The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  His arm is broken. There are no doctors or professional nurses among the refugees. Ted sets the arm, using as a splint a piece of wood torn from a chair leg. Ted is obviously no expert at this, but he’s resourceful, gentle, and willing to accept responsibility. Everything, Jenny thinks coldly, that Eric is not. Ricky screams like an animal in a steel-toothed trap. The driver of the red Taurus blubbers apologies; no one blames her. The accident is thoroughly discussed at every campfire, in every tent, on every mattress in the back of every van. Ricky is given a hoarded candy bar, a precious comic book, and a hefty slug of cough syrup mixed with whiskey to make him sleep.

  Jenny can’t sleep. Lying alone on her mattress, she tries to think coldly about her and Eric, about the destroyed cities, about what will happen now. She can’t quite manage enough coldness, but it’s better than the hell of the last four days. Somewhere in the deep dark there’s a tap at the window.

  Eric… Hope burns so sudden, so hot, that Jenny feels scorched inside. She nearly cries out as she fumbles for the door, the flashlight.

  Carleen stands there, her meaty arms limp by her side. In the upward-slanting glow from the flashlight, she says despairingly, “Ricky.”

  Jenny stumbles from the van, follows Carleen. Stars shine in a clear, cold sky. Jenny’s lighted watch face says 4:18 a.m. The SUV tailgate gapes open, and Jenny sees the usual mattress, a double in this monster vehicle, on which Ricky lies, glassy-eyed. Daniella whimpers softly in her infant seat. Cheri is not here. With Eric?

  “He been like this for a coupla hours now,” Carleen says in a low, steady voice. “He won’t drink or eat or talk. And his arm’s swelling up and turning all dark.” She trains the flashlight on Ricky’s arm.

  Jenny bends over the child, who smells as if he’s shit his pants. Gangrene—could it set in that fast? She doesn’t know, but clearly something is radically wrong.

  Carleen goes on in that strange, even voice. “I can’t leave Daniella. And Ted don’t know enough to deal with this.”

  “I don’t know anything about medical matters, either—certainly not as much as Ted!”

  Carleen continues as if Jenny hadn’t spoken. “Anyway Sue’s got some kind of diarrhea now and Ted can’t leave his kids. Not for good. Can’t take the risk. And I got Daniella. Can’t count on Cheri.”

  Jenny straightens and turns. The two women stare at each other. For a long moment, it seems to Jenny, her universe hangs in the balance, all of it: Eric and vaporized Rochester, Deirdre and Jenny’s job at the vanished public library, the running-down cell phones and Jenny’s mother waiting for her in Dundee, the stars far overhead and the trodden-down weeds underfoot in this desperate refugee camp no one planned on.

  Jenny nods.

  Together they pick up Ricky and situate him in Jenny’s arms. Ricky moans, but softly. He’s heavy, reeking, only half-conscious. There is nobody else up, or at least nobody that Jenny sees. In the dark she carries Ricky the entire length of the field, trying not to shift him even as he grows heavier and heavier, navigating by the pale glow from the alien buildings.

  Up close, they present rough, cream-colored walls like stucco, but no stucco ever shone with its own light. The buildings all seem interconnected, but Jenny sees only one entry, itself filled with light instead of any tangible door. She walks through the light and into a wide space—surely wider than the whole building appears from the outside?—that is absolutely empty.

  “Hello,” Jenny calls, inadequately, and suddenly she can hold Ricky no longer. She sinks with her burden to the stucco floor. This is as hopeless as everything else in her stupid life. She doesn’t even like this kid.

  “Hello,” an alien says. It’s the tall blonde woman in the standard brown robe; she materializes from empty air. “Is this little person hurt?”

  Anger rises in Jenny at the cloying pseudo-friendliness of “this little person”—these beings have murdered nine-tenths of the Earth’s population!—but for Ricky’s sake she holds the anger in check. “Yes. He’s hurt. His arm is broken and some kind of infection has set in.”

  “What’s his name?” the alien asks. Her eyes are blue and warm as the Mediterranean.

  “Ricky.”

  “And what’s your name?”

  What can that possibly matter? “Jenny.”

  “Jenny, close your eyes, please.”

  Should she do it? It makes no more sense than anything else, so why not? She has no idea what she’s doing here. She closes her eyes.

  “You may open them now.”

  Even before Jenny can do that, Ricky says, “What the fuck!”

  He jumps up and gazes wildly around. His arm is whole, the clumsy splint and darkened swelling both gone. His clothes are clean. He shrieks in fear and jumps into Jenny’s lap, hiding his face against her neck. His hair smells of sweet grass.

  Jenny struggles to stand while holding Ricky, who mercifully is too scared to scream. She must stand; she can’t face this terrible being from a sitting position on the ground. A table stands beside the alien: an ordinary picnic table with benches, the surface laden with scrambled eggs, toast, sweet rolls, orange juice, fragrant hot coffee. The plastic plates have a pattern of daisies. Jenny goes weak in the knees. She dumps Ricky onto a bench. He clutches her around the waist but then sees the sweet rolls and looks up at Jenny.

  “Eat,” she manages to get out. And to the alien, “Why?”

  The smiling blue eyes widen slightly. “Didn’t you want me to repair him?”

  “I mean, why did you kill all those cities? All those people?”

  The alien nods. “I see. Sit down, Jenny.”

  “No.”

  “All right. But the coffee is excellent today.”

  “Why did you do it?” Bombay, Karachi, Delhi, Shanghai, Moscow…all in strict order of size. The meticulousness alone is monstrous.

  The alien says, “Why did that man hurt Ricky when he tried to pull his arm bones back into the correct line?”

  For a minute Jenny can’t think what the creature means. Then she gets it. “Are you saying you committed massive genocide for our own good?”

  “There were too many of you,” the alien says. She sits gracefully on the picnic bench across from Ricky, who is gobbling eggs and sweet rolls with one hand, the other fastened firmly on Jenny’s jacket. “In one more generation you would have had irreversible climate change, starvation, war, and suffering beyond belief. We spared you all that.”

  Jenny can barely speak. “You did… It was…”

  “It was an act of kindness,” the alien says, “and I know it seems hard now, but we’ve spared your species an incredible amount of suffering. In two more generations, your altered world will seem normal to its inhabitants. Two generations after that, you will thank us for our intervention. And you will have learned, and you will do much better this time. We’ve seen this before, you know.”

  Jenny doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. The worst is that, with her book-nourished imagination, she can actually see how that monstrous prophecy might come about. The gratitude of the masses in countries where most people never, ever had enough to eat until the cities disappeared…. Religion would help. Saviors from the stars, revered and deified and carrying out the will of God, of Allah, of Shiva in the endless dance of destruction in order for there to be room for creation.

  The alien says, as if reading her thoughts, “You humans have a talent for self-destruction, you know. You cause a lot of your own suffering. It’s unfortunate.”

  Jenny picks up a butter knife and hurls it at the woman’s eyes.

  It doesn’t connect, of course. The knife bounces off the alien’s face, and the only response is from Ricky, scared all over again, and also full enough with good food to have the energy for response. He wails and wraps himself around the still-standing Jenny.

  The alien stands, too. “Don’t think we’re not sympathetic, Jenny. But we look at things differently than you do. Good-bye.”

  “Wait!” Jenny
cries over Ricky’s screams. “One more question! Why keep us here inside this invisible cage? What did you hope to learn?”

  The alien answers without hesitation. “Whether you were different in small enough groups. And you are. A few hundred of you outside Rochester and Bogota and Nantes and Chengdu—you’re much better beings in smaller groups. It’s chaotic out there just now, but you will cooperate better on survival, even if you’re no happier. We’re very glad to know this. It justifies our decision. Good-bye, Jenny.”

  The alien vanishes. Then the building vanishes. It’s not yet dawn outside, but Jenny hears a siren in the distance, drawing closer. Somewhere in the field a car door slams. She sets Ricky down and tugs at him to walk toward Carleen’s camp. The siren comes closer still; Eric and his work crew won’t need those tunnels now. Jenny can go to Dundee as soon as Bob arrives for her. He may be on his way now.

  Ricky tries to break free, but Jenny holds him firmly. He isn’t going to get hit by another car, not while he’s with her. She has no idea what the future holds for Ricky, for any of them. But now—finally!—hatred of the self-righteous aliens, blithely playing Old Testament God, burns stronger in her than does despair over Eric. It justifies our decision… The hell it does! All those innocent lives, all the grief tearing apart the survivors…

  Hatred is a great heartener. Hatred, and the knowledge that she is going to be needed (It’s chaotic out there just now…), as Carleen and Ricky had needed her. These things, hatred and usefulness, aren’t much (…even if you’re no happier…) but they’re something. And both are easier than love.

  She brings the child back to his grandmother as the camp wakes and the cars drive in.

  Afterward to “The Kindness of Strangers”

  What is an act of kindness? Some are easy to identify: helping up a stranger who has fallen, donating to disaster relief, not pointing out that your spouse has told the story about the wheelbarrow six times to the same people. But what about more ambiguous acts? Is it a kindness to stop a suicide who desperately wants to die?

  My father lives far out in the country, and his woods and field are overpopulated with deer. In the winter, many starve. Culling a deer herd by killing a bunch of them—is that a kindness? Not to the dead ones, but to the survivors, who then will not starve? What about an overpopulated planet?

  The mind recoils from the idea, but one of the functions of SF is to examine ideas that the mind recoils from. The result, as here, is often an ambiguous and bleak story. It’s bleak for Jenny, too, and I got some negative email about this story’s ending. Sometimes, however, hatred is “a great heartener,” enabling a person to go on when nothing else will.

  Perhaps you didn’t like “The Kindness of Strangers.” It’s included in this volume because I think it contains some of my best writing. You, however, will be the judge of that.

  END GAME

  Allen Dodson was sitting in seventh-grade math class, staring at the back of Peggy Corcoran’s head, when he had the insight that changed the world. First his own world and then, eventually, like dominos toppling in predestined rhythm, everybody else’s, until nothing could ever be the same again. Although we didn’t, of course, know that back then.

  The source of the insight was Peggy Corcoran. Allen had sat behind her since third grade (Anderson, Blake, Corcoran, Dodson, DuQuesne…) and never thought her remarkable. Nor was she. It was 1982 and Peggy wore a David Bowie T-shirt and straggly brown braids. But now, staring at the back of her mousy hair, Allen suddenly realized that Peggy’s head must be a sloppy mess of skittering thoughts and contradictory feelings and half-buried longings—just as his was. Nobody was what they seemed to be!

  The realization actually made his stomach roil. In books and movies, characters had one thought at a time: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” “An offer he couldn’t refuse.” “Beam me up, Scotty!” But Allen’s own mind, when he tried to watch it, was different. Ten more minutes of class I’m hungry gotta pee the answer is x+6 you moron what would it be like to kiss Linda Wilson M*A*S*H on tonight really gotta pee locker stuck today Linda eight more minutes do the first sixteen problems baseball after school—

  No. Not even close. He would have to include his mind watching those thoughts and then his thoughts about the watching thoughts and then—

  And Peggy Corcoran was doing all that, too.

  And Linda Wilson.

  And Jeff Gallagher.

  And Mr. Henderson, standing at the front of math class.

  And everyone in the world, all with thoughts zooming through their heads fast as electricity, thoughts bumping into each other and fighting each other and blotting each other out, a mess inside every mind on the whole Earth, nothing sensible or orderly or predictable…. Why, right this minute Mr. Henderson could be thinking terrible things even as he assigned the first sixteen problems on page 145, terrible things about Allen even or Mr. Henderson could be thinking about his lunch or hating teaching or planning a murder…. You could never know. No one was settled or simple, nothing could be counted on….

  Allen had to be carried, screaming, from math class.

  I didn’t learn any of this until decades later, of course. Allen and I weren’t friends, even though we sat across the aisle from each other (Edwards, Farr, Fitzgerald, Gallagher…). And after the screaming fit, I thought he was just as weird as everyone else did. I never taunted Allen like some of the boys, or laughed at him like the girls, and a part of me was actually interested in the strange things he sometimes said in class, always looking as if he had no idea how peculiar he sounded. But I wasn’t strong enough to go against the herd and make friends with such a loser.

  The summer before Allen went off to Harvard, we did become—if not friends—then chess companions. “You play rotten, Jeff,” Allen said to me with his characteristic, oblivious candor, “but nobody else plays at all.” So two or three times a week we sat on his parents’ screened porch and battled it out on the chessboard. I never won. Time after time I slammed out of the house in frustration and shame, vowing not to return. After all, unlike wimpy Allen, I had better things to do with my time: girls, cars, James Bond movies. But I always went back.

  Allen’s parents were, I thought even back then, a little frightened by their son’s intensity. Mild, hard-working people fond of golf, they pretty much left Allen alone from his fifteenth birthday on. As we moved rooks and knights around the chessboard in the gathering darkness of the porch, Allen’s mother would timidly offer a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. She treated both of us with an uneasy respect that, in turn, made me uneasy. That wasn’t how parents were supposed to behave.

  Harvard was a close thing for Allen, despite his astronomical SATs. His grades were spotty because he only did the work in courses he was interested in, and his medical history was even spottier: bouts of depression when he didn’t attend school, two brief hospitalizations in a psychiatric ward. Allen would get absorbed by something—chess, quantum physics, Buddhism—to the point where he couldn’t stop, until all at once his interest vanished as if it had never existed. Harvard had, I thought in my eighteen-year-old wisdom, every reason to be wary. But Allen was a National Merit scholar, and when he won the Westinghouse science competition for his work on cranial structures in voles, Harvard took him.

  The night before he left, we had our last chess match. Allen opened with the conservative Italian game, which told me he was slightly distracted. Twelve moves in, he suddenly said, “Jeff, what if you could tidy up your thoughts, the way you tidy up your room every night?”

  “Do what?” My mother “tidied up” my room, and what kind of weirdo used words like that, anyway?

  He ignored me. “It’s sort of like static, isn’t it? All those stray thoughts in a mind, interfering with a clear broadcast. Yeah, that’s the right analogy. Without the static, we could all think clearer. Cleaner. We could see farther before the signal gets lost in uncontrolled noise.”

  In the gloom of the porch, I could barely
see his pale, broad-cheeked face. But I had a sudden insight, rare for me that summer. “Allen—is that what happened to you that time in seventh grade? Too much…static?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t seem embarrassed, unlike anybody normal. It was as if embarrassment was too insignificant for this subject. “That was the first time I saw it. For a long time I thought if I could learn to meditate—you know, like Buddhist monks—I could get rid of the static. But meditation doesn’t go far enough. The static is still there, you’re just not paying attention to it anymore. But it’s still there.” He moved his bishop.

  “What exactly happened in the seventh grade?” I found myself intensely curious, which I covered by staring at the board and making a move.

  He told me, still unembarrassed, in exhaustive detail. Then he added, “It should be possible to adjust brain chemicals to eliminate the static. To unclutter the mind. It should!”

  “Well,” I said, dropping from insight to my more usual sarcasm, “maybe you’ll do it at Harvard, if you don’t get sidetracked by some weird shit like ballet or model railroads.”

  “Checkmate,” Allen said.

  I lost track of him after that summer, except for the lengthy Bakersville High School Alumni Notes faithfully mailed out every single year by Linda Wilson, who must have had some obsessive/compulsiveness of her own. Allen went on to Harvard Medical School. After graduation he was hired by a prestigious pharmaceutical company and published a lot of scientific articles about topics I couldn’t pronounce. He married, divorced, married again, divorced again. Peggy Corcoran, who married my cousin Joe and who knew Allen’s second wife, told me at my father’s funeral that both ex-wives said the same thing about Allen: He was never emotionally present.