Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  Emily said gently, “That’s just it, Keith. There’s nothing there, now. Whatever the agent was, it’s gone, destroyed by Lillie’s immune system. It just left this process going on.”

  “Then stop the process!”

  “We don’t know how,” Emily said, and Cord heard the frustration and anger in her voice.

  Cord stared hard at the rough wooden surface of Dr. Wilkins’s dresser. There wasn’t anything on the dresser, not even a hairbrush. Barren. Knotty-grained. Splintery.

  “She’s not contagious, at least,” Dr. Wilkins said wearily. “You can see her. She can come out”,

  “But what’s going to happen to her?” Cord burst out. “No, damn it, tell us! Don’t give me that shit about protecting us!”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Emily said. “Lillie’s prions are forming in her thalamus. She’ll get more headaches. Have increasing insomnia. Eventually dementia will set in. If we’re lucky, coma.”

  And then death. Cord pushed his way to the door.

  “Cord!” Kella said angrily, because she needed to be angry at someone. “Aren’t you even going to — “

  “Tell Mom I’ll see her later,” Cord said. He had to get out of that room, that house. Lillie would understand. That he was sure of, in a world where nothing else was any longer sure: his mother would understand.

  Lillie couldn’t sleep. At night Cord, lying sleepless himself in the room in the big house where he’d moved Clari to be near Dr. Wilkins, heard Lillie moving around the great room. It didn’t matter what hour he woke; she was there. She would walk restlessly, sometimes stumbling. As August wore on, she stumbled more often. By day she looked dazed, pale, and filmy-eyed from lack of sleep. She never complained.

  One night he heard her cry out. Cord leapt up from his pallet and tore into the room. She gazed at him wild-eyed. “Uncle Keith!”

  “It’s me, Mom. Cord.”

  “Uncle Keith, Mom’s killed herself!”

  Cord didn’t know what to do. He tried to put his arms around her, but she pushed him away, stronger than he could have imagined. “Get away! Don’t drug my mind, Pam! I’m not part of your mission!”

  “Mom …”

  “Get away!” she screamed, so loud that Cord thought half the house would rush in. But no one else awoke. Lillie started to moan. “Uncle Keith, help me, she didn’t mean it, Mom didn’t mean it …”

  Again Cord tried to approach her, and again she shoved him off with that startling strength.

  “Tess, Tess, don’t let Pam make me … don’t let…”

  “Mom!” Cord said, his despair dwarfed by horror. This wasn’t his mother. Her body, her face, her voice, and not his mother not his mother… .

  “Okay, Lillie,” another voice said behind him, deep and soothing, and Cord spun around. Mike Franzi. Cord hadn’t even heard the man come in.

  “It’s all right, Cord, I’ll take it from here,” Mike said. He reached for Lillie.

  “Get away!” she shrieked.

  Mike ignored her, folding her close to his chest. “Lillie, it’s all right. You’re safe now, nobody will mess with your mind. I’ve got you now, it’s all right…”

  “Mike? They’re inside the walls, they took me there, I saw … I saw …”

  “I know.” To Cord, over Lillie’s shoulder, he said, “She’s back aboard the ship. Go back to bed, Cord. I’m here.”

  And Hannah? Cord didn’t say. His jumbled feelings of relief, rage, and guilt left him no room for speech. He went back to bed, creeping in beside Clari. She moaned softly in her sleep and he turned away, his face toward the wall.

  When it happened, it all happened at once.

  Two days later, when Lillie seemed again to have rallied, Angie went into labor. “Not quite eight months,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Come on down to the birthing house. You can walk.”

  “Of course I can,” Angie said. “Who said I couldn’t?”

  “Nobody, dear. Come on.”

  Dr. Wilkins sent Carolina’s son Angel to find Emily. Gently Dr. Wilkins took Angie’s arm and walked her to the small house that Emily had cleared out and prepared as a maternity ward. Halfway down the well-worn dirt path, Angie suddenly pulled away from the old man. “You’re not supposed to be outside!”

  “I’m not missing this,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Don’t baby me, you baby. And anyway, Emily may very well have her hands full and need help. When you lot were born, all the girls went into labor at once.”

  “But … even so … if you got a micro …” A sudden pain hit Angie and she bent over, straightened up, put a hand on her swollen belly, her face a sculpture of comic surprise.

  “Come on, Angie, almost there …”

  “What is it?” Cord called, coming out of the barn and running toward them when he saw Dr. Wilkins outdoors.

  “Angie’s going to have her triplets,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Go get Sajelle, she’s the steadiest for this sort of thing.”

  But instead Cord went to check on Clari. She stood at the wood stove, boiling down agave syrup, a shapeless mound with the moody face of the woman he thought he’d loved.

  “Oh, leave me alone, Cord, I’m not going into labor just because the others are. I’m only carrying one child, remember, and it’s only been eight months.” She stirred the syrup harder.

  Cord hastily withdrew and went to find Sajelle. She was walking Loni toward the birthing house. Loni, unlike Angie, looked panicked. Her round face, still not shed of all its own baby fat, jerked around to scan the farm.

  “Where’s Mother? I want Mother!”

  Sajelle said to Cord, “Go find Hannah.” When he didn’t move, she snapped, “Don’t just stand there! Find Loni’s mother!”

  Everybody was telling him to find somebody else! Well, he didn’t know where Hannah was. Cord had never been comfortable with Hannah, and after the scene with Mike and the raving Lillie in the middle of the night, he’d avoided Hannah altogether.

  Loni cried out and Cord suddenly found himself willing to look for Hannah. Anything rather than listen to that animal cry. Anything rather than spend the day around girls giving birth.

  He ran back to the barn, even though he knew Hannah wasn’t there. Next he checked the vegetable gardens, with their system of irrigation ditches to bring water from the increasingly sparse creek. Bonnie, Sam, and Lupe were weeding the vegetables. Cord remembered to call to them, “Angie and Loni are having babies!” before he took off for the spring house.

  Hannah wasn’t there. Carolina was putting eggs into the half-buried plastic boxes used as coolers. Cord paused a moment, grateful for the damp coolness under the thick adobe walls. “Carolina … where’s Hannah?”

  Carolina answered with a burst of Spanish in which Cord discerned “eggs” and “broken” and “clumsy child.”

  “Carolina—where’s Hannah? Loni’s in labor!”

  Now he had her full attention. A smile like spring sunlight broke over her face. “Babies? Now?”

  “Yes, and she wants her mother! Where’s Hannah?”

  “I don’t know,” Carolina said. “Here, put these eggs in, I am need!” And Carolina was off, leaving Cord with the eggs.

  He shoved them into the box, breaking only two, and pushed the lid on. Where the hell was Hannah? Not with the pitifully reduced range crew; Hannah was afraid of cattle.

  He looked in the smokehouse, the privies, the windmills, everywhere he could think of. Finally he turned toward the cottonwood grove. It wasn’t likely she’d be here, in the middle of a workday. Over the long months that generation had gone outside more and more, simply because the work there needed to be done. But they didn’t just sit outside by choice.

  Hannah wasn’t on the bench in the grove. Cord stood still, listening to the creek murmur over its bleached stones. A jackrabbit broke cover and streaked past him. He had looked everywhere possible. No one went to town anymore; no one went anywhere, for fear of infection. So where was she?

  A tiny flash of blue across the creek caugh
t his eye. The flat land there, once thick with pine saplings and wildflowers, was reverting to mesquite and yucca. He waded through the water and bent down.

  A bit of blue cloth, snagged on mesquite. Silky blue cloth, cloth such as it wasn’t possible to make anymore. A durable microfiber synthetic, his mother had told him the first time he’d seen the beautiful blue-and-pink scarf around Hannah’s neck, the colors shading into each other so subtly that the fluttering scarf looked to him like a piece of sky. A piece of Hannah’s old life, like her music cube and silver hair brush, that life she’d shared with Lillie and Mike and Emily and the others long ago. Cord held the piece of silky material clenched in his fist and shouted Hannah’s name. No answer. He waded into the mesquite, under the grilling sun.

  It took him an hour to find the next fragment of cloth, but after that it was easy. The buzzards circled the place.

  Cord scared them away. He took off his jacket, long-sleeved and high-necked to keep the dangerous UV at bay, and wrapped it around Hannah’s torso. She was heavier than he expected. Too late, he realized that he shouldn’t be exposing himself to whatever she had died of. Well, fuck that. He had survived the sandstorm on the desert that had killed Grandmother Theresa, his immune system could probably handle this bioweapon. It was Lillie who was sick, Hannah who was dead, not anyone from his generation. His generation had the durable, subtle, silky genetic alterations from the pribir.

  Halfway to the big house, Hannah a boulder in his arms and the sun beating down on his head, Cord began to cry.

  He couldn’t brush away the tears. He let them run, along with his nose, finally stumbling clear of the mesquite when he returned to the creek. He lay Hannah down for a minute on the rough grass. He had to; his arms ached. Then, as he straightened, swiping at the snot on his face, something happened.

  A picture. In his mind. Clear as if he’d seen it out a window, accepted as matter-of-facfly as the day’s work schedule. There could be no doubt, no mistake. The picture in his mind was a message.

  The pribir were coming.

  CHAPTER 24

  Frank, Loni’s brother, stood outside the birthing house with Keith, the father of Loni’s babies. Jason, the father of Angie’s children, was out on the range. Frank and Keith looked at Cord, and he saw from their faces that they’d received the image, too.

  Frank said simply, “The pribir are coming.”

  Cord nodded. What he had to say next tore at him. Frank was Hannah’s son. Cord had left Hannah’s body, still wrapped in his jacket, on the bench under the cottonwood grove. Frank and Keith didn’t even notice that Cord was without his jacket, or that he had blood on his light undershirt. They were too bemused.

  A baby’s cry shrilled into the air.

  Keith jumped as if he’d been shot. Against orders, he flung open the door of the birthing house. “Loni!”

  “She good, she fine, go away,” Carolina yelled, and shut the door again. Another baby cried, or the same baby again.

  Cord looked at Frank, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say, Your mother died of a bioweapon and buzzards have been at her and somebody has to go bring her body up from the creek before other scavengers find it. He couldn’t do it.

  Emily was the doctor. Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne were in charge of the farm. This was their job. All Cord had to do was tell Dr. Wilkins and Emily and the whole burden would be shifted to them, who would at least know what to do. They would know how to find out what micro had killed Hannah, what to do with the body, how to tell Hannah’s children and Mike. This was their job, babies or no babies. And the pribir was coming—he had to tell them that, too!

  Cord pushed open the door and did not let Carolina close it until he was inside.

  The room smelled of blood and sweat. It was infernally hot, the windows shut tight against infection. At a far bed Sajelle bent over Angie, who was panting like a coyote in August desert. Emily waited at Angie’s feet. At a table Dr. Wilkins stood over a newborn baby, collecting stem cells from its umbilical cord. Carolina put something in a basket, and Sajelle fussed over more baskets. Thin high wails pierced the fetid air. In a bed closer to the door Loni lay, evidently finished. Her hair stuck to her scalp in sweaty coils. A bloody sheet had been thrown over her, and her eyes were closed.

  A gust of air blew in with Cord, hot dry high-plains air but not as hot as this terrible room. Instantly Loni opened her eyes. Feebly she tried to raise her head, let it drop back to the bed, sniffed the air. She looked straight at Cord.

  “The pribir are coming,” she said.

  Six beautiful infants. Two boys and four girls, born with minimal labor of mothers who immediately fell into deep, healing sleep. Two sets of perfect triplets, and the adults hardly mentioned the children. The pribir were coming.

  They had all smelled it, Cord’s generation and their parents and even the white-haired Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin. “It’s like the first time,” DeWayne said quietly, holding Sajelle’s hand.

  Emily held one of the new babies against her shoulder, patting the baby’s back. “Only we didn’t know if you young ones would smell it, too.”

  “‘Young ones,’” spat Aunt Robin. “You’re what, twenty-nine yourself, Emily? Why shouldn’t the ‘young ones’ be able to smell the pribir? They’re the ones that got everything, all the fancy genemods to survive.”

  Nobody answered her. Instead they looked at each other, glanced away, were drawn back to stare again into each other’s eyes. The pribir were coming. They were really coming.

  “I wish they’d just stay away,” Alex said in a low voice, and there it was, out in the open, filling up all the space in the great room. The older generations thought the pribir would bring only more trouble. “Controlling our minds, slicing into our bodies … they better not try that shit again,” Alex added, still in that quiet, menacing tone. Sam and Bonnie and Sajelle nodded. Emily looked fearfully into the infant’s face.

  Everyone of Cord’s generation, except the perverse Ashley, was filled with eagerness and hope.

  They knew better than to say so. Not even Taneesha or Bobby, usually so scrappy, did anything but let their eyes meet, wide and wondering. All rejoicing had to be silent. Hannah had been hastily buried under the cedars beside Grandmother Theresa. Dr. Wilkins, gray-faced, had done a quick blood analysis and identified the engineered virus that killed her. Hannah’s sons and Mike were absent from this meeting, grieving privately, remembering years no one else had shared. Lillie, worse again and given a sedative by Emily, slept heavily in a back room.

  “So what are we going to do about the bastards?” Sam said.

  Uncle DeWayne said, “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can do anything. You should know that even better than I. You were aboard their ship.”

  “I won’t let them use us again! Not us, not the kids, not these new babies! Not any humans!”

  Sajelle said sharply, “How you going to stop them, Sam? You got a plan, hmmm? You going to just develop ways to block out those smells that control our minds?”

  “I can at least wear a filter!”

  ‘Yes,” Emily said thoughtfully. “And perhaps stay outside. Their most concentrated effects were in the ship, a closed system. Out here the winds will dilute the olfactory molecules.”

  “Oh, yeah, like they did fifteen years ago at Andrews,” Bonnie said sarcastically. “The pribir had no trouble getting their message through then, and they can do it now.”

  “Still,” Emily said, “filter masks might help.”

  Sam said, “The only thing that’s going to help is to kill them the second they step off their shuttle.”

  Kella gasped. And Cord, unable to contain himself any longer, burst out, “Don’t you touch them!”

  Deep silence fell over the room.

  Cord looked at the faces. Keith, his brother, nodding slightly. Kella, with Lillie’s gold-flecked gray eyes, creasing her forehead in anxiety. The bitter downturning curves of Aunt Robin’s mouth. Rafe, his face
clouded, remembering some past event unimaginable to Cord. Jody, who neither had known the pribir nor was their product, warily waiting. Emily, her pale skin mottled with suppressed emotion. And Dr. Wilkins, tired, his neck marred by the start of still another purplish skin cancer that he hadn’t yet had time to inject.

  Spring, their eternal peacemaker, had the last word. “Maybe the aliens won’t come down, after all.” But no one believed him.

  One day, two days, and the pribir didn’t come down. Cord could no longer smell their image. Felicity gave birth to triplets, all girls. An easy birth, said Carolina, smiling hugely. Not even the threat of aliens could overcome her delight in babies. “Primita,” she crooned over one of the small wailing bundles. Little cousin.

  Kella had two boys and a girl in the middle of the night. Cord hadn’t even known his sister was in labor.

  “Bring Mom to see them,” Kella said to her brothers. She’d already left the birthing house and was sharing one of the small, shifting-occupant houses with Carolina, Jody, and their children, none of whom were present just now. Kella sat up in bed, surrounded by infants. One was asleep, one was nursing, and one lay at the foot of the bed gazing up at Cord from enormous blue eyes exactly like Dakota’s. Cord gazed back because he didn’t want to stare at his sister’s exposed breast. Keith, never modest, said, “I didn’t know you had such great bulbs, sis.”

  “Shut up,” Kella said. “Bring Mom.”

  “Kella,” Cord said, “we can’t. She’s sedated again. Dr. Wilkins says she might… last longer that way.”

  Until the pribir can get here, they all understood.

  Keith said, “Which kid is named after me?”

  “None of them, buttlips. This is Sage, that’s Wild Pink, and he’s Dakkie. After his father. Cord, Clari says you’re neglecting her.”

  Cord said coldly, “Is that any of your business?”

  “Yes. I like Clari. I thought you did, too.”

  Cord was silenced. It was hard to be around Clari. Cord couldn’t feel any connection with this new pregnant person Clari had become: weepy, frightened, sometimes even irritable. Clari, who was never irritable. Worse, Cord couldn’t feel any connection with the baby that was supposedly his. Although in truth all the babies seemed to pretty much belong to everybody. The older generation all assumed equal care and interest and responsibility as the infants’ mothers. Kella acted as if her triplets should be just as exciting to Cord and Keith, to Susie and Cavin, as to Dakota. Cord looked resentfully at his sister, in her newfound happy maternal bossiness, and felt more like an outsider than ever.