Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  When he was a child, thought thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Cord, all this seemed normal. It was just the way things were. Now, after watching the Net, he saw how abnormal it was. Well, that was good! He and his “family” were abnormal because they were special, made that way by the pribir.

  The strange thing was the way his mother reacted when they all went back to the farm in Uncle DeWayne’s truck.

  Lillie — lately Cord had begun thinking of her that way, although he wasn’t sure why—took one look at Mike Franzi and stopped dead. Then a slow, long blush spread up from her neck over her face, turning it red as sunset. Lillie, who never blushed!

  “Hello, Mike.”

  “Hello, Lillie. Long time.”

  “How many years? Twelve.”

  “You look wonderful,” he said. Cord scowled. His mother looking ‘wonderful’? She was just his mother. Lillie said, “Tell me what happened.”

  He smiled. “Direct as always. All right, the short version is, Hannah and I were in Philadelphia. It got impossible, food riots and burning. We found Robin and Sophie on the Net, living together with their kids in Denver. We went there because it sounded better, and for a while it was. But then it got as dangerous and hungry as Philly, no jobs. Two weeks ago Sophie was killed in a riot. By that time I recognized Rafe’s message on the Net, and here we are.”

  Cord knew that message, although he didn’t understand it. It went: Do you remember Andrew? How about Pam and Pete? They’re still gone, of course, but their legacy remains. Sometimes it seems I can still smell them. So much is gone, but we’re here.

  Dr. Wilkins said, “Why didn’t you Net us that you were coming?”

  Mike didn’t answer. After a moment the girl who had given Taneesha the finger said defiantly, “We were afraid you wouldn’t take us in.”

  Uncle Jody said, “We will. My mother would have wanted it.”

  Lillie added, “If we didn’t want you, why would Rafe have posted that message? You’re welcome, all of you, as long as you’re willing to work. Times are tougher than they were—but I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

  The old woman, “Robin,” said bitterly, “Lillie, you don’t know about tough times. You missed the war. Don’t try to tell me about tough times.”

  Lillie looked startled, and then her eyes met Mike’s, and something passed between them. All Cord saw was a tiny smile and an even tinier shake of his head, but once more his mother—his mother!—blushed. And then she looked at the younger woman, Hannah, and looked away.

  Mike said, “These are Sophie’s children, Roy, Patty, and Ashley.” Ashley and Taneesha stared each other down. Trouble, Taneesha had said, and Cord believed it. Ashley was as skinny as the rest but taller and muscled. Her insolent look around the cluttered great room said she didn’t think much of it. As if she was used to better.

  Hannah said in a high, strained voice, “These are my children. Frank and Bruce and Loni.”

  “Hi,” a few of the farm kids said shyly. The rest of the introductions were made. The new people would never remember all the names, Cord thought. He couldn’t even remember all of theirs, and there were only nine. Which one was Bruce?

  Aunt Sajelle said, “Let’s get you all fed and settled.” Since Grandma’s death, Aunt Sajelle had taken over running the big house, with Aunt Carolina’s help.

  Clari, at Cord’s elbow said, “They look so hungry.”

  “They probably are,” Cord said. Clari was always kind, so sweet. The other boys, especially his brother Keith, teased Cord about having a girl for a best friend, but he didn’t care. There was no one like Clari.

  CHAPTER 20

  Ashley Vogel was the only kid at the farm who hated the pribir. “They wrecked my life,” she said. “Fuck them.”

  “No,” Taneesha said, “they gave you your life. They wrecked our lives by sending you here. Why don’t you just go back where you came from.”

  “Fuck you,” Ashley said.

  A ring of kids surrounded the two at Dead Men’s Arroyo. Ashley had wanted to see where the refugees who once attacked the farm were buried, because Dolly had told her it was haunted. Nine of them had hiked out in the late afternoon, when the sun wasn’t too dangerous, on the half-day a week they were allowed off from chores and studies. The hike out was tense. Dolly, the only person who liked Ashley, walked ahead with her, whispering together and jeering over their shoulders at the others.

  Cord had gone because he was both bored and strangely keyed up. The new kids had upset the balance at the farm. New friendships formed, old alliances shifted, among both children and adults. No one liked Aunt Robin. She was the same age as Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, but she seemed older, nastier. Her hip hurt her, her gut ached, she was always complaining. Aunt Hannah was all right and her kids didn’t cause any trouble, but something wasn’t right there, either. Something about Aunt Hannah and Cord’s mother. He didn’t like to think about it. It was partly to avoid thinking about it that he’d hiked down to the arroyo with Dolly, Ashley, Taneesha, Jason, Keith, Kella, Gavin, Dakota, and Bobby. Clari had another one of her colds and her mother made her stay in bed.

  Walking over the land, following his own lengthening shadow, Cord remembered how it used to be. Greener, with bushes and little low flowers everywhere and even some cottonwood saplings starting to take growth. Now, except where the farm irrigated with windpower, the ground stretched gray and bleached, dust devils rising in yellow funnels on the wind. The new saplings had all withered. Tumbleweed rolled across his path.

  At the arroyo, studying the marker stone for the mass grave, Ashley said, “Let’s dig them up.”

  Kella was shocked. “You can’t do that! You’re not supposed to disturb the dead. Besides, what if some of the micros from the bioweapon are still active? We could die!”

  “The micros aren’t still active,” Dakota said authoritatively. He was one of the kids that studied with Dr. Wilkins. “They had a terminator gene built in for only twelve replications.”

  “Too bad,” Ashley said coolly. “We could all die. That would be so bonus.”

  Cord gaped at her. He knew that Ashley was showing off, but something about her disturbed him. Not just her meanness … something else he couldn’t name.

  Kella said, “But you don’t want to die, Ashley!”

  “Why not? End this misery.”

  Cord found himself saying, “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “And anyway, what misery? You’re here now, the farm is going to take care of you, what’s so miserable?”

  “We are,” Ashley said. “All of us. Miserable abominations because that what the fucking pribir made us.”

  “Stop it, Ashley,” Kella said. “I know you’re just showing off.”

  “I was never more serious in my life,” Ashley said, and again Cord glimpsed that something he couldn’t name. It was almost as if Ashley … meant it.

  “The pribir did an incredible job of creating us,” Dakota said, and began a technical recital of genetic engineering. Dakota, Cord saw, was also showing off.

  “Fuck that,” Ashley said. “The pribir made us so we’re not human and regular humans spit on us and hate us, and I hate the pribir for doing that. If they come back the way they said, I’ll kill them myself. Personally.”

  Complete silence.

  “I’ll sneak up on them from behind with the scythe in the barn,” Ashley embellished, “and one smack to the head will cut them in two. I’ll dance in the blood. I’ll — “

  “That’s enough,” Taneesha said. Until now she’d been quiet, sitting expressionless on a boulder. Now she stood, and Cord saw that she was outraged, and afraid, and eager. “Shut your mouth, Ashley.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you bitch.”

  The two girls started to circle each other. Everyone else drew back. Cord suddenly realized that this was why Ashley and Taneesha had come to the dry arroyo, and maybe the others, too, or at least some of them. This
fight that had been building for weeks now, for reasons he couldn’t begin to state.

  Cord didn’t want to see it. He wanted Taneesha to win, of course. Ashley’s words had genuinely sickened him. The pribir were heroes, Cord couldn’t wait for their promised return, and for Ashley to say what she had was like … well, like pissing on food. Nonetheless, he still didn’t want to see the fight.

  Taneesha, taller and better nourished, got in the first punch, hard and quick to Ashley’s stomach. Ashley bent over in pain and Cord thought the fight had ended right there. But Ashley straightened up and after that she attacked like a wounded bear. Cord had never seen this sort of fight. Ashley screamed, she gouged at Taneesha’s eyes, she kicked and scratched and bit. Was that the way kids fought in the city?

  After a stunned moment, four people rushed forward to pull the girls apart. Ashley would not let go. Cord stayed only long enough to make sure that the others had the wildcat under control and that Taneesha was being taken care of. Then he turned and started back to the farm. He was disgusted.

  Clari would never behave that way.

  No, it was more than that. He didn’t want to see blood dripping down Taneesha’s pretty face.

  No, it was more than that. If Taneesha hadn’t fought Ashley, Cord might have done it himself, for what she’d said about the pribir. It filled him with a deep rage that he didn’t know what to do with. He took the rage away from the others, out on the plain, alone.

  But that wasn’t a good idea, either. Days were longer than in winter, but not all that long, and being caught alone on the desert at night wasn’t a good idea. He’d learned that at eleven years old.

  So he stalked the mile-and-then-some back to the farm, knotting and unknotting his fists, circling a very long way around the outbuildings and cattle pens and cottonwood grove to give himself more time alone, and that was how he happened upon his mother and Uncle Mike.

  They sat on the ground under a lone cottonwood farther down the creek than the grove with the bench. This tree’s low branches drooped almost, but not quite, over the two adults. They didn’t touch. But the way they sat so close together, the tension in both figures, caught at Cord. He crept closer and crouched behind a boulder. It didn’t hide him completely and if they turned they would see him, but both were too absorbed to turn.

  “—too mixed up to tell,” Mike said.

  “I know,” Lillie answered. “They just took whatever they needed from whoever’s sperm. Any of them could have anybody’s genes.”

  The pribir. They were talking about the pribir. Cord strained to hear.

  “Still,” Mike said, “Kella and Cord look like me. A little. But with your eyes.”

  “Well… a little,” Lillie said. “But then, so does Bonnie’s Angie, sort of. We’ll never know.”

  “Scott can’t—”

  “No. He says the mixing is just too complete. The usual markers simply don’t apply. The pribir apparently built almost from scratch.”

  “Still,” Mike said, “it was you and I who slept together on the ship.”

  “Plus you and Sophie,” Lillie said. After a moment she added, “Not that it matters any more, Mike. We both know what was being done to drive us. If I blamed you at the time, it was because I was a lovesick child.”

  “I know. But, Lillie — “

  “Don’t say it. Please.”

  “No, I’m going to. It has to be said. We’re not children now.”

  “You’re with Hannah now,” Lillie said. “Since how long?”

  “Two years. But Lillie … be fair. She was desperate, she and later Sophie, and I’ve never risked being with anyone else who wasn’t one of us, afraid of what genes I’d pass on — “

  “Oh, God, I know,” Lillie said. “Some nights I’ve ached. For you, Mike. Only for you.”

  “Then we should — “

  “No! What are you going to do, tell Hannah to leave the farm? You told me what it was like out there for her, for the kids. Or are you thinking you can just switch wives while we’re both here? What will that do to Hannah?”

  “She’s not my wife. We never married. Oh, damn it, Lillie, I know you’re right. We can’t…”

  “We can’t even talk about it again,” Lillie said.

  “Then if that’s so, give me one kiss. Surely one kiss isn’t too big a booby prize for never having you again.”

  Slowly, like a rock slide starting small, Cord saw his mother lean toward Mike and his arms go around her hard.

  His rage broke. At Ashley, at Taneesha, at Clari for being sick in bed, at the loss of the pribir who’d said they would come back and hadn’t, at everything. He exploded from behind the rock and shouted, “Stop it, you whore! Stop it, you, get away from my mother!” And then stopped dead because no one spoke like that except in Net shows, he had said the unforgivable no he hadn’t but he was wrong wrong wrong. Now his mother would kill him.

  She didn’t. She detached herself from Mike’s arms and walked over to him. A pulse beat in her neck, above her open shirt, and her face was flushed, but her voice was calm. “You’re very angry, Cord. But even angry, you aren’t allowed to behave like this. Apologize, please.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cord mumbled, and then he was sorry, sorrier than he’d ever been in his life. He raised his hand, dropped it, hid his face in the crook of his arm. Lillie’s arms went around him and her voice sounded close to his ear, low and sweet and sad.

  “I know, Cord. I know, honey. But it’s all right, and no one will ever mention this again.”

  Cord knew it was the truth. She never would, and she would make sure Mike didn’t, and she wouldn’t treat him as anything less because of this. Overcome, he said, “I love you, Mom,” and felt her arms tighten and her face grow wet against his ear.

  Ashley and Taneesha both came home bloody, and Taneesha’s arm was broken. Dr. Wilkins set it, muttering about childhood stupidity. Aunt Robin, who was supposed to be in charge of Ashley, wanted to whip her but Uncle DeWayne, who along with Lillie and Aunt Sajelle and Uncle Jody was more or less in charge of everybody, refused to allow it. The girls were punished by extra chores and no time outside for two weeks. Both of them healed so fast that Dr. Wilkins took more tissue samples and spent three more days crouched over his gene equipment, trying once again to map all the immune system activity in Ashley and Sajelle.

  For days the kids talked about the fight, whispering about what Ashley had said and done, why she could possibly have done it. Her brother and sister, Roy and Patty, were consulted about things that had happened to them all before they came to the farm. Roy and Patty were reluctant to talk. Both quieter and more cooperative than Ashley, they seemed to want only to put the past out of their minds. Gavin, who had begun to read old psychology books on the Net, said that Ashley showed “self-hatred,” but this was deemed silly by the others. Why would anyone hate themselves?

  Five of them were whispering about this in the den at the big house, with Cord trying to ignore them and do his schoolwork on the computer, when Dr. Wilkins walked in. “Come to the great room. Now,” he said, and walked out again. The five kids looked at each other. Dr. Wilkins was old and wrinkled and tired, but his face didn’t usually look that gray. Something had happened.

  Cord sat on the floor next to Clari and whispered, “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. More people are coming.”

  When nearly everyone had squeezed into the great room, Dr. Wilkins said, “China and European Federation are at war. They’re using bioweapons. We’re too far away for viable micros to affect us here, but I don’t have any idea what the weapons are. There are micros that can encyst and then vitiate after they’re breathed in. Also, if China decides to include us in the war—either because they’re winning and can or are losing and are desperate —or even to include Mexico, we could have a problem. I want everybody to be completely alert to any changes in your physical functioning. And I mean anything: diarrhea, constipation, a cough, a pain, a headache, a muscl
e twitch, anything. Tell me or Emily.” Dr. Wilkins was training Emily in medicine.

  Spring said, “Hell, if I reported every muscle spasm, I’d never have time to get on a horse. Hey—what about the horse’s muscle spasms?”

  “It isn’t funny, Spring,” Dr. Wilkins said, which wasn’t fair because Spring was probably serious. Sometime it was hard to tell. “You and other non-engineered are at special risk. I think.”

  Cord took Clari’s hand. She wasn’t engineered. Lillie was, sort of, like the others in the first generation the pribir had helped. Could Cord himself withstand all bioweapons? Nobody knew. That was probably another reason that Dr. Wilkins wanted to hear about any symptoms. He could learn more about what all Cord’s extra genes were supposed to do.

  But that wouldn’t be as good as learning it from the pribir themselves. Aunt Sajelle had said that the last two pribir visits were forty years apart. God, he wasn’t going to have to wait another twenty-nine years, was he?

  “Cord,” Dr. Wilkins said, “are you listening?”

  “Yes,” he lied. Across the room, Taneesha made a face at him, her eye still half closed and her lip swollen from the fight. Cord smiled despite himself. She was healing very fast, Emily said. Taneesha would be all right. Everyone would be all right. China and Europe were an unthinkable distance away.

  Finally, three and a half years after the drought began, the rains returned. All that spring and summer majestic thunder clouds formed over the high plain, towering black piles that sometimes let down moisture and sometimes didn’t. “Much better than before the warming or the last three years,” Uncle DeWayne said, “but not as good as the best years.”

  The following summer, Cord abruptly grew four inches. His voice cracked. He spent a lot of time in the fields, since he didn’t like to ride, and the work turned him strong and, even with precautions against UV, brown. When he looked in the mirror, he frowned. Was that him? “You look wonderful,” his mother said, and he felt himself go hot with embarrassment and pleasure.