by Nancy Kress
A cop came into the room. Middle-aged, he looked weary, hard-eyed, competent. Tim did not so much as glance up. Marianne blinked back her tears and made herself stand. What she said now could be critical to Tim’s future. The interrogation was beginning.
“Hello,” she said steadily. “I’m Dr. Marianne Jenner, and this is my bodyguard, Tim Saunders, who was defending me from attack. Who are you?”
* * *
Two days spent in the police station and in court. Tim was arraigned and held until Marianne could arrange bail. Two suspects and six “persons of interest” were picked up by the police. At nine in the morning on the third day, Marianne sat in her hotel room—not the hotel downtown but a cheap one near the airport—and waited for ten o’clock, when the shuttle would take her to the damaged airport for the only flight she could find back to New York. The hour ahead felt like the arid years to come.
She had lost everything.
Sissy, the daughter of her heart.
Noah, gone to the stars.
Ryan, shut up in his grief over Connie and his implacable hatred of the Denebs.
Harrison, who’d thrown her out of his life.
The Star Brother Foundation, because she didn’t see how she could go on with it. If she paid Tim’s bail and a really good lawyer, she was out of funding. Out of courage, maybe even out of belief that the spaceship to World could ever be built. She could feel the dream leaving her, the last smoke from a spent fire.
Marianne sat on the bed, head bowed, unmoving, until her spine ached. It seemed to her that she might never move again. She had known pain before as an active thing, piercing and lancing her; this frozen pain was something new, and infinitely worse. Even breathing hurt.
A knock on the door. She couldn’t move to open it. Another knock, louder. Then the murmur of voices. The shuttle? She couldn’t break free of the icy shards of pain.
The door opened. A bellhop stuck his head in. “Dr. Jenner? This man—” He was pushed aside and Jonah Stubbins entered.
His eyes, small in the broad face atop the huge body, swept around the room. “Well, now, little lady—” He stopped, paused, and then, “Marianne, I know what happened. I need to talk to you. I have something to offer you that will, I think, matter to you.
“May I sit down?”
PART THREE
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
CHAPTER 16
S plus 6 years
“There is mouses down there!” Colin Jenner said.
“No,” his father said in that slow, frowny way that Colin hated. Jason hated it, too. “Not here.”
“Yes.” Colin pointed at the ground. “Little baby mouses!”
His father tugged at both boys’ hands so hard that even Jason was almost lifted off his feet.
Daddy hadn’t wanted to bring them on this walk. He never wanted to bring them anyplace. He sat in the living room and stared at the television or sometimes just at the wall, which was dusty and had a big spiderweb up in the corner by the ceiling. Colin didn’t think there was a spider in it, but he wasn’t sure. He hoped there was. Spiders were interesting. Sometimes Daddy would get up and cook or wash their clothes, and sometimes Jason would do it. Jason was way over six and went to real school, not just preschool, and so he could do things like that.
But today Jason had begged and pleaded, and Daddy and Jason and Colin got in the car and drove to Daddy’s swamp, which would have been exciting except for Daddy, who looked unhappy to be there. More unhappy.
The swamp was squishy underfoot and Colin’s boots made a nice splurgly sound each time he pulled a foot out of mud. There was so much to hear! To look at, too—frogs and bugs and the purple flowers Daddy hated and Colin sort of liked. But looking wasn’t as exciting as hearing. It never was.
But after just a little time Daddy said he was tired. They left the swamp and walked the trail to the parking lot, with its broken-off sign that nobody ever fixed: REARDON WETLANDS PRESER. Colin pulled away from his father’s hand, planted his muddy boots, and pointed again. “Baby mouses are down there!”
“I told you, Colin, there are no mice here. Not anymore, thanks to your grandmother’s alien ‘friends.’”
“I hear them! Baby mouses!”
His father grimaced, knelt, and put his hands on Colin’s shoulders. “Say ‘mice.’ One mouse, two mice. Look, I explained all this to you, remember? You’re old enough to begin to understand.”
“I’m five now,” Colin said, in case Daddy forgot. He seemed to forget Colin and Jason a lot.
“Yes, five. A big boy. So you can remember that all the house mice and field mice, all the ones like those in your picture book, are gone. They all got sick and died. A different kind of mouse, the deer mouse, might come and live here, but they haven’t spread this far yet. And even when they do, you couldn’t hear the babies way underground.”
It was the most words Daddy had spoken in a long time, but they weren’t true words. Colin stamped his foot. “There is mices down there.”
Ryan Jenner stood, took both sons’ hands and started toward the car. Behind them, a deer mouse sped from the cover of brush and disappeared into a tiny hole in the ground.
* * *
Daddy was wrong. Colin did understand about the mice. Grandma had explained it all on Skype. That was a while ago and Colin didn’t remember all of it, but Jason did and he explained it, everything that had happened when Colin wasn’t even born yet. Aliens had come from out of the stars, and Grandma and all the other scientists had helped them to not get sick. Only, after the aliens went away, a lot of mice died, like Jason’s hamster last Christmas, which was really scary because Pockets had been all stiff and cold. Grandma promised that she, Colin, Jason, and Daddy wouldn’t die for a long time. Mommy was already dead but that didn’t count because Colin couldn’t remember her and Jason could only remember a little. She’d died of cancer, which was different than what had killed mice. That was sad. Then birds and owls and even wolves died because there weren’t enough mice to eat. Then there were too many bugs because there weren’t enough birds to eat them.
Somehow the whole thing ended up hurting farmers and bread and fruit and money, although Colin didn’t really understand that part and neither did Jason. But it was the reason people got poor and Daddy lost his job and the car was so old and the porch steps were broken and Colin was never, ever to tell anybody that they had food in the cellar and guns in the house. Not ever.
The really confusing part, though, was the aliens from the star. Grandma said they were good and hadn’t meant to hurt any people or mice. They left directions for building a spaceship, a real one not like Colin’s toys, which sounded really exciting except that the important people who were in charge of the world didn’t have enough money to build it. And a big storm wrecked part of the spaceship, so they stopped. Grandma’s job was to tell people that the spaceship should get built again and that the aliens were good.
But Daddy said the aliens were bad. Really, really bad. They killed people and mice and wrecked something called “the economy,” which Colin didn’t understand, and “the ecology,” which he did because Daddy used to talk about it all the time, before he started staring at the wall or the TV. Ecology was how everything needed to eat everything else. Daddy said the aliens were even worse than the purple flowers.
So Colin and Jason didn’t know who to believe. Grandma and Daddy were both scientists, who were the smartest people in the world. Someday Colin was going to be a scientist, too, although Jason wanted to be an astronaut instead. When Colin was a scientist, everything would all be clear.
Meanwhile, he just listened. To everything. Nobody, he sometimes thought, knew how much he heard.
“Daddy,” he said as they walked from the car to the broken porch steps, “the trees are not happy.”
“Don’t I know it,” Daddy said.
Daddy didn’t understand. Grandma, on Skype, didn’t understand. Even Jason didn’t
understand. Jason didn’t hear what Colin did.
* * *
On her birthday, Marianne saw a picture of herself on the cover of a news magazine.
She stood in line at the supermarket in Barnsville, a Canadian town west of Toronto. The town was small, the supermarket barely deserved the name, the magazine rack held only three magazines, which were a dying commodity anyway. Two were American, and Time had pictures of her, Harrison, Ahmed Rafat, and others who’d researched aboard the Embassy. The photos ringed big red letters: ARCHITECTS OF THE SPORE PLAGUE: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Marianne’s fingers trembled as she put the magazine in her basket, along with coffee, milk, bread, cheese, and dish detergent. The clerk smiled, took her money, and did not seem to match her with the photo. At home, Marianne collapsed on her sofa and read the article and its many sidebars.
“Home” was this small rented bungalow ever since Stubbins had brought her here two and a half years ago. Canada was far less rabid about the damage the Denebs had caused to her ecology than was the United States—but then, when wasn’t Canada less rabid? Something about the United States seemed to provide a fertile medium for culturing hate groups, irrational scapegoats, mass shootings, and the blame game. When Jonah Stubbins had tried to buy a TV station in the United States, there was suddenly none available. When he’d tried to buy broadcast-frequency bandwidth from the FCC, his application had been denied. A few cable companies welcomed him, but they were small and local. To get the airtime he wanted, Stubbins bought a Canadian station, from which he broadcast illegally to the United States. “I’m a goddamn Tokyo Rose,” he’d said to reporters, but not to Marianne. She’d heard about it anyway.
The Time piece, a series of articles, began with an essay by Hugo Soltis, a popular columnist known for his anti-Deneb views:
Seven years ago, every country on Earth fell apart. And they’re still falling.
Humanity managed to survive a global death toll of over fifty million people from the spore plague, the majority of victims in Central Asia. We managed to survive the die-off of eight mouse species, with all the economic havoc resulting directly and indirectly from that extinction. What we are not managing to survive, in any meaningful way, is what has happened to our most precious resource: Earth’s children.
Enrique Velasquez, age two, lives in Compton, California, with his parents and older sister. Enrique cries almost constantly, as he has since birth. He is underweight and has been diagnosed with “failure to thrive.”
Allison Porter, in Chicago, is three. For the first two and a half years of her life, she cried—“wailed, screeched, screamed,” according to her parents—as much as Enrique. For the last six months, Allison has been on Calminex, the child-targeted tranquilizer from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Allison is calm now, but she moves and talks more slowly than what was once normal for three-year-olds. She has trouble learning.
Jazzmyn Brown is five and a half, one of the children in the womb when R. sporii struck Earth. Jazzmyn’s mother, like Enrique’s parents, cannot afford Calminex. Jazzmyn’s mother, a drug addict, surrendered her to the Florida child-protective services, and since then Jazzmyn has been in and out of eleven foster homes. No one can cope for long with her tantrums and chaotic behavior.
Michael Worden, four, has no chaotic behavior, no nonstop crying, no daily doses of Calminex. Born deaf, he is a bright and happy little boy in Oklahoma City, where his parents and two sisters are all learning American Sign Language right along with Michael.
Are these the only choices for an entire generation of children: to be on drugs that retard development, to be born deaf, or to live an existence filled with crying, frustration, and pain? Because there is pain for these children; functional MRIs confirm this. An entire generation has been genetically modified in their most complicated and human part: the brain. Everyone on planet Earth knows this, and how it happened.
But what happens next? Is there any hope on the horizon? And where are the researchers who helped bring this about by cooperating so fully with the alien Denebs? Did these human scientists know what would be the consequences of the spore plague?
And if they didn’t foresee it—should they have?
Most puzzling of all to many Americans: Why are at least some of them still working with those organizations, government and privately owned, who want to build a spaceship and renew contact with the aliens who did not bother to warn us of all the consequences of this plague? In this magazine’s recent poll, 68 percent of randomly contacted people disapproved of the four spaceships still under construction. “We have enough problems right here!” Enrique’s father says, and who should know better?
Marianne read with growing anger. To say that the scientists on the Embassy had “helped to bring this about”—how could a once-reputable news magazine even print that? Or blame the Denebs for failing to warn humanity about what they themselves didn’t know? Or that the Denebs were aliens, when all evidence said they were human? How?
The rest of the articles were more balanced. One discussed the chemistry and side effects of Calminex. One reported on the four spaceships still under construction, including the funding and engineering problems of building an unknown structure powered by unknown physics to specs dictated by an unknown race. One article examined the world’s economy, slowly recovering. One explored the ecological shifts from the mouse die-off: which animals were filling the vacated niche of fast-multiplying omnivores, how plants were adjusting.
And one traced the present activities and whereabouts of key Embassy research staff, those who had stayed until the very end.
Dr. Ahmed Rafat, geneticist. On staff at GlaxoSmithKline in London.
Penelope Hodgson, lab assistant. Housewife in Tempe, Arizona.
Dr. Ann Potter, physician. Retired from practice, living in Washington, DC.
Robert Chavez, lab assistant, working at the University of California at Berkeley.
Lisa Guiterrez, genetics counselor, changed her name to Lisa Garland, living and working in Chicago. She deeply regrets her involvement with the aliens, saying—
Marianne skipped to the last paragraphs.
Dr. Harrison Rice, immunologist and Nobel Laureate, living in New York City and working at Columbia University, reportedly on brain anomalies in mice.
Dr. Marianne Jenner, evolutionary geneticist whose son Noah was allegedly kidnapped by aliens, living in Barnsville, Ontario, Canada. She creates content for the JS Network, owned by Jonah Stubbins, which feeds pro-Deneb programs and speeches and scientific statistics to American television and the Internet around the globe.
How had they found her? And how much danger was she in now? God, she’d thought that was all over and done with. She hadn’t seen her children or grandchildren in two years, settling for Skype “visits” so that she didn’t lead murderous nut jobs to Elizabeth or Ryan or the kids. She lived in Canada with a false passport and visa, both courtesy of Stubbins’s huge and faintly illegal empire.
Maybe she needed yet another name, another passport, another place to live. Maybe she should leave the house right now and check into a motel. The article hadn’t included her alias. But maybe the motel clerk would recognize her picture. Maybe she was being incredibly paranoid.
No. Sissy was dead because Marianne had not been paranoid enough. If she hadn’t given those speeches for the foundation … No. No use thinking that way. It didn’t help.
She picked up her cell to call Jonah Stubbins. Ordinarily they had very little contact; working for the same goal had not made his fake-folksy persona any less grating. This, however, was not “ordinarily.” At least, over the phone she did not have to wonder if he was wearing any of his pheromone products, or if they were affecting her.
Before the call could go through, someone pounded on her door. “Marianne? Open up—I know you’re in there!”
* * *
Something was wrong with Daddy. Jason said so, but Colin knew it even before that. He didn’t need Jason to tell h
im everything! He wasn’t a baby.
“Daddy?” Jason said. Daddy sat in his big red chair with the tall back, Colin standing on one side of him and Jason on the other. Daddy hadn’t moved all morning, and when Colin had gone to bed last night, Daddy had been sitting in the chair just like that. He smelled bad. He looked straight at the wall so Colin looked at it, too, to see if maybe there was a spider on it. There wasn’t.
“Daddy!” Jason said again. Daddy didn’t look at him, even though Jason said it loud. Jason shook his arm, and then Daddy did look at him. “It’s lunchtime now.”
“Yes,” Daddy said.
Colin said helpfully, “We had cereal for breakfast.”
Jason put his face right up close to Daddy’s. “You have to make lunch now. We want soup. I’m not allowed to turn on the stove, remember?”
“Yes,” Daddy said, but at first he didn’t get up. Then, slowly, he pushed himself out of the chair and walked into the kitchen. He walked really slow, picking up his feet only a little bit.
Colin scampered after him. “Daddy, are you sick? You should go to bed if you’re sick.”
Daddy started to cry. He did it with no noise at all, just big fat tears rolling down his face. He still smelled bad. Colin got scared. But Jason said sharply, “Daddy! Lunch!”
Daddy heated the soup. Colin wasn’t very hungry, after all.
* * *
Marianne flung open the door to her bungalow; there was no mistaking that voice. Tim Saunders stood on the porch.
Marianne had not seen him since Albuquerque. Absolved of all charges, Tim had disappeared. He had not even thanked her or Stubbins for the high-priced lawyer or the car registered to one of Stubbins’s corporations. Stubbins had grunted, “Ungrateful bastard. And abandoning you—he’s interested mostly in keeping his own hide safe from the rest of them hate-mongers.” Marianne knew better. Tim had known that Marianne was safe under Stubbins’s professional protection, and the lack of thank-yous had not been ingratitude. Tim had disappeared into his grief for Sissy, and even the sight of Marianne would have been too much to bear.