by Nancy Kress
She typed swiftly, sent the report, and turned off the computer. With a second key, Katherine turned a small lock set into the machine's side. She closed the door, hobbled back to the car, and drove several hundred feet away. Five minutes later, the shed exploded.
Now there was nothing to keep her here at all.
Nonetheless, she drove toward Las Verdes. The village had regarded Katherine with neither kindness nor suspicion. Mostly it had let her be: one more crazy white inexplicably in love with the inhospitable desert, wasting her time making bad paintings of rocks and sunsets, supported by means beyond their world. Still, the trunk of her car held medical supplies, among other things; perhaps she could help.
* * * *
The car stopped going and Li couldn't make it start again no matter what he did. “Is it broken?” Sudie said. “Like the feeder and the world?"
"Yes,” Li said. He opened the door; it was getting very hot inside. It was hot outside, too. The four children got out and sat in the brief shade on one side of the dead car, trying to not touch its burning side.
Jana started to say something, stopped, took Li's hand.
He gazed out across the big world, glanced briefly at the hot ball of morning in the big sky, and anger grew in him. All this—all this had been out here all the time, and Taney had never let them have it. All this, and now that they had found it, they were going to die here. Li knew it, and he guessed that Jana knew it, too. Sudie and Kim did not. But Kim might have known something, deep in her different head, because she crawled over Sudie and began to lick Li's face.
He pushed her away and dropped Jana's hand. His kindness, he knew, was all used up. He didn't want to die.
"I'm so thirsty,” Sudie said. No one answered.
A long time later Sudie said, “Look at those big birds up there. Flying around and around in circles. Why are they doing that, Li?"
"I don't know,” Li said.
Jana said, “Something is coming on the big path. There.” She pointed.
Li strained his eyes. Finally he saw a sort of wiggle in the air—how could Jana see so far?—with a black dot in it. The dot got bigger and bigger and then it turned into another “car” but big, enormous, so that Sudie whimpered and tried to hide behind Li. The car stopped and a person got out.
"What the ... what happened here, son?"
"This car stopped,” Li said. He stood. The man didn't have hair on his face like Jack, and his voice sounded more like Taney's.
"You were driving? Where's your folks?"
Li didn't know what “folks” might be; everything in this world was so strange. He said, “We have to find Taney."
"But your parents ... hell, get out of the sun, first. We can help you, son. We're Department of Domestic Rescue. Climb in."
Inside the big car was another little world, with chairs and blankets and a feeder. A woman gave them water and said, “Baker, where did they come from?"
Baker sat at another of the little screens and did something to it. “They said ‘Taney,’ but GPS isn't giving me anything like that."
"Well, we're due in Las Verdes like, now. Shall I drive? And while you're on-line, is there any more email on why we're being diverted to an ass-end hole like Las Verdes when real population centers are screaming for help?"
"No. Presumably Las Verdes has an emergency situation."
"Two states have an emergency situation, Baker. Why the priority-one diversion to Las Verdes?"
"'Ann, ours is not to reason why—’”
"Oh, roast it. I'll drive."
Baker gave them all food, and Li fell asleep on the moving ground of the car. When he woke, Baker and Ann were leaving the big car. “You stay here, Li,” Baker said. “Safest and coolest inside, and we've got work to do. We'll get you sorted out tonight, I promise. Okay, buddy?"
There was kindness in Baker's voice, so Li said, “Yes."
"You could maybe ... I know! Here."
Baker did something to the car's sky, and all at once a screen came down, glowed, and made cartoons. Sudie squealed with joy. A cartoon bird—how could cartoons have birds, not just people?—flew toward the hot ball of morning in the sky, chased by a person. Sudie, Kim, and Jana crowded close.
Li watched through the clear place in the car's sky as Baker and Ann walked toward piles of dirt and crying people. He watched for a long time. The hot ball of morning sunk down into the ground (how did it do that?) and the sky turned wonderful colors, purple and red and yellow. Baker and Ann came in and out, carrying things out with them. On one coming in, Ann touched a place on the wall and morning came inside the car's world, although not in the big world outside. The girls watched the cartoons, too absorbed to even laugh. Li looked outside.
Figures moved in and out of houses made of blankets, some of which Ann had folded. Little bits of morning lighted the blanket houses. And by that light, as he peered out of the car with his nose pushed flat against it, Li saw her.
"Taney!"
* * * *
Her back ached. She had moved too much, lifted too much, grown too old for this sort of field work. For any sort of field work. But everything was done that could be done tonight. Under the capable direction of the DDR agents, Ann Lionti and Baker Tully, the wounded had been treated, the homeless housed in evac inflatables, the spring water tested and found safe. Everyone had been fed. Tomorrow the dead would be buried. Katherine looked up and saw a ghost at the window of the DDR mobile.
No. Not possible.
But there he was.
Li waved his arms and Katherine, dazed, half lifted her hand before she let it drop. How ... But it didn't matter how. What mattered was that Lionti and Tully, that everyone here, that Katherine herself, were already dead.
* * * *
The leaving door wouldn't open. It wouldn't open, no matter how Li pushed it. He cried out in frustration and shoved Sudie, who was making everything harder by pushing the door in a different direction from Li. But then he got the door open and tumbled down the square rocks made of sky material and he was with Taney, throwing his arms around her waist, Sudie and Jana and Kim right behind him. Kim started licking Taney's face, jumping up in mute excitement.
"Taney! Taney!"
"You found us!"
"You lost your covering! I can touch you!"
"Taney, the world broke and we came out! It broke!"
"Taney! Taney!"
"You know these kids?” Baker said behind Taney. She turned, Li and Sudie still clinging to her, and Baker said in a different voice, “Doctor—what is it?"
"We ... they ... Kim, stop!"
They had never heard that voice from her before. Li, startled, stepped back. But then Taney's kindness was back, although she sounded very sad.
"Li, take the others back inside the trailer. I promise I'll come in just a little while, okay? Just everybody go inside."
They went, of course; this was Taney. Jana and Li stared at each other. Sudie went back to watching the cartoons still showing on the screen. Kim pressed her nose against the clear sky-metal to watch Taney, mutely following her every tiny movement in the gathering dark. Li joined Kim.
A woman ran up to Taney and Baker, waving her arms and shouting.
* * * *
"Experiments?” Baker Tully said, bewildered and angry and, Katherine could see, terrified. As well he should be. “Bioweaponry experiments?"
"From the very end of the war,” Katherine said. “Intelligence discovered the operation and we sent in two entire battle groups five days before the surrender."
"And Ann—” He couldn't say it. It had been hard to pull him away from Ann Lionti's body, lying crumpled between a DDR inflatable and the ruins of an adobe house. Beside her, incongruously, lay an unbroken planter filled with carefully watered dahlias. Now Katherine and Baker stood behind the huge mobile, away from the others. She looked at his young, suddenly ravaged face, dimly lit by a rising gibbous moon, and she thought, I can't do this.
He had courage. H
e got out, “How long? For me, I mean?"
"I don't know for sure. The only tests we could run, obviously, were on animals. When did you and Ann first pick up the children?"
"About six hours ago. Give it to me straight, doctor. Please. I have to know."
She saw what he was doing: looking desperately for a way out. All his training, like hers, had taught him that the way out of anything was information, knowledge, reasoning. But not this time.
I can't do this.
She said, “I have to sit down, I'm sorry ... knee injury.” She eased herself onto the ground, partly cutting off the illumination from the floodlamps, so that they sat in shadowed darkness. That should have made it easier, but didn't.
"A virus in their breath gets into the bloodstream from the victim's lungs and makes a targeted, cytopathic toxin. When the virus has replicated enough for the toxin to reach a critical level, it stops the heart. And the virus is highly contagious, passed from person to person."
"So everyone here—"
"Yes,” Katherine said quietly.
"I don't understand!” All at once he sounded like a child, like Li. Simultaneously Katherine shuddered and put a hand on his arm. Baker shook it off. “I just don't understand. If that's all true, the virus would spread through the whole country, killing everybody—"
"The—"
"—and then the whole world! The enemy would have killed themselves, too!"
"No,” Katherine said. Her knee began to throb painfully. “There are racial differences among genomes. Small differences, and not very many, but enough. Think of genetic diseases: Tay-Sachs among Jews, sickle-cell anemia among Blacks. We've found more, and much more subtle. This virus exploits a tiny difference in genetic structure, and so in cellular functioning, in anyone with certain Caucasian-heritage genes. Tully—"
"The Indians here..."
She peered at his face, shrouded in night, and loved him. She had just told him he was going to die, and he had a soul generous enough to think of others. She started to say, “Depends on whether any of their ancestors intermarried with—” when his rage overcame his generosity.
"You're a fucking geneticist! You and the entire United States government couldn't come up with an antidote or vaccine or something!"
"No. Do you think we didn't try?"
"Why didn't you kill them all as soon as you found them?"
Katherine didn't answer. Either he hadn't meant the question, or he had. If it had been just more terrified rage, she certainly didn't blame him. If he meant it, nothing she could say would make it clear to him.
He said bitterly, “There were political considerations, right? Ten years ago it was fucking President DuBois, working so hard to undo the wrongs of the previous screw-ups, ending the war with compassion, re-establishing our fucking position as the so-called moral leader of the world, and so now Ann is dead and I have to....” Abruptly his anger ran out.
She waited a long moment and then uttered what she knew to be, the moment she said it, the stupidest, most futile statement of her entire life. “I'm sorry."
He didn't hear it. She sat dreading his reply, and it was a full minute, more, before she realized there wouldn't ever be one. Baker Tully still sat with his head thrown back in fury and anguish against the mobile's rear wheel, but when she felt for his wrist, there was no pulse.
Six hours, then, from the time of initial exposure.
He was too heavy for her to move, but nobody would find him there before morning. She returned to the tent where the villagers had laid Ann Lionti's body and told everyone that Baker was mourning alone, in the trailer. Katherine checked on the patients in the medical tent, issued instructions, and drank coffee to stay awake for the few hours until everyone else slept. Then she removed the distributor caps from the three working vehicles in the small camp and carried them with her inside the DDR mobile, where the children waited.
* * * *
"Why doesn't she come? Why doesn't she come? Why doesn't she come?” Sudie made the words into a song, and it made Li's face itch. But he didn't let his kindness get used up. Maybe the song helped Sudie wait.
Eventually, however, she fell asleep, and so did Kim. Jana and Li waited. In the light from the car's sky, Jana's hair looked yellow as the big morning. She smelled bad because none of them had splashed in a pool since the first world broke, but Li put his arms around her anyway, just to feel her warmth.
Finally—finally!—the door opened and Taney came in. This time Li really looked at her, at Taney without her covering. Her face was wrinkled. Her eyes sagged. She walked as if something was broken, pulling herself up the square sky-metal rocks by holding onto the edge of the leaving door. Slowly she sat on a chair. Li's heart filled with love.
"Taney,” Jana said softly, breaking free of Li's arms and climbing onto Taney's lap. “I knew we'd find you."
"No, you didn't,” Li said. He sat on the ground at Taney's feet. “Taney, I have a lot of questions."
"I'm sure you have, dear heart,” Taney said, and there was something wrong with her voice. “So do I. Let me ask mine first."
So Li and Jana told her about the break in the world, and Jack and Sally, and sitting beside the broken car on the wide hot path when Ann and Baker came along. Sudie snored and Kim whuffled in her sleep.
"Taney, why were we in that world and not this one?” Li said.
"Tell you what, I'll answer all your questions in the morning,” Taney said. “I'm very tired right now and so are you. Look, Jana's almost asleep! You lie down here and sleep. I'm going to see about the other people once more."
"Okay,” Li said, because he was sleepy.
Taney kissed them all, covered them with blankets, and left. Li heard the leaving door make a noise behind her.
* * * *
A voice in Katherine's head said, Even the most passionate minds are capable of trivial thoughts during tragedy.
Standing there in the dark, it took her a long moment to identify the speaker: Some professor back in college, droning on about some Shakespearian play. Why had that random memory come to her now? She even recalled the next thing he said: that only third-rate dramatists put children in peril to create emotion, which was one reason Shakespeare was infinitely superior to Thomas Hardy.
That professor had been an ass. Children were always the first ones put in peril by upheavals in the world. But not like this ... not like this.
She unscrewed the gas cap of the DDR mobile and drew the lighter from her pocket. Used for starting campfires at the center of the kindling, it could flick out a long projection that generated a shower of sparks. The village's distributor caps were inside the mobile. Baker's body lay beside it. Everybody else, marooned here, would be dead by morning, except those with no European ancestry in their genes. And although she'd spent the ten years in Las Verdes mostly keeping to herself, Katherine was pretty sure no such Indians existed in the small village. If they did, they might conceivably be turned into carriers, like Li and Jana and Kim and Sudie, but Katherine didn't think so. The children had been designed to be carriers. Their genomes showed many little-understood variations. The enemy, free from laws against genetic experimentation, had done so with a vengeance.
When all hosts died, so did their viruses.
She clicked the lighter and the projection snaked out, already glowing. Her hand moved toward the fuel tank, then drew back.
I can't.
But what were the alternatives? Let the children, locked inside, die of starvation. Or, either if they were picked up by other people or if Li somehow learned to drive the mobile as he had Jack's car, to let them infect more people, who would infect still others, until the air-borne virus with a 100 percent kill rate had, at a minimum, wiped out two continents. Who in hell could decide among those three choices?
Katherine had fought for these children's lives, had tended them for ten years, had loved them as her own. What mother would choose the deaths of her children over the fate of the world?
> What rational human being would not?
Hail Mary, Mother of God. ... More useless words, rising out of her distant past like subterranean rocks in an earthquake. Her hand again moved toward the fuel tank, again drew back.
She couldn't do it. It was physically impossible, like suddenly flying up into the air. And in less than a few hours she, too, would be dead, and none of this would matter to her any longer. That, too, was a choice: to do nothing.
From beyond the ruined village came wailing, many voices at once. So everyone hadn't gone to sleep, after all. The Indians were holding a ritual mourning for the three dead in the quake. Sudden light flared in the darkness: a bonfire.
Katherine clicked off the lighter and sank hopelessly to the ground. In a moment she would do it, in just another moment. The explosion would be violent and instantaneous; the children would not suffer ... in just a moment. There was no other choice. Light found its way to her eyes, and she closed them because in such a world there should not be even the flickering light of the bonfire, let alone the steady lying beauty of the silver moon in the wide desert sky.
* * * *
She woke at dawn. Cold, stiff, shivering—but alive.
With enormous effort, Katherine got to her feet. Limping, she made her way to the medical tent. Everyone in it was dead. So were the villagers in the emergency inflatables, and an old man lying beside the ashes of the bonfire. Only Katherine lived.
Trembling, she hobbled back to the mobile, climbed the steps, and unlocked the door. Only Kim was awake, tearing at a loaf of bread with her small sharp teeth. She took one look at Katherine, dropped the bread, and began to lick Katherine's face. Katherine, stretched almost to breaking, started to shove Kim away ... and stopped.
No. Not possible.
Li woke. “Taney!” he said, rubbing his dark eyes. “I was sleeping."
"Yes.” It was a croak. Li noticed ... those dark eyes, that quick little mind, missed nothing.
"You said you will answer my questions today."
"Yes.” Her arms were tight around Kim, so tight the child squirmed. When had Katherine put her arms around Kim, who usually had to be shoved away? She couldn't remember, couldn't think.... She got out, “Li, when does Kim lick people's faces?"