by Nancy Kress
They did, but Marianne could feel their anger, rising in the lovely space, a noxious gas. People murmured now, an almost infrasonic drone like a muted drill. Her words didn’t falter, but they sped up.
“In conclusion, let me just say that—”
Someone called, “How do you feel about your son Noah going with the aliens to World? Isn’t that the real reason you’re so desperate for us to go there, and why should the taxpayers fund your little family reunion?”
Mendenhall said, “Dr. Jenner has not—”
“No, I want to answer that,” Marianne said. But the background drone did not stop. She raised her voice.
“Yes, my son accompanied the Denebs to their home planet, along with nine other Terrans—as I’m sure you all already know. My family, too, has been affected by the aliens. But two points need to be made here—must be made here. First, had the Denebs not come to Earth, many more families would have been tragically stricken than actually were. Without the work that Worlders and Terrans did together aboard the Embassy, we would not have had the postinfection treatment for spore plague, a treatment that saved many. Second, we should fund the spaceship to go to World not because I want to see Noah—although of course I do—but because humanity can benefit tremendously from the kind of free exchange of ideas that have already enriched our scientific understanding of—”
“Enriched!” The voice in the balcony was almost a shriek. And yet it seemed to Marianne that it also held a forced note, like a mediocre actor. “You think the aliens left us enriched, lady? My family’s farm lost everything!”
“My father’s stocks are gone!” From a seat to her left.
“The economy’s in the toilet and none of us will get jobs when we graduate, because of your fucking aliens!”
“My apartment’s overrun with rats!”
“Did you yourself ever see anybody die of spore disease?”
People were on their feet now. Some looked bewildered, students and faculty taken by surprise. Others reached into purses and bags and backpacks, and eggs and rotten fruit began to rain onto the stage. Marianne stood her ground; this had happened before. She cried, “We cannot get—” at the same moment that an outraged Dr. Mendenhall shouted, “People! People!”
The lights went out.
A shocked, disoriented moment. Then it all happened at once. Marianne heard bodies shoving, steps running toward the stage, and the sound of gunfire. Screams. Tim was on her, covering her body with his own, pulling her relentlessly to one side. He knew where he was going, even in the dark; he’d have made sure earlier of the exits. In thirty seconds Marianne was in the wings, through a fire door, hustled down a set of steps.
She gasped, “I can’t just leave Dr.—”
“Forget him,” Tim said grimly, “it’s you they want. Come on, Marianne!”
She was out another door, she was outside, she was running across a parking lot, bent low and shielded by Tim’s arm. Then she was in the car and Sissy was driving away as the first of the police cars raced toward the arts center.
“You okay?” Tim said.
“Yes, but—”
“Fucking amateurs.” He was smiling: adrenaline pumping, taut body alive. “Didn’t even block the exits. Not a clue how to organize a riot.”
“Good thing for us,” Sissy said tartly, her red curls bobbing in the rearview mirror. “Marianne, you want to go make a police report?”
“Yes,” she said. “That … that hasn’t happened before. Not so very … that hasn’t happened.”
“Folks are riled up,” Tim said, without rancor. He was still grinning. Marianne turned away and stared at the darkness rushing past the car window.
She had never seen a person die of spore disease. Only mice.
* * *
One speech in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, neither violent. The three of them took turns driving the Ford minivan back to New York. Somewhere near Harrisburg, Marianne was at the wheel, Sissy beside her, Tim folded up in the backseat, asleep even though it was only late afternoon. Thin April sunshine cast long shadows on empty fields beside the turnpike. One long stretch was littered with downed trees; a tornado had come through here a few weeks ago. April was the start of a robust tornado season in a state that, once, had seldom experienced them.
Sissy said quietly, “You don’t like this.”
“April? No. I never did.” Kyle had died in April, which every year brought grief not that her alcoholic husband was dead of cirrhosis, but that her main emotion had been relief. Surely a long marriage—any marriage—deserved more than that.
“Not April,” Sissy said. “You don’t like giving speeches. But you were a teacher.”
Marianne smiled, grimly. “I lectured mostly to graduate students who were eager to hear me. Or if not eager, at least resigned—not like these speeches. Nobody in Bio 572, Theories of Punctuated Evolution, was armed.”
“But you do it because you think it’s important. That’s really brave, Marianne.”
Tears blurred the road; immediately Marianne blinked them away. Why couldn’t Ryan or Elizabeth see it like that? Elizabeth, now transferred to Texas, blamed the Denebs for wrecking the economy. And Ryan … Marianne did not want to think about what Ryan said, or had done.
Sometimes she imagined that Sissy was her daughter. That brought more guilt; it seemed a slight to her actual daughter. But Sissy gave Marianne more understanding, more warmth, more support than anyone else.
They had met a year ago when Sissy had walked into the tiny office of the Star Brotherhood Foundation office and said, “You need me.”
Marianne had been having a bad day. She looked at the fantastic figure in front of her: a small black woman with purple curls that looked fresh from a Van der Graaf generator, tight jeans, and a tee sewn densely with beer-bottle caps. She snapped, “No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. I’ve been at your last three speeches. You were late for one because you packed in too many appointments—you told the audience that. You got hoarse at one because you didn’t bring a bottle of water and nobody supplied you. The PowerPoint didn’t work right at one because nobody checked it. And look at that pile of papers on your desk—your filing system must be shit, if you have one at all. My name is Sissy Tate and I’m a top-grade administrative assistant. Here’s my résumé and references. I don’t care if you can’t pay me much because I believe in what you’re doing.”
Marianne stared at Sissy. An infiltrator from one of the hate groups? It had been tried before. “Who do you work for?”
Sissy gave her a thousand-watt smile. “For you, Dr. Jenner. And brotherhood with Denebs. What’s wrong with people that they cain’t see how huge it is that we ain’t alone in the universe?” When Sissy got excited, her correct English slipped into something else. Her intelligence and idealism, however, were unwavering. Even before the exhaustive background check, Marianne knew she would hire her. This girl had something. This girl was something.
Sissy had proved as efficient as she claimed. Their friendship, however, crossing generational and racial and educational lines, had nothing to do with Sissy’s job.
In the backseat, Tim stirred. “We there yet?”
“No,” Sissy said. “Go back to sleep. You’re amazing, the way you sleep anywhere.”
“Wish I didn’t. Sleep’s a waste of time.”
“But how else will you dream of me?”
Tim laughed. “Pull over—my turn to drive.”
They all changed places. City lights shone by the time they reached New York. The Holland Tunnel was no longer safe; the city had limited money for infrastructure repair. The Lincoln Tunnel now closed at 10:00 p.m. Tim drove over the George Washington Bridge and headed south to Columbia University.
“God, I’m tired,” Marianne said.
Sissy turned to smile at Tim. Neither of them looked at all tired. Sissy was thirty-two, Tim thirty-seven. Marianne caught Sissy’s half-lowered eyelids, her hand creeping toward his neck. “Marianne, we’ll
drop you first and bring the car back in the morning, okay?”
“Sure,” Marianne said brightly. Jealousy of the night ahead of them was stupid, juvenile, contemptible. She felt old.
Harrison was awake, waiting for her in their apartment in the security-fortified area near Columbia. He sat sipping scotch and frowning at something on his tablet. “How did it go?”
“Fine. Some trouble at Notre Dame, but nothing Tim couldn’t handle.” She said it lightly; Harrison didn’t like Tim, although he had never said so. But Marianne knew, and knew why. Harrison was the most intelligent man Marianne had ever met, decent and kind. But he was fifty-nine, spent his days in a lab, and was losing his hair. Tim was thirty-seven, worked out two hours a day at the gym, and had hair that hung thickly to his shoulders.
Nobody was above jealousy.
Moved to affection, she sat on the arm of Harrison’s chair and hugged him. “I missed you. What happened here?”
“Some disturbing data.” He pulled away from her, and she removed herself to another chair.
“What data? On the mice?”
“No. This study in Nature. Karcher is the lead researcher.” He held out the tablet.
Marianne didn’t take it. Nature was one of the most respected multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journals in the world, and James Karcher was a Nobel Laureate in medicine. But she was tired, and Harrison’s tiny rejection hurt. There would be no sex tonight. Like most other nights.
More guilt. She only felt juiced up because of Tim’s disturbing, utterly forbidden presence. “Tell me what Karcher says.”
“It’s a statistical analysis, so I suspect his postdocs did it and his name is on it mostly so it will be noticed. Which it should be. It’s about a significant increase both in reported agitation and in hearing problems among children born since the spore cloud. We knew about the hearing issues, of course, but nobody has quantified the data and related it to infant agitation.”
“How is that related to R. sporii?”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? We know hardly anything about its genetic effects on fetuses. It’s only been two and a half years, and very few infants have brain surgery or MRIs.”
“Why are you especially interested?”
Harrison put the tablet onto a side table and poured himself another scotch. Marianne was startled. Harrison seldom drank more than one, and never when alone. Was this his second, or more?
“Two reasons I’m interested,” he said. “First of all, Sarah is pregnant. Second, while you were gone, two more P. maniculatus were exposed.”
Sarah was Harrison’s daughter, as difficult a child as Elizabeth, and nearly forty. A dozen deer mice, Peromyscus maniculatus, were among the precious plague-free specimens salvaged by Columbia. In the years since, they had been bred in their negative-pressure pens; there were now plenty of mice for research. Not that it had helped much. If the mice were given spore disease, they died. If not, they lived. Nothing so far had altered that. But Harrison’s tone was serious. She said, “Go on.”
“It was tricky. We got two does pregnant, let them carry partway, and exposed them to R sporii. We let the pregnancies continue until the mice showed symptoms, then took the fetuses before the mothers died. So did all but three of the pups, and we only got a viable three because the gestation period is so short. We put them to nurse with another mouse. Communally living females will do that, you know. One of those died and we autopsied it. Really difficult, on such a small and incompletely developed brain.”
“So I should imagine.” Despite her tiredness, Marianne was fascinated. Between speeches she served as lab tech for Harrison, but as a theoretical geneticist, she had nothing like his polymath skill in biology. “What did the autopsy show?”
“Again, hard to be sure. But certain parts of the cortex seem enlarged. Sue is preparing slides. And the two surviving pups are just hanging on. They nurse, which is good, but they also seem agitated and edgy.”
“How does a tiny mouse seem agitated?”
Harrison smiled. “The same way Sissy does. Twitchy unfocused energy.”
This was unfair; Sissy’s great energy was very focused except when she didn’t have enough to do. Those times, she danced in place, snapped her fingers, sang off-key. Marianne had learned to keep her busy all the time. But she let Harrison’s remark go; he was genuinely upset.
She said gently, “Twitchy mice don’t mean that anything will be wrong with Sarah’s baby. Some kids are just born very reactive, like Connie’s youngest. How far along is Sarah? Has there been an ultrasound?”
“Four months, and yes. The ultrasound looks normal. I’m going to bed, Marianne. But I’m glad you’re back.” He drained his scotch and went into the bedroom.
“But I’m glad you’re back.” That “but” said it all: I’m glad you’re back, but I have too much on my mind for sex. Well, she already knew that.
She checked her e-mail, giving Harrison time to pretend to be asleep. Nothing interesting except the latest photo from Connie of Marianne’s two grandsons. They stood side by side in the backyard in their little red parkas, beside a bare-branched sapling no taller than Colin. Jason’s arm was around his little brother. Jason smiled; Colin looked ready to burst into tears. Only thirteen months apart—what had Connie been thinking? The boys didn’t look alike. Jason was slim and brown-eyed. Colin was a little Ryan, short and round, his two-year-old face pudgy around huge gray eyes.
Ryan pulling Noah on a sled, both of their faces red with cold and excitement: “Come on, let’s slide down again!” “Mommy, I love this so much!”
Marianne closed the e-mail and turned on the news. Tornados in Oklahoma and Kansas. Building of the US spaceship still halted; a conservative Congress had been arguing over funding for two years. The private firms trying to build spaceships did not give interviews, or release pictures, not since the NCWAK, No Contact with Alien Killers, had blown up Richard Branson’s effort. Starvation in Africa, war in northern China, dead zones in the ocean …
She turned off the wall screen, poured herself a glass of Harrison’s scotch, and picked up his tablet to read the article in Nature. She couldn’t concentrate. After a while she lay down on the sofa, put her hand between her legs, and tried to not think about Tim Saunders.
CHAPTER 13
S plus 2.6 years
Some people had more smarts than sense. Not that Sissy Tate hadn’t known that before she went to work for Marianne.
Look at Marianne now, bent over her messy desk, reading yet again that printout about the kids that cried all the time. Sissy had tried to read it because her sister Jasmine had just had another kid. Not that Sissy wanted to ever see Jasmine again, but word about the baby had reached Sissy through Mama. The article had been full of statistics and equations and terms that Sissy didn’t understand—she’d only gone through a secretarial course—but she’d gotten the gist, which was that everybody was fucked all over again by the spore cloud. Babies cried, sure, but they only started crying all the time and never smiling if they’d been buns in the oven since the spore cloud hit.
Marianne understood the article, though. She typed some numbers from it into her computer, whose screen was already full of different numbers, and started running some program on them. The back of Marianne’s head showed gray hair along the roots—Sissy would need to nag her into another appointment at Subtle Beauty. Some people didn’t make the most of what they had without somebody else nagging at them all the time. Marianne was bat-shit lucky to have Sissy taking care of her.
Not that Sissy didn’t know that she herself was the lucky one. She had this job, which paid about as much as flipping burgers at McDonald’s but which actually accomplished something important in the world, something she could believe in. She had gotten out of the Bronx and got some education, even if (she knew this now, after visiting real colleges with Marianne) it wasn’t a very good education. She had sweet, sexy Tim. And she had Marianne, who’d turned out to feel more like family than he
r own family ever did. And fuck anybody who said different.
Sissy sat at her own desk, whose polished surface had on it one laptop and one piece of paper, and finished making the online travel arrangements for the next speech. They’d fly, and the sponsor was even paying for three round-trip airline tickets. Tim didn’t like the venue, a high-school football stadium, because it would be hard to keep Marianne safe. They expected a really big crowd. The sponsor wasn’t a college this time but a pro-spaceship lobbying organization, Going to the Stars. Sissy had investigated it online. It looked legit, and not too crazy.
Not that “crazy” would stop Marianne. She was going to give her speeches no matter what. She spent three days a week in this tiny office, writing and reading science. Ecology, mostly. Which was another thing that was fucked, pretty much everywhere, and not just because of the mice. Sissy’d been reading about all the droughts in the Midwest because everybody had mismanaged all the crops.
“Damn!” Marianne said.
“What?”
“Here’s an article—an autopsy report, actually—on a two-year-old who died in a car crash. The father donated the brain to—”
“He let somebody cut out his kid’s brain?”
Marianne turned in her chair to look at Sissy and said gently, “The child was dead.”
“I don’t care! I wouldn’t let anybody cut up my dead kid!”
“Sissy, you’re a mass of contradictions. You admire science; this is how science advances. That father did a wonderful thing.”
Did he? Maybe. Sometimes Sissy couldn’t tell how the ideas from her old world and the ideas from her new world should line up in her mind. But the important thing was to learn all she could. Sometimes since she’d come to work for the Star Brotherhood Foundation, she felt like a flower opening up to the sun for the first time. Other days, new things felt like cold rain. She said belligerently, knowing that her belligerence was a cover for confusion, “What did the autopsy show?”
