The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “The Tahitian Sunsets are going to be glorious this year.”

  I stared at her, at the beads of sweat on her upper lip, the graceful arc of her neck, her happy smile.

  Karen clearing away Allen’s dinner dishes, picking up his sloppily dropped food. Lucy with two fingers in her mouth, studying her chessboard and then touching the pieces.

  No. Not possible.

  Karen reached for the trowel herself, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

  Lucy Hartwick lost her championship to a Russian named Dmitri Chertov. A geneticist at Stanford made a breakthrough in cancer research so important that it grabbed all headlines for nearly a week. By a coincidence that amused the media, his young daughter won the Scripps Spelling Bee. I looked up the geneticist on the Internet; a year ago he’d attended a scientific conference with Allen. A woman in Oregon, some New Age type, developed the ability to completely control her brain waves through profound meditation. Her husband is a chess grandmaster.

  I walk a lot now, when I’m not cleaning or cooking or shopping. Karen quit her job; she barely leaves the garden even to sleep. I kept my job, although I take fewer clients. As I walk, I think about the ones I do have, mulling over various houses they might like. I watch the August trees begin to tinge with early yellow, ponder overheard snatches of conversation, talk to dogs. My walks get longer and longer, and I notice that I’ve started to time my speed, to become interested in running shoes, to investigate transcontinental walking routes.

  But I try not to think about walking too much. I observe children at frenetic play during the last of their summer vacation, recall movies I once liked, wonder at the intricacies of quantum physics, anticipate what I’ll cook for lunch. Sometimes I sing. I recite the few snatches of poetry I learned as a child, relive great football games, chat with old ladies on their porches, add up how many calories I had for breakfast. Sometimes I even mentally rehearse basic chess openings: the Vienna Game or the Petroff Defense. I let whatever thoughts come that will, accepting them all.

  Listening to the static, because I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.

  Afterword to “End Game”

  I play chess. I play it a lot (the word “compulsively” has been used). And I do not play well.

  Chess has a distinctly dark side. Twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp stopped creating art after he discovered chess, in his thirties. He didn’t play the game at top ranks even after years of study, but he became obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else, describing himself to a friend as “still a victim of chess.” Ordinarily we admire single-minded drive: it’s what leads scientists to try experiment after experiment until they find verifiable hypotheses. It enables entrepreneurs to work insane hours to launch new companies. It pushes athletes and dancers to endless practice.

  But can you be too single-minded? When this idea occurred to me, the entire story fell into place almost instantly. It wasn’t quite as easy to write as “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (for one thing, it’s much longer), but it wasn’t hard, either. The story is one of the few horror stories I ever wrote. Because it is a horror story—as can be too much of any good thing.

  Maybe even writing.

  MY MOTHER, DANCING

  Fermi’s Paradox, California, 1950: Since planet formation appears to be common, and since the processes that lead to the development of life are a continuation of those that develop planets, and since the development of life leads to intelligence and intelligence to technology—then why hasn’t a single alien civilization contacted Earth?

  Where is everybody?

  They had agreed, laughing, on a form for the millennium contact, what Micah called “human standard,” although Kabil had insisted on keeping hirs konfol and Deb had not dissolved hirs crest, which waved three inches above hirs and hummed. But, then, Deb! Ling had designed floating baktors for the entire ship, red and yellow mostly, that combined and recombined in kaleidoscopic loveliness only Ling could have programmed. The viewport was set to magnify, the air mixture just slightly intoxicating, the tinglies carefully balanced by Cal, that master. Ling had wanted “natural” sleep cycles, but Cal’s argument had been more persuasive, and the tinglies massaged the limbic so pleasantly. Even the child had some. It was a party.

  The ship slipped into orbit around the planet, a massive subJovian far from its sun, streaked with muted color. “Lovely,” breathed Deb, who lived for beauty.

  Cal, the biologist, was more practical: “I ran the equations; by now there should be around 200,000 of them in the rift, if the replication rate stayed constant.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” said Ling, the challenger, and the others laughed. The tinglies really were a good idea.

  The child, Harrah, pressed hirs face to the window. “When can we land?”

  The adults smiled at each other. They were so proud of Harrah, and so careful. Hirs was the first gene-donate for all of them except Micah, and probably the only one for the rest except Cal, who was a certified intellect donor. Kabil knelt beside Harrah, bringing hirs face to the child’s height.

  “Little love, we can’t land. Not here. We must see the creations in holo.”

  “Oh,” Harrah said, with the universal acceptance of childhood. It had not changed in five thousand years, Ling was fond of remarking, that child idea that whatever it lived was the norm. But, then…Ling.

  “Access the data,” Cal said, and Harrah obeyed, reciting it aloud as hirs parents had all taught hirs. Ling smiled to see that Harrah still closed hirs eyes to access, but opened them to recite.

  “The creations were dropped on this planet 273 E-years ago. They were the one-hundred-fortieth drop in the Great Holy Mission that gives us our life. The creations were left in a closed-system rift…what does that mean?”

  “The air in the creations’ valley doesn’t get out to the rest of the planet, because the valley is so deep and the gravity so great. They have their own air.”

  “Oh. The creations are cyborged replicators, programmed for self-awareness. They are also programmed to expect human contact at the millennium. They…”

  “Enough,” said Kabil, still kneeling beside Harrah. Hirs stroked hirs hair, black today. “The important thing, Harrah, is that you remember that these creations are beings, different from us but with the same life force, the only life force. They must be respected, just as people are, even if they look odd to you.”

  “Or if they don’t know as much as you,” said Cal. “They won’t, you know.”

  “I know,” Harrah said. They had made hirs an accommodater, with strong genes for bonding. They already had Ling for challenge. Harrah added, “Praise Fermi and Kwang and Arlbeni for the emptiness of the universe.”

  Ling frowned. Hirs had opposed teaching Harrah the simpler, older folklore of the Great Mission. Ling would have preferred that the child receive only truth, not religion. But Deb had insisted. Feed the imagination first, hirs had said, and later Harrah can separate science from prophecy. But the tinglies felt sweet, and the air mixture was set for a party, and hirs own baktors floated in such graceful pattern that Ling, not even Ling, could quarrel.

  “I wonder,” Deb said dreamily, “what they have learned in 273 years.”

  “When will they holo?” Harrah said. “Are we there yet?”

  Our mother is coming.

  Two hours more and they will come, from beyond the top of the world. When they come, there will be much dancing. Much rejoicing. All of us will dance, even those who have detached and let the air carry them away. Those ones will receive our transmissions and dance with us.

  Or maybe our mother will also transmit to where those of us now sit. Maybe they will transmit to all, even those colonies out of our own transmission range. Why not? Our mother, who made us, can do whatever is necessary.

  First, the dancing. Then, the most necessary thing of all. Our mother will solve the program flaw. Completely, so that no more of us will die. Our mother doesn’t die. We are not supposed to die, eit
her. Our mother will transmit the program to correct this.

  Then the dancing there will be!

  Kwang’s Resolution, Bohr Station, 2552: Since the development of the Quantum Transport, humanity has visited nearly a thousand planets in our galaxy and surveyed many more. Not one of them has developed any life of any kind, no matter how simple. Not one.

  No aliens have contacted Earth because there is nobody else out there.

  Harrah laughed in delight. Hirs long black hair swung through a drift of yellow baktors. “The creations look like oysters!”

  The holocube showed uneven rocky ground through thick, murky air. A short distance away rose the abrupt, steep walls of the rift, thousands of feet high. Attached to the ground by thin, flexible, mineral-conducting tubes were hundreds of uniform, metal-alloy double shells. The shells held self-replicating nanomachinery, including the rudimentary AI, and living eukaryotes sealed into selectively permeable membranes. The machinery ran on the feeble sunlight and on energy produced by anaerobic bacteria, carefully engineered for the thick atmospheric stew of methane, hydrogen, helium, ammonia, and carbon dioxide.

  The child knew none of this. Hirs saw the “oysters” jumping up in time on their filaments, jumping and falling, flapping their shells open and closed, twisting and flapping and bobbing. Dancing.

  Kabil laughed, too. “Nowhere in the original programming! They learned it!”

  “But what could the stimulus have been?” Ling said. “How lovely to find out!”

  “Sssshhh, we’re going to transmit,” Micah said. Hirs eyes glowed. Micah was the oldest of them all; hirs had been on the original drop. “Seeding 140, are you there?”

  “We are here! We are Seeding 140! Welcome, our mother!”

  Harrah jabbed hirs finger at the holocube. “We’re not your mother!”

  Instantly Deb closed the transmission. Micah said harshly, “Harrah! Your manners!”

  The child looked scared. Deb said, “Harrah, we talked about this. The creations are not like us, but their ideas are as true as ours, on their own world. Don’t laugh at them.”

  From Kabil, “Don’t you remember, Harrah? Access the learning session!”

  “I…remember,” Harrah faltered.

  “Then show some respect!” Micah said. “This is the Great Mission!”

  Harrah’s eyes teared. Kabil, the tender-hearted, put hirs hand on Harrah’s shoulder. “Small heart, the Great Mission gives meaning to our lives.”

  “I..know…”

  Micah said, “You don’t want to be like those people who just use up all their centuries in mere pleasure, with no structure to their wanderings across the galaxy, no purpose beyond seeing what the nanos can produce that they haven’t produced before, no difference between today and tomorrow, no—”

  “That’s sufficient,” Ling says. “Harrah understands, and regrets. Don’t give an Arlbeni Day speech, Micah.”

  Micah said stiffly, “It matters, Ling.”

  “Of course it matters. But so do the creations, and they’re waiting. Deb, open the transmission again…. Seeding 140, thank you for your welcome! We return!”

  Arlbeni’s Vision, Planet Cadrys, 2678: We have been fools.

  Humanity is in despair. Nano has given us everything, and nothing. Endless pleasures empty of effort, endless tomorrows empty of purpose, endless experiences empty of meaning. From evolution to sentience, sentience to nano, nano to the decay of sentience.

  But the fault is ours. We have overlooked the greatest gift ever given humanity: the illogical emptiness of the universe. It is against evolution, it is against known physical processes. Therefore, how can it exist? And why?

  It can exist only by the intent of something greater than the physical processes of the universe. A conscious Intent. The reason can only be to give humanity, the universe’s sole inheritor, knowledge of this Intent. The emptiness of the universe—anomalous, unexplainable, impossible—has been left for us to discover, as the only convincing proof of God.

  Our mother has come! We dance on the seabed. We transmit the news to the ones who have detached and floated away. We rejoice together, and consult the original program.

  “You are above the planetary atmosphere,” we say, new words until just this moment, but now understood. All will be understood now, all corrected. “You are in a ship, as we are in our shells.”

  “Yes,” our mother says. “You know we cannot land.”

  “Yes,” we say, and there is momentary dysfunction. How can they help us if they cannot land? But only momentary. This is our mother. And they landed us here once, didn’t they? They can do whatever is necessary.

  Our mother says, “How many are you now, Seeding 140?”

  “We are 79,432,” we say. Sadness comes. We endure it, as we must.

  Our mother’s voice changes in wavelength, in frequency. “Seventy-nine thousand? Are you…we had calculated more. Is this replication data right?”

  A packet of data arrives. We scan it quickly; it matches our programming.

  “The data is correct, our mother. That is the rate of replication. But…” We stop. It feels like another dying ceremony, suddenly, and it is not yet time for a dying ceremony. We will wait another few minutes; we will tell our mother in another few minutes. Instead, we ask, “What is your rate of replication, our mother?”

  Another change in wavelength and frequency. We scan and match data, and it is in our databanks: laughter, a form of rejoicing. Our mother rejoices.

  “You aren’t equipped for visuals, or I would show you our replicant,” our mother says. “But the rate is much, much lower than yours. We have one new replicant with us on the ship.”

  “Welcome, new replicant!” we say, and there is more rejoicing. There, and here.

  “I’ve restricted transmission…there’s the t-field’s visual,” Micah said.

  A hazy cloud appeared to one side of the holocube, large enough to hold two people comfortably, three close together. Only words spoken inside the field would now transmit. Baktors scuttled clear of the ionized haze. Deb stepped inside the field, with Harrah; Cal moved out of it. Hirs frowned at Micah.

  “They can’t be only 79,000-plus if the rate of replication has held steady. Check the resource data, Micah.”

  “Scanning…No change in available raw materials…no change in sunlight per square unit.”

  “Scan their counting program.”

  “I already did. Fully functional.”

  “Then run an historical scan of replicants created.”

  “That will take time…there, it’s started. What about attrition?”

  Cal said, “Of course. I should have thought of that. Do a seismic survey and match it with the original data. A huge quake could easily have destroyed two-thirds of them, poor seedings…”

  Ling said, “You could ask them.”

  Kabil said, “If it’s not a cultural taboo. Remember, they have had time to evolve a culture, we left them that ability.”

  “Only in response to environmental stimuli. Would a quake or mudslide create enough stimulus pressure to evolve death taboos?”

  They looked at each other. Something new in the universe, something humanity had not created…this was why they were here! Their eyes shone, their breaths came faster. Yet they were uncomfortable, too, at the mention of death. How long since any of them…oh, yes, Ling’s clone, in that computer malfunction, but so many decades ago…Discomfort, excitement, compassion for Seeding 140, yes compassion most of all, how terrible if the poor creations had actually lost so many in a quake…All of them felt it, and meant it, the emotion was genuine. And in their minds the finger of God touched each for a moment, with the holiness of the tiny human struggle against the emptiness of the universe.

  “Praise Fermi and Kwang and Arlbeni…” one of them murmured, and no one was sure who, in the general embarrassment that took them a moment later. They were not children.

  Micah said, “Match the seismic survey with the original data,�
�� and moved off to savor alone the residue of natural transcendence, rarest and strangest of the few things nano could not provide.

  Inside the hazy field Harrah said, “Seeding! I am dancing just like you!” and moved hirs small body back and forth, up and down on the ship’s deck.

  Arlbeni’s Vision, Planet Cadrys, 2678: In the proof of God lies its corollary. The Great Intent has left the universe empty, except for us. It is our mission to fill it.

  Look around you, look at what we’ve become. At the pointless destruction, the aimless boredom, the spiritual despair. The human race cannot exist without purpose, without vision, without faith. Filling the emptiness of the universe will rescue us from our own.

  Our mother says, “Do you play any games?”

  We examine the data carefully. There is no match.

  Our mother speaks again. “That was our new replicant speaking, Seeding 140. Hirs is only half-created as yet, and hirs program language is not fully functional. Hirs means, of the new programs you have created for yourselves since the original seeding, which ones in response to the environment are expressions of rejoicing? Like dancing?”

  “Yes!” we say. “We dance in rejoicing. And we also throw pebbles in rejoicing and catch pebbles in rejoicing. But not for many years since.”

  “Do it now!” our mother says.

  This is our mother. We are not rejoicing. But this is our mother. We pick up some pebbles.

  “No,” our mother says quickly, “you don’t need to throw pebbles. That was the new replicant again. Hirs does not yet understand that seedings do what they wish, and only what they wish. Your…your mother does not command you. Anything you do, anything you have learned, is as necessary as what we do.”