Nancy Kress (33 page)

“What’s that?” Sajelle said.

“It makes your cells commit suicide.”

Emily, very pale, added, “We want more samples from each of you.”

Cord had already given so many samples of blood and tissue that he felt like he’d run into a cactus. Poke here, pierce there, scrape somewhere else. Not that there was much choice.

Kendra said, “What about the babies? How can you tell if they’re going to be all right?”

“We’re going to take amniotic samples from each of you,” Emily said.

Cord put his arm around Clari. Guilt, a constant cloud, settled into his bones. Unlike the other pregnant girls, Clari hadn’t sought the sex that led to this. And unlike the other pregnant girls, she wasn’t engineered for a super-boosted immune system. Julie and Sajelle, pribir-blessed women married to normal men, had passed on their lesser protection to their new babies. But would it work for Cord to pass on his unfathomable genes to Clari’s children? Was his total engineering, like the previous generation’s milder version, dominant? Nobody knew.

By summer, the only people transmitting live on the Net lived in isolated pockets in rural areas. Rafe monitored every waking hour. Grimly he reported that some of those people were falling ill, too, from a dozen different diseases.

“The winds go everywhere,” Clari said. She was having a very bad pregnancy, morning sickness and anemia and edema and half a dozen other things Cord couldn’t name. He wanted to spend every minute with her, and he wanted, from guilt, to never see her at all. Fortunately, the decision was not his. Every person on the farm was working as hard as possible all day, every day, to make the place self-sufficient. There were a lot of things they were going to have to do without, but right now the aim was simple survival.

Taneesha said, “You mean … everybody in the world might die?”

“Except us,” Emily said. She was too thin. She hadn’t eaten more than snatched mouthfuls in days. Neither had Dr. Wilkins, who was much older and looked much worse.

Clari said, “How would we know if anybody else survives?”

Lillie said, “Rafe will hang onto the Net until nobody at all posts or until the satellites fall out of the sky. But there might be really isolated groups that survive who don’t have Net access. Inuit or Laplanders or someone.”

Cord didn’t know who those people were, and he didn’t ask. It wouldn’t help anything. And the truth was, he didn’t really care.

Uncle Scott cared. He said somberly, “When I was born, the world held six billion people. After the first biowar there were two billion left, about the same as there had been in 1900. Today there’s maybe two hundred million people on Earth. I’m estimating, of course, extrapolating from what few figures I have. Two hundred million is the same number as when Christ was born. And the number is going down.”

Emily said gently, “Scott, the changed ecosystems probably can’t support many more than that, anyway.”

“And who changed them? Us. Humans. We’re all as guilty of these deaths as the people who fired those bioweapons.”

To Cord, that was just silly. He and Uncle Scott and Aunt Emily hadn’t killed anybody. Somebody in one of the back bedrooms began to play the music cube: “Don’t Matter None to Me.”

“Population projections for this year,” Uncle Scott said, “once were ten billion people. Instead, we have suigenocide.” He walked heavily to his room and closed the door.

Cord didn’t know what “suigenocide” was. He didn’t ask Aunt Emily. She and Uncle Scott were talking about the past, and the past was over and gone. Cord honestly couldn’t see the point. “We’ve
lost so much,”
Aunt Robin constantly whined. But Cord couldn’t see that, either.

Everything that mattered to him was here, now.

Then, in April, the cattle suddenly began to die.

“Oh, God,” Lillie said. “Scott, what can we do?”

“Nothing until we figure out what’s killing them,” Scott said testily. “Send the range crew out for blood and tissue samples. Mark each cow carefully so we know what came from whom. Emily and I will get to work as soon as you bring the samples back.”

“No,” Emily said.

It was another farm meeting in the great room. As usual, only about half were present; the rest couldn’t be spared from vital work, or were grabbing a few hours of sleep, or, in the case of Clari and Felicity, were throwing up from pregnancy. Another meeting, but different, Cord thought. He could remember when farm meetings had announced new income, new cattle purchases, new gains in water supplies. Now all the news was bad.

The room even looked different. The windows were closed tightly, a minor effort to keep out windborne micros. Alex and Dakota had built a series of entryways with shallow pans of chemicals in each to wash off your boots. People kept their outdoor clothes there, and only there, stripping to light inner layers and washing their hands before they came into the big house. The house had acquired an unaired, stale smell. And hot; this was July. Not even the thick walls could keep the house cool.

Dr. Wilkins said harshly, “What do you mean, ‘no’? Don’t go difficult on me, Emily!”

The young woman, her blond hair dirty and lank, faced the old man who had been born the same year she had. With difficulty she said, “Scott, listen. The people who never went up to the pribir ship … all that you got for genetic modifications was the olfactory alterations. You remember, at Andrews no doctors could find any other expressed alterations, and you and I haven’t found any either. That means you and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin don’t have enhanced immune systems. Yours are no better than Jody’s or Carolina’s, and you’re much older. I don’t think you should handle any of the cattle samples, in order to avoid infection. I can do it all.”

“You can’t! You don’t know enough to — “

“Yes,” Emily said. “I do.”

Dr. Wilkins looked at her for a long time. Finally he nodded, saying nothing. Then he turned and walked slowly out of the room, closing the door. Cord thought of a cow he’d once seen, old and unable to keep up with the herd, lumbering away from the herd to lie down in shade.

Emily said, “I — ” and stopped.

Cord’s mother said clearly, “You did the right thing, Em. Now everybody get back to work. DeWayne, Robin, you stay indoors, just in case.”

Ashley muttered, “Like anybody cares if that old bag Robin gets infected.”

“Shut up,” Taneesha said. The two girls glared at each other. At least, Cord thought, they couldn’t have another fight. Both their bulging bellies would keep them from getting close enough to each other to swing.

The cattle samples showed an engineered virus that Emily had never seen before. She took printouts in to Scott, who hadn’t seen them either. Scott chafed at not being able to work with the live samples, but Lillie, DeWayne, and Emily remained firm. Scott never left the big house to go anywhere, especially not down to the small house taken over as Emily’s laboratory.

“It kills bovine cells, all right,” Emily said, “but I think it’s species specific. Look, here — “

Scott listened. “I think you’re right.”

Jody, hovering in the doorway, said, “How many head are we going to lose?”

Emily answered. “All of them.”

“All?
The entire herd?”

“Yes.” Her thin face looked pinched. She knew what it meant. They were all going to have to survive on corn, chickens, and hunted game … unless that went, too. What then? There was enough food stored for maybe six months, but no more than that. The corn, genetically enhanced, gave a high yield as long as it was irrigated constantly. But no more food was going to come in to Wenton for trade.

Jody said, “It’s almost calving time. Will the calves — “

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “Isolate the calves as soon as they’re born, and wash each with dip right away. Keep them from contamination from their mothers.”

He stared at her. “Emily, how the hell can we do that? You’ve never done a calving. There’s blood and what you’d call ‘tissues’ all over the place. You can’t keep the calves from ‘contamination by the mothers.’ And even if they could, the calves have to nurse, for God’s sake. How can we — “

“I don’t know how!” Emily shouted. “That’s your job! Just do it!”

Emily never lost her temper. Dr. Wilkins put a hand on her arm. Emily shook it off. Cord, listening, went to find Keith and Spring, to tell them the herd was going to die and the calves had to be isolated from the milk that would maybe have kept them from dying, too.

Both range crews worked night and day at calving, and they pulled in people who usually had other tasks. Cord, so exhausted that if he stopped moving he fell asleep standing up, had never seen a calving like this. Even Spring, perpetually cheerful, went grimly about the grim business. They were shorthanded because all the female teenagers who usually worked range crew were pregnant. The only women were Lillie, Senni, and Bonnie. Twice Cord caught Bobby, who had a sensitive stomach, vomiting.

Cows, pre-delivery, post-delivery, and not pregnant at all, died constantly. First the animal began to tremble as its nervous system was affected. A few hours later it lay down, lowing in pain. Half an hour after that the cow thrashed on the ground, desperately gasping for air, often breaking its legs in the process. A few minutes later it died.

Dakota and Keith, both good riders, tried to cut the trembling cows out of the herd and drive the animals away from the rest. It seemed to hurt them to walk, but the men kept at it anyway. They forced the cows as far away as possible, then shot them to spare the animals their inevitable agony. The rifle shots terrified the others, as did the smell of the rotting carcasses of the dead.

If the cow was pregnant, Jody and his crew induced labor, trying to get the calf out before the mother started to tremble. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes not. A few cows died, thrashing, with calves halfway born, and most of these calves died, too. Cord saw his mother stick her hand up a cow whose induced-labor calf hadn’t turned properly and turn it by sheer force. He looked away.

The surviving calves were carried, bleating for their dying mothers, to the antiseptic dip. There was no time to clean up anything. The ground was slippery with blood, placentas, death. The reek and noise were indescribable.

Cord, covered with blood, finally could work no longer. Jody said roughly, “Go lie down, Cord. Now.”

“I can’t, the — “

“Do it!” He pushed Cord toward the bedrolls set upwind. “I’ll wake you in two hours.”

Cord collapsed onto the blankets, not washing first, and was asleep instantly, the smell of dead cattle in his nostrils.

When Lillie woke him, he put out his hand to ward her off, unsure where he was, who she was. “Cord, wake up. We need you to take charge of getting the surviving calves onto the truck and back to the barn.”

He nodded, stumbled upright, lurched back to the pens. The sky had clouded over, low angry clouds, and Cord didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon, or of what day. He set to work. The small, slippery calves, some premature from the induced labor, bleated piteously. One died on the way, falling to the truck bed where the others, packed in, crushed it with their tiny, deadly hoofs. At the barn, taking the calves off the truck and finding the dead one staring at him with open eyes, Cord succumbed. Ashamed of himself, he cried.

Emily, Sajelle, Julie, Carolina, Hannah, and Lupe waited at the barn. Emily showed them how to wash the calves again with the brew she’d concocted, and Cord showed them how to grasp the animals to carry them inside.

“Cord, you smell
awful,”
Hannah said distastefully, and he was too tired to feel his own anger.

Lupe had learned somewhere how to feed calves. She’d prepared bottles of warm solution designed by Emily for maximum nutrition. Under Lupe’s instruction, the women awkwardly began to hold bottles for the calves, two at a time, while Emily efficiently gave each a shot in the neck from prepared syringes.

“This is a gene sequence delivered by a bovine version of an adeno-type viral vector,” she said to Cord. “It’s tailored to this specific pathogen. It’ll splice in genes to create T-cells with receptors for the pathogenic virus. There’s also expo molecules to drastically increase the frequency of gene expression so that—Cord, are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” said Cord, who wasn’t. He couldn’t focus enough to understand her.

“Never mind,” she said kindly. “Go in and sleep. But wash first. Do you hear me? Don’t go in like that.”

He fell asleep in the yard, beside the outside pump, before he even had his clothes off. Somebody rigged a tarp over him to shield from UV, and he slept.