Nancy Kress (37 page)

After a moment Keith handed Pete the gun. Where did his brother get the courage? Or maybe Keith just didn’t want to end up on the ground like Sam and Rafe. Pam, still scowling and glaring, held out her hand to Gavin and hesitantly he put Sam’s pistol into it.

Cord heard himself say, “Sam didn’t mean to …” Stupid! Of course Sam meant to. “I mean, he just wasn’t sure about… you.”

Dakota said in a sudden burst, “None of them are. The ones who were on your ship before. They say you manipulated them and used them. But we young ones don’t think that. We’ve been waiting for you!”

“You have?” Pam’s face softened. Was she that easy to flatter? Cord thought dazedly. And yet Dakota had only spoken the truth. It was just that this whole thing was not at all what Cord had expected.

Pete said, “Well, of course we would plan to come for the birth of the next generation, next month. You must have known that.”

They knew when the girls would all get pregnant. Which meant they’d known exactly when those temporarily unstoppable sexual feelings would overwhelm the farm. They’d designed all that frantic, driven sex into Cord’s
genes.
He felt his face grow hot.

Dakota said, “Most of the babies are already born.”

Gavin added, “And one already died.”

Pam’s face darkened again. She was moodier than Ashley, even. “Born? Died? Your gestation period is supposed to be nine months!”

“Yeah, well,” Dakota mumbled.

Gavin added, more helpfully, “Dr. Wilkins says they come early when there’s three at a time.”

Pam and Pete looked at each other. Cord saw that they hadn’t known that. Doubt hit him like a blast of hot air. They were supposed to know all about humans! What else didn’t they know?

Pete said, “One offspring died? Of what?”

“Of this perversion of the right way!” Pam said. She was back to full anger. “This fucking ‘war’! How dare you misuse the right way!”

Keith, now also riled, said,
“We
didn’t! We’re just trying to survive it!”

“Oh,” Pam said, and subsided again. After a moment she seemed to remember. “You said Lillie was sick?”

Cord nodded, unable to speak. Keith said eagerly, “You remember our mother? Lillie?”

“Of course,” Pam said, “we’ve only been gone a few months. Now let’s go to your home base. Get in the ship.”

Nothing was like Cord imagined it would be. Nothing.

He was the only one who would ride to the farm in the ship. Keith, Dakota, and Gavin refused. Instead they ran home. “Should we tell everybody you’re here?” Gavin asked uncertainly.

“Of course,” Pete said.

Keith said, “But… they might try to kill you again.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Pete said.

Keith’s eyes narrowed. “Why not? What are you going to do?”

The pribir didn’t answer. Cord looked again at their healthy human good looks, their casual old-fashioned clothing, and a kind of dizziness came over him. It was like a dream, or a Net show. It wasn’t real.

Pam said, “We’ll just smell to them before we open the ship.”

Cord finally had to say something. “Miss Pam, Mr. Pete — “

“Just ‘Pam’ and ‘Pete,’” Pam said smiling, and she reminded Cord of Spring’s ten-year-old daughter, Terri, playing grown-up. The thought horrified him.

He tried again. “If you drug our families … the people at the farm … they’re going to be even madder and want even more to hurt you back. They resent you fooling around with their feelings.”

“Really?” Pete said. He sounded genuinely interested. “Why?”

Cord stared at him, dumbfounded. He had championed the pribir, believed in them … he still believed in them! But even he understood their parents’ objections to what Dr. Wilkins called “mood manipulation.”

Keith said shortly, “They’ll resent it because their feelings are their own.”

Pam said thoughtfully, “But it would be all right to smell information to them? Why is that different? Surely their ideas are just as much their own as their feelings.”

The boys were silent.

“You can’t explain it?” Pam said, and Cord heard triumph in her voice. “See, Pete? They don’t understand their own irrationality any better than we do!”

Keith said hotly, “It’s not irrationality! It’s … it’s …” But he couldn’t explain what it was.

Neither could Cord. He said, “Send them just information, not feelings. Send them information that you can cure my mother and you can stop more babies from dying. Then they’ll accept you.

Pete said, “At least they can understand that much of the right way. Do you humans even realize how perverted your misuse of it has been?”

Pam said, more practically, “What if we can’t cure Lillie or save more babies? Pete’s right, you know. You people exceeded all genetic perversions that we’d planned for. I’m not even sure you’re worth this much trouble at all. We have other planets we’re working on, you know.”

Other planets.
Cord clung desperately to the here and now. He repeated, “Just send them information. Say you can cure my mother and you can stop more babies from dying.”

“Well, all right, if you insist,” Pam said sulkily.

Sam and Rafe stirred on the ground. Pete said, “Do you want to dump those two in the ship? We can bring them.”

“I think,” Gavin said quickly, “they’d rather walk.”

“All right. Come on, Lillie’s offspring … what’s your name?”

“Cord,” he said, and his voice came out strangled. The ship door opened.

Nothing was like Cord imagined it would be.

The inside of the ship was small and blank. He was bewildered until he realized this was only one small section, even though he saw nothing that could be called a door. Pete spoke some high-pitched sounds no human throat could ever make, and the ship lifted slightly. A window appeared —just appeared!—in the front and Cord saw they were following Keith and Dakota, moving toward the farm at a fast jog. Gavin must be waiting for Rafe and Sam to wake up. How was Keith going to explain to Jody that the pribir were now in possession of Jody’s cherished gun?

Pam was studying Cord intently. “So you’re Lillie’s offspring.”

“I’m her son, yes. So is Keith.”

She didn’t ask which one was Keith. “You’re the child I built with her eye genes, that gray with gold flecks. And the girl, your … sister? Has she had her offspring yet?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I wanted to be there for the birth. I was very close to your mother, you know. She admired me intensely. We had a special relationship, aboard our ship.”

Fifteen years ago. Didn’t they realized how much that generation had changed in ways that weren’t physical?

Pam continued, “What is she sickening of?”

“A micro. One genetically engineered to kill people in the war. Airborne.”

“Well, I guessed that much. What is the micro’s genome? I wish you could smell me its prabisirks.”

Cord had no idea what a “prabisirk” was. He said helplessly, “You need to ask Dr. Wilkins. Or Emily. They’re our geneticists.”

“I remember Emily,” Pam said. “An intelligent girl. But who is Dr. Wilkins?”

“Scott Wilkins. He was … was one of the kids at Andrews Air Force Base but he didn’t go with my mother and the rest on your ship.”

“Oh, one of those,” Pam said, clearly losing interest in Scott Wilkins. “They don’t matter.”

Cord had to ask. “Don’t matter how?”

“They’re not carrying the engineered genes, the right way,” Pam asked, clearly surprised by the question. “Like you and your children.”

“But…” He couldn’t find words for what he wanted to say. The best he could do was, “But my mother doesn’t have my engineered genes, either. All she got was that she can smell your information. And a boosted immune system.”
But not boosted enough.

“Well, that’s true,” Pam said judiciously. “Lillie was only one of the vessel generation, but I became fond of her. Still, you’re right. She doesn’t really matter, either.”

He couldn’t manage an answer. Lillie, Dr. Wilkins, Grandmother Theresa, who had died trying to save Cord’s life . .
.“They don’t matter.”

Nothing was like he imagined it would be.

The pribir had another tantrum inside the big house.

Cord had been right; Dr. Wilkins had convinced everyone to let the aliens in without violence. Cord had still been on the ship, but he could easily imagine the arguments Dr. Wilkins used: Angie’s dead baby, Lillie, Hannah, maybe even the dead cattle. He could imagine, too, who had lined up against Dr. Wilkins, who for. Keith and Dakota would have been asked to tell their story over and over. When Sam and Rafe and Gavin straggled in from the arroyo, an arrival that Cord saw on the ship’s monitor, they would have added their voices. In all, the pribir sat waiting for an hour.

It didn’t seem to bother them. Pete had disappeared through a “door” that was there one moment, gone the next. Pam sat doing something incomprehensible with a small piece of machinery she held on her lap. She sat on a low chair, while Cord stood tensely by the monitor.

Cord ventured, “What’s that?”

“An analyzer.” She looked up, scowling. “You people really have created some perversions. What’s wrong with you? Ship plucked this microorganism out of the air right here, by your dwelling, and it’s packed with enough genetic monstrosities to kill every cow on half this continent.”

“It did,” Cord said. “Well, not all. Dr. Wilkins and Emily identified it and made something to cure it, so we saved twenty head of cattle. Out of a herd of three hundred.”

Pam didn’t seem impressed. “Yes, the righter wouldn’t be that difficult.”

“The what?”

“The righter. The organism to destroy the perversion and return the planetary genome to the right way.”

Cord left the window and squatted by her chair. It seemed important to meet her eyes directly, on the same level. “Miss … I mean, Pam, do you know that nearly the entire planet was killed in the last war?”

“Oh, yes. We know. Ship monitors thermal signatures from orbit.”

Cord didn’t know what a thermal signature was, but he was staggered by her casual unconcern. She must not have understood. He tried again. “I mean, did you know that almost all humans everywhere are dead?”

“Yes,” she said absently, turning back to her machine. “Oh, look, this allele is at least interesting.”

Something in Cord’s stillness finally caught her attention. She gazed at him with impersonal kindness. “You’re bothered, aren’t you, by all those deaths. Don’t be. Do you know what the right way really is, Cord? It’s what you’ve named ‘evolution.’ The organisms that can best adapt and breed survive, and others disappear. If they disappear, it means they weren’t fit to survive in the first place. Every species eventually gets to the point of directing their own evolution, and our mission is to help species get there faster. That inevitably means that lesser species disappear faster. But it’s nothing to mourn over, no more than was the disappearance of those big reptiles, I don’t remember the word for them.”

“Billions of people died! Billions!” What was happening here? This was the same argument Cord had had with Dr. Wilkins, only then it was Cord who hadn’t cared. But that was before he’d seen how indifference looked on somebody else.

“Yes, billions died,” Pam said with a brilliant smile, “but you won’t, nor your children. We’ve returned in time to ensure that, I think, even with the perversions that have been added to the environment. You and your children will survive and evolve.”

He could scarcely get words out. “And … and my mother…”

“Oh, yes, we’ll save her and any other remnants of the old species that we come across, anybody that gets to this ‘farm.’ At least, we’ll save them to the extent that non-germ-line alteration is possible. We’ll rehabilitate their genes so they don’t join the billions of obsolete dead. Yet. Of course we’ll do that.” Her voice took on tones of reproach.

“After all, Cord, we’re human, too.”

Uncle DeWayne eventually came out of the big house. It was full dark now, and he carried a powerful flashlight. These hoarded relics were usually saved for emergencies. DeWayne illuminated the ship, a straight-backed dignified black man with gray hair, and spoke without raising his voice. “My name is DeWayne Freeman. I’m addressing the pribir in the ship. You’re welcome at this farm. Come out of the ship and inside, please. No one will try to harm you if you don’t harm us, and everyone will be grateful for your help.”