Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  “Well, that’s true,” Pam said judiciously. “Lillie was only one of the vessel generation, but I became fond of her. Still, you’re right. She doesn’t really matter, either.”

  He couldn’t manage an answer. Lillie, Dr. Wilkins, Grandmother Theresa, who had died trying to save Cord’s life . . .“They don’t matter.”

  Nothing was like he imagined it would be.

  The pribir had another tantrum inside the big house.

  Cord had been right; Dr. Wilkins had convinced everyone to let the aliens in without violence. Cord had still been on the ship, but he could easily imagine the arguments Dr. Wilkins used: Angie’s dead baby, Lillie, Hannah, maybe even the dead cattle. He could imagine, too, who had lined up against Dr. Wilkins, who for. Keith and Dakota would have been asked to tell their story over and over. When Sam and Rafe and Gavin straggled in from the arroyo, an arrival that Cord saw on the ship’s monitor, they would have added their voices. In all, the pribir sat waiting for an hour.

  It didn’t seem to bother them. Pete had disappeared through a “door” that was there one moment, gone the next. Pam sat doing something incomprehensible with a small piece of machinery she held on her lap. She sat on a low chair, while Cord stood tensely by the monitor.

  Cord ventured, “What’s that?”

  “An analyzer.” She looked up, scowling. “You people really have created some perversions. What’s wrong with you? Ship plucked this microorganism out of the air right here, by your dwelling, and it’s packed with enough genetic monstrosities to kill every cow on half this continent.”

  “It did,” Cord said. “Well, not all. Dr. Wilkins and Emily identified it and made something to cure it, so we saved twenty head of cattle. Out of a herd of three hundred.”

  Pam didn’t seem impressed. “Yes, the righter wouldn’t be that difficult.”

  “The what?”

  “The righter. The organism to destroy the perversion and return the planetary genome to the right way.”

  Cord left the window and squatted by her chair. It seemed important to meet her eyes directly, on the same level. “Miss … I mean, Pam, do you know that nearly the entire planet was killed in the last war?”

  “Oh, yes. We know. Ship monitors thermal signatures from orbit.”

  Cord didn’t know what a thermal signature was, but he was staggered by her casual unconcern. She must not have understood. He tried again. “I mean, did you know that almost all humans everywhere are dead?”

  “Yes,” she said absently, turning back to her machine. “Oh, look, this allele is at least interesting.”

  Something in Cord’s stillness finally caught her attention. She gazed at him with impersonal kindness. “You’re bothered, aren’t you, by all those deaths. Don’t be. Do you know what the right way really is, Cord? It’s what you’ve named ‘evolution.’ The organisms that can best adapt and breed survive, and others disappear. If they disappear, it means they weren’t fit to survive in the first place. Every species eventually gets to the point of directing their own evolution, and our mission is to help species get there faster. That inevitably means that lesser species disappear faster. But it’s nothing to mourn over, no more than was the disappearance of those big reptiles, I don’t remember the word for them.”

  “Billions of people died! Billions!” What was happening here? This was the same argument Cord had had with Dr. Wilkins, only then it was Cord who hadn’t cared. But that was before he’d seen how indifference looked on somebody else.

  “Yes, billions died,” Pam said with a brilliant smile, “but you won’t, nor your children. We’ve returned in time to ensure that, I think, even with the perversions that have been added to the environment. You and your children will survive and evolve.”

  He could scarcely get words out. “And … and my mother…”

  “Oh, yes, we’ll save her and any other remnants of the old species that we come across, anybody that gets to this ‘farm.’ At least, we’ll save them to the extent that non-germ-line alteration is possible. We’ll rehabilitate their genes so they don’t join the billions of obsolete dead. Yet. Of course we’ll do that.” Her voice took on tones of reproach.

  “After all, Cord, we’re human, too.”

  Uncle DeWayne eventually came out of the big house. It was full dark now, and he carried a powerful flashlight. These hoarded relics were usually saved for emergencies. DeWayne illuminated the ship, a straight-backed dignified black man with gray hair, and spoke without raising his voice. “My name is DeWayne Freeman. I’m addressing the pribir in the ship. You’re welcome at this farm. Come out of the ship and inside, please. No one will try to harm you if you don’t harm us, and everyone will be grateful for your help.”

  “It’s about time,” Pete said. He’d returned fifteen minutes ago from wherever he’d been. Cord had the impression that he and Pam were communicating furiously, although they neither spoke nor looked at each other.

  Pam made unreplicable sounds at the door and it opened. Cord emerged behind them.

  The flashlight caught them full in the eyes and DeWayne courteously lowered it. The upward light cast weird shadows on DeWayne’s lined face, so that to Cord he suddenly looked more alien than the pribir. Cord looked away.

  The only people in the great room were Dr. Wilkins, Emily, and Jody. How had Uncle DeWayne persuaded the others to retreat to the back rooms or the other houses? Or maybe Jody had, he was supposed to be the boss of the farm. Jody, who had never seen a pribir, never been smelled to by one, looked both apprehensive and curious. Emily, who had been aboard the ship, looked as if she was trying hard not to glare. Dr. Wilkins was expressionless.

  “Hello, Emily,” Pam said. “You haven’t changed very much, dear.”

  Emily scowled.

  Pete said genially, “You must be Scott Wilkins.” He held out his hand and Dr. Wilkins took it. Pete looked expectantly at Jody.

  Dr. Wilkins said, “This is Jody Romero Ridley, the son of Theresa Romero, who was at Andrews Air Force Base with me. Jody runs this farm.”

  Pete and Pam smiled at Jody without interest. Pam said, “Where’s Lillie, Scott? Cord says she’s contracted one of your perverse bioweapons.” She pronounced the word with distaste.

  How strange, Cord thought somewhere in the depths of his dazed mind. She can’t stand the thought of bioweapons, but she doesn’t care at all about the billions they killed.

  “Yes,” Dr. Wilkins said, “Lillie is sick. The micro is out of her system. It started prion conversion to cause an accelerated form of fatal familial insomnia. It—”

  ” ‘Prions’?” Pam said. “We didn’t learn that word from Rafe or Emily. We’ll do our own analysis. Bring Lillie aboard the ship.”

  “No,” Emily said, and Cord saw that she hadn’t been able to help herself. Were the memories of pribir ship that bad? For his mother, too? Emily pressed her lips together tightly and looked at the wall.

  “Jody,” Dr. Wilkins said, “tell Mike to bring Lillie out.”

  “Oh, Mike is here, too,” Pete said, sounding pleased. “You really must give us a complete list of our old friends.”

  Emily started to leave the room.

  “Emily,” Dr. Wilkins said, “come back. We both have to go aboard, too. To learn.”

  Pam said doubtfully, “It’ll be very crowded.”

  Pete added, “And you won’t learn anything, anyway. You couldn’t possibly build our equipment. That’s why we’re building the alterations right into your genes, to compensate for your ignorance. You know that.”

  Emily slammed the door behind her.

  Mike appeared, carrying Lillie. Cord felt tears prick his eyelids. Lillie was so thin her elbows were visible knobs. Much of her hair had fallen out. She was asleep, or drugged.

  “Well, good heavens,” Pam said.

  Pete added, “It appears our immune engineering was inadequate.”

  Pam turned on him. “Who expected them to fuck up the environment this badly? The only genetic thing
they are good at is perversions. All right, Mike, bring her along.” She stamped out, followed by Pete, Mike, and Dr. Wilkins.

  Cord went with them. He couldn’t help himself. The procession went into darkness thick as mud, without DeWayne’s flashlight. Pete made a noise and the ship began to glow, guiding them. The door opened.

  This time they went through the blank room and into one that made Cord blink. Machines lined all the walls —or were they machines? No, they were the actual walls, studded with projections and indentations, and as Cord watched, the walls slithered. Not slithering. Breathing.

  Not breathing. Some other movement, unnamable but unmistakable. The walls were alive.

  Pete made another sound and a wall indentation grew longer, higher, deeper. “There,” Pete said to Mike.

  Mike stood unmoving.

  “Oh, for—” Pam said, and effortlessly took Lillie from Mike’s arms. He tightened his grip for a moment, then let Lillie go. Pam laid her in the indentation and its back wall began to mold itself around her.

  Cord broke and ran. This was not right. This was not human. As he fled through the blank outer room to the outdoors, he knew that he was being watched. He exploded into the darkness—the ship had stopped glowing—and bent over, gasping.

  A moment later he was ashamed of himself. He was a coward. It was only technology, just machines using genetics instead of motors, just the right way, what did he fucking expect…

  Not this. Not this.

  How did Mike and Dr. Wilkins stay? Of course, they were older, they were more used to the pribir … They were brave. He was a coward.

  For the first time, Cord understood why Emily, Lillie, all that generation hated the pribir. They had done this sort of thing to them aboard the first ship, without the humans’ consent, without telling them what would happen to them. The pribir had even made the girls pregnant, had taken sperm from the boys … that was rape.

  He’d never seen it before. If anyone had done that to Clari, had handled her body and put babies in her that weren’t Cord’s…

  Cord straightened in the darkness. He knew he wasn’t going to go back into that ship. Neither was he going to tell the pribir to leave his mother alone … not that the aliens would obey him! But the point was that he wasn’t going to do it. He was going to go along with whatever Pam and Pete did, and don’t fool yourself, Cord: it’s not like with the older generation. They’d had no choice. His going along was a choice. He, Cord Anderson, was choosing to let aliens rape his people.

  He couldn’t go back inside. Shivering even though it wasn’t cold, he blundered in the dark toward the bench under the cottonwoods and sat there, hearing the creek trickle over stones, staring anywhere except at the ship he couldn’t see anyway through the thick night.

  Twenty-four hours later, Lillie emerged from the ship walking steadily, her gray eyes clear as her mind. She hugged Kella, still pregnant, and Keith. She listened as DeWayne and Spring filled her in on everything that Scott Wilkins hadn’t already told her. She stood for a long moment in Mike’s arms, neither of them needing to say anything about Hannah’s death or their future. Then she went to find Cord, who had slept alone in the barn, who had refused to come anywhere near the house or the ship or any person, human or pribir.

  He was at Dead Men’s Arroyo, sitting on a boulder, staring at the mass grave of the marauders dug fourteen years ago. A flash flood had carried away the stone marker and the grave was indistinguishable from the scrub around it. You had to know where to look.

  “Cord.”

  “Mom!” He jumped up, hugged her hard, blushed, and let her

  “I’m fine, Cord. They repaired me.”

  “Are they … is anybody …”

  “They’re working, Cord. Doing what they came to do.”

  He couldn’t tell anything from her tone. He burst out, “You were right, Mom! They’re monsters!”

  “Yes.” She sat on the boulder, patted the place beside her. Reluctantly Cord sat down. He wasn’t in the mood for anybody else’s emotion except his own.

  He said, “I should go check on Clari.”

  “You haven’t thought about Clari in quite a while, it seems. She can wait a little longer. I want to talk to you.”

  But then she said nothing. Silence dragged on. Cord recognized this trick from his childhood; sooner or later the other person, unable to stand the silence, would tell Lillie whatever she was after. Not this time.

  More silence.

  He said, “They’re horrible, Mom. They don’t care about all the people dead in the war, or about your generation —” only vessels ” — or about any human at all. They only care about our genes!”

  “I know,” Lillie said.

  “That’s why you hate them! And you’re right!”

  “No, that’s not why. I don’t hate them. But I don’t trust them, because their goals aren’t ours. Their goal is to remake humanity in their own image. Like gods. And our goal—” She stopped.

  “Is what?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never known. I don’t know why we’re here or what the purpose of life is. When I was your age, I worried about that a lot.”

  “But not anymore?” Cord had never, he realized, thought about “the purpose of life.” He just lived it. This was a side of his mother he’d never seen, and it made him uneasy.

  “Not any more. We’ve been too busy surviving. But I know this, Cord. The pribir know so much more than we do, but they can’t … see. No, that’s not right. Let me try again.”

  Cord waited, wishing he were somewhere else.

  “The pribir have a vision of the infinite manipulability of genes. Using genes to create anything, to accomplish anything. But they have no vision at all to give the bodies that house those genes. They don’t care about those bodies because they’re temporary and genes are not. I don’t even think they care about their own bodies. They’re shaped like us—for now, anyway—to help their work. But their real shape is probably far different. Once, I saw—”

  Cord stood up. He didn’t want to know what his mother had seen once. He’d already seen enough himself, and none of it was what he’d imagined.

  Lillie smiled. “Okay, Cord. This isn’t your kind of conversation. That’s all right. Help me back to the farm.”

  Alarm ran through him, followed by suspicion: His mother never asked for help. But she leaned on him as they walked the mile to the farm, and he didn’t know if her grip on his arm was to ease herself or to lead him firmly, inescapably home.

  PART V: LILLIE

  He who prepares for tomorrow, prepares for life.”

  –Ovid

  CHAPTER 26

  For the first few weeks, Lillie wondered what else the pribir might have done to her brain besides free it of the prions that were killing her. If they had changed her brain chemistry significantly, had altered her neurons or transmitters into those of a different person, how would she even know?

  She seemed the same to herself. More significantly, how everyone at the farm treated her didn’t differ from her memories of how they’d treated her before her illness. No one reacted to her as if she were acting out of character. Her memories of past years matched others people’s recollections. And no amount of genetic tinkering could create memories, could it? Only erase them. So gradually Lillie began to believe she was still Lillie.

  Whatever that might mean.

  Maybe it meant only her memories. Maybe that’s all the essence of a person was: what she remembered, and how she felt about those memories. The mind’s eye, not the cell’s DNA.

  Certainly memories thronged around her thickly. Why not before now? For the reason she’d given Cord: she’d been too busy with everyone’s survival. But now survival seemed to be in the hands of the pribir. So now, in the middle of a present tense with significant genetic futures, Lillie found herself caught by insignificant memories from a world past and gone.

  Riding on the crosstown bus with Uncle Keith to the Museum of Modern Art. Th
e feel of a cherry popsickle on her tongue. The smell of paste in art class at her elementary school on New York’s West Side. The sound of planes shrieking overhead as they took off and landed at Andrews. Giggling with Theresa behind the Youth Building when they’d found someone’s stash of illegal cigarettes behind a dumpster and they’d each taken a single disgusting puff. A dress Madison had once worn at Andrews, yellow and slinky, with tiny mirrors sewn around the neckline. A nurse she’d especially liked at Malcolm Grow, a big black woman with a huge laugh, whose name Lillie wished she could remember. Going to the movies, and trying to decode graffiti, and standing in the supermarket in front of seventeen brands of scented soap, trying to choose.

  “Aunt Lillie,” Taneesha said, “Mom wants you right away. Aunt Lillie? Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” Lillie said. Taneesha looked worried, her pretty brown face creased, an infant in her arms. A pretty child, and already a mother. Well, so had Lillie been.

  “Mom says to come right away!” Taneesha said, and Lillie left the past.

  “What does Sajelle want? Is Susie in labor?” Susie was the only one still pregnant, except Clari. All the rest had had healthy triplets. Once again the farm was overwhelmed with infants, and she, Lillie, had no business daydreaming over her work.

  “No, Susie isn’t going over the top yet,” Taneesha said, and Lillie wondered if she knew the phrase had once belonged to men at war in muddy trenches with much different weapons than any war Taneesha had known. Probably not. “There’s a man here!”

  “A man? What do you mean, a man?”

  “Somebody not one of us! The pribir want to take him inside the ship.”

  Lillie took off at a run. She was strong now, so strong that again she wondered what the pribir had tampered with while they cured her war-given disease. And what did they want to do with this man?

  No one had come to the farm in at least three months. There were still pockets of survivors on the planet; Rafe monitored them on the Net. But each week the pockets were fewer, and no one had reported in from the rest of New Mexico. Which didn’t, of course, mean they weren’t out there.