Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

  Julie said, “There was a flash of light when they were taken, wasn’t there? Very bright. Almost blinding.”

  “Yes!”

  “Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

  “Can you get them back? Can you? Can you?”

  No. “I don’t know.”

  “You must get them back!”

  “We’ll do what we can. Was it a short teenage boy with a wobbling head, as if the head were too big for his neck? Or was it a girl?”

  Mrs. Carter shuddered. “It was a demon!”

  Oh. It was going to be like that.

  “A demon from Hell and he has Jenny and Kara!” She began to wail again and tear her hair.

  Slowly, painfully, Julie extracted the story. It wasn’t much different from the others, except that this time there had been two children, and the husband had disappeared, too. Apparently he had been hanging onto one of the kids. Was that significant?

  How did you know what was significant when it was all unthinkable?

  Eight other children in the last year, all vanished without a trace, each taken from a different town on the Atlantic coast. Only three of the abductions had been witnessed, however, and one of those had not succeeded. The mother had beaten off the kidnapper—a young girl—before the perp vanished in a dazzlingly bright light. Or so the mother said. But children disappeared all the time, which is why the press had not yet gotten the larger story. But even the unwitnessed disappearances followed a pattern, and patterns were what Julie did. There were other incidents, too: mostly thefts from locked stores. She was less sure those fitted, and her algorithms had to weight for that. But the geographical pattern was there, if bizarrely non-linear, and what kind of kidnapper was both smart enough to plan ten flawless abductions and stupid enough to leave any signature at all in their geography?

  Julie was not law enforcement. Gordon was, and they had discussed the question endlessly over the last months. Gordon’s answer: A psycho who wants to be caught.

  Julie had no answers. Only terrible fears.

  “It was a demon! A demon!” Mrs. Carter suddenly shrieked. “I want Ed and my kids back!” She tore out of the dune cottage, robe flapping and hair whipping around her ravaged face, as if she could find her husband and children on the cold beach. A cop leaped after her; she was of course a suspect.

  Julie wiped the blood off her arm where Mrs. Carter’s nails had pierced the skin. Did that mean she needed a tetanus shot? Was a tetanus shot even safe for her now?

  She crossed her arms over her belly and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Gordon stood watching her.

  APRIL 2014

  The sun rose above the salt marsh on the Connecticut coast. The tide flowed gently out, toward the barrier island that sheltered the land. A light breeze ruffled the cordgrass, although the breeze was not strong enough to cause waves on the pearly water. A blue heron did disturb the water, landing on a mudflat to dip its long bill, searching for breakfast. A sea-pink bloomed on a raised hummock, turning its dome-shaped cluster of flowers toward the sun.

  In the mud beside the heron’s long thin toes, something changed.

  Bacteria sliming the roots of cordgrass swapped plasmids with another species, the result of a long and intricate chain of such exchanges. The new bacteria began to feed. Abruptly, it died, unable in this mutated form to tolerate the high salt content of brackish marsh.

  The heron rose and flew away into the dawn.

  2035

  It took Pete days and days to recover from the laser burn on his foot, which became infected. McAllister was out of her special medicine—“antibiotics,” Pete thought it was called—because one of the Grab kids had needed the last dose. Sometimes McAllister sat beside Pete, sometimes Paolo and once Caity, but usually no one tended him. No one could be spared.

  He came to loathe his tiny, bare “bedroom” with no bed, just a pile of blankets on the floor and a shit bucket in the corner. Why hadn’t he taped something to the wall like Caity did in her room—something, anything to look at. They still had some tape left. Caity had taped up a picture that one of the children tore out of a precious book, a girl riding a big black horse, and beside it a bright piece of patterned cloth from an old Grab. All Pete had to look at was white Tesslie-metal walls, white Tesslie-metal ceiling, white Tesslie-metal floor.

  He drifted in and out of sleep that never refreshed him. When his fever rose high enough he thought he saw other rooms around him: the impossibly gorgeous, rich bedroom from which he’d taken the round-headed baby that Bridget had named Kathleen. The ugly city apartment with stained and crumbling walls where he’d found Tina, alone in her bed except for the rat attracted by the milk around her unwiped little mouth. The strange house, decorated only with bright pillows and low, silver-inlaid tables where he’d snatched dark, curly-haired Karim, whose name he knew only because his mother had screamed it just before Pete pushed her down that short flight of stairs to get away. Those other rooms rose around him, shimmered on the air like the world he’d seen only in snatches on Grabs, and then collapsed into so much rubble.

  “Sleep, Pete.” McAllister, a cool hand on his forehead. Or maybe not, because McAllister collapsed, too, but into a shimmer of golden sparks. Like the Tesslie that McAllister described in learning circles! Pete struggled to sit up.

  “No! No . . . not you . . . Tessl . . .”

  “Sleep.”

  When he woke for the last time from fever and delirium, he was alone.

  Cautiously he got himself up off the pallet of blankets. Pete recognized them; he’d brought them back himself, from his first store Grab. They needed washing. Everything needed washing, including himself. But that could wait.

  He lurched dizzily to the door. A Grab was supposed to be painless, and usually it was. But you weren’t supposed to shoot your own foot! Still, everyone took risks during Grabs, or at least everyone who could still go. Look what had happened to Caity on her last Grab: that mother had beat Caity off, breaking her arm, and Caity hadn’t even been strong enough to keep the child. McAllister was thinking of taking Caity off Grab duty, which would leave just Pete, Ravi, and Paolo to do them all, at least until Terrell turned twelve. Anyway, it was better than shit-bucket duty.

  Pete’s room opened onto the corridor that ran the whole half-mile length of the egg-shaped Shell. Each end of the corridor branched into maybe a hundred of these tiny rooms. The Survivors and the Six used some of them at the living end as bedrooms, and McAllister had designated a few more as storage or work areas. None of the rooms at the far end of the Shell were used at all. In the center was the important stuff.

  Such a long way to hobble. Below Pete’s halting feet, one painful enough that finally he just hopped on the other and leaned against the wall for support, stretched the same featureless white metal as his room. Above curved the ceiling of the Shell, three times his height. On either side were doors, some open and some closed, leading to more tiny rooms, white metal walls. Tesslie stuff, all of it. Stuff preserving his life. Pete hated it.

  Another hundred yards to the farm, the children’s room, the Grab room.

  All at once he didn’t want to go to any of them. The children’s room, spacious and always busy, would be cheerful with toys, learning circles, babies cooing or wailing. Caity or Jenna or Terrell would be there, whoever was on duty. Someone would also be on duty with Darlene in the farm. Someone else would be watching—endlessly, boringly—the Grab machinery. Pete was sick of all of it. This time it had nearly gotten him killed. The only person he would have liked to see was McAllister, and he’d been sick so long that he’d lost track of the duty roster and had no idea where McAllister, or anybody else, might be now.

  Miraculously unnoticed, Pete crept past the wide archways which opened on one side of the corridor to the children’s room and on the other to the farm. From the farm came the smell of dirt and the fall of water in the disinfecting and clean-water streams. Also the clank of buckets; someone was on duty at the fe
rtilizer machine. From the children’s room came the usual babble, the playing and crying and talking of eight—no, now ten!—small children.

  Head wobbling on his thin neck, he hopped past the smaller, doorless openings to the rooms holding Tesslie machinery and entered the maze of tiny, unused rooms at the far end of the Shell. His foot, wrapped in pieces of torn blanket, still hurt. “Stupid fucking foot!” McAllister had forbidden that word, but Pete—all of the Six—had learned a rich cursing vocabulary from Darlene. Her only useful contribution, in Pete’s opinion, to life in the Shell. Mean old woman.

  Finally he reached a small, low chamber at the very tip of the Shell. Here part of the outer wall was, for some reason, clear. Why had the Tesslies done that? But, then, why had they destroyed the world nearly twenty-one years ago and then chosen to imprison a handful of survivors? Nobody knew why the fucking bastards did anything. Pete sank to the metal floor and looked out.

  There wasn’t much to see: just a strip of land between him and where the ground curved abruptly away. That strip was a uniform expanse of empty black rock, once smooth but now starting to split in places. The rock had a name, and so did the thing the Shell sat on, but Pete didn’t remember them. Basil? No, that was a prince in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Balit? Basalt? He’d never been good at learning such stuff, not like Jenna or Paolo. They were the smart ones. What Pete was good at was the Grab.

  And hatred. He was terrific at hatred. So he gazed out at his tiny view of the vast dead world the Tesslies had killed, and thought about the beauty of the shore cottage where he had Grabbed the two children, and he hated.

  APRIL 2014

  Deep beneath the ice pack of the Canadian glacier, the earth shifted. Basalt magma flowed into a chamber heavy with silica and the two mingled. From below, more magma pushed upward, exerting pressure. Above, glacial ice tens of thousands of years old but already thinned by global warming, gleamed under a cold spring sky.

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Gordon stood at one end of the table that was really two tables pushed together, one moved from the bedroom of the motel “suite.” Julie stood at the other end, willing him to leave. The rest of the task force had already gone to their own rooms for the night, leaving Styrofoam cups with a half-inch of cold coffee, empty pizza boxes, crumpled paper napkins, half-crushed beer cans. On the desk Julie’s industrial-strength laptop, in sleep mode, glowed with a blue light.

  It had been a bad idea to hold the team meeting in her room, but Gordon’s wife, impelled by some marital crisis Julie wanted no part of, kept phoning his room after she’d been told not to call his cell. Maybe that was why he hadn’t left yet; Deborah was a weeper. Or so Julie had been told. She didn’t want to know for sure. If Gordon tried to talk personally with her now . . .

  He didn’t. He studied her latest printout, frowning at the equations as if he understood them. “So you think somewhere in Hingham, next Thursday?”

  “That’s what the algorithms say.”

  “God, Julie, I need a more specific location than that! Unless I can witness an actual kidnapping, maybe even have a camera set up—”

  She held onto her temper. “I’m a mathematician, Gordon, not a magician. And I’ve given you everything I’ve got.”

  A second later, horror hit her at her own wording, but Gordon, frowning at the sheaf of papers, apparently hadn’t noticed. That caused horror to give way to anger. He never had been any good at reading her feelings, had always enclosed himself in that “objective” professional shell. Well, let him.

  He ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. “I know. I didn’t mean to snap. But funding for this task force is hanging by a thread. The A-Dic isn’t convinced that the child abductions are linked, and he’s never believed any of the witnesses, you know that.”

  “I know. Can’t blame him, really.” Two witnesses—no, three now, with Mrs. Carter—attesting that someone had invaded their homes, stolen or tried to steal a child, and then dissolved, child and all, into thin air, to the accompaniment of a burst of bright light. Twice the alleged intruder was a deformed teenage boy with a wobbly head, dressed in what was described as a blanket. Once it was a girl, who had been successfully fought off until she dematerialized. Who would believe any of that? Nor did it help that two of the women had been hysterical types; one was now in a mental institution. Some days Julie wasn’t sure that she herself believed this stuff. The common M.O.s, yes. The irrefutable fact that the children were gone, yes. Above all, the algorithms that traced a non-linear but discernible mathematical path for the kidnappings.

  She said, “Your Assistant Director has reason to doubt. But I think my usefulness to the task force is pretty much over, and anyway Georgetown wants me back for the spring semester. I’ve booked a flight back to D.C. for tomorrow.”

  Gordon looked up. Was that relief in his eyes? She was lying about Georgetown, but he didn’t know that. He said, “Will you stay on call if we have any questions?”

  “Sure.” She rose, which was a mistake. The wave of nausea took her by surprise, surging up her throat so suddenly that she barely made it to the bathroom. After she threw up, she kicked the door closed behind her, then took her time rinsing her mouth and brushing her teeth. By the time she came out, he would have gone.

  He hadn’t. He stood at the end of the table, papers crumpled in one hand, his still handsome face as white as the print-outs. A little vein throbbed in his forehead. “My God, Julie.”

  “It’s nothing. Something I ate at dinner.”

  “It’s not.” And then, “I have three kids, remember.”

  Something in her that she hadn’t counted on, some streak of anger or blame, made her lash out at him. “Now you’ve got one more.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She sat down. The motel chair creaked under her. “Let’s get one thing straight, Gordon. This has nothing to do with you. I mean, it will have nothing to do with you. You don’t need to be involved at all.”

  “You’re keeping it?”

  “Yes.” She was thirty-eight, with no real relationship in sight now that the ill-thought-out thing with Gordon had ended. This might be her last chance.

  “How far along are you?”

  “Three and a half months.” Her stocky figure meant that, with her habitually loose clothing, no one had yet noticed. They would soon. She had arranged to extend her sabbatical from Georgetown to a full year, had already bought a crib, a changing table, impossibly tiny onesies. The nausea was supposed to have stopped by now but, as her obstetrician said, every pregnancy is different.

  Gordon’s jaw tightened. “You weren’t going to tell me at all, were you?”

  “No.” And then, from that same unexplored well of anger—but at what? “You have your hands full already, with Deborah and your kids.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Julie found herself studying him almost impersonally, as if he were someone she’d just met. Such a handsome man, with his deep blue eyes, firm jaw, prematurely gray hair that looked masterful rather than old. “Masterful”—that was the right word for Gordon. He liked to control situations. And yet he had been tender with her, from the conventional beginning of too-long “business dinners,” through the trite progression to so much more.

  Had she really ever loved him? It had felt like romance, those first few months of delicious hidden hours. And yet even then, Julie had had her doubts. Not because Gordon was married, but because of something in his character and—be honest!—in her own. Both of them wanted to make their own decisions, keep their options open. That stubborn independence was why Julie had never married, and why Gordon cheated on his wife. Neither had ever told the other “I love you.” Both had wanted freedom more than the inevitable compromises and sacrifices of genuine love.

  And yet now Gordon stood at his end of the littered table, running his hand through his gray hair and looking more troubled than Julie had known possible. But, then, Gordon was not one to shirk responsi
bilities. That wouldn’t have fit with his image of himself.

  “Julie, if there’s anything I can do . . . money . . .”

  Her anger evaporated. This situation was not his fault. Nor hers—precautions sometimes failed. Gordon would never leave drama-queen Deborah, and she didn’t want him to, no matter what romantic fantasies dictated that she should want. Julie needed nothing from him.

  “I’m fine,” she said gently. “Truly.”

  “At least let me—”

  “No.” She went into her motel bedroom and closed the door, her back to it until she heard him leave.

  APRIL 2014

  The sheep pasture high in New Zealand hills lay thick in white clover. One corner of the pasture had been planted with chicory, but the clover grew wild. Low, white-flowered, sweet-smelling, it attracted the bees buzzing above the fenced pasture. Sheep munched contentedly, flicking their tails. Beside the fence, two lambs chased each other.

  The clover’s root system, fibrous and fast-growing, laced itself through the soil. The original tap root extended three feet deep; branches clustered thickly near the top grew, in turn, a mass of fine rootlets. Much of the system was slimed with new bacteria, created by a long chain of plasmid swaps. There had been more than enough candidates for this gene-swapping: a teaspoon of the sheep pasture’s soil contained over 600 million bacteria. The new anaerobic strain included a gene that broke down carbohydrates, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol.

  The alcohol accumulated on the plant roots. In a short time the fermentation had deposited ethanol on the plant roots in a concentration of one part per million. When the concentration reached twice that, the clover began to die.

  The new bacteria went on multiplying. A ewe munched up a handful of clover, jostling the root system so that it touched another. The ewe ambled on toward her lamb.

  2035

  McAllister didn’t let Pete sit alone by the Shell wall for very long. She found him in another of the maze of unused rooms, as she always found him wherever he went, and knelt beside him. The folds of her simple long dress, made from a blue bed sheet patterned with yellow flowers, puddled on the metal floor. “Pete.”