Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (21 page)

My eyes flicked to my wrist sensor. It bounced from fifty-eight to three hundred and fifteen eks, radiation dribbling like a basketball. Short-term exposure would be acceptable.

"Doan sweat it. That's why so many grainships spend their time out with the gas giants. The rays are kinder out there. Laze, lady, you ain't getting a lethal dose on my ship."

Suddenly, my kits weighed a ton.

We exited through number five ventral hatch into my home maze—Little Naples. When the first refugees were loaded aboard the
#286,
a group of Eye-ties had occupied the hold. The farmers had nothing to do with Naples other than it was the closest major city anyone had heard of, so we tagged the maze with that name. Nice folks. Lucky folks. Lombardy Polis in Venus orbit took them all as an act of national solidarity.

I missed the perfume of their cooking.

Our sleeping boxes were stacked three high. The maze was created by arranging the stacks so you weren't in anyone's face. My view was the back of row six. Some joker had painted a seascape on the plastisteel shells of the boxes. The paint was chipping and blistering. Having never brought a guest home, I hadn't noticed how crappy it looked.

"These coffins are bigger than they look."

"I've slept in worse. It reminds one of the Hotel Botts on Taylor. I attended the university there."

I opened my door. My three cubic meters of personal space seemed to have shrunk since the morning.

Thin lips curled, nostrils flared. "How... cozy."

Crawling onto my bed, I rummaged through my carton of all-important etceteras until I found the old data crystal. It'd taken weeks of selective magnetic abuse to condition it to flake its data. From there I'd inserted fake files, replete with gaps and scrambles. I was proud of the job. To utility software, it resembled a defective record of repair on our primary stabilizer and a Haf ' replaced under TCRA reimbursement as per Article 175b of the Refugee Accord. I had even inputted fragments of a real signature, thumbprint, and its countersigned Deimos seal.

Perhaps I should take up forgery as a hobby.

I presented the crystal to her. She slipped it into her belt's drive and stared through me. A frown grew. What if it caused her internal computer to crash? What would that do to her?

My skin crawled.

"This is useless." Her belt device ejected the crystal onto the floor. "Martians make the worst memory crystals in the galaxy. There are molecules of iron polluting this matrix."

"It's the only hard evidence we have other than the ship's log. Not that it would prove anything. We could enter any nonsense." I faked a long coughing fit.

"You have a doctor aboard?"

"Well, Doc ain't a real doc, but she played one on TV after dropping out of med school. And she's a wonderful method actor. Took out my bad kidney." I parted my jumper to show her a scar running from my chest to my pelvis. "Her knife slipped a little."

I throttled the urge to try to sell her those bogus stock certificates I kept under my futon.

He didn't know when to quit.

Just when I began liking him, he
had
to insult my intelligence again. I'd been of half a mind to contribute my shuttle's emergency rations to the losers, then he played me for a moron.

He kept on my heels as I marched to my shuttle. His running commentary ranged from unctuous to annoying. The more he babbled, the faster I walked. When Handy tried to enter the airlock I pushed him out. Perhaps my elbow smacked harder than I intended.

A long shower restored me. Then I sprayed GermX over myself. After swallowing antibiotics, another shower felt wise.

I typed and edited my report, erased and revised for hours. At last, the screen brimmed with promise. Sorensen had presented me with a perfect excuse. The cutter
Jennings
would be riding inside a cone of electronic countermeasures behind the smuggler. There was no way for me to go through normal channels.

It took the shuttle's anemic computer the better part of an hour to lock onto Donahue Polis, this year's customs HQ. I informed Director LeGros that I had evidence that the Martians had attempted to murder a grainship with a sabotaged Haf'tsk.

The report was followed by a broadcast from that flawed memory crystal.

Sorensen couldn't steal my credit.

I'd just presented our team with the proverbial blunt instrument with which to bludgeon the Martians at the next meeting of the Trade Commission. Of course, their Deimos lackeys would "disprove" the faked evidence with faked evidence of their own.

I could chill the cold war a few more degrees. And secure a promotion. Might even re-up for a Master's berth after I nailed the exam.

If the grainers' fraud was revealed, no one would blame me. I was an innocent dupe, reporting the facts as presented to me. Besides, the government wouldn't allow fraudulent evidence to spoil this propaganda coup.

I might even contribute to the Grainer Relief Fund... next year.

The bridge was empty. Halfway between Earth and Mars there wasn't much risk of collision that the masterputer couldn't handle. I wended to the deck below to check the civic office complex. Mayor Keenan was asleep, his head rested on his icon of power—a wooden desk, plywood salvaged from a packing crate.

Captain Morris ghosted into the room, clad in a linen kaftan. Her gaunt face had grown an extra line or three.

"Have you finished your thieving?" Each word came with a pause.

Mayor Keenan added his snore.

"As soon as our guest takes off, I'll swap the transponder and remove the number panels from our hull. Grainship
#88
becomes the
#286
again within an hour. Have you studied our course changes? With a little luck, we'll slingshot Earth and be orbiting Venus ere they tumble onto the con. No way will they be able to track us."

"Handy, getting away with this is not the point. Why did we—"

"The crime is mine, and my karma has wide shoulders."

"You aren't a you, I'm not a me, we are all grainers, we are all the
#286.
My grandparents would have nothing to do with my family because my father stole from them. Humanity is our family. I can't blame them for shunning us because you're a thief."

I didn't have the patience to explain the barter deals I had on the burner. Once we reached Venus orbit, we would find the
#731
and swap our new Haf'tsk for a tug with dubious provenience papers and two hundred rabbits. A quick stop at the TCRA Station for resupply and we'd cruise to Ceres Habitat. There, the Harrison-Ziu Mining Co-op would purchase the tug, no questions asked, then berth us on the company station for a refitting of our engines. By the time we reached Saturn orbit, I expected to have six hundred rabbits to sell to the meat-starved Outers.

However reluctant I was, her glower demanded an answer from me. My eyes dribbled. I needed to see Doc. "The only need I see is—"

"Greed," interjected the captain.

"The only need I see is us earning enough hard currency for a third-class sickbay to replace our fifth-rate one. Lookit, we have nine kids that'll be college age soon. They ain't gonna get scholarships. They need. C'mon, Cap, lighten up. There are 21,104 souls on this ship and not a prospect in sight."

"You've reduced us to our own worst enemy. The outsiders hate us because we deserve to be hated," replied Morris.

"They hate us because they hate. They're guilty about how they've treated us."

"Your actions deserve hate."

For a moment a hundred snide replies came to mind. I couldn't help but envy her moral compass. Couldn't help but think how critical it was to have our engines rebuilt. "Yeah, but our people deserve more."

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty books and over a hundred short stories, many of which have appeared in
Asimov's.
Her most recent work includes a novella "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall," which just won the Nebula and is currently nominated for the Hugo. Ideas for her latest tale first surfaced when she learned about Frog Watch two years ago. "I have wanted to write about it ever since. All the facts about amphibian die-offs and deformities in the story are, alas, true. I would become a volunteer except that my neighborhood in urban Seattle has no frogs. About aliens I'm not so sure...."

There are two kinds of crazy: the funny kind and the terrible kind. The funny kind is what my high school English teacher, who was a Brit, called "eccentric." The terrible kind is what I was the first weeks after Jason was killed in the line of duty. Maybe I still am. Certainly my sister thinks so.

"Megs, you can't live out there all by yourself," Hannah says on the phone. "It's creepy."

It is creepy, the house I found to rent on the edge of the Marshall G. Portwell III Wetlands Preserve, which despite its fancy name is your basic swamp: mosquitoes, mud, frogs, snakes, marsh gas. Creepy, but also isolated, and that's what I want right now. Isolation. People are too hard to bear.
How are you doing dear we were so sorry to hear he was such a brave hero if I can do anything for you, anything at all...

They don't want to hear how I'm really doing because somebody else's loss inevitably reminds them of their own to come someday. They were sorry to hear, but within fifteen minutes are back to their own lives. Jason never considered his police work heroic: "It's my goddamn job, don't romanticize it." And the only thing I want anybody to do for me is to bring him back.

Hannah says, "Sweetie, it's only been three months—not long enough for you to be so alone."

She doesn't mean the three months since that punk shot Jason during a convenience-store robbery. She means the three months since my "incident." Since I discovered why all those ancient Biblical women used to tear out their own hair, and then their own lives. But alone is what I want to be.

"I need to be here, Hannah."

"You don't even have cell service or Internet!"

This is true. I am on my Saturday trip to town, standing with my cell outside a drugstore ten miles from my cabin, where I've just bought snack food I will not eat and paraphernalia I will use tonight. The Georgia sun pours down like thick boiling oil. The tee clings to my sweat.

I say, "I have neighbors, Hanny. There are other cabins at the edge of the swamp." Not exactly true, since the swamp is smelly and hot and buggy beyond belief, but there
is
one other cabin. At night I can see its lights through the trees dripping Spanish moss.

"So you visit neighbors?"

"Not yet." "Megs, are you eating?"

"Yes," I lie. In three months I've lost almost thirty pounds. I look like a bundle of dry sticks walking, which is how I feel. I'm always cold.

"Promise me you'll call on one neighbor today. Just one. So there's somebody to check on you if... just if."

Promising is easier than arguing. "Okay." Maybe this will mollify Hannah.

It doesn't. All at once she wails, "But what will you
do
with yourself out there?" And even though I want desperately to hang up and go back to swampy silence, I answer because Hannah is the one person who does really care about my loss and the breakdown that followed it. Who took me to the psychiatric facility after I tried to off myself, who visited every day, who drove me home when the insurance ran out. Who would really warp her life to help me if I were selfish enough to let her leave her own family and fly a thousand miles to be with me longer than she already was. Who misses Jason—no, not as much as I do, that isn't possible—but sincerely and deeply.

So I say, "I'm doing FrogWatch."

And then, lamely, "It's important."

The frog and toad population of the world started to drop over thirty years ago, in the 1980s. Among the first casualties was the Golden Toad of Costa Rica, which abruptly and completely disappeared from an isolated and pristine habitat in 1989. Just gone, the entire species. The last living Rabb's treefrog is caged in Atlanta. The current extinction rate for amphibians is 211 times the extinction rate of everything else, and if you count endangered species, it's forty thousand times the background rate.

Some of this is due to pollution. Some is due to real-estate development reducing or destroying amphibians' habitats. But frogs are disappearing from habitats that aren't touched by pollution or development, and frogs are developing weird diseases that scientists can't account for. The ones that don't die are turning up with many deformities or turning out too many female tadpoles—like, 80 percent female. Nobody knows why.

People don't think cops, especially Georgia cops, have any interests outside of crime, football, beer, and gun dogs. Jason hunted, sure—I have both his.410 shotgun and his.22 in my cabin with me now—but he also liked Wes Anderson movies, jazz, and frogs. He did FrogWatch for three years before he died, even though there weren't many frogs near our suburban tract, and so I do it now, where there are huge numbers of frogs. Every night for three minutes, a half hour after sunset and again at 10:00 P.M., I sit on the back porch and record on a data sheet all the frog calls I hear from my assigned species, five of them. Bugs hurl themselves against the screen door, which is as worn and soft as cloth. Moths circle the porch light. I listen and record.

The Southern Cricket Frog: a double or triple chit-chit-chit, like quick clicks of a remote. The American Bullfrog: a slow, deep ribbit. The Bird-voiced Tree Frog: really shrill, like an agitated small bird. The Pig Frog: a truly weird grunt. And my hardest to count: the Upland Chorus Frog, whose medium-high, sustained trills blend together in, well, a chorus. Every week I drive to town and mail my data sheet to FrogWatch USA.

On Saturday night I record all five frogs. The sun has set, but it is still very hot, and my shorts and top cling to me as I put my clipboard inside, drag a brush through my neglected hair, and spray myself with bug repellant. Then I set out to my neighbor's cabin. I owe Hannah this much. I owe Hannah my life, and I try not to think how little I wanted that gift after Jason died.