Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Clari said fearfully, “When?”

“We don’t know.”

“Soon, I want it to be soon!” Cord burst out.

His mother pulled her arm away. “Why?”

It seemed to Cord a stupid question. The pribir were clearly heroes, a word he’d learned in school software. They had tremendous powers… imagine sending information through smells! They had made all the kids at the farm, practically… why, without them he wouldn’t even exist! And they had saved his life by giving him the genes that had protected him during the sandstorm. More, they represented something Cord couldn’t name, didn’t have words for. He knew only that it was larger than the farm, the drought, the falling price of cattle that seemed to occupy the adults so much. Something large, and mysterious, and glorious.

But all he said to his mother was, “They’re wonderful!”

His mother’s voice turned cold. It was full dark now and Cord couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to. That voice was enough.

“‘Wonderful’? You call it wonderful that they designed unborn babies with no regard to anything except pribir needs? That they kidnapped us kids and used smelled chemicals to manipulate our minds? That on the ship they made us… never mind that. That the pribir designed and engineered our babies and impregnated us without so much as asking permission, so that you and Keith and Kella and all the others never even had a recognizable father. You call that wonderful?”

Floundering under this attack, all Cord could think of to say was, “I don’t need a father! I have Uncle Jody and Uncle Spring and Uncle Rafe and—”

“Every child should have a father.”

“Clari doesn’t!”

Clari, who had shrunk against the cottonwood trunk at the first hint of conflict, nodded loyally.

“But Clari did have a father,” his mother said, more softly. “He just died before she was born. But she had him.”

If Clari’s father had been dead for Clari’s whole life, Cord didn’t see what good having a father had done her. Cord was angry now. “The pribir are wonderful! You just don’t understand!”

“Oh, Cord,” she said, and now her voice was completely soft, as soft as Clari’s. He was not going to be won that easily.

“You don’t understand, Mom. The pribir gave you everything, even me! And Keith and Kella!” He’d always known his mother didn’t really want her kids. Now here was proof.

“I know,” she said. “But, Cord, honey, they still did it through manipulation, tyranny, for their own reasons, not for our good.”

“I don’t care! Come on, Clari, the mosquitoes are out.”

“Cord, please don’t go, I want to talk more…”

But he grabbed Clari’s hand and pulled her up off the bench and toward the house. Halfway there he turned back to face the cottonwoods and shouted, “The pribir are wonderful!” before running the rest of the way inside, dragging Clari with him.

He learned more from the other children. At various times, their respective mothers had dropped bits of information about the pribir. Aunt Bonnie’s daughter Angie said that when she and her two brothers were born, their mother had had a very easy labor. This was important because recently Aunt Julie and Uncle Spring had had another baby, and Aunt Julie had screamed so much that Dr. Wilkins gave her a drug. Cord didn’t see why that was a problem, but Angie said importantly that Aunt Julie had wanted to do without drugs because they could be bad for the baby. Also, added Angie, who seemed to be a gush of information on birthing, Aunt Senni had had a very bad time with both Dolly and Clari.

“So the pribir made birthing easier with the babies they engineered. Less painful,” Cord said. He was very glad he was a boy and would never have to birth anybody at all.

“Yeah,” Angie said. “They sound like good people.”

“I think so, too,” said Taneesha, Aunt Sajelle’s daughter, who was listening in. Taneesha, Kezia, and Jason had a father, Uncle DeWayne. But he wasn’t their genetic father; the triplets had been engineered inside Aunt Sajelle, just like Cord had been. Cord thought Taneesha was the prettiest girl at the farm, not counting Clari. She had light brown skin and black curly hair and the biggest brown eyes Cord had ever seen. It made him uncomfortable, though, to think that Taneesha was so pretty. It seemed unfair to Clari.

But Taneesha was a good source of information. Aunt Sajelle apparently spoke to her kids much more frankly than anybody else’s mother. “The pribir messed with my mama’s genes, too. Not as much as with ours, of course. But Mama—and your mother, too, Cord —doesn’t get sick. You ever noticed that? The pribir did something to them so they don’t catch colds and stuff like Dolly and Clari and Angel do.”

It was true, Cord realized. Clari had had something just last month that made her head ache and her muscles hurt, and Dolly and Angel got it, too, but nobody else.

“And” Taneesha said, leaning in close to the other kids huddled together behind the barn, “the pribir put the babies inside my mama and the other women without any sex!”

Cord flushed. He’d only been told about sex a few months ago, and the whole idea made him uncomfortable.

Dakota, Julie’s son, was logical. “If there wasn’t any sex, then how did the babies get made? You need an egg and a sperm.”

Taneesha said triumphantly, “The pribir had a whole supply of sperm and eggs, and they just snipped out whatever genes they wanted from any of them and sewed them back together however they wanted.”

This explanation seemed lacking to Cord — no sperm or egg anywhere had genes for what he’d grown during the sandstorm. So the pribir had also built brand-new genes from scratch, or taken them from some other… thing. If so, that made the pribir more powerful than ever. And smart: They’d known what he might need to survive. And kind, because they wanted him to survive. Probably if she hadn’t already been a grown-up when she went to that Andrews place, they might have engineered his grandmother Theresa to survive the sandstorm, too.

Dakota said solemnly to Cord, “They saved your life, you know.”

“I know.”

“Well, I can’t wait till they come back.” This piece of Cord’s information had electrified them all.

“Me, neither,” said Kendra and Taneesha, simultaneously. Taneesha added kindly, “I’m sorry you’re not genetically engineered, too, Clari.”

Clari looked down at the ground and said nothing.

By summer of 2067 it still hadn’t rained much. Three years of drought. Wenton, which had over the years grown to look almost prosperous, didn’t look that way any more. Some people left. Others, from even more desperate places, arrived on the one train per day still arriving at the decaying station. One Thursday in April, two women, one man, and six children got off the train. They stood staring past the shrunken edge of Wenton to the flat, parched plains, stretching for miles and miles of nothing.

Cord, in town with Uncle DeWayne and Taneesha to buy cloth, spied the starers, skinny and battered-looking. City people, he thought. He knew cities from the Net shows and Net news, which was the way he knew about anything more than ten miles from the farm. Well, these people wouldn’t find whatever they were looking for, work or food or a new start, in Wenton.

Uncle DeWayne stopped walking.

“Daddy?” Taneesha said. But Uncle DeWayne ignored her, walking toward the strangers and leaving her and Cord behind.

“Oh oh,” Taneesha said.

“What?”

“Haven’t you got eyes, Cord? Six kids, two women—they’re more of us. Daddy must recognize one of them.”