Nothing Human

CHAPTER 7

Uncle Keith didn’t understand. He never had, much as he loved her. No one had ever understood her, and Lillie had grown used to that, but still her heart beat faster as she crept along the corridor of the dormitory at Quantico. But the pribir would be different.

“Tess?” she whispered in Theresa’s doorway, although there was no need to whisper, “Are you with us or not?”

Theresa materialized from the bed. Her face, surrounded by wild masses of black hair, looked scared. “I… I still don’t know.”

“You have to decide,” Lillie said relentlessly. Then, because she knew how scared Theresa was, she added in a softer tone, “You don’t have to come, you know. It’s all right to stay. The pribir might need people here, too.”

Theresa gave a strangled little laugh. “I’m afraid to stay here, too.”

“Well, you have to do one or the other.”

“I’ll… I’ll come.”

She grabbed Lillie’s hand. Theresa’s was icy. Lillie squeezed her friend’s fingers reassuringly. “Get dressed. Something warm.”

“Wait for me! Don’t go ahead!”

Lillie waited while Theresa pulled on jeans, running shoes, and a Land’s End sweater. She threw more clothes, all her make-up, and a plush stuffed turtle into her pillowcase. “Okay, I’m ready.”

The two girls slipped down the hallway. In the lounge downstairs most of the others waited. The ones who were going carried suitcases or pillowcases of belongings. The ones who were staying still wore nightclothes.

In the lobby a Marine lay stretched out on the floor, deeply asleep.

“It’s like fucking Sleeping Beauty,” Jessica Kameny snickered. She was the only one of the girls who had taken time to put on make-up.

Jon Rosinski said, “So how many are going? Stand over here.”

Twenty kids moved toward Jon, fourteen girls and six boys. Some, Lillie knew, had only decided in the last fifteen minutes, even though they’d all smelled the plan last evening. She scanned the leavers. Mike Franzi, good, you could always count on Mike. Tess, Amy, Sajelle, Rebecca, Bonnie… Elizabeth? That could be real trouble. Jason, Susan, the obnoxious Jessica, too bad she didn’t stay down here. Madison, Emily, Sam, that was another one she could do without. Hannah, Rafe, Alex, Derek, Sophie, Julie… Julie? A major surprise. And Jon, their not-unchallenged organizer, although Lillie wasn’t too bad at organization herself.

The kids looked at each other.

Theresa said suddenly to Robin, who was staying, “Tell my dad I said I love him, okay?” Robin nodded. “Let’s go,” Jon said.

The twenty-one walked out of the dorm. Another Marine lay asleep outside. The night was warm, but of course they didn’t know what weather might come next. Weather? Wrong word.

Theresa groped for Lillie’s hand and held on tight.

“Well, now what, genius?” Jessica said to Jon. She spoke very loud, as if to challenge the sleep infecting everyone for… how many square miles? Lillie didn’t know.

“Lay off, Jessie,” Bonnie told her. Lillie approved. Jon didn’t know what was going to happen, any more than anybody else. The pribir had smelled to them clear pictures of where to wait, but nothing after that.

Jon led them to the empty grassy area. Lillie didn’t know what it was for; she’d never been on a Marine base before. A flagpole, now with no flag, they must take it down at night, stood at one end. The pribir had smelled to go to a big open area. They would see the kids if they did. That didn’t surprise Lillie; she had learned at school that even humans had space satellites that could read license plates. And these were the pribir.

A long slow tightening started in her belly. She wasn’t afraid, exactly. But this was the biggest thing that had ever happened to her. Or anybody! She clutched her red suitcase.

Half an hour passed and nothing happened. Everyone sat down on the grass. People talked in low voices, but not very much. Even Jessica and Sam weren’t harassing anybody. Elizabeth had her rosary out and was saying her beads, but nobody jeered at her. Elizabeth’s glasses, thick as pottery, glinted in the moonlight.

A light appeared in the sky. Grew brighter.

As one everybody stood up, even though there was no smell. Somebody whimpered… Julie, probably. Julie was afraid of everything. Well, everybody was afraid, why not? But Lillie knew no one would change their mind.

Uncle Keith, plus half the doctors, said that the kids were so accepting of the pribir only because of the chemical cascade in their brains triggered by their extra genes. Lillie knew that wasn’t so. She didn’t know why the others were going with the pribir—probably each person had their own reasons—but she knew why she was. And it wasn’t some chemical in her brain.

The light grew into a ship, soundless and not very big.

Lillie had always felt different. Nobody understood that, not even Uncle Keith. They all thought she was a normal girl, interested in movies and her friends and her grades and her clothes. And she was. But underneath, all the time and for as long as she could remember, was this other longing. She thought about things, like death and God and the pointlessness of people being born and living their lives and then dying, over and over through generations, without it meaning anything or going anywhere. What was the point of being alive?

She couldn’t accept the religious answers her mother had liked, a different one every week: Catholicism, Buddhism, Wiccans, evangelicals, whatever. In school they learned about evolution, but what good was evolution in giving life any meaning? None. And it was meaning she longed for. Sometimes the longing felt so sharp she couldn’t breathe.

She knew from books that she wasn’t the first person to feel like that. Over and over she read her favorites: Of Human Bondage, Steppenwolfe, Time Must Have a Stop. But Lillie didn’t know Somerset Maugham or Hermann Hesse or Aldous Huxley, and none of the people she did know seemed to have this same longing. Certainly not Uncle Keith or her old best friend Jenny, or Theresa, with whom she’d once tried to discuss all this. A mistake. Tess had only talked about babies being life continuing and how that was enough meaning. Lillie wasn’t much interested in babies. She wanted more than that.

But nobody else seemed to want—no, need—the universe to make sense. Why was that so weird? Why didn’t everybody see how important it was? Such as, only the foundation for how you lived your whole life!

The ship floated to the ground, soft as a feather. It was dull metal now, shaped like an egg and as big as a bus, which is what it probably was.

The pribir, Lillie figured, were her last chance.

A part of the egg’s side slid up. Jon took a step forward, hesitated, stepped back. Julie hid her face in her hands. Elizabeth’s prayers were suddenly audible: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed art thou amongst women—”

Lillie seized Theresa with one hand and Julie with the other. Violently Theresa pulled away.

“I can’t!”

“Come on, Tessie, it’s just a few steps more.”

“No!” And Theresa turned and ran back to the dorm.

Lillie led Julie firmly toward the bus.

Sixty seats, jammed in worse than a Broadway balcony. Well, that made sense. The pribir didn’t know how many would be coming. They only had what Major Connington described as “one-way information flow.”

“At least the seats are shaped right,” Jason said. “Ow, Alex, get off my foot, you dork!”

They had all wondered what the pribir looked like. No pictures had come. That was something Lillie didn’t think she’d ever gotten Uncle Keith to understand: that the information the pribir smelled to them was pictures. The pictures formed in the brain somehow; they were just there, in exactly the same way a picture of an ice cream cone would be there if someone told you to think of an ice cream cone. “But what does it smell like?” everybody asked. It didn’t smell like anything. “Smelling to” someone wasn’t the same as “smelling.”’

“Everybody strap in,” Jon said.

Each seat had straps dangling from its sides. Lillie squeezed into a seat next to Julie, and immediately the seat molded itself to her shape. She jerked up, startled, then settled back down. The straps, which felt like firm jelly, also molded themselves around her.

Rafael, who wanted to be a physicist some day, said, “I wonder how this thing avoided all Earth’s radar setups?”

“However they did it, I’ll bet the military would like to take this baby apart,” Jason said.

Rebecca said severely, “Remember, this isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way. This is only dead materials.”

“Maybe,” said Rafe, “but what materials! Whoooeee!”

Jessica snarled, “Elizabeth, if you don’t stop that stupid praying, I’m going to unstrap and come over there and whip your religious ass.”

“Don’t anybody unstrap!” Jon said.

“Jessica, leave her alone,” Bonnie said. “God, even on a major occasion you have to be an asshole.”

“Better that than a lezzie.”

Lillie said, “We’re rising!”

There was no abrupt liftoff, no noise, no windows. At first Lillie didn’t even know how she knew they were rising. Then she realized breathing was harder. Her chest felt constricted, and everything on her body felt heavier.

“I hope,” Rafe said, with difficulty, “that they understand… how many gees… we can… take.”

Of course they understood, Lillie thought. They understood everything about human bodies. Their DNA was her DNA, only they had control of theirs, which meant they had control of everything. The right way. She closed her eyes.

The pressure on her chest never became unbearable, and after a while it went away completely. A series of clear images formed in her mind, one after another. She opened her eyes but didn’t see the source of the smells. Somewhere in the bus.

She saw a human being, a man, naked except for some cloth around his hips, standing beside an ocean. The only thing weird was that the sky was pink, not blue. Next she saw him looking taller, stronger, healthier somehow. Genetics had done that.

Next came a man underwater. Parts of him, legs and arms, looked sort of like a fish, but he was still a man. Lillie understood that he had been genetically changed to live in the ocean.

A woman floated in a spaceship. The ship was vague but the woman clear. She had arms where her arms should be and arms where her legs should be, giving her four hands.

“Gross,” someone behind Lillie said.

The next images showed humans changing even more. They didn’t look human anymore. They grew tentacles, or shrank to circles, or had hard shells… all sorts of weird stuff. Then, quickly, came a series of images showing one of these monsters turned back into a human being. Children trooped up to her. Everyone smiled.

“They’ve made themselves look like us, just for our sake,” Emily said. She sounded cheerful. Lillie felt the same way. The pribir could change their babies’ genes to look or do anything they chose. And they had built some to look like Lillie and the others, so their visitors wouldn’t feel too scared. It was a nice thing to do, and it reassured Lillie.

Now, was that gratitude or chemical brainwashing? It sure felt like gratitude.

Jason, the clown, growled in a deep voice like General Richerson’s, ” ‘When you push the envelope of technology, you take major risks with personnel. It’s inevitable.’ ” Someone laughed.

All at once they were all light hearted. Even Elizabeth lowered her rosary, and Julie smiled tremulously.

“Everybody ready to walk into the future?” Jon called.

“I’m going be turned into Charlize Theron,” Madison said.

“I want Isaac Newton’s brain!” Rafe.

“Engineer me a bodacious bod, baby!”

“It’s not us… it’s our kids. Make mine geniuses!”

“Make mine rich!”

“Forget the kids… I want mine now! Give me sex hormones to kayak night and day!”

“Jason, you’d be lucky to get to kayak once,” Derek laughed. “Now me…”

“Hush your mouth,” Sajelle said suddenly. “We here.”

The door to the bus opened. The mood changed abruptly.

Lillie unstrapped herself. Julie sat frozen, looking up at her piteously. Lillie said, “Come on, Julie. You can do it. Just stay by me. Emily, help Susan, she’s tangled up. Elizabeth, pray to yourself.”

Jon went first. Lillie followed, pulling Julie. She stood in a large, empty, completely featureless room with a light source she couldn’t identify. There would have been room for three times as many kids. When everyone was in, the door to the bus closed.

For a long sudden moment, Lillie was afraid. What was she doing here, away from her friends and her school and Uncle Keith and even Earth? What if she died here? What if the Net postings and the freak channels were right and the pribir wanted to experiment on humans, to torture them…

She was being stupid. And anyway, there wasn’t anything she could do except face whatever was coming. She was here.

A second door slid upwards at the other end of the room. A man and a woman came through, then stopped. They looked like normal people dressed in normal jeans and T-shirts, except… better. The woman had a perfect body, high breasts and slim waist and long, long legs. Her shoulder-length hair bounced and shone. The man was hot, with great shoulders and deep brown eyes. Lillie breathed in and suddenly she knew everything they wanted to tell her about themselves.

They had been engineered to match the television broadcasts the pribir had intercepted from Earth. All their lives they had trained for this moment. They knew everything about Earth that it was possible to learn from either TV or high-resolution satellites. They had all the abilities Lillie had, plus more that could be made to fit with these bodies. They would live and die in these bodies, and the purpose of their lives was to bring to Earth genetic gifts —so many genetic gifts!—that would help humans have all the freedom and adaptability and health that they did.

“Fucking A,” Jason said softly.

The man and woman came forward. They spoke carefully, as if the language was familiar but the act of speaking by voice was not.

“Hello. I am Pete.”

“I am Pam.”

Lillie giggled. She couldn’t help it. Pete and Pam! Humans finally met aliens and their names were Pete and Pam, like some dorky TV sitcom! She laughed, and Jason laughed, and suddenly nearly all of them were laughing, whooping and hollering, unable to stop. It was so ridiculous, it was such a release from tension, it was just hilarious. Lillie tried to stop laughing, couldn’t, and leaned on Emily, weak with hilarity. Only Sam, Elizabeth, and Julie weren’t laughing. Sam, Lillie had always suspected, had no sense of humor. Elizabeth was lost in some religious fog. And Julie was too scared to laugh, although how anybody could be scared… “Pete” and “Pam”! And she was off again.

Finally she stopped, and was appalled. Impulsively she strode forward and held out her hand. “I’m so sorry… we’re all sorry. I guess it’s the… the strain. Please forgive us. We weren’t laughing at you, and we’re all glad to be here. Really!”

Pam smiled uncertainly. Up close, Lillie could see that her eyes were subtly different. Beautiful, but not… just somehow different. What did they see?

“Yes, forgive us,” Jon said. “God, we must seem… We are glad to meet you guys. It’s nice to communicate two ways instead of one.

Murmurs of assent from the others, straggling belatedly toward manners.

“And we’re glad you’re here,” Pete said. “Are you tired? I know we took you from the middle of your sleep cycle.”

Emily, the scholarship girl at a brainy private school, said, “The middle of ‘our’ sleep cycle? Do you have a different cycle?”

“We don’t sleep,” Pam said, and it came to Lillie with a jolt that no matter how Pete and Pam looked, no matter how similar the DNA their race had started with, these people were not human in the same way Lillie was human. Once, maybe. Not any more. They were alien.

The thought didn’t scare her. In fact, the jolt was more pleasant than not. Alien was new, was interesting. There were great adventures ahead.

Her excitement or their chemical messages affecting her brain?

Shut up, Uncle Keith, she said to her memory. Aloud she added, “I don’t think any of us are really tired. At least, I’m not. I’m too excited!”

“God, yes,” Rafe said. “What kind of drive does this ship use?”

Pete laughed. It sounded vaguely rehearsed. Poor man, he needed to find more things funny.

“We will answer all your questions,” he said, “over time. Maybe you would like to start with a tour of the ship? To see some of the right way?”

“God, yes,” Rafe said.

“Then come on!”

It wasn’t a tour of the whole ship, and it was going to take a very long time to answer everybody’s questions.

Lillie reached these conclusions after just a week aboard the ship. Madison had asked what it was named, and Pam said it didn’t have a name. It was just “the ship.” She’d lived on it her whole life. Madison thought that was dorky and she and Emily had christened the ship High Flyer. Sajelle said that was just as dorky; it sounded like a cheerleading squad. Madison, who’d been a cheerleader, was offended, but gradually everyone began referring to the ship as the Flyer simply out of convenience.

It was evident they were being restricted to a small part of it. There were doors Pam and Pete went through that no one else could open. Lillie didn’t really mind; what they were given was fascinating.

“This is the most comfortable bed I’ve ever sat on,” Madison said, bouncing on it.

“I think it’s creepy,” Sophie said, without rancor.

Lillie stood with them in Madison’s room. Each person had their own room, but they were all exactly the same, branching off a corridor so featureless that people walked into the wrong room all the time, backing out only when they saw another person’s meager possessions. Each room had a plain metal box that opened like a footlocker, a small metal table, two chairs, and a bed that was just a platform jutting out from the wall. The bed and the chairs were made of the same stuff as the seats on the bus; they molded themselves to whoever lay or sat in them. The pillow did the same. Each room had a blanket. Bed, squishy chairs, pillow, and blanket were all the same shade of light tan.

Immediately everyone had tried to personalize the rooms, spreading out whatever stuff they’d brought. Since some people brought more than others, the results differed wildly. Rafe had brought only his handheld, which sat on top of his footlocker. Madison had lugged a big suitcase full of stuff, including clothes, make-up, mirror, a holo poster of her favorite rock band, and a teddy bear dressed in a cheerleading outfit. Lillie hadn’t brought much, but she asked Pam for scissors and tacks and cut up her bright blue sweater to make a wall hanging. She didn’t need a sweater aboard the Flyer. It was never cold, never hot, always comfortable.

At the end of the hall were two bathrooms, boys and girls, and a sealed machine that you stuffed dirty clothes into. A few minutes later they came out a slot, perfectly clean and ironed. Rafe, fascinated, tried to take this apart to see how it worked, but the metal box, as featureless and strong as everything else, wouldn’t give.

There was a big common room with more of the tables and chairs. Three times a day the wall disgorged a trolley piled with food and dishes. When they gingerly tasted the food, the kids gazed at each other in astonishment.

“God, this is good!” Susan said, helping herself to more mashed potatoes.

“Pass that salad.”

“Give me some first, Jon.”

“Greedy box!”

“Like you should talk. How much of that casserole did you eat?”

Lillie had eaten a lot of the pasta casserole, which tasted as wonderful as everything else. Her belly felt full, and warm, and contented. She resented it when Sam began to complain.

“Yeah, it’s good, but there’s no meat. Future meals better have some meat. I hope Pam and Pete aren’t fucking vegetarians.”

“If the food stays this good, I won’t even miss meat,” Susan said.

“You don’t need it, Lardball. I want protein.”

Madison whispered to Susan, who was overweight and sensitive about it, “Don’t mind Sam. He’s just a stupid bully.”

True, Lillie thought. Although Susan could stand to lose thirty pounds. Madison, despite the perky cheerleader beauty that made some girls distrust her, was a kind person.

Lillie considered the kids. She herself was the tallest girl and, after Madison and Hannah and Sajelle, probably the prettiest. Sajelle was pretty in that way black girls sometimes had, sort of sassy, with her dreads bobbing on her shoulders and her ass all curvy. Rebecca, whose parents came from China or Vietnam or someplace, had gorgeous hair, long and black and shining, but her skin was bad. The other girls looked average except for poor Elizabeth, with her huge chin and squinty eyes and skin as bad as Rebecca’s. Of the boys, Jason, who wanted to be an actor, was really hot. Mike and Jon were cute. Sam looked like a thug, but he had a good body. Alex was too skinny, Rafe only about five foot three. Derek, the other African American, was all right but not as cute as DeWayne, the black guy who had stayed behind.

Her mind seized on DeWayne.

That was why she was judging everybody’s looks. She could picture DeWayne Freeman. Also the others who stayed behind: Robin Perry and Scott Wilkins and, of course, Theresa. But she couldn’t picture the kids who had died in the explosion at the Youth Center. She knew their names. She’d lived with them at Andrews for months. But she couldn’t remember what any of them looked like.

In fact, she hardly thought about them at all.

Lillie frowned. That didn’t seem right. Some of those kids— Tara, for instance-she’d hung around with a lot. When Lillie’s mom died, she couldn’t think of anything else for so long, and it hurt so much that sometimes she’d had trouble keeping it from showing. Of course, a mom was different than friends, but still it—

“If you’re all done eating, come with me,” Pam said. Lillie hadn’t even heard her come in. “I have more of the ship to show you. Parts you’ll like.”

“She always so sure what we going to like,” Sajelle grumbled, but she rose along with everybody else.

And they did like it. Pam led them through a door into a huge park. So big… how could a park be so big aboard a ship! How large was this spaceship, anyway?

“Wow!” Madison said.

“It’s… incredible,” Sophie said and not even Sam, scornful of everything, disagreed.

They ran through the park, exploring. It was incredible. There was a garden, with the most beautiful flower beds Lillie had ever seen. A big grassy lawn. A woods at one end, thick with trees through which ran narrow winding paths. A pond, for God’s sake, big enough to swim in. A paved area with a basketball hoop; three balls sat neatly underneath its regulation ten-foot height. A second paved area was furnished with tables and chairs like a little outdoor cafe, surrounded by yet more glorious flower beds.

“This is where I’m going to be,” Derek said happily. “Just pull my bed off the wall and put it here.”

“No,” Pam said. “Another room is where you’ll spend most of your time. Come.”

It took a while for everyone to obey. Some were in the woods, some inspecting flowers. Jason, the showoff, had actually taken off his running shoes and socks and waded into the pond. Derek and Mike were checking out the basketball court.

Pam waited patiently while Jon, Lillie, and the energetic Madison rounded everyone up.

“This is the most important part of your ship,” Pam said, and Lillie noted the wording. Your ship. What was their ship? “Follow me. Come.”

“She sure is bossy,” Sajelle said, but not very loud.

Pam led them to a room reached through a door in the garden wall; Pete waited there. The room looked pretty boring. More metal tables and moldable tan chairs. Two walls were lined with closed cupboards.

Pam said, “This is the school.”

Lillie and Jon looked at each other. Derek said with comic exaggeration, “Say what?”

“The school,” Pam said.

Madison said, “We’re going to school here?”

“Yes, of course,” Pete said.

Lillie was the first to break a long silence. “What are we going to learn?” Somehow she couldn’t imagine Pam and Pete teaching American history or Great Expectations.

“You’re going to learn the right way. As much of it as you can.”

“The right way?” Lillie repeated, sounding to herself like an idiot. “You mean, we’re going to learn genetics?”

“Yes. But not until tomorrow. We have made the ship to follow your day-night patterns. In a few hours the lights will dim for sleep. They will come back on eight hours later for washing, breakfast, and then school. You have a great deal to learn, you know. But it will be fun.

“You’ll love it.”

CHAPTER 8

“No way,” Jessica said. “Not me. None of that school shit.”

They were all over the garden, in groups of two or three or four. Lillie had thrown herself full length on the grass, which had that wonderful just-mowed smell. Sajelle and Madison lounged with her, and Jessica had barged in.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Madison demanded. “Walk out into space?”

“Not going to do anything about it, just not go. Are you always such a good little follower, Maddy?”

“Don’t call me that. It’s not my name, Jess-sick.”

“I’ll call you what I want, bitch.”

Lillie sat up. “Stop it, Jessica. We can’t fight. We might need each other.”

“For what?” Jessica jeered, but she didn’t answer Madison. Sajelle said, “I don’t want to go to no school, neither.”

“Why not?” Lillie said. Sajelle wasn’t usually nasty.

“Just don’t want to.”

Lillie considered Sajelle. She knew Sajelle had come from what Uncle Keith called “a tough neighborhood.” Uncle Keith… she had hardly thought about him at all, hardly missed him. Was that right? Again the nagging doubt tugged at her mind, the same that had bothered her when she realized she couldn’t picture any of the kids that had died in the bombing.

Jessica said, “Sajelle doesn’t want to be bothered with school because she’s too busy missing DeWayne.”

“You shut up, bitch!”

“Come on, Sajelle. You know you and DeWayne were getting it on back at Andrews.”

Sajelle swung on Jessica, who ducked expertly. Instantly Lillie scrambled to her knees and thrust herself between them. “Stop it! We can’t afford to fight!”

“Little Mother Superior. You’re as bad as Elizabeth,” Jessica said, rose to her feet, and strolled toward the basketball court, where all the boys except Rafe, plus Bonnie Carson, had organized a game.

“She’s bad news,” Madison said. “I don’t know why the pribir engineered her.”

“They didn’t engineer her personality,” Lillie said. “Not any of our personalities or intelligence or stuff like that. We’re too different.”

“You can say that again.” Madison stood and stretched. “Sajelle, it’s none of my business, but were you getting it on with DeWayne?”

“You right. It’s none of your business.”

Madison didn’t look offended. “Well, I want a shower before dinner. Anybody coming?”

“Not yet,” Lillie said.

When Madison had gone, Lillie looked at Sajelle. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Sajelle, but why don’t you want to go to school here? Jessica’s just being an asshole, but not you.”

“Just don’t want to.”

“You went at Andrews.”

“That different.”

“How?”

“Just was.”

Lillie knew she was pushing, but something told her Sajelle did want to talk. Sajelle just didn’t want to look like she was willing.

“What classes were you in at Andrews? We didn’t have any together.”

“‘Course not!” Sajelle said with sudden energy.

“What do you mean? If you want to talk, I don’t blab.”

“I know you don’t.”

“Then what did you mean, of course we didn’t have any classes together?”

“Didn’t have classes with nobody. They give me a private tutor.” Sajelle stared at the grass.

Suddenly Lillie saw it. She said gently, “It’s your old school, isn’t it? It was probably… not too strong academically. So you’re a little bit behind.”

Sajelle looked up. Lillie was startled by the despair in her brown eyes. “Not that. Derek, he go to school in Harlem and he keep up with the rest of you. It be me.”

“What?” Lillie said quietly.

“Something in my brain. I can’t hardly even read!”

Dyslexia. Karen, her old best friend Jenny’s little sister, had it. Jenny—why didn’t Lillie ever think about Jenny any more?

“The tutor help me a lot,” Sajelle said, calmer now. “It start to make sense. But this Pam and Pete… they aliens. They can’t help me. And I going to look like an ass in front of everybody.”

“They’re not really aliens,” Lillie said, because she couldn’t think what else to say. “They’re as human as we are, only more advanced. Maybe you could talk to them about this.”

Sajelle snorted. “Would you?”

“No,” Lillie had to admit.

Sajelle looked at her. “You honest, Lillie. And you nice. But you not the one going to look stupid tomorrow in front of that bitch Jessica.”

“Actually, we’re probably all going to look stupid next to Rafe and Emily. They’re really brains.”

“Huh,” Sajelle snorted. She got to her feet and gazed toward the basketball court. Jessica had joined the game.

“She talk about me getting it on. Look at her… she going after that sorry ass Sam. That ‘ho ain’t going to be sleeping alone. Well, she do what she want. Me, too, and I ain’t going to no school.”

Sajelle walked off across the grass. Lillie lay back down again, troubled. What would Pam or Pete do if Sajelle and Jessica, or anybody else, just refused to go to the school room? Would they force them? How?

She thought about this for a while, then raised herself on her elbow to watch the basketball. Jessica was going after Sam. Bonnie played like the boys, but Jessica was wrecking the game by “accidentally” falling against Sam and wiggling. Ugh. Why would anybody, even Jessica, want Sam?

And would they really have sex?

God, Jessica was only thirteen, same as Lillie. Lillie had let a boy kiss her once, and at dances they sort of pressed up against each other, but that was all. Did that make her backward? How many of these other girls were virgins?

Well, Elizabeth for sure, she thought, and cheered up. Imagine Elizabeth… No, don’t. Julie, too, she was too shy to do anything. Madison? Probably. Sex would mess up her hair.

Grinning, Lillie stood up, brushed the sweet-smelling grass off her jeans, and went to join a group of girls inspecting the flower beds.

The next morning, after a breakfast as delicious as dinner the night before, Lillie headed for the school room. She had slept amazingly well, without dreams. Nobody had talked much at breakfast. Nervous, maybe. Lillie was.

She was the second one in the school room. Elizabeth had beaten her there and now sat hunched at the table in the farthest corner. Suddenly Lillie felt sorry for Elizabeth. Everybody harassed her. Well, she was such a dork… but even so. It must hurt. She walked over and sat down next to Elizabeth.

“Good morning, Elizabeth.”

“Good morning,” she said, sounding startled.

“I wonder what these ‘lessons’ will be like, don’t you?”

Behind her thick glasses Elizabeth’s eyes darkened. “If they’re about genetics, they’re tampering with God’s plan.”

Lillie should have sat someplace else. “Elizabeth, if you feel that way, why on Earth did you come? Why didn’t you stay back at Quantico?”

Elizabeth set her bottom lip stubbornly. “I didn’t ask to be made this way. It wasn’t my choice. Now God wants me to do everything I can to undo the violation done to me.”

“Undo it? How?”

“That’s what I have to learn. God wants me to do this.” She really was crazy, Lillie decided. Lillie rose. “Well, nice talking to you.”

“You’re here for the same reason,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve watched you.”

“What?”

“You sometimes look… you’re no more like these others than I am. You want something more than this world. I watch your face sometimes when they’re talking about sex or basketball or some superficial thing like that, and I see the longing for more. You’re like me.”

“Not in a million years,” Lillie said, and stalked off. God, she shouldn’t let Elizabeth get to her like that. The girl was nuts.

It scared her that Elizabeth had seen that about her.

Madison and Emily came in together. “Lillie!” Madison called. “Sit with us!”

Each of the six tables had four chairs. Lillie sat down gratefully. She didn’t know Emily very well, but she knew Emily was the smartest girl here. Emily went to a private school as a scholarship student. At Andrews she’d already been taking high school biology and advanced English. Trust Madison to glue herself to a ready-made tutor. Emily, quiet and generous, would help anyone who asked. She was a slight, pale girl with a short bob so blond it was nearly white. Lillie smiled at her. Why should Madison get all the help?

Slowly, following a group of the boys, Sajelle came into the room.

Lillie jumped up. “Sajelle! Sit here!”

Madison complained, “I was saving that seat for Rebecca.”

“Well, now you’re not. Rebecca can sit someplace else.”

Sajelle sat down, frowning, chin raised. Lillie nodded at her encouragingly. From the next table Sam said, “Before Petey and Pammy start asking questions, I got some questions I want to ask them.”

“Me, too,” Rafe said, more quietly.

Pete and Pam entered from another door and stood at the front of the class, smiling. “Good morning. We found from TV broadcasts that this is how you educate your young, so we’re going to proceed this way. I hope it’s all right.”

Sam said, less stridently than before the pribir had entered, “We want to ask some questions. Is that all right?”

Pam beamed at them. “Yes, of course!”

“Why did you come to Earth?”

Pam said, “We came to spread the right way. Earth is only one of many, many planets we will go to. Pribir ships are in space for thousands of your years.”

There was a stunned silence. Thousands of years!

Madison blurted, “Then how old are you?”

Pete answered this time. “We two are only a few hundred years old, by your measure. As we told you last night, we were born for this visit, engineered for it. Once a person is born, certain things about their bodies are set forever. Other things, of course, are not. You will learn about that. But we will be mostly as we look now for all our lives.”

“How long will that be?” Madison said.

“Another several hundred years, probably.”

Jason said, “Wait a minute. You live hundreds of years and the whole point of your life is this visit to Earth? Of your whole life?”

Pete said, “What’s the point of yours?”

Jason looked puzzled. No one answered. They didn’t think, Lillie knew, about the point of their lives. Only weirdos like her did that. And Elizabeth. Most kids just lived lives. Maybe most adults did, too.

Pam said, “Our purpose is a great one. Although, we admit, we did expect there to be more of you. Seventy-two were engineered.”

What had Tara looked like?

“But we can succeed anyway,” Pam went on. “The numbers will grow over time.”

“The numbers of what?” Jessica called.

Pam smiled. “I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to start at the beginning. Let’s take a simple gene, one you already worked with on the planet. You know one protein it can code for. Who can name another one?”

An image formed in Lillie’s mind: one of the drawings she had made at Andrews and passed on to one of the constant parade of adults interviewing her. This drawing, like most of them, was a series of meaningless symbols, circles and squares and triangles and short straight lines, repeated in various sequences for anywhere from a hundred to several thousand pairs. The only thing it meant to her was that Pete and Pam could smell images to her just as well aboard the Flyer as they could on Earth, which was hardly surprising.

Pam said encouragingly, “What else can this gene encode for besides that protein?”

Lillie looked at Emily, who seemed as clueless as Lillie was.

Pam stopped smiling. “Why aren’t you answering?”

Rafe said, “We don’t know the answer.”

Pete said, “What do you mean? We don’t understand.”

Jason said, “We don’t know! How would we know? We just passed on to doctors the stuff you smelled to us.”

Pete and Pam looked at each other. When they weren’t talking to the kids, their faces went completely blank. They were smelling to each other, Lillie suddenly realized, in some way the kids couldn’t detect. Some genetic receiver they hadn’t been engineered to have. Like a secret code.

Pete said, “We know you can’t perform the genetic alterations we sent you, of course. Trained people must do that. But surely you understood the information? It’s pretty simple.”

“Simple my ass,” Jessica said.

“What do you think we are?” Sam said.

Sophie stood. “I don’t need this shit.” She started toward the door.

A babble of voices broke out, arguing with each other. Rebecca grabbed at Sophie’s hand to stop her from leaving, and Sophie pulled away angrily. Voices rose higher. Lillie stood and shouted over the din.

“Pam, Pete, you just need to start back farther! So we can understand!”

Mike stood, too. “Lillie’s right. Shut up everybody. It’s just a misunderstanding.”

Slowly everyone quieted. Mike, sensible and low-key, addressed the pribir. “You learned a lot from our TV broadcasts or you couldn’t act and talk so human, but—”

“We are human,” Pam said, with a tiny spark of something that might have been anger, the first Lillie had seen from either of them.

“If you say so,” Mike said. “But the point is that the TV shows don’t really tell what kids our age know or don’t know. So you guessed. But we don’t know as much as you think. You need to start teaching us—” He hesitated, glanced at Sam “—pretty basic stuff. Like, what a gene is. And a chromosome. And… what was that thing you said yesterday, Emily?”

Emily, all attention suddenly on her, blushed. “A codon. Or whatever you pri… whatever Pam and Pete call a group of three base pairs that codes for an amino acid.”

Pam and Pete looked as confused as the kids, and Lillie suddenly saw the problem. TV shows were usually about murders or love affairs or dumb families or sexy dancers. Stuff like genetic information was all over the Net, but it wasn’t broadcasted into space. Pam and Pete didn’t even have the words Emily was using, not only “codon” (what was a codon?) but even “amino acid,” which Lillie had heard of. Vaguely.

However, the pribir caught on quickly. “Yes,” Pam said, with one of her smiles that Lillie suddenly realized was also copied from TV shows. “I see. Okay, we’ll start with… with this.”

Lillie smelled another image: a double spiraling staircase with weirdly crooked outsides.

“Big deal,” Jessica said. “What the hell is that?”

Pam and Pete looked surprised. Well, Lillie thought, that isn’t a facial expression they learned from TV and practiced carefully. The surprise looked totally genuine. Maybe some expressions were the same even for hundreds-year-old humans from another star.

Rafe said impatiently, “It’s a double helix, dummy. DNA.”

“You call me ‘dummy’ again and I’ll beat you to mush,” Jessica said. No one doubted she could do it.

Lillie and Mike were still standing, although Sophie had sat down again. Mike said calmly, “Look. There’s a way to do this. Emily and Rafe, you know this stuff already. The basics, anyway. You go up there with Pam and Pete and when they smell us something, you explain in our words what it is.”

Emily shook her head, red-faced. Rafe said, “Okay,” and bounded to the front of the room. Madison shoved Emily until Emily joined him.

“This is good,” Pam said, beaming again. “We’ll learn your words for concepts. And we can provide the materials.”

The tabletops opened. No, not “opened”… they sort of dissolved. Inside was a bunch of stuff Lillie couldn’t identify. Black boxes, thin weird-shaped jars, pieces of what looked like equipment.

“Lab time,” Hannah said.

“Yes,” Pete agreed. “You will alter a bacteria today.”

Jon blurted, “We’re going to do genetic engineering?”

“Yes, of course,” Pete said, surprised again.

“Bonus!” Jason said. “Can I engineer a porno goddess?”

“Like you could do it without giving her three tits,” Sam said.

“That’d be okay!”

Rebecca said, “I’m not touching that stuff. Bacteria! How do you know it isn’t dangerous?”

“Nothing is dangerous,” Pam said earnestly. “And if an error occurs, Pete and I will rebuild it.”

“Rebuild Rafe, then,” Jason said. “Make him taller than a third-grader.”

“Ha ha,” Rafe said, from the front of the room.

“Let’s begin,” Pam said.

It was the strangest lesson Lillie had ever had. Images formed in her mind; Emily and Rafe explained them as well as they could; Pete and Pam instantly learned the vocal terminology from them and explained further. Some images were pictures to remember, and to her surprise Lillie found that now she remembered them easily, without even taking notes. Some images were instructions on how to use the gene-building equipment, and she remembered those, too. The four girls at her table worked together all day, and it felt good.

Sajelle, Lillie realized with amusement, hadn’t even needed to read anything.

They discussed it all at dinner, another incredible meal. “They did something to our minds,” Jon said. “This time I’m sure.”

Rebecca stopped eating. “What do you mean, ‘did something to our minds’?”

“I don’t like school much,” Jon said. “And there’s no way I’d do biology all day like that unless I was on something. They put some gas in the room, I bet. So we’d like learning genetics.”

Madison considered this. “If they did… does it matter? Isn’t it just like… I don’t know… using fizzies to get a little higher jump for a dance routine?”

Sam snorted. “That’s probably the only thing you did use fizzies for in your milk-cum school.”

Mike, logical, said, “The difference, Madison, is that you chose to use fizzies for dance. This was done without our choice. If it was done at all.”

Lillie remembered how contentedly she’d worked for hours and hours at something that didn’t ordinarily interest her. And now she remembered everything she’d learned. “It was done to us, Mike.”

He nodded. “You’re probably right.”

By now the whole table had stopped eating to listen. Jessica said, “Nobody’s going to fuck with my mind! Tomorrow they can just crawl up their own asses. I’m not going back.”

“Me either,” Sophie said.

A motion at the end of the table caught Lillie’s eye. Elizabeth swayed, her face grotesquely distorted. She looked like she was in the worst imaginable pain. A minute later she fainted, crashing off her chair.

Someone screamed. Rafe said importantly, “Let me by! I know CPR!” But Elizabeth didn’t need CPR. She revived almost instantly. As she pulled herself off the floor, her limp long hair swung over her face, hiding it, but not before Lillie saw the return of Elizabeth’s anguish and her eyes fill with tears. The pain wasn’t physical; Elizabeth jumped up and ran out of the commons toward her room.

“Fucking nuts,” Sam said.

“Why should she mind having her mind manipulated?” Rebecca said. “It already is by that so-called religion of hers.”

“Naw. Four-eyes just can’t stand to feel good.”

“Feeling good might feel seeexxxxyyyy.”

“A sin! God will punish her!”

“That’s enough, you morons,” Madison said.

People resumed eating, except for a foul-mouthed group at Sam’s end of the table who went on riffing about Elizabeth. Madison scowled at them. Julie seemed close to tears.

Lillie put another forkful of spiced carrots in her mouth. It wasn’t that Elizabeth minded feeling good. Elizabeth was caught. If she went to class, she’d voluntarily give her mind over to forces of the devil. If she didn’t go, she couldn’t learn to “undo” the genetic engineering the forces of the devil had already done to her. God wanted her to go to class; it was a sin against God to go to class. Never mind that none of this was true; Elizabeth believed it was true. And was filled with horror and pain.

Lillie felt sorry for Elizabeth. But she didn’t go after her. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

After dinner everybody except Elizabeth went to the garden, their favorite spot. Lillie was surprised when Mike dropped beside her on the grass. “Lillie, I want to ask you something.”

She felt herself color. “Yeah?”

He said, “Remember yesterday? We left Quantico in the middle of the night, and everybody was too excited to sleep, so we got a tour of the Flyer and we see our rooms and everything. Then all of a sudden we’re being taken to eat dinner, see the garden, and lights out for night. What happened to all the hours of that night and day in between arriving and dinner?”

Lillie was confused. “I don’t know. I guess we slept. Yes, we did… I woke up in my bed just before we ate dinner.”

“But do you remember going to sleep in your bed?”

“Well, I… no. I don’t. But I must have.”

“Or we were put to sleep.”

Slowly Lillie nodded.

“Well,” Mike said, getting up awkwardly, “I just thought I’d ask.” He strolled off toward the basketball court.

Despite herself, Lillie watched him go. He had a nice body. Not as tall as Jason or Jon, a little pudgy in the middle maybe, but nice.

Madison and Rebecca came over. Lillie bent over, pretending to look for four-leaf clovers in the grass so they wouldn’t see her blushing.

CHAPTER 9

The next day, everyone was in class right after breakfast, including Jessica, Sophie, and Elizabeth. And the day after that, and the day after that. It took Lillie by surprise to realize that weeks were sliding by.

Three weeks. Four. Seven. Ten. How could it have been ten weeks already? Lillie meant to ask Pam or Pete when they were going back down to Earth. She needed to see… who? Oh, Uncle Keith! Of course! She would ask tomorrow.

Tomorrow came, and somehow she forgot.

Twelve weeks. Fourteen. She forgot to keep track.

Each day was exactly the same as the others. Shower, breakfast, class all day, dinner. Evenings in the garden having fun. Pam was teaching three girls plus Rafe to genetically engineer flowers. Games had materialized, after being requested and described: Chess. Cards. Chinese checkers. Hannah had brought a music-cube with her, programmed with hit songs. Her favorite was “Don’t Matter None to Me,” by Printer Scream, and she played it over and over in the “cafe.” Basketball remained popular. It was hard to say what they all did, exactly, in the garden every evening, but the time passed and it was all fun. There were arguments but no fights. Even Sam, the bully, and Jessica, the bitch, didn’t cause too much trouble.

Lillie hung around mostly with Madison and Sajelle. Sajelle’s older sister, fifteen, had already had a baby.

“Last year,” she told them matter-of-facfly. “My mother really mad. She wanted Dee to finish high school, get herself a decent job. But Dee and Ty… you know. And the baby so darling! You should see her.”

“What’s her name?” Madison asked, not quite able to hide her disapproval.

“Kezia.” Sajelle frowned. “You know… I miss her, but I…” She searched for words, didn’t find them, let her hands fall helplessly into her lap.

You miss her but you don’t miss her, Lillie said silently. She knew. She still couldn’t remember Jenny’s face.

But she remembered all the genetics from class.

She knew the location on the human genome of a hundred and sixty genes, what proteins they could express, and how to alter many of them to express something else. She could turn genes on or off by manipulating their promoters, and could then use the results to turn off or on other genes, creating dozens of combinations of different effects. She had custom-built a bacteria capable of learning where she would put out its “food.” She had learned to splice in extra copies of genes, cut out copies of genes, locate and replace damaged genes. She understood none of the equipment she used, but she could manipulate it expertly. So could all of them.

Only once did she question what she was doing. Rafe and she happened to be sitting at a table in the garden, drinking glasses of cold water flavored with some delicious plant that Pete had taught Sophie to grow. The others had left. Rafe said abruptly, “It’s not new, you know.”

“What’s not new?” Lillie said, not really interested. Rafe’s frenetic energy and hyperintellectualism put her off.

“The genetics we’re learning. The Human Genome Project decoded a lot of this stuff over ten years ago, and the Protein Effort found out the rest of it. Well, maybe not how to get proteins to do alternate expression, but everything else. This isn’t new genetics they’re teaching us.”

“It’s new to me.”

“You don’t care, do you, any more than anyone else does. You’re the eighth person I’ve tried to have this conversation with, and nobody cares except Emily that we’ve been carted up to a spaceship to learn genetics that our scientists on the ground already know.”

That got Lillie’s attention. “Are you sure, Rafe?”

“Of course I’m sure. I didn’t win the Fanshaw National Science Prize without knowing what I’m talking about.”

“I thought you were only a state winner, not the national winner.”

“Even so. Lillie, why did they bring us here?”

“To learn the right way.” She didn’t even have to think about the answer; it rose to her lips from the deep well of certainty.

“Well, yes… but even so…” Rafe seemed to lose his thought. He frowned. “Lillie…”

Caught by his uncharacteristic foundering, she looked at him. Really looked. Of course, they were sitting down, but his shoulder seemed to be on a level with hers. “Rafe, stand up.”

He did.

“You’re taller than you were when we came.”

“Yes. Boys get their growth later than girls, my mother always said so. But Lillie…”

“No, it’s not that.” She tried to concentrate. “Look at Rebecca. Over there, with Julie.”

“What about her?”

“Her skin is all cleared up. And it was really bad when we came here… wasn’t it?”

“I don’t notice girls’ skin. I have better things to think about.”

Lillie ignored him. Getting up, she started a slow tour of the garden, looking at everyone. Really looking.

Julie was laughing with Rebecca, a free open laugh. When was the last time Lillie had seen Julie cry? A long time. Julie used to cry at everything.

Susan was no longer overweight. She was still curvy, but a good curvy.

Alex, who used to be so skinny that Sam said you could use him for a fishing pole, had bulked up.

Sam’s hair didn’t hang lankly over his ears anymore. It was thick and shiny.

And then Lillie came to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was sitting by the garden pond, braiding rushes together and sticking flowers in them to make a crown. She looked up suspiciously as Lillie approached. “What do you want?”

Still Elizabeth. But definitely not Elizabeth. She was slimmer, too, but the big change was her face. Her features were somehow more… what? Regular. Prettier. Her skin was clear. And she wasn’t…

“Elizabeth, what happened to your glasses?”

She looked briefly puzzled. “I don’t need them.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not. I just don’t.” She held up the garland she was weaving. “For the feast of Christ the Holy King. It’s tomorrow, November 26.”

November 26? They had been here for three months?

“How do you know today is November 25?” Lillie demanded.

“I asked Pam,” Elizabeth said triumphantly. “She understands that I need to keep the holy days of obligation.”

Lillie just stared. Pam understood? But Elizabeth had once told Lillie that Pam and Pete represented the forces of the devil… hadn’t she? Was Lillie remembering right?

“Hey, Lillie, come dance with us,” Rebecca called. “What are you doing talking with that dork?”

Lillie didn’t know what she was doing talking to Elizabeth. They’d been discussing something important… wait, something about Elizabeth’s religion… no, her looks…

“Come on!” Rebecca called impatiently. She’d gathered six of the girls together for a “dance” to the music on Hannah’s cube. “Don’t Matter None to Me” pounded its pronounced beat. Lillie hesitated another moment, then ran over to join Rebecca. Bonnie came, too, and Amy, with flowers in her hair.

Lillie did wonder briefly why they never seemed to invite the boys —hadn’t Madison and Rebecca, at least, liked boys?—but then she forgot the boys as the dancing started. It was too much fun.

Some uncounted weeks later, Lillie woke up as usual, showered in the girls’ bathroom, dressed and went into commons for breakfast. In the doorway she stopped cold. Something was very different.

Nothing looked different. People sitting at the long table, eating the wonderful food, talking… No, something was different. In the talking, maybe? But she could hear scraps of conversation, it was the same things they always talked about.

“—raising the genemod roses, see, you have to—”

“—and three shots from the foul line, only—”

“—a dance after dinner, would you—”

Something was different. Lillie sat down and said to Jason, “Would you please pass the cereal?” He turned and held the bowl out to her, and something in her chest turned over.

God, he was cute! Of course, everybody knew that, Jason wanted to be an actor and he was the best looking of the boys, but Lillie had never noticed how really handsome he was. His black hair fell across his forehead in a slanting line, and that smile…

Their hands brushed when she took the bowl from him, and Lillie felt a little dizzy.

“Lillie,” Mike said on the other side of her, “would you like to sit at my table in class today? I don’t know why we always sit with the same people. It’s boring.”

She turned to Mike, and a warm feeling crept up from her belly to her chest, up through her neck… She’d never noticed how broad his shoulders were. Broader, really, than Jason’s.

“Yeah,” Rafe said across the table. “We’d learn more if we changed lab partners and got new perspectives on… on the material.”

Lillie laughed and looked at him. When had Rafe developed that gleam in his eyes? He was actually witty, sometimes, now that she thought of it. He could be a pain, but he could also be fun.

Breakfast had never tasted so good before.

In class she sat with Mike, Rafe, and Emily. Emily, that pale small brainy shrinking violet, tossed her white-blond hair and teased Rafe.

“That’s not the right sequence, Rafaelo. If you don’t remove the repressor from that gene, your RNA polymerase isn’t ever going to get going.”

“I was just going to flex the repressor a bit, not remove it,” Rafe said, smiling at Emily.

“You obviously must believe in repression, then.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. What about you, Em?”

“Depends on the circumstances,” she said, looking at him sideways through half-lowered lashes. “Sometimes repression is a good thing.”

“And sometimes you can slip through repressors.”

“Can you, Rafe?”

“Well, RNA polymerase can. Just flex the repressor a little…” Mike flexed his biceps. “Like this, Rafe? Or maybe I should ask Emily.”

“You can ask me,” Lillie said, and instantly thought, What the hell am I doing? She felt herself blush.

Mike grinned. “Maybe you are the right one to ask, Lillie. Sensible Lillie.”

“That’s not very flattering to Lillie,” Emily said, laughing. “Okay,” Mike said, “pretty Lillie, then. Beautiful Lillie. Is that better, Lillie?”

“I didn’t mind ‘sensible,’ ” Lillie said, with comic primness, and knew she meant it. But he’d also called her “beautiful”…

That evening the boys and Bonnie all left their basketball and wandered over to the paved cafe area where the girls usually danced.

Sam was the boldest. “Jessie, wanna dance?”

“Why not?” she said flippantly. Lillie saw that, for the first time in a long time, Jessica had put on the make-up she’d brought with her from Earth. So had Madison.

Maybe Madison would loan Lillie some eyeliner. “Dance, Lillie?” Mike said. She nodded and he took her in his arms.

The song was slow, “Always and Only You,” a big hit by Something Extra. Leaning awkwardly against Mike’s chest, Lillie felt waves of warmth roll over her. She didn’t want the song to end.

It did, and the next one on the cube was a skurler. Lillie hung back, not knowing the steps, but Alex seized her hand. “Come on, Lillie.”

“I don’t know how to skurl,”

“It’s easy. I’ll show you.”

Skurling required the partners to hold each other’s wrists constantly and do as many energetic, rhythmic moves as they could without letting go. Alex was good. Lillie was awful, and once she fell down in a heap. Alex pulled her up, not letting go of her hands, and made her continue. His hand felt warm. She could feel the pulse in his wrist.

She danced a skurler with Rafe, who was better than she expected, a slow dance with Jason, then another with Jon. Then Sam slipped his arm around her waist. “My turn, Lillie.”

She didn’t want to dance with Sam. She didn’t even like him! But his arm pulled her strongly to him, and she didn’t pull away. He had a stronger smell than the other boys, a sort of nice smell actually, and the palms of his hands pressed flat against her back. She felt them—oh, yes, she felt them!—even through her T-shirt. But when one palm crept toward the side of her breast, she pushed him away.

“Don’t be such a cock-tease, Lillie.”

‘You leave me alone!” Suddenly she was near tears.

Sam shrugged and walked away. Lillie started out of the garden, but then changed her mind and sat down in a chair to watch the dancing.

Sajelle was dancing, very close, with Alex.

Jason’s handsome face was flushed as he clung to Hannah.

Madison was dancing with Rafe, whom she’d always called “that little dork.” He was now as tall as she was. Some of her lipstick had come off on his shirt.

Sam had taken Jessica away from Derek, and now Sam was dancing with her. They were pressing the bottom parts of their bodies together and thrusting in unison, and it almost looked like… Lillie looked away, embarrassed.

There were more girls than boys, so some of the girls danced together. Sophie danced with Amy and Bonnie with Julie. But it wasn’t the same. Sophie and Amy held each other loosely, inches between their bodies, but Bonnie kept pulling Julie toward her. Julie pulled away a bit, smiling, but Bonnie only held her more tightly, and the look on Bonnie’s face…

They used to call Bonnie “a lezzie.” Months ago, when everybody first arrived. Not lately, not for a long time, but—

“My dance,” Mike said, looming in front of her. Lillie stood and moved into him, and none of the others she’d danced with, Alex or Jason or Rafe, was the same as Mike. Nobody else felt like this in her arms, nobody else felt so right…

She danced with Mike the rest of the evening, which was over so soon that Lillie was shocked. The lights blinked, which meant time to go to their rooms, and it had to be a mistake, the system was off, it couldn’t be any later than nine at the most―

Mike and she stared at each other. For a terrifying, exhilarating moment she thought he was going to kiss her. But he stepped back and mumbled awkwardly, ”’ Night, Lillie.”

“Good night, Mike.”

She walked back to her room, feeling curiously empty.

Inside, she locked the door, undressed, and lay on the bed. Twenty minutes after blinking, the lights went out for the night, leaving only a faint glow around the doorway and in the corridor leading to the bathrooms.

Lillie stared at that glow, unable to sleep. She heard doors opening, closing again. It was a long time before she could drift off, and her dreams were troubled and strange.

At breakfast the next morning, Sam and Jessica sat very close together and groped each other under the table. “Get a room,” Madison muttered. Lillie looked away from Jessie and Sam. It was obvious they’d spent the night together and wanted everybody to know it.

Lillie went back to sitting in class with Emily, Sajelle, and Madison. None of them mentioned it; they just sat together. Lillie felt relieved. Still, she couldn’t stop glancing over at the table Mike shared with Derek, Sophie, and Amy. Why was Mike talking so much to Sophie? Sophie had never struck Lillie as that interesting.

Madison said casually, “A few people were talking about another dance tonight.”

“I heard that, too,” Emily said, too quickly. “Actually, I thought I might put on a dress. I brought one. I just haven’t worn it yet.”

Lillie hadn’t brought any dresses. Suddenly she wanted one. No, she didn’t… at home she almost never wore dresses. What was the matter with her?

She’d wear her pale blue top. It was the prettiest one she had. And the locket with the pictures of Mom and Uncle Keith, it was really pretty, she’d put it someplace in her footlocker…

Uncle Keith. For a minute she saw his face clearly, as shocking as if he’d materialized in front of her. She had to go home, Uncle Keith must miss her so much, he had nobody else… She’d always been aware of how much she meant to him…

“Lillie, still want to borrow some eyeliner?” Madison said to her, and Uncle Keith’s face vanished.

The pale blue top clung to Lillie’s body. Maybe it was a bit small, she might have grown some there… She left it on anyway. With the locket around her neck, her hair freshly washed, and Madison’s eyeliner and lipstick, she decided she looked nice.

All the girls came to the garden later tonight, having taken time to braid or puff hair, trade clothes, borrow jewelry. The boys waited impatiently, not even playing basketball. Tonight they’d agreed on Jason’s handheld for the music instead of Hannah’s cube. The sound quality on the handheld was worse, but it had more slow songs.

Mike didn’t say anything about Lillie’s appearance, but that was all right. He didn’t have to. She saw it in his eyes.

There wasn’t as much switching partners tonight as last night. That caused trouble.

Lillie danced with Mike. Sam and Jessica were dancing so close and moving their pelvises against each other so suggestively that Lillie looked away. Emily danced with Rafe, Sajelle with Alex, Madison with Jon, Hannah with Derek. Only Jason kept changing partners. Unless he was dancing with one of them, the other girls danced with each other.

Elizabeth wasn’t at the dance. Well, no surprise there, Lillie thought. But what did Elizabeth do with her evenings?

Bonnie asked Julie to dance. Julie refused. Bonnie then danced with Amy. Lillie wasn’t paying any attention to them, lost in dancing with Mike, until Amy shouted, “Get away, you lezzie!”

Everyone stopped moving.

Amy, her face red with embarrassment or anger or both, had shoved Bonnie hard enough that Bonnie fell back against a table. She scrambled up, and tears filled her eyes. For a moment she stood uncertainly, then she made a strangled sound and started to rush away.

Mike squeezed Lillie’s hand and let her go. His arm snaked out and caught Bonnie’s shoulder. “Bonnie, don’t go. Dance with me.”

Bonnie stopped, uncertain. Jessica snickered, “You haven’t got what she wants, Mike.”

Mike ignored Jessica. “Come on, Bonnie, we’ve always been friends. Dance with me.”

Bonnie smiled painfully, then moved toward Mike, keeping several inches between their bodies. They danced. Mike winked at Lillie over Bonnie’s shoulder.

“Deserted for a lezzie, Lillie?” Jessica said. Lillie ignored her. She liked what Mike had done. It was kind. Maybe Lillie… could she…

She did. When Mike’s dance with Bonnie was finished, Lillie danced with Bonnie, keeping a good distance away, not looking at the glances of everyone around her. Bonnie was a nice person, even if she was a… Why would she want to, with a girl? Well, to each her own. But Bonnie should be included in the group, should feel okay about being here.

She danced the rest of the night with Mike and didn’t notice what anybody else was doing. Or care.

He walked her to her door, and kissed her, and said, “Can I come in?”

Sajelle had already disappeared into Alex’s room. And, Lillie suspected, Jason wasn’t alone either, although she didn’t know who he was with. Maybe Sophie, maybe Rebecca. Or Amy.

“No, no,” she said to Mike.

“Lillie, please… just for a little while…”

“No. No, please. I don’t want to.”

For a second he looked annoyed, but then he sighed. “All right. For now. I guess you’re worth waiting for.”

He left abruptly. Lillie, shaking, closed her door. She wanted him to come in, but what if he hadn’t been willing to stop when she said?

What if he decided to dance and kiss with somebody else? It was a long time before she fell asleep.

CHAPTER 10

Hannah was having sex with Derek. So were Alex and Sajelle, Emily and Rafe, and of course Sam and Jessica. Jason was having sex with anyone who would agree, but since nobody would admit it, Lillie wasn’t sure who that included. The girls who weren’t paired off were embarrassed to admit they were sharing Jason. Still, Lillie knew, Rebecca and Sophie were at least spending time alone with him, whether or not they had actual intercourse. Sophie was defiant about this, Rebecca sheepish.

“I don’t seem to be able to help myself,” Rebecca admitted, looking troubled. But not, Lillie thought, troubled very much. Whatever she and Jason were doing, clearly Rebecca liked it.

That left Madison and Lillie.

“Are you going to?” Madison said.

“I don’t know,” Lillie said. “I want to. But…”

“But we’re only fourteen.”

Fourteen? Lillie considered. Her birthday was on March 6. Could it be March already? Maybe. It didn’t seem important.

Madison continued, looking down at her folded hands. “Still… I asked Pam about birth control.”

“You did?” Madison was gutsy. Or cautious. Or both. “Did anybody else?”

“I don’t know. Not the boys, I’ll bet! Anyway, Pam gave me a pill, and she said it would protect me for up to six months. It works with genes… what else? She gave me enough for all the girls, and so I passed them out to everybody. Except Elizabeth, of course. You’re the last one.”

Lillie, immensely curious, said, “Did everybody take them?”

“Yes! Although half of them gave me bullshit about not needing them but if it was a free gift why not blah blah blah. Anyway, here’s yours.”

Madison passed Lillie a piece of toilet paper. Unfolding it, Lillie found a round green pill. She stared at it, wondering if she was going to use it.

Madison said, “Is Mike pushing you?”

“Yes. No. He doesn’t push, he’s too nice, but he wants it so bad it’s almost like pushing.”

“Jon, too. What have you done so far? How much?”

Lillie didn’t want to tell Madison that she and Mike had only kissed. She waved her hand vaguely. “Oh, you know.”

“Yeah.” Madison sighed. “The thing is, I always said I’d wait till college. But when he’s playing with my breasts… I don’t know.”

Lillie had a sudden, wholly unwanted image of Jon playing with Madison’s breasts. A hot feeling shot up from Lillie’s groin through her own breasts. Shocked, she looked away to keep Madison from seeing her face.

Madison was too absorbed in her own dilemma to notice. “The thing is, I never expected to want it this much. My cousin Christy told me that when she did it with her boyfriend it was only because he insisted, and they’ve been doing it a year now and she still doesn’t like it.”

I’ll like it, Lillie knew.

“Well, Christy’s a dork anyway,” Madison said.

There were no more dances after dinner. Instead, people disappeared in couples or hung around in small groups in the garden. Lillie and Mike had strolled through the little woods and now lay stretched out on the grass under the drooping leaves of a huge tree. It seemed dark to Lillie… were the lights lower than she remembered? They seemed to be. The grass had that marvelous just-mowed smell that seemed perpetual in the garden. A little robot mower moved steadily around the lawn. Rafe had wanted to take the robot apart, but Pam wouldn’t let him.

“Kiss me, Lillie,” Mike whispered.

She did. Her whole body went warm. When Mike put his hands under her T-shirt, she didn’t stop him.

Twenty minutes later she said, “Not here. In your room.”

“Okay.” He was breathing so heavily he could barely get the word out.

Hastily they refastened their clothing. Mike led her by the hand across the grass, around the pond, alongside the cafe. Amy, Sophie, and Julie sat there, sipping drinks. Lillie blushed… they had to know where she and Mike were going. Amy and Julie pretended not to see them, but Sophie stared at Lillie hard and her look was not friendly.

A little chill ran over Lillie.

It vanished in Mike’s room. He groaned and pulled her down on the bed. But almost immediately he sat up again. “Lillie… if… if you’re a virgin, I heard it hurts the first time and I don’t want to hurt you…”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it; nothing else he could have done would have reassured her so much that she was doing the right thing. He was such a nice guy!

“I don’t care,” she said. A second later she wondered: Would it hurt? But Mike had already lain down again and began to move his hands over her breasts, and she forgot everything else.

Madison’s cousin Christy was a dork. It didn’t hurt, and it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and Lillie was in love.

Lillie dreamed. Somewhere in the half-awake recesses of her mind, she was surprised. Since coming aboard the Flyer, she’d seldom dreamed. But now she was running, terrified, something was chasing her, a thing she couldn’t see…

She jerked awake and sat up. She had never taken the green pill Madison had given her.

Mike slept heavily beside her, one leg sprawled over her calves. Carefully she pushed the leg aside and fumbled in the darkness for her clothes, discarded by the bed. Dressed, she fled down the corridor to her own room. It, too, was dark, but by the dim light from the hall she flung open her metal chest and groped in the front left corner for the tiny pill wrapped in toilet paper. When she had it, she moved into the doorway for the better light.

The pill lay in the palm of her hand, as mild-looking as aspirin. Would it still work if you took it after the sex was over? If it didn’t…

She felt a brief flash of resentment that boys didn’t have to worry about this, that the burden fell mostly on girls. But her innate sense of fairness reasserted itself: it wasn’t the boys’ fault. Wasn’t Mike’s fault. With a quick swooping motion she brought the green pill to her mouth and swallowed it.

Still, she didn’t feel like going back to Mike’s room. God, if anything happened… Sajelle’s sister already had a baby, at fifteen. Lillie didn’t even much like babies. Oh, they were cute, but when she saw one, she never had the desire that other girls apparently did to cuddle and coo at it.

Still fully dressed except for shoes, she lay down on her own bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. She needed to know. In the middle of the night? Yes. She needed to know.

Lillie padded into the ghostly corridor and closed her bedroom door. The other doors were all closed. Feeling stupid, she looked up at the ceiling and said softly, “Pam?”

A sudden clear, rare memory came to her: Her mother sitting on Lillie’s bed, folding Lillie’s small hands, teaching her to kneel and pray.

“Pam? Can you hear me?”

Nothing. Well, maybe that was good. Rafe had always asserted that the kids were constantly spied on by some advanced equipment they couldn’t detect. Maybe that wasn’t true. Or wasn’t true here.

Lillie crept down the corridor to the commons room. The door opened easily, but the room was in total blackness, so nobody ever used it after “night” fell. Lillie let the door close behind her and said, “Pam? Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Pam? I need help. It’s an emergency!”

Nothing. God, what if there was a real emergency, if somebody had a heart attack or something? Lillie hadn’t realized how much on their own the kids actually were, when they weren’t in class. Why?

Why not? Fourteen-year-olds don’t have heart attacks. Or maybe Pete and Pam could genetically repair anyone who did. Still, kids were supposed to have adults within call.

Feeling aggrieved, or stubborn, Lillie groped her way in the total darkness to the door to the garden. It took her a while to find it. When she did, it too opened easily.

There was light here. The same dim ghostly glow that suffused the bedroom corridor lit outlines of trees, tall ferns, the tables at the cafe, the basketball hoop. In silhouette they looked scary. Lillie made herself walk several feet into the lawn area before calling. “Pam?”

And then, at a shout, “Pam? Are you there? I need you!”

“Lillie?” Pam’s voice came, from nowhere and everywhere. It gave Lillie the creeps.

“Yes, it’s Lillie. I—”

“What has happened? Why aren’t you asleep?” Pam’s voice held genuine astonishment. Did she and Pete always sleep on an exact schedule, then? No, they’d once told the kids that they didn’t sleep at all. But obviously they thought the kids did, every night all night. “I have to talk to you,” Lillie said, feeling suddenly ridiculous. But the panic was still there, underneath, and she really didn’t think she could go through the rest of the night without easing the roiling inside her. “I’m coming,” Pam said. “Wait.”

Lillie shivered, even though the garden was no cooler at “night” than during the “day.” The thick grass tickled the soles of her bare feet. Something came toward her, moving fast, and Lillie almost screamed. But then she saw that it was just the lawn-care robot that fascinated Rafe so much, moving much faster than its slow steady pace during the day. It swerved to avoid her. Water, or something like water, sprayed from it onto the grass.

Then Pam was there, hurrying from behind a clump of trees, from a place where Lillie had never seen any kind of door. “Lillie! What has happened? How could you be here?”

What a strange way to put it, Lillie thought. “Pam, I have to ask you a question. Mike and I… I mean, Madison gave me one of those pills you gave her. The green birth control pills. But I didn’t take it, and then Mike and I… we had sex.” She felt the fiery color sweep her neck and face. “And I took the pill, but not until much later and so I need to know… I was wondering… will it still protect me? I can’t get pregnant, can I?”

Pam peered at her. Lillie had the sudden impression that Pam was thinking furiously, but Lillie couldn’t imagine what.

“No,” Pam finally said, “the pill still works, even if you took it later, after sex. You’re protected.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Pam said, and now her voice was gentle, compassionate. She took Lillie’s hand. Lillie didn’t like that, but it would be rude to say so, after she’d dragged Pam out of bed for a stupid question.

“Lillie, sit down a minute,” Pam said.

“The grass is wet.”

“Yes. Come to the chairs.”

She led Lillie to the cafe. Lillie didn’t really want to chat, but what choice was there? She didn’t want to be rude. She sat, barely able to make out Pam’s face across the table.

“Lillie, I want to tell you something about myself,” Pam said. “From the time I was young, I felt this desire for the whole universe to form a coherent algorithm, to have a first premise. I think you would say, ‘to make sense.’”

Lillie started.

“I think, after watching you, that you want that, too.”

How could Pam know that? Did she spy? But Lillie did not have conversations like that with the other girls! Just that one with Elizabeth, but that was so long ago…

She said slowly, “You smelled that from me.”

Silence. Then Pam said, “Yes. You are very intelligent, Lillie.”

“You can… you and Pete… do you know what everyone is thinking? Just from our pheromones?” She’d learned the word in class. Outrage was gathering in her.

“Oh, no,” Pam said. “Pheromones tell of emotions, but not thoughts. The sensory molecules that convey images and reasoning… you know you can only receive those, not send them.”

Which meant Pam and Pete could send them. Of course. They “talked” to each other right in the middle of the Earth kids, and no one else even knew they were communicating. It must be like hearing people talking to each other among a bunch of the deaf.

She said, “But if you can’t read my thoughts, how do you know I want… what you said? For life to mean something.”

“It’s hard to answer that,” Pam said thoughtfully. “It’s partly the… taste of your pheromones, combined with which times you answer me or Pete or your friends and the times you don’t… Lillie, I am human, after all. Our culture is much more advanced than yours, much farther along the right way, but not fundamentally different. Five million years ago, we shared ancestors here on Earth.”

“We did?” The pribir had never said that before! “Yes. We were taken, carried out into space, our evolution accelerated—”

“How? By who?”

“We don’t know,” Pam said. “Not any more. Maybe the memories were deliberately buried. Anyway, we were evolved, and taught, and now there are many of us in many forms, spreading ourselves throughout the galaxy. We bring the right way. That’s our purpose. It permeates everything we do, and it gives our lives the kind of meaning you’re talking about. I do understand what you long for, Lillie. It’s the quintessential human longing: to matter to the universe. To believe the universe has a design and you’re part of it.”

Yes. Lillie couldn’t breathe.

“We know that we are part of a magnificent design,” Pam continued. “If we didn’t have that, we would disintegrate. We don’t need to strive for anything, not food or travel or health or anything. The right way provides it all. If we didn’t have the right way to strive for, we would be empty. Purposeless. We might do what some other species have done, destroy themselves out of sheer pointlessness. Do you understand what I’m saying, Lillie?”

The odd thing was, Lillie did. No one else she had ever known had thoughts like these. The religious people believed God had a design for them, but Lillie could find no evidence to believe in God. Her mother’s crazy beliefs had ensured that. The non-religious people just wanted to have a good time, or make a lot of money, or look good, or maybe raise their kids. Then the kids would grow up to raise theirs, on and on, but without any point.

She said shakily, “I think I understand.”

“I think you do, too. That’s why I told you. I feel very close to you, Lillie. I think in many ways we’re very alike.”

But that was too much. Pam was a pribir, she came from another planet or ship or something, she whizzed around the galaxy teaching genetics, she smelled what her husband was thinking… Pam and Lillie were not alike. Abruptly Lillie stood. She couldn’t have said why, but she could not stay sitting down any longer.

“I know,” came Pam’s voice in the gloom, “it’s a strange thought. We’re also very different, too. I’m not minimizing that. But I’m glad we talked, Lillie.”

And then Lillie was glad, too. In a complete reversal of her precious sudden revulsion, she saw that Pam was wonderful. That Pam understood her as no one else ever had, that Pam had entrusted her with a great idea which made an unbreakable bond between them. Pam was what Lillie wanted to grow up to be, wise and compassionate and centered in herself, and Pam even smelled wonderful, a sudden rush of scent that intoxicated Lillie…

“You better go back to your room now, Lillie,” Pam said gently.

“Yes. But I… you…”

“Go back to your room,” Pam said, and Lillie went joyfully, making her way through the utter darkness of the common room to the corridor, to her door, to her bed, where she was seized with a tremendous unstoppable desire for sleep.

In the morning, however, she remembered the entire conversation. She thought about it often, while splicing genes and receiving codon images and walking with Madison and Sajelle. Not while having sex with Mike, though. That remained an undivided experience, consuming her, leaving no room for hesitation or reflection or anything else but itself.

Some days later, Lillie woke feeling ill. At first she didn’t even recognize the feeling; she hadn’t been sick since coming aboard the Flyer. But now her throat felt scratchy and sore and her head ached. She put her fingers to the sides of her neck, as her mother had done so long ago whenever Lillie complained of sickness. The glands in her throat felt swollen and sore.

Mike had already left her bed, probably for the showers. Lillie hadn’t heard him go. She swung her feet off the bed and felt the motion ricochet around in her head.

All at once she wanted Uncle Keith, unthought of for… how long?

“Lillie? You coming to breakfast?” Sajelle stuck her head in the door. “Mike asking for you.”

“I don’t… feel so good.”

Sajelle came into the room. “Oh, girl, you don’t look so good. You going to hurl?”

“No. I-“

“I’m getting Pam. Lay right there, baby.”

Pam hurried in ahead of Sajelle and Madison. Emily peered from the hallway. It was becoming a parade, Lillie thought irritably, and it seemed even the irritation hurt her head.

Suddenly all she wanted was to go home.

Pam’s eyes gleamed. “How interesting! Lillie, you must have a… I don’t know the word in English.”

“A what?” Sajelle demanded. “She got something dangerous?” Madison took a step back from the bed.

“No, no, of course not,” Pam said. “You can’t get sick on ship. Lillie must have a virus she brought with her, of the kind that can stay dormant inside cells for years and then suddenly go active. But we can deal with that.”

“How?” demanded Sajelle, ever practical.

“We’ll need to take her into our… our hospital. Lillie, we’ll give you anesthetic, all right? Nothing will hurt. We’ll just fix you up good.” Pam was proud of the slang she was learning from them.

“Drugs?” Lillie managed to get out. Her head had never ached like this before. She closed her eyes, but it didn’t help. Very rarely had Lillie gotten sick at all, and then she always threw it off quickly. Good immune system, Uncle Keith always said.

Uncle Keith…

When she opened her eyes, a second bed floated beside hers, and the room was full of people.

“Maglev!” Rafe said, ducking to crawl underneath the floating platform. “Has to be! The floor has superconductors woven into it, right, Pam?”

“Get out from there, Rafe,” Pete said. “The floater isn’t important. It’s not the right way, just a necessary machine. Just relax, Lillie.”

“Mike?”

“He’s still at breakfast,” Madison said. “You want me to go get him?”

Answering was too much effort. Pete easily lifted Lillie from her bed to the platform. Somewhere behind her headache and wheezy breathing, Lillie was glad she was dressed. The platform floated out of the room, Pam and Pete on either side, the others trailing behind in concern or excitement.

“Go eat breakfast,” Pam told them irritably.

“Do we still have school?” somebody called.

‘Yes! Of course!”

The platform floated Lillie through commons, through the garden, to a far wall. Lillie made herself turn her head to look. The wall was closed seamless metal… until Pam touched it. It began to open.

Pam said something sharply to Pete in a language Lillie had never heard. He answered impatiently, “Not outside here!” Lillie floated through the wall.

She scanned everything, ignoring pain, knowing she would have only a few seconds. Sure enough, the drowsiness struck and she was asleep.

But not before she’d seen a totally alien place, and a monster flowing toward her.

CHAPTER 11

She woke in her own room, Sajelle and Pam beside her. She felt wonderful.

“Hey, baby, you awake?” Sajelle said fondly.

“Yes.” Lillie sat up. There was no weakness, no grogginess. She felt she could run a marathon. “What was it?”

“A virus,” Pam said warmly. “Acquired, latent until now. We haven’t seen it before. We added it to the genetics library.”

“You’re a library all by yourself,” Sajelle said, grinning.

Madison breezed into the room with a huge bunch of yellow and pink flowers. “Lillie! You were right, Pam, she woke up just when you said. These are for you, fresh from the garden.”

Lillie took the flowers. They smelled incredibly sweet.

“Mixed the genes myself,” Madison said proudly.

Rafe and Jason entered hesitantly. Pam, Lillie noticed, scowled briefly at Rafe, then replaced the scowl with a pleasant smile. Jason said, “The princess awakes!” He made a low sweeping caricature of a bow.

Rafe said, “You okay, Lillie?”

“I’m fine.” She swung her feet off the bed. Her body felt bursting with health. “Where’s Mike?” Suddenly nobody looked at her.

A tiny cold chill hit Lillie’s spine. “Where’s Mike? Is he sick, too? Did I give him my disease?”

“Oh, no, Mike’s fine,” Madison said, still not looking at her.

Jason said, “He’s still in the showers. He was going in when I was coming out.”

From Sajelle: “You’ll see him in class. Right after breakfast.”

Breakfast? Lillie said, “But… but you were all going into breakfast when I went into the hospital.” A memory tugged at her, something strange and monstrous… it was gone. “Pam, did you cure me that fast?”

Pam laughed. Madison said, “She doesn’t realize! Lillie, you’ve been gone ten days!”

Ten days.

Pam saw her face. “It’s all right, Lillie,” she said reassuringly. “It just took that long to remove every trace of the virus from your body. But you’re fine.”

Madison added, “And Emily’s going to help you catch up on what you missed in class.”

Ten days.

Lillie said slowly, “I’d like a shower, too. Before breakfast.”

Pam laughed again. “Lillie, we returned you perfectly clean!”

“I’d like one anyway. Sajelle, you, too?” She caught and held Sajelle’s eye.

Sajelle understood. “That’s where I was going. I’m grubby as hell.”

“Well, be quick,” Pam said. “Class starts soon. Lillie, we’re so glad to have you back.”

She left, trailed by everyone except Sajelle. It seemed to Lillie that they were all very eager to leave.

She and Sajelle walked to the showers, undressed, stuffed their clothing into the instant-cleaning slot. Lillie turned on the water hard and said quietly to Sajelle, “What’s going on?”

Sajelle said uncomfortably, “Nothing going on.”

“Sajelle, please. I need to know.”

Sajelle scrubbed herself vigorously, her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall. “You been gone ten days, Lillie. Every day Pam and Pete say you doing fine. And you sure look fine now. But while you gone…”

“What?”

“You going to know anyway, I guess,” Sajelle said resignedly. “Mike took up with Sophie. They sleeping together.”

Such a sharp pain went through her that Lillie was astonished. It actually felt like a physical piercing.

Sajelle said, “I’m sorry, baby. He’s just no good.”

Lillie said mechanically, “Yes, he is.” And then, in anguish, “He couldn’t wait for me?”

“Guess not. Aw, Lillie, don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.” And she wasn’t. She didn’t feel at all close to tears. Just that sharp, breath-stealing pain in her chest.

Sajelle said, with a transparent effort to distract here, “What did you see in the pribir hospital?”

“Nothing.” Only there was a memory, a glimpse of… gone.”

“You out the whole time, then?”

“Yes.”

“We’re glad to have you back, girl.”

“Yes.”

Sajelle shut off the water. “Come on, Lillie. Let’s go. You need to eat. He isn’t worth it, baby. Get dressed.”

Lillie couldn’t eat. She put a few spoonfuls of food into her mouth, but the action was as mechanical as dressing had been. She followed Sajelle to class, let Sajelle seat her at a table with herself, Alex, and Bonnie. They were all self-consciously enthusiastic about her return.

At a far table, Mike held hands with Sophie.

It doesn’t stop, Lillie marveled. The pain in her chest didn’t lessen or increase, it just went on at the same level, swamping everything else. In class Lillie couldn’t handle any of the equipment. She just sat, hands folded in her lap, while the images Pete was smelling to them formed, unheeded, in her mind. Pam frowned at her in concern.

It went on the same all day. Every once in a while Lillie thought, I’m still breathing. It was an abstract thought, without force. Mike didn’t care if she was breathing or not. So neither did she.

After dinner she went to her room instead of to the garden with the others. She sat on the edge of her bed with her hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. Sajelle and Rebecca came in.

Rebecca said, “Lillie, you have to stop this.”

Sajelle snapped, “You ever had your heart broke, Becky? I don’t think so.”

“But look at her! Lillie, you’re not… you’re barely…”

Yes, Lillie thought, but said nothing.

Rebecca started to chatter desperately. “Well, at least let me tell you what’s been going on while you were gone, Lillie. You won’t believe it! Jason—you know he tomcats around, in a different bed every night, thinks he’s God’s gift to girls not in couples…” She stopped, looking stricken.

“Rebecca, you’re a fool!” Sajelle said angrily.

Lillie managed, “What about Jason?” It came out a croak.

Rebecca threw Sajelle a look of triumph. “Well! Guess who Jason finally reached in his sex tour? Elizabeth!”

Even Lillie blinked. “Elizabeth?”

“Yes! Rebecca saw him coming out of her room one morning, real early, and Jason just winked and did a cartwheel in the hall!”

Lillie said slowly, “Is Elizabeth okay?”

“Okay? It was probably the best thing that ever happened to that uptight bitch!”

Lillie thought about that. “No. Not Elizabeth. She thinks it’s wrong.”

“Well, then why did she do it?” Rebecca demanded logically. “And anyway, she doesn’t act like she thinks it was wrong. She just goes about her usual praying and whatever.”

Lillie fumbled toward a thought. Elizabeth couldn’t just be ignoring her sex with Jason… if she’d actually had sex with Jason. Elizabeth had too much rooted in her too deeply. If Elizabeth was acting like nothing happened, it must be because… because…

She couldn’t capture the thought. The pain over Mike’s betrayal washed over her again, stronger than before, and almost she cried out.

Rebecca went on prattling. “And Rafe—you won’t fucking believe what Rafe did. Oh, here’s Emily, she can explain it better than I can, the brain. Em! Tell Lillie what Rafe did!”

Emily entered shyly, smiling at Lillie. “Rafe. You know how he’s been fascinated with the lawn-care machine, Lillie. Well, he snuck into the garden at night—the garden door isn’t locked, did you know that? He caught the machine and opened it by force. He says it wasn’t built out of very strong metal at all, just flimsy stuff.”

Sajelle put in shrewdly, “Nobody never expected anyone to try to take it apart.”

“That’s right,” Emily continued. “But Rafe did. And he says there’s no machinery inside, just a mass of living tissue! A blob. He figures that it’s a genetically engineered organism created to exude exactly what the lawn needs, the chemicals for it to grow plus water chemically extracted from the air. Anyway, the machine also exudes other microorganisms that eat the grass down to a certain length before they die themselves. Mowing it, sort of.”

Lillie tried to pay attention to what Emily was saying. It was hard. All she could think of was Mike. Mike with Sophie. Mike with her. He’d said, he’d promised…

“But more than that,” Emily said. “Rafe has a theory. He thinks that nearly everything aboard the Flyer may be organic, genetically engineered. Not the walls, maybe—”

A wall opening, where there was no door… the image slipped away.

Mike with Sophie. Mike with her. He’d said, he’d promised…

“—but everything except the walls and some sort of ship’s drive. Rafe thinks our food is just genetically engineered molecules to match our taste buds and nutritional needs, not real veggies or pie or whatever—”

“Sam almost slugged Rafe for that one,” Sajelle said.

“Rafe thinks that our clothes are cleaned by organic molecules, the beds and chairs are living tissue, the gene splicers and other lab equipment all work by DNA computer, the—”

Sajelle said, “What’s that smell?”

“I don’t smell anything,” Emily said. “Rafe also says that genetically engineered molecules in the air might smell to us not only the images in the classroom, but other ideas, too. It’s an interesting theory, I think, given Pam’s constant emphasis on ‘the right way,’ but I’d want to modify it be—”

Lillie wasn’t listening. The pain over Mike was gone.

In fact, it had been really stupid of her to get so upset in the first place. Sajelle was right: Mike wasn’t worth it. She’d thought he was a nice guy, but a really nice guy would have waited ten days for a girl he said he loved, instead of starting to sleep with somebody else. That was an unpleasant truth —in fact, she hated it—but it was a truth nonetheless. She wouldn’t have behaved like that to him. He didn’t deserve her.

“That smell is gone now,” Sajelle said.

Lillie admitted to herself that she still felt bruised. He’d used her. But bruised wasn’t bone-shaking jealousy and unstoppable pain, and what had that been about, anyway? She’d lost her perspective on things. Well, she had it back, now.

“Let’s go to the garden,” she said abruptly, breaking into Emily’s monologue about Rafe’s theories.

Sajelle blinked. Emily said uncertainly, “Well, if you want to, Lillie.”

“I do.” Better to just get it over with.

Mike was dancing with Sophie in the cafe. Lillie, heart pounding but under control, walked past them to a group sitting by the pond. They welcomed her with exaggerated cries, both wary and sympathetic. Jason winked at her.

The wink looked just right to Lillie. He was saying, Don’t let it get to you, saying it with humor and style. Lillie winked back.

She tried to pretend to be natural, and the more she did, the more natural she actually felt. Also healthy and energetic. She got them all to the basketball court, where Jason, one of the captains, picked her first for his team.

Three nights later, after his persistent and exaggerated gestures that made her laugh, Lillie went with Jason to his room and had sex with him. She felt relief, and desire, and the knowledge that Jason would only be with her a few days before moving on. Sad knowledge, irrelevant knowledge. What mattered was the sex. In fact, it seemed to Lillie she wanted it more with Jason than she had ever with Mike. It was as if she was driven toward Jason, hungry and eager, and couldn’t help herself. But, then, why would she want to?

“Sajelle! Wake up!” Lillie stood by Sajelle’s bed, barefooted, shivering in a room that shouldn’t have been cold. “Wake up! Now!”

Sajelle stirred sleepily beside Alex, opened her eyes, sat up quickly.

“Something’s happening,” Lillie said. “I don’t know what. Please… come.”

Sajelle climbed over Alex and followed Lillie into the corridor. By the time they closed the door behind them, Sajelle was already frowning. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Lillie said helplessly. “I just woke up knowing something’s… wrong.”

Sajelle said slowly, “Yeah. It is.”

Relief washed over Lillie. She wasn’t the only one with this sense of doom. Not just doom, either. Anger, fear, shame, a flood of nasty emotions that made her feel terrible. What was she doing on the ship so long? God, poor Uncle Keith must think she was dead! And then Jason… and before him Mike… how had she acted like such a slut? She, Lillie! She didn’t behave like that! And she’d been here—they’d all been here—how long? What month was it, anyway? Why had they stayed, learning genetics from aliens, while their families below must not even know what happened to them!

“God,” Sajelle said, “those… aliens. What have I been doing here? How long has it been?”

“I don’t know. I lost track.”

“They not even human!”

“Well…” Lillie said, her native fairness asserting itself. But then an image came to her, sharp and horrifying: Pam taking her through the garden wall into the rest of the ship, and flowing toward her a thing, a blob, of living tissue… How had she forgotten that terrible picture? She clutched Sajelle’s arm.

“Don’t you go clinging to me!” Sajelle snapped. Then, “I’m sorry, Lillie. It’s just…”

“I know,” Lillie said. She felt on edge herself, anxious, almost sorry she’d woken Sajelle. “What’s happening?”

“We ourselves again,” Sajelle said grimly.

Yes. But how, and why? And who had Lillie been before? All of a sudden she wanted to cry, or kick something, or find Pam and Pete and demand explanations, reasons.

The door to commons opened and Rafe came through, very pale. “I did it.”

“Did what?” Sajelle snapped. “What your sorry ass doing now?”

“I took out the scent-organism complex.”

The girls stared at him. He said impatiently, “Don’t be stupid, you two! If the lawn machine was organic, then don’t you see that the scent-producing mechanism must be, too? It’s the ‘right way.’ Genetically engineer everything you can, and regard the rest with disdain. Olfactory molecules have been coming at us day and night, incredibly complex molecules, controlling our behavior. Probably acting on the emotional areas of the brain just the way the learning molecules act on the cortex.”

Lillie struggled to take it in. “You mean… Pam and Pete have been controlling our behavior? With engineered molecules? Getting us to…” She couldn’t finish.

“You got it,” Rafe said grimly. “Getting us to like school, and be happy here on ship, and not worry about what we left down below, and fuck like minks.”

“You wrong!” Sajelle yelled. “Nobody controls me!”

“Wanna bet?”

Sajelle swung on him. She connected. Rafe was taller than he had been but still slightly built; he went down, staggering up a moment later with a bloody nose.

“I’m sorry,” Sajelle whispered.

“Yeah, I’ll bet you are.” Rafe looked on the verge of tears. “Listen, Sajelle, would you have done that if I hadn’t poisoned the scent organisms? I don’t think so. Face facts for once in your unintellectual life, why don’t you.”

Lillie cried, “How did you do it, Rafe?”

“Not hard. I found the opening in commons—apparently it does our whole area —made some strong acid in the school, and poured it in.”

“We weren’t taught to make any acid.”

He looked disgusted. “Not by Pam and Pete. But unlike you, I knew some chemistry before I arrived here. I had some other priorities than clothes and sports and sex.”

“You and Emily done your share of fucking since you got here,” Sajelle jeered. “Or did you two just talk about chemistry all them nights?”

Lillie said, “We have to go back. To Earth. My Uncle Keith… how long have we been here?”

Rafe said, blood still streaming from his nose, “Seven months and twelve days. It’s April 10.”

April 10! God, how had so much time passed? She hadn’t known, hadn’t even remembered, hadn’t been herself. Who had she been? The things she’d done with Jason and Mike…

Lillie said to Rafe, “They didn’t control us completely, or we’d all have been the same. But we weren’t! Sam was still a bully, and you were still interested in science stuff, and Elizabeth was still religious, and—”

“You’re right,” Rafe said sulkily. “Basic personality remained. Like Sajelle being an idiot. But olfactory molecules controlled our moods, made us happy here no matter what, took away missing people and wanting to go home and sexual inhibitions and any emotional pain.”

Any emotional pain. Her jealousy and betrayal over Mike, and then all at once it vanished. Just like that. And Sajelle saying “What’s that smell?” And the talk with Pam in the garden, Lillie thinking Pam was wonderful, so warm and caring.

Sajelle said, “You crazy, Rafe. Why would Pam and Pete want us fucking like that?”

“I don’t know.” He’d succeeded in stopping the blood flow from his nose. He looked a mess, bloody and dirty and angry.

A door flew open and Rebecca rushed out. “Hey! I woke up and… what is this?”

“Tell them, Rafe,” Sajelle said, and even under her roil of painful emotions Lillie could see that Sajelle was trying to make amends to Rafe, trying to let him shine.

Rafe began his explanation again. In the middle of it Sam and Jessica bolted out of Jessie’s room, and Rafe had to begin a third time. When Julie appeared, Rafe said in disgust, “I’m not going to keep doing this! Wake up everybody and get them into commons so I can tell everybody at once!”

“You better watch who you’re ordering around,” Sam said threateningly. He waved a fist in Rafe’s bloody face. Rebecca scowled at Sam. Julie, cowering against a wall, began to cry silently, tears sliding down her frightened face.

They were all themselves again, Lillie realized. They’d been themselves all along, but only partly, the rest of their selves controlled and manipulated and tamed. And now they were themselves again completely. And so was she, and she was scared and angry, and she wanted to go home.

She fought down the feelings. “Becky, start waking up people. You, too, Jessie. Try to be gentle. Julie, stop bawling! It isn’t going to help. We need to get everybody into the commons room.”

Elizabeth ran out of her room. Lillie caught sight of Elizabeth’s face and the thought flashed across her mind: None of the rest of us are that terrified! But there was no time for Elizabeth. Lillie got the others set at waking people up, and then she went with Rafe to the commons.

“Here, put this on your nose, it’s bleeding again.” She handed him the sash from her pants.

“The effect is in here, too, do you feel it? Or, rather, the lack of effect.” His voice was unsteady.

“Rafe, do you think that by poisoning those… organisms, you might have poisoned our air, too? Is it safe to breathe, long term?”

“As far as I know.”

“Okay,” Lillie said.

“Do you think we should call Pam and Pete? If that’s even possible.”

It was possible, Lillie knew. Standing in her bare feet on the thick garden grass, bleating for Pam, who had reassured her about the birth-control pill and told her she was different and special, that Lillie and she were the same because they wanted, needed, meaning in their lives. Wonderful, caring Pam, who had turned Lillie into a puppet for seven and a half months. Who had used pheromones to make her forget Uncle Keith, and stay mindlessly on the Flyer, and have sex with Mike and then Jason, and…

“No,” she told Rafe. “Don’t call Pam or Pete. Some of the others might kill them. Sam or Jessica, for instance.” And me.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Rafe said. “Fuck.”

When they were all there, Rafe explained again what he’d done. He showed them the slit, a small horizontal slash high near the ceiling, into which he’d poured the acid. Shouting and tears and horror followed, a pandemonium until Jon out-shouted everybody else and got them listening again.

Proof, Lillie thought through her own anger and fear, that there were no surveillance cameras in commons. If Pam and Pete knew what was going on, wouldn’t they be there?

“The question is,” Jon said, “what are we going to do?”

“Kill the fuckers!”

“Sam, think,” Jon said curtly. “Even if we could do that, what good would it do? We want to go home.”

“Make them send us home!” Sophie called.

“How?”

More argument, everyone jumping up and talking at once, no one listening. But what good would listening do? Nobody, as far as Lillie could tell, had any real ideas. Finally, in a lull resulting not from agreement so much as exhaustion, Lillie said, “We have to ask Pam and Pete to send us home.”

“Ask them? You think they care what we want?”

“They sure didn’t ask us before!”

“Break down the fucking door! The door they took Lillie through when she was sick! Beat the shit out of them until they scream!” Sam, yelling again. Lillie looked at him, dressed only in jeans, fists clenched, stubble on his chin. Looking demented, like something from a bad video game. She looked at all her friends, these people she’d spent seven and a half months with, now furious and terrified and helpless.

Julie, crouching in her chair, bent over so that her straight fine hair hid her tearful face.

Sajelle, naked under the long T-shirt that had been the only thing on her when Lillie woke her. Her dark face set in stubborn lines, lip pushed out, black liquid eyes scared.

Jason, not clowning now, his handsome face shocked into immobility like stone.

Madison, breathing fast with her mouth open, as if she couldn’t get enough air.

Rafe, sulky and fearful and triumphant, holding Lillie’s sash to his bloody nose.

Elizabeth… Elizabeth wasn’t here.

Lillie frowned. Had Elizabeth gone back to her room, to cower and pray? Lillie hadn’t seen her leave commons. But she remembered the look on Elizabeth’s face in the hall, a look of revulsion so much deeper than anything the others showed that it had made Lillie pause. Revulsion and horror and…

The door to the garden flew open and Pam and Pete strode into the room. But… was that them? It actually took Lillie a moment to recognize them, Pam’s smooth face was so contorted. Pete’s teeth were bared, perfect white teeth.

“You… you…” Pam couldn’t get words out. Pam.

“It wasn’t bad enough that there were only twenty of you here!” Pete screamed. “Now you have to reduce the number more… stupid stupid raw genetic… All the effort! All the time! And you think you can destroy our carefully… you! You!”

The kids had all stopped dead, staring. Lillie shrank back against a wall. What had happened, why were Pam and Pete like this, she hadn’t known they could be like this —

“Our whole lives!” Pete shrieked. “To benefit you stupid ungrateful—”

Pam let loose a sound no human voice could make, a roar that rose into a steep wail.

“—don’t deserve all we’ve done for you, all we’re trying to do… our whole lives — ” Pete ran into the room and struck Alex, closest to the garden door, full in the stomach. Alex went down, bent double.

“Get ‘em!” Sam cried. “They’ll kill us!”

He rushed Pete. After a shocked moment, Mike and Jason joined him. The three boys hit Pete together, and he went down.

“No, no, it’s all a mistake!” Pam cried. “We won’t hurt you! You’re our—” She didn’t get to finish. Derek and Bonnie jumped her, knocking her down, and Sophie immediately sat on Pam’s chest.

“Stop!” Jon called. “Stop! Let them explain! They’re not—” Lillie didn’t hear more. She had run to Alex, crumpled by the garden door. He gasped for breath, clutching his stomach. He was turning blue. Something inside him must be injured, Pete had killed him… “Alex! Alex!”

Slowly his gasps began to bring air into his lungs. Color returned to his face. But he continued to clutch his stomach, moaning. “Hurts…”

“Don’t try to talk,” Lillie said. She knew CPR, but Alex didn’t need it now. She watched, panicky, for signs of shock. Elevate the feet, keep him warm… but it didn’t look like shock. Pete had injured something inside Alex, some organ… what if Alex were bleeding inside? Lillie wouldn’t have any idea what to do.

She turned her head to the fight behind her. Pam down, Pete down, Sam’s fist raised over Pete’s face… Lillie saw it all as a frozen image, a single-moment snapshot. Her head whipped back to Alex, and the motion swept her line of sight through the door into the garden, and she saw it.

Elizabeth. Hanging by the neck from a big tree. Dead.

The look on Elizabeth’s face in the hall, a look of revulsion so much deeper than anything the others showed. Elizabeth, who believed in a God that would punish her if she didn’t undo her genetic modifications. Who would also punish her if she herself learned Satan’s art. Who punished sex if you weren’t married. Rafe’s words: “Olfactory molecules controlled our moods, made us happy here no matter what.”

The olfactory molecules Rafe had killed with his homemade acid.

Lillie opened her mouth to say something, or call somebody, or scream, but whatever it was never came out. Dizziness hit her like a hammer and everything vanished.

CHAPTER 12

She woke in a small space filled with people. Immediately she recognized it, from months and months ago: the shuttle. She was strapped securely into a seat. The other eighteen kids woke at the same time. Pam and Pete, calm again, stood in the open doorway of the shuttle, behind them a huge empty room.

“You can’t speak yet,” Pam said wearily, “so don’t try. It’s only temporary. By the time you get back on Earth the speech inhibitor will have worn off. Yes, you’re going home. We’ve done as much work with your kind as we can. If there had been as many of you as there were supposed to be, or if you could understand more—”

Pete interrupted. It came to Lillie, even through her dazed incomprehension, that Pete sounded apologetic. “It was our first assignment,” he said.

“Just do the best you can, especially you girls. Lillie, Emily… well, we tried,” Pam said, still wearily. “We’ll be back.” She and Pete stepped outside the shuttle and the door closed.

The shuttle moved. Acceleration pushed Lillie against the back of her seat. She closed her eyes, her mind whirling.

The ride seemed very short. Lillie made a few attempts to speak, but they didn’t work. She saw the others do the same. By the time the shuttle came gently to rest, she could talk again. The straps holding her automatically fell away, and the shuttle door opened.

A blast of hot air blew in.

“Where are we?” Rebecca said, to no one. Sophie whimpered. Lillie felt someone grab her hand: Julie. Julie held on tight.

“I’ll check it out,” said Jon, their natural leader. He rose and walked cautiously to the open door. “Well, it looks like Earth. I just don’t know where.”

There was a general stampede outside.

The sun was just rising. They stood in a red glow on a deserted plain, with the hazy outlines of mountains in the distance. A highway ran beside the shuttle, two lanes, straight and utterly empty. A tumbleweed blew by. The rest of the plants that Lillie could see were low and dry and thorny, colored faded greens and browns.

“Looks like a high desert,” Alex said, and Lillie turned to him in surprise.

“Alex! Are you all right? Your stomach—”

“Yeah.” He felt his midriff, looking puzzled. “I’m fine now.”

“How long were we unconscious?” Emily demanded. No one answered. It could have been days, Lillie realized. It had been days for her, before. Pam and Pete had fixed up Alex.

There was nothing they could do for Elizabeth.

“Stand well away from the shuttle,” the shuttle suddenly said. Lillie jumped; Julie cried out. “Stand well away from the shuttle. You will be in danger otherwise. Move now. Stand well away from the shuttle—”

“Move!” Jon said.

They all followed him, running down the road. Lillie looked behind her. The shuttle suddenly collapsed. One minute it was there, the next it was not.

Everyone stopped, uncertain. Jon said tentatively, “Well, I guess this is far enough… Rafe, don’t go back! It said not to!”

Rafe hesitated, stopped.

“Now what?” Bonnie said.

“I don’t feel well,” Sophie said. She turned away and threw up beside the highway.

“Hey, Sophie, hold it together,” Bonnie said softly. “It’ll be all right”

“I’m not afraid, you moron,” Sophie snapped. “I just threw up, is all.”

Sajelle was staring at Sophie strangely.

“Something’s coming!” Jason said.

The nineteen kids moved closer together. Should they run, hide, wait? Nobody knew. They did nothing.

The thing Jason had spotted grew larger, resolved itself into a bus barreling down the highway. A small blue bus. Jon stepped into the road and raised his arm to flag it down. He didn’t have to. The bus skidded to a stop, and Lillie saw that it was old and patched, the metal almost rusted through in places. The door opened and a man and a woman climbed out.

Jon said bravely, “Can you help us? We were… were camping, and we’re lost and we need — ” He stopped dead, staring at the man.

Lillie peered at him. The man didn’t look familiar. But the woman did. She gazed unbelievingly at Lillie. A short, dark woman with a sun-wrinkled face and chopped-off black-gray hair. Old, maybe even in her fifties.

Jon said, choking on the word, “Scott?”

“It’s me,” the man said. He sounded dazed, too.

The woman stepped forward. “You don’t recognize me, Lillie,” she said.

Lillie shook her head.

“It’s Theresa Romero.”

Lillie stared. A black swooping wave passed over her mind, receded. Theresa? “But… but…”

“We didn’t expect you to be this age, either,” the man got out. “I’m Scott Wilkins, people. Don’t you remember me from Andrews Air Force Base?”

It was Jason who got the words out, “But… you’re old!”

“And you’re not,” Scott said. Lillie remembered him as a runty, brash kid always running to keep up with the bigger boys. Now he was tall, a little fat, old.

Rafe blurted, “What year is this?”

Theresa answered, her eyes still on Lillie. “It’s July 8, 2053.”

Again Lillie felt the black faintness brush her, and again she succeeded in pushing it away. 2053. Forty years since she’d left Quantico… not possible…

“Time dilation,” Rafe said. “Oh, wow!”

Julie whimpered. Sam advanced, fists clenched. “If this is some fucking joke—”

“Still the same old Sam,” said the man claiming to be Scott Wilkins. “It’s not a joke, Sam. You people have been gone forty years. Everyone assumed you were dead, or at least weren’t coming back. And Rafe is right, or at least I think he must be right. Your… the pribir must have accelerated into space and then come back, going so fast that time aboard the ship is different. Forty years passed for us, and… whatever time for you.”

Jon said, “Seven and a half months.”

“That we were awake for,” Rafe said. “We don’t know how long we were out. But how… you…”

“They contacted us,” Theresa said. “The old way. They smelled to us, three days ago. Come to this place at this time, pick up the travelers.” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “But they didn’t bother to tell us about ‘time dilation,’ the bastards. Or to tell you, it looks like.”

“No,” Lillie got out. She couldn’t stop staring. Theresa? Theresa fifty-four years old, her voice raspy, her face sagging. Old… “Theresa? My Uncle Keith! Is he…” She couldn’t say it.

Theresa said, “I e-mailed him while Scott was getting the bus going, if you don’t think that was a bitch… Yes, he’s alive. Eighty-seven, but still breathing. He’s in a nursing home in Amarillo.”

“My mom and dad?” Madison demanded, and then everyone was shouting names except Julie, crying hopelessly, and Sam, frozen with fists clenched and no one to hit. Theresa held up her hand.

“No use asking, I didn’t check on anybody else’s family. I only know about Lillie’s uncle because we’ve kept in touch, Lillie and I were friends—” She stopped.

Friends. Girl buddies. But Lillie was fourteen and Theresa was fifty-four. Suddenly Lillie couldn’t take any more. She felt her stomach rising, and, like Sophie, she barely turned away before throwing up beside the road.

When she had finished, Scott Wilkins stood beside her, laying a hand on her stomach. Indignantly she pushed him away.

“It’s all right, Lillie, I’m a doctor.”

A doctor? Runty, tag-along Scott?

He felt her belly, then squatted to lay his head against it. Lillie saw Sajelle watching her with the same strange look Sajelle had given Sophie.

Scott straightened, pulled Sajelle toward him, felt her belly. She submitted, very unlike Sajelle, without protest. Why? Did they all have some awful worm or virus in their stomachs? Were they seriously sick?

Scott said somberly, “The time dilation wasn’t the only thing the pribir didn’t tell you. Lillie and Sajelle are pregnant. I’ll have to examine the rest of you girls, but my hunch is that you all are.”

Madison blurted, “Oh, no. We had birth control.” Then she blushed crimson.

Scott—Dr. Wilkins—said gently, “I don’t think any birth control you were given was meant to work.”

“You!” Madison cried, glaring at Jon. Lillie’s head swam. Mike? Jason? Oh, God, how could she even know which —

“Madison, don’t blame Jon,” Dr. Wilkins said. “I don’t think your baby, if you’re carrying one, is his. Or not completely. The pribir are master geneticists, you know. And they used all of us for whatever their purpose really is. Your baby was probably very carefully engineered in vitro and implanted in you.”

“We bring the right way. That’s our purpose. It permeates everything we do, and it gives our lives meaning… You’re our first assignment!’

“I want an abortion!” Madison cried, and Dr. Wilkins’s face showed something like pain. “We’ll talk about it, Madison. Things are different now.”

“Different how?” Madison demanded, but he didn’t answer.

Pregnant. She, Lillie. Carrying a baby inside her. A genetically engineered baby—

She cried, not knowing what words would come out, “The pribir said they’d be back!”

No one answered her. Silence fell. Even Julie, stunned, had stopped crying. The only sound was the wind, rising violently with the sun, hurling tumbleweeds across the dry ground.