by Nancy Kress
As the copter lifted and the house, the town, the countryside got smaller and smaller, Marianne tried not to think of what a failure the visit had been. Yes, she had seen her grandchild. But whatever comfort or connection that had been supposed to bring her, it hadn’t. It seemed to her, perhaps irrationally, that never had she felt so alone.
* * *
When Noah woke, he instantly remembered what day it was. For a long moment, he lay still, savoring the knowledge like rich chocolate on the tongue. Then he said good-bye to his room. He would never sleep here, out of his energy suit, again.
Over the months, he had made the room as World as he could. A sleeping mat, thin but with as much give as a mattress, rolled itself tightly as soon as he sprang up and into the tiny shower. On the support wall he had hung one of Oliver’s pictures—not a half-dressed barbarian princess this time, but a black-and-white drawing of plants in the World garden. The other walls, which seemed thin as rice paper but somehow kept out sound, had been programmed, at Noah’s request, with the subtly shifting colors that the Worlders favored for everything except family gatherings. Color was extremely important to Worlders, and so to Noah. He was learning to discern shades that had once seemed all the same. This blue for mourning; this blue for adventure; this blue for loyalty. He had discarded all his Terran clothes. How had he ever stood the yellow polo shirt, the red hoodie? Wrong, wrong.
Drying his body, he rehearsed his request to Mee^hao¡. He wanted to get the words exactly right.
Breakfast, like all World meals, was communal, a time to affirm ties. Noah had already eaten in his room; the energy suit did not permit the intake of food. Nonetheless, he took his place in the hierarchy at the long table, above Oliver and Jacqui and below everyone else. That was just. Family solidarity rested on three supports: inclusion, rank, and empathy. A triangle was the strongest of all geometrical figures.
“G’morning,” Oliver said, yawning. He was not a morning person, and resented getting up for a breakfast he would not eat until much later.
“I greet you,” Noah said in World. Oliver blinked.
Jacqui, quicker, said, “Oh, today is the day, is it? Can I be there?”
“At the ceremony? No, of course not!” Noah said. She should have known better than to even make the request.
“Just asking,” Jacqui said. “Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
Yes, it does. It showed a lack of respect for all three supports in the triangle. Although Noah had not expected any more of Jacqui.
He did expect more of the three Terrans who took their places below Oliver. Isabelle Rhinehart, her younger sister Kayla, and Kayla’s son had come into the World section of the Embassy only a week ago, but already the two women were trying to speak World. The child, Austin, was only three—young enough to grow up trilling and clicking World like a native. Noah gazed with envy at the little boy, who smiled shyly and then crawled onto his mother’s lap.
But they could not hold Noah’s interest long. This was the day!
His stomach growled. He’d been too excited to eat much of the food delivered earlier to his room. And truthfully, the vegetarian World diet was not exciting. But he would learn to like it. And what a small price to pay for … everything.
The ceremony took place in the same room, right after breakfast. The other Terrans had left. Mee^hao¡ changed the wall program. Now instead of subtly shifting greens, the thin room dividers pulsed with the blue of loyalty alternating with the color of the clan of Mee^hao¡.
Noah knelt in the middle of the circle of Worlders, facing Mee^hao¡, who held a long blue rod. Now I dub thee Sir Noah.… Noah hated, completely hated, that his mind threw up that stupid thought. This was nothing like a feudal knighting. It was more like a baptism, washing him clean of his old self.
Mee^hao¡ sang a verse of what he had been told was the family inclusion song, with everyone else echoing the chorus. Noah didn’t catch all the trilling and clicking words, but he didn’t have to. Tears pricked his eyes. It seemed to him that he had never wanted anything this much in life, had never really wanted anything at all.
“Stand, brother mine,” Mee^hao¡ said.
Noah stood. Mee^hao¡ did something with the rod, and the energy shield dissolved around Noah.
Not only a baptism—an operation.
The first breath of World air almost made him vomit. No, the queasiness was excitement, not the air. It tasted strange, and with the second panicky breath he felt he wasn’t getting enough of it. But he knew that was just the lower oxygen content. The Embassy was at sea level; the O2 concentration of World matched that at twelve thousand feet. His lungs would adapt. His marrow would produce more red corpuscles. The Worlders had evolved for this; Noah would evolve, too.
The air smelled strange.
His legs buckled slightly, but before Llaa^moh¡, whom he had once known as Jones, could step toward him, Noah braced himself and smiled. He was all right. He was here. He was—
“Brother mine,” went around the circle, and then the formalities were over and they all hugged him, and for the first time in 150,000 years, Terran skin touched the skin of humans from the stars.
CHAPTER 9
S minus 3.5 months
The security officer met Marianne and Evan in their lab and conducted them to a euchre game in the observation area outside the BSL4 lab.
From the first time she’d come here, Marianne had been appalled by the amateurishness of the entire setup. Granted, this was a bunch of scientists, not the CIA. Still, the Denebs had to wonder why euchre—or backgammon or chess or Monopoly, it varied—was being played here instead of at one of the comfortable common rooms or cafeterias. Why two scientists were constantly at work in the negative-pressure lab even when they seemed to have nothing to do. Why the euchre players paid more attention to the screens monitoring the scientists’ vitals than to the card game.
Dr. Julia Namechek and Dr. Trevor Lloyd. Both young, strong, and self-infected with spore disease. They moved around the BSL4 lab in full space suits, breathing tubes attached to the air supply in the ceiling. Surely the Denebs’ energy suits would be better for this kind of work, but the suits had not been offered to the Terrans.
“When?” Marianne murmured, playing the nine of clubs.
“Three days ago,” said a physician whose name Marianne had not caught.
Spore disease (the name deliberately unimaginative, noninflammatory) had turned up in mice after three days. Marianne was not a physician, but she could read a vitals screen. Neither Namechek nor Lloyd, busily working in their space suits behind glass, showed the slightest signs of infection. This was, in fact, the third time that the two had tried to infect themselves by breathing in the spores. Each occasion had been preceded by weeks of preparation. Those times, nothing had happened, either, and no one knew why. There were theories, but nothing proved.
Physicians experimenting on themselves were not unknown in research medicine. Edward Jenner had infected himself—and the eight-year-old son of his gardener—with cowpox to develop the smallpox vaccine. Jesse William Lazear infected himself with yellow fever from mosquitoes, in order to confirm that mosquitoes were indeed the transmission vector. Julio Barrera gave himself Argentine hemorrhagic fever; Barry Marshall drank a solution of H. pylori to prove the bacterium caused peptic ulcers; Pradeep Seth injected himself with an experimental vaccine for HIV.
Marianne understood the reasons for the supposed secrecy of this experiment. The newspapers that came in on the mail runs glowed luridly with speculations about human experimentation aboard the Embassy. Journalists ignited their pages with “Goebbels,” “Guatemalan syphilis trials,” “Japanese Unit 731.” And those were the mainstream journalists. The tabloids and fringe papers invented so many details about Deneb atrocities on humans that the newsprint practically dripped with blood and body parts. The online news sources were, if anything, even worse. No, such “journalists” would never believe that Drs. Namechek and Lloyd had given spore disease to themse
lves and without the aliens knowing it.
Actually, Marianne didn’t believe that, either. The Denebs were too intelligent, too technologically advanced, too careful. They had to know this experiment was going on. They had to be permitting it. No matter how benign and peaceful their culture, they were human. Their lack of interference was a way of ensuring CYA deniability.
“Your turn, Dr. Jenner,” said Syed Sharma, a very formal microbiologist from Mumbai. He was the only player wearing a suit.
“Oh, sorry,” Marianne said. “What’s trump again?”
Evan, her partner, said, “Spades. Don’t trump my ace again.”
“No table talk, please,” Sharma said.
Marianne studied her hand, trying to remember what had been played. She had never been a good cardplayer. She didn’t like cards. And there was nothing to see here, anyway. Evan could bring her the results, if any, of the clandestine experiment. It was possible that the two scientists had not been infected, after all—not this time nor the previous two. It was possible that the pathogen had mutated, or just hadn’t taken hold in these two particular people, or was being administered with the wrong vector. In the nineteenth century, a Dr. Firth, despite heroic and disgusting measures, had never succeeded in infecting himself with yellow fever because he never understood how it was transmitted. Pathogen research was still part art, part luck.
“I fold,” she said, before she remembered that “folding” was poker, not euchre. She tried a weak smile. “I’m very tired.”
“Go to bed, Dr. Jenner,” said Seyd Sharma. Marianne gave him a grateful look, which he did not see as he frowned at his cards. Lab tech Alyssa Rosert took her place at the table and Marianne left.
Just as she reached the end of the long corridor leading from the BSL4 lab, the door opened and a security guard hurried through, face twisted with some strong emotion. Her heart stopped. What fresh disaster now? She said, “Did anything—” but before she could finish the question he had pushed past her and hurried on.
Marianne hesitated. Follow him to hear the news or wait until—
The lab exploded.
Marianne was hurled to the floor. Walls around her, the tough but thin membranelike walls favored by the Denebs, tore. People screamed, sirens sounded, pulsing pain tore through Marianne’s head like a dark, viscous tsunami.
Then everything went black.
* * *
She woke alone in a room. Small, white, windowless, with one clear wall, two doors, a pass-through compartment. Immediately, she knew, even before she detected the faint hum of blown air: a quarantine room with negative pressure. The second door, locked, led to an operating room for emergency procedures and autopsies. The explosion had exposed her to spores from the experimental lab.
Bandages wreathed her head; she must have hit it when she fell, got a concussion, and needed stitches. Nothing else on her seemed damaged. Gingerly she sat up, aware of the IV tube and catheter and pulse oximeter, and waiting for the headache. It was there, but very faint. Her movement set off a faint gong somewhere and Dr. Ann Potter, a physician whom Marianne knew slightly, appeared on the other side of the clear glass wall.
The doctor said, her voice coming from the ceiling as if she were just one more alien, “You’re awake. What do you feel?”
“Headache. Not terrible. What … what happened?”
“Let me ask you some questions first.” She was asked her name, the date, her location, the name of the president—
“Enough!” Marianne said. “I’m fine! What happened?” But she already knew. Hers was the only bed in the quarantine room.
Dr. Potter paid her the compliment of truth. “It was a suicide bomber. He—”
“The others? Evan Blanford?”
“They’re all dead. I’m sorry, Dr. Jenner.”
Evan. Dead.
Seyd Sharma, with his formal, lilting diction. Julia Namechek, engaged to be married. Trevor Lloyd, whom everyone said would win a Nobel someday. Alyssa Rosert, who always remembered what trump was—all dead.
Evan. Dead.
Marianne couldn’t process that, not now. She managed to say, “Tell me. All of it.”
Ann Potter’s face creased with emotion, but she had herself under control. “The bomber was dressed as a security guard. He had the explosive—I haven’t heard yet what it was—in his stomach or rectum, presumably encased to protect it from body fluids. Autopsy showed that the detonator, ceramic so that it got through all our metal detectors, was probably embedded in a tooth, or at least somewhere in his mouth that could be tongued to go off.”
Marianne pictured it. Her stomach twisted.
Dr. Potter continued, “His name was Michael Wendl and he was new but legitimately aboard, a sort of mole, I guess you’d call it. A manifesto was all over the Internet an hour after the explosion and this morning—”
“This morning? How long have I been out?”
“Ten hours. You had only a mild concussion but you were sedated to stitch up head lacerations, which of course we wouldn’t ordinarily do but this was complicated because—”
“I know,” Marianne said, and marveled at the calm in her voice. “I may have been exposed to the spores.”
“You have been exposed, Marianne. Samples were taken. You’re infected.”
Marianne set that aside, too, for the moment. She said, “Tell me about the manifesto. What organization?”
“Nobody has claimed credit. The manifesto was about what you’d expect: Denebs planning to kill everyone on Earth, all that shit. Wendl vetted okay when he was hired, so speculation is that he was a new recruit to their cause. He was from somewhere Upstate and there’s a lot of dissent going on up there. But the thing is, he got it wrong. He was supposed to explode just outside the Deneb section of the Embassy, not the research labs. His organization, whatever it was, knew something about the layout of the Embassy but not enough. Wendl was supposed to be restricted to sub-bay duty. It’s like someone who’d had just a brief tour had told him where to go, but either they remembered wrong or he did.”
Marianne’s spine went cold. Someone who’d had just a brief tour …
“You had some cranial swelling after the concussion, Marianne, but it’s well under control now.”
Elizabeth.
No, not possible. Not thinkable.
“You’re presently on a steroid administered intravenously, which may have some side effects I’d like you to be aware of, including wakefulness and—”
Elizabeth, studying everything during her visit aboard the Embassy: “Can I see more? Or are you lab types kept close to your cages?” “Where do the Denebs live?” “Interesting. It’s pretty close to the high-risk labs.”
“Marianne, are you listening to me?”
Elizabeth, furiously punching the air months ago: “I don’t believe it, not any of it. There are things they aren’t telling us!”
“Marianne?”
Elizabeth, grudgingly doing her duty to protect the aliens but against her own inclinations. Commanding a critical section of the Border Patrol, a member of the joint task force that had access to military-grade weapons. In an ideal position to get an infiltrator aboard the floating island.
“Marianne! Are you listening to me?”
“No,” Marianne said. “I have to talk to Ambassador Smith!”
“Wait, you can’t just—”
Marianne had started to heave herself off the bed, which was ridiculous because she couldn’t leave the quarantine chamber anyway. A figure appeared on the other side of the glass barrier, behind Dr. Potter. The doctor, following Marianne’s gaze, turned, and gasped.
Noah pressed close to the glass. An energy shield shimmered around him. Beneath it he wore a long tunic like Smith’s. His once pale skin now shone coppery under his black hair. But most startling were his eyes: Noah’s eyes, and yet not. Bigger, altered to remove as much of the skin and expose as much of the white as possible. Within that large, alien-sized expanse of white, his irises we
re still the same color as her own, an un-alien light gray flecked with gold. They shared no genetic link, and yet their eyes reflected each other. Genetic chance.
“Mom,” he said tenderly. “Are you all right?”
“Noah—”
“I came as soon as I heard. I’m sorry it’s been so long. Things have been … happening.”
It was still Noah’s voice, coming through the energy shield and out of the ceiling with no alien inflection, no trill or click. Marianne’s mind refused to work logically. All she could focus on was his voice: He was too old. He would never speak English as anything but a Middle Atlantic American, and he would never speak World without an accent.
“Mom?”
“I’m fine,” she managed.
“I’m so sorry to hear about Evan.”
She clasped her hands tightly together on top of the hospital blanket. “You’re going. With the aliens. When they leave Earth.”
“Yes.”
One simple word. No more than that, and Marianne’s son became an extraterrestrial. She knew that Noah was not doing this in order to save his life. Or hers, or anyone’s. She didn’t know why he had done it. As a child, Noah had been fascinated by superheroes, aliens, robots, even of the more ridiculous kind where the science made zero sense. Comic books, movies, TV shows—he would sit transfixed for hours by some improbable human transformed into a spider or a hulk or a sentient hunk of metal. Did Noah remember that childish fascination? She didn’t understand what this adopted child, this beloved boy she had not borne, remembered or thought or desired. She never had.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
She said, “Don’t be,” and neither of them knew exactly what he was apologizing for in the first place, nor what she was excusing him from. After that, Marianne could find nothing else to say. Of the thousands of things she could have said to Noah, absolutely none of them rose to her lips. So finally she nodded.
