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

“Linda, there is no ‘Gordon and me.’ And I don’t want there to be. I’m having the baby, I’m keeping the baby, I’m raising the baby. Georgetown’s given me a year’s sabbatical, for which I was overdue anyway. I’ve got great medical coverage. I feel fine now that morning sickness is over. And I’m happy to be doing this alone.”

“Except for me,” said Linda, to whom anything else was unthinkable.

Julie smiled. “Of course. You can be my labor coach. Always good to have a coach who won all her own games.”

“And your due date is—”

“May 1.”

Linda sipped her caramel macchiato. Julie saw that her friend was still troubled. Linda would never understand isolates like Julie and Jake.

As if reading Julie’s mind, Linda said, “And how is that gorgeous brother of yours?”

“Still monitoring mud in Wyoming.” Jake was a geologist.

“What did he say about the baby?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“But he’ll come here for the birth, right?”

“I’m sure he will,” said Julie, who was sure of no such thing. She and Jake liked being affectionate at a distance.

“Then you’ll have me and Jake, and I’m sure that Lucy Anderson will come to—”

Ah, Linda! Even parturition required a committee.

That evening Julie’s cell rang just as she was tapping the lid back on a paint can in her D.C. apartment. Paint had spilled over the side of the can and flowed down its side, but fortunately she had laid down a thick wad of paper. Winterfresh green puddled over a science article: POLLUTION FROM ASIA CONTAMINATES STRATOSPHERE. Julie’s paper mask was still in place; the baby book had recommended a filter mask if a pregnant woman felt it absolutely necessary to paint something. Julie had felt it absolutely necessary to paint her mother’s old chest of drawers, after which she would apply decals of bears. The ultrasound showed she was having a girl. But no Disney princesses or any of that shit; Julie’s daughter would be brought up to be a strong, independent woman. Bears were a good start.

The nursery, formerly Julie’s study, was very cold, since the baby book had also recommended painting with open windows. She shivered as she picked up her cell and walked into the hallway of the two-bedroom apartment, squeezing past the furniture and boxes moved from her former study. Somehow she would have to find room for all this stuff. At the moment her computer and printer sat on the dining table and her file cabinet crowded the kitchen. The baby wasn’t even here yet and it had disrupted everything. “Hello. Julie Kahn speaking.”

“It’s Gordon.”

Damn. She said neutrally, “Yes?”

“Is that really you? You sound all muffled.”

She took off the filter mask and said crisply, “What is it, Gordon?”

He was direct, one of the things she’d liked about him, when she still liked things about him. “There was no kidnapping Thursday at Hingham.”

That threw her. “Are you sure? Could there possibly be a child missing but the parents didn’t report it, or… or maybe just another burglary, the algorithms used those to—”

“I know my damn job. If there were so much as a misplaced screwdriver in this town tonight, we’d fucking well know about it.”

In his unaccustomed irritability she heard his tension over the situation. Unless his tension was over her, which she definitely did not want.

She said, “I explained to you that the burglaries complicated the algorithms, made them more than a simple linear progression. It was a judgment call which ones to include. I might have included some that were inside jobs with no forced entry, I might have missed some that—”

“I know all that. You did explain it. Several times. But the fact is that your predictive program isn’t working, and you need to fix it in part because I’ve staked my credibility with the A-Dic on it.”

Not like him to say so much. Her temper rose. “You can’t blame this failure on me, Gordon. I told you when you approached me at the university that predictive algorithms with this kind of data—”

“I know what you told me. Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot. Just put this new non-data in and give me something else I can work with. If you really can.”

“I’ll do what is possible,” she said stiffly.

“Great. Call me whenever it’s done.” He hung up, everything else unsaid between them.

Julie closed the door to the freezing nursery-to-be, put on a heavy sweater, and went to her computer.

From the floor of the Atlantic Ocean rose the longest mountain range in the world, separating huge tectonic plates. All at once a northern section of the African Plate moved closer to the South American Plate. The move was only an inch, and the resulting earthquake so slight it was felt by nobody. But the hydrophones set around the ocean picked up the shift from its low-frequency sonic rumbles, sending the information to monitoring stations on four continents.

“¡Mirar esto!” a technician called to his superior in Spain.

“Regardez!”

“Ei, olhar para esta!”

“Kijk naar dit!”

“Will you fucking take a look at that!”

Kara started screaming as soon as Pete came through the archway to the children’s room.

Thirteen children played or slept or learned in this large open space. Like all interior Shell rooms, it had featureless white metal walls, floor, and ceiling. There was no visible lighting but the room was suffused with a glow that brightened at “day” and dimmed at “night,” although never to complete blackness. The Shell contained only those objects originally gathered by Tesslies before they destroyed the world, or else objects seized on Grabs with the machinery the aliens had supplied a year ago. Pallets of blankets either thin and holey or else thick and new. Pillows on the floor for the adults to sit on. Many bright plastic toys, from the time that one of Jenna’s Grabs had landed her in something called a “Wal-Mart.” That Grab was famous. Jenna, almost as smart as her mother, had used her ten minutes to lash together three huge shopping carts and frantically fill them with everything in the closest aisles, toys and tools and clothing and “soft goods.” The pillows had come from that Grab, and the sheets and blankets that made both bedding and clothes for those who didn’t happen at the moment to fit into any clothes Grabbed at other stores. The shopping carts were now used to trundle things along the central corridor.

One wall held McAllister’s calendar. Crayons and paint just slid off the metal walls, but McAllister had put up a large sheet with packing tape and on that she kept careful track of how long humanity had been in the Shell. As a little boy Pete had sat in front of that calendar in a learning circle and learned to count. He’d been taught to read, too, although until Jenna’s Grab all the letters had to be written on a blanket using burned twigs from the farm. Now the Shell had six precious books, which everyone read over and over. All the pages were smeary and torn at the edges.

The children’s room—and many other rooms as well—held piles of buckets. These had been here from the beginning; evidently the Tesslies considered buckets important. The Shell contained whole rooms full of buckets, from fist-sized (these were used as bowls and cups) to big ones on the farm. The buckets could be stuck to each other with something in tubes that Jenna had brought back from her Wal-Mart Grab. A shoulder-high wall of stuck-together buckets divided the babies’ corner from the rest of the children’s room. And, of course, the buckets were used for pissing and shitting.