The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

By the time the world learned of this, from a call made on the village’s only comlink, the child was already inside the alien ship. News people and government people raced to the scene. East Africa was in its usual state of confused civil war, incipient drought, and raging disease. The borders were theoretically sealed. This made no difference whatsoever. Gunfire erupted, disinformation spread, ultimata were issued. The robocams went on recording.

“Does it look the same as the ship you saw?” Lem said softly, watching the news beside me. His wife Amalie was in the kitchen with Lehani. I could hear them laughing.

“It looks the same.” Forty-five years fell away and I stood in Uncle John’s cow field, watching Kyra walk into the pewter-colored ship and walk out the most famous little girl in the world.

Lem said, “What do you think they want?”

I stared at him. “Don’t you think I’ve wondered that for four and a half decades? That everyone has wondered that?”

Lem was silent.

A helicopter appeared in the sky over the alien craft. That, too, was familiar-until it set down and I grasped its huge size. Troops began pouring out, guns were leveled, and orders barked. A newsman, maybe live but probably virtual, said, “We’re being ordered to shut down all reporting on this-” He disappeared.

A black cloud emanated from the helicopter, but not before a robocam had shown more equipment being off-loaded. Lem said, “My God, I think that’s a bombcase!” Through the black cloud ripped more gunfire.

Then no news came through at all.

The stories conflicted wildly, of course. At least six different agencies, in three different countries, were blamed. A hundred and three people died at the scene, and uncounted more in the senseless riots that followed. One of the dead was the second little boy that had witnessed the landing.

The first child went up with the ship. It was the only picture that emerged after the government erected visual and electronic blockage: the small craft rising unharmed above the black cloud, ascending into the sky and disappearing into the bright African sunlight.

The Kikuyu boy was released about a hundred miles away, near another village, but it was a long time before ordinary people learned that.

Kyra never called me after the furor had died down. I searched for her, but she was more savvy about choosing her aliases. If the government located her, and I assumed they did, no one informed me.

Why would they?

Sometimes the world you want comes too late.

It was not really the world anyone wanted, of course. Third world countries, especially but not exclusively in Africa, were still essentially ungovernable. Fetid urban slums, disease, and terror from local warlords. Daily want, brutality, and suffering, all made orders of magnitude worse by the lunatic compulsion to genocide. Much of the globe lives like this, with little hope of foreseeable change.

But inside the United States’s tightly guarded, expensively defended borders, a miracle had occurred. Loaves from fishes, something for nothing, the free lunch there ain’t supposed to be one of. Nanotechnology.

It was still an embryonic industry. But it had brought burgeoning prosperity. And with prosperity came the things that aren’t supposed to cost money but always do: peace, generosity, civility. And one more thing: a space program, the cause of all the news agitation I was pointedly not watching.

“It’s not fair to say that nano brought civility,” Lucy protested. She was back from a journalism assignment in Sudan that had left her gaunt and limping, with half her hair fallen out. Lucy didn’t volunteer details and I didn’t ask. From the look in her haunted eyes, I didn’t think I could bear to hear her answers.

“Civility is a by-product of money,” I said. “Starving people are not civil to each other.”

“Sometimes they are,” she said, looking at some painful memory I could not imagine.

“Often?” I pressed.

“No. Not often.” Abruptly Lucy left the room.

I have learned to wait serenely until she’s ready to return to me, just as she has learned to wait, less serenely, until she is ready to return to those parts of the world where she makes her living. My daughter is too old for what she does, but she cannot, somehow, leave it alone. Injured, diseased, half bald, she always goes back.

But Lucy is partly right. It isn’t just America’s present riches that have led to her present civility. This decade’s culture-optimistic, tolerant, fairly formal-is also a simple backlash to what went before. Pendulums swing. They cannot not swing.

While I waited for Lucy, I returned to my needlepoint. Now that nano has begun to easily make us anything, things that are hard to make are back in fashion. My eyes are too old for embroidery or even petit point, but gros point I can do. Under my fingers, roses bloomed on a pair of slippers. A bird flew to the tree beside me, lit on a branch, and watched me solemnly.