The Best of Nancy Kress (59 page)

He blathered on about MRI results.

“Allen—please tell me what you meant!”

But he couldn’t. And now I would never know.

I called the front desk of the research building. I called 911. Then I called Karen, needing to hear her voice, needing to connect with her. But she didn’t answer her cell, and the office said she’d left her desk to go home early.

Both Allen and Lucy were hospitalized briefly, then released. I never heard the diagnosis, although I suspect it involved an “inability to perceive and relate to social interactions” or some such psychobabble. Doesn’t play well with others. Runs with scissors. Lucy and Allen demonstrated they could physically care for themselves by doing it, so the hospital let them go. Business professionals, I hear, mind their money for them, order their physical lives. Allen has just published another brilliant paper, and Lucy Hartwick is the first female World Chess Champion.

Karen said, “They’re happy, in their own way. If their single-minded focus on their passions makes them oblivious to anything else—well, so what. Maybe that’s the price for genius.”

“Maybe,” I said, glad that she was talking to me at all. There hadn’t been much conversation lately. Karen had refused any more marriage counseling and had turned silent, escaping me by working in the garden. Our roses are the envy of the neighborhood. We have Tuscan Sun, Ruffled Cloud, Mister Lincoln, Crown Princess, Golden Zest. English roses, hybrid teas, floribunda, groundcover roses, climbers, shrubs. They glow scarlet, pink, antique apricot, deep gold, delicate coral. Their combined scent nauseates me.

I remember the exact moment that happened. We were in the garden, Karen kneeling beside a flower bed, a wide hat shading her face from the sun so that I couldn’t see her eyes.

“Karen,” I said, trying to mask my desperation, “Do you still love me?”

“Hand me that trowel, will you, Jeff?”

“Karen! Please! Can we talk about what’s happening to us?”

“The Tahitian Sunsets are going to be glorious this year.”

I stared at her, at the beads of sweat on her upper lip, the graceful arc of her neck, her happy smile.

Karen clearing away Allen’s dinner dishes, picking up his sloppily dropped food. Lucy with two fingers in her mouth, studying her chessboard and then touching the pieces.

No. Not possible.

Karen reached for the trowel herself, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

Lucy Hartwick lost her championship to a Russian named Dmitri Chertov. A geneticist at Stanford made a breakthrough in cancer research so important that it grabbed all headlines for nearly a week. By a coincidence that amused the media, his young daughter won the Scripps Spelling Bee. I looked up the geneticist on the Internet; a year ago he’d attended a scientific conference with Allen. A woman in Oregon, some New Age type, developed the ability to completely control her brain waves through profound meditation. Her husband is a chess grandmaster.

I walk a lot now, when I’m not cleaning or cooking or shopping. Karen quit her job; she barely leaves the garden even to sleep. I kept my job, although I take fewer clients. As I walk, I think about the ones I do have, mulling over various houses they might like. I watch the August trees begin to tinge with early yellow, ponder overheard snatches of conversation, talk to dogs. My walks get longer and longer, and I notice that I’ve started to time my speed, to become interested in running shoes, to investigate transcontinental walking routes.

But I try not to think about walking too much. I observe children at frenetic play during the last of their summer vacation, recall movies I once liked, wonder at the intricacies of quantum physics, anticipate what I’ll cook for lunch. Sometimes I sing. I recite the few snatches of poetry I learned as a child, relive great football games, chat with old ladies on their porches, add up how many calories I had for breakfast. Sometimes I even mentally rehearse basic chess openings: the Vienna Game or the Petroff Defense. I let whatever thoughts come that will, accepting them all.

Listening to the static, because I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.

Afterword to “End Game”

I play chess. I play it a lot (the word “compulsively” has been used). And I do not play well.

Chess has a distinctly dark side. Twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp stopped creating art after he discovered chess, in his thirties. He didn’t play the game at top ranks even after years of study, but he became obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else, describing himself to a friend as “still a victim of chess.” Ordinarily we admire single-minded drive: it’s what leads scientists to try experiment after experiment until they find verifiable hypotheses. It enables entrepreneurs to work insane hours to launch new companies. It pushes athletes and dancers to endless practice.

But can you be too single-minded? When this idea occurred to me, the entire story fell into place almost instantly. It wasn’t quite as easy to write as “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (for one thing, it’s much longer), but it wasn’t hard, either. The story is one of the few horror stories I ever wrote. Because it
is
a horror story—as can be too much of any good thing.

Maybe even writing.

Fermi’s Paradox, California, 1950: Since planet formation appears to be common, and since the processes that lead to the development of life are a continuation of those that develop planets, and since the development of life leads to intelligence and intelligence to technology—then why hasn’t a single alien civilization contacted Earth?

Where is everybody
?

They had agreed, laughing, on a form for the millennium contact, what Micah called “human standard,” although Kabil had insisted on keeping hirs konfol and Deb had not dissolved hirs crest, which waved three inches above hirs and hummed. But, then, Deb! Ling had designed floating baktors for the entire ship, red and yellow mostly, that combined and recombined in kaleidoscopic loveliness only Ling could have programmed. The viewport was set to magnify, the air mixture just slightly intoxicating, the tinglies carefully balanced by Cal, that master. Ling had wanted “natural” sleep cycles, but Cal’s argument had been more persuasive, and the tinglies massaged the limbic so pleasantly. Even the child had some. It was a party.

The ship slipped into orbit around the planet, a massive subJovian far from its sun, streaked with muted color. “Lovely,” breathed Deb, who lived for beauty.

Cal, the biologist, was more practical: “I ran the equations; by now there should be around 200,000 of them in the rift, if the replication rate stayed constant.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” said Ling, the challenger, and the others laughed. The tinglies really were a good idea.

The child, Harrah, pressed hirs face to the window. “When can we land?”

The adults smiled at each other. They were so proud of Harrah, and so careful. Hirs was the first gene-donate for all of them except Micah, and probably the only one for the rest except Cal, who was a certified intellect donor. Kabil knelt beside Harrah, bringing hirs face to the child’s height.

“Little love, we can’t land. Not here. We must see the creations in holo.”

“Oh,” Harrah said, with the universal acceptance of childhood. It had not changed in five thousand years, Ling was fond of remarking, that child idea that whatever it lived was the norm. But, then…
Ling
.

“Access the data,” Cal said, and Harrah obeyed, reciting it aloud as hirs parents had all taught hirs. Ling smiled to see that Harrah still closed hirs eyes to access, but opened them to recite.

“The creations were dropped on this planet 273 E-years ago. They were the one-hundred-fortieth drop in the Great Holy Mission that gives us our life. The creations were left in a closed-system rift…what does that mean?”

“The air in the creations’ valley doesn’t get out to the rest of the planet, because the valley is so deep and the gravity so great. They have their own air.”

“Oh. The creations are cyborged replicators, programmed for self-awareness. They are also programmed to expect human contact at the millennium. They…”

“Enough,” said Kabil, still kneeling beside Harrah. Hirs stroked hirs hair, black today. “The important thing, Harrah, is that you remember that these creations are beings, different from us but with the same life force, the only life force. They must be respected, just as people are, even if they look odd to you.”

“Or if they don’t know as much as you,” said Cal. “They won’t, you know.”

“I know,” Harrah said. They had made hirs an accommodater, with strong genes for bonding. They already had Ling for challenge. Harrah added, “Praise Fermi and Kwang and Arlbeni for the emptiness of the universe.”

Ling frowned. Hirs had opposed teaching Harrah the simpler, older folklore of the Great Mission. Ling would have preferred that the child receive only truth, not religion. But Deb had insisted. Feed the imagination first, hirs had said, and later Harrah can separate science from prophecy. But the tinglies felt sweet, and the air mixture was set for a party, and hirs own baktors floated in such graceful pattern that Ling, not even Ling, could quarrel.

“I wonder,” Deb said dreamily, “what they have learned in 273 years.”

“When will they holo?” Harrah said. “Are we there yet?”

Kwang’s Resolution, Bohr Station, 2552: Since the development of the Quantum Transport, humanity has visited nearly a thousand planets in our galaxy and surveyed many more. Not one of them has developed any life of any kind, no matter how simple. Not one.

No aliens have contacted Earth because there is nobody else out there
.

Harrah laughed in delight. Hirs long black hair swung through a drift of yellow baktors. “The creations look like oysters!”

The holocube showed uneven rocky ground through thick, murky air. A short distance away rose the abrupt, steep walls of the rift, thousands of feet high. Attached to the ground by thin, flexible, mineral-conducting tubes were hundreds of uniform, metal-alloy double shells. The shells held self-replicating nanomachinery, including the rudimentary AI, and living eukaryotes sealed into selectively permeable membranes. The machinery ran on the feeble sunlight and on energy produced by anaerobic bacteria, carefully engineered for the thick atmospheric stew of methane, hydrogen, helium, ammonia, and carbon dioxide.

The child knew none of this. Hirs saw the “oysters” jumping up in time on their filaments, jumping and falling, flapping their shells open and closed, twisting and flapping and bobbing. Dancing.

Kabil laughed, too. “Nowhere in the original programming! They learned it!”

“But what could the stimulus have been?” Ling said. “How lovely to find out!”

“Sssshhh, we’re going to transmit,” Micah said. Hirs eyes glowed. Micah was the oldest of them all; hirs had been on the original drop. “Seeding 140, are you there?”

“We are here! We are Seeding 140! Welcome, our mother!”

Harrah jabbed hirs finger at the holocube. “We’re not your mother!”

Instantly Deb closed the transmission. Micah said harshly, “Harrah! Your manners!”

The child looked scared. Deb said, “Harrah, we talked about this. The creations are not like us, but their ideas are as true as ours, on their own world. Don’t laugh at them.”

From Kabil, “Don’t you remember, Harrah? Access the learning session!”

“I…remember,” Harrah faltered.

“Then show some respect!” Micah said. “This is the Great Mission!”

Harrah’s eyes teared. Kabil, the tender-hearted, put hirs hand on Harrah’s shoulder. “Small heart, the Great Mission gives meaning to our lives.”

“I..know…”

Micah said, “You don’t want to be like those people who just use up all their centuries in mere pleasure, with no structure to their wanderings across the galaxy, no purpose beyond seeing what the nanos can produce that they haven’t produced before, no difference between today and tomorrow, no—”

“That’s sufficient,” Ling says. “Harrah understands, and regrets. Don’t give an Arlbeni Day speech, Micah.”

Micah said stiffly, “It matters, Ling.”

“Of course it matters. But so do the creations, and they’re waiting. Deb, open the transmission again…. Seeding 140, thank you for your welcome! We return!”

Arlbeni’s Vision, Planet Cadrys, 2678: We have been fools.

Humanity is in despair. Nano has given us everything, and nothing. Endless pleasures empty of effort, endless tomorrows empty of purpose, endless experiences empty of meaning. From evolution to sentience, sentience to nano, nano to the decay of sentience.

But the fault is ours. We have overlooked the greatest gift ever given humanity: the illogical emptiness of the universe. It is against evolution, it is against known physical processes. Therefore, how can it exist? And why?

It can exist only by the intent of something greater than the physical processes of the universe. A conscious Intent. The reason can only be to give humanity, the universe’s sole inheritor, knowledge of this Intent. The emptiness of the universe—anomalous, unexplainable, impossible—has been left for us to discover, as the only convincing proof of God.