Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

The pill lay in the palm of her hand, as mild-looking as aspirin. Would it still work if you took it after the sex was over? If it didn’t…

She felt a brief flash of resentment that boys didn’t have to worry about this, that the burden fell mostly on girls. But her innate sense of fairness reasserted itself: it wasn’t the boys’ fault. Wasn’t Mike’s fault. With a quick swooping motion she brought the green pill to her mouth and swallowed it.

Still, she didn’t feel like going back to Mike’s room. God, if anything happened… Sajelle’s sister already had a baby, at fifteen. Lillie didn’t even much like babies. Oh, they were cute, but when she saw one, she never had the desire that other girls apparently did to cuddle and coo at it.

Still fully dressed except for shoes, she lay down on her own bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. She needed to know. In the middle of the night? Yes. She needed to know.

Lillie padded into the ghostly corridor and closed her bedroom door. The other doors were all closed. Feeling stupid, she looked up at the ceiling and said softly, “Pam?”

A sudden clear, rare memory came to her: Her mother sitting on Lillie’s bed, folding Lillie’s small hands, teaching her to kneel and pray.

“Pam? Can you hear me?”

Nothing. Well, maybe that was good. Rafe had always asserted that the kids were constantly spied on by some advanced equipment they couldn’t detect. Maybe that wasn’t true. Or wasn’t true here.

Lillie crept down the corridor to the commons room. The door opened easily, but the room was in total blackness, so nobody ever used it after “night” fell. Lillie let the door close behind her and said, “Pam? Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Pam? I need help. It’s an emergency!”

Nothing. God, what if there was a real emergency, if somebody had a heart attack or something? Lillie hadn’t realized how much on their own the kids actually were, when they weren’t in class. Why?

Why not? Fourteen-year-olds don’t have heart attacks. Or maybe Pete and Pam could genetically repair anyone who did. Still, kids were supposed to have adults within call.

Feeling aggrieved, or stubborn, Lillie groped her way in the total darkness to the door to the garden. It took her a while to find it. When she did, it too opened easily.

There was light here. The same dim ghostly glow that suffused the bedroom corridor lit outlines of trees, tall ferns, the tables at the cafe, the basketball hoop. In silhouette they looked scary. Lillie made herself walk several feet into the lawn area before calling. “Pam?”

And then, at a shout, “Pam? Are you there? I need you!”

“Lillie?” Pam’s voice came, from nowhere and everywhere. It gave Lillie the creeps.

“Yes, it’s Lillie. I—”

“What has happened? Why aren’t you asleep?” Pam’s voice held genuine astonishment. Did she and Pete always sleep on an exact schedule, then? No, they’d once told the kids that they didn’t sleep at all. But obviously they thought the kids did, every night all night. “I have to talk to you,” Lillie said, feeling suddenly ridiculous. But the panic was still there, underneath, and she really didn’t think she could go through the rest of the night without easing the roiling inside her. “I’m coming,” Pam said. “Wait.”

Lillie shivered, even though the garden was no cooler at “night” than during the “day.” The thick grass tickled the soles of her bare feet. Something came toward her, moving fast, and Lillie almost screamed. But then she saw that it was just the lawn-care robot that fascinated Rafe so much, moving much faster than its slow steady pace during the day. It swerved to avoid her. Water, or something like water, sprayed from it onto the grass.

Then Pam was there, hurrying from behind a clump of trees, from a place where Lillie had never seen any kind of door. “Lillie! What has happened? How could you be here?”

What a strange way to put it, Lillie thought. “Pam, I have to ask you a question. Mike and I… I mean, Madison gave me one of those pills you gave her. The green birth control pills. But I didn’t take it, and then Mike and I… we had sex.” She felt the fiery color sweep her neck and face. “And I took the pill, but not until much later and so I need to know… I was wondering… will it still protect me? I can’t get pregnant, can I?”

Pam peered at her. Lillie had the sudden impression that Pam was thinking furiously, but Lillie couldn’t imagine what.

“No,” Pam finally said, “the pill still works, even if you took it later, after sex. You’re protected.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Pam said, and now her voice was gentle, compassionate. She took Lillie’s hand. Lillie didn’t like that, but it would be rude to say so, after she’d dragged Pam out of bed for a stupid question.

“Lillie, sit down a minute,” Pam said.

“The grass is wet.”

“Yes. Come to the chairs.”

She led Lillie to the cafe. Lillie didn’t really want to chat, but what choice was there? She didn’t want to be rude. She sat, barely able to make out Pam’s face across the table.

“Lillie, I want to tell you something about myself,” Pam said. “From the time I was young, I felt this desire for the whole universe to form a coherent algorithm, to have a first premise. I think you would say, ‘to make sense.’”

Lillie started.

“I think, after watching you, that you want that, too.”

How could Pam know that? Did she spy? But Lillie did not have conversations like that with the other girls! Just that one with Elizabeth, but that was so long ago…

She said slowly, “You smelled that from me.”

Silence. Then Pam said, “Yes. You are very intelligent, Lillie.”

“You can… you and Pete… do you know what everyone is thinking? Just from our pheromones?” She’d learned the word in class. Outrage was gathering in her.

“Oh, no,” Pam said. “Pheromones tell of emotions, but not thoughts. The sensory molecules that convey images and reasoning… you know you can only receive those, not send them.”

Which meant Pam and Pete could send them. Of course. They “talked” to each other right in the middle of the Earth kids, and no one else even knew they were communicating. It must be like hearing people talking to each other among a bunch of the deaf.

She said, “But if you can’t read my thoughts, how do you know I want… what you said? For life to mean something.”

“It’s hard to answer that,” Pam said thoughtfully. “It’s partly the… taste of your pheromones, combined with which times you answer me or Pete or your friends and the times you don’t… Lillie, I am human, after all. Our culture is much more advanced than yours, much farther along the right way, but not fundamentally different. Five million years ago, we shared ancestors here on Earth.”

“We did?” The pribir had never said that before! “Yes. We were taken, carried out into space, our evolution accelerated—”

“How? By who?”

“We don’t know,” Pam said. “Not any more. Maybe the memories were deliberately buried. Anyway, we were evolved, and taught, and now there are many of us in many forms, spreading ourselves throughout the galaxy. We bring the right way. That’s our purpose. It permeates everything we do, and it gives our lives the kind of meaning you’re talking about. I do understand what you long for, Lillie. It’s the quintessential human longing: to matter to the universe. To believe the universe has a design and you’re part of it.”

Yes. Lillie couldn’t breathe.

“We know that we are part of a magnificent design,” Pam continued. “If we didn’t have that, we would disintegrate. We don’t need to strive for anything, not food or travel or health or anything. The right way provides it all. If we didn’t have the right way to strive for, we would be empty. Purposeless. We might do what some other species have done, destroy themselves out of sheer pointlessness. Do you understand what I’m saying, Lillie?”