Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

  The other two data points were more uncertain. A break-in in a garden shop in Massachusetts, no forced entry, the cash box untouched. The usual bizarre collection of goods had been taken: rakes, seeds, wind chimes. And yesterday’s incident, the kidnapping of a Maine infant who was supposed to be watched by her teenage sister while the parents strolled on the beach. No trace of the baby girl had been found, but the whole thing so closely resembled a set-up that even the local cops were suspicious, regarding the sister as either a suspect or a scapegoat; Julie couldn’t tell which. Could be a significant, could not. The location fit with her current algorithm, but not so closely if she didn’t include it as a data point to create the algorithm in the first place, which was the kind of thinking that drove mathematicians crazy. And when had she started thinking of a lost child as a “data point”?

  She had to go to bed. Just one more scan of breaking news. And there it was:

  SCIENTIST ARRESTED FOR SECURITY BREACH

  Dr. Geoffrey Fanshaw, Biologist, Believed Connected to

  Unspecified Terrorist Activity

  The article said nothing much. It didn’t have to. Julie, all exhaustion banished, ran into her bedroom and started packing.

  2035

  Two Grabs right in a row, then nothing for a few days, then another Grab for Caity.

  “They’re playing fucking games, ain’t they,” Darlene said. “With our lives!”

  “Not yours,” Caity answered spitefully. “You never have to go.” She was disappointed with the results of her Grab. She’d found herself in a strange, small store for twenty-two minutes and had not known what to do. There were no shopping carts, and anyway she was afraid of this store. She hadn’t said that, not even later, but then Caity didn’t ever admit fear. Still, Pete knew that’s what she’d felt. She hadn’t wanted to touch anything, but neither did she want to come back empty-handed and anyway, she said later and in a strong temper, “Who knew what the fuck McAllister was going to want?” So she yanked some zippered carrying-bags off a shelf and made herself stuff things into them.

  “Gerbils?” Eduardo said, astonished. He and Tommy happened to walk by the Grab room just as Caity returned.

  “That’s what they had!” Caity was near tears. “Get McAllister! Never mind, I’ll go myself!”

  “Wow, a puppy!” Tommy cried, unzipping a bag with mesh sides.

  The Six had never seen gerbils before. Only Terrell, Jenna, and Pete had seen dogs during Grabs, and the one Pete saw had tried to kill him. He didn’t much like the puppy, a small brown-and-white creature with floppy ears. It barked and shit everywhere and chewed up any shoes left on the floor. But everyone else thought it was wonderful, cute and cuddly. Tommy named it Fuzz Ball.

  The gerbils were kept in their own room, with an old blanket that McAllister wearily ordered to be torn into strips. The gerbils then finished the job. Unlike the puppy, which had to be coaxed to eat mashed-up soy and only did so when it got hungry enough, the gerbils ate the vegetable crops happily. But their room smelled and had to be cleaned out every day, and Pete couldn’t see the point of them.

  “Wait,” McAllister said. “Something is going to happen, I think.”

  “What?” Pete said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it because of what I saw?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  She didn’t seem to know much. And once, Pete had thought she knew everything!

  Two of the gerbils died the day after Caity brought them back. Pete hoped the rest would die, too, and maybe even the puppy, but they didn’t. The gerbils ate and smelled, the puppy raced around and barked and chewed, the babies wailed.

  “A regular madhouse, this,” Darlene muttered.

  Ravi went on a Grab and returned with yet another large load of objects on yet another large rolling cart. “Look! Look what I got!”

  Bundles of tough, heavy cloth that Pete thought would be poor blankets: too uncomfortable. However, it turned out they were not blankets at all. Eduardo let out a whoop such as Pete had never before heard the quiet man make. Eduardo sat on the floor and did things to one of the bundles and it sprang into a little cloth room.

  “A tent!” Tommy cried, and crawled inside.

  McAllister leaned against the wall, her hand on her belly, and stared at the “tent.”

  Eduardo said to McAllister, “Five-pole four-season Stormkings. An earlier generation of these is what we used to use on field expeditions in the mountains, when I was a grad student in botany.” Pete didn’t know what a botany or a grad student were, and he didn’t ask. He was too jealous.

  There were more tents, plus a lot of rope, a sharp “axe” that McAllister immediately took away someplace, and many metal things Pete didn’t understand the use of. McAllister directed it all to be stowed back on the rolling cart—no playing with this one—and pulled into the room next to the gerbils.

  But the most interesting thing, McAllister didn’t see at all. Ravi said quietly to Pete, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

  “I can’t leave the Grab room. I’m next.” Pete already wore the wrister.

  “Then wait until everybody leaves.”

  Pete nodded, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to see anything from Ravi. Pete regarded it as a private triumph that when he masturbated he no longer thought of McAllister; now he imagined the beautiful red-haired girl that had been Susie’s big sister. He’d already calculated how many years before Susie herself would be ready for sex. Still, every time he saw the growing curve of McAllister’s belly, the old animosity toward Ravi stirred.

  At the same time, he and Ravi were now allies. Together they were going to get revenge for Earth. The first Tesslie they saw—and one had to show up eventually, after all he’d seen one when he’d gone Outside!—they were going to kill. They spent a lot of time in Pete’s clear-walled secret room, gazing out at the growing grasses in the black rock and planning ways to accomplish this. If the Tesslie was an alien inside a bucket-case they could hit the case with something until it cracked open, drag the alien out, and stomp on it. If it was a robot, they would find the batteries and pull them out.

  “Look,” Ravi said when everyone else had left the Grab room. He reached under his tunic, made from a thick blanket folded and sewn to create pockets. Ravi pulled out something encased in leather. The leather slipped off and there was the knife, long and gleaming and, Pete knew without testing it, really sharp. Then another one.

  “They had a lot of knives in the store and I put some on the rolling cart. But these two are for us.”

  “Yes,” Pete said. He took one. Just holding it made him feel strange: powerful and bad, both. But he liked the feeling.

  “Yes,” he said again.

  JULY 2014

  Julie tried to be good at running and hiding, but most of the time she felt like a fool. After all, she didn’t even know if whichever agency had arrested Fanshaw would come for her. And what if they did? All she had done was work on data he had given her.

  Data that she knew had been obtained illegally, which made her at the very least an accessory to crime. Data that might, in fact, constitute a terrorist risk.

  So why hadn’t she reported Fanshaw? Because he must have gotten the data from some government agency, which meant they were already aware of the threat. She couldn’t have helped any, and she might have endangered herself. Material witnesses could be detained by the FBI or CIA indefinitely, in secret and without filed charges. If that had happened, who would have cared for Alicia? Linda had her hands full with her job and her own family; Jake was out of the question.

  It was because of Alicia that Julie was trying to plan responsibly now. At first light she packed the car carefully. She stopped at the bank as soon as it opened and withdrew $3,000 in cash. She turned off her cell phone. Then she drove north from D.C. on I-270. In Pennsylvania, just over the border from Maryland, she found a seedy motel that looked like it would accept cash. It did. The bored clerk behi
nd a shield of bullet-proof glass didn’t check the parking lot to see if the false license number she put down matched the one on her car. If the clerk was surprised to see a woman with a baby walk in to his establishment, which usually catered to an entirely different sort of trade, he didn’t show it.

  Locking the motel door behind her, Julie had a moment of panic. What was she doing? Her life had been going so well, had felt so sweet—

  She was doing what she had to do.

  After feeding Alicia, Julie drove to the nearest library and used their Internet connection until the library closed. It helped that Alicia, an unusually good baby now that the first bouts of colic were over, slept peacefully in her infant seat or stared calmly at whatever crossed her vision. Back in her motel room, Julie worked on her own laptop, which couldn’t have accessed the Internet if she’d wanted to; this was not the sort of place with wi-fi.

  When she couldn’t go any further with the data she had, she watched the TV. It only got three channels, but that was enough. Through the thin walls came first loud music and then louder laughter, followed by a lot of sexual moaning. Sleep came late and hard. Julie upped the volume on the TV, flipping channels to find what she sought.

  “Dead zones” were increasing in the world’s oceans. No fish, no algae, no life.

  The Nile was threatened by industrial pollution. No fish, no algae, no life.

  CO2 levels in the atmosphere were creeping upward.

  Overfishing was causing starvation in southeast Asian islands.

  The noise from adjoining rooms grew louder. A door slammed, hard. Julie’s gun, a snub-nosed .38, lay on the floor beside her bed. Julie was licensed to carry, and a reasonably good shot. She didn’t expect to have to use the gun, but it was comforting to know she had it.

  2035

  Pete sat in the Grab room, waiting for the platform to brighten. He had been there each day for a week now, relieved from duty only to sleep, and he was terrifically bored. Darlene had brought him onions and peppers to slice and chop. Eduardo had brought him sewing. Tommy popped in and out, too restless to stay very long. Caity had strolled in, nonchalantly offering sex, and had stalked out, her back stiff, when Pete said no. Jenna brought Petra, both of them trundled in on the rolling cart by Terrell. Petra was just learning to walk. Pete and Jenna sat a few paces apart and set the baby to waddling happily between them until she got tired and went to sleep.

  But most of the time he was bored. Of the Shell’s six books, two of them were too hard for Pete, and he’d read the others over and over. He knew all about the Cat in the Hat, the fairy tales with all the princes and horses and swords, the moon you said good-night to, and Animals in the Friendly Zoo. Why didn’t the fucking Grab machinery brighten?

  It was a relief of sorts to think bad words, so he said them again, this time aloud. “Why doesn’t the fucking Grab machinery brighten?”

  “Language, Pete,” McAllister said. She smiled at him from the doorway, walked heavily to his side, and braced one hand on the wall to lower herself beside him. Pete blushed, then scowled, conscious of the forbidden knife under his shirt. He had sounded out the words on its sheath: CAUTION: Carlton Hunting Knife. Very Sharp.

  “I came to keep you company,” McAllister said. “Are you very bored?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re doing a good job. You always do.”

  Pete looked away. He used to love McAllister’s praise, used to practically live for it. Now, however, he wondered if she really meant it, or if she just wanted him to keep on doing what she wished. Did she praise all the Six the same way? And the older Grab kids, too?

  McAllister watched him carefully. Finally she said, “You’re growing up, Pete.”

  “I am grown up! I’m fifteen!”

  “So you are.”

  Silence, which lengthened until Pete felt he had to say something. “How is the fetus?”

  To his surprise, McAllister smiled, and the smile had a tinge of sadness in it. “Doing fine. Do you know how odd it would have been for a fifteen-year-old to utter that sentence, in Before?”

  He didn’t know. He said belligerently, “I don’t see why. That fetus is important to us.”

  “You’re right. And you Six have all grown up knowing that. Language follows need. It was your father who taught me that, you know. He was studying to be a linguist.”

  Startlement shook Pete out of his belligerence. McAllister—none of the Survivors—talked much about the ones who had died, or about their own lives Before. When he’d been a child, Pete and the other Six had asked hundreds of questions, which always received the same answer: “Now is what counts, now and the future.” Caity had pointed out, years ago, that the Survivors must have made a pact to say that. Gradually everyone had stopped asking.

  Now Pete said carefully (CAUTION: Very Sharp), “My father?”

  “Yes. Richard had been a student at the same university I was, although we didn’t know each other then.”

  “Where was that?” This flow of information was unprecedented. Pete didn’t want to ask anything complicated that might interrupt it.

  “The name of the university wouldn’t mean anything to you, and there’s no reason why it should. That’s all gone, and what matters is now and the future.”

  “Yes, of course, but how did my father get here, McAllister? How did you?”

  She sighed and shifted uncomfortably on the floor. Pete tried to imagine carrying something the size of a bucket inside you. McAllister said, “I was home from university for summer vacation when the Tesslie destruction began. They caused a megatsunami. That’s a . . . You’ve seen waves in the ocean when you’ve been on a Grab, right? A tsunami is a wave so huge it was higher than the whole Shell, and could wash it right away. Wash away whole cities. The Tesslies started the tsunami with an earthquake in the Canary Islands off the coast of Europe and it rolled west across the Atlantic.”

  Her face had changed. Pete thought: She’s talking to herself now, not me, but he didn’t mind as long as she kept talking. He’d never seen McAllister like this. Was it because she was pregnant? It had been a while since anyone in the Shell had been pregnant: at least six years, when Bridget had miscarried that last time. The Survivors were too old (or so everyone had thought) and the Grab kids too young. The Shell was awash in babies, but in the last years no pregnancies. Until now.

  McAllister kept talking, her back resting against the Grab room wall, her hands resting lightly on the mound of her belly. “We lived, my family and I, in the countryside of southern Maryland. Honeysuckle and mosquitoes. Dad had a little tobacco farm that had been in the family for generations. Ten acres, two barns, a house built by my great-grandfather. It wasn’t very profitable but he liked the life. We had no close neighbors. That day my parents drove my little brother to Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment, a specialist. Jimmy had had leukemia but he was recovering well. I woke up late and turned on the little TV in my room while I was getting dressed and I learned that by then the tsunami was forty-five minutes away. My parents might have been trying to call me but I’d forgotten to plug in my cell and the battery was dead.”

  The words made no sense to Pete but he didn’t interrupt her.

  “Mom and Dad had taken our only car—we didn’t have much money and I was at university on a merit scholarship. They were so proud of that. I ran out of the house and climbed the hill behind the barns. The hill wasn’t very high, not in coastal Virginia, but it was high enough to see the water coming. A huge wall of it, smashing everything, trees and houses and tobacco barns. Our house. I knew it was going to smash me.”

  Pete blurted, despite himself, “What did you do?”

  To his surprise, she chuckled. “I prayed. For the first time in a decade—I was a smart-ass college kid who thought she had outgrown all that hooey—I prayed to a god, any god, to save me. And then a Tesslie did. It materialized out of the air beside me in what looked like a shower of golden sparks—that’s why we called them Tesslies, you
know. Ted Mgambe came up with the name. He said when they materialized through whatever unthinkable machinery they had, it looked just like the shower of sparks from Tesla’s famous experiments.”

  She had gone beyond Pete again. He didn’t interrupt.

  “The materializing was quite a trick, but the Tesslie was solid enough, a hard-shelled space suit, or perhaps a robot, with flexible long tentacles. It wrapped one around me but it really didn’t have to. The tsunami was almost on me, a wall of dirty raging water with trees and boards and pieces of cars and even a dead cow in it. I saw that cow and I clutched the Tesslie with every ounce of strength I had.”

  Silence. Pete said, “And then what? What?”

  McAllister shrugged. “I woke up in the Shell, along with twenty-five other people. All about my age, all intelligent, all healthy. You know their names. Everything was here except the Grab machinery, which just appeared twenty years later when it became evident that we were not going to be able to produce enough children to restart the human race. Too much genetic damage, Xiaobo thought, although nobody knew from what. All of us Survivors came from Maryland and Virginia, although we represented genetic diversity. Xiaobo was a Chinese exchange student, Eduardo was Hispanic, Ted was black, Darlene was plucked from up-country Piedmont. The diversity was probably deliberate. And we all happened to be in the open, high up, and alone when the tsunami hit.

  “When each of us regained consciousness, we explored the Shell, and we saw what Earth had become through the clear patch of wall in the unused maze—no, Pete, you weren’t the first to go there. And after the initial grief and rage, we made a pact that we would do whatever it took to restart humanity. Anything, anything at all, putting the good of the whole first and our individual selves second, if at all.”

  “Didn’t you hate them? The Tesslies, I mean?”

  “Of course we did. They wrecked the world. Even the brief hysterical newscast I saw that last day said that the tsunami wasn’t natural. It came from something—a quake, a volcano, I don’t remember exactly—that couldn’t have happened in that way by itself. And then the Tesslies saved us, like lab rats. We expected biological experimentation on us, those first years. It didn’t happen. The Tesslies left us alone until they gave us the Grab machinery, although no one saw them do it. Until you went Outside, I thought they’d probably left Earth for good. But they hadn’t, and I think now that they’re here for whatever happens next. Because something is happening, Pete. The grass is growing Outside. You breathed the air, even if it isn’t completely right yet. The Grabs have accelerated enormously. It’s possible more Tesslies will return soon.”