by Nancy Kress
She couldn’t accept the religious answers her mother had liked, a different one every week: Catholicism, Buddhism, Wiccans, evangelicals, whatever. In school they learned about evolution, but what good was evolution in giving life any meaning? None. And it was meaning she longed for. Sometimes the longing felt so sharp she couldn’t breathe.
She knew from books that she wasn’t the first person to feel like that. Over and over she read her favorites: Of Human Bondage, Steppenwolfe, Time Must Have a Stop. But Lillie didn’t know Somerset Maugham or Hermann Hesse or Aldous Huxley, and none of the people she did know seemed to have this same longing. Certainly not Uncle Keith or her old best friend Jenny, or Theresa, with whom she’d once tried to discuss all this. A mistake. Tess had only talked about babies being life continuing and how that was enough meaning. Lillie wasn’t much interested in babies. She wanted more than that.
But nobody else seemed to want—no, need—the universe to make sense. Why was that so weird? Why didn’t everybody see how important it was? Such as, only the foundation for how you lived your whole life!
The ship floated to the ground, soft as a feather. It was dull metal now, shaped like an egg and as big as a bus, which is what it probably was.
The pribir, Lillie figured, were her last chance.
A part of the egg’s side slid up. Jon took a step forward, hesitated, stepped back. Julie hid her face in her hands. Elizabeth’s prayers were suddenly audible: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed art thou amongst women—”
Lillie seized Theresa with one hand and Julie with the other. Violently Theresa pulled away.
“I can’t!”
“Come on, Tessie, it’s just a few steps more.”
“No!” And Theresa turned and ran back to the dorm.
Lillie led Julie firmly toward the bus.
Sixty seats, jammed in worse than a Broadway balcony. Well, that made sense. The pribir didn’t know how many would be coming. They only had what Major Connington described as “one-way information flow.”
“At least the seats are shaped right,” Jason said. “Ow, Alex, get off my foot, you dork!”
They had all wondered what the pribir looked like. No pictures had come. That was something Lillie didn’t think she’d ever gotten Uncle Keith to understand: that the information the pribir smelled to them was pictures. The pictures formed in the brain somehow; they were just there, in exactly the same way a picture of an ice cream cone would be there if someone told you to think of an ice cream cone. “But what does it smell like?” everybody asked. It didn’t smell like anything. “Smelling to” someone wasn’t the same as “smelling.”’
“Everybody strap in,” Jon said.
Each seat had straps dangling from its sides. Lillie squeezed into a seat next to Julie, and immediately the seat molded itself to her shape. She jerked up, startled, then settled back down. The straps, which felt like firm jelly, also molded themselves around her.
Rafael, who wanted to be a physicist some day, said, “I wonder how this thing avoided all Earth’s radar setups?”
“However they did it, I’ll bet the military would like to take this baby apart,” Jason said.
Rebecca said severely, “Remember, this isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way. This is only dead materials.”
“Maybe,” said Rafe, “but what materials! Whoooeee!”
Jessica snarled, “Elizabeth, if you don’t stop that stupid praying, I’m going to unstrap and come over there and whip your religious ass.”
“Don’t anybody unstrap!” Jon said.
“Jessica, leave her alone,” Bonnie said. “God, even on a major occasion you have to be an asshole.”
“Better that than a lezzie.”
Lillie said, “We’re rising!”
There was no abrupt liftoff, no noise, no windows. At first Lillie didn’t even know how she knew they were rising. Then she realized breathing was harder. Her chest felt constricted, and everything on her body felt heavier.
“I hope,” Rafe said, with difficulty, “that they understand … how many gees … we can … take.”
Of course they understood, Lillie thought. They understood everything about human bodies. Their DNA was her DNA, only they had control of theirs, which meant they had control of everything. The right way. She closed her eyes.
The pressure on her chest never became unbearable, and after a while it went away completely. A series of clear images formed in her mind, one after another. She opened her eyes but didn’t see the source of the smells. Somewhere in the bus.
She saw a human being, a man, naked except for some cloth around his hips, standing beside an ocean. The only thing weird was that the sky was pink, not blue. Next she saw him looking taller, stronger, healthier somehow. Genetics had done that.
Next came a man underwater. Parts of him, legs and arms, looked sort of like a fish, but he was still a man. Lillie understood that he had been genetically changed to live in the ocean.
A woman floated in a spaceship. The ship was vague but the woman clear. She had arms where her arms should be and arms where her legs should be, giving her four hands.
“Gross,” someone behind Lillie said.
The next images showed humans changing even more. They didn’t look human anymore. They grew tentacles, or shrank to circles, or had hard shells … all sorts of weird stuff. Then, quickly, came a series of images showing one of these monsters turned back into a human being. Children trooped up to her. Everyone smiled.
“They’ve made themselves look like us, just for our sake,” Emily said. She sounded cheerful. Lillie felt the same way. The pribir could change their babies’ genes to look or do anything they chose. And they had built some to look like Lillie and the others, so their visitors wouldn’t feel too scared. It was a nice thing to do, and it reassured Lillie.
Now, was that gratitude or chemical brainwashing? It sure felt like gratitude.
Jason, the clown, growled in a deep voice like General Richerson’s, ” ‘When you push the envelope of technology, you take major risks with personnel. It’s inevitable.’ ” Someone laughed.
All at once they were all light hearted. Even Elizabeth lowered her rosary, and Julie smiled tremulously.
“Everybody ready to walk into the future?” Jon called.
“I’m going be turned into Charlize Theron,” Madison said.
“I want Isaac Newton’s brain!” Rafe.
“Engineer me a bodacious bod, baby!”
“It’s not us … it’s our kids. Make mine geniuses!”
“Make mine rich!”
“Forget the kids… I want mine now! Give me sex hormones to kayak night and day!”
“Jason, you’d be lucky to get to kayak once,” Derek laughed. “Now me…”
“Hush your mouth,” Sajelle said suddenly. “We here.”
The door to the bus opened. The mood changed abruptly.
Lillie unstrapped herself. Julie sat frozen, looking up at her piteously. Lillie said, “Come on, Julie. You can do it. Just stay by me. Emily, help Susan, she’s tangled up. Elizabeth, pray to yourself.”
Jon went first. Lillie followed, pulling Julie. She stood in a large, empty, completely featureless room with a light source she couldn’t identify. There would have been room for three times as many kids. When everyone was in, the door to the bus closed.
For a long sudden moment, Lillie was afraid. What was she doing here, away from her friends and her school and Uncle Keith and even Earth? What if she died here? What if the Net postings and the freak channels were right and the pribir wanted to experiment on humans, to torture them …
She was being stupid. And anyway, there wasn’t anything she could do except face whatever was coming. She was here.
A second door slid upwards at the other end of the room. A man and a woman came through, then stopped. They looked like normal people dressed in normal jeans and T-shirts, except … better. The woman had a perfect body, high breasts and slim waist and long, l
ong legs. Her shoulder-length hair bounced and shone. The man was hot, with great shoulders and deep brown eyes. Lillie breathed in and suddenly she knew everything they wanted to tell her about themselves.
They had been engineered to match the television broadcasts the pribir had intercepted from Earth. All their lives they had trained for this moment. They knew everything about Earth that it was possible to learn from either TV or high-resolution satellites. They had all the abilities Lillie had, plus more that could be made to fit with these bodies. They would live and die in these bodies, and the purpose of their lives was to bring to Earth genetic gifts —so many genetic gifts!—that would help humans have all the freedom and adaptability and health that they did.
“Fucking A,” Jason said softly.
The man and woman came forward. They spoke carefully, as if the language was familiar but the act of speaking by voice was not.
“Hello. I am Pete.”
“I am Pam.”
Lillie giggled. She couldn’t help it. Pete and Pam! Humans finally met aliens and their names were Pete and Pam, like some dorky TV sitcom! She laughed, and Jason laughed, and suddenly nearly all of them were laughing, whooping and hollering, unable to stop. It was so ridiculous, it was such a release from tension, it was just hilarious. Lillie tried to stop laughing, couldn’t, and leaned on Emily, weak with hilarity. Only Sam, Elizabeth, and Julie weren’t laughing. Sam, Lillie had always suspected, had no sense of humor. Elizabeth was lost in some religious fog. And Julie was too scared to laugh, although how anybody could be scared … “Pete” and “Pam”! And she was off again.
Finally she stopped, and was appalled. Impulsively she strode forward and held out her hand. “I’m so sorry … we’re all sorry. I guess it’s the … the strain. Please forgive us. We weren’t laughing at you, and we’re all glad to be here. Really!”
Pam smiled uncertainly. Up close, Lillie could see that her eyes were subtly different. Beautiful, but not… just somehow different. What did they see?
“Yes, forgive us,” Jon said. “God, we must seem … We are glad to meet you guys. It’s nice to communicate two ways instead of one.
Murmurs of assent from the others, straggling belatedly toward manners.
“And we’re glad you’re here,” Pete said. “Are you tired? I know we took you from the middle of your sleep cycle.”
Emily, the scholarship girl at a brainy private school, said, “The middle of ‘our’ sleep cycle? Do you have a different cycle?”
“We don’t sleep,” Pam said, and it came to Lillie with a jolt that no matter how Pete and Pam looked, no matter how similar the DNA their race had started with, these people were not human in the same way Lillie was human. Once, maybe. Not any more. They were alien.
The thought didn’t scare her. In fact, the jolt was more pleasant than not. Alien was new, was interesting. There were great adventures ahead.
Her excitement or their chemical messages affecting her brain?
Shut up, Uncle Keith, she said to her memory. Aloud she added, “I don’t think any of us are really tired. At least, I’m not. I’m too excited!”
“God, yes,” Rafe said. “What kind of drive does this ship use?”
Pete laughed. It sounded vaguely rehearsed. Poor man, he needed to find more things funny.
“We will answer all your questions,” he said, “over time. Maybe you would like to start with a tour of the ship? To see some of the right way?”
“God, yes,” Rafe said.
“Then come on!”
It wasn’t a tour of the whole ship, and it was going to take a very long time to answer everybody’s questions.
Lillie reached these conclusions after just a week aboard the ship. Madison had asked what it was named, and Pam said it didn’t have a name. It was just “the ship.” She’d lived on it her whole life. Madison thought that was dorky and she and Emily had christened the ship High Flyer. Sajelle said that was just as dorky; it sounded like a cheerleading squad. Madison, who’d been a cheerleader, was offended, but gradually everyone began referring to the ship as the Flyer simply out of convenience.
It was evident they were being restricted to a small part of it. There were doors Pam and Pete went through that no one else could open. Lillie didn’t really mind; what they were given was fascinating.
“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever sat on,” Madison said, bouncing on it.
“I think it’s creepy,” Sophie said, without rancor.
Lillie stood with them in Madison’s room. Each person had their own room, but they were all exactly the same, branching off a corridor so featureless that people walked into the wrong room all the time, backing out only when they saw another person’s meager possessions. Each room had a plain metal box that opened like a footlocker, a small metal table, two chairs, and a bed that was just a platform jutting out from the wall. The bed and the chairs were made of the same stuff as the seats on the bus; they molded themselves to whoever lay or sat in them. The pillow did the same. Each room had a blanket. Bed, squishy chairs, pillow, and blanket were all the same shade of light tan.
Immediately everyone had tried to personalize the rooms, spreading out whatever stuff they’d brought. Since some people brought more than others, the results differed wildly. Rafe had brought only his handheld, which sat on top of his footlocker. Madison had lugged a big suitcase full of stuff, including clothes, make-up, mirror, a holo poster of her favorite rock band, and a teddy bear dressed in a cheerleading outfit. Lillie hadn’t brought much, but she asked Pam for scissors and tacks and cut up her bright blue sweater to make a wall hanging. She didn’t need a sweater aboard the Flyer. It was never cold, never hot, always comfortable.
At the end of the hall were two bathrooms, boys and girls, and a sealed machine that you stuffed dirty clothes into. A few minutes later they came out a slot, perfectly clean and ironed. Rafe, fascinated, tried to take this apart to see how it worked, but the metal box, as featureless and strong as everything else, wouldn’t give.
There was a big common room with more of the tables and chairs. Three times a day the wall disgorged a trolley piled with food and dishes. When they gingerly tasted the food, the kids gazed at each other in astonishment.
“God, this is good!” Susan said, helping herself to more mashed potatoes.
“Pass that salad.”
“Give me some first, Jon.”
“Greedy box!”
“Like you should talk. How much of that casserole did you eat?”
Lillie had eaten a lot of the pasta casserole, which tasted as wonderful as everything else. Her belly felt full, and warm, and contented. She resented it when Sam began to complain.
“Yeah, it’s good, but there’s no meat. Future meals better have some meat. I hope Pam and Pete aren’t fucking vegetarians.”
“If the food stays this good, I won’t even miss meat,” Susan said.
“You don’t need it, Lardball. I want protein.”
Madison whispered to Susan, who was overweight and sensitive about it, “Don’t mind Sam. He’s just a stupid bully.”
True, Lillie thought. Although Susan could stand to lose thirty pounds. Madison, despite the perky cheerleader beauty that made some girls distrust her, was a kind person.
Lillie considered the kids. She herself was the tallest girl and, after Madison and Hannah and Sajelle, probably the prettiest. Sajelle was pretty in that way black girls sometimes had, sort of sassy, with her dreads bobbing on her shoulders and her ass all curvy. Rebecca, whose parents came from China or Vietnam or someplace, had gorgeous hair, long and black and shining, but her skin was bad. The other girls looked average except for poor Elizabeth, with her huge chin and squinty eyes and skin as bad as Rebecca’s. Of the boys, Jason, who wanted to be an actor, was really hot. Mike and Jon were cute. Sam looked like a thug, but he had a good body. Alex was too skinny, Rafe only about five foot three. Derek, the other African American, was all right but not as cute as DeWayne, the black
guy who had stayed behind.
Her mind seized on DeWayne.
That was why she was judging everybody’s looks. She could picture DeWayne Freeman. Also the others who stayed behind: Robin Perry and Scott Wilkins and, of course, Theresa. But she couldn’t picture the kids who had died in the explosion at the Youth Center. She knew their names. She’d lived with them at Andrews for months. But she couldn’t remember what any of them looked like.
In fact, she hardly thought about them at all.
Lillie frowned. That didn’t seem right. Some of those kids— Tara, for instance-she’d hung around with a lot. When Lillie’s mom died, she couldn’t think of anything else for so long, and it hurt so much that sometimes she’d had trouble keeping it from showing. Of course, a mom was different than friends, but still it—
“If you’re all done eating, come with me,” Pam said. Lillie hadn’t even heard her come in. “I have more of the ship to show you. Parts you’ll like.”
“She always so sure what we going to like,” Sajelle grumbled, but she rose along with everybody else.
And they did like it. Pam led them through a door into a huge park. So big … how could a park be so big aboard a ship! How large was this spaceship, anyway?
“Wow!” Madison said.
“It’s … incredible,” Sophie said and not even Sam, scornful of everything, disagreed.
They ran through the park, exploring. It was incredible. There was a garden, with the most beautiful flower beds Lillie had ever seen. A big grassy lawn. A woods at one end, thick with trees through which ran narrow winding paths. A pond, for God’s sake, big enough to swim in. A paved area with a basketball hoop; three balls sat neatly underneath its regulation ten-foot height. A second paved area was furnished with tables and chairs like a little outdoor cafe, surrounded by yet more glorious flower beds.
“This is where I’m going to be,” Derek said happily. “Just pull my bed off the wall and put it here.”
