Nothing Human

CHAPTER 13

In the old days, Theresa thought, they’d have brought in crisis counselors, child psychologists, what all. But these weren’t the old days. They had only themselves.

“Where will I go?” Lillie had asked, after the initial crying and shouting had subsided a bit. The infernal wind had begun the way it did every morning, hot and violent, and Scott had herded everyone into the shelter of the bus, which was already heating up like the furnace it was.

Theresa and Scott looked at each other. Scott said, “Lillie, all of you, it’s been a long time. Things are… different. Nobody knows you’re back, and probably only your families will care. And they—”

Sajelle said, “We back from an alien spaceship, pregnant, and nobody going to care?”

“I’m afraid not,” Scott said. “Since you left…” He trailed off and Theresa saw that he didn’t know where to begin describing the world they had returned to. How did you compress forty violent years into a few sentences for fourteen-year-olds?

Madison clung to the main point. “Our families… how can we get to them? Will you take us?”

Sam said, without a trace of the obnoxious bluster Theresa remembered, “If our families are still alive.”

The point was truer than he knew. Nearly a third of the United States population had died in the war ten years ago. Theresa had heard that in Africa, the rate was eighty percent. She didn’t know if the figure was correct or if it was, like so much else, inflated rumor. Anything on the Net was suspect, even the news sites, and there was no other source of information any more.

She said to Madison, “To get you to your families, we’ll have to find them first. A lot of people have been dislocated. Scott, it’s dangerous to stay here, they’re predicting another storm. I’m going to drive back to the farm.” And leave you to explain. He gave her a look that would wither a cactus.

Theresa slipped behind the wheel. They were going to be lucky to have Scott: a doctor, a good man. He had shown up at the farm last night, the only one to respond to the pribir’s message. Well, maybe the others, now scattered God knew where, had never smelled it. Theresa had happened to live close to the landing area. What would have happened to these children if she and Scott hadn’t come? They would have died out here, that’s what.

These children. Who had been part of her own childhood, long ago in a different world.

The bus was noisy. Modified to run on methanol, it was anachronistic, inefficient, falling apart, and highly illegal. But the fuel-cell-powered electric car, also falling apart, could not carry twenty-one people. The bus’s tires were so patched it was a miracle they held together. God knew how much unlawful emission they were putting out this very minute.

Theresa couldn’t hear Scott over the engine noise. What was he saying? How could he possibly explain?

Global warming took off, Scott could tell them, and accelerated in a feedback loop, more than anyone ever imagined. We reached a tipping point, where even a tiny additional increase could throw the system into violent change. And it did. He could tell them that, but how could they understand what it had meant?

The Earth’s temperature had risen fifteen degrees Fahrenheit in forty years. Peat bogs and Arctic permafrost had released their stored methane, trapping yet more heat in the atmosphere. Polar caps melted, coastal areas flooded, farmland became dustbowls, deserts became farmland. Entire island archipelagos disappeared under water. The weather became the enemy: crazy storms, wildfires covering half a state. Tropical diseases spread as fast as famine. People migrated, people died, people dug into places that were still livable and shot refugees who tried to move in. Governments collapsed. Technology slid backward, except among the rich in defended enclaves that have somehow kept the Net going through aging satellites. Conservative backlashes developed, and weird religions, and a dozen other means for people to make sense of the senseless. And then, in rational response to all of this, we had a biowar with China and nobody won.

Somewhere behind her, one of the kids cried out.

Where were they all going to go? Trains still ran, sometimes, if no eco-groups sabotaged. The Net might be able to track down these kids’ relatives, or it might not. The farm couldn’t feed nineteen more people, twelve of them probably pregnant.

Behind her, the bus had fallen deadly quiet.

Two hours later, Theresa stopped the bus, which had —miracle, miracle!—held together, in the space between the barn and the farm wellhouse. Her practiced eye ran over the farm; everything looked all right. Her three sons were out with the cattle, following them around on summer forage to check that their GPS collars still worked, and to make sure nobody stole a cow. Her daughter Senni had shifted the garden-guards against the hot wind. The huge rain cisterns were still half full; the windmills whirred frantically. Behind the chicken coop, their current and temporary farmhand, Ramon, was slaughtering a chicken.

Senni came out of the house onto the porch, expressionless, as the kids got off the bus. The hot wind whipped Senni’s short hair into a dirty froth. Hurriedly, squinting, the pribir children covered the distance from the bus to the doorway.

“The pribir children.” How long since Theresa had said that phrase? Or even thought it?

Inside, they looked around at the large adobe-walled great room, as wind-tight as Theresa could make it, lit at this hour only by light from the small windows. Some of the kids looked bewildered, some angry, a few in shock. Well, Theresa couldn’t blame them.

“Sit on the floor,” she said gently. “We don’t have enough chairs. This is my daughter Senni and my granddaughter Dolly, who’s almost two.”

Lillie’s face turned slowly toward the baby.

“I guess the next thing is food,” Theresa continued. “Are you hungry? Senni, did you make that soup?”

“Yes,” Senni said sullenly. They’d argued about it before Theresa left. Silently Senni ladled out steaming bowls. Lillie got up and passed a bowl to each kid. She’d always been sensible, Lillie had. Solid. A few children started eating, but most did not.

Scott said, “Where’s your computer, Tess?”

Senni started. No one had called Theresa “Tess” for forty years.

“I’ll get it,” she told Scott, and fetched the ancient thing from the bedroom. Carlo kept it running, the only techie among her four children. She put the computer on the long wooden table.

“Good God,” Scott said, “does it work?”

“Not for me,” Theresa said. “You any good at tech, Scott?”

“I can manage. Voice control?”

“Only Three-A. You’d best use the keyboard except for simple stuff.”

Scott sat on a chair and turned the computer on. Abruptly Rafe rose from the floor and stood beside Scott. That’s right, Rafe had always been interested in machines. Theresa watched them, the sun-wrinkled middle-aged man (there was no other kind, now) and the young boy, who had been born in the same year.

Scott linked the computer to the wireless Net. Rafe said, “Basic information search. Rafael Domingo Fernando,” and Scott looked up at him.

“Not your name, Rafe,” he said gently. “You’ll be listed as dead. Your parents’ names.”

Rafe said, “Angela Santos Fernando and Carlos Juan Fernando.”

Scott entered the names. Theresa saw that he was trying to shield the screen from Rafe, who saw it anyway. Rafe said in a flat voice, “Both dead.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“An older brother. Maximilliano Fernando.”

“Do you know his citizen I.D. number?”

“No.”

“Birthday?”

“September 7, 1996.”

“Okay. This is him… he’s living in Durham, North Carolina. There’s an e-mail address listed. Do you want to mail him?”

And say what? Theresa thought. Here I am, back from the dead, a fourteen-year-old kid?

Rafe said, his voice finally unsteady, “In… in a minute. Do someone else first.”

Theresa couldn’t stand it. All right, she was a coward, she couldn’t watch. She picked up Dolly. “Her diaper’s dirty. I better change it.” She carried the baby into the bedroom.

Senni followed her. “Mom, what the hell are you doing? Where are these kids supposed to go?”

Theresa turned on her daughter, glad to have someone to yell at. “I don’t know! But I couldn’t just leave them out there! These are—were—my friends! Lillie…” But there was no way to explain to Senni what she and Lillie had once been to each other, in those extraordinary circumstances that could never come again. “Senni, whatever the others do, Lillie at least is staying here. I know she hasn’t got anywhere else to go.”

Senni flounced out of the room. She, too, was pregnant, with her dead husband’s last legacy. Theresa sighed.

She lingered over Dolly, playing with her, rocking her to sleep, fussing with the blanket in the crib that Senni had made out of a dresser drawer.

When Theresa went back into the room, three girls were crying. Two boys yelled at Scott, who was showing superhuman patience. Sophie, whom Theresa had never liked, strode up to her and demanded, “Can you take me to the train today? Train to New York?”

“No, not today,” Theresa answered. She understood, as she had not forty years ago, that Sophie’s belligerence sprang from insecurity and youth. But Sophie didn’t understand that winds and storms made day travel on the plains risky; that a train all the way to New York was equally risky; that Theresa didn’t have the money for tickets for everybody; what New York would be like even if Sophie could get there.

“You won’t help me?” Sophie demanded. “You always were a bitch!” And then Lillie was there, taking Sophie’s arm, soothing her, and Sophie unexpectedly turned and buried her face in Lillie’s shoulder.

Theresa met Lillie’s eyes. Lillie smiled sadly.

“You must be scared, too,” Theresa said, out of the old, never-admitted antagonism that her friend could cope better, adapt quicker, control herself more.

“I am,” Lillie said, so softly that Theresa wasn’t sure of the words. But, then, she didn’t have to be. She understood, and her momentary resentment evaporated, never to return. Lillie was a child, still. And she, Theresa, was not.

The moon shone high and clear as Theresa drove the horse cart to town. They had a few more hours before dawn, before the winds began. Night on the high plains was still cool, even in July. Theresa and Lillie sat wrapped in blankets. “Is the horse old?” Lillie asked.

“No,” Theresa said, “just malnourished. Like most everything else, except you.”

Immediately she regretted her words. She’d intended them to be jocular, but they hadn’t come out that way. It wasn’t Lillie’s fault she was healthy when nothing else seemed to be. God, think how much worse it would be if sick kids had been dumped on the farm! By way of apology, she said to Lillie, “Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “Why are we taking a horse, Tess, instead of the bus or that little car?”

“The bus is illegal. Greenhouse emissions. The car is all right, it uses fuel cells to make electricity and gives off only water, but the car is old and I want to save it as much as I can.”

Lillie was quiet. So much of this must be strange to her. Tess said, “We have pre-war solar panels on the roof, too, you probably noticed them. They’re getting old as well. They mostly fuel the water pumps, while the wind power—” But Lillie wasn’t listening.

“Tess, this is your parents’ land in the New Mexico desert, isn’t it? We were going to come here once to hike.”

“We were?” Theresa said.

“Don’t you remember? We said that after we left Andrews Air Force Base to go home, we’d come here with your parents for a vacation. Together we asked Uncle Keith to let me go.”

Theresa didn’t remember. It was forty years ago. But not to Lillie.

The land had changed as much as she had, Theresa thought. She could recall it as she’d seen it at thirteen: a forsaken tract in the Chihuahuan shrub desert, bare of everything but mesquite, creosote, and yucca. Dry playas and arroyos. Nothing moving until you looked close enough to see the scorpions, lizards, and diamondbacks.

But all over the Earth, warming had brought climate shifts. Georgia now looked like Guatemala, Alberta like Iowa, Iowa like the edges of the Sahara. None of the computer models to predict warming consequences had been accurate, except to say that everything would get warmer. New Mexico was supposed to get a temperature increase of three degrees in spring, four degrees in winter and summer, with increased spring precipitation, decreased summer soil moisture, and spreading deserts.

It hadn’t worked out that way.

Her parents’ remote, worthless land bloomed. Its average annual rainfall had been fourteen inches in 2000, ninety percent of it between July and October, with an annual average evaporation rate of forty inches. But temperatures rose, wind patterns shifted violently, and El Nino events proliferated in the all-important Pacific, thousands of miles away. The beautiful clear desert air contained few pollutant particles to block sunlight and provide countering cooling, and so the temperature rose even more. Runaway greenhouses gases let plants use water in the soil ever more efficiently. Year by year, the average rainfall increased and the average evaporation decreased, until the numbers passed each other going in opposite directions.

The mesquite and yucca gave way to blue grama grasses and yellow columbines. The desert had always had the odd cottonwood or cedar growing along its intermittent waterways, but now these dusty trees were joined by young groves of oak, juniper, and pinion. The arroyos and playas, most of them anyway, stayed wet year-round, and in some years of heavy winter runoff the ranch even developed a temporary through-flowing river, running south down the tilted face of New Mexico toward the border. This past May, Theresa had found a wild rose bush, unheard of here, its delicate pink flowers perfuming the warm air. Antelope moved in from the faraway hills, and bobcats and wild Angora goats.

Carlo and Rosalita Romero were dead by then. Theresa and Cole brought their young family from the East twenty years ago, when times were dangerous and the desert still not arable. It had been safer than the East because it was more remote. Over time, they bought cattle, built outbuildings, expanded the house, planted peanuts and corn and beans and potatoes, some of it even without irrigation. The growing season now extended from April to November. When the biowar ten years ago reduced the Earth’s population to less than two billion, about what it had been in 1900, Tess’s farm had not been reached by any of the blowing, deadly, bioengineered microorganisms.

Patches of desert remained; there was a wide swatch of empty scrub to the south of the ranch. And there were still the flash floods, the terrifying thunderstorms, the wildfires and the infernal daily wind, rising at dawn and dying at dusk like some diurnal atmospheric tantrum. But Theresa knew she had been one of the lucky ones in the unpredictable climate sweepstakes. Their high-tech machinery was breaking down year by year and the world was not manufacturing much by way of replacements, but the farm was making do and increasing its productivity. The United States slowly recovered from the war, putting together some sort of replacement civilization. Nuclear energy, once anathema, powered cities. Theresa Romero and her family were part of that effort. Survivors. Contributors.

None of this would have meant anything at all to Lillie, of course. That young grove of oak over there, strong straight saplings silvery in the moonlight, was not a symbol of anything to her. No reason why it should be. She didn’t know that the fields of wildflowers, vervain and blue gila and sweet alyssium, were, in this place, a miracle.

Still, hard times were difficult to relinquish. They were all so accustomed, she and Senni and her sons, to scrimping and saving and going without! The little edge they’d achieved for themselves, the food stored on the ranch and the credit stored in the rebuilt on-line banks, could so easily vanish again. That was why Senni hadn’t wanted Theresa to make this trip. A waste of resources, of time, of precious money, Senni said, her mouth drawn in a tight hard line. Her brothers would be back anytime with the cattle; Mother should be here when they arrived. Jody and Spring and Carlo had a right in this decision to feed so many extra mouths.

The remaining pribir kids, too, had looked sullenly at Lillie, the only one given free train tickets. The days immediately following the kids’ arrival had been hard on everyone (there was an understatement!) Things had sorted themselves out, but not without tears and anger and threats.

Eleven kids contacted relatives on the Net. Only one, Amy, had a parent still alive, but the other nine found brothers or sisters. Susan, Amy, Rebecca, and Jon had train tickets booked for them, and Hannah had an actual airline ticket, worth more than the entire farm income for a year. Scott had driven them in the bus to the train station at Wenton, and they had disappeared into the vast disorganized mess that was the United States transport system. Theresa hoped they would each reach his or her destination, that they would stay in touch as long as the farm computer held out, and that she would never see any of them again.

The other six—Julie, Bonnie, Sophie, Jason, Mike, and Derek — had located siblings that could not afford to send for them. Theresa had already explained that there was not enough money to buy them train tickets. She had found them all jobs, the boys as laborers and the pregnant girls as clerks in town. They would work a few months in return for room, board, and a train ticket “home.” They, too, had gone on the bus to Wenton.

That left eight kids with nowhere to go: Madison, Sajelle, Jessica, Emily, Alex, Rafe (whose older brother had recently died), and Sam. And Lillie.

The boys weren’t really a problem; they could bring more land under cultivation, free Theresa’s sons for more skilled work. Strong young backs would earn their own keep, and then some. It was the five pregnant girls that Theresa and Senni had argued about. “Five now, and how many later?” Senni demanded. Her lusterless hair straggled around her thin face. “Scott Wilkins says each of those girls is carrying triplets!”

“What do you want me to do, Senni? Abandon them on the range to die?”

“Find them jobs in Wenton, like the others!”

“It was tough enough finding town jobs for the other three girls. I had to call in every favor we owe.”

“On their behalf. Strangers.”

“Not to me.”

“What do you think the boys are going to say when they find five pregnant teenagers here? Eating our food and whelping God-knows-what… what do you think the people in Wenton are going to say?”

Theresa went silent. Bonnie, Julie, and Sophie would all have left Wenton before their pregnancies began to show. That was part of the bargain that Theresa, hating herself for having to negotiate with bewildered and frightened children, had insisted on. Wenton, like most small towns now, was pretty conservative. It was a survival trait. People supported each other, helped each other, protected each other. The other side of that was conformity, provincialism, distrust of anything strange. Nothing could be stranger than Madison, Sajelle, Jessica, Emily, and Lillie. Unless it was their fetuses.

“Senni,” Theresa said, and merely saying her daughter’s name brought welling up all the love and frustration Theresa felt for this most difficult of her four living children. All her life, Senni had hurled herself against circumstances. Almost always, she’d lost. Theresa’s heart ached for her.

“Senni, I know what people in Wenton are going to say. Even if Madison and Jessie… you know. But I can’t help it. Don’t you see… there’s nothing I can do. All my choices are bad. I can’t send them someplace else because there is no other place for them. I can’t throw them out to die. I can’t do anything but keep them and try to muddle on. All of us, getting through.”

“And I don’t have a vote.”

It always came down to this, with Senni. “No,” Theresa said wearily, “you don’t. I still run this farm, which means I still make the decisions. Not you, not the boys. That’s the way it is.”

“Fine,” Senni said, with the triumphant coldness of having forced her mother into the role of bully. Which of course left Senni as the innocent victim. “You get your way, Mother. They stay.”

Theresa let Senni have the last word. God, she was grateful that her sons all had more easy-going temperaments. They might not like having the kids here, especially Carlo, given to fits of religion. But they wouldn’t fight her.

That left only the fight with Madison and Jessica, which also took place in the barn. The old horse dozed in his stall, and the half-feral cat, Pablum (never was a cat more inappropriately named) toyed with a maimed rat in the corner. Theresa hoped that Madison, fastidious, didn’t notice the rat.

Madison said, “Tess, I mean it. I want an abortion.”

“Me, too,” said Jessica.

“I told you, it’s not that simple,” Theresa said patiently. “One more time… this is not the world you left. Abortion is illegal again. Too many Christians decided that all our troubles were caused by Godless practices, starting with Roe v. Wade.”

“With who?” Jessica said.

Madison said, “You also told us that laws don’t count for much any more, because there’s nobody to enforce them.”

True enough. Theresa, Senni, and the boys had learned to defend what was theirs. All of them could shoot. Ammunition was a high priority on her yearly budget. And as arable land shifted in their favor, there could only be more “refugees” to defend against.

She heard Senni’s voice jeering in her head: “So why shoot them and not this lot? Same thing.”

“Yes, Madison, there’s nobody to enforce laws. Mostly. But there’s also nobody to perform abortions. You already argued with Scott, and he absolutely refuses.”

“He’s too interested in the monsters we’re supposed to give birth to,” Jessica sneered. “Wants to take apart their genes. No way. Not me. Let Emily and Sajelle and Lillie be his own private genetic experiments. Shit, Sajelle probably will love having his wrinkled old hands on her.”

Madison ignored Jessica. “I don’t believe there’s no place in Wenton or Amarillo to get an abortion! I just don’t believe it! My mother told me that abortions were illegal when her mother was a girl and people got them anyway!”

When Madison’s grandmother was a girl. A hundred and ten years ago.

Jessica said, “If you don’t help us, Theresa, I’ll do it to myself.”

“You’d kill yourself.”

“Maybe.” Jessica smirked. The girl knew there was no way Theresa would let her do it to herself, or to Madison.

“I wish you weren’t so damn maternal!” Cole had once yelled at Theresa when they’d been fighting about how little time she gave him since Jody and Carlo were born. It hadn’t been a happy marriage.

“Please, Tess,” Madison whispered, her eyes filling with tears. “I can’t go through with this birth. I just can’t.”

And Theresa had given in, out of God-knew-what twisted reasons. Pity. Friendship. Jealousy. Practicality. Fear. So now she sat on the hard bench of the primitive cart Spring had made, behind a wheezing horse, going to the train at Wenton and then on to Amarillo to find Lillie an uncle and Madison an abortionist.

“Why is the town called ‘Wenton’?” Lillie asked. The sun was rising, gold and pink, above the endless plains.

“Because we just ‘went on’,” Theresa said. “It’s not a real town, just a stop on the railroad that was routed through here after the climate shifts made these parts of New Mexico and west Texas better for ranching and farming. The global warming—” She saw that Lillie again wasn’t listening.

Just in time, Theresa stopped the cart. Lillie leaned over the side and threw up.

Only she and Emily had morning sickness. Lillie’s was worse. Scott said it was normal (Theresa had never been sick during her pregnancies, except for Carlo) and might go away after the first trimester. The fetuses, as far as he could tell with the equipment with him, were all healthy and thriving. Jessica was right about one thing: Scott was intensely interested in the pribir children’s children. It was the reason he stayed on. Not even Senni objected to that. Already townspeople had heard there was a doctor in the area. Three people had come for treatment, paying Scott (and the farm) in livestock or Net credit.

When Lillie had finished retching, she swiped her hand across her mouth. “Sorry, Tess.”

“Don’t apologize. You can’t help it.”

“No. Will I recognize him?”

“No. He’s eighty-seven years old. But he’ll recognize you,” Theresa said. Lillie was only seven and a half months older than when Keith had seen her last.

“Tess, did you go on to college?”

Theresa remembered, now, how direct Lillie had always been, how intense about finding out all she could about everything she could. “Yes, I went to college.”

“Where?”

“Saint Lucia’s. A small Catholic college for girls.” Her mother’s choice.

“What did you study?”

“Elementary education. I didn’t finish.”

“Why not?” Lillie said.

“A lot of reasons. I wasn’t very academic, you probably remember that. And then my father lost a lot of money. And I met my husband and got married.”

“What was his name? What was he like?”

“Lillie, I’d rather not talk about that.”

“Okay. I… pull over again, Tess!”

This bout of retching lasted longer. Probably the jouncing cart wasn’t helping. Theresa waited, watching the light grow on the eastern horizon. It would be best to reach Wenton before dawn.

“Just one more question,” Lillie said when they’d started forward again. “When you went back home after Quantico, and then to high school and college and everything, was it hard? Did people still stalk you and threaten you and point you out as a pribir kid?”

Theresa thought about how to answer. “At first, yes. My parents had me home-schooled for the rest of high school. I entered college under a different name, nobody but the admissions committee knew who I was. And later… well, the world had more important things to think about. We were pretty much forgotten.” Not even Cole knew, when I married him. And when I told him, it helped destroy our marriage.

“But,” Lillie said, “didn’t doctors and geneticists and everybody want to keep examining your genome?”

“Lillie, you don’t understand. I keep telling you, but you’re not listening. Everything changed. Climate, government, economics. And then the war. Nobody funded scientific research. Nobody cared.”

Lillie was silent for a long time. Then she said, “I don’t believe that. Somewhere there are scientists still investigating genetics. In one of those rich enclaves, maybe. Scientists don’t give up.”

She was probably right. “Then you better hope they don’t discover you kids are back. Or about your babies.”

Wenton grew on the horizon, its one-story buildings lower than the oldest cottonwoods and level with the newer oak and juniper.

“Tess,” Lillie said in a different voice, “will it hurt? The birth?”

Tess glanced at the girl. God, so young. She said gently, “Yes, it will hurt. I won’t lie to you. But when you hold your baby in your arms, it’s all worth it. The day Jody was born was the happiest day of my life.”

“I don’t feel that way.”

“Not yet,” Tess said. “Wait.”

Lillie didn’t answer. The wind was definitely picking up, but they’d reached Wenton. Theresa saw it suddenly through Lillie’s eyes, a weird mixture of time periods. Buildings with traditionally thick walls to keep out the murderous heat, but made of foamcast and topped with microwave rods like tall slender poles. No street paving, almost no vehicles, but a VR bar with garish holo-ads projecting onto the boards that acted as a sidewalk. No school (kids learned off the Net, if at all), no supermarket, no drugstore, no dry-cleaners—what else had existed in the past which Lillie remembered? No books or music stores or movie theaters, all that came on the Net if it came at all. And the train tracks winding away across the mixed mesquite and new green. No, she couldn’t imagine what Lillie thought of Wenton.

They stabled the horse in the foamcast building run by old Tom Carter to protect anything from dust and storms, for a reasonable fee. The windowless building smelled of animals, and Theresa saw Lillie gulp hard and leave quickly. Theresa remembered. With Carlo, nearly anything made her throw up.

She put her arm around Lillie against the wind. Bent almost double, they reached the train station and gratefully ducked inside. Open at both ends for the train to pull through, the building was hot but at least sheltered.

“Does the train run on diesel?” Lillie asked. “I thought all that was illegal now because of emissions.”

“Yes, but an exception was made for trains, in order to get food to cities. Also, there’s some form of superconductivity involved, I don’t understand what but it was one of the last things built before the war. Partly built. We’re lucky to have it.”

Or maybe not. Theresa watched as people—too many people, too badly dressed, carrying too many bundles —got off the train. Refugees. Had to be. Well, if they were willing to work, there was work digging more irrigation systems and wells, bringing more land under cultivation, channeling the newfound water. However, not all refugees could or would do manual labor. Those were the dangerous ones.

So far, the farm had been lucky. This southeast corner of New Mexico was still very remote and the world population as a whole was much less than it had once been. Wenton, despite its growing prosperity, had received few visitors. Neither had the farm, miles out on the once-desert.

But nothing stayed hidden forever.

CHAPTER 14

Lillie fell asleep on the train. At Amarillo, Theresa woke her and they set out on foot through the city. It was quite a walk but bicycle cabs were exorbitant and anyway Lillie, except for morning sickness, seemed to be in superb physical shape. What had the pribir done to her?

Better not to know.

At the nursing home, Lillie pressed her lips tight together. Theresa’s heart went out to her. Such an adult gesture for a child.

Keith Anderson had dealt shrewdly with his money. Unlike most very old people, who were cared for by often grudging families or not at all, he had been able to buy life-long care in this decent, if shabby, for-profit home. Theresa had been here once before. She led Lillie to the tiny third-floor room where Keith lay in bed. At the threshold she paused, wanting to say something to prepare Lillie… stupid. Nothing would prepare her.

“Lillie!” The thin voice cracked and the easy tears of the old slid down Keith’s wrinkled cheeks. Lillie stopped dead, collected herself, moved forward. Theresa thought, She was always brave.

“Hello, Uncle Keith. I’m back.”

“Lillie…”

She sat on the edge of his bed. Theresa saw him wince slightly, his bones disturbed. Lillie, unused to the old, didn’t notice. She took his hand. “Are you all right, Uncle Keith? Is this a good place for you to live?”

“Yes. Oh, Lillie, it’s so good to see you. I thought…”

“You thought I was dead. But I’ve just been aboard the pribir ship for seven and a half months. I mean, forty years. Do you know about time dilation?”

“Yes. Oh, Lillie… you look so much like your mother.”

Once, at Andrews Air Force Base, Theresa had seen a picture of Lillie’s dead mother. Lillie looked nothing like her.

“Once,” Keith quavered, “when we were young… Barbara was only four or five…”

Theresa slipped out. Keith wanted to live in the past. A past where he was young and fresh, maybe a later past where Lillie was a little girl. Theresa went down the steps to the living room. Several old people in deep chairs sat expressionlessly watching something on the Net. A stale smell hung in the air. Outside, the wind howled around the edges of Amarillo’s shabby buildings.

“Is there a terminal I can use?” Theresa asked a woman who might have been a nurse, or a cleaning lady, or a murderer. Government regulatory agencies had all but disappeared. Ordinarily Theresa never thought about this; it was a given. But now she was seeing things through Lillie’s eyes.

The terminal was even older than the one at the farm, and slower. Theresa had few contacts on the local Net site, and none in the UnderNet, that shadowy information reached only through secret data atolls that changed constantly. But Scott had told her what to do, although he wouldn’t do it from the farm computer. “Too dangerous,” he’d said, without explaining.

“There’s no one to enforce laws,” Theresa had told Madison, but that wasn’t strictly true. There were organizations as shadowy as the UnderNet, vigilantes and religious groups and supremacist groups and anti-science groups and God-knew-what-all. The religious groups were the least vicious but the most pervasive. A vindictive God was apparently a great comfort to some when the planet itself seemed to turn vindictive. Theresa didn’t understand the reasoning, but it was widespread enough to earn respectful caution.

Nonetheless, she found an abortionist in Amarillo, messaged with her, and set up an appointment for Madison and Jessie. More credit spent, plus three more train tickets. Although only Theresa’s would be round-trip. Still, facing Senni would be no fun.

Theresa walked back to the living room. None of the old people had changed position or expression. She took a chair and pulled out the sewing she’d brought. They couldn’t start back until sunset, when the wind would die down. Trips away from the farm were usually measured in day-long units.

Maybe Lillie would want to stay here with Keith. Work for room and board, one less mouth to feed at the farm… until the triplets were born. If Keith lasted that long.

She started sewing a maternity dress for Emily.

“I asked to stay there,” Lillie said on the way home. The sky had clouded over, and Theresa was pushing the horse to make the farm before all light faded. She had a halogen torch but hoped to save it. They had spent a few hours in Wenton, checking on the kids working there to earn tickets home: Bonnie, Sophie, Julie, Jason, Derek, Mike. Julie had cried when Lillie and Theresa left.

Theresa said, “Why didn’t you stay in Amarillo, then?”

“Uncle Keith said no.”

“Did he say why?”

“He wants me with you and Scott. He said he can’t help me if anything goes even a little bit wrong, and you can.”

“That’s sensible.”

“I won’t see him again, I don’t think,” Lillie said. “He’s close to dying.”

Theresa didn’t deny it. “You can keep in touch on the Net.”

“It isn’t the same.”

Of course not. Nothing was the same. The horse plodded through the pearly, inadequate light.

“Tess,” Lillie said after a long while, “I don’t want to be a mother.”

Not Lillie, too. “Are you saying you want an abortion?”

“No. I talked it over with Uncle Keith and… no. He said I don’t understand now how precious the continuing of life is, but I will someday.”

Theresa thought of Jody, Carlo, Spring, and her dead daughter. Of Senni and Dolly and the child Senni carried. Yes.

“Maybe he’s right,” Lillie said, with her odd mix of measured judiciousness and child’s complaint, “but I don’t want to be a mother anyway. I’m not interested in babies. And I don’t think… I don’t think I can love them like Uncle Keith loved me.”

Theresa suddenly saw that this was true. Lillie was too detached, or too young, or too something. She was many good qualities, but not tender.

“We’ll all help you,” Theresa said, inwardly groaning. More work.

“Thank you. And I’ll do the best I can. For Uncle Keith.”

The light was gone. Theresa switched on the torch. A sudden breeze brought a faint, pungent odor, and she gave a cry of pleasure. Cattle. Her sons were home!

Her heart lifted, and the night seemed much brighter.

The abortionist operated in a clean, windowless basement divided by curtains into “rooms.” Theresa brought Jessica, defiant, and Madison, scared, on the Wednesday train. “If you would help, we wouldn’t have to do this,” she told Scott accusingly before they left.

He didn’t meet her eyes. “I can’t. I know you don’t understand, Theresa.”

“Fucking right I don’t. This woman isn’t even an M.D. And you of all people should know that a bunch of genes aren’t sacred!”

Scott lost his temper. “It’s because I know how temporary a ‘bunch of genes,’ as you disparagingly call it, can be that I believe what I do! Those are people those girls are carrying, damn it, no matter what you say! If those engineered babies aren’t people, then neither are you or me!”

“Shut up, they’ll hear you in there. So what are you going to do, Scott, alert a vigilante religious group? Abortions in progress! Murder the killers so they can’t murder a bunch of non-breathing tissue!”

Scott turned away. “Let me be, Theresa. You know damn well I won’t say anything to anybody. But let me have my beliefs. You have yours.”

“Mine don’t make two frightened girls spread their legs for an unlicensed stranger.”

“Let me be!”

“Okay, Scott,” Theresa said wearily. “I’ll let you be. I need you. The other girls need you. Just so long as you know that you’re clinging to a selfish, irrational, superstitious belief for your own comfort, no matter who else suffers.”

Scott strode away, toward the open range. Almost sunrise—he shouldn’t go too far. Fuck it. Let him get lost and roast in the sun that was as unrelenting as he was.

In Amarillo, Theresa waited upstairs with Madison while the abortionist took Jessica downstairs. Jessica, her bravado stretched thin, scowled and tossed her head. Madison sat completely still, saying nothing, eyes wide and frozen.

“Maddy,” Theresa said, the old name rising, unbidden, from some well of memory, “it won’t hurt. She has good equipment and reasonable pharms.” Which was why it cost so much.

Madison didn’t answer.

Half an hour later they were called down. Jessica lay on a mattress on the floor, covered with a light blanket. She was smiling. “I’m all right.”

‘Yes,” Theresa said, wondering what she was feeling. She had borne five children, all joyously. Even Spring, born in such a hard time that the season he was named for had been the only good thing happening anywhere around Theresa.

“And I’m not pregnant,” Jessie said, without ambivalence.

“It went very well,” the woman said crisply. “She can travel in a few hours, I think. Do you want the tissue?”

“No!” Theresa said.

The woman shrugged. “Some people do. Now you, young lady. This way.”

“Wait,” Theresa said, “I do want it.” She needed to look. She knew what a three-month fetus looked like; this was her only chance to see if what the girls carried was indeed normal, or if it was some sort of… what?

The woman pointed to another curtain and led Madison away.

Theresa made herself go through the curtain. A dark blue plastic box sat on a table, its cover beside it. She peered in, and her eyes filled with relieved tears. Normal.

She should take one of the fetuses for Scott, she realized belatedly. He would want the genes. No, he wouldn’t, not this way… not Scott. Or would he? Which was stronger, the religious or the scientist?

Suddenly she knew that whatever Scott wanted, she couldn’t carry this thing back with her on the train. She just couldn’t. This clump of genetically engineered tissue, this dead baby.

She went back to sit by Jessica, who had fallen back asleep. Theresa studied the young face smoothed into blankness by sleep. Forty years ago she had been afraid of Jessica. Jessica the bully, quick with her fists, sarcastic about everything, dangerous and despicable. Forty years ago. Theresa reached out and smoothed a few stray hairs back from Jessica’s forehead.

Time passed. Too much time — Madison was taking much longer than Jessie had. Theresa got up and made her way through the maze of curtains. At the end she found an actual door, wood set into the foamcast wall, and went through it.

“Use the calatal!” cried a woman Theresa hadn’t seen before. She and the abortionist were applying various pieces of equipment to Madison, unconscious on a table. There was blood everywhere, way too much blood. The smell of it, metallic and hot, hung in the air.

“Get out!” the second woman yelled at Theresa. “You’re not sterile!”

Theresa blundered back out the door. She stood there, not breathing, for what seemed like hours. When the door finally opened, Theresa already knew.

“Unexpected tearing,” the abortionist said unsteadily. “It’s never happened before, I couldn’t stop it, I tried and tried… I’m so sorry…”

A sound behind her. Theresa turned to see Jessica leaning against the wall. “Madison’s dead, isn’t she?” Jessica said, and when no one answered, Jessica—the bully, the truculent—cried and cried, and would not be comforted.

The rest of the summer brought many good things. It didn’t matter. Every night Theresa dreamed of Madison’s face. Not even the birth of Senni’s child in October made a difference to Theresa’s mood, which made no sense. Senni was her daughter, the new child her granddaughter. Madison was only someone Theresa had known a long time ago, in another time and place.

Senni had an easy birth. The baby was healthy, perfect, strong despite being three weeks premature. Senni named her Clari, after nothing in particular.

Patients came to Scott from towns up to fifty miles away. It turned out he had bought a small ad on the Net. By the beginning of November he was going into Wenton three days a week to hold “office hours” at a tiny rented room. He bought a horse for this trip, helped by Jody, who also taught him to ride. Fortunately, Scott was a natural. There was a lot of work: the warming and increased rain had had brought malaria and dengue fever this far north. Simple diseases to treat, even to vaccinate against—if you had the knowledge and the drugs.

The delivery of drugs was only intermittently reliable. There was no Post Office anymore. Information went by the Net; packages went by the few struggling private companies that exploited the rail circuit. Scott ordered double amounts in staggered deliveries; some got through. Eventually.

He charged patients according to what he learned about them on the Net. Often the fee was paid in welcome foodstuffs or livestock. As his reputation spread, Scott began to get rich people from the enclave outside of Ruidoso. Except for buying drugs, Scott turned every credit he made over to Theresa for the farm.

The crops flourished in the summer heat and new rain, despite the punishing daily wind and violent storms. The harvest was rich. Theresa was now beyond subsistence farming, and ten years ago that had been a glittering goal. The warming had killed billions of people, one way or another: geographic dislocation, epidemic diseases, political collapse, random violence. The war had killed billions more. But Theresa was going to have her best year ever.

Winners and losers, she thought, and her mood did not improve.

At the beginning of October, Bonnie Carson and Julie Cunningham arrived back at the farm, brought by old Tom Carter from Wenton.

“Theresa, these girls would rather be with you,” Tom said, his ancient, pale blue eyes giving away nothing.

“Come in, Tom,” Theresa said. She stood in the cool dawn, already dressed, and bit off her questions until she was alone with the girls. You didn’t burden outsiders with family troubles.

“Got to get back,” Tom said.

Theresa glanced at the brightening sky. “You can’t now. Not in that open cart.”

“I’ll spend the day at the Graham place,” Tom said, not looking at her. The Grahams owned the next homestead; Tom could make it there before the punishing wind began. Theresa understood. Tom didn’t want to be around whatever was going to happen next any more than Theresa did. She, however, didn’t have a choice.

Julie helped Bonnie out of the back of the cart. Bonnie could hardly walk. She held her left arm cradled in her right. Her strong-planed face was covered with bruises, the lip split open. Jody, Theresa’s oldest son, appeared at her side, casually armed. When Tom had left, Julie quavered, “She was in a fight. She—”

“I can see she was in a fight,” Theresa snapped. “Bring her inside. Jody, go find Scott and tell him to bring his medical stuff. Julie, stop sniffling. Did Bonnie miscarry? Any show of blood?”

“I don’t think so,” Julie sniffed.

“I’m… okay,” Bonnie muttered.

Her arm was broken. Scott sedated Bonnie and set the arm. Bonnie lay on Lillie’s bed; God, they were going to have to jam two more beds in here somewhere. The farm house had only three small bedrooms. Theresa, Senni, and the two babies were in one; Rafe, Alex, Sam, and Scott in another; Lillie, Emily, and Sajelle in the third. Theresa’s sons, having ceded their mattresses to pregnant girls, now slept in the barn with the migrant laborers who drifted through. And there were no more extra mattresses. Well, Rafe or Alex or Sam, any two, could give up theirs. Although five mattresses would never fit in this tiny space…

She was pondering housekeeping to avoid thinking about anything else.

Scott frowned. “Bonnie will be fine. In fact, the break is already healing much faster than it should, and her injuries are much lighter than they should be for the kind of beating she took. The pribir did something to her, Tess. Boosted her immune system somehow.”

“Too bad they didn’t give her more muscles so she could have kicked the hell out of those bastards.”

Scott wasn’t listening. Probably he was running over medical possibilities in his head. Theresa went into the great room.

Fifteen people and two babies awaited her. Infant Clari nursed at Senni’s breast; little Dolly wandered around, whimpering for her breakfast. Sajelle got Dolly a piece of bread. Everybody else looked expectantly at Theresa.

“What?” she snapped. Irritation as cover for feeling burdened beyond bearing.

Jody spoke up. “Mom, we’ve been talking. Julie told us why that girl was beat up. She’s… somebody thought she liked girls instead of boys.” He said it with distaste, and Theresa sighed. Her children had grown up in a world they didn’t choose, a frightened world backsliding into protective conservatism. Not what she would have chosen for them, but there it was.

“All right, listen up,” she told everyone. “I don’t care if Bonnie likes boys, girls, or roadrunners, and that means nobody here is going to care, either. She’s one of us—”

Senni opened her mouth, closed it again, scowled.

“—because she was with me and the others at Andrews Air Force Base. I’ve told you about it, and that telling is all I need to do. I still run this place. Bonnie is a scared, pregnant kid, just like the others. She stays here. Julie, too. Now, is anybody going to fight me on this? Jody?”

“No.” Promptly. Bless her oldest, he had always been her ally. “Carlo?”

Hesitation. Carlo, she knew, dabbled in religion. Then, “No, Mom.”

“Spring?”

“Not at all.” Her sweet-tempered boy. “Senni?”

Senni said coldly, “You haven’t left much choice, have you? This hardly seems a time to bring in more dependents, with what happened on that farm near Hobbs. But naturally I’ll go along with whatever you say.”

“Good,” Theresa said. They were all nervous about the other farm, forty miles away. Its owners had disappeared from the Net, and Wenton rumor was that refugees had attacked, killing the owners. There was no law enforcement to check up on the farm, and so far no one else had either, probably from fear. The same thing had happened eighty miles east, in Texas, and there the investigating neighbors had also disappeared. Theresa said, “Now, about rooms—”

Spring interrupted her. “Mom, we need an extension on the house. Harvest is over. The herd is here for the winter—anyway, six more GPS collars broke and we can’t just keep track of the herd remotely any more, so they have to be here. Work is slack enough right now that Alex, Rafe, Sam, and I can build it in a week.” Alex and Rafe, both slight boys next to Theresa’s hulking sons, looked startled. Sam scowled. “All right?”

“Yes,” Theresa said, “good. Now let’s get breakfast.”

Five mothers-to-be, all carrying triplets. It was going to have be a hell of an extension.

For the first time since Madison’s death, she felt better.

CHAPTER 15

Keith died two weeks later. Theresa, amazed that he had hung on this long, got the news on the Net. The computer had been moved into the new part of the building, which had four more tiny bedrooms and a smaller gathering room that Scott called grandly “the den.”

She found Lillie on her knees, weeding the winter herb garden in the relatively calm air after sunset. The girl, seven and a half months along, looked up over the massive curve of her belly.

“Lillie, should you be doing that?”

“Sure. I’m fine.”

“You look like a beach ball.”

Lillie laughed. Theresa could say things like that to Lillie. None of her own kids had ever seen a beach. Lillie’s morning sickness had ended after four months and, like the other five pregnant girls, she was healthy, strong, and active still.

“Lillie, I have something to tell you. It’s going to be hard. Your Uncle Keith died this morning.”

“I’m glad,” Lillie said simply.

Theresa stared at her, then slowly nodded. Lillie was right. Keith had been lingering too long in weakness and pain. And how like Lillie not to cry or wail, but to accept. Julie would have needed emotional attention for days.

Lillie said, “Do I need to do anything? Go to Amarillo?”

“No.” Funerals were simple now; you put the body in a sheet or box and buried it as soon as possible. Embalming, viewings, waterproof caskets, funeral directors… all gone. And by Theresa at least, not missed. “I made the arrangements on the Net.”

Lillie nodded. Sweat stuck tendrils of brown hair to her forehead and nape. The armpits of her maternity smock, a basic tent, were stained dark. Even in November the days, if not the nights, were warm. “I’d like to be alone for a bit, Tess. To walk out a ways.”

“Just don’t go too far.” Theresa would have Jody keep an eye on her.

Lillie hauled herself to her feet and waddled off, her bulky figure silhouetted against the fiery sky.

Theresa sighed and went to find Jody. Instead she found Spring and Julie, sitting in the seclusion of a drooping cottonwood tree. Julie’s head was nestled on Spring’s shoulder. He put his hand under her chin, lifted it, and kissed her.

Oh my dear Lord.

They hadn’t seen her. Theresa crept silently away. She hadn’t seen it coming. Not at all, not at all. Julie was heavily pregnant, and fourteen years old! Spring was twenty-four. And Julie, timid and weepy—why couldn’t Spring at least have chosen Lillie instead?

Theresa sat on the ground behind the barn and laughed at herself. A mother, choosing among pregnant fourteen-year-olds for her son! And it was inevitable that her boys choose somebody, sooner or later. Already she suspected Carlo was visiting a girl in Wenton. And for Spring, that tender-hearted rescuer of wounded rabbits and broken-winged birds, Julie was probably inevitable. Get used to it, Theresa.

It was full dark when she went back to the house, its candles gleaming through the small windows. Jody met her on the porch. “Where’s Lillie?”

Theresa felt her stomach sink. “Isn’t she here?”

“We thought she was with you.”

“No, I was going to… but I forgot because… she went for a walk, she said. Her Uncle Keith finally died, and she wanted to be alone.”

“Which way?”

“West. But you can’t…” Jody was already gone toward the barn to saddle his horse. A half moon, stars… all her boys could ride at night if they had to. Heart hammering, Theresa went inside.

How long?

They were back in an hour, Lillie seated on the horse, clutching the pommel desperately. Lillie, child of New York subways and a spaceship, had never learned to ride. Jody walked alongside, leading the horse. Theresa couldn’t help her image: Joseph and the pregnant Mary. None of her kids except Carlo would even recognize the icon.

“She’s fine,” Jody called. “But, Mom, we’ve got trouble.” Inside, he told them: a large band of refugees camped by the arroyo a mile to the west. Lillie had seen them before they’d seen her, and had caught the glint of moonlight on guns. She’d been starting back when Jody found her. He’d taken a closer look with night-vision binoculars.

“They have at least one shoulder-mounted missile launcher. Military, looks like. About thirty men and women, no kids that I saw. Military tents. This is no ragtag bunch of migrants, Mom.”

No. Theresa knew what it was. How had they escaped it this long, so many years, with the land growing more arable and desirable and prosperous? Dumb luck, she guessed.

She said quietly, “Lillie, take the other girls into the bedroom. You go, too, Sam and Alex and Rafe.”

“No,” Rafe said.

Theresa looked at him. She remembered him as a skinny, intrusive, intelligent nerd, and he still was. She almost tended to forget that he and Alex (but not Sam, noisy as ever) were around, so completely had they become her sons’ responsibility.

Rafe said, “We’re in this together. You said so over and over, Theresa. Whatever you’re going to do, tell us.”

“All right!” Theresa snapped. Rafe wasn’t the problem, anyway. Scott was.

She continued, “We have a few guns and ammunition and five people who can shoot. Nowhere near enough to stand against what Jody and Lillie saw. We’ve known that for a while. But we also have something else, something left over from before you came back, Rafe. A bioweapon.”

Scott jerked in his chair, rose to his feet.

“It’s an engineered virus,” Theresa said steadily. “Ten built-in replications after release before the terminator gene kicks in. Airborne. Lethal within five minutes.”

“Jesus God, Theresa!”

“Scott, don’t lecture me. Just don’t. I knew this day would come eventually, and when I had the chance to buy this stuff left over from the war, I did. I’m not letting all of you die because I’m too squeamish. That would be like being presented with a choice and choosing them to live, not us.”

Her knees trembled. Yes, she’d known this day would come, but she’d dreaded its coming, too. Thirty men and women… who would kill without any trembling. Remember that. At least there were no children with them. She hoped.

Theresa looked at the faces around the room. The rains had tapered off and the solar panels generated every clear day, but she tended to store the power or use it for farm needs. Candlelight flickered shadows around the room so that she saw a cheekbone here, a chin there. But it seemed to Theresa that she could see all their eyes, every pair. Shocked, frightened, impassive, angry.

“You can’t,” Scott said. “You don’t even know that those refugees are going to attack here!”

“I know. And so do you. They’re camped closest to us, we’re on a line from the other two attacks, people don’t carry around missile-launchers for fun. And anyway,” she said, her voice rising in fury, “what if the attack isn’t on us? What if it’s on the Graham farm, or even on Wenton? Is it the moral high ground to let those people die because we’re not the direct target?”

Scott said, “You’re going to kill—”

“Yes! Would you rather sacrifice these kids and unborn babies and my sons and daughter and grandchildren? Would you, Scott? Because if the answer is no, you better not judge what I’m doing.”

“You’re not the law, Tess!”

Abruptly the fury went out of her. “Yes. I am. Out here, now, I am.”

She put her hands over her face. Jody took them down, gently. “I’ll do it, Mom. Tell me where the canister is.”

She gazed at her first-born. Yes, he was the right person. Spring was too sweet-natured, Carlo too entangled in religious conflict. Carlo sat in a corner, his face gray. Well, she couldn’t talk to him now. At least he wasn’t interfering.

She led Jody out to the porch. Scott took a step as if to follow her, then didn’t. Outside, the infernal wind howled around the barn, blew her hair into her mouth, sent a chair carelessly left outside flying across the yard. Night wind, hot angry breath of the violated land. Well, the wind was her ally now.

“You’ll have to circle around the far side of the arroyo to get downwind of them,” she told Jody. “The dispersion distance is supposed to be only a mile, but I don’t trust it. Some micro might reach here. I only have six masks. I think I better take everybody in the bus, maybe three miles out into the desert.”

“All right,” Jody said neutrally.

“If they catch you—”

“They won’t catch me.”

They walked hand-in-hand to the barn, Jody keeping Theresa upright against the wind and her own trembling. She showed him where the canister was buried and gave him the code to activate it. His horse was already saddled from looking for Lillie. In ten minutes he was gone.

Theresa fought her way back to the house. “All right, everybody, into the bus. Now. We need to get out past the dispersion distance. Come on, we don’t have time to waste.” She didn’t look at any of them directly.

They crowded into the ancient bus, eerily silent. The only noise was the wind. Theresa drove until she reached the start of a patch of desert, a reverse oasis in the greening land. When she turned off the engine, it was pitch dark.

Julie sobbed softly.

Someone cleared his throat.

The baby, carried in Senni’s arms, woke and whimpered for the breast.

Then she heard Lillie’s clear voice. “How long before we can return, Tess?”

“I’m going to give it five hours.” Twenty minutes per replication, ten replications. After that, even if remnants did reach the house, the virus would be inactive.

They would all have to endure five hours here. So they would.

Maybe a few of the kids would be able to fall asleep.

When they returned to the farm, Jody was there. He nodded at her. Carlo pushed past his brother and headed for the barn. Scott went directly to his room, looking suddenly much older than his fifty-three years.

Jody and Spring sat with her, drinking coffee, saying nothing, until Theresa told them she could sleep now, from sheer exhaustion.

When she woke late the next morning, all three of her sons were gone, plus, surprisingly, Sam. They’d taken the cart and the decrepit horse that drew it. Carlo must have been driving; Jody’s and Spring’s horses were gone but Carlo’s bay snorted in its stall. Theresa thought of saddling him, but she was at best an indifferent rider and the wind blew at its full force. She returned to the house.

They came in after sunset, filthy and silent. She had already brought the well hose to the back shed and filled the two oversize plastic garbage cans sometimes used as vertical bathtubs. When the men were washed, she had their dinner ready. She’d sent everyone else to their rooms or the “den,” damn if she cared how cramped they were in there for an entire evening. Scott had left a day early to do his doctoring in Wenton, leaving word with Senni that he’d spend several nights there. Just as well.

After he’d eaten ferociously, Jody said, “We buried them all. Mass grave. The weapons, plus anything else I thought we could use, we brought back on the cart. It’s all in the barn. You can look it over tomorrow.”

Theresa nodded. Slowly she said, “I never wanted this for my children. Not for any of you.”

“We know,” Spring said. He smiled. “Stop feeling guilty, Mom. You’re not responsible for every single bad thing that happens to us for our entire lives, you know.”

Jody said, “Motherhood is powerful.”

“But not that powerful,” Spring added.

“I want to say,” Jody added, “that Sam was an enormous help to us. He more than carried his share.”

Sam flushed with pleasure. He was sunburned, a whole day spent in that dangerous high-UV sun. Not good. But his angry, sullen look was gone. He’d been needed, and praised.

She said, “Carlo?”

He looked at her directly. Seeing the pain in his eyes, she could have wept. Carlo said, “We did what we had to. But I don’t have to pretend it wasn’t a mortal sin.” Abruptly he pushed his chair from the table, stood, and strode out.

Spring said, “He had a funeral. A mass, or whatever you call it, over the grave. Prayers and crosses in the air. I thought he’d never get done.”

“Let him have it, if it helps him,” Theresa said.

“Mom, he’s going into Wenton to that priest’s church, Father What’s-His-Name, spending the entire day with him, every Sunday. Did you know?”

She hadn’t. “I thought he was seeing some girl.”

“Carlo?” Jody laughed. “No. But I am.”

She was caught by surprise. “Well, you certainly took time for it that I didn’t notice. Who?”

He said defiantly, “Her name is Carolina Mendoza.”

Mexican. From the new encampment, growing larger every month, a few miles beyond Wenton. The source of migrant labor, especially at harvest… but of brides? How had Jody even met her? The Mexicans guarded their women zealously. Theresa didn’t ask. She said carefully, “Do her people mind you seeing her?”

“She doesn’t have any people,” Jody said. “Just a cousin. She’s been knocked around a lot. But she’s sweet and good and beautiful and very soon I’m going to marry her and bring her here.”

Careful, be careful. “Have you thought this through, Jody? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ve thought.”

But about what? Theresa wanted to say. Jody had been a teenager during the war with Mexico, which had been a confused and misbegotten side conflict to the global biowar. The warming, the depression, the greenhouse gases, the UV exposure —all of it had been harder on Mexico than on the United States. More people had starved, had died of diseases, had died of floods and storms and wildfires, had died period. Mexico had been desperate. Mexicans had flooded over the border in numbers too big to stop, or to economically tolerate. The state of Texas had gone to war, using illegal bioweapons in defiance of Congress and the entire federal government, and in a week the war was over. The anger and fear, on both sides, were not.

The bioweapon Jody had just used at the arroyo came from that war.

He said tightly, “Say it, Mom.”

Say what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking. No, just answer one question. Is Carolina welcome here?”

Even brief hesitation would be fatal. She said, “Of course.”

The relief that flooded Jody’s eyes made her chest tighten.

Spring said, “Of course she’s welcome, if you’re marrying her. But Senni won’t like it.”

“Senni never likes anything,” Jody said.

Spring grinned. “Well, tell her that if we can have five pregnant genetically engineered girls carrying fifteen mutated babies, then we can have one senorita. But I have something to say, too, Mom.”

Theresa groaned. “No, Spring, no. She’s only fourteen years old!”

“Fifteen last month. And I want to marry her, Mom.”

“Who?” Jody demanded, and despite herself, Theresa laughed. “Jody, you’ve been so wrapped up in your own girl that you haven’t even noticed your brother falling all over Julie.”

“Julie? She’s fourteen!”

“Fifteen. You going to give me a hard time, big brother?” Jody shook his head.

“Well, then,” Spring said, “we can go to Wenton together and have a double wedding. I hear Father What’s-His-Name is back in the marrying business. And that will please Carlo. Hey, maybe Carlo can marry Emily or Sajelle!”

“Ha ha,” Theresa said. “Now get to bed. It’s back to the cows in the morning.”

Somehow they had moved from murder to marriage. Theresa shook her head to disperse the sense of unreality. It didn’t go away. But, then, she was getting used to that.

CHAPTER 16

Lillie went into labor the second week in December, in the aftermath of a storm so severe it knocked down the wellhouse. Flash flood in the arroyo carried off and killed two head of cattle. The men, plus Senni and Carolina, were all out on the farm, repairing damage. Theresa was minding her grandchildren, Dolly and baby Clari. Lillie, Emily, Sajelle, Bonnie, and Julie all worked at tasks near the house, so Theresa could keep an eye on them, too.

Lillie looked up from making tortillas at the wooden table. “Oh!”

“What is it, Lil?” Bonnie said.

“I think it’s starting. A sort of sharp pain in my gut, here.”

Theresa said, “You can’t be up to sharp pains yet, Lillie. Your water hasn’t even broken.”

“It just did. And we don’t know what the pribir did to change labor,” Lillie said logically, then doubled over with a look of surprise that was half comical, half pain.

Theresa got her into bed. Eight months, shouldn’t be a problem. Eight months was perfectly viable. Everything was ready. Except maybe Theresa and Lillie.

“Get that sheet of plastic on the bed first, Emily, there’s going to be blood and I want to save as many sheets as possible. Bonnie, heat water and boil the scissors and the string. Sajelle, warm blankets and line three of those baskets I bought in Wenton. Keep the blankets warm. Julie, watch Dolly and Clari. If Lillie starts screaming, take the kids out to the barn.”

“I’m not going to scream,” Lillie said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t scream,” Lillie said.

And she didn’t, although at one point she bit her bottom lip almost through. Labor lasted only thirty minutes. Theresa couldn’t believe it; she’d been twenty-seven hours with Jody.

Sajelle turned out to be invaluable. Steady, quick, unsqueamish. Theresa sent Emily and Bonnie away; no use cluttering up the tiny room with more people than necessary.

“You doing good, Lillie,” Sajelle said.

“Talk to me,” Lillie said, her face horribly contorted.

“Remember the garden on the ship?” Sajelle said. The pribir seemed a strange subject for Sajelle to choose, until Theresa realized that the aliens were the only experience the two girls had in common. “Them gorgeous flowers by the pool, yellow and red, smelling like heaven? Remember that music cube of Hannah’s that we played over and over? ‘Don’t Matter None to Me.’ ” She began to hum.

“Keep talking,” Lillie grunted.

“Okay. Remember the day we all swapped make-up and tried on different colors? Or the time Rafe took apart the lawn robot thing and Pam was so mad? Lillie?”

“Keep talking,” Lillie gasped, and Sajelle did, talking her friend through it, talking her on, talking her down from the bad heights and the worse depths, until it was over and three babies lay in the warmed baskets, two boys and a girl.

“They’re human,” Sajelle said, and Theresa looked up, startled at the deep relief in Sajelle’s voice. Sajelle cradled her own belly.

“Lillie,” Theresa said, “you have three beautiful children.” But Lillie was already asleep, her face turned toward the wall.

Lillie named the babies Keith, Cord, and Kella. She nursed them with a puzzled look on her face. “What is it, Lillie?” Theresa said.

“They don’t really seem like mine.”

Theresa noticed that Lillie was conscientious in keeping the infants fed, dry, and warm. But she didn’t play with them, or make cooing noises at them, or cuddle them. The two people most interested in the triplets were Carolina and Scott.

Carolina spoke no English, a fact Jody had neglected to mention. How much Spanish did Jody know? Enough, apparently. She was too thin but nonetheless buxom, with masses of dark hair and the prettiest face Theresa had ever seen, prettier even than Madison had been, except for a long wide scar that started at the right side of her chin and disappeared into her dress. Theresa wondered how far the scar extended and what it was from. She didn’t ask.

At first Carolina seemed afraid of all of them. But when that wore off, she turned out to have an exuberant nature. Well, she’d have to be adventurous to meet and marry Jody. So far Theresa had seen no reaction in Wenton to news of the marriage, although that didn’t mean the reaction wasn’t there. Carolina fell instantly in love with Dolly and Clari, which won over Senni. The girl loved babies. She gave Lillie’s triplets all the hectic affection that Lillie did not, chattering away at them in Spanish.

Scott, on the other hand, was all science. The very day of their birth he brought home from Wenton a piece of equipment the size of a small chair. “It came on the train yesterday. Finally. I thought it wasn’t going to get through, which would be a genuine loss considering how much credit I gave for it.”

“What is it?” Spring said.

“A Sparks-Markham genetic analyzer.”

Senni said suspiciously, “I don’t know what that is but it looks like it cost a lot of credit.”

Theresa intervened. “It’s Scott’s credit to spend. Scott, what do you need?”

“Just the stem cells from the umbilical cords, which I have. For now, anyway. And a place to work.”

“Take the den,” Theresa said. Lowering her voice so only he could hear, she added, “And Scott—talk to me first about whatever you find.”

“Of course,” he said quietly.

Several hours later he emerged from the den, looking dazed. The great room was full of people, exclamations, babies. Theresa caught Scott’s eye and motioned toward the door.

It was after sunset and the wind had softened to a hot breeze. They walked to the creek down the slope from the house, once more flowing decorously between its banks after its rampage during the storm. Debris it had left behind scattered the ground: mud, branches, rocks, a dead coyote. The creek had made its appearance, a gift of the increased mountain runoff plus more frequent rain, about five years ago, and had grown steadily since. It flowed past a grove of old cottonwoods. The cottonwoods had once drawn all the moisture available in the dell at the bottom of the little hill. Now juniper and oak saplings grew beside the cottonwoods. Spring had nailed a sturdy wooden bench to the largest tree, and the bench hadn’t been washed away in the storm, although it was still too wet to sit on.

Theresa had a sudden visceral memory. This was how her stomach had felt when she and Lillie had gone to the picnic grove at Andrews Air Force Base to be bawled out by Lillie’s Uncle Keith, the day after the girls had crashed a party in the boys’ dorm. A lifetime ago. Yet for a moment, she’d felt again the Maryland sunlight, smelled the honeysuckle, heard the roar of jets taking off and landing.

“I don’t know where to begin,” Scott said. “The children’s genome is… is what? Is ours, and isn’t. As far as I can tell from the preliminary scan, they possess the same forty-six chromosomes we do, and all the genes we have on those chromosomes. But every chromosome except the X and Y have extra genes spliced in, because… I still can’t believe this. It can’t be true.”

“Tell me, damn it!”

“There’s no junk DNA. You remember, Tess, from what we learned at Andrews, that the—”

“I don’t remember anything of what I learned at Andrews. I don’t have that sort of mind. Start at the beginning.”

“Okay. The human genome is about seventy-five percent nonfunctioning base pairs. Some is fossilized virus genomes that spliced themselves in hundreds of millions of years ago. Some are stray scattered fragments of DNA that don’t do anything, just get themselves replicated over and over whenever a cell divides. Some are —”

“I get the picture. Get on with it, Scott.” His eyes still had that dazed bemusement.

He licked his lips. “The babies’ genome, it doesn’t have any of those introns at all. None. They’ve all been cut out.”

“Three-quarters of their genome is gone?”

“Yes. It’s an amazing job. And more… there are new genes added in place of the excised base pairs. Tens of thousands of them.”

“What do the new genes do?”

“How the hell should I know? They make proteins, or regulate protein making, because that’s what genes do. But until I see them in action, I don’t know what proteins or what regulation or… or anything.”

Theresa fell silent. Night insects sang around them in the dark. From somewhere blew the sweet sharp smell of mint. “Scott… are they human?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know… how are you defining human? They share twenty-five percent of our time-damaged genome. Hell, chimps share ninety-eight percent!”

“They look human. They look like human babies.”

“I know.”

Theresa jumped up. “They are human babies. Lillie’s babies. Listen, this is very important. Don’t say to anyone what you’ve said to me. Don’t lie. Just say… say that the babies have all our genes. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“If you say more, if you tell—”

He said irritably, “I know what the consequences would be, Tess. I can’t even publish in what’s left of the Net scientific journals. If anyone knew even that you and I and Lillie are pribir kids, there would be people from Wenton unhappy about our presence. Some folk there don’t even like Carolina being here. And if I published this genome, either I’d be dismissed as a crackpot or… or I wouldn’t.”

Theresa said, “They’re just little babies. Let them have a chance at a normal life. God, I can’t believe I just called how we live now ‘normal.’”

“Kids think whatever they grow up with is normal. But, Tess, I want to go on gathering data from the kids. How do I explain that if I say their genome is identical to ours?”

She considered, chewing on her lip. “Say they have six extra genes.”

“Six? Why six?”

“Twenty-six, then. Do you think anybody here knows enough about genetics to interpret that?”

“Yes. All the kids who went to the ship. Especially Rafe and Emily.”

“Well, they’re not going to broadcast it. Just say there’s a small difference from us, enough so it’s plausible you’d study it but not enough to make the babies seem too different.”

“All right,” Scott said. “You know, when the wind dies down, it’s pleasant here.”

Theresa said, “When the wind dies down, and we’re not having a hugely destructive storm, and the sun has set, and no toxins happen to be carried on the breeze, and the tropical diseases that have come north aren’t infecting, and the UV damage hasn’t caused too much cancer… then, yes, it’s pleasant here.”

He said, “Do you ever wish you’d gone, that night at Quantico? Gone up to the pribir ship instead of staying behind?”

“And have missed out on all the excitement of the last forty years? No.”

“Ha,” he laughed mirthlessly.

Theresa stood. “We should get back to the house.”

“Wait a minute more. Now that I’ve got the analyzer, I’d like to scan your genome, too. And Jody and Carlo and Spring and Senni. Plus Senni’s children. I’d like to see if the modifications we carry are dominant.”

“You mean…” God, she’d never considered this before! “You mean, my kids and grandkids might be able to smell pribir messages? Like we did?”

“If there were any pribir to send. Which there aren’t. Can I scan them, Tess?”

“If they let you.”

“Okay. You go on in, I want to sit here and think for a while.”

She was glad to leave him. She didn’t want any more information to confuse her actions. Besides, her arms ached to hold a newborn baby: that helpless warmth against her chest, those rosy sucking little lips screwing themselves into yawns and cries and, eventually, smiles. Why should Carolina get all the cuddle time?

Theresa ran back to the farm house in the fragrant dusk, feeling light as a young girl, light as air.

Emily also had an easy birth, bearing three bald, round, blue-eyed girls. Bonnie had two boys and a girl. Sajelle bore two girls and a boy, chocolate-brown infants with huge brown eyes. Only Julie had a difficult time. One of her triplets, a girl, died soon after birth. The other two, a boy and girl, were healthy and strong.

“We’re awash in babies,” Bonnie said. She gazed lovingly at her three infants, miraculously all asleep at the same time in baskets lined up in her room. Yet another addition had been hastily put on the farm house, which now looked like a crazily growing organism of some kind. Each mother shared a tiny bedroom with her children. Jody and Carolina had a room but the other men had moved, with relief, to the barn. All the babies were remarkably good: no colic, no projectile vomiting, no prolonged crying. Theresa, sleeping on a pallet in the great room, silently thanked the pribir.

Carolina was invaluable. From dawn till bedtime she tirelessly tended children, cooing endearments at them in Spanish. “Mi corazon, mi carino, primito . . .” Then she disappeared one day in the cart, returning with two other Mexican girls and a boy of about twelve.

Jody translated. “These are Carolina’s cousins, Lupe and Rosalita and Juan. They can help with the babies.” Jody looked defiant and embarrassed; clearly he had not authorized this.

Theresa looked at the newcomers. Skinny, malnourished, hopeful, clinging desperately to each other’s hands. Carolina said pleadingly, “Rosalita, Lupe, Juan work much. Very much.”

Theresa said to Jody, “Can we feed all these people? The babies won’t be on breast milk forever, you know.”

“I think so. We’re doing pretty well, Mom. Cattle prices are a little up now that things are returning to normal, and we’re going to unload twenty more head at Wenton.”

Normal? This was normal? And how would Jody, living in a crashing world his entire life, know?

She looked again at the Mexican “cousins.” In the house, two babies began to wail simultaneously. Maybe three.

“Okay,” she said, and the girls fell to their knees and kissed her hands, which embarrassed her. She saw a louse crawling on the top of Lupe’s head.

“Get them scrubbed and deloused before they go anywhere near the babies! Also, Scott should check them out for diseases. And, Jody—no more Mexicans. Tell Carolina.”

“I will.”

“None of the triplets are identical,” Scott said, after running days of gene scans. “I guess the pribir wanted as wide a gene pool as possible.”

“Do they all have… are they all…” Theresa asked.

“They all have the same scan as Lillie’s babies. Introns completely excised. Thousands of extra genes.”

“And you still don’t know what any of them do.”

“Not a one. Blood chemistry is completely normal, no unknown proteins. So is urine, tissue samples, everything I can think of to test.” He almost sounded disappointed.

Theresa wasn’t disappointed. There were already rumors in Wenton of odd occurrences at the farm, and on trips to town Theresa had felt the drawing back by people who had known her for fifteen years.

The news from the Net, however, distracted everyone. The United States’s economy might slowly be returning to “normal,” but much of the rest of the world was not. A national news network now operated via ancient satellites. It didn’t go as far as sending actual reporters to China, but it picked up and translated China’s own broadcasts.

“They’re talking about war,” said Sam, who didn’t remember the last one. During that war horrifying bioweapons, some with and some without terminator genes, had been swept by the warming winds around the globe. Some places were still unlivable. Bacteria or viruses lurked in the ground, in the water. No one knew what micros the survivors still harbored in their livers, in their bones, in their blood.

“They can’t,” she said. War. “Not again… they can’t.”

“Do you really believe that?” Scott said grimly.

“Are there any bioweapons even left? In China? Here?”

“Of course there are,” Scott said. “And new ones have probably been invented. Never, in all of history, have hard times prevented war.”

“But why? What do the Chinese want? They don’t even have transport to get here and take over the country after they destroy it!”

“I guess they think they do,” Scott said. “Enough transport, anyway.”

An unspoken arrangement developed in the house. After dark, the people who wanted to hear the news gathered in the “den” around the computer, now upgraded with parts that had only recently appeared for sale in Wenton, part of the town’s growing prosperity. The news listeners were Scott, Jody, Carlo, Senni, Rafe, and Lillie. The others stayed with the children in the great room, asking no questions when grim faces emerged from the den.

One night, however, the faces were not grim. Lillie raced from the den into the great room, where Theresa was changing the diaper on Lillie’s son Cord. “Tess! Come here! DeWayne is on the Net!”

“Who?”

“DeWayne Freeman! From Andrews!”

From Andrews Air Force Base, which for Lillie was eighteen months ago and for Theresa, forty-one years. She barely remembered DeWayne Freeman. “You talk to him, Lillie. I can’t leave Cord. But don’t tell him anything about—”

“I know,” Lillie said. She and Alex talked to DeWayne. A week later DeWayne turned up at the farm, driving a new fuel-celled electric car that immediately brought gawkers streaming out onto the porch. “Wow,” Rafe said. “Look at that!”

A tall, well-dressed black man climbed out of the car. He carried an expensive suitcase. Theresa said quickly, “Everybody go inside. Now. I want to talk to him alone.” She hadn’t heard from DeWayne in forty years; he could be an anti-genetics nut for all she knew.

The family vanished inside. DeWayne climbed the porch steps. “Theresa Romero?”

“Hello, DeWayne.”

“I wouldn’t have known you, Theresa.”

“And I wouldn’t have known you.”

“I want to talk to you. Can we go inside?”

“I don’t think so. I really have a lot to do. Let’s talk out here.” She knew she sounded ungracious, as well as peculiar, but she couldn’t help it.

DeWayne didn’t waste words. “Rafe told me how a bunch of you have gathered here—a bunch of us from the old days. Friends. My wife and children are dead. They… never mind. I don’t have anyone. But I have a lot of credits in the Net, and more each day. I develop Net prosi… what used to be called software. I can do it from anywhere. I’m rich, Theresa, and I’ll share it all with the farm if I can live here with you and the rest.”

Theresa said, “How rich?”

He smiled. “Six billion international credits.”

Theresa sat down on the nearest porch chair, nailed down to keep it from blowing away. Six billion credits. Even with inflation what it had been, that was a fortune. She said bluntly, “Why, DeWayne? With that kind of money, you could buy yourself another wife. Hell, you could buy pretty much anything. Why here?”

“I haven’t ever felt at home anywhere, Theresa. Not since I came out of that trance in a Queens hospital forty-one years ago and learned what I was. And nobody’s been at home with me, either. Andrews was the only time I ever belonged. We’re getting older. I want to settle somewhere.”

Theresa studied him. There were people, she knew, who made their own alienations in life. Maybe DeWayne was one of those. Maybe he’d never belonged because, feeling so different, he never let himself belong. Like, she thought, her throat closing with the old anxiety, like Carlo. DeWayne didn’t look like a man who made emotional revelations easily. Talking to her like this, on her porch long since wind-scoured of any paint, had cost him. Was he telling the truth? Well, Scott and Rafe could check that out on the Net. Could he be trusted? That was a much tougher question.

And then he said, not looking at her, “Rafe said Sajelle is here. And that she isn’t married.”

Oh, God. Damn Rafe! “DeWayne… I have to talk to my sons and daughter about this. Could you come back tomorrow? I’m afraid I can’t let you stay here, but there’s a sort of inn in Wenton… who’s that sitting in your car?”

“Bodyguard. But he won’t be staying. I’ll send him back to the enclave, he—” DeWayne stopped dead.

Sajelle was hurrying up the path from the chicken coop, carrying a basket of fresh eggs clutched against her chest against the wind. Her dreadlocks tossed wildly. Bent over the eggs, she didn’t notice DeWayne until she’d rushed into the comparative shelter of the porch and nearly run into him. Sajelle looked confused to see a stranger, a black man, on the porch. DeWayne hadn’t recognized Theresa right away. Not so now.

He said dazedly, “Sajelle?”

Theresa thought of saying this was Sajelle’s daughter. But Sajelle herself recognized something in his voice or manner. “DeWayne? DeWayne Freeman?”

He seemed unable to speak. Theresa said, “You might as well come in, DeWayne. There are a few little things we’re going to have to explain to you.”

CHAPTER 17

DeWayne stayed, and many things became possible.

In the late spring, Rafe, Emily, and Lillie waylaid Theresa in the barn, pitching hay to the horses. “Tess, we need to talk to you.”

“So talk. But if you’re going to tell me more bad news about the Chinese, forget it. I don’t want to hear it until I have to.”

“It’s not about the Chinese,” Lillie said. “We have a proposition. We want to convince you so you can convince the others.”

Theresa put down her pitchfork and looked at Lillie, who stood a little in front of the others and was clearly their designated spokesman. Lillie had regained her figure after the triplets’ birth more quickly than the other girls. She stood slim and young, direct, her gaze meeting Theresa’s squarely. Lillie’s babies, Theresa knew, were right now being bathed by Carolina and Lupe. Whenever Lillie looked at her children there was a faintly puzzled look in her gray eyes: Mine? Theresa did not understand.

“You know that we learned a lot of genetics aboard the pribir ship,” Lillie said. “We only know how to use pribir equipment, though. But Scott has been teaching Rafe and Emily how to use his Sparks-Markham, plus all the new stuff DeWayne bought, and they’ve been teaching Scott what the pribir taught us. They remember a lot, unlike me and the rest.”

“Yes,” Theresa said neutrally. Why didn’t Lillie feel more involved with her babies? They were adorable, especially little Cord. He had Lillie’s eyes, gray with gold flecks.

“Rafe and Emily put some of the hay genes through the scanner. Also rice from the sacks Carlo bought in Wenton. They experimented with the splicer, and they think they can create hay that will have three times the yield on the same plot of land, and rice that will grow here in the summer rains.”

Three times the yield. They could run more cattle, lots more. The range grew more vegetation than ever, but there was still not enough to sustain her herd year-round without feed. The amount of hay had been the limiting factor on how much cattle she could run. And if rice, which had never in the history of the world grown here, could be raised as a cash crop, the market for it would be large and close. Cheap transportation costs…

Suddenly it hit her. ”’ Create.’ You mean genetically engineered crops.”

“Yes,” Rafe said eagerly over Lillie’s shoulder.

“Anything to do with genetically engineered crops is illegal. You know that. Anything to do with genetically engineered anything — that’s why we’ve been so careful!”

“And we’ll go on being careful,” Lillie said. “No one will know, anymore than they know about us, or about the babies. And anyway you said there’s no law to—”

“There’s vigilantes,” Theresa said harshly. “God, you three don’t remember. You weren’t here during the war.” The labs and corporations that had been the targets of mob rage during and right after the biowar. The CEO of Monsanto had been disemboweled alive. Theresa had seen a Net video.

“That was eleven years ago,” Lillie said logically. “And anyway, no one will know. Wenton doesn’t have any gene-analyzing equipment. We’ll just say DeWayne bought a different kind of seed from back East, and we’ll offer to share planting seeds for the hay with anyone who wants them. Look, Tess, I’ve done some figures.”

Lillie held out a piece of DeWayne’s grayish paper, another new luxury, and began to go over the numbers for Tess. Costs, needed labor, projected market price, possible profit range. The handwriting was the round unformed hand of a schoolgirl.

“Lillie, who taught you to do this?”

Lillie looked surprised. “Nobody taught me. It’s just common sense.”

And Lillie had always had a lot of that. No maternal feelings, but a direct pragmatism even greater than Theresa’s own. She said, “Does Scott know all this?”

“No,” Lillie said.

Rafe said transparently, “We thought you, as boss, were entitled to see it first.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” Lillie said. “Scott isn’t going to like it. He wants us to keep as much out of public notice as possible. We’re showing it to you first so you can change his mind.”

Emily said eagerly, “We know it will work!” Unlike Lillie, she had baby-food stains all down the front of her maternity smock, which she was still wearing because she hadn’t lost all her pregnancy weight.

Theresa looked at the three young faces: Rafe excited, Emily hopeful, Lillie coolly considering. It was an interesting idea. Rice… Theresa could almost see the low green plants growing in the flat land below the cottongrove, where the creek flooded regularly. Regularly enough? Maybe they could build a little dam…

“I’ll talk to Scott,” she said, “and Jody, Senni, Carlo, and Spring. We’ll see.”

“We can increase farm income by about twenty percent, not counting DeWayne’s contribution,” Lillie said. “That’s a lot of flour and cloth and ammunition.”

“Not,” Theresa noticed, “a lot of diapers.” Oh, Lillie.

After much argument, they planted a test crop of the genetically engineered crops. Both hay and rice flourished. It was only a few inconspicuous square yards of land under cultivation this year, but next year…

Sajelle married DeWayne in July. She was fifteen, he was fifty-four. Senni thought it was “obscene,” but Theresa only shrugged. Things were different now. Statutory rape laws belonged to another life. DeWayne was good to Sajelle, she made him happy, and her children’s future was assured. Within two months Sajelle was pregnant again.

The babies turned eight months old. With Senni’s nine-month Clari, there were fifteen babies crawling around the great room, pulling themselves up on furniture, throwing around food, babbling at each other. Without the three Mexican girls, caring for them would have been impossible. All of the children were beautiful. None had ever had as much as a cold. Scott could find nothing abnormal in any of their physiology.

That summer Carlo married Rosalita. Theresa, who was afraid that Carlo would someday announce he wanted to be a priest, was relieved. Everyone pitched in to expand housing, and eventually there was a compound of four houses, one large and three smaller, and everyone had more room.

Another group of refugees attacked, but they were ill-equipped and easily driven off with guns. Only one was killed. Theresa didn’t ask where Jody, Bonnie, and Sam buried him.

The Chinese threat abated, presumably due to some mysterious cycle of political fluctuation. Maybe the Chinese were also becoming more prosperous, less desperate. Maybe not. Theresa didn’t care just so long as the word “war” disappeared from farm conversations.

That summer, the horrendous storms leveled off. Net news said the global warming seemed to have stabilized, perhaps due to the drastic cutback of greenhouse gases since the war. Theresa’s land remained fertile, and the range was better watered than ever before. She allowed herself to be hopeful, then grateful, then happy. They were going to make it.

Just after she’d decided this, the delegation from Wenton arrived.

“Come in,” Theresa said, because she couldn’t keep them standing on the porch. There were six of them, arriving in the early afternoon, an indication of how far the weather had softened. The wind still blew till sundown, but it had less force, less grit, less unrelenting howl. The delegation came in a car, as new as DeWayne’s but larger and very simple, a closed metal box on a slow-moving, fuel-cell-driven base. Still, the fact that new, non-luxury cars were available in a place like Wenton felt significant to Theresa.

She studied them as they filed into the great room. Three of the babies crawled around under Carolina’s watchful eye. The rest were either in the smaller houses or napping. Everyone else who could be was out harvesting.

Old Tom Carter, who used to run the storage building that was no longer needed. Rachel Monaghan, a woman Theresa’s age, who kept a cloth and clothing store. Lucy Tetrino from the train station. Bill Walewski, the grain buyer. Two hard-faced men she didn’t recognize. She saw Rachel’s lips purse at the sight of Carolina.

“Carolina,” Theresa said pleasantly, “take the babies down to Senni’s, please. Everyone, sit down anywhere you like.”

Carolina cast one frightened look at the Wenton delegation, then piled all three babies into a huge basket and hoisted it to her hip. She was much stronger than she looked. The children gurgled delightedly. Carolina hurried outside.

“My daughter-in-law, Jody’s wife,” Theresa said. A pre-emptive strike.

“So we heard,” Lucy Tetrino said, and from her tone Theresa knew that Wenton didn’t like having the Mexican girls and Juan here but that they weren’t the reason for this visit. The delegation scanned the great room, with its litter of baby clothes, leftover beans and rice on the table, guns high on the wall where the children couldn’t reach. The room smelled of candles and diapers and food and the vase of wild roses Sajelle had picked by the creek.

“Theresa,” Bill Walewski said, “I guess I better start, since I’m the new mayor of Wenton.”

“Congratulations,” Theresa said. She hadn’t even known there’d been an election.

“Thanks. The reason we’re here is that there’ve been some pretty strange rumors going around town about you this last year.”

“Really.” Bill didn’t meet her eyes. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t fully behind it.

“Yes. People are saying… people are wondering how you could have got all these teenage girls, all pregnant at the same time, all having twins or triplets or even quads. Pretty peculiar.”

“There are no quads,” Theresa said.

“But there are twins and triplets,” Lucy put in.

“Yes.” She didn’t explain that there would have been only triplets if one of Julie’s infants hadn’t died.

“Well, don’t you think that’s a little weird?” Lucy said.

“More than ‘weird,’” said one of the strangers. “It’s obscene,” and Theresa knew the source of the delegation.

“I’m afraid I didn’t get your name, sir.” Courtesy just this side of insolence.

“Matt Campion. I represent America Restored.” He didn’t smile.

Theresa said, “Restored to what?”

“To livability. To respect for the natural ecology of this great country. To decent acknowledgment of human limitations, so that we don’t destroy ourselves by mucking around with forces beyond our ability to understand or control.”

An anti-science league. Well, Wenton had escaped longer than many places. “I see.”

“I doubt it,” Campion said.

Old Tom said hastily, “We’ve all known you a long time, Theresa, and—”

“Yes, you have, Tom. Rachel, I’ve been buying cloth from you for sixteen years now. Bill, you’ve been buying grain from me for… how long?”

“Nine years,” Bill said unhappily.

“Right. And Lucy, we’ve ridden the train and shipped supplies on it since my husband and I came to this state.”

“None of that is relevant,” Campion said harshly. “We’re here to find out what’s going on at this farm, Ms. Romero. How come you have all these girls simultaneously giving birth to triplets?”

“That’s not hard to explain,” Theresa said. The explanation had been ready for a year. “You know that Dr. Wilkins boards here. We’re old friends, from before the war. After his wife died, he came here to practice because I told him there was no doctor anywhere around and he was both needed and could build a good practice here.”

“That’s true,” Tom put in, nodding vigorously. “Dr. Wilkins came about a year and a half ago.”

“Yes,” Theresa continued. “Before that, he practiced in Illinois. He did pro bono work there, too. One of his projects was a home for unwed mothers.” Briefly Theresa remembered the flamboyant, loose sexual atmosphere of her youth. All that had been swept away; homes for unwed mothers were plausible again. “The home was going to close. No credit. Five of the girls had no place to go. I said Scott could bring them here.”

“Why?” Campion demanded.

Theresa opened her eyes wide. “Humanitarian reasons, Mr. Campion. I’m sure any organization that, like yours, values decency and respect can understand humanitarian purposes.”

Rachel Monaghan narrowed her eyes, and Theresa told herself to watch it. Ruffling Campion wasn’t worth losing any lurking support from her long-time neighbors.

“So that explains why the girls came here,” said the other stranger. Quieter, milder, his expression gave away nothing. “But it doesn’t explain the multiple births.”

“No,” Theresa said.

“Well, what about that? Isn’t it a little unusual? I’m the Reverend James Beslor, incidentally.”

“How do you do. Yes, it is unusual. We were all surprised at so many babies.”

Campion said in exasperation, “Well, what caused it?”

“I have no idea,” Theresa said.

They all stared at her.

“Neither does Scott Wilkins. Nor the girls. Nobody even has a theory. All we know is that since the girls came to us pregnant, and my daughter hasn’t had twins or triplets, whatever happened didn’t happen on this farm. And, of course, the babies are all completely normal. You’re welcome to examine them, if you like.”

Campion said, “We most certainly want to do that.”

“Now? I can wake them up.”

“No, not now,” Campion said, flushing in annoyance. “When I get a doctor out here!”

“Any time that’s convenient,” Theresa said. Scott had assured her that no one short of a geneticist with expensive analyzers would find anything odd about the children, and it was unlikely this delegation could produce anything like that. Although, if this organization “America Restored” was big enough and funded well enough… she felt a thrill of fear.

Campion said slowly, “There’s something else going on here. There is. Even if those girls came to you pregnant and you had nothing to do with it, the girls are still wrong. Unnatural. Dangerous. We don’t ever want another repeat of the ecological disasters that almost destroyed us. Never again.”

Theresa made herself look bewildered. “I don’t know what more I can do, Mr. Campion. I’ve said you can examine the children, and their mothers, too, if you like. They’re just normal people. Statistical flukes do happen, you know, including multiple births. If you can’t prove anything else… I can tell that your belief in this country is too great to undermine the Constitutional requirement for proof before finding anyone guilty. Of anything.”

Campion looked at her with open dislike. But Lucy said eagerly, “It’s true, Matt. Theresa has agreed to cooperate completely, nothing happened here at the farm, and there’s not any proof anything wrong ever happened at all.”

“That’s so,” Tom said.

Theresa stood. “Can I get you some chicory coffee? Or sumac tea?”

Bill said abruptly, “Theresa, where did that fancy truck come from? The one Jody was driving the other day?”

“Oh, that was recently purchased in Amarillo by a new member of our farm co-op. DeWayne Freeman. He’s a Net developer, you should look him up. Impressive guy.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“He married another of our co-op members.”

Bill nodded, satisfied. Theresa showed them out. Matt Campion gave her a hard stare. When they were out the door, Theresa closed it and leaned against it, breathing hard.

The children were two, three, four. Nothing changed, everything changed. Carlo and his wife Rosalita left the farm, almost breaking Theresa’s heart. Carlo, ever restless, searching for something he couldn’t name, wanted to go to a religious community he’d heard about in Colorado. Theresa only hoped they would be back some day.

Sajelle had two children with DeWayne. Carolina and Jody had a son, Angel. Scott ran genome analyses on each child minutes after the birth. The results were always the same: the frontal lobe included the dense structure connected to the huge number of receptors in the nose. The genes were dominant. The babies would be able to smell information molecules, if anyone had been able to send them.

The genetically altered rice and hay flourished, although out of prudence Theresa insisted the entire crop be consumed on the farm rather than sold. Lillie was disappointed, but she managed production costs and quantities so well that the net savings to the farm was large. Lillie, and the others, turned sixteen, seventeen, twenty-one. Gradually Lillie began to share with Theresa and DeWayne the financial management of the farm, which Theresa had never enjoyed. The federal government resuscitated both itself and the income tax.

Lillie had grown lean, hard-bodied, briskly capable. She and Alex were the only two of the pribir kids who learned to ride. “Pribir kids” —it had been years since Theresa had thought that phrase. There was nothing about the farm that did not look and feel totally normal, except for the large number of children the same age. Everyone looked and acted no different from their neighbors.

Unless you counted Lillie’s attitude toward her children.

As the years rolled by, Theresa became more troubled by this. Lillie was kind to Cord, Keith, and Kella. It was the wary, impersonal kindness of a childless boarder. It reminded Theresa, as nothing else could, of the days at Andrews Air Force Base, when both she and Lillie had been on the receiving end of wary consideration from doctors and intelligence agents and security chiefs.

“It’s not right, Lillie. They need you.”

“I know it’s not right,” Lillie said with her habitual honesty. “But I can’t help it. Although they don’t need me while they have you and Carolina.”

“You’re their mother!”

“I know.”

“Cord, especially, needs you. Haven’t you seen how he follows you around, hoping for your attention?” Kella, Lillie’s daughter, had fastened herself onto Carolina. Keith seemed to have a temperament like Lillie’s, adventurous and self-sufficient. But the look in Cord’s eyes when they followed his mother tore at Theresa’s heart. The only time the little boy seemed happy was with Clari, Senni’s little girl. The two were inseparable. Just a few months apart in age, they shared secrets and games far more than did Cord and his siblings.

Lillie said, in a rare moment of overt emotion, “I can’t… can’t seem to love them, Tess.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I don’t know.”

Theresa gazed at Lillie. Theresa didn’t understand, wouldn’t ever understand. Cord—all the children—were beautiful, bright, good-natured. Sometimes Theresa felt guilty because she preferred Cord to her own blood granddaughter, Senni’s older girl, Dolly. Dolly was a whiner, and she had a selfish streak not shared by her younger sister, Clari. Cord was a wonderful child. How could Lillie not feel —

“I don’t know,” Lillie repeated and turned away, her face once more a composed, competent, pleasant mask.

CHAPTER 18

The drought began in the summer of 2064.

At first, no one worried. For years the climate in southeast New Mexico had been improving, increasingly favorable for agriculture, ranching, and shade trees. The farm barely needed to irrigate anymore. Theresa and her “farm co-op” had learned to take their good luck for granted. They were in the right place, during the right years. In the vast planetary climatic lottery, they’d drawn a winning number.

However, after the drought had continued for an entire year, Theresa began to get nervous. The farm had been sustained through the year by savings, by DeWayne, and by good management. But the herd had been reduced in size and the harvest was largely a failure. If the land began to revert to its former aridity, both water and plant life drying up, she would be ruined. There were too many people, too many cows, too much diverse activity to go back to what the farm had been twenty years ago.

It was the same in other places, but not everywhere. With mixed feelings Theresa heard on Net news that the northeast coast, that part of it not under water, continued to rise in productivity, population, and malaria. The Canadian plains also continued to enjoy its gains of the last decades. But the southwest, along with large portions of China, were shifting in weather yet again.

International tensions with China again worsened.

Let it be temporary, Theresa prayed to nothing. Not a dangerous shift, just a few bad years. Farmers and ranchers have always had bad years. Nothing new in that, nothing terrifying.

Jody and Spring decided to end the hog operation. Lillie, studying the figures, agreed. They also stopped growing the genetically altered rice. The creek was not delivering enough floodwater.

She was too old for this, Theresa thought. She and Scott and DeWayne, all sixty-four years old. Arthritis was starting to make it painful to turn her neck. She could no longer eat raw vegetables without stomach distress. She was too old to hunker down and then spring up to start over.

Autumn still didn’t bring rain. In December, Lillie’s children would turn eleven. Theresa decided to have a party. Everyone needed cheering up. She would hold a massive party for all fourteen kids on December 10, Cord’s birth date. The look in his eyes when they followed Lillie had changed. Wistfulness had been replaced by bewildered anger. Theresa was worried about him. He played, worked, and studied almost exclusively with Clari, his gentle shadow. She worshipped him, much to Senni’s annoyance.

“Let’s have party hats,” Julie said, from some memory at least a half century old. “I know how to fold them out of newspapers.”

“There aren’t any newspapers,” Sajelle pointed out.

“Well, any paper. And candles.”

“That we can get,” Theresa said, making a list. Lillie could go to Wenton and pick up the supplies for the party. It was probably the most involved Lillie would get.

“Carolina said she’d bake three of those Spanish cakes with the prickly-pear jelly inside,” Emily said. “They were soooooo good.”

“What about presents?” Bonnie said. “The same thing for everybody? Or each mother buys her own?”

“There shouldn’t be a large difference in cost, though,” Emily said, not looking at Sajelle, who thanks to DeWayne had so much more than the rest of them. Although Sajelle never flaunted it.

Bonnie said, “I heard Angie talk about a doll in Lucy Tertino’s store. Some woman in Wenton sews them by hand, with little outfits, too.”

Emily laughed. “Bonnie, your daughter is such a girly girl.”

Bonnie smiled. “You saying that’s ironic, Em?”

“Never.”

“I know!” Julie said. “Water balloons!”

Theresa listened to them plan, joke, enjoy, four young women of twenty-five, her school friends and contemporaries as she faced her sixty-fifth birthday. It would be a good party. And for a day at least, nobody would think about the drought. Maybe.

As the day grew closer, the children became frantic with excitement. Studies were neglected, chores left undone, sleep interrupted. Even obedient Clari forgot to water the winter herb garden because she was out playing with Cord, and after two days, when Theresa discovered this, the cooking herbs were nearly dead in their pots under the relentless sun.

“I’m sorry!” Clari sobbed, and Theresa wouldn’t have had the heart to punish her. But Senni did.

“You were off playing with Cord, weren’t you! You irresponsible brat! If you’d pay attention to your chores instead of that spoiled kid, everybody would be better off!”

“I’m sorry, Mommy, I’m sorry…”

“I’ll make you sorry, all right, Clari Marie. I’ll make sure you don’t forget again!” She took a bridle strap from its peg on the barn wall.

Theresa didn’t hear about this scene until the next day. By that time, Cord was gone.

“Who saw him last?” Theresa demanded. His brother Keith said, “Not me. We woke up this morning and Cord wasn’t in his bunk and the blankets were still all smooth.” For the last year, the bedrooms had been shuffled yet again to make separate bunkrooms for boys and girls. This wasn’t observed much; the kids slept wherever they chose, at whatever house they chose, in whatever groups the evening’s play had dictated to them.

Theresa looked at the people assembled in the great room: seven ten-year-old children, Lupe, Carolina, and a clutter of younger children. The others were already busy elsewhere. Lillie had left for town before dawn. Theresa said to Keith, “Was Cord around when you went to bed last night?”

“No,” volunteered Gavin, Bonnie’s son. “We looked for him and Clari to play Hot Rocks, but they weren’t around.”

“Clari’s missing, too? Carolina?”

“No, no, Clari, she here. She come breakfast, eat nothing. I say, ‘eat,’ but she no eat. She cry and cry.”

“Where is Clari now?”

“In the girl room. Not in her mother’s house, I say Clari no do chores today. Senni hit Clari.” Carolina’s dark eyes flashed; she didn’t approve of Senni’s child-raising methods. Her and Jody’s son Angel was never hit, and he was very well behaved.

Theresa said, “Senni hit Clari? For neglecting the herb garden?”

Carolina nodded, her lips pursed.

“All right, kids, everybody get to work. You, too, Lupe. I’ll take care of this.”

She knocked on the door to the girls’ bunkroom. There was no answer, but she pushed in anyway.

Clari lay rumpled in a dark corner of a bottom bunk. Theresa looked at the child’s miserable, tear-stained face and inwardly cursed Senni. Her daughter was a hard woman. Why Senni, when Jody and Spring were so sweet-tempered? Even moody Carlo would never have hit a child. And Clari herself was the gentlest kid on the farm. Genes were so strange.

“Clari, it’s Grandma. I want to talk to you, honey. Come out.”

Ever obedient, Clari crept from the bunk. She was taller than Cord but smaller-boned, with short brown curls and blue eyes. Theresa said, “Where did your mother hit you? Never mind, I can see from the way you’re moving. Take off your pants, honey.”

Painfully, Clari wiggled out of her pants. Red welts striped the backs of her thighs. Something turned over in Theresa’s chest: anger and fear and a painful love for Senni, who was alienating those who should love her. Carefully she took Clari on her lap.

“Tell Grandma what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”

Every child at the farm and most of the adults obeyed that tone in Theresa’s voice. Clari said, “We were playing, me and Cord and Kella and Susie and Angel. Monday and Tuesday, a long game of Hot Rocks, it lasted three days and I forgot to take care of the herb garden in the evenings.”

Theresa had never asked the rules for Hot Rocks, an enormously complicated game the kids had invented and, apparently, kept adding to. She said, “Go on.”

“Mommy hit me and Cord found out ‘cause I was crying. He got really mad. He threw the Ender Rock so hard it broke, Grandma. Then he said him and me should run away and that would show Mom.”

“Run away? Where? How?”

“To our secret place. On Uncle Scott’s old horse.”

Cold seeped up Theresa’s spine. She hadn’t thought to check the horses. Scott’s bay, the one he’d first used when he came here, was too old for real use, but Scott let the children ride him for short periods and short distances. Cord wasn’t a very good rider.

“Did Cord go to your secret place on Uncle Scott’s horse?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t go with him, Mommy would have been really really mad. I came here and slept in Angie’s bed. Is Cord gone?” Clari looked scared.

“Yes, but I’m going to get him back right now. Where is your secret place, Clari?”

“Where all the dead bad men are buried. It has ghosts.”

Theresa closed her eyes. She should monitor the stuff the kids watched on the Net more carefully. There was never time. The “bad dead men” were the refugees that Jody had killed with the bioweapon and buried in the arroyo, once again dry in the year-and-a-half drought. How had Clari even known about that incident?

She didn’t ask. “Clari, I want you to go ask Carolina for some breakfast, eat it, and do two units of school software. It’s your turn.” DeWayne had bought school software and computers for all the kids to share.

“Is Cord okay?”

“Of course he is. Now go do as I told you.”

Scott’s nag wasn’t in the barn. No one had noticed, since all the other horses were in use out on the range. DeWayne’s truck, which he had purchased in lieu of the fancy little car he’d arrived in, had gone to Wenton. The bus was finally dead, and the new one Lillie had ordered last year had had to be sold as the farm funds dwindled.

Theresa smacked her fist against the barn wall in frustration. She could have gone back to the house and Net-paged Jody out on the range, the pagers being another innovation due to DeWayne. But God knew where Jody was. He could be halfway to the El Capitan mountains with their cattle. The arroyo was only a little over a mile away. She put on the wide-brimmed hat with neck curtains that the high UV made necessary, filled a canteen, and started to walk.

By the time she reached the arroyo, Theresa’s legs felt wobbly. She didn’t walk much anymore on the open range. She had a canteen with her but wanted to save the water for Cord. The arroyo was completely dry, and the gray rough bark of the cottonwoods looked tired and dusty. Cord wasn’t there.

She sat in the welcome shade, panting. Hoof tracks led away from the arroyo. But there was nothing in that direction but desert. Desert that a year ago had just begun to be prairie, its greening now cut off like an execution.

Theresa took three long swallows of water and started walking. If Cord hadn’t thought to bring a hat… it had been night when he’d run off. And he’d been too angry to think straight or he wouldn’t have started this stupid trek in the first place.

A few miles out, Theresa came across Scott’s horse. It had found a semi-living green bush and was chomping at it eagerly. The saddle was empty.

Now she was genuinely afraid. How far had Cord gotten before he fell off, or let the horse wander away, or whatever had happened? The child could be laying injured in the hot sun, dehydrated, alone…

Theresa took two more swallows of water—her last, she promised herself—and kept on walking. How soon before someone followed her? They would, of course. Senni would have the sense (and the remorse) to Net-page Jody or Spring. Lillie and DeWayne would come home from town. Someone would come.

Meanwhile, she kept walking, kept calling. “Cord! Cord, can you hear me? Cord, answer me! Cord!” Her throat grew hoarse.

The wind was picking up. Sand started to blow against her face, into her eyes. Oh, God, no, not a dust storm, no one would ever find Cord or her, and alone out here in a dust storm… “Cord! Cord!”

The wind blew harder.

Was that him? She ran forward, her legs aching, but it was only an unusually large prickly pear, vaguely shaped like a prone boy.

She was sobbing from frustration and fear when she finally spotted Cord. Lurching, stumbling forward, she fell on her knees beside his crumpled little body, lying beside a clump of thorny mesquite.

She gasped, inhaling a mouthful of dust.

It was Cord… and it wasn’t. He crouched on his stomach, head tucked forward as much under his chest as possible, facing away from the wind. His arms and legs were drawn under him. His thin shirt had torn, and Theresa could see that over his back and neck and head had grown a sort of… shell. A thin membrane, tough and flexible as plastic when she touched it.

Water. He had grown a temporary shell to keep water from evaporating.

The sand was blowing harder now. Theresa closed her eyes against its sting and groped for Cord’s pulse along his neck. She found it through the membrane and counted: ten pulses per minute, slow and even. Her fingers groped underneath the boy, and touched something hard and thin at his belly. She felt it, dug with her nails where it entered the soil. She knew what it was, had encountered it her whole life on the range. All cacti had them. A taproot, sent deep into the soil to tap whatever water might be buried far down.

Behind the membrane, Cord’s eyes were closed. His child’s face had evened out in his deep sleep, hibernation, estivation, whatever the right word was. Or maybe there was no right word for this.

The storm was building fiercely now. Theresa drank the last of her water, feeling it mix with the grit in her mouth and scrape down her throat, knowing it wouldn’t make much difference. Everything depended now on how long and hard the wind blew, obscuring visibility, accelerating dehydration. She lay down beside Cord and put her arms around him.

Scott, I know what all the extra genes are for. They’re for adapting to whatever we do to fuck up the planet.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Grit ground under the lids, making her gasp with pain and open them. A mistake. Now she could barely see the mesquite a foot away.

Was Cord human? Yes, yes, yes, her fading mind said. She didn’t know why or how she knew, but she did. Cord, all of the children engineered on that alien ship, were human. She would bet her life on it.

Which was pretty funny, actually—

The wind mounted in fury. Theresa’s arms loosened, unable to hold their grip.

Her last thought was for Cord: Pribir, wherever you are, thank you.

The storm blew till night fell. The winds brought clouds in their wake, fierce black clouds like a tarp under the sky. Clouds, but no rain. It was twenty-four hours before they could find and retrieve Theresa’s body. By that time, there wasn’t much left of it. Weather and coyotes.

Lillie spent the twenty-four convinced that both Cord and Theresa were dead. Theresa, who had been first a friend and then a mother to Lillie, far more of a mother than Barbara had ever been. Theresa, who had taken Uncle Keith’s place so naturally, so unobtrusively that Lillie had hardly even noticed.

For those two days Keith and Kella had clung to her, crying for their brother. Awkwardly she held them to her, struggling with her own pain. Cord, dead out on the range somewhere in this terrible storm. Cord, her little boy… oh, God, at least let them be together. Let him have Theresa in his last hours. He’d never had his mother.

Keith and Kella slept with her, for the few hours she could sleep. Lying in the narrow bed with a child pressed up close to her on either side, clutching at her even in sleep, Lillie realized for the first time the terrible burden of being a real parent. It was not that she didn’t love her children, but that she did. She was hostage to their fortune, her life’s outcome dependent on theirs, as Keith’s had been on Lillie’s. She had never known. She had never understood, not any of it.

Theresa had known. Theresa had always known.

When Spring found Cord, he was still “dormant.” That’s what Scott called it. Scott, fascinated and grateful and appalled, took cells from all of Cord’s adaptations, including the “taproot” that Spring had sliced through because it went too deep to pull up. Then, holding his breath, he’d poured water over Cord.

As Scott and Lillie watched, the membrane around the child dissolved. The base of the taproot fell off as easily as an outgrown umbilical. Cord’s breathing quickened. He opened his eyes, saw his mother’s face, and started to cry.

Lillie gathered him into her arms, wet and filthy and smelling of what Scott would later determine was a skin repellent against predators. She held him tightly against her, and for the first time in years she cried, too. Scott left the room with his collected samples, softly closing the door. Lillie cradled her pribir-created son and knew for the first time not only what he was, but also that through him she, too, was becoming, finally, fully human.