Nancy Kress (26 page)

“Are there any bioweapons even left? In China? Here?”

“Of course there are,” Scott said. “And new ones have probably been invented. Never, in all of history, have hard times prevented war.”

“But
why?
What do the Chinese want? They don’t even have transport to get here and take over the country after they destroy it!”

“I guess they think they do,” Scott said. “Enough transport, anyway.”

An unspoken arrangement developed in the house. After dark, the people who wanted to hear the news gathered in the “den” around the computer, now upgraded with parts that had only recently appeared for sale in Wenton, part of the town’s growing prosperity. The news listeners were Scott, Jody, Carlo, Senni, Rafe, and Lillie. The others stayed with the children in the great room, asking no questions when grim faces emerged from the den.

One night, however, the faces were not grim. Lillie raced from the den into the great room, where Theresa was changing the diaper on Lillie’s son Cord. “Tess! Come here! DeWayne is on the Net!”

“Who?”

“DeWayne Freeman! From Andrews!”

From Andrews Air Force Base, which for Lillie was eighteen months ago and for Theresa, forty-one years. She barely remembered DeWayne Freeman. “You talk to him, Lillie. I can’t leave Cord. But don’t tell him anything about—”

“I know,” Lillie said. She and Alex talked to DeWayne. A week later DeWayne turned up at the farm, driving a new fuel-celled electric car that immediately brought gawkers streaming out onto the porch. “Wow,” Rafe said. “Look at that!”

A tall, well-dressed black man climbed out of the car. He carried an expensive suitcase. Theresa said quickly, “Everybody go inside.
Now.
I want to talk to him alone.” She hadn’t heard from DeWayne in forty years; he could be an anti-genetics nut for all she knew.

The family vanished inside. DeWayne climbed the porch steps. “Theresa Romero?”

“Hello, DeWayne.”

“I wouldn’t have known you, Theresa.”

“And I wouldn’t have known you.”

“I want to talk to you. Can we go inside?”

“I don’t think so. I really have a lot to do. Let’s talk out here.” She knew she sounded ungracious, as well as peculiar, but she couldn’t help it.

DeWayne didn’t waste words. “Rafe told me how a bunch of you have gathered here—a bunch of us from the old days. Friends. My wife and children are dead. They … never mind. I don’t have anyone. But I have a lot of credits in the Net, and more each day. I develop Net prosi … what used to be called software. I can do it from anywhere. I’m rich, Theresa, and I’ll share it all with the farm if I can live here with you and the rest.”

Theresa said, “How rich?”

He smiled. “Six billion international credits.”

Theresa sat down on the nearest porch chair, nailed down to keep it from blowing away. Six billion credits. Even with inflation what it had been, that was a fortune. She said bluntly, “Why, DeWayne? With that kind of money, you could buy yourself another wife. Hell, you could buy pretty much anything. Why here?”

“I haven’t ever felt at home anywhere, Theresa. Not since I came out of that trance in a Queens hospital forty-one years ago and learned what I was. And nobody’s been at home with me, either. Andrews was the only time I ever belonged. We’re getting older. I want to settle somewhere.”

Theresa studied him. There were people, she knew, who made their own alienations in life. Maybe DeWayne was one of those. Maybe he’d never belonged because, feeling so different, he never let himself belong. Like, she thought, her throat closing with the old anxiety, like Carlo. DeWayne didn’t look like a man who made emotional revelations easily. Talking to her like this, on her porch long since wind-scoured of any paint, had cost him. Was he telling the truth? Well, Scott and Rafe could check that out on the Net. Could he be trusted? That was a much tougher question.

And then he said, not looking at her, “Rafe said Sajelle is here. And that she isn’t married.”

Oh, God. Damn Rafe! “DeWayne … I have to talk to my sons and daughter about this. Could you come back tomorrow? I’m afraid I can’t let you stay here, but there’s a sort of inn in Wenton … who’s that sitting in your car?”

“Bodyguard. But he won’t be staying. I’ll send him back to the enclave, he—” DeWayne stopped dead.

Sajelle was hurrying up the path from the chicken coop, carrying a basket of fresh eggs clutched against her chest against the wind. Her dreadlocks tossed wildly. Bent over the eggs, she didn’t notice DeWayne until she’d rushed into the comparative shelter of the porch and nearly run into him. Sajelle looked confused to see a stranger, a black man, on the porch. DeWayne hadn’t recognized Theresa right away. Not so now.

He said dazedly, “Sajelle?”

Theresa thought of saying this was Sajelle’s daughter. But Sajelle herself recognized something in his voice or manner. “DeWayne? DeWayne Freeman?”

He seemed unable to speak. Theresa said, “You might as well come in, DeWayne. There are a few little things we’re going to have to explain to you.”

DeWayne stayed, and many things became possible.

In the late spring, Rafe, Emily, and Lillie waylaid Theresa in the barn, pitching hay to the horses. “Tess, we need to talk to you.”

“So talk. But if you’re going to tell me more bad news about the Chinese, forget it. I don’t want to hear it until I have to.”

“It’s not about the Chinese,” Lillie said. “We have a proposition. We want to convince you so you can convince the others.”

Theresa put down her pitchfork and looked at Lillie, who stood a little in front of the others and was clearly their designated spokesman. Lillie had regained her figure after the triplets’ birth more quickly than the other girls. She stood slim and young, direct, her gaze meeting Theresa’s squarely. Lillie’s babies, Theresa knew, were right now being bathed by Carolina and Lupe. Whenever Lillie looked at her children there was a faintly puzzled look in her gray eyes:
Mine?
Theresa did not understand.

“You know that we learned a lot of genetics aboard the pribir ship,” Lillie said. “We only know how to use pribir equipment, though. But Scott has been teaching Rafe and Emily how to use his Sparks-Markham, plus all the new stuff DeWayne bought, and they’ve been teaching Scott what the pribir taught us. They remember a lot, unlike me and the rest.”

“Yes,” Theresa said neutrally. Why didn’t Lillie feel more involved with her babies? They were adorable, especially little Cord. He had Lillie’s eyes, gray with gold flecks.

“Rafe and Emily put some of the hay genes through the scanner. Also rice from the sacks Carlo bought in Wenton. They experimented with the splicer, and they think they can create hay that will have three times the yield on the same plot of land, and rice that will grow here in the summer rains.”

Three times the yield. They could run more cattle, lots more. The range grew more vegetation than ever, but there was still not enough to sustain her herd year-round without feed. The amount of hay had been the limiting factor on how much cattle she could run. And if rice, which had never in the history of the world grown here, could be raised as a cash crop, the market for it would be large and close. Cheap transportation costs …

Suddenly it hit her. ”’ Create.’ You mean genetically engineered crops.”

“Yes,” Rafe said eagerly over Lillie’s shoulder.

“Anything to do with genetically engineered crops is illegal. You know that. Anything to do with genetically engineered anything — that’s why we’ve been so careful!”

“And we’ll go on being careful,” Lillie said. “No one will know, anymore than they know about us, or about the babies. And anyway you said there’s no law to — “

“There’s vigilantes,” Theresa said harshly. “God, you three don’t remember. You weren’t here during the war.” The labs and corporations that had been the targets of mob rage during and right after the biowar. The CEO of Monsanto had been disemboweled alive. Theresa had seen a Net video.

“That was eleven years ago,” Lillie said logically. “And anyway, no one will know. Wenton doesn’t have any gene-analyzing equipment. We’ll just say DeWayne bought a different kind of seed from back East, and we’ll offer to share planting seeds for the hay with anyone who wants them. Look, Tess, I’ve done some figures.”

Lillie held out a piece of DeWayne’s grayish paper, another new luxury, and began to go over the numbers for Tess. Costs, needed labor, projected market price, possible profit range. The handwriting was the round unformed hand of a schoolgirl.

“Lillie, who taught you to do this?”

Lillie looked surprised. “Nobody taught me. It’s just common sense.”

And Lillie had always had a lot of that. No maternal feelings, but a direct pragmatism even greater than Theresa’s own. She said, “Does Scott know all this?”

“No,” Lillie said.

Rafe said transparently, “We thought you, as boss, were entitled to see it first.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” Lillie said. “Scott isn’t going to like it. He wants us to keep as much out of public notice as possible. We’re showing it to you first so you can change his mind.”

Emily said eagerly, “We know it will work!” Unlike Lillie, she had baby-food stains all down the front of her maternity smock, which she was still wearing because she hadn’t lost all her pregnancy weight.

Theresa looked at the three young faces: Rafe excited, Emily hopeful, Lillie coolly considering. It
was
an interesting idea. Rice … Theresa could almost see the low green plants growing in the flat land below the cottongrove, where the creek flooded regularly. Regularly enough? Maybe they could build a little dam …

“I’ll talk to Scott,” she said, “and Jody, Senni, Carlo, and Spring. We’ll see.”

“We can increase farm income by about twenty percent, not counting DeWayne’s contribution,” Lillie said. “That’s a lot of flour and cloth and ammunition.”

“Not,” Theresa noticed, “a lot of diapers.” Oh, Lillie.

After much argument, they planted a test crop of the genetically engineered crops. Both hay and rice flourished. It was only a few inconspicuous square yards of land under cultivation this year, but next year…

Sajelle married DeWayne in July. She was fifteen, he was fifty-four. Senni thought it was “obscene,” but Theresa only shrugged. Things were different now. Statutory rape laws belonged to another life. DeWayne was good to Sajelle, she made him happy, and her children’s future was assured. Within two months Sajelle was pregnant again.

The babies turned eight months old. With Senni’s nine-month Clari, there were fifteen babies crawling around the great room, pulling themselves up on furniture, throwing around food, babbling at each other. Without the three Mexican girls, caring for them would have been impossible. All of the children were beautiful. None had ever had as much as a cold. Scott could find nothing abnormal in any of their physiology.

That summer Carlo married Rosalita. Theresa, who was afraid that Carlo would someday announce he wanted to be a priest, was relieved. Everyone pitched in to expand housing, and eventually there was a compound of four houses, one large and three smaller, and everyone had more room.

Another group of refugees attacked, but they were ill-equipped and easily driven off with guns. Only one was killed. Theresa didn’t ask where Jody, Bonnie, and Sam buried him.

The Chinese threat abated, presumably due to some mysterious cycle of political fluctuation. Maybe the Chinese were also becoming more prosperous, less desperate. Maybe not. Theresa didn’t care just so long as the word “war” disappeared from farm conversations.

That summer, the horrendous storms leveled off. Net news said the global warming seemed to have stabilized, perhaps due to the drastic cutback of greenhouse gases since the war. Theresa’s land remained fertile, and the range was better watered than ever before. She allowed herself to be hopeful, then grateful, then happy. They were going to make it.

Just after she’d decided this, the delegation from Wenton arrived.

“Come in,” Theresa said, because she couldn’t keep them standing on the porch. There were six of them, arriving in the early afternoon, an indication of how far the weather had softened. The wind still blew till sundown, but it had less force, less grit, less unrelenting howl. The delegation came in a car, as new as DeWayne’s but larger and very simple, a closed metal box on a slow-moving, fuel-cell-driven base. Still, the fact that new, non-luxury cars were available in a place like Wenton felt significant to Theresa.

She studied them as they filed into the great room. Three of the babies crawled around under Carolina’s watchful eye. The rest were either in the smaller houses or napping. Everyone else who could be was out harvesting.