Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

All at once her leg hurt where she’d fallen, and she was drenched and cold.

“Come on, Mommy,” Rhea said, taking her hand. The little girl’s unfurled tentacles felt warm and soft. “We’ll take you home!

Gaia looked down at herself. She smelled in disgust, and then spoke aloud. “I’m not going to wear clothes any more. Stupid things! This pants got me caught on bushes!”

Dion clasped Lillie around the knees. “I’m not hurt, Mommy,” he repeated, this time aloud.

“No,” she said, and felt worn out by the gratitude, the strangeness, the sorrow that she was inevitably losing them and the sorrow that they were still hers to agonize over, a loving burden on her useless heart.

They compromised on the clothes. The triplets agreed to wear tough canvas shorts to cover their genitals, which were both vulnerable to thorny bushes and embarrassing to the other children. Shorts, but nothing else.

Everyone else needed coverings from head to foot, as the UV increased.

That summer, the computer finally broke down for good. Neither Scott nor Loni could get it up again. This mattered greatly to Scott, but not, Lillie realized, to anybody else. When he wasn’t carefully noting data about the triplets in a crabbed longhand, or reading to them, Scott sat quietly in an old chair under the cooling shade of an oak tree, doing nothing. He wasn’t sick, he insisted. “I’m too old and it’s too hot,” was all he’d say. He ate less and less.

Rhea, Dion, and Gaia spent more and more time away from home, off somewhere on the mountain. The first time they stayed out overnight, Lillie was frantic. Oddly enough, it was Clari who reassured her. The young woman sat beside Lillie through the long dark hours, brewing chicory coffee, a wispy young figure in her brief white sleepgown. The cottage was slower to cool off these days, even though Lillie drew the curtains during the day. She could feel her shirt sticking to the small of her back.

“Rhea was talking to Vervain yesterday and I overheard,” Clari said, and Lillie thought how easily they all used “talking” and “overhearing” to describe conversations that may or may not have been one-way audio and one-way pheromonal. “Rhea said they had found eighteen different plants they could digest, and were looking for more. Also that Gaia could build a good campfire in their ‘special cave.’”

Lillie raised her hand helplessly, let it fall back to her lap. “Clari… are they going to revert to cavemen? Hunter-gatherers? Foraging for plants and building fires in caves?”

Clari laughed. “Lillie, they’re kids. Kids do that. Yours are just better at it than most. Besides, could cavemen solve square roots and recite Shakespeare? Scott says the triplets can do both.”

“You have no idea,” Lillie said, “how glad I am that you married Cord.”

Clari blushed with pleasure. She ducked her head, and in the gesture Lillie suddenly saw Tess, a Tess younger than Clari was now, and infinitely less experienced. Tess at Andrews Air Force Base, glitter in her masses of black hair, embarrassed at a compliment from some boy.

Some boy. All at once Lillie wondered: Was Clari so casual about the triplets staying away from home because she genuinely believed that they’d be safe? Or because it meant they would be spending less time around Raindrop and the others as adolescence approached?

Probably both. That’s how humans were, motives as knotted and twisted as mesquite. Anyway, adolescence was a long ways off.

Gaia, Rhea, and Dion straggled home the next afternoon, dirty and sleepy and hugely pleased with themselves. Immediately they fell asleep, and were still asleep when Jody rode up to the compound on horseback calling, “Lillie! Scott! Alex! Anybody home?”

“We’re here!” Alex called from the big house, and Jody dismounted and threw his horse’s reins over the porch railing. Everyone streamed out.

He looked much older. Sun lines, deep and deadly, creased even the skin on his thin cheeks. A purple carcinoma sat at one temple… did that mean Emily wasn’t there to keep up with cancer removal? Lillie’s chest tightened.

The five children at home, Keith’s three and Cord’s two, clustered on the porch behind their parents, peeping shyly. Lillie realized they hadn’t seen a stranger in… how many years? It was so easy to lose track.

Jody said abruptly, “I’ve got bad news.”

Keith said, “What? Shove it out, Jody.”

“Some sort of microbe got to the farm. Maybe engineered, maybe naturally mutated, Emily didn’t know. She said it might have lain dormant somehow, or jumped species, or anything.”

Alex said steadily, “Who? How many?”

“Bonnie. Dakota. Two of Gavin’s kids. Wild Pink.” He looked away, and the flesh in his throat worked. “And Carolina.”

Carolina. No engineering, no boosted immunity at all, nothing but her generous heart. Lillie felt more for Carolina’s death than she did for Wild Pink, Kella’s daughter, Lillie’s own grandchild. She’d barely known Wild Pink.

Clari said gently, “Come in, Jody.”

“No. I’m not staying. There’s no way of knowing who’s carrying what, Emily says. I just came to bring you this. It’s her genetic analysis and some doses that seemed to prevent dying from—where’s Scott? Is he dead?”

“No, no, just in bed. He feels his age.”

“It’s good he’s not dead because you might need him,” Jody said grimly. “Emily says if this can happen once, it can happen again, with a different micro.”

Just as Pete and Pam had said. “What your perversions of the right way have done to the planet… 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!’ These days Lillie seldom thought of the pribir. They had said they’d return “soon,” but to pribir that didn’t mean the same thing as to humans.

She said, “Come in, Jody. We’ll take our chances with you if you will with us. We’re still family, and you look completely tired out. We have some very good stew left from dinner.”

Jody hesitated, then clumped wearily up the steps. He halted at the children clustered behind the adults: Vervain, Stone, Lonette, Raindrop, little Theresa. Lillie saw his eyes scan them, then look beyond them down the length of the porch. His face relaxed when he didn’t see her triplets.

He ate the stew greedily, the kids clustering wide-eyed around this new “uncle.” As Jody ate, he filled them in on news of the farm. There were only ten head of cattle left, but those were healthy as long as they stayed out of the daylight heat. Two years ago Sajelle and DeWayne had had another child, which shocked and pleased them both. DeWayne was seventy-seven now, as old as Scott, but going strong. (Scott grimaced.) The farm had two new windmills, but the generator no longer worked and so the windmills drove crankshafts. Rafe and Jason had built a better irrigation system, which conserved water from the storms better and also kept flooding down. A few Net sites were still responding on the old computer, there were people left in the world, but not in Wenton where Dakota and Susie and Sam had gone and brought back a great find of useful objects, all sorts of—

Dion stood in the doorway of the big house, blinking in the candlelight after the dark path up from the woods.

Jody put down his spoon and stood. He said nothing. Lillie saw that he was holding his breath against any olfactory molecules, and that although he hated himself for doing it, he couldn’t stop himself. Jody walked carefully past Dion, went down the porch steps, and mounted his horse. Several yards away he turned and looked at Lillie. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”