The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I rinsed Robin, wrapped him in a large, gray-from-age towel, and laid him on the floor. He smiled at me; such a sweet-natured child. I gave Lucy and Lem, too frenetic for sweetness, a hoarded cookie each, and turned on the Internet. The Trumpeter avatar, whom someone had designed to subtly remind viewers of Honest Abe Lincoln, was in the middle of the story, complete with what must have been hastily assembled archival footage from obsolete media.

There was the little pewter-colored spaceship in my Uncle John’s cow field twenty-five years ago, and Kyra walking out with a dazed look on her small face. God-she’d been only a few years older than Lucy and Lem. There was the ship lifting straight up, passing the Army helicopter. That time, no watching telescopes or satellites had detected a larger ship, coming or going… either our technology was better now, or the aliens had a different game plan. Now the screen showed pictures from the Blanding, which looked like nothing but a dot in space until computers enhanced it, surrounded it with graphics, and “artistically rendered” various imaginary appearances and routes and speculations. In the midst of the hype given somberly in Abraham Lincoln’s “voice,” I gathered that the ship’s trajectory would intersect with the same cow pasture as last time-unless, of course, it didn’t-and would arrive at Earth in thirteen hours and seven minutes.

A Chinese general appeared on-screen, announcing in translation that China was prepared to shoot the intruder down.

“Mommy!” Lucy shrieked. “My cookie’s gone!”

“Not now, honey.”

“But Lem gots some of his cookie and he won’t share!”

“In a minute!”

“But Mommy-”

The Internet abruptly cut out. The Internet.

Into the shocking, eerie silence came Lem’s voice, marginally quieter than his sister’s. “Mommy. I hear some sirens.”

Three days of chaos. I had never believed panic-old-style Roman rioting in the streets, totally out of control, murderous panic-could happen in the United States, in gray cities like Rochester, New York. Yes, there were periodic race riots in Atlanta and looting spells in New York or war hysteria in San Francisco, but the National Guard quickly contained them in neighborhoods where violence was a way of life anyway. But this panic took over the whole city-Rochester-in a cold February and watching on the Internet, when a given site’s coverage was up anyway, was to know a surreal horror. This was supposed to be America.

People were publicly beheaded on the lawns of the art museum, their breath frozen on the winter air a second before the blood leapt from their severed heads toward the camera. No one could say why they were being executed, or even if there was a reason. Buildings that the National Guard had protected from being bombed by Chinese terrorists were bombed by crazed Americans. Anyone Chinese-American, or appearing Chinese-American, or rumored to be Chinese-American, was so savagely assaulted that the fourteenth century would have been disgusted. A dead, mangled baby was thrown onto our fourth-floor fire escape, where it lay for the entire three days, pecked at by crows.

I kept the children huddled in the bathroom, which had no windows to shatter. Or see out of. The electricity went off, then on, then off for good. The heat ceased. David stayed by the living room window in case the building caught fire and we had no choice but to evacuate. Even during this horror he belittled and criticized: “If you’d had more food stockpiled, Amy, maybe the kids wouldn’t have to have cereal again.” “You never were any good at keeping them soothed and quiet.”

Soothed and quiet. The crows on the fire escape had plucked out the dead infant’s eyes.

Whenever Lucy, Lem, and Robin were finally asleep, I turned on the radio. The riots were coming under control. No, they weren’t. The President was dead. No, he wasn’t. The President had declared martial law. Massive bio-weapons had been unleashed in New York. No, in London. No, in Peking. The Chinese were behind these attacks. No, the Chinese were having worse riots than we were, their present chaos merging with their previous chaos of civil war. It was that civil war that had broken the American-Chinese alliance three years ago. And then during their civil upheavals, the Chinese had attacked Alaska. Maybe. Not even the international intelligence network was completely sure who’d released the bubonic-plague-carrying rats in Anchorage. But, announced the White House, the excesses of China had become too much for the Western world to stomach.

I didn’t see how those excesses could be worse than this.