Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

She hadn’t told him before about her pregnancy because he was going to disapprove. Not of her getting pregnant, although he would undoubtedly consider that careless, but of her having and keeping the baby. Jake, deeply ambitious, had risen rapidly through the ranks of the U.S. Geological Survey. He was proud of both her career and his own, and he would frown at the year-long sabbatical she was taking to even have the baby, due May 1, let alone the professional sacrifices that she knew perfectly well would follow. Julie did not intend to have her child raised by a succession of nannies, even if she had had room for a nanny. She would make the transition from brilliant professor to brilliant consultant and work at home, perhaps teaching one course per semester as a sideline. Already she had feelers out for potential projects with various industries and government agencies.

  She taped wrapping paper around a Bunny Mine, the current hot toy for toddlers. Her daughter, now a four-and-a-half-month fetus, wouldn’t be playing with a Bunny Mine for at least a year, but it would look cute on the shelves that Julie had put up in the nursery. The nursery was finished. The layette was complete. The childbirth classes began in January. It was all planned out, everything under control.

  Julie had just begun to wrap a sweater for Jake when her cell rang. “Hello, Julie Kahn speaking.”

  “This is Gordon.”

  Her lips pursed. She hadn’t heard from him in nearly a month, since she’d given him her best stab at the revised data on the kidnappings. Since then she’d watched the Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine newspapers; no child had been reported as missing. Plenty of burglaries, of course—theft always picked up as Christmas approached—but without Gordon’s input, Julie had no way of knowing which ones fit the M.O. that the task force had been pursuing.

  “Hello, Gordon,” she said neutrally, hoping this call wasn’t personal.

  It wasn’t. He said, “I wanted you to know that the A-Dic pulled the plug on the task force. Each kidnapping has been assigned to a local Special Agent in Charge. The A-Dic just doesn’t believe a connective enterprise exists.”

  “The mathematical pattern exists.”

  “Maybe. No more kidnappings since Kara and Jennifer Carter. No store burglaries with that M.O., either.”

  “Before this there have been long stretches between incidents.”

  He made a noise she recognized: the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Gordon was moving on. He was not a man to hold on to what he could not control.

  She said, “The pattern exists, Gordon.”

  Instead of agreeing or arguing, he said, “How are you?”

  “Still pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Can I come see you?”

  “No. You’re married, Gordon.”

  “There were two of us in those motel rooms, Julie.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I take complete responsibility for my actions, and for this result. It doesn’t involve you.”

  “Damn it, I’m the father!”

  She drew a deep breath. “Only biologically. I don’t mean that to be nasty, Gordon. You have no room for us in your life, and anyway I don’t want that. I don’t think you do, either, not really. Please just leave me be.”

  “If you need money—”

  “I don’t. Bye, Gordon. I’m sorry about the task force, because I still think there’s something there.”

  “But Julie—”

  Gently she pressed the disconnect button on her cell.

  Within her body, the baby moved, and she put her hand on her belly and watched the lights twinkle on and off on the little Christmas tree above the festive packages.

  2035

  It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything. I’m dead, Pete thought, as usual, but of course he wasn’t, as usual.

  When the nothing receded, disappointment warred with relief. There would be no little girls here. But there would be no fighting or dying, either. He stood in dim light inside a store filled with objects he couldn’t even identify until he saw a big doll, life-size, with no head or arms or legs, wearing some of the objects. Oh—it was clothing! Skimpy filmy pants, strips of fancy cloth across the breasts, racks and racks of this stuff . . . All at once he pictured Caity wearing it, and then McAllister, and his cock rose and he groaned. He couldn’t bring back stuff like this!

  He glanced at his wrist to see how much time he had left, but of course he wasn’t wearing the wrister. Terrell still had it. Now what?

  He ran past the headless dolls wearing fancy skimpy things and discovered that around the corner were other parts of the store, that in fact it was as big as the children’s room, maybe even bigger than the farm. The other areas held different stuff, as well as shopping carts. He grabbed one and started throwing things into it from under a sign labeled HOMEWARES. Blankets, towels, rugs—damn this was good!—and then pots and a big red tray and boxes of spoons and—

  A dog came racing down a set of metal stairs, snarling and barking.

  Pete screamed and climbed on top of the shopping cart, nearly slipping on the red tray and falling back off. The dog leaped and its teeth closed on Pete’s leg, although only for a moment before the animal’s weight sent it crashing back to the floor. Pete screamed, grabbed the tray, and held it in front of him. With his other hand he yanked a pot free of the stuff in the shopping cart and threw it at the dog, missing it. How much time was left—how much? Blood streamed down his leg.

  The dog leapt again, but it couldn’t reach Pete on top of the cart. However, the impact of its body sent the cart skittering across the floor. Alarms sounded and lights came on. The dog barked and Pete shrieked at it.

  The cart rolled past a display of DIGITAL FOTO FRAMEs, heavy-looking metal squares. Pete grabbed one. Before he could throw it at the dog, the Grab took him back.

  On the platform, the rolling shopping cart kept rolling. It crashed over the edge and tipped on its side. Pete fell heavily amid pots, rugs, blankets. For a moment his head rang, but nothing on him broke and he staggered up out of the debris, clutching the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME and more furious than he’d ever been in his life.

  He roared at Tommy, “Where the fuck is Ravi?”

  The child was not a weeper. He stared back, scared but not budging, and said, “Where did you go?”

  Others rushed into the Grab room: Darlene, Paolo, Eduardo. From down the corridor Caity and Jenna, who could not leave the children, screamed, “What is it? What is it?” But no Ravi, and no McAllister.

  Pete pushed past everyone and ran down the corridor to the unused far end. Behind him Darlene cackled, “Oh, lovely, an electric fryer! Just what we need!”

  Paolo, unable to keep up, called, “Wait, Pete! Wait!”

  Tommy, easily able to keep up, ran beside him saying, “What is it? What, Pete? What?”

  He found them in the maze of rooms near the tip of the Shell. A blanket had been spread on the floor. McAllister had just slid her loose dress back onto her body, but Ravi was still naked, lying on the blanket, too drained and heavy to move. Pete recognized Ravi’s sated heaviness; he’d felt it after sex with Caity. But never with McAllister: never, never, never.

  She said, “Pete—”

  “You fucking bastards.”

  Tommy gaped. “What is it? What?”

  In rage and hurt and frustration, and before he knew he was going to do it, Pete threw the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME at McAllister. It grazed her on the side of the head and she cried out. Ravi leapt up and threw a punch at Pete. Pete dodged, Ravi missed, and Pete kicked him in the balls.

  “Stop! That’s enough!” McAllister shouted. But it wasn’t her words, or even that she shouted—McAllister, who never raised her voice! It was the blood on her head, streaming down one cheek. He had hurt McAllister. He collapsed to the ground in tears.

  Ravi was up and charging, but McAllister stopped him with a word. She bent over Pete. Now Paolo and Eduardo and Darlene were all there; Pete could see their bare feet from where he huddled on the floor. McA
llister sent them all away with sharp commands, even Ravi, who snatched up his clothes as he left.

  “Pete,” she said, her voice soft again, “listen to me. Ravi—”

  “You never would with me! You said it would cause trouble! You said for the good of all—”

  “I know what I said. But listen to me, dear heart. Please listen, I know you’re strong enough to listen. This is for the good of all. Ravi is fertile.”

  He stopped ranting, too desolate even for rage.

  “You know I checked you boys’ sperm with the little microscope Jenna got on her Wal-Mart Grab. Ravi is the only one of you who is fertile. He’s had sex with both Caity and Jenna, and neither got pregnant, and now Jenna is too fragile. This is the only chance left among ourselves.”

  “We have the Grab kids!”

  “Yes, of course. But we need every soul we can get, you know that. The Tesslies could end the Grabs at any time. And we miss some of them.”

  “Well, Ravi just missed his. And so did Terrell because he was throwing up—did you know that? So I just did the Grab and nearly got killed!” He tried to wrench free of her, but McAllister held on and the truth was that he didn’t want to get free.

  He wanted what Ravi had had.

  He put a hand on her breast. When she removed it, he forced her down onto the blanket.

  “No, Pete,” she said, calm as ever, “I know you wouldn’t do that. That’s not you. Dear heart, please try to understand. You have a deep, sweet nature and I know you can understand. For the good of all.”

  He let her up, gazing bleakly at the blood on her face. “I hurt you.”

  “And I hurt you. I’m deeply sorry for that, but we need to survive.”

  He said fiercely, “Did you like it?”

  She touched his eyelids, one after the other, a delicate finger-kiss.

  “Because Ravi liked it! I know!”

  “I love you, Pete. I love you all.”

  He got to his feet and seized the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Something had to be his, something had to be outside of the “good of all,” something had to be . . . He didn’t know what his confused thoughts meant. But he said defiantly, stupidly, “I’m keeping this!”

  “All right,” McAllister said.

  “It’s mine! Just mine!” Nothing ever belonged to one person, nothing.

  “All right,” she repeated.

  He clutched it, scowling at her, hating her, loving her. The silence stretched on. She waited, but he didn’t know for what. For him to say something, for him to look away.

  He looked away, down at the object in his hand, and said, “What is it?”

  MARCH 2014

  Under the Canadian glacier, molten rock bubbled up from a fissure in the earth. When the pressure became great enough, the ground erupted. Lava met ice, which instantly boiled into steam. The magma hitting the steam exploded into miniscule fragments, sending pillar after pillar of ash billowing overhead. The magma was heavy on silica from the chamber it had breached earlier, which made it much more viscous and sticky than usual. That prevented air bubbles from escaping quickly and so pressure built relentlessly, leading to more and more explosions.

  Ash blew southeast on a cold wind, toward Ontario and Québec.

  MARCH 2014

  Julie sat in the Starbucks on K Street. Linda had just left, full of plans for her family, Julie, and the baby to take a cottage together in August on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “The baby’ll be nearly four months by then, and it’ll be such fun!” Julie wasn’t sure about that—two weeks with Linda’s noisy kinds and noisier dogs? On the other hand, two weeks with Linda and Ted would be fun. Or two weeks in separate, side-by-side cottages. Or two weeks someplace else.

  She frowned at the out-of-town newspaper she’d bought at World Wide News. The headlines were all about air traffic hopelessly snarled in Canada by blowing and drifting ash, but that was not what she stared at. Was it or wasn’t it? Then, wryly: I sound like a Clairol commercial. And not even a current commercial. She was showing her age.

  Again she read the short, not-very-informative article about the burglary in a small town in western Massachusetts, which was one of the projected paths of her original algorithm. A family-owned department store, one of the few left in the country, had been robbed of a collection of miscellaneous objects, primarily blankets, rugs, and cookware. Also a shopping cart, which was considered “an unusual theft for this kind of burglary.” Julie wasn’t sure what “kind of burglary” the small-town news stringer meant, but she knew what she was looking at. Shopping cart, no forced entry. This time, however, the store had had a guard dog, which had not been harmed. Drops of blood on the floor indicated that the “perpetrator” might have been harmed, but the police had as yet made no arrests.

  Whose blood?

  “May I sit here? There don’t seem to be any free tables.”

  He was tall, attractive, dressed in a suit and tie. He carried the Wall Street Journal, folded to show the headline: FINANCIAL IMPACT OF COMING FRESH WATER SHORTAGES. Glancing at her ringless left hand, he smiled and sat down without waiting for an invitation. Julie stood, and as soon as the curve of her belly under her open coat came into view, his smile vanished.

  Julie grinned. “Sure, the table’s all yours.”

  Relief on that handsome face.

  She buttoned her coat and waddled out. The OB had said she was gaining too much weight, once she’d stopped throwing up, but that otherwise everything was “progressing swimmingly,” a phrase she had liked instantly. Little Alicia, swimming in her secret sea. The baby now had fully developed toenails. Her body could store calcium and phosphorus. She had begun to show the brain waves of REM sleep. What will you dream of, my darling?

  Julie left Starbucks. Walking was supposed to be good for her, so she walked even though she had piles of work at home. Consulting work for a high-resolution space imagery firm, for a professor doing research on microbes, even for the Bureau, in a division different from Gordon’s. Everybody, it seemed, needed well-recommended and high-priced mathematical insight. Things were working out well.

  The air was crisp and cold, unusually cold for March. Julie walked briskly. Some kids who probably should have been in school ran frantically in the pocket park across the street, trying to get a kite aloft. Daffodils and tulips splotched the park with color.

  Whose blood had been on the floor of that department store in western Massachusetts?

  2035

  The DIGITAL FOTO FRAME held pictures that moved out of the frame so the next one could come in. Pete had never imagined anything like it. It was even better than the drawings in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales or Good Night, Moon because these pictures looked far more real. There were three, and Pete never tired of looking at them. He wouldn’t let any others of the Six look at them, and for once McAllister did not insist that he share.

  One of the pictures was of two children playing with a dog. This didn’t look anything like the dog that had attacked Pete in the store. This dog was reddish and happy-looking, but Pete didn’t like it anyway and sometimes he closed his eyes when that picture appeared. The other two were glorious. One was a beach like the place where he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara, but with mountains across the water, colored gold by a setting sun. The other showed a forest filled with trees and flowers. Pete had never seen mountains or sunset, but on Grabs he’d seen sunrise, several trees, and some flowers, and now it was wonderful to sit and gaze at them without the fear and tension of a Grab.

  “Why aren’t there more pictures?” he asked Eduardo. He was avoiding McAllister. It was a complaint, not a real question, but Eduardo had a real answer.

  “There could be more if we had them to upload,” he said in his soft accent. “These are just demonstration photos. You understand that the battery will run out eventually?”

  “Of course,” Pete said scornfully. Some of the children’s toys from Jenna’s famous Grab had used batteries, which all died.

  “The more you
use it, the less long it will last.”

  “I know.” But he couldn’t stop gazing at the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME.

  He held it, clutched in one hand, during Xiaobo’s funeral. The funeral room, located off the central corridor across from the Grab room, was yet another featureless white-metal room. There was absolutely nothing in it except the outline of the slot on the far wall, close to the floor, and the button set high on the opposite wall, by the door. Caity, Eduardo, Terrell, McAllister, Darlene, Ravi, and Pete attended the funeral. Also Tommy, now that he was nearly eight. Jenna and Paolo stayed with the Grab children.

  It was Tommy’s first funeral and he held tight to McAllister’s hand, although to Pete he looked more interested than scared. Tommy was tough. Well, good. He’d have an easier time of it than some of the children did. Kara still screamed every time she saw Pete.

  Ravi, another tough one, stared down at Xiaobo’s body, wrapped in their oldest blanket. On top of the body, as was the custom, lay one small thing that the dead person had cherished. For Xiaobo, it was a little stone statue of a fat smiling man that Xiaobo had had with him all the way back when the Tesslies put him in the Shell. Bridget had gone with a lock of hair from a baby of hers that had been stillborn.

  Ravi’s face remained blank. Caity and Terrell leaned against the wall, tearful. Darlene, Eduardo, and McAllister, the last of the Survivors, had so many feelings on their faces that Pete could barely look at them.

  His own feelings troubled him, because there didn’t seem to be enough of them. He’d known Xiaobo his whole life, had worked beside him, eaten with him, probably been diapered by him when Pete was a baby. They hadn’t talked much, given Xiaobo’s limited English, but he’d always been kind to Pete, to everyone. Right up until this last illness, Xiaobo had been a hard worker. And all Pete felt was that he should feel more, along with a vague curiosity about what it felt like to be dead. Darlene said that the ghosts of billions murdered by the Tesslies haunted the Shell. But Pete had never seen a ghost at all, and anyway where in the Shell could you fit billions of them? He wasn’t exactly sure how much a “billion” was, but it sounded large.