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

by Nancy Kress

  Julie said, in a voice Pete recognized: “There goes the West. To match the East.” The words made no sense, but the voice was the one Bridget had used when her last baby miscarried. Quiet, toneless, dead.

  Pete stared at this baby, now awake in its padded bucket and peering curiously around. Was it a girl? How hard would Julie fight for it?

  She said, “Take us with you.”

  He gaped at her. She didn’t give him a chance to speak.

  “You can, I know you can. You’ve taken twelve children, starting—”

  “Thirteen,” he corrected, without thinking.

  “—with Tommy Candless over a year ago, and you can take us. Don’t you understand, Pete? Everything here is dying, the Earth itself is dying! Tsunamis, earthquakes, a mutated bacteria that is killing every plant above tide level. Governments will collapse, and as they collapse they’ll fight back, there will be nuclear retaliation with radiation that will—”

  “Radiation, yes.” She had used a word he knew. “It damages babies. It damaged me. But it’s mostly gone now.”

  “Is it? Then take—”

  “Everything you said, the destroying of the whole Earth—the Tesslies did that. But McAllister is leading us to restart humanity. And Ravi and I will kill the fucking alien Tesslies!”

  “The—”

  Suddenly all the DIGIAL FOTO FRAMES went black at once. The silence somehow felt loud. Into it Julie said, “No aliens wrecked the Earth. We did. Humans.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “No, Pete, it’s not. We poisoned the Earth and raped her and denuded her. We ruined the oceans and air and forests, and now she is fighting back.”

  “The Tesslies destroyed the world!”

  “I don’t think so. Tell me this: Are there any plants where you live? Growing wild outside the Shell, I mean?”

  “There are now. Grasses and bushes and red flowers.”

  Julie closed her eyes, and her lips moved soundlessly. When she opened her eyes again, they were wet. “Thank God. Or Gaia. The microbial mutation reversed.”

  “What?”

  “Take us with you, Pete. I can help your McAllister start over. I’m strong and a good worker and I know a lot of different things. I can be really useful to…to the Shell.”

  She took a step forward and looked at him with such beseeching eyes that all at once Pete saw her. She was a real person, as real as McAllister or Petra or Ravi, a person who was going to die in McAllister’s tsunami. The first person in Before who had ever been real to him.

  “Take us with you!”

  He choked out, “I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can! You’ve done it twelve times already!”

  “Only kids,” Pete said. “If adults go through a Grab, they die.” Robert, Seth, the thing that had come back with him and Kara and Petra. The thing that had been their father. “The Tesslies made the Grab that way. They didn’t want the Survivors to just get everybody on the platform and lead them all back to Before.”

  Julie went so still and so sick-looking that for a crazy moment Pete thought she had turned into the “yellow stone” the wall had been screaming about. Robert, Seth, the thing that had been Petra’s father… He started to babble. “But I can take that baby, yes I can, kids can go through a Grab so I can take the baby! Give it to me!”

  Julie didn’t move.

  “Give me the baby! I’ve only got—” a quick glance at his wrister “—another two and a half minutes!”

  The number brought her alive. She shoved the baby bucket into his arms. “Her name is Alicia. Tell her—oh, tell her about me!”

  “Okay.” He couldn’t do that; it was important that the Grab kids belong to the Shell, not to Before. McAllister insisted on it. But he didn’t have to tell Julie that.

  She began to cry. Pete hated it when people cried. But she had a good reason, and anyway there were only three or four sobs before she got hold of herself and began to talk. “Listen, Pete, it was us, not any aliens. Have you ever heard of Gaia?”

  “No.”

  “Is your McAllister an educated man?”

  “She knows everything.”

  “Then tell her this: We did it. We wrecked the Earth, and now the Earth is fighting back. The planet is full of self-regulating mechanisms—remember those exact words!—to keep life intact. We’ve violated them, and Gaia—remember that word!—is cleansing herself of us. It’s not mysticism, it’s Darwinian self-preservation. Maybe Gaia will start over. Maybe you in the Shell are part of that! But tell McAllister that, tell everyone! Say it!”

  She was hysterical, the way Petra’s mother had got hysterical when Pete Grabbed Petra. But she was also real. So Pete repeated the words after her, and then repeated them again, all the while hurling more things into shopping carts. “Gaia. Darwinian self-preservation.” Blankets, socks, a tableful of flimsy books. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” Three folding chairs, all he had room for. “Identical deadly plant mutations in widely separated places. Gaia.” Now he’d reached the start of the food section. Loaves of bread! Boxes of something else!

  The ground shook again. The baby started to whimper. Pete tied the huge shopping carts together with towels. He clutched one of the handles in one hand, the baby bucket in the other. Fifteen seconds.

  “Bye, Julie. I’m sorry about the tsunami.”

  “Alicia!” Julie cried. Then, stopping herself in mid-lunge: “It was us.”

  “It was the Tesslies.”

  “No, no—don’t you see? We humans always blame the wrong ones! The—”

  Pete never heard the rest. He was Grabbed.

  2035

  “I'm back!” Pete cried from the platform. “Look! Look!” No one was in the Grab room.

  That made no sense. McAllister had seen him go. She knew he would be back in twenty-two minutes, and his wrister said that he was. She, at least, should be waiting here. Disappointment lurched through him—he had a baby girl to show her! And all this great stuff! And all those words to tell her that Julie had said… If he could remember them.

  He found he remembered them perfectly.

  Pete’s belly churned. The excitement of the Grab, the disappointment at no one seeing his triumphant return, his deep disturbance at Julie’s statements, going deeper every moment. Where was McAllister? Where was everybody?

  “Hello?” he said, but not loud. No answer.

  He hopped off the platform, leaving his Grabbed prizes, still carrying Alicia in her baby-bucket. Cautiously he peered into the corridor.

  No one. But through the wide arched entrance to the farm, he glimpsed a movement behind the wide white bulk of the fertilizer machine. A second later Ravi appeared, gestured wildly for Pete to come, then ducked again out of sight. Was it a game of some sort?

  He knew it wasn’t. He set the baby-bucket down in the middle of the corridor and sprinted toward Ravi.

  “We don’t have much time,” Ravi gasped. “They’ll find out it’s missing. My knife doesn’t work at all on its bucket-case. But you have the laser on your wrister. Quick, kill it!”

  Lying on the ground at Ravi’s feet was a Tesslie.

  JULY 2014

  Julie walked calmly to a deep faux-leather chair in the Costco furniture display. Calmly she sat down. The calm, she knew with the part of her brain that was still rational, would not last. It was shock. Also several other things, including a preternaturally heightened ability to simultaneously comprehend everything around her, instead of in the linear shards that the human mind was usually stuck with.

  Alicia was gone.

  The megatsunami was on its way.

  Washington D.C., including her life there, would soon no longer exist.

  Her country would not allow that to go by without a military reaction.

  Pete had left behind a pile of objects that must have slid off one of his shopping carts before he…left.

  Jake was dead in whatever was happening at the Yellowstone Caldera.

  The TVs o
n the wall had stopped broadcasting.

  The Tokyo earthquake and tsunami had been a rehearsal for what would come, once the biologists had detected and contained the plant mutations. Or, alternatively, once Gaia had changed its tactics.

  The chair she sat in was on sale for $179.99.

  Linda and her family were in Winnipeg, far from the coast. Would that save them? For how long? Gordon and his kids, all the people Julie knew at Georgetown and in D.C.—all gone, or soon to be gone. And then incongruously: The motel clerk’s niece will never be crowned Miss Cochranton Azalea.

  Julie drew the snub-nosed .38 from her pocket. She would not wait for the tsunami. This was better. And Alicia—her baby, her treasure, the miracle she had given up hoping to have—was safe. Safe someplace that might, with any luck, become the future.

  JULY 2014

  Beneath the Yellowstone Caldera, the geothermal system exploded from pressure from below. A magma pool twenty miles by forty miles blew into the sky, greater than the supervolcano in Indonesia that, 75,000 years ago, had killed fifty percent of the human race. More than 250 cubic miles of magma erupted into the air. For hundreds of miles everything burned, and ash choked the air. Burning, suffocating night spread over the land.

  The explosion triggered earthquakes in the San Andreas Fault and on into the Pacific Rim. As convergent tectonic plate boundaries lifted or subducted, more tsunamis were generated in the Pacific, and then in the Indian Ocean. Even deep sea life was affected as thermal vents opened—but not affected very much. Most of the ocean life was hardy, adapted, and innocent.

  2035

  Pete gaped at the Tesslie lying at Ravi’s feet. Or…was it lying? The thing was the squarish metal can he remembered, without clear head or feet or anything. He said, inanely, “How do you know it isn’t standing up instead of lying down?”

  “Because I knocked it over!”

  “Did it come out of the air in a bunch of golden sparks?”

  “Yes!”

  “It’s not moving. How do you know it’s still alive?”

  “It won’t be if you fucking laser it!”

  Pete didn’t move. Ravi leaped forward, grabbed Pete’s arm with both hands, and fumbled with the buckle on the wrister.

  Ideas surged and eddied in Pete’s mind, even as he kept his eyes on the Tesslie. It lay still now, but Pete knew it wasn’t helpless. It was watching. Without eyes or anything, it was still watching to see what he and Ravi would do. And it was not helpless. The Tesslies had built this whole Shell! They had made Grab machinery to send the Six back to get kids and stuff! They had come from someplace else through the sky! One of them was not going to let a human laser him open. Ravi was crazy.

  But even more, Julie’s words swirled in his brain. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” “Darwinian self-preservation.” “Gaia.” “We did it. We wrecked the Earth.” And “We humans always blame the wrong ones.”

  Pete pushed Ravi away. Ravi said, “What the fuck? Give me the laser.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You mean you can’t laser the bastard? I can! Give it to me, you wimp!”

  “I don’t know…maybe the Tesslies…I don’t know!” It was a cry of anguish. We humans always blame the wrong ones.

  Ravi, much stronger than Pete, knocked him to the ground and sat on him. Pete stuck his arm with the wrister behind his back. Ravi easily got it out, but he couldn’t unbuckle the wrister and also keep both Pete’s arms pinned. Pete flailed, wrenching his bad shoulder, hitting Ravi’s face, shoulder, anywhere he could reach. Ravi snarled at him, exposing the crooked stumps of the teeth that Pete had knocked out.

  The Tesslie turned itself so it stood on a different side of its bucket-case, and waited quietly.

  “Give it to me, you wimp!”

  “No! McAllister said—”

  “It took McAllister! It took them all, you fucking idiot! They’re prisoners! That’s why I—give it to me!” He smashed a fist into Pete’s face.

  “Prisoners?” He could barely get the word out for pain, even though he’d turned his head in time for Ravi’s blow to hit him on the side of the jaw instead of on the mouth.

  “Yes! The bastards took them all!”

  “Petra?”

  “Give it to me!”

  “Took where?”

  Ravi flipped Pete over and wrenched his arm behind his head. The pain was astonishing. Ravi got the wrister unbuckled, sprang off Pete, and aimed the laser at the Tesslie. Ravi fired.

  Nothing happened.

  Pete, gasping on the floor, saw the laser beam hit the Tesslie’s bucket-case. The red beam vanished. The Tesslie stood stolid and silent.

  Ravi gave a low moan. Pete got to his feet. His vision blurred during the process, but he did it. He faced the Tesslie.

  “Don’t hurt him, please. He doesn’t know. He thinks you destroyed everything.”

  The Tesslie said and did nothing.

  Pete blurted, “Did you?”

  Nothing.

  “Or was it really—” All of a sudden he couldn’t remember the weird name Julie had said. Gouda? Or was that the cheese Caity had once brought back from a Grab? Guide-a? Gaga? Gina?

  “—us?”

  The Tesslie rose a few inches into the air and moved past Pete, floating on nothing at all toward the corridor. A long ropelike metal arm shot out of its tin can, startling Pete. The arm flicked toward him, then pointed to the corridor. The Tesslie floated on, and Pete followed.

  “I’m not going!” Ravi shouted. “I’m not!”

  “Wimp,” Pete said.

  In the corridor he picked up Alicia’s baby-bucket. She had started to fuss, working up to a full wail. The Tesslie floated on, toward the maze at the far end and then through its small rooms. Pete trailed behind because he needed McAllister and anyway he couldn’t think what else to do. What if they were all dead? What if he and this baby were going to their deaths?

  That made no sense.

  But, then, neither did anything else.

  He heard Darlene first. She was singing at the top of her lungs, belting out a desperate stupid song in her scratchy voice: “‘Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war…’”

  McAllister had told Darlene not to sing that song because wars were all over. Darlene had never listened. Now Pete could hear a baby wailing. Then McAllister’s voice, sharp and uncharacteristically angry: “Darlene, stop that!”

  Darlene didn’t. The Tesslie and Pete rounded a corner in the maze and faced an open door.

  They were all crowded into one small room. McAllister and Darlene and Eduardo stood in the front. Behind them huddled Caity, Paolo, Jenna, Terrell. The Grab children were penned in the corner, the babies lying on the bare metal floor. Two more Tesslies guarded the doorway. Pete ran past them to McAllister. “Are you hurt? Is anybody hurt? What happened?”

  Caity said, “They brought us here! Like…like gerbils!”

  Where were the gerbils? Then Pete saw them, trying to get out of a large bucket. They couldn’t. Tommy held the squirming Fuzz Ball. Tommy’s eyes were big as bucket bottoms.

  McAllister said, “You Grabbed another child? Where’s Ravi?”

  “He—”

  The edges of the room began to shimmer with golden sparks.

  McAllister ran forward, her big belly swaying. “No, please, not without Ravi—please!”

  No response from any of the three Tesslies.

  “Please! Listen, we’re so grateful for all you’ve done but if you’re really helping us again, we need everyone! We need Ravi!”

  “That angel ain’t going to listen to you!” Darlene said, with all the bitterness of her bitter self. “Them cherubim are flaming swords! Don’t you know nothing?”

  “Please,” McAllister said to the Tesslie. And then, “Ravi is fertile!”

  The golden sparks stopped.

  “Ueeuuggthhhg,” Caity said, which might have meant anything.

  “Flaming swords!” Darlene shouted, and several childre
n began to cry. McAllister whirled around and slapped Darlene. Pete gaped at McAllister; Darlene put her hand to her red cheek; Caity looked scared in a way that Caity never did; more children screamed.

  A fourth Tesslie dragged Ravi into the room, its ropy metal arm wrapped around Ravi’s neck. Released, Ravi stumbled forward as if pushed. He fell into Jenna, who also went down with a cry of pain. Jenna’s fragile bones—

  Pete had no time to pull Ravi off Jenna, or to pick up the crying Alicia, or to clutch at McAllister. The sparks enveloped all of them in a shower of gold, and then there was nothing.

  It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t.

  He lay on something hard in places and soft in others. The air felt warm and thick. Something gray shifted above him, far above him. Some noise, faint and rhythmic, sounded over and over in his ears. Something stirred behind him.

  The cold retreated abruptly and Pete returned fully to himself. He sprawled Outside, beside Ravi and McAllister, and underneath Ravi was Jenna. He lay Outside, partly on rock and partly on some plant low and green and alive. Gray clouds blew overhead. Warm wind ruffled his hair. Dazed, he got to his feet, just as the others began to move.

  They were all there, stirring on the ground. The Tesslies were gone. The Shell was gone. Piles of stuff lay on the ground in places where, he vaguely realized, it had all been lying when the Shell enclosed it: toys, blankets, food, tents, piles and piles of buckets. Pete turned around.

  This was the view he’d had when he’d gone Outside through the funeral slot and then had gone around to the far side of the Shell. He stood on a high ridge of black rock. Below him the land sloped down to the sea. The whole long slope was a mixture of bare rock, green plants, red flowery bushes. A brownish river gushed down the hillside. Beyond, along the shore, the land flattened and gold-and-green plants grew more thickly a long way out, until the water began.

  It was quiet Eduardo who spoke first. “Regenerated from wind-blown seeds, maybe. From…wherever survived. And those lupines are nitrogen-fixers, enriching the soil.”

  McAllister said shakily, “There must still be ash in the air, it’s so thick, but it’s breathable…fresh water….” She put her hands over her face, all at once reminding Pete of Julie, in the last-ever Grab.