Nancy Kress - After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

Eduardo said in his musical voice, “As for man, his days are like grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.”That was what he always said at funerals, and Pete always hated it. It sounded sad, and anyway it was stupid. Xiaobo wasn’t grass—people were made of skin and bones and blood. There was no wind inside the Shell. And this place certainly would remember Xiaobo. Pete would, and so would the other Six and Darlene and Eduardo and, of course, McAllister.

Her words made more sense. “To the Earth we commit the body of our friend and family, Lung Xiaobo. His bones and tissues and heart will enrich the land and help to make it one to which humanity will, someday, return. Go with our gratitude, Xiaobo, and our love.”

Darlene began to sing, another of her awful scratchy songs with words Pete didn’t understand. There were so many things he didn’t understand, starting with how McAllister could bear to have sex with Ravi. He hated him, he hated her, he hated everything. He clutched his DIGITAL FOTO FRAME tighter.

Darlene howled, “‘Abide with me, ’tis eventide…’”

When the song was finished, McAllister pressed the funeral button. A section of the wall opened, a slot near the floor three feet wide and two high. Xiaobo didn’t need that much room. Some unseen force pulled him into the wall. Tommy squatted to peer inside, just as Pete had done when he was little. Now, after being present at three funerals for Survivors and six for miscarriages, Pete knew there was nothing to see. The slot opened into a small bare featureless space, and the other side wouldn’t open to deposit Xiaobo’s body Outside until the first wall closed up.

Darlene bawled another song, this one about the land being beautiful with spacious skies and a lot of grain, but Pete wasn’t listening. He watched Ravi, who had turned his gaze to McAllister. Ravi looked the way he used to when there was a treat Grabbed from a store—oh, those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!—and Ravi had tried to figure a way to get a bite of another child’s share. Pete’s hand tightened on the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He wanted to throw it at Ravi, to get his hands around Ravi’s neck and squeeze… No, he didn’t. Ravi was his half-brother. Yes, he did—Ravi had sex with McAllister, he was going to have more sex with McAllister, Pete wanted to kill him—

Ravi caught Pete’s look and glared back.

The funeral was over. People moved away, returning to their duties. Caity stomped off, covering whatever softer feelings she had with vague bad temper. Pete lingered, and Tommy stayed with him. When they were the only two left in the funeral room, Tommy demanded, “How does McAllister know that the fucking bastard Tesslies will really put Xiaobo’s body Outside to help grass to come back?”

Tommy must have been listening to Darlene. “McAllister knows.”

“But how?”

Pete looked down at the intense little face. “Well, you didn’t see any other bodies in there, did you? We’ve had a lot of funerals—you know that from learning circles. If the bodies weren’t dumped out, they would just pile up in there.”

Tommy considered. “Maybe the Tesslies just put them in a fertilizer machine. Like shit. And then we spread them on the farm.”

Pete had never thought of this. He could see that Tommy wished he hadn’t thought of it, either. He knelt beside Tommy and said firmly, “No, that doesn’t happen. The Tesslies told McAllister.”

“I thought she never talked to them.”

“Well, then they got her to understand some other way, like they got her to understand to press the funeral button, and how the fertilizer machine works and the Grab machinery and everything else.” Actually, Pete wasn’t sure how any of that had happened. Maybe the Survivors just figured everything out by themselves.

“All right,” Tommy said. “But why do we believe the Tesslies?”

A good question. But not one that Pete wanted troubling Tommy. “We believe McAllister. You know how smart she is, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then there you have it, laddie.” One of Bridget’s favorite expressions.

“Okay.” And then, “But I have another question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you and Ravi mad at each other?”

Pete stood. This he was not going to discuss with Tommy.

“It’s because Ravi had sex with McAllister, right? But you have sex with Caity. And when he wasn’t sick, Terrell tried to have sex with Jenna, only she said he was still too young. And—”

Was there anything the kid didn’t know? Pete said, “I want privacy on this.” Those were words they all learned young, and learned to respect. A necessity in such a small, closed family, McAllister often said.

Tommy said, “Can I see the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME? Please, Pete, please please please?”

“All right.” He turned it on, let the pictures move through the frame once each. Tommy watched, rapt. He reached out one finger to touch the mountain range. When Pete turned off the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, Tommy sighed the same way he did right after Jenna finished reading aloud a fairy tale.

“Now go back to the children’s room,” Pete said.

Tommy said importantly, “I have farm duty .”

“Oh. Then go do that.”

Tommy left the funeral room, said, “Oh, hi,” to someone in the corridor, and ran off. Pete tensed. If that was Ravi out there, waiting for him…

It was McAllister. “Pete, I want to talk with you.”

“I want privacy on this,” Pete said, with as much coldness as he could.

She smiled. “You don’t even know what ‘this’ is yet, so how can you want privacy on it?”

He gazed sullenly at the wall behind her.

“What I wanted to say was thank you for being so good with Tommy. He’s more unsure inside than he shows. Jenna says sometimes in bed he still cries for his mother. But he adores you and looks up to you, and you’re such a good influence on him.”

Pete glared at her. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to make me feel good so I won’t fight Ravi. Well, he’s the one who wants to fight me. Didn’t you see him smirk at me during the funeral?”

“I saw you smirking and glaring at each other. That has to stop. Pete, there is a statement from Before, said by a very smart and wise man, that the biggest threat to any society is its own young males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Do you understand what that means?”

“No.”

“It means—”

“I want privacy on this,” Pete said and walked away. Whether or not the words fit—who the fuck cared, anyway?

In the complex network of faults in the Pacific Seismic Network, a thrust fault two hundred miles off the shore of Japan abruptly moved, as had happened before. The seabed deformed, vertically displacing an enormous volume of water. A huge wave rose on the ocean, long and low enough that an oil tanker barely noticed when it passed beneath its hull. As the wave raced toward shore, the shallower water both slowed and raised it. By the time the tsunami broke on Tokyo, the highest wave crested at ninety-four feet of water, smashing and inundating the city as well as the country far inland.

This had been predicted for a long time as a possibility for Tokyo. Only a few years earlier, it had happened south of that ancient city, with devastating results. Not the prediction, not the unfairness of being struck twice within a few years, not Japan’s excellent tsunami-warning system—none of it lessened the horrific destruction.

Pete sat crossed-legged in his secret room by the Shell wall, gazing out. The room wasn’t all that secret anymore; McAllister knew where it was, and Tommy had followed him here. Since Xiaobo’s funeral, Pete had had unhappy sex with Caity here. Twice. The second time she’d bitten his ear; she was always rougher than he was. He wasn’t going to do it with her anymore. He’d just masturbate.