On the pathway through the settlement, I glanced up at the blue April sky.
But of course there was nothing to see. The alien ship was in orbit between Earth and Mars, too far away for anything dangerous from Earth to reach it.
“They took copper,” Carrie said. “Stripped out wiring and pipes. I guess they needed it for themselves.”
“So that makes it okay?”
“Of course not, Sophie.”
My sister had the sort of mild face a Sweet should have, a face from another century: calm eyes, pale oval face, fair hair in frizzy ringlets. Put a ruff and a stomacher on her and she would look like one of those obedient ladies in some patriarchal seventeenth-century court. As always, since we were children, she brought out the bully in me.
“How far along are you?”
Carrie blinked. “Mama told you?”
“Of course Mom told me. Why else would I be here? You have the right to get shot by some looting asshole if you want, but you don’t have the right to get my niece or nephew killed because you won’t defend yourself.”
“I don’t think—”
“Already obvious. You’re coming back with Ian and me.”
“No.” An actual shudder ran over her entire thin body, as if the mere thought of living with us was a toxin. “Sophie, I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“I won’t.”
“All right, in that case, I’m not doing this anymore. Do you hear me? Baby or no, this is the last time we’re risking our lives for people who won’t do anything to help themselves. But before I go, let me ask you something: Why won’t you come with me?”
And then Carrie said the stupidest, most wimpy thing I’d ever heard her say during a lifetime of stupid, wimpy things. She said, “This is the only place I feel safe.”
In anger, in resentment, in contempt, I turned my back on her and walked out.
The first clear picture of the alien ship flashed onto the wallscreen, caught by a Chinese unmanned spacecraft, the Hope of Heaven, on its long exploratory voyage to the Oort Cloud. The alien ship, a long tapered cylinder of some grayish metal, had three weirdly-shaped projections at seemingly random places on one side of the hull. The magnified image revealed zero about the craft’s occupants. Remotely controlled signals, sent in a variety of forms and in a variety of wavelengths, went unanswered. The aliens were not interested in prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences, or pi.
“Fuckers,” I muttered. Ian and I sat on the sofa in our pajamas, eating pizza. Our apartment on the fortified APBRI compound was small and hastily constructed, but safe. Nobody was going to take our copper wiring. We had a tiny bedroom and a great room not much larger, furnished with a second-hand sofa of a particularly hideous plaid, a table and wobbly chairs, and a very good multipurpose screen. Researchers knew what mattered. I’d made the pizza since pizza chains were few and no longer delivered: too dangerous. The crusts were burned.
Ian, to my surprise, put down his plate and reached for my hand. He is not usually a demonstrative man. “Sophie . . . you have to stop being so angry.”
“But just look at them! Sitting up there all lordly, waiting for everything to unravel on Earth even more than it already—”
“I don’t mean angry at them.”
I looked into Ian’s eyes. In some lights the gray was flecked with silver. Those eyes are my home, a thing I have never said aloud: too silly. “You mean I’m angry at Carrie.”
“No. That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what—”
He dropped my hand. “I’ll let you figure that out.”
“You know I hate it when you go all superior-paternal on me.”
“I’m not,” he said, took another bite of the mediocre pizza, and changed the channel.
The national news was all bad. Unemployment had reached forty-nine percent. Two more cities were on fire: Atlanta and San Francisco. San Diego was also burning, but that was due to wildfires rather than rioting. The GNP was in the toilet and getting liberally shitted on. Children were starving, old people were starving, animals at the zoo were starving. When the entire workforce under thirty years old will not work in any industry that remotely damages anyone, a population already heavy on the elderly inevitably falls into slow, agonizing collapse. The only reason the United States hasn’t had a revolution is that revolutions are made by young people, and our young people were all Sweets.
In the rest of the world the situation was the same or worse, except for China. Their one-baby policy had kept the number of Sweets down, and a few years after the volcano, they’d limited population growth even further. Their trouble will come later than ours, but it will come. Meanwhile, they have the only thriving space program, all of which is secret and worrisome.
Part of the worry is that the economic situation lent itself to idiots. On TV, Louis William Porter, the latest conspiracy-theorist pundit, spewed his kitchen-sink theory of the world.
“Is it just a coincidence that our young people have been biologically incapacitated, our glorious country fallen economically just as China rises, and so-called aliens present in our skies? Do you believe in that much coincidence, my friends? Because I surely do not. No! This is not chance; it is a scheme, the most ungodly and dangerous scheme ever mounted against the United States by a worldly enemy. This has all been planned, planned in the laboratories and spaceports of Beijing. First, create poisons that damage our innocent precious children and spew them like vomit across the globe. Decades later, present so-called ‘evidence’ that there is an ‘alien’ ship waiting out there in space. There is no ship, my friends, there is only the insane ambition toward world domination on the part of the Chinese, who—”
“Turn it off,” I said, and Ian did. “Porter is nothing but a crackpot.”
“His following is enormous and growing. People want someone to blame.”
“So they need three someones—aliens and Chinese and Sweets as an unholy trinity? The E.T. fathers, heathen sons, and insubstantial ghosts?”
Ian laughed. Wit was one of the things he enjoyed about me. Christ, I loved him so much.
Love will get you every time.
Ian’s research group had a breakthrough. He came down to the cafeteria to tell me about it, his gray eyes glowing, his whole face alive. I was in the back room, washing up lunch dishes. Ted and Sarah had already left, and I had the kitchen wallscreen show an ancient rerun of some old comedy, for the mindless company. Before the Collapse I’d been an insurance adjustor, back when ordinary people had insurance. With a community-college degree in English, there was nothing at APBRI that I was qualified to do, but Ian got me this job so that I wouldn’t be one of the 49% unemployed. It paid crap but that didn’t matter. It’s necessary work, feeding people. I wasn’t much of a cook but I could chop and mix and clean. My mother did those jobs her whole life.
“Sophie—I think we’ve isolated it! The protein!”
I wiped my hands on a not-very-clean towel. “Really?”
“Yes!” He began a long, involved explanation of what his team had done, or maybe it was what the protein had done. I’d never taken much biology in school. But from Ian I’d learned Francis Crick’s “central dogma” of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein. Which then folds and goes about its business in and out of cells. A wrong fold and you can get prions, which can lead to a lot of terrible outcomes like mad cow disease and Alzheimer’s.
I said, “Is it a misfolded protein?”
“A differently folded protein, anyway.”
I let that go. Ian never referred to Sweetness as a disease; it didn’t meet something called “Koch’s postulates.” But then, Ian didn’t have a younger sister.