Nebula Awards Showcase 2003

by Nancy Kress

  “Tourists, maybe?” I guessed. “Here to see Sandor’s recovered history?”

  “But I see no children.” Casey shook his head. “You’d think they’d bring the children.”

  “They’re people, anyhow.” Pepe grinned hopefully. “We’ll find somebody to tell us more than Sandor did.”

  •

  We climbed down the stairs, on down a wide flight of steps to a walk that curved through banks of strange and fragrant blooms. Ahead of us a couple had stopped. The woman looked a little odd, I thought, with her head of short ginger-hued fur instead of hair, yet as lovely as Mona had looked in the holos made when she and El Chino reached the Moon. The man was youthful and handsome as Sandor. I thought they were in love.

  Laughing at something he had said, she ran a little way ahead and turned to pose for his camera, framed between the monument and the Sphinx. She had worn a scarlet shawl around her shoulders. At a word from him, she whipped it off and smiled for his lens. Her daintily nippled breasts had been pale beneath the shawl, and he waited for the sun to color them.

  We watched till he had snapped the camera. Laughing again, she ran back to toss the shawl around his shoulders and throw her arms around him. They clung together for a long kiss. We had stopped a dozen yards away. Casey spoke hopefully when they turned to face us.

  “Hello?”

  They stared blankly at us. Casey managed an uncertain smile, but a nervous sweat had filmed his dark Oriental face.

  “Forgive us, please. Do you speak English? Français? ¿Español?”

  They frowned at him, and the man answered with a stream of vowels that were almost music and a rattle of consonants I knew I could never learn to imitate. I caught a hint of Sandor’s odd accent but nothing like our English. They moved closer. The man pulled the little camera out of his bag, clicked it at Casey, stepped nearer to get his head. Laughing at him, the woman came to pose again beside Casey, slipping a golden arm around him for a final shot.

  “We came in that machine. Down from the Moon!” Desperation on his face, he gestured at the spaceplane behind us, turned to point toward the Moon’s pale disk in the sky above the Parthenon, waved to show our flight from it to the pedestal. “We’ve just landed from Tycho Station. If you understand—”

  Laughing at him, they caught hands and ran on toward the Sphinx.

  “What the hell!” Staring after them, he shook his head. “What the bloody hell!”

  “They don’t know we’re real.” Pepe chuckled bitterly. “They take us for dummies. Part of the show.”

  •

  We followed a path that led toward the Parthenon and stopped at the curb to watch the traffic flowing around the quadrangle. Cars, buses, vans, occasional trucks; they reminded me of street scenes in pre-impact videos. A Yellow Cab pulled up beside us. A woman sprang out. Slim and golden-skinned, she was almost a twin of the tourist who had posed with Casey.

  The driver, however, might have been an unlikely survivor from the old Earth. Heavy, swarthy, wheezing for his breath, he wore dark glasses and a grimy leather jacket. Lighting a cigarette, he hauled himself out of the cab, waddled around to open the trunk, handed the woman a folded tripod, and grunted sullenly when she tipped him.

  Casey walked up to him as he was climbing back into the cab.

  “Sir!” He seemed not to hear, and Casey called louder. “Sir!”

  Ignoring us, he got into the cab and pulled away. Casey turned with a baffled frown to Pepe and me.

  “Did you see his face? It was dead! Some stiff plastic. His eyes are blind, behind those glasses. He’s some kind of robot, no more alive than our robots on the Moon.”

  Keeping a cautious distance, we followed the woman with the tripod. Ignoring us, she stopped to set it up to support a flat round plate of some black stuff. As she stepped away, a big transparent bubble swelled out of the plate, clouded, turned to silver. She leaned to peer into it.

  Venturing closer, I saw that the bubble had become a circular window that framed the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sphinx. They seemed oddly changed, magnified and brighter, suddenly in motion. Everything shook. The monument leaned and toppled, crushing the statue. The Sphinx looked down across the fragments, intact and forever enigmatic.

  I must have come too close. The woman turned with an irritated frown to brush me away as if I had been an annoying fly. Retreating, I looked again. As she bent again to the window, the sky in it changed. The Sun exploded into a huge, dull-red ball that turned the whole scene pink. Close beside it was a tiny, bright-blue star. Our spaceplane took shape in the foreground, the motors firing and white flame washing the pedestal, as if it were taking off to escape catastrophe.

  Awed into silence, Casey gestured us away.

  “An artist!” Pepe whispered. “An artist at work.”

  We walked on past the Parthenon and waited at the corner to cross the avenue. Pepe nodded at the blue-clad cop standing out on the pavement with a whistle and a white baton, directing traffic. “Watch him. He’s mechanical.”

  So were most of the drivers. The passengers, however, riding in the taxis and buses or arriving on the train, looked entirely human, as live as Sandor himself, eager as the tourists of the pre-impact Earth to see these monumental restorations of their forgotten past.

  They flocked the sidewalks, climbed the Capital steps to photograph the quadrangle and one another, wandered around the corner and on down the avenue. We fell in with them. They seldom noticed Pepe or me, but sometimes stopped to stare at Casey or take his picture.

  “One more robot!” he muttered. “That’s what they take me for.”

  •

  We spent the rest of the day wandering replicated streets, passing banks, broker’s offices, shops, bars, hairdressers, restaurants, police stations. A robot driver had parked his van in front of a bookstore to unload cartons stamped Encyclopaedia Britannica. A robot beggar was rattling coins in a tin cup. A robot cop was pounding in pursuit of a red-spattered robot fugitive. We saw slim gold-skinned people, gracefully alive, entering restaurants and bars, trooping into shops, emerging with their purchases.

  Footsore and hungry before the day was over, we followed a tantalizing aroma that led us to a line of golden folk waiting under a sign that read:

  STEAK PLUS!

  PRIME ANGUS BEEF

  DONE TO YOUR ORDER

  Pepe fretted that we had no money for a meal.

  “We’ll eat before we tell them,” Casey said.

  “They’re human, anyhow.” Pepe grasped for some crumb of comfort. “They like food.”

  “I hope they’re human.”

  Standing in line, I watched and listened to those ahead of us, hoping for any link of human contact, finding none at all. A few turned to give us puzzled glances. One man stared at Casey till I saw his fists clenching. Their speech sometimes had rhythm and pitch that made an eerie music, but I never caught a hint of anything familiar.

  A robot at the door was admitting people a few at a time. His bright-lensed eyes looked behind us when we reached him. Finding nobody, he shut the door.

  Limping under Earth gravity, growing hungrier and thirstier, we drifted on until the avenue ended at a high wall of something clear as glass, which cut the memorial off like a slicing blade. Beyond the wall lay an open landscape that recalled Dian’s travel videos of tropical Africa. A line of trees marked a watercourse that wound down a shallow valley. Zebras and antelope grazed near us, unalarmed by a dark-maned lion watching sleepily from a little hill.

  “There’s water we could drink.” Pepe nodded at the stream. “If we can get past the wall.”

  We walked on till it stopped us. Seamless, hard and slick, too tall for us to climb, it ran on in both directions as far as we could see. Too tired to go farther, we sat there on the curb watching the freedom of the creatures beyond till dusk and a chill in the air drove us back to look for shelter. What we found was a stack of empty cartons behind a discount furniture outlet. We flattene
d a few of them to make a bed, ripped up the largest to cover us, and tried to sleep.

  “You can’t blame Sandor,” Pepe muttered as we lay there shivering under our cardboard. “He told us we’d never belong.”

  4

  We dozed on our cardboard pallet, aching under the heavy drag of Earth’s gravity through a never-ending night, and woke stiff and cold and desperate. I almost wished we were back on the Moon.

  “There has to be a hole in the fence,” Casey tried to cheer us. “To let the tourists in.”

  The train had come from the north. Back at the wall, we limped north along a narrow road inside it, our spirits lifting a little as exercise warmed us. Beyond a bend, the railway ran out of a tunnel, across a long steel bridge over a cliff-rimmed gorge the stream had cut, and into our prison through a narrow archway in the barrier.

  “We’d have to walk the bridge.” Pepe stopped uneasily to shake his head at the ribbon of water on the canyon’s rocky floor, far below. “A train could catch us on the track.”

  “We’ll just wait for it to pass,” Casey said.

  We waited, lying hidden in a drainage ditch beside the track till the engine burst out of the tunnel, steam whistle howling. The cars rattled past us, riders leaning to stare at Sandor’s restorations ahead. We clambered out of the ditch and sprinted across the bridge. Jumping off the track at the tunnel mouth, we rolled down a grass slope, got our breath, and tramped southwest away from the wall and into country that looked open.

  The memorial sank behind a wooded ridge until all we could see was Sandor’s replica of our own lookout dome on his replica of Tycho’s rugged rim. We came out across a wide valley floor, scattered with clumps of trees and grazing animals I recognized; wildebeest, gazelles, and a little herd of graceful impala.

  “Thanks to old Calvin DeFort. Another Noah saving Earth from a different deluge.” Casey shaded his eyes to watch a pair of ostriches running from us across the empty land. “But where are the people?”

  “Where’s any water?” Pepe muttered. “No deluge, please. Just water we can drink.”

  We plodded on through tall green grass till I saw elephants marching out of a stand of trees off to our right. A magnificent bull with great white tusks, half a dozen others behind him, a baby with its mother. They came straight toward us. I wanted to run, but Casey simply beckoned for us to move aside. They ambled past us to drink from a pool we hadn’t seen. Waiting till they had moved on, we turned toward the pool. Pepe pushed ahead and bent to scoop water up in his cupped hands.

  “Don’t!” a child’s voice called behind us. “Unclean water might harm you.”

  A small girl came running toward us from the trees where the elephants had been. The first child we had seen, she was daintily lovely in a white blouse and a short blue skirt, her fair face half hidden under a wide-brimmed hat tied under her chin with a bright red ribbon.

  “Hello.” She stopped a few yards away, her blue eyes wide with wonder. “You are the Moon men?”

  “And strangers here.” Casey gave her our names. “Strangers in trouble.”

  “You deceived the ancient spaceship,” she accused us soberly. “You should not be here on Earth.”

  We gaped at her. “How did you know?”

  “The ship informed my father.”

  We stood silent, lost in wonder of our own. A charming picture of childish innocence, but she had shaken me with a chill of terror. Pepe stepped warily back from her, but after a moment Casey caught his breath to ask, “Who is your father?”

  “You called him your uncle when you knew him on the Moon.” Pride lit her face. “He is a very great and famous man. He discovered the lunar site and recovered the lost history of humankind. He rebuilt the ancient structures you saw around you where the ship came down.”

  “I get it.” Casey nodded, looking crestfallen and dazed. “I think I begin to get it.”

  “We can’t be sorry.” Blinking at her, Pepe caught a long breath. “We’d had too much of the Moon. But now we’re lost here, in a world I don’t begin to understand. Do you know what will happen to us?”

  “My father isn’t sure.” She looked away toward the replicated Tycho dome. “I used to beg him to take me with him to the Moon. He said the station had no place for me.” She turned to study us again. “You are interesting to see. My name is—”

  She uttered a string of rhythmic consonants and singing vowels, and smiled at Pepe’s failure when he tried to imitate them.

  “Just call me Tling,” she said. “That will be easier for you to say.” She turned to Pepe. “If you want water, come with me.”

  We followed her back to a little circle of square stones in the shade of the nearest tree. Beckoning us to sit, she opened a basket, found a bottle of water, and filled a cup for Pepe. Amused at the eager way he drained it, she filled it again for him, and then for Casey and me.

  “I came out to visit the elephants,” she told us. “I love elephants. I am very grateful to you Moon people for preserving the tissue specimens that have kept so many ancient creatures alive.”

  I had caught a tantalizing fragrance when she opened the basket. She saw Pepe’s eyes still on it.

  “I brought food for some of my forest friends,” she said. “If you are hungry.”

  Pepe said we were starving. She spread a white napkin on one of the stones and began laying out what she had brought. Fruits I thought were peachlike and grapelike and pearlike, but wonderfully sweet and different. Small brown cakes with aromas that that wet my mouth. We devoured them so avidly that she seemed amused.

  “Where are the people?” Casey waved his arm at the empty landscape. “Don’t you have cities?”

  “We do,” she said. “Though my father says they are smaller than those you built on the prehistoric Earth.” She gestured toward the elephants. “We share the planet with other beings. He says you damaged it when you let your own biology run out of control.”

  “Maybe we did, but that’s not what brought the impactor.” Casey frowned again. “You are the only child we have seen.”

  “There’s not much room for us. You see, we don’t die.”

  I was listening, desperately hoping for something that might help us find or make a place for ourselves, but everything I heard was making our new world stranger. Casey gazed at her.

  “Why don’t you die?”

  “If I can explain—” She paused as if looking for an answer we might understand. “My father says I should tell you that we have changed ourselves since the clones came back to colonize the dead Earth. We have altered the genes and invented the nanorobs.”

  “Nanorobs?”

  She paused again, staring at the far-off elephants.

  “My father calls them artificial symbiotes. They are tiny things that live like bacteria in our bodies but do good instead of harm. They are partly organic, partly diamond, partly gold. They move in the blood to repair or replace injured cells, or regrow a missing organ. They assist our nerves and our brain cells.”

  The food forgotten, we were staring at her. A picture of innocent simplicity in the simple skirt and blouse and floppy hat, she was suddenly so frightening that I trembled. She reached to put her small hand on mine before she went on.

  “My father says I should say they are tiny robots, half-machine and half-alive. They are electronic. They can be programmed to store digital information. They pulse in unison, making their own waves in the brain and turning the whole body into a radio antenna. Sitting here speaking to you, I can also speak to my father.”

  She looked up to smile at me, her small hand closing on my fingers.

  “Mr. Dunk, please don’t be afraid of me. I know we seem different. I know I seem strange to you, but I would never harm you.”

  She was so charming that I wanted to take her in my arms, but my awe had grown to dread. We all shrank from her and sat wordless till hunger drove us to attack the fruit and cakes again. Pepe began asking questions as we ate.

  Where did s
he live?

  “On that hill.” She nodded toward the west, but I couldn’t tell which hill she meant. “My father selected a place where he could look out across the memorial.”

  Did she go to school?

  “School?” The word seemed to puzzle her for a moment, and then she shook her head. “We do not require the schools my father says you had in the prehistoric world. He says your schools existed to program the brains of young people. Our nanocoms can be programmed and reprogrammed instantly, with no trouble at all, to load whatever information we need. That is how I learned your English when I needed it.”

  She smiled at his dazed face and selected a plump purple berry for herself.

  “Our bodies, however, do need training.” Delicately, she wiped her lips on a white napkin. “We form social groups to play games or practice skills. We fly our sliders all around the Earth. I love to ski on high mountains where snow falls. I’ve dived off coral reefs to observe sea things. I like music, art, drama, games of creation.”

  “That should be fun.” Pepe’s eyes were wide. “More fun than life in our tunnels on the Moon.” His face went suddenly dark. “I hope your father doesn’t send us back there.”

  “He can’t, even if he wanted to.” She laughed at his alarm. “He’s finally done with the excavation. The charter site is closed and protected for future ages. All intrusion prohibited.”

  “So what will he do with us?”

  “Does he have to do anything?” Seeming faintly vexed, she looked off toward the station dome on the crater ridge. “He says he has no place ready for you, but there are humanoid replicates playing your roles there in the Tycho simulation. I suppose you could replace them, if that would make you happy.”

  “Pretending we were back on the Moon?” Casey turned grim. “I don’t think so.”

  “If you don’t want that—”

  She stopped, tipped her head as if to listen, and began gathering the water bottle and the rest of the fruit into the basket. Anxiously, Pepe asked if something was wrong.