Nancy Kress (38 page)

“It’s about time,” Pete said. He’d returned fifteen minutes ago from wherever he’d been. Cord had the impression that he and Pam were communicating furiously, although they neither spoke nor looked at each other.

Pam made unreplicable sounds at the door and it opened. Cord emerged behind them.

The flashlight caught them full in the eyes and DeWayne courteously lowered it. The upward light cast weird shadows on DeWayne’s lined face, so that to Cord he suddenly looked more alien than the pribir. Cord looked away.

The only people in the great room were Dr. Wilkins, Emily, and Jody. How had Uncle DeWayne persuaded the others to retreat to the back rooms or the other houses? Or maybe Jody had, he was supposed to be the boss of the farm. Jody, who had never seen a pribir, never been smelled to by one, looked both apprehensive and curious. Emily, who had been aboard the ship, looked as if she was trying hard not to glare. Dr. Wilkins was expressionless.

“Hello, Emily,” Pam said. “You haven’t changed very much, dear.”

Emily scowled.

Pete said genially, “You must be Scott Wilkins.” He held out his hand and Dr. Wilkins took it. Pete looked expectantly at Jody.

Dr. Wilkins said, “This is Jody Romero Ridley, the son of Theresa Romero, who was at Andrews Air Force Base with me. Jody runs this farm.”

Pete and Pam smiled at Jody without interest. Pam said, “Where’s Lillie, Scott? Cord says she’s contracted one of your perverse bioweapons.” She pronounced the word with distaste.

How strange, Cord thought somewhere in the depths of his dazed mind. She can’t stand the thought of bioweapons, but she doesn’t care at all about the billions they killed.

“Yes,” Dr. Wilkins said, “Lillie is sick. The micro is out of her system. It started prion conversion to cause an accelerated form of fatal familial insomnia. It—”

” ‘Prions’?” Pam said. “We didn’t learn that word from Rafe or Emily. We’ll do our own analysis. Bring Lillie aboard the ship.”

“No,” Emily said, and Cord saw that she hadn’t been able to help herself. Were the memories of pribir ship that bad? For his mother, too? Emily pressed her lips together tightly and looked at the wall.

“Jody,” Dr. Wilkins said, “tell Mike to bring Lillie out.”

“Oh, Mike is here, too,” Pete said, sounding pleased. “You really must give us a complete list of our old friends.”

Emily started to leave the room.

“Emily,” Dr. Wilkins said, “come back. We both have to go aboard, too. To learn.”

Pam said doubtfully, “It’ll be very crowded.”

Pete added, “And you won’t learn anything, anyway. You couldn’t possibly build our equipment. That’s why we’re building the alterations right into your genes, to compensate for your ignorance. You know that.”

Emily slammed the door behind her.

Mike appeared, carrying Lillie. Cord felt tears prick his eyelids. Lillie was so thin her elbows were visible knobs. Much of her hair had fallen out. She was asleep, or drugged.

“Well, good heavens,” Pam said.

Pete added, “It appears our immune engineering was inadequate.”

Pam turned on him. “Who expected them to fuck up the environment this badly? The only genetic thing they
are
good at is perversions. All right, Mike, bring her along.” She stamped out, followed by Pete, Mike, and Dr. Wilkins.

Cord went with them. He couldn’t help himself. The procession went into darkness thick as mud, without DeWayne’s flashlight. Pete made a noise and the ship began to glow, guiding them. The door opened.

This time they went through the blank room and into one that made Cord blink. Machines lined all the walls —or were they machines? No, they were the actual walls, studded with projections and indentations, and as Cord watched,
the walls slithered.
Not slithering. Breathing.

Not breathing. Some other movement, unnamable but unmistakable. The walls were alive.

Pete made another sound and a wall indentation grew longer, higher, deeper. “There,” Pete said to Mike.

Mike stood unmoving.

“Oh, for—” Pam said, and effortlessly took Lillie from Mike’s arms. He tightened his grip for a moment, then let Lillie go. Pam laid her in the indentation and its back wall began to mold itself around her.

Cord broke and ran.
This was not right.
This was not human. As he fled through the blank outer room to the outdoors, he knew that he was being watched. He exploded into the darkness—the ship had stopped glowing—and bent over, gasping.

A moment later he was ashamed of himself. He was a coward. It was only technology, just machines using genetics instead of motors, just the right way, what did he fucking expect…

Not this. Not this.

How did Mike and Dr. Wilkins stay? Of course, they were older, they were more used to the pribir … They were brave. He was a coward.

For the first time, Cord understood why Emily, Lillie, all that generation hated the pribir. They had done this sort of thing to them aboard the first ship, without the humans’ consent, without telling them what would happen to them. The pribir had even made the girls pregnant, had taken sperm from the boys … that was
rape.

He’d never seen it before. If anyone had done that to Clari, had handled her body and put babies in her that weren’t Cord’s…

Cord straightened in the darkness. He knew he wasn’t going to go back into that ship. Neither was he going to tell the pribir to leave his mother alone … not that the aliens would obey him! But the point was that he wasn’t going to do it. He was going to go along with whatever Pam and Pete did, and don’t fool yourself, Cord: it’s not like with the older generation. They’d had no choice. His going along was a choice. He, Cord Anderson, was choosing to let aliens rape his people.

He couldn’t go back inside. Shivering even though it wasn’t cold, he blundered in the dark toward the bench under the cottonwoods and sat there, hearing the creek trickle over stones, staring anywhere except at the ship he couldn’t see anyway through the thick night.

Twenty-four hours later, Lillie emerged from the ship walking steadily, her gray eyes clear as her mind. She hugged Kella, still pregnant, and Keith. She listened as DeWayne and Spring filled her in on everything that Scott Wilkins hadn’t already told her. She stood for a long moment in Mike’s arms, neither of them needing to say anything about Hannah’s death or their future. Then she went to find Cord, who had slept alone in the barn, who had refused to come anywhere near the house or the ship or any person, human or pribir.

He was at Dead Men’s Arroyo, sitting on a boulder, staring at the mass grave of the marauders dug fourteen years ago. A flash flood had carried away the stone marker and the grave was indistinguishable from the scrub around it. You had to know where to look.

“Cord.”

“Mom!” He jumped up, hugged her hard, blushed, and let her

“I’m fine, Cord. They repaired me.”

“Are they … is anybody …”

“They’re working, Cord. Doing what they came to do.”

He couldn’t tell anything from her tone. He burst out, “You were right, Mom! They’re monsters!”

“Yes.” She sat on the boulder, patted the place beside her. Reluctantly Cord sat down. He wasn’t in the mood for anybody else’s emotion except his own.

He said, “I should go check on Clari.”

“You haven’t thought about Clari in quite a while, it seems. She can wait a little longer. I want to talk to you.”

But then she said nothing. Silence dragged on. Cord recognized this trick from his childhood; sooner or later the other person, unable to stand the silence, would tell Lillie whatever she was after. Not this time.

More silence.

He said, “They’re horrible, Mom. They don’t care about all the people dead in the war, or about your generation —”
only vessels
” — or about any human at all. They only care about our genes!”

“I know,” Lillie said.

“That’s why you hate them! And you’re right!”

“No, that’s not why. I don’t hate them. But I don’t trust them, because their goals aren’t ours. Their goal is to remake humanity in their own image. Like gods. And our goal—” She stopped.

“Is what?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known. I don’t know why we’re here or what the purpose of life is. When I was your age, I worried about that a lot.”

“But not anymore?” Cord had never, he realized, thought about “the purpose of life.” He just lived it. This was a side of his mother he’d never seen, and it made him uneasy.

“Not any more. We’ve been too busy surviving. But I know this, Cord. The pribir know so much more than we do, but they can’t … see. No, that’s not right. Let me try again.”

Cord waited, wishing he were somewhere else.

“The pribir have a vision of the infinite manipulability of genes. Using genes to create anything, to accomplish anything. But they have no vision at all to give the bodies that house those genes. They don’t care about those bodies because they’re temporary and genes are not. I don’t even think they care about their own bodies. They’re shaped like us—for now, anyway—to help their work. But their real shape is probably far different. Once, I saw—”

Cord stood up. He didn’t want to know what his mother had seen once. He’d already seen enough himself, and none of it was what he’d imagined.

Lillie smiled. “Okay, Cord. This isn’t your kind of conversation. That’s all right. Help me back to the farm.”

Alarm ran through him, followed by suspicion: His mother never asked for help. But she leaned on him as they walked the mile to the farm, and he didn’t know if her grip on his arm was to ease herself or to lead him firmly, inescapably home.

He who prepares for tomorrow, prepares for life.”

–
Ovid

For the first few weeks, Lillie wondered what else the pribir might have done to her brain besides free it of the prions that were killing her. If they had changed her brain chemistry significantly, had altered her neurons or transmitters into those of a different person, how would she even know?

She seemed the same to herself. More significantly, how everyone at the farm treated her didn’t differ from her memories of how they’d treated her before her illness. No one reacted to her as if she were acting out of character. Her memories of past years matched others people’s recollections. And no amount of genetic tinkering could create memories, could it? Only erase them. So gradually Lillie began to believe she was still Lillie.

Whatever that might mean.

Maybe it meant only her memories. Maybe that’s all the essence of a person was: what she remembered, and how she felt about those memories. The mind’s eye, not the cell’s DNA.

Certainly memories thronged around her thickly. Why not before now? For the reason she’d given Cord: she’d been too busy with everyone’s survival. But now survival seemed to be in the hands of the pribir. So now, in the middle of a present tense with significant genetic futures, Lillie found herself caught by insignificant memories from a world past and gone.

Riding on the crosstown bus with Uncle Keith to the Museum of Modern Art. The feel of a cherry popsickle on her tongue. The smell of paste in art class at her elementary school on New York’s West Side. The sound of planes shrieking overhead as they took off and landed at Andrews. Giggling with Theresa behind the Youth Building when they’d found someone’s stash of illegal cigarettes behind a dumpster and they’d each taken a single disgusting puff. A dress Madison had once worn at Andrews, yellow and slinky, with tiny mirrors sewn around the neckline. A nurse she’d especially liked at Malcolm Grow, a big black woman with a huge laugh, whose name Lillie wished she could remember. Going to the movies, and trying to decode graffiti, and standing in the supermarket in front of seventeen brands of scented soap, trying to choose.

“Aunt Lillie,” Taneesha said, “Mom wants you right away. Aunt Lillie? Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Lillie said. Taneesha looked worried, her pretty brown face creased, an infant in her arms. A pretty child, and already a mother. Well, so had Lillie been.

“Mom says to come right away!” Taneesha said, and Lillie left the past.

“What does Sajelle want? Is Susie in labor?” Susie was the only one still pregnant, except Clari. All the rest had had healthy triplets. Once again the farm was overwhelmed with infants, and she, Lillie, had no business daydreaming over her work.