Nancy Kress (40 page)

Pete’s statement electrified the room. Lillie stood shakily. “I have to tell that to Sajelle, the kitchen crew fixes rabbit stew all the time, we had it two days ago — “

“Those rabbits weren’t poisoned or you’d already be dead,” Pam said crossly. “Don’t you listen, Lillie? And I already told Sajelle. The point is, you can’t eat any more rabbit at all. This genemod is dominant, and it’s coupled with other genes that confer a preferential evolutionary advantage on rabbits that have it. A nasty construction. Eventually every rabbit will have it.”

Rabbits currently formed a mainstay of the farm’s protein.

Scott said, “Are you sure, Pete?”

He looked surprised. “Of course we’re sure.”

Scott said, “Have you detected this gene in any other wildlife?”

“That’s just the point,” Pam said. “It’s already transmitted, probably by transposon in a parasite, to those little rodents in the desert, the small quick ones that jump so well.”

“Deermice,” Scott said. “We don’t eat those.”

“But the transposon might keep jumping species. And we’ve also detected something strange in the mesquite.”

In the mesquite. That meant
plants… .
Lillie was no scientist, but she understood that plants underlay everything, the whole food chain.

“It’s not interfering with basic plant functions,” Pete said, “photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixing, all that. We’re not even sure its expression could harm you, and anyway you don’t eat mesquite. But it’s a sign.”

Lillie said, although she was afraid to hear the answer, “Of what?”

Pam said, “Of the complete changing of Earth ecology. Between what you’ve done to the atmospheric gas balance, what that’s done to the climate, and what your perversions of the right way have done to the fauna and now even the flora … you people just aren’t worth our trouble!”

“But you’re our assignment,” Pete said. “So we’ll do what’s necessary. However, you can’t keep your current genome and hope to survive more than a few more generations. We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you. We have to rebuild from the beginning.”

Emily spoke for the first time. “‘Way back at your generation.’ You knew the human race was going to need genetic modifications to survive, didn’t you. You knew it seventy years ago, when you started all this with poor deluded Dr. Timothy Miller. You knew it.”

“Yes, of course,” Pete said.

“Did you know a war with bioweapons was going to happen?”

“With a sixty-seven percent probability,” Pete said. He flicked his hair off his sweaty forehead; the room was already stifling, and it wasn’t even noon.

Emily repeated carefully, “You knew there would be a devastating biowar. And you didn’t use us engineered kids to warn humanity, back in 2013, when it might have done some good.”

Pete said patiently, “That’s not the right way, Emily.”

“And now you want to ‘rebuild from the beginning.’ You mean, you want to take human genes and create some creature that can survive in the new ecology, but won’t look or act or function anything like human beings.”

Pete and Pam looked at each other, bewildered. Pam said, “How could they not be human? They’ll have mostly human genes. Of course they’ll be human.”

“Brewed up in some vat?”

Pam said, “Carried in human wombs, of course. It has to be a heritable germ-line rebuilding, you know that. Emily, you’re being ridiculous.”

Emily stood. “I’m being human. Which you are not. And before we’d let you turn our children into the kind of monsters you are, we’ll all die first and the whole race with us.” She walked past the pribir and out the door.

Scott said quietly, “What would the new ones look like?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ll try to preserve as much of your current appearance as we can, if you like, but, really, there are much better and more efficient designs.”

Lillie remembered the … thing she’d glimpsed, for a brief almost-sedated moment, behind the wall of the garden on the
Flyer. A
shapeless blob, flowing toward her…

The future of humanity. And just yesterday she had been regretting the loss of the crosstown bus, cherry popsickles, movies, graffiti. All nothing compared to the losses to come.

Or else the human race could die out completely.

Pete said, “We wanted to tell you three first, before we tell the others.” He looked proud of this piece of adaptation to local custom.

Scott said quickly, “Don’t tell the others, please, Pete. Let me do it.”

Pam frowned. “It’s our—”

“Of course it’s your project, your discovery, Pam. All the credit goes to you two. But just let Lillie and me present it to everybody else.

“Well, all right.”

Lillie said, “I have a question.”

“Yes?” Pam said. She even smiled. She still thought, Lillie knew, that she and Lillie had a special shared bond. It made Lillie’s skin prickle.

Lillie spoke very carefully. “If the others don’t like the idea of ‘rebuilding from the beginning’ … if they refuse … will you go ahead and try to do it anyway? Without our consent?”

As
you did on the ship when you made us all pregnant.
She didn’t say it.

Pete said, “Why would you refuse?”

“If we do,” Lillie said. No use explaining; Pete would never get it.

Pam and Pete were silent.
Smelling to each other,
Lillie knew. Beside her, Scott’s body tensed.

Pam finally said, “This planet is our assignment. The sentient life on it is our project. You said that yourself, Lillie.”

It wasn’t an answer. And it was.

She said, “Tell me exactly how you would remake humans, all the survival advantages, so that I can tell the others.”

“Well, we’re not exactly sure yet of the — “

“Tell me what you can, Pete. It’s important. I have to have positive arguments, and I have to present them to everybody before Emily gets to them.”

Scott said, “Lillie …”

“I have to know, Scott.
We
have to know.”

The pribir told them.

“Oh my God,” Scott said.

Emily had had a chance to talk to no one yet. As she left the lab for the big house, Cord grabbed her to say that Clari had gone into labor. “She’s screaming, Emily … I can’t stand it!”

“Well, I don’t know why not,” Emily snapped.
“You’re
not in labor.”

“I’ll go get Mom — “

“Don’t bother. She’s too busy with the pribir. Take me to Clari.”

Cord did, then ran to fetch Sajelle and Carolina, and then ran to sit by Clari until she whimpered for him to get out.

So by the time Lillie reached the small house where Clari sat on the birthing stool Alex had built months ago, Clari was eight centimeters dilated. The girl squatted among the women, who wiped her face and gave her sips of water and held her hands when the pain came. “It’s going to break me in two,” Clari gasped. “Oh, save the baby if… if…”

“None of that talk,” Sajelle said, but she shot Lillie a worried look.

Clari had a very bad time. It wasn’t until midnight that Cord’s son slid out from her torn body, amid a wash of blood. Scott and Emily immediately sedated Clari and worked feverishly to repair the damage. Lillie held her breath until she heard the tiny, high wail. Carolina, she of the gentle hands, took the baby to the tub of heated water to be bathed, crooning to him in Spanish.
“Primito, mi corazon …”

“Can I—”

“You get out of here, Lillie,” Sajelle ordered. “You never were any good at nursing.” Gratefully, Lillie went. She leaned against the side of the house and gulped the sweet fresh air. A figure hovered there.

“You have a son, Cord.”

“Can I — “

“Not yet. Scott and Emily are — “

It didn’t matter. He had bolted through the door. Well, sterility was a thing of the past, anyway. The pribir adjustments to the immune system made it able to fight off anything.

No. Not anything. If that were so, there would be no need for the pribir to go on being here. And God, what a blessing that would be.

Lillie made herself stay awake until Emily emerged. Lillie said only, “Wait until morning?”

Emily nodded wearily, her shirt splattered with blood. “Both of us, then. To everybody at once.”

“Okay.”

Emily stumbled toward the lab, where she often slept. Lillie longed for sleep, but she went once more into the house to check on Clari and to see her new grandson. Cord was holding the sleeping baby, his face suffused with wonder. So he was parental, after all, as she herself had not been. Lillie breathed in relief. The baby would enrapture Cord, and Clari would see that, and the tension Lillie had detected between them during Clari’s pregnancy might wither away.

Lillie dutifully inspected the infant. Clari’s abundant dark hair, a standard baby face. Lillie wasn’t sure she could have differentiated this child from Kella’s dark-haired one. Or maybe even from any dark-haired infant on the farm.

But this one
was
different. If the pribir had their way, it would be the last human-looking child ever born.

It rained that next, crucial morning, a steady warm thunderless gift of water that greened the desert, filled the cisterns, and slid gracefully down the glass windows. Rafe and Spring planned on going to Wenton, eventually, to scavenge for anything useful, including more glass windows pried from the deserted buildings. Once they were convinced the town was truly deserted, for good.

Lillie and Emily stood by the cold fireplace, facing everyone else seated or standing around the great room. All the infants except Clari’s were in the adjoining den, with the childminders on duty hovering in the doorway between rooms. This early in the morning the room was at least cool, even with this many bodies packed in. It smelled of rain and cattle and babies and chicory coffee carried hot from the cookshack that kept cooking heat away from the big house.

Emily talked first, and Lillie had a sudden, useless flash of memory: Emily standing shyly alongside Rafe in the classroom aboard the
Flyer,
supplying Pam with the English words for genetic concepts. Emily blushing, proud of her ability to help these wonderful teachers in this most wonderful school.

Emily surveyed the tense faces in the great room and spoke with restraint. Lillie saw what that cost her. ” — and the rabbit population
is
poison to us now, or soon will be. There may or may not be difficulties with eating some plants, and more difficulties might develop later. The pribir say we can’t survive with all the changes that are going to happen on Earth. So they want to … want to …”

Emily licked her lips, and chose her words with care. “… to reengineer our genes again. To create embryos and implant them in fertile females, as they did aboard the ship fifteen years ago. But this time, the embryos will be much different from us. The pribir say they will have a different shape, different internal functions, different diets and … they’re not sure yet of all the necessary changes. But one thing the aliens are very clear on. These offspring we will give birth to will not be human, and they will eventually replace humans on the planet.”

There was stunned silence. Lillie stepped into it.

“Emily has told you the truth, but she’s left a few things out. First, the alternative to the pribir plan is death to the human race, forever. The genemods we already have, that the last two generations have, aren’t enough to let us adapt to what might happen to Earth. The bioweapons are too many and too persistent, and they’re mutating. Also, climate changes aren’t settling back down as we hoped they would. Rafe ran a computer simulation, and the global warming is caught in a feedback loop. All the sensors still transmitting from the upper atmosphere say the methane, ozone, and carbon dioxide are all increasing. Down here it’s only going to get worse. Our choice is simple: we do what the pribir suggest or our descendants all die.

“Second, there’s a big difference between this engineering and the last one. The pribir are asking our permission. They won’t go ahead with any embryo implants in anybody without consent.”

Scott stirred on his bench. Lillie met his eyes steadily, and held her breath. If he disputed that statement, the argument was over. Scott said nothing.