Nancy Kress (10 page)

‘A little more than kin, and less than kind:

—
William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

Uncle Keith didn’t understand. He never had, much as he loved her. No one had ever understood her, and Lillie had grown used to that, but still her heart beat faster as she crept along the corridor of the dormitory at Quantico. But the pribir would be different.

“Tess?” she whispered in Theresa’s doorway, although there was no need to whisper, “Are you with us or not?”

Theresa materialized from the bed. Her face, surrounded by wild masses of black hair, looked scared. “I … I still don’t know.”

“You have to decide,” Lillie said relentlessly. Then, because she knew how scared Theresa was, she added in a softer tone, “You don’t have to come, you know. It’s all right to stay. The pribir might need people here, too.”

Theresa gave a strangled little laugh. “I’m afraid to stay here, too.”

“Well, you have to do one or the other.”

“I’ll … I’ll come.”

She grabbed Lillie’s hand. Theresa’s was icy. Lillie squeezed her friend’s fingers reassuringly. “Get dressed. Something warm.”

“Wait for me! Don’t go ahead!”

Lillie waited while Theresa pulled on jeans, running shoes, and a Land’s End sweater. She threw more clothes, all her make-up, and a plush stuffed turtle into her pillowcase. “Okay, I’m ready.”

The two girls slipped down the hallway. In the lounge downstairs most of the others waited. The ones who were going carried suitcases or pillowcases of belongings. The ones who were staying still wore nightclothes.

In the lobby a Marine lay stretched out on the floor, deeply asleep.

“It’s like fucking Sleeping Beauty,” Jessica Kameny snickered. She was the only one of the girls who had taken time to put on make-up.

Jon Rosinski said, “So how many are going? Stand over here.”

Twenty kids moved toward Jon, fourteen girls and six boys. Some, Lillie knew, had only decided in the last fifteen minutes, even though they’d all smelled the plan last evening. She scanned the leavers. Mike Franzi, good, you could always count on Mike. Tess, Amy, Sajelle, Rebecca, Bonnie …
Elizabeth?
That could be real trouble. Jason, Susan, the obnoxious Jessica, too bad she didn’t stay down here. Madison, Emily, Sam, that was another one she could do without. Hannah, Rafe, Alex, Derek, Sophie, Julie … Julie? A major surprise. And Jon, their not-unchallenged organizer, although Lillie wasn’t too bad at organization herself.

The kids looked at each other.

Theresa said suddenly to Robin, who was staying, “Tell my dad I said I love him, okay?” Robin nodded. “Let’s go,” Jon said.

The twenty-one walked out of the dorm. Another Marine lay asleep outside. The night was warm, but of course they didn’t know what weather might come next.
Weather?
Wrong word.

Theresa groped for Lillie’s hand and held on tight.

“Well, now what, genius?” Jessica said to Jon. She spoke very loud, as if to challenge the sleep infecting everyone for … how many square miles? Lillie didn’t know.

“Lay off, Jessie,” Bonnie told her. Lillie approved. Jon didn’t know what was going to happen, any more than anybody else. The pribir had smelled to them clear pictures of where to wait, but nothing after that.

Jon led them to the empty grassy area. Lillie didn’t know what it was for; she’d never been on a Marine base before. A flagpole, now with no flag, they must take it down at night, stood at one end. The pribir had smelled to go to a big open area. They would see the kids if they did. That didn’t surprise Lillie; she had learned at school that even humans had space satellites that could read license plates. And these were the pribir.

A long slow tightening started in her belly. She wasn’t afraid, exactly. But this was the biggest thing that had ever happened to her. Or anybody! She clutched her red suitcase.

Half an hour passed and nothing happened. Everyone sat down on the grass. People talked in low voices, but not very much. Even Jessica and Sam weren’t harassing anybody. Elizabeth had her rosary out and was saying her beads, but nobody jeered at her. Elizabeth’s glasses, thick as pottery, glinted in the moonlight.

A light appeared in the sky. Grew brighter.

As one everybody stood up, even though there was no smell. Somebody whimpered … Julie, probably. Julie was afraid of everything. Well, everybody was afraid, why not? But Lillie knew no one would change their mind.

Uncle Keith, plus half the doctors, said that the kids were so accepting of the pribir only because of the chemical cascade in their brains triggered by their extra genes. Lillie knew that wasn’t so. She didn’t know why the others were going with the pribir—probably each person had their own reasons—but she knew why she was. And it wasn’t some chemical in her brain.

The light grew into a ship, soundless and not very big.

Lillie had always felt different. Nobody understood that, not even Uncle Keith. They all thought she was a normal girl, interested in movies and her friends and her grades and her clothes. And she
was.
But underneath, all the time and for as long as she could remember, was this other longing. She thought about things, like death and God and the pointlessness of people being born and living their lives and then dying, over and over through generations, without it meaning anything or going anywhere. What was the point of being alive?

She couldn’t accept the religious answers her mother had liked, a different one every week: Catholicism, Buddhism, Wiccans, evangelicals, whatever. In school they learned about evolution, but what good was evolution in giving life any meaning? None. And it was meaning she longed for. Sometimes the longing felt so sharp she couldn’t breathe.

She knew from books that she wasn’t the first person to feel like that. Over and over she read her favorites:
Of Human Bondage, Steppenwolfe, Time Must Have a Stop.
But Lillie didn’t know Somerset Maugham or Hermann Hesse or Aldous Huxley, and none of the people she did know seemed to have this same longing. Certainly not Uncle Keith or her old best friend Jenny, or Theresa, with whom she’d once tried to discuss all this. A mistake. Tess had only talked about babies being life continuing and how that was enough meaning. Lillie wasn’t much interested in babies. She wanted more than that.

But nobody else seemed to want—no, need—the universe to make sense. Why was that so weird? Why didn’t everybody see how important it was? Such as, only the foundation for how you lived your whole life!

The ship floated to the ground, soft as a feather. It was dull metal now, shaped like an egg and as big as a bus, which is what it probably was.

The pribir, Lillie figured, were her last chance.

A part of the egg’s side slid up. Jon took a step forward, hesitated, stepped back. Julie hid her face in her hands. Elizabeth’s prayers were suddenly audible: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed art thou amongst women—”

Lillie seized Theresa with one hand and Julie with the other. Violently Theresa pulled away.

“I can’t!”

“Come on, Tessie, it’s just a few steps more.”

“No!” And Theresa turned and ran back to the dorm.

Lillie led Julie firmly toward the bus.

Sixty seats, jammed in worse than a Broadway balcony. Well, that made sense. The pribir didn’t know how many would be coming. They only had what Major Connington described as “one-way information flow.”

“At least the seats are shaped right,” Jason said. “Ow, Alex, get off my foot, you dork!”

They had all wondered what the pribir looked like. No pictures had come. That was something Lillie didn’t think she’d ever gotten Uncle Keith to understand: that the information the pribir smelled to them was pictures. The pictures formed in the brain somehow; they were just there, in exactly the same way a picture of an ice cream cone would be there if someone told you to think of an ice cream cone. “But what does it smell like?” everybody asked. It didn’t smell like anything. “Smelling to” someone wasn’t the same as “smelling.”’

“Everybody strap in,” Jon said.

Each seat had straps dangling from its sides. Lillie squeezed into a seat next to Julie, and immediately the seat molded itself to her shape. She jerked up, startled, then settled back down. The straps, which felt like firm jelly, also molded themselves around her.

Rafael, who wanted to be a physicist some day, said, “I wonder how this thing avoided all Earth’s radar setups?”

“However they did it, I’ll bet the military would like to take this baby apart,” Jason said.

Rebecca said severely, “Remember, this isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way. This is only dead materials.”

“Maybe,” said Rafe, “but what materials! Whoooeee!”

Jessica snarled, “Elizabeth, if you don’t stop that stupid praying, I’m going to unstrap and come over there and whip your religious ass.”

“Don’t
anybody
unstrap!” Jon said.

“Jessica, leave her alone,” Bonnie said. “God, even on a major occasion you have to be an asshole.”

“Better that than a lezzie.”

Lillie said, “We’re rising!”

There was no abrupt liftoff, no noise, no windows. At first Lillie didn’t even know how she knew they were rising. Then she realized breathing was harder. Her chest felt constricted, and everything on her body felt heavier.

“I hope,” Rafe said, with difficulty, “that they understand … how many gees … we can … take.”

Of course they understood, Lillie thought. They understood everything about human bodies. Their DNA was her DNA, only they had control of theirs, which meant they had control of everything. The right way. She closed her eyes.

The pressure on her chest never became unbearable, and after a while it went away completely. A series of clear images formed in her mind, one after another. She opened her eyes but didn’t see the source of the smells. Somewhere in the bus.

She saw a human being, a man, naked except for some cloth around his hips, standing beside an ocean. The only thing weird was that the sky was pink, not blue. Next she saw him looking taller, stronger,
healthier
somehow. Genetics had done that.

Next came a man underwater. Parts of him, legs and arms, looked sort of like a fish, but he was still a man. Lillie understood that he had been genetically changed to live in the ocean.

A woman floated in a spaceship. The ship was vague but the woman clear. She had arms where her arms should be and arms where her legs should be, giving her four hands.

“Gross,” someone behind Lillie said.

The next images showed humans changing even more. They didn’t look human anymore. They grew tentacles, or shrank to circles, or had hard shells … all sorts of weird stuff. Then, quickly, came a series of images showing one of these monsters turned back into a human being. Children trooped up to her. Everyone smiled.

“They’ve made themselves look like us, just for our sake,” Emily said. She sounded cheerful. Lillie felt the same way. The pribir could change their babies’ genes to look or do anything they chose. And they had built some to look like Lillie and the others, so their visitors wouldn’t feel too scared. It was a nice thing to do, and it reassured Lillie.

Now, was that gratitude or chemical brainwashing? It sure felt like gratitude.

Jason, the clown, growled in a deep voice like General Richerson’s, ” ‘When you push the envelope of technology, you take major risks with personnel. It’s inevitable.’ ” Someone laughed.

All at once they were all light hearted. Even Elizabeth lowered her rosary, and Julie smiled tremulously.

“Everybody ready to walk into the future?” Jon called.

“I’m going be turned into Charlize Theron,” Madison said.

“I want Isaac Newton’s brain!” Rafe.

“Engineer me a bodacious bod, baby!”

“It’s not us … it’s our
kids.
Make mine geniuses!”

“Make mine rich!”

“Forget the kids… I want mine now! Give me sex hormones to kayak night and day!”

“Jason, you’d be lucky to get to kayak once,” Derek laughed. “Now
me…”

“Hush your mouth,” Sajelle said suddenly. “We here.”

The door to the bus opened. The mood changed abruptly.

Lillie unstrapped herself. Julie sat frozen, looking up at her piteously. Lillie said, “Come on, Julie. You can do it. Just stay by me. Emily, help Susan, she’s tangled up. Elizabeth, pray to yourself.”