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After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A Novel

Page 5

by Nancy Kress


  “Damn it, I’m the father!”

  She drew a deep breath. “Only biologically. I don’t mean that to be nasty, Gordon. You have no room for us in your life, and anyway I don’t want that. I don’t think you do, either, not really. Please just leave me be.”

  “If you need money—”

  “I don’t. Bye, Gordon. I’m sorry about the task force, because I still think there’s something there.”

  “But Julie—”

  Gently she pressed the disconnect button on her cell.

  Within her body, the baby moved, and she put her hand on her belly and watched the lights twinkle on and off on the little Christmas tree above the festive packages.

  2035

  It wasn't dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything. I’m dead, Pete thought, as usual, but of course he wasn’t, as usual.

  When the nothing receded, disappointment warred with relief. There would be no little girls here. But there would be no fighting or dying, either. He stood in dim light inside a store filled with objects he couldn’t even identify until he saw a big doll, life-size, with no head or arms or legs, wearing some of the objects. Oh—it was clothing! Skimpy filmy pants, strips of fancy cloth across the breasts, racks and racks of this stuff… All at once he pictured Caity wearing it, and then McAllister, and his cock rose and he groaned. He couldn’t bring back stuff like this!

  He glanced at his wrist to see how much time he had left, but of course he wasn’t wearing the wrister. Terrell still had it. Now what?

  He ran past the headless dolls wearing fancy skimpy things and discovered that around the corner were other parts of the store, that in fact it was as big as the children’s room, maybe even bigger than the farm. The other areas held different stuff, as well as shopping carts. He grabbed one and started throwing things into it from under a sign labeled HOMEWARES. Blankets, towels, rugs—damn this was good!—and then pots and a big red tray and boxes of spoons and—

  A dog came racing down a set of metal stairs, snarling and barking.

  Pete screamed and climbed on top of the shopping cart, nearly slipping on the red tray and falling back off. The dog leaped and its teeth closed on Pete’s leg, although only for a moment before the animal’s weight sent it crashing back to the floor. Pete screamed, grabbed the tray, and held it in front of him. With his other hand he yanked a pot free of the stuff in the shopping cart and threw it at the dog, missing it. How much time was left—how much? Blood streamed down his leg.

  The dog leapt again, but it couldn’t reach Pete on top of the cart. However, the impact of its body sent the cart skittering across the floor. Alarms sounded and lights came on. The dog barked and Pete shrieked at it.

  The cart rolled past a display of DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, heavy-looking metal squares. Pete grabbed one. Before he could throw it at the dog, the Grab took him back.

  On the platform, the rolling shopping cart kept rolling. It crashed over the edge and tipped on its side. Pete fell heavily amid pots, rugs, blankets. For a moment his head rang, but nothing on him broke and he staggered up out of the debris, clutching the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME and more furious than he’d ever been in his life.

  He roared at Tommy, “Where the fuck is Ravi?”

  The child was not a weeper. He stared back, scared but not budging, and said, “Where did you go?”

  Others rushed into the Grab room: Darlene, Paolo, Eduardo. From down the corridor Caity and Jenna, who could not leave the children, screamed, “What is it? What is it?” But no Ravi, and no McAllister.

  Pete pushed past everyone and ran down the corridor to the unused far end. Behind him Darlene cackled, “Oh, lovely, an electric fryer! Just what we need!”

  Paolo, unable to keep up, called, “Wait, Pete! Wait!”

  Tommy, easily able to keep up, ran beside him saying, “What is it? What, Pete? What?”

  He found them in the maze of rooms near the tip of the Shell. A blanket had been spread on the floor. McAllister had just slid her loose dress back onto her body, but Ravi was still naked, lying on the blanket, too drained and heavy to move. Pete recognized Ravi’s sated heaviness; he’d felt it after sex with Caity. But never with McAllister: never, never, never.

  She said, “Pete—”

  “You fucking bastards.”

  Tommy gaped. “What is it? What?”

  In rage and hurt and frustration, and before he knew he was going to do it, Pete threw the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME at McAllister. It grazed her on the side of the head and she cried out. Ravi leapt up and threw a punch at Pete. Pete dodged, Ravi missed, and Pete kicked him in the balls.

  “Stop! That’s enough!” McAllister shouted. But it wasn’t her words, or even that she shouted—McAllister, who never raised her voice! It was the blood on her head, streaming down one cheek. He had hurt McAllister. He collapsed to the ground in tears.

  Ravi was up and charging, but McAllister stopped him with a word. She bent over Pete. Now Paolo and Eduardo and Darlene were all there; Pete could see their bare feet from where he huddled on the floor. McAllister sent them all away with sharp commands, even Ravi, who snatched up his clothes as he left.

  “Pete,” she said, her voice soft again, “listen to me. Ravi—”

  “You never would with me! You said it would cause trouble! You said for the good of all—”

  “I know what I said. But listen to me, dear heart. Please listen, I know you’re strong enough to listen. This is for the good of all. Ravi is fertile.”

  He stopped ranting, too desolate even for rage.

  “You know I checked all of your sperm with the little microscope Jenna got on her Wal-Mart Grab. Ravi is the only one of you who is fertile. He’s had sex with both Caity and Jenna, and neither got pregnant, and now Jenna is too fragile. This is the only chance left among ourselves.”

  “We have the Grab kids!”

  “Yes, of course. But we need every soul we can get, you know that. The Tesslies could end the Grabs at any time. And we miss some of them.”

  “Well, Ravi just missed his. And so did Terrell because he was throwing up—did you know that? So I just did the Grab and nearly got killed!” He tried to wrench free of her, but McAllister held on and the truth was that he didn’t want to get free.

  He wanted what Ravi had had.

  He put a hand on her breast. When she removed it, he forced her down onto the blanket.

  “No, Pete,” she said, calm as ever, “I know you wouldn’t do that. That’s not you. Dear heart, please try to understand. You have a deep, sweet nature and I know you can understand. For the good of all.”

  He let her up, gazing bleakly at the blood on her face. “I hurt you.”

  “And I hurt you. I’m deeply sorry for that, but we need to survive.”

  He said fiercely, “Did you like it?”

  She touched his eyelids, one after the other, a delicate finger-kiss.

  “Because Ravi liked it! I know!”

  “I love you, Pete. I love you all.”

  He got to his feet and seized the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Something had to be his, something had to be outside of the “good of all,” something had to be… He didn’t know what his confused thoughts meant. But he said defiantly, stupidly, “I’m keeping this!”

  “All right,” McAllister said.

  “It’s mine! Just mine!” Nothing ever belonged to one person, nothing.

  “All right,” she repeated.

  He clutched it, scowling at her, hating her, loving her. The silence stretched on. She waited, but he didn’t know for what. For him to say something, for him to look away.

  He looked away, down at the object in his hand, and said, “What is it?”

  APRIL 2014

  Under the Canadian glacier, molten rock bubbled up from a fissure in the earth. When the pressure became great enough, the ground erupted. Lava met ice, which instantly boiled into steam. The magma hitting the steam exploded into miniscule fragments, sending pillar after pillar of ash billowing overhead. The ma
gma was heavy on silica from the chamber it had breached earlier, which made it much more viscous and sticky than usual. That prevented air bubbles from escaping quickly and so pressure built relentlessly, leading to more and more explosions.

  Ash blew southeast on a cold wind, toward Ontario and Quebec.

  APRIL 2014

  Julie sat in the Starbucks on K Street. Linda had just left, full of plans for her family, Julie, and the baby to take a cottage together in August on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “The baby’ll be nearly four months by then, and it’ll be such fun!” Julie wasn’t sure about that—two weeks with Linda’s noisy kids and noisier dogs? On the other hand, two weeks with Linda and Ted would be fun. Or two weeks in separate, side-by-side cottages. Or two weeks someplace else.

  She frowned at the out-of-town newspaper she’d bought at World Wide News. The headlines were all about air traffic hopelessly snarled in Canada by blowing and drifting ash, but that was not what she stared at. Was it or wasn’t it? Then, wryly: I sound like a Clairol commercial. And not even a current commercial. She was showing her age.

  Again she read the short, not-very-informative article about the burglary in a small town in western Massachusetts, which was one of the projected paths of her original algorithm. A family-owned department store, one of the few left in the country, had been robbed of a collection of miscellaneous objects, primarily blankets, rugs, and cookware. Also a shopping cart, which was considered “an unusual theft for this kind of burglary.” Julie wasn’t sure what “kind of burglary” the small-town news stringer meant, but she knew what she was looking at. Shopping cart, no forced entry. This time, however, the store had had a guard dog, which had not been harmed. Drops of blood on the floor indicated that the “perpetrator” might have been harmed, but the police had as yet made no arrests.

  Whose blood?

  “May I sit here? There don’t seem to be any free tables.”

  He was tall, attractive, dressed in a suit and tie. He carried the Wall Street Journal, folded to show the headline: FINANCIAL IMPACT OF COMING FRESH WATER SHORTAGES. Glancing at her ringless left hand, he smiled and sat down without waiting for an invitation. Julie stood, and as soon as the curve of her belly under her open coat came into view, his smile vanished.

  Julie grinned. “Sure, the table’s all yours.”

  Relief on that handsome face.

  She buttoned her coat and waddled out. The OB had said she was gaining too much weight, once she’d stopped throwing up, but that otherwise everything was “progressing swimmingly,” a phrase she had liked instantly. Little Alicia, swimming in her secret sea. The baby now had fully developed toenails. Her body could store calcium and phosphorus. She had begun to show the brain waves of REM sleep. What will you dream of, my darling?

  Julie left Starbucks. Walking was supposed to be good for her, so she walked even though she had piles of work at home. Consulting work for a high-resolution space imagery firm, for a professor doing research on microbes, even for the Bureau, in a division different from Gordon’s. Everybody, it seemed, needed well-recommended and high-priced mathematical insight. Things were working out well.

  The air was crisp and cold, unusually cold for March. Julie walked briskly. Some kids who probably should have been in school ran frantically in the pocket park across the street, trying to get a kite aloft. Daffodils and tulips splotched the park with color.

  Whose blood had been on the floor of that department store in western Massachusetts?

  2035

  The DIGITAL FOTO FRAME held pictures that moved out of the frame so the next one could come in. Pete had never imagined anything like it. It was even better than the drawings in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales or Goodnight Moon because these pictures looked far more real. There were three, and Pete never tired of looking at them. He wouldn’t let any others of the Six look at them, and for once McAllister did not insist that he share.

  One of the pictures was of two children playing with a dog. This didn’t look anything like the dog that had attacked Pete in the store. This dog was reddish and happy-looking, but Pete didn’t like it anyway and sometimes he closed his eyes when that picture appeared. The other two were glorious. One was a beach like the place where he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara, but with mountains across the water, colored gold by a setting sun. The other showed a forest filled with trees and flowers. Pete had never seen mountains or sunset, but on Grabs he’d seen sunrise, several trees, and some flowers, and now it was wonderful to sit and gaze at them without the fear and tension of a Grab.

  “Why aren’t there more pictures?” he asked Eduardo. He was avoiding McAllister. It was a complaint, not a real question, but Eduardo had a real answer.

  “There could be more if we had them to upload,” he said in his soft accent. “These are just demonstration photos. You understand that the battery will run out eventually?”

  “Of course,” Pete said scornfully. Some of the children’s toys from Jenna’s famous Grab had used batteries, which all died.

  “The more you use it, the less long it will last.”

  “I know.” But he couldn’t stop gazing at the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME.

  He held it, clutched in one hand, during Xiaobo’s funeral. The funeral room, located off the central corridor across from the Grab room, was yet another featureless white-metal room. There was absolutely nothing in it except the outline of the slot on the far wall, close to the floor, and the button set high on the opposite wall, by the door. Caity, Eduardo, Terrell, McAllister, Darlene, Ravi, and Pete attended the funeral. Also Tommy, now that he was nearly eight. Jenna and Paolo stayed with the Grab children.

  It was Tommy’s first funeral and he held tight to McAllister’s hand, although to Pete he looked more interested than scared. Tommy was tough. Well, good. He’d have an easier time of it than some of the children. Kara still screamed every time she saw Pete.

  Ravi, another tough one, stared down at Xiaobo’s body, wrapped in their oldest blanket. On top of the body, as was the custom, lay one small thing that the dead person had cherished. For Xiaobo, it was a little stone statue of a fat smiling man that Xiaobo had had with him all the way back when the Tesslies put him in the Shell. Bridget had gone with a lock of hair from a baby of hers that had been stillborn.

  Ravi’s face remained blank. Caity and Terrell leaned against the wall, tearful. Darlene, Eduardo, and McAllister, the last of the Survivors, had so many feelings on their faces that Pete could barely look at them.

  His own feelings troubled him, because there didn’t seem to be enough of them. He’d known Xiaobo his whole life, had worked beside him, eaten with him, probably been diapered by him when Pete was a baby. They hadn’t talked much, given Xiaobo’s limited English, but he’d always been kind to Pete, to everyone. Right up until this last illness, Xiaobo had been a hard worker. And all Pete felt was that he should feel more, along with a vague curiosity about what it felt like to be dead. Darlene said that the ghosts of billions murdered by the Tesslies haunted the Shell. But Pete had never seen a ghost at all, and anyway where in the Shell could you fit billions of them? He wasn’t exactly sure how much a “billion” was, but it sounded large.

  Eduardo said in his musical voice, “As for man, his days are like grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” That was what he always said at funerals, and Pete always hated it. It sounded sad, and anyway it was stupid. Xiaobo wasn’t grass—people were made of skin and bones and blood. There was no wind inside the Shell. And this place certainly would remember Xiaobo. Pete would, and so would the other Six and Darlene and Eduardo and, of course, McAllister.

  Her words made more sense. “To the Earth we commit the body of our friend and family, Lung Xiaobo. His bones and tissues and heart will enrich the land and help to make it one to which humanity will, someday, return. Go with our gratitude, Xiaobo, and our love.”

  Darlene began to sing, another of her awf
ul scratchy songs with words Pete didn’t understand. There were so many things he didn’t understand, starting with how McAllister could bear to have sex with Ravi. He hated him, he hated her, he hated everything. He clutched his DIGITAL FOTO FRAME tighter.

  Darlene howled, “‘Abide with me, ’tis eventide…’”

  When the song was finished, McAllister pressed the funeral button. A section of the wall opened, a slot near the floor three feet wide and two high. Xiaobo didn’t need that much room. Some unseen force pulled him into the wall. Tommy squatted to peer inside, just as Pete had done when he was little. Now, after being present at three funerals for Survivors and six for miscarriages, Pete knew there was nothing to see. The slot opened into a small bare featureless space, and the other side wouldn’t open to deposit Xiaobo’s body Outside until the first wall closed up.

  Darlene bawled another song, this one about the land being beautiful with spacious skies and a lot of grain, but Pete wasn’t listening. He watched Ravi, who had turned his gaze to McAllister. Ravi looked the way he used to when there was a treat Grabbed from a store—oh, those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!—and Ravi had tried to figure a way to get a bite of another child’s share. Pete’s hand tightened on the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He wanted to throw it at Ravi, to get his hands around Ravi’s neck and squeeze… No, he didn’t. Ravi was his half-brother. Yes, he did—Ravi had sex with McAllister, he was going to have more sex with McAllister, Pete wanted to kill him—

  Ravi caught Pete’s look and glared back.

  The funeral was over. People moved away, returning to their duties. Caity stomped off, covering whatever softer feelings she had with vague bad temper. Pete lingered, and Tommy stayed with him. When they were the only two left in the funeral room, Tommy demanded, “How does McAllister know that the fucking bastard Tesslies will really put Xiaobo’s body Outside to help grass to come back?”

 

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