Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  Strength or not, Lillie was panting by the time she reached the ship. It was closed and no one was beside it. Lillie covered the short distance to the big house.

  “They’re at Dr. Wilkins’s lab,” said Kendra, looking frightened. She sat in a deep chair nursing two babies at once. “Aunt Sajelle wants you right away!”

  Scott wasn’t in the lab. Since the pribir had done something to his immune system, he could go anywhere again, despite whatever bioweapons might still exist. The pribir had done the same to everyone in Lillie’s generation who would consent. Not everybody would. Next the pribir had started on her generation’s children, Keith and Kella and the rest. After that would come the infants; no one had forgotten that one of Angie’s babies had died.

  But now Pam and Pete were not escorting another sullen, frightened person into their ship. Instead they stood over a bed in Scott’s lab, staring at the man lying there. Sajelle spied Lillie, blew out a breath in relief, and pointed.

  “He came in an hour ago, from God knows where. Or how. And I don’t even want to think about what he might be carrying. He was raving, and Dolly put him out.”

  Dolly, Senni’s sulky daughter and Clari’s sister, was the only other person in the room. Lately she had been helping Emily in the lab, cleaning up and running simple tests. She was the only woman on the farm between fifteen and twenty-nine who wasn’t pregnant or nursing, and Emily had taken what help she could get. Everyone else was desperately needed to ensure food or to care for children.

  Dolly said, “He needs a bath. He smells awful.”

  A bath wasn’t all he needed. The stranger was so thin that his collarbones stood out like mountain ranges above the sere wasteland of his sunken chest. Forty? Thirty? Twenty-five? It was impossible to tell under the beard and dirt and sunburn. His shirt and pants were torn, probably by mesquite, and if he’d ever had a hat, he’d lost it. A purple skin cancer spread from the top of his forehead to under his hairline.

  Lillie said, “Did anyone send for Scott or Emily?” and then realized how stupid that was. There was nothing Scott or Emily could do that the pribir couldn’t do infinitely better.

  Pam and Pete had been gazing at the stranger with interest. Pete said, “We need him in the ship. He’s never had any engineering at all, not even the rudiments. He could be carrying really fascinating micros.”

  Lillie said, “Will you cure him of that cancer? And whatever else he has?”

  “Sure.”

  Sajelle said, “We can each grab one end of that bed and carry it, he don’t look heavy at all. Skinny as wire.”

  On impulse Lillie said, “Let Pam and Pete do it. I’m sure they’re engineered to be stronger than we are. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Pam said absently, “but he’s really one of yours.” And the two pribir walked out.

  Sajelle blew a raspberry. “Come on, Lillie. Grab that other end. Dolly, you scrub this room down with disinfectant and air it out good.”

  In twenty-four hours the stranger was back, cured and clean and sane, but still very weak. No engineered reserve strength, Lillie thought. He gazed fearfully at Lillie, Dolly, and Emily and tried to get out of bed.

  “Lie still, please, I’m a doctor,” Emily said. She’d already performed her own tests on the man while he was still drugged, learning what she could from whatever the pribir had done to him. Picking up their crumbs, Lillie thought, and hoped Emily didn’t think of it that way. Pam and Pete had lost all interest in the stranger once they had their samples.

  “Where … am I?” he said.

  Dolly answered, “This is the farm,” and Lillie realized that to Dolly, born here and seldom off the farm, that was sufficient identification.

  Lillie said, “We’re a group of survivors from the war who’ve been here many years before that. Who are you?”

  “Martin Wade. Santa Fe.”

  Emily said, “Is there still a Santa Fe?”

  “No,” Martin said. Lillie saw the painful memories shadowed in his eyes.

  Dolly said shyly, “Can we get you anything? Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah, I am,” he said wonderingly. Lillie understood. He’d been at the edge of death, body too ravaged to keep food down, and now he found himself hungry again and food offered. A miracle.

  “I’ll get you something!” Dolly said eagerly, and Emily’s eyes met Lillie’s across the bed.

  Martin Wade proved resilient. He absorbed what he was told about the pribir without disbelief or horror. His body was too abused to recover rapidly, but he turned out to have a knack with babies and after he was moved to the big house, the harassed childminders were grateful to put one, two, or even three infants on the bed where he lay. He couldn’t nurse but he could change diapers, rock fretting infants, even sing to them in a low tuneless monotone. Watching him handle a baby, Lillie knew that he had been a father. She didn’t ask, and he said nothing about his past, ever. After Susie gave birth, the last of the triplets to be born, Martin was desperately needed.

  Dolly developed a sudden interest in children. Whenever she could she helped Martin with his transient charges, considerably less skillfully than he. On a hot July night when Lillie couldn’t sleep, she went outside onto the porch and found Senni and Dolly screaming at each other in whispers.

  Lillie had been hoping to find Mike. Since she had become well again they had said nothing, done nothing. But Hannah was dead, and Lillie knew that eventually, when Mike was ready, it would happen. She could wait. She had waited years already.

  Instead of Mike, she blundered into mother-daughter anger, “—like some whore! Like those mutant whores, sleeping with just anybody, having their pups in litters!”

  Lillie caught her breath. Senni never used this language around her, or around anyone else on the farm. She’d have been slapped down.

  “He’s not just anybody! He’s … he’s …”

  “Like a girl, tending those babies! You sure he’s not queer like Bonnie? Sure he wouldn’t rather be with Rafe or Alex?”

  The sound of flesh slapping flesh. A gasp and a scream, not whispered. Then Senni stalked past, giving Lillie a look of such deep contempt that Lillie was startled. She knew Senni didn’t like her—hell, she didn’t like Senni either—but Senni was Tess’s daughter and for that reason alone, Lillie had been as kind to Senni as possible.

  Dolly sobbed softly in the darkness. Lillie moved toward her. The girl said shrilly, “Who’s there?”

  “Aunt Lillie. Don’t be scared. I overheard. I’m sorry.”

  Lillie had expected Dolly, usually a sullen seventeen-year-old, to either storm past or turn sarcastic. Instead, Dolly grabbed at Lillie’s sleeve.

  “It isn’t fair! Everybody else has somebody for love and sex, even Clari, and she’s two years younger than me! Nobody ever thinks about me, maybe I don’t want to be alone, and when somebody finally comes along who wants me, that bitch my mother… it isn’t fair!”

  “No,” Lillie said calmly, trying to calm Dolly, “it isn’t.” Dolly peered like a frightened rabbit. “You … you agree with me? You think it’s all right for me to be with Martin?”

  “Do you like him, Dolly?”

  The girl let go of Lillie’s sleeve. “Yes. I do. He’s sort of soft, not like Keith or Dakota or Bobby—” Lillie heard the resentment that none of those had chosen Dolly “—but he’s nice. And I do like him. And he’s cured now, not carrying disease like she said, and forty-two isn’t that old! Bitch!”

  “He likes you,” Lillie stated quietly.

  “Yes! He does, which is more than anybody else around here … oh, Aunt Lillie, is it so terrible to want what everybody else already has?”

  Lillie blinked at the transition from resentment to genuine despair. Seventeen. For the first time, she liked Dolly.

  “No, it’s not terrible. Do you want to … I mean …”

  “We want to get married,” Dolly said fervently. “Not just be together until I get pregnant and then forget it ever happened like th
ose whor … like some of the others. We want a real wedding, with a white dress and flowers and a party!”

  Like she’d seen on old Net shows, Lillie thought, and wondered if that was what Martin wanted, too, or if this was Dolly’s vision. Maybe she just wanted to one-up Clari, who had never actually married Cord. A wedding like that—any wedding—in the middle of the pribir’s attempt to remake humanity: how ludicrous was that? But Dolly was Tess’s granddaughter, and Dolly was filled with hope and pleasure for the first time that Lillie could remember. A white-dress antiquated wedding was no more ludicrous than anything else going on now. And maybe a wedding would … do what? Remind them all that they were human.

  “You and Martin should talk to your Uncle Jody,” she told Dolly. Jody was the only one with influence over his sister. “I’ll bet he’ll be on your side.”

  “You think so?” Dolly’s young voice vibrated with hope. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow!”

  Poor Martin, Lillie thought. Tumbleweed in the gale. Well, Martin was gaining, too. Survival, for one thing, plus sex and probably devotion. Dolly seemed capable of complete, devouring devotion.

  “Thank you, Aunt Lillie.”

  “You’re welcome. Now go to bed. The mosquitoes are fierce tonight.”

  The next day, Dolly announced that she and Martin were getting married on October 5, at six o’clock in the evening. Martin said nothing. The date tickled at Lillie’s mind. Only hours later did she realize that October 5 would have been Tess’s sixty-eighth birthday.

  “We have something to tell you,” Pam told Lillie. The pribir had apparently decided that all their communication with humans would go through either Lillie or Scott, the only two humans who didn’t scowl or draw away when an alien approached. Cord’s generation had found the pribir of actuality to be too different from the pribir of imagination. They were grudgingly grateful for the genetic help, but awkward in talking to the helpers.

  Lillie accepted the burden with resignation. So far, the pribir had not tried to do anything to any human without permission, or to smell to them in any way that manipulated human behavior.

  So far.

  “We want you to find Scott and Emily,” Pam continued. “They need to hear this, too. It’s important.”

  “I don’t think Emily will come,” Lillie said. Emily learned everything second-hand, from Scott. The old man looked and acted twenty years younger since the aliens had done to him … whatever they had done.

  “Make Emily come,” Pam snapped. “This is too important for her to miss.”

  The meeting was held in Scott’s lab; Emily flatly refused to enter the pribir ship. Lillie looked around her curiously. She saw nothing that she could identify as a pribir machine, only the usual jumble of expensive, aging scientific equipment, none of which could ever be replaced again, with crude wooden boxes, vials labeled in Scott’s careful hand, Sajelle’s nursing equipment. This was also the hospital. Two neatly made beds stood against the far wall. On a separate shelf were Scott’s handwritten records on his precious supply of paper, encased in plastic boxes against damp, rodents, and time. Records that no one was left to read.

  Emily sat stiffly on one of the beds, Scott beside her. Lillie seated herself on the other. Pam and Pete stood between them, holding what looked like a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit.

  It was a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit. “Look at this,” Pam said. “Just look at it! This is what you people have done!”

  Emily’s fist clenched. Scott put a restraining hand on her arm and said mildly, “Not us, Pam.”

  “Your species!”

  Pete, upset but calmer than Pam, said, “The rabbit’s genes have been damaged, in the germ line. It now carries a gene that expresses at death, making a kind of poison. The gene was adapted from plants that use poison to keep away predators. The gene turns on throughout the rabbit’s muscles and flesh, triggered by the reduction in oxygen. If humans eat this rabbit, they will die.”

  Pete’s statement electrified the room. Lillie stood shakily. “I have to tell that to Sajelle, the kitchen crew fixes rabbit stew all the time, we had it two days ago — “

  “Those rabbits weren’t poisoned or you’d already be dead,” Pam said crossly. “Don’t you listen, Lillie? And I already told Sajelle. The point is, you can’t eat any more rabbit at all. This genemod is dominant, and it’s coupled with other genes that confer a preferential evolutionary advantage on rabbits that have it. A nasty construction. Eventually every rabbit will have it.”

  Rabbits currently formed a mainstay of the farm’s protein.

  Scott said, “Are you sure, Pete?”

  He looked surprised. “Of course we’re sure.”

  Scott said, “Have you detected this gene in any other wildlife?”

  “That’s just the point,” Pam said. “It’s already transmitted, probably by transposon in a parasite, to those little rodents in the desert, the small quick ones that jump so well.”

  “Deermice,” Scott said. “We don’t eat those.”

  “But the transposon might keep jumping species. And we’ve also detected something strange in the mesquite.”

  In the mesquite. That meant plants… . Lillie was no scientist, but she understood that plants underlay everything, the whole food chain.

  “It’s not interfering with basic plant functions,” Pete said, “photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixing, all that. We’re not even sure its expression could harm you, and anyway you don’t eat mesquite. But it’s a sign.”

  Lillie said, although she was afraid to hear the answer, “Of what?”

  Pam said, “Of the complete changing of Earth ecology. Between what you’ve done to the atmospheric gas balance, what that’s done to the climate, and what your perversions of the right way have done to the fauna and now even the flora … you people just aren’t worth our trouble!”

  “But you’re our assignment,” Pete said. “So we’ll do what’s necessary. However, you can’t keep your current genome and hope to survive more than a few more generations. We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you. We have to rebuild from the beginning.”

  Emily spoke for the first time. “‘Way back at your generation.’ You knew the human race was going to need genetic modifications to survive, didn’t you. You knew it seventy years ago, when you started all this with poor deluded Dr. Timothy Miller. You knew it.”

  “Yes, of course,” Pete said.

  “Did you know a war with bioweapons was going to happen?”

  “With a sixty-seven percent probability,” Pete said. He flicked his hair off his sweaty forehead; the room was already stifling, and it wasn’t even noon.

  Emily repeated carefully, “You knew there would be a devastating biowar. And you didn’t use us engineered kids to warn humanity, back in 2013, when it might have done some good.”

  Pete said patiently, “That’s not the right way, Emily.”

  “And now you want to ‘rebuild from the beginning.’ You mean, you want to take human genes and create some creature that can survive in the new ecology, but won’t look or act or function anything like human beings.”

  Pete and Pam looked at each other, bewildered. Pam said, “How could they not be human? They’ll have mostly human genes. Of course they’ll be human.”

  “Brewed up in some vat?”

  Pam said, “Carried in human wombs, of course. It has to be a heritable germ-line rebuilding, you know that. Emily, you’re being ridiculous.”

  Emily stood. “I’m being human. Which you are not. And before we’d let you turn our children into the kind of monsters you are, we’ll all die first and the whole race with us.” She walked past the pribir and out the door.

  Scott said quietly, “What would the new ones look like?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’ll try to preserve as much of your current appearance as we can, if you lik
e, but, really, there are much better and more efficient designs.”

  Lillie remembered the … thing she’d glimpsed, for a brief almost-sedated moment, behind the wall of the garden on the Flyer. A shapeless blob, flowing toward her…

  The future of humanity. And just yesterday she had been regretting the loss of the crosstown bus, cherry popsickles, movies, graffiti. All nothing compared to the losses to come.

  Or else the human race could die out completely.

  Pete said, “We wanted to tell you three first, before we tell the others.” He looked proud of this piece of adaptation to local custom.

  Scott said quickly, “Don’t tell the others, please, Pete. Let me do it.”

  Pam frowned. “It’s our—”

  “Of course it’s your project, your discovery, Pam. All the credit goes to you two. But just let Lillie and me present it to everybody else.

  “Well, all right.”

  Lillie said, “I have a question.”

  “Yes?” Pam said. She even smiled. She still thought, Lillie knew, that she and Lillie had a special shared bond. It made Lillie’s skin prickle.

  Lillie spoke very carefully. “If the others don’t like the idea of ‘rebuilding from the beginning’ … if they refuse … will you go ahead and try to do it anyway? Without our consent?”

  As you did on the ship when you made us all pregnant. She didn’t say it.

  Pete said, “Why would you refuse?”

  “If we do,” Lillie said. No use explaining; Pete would never get it.

  Pam and Pete were silent. Smelling to each other, Lillie knew. Beside her, Scott’s body tensed.

  Pam finally said, “This planet is our assignment. The sentient life on it is our project. You said that yourself, Lillie.”

  It wasn’t an answer. And it was.

  She said, “Tell me exactly how you would remake humans, all the survival advantages, so that I can tell the others.”

  “Well, we’re not exactly sure yet of the — “

  “Tell me what you can, Pete. It’s important. I have to have positive arguments, and I have to present them to everybody before Emily gets to them.”