After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

2035

Pete gaped at the Tesslie lying at Ravi’s feet. Or… was it lying? The thing was the squarish metal can he remembered, without clear head or feet or anything. He said, inanely, “How do you know it isn’t standing up instead of lying down?”

“Because I knocked it over!”

“Did it come out of the air in a bunch of golden sparks?”

“Yes!”

“It’s not moving. How do you know it’s still alive?”

“It won’t be if you fucking laser it!”

Pete didn’t move. Ravi leaped forward, grabbed Pete’s arm with both hands, and fumbled with the buckle on the wrister.

Ideas surged and eddied in Pete’s mind, even as he kept his eyes on the Tesslie. It lay still now, but Pete knew it wasn’t helpless. It was watching. Without eyes or anything, it was still watching to see what he and Ravi would do. And it was not helpless. The Tesslies had built this whole Shell! They had made Grab machinery to send the Six back to get kids and stuff! They had come from someplace else through the sky! One of them was not going to let a human laser him open. Ravi was crazy.

But even more, Julie’s words swirled in his brain. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” “Darwinian self-preservation.” “Gaia.” “We did it. We wrecked the Earth.” And “We humans always blame the wrong ones.”

Pete pushed Ravi away. Ravi said, “What the fuck? Give me the laser.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you can’t laser the bastard? I can! Give it to me, you wimp!”

“I don’t know… maybe the Tesslies… I don’t know!” It was a cry of anguish. We humans always blame the wrong ones.

Ravi, much stronger than Pete, knocked him to the ground and sat on him. Pete stuck his arm with the wrister behind his back. Ravi easily got it out, but he couldn’t unbuckle the wrister and also keep both Pete’s arms pinned. Pete flailed, wrenching his bad shoulder, hitting Ravi’s face, shoulder, anywhere he could reach. Ravi snarled at him, exposing the crooked stumps of the teeth that Pete had knocked out.

The Tesslie turned itself so it stood on a different side of its bucket-case, and waited quietly.

“Give it to me, you wimp!”

“No! McAllister said—”

“It took McAllister! It took them all, you fucking idiot! They’re prisoners! That’s why I—give it to me!” He smashed a fist into Pete’s face.

“Prisoners?” He could barely get the word out for pain, even though he’d turned his head in time for Ravi’s blow to hit him on the side of the jaw instead of on the mouth.

“Yes! The bastards took them all!”

“Petra?”

“Give it to me!”

“Took where?”

Ravi flipped Pete over and wrenched his arm behind his head. The pain was astonishing. Ravi got the wrister unbuckled, sprang off Pete, and aimed the laser at the Tesslie. Ravi fired.

Nothing happened.

Pete, gasping on the floor, saw the laser beam hit the Tesslie’s bucket-case. The red beam vanished. The Tesslie stood stolid and silent.

Ravi gave a low moan. Pete got to his feet. His vision blurred during the process, but he did it. He faced the Tesslie.

“Don’t hurt him, please. He doesn’t know. He thinks you destroyed everything.”

The Tesslie said and did nothing.

Pete blurted, “Did you?”

Nothing.

“Or was it really—” All of a sudden he couldn’t remember the weird name Julie had said. Gouda? Or was that the cheese Caity had once brought back from a Grab? Guide-a? Gaga? Gina?

“—us?”

The Tesslie rose a few inches into the air and moved past Pete, floating on nothing at all toward the corridor. A long ropelike metal arm shot out of its tin can, startling Pete. The arm flicked toward him, then pointed to the corridor. The Tesslie floated on, and Pete followed.

“I’m not going!” Ravi shouted. “I’m not!”

“Wimp,” Pete said.

In the corridor he picked up Alicia’s baby-bucket. She had started to fuss, working up to a full wail. The Tesslie floated on, toward the maze at the far end and then through its small rooms. Pete trailed behind because he needed McAllister and anyway he couldn’t think what else to do. What if they were all dead? What if he and this baby were going to their deaths?

That made no sense.

But, then, neither did anything else.

He heard Darlene first. She was singing at the top of her lungs, belting out a desperate stupid song in her scratchy voice: “‘Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war…’”

McAllister had told Darlene not to sing that song because wars were all over. Darlene had never listened. Now Pete could hear a baby wailing. Then McAllister’s voice, sharp and uncharacteristically angry: “Darlene, stop that!”

Darlene didn’t. The Tesslie and Pete rounded a corner in the maze and faced an open door.

They were all crowded into one small room. McAllister and Darlene and Eduardo stood in the front. Behind them huddled Caity, Paolo, Jenna, Terrell. The Grab children were penned in the corner, the babies lying on the bare metal floor. Two more Tesslies guarded the doorway. Pete ran past them to McAllister. “Are you hurt? Is anybody hurt? What happened?”

Caity said, “They brought us here! Like… like gerbils!”

Where were the gerbils? Then Pete saw them, trying to get out of a large bucket. They couldn’t. Tommy held the squirming Fuzz Ball. Tommy’s eyes were big as bucket bottoms.

McAllister said, “You Grabbed another child? Where’s Ravi?”

“He—”

The edges of the room began to shimmer with golden sparks.

McAllister ran forward, her big belly swaying. “No, please, not without Ravi—please!”

No response from any of the three Tesslies.

“Please! Listen, we’re so grateful for all you’ve done but if you’re really helping us again, we need everyone! We need Ravi!”

“That angel ain’t going to listen to you!” Darlene said, with all the bitterness of her bitter self. “Them cherubim are flaming swords! Don’t you know nothing?”

“Please,” McAllister said to the Tesslie. And then, “Ravi is fertile!”

The golden sparks stopped.

“Ueeuuggthhhg,” Caity said, which might have meant anything.

“Flaming swords!” Darlene shouted, and several children began to cry. McAllister whirled around and slapped Darlene. Pete gaped at McAllister; Darlene put her hand to her red cheek; Caity looked scared in a way that Caity never did; more children screamed.

A fourth Tesslie dragged Ravi into the room, its ropy metal arm wrapped around Ravi’s neck. Released, Ravi stumbled forward as if pushed. He fell into Jenna, who also went down with a cry of pain. Jenna’s fragile bones—

Pete had no time to pull Ravi off Jenna, or to pick up the crying Alicia, or to clutch at McAllister. The sparks enveloped all of them in a shower of gold, and then there was nothing.

It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t.

He lay on something hard in places and soft in others. The air felt warm and thick. Something gray shifted above him, far above him. Some noise, faint and rhythmic, sounded over and over in his ears. Something stirred behind him.

The cold retreated abruptly and Pete returned fully to himself. He sprawled Outside, beside Ravi and McAllister, and underneath Ravi was Jenna. He lay Outside, partly on rock and partly on some plant low and green and alive. Gray clouds blew overhead. Warm wind ruffled his hair. Dazed, he got to his feet, just as the others began to move.

They were all there, stirring on the ground. The Tesslies were gone. The Shell was gone. Piles of stuff lay on the ground in places where, he vaguely realized, it had all been lying when the Shell enclosed it: toys, blankets, food, tents, piles and piles of buckets. Pete turned around.

This was the view he’d had when he’d gone Outside through the funeral slot and then had gone around to the far side of the Shell. He stood on a high ridge of black rock. Below him the land sloped down to the sea. The whole long slope was a mixture of bare rock, green plants, red flowery bushes. A brownish river gushed down the hillside. Beyond, along the shore, the land flattened and gold-and-green plants grew more thickly a long way out, until the water began.

It was quiet Eduardo who spoke first. “Regenerated from wind-blown seeds, maybe. From… wherever survived. And those lupines are nitrogen-fixers, enriching the soil.”

McAllister said shakily, “There must still be ash in the air, it’s so thick, but it’s breathable… fresh water….” She put her hands over her face, all at once reminding Pete of Julie, in the last-ever Grab.

He didn’t want to remember Julie, not now. He wanted to shout, he wanted to cry, he wanted to run down the slope, he wanted to turn around and hit Ravi. He did none of those things. Instead he said, before he was going to do it, a single word. “Gaia.”

McAllister jerked her hands away from her face and turned to him sharply. “What?”

“Gaia. It’s a word the woman in the Grab said to me. Julie. Alicia’s mother.” He pointed at Alicia, who was now screaming with the full force of her lungs. Several other children also began to cry. Pete said some of Julie’s other words: “‘Self-regulating mechanisms.’ ‘Planetary Darwinian self-preservation.’ ‘Cleansing.’”

Eduardo drew a sharp breath. Now the other children were shouting or screaming or whimpering. Fuzz Ball barked and raced around in circles. Darlene started to sing something about Earth abiding. Jenna began to cry. Into the din Pete said, “We did it. Not the Tesslies. Us. That’s what Julie said.”

McAllister didn’t answer. She stared out at the water, which wasn’t all that bright but still hurt Pete’s eyes to look at. He could tell McAllister was thinking, but he couldn’t tell what. All at once she turned to look at him, and in her dark eyes he saw something he couldn’t name, except that he knew she felt it deeply.

Eduardo said to her, “The Gaia theory… It posited a self-regulating planet to keep conditions optimum for life. A planet that corrects any conditions that might threaten...” He didn’t finish.

McAllister said to Pete, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“We’ll do better this time.”

“Better at what?” Why didn’t he ever understand her?

But McAllister turned her beseeching look on Eduardo. “Our chances—”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Maybe we can. If the seeds take. If any of those grasses are domesticable grains. If enough marine life survived. If we’re in a tropical climate. I don’t know. Maybe we can.”

Can what? Before Pete could ask, McAllister’s face changed and she was herself again, issuing orders. “Ravi, you and Terrell and Caity and Pete start lugging all that stuff down to that flat, sheltered place by the river—do you see where I mean? Bring the tents first, it’s going to rain. And the food, all the food. Darlene, I’m sorry I slapped you. We can discuss it later. For now, try to get rations organized until Eduardo can determine which plants are edible. Eduardo, can you walk enough to find the best spot to put the soy into the ground? Paolo, you and Jenna are going to have to look after all the kids once we get them into tents—I’m sorry, but we can’t spare anyone else. Tommy, you help move the food to under cover, and after that I’m going to want you to bring Eduardo some different plants from farther down the slope. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes!” Tommy beamed at Pete. “You did make a big adventure!”

Pete clutched McAllister’s arm. “But I have to finish telling you what Julie—”

“Later,” McAllister said. “They’ll be time. There will be lots of time.”

Pete nodded. He raced with the others to where the Shell had been. The fertilizer machine was gone, the disinfectant and clean-water streams were gone, the Grab machinery was gone. Terrell and Pete each grabbed a rolled-up tent and staggered with it back down the slope. Darlene and Caity lugged buckets of soy stew from what had been the hot part of the farm. Over armfuls of canvas Pete spied Eduardo halfway down the incline to the sea, stooping to examine some low bushy plants.

“‘Abide with me,’” Darlene howled. “‘The darkness deepens’” until Caity told her to shut the fuck up.

For just a moment, Pete felt afraid. The Shell was all he’d ever known except for the Grabs, those terrifying jolts into places he didn’t belong. The Shell had been ugly and boring, but it had been home. Sort of. A cage-sort-of-home. And now—

Had the Tesslies really captured the Survivors, caged them, and twenty years later let them out because the Tesslies wanted to help? And what were they, anyway? Robots, aliens, Darlene’s angels, res-cuers—maybe not even McAllister would ever know.

The moment of fear passed. The Tesslies were gone. This was now. He was here.

A bird swooped overhead, and on the wind came the sweet smell of warm rain.