by Nancy Kress
A gene sequence of base pairs flashed across the screen, too fast to be noted.
“This sequence will appear again later, in a form you can record. It is found in what you call ‘junk DNA.’ The sequence is a transposon and you will find it complementary to the spores’ genetic code. Your bodies made no antibodies against the spores because it does not consider them invaders. Seventy thousand years ago our people had already been taken from Earth or we, too, would have died. We are without this sequence, which appeared in mutation later than our removal.”
Marianne’s mind raced. Seventy thousand years ago. The “bottleneck event” that had shrunk the human population on Earth to a mere few thousand. It had not been caused by the Toba volcano or ferocious predators or climate changes, but by the spore cloud. As for the gene sequence—one theory said that much of the human genome consisted of inactive and fossilized viruses absorbed into the DNA. Fossilized and inactive—almost she could hear Evan’s voice: “Or so we thought…”
Smith continued. “You will find that in Marianne Jenner, Ahmed Rafat, and Penelope Hodgson this sequence has already activated, producing the protein already identified in Dr. Jenner’s blood, a protein that this recording will detail for you. The protein attaches to the outside of cells and prevents the virus from entering. Soon the genetic sequence will do so in the rest of humanity. Some may become mildly ill, like Robert Chavez, due to faulty protein production. We estimate this will comprise perhaps twenty percent of you. There may be fatalities among the old or already sick, but most of you are genetically protected. Some of your small rodents do not seem to be, which we admit was a great surprise to us, and we cannot say for certain what other Terran species may be susceptible.
“We know that we are fatally susceptible. We cannot alter our own genome, at least not for the living, but we have learned much from you. By the time the spore cloud reaches World, we will have developed a vaccine. This would not have been possible without your full cooperation and your bodily samples. We—”
“If this is true,” Penny Hodgson shouted, “why didn’t they tell us?”
“—did not tell you the complete truth because we believe that had you known Earth was in no critical danger, you would not have allocated so many resources, so much scientific talent, or such urgency into the work on the Embassy. We are all human, but your evolutionary history and present culture are very different from ours. You do not build identity on family. You permit much of Earth’s population to suffer from lack of food, water, and medical care. We didn’t think you would help us as much as we needed unless we withheld from you certain truths. If we were mistaken in our assessment, please forgive us.”
They weren’t mistaken, Marianne thought.
“We are grateful for your help,” Smith said, “even if obtained fraudulently. We leave you a gift in return. This recording contains what you call the ‘engineering specs’ for a star drive. We have already given you the equations describing the principles. Now you may build a ship. In generations to come, both branches of humanity will profit from more open and truthful exchanges. We will become true brothers.
“Until then, ten Terrans accompany us home. They have chosen to do this, for their own reasons. All were told that they would not die if they remained on Earth, but chose to come anyway. They will become World, creating further friendship with our clan brothers on Terra.
“Again—thank you.”
Pandemonium erupted on the barge: talking, arguing, shouting. The sun was above the horizon now. Three Coast Guard ships barreled across the harbor toward the barge. As Marianne clutched her yellow blanket closer against the morning breeze, something vibrated in the pocket of her jeans.
She pulled it out: a flat metal square with Noah’s face on it. As soon as her gaze fell on his, the face began to speak. “I’m going with them, Mom. I want you to know that I am completely happy. This is where I belong. I’ve mated with Llaa^moh¡—Dr. Jones—and she is pregnant. Your grandchild will be born among the stars. I love you.”
Noah’s face faded from the small square.
Rage filled her, red sparks burning. Her son, and she would never see him again! Her grandchild, and she would never see him or her at all. She was being robbed, being deprived of what was hers by right, the aliens should never have come—
She stopped. Realization slammed into her, and she gripped the rail of the barge so tightly that her nails pierced the wood.
The aliens had made a mistake. A huge, colossal, monumental mistake.
Her rage, however irrational, was going to be echoed and amplified across the entire planet. The Denebs had understood that Terrans would work really hard only if their own survival was at stake. But they did not understand the rest of it. The Deneb presence on Earth had caused riots, diversion of resources, deaths, panic, fear. The “mild illness” of the 20 percent like Robbie, happening all at once starting today, was enough to upset every economy on the planet. The aliens had swept like a storm through the world, and as in the aftermath of a superstorm, everything in the landscape had shifted. In addition, the Denebs had carried off ten humans, which could be seen as brainwashing them in order to procure prospective lab rats for future experimentation.
Brothers, yes—but Castor and Pollux, whose bond reached across the stars, or Cain and Abel?
Humans did not forgive easily, and they resented being bought off, even with a star drive. Smith should have left a different gift, one that would not let Terrans come to World, that peaceful and rich planet so unaccustomed to revenge or war.
But on the other hand—she could be wrong. Look how often she’d been wrong already: about Elizabeth, about Ryan, about Smith. Maybe, when the Terran disruptions were over and starships actually built, humanity would become so entranced with the Deneb gift that we would indeed go to World in friendship. Maybe the prospect of going to the stars would even soften American isolationism and draw countries together to share the necessary resources. It could happen. The cooperative genes that had shaped Smith and Jones were also found in the Terran genome.
But—it would happen only if those who wanted it worked hard to convince the rest. Worked, in fact, as hard at urging friendship as they had at ensuring survival. Was that possible? Could it be done?
Why are you here?
To make contact with World. A peace mission.
She gazed up at the multicolored dawn sky, but the ship was already out of sight. Only its after-image remained in her sight.
“Harrison,” Marianne said, and felt her own words steady her, “we have a lot of work to do.”
PART TWO
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
—Albert Camus
CHAPTER 12
S plus 2.6 years
Marianne stood in a small storage room somewhere in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame, waiting to go on stage and staring at eight mice.
They were, of course, dead. These eight, however, looked unnervingly lifelike, superb examples of the taxidermist’s art. Why were they here, meeting her gaze with their shiny lifeless eyes from behind the glass of a tiered display case? Had they been moved to this unlikely venue from another building, to sit among cardboard cartons and discouraged-looking mops, because someone could no longer bear to be reminded of what had been lost?
Sissy Tate, Marianne’s assistant, stuck her head into the room. “Ten minutes, Marianne. Are those mice? Wow, it’s stuffy in here.”
“No windows. What about the—”
“They should have put you in the green room! Or at least a dressing room!” Sissy shook her frizzy cherry-red curls, which leaped around her head as if electrified. Two weeks ago the curls had been the same rich brown as her skin. Today’s sweater, purple covered with tiny mirrors, glittered.
Marianne said, “There’s a concert setting up in the big hall. No space.”
“That’s not the reason and we both know it. But a
t least you don’t have to worry about the storm—this one is going to miss South Bend. No problem.” Sissy’s head disappeared, and Marianne went back to contemplating mice.
Eight representatives of what had been the world’s most common herbivore, now existing nowhere in the world except for a few sealed labs.
Mus musculus and Mus domesticus, their pointed snouts and scaly tails familiar to anyone who ever baited a mousetrap or worked in a laboratory.
A deer mouse and a white-footed mouse, almost twins, looking like refugees from a Disney cartoon.
On the second glass shelf, the shaggy, short-tailed meadow vole and its cousin, the woodland vole.
A bog lemming, its lips drawn back to show the grooves on its upper incisors.
And finally, a jumping mouse, looking lopsided with its huge hind feet and short forelimbs.
“Hey,” Marianne said to the jumping mouse, of which no specimens had been saved. “Sorry you’re extinct.”
“You talking to a mouse?” a deep voice said behind her.
Marianne turned to Tim. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Yeah, well, I came to say we might have a problem.”
“But Sissy just said—”
“No, not the storm. Your speech. But first—were you talking to those mice?”
At Tim’s grin, Marianne felt herself flush. He often had that effect on her; she knew it; she was profoundly grateful that Tim Saunders did not. He lived with Sissy, he was fifteen years her junior, and he was not all that bright. To be so affected on a visceral level by someone so inappropriate was deeply embarrassing to Marianne. The powerful lean body, mahogany hair, bright turquoise eyes that made her feel as if she stood in a blue spotlight—none of this should set her hormones on high alert, not at her age. She was a grandmother twice over, for chrissake. And she lived with Harrison Rice, contentedly.
Contentedly but not passionately, said the rebellious part of her that was still seventeen. Marianne, a long way from seventeen, was appalled at that part of herself. Surely by now all adolescent fogs of desire should have evaporated from her emotions, from her mind, from her—
“I was not talking to the mice,” she said with what she hoped was dignity.
“Sure looked like it.” Another too-masculine grin. Damn, damn, damn. If she had to still feel the fog, why for such an obvious, even clichéd, pretty boy? Not that Tim was only that.
She said, “What’s the problem with my speech?”
“The crowd for it. They look nasty.”
Marianne frowned. Notre Dame was not supposed to be one of the nasty crowds. A noted research center, the university was pro-science, and although still Catholic-conservative on a few issues, had a socially liberal faculty and, mostly, student body. The university had even reimbursed her travel expenses, which few of her speech venues did. “How nasty?”
“Can’t tell yet. But I’m on it.” Tim left.
In the last two and a half years, Marianne had given over five hundred speeches for the Star Brotherhood Foundation, which she and Harrison had founded almost as soon as the alien ship had lifted off, taking Noah and nine other Terrans with it. The foundation’s purpose was to convince the world that a spaceship should be built, using the plans that the aliens had gifted, to take to humanity to the stars.
At first, the foundation had gone well. The spore plague had been mild, with fewer Americans than expected getting sick, fewer still dying. The world’s physicists, engineers, visionaries had all agreed with her. Humanity was going to the stars! Public opinion had been sharply divided, but Marianne and Harrison had been hopeful.
Then two things happened. First, morbidity and mortality reports came from Central Asia. Some anomaly in a genome common to that part of the world caused far more deaths from R. sporii than anywhere else. Horrific deaths, gasping for air, drowning in fluids in their lungs. There was still neither vaccine nor gene therapy for R. sporii, and the spores were apparently going to be present on Earth forever, affecting each new generation. Harrison’s team had developed a postinfection treatment for the disease, but it was expensive and distribution in Russia and her neighbors was sporadic and spotty. Already beset by ethnic unrest, the countries of the former Soviet Union attacked each other with irrational blame. Hard-liners took leadership in half a dozen countries. Hatred of Denebs, skillfully fanned for political purposes, flourished in Russia, in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Simultaneously, eight species of mice died.
Who knew that the loss of a bunch of rodents could collapse the world economy? Certainly Marianne hadn’t known, but like everyone else, she learned rapidly. An ecology, as Ryan had been telling her for over a decade, was a fragile construct. Alter one major element in it, and everything else was disturbed. Those common and ubiquitous mice were—had been—a major element.
Without the mice, predators from hawks to bears did not have enough to eat. Some died; some shifted to eating such alternate prey as snakes. The snake population shrank, and their prey, such as rats and lizards, flourished. Rat-borne diseases were now rampant. Arctic wolves starved.
Without the mice to eat their seeds, some wild plants went unchecked, growing completely out of control and choking off their less hardy neighbors, which further affected their ecosystems.
Without the mice to disperse their seeds, some flora began to disappear.
Without the mice to eat insects, some species flourished, including cockroaches, some caterpillars, some beetles.
Without the mice, which in some parts of the world had eaten huge amounts of cultivated grain, farmers suddenly had bumper crops. The supply glut caused prices to plummet. Whole economies tottered.
Every market on Earth had been affected. Conspiracy theories thrived like kudzu: The Denebs were a fiction and the spore plague spread by WHO to neutralize the Russians in world politics. No, the aliens were real and were agents of the anti-Christ—see Revelations if you don’t believe me! No, they were part of an interstellar cartel crushing Earth because we would be trade competition. Sometimes the Jews were part of this cartel, sometimes the Illuminati, sometimes the Russians or Chinese or Arabs. Accusations grew more bitter, small wars broke out, and the third world struggled, often unsuccessfully, to survive.
Marianne kept giving speeches. Harrison now worked with a research team at Columbia, desperately trying to genetically alter the few surviving mice into breeds that could survive in a world where R. sporii lay dormant in every meadow, every river, every rooftop. “But,” Marianne urged over and over, “the aliens did not cause the spore cloud! Denebs are indeed human, our genetic brothers. Their intentions during their year on Earth had been good and their mistakes accidental. A ship should be built using the plans that the aliens had gifted to humanity, taking us to the stars.”
But the Denebs and the spore cloud had arrived more or less together, and for a huge number of Americans, that was enough to “prove causation.” At a speech three months ago, in Memphis, she and Sissy had been pelted with eggs and tomatoes. One rock had been thrown. After the community organizer had hustled them to safety, Marianne had learned that some of the pelters had been armed with more than rocks, although no weapons had been fired.
“You need a bodyguard,” Sissy had said. “I know somebody. We can trust him.” The foundation had stretched its miniscule budget to hire Tim Saunders as her bodyguard. Ex–Special Forces, he owned a small arsenal and was licensed to use it. A week later, he moved in with Sissy.
Marianne said to the stuffed Mus musculus, “‘Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’” It didn’t answer. Mus, she remembered, had once been nonnative to the United States. An invasive species.
Behind her, Sissy said, “You talking to those mice?”
“No,” Marianne said.
“Well, it’s time. Dr. Mendenhall’s here to escort you on stage.”
Marianne went to give her speech.
* * *
The Decio Mainstage Theatre he
ld 350 seats, and all of them were filled. Marianne walked onto the stage, which featured a gorgeous proscenium arch, and stood quietly near the lectern while the dean of Sciences introduced her. The theater’s excellent acoustics carried Dr. Mendenhall’s words throughout the beautiful, high-ceilinged space with its polished, curving balustrades. Marianne, accustomed to much shabbier venues, wondered how the university could afford to maintain the theater so well. Their endowment must be enormous.
The students were too quiet. Many of them did not look like students.
The house lights had been left up. As she began to talk, the students neither stirred nor changed expression. She covered her three main points: The aliens were indeed human, our genetic brothers; all the scientific evidence confirmed that. Their intentions during their year on Earth had been good, their mistakes accidental, and they had not caused the spore cloud. The spaceship should be—
A girl’s voice, clear and ringing, called from the balcony. “You might not think it was such an accident if your uncle died of spore disease!”
A boy stood in the third row and said, “Isn’t it true the Denebs pay you to advertise this so-called spaceship?”
“Let her finish,” someone else called, and the boy sat down. Marianne hoped it would still be all right, but from the corner of her eye she saw Tim standing in the wings, tense and alert.
“Finish us, is what you mean,” someone shouted—an older voice, deep with maturity and disgust.
Dr. Mendenhall appeared beside Marianne and grasped the mic. “This university will treat its guests with courtesy. So whether you are a member of the student body or of the visiting public, you will let Dr. Jenner complete her remarks.”