by Nancy Kress
The alien looked almost human. Almost, not quite. Tall, maybe six two, the man—it was clearly male—had long, thin arms and legs, a deep chest, a human face but much larger eyes. His skin was coppery and his hair, long and tied back, was dark brown. Most striking were his eyes: larger than humans’, with huge dark pupils in a large expanse of white. He wore dark green clothing, a simple tunic top over loose, short trousers that exposed his spindly calves. His feet were bare, and perhaps the biggest shock of all was that his feet, five-toed and broad, the nails cut short and square. Those feet looked so much like hers that she thought wildly: He could wear my shoes.
“Hello,” the alien said, and it was not his voice but the mechanical one of the radio broadcasts, coming from the ceiling.
“Hello,” Desai said, and bowed from the waist. “We are glad to finally meet. I am Secretary-General Desai of the United Nations.”
“Yes,” the alien “said,” and then added some trilling and clicking sounds in which his mouth did move. Immediately the ceiling said, “I welcome you in our own language.”
Secretary Desai made the rest of the introductions with admirable calm. Marianne tried to fight her growing sense of unreality by recalling what she had read about the Denebs’ planet. She wished she’d paid more attention to the astronomy. The popular press had said that the alien star was a K-something (K zero? K two? She couldn’t remember). The alien home world had both less gravity and less light than Earth, at different wavelengths … orange, yes. The sun was an orange dwarf. Was this Deneb so tall because the gravity was less? Or maybe he was just a basketball player—
Get a grip, Marianne.
She did. The alien had said his name, an impossible collection of trilled phonemes, and immediately said, “Call me Ambassador Smith.” How had he chosen that—from a computer-generated list of English names? When Marianne had been in Beijing to give a paper, some Chinese translators had done that: “Call me Dan.” She had assumed the translators doubted her ability to pronounce their actual names correctly, and they had probably been right. But “Smith” for a star-farer …
“You are Dr. Jenner?”
“Yes, Ambassador.”
“We wanted to talk with you, in particular. Will you please come this way, all of you?”
They did, trailing like baby ducklings after the tall alien. The room beyond the single door had been fitted up like the waiting room of a very expensive medical specialist. Did they order the upholstered chairs and patterned rug on the Internet? Or manufacture them with some advanced nanotech deep in the bowels of the Embassy? The wall pictures were of famous skylines: New York, Shanghai, Dubai, Paris. Nothing in the room suggested alienness. Deliberate? Of course it was. Nobody here but us chickens.
Marianne sat, digging the nails of one hand into the palm of the other to quiet her insane desire to giggle.
“I would like to know of your recent publication, Dr. Jenner,” the ceiling said, while Ambassador Smith looked at her from his disconcertingly large eyes.
“Certainly,” Marianne said, wondering where to begin. How much did they know about human genetics?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. For the next twenty minutes Marianne explained, gestured, answered questions. The others listened silently except for the low murmur of the Chinese and Russian translators. Everyone, human and alien, looked attentive and courteous, although Marianne detected the slightly pursed lips of Ekaterina Zaytsev’s envy.
Slowly it became clear that Smith already knew much of what Marianne was saying. His questions centered on where she had gotten her DNA samples.
“They were volunteers,” Marianne said. “Collection booths were set up in an open-air market in India, because I happened to have a colleague working there, in a train station in London, and on my college campus in the United States. At each place, a nominal fee was paid for a quick scraping of tissue from the inside of the cheek. After we found the first L7 DNA in a sample from an American student from Indiana, we went to her relatives to ask for samples. They were very cooperative.”
“This L7 sample, according to your paper, comes from a mutation that marks the strain of one of the oldest of mitochondrial groups.”
Desai made a quick, startled shift on his chair.
“That’s right,” Marianne said. “Evidence says that Mitochondrial Eve had at least two daughters, and the line of one of them was L0 whereas the other line developed a mutation that became—” All at once she saw it, what Desai had already realized. She blinked at Smith and felt her mouth fall open, just as if she had no control over her jaw muscles, just as if the universe had been turned inside out, like a sock.
CHAPTER 3
S minus 10.5 months
Noah sat in Elizabeth’s apartment, listening to his brother and sister. Ryan had just arrived and they sat together on the sagging sofa, conferring quietly, their usual belligerence temporarily replaced by shared concern. Repeated calls to their mother’s cell and landline had produced nothing.
His brother had been shortchanged in the looks department. Elizabeth was beautiful in a severe way and Noah knew he’d gotten the best of his parents’ genes: his dead father’s height and athletic build, his mother’s light-gray eyes flecked with gold. In contrast, Ryan was built like a fire hydrant: short, muscular, thickening into cylindricalness since his marriage; Connie was a good cook. At thirty, he was already balding. Ryan was smart, slow to change, secretive, humorless.
Elizabeth said, “Tell me exactly what Evan said about the FBI taking her away. Word for word.”
Ryan did, adding, “What about this—we call the FBI and ask them directly where she is and what’s going on.”
“I tried that. The local field office said they didn’t know anything about it, but they’d make inquiries and get back to me. They haven’t.”
“Of course not. We have to give them a reason to give out information, and on the way over I thought of two. We can say either that we’re going to the press, or that we need to reach her for a medical emergency.”
Elizabeth said, “I don’t like the idea of threatening the feds—too potentially messy. The medical emergency might be better. We could say Connie’s developed a problem with her pregnancy. First grandchild, life-threatening complications—”
Noah, startled, said, “Connie’s pregnant?”
“Four months,” Ryan said. “If you ever read the e-mails everybody sends you, you might have gotten the news. You’re going to be an uncle.” His gaze said that Noah would make just as rotten an uncle as he did a son.
Elizabeth said, “You need to make the phone call, Ryan. You’re the prospective father.”
Ryan pulled out his cell, which looked as if it could contact deep space. The FBI office was closed. He left a message. FBI Headquarters in DC was also closed. He left another message. Before Ryan could say, They’ll never get back to us and so begin another argument with Elizabeth over governmental inefficiency, Noah said, “Did the Wildlife Society give you that cell for your job?”
“It’s the International Wildlife Federation and yes, the phone has top-priority connections for the loosestrife invasion.”
Noah ducked his head to hide his grin.
Elizabeth guffawed. “Ryan, do you know how pretentious that sounds? An emergency hotline for weeds?”
“Do you know how ignorant you sound? Purple loosestrife is taking over wetlands, which for your information are the most biologically diverse and productive ecologies on Earth. They’re being choked by this invasive species, with an economic impact of millions of dollars that—”
“As if you cared about the United States economy! All you care about are those weeds that—”
“Agriculture depends on ecology, which in turn depends on wetlands! You can’t change that even if you get the aliens to give you the tech for their energy shields. I know that’s what you ‘border-defense’ types want but it won’t—”
“Yes, it is what we want! Our economic survival is at stake, which makes Border
Patrol a lot more important than a bunch of creeping flowers!”
“Great, just great. Just ignore invasive botanicals that encroach on farmland, so that eventually we can’t even feed everyone who would be imprisoned in your imported alien energy fields.”
“Protected, not imprisoned. The way we’re protecting you now by keeping the Denebs offshore.”
“Oh, you’re doing that, are you? That was the aliens’ decision. Do you think that if they had wanted to plop their pavilion in the middle of Times Square that your Border Patrol could have stopped them? They’re a star-faring race, for chrissake!”
“Nobody said the—”
Noah shouted, which was the only way to get their attention, “Elizabeth, your cell is ringing! It says it’s Mom!”
They both stared at the cell as if at a bomb, and then Elizabeth lunged for the phone. “Mom?”
“It’s me. You called but—”
“Where have you been? What happened? What was the FBI—”
“I’ll tell you everything. Are you and Ryan still at your place?”
“Yes. You sound funny. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. No. Stay there, I’ll get a cab, but it may be a few hours yet.”
“But where—”
The phone went dead. Ryan and Elizabeth stared at each other. Into the silence, Noah said, “Oh yeah, Mom. Noah’s here, too.”
* * *
“You are surprised,” Ambassador Smith had said, unnecessarily.
Courtesy had been swamped in shock. Marianne blurted, “You’re human? From Earth?”
“Yes. We think so.”
“Your mitochondrial DNA matches the L7 sequence? No, wait—your whole biology matches ours?”
“There are some differences, of course. We—”
The Russian delegate stood up so quickly her chair fell over. She spat something that her translator gave as a milder, “‘I do not understand how this is possible.’”
“I will explain,” Smith said. “Please sit down.”
Ekaterina Zaytsev did not sit. All at once Marianne wondered if the energy field enveloping Smith was weaponized.
Smith said, “We have known for millennia that we did not originate on World. There is no fossil record of us going back more than a hundred fifty thousand Earth years. The life-forms native to World are DNA based, but there is no direct genetic link. We know that someone took us from somewhere else and—”
“Why?” Marianne blurted out. “Why would they do that? And who is ‘they’?”
Before Smith could answer, Zaytsev said, “Why should your planet’s native life-forms be DNA based at all? If this story is not a collection of lies?”
“Panspermia,” Smith said. “And we don’t know why we were seeded from Earth to World. An experiment, perhaps, by a race now gone. We—”
The Chinese ambassador was murmuring to his translator. The translator, American and too upset to observe protocol, interrupted Smith.
“Mr. Zhu asks how, if you are from Earth, you progressed to space travel so much faster than we have? If your brains are the same as ours?”
“Our evolution was different.”
Marianne darted in with, “How? Why? A hundred fifty thousand years is not enough for more than superficial evolutionary changes!”
“Which we have,” Smith said, still in that mechanical voice that Marianne suddenly hated. Its very detachment sounded condescending. “World’s gravity, for instance, is one-tenth less than Earth’s, and our internal organs and skeletons have adjusted. World is warmer than Earth, and you can see that we carry little body fat. Our eyes are much larger than yours—we needed to gather all the light we can on a planet dimmer than yours. Most plants on World use a dark version of chlorophyll, to gather as many photons as possible. We are dazzled by the colors on Earth.”
He smiled, and Marianne remembered that all human cultures share certain facial expressions: happiness, disgust, anger.
Smith continued, “But when I said that our evolution differed from yours, I was referring to social evolution. World is a more benign planet than Earth. Little axial tilt, many easy-to-domesticate grains, much food, few predators. We had no Ice Age. We settled into agriculture over a hundred thousand years before you did.”
Over a hundred thousand years more of settled communities, of cities, with their greater specialization and intellectual cross-fertilization. While Marianne’s ancestors fifteen thousand years ago had still been hunting mastodons and gathering berries, these cousins across the galaxy might have been exploring quantum physics. But—
She said, “Then with such an environment, you must have had an overpopulation problem. All easy ecological niches rapidly become overpopulated!”
“Yes. But we had one more advantage.” Smith paused; he was giving the translators time to catch up, and she guessed what that meant even before he spoke again.
“The group of us seeded on World—and we estimate it was no more than a thousand—were all closely related. Most likely they were all brought from one place. Our gene pool does not show as much diversity as yours. More important, the exiles—or at least a large number of them—happened to be unusually mild-natured and cooperative. You might say, ‘sensitive to other’s suffering.’ We have had wars, but not very many, and not early on. We were able to control the population problem, once we saw it coming, with voluntary measures. And, of course, those subgroups that worked together best, made the earliest scientific advances and flourished most.”
“You replaced evolution of the fittest with evolution of the most cooperative,” Marianne said, and thought: There goes Dawkins.
“You may say that.”
“I not say this,” Zaytsev said, without waiting for her translator. Her face twisted. “How you know you come from Earth? And how know where is Earth?”
“Whoever took us to World left titanium tablets, practically indestructible, with diagrams. Eventually we learned enough astronomy to interpret them.”
Moses on the mountain, Marianne thought. How conveniently neat! Profound distrust swamped her, followed by profound belief. Because, after all, here the aliens were, having arrived in a starship, and they certainly looked human. Although—
She said abruptly, “Will you give us blood samples? Tissue? Permit medical scans?”
“Yes.”
The agreement was given so simply, so completely, that everyone fell silent. Marianne’s dazed mind tried to find the scam in this, this possible nefarious treachery, and failed. It was quiet Zhu Feng who, through his translator, finally broke the silence.
“Tell us, please, honored envoy, why you are here at all?”
Again Smith answered simply. “To save you all from destruction.”
* * *
Noah slipped out of the apartment, feeling terrible but not terrible enough to stay. First transgression: If Mom returned earlier than she’d said, he wouldn’t be there when she arrived. Second transgression: He’d taken twenty dollars from Elizabeth’s purse. Third transgression: He was going to buy sugarcane.
But he’d left Elizabeth and Ryan arguing yet again about isolationism, the same argument in the same words as when he’d seen them last, four months ago. Elizabeth pulled out statistics showing that the United States’ only option for survival, including avoiding revolution, was to retain and regain jobs within its borders, impose huge tariffs on imports, and rebuild infrastructure. Ryan trotted out different statistics proving that only globalization could, after a period of disruption, bring economic benefits in the long run, including a fresh flow of workers into a graying America. Workers, not flora or fauna. They had gotten to the point of hurtling words like “fascist” and “sloppy thinker,” when Noah left.
He walked the three blocks to Broadway. It was, as always, brightly lit, but the gyro places and electronics shops and restaurants, their outside tables empty and chained in the cold dusk, looked shabbier than he remembered. Some stores were not just shielded by grills but boarded up. He kep
t walking east, toward Central Park.
The dealer huddled in a doorway. He wasn’t more than fifteen. Sugarcane was a low-cost, low-profit drug, not worth the gangs’ time, let alone that of organized crime. The kid was a freelance amateur, and God knows what the sugarcane was cut with.
Noah bought it anyway. In the nearest Greek place he bought a gyro as the price of the key to the bathroom and locked himself in. The room was windowless but surprisingly clean. The testing set that Noah carried everywhere showed him the unexpected: the sugarcane was cut only with actual sugar, and only by about 50 percent.
“Thank you, Lord,” he said to the toilet, snorted twice his usual dose, and went back to his table to eat the cooling gyro and wait.
The drug took him quickly, as it always did. First came a smooth feeling, as if the synapses of his brain were filling with rich, thick cream. Then: One moment he was Noah Jenner, misfit, and the next he wasn’t. He felt like a prosperous small businessman of some type, a shop owner maybe, financially secure and blissfully uncomplicated. A contented, centered person who never questioned who he was or where he was going, who fit in wherever he happened to be. The sort of man who could eat his gyro and gaze out the window without a confusing thought in his head.
Which he did, munching away, the juicy meat and mild spices satisfying in his mouth, for a quiet half hour.
Except—something was happening on the street.
A group of people streamed down Broadway. A parade. No, a mob. They carried torches, of all things, and something larger, held high … Now Noah could hear shouting. The thing carried high was an effigy made of straw and rags, looking like the alien in a hundred bad movies: big blank head, huge eyes, spindly pale green body. It stood in a small metal tub atop a board. Someone touched a torch to the straw and set the effigy on fire.
Why? As far as Noah could see, the aliens weren’t bothering anybody. They were even good for business. It was just an excuse for people floundering in a bad economy to vent their anger—
