Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  “Yes,” the girl said. “Why are we taking a horse, Tess, instead of the bus or that little car?”

  “The bus is illegal. Greenhouse emissions. The car is all right, it uses fuel cells to make electricity and gives off only water, but the car is old and I want to save it as much as I can.”

  Lillie was quiet. So much of this must be strange to her. Tess said, “We have pre-war solar panels on the roof, too, you probably noticed them. They’re getting old as well. They mostly fuel the water pumps, while the wind power—” But Lillie wasn’t listening.

  “Tess, this is your parents’ land in the New Mexico desert, isn’t it? We were going to come here once to hike.”

  “We were?” Theresa said.

  “Don’t you remember? We said that after we left Andrews Air Force Base to go home, we’d come here with your parents for a vacation. Together we asked Uncle Keith to let me go.”

  Theresa didn’t remember. It was forty years ago. But not to Lillie.

  The land had changed as much as she had, Theresa thought. She could recall it as she’d seen it at thirteen: a forsaken tract in the Chihuahuan shrub desert, bare of everything but mesquite, creosote, and yucca. Dry playas and arroyos. Nothing moving until you looked close enough to see the scorpions, lizards, and diamondbacks.

  But all over the Earth, warming had brought climate shifts. Georgia now looked like Guatemala, Alberta like Iowa, Iowa like the edges of the Sahara. None of the computer models to predict warming consequences had been accurate, except to say that everything would get warmer. New Mexico was supposed to get a temperature increase of three degrees in spring, four degrees in winter and summer, with increased spring precipitation, decreased summer soil moisture, and spreading deserts.

  It hadn’t worked out that way.

  Her parents’ remote, worthless land bloomed. Its average annual rainfall had been fourteen inches in 2000, ninety percent of it between July and October, with an annual average evaporation rate of forty inches. But temperatures rose, wind patterns shifted violently, and El Nino events proliferated in the all-important Pacific, thousands of miles away. The beautiful clear desert air contained few pollutant particles to block sunlight and provide countering cooling, and so the temperature rose even more. Runaway greenhouses gases let plants use water in the soil ever more efficiently. Year by year, the average rainfall increased and the average evaporation decreased, until the numbers passed each other going in opposite directions.

  The mesquite and yucca gave way to blue grama grasses and yellow columbines. The desert had always had the odd cottonwood or cedar growing along its intermittent waterways, but now these dusty trees were joined by young groves of oak, juniper, and pinion. The arroyos and playas, most of them anyway, stayed wet year-round, and in some years of heavy winter runoff the ranch even developed a temporary through-flowing river, running south down the tilted face of New Mexico toward the border. This past May, Theresa had found a wild rose bush, unheard of here, its delicate pink flowers perfuming the warm air. Antelope moved in from the faraway hills, and bobcats and wild Angora goats.

  Carlo and Rosalita Romero were dead by then. Theresa and Cole brought their young family from the East twenty years ago, when times were dangerous and the desert still not arable. It had been safer than the East because it was more remote. Over time, they bought cattle, built outbuildings, expanded the house, planted peanuts and corn and beans and potatoes, some of it even without irrigation. The growing season now extended from April to November. When the biowar ten years ago reduced the Earth’s population to less than two billion, about what it had been in 1900, Tess’s farm had not been reached by any of the blowing, deadly, bioengineered microorganisms.

  Patches of desert remained; there was a wide swatch of empty scrub to the south of the ranch. And there were still the flash floods, the terrifying thunderstorms, the wildfires and the infernal daily wind, rising at dawn and dying at dusk like some diurnal atmospheric tantrum. But Theresa knew she had been one of the lucky ones in the unpredictable climate sweepstakes. Their high-tech machinery was breaking down year by year and the world was not manufacturing much by way of replacements, but the farm was making do and increasing its productivity. The United States slowly recovered from the war, putting together some sort of replacement civilization. Nuclear energy, once anathema, powered cities. Theresa Romero and her family were part of that effort. Survivors. Contributors.

  None of this would have meant anything at all to Lillie, of course. That young grove of oak over there, strong straight saplings silvery in the moonlight, was not a symbol of anything to her. No reason why it should be. She didn’t know that the fields of wildflowers, vervain and blue gila and sweet alyssium, were, in this place, a miracle.

  Still, hard times were difficult to relinquish. They were all so accustomed, she and Senni and her sons, to scrimping and saving and going without! The little edge they’d achieved for themselves, the food stored on the ranch and the credit stored in the rebuilt on-line banks, could so easily vanish again. That was why Senni hadn’t wanted Theresa to make this trip. A waste of resources, of time, of precious money, Senni said, her mouth drawn in a tight hard line. Her brothers would be back anytime with the cattle; Mother should be here when they arrived. Jody and Spring and Carlo had a right in this decision to feed so many extra mouths.

  The remaining pribir kids, too, had looked sullenly at Lillie, the only one given free train tickets. The days immediately following the kids’ arrival had been hard on everyone (there was an understatement!) Things had sorted themselves out, but not without tears and anger and threats.

  Eleven kids contacted relatives on the Net. Only one, Amy, had a parent still alive, but the other nine found brothers or sisters. Susan, Amy, Rebecca, and Jon had train tickets booked for them, and Hannah had an actual airline ticket, worth more than the entire farm income for a year. Scott had driven them in the bus to the train station at Wenton, and they had disappeared into the vast disorganized mess that was the United States transport system. Theresa hoped they would each reach his or her destination, that they would stay in touch as long as the farm computer held out, and that she would never see any of them again.

  The other six—Julie, Bonnie, Sophie, Jason, Mike, and Derek — had located siblings that could not afford to send for them. Theresa had already explained that there was not enough money to buy them train tickets. She had found them all jobs, the boys as laborers and the pregnant girls as clerks in town. They would work a few months in return for room, board, and a train ticket “home.” They, too, had gone on the bus to Wenton.

  That left eight kids with nowhere to go: Madison, Sajelle, Jessica, Emily, Alex, Rafe (whose older brother had recently died), and Sam. And Lillie.

  The boys weren’t really a problem; they could bring more land under cultivation, free Theresa’s sons for more skilled work. Strong young backs would earn their own keep, and then some. It was the five pregnant girls that Theresa and Senni had argued about. “Five now, and how many later?” Senni demanded. Her lusterless hair straggled around her thin face. “Scott Wilkins says each of those girls is carrying triplets!”

  “What do you want me to do, Senni? Abandon them on the range to die?”

  “Find them jobs in Wenton, like the others!”

  “It was tough enough finding town jobs for the other three girls. I had to call in every favor we owe.”

  “On their behalf. Strangers.”

  “Not to me.”

  “What do you think the boys are going to say when they find five pregnant teenagers here? Eating our food and whelping God-knows-what… what do you think the people in Wenton are going to say?”

  Theresa went silent. Bonnie, Julie, and Sophie would all have left Wenton before their pregnancies began to show. That was part of the bargain that Theresa, hating herself for having to negotiate with bewildered and frightened children, had insisted on. Wenton, like most small towns now, was pretty conservative. It was a survival trait. People supp
orted each other, helped each other, protected each other. The other side of that was conformity, provincialism, distrust of anything strange. Nothing could be stranger than Madison, Sajelle, Jessica, Emily, and Lillie. Unless it was their fetuses.

  “Senni,” Theresa said, and merely saying her daughter’s name brought welling up all the love and frustration Theresa felt for this most difficult of her four living children. All her life, Senni had hurled herself against circumstances. Almost always, she’d lost. Theresa’s heart ached for her.

  “Senni, I know what people in Wenton are going to say. Even if Madison and Jessie … you know. But I can’t help it. Don’t you see … there’s nothing I can do. All my choices are bad. I can’t send them someplace else because there is no other place for them. I can’t throw them out to die. I can’t do anything but keep them and try to muddle on. All of us, getting through.”

  “And I don’t have a vote.”

  It always came down to this, with Senni. “No,” Theresa said wearily, “you don’t. I still run this farm, which means I still make the decisions. Not you, not the boys. That’s the way it is.”

  “Fine,” Senni said, with the triumphant coldness of having forced her mother into the role of bully. Which of course left Senni as the innocent victim. “You get your way, Mother. They stay.”

  Theresa let Senni have the last word. God, she was grateful that her sons all had more easy-going temperaments. They might not like having the kids here, especially Carlo, given to fits of religion. But they wouldn’t fight her.

  That left only the fight with Madison and Jessica, which also took place in the barn. The old horse dozed in his stall, and the half-feral cat, Pablum (never was a cat more inappropriately named) toyed with a maimed rat in the corner. Theresa hoped that Madison, fastidious, didn’t notice the rat.

  Madison said, “Tess, I mean it. I want an abortion.”

  “Me, too,” said Jessica.

  “I told you, it’s not that simple,” Theresa said patiently. “One more time … this is not the world you left. Abortion is illegal again. Too many Christians decided that all our troubles were caused by Godless practices, starting with Roe v. Wade.”

  “With who?” Jessica said.

  Madison said, “You also told us that laws don’t count for much any more, because there’s nobody to enforce them.”

  True enough. Theresa, Senni, and the boys had learned to defend what was theirs. All of them could shoot. Ammunition was a high priority on her yearly budget. And as arable land shifted in their favor, there could only be more “refugees” to defend against.

  She heard Senni’s voice jeering in her head: “So why shoot them and not this lot? Same thing.”

  “Yes, Madison, there’s nobody to enforce laws. Mostly. But there’s also nobody to perform abortions. You already argued with Scott, and he absolutely refuses.”

  “He’s too interested in the monsters we’re supposed to give birth to,” Jessica sneered. “Wants to take apart their genes. No way. Not me. Let Emily and Sajelle and Lillie be his own private genetic experiments. Shit, Sajelle probably will love having his wrinkled old hands on her.”

  Madison ignored Jessica. “I don’t believe there’s no place in Wenton or Amarillo to get an abortion! I just don’t believe it! My mother told me that abortions were illegal when her mother was a girl and people got them anyway!”

  When Madison’s grandmother was a girl. A hundred and ten years ago.

  Jessica said, “If you don’t help us, Theresa, I’ll do it to myself.”

  “You’d kill yourself.”

  “Maybe.” Jessica smirked. The girl knew there was no way Theresa would let her do it to herself, or to Madison.

  “I wish you weren’t so damn maternal!” Cole had once yelled at Theresa when they’d been fighting about how little time she gave him since Jody and Carlo were born. It hadn’t been a happy marriage.

  “Please, Tess,” Madison whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “I can’t go through with this birth. I just can’t.”

  And Theresa had given in, out of God-knew-what twisted reasons. Pity. Friendship. Jealousy. Practicality. Fear. So now she sat on the hard bench of the primitive cart Spring had made, behind a wheezing horse, going to the train at Wenton and then on to Amarillo to find Lillie an uncle and Madison an abortionist.

  “Why is the town called ‘Wenton’?” Lillie asked. The sun was rising, gold and pink, above the endless plains.

  “Because we just ‘went on’,” Theresa said. “It’s not a real town, just a stop on the railroad that was routed through here after the climate shifts made these parts of New Mexico and west Texas better for ranching and farming. The global warming—” She saw that Lillie again wasn’t listening.

  Just in time, Theresa stopped the cart. Lillie leaned over the side and threw up.

  Only she and Emily had morning sickness. Lillie’s was worse. Scott said it was normal (Theresa had never been sick during her pregnancies, except for Carlo) and might go away after the first trimester. The fetuses, as far as he could tell with the equipment with him, were all healthy and thriving. Jessica was right about one thing: Scott was intensely interested in the pribir children’s children. It was the reason he stayed on. Not even Senni objected to that. Already townspeople had heard there was a doctor in the area. Three people had come for treatment, paying Scott (and the farm) in livestock or Net credit.

  When Lillie had finished retching, she swiped her hand across her mouth. “Sorry, Tess.”

  “Don’t apologize. You can’t help it.”

  “No. Will I recognize him?”

  “No. He’s eighty-seven years old. But he’ll recognize you,” Theresa said. Lillie was only seven and a half months older than when Keith had seen her last.

  “Tess, did you go on to college?”

  Theresa remembered, now, how direct Lillie had always been, how intense about finding out all she could about everything she could. “Yes, I went to college.”

  “Where?”

  “Saint Lucia’s. A small Catholic college for girls.” Her mother’s choice.

  “What did you study?”

  “Elementary education. I didn’t finish.”

  “Why not?” Lillie said.

  “A lot of reasons. I wasn’t very academic, you probably remember that. And then my father lost a lot of money. And I met my husband and got married.”

  “What was his name? What was he like?”

  “Lillie, I’d rather not talk about that.”

  “Okay. I … pull over again, Tess!”

  This bout of retching lasted longer. Probably the jouncing cart wasn’t helping. Theresa waited, watching the light grow on the eastern horizon. It would be best to reach Wenton before dawn.

  “Just one more question,” Lillie said when they’d started forward again. “When you went back home after Quantico, and then to high school and college and everything, was it hard? Did people still stalk you and threaten you and point you out as a pribir kid?”

  Theresa thought about how to answer. “At first, yes. My parents had me home-schooled for the rest of high school. I entered college under a different name, nobody but the admissions committee knew who I was. And later … well, the world had more important things to think about. We were pretty much forgotten.” Not even Cole knew, when I married him. And when I told him, it helped destroy our marriage.

  “But,” Lillie said, “didn’t doctors and geneticists and everybody want to keep examining your genome?”

  “Lillie, you don’t understand. I keep telling you, but you’re not listening. Everything changed. Climate, government, economics. And then the war. Nobody funded scientific research. Nobody cared.”

  Lillie was silent for a long time. Then she said, “I don’t believe that. Somewhere there are scientists still investigating genetics. In one of those rich enclaves, maybe. Scientists don’t give up.”

  She was probably right. “Then you better hope they don’t discover you kids are back. Or
about your babies.”

  Wenton grew on the horizon, its one-story buildings lower than the oldest cottonwoods and level with the newer oak and juniper.

  “Tess,” Lillie said in a different voice, “will it hurt? The birth?”

  Tess glanced at the girl. God, so young. She said gently, “Yes, it will hurt. I won’t lie to you. But when you hold your baby in your arms, it’s all worth it. The day Jody was born was the happiest day of my life.”

  “I don’t feel that way.”

  “Not yet,” Tess said. “Wait.”

  Lillie didn’t answer. The wind was definitely picking up, but they’d reached Wenton. Theresa saw it suddenly through Lillie’s eyes, a weird mixture of time periods. Buildings with traditionally thick walls to keep out the murderous heat, but made of foamcast and topped with microwave rods like tall slender poles. No street paving, almost no vehicles, but a VR bar with garish holo-ads projecting onto the boards that acted as a sidewalk. No school (kids learned off the Net, if at all), no supermarket, no drugstore, no dry-cleaners—what else had existed in the past which Lillie remembered? No books or music stores or movie theaters, all that came on the Net if it came at all. And the train tracks winding away across the mixed mesquite and new green. No, she couldn’t imagine what Lillie thought of Wenton.

  They stabled the horse in the foamcast building run by old Tom Carter to protect anything from dust and storms, for a reasonable fee. The windowless building smelled of animals, and Theresa saw Lillie gulp hard and leave quickly. Theresa remembered. With Carlo, nearly anything made her throw up.

  She put her arm around Lillie against the wind. Bent almost double, they reached the train station and gratefully ducked inside. Open at both ends for the train to pull through, the building was hot but at least sheltered.

  “Does the train run on diesel?” Lillie asked. “I thought all that was illegal now because of emissions.”

  “Yes, but an exception was made for trains, in order to get food to cities. Also, there’s some form of superconductivity involved, I don’t understand what but it was one of the last things built before the war. Partly built. We’re lucky to have it.”