The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Dear Sarah ^{NANCY KRESS}

In some families, it coulda been just an argument. Or maybe a shunning. Not my family—they done murder for less. I got two second cousins doing time in Riverbend. Blood feuds.

So I told them by Skype.

Call me a coward. You don’t know Daddy, or Seth. Anyways, it warn’t like I wanted to do it. I just didn’t see no other way out of Brightwater and the life waiting for me there. And Daddy always said to use whatever you got. I was always the best shot anywhere around Brightwater. Shooting good is what I got.

And like I said, I couldn’t see no other choice.

“MaryJo! Where the hell you been?”

“I left a note, Daddy.”

“All it says is you be gone for a few days. Where are you?”

I took in a real deep breath. Just say it, Jo. His face filled the screen in the room the recruiter let me have to myself to make this call. She didn’t even seem worried I might steal something. Then Daddy stepped back and I saw our living room behind him, with its sprung tatty couch and magazine pictures on the walls. We piggyback on the Cranstons’ internet, which works most days.

“Daddy… you know there’s nothing for me in Brightwater now.”

He didn’t answer. Waiting. Mama moved into the screen behind him, then Seth and Sarah.

I said, “Nothing for any of us. I know we’ve always been there, but now things are different.”

I didn’t have to say what I meant. Daddy’s eyes got that look he gets when anybody mentions the aliens. Eight years now since the oil rigs closed, and the gas drilling, and most important to us, the coal mines. Everybody I know is out of work since the Likkies gave us the Q-energy. Only they didn’t really give it to us, they gave it to the rich guys in Washington and San Francisco and Seattle and Oklahoma City, who just got a whole lot richer selling it back to the country. “A trade partnership” they called it, but somehow people like us got left out of all the trading. We always do.

I stumbled on. “I want more, Daddy. You always said to use whatever you—”

“What did you do?” he said, and his voice was quiet thunder.

“I enlisted.”

Sarah cried out. She’s only eleven, she don’t understand. Seth, who’s a pretty good stump preacher, pointed his finger at me and started in. “‘Mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted, who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his hand against me!’”

Psalm four-something.

Mama said, “Did you sign anything? Come back and we’ll hide you!”

Jacob—and where did he come from? He shoulda been out digging bootleg coal for the stove—yelled, “Brightwater is good enough for the rest of us! We been here two hundred years!”

Mama said, all desperate, “MaryJo, pride goeth before a fall!”

Sarah: “Come home!”

Seth: “‘And the many will fall away and betray one another!’”

Jacob: “You always thought you were better than us!”

Mama: “Oh dear sweet Jesus, help this prodigal girl to see the light and—”

Then Daddy cut it all short with that voice of his. “You’re a traitor. To us and to your country.”

I cried, “I joined the United States Army! You fought in Afghanistan and Grandpa in—”

“Traitor. And not my daughter. I don’t never want to see your face again.”

A wail from Mama, and then the screen went black and dead, dead, dead.

The recruiter came back in. She was in a fancy uniform but her face was kind. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I warn’t about to talk on this with her. Anyways, she knew the situation. The whole fucking country knew the situation. If you have money, you’re glad the Likkies are here, changing up the economy and saving the environment. If you don’t have money, if you’re just working people, your job disappeared to the Likkies’ Q-energy and their factory ’bots and all the rest of it. So you starve. Or you join one of the terrorist groups trying to bring the Likkies down. Or, like me, you do what poor kids have always done, including Daddy and Grandpa—you join the army for a spell.

Only this time, the army was on the wrong side. The military was fighting our home-raised anti-Likkie terrorists in American cities, even on the moon base and in space. I was going to be defending my family’s enemy.

I went outside and got on the bus to go to basic training.

Basic warn’t too bad. I was at Fort Benning for OSUP, one stop unit training. I’m tough and I don’t need much sleep and after the first few days, nobody messed with me. The drill sergeants mostly picked on somebody else, and my battle buddy was okay, and silent. I had the highest rifle qualification score and so I got picked to fire the live round at AT4 training. The Claymore blew up with more noise and debris than anybody expected, but all I could think of was this: Daddy taught me to shoot, he should be proud of me. Only, of course, he warn’t.

I didn’t see no aliens at Fort Benning.

Once somebody suggested sniper school, and I was kinda interested until I found out it involved a lot of math. No way.

I had three days after OSUT before I had to report to my unit at Fort Drum. I checked into a motel and played video games. The last day, I called home—at least the phone warn’t cut off—and by a miracle, Sarah answered instead of anybody else.

“Hey, Squirt.”

“MaryJo?”

“Yeah. How you doing?”

“How are you? Where are you? Are you coming home now?”

“No. I’m going to my unit, in New York. Sarah—”

“In New York City?”

I heard the dazzle in her voice, and all at once my throat closed up. It was me who taught Sarah to shoot and about her period and all sorts of shit. I got out, “No, upcountry New York. Listen, you doing okay?” And then what I really wanted to ask: “They forgive me yet?”

Silence. Then a little whisper, “No. Oh, Jo, quit that army and them Likkies and come home! I miss you!”

“I can’t, Squirt. But I’ll send—”

“Gotta go Seth just come home. Bye!”

A sharp click on the line.

I spent my last night drunk.

The next day I got on my first plane ride and reported to Fort Drum. And right there was my first alien.

“Does anybody have any questions?”

Nobody did. The officer—a lieutenant colonel, the highest rank I ever expected to see talking right at us—stood in front of a hundred sixty FNGs—”fucking new guys”—talking about Likkies. Only of course he called them by their right name, Leckinites. I don’t know where the name come from or what it means; I mighta slept through that part. But I knew nearly everything else, because for a solid week we been learning about the aliens: their home planet and their biology and their culture and, a lot, how important their help was to fixing Earth’s problems with energy and environment and a bunch of other stuff. We seen pictures and movies and charts, and at night we used our personal hour to argue about them. Near as I could tell, about half the base thought the Likkies were great for humans. The other half was like me, knowing just how bad the aliens made it for folks on the bottom.

And now we were going to meet one for the first time.

“Are you sure you have no questions?” Colonel Jamison said, sounding like we shoulda had some. But in the army, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. “No? Then without further delay, let me introduce Mr. Granson. Tensh-hut!”

We all leapt to attention and the Likkie walked into the room. If its name was “Mr. Granson,” then mine was Dolly Parton. It was tall, like in the movies we seen, and had human-type arms and legs and head. (“This optimum symmetrical design is unsurprisingly replicated in various Terran mammalian species as well” one of our hand-outs read, whatever the fuck that means.) The Likkie had two eyes and a wide mouth with no lips, no hair or nose. It wore a loose white robe like pictures I seen of Arab sheiks, and there mighta had anything underneath. Its arms ended in seven tentacles each, its skin was sorta light purplish, and it wore a clear helmet like a fishbowl ’cause it can’t breathe our air. No oxygen tank and hose to lug around like old Grandpa Addams had when the lung cancer was getting him. The helmet someways turned our air into theirs. They’re smart bastards, I’ll give them that.

“Hello,” it said. “I am privileged to meet with you today.”

Real good English and not too much accent—I heard a lot worse at Fort Benning.

“My wish is to offer thanks for the help of the U.S. Army, including all of you, in protecting the partnership that we are here to forge between your people and mine. A partnership that will benefit us all.”

The guy next to me, Lopez, shifted in his seat. His family used to work at a factory that now uses Likkie ’bots instead. But Lopez kept his face empty.

The Likkie went on like that, in a speech somebody human musta wrote for him because it didn’t have no mistakes. At least the speechwriters still got jobs.

Afterward, there was a lot of bitching in the barracks about the speech, followed by a lot of arguing. I didn’t say nothing. But after lights out, the soldier in the next bunk, Drucker, whispered to me, “You don’t like the Likkies either, do you, Addams?”

I didn’t answer her. It was after lights-out. But for a long time I couldn’t sleep.

Fort Drum sucked. Snow and cold and it was almost April, for Chrissake. Back home, flowers would be blooming. Sarah would be barefoot in shorts.

She sent me a letter. She was way better’n me at writing.

“What’s that?” Drucker said. She was looking over my shoulder and I didn’t even hear her come up behind me.

“Nothing!” I said, folding the letter. But she already read it. She must read real fast.

“I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, Jo,” she said—that’s the way she talks. “But I have to say that Sarah—is she your younger sister?—sounds like a really smart kid. With the right ideas.”

Then Drucker looked at me long and serious. I wanted to punch her—for reading my letter, for talking fancy, for not being my family. I didn’t do none of that. Keeping my nose clean. I just said, “Go fuck yourself, Drucker.”

She only laughed.

And who said she gets to call me “Jo”?

Fort Drum was not just cold, it was boring. Drill and hike, hike and drill. But we warn’t there long. After a week, fifty of us had a half-hour to prepare to ship out, down to a city called Albany. Drucker was one of us. For days she’d been trying to friend around with me, and sometimes I let her. Usually I keep to myself, but listening to her took my mind off home, at least for a while.

“Where the fuck is Albany?” I said on the bus.

A guy in the seat behind me laughed. “Don’t you ever watch the news, Addams?”

“It’s the capital city of New York State,” Drucker said without sounding snotty, which was the other reason I let her hang around with me. She don’t ever act like she knows more’n me, though she does.

I gave the guy behind us the finger and lowered my voice. “What’s going on in Albany?”

Drucker said quietly, “It’s bad. You ever hear about the T-bocs?”

I shook my head. Our buses tore through the gates like it was fleeing demons. Wherever Albany was, the army wanted us there fast.

“The Take Back Our Country organization. Anti-alien terrorists, the largest and best armed and organized of all those groups. They’ve captured a warehouse outside Albany, big fortified place used to store explosives. The owners, a corporation, were in the process of moving the stuff out when the T-bocs took the building. They’ve got hostages in there along with the explosives.”

“And we’re going to take the building back?”

Drucker smiled. “Marines and US Rangers are going to take the building back, Addams. We’ll probably just be the outer perimeter guard. To keep away press and stupid civilians.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid myself. “Okay, then.”

“Thing is, some of the hostages are kids.”

“Kids?” I thought of Sarah. “Why were kids in a warehouse?”

“They weren’t. They were brought there. It was all timed just so. This is big.”

Big. Bigger than anything that ever happened to me, or might happen to me, in Brightwater. Then Drucker said something that made it bigger.

“Our kids, Jo. And three of theirs.”

Drucker was right, about every last thing. We were perimeter guards for a real big perimeter—half a mile around the warehouse. There was houses and train tracks and other buildings and trucks with no cabs and huge big dumpsters and a homeless tent town, and every last one of them had to be cleared of people. I was with a four-man stack, flushing out everybody who didn’t have enough sense to already leave, which was a lot of people. We cleared rooms and escorted out squatters and made tenants in the saggy houses pack up what they could carry and then leave. Some of them got angry, shouting that they had no place to go. Some of them cried. One man attacked with a sledge hammer, which didn’t get him nowhere. My sarge knew what he was doing—he cleared rooms in Iraq, where the enemy had more’n sledgehammers.

Drucker was right about something else, too. There were kids in there. Turns out that seven years ago, while Daddy and Seth and Jacob were losing their jobs in the mines and we got evicted from our house, the Likkies put some of their kids in special schools with our kids so they could all learn each other’s languages and grow up together just like there warn’t no difference between us and them. The T-bocs took that school and transported six kids to the warehouse. Seven bodyguards and five teachers at the school were dead. They mighta been pretty good bodyguards, but the T-bocs had military weapons.

“I told you it was big,” Drucker said.

“Yeah, you did.” We just spent twenty hours clearing buildings. Then fresh troops arrived to relieve us, more experienced soldiers. We’d been first just because we were closest. Rangers and Marines were there but they warn’t permitted to do nothing while the negotiators tried to talk the T-bocs down. Drucker and I were off-duty, laying on mats in a high school gym that was now a barracks. I had a shower in the locker room and I was so tired my bones felt like melting. It warn’t a bad feeling.

But Drucker wanted to talk.

“What do you think about all this, Jo?”

“I’m not thinking.”

“Well, start. Do you think the T-bocs are justified?”

“Justified? You mean, like, right to kidnap kids? How old are them kids, anyway?”

“Second graders. The humans are seven years old, two girls and a boy, all the children of VIPS. Who knows how old the Likkies are? Maybe they just live a real short time, like insects, and these so-called ‘kids’ are really adults halfway through their lives.”

“That warn’t what our lectures said.”

“Do you believe everything the army tells you?”

I raised up on one elbow and looked at her. In the half-light her eyes shone too bright, like she was using. Was she?

Drucker sat all the way up. We’d hauled our gym mats into a corner and nobody else could hear.

“Jo, you told me your family are all unemployed and on welfare because of the Likkies. I imagine that’s a deep shame to people like yours, isn’t it?”

“Shut up,” I said, ’cause she was right. Shame is what made Daddy and them so angry. All their choices got taken away by the aliens.

“But it’s not right,” she said, real soft. “This is supposed to be our country. These aliens are just more damn immigrants trying to take it away. Sometimes I think the army is on the wrong side. Do you ever think that, Jo?”

“Shut up,” I said again, ’cause I didn’t like hearing my thoughts coming from her mouth. “You using?”

“Yes. Want some?”

“No.”

“That’s all right. I just wanted the chance to express my thoughts, so thank you for listening. You’re a real friend.”

We warn’t friends. I shoulda said that, but I didn’t. I waited, ’cause it was clear she warn’t done. If she was trying to recruit me for something, I wanted to hear what.

But all she said was, “This is big,” and her voice gleamed with satisfaction like a gun barrel with fresh oil.

The standoff went on for a day, and then a week, and then two weeks. We had more soldiers. We had army choppers to keep away the press choppers. We had drones in the air, thicker than mosquitos in July. We had more negotiators—not that I ever saw them. My unit kept getting pushed farther and farther away from the warehouse as the perimeter got wider. More people got evacuated. None of them liked it.

But every night my unit moved back to the high school to sleep. I don’t know where the Special Forces guys slept, but I know they were antsy as hell, wanting to go in and take the objective. Which they couldn’t do because the T-bocs said they’d kill the kids.

“An interstellar incident,” Drucker said. “Maybe that’s what we need to get the Likkies off our planet. Blow the place to smithereens and they’ll think it’s too dangerous to stay on Earth.”

“Is that what you want?” I finally asked.

She only smiled. Then after that I didn’t see her much, because she started fucking somebody in off-duty hours. I don’t know who or where, and I didn’t care.

The whole thing couldn’t go on like that.

And it didn’t.

The night was like home, only not really ’cause all the city lights blotted the stars and it smelled like a city and under my boots was concrete instead of switchgrass. But the air had that spring softness like I hadn’t felt up here before, and that little spring breeze that made you just ache inside.

At home, Mama would be setting out tomato plants. Sarah would be picking wild strawberries. The fawns would be standing for the first time on spindly little legs. Last year me and Sarah got real close to one.

Coming off guard duty on the perimeter, I warn’t sleepy. I put my rifle in its sling and walked, careful to stay in the middle of the street where it was allowed. I passed a bar and a V-R playroom, both closed and boarded up. At the end of the allowed section, a rope marked another perimeter, this time around the old hotel where brass and negotiators and them stayed. It looked nice, with a awning over the door and big pots of fake flowers. They warn’t sleeping on gym mats.

Sarah’s letter was in my pocket. She didn’t send a second one, or I else didn’t get it. Was Jacob married yet? He—

Gunfire someplace behind me.

I hit the ground. Gunfire came from another place, off to my left. Then explosions, little ones, at a bunch of different places—pop pop pop. Somebody screamed.

Soldiers poured out of buildings. The Marines guarding the hotel raised their weapons. An officer barked orders but I couldn’t hear him because a flashbang went off and everything was noise and blinding light and confusion and people running.

I got to my feet and unslung my rifle, but then I didn’t know what to do with it, or myself. I warn’t even supposed to be here. I backed away, trying to make out what was happening, when another explosion went off, pretty close to the hotel.

When I could see again, a Likkie was running out of the hotel door, yelling. One of the Marines at the door was down. I didn’t see the other one. The Likkie ran right past me, high-tailing it to the warehouse, and I didn’t need no translator to know why it was there or what it was screaming. I seen that look on Mama’s face the time Sarah fell into the pond and got fished out half drowned. I seen it on Daddy’s face when Seth got injured in the mine. That Likkie had a kid in the warehouse and it was going in after it.

It was going to pass right by me. I already had my rifle raised. I wouldn’t even need to sight.

If you shoot an alien I bet Daddy would forgive you. Seth too. DO IT!!!

Then I saw Drucker.

She was supposed to be asleep in the gym. But here she was in full kit, her top half popping up from inside a dumpster, M4 swinging around, cheek against the stock. She warn’t that good a marksman, but she was good enough. All I had to do was nothing—let her do it for me. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but I never believed that horseshit. The Lord might have vengeance against tribes attacking Israel, but He ain’t interested in Likkies taking a living from people like us.

Choppers roared above, heading for the warehouse. Whoever set off that gunfire and explosives and flashbangs, whether they were our diversionary tactic or T-boc’s, the raid was going to happen now. Special Forces were going in and Marines were laying down covering fire. The noise and confusion was like Armageddon. But I warn’t part of that neither, warn’t at the center of it. People like me never was.

Drucker had her sight now. She stilled.

All I had to do was wait.

But—soldiers aren’t supposed to murder civilians, which that Likkie was. Soldiers in the US Army aren’t supposed to murder each other neither. It was all tangled up in my mind, only now it had to be one or the other. Or nothing.

I always been real fast. I sighted and squeezed. I got Drucker just before she fired, right in the head. She fell backwards into the dumpster.

A second later a Marine sort of surrounded the running Likkie and stopped it. A second after that, another Marine had me on the ground, M4 kicked away. “You move and I’ll blow your head off, motherfucker!” I didn’t move. He cuffed me and took my sidearm. When he yanked me to my feet, I somehow heard—over all the choppers, automatic fire, sirens, explosions—the rustle of Sarah’s letter in my pocket, louder than anything else.

I write Sarah from the brig at Fort Drum.

Special Forces took the warehouse. Sixteen troops died, and thirty-eight T-bocs. Two of the kids were killed during the rescue. One of ours, Kayla Allison Howell, seven years old, black hair and blue eyes, pink tee shirt with Hello Kitty on it. I seen pictures. One of the Likkie kids, a little bald purplish thing, whose name I can’t pronounce. They were shot in the head before a US Ranger shot the murderer. Later, my lawyer told me, some of the Special Forces who went into that room cried.

A whole bunch of important people said the raid was wrong, the army shoulda waited. The army said that under the circumstances, it had no choice. The arguing is red-hot and it don’t stop. Probably it will never stop.

I don’t know if they shoulda gone in or not. But I know this, now: There is always a choice, even for people who will never be at the center of nothing. Changes and choices, they go together, bound up like sticks for a bonfire that’s going to be lit no matter what.

Drucker made a choice when she joined the T-bocs, a choice to kill anything that made changes happen.

That Likkie outside the hotel, it chose to risk its life trying to get to its kid. And the Likkies are choosing to stay here, in the United States, instead of avenging their dead kid or else packing up and going home. In fact, more are coming. They have more plans for helping us with technology and shit. Saving the planet, they say, and politicians agree with them.

My family chose to give up.

What I did is earning me a court martial. But I chose long before the night of the raid. In the locker room of the high school I saw Drucker’s T-boc patch, hidden under her uniform. I saw it ’cause she wanted me to see it, wanted me to join them. I coulda reported it then, and I didn’t.

Did I choose wrong when I killed Drucker? Even now, even after all the thinking I do sitting here in my cell, even after my lawyer says I’ll get off because the evidence shows that Drucker was part of T-bocs, even after all that—I don’t know.

But I do know this—things change. Even things that look set in stone. Maybe someday, years from now, jobs or people or aliens or something will change enough that I can go home.

For now, I write a letter that might or might not get delivered.