Нэнси Кресс - The End Has Come

We cannot, however, talk to them. They understand us, but their speech is pitched too high for human ears. All that we have learned from them has been by demonstration, gesture, pantomime. It is enough; it is more than enough.

Jenna kisses Dant23’s cheek and says, “Good morning! How are the children?”

Dant23 nods and waves a tentacle. After more ritual greetings, we get down to work. I look at the new plant samples in the greenhouse.

Overnight, they’ve all died.

We choose our destinations carefully. Never small villages, although most of the planet now lives in small villages. And of course not the cities, unlivable and abandoned. We pick large settlements: harder to attack, but that’s where the targets are.

Usually.

Jenna stares at the dead soybeans; this was her experiment. But I know she won’t cry. Unlike Zane and Sarah, my other two apprentices, Jenna can summon a sort of steeliness that sometimes worries me. Once, when she was small, I actually saw her hit another child in a dispute over a toy. Hit him! He froze immediately, of course, in normal Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia — but she did not. Even now, the memory makes me shudder.

Genes are strange things. Even with the inhibiting compounds now tightly woven into our DNA from the Dants’ Blessing, we are individuals.

Jenna says, “I’ll start the plant analyses.”

Zane, who has come into the lab, says, “I’ll help.”

She smiles at him. He smiles back. They make a plan to divide the work and I turn to my own experiments, which are not doing much better than Jenna’s. The wheat plants look normal, but CO 2levels have changed their physiology, and they contain thirty percent less iron and twenty-two percent less zinc than preserved samples from forty years ago.

At least, I think those are the percentages. I nurse along my decades-old absorption spectrophotometer. So much sophisticated equipment on Earth is either falling apart or newly manufactured in ways that do — that must — protect the environment and the living things within it. The trade-off is worth it. Doing no harm comes first. Mutuality comes first. I don’t understand how pre-Blessing humans tolerated their world. Manufacturing chemicals leaching into the soil and water, people sickened and dying by the greed of others, whole landscapes destroyed by dangerous mining practices, toxic work environments . . . .

I breathe deeply, before I get overwhelmed.

But, still, our equipment is inadequate. I remember computers; there were still a few around when I was a boy, running on cannibalized parts. We could not do now what Ian McGill did fifty years ago: describe the genetic changes that confer the Blessing. There are no gene sequencers left. Nor can we communicate the results of our scientific work to each other as easily as could McGill. But I have seen the great pile of shameful trash outside Buffalo, before the whole area was proscribed: dead computers, gasoline-powered cars, airplane fuselages, frivolous electronics, all costing innocent lives and destroying the Earth. Never again.

Jenna finishes her tests and scowls. “This batch of soy shows more zinc and iron, but the plants couldn’t live with the CO 2level. And the batches that can live with it are still starving us of key nutrients!”

“We’ll cross-breed again,” Zane says.

“It never does any good!” Jenna’s scowl deepens. “Without enough zinc and iron . . .”

She doesn’t finish; she doesn’t have to. Nearly everyone is already suffering the symptoms of reduced micronutrients: anemia, weakened immune systems, and reduced hormone production.

Jenna hurls the tray of useless plants to the greenhouse floor. Zane shudders.

We come together after dark, to plan. The village in the valley is not large, but it is important for its size. There is a scientific facility, a small soap manufactury, and a textile mill, all powered by the turbine set into the swift river. Cottages, each with its neat garden. Their windows glow with electric light, but it is torches that illuminate the meadow near the river, where the music comes from. “A dance,” Carl says half scornfully, half wistfully.

I train the night-vision goggles on the festivities. The villages are always celebrating something or other. Fools.

“Two of them,” I say. “Watching the dancing. I’ll do recon. You get into position.”

I watch Jenna dance with Zane, scrutinizing them with a father’s eye. His face in the torchlight glows with love. Hers does not. Well, Zane will get over it. Puppy love isn’t fatal; desire, even less so. Not that Zane’s body — dancing inches away from Jenna, his hand barely touching her waist — expresses much desire. Pre-Blessing people apparently tore themselves apart over sex, which makes no sense. It’s just a mild pleasure, like a lovely sunset or a good cup of coffee, and of course it’s necessary to produce the next generation. I can’t remember the last time I had sex. If the scientific literature is right and the Blessing also created changes in human hormone production, then that’s another reason to thank the Dant. We are spared rape, adultery, population overgrowth, and the kinds of violence to Mutuality that I read about in incomprehensible books stored in my grandmother’s attic: Anna Karenina, Lolita, Romeo and Juliet.

“Larry, do you want to dance?”

Rachel Notting. She’s a good dancer. I smile, get to my feet, and move into the circle of dancers — just as a beam of blue light slices down from the sky and explodes beyond the hill.

People scream. A few, the most sensitive, freeze into Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia. Kyra Hanreddy, our mayor this cycle, cries, “Everyone to the community hall! Mutuality!”

People move toward the hall, no one faster than the slowest. Jenna pushes Mr. Caruthers’s wheelchair. I help Rachel with her twins. The frozen are soothingly coaxed into normal heartbeats and led forward. Katherine Pacer, an extreme sensitive, is carried stiff as a plank by two men. The Dant have disappeared.

I have seen this before, in another village. Jenna has not. As I walk beside her, carrying a twin sweating and gasping with EIFB, she gasps, “What is it?”

“Alien protection. Probably bears.”

She nods, reassured. Dant23 and Dant16 have warned us before when bears, who somehow were made more aggressive by the Blessing, are in the area. A Dant ship in orbit chases the bears away. I suspect that the ships actually kill the animals, but I don’t want to think about fried and smoking bears.

In the Hall, the Council closes the shutters. Everyone listens for a while, but there is nothing to hear. Eventually the musicians begin again on fiddle and guitar, and the dancing resumes inside. Katherine Pacer unfreezes, watching with dazed eyes, friends hovering over her. Three songs later, Dant23 and Dant16 knock on the door and are admitted. No one asks them anything. We wouldn’t understand the answers anyway.

The bastards got them all. There isn’t even anything left to bury. Damn them, damn them to an alien hell in agony and tears.

The supplies and weapons were with the cadre. Hannah’s group is only forty miles northwest; I can join them. But all at once I know that I won’t.

Hidden under a brush fall, I spend the night silently chanting the farewell song for my dead.

Carl, sixteen years old.

Kaylie, the best shot I ever saw.

Jerome, who ran away from his village at eleven and somehow survived alone until we found him.