Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  “What’s wrong with you people!” Pam screamed. “You refuse the only thing that will save your species, you piss on the right way, you disgust me! All of you!”

  “Give Dolly back,” Lillie said, and heard her own voice rise. “You can’t succeed with this. Not against our will.”

  “You ungrateful, impotent, stupid stupid stupid—”

  Pam was seized from behind and her arms pinned to her sides. Sam. And behind him, Alex and Cord.

  Lillie said levelly, “Let her go, Sam.”

  “It’s not a ‘her.’ It’s a fucking thing, and she’s not going to turn us into fucking things, too.” He pulled a knife from his belt.

  Not real. None of this was real. She made her tone stay calm. “Sam, think. If you hurt her—if you even can hurt her—Pete is in the ship and has control of machinery we can’t even imagine. He’ll fry you right where you stand, and maybe the rest of us, too.”

  Pam said, “Sam, you’re stupider even than the rest. You always were.” She flexed her arms and Sam went flying through the air, landing hard on the ground a few feet away. “Now, about Dolly and our embryos — “

  Alex threw another knife. It hit Pam square in the back.

  She gasped and fell forward, onto her knees. The humans stood frozen. Now, Lillie thought, now Pete would —now—

  Pam collapsed and lay still, the knife still protruding from her back. The next moment Lillie fell to the ground. Her last thought was Not Cord! But it was too late.

  She awoke in twilight, lying in the same spot on the ground, Cord and Sam and Alex around her like folded dolls. Lillie shook off as much grogginess as she could and crawled over to Cord. Breathing. He was alive.

  She lay gasping, pushing the last of the drug out of her lungs, gulping in the sweet night air. A hawk soared overhead, oblivious. For a moment, it was limned against the rising moon. Lillie saw Pam sitting to one side on a sleek green chair molded to her body, watching her.

  “Pam … Cord …”

  “Oh, he’s all right,” Pam snapped. “See? It’s just as I told you. You humans take care of your young, once they’re born. Cord isn’t anything like you genetically, but you nurture him. Dolly would nurture her embryos, too.”

  “Dolly? The others? Where—”

  “Everybody’s perfectly fine. And thank you about asking after me, Lillie. I thought we were friends.”

  Pam, too, looked fine. She stood, and the green chair dissolved, seeping into the soil. The last thing Pam looked like was a woman who’d taken a knife in the back.

  Lillie sat up. “Pam, are you and Pete immortal?”

  “Our genes are. So are yours, so are all genes, only the bodies that hold them change. Unless a species stupidly allows itself to become extinct, of course!”

  “But … are you the same Pam who just took a knife in the back? Or are you …” Lillie couldn’t say what she meant. Incoherent thoughts chased themselves through her head. Cloning, regeneration, what else?

  “My genes are all on file with ship,” Pam said crossly, and Lillie gave it up. The basic assumptions were too different. She said, “Dolly―”

  “Is back in her primitive house with her mate. Everybody will be waking up soon. I wanted to talk to you first. At least you tried to warn me, Lillie. Thank you.”

  It was the first time Lillie had ever heard a pribir thank anyone for anything. And yet, at the same time Pam’s lovely face wore a slight triumphant smirk, as if she were congratulating herself on getting it right, this strange senseless human ritual.

  Pam continued, “Yes, the embryo is still implanted in Dolly. Now we’ll have to engineer a permanent maternal virus to make the idea of abortion totally abhorrent to Dolly. Do you know how hard that is? Pete has the entire ship genetic library working on it, plus everyone in orbit. You people think it’s easy to engineer behavioral changes. Well, maybe it is if you can keep pumping olfactory molecules into a closed space, but it’s a lot harder to engineer a permanent brain change in behavior that doesn’t also affect other species-specific behavior. You can’t appreciate how difficult. We had no idea about Madison and Jessica. We had no idea how perverse and backward you people really are. Your males didn’t even mate with non-engineered women, except for Cord, in order to enlarge the gene pool as much as possible. They just wasted a dominant genome by mating with females who already had it to pass on. I don’t know why we even bother.”

  Pam was back on full rant. Lillie said, “The embryos are still in Dolly?”

  “I said so, didn’t I?”

  “It won’t work, Pam. Even if Dolly now wants to have your … your creation, the others wouldn’t let her. They’d abort anyway. They’d think she was just being manipulated by you and Pete.” Which would be the truth.

  Pam was speechless. A first, Lillie thought, and rushed in while there was still time.

  “Listen, Pam, you have an alternative. Remove the embryos from Dolly. You can do that, can’t you? Don’t force or manipulate anyone to carry them. That will simply never work. Instead … instead …”

  Lillie faltered. She wasn’t sure she could say it. “Instead what?” Pam demanded.

  “Instead you’ll have a willing mother, without any weird viruses in her brain. We humans have voted against forced pregnancy. Well, that ought to mean we voted for unforced pregnancy. The others have no right to insist on abortion if the mother doesn’t want it. And I think they’ll see it that way. I really do.

  “Take the embryos out of Dolly and plant them in me. I’ll carry the babies, and ‘nurture’ them, and start your new version of humans.

  “I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER 28

  No one believed her. They believed that the embryos nestled in her womb; Scott had verified that. Three fetuses. But no one believed that Lillie’s choice to carry them was voluntary. They thought, Emily and Sam and Rafe and DeWayne and maybe even Scott, that she’d been drugged, brainwashed into her decision. Lillie didn’t tell them about the “maternal virus” the pribir had been trying to concoct for Dolly. Instead she pointed out that no pribir olfactory drug had ever been known to affect only one person; the molecules always affected everyone who smelled them. This was not a coerced decision. She wanted to carry these embryos. It was her choice. “We all voted against it!” Bonnie said.

  “I want to do it,” Lillie said, over and over and over. “And when we voted, we didn’t know how far the pribir would go to get this done. Look, people, say for the sake of argument that you’re right. This is a different species, not human. That doesn’t mean that the rest of you can’t go on breeding normal humans.”

  Normal, she jeered at herself. Cord and his generation were already engineered so much they had once seemed monstrous to Jessica, to Madison. Too monstrous to give life to. Now Cord and the rest had become the norm. And so would this new child, at least to itself. Normal was whatever you yourself were.

  There was no way most of them would see that. They didn’t want to see it.

  “So you breed your race and we breed ours, and the best species wins, is that it, Lillie?” Rafe jeered. “Evolution in practice?”

  “It’s a big planet, Rafe. And as far as we know, empty. You saying there’s no room for another intelligent species?”

  “Mom,” Kella said, and her voice broke, “why are you doing this?”

  Why was she? Because she was making herself a sacrifice, acting to save everyone from the kinds of coercion the pribir were capable of using if they were completely resisted. Because she was a pessimist, and believed the worst sim scenarios about where Earth was headed ecologically. Because she was an optimist, and believed that change could work out for the best. Because she was, and always had been, an outsider. Because she had always yearned for a mission in life, and this was one. How could you put all the reasons of a human heart into a few words?

  She said to her children, Kella and Keith and Cord, “You never knew your great-uncle Keith. He was a wonderful person. He and I had a discussion once,
a long time ago, about an orbiting nuclear power station. He said that unfortunately new technologies always seem to cost lives at first. Railroads, air travel, heart transplants. Probably even the discovery of fire.”

  “Was it worth it, Uncle Keith? Two people dead, and everybody else gets lots of energy?”

  “We don’t look at it like that.”

  “I see,” Lillie’s ten-year-old self said primly. And then, “I think two deaths is worth it.”

  Kella and Keith stared at her with incomprehension. But in Cord, Lillie thought she saw a flash of reluctant understanding.

  Eventually, during the arguing and shouting, Lillie asked the key question. “What are you going to do about it? Tie me down and abort, against my will? How does that make you different from the pribir?”

  Even Emily and Rafe, the quick-witted ones, had no answer.

  Finally, DeWayne came to her when she sat alone on the bench in the cottonwood grove by the creek. She’d gone there hoping that Mike would join her. But he’d seen her leave, and he’d turned away tight-lipped, and Lillie knew he never would be joining her, in any way.

  That was part of the price she was paying.

  She sat in the cottonwood shade, watching a lizard bask on a sunlit rock beside the creek. Lillie wasn’t much of a naturalist, and lizards interested her even less than jackrabbits or wildflowers, but it seemed to her there was something odd about this lizard. Its color? Shape? She didn’t know. She looked across the creek at the strip of wildflowers hugging the bank, and she felt reassured. Purple vervain, blue gila, yellow columbine. Tess had taught her the names. The flowers all looked normal.

  “Lillie?”

  “Hello, DeWayne.”

  He sat down awkwardly beside her, pulling up the non-existent crease on his trousers—even, she thought, after a decade on the farm. Of everyone, DeWayne was the least comfortable out of doors. He said, “I think you know why I’m here, Lillie.”

  “Yes. I do. When do they want me to leave?”

  “Not until after the … your babies are born.”

  She’d hoped for that. “Who’s going with me?”

  “Keith and Loni. Spring and Julie and all their kids. Roy and Felicity. Lupe and Juan and Alex.”

  Alex was a surprise. She said steadily, “Not Cord.”

  DeWayne didn’t look at her. “He would have, I think. But Clari …”

  “I know.” Timid Clari, who always let Cord have his way. But not now, not when she had her son to, as she saw it, protect. Lillie understood.

  “And not Kella, either,” DeWayne said.

  “I didn’t expect Kella. I’m glad to have Keith.” Always her most adventurous child.

  DeWayne said, “You’ll have enough people to survive if you go up toward the mountains. There are so few people left that you can probably have your pick of houses. Jody is more than willing to supply you with a few cattle, plus chickens and seed. Rafe thinks he can get you on-line with us, using that old equipment in the storeroom, and you can summon help if you ever need it. We’ll do everything we can, Lillie.”

  “Except let me stay here. You don’t want my kids around your kids.”

  “No,” DeWayne said, and still he didn’t face her. “We don’t.”

  “It isn’t your kids who will object to the new humans, you know. Kids accept whatever is around them as normal. It’s you adults.”

  “I know,” DeWayne said. He hesitated. “Do you know what they’ll look like? Has Pam even told you?”

  Pam had, but Lillie was not about to tell DeWayne. “No.”

  He burst out suddenly, “Lillie—how can you?”

  “DeWayne, look at me.” He did, reluctantly. She noticed for the first time how furrowed his brown face looked, as if it were he, and not Jody or Spring, who spent most of the time in the sun. Genes were strange things.

  She said, “How can I? Because I have to. Or, rather, somebody has to, or we risk extinction. Like dinosaurs, like mastodons, like saber-toothed tigers. If I had another choice besides extinction, I’d take it. But I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. Go on adapting, the way we have been so far, maybe with a little help from the pribir. You don’t know that the climate’s going to make that impossible. You don’t know.”

  I know, Lillie thought. The pribir, damn them, had never been wrong yet. Except about how human beings would behave, and Lillie wasn’t sure she could blame them for that. Humans themselves weren’t very good at predicting their own behavior.

  Aloud she said, “Then call my choice an insurance policy. If humans in our present form go extinct, the new humans will take up where we left off. If we don’t, then surely the Earth is empty enough to hold two strains of humans.”

  DeWayne said somberly, “It didn’t once before. Homo sapiens killed off the Neanderthals.”

  So that was their real fear. Lillie could have told him it wouldn’t happen that way, but she knew that was the one piece of information about which she absolutely must lie. Would he ask the question?

  He did. “Emily wanted me to ask you something, and I said I would. If…”

  “Spit it out, DeWayne.”

  “If they ever wanted to … will your ‘New Humans’ be able to mate with our descendants?”

  “No,” Lillie lied. And if Emily actually believed that, she was a fool. The pribir would not only ensure compatibility, they would ensure genetic dominance, and Emily knew it. But Lillie wouldn’t give Emily that weapon for her arsenal.

  Even DeWayne, no geneticist, looked unconvinced. He sighed heavily and stood. “I’m sorry about all this, Lillie.”

  She merely smiled up at him.

  “They won’t be human, you know. Your kids. No matter what you call them. There are limits.”

  “And can you say for sure where they are, DeWayne? The limits of being human include Cord and Taneesha, with all their genemods, most of which we haven’t even seen expressed, but those limits don’t include the next batch of genetic engineering? Who decided that?”

  He said nothing, turned and walked from under the shade of the cottonwoods and over the rise to the big house.

  Lillie stayed on the bench. Sometime during the human conversation, the lizard had quietly left its rock. She should feel somber, Lillie thought, but she didn’t. Amusement flooded her like water.

  All her life she’d wanted the universe to have a design, to make sense, and she herself to have a mission within that design. Now Pam and Pete, tunnel-visioned carriers of their own mission, had given her one: to save the human race. Or, at least, to play a part in that rescue. And it had nothing to do with any grand universal design anywhere.

  Lillie had a sudden vision of the entire empty, depopulated planet, falling toward ecological ruin. Beyond it, the rest of the solar system, the galaxy, the local group … all that stuff they’d taught her in school. Huge unimaginable distances filled with an infinity of suns and worlds, and all of them were hurtling toward eventual ruin. Novas, burn-outs, maybe even—what had Rafe called it once? —she couldn’t remember the word but it meant that everything in the universe would eventually run down and stop. Everything was going to go extinct, and in the face of that there were no missions in life. Humanity, old or ‘new,’ was just an eyeblink that hardly anyone except two egomaniacal aliens would even notice.

  Oddly, this not only amused Lillie but refreshed her. It was comforting. She’d never needed a grand mission at all. All she’d needed was to live whatever life circumstances presented to her, and she was automatically a part of the universe. Nothing she did could ever make that part any bigger, not on the true infinite scale of things. That implied that nothing could make her part any smaller, either. She was already as counted in the cosmic census as possible, already part of whatever salvation was possible. Not the religious salvation her mother had believed in, but the salvation of the great march of evolution, the only point the universe had.

  She rose, stretched lazily, and watched a jackrabbit tear across the open spaces an
d into the mesquite. She felt amazingly refreshed. She wished she could tell Uncle Keith; he’d have enjoyed knowing.

  With the careful gait of pregnancy, she walked up the rise toward the farm.

  “Breathe, damn it!” Pam said. “Breathe harder, Lillie!”

  She managed to get out, “You should have … made the head … smaller.”

  “Can’t do that,” Pete said. “Not without loss of cranial capacity for intelligence. There are some design features we were stuck with, you know.” He sounded put out.

  “Breathe, don’t push yet! Fuck it, Lillie, you’ve done this before!”

  And it wasn’t any fun then, either, Lillie thought, between waves of pain. But Pam was right. It was too early to push.

  She lay inside the ship, but that didn’t seem to make labor any easier. Pam had refused to give her any drugs. Surely the pribir could have created molecules to block pain centers in the brain without affecting the babies, but they hadn’t. Why? Lillie hadn’t thought to ask before, and now it was too late. Maybe they wanted to see how New Human births would go after the pribir departure.

  Carolina put water to her lips. “Drink very small, carina.”

  To please her, Lillie sipped the water. Carolina was the only person who had insisted on being present at the birth, although Lillie suspected that others waited outside to hear the outcome. Carolina had defied even Jody, unleashing torrents of Spanish and tossing her black hair defiantly until he had helplessly given up. Nothing could keep Carolina from babies, even non-human babies, or New Human babies, or whatever these three were going to be.

  “Now push!” Pam commanded, and Lillie gratefully complied. She felt the equivalent of shitting a pumpkin, and gasped. “Is it… alive?”

  No one answered her. “Here comes the second,” Pete said. “All right, push!”

  “Is it…” She couldn’t get the rest of the words out.

  “Aaaahhhhhh,” Carolina said, and Lillie fainted. A second later she was back, shocked into consciousness by some olfactory molecules from Pam, who said angrily, “Stay with us, Lillie! You’re not done!”