Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  Jason’s handsome face was flushed as he clung to Hannah.

  Madison was dancing with Rafe, whom she’d always called “that little dork.” He was now as tall as she was. Some of her lipstick had come off on his shirt.

  Sam had taken Jessica away from Derek, and now Sam was dancing with her. They were pressing the bottom parts of their bodies together and thrusting in unison, and it almost looked like … Lillie looked away, embarrassed.

  There were more girls than boys, so some of the girls danced together. Sophie danced with Amy and Bonnie with Julie. But it wasn’t the same. Sophie and Amy held each other loosely, inches between their bodies, but Bonnie kept pulling Julie toward her. Julie pulled away a bit, smiling, but Bonnie only held her more tightly, and the look on Bonnie’s face …

  They used to call Bonnie “a lezzie.” Months ago, when everybody first arrived. Not lately, not for a long time, but—

  “My dance,” Mike said, looming in front of her. Lillie stood and moved into him, and none of the others she’d danced with, Alex or Jason or Rafe, was the same as Mike. Nobody else felt like this in her arms, nobody else felt so right…

  She danced with Mike the rest of the evening, which was over so soon that Lillie was shocked. The lights blinked, which meant time to go to their rooms, and it had to be a mistake, the system was off, it couldn’t be any later than nine at the most―

  Mike and she stared at each other. For a terrifying, exhilarating moment she thought he was going to kiss her. But he stepped back and mumbled awkwardly, ”’ Night, Lillie.”

  “Good night, Mike.”

  She walked back to her room, feeling curiously empty.

  Inside, she locked the door, undressed, and lay on the bed. Twenty minutes after blinking, the lights went out for the night, leaving only a faint glow around the doorway and in the corridor leading to the bathrooms.

  Lillie stared at that glow, unable to sleep. She heard doors opening, closing again. It was a long time before she could drift off, and her dreams were troubled and strange.

  At breakfast the next morning, Sam and Jessica sat very close together and groped each other under the table. “Get a room,” Madison muttered. Lillie looked away from Jessie and Sam. It was obvious they’d spent the night together and wanted everybody to know it.

  Lillie went back to sitting in class with Emily, Sajelle, and Madison. None of them mentioned it; they just sat together. Lillie felt relieved. Still, she couldn’t stop glancing over at the table Mike shared with Derek, Sophie, and Amy. Why was Mike talking so much to Sophie? Sophie had never struck Lillie as that interesting.

  Madison said casually, “A few people were talking about another dance tonight.”

  “I heard that, too,” Emily said, too quickly. “Actually, I thought I might put on a dress. I brought one. I just haven’t worn it yet.”

  Lillie hadn’t brought any dresses. Suddenly she wanted one. No, she didn’t … at home she almost never wore dresses. What was the matter with her?

  She’d wear her pale blue top. It was the prettiest one she had. And the locket with the pictures of Mom and Uncle Keith, it was really pretty, she’d put it someplace in her footlocker …

  Uncle Keith. For a minute she saw his face clearly, as shocking as if he’d materialized in front of her. She had to go home, Uncle Keith must miss her so much, he had nobody else … She’d always been aware of how much she meant to him …

  “Lillie, still want to borrow some eyeliner?” Madison said to her, and Uncle Keith’s face vanished.

  The pale blue top clung to Lillie’s body. Maybe it was a bit small, she might have grown some there … She left it on anyway. With the locket around her neck, her hair freshly washed, and Madison’s eyeliner and lipstick, she decided she looked nice.

  All the girls came to the garden later tonight, having taken time to braid or puff hair, trade clothes, borrow jewelry. The boys waited impatiently, not even playing basketball. Tonight they’d agreed on Jason’s handheld for the music instead of Hannah’s cube. The sound quality on the handheld was worse, but it had more slow songs.

  Mike didn’t say anything about Lillie’s appearance, but that was all right. He didn’t have to. She saw it in his eyes.

  There wasn’t as much switching partners tonight as last night. That caused trouble.

  Lillie danced with Mike. Sam and Jessica were dancing so close and moving their pelvises against each other so suggestively that Lillie looked away. Emily danced with Rafe, Sajelle with Alex, Madison with Jon, Hannah with Derek. Only Jason kept changing partners. Unless he was dancing with one of them, the other girls danced with each other.

  Elizabeth wasn’t at the dance. Well, no surprise there, Lillie thought. But what did Elizabeth do with her evenings?

  Bonnie asked Julie to dance. Julie refused. Bonnie then danced with Amy. Lillie wasn’t paying any attention to them, lost in dancing with Mike, until Amy shouted, “Get away, you lezzie!”

  Everyone stopped moving.

  Amy, her face red with embarrassment or anger or both, had shoved Bonnie hard enough that Bonnie fell back against a table. She scrambled up, and tears filled her eyes. For a moment she stood uncertainly, then she made a strangled sound and started to rush away.

  Mike squeezed Lillie’s hand and let her go. His arm snaked out and caught Bonnie’s shoulder. “Bonnie, don’t go. Dance with me.”

  Bonnie stopped, uncertain. Jessica snickered, “You haven’t got what she wants, Mike.”

  Mike ignored Jessica. “Come on, Bonnie, we’ve always been friends. Dance with me.”

  Bonnie smiled painfully, then moved toward Mike, keeping several inches between their bodies. They danced. Mike winked at Lillie over Bonnie’s shoulder.

  “Deserted for a lezzie, Lillie?” Jessica said. Lillie ignored her. She liked what Mike had done. It was kind. Maybe Lillie … could she …

  She did. When Mike’s dance with Bonnie was finished, Lillie danced with Bonnie, keeping a good distance away, not looking at the glances of everyone around her. Bonnie was a nice person, even if she was a … Why would she want to, with a girl? Well, to each her own. But Bonnie should be included in the group, should feel okay about being here.

  She danced the rest of the night with Mike and didn’t notice what anybody else was doing. Or care.

  He walked her to her door, and kissed her, and said, “Can I come in?”

  Sajelle had already disappeared into Alex’s room. And, Lillie suspected, Jason wasn’t alone either, although she didn’t know who he was with. Maybe Sophie, maybe Rebecca. Or Amy.

  “No, no,” she said to Mike.

  “Lillie, please … just for a little while …”

  “No. No, please. I don’t want to.”

  For a second he looked annoyed, but then he sighed. “All right. For now. I guess you’re worth waiting for.”

  He left abruptly. Lillie, shaking, closed her door. She wanted him to come in, but what if he hadn’t been willing to stop when she said?

  What if he decided to dance and kiss with somebody else? It was a long time before she fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 10

  Hannah was having sex with Derek. So were Alex and Sajelle, Emily and Rafe, and of course Sam and Jessica. Jason was having sex with anyone who would agree, but since nobody would admit it, Lillie wasn’t sure who that included. The girls who weren’t paired off were embarrassed to admit they were sharing Jason. Still, Lillie knew, Rebecca and Sophie were at least spending time alone with him, whether or not they had actual intercourse. Sophie was defiant about this, Rebecca sheepish.

  “I don’t seem to be able to help myself,” Rebecca admitted, looking troubled. But not, Lillie thought, troubled very much. Whatever she and Jason were doing, clearly Rebecca liked it.

  That left Madison and Lillie.

  “Are you going to?” Madison said.

  “I don’t know,” Lillie said. “I want to. But…”

  “But we’re only fourteen.”

  Fourteen
? Lillie considered. Her birthday was on March 6. Could it be March already? Maybe. It didn’t seem important.

  Madison continued, looking down at her folded hands. “Still … I asked Pam about birth control.”

  “You did?” Madison was gutsy. Or cautious. Or both. “Did anybody else?”

  “I don’t know. Not the boys, I’ll bet! Anyway, Pam gave me a pill, and she said it would protect me for up to six months. It works with genes… what else? She gave me enough for all the girls, and so I passed them out to everybody. Except Elizabeth, of course. You’re the last one.”

  Lillie, immensely curious, said, “Did everybody take them?”

  “Yes! Although half of them gave me bullshit about not needing them but if it was a free gift why not blah blah blah. Anyway, here’s yours.”

  Madison passed Lillie a piece of toilet paper. Unfolding it, Lillie found a round green pill. She stared at it, wondering if she was going to use it.

  Madison said, “Is Mike pushing you?”

  “Yes. No. He doesn’t push, he’s too nice, but he wants it so bad it’s almost like pushing.”

  “Jon, too. What have you done so far? How much?”

  Lillie didn’t want to tell Madison that she and Mike had only kissed. She waved her hand vaguely. “Oh, you know.”

  “Yeah.” Madison sighed. “The thing is, I always said I’d wait till college. But when he’s playing with my breasts … I don’t know.”

  Lillie had a sudden, wholly unwanted image of Jon playing with Madison’s breasts. A hot feeling shot up from Lillie’s groin through her own breasts. Shocked, she looked away to keep Madison from seeing her face.

  Madison was too absorbed in her own dilemma to notice. “The thing is, I never expected to want it this much. My cousin Christy told me that when she did it with her boyfriend it was only because he insisted, and they’ve been doing it a year now and she still doesn’t like it.”

  I’ll like it, Lillie knew.

  “Well, Christy’s a dork anyway,” Madison said.

  There were no more dances after dinner. Instead, people disappeared in couples or hung around in small groups in the garden. Lillie and Mike had strolled through the little woods and now lay stretched out on the grass under the drooping leaves of a huge tree. It seemed dark to Lillie … were the lights lower than she remembered? They seemed to be. The grass had that marvelous just-mowed smell that seemed perpetual in the garden. A little robot mower moved steadily around the lawn. Rafe had wanted to take the robot apart, but Pam wouldn’t let him.

  “Kiss me, Lillie,” Mike whispered.

  She did. Her whole body went warm. When Mike put his hands under her T-shirt, she didn’t stop him.

  Twenty minutes later she said, “Not here. In your room.”

  “Okay.” He was breathing so heavily he could barely get the word out.

  Hastily they refastened their clothing. Mike led her by the hand across the grass, around the pond, alongside the cafe. Amy, Sophie, and Julie sat there, sipping drinks. Lillie blushed … they had to know where she and Mike were going. Amy and Julie pretended not to see them, but Sophie stared at Lillie hard and her look was not friendly.

  A little chill ran over Lillie.

  It vanished in Mike’s room. He groaned and pulled her down on the bed. But almost immediately he sat up again. “Lillie … if … if you’re a virgin, I heard it hurts the first time and I don’t want to hurt you …”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it; nothing else he could have done would have reassured her so much that she was doing the right thing. He was such a nice guy!

  “I don’t care,” she said. A second later she wondered: Would it hurt? But Mike had already lain down again and began to move his hands over her breasts, and she forgot everything else.

  Madison’s cousin Christy was a dork. It didn’t hurt, and it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and Lillie was in love.

  Lillie dreamed. Somewhere in the half-awake recesses of her mind, she was surprised. Since coming aboard the Flyer, she’d seldom dreamed. But now she was running, terrified, something was chasing her, a thing she couldn’t see …

  She jerked awake and sat up. She had never taken the green pill Madison had given her.

  Mike slept heavily beside her, one leg sprawled over her calves. Carefully she pushed the leg aside and fumbled in the darkness for her clothes, discarded by the bed. Dressed, she fled down the corridor to her own room. It, too, was dark, but by the dim light from the hall she flung open her metal chest and groped in the front left corner for the tiny pill wrapped in toilet paper. When she had it, she moved into the doorway for the better light.

  The pill lay in the palm of her hand, as mild-looking as aspirin. Would it still work if you took it after the sex was over? If it didn’t…

  She felt a brief flash of resentment that boys didn’t have to worry about this, that the burden fell mostly on girls. But her innate sense of fairness reasserted itself: it wasn’t the boys’ fault. Wasn’t Mike’s fault. With a quick swooping motion she brought the green pill to her mouth and swallowed it.

  Still, she didn’t feel like going back to Mike’s room. God, if anything happened … Sajelle’s sister already had a baby, at fifteen. Lillie didn’t even much like babies. Oh, they were cute, but when she saw one, she never had the desire that other girls apparently did to cuddle and coo at it.

  Still fully dressed except for shoes, she lay down on her own bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. She needed to know. In the middle of the night? Yes. She needed to know.

  Lillie padded into the ghostly corridor and closed her bedroom door. The other doors were all closed. Feeling stupid, she looked up at the ceiling and said softly, “Pam?”

  A sudden clear, rare memory came to her: Her mother sitting on Lillie’s bed, folding Lillie’s small hands, teaching her to kneel and pray.

  “Pam? Can you hear me?”

  Nothing. Well, maybe that was good. Rafe had always asserted that the kids were constantly spied on by some advanced equipment they couldn’t detect. Maybe that wasn’t true. Or wasn’t true here.

  Lillie crept down the corridor to the commons room. The door opened easily, but the room was in total blackness, so nobody ever used it after “night” fell. Lillie let the door close behind her and said, “Pam? Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  “Pam? I need help. It’s an emergency!”

  Nothing. God, what if there was a real emergency, if somebody had a heart attack or something? Lillie hadn’t realized how much on their own the kids actually were, when they weren’t in class. Why?

  Why not? Fourteen-year-olds don’t have heart attacks. Or maybe Pete and Pam could genetically repair anyone who did. Still, kids were supposed to have adults within call.

  Feeling aggrieved, or stubborn, Lillie groped her way in the total darkness to the door to the garden. It took her a while to find it. When she did, it too opened easily.

  There was light here. The same dim ghostly glow that suffused the bedroom corridor lit outlines of trees, tall ferns, the tables at the cafe, the basketball hoop. In silhouette they looked scary. Lillie made herself walk several feet into the lawn area before calling. “Pam?”

  And then, at a shout, “Pam? Are you there? I need you!”

  “Lillie?” Pam’s voice came, from nowhere and everywhere. It gave Lillie the creeps.

  “Yes, it’s Lillie. I — “

  “What has happened? Why aren’t you asleep?” Pam’s voice held genuine astonishment. Did she and Pete always sleep on an exact schedule, then? No, they’d once told the kids that they didn’t sleep at all. But obviously they thought the kids did, every night all night. “I have to talk to you,” Lillie said, feeling suddenly ridiculous. But the panic was still there, underneath, and she really didn’t think she could go through the rest of the night without easing the roiling inside her. “I’m coming,” Pam said. “Wait.”

  Lillie shivered, even though the garden was no cooler at “night” than durin
g the “day.” The thick grass tickled the soles of her bare feet. Something came toward her, moving fast, and Lillie almost screamed. But then she saw that it was just the lawn-care robot that fascinated Rafe so much, moving much faster than its slow steady pace during the day. It swerved to avoid her. Water, or something like water, sprayed from it onto the grass.

  Then Pam was there, hurrying from behind a clump of trees, from a place where Lillie had never seen any kind of door. “Lillie! What has happened? How could you be here?”

  What a strange way to put it, Lillie thought. “Pam, I have to ask you a question. Mike and I … I mean, Madison gave me one of those pills you gave her. The green birth control pills. But I didn’t take it, and then Mike and I… we had sex.” She felt the fiery color sweep her neck and face. “And I took the pill, but not until much later and so I need to know … I was wondering … will it still protect me? I can’t get pregnant, can I?”

  Pam peered at her. Lillie had the sudden impression that Pam was thinking furiously, but Lillie couldn’t imagine what.

  “No,” Pam finally said, “the pill still works, even if you took it later, after sex. You’re protected.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Pam said, and now her voice was gentle, compassionate. She took Lillie’s hand. Lillie didn’t like that, but it would be rude to say so, after she’d dragged Pam out of bed for a stupid question.

  “Lillie, sit down a minute,” Pam said.

  “The grass is wet.”

  “Yes. Come to the chairs.”

  She led Lillie to the cafe. Lillie didn’t really want to chat, but what choice was there? She didn’t want to be rude. She sat, barely able to make out Pam’s face across the table.

  “Lillie, I want to tell you something about myself,” Pam said. “From the time I was young, I felt this desire for the whole universe to form a coherent algorithm, to have a first premise. I think you would say, ‘to make sense.’”

  Lillie started.

  “I think, after watching you, that you want that, too.”

  How could Pam know that? Did she spy? But Lillie did not have conversations like that with the other girls! Just that one with Elizabeth, but that was so long ago …