Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  Jody said, “Oh, we’ve always been there.” To him, Lillie saw, it was a reason. His farm, his roots, his mother’s grave.

  “When are you starting back?” Alex said. There was some tension between him and Jody. Alex had always idolized the older man. No longer.

  “Can’t go until tomorrow,” Jody said. “There’s a big storm coming up”

  “You should stay as long as you want,” Lillie said deliberately. “You’re always welcome with us.” Jody looked away.

  Everyone helped unpack. Lillie and Scott took one cottage, with Gaia, Rhea, and Dion. Keith, Loni, and their children took another, as did Cord and Clari and little Raindrop. Alex was offered the third bedroom in Cord’s cottage but said he preferred to put a bunk in what they were already calling “the big house,” the dining room/kitchen. Scott declared the vacant cottage his laboratory. The sixth remained what it already was, a storehouse bursting with supplies.

  Did Alex miss Kezia? It was hard to tell. She had refused to come with him, and Lillie knew that unlike some of the men, Alex had never felt much personal attachment to Kezia or to the children that the pribir-mandated sex had given him. Kezia didn’t seem to mind. For her, too, the driven interlude seemed to have been total hormonal. And maybe Alex simply wasn’t very parental.

  She had known, once, what that felt like. No more.

  When everyone was settled, dinner over, and the infants asleep, Lillie went outside. Scott remained in their cottage, using the ancient computer. For a brief moment she let herself imagine what it would be like if Mike sat there instead. She suppressed the thought. Don’t dwell on it. No use in pointless pain.

  How strange it felt to be completely surrounded by trees again! Pine and spruce instead of cottonwood and cedar. But the ubiquitous pinons were here, too. The trees blocked sections of the sky, which Lillie was used to seeing whole and vast and limitless. Not here.

  When she looked more closely, she could see that some of the trees were dying. The climate was starting to dry off, just as it was on the plains; the process just hadn’t yet advanced as far. She didn’t know which flora had migrated here when the warming accelerated and the rains increased, but those plants were probably again in retreat. How long would it take?

  Lillie felt the wind rise: Jody’s storm. It whipped tree branches this way and that. She didn’t venture very far; she didn’t know either the terrain or the area’s vermin, and it was black as a pit in the windy dark. She stumbled back to the house and went inside. Two candles glowing in the living room, and Scott looking up from the computer with a weary smile, and, above all, the faint smell of her babies, asleep in the next room, as living and welcome as the scent of water.

  At the end of October, three months after Lillie moved to the mountains, Spring and Jody and Kella visited overnight. Kella did not bring her triplets, Lillie’s grandchildren. The visitors didn’t bring much news, or carry any away, since the two homesteads communicated by computer almost every day. Kella exclaimed over how much her brothers’ children had all grown. She didn’t look at her mother’s children, and Lillie saw that Kella was trying to stay away from them. It was a miserable visit.

  It was another year before Spring returned, and Kella didn’t come with him.

  It was remarkably easy to live in the mountains. Crops grew easily. Water was more plentiful, although the growing season was shorter. Game was plentiful. Keith, Loni, and Alex learned to make snares. On the entire mountain, they never met another person.

  Keith tended the cows, and Cord devoted himself to farming. Clari became pregnant again, and gave birth to a girl they named Theresa.

  Scott grew frailer, but his mind was sharp and clear, mapping more of the children’s gene expressions every year. At the farm, Robin died. Natural causes, Emily e-mailed; Robin’s heart just gave out. Lillie wondered if anyone genuinely mourned. Angie bore another child, a single baby, not triplets. Evidently Pam had had some mercy. Susie had a baby; Felicity had identical twins boys. Kella had a baby Lillie had never seen.

  In the mountains the four older children turned two, three, five. They ran barefoot through the woods and learned to trap, fish, farm, read, add, and write code. The old computer held out. “Cheap Japanese parts,” Scott joked, and only Lillie understood what he meant. The real miracle was that the Net still functioned. It would, Scott said, as long as the telecom satellites stayed functional in orbit.

  It had been three years since they’d seen anyone from the farm. E-mail came once a week, then once every two weeks, then maybe once a month.

  Alex and Lillie became lovers in a detached, considerate sort of way. Neither risked passion, but they were kind to each other.

  Gaia, Rhea, and Dion stuck together from the time they were toddlers. They didn’t avoid the other children; they just preferred their own company. “They’re smelling to each other, aren’t they?” Cord said. “The way the pribir can. Even though they can talk normally. But this way, nobody else can listen.”

  “I think so,” said Lillie, who knew so. Her hair had started to gray, pale strands glittering in the bright sunlight among the dark brown. She was thirty-four.

  “Mom, I saw them eating something yesterday. A woody bush, not anything we can eat. They were nibbling the leaves and sort of laughing. I told Scott, and he said they’re probably engineered to digest a big range of plants that we can’t.”

  “I know,” Lillie said. She’d observed it for a few months now, and had had her own talk with Scott. She had been concerned. Cord’s tone conveyed something else: doubt and distaste.

  “They play well with Raindrop and the others, though,” Cord said, as much to reassure himself as anything. Then, “But they wouldn’t ever … turn on the others, would they?” He and Lillie were having this conversation away from the children, which was the only way they could have had it.

  “Of course not,” Lillie said acidly. “Why would they? They’re all cousins.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Cord,” Lillie said, “have you noticed that it’s getting hotter, even up here in the mountains?”

  Cord looked at her as if she were crazy. “Of course I’ve noticed. Everybody has noticed. Clari and I were saying just last night that the vervain have all but disappeared. It’s drier, too. And the UV— we’re going to keep the kids inside even more than we do.”

  His kids and Keith’s kids, he meant. Not Lillie’s.

  Rhea, Gaia, and Dion went wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. They were only five, but Lillie had spent an entire week following them, and she had seen that they were safe without her. She had seen it graphically, during a thunderstorm that had sprung up on what had been a quiet afternoon.

  “Rhea! Gaia! Dion! Come on, we’re going back to the house now.”

  Rhea materialized at Lillie’s knees. Short and squat, her gray-green scaly skin blending in with the foliage, she could achieve near-perfect camouflage. She gazed up at Lillie from Lillie’s own eyes set above a large snout in that mouthless face and smelled to her mother.

  “Not yet, Mommy! We want to stay here!”

  “No. It’s going to thunderstorm. There could be flash flooding”

  The feel of interest came to Lillie’s mind. The triplets were interested in everything. Intelligent and curious, they had learned to understand language at a precocious age, and they smelled back increasingly complex ideas. They differed more from each other in their thoughts than in their appearance. Rhea was the gentlest, meditating on butterflies, seldom disobeying. Dion was the most adventurous, and also the most loving. Gaia was the brightest but had a temper. Sometimes Lillie wondered if Pam’s own genes were in Gaia. She hoped not.

  A surprise had been Gaia’s intense interest in Shakespeare. Scott had bought a few actual books with him, antiquated volumes on acid-free paper, including a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Even before she understood the words, Gaia delighted in the rhythms as Scott or Lillie read to her. Lillie was startled by how quickly Gaia remembere
d and recited long passages. It was disconcerting to see a snouted, scaled five-year-old making mudpies and singing to herself:

  “‘Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made:

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea change

  Into something rich and strange’ … Mommy! Dion’s throwing mud at me!”

  Where had Gaia’s interest in Shakespeare come from? Lillie had never particularly liked literature, nor had Uncle Keith.

  Often Lillie wished she could show Gaia, Rhea, and Dion to Uncle Keith. They were children any mother would be proud of. But they were still children.

  “Come on, Rhea, the storm is coming. Where are the others?”

  Gaia emerged noiselessly from the brush. “I’m here,” she smelled. “I don’t know where Dion is.”

  “Dion!” Lillie called, just as the first clap of thunder sounded. “Girls, smell to him, at far range.”

  “We are, Mommy,” Gaia said. A second thunderclap, and two seconds later lightning split the sky.

  “Where did he go?” she shouted. Gaia smelled her the direction.

  Fear crept cold up Lillie’s spine. There was an arroyo that way, and it could flash flood in an instant. “Go back to the house!” she shouted over more thunder. “Hold hands and stay together!” She started off in the direction Gaia had pointed.

  The rain came, lashing against Lillie’s face, making it difficult to see anything. She tried to run, clumsy against the wind, and stumbled over a dense knot of twisted vines. In less than a minute she was soaked to the skin. The solid sheet of rain blew almost sideways, warm and merciless, and she couldn’t make herself heard over the wind.

  “Dion! Dion!”

  He could smell to her, even over the storm … couldn’t he? Maybe not. She fell again, tearing open one pant leg. Blood ran down her calf, instantly sprayed off by the rain.

  By the time she reached the arroyo, it was already flooding. Water tore along between the bare banks, washing down so much mud that the water looked like sludge. But it raced along at a speed no sludge could match, rising visibly as it was fed by countless flooding streams up the mountain.

  “Dion!”

  She saw him then, upstream on the opposite bank, a small,

  squat, twisted figure watching the water. “Dion!” she screamed again, and he looked up, startled, and took a step forward. The bank gave way and he fell into the flood.

  Lillie nearly jumped into the water but some native shrewdness stopped her. Not here, there was a place just a little ways down the arroyo where it turned sharply to follow the hidden rocks underneath. Dion would be slowed there, she’d have a better chance of getting him, his speed in the water would just about equal hers in reaching the place —

  She thought all of these things, and none of them, even as she began to run. She reached the spot a few seconds too late. Dion’s body shot past her in the torrent.

  Lillie screamed and ran alongside the banks. Now she had no chance of matching his speed. She ran anyway, lurching and stumbling, flogged by the horizontal rain. Later, she could never remember how far she’d gone, or how long. When she finally reached a flat place where the water spread out into a slower flood plain, Dion was already bobbing in the shallows, inert.

  She splashed in and pulled him out. He was dead, he must be dead, she’d seen his body banged against the rocks… .

  He wasn’t dead. His clothes had been entirely torn off, but his squat, fat-cushioned body had curled into a tight ball and the flexible thin shell on his back had curved around it. In the air he uncurled, opened his eyes, and smelled to her. “Hi, Mommy.”

  “Dion!”

  “I’m not hurt.” She felt puzzlement in her mind.

  “I … see that,” she gasped, but there was no way he could have heard her because thunder split the sky, deafening as an explosion.

  His big ears closed against the din. She saw his throat slit open again, without shedding water because none had gotten in. The big nostrils in his snout also opened. Dion stood.

  Gaia and Rhea burst through the underbrush, obediently holding hands as Lillie had told them to. Their pink play suits were torn and soaked. Dion turned toward them and Lillie knew they were smelling furiously to each other, with those olfactory molecules meant only for each other.

  All at once her leg hurt where she’d fallen, and she was drenched and cold.

  “Come on, Mommy,” Rhea said, taking her hand. The little girl’s unfurled tentacles felt warm and soft. “We’ll take you home!

  Gaia looked down at herself. She smelled in disgust, and then spoke aloud. “I’m not going to wear clothes any more. Stupid things! This pants got me caught on bushes!”

  Dion clasped Lillie around the knees. “I’m not hurt, Mommy,” he repeated, this time aloud.

  “No,” she said, and felt worn out by the gratitude, the strangeness, the sorrow that she was inevitably losing them and the sorrow that they were still hers to agonize over, a loving burden on her useless heart.

  CHAPTER 30

  They compromised on the clothes. The triplets agreed to wear tough canvas shorts to cover their genitals, which were both vulnerable to thorny bushes and embarrassing to the other children. Shorts, but nothing else.

  Everyone else needed coverings from head to foot, as the UV increased.

  That summer, the computer finally broke down for good. Neither Scott nor Loni could get it up again. This mattered greatly to Scott, but not, Lillie realized, to anybody else. When he wasn’t carefully noting data about the triplets in a crabbed longhand, or reading to them, Scott sat quietly in an old chair under the cooling shade of an oak tree, doing nothing. He wasn’t sick, he insisted. “I’m too old and it’s too hot,” was all he’d say. He ate less and less.

  Rhea, Dion, and Gaia spent more and more time away from home, off somewhere on the mountain. The first time they stayed out overnight, Lillie was frantic. Oddly enough, it was Clari who reassured her. The young woman sat beside Lillie through the long dark hours, brewing chicory coffee, a wispy young figure in her brief white sleepgown. The cottage was slower to cool off these days, even though Lillie drew the curtains during the day. She could feel her shirt sticking to the small of her back.

  “Rhea was talking to Vervain yesterday and I overheard,” Clari said, and Lillie thought how easily they all used “talking” and “overhearing” to describe conversations that may or may not have been one-way audio and one-way pheromonal. “Rhea said they had found eighteen different plants they could digest, and were looking for more. Also that Gaia could build a good campfire in their ‘special cave.’”

  Lillie raised her hand helplessly, let it fall back to her lap. “Clari… are they going to revert to cavemen? Hunter-gatherers? Foraging for plants and building fires in caves?”

  Clari laughed. “Lillie, they’re kids. Kids do that. Yours are just better at it than most. Besides, could cavemen solve square roots and recite Shakespeare? Scott says the triplets can do both.”

  “You have no idea,” Lillie said, “how glad I am that you married Cord.”

  Clari blushed with pleasure. She ducked her head, and in the gesture Lillie suddenly saw Tess, a Tess younger than Clari was now, and infinitely less experienced. Tess at Andrews Air Force Base, glitter in her masses of black hair, embarrassed at a compliment from some boy.

  Some boy. All at once Lillie wondered: Was Clari so casual about the triplets staying away from home because she genuinely believed that they’d be safe? Or because it meant they would be spending less time around Raindrop and the others as adolescence approached?

  Probably both. That’s how humans were, motives as knotted and twisted as mesquite. Anyway, adolescence was a long ways off.

  Gaia, Rhea, and Dion straggled home the next afternoon, dirty and sleepy and hugely pleased with themselves. Immediately they fell asleep, and were still asleep when Jody rode up to
the compound on horseback calling, “Lillie! Scott! Alex! Anybody home?”

  “We’re here!” Alex called from the big house, and Jody dismounted and threw his horse’s reins over the porch railing. Everyone streamed out.

  He looked much older. Sun lines, deep and deadly, creased even the skin on his thin cheeks. A purple carcinoma sat at one temple … did that mean Emily wasn’t there to keep up with cancer removal? Lillie’s chest tightened.

  The five children at home, Keith’s three and Cord’s two, clustered on the porch behind their parents, peeping shyly. Lillie realized they hadn’t seen a stranger in … how many years? It was so easy to lose track.

  Jody said abruptly, “I’ve got bad news.”

  Keith said, “What? Shove it out, Jody.”

  “Some sort of microbe got to the farm. Maybe engineered, maybe naturally mutated, Emily didn’t know. She said it might have lain dormant somehow, or jumped species, or anything.”

  Alex said steadily, “Who? How many?”

  “Bonnie. Dakota. Two of Gavin’s kids. Wild Pink.” He looked away, and the flesh in his throat worked. “And Carolina.”

  Carolina. No engineering, no boosted immunity at all, nothing but her generous heart. Lillie felt more for Carolina’s death than she did for Wild Pink, Kella’s daughter, Lillie’s own grandchild. She’d barely known Wild Pink.

  Clari said gently, “Come in, Jody.”

  “No. I’m not staying. There’s no way of knowing who’s carrying what, Emily says. I just came to bring you this. It’s her genetic analysis and some doses that seemed to prevent dying from—where’s Scott? Is he dead?”

  “No, no, just in bed. He feels his age.”

  “It’s good he’s not dead because you might need him,” Jody said grimly. “Emily says if this can happen once, it can happen again, with a different micro.”