Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

Alex and Lillie became lovers in a detached, considerate sort of way. Neither risked passion, but they were kind to each other.

Gaia, Rhea, and Dion stuck together from the time they were toddlers. They didn’t avoid the other children; they just preferred their own company. “They’re smelling to each other, aren’t they?” Cord said. “The way the pribir can. Even though they can talk normally. But this way, nobody else can listen.”

“I think so,” said Lillie, who knew so. Her hair had started to gray, pale strands glittering in the bright sunlight among the dark brown. She was thirty-four.

“Mom, I saw them eating something yesterday. A woody bush, not anything we can eat. They were nibbling the leaves and sort of laughing. I told Scott, and he said they’re probably engineered to digest a big range of plants that we can’t.”

“I know,” Lillie said. She’d observed it for a few months now, and had had her own talk with Scott. She had been concerned. Cord’s tone conveyed something else: doubt and distaste.

“They play well with Raindrop and the others, though,” Cord said, as much to reassure himself as anything. Then, “But they wouldn’t ever… turn on the others, would they?” He and Lillie were having this conversation away from the children, which was the only way they could have had it.

“Of course not,” Lillie said acidly. “Why would they? They’re all cousins.”

He didn’t answer.

“Cord,” Lillie said, “have you noticed that it’s getting hotter, even up here in the mountains?”

Cord looked at her as if she were crazy. “Of course I’ve noticed. Everybody has noticed. Clari and I were saying just last night that the vervain have all but disappeared. It’s drier, too. And the UV— we’re going to keep the kids inside even more than we do.”

His kids and Keith’s kids, he meant. Not Lillie’s.

Rhea, Gaia, and Dion went wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. They were only five, but Lillie had spent an entire week following them, and she had seen that they were safe without her. She had seen it graphically, during a thunderstorm that had sprung up on what had been a quiet afternoon.

“Rhea! Gaia! Dion! Come on, we’re going back to the house now.”

Rhea materialized at Lillie’s knees. Short and squat, her gray-green scaly skin blending in with the foliage, she could achieve near-perfect camouflage. She gazed up at Lillie from Lillie’s own eyes set above a large snout in that mouthless face and smelled to her mother.

“Not yet, Mommy! We want to stay here!”

“No. It’s going to thunderstorm. There could be flash flooding”

The feel of interest came to Lillie’s mind. The triplets were interested in everything. Intelligent and curious, they had learned to understand language at a precocious age, and they smelled back increasingly complex ideas. They differed more from each other in their thoughts than in their appearance. Rhea was the gentlest, meditating on butterflies, seldom disobeying. Dion was the most adventurous, and also the most loving. Gaia was the brightest but had a temper. Sometimes Lillie wondered if Pam’s own genes were in Gaia. She hoped not.

A surprise had been Gaia’s intense interest in Shakespeare. Scott had bought a few actual books with him, antiquated volumes on acid-free paper, including a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Even before she understood the words, Gaia delighted in the rhythms as Scott or Lillie read to her. Lillie was startled by how quickly Gaia remembered and recited long passages. It was disconcerting to see a snouted, scaled five-year-old making mudpies and singing to herself:

“‘Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange’… Mommy! Dion’s throwing mud at me!”

Where had Gaia’s interest in Shakespeare come from? Lillie had never particularly liked literature, nor had Uncle Keith.

Often Lillie wished she could show Gaia, Rhea, and Dion to Uncle Keith. They were children any mother would be proud of. But they were still children.

“Come on, Rhea, the storm is coming. Where are the others?”

Gaia emerged noiselessly from the brush. “I’m here,” she smelled. “I don’t know where Dion is.”

“Dion!” Lillie called, just as the first clap of thunder sounded. “Girls, smell to him, at far range.”

“We are, Mommy,” Gaia said. A second thunderclap, and two seconds later lightning split the sky.

“Where did he go?” she shouted. Gaia smelled her the direction.

Fear crept cold up Lillie’s spine. There was an arroyo that way, and it could flash flood in an instant. “Go back to the house!” she shouted over more thunder. “Hold hands and stay together!” She started off in the direction Gaia had pointed.

The rain came, lashing against Lillie’s face, making it difficult to see anything. She tried to run, clumsy against the wind, and stumbled over a dense knot of twisted vines. In less than a minute she was soaked to the skin. The solid sheet of rain blew almost sideways, warm and merciless, and she couldn’t make herself heard over the wind.

“Dion! Dion!”

He could smell to her, even over the storm… couldn’t he? Maybe not. She fell again, tearing open one pant leg. Blood ran down her calf, instantly sprayed off by the rain.

By the time she reached the arroyo, it was already flooding. Water tore along between the bare banks, washing down so much mud that the water looked like sludge. But it raced along at a speed no sludge could match, rising visibly as it was fed by countless flooding streams up the mountain.

“Dion!”

She saw him then, upstream on the opposite bank, a small,

squat, twisted figure watching the water. “Dion!” she screamed again, and he looked up, startled, and took a step forward. The bank gave way and he fell into the flood.

Lillie nearly jumped into the water but some native shrewdness stopped her. Not here, there was a place just a little ways down the arroyo where it turned sharply to follow the hidden rocks underneath. Dion would be slowed there, she’d have a better chance of getting him, his speed in the water would just about equal hers in reaching the place —

She thought all of these things, and none of them, even as she began to run. She reached the spot a few seconds too late. Dion’s body shot past her in the torrent.

Lillie screamed and ran alongside the banks. Now she had no chance of matching his speed. She ran anyway, lurching and stumbling, flogged by the horizontal rain. Later, she could never remember how far she’d gone, or how long. When she finally reached a flat place where the water spread out into a slower flood plain, Dion was already bobbing in the shallows, inert.

She splashed in and pulled him out. He was dead, he must be dead, she’d seen his body banged against the rocks… .

He wasn’t dead. His clothes had been entirely torn off, but his squat, fat-cushioned body had curled into a tight ball and the flexible thin shell on his back had curved around it. In the air he uncurled, opened his eyes, and smelled to her. “Hi, Mommy.”

“Dion!”

“I’m not hurt.” She felt puzzlement in her mind.

“I… see that,” she gasped, but there was no way he could have heard her because thunder split the sky, deafening as an explosion.

His big ears closed against the din. She saw his throat slit open again, without shedding water because none had gotten in. The big nostrils in his snout also opened. Dion stood.

Gaia and Rhea burst through the underbrush, obediently holding hands as Lillie had told them to. Their pink play suits were torn and soaked. Dion turned toward them and Lillie knew they were smelling furiously to each other, with those olfactory molecules meant only for each other.