Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

  Lucky. Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.

  McAllister led Pete around the bucket-wall to the babies’ corner. Three infants lay asleep on blankets, watched over by Ravi, who didn’t much like babies but it was his turn for this duty. Ravi was the least deformed of the Six. His eyes were permanently crossed, but his body was strong and even though he was a year younger than Pete, he was taller and heavier. With thick dark hair and a handsome face, he looked the most like the princes in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Sometimes Pete hated him for that, although in general they got along well enough. Ravi was his biological half-brother, after all. Not that that counted for much; what counted was the good of all.

  “Look,” McAllister said to Pete, “at the treasure you brought us.”

  Petra lay asleep on a blanket, a square of plastic between it and the clumsy diaper made of another blanket. On top she wore a very faded yellow shirt too big for her. Her tiny pink mouth, the little curled fists with the creases at the wrists, the shape of her head . . . She was a perfect human person and of course she would be fertile. Radiation levels had subsided enough by now, McAllister had said, although Pete didn’t really understand what that meant. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had done this thing: brought back a perfect, precious boost to the restarting of humanity on Earth. Someday that restarting would move Outside, McAllister said.

  If the Tesslies permitted it.

  McAllister put her thin hands on either side of Pete’s face and turned him toward her. “Listen to me, dear heart. I am making you this baby’s father. You are now responsible for her life and, as much as possible, her happiness. Do you understand me? I put Petra’s life in your hands. You are her father.”

  Both Pete and Ravi gaped at her. No one in the Shell was “father” or “mother” to any kid taken on a Grab! Everyone was responsible for the good of all, always. Why now, why Petra, why Pete? The questions were lost in the feel of McAllister’s hands on his face.

  “Why him?” Ravi blurted. “Is it because he’s the oldest?”

  McAllister didn’t answer. She never answered anything she didn’t choose to. But she gave Ravi a look that Pete couldn’t read, and didn’t want to. All he wanted was for her to keep on holding his face between her long slim fingers, forever and ever.

  She didn’t. But he could feel her hands long after she took them away, could feel his own deep blush, could feel the burden, welcome because she had given it, that McAllister had just placed on his heart. To turn his red face away from her, he gazed down at Petra.

  “Hey,” he said to the baby, who woke and immediately shit her diaper.

  NOVEMBER 2013

  Julie sat in her apartment, studying the graphs on her computer screen. Her desk was jammed against the living room window. Beyond the glass a few flakes of early snow drifted through darkness. Cars swooshed through street slush and swept ghostly patterns of light across the ceiling.

  The kidnappings and mysterious store burglaries had followed an erratic path, but the rough outline was clear. The first abduction—the first they knew about and had included in the data, she corrected herself—had been in Sarasota a year ago. October 16, 2011: Tommy Candless, age six. Parents divorced, and the child basically a ping-pong ball for power struggles between them. John Candless, who did not have custody, had grabbed his son and run before, but he’d easily been caught by state troopers since he hadn’t even had the sense to leave Florida. Heather Candless had one conviction for DWI. Julie wasn’t even positive that Tommy wasn’t squirreled away with some obscure relative or friend somewhere that Gordon’s task force had failed to discover. Or the child could have been killed and the body never found. Both parents seemed to her capable of even that in their intense hatred for each other.

  Drop Tommy from the data? Would that help? No, her gut said to leave him in. She did.

  The path of subsequent abductions moved roughly up the East Coast, sometimes swerving inland, sometimes back-tracking. The intervals weren’t even, coming in clusters that themselves weren’t even. Nine children after Tommy, including Kara and Jennifer Carter. The kids ranged from ten months old to Tommy’s six years. Seven girls, three boys. Two hysterical witnesses, one relatively calm one (but her baby hadn’t been taken; she’d fought off the young abductress). One hysterical witness had been pushed over the slippery edge of her already advancing illness into an institutional schizophrenia, which did not help the FBI Assistant Director to trust her credibility.

  The big problem with the data, as Julie had told Gordon, were the store burglaries. Here, too, the M.O. was the same: no forced entry, no money taken, seemingly random grabs of diverse merchandise, including shopping carts. Why take shopping carts, both worthless and conspicuous? Why take an entire display of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? At Wal-Mart’s why take pillows and leave untouched a display of diamond rings? And should the Baltimore Kohl’s burglary be included or not? How about that earlier one in Georgia? Or the one in the New Jersey convenience store? That store had had a broken back window, which might have taken it off the list of no-forced-entry burglaries. However, a neighbor walking his dog at 3:00 a.m. thought he heard glass breaking. He shouted and saw kids ran away, empty-handed, so did that mean there were two incidents at the same store at the same night, a coincidence?

  She played with the data, putting in one incident, taking out another, changing the patterns. The maddening thing was that the patterns were there, and not just in M.O.s. The numbers showed patterns, too: non-linear, closer to fractals than to conventional graphs, but nonetheless there. And the numbers should have pointed to another abduction or burglary in Hingham, Massachusetts, on Thursday. Which hadn’t happened. So obviously she had included something erroneous, or left something out, or missed something altogether.

  She sat far into the night, scrutinizing data.

  APRIL 2014

  In Xinjiang Autonomous Region of northern China, the cotton fields lay serene under the sun. Acre upon acre of the plants stretched to the horizon, dark green leaves a little dusty from lack of rain. Clouds overhead, however, promised water soon. The white boles had only just begun to open, filling the green fields with lopsided polka dots. A golden eagle coasted on an air current, a darker speck against the gray clouds. To the south lay the ancient Silk Road, and much farther south, the majestic and forbidding peaks of the Kun Lun.

  On the roots of the cotton plants, bacteria mutated.

  2035

  The Grab machinery was Tesslie, of course. It sat in its own room in the Shell, a room without a door just down the central corridor from the farm and the children’s room. Someone had to sit there day and night because no one knew when the machinery would brighten. When it did, they had only a few minutes to get someone on it. Then ten minutes in Before to make a Grab. The whole system was stupid. Pete said so to McAllister, often.

  “It isn’t our machinery, remember,” she said. “We don’t know how the Tesslies manage time, or intervals of time. We don’t know how they think.”

  “They think it’s fun to destroy the Earth, rescue a few Survivors, put them in the Shell, and watch them for twenty years.”

  “There’s no reason to think they watch us.”

  “There’s no reason to think they don’t.”

  “They need machinery, Pete—they’re aliens but not gods. I see no cameras here.”

  Pete turned away, because McAllister had just, as she so often did, gone abruptly beyond him. He didn’t know what “gods” were, although some of the Survivors had babbled about them when Pete was little, and Darlene still did. She sang songs about green pastures and washing in blood and rowing boats ashore, all in her scratchy tuneless very loud voice. However, nobody listened to Darlene, who was a nasty old woman. Pete wasn’t too sure about the word “camera” either, although it seemed to be a non-Tesslie machinery that made pictures. Pete didn’t know how machines could draw that fast. But how could the Grab do what it did?

 
The machinery sat in the center of the room, looking like nothing but a gray metal platform a few inches above the floor. If climbed onto it, ordinarily nothing happened. But sometimes the platform started to glow and then it became a stupid invisible door. No, not a door. Something else. Whatever it was, if you jumped on the platform and went through it, you had ten minutes in Before.

  The Grabs usually came a few close together, then long weeks of no brightening. After the Grab when Pete got Kara and Petra, while he’d been feverish with his infected foot, Paolo had fallen asleep and missed the whole thing. Even if Paolo hadn’t been sick, Pete couldn’t really blame him. Watching the Grab machine do nothing, with only your own thoughts to occupy you, was easily the most boring duty on the roster.

  But did the Tesslies watch humanity? That was the question that now consumed Pete. Did they watch Pete and Caity when they had sex? Even though Pete didn’t like Caity, she was his only choice. Jenna had grown too fragile, and the kids from the Grab were still too young. That was why they were Grabbed, of course—to have sex when they were older. The girls would be fertile. The boys would be fertile, too, but the Shell needed a lot more girls than boys. None of the Six apparently were fertile, and the four Survivors left were too old to have babies.

  But they had had a lot of sex when they were young and newly in the Shell. Even way back then they had been trying to start humanity all over again. Lots of sex—Pete got hard just imagining it—and lots of babies, most of which died.

  But had the fucking bastards (more of Darlene’s useful words) watched while the Survivors had all that sex? Did they watch Pete and Caity? And what was a “bastard,” anyway?

  Pete tried to sneak across the corridor from the farm to the children’s room. It had been his turn for fertilizer duty, a job he hated. The fertilizer was made from everybody’s shit. You dumped it into a huge closed metal box (more Tesslie machinery!) and the box did something to it. When it fell out a hole into a bucket, it didn’t smell like shit anymore and McAllister said it couldn’t make you sick. But it still looked like shit. Pete had been collecting shit buckets from all over the Shell, trundling them along the wide central corridor on a shopping cart and dumping them into the fertilizer box. Then he had to rinse each bucket thoroughly under the disinfectant waterfall, which was a continuous rain of blue water that shot out of a wall and disappeared into a hole in the floor. Just after he’d rinsed the last bucket, the fertilizer machine delivered a load of fertilizer. Pete tried to pretend he hadn’t seen the bucket fill, so that spreading the fertilizer would have to be the next person’s job, but Darlene caught him.

  “Ha! Don’t be sneaking off before the job’s done! I seen you!”

  “I wasn’t sneaking off!”

  “Sure you was. You’re bone lazy, Pete. A wild one for sure. Go spread that bucket.”

  When Bridget died, Pete wished it had been Darlene instead. “Where should I spread this?” He picked up the bucket of fertilizer. “On the soy?”

  “Them ain’t soy,” she said scathingly. “Them are some concoction the Tesslies dreamed up and don’t you think nothing different, boy! Them plants will probably poison us yet!”

  “Yeah, right,” Pete said. Darlene was crazy. The Tesslies keeping humans alive for twenty years, giving them Grab machinery to get fertile kids to make more humans, just to poison the whole lot.

  Then he realized that Darlene’s craziness was driving him to defend the Tesslies, and he threw the brown gunk—it still looked like shit!—harder than necessary onto the soy. Or whatever it was. “High-protein, dense-calorie plants,” Jenna had told him once. McAllister was teaching Jenna and Paolo all the science she knew from Before, so it wouldn’t be lost. The other Survivors had done the same, but they hadn’t known nearly as much. “We must save everything we can,” she always said.

  Pete spread the fertilizer through the soy. There was enough for half the onion bed, too. Then he rinsed the bucket. Darlene watched him every minute.

  Darlene was in charge of the farm. In a way that was weird because Eduardo was the Survivor who had been studying plants when the Tesslies put him into the Shell. “Ecobiology,” McAllister had called it. But that just meant that the plants Eduardo knew about were wild ones, and he told Pete that no special knowledge was needed to grow the vegetables on the farm. Besides, nobody wanted Darlene anywhere near the Grab children. She was too mean.

  The farm was the biggest room in the Shell, with rows and rows of raised beds holding various crops, crossed by long metal pipes that leaked water. The farm also housed the disinfecting waterfall and the clean-water waterfall, from which endless buckets of water were hauled for drinking, washing, cooking. Here, too, stood the raised section of the floor that could be turned hot by pressing a button. Bridget had been especially good at simmering vegetable stews on the hot box, in buckets. Now Eduardo did it, less well. The farm smelled good, of dirt and water and cooking, and it would have been a lovely place if it hadn’t been for Darlene.

  “Rock of ages,” she sang in her tuneless, scratchy voice while Pete spread fertilizer. “‘Cleft for me’ . . . You spread that even, Pete, you hear me? Bone lazy!” He escaped as soon as he could and went to see Petra.

  She was awake, lying on a blanket, kicking her fat little legs. Caity was on duty in the babies’ corner behind its wall of buckets. At the sight of her, Pete again thought of sex, but Caity didn’t seem interested, and after a moment he realized that he wasn’t, either. Not with Caity.

  She said, “Did you hear about Xiaobo?”

  “What about him?

  “He’s dying.”

  It took Pete a moment to take it in, even though the news wasn’t unexpected. “Where?”

  “His room.”

  McAllister would be there. Pete walked back through the children’s room. At the sight of him, Kara started screaming. How long was that going to keep on? Kara would just have to get over it. The older children, three to five years old, were clustered around Jenna in a learning circle, being taught to count buckets and read letters and sing songs. When they were older, McAllister and Eduardo would teach them about stars and atoms and the digestive system. “We must save everything we can.”

  McAllister wasn’t with Xiaobo, but Eduardo and Paolo were.

  Eduardo was the oldest of the Survivors, and looked it. Only a few years older than McAllister, he seemed to Pete to be older than time. Thinning gray hair straggled around a deeply lined face. Eduardo, a quiet and courteous man, had never lost his soft Spanish accent, and when Pete had been little, he’d loved to have Eduardo tell him stories. He was Paolo’s father, and the two looked alike, although even now Eduardo was stronger than the sickly Paolo. The two sat one on each side of Xiaobo, who lay on a pile of blankets in the bare little room. Paolo held Xiaobo’s hand. Next to these three, Pete actually felt strong and whole.

  He knelt at the foot of the nest of blankets. “Xiaobo.”

  The dying man opened his eyes. When Pete had been very small, Xiaobo’s eyes had fascinated him: small, slanted, hooded by a fold of skin. At the same time, Xiaobo had scared him because he spoke so weird. English had come slowly to him, and now that Pete was grown himself he realized how lonely Xiaobo must have been in the Shell, the only Survivor of his people, the only one who could not talk to anyone else.

  “Xiaobo, are you hurting?”

  “No.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Nothing. I go now, Pete.”

  “You don’t know that you—”

  “It is time. I go.” He closed his eyes again, and smiled.

  I will never go that quietly. The thought built itself in his mind, solid as the Shell itself. I will not.

  He didn’t know what else to say, but then there wasn’t time to say anything else. Tommy, at seven the oldest of the children and the only one yet permitted to leave the children’s room alone, raced into Xiaobo’s room. “The Grab is bright!”

  Pete leapt up. “Where’s McAllister?”
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br />   “I don’t know!” The boy throbbed with excitement. Unlike Kara, Tommy was one who’d adapted easily to his new life.

  “It’s Ravi’s turn to go on the Grab,” Pete said. “Where’s Ravi?”

  “I don’t know that either! Anyway Terrell was supposed to go because McAllister said he’s twelve now but Terrell got sick again and threw up and Darlene came over from the farm and told him to go lie down in his room like a useless stone.”

  Darlene wasn’t supposed to tell Grab watchers anything. Pete, Paolo, and Eduardo looked at each other. How much longer would the platform stay bright? Paolo said, “You just went, Pete. Caity can go.”

  “She’s on baby duty,” Pete said. And he was off running down the corridor, cursing Ravi for being—where? Doing what? It was Ravi’s turn, not Terrell’s! And why had McAllister changed the duty roster?

  Tommy raced at his heels. “Can I go, Pete? Can I, huh? Can I go, too?”

  “No!”

  The boy stopped cold and shouted after him, “You’re selfish! You’re a selfish piggy who doesn’t care about the good of all! I’m telling! I am!”

  Pete reached the Grab machinery and climbed onto the platform.

  DECEMBER 2013

  Julie sat on her new sleep sofa in her living room, which had grown smaller with the addition of her desk, smaller still with the broad sofa, and yet again smaller with the Christmas tree crowded into a corner. The scent of Douglas fir drifted through the room. She was wrapping presents in bright metallic paper. Jake was flying in from Wyoming for Christmas and although they weren’t particularly close, each was the only family the other had since their parents had died in a plane crash three years ago, and it was Christmas. For Christmas you gathered family, even if half your heritage was Jewish. Jake, who would sleep on the extended sofa with his feet against the tree, was about to discover that he had one more family member than he thought.