Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Lillie had expected Dolly, usually a sullen seventeen-year-old, to either storm past or turn sarcastic. Instead, Dolly grabbed at Lillie’s sleeve.

“It isn’t fair! Everybody else has somebody for love and sex, even Clari, and she’s two years younger than me! Nobody ever thinks about me, maybe I don’t want to be alone, and when somebody finally comes along who wants me, that bitch my mother… it isn’t fair!”

“No,” Lillie said calmly, trying to calm Dolly, “it isn’t.” Dolly peered like a frightened rabbit. “You… you agree with me? You think it’s all right for me to be with Martin?”

“Do you like him, Dolly?”

The girl let go of Lillie’s sleeve. “Yes. I do. He’s sort of soft, not like Keith or Dakota or Bobby—” Lillie heard the resentment that none of those had chosen Dolly “—but he’s nice. And I do like him. And he’s cured now, not carrying disease like she said, and forty-two isn’t that old! Bitch!”

“He likes you,” Lillie stated quietly.

“Yes! He does, which is more than anybody else around here… oh, Aunt Lillie, is it so terrible to want what everybody else already has?”

Lillie blinked at the transition from resentment to genuine despair. Seventeen. For the first time, she liked Dolly.

“No, it’s not terrible. Do you want to… I mean…”

“We want to get married,” Dolly said fervently. “Not just be together until I get pregnant and then forget it ever happened like those whor… like some of the others. We want a real wedding, with a white dress and flowers and a party!”

Like she’d seen on old Net shows, Lillie thought, and wondered if that was what Martin wanted, too, or if this was Dolly’s vision. Maybe she just wanted to one-up Clari, who had never actually married Cord. A wedding like that—any wedding—in the middle of the pribir’s attempt to remake humanity: how ludicrous was that? But Dolly was Tess’s granddaughter, and Dolly was filled with hope and pleasure for the first time that Lillie could remember. A white-dress antiquated wedding was no more ludicrous than anything else going on now. And maybe a wedding would… do what? Remind them all that they were human.

“You and Martin should talk to your Uncle Jody,” she told Dolly. Jody was the only one with influence over his sister. “I’ll bet he’ll be on your side.”

“You think so?” Dolly’s young voice vibrated with hope. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow!”

Poor Martin, Lillie thought. Tumbleweed in the gale. Well, Martin was gaining, too. Survival, for one thing, plus sex and probably devotion. Dolly seemed capable of complete, devouring devotion.

“Thank you, Aunt Lillie.”

“You’re welcome. Now go to bed. The mosquitoes are fierce tonight.”

The next day, Dolly announced that she and Martin were getting married on October 5, at six o’clock in the evening. Martin said nothing. The date tickled at Lillie’s mind. Only hours later did she realize that October 5 would have been Tess’s sixty-eighth birthday.

“We have something to tell you,” Pam told Lillie. The pribir had apparently decided that all their communication with humans would go through either Lillie or Scott, the only two humans who didn’t scowl or draw away when an alien approached. Cord’s generation had found the pribir of actuality to be too different from the pribir of imagination. They were grudgingly grateful for the genetic help, but awkward in talking to the helpers.

Lillie accepted the burden with resignation. So far, the pribir had not tried to do anything to any human without permission, or to smell to them in any way that manipulated human behavior.

So far.

“We want you to find Scott and Emily,” Pam continued. “They need to hear this, too. It’s important.”

“I don’t think Emily will come,” Lillie said. Emily learned everything second-hand, from Scott. The old man looked and acted twenty years younger since the aliens had done to him… whatever they had done.

“Make Emily come,” Pam snapped. “This is too important for her to miss.”

The meeting was held in Scott’s lab; Emily flatly refused to enter the pribir ship. Lillie looked around her curiously. She saw nothing that she could identify as a pribir machine, only the usual jumble of expensive, aging scientific equipment, none of which could ever be replaced again, with crude wooden boxes, vials labeled in Scott’s careful hand, Sajelle’s nursing equipment. This was also the hospital. Two neatly made beds stood against the far wall. On a separate shelf were Scott’s handwritten records on his precious supply of paper, encased in plastic boxes against damp, rodents, and time. Records that no one was left to read.

Emily sat stiffly on one of the beds, Scott beside her. Lillie seated herself on the other. Pam and Pete stood between them, holding what looked like a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit.

It was a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit. “Look at this,” Pam said. “Just look at it! This is what you people have done!”

Emily’s fist clenched. Scott put a restraining hand on her arm and said mildly, “Not us, Pam.”

“Your species!”

Pete, upset but calmer than Pam, said, “The rabbit’s genes have been damaged, in the germ line. It now carries a gene that expresses at death, making a kind of poison. The gene was adapted from plants that use poison to keep away predators. The gene turns on throughout the rabbit’s muscles and flesh, triggered by the reduction in oxygen. If humans eat this rabbit, they will die.”

Pete’s statement electrified the room. Lillie stood shakily. “I have to tell that to Sajelle, the kitchen crew fixes rabbit stew all the time, we had it two days ago—”

“Those rabbits weren’t poisoned or you’d already be dead,” Pam said crossly. “Don’t you listen, Lillie? And I already told Sajelle. The point is, you can’t eat any more rabbit at all. This genemod is dominant, and it’s coupled with other genes that confer a preferential evolutionary advantage on rabbits that have it. A nasty construction. Eventually every rabbit will have it.”

Rabbits currently formed a mainstay of the farm’s protein.

Scott said, “Are you sure, Pete?”

He looked surprised. “Of course we’re sure.”

Scott said, “Have you detected this gene in any other wildlife?”

“That’s just the point,” Pam said. “It’s already transmitted, probably by transposon in a parasite, to those little rodents in the desert, the small quick ones that jump so well.”

“Deermice,” Scott said. “We don’t eat those.”

“But the transposon might keep jumping species. And we’ve also detected something strange in the mesquite.”

In the mesquite. That meant plants… . Lillie was no scientist, but she understood that plants underlay everything, the whole food chain.

“It’s not interfering with basic plant functions,” Pete said, “photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixing, all that. We’re not even sure its expression could harm you, and anyway you don’t eat mesquite. But it’s a sign.”

Lillie said, although she was afraid to hear the answer, “Of what?”

Pam said, “Of the complete changing of Earth ecology. Between what you’ve done to the atmospheric gas balance, what that’s done to the climate, and what your perversions of the right way have done to the fauna and now even the flora… you people just aren’t worth our trouble!”

“But you’re our assignment,” Pete said. “So we’ll do what’s necessary. However, you can’t keep your current genome and hope to survive more than a few more generations. We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you. We have to rebuild from the beginning.”