"We don't need a Mute button," she whispered, "we need an Unmute button."
"Want to change the channel? Look."
The next channel was a gray screen with wavy lines and the yellow word mute in one corner, but the next one after it had a pretty, friendly looking woman sitting at a table and talking. The yellow mute was in the corner of her screen, too. She had a very sharp yellow pencil in her hands, and she played with it as she talked. Jill wished that she would write something instead, but she did not.
The next channel showed an almost empty street, and the yellow mute. The street was not quite empty because two people, a man and a woman, were lying down in it. They did not move.
"You want to watch this?"
Jill shook her head. "Go back to the man Dad was watching."
"The first one?"
She nodded, and channels flicked past.
"You like—" Her brother froze in mid-sentence. Seconds crept past, fearful and somehow guilty.
"I—"Jill began.
"Shhh! Someone's walking around upstairs. Hear it?" Her brother dashed out of the room.
She, who had heard nothing, murmured to herself, "I really don't like him at all. But he talks slower than the woman, and I think maybe I can learn to read his lips if I watch him long enough."
She tried, and searched for the control between times.
There had been no one upstairs, but there was a big bedroom there with two small beds, one against the east wall and one against the south, three windows, and two dressers. Her brother had wanted a room of his own; but she, terrified at the thought of lying alone in the dark, promised that the room would be his room and she would have no room—that she would sweep and dust his room for him every day, and make his bed for him.
Reluctantly, he consented.
They ate canned chili the first night, and oatmeal the next morning. The house, they found, had three floors and fourteen rooms—fifteen counting the pantry. The TV, which Jill had turned off when she had left the room to heat their supper, was on again, still on mute.
There was an attached garage, with two cars. Her brother spent all afternoon hunting for the keys to one or the other without finding them. Indeed, without finding any keys at all.
In the living room, the man who had been (silently) talking talked silently still, on and on. Jill spent most of her time watching him, and eventually concluded that he was on tape. His last remark (at which he looked down at the polished top of his desk) being followed by his first.
That evening, as she prepared Vienna sausages and canned potato salad, she heard her brother shout, "Dad!" The shout was followed by the banging of a door and the sound of her brother's running feet.
She ran too, and caught up with him as he was looking through a narrow doorway in the back hall. "I saw him!" he said. "He was standing there looking right at me."
The narrow doorway opened upon darkness and equally narrow wooden steps.
"Then I heard this slam. I know it was this one. It had to be!"
Jill looked down, troubled by a draft from the doorway that was surely cold, dank, and foul. "It looks like the basement," she said.
"It is the basement. I've been down here a couple times, only I never could find the light. I kept thinking I'd find a flashlight and come down again." Her brother started down the steps, and turned in surprise when a single dim bulb suspended from a wire came on. "How'd you do that, Jelly?"
"The switch is here in the hall, on the wall behind the door."
"Well, come on! Aren't you coming?"
She did. "I wish we were back at that place."
Her brother did not hear her. Or if he heard her, chose to ignore her. "He's down here somewhere, Jelly—he's got to be. With two of us, he can't hide very long."
"Isn't there any other way out?"
"I don't think so. Only I didn't stay long. It was really dark, and it smelled bad."
They found the source of that smell in back of a bank of freestanding shelves heaped with tools and paint cans. It was rotting and had stained its clothing. In places its flesh had fallen in, and in others had fallen away. Her brother cleared scrap wood, a garden sprayer, and half a dozen bottles and jugs from the shelves so that the light might better reach the dead thing on the floor; after a minute or two, Jill helped him.
When they had done all they could, he said, "Who was it?" and she whispered, "Dad."
After that, she turned away and went back up the stairs, washed her hands and arms at the kitchen sink, and sat at the table until she heard the basement door close and her brother came in. "Wash," she told him. "We ought to take baths, really. Both of us."
"Then let's do it."
There were two bathrooms upstairs. Jill used the one nearest their room, her brother the other. When she had bathed and dried herself, she put on a robe that had perhaps been her mother's once, hitching it up and knotting the sash tight to keep the hem off the floor. So attired, she carried their clothes downstairs and into the laundry room, and put them in the machine.
In the living room, the man whose lips she had tried to read was gone. The screen was gray and empty now save for the single word mute in glowing yellow. She found the panel her brother had shown her. Other channels she tried were equally empty, equally gray, equally muted.
Her brother came in, in undershorts and shoes. "Aren't you going to eat?"
"Later," Jill said. "I don't feel like it."
"You mind if I do?"
She shrugged.
"You think that was Dad, don't you? What we found in the basement."
"Yes," she said, "I didn't know being dead was like that."
"I saw him. I didn't believe you did, that time. But I did, and he closed the basement door. I heard it."
She said nothing.
"You think we'll see him any more?"
"No."
"Just like that? He wanted us to find him, and we did, and that was all he wanted?"
"He was telling us that he was dead." Her voice was flat, expressionless. "He wanted us to know he wouldn't be around to help us. Now we do. You're going to eat?"
"Yeah."
"Wait just a minute and I'll eat with you. Did you know there isn't any more TV?"
"There wasn't any before," her brother said.
"I guess. Tomorrow I'm going out. You remember that gate we passed on the bus?"
He nodded. "Poplar Hill."
"That's it. I'm going to walk there. Maybe it will be unlocked to let cars in. If it isn't, I can probably get over the wall some way. There were a lot of trees, and it wasn't very high. I'd like it if you came with me, but if you won't I'm going to anyhow."
"We'll both go," he said. "Come on, let's eat."
They set out next morning, shutting the kitchen door but making very certain that it was unlocked, and walking down the long, curving drive the bus had climbed. When the house was almost out of sight, Jill stopped to look back at it. "It's sort of like we were running away from home," she said.
"We're not," her brother told her.
"I don't know."
"Well, I do. Listen, that's our house. Dad's dead, so it belongs to you and me."
"I don't want it," Jill said; and then, when the house was out of sight, "but it's the only home we've got."
The drive was long, but not impossibly so, and the highway—if it could be called a highway—stretched away to right and left at the end of it. Stretched silent and empty. "I was thinking if there were some cars, we could flag one down," her brother said. "Or maybe the bus will come by."
"There's grass in the cracks."
"Yeah, I know. This way, Jelly." He set out, looking as serious as always, and very, very determined.
She trotted behind. "Are you going into Poplar Hill with me?"
"If we can flag down a car first, or a truck or anything, I'm going with them if they'll take me. So are you."
She shook her head.
"But if we can't, I'm going to Poplar Hill like you say. Maybe
there's somebody there, and if there is, maybe they'll help us."
"I'll bet somebody is." She tried to sound more confident than she felt.
"There's no picture on the TV. I tried all the channels."
He was three paces ahead of her, and did not look back.
"So did I." It was a lie, but she had tried several.
"It means there's nobody in the TV stations. Not in any of them." He cleared his throat, and his voice suddenly deepened, as the voices of adolescent boys will. "Nobody alive, anyhow."
"Maybe there's somebody alive who doesn't know how to work it," she suggested. After a moment's thought she added, "Maybe they don't have any electricity where they are."
He stopped and looked around at her. "We do."
"So people are still alive. That's what I said."
"Right! And it means a car might come past, and that's what I said."
A small bush, fresh and green, sprouted from a crevice in the middle of the highway. Seeing it, Jill sensed that some unknown and unknowable power had overheard them and was gently trying to show them that they were wrong. She shuddered, and summoned up all the good reasons that argued that the bush was wrong instead. "There were live people back at that place. The bus driver was all right, too."
The iron gates were still there, just as she had seen them the previous day, graceful and strong between their pillars of cut stone. The lions still snarled atop those pillars, and the iron sign on the iron bars still proclaimed Poplar Hill.
"They're locked," her brother announced. He rattled the lock to show her—a husky brass padlock that looked new.
"We've got to get in."
"Sure. I'm going to go along this wall, see? I'm going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it's fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I'll come back and tell you."
"I want to go with you." Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?
"Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now don't follow me!"
She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. "How'd you get in?" he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.
She shrugged. "You first. How did you?"
"I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn't try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down."
"Then you can't get out," she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.
"I'll find some way. How did you get in?"
"Through the bars. It was tight and scrapy, though. I don't think you could." Somewhat maliciously, she added, "I've been waiting in here a long time."
The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl-colored button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.
Peering though the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read mute in bright yellow letters.
Circling the house they found the kitchen door unlocked, as they had left it. She was heaping corned beef hash out of her frying pan when the lights went out.
"That means no more hot food," she told her brother. "It's electric. My stove is."
"They'll come back on," he said confidently, but they did not.
That night she undressed in the dark bedroom they had made their own, in the lightless house, folding clothes she could not see and laying them as neatly as her fingers could manage upon an invisible chair before slipping between the sheets.
Warm and naked, her brother followed her half a minute later. "You know, Jelly," he said as he drew her to him, "we're probably the only live people in the whole world."
Inertia
by Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress is the author of fourteen science fiction or fantasy novels, and more than eighty short stories, which have been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker's Dozen. Her novella, "Beggars in Spain," which was later expanded into a novel, won both the Hugo and Nebula Award. She received the Nebula Award twice more, once for her story "Out of All Them Bright Stars," and again for "The Flowers of Aulit Prison," which also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In 2003, Kress won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for her novel Probability Space.
In 2007 and 2008, Kress will have three new books out: a new story collection from Golden Gryphon Press, a new SF novel, Steal Across the Sky, and an SF thriller, Dogs, which, like the story included here, involves a highly communicable plague.
"Inertia" tells the story of the victims of a disfiguring epidemic who are interned in the modern equivalent of leper colonies. Kress says that identity—who you are, why you're here, why you are who you are (and what you are supposed to be doing about it)—is a central idea in her work, and this story is no exception.
At dusk the back of the bedroom falls off. One minute it's a wall, exposed studs and cracked blue drywall, and the next it's snapped-off two-by-fours and an irregular fence as high as my waist, the edges both jagged and furry, as if they were covered with powder. Through the hole a sickly tree pokes upward in the narrow space between the back of our barracks and the back of a barracks in E Block. I try to get out of bed for a closer look, but today my arthritis is too bad, which is why I'm in bed in the first place. Rachel rushes into the bedroom.
"What happened, Gram? Are you all right?"
I nod and point. Rachel bends into the hole, her hair haloed by California twilight. The bedroom is hers, too; her mattress lies stored under my scarred four-poster.
"Termites! Damn. I didn't know we had them. You sure you're all right?"
"I'm fine. I was all the way across the room, honey. I'm fine."
"Well—we'll have to get Mom to get somebody to fix it."
I say nothing. Rachel straightens, throws me a quick glance, looks away. Still I say nothing about Mamie, but in a sudden flicker from my oil lamp I look directly at Rachel, just because she is so good to look at. Not pretty, not even here Inside, although so far the disease has affected only the left side of her face. The ridge of thickened, ropy skin, coarse as old hemp, isn't visible at all when she stands in right profile. But her nose is large, her eyebrows heavy and low, her chin a bony knob. An honest nose, expressive brows, direct gray eyes, chin that juts forward when she tilts her head in intelligent listening—to a grandmother's eye, Rachel is good to look at. They wouldn't think so, Outside. But they would be wrong.
Rachel says, "Maybe I could trade a lottery card for more drywall and nails, and patch it myself."
"The termites will still be there."
"Well, yes, but we have to do something." I don't contradict her. She is sixteen years old. "Feel that air coming in—you'll freeze at night this time of year. It'll be terrible for your arthritis. Come in the kitchen now, Gram—I've built up the fire."
She helps me into the kitchen, where the metal wood-burning stove throws a rosy warmth that feels good on my joints. The stove was donated to the colony a year ago by who-knows-what charity or special interest group for, I suppose, whatever tax breaks still hold for that sort of thing. If any do. Rachel tells me that we still get newspapers, and once or twice I've wrapped vegetables from our patch in some fairly new-looking ones. She even says that the young Stevenson boy works a donated computer news net in the Block J community hall, but I no longer follow Outside tax regulations. Nor do I ask why Mamie was the one to get the wood-burning stove when it wasn't a lottery month.
The light from th
e stove is stronger than the oil flame in the bedroom; I see that beneath her concern for our dead bedroom wall, Rachel's face is flushed with excitement. Her young skin glows right from intelligent chin to the ropy ridge of disease, which of course never changes color. I smile at her. Sixteen is so easy to excite. A new hair ribbon from the donations repository, a glance from a boy, a secret with her cousin Jennie.
"Gram," she says, kneeling beside my chair, her hands restless on the battered wooden arm, "Gram—there's a visitor. From Outside. Jennie saw him."
I go on smiling. Rachel—nor Jennie, either—can't remember when disease colonies had lots of visitors. First bulky figures in contamination suits, then a few years later, sleeker figures in the sani-suits that took their place. People were still being interred from Outside, and for years the checkpoints at the Rim had traffic flowing both ways. But of course Rachel doesn't remember all that; she wasn't born. Mamie was only twelve when we were interred here. To Rachel, a visitor might well be a great event. I put out one hand and stroke her hair.
"Jennie said he wants to talk to the oldest people in the colony, the ones who were brought here with the disease. Hal Stevenson told her."
"Did he, sweetheart?" Her hair is soft and silky. Mamie's hair had been the same at Rachel's age.
"He might want to talk to you!"
"Well, here I am."
"But aren't you excited? What do you suppose he wants?"
I'm saved from answering her because Mamie comes in, her boyfriend Peter Malone following with a string-bag of groceries from the repository.
At the first sound of the doorknob turning, Rachel gets up from beside my chair and pokes at the fire. Her face goes completely blank, although I know that part is only temporary. Mamie cries, "Here we are!" in her high, doll-baby voice, cold air from the hall swirling around her like bright water. "Mama darling—how are you feeling? And Rachel! You'll never guess—Pete had extra depository cards and he got us some chicken! I'm going to make a stew!"
Wastelands Page 29