Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

He looked in the smokehouse, the privies, the windmills, everywhere he could think of. Finally he turned toward the cottonwood grove. It wasn’t likely she’d be here, in the middle of a workday. Over the long months that generation had gone outside more and more, simply because the work there needed to be done. But they didn’t just sit outside by choice.

Hannah wasn’t on the bench in the grove. Cord stood still, listening to the creek murmur over its bleached stones. A jackrabbit broke cover and streaked past him. He had looked everywhere possible. No one went to town anymore; no one went anywhere, for fear of infection. So where was she?

A tiny flash of blue across the creek caught his eye. The flat land there, once thick with pine saplings and wildflowers, was reverting to mesquite and yucca. He waded through the water and bent down.

A bit of blue cloth, snagged on mesquite. Silky blue cloth, cloth such as it wasn’t possible to make anymore. A durable microfiber synthetic, his mother had told him the first time he’d seen the beautiful blue-and-pink scarf around Hannah’s neck, the colors shading into each other so subtly that the fluttering scarf looked to him like a piece of sky. A piece of Hannah’s old life, like her music cube and silver hair brush, that life she’d shared with Lillie and Mike and Emily and the others long ago. Cord held the piece of silky material clenched in his fist and shouted Hannah’s name. No answer. He waded into the mesquite, under the grilling sun.

It took him an hour to find the next fragment of cloth, but after that it was easy. The buzzards circled the place.

Cord scared them away. He took off his jacket, long-sleeved and high-necked to keep the dangerous UV at bay, and wrapped it around Hannah’s torso. She was heavier than he expected. Too late, he realized that he shouldn’t be exposing himself to whatever she had died of. Well, fuck that. He had survived the sandstorm on the desert that had killed Grandmother Theresa, his immune system could probably handle this bioweapon. It was Lillie who was sick, Hannah who was dead, not anyone from his generation. His generation had the durable, subtle, silky genetic alterations from the pribir.

Halfway to the big house, Hannah a boulder in his arms and the sun beating down on his head, Cord began to cry.

He couldn’t brush away the tears. He let them run, along with his nose, finally stumbling clear of the mesquite when he returned to the creek. He lay Hannah down for a minute on the rough grass. He had to; his arms ached. Then, as he straightened, swiping at the snot on his face, something happened.

A picture. In his mind. Clear as if he’d seen it out a window, accepted as matter-of-facfly as the day’s work schedule. There could be no doubt, no mistake. The picture in his mind was a message.

The pribir were coming.

Frank, Loni’s brother, stood outside the birthing house with Keith, the father of Loni’s babies. Jason, the father of Angie’s children, was out on the range. Frank and Keith looked at Cord, and he saw from their faces that they’d received the image, too.

Frank said simply, “The pribir are coming.”

Cord nodded. What he had to say next tore at him. Frank was Hannah’s son. Cord had left Hannah’s body, still wrapped in his jacket, on the bench under the cottonwood grove. Frank and Keith didn’t even notice that Cord was without his jacket, or that he had blood on his light undershirt. They were too bemused.

A baby’s cry shrilled into the air.

Keith jumped as if he’d been shot. Against orders, he flung open the door of the birthing house. “Loni!”

“She good, she fine, go away,” Carolina yelled, and shut the door again. Another baby cried, or the same baby again.

Cord looked at Frank, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say, Your mother died of a bioweapon and buzzards have been at her and somebody has to go bring her body up from the creek before other scavengers find it. He couldn’t do it.

Emily was the doctor. Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne were in charge of the farm. This was their job. All Cord had to do was tell Dr. Wilkins and Emily and the whole burden would be shifted to them, who would at least know what to do. They would know how to find out what micro had killed Hannah, what to do with the body, how to tell Hannah’s children and Mike. This was their job, babies or no babies. And the pribir was coming—he had to tell them that, too!

Cord pushed open the door and did not let Carolina close it until he was inside.

The room smelled of blood and sweat. It was infernally hot, the windows shut tight against infection. At a far bed Sajelle bent over Angie, who was panting like a coyote in August desert. Emily waited at Angie’s feet. At a table Dr. Wilkins stood over a newborn baby, collecting stem cells from its umbilical cord. Carolina put something in a basket, and Sajelle fussed over more baskets. Thin high wails pierced the fetid air. In a bed closer to the door Loni lay, evidently finished. Her hair stuck to her scalp in sweaty coils. A bloody sheet had been thrown over her, and her eyes were closed.

A gust of air blew in with Cord, hot dry high-plains air but not as hot as this terrible room. Instantly Loni opened her eyes. Feebly she tried to raise her head, let it drop back to the bed, sniffed the air. She looked straight at Cord.

“The pribir are coming,” she said.

Six beautiful infants. Two boys and four girls, born with minimal labor of mothers who immediately fell into deep, healing sleep. Two sets of perfect triplets, and the adults hardly mentioned the children. The pribir were coming.

They had all smelled it, Cord’s generation and their parents and even the white-haired Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin. “It’s like the first time,” DeWayne said quietly, holding Sajelle’s hand.

Emily held one of the new babies against her shoulder, patting the baby’s back. “Only we didn’t know if you young ones would smell it, too.”

“‘Young ones,’” spat Aunt Robin. “You’re what, twenty-nine yourself, Emily? Why shouldn’t the ‘young ones’ be able to smell the pribir? They’re the ones that got everything, all the fancy genemods to survive.”

Nobody answered her. Instead they looked at each other, glanced away, were drawn back to stare again into each other’s eyes. The pribir were coming. They were really coming.

“I wish they’d just stay away,” Alex said in a low voice, and there it was, out in the open, filling up all the space in the great room. The older generations thought the pribir would bring only more trouble. “Controlling our minds, slicing into our bodies… they better not try that shit again,” Alex added, still in that quiet, menacing tone. Sam and Bonnie and Sajelle nodded. Emily looked fearfully into the infant’s face.

Everyone of Cord’s generation, except the perverse Ashley, was filled with eagerness and hope.

They knew better than to say so. Not even Taneesha or Bobby, usually so scrappy, did anything but let their eyes meet, wide and wondering. All rejoicing had to be silent. Hannah had been hastily buried under the cedars beside Grandmother Theresa. Dr. Wilkins, gray-faced, had done a quick blood analysis and identified the engineered virus that killed her. Hannah’s sons and Mike were absent from this meeting, grieving privately, remembering years no one else had shared. Lillie, worse again and given a sedative by Emily, slept heavily in a back room.

“So what are we going to do about the bastards?” Sam said.

Uncle DeWayne said, “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can do anything. You should know that even better than I. You were aboard their ship.”

“I won’t let them use us again! Not us, not the kids, not these new babies! Not any humans!”