by Nancy Kress
Judy said, “I don’t think they can see us. Go.”
“Can they fire on us?”
“How the fuck should I know? Go!”
Marianne sat down in the seat Judy vacated, the drop into the chair a harder jar to her aching body than she expected. She said loudly, “Mest’! This is Dr. Marianne Jenner.”
Sudden silence. “I am on the Venture.” Maybe if she used simple words, someone aboard the Mest’ would know enough English to understand. Although the Mest’ had taken off as suddenly as the Venture and so was probably without a linguist. “We will not fire. This is a mistake!”
A torrent of Russian answered her.
“I don’t know what they’re saying!”
“They’re moving closer,” Judy said. She had taken Wilshire’s chair. And then, very softly, “I can fire first.”
“What? No!”
“Marianne, I’m not getting blown up when there’s a way I can defend myself.”
“You have no reason to think they’ll—”
“Why else are they moving closer?”
Marianne’s guts churned. She hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected this side of Judy. The Russian torrent became more insistent. Marianne said, “Nyet! Nyet! We will not fire! We will land our ship!”
More Russian.
Then Colin said at her elbow, “Say this, Grandma: ‘Sdayus.’ It means ‘I surrender.’”
“What … how do you know that, Colin?”
He hung his head. “Ataka! The game you wouldn’t let me and Jason play.”
A tremor shook her whole body. “Can you say, ‘I will not fire’?”
“You said that was a bad game.”
“Tell me.”
“It might not be right.”
“Tell me anyway! ‘I will not fire.’”
He screwed up his little face. “I think … maybe … it’s sort of like ‘Strelyat’ ne budu.’ That’s what Ivan says in level two when he puts down his gun.”
Marianne repeated the strange sounds, twice.
No response.
She turned back to Colin. Can you say, ‘We both should land now’?”
He shook his head.
“Try, Colin! Maybe ‘We go back now’?”
“What if I get it wrong?”
Then we all die. Her six-year-old grandchild looked at her from clear gray eyes. Colin’s little body stood stiffly beside her elbow. His lip trembled. She had no idea how much of this he understood.
She said gently, “Do the best you can, Col. ‘We go back now together.’”
“Maybe … ‘Poshli obratno umeste’?”
She said to the unseen Russians, “Poshli obratno umeste,” and held her breath.
A long silence. At the other console, Judy did something. Arming warheads?
She cried, “We go back together now! Poshli obratno umeste!”
Another eternity, and then a heavily accented voice said, “You first.”
* * *
Judy didn’t know how to land the Venture. However, she didn’t need to. As soon as she opened the communications frequency, NASA ground control took over. People who had worked on the United States Deneb ship destroyed by the superstorm three years ago were hastily brought online. It seemed there were hundreds of people who understood how to control the Deneb crafts, if not the underlying forces that animated them.
Not, Marianne thought, unlike human minds.
Stubbins, lying on the cabin floor, worked steadily and ineffectively at Marianne’s duct tape and made noises around the sock in his mouth. Both women ignored him. Marianne sat in the captain’s chair, Colin on her lap. Judy, in what had been Wilshire’s chair, followed instructions from NASA—push that button, then these two simultaneously, then—and the ship took over. The Venture landed lightly as a butterfly in the no-man’s land between the inner and outer fences of its building site. Immediately the ship was surrounded and besieged.
Judy sagged in the chair, her broken arm dangling at her side. Once the ship was down, she allowed her face to contort in the full assault of pain.
“Venture,” said a man’s voice on the encrypted channel that served the building site, “this is the FBI.”
Stubbins groaned.
“Who am I talking to?” said the FBI—Marianne incongruously pictured the entire Hoover Building squatting on the Pennsylvania scrub—in a calm, subtly reassuring voice. “Jonah Stubbins?”
“No,” Judy said. “This is—” She moved in her chair and gasped with sudden pain.
“Let me,” Marianne said. She put Colin down as far away from Stubbins as possible in the cramped space and stood behind Judy. Public speaking was what she did. “This is Dr. Marianne Jenner. Dr. Judith Taunton and I are in control of the bridge, and Jonah Stubbins is in our custody for assault, attempted murder, and bioterrorism. Dr. Taunton is injured.”
“This is Special Agent in Charge Jack Warfield. Are you coming out of the Venture, Dr. Jenner?”
“Yes, of course we are. But first we need help. An engineer, Eric Wilshire, is somewhere else in the ship, I don’t know where. He may have found weapons. I have a child with me here. I can’t open the door from the bridge to the main cabin until I know we’ll be safe.”
A long pause. Then Agent Warfield said in that same hostage-negotiator voice, “I see. Why might Eric Wilshire be a threat to you?”
Because we’ve hog-tied his boss and killed two other men. Marianne didn’t say this. Whatever she did say now was going to be very important. There were going to be investigations, hearings, maybe even trials for murder. She needed to present everything in the best possible light.
She said, “Has the Russian spaceship returned to Earth? We made an agreement with them that both ships would land and avert any kind of international problems. That was our first concern.”
Another long pause. Warfield was conferring with someone, probably several someones. The wall screen showed the people and vehicles around the ship, and a larger mob, probably press, beyond the outer fence.
“Yes,” Warfield finally said. “The Stremlenie has returned to Vostochny, Dr. Jenner. We can send in people to protect you and to tend to Dr. Taunton’s injuries as soon as you release the door lock to the Venture. Can you do that from the bridge?”
“I don’t know how. Judy?”
Judy shook her head.
Colin said, “Some machines are coming.”
“I’m sorry,” Marianne said. “We don’t know how.”
“We have experts here who will explain it.”
Marianne followed NASA’s instructions. They didn’t work. She said, “The lock must be customized.”
“Is Mr. Stubbins conscious? Can he tell you how?”
“He has a sock in his mouth,” Marianne said, and all at once was conscious of her one bare foot. It felt cold. She had to get control of this situation.
“Agent Warfield, I’ll take the sock out of Jonah Stubbins’s mouth, but I don’t know if he will cooperate. But before we do that, I want to tell you for the record exactly what happened here. Step by step. Can I do that? Will you please record this?”
“Certainly,” Warfield said. “We very much appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Jenner. Go ahead.”
Marianne took a deep breath and began. Two sentences in, bullets exploded against the door of the bridge.
“Stop shooting!” Marianne screamed. “Stop!” She ran to Colin and stood between him and the door.
“We’re not shooting,” Warfield said. “It’s not us. Dr. Jenner, are you all right? Can you hear me?”
More bullets, a spray of missiles against the outer door. Wilshire. Could the bullets pierce the door? It was heavy metal, and the lock on this side, Marianne realized for the first time, was a manual bolt because Stubbins’s paranoia had wanted a shield against the digital dexterity of his own crew. A last-ditch fortress. Just in case.
She shouted over the din, “It’s the engineer! Wilshire! He’s firing at the door with some sort of heavy-duty gun,
you need to come in and stop him!”
No answer. But then she heard the high-pitched whine of a laser cutter, and the bridge wall screen went dark and shattered. They’d been ready for something like this. They were cutting their way onto the bridge, careful to destroy not the consoles that controlled alien forces nobody understood, but only the human communications devices that everybody did.
Wilshire must have heard it, too. The hail of bullets stopped.
It took an astonishingly short time for the SWAT team, in full armor, to burst through the jagged metal hole onto the bridge. Marianne, with Colin in her arms, said, “I’m Dr. Jenner.” Judy gave the men surrounding her a weary, pain-filled grimace.
Marianne said, “There are mice loose in the ship, infected with a very contagious version of a deadly virus. Do not let any of them escape. I repeat—You cannot let any of those mice escape. Jonah Stubbins was stockpiling dangerous and illegal living weapons of bioterrorism.”
Stubbins, his mouth still stopped with Marianne’s sock, closed his eyes, and every muscle in his huge body sagged with epic, monumental defeat.
CHAPTER 24
S plus 6.9 years
Ryan and Marianne sat in wing chairs in the day room of Oakwood Gardens. The day room looked, Marianne thought, more like a living room in Georgetown than a mental-health center. The distinguished, dark-toned portraits on the wall could have been nineteenth-century ancestors of some senator or congressman. A bouquet of June roses sat on the mantel. The Chippendale bookcases, worn oriental rug, and nautical pillows looked like they belonged to the sort of people who summered at Newport.
They were the only occupants of the room. This was a special visit and the other patients were at lunch. A nurse hovered in the doorway, but the room was so big that her presence didn’t feel obtrusive. Warm rain beat sideways against the tall windows. When Marianne had first arrived, Ryan had seemed troubled by the weather, but now his full attention was on his mother. Because he had seemed so distracted, she had begun to talk.
“The boys are with me, and Luke, too. You don’t know who Luke is, do you? He was living under some murky arrangement with Jonah Stubbins. When Stubbins was arrested for domestic terrorism, I took Luke with me. We’re all living near my old college. The boys are doing fine, you don’t have to worry about them.”
Ryan said nothing. But he looked, for the first time since he’d come to Oakwood, as if what she was saying genuinely mattered to him. She didn’t dare stop talking.
“Judy Taunton will stand trial, too, for killing a man named Andrew Stone. You don’t know about that and I won’t explain it now, but Judy’s attorney is positive that she’ll get off. Actually, a whole bunch of Stubbins’s people are being detained until the FBI sorts out who knew what about the mice.”
Ryan didn’t ask about the mice, and Marianne didn’t explain. Nor did she tell him that no charges had been filed against her for Wolski’s murder; the district attorney had decided it was self-defense. Marianne had no idea how much Ryan understood, or had been told, of what had happened aboard the spaceship. Maybe nothing. She was now talking as much to herself as to him, saying aloud all the things that had kept her awake nights during these last painful months. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop.
“The Venture has been taken over by the government. Some law about seizing property involved in terrorism. I doubt Stubbins will ever get it back.”
“But you know the strange thing, Ryan? The thing that doesn’t fit? Stubbins’s pharmaceutical company just released the drug he developed for children born after the spore cloud. It fast-tracked through the FDA trials without a single hitch. It blocks ultrasonic and infrasonic hearing, so that those who can’t do what Colin and Luke and Ava can, won’t need Calminex. Won’t be little zombies. Stubbins did that. The same Stubbins that could commit an atrocity like weaponizing HFRS.”
Ryan didn’t even blink. His steady, sharp gaze was a beacon, or her need for a beacon.
“I was wrong,” she said. “Completely wrong, a hundred eighty degrees wrong. But I thought that by urging the spaceship to be built no matter what, I was helping promote human cooperation and brotherhood. That’s how I felt when I was researching aboard the Embassy. When Harrison and I were running the Star Foundation. When I was helping Stubbins get to World. I thought that because Worlders and Terrans are both human and not separated by much evolutionary time, we should just establish open communication.”
She let her hands rise, then fall back to her lap. Ryan’s gaze stayed on her face.
“But I was wrong. It can’t be that simple. We can’t have an open highway between Earth and World. It has to be … oh, I don’t know, a toll road. With checkpoints so that not everyone with the money and expertise can just drive past. Because you were right, Ryan. You were right all along.”
His eyes, so completely without Noah’s and Elizabeth’s beauty, sharpened.
“No,” Marianne corrected herself, “you weren’t completely right. You were right to say that on World, we would be an invasive species. An organism not in its native ecological niche, infecting the Worlders with pathogens like Jonah Stubbins. He was a pathogen, yes. But the answer isn’t to never go to World, or anywhere else. The answer is to do what Noah did, to slowly infect each other. In a controlled way. With restrictions on who can go to World, and why. And on who can come here. A slow journey toward brotherhood. Like any two clans would have done when our species was still whole, on the savannah, before Worlders left us in the first place.”
Ryan said something, very low.
“I’m sorry,” Marianne said, “I didn’t hear you? Ryan?”
He said, “I did it.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. She knew. Knew, too, that this secret was what had been destroying him ever since the Embassy bombing. Marianne’s heart shattered and rose into her throat; she couldn’t breathe. Her son had arranged for Evan’s death, for the deaths of the other scientists—
He said, “I gave them the layout of the Embassy, that you told me about. I never thought they’d bring in a bomb. It was supposed to be just a group of spokespeople, with all our arguments against the Denebs’ presence, I never thought they’d … but that doesn’t change my responsibility. I told them. I did it.”
Marianne breathed again.
“No, Ryan—no. If you believed it would be only a peaceful protest, if you didn’t know about the bomb … You can’t destroy yourself with guilt because you were wrong! Everybody is wrong sometimes!” And then, as much to herself as to him, “You can’t control everything.”
Not ecologies, not economies, not superstorms or spore clouds or invasive species. Not one’s own children.
Ryan said nothing. Marianne tried to calm herself; she was shaking. The silence stretched on and on.
Finally Ryan said the same words he’d been uttering for months. This time, however, he said them not as a cry for an uncapturable past, but with their real meaning. “Mom … I want to go home.”
Marianne gazed at him. She saw Ryan the sturdy little boy, tagging after Elizabeth. Ryan the quiet, secretive teen. Ryan the angry conspirator, holding his anger inside. Ryan the invalid, ravaged by his own failure. This was the way it was with one’s children; all the versions of them lived simultaneously in your heart.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
EPILOGUE
Everything old is new again.
—songwriter Peter Allen
S plus 9 years
Sunday evenings always bustled, she thought, no matter how much planning had gone into the next week. No matter how much relaxation had taken place over the weekend. No matter how lazy the weather, like this warm August sunset of still air, humming crickets, sweet fragrance of lilies.
She sat on the front steps of her rented house, a half-eaten peach juicy in her hand, a stack of textbooks beside her. The children played in the cornfield next door, some game that involved a lot of running and shouting; occasionally one of their bright T-
shirts flashed through the stalks, a pink or red or orange comet. Harrison came out of the house, suitcase in hand.
“All packed?” Marianne said.
“I travel light.” He put down the suitcase and lowered himself to sit beside her. “Preparing your syllabi?”
“Nominally, anyway.” The semester started in two more weeks, and she would be teaching two classes she’d taught before and one for the first time, all in evolutionary biology.
He took her hand, a little awkwardly. Their relationship, simultaneously old and new, was still finding its way and, contrary to what Harrison had just said, neither of them traveled light. Too much had happened.
She said, “Good luck with the speech in Chicago.”
“Thanks.” And then, “I wish you were going with me.”
She squeezed his hand. She wrote Harrison’s speeches so he didn’t have to take too much time from his research, but she could not give them herself. No one wanted to hear Marianne Jenner talk about careful screening and control of interaction with World, not after she had spent eight years advocating just the opposite. Flip-flopper was the kindest of the invectives hurled at her now. Most people didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, understand that experience modified political stances, or that isolationism and brotherhood were not a dichotomy but two ends of a continuum, with many viable points between them. She had always fought to protect Earth, but now World needed protection, too. Everything was intertwined—Terra and World, profit and idealism, ecology and progress—and the only way forward was to respect those sometimes inconvenient connections.
Harrison, unlike Marianne, could make these points, and did. His work in neurology had earned him that. The SuperHearers—the media’s dumb name for children born after the spore plague—were now contented pre- and elementary-school kids. Harrison had blended his careful work in neurochemicals and cranial electrical mapping with the hastier research of Stubbins’s pharmaceutical team. The result was Audexica, one of the most successful drugs ever known. Public pressure combined with sheer volume kept the price low. Humanitarian groups had cooperated to manufacture, ship, and distribute it around the world. Eighty-nine percent of Terran children now took Audexica.