Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  The genetically altered rice and hay flourished, although out of prudence Theresa insisted the entire crop be consumed on the farm rather than sold. Lillie was disappointed, but she managed production costs and quantities so well that the net savings to the farm was large. Lillie, and the others, turned sixteen, seventeen, twenty-one. Gradually Lillie began to share with Theresa and DeWayne the financial management of the farm, which Theresa had never enjoyed. The federal government resuscitated both itself and the income tax.

  Lillie had grown lean, hard-bodied, briskly capable. She and Alex were the only two of the pribir kids who learned to ride. “Pribir kids” —it had been years since Theresa had thought that phrase. There was nothing about the farm that did not look and feel totally normal, except for the large number of children the same age. Everyone looked and acted no different from their neighbors.

  Unless you counted Lillie’s attitude toward her children.

  As the years rolled by, Theresa became more troubled by this. Lillie was kind to Cord, Keith, and Kella. It was the wary, impersonal kindness of a childless boarder. It reminded Theresa, as nothing else could, of the days at Andrews Air Force Base, when both she and Lillie had been on the receiving end of wary consideration from doctors and intelligence agents and security chiefs.

  “It’s not right, Lillie. They need you.”

  “I know it’s not right,” Lillie said with her habitual honesty. “But I can’t help it. Although they don’t need me while they have you and Carolina.”

  “You’re their mother!”

  “I know.”

  “Cord, especially, needs you. Haven’t you seen how he follows you around, hoping for your attention?” Kella, Lillie’s daughter, had fastened herself onto Carolina. Keith seemed to have a temperament like Lillie’s, adventurous and self-sufficient. But the look in Cord’s eyes when they followed his mother tore at Theresa’s heart. The only time the little boy seemed happy was with Clari, Senni’s little girl. The two were inseparable. Just a few months apart in age, they shared secrets and games far more than did Cord and his siblings.

  Lillie said, in a rare moment of overt emotion, “I can’t… can’t seem to love them, Tess.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Theresa gazed at Lillie. Theresa didn’t understand, wouldn’t ever understand. Cord—all the children—were beautiful, bright, good-natured. Sometimes Theresa felt guilty because she preferred Cord to her own blood granddaughter, Senni’s older girl, Dolly. Dolly was a whiner, and she had a selfish streak not shared by her younger sister, Clari. Cord was a wonderful child. How could Lillie not feel —

  “I don’t know,” Lillie repeated and turned away, her face once more a composed, competent, pleasant mask.

  CHAPTER 18

  The drought began in the summer of 2064.

  At first, no one worried. For years the climate in southeast New Mexico had been improving, increasingly favorable for agriculture, ranching, and shade trees. The farm barely needed to irrigate anymore. Theresa and her “farm co-op” had learned to take their good luck for granted. They were in the right place, during the right years. In the vast planetary climatic lottery, they’d drawn a winning number.

  However, after the drought had continued for an entire year, Theresa began to get nervous. The farm had been sustained through the year by savings, by DeWayne, and by good management. But the herd had been reduced in size and the harvest was largely a failure. If the land began to revert to its former aridity, both water and plant life drying up, she would be ruined. There were too many people, too many cows, too much diverse activity to go back to what the farm had been twenty years ago.

  It was the same in other places, but not everywhere. With mixed feelings Theresa heard on Net news that the northeast coast, that part of it not under water, continued to rise in productivity, population, and malaria. The Canadian plains also continued to enjoy its gains of the last decades. But the southwest, along with large portions of China, were shifting in weather yet again.

  International tensions with China again worsened.

  Let it be temporary, Theresa prayed to nothing. Not a dangerous shift, just a few bad years. Farmers and ranchers have always had bad years. Nothing new in that, nothing terrifying.

  Jody and Spring decided to end the hog operation. Lillie, studying the figures, agreed. They also stopped growing the genetically altered rice. The creek was not delivering enough floodwater.

  She was too old for this, Theresa thought. She and Scott and DeWayne, all sixty-four years old. Arthritis was starting to make it painful to turn her neck. She could no longer eat raw vegetables without stomach distress. She was too old to hunker down and then spring up to start over.

  Autumn still didn’t bring rain. In December, Lillie’s children would turn eleven. Theresa decided to have a party. Everyone needed cheering up. She would hold a massive party for all fourteen kids on December 10, Cord’s birth date. The look in his eyes when they followed Lillie had changed. Wistfulness had been replaced by bewildered anger. Theresa was worried about him. He played, worked, and studied almost exclusively with Clari, his gentle shadow. She worshipped him, much to Senni’s annoyance.

  “Let’s have party hats,” Julie said, from some memory at least a half century old. “I know how to fold them out of newspapers.”

  “There aren’t any newspapers,” Sajelle pointed out.

  “Well, any paper. And candles.”

  “That we can get,” Theresa said, making a list. Lillie could go to Wenton and pick up the supplies for the party. It was probably the most involved Lillie would get.

  “Carolina said she’d bake three of those Spanish cakes with the prickly-pear jelly inside,” Emily said. “They were soooooo good.”

  “What about presents?” Bonnie said. “The same thing for everybody? Or each mother buys her own?”

  “There shouldn’t be a large difference in cost, though,” Emily said, not looking at Sajelle, who thanks to DeWayne had so much more than the rest of them. Although Sajelle never flaunted it.

  Bonnie said, “I heard Angie talk about a doll in Lucy Tertino’s store. Some woman in Wenton sews them by hand, with little outfits, too.”

  Emily laughed. “Bonnie, your daughter is such a girly girl.”

  Bonnie smiled. “You saying that’s ironic, Em?”

  “Never.”

  “I know!” Julie said. “Water balloons!”

  Theresa listened to them plan, joke, enjoy, four young women of twenty-five, her school friends and contemporaries as she faced her sixty-fifth birthday. It would be a good party. And for a day at least, nobody would think about the drought. Maybe.

  As the day grew closer, the children became frantic with excitement. Studies were neglected, chores left undone, sleep interrupted. Even obedient Clari forgot to water the winter herb garden because she was out playing with Cord, and after two days, when Theresa discovered this, the cooking herbs were nearly dead in their pots under the relentless sun.

  “I’m sorry!” Clari sobbed, and Theresa wouldn’t have had the heart to punish her. But Senni did.

  “You were off playing with Cord, weren’t you! You irresponsible brat! If you’d pay attention to your chores instead of that spoiled kid, everybody would be better off!”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m sorry …”

  “I’ll make you sorry, all right, Clari Marie. I’ll make sure you don’t forget again!” She took a bridle strap from its peg on the barn wall.

  Theresa didn’t hear about this scene until the next day. By that time, Cord was gone.

  “Who saw him last?” Theresa demanded. His brother Keith said, “Not me. We woke up this morning and Cord wasn’t in his bunk and the blankets were still all smooth.” For the last year, the bedrooms had been shuffled yet again to make separate bunkrooms for boys and girls. This wasn’t observed much; the kids slept wherever they chose, at whatever house they chose, in whatever groups the evening’s play had
dictated to them.

  Theresa looked at the people assembled in the great room: seven ten-year-old children, Lupe, Carolina, and a clutter of younger children. The others were already busy elsewhere. Lillie had left for town before dawn. Theresa said to Keith, “Was Cord around when you went to bed last night?”

  “No,” volunteered Gavin, Bonnie’s son. “We looked for him and Clari to play Hot Rocks, but they weren’t around.”

  “Clari’s missing, too? Carolina?”

  “No, no, Clari, she here. She come breakfast, eat nothing. I say, ‘eat,’ but she no eat. She cry and cry.”

  “Where is Clari now?”

  “In the girl room. Not in her mother’s house, I say Clari no do chores today. Senni hit Clari.” Carolina’s dark eyes flashed; she didn’t approve of Senni’s child-raising methods. Her and Jody’s son Angel was never hit, and he was very well behaved.

  Theresa said, “Senni hit Clari? For neglecting the herb garden?”

  Carolina nodded, her lips pursed.

  “All right, kids, everybody get to work. You, too, Lupe. I’ll take care of this.”

  She knocked on the door to the girls’ bunkroom. There was no answer, but she pushed in anyway.

  Clari lay rumpled in a dark corner of a bottom bunk. Theresa looked at the child’s miserable, tear-stained face and inwardly cursed Senni. Her daughter was a hard woman. Why Senni, when Jody and Spring were so sweet-tempered? Even moody Carlo would never have hit a child. And Clari herself was the gentlest kid on the farm. Genes were so strange.

  “Clari, it’s Grandma. I want to talk to you, honey. Come out.”

  Ever obedient, Clari crept from the bunk. She was taller than Cord but smaller-boned, with short brown curls and blue eyes. Theresa said, “Where did your mother hit you? Never mind, I can see from the way you’re moving. Take off your pants, honey.”

  Painfully, Clari wiggled out of her pants. Red welts striped the backs of her thighs. Something turned over in Theresa’s chest: anger and fear and a painful love for Senni, who was alienating those who should love her. Carefully she took Clari on her lap.

  “Tell Grandma what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Every child at the farm and most of the adults obeyed that tone in Theresa’s voice. Clari said, “We were playing, me and Cord and Kella and Susie and Angel. Monday and Tuesday, a long game of Hot Rocks, it lasted three days and I forgot to take care of the herb garden in the evenings.”

  Theresa had never asked the rules for Hot Rocks, an enormously complicated game the kids had invented and, apparently, kept adding to. She said, “Go on.”

  “Mommy hit me and Cord found out ‘cause I was crying. He got really mad. He threw the Ender Rock so hard it broke, Grandma. Then he said him and me should run away and that would show Mom.”

  “Run away? Where? How?”

  “To our secret place. On Uncle Scott’s old horse.”

  Cold seeped up Theresa’s spine. She hadn’t thought to check the horses. Scott’s bay, the one he’d first used when he came here, was too old for real use, but Scott let the children ride him for short periods and short distances. Cord wasn’t a very good rider.

  “Did Cord go to your secret place on Uncle Scott’s horse?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t go with him, Mommy would have been really really mad. I came here and slept in Angie’s bed. Is Cord gone?” Clari looked scared.

  “Yes, but I’m going to get him back right now. Where is your secret place, Clari?”

  “Where all the dead bad men are buried. It has ghosts.”

  Theresa closed her eyes. She should monitor the stuff the kids watched on the Net more carefully. There was never time. The “bad dead men” were the refugees that Jody had killed with the bioweapon and buried in the arroyo, once again dry in the year-and-a-half drought. How had Clari even known about that incident?

  She didn’t ask. “Clari, I want you to go ask Carolina for some breakfast, eat it, and do two units of school software. It’s your turn.” DeWayne had bought school software and computers for all the kids to share.

  “Is Cord okay?”

  “Of course he is. Now go do as I told you.”

  Scott’s nag wasn’t in the barn. No one had noticed, since all the other horses were in use out on the range. DeWayne’s truck, which he had purchased in lieu of the fancy little car he’d arrived in, had gone to Wenton. The bus was finally dead, and the new one Lillie had ordered last year had had to be sold as the farm funds dwindled.

  Theresa smacked her fist against the barn wall in frustration. She could have gone back to the house and Net-paged Jody out on the range, the pagers being another innovation due to DeWayne. But God knew where Jody was. He could be halfway to the El Capitan mountains with their cattle. The arroyo was only a little over a mile away. She put on the wide-brimmed hat with neck curtains that the high UV made necessary, filled a canteen, and started to walk.

  By the time she reached the arroyo, Theresa’s legs felt wobbly. She didn’t walk much anymore on the open range. She had a canteen with her but wanted to save the water for Cord. The arroyo was completely dry, and the gray rough bark of the cottonwoods looked tired and dusty. Cord wasn’t there.

  She sat in the welcome shade, panting. Hoof tracks led away from the arroyo. But there was nothing in that direction but desert. Desert that a year ago had just begun to be prairie, its greening now cut off like an execution.

  Theresa took three long swallows of water and started walking. If Cord hadn’t thought to bring a hat … it had been night when he’d run off. And he’d been too angry to think straight or he wouldn’t have started this stupid trek in the first place.

  A few miles out, Theresa came across Scott’s horse. It had found a semi-living green bush and was chomping at it eagerly. The saddle was empty.

  Now she was genuinely afraid. How far had Cord gotten before he fell off, or let the horse wander away, or whatever had happened? The child could be laying injured in the hot sun, dehydrated, alone …

  Theresa took two more swallows of water—her last, she promised herself—and kept on walking. How soon before someone followed her? They would, of course. Senni would have the sense (and the remorse) to Net-page Jody or Spring. Lillie and DeWayne would come home from town. Someone would come.

  Meanwhile, she kept walking, kept calling. “Cord! Cord, can you hear me? Cord, answer me! Cord!” Her throat grew hoarse.

  The wind was picking up. Sand started to blow against her face, into her eyes. Oh, God, no, not a dust storm, no one would ever find Cord or her, and alone out here in a dust storm … “Cord! Cord!”

  The wind blew harder.

  Was that him? She ran forward, her legs aching, but it was only an unusually large prickly pear, vaguely shaped like a prone boy.

  She was sobbing from frustration and fear when she finally spotted Cord. Lurching, stumbling forward, she fell on her knees beside his crumpled little body, lying beside a clump of thorny mesquite.

  She gasped, inhaling a mouthful of dust.

  It was Cord … and it wasn’t. He crouched on his stomach, head tucked forward as much under his chest as possible, facing away from the wind. His arms and legs were drawn under him. His thin shirt had torn, and Theresa could see that over his back and neck and head had grown a sort of … shell. A thin membrane, tough and flexible as plastic when she touched it.

  Water. He had grown a temporary shell to keep water from evaporating.

  The sand was blowing harder now. Theresa closed her eyes against its sting and groped for Cord’s pulse along his neck. She found it through the membrane and counted: ten pulses per minute, slow and even. Her fingers groped underneath the boy, and touched something hard and thin at his belly. She felt it, dug with her nails where it entered the soil. She knew what it was, had encountered it her whole life on the range. All cacti had them. A taproot, sent deep into the soil to tap whatever water might be buried far down.

  Behind the membrane, Cord’s eyes were clos
ed. His child’s face had evened out in his deep sleep, hibernation, estivation, whatever the right word was. Or maybe there was no right word for this.

  The storm was building fiercely now. Theresa drank the last of her water, feeling it mix with the grit in her mouth and scrape down her throat, knowing it wouldn’t make much difference. Everything depended now on how long and hard the wind blew, obscuring visibility, accelerating dehydration. She lay down beside Cord and put her arms around him.

  Scott, I know what all the extra genes are for. They’re for adapting to whatever we do to fuck up the planet.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Grit ground under the lids, making her gasp with pain and open them. A mistake. Now she could barely see the mesquite a foot away.

  Was Cord human? Yes, yes, yes, her fading mind said. She didn’t know why or how she knew, but she did. Cord, all of the children engineered on that alien ship, were human. She would bet her life on it.

  Which was pretty funny, actually—

  The wind mounted in fury. Theresa’s arms loosened, unable to hold their grip.

  Her last thought was for Cord: Pribir, wherever you are, thank you.

  The storm blew till night fell. The winds brought clouds in their wake, fierce black clouds like a tarp under the sky. Clouds, but no rain. It was twenty-four hours before they could find and retrieve Theresa’s body. By that time, there wasn’t much left of it. Weather and coyotes.

  Lillie spent the twenty-four convinced that both Cord and Theresa were dead. Theresa, who had been first a friend and then a mother to Lillie, far more of a mother than Barbara had ever been. Theresa, who had taken Uncle Keith’s place so naturally, so unobtrusively that Lillie had hardly even noticed.

  For those two days Keith and Kella had clung to her, crying for their brother. Awkwardly she held them to her, struggling with her own pain. Cord, dead out on the range somewhere in this terrible storm. Cord, her little boy … oh, God, at least let them be together. Let him have Theresa in his last hours. He’d never had his mother.