Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress Page B

even having an academic career after the spore cloud hit.
    Oliver Pardo would have been given the part of geek by any film casting department with no imagination. Overweight, computer-savvy, fan of superheroes, he quoted obscure science fiction books sixty years old and drew endless pictures of girls in improbable costumes slaying dragons or frost giants. Socially inept, he was nonetheless gentle and sweet-natured, and Noah preferred his company to Jacqui’s, who asked too many questions.
    “Why?” she said.
    “Why what?” Noah said, even though he knew perfectly well what she meant. He lounged back on the comfortable moss and closed his eyes.
    “Why are you undergoing this punishing regime of shots just so you can take off your shield?”
    “They’re not shots,” Noah said. Whatever the Denebs were doing to him, they did it by having him apply patches to himself when he was out of his energy suit and in an isolation chamber. This had happened once a week for a while now. The treatments left him nauseated, dizzy, sometimes with diarrhea, and always elated. There was only one more to go.
    Jacqui said, “Shots or whatever, why do it?”
    Oliver looked up from his drawing of a barbarian girl riding a lion. “Isn’t it obvious?”
    Jacqui said, “Not to me.”
    Oliver said, “Noah wants to become an alien.”
    “No,” Noah said. “I was an alien. Now I’m becoming . . . not one.”
    Jacqui’s pitying look said, You need help . Oliver shaded in the lion’s mane. Noah wondered why, of all the Terrans of L7 mitochondrial haplotype, he was stuck with these two. He stood. “I have to study.”
    “I wish I had your fluency in Worldese,” Jacqui said. “It would help my work so much.”
    So study it . But Noah knew she wouldn’t, not the way he was doing. She wanted the quick harvest of startling data, not . . . whatever it was he wanted.
    Becoming an alien . Oliver was more correct than Noah’s flip answer. And yet Noah had been right, too, which was something he could never explain to anyone, least of all his mother. Whom he was supposed to visit this morning, since she could not come to him.
    All at once Noah knew that he was not going to keep that appointment. Although he flinched at the thought of hurting Marianne, he was not going to leave the World section of the Embassy . Not now, not ever. He couldn’t account for this feeling, so strong that it seemed to infuse his entire being, like oxygen in the blood. But he had to stay here, where he belonged. Irrational, but—as Evan would have said—there it was, mustn’t grumble, at least it made a change, no use going on about it.
    He had never liked Evan.
    In his room, Noah took pen and a pad of paper to write a note to his mother. The words did not come easy. All his life he had disappointed her, but not like this.
    Dear Mom—I know we were going to get together this afternoon but —
    Dear Mom—I wish I could see you as we planned but —
    Dear Mom—We need to postpone our visit because Ambassador Smith has asked me if this afternoon I would —
    Noah pulled at the skin on his face, realized that was his mother’s gesture, and stopped. He looked longingly at the little cubes that held his language lessons. As the cube spoke Worldese, holofigures in the cube acted out the meaning. After Noah repeated each phrase, it corrected his pronunciation until he got it right.
    “My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” a smiling girl said in the holocube, in Worldese. Two boys, one younger than she and one much older, appeared beside her with a much older woman behind them, all four with similar features, a shimmering dome behind them.
    “My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” Noah repeated. The Worldese tenses were tricky; these verbs were the ones for things that not only could change, but could change without the speaker’s having much say about events. A mother could die. The family could be chosen for a