Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress

Author:Nancy Kress
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781616961756
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2014-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

NOAH

Noah stood in a corner of the conference room, which held eleven people and two aliens. Someone had tried to make the room festive with a red paper tablecloth, flowers, and plates of tiny cupcakes. This had not worked. It was still a utilitarian, corporate-looking conference room, filled with people who otherwise would have no conceivable reason to be together at either a conference or a party. Lisa Guiterrez circulated among them: smiling, chatting, trying to put people at ease. It wasn’t working.

Two young women, standing close together for emotional support. A middle-aged man in an Armani suit and Italian leather shoes. An unshaven man, hair in a dirty ponytail, who looked homeless but maybe only because he stood next to Well-Shod Armani. A woman carrying a plastic tote bag with a hole in one corner. And so on and so on. It was the sort of wildly mixed group that made Noah, standing apart with his back to a wall, think of worshippers in an Italian cathedral.

The thought brought him a strained smile. A man nearby, perhaps emboldened by the smile, sidled closer and whispered, “They will let us go back to New York, won’t they?”

Noah blinked. “Why wouldn’t they, if that’s what you want?”

“I want them to offer us shields for the spore cloud! To take back with us to the city! Why else would I come here?”

“I don’t know.”

The man grimaced and moved away. But—why had he even come, if he suspected alien abduction or imprisonment or whatever? And why didn’t he feel what Noah did? Every single one of the people in this room had caused in him the same shock of recognition as had Ambassador Smith. Every single one. And apparently no one else had felt it at all.

But the nervous man needn’t have worried. When the party and its ceiling-delivered speeches of kinship and the invitation to make a longer visit aboard the Embassy were all over, everyone else left. They left looking relieved or still curious or satisfied or uneasy or disappointed (No energy shield offered! No riches!), but they all left, Lisa still chattering reassuringly. All except Noah.

Ambassador Smith came over to him. The Deneb said nothing, merely silently waited. He looked as if he were capable of waiting forever.

Noah’s hands felt clammy. All those brief, temporary lives on sugarcane, each one shed like a snake skin when the drug wore off. No, not snake skins; that wasn’t the right analogy. More like breadcrumbs tossed by Hansel and Gretel, starting in hope but vanishing before they could lead anywhere. The man with the dirty ponytail wasn’t the only homeless one.

Noah said, “I want to know who and what you are.”

The ceiling above Smith said, “Come with me to a genuine celebration.”

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