by Kij Johnson
Terrell was disappointed that he hadn’t Grabbed a girl. But McAllister said they should all be grateful that Terrell’s first Grab had been so easy. Terrell had been able to get into the house, pick up the kid, and get out without waking anyone. McAllister named the boy “Keith,” since he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say his own name. “Never mind,” Caity said. “Maybe McAllister’s baby will be a girl.”
“She’s too old to be having a baby at all,” Darlene said. “Pure foolishness. Probably we’ll lose them both.”
Pete stalked away, fists clenched at his side.
Caity had insisted she could handle another Grab—look how easy Terrell’s was! She went and it did turn out to be easy, a store Grab in a “supermarket.” Caity brought back a huge shopping cart of food and they had interesting feasts until it was gone, although the haul had not included any Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The oversize shopping cart remained and was useful for hauling shit buckets. The next Grab would be Ravi’s.
Pete spent a lot of time with Petra and Tommy, Petra because he wanted to, Tommy because he’d attached himself to Pete, pestering him about the promised “big adventure.” Pete was harvesting soy in the farm, picking off the thick ripe leaves and hard nuts, when Tommy started in again. Two half-full buckets sat on the floor beside the dirt beds. The farm smelled of rich dirt, growing crops, and the disinfectant waterfall by the fertilizer machine.
Tommy said, “When are we going on the adventure?”
“I don’t know.”
“What will it be?”
“You have to wait and see.”
“I don’t want to fucking wait.”
“Don’t let McAllister hear you using that language of Darlene’s.”
Tommy looked around fearfully as if McAllister might suddenly appear, then changed direction. “Why are those new grasses growing outside the Shell?”
This was no longer Pete’s secret, just like nothing else was his, not even the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He said, “You know that, Tommy. You had it in learning circle. The Earth was sick but it’s getting better.”
“Why did it get sick?”
“The Tesslies did it. They destroyed the whole Earth.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re bastards.”
“Oh. Why don’t we kill them dead?”
“Because nobody but the Survivors has ever seen one, and that was a long time ago.”
“Are the Tesslies going to come back?”
“I don’t know.”
Tommy considered this. “They have to come back, Pete, to let us out of the Shell.”
“Maybe when it’s time the Shell will just melt around us. You know, like the briar hedge in the fairy tale book.”
“Really? When?”
“McAllister says when the air is good to breathe again.”
“Oh. When will that be?”
“I don’t know, Tommy!”
Tommy said judiciously, “I don’t think you know much.”
Another voice behind Pete said, “You’re right. He doesn’t.”
Ravi. Pete willed himself to not turn around. He was trying for the good of all, he was trying, he was trying. But Ravi these days had a cutting edge. McAllister had stopped having sex with him once she got pregnant; Pete knew this from Jenna, who’d been trying to make Pete feel better. At first Ravi swaggered and pretended that he and McAllister still did it. When Pete had smirked at him and rolled his eyes, Ravi had stalked away. After that he’d avoided Pete. Now he had come from the direction of McAllister’s room, and Pete heard the dangerous note in his brother’s voice, and knew that Ravi was as angry and frustrated as he was. And looking for a way to let that anger out.
Ravi repeated, “Pete doesn’t know anything. He only thinks he does.”
Tommy said, “Pete knows lots!”
“Really? I say he doesn’t. Do you, Pete?”
Pete said nothing. Trying, trying, trying! Tommy, wide-eyed, looked back and forth between them.
Ravi pushed harder. “Pete doesn’t know, for instance, how McAllister’s breasts feel, do you, Pete?”
He knew he shouldn’t. He knew a fight was what Ravi wanted, and that in giving it to him, Pete was losing. He even knew, somewhere in the back of his love-sick brain, what McAllister had said: The biggest threat to any society is its own young males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. None of it stopped him. In one fluid motion he grabbed the bucket of soy nuts and swung it at Ravi’s head.
The bigger boy was unprepared. The edge of the bucket caught him in the mouth. Ravi cried out and went down, blood and teeth spurting onto the farm floor. Tommy screamed. Then Darlene was there, running from the other end of the farm, shrieking something about Cain and Abel.
Pete stared, horrified, at the writhing Ravi. “Is he dead? Is he dead?” Tommy cried, even though Ravi clearly was not. But he was hurt, badly hurt, all that blood, those teeth . . .
Then Pete was running down the corridor. For once Tommy didn’t follow him. Pete hurled himself into the funeral room and pressed the button high on the wall; he had to jump to reach it. The slot opened, low on the opposite wall. Pete dropped to his knees and then onto his belly and crawled into it. The wall closed up behind him, and he was in darkness.
JUNE 2014
Julie walked the floor of her living room with Alicia, now six weeks old. Despite being premature, Alicia had weighed a healthy six pounds at birth and just kept on putting on weight, emptying Julie of milk as if she’d had a suction pump in her tiny pink mouth. Then, because she drank so fast, she got a tummy-ache and Julie had to walk her, steadily patting the baby’s back, singing songs until Alicia burped, farted, threw up, or fell asleep. Tonight none of these things had yet happened. Julie paced up and down, caught as always in the rich stew of love, exasperation, fatigue, and joy that was motherhood. Behind her, CNN murmured softly. Sometimes the sound of the TV lulled Alicia into sleep. But not tonight.
Love, exasperation, fatigue, joy—but mostly love. Julie had never expected to feel such fierce, passionate, possessive attachment for anyone as she did for this damp, malodorous bundle on her shoulder. She’d always thought of herself as a cool person (in emotional temperature, not in hipness—she’d never been hip in her life). Certainly Gordon, nor any other man, had never ignited in her this intense love. Did he feel this way about his children? Did Linda about hers? Why hadn’t anyone warned her?
“. . . continues in the clean-up efforts in Tokyo. Officials say it may be months before there is anywhere near a complete list of the dead. With damage reckoned in the billions and—” And there was the video again, shot from a tourist helicopter over Tokyo when the tsunami hit. The tsunami had registered 4.2 on the Soloniev-Imamura Intensity Scale, almost as large as the 2004 one in Indonesia. A wall of water fifty feet high had crashed over Tokyo.
“. . . not unexpected in that the Pacific Rim is well known for underwater faults that—”
Julie jiggled at the remote, trapped between Alicia’s diaper and Julie’s forearm. She got a rerun of M*A*S*H, then PBS: “—over 9,000 species going extinct each year, largely because of human activity. The rainforest is particularly susceptible as—” Another fumble at the remote, which fell to the floor. Unthinking, Julie bent to retrieve it. The sudden motion knocked a huge burp out of Alicia. She jerked in Julie’s arms, let out a contented sigh, and went to sleep.
Don’t think about the children drowned in Tokyo. There was nothing Julie could do about it. But standing there in the dim living room, she clutched her infant tight.
2035
As soon as the funeral slot closed up behind him, Pete wanted to get out again. In the complete darkness he pounded on the wall, all the walls. Nothing happened.
I always knew I would die this way, he thought, and immediately thought how stupid that was; he’d never had any such thought. He’d thought he would die on a Grab for the good of all, or from some sickness, or just old age. Or that he’d fight a Tesslie to both their deaths
. But this—why didn’t somebody else push the funeral button to let him out? Somebody would! Tommy would get someone tall enough, McAllister or Eduardo or Ravi . . . but Ravi lay bleeding on the farm floor with his teeth knocked out. Still, somebody must come soon. . . .
The air went out of the dark room.
Pete heard it, in a whoosh, and then he couldn’t breathe. Pain invaded his chest. So he would die here, he would—
Air rushed back in, and light, and Pete was shot forward by a force he couldn’t see. It felt like someone had pushed him hard from behind. He landed beside Xiaobo, half-glimpsed through the rotting blanket, and a pile of bones.
Pete screamed and skittered away. Xiaobo was barely recognizable, a stinking mass of rotting flesh crawled over by disgusting white things. If it hadn’t been for the little statue of the naked fat-bellied man on top of the mass, Pete wouldn’t have known it was a human. But that was Xiaobo. Pete started to cry, then abruptly stopped.
He was Outside, but something was wrong with the air.
He could breathe it; this wasn’t like the airless funeral slot. But the air was . . . dirty. He didn’t know what he meant except that it was somehow not clean and fresh like the air in the Shell, but clogged with stuff he could smell and taste even if he couldn’t see it. Still, it was air and he was breathing it and he was Outside.
Outside.
Partly to get away from Xiaobo and the other bones—which were Bridget’s? Robert’s? His father’s?—Pete moved along the sides of the Shell. A plan formed in his dazed mind. He would find the outside of the clear patch of wall at the end of the Shell and he would wait there until Tommy or somebody went there and saw him. Then Pete would gesture to be let back in. McAllister could open the funeral slot and Pete could crawl past Xiaobo—ugh—back inside the Shell.
Unless—
He rounded the far edge of the Shell and forgot his plan.
The Shell sat on a hill of black rock. The black rock, broken with various grasses, sloped gently and unevenly a long way down, but then it gave way to . . . what? “Fields,” McAllister had called them about his pictures in the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Not fields of amber grain like in Darlene’s song, but of low spindly bushes covered with green leaves. So many bushes that Pete felt dizzy. And none of them were soy! Beyond that were stretches of very tall grasses dotted with clumps of pink flowers and beyond those, more water than he had ever imagined still existed. It was blue water like on the beach where he had Grabbed Petra and Kara, water like Before!
He started to run down the hill, across the black rock toward the water. Pebbles and scrub crunched under his bare feet. Then something stopped him. At first he thought it was the hard-to-breathe air slowing him down, but this was more like someone had grabbed his arm from behind without him even feeling it. He turned, and there stood a Tesslie.
McAllister had described the alien over and over to the Six when they were younger: “In case you ever encounter one when I’m gone.” At first Pete had thought she meant gone to use a shit bucket, or maybe to sleep, but when he grew older he knew she meant if she died. The Tesslie looked just as she had described: not a being but a hard metal case like a bucket, four feet high and squarish, with no head or mouth or anything. The bucket-case floated a few inches above the ground. Whatever the Tesslies were, they were inside. Or else this was a “robot,” a machine like the battery-car from Jenna’s Grab, and the Tesslie was controlling it from someplace else. McAllister had said she didn’t know which, and now Pete didn’t know either.
“Aaaarggghhhh!” Pete cried and tried to leap on it, knock it over, split it open as he had split Ravi’s mouth. This thing had killed his world!
He couldn’t move. Not even a finger.
The Tesslie said nothing. But all at once Pete found it much harder to breathe. He wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t doing anything. He woke inside one of the tiny featureless rooms in the far end of the Shell, and it turned out that, in their concern over Ravi’s injuries, no one even realized he’d been gone.
JUNE 2014
Julie sat in front of the young professor’s desk. She didn’t much like him, even though she’d only met him ten minutes ago. Pompous, self-satisfied, and perhaps even a little sleazy, or how else would he have the “top secret” information he claimed to possess? He’d made her sign a non-disclosure agreement, standard for her job, but still. . . . She didn’t like him.
He said, “You come with top-level recommendations from people I’m not at liberty to name. You understand why not.”
“Of course.” He was name-dropping by not dropping any names, and he was out to make his own reputation. Nonetheless, curiosity was rising in her about the nature of the project for which he wanted predictive algorithms. He was a researcher in biology, after all—not usually the stuff of intense secrecy unless you were involved in genetic engineering or pharmaceutical research, which he was not. She’d checked him out. Two published articles so far, both on the geographical distribution of weeds nobody ever heard of, or cared about since the weeds were not edible, threatening, invasive, or endangered. The statistical analyses in both articles struck her as sloppy. But he was old money, Harvard, Skull and Crossbones—all the things that gave one contacts in high places.
His office was the usual thing for academics just starting to climb the university ladder: small, dark, crowded with metal shelves holding messy piles of papers, binders, fodders, books. A scuffed wooden desk and two chairs. Still, he wasn’t housed in the building’s basement with the teaching assistants, his office had a window, and on the wall hung an expensively framed photo of young men crewing on the Charles River.
Julie shifted on her chair. Beneath her maternity bra and thick sweater, she felt her breasts begin to leak. Alicia was a hungry little milk demon. Julie tried not to be away from her for more than a few hours at a time, for both their sakes.
Dr. Geoffrey Fanshaw pursed his lips theatrically, studied her, and nodded several times, as if making a decision that clearly had been made before. With a flourish suited to a bad Shakespearean actor, he handed her a sheaf of papers, then rose to lock his office door.
Ten minutes later Julie sat in shock, staring at him.
“How did you come by this information?”
“I told you that I can’t say.” He puffed with importance instead of what he should have felt: fear.
“The data on the simultaneous appearance of the altered Klebsiella planticola on three separate continents—you’re sure of its authenticity?”
“Absolutely.”
“And its accuracy?”
“Yes.”
“Have you personally visited any of these sites? The Connecticut one, maybe?”
Annoyance erased his habitual smirk. “No, not yet. New Zealand and Brazil, of course, would be difficult to get to. And—”
“But,” she burst out, unable to restrain herself, “what is anybody doing about this?”
“I don’t know. My concern is publishing on-line with the predictive algorithms in place as soon as the story blows in the press. Which can’t be too long now—some smart journalist will get it. As soon as that happens, I want to be poised to publish in a professional journal with some prominence.”
Julie heard what Fanshaw wasn’t saying: He wanted to be the instant go-to guy for the news shows, talk shows, sound-bite seekers. A professor, personable, well-connected, first to publish a serious analysis—he’d be a natural. He wanted the 60 Minutes interview and the Today show discussion, and to hell with the fact that in three widely separated locations around the planet—three known about now, who was to say there weren’t actually more—a deadly bacterial mutation was killing the roots of plants through an alcoholic by-product. Drowning them in booze. A bacterium found on the roots of virtually every plant on Earth except those growing in or near brackish water.
Fanshaw said eagerly, “Can you do the statistical analysis?”
She managed to get out, “Yes.”
“By when? I need it, l
ike, yesterday.”
“I’ll start this afternoon.” The statistical part wasn’t hard. There must be mathematicians—not to mention biologists!—working frantically on this around the globe. Fanshaw was right—the press would get this very soon. And if—
The fuller implications hit her.
“If this isn’t natural—three locations for a naturally occurring identical mutation just doesn’t seem likely. Even an accidental release of a created genetic mutation would only happen in one place. So is this a terrorist attack?”
“I don’t know.” For a second he looked almost concerned, but that washed away in a fresh surge of self-obsession. “As I said, Dr. Kahn, time is of the essence, I need those algorithms.”
“Yes.” She stood, unable to stand him one minute more.
On her way to the parking lot, breasts leaking milk with every step, she passed summer-term students hurrying to class, chatting on a low wall, sprawled on the grass over open books or laptops. Despite herself, she stopped to gaze at a flower bed, unable to look away. Pansies, impatiens, baby’s breath.
Nearly every plant on Earth.
Who? And in the name of every god she didn’t believe in—why?
2035
McAllister and Tommy were the only ones who believed Pete had been Outside. Tommy was angry because Pete hadn’t taken him along on the “adventure.” McAllister was tense with hope. “Tell me again,” she said.
They sat alone in her room. Pete avoided looking at the curve of her belly. Again he recited everything that had happened, too frightened at what he himself had done to leave anything out, not even the cause of the fight with Ravi. But that wasn’t what she was interested in.
“You saw bushes and grasses. Trees?”
