Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (66 page)

Marianne pictured it. Her stomach twisted.

Dr. Potter continued., “His name was Michael Wendl and he was new but legitimately aboard, a sort of mole, I guess you'd call it. A manifesto was all over the Internet an hour after the explosion and this morning—”

“This morning? How long have I been out?”

“Ten hours. You had only a mild concussion but you were sedated to stitch up head lacerations, which of course we wouldn't ordinarily do but this was complicated because—”

“I know,” Marianne said, and marveled at the calm in her voice. “I may have been exposed to the spores.”

“You
have
been exposed, Marianne. Samples were taken. You're infected.”

Marianne set that aside, too, for the moment. She said, “Tell me about the manifesto. What organization?”

“Nobody has claimed credit. The manifesto was about what you'd expect: Denebs planning to kill everyone on Earth, all that shit. Wendl vetted okay when he was hired, so speculation is that he was a new recruit to their cause. He was from somewhere upstate and there's a lot of dissent going on up there. But the thing is, he got it wrong. He was supposed to explode just outside the Deneb section of the
Embassy
, not the research labs. His organization, whatever it was, knew something about the layout of the
Embassy
but not enough. Wendl was supposed to be restricted to sub-bay duty. It's like someone who'd had just a brief tour had told him where to go, but either they remembered wrong or he did.”

Marianne's spine went cold.
Someone who'd had just a brief tour
 . . .

“You had some cranial swelling after the concussion, Marianne, but it's well under control now.”

Elizabeth.

No, not possible. Not thinkable.

“You're presently on a steroid administered intravenously, which may have some side effects I'd like you to be aware of, including wakefulness and—”

Elizabeth, studying everything during her visit aboard the
Embassy
:
“Where do the Denebs live?” “Behind these doors here. No one has ever been in there.” “Interesting.
It's pretty close the high-risk labs. “

“Marianne, are you listening to me?”

Elizabeth, furiously punching the air months ago:
“I don't believe it, not any of it. There are things they aren't telling us!”

“Marianne?”

Elizabeth, grudgingly doing her duty to protect the aliens but against her own inclinations. Commanding a critical section of the Border Patrol, a member of the joint task force that had access to military-grade weapons. In an ideal position to get an infiltrator aboard the floating island.

“Marianne!
Are
you listening to me?”

“No,” Marianne said. “I have to talk to Ambassador Smith!”

“Wait, you can't just—”

Marianne had started to heave herself off the bed, which was ridiculous because she couldn't leave the quarantine chamber anyway. A figure appeared on the other side of the glass barrier, behind Dr. Potter. The doctor, following Marianne's gaze, turned, and gasped.

Noah pressed close to the glass. An energy shield shimmered around him. Beneath it he wore a long tunic like Smith's. His once-pale skin now shone coppery under his black hair. But most startling were his eyes: Noah's eyes, and yet not. Bigger, altered to remove as much of the skin and expose as much of the white as possible. Within that large, alien-sized expanse of white, his irises were still the same color as her own, an un-alien light gray flecked with gold.

“Mom,” he said tenderly. “Are you all right?”

“Noah—”

“I came as soon as I heard. I'm sorry it's been so long. Things have been . . . happening.”

It was still Noah's voice, coming through the energy shield and out of the ceiling with no alien inflection, no trill or click. Marianne's mind refused to work logically. All she could focus on was his voice: He was too old. He would never speak English as anything but a Middle Atlantic American, and he would never speak Worldese without an accent.

“Mom?”

“I'm fine,” she managed.

“I'm so sorry to hear about Evan.”

She clasped her hands tightly together on top of the hospital blanket. “You're going. With the aliens. When they leave Earth.”

“Yes.”

One simple word. No more than that, and Marianne's son became an extraterrestrial. She knew that Noah was not doing this in order to save his life. Or hers, or anyone's. She didn't know why he had done it. As a child, Noah had been fascinated by superheroes, aliens, robots, even of the more ridiculous kind where the science made zero sense. Comic books, movies, TV shows—he would sit transfixed for hours by some improbable human transformed into a spider or a hulk or a sentient hunk of metal. Did Noah remember that childish fascination? She didn't understand what this adopted child, this beloved boy she had not borne, remembered or thought or desired. She never had.

He said, “I'm sorry.”

She said, “Don't be,” and neither of them knew exactly what he was apologizing for in the first place, nor what she was excusing him from. After that, Marianne could find nothing else to say. Of the thousands of things she could have said to Noah, absolutely none of them rose to her lips. So finally she nodded.

Noah blew her a kiss. Marianne did not watch him go. She couldn't have borne it. Instead she shifted her weight on the bed and got out of it, holding on to the bedstead, ignoring Ann Potter's strenuous objections on the other side of the glass.

She had to see Ambassador Smith, to tell him about Elizabeth. The terrorist organization could strike again.

As soon as she told Smith, Elizabeth would be arrested.
Two children lost
—

No, don't think of it. Tell Smith.

But—
wait
. Maybe it hadn't been Elizabeth. Surely others had had an unauthorized tour of the ship? And now, as a result of the attack, security would be tightened. Probably no other saboteur could get through. Perhaps there would be no more supply runs by submarine, no more helicopters coming and going on the wide pier. Time was so short—maybe there were enough supplies aboard already. And perhaps the Denebs would use their unknowable technology to keep the
Embassy
safer until the spore cloud hit, by which time, of course, the aliens would have left. There were only three months left. Surely a second attack inside the Embassy couldn't be organized in such a brief time! Maybe there was no need to name Elizabeth at all.

The room swayed as she clutched the side of the bed.

Ann Potter said, “If you don't get back into bed right now, Marianne, I'm calling security.”

“Nothing is secure, don't you know that, you silly woman?” Marianne snapped.

Noah was lost to her. Evan was dead. Elizabeth was guilty.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'll get back in bed.” What was she even doing, standing up? She couldn't leave. She carried the infection inside her body. “But I . . . I need to see Ambassador Smith. Right now, here. Please have someone tell him it's the highest possible priority. Please.”

NOAH

The visit to his mother upset Noah more than he'd expected. She'd looked so small, so fragile in her bed behind the quarantine glass. Always, his whole life, he'd thought of her as large, towering over the landscape like some stone fortress, both safe and formidable. But she was just a small, frightened woman who was going to die.

As were Elizabeth, Ryan and Connie and their baby, Noah's last girlfriend Emily, his childhood buddies Sam and Davey, Cindy and Miguel at the restaurant—all going to die when the spore cloud hit. Why hadn't Noah been thinking about this before? How could he be so selfish about concentrating on his delight in his new clan that he had put the rest of humanity out of his mind?

He had always been selfish. He'd known that about himself. Only before now, he'd called it “independent.”

It was a relief to leave the Terran part of the
Embassy,
with its too-heavy gravity and glaring light. The extra rods and cones that had been inserted into Noah's eyes made them sensitive to such terrible brightness. In the World quarters, Kayla's little boy Austin was chasing a ball along the corridor, his energy suit a faint glimmer in the low light. He stopped to watch Noah shed his own suit.

Austin said, “I wanna do that.”

“You will, some day. Maybe soon. Where's your mother?”

“She comes right back. I stay right here!”

“Good boy. Have you—hi, Kayla. Do you know where Mee^hao¡ is?”

“No. Oh, wait, yes—he left the sanctuary.”

That, Noah remembered, was what both Kayla and her sister called the World section of the
Embassy
. “Sanctuary”—the term made him wonder what their life had been before they came aboard. Both, although pleasant enough, were close-mouthed about their pasts to the point of lock-jaw.

Kayla added, “I think Mee^hao¡ said it was about the attack.”

It would be, of course. Noah knew he should wait until Mee^hao¡ was free. But he couldn't wait.

“Where's Llaa^moh¡?”

Kayla looked blank; her Worldese was not yet fluent.

“Officer Jones.”

“Oh. I just saw her in the garden.”

Noah strode to the garden. Llaa^moh¡ sat on a bench, watching water fall in a thin stream from the ceiling to a pool below. Delicately she fingered a llo flower, without picking it, coaxing the broad dark leaf to release its spicy scent. Noah and Llaa^moh¡ had avoided each other ever since Noah's welcome ceremony, and he knew why. Still, right now his need overrode awkward desire.

“Llaa^moh¡—may we speak together?” He hoped he had the verb tense right: urgency coupled with supplication.

“Yes, of course.” She made room for him on the bench. “Your Worldese progresses well.”

“Thank you. I am troubled in my liver.” The correct idiom, he was certain. Almost.

“What troubles your liver, brother mine?”

“My mother.” The word meant not only female parent but matriarchal clan leader, which Noah supposed that Marianne was, since both his grandmothers were dead. Although perhaps not his biological grandmothers, and to World, biology was all. There were no out-of-family adoptions.

“Yes?”

“She is Dr. Marianne Jenner, as you know, working aboard the
Embassy
. My brother and sister live ashore. What will happen to my family when the spore cloud comes? Does my mother go with us to World? Do my birth-siblings?” But . . . how could they, unaltered? Also, they were not of his haplotype and so would belong to a different clan for lllathil, clans not represented aboard ship. Also, all three of them would hate everything about World. But otherwise they would die. All of them, dead.

Llaa^moh¡ said nothing. Noah gave her the space and time to think; one thing World humans hated about Terrans was that they replied so quickly, without careful thought, sometimes even interrupting each other and thereby dishonoring the speaker. Noah watched a small insect with multi-colored wings, whose name did not come to his fevered mind, cross the llo leaf, and forced his body to stay still.

Finally Llaa^moh¡ said, “Mee^hao¡ and I have discussed this. He has left this decision to me. You are one of us now. I will tell you what will happen when the spore cloud comes.”

“I thank you for your trust.” The ritual response, but Noah meant it.

“However, you are under obligation—” she used the most serious degree for a word of promise “—to say nothing to anyone else, World or Terran. Do you accept this obligation?”

Noah hesitated, and not from courtesy. Shouldn't he use the information, whatever it was, to try to ensure what safety was possible for his family? But if he did not promise, Llaa^moh¡ would tell him nothing.

“I accept the obligation.”

She told him.

Noah's jaw dropped. He couldn't help it, even though it was very rude. Llaa^moh¡ was carefully not looking at him; perhaps she had anticipated this reaction.

Noah stood and walked out of the garden.