Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

“Wait” Kella repeated. “Prion disease… I remember now. That’s no choice for a bioweapon! It takes months to kill, sometimes even years!”

Dr. Wilkins said, “Ordinarily, yes. But whatever is inducing Lillie’s proteins to refold, it’s designed to act fast. The only reason she isn’t dying now is her boosted immune system. Whatever the pribir did to it, it’s fighting like hell now.”

Keith, always direct, said, “Well, find whatever’s causing the protein refolds and kill it!”

Emily said gently, “That’s just it, Keith. There’s nothing there, now. Whatever the agent was, it’s gone, destroyed by Lillie’s immune system. It just left this process going on.”

“Then stop the process!”

“We don’t know how,” Emily said, and Cord heard the frustration and anger in her voice.

Cord stared hard at the rough wooden surface of Dr. Wilkins’s dresser. There wasn’t anything on the dresser, not even a hairbrush. Barren. Knotty-grained. Splintery.

“She’s not contagious, at least,” Dr. Wilkins said wearily. “You can see her. She can come out”,

“But what’s going to happen to her?” Cord burst out. “No, damn it, tell us! Don’t give me that shit about protecting us!”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Emily said. “Lillie’s prions are forming in her thalamus. She’ll get more headaches. Have increasing insomnia. Eventually dementia will set in. If we’re lucky, coma.”

And then death. Cord pushed his way to the door.

“Cord!” Kella said angrily, because she needed to be angry at someone. “Aren’t you even going to—”

“Tell Mom I’ll see her later,” Cord said. He had to get out of that room, that house. Lillie would understand. That he was sure of, in a world where nothing else was any longer sure: his mother would understand.

Lillie couldn’t sleep. At night Cord, lying sleepless himself in the room in the big house where he’d moved Clari to be near Dr. Wilkins, heard Lillie moving around the great room. It didn’t matter what hour he woke; she was there. She would walk restlessly, sometimes stumbling. As August wore on, she stumbled more often. By day she looked dazed, pale, and filmy-eyed from lack of sleep. She never complained.

One night he heard her cry out. Cord leapt up from his pallet and tore into the room. She gazed at him wild-eyed. “Uncle Keith!”

“It’s me, Mom. Cord.”

“Uncle Keith, Mom’s killed herself!”

Cord didn’t know what to do. He tried to put his arms around her, but she pushed him away, stronger than he could have imagined. “Get away! Don’t drug my mind, Pam! I’m not part of your mission!”

“Mom…”

“Get away!” she screamed, so loud that Cord thought half the house would rush in. But no one else awoke. Lillie started to moan. “Uncle Keith, help me, she didn’t mean it, Mom didn’t mean it…”

Again Cord tried to approach her, and again she shoved him off with that startling strength.

“Tess, Tess, don’t let Pam make me… don’t let…”

“Mom!” Cord said, his despair dwarfed by horror. This wasn’t his mother. Her body, her face, her voice, and not his mother not his mother… .

“Okay, Lillie,” another voice said behind him, deep and soothing, and Cord spun around. Mike Franzi. Cord hadn’t even heard the man come in.

“It’s all right, Cord, I’ll take it from here,” Mike said. He reached for Lillie.

“Get away!” she shrieked.

Mike ignored her, folding her close to his chest. “Lillie, it’s all right. You’re safe now, nobody will mess with your mind. I’ve got you now, it’s all right…”

“Mike? They’re inside the walls, they took me there, I saw… I saw…”

“I know.” To Cord, over Lillie’s shoulder, he said, “She’s back aboard the ship. Go back to bed, Cord. I’m here.”

And Hannah? Cord didn’t say. His jumbled feelings of relief, rage, and guilt left him no room for speech. He went back to bed, creeping in beside Clari. She moaned softly in her sleep and he turned away, his face toward the wall.

When it happened, it all happened at once.

Two days later, when Lillie seemed again to have rallied, Angie went into labor. “Not quite eight months,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Come on down to the birthing house. You can walk.”

“Of course I can,” Angie said. “Who said I couldn’t?”

“Nobody, dear. Come on.”

Dr. Wilkins sent Carolina’s son Angel to find Emily. Gently Dr. Wilkins took Angie’s arm and walked her to the small house that Emily had cleared out and prepared as a maternity ward. Halfway down the well-worn dirt path, Angie suddenly pulled away from the old man. “You’re not supposed to be outside!”

“I’m not missing this,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Don’t baby me, you baby. And anyway, Emily may very well have her hands full and need help. When you lot were born, all the girls went into labor at once.”

“But… even so… if you got a micro…” A sudden pain hit Angie and she bent over, straightened up, put a hand on her swollen belly, her face a sculpture of comic surprise.

“Come on, Angie, almost there…”

“What is it?” Cord called, coming out of the barn and running toward them when he saw Dr. Wilkins outdoors.

“Angie’s going to have her triplets,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Go get Sajelle, she’s the steadiest for this sort of thing.”

But instead Cord went to check on Clari. She stood at the wood stove, boiling down agave syrup, a shapeless mound with the moody face of the woman he thought he’d loved.

“Oh, leave me alone, Cord, I’m not going into labor just because the others are. I’m only carrying one child, remember, and it’s only been eight months.” She stirred the syrup harder.

Cord hastily withdrew and went to find Sajelle. She was walking Loni toward the birthing house. Loni, unlike Angie, looked panicked. Her round face, still not shed of all its own baby fat, jerked around to scan the farm.

“Where’s Mother? I want Mother!”

Sajelle said to Cord, “Go find Hannah.” When he didn’t move, she snapped, “Don’t just stand there! Find Loni’s mother!”

Everybody was telling him to find somebody else! Well, he didn’t know where Hannah was. Cord had never been comfortable with Hannah, and after the scene with Mike and the raving Lillie in the middle of the night, he’d avoided Hannah altogether.

Loni cried out and Cord suddenly found himself willing to look for Hannah. Anything rather than listen to that animal cry. Anything rather than spend the day around girls giving birth.

He ran back to the barn, even though he knew Hannah wasn’t there. Next he checked the vegetable gardens, with their system of irrigation ditches to bring water from the increasingly sparse creek. Bonnie, Sam, and Lupe were weeding the vegetables. Cord remembered to call to them, “Angie and Loni are having babies!” before he took off for the spring house.

Hannah wasn’t there. Carolina was putting eggs into the half-buried plastic boxes used as coolers. Cord paused a moment, grateful for the damp coolness under the thick adobe walls. “Carolina… where’s Hannah?”

Carolina answered with a burst of Spanish in which Cord discerned “eggs” and “broken” and “clumsy child.”

“Carolina—where’s Hannah? Loni’s in labor!”

Now he had her full attention. A smile like spring sunlight broke over her face. “Babies? Now?”

“Yes, and she wants her mother! Where’s Hannah?”

“I don’t know,” Carolina said. “Here, put these eggs in, I am need!” And Carolina was off, leaving Cord with the eggs.

He shoved them into the box, breaking only two, and pushed the lid on. Where the hell was Hannah? Not with the pitifully reduced range crew; Hannah was afraid of cattle.