The End Has Come

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.