The Best of Nancy Kress (56 page)

Every once in a while Jenny glimpses Eric in the distance, working on yet another futile tunnel, or huddled in desperate conference with other men, or with Cheri. Each of these sightings turns her inside out like a sock, all her vulnerable organs battered by the smallest sound, breeze, photon of light.

“My Cheri never was no good around men,” Carleen says, handing Jenny yet another cup of boiled coffee, not meeting her eyes. It’s the first time Carleen has mentioned the situation. Jenny doesn’t reply. Carleen’s kindness is like air, ubiquitous and necessary and equally available to everyone, but even air hurts Jenny now.

“Honey,” Carleen adds, “you gotta
eat
.”

“Later,” Jenny says, the syllable scraping her throat like gritty vomit.

Carleen goes away, but half an hour later Ricky appears beside the van, holding a book. He is incredibly dirty, smells bad, and clearly does not want to be there. “You spozed to read me this.”

It’s
Treasure Island
in the original, a book whose flowery language and slow pace Ricky will neither understand nor enjoy. Where on Earth did Carleen get it? She must have asked every last person in the camp, must have remembered that Jenny is—was—a librarian, must have cudgeled her slow wits to think of something that might make Jenny feel better. Jenny starts to cry. An old song title fills her head: “Roses from the Wrong Man.” Carleen is not a man, and this filthy child with his reluctant offering is about as far from roses as it’s possible to get, but Jenny is in too much pain to appreciate the incongruity. She only knows that if it had been Eric who’d arranged this perverse kindness on her behalf, she could have borne anything. But it is not Eric.

Ricky looks at her tears with the same alarm as would any grown man. “Hey! You…you gonna read me that book?”

“No. You’d hate it. Go play.”

Released, Ricky gives a whoop and races away, running backward, maybe to fulfill some small-boy notion of paying attention to the adult he’s been told to pay attention to. No one else is in the center of the field; the cars are doing their daily promenade to charge up batteries. The red Taurus is not going very fast and the driver slams on her brakes, but not soon enough. Ricky is hit.

He starts shrieking to wake the dead. Carleen and Cheri both scream and dart from beside their SUV, Cheri with Daniella clamped to one naked breast. Sue’s husband, Ted, leaps from his car and reaches Ricky just as Jenny does. Ted says, “Ricky! Buddy!”

The child is wailing and writhing on the flattened weeds. His left arm hangs at a strange angle. Ted gently holds down Ricky’s shoulders. “Lie still, buddy, till we see what’s broken.” Cheri thrusts Daniella at Carleen, yells something anguished, and throws herself practically on top of Ricky. Ted shoves her off. “For Chrissake, let me see how bad he’s hurt! Don’t crush him, Cheri!”

“Ted’s an EMT,” Sue says at Jenny’s elbow. “What happened?”

Jenny shakes her head. She can’t speak. Cheri says shakily, “He was just racing around like always and—fuck it, why does everything always happen to me!”

Jenny just stares at her. The statement is so selfish, so inadequate, so stupid, that no response is possible. A thought forms in Jenny’s mind:
If this is what Eric prefers to me, the hell with him.
The next second she’s ashamed of this thought; it’s as self-absorbed as Cheri’s. She turns her attention to Ricky.

His arm is broken. There are no doctors or professional nurses among the refugees. Ted sets the arm, using as a splint a piece of wood torn from a chair leg. Ted is obviously no expert at this, but he’s resourceful, gentle, and willing to accept responsibility. Everything, Jenny thinks coldly, that Eric is not. Ricky screams like an animal in a steel-toothed trap. The driver of the red Taurus blubbers apologies; no one blames her. The accident is thoroughly discussed at every campfire, in every tent, on every mattress in the back of every van. Ricky is given a hoarded candy bar, a precious comic book, and a hefty slug of cough syrup mixed with whiskey to make him sleep.

Jenny can’t sleep. Lying alone on her mattress, she tries to think coldly about her and Eric, about the destroyed cities, about what will happen now. She can’t quite manage enough coldness, but it’s better than the hell of the last four days. Somewhere in the deep dark there’s a tap at the window.

Eric
… Hope burns so sudden, so hot, that Jenny feels scorched inside. She nearly cries out as she fumbles for the door, the flashlight.

Carleen stands there, her meaty arms limp by her side. In the upward-slanting glow from the flashlight, she says despairingly, “Ricky.”

Jenny stumbles from the van, follows Carleen. Stars shine in a clear, cold sky. Jenny’s lighted watch face says 4:18 a.m. The SUV tailgate gapes open, and Jenny sees the usual mattress, a double in this monster vehicle, on which Ricky lies, glassy-eyed. Daniella whimpers softly in her infant seat. Cheri is not here. With Eric?

“He been like this for a coupla hours now,” Carleen says in a low, steady voice. “He won’t drink or eat or talk. And his arm’s swelling up and turning all dark.” She trains the flashlight on Ricky’s arm.

Jenny bends over the child, who smells as if he’s shit his pants. Gangrene—could it set in that fast? She doesn’t know, but clearly something is radically wrong.

Carleen goes on in that strange, even voice. “I can’t leave Daniella. And Ted don’t know enough to deal with this.”

“I don’t know anything about medical matters, either—certainly not as much as Ted!”

Carleen continues as if Jenny hadn’t spoken. “Anyway Sue’s got some kind of diarrhea now and Ted can’t leave his kids. Not for good. Can’t take the risk. And I got Daniella. Can’t count on Cheri.”

Jenny straightens and turns. The two women stare at each other. For a long moment, it seems to Jenny, her universe hangs in the balance, all of it: Eric and vaporized Rochester, Deirdre and Jenny’s job at the vanished public library, the running-down cell phones and Jenny’s mother waiting for her in Dundee, the stars far overhead and the trodden-down weeds underfoot in this desperate refugee camp no one planned on.

Jenny nods.

Together they pick up Ricky and situate him in Jenny’s arms. Ricky moans, but softly. He’s heavy, reeking, only half-conscious. There is nobody else up, or at least nobody that Jenny sees. In the dark she carries Ricky the entire length of the field, trying not to shift him even as he grows heavier and heavier, navigating by the pale glow from the alien buildings.

Up close, they present rough, cream-colored walls like stucco, but no stucco ever shone with its own light. The buildings all seem interconnected, but Jenny sees only one entry, itself filled with light instead of any tangible door. She walks through the light and into a wide space—surely wider than the whole building appears from the outside?—that is absolutely empty.

“Hello,” Jenny calls, inadequately, and suddenly she can hold Ricky no longer. She sinks with her burden to the stucco floor. This is as hopeless as everything else in her stupid life. She doesn’t even like this kid.

“Hello,” an alien says. It’s the tall blonde woman in the standard brown robe; she materializes from empty air. “Is this little person hurt?”

Anger rises in Jenny at the cloying pseudo-friendliness of “this little person”—these beings have murdered nine-tenths of the Earth’s population!—but for Ricky’s sake she holds the anger in check. “Yes. He’s hurt. His arm is broken and some kind of infection has set in.”

“What’s his name?” the alien asks. Her eyes are blue and warm as the Mediterranean.

“Ricky.”

“And what’s your name?”

What can that possibly matter? “Jenny.”

“Jenny, close your eyes, please.”

Should she do it? It makes no more sense than anything else, so why not? She has no idea what she’s doing here. She closes her eyes.

“You may open them now.”

Even before Jenny can do that, Ricky says, “What the fuck!”

He jumps up and gazes wildly around. His arm is whole, the clumsy splint and darkened swelling both gone. His clothes are clean. He shrieks in fear and jumps into Jenny’s lap, hiding his face against her neck. His hair smells of sweet grass.

Jenny struggles to stand while holding Ricky, who mercifully is too scared to scream. She must stand; she can’t face this terrible being from a sitting position on the ground. A table stands beside the alien: an ordinary picnic table with benches, the surface laden with scrambled eggs, toast, sweet rolls, orange juice, fragrant hot coffee. The plastic plates have a pattern of daisies. Jenny goes weak in the knees. She dumps Ricky onto a bench. He clutches her around the waist but then sees the sweet rolls and looks up at Jenny.

“Eat,” she manages to get out. And to the alien, “Why?”

The smiling blue eyes widen slightly. “Didn’t you want me to repair him?”

“I mean, why did you kill all those cities?
All those people?
”

The alien nods. “I see. Sit down, Jenny.”

“No.”

“All right. But the coffee is excellent today.”

“Why did you do it?” Bombay, Karachi, Delhi, Shanghai, Moscow…all in strict order of size. The meticulousness alone is monstrous.

The alien says, “Why did that man hurt Ricky when he tried to pull his arm bones back into the correct line?”

For a minute Jenny can’t think what the creature means. Then she gets it. “Are you saying you committed massive genocide for our own
good
?”

“There were too many of you,” the alien says. She sits gracefully on the picnic bench across from Ricky, who is gobbling eggs and sweet rolls with one hand, the other fastened firmly on Jenny’s jacket. “In one more generation you would have had irreversible climate change, starvation, war, and suffering beyond belief. We spared you all that.”

Jenny can barely speak. “You did… It was…”

“It was an act of kindness,” the alien says, “and I know it seems hard now, but we’ve spared your species an incredible amount of suffering. In two more generations, your altered world will seem normal to its inhabitants. Two generations after that, you will thank us for our intervention. And you will have learned, and you will do much better this time. We’ve seen this before, you know.”

Jenny doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. The worst is that, with her book-nourished imagination, she can actually see how that monstrous prophecy might come about. The gratitude of the masses in countries where most people never, ever had enough to eat until the cities disappeared…. Religion would help. Saviors from the stars, revered and deified and carrying out the will of God, of Allah, of Shiva in the endless dance of destruction in order for there to be room for creation.

The alien says, as if reading her thoughts, “You humans have a talent for self-destruction, you know. You cause a lot of your own suffering. It’s unfortunate.”

Jenny picks up a butter knife and hurls it at the woman’s eyes.

It doesn’t connect, of course. The knife bounces off the alien’s face, and the only response is from Ricky, scared all over again, and also full enough with good food to have the energy for response. He wails and wraps himself around the still-standing Jenny.

The alien stands, too. “Don’t think we’re not sympathetic, Jenny. But we look at things differently than you do. Good-bye.”

“Wait!” Jenny cries over Ricky’s screams. “One more question! Why keep us here inside this invisible cage? What did you hope to learn?”

The alien answers without hesitation. “Whether you were different in small enough groups. And you are. A few hundred of you outside Rochester and Bogota and Nantes and Chengdu—you’re much better beings in smaller groups. It’s chaotic out there just now, but you
will
cooperate better on survival, even if you’re no happier. We’re very glad to know this. It justifies our decision. Good-bye, Jenny.”

The alien vanishes. Then the building vanishes. It’s not yet dawn outside, but Jenny hears a siren in the distance, drawing closer. Somewhere in the field a car door slams. She sets Ricky down and tugs at him to walk toward Carleen’s camp. The siren comes closer still; Eric and his work crew won’t need those tunnels now. Jenny can go to Dundee as soon as Bob arrives for her. He may be on his way now.

Ricky tries to break free, but Jenny holds him firmly. He isn’t going to get hit by another car, not while he’s with her. She has no idea what the future holds for Ricky, for any of them. But now—finally!—hatred of the self-righteous aliens, blithely playing Old Testament God, burns stronger in her than does despair over Eric.
It justifies our decision
… The hell it does! All those innocent lives, all the grief tearing apart the survivors…

Hatred is a great heartener. Hatred, and the knowledge that she is going to be needed (
It’s chaotic out there just now
…), as Carleen and Ricky had needed her. These things, hatred and usefulness, aren’t much (…
even if you’re no happier
…) but they’re something. And both are easier than love.

She brings the child back to his grandmother as the camp wakes and the cars drive in.

Afterward to “The Kindness of Strangers”

What is an act of kindness? Some are easy to identify: helping up a stranger who has fallen, donating to disaster relief, not pointing out that your spouse has told the story about the wheelbarrow six times to the same people. But what about more ambiguous acts? Is it a kindness to stop a suicide who desperately wants to die?

My father lives far out in the country, and his woods and field are overpopulated with deer. In the winter, many starve. Culling a deer herd by killing a bunch of them—is that a kindness? Not to the dead ones, but to the survivors, who then will not starve? What about an overpopulated planet?

The mind recoils from the idea, but one of the functions of SF is to examine ideas that the mind recoils from. The result, as here, is often an ambiguous and bleak story. It’s bleak for Jenny, too, and I got some negative email about this story’s ending. Sometimes, however, hatred
is
“a great heartener,” enabling a person to go on when nothing else will.

Perhaps you didn’t like “The Kindness of Strangers.” It’s included in this volume because I think it contains some of my best writing. You, however, will be the judge of that.