Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  The kids all seemed to fly apart that summer. Instead of spending their time together playing Hot Rocks, each of them began to spend more time with adults, working hard. Dr. Wilkins was training Emily in science and genetics. Keith spent more and more time with Uncle Jody and the cattle. Kendra started learning poetry by heart—why would anybody want to do that? Kezia and Roy hung around the hot cookhouse, and Roy learned to make a chili stew that was better than Aunt Sajelle’s or Aunt Carolina’s. He wouldn’t tell anybody what he put into it.

  Aunt Hannah had brought an old music cube with her, and her kids played it over and over. Ashley’s favorite song was “Don’t Matter None to Me.” The first time Cord’s mother heard the cube play that song, she froze, a strange look on her face. But the look passed, and Cord forgot about it.

  Small biowars went on breaking out over the globe, but Cord didn’t pay much attention. Nobody in New Mexico got sick, and that was all he really cared about.

  The pribir did not come.

  Later, it seemed to him that the three years between Grandma Theresa’s death and Cord’s fourteenth birthday had passed in one long, unbroken, monotonous, peaceful stretch. Nothing seemed to have happened, even though he could recite events that had. But he walked through them half-conscious, maybe, or encased in some sort of childish membrane. Nothing got through unfiltered, undiluted. Nothing upset his internal chemistry.

  In December 2067, Cord and the others turned fourteen.

  CHAPTER 21

  Cord awoke abruptly, his heart pounding. Second time tonight! He could take care of it in the usual way … but he didn’t want to. He wanted to go outside. Why? He just did. Damn it, did he have to have a reason for everything he did?

  Throwing on his clothes, he left the room where Keith, Bobby, and Gavin slept fitfully in their bunks. Jason, Roy, and Dakota had gone on the cattle drive, along with some of the girls, Kendra and Kella and maybe Felicity.

  At the thought of girls, the problem got worse.

  The night was cool and starry, moonless. An owl hooted in the dark. Cord smelled sage and mint on the fresh breeze. Maddened by the sweetness, he paced restlessly out to the barn, didn’t go inside, paced back. He didn’t want to go in. He headed for the bench under the cottonwood grove by the creek, stumbling and cursing in the dark.

  Two figures sat there, wrapped in each other’s arms.

  Cord couldn’t tell who they were, not even by straining his eyesight. Suddenly he was ashamed of himself for even trying. Not his business. Only … why would any of the married couples be kissing outside at two in the morning? They could be warm in their beds, touching each other in comfort and …

  He ached with envy.

  Cord turned toward the smaller houses set up the slope. At Senni’s place, he stopped. Clari was in there. God, to sit with Clari under that tree and do what that couple were doing! He would wake Clari.

  He couldn’t wake Clari. She would be upset and if Aunt Senni ever found out… Cord shuddered.

  Totally frustrated, he smacked his fist into the side of his head and again started toward the big house. He hadn’t even put shoes on, his feet were freezing, he was the world’s biggest idiot…

  Someone stood in the shadows on the porch, a dark figure in a white nightdress. Cord moved cautiously closer. He had to practically walk into her before he could see who it was. Taneesha.

  The two stared at each other, inches apart. Cord could hear himself breathing. Finally Taneesha said, “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.” His voice came out ragged.

  “Cord, I…” She took a step toward him.

  Cord couldn’t help himself. As if propelled by some sort of motor, a will-less machine, he reached for her. She lunged toward him with a sort of small hop, and then they were kissing and his hands were on her breasts through her thin nightdress and nothing else existed in the world.

  “Where … can we go?” Taneesha breathed when he pulled his mouth away from hers to breathe. “Oh, Cord …”

  She was as driven as he was. He gasped, “Wait here a minute,” went back inside and pulled the blankets off his bunk. He thought Gavin opened his eyes but Cord wasn’t sure and he didn’t care.

  They took the blankets to the wellhouse and threw them on the floor of hard-packed dirt. It was even colder in here, plus damp; neither noticed. They went at each other with a fierceness beyond control. Not even breaking Taneesha’s hymen, and her brief cry of pain, stopped either one of them. Afterward, they both fell asleep, only to wake sometime in the predawn and do it again.

  It wasn’t until he woke for the second time, shivering under the inadequate blanket with Taneesha rumpled beside him, that Cord thought in anguish: Clari.

  Sex happened to all of them at once. That was how Cord thought of it: “Sex happened.” Like thunderstorms or earthquakes.

  Keith and Loni, Bobby and Maya, Gavin and Susie, Frank and Patty, Bruce and Ashley. Kezia, unpaired, looked angry and desperate. She asked often when the range crew was returning.

  It took the adults twenty-four hours to notice what was happening. Work was neglected, couples disappeared, all the kids looked dazed and wobbly. Dr. Wilkins was appalled. “They’re not even using birth control!”

  “Then give them some,” Sajelle said wearily. “Scott, you don’t know. They can’t help it.”

  “Of course they can help it!” snapped Robin, old and outraged. “They’re not animals!”

  “Robin, you weren’t on the ship,” Emily said. “You don’t know. For us the pribir did it with olfactory molecules. For this generation, it’s apparently built in.”

  “I don’t believe — “

  “I don’t care what you believe, Robin,” Lillie said, and Cord, who overheard this and knew he was not supposed to, was surprised at the rare anger in his mother’s voice. Why?

  Keith, Lillie’s son, was having sex with Loni, Mike’s daughter. Was that it? That whole episode with Lillie and Mike under the cottonwood three years ago looked entirely different now. Had his mother and Mike felt like he did with Taneesha? Don’t think about it.

  Lillie added, still angry, “Scott, give them some birth control.”

  Emily said, “I’m not sure it will do any good. I can run some tests, but the pribir knew their genetics. My guess is that the girls’ Fallopian tubes are designed to counteract any birth control we can manage.”

  Bonnie said, appalled, “You mean the girls … my Angie … she’s going to get pregnant no matter what we do?”

  “We did,” Lillie said, still angry.

  Julie —quiet, timid Julie!—said, “Damn the pribir all to hell forever,” and Cord crept away. He didn’t want to hear that.

  And he had to find Clari.

  She was in the washhouse, doing laundry. The windpowered generator made limited amounts of non-emission electricity, which powered select machines in order of necessity. The washing machine was not a high priority, but nothing else was running right now and Clari, Dolly, and Aunt Carolina’s eight-year-old, Elena, were doing laundry. Dolly looked up as soon as Cord blundered in.

  “Come to help, Cord?” she sneered. “You haven’t been much use otherwise lately.”

  “Clari,” he said humbly, “can I talk to you?” Her nose was red and swollen; she’d been crying.

  Dolly said, “Leave her alone. We know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing!”

  “What was he doing?” said little Elena with interest.

  “Please, Clari,” Cord begged.

  She put down sopping clothes and followed him outside. Glaring sun cast stunted shadows.

  “Come under the trees, Clari.” He led her to a nearby stand of young juniper that had been carefully nurtured through the long drought. “I … I …”

  She looked at him miserably, and his words burst out.

  “Oh, Clari, I’m so sorry. It was you I wanted, not Taneesha, but you were asleep in the middle of the night and… Clari, I heard the grown-ups talking. Aunt Emily said
we’ve been engineered to do this, to be driven to sex right now so the girls will get pregnant—” At the look on her face he stopped.

  She said, “Engineered? To have sex and get pregnant, and you can’t help it?”

  “Yes! I mean, no!”

  “That’s evil, Cord! That’s genuinely evil. To use people like that.”

  Cord didn’t feel used. Looking at her swollen, dear face, he felt more lust. His groin swelled and all he wanted was to —

  “Come with me,” he said desperately. “To the barn. Or someplace. It’s you I want, not Taneesha, but if I can’t have you I will do it again with her. I know it. Oh, please, Clari, we belong together, we always have, I want to marry you …”

  He didn’t know what he was saying. Marry? Now, at fourteen? But he dimly realized that he would say anything, anything at all, to get Clari to go with him to the barn.

  She looked scared. “Cord, I … don’t want to. Not yet. Someday—”

  “I can’t wait until someday!”

  “Then you don’t love me very much, if you won’t wait for me,” she said sadly, and walked away.

  Cord stood there, wretched and angry and ashamed and driven, and after a minute he went to find Taneesha.

  For forty-eight hours he avoided Clari and had sex with Taneesha every chance he could. The range crew came in, or rather part of them did. Alex said, “I brought the kids back. They were no use. They …”

  “I know,” Lillie said.

  “Me, too,” Alex said, not looking at her. “I remember. Jody is upset and angry.”

  “He doesn’t have to be, Alex. His and Carolina’s kids aren’t engineered.”

  “What about Julie’s kids with Spring, when they’re older? Will they inherit it? The sex drive could be dominant.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Lillie said slowly.

  “I’ll bet Scott has. Lillie … I’m going to ask you because you’re the most level-headed woman here. There are more girls than boys. Do you think Kezia … I mean, does it have to be one of their own … God, Lillie, it’s been so long!”

  “She’s fourteen, Alex.”

  “I know. So were we.”

  “You’re twenty-eight.”

  “I know!”

  “It’s up to you and her,” Lillie said wearily. “And, I guess, to Sajelle. Sajelle’s her mother. You can ask. Sajelle’s always been clear-eyed.”

  Alex said, “I hate this. But in Wenton now there are mostly … I’d be good to Kezia, Lillie.”

  “I believe it,” Lillie said.

  The next day Kezia left to go back with Alex to the cattle on the range.

  Cord said to Taneesha, “Tannie … I’m sorry. You’re great, and beautiful, and I always liked you. But me and Clari — “

  Taneesha’s dark eyes flashed. “Yeah? You and Clari? It’s Clari you want to have sex with, not me?”

  Cord said nothing, staring at his stupid goddamn feet in their stupid goddamn boots.

  Taneesha was Sajelle’s daughter, clear-eyed. She sighed. “Okay, Cord. I guess I knew that. I just… I just…”

  “Don’t cry!” he begged.

  “I don’t ever cry, Cord Anderson, and don’t you forget it! You aren’t the only male in the whole sorry world, you know! Anyway,” she said, changing mood again, “does Clari want to?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you — “

  “I don’t know!” he shouted, and to his surprise, she actually chuckled.

  “I know. You love her, you always did. Go find Clari and talk her into it, Cord. I’ll be fine.”

  She was. The next time Cord saw her, she was with Rafe, who looked just as embarrassed and uneasy and pleased as Alex.

  Cord found Clari and pleaded and coaxed until Clari said yes. But it wasn’t like with Taneesha. Clari didn’t seem to enjoy it and the first time hurt her a lot. Cord hated himself, and couldn’t stop, and vowed in his heart that he would make it up to Clari. He would get for her anything, everything, she might ever want. If it took the whole rest of his life, he would make it up to her.

  By year’s end, all eleven of the girls engineered aboard the pribir ship, plus Clari, were pregnant. On January 7, war was declared with China. Within the first hour, missiles delivered bioweapons into the atmosphere over forty-seven targets in the United States.

  The U.S. defense system, more obsolete than the government had even realized, shot down only eight. The Defense Department retaliated with bioweapons of their own.

  Net news reported deaths in the millions, then the tens of millions. The camvids on the Net, the posted recordings of the dying, the roboviews of entire cities, were horrifying.

  Then the Net sites, one by one, ceased to record, or post, or move from the frozen agony of whatever they’d been displaying last.

  “It’s a mixed lot, from the little definitive information I can get on the medical list serves still running,” Uncle Scott said. “It’s possible not all the bioweapons are Chinese. There’s anthrax and Ebola, for sure, possibly modified. The Ebola may have been made airborne. There are also engineered bacteria and viruses and even spores, which present a special problem because they remain viable so long. One in particular we want to watch out for—it induces your cells to produce TP53 in enormous quantities, and that in turn induces apoptosis.”

  “What’s that?” Sajelle said.

  “It makes your cells commit suicide.”

  Emily, very pale, added, “We want more samples from each of you.”

  Cord had already given so many samples of blood and tissue that he felt like he’d run into a cactus. Poke here, pierce there, scrape somewhere else. Not that there was much choice.

  Kendra said, “What about the babies? How can you tell if they’re going to be all right?”

  “We’re going to take amniotic samples from each of you,” Emily said.

  Cord put his arm around Clari. Guilt, a constant cloud, settled into his bones. Unlike the other pregnant girls, Clari hadn’t sought the sex that led to this. And unlike the other pregnant girls, she wasn’t engineered for a super-boosted immune system. Julie and Sajelle, pribir-blessed women married to normal men, had passed on their lesser protection to their new babies. But would it work for Cord to pass on his unfathomable genes to Clari’s children? Was his total engineering, like the previous generation’s milder version, dominant? Nobody knew.

  By summer, the only people transmitting live on the Net lived in isolated pockets in rural areas. Rafe monitored every waking hour. Grimly he reported that some of those people were falling ill, too, from a dozen different diseases.

  “The winds go everywhere,” Clari said. She was having a very bad pregnancy, morning sickness and anemia and edema and half a dozen other things Cord couldn’t name. He wanted to spend every minute with her, and he wanted, from guilt, to never see her at all. Fortunately, the decision was not his. Every person on the farm was working as hard as possible all day, every day, to make the place self-sufficient. There were a lot of things they were going to have to do without, but right now the aim was simple survival.

  Taneesha said, “You mean … everybody in the world might die?”

  “Except us,” Emily said. She was too thin. She hadn’t eaten more than snatched mouthfuls in days. Neither had Dr. Wilkins, who was much older and looked much worse.

  Clari said, “How would we know if anybody else survives?”

  Lillie said, “Rafe will hang onto the Net until nobody at all posts or until the satellites fall out of the sky. But there might be really isolated groups that survive who don’t have Net access. Inuit or Laplanders or someone.”

  Cord didn’t know who those people were, and he didn’t ask. It wouldn’t help anything. And the truth was, he didn’t really care.

  Uncle Scott cared. He said somberly, “When I was born, the world held six billion people. After the first biowar there were two billion left, about the same as there had been in 1900. Today there’s maybe two hundred million people o
n Earth. I’m estimating, of course, extrapolating from what few figures I have. Two hundred million is the same number as when Christ was born. And the number is going down.”

  Emily said gently, “Scott, the changed ecosystems probably can’t support many more than that, anyway.”

  “And who changed them? Us. Humans. We’re all as guilty of these deaths as the people who fired those bioweapons.”

  To Cord, that was just silly. He and Uncle Scott and Aunt Emily hadn’t killed anybody. Somebody in one of the back bedrooms began to play the music cube: “Don’t Matter None to Me.”

  “Population projections for this year,” Uncle Scott said, “once were ten billion people. Instead, we have suigenocide.” He walked heavily to his room and closed the door.

  Cord didn’t know what “suigenocide” was. He didn’t ask Aunt Emily. She and Uncle Scott were talking about the past, and the past was over and gone. Cord honestly couldn’t see the point. “We’ve lost so much,” Aunt Robin constantly whined. But Cord couldn’t see that, either.

  Everything that mattered to him was here, now.

  Then, in April, the cattle suddenly began to die.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Oh, God,” Lillie said. “Scott, what can we do?”

  “Nothing until we figure out what’s killing them,” Scott said testily. “Send the range crew out for blood and tissue samples. Mark each cow carefully so we know what came from whom. Emily and I will get to work as soon as you bring the samples back.”

  “No,” Emily said.

  It was another farm meeting in the great room. As usual, only about half were present; the rest couldn’t be spared from vital work, or were grabbing a few hours of sleep, or, in the case of Clari and Felicity, were throwing up from pregnancy. Another meeting, but different, Cord thought. He could remember when farm meetings had announced new income, new cattle purchases, new gains in water supplies. Now all the news was bad.