The Fountain of Age

by Nancy Kress

  “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?” Mumbai, 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 cites 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 Bogotá 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.

  BY FOOLS LIKE ME

  Hope creeps quietly into my bedroom without knocking, peering around the corner of the rough doorjamb. I’m awake; sleep eludes me so easily now. I know from the awful smell that she has been to the beach.

  “Come in, child, I’m not asleep.”

  “Grandma, where’s Mama and Papa?”

  “Aren’t they in the field?” The rains are late this year and water for the crops must be carried in ancient buckets from the spring in the dell.

  “Maybe. I didn’t see them. Grandma, I found something.”

  “What, child?”

  She gazes at me and bites her lip. I see that this mysterious find bothers her. Such a sensitive child, though sturdy and healthy enough, God knows how.

  “I went to the beach,” she confesses in a rush. “Don’t tell Mama! I wanted to dig you some trunter roots because you like them so much, but my shovel went clunk on something hard and I . . . I dug it up.”

  “Hope,” I reprimand, because the beach is full of dangerous bits of metal and plastic, washed up through the miles of dead algae on the dead water. And if a soot cloud blows in from the west, it will hit the beach first.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, clearly lying, “but, Grandma, it was a metal box and the lock was all rusted and there was something inside and I brought it here.”

  “The box?”

  “No, that was too heavy. The . . . just wait!”

  No one can recognize most of the bits of rusted metal and twisted plastic from before the Crash. Anything found in a broken metal box should be decayed beyond recognition. I call “Hope! Don’t touch anything slimy—” but she is already out of earshot, running from my tiny bedroom with its narrow cot, which is just blankets and pallet on a rope frame to keep me off the hard floor. It doesn’t; the old ropes sag too much, just as the thick clay walls don’t keep out the heat. But that’s my fault. I close the window shutters only when I absolutely have to. Insects and heat are preferable to dark. But I have a door, made of precious and rotting wood, which is more than Hope or her parents have on their sleeping alcoves off the house’s only other room. I expect to die in this room.

  Hope returns, carrying a bubble of sleek white plastic that fills her bare arms. The bubble has no seams. No mold sticks to it, no sand. Carefully she lays the thing on my cot.

  Despite myself, I say, “Bring me the big knife and be very careful, it’s sharp.”

  She gets the knife, carrying it as gingerly as an offering for the altar. The plastic slits more readily than I expected. I peel it back, and we both gasp.

  I am the oldest person on Island by two decades, and I have seen much. Not of the world my father told me about, from before the Crash, but in our world now. I have buried two husbands and five children, survived three great sandstorms and two years where the rains didn’t come at all, planted and first-nursed a sacred tree, served six times at the altar. I have seen much, but I have never seen so much preserved sin in one place.

  “What . . . Grandma . . . what is that?”

  “A book, child. They’re all books.”

  “Books?” Her voice holds titillated horror. “You mean . . . like they made before the Crash? Like they cut down trees to make?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trees? Real trees?”

  “Yes.” I lift the top one from the white plastic bubble. Firm thick red cover, like . . . dear God, it’s made from the skin of some animal. My gorge rises. Hope musn’t know that. The edges of the sin are gold. My father told me about books, but not that they could look like this. I open it.

  “Oh!” Hop
e cries. “Oh, Grandma!”

  The first slate—no, first page, the word floating up from some childhood conversation—is a picture of trees, but nothing like the pictures children draw on their slates. This picture shows dozens of richly colored trees, crowded together, each with hundreds of healthy, beautifully detailed green leaves. The trees shade a path bordered with glorious flowers. Along the path runs a child wearing far too many wraps, following a large white animal dressed in a wrap and hat and carrying a small metal machine. At the top of the picture, words float on golden clouds: alice in wonderland.

  “Grandma! Look at the—Mama’s coming!”

  Before I can say anything, Hope grabs the book, shoves it into the white bubble, and thrusts the whole thing under my cot. I feel it slide under my bony ass, past the sag that is my body, and hit the wall. Hope is standing up by the time Gloria crowds into my tiny room.

  “Hope, have you fed the chickens yet?”

  “No, Mama, I—”

  Gloria reaches out and slaps her daughter. “Can’t I trust you to do anything?”

  “Please, Gloria, it’s my fault. I sent her to see if there’s any more mint growing in the dell.”

  Gloria scowls. My daughter-in-law is perpetually angry, perpetually exhausted. Before my legs gave out and I could still do a full day’s work, I used to fight back. The Island is no more arid, the see-oh-too no higher, for Gloria than for anyone else. She has borne no more stillborn children than have other women, has endured no fewer soot clouds. But now that she and my son must feed my nearly useless body, I try to not anger her too much, to not be a burden. I weave all day. I twist rope, when there are enough vines to spare for rope. I pretend to be healthier than I am.

  Gloria says, “We don’t need mint, we need fed chickens. Go, Hope.” She turns.

  “Gloria—”

  “What?” Her tone is unbearable. I wonder, for the thousandth time, why Bill married her, and for the thousandth time I answer my own question.

  “Nothing,” I say. I don’t tell her about the sin under the bed. I could have, and ended it right there. But I do not.

  God forgive me.

  Gloria stands behind the altar, dressed in the tattered green robe we all wear during our year of service. I sit on a chair in front of the standing villagers; no one may miss services, no matter how old or sick or in need of help to hobble to the Grove. Bill half carried me here, afraid no doubt of being late and further angering his wife. It’s hard to have so little respect for my son.

  It is the brief time between the dying of the unholy wind that blows all day and the fall of night. Today the clouds are light gray, not too sooty, but not bearing rain, either.

  The altar stands at the bottom of the dell, beside the spring that makes our village possible. A large flat slab of slate, it is supported by boulders painstakingly chiseled with the words of God. It took four generations to carve that tiny writing, and three generations of children have learned to read by copying the sacred texts onto their slates. I was among the first. The altar is shaded by the six trees of the Grove and from my uncomfortable seat, I can gaze up at their branches against the pale sky.

  How beautiful they are! Ours are the tallest, straightest, healthiest trees of any village on Island. I planted and first-nursed one of them myself, the honor of my life. Even now I feel a thickness in my shriveled chest as I gaze up at the green leaves, each one wiped free of dust every day by those in service. Next year, Hope will be one of them. There is nothing on Earth lovelier than the shifting pattern of trees against the sky. Nothing.

  Gloria raises her arms and intones, “‘Then God said, “I give you every plant and every tree on the whole Earth. They will be food for you.”’”

  “Amen,” call out two or three people.

  “‘Wail, oh pine tree,’” Gloria cries, “‘for the cedar has fallen, the stately trees are ruined! Wail, oaks—’”

  “Wail! Wail!”

  I have never understood why people can’t just worship in silence. This lot is sometimes as bad as a flock of starlings.

  “—oaks of Bashan, the—”

  Hope whispers, “Who’s Bashan?”

  Bill whispers back, “A person at the Crash.”

  “‘—dense forest has been cut down! And they were told—told!—not to harm the grass of Earth or any plant or tree.’”

  Revelation 9:4, I think automatically, although I never did find out what the words or numbers mean.

  “‘The vine is dried up!’” Gloria cries, “‘the fig tree is withered! The pomegranate and the palm and the apple tree, all the trees of the field, are dried up! Surely the joy of mankind is withered away!’”

  “Withered! Oh, amen, withered!”

  Joel 1:12.

  “‘Offer sacrifices and burn incense on the high places, under any spreading tree!’”

  Amy Martin, one of the wailers, comes forward with the first sacrifice, an unrecognizable piece of rusted metal dug up from the soil or washed up on the beach. She lays it on the altar. Beside me Hope leans forward, her mouth open and her eyes wide. I can read her young thoughts as easily as if they, too, are chiseled in stone: That metal might have been part of a “car” that threw see-oh-two and soot into the air, might have been part of a “factory” that poisoned the air, might have even been part of a “saw” that cut down the forests! Hope shudders, but I glance away from the intensity on her face. Sometimes she looks too much like Gloria.

  Two more sacrifices are offered. Gloria takes an ember from the banked fire under the altar—the only fire allowed in the village—and touches it briefly to the sacrifices. “‘Instead of the thornbush will grow the pine tree, and instead of briars the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord’s glory, for an everlasting sign which—’”

  I stop listening. Instead I watch the leaves move against the sky. What is “myrtle”—what did it look like, why was it such a desirable plant? The leaves blur. I have dozed off, but I realize this only when the whole Village shouts together, “We will never forget!” and services are over.

  Bill carries me back through the quickening darkness without stars or moon. Without the longed-for rain. Without the candles I remember from my childhood on Island, or the dimly remembered (dreamed?) fireless lights from before that. There are no lights after dark on Island, nothing that might release soot into the air.

  We will never forget.

  It’s just too bad that services are so boring.

  Alice in Wonderland.

  Pride and Prejudice

  Birds of India and Asia

  Moby Dick

  Morning Light

  Jane Eyre

  The Sun Also Rises

  I sit on my cot, slowly sounding out the strange words. Of course the sun rises—what else could it do? It’s rising now outside my window, which lets in pale light, insects, and the everlasting hot wind.

  “Can I see, Grandma?” Hope, naked in the doorway. I didn’t hear the door open. She could have been Gloria. And is it right for a child to see this much sin?

  But already she’s snuggled beside me, smelling of sweat and grime and young life. Even her slight body makes the room hotter. All at once a memory comes to me, a voice from early childhood: Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that’s a—

  What bruise? What was I to listen to? The memory is gone.

  “M—m—m—oh—-bee—-Grandma, what’s a ‘moby’?”

  “I don’t know, child.”

  She picks up a different one. “J—j—aye—n . . . Jane! That’s Miss Anderson’s name! Is this book about her?”

  “No. Another Jane, I think.” I open Moby Dick. Tiny, dense writing, pages and pages of it, whole burned forests of it.

  “Read the sin with the picture of trees!” She roots among the books until she finds Alice in Wonderland and opens it to that impossible vision of tens, maybe hundreds, of glorious trees. Hope studies the child blessed enough to walk that flower-bordered path.

  “What’s her
name, Grandma?”

  “Alice.” I don’t really know.

  “Why is she wearing so many wraps? Isn’t she hot? And how many days did her poor mother have to work to weave so many? “

  I recognize Gloria’s scolding tone. The pages of the book are crisp, bright and clear, as if the white plastic bubble had some magic to keep sin fresh. Turning the page, I begin to read aloud. “‘Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank—’”

  “She has a sister,” Hope breathes. Nearly no one does now; so few children are carried to term and born whole.

  “‘—and tired of having nothing to do: once—’”

  “How could she have nothing to do? Why doesn’t she carry water or weed crops or hunt trunter roots or—”

  “Hope, are you going to let me read this to you or not?”

  “Yes, Grandma. I’m sorry.”

  I shouldn’t be reading to her at all. Trees were cut down to make this book; my father told me so. As a young man, not long after the Crash, he himself was in service as a book sacrificer, proudly. Unlike many of his generation, my father was a moral man.

  “‘—or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?” So she was considering—’”

  We read while the sun clears the horizon, a burning merciless ball, and our sweat drips onto the gold-edged page. Then Gloria and Bill stir in the next room and Hope is on the floor in a flash, shoving the books under my sagging cot, running out the door to feed the chickens and hunt for their rare, precious eggs.

  The rains are very late this year. Every day Gloria, scowling, scans the sky. Every day at sunset she and Bill drag themselves home, bone-weary and smeared with dust, after carrying water from the spring to the crops. The spring is in the dell, and water will not flow uphill. Gloria is also in service this year and must nurse one of the trees, wiping the poisonous dust from her share of the leaves, checking for dangerous insects. More work, more time. Some places on Earth, I was told once, have too much water, too many plants from the see-oh-too. I can’t imagine it. Island has heard from no other place since I was a young woman and the last radio failed. Now a radio would be sin.