Sea Change Read online

  Praise for Sea Change

  “Sea Change is like liquid nitrogen ice cream—a chilling treat. Right next door to the future, filled with dark wit—a fine addition to Kress’s work.”

  —Greg Bear, author of Eon and Take Back the Sky

  “This quietly revelatory bio-thriller from Nebula Award–winner Kress (Beggars in Spain) follows one woman’s moral persistence in the face of a near-future worldwide emergency. . . . Kress wisely keeps her global catastrophe on a human scale, eschewing superheroic action for tense realism. This urgent, deeply satisfying story is as tenacious and inspiring as its heroine.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A strong, striking look at a possible future, and the courage that will allow us to survive it.”

  —Laura Anne Gilman, author of Heart of Briar and Soul of Fire

  “Nobody is better at destroying the world—see one of my favorite novellas, the multi-award-winning After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall—but here Nancy Kress dives into the science of genetically modified plants and shows us how we just may need them to save the planet. And this brilliant, thoughtful story is also a page-turner! I don’t know about you, but a thriller about a fear-mongering, anti-science government and the smart, brave people resisting it was exactly the story I needed right now.”

  —Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Spoonbenders

  “This taut, suspenseful near-future ecothriller combines a frighteningly plausible ecological/economic collapse scenario with genuine human emotion. A winner!”

  —David D. Levine, author of Arabella of Mars

  “It actually reads like a Hollywood thriller!”

  —Strange Horizons

  “Kress brilliantly weaves together two halves of a biothriller about GMOs and climate change that blooms logically from our immediate past and into one possible catastrophic near future. What’s even more impressive is how she warns us about the dangers of GMOs on one hand, and teaches us about their wonderous advantages on the other. Highly recommended.”

  —Patrick Swenson, author of The Ultra Thin Man

  “In a word, fantastic. Ms. Kress has crafted a brilliant and frighteningly realistic near future world.”

  —Disciples of Boltax

  “It’s another excellent, fast-paced read from one of speculative fiction’s most consistent voices.”

  —Christopher East

  Praise for Nancy Kress

  “Nancy Kress is one of the best science-fiction writers working today. Her use of science is tricky and thought-provoking, her command of fiction sharp and full of feeling.”

  —Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy

  “Kress, a witty and engaging writer, creates chilling suspense as twisty as a DNA double helix.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “It’s hard to imagine a better writer of science fiction in America today than Nancy Kress.”

  —Salt Lake Tribune

  “Devilishly inventive.”

  —CNN.com

  “A depth of imagination unusual even among science fiction writers.”

  —Analog

  “Kress has the magical ability of weaving amazing plot, believable science, and intriguing characters into a coherent whole.”

  —Blogcritics

  “Kress combines intriguing scientific speculation with strong human drama to create a finely crafted story.”

  —Asimov’s Science Fiction

  Praise for the Nebula Award–winning

  After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

  “After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall is the coming-of-age story for the human race. Nancy Kress has written a chillingly plausible tale of the end of the world.”

  —Mary Robinette Kowal, author of The Calculating Stars

  “Nancy Kress displays all her usual strengths in After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: strong plotting, fast-paced action, complex and interesting characters, thought-provoking speculation. But there’s something more here: a beautiful meditation on the fate of the earth, an elegy, a warning—and a glimpse of hope.”

  —Lisa Goldstein, author of The Red Magician

  “The book is typical Kress, which means impossible to put down.”

  —Jack McDevitt, author of Infinity Beach and Echo

  “An elegant novella that combines several wildly different science fiction ideas into a tight package. There’s a little bit of everything here: time travel, hard science, environmental collapse, aliens, post-apocalyptic dystopia. It may sound hard to combine all of these in such a short format, but Nancy Kress makes it work.”

  —Tor.com

  Praise for the Nebula Award–winning

  Yesterday’s Kin

  “Consider this novella one of the most extreme versions of ‘Can women have it all?’ in recent fiction, with serious family conflict and alien predators to boot.”

  —Glamour

  “Nancy Kress delivers one of the strongest stories of the year to date.”

  —Gardner Dozois, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction series

  “Science-fiction fans will luxuriate in the dystopian madness, while even nonfans will find an artful critique of humanity’s ability to cooperate in the face of a greater threat.”

  —Kirkus

  “Nancy Kress has always written stories as accessible to the novice as to the seasoned fan, and Yesterday’s Kin gets my vote as this summer’s most inviting introduction to science fiction for new readers.”

  —Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune

  “Sparely constructed and cleverly resolved, Yesterday’s Kin provides everything readers need for an immersive plunge into a frightening, fascinating, and inescapable predicament.”

  —Seattle Times

  Other books by Nancy Kress

  Novels

  The Prince of Morning Bells(1981)

  The Golden Grove (1984)

  The White Pipes (1985)

  An Alien Light (1988)

  Brain Rose (1990)

  Maximum Light (1998)

  Nothing Human (2003)

  Crossfire (2003)

  Crucible (2004)

  Dogs (2008)

  Steal Across the Sky (2009)

  Flash Point (2012)

  Sleepless Series

  Beggars in Spain (1993)

  Beggars and Choosers(1994)

  Beggars Ride (1996)

  Probability Sun Trilogy

  Probability Moon (2000)

  Probability Sun (2001)

  Probability Space (2002)

  Novellas

  After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (2012)

  Yesterday’s Kin (2014)

  Collections

  Trinity and Other Stories(1985)

  The Aliens of Earth (1993)

  Beaker’s Dozen (1998)

  Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories (2008)

  AI Bound: Two Stories of Artificial Intelligence (2012)

  The Body Human: Three Stories of Future Medicine (2012)

  Fountain of Age: Stories (2012)

  Future Perfect: Six Stories of Genetic Engineering (2012)

  The Best of Nancy Kress (2015)

  NANCY KRESS

  SEA CHANGE

  Tachyon Publications San Francisco

  Sea Change

  Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Kress

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story

  Author photo by Liza Trombi

  Tachyon
Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  (415) 285-5615

  [email protected]

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-331-6

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-332-3

  Printed in the United States of America by Versa Press, Inc.

  First Edition: 2020

  FOR JACK

  “One thing is sure: the earth is more cultivated and developed now than ever before; there is more farming and fewer forests, swamps are drying up and cities are springing up on an unprecedented scale. We have become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.”

  —Quintus Septimius Tertullianus, 200 BCE

  2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  THE HOUSE WAS CLEARLY LOST.

  I watched from my seat on the second-story balcony of the Cinnamon Café as the tiny house, a ten-by-fifteen imitation Cape Cod with a single dormer, wavered in the middle of the intersection below. It turned to the left, to the right, back to the left, ending up crosswise to the intersection. Traffic honked and stopped. The house didn’t budge, probably recalibrating. An ancient Lexus with an ancient driver tried to swerve around the house, but there wasn’t enough room. The driver leaned out and shouted at the house—as if that would do any good. Whoever was inside had the shutters closed.

  Several homeless, who were not supposed to be in this historic-preservation neighborhood, jeered and laughed.

  The robo-server wheeled up to my table. “Can I bring you something else, ma’am?” I waved it away; my beer was only half drunk. And the show below was too entertaining to gulp the rest, even though I would be late to meet the new recruit. Let him wait. From now on, his life would include a lot of waiting.

  The old man in the Lexus, surprisingly spry, jumped out of the car and pounded on the door of the house. Nothing. People in cars, both drivies and manual, leaned out of their windows, looking impatient. One of the homeless threw a plastic cup at the house’s back wall. It missed. A few pedestrians stopped to watch, smiling, probably gloating that they weren’t the ones whose important rushing was being interrupted by an edifice with confused GPS.

  Still the house didn’t move. Mobile conveyances this large weren’t permitted on city streets unless occupied, although that didn’t guarantee that the occupants weren’t asleep or drunk or too busy having sex to notice that their dwelling wasn’t moving. At the very least, by now the mandatory pull-to-curbside auxiliary engine should have engaged. Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded, probably cops trying to get through the increasingly snarled traffic.

  Grinning, I leaned forward for a better view, and that’s when I saw the windowsill below a closed shutter. Simultaneously, my pocket pinged, just once. Not my phone—the D. It only operated at a distance of fewer than twenty-five feet, to avoid electronic surveillance.

  I walked down the stairs, forcing myself to not hurry, to look like any other person strolling around Pioneer Square in the rare October sunshine. The ping from my D was significant, but it was the paint on the windowsill that propelled me, a specific and ugly shade called Tiffany Teal. The famous New York jewelry store should have sued over the name. The paint company, after spectacularly bad sales, had discontinued the color. Tiffany Teal was roughly the color of wet cleanser and it went with no other color in the known universe. It was the first thing every new recruit memorized, drilled until they could distinguish it from Azure, Leaf, Evening Sky, and Pale Turquoise. We possessed gallons of it, all that was left in the United States, in multiple discreet locations.

  Every organization needs a signature color, Eric Kitson had said, among his other stupid utterances. “Blues” are cops. “Reds” are Communists, unless you live in Boston, where they’re a baseball team. “Oranges” are historic Irish enemies. “Pinks” are a girl band. I could go on, but the argument was too dumb, Eric Kitson was dead, and Tiffany Teal paint was used only to signal presence of the Org. It was useful only for line-of-sight, but on the other hand, it couldn’t be hacked, unlike all other forms of communication, and the Org knew better than to trust what the government or software companies said about digital security. Not since Kitson’s murder.

  The house had a single step leading to its single door. The driver who’d pounded on the door had retreated in disgust; he sat in the front seat of his car, shouting into his phone. In one of the backed-up cars, not too far away, a child wailed. Surreptitiously I pinged open the door with my D, turned to give a theatrically amazed look to onlookers, and ducked inside to the blatting of the alarm system. The siren was much closer now. I had only a minute or two.

  There was nobody in the tiny house.

  It had a loft bed—no time to go up there—a galley kitchen, fold-down table, two easy chairs, bookshelves, a TV. The door to the bathroom was open. I darted in, took the toothbrush, and barely had time to swallow my D. Saliva deactivated its mechanism. The D was soft but nearly a half-inch square, and it got stuck partway down my throat, which gave my voice a strangled gasp when I turned to two cops who filled the doorway.

  “The door . . . it was . . . was—” go down my throat, damn it! “—open . . . I heard a child—” the D finally finished its trip down my gullet “—crying and I thought someone might need . . .”

  I’d always been a more than passable actress. Jake would have been proud of me. Or maybe not, given . . . everything. But I gave the cops the tremulous shakiness of a shy-but-compassionate middle-aged woman trespassing to save a child. I also had: real trepidation creasing my face, a fake ID in my wallet that matched my fake retina scan, and fury in my blood for whatever missing agent of the Org had put me in this position. If it had been an agent. The alternative was worse.

  Most of all, I felt fear. Not for myself but for the organization that always hovered between detection and ineptitude, the organization made of dedicated amateurs up against both law-enforcement professionals and a stupid public, the organization that I would protect with everything in the world until we’d succeeded in our quixotic attempt to save that—probably unworthy—world from itself, whether it wanted that or not.

  Sometimes the world doesn’t know what’s best for it.

  Only one of the cops, the one in uniform, did the talking. Middle-aged and stocky, he balanced exasperation with boredom; a traffic problem didn’t interest him much. It didn’t interest the younger one, either, who wore a suit and spent most of his time scrutinizing the inside of the lost house. His silky brown hair wanted cutting; it kept flopping over his eyes in, I assumed, a misguided attempt to look like the pop singer Canton Sparks. Not a chance—his eyes were the same blue but his nose was too big, his lips too thin. Ah, vanity.

  They didn’t keep me long. “Caroline Denton” did not own a drivie house, had no priors, and possessed ID that matched her retina scan. She had a job with Dugan Brothers Temp Agency. Routine police-wanding showed no electronic devices except a cell phone; by now the D would have dissolved in my stomach acid into its nanocomponents. But I would have been happier to talk to cops had I not been in my Caroline Denton identity. Much happier.

  However, I recorded a witness statement, since abandoning a self-driving house to drive alone was a misdemeanor. Then I left, concealing how shaken I felt.

  Who was supposed to have been in the house? And where were they? Arrested, kidnapped, defected?

  The problem—one of the problems—with any modern resistance movement is that anything can be hacked. Anything—as three presidential elections, the Wall Street Great Meltdown, the Catastrophe, and Kitson’s murder all proved. The reconstituted Org takes no chances. None of our communications are electronic. We use couriers like me and, only if we have to, the U.S. mail. We use verbal codes. We use methods that would be familiar during World War II. Except that back then, they had radio
s and the mechanical Enigma machine. We don’t even do that. We rely on our members’ brains, also a fallible storage-andcommunication system, but at least a hacker in China or at DAS or in one of the fanatical Luddite movements can’t obtain documentation of what we’re doing.

  They can, of course, obtain our brains. Where was the Org agent who should have been in the wandering house?

  The new recruit would be waiting for me in Lincoln Park. He’d wait all day and all night if necessary. If he didn’t, he was no longer our recruit. I had three choices: leave him there, meet with him first and then go alone to report the wandering house to Kyle, or grab the recruit and take him with me to meet Kyle.

  By the time I reached West Seattle, I had decided. I would meet him first. I have good instincts about people.

  Lincoln Park in October was lovely. Not New England lovely, where I’d gone to college; the Pacific Northwest ran more to coniferous trees than deciduous. But the park, bordering Puget Sound, had an unusual number of maples and birches, and I crunched through a colorful blanket of leaves on my way to the water. The air smelled earthy, of pine and loam and, somewhere, a hint of mint. People passed me, walking dogs or holding hands, a few children running ahead and shouting. Cops patrolled to keep homeless encampments from forming on park grounds. A peaceful autumnal Eden, just as if the economy had not been nearly destroyed ten years ago and was not still, for the bottom of the human pyramid, an unholy mess.

  The recruit sat on the designated park bench facing the bay, exactly where he was supposed to be. I approached him from behind, scrutinizing carefully. He stretched out his arms, probably stiff from the long wait, and I saw the flash of the Tiffany Teal bracelet on his left wrist. “Hello,” I said, and he rose and turned toward me.