Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online

the galaxy and the entire galaxy moves through space relative to the cosmic microwave background. Anyway, ten months from now, Earth and this spore cloud will meet. And the spores are deadly to humans.”
    Elizabeth said skeptically, “And they know this how ?”
    “Because two of their colony planets lay in the path of the cloud and were already exposed. Both populations were completely destroyed. The Denebs have recordings. Then they sent unmanned probes to capture samples, which they brought with them. They say the samples are a virus, or something like a virus, but encapsulated in a coating that isn’t like anything viruses can usually make. Together, aliens and humans are going to find a vaccine or a cure.”
    More silence. Then all three of her children spoke together, but in such different tones that they might have been discussing entirely different topics.
    Ryan: “In ten months? A vaccine or cure for an unknown pathogen in ten months? It took the CDC six months just to fully identify the bacterium in Legionnaires’ disease!”
    Elizabeth: “If they’re so technologically superior, they don’t need us to develop any sort of ‘cure’!”
    Noah: “What do the spores do to people?”
    Marianne answered Noah first, because his question was the simplest. “They act like viruses, taking over cellular machinery to reproduce. They invade the lungs and multiply and then . . . then victims can’t breathe. It only takes a few days.” A terrible, painful death. A sudden horror came into her mind: her three children gasping for breath as their lungs were swamped with fluid, until they literally drowned. All of them.
    “Mom,” Ryan said gently, “are you all right? Elizabeth, do you have any wine or anything?”
    “No,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t drink. Marianne suddenly, ridiculously, clung to that fact, as if it could right the world: her two-fisted cop daughter, whose martial arts training enabled her to take down a two-hundred-fifty-pound attacker, had a Victorian lady’s fastidiousness about alcohol. Stereotypes didn’t hold. The world was more complicated than that. The unexpected existed—a Border Patrol section chief did not drink!—and therefore an unexpected solution could be found to this unexpected problem. Yes.
    She wasn’t making sense, and knew it, and didn’t care. Right now, she needed hope more than sense. The Denebs, with technology an order of magnitude beyond humans, couldn’t deal with the spore cloud, but Elizabeth didn’t drink and, therefore, together Marianne and Smith and—throw in the president and WHO and the CDC and USAMRIID, why not—could defeat mindless space-floating dormant viruses.
    Noah said curiously, “What are you smiling about, Mom?”
    “Nothing.” She could never explain.
    Elizabeth blurted, “So even if all this shit is true, what the fuck makes the Dennies think that we can help them?”
    Elizabeth didn’t drink like a cop, but she swore like one. Marianne said, “They don’t know that we can. But their biological sciences aren’t much more advanced than ours, unlike their physical sciences. And the spore cloud hits Earth next September. The Denebs have twenty-five years.”
    “Do you believe that their biological sciences aren’t as advanced as their physics and engineering?”
    “I have no reason to disbelieve it.”
    “If it’s true, then we’re their lab rats! They’ll test whatever they come up with on us, and then they’ll sit back in orbit or somewhere to see if it works before taking it home to their own planet!”
    “That’s one way to think of it,” Marianne said, knowing that this was exactly how a large part of the media would think of it. “Or you could think of it as a rescue mission. They’re trying to help us while there’s time, if not much time.”
    Ryan said, “Why do they want you? You’re not a virologist.”
    “I don’t know,” Marianne said.
    Elizabeth erupted once more, leaping up to pace around the room