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 & 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, Brainrose, Oaths and Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Crossfire, Nothing Human, Crucible, Dogs, Steal Across the Sky, and the Probability Trilogy, comprised of 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 books are a new novel, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, and two new collections, Fountain of Age and Five Stories. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” 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 to a ruined future America to ask the question, in a world where only basic brute survival counts, is there any room left for beauty? And would you be willing to kill for it if you found it?
SECOND ARABESQUE, VERY SLOWLY
When we came to the new place it was already night and I couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t like Mike to move us after dark. But our pack had taken longer than he’d expected, or longer than the scouts had said, to travel south. That was partly my fault. I can’t walk as fast or long as I once could. And neither could Pretty, because that day turned out to be her Beginning.
“My belly hurts, it does,” the girl moaned.
“Just a little farther,” I said, hoping that was true. Hoping, too, that I wouldn’t have to threaten her. Pretty turned ugly when she felt bad and whined when she didn’t, although never in Mike’s presence. “A little farther, and tomorrow you’ll have your ceremony.”
“With candy?”
“With candy.”
So Pretty trudged through the dark, broken, rubble-choked streets with me and the other six girls, behind a swinging lantern. The night was cold for July. The men closest to us—although I don’t call fifteen-year-olds men, even if Mike does—walked bent over with the weight of our belongings. The men on the perimeter carried weapons. The danger was partly from other packs wanting foraging territory, although there are fewer territorial firefights than when I was young. Still, we have desirable assets: seven young women, at least two of them fertile, plus three children and me. And then there are the dogs. Cities are full of wild dogs.
I could hear them, howling in the distance. As that distance grew smaller and Mike still had us stumbling along by patchy moonlight and one lantern, I left the girls in Bonnie’s charge and walked double time to find Mike.
“What be you doing here?” he demanded, gaze and rifle both focused outward. “Get back to them girls!”
“It’s the girls I’m concerned about. How much farther?”
“Get back there, Nurse!”
“I’m asking because Pretty is in some pain. She’s at her Beginning.”
That took his attention from any dangers in the darkness. “Yeah? You sure?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t.
Mike gave his slow, rare smile. He wasn’t a bad pack leader. Huge, strong, illiterate—well, they all were, and I needed them to be—he cared about his people, and wasn’t any more brutal to us than discipline required. A big improvement on Lew, our previous leader. Sometimes Mike could even lurch into moments of grace, as he did now. “She be okay?”
“Yes.” Nothing that the start of her monthlies and a little candy wouldn’t cure.
And then, even more surprising, “You be okay, Nurse?”
“Yes.”
“How old you be now?”
“Sixty,” I said, shaving off four years. I was under no illusions what Mike would do once I could no longer keep up with the pack. Already Bonnie had learned half of what I had to teach her. Not even a Nurse would be allowed to slow down the nomadic moving that meant food.
We had kept walking as we talked. Mike said, “I be first, with Pretty.”
“She knows that.”
He grunted, not asking her thoughts about it. If Pretty were fertile, she must be mated with a fertile male, and no one knew which of the pack men that might be. Nor did we have any idea how to find out. So Pretty, like Junie and Lula before her, would be mated with all of them in turn. Already Pretty, a natural flirt when she wasn’t a natural whiner, tossed her long blond hair and flashed her shapely legs at all of them.
The dogs were closer now, and I had lost Mike’s attention. I stood still, waiting for the center of the pack to reach me, and rejoined my charges.
By the time we reached our new building, the moon had vanished behind the clouds, a drizzle had started, and I could see nothing. The men led us past some large structures—the city was full of large structures, most ruined but mostly on the insides—and through a metal door. Steps downward. Cold, damp. A featureless corridor. Still, this place would be easy to defend, since it was underground and nearly windowless. The scouts had prepared the women’s room, which did have a small window, to which they’d vented our propane stove. The room was warm and blanketed. Junie and Lula bedded down their children, who were already half-asleep. So were the girls. I stayed awake long enough to prepare Pretty a hot tisane—only herbs, not drugs—to ease her cramps, and then fell into sleep.
In the morning I woke first and made my way outside to pee. The guard, a gentle sixteen-year-old named Guy, nodded at me. “Morning, Nurse.”
“Good morrow to you, sir,” I said, and Guy grinned. He was one of the few that was interested in the learning—history, literature—I sometimes tossed out. He could even read; I was teaching him. “Where is the piss pit?”
He told me. I continued outside, blinking a little in the bright sunshine, along the side of the building and around a corner, where I stopped dead.
I knew this place. I had never been here before, but I knew it.
Three large buildings set around a vast square of now broken and weedy stone, with steps at the far end leading down to a deserted street. On the tallest building, five wide, immensely tall arches looked down on a sea of smashed glass. The other two buildings, glass fronts also smashed, bristled with balconies, with marble, with stone sculptures too large to break or carry away. Inside, still visible, were remnants of ancient, tattered carpet.
I said aloud, “This is Lincoln Center.” But the perimeter guard, sitting with his rifle on the edge of what had once been a fountain, was too far away to hear. I wasn’t talking to him, anyway. I was talking to my grandmother.
“My best job, Susan,” she’d said to me, “was when I was on the cleaning crew at Lincoln Center.”
“Tell me,” I said, although I’d heard all this so many times before that I could recite it. I never tired of it.
“I was young, before I went to nursing school. We deep-cleaned the Metropolitan Opera House the last two weeks in August and the first two weeks in September, when there were no performances,” she always began. “It was way before the Infertility Plague, you know.”
I knew. My grandmother was very old then, older than I am now, and dying. I was twelve. Grandmother was frantically teaching me to Nurse, in case I should prove infertile, which the following year, I did. Packs not desperate for bedmates have no use for infertile women unless a girl can prove herself as a fighter. I was no fighter.
“We lowered all twenty-one electric chandeliers at the Met—think of that, Susan, twenty-one—and cleaned each crystal drop individually. Every other year all the red carpet was completely replaced, at a cost of $700,000. In 1990s dollars! Every five years the seats were replaced in the New York State Theater—that’s what it was called then, although later they changed the name, I forget to what. Five window washers worked every day of the year, constantly keeping the windows bright. At night, when all the buildings were lit up, they shone out on the plaza like liquid gold. People laughed and talked and lined up by the hundreds to hear opera and see ballet and watch plays and listen to concerts. And such rich performances as I saw … you can’t imagine!”
No liquid gold now. No performances, no electricity, no opera nor ballet nor plays nor concerts. Grandmother had been talking about a time gone when I was born, and I am old.
I went back inside. Pretty was awake, her huge blue eyes filled with awe at herself. “Nurse! It started—my blood! I’m at my Beginning!”
“Congratulations,” I said. “We’ll have your ceremony today.”
“I am a woman now,” she said, with pride. I looked at her round, childish, simple face; at her skinny arms and legs; at her concave belly, not even distended with fluid retention. She was thirteen, early for our girls to Begin. Kara was a year older, with no sign of her monthlies. I said gently, “Yes, Pretty. You’re a woman now. You can bear the pack a child.”
“You other childless,” Pretty said importantly, “you have to obey me now!”
The younger girls, Seela and Tiny, scowled ferociously.
My grandmother taught me a great deal more than nursing. And I read. Books might have survived the destruction and stupid rioting when the world realized that 99 percent of its women had contracted a virus that destroyed their eggs. Most books had not, however, survived time and damp and rats and insects. But some did.
How many other people are left in the world? There is no way to tell. Census organizations, radio and TV stations, central governments—all that vanished decades ago. Too few people left to sustain them. The world now—or at least this part of it—consists of the communities and the packs. The communities live outside the city, and they farm. I have never seen one. I was born to a pack—although not this one—my mother and grandmother captive to it. The packs prefer to be hunter-gatherers in urban environments. We hunt meat—rabbits, deer, dogs—and gather canned goods. Not exactly what happened during the Stone Age, but we manage. Every once in a while rumors come of places that have preserved more of civilization, usually small cities north and west—“Endicott,” “Bath,” “Ithaca”—but I have no knowledge of them.
However, it turned out that among the others that were left in the world was a pack based just blocks away, in an old hotel on a street called “Central Park South,” and Mike was furious with his scouts. “You don’t find this out?”
The men hung their heads.
“You put us in danger ’cause you don’t find this out? I deal with you later. Now we gotta parley.”
I was startled. Parley, not move? But later Guy, off duty and cleaning his guns, explained it to me. “There be a big forest here, Nurse, with lotsa game. Mike wants to stay.”
So Mike left with half his pack, all heavily armed, to parley for hunt-gather rights with the other pack. Meanwhile, guarded by Guy and his friend Jemmy, Bonnie and I looked for a good place to hold Pretty’s ceremony.
Bonnie, my apprentice, might or might not make a good Nurse when I can no longer keep up with the pack. Smart and strong, she already knew more than I let Mike realize. She could use our dwindling supplies of pre-plague medicines, those miracles whose making is lost to us. More important, she could find, prepare, and administer the plant drugs we relied on: bilberry for diarrhea, horsetail to stop bleeding, elderberry for fever, primrose for rashes. She could set a bone, dig out a bullet, use maggots to clean a wound.
But Bonnie had neither warmth nor that brisk reassurance that, as much as drugs, brings men to healing. Bonnie was like stone. I’d never seen her smile, seldom heard her speak except in answer to a question, never surprised interest or delight on her face. Big, ungainly, painfully homely, she had colorless hair and almost no chin. I think she had a bad time when she Began, which was before I was taken into this pack. Her thighs and breasts bore permanent scars. Lew might have had her shot when she was declared infertile except it was about that time he was killed in a pack war. I persuaded Mike to let Bonnie become my apprentice. That also rescued her from the sex list, since Nurses—even apprentice Nurses—were the only women who got to invite men to bed. Bonnie never did.
She said nothing as she and I, Guy and Jemmy, went into all the ruined buildings of what had been Lincoln Center. From Grandmother’s descriptions I recognized them all. Above us, in the New York State Theater, broken seats once supported the asses of people watching dancers. Our housing below had probably been practice rooms. In the Metropolitan Opera House, the building with five tall arches, the caved-in stage had once held opera singers. Here, in Somebody Hall (my memory wasn’t what it had been), orchestras had played music. All the musicians wore black, with the women in long and sparkly dresses. Grandmother told me. In the Vivian Beaumont Theater, off to the side of the Met, the collapsed roof sheltered actors performing plays. The small library beside the Met had been burned and was now overgrown with weeds, wildflowers, and saplings.
But it was underneath the Vivian Beaumont, below street level and behind two locked doors that Guy shot open with his rifle, that we found it. I had brought a lantern, and now I lit it, although we’d left both doors open for light. The first door led to a downward-sloping ramp of concrete, the second to another small theater, eight rows of seats in a half circle, windowless and untouched except for time and rats. No looters had taken or destroyed the seats; no rain had rotted the wooden, uncurtained stage; no wild dogs nested in the tiny rooms beyond.
Jemmy let out a whoop and swung himself up to a booth on the back wall. Probably he hoped for undestroyed machinery, and his second whoop said he’d found it. A faint glow appeared in the booth.
“Jemmy!” I shouted up. “If you waste candles like that, Mike will flog you himself!”
No answer, and the light did not go off. Guy shrugged and laughed. “You know Jemmy.”
“Help me up onto that stage,” I said.
He did, leaping up gracefully to stand beside me, the lantern at our feet. I looked out over the darkened seats. What must it have been like, to stand here as an actor, a musician, a dancer? To perform in front of people who watched you with delight? To control an audience?
“Such rich performances as I saw … you can’t imagine.”
Boots on the corridor, and then a voice in the darkness: “Nurse? Get your ass back to them girls! Pretty waiting!”
“Is that you, Karl?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you ever again talk to me in that tone of voice, young man, or I will tell Mike that you’re disrespecting a Nurse and you will go to the bottom of the sex list, if you even stay on it at all!”
Silence, then a sullen, “Yes’m.”
“In fact, you bring all the girls here. This is where we’ll have Pretty’s ceremony, and we’ll have it now.”
“Here? Now?”
“You heard me.”
“Yes’m.” And then: “You tell Mike I disrespected you?”
“Not if you get those girls here right away.”
Karl galloped off, his boots loud on the concrete ramp. Guy grinned at me. Then he gazed out into the darkness and I saw that he had been doing just what I had: imagining himself a performer in a vanished time. All at once he grabbed me around the waist and swung me into a dance.
I was never a dancer, and I am old. I stumbled, and Guy let me go. He danced alone, as he never would have done had anybody been present except me and his trusted friend Jemmy, who probably wasn’t even looking away from his precious machinery. I watched Guy move gracefully through the two-step that packs danced at the rare gatherings, and sadness washed over me that Guy could never be anything but a low-level pack soldier. He was too kind and too dreamy to ever become a leader like Mike, too male to ever be as important as a fertile girl.
Bonnie watched, wooden-faced, before she turned away.
Pretty’s ceremony was lit by thirteen candles, one for each year of her age, as was customary. No men present, of course, not even the two male children, year-old Davey and eight-year-old Rick, whose mother, Emma, died last year giving birth to a stillborn girl. Nothing I did saved either one of them, and if Lew had still been pack chief, I think I would have been shot then and there.
The two mothers, Junie and Lula, sat on chairs, with Lula’s baby, Jaden, on her lap. Jaden started to fuss and Lula gave her the breast. Bonnie, as my apprentice but also as an infertile female, stood behind the mothers. The girls who had not yet had their Beginnings sat to one side on the floor, their hands full of wildflowers. Seela and Tiny, ten and nine, looked interested. Kara, her own Beginning only a few months off, judging from her buds of breasts, wore an expression I could not interpret.
Pretty, now neither child nor mother, sat in the center of the circle, on a sort of throne made of a chair covered with a blanket, which in turn was spread with towels. Old, as faded as everything else we take from abandoned buildings, the towels had once been sun-yellow. Pretty’s legs were spread wide, the thighs smeared with the new blood she was so proud of. One by one, the unBegun girls laid flowers between Pretty’s legs.
“May you be blessed with children,” said Tiny, looking excited.
“May you be blessed with children.” Seela, jealousy on her thin little face.
“May you be … blessed with … children.” Kara could barely get the words out. Her face creased with anguish. Her fingers trembled.
Pretty looked at her in astonishment. “What be wrong with you?”
Bonnie pushed forward. “Be you sick, Kara? What be your symptoms?”
“I’m not sick! Leave me alone!”
“Come here, Kara,” I said in the tone that all of the girls, and most of the younger men, obeyed instantly. I had been in charge of these girls since the pack acquired them, of Kara since she was four. Kara came to me. She had always been complicated, sweet-natured and hardworking (unlike lazy Pretty), but too excitable. Death distressed her too much, happiness elated her too much, beauty transported her too much. I have seen her in tears over a sunset.
“Do not spoil Pretty’s ceremony,” I said to her in a low voice, and she subsided.
Afterward, however, while the two mothers took Pretty aside for the traditional sex instruction that was hardly ever needed and the unBegun girls played with Jaden, I led Kara off the stage, to the back of the theater. “Sit.”
“Yes, Nurse. What is this place?”
“It was a theater. Kara, what troubles you?”
She looked away, looked down, looked everywhere but at me until I took her chin in my hand and made her face me. Then she blurted, “I don’t want to!”
“Don’t want to what?”
“Any of it! Begin, have a ceremony, bed with Mike and all them. Have a baby—I don’t want to!”
“Many girls are frightened at first.” I remembered my own first bedding, with a pack leader much less gentle than I suspected Mike would be. So long ago. Yet I had come to like sex, and right up until a few years ago, I had sometimes gone with Buddy off-list, until he was killed by that wild dog.
“I be frightened, yes. But I also don’t want to!”
“Is there something you want to do instead?” I was afraid she would say “nurse.” I already had Bonnie, and anyway, even if she proved infertile, Kara would not make a Nurse. No amount of hard work would make up for her lack of stability and brains.
“No.”
“What, then?” For girls there was only mother, nurse, or infertile bedmate, and the last became camp drudges with little respect, when packs kept infertile women at all. Our last such, Daisy, had run away. I didn’t like to imagine what had happened to her. Kara knew all this.
“I don’t know!” It was a wail of pure anguish. I had no time for this: a self-indulgent girl with no aim, merely obstruction of what was necessary. A woman did what she had to do, just as men did. I left her sitting in the tattered velvet chair and went back to Pretty. It was her day, not Kara’s.
Bonnie still stood, stony, beside Pretty’s flower-strewn chair.
Mike returned from the parley looking pleased, a rare look for him. The other pack, smaller than ours, was not only unwilling to go to war over the urban forest but was interested in trading, even in possible joint hunting and foraging trips. I knew without being told that Mike hoped to eventually unite the two packs and become chief of both. The men brought back gifts from the other pack. Evidently their base had heaps of things so sealed in plastic—blankets, pillows, even clothing—that no rats had gotten into them and they looked almost new. Each of the girls got a fluffy white robe stitched with “St. Regis Hotel.”
“Can’t we move to a hotel?” Lula cried, twirling around in hers.
“Too hard to defend,” Karl said. He reached up to catch Lula and pull her onto his lap. She giggled. Lula has always liked Karl; she maintained that she “knows” he fathered Jaden. Jaden did have his bright blue eyes.
We were all at Pretty’s ceremony feast in the common room, an underground room in what Grandmother remembered as the New York State Theater. The common room had a wooden floor, a curious wooden rail on three sides, and a smashed, unusable piano in one corner. The boys had swept up the huge amount of mirror glass that yesterday lay all around. Junie had spread blankets on the floor for the feast, which tasted wonderful. Rabbit shot that morning and roasted with wild onions over open fires built on the stone terrace in front of the Vivian Beaumont. Cans of beans that Eric had brought back from foraging. A salad of dandelion greens and the candy that Pretty so loved and I had been hoarding since winter: maple sap mixed with nuts. Every lantern we owned was lit, giving the room a romantic glow.
Mike eyed Pretty, who blushed and cast eyes at him. The younger men watched enviously. I didn’t have much sympathy for them. They were at the bottom of the sex list, of course, and, they didn’t get much. Too bad—they should have treated Bonnie better when they had her.
Besides Bonnie, two of the young men seemed unaware of the heavy scent of sex filling the common room. Guy and Jemmy kept giving me significant looks, and eventually I got up from my dinner and went to them. “Do you need me?”
“I have a pain,” Jemmy said, loud enough for Mike to hear. Jemmy was a terrible actor. His eyes shone, and every muscle in his body tensed with excitement. I had never seen anybody less in pain.
I went to Mike. “Jemmy is ill. I’m taking him to the sickroom to examine, in case it’s contagious.”
Mike nodded, too absorbed by Pretty to pay much attention.
Jemmy and I slipped out. Guy followed with a lantern. As soon as we were beyond earshot of the sullen guard—he was missing the feast—I said to Jemmy, “Well?”
“We want to show you something. Please come, Nurse!”
The pack had raised Jemmy since he was six and his mother died. He had a lively curiosity but, unlike Guy, Jemmy had never learned to read, although not because he shared the men’s usual scorn for reading as useless and feminine. Jemmy said that the letters jumped places in front of his eyes, which made no sense but seemed to be true, since otherwise he was intelligent. Too delicately built to ever be of much use to Mike, he could make any mechanical equipment function again. It was Jemmy who figured out how to get the generators we sometimes found to run on the fuel we also sometimes found. The generators never lasted long, and most of the machinery they were supposed to power had decayed or rusted beyond use, but every once in a while we got lucky. Until the fuel ran out.
“Is it another generator?” I asked.
“Half be that!” Jemmy said.
Guy added mysteriously, “No, one-third.”
But this arithmetic was too much for Jemmy, whose instincts about machinery were just that: instincts. He ignored Guy and pulled me along.
We went outside the building, across the square to the Vivian Beaumont, and to the rear of the building. It was dark out and there was a light drizzle, but the boys ignored it. I didn’t get much choice. In the little underground theater our single lantern cast a forlorn glow.
“You climb up there,” Jemmy said, pointing to the booth halfway up the wall. “The steps be gone, but I found a ladder.”
“I’m not going up a ladder,” I said, but of course I did. Their excitement was contagious. Also worrying: This was not the way Mike wanted his pack men to behave. In Mike’s mind, fighters spoke little and showed less.
I was no longer young nor agile, and the ladder was a trial. But, lit from above by the lantern Guy carried, I heaved myself into the small space. The first thing I saw was a pile of books. “Oh!”
“That’s not first,” Guy said gleefully, preventing me from snatching at one. “The other things first!”
I said, “Let go of those books!”
Jemmy, scampering up the ladder like a skinny squirrel, echoed, “The other things first!”
I demanded of Guy, “Where did you find the books?”
“Here.”
A noise filled the small space: another of Jemmy’s generators. I was far more interested in the books.
Jemmy said, “I can’t believe this still works! It be already connected or I don’t know how to do. Look!”
A flat window standing on a table flickered and glowed. A moment of surprise, and then the word came to me: teevee. Grandmother had told me about them. I never saw one work before, and when I was a child I confused teevee and teepee, so that I thought tiny people must live in the window, as we sometimes lived in teepees on summer forages.
They did.
She started out alone on the stage, except for words that appeared briefly below her:
PAS DE DEUX FROM THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS
MUSIC BY PAUL HINDEMITH
CHOREOGRAPHY BY GEORGE BALANCHINE
The girl wore tight, clinging clothes that Mike would never have permitted on his women: too inflaming for men far down the sex list. On her feet were flimsy pink shoes with pink ribbons and square toes. The girl raised one arm in a curve above her head and then raised her body up onto the ends of those pink shoes—how could she do that? Music started. She began to dance.