“I hate her, Mommy.”
“No, you don’t. But Kyra is getting all the attention and—” She sighed and held me tighter. It was nice, even though I’m too big to be held tight like that.
“Is Kyra going to go on TV?”
“No. Aunt Julie and I agreed to keep both of you off TV and magazines and whatever.”
“Kyra’s been on lots of magazines.”
“Not by choice.”
“Mommy,” I said, because it was safe sitting there on her lap and the cookies smelled good, “what did Kyra do in the spaceship?”
Her chest got stiff. “We don’t know. Kyra can’t remember. Unless ... unless she told you something, Amy?”
“She says she can’t remember.”
I twisted to look at Mommy’s face. “So how come they still send presents? It was last year!”
I know.” Mommy put me on the floor and opened the oven to poke at the cookies. They smelled wonderful.
“And,” I demanded, “how come Uncle John doesn’t come home anymore?”
Mommy bit her lip. “Would you like a cookie, Amy?”
“Yes. How come?”
“Sometimes people just—”
“Are Aunt Julie and Uncle John getting a divorce? Because of Kyra?”
“No. Kyra is not responsible here, and you just remember that, young lady! I don’t want you making her feel, more confused than she is!”
I ate my cookie. Kyra wasn’t confused. She was a cry-baby and a Barbie hog and I hated her. I didn’t want her to be my cousin anymore.
What was so great about going into some stupid spaceship, anyway? Nothing. She couldn’t even remember anything about it!
Mommy put her hands over her face.
2008
Whispers broke out all over the cafeteria. “That’s her ... her ... her!”
Oh, shit. I bent my head over my milk. Last year the cafeteria used to serve fizzies and Coke and there were vending machines with candy and chips, but the new principal took all that out. He’s a real bastard. Part of the “Clean Up America” campaign our new president is forcing down our throats, Dad said. Only he didn’t say “forcing” because he thinks it’s cool, like all the Carter Falls High parents do. Supervision for kids. School uniforms. Silent prayer. A mandatory class in citizenship. Getting expelled for everything short of breathing. It all sucks.
“It is her,” Jack said. “I saw her picture online.”
Hannah said, “What do you suppose they really did to her in that ship when she was a little kid?”
Angie giggled and licked her lips. She has a really dirty mind. Carter, who’s sort of a goody-goody even though he’s on the football team, said, “It’s none of our business. And she was just a little kid.”
“So?” Angie smirked. “You never heard of pedophiles?”
Hannah said, “Pedophile aliens? Grow up, Angie.”
Jack said, “She’s kind of cute.”
“I thought you wanted a virgin, Jack,” Angie said, still smirking.
Carter said, “Oh, give her a break. She just moved here, after all.”
I watched Kyra walk uncertainly toward the cafeteria tables. The monitors were keeping a close eye on everybody. We have monitors everywhere, just like the street has National Guard everywhere. Clean up America, my ass. Kyra squinted; she’s near-sighted and doesn’t like to wear her contacts because she says they itch. I ducked lower over my milk.
Angie said, “Somebody told me Kyra Lunden is your cousin.”
Everybody’s head jerked to look at me. Damn that bitch Angie! Where had she heard that? Mom had promised me that nobody in school would know and Kyra wouldn’t say anything! She and Aunt Julie had to move, Mom and Dad said, because Aunt Julie was having a rough time since the divorce and she needed to be close to her sister, and I should understand that. Well, I did, I guess, but not if Kyra blasted in and ruined everything for me. This was my school, not hers, I spent a lot of time getting into the good groups, the ones I was never part of in junior high, and no pathetic famous cousin was going to wreck that. She couldn’t even dance.
Jack said, “Kyra Lunden is your cousin, Amy? Really?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
Angie said, “That’s not what I heard.”
Carter said, “So it’s just gossip? You can hurt people that way, Angie.”
“God, Carter, don’t you ever let up? Holier-than-thou!”
Carter mottled red. Hannah, who likes him even though Carter doesn’t know it, said, “It’s nice that some people at least try to be kind to others.”
“Spit it in your soup, Hannah,” Angie said.
Jack and Hannah exchanged a look. They really make the decisions for the group, and for a bunch of other groups, too. Angie’s too stupid to realize that, or to realize that she’s going to be oozed out. I don’t feel sorry for her. She deserves it, even if being oozed is really horrible. You walk through the halls alone, and nobody looks directly at you, and people laugh at you behind your back because you can’t even keep your own friends. Still, Angie deserves it.
Hannah looked at me straight, with that look Jack calls her “police interrogation gaze.” “Amy ... is Kyra Lunden your cousin?”
Kyra sat alone at one end of a table. A bunch of kids, the really cobra ones that run the V-R lab, sat at the other end, kind of laughing at her without laughing. I saw Eleanor Murphy, who was elected Queen of V-R Gala even though she’s only a junior, give Kyra a long cool level look and then turn disdainfully away.
“No,” I said, “I already told you. She’s not my cousin. In fact, I never even met her.”
2018
I stared at the villa with disbelief. Not at the guards—everywhere rich is guarded now, we’re a nation of paranoids, perhaps not without reason. There seems no containing the lunatic terrorists, home-grown patriotic militias, White Supremacists and Black Equalizers, not to mention the run-of-the-mill gangs and petty drug lords and black-market smugglers. Plus, of course, the government’s response to these, which sometimes seems to involve putting every single nineteen-year-old in the country out on the streets in camouflage—except, of course, those nineteen-year-olds who are already bespoken as lunatic terrorists, home-grown militia, White Supremacists, et al. The rest of us get on with our normal lives.
So the guards didn’t surprise me—the villa did. It was a miniaturized replica of a Forbidden City palace—in Minnesota.
The chief guard caught me gaping at the swooping curved roof, the gilded archways, the octagonal pagoda. “Papers, please?”
I pulled myself together and looked professional, which is to say, not desperate. I was desperate, of course. But not even Kyra was going to know that.
“I am Madame Lunden’s cousin,” I said formally, “Amy Parker. Madame Lunden is expecting me.”
Forget inscrutable Chinese—the guard looked as suspicious as if I’d said I was a Muslim Turkic Uighur. He examined me, he examined my identity card, he ran the computer match on my retina scan. I walked through metal detectors, explosive residue detectors, detector detectors. I was patted down thoroughly but not obscenely. Finally he let me through the inner gate, watching me all the way through the arch carved with incongruous peacocks and dragons.
Kyra waited in the courtyard beyond the arch. She wore an aggressively fashionable blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front. Her hair was dyed bright blonde and cut in the sharp asymmetrical cut popularized by that Dutch on-line model, Brigitte. In the traditional Chinese courtyard, set with flowering plum trees in porcelain pots and a pool with golden carp, she looked either ridiculous or exotic, depending on your point of view. Point of view was why I was here. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years.
“Hello, Amy,” Kyra said in her low, husky voice.
“Hello, Kyra. Thank you for seeing me.”
“My pleasure.”
Was there mockery in her tone? Probably. If so, I’d earned it. “How is Aunt Julie?�
�
“I have no idea. She refuses to have any contact with me.”
My eyes widened; I hadn’t known that. I should have known that. A good journalist does her homework. Kyra smiled at me, and this time there was no mistaking the mockery. I had stepped in it, and oh God, I couldn’t afford to ruin this interview. My job depended on it. Staff was being cut, and Paul had not axed me only because I said, with the desperation of fear, Kyra Lunden is my cousin. I know she’s refused all other interviews, but maybe ...
Kyra said, “Sit down, Amy. Shall we start? Which service do you write for, again?”
“Times online.”
“Ah, yes. Well, what do you want to know?”
“I thought we’d start with some background. How did you and General Chou meet?”
“At a party.”
“Oh. Where was the party held?” She wasn’t going to help me at all.
Kyra crossed her legs. The expensive blue fabric of the jumpsuit draped becomingly. She looked fabulous; I wondered if she’d had any body work done. But, then, she’d always been pretty, even when she’d been ten and the most famous little girl in the world, blinking bewildered into the clunky TV equipment of sixteen years ago. My robocam drifted beside me, automatically recording us from the most flattering angles.
“The party was at Carol Perez’s,” Kyra said, naming a Washington hostess I’d only seen in the society programs. “I’d met Carol at Yale, of course. I met a lot of people at Yale.”
Yes, she did. By college, Kyra had lost her shyness about what had happened to her when we were ten. She’d developed what sounded like a superb act—we had mutual friends—composed of mystery combined with notoriety. Subtly she reminded people that she had had an experience unique to all of mankind, never duplicated since, and that although she was reluctant to talk about it, yes, it was true that she was undergoing deep hypnosis and it was possible she might remember what actually happened ...
By her junior year, she’d “remembered.” Tastefully, shyly, nothing to make people label her a lunatic. The aliens were small and bipedal, they’d put a sort of helmet on her head and she’d watched holograms while, presumably, they recorded her reactions. ... No, she couldn’t remember any specifics. Not yet, anyway.
Yale ate it up. Intellectuals, especially political types, debated the aliens’ intentions in terms of future United States policy. Artsy preppies’ imaginations were stirred. Socialites decided that Kyra Lunden was an interesting addition to their parties. She was in.
“Carol’s party was at their Virginia home,” Kyra continued. “Diplomats, horse people, the usual. Ch’un-fu and I were introduced, and we both knew right away this could be something special.”
I peered at her. Could she really be that naive? Chou Ch’un-fu had already had two American mistresses. The Han Chinese, Chou’s party, and the United States were now allies, united in their actions against terrorists from the western part of China, the Muslim Turkic Uighurs, who were destabilizing China with their desperate war for independence. The Uighurs would lose. Everyone knew this, probably even the Uighurs. But until they did, they were blowing up things in Peking and Shanghai and San Francisco and London, sometimes in frantic negotiation for money, sometimes with arrogant political manifestos, sometimes, it seemed, out of sheer frustration. The carnage, even in a century used to it, could make a diplomat pale. General Chou was experienced in all this. Press drudges like me don’t get insider data, but rumor linked him with some brutal actions. He maintained a home in Minnesota because it was easy to reach on the rocket flights over the pole.
And Kyra believed they had a “special” romantic relationship?
Incredibly, it seemed she did. As she talked about their meeting, about her life with Chou, I saw no trace of irony, of doubt, of simple confusion. Certainly not of anything approaching shame. I did detect anger, and that was the most intriguing thing about her demeanor. Who was she angry with? Chou? Her mother, that straight-laced paragon who had rejected her? The aliens? Fate?
She deflected all political questions. “Kyra, do you approve of the way the Chinese-American alliance is developing?”
“I approve of the way my life is developing.” Tinkly laugh, undercut with anger.
We toured the villa, and she let me photograph everything, even their bedroom. Huge canopied bed, carved chests, jars of plum blossoms. Chou, or some PR spinner, had decided that a Chinese political partner should appear neither too austere nor too American. China’s past was honored in her present, even as she looked toward the future—that was clearly the message I was to get out. I recorded everything. Kyra said nothing as we toured, usually not even looking at me. She combed her hair in front of her ornate carved mirror, fiddled with objects, sat in deep reverie. It was as if she’d forgotten I was there.
Kyra’s silence broke only as she escorted me to the gate. Abruptly she said, “Amy ... do you remember Carter Falls High? The V-R Gala?”
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
“You and I and our dates were in the jungle room. There was a virtual coconut fight. I tossed a coconut at you, it hit, and you pretended you didn’t even see it.”
“Yes,” I said. Out of all the shunning I’d done to her in those horrible, terrified, cruel teenage years, she picked that to recall!
“But you did see it. You knew I was there.”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Kyra.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, with such a glittering smile that all at once I knew who her anger was directed at. She had given me this interview out of old family ties, or a desire to show off the superiority of our relative positions, or something, but she was angry at me. And always would be.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, with spectacular inadequacy. Kyra didn’t answer, merely turned and walked back toward her tiny Forbidden City.
My story was a great success. The Times ran it in flat-screen, 3-D, and V-R, and its access rate went off the charts. It was the first time anyone had been inside the Chou compound, had met the American girlfriend of an enigmatic general, had seen that particular lifestyle up close. Kyra’s mysterious encounter with aliens sixteen years ago gave it a unique edge. Even those who hated the story—and there were many, calling it exploitative, immoral, decadent, symptomatic of this or that—noticed it. My message system nearly collapsed under the weight of congratulations, condemnations, job offers.
The next day, Kyra Lunden called a press conference. She denied everything. I had been admitted to the Chou villa, yes, but only as a relative, for tea. Our agreement had been no recorders. I had violated that, had recorded secretly, and furthermore had endangered Chinese-American relations. Kyra had tears in her eyes. The Chinese Embassy issued an angry denunciation. The State Department was not pleased.
The Times fired me.
Standing in my apartment, still surrounded by the masses of flowers that had arrived yesterday, I stared at nothing. The sickeningly sweet fragrances made me queasy. Wild ideas, stupid ideas, rioted in my head. I could sue. I could kill myself. Kyra really had been altered by the aliens. She was no longer human, but a V-R-thriller simulacrum of a human, and it was my duty to expose her.
All stupid. Only one idea was true.
Kyra had, after all these years, found a way to get even.
2027
In the second year of the war, the aliens came back.
David told me while I was bathing the baby in the kitchen sink. The twins, Lucy and Lem, were shrieking around the tiny apartment like a pair of banshees. It was a crummy apartment, but it wasn’t too far from David’s job, and we were lucky to get it. There was a war on.
“The Blanding telescope has picked up an alien ship heading for Earth.” David spoke the amazing sentence flatly, the way he speaks everything to me now. It was the first time he’d initiated conversation in two weeks.
I tightened my grip on Robin, a wriggler slippery with soap, and stared at him. “When ... how ...”
“It would be good, Amy, if yo
u could ever finish a sentence,” David said, with the dispassionate hypercriticism he brings these days to everything I say. It wasn’t always like this. David wasn’t always like this. Depression, his doctor told me, unfortunately not responding to available medications. Well, great, so David’s depressed. The whole country’s depressed. Also frightened and poor and gray-faced with anxiety about this unpredictable war’s bio-attacks and Q-bomb attacks and EMP attacks, all seemingly random. We’re all depressed, but not all of us take it out on the people we live with.
I said with great deliberation, “When did the Blanding pick up the aliens, and do the scientists believe they’re the same aliens that came here in July of 2002?”
“Yesterday. Yes. You should either bathe Robin or not bathe him, instead of suspending a vital parental job in the middle like that.” He left the room.
I rinsed Robin, wrapped him in a large, gray-from-age towel, and laid him on the floor. He smiled at me; such a sweet-natured child. I gave Lucy and Lem, too frenetic for sweetness, a hoarded cookie each, and turned on the Internet. The Trumpeter avatar, whom someone had designed to subtly remind viewers of Honest Abe Lincoln, was in the middle of the story, complete with what must have been hastily assembled archival footage from obsolete media.
There was the little pewter-colored spaceship in my Uncle John’s cow field twenty-five years ago, and Kyra walking out with a dazed look on her small face. God—she’d been only a few years older than Lucy and Lem. There was the ship lifting straight up, passing the Army helicopter. That time, no watching telescopes or satellites had detected a larger ship, coming or going ... either our technology was better now, or the aliens had a different game plan. Now the screen showed pictures from the Blanding, which looked like nothing but a dot in space until computers enhanced it, surrounded it with graphics, and “artistically rendered” various imaginary appearances and routes and speculations. In the midst of the hype given somberly in Abraham Lincoln’s “voice,” I gathered that the ship’s trajectory would intersect with the same cow pasture as last time—unless, of course, it didn’t—and would arrive at Earth in thirteen hours and seven minutes.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 16