Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

“And have missed out on all the excitement of the last forty years? No.”

“Ha,” he laughed mirthlessly.

Theresa stood. “We should get back to the house.”

“Wait a minute more. Now that I’ve got the analyzer, I’d like to scan your genome, too. And Jody and Carlo and Spring and Senni. Plus Senni’s children. I’d like to see if the modifications we carry are dominant.”

“You mean…” God, she’d never considered this before! “You mean, my kids and grandkids might be able to smell pribir messages? Like we did?”

“If there were any pribir to send. Which there aren’t. Can I scan them, Tess?”

“If they let you.”

“Okay. You go on in, I want to sit here and think for a while.”

She was glad to leave him. She didn’t want any more information to confuse her actions. Besides, her arms ached to hold a newborn baby: that helpless warmth against her chest, those rosy sucking little lips screwing themselves into yawns and cries and, eventually, smiles. Why should Carolina get all the cuddle time?

Theresa ran back to the farm house in the fragrant dusk, feeling light as a young girl, light as air.

Emily also had an easy birth, bearing three bald, round, blue-eyed girls. Bonnie had two boys and a girl. Sajelle bore two girls and a boy, chocolate-brown infants with huge brown eyes. Only Julie had a difficult time. One of her triplets, a girl, died soon after birth. The other two, a boy and girl, were healthy and strong.

“We’re awash in babies,” Bonnie said. She gazed lovingly at her three infants, miraculously all asleep at the same time in baskets lined up in her room. Yet another addition had been hastily put on the farm house, which now looked like a crazily growing organism of some kind. Each mother shared a tiny bedroom with her children. Jody and Carolina had a room but the other men had moved, with relief, to the barn. All the babies were remarkably good: no colic, no projectile vomiting, no prolonged crying. Theresa, sleeping on a pallet in the great room, silently thanked the pribir.

Carolina was invaluable. From dawn till bedtime she tirelessly tended children, cooing endearments at them in Spanish. “ Mi corazon, mi carino, primito . . .” Then she disappeared one day in the cart, returning with two other Mexican girls and a boy of about twelve.

Jody translated. “These are Carolina’s cousins, Lupe and Rosalita and Juan. They can help with the babies.” Jody looked defiant and embarrassed; clearly he had not authorized this.

Theresa looked at the newcomers. Skinny, malnourished, hopeful, clinging desperately to each other’s hands. Carolina said pleadingly, “Rosalita, Lupe, Juan work much. Very much.”

Theresa said to Jody, “Can we feed all these people? The babies won’t be on breast milk forever, you know.”

“I think so. We’re doing pretty well, Mom. Cattle prices are a little up now that things are returning to normal, and we’re going to unload twenty more head at Wenton.”

Normal? This was normal? And how would Jody, living in a crashing world his entire life, know?

She looked again at the Mexican “cousins.” In the house, two babies began to wail simultaneously. Maybe three.

“Okay,” she said, and the girls fell to their knees and kissed her hands, which embarrassed her. She saw a louse crawling on the top of Lupe’s head.

“Get them scrubbed and deloused before they go anywhere near the babies! Also, Scott should check them out for diseases. And, Jody—no more Mexicans. Tell Carolina.”

“I will.”

“None of the triplets are identical,” Scott said, after running days of gene scans. “I guess the pribir wanted as wide a gene pool as possible.”

“Do they all have… are they all…” Theresa asked.

“They all have the same scan as Lillie’s babies. Introns completely excised. Thousands of extra genes.”

“And you still don’t know what any of them do.”

“Not a one. Blood chemistry is completely normal, no unknown proteins. So is urine, tissue samples, everything I can think of to test.” He almost sounded disappointed.

Theresa wasn’t disappointed. There were already rumors in Wenton of odd occurrences at the farm, and on trips to town Theresa had felt the drawing back by people who had known her for fifteen years.

The news from the Net, however, distracted everyone. The United States’s economy might slowly be returning to “normal,” but much of the rest of the world was not. A national news network now operated via ancient satellites. It didn’t go as far as sending actual reporters to China, but it picked up and translated China’s own broadcasts.

“They’re talking about war,” said Sam, who didn’t remember the last one. During that war horrifying bioweapons, some with and some without terminator genes, had been swept by the warming winds around the globe. Some places were still unlivable. Bacteria or viruses lurked in the ground, in the water. No one knew what micros the survivors still harbored in their livers, in their bones, in their blood.

“They can’t,” she said. War. “Not again… they can’t.”

“Do you really believe that?” Scott said grimly.

“Are there any bioweapons even left? In China? Here?”

“Of course there are,” Scott said. “And new ones have probably been invented. Never, in all of history, have hard times prevented war.”

“But why? What do the Chinese want? They don’t even have transport to get here and take over the country after they destroy it!”

“I guess they think they do,” Scott said. “Enough transport, anyway.”

An unspoken arrangement developed in the house. After dark, the people who wanted to hear the news gathered in the “den” around the computer, now upgraded with parts that had only recently appeared for sale in Wenton, part of the town’s growing prosperity. The news listeners were Scott, Jody, Carlo, Senni, Rafe, and Lillie. The others stayed with the children in the great room, asking no questions when grim faces emerged from the den.

One night, however, the faces were not grim. Lillie raced from the den into the great room, where Theresa was changing the diaper on Lillie’s son Cord. “Tess! Come here! DeWayne is on the Net!”

“Who?”

“DeWayne Freeman! From Andrews!”

From Andrews Air Force Base, which for Lillie was eighteen months ago and for Theresa, forty-one years. She barely remembered DeWayne Freeman. “You talk to him, Lillie. I can’t leave Cord. But don’t tell him anything about—”

“I know,” Lillie said. She and Alex talked to DeWayne. A week later DeWayne turned up at the farm, driving a new fuel-celled electric car that immediately brought gawkers streaming out onto the porch. “Wow,” Rafe said. “Look at that!”

A tall, well-dressed black man climbed out of the car. He carried an expensive suitcase. Theresa said quickly, “Everybody go inside. Now. I want to talk to him alone.” She hadn’t heard from DeWayne in forty years; he could be an anti-genetics nut for all she knew.

The family vanished inside. DeWayne climbed the porch steps. “Theresa Romero?”

“Hello, DeWayne.”

“I wouldn’t have known you, Theresa.”

“And I wouldn’t have known you.”

“I want to talk to you. Can we go inside?”

“I don’t think so. I really have a lot to do. Let’s talk out here.” She knew she sounded ungracious, as well as peculiar, but she couldn’t help it.

DeWayne didn’t waste words. “Rafe told me how a bunch of you have gathered here—a bunch of us from the old days. Friends. My wife and children are dead. They… never mind. I don’t have anyone. But I have a lot of credits in the Net, and more each day. I develop Net prosi… what used to be called software. I can do it from anywhere. I’m rich, Theresa, and I’ll share it all with the farm if I can live here with you and the rest.”