Asimov's SF, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “You could maybe ... I know! Here."

  Baker did something to the car's sky, and all at once a screen came down, glowed, and made cartoons. Sudie squealed with joy. A cartoon bird—how could cartoons have birds, not just people?—flew toward the hot ball of morning in the sky, chased by a person. Sudie, Kim, and Jana crowded close.

  Li watched through the clear place in the car's sky as Baker and Ann walked toward piles of dirt and crying people. He watched for a long time. The hot ball of morning sunk down into the ground (how did it do that?) and the sky turned wonderful colors, purple and red and yellow. Baker and Ann came in and out, carrying things out with them. On one coming in, Ann touched a place on the wall and morning came inside the car's world, although not in the big world outside. The girls watched the cartoons, too absorbed to even laugh. Li looked outside.

  Figures moved in and out of houses made of blankets, some of which Ann had folded. Little bits of morning lighted the blanket houses. And by that light, as he peered out of the car with his nose pushed flat against it, Li saw her.

  “Taney!"

  * * * *

  Her back ached. She had moved too much, lifted too much, grown too old for this sort of field work. For any sort of field work. But everything was done that could be done tonight. Under the capable direction of the DDR agents, Ann Lionti and Baker Tully, the wounded had been treated, the homeless housed in evac inflatables, the spring water tested and found safe. Everyone had been fed. Tomorrow the dead would be buried. Katherine looked up and saw a ghost at the window of the DDR mobile.

  No. Not possible.

  But there he was.

  Li waved his arms and Katherine, dazed, half lifted her hand before she let it drop. How ... But it didn't matter how. What mattered was that Lionti and Tully, that everyone here, that Katherine herself, were already dead.

  * * * *

  The leaving door wouldn't open. It wouldn't open, no matter how Li pushed it. He cried out in frustration and shoved Sudie, who was making everything harder by pushing the door in a different direction from Li. But then he got the door open and tumbled down the square rocks made of sky material and he was with Taney, throwing his arms around her waist, Sudie and Jana and Kim right behind him. Kim started licking Taney's face, jumping up in mute excitement.

  “Taney! Taney!"

  “You found us!"

  “You lost your covering! I can touch you!"

  “Taney, the world broke and we came out! It broke!"

  “Taney! Taney!"

  “You know these kids?” Baker said behind Taney. She turned, Li and Sudie still clinging to her, and Baker said in a different voice, “Doctor—what is it?"

  “We ... they ... Kim, stop!"

  They had never heard that voice from her before. Li, startled, stepped back. But then Taney's kindness was back, although she sounded very sad.

  “Li, take the others back inside the trailer. I promise I'll come in just a little while, okay? Just everybody go inside."

  They went, of course; this was Taney. Jana and Li stared at each other. Sudie went back to watching the cartoons still showing on the screen. Kim pressed her nose against the clear sky-metal to watch Taney, mutely following her every tiny movement in the gathering dark. Li joined Kim.

  A woman ran up to Taney and Baker, waving her arms and shouting.

  * * * *

  “Experiments?” Baker Tully said, bewildered and angry and, Katherine could see, terrified. As well he should be. “Bioweaponry experiments?"

  “From the very end of the war,” Katherine said. “Intelligence discovered the operation and we sent in two entire battle groups five days before the surrender."

  “And Ann—” He couldn't say it. It had been hard to pull him away from Ann Lionti's body, lying crumpled between a DDR inflatable and the ruins of an adobe house. Beside her, incongruously, lay an unbroken planter filled with carefully watered dahlias. Now Katherine and Baker stood behind the huge mobile, away from the others. She looked at his young, suddenly ravaged face, dimly lit by a rising gibbous moon, and she thought, I can't do this.

  He had courage. He got out, “How long? For me, I mean?"

  “I don't know for sure. The only tests we could run, obviously, were on animals. When did you and Ann first pick up the children?"

  “About six hours ago. Give it to me straight, doctor. Please. I have to know."

  She saw what he was doing: looking desperately for a way out. All his training, like hers, had taught him that the way out of anything was information, knowledge, reasoning. But not this time.

  I can't do this.

  She said, “I have to sit down, I'm sorry ... knee injury.” She eased herself onto the ground, partly cutting off the illumination from the floodlamps, so that they sat in shadowed darkness. That should have made it easier, but didn't.

  “A virus in their breath gets into the bloodstream from the victim's lungs and makes a targeted, cytopathic toxin. When the virus has replicated enough for the toxin to reach a critical level, it stops the heart. And the virus is highly contagious, passed from person to person."

  “So everyone here—"

  “Yes,” Katherine said quietly.

  “I don't understand!” All at once he sounded like a child, like Li. Simultaneously Katherine shuddered and put a hand on his arm. Baker shook it off. “I just don't understand. If that's all true, the virus would spread through the whole country, killing everybody—"

  “The—"

  “—and then the whole world! The enemy would have killed themselves, too!"

  “No,” Katherine said. Her knee began to throb painfully. “There are racial differences among genomes. Small differences, and not very many, but enough. Think of genetic diseases: Tay-Sachs among Jews, sickle-cell anemia among Blacks. We've found more, and much more subtle. This virus exploits a tiny difference in genetic structure, and so in cellular functioning, in anyone with certain Caucasian-heritage genes. Tully—"

  “The Indians here..."

  She peered at his face, shrouded in night, and loved him. She had just told him he was going to die, and he had a soul generous enough to think of others. She started to say, “Depends on whether any of their ancestors intermarried with—” when his rage overcame his generosity.

  “You're a fucking geneticist! You and the entire United States government couldn't come up with an antidote or vaccine or something!"

  “No. Do you think we didn't try?"

  “Why didn't you kill them all as soon as you found them?"

  Katherine didn't answer. Either he hadn't meant the question, or he had. If it had been just more terrified rage, she certainly didn't blame him. If he meant it, nothing she could say would make it clear to him.

  He said bitterly, “There were political considerations, right? Ten years ago it was fucking President DuBois, working so hard to undo the wrongs of the previous screw-ups, ending the war with compassion, re-establishing our fucking position as the so-called moral leader of the world, and so now Ann is dead and I have to.... “Abruptly his anger ran out.

  She waited a long moment and then uttered what she knew to be, the moment she said it, the stupidest, most futile statement of her entire life. “I'm sorry."

  He didn't hear it. She sat dreading his reply, and it was a full minute, more, before she realized there wouldn't ever be one. Baker Tully still sat with his head thrown back in fury and anguish against the mobile's rear wheel, but when she felt for his wrist, there was no pulse.

  Six hours, then, from the time of initial exposure.

  He was too heavy for her to move, but nobody would find him there before morning. She returned to the tent where the villagers had laid Ann Lionti's body and told everyone that Baker was mourning alone, in the trailer. Katherine checked on the patients in the medical tent, issued instructions, and drank coffee to stay awake for the few hours until everyone else slept. Then she removed the distributor caps from the three working vehicles in the small camp and carried them w
ith her inside the DDR mobile, where the children waited.

  * * * *

  “Why doesn't she come? Why doesn't she come? Why doesn't she come?” Sudie made the words into a song, and it made Li's face itch. But he didn't let his kindness get used up. Maybe the song helped Sudie wait.

  Eventually, however, she fell asleep, and so did Kim. Jana and Li waited. In the light from the car's sky, Jana's hair looked yellow as the big morning. She smelled bad because none of them had splashed in a pool since the first world broke, but Li put his arms around her anyway, just to feel her warmth.

  Finally—finally!—the door opened and Taney came in. This time Li really looked at her, at Taney without her covering. Her face was wrinkled. Her eyes sagged. She walked as if something was broken, pulling herself up the square sky-metal rocks by holding onto the edge of the leaving door. Slowly she sat on a chair. Li's heart filled with love.

  “Taney,” Jana said softly, breaking free of Li's arms and climbing onto Taney's lap. “I knew we'd find you."

  “No, you didn't,” Li said. He sat on the ground at Taney's feet. “Taney, I have a lot of questions."

  “I'm sure you have, dear heart,” Taney said, and there was something wrong with her voice. “So do I. Let me ask mine first."

  So Li and Jana told her about the break in the world, and Jack and Sally, and sitting beside the broken car on the wide hot path when Ann and Baker came along. Sudie snored and Kim whuffled in her sleep.

  “Taney, why were we in that world and not this one?” Li said.

  “Tell you what, I'll answer all your questions in the morning,” Taney said. “I'm very tired right now and so are you. Look, Jana's almost asleep! You lie down here and sleep. I'm going to see about the other people once more."

  “Okay,” Li said, because he was sleepy.

  Taney kissed them all, covered them with blankets, and left. Li heard the leaving door make a noise behind her.

  * * * *

  A voice in Katherine's head said, Even the most passionate minds are capable of trivial thoughts during tragedy.

  Standing there in the dark, it took her a long moment to identify the speaker: Some professor back in college, droning on about some Shakespearian play. Why had that random memory come to her now? She even recalled the next thing he said: that only third-rate dramatists put children in peril to create emotion, which was one reason Shakespeare was infinitely superior to Thomas Hardy.

  That professor had been an ass. Children were always the first ones put in peril by upheavals in the world. But not like this ... not like this.

  She unscrewed the gas cap of the DDR mobile and drew the lighter from her pocket. Used for starting campfires at the center of the kindling, it could flick out a long projection that generated a shower of sparks. The village's distributor caps were inside the mobile. Baker's body lay beside it. Everybody else, marooned here, would be dead by morning, except those with no European ancestry in their genes. And although she'd spent the ten years in Las Verdes mostly keeping to herself, Katherine was pretty sure no such Indians existed in the small village. If they did, they might conceivably be turned into carriers, like Li and Jana and Kim and Sudie, but Katherine didn't think so. The children had been designed to be carriers. Their genomes showed many little-understood variations. The enemy, free from laws against genetic experimentation, had done so with a vengeance.

  When all hosts died, so did their viruses.

  She clicked the lighter and the projection snaked out, already glowing. Her hand moved toward the fuel tank, then drew back.

  I can't.

  But what were the alternatives? Let the children, locked inside, die of starvation. Or, either if they were picked up by other people or if Li somehow learned to drive the mobile as he had Jack's car, to let them infect more people, who would infect still others, until the air-borne virus with a 100 percent kill rate had, at a minimum, wiped out two continents. Who in hell could decide among those three choices?

  Katherine had fought for these children's lives, had tended them for ten years, had loved them as her own. What mother would choose the deaths of her children over the fate of the world?

  What rational human being would not?

  Hail Mary, Mother of God. ... More useless words, rising out of her distant past like subterranean rocks in an earthquake. Her hand again moved toward the fuel tank, again drew back.

  She couldn't do it. It was physically impossible, like suddenly flying up into the air. And in less than a few hours she, too, would be dead, and none of this would matter to her any longer. That, too, was a choice: to do nothing.

  From beyond the ruined village came wailing, many voices at once. So everyone hadn't gone to sleep, after all. The Indians were holding a ritual mourning for the three dead in the quake. Sudden light flared in the darkness: a bonfire.

  Katherine clicked off the lighter and sank hopelessly to the ground. In a moment she would do it, in just another moment. The explosion would be violent and instantaneous; the children would not suffer ... in just a moment. There was no other choice. Light found its way to her eyes, and she closed them because in such a world there should not be even the flickering light of the bonfire, let alone the steady lying beauty of the silver moon in the wide desert sky.

  * * * *

  She woke at dawn. Cold, stiff, shivering—but alive.

  With enormous effort, Katherine got to her feet. Limping, she made her way to the medical tent. Everyone in it was dead. So were the villagers in the emergency inflatables, and an old man lying beside the ashes of the bonfire. Only Katherine lived.

  Trembling, she hobbled back to the mobile, climbed the steps, and unlocked the door. Only Kim was awake, tearing at a loaf of bread with her small sharp teeth. She took one look at Katherine, dropped the bread, and began to lick Katherine's face. Katherine, stretched almost to breaking, started to shove Kim away ... and stopped.

  No. Not possible.

  Li woke. “Taney!” he said, rubbing his dark eyes. “I was sleeping."

  “Yes.” It was a croak. Li noticed ... those dark eyes, that quick little mind, missed nothing.

  “You said you will answer my questions today."

  “Yes.” Her arms were tight around Kim, so tight the child squirmed. When had Katherine put her arms around Kim, who usually had to be shoved away? She couldn't remember, couldn't think.... She got out, “Li, when does Kim lick people's faces?"

  “When she thinks they're sad or angry or hurt. Taney, you said it was my turn to ask questions today."

  “Yes."

  He crowded close to her, smelling terrible. “You said the first world was to keep us safe. But the feeder broke and we were hungry and then the first world broke, Taney, it broke, and all this other world was out here. Why did you say the first world would keep us safe?"

  “A safeguard,” Katherine said, and wasn't sure what she was saying. “Oh, the bastards—an antidotal safeguard for the first researchers. In her saliva."

  “What?"

  “Thousands of compounds in saliva. We couldn't possibly have tested them all."

  “What—"

  “Taney,” Jana said sternly from the floor, “stop crying. There's nothing to cry about. We found you.... Stop it, please, Taney, stop it before my kindness gets all used up."

  * * * *

  The real fight was just beginning, she knew that. It would rage on so many fronts: medical, military, political, even journalistic if they drove her to that. So much energy would be required, so much strategy. She had won ten years ago but she was older now, and much more tired.

  Nonetheless, her mind was already marshalling arguments. The enemy's research division had been thoroughly destroyed, and so had its personnel. But there was no guarantee that the bombs had actually gotten them all; there had never been any guarantee. The enemy was supposedly our ally now, but if the world situation changed again ... and things always changed. A biological antidote was the first step toward a vaccine ... No, Mr. President, tis
sue samples cannot provide the same mechanisms as a living organism....

  Katherine, driving the DDR mobile across the Mojave, glanced back over her shoulder at Kim, the only ugly and unappealing child of the four. Kim, erratic about controlling her bowels, screaming like a stuck siren, forever licking the faces of people she loved. A child no one would want, a child likely to have been stuck in the back ward of some institution somewhere, while the other three babies would have been adopted, cuddled, loved. Kim, now the most important child on the planet.

  “It's my turn now!” Jana said.

  “In a minute,” Li answered, just as the computer said, “Cat. ‘Cat’ starts with ‘c.’ Say ‘kuh’ for ‘c'."

  “Kuh,” Li and Jana said simultaneously, and the computer broke into congratulatory song. Li and Jana laughed with excitement.

  Sudie suddenly appeared beside the driver's seat. “Taney,” she said seriously, “Now that the real world got broke, are you going to keep us safe?"

  Medical fights, military fights, political fights, journalistic fights. Katherine's knee throbbed. The desert shimmered in front of her, murderous with heat, the earthquake disaster behind. Katherine was nearly seventy years old, and her knee hurt.

  “Yes, dear heart, I am,” she said, and drove on across the desert, toward the next world.

  Copyright © 2006 Nancy Kress

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  * * *

  POISON

  by Bruce McAllister

  Golden Gryphon Press will bring out a collection of Bruce McAllister's science fiction stories entitled The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories this fall. The author's latest tale, however, is a fantasy. This past summer, he traveled to Italy to revisit, after forty-five years, the world (village, witches, and lizards) of “Poison” and to trace the medieval itinerary of the hero of a fantasy novel—The Dragons of Como—that's almost finished.

  In school that day the American boy, whose twelfth birthday was approaching, did just as well as his friends on the Roman history recitation and the spelling test, which included the word stregheria—witchcraft—which could, if you weren't careful, easily be confused with straggaria, an old-fashioned word for respect.