by Nancy Kress
You never know how any war is going until it’s over, and sometimes not until long after that. All you know for sure in the chaos of battle is the fate of individual soldiers. Over the past months, there had been a lot of battles.
More Org stations had been identified and prosecuted by DAS. Those convicted of terrorism included Kyle, April, Jonas, and Tom, the hapless recruit who never had time to actually do anything before he was arrested for not doing it.
Louis Weinberg, eight months after the raid on his carrot station, was still in prison. He refused to enter a plea, determined to use the firestorm of publicity to push the scientific crusade he believed in. Jean and Miguel were still out on bail, awaiting trials that would involve massive discovery efforts and expert witnesses on both sides, and would generate even more publicity than the Org’s online war already had.
I never found on the internet anything at all about Joe Peck. That led me to suspect that DAS never identified him, and to hope that he was back with the Quinault Nation, working for NOAA now that funding has been restored.
I didn’t know where Dylan was, although I suspected that Jake knew. Five times in eight months, I received letters addressed to Julie Jane Tolliver and postmarked from cities other than Los Angeles. The letters were signed “Tartuffe.” They said nothing that couldn’t be read by any agency that intercepted them, but in the quotes and reminiscences and obscure allusions, I read undertones of longing. Or maybe that was only my own longing. Online celebrity sites said that Jake and Gina were on the verge of breaking up, but anybody who would trust online celebrity sites would believe in leprechauns, elves, and the wholesomeness of high-fructose corn syrup made from corn drenched with glyphosate.
I did trust the internet sites reporting judicial outcomes. Lisa Anderson’s attackers were, all three, in prison for a long, long time.
Who was winning the GMO war? I still didn’t know. Both sides were expending stupendous resources to convince the public. But if the eventual outcome wasn’t clear, individual battles still had winners and losers.
In New York state, a farmer defiantly and openly planted a crop of GMO onions that fixed nitrogen from the air and so needed no fertilizer, a distinct economic advantage. The crop was torched by ecoterrorists. The farmer sued the group, a case that is getting a lot of attention, and a larger proportion of that attention than I would have expected is on the farmer’s side.
In Louisiana, a child wrote to the president that fish were dying in her lake and could the president do something about this? She heard that some “new little animals, too little to see” could fix that. The parents recorded her reading her letter and put it on the internet, a move that would have gone nowhere except that a lunatic state senator declared that the child was an actor and her plea was fake. The child, in tears, made another video. The whole thing went viral, and the mayor of the city declared the child to be a real child. TV and Link comedians seized on this. The senator then made a really stupid mistake: he declared that the mayor, too, was an actor and the whole thing was a left-wing conspiracy. A blight of derision descended over all media—but the GMO bacteria that could clean up oil slicks gained a lot of champions.
A congresswoman in Massachusetts boldly introduced a bill to repeal the Agricultural Security Act.
More farmers planted GMO crops as they realized the economic benefits.
More municipalities risked the oil- or plastic- or garbage-eating GMOs in their waters.
A controversial rock concert in favor of GMOs, Let Us Feed the World, was organized in Los Angeles. I suspected that, way behind the scenes, Jake had something to do with that.
But it’s money, not rock music, that powers the world. The whole pro-GMO movement received a huge boost from an unexpected ally: employment.
Under the old agribusinesses, two percent of the population had been engaged in farm work. The new farms were smaller, organic, and genemod—once people realized those two were not exclusive of each other—and they needed more workers. So did the new factories creating specialized bots for the weeding that replaced chemical spraying, the bots for smaller-scale tending and harvesting. It was amazing to me how fast things could be invented and brought to market if that market looked lucrative enough.
More genemod crops appeared in more states, made available by either the Org or some other organization like it. Scientific papers and popular journalism alike were full of them. The most unexpected was intermediate wheatgrass. I knew it had taken hold when I saw recipes appearing for “wheatgrass bread” not just online but in one of the cooking magazines next to a checkout bot. I just hope intermediate wheatgrass bread tastes better than teff pudding.
But what I’ve followed most closely in my Canadian exile hasn’t yet reached the notice of the scientific community, because you can’t prove a negative. This summer’s algae blooms along the west coast of the United States and Canada have produced no domoic acid. Zip. Zilch. None.
The boy across the aisle flung out an arm so violently that it hit me in the face. His father ripped off the kid’s headphones and said, “Robbie!”
“Oh, sorry,” Robbie said to me, just before the service bot rolled between us. It said in its carefully calibrated voice, inflected but not human, “What beverage can I get for you, ma’am?”
“Coffee. Cream, no sugar.” And to Robbie, “That’s okay. Are you winning?”
“Yeah!”
“Go get ’em, Ian.”
He frowned. “I’m not Ian, I’m Robert.”
“I know.”
Puzzled, he shrugged and put his headphones back on.
I went back to my tablet. GMO research and field trials in Africa, Asia, South America. Some of those may find their way to the United States. It will take time, but maybe as the political climate changes along with the global climate, we can still save the world from famine. One carrot at a time.
I want to help. In Victoria, I’d done volunteer work for important causes, but none that mattered to me as much as GMOs. I want to belong again in my own county, working for something I am passionate about. In the Caymans, plastic surgery, like banking, is discreet. Really discreet, even when it’s so total that it includes eye replacement, fingerprint replacement, facial realignment—everything necessary to deceive ever-more-sophisticated border security. As long as you have the money, you can start over as somebody else. If I get halfway through the operations to turn me into my fifth identity and I need even more money, I know that Jake will give it to me. However, he will find out about my procedures only when it’s either too late to stop them or he gets a death notice as next of kin.
There is a medical risk.
There is a legal risk; a federal arrest warrant is out for Renata Black, aka Renata Sanderson, aka Caroline Denton.
There is a risk that no GMO activist group will take me again.
Let’s find out.
Nancy Kress is the best-selling author of more than thirty science fiction and fantasy novels and novellas, including Beggars in Spain, Probability Space, and Steal Across the Sky. To date, she has also published more than ten short story collections and three nonfiction books for Writer's Digest on the fundamentals of writing.
Kress is a six-time Nebula Award winner, including two consecutive awards for her novellas After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall and Yesterday’s Kin. She is also the recipient of the Sturgeon and Campbell awards, as well as two Hugo awards. Her fiction has been translated into nearly two dozen languages, including Klingon. Kress teaches writing at workshops, including Clarion West and Taos Toolbox, as well as at the University of Leipzig in Germany, as a guest professor.
Kress lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, the author Jack Skillingstead.
Table of Contents
2005: NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
2010: PORTLAND, OREGON
2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
2011: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
2022: INDIA
/> 2022: SEATTLE
2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
2032: VICTORIA, CANADA
2033: GRAND CAYMAN
Nancy Kress is the best-selling author of more than thirty science fiction and fantasy novels and novellas, including Beggars in Spain, Probability Space, and Steal Across the Sky. To date, she has also published more than ten short story collections and three nonfiction books for Writer’s Digest on the fundamentals of writing.
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