Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  Or maybe not. Theresa watched as people—too many people, too badly dressed, carrying too many bundles —got off the train. Refugees. Had to be. Well, if they were willing to work, there was work digging more irrigation systems and wells, bringing more land under cultivation, channeling the newfound water. However, not all refugees could or would do manual labor. Those were the dangerous ones.

  So far, the farm had been lucky. This southeast corner of New Mexico was still very remote and the world population as a whole was much less than it had once been. Wenton, despite its growing prosperity, had received few visitors. Neither had the farm, miles out on the once-desert.

  But nothing stayed hidden forever.

  CHAPTER 14

  Lillie fell asleep on the train. At Amarillo, Theresa woke her and they set out on foot through the city. It was quite a walk but bicycle cabs were exorbitant and anyway Lillie, except for morning sickness, seemed to be in superb physical shape. What had the pribir done to her?

  Better not to know.

  At the nursing home, Lillie pressed her lips tight together. Theresa’s heart went out to her. Such an adult gesture for a child.

  Keith Anderson had dealt shrewdly with his money. Unlike most very old people, who were cared for by often grudging families or not at all, he had been able to buy life-long care in this decent, if shabby, for-profit home. Theresa had been here once before. She led Lillie to the tiny third-floor room where Keith lay in bed. At the threshold she paused, wanting to say something to prepare Lillie … stupid. Nothing would prepare her.

  “Lillie!” The thin voice cracked and the easy tears of the old slid down Keith’s wrinkled cheeks. Lillie stopped dead, collected herself, moved forward. Theresa thought, She was always brave.

  “Hello, Uncle Keith. I’m back.”

  “Lillie …”

  She sat on the edge of his bed. Theresa saw him wince slightly, his bones disturbed. Lillie, unused to the old, didn’t notice. She took his hand. “Are you all right, Uncle Keith? Is this a good place for you to live?”

  “Yes. Oh, Lillie, it’s so good to see you. I thought…”

  “You thought I was dead. But I’ve just been aboard the pribir ship for seven and a half months. I mean, forty years. Do you know about time dilation?”

  “Yes. Oh, Lillie … you look so much like your mother.”

  Once, at Andrews Air Force Base, Theresa had seen a picture of Lillie’s dead mother. Lillie looked nothing like her.

  “Once,” Keith quavered, “when we were young … Barbara was only four or five …”

  Theresa slipped out. Keith wanted to live in the past. A past where he was young and fresh, maybe a later past where Lillie was a little girl. Theresa went down the steps to the living room. Several old people in deep chairs sat expressionlessly watching something on the Net. A stale smell hung in the air. Outside, the wind howled around the edges of Amarillo’s shabby buildings.

  “Is there a terminal I can use?” Theresa asked a woman who might have been a nurse, or a cleaning lady, or a murderer. Government regulatory agencies had all but disappeared. Ordinarily Theresa never thought about this; it was a given. But now she was seeing things through Lillie’s eyes.

  The terminal was even older than the one at the farm, and slower. Theresa had few contacts on the local Net site, and none in the UnderNet, that shadowy information reached only through secret data atolls that changed constantly. But Scott had told her what to do, although he wouldn’t do it from the farm computer. “Too dangerous,” he’d said, without explaining.

  “There’s no one to enforce laws,” Theresa had told Madison, but that wasn’t strictly true. There were organizations as shadowy as the UnderNet, vigilantes and religious groups and supremacist groups and anti-science groups and God-knew-what-all. The religious groups were the least vicious but the most pervasive. A vindictive God was apparently a great comfort to some when the planet itself seemed to turn vindictive. Theresa didn’t understand the reasoning, but it was widespread enough to earn respectful caution.

  Nonetheless, she found an abortionist in Amarillo, messaged with her, and set up an appointment for Madison and Jessie. More credit spent, plus three more train tickets. Although only Theresa’s would be round-trip. Still, facing Senni would be no fun.

  Theresa walked back to the living room. None of the old people had changed position or expression. She took a chair and pulled out the sewing she’d brought. They couldn’t start back until sunset, when the wind would die down. Trips away from the farm were usually measured in day-long units.

  Maybe Lillie would want to stay here with Keith. Work for room and board, one less mouth to feed at the farm … until the triplets were born. If Keith lasted that long.

  She started sewing a maternity dress for Emily.

  “I asked to stay there,” Lillie said on the way home. The sky had clouded over, and Theresa was pushing the horse to make the farm before all light faded. She had a halogen torch but hoped to save it. They had spent a few hours in Wenton, checking on the kids working there to earn tickets home: Bonnie, Sophie, Julie, Jason, Derek, Mike. Julie had cried when Lillie and Theresa left.

  Theresa said, “Why didn’t you stay in Amarillo, then?”

  “Uncle Keith said no.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He wants me with you and Scott. He said he can’t help me if anything goes even a little bit wrong, and you can.”

  “That’s sensible.”

  “I won’t see him again, I don’t think,” Lillie said. “He’s close to dying.”

  Theresa didn’t deny it. “You can keep in touch on the Net.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  Of course not. Nothing was the same. The horse plodded through the pearly, inadequate light.

  “Tess,” Lillie said after a long while, “I don’t want to be a mother.”

  Not Lillie, too. “Are you saying you want an abortion?”

  “No. I talked it over with Uncle Keith and … no. He said I don’t understand now how precious the continuing of life is, but I will someday.”

  Theresa thought of Jody, Carlo, Spring, and her dead daughter. Of Senni and Dolly and the child Senni carried. Yes.

  “Maybe he’s right,” Lillie said, with her odd mix of measured judiciousness and child’s complaint, “but I don’t want to be a mother anyway. I’m not interested in babies. And I don’t think … I don’t think I can love them like Uncle Keith loved me.”

  Theresa suddenly saw that this was true. Lillie was too detached, or too young, or too something. She was many good qualities, but not tender.

  “We’ll all help you,” Theresa said, inwardly groaning. More work.

  “Thank you. And I’ll do the best I can. For Uncle Keith.”

  The light was gone. Theresa switched on the torch. A sudden breeze brought a faint, pungent odor, and she gave a cry of pleasure. Cattle. Her sons were home!

  Her heart lifted, and the night seemed much brighter.

  The abortionist operated in a clean, windowless basement divided by curtains into “rooms.” Theresa brought Jessica, defiant, and Madison, scared, on the Wednesday train. “If you would help, we wouldn’t have to do this,” she told Scott accusingly before they left.

  He didn’t meet her eyes. “I can’t. I know you don’t understand, Theresa.”

  “Fucking right I don’t. This woman isn’t even an M.D. And you of all people should know that a bunch of genes aren’t sacred!”

  Scott lost his temper. “It’s because I know how temporary a ‘bunch of genes,’ as you disparagingly call it, can be that I believe what I do! Those are people those girls are carrying, damn it, no matter what you say! If those engineered babies aren’t people, then neither are you or me!”

  “Shut up, they’ll hear you in there. So what are you going to do, Scott, alert a vigilante religious group? Abortions in progress! Murder the killers so they can’t murder a bunch of non-breathing tissue!”

  Scott turned away. “Let
me be, Theresa. You know damn well I won’t say anything to anybody. But let me have my beliefs. You have yours.”

  “Mine don’t make two frightened girls spread their legs for an unlicensed stranger.”

  “Let me be!”

  “Okay, Scott,” Theresa said wearily. “I’ll let you be. I need you. The other girls need you. Just so long as you know that you’re clinging to a selfish, irrational, superstitious belief for your own comfort, no matter who else suffers.”

  Scott strode away, toward the open range. Almost sunrise—he shouldn’t go too far. Fuck it. Let him get lost and roast in the sun that was as unrelenting as he was.

  In Amarillo, Theresa waited upstairs with Madison while the abortionist took Jessica downstairs. Jessica, her bravado stretched thin, scowled and tossed her head. Madison sat completely still, saying nothing, eyes wide and frozen.

  “Maddy,” Theresa said, the old name rising, unbidden, from some well of memory, “it won’t hurt. She has good equipment and reasonable pharms.” Which was why it cost so much.

  Madison didn’t answer.

  Half an hour later they were called down. Jessica lay on a mattress on the floor, covered with a light blanket. She was smiling. “I’m all right.”

  ‘Yes,” Theresa said, wondering what she was feeling. She had borne five children, all joyously. Even Spring, born in such a hard time that the season he was named for had been the only good thing happening anywhere around Theresa.

  “And I’m not pregnant,” Jessie said, without ambivalence.

  “It went very well,” the woman said crisply. “She can travel in a few hours, I think. Do you want the tissue?”

  “No!” Theresa said.

  The woman shrugged. “Some people do. Now you, young lady. This way.”

  “Wait,” Theresa said, “I do want it.” She needed to look. She knew what a three-month fetus looked like; this was her only chance to see if what the girls carried was indeed normal, or if it was some sort of… what?

  The woman pointed to another curtain and led Madison away.

  Theresa made herself go through the curtain. A dark blue plastic box sat on a table, its cover beside it. She peered in, and her eyes filled with relieved tears. Normal.

  She should take one of the fetuses for Scott, she realized belatedly. He would want the genes. No, he wouldn’t, not this way … not Scott. Or would he? Which was stronger, the religious or the scientist?

  Suddenly she knew that whatever Scott wanted, she couldn’t carry this thing back with her on the train. She just couldn’t. This clump of genetically engineered tissue, this dead baby.

  She went back to sit by Jessica, who had fallen back asleep. Theresa studied the young face smoothed into blankness by sleep. Forty years ago she had been afraid of Jessica. Jessica the bully, quick with her fists, sarcastic about everything, dangerous and despicable. Forty years ago. Theresa reached out and smoothed a few stray hairs back from Jessica’s forehead.

  Time passed. Too much time — Madison was taking much longer than Jessie had. Theresa got up and made her way through the maze of curtains. At the end she found an actual door, wood set into the foamcast wall, and went through it.

  “Use the calatal!” cried a woman Theresa hadn’t seen before. She and the abortionist were applying various pieces of equipment to Madison, unconscious on a table. There was blood everywhere, way too much blood. The smell of it, metallic and hot, hung in the air.

  “Get out!” the second woman yelled at Theresa. “You’re not sterile!”

  Theresa blundered back out the door. She stood there, not breathing, for what seemed like hours. When the door finally opened, Theresa already knew.

  “Unexpected tearing,” the abortionist said unsteadily. “It’s never happened before, I couldn’t stop it, I tried and tried … I’m so sorry …”

  A sound behind her. Theresa turned to see Jessica leaning against the wall. “Madison’s dead, isn’t she?” Jessica said, and when no one answered, Jessica—the bully, the truculent—cried and cried, and would not be comforted.

  The rest of the summer brought many good things. It didn’t matter. Every night Theresa dreamed of Madison’s face. Not even the birth of Senni’s child in October made a difference to Theresa’s mood, which made no sense. Senni was her daughter, the new child her granddaughter. Madison was only someone Theresa had known a long time ago, in another time and place.

  Senni had an easy birth. The baby was healthy, perfect, strong despite being three weeks premature. Senni named her Clari, after nothing in particular.

  Patients came to Scott from towns up to fifty miles away. It turned out he had bought a small ad on the Net. By the beginning of November he was going into Wenton three days a week to hold “office hours” at a tiny rented room. He bought a horse for this trip, helped by Jody, who also taught him to ride. Fortunately, Scott was a natural. There was a lot of work: the warming and increased rain had had brought malaria and dengue fever this far north. Simple diseases to treat, even to vaccinate against—if you had the knowledge and the drugs.

  The delivery of drugs was only intermittently reliable. There was no Post Office anymore. Information went by the Net; packages went by the few struggling private companies that exploited the rail circuit. Scott ordered double amounts in staggered deliveries; some got through. Eventually.

  He charged patients according to what he learned about them on the Net. Often the fee was paid in welcome foodstuffs or livestock. As his reputation spread, Scott began to get rich people from the enclave outside of Ruidoso. Except for buying drugs, Scott turned every credit he made over to Theresa for the farm.

  The crops flourished in the summer heat and new rain, despite the punishing daily wind and violent storms. The harvest was rich. Theresa was now beyond subsistence farming, and ten years ago that had been a glittering goal. The warming had killed billions of people, one way or another: geographic dislocation, epidemic diseases, political collapse, random violence. The war had killed billions more. But Theresa was going to have her best year ever.

  Winners and losers, she thought, and her mood did not improve.

  At the beginning of October, Bonnie Carson and Julie Cunningham arrived back at the farm, brought by old Tom Carter from Wenton.

  “Theresa, these girls would rather be with you,” Tom said, his ancient, pale blue eyes giving away nothing.

  “Come in, Tom,” Theresa said. She stood in the cool dawn, already dressed, and bit off her questions until she was alone with the girls. You didn’t burden outsiders with family troubles.

  “Got to get back,” Tom said.

  Theresa glanced at the brightening sky. “You can’t now. Not in that open cart.”

  “I’ll spend the day at the Graham place,” Tom said, not looking at her. The Grahams owned the next homestead; Tom could make it there before the punishing wind began. Theresa understood. Tom didn’t want to be around whatever was going to happen next any more than Theresa did. She, however, didn’t have a choice.

  Julie helped Bonnie out of the back of the cart. Bonnie could hardly walk. She held her left arm cradled in her right. Her strong-planed face was covered with bruises, the lip split open. Jody, Theresa’s oldest son, appeared at her side, casually armed. When Tom had left, Julie quavered, “She was in a fight. She — “

  “I can see she was in a fight,” Theresa snapped. “Bring her inside. Jody, go find Scott and tell him to bring his medical stuff. Julie, stop sniffling. Did Bonnie miscarry? Any show of blood?”

  “I don’t think so,” Julie sniffed.

  “I’m … okay,” Bonnie muttered.

  Her arm was broken. Scott sedated Bonnie and set the arm. Bonnie lay on Lillie’s bed; God, they were going to have to jam two more beds in here somewhere. The farm house had only three small bedrooms. Theresa, Senni, and the two babies were in one; Rafe, Alex, Sam, and Scott in another; Lillie, Emily, and Sajelle in the third. Theresa’s sons, having ceded their mattresses to pregnant girls, now slept in the barn
with the migrant laborers who drifted through. And there were no more extra mattresses. Well, Rafe or Alex or Sam, any two, could give up theirs. Although five mattresses would never fit in this tiny space …

  She was pondering housekeeping to avoid thinking about anything else.

  Scott frowned. “Bonnie will be fine. In fact, the break is already healing much faster than it should, and her injuries are much lighter than they should be for the kind of beating she took. The pribir did something to her, Tess. Boosted her immune system somehow.”

  “Too bad they didn’t give her more muscles so she could have kicked the hell out of those bastards.”

  Scott wasn’t listening. Probably he was running over medical possibilities in his head. Theresa went into the great room.

  Fifteen people and two babies awaited her. Infant Clari nursed at Senni’s breast; little Dolly wandered around, whimpering for her breakfast. Sajelle got Dolly a piece of bread. Everybody else looked expectantly at Theresa.

  “What?” she snapped. Irritation as cover for feeling burdened beyond bearing.

  Jody spoke up. “Mom, we’ve been talking. Julie told us why that girl was beat up. She’s… somebody thought she liked girls instead of boys.” He said it with distaste, and Theresa sighed. Her children had grown up in a world they didn’t choose, a frightened world backsliding into protective conservatism. Not what she would have chosen for them, but there it was.

  “All right, listen up,” she told everyone. “I don’t care if Bonnie likes boys, girls, or roadrunners, and that means nobody here is going to care, either. She’s one of us — “

  Senni opened her mouth, closed it again, scowled.

  “—because she was with me and the others at Andrews Air Force Base. I’ve told you about it, and that telling is all I need to do. I still run this place. Bonnie is a scared, pregnant kid, just like the others. She stays here. Julie, too. Now, is anybody going to fight me on this? Jody?”

  “No.” Promptly. Bless her oldest, he had always been her ally. “Carlo?”