Nancy Kress (6 page)

“I need a big piece of paper,” Lillie said, coming inside their temporary housing with a bag of corn chips. PX privileges had been extended to the base visitors.

“Do we have any big sheets of paper?” Theresa asked, bursting in the other door.

Keith and Carlo, who had been using handhelds in vain attempts to do their respective jobs from hundreds of miles away, looked at each other. Rosalita was out shopping.

“Oh, there’s this shelf paper your mother bought,” Lillie said, rummaging in a kitchen cupboard. “Here, Tess.”

Both girls efficiently cleared the bungalow’s one table, spread out a hunk of white shelf paper, and began to draw. Keith and Carlo rose at the same time to stand beside them. After a few minutes of silence, Keith risked, “Is what you’re both drawing a message from the pribir?”

“Yes,” Lillie answered. “Do we have any other color pens besides blue?”

Carlo said, “Do you … do you want to use the handheld?”

“No, thanks, Dad,” Theresa said. “This is better.”

Why? Keith wondered but didn’t ask. He found he was holding his breath as he watched the girls draw. They both drew the same thing, although it was obvious that Theresa was the better artist. Lillie’s drawing was fairly crude: a human eye. Then she drew a mouse and heavily circled its eye. Then some sort of flying insect, with its eye circled. Underneath she put four symbols: a circle, a square, a triangle, and a short straight line. Then she began to rapidly write a whole string of these, as if they were an alphabet.

When she was done, she stood and stretched. “Tess, want some corn chips?”

“Sure, just a minute, I’m not quite done.” Carlo said, “Theresa, what … what are you going to do with that?”

“Take it to Major Fenton. She’s leading my group.”

“Do you like her?” Lillie asked.

“She’s okay. A little staff-assed.”

“Yeah, I think so, too. But she’s okay.”

Keith said, “Do you want me to call her? To give her this … thing?”

“No, I’ll take it when I have my appointment this afternoon,” Lillie said. “But thanks anyway, Uncle Keith. C’mon, Tess, let’s eat these chips on the way to basketball.”

The girls left the men staring at each other blankly.

“The decision has been made,” said a female major—yet someone else Keith hadn’t met yet, this project had more personnel than an aircraft carrier—“to pass on to you parents everything we learn about the children’s messages from the pribir.”

Eighty-three parents sat again in a room at the Officer’s Club. Keith counted; evidently seven had gone home. Probably they were from two-parent sets, with other children or critical jobs to see to. He had a critical job, too, and it was going down the toilet, but he couldn’t leave.

“We recognize the dangers in this open communication, and hope you do as well,” the major continued. “It’s much better for everyone if the press receives its information through official government channels, to guarantee both accuracy and security. On the other hand, these are your children.” She smiled. The smile came out a bit thin.

She started reading from a prepared statement. “This morning all sixty children produced the same drawing, in most cases immediately after being outdoors. Each child told his or her counselor that the pribir wished to help us with our genes. The four symbols, as you probably guessed—circle, square, triangle, line—correspond to the four bases of DNA, adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine. The long string of symbols matches the gene that creates the eye in a developing human fetus. Its base sequence is very close to the sequence for the eye gene in mice and fruit flies.”

The audience began to buzz. Keith saw that not everybody here understood even the basics about DNA. The major was going to have to get a prepared statement that started genetic education a great deal earlier.

“We think,” she continued, “that this message is designed to establish a basic language between pribir and us, in order to communicate future genetic information.” She looked up. “Any questions?”

“Are they going to give us the ‘genetic information’ to understand what was done to our kids?” a man called. It was Carlo Romero.

“We don’t know what they’re going to say in the future, Mr. Romero, any more than you do. We can only wait.”

Keith left the meeting early, as the major struggled to explain concepts so basic to her that she had trouble understanding that her audience didn’t all already know them: base pairs, DNA, chromosomes, codons, amino acid formation. Keith had only undergraduate biology, but it was enough for this. So far, anyway.

He caught a base bus back to the bungalow, rather than waiting for designated transport. The bus was filled with military and civilian personnel. A few of them stared at him strangely, and he realized that Andrews Air Force Base knew who had invaded its midst and sealed its perimeters, and not everyone liked the visitors. He stared back.

Lillie and Theresa were in their bedroom, the door half closed. They didn’t hear him come in, and he stood in the darkened living room and listened to the conversation he was not supposed to hear.

“Are you scared?” That was Theresa.

“No. I keep thinking I should be, but I’m not,” Lillie said.

“It’s like it’s weird and not weird at the same time.”

“I know. But they’re such good people,” Lillie said.

Who were? The Air Force, the pribir, the parents, the workers who died on SkyPower? Keith scarcely breathed, not wanting to give himself away.

Theresa said, “They
are
good. But my dad says I only think that because the messages are affecting my brain.”

“I know. But, Tess, I thought about this. Could the pribir change our emotions about them and not about anything else? I don’t think
everything
is good. Or everybody.”

“I don’t know.”

“I still feel like myself. But Uncle Keith looks at me funny sometimes, like he thinks I’m what the assholes call us. Puppets.”

Theresa exploded. “You got it easy, Lillie! Your uncle doesn’t harass you! My mom … if she wasn’t leaving tomorrow, I don’t know what I’d do. Kill her, maybe. She thinks I’m possessed by the devil!”

Lillie said mischievously, “Well, you did kiss Scott Wilkins at the dance, and open mouth, even …”

Both girls giggled and Theresa cried, “You promised to never tell anybody!”

“I won’t. But you’re amazing, Tess. I wouldn’t
dare.”

“Well, it wasn’t that great, to tell you the truth. But someday I want to get married and have lots of kids. I love babies. Don’t you?”

“Well … not especially,” Lillie admitted.

“Really? Why not? They’re so cute!”

“I don’t know. I think I’d rather be an explorer. Or maybe a diplomat. Somebody doing something important for the human race.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, I’m glad my mom is leaving. And you know what else? I’m glad the pribir changed me.”

“Oh, me, too,” Lillie said. “It’s like having this really important connection, somehow, who also loves you … I can’t explain.”

Theresa said solemnly, “It’s like knowing God.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“But you believe in the pribir!”

“Oh, yes,” Lillie said, and at her tone—fervent, uplifted, religious—Keith crept out of the bungalow and came back in with as much noise as he could. Anything to cut that conversation short. Anything to not hear Lillie sounding like her deluded mother.

There was another “message,” leading to another drawing, the next day. Then another the day after that. They came every day, and every one concerned genetics. The Air Force brought in a high school teacher used to basic instruction to explain to the parents in simple terms what was being transmitted by the pribir.

Then a family made a secret deal to sell their story to a Net channel for three million dollars. The secret deal didn’t stay secret. Child and parents were sent … where? Home would be too dangerous; the full set of violent nuts was still yelling “Death to Mutants.” The official sessions passing on communications to the parents stopped. But the drawings didn’t, and Keith looked at Lillie’s latest sketch and then went to find Dennis Reeder.

The doctor and his daughter Hannah were housed with an older woman and her granddaughter. The grandmother had barely finished the eighth grade. Dennis Reeder was glad to talk to Keith.

“The drawing Hannah did Tuesday was clearly of Sertoli cells. Those are found in the testes. The female equivalent is follicular cells in the ovaries, and Hannah’s drawing included those, too.”

So that’s what that strange pear-shaped object had been. Lillie was no Matisse.

“Remember, I’m not a geneticist,” Reeder said, and Keith nodded encouragingly. “But it’s pretty obvious that the long strings of base pairs were descriptions of existing genes that the Sertoli cells switches on to make the corresponding proteins.”

“What do those proteins do?”

“Sertoli cell proteins do a lot of things. But one of them is make cells kill themselves. Apoptosis.”

Keith was startled. “And that’s a good thing?”

“Sometimes. There are genes for apoptosis in every cell. They’re tumor-suppresser genes, and if the cell starts dividing wildly, they stop it by making it commit suicide. When the tumor-suppresser genes aren’t working right, you get cancer.”

Cancer. In the last ten years, since the human genome was first mapped, medicine had made some progress toward curing cancer. That is, they could cure some cancers some of the time for some people, which had always pretty much been the situation. Now the success rate was higher, but it was still a long way from even fifty percent.

Reeder said, “Sertoli and follicular cells regulate sperm and eggs. They knock out all the ones whose DNA isn’t perfect. A five-month-old female fetus has seven million germ cells—sort of pre-eggs. At birth there are only two million. At puberty, less than a million. Only about five hundred will be allowed to mature.”

Keith said, “So these Sertoli proteins are really good at finding the cells with damaged genes and killing them. And if you could somehow apply that to cancer cells …”

“Bingo,” Reeder said. Then he let himself get excited. “It’s been thought of before, but the obstacles are huge. But the drawings Hannah did Wednesday and today … I think the pribir are giving us the genetic code to create synthetic proteins that will kill all cancers all the time.”

“Well, that should certainly counterbalance the first bad impression they made by killing the SkyPower workers.”

He was surprised at his own cynicism. So, apparently was Reeder, who said stiffly, “That seems a pretty trivializing way to view a cure for our major killer of people over forty.”

Which only showed how quickly the first impression was being counterbalanced. The pribir obviously knew what they were doing.