by Nancy Kress
Marianne was outraged—how dare Stubbins? But then she realized she was not as outraged as she should be. A Scud had just destroyed the SpaceX ship. Stubbins needed every single precaution, and privacy versus security was an old, old story.
Tim returned. “Tell your chopper pilot—who’s looking at us hard—that I’m an old flame still carrying the torch, okay? I’ll say this quick. You know I never liked that Earth for Humans gunman outside your apartment right as you came home, or that kid who knew Colin’s real name at his school—both just felt hinky. So I’ve been digging.”
Marianne, already cold in the January wind, went colder.
“The gunman got caught on the building security camera and I—”
“How did you get access to those recordings?”
Tim didn’t even bother to answer. “Got a photo of the guy, did some asking around. He does work for a man who sometimes gets things done for Stubbins. Okay, that’s not much to go on. But the kid who knew Colin’s name and all about you, Paul Tyson, his father is a vice president of something at Stubbins’s Manhattan sales headquarters for the perfumes. And Tyson’s a very old friend of old Jonah himself. And he—no, don’t turn away, listen to me—just got promoted to head honcho on the research project Stubbins is running at his big pharma company in Colorado to find a drug to help all those kids born since the spore cloud. Even though Tyson has no research background.”
“What drug? I didn’t hear about this.”
“Since when does Stubbins tell about his drugs until they’re on the market? That’s gonna be a huge market, a drug that can block unwanted sounds for those kids without turning them into zombies like Calminex does.”
“If anything like that were in the works, Harrison would know about it.”
“Maybe he does. Did you ask him?”
She hadn’t. Tim made a gesture of impatience that she remembered all too well.
“Focus, Marianne. I’m telling you that I think Stubbins arranged both the gunman threat and the Paul kid in order to get you to the Venture site.”
“Why would he do that? I could have gone on writing his web and broadcast content from Manhattan.”
“I don’t know why. That’s for you to find out.”
Marianne wrapped her arms around her body for warmth. “It all seems pretty circumstantial to me.”
“Uh-huh. And you seem like the trusting idiot you’ve always been.” His face softened. “The smartest idiot, though. Listen, I have to go—your pilot is barreling over here to rescue you. I just wanted you to have all the info.” He ran off, faster than the middle-aged and overweight pilot could possibly follow.
Marianne intercepted the pilot and fed him Tim’s romantic lies. Was Tim being paranoid about Stubbins? As her bodyguard, paranoia had been his job description. But … was he right?
She needed to have a talk with Jonah Stubbins. This time, she would keep hunting until she found him.
CHAPTER 22
S plus 6.5 years
The mice were disappointing. The mother mouse did not come home, the striped mouse did not reappear, and the baby mice stayed underground where Colin could hear them but not see them.
The children sat yet again around the mouse hole, waiting for something to happen. Colin was cold, even though he had on his parka and Grandma kept saying how warm this winter was. The trees above them had no leaves, except for the Christmas trees and one big tree with dead brown leaves that just stayed on it and didn’t fall. The little woods had no color, not even in the sky, except for some red berries that Grandma said were poison. Maybe Ms. Blake got sick because she ate the red berries. But she was a teacher so wouldn’t she know better? Colin was worried about Ms. Blake. She was still in the infirmary. Colin had gone there and pressed his ear to the building and he heard lots of things—people, machines, plants—but not Ms. Blake’s voice. He missed it. And he never even saw any mice.
“This is stupid,” Ava said. “We been here a really long time.”
“You only came with us once before,” Jason said, “but we’ve been here lots, waiting. So you can wait, too.”
“It ain’t my fault if Devil Stubbins needed me for more fucking tests!”
“Don’t use bad words,” Colin said.
“Will if I want to.”
“Luke doesn’t like it,” Jason said.
Ava looked from Colin to Luke. It was true that Luke didn’t like any kind of fighting or cursing. And it was also true that Ava liked Luke best, even though he was slow and Jason was their leader. Ava was always kind to Luke. Colin didn’t understand that but at least it was something good. He went back to watching the mouse hole.
And then he heard it. “Shhhh! She’s coming!”
All four children froze. Luke and Ava turned just their heads, their bodies still, in the direction of the noise. Jason followed their gaze. He couldn’t hear what Colin heard, the high screeeeee, but in another minute they all saw her.
The mommy mouse staggered from a bunch of dead leaves toward the hole. She fell down, got up, fell down again. Her brown fur—no long stripe on her back, she was just a regular mouse—was all weird, standing up in patches. She was really skinny. All at once her body started to shake hard as she kept making that awful noise: Screeeeeeeeee! And then she gave a huge shake and lay still.
Nobody spoke until Jason said, “I think she’d dead.”
Ava said, “I don’t see no blood.”
“Maybe she died of sickness,” Jason said.
Colin didn’t like that, because of Ms. Blake. What if she died, too? He stared at the dead mouse.
Luke burst into tears. “Without their mom, the baby mice will die!”
“No, they won’t,” Ava said. “We’ll take care of them. Don’t you cry, Luke.”
“We don’t know how to take care of baby mice,” Jason said.
Then Colin had an inspiration. “We’ll take them all to Grandma! She used to have mice at her work, she told me. She’ll know how to take care of the babies, and maybe she can even fix the mommy mouse!”
Jason stared at the corpse. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty dead.”
“Well, let’s bring it anyway.”
Luke said, “We haven’t got a box.”
“That’s okay,” Ava said. “We got clothes.” She pulled off her parka. It was pink, but the mommy mouse was a girl so that was okay.
“Don’t touch the mice!” Jason said. “Pick them up with clothes!”
Carefully, Ava scooped up the dead mouse with her parka.
Colin said, “We got to get the babies.” He started digging dirt away from the hole.
The babies were deeper than Colin thought, but they got them out. There were six, but two were already dead. Jason put the live ones in his parka and Colin put the dead two into his pockets, lifting them with brown leaves. Luke took off his parka and made Ava wear it. The baby mice kept on crying for their mother.
Colin really, really hoped that Grandma would know what to do.
* * *
It took Marianne almost a week to find Stubbins. First he was “off-site” at one of his companies. Then she’d “just missed him” at the mess. There was a warm cup of coffee in his office but no Stubbins. Finally she ran him to ground on the bridge of the Venture, where she was not supposed to be but Judy told the duty guard it was urgent that they see Mr. Stubbins stat. The guard knew that Judy was a scientist, and she’d put on her most intimidating look. They went aboard.
So this was the twin of the ship that had taken Noah away to the stars. Marianne was surprised all over again at how small it was. She’d always imagined the Deneb mother ship to be even larger than an aircraft carrier, but the Venture wouldn’t have filled a football field. A quarter of the interior was taken up by the shuttle bay, another quarter by storage. The drive machinery was encased in some sort of field that involved both quantum entanglement and dark energy. There may or may not have been an unknown version of wormholes connected to the star drive. That anybody
would ride in this ship was an act of insane courage.
The rest of the Venture was divided into a small bridge at the bow and, behind it, a large living area. This contained partly unfinished seats, sleeping cubicles, kitchen, bathrooms, communications systems, none of which were specified in the plans. The basic machinery was Deneb but the fittings would be Terran. Marianne picked her way among crates, tools, and workmen listening to loud rock as they riveted.
Over the din Judy yelled, “You asked once if I’d go? In a New York minute. But my frustrations aren’t the point today, are they? Good luck, Marianne.” She left, running her hand lovingly along a gleaming curved bulkhead. All the beauty and grace the campsite lacked was embodied here, at least potentially, in the alien ship that humans were trying to make their own.
The door to the bridge stood open. Beyond it, Stubbins loomed large, listening intently to two engineers. If he was surprised to see Marianne, he didn’t show it.
She listened to the rest of the engineers’ report, unable to follow most of it. When they left, Stubbins followed. Marianne said, “A word, please, Jonah.”
“Not now. I gotta—”
“It’s about Carl Tyson and his son Paul.”
Stubbins stopped, looked at her.
Marianne said, “You might want to close the door.”
He did. Marianne told him what Tim had said about Paul and the gunman in Manhattan, making the connections sound more definite than Tim had actually found. She finished with, “I don’t expect you to admit any of this. What I want to know, right now, is why you so badly wanted me here at the Venture site. Why you paid for apartments, bodyguard, the kids’ school, Ryan’s treatment, all of it. Why you brought me here.”
He said, “Your insider’s view as a force shaping public opinion about—”
“Bullshit. Two dozen people could have written those articles, and if we changed even one person’s mind in this polarized political atmosphere, I’ve yet to hear about it. It was Colin you wanted, wasn’t it? Not me. The research on your new drug under hush-hush development in Colorado, the one to help the generation born with hyper-hearing issues—you wanted to run fMRIs and other tests on Colin’s brain, to find out what is different about him that he can handle the auditory bombardment. How did you even find out he could? The testing company I first took him to, right? You were collecting that sort of data.”
Stubbins said nothing, watching her.
“But then you found Ava. She’s better at that than even Colin is, and you can get agreement from her mother for pretty much anything, including things that I might balk at. Just offer to marry Belinda.”
“Marianne,” Stubbins said, and now his voice had gone avuncular, “maybe it’s good that we’re having this conversation. If you are really unhappy here, maybe it’s better if you and the boys go.”
She hadn’t expected that, hadn’t been thinking far enough ahead. Where would they go? A laboratory job might be impossible to find, given her notoriety. Perhaps her old college would take her back. Most universities were, for various reasons, pro-Deneb. Even if she couldn’t get tenure-track again, or at least not right away, maybe she could negotiate a year-to-year contract until something opened up.
“Maybe that is best,” she said to Stubbins. “But I need a few weeks to make arrangements. At least. Can I stay here that long?”
“Of course. Stay as long as you like.” He waved his hand magnanimously, a cheap fake-regal gesture, and she thought how much she disliked him. Then he made one of his chameleon changes of personality. “Marianne—don’t judge me too harshly. If I can bring this drug to market, the one that suppresses the neural firings that respond to hyper- and subsonic sounds, I can help a lot of families. And I want to. As much as I want to launch the Venture.”
Impossible to not believe him. She had never met such a complex person, such a mixture of idealism, ego, and crassness. She hoped to never meet one again. Jonah Stubbins bewildered her.
“Best of luck to you, Marianne,” he said—with genuine feeling, as far as she could tell—and lumbered off the bridge.
* * *
She was in the mess, sending e-mails on her laptop, when Judy dropped onto the chair beside her. Judy’s voice was husky and she held, against all rules, a burning cigarette. “Allison is really ill.”
Alarm ran through Marianne; Allison dealt so closely with her pupils. “Not just a stomach virus? Is it a virulent strain of flu? This is flu season. Is anybody else ill?”
“Nobody else, which makes me think it’s not flu. Everybody is supposed to get vaccines immediately. It’ll be on the PA soon.”
“Vaccines for what?”
“They’re not saying.”
“Judy, that’s ridiculous. You can’t vaccinate people without telling them what for. That’s illegal.”
“Oh, they’ll tell us something. But will it be what Allison really has? If it were flu, somebody else would be sick. Especially the kids, since she works with them, and I saw them tearing toward your room just a few minutes ago, healthy as wild pigs. It’s not flu. So what is it?”
Judy’s innate paranoia? Maybe. “How do you know that Allison is that sick? And what are her symptoms?”
“Nurse at the infirmary is a friend of mine. Fever, chills, and nausea to start, now low blood pressure, vascular leakage, kidney problems.”
“Couldn’t that be a lot of different things? And if she were really ill, wouldn’t they move her to a real hospital?”
“Maybe. My friend isn’t nursing Allison, she’s in isolation and the only doctor who’s treating her does everything, including bedpans.”
“Well, for quarantine…” Vivid memories flooded Marianne of her own quarantine aboard the Embassy. But that had been for R. sporii, a truly dangerous microbe. “Or so we thought,” she suddenly heard in Evan’s voice, ghostly across seven years. “But still, a vaccine requires full disclosure.”
“If you say so.” Judy ground the cigarette onto the concrete floor, left it there, and walked off.
Marianne picked up her laptop and went to her room. All four children waited there and Judy was right: They looked healthy in a wild, hectic sort of way. Two parkas lay bunched up on the table. One squeaked.
“Mice!” Jason cried. “Grandma, we got to show you something!”
Six pups of Mus musculus, two of them dead and the other four not looking good. A dead doe with thin and patchy fur lay stiffly in what looked like a convulsive position. No blood or other evidence of predation. She said as calmly as she could, “Did you touch the mice? Any of you?”
“No!” Jason said proudly. “I told everybody to pick them up with their clothes!”
Colin, looking more troubled, said, “Can you make the other babies stay alive?”
“I don’t know, honey. Probably not.” Most diseases did not jump species. But some could: rabies, avian flu, MERS. And rodents could be carriers of human diseases without being affected themselves, although these mice certainly had been. So not hantavirus, not bubonic plague, not a lot of things. Probably just a mouse disease, something else that, if it spread, would again complicate ecological recovery.
“I want you all to go take a good shower, with lots of soap. Wash your hair. Don’t put the same clothes on again. Just in case you might get whatever disease the mice have, okay? Let’s do that now.”
Ava, staring at the mice, said, “I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody’s going to die, honey. I promise.”
Colin, focused on his main concern, said, “But can you make the babies well?”
“I don’t know, Col. We’ll try.”
He stuck out his lower lip. “The other mouse was well. It ran fast.”
“What other mouse?”
“The other one. The striped one.”
There should be no striped mice in this part of Pennsylvania. She said, “You can draw me a picture later. First, a shower.”
Marianne put Ava in her own shower and the three boys, one after the ot
her, in theirs, carefully bagging their clothes in plastic and giving Ava some of Colin’s, which fit her skinny little body well. Who had been looking after Ava since her mother went off-site for plastic surgery? Marianne felt guilty that she hadn’t even asked. Stubbins must have found someone; he always did.
And what of Luke, now that Marianne would be taking her grandchildren away with her?
She pushed that thought aside for now. She didn’t even have a position at the college yet. When the kids were clean and dry, the announcement came over the PA—Lyme disease had stricken a staff member. Everyone would be vaccinated, purely as a precaution.
Allison Blake’s symptoms, as described by Judy, didn’t sound like Lyme disease, which was tick-borne. Marianne examined the mouse pups, dead and alive. None of them carried ticks. And Lyme disease did not kill M. musculus.
Colin brought her the drawing he’d been working on while Ava, Luke, and Jason played something noisy on their Nintendo. Colin had always been an exceptionally good artist for his age. He’d used his colored pencils and worked carefully.
Marianne took the picture and her spine stiffened as if she’d never move again.
“What is it, Grandma? Why do you look like that? Is that a bad mouse? Did it trap those angry people we heard down in the cave under the woods?”
* * *
“Marianne, it’s the middle of the night! What’s happened? You look—Come in!”
Harrison stood frowzy and alarmed at the door of his—once their—apartment in the secure enclave near Columbia. She’d insisted that the gate guard phone him, just as she’d insisted that the chopper pilot take her immediately to Ryan’s home because her son had tried to commit suicide. The pilot had of course checked with Stubbins, who’d okayed the trip. Marianne would feel guilty later about using Ryan’s illness like that. The chopper departed and the cab she had waiting at Oakwood Gardens drove at crash-worthy speed south to New York.
“You’re the only one I can trust, Harrison. There’s something going on at the Venture building site and—”
He said sharply, “The kids?”
“Okay. I left them with Judy. This is—”