Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Lillie said wearily, “I’m going to help prepare for Dolly’s wedding.”

“Good,” Sajelle said.

The whole farm was caught up in the preparation. The activity had a desperate edge, the gaiety not forced but brittle. Everyone wanted, needed this distraction, and yet no distraction would have been enough.

Hannah’s children played her music cube over and over, and every time Lillie heard it she was back on the Flyer, happy and excited, putting on Madison’s make-up for that first “dance,” making her way shyly to the ship’s garden, dancing in Mike’s arms. But she didn’t ask Frank, Bruce, or Loni to stop playing the music. They were mourning their mother’s death, even as they prepared for Dolly’s wedding.

Lupe and Kezia, the best needlewomen, took time away from babyminding to sew every bit of clean white cloth on the farm into a wedding dress for Dolly. Spring and Jody slaughtered and barbecued a cow. Sajelle and the kitchen crew made everything good possible out of the garden produce. Forage, and judicious amounts of the hoarded stuff that could not be replaced: sugar, baking powder, rice. There was even a wedding cake, decorated with fresh flowers that Carolina’s excited daughters picked by the creek.

The wedding was held at dusk, in the cool space between the dying of the wind and the dying of the light. The children had dragged every chair on the farm to the newly swept area between the big house and the barn and set them in rows on either side of a dirt-packed aisle. At the barn end, a table was draped with flowers, bright with candles. Dolly would come out of the big house, preceded by two little girls carrying more flowers, and walk to the table, where Martin waited with DeWayne, who would recite the ceremony. “Dearly beloved… .”

All of it off the Net, Lillie thought. Copied from countless old shows that had as much relevance to their lives now as the tribal rituals of Hottentots. And as for relevance to the lives they would be living ten years from now…

She kept her mouth shut. This was what Dolly wanted. And apparently few others thought as she did. Scott, maybe. Emily. DeWayne. Maybe even Cord, although he would never say so. The others were caught up, or made themselves be caught up, in the artificial excitement. Even Senni had been smiling the last few days, as she changed endless diapers or tended the pots kept constantly boiling outside to launder them.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together…”

Pam and Pete had not been invited.

The night was lovely, clear and starry. Afterward everyone moved inside, escaping the insects, to eat and dance. No, Lillie thought, don’t play it! But they did. “Don’t matter none to me, never really did…”

One of the small houses had been cleared out for Martin and Dolly’s “honeymoon.” No other couple had had such a thing… but no other couple of Dolly’s generation had come together slowly, voluntarily, free of pribir-engineered sex triggered at a pribir-chosen time and physiologically allowing no delay.

The day after the wedding, neither Martin nor Dolly emerged from the house for breakfast. Lillie happened to catch Mike’s eyes. Something in her expression (What? She didn’t know how her face looked) made his gaze deepen. He didn’t look away. Lillie caught her breath. He was ready, then, enough over Hannah’s death. She smiled at him, and the smile made her feel fourteen again.

Later. Soon.

Dolly and Martin didn’t come to the big house for lunch, either.

“Something’s wrong,” Senni said to DeWayne. “I left some breakfast for them outside the door, and nobody touched it. This isn’t just sex. I don’t believe it.”

Senni knocked on the door. When there was no answer, she pushed it open. She screamed.

Why screams? Lillie thought irritably. All she saw was that Martin lay asleep on the bed and Dolly wasn’t there. Dolly could have been in the latrine, for all Senni knew. Senni never considered the reasonable explanation.

But Dolly wasn’t in the latrine, and Martin couldn’t be wakened.

“He’s breathing normally,” Emily said, after examining him. “Nothing has been damaged. He’s drugged. Did anybody find Dolly?”

“Jody and Spring are still looking.” But after an hour the news had spread and everyone was looking. Martin did not wake up.

Sam said grimly, “The fucking pribir have her. In their ship. And Martin’s knocked out with the same stuff we always were on the Flyer—you telling me you don’t remember?”

Lillie, along with the others, remembered.

She slipped away, to the pribir ship. It was undoubtedly impregnable, but that wouldn’t stop Sam and the others like him from assaulting it. Lillie wanted to get there first.

She stood on the ship’s far side, where she couldn’t be seen from the big house. “Pam. This is Lillie. I need to talk to you.”

Immediately Pam’s disembodied voice sounded through the ship wall. “What do you want, Lillie? I’m busy.”

“Pam, you can’t implant engineered embryos in Dolly and pretend she got pregnant by Martin last night. I mean, you can physically do it. But everyone knows what happened. Senni found Martin before he revived and before you could get Dolly back beside him. Everybody else will be up here soon.”

“So?” Pam said.

“Scott will abort the fetuses. Or Emily will. Dolly herself will insist on it.”

Silence. Lillie thought she’d lost, but then a door appeared in the ship and Pam erupted through it. “Abort? You mean she would destroy our embryos?”

“Of course she would, Pam,” Lillie said. She struggled to keep control of her tone. “Scott told you we don’t want it.”

“But we saw! With your lot! Once the babies are growing inside the females, they let them grow! And after they were born, they nurtured them anyway! We saw it right here on this farm! You and Bonnie and Emily and Julie and Sajelle, and in the next generation Felicity and Kella and Taneesha and Angie and—”

“You didn’t see everybody from the ship, did you, Pam? Jessica aborted her triplets, fifteen years ago. So did Madison, and she died of the abortion.” All the memories back, after so many years not thinking of them. Tess’s story of Madison lying ashen and dead in an Amarillo basement, her legs caked with blood.

“What’s wrong with you people!” Pam screamed. “You refuse the only thing that will save your species, you piss on the right way, you disgust me! All of you!”

“Give Dolly back,” Lillie said, and heard her own voice rise. “You can’t succeed with this. Not against our will.”

“You ungrateful, impotent, stupid stupid stupid—”

Pam was seized from behind and her arms pinned to her sides. Sam. And behind him, Alex and Cord.

Lillie said levelly, “Let her go, Sam.”

“It’s not a ‘her.’ It’s a fucking thing, and she’s not going to turn us into fucking things, too.” He pulled a knife from his belt.

Not real. None of this was real. She made her tone stay calm. “Sam, think. If you hurt her—if you even can hurt her—Pete is in the ship and has control of machinery we can’t even imagine. He’ll fry you right where you stand, and maybe the rest of us, too.”

Pam said, “Sam, you’re stupider even than the rest. You always were.” She flexed her arms and Sam went flying through the air, landing hard on the ground a few feet away. “Now, about Dolly and our embryos—”

Alex threw another knife. It hit Pam square in the back.

She gasped and fell forward, onto her knees. The humans stood frozen. Now, Lillie thought, now Pete would —now—

Pam collapsed and lay still, the knife still protruding from her back. The next moment Lillie fell to the ground. Her last thought was Not Cord! But it was too late.