Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

“Jody―”

But he was gone, from embarrassment and guilt and old, old anger. Probably Jody wouldn’t try to get all the way to the farm tonight, in the dark. He’d camp somewhere not all that far from here, with the insects and vermin and possible rain, rather than be manipulated by scent into accepting Lillie’s children.

“Who was that?” Dion smelled to everyone at the same time that Lonette said plaintively, “Why did Uncle Jody go away?”

No one answered either of them.

The climate changes accelerated. The pounding rains all but ceased. Streams went dry. The winds still blew fiercely, but with each year they carried less moisture. Certain wildflowers retreated to growing only along streams or in run-off pockets of moisture. Others disappeared altogether.

Scott, now mostly bedridden but still clear-minded, said, “It all goes back to the oceans. If we had the computer, maybe we could tell what’s going on. But if the ocean gets warmer or colder in different places, or currents shift for any reason, then winds shift. If winds shift, everything else changes. Precipitation, evaporation, the whole nine yards.”

Lillie tried to remember the last time she had heard anyone say the whole nine yards. When Scott’s generation, which was also her generation, went, no one ever would again.

“Maybe the ocean currents will shift back,” Cord said.

Scott smiled sadly. “Did you know that during the last ice age, glaciers extended as far south as Ruidoso?”

“Glaciers,” Cord said wonderingly, and looked through the open door at the hot, parched pines.

Wildfires increased dramatically. Any stray bolt of lightning could start a fire. The first time one began several miles away, Lillie sat on the porch and watched the black clouds of smoke rise and blot out the sun. That fire didn’t last too long. Afterward, the sunsets and sunrises were glorious. There was still some rain in some months, and she thought they were probably safe for now.

The next year, there were more wildfires.

The triplets were ten years old. With the other children, they hauled water and gathered firewood and hoed crops and pounded chicory nuts. Their long, soft tentacles, seven on each hand, were good at using tools: sewing needles, meat grinders, knives. Like the others, they could skin an animal and debone a fish. They were better than the others at learning everything Scott could teach them about genetics, everything Alex knew about building things, all the poetry and history and physics from their few precious books. They worked cheerfully, played happily, and, always, kept their private “conversations” private. Lillie had no idea what they smelled among themselves. She didn’t even have any proof that they did, that any exchange of olfactory molecules existed except the ones that everyone could receive. No proof, but she knew it happened. She was their mother.

“I don’t like them anymore,” she once overheard Stone say to his sister.

“Oh, they’re all right,” Vervain replied. “They’re just different. Look… what’s that over those trees, up in the sky?”

Lillie’s breath caught. She whirled to look where Vervain pointed, but it was only a trick of the clouds, the light, the shimmering heat.

One blisteringly hot day in June, Gaia, Rhea, and Dion had been sent out to fill in the old latrine and dig a new one. Lillie felt vaguely guilty about assigning them this chore. But they seemed to mind it much less than anyone else did; in fact, it didn’t seem to bother them at all. Could they selectively close their receptors to certain odors? She didn’t know. Nor did they mind the sun streaming down on them, and Scott said they didn’t have to. Their gray-green scales, flexible carapace, and mysterious genetic cooling system meant they didn’t have to wear so much as a hat, although Dion often did. He said he liked the look of hats, and he tried to persuade his sisters to wear them, but the girls refused.

It was all right to assign them latrine duty three times in a row.

No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t fair. The other kids were inside, doing unstrenuous tasks. Lonette was actually asleep. Lillie decided to at least take the triplets a plate of cookies. The “cookies” were a recipe Clari had invented, using pounded acorn flour and agave syrup to create a sweet, sticky confection. All eight kids loved them.

Lillie put on a hat with neck shades, a jacket with long sleeves, and her boots, now so worn that any minute they were going to develop another hole to patch. She covered the plate of sticky cookies with a light cloth against bugs and set out for the main latrine. Unlike the nighttime privy, which was conveniently close to the house, the daytime latrine lay down the mountain beyond a grove of pines, below the water supply and downwind.

It was relatively cool under the pines. Lillie paused a moment, balancing her plate, breathing in the sweet clean fragrance. Then she heard the noise.

Rhea stood beside the shithole she had just filled in. The wooden seat had already been moved, and another hole was partially dug. Rhea held the shovel in her hand, its handle shortened for her squat frame. Rhea’s big ears had swiveled forward, and her mouthless head on its curving scaly neck jutted a foot in front of her forward-tilted body. Lillie smelled her surprise. Gaia and Dion weren’t in sight.

The men had stopped beside a creosote bush. There were three of them, dressed in what Lillie recognized from a long time ago as military camouflage. They were unshaven, unwashed. They carried guns.

“What the hell is that?” one of them cried. He raised his pistol.

Laser? Projectile? Something Lillie couldn’t even imagine?

She dropped the cookies and ran forward. Before she even broke cover from the pine grove, the other two men had leveled guns at Rhea. There was no sound, no flash of light. But Rhea dropped to the ground and a tree behind Lillie exploded.

Then all three men dropped their guns, shrieked in pain as they clutched their heads, and collapsed.

Lillie rushed to Rhea. The little girl, so flattened to the ground that she’d been nowhere higher than the thickness of her head, was already getting up. She smelled “Mommy!” and rushed to Lillie, clutching her mother’s knees. Lillie snatched her up and was starting to run when Gaia smelled to her, “Stop. They’re all dead.”

Slowly Lillie turned with Rhea awkwardly, heavily in her arms.

Gaia stood over the three men. Dion was emerging from brush a short distance away. Lillie smelled both of their grimness, their anger. She put Rhea on the ground and walked over to the men, bent, felt for pulses in their necks. They were dead.

“What… what did you do?”

Gaia tilted her head back to say aloud with stout determination, “They were going to kill Rhea!”

“What did you do, Gaia? Dion?”

Gaia said defensively, “Rhea did it, too.”

“No, I didn’t,” Rhea retorted. “Mommy was holding me wrong. Just you and Dion did it!”

“I don’t care,” Dion said. “They were going to hurt Rhea.”

“Dion, Gaia,” Lillie said, as carefully as she could manage, “what did you do?”

The two children looked at each other. Finally Dion said, “We noised them. Don’t be mad, Mommy.”

Gaia added, “We wouldn’t do it if they weren’t hurting Rhea!”

“I know,” Lillie said. “What do you mean, you ‘noised’ them?”

“We made the stopping noise,” Dion said. “Like bats do, except theirs doesn’t stop anything.”

“A very high-pitched noise,” Lillie said, and was met with dumb stares, which she didn’t believe. They understood pitch.

“If you did that,” she said, still very careful, “if you noised the men’s brains to make them fall over, why didn’t it stop me, too?”