Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I’ll check it out,” I told Ian, who got behind the Hummer to cover me. As I approached the window, a bench came hurtling through it.

  Inside were only four of them, three men and a woman, all of course late thirties or older. At least fifteen Sweets huddled at the far end of the room, including four children. The adults could’ve jumped the attackers while the fuckers were picking up furniture to smash, their sidearms holstered, but the Sweets didn’t move. They stood frozen, only their eyes darting around the room.

  Cowards.

  Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia.

  Both terms came to mind, and I pushed them aside. “Hey!” I yelled, and fired a shot into the air. The attackers pivoted to face me.

  They were a scruffy lot, dirty and maybe drunk. Only one drew his weapon—were the other guns even loaded?—and I snapped, “Don’t try it.” Ian appeared behind me with his AK-47, which was laughable overkill. I said to one of the Sweets, “Was anybody hurt?” and, with great effort, he shook his head.

  “Get out of here,” I told the scumbags. “And if anybody in this settlement has been hurt today, or if any of you ever come back here, I swear I’ll hunt you down, each and every one of you. Captain Zap there has your pictures on his cell and we can find out where you live. Do I make myself clear? Do I?”

  One by one, they nodded. The only guy with a drawn weapon tried to scowl at me, but I locked my eyes onto his and he lowered both his gaze and his gun. A minute later, they’d all gone.

  Slowly the Sweets began to unfreeze, and the adults knelt to comfort their children. Carrie wasn’t there, but I hadn’t expected her to be: If she had been able to call our mother, she hadn’t been confronted directly by an attacker.

  Ian, ever the researcher, asked permission to take blood samples. Everyone said yes. Blood tests were the price they paid for people like Ian and me doing for them what they would not do for themselves. Sweets understood that. They were cowardly, but not stupid.

  I went to find my sister.

  • • • •

  It started with the volcano. When that mountain blew up in Indonesia, the ash contained a weird compound that affected developing fetuses (and still does). The stuff was as eternal as the dormant genes it activated. Twenty-five years later, researchers like Ian were still trying to catalogue all the effects those few genes have on the half-million miles of nerve fibers in the human brain, not to mention the rest of the body. The short list:

  Cooperative, altruistic personality traits.

  Extreme involuntary fear bradycardia—a parasympathetic nervous system response to violence. Heart rate drops, oxygenation lowers, muscles stiffen, the amygdala-periaqueductal gray pathways are disrupted. There may be sweating. There may be fainting. There may be death.

  Heightened nurturing, due to increased oxytocin

  The kicker was that all these states were normal, within limits. Sweets pushed the limits. They were epigenetically altered from the ground up, fashioned by their DNA into much nicer people than the rest of us. Too nice to destroy each other, to destroy us, to destroy animals (they are of course vegetarian), to destroy the environment. They were just fucking angels.

  But weren’t people more than their biology? Every day human beings resisted in-built biological urges in favor of cultural ones like monogamy. Or saving people in burning buildings. Or not killing the asshole who snatches your purse.

  And the big, gazillion-dollar question is: why were the Sweets this way? There were a hundred theories drifting around the Internet. Yahweh, bringing about the End Times. Sheer Darwinian chance. The Earth, Gaia-like, fighting back to protect itself from polluters and frackers and over-fishers and those of us who own plastic water bottles. Or—

  On the pathway through the settlement, I glanced up at the blue April sky.

  But of course there was nothing to see. The alien ship was in orbit between Earth and Mars, too far away for anything dangerous from Earth to reach it.

  • • • •

  “They took copper,” Carrie said. “Stripped out wiring and pipes. I guess they needed it for themselves.”

  “So that makes it okay?”

  “Of course not, Sophie.”

  My sister had the sort of mild face a Sweet should have, a face from another century: calm eyes, pale oval face, fair hair in frizzy ringlets. Put a ruff and a stomacher on her and she would look like one of those obedient ladies in some patriarchal seventeenth-century court. As always, since we were children, she brought out the bully in me.

  “How far along are you?”

  Carrie blinked. “Mama told you?”

  “Of course Mom told me. Why else would I be here? You have the right to get shot by some looting asshole if you want, but you don’t have the right to get my niece or nephew killed because you won’t defend yourself.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Already obvious. You’re coming back with Ian and me.”

  “No.” An actual shudder ran over her entire thin body, as if the mere thought of living with us was a toxin. “Sophie, I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “All right, in that case, I’m not doing this anymore. Do you hear me? Baby or no, this is the last time we’re risking our lives for people who won’t do anything to help themselves. But before I go, let me ask you something: Why won’t you come with me?”

  And then Carrie said the stupidest, most wimpy thing I’d ever heard her say during a lifetime of stupid, wimpy things. She said, “This is the only place I feel safe.”

  In anger, in resentment, in contempt, I turned my back on her and walked out.

  • • • •

  The first clear picture of the alien ship flashed onto the wallscreen, caught by a Chinese unmanned spacecraft, the Hope of Heaven, on its long exploratory voyage to the Oort Cloud. The alien ship, a long tapered cylinder of some grayish metal, had three weirdly-shaped projections at seemingly random places on one side of the hull. The magnified image revealed zero about the craft’s occupants. Remotely controlled signals, sent in a variety of forms and in a variety of wavelengths, went unanswered. The aliens were not interested in prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences, or pi.

  “Fuckers,” I muttered. Ian and I sat on the sofa in our pajamas, eating pizza. Our apartment on the fortified APBRI compound was small and hastily constructed, but safe. Nobody was going to take our copper wiring. We had a tiny bedroom and a great room not much larger, furnished with a second-hand sofa of a particularly hideous plaid, a table and wobbly chairs, and a very good multipurpose screen. Researchers knew what mattered. I’d made the pizza since pizza chains were few and no longer delivered: too dangerous. The crusts were burned.

  Ian, to my surprise, put down his plate and reached for my hand. He is not usually a demonstrative man. “Sophie . . . you have to stop being so angry.”

  “But just look at them! Sitting up there all lordly, waiting for everything to unravel on Earth even more than it already—”

  “I don’t mean angry at them.”

  I looked into Ian’s eyes. In some lights the gray was flecked with silver. Those eyes are my home, a thing I have never said aloud: too silly. “You mean I’m angry at Carrie.”

  “No. That’s not what I mean.”

  “Then what—”

  He dropped my hand. “I’ll let you figure that out.”

  “You know I hate it when you go all superior-paternal on me.”

  “I’m not,” he said, took another bite of the mediocre pizza, and changed the channel.

  The national news was all bad. Unemployment had reached forty-nine percent. Two more cities were on fire: Atlanta and San Francisco. San Diego was also burning, but that was due to wildfires rather than rioting. The GNP was in the toilet and getting liberally shitted on. Children were starving, old people were starving, animals at the zoo were starving. When the entire workforce under thirty years old will not work in any industry that remotely damages anyo
ne, a population already heavy on the elderly inevitably falls into slow, agonizing collapse. The only reason the United States hasn’t had a revolution is that revolutions are made by young people, and our young people were all Sweets.

  In the rest of the world the situation was the same or worse, except for China. Their one-baby policy had kept the number of Sweets down, and a few years after the volcano, they’d limited population growth even further. Their trouble will come later than ours, but it will come. Meanwhile, they have the only thriving space program, all of which is secret and worrisome.

  Part of the worry is that the economic situation lent itself to idiots. On TV, Louis William Porter, the latest conspiracy-theorist pundit, spewed his kitchen-sink theory of the world.

  “Is it just a coincidence that our young people have been biologically incapacitated, our glorious country fallen economically just as China rises, and so-called aliens present in our skies? Do you believe in that much coincidence, my friends? Because I surely do not. No! This is not chance; it is a scheme, the most ungodly and dangerous scheme ever mounted against the United States by a worldly enemy. This has all been planned, planned in the laboratories and spaceports of Beijing. First, create poisons that damage our innocent precious children and spew them like vomit across the globe. Decades later, present so-called ‘evidence’ that there is an ‘alien’ ship waiting out there in space. There is no ship, my friends, there is only the insane ambition toward world domination on the part of the Chinese, who—”

  “Turn it off,” I said, and Ian did. “Porter is nothing but a crackpot.”

  “His following is enormous and growing. People want someone to blame.”

  “So they need three someones—aliens and Chinese and Sweets as an unholy trinity? The E.T. fathers, heathen sons, and insubstantial ghosts?”

  Ian laughed. Wit was one of the things he enjoyed about me. Christ, I loved him so much.

  Love will get you every time.

  • • • •

  Ian’s research group had a breakthrough. He came down to the cafeteria to tell me about it, his gray eyes glowing, his whole face alive. I was in the back room, washing up lunch dishes. Ted and Sarah had already left, and I had the kitchen wallscreen show an ancient rerun of some old comedy, for the mindless company. Before the Collapse I’d been an insurance adjustor, back when ordinary people had insurance. With a community-college degree in English, there was nothing at APBRI that I was qualified to do, but Ian got me this job so that I wouldn’t be one of the 49% unemployed. It paid crap but that didn’t matter. It’s necessary work, feeding people. I wasn’t much of a cook but I could chop and mix and clean. My mother did those jobs her whole life.

  “Sophie—I think we’ve isolated it! The protein!”

  I wiped my hands on a not-very-clean towel. “Really?”

  “Yes!” He began a long, involved explanation of what his team had done, or maybe it was what the protein had done. I’d never taken much biology in school. But from Ian I’d learned Francis Crick’s “central dogma” of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein. Which then folds and goes about its business in and out of cells. A wrong fold and you can get prions, which can lead to a lot of terrible outcomes like mad cow disease and Alzheimer’s.

  I said, “Is it a misfolded protein?”

  “A differently folded protein, anyway.”

  I let that go. Ian never referred to Sweetness as a disease; it didn’t meet something called “Koch’s postulates.” But then, Ian didn’t have a younger sister.

  I said, “So what now?”

  “We play with it.” Ian began a long explanation of what this “play” might involve, but I was no longer listening. The wallscreen had interrupted its comedy and raised its volume.

  “—report that a so-called ‘Sweet’ has been arrested and charged with murder in Erie, Pennsylvania. The victim, whose name has not yet been released, was a six-year-old child. The alleged suspect, Martin Michael Shields, is being held without bail at—”

  “Not possible,” Ian said. “Either he’s not really a Sweet or they have the wrong man. Fear bradycardia—”

  I stared at the TV. Martin Michael Shields certainly looked like a Sweet: a big man in his twenties but with the same shy, vaguely bewildered look I’d seen on my sister’s face her entire life. I said, “It’s a frame.”

  “What?”

  “A frame. Someone else killed the kid so that a Sweet could be blamed.” Bile rose in my throat. Had the child died quickly? Was it a boy or a girl? Six years old . . .

  Ian frowned. “Why?”

  He was so much smarter than I was about science, but not about things like this. “To justify the violence against Sweets. Not the violence that’s already happened. Something more. Something big and coordinated.”

  “That’s a little paranoid, Sophie.”

  I hoped so. I really hoped so.

  • • • •

  For the next week, all I did was watch the news. In our apartment I watched it on the wallscreen. In the APBRI cafeteria I tried to stay as much as possible in the back kitchen and I kept the screen tuned to news channels. Eventually Ted and Sarah and Kayla, the new cook, objected. “All that doom and gloom,” Sarah said, switching to a rerun of some show so old that cars thronged New York City. A half hour later I said I felt nauseated, went home, and stayed there, watching news shows whenever they were broadcast. A few times I even got recast European and Asian news, with and without translations. I told Kayla that I had the flu.

  In seven different countries, children were attacked and mutilated. Each time, the alleged attacker, for whom there was “forensic evidence,” was another Sweet. A little boy in San Diego, twin girls in Munich, children in Cairo and Shanghai and Mumbai and Rio and London.

  Louis William Porter was everywhere, vomiting out his poison that it was no coincidence the alien ship had appeared just before Sweets “went vicious.”

  Attacks against Sweets ramped up around the world, became more organized and deadly.

  My mother phoned constantly; eventually I stopped taking her calls. A dozen times I picked up the phone to call Carrie and then set it down again. What would I say? “Come here?” APBRI was not sheltering anyone but its own personnel. Go somewhere else? She wouldn’t go. Arm yourself for an attack? She wouldn’t.

  Eventually I settled for calling her a few times every day, hearing her say, “Sophie?” and then cutting the link. As long as her voice was calm, the settlement was okay.

  More murdered and mutilated children on TV.

  Scientists fought back. On Understanding the News, Ian took his turn explaining that the biology of Sweets “as it is understood now” simply made such violence impossible to them. It was this objective fairness that sunk him. Fifteen minutes after Ian’s broadcast, Louis William Porter proclaimed triumphantly, practically licking his lips, that “science as it is understood now” implied both incomplete understanding and the possibility of change. The Sweets had changed, and the aliens had caused it. (Porter had changed his mind about their existence—they were now not only allies of the Chinese but were in fact controlling Sweets “like the soulless puppets they are!”)

  When Ian got home, I turned on him. “Why the fuck did you say that?”

  He stood in the doorway to our apartment, and for a moment I saw it through his eyes: blaring wallscreen to keep me awake, dirty dishes with the bizarre food combinations left in the pantry, myself even dirtier than the dishes. It had been days since I showered. The place reeked. But Ian didn’t look all that great, either: pale, heavy-eyed. He knew he’d screwed up.

  He said, too evenly, “I said it because it’s true.”

  “Ian McGill, the great acolyte of Truth! And now more people will die because you needed to preserve your scientific purity!”

  He took a step forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Ian, who was never violent. But neither was he a Sweet, and I knew that in my anger I’d crossed an important line. But he
mastered himself, threw me a look so terrible that it seared itself onto my brain, and went into the bedroom. I heard the door lock.

  I picked up my cell, called Carrie, and hung up when I heard her voice.

  • • • •

  A few days later, the attack came. Not on Carrie’s settlement—the other attack I’d been waiting for.

  Only cynics like me believed that what was left of the United States government was mistaken about China’s space capabilities. Was mistaken, or was lying, or was protecting diplomatic secrets—in the end, all three came down to the same thing. NASA said no one on Earth had nuclear missiles that could accurately reach the alien ship, but at 2:47 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on May 14, China hit the alien spacecraft with enough nuclear power to blow up greater Los Angeles.

  Our one remaining orbiting telescope caught the attack on camera. The missile exploded and the ship did not. The photo wasn’t a close-up, but it was clear enough to see that the ship emitted a blue haze a nanosecond before the missile hit, the missile disappeared, and the ship floated serenely in the void, its fragile-looking and oddly-shaped projections still intact.

  The news feeds erupted. Theories, accusations, counter-theories, counter-accusations, defenses and offenses—it was a fucking law court on the airwaves. Somewhere a few hours in, I stopped listening. I no longer knew if the aliens had caused the biological changes in the Sweets, or the volcano, or the Big Bang that began the universe. I was sure of only one thing: They were waiting. They would wait for decades, if necessary. Until everyone over thirty-five, every nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, pre-Sweet human was dead.