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

Despite himself, he said, “What?”

“The two little girls you brought us a week ago are doing fine.”

“They are?” And then, because he didn’t want to look yet at anything good, “A week ago? I was sick for a week?”

“Yes.”

“I missed a whole week of duties?”

“Yes, but don’t worry about it. Your foot got infected and you were wonderful. Just kept fighting. You always do.”

That was McAllister: always encouraging, always kind. She was one of the Survivors, from the time before the Tesslies destroyed the world. When that happened, McAllister had been only twenty-one, six years older than Pete was now. The Tesslies had put her and twenty-five others in the Shell, and then—what? Kept them there to breed and…. Pete didn’t know what the Tesslies had wanted, or wanted now. Who could understand killer aliens who destroyed a world and then for over twenty years kept a zoo going with random survivors? And when that experiment failed, having produced only six children, replaced it with another experiment involving machinery that they could have put in the Shell decades before?

Only four of the Survivors were still alive: McAllister, Eduardo, Xiaobo, and the awful Darlene. “Radiation damage created cancers and genetic damage,” McAllister had said; Pete hadn’t listened closely to the rest of the explanation. Jenna and Paolo, not him, were good at that science stuff. What Pete knew was that the Survivors miscarried, got weaker, eventually died. Most of them he couldn’t even remember, including both his biological parents, although he was the oldest of the Six. But he remembered Seth and Hannah, Robert and Jenny, and especially kind and loving Bridget, who had died only three months ago. All the Six had loved Bridget, and so had the Grab kids.

Pete looked at McAllister. She was so beautiful. Her face was lined and her breasts sagged a little beneath her loose dress, but her body was slim and curving, her dark eyes and rich brown skin unmarred. And she was whole. Not damaged like the next generation, the Six. Not old-looking like the other three Survivors. She was the smartest of everybody, and the sweetest. Again Pete felt the love surge up in him, and the lust. The latter was completely hopeless and he knew it. The knowledge turned him sullen again.

“So who did the next Grab? Was there one?”

“The platform brightened but nobody went.”

“Why didn’t Paolo go? He was next in line!”

“He fell asleep and missed it.”

“He’s a wimp.” It was their deadliest insult, learned from the Survivors. It meant you shirked your fair share of work and risk and unpleasant duties like lugging shit buckets to the fertilizer machine. It was also unfair applied to Paolo, who had always been sickly and couldn’t help falling asleep. He had some disease that made him do it. Pete had forgotten the name.

“Paolo isn’t really strong enough for a Grab unless it’s a store, and who can predict that?” McAllister said reasonably. “I’m taking him off Grab duty. Pete, don’t you want to hear about the little girls?”

“No. Caity could have gone on the Grab when Paolo fell asleep,” he said, although he knew that if it wasn’t her turn, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near the machinery. But Pete had his own reasons for a grudge against Caity, reasons he couldn’t tell McAllister. And the truth was that of the Six, Pete and Ravi were best at the Grab. Terrell wouldn’t go until he turned twelve, Paolo and Jenna had gotten too sickly, Caity had her arm broken when she tried to Grab a child, which she hadn’t even been able to bring back. Although, to be fair, Caity insisted on going again as soon as her arm healed. But Pete was in no mood to be fair to Caity.

Only the Six could go through the Grab machinery. Before the humans in the Shell knew that, they’d lost two Survivors, Robert and Seth. You’d think the Tesslies would have told McAllister about the age limit when they left the Grab machinery a year ago! But no one had even seen them leave the machinery (and how did they do that?). Nobody had seen a Tesslie in twenty-one years, and nobody ever had heard one speak. Maybe they couldn’t.

McAllister said, still trying to cheer up Pete, “Both little girls are adjusting so much better than we’d hoped. You must come see them. The little girl said her name is Kara. She just called the infant ‘Baby,’ so we had to pick a name for her, and we chose ‘Petra.’ After you.”

Petra . Despite himself, Pete rolled the name on his tongue, savoring it as once—only once—he’d savored “candy” that Paolo had Grabbed when he’d found himself sent to a store. They’d all had a piece. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, McAllister had called them. Feeling the astounding sweetness dissolve on his tongue, Pete had hated the Tesslies all over again. This, this, this —he might have had a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup every day of his life! A whole Peanut Butter Cup, every day!

He might even have had a woman like McAllister.

“Come see Petra,” she coaxed.

He’d been trained since birth not to indulge himself. Don’t be a wimp! Indulgence in moods was selfish and against the restarting of humanity. Some of the others might be better at remembering that—well, all of the others—but Pete had his pride. He’d been indulgent enough for one day. He got painfully to his feet, his head wobbling, and followed McAllister to see Petra.

The Connecticut salt marsh had been filled in during the 1940s, restored during the 1980s, overrun with too many tourists enjoying its beauty in the 1990s, and finally declared an ecologically protected area in 2004. Although it proved impossible to completely eliminate the invasive nonnative plant species, the natural floral layering of back-barrier marsh was returning. At the lowest level, where the tide brought surges of salt water twice a day, cordgrass and glassworts dominated. Higher up, it was salt hay. Higher still, on the upland border of the marsh, the ground was thick with black rush and marsh elder.

A particularly large marsh elder, nearly eight feet high, held a half-finished nest. A red-winged blackbird brought another piece of grass, laid it in the nest, and flew off. The shrub’s still furled buds, which would soon become greenish-white flowers, bobbed in a wind from the sea.

Below ground, bacteria mutated again. This time it found the lower salinity much more congenial than it had the roots of cordgrass, a month ago. The bacterial slime engaged in all its metabolic processes, including mitosis and fermentation. Alcohol began to accumulate on the marsh elder’s roots.

Julie sat in a crowded Starbucks in D.C. across the table from her best friend, Linda Campinelli. Julie’s latte and Linda’s double caramel macchiato sat untouched. The women known each other since Princeton, brought together by the vagaries of the roommate-matching computer even though they were complete opposites. Linda, a large untidy woman with a large untidy husband and three riotous sons, was an animal psychologist in Bethesda. She told long, funny stories about neurotically territorial cats or schnauzers that developed a fear of their water dishes. But not today.

“Ju… are you sure?”

“I’m four months along. Of course I’m sure.”

“Gordon?”

“Of course it was Gordon! How many men do you think I was banging at once?”

“I meant what will Gordon and you do?”

Julie had expected this. Linda was not only a romantic, she was sociability squared. Maybe even cubed. Not even after four years of dorm living did Linda understand Julie’s preference for silence and solitude. For Linda, all decisions and all endeavors were group activities.