by Nancy Kress
Ryan, did you do it?
Did you aid the organization that tried to blow up the Embassy? She could never ask him. If he had done it, he wouldn’t tell her. If he hadn’t done it and she accused him, the fraying tie between them might snap for good. Instead she said, “Jason is so excited about Colin’s birthday.”
He smiled faintly. “Well, three—an excitable age.”
“He seems to love being a big brother.”
“Yes. We haven’t seen any sibling rivalry at all. Jason constantly tries to console Colin.”
Something small to be grateful for. Sibling rivalry with Elizabeth and Ryan had made Noah feel he could never measure up, had set him adrift. Maybe Ryan and Connie were better parents than she and Kyle had been. Well—not a very high bar.
Everyone kept conversation focused on the children. Jason ate cake and helped Colin to open his presents. Colin cried. During one of his rare exhausted periods, Marianne held him on her lap. Tears stained his tired little face. She played a game of snapping her fingers to the right, to the left, above his head. Colin tried to grab them, until he again began to cry. Whatever his upset was, the baby didn’t have hearing problems.
During dinner, Colin blessedly slept. The adults, plus Jason in his booster seat, sat around the table, eating too fast, trying to get through the meal before Colin woke up. Tim had spent much of the afternoon prowling around the outside of the house, in the woods, and below the windows. Ryan and Connie were polite to him but basically uninterested. Elizabeth, however, kept glancing from Tim to Marianne. Marianne had made a big point of saying that Tim was her administrative assistant’s boyfriend. It did not stop Elizabeth’s glances. Conversation did not flow well.
Into a lull, Tim said, “I saw a wolf in your woods. Do you have a pack?”
“Yes,” Ryan said, “down from Canada. Just this winter.”
Connie said, “I worry about Jason every minute he’s outside.”
Jason, his mouth rosy with beets, mumbled, “Don’t worry, Mama.”
Tim smiled. “If there’s an adult with Jason, ma’am, then wolves won’t attack.”
Elizabeth said, “Are you a woodsman, then?”
“Was.”
“And you’re licensed to carry all three weapons you have with you.”
Tim’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, ma’am. But I’m curious how you know there’s three.”
Marianne hastened to blur the battle lines before they could harden. “Elizabeth’s with Border Patrol in Texas. And Tim’s ex–Special Forces.”
Elizabeth and Tim regarded each other even more closely, but with grudging respect. Ryan, however, frowned. Connie was still fixated on the wolves.
“Are you sure a wolf wouldn’t attack an adult? I saw ours, just last week, and it looked skinny and hungry enough to eat anything.”
Ryan said, “That’s because there are no mice for them to eat. In fact, I’m surprised wolves have survived at all.”
Tim said, “Wolves are survivors. They can make it no matter what happens.”
“Well, no,” Ryan said. “They almost didn’t survive humans. By 1940 there were only a handful of wolves left in the entire United States.”
“Don’t matter,” Tim said. “Like you said, they just retreated to Canada, ready to invade whenever the time was right. Biding their time. I hear other species do that, too. Can’t stamp ’em out, so you got to live with ’em.”
Ryan put down his fork and said evenly, “You’re talking about purple loosestrife.”
Tim said, “About what?”
Elizabeth said, “No, he’s not, Ryan—not every conversation is about purple loosestrife. He’s talking about Mom’s aliens.”
Tim said, “What’s purple loosestrife?”
Marianne said, “They’re not my aliens.”
“Sure they are,” Elizabeth said. “You helped make them welcome and now you want the ship built to go visiting.”
Ryan, for once his sister’s ally, said quietly, “She’s right, Mom. The Denebs were an invasive species, and now we’re reaping the consequences of having them here. You know that as well as anyone.”
Jason looked from his father to his grandmother. Marianne pressed her lips together and said nothing. Let the discussion die here. Connie, uncomfortable with friction of any kind, said brightly, “Who’d like more cake?”
But Tim said to Ryan, “Your mom’s right, you know. We should go to the stars. I mean—wow!”
Elizabeth said tightly, “No matter what the cost.”
“We already paid the cost,” Tim said. “So why not at least get what we paid for?”
“A great philosophy,” Elizabeth said. “The Children’s Crusade is already slaughtered, so why not have tea with the Saracens.”
“Who?” Tim said.
Ryan said, calmly but with a little too much emphasis, “An invasive species always disrupts an ecology. In this case, the ecology is the entire globe. It may end life as we know it. What, in your opinion, Tim, is worth that?”
Tim’s blue eyes glittered. “I didn’t say it was worth it. I said it was done. Take an even strain, man.”
Ryan said, “I’d rather you didn’t tell me how to behave in my own house.”
“Or more coffee!” Connie said desperately.
Elizabeth said, “The Deneb visit was a disaster. The follow-up is a disaster. Any return contact will be a disaster. That’s just the fucking truth, and you, Mom, won’t face it.”
Jason said, “Aunt Lizzie said a bad word!”
“Yes, darling, she did,” Connie said. “Elizabeth—”
“All right! I apologize for the word but not for the sentiments! Tim, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Come down to Texas and see what the Denebs’ ecological interference has done there. If you were anything but an urban New Yorker, you’d realize the full devastation.”
“I’m from Oklahoma,” Tim said. “Don’t patronize me.”
Marianne said, “The starship—”
“Will never be built,” Elizabeth said. “The plans are too different, too alien. Don’t you read about the difficulties human engineers are having in interpreting them?”
“Of course I do. Don’t patronize me, Elizabeth. Difficulties are not permanent impasses. Along with the advanced physics the Denebs gave us, we—”
“We what?” Ryan said. “Are farther ahead? The entire global ecology is becoming untenable. Invasive species—”
“We are the same species as the Denebs!” Marianne said. “The same species as Noah!”
She hadn’t meant to say it. It just burst out, driven by … everything. They all looked at her, even Jason, from wide eyes. The silence stretched and stretched, like taut cable. Before it could snap, Elizabeth murmured, “Let’s not discuss Noah. Connie, I will have more cake, thank you.”
Everybody reached for food, or resumed eating, or pretended to eat. Connie said to Jason, “You ate all your beets! Good boy!”
“I like beets,” Jason announced. “They’re red.”
“So they are,” Ryan said.
“Carrots are orange.”
“Clever boy!” Elizabeth said.
“Oranges are orange, too.” This struck Jason as funny; he giggled.
The adults exchanged strained smiles. Marianne avoided Ryan’s gaze. Did you? Did you?
In the next room, Colin began to wail.
* * *
All the way back to New York, after a night when Tim slept on Ryan’s sofa and Marianne barely slept at all, neither of them said a word. Grateful for this uncharacteristic tact, Marianne dozed, or gazed out the window, or turned on the radio to a station of classical music, without words. She’d had enough words. Fields and towns and boarded-up malls flew by.
One good thing: between exhaustion and worry and disappointment, Tim’s nearness did not disturb her at all. Sometimes you had to be grateful for what you could get.
CHAPTER 14
S plus 3.6 years
Marianne burst into the
office of the Star Brotherhood Foundation. Her face shone. Sissy half rose from her chair—what could have happened to make Marianne look like that? Not that Sissy wasn’t happy to see her all lit up for a change! She said, “What is it?”
“Harrison,” Marianne said. “They’ve bred a strain of P. maniculatus that was exposed to R. sporii without contracting it! Finally!”
“Oh, that’s good,” Sissy breathed.
“Fucking right it’s good!”
Sissy laughed. Marianne never cursed and it would do her good to loosen up. She’d had a bad year—a really bad year, which made Sissy feel guilty because her own year had been so good. Not that Marianne’s year hadn’t been good professionally, because it had. The foundation had this great new office in Midtown Manhattan, thanks to Jonah Stubbins’s money. Stubbins had kept his word about the donation being anonymous, so they hadn’t had any grief over that. They had more speeches than ever. Marianne had been heckled just as much but not attacked, not since Notre Dame.
But her personal year—not so good. Her daughter-in-law, Connie, had died of cancer. Sissy didn’t have a daughter-in-law, of course, but if she had, she’d have been devastated, just like she’d be if one of her sisters or sisters-in-law died. Not that they were all that great, especially Jasmine, but they were family. Devastated!
Marianne had gone to Connie’s funeral, and so had her daughter Elizabeth (someone else Sissy didn’t much like), but since then the Jenners hadn’t gotten together even once. Weird. Marianne felt it, Sissy knew she did, but she just didn’t go to see either Ryan or Elizabeth, and they didn’t come to see her. If it were her family, Sissy would have been charging over to each of them, trying to fix whatever was wrong. Even for Jasmine.
Maybe Marianne shared her grief with Harrison Rice. But Sissy had the impression that things weren’t too good there, either—not that Marianne ever said anything to Sissy about it. Not Marianne’s style.
So it was good to see her so happy. Sissy leaped from her chair, flipped on her music, and grabbed Marianne’s hand. It felt hot. They danced and bumped to “Lovin’ That Racket” until Marianne dropped, panting and sweating, into one of Stubbins’s deep, cushioned chairs.
“So tell me,” Sissy said.
“Well—just let me catch my breath a sec—well, it’s good. You know we have the protein that gives humans, most humans anyways, immunity to the disease. Harrison isolated the gene sequence for that protein, grafted it onto a vector, and finally succeeded in incorporating it into the mouse’s genome. The exposed mice show no sign of infection. It’s not germ-line modification, of course, and it’s almost certainly not dominant, but it’s a first step toward germ-line recombination or methylation epigenetics.”
Sissy, listening carefully, tried to sort this out. “You mean that Dr. Rice found the protein that protects humans from spore disease and—”
“We already had that protein, Sissy. Before the Denebs left.”
Sissy wasn’t sidetracked. “And put it into—deer mice?—so that now the mice breathe spores and don’t die?”
“Exactly!”
“And now Dr. Rice thinks that maybe he can get mice to pass that immunity onto their babies?”
Marianne sobered a little. “That’s a big step, though. Really complicated, if the gene doesn’t happen to get into sperm or eggs by itself and turn up dominant.”
“What are the chances of that?”
“This close to zero.” Marianne held up two fingers so close together that no light passed between them. The fingers trembled. Drops of sweat shone on her forehead.
“Are you feeling all right? That looks like more than just dancing and—”
Marianne turned her head and vomited onto the floor.
“You’re sick!” Sissy cried.
“Just a … cold…”
“It’s not.” She brought Marianne a towel from the bathroom and a glass of water, and then felt her forehead. “You’ve got a fever.”
“It’s just a cold. Sissy, stop that, you don’t have to clean up after me.”
“It ain’t going to clean itself up,” Sissy said, and knew that the words were Mama’s. “Just sit there a minute, and then I’m taking you home.”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are, so don’t argue with me.” Some people had more smarts than sense.
Marianne smiled faintly. “Someday you’re going to make a great mother, Sissy.”
“Well, I hope so.” She got Marianne into the car (“Really, I’m not an invalid!”) and drove her home. As soon as Marianne unlocked the apartment door, she dashed into the bathroom and threw up again. Sissy waited. The shower sounded, and Sissy sat down to wait some more.
She’d been to Marianne’s place before, but not often. Once, almost a year ago, Marianne had invited her and Tim to dinner. Neither had anything to say to Dr. Rice, or him to them. He was nice enough, Sissy supposed, but science was the only thing he could talk about. Not even about his little granddaughter, although Sissy tried. Marianne told her later that the baby cried all the time and Harrison thought there was something wrong with her and so didn’t want to talk about it. Which left zero to talk about. The four of them never got together again, which was fine with Sissy. Dr. Rice was a great man, but he kind of had a stick up his ass. In Sissy’s opinion.
The shower was still going. The apartment was neat but sort of drab. No fancy lampshades or bright pillows or any of the cute animal statues Sissy and Tim had on their coffee table, just a pile of printouts. Sissy picked up the top one.
HUMAN CLINICAL TRIAL OF T-413 ON BRODMANN AREA 22 AUDITORY FUNCTIONS: PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Property of Eli Lilly
The article was hard to read, even the little part in front called the abstract, but Sissy plowed on. A drug had been “fast-tracked” to see if anything could be done about all the crying babies and deaf babies being born. The drug didn’t help the ones with bad hearing, but it calmed down the ones who cried because their hearing was too good—could hearing be too good? Well, yes, if everything felt jackhammer loud all the time. Poor babies. Only Marianne had already told Sissy that when the babies were brought into soundproof rooms and music was played loud, they didn’t cry. Still, parts of their “auditory cortex” were too big or too deformed and nobody knew how that worked, just like nobody knew why a little while ago Marianne’s grandson Colin had just all at once stopped crying all the time. Just stopped. Also—
Well, look at this—of course the drug stopped the babies crying! It was a kind of tranquilizer! It probably stopped them doing anything, turned them into zombie babies.…
“Sissy, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be reading that.” Marianne stood in the doorway to the bathroom, wiping her mouth.
“No, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize!” Sissy jumped up and then wasn’t sure what to do next.
“It’s okay.” Marianne gave her that rare, sweet smile, and wobbled on her feet.
“Come on, sweetie—let’s get you to bed. I think you have a flu.”
“I don’t have time for the flu!”
“The flu don’t give a damn,” Sissy said, and heard Mama again in her own voice, but now that was okay because Mama had had her good points along with the rest of her, and one of them was taking care of sick people. Just like Sissy was going to take care of Marianne now.
* * *
It wasn’t flu. Maybe food poisoning, because when her stomach had emptied completely, she felt a little better. Sissy left. Marianne lay in bed, slept, woke. Much later she heard Harrison open the front door, drop his coat on a chair, and turn on the living room light. “Harrison?”
“Why are you awake?” Harrison said, silhouetted in the bedroom doorway against light from the living room.
“I don’t feel well.” Marianne glanced at the bedside clock: 1:42 a.m. Almost unheard of for Harrison, who rose before roosters and retired before full starlight. “Were you celebrating?”
“A bit. Look, I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
&
nbsp; She’d been longing for him to hold her. Still, he couldn’t afford to get ill. “All right. But first tell me more about the gene therapy on the mice.”
“I told you most of it.”
“You don’t sound very celebratory. Is anything wrong? Did something happen?”
“Things always happen,” he snapped, swaying on his feet, and now she realized what she’d missed before: He was drunk. Harrison, who could down four scotches without any external effects at all. She reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.
“What happened, Harrison?”
“All sorts of things happened tonight. Didn’t you see the news? Another superstorm is taking out most of the North and South Carolina coast. There are tornadoes in Oklahoma. Babies are being born with brain deformities. Entire ecologies are still chaotic from the domino effects of losing mice. Russia is in revolution to hardliners. The economy is in the toilet. The center cannot hold. Score one for Yeats.”
Now she was really alarmed. This wasn’t at all like Harrison, who neither prattled nor overstated. She tried to get out of bed but her stomach lurched again. Carefully she lay back on the pillow. Equally carefully, she searched for words that would not upset him further.
“Did something specific occur tonight at the lab?”
“Not the lab, no. I just had a crashing epigany … epiphany. Must get my terms straight. Terms very important. Marianne, we were wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
“The Denebs. The foundation. We were dead, totally, hundred-eighty-degrees wrong.”
She was silent, searching his face for some clue, some hint about what could have happened tonight.
“Bastards,” he said, “all of them. They knew what the death of the mice would do. They knew about the fetal damage to the auditory cortex. They knew. Must have!”
“Why do you say that?” Fear had started to coil around her already unsteady stomach, a constrictor ready to squeeze.
“It’s obvious.”
“Not really. Their colony ship was wiped out so probably there were no children that their scientists could—”
“Why are you still defending them? Because your child went with them? Well, great for you. Mine is dead.”