The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “I don’t have to think,” Eve says. “Adam does that for both of us, plus all the forest-dressing and fruit-tending. He works so hard, poor dear.”

  “Eve—”

  “Roses, I think. In blue.”

  I can’t stand it anymore. I go out into the constant, perpetual, monotonous sunshine, which smells like roses, like wisteria, like gardenia, like wood smoke, like new-mown hay. Like heaven.

  Eve has the baby at nine months, thirty-two seconds. She laughs as the small head slides out, which takes two painless minutes. The child is perfect.

  “We’ll call him Cain,” Adam says.

  “I thought we might call him Silas. I love the na—”

  “Cain,” Adam says firmly.

  “All right, Adam.”

  He will never know she was disappointed.

  “Eve,” I say. “Listen.”

  She is bathing the two boys in the river, in the shallows just before the river splits into four parts and leaves the garden. Cain is diligently scrubbing his small penis, but Abel has caught at some seaweed and is examining how it hangs over his chubby fists. He turns it this way and that, bending his head close. He is much more intelligent than his brother.

  “Eve, Adam will be back soon. If you’d just listen…”

  “Daddy,” Abel says, raising his head. He has a level gaze, friendly but evaluative, even at his age. He spends a lot of time with his father. “Daddy gone.”

  “Oh, yes, Daddy’s gone to pick breadfruit in the west!” Eve cries, in a perfect ecstasy of maternal pride. “He’ll be back tonight, my little poppets. He’ll be home with his precious little boys!”

  Cain looks up. He has succeeded in giving his penis the most innocent of erections. He smiles beatifically at Abel, at his mother, who does not see him because she is scrubbing Abel’s back, careful not to drip soapstone onto his seaweed.

  “Daddy pick breadfruit,” Abel repeats. “Mommy not.”

  “Mommy doesn’t want to go pick breadfruit,” Eve says. “Mommy is happy right here with her little poppets.”

  “Mommy not,” Abel repeats, thoughtfully.

  “Eve,” I say, “only with knowledge can you make choices. Only with truth can you be free. Four thousand years from now—”

  “I am free,” Eve says, momentarily startled. She looks at me. Her eyes are as fresh, as innocent, as when she was created. They open very wide. “How could anyone not think I’m perfectly free?”

  “If you’d just listen—”

  “Daddy gone,” Abel says a third time. “Mommy not.”

  “Even thirty seconds of careful listening—”

  “Mommy never gone.”

  “Tell that brat to shut up while I’m trying to talk to you!”

  Wrong, wrong. Fury leaps into Eve’s eyes. She scoops up both children as if I were trying to stone them, the silly bitch. She hugs them tight to her chest, breathing something from those perfect lips that might have been “Well!” or “Ugly!” or even “Help!” Then she staggers off with both boys in her arms, dripping water, Abel dripping seaweed.

  “Put Abel down,” Abel says dramatically. “Abel walk.”

  She does. The child looks at her. “Mommy do what Abel say!”

  I go eat worms.

  The third child is a girl, whom they name Sheitha.

  Cain and Abel are almost grown. They help Adam with the garden dressing, the animal naming, whatever comes up. I don’t know. I’m getting pretty sick of the whole lot of them. The tree still has both blossoms and fruit on the same branch. The river still flows into four exactly equal branches just beyond the garden: Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, Euphrates. Exactly the same number of water molecules in each. I stop thinking He’s theatrical and decide instead that He’s compulsive. I mean—really. Fish lay the exact same number of eggs in each river.

  Eve hasn’t seen Him in decades. Adam, of course, walks with Him in the cool of every evening. Now the two boys go, too. Heaven knows what they talk about; I stay away. Often it’s my one chance at Eve, who spends every day sewing and changing diapers and sweeping bowers and slicing breadfruit. Her toes are still pink curling delicacies.

  “Eve, listen—”

  Sheitha giggles at a bluebird perched on her dimpled knee.

  “Adam makes all the decisions, decides all the rules, thinks up all the names, does all the thinking—”

  “So?” Eve says. “Sheitha—you precious little angel!” She catches the baby in her arms and covers her with kisses. Sheitha crows in delight.

  “Eve, listen—” Miraculously, she does. She sets the baby on the grass and says seriously, “Adam says you aren’t capable of telling the truth.”

  “Not his truth,” I say. “Or His.” But of course this subtlety of pronoun goes right over her head.

  “Look, snake, I don’t want to be rude. You’ve been very kind to me, keeping me company while I do my housework, and I appreciate—”

  “I’m not being kind,” I say desperately. Kind! Oh, my Eve… “I’m too old and tired for kindness. I’m just trying to show you, to get you to listen—”

  “Adam’s back,” Eve says quickly. I hear him then, with the two boys. There is just time enough to slither under a bush. I lie there very still. Lately Adam has turned murderous toward me; I think he must have a special dispensation for it. He must have told Adam violence toward me doesn’t count, because I have stepped out of my place. Which, of course, I have.

  But this time Adam doesn’t see me. The boys fall into some game with thread and polished stones. Sheitha toddles toward her daddy, grinning.

  “We’re just here to get something to eat,” Adam says. “Ten minutes, is all—what, Eve, isn’t there anything ready? What have you been doing all morning?”

  Eve’s face doesn’t fall. But her eyes deepen in color a little, like skin that has been momentarily bruised. Of course, skin doesn’t stay bruised here. Not here.

  “I’m sorry, dear! I’ll get something ready right away!”

  “Please,” Adam says. “Some of us have to work for a living.”

  She bustles quickly around. The slim pretty fingers are deft as ever. Adam throws himself prone into a bower. Sheitha climbs into his lap. She is as precocious as the boys were.

  “Daddy go back?”

  “Yes, my little sweetie. Daddy has to go cut more sugar cane. And name some new animals.”

  “Animals,” Sheitha says happily. She loves animals. “Sheitha go.”

  Adam smiles. “No, precious, Sheitha can’t go. Little girls can’t go.”

  “Sheitha go!”

  “No,” Adam says. He is still smiling, but he stands up and she tumbles off his lap. The food is ready. Eve turns with a coconut shell of salad just as Sheitha is picking herself up. The baby stands looking up at her father. Her small face is crumpled in disappointment, in disbelief, in anguish. Eve stops her turning motion and looks, her full attention on Sheitha’s face.

  I draw a deep breath.

  The moment spins itself out, tough as spider-thread.

  Eve breaks it. “Adam—can’t you take her?”

  He doesn’t answer. Actually, he hasn’t even heard her. He can’t, in exactly the same way Eve cannot hear Him in the cool of the evening.

  You could argue that this exempts him from fault.

  Eve picks up the baby and stands beside the bower. Fragrance rises from the newly crushed flower petals where Adam was lying. When he and the boys have left again, I slither forward. Eve, the baby in her arms, has still not moved. Her head is bent. Sheitha is weeping, soft tears of vexation that will not, of course, last very long. Not here. I don’t have much time.

  “Eve,” I say. “Listen—”

  I tell her how it will be for Sheitha after she marries Cain, who is not as sweet-tempered as his father. I tell her how it will be for Sheitha’s daughter’s daughter. I spare her nothing: not the expansion of the garden until the home bowers are insignificant. Not the debate over whether women have souls. Not foot-bindin
g nor clitorectomy nor suttee nor the word “chattel.” Sheitha, I say. Sheitha and Sheitha’s daughter and Sheitha’s daughter’s daughter…I am hoarse before I’m done talking. Finally, I finish, saying for perhaps the fortieth or fiftieth time, “Knowledge is the only way to change it. Knowledge, and truth. Eve, listen—”

  She goes with me to the tree. Her baby daughter in her arms, she goes with me. She chooses a bright red apple, and she chews her mouthful so completely that when she transfers it to Sheitha’s lips there is no chance the baby could choke on it. Together, they eat the whole thing.

  I am tired. I don’t wait around for the rest: Adam’s return, and his outrage that she has acted without him, his fear that now she knows things he does not. His arrival. I don’t wait. I am too tired, and my gut twists as if I had swallowed something foul, or bitter. That happens sometimes, without my intending it. Sometimes I eat something with a vitamin I know I need, and it lies hard in my belly like pain.

  This is not the way you heard the story.

  But consider who eventually wrote that story down. Consider, too, who wiped up the ink or scrubbed the chisel or cleaned the printing office after the writing down was done. For centuries and centuries.

  But not forever.

  So this may not be the way you heard the story, but you, centuries and centuries hence, my sisters, know better. Finally you know, yes, about Eve’s screams on her childbed, and Sheitha’s murder at the hands of her husband, and Sheitha’s daughter’s cursing of her rebellious mother as the girl climbed willingly onto her husband’s funeral pyre, and her daughter’s harlotry, and her daughter’s forced marriage at age nine to a man who gained control of all her camels and oases. You know all that, all the things I didn’t tell poor Eve would happen anyway. But you know, too—as Eve would not have, had it not been for me—that knowledge can bring change. You sit cross-legged at your holodecks or in your pilot chairs or on your Councils, humming, and you finally know. Finally—it took you so fucking long to digest the fruit of knowledge and shit it out where it could fertilize anything. But you did. You are not stupid. More—you know that stupidity is only the soul asleep. The awakened sleeper may stumble a long time in the dark, but eventually the light comes. Even here.

  I woke Eve up.

  I, the mother.

  So that may not be the way you heard the story, but it is the way it happened. And now—finally, finally—you know.

  And can forgive me.

  Afterword to “Unto the Daughters”

  So a spaceship crashes on Earth and only two people survive, and at the end of the story we learn that their names are Adam and Eve…. No, wait. That’s the SF story you’re not supposed to write, the cliché of clichés.

  But I wanted to write an Adam and Eve story (who knows why). Furthermore, I wanted it to be a feminist Eve story. It always seemed to me that Adam was a wimp, blaming Eve for his own choice to eat the apple she offered him. But Eve, misled so easily by the snake, wasn’t very promising as a strong heroine. That left…

  Yes. After all, Genesis is vague about the gender of the snake. Perhaps whoever wrote down the story didn’t think gender mattered much. But it does. Throughout history, it always has.

  The thing I enjoyed most about writing “Unto the Daughters” was the voice. In creating characters, I try to become that character. With the snake, it was alarmingly easy.

  Hmmmm…

  LAWS OF SURVIVAL

  My name is Jill. I am somewhere you can’t imagine, going somewhere even more unimaginable. If you think I like what I did to get here, you’re crazy.

  Actually, I’m the one who’s crazy. You—any “you”—will never read this. But I have paper now, and a sort of pencil, and time. Lots and lots of time. So I will write what happened, all of it, as carefully as I can.

  After all—why the hell not?

  I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn’t arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn’t out scavenging. Most days I could find enough: a carrot stolen from somebody’s garden patch, my arm bloody from reaching through the barbed wire. Overlooked potato peelings under a pile of rags and glass. A can of stew thrown away by one of the soldiers on the base, but still half full. Soldiers on duty by the Dome were often careless. They got bored, with nothing to do.

  That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday’s garbage load, I’d heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I’d find bread, or even fruit that wasn’t too rotten.

  Instead I found the puppy.

  Its eyes weren’t open yet and it squirmed along the bare ground, a scrawny brown-and-white mass with a tiny fluffy tail. Nearby was a fluid-soaked towel. Some sentimental fool had left the puppy there, hoping…what? It didn’t matter. Scrawny or not, there was some meat on the thing. I scooped it up.

  The sun pushed above the horizon, flooding the haze with golden light.

  I hate it when grief seizes me. I hate it and it’s dangerous, a violation of one of Jill’s Laws of Survival. I can go for weeks, months without thinking of my life before the War. Without remembering or feeling. Then something will strike me—a flower growing in the dump, a burst of birdsong, the stars on a clear night—and grief will hit me like the maglevs that no longer exist, a grief all the sharper because it contains the memory of joy. I can’t afford joy, which always comes with an astronomical price tag. I can’t even afford the grief that comes from the memory of living things, which is why it is only the flower, the birdsong, the morning sunlight that starts it. My grief was not for that puppy. I still intended to eat it.

  But I heard a noise behind me and turned. The Dome wall was opening.

  Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?

  There was a widespread belief in the camp that the aliens started the War. I’m old enough to know better. That was us, just like the global warming and the bio-crobes were us. The aliens didn’t even show up until the War was over and Raleigh was the northernmost city left on the East Coast and refugees poured south like mudslides. Including me. That’s when the ships landed and then turned into the huge gray Domes like upended bowls. I heard there were many Domes, some in other countries. The Army, what was left of it, threw tanks and bombs at ours. When they gave up, the refugees threw bullets and Molotov cocktails and prayers and graffiti and candle-light vigils and rain dances. Everything slid off and the Domes just sat there. And sat. And sat. Three years later, they were still sitting, silent and closed, although of course there were rumors to the contrary. There are always rumors. Personally, I’d never gotten over a slight disbelief that the Dome was there at all. Who would want to visit us?

  The opening was small, no larger than a porthole, and about six feet above the ground. All I could see inside was a fog the same color as the Dome. Something came out, gliding quickly toward me. It took me a moment to realize it was a robot, a blue metal sphere above a hanging basket. It stopped a foot from my face and said, “This food for this dog.”

  I could have run, or screamed, or at the least—the very least—looked around for a witness. I didn’t. The basket held a pile of fresh produce, green lettuce and deep purple eggplant and apples so shiny red they looked lacquered. And peaches…My mouth filled with sweet water. I couldn’t move.

  The puppy whimpered.

  My mother used to make fresh peach pie.

  I scooped the food into my scavenger bag, laid the puppy in the basket, and backed away. The robot floated back into the Dome, which closed immediately. I sped back to my corrugated-tin and windowless hut and ate until I couldn’t hold any more. I slept, woke, and ate the rest, cro
uching in the dark so nobody else would see. All that fruit and vegetables gave me the runs, but it was worth it.

  Peaches.

  Two weeks later, I brought another puppy to the Dome, the only survivor of a litter deep in the dump. I never knew what happened to the mother. I had to wait a long time outside the Dome before the blue sphere took the puppy in exchange for produce. Apparently the Dome would only open when there was no one else around to see. What were they afraid of? It’s not like PETA was going to show up.

  The next day I traded three of the peaches to an old man in exchange for a small, mangy poodle. We didn’t look each other in the eye, but I nonetheless knew that his held tears. He limped hurriedly away. I kept the dog, which clearly wanted nothing to do with me, in my shack until very early morning and then took it to the Dome. It tried to escape but I’d tied a bit of rope onto its frayed collar. We sat outside the Dome in mutual dislike, waiting, as the sky paled slightly in the east. Gunshots sounded in the distance.

  I have never owned a dog.

  When the Dome finally opened, I gripped the dog’s rope and spoke to the robot. “Not fruit. Not vegetables. I want eggs and bread.”

  The robot floated back inside.

  Instantly I cursed myself. Eggs? Bread? I was crazy not to take what I could get. That was Law of Survival #1. Now there would be nothing. Eggs, bread…crazy. I glared at the dog and kicked it. It yelped, looked indignant, and tried to bite my boot.

  The Dome opened again and the robot glided toward me. In the gloom I couldn’t see what was in the basket. In fact, I couldn’t see the basket. It wasn’t there. Mechanical tentacles shot out from the sphere and seized both me and the poodle. I cried out and the tentacles squeezed harder. Then I was flying through the air, the stupid dog suddenly howling beneath me, and we were carried through the Dome wall and inside.