After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A Novel

by Nancy Kress

  “Paolo isn’t really strong enough for a Grab unless it’s a store, and who can predict that?” McAllister said reasonably. “I’m taking him off Grab duty. Pete, don’t you want to hear about the little girls?”

  “No. Caity could have gone on the Grab when Paolo fell asleep,” he said, although he knew that if it wasn’t her turn, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near the machinery. But Pete had his own reasons for a grudge against Caity, reasons he couldn’t tell McAllister. And the truth was that of the Six, Pete and Ravi were best at the Grab. Terrell wouldn’t go until he turned twelve, Paolo and Jenna had gotten too sickly, Caity had her arm broken when she tried to Grab a child, which she hadn’t even been able to bring back. Although, to be fair, Caity insisted on going again as soon as her arm healed. But Pete was in no mood to be fair to Caity.

  Only the Six could go through the Grab machinery. Before the humans in the Shell knew that, they’d lost two Survivors, Robert and Seth. You’d think the Tesslies would have told McAllister about the age limit when they left the Grab machinery a year ago! But no one had even seen them leave the machinery (and how did they do that?). Nobody had seen a Tesslie in twenty-one years, and nobody ever had heard one speak. Maybe they couldn’t.

  McAllister said, still trying to cheer up Pete, “Both little girls are adjusting so much better than we’d hoped. You must come see them. The little girl said her name is Kara. She just called the infant ‘Baby,’ so we had to pick a name for her, and we chose ‘Petra.’ After you.”

  Petra. Despite himself, Pete rolled the name on his tongue, savoring it as once—only once—he’d savored “candy” that Paolo had Grabbed when he’d found himself sent to a store. They’d all had a piece. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, McAllister had called them. Feeling the astounding sweetness dissolve on his tongue, Pete had hated the Tesslies all over again. This, this, this—he might have had a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup every day of his life! A whole Peanut Butter Cup, every day!

  He might even have had a woman like McAllister.

  “Come see Petra,” she coaxed.

  He’d been trained since birth not to indulge himself. Don’t be a wimp! Indulgence in moods was selfish and against the restarting of humanity. Some of the others might be better at remembering that—well, all of the others—but Pete had his pride. He’d been indulgent enough for one day. He got painfully to his feet, his head wobbling, and followed McAllister to see Petra.

  APRIL 2014

  The Connecticut salt marsh had been filled in during the 1940s, restored during the 1980s, overrun with too many tourists enjoying its beauty in the 1990s, and finally declared an ecologically protected area in 2004. Although it proved impossible to completely eliminate the invasive nonnative plant species, the natural floral layering of back-barrier marsh was returning. At the lowest level, where the tide brought surges of salt water twice a day, cordgrass and glassworts dominated. Higher up, it was salt hay. Higher still, on the upland border of the marsh, the ground was thick with black rush and marsh elder.

  A particularly large marsh elder, nearly eight feet high, held a half-finished nest. A red-winged blackbird brought another piece of grass, laid it in the nest, and flew off. The shrub’s still furled buds, which would soon become greenish-white flowers, bobbed in a wind from the sea.

  Below ground, bacteria mutated again. This time it found the lower salinity much more congenial than it had the roots of cordgrass, a month ago. The bacterial slime engaged in all its metabolic processes, including mitosis and fermentation. Alcohol began to accumulate on the marsh elder’s roots.

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Julie sat in a crowded Starbucks in D.C. across the table from her best friend, Linda Campinelli. Julie’s latte and Linda’s double caramel macchiato sat untouched. The women known each other since Princeton, brought together by the vagaries of the roommate-matching computer even though they were complete opposites. Linda, a large untidy woman with a large untidy husband and three riotous sons, was an animal psychologist in Bethesda. She told long, funny stories about neurotically territorial cats or schnauzers that developed a fear of their water dishes. But not today.

  “Ju…are you sure?”

  “I’m four months along. Of course I’m sure.”

  “Gordon?”

  “Of course it was Gordon! How many men do you think I was banging at once?”

  “I meant what will Gordon and you do?”

  Julie had expected this. Linda was not only a romantic, she was sociability squared. Maybe even cubed. Not even after four years of dorm living did Linda understand Julie’s preference for silence and solitude. For Linda, all decisions and all endeavors were group activities.

  “Linda, there is no ‘Gordon and me.’ And I don’t want there to be. I’m having the baby, I’m keeping the baby, I’m raising the baby. Georgetown’s given me a year’s sabbatical, for which I was overdue anyway. I’ve got great medical coverage. I feel fine now that morning sickness is over. And I’m happy to be doing this alone.”

  “Except for me,” said Linda, to whom anything else was unthinkable.

  Julie smiled. “Of course. You can be my labor coach. Always good to have a coach who won all her own games.”

  “And your due date is—”

  “May 1.”

  Linda sipped her caramel macchiato. Julie saw that her friend was still troubled. Linda would never understand isolates like Julie and Jake.

  As if reading Julie’s mind, Linda said, “And how is that gorgeous brother of yours?”

  “Still monitoring mud in Wyoming.” Jake was a geologist.

  “What did he say about the baby?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “But he’ll come here for the birth, right?”

  “I’m sure he will,” said Julie, who was sure of no such thing. She and Jake liked being affectionate at a distance.

  “Then you’ll have me and Jake, and I’m sure that Lucy Anderson will come to—”

  Ah, Linda! Even parturition required a committee.

  That evening Julie’s cell rang just as she was tapping the lid back on a paint can in her D.C. apartment. Paint had spilled over the side of the can and flowed down its side, but fortunately she had laid down a thick wad of paper. Winterfresh green puddled over a science article: POLLUTION FROM ASIA CONTAMINATES STRATOSPHERE. Julie’s paper mask was still in place; the baby book had recommended a filter mask if a pregnant woman felt it absolutely necessary to paint something. Julie had felt it absolutely necessary to paint her mother’s old chest of drawers, after which she would apply decals of bears. The ultrasound showed she was having a girl. But no Disney princesses or any of that shit; Julie’s daughter would be brought up to be a strong, independent woman. Bears were a good start.

  The nursery, formerly Julie’s study, was very cold, since the baby book had also recommended painting with open windows. She shivered as she picked up her cell and walked into the hallway of the two-bedroom apartment, squeezing past the furniture and boxes moved from her former study. Somehow she would have to find room for all this stuff. At the moment her computer and printer sat on the dining table and her file cabinet crowded the kitchen. The baby wasn’t even here yet and it had disrupted everything. “Hello. Julie Kahn speaking.”

  “It’s Gordon.”

  Damn. She said neutrally, “Yes?”

  “Is that really you? You sound all muffled.”

  She took off the filter mask and said crisply, “What is it, Gordon?”

  He was direct, one of the things she’d liked about him, when she still liked things about him. “There was no kidnapping Thursday at Hingham.”

  That threw her. “Are you sure? Could there possibly be a child missing but the parents didn’t report it, or…or maybe just another burglary, the algorithms used those to—”

  “I know my damn job. If there were so much as a misplaced screwdriver in this town tonight, we’d fucking well know about it.”

  In his unaccustomed irritabilit
y she heard his tension over the situation. Unless his tension was over her, which she definitely did not want.

  She said, “I explained to you that the burglaries complicated the algorithms, made them more than a simple linear progression. It was a judgment call which ones to include. I might have included some that were inside jobs with no forced entry, I might have missed some that—”

  “I know all that. You did explain it. Several times. But the fact is that your predictive program isn’t working, and you need to fix it in part because I’ve staked my credibility with the A-Dic on it.”

  Not like him to say so much. Her temper rose. “You can’t blame this failure on me, Gordon. I told you when you approached me at the university that predictive algorithms with this kind of data—”

  “I know what you told me. Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot. Just put this new non-data in and give me something else I can work with. If you really can.”

  “I’ll do what is possible,” she said stiffly.

  “Great. Call me whenever it’s done.” He hung up, everything else unsaid between them.

  Julie closed the door to the freezing nursery-to-be, put on a heavy sweater, and went to her computer.

  APRIL 2014

  From the floor of the Atlantic Ocean rose the longest mountain range in the world, separating huge tectonic plates. All at once a northern section of the African Plate moved closer to the South American Plate. The move was only an inch, and the resulting earthquake so slight it was felt by nobody. But the hydrophones set around the ocean picked up the shift from its low-frequency sonic rumbles, sending the information to monitoring stations on four continents.

  “¡Mirar esto!” a technician called to his superior in Spain.

  “Regardez!”

  “Ei, olhar para esta!”

  “Kijk naar dit!”

  “Will you fucking take a look at that!”

  2035

  Kara started screaming as soon as Pete came through the archway to the children’s room.

  Thirteen children played or slept or learned in this large open space. Like all interior Shell rooms, it had featureless white metal walls, floor, and ceiling. There was no visible lighting but the room was suffused with a glow that brightened at “day” and dimmed at “night,” although never to complete blackness. The Shell contained only those objects originally gathered by Tesslies before they destroyed the world, or else objects seized on Grabs with the machinery the aliens had supplied a year ago. Pallets of blankets either thin and holey or else thick and new. Pillows on the floor for the adults to sit on. Many bright plastic toys, from the time that one of Jenna’s Grabs had landed her in something called a “Wal-Mart.” That Grab was famous. Jenna, almost as smart as her mother, had used her ten minutes to lash together three huge shopping carts and frantically fill them with everything in the closest aisles, toys and tools and clothing and “soft goods.” The pillows had come from that Grab, and the sheets and blankets that made both bedding and clothes for those who didn’t happen at the moment to fit into any clothes Grabbed at other stores. The shopping carts were now used to trundle things along the central corridor.

  One wall held McAllister’s calendar. Crayons and paint just slid off the metal walls, but McAllister had put up a large sheet with packing tape and on that she kept careful track of how long humanity had been in the Shell. As a little boy Pete had sat in front of that calendar in a learning circle and learned to count. He’d been taught to read, too, although until Jenna’s Grab all the letters had to be written on a blanket using burned twigs from the farm. Now the Shell had six precious books, which everyone read over and over. All the pages were smeary and torn at the edges.

  The children’s room—and many other rooms as well—held piles of buckets. These had been here from the beginning; evidently the Tesslies considered buckets important. The Shell contained whole rooms full of buckets, from fist-sized (these were used as bowls and cups) to big ones on the farm. The buckets could be stuck to each other with something in tubes that Jenna had brought back from her Wal-Mart Grab. A shoulder-high wall of stuck-together buckets divided the babies’ corner from the rest of the children’s room. And, of course, the buckets were used for pissing and shitting.

  Jenna would never do another Grab. Her deformities were worse than most, and now her spine would not hold up her body for more than a few minutes of painful movement. It wouldn’t be long before one of the shopping carts would have to trundle her. But despite the constant pain, she retained the sweet nature she had inherited from McAllister, and now she sat on a pillow, back against the wall beside the open door, reading to four kids sprawled on the floor. Goodnight Moon. Pete knew it well.

  Kara looked up, saw Pete, and shrieked. “No! No! Nooooooo!” The child threw herself on the floor and kicked her bare feet against the metal.

  McAllister picked her up. “No, sweetheart, no…ssshhhhhhh, Kara-love, ssshhhhh….”

  Kara went on screaming until Caity rushed over, took Kara from McAllister, and carried her away, tossing a reproachful glance over her shoulder at Pete. He’d never liked Caity, not even when they were kids themselves. “She’s too much like you,” McAllister had said to him once, and Pete had hid from McAllister in the far end of the Shell for an entire day. He still didn’t like Caity, not even when he was having sex with her.

  Jenna said, “How are you, Pete?”

  “Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.” Almost immediately he regretted saying that. Jenna loved the songs Bridget had crooned to them as kids, and she’d loved Bridget. At Bridget’s funeral a few months ago, Jenna had sobbed and sobbed.

  Jenna didn’t react to the sarcasm. She, of all the Six, was the best at setting aside her own feelings for the common good. Terrell and Paolo were pretty good at it, too. Pete, Ravi, and Caity often failed.

  Failed, failed, failed… That was Pete’s song, unless he made hatred sing louder.

  Jenna said, “I’m glad you recovered from your Grab. Kara is coming along very well—”

  “Unless she sees me, of course.”

  “—and Petra is a darling.”

  “I better go Outside to give Kara a chance to adjust.”

  McAllister said, sharply for her, “That’s enough of that talk, Pete. Come with me.”

  As if anyone could really get Outside!

  But he followed her meekly, wishing for the hundred hundredth time that he had Jenna’s patience. Ravi’s physical strength and good looks. Anything that anyone else had and he didn’t. Wishing he could seize McAllister’s waist and take her into one of the rooms at the far end of the Shell, just the two of them and a blanket… His cock rose.

  Not a good time! Still, he was glad he was only infertile, not impotent like Paolo. “Pre-embryonic genetic damage is a capricious thing,” McAllister had said. “We were lucky you Six survived at all.”

  Lucky. Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.

  McAllister led Pete around the bucket-wall to the babies’ corner. Three infants lay asleep on blankets, watched over by Ravi, who didn’t much like babies but it was his turn for this duty. Ravi was the least deformed of the Six. His eyes were permanently crossed, but his body was strong and, even though he was a year younger than Pete, he was taller and heavier. With thick dark hair and a handsome face, he looked the most like the princes in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Sometimes Pete hated him for that, although in general they got along well enough. Ravi was his biological half-brother, after all. Not that that counted for much; what counted was the good of all.

  “Look,” McAllister said to Pete, “at the treasure you brought us.”

  Petra lay asleep on a blanket, a square of plastic between it and the clumsy diaper made of another blanket. On top she wore a very faded yellow shirt too big for her. Her tiny pink mouth, the little curled fists with the creases at the wrists, the shape of her head… She was a perfect human person and of course she would be fertile. Radiation leve
ls had subsided enough by now, McAllister had said, although Pete didn’t really understand what that meant. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had done this thing: brought back a perfect, precious boost to the restarting of humanity on Earth. Someday that restarting would move Outside, McAllister said.

  If the Tesslies permitted it.

  McAllister put her thin hands on either side of Pete’s face and turned him toward her. “Listen to me, dear heart. I am making you this baby’s father. You are now responsible for her life and, as much as possible, her happiness. Do you understand me? I put Petra’s life in your hands. You are her father.”

  Both Pete and Ravi gaped at her. No one in the Shell was “father” or “mother” to any kid taken on a Grab! Everyone was responsible for the good of all, always. Why now, why Petra, why Pete? The questions were lost in the feel of McAllister’s hands on his face.

  “Why him?” Ravi blurted. “Is it because he’s the oldest?”

  McAllister didn’t answer. She never answered anything she didn’t choose to. But she gave Ravi a look that Pete couldn’t read, and didn’t want to. All he wanted was for her to keep on holding his face between her long slim fingers, forever and ever.

  She didn’t. But he could feel her hands long after she took them away, could feel his own deep blush, could feel the burden, welcome because she had given it, that McAllister had just placed on his heart. To turn his red face away from her, he gazed down at Petra.

  “Hey,” he said to the baby, who woke and immediately shit her diaper.

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Julie sat in her apartment, studying the graphs on her computer screen. Her desk was jammed against the living room window. Beyond the glass a few flakes of early snow drifted through darkness. Cars swooshed through street slush and swept ghostly patterns of light across the ceiling.