The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “Christ,” the man dancer says, “is this fake revelry really necessary?”

  “Yes,” the woman says. She looks at me. “Caroline says yes.”

  In the corner, two men show Deborah some papers. Caroline sits with them. Deborah starts to cry.

  I watch Caroline. Deborah may touch Caroline. The two men may touch Caroline. But Caroline says parties are happy. No people smell happy. I do not understand.

  The buzzer rings.

  Nobody moves. People look at each other. Caroline says, “Is the gate still open? Let it go. It’s probably kids. There’s nobody home but us.”

  The buzzer rings and rings. Then it stops. Caroline talks to Deborah. The door opens at the top of the stairs.

  A man with Caroline takes a bottle from his pocket very fast. He puts the papers on the floor and pours the bottle on it. The papers disappear. “All right, everybody, this is a party,” he says.

  Steps run down the stairs. A voice calls, “Wait! You can’t go down there! Young woman! You can’t go down there!” The voice is angry. It is Caroline’s mother.

  I walk to Caroline. She smells surprised.

  A woman comes into the basement. She holds a gun. My ears raise. I stand next to Caroline.

  “Nobody move,” the woman says. Deborah says, “Mom!”

  Caroline looks at the woman, then at Deborah, then at the woman. She walks with her cane to the woman.

  “Stay right there,” the woman says. She smells angry and scared. I move with Caroline.

  “Christ, you sound like a bad holovid,” Caroline says. “You’re Deborah’s mother? What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  From the top of the stairs Caroline’s mother calls, “Caroline! What is the meaning of this?”

  The woman says very fast, “Deborah, you’re making a terrible mistake. Bioenhancement may help your dancing for a while, but it could also kill you. The conference on genetics in Paris—they presented scientific proof that one kind of bioenhancement kills, and if they’re just finding that out now about enhancements done twenty-five years ago—then who knows what kind of insane risk you’re running with these other kinds? Don’t take my word for it, it’s on-line this morning. Pers was arrested, damn him, and I found your drug stash just before the police did. That’s how you’re paying for this, isn’t it? Debbie—how could you be such a damn fool?”

  “Wait a minute,” Caroline says. She leans on her cane. “You thought we brought Deborah here to bioenhance her?” Caroline starts to laugh. She puts her hand on her face. “Oh my God!”

  Caroline’s mother calls from the top of the stairs, “I’m phoning the police.”

  Caroline says, very fast, “Go bring her down here, James. You’ll have to lift her out of her chair and carry her. Keith, get her chair.” The two men run up the stairs.

  Caroline is shaking. I stand beside her. I growl. The woman still has the gun. She points the gun at Caroline. I wait for Caroline to tell me Attack.

  The woman says, “Don’t try to deny it. You’d do anything for ballet, wouldn’t you? All of you. You’re sick—but you’re not murdering my daughter!”

  Caroline’s face changes. Her smell changes. I feel her hand on my head. Her hand shakes. Her body shakes. I smell anger bigger than other angers. I wait for Attack.

  Deborah says, “You’re all wrong, Mom! Just like you always are! Does this look like a bioenhancement lab? Does it? These people aren’t enhancing me—they’re trying to talk me out of it! These two guys are doctors and they’re trying to ‘deprogram’ me—just like you tried to program me all my life! You never wanted me to dance, you always tried to make me into this cute little college-bound student that you needed me to be. Never what I needed!”

  The men carry Caroline’s mother and Caroline’s mother’s chair down the steps. They put Caroline’s mother in the chair. Caroline’s mother also smells angry. But Caroline smells more angry than everybody.

  Caroline says, “Sound familiar, Mother dear? What Deborah’s saying? What did you learn at the genetic conference? What I’ve been telling you for months, right? Your gift to dance is dying. Because you wanted a prima ballerina at any price. Even if I’m the one to pay it.”

  Caroline’s mother says, “You love dance. You wanted it as much as I did. You were a star.”

  “I never got to find out if I would have been one anyway! That isn’t so inconceivable, is it? And then I might have still been dancing! But instead I was…made. Molded, sewed, carpentered. Into what you needed me to be.”

  Deborah’s mother lowers her gun. Her eyes are big. Caroline’s mother says, “You were a star. You had a good run. Without me, you might have been nothing. Worthless.”

  A man says, very soft, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Caroline is shaking hard. I am afraid she will fall again. Her hand is on her cane. The cane shakes. Her other hand is on me.

  Caroline says, “You cold, self-centered bitch—”

  A little girl runs down the stairs.

  The little girl says, “Tante Anna! Tante Anna! Ou etes-vous?” She stops at the bottom of the steps. She smells afraid. “Qui sont tout ces gens?”

  Caroline looks at the little girl. The little girl has no shoes. She has long black fur on her head. Her hind feet go out like Caroline’s feet when Caroline dances. The toes look strange. I don’t understand the little girl’s feet.

  Caroline says again, “You cold, self-centered bitch.” Her voice is soft now. She stops shaking. “When did you have her made? Five years ago? Six? A new model with improved features? Who will decay all the sooner?”

  Caroline’s mother says, “You are a hysterical fool.”

  Caroline says, “Angel—attack. Now.”

  I attack Caroline’s mother. I knock over the chair. I bite her foreleg. Someone screams, “Caroline! For God’s sake! Caroline!” I bite Caroline’s mother’s head. I must protect Caroline. This person hurts Caroline. I must protect Caroline.

  A gun fires and I hurt and hurt and hurt—

  I love Caroline.

  10.

  The town of Saratoga, where the American Ballet Theater is dancing its summer season, is itself a brightly-colored stage. Visitors throng the racetrack, the brand-new Electronics Museum, the historical battle sites. In 1777, right here, Benedict Arnold and his half-trained revolutionaries stopped British forces under General John Burgoyne. It was the first great victory of freedom over the old order.

  Until this year, the New York City Ballet danced here every summer. But the Performing Arts Center chose not to renew the City Ballet contract. In New York, too, City Ballet attendance is half of what it was only a few years ago.

  The Saratoga pavilion is open to the countryside. Ballet lovers fill the seats, spread blankets up the sloping lawn, watch dancers accompanied not only by Tchaikovsky or Chopin but also by crickets and robins. In Saratoga, the ballet smells of freshly mown grass. The classic “white ballets”—Swan Lake, Les Sylphides—are remembered green. Small girls whose first taste of dance is at Saratoga will dream, for the rest of their life, of toe shoes skimming over wildflowers.

  I take my seat, in the back of the regular seating, as the small orchestra finishes tuning up. The conductor enters to the usual thunderous applause, even though nobody here knows his name and very few care. They have come to see the dancers.

  Debussy floats out over the countryside. Afternoon of a Faun: slow, melting. On the nearly bare stage, furnished only with barre and mirrors, a male dancer in practice clothes wakes up, stretches, warms up his muscles in a series of low, languorous moves.

  A girl appears in the mirror, which isn’t really a mirror but an empty place in the backdrop. A void. She, too, stretches, poses, plies. Both dancers watch the mirrors. They are so absorbed in their own reflections that they only gradually become aware of each other’s presence. Even then, they exist for each other only as foils, presences to dance to. In the end the girl will step back through the mirror. There is the feeling that
for the boy, she may not really have existed at all, except as a dream.

  It is Deborah’s first lead in a one-act ballet. Her extension is high, her turnout perfect, her movements sure and strong and sustained, filled with the joy of dancing. I can barely stand to look at her. This is her reward, her grail, for continuing her bioenhancement. She isn’t dancing for Anton Privitera, but she is dancing. A year and a half of bioenhancement, bought legally now in Copenhagen and paid for by selling her story to an eager press, has given her the physical possibilities to match her musicality, and her rhythm, and her drive.

  The faun finally touches the girl, turning her slowly en attitude. Deborah smiles. This is her afternoon. She’s willing to pay whatever price the night demands, even though science has no idea yet what, for her kind of treatments, it might be.

  Privitera must have known that some of his dancers were bioenhanced. The completely inadequate bioscans at City Ballet, the phenomenally low injury rate of his prima ballerinas—Privitera must have known. Or maybe his staff let him remain in official ignorance, keeping from him any knowledge of heresy in the ranks. There was a rumor that Privitera’s business manager John Coles even tried to keep Caroline from “deprogramming” dancers who wanted bioenhancement. The rumor about Coles was never substantiated. But in the last year, City Ballet has been struggling to survive. Too many patrons have withdrawn their favor. The mystique of natural art, like other mystiques, didn’t last forever. It had a good run.

  “If you could have chosen, and that was the only way you could have had the career, would you have chosen the embryonic engineering anyway?” was the sole thing Deborah had asked Caroline in jail, through bullet-proof plastic glass and electronic speaking systems, under the hard eyes of matrons. Caroline, awaiting trial for second-degree murder, didn’t seem to mind Deborah’s brusqueness, her self-absorption. Caroline was silent a long time, her gaunt face lengthened from the girlish roundness I remembered. Then she said to Deborah, “No.”

  “I would,” Deborah said.

  Caroline only looked at her.

  They’re here, Caroline and her dog. Somewhere up on the grass, Caroline in a powerchair, Angel hobbling on the three legs my bullet left him. Caroline was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. They didn’t let Angel stay with her during the trial. Nor did they let him testify, which would have been abnormal but not impossible. Five-year-olds can testify under some circumstances, and Angel has the biochip-and-reengineered intelligence of a five-year-old. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so abnormal. Or maybe all of us, not just Anton Privitera, will have to change our definition of abnormal.

  Five-year-olds know a lot. It was Marguerite who cried out, “Vous avez assassiné ma tante Anna!” She knew whom I was aiming at, even if the police did not. But Marguerite couldn’t know how much I loathed the old woman who had made her daughter into what the mother needed her to be—just as I, out of love, had tried to do to mine.

  On stage Deborah pirouettes. Maybe her types of bioenhancement will be all right, despite the growing body of doubts collected by Caroline’s doctor allies. When the first cures for cancer were developed from reengineered retroviruses, dying and desperate patients demanded they be administered without long, drawn-out FDA testing. Some of the patients died even sooner, possibly from the cures. Some lived until 90. The edge of anything is a lottery, and protection doesn’t help—not against change, or madmen, or errors of judgement. I protect Caroline, Angel kept saying after I shot him, yelping in pain between sentences. I protect Caroline.

  Deborah flows into a retiré, one leg bent at the knee, and rises on toe. Her face glows. Her partner lifts her above his head and turns her slowly, her feet perfectly arched in their toe shoes, dancing on air.

  Afterword to “Dancing on Air”

  I love ballet. I had lessons as a child, which proved to be a disaster. My ballet teacher told my mother, “She lacks coordination, rhythm, flexibility, musicality, and stamina, and she’s too tall.” There went that career.

  Eventually, however, I learned to write about ballet, both its beauty and the bodily torture it takes to create that beauty. “Dancing on Air” also includes another major theme of mine: families. From much science fiction, you’d get the impression that nobody whizzing around space and time has any familial ties. Yet all of us started life in some sort of families, many of us have children, and such ties exert powerful claims on the choices we make. I wanted to write about that.

  “Dancing on Air” was a nominee for both the Nebula and the Hugo. I lost the latter by three votes, to Charles Sheffield, whom a few years later I would marry. You just never know.

  UNTO THE DAUGHTERS

  This is not the way you heard the story.

  In the beginning, the tree was young. White blossoms scenting the air for a quarter mile. Shiny succulent fruit, bending the same boughs that held blossoms. Leaves of that delicate yellow-green that cannot, will not, last. Yet it did. He always did have gaudy taste. No restraint. Just look at the Himalayas. Or blowfish. I mean really!

  The woman was young, too. Pink curling toes, breasts as barely budded as the apple blossoms. And the man! My dear, those long, firm flanks alone could make you ache inside for hours. He could run five miles and not even be winded. He could make love to the woman five times a day. And did.

  The flowers were young. The animals, tumbling and cavorting on the grass, were young. The fucking beach sand was young, clean evenly shaped grains that only yesterday had been igneous rock. There was virgin rain.

  Only I was old.

  But it wasn’t that. That was the first thing that came to your mind, wasn’t it? Jealousy of glorious youth, revenge by the dried-up and jaded. Oh, you don’t know, you sitting there so many centuries ahead. It wasn’t that at all. I mean, I loved them both.

  Looking at them, how could one not?

  “Go away,” Eve says. “I’m not going to eat one.”

  She sits cross-legged, braiding flowers into a crown. The flowers are about what you’d expect from Him, garish scarlet petals and a vulva-shaped pistil like a bad joke. Braiding them, her fingers are deft and competent. Some lion cubs tumble tiresomely on the grass.

  “I want to give you a reason why you should eat one,” I say, not gently.

  “I’ve heard all your reasons.”

  “Not this one, Eve. This is a new reason.”

  She isn’t interested. She knots the crown of flowers, puts it on her head, giggles, tosses it at the lions. It settles lopsided over one cub’s left ear. The cub looks up with comic surprise, and Eve explodes into laughter.

  Really, sometimes I wonder why I bother. She’s so stupid, compared to the man.

  I bother because she’s so stupid compared to the man.

  “Listen, Eve. He withholds knowledge from you two because He’s selfish. What else would you call it to keep knowledge to yourself when you could just as well share it?”

  “I don’t need knowledge,” Eve says airily. “What do I need knowledge for? And anyway, that’s not a new reason. You’ve said that before.”

  “A tree, Eve. A fucking tree. To invest knowledge in. Doesn’t that strike you as just a teeny bit warped? Mathematics in xylem, morality in fruit pulp? Astronomy rotting on the ground every time an apple falls. Don’t you wonder what kind of a mind would do that?”

  She only stares at me blankly. Oh, she’s dumb. I mean!

  I shout, in the temper of perfect despair, “Without knowledge, nothing will change!”

  “Are you here again?” Adam says. I hadn’t heard him climb over the rock behind us. He has a very quiet footstep for someone whose toenails have never ever been cut. Also a quiet, penetrating voice. Eve jumps up as if she’s been shot.

  “I thought I told you not to talk to this…thing ever again,” Adam says. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

  Eve hangs her pretty head. “Yes, Adam. You did. I forgot.”

  He looks at her and his face softens. That blooming skin, those sweet lips. Her hair f
alls forward, lustrous as night. I don’t think my despair can go any deeper, but it does. She is so pretty. He will always forgive her. And she will always forget everything he says two minutes after he says it.

  “Be gone! You don’t belong here!” Adam shouts, and throws a rock at me. It hits just behind my head. It hurts like hell. One of the lion cubs happily fetches it back, wagging a golden tail. The other one is still wearing the lopsided crown of flowers.

  As I slither away, half blind with pain, Eve calls after me. “I don’t want anything to change! I really don’t!”

  The hell with her.

  “Just listen,” I say. “Just put your entire tiny mind on one thing for once and listen to me.”

  Eve sits sewing leaves into a blanket. Not cross-legged anymore: She is six months pregnant. The leaves are wide and soft, with a sort of furry nap on their underside. They appeared in the garden right after she got pregnant, along with tough spider webs that make splendid thread. Why not a bush that grows little caps? Or tiny diapers with plastic fastening tabs? Really, He has such a banal imagination.

  Eve hums as she sews. Beside her is the cradle Adam made. It’s carved with moons and numbers and stars and other cabalistic signs: a lovely piece of work. Adam has imagination.

  “You have to listen, Eve. Not just hear—listen. Stop that humming. I know the future—how could I know the future unless I am exactly what I say I am? I know everything that’s going to happen. I told you when you’d conceive, didn’t I? That alone should have convinced you. And now I’m telling you that your baby will be a boy, and you’ll call him Cain, and he—”

  “No, I’m going to call him Silas,” Eve says. She knots the end of her spider-thread and bites it off. “I love the name Silas.”

  “You’re going to call him Cain, and he—”

  “Do you think it would be prettier to embroider roses on this blanket, or daisies?”

  “Eve, listen, if I can foretell the future then isn’t it logical, isn’t it reasonable for you to think—”