Nothing Human

by Nancy Kress

  Theresa got her into bed. Eight months, shouldn’t be a problem. Eight months was perfectly viable. Everything was ready. Except maybe Theresa and Lillie.

  “Get that sheet of plastic on the bed first, Emily, there’s going to be blood and I want to save as many sheets as possible. Bonnie, heat water and boil the scissors and the string. Sajelle, warm blankets and line three of those baskets I bought in Wenton. Keep the blankets warm. Julie, watch Dolly and Clari. If Lillie starts screaming, take the kids out to the barn.”

  “I’m not going to scream,” Lillie said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I don’t scream,” Lillie said.

  And she didn’t, although at one point she bit her bottom lip almost through. Labor lasted only thirty minutes. Theresa couldn’t believe it; she’d been twenty-seven hours with Jody.

  Sajelle turned out to be invaluable. Steady, quick, unsqueamish. Theresa sent Emily and Bonnie away; no use cluttering up the tiny room with more people than necessary.

  “You doing good, Lillie,” Sajelle said.

  “Talk to me,” Lillie said, her face horribly contorted.

  “Remember the garden on the ship?” Sajelle said. The pribir seemed a strange subject for Sajelle to choose, until Theresa realized that the aliens were the only experience the two girls had in common. “Them gorgeous flowers by the pool, yellow and red, smelling like heaven? Remember that music cube of Hannah’s that we played over and over? ‘Don’t Matter None to Me.’ ” She began to hum.

  “Keep talking,” Lillie grunted.

  “Okay. Remember the day we all swapped make-up and tried on different colors? Or the time Rafe took apart the lawn robot thing and Pam was so mad? Lillie?”

  “Keep talking,” Lillie gasped, and Sajelle did, talking her friend through it, talking her on, talking her down from the bad heights and the worse depths, until it was over and three babies lay in the warmed baskets, two boys and a girl.

  “They’re human,” Sajelle said, and Theresa looked up, startled at the deep relief in Sajelle’s voice. Sajelle cradled her own belly.

  “Lillie,” Theresa said, “you have three beautiful children.” But Lillie was already asleep, her face turned toward the wall.

  Lillie named the babies Keith, Cord, and Kella. She nursed them with a puzzled look on her face. “What is it, Lillie?” Theresa said.

  “They don’t really seem like mine.”

  Theresa noticed that Lillie was conscientious in keeping the infants fed, dry, and warm. But she didn’t play with them, or make cooing noises at them, or cuddle them. The two people most interested in the triplets were Carolina and Scott.

  Carolina spoke no English, a fact Jody had neglected to mention. How much Spanish did Jody know? Enough, apparently. She was too thin but nonetheless buxom, with masses of dark hair and the prettiest face Theresa had ever seen, prettier even than Madison had been, except for a long wide scar that started at the right side of her chin and disappeared into her dress. Theresa wondered how far the scar extended and what it was from. She didn’t ask.

  At first Carolina seemed afraid of all of them. But when that wore off, she turned out to have an exuberant nature. Well, she’d have to be adventurous to meet and marry Jody. So far Theresa had seen no reaction in Wenton to news of the marriage, although that didn’t mean the reaction wasn’t there. Carolina fell instantly in love with Dolly and Clari, which won over Senni. The girl loved babies. She gave Lillie’s triplets all the hectic affection that Lillie did not, chattering away at them in Spanish.

  Scott, on the other hand, was all science. The very day of their birth he brought home from Wenton a piece of equipment the size of a small chair. “It came on the train yesterday. Finally. I thought it wasn’t going to get through, which would be a genuine loss considering how much credit I gave for it.”

  “What is it?” Spring said.

  “A Sparks-Markham genetic analyzer.”

  Senni said suspiciously, “I don’t know what that is but it looks like it cost a lot of credit.”

  Theresa intervened. “It’s Scott’s credit to spend. Scott, what do you need?”

  “Just the stem cells from the umbilical cords, which I have. For now, anyway. And a place to work.”

  “Take the den,” Theresa said. Lowering her voice so only he could hear, she added, “And Scott—talk to me first about whatever you find.”

  “Of course,” he said quietly.

  Several hours later he emerged from the den, looking dazed. The great room was full of people, exclamations, babies. Theresa caught Scott’s eye and motioned toward the door.

  It was after sunset and the wind had softened to a hot breeze. They walked to the creek down the slope from the house, once more flowing decorously between its banks after its rampage during the storm. Debris it had left behind scattered the ground: mud, branches, rocks, a dead coyote. The creek had made its appearance, a gift of the increased mountain runoff plus more frequent rain, about five years ago, and had grown steadily since. It flowed past a grove of old cottonwoods. The cottonwoods had once drawn all the moisture available in the dell at the bottom of the little hill. Now juniper and oak saplings grew beside the cottonwoods. Spring had nailed a sturdy wooden bench to the largest tree, and the bench hadn’t been washed away in the storm, although it was still too wet to sit on.

  Theresa had a sudden visceral memory. This was how her stomach had felt when she and Lillie had gone to the picnic grove at Andrews Air Force Base to be bawled out by Lillie’s Uncle Keith, the day after the girls had crashed a party in the boys’ dorm. A lifetime ago. Yet for a moment, she’d felt again the Maryland sunlight, smelled the honeysuckle, heard the roar of jets taking off and landing.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” Scott said. “The children’s genome is… is what? Is ours, and isn’t. As far as I can tell from the preliminary scan, they possess the same forty-six chromosomes we do, and all the genes we have on those chromosomes. But every chromosome except the X and Y have extra genes spliced in, because … I still can’t believe this. It can’t be true.”

  “Tell me, damn it!”

  “There’s no junk DNA. You remember, Tess, from what we learned at Andrews, that the — “

  “I don’t remember anything of what I learned at Andrews. I don’t have that sort of mind. Start at the beginning.”

  “Okay. The human genome is about seventy-five percent nonfunctioning base pairs. Some is fossilized virus genomes that spliced themselves in hundreds of millions of years ago. Some are stray scattered fragments of DNA that don’t do anything, just get themselves replicated over and over whenever a cell divides. Some are —”

  “I get the picture. Get on with it, Scott.” His eyes still had that dazed bemusement.

  He licked his lips. “The babies’ genome, it doesn’t have any of those introns at all. None. They’ve all been cut out.”

  “Three-quarters of their genome is gone?”

  “Yes. It’s an amazing job. And more … there are new genes added in place of the excised base pairs. Tens of thousands of them.”

  “What do the new genes do?”

  “How the hell should I know? They make proteins, or regulate protein making, because that’s what genes do. But until I see them in action, I don’t know what proteins or what regulation or … or anything.”

  Theresa fell silent. Night insects sang around them in the dark. From somewhere blew the sweet sharp smell of mint. “Scott… are they human?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know … how are you defining human? They share twenty-five percent of our time-damaged genome. Hell, chimps share ninety-eight percent!”

  “They look human. They look like human babies.”

  “I know.”

  Theresa jumped up. “They are human babies. Lillie’s babies. Listen, this is very important. Don’t say to anyone what you’ve said to me. Don’t lie. Just say … say that the babies have all our genes. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”
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  “If you say more, if you tell — “

  He said irritably, “I know what the consequences would be, Tess. I can’t even publish in what’s left of the Net scientific journals. If anyone knew even that you and I and Lillie are pribir kids, there would be people from Wenton unhappy about our presence. Some folk there don’t even like Carolina being here. And if I published this genome, either I’d be dismissed as a crackpot or … or I wouldn’t.”

  Theresa said, “They’re just little babies. Let them have a chance at a normal life. God, I can’t believe I just called how we live now ‘normal.’”

  “Kids think whatever they grow up with is normal. But, Tess, I want to go on gathering data from the kids. How do I explain that if I say their genome is identical to ours?”

  She considered, chewing on her lip. “Say they have six extra genes.”

  “Six? Why six?”

  “Twenty-six, then. Do you think anybody here knows enough about genetics to interpret that?”

  “Yes. All the kids who went to the ship. Especially Rafe and Emily.”

  “Well, they’re not going to broadcast it. Just say there’s a small difference from us, enough so it’s plausible you’d study it but not enough to make the babies seem too different.”

  “All right,” Scott said. “You know, when the wind dies down, it’s pleasant here.”

  Theresa said, “When the wind dies down, and we’re not having a hugely destructive storm, and the sun has set, and no toxins happen to be carried on the breeze, and the tropical diseases that have come north aren’t infecting, and the UV damage hasn’t caused too much cancer… then, yes, it’s pleasant here.”

  He said, “Do you ever wish you’d gone, that night at Quantico? Gone up to the pribir ship instead of staying behind?”

  “And have missed out on all the excitement of the last forty years? No.”

  “Ha,” he laughed mirthlessly.

  Theresa stood. “We should get back to the house.”

  “Wait a minute more. Now that I’ve got the analyzer, I’d like to scan your genome, too. And Jody and Carlo and Spring and Senni. Plus Senni’s children. I’d like to see if the modifications we carry are dominant.”

  “You mean …” God, she’d never considered this before! “You mean, my kids and grandkids might be able to smell pribir messages? Like we did?”

  “If there were any pribir to send. Which there aren’t. Can I scan them, Tess?”

  “If they let you.”

  “Okay. You go on in, I want to sit here and think for a while.”

  She was glad to leave him. She didn’t want any more information to confuse her actions. Besides, her arms ached to hold a newborn baby: that helpless warmth against her chest, those rosy sucking little lips screwing themselves into yawns and cries and, eventually, smiles. Why should Carolina get all the cuddle time?

  Theresa ran back to the farm house in the fragrant dusk, feeling light as a young girl, light as air.

  ———

  Emily also had an easy birth, bearing three bald, round, blue-eyed girls. Bonnie had two boys and a girl. Sajelle bore two girls and a boy, chocolate-brown infants with huge brown eyes. Only Julie had a difficult time. One of her triplets, a girl, died soon after birth. The other two, a boy and girl, were healthy and strong.

  “We’re awash in babies,” Bonnie said. She gazed lovingly at her three infants, miraculously all asleep at the same time in baskets lined up in her room. Yet another addition had been hastily put on the farm house, which now looked like a crazily growing organism of some kind. Each mother shared a tiny bedroom with her children. Jody and Carolina had a room but the other men had moved, with relief, to the barn. All the babies were remarkably good: no colic, no projectile vomiting, no prolonged crying. Theresa, sleeping on a pallet in the great room, silently thanked the pribir.

  Carolina was invaluable. From dawn till bedtime she tirelessly tended children, cooing endearments at them in Spanish. “Mi corazon, mi carino, primito . . .” Then she disappeared one day in the cart, returning with two other Mexican girls and a boy of about twelve.

  Jody translated. “These are Carolina’s cousins, Lupe and Rosalita and Juan. They can help with the babies.” Jody looked defiant and embarrassed; clearly he had not authorized this.

  Theresa looked at the newcomers. Skinny, malnourished, hopeful, clinging desperately to each other’s hands. Carolina said pleadingly, “Rosalita, Lupe, Juan work much. Very much.”

  Theresa said to Jody, “Can we feed all these people? The babies won’t be on breast milk forever, you know.”

  “I think so. We’re doing pretty well, Mom. Cattle prices are a little up now that things are returning to normal, and we’re going to unload twenty more head at Wenton.”

  Normal? This was normal? And how would Jody, living in a crashing world his entire life, know?

  She looked again at the Mexican “cousins.” In the house, two babies began to wail simultaneously. Maybe three.

  “Okay,” she said, and the girls fell to their knees and kissed her hands, which embarrassed her. She saw a louse crawling on the top of Lupe’s head.

  “Get them scrubbed and deloused before they go anywhere near the babies! Also, Scott should check them out for diseases. And, Jody—no more Mexicans. Tell Carolina.”

  “I will.”

  “None of the triplets are identical,” Scott said, after running days of gene scans. “I guess the pribir wanted as wide a gene pool as possible.”

  “Do they all have … are they all …” Theresa asked.

  “They all have the same scan as Lillie’s babies. Introns completely excised. Thousands of extra genes.”

  “And you still don’t know what any of them do.”

  “Not a one. Blood chemistry is completely normal, no unknown proteins. So is urine, tissue samples, everything I can think of to test.” He almost sounded disappointed.

  Theresa wasn’t disappointed. There were already rumors in Wenton of odd occurrences at the farm, and on trips to town Theresa had felt the drawing back by people who had known her for fifteen years.

  The news from the Net, however, distracted everyone. The United States’s economy might slowly be returning to “normal,” but much of the rest of the world was not. A national news network now operated via ancient satellites. It didn’t go as far as sending actual reporters to China, but it picked up and translated China’s own broadcasts.

  “They’re talking about war,” said Sam, who didn’t remember the last one. During that war horrifying bioweapons, some with and some without terminator genes, had been swept by the warming winds around the globe. Some places were still unlivable. Bacteria or viruses lurked in the ground, in the water. No one knew what micros the survivors still harbored in their livers, in their bones, in their blood.

  “They can’t,” she said. War. “Not again … they can’t.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Scott said grimly.

  “Are there any bioweapons even left? In China? Here?”

  “Of course there are,” Scott said. “And new ones have probably been invented. Never, in all of history, have hard times prevented war.”

  “But why? What do the Chinese want? They don’t even have transport to get here and take over the country after they destroy it!”

  “I guess they think they do,” Scott said. “Enough transport, anyway.”

  An unspoken arrangement developed in the house. After dark, the people who wanted to hear the news gathered in the “den” around the computer, now upgraded with parts that had only recently appeared for sale in Wenton, part of the town’s growing prosperity. The news listeners were Scott, Jody, Carlo, Senni, Rafe, and Lillie. The others stayed with the children in the great room, asking no questions when grim faces emerged from the den.

  One night, however, the faces were not grim. Lillie raced from the den into the great room, where Theresa was changing the diaper on Lillie’s son Cord. “Tess! Come here! DeWayne is on the Net!”
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br />   “Who?”

  “DeWayne Freeman! From Andrews!”

  From Andrews Air Force Base, which for Lillie was eighteen months ago and for Theresa, forty-one years. She barely remembered DeWayne Freeman. “You talk to him, Lillie. I can’t leave Cord. But don’t tell him anything about—”

  “I know,” Lillie said. She and Alex talked to DeWayne. A week later DeWayne turned up at the farm, driving a new fuel-celled electric car that immediately brought gawkers streaming out onto the porch. “Wow,” Rafe said. “Look at that!”

  A tall, well-dressed black man climbed out of the car. He carried an expensive suitcase. Theresa said quickly, “Everybody go inside. Now. I want to talk to him alone.” She hadn’t heard from DeWayne in forty years; he could be an anti-genetics nut for all she knew.

  The family vanished inside. DeWayne climbed the porch steps. “Theresa Romero?”

  “Hello, DeWayne.”

  “I wouldn’t have known you, Theresa.”

  “And I wouldn’t have known you.”

  “I want to talk to you. Can we go inside?”

  “I don’t think so. I really have a lot to do. Let’s talk out here.” She knew she sounded ungracious, as well as peculiar, but she couldn’t help it.

  DeWayne didn’t waste words. “Rafe told me how a bunch of you have gathered here—a bunch of us from the old days. Friends. My wife and children are dead. They … never mind. I don’t have anyone. But I have a lot of credits in the Net, and more each day. I develop Net prosi … what used to be called software. I can do it from anywhere. I’m rich, Theresa, and I’ll share it all with the farm if I can live here with you and the rest.”

  Theresa said, “How rich?”

  He smiled. “Six billion international credits.”

  Theresa sat down on the nearest porch chair, nailed down to keep it from blowing away. Six billion credits. Even with inflation what it had been, that was a fortune. She said bluntly, “Why, DeWayne? With that kind of money, you could buy yourself another wife. Hell, you could buy pretty much anything. Why here?”

  “I haven’t ever felt at home anywhere, Theresa. Not since I came out of that trance in a Queens hospital forty-one years ago and learned what I was. And nobody’s been at home with me, either. Andrews was the only time I ever belonged. We’re getting older. I want to settle somewhere.”