Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Each of the six tables had four chairs. Lillie sat down gratefully. She didn’t know Emily very well, but she knew Emily was the smartest girl here. Emily went to a private school as a scholarship student. At Andrews she’d already been taking high school biology and advanced English. Trust Madison to glue herself to a ready-made tutor. Emily, quiet and generous, would help anyone who asked. She was a slight, pale girl with a short bob so blond it was nearly white. Lillie smiled at her. Why should Madison get all the help?

Slowly, following a group of the boys, Sajelle came into the room.

Lillie jumped up. “Sajelle! Sit here!”

Madison complained, “I was saving that seat for Rebecca.”

“Well, now you’re not. Rebecca can sit someplace else.”

Sajelle sat down, frowning, chin raised. Lillie nodded at her encouragingly. From the next table Sam said, “Before Petey and Pammy start asking questions, I got some questions I want to ask them.”

“Me, too,” Rafe said, more quietly.

Pete and Pam entered from another door and stood at the front of the class, smiling. “Good morning. We found from TV broadcasts that this is how you educate your young, so we’re going to proceed this way. I hope it’s all right.”

Sam said, less stridently than before the pribir had entered, “We want to ask some questions. Is that all right?”

Pam beamed at them. “Yes, of course!”

“Why did you come to Earth?”

Pam said, “We came to spread the right way. Earth is only one of many, many planets we will go to. Pribir ships are in space for thousands of your years.”

There was a stunned silence. Thousands of years!

Madison blurted, “Then how old are you?”

Pete answered this time. “We two are only a few hundred years old, by your measure. As we told you last night, we were born for this visit, engineered for it. Once a person is born, certain things about their bodies are set forever. Other things, of course, are not. You will learn about that. But we will be mostly as we look now for all our lives.”

“How long will that be?” Madison said.

“Another several hundred years, probably.”

Jason said, “Wait a minute. You live hundreds of years and the whole point of your life is this visit to Earth? Of your whole life?”

Pete said, “What’s the point of yours?”

Jason looked puzzled. No one answered. They didn’t think, Lillie knew, about the point of their lives. Only weirdos like her did that. And Elizabeth. Most kids just lived lives. Maybe most adults did, too.

Pam said, “Our purpose is a great one. Although, we admit, we did expect there to be more of you. Seventy-two were engineered.”

What had Tara looked like?

“But we can succeed anyway,” Pam went on. “The numbers will grow over time.”

“The numbers of what?” Jessica called.

Pam smiled. “I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to start at the beginning. Let’s take a simple gene, one you already worked with on the planet. You know one protein it can code for. Who can name another one?”

An image formed in Lillie’s mind: one of the drawings she had made at Andrews and passed on to one of the constant parade of adults interviewing her. This drawing, like most of them, was a series of meaningless symbols, circles and squares and triangles and short straight lines, repeated in various sequences for anywhere from a hundred to several thousand pairs. The only thing it meant to her was that Pete and Pam could smell images to her just as well aboard the Flyer as they could on Earth, which was hardly surprising.

Pam said encouragingly, “What else can this gene encode for besides that protein?”

Lillie looked at Emily, who seemed as clueless as Lillie was.

Pam stopped smiling. “Why aren’t you answering?”

Rafe said, “We don’t know the answer.”

Pete said, “What do you mean? We don’t understand.”

Jason said, “We don’t know! How would we know? We just passed on to doctors the stuff you smelled to us.”

Pete and Pam looked at each other. When they weren’t talking to the kids, their faces went completely blank. They were smelling to each other, Lillie suddenly realized, in some way the kids couldn’t detect. Some genetic receiver they hadn’t been engineered to have. Like a secret code.

Pete said, “We know you can’t perform the genetic alterations we sent you, of course. Trained people must do that. But surely you understood the information? It’s pretty simple.”

“Simple my ass,” Jessica said.

“What do you think we are?” Sam said.

Sophie stood. “I don’t need this shit.” She started toward the door.

A babble of voices broke out, arguing with each other. Rebecca grabbed at Sophie’s hand to stop her from leaving, and Sophie pulled away angrily. Voices rose higher. Lillie stood and shouted over the din.

“Pam, Pete, you just need to start back farther! So we can understand!”

Mike stood, too. “Lillie’s right. Shut up everybody. It’s just a misunderstanding.”

Slowly everyone quieted. Mike, sensible and low-key, addressed the pribir. “You learned a lot from our TV broadcasts or you couldn’t act and talk so human, but—”

“We are human,” Pam said, with a tiny spark of something that might have been anger, the first Lillie had seen from either of them.

“If you say so,” Mike said. “But the point is that the TV shows don’t really tell what kids our age know or don’t know. So you guessed. But we don’t know as much as you think. You need to start teaching us—” He hesitated, glanced at Sam “—pretty basic stuff. Like, what a gene is. And a chromosome. And… what was that thing you said yesterday, Emily?”

Emily, all attention suddenly on her, blushed. “A codon. Or whatever you pri… whatever Pam and Pete call a group of three base pairs that codes for an amino acid.”

Pam and Pete looked as confused as the kids, and Lillie suddenly saw the problem. TV shows were usually about murders or love affairs or dumb families or sexy dancers. Stuff like genetic information was all over the Net, but it wasn’t broadcasted into space. Pam and Pete didn’t even have the words Emily was using, not only “codon” (what was a codon?) but even “amino acid,” which Lillie had heard of. Vaguely.

However, the pribir caught on quickly. “Yes,” Pam said, with one of her smiles that Lillie suddenly realized was also copied from TV shows. “I see. Okay, we’ll start with… with this.”

Lillie smelled another image: a double spiraling staircase with weirdly crooked outsides.

“Big deal,” Jessica said. “What the hell is that?”

Pam and Pete looked surprised. Well, Lillie thought, that isn’t a facial expression they learned from TV and practiced carefully. The surprise looked totally genuine. Maybe some expressions were the same even for hundreds-year-old humans from another star.

Rafe said impatiently, “It’s a double helix, dummy. DNA.”

“You call me ‘dummy’ again and I’ll beat you to mush,” Jessica said. No one doubted she could do it.

Lillie and Mike were still standing, although Sophie had sat down again. Mike said calmly, “Look. There’s a way to do this. Emily and Rafe, you know this stuff already. The basics, anyway. You go up there with Pam and Pete and when they smell us something, you explain in our words what it is.”

Emily shook her head, red-faced. Rafe said, “Okay,” and bounded to the front of the room. Madison shoved Emily until Emily joined him.

“This is good,” Pam said, beaming again. “We’ll learn your words for concepts. And we can provide the materials.”

The tabletops opened. No, not “opened”… they sort of dissolved. Inside was a bunch of stuff Lillie couldn’t identify. Black boxes, thin weird-shaped jars, pieces of what looked like equipment.