by Ian Whates
“It’s not like anything you guys have. You shouldn’t be jealous.”
I asked loads more questions, none of which mattered, and she answered all of them, and, you know, I like to think I’m a guy who accepts different cultures, but I was still left feeling pretty damn small.
I WATCHED FOR any sign of mockery from the others. I knew Helena had told them about the forthcoming visit. They didn’t say a word until the evening, when Ben clapped me round the shoulder. “What can I say, mate? You’re about to be publically cuckolded by a fucking enormous whale.”
“It’s like the porn version of Moby Dick,” added Mia.
“We can only hope,” finished off Helena, “that he’s not bi-curious.”
I started to laugh. “You bastards.” And we had a few drinks. They’d waited until Swav wasn’t around, and they hadn’t let it stay silent and terrible and I was grateful for that.
EVERYONE WAS SHOCKED by how the male arrived. That he surged like a torpedo towards the platform, without any message to us, that it swiftly became clear that that day’s tourists were going to be at the very least alarmed, and not, as expected, entertained by the spectacle of seeing one of the larger Carviv up close. Once we helped them to their feet, Helena elected to give them their money back and send them to dry land on the launch. The kids were already starting to ask awkward questions about the violence of what Swav had said would take place entirely underwater and out of sight. Maybe that had been the male’s choice, and what she’d seen before had been different. Maybe the bastard had just been showing off.
I stayed by the rail, Annie beside me. “Why are you so sure she’ll be back?” I asked.
She shook her head.
At that moment, Swav’s head burst to the surface. We all helped her back on deck. She looked dazed, and she kept putting a hand to her neck. “It’s sealed again,” she said. “My... you know.”
“I don’t think I do,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.
She wrapped her arms around me and I let her, in front of everyone. The smell of her had changed. I realised I still liked it. Only that felt wrong now. Or for just a moment it did. “He’s gone now,” she said. “It’s all going to be okay.”
I helped her back to her cabin.
I HAD TO ask how it had been. I had to. I don’t know what I was expecting to hear. It was always going to be bad. “Just this enormous... natural experience,” she said.
“Good?”
She looked pained for me, like she didn’t want to lie to me. After that, she wouldn’t say any more about it. It took us a few nights to get back to our old routine, but we did. I might have been kind of rough with her the first time, I don’t know.
SWAV APOLOGISED HUGELY to the crew for what the male’s arrival had been like, even offered Helena her resignation. She hadn’t known he’d make such a show of it, most didn’t. Helena said her leaving was out of the question. Was there going to be a... happy event? Swav looked shocked for a moment at Helena’s directness, then touched her neck and said she didn’t know.
BUT IN THE next few weeks, it became obvious. The side of her neck and her lower back swelled, and you could see something shifting inside the translucent skin. She’d been spending a lot more time in the water, going deep under for hours at a stretch, for a long time now, even before there had been visible signs of her pregnancy. “And I’m going to have to be down there,” she told me, “when it bursts.” I spent as much time as I could down there with her. I didn’t know how I felt about what she was carrying, but I wanted to be there for her, to help.
OF COURSE, WHEN it finally happened, I was on the platform, making dinner. I heard a weird cry from outside the galley, and rushed out, leaving the others, who hadn’t heard it. Swav, who’d been deep underwater for most of that day, was bobbing on the surface, and in her arms was... Tom.
I looked at him, the little fella, small and blue and sleek, and I could see something about him, an expression in those eyes that were almost hidden in the folds of his face, an expression which just hadn’t been there on that big male.
Swav smiled up at me, such an enormous smile of joy, and she didn’t have to tell me what had happened. How it happened... well, they’re still debating that.
It was something chemical. The greatest rush of my life. I leapt into the water and took my boy into my arms.
IN THE NEXT few weeks we took turns looking after Tom. Swav was going out to the edge of the reef on a regular basis to consult with a whole pack of males, yeah, including that one. They were talking, she said, about heading home soon.
“Do I get to come with?” I said.
“There’s no way you could live on my world.”
“But –”
“You want to be around Tom. I get that. So that’s something else we’ve been talking about. How about you look after him for a bit? Then he comes back home with the second party, back to visit you again with the third?”
I was pleased at that. Though of course I’d miss Swav too. This arrangement would make it all feel much more grown up, and less like I’d feared, an adolescent melodrama, spurred on by my out of control hormones. I’d asked if her lot’s scientists had come up with any ideas about how the two of us could have conceived, and she’d looked awkward. “Tom’s not the only one,” she said. “It’s happened a lot.”
AND INDEED, IT was soon all over the news, proud fathers clutching human/Carviv kids. Though I’ve got to say, I didn’t think any of them looked as much like them as Tom looked like me.
It was then that Annie made her feelings plain. I found her watching a clip of some nature show in the galley. She switched it off before I could see what it was, which made me ask if it was porn.
“Yeah,” she said, “if you’re a dunnock.”
She didn’t take much persuading to show it to me. It was a whole bunch of garden birds hopping about. “It’s for this thesis I’m writing,” she said. “The female dunnock mates with a number of males, each of which ends up thinking it’s the father of her kids. So when the eggs are laid, all of them protect them.”
“I thought you specialised in marine life?”
She paused, but I guess she couldn’t help herself. “These days,” she said, “I specialise in the Carviv.”
It took me a moment to get what she meant. I think I was pretty harsh back to her. She deserved it. It was the last time we spoke.
EVEN AFTER ALL these years, looking after Tom is still a joy. He swims like a torpedo. He’s still only got a few words of English, but I’ve learned a lot of Carviv off him. He gets that just by listening to the sea. It sometimes makes me a little jealous about the guys who had Carviv daughters, the oldest of which are in school now, and charming the world. But no, I couldn’t ask for more. There’s this incredible bond between me and him, it just takes a while for others to see it. Every now and then I think about what Annie said, I mean, it comes up in some debate, but no... no, and anyway, even if it was true, so what?
Swav’s been back once, and we took Tom over to Hawaii together, where the Carviv, having helped us sort out our climate issues, have started building an underwater holiday destination for their people. There are all these little islands covered in... well, those flowers Swav told me about.
“Tempted?” I asked.
“’Course not,” she said, “I’ve got you.”
MORE
NANCY KRESS
Nancy Kress is the author of 30 books, most recently After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, a stand-alone novella from Tachyon. Her work has earned four Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell. She writes often about genetic engineering and is best known for her Sleepless trilogy, beginning with Beggars in Spain. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
MY PRISON NAME is FMA16549EW. ‘F’ for female, ‘MA’ for maximum security, ‘EW’ for eastern Washington state, 16549 for who-the-fuck
-knows. This is stenciled on my coverall, db-ed in my records, and tattooed on my butt. I own this number – or it owns me – for perhaps thirty more minutes. Today I am getting out.
I don’t need to tell you my name. The whole world already knows it.
The steel gate clangs as it slides open, triggered by the guard in the booth. Clanging gate, silent electronic trigger: old technology manipulated by new. But of course that scenario doesn’t always end well. The whole world knows that now, too, due at least in part to me.
Two more clangs and I reach the lobby. A clerk hands me the personal effects I surrendered fifteen years ago: lipstick, pocket flashlight, cheap watch, massively outdated cell phone. I’m already wearing my own clothes. Jeans and sweatshirt don’t date that much.
The clerk smiles. “Good luck, Ms –” he glances at his tablet “– Jaworski.”
Incredibly, he does not recognize me. But, then, he appears to be about fifteen, although surely that can’t be true. So perhaps the whole world doesn’t recognize my name, after all.
The only man who matters will recognize it. He shares it.
Wayne is waiting at the prison gates, at the wheel of a sleek black car. He’s grown a short beard, which oddly enough gives him the look of an Edwardian dandy. He’s fifty now but still looks good; he’s one of those men who only get better looking as they age. He leans over to kiss me, then answers my disapproval before I can even voice it. “Electric, not gas, and the juice comes from the Green River Dam. No carbon footprint, no resource depletion.”
“And the rubber tires will never end up in a landfill? You’ll paint them white and plant daisies in them on the front lawn?”
He grins at me. “Prison hasn’t changed you, Caitlin.”
The fuck it hasn’t. But Wayne doesn’t need to know that. He has another girlfriend now, and she’s pregnant, and anyway he’s too valuable an eco-fighter to risk. Despite the car.
“So who does it belong to?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“Dangerous, Wayne.”
“This one can be trusted.”
“None of them can be trusted. You used to know that.”
He doesn’t answer. Fifteen years ago, it was someone we trusted who tipped off the CEO of HomeWalls, Inc.
I say, “Are we going to the compound?”
He glances over at me. “Would you rather I take you somewhere else?”
We both know I don’t have anywhere else to go. I gaze out the window at the shimmer in the distance and yes, as we speed along the highway toward Spokane in traffic even lighter than when I went into prison, there is the first of them. The shimmer takes form, an upside-down translucent bowl. Wayne speeds up and I say sharply, “No. Pull over. I want to look at it.”
“Caitlin –”
“Do it!”
He does, and I look my fill, letting the look sink deep into my mind, where it can become rich fertilizer to nourish equally rich hatred.
The dome, a singleton, covers perhaps thirty acres: Model C-2, then, the largest possible. Sunlight striking at just the right angle glints off it, as if it were solid. It is not. The HomeWalls dome is a force field, proprietary to the corporation. It keeps out objects, including projectiles, air, and selective wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Visible light can get through; X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves cannot. The bowl shape is open at the top, to allow air exchange and weather, and through the opening rises a single communication tower. I stare a long time at that curve up to the opening, which is as small as the engineers deemed feasible.
The dome entrance, with its heavily guarded double-door access chamber, must be on the other side, at the end of the road merging into the highway. Through the translucent wall, which is precisely 1.8 inches ‘thick’, I see the blurred outlines of houses, a few shops and restaurants, a small apartment building, trees and flowerbeds and a tennis court. Two people on bicycles ride on the bike path that circles fairly close to the wall. The translucence gives everything the wavery, magical look of an impressionist painting.
Outside the dome the squatters have erected ragged tents, shacks of tin and old lumber, piss pits beside which children play. Most of the squatters, I know, will be on the other side of the dome, hoping to someday rush the access chamber. It’s a stupid and futile hope. If they do, they will be shot by the guards. The courts have upheld these shootings as “legal defense of one’s home and person in the face of credible threat.” But still the squatters try, wanting more than the miserable little they have.
What hurts me the most is the gardens. Some of these squatters have planted corn and vegetables. In the summer heat the plants are spindly and brownish. There must be a public well here somewhere, or the people couldn’t be here, but water would have to be hand-carried to water these brave little attempts at self-sufficiency. In the closest plot, a woman hoes weeds by hand. She raises her head to stare at the car.
Wayne and I have only minutes. He steps on the gas as the first of the squatters rush the road ahead of us, waving clubs and shovels. They can’t take out their rage on the people in the domes, but we will do, in our luxurious car. Wayne revs the engine and we easily outdistance them without hurting anyone.
Moments of silence, while the dry plains of Eastern Washington roll by. Finally Wayne says, “We can’t do it the same way, Catie.”
“I know that.” And then, “Why haven’t you been trying a different way? For fifteen fucking years you haven’t tried anything real!”
“We’ve tried what we could. Broadcasts, rallies, education –”
“And look at all your great results!”
Wayne doesn’t answer. Truth roils between us like deadly gas.
“THE COLORS OF the spectrum, Catie,” my father said.
“Red, orange, yellow...” I froze. What came next? Then the right color popped into my six-year-old mind and I shouted, “Green! Blue, indigo, violet.”
“Very good! Now the name of the glass triangle that breaks light into all those pretty colors.”
“Prism!”
“And the instrument that lets us study those colors.”
This was one of the hard words, but I was sure. I said it extra carefully. “Spec-trom-e-ter.”
My father smiled at me. We sat in the back seat of his big car, while Desmond drove with Ray, the bodyguard, beside him. When Daddy took me to school in the car on his way to work, it was our special time. Mama was in heaven and Daddy was usually busy, so busy, inventing things to keep people safe. I hardly ever saw him. Mostly I just saw my nanny, who pinched me to make me be good.
“Daddy,” I said, “today in school we’re going to start learning Chinese!”
“Good,” he said, still smiling at me. “Study hard. Make me proud of you.”
“I will!” I liked school. All the kids there were smart, and most of them were nice, and the school was safe behind its high fences. Not every place was safe, I knew. We were driving right now through a part of the city that wasn’t safe, but we had to go through it to get to my school and Daddy’s work. This place was ugly, too, with litter on the streets and men – “the lazy out-of-work,” Daddy called them – sitting on sagging porches and steps in their undershirts. I saw a house with broken windows, the glass lying all over and nobody even sweeping it up.
“Opaque the windows,” I begged.
Daddy pressed a button. The car windows opaqued, and we were safe in our own cozy world, with its exciting smells of leather and aftershave, its quiet hum of the powerful car engine carrying us along.
THE COMPOUND HAS indeed changed in fifteen years. It’s shrunk.
How many of us had there been when I was here last, just before my arrest? Nearly a thousand. We hadn’t been like the naïve commune-founders of two generations before mine. We assigned roles, established a working government, used appropriate technology even if it wasn’t green, until the time came when the eco-war would be over and we could dispense with our toxic cell phones and tablets. We even recognized
that the war might never be over.
Now the compound holds fewer than a hundred die-hards. Many of the buildings are boarded-up. The radio station still works, and in prison I managed to hear a few of Wayne’s careful, chicken-hearted broadcasts on Washington state’s one public channel. The news channels, of course, are state-dominated ever since the Rescue that put the United States under military rule. What was supposed to be rescued was the economy, but of course it hadn’t been, except for those who already had enough. They just ended up with more.
A woman comes toward us from the closest ramshackle building. She walks with the swaying waddle of the heavily pregnant, and she is very young. Her gaze on Wayne is soft and adoring. Her gaze on me holds no sexual jealousy – he must not have told her of our history together. Probably wise. It no longer matters, although once my passion for him flamed just as strong as both our passions for justice.
“This is Tara,” Wayne says, putting an arm around her. “Tara, Catie Jaworski.”
“Welcome,” she says, and I hear the fear in her voice, and below fear, the hostility. So she is brighter than she looks. She knows that I could threaten her precarious security. And I will.
“Hi,” I say. And to Wayne, “Let’s get to work.”
“DADDY, IT HURTS!”
“I know it does, Catie. I know. But the operation was a success and you’re fine now. The pain is just the stitches.”
He stands beside my hospital bed, holding my hand. I am furious at him. “It hurt worse before and you weren’t even here!”
“I came as soon as I could. I had to come from the other side of the world, pumpkin.”
