Nancy Kress (13 page)

Jason said, “We don’t know! How would we know? We just passed on to doctors the stuff you smelled to us.”

Pete and Pam looked at each other. When they weren’t talking to the kids, their faces went completely blank. They were smelling to each other, Lillie suddenly realized, in some way the kids couldn’t detect. Some genetic receiver they hadn’t been engineered to have. Like a secret code.

Pete said, “We know you can’t perform the genetic alterations we sent you, of course. Trained people must do that. But surely you understood the information? It’s pretty simple.”

“Simple my ass,” Jessica said.

“What do you think we are?” Sam said.

Sophie stood. “I don’t need this shit.” She started toward the door.

A babble of voices broke out, arguing with each other. Rebecca grabbed at Sophie’s hand to stop her from leaving, and Sophie pulled away angrily. Voices rose higher. Lillie stood and shouted over the din.

“Pam, Pete, you just need to start back farther! So we can understand!”

Mike stood, too. “Lillie’s right. Shut up everybody. It’s just a misunderstanding.”

Slowly everyone quieted. Mike, sensible and low-key, addressed the pribir. “You learned a lot from our TV broadcasts or you couldn’t act and talk so human, but—”

“We are human,” Pam said, with a tiny spark of something that might have been anger, the first Lillie had seen from either of them.

“If you say so,” Mike said. “But the point is that the TV shows don’t really tell what kids our age know or don’t know. So you guessed. But we don’t know as much as you think. You need to start teaching us — ” He hesitated, glanced at Sam “—pretty basic stuff. Like, what a gene is. And a chromosome. And … what was that thing you said yesterday, Emily?”

Emily, all attention suddenly on her, blushed. “A codon. Or whatever you pri … whatever Pam and Pete call a group of three base pairs that codes for an amino acid.”

Pam and Pete looked as confused as the kids, and Lillie suddenly saw the problem. TV shows were usually about murders or love affairs or dumb families or sexy dancers. Stuff like genetic information was all over the Net, but it wasn’t broadcasted into space. Pam and Pete didn’t even have the words Emily was using, not only “codon” (what was a codon?) but even “amino acid,” which Lillie had heard of. Vaguely.

However, the pribir caught on quickly. “Yes,” Pam said, with one of her smiles that Lillie suddenly realized was also copied from TV shows. “I see. Okay, we’ll start with … with this.”

Lillie smelled another image: a double spiraling staircase with weirdly crooked outsides.

“Big deal,” Jessica said. “What the hell is that?”

Pam and Pete looked surprised.
Well,
Lillie thought,
that isn’t a facial expression they learned from
TV
and practiced carefully.
The surprise looked totally genuine. Maybe some expressions were the same even for hundreds-year-old humans from another star.

Rafe said impatiently, “It’s a double helix, dummy. DNA.”

“You call me ‘dummy’ again and I’ll beat you to mush,” Jessica said. No one doubted she could do it.

Lillie and Mike were still standing, although Sophie had sat down again. Mike said calmly, “Look. There’s a way to do this. Emily and Rafe, you know this stuff already. The basics, anyway. You go up there with Pam and Pete and when they smell us something, you explain in our words what it is.”

Emily shook her head, red-faced. Rafe said, “Okay,” and bounded to the front of the room. Madison shoved Emily until Emily joined him.

“This is good,” Pam said, beaming again. “We’ll learn your words for concepts. And we can provide the materials.”

The tabletops opened. No, not “opened” … they sort of
dissolved.
Inside was a bunch of stuff Lillie couldn’t identify. Black boxes, thin weird-shaped jars, pieces of what looked like equipment.

“Lab time,” Hannah said.

“Yes,” Pete agreed. “You will alter a bacteria today.”

Jon blurted, “We’re going to
do
genetic engineering?”

“Yes, of course,” Pete said, surprised again.

“Bonus!” Jason said. “Can I engineer a porno goddess?”

“Like you could do it without giving her three tits,” Sam said.

“That’d be okay!”

Rebecca said, “I’m not touching that stuff. Bacteria! How do you know it isn’t dangerous?”

“Nothing is dangerous,” Pam said earnestly. “And if an error occurs, Pete and I will rebuild it.”

“Rebuild Rafe, then,” Jason said. “Make him taller than a third-grader.”

“Ha ha,” Rafe said, from the front of the room.

“Let’s begin,” Pam said.

It was the strangest lesson Lillie had ever had. Images formed in her mind; Emily and Rafe explained them as well as they could; Pete and Pam instantly learned the vocal terminology from them and explained further. Some images were pictures to remember, and to her surprise Lillie found that now she remembered them easily, without even taking notes. Some images were instructions on how to use the gene-building equipment, and she remembered those, too. The four girls at her table worked together all day, and it felt good.

Sajelle, Lillie realized with amusement, hadn’t even needed to read anything.

They discussed it all at dinner, another incredible meal. “They did something to our minds,” Jon said. “This time I’m sure.”

Rebecca stopped eating. “What do you mean, ‘did something to our minds’?”

“I don’t like school much,” Jon said. “And there’s no way I’d do biology all day like that unless I was on something. They put some gas in the room, I bet. So we’d
like
learning genetics.”

Madison considered this. “If they did … does it matter? Isn’t it just like … I don’t know … using fizzies to get a little higher jump for a dance routine?”

Sam snorted. “That’s probably the only thing you
did
use fizzies for in your milk-cum school.”

Mike, logical, said, “The difference, Madison, is that you chose to use fizzies for dance. This was done without our choice. If it was done at all.”

Lillie remembered how contentedly she’d worked for hours and hours at something that didn’t ordinarily interest her. And now she remembered everything she’d learned. “It was done to us, Mike.”

He nodded. “You’re probably right.”

By now the whole table had stopped eating to listen. Jessica said, “Nobody’s going to fuck with my mind! Tomorrow they can just crawl up their own asses. I’m not going back.”

“Me either,” Sophie said.

A motion at the end of the table caught Lillie’s eye. Elizabeth swayed, her face grotesquely distorted. She looked like she was in the worst imaginable pain. A minute later she fainted, crashing off her chair.

Someone screamed. Rafe said importantly, “Let me by! I know CPR!” But Elizabeth didn’t need CPR. She revived almost instantly. As she pulled herself off the floor, her limp long hair swung over her face, hiding it, but not before Lillie saw the return of Elizabeth’s anguish and her eyes fill with tears. The pain wasn’t physical; Elizabeth jumped up and ran out of the commons toward her room.

“Fucking nuts,” Sam said.

“Why should she mind having her mind manipulated?” Rebecca said. “It already is by that so-called religion of hers.”

“Naw. Four-eyes just can’t stand to feel good.”

“Feeling good might feel seeexxxxyyyy.”

“A sin! God will punish her!”

“That’s enough, you morons,” Madison said.

People resumed eating, except for a foul-mouthed group at Sam’s end of the table who went on riffing about Elizabeth. Madison scowled at them. Julie seemed close to tears.

Lillie put another forkful of spiced carrots in her mouth. It wasn’t that Elizabeth minded feeling good. Elizabeth was caught. If she went to class, she’d voluntarily give her mind over to forces of the devil. If she didn’t go, she couldn’t learn to “undo” the genetic engineering the forces of the devil had already done to her. God wanted her to go to class; it was a sin against God to go to class. Never mind that none of this was true; Elizabeth believed it was true. And was filled with horror and pain.

Lillie felt sorry for Elizabeth. But she didn’t go after her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

After dinner everybody except Elizabeth went to the garden, their favorite spot. Lillie was surprised when Mike dropped beside her on the grass. “Lillie, I want to ask you something.”

She felt herself color. “Yeah?”

He said, “Remember yesterday? We left Quantico in the middle of the night, and everybody was too excited to sleep, so we got a tour of the
Flyer
and we see our rooms and everything. Then all of a sudden we’re being taken to eat dinner, see the garden, and lights out for night. What happened to all the hours of that night and day in between arriving and dinner?”

Lillie was confused. “I don’t know. I guess we slept. Yes, we did … I woke up in my bed just before we ate dinner.”

“But do you remember going to sleep in your bed?”

“Well, I … no. I don’t. But I must have.”

“Or we were put to sleep.”

Slowly Lillie nodded.

“Well,” Mike said, getting up awkwardly, “I just thought I’d ask.” He strolled off toward the basketball court.

Despite herself, Lillie watched him go. He had a nice body. Not as tall as Jason or Jon, a little pudgy in the middle maybe, but nice.

Madison and Rebecca came over. Lillie bent over, pretending to look for four-leaf clovers in the grass so they wouldn’t see her blushing.

The next day, everyone was in class right after breakfast, including Jessica, Sophie, and Elizabeth. And the day after that, and the day after that. It took Lillie by surprise to realize that weeks were sliding by.

Three weeks. Four. Seven. Ten. How could it have been ten weeks already? Lillie meant to ask Pam or Pete when they were going back down to Earth. She needed to see … who? Oh, Uncle Keith! Of course! She would ask tomorrow.

Tomorrow came, and somehow she forgot.

Twelve weeks. Fourteen. She forgot to keep track.

Each day was exactly the same as the others. Shower, breakfast, class all day, dinner. Evenings in the garden having fun. Pam was teaching three girls plus Rafe to genetically engineer flowers. Games had materialized, after being requested and described: Chess. Cards. Chinese checkers. Hannah had brought a music-cube with her, programmed with hit songs. Her favorite was “Don’t Matter None to Me,” by Printer Scream, and she played it over and over in the “cafe.” Basketball remained popular. It was hard to say what they all did, exactly, in the garden every evening, but the time passed and it was all fun. There were arguments but no fights. Even Sam, the bully, and Jessica, the bitch, didn’t cause too much trouble.

Lillie hung around mostly with Madison and Sajelle. Sajelle’s older sister, fifteen, had already had a baby.

“Last year,” she told them matter-of-facfly. “My mother really mad. She wanted Dee to finish high school, get herself a decent job. But Dee and Ty … you know. And the baby so darling! You should see her.”

“What’s her name?” Madison asked, not quite able to hide her disapproval.

“Kezia.” Sajelle frowned. “You know … I miss her, but I …” She searched for words, didn’t find them, let her hands fall helplessly into her lap.

You miss her but you don’t miss her,
Lillie said silently. She knew. She still couldn’t remember Jenny’s face.

But she remembered all the genetics from class.

She knew the location on the human genome of a hundred and sixty genes, what proteins they could express, and how to alter many of them to express something else. She could turn genes on or off by manipulating their promoters, and could then use the results to turn off or on other genes, creating dozens of combinations of different effects. She had custom-built a bacteria capable of learning where she would put out its “food.” She had learned to splice in extra copies of genes, cut out copies of genes, locate and replace damaged genes. She understood none of the equipment she used, but she could manipulate it expertly. So could all of them.

Only once did she question what she was doing. Rafe and she happened to be sitting at a table in the garden, drinking glasses of cold water flavored with some delicious plant that Pete had taught Sophie to grow. The others had left. Rafe said abruptly, “It’s not new, you know.”