Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

She awoke in twilight, lying in the same spot on the ground, Cord and Sam and Alex around her like folded dolls. Lillie shook off as much grogginess as she could and crawled over to Cord. Breathing. He was alive.

She lay gasping, pushing the last of the drug out of her lungs, gulping in the sweet night air. A hawk soared overhead, oblivious. For a moment, it was limned against the rising moon. Lillie saw Pam sitting to one side on a sleek green chair molded to her body, watching her.

“Pam… Cord…”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Pam snapped. “See? It’s just as I told you. You humans take care of your young, once they’re born. Cord isn’t anything like you genetically, but you nurture him. Dolly would nurture her embryos, too.”

“Dolly? The others? Where—”

“Everybody’s perfectly fine. And thank you about asking after me, Lillie. I thought we were friends.”

Pam, too, looked fine. She stood, and the green chair dissolved, seeping into the soil. The last thing Pam looked like was a woman who’d taken a knife in the back.

Lillie sat up. “Pam, are you and Pete immortal?”

“Our genes are. So are yours, so are all genes, only the bodies that hold them change. Unless a species stupidly allows itself to become extinct, of course!”

“But… are you the same Pam who just took a knife in the back? Or are you…” Lillie couldn’t say what she meant. Incoherent thoughts chased themselves through her head. Cloning, regeneration, what else?

“My genes are all on file with ship,” Pam said crossly, and Lillie gave it up. The basic assumptions were too different. She said, “Dolly―”

“Is back in her primitive house with her mate. Everybody will be waking up soon. I wanted to talk to you first. At least you tried to warn me, Lillie. Thank you.”

It was the first time Lillie had ever heard a pribir thank anyone for anything. And yet, at the same time Pam’s lovely face wore a slight triumphant smirk, as if she were congratulating herself on getting it right, this strange senseless human ritual.

Pam continued, “Yes, the embryo is still implanted in Dolly. Now we’ll have to engineer a permanent maternal virus to make the idea of abortion totally abhorrent to Dolly. Do you know how hard that is? Pete has the entire ship genetic library working on it, plus everyone in orbit. You people think it’s easy to engineer behavioral changes. Well, maybe it is if you can keep pumping olfactory molecules into a closed space, but it’s a lot harder to engineer a permanent brain change in behavior that doesn’t also affect other species-specific behavior. You can’t appreciate how difficult. We had no idea about Madison and Jessica. We had no idea how perverse and backward you people really are. Your males didn’t even mate with non-engineered women, except for Cord, in order to enlarge the gene pool as much as possible. They just wasted a dominant genome by mating with females who already had it to pass on. I don’t know why we even bother.”

Pam was back on full rant. Lillie said, “The embryos are still in Dolly?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“It won’t work, Pam. Even if Dolly now wants to have your… your creation, the others wouldn’t let her. They’d abort anyway. They’d think she was just being manipulated by you and Pete.” Which would be the truth.

Pam was speechless. A first, Lillie thought, and rushed in while there was still time.

“Listen, Pam, you have an alternative. Remove the embryos from Dolly. You can do that, can’t you? Don’t force or manipulate anyone to carry them. That will simply never work. Instead… instead…”

Lillie faltered. She wasn’t sure she could say it. “Instead what?” Pam demanded.

“Instead you’ll have a willing mother, without any weird viruses in her brain. We humans have voted against forced pregnancy. Well, that ought to mean we voted for unforced pregnancy. The others have no right to insist on abortion if the mother doesn’t want it. And I think they’ll see it that way. I really do.

“Take the embryos out of Dolly and plant them in me. I’ll carry the babies, and ‘nurture’ them, and start your new version of humans.

“I’ll do it.”

No one believed her. They believed that the embryos nestled in her womb; Scott had verified that. Three fetuses. But no one believed that Lillie’s choice to carry them was voluntary. They thought, Emily and Sam and Rafe and DeWayne and maybe even Scott, that she’d been drugged, brainwashed into her decision. Lillie didn’t tell them about the “maternal virus” the pribir had been trying to concoct for Dolly. Instead she pointed out that no pribir olfactory drug had ever been known to affect only one person; the molecules always affected everyone who smelled them. This was not a coerced decision. She wanted to carry these embryos. It was her choice. “We all voted against it!” Bonnie said.

“I want to do it,” Lillie said, over and over and over. “And when we voted, we didn’t know how far the pribir would go to get this done. Look, people, say for the sake of argument that you’re right. This is a different species, not human. That doesn’t mean that the rest of you can’t go on breeding normal humans.”

Normal, she jeered at herself. Cord and his generation were already engineered so much they had once seemed monstrous to Jessica, to Madison. Too monstrous to give life to. Now Cord and the rest had become the norm. And so would this new child, at least to itself. Normal was whatever you yourself were.

There was no way most of them would see that. They didn’t want to see it.

“So you breed your race and we breed ours, and the best species wins, is that it, Lillie?” Rafe jeered. “Evolution in practice?”

“It’s a big planet, Rafe. And as far as we know, empty. You saying there’s no room for another intelligent species?”

“Mom,” Kella said, and her voice broke, “why are you doing this?”

Why was she? Because she was making herself a sacrifice, acting to save everyone from the kinds of coercion the pribir were capable of using if they were completely resisted. Because she was a pessimist, and believed the worst sim scenarios about where Earth was headed ecologically. Because she was an optimist, and believed that change could work out for the best. Because she was, and always had been, an outsider. Because she had always yearned for a mission in life, and this was one. How could you put all the reasons of a human heart into a few words?

She said to her children, Kella and Keith and Cord, “You never knew your great-uncle Keith. He was a wonderful person. He and I had a discussion once, a long time ago, about an orbiting nuclear power station. He said that unfortunately new technologies always seem to cost lives at first. Railroads, air travel, heart transplants. Probably even the discovery of fire.”

“Was it worth it, Uncle Keith? Two people dead, and everybody else gets lots of energy?”

“We don’t look at it like that.”

“I see,” Lillie’s ten-year-old self said primly. And then, “I think two deaths is worth it.”

Kella and Keith stared at her with incomprehension. But in Cord, Lillie thought she saw a flash of reluctant understanding.

Eventually, during the arguing and shouting, Lillie asked the key question. “What are you going to do about it? Tie me down and abort, against my will? How does that make you different from the pribir?”

Even Emily and Rafe, the quick-witted ones, had no answer.

Finally, DeWayne came to her when she sat alone on the bench in the cottonwood grove by the creek. She’d gone there hoping that Mike would join her. But he’d seen her leave, and he’d turned away tight-lipped, and Lillie knew he never would be joining her, in any way.