Asimov's Science Fiction (8 page)

A noise came from the bedroom—the woman. He went to the door, trying to decide if he should kill her as he reached for the doorknob.

Andrelline launched herself at the door. It flew open with a crash, catching the man by surprise and breaking a leg from the chair. The man screamed and a gun dropped to the floor. "Son of a bitch!" the man yelled, straightening with one hand over what was probably a broken wrist. His eyes filled with anger. "What the hell have you done?" He reached down for the gun.

Andrelline ran at him, ducking her shoulder and catching him in the gut with one corner of the chair. She felt his grunt as much as she heard it, felt it in her arms and her back and her legs. She felt leverage, lifting him, using the chair to drive him backward, away from the gun. His legs wheeled to keep himself upright as she pushed him across the floor and through the dining area to crash against a flimsy table that scudded away and slammed against the wall.

Then there was a crash of glass.

Jersey Jones felt the window give way against his back, felt his leg hit the pane as he fell into open space. Shards of glass broke light into its component parts, raining prismatic reflections on him as he fell. He saw the moon, and he saw Orion's belt.

Then he saw no more.

One of the chair's arms had loosened. Andrelline twisted until her hand came free, then found a knife in the kitchen to cut away the rest of the ropes. The man on the living room floor was out cold, maybe dead. The one in the doorway had stopped moaning. She couldn't tell if he was breathing or not, but he lay in a growing pool of crimson that made her sick to her stomach. She picked up the phone and called 9-1-1. She couldn't find her clothes and didn't remember where they might be, so while she talked to the response agent, she opened a dresser drawer and grabbed one of the man's T-shirts. It was huge on her, yet still she felt naked.

Then she was off the phone.

In the distance, police sirens echoed through the streets.

People are formed of their environments, yet, as a prime cannot be represented by others, there are those among us who weather their pain rather than wear it.

Nature or nurture? A question as old as the species.

Andrelline stood in Jersey Jones's apartment, waiting.

Across the street, Harol and the kids were sleeping. They cared for her, of course, though they didn't know who she
really
was. How could they? She hadn't known herself until a moment ago. Until this evening, she had been about getting along, creating calm, finding ways to co-exist so she could make it from day-to-day. These skills come naturally when you're a child and you live in split families who don't like each other. You cope. You manage. Sometimes you even give up parts of yourself.

Later, Andrelline would learn that the man who died in the doorway was a detective, a good man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She spoke to his daughter at the funeral. Charlane was bright and young. Andrelline would eventually decide to help with her tuition the next three years, and would on this night have been happy to know they would become friendly, that both would travel, and that they would meet up for dinner on many occasions when they found themselves in the same cities. The man on the living room floor would live, and would do time for reckless homicide and killing a police officer. The man who lay dead on the side-walk was a psychopath who needed help.

It was Jones, the psychopath of course, who actually changed her.

When she drove her shoulder and the chair this man had tied her to into his chest, when she felt her legs drive forward, fighting for her life, fighting for her connection to her children, fighting for everything she cared about, Andrelline discovered that it was not death she feared, nor was it conflict, or being alone, or even being insignificant. What she feared most was living a life defined by other people.

In that moment she became the ultimate prime, the number one.

That night, standing at the window of Jersey Jones's apartment, waiting for the police to arrive, and intensely aware of the stream of ads for boutiques, and fitness centers, and (most oddly) sanitary napkins that scrolled across her feed, Andrelline Smith vowed she would never again let the world decide what she was going to be.

Nancy Kress is the Hugo-and Nebula-winning author of thirty-one books, most recently
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall
(Tachyon Press). "The Common Good" grew out of her general bemusement at how differently Republicans and Democrats envision what might be good for the United States, which led to an even more general bemusement at how people often have completely opposite ideas of what is in the best interests of humanity. The aliens are extra. This story is a sort of sequel set seventy years after a 2008 tale called "The Kindness of Strangers."

I: Outside

The final fight between Zed and his father was about the aliens. It followed the same pattern as the other fights, those about weeding or water fetching or deer hunting, because none of the arguments were about their ostensible subject. Zed was seventeen. His parents were nearing sixty and had lived all their lives in the mountains of what had been western Massachusetts, and maybe still was. That became part of the fight.

"You don't know anything because you won't go anywhere!" Zed yelled, his strong, long legs planted apart on the worn kitchen floor. "You just stay on this fucking farm and rot!"

"Zed, please..." his mother whispered at the same moment that his father shouted, "I know enough to recognize a piss-dumb moron when I see one! Now get outside and chop that wood!"

"No," Zed said.

It was a first. His mother gaped at him, a tooth missing in the front of her mouth. His father stood, face purple with rage. When he took off his belt and advanced on Zed, Zed punched him in the stomach. He hadn't planned on it; the act sprouted all at once, an instant oak whose roots stretched and intertwined deep underground.

"Oh my dear God," his mother said. And then to Zed, "Go! Go!"

Zed, looking down at his father gasping for air on the cabin floor, didn't know if she meant go chop the wood or go to his room or go away from the farm. The uncertainty created a space for action. He raced upstairs, threw a few things into his pillowcase, grabbed his.22, and flew back down the stairwell. His father sat doubled-over on a chair, his mother fluttering around him. When Zed yanked open the kitchen door, the lantern on the table flickered in the sudden draft.

A lantern. Chopping wood. Chickens squawking in their pen. Zed slammed the butt of his rifle against the wire. His parents lived—which meant
Zed
had to live— his entire pathetic life on this hardscrabble farm, in fear that "it" might happen again. Neither one would so much as say aloud the words "June thirtieth." And they lived like it was 1870, not 2070. His father had even taught himself to pour his own bullets for the antique rif le he didn't even need. You could buy bullets down in Carlsville. If his father had had his way, Zed wouldn't have even gone to Carlsville Elementary or known that anything else existed! For that alone, the old man deserved that punch.

Zed couldn't go back. Not after that. He was free.

Only—

He stood at the head of the trail, gnawing at his fingernails, pillowcase at his feet. Around him the sweet-smelling June dusk gathered in deep folds. The western sky faded from pink to silver and the first stars came out, Altair and Deneb and Vega. In an hour or so the full moon would rise. Zed had never gone the full ten miles to the village in the dark, but after the first few miles there would be the road, cracked and impassable to vehicles but a clear marker. He could do it. He could also live almost indefinitely in the woods, but he'd had more than enough of that. No, he would go to the only place he could go—Jonathan's. They would take him in.

Wouldn't they?

A sound came to him, faint on the twilight. It might have been his mother, calling his name in her thin, ineffectual voice.

He slung his pillowcase, made of cheap flowered cotton in what used to be China, over his shoulder and started down the mountain.

Electric lights. Music. A summer dance. Figures swaying on the empty parking lot beside the courthouse. All the things Zed had been denied his whole life. He stood, sweaty and resentful and shy, in the shadow of trees and watched the dancers even though he knew that Jonathan wouldn't be among them, not in a million years. The parking lot was newly paved since Zed had last attended school, just before spring planting started. They must have gotten the asphalt factory on-line again.

Not that Zed had ever experienced being "on-line." The village had a few working computers, but he had never used one. Jonathan had. Jonathan's family
owned
one.

What was he going to do if they wouldn't take him in? They had to. Synergy, right?

He made his way past the dark school, past the trading market and the scrip stores, the truck depot with its precious store of parts, the armory. There, he paused to put two fingers into bullet holes from the '15 attacks on Carlsville. The old brick felt soft on his bitten nails. It was so long ago.

Jonathan's house stood large at the far end of town, shaded by two huge maples, gleaming with fresh paint. Lights shone both downstairs and in an upstairs room that Zed hoped was Jonathan's. The window stood open. Zed stood under it and called softly, "Jonathan! Jonathan! It's me, Zed Larch!"

Jonathan's head, silhouetted, stuck itself out the window at the same moment that the front door opened and a woman's voice said sharply, "Who's there? Do you need the doctor?"

"No, ma'am!" Zed hated that his voice shook. These people might be rich and educated and all, but Jonathan was his friend and anyway they were no better than he was. Except—he didn't believe it. None of it. He almost turned to flee back into the darkness.

"Hey," Jonathan said, "Zed. Well. Come in, I guess."

"So I wondered if I can stay here a while, working of course, I'm a hard worker and I can farm and chop wood and..." He trailed off, miserable. The Bellinghams didn't farm. They didn't need wood chopped; they had an an electric stove—there it sat, right in front of the kitchen table around which the four of them sat, Dr. Bellingham and his wife and Jonathan, who didn't look as welcoming as Zed had hoped.

They only knew each other from school. Zack was in a much lower classroom since he'd only started school at age eleven when the sheriff had discovered Zed existed, hiked up the mountain, and threatened Zed's father with jail for child neglect. Boys in Jonathan's class picked on him, skinny and short and too smart and too rich. Zed had thrashed a few of them, and so he and Jonathan had taken to eating lunch together, and sometimes Zed had walked Jonathan safely home. It wasn't much of a friendship, but Zed didn't know that. Jonathan did.

Mrs. Bellingham said, "Your parents will miss you."

"No, ma'am, they won't." How could she be a mother? Zed's mother, who seldom spoke and who grew thinner and grayer and more faded every year, was nothing like Mrs. Bellingham. Dark-haired, with skin smooth as cream, she didn't look much older than Jonathan. Zed's parents, cautious and solitary and taciturn, had not married until they were both forty, and Zed had been a late and, he'd always thought, unpleasant surprise.

Jonathan said sarcastically, "They'll miss Zed? Because any mother would miss a child who stayed away overnight? Is that what you mean, Mom?"

Mrs. Bellingham glanced over at him, then down. Zed perceived complex emotions he didn't understand.

Dr. Bellingham spoke for the first time. Almost as big as Zed, imposing even sitting down, his words seemed to descend from the sky. "Of course the boy can stay here for a while. Synergy, Beth. It's all we have, really—the common good."

It seemed to Zed they had a lot more than that. Many of the things he gazed at were old: the wooden kitchen table, the rug he had glimpsed through an archway leading to the living room, maybe the pictures on the walls in their heavy gold-colored frames. But that stove looked new, which meant somebody somewhere was making stoves again, and a cup of coffee sat on the table in front of him. Zed had taken only one sip and he didn't like it, but he knew what coffee was and he knew it had come from a long way away, from some hot country. In school they'd sung a song every morning: "The world reborn/in our own hands/syner-gee-ey never torn."

Not my hands,
he thought, and again resentment against his father rose up in him like vomit.

He said to Dr. Bellingham, "Thank you, sir. I'll do anything you ask!"

"We'll need to find you a job in the village. No shortage of those. You can get work on road repair if nothing else. But what are your long-term plans, son?"

He had no long-term plans. Zed stared miserably at the doctor, this sophisticated man who had a profession, a house, a grasp of what the world was like now. All Zed had was life on a shit-poor farm, the little he'd learned at on-again-off-again school attendance, and his father's rants about June 30th, repeated over and over and over. The only long-term plan you could make out of those things was the life Zed had just left.

Jonathan said, "I'm going off to college in the fall, you know, Zed. I won't be here."

"Yes. You told me. Dartmouth College." Hanover had been just barely small enough to escape June 30th. Zed couldn't imagine it.

"Jonathan will be an engineer," his mother said, with pride. "There is nothing we need more."

"Well, a doctor isn't such a bad thing to be, Ava," the doctor said, and his smile glittered dangerously.

"Probably," Jonathan said in a lazy drawl, "it was a better thing to be when there were real hospitals and real medical research."

Zed looked from one to the other, confused. He knew there was anger here, and resentment, but he didn't understand why. Didn't these people have everything?

"In fifty-six years," the doctor said, his eyes stinging as hail, "we have regained nearly all of medicine lost on June 30th. Now we can again go forward into the kind of research that—"