by Greg Bear
“Learning was slower,” Letitia said.
“So were the kids,” Reena said, tossing off an irresponsible grin.
“I resent that,” Letitia said. Then, together, they all said, “I don’t deny it, I just resent it!” Their laughter caught the attention of an older couple sitting in a corner. Even if the man and woman were not angry, Letitia wanted them to be, and she bowed her head down, giggling into her straw, snucking bubbles up her nose and choking. Reena made a disapproving face and Fayette covered his mouth, snorting with laughter.
“You could paste rubber all over your face,” Fayette suggested.
“I’d look like Frankenstein’s monster, not an old woman,” Letitia said.
“So what’s the difference?” Reena said.
“Really, you guys,” Letitia said. “You’re acting your age.”
“Don’t have to act,” Fayette said. “Just be.”
“I wish we could act our age,” Reena said.
Not once did they mention Leroux, but it was as if he sat beside them the whole time, sharing their levity.
It was the closest thing to a wake they could have.
“Have you gone to see your designer, your medical?” Letitia asked Reena behind the stage curtains. The lights were off. Student stagehands moved muslin walls on dollies. Fresh paint smells filled the air.
“No,” Reena said. “I’m not worried. I have a different incept.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “It’s okay. If there was any problem, I wouldn’t be here. Don’t worry.” And nothing more was said.
The night of dress rehearsal came. Letitia put on her own makeup, drawing pencil lines and applying color and shadow; she had practiced and found herself reasonably adept at aging. With her great-grandmother’s photograph before her, she mimicked the jowls she would have in her later years, drew laugh lines around her lips, and completed the effect with a smelly old gray wig dug out of a prop box.
The actors gathered for a prerehearsal inspection by Miss Darcy. They seemed quite adult now, dressed in their period costumes, tall and handsome. Letitia didn’t mind standing out. Being an old woman gave her special status.
“This time, just relax, do it smooth,” said Miss Darcy. “Everybody expects you to flub your lines, so you’ll probably do them all perfectly. We’ll have an audience, but they’re here to forgive our mistakes, not laugh at them. This one,” Miss Darcy said, pausing, “is for Mr. Leroux.”
They all nodded solemnly.
“Tomorrow, when we put on the first show, that’s going to be for you.”
They took their places in the wings. Letitia stood behind Reena, who would be first on stage. Reena shot her a quick smile, nervous.
“How’s your stomach?” she whispered.
“Where’s the bag?” Letitia asked, pretending to gag herself with a finger.
“TB,” Reena accused lightly
“RC,” Letitia replied. They shook hands firmly.
The curtain went up. The auditorium was half filled with parents and friends and relatives. Letitia’ s parents were out there. The darkness beyond the stagelights seemed so profound it should have been filled with stars and nebulae. Would her small voice reach that far?
The recorded music before the first act came to its quiet end. Reena made a move to go on stage, then stopped. Letitia nudged her. “Come on.”
Reena pivoted to look at her, face cocked to one side, and Letitia saw a large tear dripping from her left eye. Fascinated, she watched the tear fall in slow motion down her cheek and spot the satin of her gown.
“I’m sorry,” Reena whispered, lips twitching. “I can’t do it now. Tell. Tell.”
Horrified, Letitia reached out, tried to stop her from falling, to lift her, paste and push her back into place, but Reena was too heavy and she could not stop her descent, only slow it. Reena’s feet kicked out like a horse’s, bruising Letitia’s legs, all in apparent silence, and her eyes were bright and empty and wet, fluttering, showing the whites.
Letitia bent over her, hands raised, afraid to touch her, afraid not to, unaware she was shrieking.
Fayette and Edna Corman stood behind her, equally helpless.
Reena lay still like a twisted doll, face upturned, eyes moving slowly to Letitia, vibrating, becoming still.
“Not you!” Letitia screamed, and barely heard the commotion in the audience. “Please, God, let it be me, not her!”
Fayette backed away and Miss Darcy came into the light, grabbing Letitia’s shoulders. She shook free.
“Not her,” Letitia sobbed. The medicals arrived and surrounded Reena, blocking her from the eyes of all around. Miss Darcy firmly, almost brutally, pushed her students from the stage and herded them into the green room. Her face was stiff as a mask, eyes stark in the paleness.
“We have to do something!” Letitia said, holding up her hands, beseeching.
“Get control of yourself,” Miss Darcy said sharply. “Everything’s being done that can be done.”
Fayette said, “What about the play?”
Everyone stared at him.
“Sorry,” he said, lip quivering. “I’m an idiot.”
Jane, Donald, and Roald came to the green room and Letitia hugged her mother fiercely, eyes shut tight, burying her face in Jane’s shoulder. They escorted her outside, where a few students and parents still milled about in the early evening. “We should go home,” Jane said.
“We have to stay here and find out if she’s all right.” Letitia pushed away from Jane’s arms and looked at the people. “They’re so frightened. I know they are. She’s frightened, too. 1 saw her. She told me—” Her voice hitched. “She told me—”
“We’ll stay for a little while,” her father said. He walked off to talk to another man. They conversed for a while, the man shook his head, they parted. Roald stood away from them, hands stuffed into his pockets, dismayed, young, uncomfortable.
“All right,” Donald said a few minutes later. “We’re not going to find out anything tonight. Let’s go home.”
This time, she did not protest. Home, she locked herself in her bedroom. She did not need to know. She had seen it happen; anything else was self-delusion.
Her father came to the door an hour later, rapped gently. Letitia came up from a troubled doze and got off the bed to let him in.
“We’re very sorry,” he said.
“Thanks,” she murmured, returning to the bed. He sat beside her. She might have been eight or nine again; she looked around the room, at toys and books, knickknacks.
“Your teacher, Miss Darcy, called. She said to tell you, Reena Cathcart died. She was dead by the time they got her to the hospital. Your mother and I have been watching the vids. A lot of children are very sick now. A lot have died.” He touched her head, patted the crown gently. “I think you know now why we wanted a natural child. There were risks.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “You didn’t have us…” She hiccupped. “The way you did, because you thought there would be risks. You talk as if there’s something wrong with these…people.”
“Isn’t there?” Donald asked, eyes suddenly flinty. “They’re defective.”
“They’re my friends!” Letitia shouted.
“Please,” Donald said, flinching.
She got to her knees on the bed, tears coming again. “There’s nothing wrong with them! They’re people! They’re just sick, that’s all.”
“You’re not making sense,” Donald said.
“I talked to her,” Letitia said. “She must have known. You can’t just say there’s something wrong with them. That isn’t enough.”
“Their parents should have known,” Donald pursued, voice rising. “Letitia…”
“Leave me alone,” she demanded. He stood up hastily, confused, and walked out, closing the door behind him. She lay back on the bed, wondering what Reena had wanted her to say, and to whom.
“I’ll do it,” she whispered.
In the m
orning, breakfast was silent. Roald ate his cereal with caution, glancing at the others with wide, concerned eyes. Letitia ate little, pushed away from the table, said, “I’m going to her funeral.”
“We don’t know—” Jane said.
“I’m going.”
Letitia went to only one funeral: Reena’s. With a puzzled expression, she watched Reena’s parents from across the grave, wondering about them, comparing them to Jane and Donald. She did not cry. She came home and wrote down the things she had thought.
That school year was the worst. One hundred and twelve students from the school died. Another two hundred became very ill.
John Fayette died.
The drama class continued, but no plays were presented. The school was quiet. Many students had been withdrawn from classes; Letitia watched the hysteria mount, listened to rumors that it was a plague, not a PPC error.
It was not a plague.
Across the nation, two million children became ill. one million died.
Letitia read, without really absorbing the truth all at once, that it was the worst disaster in the history of the United States. Riots destroyed PPC centers. Women carrying PPC babies demanded abortions. The Rifkin Society became a political force of considerable influence.
Each day, after school, listening to the news, everything about her existence seemed trivial. Their family was healthy. They were growing up normally.
Edna Corman approached her in school at the end of one day, two weeks before graduation. “Can we talk?” she asked. “Someplace quiet.”
“Sure,” Letitia said. They had not become close friends, but she found Edna Corman tolerable. Letitia took her into the old bathroom and they stood surrounded by the echoing white tiles.
“You know, everybody, I mean the older people, they stare at me, at us,” Edna said. “Like we’re going to fall over any minute. It’s really bad. I don’t think I’m going to get sick, but…It’s like people are afraid to touch me.”
“I know,” Letitia said.
“Why is that?” Edna said, voice trembling.
“I don’t know,” Letitia said. Edna just stood before her, hands limp.
“Was it our fault?” she asked.
“No. You know that.”
“Please tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“What we can do to make it right.”
Letitia looked at her for a moment, and then extended her arms, took her by the shoulders, drew her closer, and hugged her. “Remember,” she said.
Five days before graduation, Letitia asked Rutger if she could give a speech at the ceremonies. Rutger sat behind his desk, folded his hands, and said, “Why?”
“Because there are some things nobody’s saying,” Letitia told him. “And they should be said. If nobody else will say them, then…” She swallowed hard. “Maybe I can.”
He regarded her dubiously for a moment. “You really think there’s something important that you can say?”
She faced him down. Nodded.
“Write the speech,” he said. “Show it to me.”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. He read it carefully, shook his head—she thought at first in denial—and then handed it back to her.
Waiting in the wings to go on stage, Letitia Blakely listened to the low murmur of the young crowd in the auditorium. She avoided the spot near the curtain.
Rutger acted as master of ceremonies. The proceedings were somber, low-energy. She began to feel as if she were making a terrible mistake. She was too young to say these things; it would sound horribly awkward, even childish.
Rutger made his opening remarks, then introduced her and motioned for her to come on stage. Letitia deliberately walked through the spot near the curtain, paused briefly, closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to infuse herself with whatever remained there of Reena. She walked past Miss Darcy, who seemed to glare at her.
Her throat seized. She rubbed her neck quickly, blinked at the bright lights on the catwalk overhead, tried to see the faces beyond the lights. They were just smudges in great darkness. She glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw Miss Darcy nodding, Go ahead.
“This has been a bad time for all of us,” she began, voice high and scratchy. She cleared her throat. “I’ve lost a lot a friends, and so have you. Maybe you’ve lost sons and daughters. I think, even from there, looking at me, you can tell I’m not…designed. I’m natural. I don’t have to wonder whether I’ll get sick and die. But I…” She cleared her throat again. It wasn’t getting easier. “I thought someone like me could tell you something important.
“People have made mistakes, bad mistakes. But you are not the mistakes. I mean…they weren’t mistaken to make you. I can only dream about doing some of the things you’ll do. Some of you are made to live in space for a long time, and I can’t do that. Some of you will think things I can’t, and go places I won’t…travel to see the stars. We’re different in a lot of ways, but I just thought it was important to tell you…” She wasn’t following the prepared speech. She couldn’t. “I love you. I don’t care what the others say. We love you. you are very important. Please don’t forget that.”
The silence was complete. She felt like slinking away. Instead, she straightened, thanked them, hearing not a word, not a restless whisper, then bowed her head from the catwalk glare and the interstellar darkness beyond.
Miss Darcy, stiff and formal, reached her arm out as Letitia passed by. They shook hands firmly, and Letitia saw, for the first time, that Miss Darcy looked upon her as an equal.
Letitia stood backstage while the ceremonies continued, examining the old wood floor, the curtains, counterweights, and flies, the catwalk.
It seemed very long ago, she had dreamed what she felt now, this unspecified love, not for family, not for herself. Love for something she could not have known back then; love for children not her own, yet hers none the less. Brothers.
Sisters.
Family.
Originally published in Tangents (author collection), Warner Books, © Greg Bear 1989.
Hardfought
In the Han Dynasty, historians were appointed by royal edict to write the history of Imperial China. They alone were the arbiters of what would be recorded. Although various emperors tried, none could gain access to the ironbound chest in which each document was placed after it was written. The historians preferred to suffer death rather than betray their trust.
At the end of each reign the box would be opened and the documents published, perhaps to benefit the next emperor. But for these documents, Imperial China, to a large extent, has no history.
The thread survives by whim.
Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Watery black flecked a central core of ghoulish green. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula’s magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of stars—and disputed territory.
Whenever Prufrax looked at the nebula in displays or through the ship’s ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother showing an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some in the fibs.
At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the Mellangee’s mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of indoctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. “Zap, Zap,” she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldn’t think her thoughts were straying.
The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all focusing somewhere around the tellman’s spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. “How many branch individuals in the Senexi brood mind?” h
e asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. “Pru?”
“Five,” she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves.
“What will you find in the brood mind?” the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoulders. Some of the fems thought tellmen were attractive. Not many, and Pru was not one of them.
“Yoke,” she said.
“What is in the brood-mind yoke?”
“Fibs.”
“More specifically? And it really isn’t all fib, you know.”
“Info. Senexi data.”
“What will you do?”
“Zap,” she said, smiling.
“Why, Pru?”
“Yoke has team gens memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the team’s five branch inds.”
“Zap the brood, Pru?”
“No,” she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class’s inception. “Hold the brood for the supreme overs.” The tellman did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern.
“Fine,” said the tellman. “You tell well, for someone who’s always half journeying.”
Brainwalk, Prufrax thought to herself. Tellman was fancy with the words, but to Pru, what she was prone to do during Tell was brainwalk, seeking out her future. She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four.
“Zap, Zap,” she said softly.
Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Medusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branchmates, who along with the allimportant brood mind comprised one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety three orbits, each orbit—including the timeless periods outside status geometry—taking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence when the Senexi plan would finally mature.