Nothing Human

CHAPTER 1

He wrote:

He looked at the paper, and tore it up. The lame paragraph didn’t even come close. What had happened couldn’t be expressed in words. There were no words.

Of course, that had been the whole point.

“I’m pregnant,” Barbara said, and grinned at him like a six-year-old who had just tied her shoelaces for the first time.

Shit.

“Don’t look like that, Keith,” she said, her voice already trembling. Then, with a sudden show of what passed in her for anger, “Just because you’re my brother doesn’t give you the power to judge me.”

“Of course it does,” Keith Anderson said. “Don’t spout these mindless slogans at me. Everyone has the right to judge actions according to belief and practicality. It’s called ‘using good judgment.’ “

Her eyes filled with tears, and Keith willed himself to patience. Softly, go softly. Be a good brother. She had always gotten upset too easily, even when they’d been small children. He knew that. Barbara was emotionally fragile.

So how was she going to cope alone with a baby?

He reached for her hand across her tiny kitchen table. Outside the dingy apartment window, someone on Amsterdam Avenue rattled garbage cans and cursed loudly. Cabs honked incessantly. “Tell me about it, Babs,” he said gently.

Instantly her tears evaporated. “You know I always wanted children. Then the years somehow went by and things happened and… well. You know.”

Keith knew. Her first husband the non-working narcissist happened, and her second husband the just-barely-this-side-of-the-law bankrupt happened, and a string of disastrous love affairs happened, and so Barbara was thirty-six and working as an office temp and, apparently, pregnant.

“Who’s the father, Babs?”

“That’s the best part. There isn’t one.”

“A virgin birth,” he said, before he knew he was going to speak. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

Barbara laughed and ran her hand through her short brown hair. It stood up in spikes. “No, an anonymous sperm donor. No man to interfere with us, bully us, upset Lillie and me.”

Lillie. Already this fetus was a person to her. Keith braced himself for the argument ahead. But she anticipated him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Keithers. But that’s taken care of, too. This fertility clinic took five of my eggs and fertilized them all, then chose one that doesn’t carry the genetic marker. The baby won’t get breast cancer.” She and Keith were both carriers; their mother had died of the disease.

When he remained silent she added, “I’m being very careful of Lillie. Yes, I’m positive it’s a girl, I had the amnio. I wanted to know.”

“How far along are you?”

“Three months already,” she said proudly, standing up and turning sideways. “I’m starting to show!”

She wasn’t. Skinny as always, impulsive as always, improvident as always. Keith looked around the cramped apartment in the bad neighborhood that was all she could afford. Paint peeled off the walls. He glimpsed a roach crawling in the dim crevice between stove and refrigerator. Outside the grimy window, kids who should have been in school sauntered along Amsterdam Avenue in the mellow sunshine.

“Barbara, how did you afford the in vitro fertilization? A woman in my office told me it took her and her husband three tries at nine thousand dollars a pop.”

She sat down again. “This clinic, it’s called ChildGive IVF Institute, is on a sliding income scale, very cheap. It’s because they’re part of some test.”

“A clinical trial? Who’s running it?”

“Oh, Keith, how should I know? And it doesn’t matter anyway. Stop sounding like a lawyer!”

“I am a lawyer. How did you learn about the clinic?”

“Ad in the paper. Keithers, please stop.”

Again he fought down impatience. “I can’t. I care about you. Have you thought how you’ll work and take care of the baby, too? Good day care is expensive.”

“Something will turn up, it always does. The Lord will provide. You have to trust in Him more.”

Keith stared at her helplessly. The Great Divide; they always seemed to run into it sooner or later. But was it really religion, or was it temperament? Trust in God was a great excuse for sloth and lack of planning.

So was the knowledge that you had a hard-working younger brother that wouldn’t let you go begging.

It would do no good to say so. Barbara wouldn’t hear him; she never did. And Keith was honest enough to admit that he needed her as much as she needed him. His marriage record was no better than hers. Two failures, and he never saw either Stacey or Meg. He , was childless, worked fourteen hours a day, would have been wary of trying again with a new woman even if he had had the time. At thirty-four, he was already romantically burned out. Barbara was the only family he had, or probably would have. Barbara and now this child.

He gazed at his sister, with her rumpled-up pixie cut and thin body and hopeful face. She wore jeans from the teen department and a T-shirt with a pictture of kittens. A child herself, perpetually.

“Let me show you the baby clothes I bought yesterday… they’re the most darling things you ever saw!” Barbara said, jumping up from the table so quickly that his tepid coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup. She didn’t notice.

Keith mopped up the coffee before she returned from the bedroom with a shopping bag. Then he sat and looked at pink sleepers and a hat with a fuzzy ball on top and impossibly tiny soft white shoes. As she chartered away, he nodded meaninglessly and tried to smile. This was his sister, and she was determined on having this baby no matter what, and the baby would be his only genetic stake in the next generation. His niece.

Lillie.

Barbara had an easy pregnancy, which was good because she had no health insurance and could not have afforded many complications. There was no morning sickness, no bleeding, none of possible worse horrors that Barbara insisted on reading about at the public library. She recited them all to Keith, who would much rather have not heard. He took her to dinner every Tuesday, slashing the time out of his logjammed schedule. He sent her a crib from Bloomingdale’s, and he inquired of a tax attorney at Wolf, Pfeiffer about various types of trust funds. The rest of the time he forgot his sister and defended his corporate clients.

He was in court when she went into labor. Turning the case over to his assistant, he drove to St. Vincent’s.

“You can go into the labor room but not the delivery room,” a harassed nurse told him. Keith hadn’t wanted to go into either, but he donned the paper garments and followed her meekly.

Barbara lay on a gurney, her hair plastered wetly to her head and her face sweaty. To his relief, she wasn’t screaming. At least not at the moment.

“Keith.”

“I’m here, honey.” Why didn’t she have a girlfriend do this? He tried to look reassuring instead of resentful.

“Talk to me.”

“Okay. What about?”

“The trial. What is it about?” All at once her face grew very intent. She gripped the sides of the gurney hard enough to turn her entire hands white. Her features contorted so much that Keith hardly recognized her, but still she made no sound. He began talking very fast, hardly aware of what he was saying, sure she was hearing none of it anyway.

“It’s a corporate liability case. I represent the corporation. A worker was cleaning the inside of a mixing machine, which was turned off, of course—”

Barbara gave a long, low sound, less like pain than a weird kind of off-key singing.

“— and he fell asleep. Actually, he was drunk, we’ve proved that conclusively.”

Her face relaxed, became her face again. “Go on, go on, go on.” She closed her eyes.

“The allotted time for the cleaning was over,” Keith said desperately. He would give anything, anything at all, to be back in court. “And the supervisor, my client, called out loudly that all machinery was going to be turned on again, and—”

Her face contorted and she sounded the long, weird, sliding note.

“Go on, Keith!”

“And so they turned the mixer on.” Was this a suitable story to tell a woman in labor? It was not. “The worker was killed. The family is suing.”

“Go on!”

“I’ll give the summation tomorrow morning. The main point is that for liability you must have negligence on the part of the employer, the standard is that of reasonable care—”

“How are we doing?” the nurse said, rescuing him. She did something to Barbara that Keith didn’t watch and, to his intense relief, ordered him back to the crowded waiting room. He sank down gratefully into an orange plastic chair with rips in both arms. People around him jabbered in at least three languages.

It seemed only a few minutes before a doctor appeared, beaming broadly. “Mr. Anderson? You have a daughter!”

Keith felt too wrung out to correct her. He merely nodded and smiled, shuffling his feet like an idiot.

“Your wife is doing fine, she’s in Recovery. But if you go to Maternity, you can see the baby. Through this door, down the corridor, take your first left.”

“Thank you.”

The babies lay behind a big glass window. There were only two of them. Keith pointed to the crib labeled ANDERSON and a masked nurse held up a bundle wrapped in pink. Again Keith pantomimed smiling and nodding until the nurse seemed satisfied.

The baby looked like a baby: reddish, bald, wrinkled, wormlike. All babies looked alike. Keith tried to think what he should do next, and hit on the idea of buying Barbara some flowers. He escaped to the gift shop, breathing deeply with relief.

With any luck, he’d make it back to court before the judge adjourned for the day. With any luck at all.

The aide had just left. Lillie lay on her bed in New York-Presbyterian Hospital as she had lain for three weeks now, unmoving. Unseeing, unhearing. Although Keith wasn’t sure he believed that last, and so he talked to her whenever he could make himself do it.

“How are you feeling today, Lillie? You look good. Mrs. Kessler put a red ribbon in your hair. I told her red was your favorite color.”

He sat down at the little table beside her bedside and pulled out a pack of cards. It helped if his hands were occupied. Helped him, that is. There was no help for her.

Nof a conventional coma, the doctor had said. If a nipple was inserted into Lillie’s mouth, she sucked. At least that eliminated any need for an IV. She jumped at sounds, closed her eyes at light. But nothing woke her. She didn’t use the toilet, didn’t respond to anything said to her, didn’t move voluntarily. No one had ever seen anything like it. Interns trooped through the room daily. Machines scanned every corner of Lillie. Conferences were held. Lillie harbored no viruses, no bacteria, no parasites, no cancers, no blood anomalies, no nerve or muscular degeneration, no concussion, no endocrine malfunctions. No one could explain anything.

Keith shuffled the cards and began to lay them out. “I used to play solitaire on the computer,” he told her companionably. “In law school, when I couldn’t stand to study a second longer. I liked seeing those little red and black cards snap into their rows when I clicked on the mouse. Very satisfying.”

Lillie lay inert, a physically healthy thirteen-year-old dressed in a blue hospital gown and red hair ribbon.

“Funny, though. Once during a boring weekend at somebody’s beach house, a weekend it did nothing but rain, I tried to play with an old deck of cards I found in a dresser drawer. And the game wasn’t any fun. It wasn’t the solitaire itself I liked, it was the neatness and quickness of the computer moving the cards. Click click.”

There was no computer here. Keith could have brought his handheld, but if he did, he’d probably work. He didn’t want to work when he visited Lillie, didn’t want to get so absorbed in the law that he forgot about her. If that were possible.

“Red nine on the black ten, Lil.”

Someone came into the room. Keith clicked a black eight onto the growing column and looked up. At the expression on Dr. Shoba Asrani’s face, Keith got to his feet. Dr. Asrani held a printout in her hand.

“Mr. Anderson, this is a new article from a Net list serve. It describes a patient case, brain scan and PLI and DNA chart. All the same anomalies.”

No one had done a brain scan or PLI or DNA chart on Lillie when she was born. No reason: she was a normal healthy infant. And anyway, PLI and DNA charts hadn’t been invented yet. The human genome was still being sequenced. Things were different now.

Asrani took a deep breath. “Things are different now. There’s another one like Lillie.”

Keith had the biggest trial case of his career. He’d been working on it with a team of assistants for months, which meant that gradually he’d seen less and less of Barbara.

BioHope Inc. had developed a genetically engineered soya bean with strong pest resistance, good adaptability to soil variety, and dramatically high bean yield. The plant had the potential to thrive in Third World countries. The United Nations had expressed strong interest, the World Health Organization had given the bean its imprimatur, and several governments were interested. Mechanisms were being put in place to distribute seeds free, courtesy of three international charitable trusts, in Africa and Asia. Agriexperts estimated that hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved from starvation.

Then a volunteer in the American clinical trial of the soya bean went into convulsions and died.

The investigation showed that the woman had neglected to tell BioHope that she was allergic to Brazil nuts. A gene from the Brazil nut genome had been spliced into the new soya bean to make methionine, an essential amino acid which soya beans lacked. The dead woman’s family sued BioHope.

“I never expected to know this much about Brazil nuts,” Keith said to his office friend, Calvin Loesser, when they met in the glossy halls of Wolf, Pfeiffer.

“You lined up good expert witnesses?”

“The best. Did you know that the Brazil nut, technically called Bertholletia excelsa, is related to the anchovy pear, which makes good pickles?”

“I didn’t know that,” Cal said.

“Or that the Brazil nut meat is exceptionally rich in oil?”

“I didn’t know that either,” Cal said, starting to edge away down the hall.

“Or that less than half the people allergic to nuts in general are allergic to tree nuts like the Brazil nut?”

“Keith…”

“The point is,” Keith said quietly, “that the genetically engineered soya bean would probably only kill about ten people a year worldwide and would save hundreds of thousands of people from starving. Conservative estimate.”

Cal stopped edging down the hall and looked lawyerly alert. “You can’t put that in your summation. If you say that even ten people will die, the jury will turn against your client.”

“I know. But weigh it out, Cal—ten quick deaths or hundreds of thousands of slow ones? Maybe, over time, millions.”

“Too coldly calculating for a jury to respond to.”

“I know,” Keith said again. “But if it were me, I’d vote in favor of the engineered nut. Ten people is a fair sacrifice to aid millions. What is it, Denise?”

His secretary said apologetically, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but your sister is on the phone and she says it’s urgent.”

Keith sprinted to his office. “Barbara? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said tremulously, “I’m not. Keith, I’m sorry to bother you but I can’t… I can’t do it. I can’t!”

“Do what?”

“Any of it! I just can’t anymore!” She burst into hysterical weeping.

Keith closed his eyes, calculating rapidly. It wasn’t a day heavy with appointments. On the other hand, it was raining hard. Taxis would be hard to get. “Babs, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just sit down and wait for me to… where’s Lillie? Is she all right?”

“I can’t do it anymore!” Barbara cried, and now Keith heard Lillie yelling lustily in the background, screams of rage rather than pain.

“I’ll be right over. Just sit down and don’t do anything. All right?”

“All… right…”

At her apartment he found Barbara sobbing on the sofa. Lillie, seventeen months, sat and played with a pile of what looked like broken toys. The apartment reeked. Lillie, dressed in only a diaper and food-stained bib, reeked more. Every surface including the floor was covered with unwashed dishes, baby clothes, pizza cartons, and unopened mail.

Lillie looked up and gave him a beatific smile. Her eyes were gray, flecked with tiny spots of gold.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Barbara sobbed. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

But somebody had to do it. That much was clear. Keith, well aware that he hadn’t the faintest idea how, picked up the phone. Within an hour he had a very expensive Puerto Rican woman from a very expensive temp agency bathing Lillie, clucking disapprovingly at the apartment and murmuring comments in Spanish.

Barbara ignored the cup of tea he made her. “I’m just no good at being a mother, Keith! It’s terrible, I’m a complete failure, poor Lillie…”

“You’re not a failure,” Keith said. Was she? He really didn’t know if this was normal. He could easily see how it might get overwhelming, a job and a child… . But didn’t thousands of women all over the city do it every day without collapsing like this? Impatience warred with compassion, both flavored with guilt that he, Keith Anderson, did not have to face this every day.

“I hit her,” Barbara said despairingly. “I can’t believe it, but Lillie wouldn’t stop crying, she wouldn’t…”

“Drink your tea, Babs, while it’s hot.”

“I can’t believe I hit her!”

He stayed until Mrs. Perez had left and Babs was asleep. Then he carried Lillie from her crib in her tiny, stuffy bedroom into the newly cleaned living room. Clumsily Keith undressed his niece. She stirred but didn’t wake. He examined Lillie carefully. No bruises, no burns, nothing that looked either painful or suspicious. Grateful, he redressed Lillie and put her back to bed.

He had just returned to the living room when Barbara came out, calmer now, in rumpled blue pajamas. “I’m so sorry, Keith.”

“You can’t help it, honey,” Keith said, not knowing if this was true or not. “It will be easier now. I’ve hired Mrs. Perez to come twice a week to clean and cook and just sort of take care that things are going smoothly.”

“You’re so good to me,” she said, sitting in a corner of the sagging sofa and tucking her feet under her. Her voice had a softer purr. So this was what she needed: someone to shift the burden onto. She had never been strong enough to carry her life alone, even when that life had been less complicated than it was now.

“So what kind of big case are you working on?” Barbara asked. He heard the envy in her voice. “I know it must be something exciting.”

Keith thought of BioHope. Of the genuinely struggling, starving mothers and children the engineered soya bean was supposed to save. Of the American volunteer who had died eating the bean. “Ten people is a fair sacrifice to aid millions,” he’d told Cal. But what if one of the ten were Barbara, leaving him with Lillie?

“Keith? What is your case about?”

“Nuts,” he said.

April 2013

Dr. Asrani’s office was small as a paralegal’s cubicle. Keith knew that she had another, more spacious office in the physicians’ building adjourning the hospital; this one must be some sort of waystation, a place to leave papers or close her eyes for a moment or talk to patients’ relatives in privacy. He sat on the edge of a gray upholstered chair and waited.

“The article was posted by a physician in Pittsburgh,” Dr. Asrani said. She had a very faint, musical accent. “He describes a semi-active trance state with no external communication, like Lillie’s. And the brain specs… here, look.”

She hiked her chair closer to Keith’s and spread the printout on the arm of his chair. He could see that she took reassurance from the charts and graphs: so verifiable, so unambiguous. She would not have made a good lawyer.

“See, here is the PLI of the Pittsburgh patient, a twelve-year-old boy. Here, in this dark area, is the same anomalous thick growth of nerve cells that Lillie has at the base of the frontal lobe. It’s right against the glomeruli, which processes olfactory signals and relays them all over the brain to centers involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses —pretty much everything important except muscular control.

“Now here on this page is the boy’s neural firing pattern for that region. It is like Lillie’s, which is to say, minimal activity in the entire area. Nothing going on in this complex structure. Very odd.”

And that was the understatement of the year, Keith thought. An inert, non-malignant, non-functioning but very substantial growth squeezed into Lillie’s skull and this boy’s, doing nothing.

Dr. Asrani shuffled her printouts. “Now, the DNA chart shows many differences between Lillie and the boy, of course. They have entirely different genetic inheritances. See, Lillie carries the allele for Type AB blood and the boy is A. Lillie has E2 and E3 alleles in her APO genes, and the boy has two E4—a risk of heart disease there in later life. And so on. But look here, Mr. Anderson, on chromosome six. Both children have this very long—almost two million base pairs!—sequence of genes that is utterly unknown. No one has ever seen this in any other human genome. Not ever.”

“Of course,” Keith said, grasping at a vagrant straw, “you haven’t exactly examined every other human genome in the entire world.”

Dr. Asrani peered at him as if she thought he might be joking. “Hardly. Genome sequencing is only thirteen years old, after all. There is still much we don’t know. In fact, we know hardly anything.”

Much as Keith liked her honesty, it didn’t help him clarify any feelings about Lillie’s genetic anomaly. Which now she apparently shared with an unknown twelve-year-old boy somewhere in Pittsburgh. He gazed helplessly at the abbreviated version of the kid’s genetic chart, full of esoteric symbols and swooping lines.

“There is one thing more,” Dr. Asrani said, and at her tone he raised his gaze from the printout. “I almost was not going to mention it because it may sound so misleading. But I will say it, after all. Both Lillie and this boy are the products of in vitro fertilization.”

Keith’s mind blanked, then raced. “Where? What clinic?”

“Mr. Anderson, I cannot tell you that. I don’t even know it, as the publishing physician has naturally respected patient confidentiality and not included even the boy’s name in his article. But I want to caution you that this coincidence is not meaningful. No one thirteen years ago — or even today! — could have deliberately altered a fetal genome to somehow lead to Lillie’s condition. It is simply not possible. We are far, far too ignorant.”

“May I have that printout?” Keith asked, and held out his hand.

She hesitated only a moment. “Of course.”

“Thank you,” Keith said. “Is there anything more, or shall I return to Lillie?”

She watched him go, her face apprehensive and helpless. She knew what he was going to do: extremely perceptive, Shoba Asrani. She might have made a decent lawyer after all.

CHAPTER 2

It was too hot for upstate New York in early July, especially for early evening, especially if you didn’t want to be there in the first place. Keith knew he had no right to grumble; summers everywhere were getting hotter and the newspapers said New York City was broiling in its own juices. He longed for his cool sleek apartment on East Sixty-third, acquired only six months ago. He was moving up.

Barbara and Lillie, meanwhile, had moved upstate to Utica. “Beginning a new life,” she’d told Keith. “Starting over.” To Keith her new life looked quite a bit like the old one.

“Isn’t this fun?” Barbara said.- “It’s so good to see you again, Keith! Lillie, don’t go any closer to the water, you hear me?”

Lillie, ten years old, made a face but stopped obediently short of the park “pond” thirty feet across and probably all of two feet deep. Children sailed boats in it. However, since there was no wind moving the sticky, heavy air, this was a losers’ game. On her skinny, bony body Lillie wore a halter top and shorts of violent orange. Her dark brown hair hung in sticky tangles.

Barbara and Keith sat on an old blanket spread under a maple tree dying of some slow blight. They’d finished dinner, deli sandwiches and fruit and homemade brownies. At least Barbara hadn’t expected him to grill anything. The air was thick with a weird soup of barbecue smoke, portable microwave beeps, pagers, cell phones, Net music, and e-harness alarms shrieking from toddlers or dogs.

“Welcome to a state of nature,” Keith said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Keith, I’ve got something to tell you.” Barbara lowered her lashes. She looked much as she had when Lillie was born. A forty-six-year-old pixie. “Something I hope you’ll be glad to hear.”

“Yes?” Keith said neutrally. Her expression, glimpsed through the gathering dusk, made him uneasy.

“It’s wonderful, really. A wonder I didn’t expect again.”

“Spit it out, Babs.”

Lillie had come up beside them. She blurted, “Mom is going to get married!”

Barbara looked briefly vexed that Lillie had become the news-giver, but then vexation vanished in enthusiasm. “Yes, and he’s the most terrific man in the world! Kind, generous, sexy as hell, fun to be with—”

“You’ve only been with him three times,” Lillie said judiciously, not upset, merely pointing out the facts. “So you don’t know if he’s all those things.”

“I know he’s kind because he was so good to you, Miss Smarty Pants,” Barbara retorted. “And he’s generous because he paid for both our plane tickets to visit him — all three times! And I know he’s fun because we laugh a lot, and—”

“You left out ‘sexy as hell,’” Lillie said, still without bias.

“Barbara,” Keith managed to get out, “how long have you known this guy? And where did you meet him?”

“She met him on-line,” Lillie said.

“And what if I did? You can tell a lot about a person on-line, now that I have that live-video feed. Keith, we talk every night, for hours and hours. I’ve never felt I knew anyone so well, not even you. Bill is the most wonderful—”

Keith interrupted her. “How long ago did you meet on-line?”

“Six weeks and three days ago. And already he’s brought Lillie and me to New York three times… that’s one of the best parts! He lives in Manhattan, in a great old apartment on West End Avenue, bonus witchy, so we’ll be near you again!”

Bonus witchy. Keith hated it when his sister used teenage slang. But, then, he hated everything about this setup. Still, he kept his reactions in check, saying carefully, “What does Bill do?”

“Graphic designer for the Net.”

Which could mean anything. Barbara rushed on, burbling away about Bill’s apartment, the wonderful restaurant he’d taken them to, how he’d consulted Lillie and shown every concern for her opinion, what a great time they’d had. Keith let her run down while he figured out what to say first.

“Barbara, what’s Bill’s address? West End is long, and pretty varied.”

“He’s near Seventieth,” she said, which also could mean anything. A very mixed neighborhood. “What’s his last name?”

She laughed. “Checking out his ethnicity? It’s Brown. Go ahead, counselor, derive clues from that!”

He smiled. “When do I meet him?”

“Whenever you like. We’ll be in New York again next week for the wedding, so ―”

“Next week?”

“Yes, we… is that your phone?”

It was. Keith wouldn’t have taken the call except it was his investigator’s number, with the priority they’d agreed to use only if Jamal found the big evidence they were looking for. The case was complicated. His client was an alternative-energy company who’d lost two workers to an accident that simply wasn’t foreseeable. Jamal had indeed found what he was looking for, and Keith’s mood climbed as they discussed it.

By the time he’d finished, the fireworks had started. “Oh, look!” Barbara cried as a silver and green pinwheel exploded in the sky. “Isn’t it beautiful! Come on, Keith, move out from under the tree so we can see better!”

She hopped forward and plunked herself, laughing, beside the pond. Keith stayed where he was. He was a little surprised that Lillie remained seated sedately beside him.

“Uncle Keith, was that phone call about the trial you told us about? With the new kinds of energy?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Our teacher told us about people trying to make new kinds of energy. Safe fusion and solar energy and even that nuclear reactor they’re building way out in space. Is your law company connected with that?”

“No. I wish we were.”

“Why?”

“Well, lots of money, for one thing. But also it’s a fascinating project.”

“I think so, too,” she said, sounding so grown-up that Keith wanted to laugh. A Roman candle exploded above them. Lillie ignored it.

“Uncle Keith, you said that two people died on your energy case.”

“Yes, they did.” He was curious to see where this was going.

“Was it worth it? Two people dead, and everybody else gets lots of energy?”

“We don’t look at it like that,” Keith said, startled by the starkness of her viewpoint. “Although unfortunately new technologies always seem to cost lives at first. Railroads, air travel, heart transplants. Probably even the discovery of fire. Still, it’s more a question of whether the energy company could have anticipated that the accidents might happen.” Did she know the word “anticipate”? He had no idea what vocabulary a ten-year-old might have.

“I see,” she said primly. And then, “I think two deaths is worth it.”

He was strangely shocked. Was that normal for a little girl? Weren’t children supposed to be sentimental? Peering at Lillie’s face through the gloom, he saw her expression: sad and thoughtful. Her gold-flecked gray eyes gave back a reflection of his own face.

“But,” she added, “the energy company should give the families of the dead people a lot of money. And medals, too. Hero’s medals. Uncle Keith, you’re going to have that man you were talking to on the phone, that Jamal, investigate Bill, aren’t you?”

“Why, Lillie ―”

“That’s why you really wanted Bill’s name and address.”

“I―”

“It’s a good idea,” Lillie said. “Mom doesn’t know him very well. But, Uncle Keith, you shouldn’t worry too hard. Because I look out for Mom, you know.”

It was that moment, a decade after her birth, that Keith fell in love with his niece. Her serious, half-seen little face, intermittently lit by fireworks, gazed at him with everything Barbara had never had: judgment, reason, sense. She was an amazing little girl. More, she moved at that moment from being an abstract—“my niece”—to being a real, living, individual person. Herself.

But all he said was, “How did you know I was going to have Bill Brown investigated?”

“Because that’s what they do in the movies,” she said, grinning with ten-year-old glee, and his capture was complete.

“Hey!” Barbara called, ducking under the maple, “come out and watch the fireworks, you two! You’re missing everything good!”

The Pittsburgh physician’s name was Samuel Silverstein. Keith flew to Pittsburgh International and took a cab for the long ride to Silverstein’s office. The office was neither shabby nor luxurious, a solid, reassuring setting located in a new medical building. The door greeted him respectfully by name when he pushed it open, even though he was half an hour early.

“I’m told this is not a medical appointment, Mr. Anderson,” Silverstein said. His schedule ran right on time. Silverstein was short, overweight, with intelligent brown eyes.

“No, doctor. I read the article you posted on CaseNet and—”

“You are not a physician.”

“No. It was shown to me by my niece’s physician, Dr. Shoba Asrani at New York-Presbyterian. My niece Lillie has exactly the same condition as your patient, and exactly the same PLI and DNA charts.” He passed Lillie’s printouts to Silverstein.

The doctor studied them intently, paging through the stack of papers with methodical attention. When he looked up, Keith said, “Lillie was also the result of in vitro fertilization. Like your patient. I would like to know if her fertilization was done at a place called the ChildGive IVF Institute. I don’t know where the Institute was located, and no records are available.” Barbara had lost all the paperwork. All she had remembered about the location was “some town north of the city.”

Silverstein looked at Keith a long time. Then he said quietly, “Give it up, Mr. Anderson. It isn’t possible.”

“So I’m told,” Keith said grimly.

“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

Silverstein ignored that question, answering instead one that Keith hadn’t asked yet. “It is against patient confidentiality for me to identify the clinic. Or the patient.”

“Can you at least tell me if there are any others? Besides Lillie and this boy?”

Silverstein hesitated. Finally he said, “Yes, there are others. Two more.”

“So far. Doctor, I will sign anything you like attesting to the fact that I will not sue the clinic. That’s not my aim. I just have to know what happened. Lillie is my niece, my legal ward since her mother died. Anything I can learn, from anyone, might help her physician to understand her condition better, and that of the other three children, too. I’m in a much better position than you to run a discreet investigation, believe me. And I’m prepared to supply you with all sorts of references so you can check me out first.”

Silverstein was shaking his head. “Not necessary. I cannot tell you the names, and I wish you could believe that it wouldn’t help your niece if I could. I’m sorry.”

Keith tried another approach, and then another. Nothing worked, and Silverstein was becoming annoyed. Finally Keith left his card.

So it would have to be an investigation without help. More expensive, longer. But certainly possible. He flew back to New York.

During the year after the July Fourth picnic, Keith saw Lillie often. Barbara married Bill Brown, who turned out to be an ordinary, noncriminal, reasonably solvent guy whom Keith didn’t like very much. He was handsome in a thuggish sort of way, with deep-set blue eyes and a heavy beard. Barbara seemed crazy about him. She and Lillie moved into Bill’s West Side apartment and Lillie began exploring the city by subway.

“She’s too young,” Barbara said, running her hand through her short hair and making it stand up in spikes. Barbara had lost even more weight since moving back to New York. “She’s only eleven years old!”

“Kids that age go all over by subway,” Keith said, “and Lillie’s a sensible girl. I’ll teach her the ropes.”

He did. They went to the Museum of National History, to the ballet at Lincoln Center, for walks in the Park, to overpriced little restaurants in SoHo. Lillie was fun, enough of a child to be impressed by everything and enough of an adult to provide actual companionship. One Saturday just before Halloween they met at an Irish pub for a plowman’s lunch. Lately Lillie had insisted on meeting him at their excursion destinations, rather than his picking her up at home. “I like to study the people on the subway,” she said. “I’m going to be a film-maker when I grow up, you know.”

“Last week it was a diplomat.”

She remained unperturbed. “I have lots of time to decide. Uncle Keith, do you believe in angels?”

“No.”

“How about ghosts?”

“No.”

“Space aliens?”

“Could be. But there’s no evidence either way.”

“Demons?”

“No. Lillie, what’s this all about?”

“Oh,” she said, turning her head away, “Mom’s on a new kick.”

He looked at her harder. “What sort of new kick?”

“She thinks the apartment is haunted.”

Keith groaned inwardly. That was all Barbara needed — a “haunting.” He said to Lillie, “What does Bill say?”

Lillie’s face tightened. “He’s not there much anymore.”

After barely a year. Keith ran over his schedule: He could maybe go see Barbara Monday night. It was too late today, he had a date tonight. And all day tomorrow he had to work. He took his niece’s hand across the wooden table. “Lillie, are you all right? With their… their marriage problems?”

“I have to be,” she said pragmatically, and with no trace of self-pity. But clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. “Uncle Keith, tell me again about SkyPower.”

“Well, it’s a nuclear reactor in stable orbit, as you know. When it’s finished it will generate enormous amounts of energy that will be beamed down to Earth as microwaves. We’ll get all the benefits of nuclear power without the contamination risks.”

“You mean the owners of it will,” Lillie said, and Keith laughed. He enjoyed her shrewdness. She’d pulled her hand away from his; she was getting old enough to feel self-conscious about touching. The day was cold and she wore a bright red jacket. Sometime, he hadn’t noticed when, she’d had her ears pierced. Two tiny red hearts nestled in her ear lobes.

She said, “And you’re the lawyer for SkyPower.”

“Well, one of them.” His firm had only recently been named corporate counsel: a coup.

“If anything goes wrong, you defend the company.”

“So far nothing has gone wrong. Knock on wood.”

She did, rapping on the pub table and saying, “Hello? Come in?” She laughed uproariously. Keith did, too, not because it was funny but because it was so good to see her throw back her head and guffaw. A second later, however, she glanced at the watch he’d given her. “I gotta go. Thanks for lunch!”

“Don’t you want dessert?”

“I can’t. Mom’s getting home soon. Thanks again!”

Home from where? Keith wondered, but Lillie was gone, whirling out the door in a swirl of red. He must call Barbara tomorrow, not wait until Monday, find out what the current crisis was.

But Sunday he had a casual, non-involving date. Monday turned out to be spent putting down brush fires. By the time he called his sister, it was too late.

“The same clinic that did your sister did the little boy’s mother,” Jamal said, “the ChildGive IVF Institute in Croton-on-Hudson. It went out of business in January 2001. Started in May 1999. Eighteen months, and we’re looking at some very weird stuff, boss.”

Keith nodded. He wasn’t going to tell Jamal yet again that Keith disliked being called the semi-mocking “boss.” Most investigators were good at one thing: leg work or computer hacking or underworld informants or turning a tiny site clue into an entire trail of reeking spores. Jamal Mahjoub did it all, or at least got it all done by somebody, and if he wanted to call Keith “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” he could. Jamal was small, with dark curly hair, glasses, and a face that looked about sixteen.

“The clinic had four employees: a secretary, two nurses, and the doctor. The secretary and nurses check out, working types who just found other jobs when the clinic ‘went bankrupt.’ The doctor is something else. His name was Timothy—”

“Was?” Keith interrupted.

“He’s dead. Coming to that in a moment. Timothy Allen Miller. Born in 1970 and grew up in Siller, Ohio, a small town, mostly farming. Never fit in, the high school yearbook is full of little snide jokes about him. Valedictorian, went to Harvard, did brilliantly in premed but not popular there, either. Arrogant, but also weird in ways other arrogant pre-docs didn’t like. Full of conspiracy theories about everything, from the JFK assassination to secret Jewish banking cartels to some sort of black-Catholic alliance to overthrow the government.”

“I can see why nobody liked him.”

“Big time. He was brilliant at Harvard Med, intern and resident at Mass General, and then they didn’t want him on staff. Neither did anybody else.”

Keith looked out the window. Ten floors below, two yellow cabs had run into each other on Madison. The drivers stood nose to nose, waving their fists.

“So Miller joins a group practice, and that lasts two years. Then he opens up solo, and in a year he files for bankruptcy. He takes a job as a lab technician in Poughkeepsie.”

“Quite a comedown,” Keith said.

“And he felt it. Now Miller is bitter as well as arrogant. One of his coworkers said she thought he was the kind of guy who was someday going to come into work with an AK-47 and blow everybody away.”

“But he doesn’t,” Keith said. You had to let Jamal tell it his own way, and he liked audience participation.

“No. Instead, he channels all his weirdness into the Roswell thing. Aliens coming to Earth, all that.”

Oh, God. Spare me the nuts. “Roswell is a long way from Poughkeepsie.”

“Yeah. But Miller makes the trip, several times. He goes to meetings where UFO types huddle on the highway, waiting to be picked up. And then one night, he is.”

Keith grimaced and Jamal laughed.

“Well, all right, he says he is. Comes into work and says he has important work to do, aliens have anointed him, blah blah. That same coworker is so creeped out she decides to quit, but the boss saves her the trouble by firing Miller. Miller had been AWOL for a solid month, no word, no excuse.”

“Can’t blame the boss,” Keith said, keeping up his end. His hands felt like ice. Sometime in Jamais rambling tale, this lunatic medico was going to connect with Lillie.

“No. But Miller just laughs at being fired—my informant was standing right there—and he saunters out, cocky as spaniels. A month later he opens ChildGive in Croton-on-Hudson. Big glossy offices, state-of-the-art equipment, competent personnel.”

“Where’d the money come from?” Keith asked.

“Don’t know. I couldn’t find the trail. But he pays his people well. Even so, none of them like their new boss. He’s a son of a bitch to work for. But he’s apparently good at what he does. He gets hundreds of couples pregnant in vitro, some with the parents’ egg and sperm, some with donors. But no shady stuff… every time he uses a donor, the parents agree, and all the paperwork dots the legal i’s and crosses the legal t’s.”

“A model citizen.”

“Yep. Not only that, but by this time enough genes for hereditary diseases have been identified that Miller picks and chooses his embryos and everybody gets as healthy a kid as possible. No complaints filed with any officials, scores of glowing thank-you letters, money coming in hand over fist. And then, eighteen months later, Miller closes shop.”

“Why?”

“He never said. Not to anybody. He waves his hand to make the whole thing go away, and it does. Then Miller himself disappears. No tax returns, no credit cards, no e-mail address, nothing.”

“Murdered?”

“You watch too much TV, boss. No, he was alive, but he changed his name, moved to New Mexico, and worked under the table in a restaurant. For two years, the waiters and restaurant owner and busboys and customers say he’s the happiest person they ever met. The original sunshine kid. Then he’s killed by a drunk driver while crossing Main Street.”

“Did you―”

“Of course. It really was an accident. Fifteen-year-old redneck kid without a license, been arrested for it before, drunk out of his mind. He’s still doing time in juvie for vehicular manslaughter. But now hold on, boss. Here it comes.”

Keith waited.

“In the last three months, twenty of Miller’s test-tube babies have gone into trances like your niece’s. They’re starting to find each other. I have the names, and one of the parents is a doctor. He’s actually a stepparent who married the mother of a girl like Lillie years after the kid was born, and he’s not a, what do you call it, a geneticist, but he knows enough to know what he’s looking at. And he’s mad as hell. His name is Dr. Dennis Reeder, and here’s his address in Troy, New York. He wouldn’t say much to me, but he’s raring to talk to you. A physician no less. Doctor, lawyer… all you need is an Indian chief.”

Keith didn’t hire Jamal for his sensitivity. He took the card Jamal handed him and wrote the investigator a large check, plus bonus.

He was going to find out what had been done to Lillie, and why.

CHAPTER 3

Barbara hung herself in the bathroom of her apartment the day before Halloween, three days after Bill Brown moved out. Lillie found her. She called 911, then the police, then Keith. By the time he tore over to the West Side, the cops and EMTs were there, filling up the messy space. Lillie had been sent to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, and the stoic resignation on her young face broke his heart. “Uncle Keith, I…”

He sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder.

“…I was too late to stop her. I stayed at the library too long.”

All the anger at Barbara that he’d never expressed tsunamied over him. Barbara’s irresponsibility, her selfish throwing of all her problems onto other people whenever things got tough, her obstinate refusal to consider Lillie instead of making Lillie consider her… The strength of his anger frightened Keith. He fought to hold himself steady to Lillie’s need.

“Honey, it isn’t your fault, not one little part of it is your fault. Your mother was mentally ill, she must have been to do this. Depressed. You aren’t to blame, Lillie.”

“I should have come home earlier from the library. But it wasn’t… good here.” She closed her lips tightly together and Keith saw that this was all he was ever going to learn about living with Barbara during the last weeks.

Damn her, damn her… God, his sister. Babs…

He said shakily, “You’ll come live with me now, honey. I’ve got a spare room. We’ll move your furniture and things.” His mind raced over practicalities, glad to consider moving trucks and dressers instead of considering Babs. Whom he’d failed as badly as Barbara had failed Lillie.

“Thank you,” Lillie said. “I think the police want to talk to me before we go.”

They did. Awaiting his turn at interrogation, Keith walked out into the hallway, turned a corner, and pounded his fists on the wall. It didn’t help.

He arranged for cremation of the body. He moved Lillie into his spare room, first throwing out the treadmill (no space) and emptying the closet of junk he didn’t even know he had. Through Lillie’s school he found a grief counselor whom Lillie saw every week. He informed Lillie’s school and pediatrician and the state of New York that he was now her legal guardian. The paperwork began its slow drift through various bureaucracies.

Lillie turned quieter, more somber. But she didn’t collapse into hysterics or start doing crack or run wild in the streets. Keith discovered that it was pleasant, when he turned the key in his lock after work at seven or eight or nine o’clock, to be greeted by Lillie’s smile and a warmed-up casserole. On Saturdays (but not Sundays) he conscientiously refrained from work and took her places, unless she was going out with friends. He met her friends. She met the women he casually dated. Gradually they created a routine that satisfied them both.

Quite abruptly, it seemed, Lillie’s body went into overdrive. One day she was almost as skinny as Barbara had been. The next day, she was wearing tight jeans and a midriff-baring top over a figure that made him blink. He found a box of tampons in the bathroom and pretended to not see them. Thirteen—was that early or late? There was no one he could ask. And Lillie seemed to be doing fine with her new body. Lipstick tubes appeared on the ornamental shelf under the foyer mirror, tubes with fantastic names: Peach Passion and Ruby Madness and Jelly Slicker. The names amused him.

And then on March 10, 2013, Keith came home and found Lillie lying on the sofa, staring into space, and no amount of shouting or shaking or anything else could bring her out of it. An ambulance arrived within ten minutes, and as the medics carried Lillie on a stretcher out of the apartment, they bumped into the shelves and all the lipsticks clattered to the floor.

Troy was an amazingly ugly city enjoying a huge economic boom because of technology invented at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and manufactured not far from the campus. Part of that manufactury, Keith knew, was parts for SkyPower, now being assembled in geosynchronous orbit. The Hudson River, a peculiar shade of sludge, flowed through the center of Troy.

Dr. Dennis Reeder lived in a far suburb, away from the factories, surrounded by semi-open fields. Keith had forgotten how beautiful spring could be away from New York. Tulips and daffodils and even daisies foamed around the Reeder house; everything bloomed earlier now that summers had become so long and hot. The driveway where he parked his rented car was littered with plastic toys. A powerscooter, unchained and unlocked, leaned against the garage.

“We keep our daughter at home with us,” Reeder told Keith. “My wife is a nurse. She quit working when this… happened to Hannah, and we’ve also hired an aide. Would you like a drink, Mr. Anderson?”

“Keith. Yes, please. Scotch, if you have it.”

Reeder did. The large, comfortable house seemed equipped with everything. Hannah’s mother, a strikingly pretty blond woman with tired eyes, joined them in the living room but drank nothing.

“Lillie is hospitalized,” Keith said. “I’m her only family.”

Reeder said bluntly, “You’re an attorney. Are you considering some sort of class-action suit?”

“No one to sue. If Miller were still alive, we’d pursue criminal charges. No, I’m here just as a parent.”

“So are the rest of us. There are twenty-one kids like Hannah, that we know of so far. We’ve set up a list serve with—”

“I’d like to be on it.”

“Certainly. With a flag program to scan the entire Net continually for news articles, medical references, personal letters, anything that relates to this situation. One of our parents is a programmer. We come from all segments of society, since Miller offered his services nearly free as part of a ‘clinical trial.’ “

Keith saw Barbara standing sideways, proudly showing off her non-existent stomach bulge. “This clinic is on a sliding income scale, very cheap. It’s because they’re part of some test.”

Reeder continued, “The families are wildly different, and so are the kids. Were, I mean. Male, female, good kids, troublemakers, academics, jocks, dropouts, everything. But every single one has that same quiescent growth in the frontal lobe and that same increase in cerebral neurons of as much as twenty percent and the same PLI firing patterns. Plus, of course, all those unknown genes on chromosome six.”

“Are they completely unknown? Don’t we know what proteins they code for?”

“Yes, in that codons only make twenty amino acids all together,” Reeder said patiently. Keith could tell he’d given this speech to non-scientists before. “But how those twenty then combine and fold—folding is the crucial part—can result in thousands of different proteins. Also, multiple alleles at multiple loci can influence gene expression. Hannah’s extra genes don’t seem to be making any proteins at all at the moment, or none that we can detect in her bloodstream.

“But remember, Keith, that if the brain cells are making proteins to induce the trance Hannah and Lillie are in, the proteins or neurotransmitters or whatever is responsible may be found only in the brain, contained by the blood-brain barrier. Sixty percent of all messenger RNAs are expressed in the brain at some point. However, there’s nothing odd that we could detect in Hannah’s cerebrospinal fluid, either.”

Keith sat quietly, trying to absorb it all.

Reeder poured himself a second drink. “But of course genes do other things as well, including form the fetus. Presumably some of those extra genes are responsible for the anomalies in Hannah’s and Lillie’s brains.”

“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.”

CHAPTER 4

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.

Nobody knew what the pribir were.

“Well, they’re not angels or ghosts,” Lillie said with disgust. She had the TV on while she ate a bowl of cereal and a Fun Bun for breakfast. Hers was not one of the names on the Net.

“What are they, Lillie?”

“I told you. I told everybody, at the hospital. They’re people coming soon.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. We’re out of Fun Buns, Uncle Keith.”

Her nonchalance was, somehow, the part of the whole thing. She was so casual. Some information, some idea (posthypnotic?) had been planted in her brain, and to her it was as ordinary, as much a given, as breakfast cereal and rock music and warm spring weather.

“The anomalous structure is now active,” Shoba Asrani had said when Keith took Lillie back to the hospital the next day.

“It happened when we went outside,” Keith said.

“That fits with it being olfactory activity,” Dr. Asrani said.

“You mean she smelled something?” Keith said incredulously. “And it gave her some hypnotic suggestion? The same thing that kid in Troy smelled?” The open window in the pink bedroom, the sealed one in Lillie’s hospital room.

“Not hypnotic,” Asrani said. She looked visibly frayed. Keith knew there must be frantic medical conferences going on about this, on-and off-line. How could there not be? He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know. Now that he had Lillie back, his previous thirst for information had transmuted to a desire to put the whole thing behind them and have their lives back.

“Sit down, Keith,” Asrani said.

“I’d rather stand.”

She raised one arm. Let it fall again to her side. He thought he’d never seen such a helpless gesture. “Then listen standing. The usual human nose has fifty million bipolar receptor neurons inside each nostril. Inhaled molecules bind onto those receptor sites and trigger electrical signals. The brain is basically a chemical-electrical machine, you know. Each gets translated into the other all the time.

“The electrical signals travel first to a tangle of nerves called the glomeruli, where undoubtedly selective processing of some sort goes on. Then those signals go out to major portions of the brain involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses—pretty much everything important except muscular control. Have you ever seen a dog excited by a scent?”

“Of course,” Keith said.

“Well, animals like dogs that rely on smell more than humans do have roughly the same setup as ours, plus an additional structure, the olfactory tubercle, that makes our sense of smell wishy-washy.

“Lillie’s anomalous growth is in the same place as a tubercle would be, at the base of the frontal lobe, but much larger. Her glomeruli are firing in electrical patterns nobody has ever seen before. In each nostril she has not fifty million receptors but closer to five hundred million. Since each receptor site presumably binds a different molecule to it, she could be detecting molecules we have no idea of. And whatever information those molecules give her is going out to both her rational and emotional brain centers.”

“Are you saying that Lillie is smelling molecules that tell her these ‘pribir’ are coming?”

“I don’t know what they tell her. Obviously she’s not upset by whatever it is, so more than a simple exchange of information is going on. Her emotional centers are being soothed, conditioned to acceptance. She has a high measure of serotonin in her cerebrospinal fluid, much higher than she had before. Serotonin creates equilibrium.”

“You mean they’re brainwashing her!”

Dr. Asrani did something Keith had never expected: she lost her temper. The serene Indian woman shouted, “Don’t you get it? We don’t know! We don’t know anything!”

After a moment she added, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. But… how did these theoretical molecules get into the air? And how could children scattered over four states smell the same ones?”

“We don’t know how they got there. No more than we know how Lillie got to be what she is. But the distance is at least explicable. There are male moths that detect a single molecule of female moth sex pheromone and then zoom to the female moth from six miles away. A model something like that, but even more powerful, might be operating in Lillie and the others.”

He couldn’t take it in. His mind rejected it. This was Lillie, his Lillie, Babs’s daughter… He walked over to the window and stared blindly out, seeing nothing.

Dr. Asrani said, “You mentioned ‘brainwashing.’ There are as many definitions of that as there are so-called ‘experts.’ But looking at animal models again… there are a great many precedents for affecting behavior by manipulating smell. A certain kind of tapeworm in a moose will scent the moose’s breath so the breath attracts wolves. The tapeworm needs a wolf to finish its life cycle. So it gets a wolf to eat the moose, and it. And some ants—”

“Enough,” Keith said. “I understand.”

Which was probably the stupidest thing anyone had said all day. Of course he didn’t understand.

He turned to face Dr. Asrani. “The names of all the children won’t stay secret long, you know. There have been too many medical people involved. Lillie and the other twenty kids—”

“Eighty,” she interrupted him. “We have a fuller roster than Dr. Reeder.”

“I’ll bet you do. Anyway, what do you recommend I do for Lillie? Bring her here?”

“No,” she said, suddenly looking very tired. “Not here. If you want, you can take her to some friend or relative whom you can trust. But frankly, Keith, I don’t think it matters where you take her.

“I’m afraid that before long, Lillie may be telling you where she has to go.”

The first indication anyone had that the pribir did indeed exist came when they blew up SkyPower.

Keith, not knowing what else to do with Lillie, brought her with him to Wolf, Pfeiffer. They arrived by 7:00. He told the hotshots already in and working that his niece had the day off from school and he would be taking her to lunch, so she would spend the day in his office. The assistants and associates looked askance, but he was a partner and nobody objected. The other partners didn’t notice. He installed her at his computer, where she promptly began manipulating software he didn’t know he had. She found games and programming languages and video feeds and settled in happily.

He watched her a minute from the doorway before leaving for a meeting in the conference room. She sat facing away from him, absorbed in the computer. Her bright brown hair bounced on her shoulders. She wore a pale green sweater in a hideous style currently fashionable with teens, knitted with large holes on both shoulders and stuck all over with what looked to him like dangling yarn braids. Her shoulders, glimpsed through the weird holes, moved slightly as she used the keypad. He could hear her talking to the software in a low, musical voice.

He went to his meeting.

Twenty minutes later, a secretary opened the door, her face disapproving. “Mr. Anderson, your niece wants you. She says it’s an emergency.” Her tone said that in her opinion there was no emergency at all.

Keith knew Lillie better than the secretary did. He bolted from the meeting.

She stood in the middle of his office, her young face anxious but not frantic. “Uncle Keith, you have to tell all the people to get off SkyPower right away.”

“What?” he said stupidly.

“To get off SkyPower right away. It’s not the right way for us to go―”

He stared at her.

She had opened his office window the six possible inches mandated by the Sick Building Act of 2009. “Tell me from the beginning, Lillie.”

She looked perplexed. “There isn’t any beginning. You have to just get all the people off SkyPower right away, before the pribir correct it. That’s not the way we should go. It damages genes.”

“What do you mean, ‘correct it’?”

She glanced out the window. “Make it go away. It damages the right way.”

Keith said to his wall screen, “Oliver Wendell, turn on the TV to NewsNet.”

“—since eight o’clock this morning. Some of the children themselves have been calling SkyPower Corporation, news outlets such as this one, and the White House. No one knows what to make of this latest—”

“Oliver Wendell, turn the TV off. Lillie… how do you know this?”

She looked impatient. “The pribir told all of us, of course. There are people —they don’t know how many ― on SkyPower and the pribir don’t want to hurt them when they correct it. Genes are the right way, Uncle Keith, not power sources or chemicals that damage genes. So you have to get the people off, because the pribir will only wait a little while.”

“How long?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. SkyPower is really a bad thing, you know. All the nuclear reactors are. They damage genes.”

She looked, sounded, felt like Lillie. She was Lillie. But the words were not. For the first time, something deep inside Keith recoiled from her.

Keith called SkyPower Corporation. But he was a secondary legal counsel, and the CEO and her staff had no time for him. They were “in meeting,” an assistant informed him neutrally.

“Oliver Wendell, turn the TV on to NewsNet.”

“—no more than a silly hoax,” someone was saying, a wizened man with an indignant expression. “Elaborately organized, yes. But for a major transnational like SkyPower to listen to a bunch of children would be ridiculous. Nor is SkyPower going to ‘damage genes’ — anybody’s genes. Safety records show—”

Lillie said, “Aren’t they going to send the people back to Earth?” She looked troubled. Was that her talking… or them?

Did he believe there was a them?

He stayed riveted to the TV, canceling all his meetings. No one disturbed him; evidently the media still did not have Lillie’s name. Lillie went back to her computer games. At noon she looked up, frowning.

“Uncle Keith—they mean it about correcting SkyPower. Why are those people still on it?”

He could only shake his head.

“—NASA reporting that, like the Hubble, the Artemis II probe has detected no alien craft anywhere near Earth orbit—”

“Lillie… where are the pribir? In a space ship?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where is the ship?”

“I don’t know,” she said, not looking up from her game.

At 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, SkyPower blew up. The corporation had not removed its personnel.

Hysteria broke out on the Net. Terrorist acts, international provocation, cleverly obfuscated industrial sabotage… theories flew like bullets.

Half an hour later, Keith’s secretary stuck a frightened face into his office. “Mr. Anderson… the White House is on the phone channel!”

He picked up his phone, already knowing. They wanted Lillie, wanted all of them. As soon as possible, as anonymously as possible. In Washington. Highest national security. FBI agents on the way to his apartment.

Lillie turned off her computer game. “Let’s go, Uncle Keith. I need to pack some stuff at home. Where’s that red suitcase I took to Kendra’s for my last sleep over?”

No one spoke to them as they walked through the office. Everyone stared. Keith put an arm around Lillie.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “They just don’t understand yet. About the right way, I mean. But it’s okay. The pribir can explain everything.”

NASA announced the position of the spacecraft. Perhaps they’d just located it, perhaps they’d known all along. Keith knew he’d never find out which. The White House press secretary held a tense, almost belligerent session with the press in which he said, essentially, that he wasn’t going to say anything. He repeated only that the president would address the nation the following night. Condolences had gone out to the families of the seventy-three SkyPower employees killed in the explosion.

Two FBI agents, male and female, waited at Keith’s apartment. Within twenty minutes he and Lillie had packed and been escorted by car to La Guardia. They were shown to a heavily guarded private room in the airport terminal, and for the first time Keith saw some of the other kids that the press was already calling “the pribir puppets.”

They looked like any eighth grade class on a field trip.

Seventeen of them had been collected at La Guardia. They were white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The girls appeared about two years older than the boys, although in fact the sexes were distributed evenly throughout ages eleven, twelve, and barely thirteen. Newly pubescent, which had triggered the latent engineered genes. Some of the girls, like Lillie, had lush figures and wore make-up. The boys’ voices cracked when they called out to each other. At one side of the room, the parents sat looking shell shocked.

Lillie walked up to a dark-haired girl carrying an e-book. “Hi. I’m Lillie Anderson.”

“I’m Theresa Romero. You in eighth grade?”

‘Yes. At St. Anselm’s in Manhattan. I like your sweater.”

“Thanks. I got it at—hey, damn it! Keep away!”

A boy had bounced a basketball off her back. He grinned at her and she scowled. He shrugged and moved away.

“That’s Kenny,” she said with enormous disgust. “A real bonus. All the brains of a bucket of hair.”

“I know some like that,” Lillie said, and the two girls moved off, chattering. Lillie gave a little wave back over her shoulder at Keith.

He was drowning in normalcy.

They were loaded, kids and parents both, onto a military plane. Keith recognized the distinctive blue-and-white aircraft of the 89th Operations Group and guessed they were heading for Andrews Air Force Base. That made sense. Close to Washington, easily restricted and guarded, and containing Malcolm Grow Medical Center, the largest Air Force medical facility on the East Coast. Not to mention elite communications for connecting with everything from the White House to the Airforce Space Warfare Center in Colorado. Andrews was the entry point for all Air Force communications satellites, classified and not.

“I demand to know where you’re taking us!” a mother said to the Air Force major who, from the moment he appeared, was clearly in charge.

“Of course,” the major answered. “We’re going to Washington, D.C. If you’ll all get comfortable aboard, I’ll do a full briefing then.”

The woman hesitated, scowled, but shepherded her son aboard the plane. Probably, Keith thought, others had refused. There were no legal grounds for detention of these people. On the other hand, the military (or the president, or whoever) didn’t need all of the kids. They all said the same thing at the same time. That there were so many seemed to be merely deliberate backup.

Maybe. Who knew how these “pribir” thought?

Once everyone was settled, the kids talking or playing handheld games or gazing out the window at clouds, the major stood erect in the center aisle.

“Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Major Gerald Connington. As some of you already know, our destination is Andrews Air Force Base, just outside Washington, D.C. Let me say right off that the president of the United States personally thankf each and every one of you for your willingness to travel to Washington and assist him in this emergency. It’s through working together that this unprecedented situation can be handled most effectively.”

Military PR, Keith thought. The major didn’t even look uncomfortable.

A mother called out, ” ‘Unprecedented situation’ is quite a euphemism, major. Is blowing up SkyPower going to be seen as an act of war? Are our kids in danger?”

“If war is the result, all of you will be in no more danger at Andrews than in New York,” Major Connington said, and Keith’s estimate of him rose. Keeping the bullshit to a minimum.

“But are we at war?” the mother persisted.

“Madam, I cannot personally declare war all by myself,” Connington said, and a few people smiled faintly. “Like everyone else, I have to wait and see what the president and Congress wish to do.”

“War is silly! The pribir are helping us!” a boy called out indignantly.

Half the planeload of adults turned to stare at the boy. The other half gazed at their own children, who nodded in agreement, those who were listening, anyway. Keith saw the problem with any in-depth briefing. Parents and children had widely differing perspectives on the pribir. How could you talk war strategy with the enemy’s delegates present?

The others seemed to realize this, too. A hush fell over the parents. Into it, Major Connington said, “More parents and children will be joining us at Andrews, coming from different cities in the Northeast. All of you will be housed in on-base military housing that is currently being prepared for you. These are temporary lodging facilities equipped for temporary housekeeping. Each facility will lodge two children plus their parents or guardians. After you are shown to your lodgings, buses will take you all to the Officer’s Club for meetings with Pentagon and White House officials.”

A boy called, “Will the president be there?”

Connington smiled. “Not this time. Maybe later on.”

“Aawwww,” the boy whined, and went back to his computer game.

“We cannot, at this time, say exactly how long your stay will be,” Connington continued, “but we will do everything in our power to make it a pleasant one. Andrews is equipped with a movie theater, library, bowling alley, picnic area, and a brand-new Youth Center with a full-size gym, dance room, VR lab, and many activities for teens.”

“He makes it sound like a fucking resort,” a man said loudly somewhere behind Keith, “instead of a lockup.”

“Be quiet,” someone else hissed. “You’ll upset the kids!”

Keith looked at Lillie, sitting across the aisle with Theresa Romero. Both girls had thrown off their light jackets and were combing their hair, sharing a portable lighted mirror. Lillie said something and Theresa rolled her eyes and then giggled.

It wasn’t chemically possible to upset the kids.

At Andrews Air Force Base, Lillie and Theresa pleaded to stay together. A harassed housing officer was trying heroically to honor the children’s requests about pairing off. Keith introduced himself to the Romeros, a bewildered Hispanic couple. Carlo Romero, who spoke without an accent, was clearly American born, articulate and intelligent. His wife Rosalita, much younger, spoke little English. She was one of the most beautiful women Keith had ever seen, with liquid black eyes, cafe au lait skin and rippling black hair. She had passed the hair on to Theresa, but not the beauty.

The temporary housing had a living room, a tiny kitchenette, two baths, and three bedrooms, each with twin beds. Theresa and Lillie dumped their stuff into one bedroom. Carlo said to Keith, “Flimsy housing but substantial protection. I think those are Army troops from Fort Meade or Fort Bragg. They’re everywhere.”

“I noticed,” Keith said.

“I’m glad they’re here. Your daughter get any death threats?”

“Lillie is my niece; her parents are dead. No, the press hadn’t found her yet.”

“Lucky you. Those parents who refused to bring their kids here are going to regret it, I think.”

“A lot of angry nuts out there,” Keith agreed.

Rosalita Romero said something energetic in Spanish. Her husband put his arm around her and drew her close. “She’s afraid because Theresa doesn’t seem afraid. Rosalita fears… well, that Theresa is possessed.”

She is, Keith thought. But what did Rosalita mean by “possessed”? Demons? Satan? Was this gorgeous, worried woman going to go in some night and knife Theresa and Lillie in their sleep to set them free from some imagined bargain with the devil?

He glanced at the girls’ door. It came with a lock. He would tell Lillie to use it.

He smiled at Carlo and Rosalita. “We’re all concerned about our kids.”

‘Yes,” Carlo said neutrally. So he’d seen Keith’s glance at the bedroom lock. Wonderful. A bungalowful of mutual suspicion.

Sixty kids and ninety parents thronged the Officer’s Club. The kids were divided, seemingly randomly, into five groups and shunted off into five different rooms. All the parents were ushered into the lounge, now set up with rows of gilt chairs. Keith glimpsed the e-board, which apparently no one had thought to change: April 30, 6:00 p.m., DUBOIS/CARTER WEDDING, CONGRATULATIONS SUSAN AND TOM!

He wondered where Susan and Tom were now holding their wedding.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Base Commander Brigadier General Harry Richerson.” He looked like Keith’s idea of a general: tall, sun-beaten, no-nonsense. Not PR.

“I know you’re leery about being here, and nervous about what will happen to your children. I don’t blame you. Right now they’re simply being questioned in groups to see to what extent their experiences are similar. Tomorrow we want to talk to them, and you, individually. We have all the available medical records for each child, but our staff at Malcolm Grow Medical Center would also like to run their own tests. All tests will be with parental permission only, non-invasive, and confidential. Our people will be obtaining permission forms at your individual conferences tomorrow.

“I can’t tell you how long you’ll be here. Anybody can leave who wants to, but I advise against it. An hour ago one of the so-called ‘pribir children’ was murdered in Boston by an unknown assailant. Your children and you are much safer here. You are also performing a vital patriotic service. Any questions?”

There was a stunned silence. Murdered. Had it been a boy or a girl?

The same mother who’d asked on the plane now called out, “Are we going to war with these aliens?”

“Unknown at this time. The president, his advisors, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are crafting an appropriate response to the alien act of aggression. Your children’s briefing will supply one source of data for that response.”

“Have the kids been taken over by some sort of brainwashing? How?”

“Unknown at this time. The best medical guess is that communication occurs by very sophisticated pheromones. USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, is involved in determining what molecules have been released into our air. Also involved are the Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has responsibility for bioweapon attacks within the United States borders.”

“How could they get these so-called molecules into the air?”

“Unknown at this time.”

“How in heaven’s name could smelling a molecule tell the kids what the aliens want them to say?”

“Unknown at this time.”

“Is the alien ship in a place where we can shoot it down?”

“Classified. Sorry.”

“What if they start blowing up other things of ours, in space or on the ground? What will we do?”

“Unknown at this time.”

It went on like that, everything unknown or classified. Keith could see the frustration mounting around him. It was expressed at dinner, a catered buffet served to the parents without their kids. However, everyone was reunited in a large ballroom to watch the president address the nation on TV.

The president essentially said that everything was unknown at this time.

Lillie was sleepy by the time they were bussed back to their temporary housing. Neither she nor Theresa would say much about their briefing.

“What did they ask you?” Carlo Romero said.

Theresa said, “Oh, you know, who the pribir are and why they’re here.”

“Who are they and why are they here?”

Lillie spoke as if the answer should be obvious but she was being polite anyway. “They’re people from another star system who are here to help us with our genes.”

“By blowing us up?”

To Keith’s surprise, both Lillie’s and Theresa’s eyes filled with tears. Theresa said, “They didn’t want to do that. But you guys wouldn’t listen and get the people off! And the genetic good of everybody is more important than a few lives.”

Lillie nodded. Keith felt suddenly chilled. He had a sudden vivid memory: Lillie at ten years old, sitting with him under a tree while patriotic fireworks exploded overhead:

“Uncle Keith, you said that two people died on your energy case… Was it worth it? Two people dead, and everybody else gets lots of energy?”

“We don’t look at it like that. Although unfortunately new technologies always seem to cost lives at first. Railroads, air travel, heart transplants, probably even the first discovery of fire.”

“I think two deaths is worth it.”

Was that Lillie saying now that the pribir were justified in blowing up SkyPower, or was it the pribir?

Was Lillie herself still in there somewhere?

“Good night, Uncle Keith. Mr. Romero, Mrs. Romero.”

“Good night, honey.”

The three adults looked at each other. Carlo said suddenly, fiercely, “She’s still our daughter!”

Keith nodded. To his own surprise, the nod was genuine. She was still Lillie. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

And he would do anything to keep her safe.

Life settled, incredibly, into a routine. A schedule was set up for the kids to meet, separately, with both doctors and politicians/military types. Between appointments, youth counselors organized basketball tournaments, library trips, educational software, video-games contests, movies, dances. No child ever left the base and no child was ever unaccompanied outside of the temporary-housing area. The parents went places with their kids, vaguely embarrassing and unwanted presences on the sidelines, or met with “counselors” that Keith suspected were CIA agents.

There was talk of organizing a proper school, but the kids spanned three different grades and forty school systems. Also, no one wanted to admit they would be here long enough to create a separate school. Schooling on base along with the resident “military brats” was not even mentioned.

The pribir did not choose to communicate anything.

The president did not try to shoot down the alien spaceship, assuming that was possible.

Lillie reported to Keith that there was this boy she sort of liked, Alex, and he told his friend Sean who told Donald who told Theresa that Alex sort of liked Lillie, too, but Lillie didn’t know that for sure and did Uncle Keith think she should ask him to dance on Friday night or would she look like a fungal bonus?

Hysteria, fanned by the press, mounted throughout the country.

An additional Army unit appeared on base, which now had a totally sealed perimeter.

The pribir did not choose to communicate anything.

Lillie said she was missing too much algebra and would get too far behind and so would Uncle Keith download an algebra program for her at the library, since no kids were allowed at the terminals?

Keith realized the children were not allowed on the Net to protect them from the hate screeds he found there daily.

Theresa broke her thumb bowling and was treated at Malcolm Grow, where medical tests on the kids had shown nothing different from what all the medical tests elsewhere had shown.

The pribir did not choose to communicate anything.

And then, ten days later, they did, and everything changed again.

CHAPTER 5

“I need a big piece of paper,” Lillie said, coming inside their temporary housing with a bag of corn chips. PX privileges had been extended to the base visitors.

“Do we have any big sheets of paper?” Theresa asked, bursting in the other door.

Keith and Carlo, who had been using handhelds in vain attempts to do their respective jobs from hundreds of miles away, looked at each other. Rosalita was out shopping.

“Oh, there’s this shelf paper your mother bought,” Lillie said, rummaging in a kitchen cupboard. “Here, Tess.”

Both girls efficiently cleared the bungalow’s one table, spread out a hunk of white shelf paper, and began to draw. Keith and Carlo rose at the same time to stand beside them. After a few minutes of silence, Keith risked, “Is what you’re both drawing a message from the pribir?”

“Yes,” Lillie answered. “Do we have any other color pens besides blue?”

Carlo said, “Do you… do you want to use the handheld?”

“No, thanks, Dad,” Theresa said. “This is better.”

Why? Keith wondered but didn’t ask. He found he was holding his breath as he watched the girls draw. They both drew the same thing, although it was obvious that Theresa was the better artist. Lillie’s drawing was fairly crude: a human eye. Then she drew a mouse and heavily circled its eye. Then some sort of flying insect, with its eye circled. Underneath she put four symbols: a circle, a square, a triangle, and a short straight line. Then she began to rapidly write a whole string of these, as if they were an alphabet.

When she was done, she stood and stretched. “Tess, want some corn chips?”

“Sure, just a minute, I’m not quite done.” Carlo said, “Theresa, what… what are you going to do with that?”

“Take it to Major Fenton. She’s leading my group.”

“Do you like her?” Lillie asked.

“She’s okay. A little staff-assed.”

“Yeah, I think so, too. But she’s okay.”

Keith said, “Do you want me to call her? To give her this… thing?”

“No, I’ll take it when I have my appointment this afternoon,” Lillie said. “But thanks anyway, Uncle Keith. C’mon, Tess, let’s eat these chips on the way to basketball.”

The girls left the men staring at each other blankly.

“The decision has been made,” said a female major—yet someone else Keith hadn’t met yet, this project had more personnel than an aircraft carrier—“to pass on to you parents everything we learn about the children’s messages from the pribir.”

Eighty-three parents sat again in a room at the Officer’s Club. Keith counted; evidently seven had gone home. Probably they were from two-parent sets, with other children or critical jobs to see to. He had a critical job, too, and it was going down the toilet, but he couldn’t leave.

“We recognize the dangers in this open communication, and hope you do as well,” the major continued. “It’s much better for everyone if the press receives its information through official government channels, to guarantee both accuracy and security. On the other hand, these are your children.” She smiled. The smile came out a bit thin.

She started reading from a prepared statement. “This morning all sixty children produced the same drawing, in most cases immediately after being outdoors. Each child told his or her counselor that the pribir wished to help us with our genes. The four symbols, as you probably guessed—circle, square, triangle, line—correspond to the four bases of DNA, adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine. The long string of symbols matches the gene that creates the eye in a developing human fetus. Its base sequence is very close to the sequence for the eye gene in mice and fruit flies.”

The audience began to buzz. Keith saw that not everybody here understood even the basics about DNA. The major was going to have to get a prepared statement that started genetic education a great deal earlier.

“We think,” she continued, “that this message is designed to establish a basic language between pribir and us, in order to communicate future genetic information.” She looked up. “Any questions?”

“Are they going to give us the ‘genetic information’ to understand what was done to our kids?” a man called. It was Carlo Romero.

“We don’t know what they’re going to say in the future, Mr. Romero, any more than you do. We can only wait.”

Keith left the meeting early, as the major struggled to explain concepts so basic to her that she had trouble understanding that her audience didn’t all already know them: base pairs, DNA, chromosomes, codons, amino acid formation. Keith had only undergraduate biology, but it was enough for this. So far, anyway.

He caught a base bus back to the bungalow, rather than waiting for designated transport. The bus was filled with military and civilian personnel. A few of them stared at him strangely, and he realized that Andrews Air Force Base knew who had invaded its midst and sealed its perimeters, and not everyone liked the visitors. He stared back.

Lillie and Theresa were in their bedroom, the door half closed. They didn’t hear him come in, and he stood in the darkened living room and listened to the conversation he was not supposed to hear.

“Are you scared?” That was Theresa.

“No. I keep thinking I should be, but I’m not,” Lillie said.

“It’s like it’s weird and not weird at the same time.”

“I know. But they’re such good people,” Lillie said.

Who were? The Air Force, the pribir, the parents, the workers who died on SkyPower? Keith scarcely breathed, not wanting to give himself away.

Theresa said, “They are good. But my dad says I only think that because the messages are affecting my brain.”

“I know. But, Tess, I thought about this. Could the pribir change our emotions about them and not about anything else? I don’t think everything is good. Or everybody.”

“I don’t know.”

“I still feel like myself. But Uncle Keith looks at me funny sometimes, like he thinks I’m what the assholes call us. Puppets.”

Theresa exploded. “You got it easy, Lillie! Your uncle doesn’t harass you! My mom… if she wasn’t leaving tomorrow, I don’t know what I’d do. Kill her, maybe. She thinks I’m possessed by the devil!”

Lillie said mischievously, “Well, you did kiss Scott Wilkins at the dance, and open mouth, even…”

Both girls giggled and Theresa cried, “You promised to never tell anybody!”

“I won’t. But you’re amazing, Tess. I wouldn’t dare.”

“Well, it wasn’t that great, to tell you the truth. But someday I want to get married and have lots of kids. I love babies. Don’t you?”

“Well… not especially,” Lillie admitted.

“Really? Why not? They’re so cute!”

“I don’t know. I think I’d rather be an explorer. Or maybe a diplomat. Somebody doing something important for the human race.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, I’m glad my mom is leaving. And you know what else? I’m glad the pribir changed me.”

“Oh, me, too,” Lillie said. “It’s like having this really important connection, somehow, who also loves you… I can’t explain.”

Theresa said solemnly, “It’s like knowing God.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“But you believe in the pribir!”

“Oh, yes,” Lillie said, and at her tone—fervent, uplifted, religious—Keith crept out of the bungalow and came back in with as much noise as he could. Anything to cut that conversation short. Anything to not hear Lillie sounding like her deluded mother.

There was another “message,” leading to another drawing, the next day. Then another the day after that. They came every day, and every one concerned genetics. The Air Force brought in a high school teacher used to basic instruction to explain to the parents in simple terms what was being transmitted by the pribir.

Then a family made a secret deal to sell their story to a Net channel for three million dollars. The secret deal didn’t stay secret. Child and parents were sent… where? Home would be too dangerous; the full set of violent nuts was still yelling “Death to Mutants.” The official sessions passing on communications to the parents stopped. But the drawings didn’t, and Keith looked at Lillie’s latest sketch and then went to find Dennis Reeder.

The doctor and his daughter Hannah were housed with an older woman and her granddaughter. The grandmother had barely finished the eighth grade. Dennis Reeder was glad to talk to Keith.

“The drawing Hannah did Tuesday was clearly of Sertoli cells. Those are found in the testes. The female equivalent is follicular cells in the ovaries, and Hannah’s drawing included those, too.”

So that’s what that strange pear-shaped object had been. Lillie was no Matisse.

“Remember, I’m not a geneticist,” Reeder said, and Keith nodded encouragingly. “But it’s pretty obvious that the long strings of base pairs were descriptions of existing genes that the Sertoli cells switches on to make the corresponding proteins.”

“What do those proteins do?”

“Sertoli cell proteins do a lot of things. But one of them is make cells kill themselves. Apoptosis.”

Keith was startled. “And that’s a good thing?”

“Sometimes. There are genes for apoptosis in every cell. They’re tumor-suppresser genes, and if the cell starts dividing wildly, they stop it by making it commit suicide. When the tumor-suppresser genes aren’t working right, you get cancer.”

Cancer. In the last ten years, since the human genome was first mapped, medicine had made some progress toward curing cancer. That is, they could cure some cancers some of the time for some people, which had always pretty much been the situation. Now the success rate was higher, but it was still a long way from even fifty percent.

Reeder said, “Sertoli and follicular cells regulate sperm and eggs. They knock out all the ones whose DNA isn’t perfect. A five-month-old female fetus has seven million germ cells—sort of pre-eggs. At birth there are only two million. At puberty, less than a million. Only about five hundred will be allowed to mature.”

Keith said, “So these Sertoli proteins are really good at finding the cells with damaged genes and killing them. And if you could somehow apply that to cancer cells…”

“Bingo,” Reeder said. Then he let himself get excited. “It’s been thought of before, but the obstacles are huge. But the drawings Hannah did Wednesday and today… I think the pribir are giving us the genetic code to create synthetic proteins that will kill all cancers all the time.”

“Well, that should certainly counterbalance the first bad impression they made by killing the SkyPower workers.”

He was surprised at his own cynicism. So, apparently was Reeder, who said stiffly, “That seems a pretty trivializing way to view a cure for our major killer of people over forty.”

Which only showed how quickly the first impression was being counterbalanced. The pribir obviously knew what they were doing.

Andrews now swarmed with doctors. Keith watched the medvac helicopters airlift terminally ill patients into Malcolm Grow. Three, four a day. It was too big to muffle; the newsnets had it within a week.

The drawings continued to flow, one or two a day. Someone in Maryland reported seeing a “tiny rocket” descend from the sky and then break open, presumably scattering pribir molecules, but there was no way to confirm or deny this. Air tests at Andrews continued to turn up nothing anomalous in the air. Neither did radar.

A school was finally organized. Lillie resumed algebra.

A few more parents left, forced out by the pressures of ordinary life. Keith had begun spending his free time, of which he had too much, with a psychologist divorcee from Connecticut. Her son was part of the bunch of kids Lillie hung around with. She was warm and funny and pretty, but both of them recognized that the surreal circumstances permitted nothing real to develop between them.

The day she left to go home, she came by the bungalow to say goodbye. “I’ve left my other son with his father too long, Keith. That bastard’s not fit to take care of a gerbil, and Lenny’s only seven. David is thirteen, he can fend for himself better, and this place cushions the kids more effectively than I’d dare hope.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him, Jenna.”

“Thank you. I hoped you say that. You know…”

“What?”

She smiled wanly. “Anna Freud said something once about motherhood. She said, ‘A mother’s role is to be left.’ I believe that. But not like this, Keith. Not like this.”

He kissed her regretfully, not contradicting.

That night one of the doctors—there were so many that he had trouble keeping them straight—made a formal call on Keith. Lillie was at a basketball game at the youth center.

“Mr. Anderson, we’d like your permission to do an experiment with Lillie.”

“An experiment on Lillie?”

“Not ‘on’—‘with.’ We asked for volunteers and Lillie immediately raised her hand, but of course we wouldn’t go forward without your consent.”

Keith didn’t like this. Why was Lillie such an adventurer? He said warily, “Go ahead.”

“You realize, of course, that the pribir’s communication with the children is one-way. They supply inhalant molecules that—”

“Have you captured any of those molecules?” Keith asked. Might as well take advantage of temporarily being sought after.

The doctor hesitated. “Well, no. Olfactory molecules must be dissolved in the lipids in the nose in order to be smelled, so after inhalation they don’t last long.”

“I see.”

“The pribir supply information to the children through the molecules, but there’s no way for the kids to supply information back. They’re just receptors.”

Keith didn’t much like this description of Lillie, but he nodded.

“What we’d like to do is take Lillie, and three others, into a negative-pressure room for two days. Air cannot come in from the outside. We want to see if they draw anything, if any drawings still match the kids’ outside. Also, see what changes occur in her neural firing patterns.”

Keith thought it over. “The things you do to her will be noninvasive?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then if Lillie wants to go, I’ll give my consent.” It couldn’t hurt to have her out of the pribir’s olfactory clutches for a while.

“Good. Thank you,” the doctor said. “We’re not publicizing this test, by the way.”

“I understand,” Keith said.

Lillie and two other children disappeared for two and a half days. Theresa wasn’t one of them. In the negative-pressure building, the test subjects drew nothing. Neural activity in Lillie’s “anomalous brain area” subsided to nearly quiescent. The children on the outside produced three drawings.

“I’m glad that’s done,” Lillie told Keith, Theresa, and Carlo when she returned. “It was boring. And I missed the pribir.”

“Of course you did,” Theresa said.

The media (and probably the FBI) had torn apart the life of Timothy Allen Miller. Reporters found huge numbers of irrelevant details, and no further information than Jamal had about why Miller had been selected by the pribir to create the “pribir children,” or how, or to what ultimate end. Depending on the channel, Miller was portrayed as a monster, a traitor, an egomaniac, or a Christ figure. The last came about because the pribir genetic construct derived from Sertoli cells did indeed prove to cure all cancers, all the time.

More drawings, and more genetic knowledge, followed over the next few months. Sometimes a concept took twenty drawings to clarify; apparently cancer had been an easy problem. Huntington’s chorea, that terrible loss of brain cells leading to dementia and death, came with a person’s genes. The pribir sent detailed directions for how to keep affected brain cells from disintegrating. It involved, as Keith understood it, stimuli to switch on genes that switched other genes on or off that affected more genes making different proteins… He couldn’t follow the details. The effect was that those genetically fated to get Huntington’s would not get it at all.

They identified and rectified the complex chemical imbalance responsible for schizophrenia.

They gave instructions for the Holy Grail of tropical medicine, an immunity to malaria. The World Health Organization set about preparing to save a million lives every year.

“I’ll tell you what bothers me about the pribir,” Dennis Reeder said to Keith. Reeder was preparing to move back home and resume his medical practice. Hannah, like a growing number of the other “pribir children,” would live in a supervised dormitory at Andrews. For Hannah’s safety or the medicos’ convenience? Probably both.

“What bothers you about the pribir?” Keith asked. A lot about them still bothered him.

“If they wanted to give all these ‘genetic gifts’ to humanity, and if they did once have Timothy Miller upstairs on some craft to engineer our kids, then why not just give the ‘gifts’ directly to Miller? He was a geneticist, he would have understood what he was looking at a hell of a lot better than Hannah does.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said.

“It makes me wonder what else the pribir have in store for our children.”

Keith didn’t answer.

“Are you going home, too, Anderson? You must have a law practice begging for your return.”

“Not exactly.” He could have gone back, of course. But by now, after months away, his cases had all been reassigned to other attorneys, just as if Keith had died. And for reasons he couldn’t explain, reasons connected somehow to his guilt about Barbara, he couldn’t leave Lillie.

“Uncle Keith,” she said shyly a few weeks later, “do you mind if I move to the dorm with the other girls? Not that I don’t love living here with you,” she added hastily, “but all my friends are already in the dorm, Emily and Madison and Julie, and Tess and I are missing stuff.”

He looked at her hopeful face. How quickly the young could transplant their lives. He remembered doing it himself: for college, for law school, for the job in New York. “No, honey. I don’t mind.”

“You could stay on base. I’m sure they’d let you.” She glanced doubtfully around the three-bedroom bungalow, empty of the Romeroes. “Maybe in a smaller place.”

“I’ll see.”

The Andrews Housing Office assigned him a one-bedroom house across Perimeter Road from the Malcolm Grow Medical Center. He gathered that he was an exception; usually “unaccompanied military personnel” lived in a dormitory and civilian personnel lived off base. Keith knew his life was an exception long before the Housing Office told him so.

He saw Lillie every day, read a lot, hung around Malcolm Grow to learn what he could. The doctor assigned to Lillie, a woman in her sixties named Elena Rice, decided that Keith was both trustworthy and needy. She kept him accurately informed about the information the children were receiving and about medicine’s attempts to put it to use.

The media were not accurately informed. Inflated stories spread like the infectious diseases the pribir were curing. The children had been told the secret of immortality. The children had been taught to levitate, to fly, to master telekinesis, to communicate by ESP. The pribir were going to land tomorrow, next week, when humanity had been all remade in their image. The pribir were already here, disguised as humans. The pribir had already left and a mad genius was giving the children the genetic gifts, just before he destroyed us all with a horrific plague.

“People can really be stupid,” Lillie said in disgust. She and Keith sat on her dorm steps, shaded from the sultry July sun by a building overhang.

“I didn’t know you were allowed to see media stories.”

“Oh, they changed the rules a while ago. I guess they decided we weren’t going to get too scared or weird or something.”

“They were right,” Keith said. Lillie didn’t look scared or weird. She looked like a normal thirteen-year-old girl. That was what was scary and weird.

“But, you know, Uncle Keith, human people do all this stupid stuff, but pribir people don’t.”

Something inside Keith tightened. He was going to hear something important.

“That’s because the pribir people control their own genes. They made themselves work right, and they got rid of everything on their planet that could damage genes. Like nuclear reactors and chemicals and stuff.”

He said carefully, “They control all their own genes?”

“Yes. They go the right way, and that’s why they’re showing us how to control ours. We’re them, you know.”

“What do you mean, ‘We’re them’?”

“They have our DNA and stuff. They’re just humans who are way ahead of us on the right way.”

Humans. People. That’s why she had always, from the start, called them “people.”

He said, “Why didn’t you tell me—or anybody—this before? That the pribir are human beings far advanced in science?”

“I didn’t know it before,” she said, as if this should be obvious. She stood. “I’m sorry, I have to find Major Fenton. To tell her this stuff. The pribir need some things done.”

“Do you need paper?” Usually the first thing the children did was draw, then hand the drawings to what Keith suspected was a growing cadre of doctors, military intelligence, CIA, and State Department types.

“No, I don’t need to draw this. Just to say it. Bye, Uncle Keith, log you later.” She ran off across the grass, a long-legged hair-streaming figure somewhere between child and woman.

Keith remained sitting on the shaded steps, sniffing the air. It didn’t smell of anything.

CHAPTER 6

After Lillie and the other children explained the “things the pribir need done,” the media stories changed again.

“Destroy all our nuclear power plants? Stop using that long list of chemicals in manufacturing?” Carlo demanded, on a visit to Theresa at Andrews. “Who the hell do they think they are?”

“They’re the pribir,” Theresa said witheringly. “I thought you at least knew that much.”

Relations between Theresa and her parents had deteriorated lately. Lillie had insisted that she and Keith accompany Theresa to this lunch at a base restaurant. “She shouldn’t have to deal with them all by herself,” was Lillie’s explanation, which made Keith uneasy. Was he, too, going to move from being Lillie’s confidante to being something distasteful to deal with?

Carlo said, “I don’t like your tone, young lady!”

“Well, I don’t like yours!” Theresa retorted. “The pribir are good people, better than us, and they want to help us on the right way!”

“Why? So we become weak in industry and military and they can take us over easier?”

“You don’t know anything, Dad!”

“You watch your mouth, Theresa Victoria Romero!”

Now Rosalita broke in with a long stream of Spanish. Keith, who spoke no Spanish, could nonetheless see that Rosalita’s rant was a mixture of anger and grief. Theresa folded her arms across her chest and listened in stony silence.

Lillie said carefully, “Mr. Romero, the pribir really are people. They have the same DNA as us, that’s how they know what to tell us to do with ours. And they just want us to protect it from the radiation and chemical stuff that damages it, so we can make ourselves strong in the right way.”

“So now foreign policy is being set by thirteen-year-olds,” Carlo sneered.

Keith said abruptly, “Lillie… when you say ‘the right way,’ is that capitalized?”

The others stared at him dumbly.

“I mean, is it like… like ‘The Path’ of Taoists? Is it a religion the pribir have?”

“No,” Lillie said.

“Yes,” Theresa said.

The girls looked at each other and broke out laughing. Finally Lillie said, “I guess it depends on the person. How you smell it.”

But Carlo had his justification. “A religious war. That fits. Weaken us industrially for a religious war. They had to come here for some goddamn reason.”

Theresa stood up so fast her chair clattered backwards. Other diners turned to look.

“You don’t know anything!” she yelled at her father, “And you don’t want to know! You’re ignorant and suspicious and… and… don’t come here anymore!”

In sudden tears, Theresa fled the restaurant. Rosalita started talking rapidly in Spanish to Carlo. Lillie turned apologetically to Keith. “I’m sorry but I have to go, Uncle Keith, she’s really upset.”

He nodded, and she hurried after Theresa. The three adults were left looking at their half-eaten dinners with nothing to say to each other.

He didn’t believe the pribir had come to Earth to wage a holy war. Neither could he quite share Lillie’s and Theresa’s—and all the other children’s—faith that the pribir were interstellar Florence Nightingales, here merely to relieve human suffering. He couldn’t forget that they had blown up SkyPower.

Nor could many others. Almost overnight the country erupted in violent groups at such cross-purposes that at times the pribir were reduced almost to irrelevancy, footnotes to pre-existing concerns.

Environmental groups, raging for years against nuclear plants and chemical dumps, gained new legitimacy: Even aliens know we’re damaging ourselves! Protests swelled. Protests became activism, and a factory that made tool-and-die equipment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was bombed. Thirty-two people died.

Groups who had resented America’s slow, gradual powering-down of the defense budget seized on both the bombing and the pribir to scream for a military build-up.

Many religious leaders had always been uneasy with the pribir’s instructions for gene tampering. Because the engineering instructions had been aimed only at curing diseases, these conservative ministers and priests and rabbis and shaikhs had felt only limited support. It was difficult to persuade an American public that curing disease was against God’s wishes. And so far the pribir had not touched inheritable, germ-line genetic changes.

But now it was different. The aliens were preparing to force a new religion on us! All the so-called genetic gifts had merely been a softening up, the honeyed words dripping from the mouth of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon. The pribir were indeed Satan!

Blow it out your ear, indignantly replied America’s liberal religious, backed by agnostics and atheists. You guys on the religious right are the ones using this to build your power base! You’d like to brainwash us all against the pribir for your own grandiose ends!

Sometimes it seems as if a religious war was going to occur without involving the pribir at all.

And then, on August 8, a day so hot and humid that after only five minutes outdoors Keith’s shirt stuck to both his chest and back, Lillie fired the opening shot of her personal war.

She’d been unusually quiet for a few days. Three days a week, Wednesday-Friday-Sunday, Keith took Lillie to lunch at the base’s best restaurant. He jeered at himself for the choice, knowing she’d have been just as happy with hamburgers, but the formal, adult atmosphere was obscurely necessary to Keith.

Lillie wore a pale blue lipstick, matching a dress he hadn’t seen before, bare legs, and high-heeled white sandals. Her hair had grown and she’d done it in a complicated arrangement of puffs and braids that he’d noticed on other teenage girls. Her round cheeks looked childlike beside the adult trappings. She ate with gusto, finishing everything, including most of Keith’s dessert.

“Sure you’re full, honey?” he teased.

“Yes. But why don’t you order some… some coffee or something.”

He never drank coffee at lunch. He saw she wanted more time to say something uncomfortable. Flagging the waiter, he ordered coffee.

“Go ahead and tell me, Lillie. Whatever it is.” She smiled at him with grateful constraint. “Yes. Well, it’s the pribir. Something the pribir are going to do.” His stomach made a fist. “What?”

“They’ve given us so much. All the genetic gifts, and the greater knowledge of ourselves—”

“That’s not you talking, Lillie. That’s a PR statement. I think I even know which press release.”

She grinned at him, a much more honest grin than her previous smile. “Major Connington, right? Okay, I’ll tell you straight. The pribir have given us a lot, and now they want something in return. They want some of us kids to go up aboard their ship. I want to go.”

Whatever he’d vaguely expected, it hadn’t been that. Never that. For a moment all he could do was stare, stunned. Her wide gray eyes, gold-flecked, stared back.

“Uncle Keith—”

“No. Absolutely no. Under all circumstances, no.”

“Now you sound like Mr. Romero.”

“Lillie, you’re thirteen years old!”

She said reasonably, “I can’t help that.”

“Think. To go blindly aboard some spacecraft you never saw, to some aliens…” He couldn’t even finish. They weren’t the kinds of words you ever thought you’d have to say in real life. Comic-book words, video-game words. Yet the chair under him was solid as ever, and the ordinary silverware gleamed on the white tablecloth.

“I told you,” she said patiently, “they’re not aliens. They’re people. Humans.”

He grasped at anything. “What on Earth makes you think the president, or whoever, would let you go?”

“Well, we don’t know that,” she admitted.

“What if the military said no? Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

He had a sudden terrifying thought. The pribir dispensed molecules, undetected by anyone on Earth, to give the children information. Could the pribir just as easily dispense molecules to make Washington agree to this plan? Brainwashing government to release children? No, no one except the children could even smell the pribir’s molecules. No one else had the necessary, genetically engineered equipment.

He said, stalling, “What do the ali… the pribir allegedly want you there for, anyway?”

“To teach us,” she said.

“Teach you what?”

“I don’t know.”

“For what purpose?”

“I don’t know.”

Fear got the better of him. “You don’t know much!”

“I know this,” Lillie said. “I’m going.”

For once, the press didn’t get the story. Keith didn’t know how many children the pribir wanted aboard their ship… It was too surreal to even think about. No one had ever seen their ship from the inside. It was in orbit around the moon, not the Earth, and although satellites, the Hubble, the International Space Station, and various space shuttles from three countries had of course photographed it when it was visible and they were in position, the photographs were all classified. An entire amateur following had grown up on the Net, posting its orbit with precision accuracy and speculating on its size and composition, but not much could actually be known from Earth.

The two big questions were: How did the pribir get close enough to Earth to drop their “inhalant molecules” over Washington? And was their ship reachable with nuclear missiles, or some equivalently deadly weapon?

Someone might know the answers. Keith didn’t.

For the next few days, he and Lillie didn’t refer to their discussion at the restaurant. She was pleasant, slightly distant, seemingly absorbed in her schoolwork and friends. But Keith was beginning to suspect that he had simplified Lillie in his mind, and that the Lillie he thought he knew, although genuine, concealed caverns he did not know.

A boy in her group of friends, Mike Franzi, had a birthday. Lillie confided shyly to Keith that she “liked” Mike. His friends at the boys’ dorm gave him a raucous party that reportedly went on all night. Some of the girls, including Lillie and Theresa, sneaked into the party. Keith was informed of this transgression and was expected to discipline his niece.

He met with her at a picnic area beside the Youth Center. In the hectic heat, August flowers bloomed in a riot of color: chrysanthemums, asters, black-eyed Susans. Lillie had brought Theresa with her, presumably for moral support.

“You weren’t supposed to be in the boys’ dorm after hours, Lillie.”

“We didn’t do anything, Uncle Keith.”

“We’re not like that,” Theresa said, earnestly if vaguely.

Keith felt helpless. What did he know about disciplining teenage girls, even under normal circumstances? The two sat across the picnic table from him, dressed in shorts and brief red tops with strange little mirrors sewn around the necklines. Two pretty young girls with round, unlined faces, their long hair caught back with red leather clips. Both wore hideous purplish lipstick. He had no idea what to say to them.

Lillie helped him out. “I know it was against the rules, Uncle Keith, but we were careful and anyway we won’t do it again.”

“Well, uh, I believe you.”

“Then can I ask you something else?”

“Of course.” Now what?

The girls exchanged a glance. Then Lillie said in a rush, “Tess’s family has a vacation place in New Mexico!”

“It’s not really fancy or anything,” Theresa said. “It’s just a lot of empty land in the desert. Bare, so my father got it real cheap. But there’s a cabin and my mother likes it ‘cause she’s from New Mexico, so we go there sometimes in October to hike and stuff. Over Columbus Day vacation from school.”

“And Tess asked me to go with her! Can I?”

Keith thought rapidly. October. New Mexico. Death threats on the Net. He said, “Well, we can talk about it, at least.”

“That’s just a delayed ‘no,’ ” Lillie said flatly.

“Not necessarily.”

Theresa said shrewdly, “It’s really safe out there in the desert, Mr. Anderson. Believe me, there’s nothing near my folks’ property. The cabin doesn’t even have a computer.”

He said, “You don’t even know if you’ll be done here at Andrews by October, or if the government will permit you off base by then.”

“I know all that,” Lillie said. “Of course I’m only hoping to go if we’re finished here at Andrews and if I’m back in time from the pribir ship.”

Keith felt his temper rise, pushed it back down. “You are not going on a pribir ship.”

Lillie stood. The tiny mirrors on her shirt flashed in shards of sunlight. She said calmly but distantly, “I guess you’re right, Uncle Keith—we should talk about this some other time.”

“I agree. Meanwhile, do you ladies want to go out for a Coke?”

“I’m sorry, I have to study,” Lillie said. “But thanks.”

“Kind of tough on you keeping school going the whole year around,” he said, wanting to keep the conversation going. She seemed so remote.

“I don’t mind. But Tess and I have a big French test tomorrow.”

French. For children who communicated in an exotic molecular language with aliens.

“Lillie… we used to be able to talk to each other.”

“We can still talk. What do you want to talk about?”

A polite wall. Did this happen with all teenagers, or was it a product of the situation? He had no way to tell. Theresa stared down at the picnic table, embarrassed.

“Nothing,” Keith said. “You better study now.”

He watched the two girls walk away.

Two days later a terrorist claiming to act in the name of the pribir struck again, blowing up a DuPont subsidiary in Texas. Four people died.

The pribir went on insisting, through Lillie and Theresa and Mike and Jon and Hannah and DeWayne and the others, that everything which damaged genes be “corrected.”

“It’s the right way,” the children said, and even though they never talked to anyone outside Andrews, many people who weren’t there nonetheless heard “The Right Way.”

The night of Saturday, August 24, Keith felt restless. He had stayed too long at Andrews. Only a handful of parents were left, mostly mothers with an earning husband and no other children at home. He knew they looked at him askance: Didn’t he have a job? The parents that had left visited often. Most of them seemed to have decided that their children were away at the equivalent of boarding school, a feat of self-protective mental gymnastics Keith could not begin to copy.

The night was sultry, but it felt almost cool after the scorching heat of the day. Keith walked past Malcolm Grow, along Perimeter Road. Groups of soldiers headed toward the enlisted men’s club, laughing and talking. At the Officer’s Club there was some sort of formal event; cars went by carrying women in evening gowns and men in dress uniform or black tie.

He had reached the West Gate when an explosion shattered the sky.

For a moment he couldn’t see or hear. Then his vision cleared and he saw the smoke rising from beyond the Headquarters building. Possibly from the Youth Center.

He bolted in that direction, trying frantically to remember where Lillie had said she was going that night with Theresa. A dance? Or to the movies, on the other side of the base? Did she — oh, God, please —stay at the dorm?

Two smaller explosions sent debris flying into the air.

Keith dropped to the ground and covered his head. Nothing hit him. He stumbled upward and ran again, yelling senselessly. “Lillie! Lillie!”

The Youth Center was in flames. Keith heard the fire engines along with the base alert signal. People were running, hollering…an ambulance shrieked to a halt and EMTs leapt out and ran toward the building.

Like so much in Maryland, it was built of red brick. A hole had been blasted in one side but the walls still stood. Flames shot out the window and off the roof. It didn’t look as if anyone could be alive inside, but firemen in full fire-fighting suits moved into the building. Keith raced around back. There was less damage here and he saw bodies on the ground, blackened, a few moving.

“Lillie! Lillie!”

“Don’t touch her, you moron!” an EMT cried. He shoved Keith out of the way. Keith looked more closely; the charred girl wasn’t Lillie.

Sense took over. He ran up to a group of civilians. “Do any of you have a phone? My niece… please…”

A man stared at him hard, stony: One of them. But a woman immediately dug into her purse and pulled out a handheld. Keith punched in the number of the dorm. His hand shook.

All the frequencies were busy. Others had thought more quickly than he.

He keyed in Theresa’s handheld, and someone answered. “Lillie? Lillie?”

“No, it’s Tess,” said Theresa’s scared young voice. “Lillie’s not here. She went out to buy Coke and—”

“Went where? When?”

“The superette. About five minutes ago. Mr. Anderson, what happened?”

“The Youth Center blew up. Listen, Tess, stay where you are. No, wait—are you in the dorm?” They might hit that, too.

“Yes! I am!”

“Then go quietly out the back and down the path to the inter-faith chapel, you know where it is. If you see Lillie, take her with you, okay? Do you understand?”

“Y-yes.”

He raced toward the superette, still carrying the handheld. The woman cried, “Hey!” and he tossed it on the ground. The superette was a mile away and he was out of shape. Panting, wheezing, he reached it and raced down its aisles. The base alert was still wailing and the store was pandemonium. He couldn’t find Lillie.

Why the hell hadn’t he kept the handheld?

He stopped to gasp for breath, and a young woman in a waitress uniform walked up to him. “Are you all right? Are you having a heart attack?”

“Handheld… please…”

She had one. He was barely able to key in Theresa’s number. It was answered immediately. “Hello?” Lillie. She was there. “Lillie…”

“Uncle Keith? Where are you? What should I do?” Scared, but calmer than Tess.

“Stay… in chapel…”

“We’re here. Reverend Duncan is here with us. Are you all right?”

“Yes…” He couldn’t say more. The waitress took the handheld from him. “Lillie? I’m with your father. He’s just out of breath, I think.”

“Who are you?”

“I just happened to be in the superette and loaned him my handheld. What happened?”

“He said the Youth Center blew up!”

“Oh, my God.”

Keith didn’t remember getting to the chapel. The waitress must have walked him there, through the mobilizing soldiers and running civilians. Then she vanished into the night.

He clutched Lillie, who patted his back as if he were the one needing comfort, as if he were the one in danger. Later, that would seem to him the strangest thing of all.

FBI. Military intelligence. Federal Emergency Management Agency. The State Department. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. Protesters. Counter-protesters. Editorials. There appeared to be no one in America not involved in the terrorist attack on the pribir children at supposedly secure Andrews Air Force Base.

The president went on television. “My fellow Americans, an event occurred today which cannot be tolerated in a free democracy. An attack on one of our own military bases, an attack aimed at children. Everything possible is being done to bring the perpetrators to a quick and relentless justice…”

It was very quick. The “terrorists” were caught within two hours. They were airmen at Andrews, three young soldiers who believed the pribir were going to destroy America and that her leaders were doing nothing about it. One of them turned out to be a white supremacist, one a generalized hater, one a follower with an IQ of eighty. They had learned to make their easily traced explosives from the Net.

The Youth Center had hosted a dance that night for Andrews dependent children ages fifteen through eighteen, which the attackers had not known. Fifteen “pribir children” were attending a separate bowling tournament in the basement. Nine eighth graders were playing a supervised chess tournament. Eleven boys were playing pick-up basketball in the gym. Three base dependents and one pribir child, Terry Fonseca, survived.

Lillie, pale and red-eyed, insisted on going to the funeral for those whose parents wanted them buried in Arlington. Theresa couldn’t face it. It didn’t matter; neither of them was permitted to attend. The forty-five remaining pribir children were immediately airlifted to the Marine Corps Base at Quantico and installed in a heavily guarded secure dormitory that looked to Keith like a prison. When Terry Fonseca got out of the hospital, he would go there, too.

The parents who rushed to their kids from all over the Northeast went through checkpoints more stringent than those surrounding the president.

The Justice Department and the Air Force Advocate General jointly announced they would seek Maryland’s newly reinstated death penalty for the three airmen.

The pribir, inexplicably, were silent. Of course, they might not have even known about the attack and the deaths. Communication, as far as humans knew, was one-way. The pribir dispensed molecules full of genetic information, the children gave it to the scientists, and nothing went the other way.

Keith didn’t believe it.

Lillie sat on her bed at Quantico, fresh from another session with her grief counselor. No barracklike dorms here; each child had a separate room. Some kind adult had tried to make them inviting. Lillie’s bed was covered with a red blanket, and a vase of flowers sat on the bureau.

“Uncle Keith, I have to say something.”

“What, honey?”

“I want to go up to the pribir ship. I’ll be safe there.” He looked at her hopelessly.

“I told Major Fenton. I told everybody. We’re going. Not all of us, some people want to stay here.”

“The government won’t let you go. Now more than ever.”

“We’re going. But I need to tell you something first. This is necessary sometime, even if it isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way.”

“What’s necessary sometimes? What are you talking about?”

She got off her bed, walked to his chair, and awkwardly kissed the top of his head. It had been nearly a year since Lillie had permitted physical contact; he held her gratefully.

“I love you, Uncle Keith.”

“I love you, too.”

She moved away from him and pulled something from under her top. A cheap locket on a long chain. Flipping it open, he saw that the two portrait hollows held tiny pictures of him and Barbara, both portraits at least fifteen years old. Barbara smiled radiantly. Keith looked solemn and impressive, still with all his hair. He couldn’t remember ever looking that young.

Lillie closed the locket and put it back under her top. All she said was, “They keep the air conditioning too high here, don’t you think? Everybody opens the windows at night to let heat in.”

He nodded, and the moment was over.

When he woke in his room at the Quantico visitors’ center the next morning, he was surprised to see how bright out it was. Nine o’clock—he never slept that late! Standing, he was surprised to find himself staggering a little. Quickly he dressed to meet Lillie for breakfast.

She was gone. Twenty of them were gone. Overnight, they had vanished from the middle of Quantico while surrounded by marines, FBI agents, and military police. “They made you fall asleep, and us, too,” the remaining twenty-five children explained, over and over. “Everybody around here. With the smell we breathed in. Then the pribir sent another smell to wake us kids up, and they took the ones who wanted to go. It was the right way.”

It wasn’t possible, screamed everything from White House staff to barstool commentators. No trace of sedative was found in the bloodstream of anyone at Quantico. No ship or shuttle or anything irregular had been detected coming in from space, or launching up from Earth. Not by any facility anywhere in the world. Something else must have happened, with or without the complicity of the government. Those children had been taken somewhere by ground, and had been… what?

Deprogrammed.

Murdered.

Secured somewhere really safe.

Sent on one of our shuttles to the still uncompleted International Space Station. Cloned.

Brought to NORAD, under Cheyenne Mountain, where they wouldn’t be able to “smell” anything.

Genetically “restored.”

Experimented on.

“They made you fall asleep, and us, too,” the remaining twenty-five children went on repeating. “But it’s okay now. The kids are all with the pribir now. They’re fine. From now on, they’ll just do the right way.”

Keith believed the children. On the evidence, or because he wished to? No way to know.

He wasn’t permitted to leave Quantico; from the intensity of questioning going on, it seemed as if no one might ever leave Quantico again. But he was at least allowed outside. That night he stood in the shadow of the dining hall and gazed upward.

The sky, clear, glittered with thousands of stars, although the lights of Quantico dimmed them slightly. The moon was at the quarter. He didn’t know enough to tell if it was first quarter or last.

How did you do it? How did anyone do it? Fathers had once sent twelve-year-old sons as midshipmen on three-year sea voyages. Princesses had been sent at fourteen, or twelve, or ten, across oceans to marry distant princes, their parents knowing they would never see their daughters again. Countless mothers had sent young sons to war. In 1914 half the youth of Europe had been sent to die in trenches full of mud. Kids Lillie’s age had made up the shameful, futile Children’s Crusade. As recently as a century and a half ago, Irish and German and Italian children had emigrated, alone, to America’s lush promise. All voluntarily sent away from their homes.

How did any of the parents do it? Lillie wasn’t even his child, and yet he felt as if some necessary organ had been ripped from his body. Lung, liver, bowels.

Heart.

“We’re going. But I need to tell you something first. This is necessary sometime, even if it isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way.”

There was no right way for this.

He stood there a long time, staring at the sky, until a young MP, very nervous that nothing questionable should happen on his watch, told Keith to move along.