Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Her memory of the route was of changing constellations of lights, for once a month they had walked this route, at night, Nana swinging her gun in her hand openly. “Exercise,” she would exclaim with satisfaction at regular intervals. “Exercise! This is my city too, dammit!”

  Now, Ella was terrified. Here she was, all alone, pulling a dead old woman in a wagon through no-man’s land. She leaned forward and yanked hard.

  She was wearing her glasses. She felt like taking them off, but did not. When she walked with Nana, she had often removed them, until their absence was noticed and Nana demanded that she put them back on. She had noticed Ella stumbling several years earlier and checked her eyes. It was then that Ella found out that there were such people as ophthalmologists, and that Nana was one—or had been one. After the months of the first electric rains, when her parents, fifth-generation Americans from Kansas City, had been on trial for treason, everyone who could, fled the city, or were drawn into the Metro station, where, rumor had it (and they so claimed), her parents had placed some of the first uploading devices. Even the Washington Post faltered, but then cloaked their intrepid reporters in rain gear—ineffective, they soon learned—and soldiered on.

  Nana’s office was two blocks away from the apartment, dark and full of mysterious shapes until Nana flicked on the lights. “Ah,” she said. “Electricity. And my equipment is still here. Amazing. Sit up there in that chair, missy. Here’s a pillow.” And she looked into Ella’s eyes and clicked this and that until the world was sharp enough to draw tears; sharp enough to force Ella to leave fuzziness behind, enough to make her behold, remember, yearn, and regret.

  Nana let Ella pick out several frames and made lenses for them all. “Who knows if this will even be here, next month,” she said, sighing. “I loved my work. Not many can say that, missy.”

  Ella had been amazed to see, once the glasses had been slid onto her face and they stepped out into the night, that the moon was a single sharp sliver, and not white mounds resembling scoops of snowy ice cream on a velvet black sky. With glasses, she had seen the stars for the first time without the telescope. She had always believed that she needed that special tool to see stars, but there they were: a part of the everyday life of those who could see. But still she missed the blurry blossoms of light, the fuzzed red taillights shimmering on wet streets, the towers of lights, which, with glasses, were revealed as buildings with actual edges.

  After that, Nana’s newspaper room beckoned increasingly. “Never could bear to throw away the paper till I’d read the whole thing,” she said.

  Ella read advertisements from a lost world. She read advice columns about strange and alien problems: my mother-in-law is too controlling; when should I tell my fiancée that I’m bisexual?

  Finally, after figuring out the dates and searching extensively, she found biographies of her parents, starting above the fold on page one and continuing on page A-9. A thrill went through her when she saw their pictures. Then she burst out crying.

  They had both worked for the Department of Homeland Defense, and decided that what their country was doing was all wrong. Ella felt very strange reading her mother say, “You have killed my son. I demand to have my daughter back. We only wanted the best for her. She was supposed to be one of the first people uploaded.”

  When she read that, Ella stood up and made her way to the window through and over stacks of newspapers. She stared out at the park, with its soldier-statue darkened in patches by the rain that had been falling for days, at the shiny, wet streets, no longer full of evacuees but only the occasional car, inside of which, she could only imagine, sat intrepid, stubborn people like Nana. You could tell electric rain from regular rain because the charged nanocrystals glowed. Each one was unimaginably small, the paper said, but together they produced sweeping rainbow effects, and, at night, a seductively beautiful scintillation, like you were traveling among the stars.

  It was an initiation device, which changed the biochemistry of your brain, readying you for uploading. Making you want it.

  You would remain uploaded until the world was ready for peace, when you would be downloaded into the new bodies they would have ready for you by then.

  Outside, in the air above 14th Street, in colors of electric rains, Ella saw her parents’ faces, an afterimage of staring at their newspaper photographs.

  According to the paper, they had been executed several years ago, on August 17th of the year of their terrorist attack. Because they worked for the Department of Homeland Defense and knew all possible avenues of attack, so far no one had been able to hack into any of the components of their grand plan, which swept up the East Coast, and was borne inland and then out to sea by hurricanes. By then, it was reproducing, and had taken over New York City and all of the coastal cities down to Miami.

  Ella yanked at the tall window sash, but it was painted shut. She banged and smashed on it with her fist and was finally getting it to open, just a crack, when Nana came in. She immediately saw the paper and grabbed Ella. Ella fought her, struggled, but Nana was surprisingly strong and finally Ella collapsed, sobbing, into her arms.

  “There’s nothing out there,” Nana told her, in a surprisingly tender voice. “You’ve got to live your life here and now. Remember how I found you.”

  They planted crops in the back yard of the townhouse—soybeans, corn, potatoes, and kale—and the electric rains did not survive their trip through the soil to the roots.

  And Ella did not forget what she had read.

  ***

  Ella felt relatively safe on 14th Street, especially with the gun in her pocket. She had no qualms about shooting someone who might want to hurt her. Nana had drilled her fiercely about that, shoot first and think later, they wouldn’t do any different. She knew this was true, and she needed her glasses to see these threats approaching, and in gauging the degree of threat. She knew she looked defenseless trudging along with her strange bundle. This walk would take till well past daylight, and then she would find a place to nap and return at night.

  Now, the city unfolded around her with splendor. A liquor store on the next block glowed with neon of all colors, green, blue, yellow, and she slipped her glasses down briefly and saw it: yes, the unfolding flower the lights became without that focus. She loved that flower, and Nana always had to yank her along, at this point. She stopped, though, and absorbed the beauty of the flower, the glowing petal-point of intersecting green and red which read quite dully COORS with her glasses on. This was one of the landmarks. She went faster to get past the rotting smell of the dumpster in the alley next to the store, another landmark.

  The usual bodies lay in front of it, and some cardboard structures. She was not afraid; these people were the least of her problems. The wagon squeaked past them. They would not rouse even if kicked, for Nana always gave each one a token kick as she passed, saying, “Scum! Sluggards! Weaklings! You’re ruining my beautiful city!” and the like, and no one ever moved. Music blared from the door as Ella passed, and within she saw a bald, wary black man, his head washed in white neon, and rows and rows of bottles. He glanced up from a tiny TV sitting on his counter as she squeaked past. They had a television set, but Nana never turned it on anymore. There was no news, only old sitcoms and soap operas.

  Next was a block of pawnshops drawn tight with aluminum fences drawn down in the evening, terribly dark, no streetlights. She waited on that corner until a car swept down 14th Street and illuminated the sidewalk for a moment. A few bums in doorways, nothing more. She pulled forward as quickly as she could, trying not to seem afraid and hurried, standing straight, as if she were strong and powerful. In the middle of the block a shadowy figure lurched toward her. She veered to the left and reached into her pocket, then saw him fall with a thump without any assistance from her.

  On the next corner she pulled her glasses down again, for an instant, and could just see the red blinking light on top of the Monument, which stood atop a low green hill behind all the buildings ahead of
her. Prostitutes postured in very short skirts and low blouses, running out and stopping a rare car. A door opened and two got in; an arm reached out and shoved the others away; one fell down on the street and got up dusting her butt off yelling, “Fuck you too.” But they did not bother Ella as she trundled past.

  Ella was feeling a little better now. Chinatown was to her left, a few blocks over, and Ella pulled her glasses down to blur the beautiful green dragon which arched high above the buildings hiding the rest of Chinatown, fusing it into a creature who roared into flame with the pulse of her own heartbeat then returned to a coiled position. There was no clearer place to see the dragon; a block further back or forward the dragon was hidden by other buildings. She was filled with joy at the sight of the dragon each time she saw it.

  Once she had been walking down the street and stopped at a tangle of white string at her feet. It was fringed with red and blue, and as she looked Ella had become aware that it was, miraculously, twisted into the shape of a dragon, perfectly and unmistakably. She had picked it up carefully and pressed it in one of Nana’s musty books which crumpled in tiny sharp triangles from the corners of the pages whenever she opened it, with print so small that it was almost impossible to read. The dragon always gave her strength and it did now, flashing beneath the moonless sky as if, without her glasses, it were independent of buildings, poised in the sky, dancing for her, telling her that she deserved to be alive for reasons she did not understand.

  Next came the Man on Horseback, one of her favorite statues. His sword was brandished. He would protect her. She had seen him many times, dappled with sunlight, which moved as the broad branches overhead shifted in the summer wind; plastered with dead orange leaves. The bums there were old and kind, never mean; Nana told her that they were different, that for many bum generations they had preyed on government workers ascending from the Metro, an easy touch. And she always gestured toward the site of the old YWCA Cafeteria a few blocks over. Nana used to meet her friends there for lunch, and Ella knew Nana’s memory of the inside almost as well as she knew the inside of their apartment: the tall windows, the wide booths, the cheap, good food, the sound of silverware plunked on trays drifting up to the high ceiling. Nana had a table and two ladder-back chairs she bought from the cafeteria when it had been closed and the furnishings went up for sale, sitting in one of the apartment alcoves. Ella had never minded polishing the old worn wood; she loved polishing all the things in Nana’s apartment; they seemed to miraculously hold a past just beneath their surface which was lush and carefree and deep, like flowers, like city lights, something she could feel like heat as her fingers felt out their ornate crevices; and afterwards they always had good green tea from a beautiful pot covered with china flowers, and Nana always seemed so happy to see everything shining and perfect like the rows of linens in the closet.

  Ella was very tired. Her feet burned; her legs felt like rubber. She became afraid that she had gone out of her way and fear closed her throat for a moment. She removed her glasses and recognized none of the blurred constellations.

  And it began to rain.

  She saw one scintillation and it was like the first flake of snow: Was it real?

  The Smithsonian Institute was two blocks away. Nana had brought her here on sharp blue winter days, carrying flashlights so that she could see the insides of the dark museums. One time when they went, self-appointed technicians had found the central power switch and illuminated everything, but usually they saw everything in the focused beam of a flashlight, in pieces. Nana liked Modern Art more than anything else, so Ella had seen the reclining Matisse women with hairy armpits, the two-faced Picassos, the sharp edges of Cézanne. She had also seen things much more mysterious: a pendulum that never stopped swinging; the history of atomic energy; a small thing called a capsule which had orbited the earth. These were the things that interested her the most.

  Ella began to run. She was tired, but she had no choice: She had to get out of the electric rains before it began to pour. As far as she knew there were two alternatives. You would hear ethereal singing voices, or beautiful music, the intrepid Washington Posthad reported, and be irresistibly drawn to a Metro entrance. If you went down into the Metro, you would be uploaded. Or you could stay out of the rain.

  The trial of her parents had taken place in Los Angeles, which had become the new capital of the United States. The Post had gotten hold of some of their classified scientific papers and published them; the papers were subsequently critiqued by other scientists who condemned their uploading processes as being untested and dangerous. Others said that they had been tested, and that they worked, and that the entire Cabinet and the President and all of the Congress had been briefed on an alternate uploading system, one that was manufactured by the company that the President had once run.

  As Ella ran uphill, a glow lit the grayness of the morning and she realized that not only was she almost at the Smithsonian, she was also almost at the Metro entrance for the museum.

  It was glowing most brilliantly now and she stopped, panting, as the scintillations increased. She only had moments before the singing would begin, before she would become one of the derelicts drunk on electric rain living in the streets, or drawn down into the Metro.

  Her parents had not been uploaded, according to the newspaper. But . . . would they not have made copies of themselves? She had asked Nana once, and Nana had become very angry and said that those people were not her parents; they were criminals and that they had ruined her city and that she should be grateful to have a home at all, and that was the end of it. She kept her thoughts to herself after that, but did not stop wondering.

  Perhaps they were there, in the brilliant light emanating from the subway entrance.

  Perhaps she could see them again.

  If she just went into that glowing, beautiful entrance, down the rainbowed stairs . . .

  She took a few steps toward it, across the Mall, then forced herself to stop. She looked back at the sheet-wrapped body.

  Nana had taken good care of her. She had to do this one thing. Even though Nana had not asked, she knew it was what she wanted.

  Turning, she ran under the deep concrete overhang of a nearby building and huddled down to wait out the shower.

  Electric rains drifted across the face of the Castle, making it look magical. She could see the top of the Washington Monument; the anti-terrorist doors had long since been removed and she and Nana had hiked to the top one lovely winter morning, and that was one of the few times she had seen Nana cry. “My city,” she had said. “My beautiful city.”

  Ella thought that she heard one vagrant melody, in her head, faint, like birdsong through the closed window in the spring, like all the loveliness she had ever known, like flat clean sheets, like glowing polished wood, like bright tulips, and she began to sing her own songs, loudly, songs that Nana had taught her. “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “From the Halls of Montezuma,” and “Beautiful Ohio.” She stood up in the concrete alcove and shouted, “B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was his name-o.” The echo was almost like a round, as if Nana was singing with her, overlapping her sounds to make chords.

  But it was so hard to think that her own parents had been wrong. And it made her angry that Nana had never told her the truth. She began to cry, then wiped away her tears.

  The shower was over. The slight green buds on the trees lining the Mall sparkled in the morning sun.

  And five people approached the wagon holding Nana.

  Three were women and two were men, walking across the tall, dry winter grass of the unmown Mall. They were of various ages. One woman, with long blonde hair, was wearing shorts and a sweater. The two men wore business suits and red ties. The other two women were middle-aged and also wore suits.

  The wagon was about two hundred feet away from Ella’s shelter.

  She wasn’t sure what to do. She decided to stay in hiding until they passed.

  But apparently they had spotted the wagon,
all alone out there, and were heading toward it. She could hear them faintly.

  “What’s this?” asked one of the men. He bent down and began pulling at the sheet. The women murmured excitedly, and the blonde woman smiled broadly.

  “A body! What luck!” She picked up the wagon handle.

  Ella, heart beating hard, ran out from beneath her alcove. “Stop!”

  They all turned, looking surprised.

  “She’s . . . mine.”

  Ella was closer now, about twenty feet away.

  “Why, how could she possibly be yours?” asked one of the middle-aged women. “You’re far too young to have your own body.”

  “We need her,” smiled the blonde woman. “For the greater good. So that more of us can get out. And change things. You come with us, sweetie.” She gestured toward the Metro entrance, still glowing.

  “She’s not very old,” muttered one of the men. “She can wait a while.”

  Ella fumbled in her pocket. The gun got caught on some folds, but finally she got it out. She held it steady, as Nana had taught her. “You can’t have her.”

  “Why, you greedy little—”

  Ella thought sure he was going to say “bitch.” She fired over his head.

  The blonde woman turned pale. Ella was glad. She was afraid that they would not care if they were shot. “Get away or I’ll shoot you all.”

  They all looked at each other uneasily. One of the middle-aged women crouched down and held out a hand. “I . . . used to have a daughter like you, honey. I know you’re scared and lonely. Come with us and we’ll help you out.”

  Ella advanced steadily, still holding the gun on them. “I have plenty of bullets.”

  One of the men pulled on the blonde woman’s arm. “Come on. It’s not worth it. It took us a long time just to get our bodies.”

  “But—two!”