Tomorrow's Kin

by Nancy Kress

  Marianne gasped and sat up again. Her insides roiled. “Sarah? Harrison—What happened? When? How do you know?”

  “How do you shink—think—I know? Paul called me, half an hour ago. Sarah killed herself.”

  She tried to absorb the horror of this, and could not. She couldn’t imagine anything worse. All that she could manage was, “Darling—”

  “She was darling. My darling girl. I remember—” Harrison started to sob—Harrison!—and Marianne crept out of bed and stood woozily. He was remembering Sarah as a little girl or an eager bride or a happily expectant mother, and Marianne knew how deep such memories of lost children could cut. One hand on the edge of the bed, she staggered forward to put her arms around him.

  He pushed her away, but without rancor, as if she were an object he didn’t really see. “It was the baby. Isobelle wouldn’t stop crying. Paul was no help, he never was. Never liked Paul. Crying and crying and Sarah got no sleep and she was never strong and she just couldn’t take it anymore. She left a note ‘I’m sorry sorry sorry’—over a hundred sorrys. A hundred. A hundred. If the baby had been normal … if the fucking Denebs had never come.…” He cried harder.

  This wasn’t Harrison. Or rather, it was, but a Harrison buried so deep that not only had Marianne never seen him before, she suspected Harrison hadn’t either. Or maybe this Harrison was newly created, fashioned from pain—there were people who never really believed that terrible things could happen to them personally, until the things did. Even people as smart as Harrison. Maybe especially people as smart as Harrison, focused on work, expecting the rest of their lives to flow smoothly around the work.

  What to say? She couldn’t say that the Denebs had not caused the spore cloud. Harrison, of all people, knew that, and right now he didn’t care. “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Where is—”

  “Where is what? Isobelle? Paul? Me? The foundation?” His anger turned on her, and Marianne recognized that it must go somewhere. It wasn’t really her that he was furious with, or even the aliens, but she was the one right here.

  He said, “Isobelle is with her other grandparents. Paul is with the coroner. The foundation is shit, which you and I should have known all along. We made a mistake, Marianne. The Denebs screwed us. By not telling us everything they knew. Not warning us about everything the spores would cause. Then they bought us off with physics and starship plans that no one on Earth can make work, and even if we could it wouldn’t matter because there is an entire generation of children who are either deaf or screaming with auditory damage or about to be drugged into catatonia and so unable to inherit space travel anyway. A perfect case of genocide, Marianne, and you and I and everybody like us were just too dumb to see it.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said. The snake had tightened around her stomach and she fought to not vomit.

  “You don’t want to believe it. Neither did I. But it’s true—humanity’s been royally fucked over.”

  “Harrison, love—” She took another step toward him but the vomit rose in her throat and she bolted for the bathroom. There was nothing left to throw up but her body kept trying anyway. When it was over, she felt a little better, but light-headed. Holding on to the walls, she went in search of Harrison.

  He’d left the apartment. To go where? She didn’t know. But it seemed urgent that she find him. Staggering back to the bedroom, she collapsed on the bed and picked up her cell.

  “Hello?” His voice was rough with sleep, even deeper than usual. “Marianne?”

  “Yes. Tim—I need you. Something’s happened. I need you to go find Harrison for me. Please. Oh, please. Now.”

  * * *

  At 3:00 a.m. Tim kicked the door of the apartment. Marianne, waiting, flung it open. Harrison sagged in Tim’s arms. Tim’s mouth was bleeding. “Found him in a bar on Amsterdam. Not the kind of place somebody like him should be.”

  “Was there—”

  “Trouble? Yeah. But no biggie. Where do you want him?”

  Harrison mumbled something unintelligible. Sodden and with Tim’s blood smeared on his hair, he was barely conscious. Marianne said, “Bring him into the bedroom—or do you think he needs to go to an ER?”

  “For a drunk? Nah. Long as he don’t puke and breathe it in. I’ll lie him on his side and you just watch him.”

  “She can’t watch him,” Sissy said, because of course Sissy had insisted on accompanying Tim, in order to be with Marianne. “She’s sick. I’ll watch him.”

  “Sure,” Tim said. “We’ll all stay.” He lay down on the rug, his long body stretched full length, and instantly fell asleep. Sissy covered him tenderly with the sofa throw.

  “You got another blanket somewhere, Marianne? You sleep on the sofa and I’ll sit up with Harrison. I’m not at all tired.”

  She didn’t look tired. Sissy’s round, pretty face looked alert and concerned. Her frizzy curls, bright blond at the moment, stood around her head like a halo. Sainted mother to the world. Sissy shouldn’t have to watch Harrison, but Marianne was too exhausted to argue. Her stomach felt as if she’d expelled not only its contents but the lining.

  “Thanks, Sissy. I—” If she finished the sentence, she would start to sob, and she didn’t want to do that.

  Sissy found more blankets in the tiny coat closet, covered Marianne, and stood looking down at her. “Does Harrison do this often?”

  “No.” Oh God, she hadn’t even told Sissy or Tim what had happened. Her illness, her frantic worry … Sissy didn’t even know. Marianne said, “Yesterday his daughter killed herself.”

  Sissy drew a sharp breath. She squeezed onto the sofa beside Marianne. “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “Harrison said that Sarah’s baby wouldn’t stop crying and Sarah just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Sissy grimaced in disgust. “That’s no reason to kill yourself. Plenty of babies won’t stop crying and their mamas don’t kill themselves. How does that help? It’s just cowardlike.”

  “Sarah might have already had postpartum depression.”

  “So what? You don’t kill yourself if you got kids to take care of. You just don’t. You don’t have that right.”

  Marianne said nothing. The other side of Sissy’s sure confidence was a kind of arrogance that the young woman was completely unaware of. But Sissy’s hand holding hers felt warm, reassuring. On the floor, Tim snored softly.

  “Still,” Sissy went on, “I can see how Harrison got drunk from shock. I’ll watch him real carefully. But Marianne—you should face something.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry to say this, but you should face it. That man is going to leave you now.”

  Marianne pulled her fingers from Sissy’s. “No, you don’t understand, he—”

  “I do understand. You don’t. I’ve been watching you two whenever he picks you up at the office or the airport, which incidentally isn’t that often. I know, I know, he’s doing important work. But he’s one of those with tunnel vision, Marianne, and his tunnel just cracked wide open to the sky. He’s going to panic and lash out and leave you. You need to be ready for that.”

  “You’re wrong, Sissy.”

  “I hope so. Now you sleep.” Sissy switched off the light and went into the bedroom to watch Harrison.

  Marianne thought that sleep would be long coming, but it wasn’t. One careful shift of her body on the sofa and she was out. The next morning, Tim and Sissy made breakfast that neither Marianne nor Harrison could eat. When it was clear to Sissy that both of them were done vomiting, she and Tim tactfully left.

  Harrison slept most of the day. When he was awake, he wanted to be alone in the bedroom. The day after that, he spent hunched over his computer, surrounded by an invisible and impenetrable wall. The third day he flew to Indiana for Sarah’s funeral. Politely, distantly, he asked Marianne to not accompany him. Even before he called her from Terre Haute, she knew what he would say.

  Before he returned
home, she’d moved out.

  * * *

  Tim put her furniture into storage. Sissy made a back room at the Star Brotherhood Foundation into a bedroom. The office that Jonah Stubbins had made possible had a bathroom with shower. Marianne ate her meals out, or ate what Sissy provided for her. She lost weight. She slept badly. The only thing that helped was work, and then more work. When there was nothing to work on, she read on the Internet, using Harrison’s password for access to sites she could not have accessed on her own.

  Karcher’s initial research had spawned dozens of studies on both infants and mice, even though funding for science had all but disappeared since the Collapse. It was clear that something had affected the children’s brains in utero, but unclear just what that something was. Humans had always varied enormously in auditory structures—and perhaps mice did, too. With something that small, it was difficult to tell. In fact, nobody was even sure what all the auditory structures were. The babies’ receiving areas, on the upper temporal lobes, had increased neurons, or decreased neurons, or neurons with unexpected connections. Sometimes one end of the area was larger, sometimes the opposite end. Other brain activity in areas associated with hearing—auditory thalamus, Brodmann area, hippocampus, superior temporal gyrus—also differed from one child to the next. Some EEGs showed statistically significant enhancement in alpha-wave activity; some did not. Strange cortical behavior resulted from exposure to gamma waves.

  Basically, nobody understood what was going on in these kids’ heads.

  What was understood was that a small percentage of post-spore infants was deaf, and the rest cried nearly every moment they were awake. Eli Lilly’s renamed infant tranquilizer, Calminex, had not yet cleared clinical trials but already had ignited a firestorm of online controversy. Was it right to drug small children? Was it right not to drug them, when so many failed to thrive due to their constant agitation? What would be the long-term effects of that many stress hormones constantly flooding developing nervous systems? What would be the short-term effects of the drug? Would parents who used it be abusers of their children, or realistic people adjusting to circumstances?

  The Eli Lilly research lab was hit with a truck bomb. The company did not discontinue trials.

  “Marianne,” Sissy said one afternoon at the office, “why don’t you go for a walk? You’ve been plopped in front of that computer for three hours.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Three solid hours. I timed it.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No. You aren’t. Come eat something with me. You didn’t have any lunch.”

  Marianne clenched her jaw and kept on reading.

  The ecological disruptions around the world were slowly righting themselves. Every once in a while, someone would report sightings of live mice living in the wild. None of these sightings were substantiated. Most of the time, when Marianne tracked down the reporters, they also believed in elves or Martians or demons inhabiting their basement.

  Of Harrison’s research on spore-resistant mice, she found nothing at all. It was secret, or incomplete, or had led nowhere. Like her and Harrison.

  “It’s a good thing,” Sissy grumbled, “that we’re going to New Mexico next week for that big speech. At least it’ll get you out of that chair.”

  Marianne went on reading, leaning in closer to the computer screen. Trying to fill up as much of the world as possible with its digital light.

  CHAPTER 15

  S plus 4 years

  Who could live in this heat?

  “You’ll like Albuquerque,” Marianne had told Sissy. Sissy could tell it was a brave try at being cheerful, which Marianne definitely wasn’t. “The desert is gorgeous, in an austere sort of way. And our hotel is right on the Rio Grande.”

  Well, Marianne was wrong. Sissy didn’t like Albuquerque, not from the second she and Tim and Marianne stepped off the jetway into an airport where the AC was broken. At eleven in the morning it was ninety-one degrees outside, even hotter inside. And never mind all that shit about it being dry heat—ninety-one degrees was ninety-one degrees, and all three of them were sweating like stinky waterfalls by the time they reached the hotel.

  Which did have working AC. It was cranked up so high that the sweat dried instantly and Sissy rooted in her bag for a sweater. Fortunately, she’d brought the heavy purple one with the pink sequins. The Rio Grande, visible from their sixth-floor hotel suite, didn’t look like much of a river, even if Marianne did say that it was classified as “exotic” because it was a river that flowed through a desert. Sissy had seen creeks with more water in them. Also, the Rio Grande looked just as hot as everything else outdoors. Not that Sissy planned on going outdoors. Marianne’s speech would be in the grand ballroom right in this hotel, which also had two restaurants and a dance club on the top floor. Sissy had brought her dance clothes. She wasn’t setting foot outside.

  But their suite was nice, two small bedrooms and a big central room with sofas, a bar, dining table, big wall screen. Sissy and Tim’s room had a balcony outside French doors. She slung their suitcase on the bed and started to unpack.

  Tim, who’d been prowling around the suite, checking locks and window ledges, strode into the room and said, “Come on, Sis. We got that desert trip this afternoon.”

  Sissy eyed him. Tim looked so hot—the good kind of hot!—in jeans and tight tee and a cowboy hat he’d bought first thing. Weather never bothered him, the bastard. “I’m not going on a desert trip.”

  “Sure you are. It’ll be fun. Some professor is taking Marianne to see the—that thing. The ecoregion.”

  “She can see it. You can see it. I’m staying right here.”

  Tim put his arms around her. Even in the chilly room, his body radiated its own special heat. He crooned in her ear, “You my baby, I need my baby, my one and only baby.…”

  “You’re out of tune,” Sissy said severely, “and I told you that I’m not a ‘baby.’” But she knew she would go with him. When Tim was like this, there was no resisting him.

  “That’s my old woman,” Tim said, and she swatted him, not gently. He laughed.

  * * *

  The car had AC, but they didn’t stay in it. Marianne didn’t, Tim didn’t, Dr. Lopez didn’t, and so that meant Sissy couldn’t either. If Tim’s job was to protect Marianne—not that there was anything in this empty country to protect her from!—then Sissy’s was to see that Marianne didn’t tire herself out, especially not too far from the car. It’d been four months since Marianne and Harrison broke up and Marianne still wasn’t eating much. She’d lost thirty pounds. Not that it didn’t look good on her, but her face was drawn and tired and she just never knew when she should rest. Some people had no common sense.

  So Sissy clambered out of the car into the fucking awful heat, careful not to touch the hot metal of the car, blinking in the burning sunlight. The hats that Dr. Lopez gave them didn’t block enough of the glare. They left the car beside the road, which had almost no other vehicles on it, and started to walk.

  Marianne said to Dr. Lopez, “I see why you love this landscape.”

  Sissy blinked. Love this? The uneven ground, baked hard and dry, was dotted with dusty, spiky, unfriendly looking bushes, and not much else. Way off in the distance some hazy mountains spread across the horizon. The sky was a hard, unforgiving blue from which heat pressed down like stones.

  Dr. Lopez said, “You see its austere beauty, don’t you? Not everybody can.”

  I can’t, Sissy thought. Were there spores lying here, invisible, on the hard ground? Of course there were. Marianne said that heat didn’t kill them. Nothing did except radiation, and you couldn’t radiate a whole planet. In Russia, where there wasn’t so much genetic immunity for reasons Sissy didn’t understand, almost half the babies got spore disease and died horrible deaths.

  Marianne said, “Tell us about the ecoregion. As it was before the spore cloud, and as it is now.”

  Dr. Lopez nodded. Both graying and balding, he wasn�
��t handsome—especially not next to Tim, who squatted nearby, poking at rocks with a stick—but he had a gentle face that Sissy immediately liked. His voice was soft and musical, even when he sounded like he was talking to a college class. “This area lies on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion, which comprises 15.2 million acres in New Mexico and is one of the three most biologically rich and diverse desert ecoregions in the world. It has approximately thirty-five hundred plant species.”

  Where?

  “Unfortunately, the ecoregion also contains the largest assemblage of endangered cacti in America. The dominant flora is this.” He waved at one of the ugly, dusty bushes. “Creosote—Larrea tridentata. The other two common flora are acacia and tarbush. The soil is mostly a mix of clay and caliche, overlain by a layer of decomposed granite, which results from long-term outwash from the mountains. Our fauna include a high level of local endemism of butterflies, spiders, ants, lizards, snakes, and scorpions.”

  Scorpions? Snakes? This just got worse and worse.

  “Hey, I think I disturbed one of your little critters,” Tim said. He straightened, still holding his stick. Sissy shrieked. Across the ground at his feet scuttled a two-inch-long yellow monster with dark stripes, a long tail, and ugly claws.

  Dr. Lopez said quickly, “Don’t try to pick that up, Mr. Saunders. Let it go. That’s Centruroides suffuses and its sting is highly poisonous. We call it, with great respect, ‘alacran de Durango.’”

  Tim said, “It leaves me alone, I leave it alone.”

  Marianne said, “What does it eat?”

  Dr. Lopez said, “Spiders, solfugids, other scorpions, an array of insect prey. You want to know if it’s been affected by the mouse crisis. Only indirectly, in that the whole ecosystem is shifting. Before the spore cloud, we were having great success in bringing back the aplomado falcon, which was once wiped out here. But the falcons—beautiful birds, just beautiful—eat mostly small birds, but those need grasslands for breeding and Chihuahuan grasslands have been profoundly affected by the lack of mice. The grasslands had been prioritized for conservation by the World Wildlife Fund, but with the absence of mice have come shifts in seed distribution, die-offs of some larger mammals, upheavals in insect and bird population rations, invasive species…” He spread his hands, palms up, the gesture of helplessness.