I said mildly, “There isn't too much money since Jack left. Just enough for the rent."
“That asshole ... but that's not what I meant and you know it. Why haven't you replaced those old curtains and sofa with nano ones? And that TV! You could get a real big one, with an unbelievable picture."
I put my elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “I'll tell you the truth, Em: I don't know. I get nano food and diapers, and I got some school clothes for Will, but anything else ... I don't know."
“You're just being an idiot!” she said. She almost shouted it—way too angry for just my saggy sofa. I reached out and pulled off the sloping hat. Emma's eye was swollen nearly shut, and every color of squash in my garden.
All at once she started sobbing. “Ted ... he never done anything like that before ... it's terrible on men, being laid off ! They get so bored and mad—"
“He wasn't laid off, he quit,” I said, but gently.
“Same thing! He just scowls himself around the house, yells at the kids—they're glad to be back in school, let me tell you!—and criticizes everything I do, or he orders Scotch from the nano—did order it until Mayor Johnson outlawed any nano liquor and—"
“He did? The mayor did?” I said, startled.
“Yeah. And so last Thursday, Ted and I had this big fight, and ... and...” Suddenly she changed tone. “You don't know anything, Carol! You sit here safe and alone, thinking you're so superior to nano, just like you always acted so superior to poor Jack—oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that!"
“Probably you did,” I said evenly, “but it's all right. Really it is, Em."
All at once she got defiant. “You're thinking I'm just dumping on you because Ted hit me. Well, I'm not. It was only that once, most of the time he's a good husband. Our new house by the lake will be done in a few more weeks and then everything'll be better!"
I didn't see how, but all I said was, “I'll bet the house is pretty."
“It's gorgeous! It's got a blue-brick fireplace in the living room—blue bricks! And it's equipped with just everything, all those robo-appliances like you see on TV—I won't have to do hardly anything!"
“I can't wait to see it,” I said.
“You'll love it,” she said, put her hat back on so it covered her eye, and stared at me with triumph and fear.
* * * *
I pulled Will out of school to home-school him. He didn't mind once I got the Bellingham grandkids to school at my place, and then Caddie Alghren. The Bellinghams were farmers going bust. Mr. Bellingham was still doing dairy, though, even while his crops rotted in the fields. Mrs. Bellingham's always been sickly and she never struck me as real smart. But Hal Bellingham is smart, and he looked at me real sharp when I said I would home-school his grandkids because the teachers were all quitting.
“Not all, Carol."
“No, not yet. And some won't quit. But the government's not getting much tax money because nobody's earning and the TV says that the government is taking itself apart bit by bit.” I didn't understand that, but Mr. Bellingham looked like he might. “How many teachers'll stay when they can't get paid at all?"
“That time's a ways off."
“Maybe."
“What makes you think you can teach my grandkids? Begging your pardon, but you don't look or sound like a college graduate."
“I'm not. But I did good in high school, and I guess I can teach first- and second-graders. At any rate, in my living room they'll be safe from the kinds of vandalism you see all around town now."
“What'll you use for books?"
“We have some kids’ books, I'll get more out of the library as long as it lasts, and we'll make books, the kids and me. It's fun to write your own stories, and they can read each other's."
“You aren't going to get books from the nanomachinery?"
“No.” I said it flat out, and we looked at each other, sitting there in the Bellinghams’ big farm kitchen with its old-fashioned microwave.
He said, “Who's going to watch your two little ones while you teach?"
“Kitty Svenson."
“What's she get out of it?"
“That's between me and her."
“And what do you want in return?"
“Milk, and a share of the spring calves you might have sent to market, slaughtered and with the meat dressed. You aren't going to be able to get in enough hay to feed them anyway."
He got up, walked in his farm boots around his kitchen, and looked at me again. “Do you watch the news, Carol?"
“Not much. Little kids take a lot out of you."
“You should watch. Vandalism isn't limited to what we got in Clifford Falls."
I didn't say anything.
“All right, the kids will be home-schooled by you. But here, not at your place. I'll clear out the big back bedroom for you, and Kitty can use the kitchen. Mattie'll like the company. But before you agree, there's somebody I want you to meet."
“Who?"
“Suspicious little thing, aren't you? Come with me."
We went out to the barn. The cows were in the pasture, and the hayloft half empty. In an old tack room that the Bellinghams had turned into an apartment for a long-ago cattle manager, a pretty young woman sat in front of a metal table. I blinked.
The whole room was full of strange equipment, along with freezers and other stuff I recognized. The woman wore a white lab coat, like doctors on TV. She stood and smiled at us.
“This is Amelia Parsons,” Bellingham said. “She used to work for Camry Biotech, which just went out of business. She's a crop geneticist."
“Hello,” she said, holding out her hand. Women like her make me nervous. Too polished, too educated. They all had it too easy. But I shook her hand; I'm not rude.
“Amelia's working on creating an apomictic corn plant. That's corn that doesn't need pollination, that can produce its own seeds asexually, like non-hybrid varieties once did, and like blackberries and mangos and some roses do now. Apomictic corn would keep all the good traits of hybrid corn, maybe even with added benefits, but farmers wouldn't have to buy seed every year."
“I couldn't work on this very much at Camry,” Amelia said to me. Her pretty face glowed. Her red hair was cut in one of those complicated city cuts. “Even though apomixis was my doctoral thesis. The biotech company wanted us to work on things that were more immediately profitable. But now that I don't need to earn a salary, that oversight agencies are pretty much dismantling, and that I can get the equipment I need from nano ... well, nano makes it possible for me to do some real work!"
I smiled at her again, because I didn't have anything to say. There was a baby-food stain on my jeans and I moved my hand to cover it.
“Thanks, Amelia,” Hal Bellingham said. “See you later."
On the way back to the house, he said quietly, “I just wanted you to see the other side, Carol."
I didn't answer.
* * * *
My little school started on Monday. Caddie Alghren, whose mother had been killed by a drunk driver last spring, clung to me at first, but Will and she were friends and as long as she could sit next to him, she was all right. The three Bellingham kids were well-behaved and smart. Kitty watched Kimee and Jackie in the kitchen and helped Mattie Bellingham. At night Kitty went home with me, because her stepfather had started to come into her room at night. Nothing real bad had happened yet, but she hated him and was glad to babysit for her keep.
After the kids finally got to sleep each night, Kitty and I watched the TV, like Hal said, and saw what was happening in the cities. A lot of people won't work if they don't have to. But a lot of people not working means a lot of broken things don't get fixed. Nano can make water pipes and schoolbooks and buses and toilets. It can't install them or tech them or drive them. The cities were getting to be pretty scary places.
Clifford Falls wasn't that bad. But it wasn't all that far out from the city, either. Kitty and I were watching TV one night, the kids in bed, when the door b
urst open and two men rushed in.
“Look at this—not just the one, two of them,” one man said, while I was already reaching for the phone. He got there first and knocked it out of my hand. “Not that it would help you, lady. Not a lot of police left. Kenny, I'll take this one and you take the fat girl."
Kitty had shrunk back against the sofa. I tried to think fast. The kids—if I could just keep any noise from waking the kids, the men might not even know they were there. Then no matter what happened to us, the kids would be safe. But if Will saw either of their faces, if he could identify them ... and Kitty, Kitty was only fifteen....
I said quickly, “Leave her alone. She doesn't know how to do anything, she won't be any fun for you. If you leave her alone, I'll let you both do me. I won't even fight. I'd be a lot more fun for you.” My gorge rose and I tasted vomit.
The two men looked at each other. Finally “Kenny” shrugged and said, “The fat one's ugly, anyway."
The other one nodded and his piggy eyes gleamed. Noise—the important thing was no noise. I got down on the floor and unzipped my jeans. Oh, God—but no noise, no noise to wake the kids, and I had to protect Kitty, God, fifteen....
My head exploded.
No, not my head, the head leering above me. Blood and brains splattered over me. Then there was a second shot and the other man went down. I staggered up, puked, and heard Will and Kimee screaming. When I could see again, the kids stood in the doorway, clinging together, and Kitty still sat on the sofa, the gun in her hand.
She was the calmest one there, at least on the outside. “I stole it to use on my stepfather if I had to, just before you said I could live here. Carol—” Then she started shaking.
“It's okay,” I said stupidly and, my own hand trembling, picked up the phone to call the cops.
I got a recording at 911. “I'm sorry, but due to reduced manpower, your call may have to wait. Please stay on the line until—” I hung up and called Barry Anderson's cell.
It was turned off. When he finally got there, three hours later, he said it was the only sleep he'd had in two days. His deputy quit last week and left for Florida. By that time I'd gotten the kids back to sleep, the room and myself cleaned up, and Kitty to stop shaking.
The next day, Hal Bellingham moved us all out to the farm.
* * * *
By spring, there were fifty-four of us on the farm, plus ten kids. And in the spring, Jack came back.
I was coming out of the lamb barn with Will, who saw Jack first. He cried, “Daddy!” and my heart froze. Then Will was running across the muddy yard and throwing himself into Jack's arms. I trailed slowly behind.
“How'd you get past the guards?” I said.
“Bellingham let me in. What kind of set-up you got going here, anyway?"
I didn't answer, just stared at him. He looked good. Well-fed, well-dressed, maybe a little heavier but still the handsomest man ever to come out of Clifford Falls. This was how Will, beaming in his daddy's arms, would look in twenty years.
Jack reddened slightly. “Why are you living here, Carol? Don't tell me you and old Bellingham..."
“That would be what you'd think. The answer is no."
Did he look relieved? “Then why—"
“Mommy's my teacher!” Will shouted. “And I can write whole sentences!"
“Good for you,” Jack said. To me he suddenly blurted, “Carol, I don't know how to say this, but I'm so sorry, I—"
“Where's Chrissie? You get tired of her the way you did of me?"
“No, she ... who the hell is that?"
His eyes almost bugged out of his head, and well they might. Denny Bonohan strolled out of the house, dressed in one of his costumes. Denny's gay, which was hard enough for me to take, but he's also an actor, which is even worse because he strolls out to do his share of guard duty dressed in outlandish things he and the other two actors brought with them. Now he wore tights with a bright tunic almost as long as a dress, all in shades of gold. Hal is amused by him but I think Denny's loony and I won't let the kids be alone with him. My right, Hal says in his quiet way, and what Hal says goes.
I said, “That's my new boyfriend.” I said it to make Jack mad but instead he threw back his head and laughed, his white teeth gleaming in the sunshine.
“Not you, Carol. Never. I know you that much, anyways."
“What are you doing here, Jack?"
“I want to see my kids. And I want ... I want you, Carol. I miss you. I was wrong, as wrong as a man can be. Please take me back."
Jack apologizing was always hard to resist, although it's not like he ever did all that much of it. Will clung hard to his father's neck. Also, an old sweet feeling was slipping into me, along with the anger. I wanted to hit him, I wanted to hug him. I wanted to curl up inside him again.
“It's up to the Council if you can stay here."
“Here?"
“We aren't leaving, the kids and me."
He took a deep breath. “What's the Council? What do I have to do?"
“You have to start by talking to Hal. If Denny's on guard duty, Hal's probably coming off."
“Guard duty?” Jack said, bewildered.
“Yeah, Jack. You're back in the army now. Only this time, we all enlisted."
“I don't..."
“Come on,” I said roughly. “It's up to a vote of the Council. For my part, I don't give a damn what you do."
“You're lying,” he said softly, in that special voice we used between us, and I damned him all over again because it was true.
* * * *
July again, and we are eighty-seven people now. Word spreads. About half are people who fled nano, like me. The other half embraced it because it lets them do whatever they'd wanted to do before. Some of those ones have their own nanomachines, little ones, made of course by other nanomachines. Hal allows them to use nano to produce things for their jobs, but not to make food or clothing or shelter or anything else we all need to survive, except for some medicines, and we're working on that.
The two kinds of people here don't always get along very well. We have five actors, Amelia the geneticist, and two other scientists, one of them studying something about the stars. We have a man writing fiction, an inventor, and, finally, a real teacher. Also two organic farmers, a sculptor, a man who carves and puts together furniture all without nails, and, of all things, the United States chess champion, who can't find anyone good enough to play with and so plays against our old computer.
He also farms and does guard duty and lays pipe and cleans and cans and cooks, of course. Like all the rest of us. The things that the chess player didn't know how to do, which was everything, we taught him. Just like Hal, who was a Marine once, taught us all to shoot.
It's pretty bad out there now, although the TV says it's getting better as “society adjusts to this most cataclysmic of social changes.” I don't know if that's true or not. I guess it varies. There was a lot of rioting and disease and fires. Some places have some government left, some places don't, some are like us now, mostly our own government, although Hal and two educated women keep our taxes filed and all that. One of the women told me that we don't have to actually pay taxes because the farm shows a consistent loss. She was a lawyer, but a religious lawyer. She says nano is Satan's work.
Amelia Parsons says nano is a gift from God.
Me, I think something different. I think nano is a sorter. The old sorting used to put the people with money and education and nice things in one pile and the rest of us in another. But nano sorts out two different piles: the ones who like to work because work is what you do, and the ones who don't.
It was kind of like everybody won the lottery all at once. I saw a TV show about lottery winners once, a show that followed them around for a year or two after they won real big money. By that time, most of them were worse off than before they won that money: miserable and broke again and with all their relatives mad at them. But some used the money to make nicer lives. And some just gav
e nearly all of it away to charity and went back to taking care of themselves.
Jack lasted two months on the farm. Then he was gone again.
I get email from him every once in a while. Mostly he asks after the kids. He never says where he is or what he's doing instead of working. He never says who he's with, or if he's happy. I guess he is, or he'd come back here. People usually end up doing what makes them happiest, if they can.
A month ago I went with Hal and some others down to the lake to catch fish. A house stood there, burned to the ground, weeds already growing over the blue brick fireplace. In the ashes I found one diamond earring. Which I left there.
Now Kimee is in the garden, waiting for me to pick peas. I'm going to show her how to shell them, too, and how to separate the good pods from the bad ones. She's only five, but it's never too early to learn.
Copyright 2006 Nancy Kress
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* * *
YOU WILL GO TO THE MOON
by William Preston
William Preston teaches English at a small independent school and lives with his wife and daughters in Central New York. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in various literary journals. In his first published fiction, he quietly explores what it may be like when...
I had a hard enough time after my parents moved to Arizona. To picture where they lived, I imagined a map of the country, the states in various colors, the mountain ranges indicated by shadows. This helped me conceive the distance from rural New Jersey to Tucson. Once I'd visited them, I could call to mind the landscape: their isolated house, the red earth, mountains taking in too-vivid sunsets that seemed like the planet's first or last days.
I missed having my parents nearby, of course, but, more, I now lacked an excuse to see my old hometown. With no friends there, I had no reason to drive the two hours to southeastern Pennsylvania, that territory of rolling, innocuous hills, packed with development houses among a few remaining farmers’ fields. My little town, more heavily trafficked than in my childhood, held my whole past, my life before life became settled and responsible. My folks moved, and it cut off my access to that. My town surfaced in dreams, though always with me in towering buildings that hadn't existed, trying to work my way downstairs to the main street and its tidy brick buildings and Colonial-era stone houses so close to the sidewalk. I was forty, married, with two girls.
Asimov's SF, July 2006 Page 4