Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  “Stand well away from the shuttle,” the shuttle suddenly said. Lillie jumped; Julie cried out. “Stand well away from the shuttle. You will be in danger otherwise. Move now. Stand well away from the shuttle — “

  “Move!” Jon said.

  They all followed him, running down the road. Lillie looked behind her. The shuttle suddenly collapsed. One minute it was there, the next it was not.

  Everyone stopped, uncertain. Jon said tentatively, “Well, I guess this is far enough … Rafe, don’t go back! It said not to!”

  Rafe hesitated, stopped.

  “Now what?” Bonnie said.

  “I don’t feel well,” Sophie said. She turned away and threw up beside the highway.

  “Hey, Sophie, hold it together,” Bonnie said softly. “It’ll be all right”

  “I’m not afraid, you moron,” Sophie snapped. “I just threw up, is all.”

  Sajelle was staring at Sophie strangely.

  “Something’s coming!” Jason said.

  The nineteen kids moved closer together. Should they run, hide, wait? Nobody knew. They did nothing.

  The thing Jason had spotted grew larger, resolved itself into a bus barreling down the highway. A small blue bus. Jon stepped into the road and raised his arm to flag it down. He didn’t have to. The bus skidded to a stop, and Lillie saw that it was old and patched, the metal almost rusted through in places. The door opened and a man and a woman climbed out.

  Jon said bravely, “Can you help us? We were … were camping, and we’re lost and we need — ” He stopped dead, staring at the man.

  Lillie peered at him. The man didn’t look familiar. But the woman did. She gazed unbelievingly at Lillie. A short, dark woman with a sun-wrinkled face and chopped-off black-gray hair. Old, maybe even in her fifties.

  Jon said, choking on the word, “Scott?”

  “It’s me,” the man said. He sounded dazed, too.

  The woman stepped forward. “You don’t recognize me, Lillie,” she said.

  Lillie shook her head.

  “It’s Theresa Romero.”

  Lillie stared. A black swooping wave passed over her mind, receded. Theresa? “But… but…”

  “We didn’t expect you to be this age, either,” the man got out. “I’m Scott Wilkins, people. Don’t you remember me from Andrews Air Force Base?”

  It was Jason who got the words out, “But… you’re old!”

  “And you’re not,” Scott said. Lillie remembered him as a runty, brash kid always running to keep up with the bigger boys. Now he was tall, a little fat, old.

  Rafe blurted, “What year is this?”

  Theresa answered, her eyes still on Lillie. “It’s July 8, 2053.”

  Again Lillie felt the black faintness brush her, and again she succeeded in pushing it away. 2053. Forty years since she’d left Quantico … not possible …

  “Time dilation,” Rafe said. “Oh, wow!”

  Julie whimpered. Sam advanced, fists clenched. “If this is some fucking joke — “

  “Still the same old Sam,” said the man claiming to be Scott Wilkins. “It’s not a joke, Sam. You people have been gone forty years. Everyone assumed you were dead, or at least weren’t coming back. And Rafe is right, or at least I think he must be right. Your … the pribir must have accelerated into space and then come back, going so fast that time aboard the ship is different. Forty years passed for us, and … whatever time for you.”

  Jon said, “Seven and a half months.”

  “That we were awake for,” Rafe said. “We don’t know how long we were out. But how … you …”

  “They contacted us,” Theresa said. “The old way. They smelled to us, three days ago. Come to this place at this time, pick up the travelers.” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “But they didn’t bother to tell us about ‘time dilation,’ the bastards. Or to tell you, it looks like.”

  “No,” Lillie got out. She couldn’t stop staring. Theresa? Theresa fifty-four years old, her voice raspy, her face sagging. Old … “Theresa? My Uncle Keith! Is he …” She couldn’t say it.

  Theresa said, “I e-mailed him while Scott was getting the bus going, if you don’t think that was a bitch … Yes, he’s alive. Eighty-seven, but still breathing. He’s in a nursing home in Amarillo.”

  “My mom and dad?” Madison demanded, and then everyone was shouting names except Julie, crying hopelessly, and Sam, frozen with fists clenched and no one to hit. Theresa held up her hand.

  “No use asking, I didn’t check on anybody else’s family. I only know about Lillie’s uncle because we’ve kept in touch, Lillie and I were friends—” She stopped.

  Friends. Girl buddies. But Lillie was fourteen and Theresa was fifty-four. Suddenly Lillie couldn’t take any more. She felt her stomach rising, and, like Sophie, she barely turned away before throwing up beside the road.

  When she had finished, Scott Wilkins stood beside her, laying a hand on her stomach. Indignantly she pushed him away.

  “It’s all right, Lillie, I’m a doctor.”

  A doctor? Runty, tag-along Scott?

  He felt her belly, then squatted to lay his head against it. Lillie saw Sajelle watching her with the same strange look Sajelle had given Sophie.

  Scott straightened, pulled Sajelle toward him, felt her belly. She submitted, very unlike Sajelle, without protest. Why? Did they all have some awful worm or virus in their stomachs? Were they seriously sick?

  Scott said somberly, “The time dilation wasn’t the only thing the pribir didn’t tell you. Lillie and Sajelle are pregnant. I’ll have to examine the rest of you girls, but my hunch is that you all are.”

  Madison blurted, “Oh, no. We had birth control.” Then she blushed crimson.

  Scott—Dr. Wilkins—said gently, “I don’t think any birth control you were given was meant to work.”

  “You!” Madison cried, glaring at Jon. Lillie’s head swam. Mike? Jason? Oh, God, how could she even know which —

  “Madison, don’t blame Jon,” Dr. Wilkins said. “I don’t think your baby, if you’re carrying one, is his. Or not completely. The pribir are master geneticists, you know. And they used all of us for whatever their purpose really is. Your baby was probably very carefully engineered in vitro and implanted in you.”

  “We bring the right way. That’s our purpose. It permeates everything we do, and it gives our lives meaning … You’re our first assignment!’

  “I want an abortion!” Madison cried, and Dr. Wilkins’s face showed something like pain. “We’ll talk about it, Madison. Things are different now.”

  “Different how?” Madison demanded, but he didn’t answer.

  Pregnant. She, Lillie. Carrying a baby inside her. A genetically engineered baby—

  She cried, not knowing what words would come out, “The pribir said they’d be back!”

  No one answered her. Silence fell. Even Julie, stunned, had stopped crying. The only sound was the wind, rising violently with the sun, hurling tumbleweeds across the dry ground.

  PART III: THERESA

  The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.”

  —Johan Schiller, The Death of Wallenstein

  CHAPTER 13

  In the old days, Theresa thought, they’d have brought in crisis counselors, child psychologists, what all. But these weren’t the old days. They had only themselves.

  “Where will I go?” Lillie had asked, after the initial crying and shouting had subsided a bit. The infernal wind had begun the way it did every morning, hot and violent, and Scott had herded everyone into the shelter of the bus, which was already heating up like the furnace it was.

  Theresa and Scott looked at each other. Scott said, “Lillie, all of you, it’s been a long time. Things are … different. Nobody knows you’re back, and probably only your families will care. And they—”

  Sajelle said, “We back from an alien spaceship, pregnant, and nobody going to care?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Scott said. “Since you left
…” He trailed off and Theresa saw that he didn’t know where to begin describing the world they had returned to. How did you compress forty violent years into a few sentences for fourteen-year-olds?

  Madison clung to the main point. “Our families… how can we get to them? Will you take us?”

  Sam said, without a trace of the obnoxious bluster Theresa remembered, “If our families are still alive.”

  The point was truer than he knew. Nearly a third of the United States population had died in the war ten years ago. Theresa had heard that in Africa, the rate was eighty percent. She didn’t know if the figure was correct or if it was, like so much else, inflated rumor. Anything on the Net was suspect, even the news sites, and there was no other source of information any more.

  She said to Madison, “To get you to your families, we’ll have to find them first. A lot of people have been dislocated. Scott, it’s dangerous to stay here, they’re predicting another storm. I’m going to drive back to the farm.” And leave you to explain. He gave her a look that would wither a cactus.

  Theresa slipped behind the wheel. They were going to be lucky to have Scott: a doctor, a good man. He had shown up at the farm last night, the only one to respond to the pribir’s message. Well, maybe the others, now scattered God knew where, had never smelled it. Theresa had happened to live close to the landing area. What would have happened to these children if she and Scott hadn’t come? They would have died out here, that’s what.

  These children. Who had been part of her own childhood, long ago in a different world.

  The bus was noisy. Modified to run on methanol, it was anachronistic, inefficient, falling apart, and highly illegal. But the fuel-cell-powered electric car, also falling apart, could not carry twenty-one people. The bus’s tires were so patched it was a miracle they held together. God knew how much unlawful emission they were putting out this very minute.

  Theresa couldn’t hear Scott over the engine noise. What was he saying? How could he possibly explain?

  Global warming took off, Scott could tell them, and accelerated in a feedback loop, more than anyone ever imagined. We reached a tipping point, where even a tiny additional increase could throw the system into violent change. And it did. He could tell them that, but how could they understand what it had meant?

  The Earth’s temperature had risen fifteen degrees Fahrenheit in forty years. Peat bogs and Arctic permafrost had released their stored methane, trapping yet more heat in the atmosphere. Polar caps melted, coastal areas flooded, farmland became dustbowls, deserts became farmland. Entire island archipelagos disappeared under water. The weather became the enemy: crazy storms, wildfires covering half a state. Tropical diseases spread as fast as famine. People migrated, people died, people dug into places that were still livable and shot refugees who tried to move in. Governments collapsed. Technology slid backward, except among the rich in defended enclaves that have somehow kept the Net going through aging satellites. Conservative backlashes developed, and weird religions, and a dozen other means for people to make sense of the senseless. And then, in rational response to all of this, we had a biowar with China and nobody won.

  Somewhere behind her, one of the kids cried out.

  Where were they all going to go? Trains still ran, sometimes, if no eco-groups sabotaged. The Net might be able to track down these kids’ relatives, or it might not. The farm couldn’t feed nineteen more people, twelve of them probably pregnant.

  Behind her, the bus had fallen deadly quiet.

  Two hours later, Theresa stopped the bus, which had —miracle, miracle!—held together, in the space between the barn and the farm wellhouse. Her practiced eye ran over the farm; everything looked all right. Her three sons were out with the cattle, following them around on summer forage to check that their GPS collars still worked, and to make sure nobody stole a cow. Her daughter Senni had shifted the garden-guards against the hot wind. The huge rain cisterns were still half full; the windmills whirred frantically. Behind the chicken coop, their current and temporary farmhand, Ramon, was slaughtering a chicken.

  Senni came out of the house onto the porch, expressionless, as the kids got off the bus. The hot wind whipped Senni’s short hair into a dirty froth. Hurriedly, squinting, the pribir children covered the distance from the bus to the doorway.

  “The pribir children.” How long since Theresa had said that phrase? Or even thought it?

  Inside, they looked around at the large adobe-walled great room, as wind-tight as Theresa could make it, lit at this hour only by light from the small windows. Some of the kids looked bewildered, some angry, a few in shock. Well, Theresa couldn’t blame them.

  “Sit on the floor,” she said gently. “We don’t have enough chairs. This is my daughter Senni and my granddaughter Dolly, who’s almost two.”

  Lillie’s face turned slowly toward the baby.

  “I guess the next thing is food,” Theresa continued. “Are you hungry? Senni, did you make that soup?”

  “Yes,” Senni said sullenly. They’d argued about it before Theresa left. Silently Senni ladled out steaming bowls. Lillie got up and passed a bowl to each kid. She’d always been sensible, Lillie had. Solid. A few children started eating, but most did not.

  Scott said, “Where’s your computer, Tess?”

  Senni started. No one had called Theresa “Tess” for forty years.

  “I’ll get it,” she told Scott, and fetched the ancient thing from the bedroom. Carlo kept it running, the only techie among her four children. She put the computer on the long wooden table.

  “Good God,” Scott said, “does it work?”

  “Not for me,” Theresa said. “You any good at tech, Scott?”

  “I can manage. Voice control?”

  “Only Three-A. You’d best use the keyboard except for simple stuff.”

  Scott sat on a chair and turned the computer on. Abruptly Rafe rose from the floor and stood beside Scott. That’s right, Rafe had always been interested in machines. Theresa watched them, the sun-wrinkled middle-aged man (there was no other kind, now) and the young boy, who had been born in the same year.

  Scott linked the computer to the wireless Net. Rafe said, “Basic information search. Rafael Domingo Fernando,” and Scott looked up at him.

  “Not your name, Rafe,” he said gently. “You’ll be listed as dead. Your parents’ names.”

  Rafe said, “Angela Santos Fernando and Carlos Juan Fernando.”

  Scott entered the names. Theresa saw that he was trying to shield the screen from Rafe, who saw it anyway. Rafe said in a flat voice, “Both dead.”

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “An older brother. Maximilliano Fernando.”

  “Do you know his citizen I.D. number?”

  “No.”

  “Birthday?”

  “September 7, 1996.”

  “Okay. This is him … he’s living in Durham, North Carolina. There’s an e-mail address listed. Do you want to mail him?”

  And say what? Theresa thought. Here I am, back from the dead, a fourteen-year-old kid?

  Rafe said, his voice finally unsteady, “In … in a minute. Do someone else first.”

  Theresa couldn’t stand it. All right, she was a coward, she couldn’t watch. She picked up Dolly. “Her diaper’s dirty. I better change it.” She carried the baby into the bedroom.

  Senni followed her. “Mom, what the hell are you doing? Where are these kids supposed to go?”

  Theresa turned on her daughter, glad to have someone to yell at. “I don’t know! But I couldn’t just leave them out there! These are—were—my friends! Lillie …” But there was no way to explain to Senni what she and Lillie had once been to each other, in those extraordinary circumstances that could never come again. “Senni, whatever the others do, Lillie at least is staying here. I know she hasn’t got anywhere else to go.”

  Senni flounced out of the room. She, too, was pregnant, with her dead husband’s last legacy. Theresa sighed.

&nb
sp; She lingered over Dolly, playing with her, rocking her to sleep, fussing with the blanket in the crib that Senni had made out of a dresser drawer.

  When Theresa went back into the room, three girls were crying. Two boys yelled at Scott, who was showing superhuman patience. Sophie, whom Theresa had never liked, strode up to her and demanded, “Can you take me to the train today? Train to New York?”

  “No, not today,” Theresa answered. She understood, as she had not forty years ago, that Sophie’s belligerence sprang from insecurity and youth. But Sophie didn’t understand that winds and storms made day travel on the plains risky; that a train all the way to New York was equally risky; that Theresa didn’t have the money for tickets for everybody; what New York would be like even if Sophie could get there.

  “You won’t help me?” Sophie demanded. “You always were a bitch!” And then Lillie was there, taking Sophie’s arm, soothing her, and Sophie unexpectedly turned and buried her face in Lillie’s shoulder.

  Theresa met Lillie’s eyes. Lillie smiled sadly.

  “You must be scared, too,” Theresa said, out of the old, never-admitted antagonism that her friend could cope better, adapt quicker, control herself more.

  “I am,” Lillie said, so softly that Theresa wasn’t sure of the words. But, then, she didn’t have to be. She understood, and her momentary resentment evaporated, never to return. Lillie was a child, still. And she, Theresa, was not.

  The moon shone high and clear as Theresa drove the horse cart to town. They had a few more hours before dawn, before the winds began. Night on the high plains was still cool, even in July. Theresa and Lillie sat wrapped in blankets. “Is the horse old?” Lillie asked.

  “No,” Theresa said, “just malnourished. Like most everything else, except you.”

  Immediately she regretted her words. She’d intended them to be jocular, but they hadn’t come out that way. It wasn’t Lillie’s fault she was healthy when nothing else seemed to be. God, think how much worse it would be if sick kids had been dumped on the farm! By way of apology, she said to Lillie, “Are you feeling all right?”