Nancy Kress (22 page)

But nothing stayed hidden forever.

Lillie fell asleep on the train. At Amarillo, Theresa woke her and they set out on foot through the city. It was quite a walk but bicycle cabs were exorbitant and anyway Lillie, except for morning sickness, seemed to be in superb physical shape. What had the pribir done to her?

Better not to know.

At the nursing home, Lillie pressed her lips tight together. Theresa’s heart went out to her. Such an adult gesture for a child.

Keith Anderson had dealt shrewdly with his money. Unlike most very old people, who were cared for by often grudging families or not at all, he had been able to buy life-long care in this decent, if shabby, for-profit home. Theresa had been here once before. She led Lillie to the tiny third-floor room where Keith lay in bed. At the threshold she paused, wanting to say something to prepare Lillie … stupid. Nothing would prepare her.

“Lillie!” The thin voice cracked and the easy tears of the old slid down Keith’s wrinkled cheeks. Lillie stopped dead, collected herself, moved forward. Theresa thought,
She was always brave.

“Hello, Uncle Keith. I’m back.”

“Lillie …”

She sat on the edge of his bed. Theresa saw him wince slightly, his bones disturbed. Lillie, unused to the old, didn’t notice. She took his hand. “Are you all right, Uncle Keith? Is this a good place for you to live?”

“Yes. Oh, Lillie, it’s so good to see you. I thought…”

“You thought I was dead. But I’ve just been aboard the pribir ship for seven and a half months. I mean, forty years. Do you know about time dilation?”

“Yes. Oh, Lillie … you look so much like your mother.”

Once, at Andrews Air Force Base, Theresa had seen a picture of Lillie’s dead mother. Lillie looked nothing like her.

“Once,” Keith quavered, “when we were young … Barbara was only four or five …”

Theresa slipped out. Keith wanted to live in the past. A past where he was young and fresh, maybe a later past where Lillie was a little girl. Theresa went down the steps to the living room. Several old people in deep chairs sat expressionlessly watching something on the Net. A stale smell hung in the air. Outside, the wind howled around the edges of Amarillo’s shabby buildings.

“Is there a terminal I can use?” Theresa asked a woman who might have been a nurse, or a cleaning lady, or a murderer. Government regulatory agencies had all but disappeared. Ordinarily Theresa never thought about this; it was a given. But now she was seeing things through Lillie’s eyes.

The terminal was even older than the one at the farm, and slower. Theresa had few contacts on the local Net site, and none in the UnderNet, that shadowy information reached only through secret data atolls that changed constantly. But Scott had told her what to do, although he wouldn’t do it from the farm computer. “Too dangerous,” he’d said, without explaining.

“There’s no one to enforce laws,”
Theresa had told Madison, but that wasn’t strictly true. There were organizations as shadowy as the UnderNet, vigilantes and religious groups and supremacist groups and anti-science groups and God-knew-what-all. The religious groups were the least vicious but the most pervasive. A vindictive God was apparently a great comfort to some when the planet itself seemed to turn vindictive. Theresa didn’t understand the reasoning, but it was widespread enough to earn respectful caution.

Nonetheless, she found an abortionist in Amarillo, messaged with her, and set up an appointment for Madison and Jessie. More credit spent, plus three more train tickets. Although only Theresa’s would be round-trip. Still, facing Senni would be no fun.

Theresa walked back to the living room. None of the old people had changed position or expression. She took a chair and pulled out the sewing she’d brought. They couldn’t start back until sunset, when the wind would die down. Trips away from the farm were usually measured in day-long units.

Maybe Lillie would want to stay here with Keith. Work for room and board, one less mouth to feed at the farm … until the triplets were born. If Keith lasted that long.

She started sewing a maternity dress for Emily.

“I asked to stay there,” Lillie said on the way home. The sky had clouded over, and Theresa was pushing the horse to make the farm before all light faded. She had a halogen torch but hoped to save it. They had spent a few hours in Wenton, checking on the kids working there to earn tickets home: Bonnie, Sophie, Julie, Jason, Derek, Mike. Julie had cried when Lillie and Theresa left.

Theresa said, “Why didn’t you stay in Amarillo, then?”

“Uncle Keith said no.”

“Did he say why?”

“He wants me with you and Scott. He said he can’t help me if anything goes even a little bit wrong, and you can.”

“That’s sensible.”

“I won’t see him again, I don’t think,” Lillie said. “He’s close to dying.”

Theresa didn’t deny it. “You can keep in touch on the Net.”

“It isn’t the same.”

Of course not. Nothing was the same. The horse plodded through the pearly, inadequate light.

“Tess,” Lillie said after a long while, “I don’t want to be a mother.”

Not
Lillie, too.
“Are you saying you want an abortion?”

“No. I talked it over with Uncle Keith and … no. He said I don’t understand now how precious the continuing of life is, but I will someday.”

Theresa thought of Jody, Carlo, Spring, and her dead daughter. Of Senni and Dolly and the child Senni carried.
Yes.

“Maybe he’s right,” Lillie said, with her odd mix of measured judiciousness and child’s complaint, “but I don’t want to be a mother anyway. I’m not interested in babies. And I don’t think … I don’t think I can love them like Uncle Keith loved me.”

Theresa suddenly saw that this was true. Lillie was too detached, or too young, or too something. She was many good qualities, but not tender.

“We’ll all help you,” Theresa said, inwardly groaning. More work.

“Thank you. And I’ll do the best I can. For Uncle Keith.”

The light was gone. Theresa switched on the torch. A sudden breeze brought a faint, pungent odor, and she gave a cry of pleasure. Cattle. Her sons were home!

Her heart lifted, and the night seemed much brighter.

The abortionist operated in a clean, windowless basement divided by curtains into “rooms.” Theresa brought Jessica, defiant, and Madison, scared, on the Wednesday train. “If you would help, we wouldn’t have to do this,” she told Scott accusingly before they left.

He didn’t meet her eyes. “I can’t. I know you don’t understand, Theresa.”

“Fucking right I don’t. This woman isn’t even an M.D. And you of all people should know that a bunch of genes aren’t sacred!”

Scott lost his temper. “It’s because I know how temporary a ‘bunch of genes,’ as you disparagingly call it, can be that I believe what I do! Those are people those girls are carrying, damn it, no matter what you say! If those engineered babies aren’t people, then neither are you or me!”

“Shut up, they’ll hear you in there. So what are you going to do, Scott, alert a vigilante religious group? Abortions in progress! Murder the killers so they can’t murder a bunch of non-breathing tissue!”

Scott turned away. “Let me be, Theresa. You know damn well I won’t say anything to anybody. But let me have my beliefs. You have yours.”

“Mine don’t make two frightened girls spread their legs for an unlicensed stranger.”

“Let me be!”

“Okay, Scott,” Theresa said wearily. “I’ll let you be. I need you. The other girls need you. Just so long as you know that you’re clinging to a selfish, irrational, superstitious belief for your own comfort, no matter who else suffers.”

Scott strode away, toward the open range. Almost sunrise—he shouldn’t go too far. Fuck it. Let him get lost and roast in the sun that was as unrelenting as he was.

In Amarillo, Theresa waited upstairs with Madison while the abortionist took Jessica downstairs. Jessica, her bravado stretched thin, scowled and tossed her head. Madison sat completely still, saying nothing, eyes wide and frozen.

“Maddy,” Theresa said, the old name rising, unbidden, from some well of memory, “it won’t hurt. She has good equipment and reasonable pharms.” Which was why it cost so much.

Madison didn’t answer.

Half an hour later they were called down. Jessica lay on a mattress on the floor, covered with a light blanket. She was smiling. “I’m all right.”

‘Yes,” Theresa said, wondering what she was feeling. She had borne five children, all joyously. Even Spring, born in such a hard time that the season he was named for had been the only good thing happening anywhere around Theresa.

“And I’m not pregnant,” Jessie said, without ambivalence.

“It went very well,” the woman said crisply. “She can travel in a few hours, I think. Do you want the tissue?”

“No!” Theresa said.

The woman shrugged. “Some people do. Now you, young lady. This way.”

“Wait,” Theresa said, “I do want it.” She needed to look. She knew what a three-month fetus looked like; this was her only chance to see if what the girls carried was indeed normal, or if it was some sort of… what?

The woman pointed to another curtain and led Madison away.

Theresa made herself go through the curtain. A dark blue plastic box sat on a table, its cover beside it. She peered in, and her eyes filled with relieved tears. Normal.

She should take one of the fetuses for Scott, she realized belatedly. He would want the genes. No, he wouldn’t, not this way … not Scott. Or would he? Which was stronger, the religious or the scientist?

Suddenly she knew that whatever Scott wanted, she couldn’t carry this thing back with her on the train. She just couldn’t. This clump of genetically engineered tissue, this dead baby.

She went back to sit by Jessica, who had fallen back asleep. Theresa studied the young face smoothed into blankness by sleep. Forty years ago she had been afraid of Jessica. Jessica the bully, quick with her fists, sarcastic about everything, dangerous and despicable. Forty years ago. Theresa reached out and smoothed a few stray hairs back from Jessica’s forehead.

Time passed. Too much time — Madison was taking much longer than Jessie had. Theresa got up and made her way through the maze of curtains. At the end she found an actual door, wood set into the foamcast wall, and went through it.

“Use the calatal!” cried a woman Theresa hadn’t seen before. She and the abortionist were applying various pieces of equipment to Madison, unconscious on a table. There was blood everywhere, way too much blood. The smell of it, metallic and hot, hung in the air.

“Get out!” the second woman yelled at Theresa. “You’re not sterile!”

Theresa blundered back out the door. She stood there, not breathing, for what seemed like hours. When the door finally opened, Theresa already knew.

“Unexpected tearing,” the abortionist said unsteadily. “It’s never happened before, I couldn’t stop it, I tried and tried … I’m so
sorry …”

A sound behind her. Theresa turned to see Jessica leaning against the wall. “Madison’s dead, isn’t she?” Jessica said, and when no one answered, Jessica—the bully, the truculent—cried and cried, and would not be comforted.

The rest of the summer brought many good things. It didn’t matter. Every night Theresa dreamed of Madison’s face. Not even the birth of Senni’s child in October made a difference to Theresa’s mood, which made no sense. Senni was her daughter, the new child her granddaughter. Madison was only someone Theresa had known a long time ago, in another time and place.

Senni had an easy birth. The baby was healthy, perfect, strong despite being three weeks premature. Senni named her Clari, after nothing in particular.

Patients came to Scott from towns up to fifty miles away. It turned out he had bought a small ad on the Net. By the beginning of November he was going into Wenton three days a week to hold “office hours” at a tiny rented room. He bought a horse for this trip, helped by Jody, who also taught him to ride. Fortunately, Scott was a natural. There was a lot of work: the warming and increased rain had had brought malaria and dengue fever this far north. Simple diseases to treat, even to vaccinate against—if you had the knowledge and the drugs.

The delivery of drugs was only intermittently reliable. There was no Post Office anymore. Information went by the Net; packages went by the few struggling private companies that exploited the rail circuit. Scott ordered double amounts in staggered deliveries; some got through. Eventually.