Nancy Kress - Nothing Human

“So Miller, when he was doing the in vitro fertilization, did he―”

“No. Not possible,” Reeder said, and that made the third doctor who had said that to Keith. Yet here the impossibilities were, in the form of twenty-one children.

“Inserting specific genes in specific places in the human genome is really difficult,” Reeder said. “And thirteen years ago we knew even less. The inserted genes have a way of splicing themselves into unsuitable locations, disrupting other working genes. Also, the transpons and retroviruses that were the means of delivering genes into an embryo twelve years ago could never have carried as big a gene load as this. That Miller could have accomplished that—not to mention designing the genes in the first place!—with identical results for at least twenty-one babies, isn’t possible. I don’t care how much of a genius he was. The techniques just didn’t, and don’t, exist.”

Keith knew he was going to make a fool of himself. “What if it wasn’t Miller’s science? What if he got it, spelled out step by step, from elsewhere?”

“From where?”

“I don’t know.”

Reeder frowned. “No other country is that far ahead of us, if that’s what you’re thinking. Genetic information is shared internationally.”

“Not another country.”

Linda Reeder spoke for the first time. “What are you hinting at?”

“I’m not hinting, only speculating. Somebody knew a lot more genetics than we do. Aliens?”

They both stared at him. Linda rose abruptly. “I better check on Hannah.” She strode from the room, every line of her body scornful.

“I know how that sounds,” Keith said. “I’m not saying I believe it myself. But Miller did tell people he’d been abducted, and he was missing for a month. My investigator, who’s the best there is, verified that.”

Reeder finished his second drink. “I prefer to stick to facts. There’s only one more I haven’t given you. In every case I’ve tested, it looks as if the trance state began with the onset of puberty. There are numerous genes that switch on then, and it’s possible they also switched on whatever of the inserted genes are active in the children’s brains.”

Puberty. Lillie’s blossoming body, the box of tampons, the lipsticks clattering to the floor. “I see.”

“I’m not sure there’s anything more I can tell you,” Reeder said. “If you give me your e-mail address, I’ll—”

Someone screamed.

Reeder tore out of the room. Keith followed, not caring that it wasn’t his house. Reeder ran up a flight of stairs, down a hall to a bedroom.

Linda Reeder stood by a pink-covered bed, her hand to her mouth, eyes wide. On the bed sat a young girl in pink pajamas, looking puzzled and a little scared.

“Mom? What’s wrong? What did I say? Dad, what’s wrong with Mom?”

Hannah. Looking like a normal thirteen-year-old girl, long blond hair parted in the middle, music cube on the night stand, holographic poster of rock star Jude Careful above the bed. A window framed by white curtains was open to the warm April air.

“Mom? All I said was, the pribir are coming. Well, they are. Mom?

“Dad?”

By the time Keith drove back to New York, doing ninety miles an hour on Route 87, Lillie had been awake three hours. He’d given Iris permission over the phone for Dr. Asrani to run whatever tests she wanted as long as Lillie agreed and didn’t seem too upset. He could not, in this context, have defined “too upset.”

“Uncle Keith!” Lillie said. He hugged her hard, until, blushing, she pushed him away. She was never physically demonstrative. Maybe it reminded her too much of Barbara. Her beautiful gold-flecked eyes looked clear and alert.

“How do you feel?” Such banal, ordinary words! As if she’d had a head cold, or the flu.

“Okay. That doctor said it’s April 28 and I’ve been knocked out for weeks. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“How come? Did I get hit by a car or something?”

Shoba Asrani must have told her all this, but he saw that she wanted to hear it from him. “No. You just sort of collapsed in the living room, and I called 911.”

“A heart attack?”

“No, sweetie. Nobody knows why you collapsed.” God, how much was he supposed to tell her about the extra DNA, the brain structures, Miller, the other kids? How did you discuss what utterly baffled everyone?

“Well, can I go home now?”

“I don’t know. I’ll ask. Look, I’m going to talk to Dr. Asrani. You get back in bed and wait for me.”

“I don’t want to get into bed. I’m not tired.”

“Then sit in that chair.”

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Is there a vending machine? In the hall, maybe?”

The sheer normalcy was eerie. Keith gave her money. He found Dr. Asrani in her office, apparently waiting for him. She looked as unsettled as he felt, too unsettled for small talk.

“Keith. We ran tests. The structure in Lillie’s frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli is now active. The PLI isn’t like anything we’ve seen, a totally new firing pattern. Usually neurons fire at intervals of―”

He wasn’t yet interested in details. “Is she in danger? Is the growth harming her in any way?”

“Not that we can tell. She checks out fine, and she says she feels fine. Of course, we want to keep her several days to run—”

“No. She wants to go home.”

Asrani took a step forward, waving one arm. “No, we need to—”

“I’m taking her home. I’ll bring her in here every day, if you want and she agrees, or someone will — ” How long could he be away from the SkyPower legal work? “—but right now I’m checking her out of the hospital.”

Asrani looked extremely unhappy. But she had no legal ground for keeping Lillie, and she and Keith both knew it.

He said, “Something important, doctor. When she woke up, did she say to you, or to anybody, anything peculiar?”

“Peculiar how?”

“Did she happen to mention the word ‘pribir’?”

“No. What’s a pribir?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. Start the paperwork for me to take her home, doctor.”

He found Lillie back in her room, looking out the sealed window at a parking lot and eating a bag of corn chips. Two candy bars lay on the windowsill. She’d already found her jeans and sweater in a closet and changed from the hospital gown. “Uncle Keith, I can’t find my shoes. Somebody might have stole them.”

“We’ll get you new ones.”

“They were Kleesons,” she said. “And I had them all broken in just right.”

He couldn’t think of anything to answer. The situation was too surreal.

The paperwork took longer than Keith thought necessary. Why didn’t a modern, on-line hospital have more streamlined systems? Lillie, barefoot, slouched in a chair and read an old movie magazine. The air smelled of chemicals and food and cleaning solvents, a typical hospital smell, but despite the “increased activity in her frontal lobe and olfactory glomeruli,” Lillie didn’t react.

Finally they walked out of a side entrance toward the car. The sun had just set, replacing the afternoon’s warmth with a cool breeze. Warmth didn’t last in April, not even an April as hot as this one. Keith shivered and put an arm around Lillie, dressed in her cotton sweater.

She pulled away. “Can we stop at McDonald’s on the way home? I’m still hungry.”

“Yes, if you want to.”

“Good. And oh, Uncle Keith—”

“What?” He was trying to remember where, in his headlong blind haste, he’d parked the car, and if it had been a legal spot.

“The pribir are coming.”

By the next day, the Troy Record had the story. One of the parents of a newly wakened child had evidently called them, full of joy at the “miracle” that God had brought about in order to return their son. The paper sent a reporter for a human-interest story, but the reporter was less intrigued by the religious angle than by the strange utterance that more than one just-coma-free child had made simultaneously: “The pribir are coming.” The reporter only had three names, and Dennis Reeder was furious that the parents had divulged those three, but the parents swore there were seventeen more. The wire services picked up the story, and suddenly it was all over the Net and the papers and the TV news.