Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

INERTIA by Nancy Kress

At dusk the back of the bedroom falls off. One minute it’s a wall, exposed studs and cracked blue drywall, and the next it’s snapped-off two-by-fours and an irregular fence as high as my waist, the edges both jagged and furry, as if they were covered with powder. Through the hole a sickly tree pokes upward in the narrow space between the back of our barracks and the back of a barracks in E Block. I try to get out of bed for a closer look, but today my arthritis is too bad, which is why I’m in bed in the first place. Rachel rushes into the bedroom.

“What happened, Gram? Are you all right?”

I nod and point. Rachel bends into the hole, her hair haloed by California twilight. The bedroom is hers, too; her mattress lies stored under my scarred four-poster.

“Termites! Damn. I didn’t know we had them. You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. I was all the way across the room, honey. I’m fine.”

“Well—we’ll have to get Mom to get somebody to fix it.”

I say nothing. Rachel straightens, throws me a quick glance, looks away. Still I say nothing about Mamie, but in a sudden flicker from my oil lamp I look directly at Rachel, just because she is so good to look at. Not pretty, not even here Inside, although so far the disease has affected only the left side of her face. The ridge of thickened, ropy skin, coarse as old hemp, isn’t visible at all when she stands in right profile. But her nose is large, her eyebrows heavy and low, her chin a bony knob. An honest nose, expressive brows, direct gray eyes, chin that juts forward when she tilts her head in intelligent listening—to a grandmother’s eye, Rachel is good to look at. They wouldn’t think so, Outside. But they would be wrong.

Rachel says, “Maybe I could trade a lottery card for more drywall and nails, and patch it myself.”

“The termites will still be there.”

“Well, yes, but we have to do something.” I don’t contradict her. She is sixteen years old. “Feel that air coming in—you’ll freeze at night this time of year. It’ll be terrible for your arthritis. Come in the kitchen now, Gram—I’ve built up the fire.”

She helps me into the kitchen, where the metal wood-burning stove throws a rosy warmth that feels good on my joints. The stove was donated to the colony a year ago by who-knows-what charity or special interest group for, I suppose, whatever tax breaks still hold for that sort of thing. If any do. Rachel tells me that we still get newspapers, and once or twice I’ve wrapped vegetables from our patch in some fairly new-looking ones. She even says that the young Stevenson boy works a donated computer news net in the Block J community hall, but I no longer follow Outside tax regulations. Nor do I ask why Mamie was the one to get the wood-burning stove when it wasn’t a lottery month.

The light from the stove is stronger than the oil flame in the bedroom; I see that beneath her concern for our dead bedroom wall, Rachel’s face is flushed with excitement. Her young skin glows right from intelligent chin to the ropy ridge of disease, which of course never changes color. I smile at her. Sixteen is so easy to excite. A new hair ribbon from the donations repository, a glance from a boy, a secret with her cousin Jennie.

“Gram,” she says, kneeling beside my chair, her hands restless on the battered wooden arm, “Gram—there’s a visitor. From Outside. Jennie saw him.”

I go on smiling. Rachel—nor Jennie, either—can’t remember when disease colonies had lots of visitors. First bulky figures in contamination suits, then a few years later, sleeker figures in the sani-suits that took their place. People were still being interred from Outside, and for years the checkpoints at the Rim had traffic flowing both ways. But of course Rachel doesn’t remember all that; she wasn’t born. Mamie was only twelve when we were interred here. To Rachel, a visitor might well be a great event. I put out one hand and stroke her hair.

“Jennie said he wants to talk to the oldest people in the colony, the ones who were brought here with the disease. Hal Stevenson told her.”

“Did he, sweetheart?” Her hair is soft and silky. Mamie’s hair had been the same at Rachel’s age.

“He might want to talk to you!”

“Well , here I am.”

“But aren’t you excited? What do you suppose he wants?”

I’m saved from answering her because Mamie comes in, her boyfriend Peter Malone following with a string-bag of groceries from the repository.

At the first sound of the doorknob turning, Rachel gets up from beside my chair and pokes at the fire. Her face goes completely blank, although I know that part is only temporary. Mamie cries, “Here we are!” in her high, doll-baby voice, cold air from the hall swirling around her like bright water. “Mama darling—how are you feeling? And Rachel! You’ll never guess—Pete had extra depository cards and he got us some chicken! I’m going to make a stew!”

“The back wall fell off the bedroom,” Rachel says flatly. She doesn’t look at Peter with his string-crossed chicken, but I do. He grins his patient, wolfish grin. I guess that he won the depository cards at poker. His fingernails are dirty. The part of the newspaper I can see says ESIDENT CONFISCATES C.

Mamie says, “What do you mean, ‘fell off?’”

Rachel shrugs. “Just fell off. Termites.”

Mamie looks helplessly at Peter, whose grin widens. I can see how it will be: They will have a scene later, not completely for our benefit, although it will take place in the kitchen for us to watch. Mamie will beg prettily for Peter to fix the wall. He will demur, grinning. She will offer various smirking hints about barter, each hint becoming more explicit. He will agree to fix the wall. Rachel and I, having no other warm room to go to, will watch the fire or the floor or our shoes until Mamie and Peter retire ostentatiously to her room. It’s the ostentation that embarrasses us. Mamie has always needed witnesses to her desirability.

But Peter is watching Rachel, not Mamie. “The chicken isn’t from Outside, Rachel. It’s from that chicken-yard in Block B. I heard you say how clean they are.”

“Yeah,” Rachel says shortly, gracelessly.

Mamie rolls her eyes. “Say ‘thank you,’ darling. Pete went to a lot of trouble to get this chicken.”

“Thanks.”

“Can’t you say it like you mean it?” Mamie’s voice goes shrill.

“Thanks,” Rachel says. She heads towards our three-walled bedroom. Peter, still watching her closely, shifts the chicken from one hand to the other. The pressure of the string bag cuts lines across the chicken’s yellowish skin.

“Rachel Anne Wilson—”

“Let her go,” Peter says softly.

“No,” Mamie says. Between the five crisscrossing lines of disease, her face sets in unlovely lines. “She can at least learn some manners. And I want her to hear our announcement! Rachel, you just come right back out here this minute!”

Rachel returns from the bedroom; I’ve never known her to disobey her mother. She pauses by the open bedroom door, waiting. Two empty candle scones, both blackened by old smoke, frame her head. It has been since at least last winter that we’ve had candles for them. Mamie, her forehead creased in irritation, smiles brightly.

“This is a special dinner, all of you. Pete and I have an announcement. We’re going to get married.”

“That’s right,” Peter says. “Congratulate us.”

Rachel, already motionless, somehow goes even stiller. Peter watches her carefully. Mamie casts down her eyes, blushing, and I feet a stab of impatient pity for my daughter, propping up mid-thirties girlishness on such a slender reed as Peter Malone. I stare at him hard. If he ever touches Rachel… but I don’t really think he would. Things like that don’t happen anymore. Not Inside.

“Congratulations,” Rachel mumbles. She crosses the room and embraces her mother, who hugs her back with theatrical fervor. In another minute, Mamie will start to cry. Over her shoulder I glimpse Rachel’s face, momentarily sorrowing and loving, and I drop my eyes.

“Well! This calls for a toast!” Mamie cries gaily. She winks, makes a clumsy pirouette, and pulls a bottle from the back shelf of the cupboard Rachel got at the last donations lottery. The cupboard looks strange in our kitchen: gleaming white lacquer, vaguely Oriental-looking, amid the wobbly chairs and scarred table with the broken drawer no one has ever gotten around to mending. Mamie flourishes the bottle, which I didn’t know was there. It’s champagne.

What had they been thinking, the Outsiders who donated champagne to a disease colony? Poor devils, even if they never have anything to celebrate… Or Here’s something they won’t know what to do with… Or Better them than me—as long as the sickies stay Inside… It doesn’t really matter.

“I just love champagne!” Mamie cries feverishly; I think she has drunk it once. “And oh look—here’s someone else to help us celebrate! Come in, Jennie—come in and have some champagne!”

Jennie comes in, smiling. I see the same eager excitement that animated Rachel before her mother’s announcement. It glows on Jennie’s face, which is beautiful. She has no disease on her hands or her face. She must have it somewhere, she was born Inside, but one doesn’t ask that. Probably Rachel knows. The two girls are inseparable. Jennie, the daughter of Mamie’s dead husband’s brother, is Rachel’s cousin, and technically Mamie is her guardian. But no one pays attention to such things anymore, and Jennie lives with some people in a barracks in the next Block, although Rachel and I asked her to live here. She shook her head, the beautiful hair so blonde it’s almost white bouncing on her shoulders, and blushed in embarrassment, painfully not looking at Mamie.

“I’m getting married, Jennie,” Mamie says, again casting down her eyes bashfully. I wonder what she did, and with whom, to get the champagne.

“Congratulations!” Jennie says warmly. “You, too, Peter.”

“Call me Pete,” he says, as he has said before. I catch his hungry look at Jennie. She doesn’t, but some sixth sense—even here, even Inside—makes her step slightly backwards. I know she will go on calling him ‘Peter.’

Mamie says to Jennie, “Have some more champagne. Stay for dinner.”

With her eyes Jennie measures the amount of champagne in the bottle, the size of the chicken bleeding slightly on the table. She measures unobtrusively, and then of course she lies. “I’m sorry, I can’t—we ate our meal at noon today. I just wanted to ask if I could bring someone over to see you later, Gram. A visitor.” Her voice drops to a hush, and the glow is back. “From Outside.”

I look at her sparkling blue eyes, at Rachel’s face, and I don’t have the heart to refuse. Even though I can guess, as the two girls can not, how the visit will be. I am not Jennie’s grandmother, but she has called me that since she was three. “All right.”

“Oh, thank you!” Jennie cries, and she and Rachel look at each other with delight. “I’m so glad you said yes, or else we might never get to talk to a visitor up close at all!”

“You’re welcome,” I say. They are so young. Mamie looks petulant; her announcement has been upstaged. Peter watches Jennie as she impulsively hugs Rachel. Suddenly I know that he too is wondering where Jennie’s body is diseased, and how much. He catches my eye and looked at the floor, his dark eyes lidded, half ashamed. But only half. A log cackles in the wooden stove, and for a brief moment the fire flares.

The next afternoon Jennie brings the visitor. He surprises me immediately: he isn’t wearing a sani-suit, and he isn’t a sociologist.

In the years following the internments, the disease colonies had a lot of visitors. Doctors still hopeful of a cure for the thick gray ridges of skin that spread slowly over a human body—or didn’t, nobody knew why. Disfiguring. Ugly. Maybe eventually fatal. And communicable. That was the biggie: communicable. So doctors in sani-suits came looking for causes or cures. Journalists in sani-suits came looking for stories with four-color photo spreads. Legislative fact-finding committees in sani-suits came looking for facts, at least until Congress took away the power of colonies to vote, pressured by taxpayers who, increasingly pressured themselves, resented our dollar-dependent status. And the sociologists came in droves, minicams in hand, ready to record the collapse of the ill-organized and ill colonies into street-gang, dog-eat-dog anarchy.

Later, when this did not happen, different sociologists came in later-model sani-suits to record the reasons why the colonies were not collapsing on schedule. All these groups went away dissatisfied. There was no cure, no cause, no story, no collapse, no reasons.

The sociologists hung on longer than anybody else. Journalists have to be timely and interesting, but sociologists merely have to publish. Besides, everything in their cultural tradition told them that Inside must sooner or later degenerate into war zones: Deprive people of electricity (power became expensive), of municipal police (who refused to go Inside), of freedom to leave, of political clout, of jobs, of freeways and movie theatres and federal judges and state administered elementary school accreditation—and you get unrestrained violence to just survive. Everything in the culture said so. Bombed-out inner cities. Lord of the Flies. The Chicago projects. Western movies. Prison memoirs. The Bronx. East L.A. Thomas Hobbes. The sociologists knew.

Only it didn’t happen.

The sociologists waited. And Inside we learned to grow vegetables and raise chickens who, we learned, will eat anything. Those of us with computer knowledge worked real jobs over modems for a few years—maybes it was as long as a decade—before the equipment became too obsolete and unreplaced. Those who had been teachers organized classes among the children, although the curriculum, I think, must have gotten simpler every year: Rachel and Jennie don’t seem to have much knowledge of history or science. Doctors practiced with medicines donated by corporations for the tax write-offs, and after a decade or so they began to train apprentices. For a while—it might have been a long while—we listened to radios and watched TV. Maybe some people still do, if we have any working ones donated from Outside.

Eventually the sociologists remembered older models of deprivation and discrimination and isolation from the larger culture: Jewish shtetls. French Huguenots. Amish farmers. Self-sufficient models, stagnant but uncollapsed. And while they were remembering, we held goods lotteries, and took on apprentices, and rationed depository food according to who needed it, and replaced our broken-down furniture with other broken-down furniture, and got married and bore children. We paid no taxes, fought no wars, wielded no votes, provided no drama. After a while—a long while—the visitors stopped coming. Even the sociologists.

But here stands this young man, without a sani-suit, smiling from brown eyes under thick dark hair and taking my hand. He doesn’t wince when he touches the ropes of disease. Nor does he appear to be cataloguing the kitchen furniture for later recording: three chairs, one donated imitation Queen Anne and one Inside genuine Joe Kleinschmidt; the table; the wood stove; the sparkling new Oriental lacquered cupboard; plastic sink with hand pump connected to the reservoir pipe from Outside; woodbox with donated wood stamped “Gift of Boise-Cascade”; two eager and intelligent and loving young girls he had better not try to patronize as diseased freaks. It has been a long time, but I remember.

“Hello, Mrs. Pratt. I’m Tom McHabe. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me.”

I nod. “What are we going to talk about, Mr. McHabe? Are you a journalist?”

“No. I’m a doctor.”

I didn’t expect that. Nor do I expect the sudden strain that flashes across his face before it’s lost in another smile. Although it is natural enough that strain should be there: Having come Inside, of course, he can never leave. I wonder where he picked up the disease. No other new cases have been admitted to our colony for as long as I could remember. Had they been taken, for some Outside political reason, to one of the other colonies instead?

McHabe says, “I don’t have the disease, Mrs. Pratt.”

“Then why on earth—”

“I’m writing a paper on the progress of the disease in long-established colony residents. I have to do that from Inside, of course,” he says, and immediately I know he is lying. Rachel and Jennie, of course, do not. They sit one on each side of him like eager birds, listening.

“And how will you get this paper out once it’s written?” I said.

“Short-wave radio. Colleagues are expecting it,” but he doesn’t quite meet my eyes.

“And this paper is worth permanent internment?”

“How rapidly did your case of the disease progress?” he says, not answering my question. He looks at my face and hands and forearms, an objective and professional scrutiny that makes me decide at least one part of his story is true. He is a doctor.

“Any pain in the infected areas?”

“None.”

“Any functional disability or decreased activity as a result of the disease?” Rachel and Jennie look slightly puzzled; he’s testing me to see if I understand the terminology.

“None.”

“Any change in appearance over the last few years in the first skin areas to be affected? Changes in colour or tissue density or size of the thickened ridges?”

“None.”

“Any other kinds of changes I haven’t thought to mention?”

“None.”

He nods and rocks back on his heels. He’s cool, for someone who is going to develop non-dysfunctional ropes of disease himself. I wait to see if he’s going to tell me why he’s really here. The silence lengthens. Finally McHabe says, “You were a CPA,” at the same time that Rachel says, “Anyone want a glass of ’ade?”

McHabe accepts gladly. The two girls, relieved to be in motion, busy themselves pumping cold water, crushing canned peaches, mixing the ’ade in a brown plastic pitcher with a deep wart on one side where it once touched the hot stove.

“Yes,” I say to McHabe, “I was a CPA. What about it?”

“They’re outlawed now.”

“CPAs? Why? Staunch pillars of the establishment,” I say, and realize how long it’s been since I used words like that. They taste metallic, like old tin.

“Not anymore. IRS does all tax computations and sends every household a customized bill. The calculations on how they reach your particular customized figure is classified. To prevent foreign enemies from guessing at revenue available for defense.”

“Ah.”

“My uncle was a CPA.”

“What is he now?”

“Not a CPA,” McHabe says. He doesn’t smile. Jennie hands glasses of ’ade to me and then to McHabe, and then he does smile. Jennie drops her lashes and a little colour steals into her cheeks. Something moves behind McHabe’s eyes. But it’s not like Peter; not at all like Peter.

I glance at Rachel. She doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. She isn’t jealous, or worried, or hurt. I relax a little.

McHabe says to me. “You also published that artical.”

“How do you happen to know that?”

Again he doesn’t answer me. “It’s an unusual combination of abilities, accounting and history writing.”

“I suppose so,” I say, without interest. It was so long ago. Rachel says to McHabe, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Outside, do you have medicines that will cure wood of termites?”

Her face is deadly serious. McHabe doesn’t grin, and I admit—reluctantly—that he is likable. He answers her courteously. “We don’t cure the wood, we do away with the termites. The best way is to build with wood saturated with creosote, a chemical they don’t like, so that they don’t get into the wood in the first place. But there must be chemicals that will kill them after they’re already there. I’ll ask around and try to bring you something on my next trip Inside.”

His next trip Inside. He drops this bombshell as if easy passage In and Out were a given. Rachel’s and Jennie’s eyes grow wide; they both look at me. McHabe does, too, and I see that his look is a cool scrutiny, an appraisal of my reaction. He expects me to ask for details, or maybe even—it’s been a long time since I thought in these terms, and it’s an effort—to become angry at him for lying. But I don’t know whether or not he’s lying, and at any rate, what does it matter? A few people from Outside coming into the colony—how could it affect us? There won’t be large immigration, and no emigration at all.

I say quietly, “Why are you really here, Dr. McHabe?”

“I told you, Mrs. Pratt. To measure the progress of the disease.” I say nothing. He adds, “Maybe you’d like to hear more about how it is now Outside.”

“Not especially.”

“Why not?”

I shrug. “They leave us alone.”

He weighs me with his eyes. Jennie says timidly, “I’d like to hear more about Outside.” Before Rachel can add “Me, too,” the door flings violently open and Mamie backs into the room, screaming into the hall behind her.

“And don’t ever come back! If you think I’d ever let you touch me again after screwing that… that… I hope she’s got a diseased twat and you get it on your—” She sees McHabe and breaks off, her whole body jerking in rage. A soft answer from the hall, the words unintelligible from my chair by the fire, makes her gasp and turn even redder. She slams the door, bursts into tears, and runs into her bedroom, slamming that door as well.

Rachel stands up. “Let me, honey,” I say, but before I can rise—my arthritis is much better—Rachel disappears into her mother’s room. The kitchen rings with embarrassed silence.

Tom McHabe rises to leave. “Sit down, Doctor,” I say, hoping, I think, that if he remains Mamie will restrain her hysterics—maybe—and Rachel will emerge sooner from her mother’s room.

McHabe looks undecided. Then Jennie says, “Yes, please stay. And would you tell us—” I see her awkwardness, her desire to not sound stupid “—about how people do Outside?”

He does. Looking at Jennie but meaning me, he talks about the latest version of martial law, about the failure of the National Guard to control protestors against the South American war until they actually reached the edge of the White House electro-wired zone; about the growing power of the Fundamentalist underground that the other undergrounds—he uses the plural—call “the God gang.” He tells us about the industries losing out steadily to Korean and Chinese competitors, the leaping unemployment rate, the ethnic backlash, the cities in flames. Miami. New York. Los Angeles—these had been rioting for years. Now it’s Portland, St. Louis, Atlanta, Phoenix. Grand Rapids burning. It’s hard to picture.

I say, “As far as I can tell, donations to our repositories haven’t fallen off.”

He looks at me again with that shrewd scrutiny, weighing something I can’t see, then touches the edge of the stove with one boot. The boot, I notice, is almost as old and scarred as one of ours. “Korean-made stove. They make nearly all the donations now. Public relations. Even a lot of martial-law Congressmen had relatives interred, although they won’t admit it now. The Asians cut deals warding off complete protectionism, although of course your donations are only a small part of that. But just about everything you get Inside is Chink or Splat.” He uses the words casually, this courteous young man giving me the news from such a liberal slant, and that tells me more about the Outside than all his bulletins and summaries.

Jennie says haltingly, “I saw… I think it was an Asian man. Yesterday.”

“Where?” I say sharply. Very few Asian Americans contract the disease; something else no one understands. There are none in our colony.

“At the Rim. One of the guards. Two other men were kicking him and yelling names at him—we couldn’t hear too clearly over the intercom boxes.”

“We? You and Rachel? What were you two doing at the Rim?” I say, and heard my own tone. The Rim, a wide empty strip of land, is electro-mined and barb-wired to keep us communicables Inside. The Rim is surrounded by miles of defoliated and disinfected land, poisoned by preventive chemicals, but even so it’s patrolled by unwilling soldiers who communicate with the Inside by intercoms set up every half-mile on both sides of the barbed wire. When the colony used to have a fight or a rape or—once, in the early years—a murder, it happened on the Rim. When the hateful and the hating came to hurt us because before the elecro-wiring and barbed wire we were easy targets and no police would follow them Inside, the soldiers, and sometimes our men as well, stopped them at the Rim. Our dead are buried near the Rim. And Rachel and Jennie, dear gods, at the Rim…

“We went to ask the guards over the intercom boxes if they knew how to stop termites,” Jennie says logically. “After all, their work is to stop things, germs and things. We thought they might be able to tell us how to stop termites. We thought they might have special training in it.”

The bedroom door opens and Rachel comes out, her young face drawn. McHabe smiles at her, and then his gaze returns to Jennie.”I don’t think soldiers are trained in stopping termites, but I’ll definitely brim?

On his second visit to me six days later, just before the Block dance, Tom McHabe seems different. I’d forgotten that there are people who radiate such energy and purpose that they seem to set the very air tingling. He stands with his legs braced slightly apart, flanked by Rachel and Jennie, both dressed in their other skirts for the dance. Jennie has woven a red ribbon through her blonde curls; it glows like a flower. McHabe touches her lightly on the shoulder, and I realize from her answering look what must be happening between them. My throat tightens.

“I want to be honest with you, Mrs. Pratt. I’ve talked to Jack Stevenson and Mary Kramer, as well as some others in Blocks C and E, and I’ve gotten a feel for how you live here. A little bit, anyway. I’m going to tell Mr. Stevenson and Mrs. Kramer what I tell you, but I wanted you to be first.”

“Why?” I say, more harshly than I intend. Or think I intend.

He isn’t fazed. “Because you’re one of the oldest survivors of the disease. Because you had a strong education Outside. Because your daughter’s husband died of axoperidine.”

At the same moment that I realize what McHabe is going to say next, I realize too that Rachel and Jennie have already heard it. They listen to him with the slightly open-mouthed intensity of children hearing a marvellous but familiar tale. But do they understand? Rachel wasn’t present when her father finally died, gasping for air his lungs couldn’t use.

McHabe, watching me, says, “There’s been a lot of research on the disease since those deaths, Mrs. Pratt.”

“No. There hasn’t. Too risky, your government said.”

I see that he caught the pronoun. “Actual administration of any cures is illegal, yes. To minimize contact with communicables.”

“So how has this ‘research’ been carried on?”

“By doctors willing to go Inside and not come out again. Data is transmitted out by laser. In code.”

“What clean doctor would be willing to go Inside and not come out again?”

McHabe smiles; again I’m struck by that quality of spontaneous energy. “Oh, you’d be surprised. We had three doctors inside the Pennsylvania colony. One past retirement age. Another, an old-style Catholic, who dedicated his research to God. A third nobody could figure out, a dour persistent guy who was a brilliant researcher.”

Was. “And you.”

“No,” McHabe says quietly. “I go in and out.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They’re dead.” He makes a brief aborted movement with his right hand and I realize that he is, or was, a smoker. How long since I had reached like that for a non-existent cigarette? Nearly two decades. Cigarettes are not among the things people donate; they’re too valuable. Yet I recognize the movement still. “Two of the three doctors caught the disease. They worked on themselves as well as volunteers. Then one day the government intercepted the relayed data and went in and destroyed everything.”

“Why?” Jennie asks.

“Research on the disease is illegal. Everyone Outside is afraid of a leak: a virus somehow getting out on a mosquito, a bird, even as a spore.”

“Nothing has gotten out in all these years,” Rachel says.

“No. But the government is afraid that if researchers start splicing and intercutting genes, it could make viruses more viable. You don’t understand the Outside, Rachel. Everything is illegal. This is the most repressive period in American history. Everyone’s afraid.”

“You’re not,” Jennie says, so softly I barely hear her. McHabe gives her a smile that twists my heart.

“Some of us haven’t given up. Research goes on. But it’s all underground, all theoretical. And we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that the virus doesn’t just affect the skin. There are—”

“Be quiet,” I say, because I see that he’s about to say something important. “Be quiet a minute. Let me think.”

McHabe waits. Jennie and Rachel look at me, that glow of suppressed excitement on them both. Eventually I find it. “You want something, Dr. McHabe. All this research wants something from us besides pure scientific joy. With things Outside as bad as you say, there must be plenty of diseases Outside you could research without killing yourself, plenty of need among your own people—” he nods, his eyes gleaming “—but you’re here. Inside. Why? We don’t have any more new or interesting symptoms, we barely survive, the Outside stopped caring what happened to us a long time ago. We have nothing. So why are you here?”

“You’re wrong, Mrs. Pratt. You do have something interesting going on here. You have survived. Your society has regressed but not collapsed. You’re functioning under conditions where you shouldn’t have.”

The same old crap. I raise my eyebrows at him. He stares into the fire and says quietly, “To say Washington is rioting says nothing. You have to see a twelve-year-old hurl a homemade bomb, a man sliced open from neck to crotch because he still has a job to go to and his neighbour doesn’t, a three-year-old left to starve because someone abandoned her like an unwanted kitten… You don’t know. It doesn’t happen Inside.”

“We’re better than they are,” Rachel says. I look at my grandchild. She says it simply, without self-aggrandizement, but with a kind of wonder. In the firelight the thickened gray ropes of skin across her cheek glow dull maroon.

McHabe said, “Perhaps you are. I started to say earlier that we’ve learned that the virus doesn’t affect just the skin. It alters neurotransmitter receptor sites in the brain as well. It’s a relatively slow transformation, which is why the flurry of research in the early years of the disease missed it. But it’s real, as real as the faster site-capacity transformations brought about by, say, cocaine. Are you following me, Mrs. Pratt?”

I nod. Jennie and Rachel don’t look lost, although they don’t know any of this vocabulary, and I recognize that McHabe must have explained all this to them,

“As the disease progresses to the brain, the receptors which receive excitory transmitters slowly become harder to engage, and the receptors which receive inhibiting transmitters become easier to engage.”

“You mean that we become stupider.”

“Oh, no! Intelligence is not affected at all. The results are emotional and behavioural, not intellectual. You become—all of you—calmer. Disinclined to action or innovation. Mildly but definitely depressed.”

The fire burns down. I pick up the poker, bent slightly where someone once tried to use it as a crowbar, and poke at the log, which is a perfectly shaped moulded-pulp synthetic stamped “Donated by Weyerhaeuser-Seyyed.”

“I don’t feel depressed, young man.”

“It’s a depression of the nervous system, but a new kind—without the hopelessness usually associated with clinical depression.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Really? With all due courtesy, when was the last time you—or any of the older Block leaders—pushed for any significant change in how you do things Inside?”

“Sometimes things cannot be constructively changed. Only accepted. That’s not chemistry, its reality.”

“Not Outside,” McHabe says grimly. “Outside they don’t change constructively or accept. They get violent. Inside, you’ve had almost no violence since the early years, even when your resources tightened again and again. When was the last time you tasted butter, Mrs. Pratt, or smoked a cigarette, or had a new pair of jeans? Do you know what happens Outside when consumer goods become unavailable and there are no police in a given area? But Inside you just distribute whatever you have as fairly as you can, or make do without. No looting, no rioting, no cancerous envy. No one Outside knew why. Now we do.”

“We have envy.”

“But it doesn’t erupt into anger.”

Each time one of us speaks, Jennie and Rachel turn their heads to watch, like rapt spectators at tennis. Which neither of them has ever seen. Jennie’s skin glows like pearl.

“Our young people aren’t violent either, and the disease hasn’t advanced very far in some of them.”

“They learn how to behave from their elders—just like kids everywhere else.”

“I don’t feel depressed.”

“Do you feel energetic?”

“I have arthritis.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

Again that restless, furtive reach for a non-existent cigarette. But his voice is quiet. “How long did it take you to get around to applying that insecticide I got Rachel for the termites? She told me you forbid her to do it, and I think you were right; it’s dangerous stuff. How many days went by before you or your daughter spread it around?”

The chemical is still in its can.

“How much anger are you feeling now, Mrs. Pratt?” he goes on. “Because I think we understand each other, you and I, and that you guess now why I’m here. But you aren’t shouting or ordering me out of here or even telling me what you think of me. You’re listening, and you’re doing it calmly, and you’re accepting what I tell you even though you know what I want you to—”

The door opens and he breaks off. Mamie flounces in, followed by Peter. She scowls and stamps her foot. “Where were you, Rachel? We’ve been standing outside waiting for you all for ten minutes now! The dance has already started!”

“A few more minutes, Mama. We’re talking.”

“Talking? About what? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” McHabe says. “I was just asking your mother some questions about life Inside. I’m sorry we took so long.”

“You never ask me questions about life Inside. And besides, I want to dance!”

McHabe says, “If you and Peter want to go ahead, I’ll bring Rachel and Jennie.

Mamie chews her bottom lip. I suddenly know that she wants to walk up the street to the dance between Peter and McHabe, an arm linked with each, the girls trailing behind. McHabe meets her eyes steadily.

“Well, if that’s what you want,” she says pettishly. “Come on, Pete!” She closes the door hard.

I look at McHabe, unwilling to voice the question in front of Rachel, trusting him to know the argument I want to make. He does. “In clinical depression, there’s always been a small percentage for whom the illness is manifested not as passivity but as irritability. It may be the same. We don’t know.”

“Gram,” Rachel says, as if she can’t contain herself any longer, “he has a cure.”

“For the skin manifestation only,” McHabe says quickly, and I see that he wouldn’t have chosen to blurt it out that way. Not for the effects on the brain.”

I say, despite myself, “How can you cure one without the other?”

He runs his hand through his hair. Thick, brown hair. I watch Jennie watch his hand. “Skin tissue and brain tissue aren’t alike, Mrs. Pratt. The virus reaches both the skin and the brain at the same time, but the changes to brain tissue, which is much more complex, take much longer to detect. And they can’t be reversed-nerve tissue is non-regenerative. If you cut your fingertip, it will eventually break down and replace the damaged cells to heal itself. Shit, if you’re young enough, you can grow an entire new fingertip. Something like that is what we think our cure will stimulate the skin to do.

“But if you damage your cortex, those cells are gone forever. And unless another part of the brain can learn to compensate, whatever behaviour those cells governed is also changed forever.”

“Changed into depression, you mean.”

“Into calmness. Into restraint of action… The country desperately needs restraint, Mrs. Pratt.”

“And so you want to take some of us Outside, cure the skin ropes, and let the depression spread: the ‘restraint,’ the ‘slowness to act’…”

“We have enough action out there. And no one can control it—it’s all the wrong kind. What we need now is to slow everything down a little—before there’s nothing left to slow down.”

“You’d infect a whole population—”

“Slowly. Gently. For their own good—”

“Is that up to you to decide?”

“Considering the alternative, yes. Because it works. The colonies work, despite all your deprivations. And they work because of the disease!”

“Each new case would have skin ropes—”

“Which we’ll then cure.”

“Does your cure work, Doctor? Rachel’s father died of a cure like yours!”

“Not like ours,” he says, and I hear in his voice the utter conviction of the young. Of the energetic. Of the Outside. “This is new, and medically completely different. This is the right strain.”

“And you want me to try this new right strain as your guinea pig.”

There is a moment of electric silence. Eyes shift: gray, blue, brown. Even before Rachel rises from her stool or McHabe says, “We think the best chances to avoid scarring are with young people without heavy skin manifestations,” I know. Rachel puts her arms around me. And Jennie—Jennie with the red ribbon woven in her hair, sitting on her broken chair as on a throne, Jennie who never heard of neurotransmitters or slow viruses or risk calculations-says simply, “It has to be me,” and looks at McHabe with eyes shining with love.

I say no. I send McHabe away and say no. I reason with both girls and say no. They look unhappily at each other, and I wonder how long it will be before they realize they can act without permission, without obedience. But they never have.

We argue for nearly an hour, and then I insist they go on to the dance, and that I go with them. The night is cold. Jennie puts on her sweater, a heavy hand-knitted garment that covers her shapelessly from neck to knees. Rachel drags on her coat, a black donated synthetic frayed at cuffs and hem. As we go out the door, she stops me with a hand on my arm.

“Gram—why did you say no?”

“Why? Honey, I’ve been telling you for an hour. The risk, the danger.

“Is it that? Or—” I can feel her in the darkness of the hall, gathering herself together “—or is it—don’t be mad, Gram, please don’t be mad at me—is it because the cure is a new thing, a change? A… different thing you don’t want because it’s exciting? Like Tom said?”

“No, it isn’t that,” I say, and feel her tense beside me, and for the first time in her life I don’t know what the tensing means.

We go down the street towards Block B. There’s a moon and stars, tiny high pinpoints of cold light. Block B is further lit by kerosene lamps and by torches stuck in the ground in front of the peeling barracks walls that form the cheerless square. Or does it only seem cheerless because of what McHabe said? Could we have done better than this blank utilitarianism, this subdued bleakness-this peace? Before tonight, I wouldn’t have asked.

I stand in the darkness at the head of the street, just beyond the square, with Rachel and Jennie. The band plays across from me, a violin, guitar, and trumpet with one valve that keeps sticking. People bundled in all the clothes they own ring the square, clustering in the circles of light around the torches, talking in quiet voices. Six or seven couples dance slowly in the middle of the barren earth, holding each other loosely and shuffling to a plaintive version of “Starships and Roses.” The song was a hit the year I got the disease, and then had a revival a decade later, the year the first manned expedition left for Mars. The expedition was supposed to set up a colony.

Are they still there?

We had written no new songs.

Peter and Mamie circle among the other couples. “Starships and Roses” ends and the band begins “Yesterday.” A turn brings Mamie’s face briefly into full torchlight: it’s clenched and tight, streaked with tears.

“You should sit down, Gram,” Rachel says. This is the first time she’s spoken to me since we left the barracks. Her voice is heavy but not angry, and there is no anger in Jennie’s arm as she sets down the three-legged stool she carried for me. Neither of them is ever really angry.

Under my weight the stool sinks unevenly into the ground. A boy, twelve or thirteen years old, comes up to Jennie and wordlessly holds out his hand. They join the dancing couples. Jack Stevenson, much more arthritic than I, hobbles towards me with his grandson Hal by his side.

“Hello, Sarah. Been a long time.”

“Hello, Jack.” Thick disease ridges cross both his cheeks and snakes down his nose. Once, long ago, we were at Yale together.

“Hal, go dance with Rachel,” Jack says. “Give me that stool first.” Hal, obedient, exchanges the stool for Rachel, and Jack lowers himself to sit beside me. “Big doings, Sarah.”

“So I hear.”

“McHabe told you? All of it? He said he’d been to see you just before me.”

“He told me.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“He wants Hal to try the cure.”

Hal. I hadn’t thought. The boy’s face is smooth and clear, the only visible skin ridges on his right hand. I say, “Jennie, too.”

Jack nods, apparently unsurprised. “Hal said no.”

“Hal did?”

“You mean Jennie didn’t?” He stares at me. “She’d even consider something as dangerous as an untried cure-not to mention this alleged passing Outside?” I don’t answer. Peter and Mamie dance from behind the other couples, disappear again. The song they dance to is slow, sad, and old.

“Jack—could we have done better here? With the colony?”

Jack watches the dancers. Finally he says, “We don’t kill each other. We don’t burn things down. We don’t steal, or at least not much and not cripplingly. We don’t hoard. It seems to me we’ve done better than anyone had ever hoped. Including us.” His eyes search the dancers for Hal. “He’s the best thing in my life, that boy.”

Another rare flash of memory: Jack debating in some long-forgotten political science class at Yale, a young man on fire. He stands braced lightly on the balls of his feet, leaning forward like a fighter or a dancer, the electric lights brilliant on his glossy black hair. Young women watch him with their hands quiet on their open textbooks. He has the pro side of the debating question: Resolved: Fomenting first-strike third-world wars is an effective method of deterring nuclear conflict among superpowers.

Abruptly the band stops playing. In the centre of the square Peter and Mamie shout at each other.

“—saw the way you touched her! You bastard, you faithless prick!”

“For God’s sake, Mamie, not here!”

“Why not here? You didn’t mind dancing with her here, touching her back here, and ass and… and…” She starts to cry. People look away, embarrassed. A woman I don’t know steps forward and puts a hesitant hand on Mamie’s shoulder. Mamie shakes it off, her hands to her face, and rushes away from the square. Peter stands there dumbly a moment before saying to no one in particular, “I’m sorry. Please dance.” He walks towards the band who begin, raggedly, to play “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” The song is twenty-five years old. Jack Stevenson says, “Can I help, Sarah? With your girl?”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and of course he doesn’t. He offers not out of usefulness but out of empathy, knowing how the ugly little scene in the torchlight depresses me. Do we all so easily understand depression?

Rachel dances by with someone I don’t know, a still-faced older man. She throws a worried glance over his shoulder: now Jennie is dancing with Peter. I can’t see Peter’s face. But I see Jennie’s. She looks directly at no one, but then she doesn’t have to. The message she’s sending is clear: I forbade her to come to the dance with McHabe, but I didn’t forbid her to dance with Peter and so she is, even though she doesn’t want to, even though it’s clear from her face that this tiny act of defiance terrifies her. Peter tightens his arm and she jerks backward against it, smiling hard.

Kara Desmond and Rob Cottrell come up to me, blocking my view of the dancers. They’ve been here as long as I. Kara has an infant great-grandchild, one of the rare babies born already disfigured by the disease. Kara’s dress, which she wears over jeans for warmth, is torn at the hem; her voice is soft. “Sarah. It’s great to see you out.” Rob says nothing. He’s put on weight in the few years since I saw him last. In the flickering torchlight his jowly face shines with the serenity of a diseased Buddha.

It’s two more dances before I realize that Jennie has disappeared.

I look around for Rachel. She’s pouring sumac tea for the band. Peter dances by with a woman not wearing jeans under her dress; the woman is shivering and smiling. So it isn’t Peter that Jennie left with…

“Rob, will you walk me home? In case I stumble?” The cold is getting to my arthritis.

Rob nods, incurious. Kara says, “I’ll come, too,” and we leave Jack Stevenson on his stool, waiting for his turn at hot tea. Kara chatters happily as we walk along as fast as I can go, which isn’t as fast as I want to go. The moon has set. The ground is uneven and the street dark except for the stars and fitful lights in barracks windows. Candles. Oil lamps. Once, a single powerful glow from what I guess to be a donated stored-solar light, the only one I’ve seen in a long time.

Korean, Tom said.

“You’re shivering,” Kara says. “Here, take my coat.” I shake my head.

I make them leave me outside our barracks and they do, unquestioning. Quietly I open the door to our dark kitchen. The stove has gone out. The door to the back bedroom stands half-open, voices coming from the darkness. I shiver again, and Kara’s coat wouldn’t have helped.

But I am wrong. The voices aren’t Jennie and Peter.

“—not what I wanted to talk about just now,” Mamie says.

“But it’s what I want to talk about.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

I stand listening to the rise and fall of their voices, to the petulance in Mamie’s, the eagerness in McHabe’s.

“Jennie is your ward, isn’t she?”

“Oh, Jennie. Yes. For another year.”

“Then she’ll listen to you, even if your mother… the decision is yours. And hers.”

“I guess so. But I want to think about it. I need more information.”

“I’ll tell you anything you ask.”

“Will you? Are you married, Dr. Thomas McHabe?”

Silence. Then his voice, different. “Don’t do that.”

“Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Really, really sure? That you want me to stop?”

I cross the kitchen, hitting my knee against an unseen chair. In the open doorway a sky full of stars moves into view through the termite hole in the wall.

“Ow!”

“I said to stop it, Mrs. Wilson. Now please think about what I said about Jennie. I’ll come back tomorrow morning and you can—”

“You can go straight to hell!” Mamie shouts. And then, in a different voice, strangely calm, “Is it because I’m diseased? And you’re not? And Jennie is not?”

“No. I swear it, no. But I didn’t come here for this.”

“No,” Mamie says in that same chill voice, and I realize that I have never heard it from her before, never, “you came to help us. To bring a cure. To bring the Outside. But not for everybody. Only for the few who aren’t too far gone, who aren’t too ugly-who you can use.”

“It isn’t like that—”

“A few who you can rescue. Leaving all the rest of us here to rot, like we did before.”

“In time, research on the—”

“Time! What do you think time matters Inside? Time matters shit here! Time only matters when someone like you comes in from the Outside, showing off your healthy skin and making it even worse than it was before with your new whole clothing and your working wristwatch and your shiny hair and your… your…” She is sobbing. I step into the room.

“All right, Mamie. All right.”

Neither of them react to seeing me. McHabe just stands there until I wave him towards the door and he goes, not saying a word. I put my arms around Mamie and she leans against my breast and cries. My daughter. Even through my coat I feet the thick ropy skin of her cheek pressing against me, and all I can think of is that I never noticed at all that McHabe wears a wristwatch.

Late that night, after Mamie has fallen into damp exhausted sleep and I have lain awake tossing for hours, Rachel creeps into our room to say that Jennie and Hal Stevenson have both been injected with an experimental disease cure by Tom McHabe. She’s cold and trembling, defiant in her fear, afraid of all their terrible defiance. I hold her until she, too, sleeps, and I remember Jack Stevenson as a young man, classroom lights glossy on his thick hair, spiritedly arguing in favour of the sacrifice of one civilization for another.

Mamie leaves the barracks early the next morning. Her eyelids are still swollen and shiny from last night’s crying. I guess that she’s going to hunt up Peter, and I say nothing. We sit at the table, Rachel and I, eating our oatmeal, not looking at each other. It’s an effort to even lift the spoon. Mamie is gone a long time.

Later, I picture it. Later, when Jennie and Hal and McHabe have come and gone, I can’t stop picturing it: Mamie walking with her swollen eyelids down the muddy streets between the barracks, across the unpaved squares with their corner vegetable gardens of rickety bean poles and the yellow green tops of carrots. Past the depositories with their donated Chinese and Japanese and Korean wool and wood stoves and sheets of alloys and unguarded medicines. Past the chicken runs and goat pens. Past Central Administration, that dusty cinder-block building where people stopped keeping records maybe a decade ago because why would you need to prove you’d been born or had changed barracks? Past the last of the communal wells, reaching deep into a common and plentiful water table. Mamie walking, until she reaches the Rim, and is stopped, and says what she came to say.

They come a few hours later, dressed in full sanksuits and armed with automatic weapons that don’t look American-made. I can see their faces through the clear shatter-proof plastic of their helmets. Three of them stare frankly at my face, at Rachel’s, at Hal Stevenson’s hands. The other two won’t look directly at any of us, as if viruses could be transmitted over locked gazes.

They grab Tom McHabe from his chair at the kitchen table, pulling him up so hard he stumbles, and throw him against the wall. They are gentler with Rachel and Hal. One of them stares curiously at Jennie, frozen on the opposite side of the table. They don’t let McHabe make any of the passionate explanations he had been trying to make to me. When he tries, the leader hits him across the face.

Rachel-Rachel-throws herself at the man. She wraps her strong young arms and legs around him from behind, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” The man shrugs her off like a fly. A second soldier pushes her into a chair. When he looks at her face he shudders. Rachel goes on yelling, sound without words.

Jennie doesn’t even scream. She dives across the table and clings to McHabe’s shoulder, and whatever is on her face is hidden by the fall of her yellow hair.

“Shut you fucking ‘doctors’ down once and for all!” the leader yells, over Rachel’s noise. The words come through his helmet as clearly as if he weren’t wearing one. “Think you can just go on coming Inside and Outside and diseasing us all?”

“I—” McHabe says.

“Fuck it!” the leader says, and shoots him.

McHabe slumps against the wall. Jennie grabs him, desperately trying to haul him up upright. The soldier fires again. The bullet hits Jennie’s wrist, shattering the bone. A third shot, and McHabe slides to the floor.

The soldiers leave. There is little blood, only two small holes where the bullets went in and stayed in. We didn’t know, Inside, that they have guns like that now. We didn’t know bullets could do that. We didn’t know.

“You did it,” Rachel says.

“I did it for you,” Mamie says. “I did!” They stand across the kitchen from each other, Mamie pinned against the door she just closed behind her when she finally came home, Rachel standing in front of the wall where Tom died. Jennie lies sedated in the bedroom. Hal Stevenson, his young face anguished because he had been useless against five armed soldiers, had run for the doctor who lives in Barracks J, who had been found setting the leg of a goat.

“You did it. You.” Her voice is dull, heavy. Scream, I want to say. Rachel, scream.

“I did it so you would be safe!”

“You did it so I would be trapped Inside. Like you.”

“You never thought it was a trap!” Mamie cries. “You were the one who was happy here!”

“And you never will be. Never. Not here, not anyplace else.”

I close my eyes, to not see the terrible maturity on my Rachel’s face. But the next moment she’s a child again, pushing past me to the bedroom with a furious sob, slamming the door behind her.

I face Mamie. “Why?”

But she doesn’t answer. And I see that it doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t have believed her anyway. Her mind is not her own. It is depressed, ill. I have to believe that now. She’s my daughter, and her mind has been affected by the ugly ropes of skin that disfigure her. She is the victim of disease, and nothing she says can change anything at all.

It’s almost morning. Rachel stands in the narrow aisle between the bed and the wall, folding clothes. The bedspread still bears the imprint of Jennie’s sleeping shape; Jennie herself was carried by Hal Stevenson to her own barracks, where she won’t have to see Mamie when she wakes up. On the crude shelf beside Rachel the oil lamp burns, throwing shadows on the newly whole wall that smells of termite exterminator.

She has few enough clothes to pack. A pair of blue tights, old and clumsily darned; a sweater with pulled threads; two more pairs of socks; her other skirt, the one she wore to the Block dance. Everything else she already has on.

“Rachel,” I say. She doesn’t answer, but I see what silence costs her. Even such a small defiance, even now. Yet she is going. Using McHabe’s contacts to go Outside, leaving to find the underground medical research outfit. If they have developed the next stage of the cure, the one for people already disfigured, she will take it. Perhaps even if they have not. And as she goes, she will contaminate as much as she can with her disease, depressive and non-aggressive. Communicable.

She thinks she has to go. Because of Jennie, because of Mamie, because of McHabe. She is sixteen years old, and she believes-even growing up Inside, she believes this-that she must do something. Even if it is the wrong thing. To do the wrong thing, she has decided, is better than to do nothing.

She has no real idea of Outside. She has never watched television, never stood in a bread line, never seen a crack den or a slasher movie. She cannot define napalm, or political torture, or neutron bomb, or gang rape. To her, Mamie, with her confused and self-justifying fear, represents the height of cruelty and betrayal; Peter, with his shambling embarrassed lewdness, the epitome of danger; the theft of a chicken, the last word in criminality. She has never heard of Auschwitz, Cawnpore, the Inquisition, gladiatorial games, Nat Turner, Pol Pot, Stalingrad, Ted Bundy, Hiroshima, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Babi Yar, Bloody Sunday, Dresden or Dachau. Raised with a kind of mental inertia, she knows nothing of the savage inertia of destruction, that once set in motion in a civilization is as hard to stop as a disease.

I don’t think she can find the underground researchers, no matter how much McHabe told her. I don’t think her passage Outside will spread enough infection to make any difference at all. I don’t think it’s possible that she can get very far before she is picked up and either returned Inside or killed. She cannot change the world. It’s too old, too entrenched, too vicious, too there. She will fail. There is no force stronger than destructive inertia.

I get my things ready to go with her.