Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  Keith and Kella slept with her, for the few hours she could sleep. Lying in the narrow bed with a child pressed up close to her on either side, clutching at her even in sleep, Lillie realized for the first time the terrible burden of being a real parent. It was not that she didn’t love her children, but that she did. She was hostage to their fortune, her life’s outcome dependent on theirs, as Keith’s had been on Lillie’s. She had never known. She had never understood, not any of it.

  Theresa had known. Theresa had always known.

  When Spring found Cord, he was still “dormant.” That’s what Scott called it. Scott, fascinated and grateful and appalled, took cells from all of Cord’s adaptations, including the “taproot” that Spring had sliced through because it went too deep to pull up. Then, holding his breath, he’d poured water over Cord.

  As Scott and Lillie watched, the membrane around the child dissolved. The base of the taproot fell off as easily as an outgrown umbilical. Cord’s breathing quickened. He opened his eyes, saw his mother’s face, and started to cry.

  Lillie gathered him into her arms, wet and filthy and smelling of what Scott would later determine was a skin repellent against predators. She held him tightly against her, and for the first time in years she cried, too. Scott left the room with his collected samples, softly closing the door. Lillie cradled her pribir-created son and knew for the first time not only what he was, but also that through him she, too, was becoming, finally, fully human.

  PART IV: CORD

  If this is the best of all possible worlds,

  then where are the others?”

  —Voltaire, Candide

  CHAPTER 19

  After his grandmother died, nothing was the same for Cord, except Clari. Everything else turned itself inside out, like a sock.

  “Tell me about the pribir,” he demanded of Dr. Wilkins. It seemed all Cord could do lately was demand, as if he were a three-year-old like Aunt Julie’s newest baby. He knew it, and regretted it, and couldn’t stop it.

  Dr. Wilkins, gray-haired and a bit stooped, said, “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. Grandma didn’t talk to me about them. All she said was they changed the genes for my mother and then for all us kids.”

  “All of you born to the girls—women—who went up to the spaceship. Not Dolly or Clari or…”

  “I know that. But what did they do on the ship?”

  Dr. Wilkins said gently, “I wasn’t there, Cord. I stayed behind, like your grandmother.”

  “But―”

  “You should ask your mother.”

  “Okay,” Cord said. “But you’re the one who can tell me about genetics.”

  Dr. Wilkins looked startled. He was really old, as old as Grandma had been. But he knew things, and Cord wanted to learn them.

  “Cord, you never showed any interest in genetics before.”

  “Well, I am now,” he said stubbornly. But when Dr. Wilkins started to explain messenger RNA and transcription and protein formation, Cord’s mind wandered. This wasn’t what he thirsted for, after all. Even he could see that. Bobby and Angie and Taneesha were much more interested, working at the school software in biology, clustering around Dr. Wilkins and Uncle Rafe to learn to use the complicated, expensive engineering equipment.

  Cord turned instead to his mother. That was another thing that had changed. His mother used to mostly ignore him, busy with the farm’s bills and income and boring stuff like that. But now she was home for dinner every night, listening to Cord and Keith and Kella, asking about their day, touching them on the arm or cheek. It made Cord uncomfortable. He didn’t know why she was behaving like this, like all of a sudden she was Grandma. Well, she wasn’t. Grandma was dead. Nobody else was Grandma and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

  Still, she was the one to ask about the pribir. He waited until late afternoon on a hot, dry, June day. June was supposed to bring rain, Uncle Jody said. That was the old way for this country; the new way was rain all year long. But now they didn’t have either way. The drought continued, and every night his mother walked out to watch the sunset with her face calm and hard.

  On the porch Cord passed Clari coming up to the big house. “Cord? Where are you going?”

  “I want to ask my mother about the pribir.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Sure.” As far as Cord was concerned, Clari could go anywhere he did. She was quiet, and she listened carefully, not like his pesky sister Kella, who interrupted everybody all the time.

  The two children started toward the cottonwood stand by the creek, where a long time ago somebody had built a wide bench facing west. It was the prettiest place on the farm, the only place wildflowers bloomed often, even though the creek was only a trickle. Lillie sat there, gazing at the sky flaming red and gold above the long stretch of gray land. “There goes a jackrabbit,” Clari said, but Cord had more important things on his mind than jackrabbits.

  “Hi, Cord, Clari,” Lillie said. “Look at that sky.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty. Mom — “

  “It would be much prettier with rain clouds in it.”

  “Sure. Mom, tell me about the pribir.” Cord flushed in embarrassment. He was demanding again, and anyway it never felt easy to talk to his mother.

  But she tried to make it easy. “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “Everything. I heard you talk about Andrews Air Force Base with Grandma. What’s an Air Force Base? Were the pribir there?”

  “No. Sit down.”

  Cord and Clari sat. The wooden bench felt smooth under his rump. Somewhere above him an owl hooted softly.

  His mother began slowly, as if searching for the right words. “Andrews Air Force Base was—maybe is again—a big camp for soldiers and planes. After doctors discovered that Grandma and Dr. Wilkins and I were genetically engineered, we were taken there.”

  “Why? How did they find out?”

  “They found out because we all, all sixty of us, started to smell things. Smell information.”

  Clari said timidly, “I don’t understand, Aunt Lillie.”

  His mother smiled. “Well, that’s reasonable, because neither did we. All at once all of us just started to have … images in our head. Ideas and pictures and information, all about genetics. We were smelling special complex molecules that the pribir were secretly releasing into the air to send learning to humans on Earth.”

  Cord demanded, “How come you kids could smell the molecules and no one else could?”

  “We were genetically engineered to do it, before we were born, by a doctor working for the pribir.”

  “Why didn’t the pribir just give humans the information themselves? Why use a bunch of kids?” Cord said logically. This roundabout transmission route seemed dumb.

  “They didn’t want to risk coming to Earth. A lot of people didn’t like the idea of genetic engineering.”

  Well, that made sense. As long as Cord could remember, he’d been told over and over to never mention genetics to anybody from Wenton.

  “Also,” his mother continued, “the pribir had something else in mind. Eventually they sent a shuttle —a small spaceship—to pick up all the engineered kids who wanted to go up to the ship. Twenty of us went, including me. Your grandmother Theresa stayed behind.”

  Clari asked, “Why did you go?”

  His mother hesitated. “I’m not sure. I think partly for the adventure, partly because the pribir were making us smell molecules that made us want to go.”

  Cord considered this. “They couldn’t be very strong molecules. Some people didn’t go. Like Grandma.”

  “True.”

  “What happened on the ship?” Cord said.

  Again his mother hesitated. The colors in the western sky were fading now and the stars were coming out, one by one. Finally she said, “A lot happened on the ship. The main thing was that the pribir engineered the babies we girls were all pregnant with. Including you, Cord. They gave you many different gen
es. Dr. Wilkins thinks a lot of them are designed to let you survive on Earth no matter what changes the planet undergoes, or what environment you find yourself in.”

  Like the sandstorm that had killed Grandma. Cord had been told how he’d survived that.

  Clari said, “How many pribir were on the ship, Aunt Lillie?”

  “Probably a lot. But we only saw two.”

  Cord hadn’t known that. “Two? Only two? The whole time?”

  “Only two.”

  Clari breathed, “What did they look like?”

  His mother smiled, but it wasn’t a good smile. “They looked exactly like us. They said they’d been made that way deliberately. Their names were Pam and Pete.”

  Cord peered at his mother through the gloom to see if she was joking. She didn’t seem to be. But … “Pam” and “Pete”? Those were names on old, stupid Net shows, not names for pribir. He said harshly, “Then did the pribir put you back on Earth? Why?”

  “We didn’t know. To have our babies here, I guess. But, Cord …” The longest hesitation yet. Cord waited. This was going to be important, he could tell from her voice. “Cord, you should probably know this. You’re old enough, and anyway I think Dr. Wilkins already told Bobby and the other kids that hang around with him. The last thing the pribir said to us was that they would be back.”

  Cord sat very still. His mother put her arm around him, and for once he didn’t pull away. He hardly felt the arm. Gladness was flooding through him. They were coming back!

  Clari said fearfully, “When?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Soon, I want it to be soon!” Cord burst out.

  His mother pulled her arm away. “Why?”

  It seemed to Cord a stupid question. The pribir were clearly heroes, a word he’d learned in school software. They had tremendous powers… imagine sending information through smells! They had made all the kids at the farm, practically … why, without them he wouldn’t even exist! And they had saved his life by giving him the genes that had protected him during the sandstorm. More, they represented something Cord couldn’t name, didn’t have words for. He knew only that it was larger than the farm, the drought, the falling price of cattle that seemed to occupy the adults so much. Something large, and mysterious, and glorious.

  But all he said to his mother was, “They’re wonderful!”

  His mother’s voice turned cold. It was full dark now and Cord couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to. That voice was enough.

  “‘Wonderful’? You call it wonderful that they designed unborn babies with no regard to anything except pribir needs? That they kidnapped us kids and used smelled chemicals to manipulate our minds? That on the ship they made us … never mind that. That the pribir designed and engineered our babies and impregnated us without so much as asking permission, so that you and Keith and Kella and all the others never even had a recognizable father. You call that wonderful?”

  Floundering under this attack, all Cord could think of to say was, “I don’t need a father! I have Uncle Jody and Uncle Spring and Uncle Rafe and — “

  “Every child should have a father.”

  “Clari doesn’t!”

  Clari, who had shrunk against the cottonwood trunk at the first hint of conflict, nodded loyally.

  “But Clari did have a father,” his mother said, more softly. “He just died before she was born. But she had him.”

  If Clari’s father had been dead for Clari’s whole life, Cord didn’t see what good having a father had done her. Cord was angry now. “The pribir are wonderful! You just don’t understand!”

  “Oh, Cord,” she said, and now her voice was completely soft, as soft as Clari’s. He was not going to be won that easily.

  “You don’t understand, Mom. The pribir gave you everything, even me! And Keith and Kella!” He’d always known his mother didn’t really want her kids. Now here was proof.

  “I know,” she said. “But, Cord, honey, they still did it through manipulation, tyranny, for their own reasons, not for our good.”

  “I don’t care! Come on, Clari, the mosquitoes are out.”

  “Cord, please don’t go, I want to talk more …”

  But he grabbed Clari’s hand and pulled her up off the bench and toward the house. Halfway there he turned back to face the cottonwoods and shouted, “The pribir are wonderful!” before running the rest of the way inside, dragging Clari with him.

  He learned more from the other children. At various times, their respective mothers had dropped bits of information about the pribir. Aunt Bonnie’s daughter Angie said that when she and her two brothers were born, their mother had had a very easy labor. This was important because recently Aunt Julie and Uncle Spring had had another baby, and Aunt Julie had screamed so much that Dr. Wilkins gave her a drug. Cord didn’t see why that was a problem, but Angie said importantly that Aunt Julie had wanted to do without drugs because they could be bad for the baby. Also, added Angie, who seemed to be a gush of information on birthing, Aunt Senni had had a very bad time with both Dolly and Clari.

  “So the pribir made birthing easier with the babies they engineered. Less painful,” Cord said. He was very glad he was a boy and would never have to birth anybody at all.

  “Yeah,” Angie said. “They sound like good people.”

  “I think so, too,” said Taneesha, Aunt Sajelle’s daughter, who was listening in. Taneesha, Kezia, and Jason had a father, Uncle DeWayne. But he wasn’t their genetic father; the triplets had been engineered inside Aunt Sajelle, just like Cord had been. Cord thought Taneesha was the prettiest girl at the farm, not counting Clari. She had light brown skin and black curly hair and the biggest brown eyes Cord had ever seen. It made him uncomfortable, though, to think that Taneesha was so pretty. It seemed unfair to Clari.

  But Taneesha was a good source of information. Aunt Sajelle apparently spoke to her kids much more frankly than anybody else’s mother. “The pribir messed with my mama’s genes, too. Not as much as with ours, of course. But Mama—and your mother, too, Cord —doesn’t get sick. You ever noticed that? The pribir did something to them so they don’t catch colds and stuff like Dolly and Clari and Angel do.”

  It was true, Cord realized. Clari had had something just last month that made her head ache and her muscles hurt, and Dolly and Angel got it, too, but nobody else.

  “And” Taneesha said, leaning in close to the other kids huddled together behind the barn, “the pribir put the babies inside my mama and the other women without any sex!”

  Cord flushed. He’d only been told about sex a few months ago, and the whole idea made him uncomfortable.

  Dakota, Julie’s son, was logical. “If there wasn’t any sex, then how did the babies get made? You need an egg and a sperm.”

  Taneesha said triumphantly, “The pribir had a whole supply of sperm and eggs, and they just snipped out whatever genes they wanted from any of them and sewed them back together however they wanted.”

  This explanation seemed lacking to Cord — no sperm or egg anywhere had genes for what he’d grown during the sandstorm. So the pribir had also built brand-new genes from scratch, or taken them from some other … thing. If so, that made the pribir more powerful than ever. And smart: They’d known what he might need to survive. And kind, because they wanted him to survive. Probably if she hadn’t already been a grown-up when she went to that Andrews place, they might have engineered his grandmother Theresa to survive the sandstorm, too.

  Dakota said solemnly to Cord, “They saved your life, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I can’t wait till they come back.” This piece of Cord’s information had electrified them all.

  “Me, neither,” said Kendra and Taneesha, simultaneously. Taneesha added kindly, “I’m sorry you’re not genetically engineered, too, Clari.”

  Clari looked down at the ground and said nothing.

  ———

  By summer of 2067 it still hadn’t rained much. Three ye
ars of drought. Wenton, which had over the years grown to look almost prosperous, didn’t look that way any more. Some people left. Others, from even more desperate places, arrived on the one train per day still arriving at the decaying station. One Thursday in April, two women, one man, and six children got off the train. They stood staring past the shrunken edge of Wenton to the flat, parched plains, stretching for miles and miles of nothing.

  Cord, in town with Uncle DeWayne and Taneesha to buy cloth, spied the starers, skinny and battered-looking. City people, he thought. He knew cities from the Net shows and Net news, which was the way he knew about anything more than ten miles from the farm. Well, these people wouldn’t find whatever they were looking for, work or food or a new start, in Wenton.

  Uncle DeWayne stopped walking.

  “Daddy?” Taneesha said. But Uncle DeWayne ignored her, walking toward the strangers and leaving her and Cord behind.

  “Oh oh,” Taneesha said.

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you got eyes, Cord? Six kids, two women—they’re more of us. Daddy must recognize one of them.”

  Of course. Cord and Taneesha ran after Uncle DeWayne.

  Uncle DeWayne said to the man, “Mike? Mike Franzi?”

  The man said nothing, studying this well-dressed black man. One of the little girls shrank behind him.

  Uncle DeWayne grinned hugely. “Sure it is. Mike Franzi, and you’ve forgotten all those basketball games at Andrews where I whipped your white ass. DeWayne Freeman!”

  The stranger seized Uncle DeWayne’s hand. One of the women started to cry.

  Taneesha said in a low voice to Cord, “Here’s trouble.”

  “What? Who?”

  Taneesha didn’t answer, but she stared back without flinching at one of the girls, who was giving her the finger.

  It was another of those weird relationships. Two of the strangers, Mike Franzi and Hannah Reeder, were twenty-seven. They had been at Andrews Air Force Base with Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, who were sixty-seven. So had the other woman, Robin Perry, but she hadn’t gone up to the pribir ship and so she was sixty-seven, too. Three of the kids were “Aunt Hannah’s,” as Cord was instructed to call her. The other three belonged to some woman named Sophie, who was dead, but now old “Aunt Robin” was taking care of her kids.