Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Next came a man underwater. Parts of him, legs and arms, looked sort of like a fish, but he was still a man. Lillie understood that he had been genetically changed to live in the ocean.

A woman floated in a spaceship. The ship was vague but the woman clear. She had arms where her arms should be and arms where her legs should be, giving her four hands.

“Gross,” someone behind Lillie said.

The next images showed humans changing even more. They didn’t look human anymore. They grew tentacles, or shrank to circles, or had hard shells… all sorts of weird stuff. Then, quickly, came a series of images showing one of these monsters turned back into a human being. Children trooped up to her. Everyone smiled.

“They’ve made themselves look like us, just for our sake,” Emily said. She sounded cheerful. Lillie felt the same way. The pribir could change their babies’ genes to look or do anything they chose. And they had built some to look like Lillie and the others, so their visitors wouldn’t feel too scared. It was a nice thing to do, and it reassured Lillie.

Now, was that gratitude or chemical brainwashing? It sure felt like gratitude.

Jason, the clown, growled in a deep voice like General Richerson’s, ” ‘When you push the envelope of technology, you take major risks with personnel. It’s inevitable.’ ” Someone laughed.

All at once they were all light hearted. Even Elizabeth lowered her rosary, and Julie smiled tremulously.

“Everybody ready to walk into the future?” Jon called.

“I’m going be turned into Charlize Theron,” Madison said.

“I want Isaac Newton’s brain!” Rafe.

“Engineer me a bodacious bod, baby!”

“It’s not us… it’s our kids. Make mine geniuses!”

“Make mine rich!”

“Forget the kids… I want mine now! Give me sex hormones to kayak night and day!”

“Jason, you’d be lucky to get to kayak once,” Derek laughed. “Now me…”

“Hush your mouth,” Sajelle said suddenly. “We here.”

The door to the bus opened. The mood changed abruptly.

Lillie unstrapped herself. Julie sat frozen, looking up at her piteously. Lillie said, “Come on, Julie. You can do it. Just stay by me. Emily, help Susan, she’s tangled up. Elizabeth, pray to yourself.”

Jon went first. Lillie followed, pulling Julie. She stood in a large, empty, completely featureless room with a light source she couldn’t identify. There would have been room for three times as many kids. When everyone was in, the door to the bus closed.

For a long sudden moment, Lillie was afraid. What was she doing here, away from her friends and her school and Uncle Keith and even Earth? What if she died here? What if the Net postings and the freak channels were right and the pribir wanted to experiment on humans, to torture them…

She was being stupid. And anyway, there wasn’t anything she could do except face whatever was coming. She was here.

A second door slid upwards at the other end of the room. A man and a woman came through, then stopped. They looked like normal people dressed in normal jeans and T-shirts, except… better. The woman had a perfect body, high breasts and slim waist and long, long legs. Her shoulder-length hair bounced and shone. The man was hot, with great shoulders and deep brown eyes. Lillie breathed in and suddenly she knew everything they wanted to tell her about themselves.

They had been engineered to match the television broadcasts the pribir had intercepted from Earth. All their lives they had trained for this moment. They knew everything about Earth that it was possible to learn from either TV or high-resolution satellites. They had all the abilities Lillie had, plus more that could be made to fit with these bodies. They would live and die in these bodies, and the purpose of their lives was to bring to Earth genetic gifts —so many genetic gifts!—that would help humans have all the freedom and adaptability and health that they did.

“Fucking A,” Jason said softly.

The man and woman came forward. They spoke carefully, as if the language was familiar but the act of speaking by voice was not.

“Hello. I am Pete.”

“I am Pam.”

Lillie giggled. She couldn’t help it. Pete and Pam! Humans finally met aliens and their names were Pete and Pam, like some dorky TV sitcom! She laughed, and Jason laughed, and suddenly nearly all of them were laughing, whooping and hollering, unable to stop. It was so ridiculous, it was such a release from tension, it was just hilarious. Lillie tried to stop laughing, couldn’t, and leaned on Emily, weak with hilarity. Only Sam, Elizabeth, and Julie weren’t laughing. Sam, Lillie had always suspected, had no sense of humor. Elizabeth was lost in some religious fog. And Julie was too scared to laugh, although how anybody could be scared… “Pete” and “Pam”! And she was off again.

Finally she stopped, and was appalled. Impulsively she strode forward and held out her hand. “I’m so sorry… we’re all sorry. I guess it’s the… the strain. Please forgive us. We weren’t laughing at you, and we’re all glad to be here. Really!”

Pam smiled uncertainly. Up close, Lillie could see that her eyes were subtly different. Beautiful, but not… just somehow different. What did they see?

“Yes, forgive us,” Jon said. “God, we must seem… We are glad to meet you guys. It’s nice to communicate two ways instead of one.

Murmurs of assent from the others, straggling belatedly toward manners.

“And we’re glad you’re here,” Pete said. “Are you tired? I know we took you from the middle of your sleep cycle.”

Emily, the scholarship girl at a brainy private school, said, “The middle of ‘our’ sleep cycle? Do you have a different cycle?”

“We don’t sleep,” Pam said, and it came to Lillie with a jolt that no matter how Pete and Pam looked, no matter how similar the DNA their race had started with, these people were not human in the same way Lillie was human. Once, maybe. Not any more. They were alien.

The thought didn’t scare her. In fact, the jolt was more pleasant than not. Alien was new, was interesting. There were great adventures ahead.

Her excitement or their chemical messages affecting her brain?

Shut up, Uncle Keith, she said to her memory. Aloud she added, “I don’t think any of us are really tired. At least, I’m not. I’m too excited!”

“God, yes,” Rafe said. “What kind of drive does this ship use?”

Pete laughed. It sounded vaguely rehearsed. Poor man, he needed to find more things funny.

“We will answer all your questions,” he said, “over time. Maybe you would like to start with a tour of the ship? To see some of the right way?”

“God, yes,” Rafe said.

“Then come on!”

It wasn’t a tour of the whole ship, and it was going to take a very long time to answer everybody’s questions.

Lillie reached these conclusions after just a week aboard the ship. Madison had asked what it was named, and Pam said it didn’t have a name. It was just “the ship.” She’d lived on it her whole life. Madison thought that was dorky and she and Emily had christened the ship High Flyer. Sajelle said that was just as dorky; it sounded like a cheerleading squad. Madison, who’d been a cheerleader, was offended, but gradually everyone began referring to the ship as the Flyer simply out of convenience.

It was evident they were being restricted to a small part of it. There were doors Pam and Pete went through that no one else could open. Lillie didn’t really mind; what they were given was fascinating.

“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever sat on,” Madison said, bouncing on it.