The Best of Nancy Kress

  The stars glittered.

  Across the sky the branches of the sugar maple slanted like bars. Gemini sliced in half, Dubhe divided from Merak. Through the bars the Milky Way looked broken, fitful, about to sever and recede even more, and it was already so far away, so high…so high…they were all so high…. For a dizzy second Casey put his hand on the tree trunk, searching for a foothold. But the second passed and he stood on the ground, half-trampled fern shoots under his worn boots.

  The stars glittered.

  Okay, so the universe doesn’t notice, hardly an original observation, Casey ol’ boy, got to do better than that. What’d you expect—a supernova? No romantic despair; cosmic self-pity strictly forbidden in moments of drunken triumph, on pain of triviality. No brooding, no self-indulgent self-incrimination. “A man’s reach should exceed….” so you’ve got a hell of a reach, kudos to you ol’ Jer, good to have a hell of a reach. Supposed to have a hell of a reach. Reach for a star a star is born born to boogie…oh, hell. I am not Prufrock, nor was meant to be—

  Meant to be what?

  Abruptly, he saw that he was not alone. Under the sugar maple, at the edge of the wide circle of branches, stood a child. A skinny, grubby boy, ten years old, gazing upward. Casey lurched forward, but the boy ignored him. Motionless except for his eyes, he was conquering distant, spangle-colored planets, and in his shining look, Casey saw, there was no longing; no one longs for what he already possesses. He was still, complete, but as Casey grabbed wildly to throttle that unbearable wholeness in the rapt face that he knew perfectly well was not there, the champagne heaved and he threw up into the trampled fern shoots. When he could finally wipe his mouth on his shirt tail, the boy was gone.

  The stars glittered.

  Casey stumbled back through the woods. In one small clearing he smelled lilacs, barely budded but sweet in the dark, and he turned his head away. Somewhere he lost the path. Scratched by brambles, scuffing the decay of last year’s leaves, he thrashed forward until the moon rose. It was easier, then, to walk, but the moonlit pattern of dark branches on the white letter made him squeeze his eyes shut, and it was thus that he tripped over the spaceship.

  It wasn’t really, of course. The ship itself was a hundred feet away, dully black in the moonlight, circled with birch branches that had been pushed aside by its landing and had snapped back. Casey, sprawled on the ground over a foot-long, log-shaped…whatever it was, could almost feel the crack of those returning birch limbs on his back and shoulders. He reached under himself to feel the Whatever; it was hard and smooth, faintly vibrating. Unlike the boy, it did not vanish.

  Unsuspected additional champagne churned in his stomach.

  The ship was small; it could hardly be more than some sort of shuttle. Curved into flowing lines and embraced by budding trees, it looked weirdly beautiful in the night woods, weirdly right. Moonlight slid off the black surface, a deep rich black the color of loam. Leaves and ferns grew right up to where the ship rested on the forest floor. There was no burned patch, no sign that the ship had not always been there, would not always be there, a part of the ferns and birches, surrounded by the usual night rustlings and scamperings. An owl hooted.

  Under Casey’s belly, the Whatever began to hum.

  He rolled off it and scrambled to his feet. A section of the ship slid upward, sending a shaft of blue light over the ground. Slowly a ramp descended until it met the dead leaves, which sighed softly.

  Casey closed his eyes. He was drunk, he told himself. He was drunk, he was emotionally exhausted, he was hallucinating in some bizarre, wish-fulfillment fantasy. He was insane, he was schizophrenic, he was dead. He was a grown man with a more-or-less job, aging parents, and his own copy of the ten-volume Oxford English Dictionary. He was afraid, but not of the ship.

  When he opened his eyes, it was still there. The “door” was still open. Nothing was visible inside except the bright blue light. The log-shaped Whatever rose into the air as high as Casey’s chest and floated towards the ship. Ten feet away it stopped, floated back to Casey’s chest, then again toward the ship. When Casey didn’t follow, it repeated the whole sequence. Casey took one step forward.

  He was on the flat rock under the twilight sky. Would You Go? they asked each other, sprawled on concave stomachs. Nah, said Marty Hillek—too dangerous. Chicken! said Carl Nielsen, chicken! I’d go, said Billy DeTine, I wouldn’t care, I’m not afraid, I’d go. Me too, whispered little Jerry Casey, youngest of the lot. Me too. What if you never got back? said Marty Hillek, and no one said anything.

  “The probability,” lectured the professor to Astronomy 101, “of intelligent life visiting earth covertly is very small. Even if we generously suppose a 50-50 chance of life developing on any planet within a 25-light-year radius of Earth, the next calculation would—”

  “You don’t know,” insisted Kara Stine, née Phillips. “Nobody really knows.”

  Casey took another step forward. Wet leaves squished under his boot. The letter rustled in his hand:

  Dear Mr. Casey:

  We are happy to inform you that our editorial staff is very impressed with your book, and that we are interested in publishing it. First, however, it is necessary….

  The Whatever floated back to Casey a third time. It was humming more loudly now, and in the humming Casey heard a soft urgency.

  Moonlight shone on the letter, crumpled where his fist had tightened, fouled at one corner with vomited champagne.

  Would You Go? asked Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine. What if you never got back? Nights on the cemetery tombs: Regulus Formalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. Days at his desk, struggling with stars on the head of a pin. “If Jerry Casey, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen one….” Me too, whispered little Jerry Casey. We are happy to inform you… “What are you doing now? I mean your, uh, plans?” Me too. Oh, me too. Happy to inform… “Escapist improbabilities, Mr. Casey. You must see…‘galactic empire’!” Happy to inform you….

  Casey, battlefield for two warring empires, hiccupped in anguish.

  Carefully, as if he might break, he took three steps backward. Then three more.

  The Whatever followed him, then reversed direction and floated towards the ship, but only once. It floated inside, and the curved section of hull lowered slowly. The ship started to rise, slowly at first, then more rapidly. For a moment the dark hull stood poised above the birches, blotting out the stars. Then it blurred and was gone. The birch branches snapped back. Something small and furry scuttled away through the leaves, startled by the sudden sharp sobbing that went on and on, the unchecked tearless sobbing of a ten-year-old-boy.

  You know the rest. All but Casey’s name, which is not Casey. You can read in any standard reference work about the first official UN contact with the Beta Hydrans, fifteen years ago last May. You can read the pages and pages of testimony from the Des Moines dentist and the Portuguese fisherman and the Australian housewife who visited the Beta Hydran spacecraft during their reconnaissance landings. You can read about the shifts of global power and the scientific boons and the interstellar promises of good faith and speedy return by the Beta Hydrans, who were not part of a galactic empire and who seemed bewildered by the entire concept. You can’t not read it; it’s everywhere.

  You can look up Casey, too, in the reference works, and read about how he became the most famous “name” in SF before he was forty-five. You can look up his awards, his honorary this-and-thats, his movie credits, the alimony he pays both wives, his bout with alcoholism. If your mind runs that way, you can look up his biographies—written, all, by impoverished Ph.D.’s weary of Keats—which will analyze for you all the early environmental influences on Casey’s writing. You can look up the academic critics, also impoverished Ph.D.’s, who have concerned themselves with Casey’s novels. They find in all of them, except the first, a “lost, human yearning, a quality almost mythic in the scope of its cosmic rootlessness” (Glasser, Richard J., “Rockets and Wanderjahr: Ano
ther Look at SF,” PMLA, 122 (1992), 48-76). You can look it all up, or could if you knew Casey’s name. You’d recognize it, even if you don’t read “that space stuff.”

  But what you don’t know, can’t look up, is the loss of Casey’s galactic empire. What it was, what it meant, how it felt. You don’t know. Unless it has happened to you, you don’t know. You can’t ever know.

  Afterword to “Casey’s Empire”

  This was a very important story to me, and not only because of its content. It garnered me my very first piece of fan mail: a postcard from James Patrick Kelly, who had the generous habit of telling other pros when he liked a story of theirs. Subsequently I met Jim at a convention; he introduced me to John Kessel; together they introduced me to Connie Willis. Thirty-five years later, we are still friends.

  At the time I wrote the story, I had just finished my Master’s degree in English, during which I served as a teaching assistant in the English department of the college, teaching freshman composition. Fortunately, several members of that particular department considered science fiction to be genuine literature. Other members did not. In subsequent decades, that situation has changed for the better. Now we are not only accepted but trendy. Who knew?

  The process of becoming a writer, for me as for Jerry Casey, is often long and anguished. As for Jerry Casey’s long string of rejection slips—well, every writer is familiar with those. I have saved all of mine.

  SHIVA IN SHADOW

  1. SHIP

  I watched the probe launch from the Kepler’s top-deck observatory, where the entire Schaad hull is clear to the stars. I stood between Ajit and Kane. The observatory, which was also the ship’s garden, bloomed wildly with my exotics, bursting into flower in such exuberant profusion that even to see the probe go, we had to squeeze between a seven-foot-high bed of comoralias and the hull.

  “God, Tirzah, can’t you prune these things?” Kane said. He pressed his nose to the nearly invisible hull, like a small child. Something streaked briefly across the sky. “There it goes. Not that there’s much to see.”

  I turned to stare at him. Not much to see! Beyond the Kepler lay the most violent and dramatic part of the galaxy, in all its murderous glory. True, the Kepler had stopped a hundred light years from the core, for human safety, and dust-and-gas clouds muffled the view somewhat. But, on the other hand, we were far enough away for a panoramic view.

  The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the lethal heart of the galaxy, shone gauzily with the heated gases it was sucking down-ward into oblivion. Around Sgr A* circled Sagittarius West, a three-armed spiral of hot plasma ten light years across, radiating furiously as it cooled. Around that, Sagittarius East, a huge shell left over from some catastrophic explosion within the last 100,000 years, expanded outward. I saw thousands of stars, including the blazing blue-hot stars of IRS16, hovering dangerously close to the hole, and giving off a stellar wind fierce enough to blow a long, fiery tail off the nearby red giant star. Everything was racing, radiating, colliding, ripping apart, screaming across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All set against the sweet, light scent of my brief-lived flowers.

  Nothing going on. But Kane had never been interested in spectacle.

  Ajit said in his musical accent, “No, not much to see. But much to pray for. There go we.”

  Kane snapped, “I don’t pray.”

  “I did not mean ‘pray’ in the religious sense,” Ajit said calmly. He is always calm. “I mean hope. It is a miraculous thing, yes? There go we.”

  He was right, of course. The probe contained the Ajit-analogue, the Kane-analogue, the Tirzah-analogue, all uploaded into a crystal computer no bigger than a comoralia bloom. “We” would go into that stellar violence at the core, where our fragile human bodies could not go. “We” would observe, and measure, and try to find answers to scientific questions in that roiling heart of galactic space-time. Ninety percent of the probe’s mass was shielding for the computer. Ninety percent of the rest was shielding for the three mini-capsules that the probe would fire back to us with recorded and analyzed data. There was no way besides the mini-caps to get information out of that bath of frenzied radiation.

  Just as there was no way to know exactly what questions Ajit and Kane would need to ask until they were close to Sgr A*. The analogues would know. They knew everything Ajit and Kane and I knew, right up until the moment we were uploaded.

  “Shiva, dancing,” Ajit said.

  “What?” Kane said.

  “Nothing. You would not appreciate the reference. Come with me, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

  I stopped straining to see the probe, unzoomed my eyes, and smiled at Ajit. “Of course.”

  This is why I am here.

  Ajit’s skin is softer than Kane’s, less muscled. Kane works out every day in ship’s gym, scowling like a demon. Ajit rolled off me and laid his hand on my glowing, satisfied crotch.

  “You are so beautiful, Tirzah.”

  I laughed. “We are all beautiful. Why would anyone effect a genetic alteration that wasn’t?”

  “People will do strange things sometimes.”

  “So I just noticed,” I teased him.

  “Sometimes I think so much of what Kane and I do is strange to you. I see you sitting at the table, listening to us, and I know you cannot follow our physics. It makes me sad for you.”

  I laid my hand on top of his, pushing down my irritation with the skill of long practice. It does irritate me, this calm sensitivity of Ajit’s. It’s lovely in bed—he is gentler and more considerate, always, than Kane—but then there comes the other side, this faint condescension. “I feel sad for you.” Sad for me! Because I’m not also a scientist! I am the captain of this expedition, with master status in ship control and a first-class license as a Nurturer. On the Kepler, my word is law, with virtually no limits. I have over fifty standard-years’ experience, specializing in the nurture of scientists. I have never lost an expedition, and I need no one’s pity.

  Naturally, I showed none of this to Ajit. I massaged his hand with mine, which meant that his hand massaged my crotch, and purred softly. “I’m glad you decided to show me this.”

  “Actually, that is not what I wanted to show you.”

  “No?”

  “No. Wait here, Tirzah.”

  He got up and padded, naked, to his personal locker. Beautiful, beautiful body, brown and smooth, like a slim, polished tree. I could see him clearly; Ajit always makes love with the bunk lights on full, as if in sunlight. We lay in his bunk, not mine. I never take either him or Kane to my bunk. My bunk contained various concealed items that they don’t, and won’t, know about, from duplicate surveil-lance equipment to rarely used subdermal trackers. Precautions, only. I am a captain.

  From his small storage locker, Ajit pulled a statue and turned shyly, even proudly, to show it to me. I sat up, surprised.

  The statue was big, big enough so that it must have taken up practically his entire allotment of personal space. Heavy, too, from the way Ajit balanced it before his naked body. It was some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.

  “This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”

  “Ajit—”

  “No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods—thousands—but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three.”

  This explanation sounded weak to me—a holo of Shiva would have accomplished the same thing, without using up nearly all of Ajit’s weight allotment. Before I could say this, Ajit said, “This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to my scientific questions.”

  I don’t understand
Ajit’s scientific concerns very well—or Kane’s—but I know down to my bones how much they matter to him. It is my job to know. Ajit carries within his beautiful body a terrible, coursing ambition, a river fed by the longings of a poor family who have sacrificed what little they had gained on New Bombay for this favored son. Ajit is the receptacle into which they have poured so much hope, so much sacrifice, so much selfishness. The strain on that vessel is what makes Ajit’s love-making so gentle. He cannot afford to crack.

  “You’ll bring the Shiva statue back to New Bombay,” I said softly, “and your answers, too.”

  In his hands, with the bright lighting, the bronze statue cast a dancing shadow on his naked body.

  I found Kane at his terminal, so deep in thought that he didn’t know I was there until I squeezed his shoulder. Then he jumped, cursed, and dragged his eyes from his displays.

  “How does it progress, Kane?”

  “It doesn’t. How could it? I need more data!”

  “It will come. Be patient,” I said.

  He rubbed his left ear, a constant habit when he’s irritated, which is much of the time. When he’s happily excited, Kane runs his left hand through his coarse red hair until it stands up like flames. Now he smiled ruefully. “I’m not much known for patience.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “But you’re right, Tirzah. The data will come. It’s just hard wait-ing for the first mini-cap. I wish to hell we could have more than three. Goddamn cheap bureaucrats! At an acceleration of—”

  “Don’t give me the figures again,” I said. I wound my fingers in his hair and pulled playfully. “Kane, I came to ask you a favor.”

  “All right,” he said instantly. Kane never counts costs ahead of time. Ajit would have turned gently cautious. “What is it?”