Nancy Kress

by Nothing Human

  Just as Pete and Pam had said. “What your perversions of the right way have done to the planet … We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you!’ These days Lillie seldom thought of the pribir. They had said they’d return “soon,” but to pribir that didn’t mean the same thing as to humans.

  She said, “Come in, Jody. We’ll take our chances with you if you will with us. We’re still family, and you look completely tired out. We have some very good stew left from dinner.”

  Jody hesitated, then clumped wearily up the steps. He halted at the children clustered behind the adults: Vervain, Stone, Lonette, Raindrop, little Theresa. Lillie saw his eyes scan them, then look beyond them down the length of the porch. His face relaxed when he didn’t see her triplets.

  He ate the stew greedily, the kids clustering wide-eyed around this new “uncle.” As Jody ate, he filled them in on news of the farm. There were only ten head of cattle left, but those were healthy as long as they stayed out of the daylight heat. Two years ago Sajelle and DeWayne had had another child, which shocked and pleased them both. DeWayne was seventy-seven now, as old as Scott, but going strong. (Scott grimaced.) The farm had two new windmills, but the generator no longer worked and so the windmills drove crankshafts. Rafe and Jason had built a better irrigation system, which conserved water from the storms better and also kept flooding down. A few Net sites were still responding on the old computer, there were people left in the world, but not in Wenton where Dakota and Susie and Sam had gone and brought back a great find of useful objects, all sorts of—

  Dion stood in the doorway of the big house, blinking in the candlelight after the dark path up from the woods.

  Jody put down his spoon and stood. He said nothing. Lillie saw that he was holding his breath against any olfactory molecules, and that although he hated himself for doing it, he couldn’t stop himself. Jody walked carefully past Dion, went down the porch steps, and mounted his horse. Several yards away he turned and looked at Lillie. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

  “Jody―”

  But he was gone, from embarrassment and guilt and old, old anger. Probably Jody wouldn’t try to get all the way to the farm tonight, in the dark. He’d camp somewhere not all that far from here, with the insects and vermin and possible rain, rather than be manipulated by scent into accepting Lillie’s children.

  “Who was that?” Dion smelled to everyone at the same time that Lonette said plaintively, “Why did Uncle Jody go away?”

  No one answered either of them.

  ———

  The climate changes accelerated. The pounding rains all but ceased. Streams went dry. The winds still blew fiercely, but with each year they carried less moisture. Certain wildflowers retreated to growing only along streams or in run-off pockets of moisture. Others disappeared altogether.

  Scott, now mostly bedridden but still clear-minded, said, “It all goes back to the oceans. If we had the computer, maybe we could tell what’s going on. But if the ocean gets warmer or colder in different places, or currents shift for any reason, then winds shift. If winds shift, everything else changes. Precipitation, evaporation, the whole nine yards.”

  Lillie tried to remember the last time she had heard anyone say the whole nine yards. When Scott’s generation, which was also her generation, went, no one ever would again.

  “Maybe the ocean currents will shift back,” Cord said.

  Scott smiled sadly. “Did you know that during the last ice age, glaciers extended as far south as Ruidoso?”

  “Glaciers,” Cord said wonderingly, and looked through the open door at the hot, parched pines.

  Wildfires increased dramatically. Any stray bolt of lightning could start a fire. The first time one began several miles away, Lillie sat on the porch and watched the black clouds of smoke rise and blot out the sun. That fire didn’t last too long. Afterward, the sunsets and sunrises were glorious. There was still some rain in some months, and she thought they were probably safe for now.

  The next year, there were more wildfires.

  The triplets were ten years old. With the other children, they hauled water and gathered firewood and hoed crops and pounded chicory nuts. Their long, soft tentacles, seven on each hand, were good at using tools: sewing needles, meat grinders, knives. Like the others, they could skin an animal and debone a fish. They were better than the others at learning everything Scott could teach them about genetics, everything Alex knew about building things, all the poetry and history and physics from their few precious books. They worked cheerfully, played happily, and, always, kept their private “conversations” private. Lillie had no idea what they smelled among themselves. She didn’t even have any proof that they did, that any exchange of olfactory molecules existed except the ones that everyone could receive. No proof, but she knew it happened. She was their mother.

  “I don’t like them anymore,” she once overheard Stone say to his sister.

  “Oh, they’re all right,” Vervain replied. “They’re just different. Look … what’s that over those trees, up in the sky?”

  Lillie’s breath caught. She whirled to look where Vervain pointed, but it was only a trick of the clouds, the light, the shimmering heat.

  One blisteringly hot day in June, Gaia, Rhea, and Dion had been sent out to fill in the old latrine and dig a new one. Lillie felt vaguely guilty about assigning them this chore. But they seemed to mind it much less than anyone else did; in fact, it didn’t seem to bother them at all. Could they selectively close their receptors to certain odors? She didn’t know. Nor did they mind the sun streaming down on them, and Scott said they didn’t have to. Their gray-green scales, flexible carapace, and mysterious genetic cooling system meant they didn’t have to wear so much as a hat, although Dion often did. He said he liked the look of hats, and he tried to persuade his sisters to wear them, but the girls refused.

  It was all right to assign them latrine duty three times in a row.

  No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t fair. The other kids were inside, doing unstrenuous tasks. Lonette was actually asleep. Lillie decided to at least take the triplets a plate of cookies. The “cookies” were a recipe Clari had invented, using pounded acorn flour and agave syrup to create a sweet, sticky confection. All eight kids loved them.

  Lillie put on a hat with neck shades, a jacket with long sleeves, and her boots, now so worn that any minute they were going to develop another hole to patch. She covered the plate of sticky cookies with a light cloth against bugs and set out for the main latrine. Unlike the nighttime privy, which was conveniently close to the house, the daytime latrine lay down the mountain beyond a grove of pines, below the water supply and downwind.

  It was relatively cool under the pines. Lillie paused a moment, balancing her plate, breathing in the sweet clean fragrance. Then she heard the noise.

  Rhea stood beside the shithole she had just filled in. The wooden seat had already been moved, and another hole was partially dug. Rhea held the shovel in her hand, its handle shortened for her squat frame. Rhea’s big ears had swiveled forward, and her mouthless head on its curving scaly neck jutted a foot in front of her forward-tilted body. Lillie smelled her surprise. Gaia and Dion weren’t in sight.

  The men had stopped beside a creosote bush. There were three of them, dressed in what Lillie recognized from a long time ago as military camouflage. They were unshaven, unwashed. They carried guns.

  “What the hell is that?” one of them cried. He raised his pistol.

  Laser? Projectile? Something Lillie couldn’t even imagine?

  She dropped the cookies and ran forward. Before she even broke cover from the pine grove, the other two men had leveled guns at Rhea. There was no sound, no flash of light. But Rhea dropped to the ground and a tree behind Lillie exploded.

  Then all three men dropped their guns, shrieked in pain as they clutched their heads, and collapsed.

  Lillie ru
shed to Rhea. The little girl, so flattened to the ground that she’d been nowhere higher than the thickness of her head, was already getting up. She smelled “Mommy!” and rushed to Lillie, clutching her mother’s knees. Lillie snatched her up and was starting to run when Gaia smelled to her, “Stop. They’re all dead.”

  Slowly Lillie turned with Rhea awkwardly, heavily in her arms.

  Gaia stood over the three men. Dion was emerging from brush a short distance away. Lillie smelled both of their grimness, their anger. She put Rhea on the ground and walked over to the men, bent, felt for pulses in their necks. They were dead.

  “What… what did you do?”

  Gaia tilted her head back to say aloud with stout determination, “They were going to kill Rhea!”

  “What did you do, Gaia? Dion?”

  Gaia said defensively, “Rhea did it, too.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Rhea retorted. “Mommy was holding me wrong. Just you and Dion did it!”

  “I don’t care,” Dion said. “They were going to hurt Rhea.”

  “Dion, Gaia,” Lillie said, as carefully as she could manage, “what did you do?”

  The two children looked at each other. Finally Dion said, “We noised them. Don’t be mad, Mommy.”

  Gaia added, “We wouldn’t do it if they weren’t hurting Rhea!”

  “I know,” Lillie said. “What do you mean, you ‘noised’ them?”

  “We made the stopping noise,” Dion said. “Like bats do, except theirs doesn’t stop anything.”

  “A very high-pitched noise,” Lillie said, and was met with dumb stares, which she didn’t believe. They understood pitch.

  “If you did that,” she said, still very careful, “if you noised the men’s brains to make them fall over, why didn’t it stop me, too?”

  “We wouldn’t hurt you!” Rhea said, shocked. She’d switched to smelling the concepts to Lillie, as all three children tended to do when emotional. “You’re our mommy!”

  “But why didn’t it stop me?”

  “We only aimed it at them,” Dion said.

  A directed signal, like bats used for navigation. Lillie could understand that. Too high-pitched for her to hear, yes. Very loud, high sounds could cause enough pain to stop the men cold, make them fall down, and then —

  Rhea, watching Lillie from gray gold-flecked eyes, said, “I made the defense poison, Mommy.”

  Defense poison.

  Dion said, “Don’t look like that, Mommy.”

  Rhea smelled fearfully, “Are you mad at us?”

  “No. No, I’m not. Those are bad men, they were going to kill Rhea―”

  “Like Macbeth killed King Duncan,” Gaia said helpfully, and through her confusion and shock Lillie thought again what a heritage her children were getting, what a terrible jumble.

  Gaia said, ”’ By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!’ It’s my turn to dig, Rhea.”

  “I smell cookies,” Dion said. “Did you bring cookies?”

  “Under the pines,” Lillie said, still shaky. Dion took off running. If the cookies were dirty from falling, it wouldn’t matter. The triplets could digest anything.

  Rhea, the most thoughtful, said, “We need to dig a big hole to bury those bad people.”

  “I’ll start the big hole,” Gaia said enthusiastically. “I like to dig.”

  “Well, have a cookie first,” Rhea said.

  Dion returned with the plate, its cookies covered with dried pine needles. The children ate eagerly. “Mommy, do you want one?” Gaia said.

  “No, I… no, I don’t. I need to get out of the sun.” She retreated to the pine grove and lowered herself, trembling, to sit on the fragrant ground.

  What were her children?

  Not human, Emily had cried once. Once, twice, an infinity of times, from everyone who had stayed at the farm. A few minutes ago Gaia, Rhea, Dion had casually killed, without weapons, without contact. Now they sat gobbling sweets like any human children from any place, any time. They learned Shakespeare, history, algebra, their intellectual heritage. They played games with Raindrop and Theresa, Lillie’s grandchildren. They did their chores, sometimes grumbling, sometimes interested.

  They had just casually killed three men. As casually as Alex or Loni killed game for dinner.

  If they had to, if there was nothing else, would her children eat those three men for dinner? Why not? The men were another, lesser species.

  No. Her children were human. The next step in humanity, yes, but human. What made them human was … was…

  Eagerly Gaia began to dig a grave next to the three fallen bodies.

  Not their genes. Not really. Everything on the planet shared the same DNA, base pairs and sugar phosphate spines and protein expression. Everything: bacteria and mesquite and gila monsters and Lillie. DNA didn’t make her children human; God knows what DNA they had in their genome, anyway. Pete and Pam could have put anything in there. Pam and Pete, who also shared this same DNA, and whom Lillie no longer considered human at all.

  Intelligence? Did that make for being human? No. There could be—probably were —all sorts of alien beings out there who were highly intelligent (an oozing glob behind the ship’s garden wall, glimpsed for only a second …) Pam and Pete were intelligent, more so than Lillie, than Lillie’s children. Not intelligence.

  Love? Even animals loved. Dogs, cats… . No. Too sentimental an answer.

  Culture? Gaia could recite whole sections of Shakespeare. Rhea loved the abstract puzzles of geometry. Dion had begun to read Scott’s endless notes on genetics. But what if they couldn’t do those things? If they knew nothing at all of the vast human heritage, nothing, would that make them less human? No. Kalahari bushmen isolated and ignorant of the rest of the world were—had been —fully human.

  Evolution, maybe. Gaia and Rhea and Dion were human because they were born of Lillie, who was born of Barbara, who if you went far enough back would end up sharing a common ancestor with apes, and that ancestor was certainly not human. One thing evolved into another, different thing.

  Which was what was happening here, in front of her very eyes, with help from those who had already gone ahead, taking charge of their own evolution and so becoming something else in the process. Could you start a new race with only three people? Lillie vaguely remembered learning something about an “African Eve,” a single woman who had been the ancestor of everyone alive on Earth before the war. And Scott had told her once of a herd of feral English cattle that had had no new genes available to their tiny pool for over three hundred years, yet the herd had stayed healthy and growing.

  And, of course, there might eventually be more than just Gaia, Rhea, and Dion to start this new race. The pribir had promised to return, and no one really knew what they could, or would, do next.

  Maybe Emily and the others at the farm were right. Maybe Gaia and Rhea and Dion were not human. A new thought came to Lillie: Did it matter?

  It was hard to accept.

  How did you accept such rapid evolution, even if you yourself were causing it? Nations, states, villages had always had trouble accepting people who were “different.” Outsiders. Foreigners. But never before in history had the biological outsiders been your own children, so genetically different that you were watching your own extinction right before you, all at once, in an eyeblink.

  Not human.

  But still hers.

  She got up off the ground to retrieve the discarded plate from the cookies, take it home, wash it, store it away for more sweets, another day, to give her children. They were digging earnestly, “conversing” with each other without sound, feeling the warm sun on bare heads; even Dion had lost his hat. None of them noticed Lillie leave.

  But all of them would look for her when, tired and sweaty and satisfied, they made their way home.

  EPILOGUE: GAIA

  I believe that man will not merely

  endure; he will prevail.”

  —William Faulkner

 
2083

  Gaia emerged from the canyon, carrying an armful of prickly pear fruit she’d stripped off the cacti. Rhea loved juice wrung from the sweet, purplish fruit, and Gaia planned to pulp the pears and boil them into jelly for her sister. This was partly guilt; lately Gaia hadn’t been spending much time with Rhea or Dion. She didn’t know why, but more and more she wanted to go off alone to explore, to taste, to … what? Something. Now she was further from home than she’d ever been.

  “I have immortal longings in me.” Uncle Scott had taught her that, before she could read it for herself. Gaia had loved the old man more than anyone else on Earth, except her mother. He had been so good. The good should never die.

  She dumped the prickly pear fruit into a pile and pulled a stoppered earthen jar from her backpack, the only thing she wore except for her shorts. One by one, she squeezed the fruit above the jar, every motion quick and strong. A bit splashed back, onto the new breasts which had suddenly started swelling on her chest a few months ago. Impatiently Gaia wiped the juice off with her tentacles.

  Someone was coming over the rise to her left.

  Gaia immediately flattened, ready to retract into her shell, but just as quickly she rose again. Her gray, gold-flecked eyes widened.

  A stranger. A boy. Like her cousins, but it wasn’t Stone or Raindrop. She smelled him advancing, not because he was sending her a greeting; he couldn’t do that. Rather, she smelled his body on the wind. Instantly, without volition, Gaia was smelling back to him.

  He could receive. He stopped cold and looked for her.

  For just a second, so brief that later Gaia thought she’d imagined it, the terrible look appeared on his face, the one that Gaia saw sometimes on Alex’s face until she got closer to him. She’d learned to accept it from Alex, although she avoided him as much as possible. But she couldn’t have seen that look on this boy’s face because the next moment he was striding toward her, his face with all those unnecessary holes more alight and curious and interested than Alex had ever been.