by Nagle, Pati
The bugs that were supposed to eat the oil-eating bugs, had decided that humans were nasty bugs too and should be eaten.
I held my breath as I sent a message to my superior at the FBI. He acknowledged receipt and told me agents would get to this information immediately. Nothing to worry about. They would handle it.
Upon pain of death or life imprisonment I must tell no one what I found.
My birthday rolled around again with no further word from the FBI about the bacteria. Mom brought me a cake. It wasn’t much bigger than two cupcakes, just enough for the two of us to share. She’d saved her personal gas ration coupons for months to drive up to the University from the Bay, using personal resources for her government vehicle.
“Do you like it, Hope?” she asked as we savored each bite.
“Oh, yes, this is the best cake I’ve had in years. I just wish Dad could have shared it with us.”
We both bowed our heads in a moment of private remembrance.
“I took a bit of it up to the cemetery and left it at his grave marker for him.”
“Thank you for visiting Dad’s headstone. Next year maybe I can schedule time and fuel rations to go with you.”
“We’ll try, Hope.”
“Yeah, maybe. My schedule is really tight now. It’ll be worse when I’m an intern. Speaking of which . . . I need a couple hours of lab time tonight.” I’d found a way to network with the big computer and hoped to finally access the crystals that nestled on a long chain under my T-shirt. Arranged properly, they worked better than a heavily padded bra to enhance my figure. With one snugged on the outside of each breast, and one below, worn with loose tops, the only people who looked close were guys who were more interested in sex than what was really hiding in my undies.
“Do you have to go right now?” Mom looked disappointed, older, and more careworn than I remembered.
“No, we can have a cup of tea together.”
We chewed in companionable silence.
“Mom, how did Dad die? I mean, really die. The Navy didn’t tell us much. Just that it was a sudden illness.”
“CDC told me a long complex name for a disease I’d never heard of.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Maybe I can look it up. It should be on his death certificate . . . ”
“The government kept the original.”
“Mom, what aren’t you telling me?” Probably the same things no one would tell me when he died.
Maybe the same things the FBI wasn’t telling me about my research conclusions.
“It was ugly and messy and they buried his ashes at sea.” She clamped her mouth closed and finally looked at me, defying me to break her seven-year wall of silence.
I’d heard that phrase before. Ashes.
Cremation used up a lot of fuel. The government only authorized the procedure when a body was still contagious after death and needed sterilizing..
Obviously, to me anyway, Mom had a gag order from the government. I did too.
Secretly I had back-up data crystals of all my FBI work stashed with lab partners. All close friends. I trusted them more than the FBI. They trusted me enough to ask me to store their back-up crystals without looking at them.
I saw conspiracy but remembered my gag clause.
The wonderful cake suddenly tasted like sawdust.
Roaring thunder filled the sky. We jumped at the sudden noise. Mom clasped her chest and looked around in panic.
Concern for her overrode my curiosity.
She leaped to her feet and began pawing through her tote bag. “Go, go look now, Hope. Before it’s too late. If there is any hope at all . . . ”
“Mom . . . ?”
“Hope, please go. It’s important.”
I looked out my dorm window, keeping half an eye on her as she put her car keys in her pocket.
An endless flash of lightning lit the sky with layers of white and green streaked with red and orange fire.
Something dropped from the middle of a dark cloud that marred the glorious skyscape. Something heavy. I heard it thud into the ground before the image of an egg shape registered in my brain. It buried itself in the open lawn of the quad, three stories down.
I glanced over my shoulder to check on my mother. She nodded encouragingly, so I raced down the stairs and outside barely ahead of my classmates, my friends. My gaze locked onto the overlapping scales of pale green and white poking above the disturbed dirt.
The piece couldn’t be very big, judging by the size of the crater, or rather the lack of size. Twenty feet across and maybe five deep. Even the little bit of the green and white egg that I could see should have displaced sixty times as much dirt as it had. Something inside those scales had a power source to slow its passage and gentle the landing.
Every science fiction movie I’d ever seen, and all the books I’d read seemed to be coming true. The crystals around my boobs warmed and glowed green through my sloppy white T. Were they the same shade as the tip of the . . . egg?
I skidded to a halt at the edge of the crater. “Stop, Hope,” John, my primary lab partner and sorta boyfriend, yelled, holding an arm out to keep me back. “It’s probably radioactive.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied, pushing him aside. With more curiosity than caution I slipped and slid down the shallow crater wall. My speed increased the deeper I went until I was nearly running when I bumped up against the chest high top of the green and white thing. It looked like an artichoke—what I could remember of artichokes from fifteen years ago.
“Not a meteorite,” I called up to my comrades. My crystals positively hummed with joy. When I peered at them in question I noted for the first time, that the crystal facets resembled the overlapping scales of the artifact.
“Is it a bomb?” John asked.
“I don’t think so.” Tentatively I stretched out my hand, hovering over the tip while I bit my lip and gathered my courage.
My mother’s words came back to me. Please go. It’s important.
“What does she know?” I whispered. More than she let on. Than she had ever let on. Much more.
My fingers began to tingle. I jerked them away just before I made contact with that strange tile. Or was it a leaf? I presumed it was metal.
The distance I put between myself and the thing set my ears to ringing with the lack of noise. Even my necklace was quiet, like it held its breath in anticipation.
Noise? The growing crowd of spectators at the rim of the crater stared in gape-jawed silence. My ears tried to tell me that a sound was missing.
I forced my hand back toward the tip. A faint humming grew louder and more distinct the closer I got. My data crystals resonated at the same frequency, seeking . . . seeking kinship, contact, something. I freed them from my shirt.
Then the crystals lifted away from my shirt like iron filings attracted to a magnet.
In the far distance I heard sirens and the whop-whop of a helicopter. Miles away, approaching fast.
“We’ve got to get this into the lab! John, help me.”
“Um . . . ” He looked everywhere but at me. “Uh, Hope, I don’t think so.”
“Do it. Now!” Mom said with authority. She stood on the bottom step of my dorm, a pistol in her hand, nearly as big as a hand cannon.
Where had my Mom gotten a gun? And why?
“We can’t let the government hide this one away. It was sent to us so we can use it.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think so.”
Mom raised the gun and pointed it directly at John. “That was not a request.”
“On whose authority?” John backed away from her weapon with hands raised.
“By the authority of UNOMA Security. This artifact belongs to all the earth, not a single government or agency. Now roll it out of that hole and into the lab. I estimate we have seven minutes. Tops.”
No one moved.
Mom pulled the trigger. The explosion nearly deafened me. The bullet made a big puff of dirt an inch from John’s
toes. He jumped straight up and landed halfway down the crater wall. He fetched up inches from me.
“Might as well help, now that you’re down here.” I shrugged and leaned a shoulder into the tiles. Two more classmates joined us. As we pushed and wiggled the artichoke, it levitated, the base hovering at my ankles and the tip a foot above my head.
“Big sucker,” Mom said, peering over the edge of the crater. “Biggest one yet.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Mom?” I asked for the second time that night.
“A lot. I’m trying to keep you from getting killed. I was too late with the last three pods.”
The displaced air from the approaching helicopter ground against my ears. They’d covered the distance more quickly than I thought possible.
Mom looked up at the blinding searchlights approaching from north, south, and west. “Damn, three minutes out. Get moving. Quickly. We can argue and question later. Just get that thing under cover. Now!”
I laid a hand on the artichoke’s side and hastened upward. The thing followed obediently, matching my speed.
We crossed the threshold to the lab side of the quad seconds before lights began sweeping the ground from a quarter mile up and two miles away.
Mom hissed and stood guard on the top step. “Quickly, Hope. The thing should be keyed to a scientist’s DNA. Maybe yours since it levitated and followed you, or John’s. It will open to one of you or your classmates.”
“How?” I studied the artichoke where it waited in the foyer.
“I don’t know. Each one is different. Each one is sent to one person and remains impermeable to everyone else.”
“Mom . . . You aren’t just a site analyst, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I’ve tracked these things for nearly fifteen years. Now stop asking questions. The FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, the Chinese, the Russians, and probably the Israelis will be here within minutes. The African Consortium and the Saudis won’t be far behind. You’ve got to get the crystal from inside the pod. Add it to the others and get away from here fast. You’ve got to download the data on it before they catch up to you and steal it back.”
Gone was the vague and forgetful mother who pinched ration coupons and gently guided my homework. Here was an entirely different woman. Authoritative, powerful, and dangerous. Someone out of a spy movie. Jane Bond.
“Move, Hope. Now!”
Gulping back my fears and my questions, I caressed a tile. The humming resumed. My data crystals joined the orchestra again.
My finger tingled as I traced the edge of one of the green-tipped leaves. John traced a different one and shook his head. “I got nothing.”
When I moved my hand one tile to the right, the vibrations intensified, faded to the right of that, grew stronger one down. Textures blossomed beneath my palm when I flattened it. The cool alloy grew warm, hot, burned until it melded with my skin.
John gasped, and clamped his fingers around my wrist. I stopped him from yanking my hand away with a gesture. My hand sank into the surface as if it were foam.
Something whirred and spat.
I gritted my teeth and kept my hand in place.
The helicopter’s whop-whop descended to the crater.
A door the size of six tiles popped open below my hand. I jumped back, staring at the gaping hole. Soft, green light spilled forth.
“Grab the goods and go!” Mom yelled. “All of you. Take it and disappear.”
“But . . . ”
“Do it. I can misdirect and bluff for a few moments, but my UNOMA badge only holds so much respect with the big guns.”
I grabbed a fistful of green light and came out with a glowing data crystal. It matched the others in shape, but was half again as big. “What are they?”
“A gift from someone out in the galaxy who wants to help us clean up our messes. St. Rudi got the first one and mucked it up.”
That explained shutting down SETI. Or maybe just public access to what they found with SETI.
“Rudi was more interested in accolades and glory than a solution. When he realized that his shortcuts and incomplete reading were killing him and a lot of others, including your father, he tried to smash his crystal.” Mom turned a feral grin on my necklace. “I stole it before he succeeded.”
That explained sealing his lab and the strange investigations I did for the FBI instead of the CDC. They fed me bits and pieces of Rudi’s data for me to analyze properly. They farmed out the work to bright students, bound us with fear and money, because they couldn’t trust their own scientists and agents.
Mom continued. “There have been four other gifts from space, but the governments of the world don’t want anyone else to have the knowledge in those crystals, so they’ve gone to great lengths to confiscate them or destroy them. I and my agents stole them. You’re wearing them.”
I stared at the glowing crystal. I could almost see formulae and diagrams swirling beneath the facets, spiraling inward and outward, sending laser streaks to each of my crystals in turn, then speaking to my brain synapses directly.
Mom thrust something heavy and jangling into my labcoat pocket. Car keys.
“I know an abandoned high school that might still have some equipment,” John offered. “I—uh—work there sometimes for the CIA.”
“I’ve got my netpad and it’s still networked with the mainframe in the school lab.” Mary held up her mini-computer. “I’m with Homeland Security.” She flashed a smile and a mini badge.
“Will the crystals fit this data port?” Sean added, showing an external that plugged into a netpad. “The National Security Agency gave me some extra adapters.” He too produced a badge.
We looked to each other, four medical students with a hoard of knowledge and bits of equipment and . . . and hope in our hearts. We had each worked separately for a different official agency. Now it was time to work together.
“Work as a team, share every scrap of knowledge you glean so that no one will hide or hoard it again,” Mom whispered. She turned and marched down the steps, gun held out to the side, a symbol of co-operation, but ready to defend and protect if necessary.
“Good luck, Hope,” Mom called from the doorway. Then she turned and faced the enemies of hope.
As one we turned and ran through the corridors, out the back door, across a lawn to the faculty parking lot.
Mom’s little car, with nearly a full tank of fuel and battery charge, sat in the last spot, next to the gate, parked nose out for a quick getaway.
We crammed ourselves into the seats, likes clowns in the circus.
“Goodbye, Mom.” Tears spilled from my eyes. I’d never see her again. I knew it. And so did she.
I peeled out of the lot, spraying gravel, facing an unknown future with all I had left, my friends, a few wishes, and . . . hope. Hope that this time we’d find a way to save our oceans, and ourselves before the government shut us down.
By the Sea
Shannon Page
Though it’s an early story of mine, it’s still one of my favorites because I just fell in love with the character of the narrator, a crotchety old English writer, Elizabeth Barnett; and I loved the situation (a post-apocalyptic world, where half the survivors believed that humanity was regathering in Grants Pass, Oregon, and half rejected the notion). And then, I moved to Oregon a year or so after I sold the story, and now I drive past Grants Pass all the time, and it still makes me smile.
∞ ∞ ∞
Elizabeth Barnett stood on the veranda, lifting a wiry hand to shade her eyes as she watched Christos sail away. The sun gleaming off the Mediterranean assaulted her, but the light was beautiful all the same. Sometimes the loveliness here made it hard to remember how thoroughly everything had gone wrong.
Or maybe she was just being an old fool. Sunlight, kilometers of pale beaches thrust against bright blue water, hills covered with scrubby brush, khaki-colored rocks, and the occasional dark green cypress tree—it was not enough to hide the fact that she was very likely
the last person left on the island. The last living person, anyway.
She snorted and turned away from the sea before Christos, in his little white sailboat, had moved out of sight. No point in watching him go. He wouldn’t be back. She’d seen to that—they’d fought for weeks like rabid dogs. Or plague-infested weasels, more like. In the end, she’d set her teeth and scratched his lovely face with her long fingernails until the blood touched his chin. And still he stood, pleading.
“Beth, come to Grants Pass, I know it’s real.”
“It’s a lie, and you’re never going to get there on that damn fool thing anyway.”
“This is our only chance.”
“We have no chance.”
He’d simply stood there, looking at her.
“I have no chance,” she’d finally added, her voice bitter and dry. “I’m seventy-eight years old, and you know my health. I’ll die out on the water.”
“You’ll die here.” He’d leaned forward, almost touching her, but holding back.
That was when she’d scratched him, digging in with every last shred of strength she had. It was either that or touch him in a different way, and she’d held on to at least that much dignity, through it all.
Now she would not watch him go. The world had died; what difference would one more person make?
∞
“Kayley’s journal,” Beth said out loud as she heated a slab of halloumi over a wood fire she’d built in the stove. Bitter as it still was, at least her voice had lost its edge of testy near-panic, she thought. Three days Christos had been gone, and although she was growing accustomed to the terrible silence, she still felt the need to speak to the air from time to time.
She’d made this batch of the cheese herself, and she was proud of it, even if it didn’t have the tenacity of the stuff she’d been able to find at the market when she’d first bought this property, fifteen years ago. Or even the weaker but still salty-sweet cheese that Christos had come up with, using the thin milk they’d managed to glean from the last goat.