Sea Change

by Nancy Kress

  He did something, and an explosion rocked the ground, the tree, me. The sky lit up and smoke rose from the direction the cabin had stood. A second later, we were in darkness again, a wet blackness more complete than I had ever known.

  “Joe,” I said into that blackness, “please tell me what’s going on!”

  “Soon,” he said, a disembodied voice. “Right now, we have to move.”

  Everything on me ached from our previous trek; I was not Joe’s age. His hand grasped mine—I didn’t know how he even found it in the darkness—and again he pulled me along. I kept tripping, but at least the rain had stopped.

  After fifteen or twenty or thirty minutes, I heard water. Joe turned on a flashlight, sweeping the low beam over the ground. We were beside the Quinault River—or maybe it was the Queets or the Raft; by now I had absolutely no sense of direction. Joe drew a flat-bottomed rowboat from under brush and helped me into it. He turned off the flashlight. In the dark we half drifted, half rowed down the river.

  I sat shivering in the prow, knowing that I must not talk. Sound carried over water. The watery silence felt apocalyptic, as if the world had ended and all that was left was this boat, darkness, and the river.

  Eternity passed. Slowly.

  Lights on the shore, from a collection of houses, but not enough houses to be Taholah or Queets. So this was the Raft River. Nothing stirred on the riverbanks. Ahead, ocean waves lapped softly.

  Joe paddled more vigorously now. The tide was going out, which helped. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. I pushed out of my mind visions of a riptide taking us, or a suicide/ murder to ensure silence, or simple death by hypothermia.

  Joe’s breathing became more labored. He was working hard. I heard another sound: a helicopter.

  Joe said softly, his first words in an hour, “The chopper’s over land. Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry? Don’t worry? I was at sea in a small rowboat at night, a fugitive from federal justice, and I shouldn’t worry?

  Once, long ago during a fight with Jake, he told me that I was “too intense.” I’d said that it was impossible to be too intense about a just cause that you believed in. Jake retorted that no, it wasn’t impossible, because intensity can cloud judgment. The fight had gone on from there, until we were both exhausted.

  Feeling Joe strain at the oars, I knew that I hadn’t known what intensity really was.

  A light, somewhere ahead. A boat. Joe pulled toward it, and then someone was hauling me, frozen and numb, over the side of a fishing boat. I collapsed onto the deck. Someone yanked me, not gently, upright and pushed me into a cabin. At first, all I knew was that it was blessedly warm.

  Someone handed me a cup of hot coffee. Someone else said, “God, Joe—who the fuck is she?” I didn’t hear his answer.

  The boat was moving.

  “If we’re boarded, she’ll have to go in the hole.”

  Then a woman’s voice. “Let her be for now.”

  I drained the coffee, even though my stiff fingers could barely hold the cup and even though I didn’t take it black. The liquid burn in my throat was welcome. “No,” I said, “don’t let me be. I want answers. Joe?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  The “missiles” were weapons of war, but not the war anyone expected. They’d been launched from four different locations, by a signal sent through a communications satellite, using software that Org hackers had piggybacked onto the satellite’s software. I hadn’t known we had hackers that good.

  The missiles were self-exploding cannisters that scattered a genetically altered virus over the ocean. For billions of years, viruses have evolved to make war on bacteria, and vice versa. This particular virus was engineered to infect Pseudo-nitzschia and change the diatom so that it could not make use of the bacteria that caused it to make domoic acid. The bloom would remain, but it would not produce toxin.

  “That’s the GMO least likely to be detected by DAS,” Joe finished. “And the one I’ve worked on.”

  “All these years, you were—”

  “Yes. Renata, please don’t—”

  “I’m not crying. I’m not going to cry.”

  Joe studied the dark water, looking away from the scene I was not going to make. Jake was the only man I’ve ever known who could meet an emotional scene head on. And some feelings are too deep for theatrics.

  I said quietly, “No more toxicity in blooms. If—”

  If this had happened a decade ago, Ian might not have died.

  “Yes, if all goes well. We built the GMO with a gene drive to spread the allele quicker and more reliably. But, Renata, we planned this escape as a last resort, and we didn’t plan for you. We can’t—”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “I planned, too.”

  2032: VICTORIA, CANADA

  IN THE MORNING, I sat in the boat’s tiny cabin, eating a bagel and cream cheese that did not taste like the ones in New York. They never do. Stay below decks, the woman called “Jenny” had told me, in case of drone or satellite surveillance. This is a fishing boat, and you’re no Quinault fisher.

  Joe slipped onto the bench across from me. “Let me see them.”

  I pushed across the table the Canadian passport and Barclay bank card in the name of Ellen Mary Tompkins. Both had my picture, thumbprint, retinal scan. They were slightly damp from the time in my boot.

  “And nobody in the Org knows about this identity. You got these on your own.”

  “Yes. Jeremy Hardwick doesn’t know about them, either.”

  “Facial recognition at Passport Control will flag you as Renata Black.”

  “Canada refuses to share facial-recog data with the United States. They don’t like our policies on immigration. And I’ve never been in Canada before. I won’t be in the data bank.”

  “Renata, if—”

  “No. I’ve endangered you enough already, Joe. And I can’t go home.” I paused. “Can you?”

  “Depends. If DAS hasn’t learned my identity—”

  “I’ve thought about that. I never told Dylan about you. He’s the one who first put me in touch with the Org years ago, but I never told him anything about it, or you.”

  He nodded, his face blank. The closeness, the sense of a shared plight that I’d felt from him last night, had evaporated. I might have been a thousand yards away.

  “If that’s true, Renata—” and he must have known how his doubt stung “—then maybe eventually I can go home. If not, there are tribes in Canada that will accept me. But not you.”

  “I know. Just set me ashore in the harbor. And Joe—will you do one more thing for me? Get word to Jake Sanderson that I’m alive and safe?”

  Joe looked at me for longer than was comfortable. I couldn’t read his expression, but it seemed that he saw more than I wanted. Finally he said, “Okay.”

  The boat chugged on up the Strait of Juan de Fuca toward Victoria, Canada.

  At the government building at Victoria harbor, I got in the line labeled RETURNING CITIZENS.

  “Name?”

  “Ellen Mary Tompkins.”

  The inspector flipped through, looking for the exit stamp. It was there, dated a week ago. That much the fishing boat had been able to do for me. That and a small, nearly empty suitcase, because travelers carried luggage.

  “Purpose of your trip to the United States?”

  “To visit relatives.”

  He glanced at me, flicked his eyes at the photo, and stamped the passport. He said, “Welcome home, Ms. Tompkins,” and I was a Canadian citizen.

  I took a drivie to a cheaper hotel in a cheaper section of town than the touristy harbor, and checked in. All day I watched news, switching channels promiscuously, hoping to find something about DAS’ war on the Org.

  Nothing.

  I had no internet access, or I might have realized where the real war was being fought.

  The money in my Barclay account, slowly accumulated over the years, would not last more than six months. I needed a
job, a place to live, a Canadian driver’s license. Without any work history, any job I could get was not going to be very impressive. Restaurant work, maybe. Still, it was better than imprisonment in the United States for terrorism. An odd sort of terrorism: destroying toxins that killed people and animals.

  It was possible that DAS, or anybody else, would never even detect the virus Joe had set loose in the world. P-nitzschia would just cease producing domoic acid because things mutated. Evolution at work.

  My life, too, evolved. I found work at a low-rent diner. The work was hard on my middle-aged feet, but the owner wasn’t very particular, or very often present. I drank a lot of coffee to get through my shift. The wages covered my room in a boardinghouse, the food I didn’t eat at the diner, and not much else. Not wanting to touch the money in my Barclay account, I put off buying a phone. I made plans for the future, for after enough time had passed that I could feel secure that no one was looking for me. I would join an activist organization, although probably not one concerned with GMOs; that was closed to me now. But other causes mattered, too. I could still have a genuine life.

  A few weeks later, as I sat sipping coffee in an empty booth, waiting for the old couple in the corner to finish their pie, Jake maneuvered through the door in a powerchair.

  I knocked over my coffee cup, righted it, sopped at the mess with ineffectual napkins while Jake maneuvered himself up to the table. “Hello, Renata. Love the hair.”

  I had dyed my hair what the box promised was “Autumn Auburn,” and it was a streaky, straw-dry, chemical disaster. I said, “What are you doing here?”

  He lowered his sunglasses enough to peer at me over the top, then put them back on. He wore a slouchy fisherman’s hat, a cheap windbreaker, baggy pants. On the huge cast on his leg was written BUDWISER, misspelled, in red magic marker. He was unrecognizable, except by me. I would always recognize Jake.

  He said, “I got your message.”

  “You weren’t supposed to get my new name and location!”

  He shrugged. “I guess somebody thought I should have it.”

  “But . . . how did you . . .”

  “I borrowed Gina’s plane, then took three different drivies.”

  “You must have been recognized at the airport!”

  “Of course. But did you not just hear me say that in Canada I took three different drivies? It was a bitch to get in and out of them with this chair. It folds up, but I don’t.” He began fumbling in a messenger bag.

  “Jake,” I said in a different tone, “are you . . . will you be all right?”

  “Yes. Eventually. Everything is healing. Here, I came to bring you this.” He slid a manila envelope across the table.

  It held three items. A plane ticket, an index card with an address, and yet another passport. The plane ticket was for next week, first class from Victoria, Canada, to Owen Roberts International Airport, George Town, Grand Cayman Island. The street address was on Grand Cayman. On the passport, the name under my own picture was the same as that on the plane ticket, Julie Jane Tolliver.

  “Julie Jane” was what we’d planned to name Ian if he’d been a girl.

  I felt my eyes prickle. “How . . .”

  “That’s what took me so long to get here, along with healing enough that I could get on a plane. With apologies to Flannery O’Connor, a good forger is hard to find. Well, maybe not that hard, but I wanted one that Morgan trusted completely. I didn’t know how solid your fake ‘Ellen Tompkins’ ID is.”

  “Morgan knows?”

  “Morgan always knows everything. Well, not everything. That address is a beach house that belongs to him. Okay, it now belongs to me, through several shell corporations. That was the other thing that took time. It turns out you can’t set up property transfers through nonexistent entities all that fast. Renata, what exactly happened?”

  I made a quick decision. I told him but only in vague terms. A secret organization to aid the development, testing, and public opinion of GMO crops. A GMO virus launched into a Northwest Blob to prevent P-nitzschia from producing the domoic acid that had killed Ian. Jake listened, his face under the superb control of a gifted actor. But his voice was thick when he finally said, “Then you don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What’s happening online, and starting to happen offline.”

  I shook my head. “I have no internet access, and after waitressing all day, I just fall into bed.”

  “You’re too old for this job, Renata.”

  “Jake Sanderson, always the charmer.”

  “Get a good phone for Julie Jane and check it out. There’s a lot of cash in her account. A very lot.” Abruptly his voice turned curt. “I have to go.”

  “Jake, I appreciate this, but I’m not going to the Caymans. I’m staying here. I can take care of myself.”

  “Christ, do you think I ever doubted it? You took care of Ian, of me, of as much of the fucked-up world as would let you. You are among the strongest people I know, or maybe just the most stubborn. You faced Ian’s death and your grief instead of manically evading it like I—” He couldn’t go on.

  I reached across the table to take his hand. He let me.

  I said, “Julie Jane would be my fourth identity. I might as well be an actor.”

  Jake gave a shaky laugh before he regained himself. “You don’t have to go to the Caymans if you don’t want to. But the offer is there, and the plane ticket is good for a year if you give them some notice. I can’t visit you there, I’d be recognized.”

  “Of course you would.”

  “And there’s Gina.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are good causes in the Bahamas, too, you know. You wouldn’t have to live a pointless life. Lots of good causes.”

  “Thank you, Jake. I mean it.”

  “Bye, Renata.”

  But even as he powered his chair to the door, I knew I’d see him again, sometime, even if it took a few years. I felt it, strong as a healthy heart. I knew that with every single fiber of the bond that held us together. I knew something else, too. Our lives might never mesh well, but I had never, not even in the beginning at Yale, loved him as much as I did in that moment.

  It isn’t the past that creates the future. It’s how you interpret the past.

  I finished my shift, left the restaurant, and bought a tablet. The rest of the day and night, I spent in cyberspace.

  I had talked to April as little as possible. I should have done so more often. But I hadn’t realized, along with everything else I’d been so smugly naïve about, how real wars were now fought. Not with bullets or raids, but with pixels.

  Not the cautious, don’t-break-the-law posts that the Org had put up before. Those had been water drops; this was a tsunami, trillions of pixels, prepared to be unleashed the moment Joe had launched the virus-scattering missiles.

  Videos and statistics about how agribusinesses had poisoned and depleted the soil, created dust bowls, led to monocultures, caused water pollution. Statistics seldom change minds, but images can. Hundreds of different videos, including those of dying sea lions, otters, even whales. The videos were well written and produced and gut-wrenching, the science explained clearly and accurately.

  Posts and whole websites about the mistaken ideas of ecoterrorists: “People twist scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that are supported not by science but only by their own worldviews.”

  More videos showing how other GMOs could feed the world. How they hadn’t done so because of the use that agribusinesses had put them to: profits for corporations instead of plentiful local food for those in need. “Hunger should not be merely a business opportunity!” How the backlash after the Catastrophe had caused famine and death.

  Videos simply and clearly explaining the difference between controlling insects with GMOs that could tolerate sprayed chemicals, which degraded soil and accumulated in human bodies, and GMOs that created disease resistance, so that pesticides and fungicides became mostly unn
ecessary.

  The most care had been lavished on how the genetic engineering of Klenbar, the biopharmed drug that had caused the Catastrophe, differed from what could be done now. The old ways were not the new genetic engineering of possible modified crops. A hammer, after all, can be used to break windows or to build a house. Responsible use of tools was the key.

  Millions of posts—at least, it seemed like millions—urged action. Protests, marches, flash mobs, petitions—all the old techniques of civil rebellion. These, the news links reported breathlessly, were just beginning, not many yet and not thousands strong—but they were beginning.

  Was all this from the Org? Or had we been working in conjunction with other groups with aligned interests? Who? And who had paid for it all? This campaign represented more resources, more vastly distributed, than I had known the Org possessed. The inescapable conclusion was that we had powerful allies.

  Would all this really sway public opinion in favor of crop GMOs? Enough to make a difference? I didn’t know.

  But seeds had been planted, and the harvest of changed perceptions might grow.

  2033: GRAND CAYMAN

  THE JUMBO PLANE lifted off and rose through high, thin clouds. I watched Victoria, my residence for eight months but never my home, dwindle beneath me. A beautiful city, but not my city.

  Neither was George Town. But, I would be on Grand Cayman Island for only a month, depending on how everything went. Grand Cayman would be sweltering in late July, but I would not be outdoors much.

  “All internet devices may now be turned on,” the flight-attendant bot said as it rolled down the aisle. Only first class got human attendants, and I was not flying first class. I needed nearly all the money I had for the George Town activity.

  Thinking of it as “activity,” instead of what it was, made it seem less momentous, and less risky. The games we play on our own minds.

  The woman in the seat next to me was already asleep, or medicated. She snored softly. Across the aisle, a preteen boy in headphones and V-R glasses gestured frantically at something he could see and I could not. His flailing arm hit the shoulder of the man next to him, who looked resigned. I unfolded my tablet for my now-obsessive check on the news.