by Nancy Kress
She clasped her hands tightly together on top of the hospital blanket. “You’re going. With the aliens. When they leave Earth.”
“Yes.”
One simple word. No more than that, and Marianne’s son became an extraterrestrial. She knew that Noah was not doing this in order to save his life. Or hers, or anyone’s. She didn’t know why he had done it. As a child, Noah had been fascinated by superheroes, aliens, robots, even of the more ridiculous kind where the science made zero sense. Comic books, movies, TV shows—he would sit transfixed for hours by some improbable human transformed into a spider or a hulk or a sentient hunk of metal. Did Noah remember that childish fascination? She didn’t understand what this adopted child, this beloved boy she had not borne, remembered or thought or desired. She never had.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
She said, “Don’t be,” and neither of them knew exactly what he was apologizing for in the first place, nor what she was excusing him from. After that, Marianne could find nothing else to say. Of the thousands of things she could have said to Noah, absolutely none of them rose to her lips. So finally she nodded.
Noah blew her a kiss. Marianne did not watch him go. She couldn’t have borne it. Instead she shifted her weight on the bed and got out of it, holding on to the bedstead, ignoring Ann Potter’s strenuous objections on the other side of the glass.
She had to see Ambassador Smith, to tell him about Elizabeth. The terrorist organization could strike again.
As soon as she told Smith, Elizabeth would be arrested. Two children lost—
No, don’t think of it. Tell Smith.
But—wait. Maybe it hadn’t been Elizabeth. Surely others had had an unauthorized tour of the ship? And now, as a result of the attack, security would be tightened. Probably no other saboteur could get through. Perhaps there would be no more supply runs by submarine, no more helicopters coming and going on the wide pier. Time was so short—maybe there were enough supplies aboard already. And perhaps the Denebs would use their unknowable technology to keep the Embassy safer until the spore cloud hit, by which time, of course, the aliens would have left. There were only three months left. Surely a second attack inside the Embassy couldn’t be organized in such a brief time! Maybe there was no need to name Elizabeth at all.
The room swayed as she clutched the side of the bed.
Ann Potter said, “If you don’t get back into bed right now, Marianne, I’m calling security.”
“Nothing is secure, don’t you know that, you silly woman?” Marianne snapped.
Noah was lost to her. Evan was dead. Elizabeth was guilty.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll get back in bed.” What was she even doing, standing up? She couldn’t leave. She carried the infection inside her body. “But I . . . I need to see Ambassador Smith. Right now, here. Please have someone tell him it’s the highest possible priority. Please.”
NOAH
The visit to his mother upset Noah more than he’d expected. She’d looked so small, so fragile in her bed behind the quarantine glass. Always, his whole life, he’d thought of her as large, towering over the landscape like some stone fortress, both safe and formidable. But she was just a small, frightened woman who was going to die.
As were Elizabeth, Ryan and Connie and their baby, Noah’s last girlfriend, Emily, his childhood buddies Sam and Davey, Cindy and Miguel at the restaurant—all going to die when the spore cloud hit. Why hadn’t Noah been thinking about this before? How could he be so selfish about concentrating on his delight in his new clan that he had put the rest of humanity out of his mind?
He had always been selfish. He’d known that about himself. Only before now, he’d called it “independent.”
It was a relief to leave the Terran part of the Embassy, with its too-heavy gravity and glaring light. The extra rods and cones that had been inserted into Noah’s eyes made them sensitive to such terrible brightness. In the World quarters, Kayla’s little boy Austin was chasing a ball along the corridor, his energy suit a faint glimmer in the low light. He stopped to watch Noah shed his own suit.
Austin said, “I wanna do that.”
“You will, some day. Maybe soon. Where’s your mother?”
“She comes right back. I stay right here!”
“Good boy. Have you—hi, Kayla. Do you know where Mee^hao¡ is?”
“No. Oh, wait, yes—he left the sanctuary.”
That, Noah remembered, was what both Kayla and her sister called the World section of the Embassy. “Sanctuary”—the term made him wonder what their life had been before they came aboard. Both, although pleasant enough, were close-mouthed about their pasts to the point of lock-jaw.
Kayla added, “I think Mee^hao¡ said it was about the attack.”
It would be, of course. Noah knew he should wait until Mee^hao¡ was free. But he couldn’t wait.
“Where’s Llaa^moh¡?”
Kayla looked blank; her Worldese was not yet fluent.
“Officer Jones.”
“Oh. I just saw her in the garden.”
Noah strode to the garden. Llaa^moh¡ sat on a bench, watching water fall in a thin stream from the ceiling to a pool below. Delicately she fingered a llo flower, without picking it, coaxing the broad dark leaf to release its spicy scent. Noah and Llaa^moh¡ had avoided each other ever since Noah’s welcome ceremony, and he knew why. Still, right now his need overrode awkward desire.
“Llaa^moh¡—may we speak together?” He hoped he had the verb tense right: urgency coupled with supplication.
“Yes, of course.” She made room for him on the bench. “Your Worldese progresses well.”
“Thank you. I am troubled in my liver.” The correct idiom, he was certain. Almost.
“What troubles your liver, brother mine?”
“My mother.” The word meant not only female parent but matriarchal clan leader, which Noah supposed that Marianne was, since both his grandmothers were dead. Although perhaps not his biological grandmothers, and to World, biology was all. There were no out-of-family adoptions.
“Yes?”
“She is Dr. Marianne Jenner, as you know, working aboard the Embassy. My brother and sister live ashore. What will happen to my family when the spore cloud comes? Does my mother go with us to World? Do my birth-siblings?” But . . . how could they, unaltered? Also, they were not of his haplotype and so would belong to a different clan for lllathil, clans not represented aboard ship. Also, all three of them would hate everything about World. But otherwise they would die. All of them, dead.
Llaa^moh¡ said nothing. Noah gave her the space and time to think; one thing World humans hated about Terrans was that they replied so quickly, without careful thought, sometimes even interrupting each other and thereby dishonoring the speaker. Noah watched a small insect with multicolored wings, whose name did not come to his fevered mind, cross the llo leaf, and forced his body to stay still.
Finally Llaa^moh¡ said, “Mee^hao¡ and I have discussed this. He has left this decision to me. You are one of us now. I will tell you what will happen when the spore cloud comes.”
“I thank you for your trust.” The ritual response, but Noah meant it.
“However, you are under obligation—” she used the most serious degree for a word of promise “—to say nothing to anyone else, World or Terran. Do you accept this obligation?”
Noah hesitated, and not from courtesy. Shouldn’t he use the information, whatever it was, to try to ensure what safety was possible for his family? But if he did not promise, Llaa^moh¡ would tell him nothing.
“I accept the obligation.”
She told him.
Noah’s jaw dropped. He couldn’t help it, even though it was very rude. Llaa^moh¡ was carefully not looking at him; perhaps she had anticipated this reaction.
Noah stood and walked out of the garden.
MARIANNE
“Thought,” a famous poet—Marianne couldn’t remember which one—had once said, “is an infection. In
the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.” Lying in her bed in the quarantine chamber, Marianne felt an epidemic in her brain. What Elizabeth had done, what she herself harbored now in her body, Noah’s transformation, Evan’s death—the thoughts fed on her cells, fevered her mind.
Elizabeth, studying the complex layout of the Embassy: “Where do the Denebs live?” “Behind these doors here.”
Noah, with his huge alien eyes.
Evan, urging her to meet the aliens by scribbling block letters on a paper sushi bag: CHANCE OF SIX THOUSAND LIFETIMES! The number of generations since Mitochondrial Eve.
Herself, carrying the deadly infection. Elizabeth, Noah, Evan, spores—it was almost a relief when Ambassador Smith appeared beyond the glass.
“Dr. Jenner,” the ceiling said in uninflected translation. “I am so sorry you were injured in this attack. You said you want to see me now.”
She hadn’t been sure what she was going to say to him. How did you name your own child a possible terrorist, condemn her to whatever unknown form justice took among aliens? What if that meant something like drawing and quartering, as it once had on Earth? Marianne opened her mouth, and what came out were words she had not planned at all.
“Why did you permit Drs. Namechek and Lloyd to infect themselves three times when it violates both our medical code and yours?”
His face, both Terran and alien, that visage that now and forever would remind her of what Noah had done to his own face, did not change expression. “You know why, Dr. Jenner. It was necessary for the research. There is no other way to fully assess immune system response in ways useful to developing antidotes.”
“You could have used your own people!”
“There are not enough of us to put anyone into quarantine.”
“You could have run the experiment yourself with human volunteers. You’d have gotten volunteers, given what Earth is facing. And then the experiment could have had the advantage of your greater expertise.”
“It is not much greater than yours, as you know. Our scientific knowledges have moved in different directions. But if we had sponsored experiments on Terrans, what would have been the Terran response?”
Marianne was silent. She knew the answer. They both knew the answer.
He said, “You are infected, I am told. We did not cause this. But now our two peoples can work more openly on developing medicines or vaccines. Both Earth and World will owe you an enormous debt.”
Which she would never collect. In roughly two more days she would be dead of spore disease.
And she still had to tell him about Elizabeth.
“Ambassador Smith—”
“I must show you something, Dr. Jenner. If you had not sent for me, I would have come to you as soon as I was informed that you were awake. Your physician performed an autopsy on the terrorist. That is, by the way, a useful word, which does not exist on World. We shall appropriate it. The doctors found this in the mass of body tissues. It is engraved titanium, possibly created to survive the blast. Secretary-General Desai suggests that it is a means to claim credit, a ‘logo.’ Other Terrans have agreed, but none know what it means. Can you aid us? Is it possibly related to one of the victims? You were a close friend of Dr. Blanford.”
He held up something close to the glass: a flat piece of metal about three inches square. Whatever was pictured on it was too small for Marianne to see from her bed.
Smith said, “I will have Dr. Potter bring it to you.”
“No, don’t.” Ann would have to put on a space suit and maneuver through the double airlock with respirator. The fever in Marianne’s brain could not wait that long. She pulled out her catheter tube, giving a small shriek at the unexpected pain. Then she heaved herself out of bed and dragged the IV pole over to the clear barrier. Ann began to sputter. Marianne ignored her.
On the square of metal was etched a stylized purple rocket ship, sprouting leaves.
Not Elizabeth. Ryan.
“Dr. Jenner?”
“They’re an invasive species,” Ryan had said.
“Didn’t you hear a word I said?” Marianne said. “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.”
“Dr. Jenner?” the ambassador repeated. “Are you all right?”
Ryan, his passion about purple loosestrife a family joke. Ryan, interested in the Embassy, as Connie was not, asking questions about the facilities and the layout while Marianne cuddled her new grandson. Ryan, important enough in this terrorist organization to have selected its emblem from a sheet of drawings in a kitschy bathroom.
Ryan, her son.
“Dr. Jenner, I must insist—”
“Yes. Yes. I recognize that thing. I know who—what group—you should look for.” Her heart shattered.
Smith studied her through the glass. The large, calm eyes—Noah’s eyes now, except for the color—held compassion.
“Someone you know.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t matter. We shall not look for them.”
The words didn’t process. “Not . . . not look for them?”
“No. It will not happen again. The embassy has been sealed and the Terrans removed except for a handful of scientists directly involved in immunology, all of whom have chosen to stay, and all of whom we trust.”
“But—”
“And, of course, those of our clan members who wish to stay.”
Marianne stared at Smith through the glass, the impermeable barrier. Never had he seemed more alien. Why would this intelligent man believe that just because a handful of Terrans shared a mitochondrial haplotype with him, they could not be terrorists, too? Was it a cultural blind spot, similar to the Terran millennia-long belief in the divine right of kings? Was it some form of perception, the product of divergent evolution, that let his brain perceive things she could not? Or did he simply have in place such heavy surveillance and protective devices that people like Noah, sequestered in a different part of the Embassy, presented no threat?
Then the rest of what he had said struck her. “Immunologists?”
“Time is short, Dr. Jenner. The spore cloud will envelop Earth in merely a few months. We must perform intensive tests on you and the other infected people.”
“Other?”
“Dr. Ahmed Rafat and two lab technicians, Penelope Hodgson and Robert Chavez. They are, of course, all volunteers. They will be joining you soon in quarantine.”
Rage tore through her, all the rage held back, pent up, about Evan’s death, about Ryan’s deceit, about Noah’s defection. “Why not any of your own people? No, don’t tell me that you’re all too valuable—so are we! Why only Terrans? If we take this risk, why don’t you? And what the fuck happens when the cloud does hit? Do you take off two days before, keeping yourselves safe and leaving Earth to die? You know very well that there is no chance of developing a real vaccine in the time left, let alone manufacturing and distributing it! What then? How can you just—”
But Ambassador Smith was already moving away from her, behind the shatterproof glass. The ceiling said, without inflection or emotion, “I am sorry.”
NOAH
Noah stood in the middle of the circle of Terrans. Fifty, sixty—they had all come aboard the Embassy in the last few days, as time shortened. Not all were L7s; some were families of clan brothers, and these too had been welcomed, since they’d had the defiance to ask for asylum when the directives said explicitly that only L7s would be taken in. There was something wrong with this system, Noah thought, but he did not think hard about what it might be.
The room, large and bare, was in neither the World quarters nor the now-sealed part of the Embassywhere the Terran scientists worked. The few scientists left aboard, anyway. The room’s air, gravity, and light were all Terran, and Noah again wore an energy suit. He could see its faint
shimmer along his arms as he raised them in welcome. He hadn’t realized how much he was going to hate having to don the suit again.
“I am Noah,” he said.
The people pressed against the walls of the bare room or huddled in small groups or sat as close to Noah as they could, cross-legged on the hard floor. They looked terrified or hopeful or defiant or already grieving for what might be lost. They all, even the ones who, like Kayla and Isabelle, had been here for a while, expected to die if they were left behind on Earth.
“I will be your leader and teacher. But first, I will explain the choice you must all make, now. You can choose to leave with the people of World, when we return to the home world. Or you can stay here, on Earth.”
“To die!” someone shouted. “Some choice!”
Noah found the shouter: a young man standing close behind him, fists clenched at his side. He wore ripped jeans, a pin through his eyebrow, and a scowl. Noah felt the shock of recognition that had thrilled through him before with the nurse on the Upper West Side of New York and when he’d met Mee^hao¡. Not even Llaa^moh¡, who was a geneticist, could explain that shock, although she seemed to think it had to do with certain genetically determined pathways in Noah’s L7 brain coupled with the faint electromagnetic field surrounding every human skull. She was fascinated by it.
Lisa Guiterrez, Noah remembered, had also attributed it to neurological pathways, changed by his heavy use of sugarcane.
Noah said to the scowler, “What is your name?”
He said, “Why?”
“I’d like to know it. We are clan brothers.”
“I’m not your fucking brother. I’m here because it’s my only option to not die.”
A child on its mother’s lap started to cry. People murmured to each other, most not taking their eyes off Noah. Waiting, to see what Noah did about the young man. Answer him? Let it go? Have him put off the Embassy?
Noah knew it would not take much to ignite these desperate people into attacking him, the alien-looking stand-in for the Worlders they had no way to reach.
He said gently to the young man, to all of them, to his absent and injured and courageous mother: “I’m going to explain your real choices. Please listen.”
