“Let me out up here,” he says, when they approach the edge of town.
“You crazy?” she asks. “It’d take you two hours to walk the rest of the way. Maybe more.”
“I said pull over,” he says, hardening his voice, because if she goes much farther, out of sight of prying protective eyes, around the next bend, maybe, or even before that, the thing inside him may emerge. It knows these things, somehow.
“Have fun carrying those two big bags of groceries all that way,” she says, when he gets out. “Asshole.”
“Meet me here in a week,” he says. “Same time.”
“You must be a Jehovah’s Witness or something,” she says, and he is relieved when she is gone.
The first two days pass in a pleasant enough blur. He reads books, engages in desultory masturbation to a cheaply printed paperback of gay erotic stories Hugh had lent him. Only one symptom: hunger. Low and rumbling, and not sated no matter how much he eats.
And then: lost time. He comes to on his knees, in the cool midnight dirt behind a bar.
“Thanks, man,” says the sturdy bearded trucker type standing over him, pulling back on a shirt. Puzzled by how it suddenly sports a spray of holes, each fringed with what look like chemical burns. “I needed that.”
He strides off. MacReady settles back into a squat. Leans against the building.
What did I do to him? He seems unharmed. But I’ve done something. Something terrible.
He wonders how he got into town. Walked? Hitchhiked? And how the hell he’ll get back.
* * *
The phone rings, his first night back. He’d been sitting on his fire escape, looking down at the city, debating jumping, though not particularly seriously. Hugh’s words echoing in his head. Help us or don’t. He is still not sure which one he’ll choose.
He picks up the phone.
“Mac,” says the voice, rich and deep and unmistakable.
“Childs.”
“Been trying to call you.” Cars honk, through the wire. Childs is from Detroit, he dimly remembers, or maybe Minneapolis.
“I was away. Had to get out of town, clear my head.”
“You too, huh?”
MacReady lets out his breath, once he realizes he’s been holding it. “You?”
“Yup.”
“What the hell, man? What the fuck is going on?”
Childs chuckles. “Was hoping you’d have all the answers. Don’t know why. I already knew what a dumbass you are.”
A lump of longing forms in MacReady’s throat. But his body fits him wrong, suddenly. Whatever crazy mental illness he was imagining he had, Childs sharing it was inconceivable. Something else is wrong, something his mind rejects but his body already knows. “Have you been to a doctor?”
“Tried,” Childs says. “I remember driving halfway there, and the next thing I knew I was home again.” A siren rises then slowly fades, in Detroit or Minneapolis.
MacReady inspects his own reflection in the window, where the lights of his bedroom bounce back against the darkness. “What are we?” he whispers.
“Hellbound,” Childs says, “but we knew that already.”
* * *
The duffel bag says Astoria Little League. Two crossed baseball bats emblazoned on the outside. Dirty bright-blue blazer sleeves reaching out. A flawless facsimile of something harmless, wholesome. No one would see it and suspect. The explosives are well-hidden, small, sewn into a pair of sweat pants, the timer already ticking down to some unknown hour, some unforeseeable fallout.
* * *
“Jimmy,” his father says, hugging him, hard. His beard brushes MacReady’s neck, abrasive and unyielding as his love.
The man is immense, dwarfing the cluttered kitchen table. Uncles lurk in the background. Cigars and scotch sour the air. Where are the aunts and wives? MacReady has always wondered, these manly Sundays.
“They told me this fucker died,” his father says to someone.
“Can’t kill one of ours that easy,” someone says. Eleven men in the little house, which has never failed to feel massive.
Here his father pauses. Frowns. No one but MacReady sees. No one here but MacReady knows the man well enough to suspect that the frown means he knows something new on the subject of MacReady mortality. Something that frightens him. Something he feels he has to shelter his family from.
“Fucking madness, going down there,” his father says, snapping back with the unstoppable positivity MacReady lacks, and envies. “I’d lose my mind inside of five minutes out in Alaska.”
“Antarctica,” he chuckles.
“That too!”
Here, home, safe, among friends, the immigrant in his father emerges. Born here to brand-new arrivals from Ireland, never saw the place but it’s branded on his speech, the slight Gaelic curling of his consonants he keeps hidden when he’s driving the subway car but lets rip on weekends. His father’s father is who MacReady hears now, the big glorious drunk they brought over as soon as they got themselves settled, the immense shadow over MacReady’s own early years, and who, when he died, took some crucial piece of his son away with him. MacReady wonders how his own father has marked him, how much of him he carries around, and what kind of new terrible creature he will be when his father dies.
An uncle is in another room, complaining about an impending Congressional hearing into police brutality against Blacks; the flood of reporters bothering his beat cops. The uncle uses ugly words to describe the people he polices out in Brooklyn; the whole room laughs. His father laughs. MacReady slips upstairs unnoticed. Laments, in silence, the horror of human hatred—how such marvelous people, whom he loves so dearly, contain such monstrosity inside of them.
In the bathroom, standing before the toilet where he first learned to pee, MacReady sees smooth purple lesions across his stomach.
* * *
Midnight, and MacReady stands at the center of the George Washington Bridge. The monstrous creature groans and whines with the wind, with the heavy traffic that never stops. New York City’s most popular suicide spot. He can’t remember where he heard that, but he’s grateful that he did. Astride the safety railing, looking down at deep black water, he stops to breathe.
Once, MacReady was angry. He is not angry anymore. This disturbs him. The things that angered him are still true, are still out there; are, in most cases, even worse.
His childhood best friend, shot by cops at fourteen for “matching a description” of someone Black. His mother’s hands, at the end of a fourteen-hour laundry shift. Hugh, and Childs, and every other man he’s loved, and the burning glorious joy he had to smother and hide and keep secret. He presses against these memories, traces along his torso where they’ve marked him, much like the cutaneous lesions along Hugh’s sides. And yet, like those purple blotches, they cause no pain. Not anymore.
A train’s whistle blows, far beneath him. Wind stings his eyes when he tries to look. He can see the warm dim lights of the passenger cars; imagines the seats where late-night travelers doze or read or stare up in awe at the lights of the bridge. At him.
Something is missing, inside of MacReady. He can’t figure out what. He wonders when it started. McMurdo? Maybe. But probably not. Something drew him to McMurdo, after all. The money, but not just the money. He wanted to flee from the human world. He was tired of fighting it and wanted to take himself out. Whatever was in him, changing, already, McMurdo fed it.
He tries to put his finger on it, the thing that is gone, and the best he can do is a feeling he once felt, often, and feels no longer. Trying to recall the last time he felt it he fails, though he can remember plenty of times before that. Leaving his first concert; gulping down cold November night air and knowing every star overhead belonged to him. Bus rides back from away baseball games, back when the Majors still felt possible. The first time he followed a boy onto the West Side Piers. A feeling at once frenzied and calm, energetic yet restive. Like he had saddled himself, however briefly, onto something impossibly pow
erful, and primal, sacred, almost, connected to the flow of things, moving along the path meant only for him. They had always been rare, those moments—life worked so hard to come between him and his path—but lately they did not happen at all.
He is a monster. He knows this now. So is Childs. So are countless others, people like Hugh who he did something terrible to, however unintentionally it was. He doesn’t know the details, what he is or how it works, or why, but he knows it.
Maybe he’d have been strong enough, before. Maybe that other MacReady would have been brave enough to jump. But that MacReady had no reason to. This MacReady climbs back to the safe side of the guardrail, and walks back to solid ground.
* * *
MacReady strides up the precinct steps, trying not to cry. Smiling, wide-eyed, white and harmless.
When Hugh handed off the duffel bag, something was clearly wrong. He’d lost fifty pounds, looked like. All his hair. Half of the light in his eyes. By then MacReady’d been hearing the rumors, seeing the stories. Gay cancer, said the Times. Dudes dropping like mayflies.
And that morning: the call. Hugh in Harlem Hospital. From Hugh’s mother, whose remembered Christmas ham had no equal on this earth. When she said everything was going to be fine, MacReady knew she was lying. Not to spare his feelings, but to protect her own. To keep from having a conversation she couldn’t have.
He pauses, one hand on the precinct door. Panic rises.
* * *
Blair built a space ship.
The image comes back to him suddenly, complete with the smell of burning petrol. Something he saw, in real life? Or a photo he was shown, from the wreckage? A cavern dug into the snow and ice under McMurdo. Scavenged pieces of the helicopter and the snowmobiles and the Ski-dozer assembled into … a space ship. How did he know that’s what it was? Because it was round, yes, and nothing any human knew how to make, but there’s more information here, something he’s missing, something he knew once but doesn’t know now. But where did it come from, this memory?
Panic. Being threatened, trapped. Having no way out. It triggers something inside of him. Like it did in Blair, which is how an assistant biologist could assemble a spacefaring vessel. Suddenly MacReady can tap into so much more. He sees things. Stars, streaking past him, somehow. Shapes he can take. Things he can be. Repulsive, fascinating. Beings without immune systems to attack; creatures whose core body temperatures are so low any virus or other invading organism would die.
A cuttlefish contains so many colors, even when it isn’t wearing them.
His hands and neck feel tight. Like they’re trying to break free from the rest of him. Had someone been able to see under his clothes, just then, they’d have seen mouths opening and closing all up and down his torso.
“Help you?” a policewoman asks, opening the door for him, and this is bad, super bad, because he—like all the other smiling white harmless allies who are at this exact moment sauntering into every one of the NYPD’s 150 precincts and command centers—is supposed to not be noticed.
“Thank you,” he says, smiling the Fearless Man Smile, powering through the panic. She smiles back, reassured by what she sees, but what she sees isn’t what he is. He doffs the cowboy hat and steps inside.
He can’t do anything about what he is. All he can do is try to minimize the harm, and do his best to counterbalance it.
* * *
What’s the endgame here, he wonders, waiting at the desk. What next? A brilliant assault, assuming all goes well—simultaneous attacks on every NYPD precinct, chaos without bloodshed, but what victory scenario are his handlers aiming for? What is the plan? Is there a plan? Does someone, upstairs, at Black Liberation Secret Headquarters, have it all mapped out? There will be a backlash, and it will be bloody, for all the effort they put into a casualty-free military strike. They will continue to make progress, person by person, heart by heart and mind by mind, but what then? How will they know they have reached the end of their work? Changing minds means nothing if those changed minds don’t then change actual things. It’s not enough for everyone to carry justice inside their hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.
“Sound permit for a block party?” he asks the clerk, who slides him a form without even looking up. All over the city, sound permits for block parties that will never come to pass are being slid across ancient well-worn soon-to-be-incinerated desks.
Walking out, he hears the precinct phone ring. Knows it’s The Call. The same one every other precinct is getting. Encouraging everyone to evacuate in the next five minutes if they’d rather not die screaming; flagging that the bomb is set to detonate immediately if tampered with, or moved (this is a bluff, but one the organizers felt fairly certain hardly anyone would feel like calling, and, in fact, no one does).
* * *
And that night, in a city at war, he stands on the subway platform. Drunk, exhilarated, frightened. A train pulls in. He stands too close to the door, steps forward as it swings open, walks right into a woman getting off. Her eyes go wide and she makes a terrified sound. “Sorry,” he mumbles, cupping his beard and feeling bad for looking like the kind of man who frightens women, but she is already sprinting away. He frowns, and then sits, and then smiles. A smile of shame, at frightening someone, but also of something else, of a hard-earned, impossible-to-communicate knowledge. MacReady knows, in that moment, that maturity means making peace with how we are monsters.
Fieldwork
SHARIANN LEWITT
Author of seventeen novels under five different names, Shariann Lewitt (aka S.N. Lewitt, Nina Harper, Rick North, and Gordon Kendall) has written literary hard science fiction, high fantasy, young adult, military science fiction, and urban fantasy. She has published forty short stories in anthologies, including Decopunk, Gifts of Darkover, OtherWere, The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, To Shape the Dark, and Bending the Landscape, Vol. 2, Science Fiction. Lewitt has formal backgrounds in population genetics and group theory, and learned that fieldwork was just a bit too applied (also too dirty!) for her as an undergrad. She currently teaches at MIT.
In the thoughtful story that follows, she shows us a scientist following in her famous grandmother’s footsteps and carrying on with her work, even if to continue that work, those footsteps lead her to face an icy death in the Outer Solar System.
“Grandma, do you think Ada Lovelace baked cookies?” We were in her kitchen and the scent of the cookies in the oven had nearly overwhelmed my childhood sensibilities.
“I don’t think so sweetie,” Grandma Fritzie replied. “She was English.”
“Oh. Mama doesn’t bake either.”
Grandma Fritzie shook her head. “There wasn’t any good food when she was young.”
“Did her Mama bake?”
“Maybe. But not after they left Earth. They only had packaged food on Europa, and not any ovens or hot cookies or anything good. That’s why your Mama is so tiny. We’re going to make sure you get plenty of good things to eat so you grow up big and strong.”
Grandma Fritzie sneered when she said “packaged food.” She was the head of the Mayor’s Council on Children and Family Health, and I was living with her while Mama was in the hospital.
My mother won the Fields Medal when I was eight. That may not have presaged another breakdown if the press had reported it as “Irene Taylor, Russian-born American mathematician working in algebra” etc. etc. But of course they did not. Some reporter even asked me, “So what was it like, being Kolninskaya’s granddaughter? You never knew your grandmother, of course…”
To which I replied that I knew my grandmother very well, that she lived all of three subway stops away in Brooklyn just like me and would tell me not to open the door to strangers. Then I slammed the door in the reporters’ faces. I went to live with Grandma Fritzie and Grandpa George three days later when Mama went to the hospital.
The press couldn’t just leave her alone. She’d been a hero, done something amazing and brave when
she’d only been a bit older than me, and now she’d only been the fourth woman to win a Fields Medal, and the media had to be horrible to her.
Even when I was eight I knew she wasn’t like other people’s mothers, was fragile in some way I didn’t understand, and I swore that I wasn’t going to be like her. I was going to be like Daddy and Grandma Fritzie and Grandpa George.
And maybe even, though I wouldn’t admit it, like Tatyana Kolninskaya, the famous grandmother I had never met. The one who had died and who my mother never talked about. Because at least Kolninskaya had gone out and explored, left her room, left our planet even. Unlike Mama, who never wanted to leave our brownstone in Park Slope except to go to her office, and even then didn’t like to take the subway. Too many people she said, which confused me. I thought she’d feel better with lots of people around. But, as Grandma Fritzie said, I was a sensible child and my mother’s neuroses were not comprehensible to me then. I don’t understand them now, either, but at least I understand where they came from and I’m pretty impressed that she’s managed to function at all. Let alone become one of the leading mathematicians of her generation. Besides, everyone knows that mathematicians are a bit strange, even those who grew up on Earth with loving parents and all the fresh food they could ingest.
None of the Europa survivors returned to anything close to normal. Most accepted implants to mitigate the worst of their nightmares, but Mama was afraid that it would interfere with the part of her brain that saw into math the way she does. So she uses drugs to lessen the bouts of PTSD that even the Romulus orphans who took the implants suffer to a lesser extent.
Now that I’ve been there, now that I’ve seen the ice and what remains of Romulus Base, and flown that journey and have some idea of what she went through, finally, now I can forgive her. For her fears and her craziness but also for the way she disappeared into her work for so much of my life.
There is only forever the ice. It expands to the dull greenish horizon flat and grayish green, as if it teased at being alive. Only of course it is not. Underneath is the sea, pulsing and alive. Maybe alive.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 35