Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  The room even looked different. The windows were closed tightly, a minor effort to keep out windborne micros. Alex and Dakota had built a series of entryways with shallow pans of chemicals in each to wash off your boots. People kept their outdoor clothes there, and only there, stripping to light inner layers and washing their hands before they came into the big house. The house had acquired an unaired, stale smell. And hot; this was July. Not even the thick walls could keep the house cool.

  Dr. Wilkins said harshly, “What do you mean, ‘no’? Don’t go difficult on me, Emily!”

  The young woman, her blond hair dirty and lank, faced the old man who had been born the same year she had. With difficulty she said, “Scott, listen. The people who never went up to the pribir ship … all that you got for genetic modifications was the olfactory alterations. You remember, at Andrews no doctors could find any other expressed alterations, and you and I haven’t found any either. That means you and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin don’t have enhanced immune systems. Yours are no better than Jody’s or Carolina’s, and you’re much older. I don’t think you should handle any of the cattle samples, in order to avoid infection. I can do it all.”

  “You can’t! You don’t know enough to — “

  “Yes,” Emily said. “I do.”

  Dr. Wilkins looked at her for a long time. Finally he nodded, saying nothing. Then he turned and walked slowly out of the room, closing the door. Cord thought of a cow he’d once seen, old and unable to keep up with the herd, lumbering away from the herd to lie down in shade.

  Emily said, “I — ” and stopped.

  Cord’s mother said clearly, “You did the right thing, Em. Now everybody get back to work. DeWayne, Robin, you stay indoors, just in case.”

  Ashley muttered, “Like anybody cares if that old bag Robin gets infected.”

  “Shut up,” Taneesha said. The two girls glared at each other. At least, Cord thought, they couldn’t have another fight. Both their bulging bellies would keep them from getting close enough to each other to swing.

  The cattle samples showed an engineered virus that Emily had never seen before. She took printouts in to Scott, who hadn’t seen them either. Scott chafed at not being able to work with the live samples, but Lillie, DeWayne, and Emily remained firm. Scott never left the big house to go anywhere, especially not down to the small house taken over as Emily’s laboratory.

  “It kills bovine cells, all right,” Emily said, “but I think it’s species specific. Look, here — “

  Scott listened. “I think you’re right.”

  Jody, hovering in the doorway, said, “How many head are we going to lose?”

  Emily answered. “All of them.”

  “All? The entire herd?”

  “Yes.” Her thin face looked pinched. She knew what it meant. They were all going to have to survive on corn, chickens, and hunted game … unless that went, too. What then? There was enough food stored for maybe six months, but no more than that. The corn, genetically enhanced, gave a high yield as long as it was irrigated constantly. But no more food was going to come in to Wenton for trade.

  Jody said, “It’s almost calving time. Will the calves — “

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. “Isolate the calves as soon as they’re born, and wash each with dip right away. Keep them from contamination from their mothers.”

  He stared at her. “Emily, how the hell can we do that? You’ve never done a calving. There’s blood and what you’d call ‘tissues’ all over the place. You can’t keep the calves from ‘contamination by the mothers.’ And even if they could, the calves have to nurse, for God’s sake. How can we — “

  “I don’t know how!” Emily shouted. “That’s your job! Just do it!”

  Emily never lost her temper. Dr. Wilkins put a hand on her arm. Emily shook it off. Cord, listening, went to find Keith and Spring, to tell them the herd was going to die and the calves had to be isolated from the milk that would maybe have kept them from dying, too.

  Both range crews worked night and day at calving, and they pulled in people who usually had other tasks. Cord, so exhausted that if he stopped moving he fell asleep standing up, had never seen a calving like this. Even Spring, perpetually cheerful, went grimly about the grim business. They were shorthanded because all the female teenagers who usually worked range crew were pregnant. The only women were Lillie, Senni, and Bonnie. Twice Cord caught Bobby, who had a sensitive stomach, vomiting.

  Cows, pre-delivery, post-delivery, and not pregnant at all, died constantly. First the animal began to tremble as its nervous system was affected. A few hours later it lay down, lowing in pain. Half an hour after that the cow thrashed on the ground, desperately gasping for air, often breaking its legs in the process. A few minutes later it died.

  Dakota and Keith, both good riders, tried to cut the trembling cows out of the herd and drive the animals away from the rest. It seemed to hurt them to walk, but the men kept at it anyway. They forced the cows as far away as possible, then shot them to spare the animals their inevitable agony. The rifle shots terrified the others, as did the smell of the rotting carcasses of the dead.

  If the cow was pregnant, Jody and his crew induced labor, trying to get the calf out before the mother started to tremble. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes not. A few cows died, thrashing, with calves halfway born, and most of these calves died, too. Cord saw his mother stick her hand up a cow whose induced-labor calf hadn’t turned properly and turn it by sheer force. He looked away.

  The surviving calves were carried, bleating for their dying mothers, to the antiseptic dip. There was no time to clean up anything. The ground was slippery with blood, placentas, death. The reek and noise were indescribable.

  Cord, covered with blood, finally could work no longer. Jody said roughly, “Go lie down, Cord. Now.”

  “I can’t, the — “

  “Do it!” He pushed Cord toward the bedrolls set upwind. “I’ll wake you in two hours.”

  Cord collapsed onto the blankets, not washing first, and was asleep instantly, the smell of dead cattle in his nostrils.

  When Lillie woke him, he put out his hand to ward her off, unsure where he was, who she was. “Cord, wake up. We need you to take charge of getting the surviving calves onto the truck and back to the barn.”

  He nodded, stumbled upright, lurched back to the pens. The sky had clouded over, low angry clouds, and Cord didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon, or of what day. He set to work. The small, slippery calves, some premature from the induced labor, bleated piteously. One died on the way, falling to the truck bed where the others, packed in, crushed it with their tiny, deadly hoofs. At the barn, taking the calves off the truck and finding the dead one staring at him with open eyes, Cord succumbed. Ashamed of himself, he cried.

  Emily, Sajelle, Julie, Carolina, Hannah, and Lupe waited at the barn. Emily showed them how to wash the calves again with the brew she’d concocted, and Cord showed them how to grasp the animals to carry them inside.

  “Cord, you smell awful,” Hannah said distastefully, and he was too tired to feel his own anger.

  Lupe had learned somewhere how to feed calves. She’d prepared bottles of warm solution designed by Emily for maximum nutrition. Under Lupe’s instruction, the women awkwardly began to hold bottles for the calves, two at a time, while Emily efficiently gave each a shot in the neck from prepared syringes.

  “This is a gene sequence delivered by a bovine version of an adeno-type viral vector,” she said to Cord. “It’s tailored to this specific pathogen. It’ll splice in genes to create T-cells with receptors for the pathogenic virus. There’s also expo molecules to drastically increase the frequency of gene expression so that—Cord, are you listening to me?”

  “Yes,” said Cord, who wasn’t. He couldn’t focus enough to understand her.

  “Never mind,” she said kindly. “Go in and sleep. But wash first. Do you hear me? Don’t go in like that.”

  He fell asleep in the yard,
beside the outside pump, before he even had his clothes off. Somebody rigged a tarp over him to shield from UV, and he slept.

  They saved only twenty calves. Three of those died despite attempts to nurse them. The others fought off the bioweapon micro even when they contracted it. There were seven bulls and ten cows. Eventually they castrated three of the males. Four bulls were a lot, but Jody and Spring didn’t want to risk being without any sperm for the next generation.

  That decision was, Emily said, an act of pure unjustified faith that there would be a next generation.

  Cord wondered about that. Staring at the surviving calves, he remembered the huge herd of his early childhood, when Grandma Theresa had been alive. It had seemed to Cord then, held firmly on the front of Uncle Jody’s saddle, that the world had been full of living, breathing cattle. All gone.

  He turned away from the pen and stumbled toward the house.

  CHAPTER 23

  Sajelle, thinking ahead to winter, put everyone on rationing, the calories carefully worked out for men, women, pregnant women, children. Cord always felt slightly hungry. He assumed that everyone else did, too, but not even Dolly complained. Even the youngest children understood how close to the edge the farm might be balanced. But there were still—for now, anyway—enough game to trap, enough plants to gather. Wild onion, chicory for coffee, salad greens, agave to make the sweet syrup that Cord loved. Plus, this year’s harvest would be good, thanks to careful irrigation. The chickens, mercifully, didn’t contract any diseases from bioweapons.

  “Well, that makes sense,” Emily said. “You start fooling around with avian pathogens, you could infect all birds and really ruin the ecology.” She fell silent, realizing that it was she who was not making sense.

  “Aunt Emily, how many other people are left alive near us?” Kezia asked plaintively.

  Uncle DeWayne said, “There are still some groups posting. A large one in Colorado, one in east Texas, one in the Arizona mountains. A few more, farther away. Then there are groups in the East, plus a few overseas. But there are fewer every month.”

  Dr. Wilkins said, “Nobody else has the enhanced immune systems of our people.”

  But not all enhanced equally, Cord thought. His generation, built genetically by the pribir, could probably survive in ways they didn’t even know about, as he had during the sandstorm four years ago. The men and women who had gone up to the pribir ship, including his mother, at least never got sick with anything. But DeWayne, Robin, and Dr. Wilkins had no engineered protection. Neither did Grandma Theresa’s children, Senni and Jody and Spring. Spring’s kids had boosted immune systems from their mother, Julie, but Jody’s and Senni’s children were vulnerable. Including Clari.

  Cord went into their bedroom. Clari wasn’t there.

  She, like Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins and Aunt Robin, wasn’t supposed to go outside. But sometimes she did anyway, dressed in a plastic rig Sajelle had created, with a mask over her face. Cord knew where to look for her.

  The sun was setting in the west, fanning theatrical rays of gold and orange over a purple sky. A full moon shone gloriously on the eastern horizon. Over it passed momentarily the silent silhouette of a hawk. With the return of rain, some of the plants new since the warming had revived. Cord smelled the cool fragrance of sage, the stronger odor of cedars brought to him on a shifting breeze. Grandma Theresa had been buried under a stand of cedars, a quarter mile from the house.

  Clari, in her weird plastic covering, stood in the shadow of the cedars, gazing at the stone marker. The bulge of her pregnancy made her look even more grotesque. How much longer? Two months, unless the baby came early. Clari, unlike the girls engineered by the pribir, carried only one child. Cord’s son.

  He didn’t feel like a father. He felt like a boy looking at the girl he loved, who inexplicably was carrying around a hay bale under her smock.

  “Clari,” he said softly.

  “Hey, Cord.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “In this plastic? No.” She laughed, without pleasure.

  “Are you … can I do anything for you?”

  “Yes,” she said, which surprised him. He asked, often and helplessly, and the answer was always no.

  “What? Anything, Clari, you know that.”

  She didn’t answer. He peered at the semi-transparent face mask, but couldn’t make out her expression. Finally she said, “It’s going to sound terrible. I don’t mean to be gloomy or to upset you, but if … if anything happens …”

  “What?”

  “If anything happens while I’m in labor, would you please bury me and the baby here, next to Grandma?”

  He didn’t understand why he felt anger. “Nothing is going to happen to you or the baby!”

  “You don’t know that. It might. I’m not made like the other girls. And sometimes — ” She dropped her voice so low he could hardly hear her, ” — sometimes I hope it does.”

  “Don’t say that! What’s wrong with you, to say that? I don’t want you to die!”

  She clutched at his hand. “Don’t be mad, Cord. Please don’t be mad. It’s just that I don’t believe … everybody is so optimistic. They say we’ll get through this. But, Cord, almost everybody in the world is dead! Everybody! Don’t you think about that… a whole planetful of people just gone?”

  Cord didn’t usually think about that, although he knew that others did. What good did thinking about it do?

  She rushed on. “I have trouble believing this farm is going to make it when no one else did. And sometimes I think that if we’re all going to die anyway, I’d rather it happened to the baby now, before he’s properly born, so he doesn’t suffer. I don’t want him to suffer, Cord.”

  So many conflicting feelings swamped Cord that he couldn’t answer. He didn’t have to. A figure came running toward them from the big house, calling, “Cord! Cord!”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Keith.” His brother tore up to Cord and Clari, and at the look on Keith’s face in the moonlight Cord’s chest tightened.

  “Cord, come quick. It’s Mom. She’s sick!”

  Lillie? Sick? They were none of them sick, that generation! “You’re lying!”

  Keith didn’t even counterattack. “Come quick! Now!” And he was off, back to the house.

  Cord ran after him, remembered Clari, stopped and turned.

  “Go, go,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  He raced away, leaving her lumbering after.

  Lillie sat on the bed in her room at the big house. She didn’t look sick to Cord. Emily, masked, had just handed her a homemade plastic suit like the one Clari wore. Even through the mask Cord could see Emily’s fear. If Lillie could get sick, then any of her generation could.

  “Mom?” Cord said from the doorway.

  “Get out, Cord, and close the door,” Emily said. “I’m taking your mother down to my lab, in quarantine. You can talk to her there if you wear a mask.”

  “I’m not going to get sick,” Cord said, before he thought. “I’m pribir-engineered from scratch!”

  “Good for you,” Emily said acidly. “But it doesn’t look like the pribir knew what they were doing after all, does it? Lillie’s supposed to have a much boosted immune system, too.”

  Not like mine, Cord didn’t say, because he was too worried about his mother. She smiled at him.

  “I’m all right, Cord. Get out now and I’ll see you and Keith at the lab. Don’t let Kella come, though, or any of the pregnant girls.”

  “They’re not coming, Lillie,” Emily said. “Cord, close the door.”

  He did, feeling relieved. His mother didn’t look sick at all. Whatever it was, the pribir would have guarded against it. They wouldn’t let Lillie die. They were too good for that.

  For the next two weeks, it looked as if Cord were right. Lillie started with merely a headache, which wouldn’t have even been noticed except that none of that group, the twenty-nine-year-olds, ever got headaches. And she couldn’t se
em to sleep, not even fitfully. A few days later those symptoms disappeared, and Emily would have let Lillie out of quarantine if she and Scott hadn’t already discovered the problem.

  “Oh my dear God,” Scott said.

  “I found it on the Net medical library, what’s still functioning of the Net medical library, but I hoped I was wrong,” Emily said, white as bleached bone.

  “No. You’re not wrong.”

  “Can we—”

  “No. I don’t know how to fight this in the brain, Emily. No one does. We’ll have to rely on Lillie’s own immune system.”

  “What is it?” Kella demanded. “Tell me!”

  Lillie’s two sons had waited outside Emily’s lab. They insisted on going with her to Dr. Wilkins in the big house where Kella, eight months pregnant, had joined them. The five people crowded into Dr. Wilkins’s little room, crushing each other between bed and crude dresser, knocking elbows into the enormous curve of Kella’s belly.

  Dr. Wilkins said, “It’s an induced variant of a prion disease.”

  Cord and Keith looked blank. Kella, visibly dredging her memory, said, “That’s … wait a minute … that’s a disease where a protein changes its form and it… does what?”

  Emily said, “Clumps together in sticky, aggregate lumps that disrupt cell structure. And resists all efforts to destroy it. Lillie’s prion changes are in the brain, uninduced by her genes. Something else caused it.”

  “Wait” Kella repeated. “Prion disease … I remember now. That’s no choice for a bioweapon! It takes months to kill, sometimes even years!”

  Dr. Wilkins said, “Ordinarily, yes. But whatever is inducing Lillie’s proteins to refold, it’s designed to act fast. The only reason she isn’t dying now is her boosted immune system. Whatever the pribir did to it, it’s fighting like hell now.”

  Keith, always direct, said, “Well, find whatever’s causing the protein refolds and kill it!”