Nancy Kress (11 page)

Jon went first. Lillie followed, pulling Julie. She stood in a large, empty, completely featureless room with a light source she couldn’t identify. There would have been room for three times as many kids. When everyone was in, the door to the bus closed.

For a long sudden moment, Lillie was afraid. What was she doing here, away from her friends and her school and Uncle Keith and even
Earth?
What if she died here? What if the Net postings and the freak channels were right and the pribir wanted to experiment on humans, to torture them …

She was being stupid. And anyway, there wasn’t anything she could do except face whatever was coming. She was here.

A second door slid upwards at the other end of the room. A man and a woman came through, then stopped. They looked like normal people dressed in normal jeans and T-shirts, except …
better.
The woman had a perfect body, high breasts and slim waist and long, long legs. Her shoulder-length hair bounced and shone. The man was hot, with great shoulders and deep brown eyes. Lillie breathed in and suddenly she knew everything they wanted to tell her about themselves.

They had been engineered to match the television broadcasts the pribir had intercepted from Earth. All their lives they had trained for this moment. They knew everything about Earth that it was possible to learn from either TV or high-resolution satellites. They had all the abilities Lillie had, plus more that could be made to fit with these bodies. They would live and die in these bodies, and the purpose of their lives was to bring to Earth genetic gifts —so many genetic gifts!—that would help humans have all the freedom and adaptability and health that they did.

“Fucking A,” Jason said softly.

The man and woman came forward. They spoke carefully, as if the language was familiar but the act of speaking by voice was not.

“Hello. I am Pete.”

“I am Pam.”

Lillie giggled. She couldn’t help it. Pete and Pam! Humans finally met aliens and their names were Pete and Pam, like some dorky TV sitcom! She laughed, and Jason laughed, and suddenly nearly all of them were laughing, whooping and hollering, unable to stop. It was so ridiculous, it was such a release from tension, it was just hilarious. Lillie tried to stop laughing, couldn’t, and leaned on Emily, weak with hilarity. Only Sam, Elizabeth, and Julie weren’t laughing. Sam, Lillie had always suspected, had no sense of humor. Elizabeth was lost in some religious fog. And Julie was too scared to laugh, although how anybody could be scared … “Pete” and “Pam”! And she was off again.

Finally she stopped, and was appalled. Impulsively she strode forward and held out her hand. “I’m so sorry … we’re all sorry. I guess it’s the … the strain. Please forgive us. We weren’t laughing at you, and we’re all glad to be here. Really!”

Pam smiled uncertainly. Up close, Lillie could see that her eyes were subtly different. Beautiful, but not… just somehow different. What did they see?

“Yes, forgive us,” Jon said. “God, we must seem … We are glad to meet you guys. It’s nice to communicate two ways instead of one.

Murmurs of assent from the others, straggling belatedly toward manners.

“And we’re glad you’re here,” Pete said. “Are you tired? I know we took you from the middle of your sleep cycle.”

Emily, the scholarship girl at a brainy private school, said, “The middle of ‘our’ sleep cycle? Do you have a different cycle?”

“We don’t sleep,” Pam said, and it came to Lillie with a jolt that no matter how Pete and Pam looked, no matter how similar the DNA their race had started with, these people were not human in the same way Lillie was human. Once, maybe. Not any more. They were alien.

The thought didn’t scare her. In fact, the jolt was more pleasant than not. Alien was new, was interesting. There were great adventures ahead.

Her excitement or their chemical messages affecting her brain?

Shut up, Uncle Keith,
she said to her memory. Aloud she added, “I don’t think any of us are really tired. At least, I’m not. I’m too excited!”

“God, yes,” Rafe said. “What kind of drive does this ship use?”

Pete laughed. It sounded vaguely rehearsed. Poor man, he needed to find more things funny.

“We will answer all your questions,” he said, “over time. Maybe you would like to start with a tour of the ship? To see some of the right way?”

“God, yes,” Rafe said.

“Then come on!”

It wasn’t a tour of the whole ship, and it was going to take a very long time to answer everybody’s questions.

Lillie reached these conclusions after just a week aboard the ship. Madison had asked what it was named, and Pam said it didn’t have a name. It was just “the ship.” She’d lived on it her whole life. Madison thought that was dorky and she and Emily had christened the ship
High Flyer.
Sajelle said that was just as dorky; it sounded like a cheerleading squad. Madison, who’d been a cheerleader, was offended, but gradually everyone began referring to the ship as the
Flyer
simply out of convenience.

It was evident they were being restricted to a small part of it. There were doors Pam and Pete went through that no one else could open. Lillie didn’t really mind; what they were given was fascinating.

“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever sat on,” Madison said, bouncing on it.

“I think it’s creepy,” Sophie said, without rancor.

Lillie stood with them in Madison’s room. Each person had their own room, but they were all exactly the same, branching off a corridor so featureless that people walked into the wrong room all the time, backing out only when they saw another person’s meager possessions. Each room had a plain metal box that opened like a footlocker, a small metal table, two chairs, and a bed that was just a platform jutting out from the wall. The bed and the chairs were made of the same stuff as the seats on the bus; they molded themselves to whoever lay or sat in them. The pillow did the same. Each room had a blanket. Bed, squishy chairs, pillow, and blanket were all the same shade of light tan.

Immediately everyone had tried to personalize the rooms, spreading out whatever stuff they’d brought. Since some people brought more than others, the results differed wildly. Rafe had brought only his handheld, which sat on top of his footlocker. Madison had lugged a big suitcase full of stuff, including clothes, make-up, mirror, a holo poster of her favorite rock band, and a teddy bear dressed in a cheerleading outfit. Lillie hadn’t brought much, but she asked Pam for scissors and tacks and cut up her bright blue sweater to make a wall hanging. She didn’t need a sweater aboard the
Flyer.
It was never cold, never hot, always comfortable.

At the end of the hall were two bathrooms, boys and girls, and a sealed machine that you stuffed dirty clothes into. A few minutes later they came out a slot, perfectly clean and ironed. Rafe, fascinated, tried to take this apart to see how it worked, but the metal box, as featureless and strong as everything else, wouldn’t give.

There was a big common room with more of the tables and chairs. Three times a day the wall disgorged a trolley piled with food and dishes. When they gingerly tasted the food, the kids gazed at each other in astonishment.

“God, this is good!” Susan said, helping herself to more mashed potatoes.

“Pass that salad.”

“Give me some first, Jon.”

“Greedy box!”

“Like you should talk. How much of that casserole did you eat?”

Lillie had eaten a lot of the pasta casserole, which tasted as wonderful as everything else. Her belly felt full, and warm, and contented. She resented it when Sam began to complain.

“Yeah, it’s good, but there’s no meat. Future meals better have some meat. I hope Pam and Pete aren’t fucking vegetarians.”

“If the food stays this good, I won’t even miss meat,” Susan said.

“You don’t need it, Lardball. I want protein.”

Madison whispered to Susan, who was overweight and sensitive about it, “Don’t mind Sam. He’s just a stupid bully.”

True, Lillie thought. Although Susan could stand to lose thirty pounds. Madison, despite the perky cheerleader beauty that made some girls distrust her, was a kind person.

Lillie considered the kids. She herself was the tallest girl and, after Madison and Hannah and Sajelle, probably the prettiest. Sajelle was pretty in that way black girls sometimes had, sort of sassy, with her dreads bobbing on her shoulders and her ass all curvy. Rebecca, whose parents came from China or Vietnam or someplace, had gorgeous hair, long and black and shining, but her skin was bad. The other girls looked average except for poor Elizabeth, with her huge chin and squinty eyes and skin as bad as Rebecca’s. Of the boys, Jason, who wanted to be an actor, was really hot. Mike and Jon were cute. Sam looked like a thug, but he had a good body. Alex was too skinny, Rafe only about five foot three. Derek, the other African American, was all right but not as cute as DeWayne, the black guy who had stayed behind.

Her mind seized on DeWayne.

That was why she was judging everybody’s looks. She could picture DeWayne Freeman. Also the others who stayed behind: Robin Perry and Scott Wilkins and, of course, Theresa. But she couldn’t picture the kids who had died in the explosion at the Youth Center. She knew their names. She’d lived with them at Andrews for months. But she couldn’t remember what any of them looked like.

In fact, she hardly thought about them at all.

Lillie frowned. That didn’t seem right. Some of those kids— Tara, for instance-she’d hung around with a lot. When Lillie’s mom died, she couldn’t think of anything else for so long, and it hurt so much that sometimes she’d had trouble keeping it from showing. Of course, a mom was different than friends, but still it—

“If you’re all done eating, come with me,” Pam said. Lillie hadn’t even heard her come in. “I have more of the ship to show you. Parts you’ll like.”

“She always so sure what we going to like,” Sajelle grumbled, but she rose along with everybody else.

And they did like it. Pam led them through a door into a huge park. So big … how could a park be so big aboard a ship! How large was this spaceship, anyway?

“Wow!” Madison said.

“It’s … incredible,” Sophie said and not even Sam, scornful of everything, disagreed.

They ran through the park, exploring. It was incredible. There was a garden, with the most beautiful flower beds Lillie had ever seen. A big grassy lawn. A woods at one end, thick with trees through which ran narrow winding paths. A
pond,
for God’s sake, big enough to swim in. A paved area with a basketball hoop; three balls sat neatly underneath its regulation ten-foot height. A second paved area was furnished with tables and chairs like a little outdoor cafe, surrounded by yet more glorious flower beds.

“This is where I’m going to be,” Derek said happily. “Just pull my bed off the wall and put it here.”

“No,” Pam said. “Another room is where you’ll spend most of your time. Come.”

It took a while for everyone to obey. Some were in the woods, some inspecting flowers. Jason, the showoff, had actually taken off his running shoes and socks and waded into the pond. Derek and Mike were checking out the basketball court.

Pam waited patiently while Jon, Lillie, and the energetic Madison rounded everyone up.

“This is the most important part of your ship,” Pam said, and Lillie noted the wording. Your
ship.
What was their ship? “Follow me. Come.”

“She sure is bossy,” Sajelle said, but not very loud.

Pam led them to a room reached through a door in the garden wall; Pete waited there. The room looked pretty boring. More metal tables and moldable tan chairs. Two walls were lined with closed cupboards.

Pam said, “This is the school.”

Lillie and Jon looked at each other. Derek said with comic exaggeration, “Say what?”

“The school,” Pam said.

Madison said, “We’re going to
school
here?”

“Yes, of course,” Pete said.

Lillie was the first to break a long silence. “What are we going to learn?” Somehow she couldn’t imagine Pam and Pete teaching American history or
Great Expectations.

“You’re going to learn the right way. As much of it as you can.”

“The right way?” Lillie repeated, sounding to herself like an idiot. “You mean, we’re going to learn genetics?”

“Yes. But not until tomorrow. We have made the ship to follow your day-night patterns. In a few hours the lights will dim for sleep. They will come back on eight hours later for washing, breakfast, and then school. You have a great deal to learn, you know. But it will be fun.