Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

“Please fill out this form,” said a pretty, grim-faced young woman. Not a nurse: security. She looked like a faded version of his sister, bleached of Elizabeth’s angry command. Noah filled out the form, gave his small vial of blood, and filed back to Building A. He felt flooded with anticlimactic letdown. When he had reclaimed his belongings, a guard handed him a hundred dollars and a small round object the size and feel of a quarter.

“Keep this with you,” a guard said. “It’s a one-use, one-way communication device. In the unlikely event that it rings, press the center. That means that we’d like to see you again.”

“If you do, does that mean I’m in the alien’s haplogroup?”

He didn’t seem to know the word. “If it rings, press the center.”

“How many people have had their devices ring?”

The guard’s face changed, and Noah glimpsed the person behind the job. He shrugged. “I never heard of even one.”

“Is it—”

“Move along, please.” The job mask was back.

Noah put on his shoes, balancing first on one foot and then on the other to avoid touching the grimy floor. It was like being in an airport. He started for the door.

“Noah!” Elizabeth sailed toward him across a sea of stained concrete. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Hi, Lizzie. Is this part of the New York State border?”

“I’m on special assignment.”

God, she must hate that. Her scowl threatened to create permanent furrows in her tanned skin. But Elizabeth always obeyed the chain of command.

“Noah, how can you—”

A bomb went off.

A white light blinded Noah. His hearing went dead, killed by the sheer onslaught of sound. His legs wobbled as his stomach lurched. Then Elizabeth knocked him to the ground and hurled herself on top of him. A few seconds later she was up and running and Noah could hear her again: “Fucking flashbang!”

He stumbled to his feet, his eyes still painful from the light. People screamed and a few writhed on the floor near a pile of clothes that had ignited. Black smoke billowed from the clothing, setting the closest people to coughing, but no one seemed dead. Guards leaped at a young man shouting something lost in the din.

Noah picked up his shoes and slipped outside, where sirens screamed, honing in from nearby streets. The salt-tanged breeze touched him like a benediction.

A flashbang. You could buy a twelve-pack of them on the Internet for fifty bucks, although those weren’t supposed to ignite fires. Whatever that protester had hoped to accomplish, it was ineffective. Just like this whole dumb blood-donation expedition.

But he had a hundred dollars he hadn’t had this morning, which would buy a few good hits of sugarcane. And in his pocket, his fingers closed involuntarily on the circular alien coin.

Marianne was surprised at how few areas of the Embassy were restricted.

The BSL4 areas, of course. The aliens’ personal quarters, not very far from the BSL 4 labs. But her and Evan’s badges let them roam pretty much everywhere else. Humans rushed passed them on their own errands, some nodding in greeting but others too preoccupied to even notice they were there.

“Of course there are doors we don’t even see,” Evan said. “Weird alien cameras we don’t see. Denebs we don’t see. They know where we are, where everyone is, every minute. Dead easy.”

The interior of the Embassy was a strange mixture of materials and styles. Many corridors were exactly what you’d expect in a scientific research facility: unadorned, clean, lined with doors. The walls seemed to be made of something that was a cross between metal and plastic, and did not dent. Walls in the personal quarters and lounges, on the other hand, were often made of something that reminded her of Japanese rice paper, but soundproof. She had the feeling that she could have put her fist through them, but when she actually tried this, the wall only gave slightly, like a very tough piece of plastic. Some of these walls could be slid open, to change the size or shapes of rooms. Still other walls were actually giant screens that played constantly shifting patterns of subtle color. Finally, there were odd small lounges that seemed to have been furnished from upscale mail-order catalogs by someone who thought anything Terran must go with anything else: earth-tone sisal carpeting with a Victorian camelback sofa, Picasso prints with low Moroccan tables inlaid with silver and copper, a Navajo blanket hung on the wall above Japanese zabutons.

Marianne was tired. They’d come to one such sitting area outside the main mess, and she sank into an English club chair beside a small table of swooping purple glass. “Evan—do you really believe we are all going to die a year from now?”

“No.” He sat in an adjoining chair, appreciatively patting its wide and upholstered arms. “But only because my mind refuses to entertain the thought of my own death in any meaningful way. Intellectually, though, yes. Or rather, nearly all of us will die.”

“A vaccine to save the rest?”

“No. There is simply not enough time to get all the necessary bits and pieces sorted out. But the Denebs will save some Terrans.”

“How?”

“Take a selected few back with them to that big ship in the sky.”

Immediately she felt stupid that she hadn’t thought of this before. Stupidity gave way to the queasy, jumpy feeling of desperate hope. “Take us Embassy personnel? To continue joint work on the spores?” Her children—somehow she would have to find a way to include Elizabeth, Noah, and Ryan and Connie. But everyone here had family—

“No,” Evan said. “Too many of us. My guess is just the Terran members of their haplogroup. Why else bother to identify them? And everything I’ve heard reinforces their emphasis on blood relationships.”

“Heard from whom? We’re in the lab sixteen hours a day—”

“I don’t need much sleep. Not like you, Marianne. I talk to the Biology Team, who talk more than anybody else to the aliens. Also I chat with Lisa Guiterrez, the genetics counselor.”

“And the Denebs told somebody they’re taking their haplogroup members with them before the spore cloud hits?”

“No, of course not. When do the Denebs tell Terrans anything directly? It’s all smiling evasion, heartfelt reassurances. They’re like Filipino houseboys.”

Startled, Marianne gazed at him. The vaguely racist reference was uncharacteristic of Evan, and had been said with some bitterness. She realized all over again how little Evan gave away about his past. When had he lived in the Philippines? What had happened between him and some apparently not forgiven houseboy? A former lover? Evan’s sexual orientation was also something they never discussed, although of course she was aware of it. From his grim face, he wasn’t going to discuss it now, either.

She said, “I’m going to ask Smith what the Denebs intend.”

Evan’s smooth grin had returned. “Good luck. The UN can’t get information from him, the project’s chief scientists can’t get information from him, and you and I never see him. Just minor roadblocks to your plan.”

“We really are lab rats,” she said. And then, abruptly, “Let’s go. We need to get back to work.”

Evan said slowly, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“What?”

“The origin of viruses. How they didn’t evolve from a single entity and don’t have a common ancestor. About the theory that their individual origins were pieces of DNA or RNA that broke off from cells and learned to spread to other cells.”

Marianne frowned. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“I don’t either, actually.”