Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“You made some?”

“Who does everything around here, bookworm?” I nudge her in the ribs and she laughs reluctantly and smiles at me with our smile. I remember learning to comb her hair after Mom got sick; the careful part I would make while she squirmed and hollered at me, the two hair balls I would twist and fasten to each side of her head. I would make the bottom of her hair immaculate: brushed and gelled and fastened into glossy, thick homogeneity. But on top it would sprout like a bunch of curly kale, straight up and out and olive-oil shiny. She would parade around the house in this flouncy slip she thought was a dress and pose for photos with her hand on her hip. I’m in a few of those pictures, usually in overalls or a smock. I look awkward and drab as an old sock next to her, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because we have the same slightly bucked front teeth, the same fat cheeks, the same wide eyes going wider. We have a nice smile, Tris and I.

Tris doesn’t wear afro-puffs any more. She keeps her hair in a bun and I keep mine short.

“Libs, oh Libs, things aren’t so bad, are they?”

I look up at Tris, startled. She’s sitting in the grass with her hands beneath her thighs and tears are dripping off the tip of her nose. I was lulled by her laugh—we don’t often talk about the shit we can’t control. Our lives, for instance.

I think about the field that we’re going to leave for crows so no one gets blown up for touching one of a thousand beautiful multicolored jewels. I think about funerals and Dad killing himself faster just so he can eat catfish with bellies full of white phosphorus.

“It’s not that great, Tris.”

“You think it’s shit.”

“No, not shit —”

“Close. You think it’s close.”

I sigh. “Some days. Tris. I have to get back to Meshach in a minute. What is going on?”

“I’m pregnant,” she says.

I make myself meet her eyes, and see she’s scared; almost as scared as I am.

“How do you know?”

“I suspected for a while. Yolanda finally got some test kits last night from a river trader.”

Yolanda has done her best as the town midwife since she was drafted into service five years ago, when a glassman raid killed our last one. I’m surprised Tris managed to get a test at all.

“What are you going to do? Will you…” I can’t even bring myself to say “keep it.” But could Yolanda help her do anything else?

She reaches out, hugs me, buries her head in my shirt and sobs like a baby. Her muffled words sound like “Christ” and “Jesus” and “God,” which ought to be funny since Tris is a capital-A atheist, but it isn’t.

“No,” she’s saying, “Christ, no. I have to… someone has to… I need an abortion, Libby.”

Relief like the first snow melt, like surviving another winter. Not someone else to worry about, to love, to feed.

But an abortion? There hasn’t been a real doctor in this town since I was twelve.

Bill’s mom used to be a registered nurse before the occupation, and she took care of everyone in town as best she could until glassman robots raided her house and called in reapers to bomb it five years ago. Bill left town after that. We never thought we’d see him again, but then two planting seasons ago, there he was with this green giant, a forty-year-old Deere combine—Shadrach, he called it, because it would make the third with our two older, smaller machines. He brought engine parts with him, too, and oil and enough seed for a poppy field. He had a bullet scar in his forearm and three strange, triangular burns on the back of his neck. You could see them because he’d been shaved bald and his hair was only starting to grow back, a patchy gray peach-fuzz.

He’d been in prison, that much was obvious. Whether the glassmen let him go or he escaped, he never said and we never asked. We harvested twice as much wheat from the field that season, and the money from the poppy paid for a new generator. If the bell on lookout hill rang more often than normal, if surveillance drones whirred through the grass and the water more than they used to, well, who was to say what the glassmen were doing? Killing us, that’s all we knew, and Bill was one of our own.

So I ask Bill if his mother left anything behind that might help us—like a pill, or instructions for a procedure. He frowns.

“Aren’t you a little old, Libby?” he says, and I tell him to fuck off. He puts a hand on my shoulder—conciliatory, regretful—and looks over to where Tris is trudging back home. “You saw what the reapers did to my Mom’s house. I couldn’t even find all of her teeth. ”

I’m not often on that side of town, but I can picture the ruin exactly. There’s still a crater on Mill Street. I shuffle backward, contrite. “God, Bill. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

He shrugs. “Sorry, Libs. Ask Yolanda, if you got to do something like that.” I don’t like the way he frowns at me; I can hear his judgment even when all he does is turn and climb back inside Shadrach.

“Fucking hot out here,” I say, and walk back over to Meshach. I wish Bill wasn’t so goddamn judgmental. I wish Tris hadn’t messed up with whichever of her men provided the sperm donation. I wish we hadn’t lost the east field to another cluster bomb.

But I can wish or I can drive, and the old man’s engine coughs loud enough to drown even my thoughts.

Tris pukes right after dinner. That was some of my best cornbread, but I don’t say anything. I just clean it up.

“How far along are you?” I ask. I feel like vomit entitles me to this much.

She pinches her lips together and I hope she isn’t about to do it again. Instead, she stands up and walks out of the kitchen. I think that’s her answer, but she returns a moment later with a box about the size of my hand. It’s got a hole on one side and a dial like a gas gauge on the other. The gauge is marked with large glassman writing and regular letters in tiny print: “Fetal Progression,” it reads, then on the far left “Not Pregnant,” running through “Nine Months” on the far right. I can’t imagine what the point of that last would be, but Tris’s dial is still barely on the left hand side, settled neatly between three and four. A little late for morning sickness, but maybe it’s terror as much as the baby that makes her queasy.

“There’s a note on the side. It says ‘All pregnant women will receive free rehabilitative healthcare in regional facilities.’” She says the last like she’s spent a long day memorizing tiny print.

“Glassmen won’t do abortions, Tris.”

No one knows what they really look like. They only interact with us through their remote-controlled robots. Maybe they’re made of glass themselves—they give us pregnancy kits, but won’t bother with burn dressings. Dad says the glassmen are alien scientists studying our behavior, like a human would smash an anthill to see how they scatter. Reverend Beale always points to the pipeline a hundred miles west of us. They’re just men stealing our resources, he says, like the white man stole the Africans’, though even he can’t say what those resources might be. It’s a pipeline from nowhere, to nothing, as far as any of us know.

Tris leans against the exposed brick of our kitchen wall. “All fetuses are to be carried to full term,” she whispers, and I turn the box over and see her words printed in plain English, in larger type than anything else on the box. Only one woman in our town ever took the glassmen up on their offer. I don’t know how it went for her; she never came home.

“Three months!” I say, though I don’t mean to.

Tris rubs her knuckles beneath her eyes, though she isn’t crying. She looks fierce, daring me to ask her how the hell she waited this long. But I don’t, because I know. Wishful thinking is a powerful curse, almost as bad as storytelling.