by Nancy Kress
DiBella would have put it differently: If you have only a few neurons, you don’t have a conscious brain. But it came to the same thing in the end.
“If so many hadn’t merged, then the consciousness would have had to . . .” Henry didn’t finish his sentence, then or ever. But DiBella could guess.
“Come on, boy,” Uncle Sam called, “get yourself a partner and dance!”
DiBella shook his head and smiled. He didn’t have a partner just now and he didn’t want to dance. All the same, old Sam was right. Dancing had a limited shelf life. The sell-by date was already stamped on most human activity. Someday his mother’s generation, the largest demographic bulge in history, would turn eighty. And Henry’s choice would have to be made yet again.
How would it go next time?
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
When morning finally dawns, Rochester isn’t there anymore.
Jenny stands beside Eric, gazing south from the rising ground that yesterday was a fallow field. Maybe the whole city hasn’t vanished. Certainly the tall buildings are gone, Xerox Square and Lincoln Tower and the few others that just last night poked above the horizon, touched by the red fire of the setting September sun. But, unlike Denver or Tokyo or Seattle, Rochester, New York sits—sat—on flat ground and there’s no point from which the whole city could be seen at once. And it was such a small city.
“Maybe they only took downtown,” Jenny says to Eric, “and Penfield is still there or Gates or Brighton . . .”
Eric just looks at her and pulls out his cell yet again. Most of the others—other what? refugees?—are still asleep in their cars or tents or sleeping bags on the dew-soaked weeds. There aren’t nearly as many refugees as Jenny expected. Faced with the choice of staying in the city—and such a small city!—or leaving it, most had stayed. Devil you know and all that.
She thinks she might be a little hysterical.
Eric walks around the car, cell pressed to his ear. Deirdre will not answer, will never answer again, but that won’t stop him from trying. He tried even as he and Jenny hastily packed up her Dodge Caravan yesterday afternoon, even as she drove frantically south, even as they were stopped. When the battery in Eric’s cell runs down, he will take hers. Jenny, sure of this if of nothing else, presses her hands to her temple, trying to stop the blood pounding there. It doesn’t work.
“Good morning,” says an alien, coming up behind her. “Breakfast is ready now.”
Jenny whirls around and stumbles backward, falling against the hood of her van. This one is female, a tall Scandinavian-looking blonde. Her pink skin glows with health; her blue eyes shine warmly; her teeth are small and regular. She is dressed like last night’s alien, in a ground-length, long-sleeved brown garment. Loose, modest, cultureless, suitable for dissolving cities on any part of the globe.
Definitely a little hysterical.
“No, thank you,” Jenny manages.
“Are you sure?” the alien asks. She gestures toward the low, pale buildings at the far end of the sloping meadow. “The coffee is excellent today.”
“No, thank you.”
The alien smiles and moves on to the next car. Eric turns on Jenny. “Why are you so polite to them?”
She doesn’t answer. To say anything—anything at all—will be to unleash the rage he’s been battling for fourteen hours. So far, Eric has held that rage in check. She can’t risk it.
“Here,” he says, thrusting a Quaker Oats breakfast bar at her. She isn’t hungry but takes it anyway.
“Some of us are going to dig a latrine,” he says, not looking at her, and strides off.
Two cars over, a woman with crazy eyes fires a nine-millimeter at the alien. The bullet ricochets off her, striking another car’s hubcap. People wake and cry out. The alien smiles at the crazed human.
“Good morning. Breakfast is ready now.”
Probably the aliens aren’t even present. If you touch one—or hit it or shotgun it or hurl a Molotov cocktail at it, all of which were tried last night—you encounter a tough, impenetrable shell that doesn’t even wobble under impact. Personal force field, someone said. Holographic projection, said another, protected by a force field. Jenny has no idea who’s right, and it hardly matters. The same maybe-force-field was what stopped her and Eric’s mad drive south last night. Another transparent wall prevented her from retracing her route. A hundred or so cars were thus invisibly herded into this empty field, their drivers leaping out to compare sketchy information, children crying in the back seat and wives hunched over car radios, their faces in white shock.
Mumbai and Karachi had been first, vanishing at 2:16 P.M. No explosion, no dust, no blinding light. One moment, reported dazed observers by satellite, the great cities and their vast suburbs had existed and the next they were gone, leaving bare ground that ended in roads sheared off as neatly as if by a very sharp knife, in halves of temples on the shear line, in bisected holy cows. The ground was not even scorched. People standing beyond the vanishing point saw nothing happen.
Fifteen minutes later it was Delhi, Shanghai, and Moscow.
Fifteen minutes after that, Seoul, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Lima, and Mexico City.
Then Jakarta, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Cairo, Tehran, and Riyad.
By this time the hysterical media had figured out that cities were vanishing in order of size, and by a progression of prime numbers. At 3:16 P.M. (London, Bogotá, Lagos, Baghdad, Bangkok, Lahore, Dacca, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Wuhan, and Tientsin), the panicked evacuations began. Most people were vaporized (except that no vapor remained) long before they reached the end of the murderous city traffic jams.
Canton, Toronto, Jiddah, Abidjan, Chongqing, Santiago, Calcutta, Singapore, Chennai, St. Petersburg, Shenyang, Los Angeles, Ahmadabad.
As soon as he heard, Eric called Deirdre in Chicago, over and over, even as he and Jenny had been packing her car. He hadn’t been able to get through by either cell or land line: all circuits busy. please try your call again later.
Pusan, Alexandria, Hyderabad, Ankara, Pyongyang, Yokohama, Montreal, Casablanca, Ho Chi Minh City, Berlin, Nanjing, Addis Ababa, Poona, Medellin, Kano.
Only two United States cities so far. Jenny lived in Henrietta, Rochester’s southernmost suburb. The roads were crowded but not impassable. She inched through traffic, the radio turned on, while Eric tried Deirdre over and over again. all circuits busy.
At 4:01, Chicago vanished along with Omdurman, Surat, Madrid, Sian, Kanpur, Havana, Jaipur, Nairobi, Harbin, Buenos Aires, Incheon, Surabaya, Kiev, Hangchou, Salvador, Taipei, Hai Phong, and Dar es Salaam. Eric kept calling. He said, “Maybe she was visiting someone out of the city, shopping at a mall someplace rural . . . . She doesn’t always have her cell turned on!”
Jenny knew better than to answer. She concentrated on the road, on the traffic, on the panicky radio announcer relaying by satellite a report from where Houston used to be.
“Can I have that?”
A small voice at her elbow. Jenny realizes she is still holding the unopened Quaker Oats bar. The little boy is maybe five or six, dirty and snot-nosed, but with wide dark eyes that hold soft depths, like ash. He stares hungrily at the breakfast bar.
“Sure, take it.” Her voice is thick. “What’s your name?”
“Ricky.” He tears off the wrapping and drops it on the grass. Jenny picks it up.
“Where’s your mom, Ricky?”
“Over there.” He gobbles the bar in three bites. His mother, a voluptuous redhead in pink stretch pants, sits on the ground with her back against an old green SUV. She nurses an infant from one large breast and watches Jenny. All at once she bawls, “Ricky! Get your ass over here!”
Ricky ignores this. “Do you got any more food?”
“No,” Jenny lies. Apparently not everyone thought to pack their cars with food. Those that have, will run out before long. The low, pale buildings still sit unvisited.
“Ricky!” his mother screams, and this time he leaves.
&
nbsp; Jenny pulls off her sweater; the morning sun is turning the day hot. She opens her cell to key in her brother Bob’s number. Bob lives with his family in Dundee, a small town fifty miles away; his and Jenny’s mother lives with them. Jenny’s sister and her family are nearby. “Bob? You all okay? . . . No, nothing changed since last night . . . Jane? You talk to her? . . . Okay, look, I don’t want to run down the phone too much . . . Love you, too . . . .” When she closes the case, Eric is back.
They stare at each other. Now it will come, Jenny thinks. She feels as if she’s carrying a teacup of nitroglycerin across a tightrope; the fall is only a matter of time. But all Eric says is, “There’s a man here who’s good at organization. We divided into sections and checked out the whole wall. No breaks, and it extends as far up as anyone can throw a stone and as far underground as we had time to dig. The force field surrounds the buildings, too. Anything new on the radio?”
“No,” Jenny says, not telling him that she hasn’t been listening. But he knows; his question was not inquisitive but hostile. He can’t help that, Jenny knows as much, but she recoils as if he’d struck her. She’s always been too sensitive to rejection.
Eric says, “I’m going back to help the tunnel crew.”
“Okay.” And then she can’t stand it anymore. “Eric, I’m so sorry, but it’s not my fault that my family is alive and Deirdre and Mary—”
“Don’t,” he says, so low and dangerous that Jenny is shocked into silence. Eric is not ordinarily a dangerous man. One thing she loved about him was his light-hearted exuberance.
He walks away, his back toward her, and Jenny covers her face with her hands. It is her fault, will always be her fault. Not that Eric’s wife and daughter are dead, of course, but that Eric was with Jenny, in bed with Jenny in another city, pumping away on top of Jenny, when it happened. He will never forgive either of them for that.
They met a year ago, at the American Library Association annual conference, in Kansas City. Jenny’s attraction to him was instantaneous, and so was her glance at the wedding ring on Eric’s left hand. But he was so handsome and so charming, and she was so thrilled by the almost unprecedented masculine attention. They drifted together at the luncheon held between “Reference Tools for the Online Generation” and “Collaborative Approaches to Information Literacy.” They had a drink in the bar after the obligatory inedible banquet, laughing at the dullness of the speakers. One drink became many. They spent the last night of the conference in Jenny’s room, and the next day she’d flown back to Rochester, suspended somewhere between euphoria and dread. Two days later she’d emailed him. Eric had replied, and things had gone on from there.
Sometimes, if she hadn’t had an email or phone call from him in several days, Jenny let herself imagine that he’d told his wife about the affair. He’d told her, and then he’d moved out of their Evanston home, and he was just waiting to hear from his lawyer before he told Jenny the great news. She let herself imagine all this in exquisite detail—the scene with Deirdre, Eric’s complicated emotions, the phone call to Jenny and how understanding she would be—even while she knew it was not going to happen. Very few married men actually left their wives for their mistresses. Eric adored his six-year-old daughter. He had never even said that he loved Jenny.
But she loved him, and she knew it was turning her desperate, which in turn was driving him away. She waited, helpless and all but hopeless, by the phone. She turned up the volume on her computer (“You’ve got mail!”) so that anywhere in the apartment she would know the instant his email came through. She wrote long, eloquent letters giving him tender ultimatums, and never sent the letters because she knew he would not choose her. It took all her strength to never ask him the Fatal Questions: Do we have a future? Are you tired of me? Is there somebody else? Somebody besides Deirdre, she meant. She tried not to think about Deirdre, and the effort further exhausted her. Finally she googled Deirdre and got over a thousand hits; Deirdre was a successful real estate agent in Evanston. She was slim, tanned, smiling, dressed more stylishly than Jenny had ever managed. She grew roses and played golf. Jenny mailed one of the eloquent ultimatums.
“I think we’d better end this, Jenny,” Eric said gently on the phone. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t what I’d thought it was. I don’t want you to get any more hurt than it seems you already are.”
Seems? More hurt? Not “what he thought it was?” What was that? She found a steeliness she didn’t know she possessed. “I want to discuss this in person, Eric. I think you owe me that!” And he agreed, from guilt or compassion or fair play or who-knew-what. He flew to Rochester on a Friday morning, a return flight scheduled for that evening, six hours in which to end what had become the center of her life. She lured him—there really was no other word—into a farewell fuck, thinking desperately, stupidly, Maybe if it’s really good, better than Deirdre . . . But Friday afternoon Mumbai and Karachi disappeared, and a few hours later Chicago took Deirdre (maybe) and little Mary along with three million other people, and now Rochester is gone and Eric can barely look at Jenny.
She gets into the minivan, but even with the passenger door open, the September sun starts to heat up the car. For something to do, she straightens the blankets on top of the mattress that fills the back of the van; she and Eric, not touching, slept here last night. She checks their boxes of food, bottles of water, two flashlights and small hoard of extra batteries. Jenny, no camper, didn’t own the tent, Coleman lanterns, propane stoves she sees blossoming over the field like mushrooms. Communities are forming. Ricky and two other little boys have started a soccer game in the middle of the semicircle of cars. Somebody’s dog, barking wildly, chases the boys. In front of the green SUV, three women gossip over coffee bubbling on a campfire. One of them is Ricky’s slatternly mother, and the other two look enough like her to be her sisters or cousins. Out of desperation—she will go mad if she just sits here—Jenny fights off her innate shyness and walks over.
The oldest of the women, overweight and sweet-faced in a Redwings T-shirt, says, “Hi, honey. Want some coffee?”
“Yes, please.” The small kindness almost brings tears. “Thank you so much. I’m Jenny.”
“Carleen, and this here’s Sue and Cheri.” Carleen hands Jenny coffee in a thick white mug. “I figure we’re all in this together, so we better stick together, right?”
“Right,” Jenny says unconvincingly. Cheri, Ricky’s mother, is studying Jenny as if planning to dissect her. The coffee is hot and wonderful.
Sue is as talkative as Carleen. “Your husband at the big pow-wow?”
How to answer that? Cheri’s gaze sharpens. Jenny finally says, “They investigated the . . . the wall this morning and found no breaks. Now they’re trying to tunnel underneath.”
“That’s what my Ted said,” Sue says. “But he told me he thinks an assault on the ETs’ building is gonna have to happen sooner or later.”
Jenny nods. “ET” conjures up for her the cuddly and benevolent creature from the old movie, not the beautiful alien megaterrorist who offered her breakfast and who may or may not even be bodily present. And “assault” is an alarming word all by itself. These look like gun people, which Jenny and Eric emphatically are not.
Carleen says, “If the assholes really do have food in there and—Ricky! Be careful!”
The soccer ball has nearly gone into the campfire. Cheri grabs for her son, who wriggles away with the agility of long practice. She bellows, “Ricky!” The child darts behind Carleen and grabs her ample waist.
“There now, he didn’t mean nothing, Cheri—don’t get your blood in a boil. Ricky, you be good now, you hear?”
Ricky nods and darts off. Desultory chatter reveals that Carleen is Cheri and Sue’s mother, the grandmother of Ricky and the now-sleeping infant, Daniella. Carleen does not, to Jenny’s eyes, look anywhere near old enough to be a grandmother. Sue is the mother of the other two little boys, non-identical twins. Neither Carleen nor Cheri mentions husbands, either present
or vaporized in Rochester. Carleen is casually maternal to anyone who enters her radar, including Jenny. Cheri asks fake-nonchalant questions about Eric, which Jenny avoids answering. After a half hour of this, the coffee is gone, the fire is out, and Jenny is emotionally exhausted.
She excuses herself, crawls onto the mattress in the hot van, and falls fitfully asleep. When she wakes, sweaty and unrefreshed, Eric still hasn’t returned. She stumbles out of the car into a mid-afternoon chaos of cooking, unleashed pets, gossiping, worrying, grieving. Radios yammer, although it’s clear that groups have pooled electronic resources to save batteries. Women cry. Children either race frantically around or sit in frightened huddles against parents’ knees. There are no aliens visible.
Carleen comes over, evidently a response to Jenny’s dazed look. “You need the latrine, honey? Over there.” She points. “And your husband said to tell you to go ahead and eat without him, he’s gonna work on the tunnel and he’ll get something later. You got to make sure he eats, Jenny. Some of these men are mad enough to just burn themselves out.”
Jenny nods. She finds the latrine, efficiently and deeply dug behind the field’s only line of scrub bushes, divided by a blanket on poles into separate pits for males and females. Many of these people, she realizes, are far better at basic survival than she. Not that that’s hard. On the way back to the van, she notices a prayer service of some sort under a tarp strung between two cars, a card game around a collapsible table, and a woman reading a book to a toddler on her lap. All the adults wear the resolute, pinched look of people going through funeral rites and determined to do them correctly despite whatever they might be feeling. This should, Jenny thinks, be an inspiring model for her own behavior, but instead it makes her feel even more inadequate.
How long will Eric stay away from her?
The rest of the day, it turns out. Jenny calls her brother Bob on the cell and then sits in the van, waiting. The early September dusk falls and a few cars, chosen by lottery, train their headlights on the low, pale buildings across the meadow. This hardly seems necessary, since the buildings glow with their own subtle light. People put on sweaters and jackets and the smell of canned stew fills the air. Three aliens begin to circulate among the cars.