Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Scott said somberly, “The time dilation wasn’t the only thing the pribir didn’t tell you. Lillie and Sajelle are pregnant. I’ll have to examine the rest of you girls, but my hunch is that you all are.”

Madison blurted, “Oh, no. We had birth control.” Then she blushed crimson.

Scott—Dr. Wilkins—said gently, “I don’t think any birth control you were given was meant to work.”

“You!” Madison cried, glaring at Jon. Lillie’s head swam. Mike? Jason? Oh, God, how could she even know which —

“Madison, don’t blame Jon,” Dr. Wilkins said. “I don’t think your baby, if you’re carrying one, is his. Or not completely. The pribir are master geneticists, you know. And they used all of us for whatever their purpose really is. Your baby was probably very carefully engineered in vitro and implanted in you.”

“We bring the right way. That’s our purpose. It permeates everything we do, and it gives our lives meaning… You’re our first assignment!’

“I want an abortion!” Madison cried, and Dr. Wilkins’s face showed something like pain. “We’ll talk about it, Madison. Things are different now.”

“Different how?” Madison demanded, but he didn’t answer.

Pregnant. She, Lillie. Carrying a baby inside her. A genetically engineered baby—

She cried, not knowing what words would come out, “The pribir said they’d be back!”

No one answered her. Silence fell. Even Julie, stunned, had stopped crying. The only sound was the wind, rising violently with the sun, hurling tumbleweeds across the dry ground.

In the old days, Theresa thought, they’d have brought in crisis counselors, child psychologists, what all. But these weren’t the old days. They had only themselves.

“Where will I go?” Lillie had asked, after the initial crying and shouting had subsided a bit. The infernal wind had begun the way it did every morning, hot and violent, and Scott had herded everyone into the shelter of the bus, which was already heating up like the furnace it was.

Theresa and Scott looked at each other. Scott said, “Lillie, all of you, it’s been a long time. Things are… different. Nobody knows you’re back, and probably only your families will care. And they—”

Sajelle said, “We back from an alien spaceship, pregnant, and nobody going to care?”

“I’m afraid not,” Scott said. “Since you left…” He trailed off and Theresa saw that he didn’t know where to begin describing the world they had returned to. How did you compress forty violent years into a few sentences for fourteen-year-olds?

Madison clung to the main point. “Our families… how can we get to them? Will you take us?”

Sam said, without a trace of the obnoxious bluster Theresa remembered, “If our families are still alive.”

The point was truer than he knew. Nearly a third of the United States population had died in the war ten years ago. Theresa had heard that in Africa, the rate was eighty percent. She didn’t know if the figure was correct or if it was, like so much else, inflated rumor. Anything on the Net was suspect, even the news sites, and there was no other source of information any more.

She said to Madison, “To get you to your families, we’ll have to find them first. A lot of people have been dislocated. Scott, it’s dangerous to stay here, they’re predicting another storm. I’m going to drive back to the farm.” And leave you to explain. He gave her a look that would wither a cactus.

Theresa slipped behind the wheel. They were going to be lucky to have Scott: a doctor, a good man. He had shown up at the farm last night, the only one to respond to the pribir’s message. Well, maybe the others, now scattered God knew where, had never smelled it. Theresa had happened to live close to the landing area. What would have happened to these children if she and Scott hadn’t come? They would have died out here, that’s what.

These children. Who had been part of her own childhood, long ago in a different world.

The bus was noisy. Modified to run on methanol, it was anachronistic, inefficient, falling apart, and highly illegal. But the fuel-cell-powered electric car, also falling apart, could not carry twenty-one people. The bus’s tires were so patched it was a miracle they held together. God knew how much unlawful emission they were putting out this very minute.

Theresa couldn’t hear Scott over the engine noise. What was he saying? How could he possibly explain?

Global warming took off, Scott could tell them, and accelerated in a feedback loop, more than anyone ever imagined. We reached a tipping point, where even a tiny additional increase could throw the system into violent change. And it did. He could tell them that, but how could they understand what it had meant?

The Earth’s temperature had risen fifteen degrees Fahrenheit in forty years. Peat bogs and Arctic permafrost had released their stored methane, trapping yet more heat in the atmosphere. Polar caps melted, coastal areas flooded, farmland became dustbowls, deserts became farmland. Entire island archipelagos disappeared under water. The weather became the enemy: crazy storms, wildfires covering half a state. Tropical diseases spread as fast as famine. People migrated, people died, people dug into places that were still livable and shot refugees who tried to move in. Governments collapsed. Technology slid backward, except among the rich in defended enclaves that have somehow kept the Net going through aging satellites. Conservative backlashes developed, and weird religions, and a dozen other means for people to make sense of the senseless. And then, in rational response to all of this, we had a biowar with China and nobody won.

Somewhere behind her, one of the kids cried out.

Where were they all going to go? Trains still ran, sometimes, if no eco-groups sabotaged. The Net might be able to track down these kids’ relatives, or it might not. The farm couldn’t feed nineteen more people, twelve of them probably pregnant.

Behind her, the bus had fallen deadly quiet.

Two hours later, Theresa stopped the bus, which had —miracle, miracle!—held together, in the space between the barn and the farm wellhouse. Her practiced eye ran over the farm; everything looked all right. Her three sons were out with the cattle, following them around on summer forage to check that their GPS collars still worked, and to make sure nobody stole a cow. Her daughter Senni had shifted the garden-guards against the hot wind. The huge rain cisterns were still half full; the windmills whirred frantically. Behind the chicken coop, their current and temporary farmhand, Ramon, was slaughtering a chicken.

Senni came out of the house onto the porch, expressionless, as the kids got off the bus. The hot wind whipped Senni’s short hair into a dirty froth. Hurriedly, squinting, the pribir children covered the distance from the bus to the doorway.

“The pribir children.” How long since Theresa had said that phrase? Or even thought it?

Inside, they looked around at the large adobe-walled great room, as wind-tight as Theresa could make it, lit at this hour only by light from the small windows. Some of the kids looked bewildered, some angry, a few in shock. Well, Theresa couldn’t blame them.

“Sit on the floor,” she said gently. “We don’t have enough chairs. This is my daughter Senni and my granddaughter Dolly, who’s almost two.”

Lillie’s face turned slowly toward the baby.