Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  He dreamed of Aunt Carrie, sobbing on the floor because he was leaving forever. Carrie, who had raised him after his parents died, who loved him. In his dream, she held a dying pupcat, who looked up at him and whispered in First Officer Bridges’s voice: “For nothing, nothing. All for nothing.”

  When he woke in the morning, Eva sat beside his bed in the small guest room. Startled, Lukas sat up, clutching his blanket, under which he was naked. Eva didn’t seem to notice. Her voice sounded thick. “She’s ready.”

  “Who’s ready? For what?”

  “Marianne. Stay where you are.” Eva left.

  Bewildered and becoming angry—why the weird mystery?—Lukas reached down to the floor for his pants. A moment later, he stopped dead, one arm dripping fabric.

  Something was happening in his mind.

  Blurry at first, the intrusion abruptly sharpened. Moving images, strong and clear—his images. The pupcat with a pink bow, jumping toward Freedom in the night sky until, emaciated and covered with sores, the animal died. The pupcat on the terrace, falling to its death in the futile attempt to leap toward home. The pupcat unable to leap any longer, biting a child from its total despair at not being able to migrate, as every instinct of its genes forced it to do.

  Lukas jumped out of bed, heedless of his pants, and hurtled himself from the room. Marianne slumped in a chair in the corner of the living room, breathing hard, pale as dawn. A small holo player, switched off, sat on the floor beside a glass of sludgy green liquid. He gasped, “How . . .”

  Silently Eva removed his recording cube from the machine, handed it to him, and left the room. Her face looked like a hillside ravaged by storm.

  Marianne tried to speak, couldn’t, waited a few moments, and then got out, “Drink.”

  Lukas raised the glass to her mouth. Whatever was in it revived her, and more. Color raced back into her face, and her eyes grew too bright. She sat up straight and put a hand on his arm.

  “Don’t blame my mother.”

  “For what?” But he had already guessed. “You’re genemod for telepathy.”

  “No. I can only send, only over short range, and at great cost. Lukas—you know what that means. Even on Freedom.”

  He did. Purity Control banned all genemods throughout the Coalition not because people with purple skin or augmented muscles represented a threat to society, but because genetic changes to the brain did. And among those changes possible, the most feared was anything that affected the electromagnetic field that both surrounded, and was, the human brain. Strengthen that field, extend it, manipulate it, and you created a tool to affect other fields, both machine and human. No one liked having their minds suddenly invaded with someone else’s images. Even less did they like having images read from their own minds. Before he knew he was going to move, Lukas took a step back from Marianne, and his face distorted into a grimace.

  She noticed. Her smile was bitter. “I can’t read, only send, and that only for about twenty feet. No one knows. I would probably be killed.”

  “I thought Freedom was the sanctuary for genemods!”

  “For most, yes. And probably some ad hoc vigilante group would avenge me. That’s how it works here. But I’d still be dead, wouldn’t I?”

  “I—”

  But whatever drug had revived Marianne kept her talking. “I said don’t blame my mother, and I meant it. I blamed her when I was younger. Oh, how I blamed her! But not since the—Lukas, do you know who emigrates to Freedom? Do you?”

  Her intensity was making him uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to people more intense than he was. He shook his head.

  “Three groups emigrate to a society without laws: criminals, idealists, and inventors. My parents were the last two. They had an idea that if the human race could be engineered to be more empathetic, more sensitive to each other’s suffering, that might create a society that was just and good and caring. Eva is a scientist in fluid dynamics—she knew how one little alteration in direction in the right place, at the right time, can end up producing huge changes in the system overall. I was supposed to be that little alteration. But genes are funny things, and we don’t really have control over their interaction, and it didn’t quite work out that way. But, then, you already know that, don’t you?”

  Her eyes were very bright. Her whole body tensed toward him. Lukas, powerfully aware of her beauty, knew what she was asking. He knew, too, that she was his last chance. For many things. Could he trust her? No way to tell. But what other choice did he have?

  Still, he hesitated; alone with his secret for so long, the idea of telling someone the truth seemed painful. But she didn’t let him evade.

  “What was done to you?” she said. “What genemod? Where?”

  “Here,” he said, and once he’d started, the rest came out more easily. “Here, on Freedom. I was an experiment, too, but not for an idealistic reason. I have pupcat genes in me.”

  Her eyes widened and her hand went to her mouth.

  “Why not? After all, it’s all just DNA, right? Only it wasn’t supposed to actually work. But it did.”

  Marianne said, “You—”

  “I’m compelled to migrate. Every year, to the Ice, like the pupcats. And since I couldn’t, I got sick, every year, like the pupcats. Very sick. The only difference is that I didn’t die.”

  “You came here, instead.”

  “I came here, instead,” he agreed. “To stop it. And to go out on the Ice.”

  They stared at each other. Finally she whispered, “The migration starts in two days.”

  “I know,” Lukas said.

  “Can we—”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a group of them, small and not rich, utterly dedicated to saving the pupcats. Did that crusade, Lukas wondered, take the place of the larger one that Eva had once envisioned, using genetics to free society from cruelty to and exploitation of humans? He didn’t ask. The group, led by a middle-aged man named Paul with eyes like lasers and an incongruous paunch, was well organized. Within a few hours they gathered in Eva’s apartment, and a few hours after that everything began.

  They targeted the tourists first. Marianne walked through a roverbus terminal filled with tourists about to set out to the pupcats’ feeding grounds. She projected as hard as she could, and in their startled minds unwound the terrible images of pupcats dying as they tried to migrate home. Some people screamed. Marianne was one of them, pretending to be as shocked as the others, collapsing to the ground to cover her eyes and sob.

  She walked along Freedom’s hotel strip at dinner time. People leaned into the wind, hurrying into restaurants and shops and bars. Into their minds came the same terrible images of instinct-driven migration ending in death for creatures helpless and appealing and loved.

  She sent to a different batch of tourists, this time in a hotel dining room. Then one at the feeding grounds, with the adorable pupcats right in front of the minds into which she sent her terrible images.

  “Is it true? Does this happen?”

  “That’s not the point, John! There’s a sender here somewhere—ugh!”

  “I’m leaving!”

  “It shouldn’t be allowed!”

  “This is Freedom, remember? Everything is allowed.”

  “Well, I’m going to do something about it!”

  “About the sender or the pupcats?”

  “The pupcats, you idiot! Oh my God, those poor creatures . . .”

  “Eleanor just bought one back home.”

  Silence.

  Lukas, too, was silent. He couldn’t help. The Export Company would have traced the holo projectors to Theobald Garner, and both Garner and the delivery driver could identify Lukas. He stayed in Eva’s apartment with the windows opaqued and watched Marianne grow weaker after each sending. Eventually she would either give out or would be identified as the only person at each scene of telepathy. She stayed anonymous longer than he expected, disguised by the group’s masterly efforts with clothes, make-up
, prosthetics, wigs, and fortified after each sending by stimulants. But she was growing weaker.

  The protests were growing stronger.

  A small rally, held at the spaceport, was easily dispersed by The Export Company’s crowd-control weapons. But the group had recordings—not, Lukas suspected, all of them true—of Company enforcers manhandling protestors. These found their way to the Link, before the Company techs could suppress them, as did the suppression attempts. All at once—and only then—did public opinion move violently in favor of the protestors. This was Freedom! How dare a corporation control any part of the Link that they did not own!

  How dare they try to control rallies!

  It wasn’t such a large step from there to: How dare they try to exploit the pupcats that bring tourism to Freedom!

  Eva said, “Economics trumps liberty. As always.”

  Paul, eyes glued to his handheld, said, “Well, not yet. There’ll be more skirmishes. People unconvinced by the recordings, people more outraged by the telepathy than the animal cruelty, people who’ll say that freedom to live however you want is more important than a bunch of dumb animals. The skeptics, the callous, and the fanatics. They are with you always, yea and verily.”

  Lukas said, “Marianne can’t go out there anymore.”

  Eva said, “She won’t have to. Look out the window.”

  A huge crowd surged along the river toward the spaceport. Paul sent out a robocam and Lukas, holding Marianne’s hand, saw it all: the young people smashing the bars of pupcat cages, the older people talking to the press, Export Company security standing back, not interfering, under orders from managers who, true capitalists, could recognize a loss.

  Eva, on the computer, said, “Company stock is plummeting. I think you’re wrong, Paul—it is over. The exporters will fold in a week.”

  Marianne whispered, “The trappers . . .”

  “Will hang on longer,” Paul said. “They’ll get furious, they’ll bluster, and then their numbers will thin down to just a few who will bring back pupcats for locals who will let them migrate each year. Or—oh, I’ll bet this is what happens!—the trappers who are left will organize tourist trips right out onto the Ice.”

  Marianne raised her eyes to Lukas’s face. Too exhausted to speak again, she mouthed the single word, “When?”

  He said, “Tomorrow.”

  They had outfitted him. Lukas knew that the group had all contributed more than they could afford to buy him first the necessary gear, and second, a trapper willing to take Lukas with him. Lukas tried to feel grateful, but there was no real room for emotion left in him. He had become a single tsunami-like urge: Go. Go. Go now. The sensation was familiar; he’d felt it every year of his life, and every year, it had sickened him as he kept desperate eyes fastened on a part of the sky not even strewn with many stars.

  “Happen you don’t keep up,” the trapper growled at him, “I leave you behind. That’s the deal I signed.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t understand nothing, boy. These damn protestors . . .” He was off on a rant, full of obscenities and anatomical impossibilities, which Lukas ignored.

  The migration had begun.

  Thousands of pupcats began walking away from the Three Settlements and out toward the Ice. Bellies full from a month at the feeding grounds, some of the females already pregnant, they frisked and barked; the younger ones ran in jubilant circles. Light from Freedom’s dim star played over their silky white coats. In a few more days, they would be deep enough into the farside that the star would have disappeared, and the only glow on the pupcats would be starlight. The pupcats would travel nearly 1,000 miles over the uneven and treacherous Ice, Ice riddled with crevasses and mountains and snow fields, and Lukas would be with them. Migration.

  It filled his mind, his muscles, his vision, and would do so until the instinct engineered into him was satisfied. Even last night, saying goodbye to Marianne, it had been difficult to keep his mind off the Ice. But he had tried, pushing away both the exaltation and the deeper resentment that he must feel that exultation, without choice.

  “It’s not really Freedom, is it?” Lukas said. “Not here any more than anyplace else. We’re still our biology. All of us, even the so-called human standards.”

  “Yes,” Marianne said. She looked very small and weak, lying in her bed. All at once, she smiled and her eyes brightened. “But biology’s not always bad. You know I’ll be here when you get back from the Ice, right?”

  “Yes,” he’d said, and brushed his lips across hers, and turned toward the barking outside.

  PATHWAYS

  The Chinese clinic warn’t like I expected. It warn’t even Chinese.

  I got there afore it opened. I was hoping to get inside afore anybody else came, any neighbors who knew us or busybodies from Blaine. But Carrie Campbell was already parked in her truck, the baby on her lap. We nodded to each other but didn’t speak. The Campbells are better off than us—Dave works in the mine up to Allington—but old Gacy Campbell been feuding with Dr. Harman for decades and Carrie was probably glad to have someplace else to take the baby. He didn’t look good, snuffling and whimpering.

  When the doors opened, I went in first, afore Carrie was even out of the truck. It was going to take her a while. She was pregnant again.

  “Yes?” said the woman behind the desk. Just a cheap metal desk, which steadied me some. The room was nothing special, just a few chairs, some pictures on the wall, a clothes basket of toys in the corner. What really surprised me was that the woman warn’t Chinese. Blue eyes, brown hair, middle-aged. She looked a bit like Granmama, but she had all her teeth. “Can I help you?”

  “I want to see a doctor.”

  “Certainly.” She smiled. Yeah, all her teeth. “What seems to be the problem, miss?”

  “No problem.” From someplace in the back another woman came out, this one dressed like a nurse. She warn’t Chinese either.

  “I don’t understand,” the woman behind the desk said. From her accent she warn’t from around here—like I didn’t already know that. “Are you sick?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then how can I—”

  Carrie waddled into the door, the baby balanced on her belly. Now my visit would be table-talk everywhere. All at once I just wanted to get it over with.

  “I’m not sick,” I said, too loud. “I just want to see a doctor.” I took a deep breath. “My name is Ludmilla Connors.”

  The nurse stopped walking toward Carrie. The woman behind the counter half stood up, then sat down again. She tried to pretend like she hadn’t done it, like she warn’t pleased. If Bobby were that bad a liar, he’d a been in jail even more than he was.

  “Certainly,” the woman said. I didn’t see her do nothing, but a man came out from the back, and he was Chinese. So was the woman who followed him.

  “I’m Ludmilla Connors,” I told him, and I clenched my ass together real hard to keep my legs steady. “And I want to volunteer for the experiment. But only if it pays what I heard. Only if.”

  The woman behind the desk took me back to a room with a table and some chairs and a whole lot of filing cabinets, and she left me there with the Chinese people. I looked at their smooth faces with those slanted, mostly closed eyes, and I wished I hadn’t come. I guess these two were the reason everybody hereabouts called it the “Chinese clinic,” even if everybody else there looked like regular Americans.

  “Hello, Ms. Connors,” the man said and he spoke English real good, even if it was hard to understand some words. “We are glad you are here. I am Dr. Dan Chung and this is my chief technician Jenny.”

  “Uh huh.” He didn’t look like no “Dan,” and if she was “Jenny,” I was a fish.

  “Your mother is Courtney Connors and your father was Robert Connors?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We have family trees for everyone on the mountain. It’s part of our work, you know. You said you want to aid us in this res
earch?”

  “I said I want to get paid.”

  “Of course. You will be. You are nineteen.”

  “Yeah.” It warn’t a question, and I didn’t like that they knew so much about me. “How much money?”

  He told me. It warn’t as much as the rumors said, but it was enough. Unless they actually killed me, it was enough. And I didn’t think they’d do that. The government wouldn’t let them do that—not even this stinking government.

  “Okay,” I said. “Start the experiment.”

  Jenny smiled. I knew that kind of smile, like she was so much better than me. My fists clenched. Dr. Chung said, “Jenny, you may leave. Send in Mrs. Cully, please.”

  I liked the surprised look on Jenny’s face, and then the angry look she tried to hide. Bitch.

  Mrs. Cully didn’t act like Jenny. She brought in a tray with coffee and cookies: just regular store-bought Pepperidge Farm, not Chinese. Under the tray was a bunch of papers. Mrs. Cully sat down at the table with us.

  “These are legal papers, Ms. Connors,” Dr. Chung said. “Before we begin, you must sign them. If you wish, you can take them home to read, or to a lawyer. Or you can sign them here, now. They give us permission to conduct the research, including the surgery. They say that you understand this procedure is experimental. They give the university, myself, and Dr. Liu all rights to information gained from your participation. They say that we do not guarantee any cure, or even any alleviation, of any medical disorder you may have. Do you want to ask questions?”

  I did, but not just yet. Half of me was grateful that he didn’t ask if I can read, the way tourists and social workers sometimes do. I can, but I didn’t understand all the words on this page: indemnify, liability, patent rights. The other half of me resented that he was rushing me so.

  I said something I warn’t intending: “If Ratface Rollins warn’t president, this clinic wouldn’t be here at all!”

  “I agree,” Dr. Chung said. “But you Americans elected a Libertarian.”

  “Us Americans? Aren’t you one?”