A Chinese general appeared on-screen, announcing in translation that China was prepared to shoot the intruder down.
“Mommy!” Lucy shrieked. “My cookie’s gone!”
“Not now, honey.”
“But Lem gots some of his cookie and he won’t share!”
“In a minute!”
“But Mommy—”
The Internet abruptly cut out. The Internet.
Into the shocking, eerie silence came Lem’s voice, marginally quieter than his sister’s. “Mommy. I hear some sirens.”
Three days of chaos. I had never believed panic—old-style Roman rioting in the streets, totally out of control, murderous panic—could happen in the United States, in gray cities like Rochester, New York. Yes, there were periodic race riots in Atlanta and looting spells in New York or war hysteria in San Francisco, but the National Guard quickly contained them in neighborhoods where violence was a way of life anyway. But this panic took over the whole city—Rochester—in a cold February and watching on the Internet, when a given site’s coverage was up anyway, was to know a surreal horror. This was supposed to be America.
People were publicly beheaded on the lawns of the art museum, their breath frozen on the winter air a second before the blood leapt from their severed heads toward the camera. No one could say why they were being executed, or even if there was a reason. Buildings that the National Guard had protected from being bombed by Chinese terrorists were bombed by crazed Americans. Anyone Chinese-American, or appearing Chinese-American, or rumored to be Chinese-American, was so savagely assaulted that the fourteenth century would have been disgusted. A dead, mangled baby was thrown onto our fourth-floor fire escape, where it lay for the entire three days, pecked at by crows.
I kept the children huddled in the bathroom, which had no windows to shatter. Or see out of. The electricity went off, then on, then off for good. The heat ceased. David stayed by the living room window in case the building caught fire and we had no choice but to evacuate. Even during this horror he belittled and criticized: “If you’d had more food stockpiled, Amy, maybe the kids wouldn’t have to have cereal again.” “You never were any good at keeping them soothed and quiet.”
Soothed and quiet. The crows on the fire escape had plucked out the dead infant’s eyes.
Whenever Lucy, Lem, and Robin were finally asleep, I turned on the radio. The riots were coming under control. No, they weren’t. The President was dead. No, he wasn’t. The President had declared martial law. Massive bio-weapons had been unleashed in New York. No, in London. No, in Peking. The Chinese were behind these attacks. No, the Chinese were having worse riots than we were, their present chaos merging with their previous chaos of civil war. It was that civil war that had broken the American-Chinese alliance three years ago. And then during their civil upheavals, the Chinese had attacked Alaska. Maybe. Not even the international intelligence network was completely sure who’d released the bubonic-plague-carrying rats in Anchorage. But, announced the White House, the excesses of China had become too much for the Western world to stomach.
I didn’t see how those excesses could be worse than this.
And then it was over. The Army prevailed. Or maybe the chaos, self-limiting as some plagues, just ran its course. Everyone left alive was immune. After another week, David and I—but not the kids—emerged from our building into the rubble to start rebuilding some sort of economic and communal existence. We never left the children alone, but even so David had found an isolated moment to say, resentment in every line of his body, “You’re the one who wanted to have children. I don’t know how much longer I can go on paying for your bad judgment.”
It was then that I got the e-mail from Kyra.
“Why did you come?” Kyra asked me.
We faced each other in a federal prison in the Catskill Mountains northeast of New York City. The prison, built in 2022, was state-of-the-art. Nothing could break in or out, including bacteria, viruses, and some radiation. The Kyra sitting opposite me, this frightened woman, was actually two miles away, locked in some cell that probably looked nothing like the hologram of her I faced in the Visitors’ Center.
I said slowly, “I can’t say why I came.” This was the truth. Or, rather, I could say but only with so much mixed motive that she would never understand. Because I had to get away from David for these two days. Because the childhood she and I shared, no matter how embittered by events, nonetheless looked to me now like Arcadia. Because I wanted to see Kyra humbled, in pain, as she had once put me. Because I had some insane idea, as crazy as the chaos we had lived through two weeks ago, that she might hold a key to understanding the inexplicable. Because.
She said, “Did you come to gloat?”
“In part.”
“All right, you’re entitled. Just help me!”
“To tell the truth, Kyra, you don’t look like you need all that much help. You look well-fed, and bathed, and safe enough behind these walls.” All more than my children were. “When did you land in here, anyway?”
“They put me in the second the alien ship was spotted.” Her voice was bitter.
“On what charges?”
“No charges. I’m a detainee for the good of the state.”
I said levelly, “Because of the alien ship or because you slept with the Chinese enemy?”
“They weren’t the enemy then!” she said angrily, and I saw that my goading was pushing her to the point where she wanted to tell me to fuck off. But she didn’t dare.
She didn’t look bad. Well-fed, bathed, as I’d said. No longer pretty, however. Well, it had been nine hard years since I’d seen her. That delicate skin had coarsened and wrinkled much more than mine, as if she’d spent a lot of time in the sun. The hair, once blazingly blonde, was a dull brown streaked with gray. My Aunt Julie, her mother, had died five years ago in a traffic accident.
“Amy,” she said, visibly controlling herself, “I’m afraid they’ll just quietly keep me here forever. I don’t have any ties with the Chinese anymore, and I don’t know anything about or from that alien ship. I was just living quietly, under an alias, and then they broke in to my apartment in the middle of the night and cuffed me and brought me here.”
“Why don’t you contact General Chou?” I said cruelly.
Kyra only looked at me with such despair that I despised her. She was, had always been, a sentimentalist. I remembered how she’d actually thought that military monster loved her.
“Tell me what happened since 2018,” I said, and watched her seize on this with desperate hope.
“After your news story came out and—I’m sorry, Amy, I ...”
“Don’t,” I said harshly, and she knew enough to stop.
“I left Chun’fu, or rather he threw me out. It hit me hard, although I guess I was pretty much a fool not to think he’d react that way, not to anticipate—” She looked away, old pain fresh on her face. I thought that “fool” didn’t begin to cover it.
“Anyway, I had some old friends who helped me. Most people wanted nothing to do with me, but a few loyal ones got me a new identity and a job on a lobster farm on Cape Cod. You know, I liked it. I’d forgotten how good it can feel to work outdoors. It was different from my father’s dairy farm, of course, but the wind and the rain and the sea ...” She trailed off, remembering things I’d never seen.
“I met a lobster farmer named Daniel and we lived together. I never told him my real name. We had a daughter, Jane ...”
I thought I’d seen pain on her face before. I’d been wrong.
I said, and it came out gentle, “Where are Daniel and Jane now?”
“Dead. A bio-virus attack. I didn’t think I could go on after that, but of course I did. People do. Are you married, Amy?”
“Yes. I hate him.” I hadn’t planned on saying that. Something in her pain drew out my own. Kyra didn’t look shocked.
“Kids?”
“Three wonderful ones. Five-year-old twins and a six-month-old.”
> She leaned forward, like a plant hungry for sun. “What are their names?”
“Lucy. Lem. Robin. Kyra ... how do you think I can help you?”
“Write about me. You’re a journalist.”
“No, I’m not. You ended my career.” Did Kyra really not know that?
“Then call a press conference. Send data to the news outlets. Write letters to Congress. Just don’t let me rot here indefinitely because they don’t know what to do with me!”
She really had no idea how things worked. Still an innocent. I wasn’t ready yet to tell her that all her anguish was silly. Instead I said, “Did the aliens communicate with you from their ship in some way?”
“Of course not!”
“The ship left, you know.”
From her face, it was clear she didn’t know. “They left?”
“Two weeks ago. Came no closer than the moon. If we had any sort of decent space program left, if anyone did, we might have tried to contact them. But they just observed us, or whatever, from that distance, then took off again.”
“Fuck them to bloody hell! I wish we had shot them down!”
She had surprised me, with both the language—Kyra had always been a bit prissy, despite her sexual adventures—and the hatred. My surprise must have shown on my face.
“Amy,” Kyra said, “they ruined my life. Without that abduction—” the word didn’t really seem appropriate—“when I was ten, my parents would never have divorced. I wouldn’t have been an outcast in school. I never would have met Chou, or behaved like ... and I certainly wouldn’t be in this fucking prison now! They came here to ruin my life and they succeeded!”
“You take no responsibility for anything,” I said evenly.
Kyra glared at me. “Don’t you dare judge me, Amy. You with your beautiful living children and your life free of any suspicion that you’re somehow deformed and dangerous because of a few childhood hours you can’t even remember—”
“ ‘Can’t remember’? What about the helmet and the flickering images and the observing aliens? Did you make those all up, Kyra?”
Enraged, she lunged forward to slap me. There was nothing there, of course. We were only virtually together. I stood to leave my half of the farce.
“Please, Amy ... please! Say you’ll help me!”
“You’re a fool, Kyra. You learn nothing. Do you think the prison officials would be letting you have this ‘meeting’ with me if they were going to keep you here hidden away for good? Do you think you’d even have been permitted to send me e-mail? You’re as good as out already. And when you are, try this time to behave as if you weren’t still ten years old.”
We parted in contempt and anger. I hoped to never see or hear from her again.
2047
The next time the aliens returned, they landed.
I was at JungleTime Playland with my granddaughter, Lehani. She loved JungleTime Playland. I was amused by it; in the long, long rebuilding after the war, V-R had finally reached the commercial level that Robin and Lucy and Lem, Lehani’s father, had also played in. Of course, government applications of V-R and holo and AI were another matter, but I had nothing to do with those. I led a very small, contented life.
“I go Yung Lan,’ ” Lehani said, looking up at me with the shining, wholehearted hope of the young on her small face. Every wish granted is paradise, every wish crushed is eternal disappointment.
“Yes, you can go into JungleLand, but we have to wait our turn, dear heart.”
So she stood in line beside me, hopping from foot to foot, holding my hand. Nobody ever told me grandmotherhood was going to be this sweet.
When we finally reached the head of the line, I registered her, put the tag on her neck that would keep me informed of her every move as well as the most minute changes in her skin conductivity. If she got scared or inattentive, I would know it. No adults are allowed in Jungle Playland; that would spoil the thrill. Lehani grinned and ran through the virtual curtain. I accepted the map tuned to her tag and sat at a table in the lobby, surrounded by lines of older children registering for the other V-R playlands.
Sipping tea, I was checking my e-mail when the big lobby screen abruptly came on.
“News! News! An alien ship has been sighted moving toward Earth. Government sources say it resembles the ship that landed in Minnesota in 2002 and traveled as far as lunar orbit in 2027 but so far no—”
People erupted all around me. Buzzing, signaling for their children, and, in the case of one stupid woman, pointless shrieking. Under cover of the noise I comlinked Central, before the site was hopelessly jammed.
“Library,” I keyed in. “Public Records, State of Maine. Data search.”
“Search ready,” the tiny screen said.
“Death certificate, first name Daniel, same date as death certificate, first name Jane, years 2020 through 2026.”
“Searching.”
Children began to pour out of the playlands, most resentful at having their V-R time interrupted. Kyra had never told me Daniel’s last name. Nor did I have any idea what name she was using now. But if she simply wanted to pass unnoticed among ordinary people, his name would do, and Kyra had always been sentimental. The government, of course, would know exactly where she was, but they would know that no matter what name she used or what paper trails she falsified. Her DNA was on record. The press, too, could track her down if they decided to take the trouble. The alien landing meant they would take the trouble.
My handheld displayed, “Daniel Ethan Parmani, died June 16, 2025, age forty-two, and Jane Julia Parmani, died June 16, 2025, age three.”
“Second search. United States. Locate Kyra Parmani, ages—” What age might Kyra think she could pass for? In prison, twenty years ago, she had looked far older than she was. “Ages fifty through seventy.”
“Searching.”
Lehani appeared at the JungleLand door, looking furious. She spied me and ran over. “Lady sayed I can’t play!”
“I know, sweetie. Come sit on Grandma’s lap.”
She climbed onto me, buried her head in my shoulder, and burst into angry tears. I peered around her to see the handheld.
“Six matches.” It displayed them. Six? With a name like “Parmani” coupled with one like “Kyra”? I sighed and shifted Lehani’s weight.
“Call each of them in turn.”
Kyra was the second match. She answered the call herself, her voice unconcerned. She hadn’t heard. “Hello?”
“Kyra. It’s Amy, your cousin. Listen, they’ve just spotted an alien ship coming in. They’ll be looking for you again.” Silence on the other end. “Kyra?”
“How did you find me?”
“Lucky guesswork. But if you want to hide, from the feds or the press ...” They might put her in jail again, and who knew this time when she would get out? At the very least, the press would make her life, whatever it was now, a misery. I said, “Do you have somewhere to go? Some not-too-close-but-perfectly-trusted friend’s back bedroom or strange structure in a cowfield?”
She didn’t laugh. Kyra never had had much of a sense of humor. Not that this was an especially good time for joking.
“Yes, Amy. I do. Why are you warning me?”
“Oh, God, Kyra, how do I answer that?”
Maybe she understood. Maybe not. She merely said, “All right. And thanks. Amy ...”
“What?”
“I’m getting married again. I’m happy.”
That was certainly like her: blurting out the personal that no one had asked about. For a second I, too, was the old Amy, bitter and jealous. I had not remarried since my terrible divorce from David, had not even loved any one again. I suspected I never would. But the moment passed. I had Robin and Lem and Lehani and, intermittently when she was in the country, Lucy.
“Congratulations, Kyra. Now get going. They can find you in about forty seconds if they want to, you know.”
“I know. I’ll call you when this is all over, Amy. Where are you?”<
br />
“Prince George’s County, Maryland. Amy Suiter Parker. Bye, Kyra.” I broke the link.
“Who on link?” Lehani demanded, apparently having decided her tears were not accomplishing anything.
“Somebody Grandma knew a long time ago, dear heart. Come on, let’s go home, and you can play with Mr. Grindle’s cat.”
“Yes! Yes!”
It is always so easy to distract the uncorrupted.
The alien ship parked itself in lunar orbit for the better part of three days. Naturally we had no one up there; not a single nation on Earth had anything you could call a space program anymore. But there were satellites. Maybe we communicated with the aliens, or they with us, or maybe we tried to destroy them, or entice them, or threaten them. Or all of the above, by different nations with different satellites. Ordinary citizens like me were not told. And of course the aliens could have been doing anything with their ship: sampling broadcasts, scrambling military signals, seeding clouds, sending messages to true believers’ back teeth. How would I know?
On the second day, three agents from People’s Safety Commission, the latest political reincarnation of that office, showed up to ask me about Kyra’s whereabouts. I said, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen her in twenty years and had no idea where she was now. They thanked me politely and left. News cams staked out her house, a modest foamcast building in a small Pennsylvania town, and they dissected her current life, but they never actually found her, so it made a pretty lackluster story.
After three days of lunar orbit, a small alien craft landed on the upland savanna of East Africa.
Somehow it sneaked past whatever surveillance we had as if it didn’t exist. The ship set down just beyond sight of a Kikuyu village. Two small boys herding goats spotted it, and one of them went inside.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 17