by Nancy Kress
Like a car still good for another thousand miles, Lillie thought. These children would never see a car. “Are they …”
“Push!”
The third one finished her. She passed out, or fell asleep, but not before the unexpected came to her, startling as snow in ninety degrees. Oh, my God―
She woke all at once, undoubtedly by design. No one was in the room.
But I smelled it, Lillie thought, with complete clarity. I smelled them.
No. They, her babies, had smelled to her.
“Pam?” she called, and instantly a door melted from the wall and Pete bustled in, carrying a wrapped bundle. Lillie smelled it again.
Her child, emitting olfactory molecules as Pam and Pete did, molecules that created an image in Lillie’s mind. The image was fuzzy, mostly a smear of color, but the feeling that accompanied it was clear as spring water: distress. Too cold, too bright, not the womb. Her child, like all children, was protesting the birth experience.
Pete didn’t ask how Lillie felt. “Do you want to see her?”
“Yes,” Lillie said, and struggled to sit up.
Pete put the bundle on Lillie’s lap and unwrapped it. Lillie gasped. She’d been told, but still… Pete didn’t notice the gasp. He glowed with the satisfaction of the right way.
Pete said importantly, “The torso is tilted forward like that to relieve pressure on the vertebrae, and then the neck has that pronounced curve to counteract the tilt, so the adult form will still be able to face forward. The legs are so short in order to keep the center of gravity lower. Those short legs will be very strong. The knee bends backward like that to prevent the grinding and deterioration that you humans all get eventually. Including you, Lillie. This human will live about one hundred and sixty years, and we built everything to last. The bigger ears, of course, are better at gathering sound. We thought about eliminating the vocal chords, since essentially they’re unnecessary, but in the end—”
“Be quiet,” Lillie said.
Pete, unlike Pam, occasionally listened. He fell silent while Lillie studied the sleeping … baby.
A cross between a troll and a turtle, with the curved neck of a swan.
The baby’s skin was thick, gray-green, scaly. Its body, with all the features Pete had so clinically described, reminded Lillie of an illustration in a picture book she’d had as a child, a drawing of a stunted gnome. On the child’s back, however, was a very thin, flexible, hard shell, extending from tailbone to neck. The feet were webbed with more of the gray-green turtle skin. The hands had scaled skin, too, but ended in a mass of long, delicate tentacles.
Most awful was the face. The nose was a long snout. There was no mouth. Two eyes closed in sleep.
Pam bustled in. “Isn’t that a good engineering job, Lillie? She can survive in sand, dust, rain, heat, go into estivation in the cold. And―”
“How does she eat?” Lillie faltered, and a part of her brain not in shock was amazed that she got the words out at all.
“That’s the best part,” Pam said triumphantly. “We saved it as a surprise. There’s a slit just under the curve of the throat for conventional feeding; you can’t see it now because it seals completely when not used. But in an emergency, she can also send a tubule into the earth for water and nitrates and then synthesize ATP for energy from sunlight. It’s a limited function, only supplementary, of course, but an ingenious one. What Pete and I did was use halobacteria, which photosynthesizes not with chlorophyll but with retinal rhodopsin, and—”
Lillie scarcely listened. It didn’t stop Pam, who went on about halobacteria and photosynthesis before returning to her tour of Lillie’s child.
“That long nose allows for filters that should block nearly all pathogens before they get inside, but in case not, she’s got an immune system like you wouldn’t believe. She can also draw her entire body under that shell against really adverse conditions and just estivate for up to six months. Her—”
“How does she talk?” Lillie stared at the mouthless face.
“Why are you so interested in that?” Pam said, offended. “We almost didn’t give her your primitive communication system, since she has ours. But if she wants to, she can tilt her head back slightly and talk through her throatslit. The vocal chords are intact, as Pete told you. And of course, her hearing is excellent and she can hear your speech just fine.”
“Will she understand … is she …”
“She’s a lot more intelligent than you are,” Pam said. “Really, Lillie, don’t you think I know my profession?”
Lillie unwrapped the baby’s diaper. The baby had normal genitalia. Against the rest of her, the sight was terrible.
“Couldn’t do much about that,” Pete sighed. “The design has to stay cross-fertile with the old-style humans as long as they’re still around. Although maybe we can fix that next time through here.”
Lillie started to tremble. She was not this strong. She’d thought she was, but she made a terrible mistake, she couldn’t do this, it wasn’t possible, this thing was not human, oh God help me Uncle Keith ―
The baby opened her eyes.
“There!” Pam said in triumph. “Our other surprise for you!”
Under a thick nicitating membrane, the baby’s irises and pupils were a duplicate of Cord’s, of Lillie’s own. Deep gray flecked with gold, alert and bright. Human eyes. A smell came to Lillie, an image in the mind, a stirring in the heart. The baby looked at her.
Immediately, Lillie loved her fiercely.
A trick of the olfactory molecules.
So what? This was Lillie’s child.
Pam said, “Do you want to see the other two? Bring them in, Pete. Lillie, what are you going to name them? Lillie?”
Lillie didn’t answer. She gazed back at the baby, lost in the infant’s eyes, its helpless need of her. She would do anything to protect this child. Anything.
And oh God, the baby was so beautiful.
CHAPTER 29
Rafe said, “It’s a defense, isn’t it. Built in. Like a skunk’s bad smell.”
“Not the best comparison,” Lillie said acidly. They sat on chairs outside Scott’s lab, in the early evening. To the west the sun was setting amid piles of gold and orange clouds. Lillie’s infants were inside, being poked at by Scott, with Sajelle and Carolina in eager attendance.
Rafe continued, “When any of us are near the babies, we love them because they continuously send out pheromones to make us love them. It’s only when we’re out of that particular olfactory range that we remember what they really are.”
“When did you become a biologist, Rafe? You’re supposed to be our engineer.” Their engineer. Lillie was leaving with her children in another two weeks. Jody had found her an abandoned vacation house at the foot of the El Capitan mountains, north of what had once been the city of Ruidoso. The place had, he said, a good water supply, insulation, stored canned food, fertile soil. She wondered if Jody had had to bury the bodies of its previous owners, and what bioweapon they had died of.
“I’m not a biologist,” Rafe said. “Just an observer. The pribir can learn how we behave, even if they can’t anticipate it. They built in their secret protective weapon in the little mutants’ pheromones.”
“Don’t call them that,” Lillie said sharply.
Rafe grinned at her ruefully. “Even when you’re not smelling them, you can’t see them clearly, can you. Well, you’re their mother. I guess Pam and Pete couldn’t risk you going to the latrine and just deciding to never return. Lillie … do yourself a favor. Don’t ever be alone until Pam and Pete leave next week.”
She started in surprise. “You mean you think the pribir might—”
“They want as many of these … offspring as they can get. They could easily impregnate you again.”
Lillie considered. “No. It’s too soon. They know I’m nursing three kids. The strain on my body would be too great. It would endanger both sets of kids.”
Rafe looked unconvinced. He stood,
gazing down at her. Abruptly he said, “You’re very brave.”
She said nothing.
“But, then, you always were. Even on the Flyer. Probably the bravest of all of us.” He turned and walked away very fast.
Lillie went inside. Sajelle sat holding one of the infants, crooning to it affectionately. Carolina changed another’s diaper. The third lay on Scott’s lab table, her gold-flecked gray eyes fastened on his face. Julie fussed with baby clothes. The room was very crowded.
Scott, delighted, said, “She’s smiling at me with her eyes!”
Lillie had been holding her breath, trying to assess her children objectively. Squat, gray-green, scaled hybrids …
“Scott,” she said, not exhaling, “Did Pam use reptile genes along with human ones? Did she?”
Scott looked startled. “Why, yes, she did. Does it matter?”
Lillie couldn’t hold her breath any longer. She let it out and gulped air, and with the air came the sweet baby smell.
“No,” she said, “it doesn’t.”
Sajelle said, “Have you decided yet what to name them?”
“The boy is Dionysus. The girls are Rhea and Gaia. You’re holding Gaia.”
“I never heard of names like that,” Sajelle complained. “What kind of names are those?”
“Very old ones,” Lillie said. “Scott, what have you learned about their genome?”
“Not a whole lot,” Scott said. “Four billion base pairs, a third more than we’ve got. I can only identify about twenty percent. Less than I can identify for your first lot of kids, Cord and Keith and Kella. We never even found out what all their genes can do, let alone this lots’. There’s just no match in the database. Maybe I’ll learn more over time. Here, take Rhea. I have to sit down.”
He eased himself into a chair. Lately Scott’s right knee had been bothering him. His hair was almost gone now, his face deeply lined. “Lillie, there’s been some shifts about your move. Lupe and Juan aren’t going.”
Well, that wasn’t unexpected. Neither Lupe nor Juan had builtin olfactory engineering. They never perceived the pheromones the babies sent out, and so their ridiculous prejudices must always be operating. The same was true for Martin and for Carolina, but Carolina was here anyway, calling Rhea “little cousin.” Evidently some people were naturally nurturing no matter what.
Scott continued. “Roy and Felicity also decided to stay here.”
Roy. The men weren’t around the babies as much as were the women, all with babies of their own. Roy may have persuaded Felicity to not go. Felicity was Julie’s daughter, did that mean —
“Spring and I aren’t going, either,” Julie said. She looked near tears. “I’m sorry, Lillie. But my own kids — “
“I understand,” Lillie said. Julie’s older children, Dakota and Felicity, and her six grandchildren would be here. Julie wanted to be near them.
“But,” Scott said, “Keith and Loni are still going. So is Alex. And also Cord, Clari, and the baby.”
Gladness flooded through her. Cord. “Did Clari — “
“I think it was actually her idea.”
“I’m glad I’ll have one of Tess’s grandchildren along.”
“You’ll be fine,” Scott said, wiping his forehead. He felt the ever increasing heat more than anyone except Robin. “As far as Rafe can tell over the Net, there’s nobody left in a hundred square miles of where you’ll be.
“And one more thing. I’m going, too.”
“You?”
“Don’t look at me like that. You neither, Sajelle and Julie. I know I look like an old wreck to you, but I’ll be better off at a higher, cooler elevation than I am here. And somebody should document as much as possible of the gene expression of Homo sapiens novus.”
Why? Lillie thought. Her children were not going to be building sequencers and analyzers any time soon. When they did, the design and data would be all different. She didn’t say this; she was too glad Scott was going with her. He was one of the few who could remember the world she had grown up in. One who could share those memories, that vanished life.
“I’m happy you’re coming, Scott.”
He said, “Emily can handle medical needs here.”
Sajelle said, “And all the rest of us will visit often, Lillie, and you can visit here. We don’t want to lose track of you, or these precious babies.” She gazed fondly at the infant in her arms.
Scott and Lillie looked at each other, and he made a complicated gesture not even Lillie could read.
The pribir ship lifted off in the middle of the night. No one heard it go. When Lillie came out of Scott’s lab in the morning, a knot of people stood behind the big house where the ship had been.
Lillie wasn’t really surprised. The last time, Pam and Pete had just ceremoniously dumped the humans in the desert, hardly saying goodbye. Farewell speeches apparently weren’t genetic.
She walked up to the group. A few people drew back, Sam and Senni and Kezia and, most hurtfully, Kella. Kella wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.
Lillie said, “Where’s Jody?”
“Inside,” Gavin said. “Do you want me to get him?”
They didn’t want her to go inside the big house, even though she wasn’t carrying any of the babies. A strange pain slid through her. “Yes. Get him.”
Jody came out, a few minutes after the others had left. He looked embarrassed but stubborn. The look suddenly reminded Lillie of a very young Tess.
“Jody, I want to leave for the mountains tomorrow, not in a few weeks. There’s no reason to wait. The children and I are more than strong enough to travel — ” thanks to the pribir ” — and I think we should go.”
He looked relieved, and that, too, sent a pain through Lillie. He said, “Okay. Tomorrow is good. Can you be ready at four? I want to get there before the heat of the day.”
There and back, he meant. But she only nodded. “We’ll be ready. Send out Cord and Keith.”
It was a caravan, the next morning, peculiar but probably no more peculiar than other caravans that had crossed this desert. Covered wagons, prospectors on mules, oil-seeking geologists, nuclear-waste trucks. Lillie had spent last evening using the old computer they were taking with them, seeking information on the site of her new home. She’d been shocked to see how little was left to access. Most sites had just ceased. The electricity had gone, the batteries had gone, the people had gone. How had the big libraries continued, with no one running them? Maybe someone was running them. Or maybe the machines were self-running by now, providing data and services endlessly for users who no longer existed. Lillie could have asked Rafe, but she knew she wouldn’t.
Jody drove DeWayne’s truck, still in good condition. In the ample truck bed, under tarps, rode Lillie, Alex, and Scott, each holding one of Lillie’s triplets. Keith and Loni’s three ten-month-old children were, miraculously, all asleep. Clari sat close beside Cord, holding baby Raindrop. Keith’s children were named Vervain, Stone, and Lonette. Cord and Clari, Keith and Loni had spent their whole lives on the isolated New Mexico farm. Conventional names meant little to them, mostly associated with silly Net shows. They named their kids after things that mattered to them. And, Lillie thought, “Gaia,” “Rhea,” and “Dion” were hardly more conventional.
Somewhere behind DeWayne’s speedier truck, Taneesha and Bobby drove horse carts piled with bags of foodstuffs from the farm, kegs of salted or smoked meat, some of Scott’s lab equipment. He’d apparently had an argument with Emily over what went and what stayed, but Scott must have pulled rank because it seemed to Lillie that most of it was here. There was also a precious box of weapons and ammunition.
“We don’t want them,” Cord said, but Lillie had spoken to him quietly and changed his mind. The mountains, too, had warmed and changed their ecology, although not as much as the desert, and it was possible they might encounter black bears, mountain lions, wolves.
Or leftover humans.
She didn’t say this last to Cord. Her
favorite child, still idealistic, still prickly. But all of them knew how to use a handlaser on a rattlesnake, and Alex and Keith could fire everything in that sealed box.
Somewhere behind the horse carts, Spring and Dakota rode herd on a few dairy cows that would be left with Lillie. So would two horses. Spring, Bobby, Dakota, and Taneesha would return with Jody at nightfall, in the empty truck. And after that Lillie would see them … when?
Not soon, she knew. Away from her newest babies, the others’ memories of the children’s monstrosity would grow. That’s the way the human mind worked. Unless Lillie sent someone on horseback to fetch help, it might be a very long time before she saw the people she’d lived with for fifteen years, including her daughter.
Not Lillie’s choice. But innocence never meant you were spared punishment.
“We’re nearly there,” Jody said from the driver’s console. “Does everybody understand the route back?”
Lillie didn’t answer.
Six thick-walled cottages, of roughly equal size. This place had been a vacation compound, maybe a tourist resort. Four of the cottages were guest houses, each with three small bedrooms, comfortable large living room, and spectacular glass-walled view. The roofs had working solar panels, although the windpowered electric generator was no longer functional. The fifth, slightly larger cottage was a communal dining room with the kind of kitchen Lillie hadn’t seen in decades: steel appliances, smart ovens, servos. None of them worked. But the dining room had a woodstove and a huge fireplace, and water still ran in the sinks and toilets and tubs.
“Nice big tubs,” Jody said, grinning without mirth, “and you should have enough water. It won’t be as hot up here, either. Good thing, with those glass walls. Stupid building design.”
There had once been air conditioning, Lillie thought but didn’t say. Possibly Jody had never experienced air conditioning.
“Jody,” Scott said, “why don’t you all move up to the mountains?”
A reasonable question. Once, Tess and her husband had had to live where they owned land, and it was their good luck that it was in an area that the warming had made wetter rather than drier. Then, the farm people had huddled together for defense. After that, isolation from the bioweapons. But now there was no reason to stay in that exposed, hot, drying place. The world, or most of it, was empty.