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

The ground shook again. The baby started to whimper. Pete tied the huge shopping carts together with towels. He clutched one of the handles in one hand, the baby bucket in the other. Fifteen seconds.

“Bye, Julie. I’m sorry about the tsunami.”

“Alicia!” Julie cried. Then, stopping herself in mid-lunge: “It was us.”

“It was the Tesslies.”

“No, no—don’t you see? We humans always blame the wrong ones! The—”

Pete never heard the rest. He was Grabbed.

“I’m back!” Pete cried from the platform. “Look! Look!” No one was in the Grab room.

That made no sense. McAllister had seen him go. She knew he would be back in twenty-two minutes, and his wrister said that he was. She, at least, should be waiting here. Disappointment lurched through him—he had a baby girl to show her! And all this great stuff! And all those words to tell her that Julie had said… If he could remember them.

He found he remembered them perfectly.

Pete’s belly churned. The excitement of the Grab, the disappointment at no one seeing his triumphant return, his deep disturbance at Julie’s statements, going deeper every moment. Where was McAllister? Where was everybody?

“Hello?” he said, but not loud. No answer.

He hopped off the platform, leaving his Grabbed prizes, still carrying Alicia in her baby-bucket. Cautiously he peered into the corridor.

No one. But through the wide arched entrance to the farm, he glimpsed a movement behind the wide white bulk of the fertilizer machine. A second later Ravi appeared, gestured wildly for Pete to come, then ducked again out of sight. Was it a game of some sort?

He knew it wasn’t. He set the baby-bucket down in the middle of the corridor and sprinted toward Ravi.

“We don’t have much time,” Ravi gasped. “They’ll find out it’s missing. My knife doesn’t work at all on its bucket-case. But you have the laser on your wrister. Quick, kill it!”

Lying on the ground at Ravi’s feet was a Tesslie.

Julie walked calmly to a deep faux-leather chair in the Costco furniture display. Calmly she sat down. The calm, she knew with the part of her brain that was still rational, would not last. It was shock. Also several other things, including a preternaturally heightened ability to simultaneously comprehend everything around her, instead of in the linear shards that the human mind was usually stuck with.

Alicia was gone.

The megatsunami was on its way.

Washington D.C., including her life there, would soon no longer exist.

Her country would not allow that to go by without a military reaction.

Pete had left behind a pile of objects that must have slid off one of his shopping carts before he… left.

Jake was dead in whatever was happening at the Yellowstone Caldera.

The TVs on the wall had stopped broadcasting.

The Tokyo earthquake and tsunami had been a rehearsal for what would come, once the biologists had detected and contained the plant mutations. Or, alternatively, once Gaia had changed its tactics.

The chair she sat in was on sale for $179.99.

Linda and her family were in Winnipeg, far from the coast. Would that save them? For how long? Gordon and his kids, all the people Julie knew at Georgetown and in D.C.—all gone, or soon to be gone. And then incongruously: The motel clerk’s niece will never be crowned Miss Cochranton Azalea .

Julie drew the snub-nosed .38 from her pocket. She would not wait for the tsunami. This was better. And Alicia—her baby, her treasure, the miracle she had given up hoping to have—was safe. Safe someplace that might, with any luck, become the future.

Beneath the Yellowstone Caldera, the geothermal system exploded from pressure from below. A magma pool twenty miles by forty miles blew into the sky, greater than the supervolcano in Indonesia that, 75,000 years ago, had killed fifty percent of the human race. More than 250 cubic miles of magma erupted into the air. For hundreds of miles everything burned, and ash choked the air. Burning, suffocating night spread over the land.

The explosion triggered earthquakes in the San Andreas Fault and on into the Pacific Rim. As convergent tectonic plate boundaries lifted or subducted, more tsunamis were generated in the Pacific, and then in the Indian Ocean. Even deep sea life was affected as thermal vents opened—but not affected very much. Most of the ocean life was hardy, adapted, and innocent.

Pete gaped at the Tesslie lying at Ravi’s feet. Or… was it lying? The thing was the squarish metal can he remembered, without clear head or feet or anything . He said, inanely, “How do you know it isn’t standing up instead of lying down?”

“Because I knocked it over!”

“Did it come out of the air in a bunch of golden sparks?”

“Yes!”

“It’s not moving. How do you know it’s still alive?”

“It won’t be if you fucking laser it!”

Pete didn’t move. Ravi leaped forward, grabbed Pete’s arm with both hands, and fumbled with the buckle on the wrister.

Ideas surged and eddied in Pete’s mind, even as he kept his eyes on the Tesslie. It lay still now, but Pete knew it wasn’t helpless. It was watching. Without eyes or anything, it was still watching to see what he and Ravi would do. And it was not helpless. The Tesslies had built this whole Shell! They had made Grab machinery to send the Six back to get kids and stuff! They had come from someplace else through the sky! One of them was not going to let a human laser him open. Ravi was crazy.

But even more, Julie’s words swirled in his brain. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” “Darwinian self-preservation.” “Gaia.” “We did it. We wrecked the Earth.” And “We humans always blame the wrong ones.”

Pete pushed Ravi away. Ravi said, “What the fuck? Give me the laser.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you can’t laser the bastard? I can! Give it to me, you wimp!”

“I don’t know… maybe the Tesslies… I don’t know!” It was a cry of anguish. We humans always blame the wrong ones .

Ravi, much stronger than Pete, knocked him to the ground and sat on him. Pete stuck his arm with the wrister behind his back. Ravi easily got it out, but he couldn’t unbuckle the wrister and also keep both Pete’s arms pinned. Pete flailed, wrenching his bad shoulder, hitting Ravi’s face, shoulder, anywhere he could reach. Ravi snarled at him, exposing the crooked stumps of the teeth that Pete had knocked out.

The Tesslie turned itself so it stood on a different side of its bucket-case, and waited quietly.

“Give it to me, you wimp!”

“No! McAllister said—”

“It took McAllister! It took them all, you fucking idiot! They’re prisoners! That’s why I—give it to me!” He smashed a fist into Pete’s face.

“Prisoners?” He could barely get the word out for pain, even though he’d turned his head in time for Ravi’s blow to hit him on the side of the jaw instead of on the mouth.

“Yes! The bastards took them all!”

“Petra?”

“Give it to me!”

“Took where?”

Ravi flipped Pete over and wrenched his arm behind his head. The pain was astonishing. Ravi got the wrister unbuckled, sprang off Pete, and aimed the laser at the Tesslie. Ravi fired.

Nothing happened.

Pete, gasping on the floor, saw the laser beam hit the Tesslie’s bucket-case. The red beam vanished. The Tesslie stood stolid and silent.

Ravi gave a low moan. Pete got to his feet. His vision blurred during the process, but he did it. He faced the Tesslie.