Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Thinking this way felt strange, frightening. She was glad when Evan said, “Where’s Max? I’ll tell him about Gina.”

“Gone to bed with a cold. It can wait until morning. What’s that?”

Evan gave her a letter, addressed by hand. Marianne tore it open. “It’s from Ryan. The baby was born, a month early but he’s fine and so is she. Six pounds two ounces. They’re naming him Jason William Jenner.”

“Congratulations. You’re a nan.”

“A what?”

“Grandmum.” He kissed her cheek.

She turned to cling to him, without passion, in sudden need of the simple comfort of human touch. Evan smelled of damp wool and some cool, minty lotion. He patted her back. “What’s all this, then?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Don’t be sorry.” He held her until she was ready to pull away.

“I think I should write to Gina’s parents.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I want to make them understand—” Understand what? That sometimes children were lost, and the reasons didn’t necessarily make sense. But this reason did make sense, didn’t it? Gina had died because she’d been aboard the Embassy, died as a result of the work she did, and right now this was the most necessary work in the entire world.

She had a sudden memory of Noah, fifteen, shouting at her: You’re never home! Work is all you care about! And she, like so many beleaguered parents, had shouted back, If it weren’t for my work, we’d all starve!

And yet, when the kids had all left home and she could work as much as she wanted or needed without guilt, she’d missed them dreadfully. She’d missed the harried driving schedules— I have to be at Jennifer’s at eight and Soccer practice is moved up an hour Saturday! She’d missed their electronics, cells and iPods and tablets and laptops, plugged into all of the old house’s inadequate outlets. She’d missed the rainbow laundry in the basement, Ryan’s red soccer shirts and Elizabeth’s white jeans catastrophically dyed pink and Noah’s yellow-and-black bumblebee costume for the second-grade play. All gone. When your children were small you worried that they would die and you would lose them, and then they grew up and you ended up losing the children they’d been, anyway.

Marianne pulled at the skin on her face and steeled herself to write to Gina’s parents.

There were three of them now. Noah Jenner, Jacqui Young, Oliver Pardo. But only Noah was undergoing the change.

They lounged this afternoon in the World garden aboard the Embassy, where the ceiling seemed to be open to an alien sky. A strange orange shone, larger than Sol and yet not shedding as much light, creating a dim glow over the three Terrans. The garden plants were all dark in hue ( To gather as much light as possible, Mee^hao¡ had said), large lush leaves in olive drab and avocado and asparagus. Water trickled over rocks or fell in high, thin streams. Warmth enveloped Noah even though his energy suit, and he felt light on the ground in the lesser gravity. Some nearby flower sent out a strange, musky, heady fragrance on the slight breeze.

Jacqui, an energetic and enormously intelligent graduate student, had chosen to move into the alien section of the Embassy in order to do research. She was frank, with both Terrans and Denebs, that she was not going to stay after she had gathered the unique data on Deneb culture that would ensure her academic career. Mee^hao¡ said that was all right, she was clan and so welcome for as long as she chose. Noah wondered how she planned on even having an academic career after the spore cloud hit.

Oliver Pardo would have been given the part of geek by any casting department with no imagination. Overweight, computer-savvy, a fan of superheroes, he quoted obscure science fiction books sixty years old and drew endless pictures of girls in improbable costumes slaying dragons or frost giants. Socially inept, he was nonetheless gentle and sweet natured, and Noah preferred his company to Jacqui’s, who asked too many questions.

“Why?” she said.

“Why what?” Noah said, even though he knew perfectly well what she meant. He lounged back on the comfortable moss and closed his eyes.

“Why are you undergoing this punishing regime of shots just so you can take off your shield?”

“They’re not shots,” Noah said. Whatever the Denebs were doing to him, they did it by having him apply patches to himself when he was out of his energy suit and in an isolation chamber. This had happened once a week for a while now. The treatments left him nauseated, dizzy, sometimes with diarrhea, and always elated. There was only one more to go.

Jacqui said, “Shots or whatever, why do it?”

Oliver looked up from his drawing of a barbarian girl riding a lion. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Jacqui said, “Not to me.”

Oliver said, “Noah wants to become an alien.”

“No,” Noah said. “I was an alien. Now I’m becoming… not one.”

Jacqui’s pitying look said You need help. Oliver shaded in the lion’s mane. Noah wondered why, of all the Terrans of L7 mitochondrial haplotype, he was stuck with these two. He stood. “I have to study.”

“I wish I had your fluency in World,” Jacqui said. “It would help my work so much.”

So study it. But Noah knew she wouldn’t, not the way he was doing. She wanted the quick harvest of startling data, not… whatever it was he wanted.

Becoming an alien. Oliver was more correct than Noah’s flip answer. And yet Noah had been right, too, which was something he could never explain to anyone, least of all his mother. Whom he was supposed to visit this morning, since she could not come to him.

All at once Noah knew that he was not going to keep that appointment. Although he flinched at the thought of hurting Marianne, he was not going to leave the World section of the Embassy . Not now, not ever. He couldn’t account for this feeling, so strong that it seemed to infuse his entire being, like oxygen in the blood. But he had to stay here, where he belonged. Irrational, but—as Evan would have said—there it was, mustn’t grumble, at least it made a change, no use going on about it.

He had never liked Evan.

In his room, Noah took pen and a pad of paper to write a note to his mother. The words did not come easy. All his life he had disappointed her, but not like this.

Dear Mom—I know we were going to get together this afternoon but—

Dear Mom—I wish I could see you as we planned but—

Dear Mom—We need to postpone our visit because Ambassador Smith has asked me if this afternoon I would—

Noah pulled at the skin on his face, realized that was his mother’s gesture, and stopped. He looked longingly at the little cubes that held his language lessons. As the cube spoke World, holofigures in the cube acted out the meaning. After Noah repeated each phrase, it corrected his pronunciation until he got it right.

“My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” a smiling girl said in the holocube, in World. Two boys, one younger than she and one much older, appeared beside her with a much older woman behind them, all four with similar features, a shimmering dome behind them.

“‘My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,’” Noah repeated. The World tenses were tricky; these verbs were the ones for things that not only could change, but could change without the speaker’s having much say about events. A mother could die. The family could be chosen for a space colony. The older brother could marry and move in with his wife’s family.

Sometimes things were beyond your control and you had no real choice.