by Nancy Kress
“Thank you, Lord,” he said to the toilet, snorted twice his usual dose, and went back to his table to eat the cooling gyro and wait.
The drug took him quickly, as it always did. First came a smooth feeling, as if the synapses of his brain were filling with rich, thick cream. Then: One moment he was Noah Jenner, misfit, and the next he wasn’t. He felt like a prosperous small businessman of some type, a shop-owner maybe, financially secure and blissfully uncomplicated. A contented, centered person who never questioned who he was or where he was going, who fit in wherever he happened to be. The sort of man who could eat his gyro and gaze out the window without a confusing thought in his head.
Which he did, munching away, the juicy meat and mild spices satisfying in his mouth, for a quiet half-hour.
Except—something was happening on the street.
A group of people streamed down Broadway. A parade. No, a mob. They carried torches, of all things, and something larger on fire, carried high. . . . Now Noah could hear shouting. The thing carried high was an effigy made of straw and rags, looking like the alien in a hundred bad movies: big blank head, huge eyes, spindly body of pale green. It stood in a small metal tub atop a board. Someone touched a torch to the straw and set the effigy on fire.
Why? As far as Noah could see, the aliens weren’t bothering anybody. They were even good for business. It was just an excuse for people floundering in a bad economy to vent their anger—
Were these his thoughts? Noah’s? Who was he now?
Police sirens screamed farther down the street. Cops appeared on foot, in riot gear. A public-address system blared, its words audible even through the shop window: “Disperse now! Open flame is not allowed on the streets! You do not have a parade permit! Disperse now!”
Someone threw something heavy, and the other window of the gyro place shattered.
Glass rained down on the empty tables in that corner. Noah jerked upright and raced to the back of the tiny restaurant, away from the windows. The cook was shouting in Greek. People left the parade, or joined it from side streets, and began to hurl rocks and bottles at the police. The cops retreated to the walls and doorways across Broadway and took out grenades of tear gas.
On the sidewalk outside, a small child stumbled by, crying and bleeding and terrified.
The person who Noah was now didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He ran out into the street, grabbed the child, and ran back into the restaurant. He wasn’t quite fast enough to escape the spreading gas. His nose and eyes shrieked in agony, even as he held his breath and thrust the child’s head under his jacket.
Into the tiny kitchen, following the fleeing cook and waiter, and out the back door to an alley of overflowing garbage cans. Noah kept running, even though his agonized vision was blurring. Store owners had all locked their doors. But he had outrun the tear gas, and now a woman was leaning out of the window of her second-floor apartment, craning her neck to see through brick walls to the action two streets away. Gunfire sounded. Over its echo off the steel and stone canyons, Noah shouted up, “A child got gassed! Please—throw down a bottle of water!”
She nodded and disappeared. To his surprise, she actually appeared on the street to help a stranger, carrying a water bottle and towel. “I’m a nurse, let me have him . . . aahh.” Expertly she bathed the child’s eyes, and then Noah’s, just as if a battle wasn’t going on within hearing if not within sight.
“Thank you,” Noah gasped. “It was. . . .” He stopped.
Something was happening in his head, and it wasn’t due to the sugarcane. He felt an immediate and powerful kinship with this woman. How was that possible? He’d never seen her before. Nor was the attraction romantic—she was in late middle age, with graying hair and a drooping belly. But when she smiled at him and said, “You don’t need the ER,” something turned over in Noah’s heart. What the fuck?
It must be the sugarcane.
But the feeling didn’t have the creamy, slightly unreal feel of sugarcane.
She was still talking. “You probably couldn’t get into any ER anyway, they’ll all be jammed. I know—I was an ER nurse. But this kid’ll be fine. He got almost none of the gas. Just take him home and calm him down.”
“Who . . . who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” And she was gone, backing into the vestibule of her apartment building, the door locking automatically behind her. Restoring the anonymity of New York.
Whatever sense of weird recognition and bonding Noah had felt with her, it obviously had not been mutual. He tried to shake off the feeling and concentrate on the kid, who was wailing like a hurricane. The effortless competence bestowed by the sugarcane was slipping away. Noah knew nothing about children. He made a few ineffective soothing noises and picked up the child, who kicked him.
More police sirens in the distance. Eventually he found a precinct station, staffed only by a scared-looking civilian desk clerk; probably everyone else was at the riot. Noah left the kid there. Somebody would be looking for him. Noah walked back to West End Avenue, crossed it, and headed northeast to Elizabeth’s apartment. His eyes still stung, but not too badly. He had escaped the worst of the gas cloud.
Elizabeth answered the door. “Where the hell did you go? Damn it, Noah, Mom’s arriving any minute! She texted!”
“Well, I’m here now, right?”
“Yes, you’re here now, but of all the shit-brained times to go out for a stroll! How did you tear your jacket?”
“Dunno.” Neither his sister nor his brother seemed aware that eight blocks away there had been—maybe still was—an anti-alien riot going on. Noah didn’t feel like informing them.
Ryan held his phone. “She’s here. She texted. I’ll go down.”
Elizabeth said, “Ryan, she can probably pay off a cab and take an elevator by herself.”
Ryan went anyway. He had always been their mother’s favorite, Noah thought wearily. Except around Elizabeth, Ryan was affable, smooth, easy to get along with. His wife was charming, in an exaggeratedly feminine sort of way. They were going to give Marianne a grandchild.
It was an effort to focus on his family. His mind kept going back to that odd, unprecedented feeling of kinship with a person he had never seen before and probably had nothing whatsoever in common with. What was that all about?
“Elizabeth,” his mother said. “And Noah! I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve got . . . I’ve got a lot to tell you all. I—”
And his mother, who was always equal to anything, abruptly turned pale and fainted.
MARIANNE
Stupid, stupid—she never passed out! To the three faces clustered above her like balloons on sticks she said irritably, “It’s nothing—just hypoglycemia. I haven’t eaten since this morning. Elizabeth, if you have some juice or something. . . .”
Juice was produced, crackers, slightly moldy cheese.
Marianne ate. Ryan said, “I didn’t know you were hypoglycemic, Mom.”
“I’m fine. Just not all that young anymore.” She put down her glass and regarded her three children.
Elizabeth, scowling, looked so much like Kyle—was that why Marianne and Elizabeth had never gotten along? Her gorgeous alcoholic husband, the mistake of Marianne’s life, had been dead for fifteen years. Yet here he was again, ready to poke holes in anything Marianne said.
Ryan, plain next to his beautiful sister but so much easier to love. Everybody loved Ryan, except Elizabeth.
And Noah, problem child, she and Kyle’s last-ditch effort to save their doomed marriage. Noah was drifting and, she knew without being able to help, profoundly unhappy.
Were all three of them, and everybody else on the planet, going to die, unless humans and Denebs together could prevent it?
She hadn’t fainted from hypoglycemia, which she didn’t have. She had fainted from sheer delayed, maternal terror at the idea that her children might all perish. But she was not going to say that to her kids. And the fainting wasn’t going to happen again.
&nbs
p; “I need to talk to you,” she said, unnecessarily. But how to begin something like this? “I’ve been talking to the aliens. In the Embassy.”
“We know, Evan told us,” Noah said, at the same moment that Elizabeth, quicker, said sharply, “Inside?”
“Yes. The Deneb ambassador requested me.”
“Requested you? Why?”
“Because of the paper I just published. The aliens—did any of you read the copies of my paper I e-mailed you?”
“I did,” Ryan said. Elizabeth and Noah said nothing. Well, Ryan was the scientist.
“It was about tracing human genetic diversity through mitochondrial evolution. Thirty mitochondrial haplogroups had been discovered. I found the thirty-first. That wouldn’t really be a big deal, except that—in a few days this will be common knowledge but you must keep it among yourselves until the ambassador announces—the aliens belong to the thirty-first group, L7. They’re human.”
Silence.
“Didn’t you understand what I just—”
Elizabeth and Ryan erupted with questions, expressions of disbelief, arm waving. Only Noah sat quietly, clearly puzzled. Marianne explained what Ambassador Smith—impossible name!—had told her. When she got to the part about the race that had taken humans to “World” also leaving titanium tablets engraved with astronomical diagrams, Elizabeth exploded. “Come on, Mom, this fandango makes no sense!”
“The Denebs are here,” Marianne pointed out. “They did find us. And the Denebs are going to give tissue samples. Under our strict human supervision. They’re expanding the Embassy and allowing in humans. Lots of humans, to examine their biology and to work with our scientists.”
“Work on what?” Ryan said gently. “Mom, this can’t be good. They’re an invasive species.”
“Didn’t you hear a word I said?” Marianne said. God, if Ryan, the scientist, could not accept truth, how would humanity as a whole? “They’re not ‘invasive,’ or at least not if our testing confirms the ambassador’s story. They’re native to Earth.”
“An invasive species is native to Earth. It’s just not in the ecological niche it evolved for.”
Elizabeth said, “Ryan, if you bring up purple loosestrife, I swear I’m going to clip you one. Mom, did anybody think to ask this ambassador the basic question of why they’re here in the first place?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot. Of course we did. There’s a—” She stopped and bit her lip, knowing how this would sound. “You all know what panspermia is?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth.
“Of course.” Ryan.
“No.” Noah.
“It’s the idea that original life in the galaxy—” whatever that actually was, all the textbooks would now need to be rewritten “—came from drifting clouds of organic molecules. We know that such molecules exist inside meteors and comets and that they can, under some circumstances, survive entry into atmospheres. Some scientists, like Fred Hoyle and Stephen Hawking, have even endorsed the idea that new biomolecules are still being carried down to Earth. The Denebs say that there is a huge, drifting cloud of spores—well, they’re technically not spores, but I’ll come to that in a minute—drifting toward Earth. Or, rather, we’re speeding toward it, since the solar system rotates around the center of the galaxy and the entire galaxy moves through space relative to the cosmic microwave background. Anyway, ten months from now, Earth and this spore cloud will meet. And the spores are deadly to humans.”
Elizabeth said skeptically, “And they know this how?”
“Because two of their colony planets lay in the path of the cloud and were already exposed. Both populations were completely destroyed. The Denebs have recordings. Then they sent unmanned probes to capture samples, which they brought with them. They say the samples are a virus, or something like a virus, but encapsulated in a coating that isn’t like anything viruses can usually make. Together, aliens and humans are going to find a vaccine or a cure.”
More silence. Then all three of her children spoke together, but in such different tones that they might have been discussing entirely different topics.
Ryan: “In ten months? A vaccine or cure for an unknown pathogen in ten months? It took the CDC six months just to fully identify the bacterium in Legionnaires’ disease!”
Elizabeth: “If they’re so technologically superior, they don’t need us to develop any sort of ‘cure’!”
Noah: “What do the spores do to people?”
Marianne answered Noah first, because his question was the simplest. “They act like viruses, taking over cellular machinery to reproduce. They invade the lungs and multiply and then . . . then victims can’t breathe. It only takes a few days.” A terrible, painful death. A sudden horror came into her mind: her three children gasping for breath as their lungs were swamped with fluid, until they literally drowned. All of them.
“Mom,” Ryan said gently, “are you all right? Elizabeth, do you have any wine or anything?”
“No,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t drink. Marianne suddenly, ridiculously, clung to that fact, as if it could right the world: her two-fisted cop daughter, whose martial arts training enabled her to take down a two-hundred-fifty-pound attacker, had a Victorian lady’s fastidiousness about alcohol. Stereotypes didn’t hold. The world was more complicated than that. The unexpected existed—a Border Patrol section chief did not drink!—and therefore an unexpected solution could be found to this unexpected problem. Yes.
She wasn’t making sense, and knew it, and didn’t care. Right now, she needed hope more than sense. The Denebs, with technology an order of magnitude beyond humans, couldn’t deal with the spore cloud, but Elizabeth didn’t drink and, therefore, together Marianne and Smith and—throw in the president and WHO and the CDC and USAMRIID, why not—could defeat mindless space-floating dormant viruses.
Noah said curiously, “What are you smiling about, Mom?”
“Nothing.” She could never explain.
Elizabeth blurted, “So even if all this shit is true, what the fuck makes the Dennies think that we can help them?”
Elizabeth didn’t drink like a cop, but she swore like one. Marianne said, “They don’t know that we can. But their biological sciences aren’t much more advanced than ours, unlike their physical sciences. And the spore cloud hits Earth next September. The Denebs have twenty-five years.”
“Do you believe that their biological sciences aren’t as advanced as their physics and engineering?”
“I have no reason to disbelieve it.”
“If it’s true, then we’re their lab rats! They’ll test whatever they come up with on us, and then they’ll sit back in orbit or somewhere to see if it works before taking it home to their own planet!”
“That’s one way to think of it,” Marianne said, knowing that this was exactly how a large part of the media would think of it. “Or you could think of it as a rescue mission. They’re trying to help us while there’s time, if not much time.”
Ryan said, “Why do they want you? You’re not a virologist.”
“I don’t know,” Marianne said.
Elizabeth erupted once more, leaping up to pace around the room and punch at the air. “I don’t believe it. Not any of it, including the so-called ‘cloud.’ There are things they aren’t telling us. But you, Mom—you just swallow whole anything they say! You’re unbelievable!”
Before Marianne could answer, Noah said, “I believe you, Mom,” and gave her his absolutely enchanting smile. He had never really become aware of the power of that smile. It conferred acceptance, forgiveness, trust, the sweet sadness of fading sunlight. “All of us believe everything you said.”
“We just don’t want to.”
MARIANNE
Noah was right. Ryan was right. Elizabeth was wrong.
The spore cloud existed. Although technically not spores, that was the word the Deneb translator gave out, and the word stuck among astronomers because it was a term they already knew. As soon as the cloud’s
coordinates, composition, and speed were given by the Denebs to the UN, astronomers around the globe found it through spectral analysis and the dimming of stars behind it. Actually, they had known of its existence all along but had assumed it was just another dust cloud too small and too cool to be incubating stars. Its trajectory would bring it in contact with Earth when the Denebs said, in approximately ten months.
Noah was right in saying that people did not want to believe this. The media erupted into three factions. The most radical declared the “spore cloud” to be just harmless dust and the Denebs plotting, in conspiracy with the UN and possibly several governments, to take over Earth for various evil and sometimes inventive purposes. The second faction believed that the spore threat might be real but that, echoing Elizabeth, humanity would become “lab rats” in alien experiments to find some sort of solution, without benefit to Earth. The third group, the most scientifically literate, focused on a more immediate issue: They did not want the spore samples brought to Earth for research, calling them the real danger.
Marianne suspected the samples were already here. NASA had never detected shuttles or other craft going between the ship in orbit around the moon and the Embassy. Whatever the aliens wanted here probably already was.
Teams of scientists descended on New York. Data were presented to the UN, the only body that Smith would deal with directly. Everyone kept saying that time was of the essence. Marianne, prevented from resuming teaching duties by the insistent reporters clinging to her like lint, stayed in Elizabeth’s apartment and waited. Smith had given her a private communication device, which no one except the UN Special Mission knew about. Sometimes as she watched TV or cleaned Elizabeth’s messy apartment, Marianne pondered this: An alien had given her his phone number and asked her to wait. It was almost like dating again.
Time is of the essence! Time is of the essence! A few weeks went by in negotiations she knew nothing of. Marianne reflected on the word “essence.” Elizabeth worked incredible hours; the Border Patrol had been called in to help keep “undesirables” away from the harbor, assisting the Coast Guard, INS, NYPD, and whoever else the city deemed pertinent. Noah had left again and did not call.
