without a second’s hesitation—he could face anything!—Noah pulled it from his pocket and pressed its center.

  A woman’s voice said, “Noah Richard Jenner?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “This is Dr. Lisa Gutierrez at the Deneb embassy. We would like to see you, please. Can you come as soon as possible to the UN Special Mission Headquarters at its pier?”

  Noah drew a deep breath. Then full realization crashed around him, loud and blinding as last week’s flashbang. Oh my God—why hadn’t he seen it before? Maybe because he hadn’t been a warrior before. His mother had—son of a bitch—

  “Noah?”

  He said, “I’ll be there.”

  The submarine surfaced in an undersea chamber. A middle-aged woman in jeans and blazer, presumably Dr. Gutierrez, awaited Noah in the featureless room. He didn’t much notice woman or room. Striding across the gangway, he said, “I want to see my mother. Now. She’s Dr. Marianne Jenner, working here someplace.”

  Dr. Guiterrez didn’t react as if this were news, or strange. She said, “You seem agitated.” Hers was the human voice Noah had heard coming from the alien token.

  “I am agitated! Where is my mother?”

  “She’s here. But first, someone else wants to meet you.”

  “I demand to see my mother!”

  A door in the wall slid open, and a tall man with coppery skin and bare feet stepped through. Noah looked at him, and it happened again.

  Shock, bewilderment, totally unjustified recognition—he knew this man, just as he had known the nurse who washed tear gas from his and a child’s eyes during the West Side demonstration. Yet he’d never seen him before, and he was an alien. But the sense of kinship was powerful, disorienting, ridiculous.

  “Hello, Noah Jenner,” the ceiling said. “I am Ambassador Smith. Welcome to the Embassy.”

  “I—”

  “I wanted to welcome you personally, but I cannot visit now. I have a meeting. Lisa will help you get settled here, should you choose to stay with us for a while. She will explain everything. Let me just say—”

  Impossible to deny this man’s sincerity, he meant every incredible word—

  “—that I’m very glad you are here.”

  After the alien left, Noah stood staring at the door through which he’d vanished. “What is it?” Dr. Guiterrez said. “You look a bit shocked.”

  Noah blurted, “I know that man!” A second later he realized how dumb that sounded.

  She said gently, “Let’s go somewhere to talk, Noah. Somewhere less . . . wet.”

  Water dripped from the sides of the submarine, and some had sloshed onto the floor. Sailors and officers crossed the gangway, talking quietly. Noah followed Lisa from the sub bay, down a side corridor, and into an office cluttered with charts, print-outs, coffee mugs, a laptop—such an ordinary-looking place that it only heightened Noah’s sense of unreality. She sat in an upholstered chair and motioned him to another. He remained standing.

  She said, “I’ve seen this before, Noah. What you’re experiencing, I mean, although usually it isn’t as strong as you seem to be feeling it.”

  “Seen what? And who are you, anyway? I want to talk to my mother!”

  She studied him, and Noah had the impression she saw more than he wanted her to. She said, “I’m Dr. Lisa Gutierrez, as Ambassador Smith said. Call me Lisa. I’m a genetics counselor serving as the liaison between the ambassador and those people identified as belonging to his haplotype, L7, the one identified by your mother’s research. Before this post, I worked with Dr. Barbara Formisano at Oxford, where I also introduced people who share the same haplotype. Over and over again I’ve seen a milder version of what you seem to be experiencing now—an unexpected sense of connection between those with an unbroken line of mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers back to their haplogroup clan mother. It—”

  “That sounds like bullshit!”

  “—is important to remember that the connection is purely symbolic. Similar cell metabolisms don’t cause shared emotions. But—an important ‘but!’—symbols have a powerful effect on the human mind. Which, in turn, causes emotion.”

  Noah said, “I had this feeling once before. About a strange woman, and I had no way of knowing if she’s my ‘haplotype’ !”

  Lisa’s gaze sharpened. She stood. “What woman? Where?”

  “I don’t know her name. Listen, I want to talk to my mother!”

  “Talk to me first. Are you a sugarcane user, Noah?”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “Habitual use of sugarcane heightens certain imaginative and perceptual pathways in the brain. Ambassador Smith—well, let’s set that aside for a moment. I think I know why you want to see your mother.”

  Noah said, “Look, I don’t want to be ruder than I’ve already been, but this isn’t your business. Anything you want to say to me can wait until I see my mother.”

  “All right. I can take you to her lab.”

  It was a long walk. Noah took in very little of what they passed, but then, there was very little to take in. Endless white corridors, endless white doors. When they entered a lab, two people that Noah didn’t know looked up curiously. Lisa said, “Dr. Jenner—”

  The other woman gestured at a far door. Before she could speak, Noah flung the door open. His mother sat at a small table, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking. Her eyes widened.

  Noah said, “Mom—why the fuck didn’t you ever tell me I was adopted?”

  MARIANNE

  Evan and Marianne sat in his room, drinking sixteen-year-old single-malt Scotch. She seldom drank but knew that Evan often did. Nor had she ever gone before to his quarters in the Embassy, which were identical to hers: ten-foot square room with a bed, chest of drawers, small table, and two chairs. She sat on one of the straight-backed, uti
litarian chairs while Evan lounged on the bed. Most of the scientists had brought with them a few items from home, but Evan’s room was completely impersonal. No art, no framed family photos, no decorative pillows, not even a coffee mug or extra doughnut carried off from the cafeteria.

  “You live like a monk,” Marianne said, immediately realizing how drunk she must be to say that. She took another sip of Scotch.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell him?” Evan said.

  She put down her glass and pulled at the skin on her face. The skin felt distant, as if it belonged to somebody else.

  “Oh, Evan, how to answer that? First Noah was too little to understand. Kyle and I adopted him in some sort of stupid effort to save the marriage. I wasn’t thinking straight—living with an alcoholic will do that, you know. If there was one stupid B-movie scene of alcoholic and wife that we missed, I don’t know what it was. Shouting, pleading, pouring away all the liquor in the house, looking for Kyle in bars at two a.m . . . anyway. Then Kyle died and I was trying to deal with that and the kids and chasing tenure and there was just too much chaos and fragility to add another big revelation. Then somehow it got too late, because Noah would have asked why he hadn’t been told before, and then somehow . . . it all just got away from me.”

  “And Elizabeth and Ryan never told him?”

  “Evidently not. We yell a lot about politics and such but on a personal level, we’re a pretty reticent family.” She waved her hand vaguely at the room. “Although not as reticent as you.”

  Evan smiled. “I’m British of a certain class.”

  “You’re an enigma.”

  “No, that was the Russians. Enigmas wrapped in riddles.” But a shadow passed suddenly behind his eyes.

  “What do you—”

  “Marianne, let me fill you in on the bits and pieces of news that came in while you were with Noah. First, from the Denebs: they’re bringing aboard the Embassy any members of their ‘clan’—that’s what the translator is calling the L7 haplogroup—who want to come. But you already know that. Second, the—”

  “How many?”

  “How many have we identified or how many want to come here?”

  “Both.” The number of L7 haplotypes had jumped exponentially once they had the first few and could trace family trees through the female line.

  “Sixty-three identified, including the three that Gina flew to Georgia to test. Most of the haplogroup may still be in Africa, or it may have largely died out. Ten of those want to visit the Embassy.” He hesitated.”So far, only Noah wants to stay.”

  Marianne’s hand paused, glass halfway to her mouth. “To stay? He didn’t tell me that. How do you know?”

  “After Noah . . . left you this afternoon, Smith came to the lab with that message.”

  “I see.” She didn’t. She had been in her room, pulling herself together after the harrowing interview with her son. Her adopted son. She hadn’t been able to tell Noah anything about his parentage because she hadn’t known anything: sealed adoption records. Was Noah the way he was because of his genes? Or because of the way she’d raised him? Because of his peer group? His astrological sign? Theories went in and out of fashion, and none of them explained personality.

  She said, “What is Noah going to do here? He’s not a scientist, not security, not an administrator. . .” Not anything. It hurt her to even think it. Her baby, her lost one.

  Evan said, “I have no idea. I imagine he’ll either sort himself out or leave. The other news is that the Biology Team has made progress in matching Terran and Deneb immune-system components. There were a lot of graphs and charts and details, but the bottom line is that ours and theirs match pretty well. Remarkably little genetic drift. Different antibodies, of course, for different pathogens, and quite a lot of those, so no chance we’ll be touching skin without their wearing their energy shields.”

  “So cancel the orgy.”

  Evan laughed. Emboldened by this as much as by the drink, Marianne said, “Are you gay?”

  “You know I am, Marianne.”

  “I wanted to be sure. We’ve never discussed it. I’m a scientist, after all.”

  “You’re an American. Leave nothing unsaid that can be shouted from rooftops.”

  Her fuzzy mind had gone back to Noah. “I failed my son, Evan.”

  “Rubbish. I told you, he’ll sort himself out eventually. Just be prepared for the idea that it may take a direction you don’t fancy.”

  Again that shadow in Evan’s eyes. She didn’t ask; he obviously didn’t want to discuss it, and she’d snooped enough. Carefully she rose to leave, but Evan’s next words stopped her.

  “Also, Elizabeth is coming aboard tomorrow.”

  “Elizabeth? Why?”

  “A talk with Smith about shore-side security. Someone tried a second attack at the sample collection site shore-side.”

  “Oh my God. Anybody hurt?”

  “No. This time.”

  “Elizabeth is going to ask the Denebs to give her the energy-shield technology. She’s been panting for it for border patrol ever since the Embassy first landed in the harbor. Evan, that would be a disaster. She’s so focused on her job that she can’t see what will happen if—no, when—the street finds its own uses for the tech, and it always does.” Who had said that? Some writer. She couldn’t remember.

  “Well, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Elizabeth can ask, but that doesn’t mean that Smith will agree.”

  “But he’s so eager to find his ‘clan’—God, it’s so stupid! That Korean mitochondrial sequence, to take just one example, that turns up regularly in Norwegian fisherman, or that engineer in Minnesota who’d traced his ancestry back three hundred years without being able to account for the Polynesian mitochondrial signature he carries—nobody has a cure ‘plan.’ I mean, ‘clan.’ ”

  “Nobody on Earth, anyway.”

  “And even if they did,” she barreled on, although all at once her words seemed to have become slippery in her mouth, like raw oysters, “There’s no sig . . . sif . . . significant connection between two people with the same mitochondrial DNA than between any other two strangers!”

  “Not to us,” Evan said. “Marianne, go to bed. You’re too tipsy, and we have work to do in the morning.”

  “It’s not work that matters to protection against the shore cloud. Spore cloud. Spore cloud.”

  “Nonetheless, it’s work. Now, go.”

  NOAH

  Noah stood in a corner of the conference room, which held eleven people and two aliens. Someone had tried to make the room festive with a red paper tablecloth, flowers, and plates of tiny cupcakes. This had not worked. It was still a utilitarian, corporate-looking conference room, filled with people who otherwise would have no conceivable reason to be together at either a conference or a party. Lisa Gutierrez circulated among them: smiling, chatting, trying to put people at ease. It wasn’t working.

  Two young women, standing close together for emotional support. A middle-aged man in an Armani suit and Italian leather shoes. An unshaven man, hair in a dirty ponytail, who looked homeless but maybe only because he stood next to Well-Shod Armani. A woman carrying a plastic tote bag with a hole in one corner. And so on and so on. It was the sort of wildly mixed group that made Noah, standing apart with his back to a wall, think of worshippers in an Italian cathedral.

  The thought brought him a strained smile. A man nearby, perhaps emboldened by the smile, sidled closer and whispered, “They will let us go back to New York, won’t they?”

  Noah blinked. “Why wouldn’t they, if that’s what you want?”

  “I want them to offer us shields for the spore cloud! To take back with us to the city! Why else would I come here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man grimaced and moved away. But—why had he even come, if he suspected alien abduction or imprisonment or whatever? And why didn’t he feel what Noah did? Every single one of the people in this room had caused in him the same shock of recogniti
on as had Ambassador Smith. Every single one. And apparently no one else had felt it at all.

  But the nervous man needn’t have worried. When the party and its ceiling delivered speeches of kinship and the invitation to make a longer visit aboard the Embassy were all over, everyone else left. They left looking relieved or still curious or satisfied or uneasy or disappointed (no energy shield offered! No riches!), but they all left, Lisa still chattering reassuringly. All except Noah.

  Ambassador Smith came over to him. The Deneb said nothing, merely silently waited. He looked as if he were capable of waiting forever.

  Noah’s hands felt clammy. All those brief, temporary lives on sugarcane, each one shed like a snakeskin when the drug wore off. No, not snakeskins; that wasn’t the right analogy. More like bread crumbs tossed by Hansel and Gretel, starting in hope but vanishing before they could lead anywhere. The man with the dirty pony tail wasn’t the only homeless one.

  Noah said, “I want to know who and what you are.”

  The ceiling above Smith said, “Come with me to a genuine celebration.”

  A circular room, very small. Noah and Smith faced each other. The ceiling said, “This is an airlock. Beyond this space, the environment will be ours, not yours. It is not very different, but you are not used to our microbes and so must wear the energy suit. It filters air, but you may have some trouble breathing at first because the oxygen content of World is like Earth’s at an altitude of 12,000 feet. If you feel nausea in the airlock, where we will stay for a few minutes, you may go back. The light will seem dim to you, the smells strange, and the gravity less than you are accustomed to by one-tenth. There are no built-in translators beyond this point, and we will speak our own language, so you will not be able to talk to us. Are you sure you wish to come?”

  “Yes,” Noah said.

  “Is there anything you wish to say before you join your birthright clan?”

  Noah said, “What is your name?”

  Smith smiled. He made a noise that sounded like a trilled version of meehao, with a click on the end.

  Noah imitated it.

  Smith said, in trilling English decorated with a click, “Brother mine.”