The End Has Come

BLESSINGS Nancy Kress

We move by night, silently, widely separated. It’s impossible to know how much the enemy can detect. Their technology is, of course, better than ours. But we have had many successes. We will have more. And we will not give up.

“Jenna? You awake yet?”

Nothing. I raise my voice.

“Jenna!”

She emerges from her bedroom, my sweet daughter, sleep-tousled hair and dream-wide eyes. “I’m sorry, Dad — I overslept! I’ll be ready in five minutes!”

I pour two more coffees, one for her and a half-cup for me. Four minutes later I hand her the ceramic mug; she drinks it as we walk to the lab. People smile and greet us as we pass, and Jeanette Foch — whose son brought her down from Quebec twenty years ago and who still speaks no English — murmurs, “Tres belle, tres belle.” At twenty Jenna is prettier than her mother was, prettier than my mother, much prettier than my grandmother, whose faded picture hangs on the wall of our bungalow. My grandparents, Sophie and Luke Ames, once saved this settlement from horrors I can’t bear to think about, during the first years of the Blessing. Their photograph used to hang in the Common Hall, but of course nobody else could bear to think about what Sophie and Luke did, either, so the picture stays in a drawer.

I don’t know how my people survived the constant violence during the early years of the Blessing.

Jenna stops to greet more people. Old Mr. Caruthers has his breathing mask on today. CO₂ is 1.9% and falling. A generation ago, it looked like all of us might have to wear breathing masks.

Jenna kneels by his wheelchair. “Are you taking your pills, Mr. Caruthers?”

He nods, although I’m not sure he understands. I make a note to remind his granddaughter yet again about his zinc and iron. Kay Caruthers is among the sweetest people in New Eden, but not all that bright.

Unlike Jenna, I think, and then chastise myself for ridiculous pride. Jenna’s intelligence and beauty are no more my conscious work than is Kay’s dimness, and comparisons only undermine Mutuality.

In the lab, Dant23 greets me by waving a tentacle. I’d forgotten that he is observing today. The Dant — who look like a cross between a flower and an octopus — show up on a semi-regular schedule. Five tentacles where we have arms and legs, an elongated head that on top flares into segments that resemble petals, skin the color of prominent human veins. But they are DNA-based — panspermia is the usual conjecture — and they can breathe our atmosphere. Which is, of course, why they’re here.

Humanity owes them a debt we can never repay. Sharing our planet does not even come close. Without the Blessing, we wouldn’t have gotten the runaway CO₂ caused by sociopathic industrialization under control. We wouldn’t have stopped interpersonal violence and that most unthinkable of acts, war. We wouldn’t be free people, living in peace and Mutuality. The Dant remade us.

We cannot, however, talk to them. They understand us, but their speech is pitched too high for human ears. All that we have learned from them has been by demonstration, gesture, pantomime. It is enough; it is more than enough.

Jenna kisses Dant23’s cheek and says, “Good morning! How are the children?”

Dant23 nods and waves a tentacle. After more ritual greetings, we get down to work. I look at the new plant samples in the greenhouse.

Overnight, they’ve all died.

We choose our destinations carefully. Never small villages, although most of the planet now lives in small villages. And of course not the cities, unlivable and abandoned. We pick large settlements: harder to attack, but that’s where the targets are.

Usually.

Jenna stares at the dead soybeans; this was her experiment. But I know she won’t cry. Unlike Zane and Sarah, my other two apprentices, Jenna can summon a sort of steeliness that sometimes worries me. Once, when she was small, I actually saw her hit another child in a dispute over a toy. Hit him! He froze immediately, of course, in normal Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia — but she did not. Even now, the memory makes me shudder.

Genes are strange things. Even with the inhibiting compounds now tightly woven into our DNA from the Dants’ Blessing, we are individuals.

Jenna says, “I’ll start the plant analyses.”

Zane, who has come into the lab, says, “I’ll help.”

She smiles at him. He smiles back. They make a plan to divide the work and I turn to my own experiments, which are not doing much better than Jenna’s. The wheat plants look normal, but CO₂ levels have changed their physiology, and they contain thirty percent less iron and twenty-two percent less zinc than preserved samples from forty years ago.

At least, I think those are the percentages. I nurse along my decades-old absorption spectrophotometer. So much sophisticated equipment on Earth is either falling apart or newly manufactured in ways that do — that must — protect the environment and the living things within it. The trade-off is worth it. Doing no harm comes first. Mutuality comes first. I don’t understand how pre-Blessing humans tolerated their world. Manufacturing chemicals leaching into the soil and water, people sickened and dying by the greed of others, whole landscapes destroyed by dangerous mining practices, toxic work environments . . . .

I breathe deeply, before I get overwhelmed.

But, still, our equipment is inadequate. I remember computers; there were still a few around when I was a boy, running on cannibalized parts. We could not do now what Ian McGill did fifty years ago: describe the genetic changes that confer the Blessing. There are no gene sequencers left. Nor can we communicate the results of our scientific work to each other as easily as could McGill. But I have seen the great pile of shameful trash outside Buffalo, before the whole area was proscribed: dead computers, gasoline-powered cars, airplane fuselages, frivolous electronics, all costing innocent lives and destroying the Earth. Never again.

Jenna finishes her tests and scowls. “This batch of soy shows more zinc and iron, but the plants couldn’t live with the CO₂ level. And the batches that can live with it are still starving us of key nutrients!”

“We’ll cross-breed again,” Zane says.

“It never does any good!” Jenna’s scowl deepens. “Without enough zinc and iron . . .”

She doesn’t finish; she doesn’t have to. Nearly everyone is already suffering the symptoms of reduced micronutrients: anemia, weakened immune systems, and reduced hormone production.

Jenna hurls the tray of useless plants to the greenhouse floor. Zane shudders.

We come together after dark, to plan. The village in the valley is not large, but it is important for its size. There is a scientific facility, a small soap manufactury, and a textile mill, all powered by the turbine set into the swift river. Cottages, each with its neat garden. Their windows glow with electric light, but it is torches that illuminate the meadow near the river, where the music comes from. “A dance,” Carl says half scornfully, half wistfully.

I train the night-vision goggles on the festivities. The villages are always celebrating something or other. Fools.

“Two of them,” I say. “Watching the dancing. I’ll do recon. You get into position.”

I watch Jenna dance with Zane, scrutinizing them with a father’s eye. His face in the torchlight glows with love. Hers does not. Well, Zane will get over it. Puppy love isn’t fatal; desire, even less so. Not that Zane’s body — dancing inches away from Jenna, his hand barely touching her waist — expresses much desire. Pre-Blessing people apparently tore themselves apart over sex, which makes no sense. It’s just a mild pleasure, like a lovely sunset or a good cup of coffee, and of course it’s necessary to produce the next generation. I can’t remember the last time I had sex. If the scientific literature is right and the Blessing also created changes in human hormone production, then that’s another reason to thank the Dant. We are spared rape, adultery, population overgrowth, and the kinds of violence to Mutuality that I read about in incomprehensible books stored in my grandmother’s attic: Anna Karenina, Lolita, Romeo and Juliet.

“Larry, do you want to dance?”

Rachel Notting. She’s a good dancer. I smile, get to my feet, and move into the circle of dancers — just as a beam of blue light slices down from the sky and explodes beyond the hill.

People scream. A few, the most sensitive, freeze into Extreme Involuntary Fear Bradycardia. Kyra Hanreddy, our mayor this cycle, cries, “Everyone to the community hall! Mutuality!”

People move toward the hall, no one faster than the slowest. Jenna pushes Mr. Caruthers’s wheelchair. I help Rachel with her twins. The frozen are soothingly coaxed into normal heartbeats and led forward. Katherine Pacer, an extreme sensitive, is carried stiff as a plank by two men. The Dant have disappeared.

I have seen this before, in another village. Jenna has not. As I walk beside her, carrying a twin sweating and gasping with EIFB, she gasps, “What is it?”

“Alien protection. Probably bears.”

She nods, reassured. Dant23 and Dant16 have warned us before when bears, who somehow were made more aggressive by the Blessing, are in the area. A Dant ship in orbit chases the bears away. I suspect that the ships actually kill the animals, but I don’t want to think about fried and smoking bears.

In the Hall, the Council closes the shutters. Everyone listens for a while, but there is nothing to hear. Eventually the musicians begin again on fiddle and guitar, and the dancing resumes inside. Katherine Pacer unfreezes, watching with dazed eyes, friends hovering over her. Three songs later, Dant23 and Dant16 knock on the door and are admitted. No one asks them anything. We wouldn’t understand the answers anyway.

The bastards got them all. There isn’t even anything left to bury. Damn them, damn them to an alien hell in agony and tears.

The supplies and weapons were with the cadre. Hannah’s group is only forty miles northwest; I can join them. But all at once I know that I won’t.

Hidden under a brush fall, I spend the night silently chanting the farewell song for my dead.

Carl, sixteen years old.

Kaylie, the best shot I ever saw.

Jerome, who ran away from his village at eleven and somehow survived alone until we found him.

Matt, Ruhan, Pedro, Susan, Terry.

Rest in fucking peace.

I stand in the greenhouse, staring at the tray of crossbred wheat plants. Morning light streams like green water through the uneven glass; there must have been iron oxide impurities in the glassmaker’s last firing. The steamy air smells loamy, rich with life.

Jenna comes in. “Oh, it’s so hot in here and — Dad? What is it?”

“I ran the tests on the ashing filtrate from this last batch.”

“And . . . ?” Her pretty face wrinkles quizzically.

“The strain is producing ten percent more zinc than either parent plant.”

Now Jenna stares at the plants. “Ten percent more? But how . . . .”

“I don’t know. If we had a gene sequencer . . . .”

She grimaces, then tries to console me. “Wheat was never genetically engineered anyway, only crossbred. Do you really need a sequencer? The important thing is the increased nutrition.”

“Yes,” I say, smiling at her, “of course.” And there it is — Jenna’s major flaw as a scientist. She is intelligent, meticulous, even inventive. But she is mostly interested in practical results: Of what use is this? Not: Why did this happen?

Why did this happen? I have a theory, but no way to test it.

“Dad,” she says, “will you run the tests on of my soybeans — tray number eighteen? Julie and Gary and Miguel are getting together a group to hike into the mountains. We’ll be back by dark, but they want to leave right away, and they only got around to informing me now.”

There is no rancor in the way she says this, only pleasure in the proposed expedition. I think about bears, then remind myself that attacks are less frequent than when I was a boy, that Jenna has tranquilizer darts, that she’s not an extreme sensitive. I say, “Of course I’ll run your tests. Have fun.”

“Thanks!”

Before she can leave, however, the door opens and a stranger limps in. We both smile at him. “Hello,” I say, “I’m Larry Travis. Can we help you?”

“Jake Martin,” he says. His smile seems strained. Is he ill? “I’m on my way to Bremerville to see my sister, but I hurt my leg. Hoping I can stay here a few days.”

“Of course. We have room at our bungalow. This is my daughter, Jenna.”

She says, “What’s wrong with your leg? Do you need a doctor? I can send for one from Castleton.”

“No, ma’am, I just need to stay off it a bit.”

“Jenna, take him to the bungalow and get him something to eat. No, wait — you want to hike. Jake, do you mind waiting here about half an hour while I finish up a —”

Jenna says quickly, “I’ll take him.”

“But you —”

“I’m happy to take him.” She smiles again at the stranger, and he says, “Thank you.”

As they leave, him leaning a little on her shoulder to favor his left leg, I stare after them. Why did Jenna so abruptly change her mind?

I shrug and begin the dry-ashing procedure on her soybeans.

No enemies sighted yet. But they’re here. I buried my guns in the woods; they can detect metal at close range. Meanwhile, there is this woman, taking me home, collecting some hot food from a refectory, letting me lean on her all the way. I don’t need to lean on her, and I think she knows that. She and her father take me in without a second thought — nobody here would harm anyone else. But this woman . . . How can she be one of the dehumanized, alien-whipped, de-sexed sheep? Her?

She smells like strawberries.

“How did you hurt your leg?”

“Stupid clumsiness,” I lie, and she laughs. The laugh sounds confused.

We talk, although it’s hard to keep my mind concentrated. She’s smart and — like all of them — sweet. But she isn’t like all of them.

My cock is like stone.

This woman . . .

Dant23 comes in to the lab as I finish the tests. He waves his tentacles at me and I smile. I show him Zane’s and my own handwritten notes on the zinc percentages in different wheat strains.

Does he read them? Does he somehow photograph them with his eyes and transmit them to some unimaginable computer somewhere? Does he only pretend to know what they mean? There is no way to tell.

The Dant came down from their ship twenty years ago, when everyone alive from before the Blessing was very old, and we still know almost nothing about them. Not why they chose to help humanity by altering our genes for EIFB. Not why they chose a volcano, of all things, to distribute the molecules that conferred that incalculable boon. Obviously, they wanted to be able to contact humanity without risk of violence to themselves, but we, not them, are the major beneficiaries of their Blessing.

The library at Bremerton has books, very old, with pictures in them that I saw only once, years ago, and still have nightmares about. Worldwide wars. Bodies in trenches. Instruments of medieval torture. Children spitted, women raped, cows slaughtered for meat. People who ate flesh.

Dant23 makes a noise, waves a different tentacle, and settles into a corner of the lab to observe.

She wants it, too, although when I begin, she seems startled at herself. I would bet my rifle that she didn’t know she could experience desire like this — how would she know, living here? She’s a virgin. Then I’m the one who’s startled. I have never known sex like this. She holds nothing back. Not while we do it, not while we talk. And it doesn’t seem to occur to her that I might be holding back. Without knowing me at all, she trusts me utterly — not to hurt her, not to lie to her, not to ignore her pleasure.

Is she fucking crazy?

I reach for her again.

I transfer the soybean filtrate into a beaker and prepare the reagent. But then the ancient spectrophotometer refuses to turn on. The display stays dark. Nothing lights, nothing works, nothing I do repairs it. The thing is finally dead.

I’ve lost equipment before. But for some reason, this loss affects me profoundly. I sit on a stool and sob like a four-year-old.

Maybe it’s the low zinc and iron in my blood. For millions of years, humans absorbed zinc and iron mostly from animal flesh. Barbarianism should not be the price of health.

Or maybe it’s not what’s in my blood but what’s in my head.

Eventually I rise from the stool and splash cold water on my face. I can’t stand to be in the lab any longer. It’s dusk and music has started by the river, for the second day of the festival. There will be people there, laughter, Mutuality. I make my way toward the bright music, trying to let it overcome the ideas circling, like savage bears, in my bruised mind.

“There’s a dance tonight,” Jenna says, “part of the Blessing festival. I know you can’t dance but there’s a bonfire and music and games and it’s fun.”

She lies tangled in soft, worn, clean sheets in the last rays of sun slanting through a high window. Her bare breasts rise and fall gently. Her hair is as tangled as the sheets and her eyes are bright, gray flecked with gold.

The enemy might be at the dance.

So far, at least, I’ve passed as one of these . . . . “people.”

She’s talked all afternoon. I know her now. How can she be one of them?

I make myself remember Carl, sixteen years old.

Kaylie, the best shot I ever saw.

Jerome, who ran away from his village at eleven and somehow survived alone until we found him.

Matt, Ruhan, Pedro, Susan, Terry.

Both Dant16 and Dant23 are at the dance, standing in the shadows beyond the bonfire, observing. What if I showed them the broken absorption spectrophotometer and pantomimed a great need for another? Would they make me one, or the alien equivalent? Can their tech really be so different that they cannot replace ours?

Or do they want us to have, year after year, less and less?

Jenna says shyly, “I’m going to say something dumb.”

We walk toward the river. In the warm twilight she wears only loose pants and a sleeveless tunic of some woven blue cloth. She doesn’t notice, or at least doesn’t remark on, my long heavy jacket. Her hand moves ceaselessly in mine, like some small fidgety animal.

“What dumb thing are you going to say?”

“I think . . . that you’re different.”

I tense. Oh, God, no . . . what has she noticed? Will she betray me? I don’t want to have to —

“You’re different because you’re like me,” she says. “Nobody else here is. Not really.”

My free hand moves back from my jacket pocket. I say cautiously, “I am? How?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice is troubled. “Well, yes, the sex . . . I never felt any of that wanting before, not like . . . . Jake, why did I feel like that about you but never before? Who are you, really?”

All at once, to my own astonishment, I want to tell her. But I can’t, and I don’t want her thinking about my differences from her people. So I pull her toward me and say, to distract her, “Someone who’s falling in love with you.”

But if it’s really to distract her, then why do I say it so softly that maybe I don’t want her to hear?

Then I see them under the trees, standing beside Jenna’s father.

Dant16 waves one tentacle, vaguely in time with the music. Dancers stomp and whirl on the flattened grass. The river murmurs, shining in the moonlight, reflecting the bonfire flames. From somewhere comes the sweet odor of wild mint.

How can I be thinking what is gnawing at my brain?

Jenna and Jake come along the path from the bungalows. She tries to pull him toward the dance; he shakes his head, smiling. There’s something wrong with his smile but I don’t know what. The bonfire behind them haloes both their heads with dancing gold. The fiddles sing; crickets chirp in the grass; the rising moon shines every moment brighter in the darkening sky.

Jenna turns to talk to Kay Caruthers. Jenna looks as if she is introducing Jake, but he is no longer there. He moves quickly toward me, not running but with no sign of his limp. Closer, and I can see his wrong smile. “Hello, Larry,” he says, pulls a ceramic knife from his jacket and plunges it into Dant16’s forehead.

I can’t move. My heart slows and vertigo swoops over me.

Dant23 lets out a shrill, prolonged shriek I have never heard before. He tries to run but Jake pulls the knife from Dant16 and drives it, lightning fast, into Dant23. Both aliens crumple to the grass, oozing foul-smelling liquid.

People rush over, freeze, sway or crumple or stare, eyes wide, mouths gaping, oxygenation and heart rate falling.

All but Jenna.

She runs to Jake and beats him — beats him! — with small, ineffectual fists. “Why? Why?”

He grabs her arms and pins them to her sides. His shoulders shake — this has cost him, too, but not enough. Not nearly enough. “Carl,” he gasps, “Kaylie, Jerome, Matt . . .”

“Why?”

Neither of them show any signs of EIFB. I don’t wonder about the reason. I know.

“Listen, Jenna,” Jake says. He has control of himself now. He’s wrestled her against him so that she cannot strike. “They’re the enemy. They fucked up our biology, made us —”

“They made us better!”

“No. They made us sheep, passive and fearful so that we won’t interfere while they take over Earth. They want our planet.”

“They gave us the Blessing! No more violence, no more wars —”

“No more progress, no more discoveries, almost no more sex! How many more generations before humans disappear completely? And all without the violence they can’t stand face-to-face, any more than these people can.”

“But you —”

“I what?” He holds her more gently now; she struggles less. My breath comes more normally.

Jenna says, “You were able to — how?”

“Because I had to. We have to — listen, there are more of us. More than you might think. We want the Dant to leave. With enough violence, they will leave. We’ll convince them that Earth will never be free of humans. If the fuckers don’t wipe us out first.”

“The Dant don’t —”

“Yes,” he says grimly, “they do. They laser us from space, like the cowards they are. But we will succeed.”

Zane and Ted are coming out of EIFB. Uncertainly, they step toward Jake. He raises his fist and both retreat.

I find my voice. “You don’t know what success is.”

Jake says savagely, “I know what it isn’t.”

Jenna — my Jenna, bewildered and upset but not nearly enough frightened — says, “But I still don’t understand why the —”

“Jenna, I don’t have time for this! Don’t you understand? I have to leave now, before whatever trackers these bastards use finds me. I have to go.”

They look at each other. I don’t understand the look. I have never been in the place they are now: wild, challenging, hot.

I think No no no no no . . .

“Daddy,” she says, turning toward me, and I know I’ve already lost. She hasn’t called me “Daddy” for years. “Daddy” was Jenna at three, running toward me to be lifted into my arms. At seven, holding my hands on a walk by a sun-dappled river. At eleven, chin in her hand, listening as I explained crossbreeding plants. Jenna who loved me, not some example of outdated, over-sexed, dangerous “masculinity” with a knife in his hand and an attitude that could destroy the world.

Or remake it.

Tears choke Jenna’s voice. “Daddy, I have to go with him.” And then fiercely, “I have to know. If he’s wrong, I’ll come back.”

She trusts that he would let her go. She trusts everything. He trusts nothing.

Yet they are alike. I know this in ways that Jake, not a scientist, never will. I know it because a crossbred strain of wheat contains far more zinc than either parent plant. Because bear attacks, however terrible, are milder than in my great-grandmother Carrie’s day, or my grandmother Sophie’s, or mine. Because I’ve read about regression to the mean, about genetic “throwbacks” that always counterbalance Darwinian selection. About the eternally disturbed, and then restored, balance between predator and prey, violence and cooperation, sex and aggression.

Jenna kisses me. Jake has the grace to say, “Larry, I’m sorry.” Then they are running, sprinting hand-in-hand toward the cover of the dark woods.

Around me, the villagers — my people — move, shudder, sob. The bodies of Dant16 and Dant23 lie at my feet. On the horizon, a blue dot appears in the sky, moving fast.

I can’t imagine what kind of world Jake and Jenna will make, what kind of world their children will inherit. I don’t want to imagine it. But I know, in my bones, that it will come.