Nancy Kress (20 page)

Somewhere behind her, one of the kids cried out.

Where were they all going to go? Trains still ran, sometimes, if no eco-groups sabotaged. The Net might be able to track down these kids’ relatives, or it might not. The farm couldn’t feed nineteen more people, twelve of them probably pregnant.

Behind her, the bus had fallen deadly quiet.

Two hours later, Theresa stopped the bus, which had —miracle, miracle!—held together, in the space between the barn and the farm wellhouse. Her practiced eye ran over the farm; everything looked all right. Her three sons were out with the cattle, following them around on summer forage to check that their GPS collars still worked, and to make sure nobody stole a cow. Her daughter Senni had shifted the garden-guards against the hot wind. The huge rain cisterns were still half full; the windmills whirred frantically. Behind the chicken coop, their current and temporary farmhand, Ramon, was slaughtering a chicken.

Senni came out of the house onto the porch, expressionless, as the kids got off the bus. The hot wind whipped Senni’s short hair into a dirty froth. Hurriedly, squinting, the pribir children covered the distance from the bus to the doorway.

“The pribir children.”
How long since Theresa had said that phrase? Or even thought it?

Inside, they looked around at the large adobe-walled great room, as wind-tight as Theresa could make it, lit at this hour only by light from the small windows. Some of the kids looked bewildered, some angry, a few in shock. Well, Theresa couldn’t blame them.

“Sit on the floor,” she said gently. “We don’t have enough chairs. This is my daughter Senni and my granddaughter Dolly, who’s almost two.”

Lillie’s face turned slowly toward the baby.

“I guess the next thing is food,” Theresa continued. “Are you hungry? Senni, did you make that soup?”

“Yes,” Senni said sullenly. They’d argued about it before Theresa left. Silently Senni ladled out steaming bowls. Lillie got up and passed a bowl to each kid. She’d always been sensible, Lillie had. Solid. A few children started eating, but most did not.

Scott said, “Where’s your computer, Tess?”

Senni started. No one had called Theresa “Tess” for forty years.

“I’ll get it,” she told Scott, and fetched the ancient thing from the bedroom. Carlo kept it running, the only techie among her four children. She put the computer on the long wooden table.

“Good God,” Scott said, “does it work?”

“Not for me,” Theresa said. “You any good at tech, Scott?”

“I can manage. Voice control?”

“Only Three-A. You’d best use the keyboard except for simple stuff.”

Scott sat on a chair and turned the computer on. Abruptly Rafe rose from the floor and stood beside Scott. That’s right, Rafe had always been interested in machines. Theresa watched them, the sun-wrinkled middle-aged man (there was no other kind, now) and the young boy, who had been born in the same year.

Scott linked the computer to the wireless Net. Rafe said, “Basic information search. Rafael Domingo Fernando,” and Scott looked up at him.

“Not your name, Rafe,” he said gently. “You’ll be listed as dead. Your parents’ names.”

Rafe said, “Angela Santos Fernando and Carlos Juan Fernando.”

Scott entered the names. Theresa saw that he was trying to shield the screen from Rafe, who saw it anyway. Rafe said in a flat voice, “Both dead.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“An older brother. Maximilliano Fernando.”

“Do you know his citizen I.D. number?”

“No.”

“Birthday?”

“September 7, 1996.”

“Okay. This is him … he’s living in Durham, North Carolina. There’s an e-mail address listed. Do you want to mail him?”

And say what?
Theresa thought. Here I am, back from the dead, a fourteen-year-old kid?

Rafe said, his voice finally unsteady, “In … in a minute. Do someone else first.”

Theresa couldn’t stand it. All right, she was a coward, she couldn’t watch. She picked up Dolly. “Her diaper’s dirty. I better change it.” She carried the baby into the bedroom.

Senni followed her. “Mom, what the hell are you doing? Where are these kids supposed to go?”

Theresa turned on her daughter, glad to have someone to yell at. “I don’t know! But I couldn’t just leave them out there! These are—were—my friends! Lillie …” But there was no way to explain to Senni what she and Lillie had once been to each other, in those extraordinary circumstances that could never come again. “Senni, whatever the others do, Lillie at least is staying here. I know she hasn’t got anywhere else to go.”

Senni flounced out of the room. She, too, was pregnant, with her dead husband’s last legacy. Theresa sighed.

She lingered over Dolly, playing with her, rocking her to sleep, fussing with the blanket in the crib that Senni had made out of a dresser drawer.

When Theresa went back into the room, three girls were crying. Two boys yelled at Scott, who was showing superhuman patience. Sophie, whom Theresa had never liked, strode up to her and demanded, “Can you take me to the train today? Train to New York?”

“No, not today,” Theresa answered. She understood, as she had not forty years ago, that Sophie’s belligerence sprang from insecurity and youth. But Sophie didn’t understand that winds and storms made day travel on the plains risky; that a train all the way to New York was equally risky; that Theresa didn’t have the money for tickets for everybody; what New York would be like even if Sophie could get there.

“You won’t help me?” Sophie demanded. “You always were a bitch!” And then Lillie was there, taking Sophie’s arm, soothing her, and Sophie unexpectedly turned and buried her face in Lillie’s shoulder.

Theresa met Lillie’s eyes. Lillie smiled sadly.

“You must be scared, too,” Theresa said, out of the old, never-admitted antagonism that her friend could cope better, adapt quicker, control herself more.

“I am,” Lillie said, so softly that Theresa wasn’t sure of the words. But, then, she didn’t have to be. She understood, and her momentary resentment evaporated, never to return. Lillie was a child, still. And she, Theresa, was not.

The moon shone high and clear as Theresa drove the horse cart to town. They had a few more hours before dawn, before the winds began. Night on the high plains was still cool, even in July. Theresa and Lillie sat wrapped in blankets. “Is the horse old?” Lillie asked.

“No,” Theresa said, “just malnourished. Like most everything else, except you.”

Immediately she regretted her words. She’d intended them to be jocular, but they hadn’t come out that way. It wasn’t Lillie’s fault she was healthy when nothing else seemed to be. God, think how much worse it would be if sick kids had been dumped on the farm! By way of apology, she said to Lillie, “Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “Why are we taking a horse, Tess, instead of the bus or that little car?”

“The bus is illegal. Greenhouse emissions. The car is all right, it uses fuel cells to make electricity and gives off only water, but the car is old and I want to save it as much as I can.”

Lillie was quiet. So much of this must be strange to her. Tess said, “We have pre-war solar panels on the roof, too, you probably noticed them. They’re getting old as well. They mostly fuel the water pumps, while the wind power—” But Lillie wasn’t listening.

“Tess, this is your parents’ land in the New Mexico desert, isn’t it? We were going to come here once to hike.”

“We were?” Theresa said.

“Don’t you remember? We said that after we left Andrews Air Force Base to go home, we’d come here with your parents for a vacation. Together we asked Uncle Keith to let me go.”

Theresa didn’t remember. It was forty years ago. But not to Lillie.

The land had changed as much as she had, Theresa thought. She could recall it as she’d seen it at thirteen: a forsaken tract in the Chihuahuan shrub desert, bare of everything but mesquite, creosote, and yucca. Dry playas and arroyos. Nothing moving until you looked close enough to see the scorpions, lizards, and diamondbacks.

But all over the Earth, warming had brought climate shifts. Georgia now looked like Guatemala, Alberta like Iowa, Iowa like the edges of the Sahara. None of the computer models to predict warming consequences had been accurate, except to say that everything would get warmer. New Mexico was supposed to get a temperature increase of three degrees in spring, four degrees in winter and summer, with increased spring precipitation, decreased summer soil moisture, and spreading deserts.

It hadn’t worked out that way.

Her parents’ remote, worthless land bloomed. Its average annual rainfall had been fourteen inches in 2000, ninety percent of it between July and October, with an annual average evaporation rate of forty inches. But temperatures rose, wind patterns shifted violently, and El Nino events proliferated in the all-important Pacific, thousands of miles away. The beautiful clear desert air contained few pollutant particles to block sunlight and provide countering cooling, and so the temperature rose even more. Runaway greenhouses gases let plants use water in the soil ever more efficiently. Year by year, the average rainfall increased and the average evaporation decreased, until the numbers passed each other going in opposite directions.

The mesquite and yucca gave way to blue grama grasses and yellow columbines. The desert had always had the odd cottonwood or cedar growing along its intermittent waterways, but now these dusty trees were joined by young groves of oak, juniper, and pinion. The arroyos and playas, most of them anyway, stayed wet year-round, and in some years of heavy winter runoff the ranch even developed a temporary through-flowing river, running south down the tilted face of New Mexico toward the border. This past May, Theresa had found a wild rose bush, unheard of here, its delicate pink flowers perfuming the warm air. Antelope moved in from the faraway hills, and bobcats and wild Angora goats.

Carlo and Rosalita Romero were dead by then. Theresa and Cole brought their young family from the East twenty years ago, when times were dangerous and the desert still not arable. It had been safer than the East because it was more remote. Over time, they bought cattle, built outbuildings, expanded the house, planted peanuts and corn and beans and potatoes, some of it even without irrigation. The growing season now extended from April to November. When the biowar ten years ago reduced the Earth’s population to less than two billion, about what it had been in 1900, Tess’s farm had not been reached by any of the blowing, deadly, bioengineered microorganisms.

Patches of desert remained; there was a wide swatch of empty scrub to the south of the ranch. And there were still the flash floods, the terrifying thunderstorms, the wildfires and the infernal daily wind, rising at dawn and dying at dusk like some diurnal atmospheric tantrum. But Theresa knew she had been one of the lucky ones in the unpredictable climate sweepstakes. Their high-tech machinery was breaking down year by year and the world was not manufacturing much by way of replacements, but the farm was making do and increasing its productivity. The United States slowly recovered from the war, putting together some sort of replacement civilization. Nuclear energy, once anathema, powered cities. Theresa Romero and her family were part of that effort. Survivors. Contributors.

None of this would have meant anything at all to Lillie, of course. That young grove of oak over there, strong straight saplings silvery in the moonlight, was not a symbol of anything to her. No reason why it should be. She didn’t know that the fields of wildflowers, vervain and blue gila and sweet alyssium, were, in this place, a miracle.

Still, hard times were difficult to relinquish. They were all so accustomed, she and Senni and her sons, to scrimping and saving and going without! The little edge they’d achieved for themselves, the food stored on the ranch and the credit stored in the rebuilt on-line banks, could so easily vanish again. That was why Senni hadn’t wanted Theresa to make this trip. A waste of resources, of time, of precious money, Senni said, her mouth drawn in a tight hard line. Her brothers would be back anytime with the cattle; Mother should be here when they arrived. Jody and Spring and Carlo had a right in this decision to feed so many extra mouths.

The remaining pribir kids, too, had looked sullenly at Lillie, the only one given free train tickets. The days immediately following the kids’ arrival had been hard on everyone (there was an understatement!) Things had sorted themselves out, but not without tears and anger and threats.

Eleven kids contacted relatives on the Net. Only one, Amy, had a parent still alive, but the other nine found brothers or sisters. Susan, Amy, Rebecca, and Jon had train tickets booked for them, and Hannah had an actual airline ticket, worth more than the entire farm income for a year. Scott had driven them in the bus to the train station at Wenton, and they had disappeared into the vast disorganized mess that was the United States transport system. Theresa hoped they would each reach his or her destination, that they would stay in touch as long as the farm computer held out, and that she would never see any of them again.