Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

The article was hard to read, even the little part in front called the abstract, but Sissy plowed on. A drug had been “fast-tracked” to see if anything could be done about all the crying babies and deaf babies being born. The drug didn’t help the ones with bad hearing, but it calmed down the ones who cried because their hearing was too good—could hearing be too good? Well, yes, if everything felt jackhammer loud all the time. Poor babies. Only Marianne had already told Sissy that when the babies were brought into soundproof rooms and music was played loud, they didn’t cry. Still, parts of their “auditory cortex” were too big or too deformed and nobody knew how that worked, just like nobody knew why a little while ago Marianne’s grandson Colin had just all at once stopped crying all the time. Just stopped. Also—

Well, look at this—of course the drug stopped the babies crying! It was a kind of tranquilizer! It probably stopped them doing anything, turned them into zombie babies….

“Sissy, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be reading that.” Marianne stood in the doorway to the bathroom, wiping her mouth.

“No, I’m sorry! I didn’t realize!” Sissy jumped up and then wasn’t sure what to do next.

“It’s okay.” Marianne gave her that rare, sweet smile, and wobbled on her feet.

“Come on, sweetie—let’s get you to bed. I think you have a flu.”

“I don’t have time for the flu!”

“The flu don’t give a damn,” Sissy said, and heard Mama again in her own voice, but now that was okay because Mama had had her good points along with the rest of her, and one of them was taking care of sick people. Just like Sissy was going to take care of Marianne now.

It wasn’t flu. Maybe food poisoning, because when her stomach had emptied completely, she felt a little better. Sissy left. Marianne lay in bed, slept, woke. Much later she heard Harrison open the front door, drop his coat on a chair, and turn on the living room light. “Harrison?”

“Why are you awake?” Harrison said, silhouetted in the bedroom doorway against light from the living room.

“I don’t feel well.” Marianne glanced at the bedside clock: 1:42 a.m. Almost unheard of for Harrison, who rose before roosters and retired before full starlight. “Were you celebrating?”

“A bit. Look, I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

She’d been longing for him to hold her. Still, he couldn’t afford to get ill. “All right. But first tell me more about the gene therapy on the mice.”

“I told you most of it.”

“You don’t sound very celebratory. Is anything wrong? Did something happen?”

“Things always happen,” he snapped, swaying on his feet, and now she realized what she’d missed before: He was drunk. Harrison, who could down four scotches without any external effects at all. She reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.

“What happened, Harrison?”

“All sorts of things happened tonight. Didn’t you see the news? Another superstorm is taking out most of the North and South Carolina coast. There are tornadoes in Oklahoma. Babies are being born with brain deformities. Entire ecologies are still chaotic from the domino effects of losing mice. Russia is in revolution to hardliners. The economy is in the toilet. The center cannot hold. Score one for Yeats.”

Now she was really alarmed. This wasn’t at all like Harrison, who neither prattled nor overstated. She tried to get out of bed but her stomach lurched again. Carefully she lay back on the pillow. Equally carefully, she searched for words that would not upset him further.

“Did something specific occur tonight at the lab?”

“Not the lab, no. I just had a crashing epigany… epiphany . Must get my terms straight. Terms very important. Marianne, we were wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“The Denebs. The foundation. We were dead, totally, hundred-eighty-degrees wrong.”

She was silent, searching his face for some clue, some hint about what could have happened tonight.

“Bastards,” he said, “all of them. They knew what the death of the mice would do. They knew about the fetal damage to the auditory cortex. They knew . Must have!”

“Why do you say that?” Fear had started to coil around her already unsteady stomach, a constrictor ready to squeeze.

“It’s obvious.”

“Not really. Their colony ship was wiped out so probably there were no children that their scientists could—”

“Why are you still defending them? Because your child went with them? Well, great for you. Mine is dead.”

Marianne gasped and sat up again. Her insides roiled. “Sarah? Harrison— What happened? When? How do you know?”

“How do you shink—think—I know? Paul called me, half an hour ago. Sarah killed herself.”

She tried to absorb the horror of this, and could not. She couldn’t imagine anything worse. All that she could manage was, “Darling—”

“She was darling. My darling girl. I remember—” Harrison started to sob—Harrison!—and Marianne crept out of bed and stood woozily. He was remembering Sarah as a little girl or an eager bride or a happily expectant mother, and Marianne knew how deep such memories of lost children could cut. One hand on the edge of the bed, she staggered forward to put her arms around him.

He pushed her away, but without rancor, as if she were an object he didn’t really see. “It was the baby. Isobelle wouldn’t stop crying. Paul was no help, he never was. Never liked Paul. Crying and crying and Sarah got no sleep and she was never strong and she just couldn’t take it anymore. She left a note ‘I’m sorry sorry sorry’ —over a hundred sorrys. A hundred. A hundred . If the baby had been normal… if the fucking Denebs had never come….” He cried harder.

This wasn’t Harrison. Or rather, it was, but a Harrison buried so deep that not only had Marianne never seen him before, she suspected Harrison hadn’t either. Or maybe this Harrison was newly created, fashioned from pain—there were people who never really believed that terrible things could happen to them personally, until the things did. Even people as smart as Harrison. Maybe especially people as smart as Harrison, focused on work, expecting the rest of their lives to flow smoothly around the work.

What to say? She couldn’t say that the Denebs had not caused the spore cloud. Harrison, of all people, knew that, and right now he didn’t care. “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry. Where is—”

“Where is what? Isobelle? Paul? Me? The foundation?” His anger turned on her, and Marianne recognized that it must go somewhere. It wasn’t really her that he was furious with, or even the aliens, but she was the one right here.

He said, “Isobelle is with her other grandparents. Paul is with the coroner. The foundation is shit, which you and I should have known all along. We made a mistake, Marianne. The Denebs screwed us. By not telling us everything they knew. Not warning us about everything the spores would cause. Then they bought us off with physics and starship plans that no one on Earth can make work, and even if we could it wouldn’t matter because there is an entire generation of children who are either deaf or screaming with auditory damage or about to be drugged into catatonia and so unable to inherit space travel anyway. A perfect case of genocide, Marianne, and you and I and everybody like us were just too dumb to see it.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said. The snake had tightened around her stomach and she fought to not vomit.