Nancy Kress (30 page)

If Clari’s father had been dead for Clari’s whole life, Cord didn’t see what good having a father had done her. Cord was angry now. “The pribir
are
wonderful! You just don’t understand!”

“Oh, Cord,” she said, and now her voice was completely soft, as soft as Clari’s. He was not going to be won that easily.

“You don’t understand, Mom. The pribir gave you everything, even me! And Keith and Kella!” He’d always known his mother didn’t really want her kids. Now here was proof.

“I know,” she said. “But, Cord, honey, they still did it through manipulation, tyranny, for their own reasons, not for our good.”

“I don’t care! Come on, Clari, the mosquitoes are out.”

“Cord, please don’t go, I want to talk more …”

But he grabbed Clari’s hand and pulled her up off the bench and toward the house. Halfway there he turned back to face the cottonwoods and shouted, “The pribir
are
wonderful!” before running the rest of the way inside, dragging Clari with him.

He learned more from the other children. At various times, their respective mothers had dropped bits of information about the pribir. Aunt Bonnie’s daughter Angie said that when she and her two brothers were born, their mother had had a very easy labor. This was important because recently Aunt Julie and Uncle Spring had had another baby, and Aunt Julie had screamed so much that Dr. Wilkins gave her a drug. Cord didn’t see why that was a problem, but Angie said importantly that Aunt Julie had wanted to do without drugs because they could be bad for the baby. Also, added Angie, who seemed to be a gush of information on birthing, Aunt Senni had had a very bad time with both Dolly and Clari.

“So the pribir made birthing easier with the babies they engineered. Less painful,” Cord said. He was very glad he was a boy and would never have to birth anybody at all.

“Yeah,” Angie said. “They sound like good people.”

“I think so, too,” said Taneesha, Aunt Sajelle’s daughter, who was listening in. Taneesha, Kezia, and Jason had a father, Uncle DeWayne. But he wasn’t their genetic father; the triplets had been engineered inside Aunt Sajelle, just like Cord had been. Cord thought Taneesha was the prettiest girl at the farm, not counting Clari. She had light brown skin and black curly hair and the biggest brown eyes Cord had ever seen. It made him uncomfortable, though, to think that Taneesha was so pretty. It seemed unfair to Clari.

But Taneesha was a good source of information. Aunt Sajelle apparently spoke to her kids much more frankly than anybody else’s mother. “The pribir messed with my mama’s genes, too. Not as much as with ours, of course. But Mama—and your mother, too, Cord —doesn’t get sick. You ever noticed that? The pribir did something to them so they don’t catch colds and stuff like Dolly and Clari and Angel do.”

It was true, Cord realized. Clari had had something just last month that made her head ache and her muscles hurt, and Dolly and Angel got it, too, but nobody else.

“And”
Taneesha said, leaning in close to the other kids huddled together behind the barn, “the pribir put the babies inside my mama and the other women without any sex!”

Cord flushed. He’d only been told about sex a few months ago, and the whole idea made him uncomfortable.

Dakota, Julie’s son, was logical. “If there wasn’t any sex, then how did the babies get made? You need an egg and a sperm.”

Taneesha said triumphantly, “The pribir had a whole supply of sperm and eggs, and they just snipped out whatever genes they wanted from any of them and sewed them back together however they wanted.”

This explanation seemed lacking to Cord — no sperm or egg anywhere had genes for what he’d grown during the sandstorm. So the pribir had also built brand-new genes from scratch, or taken them from some other … thing. If so, that made the pribir more powerful than ever. And smart: They’d known what he might need to survive. And kind, because they wanted him to survive. Probably if she hadn’t already been a grown-up when she went to that Andrews place, they might have engineered his grandmother Theresa to survive the sandstorm, too.

Dakota said solemnly to Cord, “They saved your life, you know.”

“I know.”

“Well, I can’t wait till they come back.” This piece of Cord’s information had electrified them all.

“Me, neither,” said Kendra and Taneesha, simultaneously. Taneesha added kindly, “I’m sorry you’re not genetically engineered, too, Clari.”

Clari looked down at the ground and said nothing.

———

By summer of 2067 it still hadn’t rained much. Three years of drought. Wenton, which had over the years grown to look almost prosperous, didn’t look that way any more. Some people left. Others, from even more desperate places, arrived on the one train per day still arriving at the decaying station. One Thursday in April, two women, one man, and six children got off the train. They stood staring past the shrunken edge of Wenton to the flat, parched plains, stretching for miles and miles of nothing.

Cord, in town with Uncle DeWayne and Taneesha to buy cloth, spied the starers, skinny and battered-looking.
City people,
he thought. He knew cities from the Net shows and Net news, which was the way he knew about anything more than ten miles from the farm. Well, these people wouldn’t find whatever they were looking for, work or food or a new start, in Wenton.

Uncle DeWayne stopped walking.

“Daddy?” Taneesha said. But Uncle DeWayne ignored her, walking toward the strangers and leaving her and Cord behind.

“Oh oh,” Taneesha said.

“What?”

“Haven’t you got eyes, Cord? Six kids, two women—they’re more of
us.
Daddy must recognize one of them.”

Of course. Cord and Taneesha ran after Uncle DeWayne.

Uncle DeWayne said to the man, “Mike? Mike Franzi?”

The man said nothing, studying this well-dressed black man. One of the little girls shrank behind him.

Uncle DeWayne grinned hugely. “Sure it is. Mike Franzi, and you’ve forgotten all those basketball games at Andrews where I whipped your white ass. DeWayne Freeman!”

The stranger seized Uncle DeWayne’s hand. One of the women started to cry.

Taneesha said in a low voice to Cord, “Here’s trouble.”

“What? Who?”

Taneesha didn’t answer, but she stared back without flinching at one of the girls, who was giving her the finger.

It was another of those weird relationships. Two of the strangers, Mike Franzi and Hannah Reeder, were twenty-seven. They had been at Andrews Air Force Base with Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, who were sixty-seven. So had the other woman, Robin Perry, but she hadn’t gone up to the pribir ship and so she was sixty-seven, too. Three of the kids were “Aunt Hannah’s,” as Cord was instructed to call her. The other three belonged to some woman named Sophie, who was dead, but now old “Aunt Robin” was taking care of her kids.

When he was a child, thought thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Cord, all this seemed normal. It was just the way things were. Now, after watching the Net, he saw how abnormal it was. Well, that was good! He and his “family” were abnormal because they were special, made that way by the pribir.

The strange thing was the way his mother reacted when they all went back to the farm in Uncle DeWayne’s truck.

Lillie — lately Cord had begun thinking of her that way, although he wasn’t sure why—took one look at Mike Franzi and stopped dead. Then a slow, long blush spread up from her neck over her face, turning it red as sunset. Lillie, who never blushed!

“Hello, Mike.”

“Hello, Lillie. Long time.”

“How many years? Twelve.”

“You look wonderful,” he said. Cord scowled. His mother looking ‘wonderful’? She was just his mother. Lillie said, “Tell me what happened.”

He smiled. “Direct as always. All right, the short version is, Hannah and I were in Philadelphia. It got impossible, food riots and burning. We found Robin and Sophie on the Net, living together with their kids in Denver. We went there because it sounded better, and for a while it was. But then it got as dangerous and hungry as Philly, no jobs. Two weeks ago Sophie was killed in a riot. By that time I recognized Rafe’s message on the Net, and here we are.”

Cord knew that message, although he didn’t understand it. It went:
Do you remember Andrew? How about Pam and Pete? They’re still gone, of course, but their legacy remains. Sometimes it seems
I
can still smell them. So much is gone, but we’re here.

Dr. Wilkins said, “Why didn’t you Net us that you were coming?”

Mike didn’t answer. After a moment the girl who had given Taneesha the finger said defiantly, “We were afraid you wouldn’t take us in.”

Uncle Jody said, “We will. My mother would have wanted it.”

Lillie added, “If we didn’t want you, why would Rafe have posted that message? You’re welcome, all of you, as long as you’re willing to work. Times are tougher than they were—but I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

The old woman, “Robin,” said bitterly, “Lillie, you don’t know about tough times. You missed the war. Don’t try to tell me about tough times.”

Lillie looked startled, and then her eyes met Mike’s, and something passed between them. All Cord saw was a tiny smile and an even tinier shake of his head, but once more his mother—his mother!—blushed. And then she looked at the younger woman, Hannah, and looked away.

Mike said, “These are Sophie’s children, Roy, Patty, and Ashley.” Ashley and Taneesha stared each other down.
Trouble,
Taneesha had said, and Cord believed it. Ashley was as skinny as the rest but taller and muscled. Her insolent look around the cluttered great room said she didn’t think much of it. As if she was used to better.

Hannah said in a high, strained voice, “These are my children. Frank and Bruce and Loni.”

“Hi,” a few of the farm kids said shyly. The rest of the introductions were made. The new people would never remember all the names, Cord thought. He couldn’t even remember all of theirs, and there were only nine. Which one was Bruce?

Aunt Sajelle said, “Let’s get you all fed and settled.” Since Grandma’s death, Aunt Sajelle had taken over running the big house, with Aunt Carolina’s help.

Clari, at Cord’s elbow said, “They look so hungry.”

“They probably are,” Cord said. Clari was always kind, so sweet. The other boys, especially his brother Keith, teased Cord about having a girl for a best friend, but he didn’t care. There was no one like Clari.

Ashley Vogel was the only kid at the farm who hated the pribir. “They wrecked my life,” she said. “Fuck them.”

“No,” Taneesha said, “they gave you your life. They wrecked our lives by sending you here. Why don’t you just go back where you came from.”

“Fuck you,” Ashley said.

A ring of kids surrounded the two at Dead Men’s Arroyo. Ashley had wanted to see where the refugees who once attacked the farm were buried, because Dolly had told her it was haunted. Nine of them had hiked out in the late afternoon, when the sun wasn’t too dangerous, on the half-day a week they were allowed off from chores and studies. The hike out was tense. Dolly, the only person who liked Ashley, walked ahead with her, whispering together and jeering over their shoulders at the others.

Cord had gone because he was both bored and strangely keyed up. The new kids had upset the balance at the farm. New friendships formed, old alliances shifted, among both children and adults. No one liked Aunt Robin. She was the same age as Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, but she seemed older, nastier. Her hip hurt her, her gut ached, she was always complaining. Aunt Hannah was all right and her kids didn’t cause any trouble, but something wasn’t right there, either. Something about Aunt Hannah and Cord’s mother. He didn’t like to think about it. It was partly to avoid thinking about it that he’d hiked down to the arroyo with Dolly, Ashley, Taneesha, Jason, Keith, Kella, Gavin, Dakota, and Bobby. Clari had another one of her colds and her mother made her stay in bed.

Walking over the land, following his own lengthening shadow, Cord remembered how it used to be. Greener, with bushes and little low flowers everywhere and even some cottonwood saplings starting to take growth. Now, except where the farm irrigated with windpower, the ground stretched gray and bleached, dust devils rising in yellow funnels on the wind. The new saplings had all withered. Tumbleweed rolled across his path.

At the arroyo, studying the marker stone for the mass grave, Ashley said, “Let’s dig them up.”