Tomorrow's Kin

by Nancy Kress

  “Well, it’s more what it seems to show, which is either enlarged or deformed primary auditory cortex, with unusually dense neural connections to the midbrain and brain stem.”

  Sissy seized on the part of this she could understand. “What do you mean, either that thing is enlarged or it’s deformed? Can’t they tell which?”

  “Not really.” Marianne swiveled her computer chair to face Sissy. “We don’t know much about the parts of the brain that process sound. It’s really complex, and to make it more complex, no two human cortices are the same. This might mean nothing. But Harrison’s mice…”

  “What about Harrison’s mice?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just don’t—I need to do a lot more reading. What else is on my schedule for today?”

  “Fund-raising dinner in Tribeca.”

  “Damn. Can’t I—”

  “No. You have to go. This lady has money and she’s willing to give us some.”

  Marianne glanced at her computer screen, back at Sissy, back at the screen. “How much money?”

  Sissy decided to be honest. Not that she wasn’t usually honest with Marianne. “Probably not that much, but—”

  “Tell them I’m sick and reschedule.”

  “But Tim says it’s important you show up so nobody thinks you’re scared off because of that attack at Notre Dame.”

  “I am scared.”

  “I said ‘scared off.’ Anyway, it’s too late to reschedule.”

  “You’re a hard taskmaster, Sissy Tate.”

  “Tim is going to pick you up in an hour at your place so you better go home and get ready. You aren’t going to wear that, are you?”

  “No. I’m going to wear sackcloth and ashes and mourn my reading time.”

  “Little lady, you’d look good even in that rig-out and that’s just the God honest truth,” said a voice behind them. Sissy whirled. How had anybody gotten in here and was he armed and— But Tim stood beside the intruder, and Tim was grinning.

  Sissy felt her insides draw up and back, like a rat getting ready to fight. She knew who this was. She’d seen him just yesterday on the news.

  Jonah Stubbins was even taller than Tim, and about 150 pounds heavier. He was dressed in what Marianne had once called Full Sunbelt: yellow shirt, khakis, white belt and shoes, bolo tie. He seized Marianne’s hand. “Dr. Jenner, I’m real glad to meet y’all!”

  Sissy saw that Marianne was holding her breath. Stubbins saw it, too. He laughed. “Aw, I ain’t wearing none of my product, Doc. Y’all are perfectly safe from … whatever. Unless a’course you don’t wanna be!”

  Marianne freed her hand and said icily, “I don’t understand why you are here, Mr. Stubbins. Tim—”

  “Sure you understand. You and me, little lady—may I call you Marianne?”

  “No.”

  “All right. But we got interests in common. You already knew that, din’t you?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t say nothing till you hear me out. You Eastern types allus too quick to get to jawin’. I’m here to make y’all a donation. A real big one, that you don’t expect. That’s why your bodyguard showed me up here.”

  A donation. From Jonah Stubbins. Sissy looked at Marianne, who said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Then think again. Just hear me out, little lady, that’s all I ask. Right now, anyways!”

  “I am not a ‘little lady.’ And you are not a viable donor to the foundation, however much you might think our interests align. Lastly, I’m not fooled, not amused, and not charmed by your folksy presentation. You have an MBA from Harvard, for God’s sake, which you have misused to criminal levels.”

  Sissy caught her breath. She’d never heard Marianne be rude like that.

  Stubbins did not leave. Instead he altered his body, somehow becoming less mountainous, less looming, less gaudy. He said, “That’s a great relief. I do get tired of my business persona, you know. But it’s even more of a relief to realize I wasn’t wrong about you. You have the backbone to perhaps succeed at your foundation’s mission, to sway public opinion by inches, until it reaches the tipping point. Because our interests do align, Dr. Jenner. We both want a starship built. However, I know the government can’t, or won’t, get the job done. No surprise there—I’m a Libertarian and we Libertarians know that government can seldom get anything right because responsibility is diffused and unaccountable. So I’m getting it done, even if it takes my entire fortune.”

  He waved his hand like the fortune was right there in front of him, and somehow Sissy could see it: piles of gold and diamonds and rubies like in a storybook.

  Stubbins continued, “Now, you don’t want to accept my donation because first, you don’t like my products. That’s irrelevant. Second, you’re afraid that I’ll want something from you, that there are strings attached to my donation. There aren’t. I only want you to go on doing what you’re doing. And third, you think that if you’re associated with me, your cause will suffer. Well, it won’t, because my donation will be completely anonymous. Not even the IRS can trace what I don’t want them to.

  “You know and I know—the whole word knows—that if environmental conditions on Earth trend the way they are now, with ocean pollution and superstorms and desertification, in three or four generations this planet will be almost uninhabitable. Escape from Earth is humanity’s strongest hope for survival. I know you agree with me on that—your speeches quote Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies on the subject. People like me are the only ones getting the job done. So take my anonymous donation and add your bit to a private lifeboat for humanity.”

  Sissy felt dazed. Some of those words were straight from Marianne’s speeches. Marianne looked dazed, too. Was this devil using one of his products on them? Sissy wanted to move closer and sniff, but then the perfume might get her, too.

  Marianne said, “How can I be sure your donation will really be anonymous?”

  “Because I’ve made them before, to other groups working in my interests. You know some of the recipients.” He pulled a piece of paper from a pocket. “Ask them, privately and in a place you’re sure isn’t bugged. Here, take the list, it’s going to erase itself in a few minutes.”

  Marianne took the paper. “I can’t give you an answer now, Mr. Stubbins. I need to consider.”

  “Of course. My personal phone number is at the bottom of the list. It won’t erase. Only ten people in the world have that number. You’re the eleventh. Also, here is the figure I’m prepared to donate anonymously to your foundation. Call me. Good-bye, Dr. Jenner. A pleasure.”

  He lumbered out and Tim locked the door. When he turned back to face Sissy and Marianne, his blue eyes shone like lighthouses. “It’s a lot of money. You gotta take it, Marianne.”

  “No,” Sissy said, and it came out almost a shout. Not that she didn’t feel that strongly about it. But she lowered her voice. “I don’t trust him.”

  Marianne gazed down at the list. Sissy, not good at reading upside down, saw only that it held six or seven names and some numbers before the names abruptly vanished and Marianne crumpled the paper in her fist.

  Tim said, “Fuck me! How did it do that? Marianne, we gotta take his money.”

  “No,” Sissy said. And again, “No.”

  * * *

  Jonah Stubbins was an unlikely multibillionaire in a high-tech electronic age, more like P. T. Barnum than Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, although Stubbins’s fortune now rivaled Gates’s. Stubbins had been born country-shucks poor, in the hills of Appalachia, which he’d hated enough to hike out of on the day he turned sixteen, bringing with him nothing but clothes, a rifle, and an untutored brain. Still, the meth labs of his violent kin had imbued him with three things: a hatred of poverty, a respect for chemistry, and a light regard for the law.

  The next few years of his biography were murky, defying even journalists to discover where, how, and with what he had survived. But at twenty-two he enrolled in a third-rate college, tested o
ut of most subjects, and emerged a year later with a degree in chemistry. By that time his good-ol’-boy façade was firmly in place, and he kept it through Harvard, which he attended on scholarship. He had already founded his fledgling company, and the applications committee was impressed. Nobody at Harvard liked Stubbins, not the legacy babies nor the brilliant nobodies nor the faculty. Nobody understood why he kept up his pose of illiteracy, despite stellar grades. In fact, nobody understood anything about him. But by the time he had his MBA, everybody knew who he was.

  His company, like many start-ups, began in a garage. The garage belonged to the first of his many wives, who’d received it in the divorce from the first of her many husbands. The product was perfume.

  “Perfume?” Carla Mae had scoffed. “What the fuck do you know about perfume?”

  “Nothing a’tall,” Jonah had said. “But it ain’t regulated by the FDA, and the industry’s going about its job ass-fuck wrong. You don’t want to make people smell like flowers or fruit or beaches. You want to make ’em smell like sex. Or like what suggests sex.”

  A year later he brought out, in tiny cheap bottles, a musky oil called Sleep With Me. The equally cheap advertising campaign promised that wearing it would induce desire in whoever smelled you. Unlike every other perfume ad that ever existed, this one told the truth. Developed from a secret formula that Stubbins’s genius for chemistry had based on human pheromones, Sleep With Me created desire as effectively as ecstasy combined with Viagra. The desire was not irresistible, of course, human beings still having enough free will to overcome lust if they really wanted to. Legions of smellers did not want to.

  The second year, the company went public. The third year, it brought out a perfume that induced a desire to obey—very subtle, perhaps no more than the same effect created by an authoritative stance in a charismatic personality. But most people were not charismatic. I’m In Charge Here was just as big a success as Sleep With Me. The lawsuits began, and Stubbins hired the best lawyers he could find. So far, neither the government nor class-action suits had succeeded in getting any of his four products off the market.

  Sleep With Me. I’m In Charge Here. Ain’t We Got Fun! Trust Me. All patented, all ravenously bought and used and then bought again because who wouldn’t want to be desired, obeyed, delighted, or trusted? Whether the “perfume” actually affected the person who smelled it or altered the natural body chemistry of the wearer was not conclusively proved, despite many attempts by scientists and many outraged articles by journalists. Perhaps the whole thing was a mass-hysteria placebo effect multiplied by a brilliant ad campaign. The public, even in a depressed economy, didn’t care. They bought the small, expensive, distinctively green bottles with the outrageous names.

  Stubbins put his MBA to good use, shrewdly diversifying and investing. When the spore clouds wrecked the global economy and entire countries went bankrupt, his personal economy dipped only a small amount. That was due in part, persistent rumor said, to bought congressmen and illegal lobbying and ruthless dealing with would-be competitors. Jonah Stubbins merely grinned at the allegations, and shuffled his feet, and made yet more enemies. He was forty-six years old and he owned the world.

  And this was the man who now wanted to donate to the Star Brotherhood Foundation! Marianne sat at that evening’s fund-raiser, which would net at most donations of a few thousand dollars, and made mechanical conversation with overdressed women and their mostly preoccupied husbands. She gave her brief after-dinner speech without really hearing her own words. Jonah Stubbins! His spaceship, constructed according to engineers’ interpretations of the plans left by the Denebs, was the furthest along since domestic terrorists had blown up Branson’s ship. Stubbins was serious about this. And the figure he had written on the erase-o-paper was staggering. The foundation could create TV and Internet spots, pay for ads, hire another speech-giver.…

  She sat down to polite applause. Conversation resumed. That man at the next table, leaning in so eagerly toward that woman—was she wearing Sleep With Me? Were either of the two women at the end of her table, who appeared to be discussing a business deal, scented with Trust Me or I’m In Charge Here? Did any of that stuff actually work? Well, yes, Sleep With Me did, there was independent-lab verification for that, but sexual-arousal hormones had been researched and studied for decades. The others might just be smoke and mirrors.

  But Stubbins’s money was real.

  “Well,” she replied to whatever it was that her host had just said, “that is interesting. Tell me more.”

  * * *

  Marianne sat in the front seat of the rented minivan beside Tim, who drove too fast north on Route 87 from New York to Tannersville. The college where Marianne had taught was there, and so was Ryan’s home. Colin had turned two a month ago and, finally, there was to be a family celebration.

  “I can drive myself,” Marianne had said. “Or take the train.”

  “Amtrak isn’t reliable,” Sissy had said, “especially north of Albany. You know that, Marianne. Look what happened when you tried to get to Pittsburgh for that speech.”

  “Pittsburgh isn’t north of Albany.”

  “Tim’s driving you,” Sissy said. “That’s what a bodyguard does, he guards people. Am I right, Tim?”

  “Always,” Tim said, not looking up from the videogame on his tablet.

  Sissy snorted. “Yeah, right. But I’m right this time, Marianne. Tim should drive you. Why wouldn’t you want him to?”

  Tim raised his blindingly blue gaze from his tablet. Sissy stared at Marianne. Danger, danger. She loved Sissy like a daughter. Tim’s long legs sprawled across Marianne’s office in black jeans and boots. He smelled of leather and masculinity.

  Marianne had made herself shrug. “No reason. Okay, Tim, you drive.”

  Now she sat beside him, hunched over her tablet as the slowly greening spring landscape slid past. She concentrated on Harrison’s research notes, and only on that.

  If only mice weren’t so damn tiny! Adult Mus weighed on average half a pound. As far as Harrison could tell, and it wasn’t very far, the brains of sacrificed mice showed the same abnormal tissue growth as those of the deer mice. Which might or might not have been the same as the autopsied child, which in turn might or might not have anything to do with Karcher’s statistical analysis of increased agitation among children born since the spore cloud. Many, but not all, of these children were deaf, and deafness did not ordinarily increase infant agitation. The data simply did not yet yield enough correlations.

  Marianne looked up from her tablet and rubbed her eyes. Elizabeth was flying up from Texas for the birthday party. It would be the first time they had all been together since the Denebs left.

  No, not all together. Noah was gone. Every time Marianne thought that, it was as if for the first time. She would never see Noah again. Was he happy, out there on an alien planet, with an alien wife? Probably Marianne would never know.

  Tim said abruptly, “You should take the money.”

  The interruption was welcome. “Stubbins’s money?”

  “Yeah. We can use it. And who cares if he makes perfume? Money is money.”

  Curiosity overrode prudence. “Have you ever used any of his scents?”

  “Once I tried I’m In Charge Here, when I was Special Forces. It didn’t work too good. My CO didn’t believe I was in charge.” He chuckled, a low lazy sound that went straight to Marianne’s primitive brain.

  She said, “I’m going to take the money.”

  “Good. Sissy won’t like it, though.”

  “I know.”

  “It’ll be okay.” He began whistling, and Marianne went back to Harrison’s notes.

  Was Ryan and Connie’s youngest, Colin, among the children with hearing problems? That was one of the things she wanted to find out at this family gathering. The other thing she wanted to know from Ryan, she could never ask. Maybe Tim’s presence would be useful, after all. With an outsider present, her family could not get too personal w
ith each other. They had never done well with personal.

  * * *

  “Grandma! I’m three!” Jason held up three fingers of a candy-smeared hand.

  “What a big boy!”

  “And Colin’s two!” Two little fingers.

  It would be okay. Ryan, Connie, Jason, Elizabeth—they all met her, smiling, on the porch of the little house. This was just a normal family gathering, and everything would be okay.

  Within the hour, none of it was okay.

  Colin, the birthday boy, cried constantly, a high thin wail. Marianne walked him; Connie fed him; Jason brought him toys. Only food quieted him, and then only briefly. He looked underweight. Elizabeth, who did not like children, asked Jason to show her his sandbox, just to get out of the house. Ryan, looking strained, dressed Jason in his jacket and sent him outside with his aunt.

  “She shouldn’t have come,” Ryan said to Marianne as they stood in the hall. In the living room, Colin cried. “Already Elizabeth’s started that old drumbeat about law and order. Connie isn’t up to this.”

  Marianne said carefully, “Connie looks really tired.” The hallway rug was stained, the walls bore crayon marks, a houseplant looked dusty and parched. Connie had always been a meticulous housekeeper.

  “Of course she looks tired,” Ryan said. “She doesn’t ever get uninterrupted sleep. Colin just cries and cries. Jason wasn’t like this.”

  “Every child is different,” Marianne said, and immediately regretted the fatuous truth. It was no help.

  “Did any of us cry like this?”

  “No. I guess I was lucky. Ryan, Connie looks like she’s lost a lot of weight. Has she seen a doctor?”

  “She has an appointment next week. Colin, too, although the doctor appointments never seem to help.” He ran his hand though his hair, already going thin on top.

  “If you need money for a night nurse or other household help.…”

  “No. We don’t. And I know you don’t have any to spare. But thanks, Mom.”

  He had always been like that, reluctant to accept help. “Me do it,” he’d said as a little child, never belligerently but as a statement of fact. Self-contained, self-reliant. And always, always secretive.