She played with the data, putting in one incident, taking out another, changing the patterns. The maddening thing was that the patterns were there, and not just in MOs. The numbers showed patterns, too: nonlinear, closer to fractals than to conventional graphs, but nonetheless there. And the numbers should have pointed to another abduction or burglary in Hingham, Massachusetts, on Thursday. Which hadn’t happened. So obviously she had included something erroneous, or left something out, or missed something altogether.
She sat far into the night, scrutinizing data.
APRIL 2014
In Xinjiang Autonomous region of northern China, the cotton fields lay serene under the sun. Acre upon acre of the plants stretched to the horizon, dark green leaves a little dusty from lack of rain. Clouds overhead, however, promised water soon. The white boles had only just begun to open, filling the green fields with lopsided polka dots. A golden eagle coasted on an air current, a darker speck against the gray clouds. To the south lay the ancient Silk Road, and much farther south, the majestic and forbidding peaks of the Kunlun Mountains.
On the roots of the cotton plants, bacteria mutated.
2035
The Grab machinery was Tesslie, of course. It sat in its own room in the Shell, a room without a door just down the central corridor from the farm and the children’s room. Someone had to sit there day and night because no one knew when the machinery would brighten. When it did, they had only a few minutes to get someone on it. Then ten minutes in Before to make a Grab. The whole system was stupid. Pete said so to McAllister, often.
“It isn’t our machinery, remember,” she said. “We don’t know how the Tesslies manage time, or intervals of time. We don’t know how they think.”
“They think it’s fun to destroy the Earth, rescue a few Survivors, put them in the Shell, and watch them for twenty years.”
“There’s no reason to think they watch us.”
“There’s no reason to think they don’t.”
“They need machinery, Pete—they’re aliens but not gods. I see no cameras here.”
Pete turned away because McAllister had just, as she so often did, gone abruptly beyond him. He didn’t know what “gods” were, although some of the Survivors had babbled about them when Pete was little, and Darlene still did. She sang songs about green pastures and washing in blood and rowing boats ashore, all in her scratchy tuneless very loud voice. However, nobody listened to Darlene, who was a nasty old woman. Pete wasn’t too sure about the word “camera” either, although it seemed to be a non-Tesslie machinery that made pictures. Pete didn’t know how machines could draw that fast. But how could the Grab do what it did?
The machinery sat in the center of the room, looking like nothing but a gray metal platform a few inches above the floor. If he climbed onto it, ordinarily nothing happened. But sometimes the platform started to glow and then it became a stupid invisible door. No, not a door. Something else. Whatever it was, if you jumped on the platform and went through it, you had ten minutes in Before.
The Grabs usually came a few close together, then long weeks of no brightening. After the Grab when Pete got Kara and Petra, while he’d been feverish with his infected foot, Paolo had fallen asleep and missed the whole thing. Even if Paolo hadn’t been sick, Pete couldn’t really blame him. Watching the Grab machine do nothing, with only your own thoughts to occupy you, was easily the most boring duty on the roster.
But did the Tesslies watch humanity? That was the question that now consumed Pete. Did they watch Pete and Caity when they had sex? Even though Pete didn’t like Caity, she was his only choice. Jenna had grown too fragile, and the kids from the Grab were still too young. That was why they were Grabbed, of course—to have sex when they were older. The girls would be fertile. The boys would be fertile, too, but the Shell needed a lot more girls than boys. None of the Six apparently were fertile, and the four Survivors left were too old to have babies.
But they had had a lot of sex when they were young and newly in the Shell. Even way back then they had been trying to start humanity all over again. Lots of sex—Pete got hard just imagining it—and lots of babies, most of which died.
But had the fucking bastards (more of Darlene’s useful words) watched while the Survivors had all that sex? Did they watch Pete and Caity? And what was a “bastard,” anyway?
Pete tried to sneak across the corridor from the farm to the children’s room. It had been his turn for fertilizer duty, a job he hated. The fertilizer was made from everybody’s shit. You dumped it into a huge closed metal box (more Tesslie machinery!) and the box did something to it. When it fell out a hole into a bucket, it didn’t smell like shit anymore and McAllister said it couldn’t make you sick. But it still looked like shit. Pete had been collecting shit buckets from all over the Shell, trundling them along the wide central corridor on a shopping cart and dumping them into the fertilizer box. Then he had to rinse each bucket thoroughly under the disinfectant waterfall, which was a continuous rain of blue water that shot out of a wall and disappeared into a hole in the floor. Just after he’d rinsed the last bucket, the fertilizer machine delivered a load of fertilizer. Pete tried to pretend he hadn’t seen the bucket fill, so that spreading the fertilizer would have to be the next person’s job, but Darlene caught him.
“Ha! Don’t be sneaking off before the job’s done! I seen you!”
“I wasn’t sneaking off!”
“Sure you was. You’re bone lazy, Pete. A wild one for sure. Go spread that bucket.”
When Bridget died, Pete wished it had been Darlene instead. “Where should I spread this?” He picked up the bucket of fertilizer. “On the soy?”
“Them ain’t soy,” she said scathingly. “Them are some concoction the Tesslies dreamed up and don’t you think nothing different, boy! Them plants will probably poison us yet!”
“Yeah, right,” Pete said. Darlene was crazy. The Tesslies keeping humans alive for twenty years, giving them Grab machinery to get fertile kids to make more humans, just to poison the whole lot.
Then he realized that Darlene’s craziness was driving him to defend the Tesslies, and he threw the brown gunk—it still looked like shit!—harder than necessary onto the soy. Or whatever it was. “High-protein, dense-calorie plants,” Jenna had told him once. McAllister was teaching Jenna and Paolo all the science she knew from Before, so it wouldn’t be lost. The other Survivors had done the same, but they hadn’t known nearly as much. “We must save everything we can,” she always said.
Pete spread the fertilizer through the soy. There was enough for half the onion bed, too. Then he rinsed the bucket. Darlene watched him every minute.
Darlene was in charge of the farm. In a way that was weird because Eduardo was the Survivor who had been studying plants when the Tesslies put him into the Shell. “Ecobiology,” McAllister had called it. But that just meant that the plants Eduardo knew about were wild ones, and he told Pete that no special knowledge was needed to grow the vegetables on the farm. Besides, nobody wanted Darlene anywhere near the Grab children. She was too mean.
The farm was the biggest room in the Shell, with rows and rows of raised beds holding various crops, crossed by long metal pipes that leaked water. The farm also housed the disinfecting waterfall and the clean-water waterfall, from which endless buckets of water were hauled for drinking, washing, cooking. Here, too, stood the raised section of the floor that could be turned hot by pressing a button. Bridget had been especially good at simmering vegetable stews on the hot box, in buckets. Now Eduardo did it, less well. The farm smelled good, of dirt and water and cooking, and it would have been a lovely place if it hadn’t been for Darlene.