Nancy Kress (4 page)

Her nonchalance was, somehow, the part of the whole thing. She was so casual. Some information, some idea (posthypnotic?) had been planted in her brain, and to her it was as ordinary, as much a given, as breakfast cereal and rock music and warm spring weather.

“The anomalous structure is now active,” Shoba Asrani had said when Keith took Lillie back to the hospital the next day.

“It happened when we went outside,” Keith said.

“That fits with it being olfactory activity,” Dr. Asrani said.

“You mean she smelled something?” Keith said incredulously. “And it gave her some hypnotic suggestion? The same thing that kid in Troy smelled?” The open window in the pink bedroom, the sealed one in Lillie’s hospital room.

“Not hypnotic,” Asrani said. She looked visibly frayed. Keith knew there must be frantic medical conferences going on about this, on-and off-line. How could there not be? He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know. Now that he had Lillie back, his previous thirst for information had transmuted to a desire to put the whole thing behind them and have their lives back.

“Sit down, Keith,” Asrani said.

“I’d rather stand.”

She raised one arm. Let it fall again to her side. He thought he’d never seen such a helpless gesture. “Then listen standing. The usual human nose has fifty million bipolar receptor neurons inside each nostril. Inhaled molecules bind onto those receptor sites and trigger electrical signals. The brain is basically a chemical-electrical machine, you know. Each gets translated into the other all the time.

“The electrical signals travel first to a tangle of nerves called the glomeruli, where undoubtedly selective processing of some sort goes on. Then those signals go out to major portions of the brain involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses—pretty much everything important except muscular control. Have you ever seen a dog excited by a scent?”

“Of course,” Keith said.

“Well, animals like dogs that rely on smell more than humans do have roughly the same setup as ours, plus an additional structure, the olfactory tubercle, that makes our sense of smell wishy-washy.

“Lillie’s anomalous growth is in the same place as a tubercle would be, at the base of the frontal lobe, but much larger. Her glomeruli are firing in electrical patterns nobody has ever seen before. In each nostril she has not fifty million receptors but closer to five hundred million. Since each receptor site presumably binds a different molecule to it, she could be detecting molecules we have no idea of. And whatever information those molecules give her is going out to both her rational and emotional brain centers.”

“Are you saying that Lillie is smelling molecules that tell her these ‘pribir’ are coming?”

“I don’t know what they tell her. Obviously she’s not upset by whatever it is, so more than a simple exchange of information is going on. Her emotional centers are being soothed, conditioned to acceptance. She has a high measure of serotonin in her cerebrospinal fluid, much higher than she had before. Serotonin creates equilibrium.”

“You mean they’re brainwashing her!”

Dr. Asrani did something Keith had never expected: she lost her temper. The serene Indian woman shouted, “Don’t you get it? We don’t know! We don’t know anything!”

After a moment she added, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. But … how did these theoretical molecules get into the air? And how could children scattered over four states smell the same ones?”

“We don’t know how they got there. No more than we know how Lillie got to be what she is. But the distance is at least explicable. There are male moths that detect a single molecule of female moth sex pheromone and then zoom to the female moth from six miles away. A model something like that, but even more powerful, might be operating in Lillie and the others.”

He couldn’t take it in. His mind rejected it. This was Lillie, his Lillie, Babs’s daughter… He walked over to the window and stared blindly out, seeing nothing.

Dr. Asrani said, “You mentioned ‘brainwashing.’ There are as many definitions of that as there are so-called ‘experts.’ But looking at animal models again … there are a great many precedents for affecting behavior by manipulating smell. A certain kind of tapeworm in a moose will scent the moose’s breath so the breath attracts wolves. The tapeworm needs a wolf to finish its life cycle. So it gets a wolf to eat the moose, and it. And some ants — “

“Enough,” Keith said. “I understand.”

Which was probably the stupidest thing anyone had said all day. Of course he didn’t understand.

He turned to face Dr. Asrani. “The names of all the children won’t stay secret long, you know. There have been too many medical people involved. Lillie and the other twenty kids — “

“Eighty,” she interrupted him. “We have a fuller roster than Dr. Reeder.”

“I’ll bet you do. Anyway, what do you recommend I do for Lillie? Bring her here?”

“No,” she said, suddenly looking very tired. “Not here. If you want, you can take her to some friend or relative whom you can trust. But frankly, Keith, I don’t think it matters where you take her.

“I’m afraid that before long, Lillie may be telling
you
where she has to go.”

The first indication anyone had that the pribir did indeed exist came when they blew up SkyPower.

Keith, not knowing what else to do with Lillie, brought her with him to Wolf, Pfeiffer. They arrived by 7:00. He told the hotshots already in and working that his niece had the day off from school and he would be taking her to lunch, so she would spend the day in his office. The assistants and associates looked askance, but he was a partner and nobody objected. The other partners didn’t notice. He installed her at his computer, where she promptly began manipulating software he didn’t know he had. She found games and programming languages and video feeds and settled in happily.

He watched her a minute from the doorway before leaving for a meeting in the conference room. She sat facing away from him, absorbed in the computer. Her bright brown hair bounced on her shoulders. She wore a pale green sweater in a hideous style currently fashionable with teens, knitted with large holes on both shoulders and stuck all over with what looked to him like dangling yarn braids. Her shoulders, glimpsed through the weird holes, moved slightly as she used the keypad. He could hear her talking to the software in a low, musical voice.

He went to his meeting.

Twenty minutes later, a secretary opened the door, her face disapproving. “Mr. Anderson, your niece wants you. She says it’s an emergency.” Her tone said that in her opinion there was no emergency at all.

Keith knew Lillie better than the secretary did. He bolted from the meeting.

She stood in the middle of his office, her young face anxious but not frantic. “Uncle Keith, you have to tell all the people to get off SkyPower right away.”

“What?” he said stupidly.

“To get off SkyPower right away. It’s not the right way for us to go―”

He stared at her.

She had opened his office window the six possible inches mandated by the Sick Building Act of 2009. “Tell me from the beginning, Lillie.”

She looked perplexed. “There isn’t any beginning. You have to just get all the people off SkyPower right away, before the pribir correct it. That’s not the way we should go. It damages genes.”

“What do you mean, ‘correct it’?”

She glanced out the window. “Make it go away. It damages the right way.”

Keith said to his wall screen, “Oliver Wendell, turn on the TV to NewsNet.”

” — since eight o’clock this morning. Some of the children themselves have been calling SkyPower Corporation, news outlets such as this one, and the White House. No one knows what to make of this latest—”

“Oliver Wendell, turn the TV off. Lillie … how do you know this?”

She looked impatient. “The pribir told all of us, of course. There are people —they don’t know how many ― on SkyPower and the pribir don’t want to hurt them when they correct it. Genes are the right way, Uncle Keith, not power sources or chemicals that damage genes. So you have to get the people off, because the pribir will only wait a little while.”

“How long?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. SkyPower is really a bad thing, you know. All the nuclear reactors are. They damage genes.”

She looked, sounded, felt like Lillie. She
was
Lillie. But the words were not. For the first time, something deep inside Keith recoiled from her.

Keith called SkyPower Corporation. But he was a secondary legal counsel, and the CEO and her staff had no time for him. They were “in meeting,” an assistant informed him neutrally.

“Oliver Wendell, turn the TV on to NewsNet.”

” — no more than a silly hoax,” someone was saying, a wizened man with an indignant expression. “Elaborately organized, yes. But for a major transnational like SkyPower to listen to a bunch of children would be ridiculous. Nor is SkyPower going to ‘damage genes’ — anybody’s genes. Safety records show—”

Lillie said, “Aren’t they going to send the people back to Earth?” She looked troubled. Was that her talking … or them?

Did he believe there was a them?

He stayed riveted to the TV, canceling all his meetings. No one disturbed him; evidently the media still did not have Lillie’s name. Lillie went back to her computer games. At noon she looked up, frowning.

“Uncle Keith—they mean it about correcting SkyPower. Why are those people still on it?”

He could only shake his head.

“—NASA reporting that, like the Hubble, the Artemis II probe has detected no alien craft anywhere near Earth orbit—”

“Lillie … where are the pribir? In a space ship?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where is the ship?”

“I don’t know,” she said, not looking up from her game.

At 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, SkyPower blew up. The corporation had not removed its personnel.

Hysteria broke out on the Net. Terrorist acts, international provocation, cleverly obfuscated industrial sabotage … theories flew like bullets.

Half an hour later, Keith’s secretary stuck a frightened face into his office. “Mr. Anderson … the White House is on the phone channel!”

He picked up his phone, already knowing. They wanted Lillie, wanted all of them. As soon as possible, as anonymously as possible. In Washington. Highest national security. FBI agents on the way to his apartment.

Lillie turned off her computer game. “Let’s go, Uncle Keith. I need to pack some stuff at home. Where’s that red suitcase I took to Kendra’s for my last sleep over?”

No one spoke to them as they walked through the office. Everyone stared. Keith put an arm around Lillie.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “They just don’t understand yet. About the right way, I mean. But it’s okay. The pribir can explain everything.”

NASA announced the position of the spacecraft. Perhaps they’d just located it, perhaps they’d known all along. Keith knew he’d never find out which. The White House press secretary held a tense, almost belligerent session with the press in which he said, essentially, that he wasn’t going to say anything. He repeated only that the president would address the nation the following night. Condolences had gone out to the families of the seventy-three SkyPower employees killed in the explosion.

Two FBI agents, male and female, waited at Keith’s apartment. Within twenty minutes he and Lillie had packed and been escorted by car to La Guardia. They were shown to a heavily guarded private room in the airport terminal, and for the first time Keith saw some of the other kids that the press was already calling “the pribir puppets.”

They looked like any eighth grade class on a field trip.

Seventeen of them had been collected at La Guardia. They were white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The girls appeared about two years older than the boys, although in fact the sexes were distributed evenly throughout ages eleven, twelve, and barely thirteen. Newly pubescent, which had triggered the latent engineered genes. Some of the girls, like Lillie, had lush figures and wore make-up. The boys’ voices cracked when they called out to each other. At one side of the room, the parents sat looking shell shocked.

Lillie walked up to a dark-haired girl carrying an e-book. “Hi. I’m Lillie Anderson.”

“I’m Theresa Romero. You in eighth grade?”

‘Yes. At St. Anselm’s in Manhattan. I like your sweater.”