Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  What were the kinship taboos on sex? What were any of the taboos on sex? Not that Noah could have touched her skin-to-skin, anyway. He was encased, so unobtrusively that he usually forgot it was there, in the “energy suit” that protected him from alien microbes.

  Microbes. Spores. How much time was left before the cloud hit Earth? At the moment it didn’t seem important. (Noah, you can’t just pretend problems don’t exist! That had usually been Elizabeth.)

  He said, “Can—yes, no?—make my—” Damn it, what was the word for microbes? “—my inside like you? My inside spores?”

  IV: S MINUS 6.5 MONTHS

  MARIANNE

  Gina had not returned from Brooklyn on the day’s last submarine run. Marianne was redoing an entire batch of DNA amplification that had somehow become contaminated. Evan picked up the mail sack and the news dispatches. When he came into the lab, where Marianne was cursing at a row of beakers, he uncharacteristically put both hands on her shoulders. She looked at his face.

  “What is it? Tell me quickly.”

  “Gina is dead.”

  She put a hand onto the lab bench to steady herself. “How?”

  “A mob. They were frighteningly well armed, almost a small army. End-of-the-world rioters.”

  “Was Gina . . . did she. . .?”

  “A bullet, very quick. She didn’t suffer, Marianne. Do you want a drink? I have some rather good Scotch.”

  “No. Thank you, but no.”

  Gina. Marianne could picture her so clearly, as if she still stood in the lab in the wrinkled white coat she always wore even though the rest of them did not. Her dark hair just touched with gray, her ruddy face calm. Brisk, pleasant, competent . . . What else? Marianne hadn’t known Gina very well. All at once, she wondered if she knew anyone, really knew them. Two of her children baffled her: Elizabeth’s endemic anger, Noah’s drifty aimlessness. Had she ever known Kyle, the man he was under the charming and lying surface, under the alcoholism? Evan’s personal life was kept personal, and she’d assumed it was his British reticence, but maybe she knew so little about him because of her limitations, not his. With everyone else aboard the Embassy, as with her university department back home, she exchanged only scientific information or meaningless pleasantries. She hadn’t seen her brother, to whom she’d never been close, in nearly two years. Her last close female friendship had been over a decade ago.

  Thinking this way felt strange, frightening. She was glad when Evan said, “Where’s Max? I’ll tell him about Gina.”

  “Gone to bed with a cold. It can wait until morning. What’s that?”

  Evan gave her a letter, addressed by hand. Marianne tore it open. “It’s from Ryan. The baby was born, a month early but he’s fine and so is she. Six pounds two ounces. They’re naming him Jason William Jenner.”

  “Congratulations. You’re a nan.”

  “A what?”

  “Grand-mum.” He kissed her cheek.

  She turned to cling to him, without passion, in sudden need of the simple comfort of human touch. Evan smelled of damp wool and some cool, minty lotion. He patted her back. “What’s all this, then?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He held her until she was ready to pull away.

  “I think I should write to Gina’s parents.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I want to make them understand—” Understand what? That sometimes children were lost, and the reasons didn’t necessarily make sense. But this reason did make sense, didn’t it? Gina had died because she’d been aboard the Embassy, died as a result of the work she did, and right now this was the most necessary work in the entire world.

  She had a sudden memory of Noah, fifteen, shouting at her: “You’re never home! Work is all you care about!” And she, like so many beleaguered parents, had shouted back, “If it weren’t for my work, we’d all starve!”

  And yet, when the kids had all left home and she could work as much as she wanted or needed without guilt, she’d missed them dreadfully. She’d missed the harried driving schedules—I have to be at Jennifer’s at eight and Soccer practice is moved up an hour Saturday! She’d missed their electronics, cells and iPods and tablets and laptops, plugged in all of the old house’s inadequate outlets. She’d missed the rainbow laundry in the basement, Ryan’s red soccer shirts and Elizabeth’s white jeans catastrophically dyed pink and Noah’s yellow-and-black bumblebee costume for the second-grade play. All gone. When your children were small you worried that they would die and you would lose them, and then they grew up and you ended up losing the children they’d been, anyway.

  Marianne pulled at the skin on her face and steeled herself to write to Gina’s parents.

  NOAH

  There were three of them now. Noah Jenner, Jacqui Young, Oliver Pardo. But only Noah was undergoing the change.

  They lounged this afternoon in the World garden aboard the Embassy, where the ceiling seemed to be open to an alien sky. A strange orange shone, larger than Sol and yet not shedding as much light, creating a dim glow over the three Terrans. The garden plants were all dark in hue (“To gather as much light as possible,” Mee^hao¡ had said), lush leaves in olive drab and pine and asparagus. Water trickled over rocks or fell in high, thin streams. Warmth enveloped Noah even through his energy suit, and he felt light on the ground in the lesser gravity. Some nearby flower sent out a strange, musky, heady fragrance on the slight breeze.

  Jacqui, an energetic and enormously intelligent graduate student, had chosen to move into the alien section of the Embassy in order to do research. She was frank, with both Terrans and Denebs, that she was not going to stay after she had gathered the unique data on Deneb culture that would ensure her academic career. Smith said that was all right, she was clan and so welcome for as long as she chose. Noah wondered how she planned on even having an academic career after the spore cloud hit.

  Oliver Pardo would have been given the part of geek by any film-casting department with no imagination. Overweight, computer-savvy, and a fan of superheroes, he quoted obscure sixty-year-old science fiction books and drew endless pictures of girls in improbable costumes slaying dragons or frost giants. Socially inept, he was nonetheless gentle and sweet-natured, and Noah preferred his company to Jacqui’s, who asked too many questions.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Why what?” Noah said, even though he knew perfectly well what she meant. He lounged back on the comfortable moss and closed his eyes.

  “Why are you undergoing this punishing regime of shots just so you can take off your shield?”

  “They’re not shots,” Noah said. Whatever the Denebs were doing to him, they did it by having him apply patches to himself when he was out of his energy suit and in an isolation chamber. This had happened once a week for a while now. The treatments left him nauseated, dizzy, sometimes with diarrhea, and always elated. There was only one more to go.

  Jacqui said, “Shots or whatever, why do it?”

  Oliver looked up from his drawing of a barbarian girl riding a lion. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Jacqui said, “Not to me.”

  Oliver said, “Noah wants to become an alien.”

  “No,” Noah said. “I was an alien. Now I’m becoming . . . not one.”

  Jacqui’s pitying look said You need help. Oliver shaded in the lion’s mane. Noah wondered why, of all the Terrans of L7 mitochondrial haplotype, he was stuck with these two. He stood. “I have to study.”

  “I wish I had your fluency in Worldese,” Jacqui said. “It would help my work so much.”

  So study it. But Noah knew she wouldn’t, not the way he was doing. She wanted the quick harvest of startling data, not . . . whatever it was he wanted.

  Becoming an alien. Oliver was more correct than Noah’s flip answer. And yet Noah had been right, too, which was something he could never explain to anyone, least of all his mother. Whom he was supposed to visit this morning, since she could not come to him.
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br />   All at once Noah knew that he was not going to keep that appointment. Although he flinched at the thought of hurting Marianne, he was not going to leave the World section of the Embassy. Not now, not ever. He couldn’t account for this feeling, so strong that it seemed to infuse his entire being, like oxygen in the blood. But he had to stay here, where he belonged. Irrational, but—as Evan would have said—there it was, musn’t grumble, at least it made a change, no use going on about it.

  He had never liked Evan.

  In his room, Noah took a pen and a pad of paper to write a note to his mother. The words did not come easy. All his life he had disappointed her, but not like this.

  Dear Mom—I know we were going to get together this afternoon but—

  Dear Mom—I wish I could see you as we planned but—

  Dear Mom—We need to postpone our visit because Ambassador Smith has asked me if this afternoon I would—

  Noah pulled at the skin on his face, realized that was his mother’s gesture, and stopped. He looked longingly at the little cubes that held his language lessons. As the cube spoke Worldese, holofigures in the cube acted out the meaning. After Noah repeated each phrase, it corrected his pronunciation until he got it right.

  “My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” a smiling girl said in the holocube, in Worldese. Two boys, one younger than she and one much older, appeared beside her with a much older woman behind them, all four with similar features, a shimmering dome behind them.

  “My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” Noah repeated. The Worldese tenses were tricky; these verbs were the ones for things that not only could change, but could change without the speaker’s having much say about events. A mother could die. The family could be chosen for a space colony. The older brother could marry and move in with his wife’s family.

  Sometimes things were beyond your control and you had no real choice.

  Dear Mom—I can’t come. I’m sorry. I love you. Noah

  MARIANNE

  The work—anybody’s work—was not going well.

  It seemed to be proceeding at an astonishing pace, but Marianne—and everyone else—knew that was an illusion. She sat in the auditorium for the monthly report, Evan beside her. This time, no Denebs were present—why not? She listened to Terence Manning enumerate what under any other circumstances would have been incredibly rapid triumphs.

  “We have succeeded in isolating the virus,” Manning said, “although not in growing it in vitro. After isolation, we amplified it with the usual polymerase processes. The virus has been sequenced and—only a few days ago!—captured on an electromicrograph image, which, as most of you know, can be notoriously difficult. Here it is.”

  A graphic appeared on the wall behind Manning: fuzzy concentric circles blending into each other in shades of gray. Manning ran his hand over his head, now completely bald. Had he shaved his last three hairs, Marianne wondered irrelevantly. Or had they just given up and fallen out from stress?

  “The virion appears to be related to known paramyxoviruses, although the gene sequence, which we now have, does not exactly match any of them. It is a negative-sense single-stranded RNA virus. Paramyxoviruses, to which it may or may not be directly related, are responsible for a number of human and animal diseases, including parainfluenza, mumps, measles, pneumonia, and canine distemper. This family of viruses jumps species more easily than any other. From what we have determined so far, it most closely resembles both Hendra and Nipah viruses, which are highly contagious and highly virulent.

  “The genome follows the paramyxovirus ‘Rule of Six,’ in that the total length of the genome is almost always a multiple of six. The spore virus consists of twenty-one genes with 21,645 base pairs. That makes it a large virus, but by no means the largest we know. Details of sequence, structure, envelope proteins, etc. can be found on the LAN. I want to especially thank Drs. Yu, Sedley, and Lapka for their valuable work in identifying Respirovirus sporii.”

  Applause. Marianne still stared at the simple, deadly image behind Manning. An unwelcome thought had seized her: the viral image looked not unlike a fuzzy picture of a not-too-well-preserved trilobite. Trilobites had been the dominant life form on Earth for 300 million years and comprised more than 10,000 species. All gone now. Humans could be gone, too, after a much briefer reign.

  But we survived so much! The Ice Age, terrible predators, the “bottleneck event” of 70,000 years ago that reduced Homo sapiens to mere thousands . . .

  Manning was continuing. This was the bad news. “However, we have made little progress in figuring out how to combat R. sporii. Blood from the infected mice has been checked against known viruses and yielded no seriological positives. None of our small number of antiviral drugs were effective, although there was a slight reaction to ribavirin. That raises a further puzzle, since ribavirin is mostly effective against Lassa fever, which is caused by an arenavirus, not a paramyxovirus.” Manning tried to smile; it was not a success. “So, the mystery deepens. I wish we had more to report.”

  Someone asked, “Are the infected mice making antibodies?”

  “Yes,” Manning said, “and if we can’t manage to develop a vaccine, this is our best possible path to a post-exposure treatment, following the MB-003 model developed for Ebola. For you astronomers—and please forgive me if I am telling you things you already know—a successful post-exposure treatment for Ebola in nonhuman primates was developed two years ago, using a cocktail of monoclonal antibodies. It was the work of a partnership between American industry and government agencies. When administered an hour after infection, MB-003 yields a one hundred percent survival rate. At forty-eight hours, the survival rate is two-thirds. MB-003 was initially developed in a mouse model and then produced in plants. The work took ten years. It has not, of course, been tested in humans.”

  Ten years. The Embassy scientists had less than five months left. Ebola had previously been studied since its first outbreak in 1976. And the biggie: It has not, of course, been tested in humans. In whom it might, for all anyone knew, not even work.

  Maybe the Denebs knew faster ways to produce a vaccine from antibodies, exponentially increase production, and distribute the results. But the aliens weren’t even at this meeting. They had surely been given all this information already, but even so—

  —Where the hell were the aliens that was more important than this?

  V: S MINUS 3.5 MONTHS

  MARIANNE

  Marianne felt ridiculous. She and Evan leaned close over the sink in the lab. Water gushed full-strength from the tap, making noise that, she hoped, covered their words. The autoclave hummed; a Bach concerto played tinnily on the computer’s inadequate speaker. The whole thing felt like a parody of a bad spy movie.

  They had never been able to decide if the labs, if everywhere on the Embassy, were bugged. Evan had said yes, of course, don’t be daft. Max, with the hubris of the young, had said no because his computer skills would have been able to detect any surveillance. Marianne and Gina had said it was irrelevant since both their work and their personal lives were so transparent. In addition, Marianne had disliked the implication that the Denebs were not their full and open partners. Gina had said—

  Gina. Shot down, her life ended just as Jason William Jenner’s had begun. And for how long? Would Marianne even get to see her grandson before everything was as over as Gina’s life?

  Dangerous to think this way. Their work on the Embassy was a thin bridge laid across a pit of despair, the same despair that had undoubtedly fueled Gina’s killers.

  “You know what has to happen,” Marianne whispered. “Nobody’s saying it aloud, but without virus replication in human bodies, we just can’t understand the effect on the immune system and we’re working blindly. Mice aren’t enough. Even if we could have infected monkeys, it wouldn’t be enough. We have to infect volunteers.”

  Evan stuck his finger into the flow of water, which spattered in bright drops against the
side of the sink. “I know. Everyone knows. The request has been made to the powers that be.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I talk to people on the other teams. You know the laws against experimentation on humans unless there have first been proper clinical trials that—”

  “Oh, fuck proper trials, this is a crisis situation!”

  “Not enough people in power are completely convinced of that. You haven’t been paying attention to the bigger picture, Marianne. The Public Health Service isn’t even gearing up for mass inoculation or protection—Robinson is fighting it with claw and tusk. FEMA is divided and there’s almost anarchy in the ranks. Congress just filibusters on the whole topic. And the president just doesn’t have the votes to get much of anything done. Meanwhile, the masses riot or flee or just pretend the whole thing is some sort of hoax. The farther one gets from New York, the more the conspiracy theorists don’t even believe there are aliens on Earth at all.”

  Marianne, still standing, pulled at the skin on her face. “It’s all so frustrating. And the work we’re doing here—you and I and Max and Gina”—her voice faltered—“is pointless. It really is. Identifying members of Smith’s so-called clan? Who cares? I’m going to volunteer myself to be infected.”

  “They won’t take you.”

  “If—”

  “The only way that could happen is in secret. If a subgroup on the Spore Team decided the situation was desperate enough to conduct an unauthorized experiment.”

  She studied his face. In the biology department at the university, Evan had always been the one who knew how to obtain travel money for a conference, interviews with Nobel Prize winners, an immediate appointment with the dean. He had the knack, as she did not, for useful connections. She said, “You know something.”

  “No. I don’t. Not yet.”

  “Find out.”

  He nodded and turned off the water. The music crescendoed: Brandenburg Concerto #2, that had gone out into space on the “golden record” inside Voyager 1.