Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The weather did not hold out. The bike did not hold out. No one in any of the towns they passed through had the parts to fix it. America had become adept at conserving and jerry-rigging anything manufactured, but the bike was just too old. Isobel kicked it hard, bruising her foot even through her boot. They walked, in rain.

  She tired far more easily than Zed. Sometimes the rain was too heavy, or the road too potentially dangerous, to risk a fire. Then she shivered in the tent while Zed tried to warm her with blankets and sex. Usually it worked, or she said it did.

  On the fourth day, the weather cleared. Isobel sent him to buy food in the largest town they’d come to yet. When he returned, laden with packages and triumphant with a rabbit he’d shot to roast, Isobel sat before their tent with three men. Zed dropped his packages and reached for his.22. But she saw him, rose, and beckoned him forward.

  “Zed! Look—my cousins!”

  They didn’t look like cousins. Older, unsmiling, faces closed as rock, they reminded Zed of his father. The oldest, maybe forty, held out his hand.

  “Hi, Zed. I’m Gary. Isobel radioed us that you two were here.”

  Radioed? Isobel had a radio? Zed knew that once there had been a whole system of phones you could hold in your hand, of televisions and computer stations (or whatever they’d been called), of satellites in orbit that made communications instantaneous even across oceans. Then the nerve centers for these things, the TV stations and cell towers and servers and launch sites, had gone. The artifacts remained and some had been gotten working again, for local TV and rerouted cell networks and small servers. The problem, as with the dirt bike, had been parts. The factories, American and foreign, no longer existed. A few electronic geniuses, mostly young, had concentrated on cannibalizing computers and some still worked. Zed had heard that in some places factories were producing TVs again, and TV shows. Everybody else made do with crystal radios. Even his father had had one, so he would know when the aliens made their second assault on humanity. Once a month, he tested the radio.

  “Isobel, why didn’t you tell me that—”

  “Gary says there’s trouble ahead. Outlaws. He and Luke and Dave came to take us the rest of the way to the dome. They have a truck.”

  Zed saw it, then, parked just under cover of the trees, seventy years old and still running due to fanatical care and parts cannibalized from other vehicles. It ran on corn alcohol now, but it ran. He and Isobel had passed a surprising number of cars on the road. Small towns were more likely to have spare parts for cars than for cell towers or orbital satellites.

  “Get in,” Gary said. “Isobel already loaded your gear. We can be there before morning.”

  “I—”

  “Come on, Zed!” Isobel said happily. “We’re almost there!” She took his hands and smiled.

  He couldn’t resist her. Maybe these guys were her cousins. They must be, or why would they be so eager to help? Jealousy was silly; she was his, all his, she’d risked her life, practically, to be with him. Anyway, they were too old for her.

  Zed climbed into the back of the truck. He held Isobel close and fell asleep. When he woke just after dawn, the truck had stopped and he was alone. He got out, holding his.22, calling for Isobel. And stopped cold.

  A few feet from him stood the alien dome.

  It wasn’t what he had expected. He’d vaguely imagined his mother’s mixing bowl turned upside down, only made of tingling energy instead of ancient plastic. This wasn’t clear, wasn’t curved, didn’t tingle. Opaque and black, it rose straight up into the air taller than all trees; it stretched as far in both directions as he could see. Any curve must be really gradual, which meant the dome enclosed a huge area. When Zed touched it, it felt solid, slick, and hard.

  It was real. He was here. He, Zed Larch, touching the alien dome created by beings from the stars.

  Isobel exploded into view from the other side of the truck. “Oh, good, you’re awake, we have to go now! Right this minute, before the battle!”

  Battle? Zed saw no signs of battle, heard nothing but the first morning birds, warning everybody away from their territory, their mates, their insects. Isobel grabbed his hand and pulled him into a run alongside the alien wall. It made an abrupt, sharp turn—whoever had called this a “dome” was crazy—and there stood a serious camp. Large olive-green tents, open-sided lean-tos with wood stoves, an American flag on a tall pole in the middle, guards with guns.

  “Earthers,” Isobel whispered. “To prevent anyone going in. Be very quiet. We only paid off the night guards. Shhh!”

  Three men with guns stood between the camp and the wall. There was no one else in sight. The breeze shifted, carrying to Zed’s nostrils a thick, coppery odor.

  Gary, Luke, and Dave nodded at the guards. Unsmiling, they stepped aside. Isobel tugged on Zed’s hand.

  “Wait,” he whispered. “Isobel—wait. What’s happening?”

  “We’re going inside!”

  “But how . . . who . . . wait.”

  Gary said, “Hey, this isn’t really the time to discuss logistics, you know?”

  They were hurrying him along, body and mind. Zed didn’t like it. He planted his feet apart and talked directly at Isobel. “Who goes inside? All of us?”

  “No, no, they’re too old—I thought you knew. Everybody knows!”

  Zed didn’t flinch at her tone. Not this time. “You have to be young to go in?”

  “Yes, yes—Zed, let me by, I have to stand by the gate!”

  All her self-assurance had fled; she was frantic. Zed caught her shoulders and held her. “How do you know what to do?”

  “Do you think we’re the first? Zed, come on, we have to hurry, before the camp wakes up and stops us!”

  “That’s what they’re here for? To stop us?” He looked over her shoulder at the quiet camp, the guards who had been bribed to break the rules. Birds shrilled. The wind picked up and he caught again the coppery odor.

  Gary said, “Shit—they’re waking up!”

  Zed hadn’t seen anything but he let Gary dart past him and lean into the black wall. Isobel yanked Zed around to face the dome. Low to the ground, a square hole opened, no more than three feet tall and three wide. In it, mist swirled. Isobel tore herself from his grasp and dropped to the ground.

  Zed caught at her hair. “No, me first—it might be dangerous!”

  Isobel hesitated but then said, “Okay.”

  Zed got down on all fours, still holding his rifle. He couldn’t see anything through the mist. Fear blossomed in him like a lily, chalky white, but not as vibrant as his excitement. He was going into an alien dome. He was going with Isobel, whom he would protect. It was really happening.

  The mist felt like nothing at all, not even droplets of moisture. He emerged into a perfectly featureless cube of a room, maybe ten feet square. No windows or doors. Nothing. His.22 was gone.

  “Hey! My gun!”

  All at once he thought he was the stupidest person alive. The aliens had vaporized his rifle. They had vaporized entire cities. What was he doing? He had to get out!

  Zed bolted back toward the mist, but somehow it had become impassable. Zed beat his fists against it, which was like beating on stone. On the other side of the mist, Isobel screamed.

  He thought first that the aliens were hurting her. Then, that the Earther soldiers had grabbed her and her cousins. Finally he realized that her screams were not pain or fear, but fury.

  “Let me in too! Let me in, you fucking bastards! I go with Zed! Let me in!”

  “Isobel!”

  The sound ceased. Zed cried at the ceiling, “Don’t hurt her! Don’t you dare hurt her!”

  “No,” the ceiling said back.

  A mechanical voice, but it startled Zed so much that for a moment he thought it was the voice of God, answering the prayers his father always directed at the cabin ceiling.

  “She is not hurt. But she cannot enter. You may enter.”

  The far wall dissolved.

  Z
ed blinked. He was on the other side of the wall, and young people stood smiling at him.

  “Hi,” one of the girls said. “I’m Leah, and this is June and Paul. Welcome to The Resort.”

  II: Inside

  Three ordinary human teenagers, two girls and a boy, dressed in ordinary pants and shirts and leather shoes. Behind them a field stretched to a bright blue sea with the sun rising above it in multi-colored glory. The air smelled of flowers. Zed said, “Let me out!”

  Leah frowned. “You just got in.”

  “I have to go to Isobel.”

  “Oh.” The frown was replaced by compassion. “Your wife?”

  Zed looked at them more closely. Not teenagers: older than he thought. Twenties, maybe. He didn’t care. “Girlfriend,” he said, aware even now, even here, of a ridiculous little hiccup of pride as he said it. “I have to get back! We were supposed to come in together!”

  “If she didn’t come in with you,” Paul said, “there’s a reason for that.”

  “What reason?” Zed rounded on him, fists half-clenched, almost glad to have a target he could understand.

  “Easy, big guy,” Paul said. “This isn’t a place for fighting.”

  “I have to go back!”

  “Well,” Leah said reasonably, “if you really want to do that, you can. But—”

  “I can?”

  “—first you have to see your mentor. Once, at a minimum. Those are the rules. Then if you want, you can go back. June, who’s he assigned to?”

  June appeared to stare at something invisible. “C7.”

  “Okay,” Leah said. “Come on, I’ll take you. What’s your name?”

  It was a trap. They wanted to get him away from the wall so he couldn’t go back to Isobel. But he couldn’t go back to Isobel now. If they wanted him dead, he’d be as gone as his.22. Wouldn’t he?

  Utterly confused, he said, “Zed Larch.”

  “This way, Zed.”

  She led him across the field, toward the ocean. As they got closer, Zed halted to stare. He’d never seen any water bigger than a mountain lake. The Atlantic threw up sparkling whitecaps before it broke on rocks. Seagulls wheeled overhead, crying raucously. The wind smelled of salt and freshness.

  Leah waited, smiling, while he took it all in. Her smile stayed even after he planted his feet and stared at her. “No farther till you answer some questions!”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I really leave after I see Seeven?”

  “C7. Yes. A few do. Most of us stay.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re learning things. Or we like it here. Or we were hurt or sick when we came. Or it’s a big adventure. Or we understand what’s happening. Pick your reason.”

  “What is happening?”

  “History.”

  “I want answers!”

  “You’re getting them.”

  He raised his hand and gnawed on his fingernails. “How long have you been here?”

  “Two years.”

  “What do the aliens do to you?”

  “Do? Do you mean do they torture us or brainwash us or force us into hard labor or eat us? Grow up, Zed. If you were a starfaring race with the technology to remake a planet, would you need slaves? Would you want to eat microbe-ridden mammals whose flesh might kill you?”

  Zed didn’t know what microbes were, but it didn’t sound good. God, he was behaving like his father. The last thing he wanted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “You didn’t. Come on, C7 will answer your questions. Or rather, ‘The Question.’ That’s what you really want to ask.”

  “I—”

  “Come on.”

  Women were always telling him to do something. Leah, Isobel, Mrs. Bellingham, his mother. Go, come, go.

  They walked a long way along the shoreline to a low white building, gracefully curved. It blended with the white sand between it and the sea. Behind, dunes rose to woods and fields, where the low buildings were brown or green or gray. A rabbit dashed across the path.

  A young woman passed them, walking beside a low cart that floated above the ground. In the cart lay two infants. Zed gaped at the floating cart, the babies, the cart again. The young woman said, “Hi, Leah.”

  “Hi, Mary. How are the twins?”

  “Off to J4. We’re late.”

  She hurried off, the floating cart keeping pace. Zed said, “How—”

  “The usual way, of course. Their father is Tim, my brother. Come on inside.”

  An ordinary room; chairs and a table and wide, open doors facing the sea. Beside the doors, something unordinary.

  “Hello,” the thing said.

  As a child, Zed had gathered stones by the mountain stream. His mother had even paused in her endless chores long enough to tell him the names of the ones she knew: granite and shale and mica and quartz. C7 looked like a thigh-high piece of quartz shot through with mica and then overlaid with patchy slime. The slime was gray and oozy. The quartz was cut into hundreds of precise, diamond-shaped facets like those on his mother’s tiny wedding ring.

  This had destroyed civilization?

  To Leah he whispered, “Is it alive?”

  “Sort of. This is his remote. C7, this is Zed Larch.”

  “Welcome,” said a rich, deep voice, nothing like the mechanical one in the wall. “I’m happy to meet you, Zed.”

  Zed blurted, “What are you?”

  Leah looked sideways at him, but C7 merely chuckled. “I look strange to you, I know. You will become accustomed.”

  “I don’t think so,” Zed said, so dazed that the words just tumbled out, grain from a ripped sack, without volition or manners.

  Leah said, “I’ll leave you two.”

  C7 said, “As Leah said, this is my remote. It is alive, an extension of myself, like an arm would be for you. The rest is aboard our ship in orbit around the moon. What you humans perceive as ‘slime’ is an organic compound functioning to control moisture levels and pH. Do you understand?”

  “No. You’re an arm? What if I . . . what if you have an accident? Does the part of you aboard the ship lose an arm? With pain and . . . and armlessness?” He hardly knew what he said.

  “Yes. With pain and the equivalent of armlessness. But I know you aren’t going to cause me an accident, Zed. Your brain waves were measured when you came through the wall. You are not intending destruction.”

  “The wall wouldn’t let Isobel through!”

  “She was so intending.”

  “That’s a lie! We were going to get jobs here, work together! And I’m going back out to her!”

  “You are free to do so. But first there’s a question you want to ask, isn’t there?”

  Zed stared steadily at the thing that was an arm, or a rock covered with slime, or a pack of dirty lies. Leah, June, Paul—they could be all brainwashed, in which case the Earthers had been right all along. Maybe Zed himself was already brainwashed. But he just felt like himself. He asked the question.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “You mean, why did my race destroy Earth’s cities and half its population?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone who comes here asks the same question, and each receives the same answer. I will show you.”

  Silently the wide door facing the seashore swung shut, and the room darkened. Zed cried out. The room had disappeared and he stood on a road, but unlike any road he had ever seen: crowded, jammed, dense with people and cars and bicycles and carts pulled by large, strange animals. Buildings crowded him, lights flashed, people shouted in a strange language, smells assaulted his nose. A child fell and the wheels of a cart rolled over him. People screamed. More lights flashed. Sirens sounded. Sudden smoke clogged the air.

  “This was a city in 2014,” C7 said. “It is Karachi, but it could be any of very many. Here is another.”

  Karachi disappeared. Before Zed could draw a normal breath, tall buildings—taller than trees, as tall
as the sky—dwarfed him. Lights blinked incessantly, red and green and blue and blinding white. People thronged close to him, so that he flinched away, until one walked right through him. Even more cars, trucks, buses, bicycles . . . panic rose in him and he tried to run toward the door. Stopped himself. It wasn’t real. It was an illusion, like a picture in a book . . ..

  “New York in 2014,” C7 said. “Stay still, Zed. This is New York as it would have been in 2050, if it still existed.”

  Howling winds knocked Zed off his feet. He lay on the floor as wind and rain pelted him. Buildings sagged and one collapsed. Through the bars of a cellar window he saw a woman’s face looking at him, nothing but skin stretched over skull, her eyes sunken, her hair patchy. Zed had found deer with that look, starving after a hard winter. Another building toppled.

  “Superstorms,” C7 said, “the result of climate change. In 2014 the United States had nine hurricanes and one superstorm. By 2050, twenty ‘class-one’ hurricanes and ten superstorms, which raged over huge areas at once. This is Seattle.”

  The same, with fewer buildings left, muddy hills sliding into the sea.

  “Wichita.”

  Almost nothing left but the ceaseless, howling winds over dusty ground.

  “The Atlantic Ocean, right here on this beach, by 2070.”

  Masses of floating garbage, between them greenish algae as far as the eye could see, growth so out of hand that everything underneath was dead. A little boy picked his way through the garbage. He looked as skeletal as the woman in the New York basement, his body bent almost double against the wind. Oozing sores covered his nearly naked body.

  “The child’s illness,” C7 said, “is the result of biowarfare. Now here is New York again, in the year 2200.”

  The winds had ceased. There were no people, no buildings. Only jungle, plant life thicker than Zed could have imagined, as thick as dirt covering a grave. No animals moved in that thickness; no birds flew. Zed gasped, his lungs burning, he couldn’t breathe—

  “Carbon dioxide levels up over 3 percent,” C7 said. “No mammals left. That future—humanity’s future without intervention—is why we did it. For the common good.”