Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (2 page)

OUTMODED THINGS
by Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress
began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to
Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, SCI FICTION,
and elsewhere. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story,
Beggars in Spain,
and a sequel,
Beggars and Choosers,
as well as
The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, The Flowers of Aulit Prison, Crucible, Dogs,
and the
Space Opera
trilogy
Probability Moon, Probability Sun,
and
Probability Space.
Her short work has been collected in
Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, Beaker’s Dozen,
and
Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories.
Her most recent book is the YA novel,
Flash Point.
In addition to the awards for
Beggars in Spain
, she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories
“Out Of All Them Bright Stars,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” and “Fountain of Age,” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2003 for her novel
Probability Space,
and another Hugo in 2009 for “The Erdmann Nexus.” She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead.

Here she takes us back to the frontier planet Roland, the setting for one of Poul Anderson’s most famous stories, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” to examine the question of what happens to changelings stolen by the “fairies” when they return to human society. And are faced with a difficult choice of worlds.

“People had moved starward in the hopes of preserving such outmoded things as their mother tongues or constitutional government or rational-technological civilization.”

—Poul Anderson, “The Queen of Air and Darkness”

It was difficult to hear over the barking. All the dogs—and there were so
many
dogs—seemed to have started howling all at once. The patient turned her head toward the window, which Luke had opaqued before the session began. He leaned toward the girl.

“Anne?”

“Something’s happening.”

“Those dogs bark all the time.” He hadn’t yet told anyone how much he disliked dogs; a therapist was not supposed to have such silly weaknesses. And here at Christmas Landing, the animals were necessary. Maybe. Luke preferred to put his faith in the mind-shields.

“That barking is different.” She rose, a pale, doughy, difficult girl that he was coming to like very much, even though she took time away from what was supposed to be his main duty here. “I want to go see.”

The session was almost over. Luke said, “I’ll come with you,” and stood. For a moment, dizziness took him and he put a hand on the edge of the ugly, utilitarian table to steady himself, but Anne didn’t notice. That alone was a measure of her distraction; this was a girl who usually noticed everything, reacted intensely to everything, embroidered everything with the colors of her own over-romantic soul, all beneath a stolid exterior that misled nearly everyone about who she actually was.

Anyway, very few sixteen-year-olds would notice the symptoms of an old man’s hidden disease.

Anne moved lightly to the door—for such a big girl, she could move with surprising grace—and pulled it open. Luke followed her through the corridor, as ugly and utilitarian as his borrowed desk in his borrowed office.

Most of Christmas Landing looked ugly to him. The entire planet had only hosted human settlements for a hundred years, and half of Roland’s scant million people were crowded into Portolondon. This pioneer outpost at the edge of civilization had not had much time to beautify itself, being too occupied with, first, survival. Next, with its business as a market town for the farmers and fur trappers and miners who labored in the open country to the east and west. And then, in the last months, with Project Recovery. Accustomed to the greater age and comfort of Portolondon, it had taken something special for Dr. Luke Silverstein to uproot himself in his present condition and come here.

The something special ran past them.

“Oh!” Anne gasped. “Shadow-of-a-Dream!” And Anne went after her, all grace gone in comparison with the other girl, who once again had shed, or forgotten to put on, her clothes. Luke followed more slowly, apprehension shifting in his chest like some emotional tectonic plates. The dogs’ barking grew hysterical.

In the Arctic circle’s brief summer, hot and feverish, entire corridor walls were rolled open. Luke’s borrowed office, at the edge of the town farthest from the bars and brothels and clamorous equipment that received grain and ore and furs, gave onto a wide strip of bare dirt that, supposedly, would one day be planted as a park. Beyond the strip of dirt, the shield shimmered faintly, jamming all electromagnetic signals not aimed at the high tower rising above Christmas Landing. Beyond that shimmer, wending its way among the shiverleaf bushes and vivid sprays of firethorn, a figure moved. The dogs, kept inside by the restraints on their collars, dashed forward to throw themselves against the unseen barrier.

Luke, like the two girls, watched the alien approach—but what did one of them see?

When Luke had first arrived at Christmas Landing, Police Chief Halford had driven him from the spaceport to the city. “The port is shielded,” had been almost her first words to Luke, “and so is the entire perimeter of Christmas Landing. But this rover and the area in between is not. You probably won’t see anything, but just in case you do, be aware that the illusion is not real. Most of the Rollies can’t project farther than three or four feet, but a few can. The talented ones, if you call that talent.” She had snorted derisively and made a gesture considered filthy in Portolondon. That, plus the dismissive “Rollies,” made him dislike her. However, he kept an open mind. For one thing, the outlying settlements had been losing their children to the natives for nearly twenty years, and anger was to be expected. For another, he was paid to keep an open mind.

So he said mildly, “What might I see?”

She scowled. “I thought they briefed you.”

“They did. I’d like to hear it from your perspective.”

“My perspective is that the Rollies are kidnappers who used brain-washing to steal away our kids, less than half of which have been recovered.
Your
perspective is to straighten out the ones who have.” She jerked the rover into motion.

Definitely dislikeable—and to call the aliens “brain-washers” was to call a tsunami a “beach wave.” Luke had turned his attention to the countryside, in case he might “see something.” He had not, except for the wild beauty of the largely unexplored and completely untamed northern wilderness. Such an alien wilderness, bright with strange summer colors, even though Luke Silverstein had been born in Portolondon, in the second generation of settlers on Roland. But Portolondon was far from any native sentience. Not even Christmas Landing had believed there was any native sentience on Roland, until recently. All the stories from outwayers had been dismissed as folk tales, superstitions, fanciful embroideries by humans living too much in isolation on their remote farms and ranches and trapping posts.

Nor had Luke “seen anything” in the month since. The elusive natives with their peculiar talent came nowhere near Christmas Landing. Meanwhile, the recovery teams had gone out twice and brought back six children, all under two years old. These six, like the others recovered so far, had gone back to the outwayer farms from which they’d been stolen. Luke had started therapy with the four older ones who had not gone home. And also with Anne, who was Police Chief’s Halford’s unlikely daughter.

Mistherd, Fire-Born, Cloud, Shadow-of-a-Dream. Or: Terry Barkley, Hal DiSilvio, Laura Simmons, Carolyn Grunewald. Terry had completely renounced his other name, a renunciation that was part of the extreme bitterness the police chief considered normal and Luke considered problematic. Hal, an exuberant eight-year-old orphan with astonishing adaptive capacity, was adjusting well to human life. Laura, eleven, said little and cried at night, although not for the parents whom she didn’t remember and who were too afraid to reclaim her. But she, too, was coming along, having attached herself to a kindly refectory cook who was teaching her to bake. It was Carolyn—Shadow-of-a-Dream—who genuinely worried Luke.

She stood now, lovely in her nakedness that was both more innocent and more sensual than merely an unclothed human body. Every taut muscle strained toward the approaching figure. Every muscle—and what else? The shield deflected electromagnetic radiation, including brain waves, but Luke was not convinced that humans knew as much about their own brains as researchers claimed. Who, for instance, had known that what the aliens had done was even possible?

The figure stopped. Through the shimmer of the shield Luke saw an upright, vaguely reptilian creature: lean, scaly, long-tailed, big-beaked, with two small forearms and two heavy hind legs meant for speed. Behind the beak, its face was flat, with two eyes at the front and a third on the top of its head.
Once there were aerial predators on Roland
, he thought, inanely. In a curious way, the ugliness of the native matched the ugliness of Christmas Landing. It came closer and whistled something: high, fluted, oddly musical.

Carolyn gave a wordless cry and plunged forward, across the strip of bare dirt and through the shield. Without a moment’s hesitation, Anne followed.

Alarms sounded. Police, already alerted by the barking dogs, raced belatedly down the corridor from the opposite direction. Only two men—Christmas Landing had diverted much of its constabulary to Project Recovery. By the time the cops reached the shield, which stopped radiation and dogs but not people, Luke had already reached it himself.

Carolyn, laughing and crying, threw her arms around the scaly alien and fluted back. Anne stood transfixed, her pale eyes wide as Roland’s larger moon. Luke groaned inwardly. Anne should not have experienced this, it would make her therapy so much harder, and as for Shadow-of-a-Dream . . . Luke stepped through the barrier.

Dizziness took him, and he fell to his knees.

The angel was neither young nor old, male nor female. All white: wings, skin, robe. Not soft but infinitely compassionate, it held a hand out to Luke and said, “There is nothing to fear.”

“I know,” he said, and a sob broke from him just as one of the cops seized him roughly and dragged him back behind the shield, and the Angel of Death vanished.

“I don’t think you realize how brave it was of the alien to come here,” Luke said carefully to Police Chief Halford.

“I don’t think you realize what a spectacle you made of yourself out there,” Halford said. Disgust rimmed her features like frost. It didn’t help that she was right. But so was Luke.

“Consider, Chief Halford. A native, alien to us, comes to the conquerors of her people without the only protection she knows, all because she wants to assure herself that the human girl she raised is well and not being mistreated. That takes enormous courage in any species.”

“If that’s what you assume her motive was.”

“Shadow-of-a-Dream said it was.”

“
Carolyn
is deluded—that’s the whole point of this therapy, isn’t it? If this were up to me, Dr. Silverstein, you would be on the next transport back to Portolondon. But Terry wants you to continue ‘helping’ Carolyn.”

Luke wasn’t surprised to hear that sixteen-year-old Terry’s wishes carried so much weight. In this pioneer society, sixteen was formally an adult. Carolyn’s parents were dead; she and Terry were lovers; Chief Halford had no other real options for dealing with Carolyn. Luke also knew, without being told, that he was to continue seeing Anne as well because Anne herself wished it and she, too, was sixteen.

He said with deliberate mildness, “I’ll see Carolyn now.”

“Terry is with her.”

“I don’t do therapy that way, Chief Halford.”

“Then you won’t do it at all. He says she won’t come without him.”

There is more than one control freak here
. But he said only, “Send them both in.”

The two youngsters held hands. Carolyn wore clothes, jeans and a loose blue shirt, although her feet were bare, the soles hard as leather from fourteen years of running barefoot in the wilderness. They were both so beautiful, Luke thought, conscious of his own wrinkled skin and bald head. He had never gone in for cosmetic enhancements. Carolyn’s long brown hair, streaked with sun-gold, fell around her shoulders. Terry’s blue eyes burned with anger.

The first three seconds and he was already faced with a problem.
She
wanted to be addressed as “Shadow-of-a-Dream”;
he
would be furious if Luke used the name the aliens had given her—the name she had been called by for most of her life. He said, “Hello to both of you.”

“Hello,” Terry said. The girl said nothing.

“Terry, it’s not usual to do therapy with a third person present.”

“We aren’t usual,” the young man said.