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$2.99 Ebook Sale: Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kress

Place holder  of - 55The ebook edition of Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kress is on sale now for only $2.99! See how Dr. Marianne Jenner’s story began before seeing how it all ends in Terran Tomorrow, out on November 13. This offer will only last for a limited time, so order your copy today.

About Tomorrow’s Kin: 

The aliens have arrived… they’ve landed their Embassy ship on a platform in New York Harbor, and will only speak with the United Nations. They say that their world is so different from Earth, in terms of gravity and atmosphere, that they cannot leave their ship. The population of Earth has erupted in fear and speculation.

One day Dr. Marianne Jenner, an obscure scientist working with the human genome, receives an invitation that she cannot refuse. The Secret Service arrives at her college to escort her to New York, for she has been invited, along with the Secretary General of the UN and a few other ambassadors, to visit the alien Embassy.

The truth is about to be revealed. Earth’s most elite scientists have ten months to prevent a disaster—and not everyone is willing to wait.

Order Your Copy

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This sale ends November 1st.

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New Releases: 2/13/18

Happy New Release Day! Here’s what went on sale today.

1972: A Novel of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution by Morgan Llewelyn

Image Placeholder of - 30 The Irish Century series is the narrative of the epic struggle of the Irish people for independence through the tumultuous twentieth century. Morgan Llywelyn’s magisterial multi-novel chronicle of that story began with 1916, continued in 1921 and 1949, and now continues with 1972.

1972 tells the story of Ireland from 1950–1972 as seen through the eyes of young Barry Halloran, son and grandson of Irish revolutionaries. Following family tradition, at eighteen Barry joins the Irish Republican Army to help complete what he sees as ‘the unfinished revolution’.

Echoes of Understorey by Thoraiya Dyer

Image Place holder  of - 9 Great deeds are expected of Imeris. She has trained endlessly to become an extraordinary fighter. Yet she wants more than to compete against the glories of her divine sister and the charms of her courtesan brother.

Imeris thought she could prove her worth during a mission to kill a body-snatching sorceress, but fails disastrously. With death on her conscience and in hiding from her peers, Imeris is determined to find a way to redeem herself.

What she doesn’t expect is to be recruited in a Hunt for the Ages, chasing a terrifying, magical beast that will take all her skills to stop.

Final Strike by William S. Cohen

Poster Placeholder of - 73 Sixty million years ago, the K-T Asteroid obliterated the dinosaurs, and now its apocalyptic twin is rocketing toward the US on a similar mission of extermination. Russian President Boris Lebed, the charismatic successor to Vladimir Putin, wants to turn that asteroid into a superweapon to use against the US and is holding Hamilton hostage in Moscow until Hamilton agrees to help. Former Senator and National Security Advisor Sean Falcone leads a dangerous off-the-books operation to bring Hamilton home and derail Lebed’s disastrous plan.

But will Falcone succeed in time?

Prettyboy Must Die by Kimberly Reid

Placeholder of  -95 When Peter Smith’s classmate snaps a picture of him during a late night run at the track, Peter thinks he might be in trouble. When she posts that photo—along with the caption, “See the Pretty Boy Run,”—Peter knows he’s in trouble. But when hostiles drop through the ceiling of his 6th period Chem Class, Peter’s pretty sure his trouble just became a national emergency.

Because he’s not really Peter Smith. He’s Jake Morrow, former foster-kid turned CIA operative.

Sightwitch by Susan Dennard

Place holder  of - 6 Ryber Fortiza was a Sightwitch Sister at a secluded convent, waiting to be called by her goddess into the depths of the mountain. There she would receive the gift of foretelling. But when that call never comes, Ryber finds herself the only Sister without the Sight.

Years pass and Ryber’s misfit pain becomes a dull ache, until one day, Sisters who already possess the Sight are summoned into the mountain, never to return. Soon enough, Ryber is the only Sister left. Now, it is up to her to save her Sisters, though she does not have the Sight—and though she does not know what might await her inside the mountain.

NEW IN PAPERBACK:

Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

In Amberlough, amidst rising political tensions, three lives become intertwined with the fate of the city itself. As the twinkling marquees lights yield to the rising flames of a fascist revolution, these three will struggle to survive using whatever means — and people — necessary. Including each other.

 

Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kress

The aliens have arrived… they’ve landed their Embassy ship on a platform in New York Harbor, and will only speak with the United Nations. They say that their world is so different from Earth, in terms of gravity and atmosphere, that they cannot leave their ship. The population of Earth has erupted in fear and speculation.

One day Dr. Marianne Jenner, an obscure scientist working with the human genome, receives an invitation that she cannot refuse. The Secret Service arrives at her college to escort her to New York, for she has been invited, along with the Secretary General of the UN and a few other ambassadors, to visit the alien Embassy.

NEW IN MANGA:

Citrus Vol. 7 Story and art by Saburouta

Magical Girl Site Vol. 5 Story and art by Kentaro Sato

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On the Road: Tor/Forge Author Events in September

Tor/Forge authors are on the road in September! See who is coming to a city near you this month.

Spencer Ellsworth, Starfire: A Red Peace

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Friday, September 1
The Book Bin
Salem, OR
7:00 PM

Saturday, September 16
Village Books
Bellingham, WA
7:00 PM

Sarah Gailey, Taste of Marrow

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Saturday, September 9
Borderlands Café
San Francisco, CA
5:00 PM
Also with Seanan McGuire.

Max Gladstone, The Ruin of Angels

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Tuesday, September 5
Pandemonium Books and Games
Cambridge, MA
7:00 PM

Monday, September 11
Powell’s Books
Beaverton, OR
7:00 PM
In conversation with Fonda Lee.

Saturday, September 16
Borderlands Café
San Francisco, CA
3:00 PM

Monday, September 18
The Last Bookstore
Los Angeles, CA
7:30 PM

Thursday, September 21
Harvard Book Store
Cambridge, MA
7:00 PM

Matt Goldman, Gone to Dust

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Sunday, September 10
Poisoned Pen
Scottsdale, AZ
2:00 PM

Wednesday, September 13
Montgomery Public Library
Montgomery, MN
7:00 PM

Thursday, September 14
Once Upon a Crime
Minneapolis, MN
7:00 PM

Alan Gratz, Ban This Book

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Sunday, September 24
Malaprops
Asheville, NC
2:00 PM

Monday, September 25
The Book Stall
Winnetka, IL
4:30 PM

Tuesday, September 26
Anderson’s Bookshop
Downers Grove, IL
7:00 PM

Wednesday, September 27
Avid Bookshop
Athens, GA
4:00 PM

Thursday, September 28
Let’s Play Books
Emmaus, PA
3:30 PM

Friday, September 29
Hooray for Books
Alexandria, VA
6:30 PM

Saturday, September 30
Chapel Hill Library
Chapel Hill, NC
2:00 PM

Rachel Howzell Hall, City of Saviors

Sunday, September 10
Poisoned Pen
Scottsdale, AZ
2:00 PM

Nancy Kress, Tomorrow’s Kin

Thursday, September 14
Third Place Books – Ravenna
Seattle, WA
7:00 PM

Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

Wednesday, September 20
Caveat
New York, NY
6:00 PM
In conversation with Rose Eveleth.

Thursday, September 21
Fountain Bookstore
Richmond, VA
6:30 PM

Friday, September 22
Flyleaf Books
Chapel Hill, NC
7:00 PM

Saturday, September 23
Bookfest St. Louis at The McPherson
St. Louis, MO
5:00 PM
Science Fiction Panel – also with Charlie Jane Anders, Mark Tiedemann, and Ann Leckie.

Sunday, September 24
Women and Children First
Chicago, IL
Also with Charlie Jane Anders.
4:00 PM

Thursday, September 28
Books Inc
Alameda, CA
7:00 PM

Saturday, September 30
Borderlands Café
San Francisco, CA
3:00 PM

Malka Older, Null States

Monday, September 18
Kinokuniya Bookstore
New York, NY
6:00 PM

Thursday, September 28
East City Bookshop
Washington, DC
6:30 PM

Sarah Porter, When I Cast Your Shadow

Thursday, September 14
The Astoria Bookshop
Astoria, NY

Linda Stasi, Book of Judas

Monday, September 18
7:00 PM
Also with Nelson DeMille

Thursday, September 28
Book Revue
Huntington, NY
7:00 PM

Sage Walker, The Man in the Tree

Saturday, September 16
Page One Bookstore
Albuquerque, NM
4:00 PM
Also with Jeffe Kennedy.

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New Releases: 7/11/17

Happy New Release Day! Here’s what went on sale today.

The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross

Poster Placeholder of - 9 Following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.

Shoreline by Carolyn Baugh

Place holder  of - 82 Officer Nora Khalil is a strong independent woman used to navigating different terrains. As an American-born Muslim, she loves her country and tries to honor the traditions of her people, but feels that she must constantly confront those who think she is alien.

Assigned to the FBI office in Erie, Pennsylvania, she tries to fit into small-town America after a childhood growing up in the bustle of Philly’s dark streets. A series of horrific acts of violence are committed by a well-connected group of domestic terrorists eager to spark a national revolution.

Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kress

Image Place holder  of - 92 The aliens have arrived… they’ve landed their Embassy ship on a platform in New York Harbor, and will only speak with the United Nations. They say that their world is so different from Earth, in terms of gravity and atmosphere, that they cannot leave their ship. The population of Earth has erupted in fear and speculation.

NEW IN PAPERBACK:

A Shadow All of Light by Fred Chappell

Image Placeholder of - 9 Falco, a young man from the country, arrives in the port city of Tardocco with the ambition of becoming an apprentice shadow thief. Falco’s tests and adventures teach him to break through ingenious security traps and drop him among con men, monsters, pirates, and the King of Cats.

 

The Ghost Line by Andrew Neil Gray and J.S. Herbison

Placeholder of  -71 The Martian Queen was the Titanic of the stars before it was decommissioned, set to drift back and forth between Earth and Mars on the off-chance that reclaiming it ever became profitable for the owners. For Saga and her husband Michel the cruise ship represents a massive payday. Hacking and stealing the ship could earn them enough to settle down, have children, and pay for the treatments to save Saga’s mother’s life.

But the Martian Queen is much more than their employer has told them.

Night Work by David C. Taylor

Michael Cassidy, a New York cop plagued by dreams that sometimes come true, escorts a prisoner accused of murder to Havana on the cusp of Fidel Castro’s successful revolution against the Batista dictatorship. After delivering the man to La Cabaña prison and rescuing Dylan McCue, a Russian KGB agent and his now-married former lover, from her scheduled execution, Cassidy returns to New York and retreats into the comforts of alcohol and sex.

The arrival of Fidel Castro in New York three months later complicates the cop’s life once more.

NEW IN MANGA: 

Dreamin’ Sun Vol. 2 Story and art by Ichigo Takano

Ghost Diary Vol. 2 Story & Art by Seiju Natsumegu

NTR: Netsuzou Trap Vol. 3 Story and art Kodama Naoko

The Sacred Blacksmith Vol. 10 Story by Isao Miura; art by Kotaro Yamada

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Science and Science Fiction: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Place holder  of - 34Written by Nancy Kress

One of the scariest statements I ever heard came from a young relative of mine: “All the science I know I learned from your books!” To which I replied, gasping a little, “But you know I make it up, right?”

But not entirely—which raises a critical question. While much has been written about how to use science to create, plot, or enhance one’s fiction, not as much has been written about how speculative fiction impacts our understanding of science. Consider the following: Haijun Yao, editor of China’s major SF magazine, Science Fiction World, told me last year that the Chinese government, which banned SF during the Cultural Revolution, is now very enthusiastic about its publication. The reason, Mr. Yao said, is that reading science fiction encourages young people to learn about science.

Many, many more people see science fiction movies than read print SF.

Almost all SF movies, and much print SF as well, depicts science that is misleading at best, harmful at worst.

The misleading first. Whenever I have taught science fiction as literature, I have had students who believed the following:

  1. Cloning will lead to groups of people who are telepathic with each other, or who duplicate the moral bearings of the original DNA bearer, or are inherently evil and monstrous because, well, after all, they’re clones. Not “real” human beings.
  2. Aliens who contact Earth will aggressively want to use humans as slaves or food, or will want our gold or water or expertise.
  3. If we destroy the Earth’s ecology, future generations will just move to other planets, so don’t worry.
  4. Going into a black hole can take us into the past.

Sometimes it helps to point out obvious dissents:

  1. Cloning is just delayed twinning.
  2. Aliens, whose different evolutionary paths will result in biology probably not based on DNA, will be unable to eat us or mate with us. Water and gold are more profitably mined on an asteroid than carried up a gravity well. Robots are more efficient than human slaves at hard labor. Any star-faring race already has more scientific expertise than we do, or we would be going to them.
  3. No solar-system planet can as yet support sustainable human colonies, and the stars are way out of reach.
  4. A black hole smashes everything down into unrecognizable forms of matter—even Matthew McConaughey (yes, I hated that movie).

Alas, sometimes saying these things does no good. Movies and books are powerful.

However, that the “science” the public learns from SF is debatable doesn’t strike me as the worst problem. That comes from another source: Writers and scriptwriters often make science itself the villain. A problem involving some scientific advance—cloning, nanotechnology, AI—is set up, and all the negative aspects of the tech are brought out, exaggerated, falsified, and blamed. I understand the impetus for this—I’m a writer, too!—which is to create the conflict necessary to drive any story. But the cumulative net effect is the impression that new science and its offspring, new tech, are invariably bad.

In the movie Ex Machina, robots turn murderous.

In countless SF stories, AI tries to take over and must be fought, shut down, destroyed.

Cloning produces not crops or food animals that can feed an ever-expanding population, but rather the oppressive (and ridiculous) one-world biological totalitarianism of Gattaca.

There are exceptions, of course. The Martian, book and movie, portray science as savior. My favorite line is when the protagonist, faced with the problem of basic survival, vows, “I’m going to science the shit out of this!” The film Contagion depicts an accurate, science-driven response to a worldwide pandemic (as, incidentally, does my own Tomorrow’s Kin, to a pandemic with much different causes). Many authors write thoughtful explorations, not hopped-up modern Luddism, about the implications of emerging technologies. There are not, in my not-all-that-humble opinion, enough such SF authors.

Before you try to lynch me with that symbol of nostalgic obsolescence, the used typewriter ribbon, let me just say that I’m not calling here for Pollyannaism about science, or for the removal of exciting adventure SF, or of that venerable SF subgenre, the cautionary tale. “If this goes on…big trouble ahead!” is a fair structure for SF. Nor am I saying that fantasy doesn’t have a cherished place in speculative fiction. Nor that such sui generis hybrids as Charlie Jane Anders’s delightful romp, All the Birds in the Sky, shouldn’t contain her wildly inventive combination of magic and implausible science—especially if they’re as wittily written as that award-winning novel.

I am saying that I wish writers and—particularly movie makers—would look harder, deeper, and more thoroughly into their scientific subjects when the tone of their work is hard-science plausibility. There are many dramatic ways to exploit, for fictional purposes, the actual boons and pitfalls of science, without an overload of wrong, sometimes ludicrous, disinformation.

After all, readers are listening, watching, noting. It would be nice if they didn’t get the impression that everything produced in a science lab (food, energy, medicines, data) is aimed at harming them. A little realistic balance is what I’m calling for here.

Is that really too much to ask?

Order Your Copy

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Follow Nancy Kress on Twitter and on her website.

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On the Road: Tor/Forge Author Events in July

Tor/Forge authors are on the road in July! See who is coming to a city near you this month.

Cora Carmack, Roar

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Tuesday, July 11
Turn of the Corkscrew
Rockville Centre, NY
7:00 PM
Also with A.J. Hartley, in conversation with editor Diana Pho and author Sarah Beth Durst.

Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

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Monday, July 17
Pandemonium Books
Cambridge, MA
7:00 PM
Also with Chris Sharp and Fran Wilde.

A.J. Hartley, Firebrand

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Tuesday, July 11
Turn of the Corkscrew
Rockville Centre, NY
7:00 PM
Also with Cora Carmack, in conversation with editor Diana Pho and author Sarah Beth Durst.

Michael F. Haspil, Graveyard Shift

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Thursday, July 20
Tattered Cover
Littleton, CO
7:00 PM

Nancy Kress, Tomorrow’s Kin

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Wednesday, July 12
University Bookstore
Seattle, WA
7:00 PM
Also with Kay Kenyon.

Wednesday, July 19
Powell’s Books
Beaverton, OR
7:00 PM
Also with Brenda Cooper.

Thursday, July 20
Pacific Planetarium
Bremerton, WA
6:30 PM
Books provided by Liberty Bay Books.

David D. Levine, Arabella and the Battle of Venus

Tuesday, July 18
Powell’s Books
Beaverton, OR
7:00 PM

Thursday, July 20
University Bookstore
Seattle, WA

Saturday, July 22
San Francisco, CA

Chris Sharp, Cold Counsel

Monday, July 17
Pandemonium Books
Cambridge, MA
7:00 PM
Also with Ruthanna Emrys and Fran Wilde.

Fran Wilde, The Jewel and Her Lapidary / Updraft

Friday, July 14
Parkway Central Library
Philadelphia, PA
7:30 PM
Also with Kevin Hearne and Chuck Wendig.

Monday, July 17
Pandemonium Books
Cambridge, MA
7:00 PM
Also with Ruthanna Emrys and Chris Sharp.

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Excerpt: Tomorrow’s Kin by Nancy Kress

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Tomorrow’s Kin is the first volume in an all new hard science fiction trilogy by Nancy Kress based on the Nebula Award-winning Yesterday’s Kin.

The aliens have arrived… they’ve landed their Embassy ship on a platform in New York Harbor, and will only speak with the United Nations. They say that their world is so different from Earth, in terms of gravity and atmosphere, that they cannot leave their ship. The population of Earth has erupted in fear and speculation.

One day Dr. Marianne Jenner, an obscure scientist working with the human genome, receives an invitation that she cannot refuse. The Secret Service arrives at her college to escort her to New York, for she has been invited, along with the Secretary General of the UN and a few other ambassadors, to visit the alien Embassy.

The truth is about to be revealed. Earth’s most elite scientists have ten months to prevent a disaster—and not everyone is willing to wait.

Tomorrow’s Kin will become available July 11th. Please enjoy this excerpt.

CHAPTER 1

The publication party was held in the dean’s office, which was supposed to be an honor. Oak-paneled room, sherry in little glasses, small-paned windows facing the quad—the room was trying hard to be a Commons someplace like Oxford or Cambridge, a task for which it was several centuries too late. The party was trying hard to look festive. Marianne’s colleagues, except for Evan and the dean, were trying hard not to look too envious, or at their watches.

“Stop it,” Evan said at her from behind the cover of his raised glass.

“Stop what?”

“Pretending you hate this.”

“I hate this,” Marianne said.

“You don’t.”

He was half right. She didn’t like parties but she was proud of her paper, which had been achieved despite two years of gene sequencers that kept breaking down, inept graduate students who contaminated samples with their own DNA, murmurs of “Lucky find” from Baskell, with whom she’d never gotten along. Baskell, an old-guard physicist, saw her as a bitch who refused to defer to rank or to back down gracefully in an argument. Many people, Marianne knew, saw her as some variant of this. The list included two of her three grown children.

Outside the open casements, students lounged on the grass in the mellow October sunshine. Three girls in cut-off jeans played Frisbee, leaping at the blue flying saucer and checking to see if the boys sitting on the stone wall were watching. Feinberg and Davidson, from Physics, walked by, arguing amiably. Marianne wished she were with them instead of at her own party.

“Oh God,” she said to Evan, “Curtis just walked in.”

The president of the university made his ponderous way across the room. Once he had been an historian, which might be why he reminded Marianne of Henry VIII. Now he was a campus politician, as power-mad as Henry but stuck at a second-rate university where there wasn’t much power to be had. Marianne held against him not his personality but his mind; unlike Henry, he was not all that bright. And he spoke in clichés.

“Dr. Jenner,” he said, “congratulations. A feather in your cap, and a credit to us all.”

“Thank you, Dr. Curtis,” Marianne said.

“Oh, ‘Ed,’ please.”

“Ed.” She didn’t offer her own first name, curious to see if he remembered it. He didn’t. Marianne sipped her sherry.

Evan jumped into the awkward silence. “I’m Dr. Blanford, visiting post-doc,” he said in his plummy British accent. “We’re all so proud of Marianne’s work.”

“Yes! And I’d love for you to explain to me your innovative process—ah, Marianne.”

He didn’t have a clue. His secretary had probably reminded him that he had to put in an appearance at the party: Dean of Science’s office, 4:30 Friday, in honor of that publication by Dr. Jenner in—quick look at e-mail—in Nature, very prestigious, none of our scientists has published there before. . . .

“Oh,” Marianne said as Evan poked her discreetly in the side: Play nice! “It wasn’t so much an innovation in process as unexpected results from known procedures. My assistants and I discovered a new haplogroup of mitochondrial DNA. Previously it was thought that the genome of Homo sapiens consisted of thirty haplogroups, and we found a thirty-first.”

“By sequencing a sample of contemporary genes, you know,” Evan said helpfully. “Sequencing and verifying.”

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent, and Dr. Curtis looked suitably impressed. “Of course, of course. Splendid results. A star in your crown.”

“It’s yet another haplogroup descended,” Evan said with malicious helpfulness, “from humanity’s common female ancestor a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. ‘Mitochondrial Eve.’”

Dr. Curtis brightened. There had been a TV program about Mitochondrial Eve, Marianne remembered, featuring a buxom actress in a leopard-skin sarong. “Oh, yes! Wasn’t that—”

“I’m sorry, you can’t go in there!” someone shrilled in the corridor outside the room. All conversation ceased. Heads swiveled toward three men in dark suits pushing their way past the knot of graduate students by the door. The three men wore guns.

Another school shooting, Marianne thought, where can I—

“Dr. Marianne Jenner?” the tallest of the three men said, flashing a badge. “I’m Special Agent Douglas Katz of the FBI. We’d like you to come with us.”

Marianne said, “Am I under arrest?”

“No, no, nothing like that. We are acting under direct order of the president of the United States. We’re here to escort you to New York.”

Evan had taken Marianne’s hand—she wasn’t sure just when. There was nothing romantic in the handclasp, nor anything sexual. Evan, twenty-five years her junior and discreetly gay, was a friend, an ally, the only other evolutionary biologist in the department and the only one who shared Marianne’s cynical sense of humor. “Or so we thought,” they said to each other whenever any hypothesis proved wrong. Or so we thought . . . His fingers felt warm and reassuring around her suddenly icy ones.

“Why am I going to New York?”

“I’m afraid we can’t tell you that. But it is a matter of national security.”

Me? What possible reason—”

Special Agent Katz almost, but not quite, hid his impatience at her questions. “I wouldn’t know, ma’am. My orders are to escort you to UN Special Mission Headquarters in Manhattan.”

Marianne looked at her gaping colleagues, at the wide-eyed grad students, at Dr. Curtis, who was already figuring how this could be turned to the advantage of the university. She freed her hand from Evan’s and managed to keep her voice steady.

“Please excuse me, Dr. Curtis, Dean. It seems I’m needed for something connected with . . . with the aliens.”

One more time, Noah Jenner rattled the doorknob to the apartment. It felt greasy from too many unwashed palms, and it was still locked. But he knew that Emily was in there. That was the kind of thing he was always, somehow, right about. He was right about things that didn’t do him any good.

“Emily,” he said softly through the door, “please open up.”

Nothing.

“Emily, I have nowhere else to go.”

Nothing.

“I’ll stop, I promise. I won’t do sugarcane ever again.”

The door opened a crack, chain still in place, and Emily’s despairing face appeared. She wasn’t the kind of girl given to dramatic fury, but her quiet despair was even harder to bear. Not that Noah didn’t deserve it. He knew he did. Her fair hair hung limply on either side of her long, sad face. She wore the green bathrobe he liked, with the butterfly embroidered on the left shoulder.

“You won’t stop,” Emily said. “You can’t. You’re an addict.”

“It’s not an addictive drug. You know that.”

“Not physically, maybe. But it is for you. You won’t give it up. I’ll never know who you really are.”

“I—”

“I’m sorry, Noah. But—Go away.” She closed and relocked the door.

Noah stood slumped against the dingy wall, waiting to see if anything else would happen. Nothing did. Eventually, as soon as he mustered the energy, he would have to go away.

Was she right? Would he never give up sugarcane? It wasn’t that it delivered a high: it didn’t. No rush of dopamine, no psychedelic illusions, no out-of-body experiences, no lowering of inhibitions. It was just that on sugarcane, Noah felt like he was the person he was supposed to be. The problem was that it was never the same person twice. Sometimes he felt like a warrior, able to face and ruthlessly defeat anything. Sometimes he felt like a philosopher, deeply content to sit and ponder the universe. Sometimes he felt like a little child, dazzled by the newness of a fresh morning. Sometimes he felt like a father (he wasn’t), protective of the entire world. Theories said that sugarcane released memories of past lives, or stimulated the collective unconscious, or made temporarily solid the images of dreams. One hypothesis was that it created a sort of temporary, self-induced Korsakoff’s syndrome, the neurological disorder in which invented selves seem completely true. No one knew how sugarcane really acted on the brain. For some people, it did nothing at all. For Noah, who had never felt he fit in anywhere, it gave what he had never had: a sense of solid identity, if only for the hours that the drug stayed in his system.

The problem was, it was difficult to hold a job when one day you were nebbishy, sweet-natured Noah Jenner, the next day you were Attila the Hun, and two days later you were far too intellectual to wash dishes or make change at a convenience store. Emily had wanted Noah to hold a job. To contribute to the rent, to scrub the floor, to help take the sheets to the laundromat. To be an adult, and the same adult every day. She was right to want that. Only—

He might be able to give up sugarcane and be the same adult, if only he had the vaguest idea who that adult was. Which brought him back to the same problem—he didn’t fit anywhere. And never had.

Noah picked up the backpack in which Emily had put his few belongings. She couldn’t have left it in the hallway for very long or the backpack would have already been stolen. He made his way down the three flights from Emily’s walk-up and out onto the streets. The October sun shone warmly on his shoulders, on the blocks of shabby buildings, on the trash skirling across the dingy streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Walking, Noah reflected bitterly, was one thing he could do without fitting in. He walked the blocks to Battery Park, that green oasis on the tip of Manhattan’s steel canyons, leaned on a railing, and looked south.

He could just make out the Embassy, floating in New York Harbor. Well, no, not the Embassy itself, but the shimmer of light off its energy shield. Everybody wanted that energy shield, including his sister Elizabeth. It kept everything out, short of a nuclear missile. Maybe that, too: so far nobody had tried, although in the two months since the Embassy had floated there, three different terrorist groups had tried other weapons. Nothing got through the shield, although maybe air and light did. They must, right? Even aliens needed to breathe.

When the sun dropped below the horizon, the glint off the floating embassy disappeared. Dusk was gathering. He would have to make the call if he wanted a place to sleep tonight. Elizabeth or Ryan? His brother wouldn’t yell at him as much, but Ryan lived Upstate, in the same little Hudson River town as their mother’s college, and Noah would have to hitchhike there. Also, Ryan was often away, doing fieldwork for his wildlife agency. Noah didn’t think he could cope with Ryan’s talkative, sticky-sweet wife right now. So it would have to be Elizabeth.

He called his sister’s number on his cheap cell. “Hello?” she snapped. Born angry, their mother always said of Elizabeth. Well, Elizabeth was in the right job, then.

“Lizzie, it’s Noah.”

“Noah.”

“Yes. I need help. Can I stay with you tonight?” He held the cell away from his ear, bracing for her onslaught. Shiftless, lazy, directionless . . . When it was over, he said, “Just for tonight.”

They both knew he was lying, but Elizabeth said, “Come on then,” and clicked off without saying good-bye.

If he’d had more than a few dollars in his pocket, Noah would have looked for a sugarcane dealer. Since he didn’t, he left the park, the wind pricking at him now with tiny needles, and descended to the subway that would take him to Elizabeth’s apartment on the Upper West Side.

Copyright © 2017 by Nancy Kress

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