Nancy Kress (44 page)

Rafe looked unconvinced. He stood, gazing down at her. Abruptly he said, “You’re very brave.”

She said nothing.

“But, then, you always were. Even on the
Flyer.
Probably the bravest of all of us.” He turned and walked away very fast.

Lillie went inside. Sajelle sat holding one of the infants, crooning to it affectionately. Carolina changed another’s diaper. The third lay on Scott’s lab table, her gold-flecked gray eyes fastened on his face. Julie fussed with baby clothes. The room was very crowded.

Scott, delighted, said, “She’s smiling at me with her eyes!”

Lillie had been holding her breath, trying to assess her children objectively. Squat, gray-green, scaled hybrids …

“Scott,” she said, not exhaling, “Did Pam use reptile genes along with human ones? Did she?”

Scott looked startled. “Why, yes, she did. Does it matter?”

Lillie couldn’t hold her breath any longer. She let it out and gulped air, and with the air came the sweet baby smell.

“No,” she said, “it doesn’t.”

Sajelle said, “Have you decided yet what to name them?”

“The boy is Dionysus. The girls are Rhea and Gaia. You’re holding Gaia.”

“I never heard of names like that,” Sajelle complained. “What kind of names are those?”

“Very old ones,” Lillie said. “Scott, what have you learned about their genome?”

“Not a whole lot,” Scott said. “Four billion base pairs, a third more than we’ve got. I can only identify about twenty percent. Less than I can identify for your first lot of kids, Cord and Keith and Kella. We never even found out what all
their
genes can do, let alone this lots’. There’s just no match in the database. Maybe I’ll learn more over time. Here, take Rhea. I have to sit down.”

He eased himself into a chair. Lately Scott’s right knee had been bothering him. His hair was almost gone now, his face deeply lined. “Lillie, there’s been some shifts about your move. Lupe and Juan aren’t going.”

Well, that wasn’t unexpected. Neither Lupe nor Juan had builtin olfactory engineering. They never perceived the pheromones the babies sent out, and so their ridiculous prejudices must always be operating. The same was true for Martin and for Carolina, but Carolina was here anyway, calling Rhea “little cousin.” Evidently some people were naturally nurturing no matter what.

Scott continued. “Roy and Felicity also decided to stay here.”

Roy. The men weren’t around the babies as much as were the women, all with babies of their own. Roy may have persuaded Felicity to not go. Felicity was Julie’s daughter, did that mean —

“Spring and I aren’t going, either,” Julie said. She looked near tears. “I’m sorry, Lillie. But my own kids — “

“I understand,” Lillie said. Julie’s older children, Dakota and Felicity, and her six grandchildren would be here. Julie wanted to be near them.

“But,” Scott said, “Keith and Loni are still going. So is Alex. And also Cord, Clari, and the baby.”

Gladness flooded through her.
Cord.
“Did Clari — “

“I think it was actually her idea.”

“I’m glad I’ll have one of Tess’s grandchildren along.”

“You’ll be fine,” Scott said, wiping his forehead. He felt the ever increasing heat more than anyone except Robin. “As far as Rafe can tell over the Net, there’s nobody left in a hundred square miles of where you’ll be.

“And one more thing. I’m going, too.”

“You?”

“Don’t look at me like that. You neither, Sajelle and Julie. I know I look like an old wreck to you, but I’ll be better off at a higher, cooler elevation than I am here. And somebody should document as much as possible of the gene expression of
Homo sapiens novus.”

Why? Lillie thought. Her children were not going to be building sequencers and analyzers any time soon. When they did, the design and data would be all different. She didn’t say this; she was too glad Scott was going with her. He was one of the few who could remember the world she had grown up in. One who could share those memories, that vanished life.

“I’m happy you’re coming, Scott.”

He said, “Emily can handle medical needs here.”

Sajelle said, “And all the rest of us will visit often, Lillie, and you can visit here. We don’t want to lose track of you, or these precious babies.” She gazed fondly at the infant in her arms.

Scott and Lillie looked at each other, and he made a complicated gesture not even Lillie could read.

The pribir ship lifted off in the middle of the night. No one heard it go. When Lillie came out of Scott’s lab in the morning, a knot of people stood behind the big house where the ship had been.

Lillie wasn’t really surprised. The last time, Pam and Pete had just ceremoniously dumped the humans in the desert, hardly saying goodbye. Farewell speeches apparently weren’t genetic.

She walked up to the group. A few people drew back, Sam and Senni and Kezia and, most hurtfully, Kella. Kella wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

Lillie said, “Where’s Jody?”

“Inside,” Gavin said. “Do you want me to get him?”

They didn’t want her to go inside the big house, even though she wasn’t carrying any of the babies. A strange pain slid through her. “Yes. Get him.”

Jody came out, a few minutes after the others had left. He looked embarrassed but stubborn. The look suddenly reminded Lillie of a very young Tess.

“Jody, I want to leave for the mountains tomorrow, not in a few weeks. There’s no reason to wait. The children and I are more than strong enough to travel — ” thanks to the pribir ” — and I think we should go.”

He looked relieved, and that, too, sent a pain through Lillie. He said, “Okay. Tomorrow is good. Can you be ready at four? I want to get there before the heat of the day.”

There and back,
he meant. But she only nodded. “We’ll be ready. Send out Cord and Keith.”

It was a caravan, the next morning, peculiar but probably no more peculiar than other caravans that had crossed this desert. Covered wagons, prospectors on mules, oil-seeking geologists, nuclear-waste trucks. Lillie had spent last evening using the old computer they were taking with them, seeking information on the site of her new home. She’d been shocked to see how little was left to access. Most sites had just ceased. The electricity had gone, the batteries had gone, the people had gone. How had the big libraries continued, with no one running them? Maybe someone was running them. Or maybe the machines were self-running by now, providing data and services endlessly for users who no longer existed. Lillie could have asked Rafe, but she knew she wouldn’t.

Jody drove DeWayne’s truck, still in good condition. In the ample truck bed, under tarps, rode Lillie, Alex, and Scott, each holding one of Lillie’s triplets. Keith and Loni’s three ten-month-old children were, miraculously, all asleep. Clari sat close beside Cord, holding baby Raindrop. Keith’s children were named Vervain, Stone, and Lonette. Cord and Clari, Keith and Loni had spent their whole lives on the isolated New Mexico farm. Conventional names meant little to them, mostly associated with silly Net shows. They named their kids after things that mattered to them. And, Lillie thought, “Gaia,” “Rhea,” and “Dion” were hardly more conventional.

Somewhere behind DeWayne’s speedier truck, Taneesha and Bobby drove horse carts piled with bags of foodstuffs from the farm, kegs of salted or smoked meat, some of Scott’s lab equipment. He’d apparently had an argument with Emily over what went and what stayed, but Scott must have pulled rank because it seemed to Lillie that most of it was here. There was also a precious box of weapons and ammunition.

“We don’t want them,” Cord said, but Lillie had spoken to him quietly and changed his mind. The mountains, too, had warmed and changed their ecology, although not as much as the desert, and it was possible they might encounter black bears, mountain lions, wolves.

Or leftover humans.

She didn’t say this last to Cord. Her favorite child, still idealistic, still prickly. But all of them knew how to use a handlaser on a rattlesnake, and Alex and Keith could fire everything in that sealed box.

Somewhere behind the horse carts, Spring and Dakota rode herd on a few dairy cows that would be left with Lillie. So would two horses. Spring, Bobby, Dakota, and Taneesha would return with Jody at nightfall, in the empty truck. And after that Lillie would see them … when?

Not soon, she knew. Away from her newest babies, the others’ memories of the children’s monstrosity would grow. That’s the way the human mind worked. Unless Lillie sent someone on horseback to fetch help, it might be a very long time before she saw the people she’d lived with for fifteen years, including her daughter.

Not Lillie’s choice. But innocence never meant you were spared punishment.

“We’re nearly there,” Jody said from the driver’s console. “Does everybody understand the route back?”

Lillie didn’t answer.

Six thick-walled cottages, of roughly equal size. This place had been a vacation compound, maybe a tourist resort. Four of the cottages were guest houses, each with three small bedrooms, comfortable large living room, and spectacular glass-walled view. The roofs had working solar panels, although the windpowered electric generator was no longer functional. The fifth, slightly larger cottage was a communal dining room with the kind of kitchen Lillie hadn’t seen in decades: steel appliances, smart ovens, servos. None of them worked. But the dining room had a woodstove and a huge fireplace, and water still ran in the sinks and toilets and tubs.

“Nice big tubs,” Jody said, grinning without mirth, “and you should have enough water. It won’t be as hot up here, either. Good thing, with those glass walls. Stupid building design.”

There had once been air conditioning, Lillie thought but didn’t say. Possibly Jody had never experienced air conditioning.

“Jody,” Scott said, “why don’t you all move up to the mountains?”

A reasonable question. Once, Tess and her husband had had to live where they owned land, and it was their good luck that it was in an area that the warming had made wetter rather than drier. Then, the farm people had huddled together for defense. After that, isolation from the bioweapons. But now there was no reason to stay in that exposed, hot, drying place. The world, or most of it, was empty.

Jody said, “Oh, we’ve always been there.” To him, Lillie saw, it was a reason. His farm, his roots, his mother’s grave.

“When are you starting back?” Alex said. There was some tension between him and Jody. Alex had always idolized the older man. No longer.

“Can’t go until tomorrow,” Jody said. “There’s a big storm coming up”

“You should stay as long as you want,” Lillie said deliberately. “You’re always welcome with us.” Jody looked away.

Everyone helped unpack. Lillie and Scott took one cottage, with Gaia, Rhea, and Dion. Keith, Loni, and their children took another, as did Cord and Clari and little Raindrop. Alex was offered the third bedroom in Cord’s cottage but said he preferred to put a bunk in what they were already calling “the big house,” the dining room/kitchen. Scott declared the vacant cottage his laboratory. The sixth remained what it already was, a storehouse bursting with supplies.

Did Alex miss Kezia? It was hard to tell. She had refused to come with him, and Lillie knew that unlike some of the men, Alex had never felt much personal attachment to Kezia or to the children that the pribir-mandated sex had given him. Kezia didn’t seem to mind. For her, too, the driven interlude seemed to have been total hormonal. And maybe Alex simply wasn’t very parental.

She had known, once, what that felt like. No more.

When everyone was settled, dinner over, and the infants asleep, Lillie went outside. Scott remained in their cottage, using the ancient computer. For a brief moment she let herself imagine what it would be like if Mike sat there instead. She suppressed the thought. Don’t dwell on it. No use in pointless pain.

How strange it felt to be completely surrounded by trees again! Pine and spruce instead of cottonwood and cedar. But the ubiquitous pinons were here, too. The trees blocked sections of the sky, which Lillie was used to seeing whole and vast and limitless. Not here.

When she looked more closely, she could see that some of the trees were dying. The climate was starting to dry off, just as it was on the plains; the process just hadn’t yet advanced as far. She didn’t know which flora had migrated here when the warming accelerated and the rains increased, but those plants were probably again in retreat. How long would it take?