The uniformed military aide appeared at her elbow just as Katherine Taney rose from her gilded chair to enter the Oval Office. “The president will see you now,” his secretary said simultaneously with the aide’s statement, “Wait a moment, Katie.”
She turned to stare at him. Keep the president waiting? But his face told. For a moment vertigo nearly took her, a swooping blackness, but only for a moment. She said quietly to the aide, “Another one?”
“Two more. Possibly three.”
Dear God.
“Ma’am,” chided the secretary, “the president is ready.”
She straightened her aging back, thought a quick prayer, and went to brief the commander-in-chief. No, not really to brief—to plead, with the war-battered United States government, for compassion in the face of the unthinkable.
In the beginning, Li remembered, there had been big faceless people, white as cartoons. These memories were quick and slippery, like dreams. The other children didn’t have them at all. Since that time, there had been only the real cartoons, the world, and Taney.
He had realized a long time ago that Taney was a person inside a white cartoon covering, and that he himself was a person inside the world, another covering. The world must also have an outside because when Taney left after each visit, she couldn’t have stayed for days in the space behind the leaving door. The space was too small, not even room to lie down to sleep. And what would she eat or drink in there until she came back? And where did she get the fried cakes and other things she brought them?
“There’s another door, isn’t there, Taney?” he said yet again as the five of them sat around the feeder in the Grove. The feeder had just brought up bowls of food, but no one except Sudie was eating them because Taney had brought a lot of fried cakes in a white bag. Sudie, always greedy, had eaten three fried cakes and half a bowl of stew and now slumped happily against a palm tree, her naked belly round and her lips greasy. Jana sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her thin arms clasped around her legs. Kim stared at nothing.
Li repeated, “Another door. You go out of the world through another door, don’t you?”
“I can’t answer that,” Taney said, as always. The girls didn’t even glance at her. Li didn’t expect them to; he was the only one who ever questioned Taney.
But tonight Jana, still gazing over her clasped knees at the shadow of trees against the sky, said, “Why can’t you answer, Taney?”
Taney’s head swiveled toward Jana. It was hard to see Taney’s eyes through the faceplate on her white covering; you had to get very close and squint. The cartoons covered like Taney didn’t even have eyes, no matter how much you squinted at them.
There hadn’t been any new cartoons for a long while.
Taney finally said, “I can’t answer you, Jana, because the world keeps you safe.”
The old answer, the one they’d heard all their lives from Taney, from the cartoons. For the first time, Li challenged it. “How, Taney? How does the world keep us safe? Sudie still fell over that stone and you had to come and fix her arm. Jana ate that flower and all her food came out of her mouth.” The next day, all of that kind of flower, all over the world, had disappeared.
Taney merely repeated, “The world keeps you safe.”
Sudie said suddenly from her place against the tree, “Your voice is sad, Taney.”
Jana said, “When will we get new cartoons?”
But Taney was already getting to her feet, slow and heavy in her white covering. Even Kim knew what that meant. Kim climbed onto Taney’s lap and started to lick frantically at Taney’s face, and it took both Sudie and Li to pull her back. Kim was tall and strong. Taney said, as always, “Be well, dear hearts,” and started away.
Li, clutching the screaming Kim, watched Taney walk the path between the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. The leaving door was in a big pink rock at the small end of the world, near the pond. Maybe tomorrow they would splash in the pond. That might be fun.
Except that nothing was as much fun as it used to be. Li didn’t know why, but it was true.
Eventually Kim stopped screaming and they let her go. Jana folded and refolded the white paper bag Taney had left her, making pretty shapes. The sky overhead and beside the Grove darkened. The feeder with its three untouched bowls and one empty one sank into the ground. The blankets rose, clean even though last night Kim had shit hers again.
The four children wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down on the grass. Within minutes all were asleep in the circling grove of antiseptic palm trees that produced no fruit, and whose fronds never rustled in the motionless air.
“Two-and-a-half enclosed acres. Double-built dome construction, translucent and virtually impenetrable. Negative air pressure with triple filters. Inside, semi-tropical flora, no fauna, monitors throughout. Life-maintenance machinery to be concentrated by the east wall within a circle of trees, including the input screen. All instructional programs to feature only cartoon characters in biohazard suits, to minimize curiosity about other people.”
Katherine said, “Two-and-a-half acres isn’t sufficient for a self-sustaining biosphere.”
“Of course not, ma’am,” the high-clearance DOD engineer said, barely concealing his impatience. “An outside computer will control all plant-maintenance and atmospheric functions.”
“And personnel?”
“Once the biosphere is up and running, it will need little human oversight. Both functional and contact personnel will be your agency’s responsibility. Our involvement extends only to the construction and maintenance of the cage.”
“Don’t call it that!”
The engineer, whom Katherine knew she should be thanking instead of reprimanding, merely shrugged. His blue eyes glittered with dislike. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”
Three days later, Taney didn’t come.
It was her day. But lunch came up on the feeder, and then dinner, and then the sky got dark, and the leaving door never opened. Kim sat staring at it the whole day, her mouth hanging open until Jana pressed it closed. Kim couldn’t talk or do much of anything, but somehow she always knew when it was Taney’s day. So she sat, while the others splashed in the pond and pretended to have fun.
All at once the water in the pond gave a small hiccup and sloshed gently onto the sandy beach.
“Did you feel that?” Sudie said. “The ground moved!”
“Ground can’t move,” Li said, because he was the leader. But it had. He waited for the ground to do something else but it just lay there, ground under water. Li got out of the pond.
“Where are you going?” Jana said.
“Feeder time,” Li said, although it wasn’t.
They pulled Kim to her feet and ran. By the time they reached the Grove, their naked bodies were dry. Li could feel his hair, which Taney sometimes cut, curling wetly on the back of his neck. Jana’s hair, shorter than his, stood up in yellow fluff that Li liked. Maybe Jana would want to play bodies with him tonight.
They sat in a circle under the trees, hungry and pleasantly tired from splashing in the pond. Sudie studied the keypad under the screen, each button with a little picture on it, and chose the cartoon about four children helping each other to make sand paintings. Li was tired of that cartoon, although when it first appeared, they’d all loved it. Days and days had been spent making sand paintings with the many-colored sands on the beach by the pond.
The cartoon played, but only Kim really watched it. The feeder rose and—
“The bowls are empty!” Jana cried.
Li leaped up and examined the four wooden bowls. Empty. How could that be? Why would the feeder bring empty bowls?
The ground moved gently beneath them.
“The feeder is broken!” Sudie jumped up and ran to the keypad. Each of its buttons had a picture of a cartoon showing the right thing to do for eating, for playing, for cleaning themselves, for fixing bloody scratches if they fell, for not using up all their kindness if they got angry with each other. But nothing for a broken feeder, a thing that couldn’t happen because the feeder was part of the world. But if there was an inside to the covering that was the world and therefore an outside then maybe—Li had never thought this before—maybe the feeder, like Taney, went outside and things could break there?
Cold slid along Li’s neck. Kim started licking everyone’s face, running from one to another. Li let her because Kim was stronger than he was and anyway he was used to it.
“I’m calling Taney,” Sudie said, but she looked questioningly at Li. Calling Taney was, they had all been told over and over, very serious. The only times they’d ever called her was when Sudie broke her arm and when Jana ate the bad flower and all her food came back up through her mouth. Only twice.
“Do it,” Li said, and Sudie pushed at the exact same time both buttons with Taney’s picture.
Katherine sat very erect, the back of her best suit not touching the back of her chair, her face stone. A secret congressional hearing didn’t scare her, veteran of far too many. But what this particular committee might decide, did.
“Dr. Taney, are they, in your expert opinion, the result of deliberate genetic experimentation?”
“Of course they are, Mr. Chairman.”
“And intended by the enemy for use as a covert terrorist weapon against the United States?”
“The enemy does not inform me of its intentions.”
“But if released, these things—”
“Children, Senator. And no one is suggesting releasing them.”
“But—”
“They are children. Have you even seen them?” Katherine pressed the button on her purse. Equipment she should not have been able to get into the committee room suddenly flashed an image on the far wall. Four babies, three of them beautiful with skin pink or brown or golden, one with a shock of thick black hair and eyes already the color of coffee beans. They could have posed for a diversity poster. Smiling, plump-armed, adorable.
Lethal.
Li hadn’t expected Taney to come right away, maybe not until morning. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to play bodies with Jana or Sudie. All night, it seemed, he lay in his blanket, listening to Kim breathe heavily beside him, her mouth open. And in the morning, the world broke.
It began with a big shake of the ground, much harder than yesterday, that would have knocked them all down if anyone had been standing. Next came a terrible grinding noise like scraping rocks together but so loud that Kim clapped her hands over her ears. Sudie screamed. Then the ground shook even more, and the sky cracked, and pieces fell down on Li.
He rolled over and shut his eyes tight. The noise went on and on. A tree fell over—he knew it was a tree even without looking, and that made him jump up and shout, “Get away from the Grove! Go! Go!”
No one moved. Another tree toppled and something went bang!
All at once, it was over.
Kim began licking Li’s face, then Jana’s. Sudie still screamed. Jana cried, “Stop that!” and hit her. Sudie stopped. Kim did not; she licked Sudie’s face until Sudie shoved her away.
Silence.
“Children,” Katherine said into the silence. “And I have more pictures. So do others, who know these babies’ stories.”
The chairman leaned forward, his face colder than the medals on the chest of the general beside him. “Dr. Taney, are you saying you have breached national security by leaking this information to others? And further, that you are attempting to blackmail—”
“I attempt nothing, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have to. Secrets extend only so far, even secret terrorist weapons. Which these children are, in a long and shameful tradition. Children have been used to blow up American soldiers—and themselves—on four continents, to smuggle poisons into military camps, to deliver biological bombs. We all know that. Right now your impulse is to destroy these children as soon as researchers have taken enough blood and tissue samples. You want to destroy them partly because they are truly dangerous and partly to avoid widespread panic. With the war so recently ended, you don’t want the populace to know what the enemy was—and may still be—capable of, both technically and morally. That’s understandable. But—”
Katherine leaned forward, her gaze locked with the chairman’s. “But I am telling you, Senator Blaine, that your information chain is not secure, and that if you destroy these children—these innocent and very photogenic babies—that fact will become known. This administration—and your political party—has worked very hard to position themselves as the new world force that acts compassionately, that does the right thing. You’ve had a hard row to hoe in that regard, given your predecessors’ actions on the world stage. Do you really want to undo all that careful positioning by destroying four innocent children?”
The senator said angrily, “This is not a partisan—”
“Of course not,” Katherine said wearily. “But you’ve already commissioned a feasibility study for a self-contained and completely secure dome to—”
“How do you know that, madame? How?”
She just stared at him. Then she said, in a different voice, “I was with the original team that extracted the children from behind enemy lines, and I just told you that your information chain is not secure. How would I not know?
“Senator—grow up.”
* * *
Cautiously Li stamped one bare foot on the ground. It didn’t move. He said, startled to hear his own voice so high, so squeaky, “Is anybody hurt?”
“No,” Jana said. Sudie said, “Find the cartoon about the right thing to do if the world breaks.”
“There’s no cartoon for that,” Jana said. She looked at Li. “What should we do?”
“I don’t know,” Li said, because he didn’t. How could the world break?
“Let’s go to the leaving door,” Jana said. “Maybe Taney will come.”
They wound their way to the far end of the world, Jana in the lead, Li lagging behind to look at everything. Trees fallen to the ground or leaning over. Big pieces of the sky on the ground—what if one of those had fallen on the Grove? And then, almost to the pond and the leaving door—
“Stop,” Li said, and looked, and couldn’t stop looking.
Sudie breathed, “What is it?”
Li took a long time to find the right words. “It’s a crack in the world.”
A narrow jagged break, just like when he cracked a stick on a hard stone. The break started at the ground and he could follow it with his eyes up the sky to a place where pieces of sky had fallen, making a white pile. Jana started toward the crack, stopped, started again. Li followed her. After a moment Kim darted after them both, frantically trying to lick their faces.
“Not now, Kim!” Li snapped. He stood beside Jana at the crack and they both peered through.
“What is it, Li?” Jana whispered.
“It’s . . . it’s another world. Where Taney goes when she leaves us.”
Jana turned her thin body sideways and squeezed through. Li said, “No! You don’t—”
“We need to find Taney, don’t we?” Jana said.
Li didn’t know. He didn’t know anything any more. The world on the other side of the crack looked so different. . . . All at once he wanted to see more of it, see it all. He turned sideways and pushed himself through, scraping skin off his shoulders. Immediately Sudie and Kim began to howl.
“Stop that!” Jana said. “We’re going to find Taney! Sudie, push Kim through.”
Kim was the biggest but very strong and flexible; she wiggled herself through easily. Once out, she just stared from the tiny eyes in her broad, flat face. She didn’t even try to lick anybody. For once Li knew how Kim felt. He had walked a few steps away from the old world and he couldn’t stop staring.
Rocky, wrinkled ground stretched away on all sides—so much ground! Li’s stomach flopped; this world was so big. But empty. He saw no palms, no bushes, no flowers, nothing but ground that was red and white and brown, endless ground, and far, far away the ground rose up high, blue with white on top, and above that—
The sky of this world was blue, not white, and it went on forever. Forever, so high above that Li’s head wrinkled inside just like the ground. All this . . . and Taney had never told them. Why not?
“Li, Sudie won’t fit,” Jana said. “She’s too fat for the break in the world.”
Sudie had reached one arm through the crack and was frantically waving it and howling. Li wanted her to shut up; he wanted to go on looking and looking. The endless ground was covered with rocks, hundreds of rocks; for the first time, Li understood what the numbers cartoon meant by “hundreds.” Rocks red and white and gray and black, all sizes and shapes, some tiny as a thumb and some bigger than Li, some—
“Li, she won’t fit,” Jana said. Sudie howled louder. Jana said, “Oh, be quiet, Sudie, we’re not going to leave you. Li?”
“Tell her to go roll in the mud by the pond and get all wet and slippery.”
Sudie did, and eventually they pulled her through, although not without making blood come out on her arms and shoulders and hips. Sudie didn’t seem to mind the blood. But she took one look at the new world and promptly began howling again, plopping down onto the ground and covering her head with her bloody arms.
Something very bright came into the new sky over the top of the old world. Li tried to look at it and couldn’t; it hurt his eyes too much. Fear filled him.
Jana gasped, “What’s that? Sudie, shut up!” Kim began licking all their faces.
The bright thing didn’t seem to be falling on them. Li said, “I think . . . I think it’s morning.”
“That’s silly,” Jana said. “Morning comes all over the whole sky at the same time.”
“Not in this world,” Li said. He felt a little dizzy, as if he’d been playing the spinning game. “Jana, this place is so big.”
“Then how are we going to find Taney? I think we should walk on the path.” She pointed.
Li had to turn his back on the morning and squint before he could see what she pointed at. A faint path, no more than a pressing down of rocks, led away from the real world. Closest to him, it had a broken pattern of triangles in the dust.
“Come on, Sudie,” Jana said. “Get up. We’re going to find Taney. Li, follow me and she’ll come, too.”
Li followed Jana, who didn’t look around but just walked fast on her thin, long legs. Sudie and Kim stumbled after them, Sudie complaining that all the stones on the ground hurt her feet. Jana seemed to have become the leader now, but Li didn’t care about that, or his feet. All he wanted to do was look and look.
Rocks, growing redder as the morning rose in the sky. The morning looked like a rock, too, brighter and brighter, so that looking at it for even a second hurt Li’s eyes. And there, on that flat rock . . .
Sudie started to scream again. Jana, who had used up all her kindness, hit her. The thing on the rock scurried away, underneath more stones. Li said, “Don’t hit Sudie, Jana!” at the same minute that Jana said, “I’m sorry. She won’t—what was that, Li?”
“It was alive, I think,” Li said uncertainly. “Like birds.”
“Then why didn’t it fly away?”
“I don’t know.” He had never seen anything alive except themselves, Taney, and the birds in the old world. A memory came, himself asking Taney, “What do the birds eat?” “The world gives them food high up on the sky,” she’d answered, “just like the feeder gives you food. The world keeps you both safe.”
They weren’t in that world anymore. Li said, “Watch out for other living things. Don’t step on any because you might hurt them. You might even make them dead.” They had all seen dead birds in the real world. Taney always took the bodies away with her.
They walked for a long time. The morning rock in the sky got brighter still. Something was wrong with the air; it got way too hot. Li was very thirsty but there was nothing to drink. They walked silently, even Sudie, and Li began to feel very afraid. The hard-to-see path didn’t seem to go anywhere. Why would there be a path that didn’t go anywhere? What if they couldn’t find Taney?
“Look,” Sudie said as they trudged over a low rise, “a big path!”
She was right, but this path was different: very wide and very straight and very hot. Putting a foot on the black stone, Li yelped and immediately pulled it back. But immediately he forgot about the pain. Something was coming very fast along the path.
Sudie screamed until Jana raised her hand and Sudie stopped. Li could feel Jana tremble beside him. All four children huddled into a knot. The thing made a lot of noise, growing bigger and bigger until it stopped with the loudest noise yet and a person jumped out.
A person who was not Taney, and not in a slippery white covering or a faceplate. Again Li’s mind wrinkled and dizzied. Even Sudie was too scared to make noise. The only one who moved was Kim, licking everyone’s faces.
“Oh my God, you kids caught in the earthquake? What in hell happened to you? Jack, one of ’em’s bleeding!”
Another person got out of the moving thing. Now Li could see that the thing wasn’t alive, like the not-bird had been, but it still made puffing noises. The second person had a lot of hair growing on his face, which looked silly and scary. But his voice was kind. “Where’s your folks? And your clothes? Sally, they look damn near dehydrated. Get the water. Kids, what happened?”
Jana said, “We have to find Taney.”
“Taney? Is that a town?”
Jana said, Li wondering at her bravery, “Taney’s a person. The world broke and before that the feeders didn’t give us any food and we have to find Taney!”
The person with the hair on his face looked away from Jana. His face above the hair looked very red. The other person came hurrying toward them with a white thing in her hand. “Here, drink first. Jack, go get some sheets or something from the trunk. Poor kids must have been asleep when the quake hit, you know these hippie tourists just let their kids sleep buck naked, it’s a disgrace but even so—”
Li stopped listening to her words, which after all didn’t even make sense. The white thing was sort of like a food bowl closed at the top and sort of like the spring faucet in the real world, giving out water. Li passed it first to Kim, as always, who drank greedily, the water dribbling down her chest. Then Jana, then Sudie, and by the time it got to Li, he felt he couldn’t wait another moment. Nothing had ever tasted as good as that water, nothing.
The person called Sally handed a big thin blanket to Jana, who let it drop to the ground. “Put it on you, for God’s sake,” Sally said, and the kindness in her voice was getting used up.
Jack still not looking at them, said, “Sal, I think maybe they’re in shock. Or maybe a little feeble-minded.”
“Oh!” Sally said, and she looked at Kim, still trying to lick Sudie’s face. “Oh, of course, poor things. Here, honey, let me help you.” She picked up the blanket, tore it in half, and began to wrap Jana in it.
Jana pushed away. “It’s not time to sleep!”
“Jana, let her,” Li said. He didn’t know what these people were doing, but the kindness had come back into Sally’s voice, and they were going to need kindness, Li realized, to find Taney. This place was much different from the real world. Brighter and harder and hungrier and bigger.
From the corner of his eye he saw another of the not-birds watching him, stretched out on a flat gray rock. Its eyes were shiny and black as pebbles.
Sally tied blanket pieces around all of them and said, very slowly, “Now get out of this sun and into the car before you all broil. Honey, you’re burning already, and bleeding, too. You get hit by debris in the quake?”
She was looking at Sudie, but Li answered. “She got scraped by the crack in the world.”
“I knew it. Get in, get in!”
The “car” was just another covering, made of the same material as the place the sky met the ground in the real world. Inside the car, however, the air was more like the real world: cooler and not so bright. The four of them squeezed into a space in the back, and Sally and Jack climbed into the front space. Sally turned around.
“Now what all are your names?” She still spoke very slowly, making each word with her lips all pushed out.
Li said, “I’m Li. This is Jana and Sudie and Kim.”
“Good,” Sally said, smiling wide as a cartoon person. “Now tell Aunt Sally what happened. How you got all alone out on the desert.”
Li said, “The ground shook last night and then this morning the world broke. We squeezed out through a crack in the sky and walked. We have to find Taney.”
“Is Taney a town, son?” Jack said.
Li didn’t know what a town was. “Taney’s a person. She takes care of us.”
“A foster mother?” Sally said.
Jack said, “I don’t think a foster mother could handle four retards, Sal. More likely some sort of institution. Might be in East Lancaster.”
“Doubt it,” Sally said. “East Lancaster got hit pretty hard by the depression, only been minimal facilities there for fifteen years, and now with the quake and all. . . .”
“Well, them kids didn’t walk very far buck-naked in the desert,” Jack said. Li could hear that the kindness was getting used up in his voice. “Somebody must of took them camping or something. But I can’t go racketing around looking for some institution when we need to see how badly our place got hit. Best bring them home with us tonight and check the Internet for this ‘Taney.’ ”
“Right,” Sally said. “Kids, don’t worry, everything’ll be all right.”
Jack snorted.
The covering round them leapt forward and Sudie screamed. Jana pinched her hard and Sudie stopped, although she didn’t look any less terrified. Kim began licking Sudie’s face. Sally watched a minute and then turned away, the tips of her mouth turning down. Li didn’t want Sally’s kindness to get used up again. He leaned forward.
“Sally, thank you so much for the water. It was very good.”
“Oh, God, you’re welcome,” Sally said.
“My name is Li. Not God.”
Jack laughed. “He’s not so dumb after all!”
The “car” walked a long way, and everywhere on the long way looked the same. Li watched everything, inside and outside the car, until despite himself, he fell asleep. He woke up when the car stopped at a big square thing which, Li realized when they went inside it, was another world, with its own ground and sky. How many worlds were there?
“Still standing, by the grace of God,” Sally said. “We’re damn lucky. Jack, you get on that computer and start searching. Li, what did you say your last name was?”
“My name is Li.”
“No, honey, your other name.”
Li just stared. He had no other name. Jack sighed and went around a part of this world’s sky. The place the children stood in was cool and dim, with large, funny-shaped rocks covered in blankets to sit on, and a feeder. The children crowded near it, waiting.
“Y’all are hungry, right?” Sally said. “Can’t say as I blame you. Well, go ahead sit at the table and I’ll rustle up something. A lot of smashed crockery in the kitchen, but that can wait.”
This feeder was broken, too; no bowls rose from it. But apparently Sally had saved food from before it broke because she brought out big bowls. The food looked strange but tasted wonderful, and Li ate until his belly felt full and round. Afterward sleepiness took him again, and he stretched out on the floor beside Jana, who was making strange sounds in her throat.
“You got allergies, hon?” Sally said. “Never mind, I don’t expect you to know. Jack, you making any progress in there?”
“Just over a million hits on ‘Taney,’ is all,” Jack said, which made no sense. Nobody was hitting anybody. “This ain’t going to be easy.”
Li’s throat felt strange, and not in a good way. Jana kept making strange noises in her throat. Li must have slept, because when he woke it was night again, and very dark. Something glowed in a far corner of the room, and at first that scared Li. He lay on the ground, watching to see if the glowing thing moved. It didn’t. Slowly he crawled toward it, until he could see that it was a tiny ball of morning, like the big one in the sky of the big world, but not so bright. Li touched it, and snatched back his finger. The tiny morning was hot.
Carefully he studied it. It was a made thing, like the pretty folded things Jana made from Taney’s paper bags. Li’s breath came faster. All these things were made: the feeder and the bowls and the blanket-covered rocks—“chairs” Sally had called them—to sit on, and maybe even the sky of this world.
Of any world.
Li’s mind raced. He never got back to sleep. All the rest of the night he either crawled around, touching things and trying to figure out how they’d been made, or else lay still, thinking. His throat still hurt but he ignored it. Made things. Other people. Worlds within worlds.
When morning—the big morning—returned, the girls still lay sleeping on the ground. All of them breathed too heavily. Li stood, stretched, and went to look around the parts of sky that touched the ground for Jack and Sally.
Jack sat slumped over a small screen, which still glowed. Sally lay on the floor. Both of them were dead…
