Nothing Human

CHAPTER 19

After his grandmother died, nothing was the same for Cord, except Clari. Everything else turned itself inside out, like a sock.

“Tell me about the pribir,” he demanded of Dr. Wilkins. It seemed all Cord could do lately was demand, as if he were a three-year-old like Aunt Julie’s newest baby. He knew it, and regretted it, and couldn’t stop it.

Dr. Wilkins, gray-haired and a bit stooped, said, “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Grandma didn’t talk to me about them. All she said was they changed the genes for my mother and then for all us kids.”

“All of you born to the girls—women—who went up to the spaceship. Not Dolly or Clari or…”

“I know that. But what did they do on the ship?”

Dr. Wilkins said gently, “I wasn’t there, Cord. I stayed behind, like your grandmother.”

“But―”

“You should ask your mother.”

“Okay,” Cord said. “But you’re the one who can tell me about genetics.”

Dr. Wilkins looked startled. He was really old, as old as Grandma had been. But he knew things, and Cord wanted to learn them.

“Cord, you never showed any interest in genetics before.”

“Well, I am now,” he said stubbornly. But when Dr. Wilkins started to explain messenger RNA and transcription and protein formation, Cord’s mind wandered. This wasn’t what he thirsted for, after all. Even he could see that. Bobby and Angie and Taneesha were much more interested, working at the school software in biology, clustering around Dr. Wilkins and Uncle Rafe to learn to use the complicated, expensive engineering equipment.

Cord turned instead to his mother. That was another thing that had changed. His mother used to mostly ignore him, busy with the farm’s bills and income and boring stuff like that. But now she was home for dinner every night, listening to Cord and Keith and Kella, asking about their day, touching them on the arm or cheek. It made Cord uncomfortable. He didn’t know why she was behaving like this, like all of a sudden she was Grandma. Well, she wasn’t. Grandma was dead. Nobody else was Grandma and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

Still, she was the one to ask about the pribir. He waited until late afternoon on a hot, dry, June day. June was supposed to bring rain, Uncle Jody said. That was the old way for this country; the new way was rain all year long. But now they didn’t have either way. The drought continued, and every night his mother walked out to watch the sunset with her face calm and hard.

On the porch Cord passed Clari coming up to the big house. “Cord? Where are you going?”

“I want to ask my mother about the pribir.”

“Can I come?”

“Sure.” As far as Cord was concerned, Clari could go anywhere he did. She was quiet, and she listened carefully, not like his pesky sister Kella, who interrupted everybody all the time.

The two children started toward the cottonwood stand by the creek, where a long time ago somebody had built a wide bench facing west. It was the prettiest place on the farm, the only place wildflowers bloomed often, even though the creek was only a trickle. Lillie sat there, gazing at the sky flaming red and gold above the long stretch of gray land. “There goes a jackrabbit,” Clari said, but Cord had more important things on his mind than jackrabbits.

“Hi, Cord, Clari,” Lillie said. “Look at that sky.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty. Mom—”

“It would be much prettier with rain clouds in it.”

“Sure. Mom, tell me about the pribir.” Cord flushed in embarrassment. He was demanding again, and anyway it never felt easy to talk to his mother.

But she tried to make it easy. “Okay, what do you want to know?”

“Everything. I heard you talk about Andrews Air Force Base with Grandma. What’s an Air Force Base? Were the pribir there?”

“No. Sit down.”

Cord and Clari sat. The wooden bench felt smooth under his rump. Somewhere above him an owl hooted softly.

His mother began slowly, as if searching for the right words. “Andrews Air Force Base was—maybe is again—a big camp for soldiers and planes. After doctors discovered that Grandma and Dr. Wilkins and I were genetically engineered, we were taken there.”

“Why? How did they find out?”

“They found out because we all, all sixty of us, started to smell things. Smell information.”

Clari said timidly, “I don’t understand, Aunt Lillie.”

His mother smiled. “Well, that’s reasonable, because neither did we. All at once all of us just started to have… images in our head. Ideas and pictures and information, all about genetics. We were smelling special complex molecules that the pribir were secretly releasing into the air to send learning to humans on Earth.”

Cord demanded, “How come you kids could smell the molecules and no one else could?”

“We were genetically engineered to do it, before we were born, by a doctor working for the pribir.”

“Why didn’t the pribir just give humans the information themselves? Why use a bunch of kids?” Cord said logically. This roundabout transmission route seemed dumb.

“They didn’t want to risk coming to Earth. A lot of people didn’t like the idea of genetic engineering.”

Well, that made sense. As long as Cord could remember, he’d been told over and over to never mention genetics to anybody from Wenton.

“Also,” his mother continued, “the pribir had something else in mind. Eventually they sent a shuttle —a small spaceship—to pick up all the engineered kids who wanted to go up to the ship. Twenty of us went, including me. Your grandmother Theresa stayed behind.”

Clari asked, “Why did you go?”

His mother hesitated. “I’m not sure. I think partly for the adventure, partly because the pribir were making us smell molecules that made us want to go.”

Cord considered this. “They couldn’t be very strong molecules. Some people didn’t go. Like Grandma.”

“True.”

“What happened on the ship?” Cord said.

Again his mother hesitated. The colors in the western sky were fading now and the stars were coming out, one by one. Finally she said, “A lot happened on the ship. The main thing was that the pribir engineered the babies we girls were all pregnant with. Including you, Cord. They gave you many different genes. Dr. Wilkins thinks a lot of them are designed to let you survive on Earth no matter what changes the planet undergoes, or what environment you find yourself in.”

Like the sandstorm that had killed Grandma. Cord had been told how he’d survived that.

Clari said, “How many pribir were on the ship, Aunt Lillie?”

“Probably a lot. But we only saw two.”

Cord hadn’t known that. “Two? Only two? The whole time?”

“Only two.”

Clari breathed, “What did they look like?”

His mother smiled, but it wasn’t a good smile. “They looked exactly like us. They said they’d been made that way deliberately. Their names were Pam and Pete.”

Cord peered at his mother through the gloom to see if she was joking. She didn’t seem to be. But… “Pam” and “Pete”? Those were names on old, stupid Net shows, not names for pribir. He said harshly, “Then did the pribir put you back on Earth? Why?”

“We didn’t know. To have our babies here, I guess. But, Cord…” The longest hesitation yet. Cord waited. This was going to be important, he could tell from her voice. “Cord, you should probably know this. You’re old enough, and anyway I think Dr. Wilkins already told Bobby and the other kids that hang around with him. The last thing the pribir said to us was that they would be back.”

Cord sat very still. His mother put her arm around him, and for once he didn’t pull away. He hardly felt the arm. Gladness was flooding through him. They were coming back!

Clari said fearfully, “When?”

“We don’t know.”

“Soon, I want it to be soon!” Cord burst out.

His mother pulled her arm away. “Why?”

It seemed to Cord a stupid question. The pribir were clearly heroes, a word he’d learned in school software. They had tremendous powers… imagine sending information through smells! They had made all the kids at the farm, practically… why, without them he wouldn’t even exist! And they had saved his life by giving him the genes that had protected him during the sandstorm. More, they represented something Cord couldn’t name, didn’t have words for. He knew only that it was larger than the farm, the drought, the falling price of cattle that seemed to occupy the adults so much. Something large, and mysterious, and glorious.

But all he said to his mother was, “They’re wonderful!”

His mother’s voice turned cold. It was full dark now and Cord couldn’t see her face, but he didn’t need to. That voice was enough.

“‘Wonderful’? You call it wonderful that they designed unborn babies with no regard to anything except pribir needs? That they kidnapped us kids and used smelled chemicals to manipulate our minds? That on the ship they made us… never mind that. That the pribir designed and engineered our babies and impregnated us without so much as asking permission, so that you and Keith and Kella and all the others never even had a recognizable father. You call that wonderful?”

Floundering under this attack, all Cord could think of to say was, “I don’t need a father! I have Uncle Jody and Uncle Spring and Uncle Rafe and—”

“Every child should have a father.”

“Clari doesn’t!”

Clari, who had shrunk against the cottonwood trunk at the first hint of conflict, nodded loyally.

“But Clari did have a father,” his mother said, more softly. “He just died before she was born. But she had him.”

If Clari’s father had been dead for Clari’s whole life, Cord didn’t see what good having a father had done her. Cord was angry now. “The pribir are wonderful! You just don’t understand!”

“Oh, Cord,” she said, and now her voice was completely soft, as soft as Clari’s. He was not going to be won that easily.

“You don’t understand, Mom. The pribir gave you everything, even me! And Keith and Kella!” He’d always known his mother didn’t really want her kids. Now here was proof.

“I know,” she said. “But, Cord, honey, they still did it through manipulation, tyranny, for their own reasons, not for our good.”

“I don’t care! Come on, Clari, the mosquitoes are out.”

“Cord, please don’t go, I want to talk more…”

But he grabbed Clari’s hand and pulled her up off the bench and toward the house. Halfway there he turned back to face the cottonwoods and shouted, “The pribir are wonderful!” before running the rest of the way inside, dragging Clari with him.

He learned more from the other children. At various times, their respective mothers had dropped bits of information about the pribir. Aunt Bonnie’s daughter Angie said that when she and her two brothers were born, their mother had had a very easy labor. This was important because recently Aunt Julie and Uncle Spring had had another baby, and Aunt Julie had screamed so much that Dr. Wilkins gave her a drug. Cord didn’t see why that was a problem, but Angie said importantly that Aunt Julie had wanted to do without drugs because they could be bad for the baby. Also, added Angie, who seemed to be a gush of information on birthing, Aunt Senni had had a very bad time with both Dolly and Clari.

“So the pribir made birthing easier with the babies they engineered. Less painful,” Cord said. He was very glad he was a boy and would never have to birth anybody at all.

“Yeah,” Angie said. “They sound like good people.”

“I think so, too,” said Taneesha, Aunt Sajelle’s daughter, who was listening in. Taneesha, Kezia, and Jason had a father, Uncle DeWayne. But he wasn’t their genetic father; the triplets had been engineered inside Aunt Sajelle, just like Cord had been. Cord thought Taneesha was the prettiest girl at the farm, not counting Clari. She had light brown skin and black curly hair and the biggest brown eyes Cord had ever seen. It made him uncomfortable, though, to think that Taneesha was so pretty. It seemed unfair to Clari.

But Taneesha was a good source of information. Aunt Sajelle apparently spoke to her kids much more frankly than anybody else’s mother. “The pribir messed with my mama’s genes, too. Not as much as with ours, of course. But Mama—and your mother, too, Cord —doesn’t get sick. You ever noticed that? The pribir did something to them so they don’t catch colds and stuff like Dolly and Clari and Angel do.”

It was true, Cord realized. Clari had had something just last month that made her head ache and her muscles hurt, and Dolly and Angel got it, too, but nobody else.

“And” Taneesha said, leaning in close to the other kids huddled together behind the barn, “the pribir put the babies inside my mama and the other women without any sex!”

Cord flushed. He’d only been told about sex a few months ago, and the whole idea made him uncomfortable.

Dakota, Julie’s son, was logical. “If there wasn’t any sex, then how did the babies get made? You need an egg and a sperm.”

Taneesha said triumphantly, “The pribir had a whole supply of sperm and eggs, and they just snipped out whatever genes they wanted from any of them and sewed them back together however they wanted.”

This explanation seemed lacking to Cord — no sperm or egg anywhere had genes for what he’d grown during the sandstorm. So the pribir had also built brand-new genes from scratch, or taken them from some other… thing. If so, that made the pribir more powerful than ever. And smart: They’d known what he might need to survive. And kind, because they wanted him to survive. Probably if she hadn’t already been a grown-up when she went to that Andrews place, they might have engineered his grandmother Theresa to survive the sandstorm, too.

Dakota said solemnly to Cord, “They saved your life, you know.”

“I know.”

“Well, I can’t wait till they come back.” This piece of Cord’s information had electrified them all.

“Me, neither,” said Kendra and Taneesha, simultaneously. Taneesha added kindly, “I’m sorry you’re not genetically engineered, too, Clari.”

Clari looked down at the ground and said nothing.

By summer of 2067 it still hadn’t rained much. Three years of drought. Wenton, which had over the years grown to look almost prosperous, didn’t look that way any more. Some people left. Others, from even more desperate places, arrived on the one train per day still arriving at the decaying station. One Thursday in April, two women, one man, and six children got off the train. They stood staring past the shrunken edge of Wenton to the flat, parched plains, stretching for miles and miles of nothing.

Cord, in town with Uncle DeWayne and Taneesha to buy cloth, spied the starers, skinny and battered-looking. City people, he thought. He knew cities from the Net shows and Net news, which was the way he knew about anything more than ten miles from the farm. Well, these people wouldn’t find whatever they were looking for, work or food or a new start, in Wenton.

Uncle DeWayne stopped walking.

“Daddy?” Taneesha said. But Uncle DeWayne ignored her, walking toward the strangers and leaving her and Cord behind.

“Oh oh,” Taneesha said.

“What?”

“Haven’t you got eyes, Cord? Six kids, two women—they’re more of us. Daddy must recognize one of them.”

Of course. Cord and Taneesha ran after Uncle DeWayne.

Uncle DeWayne said to the man, “Mike? Mike Franzi?”

The man said nothing, studying this well-dressed black man. One of the little girls shrank behind him.

Uncle DeWayne grinned hugely. “Sure it is. Mike Franzi, and you’ve forgotten all those basketball games at Andrews where I whipped your white ass. DeWayne Freeman!”

The stranger seized Uncle DeWayne’s hand. One of the women started to cry.

Taneesha said in a low voice to Cord, “Here’s trouble.”

“What? Who?”

Taneesha didn’t answer, but she stared back without flinching at one of the girls, who was giving her the finger.

It was another of those weird relationships. Two of the strangers, Mike Franzi and Hannah Reeder, were twenty-seven. They had been at Andrews Air Force Base with Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, who were sixty-seven. So had the other woman, Robin Perry, but she hadn’t gone up to the pribir ship and so she was sixty-seven, too. Three of the kids were “Aunt Hannah’s,” as Cord was instructed to call her. The other three belonged to some woman named Sophie, who was dead, but now old “Aunt Robin” was taking care of her kids.

When he was a child, thought thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Cord, all this seemed normal. It was just the way things were. Now, after watching the Net, he saw how abnormal it was. Well, that was good! He and his “family” were abnormal because they were special, made that way by the pribir.

The strange thing was the way his mother reacted when they all went back to the farm in Uncle DeWayne’s truck.

Lillie — lately Cord had begun thinking of her that way, although he wasn’t sure why—took one look at Mike Franzi and stopped dead. Then a slow, long blush spread up from her neck over her face, turning it red as sunset. Lillie, who never blushed!

“Hello, Mike.”

“Hello, Lillie. Long time.”

“How many years? Twelve.”

“You look wonderful,” he said. Cord scowled. His mother looking ‘wonderful’? She was just his mother. Lillie said, “Tell me what happened.”

He smiled. “Direct as always. All right, the short version is, Hannah and I were in Philadelphia. It got impossible, food riots and burning. We found Robin and Sophie on the Net, living together with their kids in Denver. We went there because it sounded better, and for a while it was. But then it got as dangerous and hungry as Philly, no jobs. Two weeks ago Sophie was killed in a riot. By that time I recognized Rafe’s message on the Net, and here we are.”

Cord knew that message, although he didn’t understand it. It went: Do you remember Andrew? How about Pam and Pete? They’re still gone, of course, but their legacy remains. Sometimes it seems I can still smell them. So much is gone, but we’re here.

Dr. Wilkins said, “Why didn’t you Net us that you were coming?”

Mike didn’t answer. After a moment the girl who had given Taneesha the finger said defiantly, “We were afraid you wouldn’t take us in.”

Uncle Jody said, “We will. My mother would have wanted it.”

Lillie added, “If we didn’t want you, why would Rafe have posted that message? You’re welcome, all of you, as long as you’re willing to work. Times are tougher than they were—but I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

The old woman, “Robin,” said bitterly, “Lillie, you don’t know about tough times. You missed the war. Don’t try to tell me about tough times.”

Lillie looked startled, and then her eyes met Mike’s, and something passed between them. All Cord saw was a tiny smile and an even tinier shake of his head, but once more his mother—his mother!—blushed. And then she looked at the younger woman, Hannah, and looked away.

Mike said, “These are Sophie’s children, Roy, Patty, and Ashley.” Ashley and Taneesha stared each other down. Trouble, Taneesha had said, and Cord believed it. Ashley was as skinny as the rest but taller and muscled. Her insolent look around the cluttered great room said she didn’t think much of it. As if she was used to better.

Hannah said in a high, strained voice, “These are my children. Frank and Bruce and Loni.”

“Hi,” a few of the farm kids said shyly. The rest of the introductions were made. The new people would never remember all the names, Cord thought. He couldn’t even remember all of theirs, and there were only nine. Which one was Bruce?

Aunt Sajelle said, “Let’s get you all fed and settled.” Since Grandma’s death, Aunt Sajelle had taken over running the big house, with Aunt Carolina’s help.

Clari, at Cord’s elbow said, “They look so hungry.”

“They probably are,” Cord said. Clari was always kind, so sweet. The other boys, especially his brother Keith, teased Cord about having a girl for a best friend, but he didn’t care. There was no one like Clari.

CHAPTER 20

Ashley Vogel was the only kid at the farm who hated the pribir. “They wrecked my life,” she said. “Fuck them.”

“No,” Taneesha said, “they gave you your life. They wrecked our lives by sending you here. Why don’t you just go back where you came from.”

“Fuck you,” Ashley said.

A ring of kids surrounded the two at Dead Men’s Arroyo. Ashley had wanted to see where the refugees who once attacked the farm were buried, because Dolly had told her it was haunted. Nine of them had hiked out in the late afternoon, when the sun wasn’t too dangerous, on the half-day a week they were allowed off from chores and studies. The hike out was tense. Dolly, the only person who liked Ashley, walked ahead with her, whispering together and jeering over their shoulders at the others.

Cord had gone because he was both bored and strangely keyed up. The new kids had upset the balance at the farm. New friendships formed, old alliances shifted, among both children and adults. No one liked Aunt Robin. She was the same age as Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, but she seemed older, nastier. Her hip hurt her, her gut ached, she was always complaining. Aunt Hannah was all right and her kids didn’t cause any trouble, but something wasn’t right there, either. Something about Aunt Hannah and Cord’s mother. He didn’t like to think about it. It was partly to avoid thinking about it that he’d hiked down to the arroyo with Dolly, Ashley, Taneesha, Jason, Keith, Kella, Gavin, Dakota, and Bobby. Clari had another one of her colds and her mother made her stay in bed.

Walking over the land, following his own lengthening shadow, Cord remembered how it used to be. Greener, with bushes and little low flowers everywhere and even some cottonwood saplings starting to take growth. Now, except where the farm irrigated with windpower, the ground stretched gray and bleached, dust devils rising in yellow funnels on the wind. The new saplings had all withered. Tumbleweed rolled across his path.

At the arroyo, studying the marker stone for the mass grave, Ashley said, “Let’s dig them up.”

Kella was shocked. “You can’t do that! You’re not supposed to disturb the dead. Besides, what if some of the micros from the bioweapon are still active? We could die!”

“The micros aren’t still active,” Dakota said authoritatively. He was one of the kids that studied with Dr. Wilkins. “They had a terminator gene built in for only twelve replications.”

“Too bad,” Ashley said coolly. “We could all die. That would be so bonus.”

Cord gaped at her. He knew that Ashley was showing off, but something about her disturbed him. Not just her meanness… something else he couldn’t name.

Kella said, “But you don’t want to die, Ashley!”

“Why not? End this misery.”

Cord found himself saying, “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “And anyway, what misery? You’re here now, the farm is going to take care of you, what’s so miserable?”

“We are,” Ashley said. “All of us. Miserable abominations because that what the fucking pribir made us.”

“Stop it, Ashley,” Kella said. “I know you’re just showing off.”

“I was never more serious in my life,” Ashley said, and again Cord glimpsed that something he couldn’t name. It was almost as if Ashley… meant it.

“The pribir did an incredible job of creating us,” Dakota said, and began a technical recital of genetic engineering. Dakota, Cord saw, was also showing off.

“Fuck that,” Ashley said. “The pribir made us so we’re not human and regular humans spit on us and hate us, and I hate the pribir for doing that. If they come back the way they said, I’ll kill them myself. Personally.”

Complete silence.

“I’ll sneak up on them from behind with the scythe in the barn,” Ashley embellished, “and one smack to the head will cut them in two. I’ll dance in the blood. I’ll—”

“That’s enough,” Taneesha said. Until now she’d been quiet, sitting expressionless on a boulder. Now she stood, and Cord saw that she was outraged, and afraid, and eager. “Shut your mouth, Ashley.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, you bitch.”

The two girls started to circle each other. Everyone else drew back. Cord suddenly realized that this was why Ashley and Taneesha had come to the dry arroyo, and maybe the others, too, or at least some of them. This fight that had been building for weeks now, for reasons he couldn’t begin to state.

Cord didn’t want to see it. He wanted Taneesha to win, of course. Ashley’s words had genuinely sickened him. The pribir were heroes, Cord couldn’t wait for their promised return, and for Ashley to say what she had was like… well, like pissing on food. Nonetheless, he still didn’t want to see the fight.

Taneesha, taller and better nourished, got in the first punch, hard and quick to Ashley’s stomach. Ashley bent over in pain and Cord thought the fight had ended right there. But Ashley straightened up and after that she attacked like a wounded bear. Cord had never seen this sort of fight. Ashley screamed, she gouged at Taneesha’s eyes, she kicked and scratched and bit. Was that the way kids fought in the city?

After a stunned moment, four people rushed forward to pull the girls apart. Ashley would not let go. Cord stayed only long enough to make sure that the others had the wildcat under control and that Taneesha was being taken care of. Then he turned and started back to the farm. He was disgusted.

Clari would never behave that way.

No, it was more than that. He didn’t want to see blood dripping down Taneesha’s pretty face.

No, it was more than that. If Taneesha hadn’t fought Ashley, Cord might have done it himself, for what she’d said about the pribir. It filled him with a deep rage that he didn’t know what to do with. He took the rage away from the others, out on the plain, alone.

But that wasn’t a good idea, either. Days were longer than in winter, but not all that long, and being caught alone on the desert at night wasn’t a good idea. He’d learned that at eleven years old.

So he stalked the mile-and-then-some back to the farm, knotting and unknotting his fists, circling a very long way around the outbuildings and cattle pens and cottonwood grove to give himself more time alone, and that was how he happened upon his mother and Uncle Mike.

They sat on the ground under a lone cottonwood farther down the creek than the grove with the bench. This tree’s low branches drooped almost, but not quite, over the two adults. They didn’t touch. But the way they sat so close together, the tension in both figures, caught at Cord. He crept closer and crouched behind a boulder. It didn’t hide him completely and if they turned they would see him, but both were too absorbed to turn.

“—too mixed up to tell,” Mike said.

“I know,” Lillie answered. “They just took whatever they needed from whoever’s sperm. Any of them could have anybody’s genes.”

The pribir. They were talking about the pribir. Cord strained to hear.

“Still,” Mike said, “Kella and Cord look like me. A little. But with your eyes.”

“Well… a little,” Lillie said. “But then, so does Bonnie’s Angie, sort of. We’ll never know.”

“Scott can’t—”

“No. He says the mixing is just too complete. The usual markers simply don’t apply. The pribir apparently built almost from scratch.”

“Still,” Mike said, “it was you and I who slept together on the ship.”

“Plus you and Sophie,” Lillie said. After a moment she added, “Not that it matters any more, Mike. We both know what was being done to drive us. If I blamed you at the time, it was because I was a lovesick child.”

“I know. But, Lillie—”

“Don’t say it. Please.”

“No, I’m going to. It has to be said. We’re not children now.”

“You’re with Hannah now,” Lillie said. “Since how long?”

“Two years. But Lillie… be fair. She was desperate, she and later Sophie, and I’ve never risked being with anyone else who wasn’t one of us, afraid of what genes I’d pass on—”

“Oh, God, I know,” Lillie said. “Some nights I’ve ached. For you, Mike. Only for you.”

“Then we should—”

“No! What are you going to do, tell Hannah to leave the farm? You told me what it was like out there for her, for the kids. Or are you thinking you can just switch wives while we’re both here? What will that do to Hannah?”

“She’s not my wife. We never married. Oh, damn it, Lillie, I know you’re right. We can’t…”

“We can’t even talk about it again,” Lillie said.

“Then if that’s so, give me one kiss. Surely one kiss isn’t too big a booby prize for never having you again.”

Slowly, like a rock slide starting small, Cord saw his mother lean toward Mike and his arms go around her hard.

His rage broke. At Ashley, at Taneesha, at Clari for being sick in bed, at the loss of the pribir who’d said they would come back and hadn’t, at everything. He exploded from behind the rock and shouted, “Stop it, you whore! Stop it, you, get away from my mother!” And then stopped dead because no one spoke like that except in Net shows, he had said the unforgivable no he hadn’t but he was wrong wrong wrong. Now his mother would kill him.

She didn’t. She detached herself from Mike’s arms and walked over to him. A pulse beat in her neck, above her open shirt, and her face was flushed, but her voice was calm. “You’re very angry, Cord. But even angry, you aren’t allowed to behave like this. Apologize, please.”

“I’m sorry,” Cord mumbled, and then he was sorry, sorrier than he’d ever been in his life. He raised his hand, dropped it, hid his face in the crook of his arm. Lillie’s arms went around him and her voice sounded close to his ear, low and sweet and sad.

“I know, Cord. I know, honey. But it’s all right, and no one will ever mention this again.”

Cord knew it was the truth. She never would, and she would make sure Mike didn’t, and she wouldn’t treat him as anything less because of this. Overcome, he said, “I love you, Mom,” and felt her arms tighten and her face grow wet against his ear.

Ashley and Taneesha both came home bloody, and Taneesha’s arm was broken. Dr. Wilkins set it, muttering about childhood stupidity. Aunt Robin, who was supposed to be in charge of Ashley, wanted to whip her but Uncle DeWayne, who along with Lillie and Aunt Sajelle and Uncle Jody was more or less in charge of everybody, refused to allow it. The girls were punished by extra chores and no time outside for two weeks. Both of them healed so fast that Dr. Wilkins took more tissue samples and spent three more days crouched over his gene equipment, trying once again to map all the immune system activity in Ashley and Sajelle.

For days the kids talked about the fight, whispering about what Ashley had said and done, why she could possibly have done it. Her brother and sister, Roy and Patty, were consulted about things that had happened to them all before they came to the farm. Roy and Patty were reluctant to talk. Both quieter and more cooperative than Ashley, they seemed to want only to put the past out of their minds. Gavin, who had begun to read old psychology books on the Net, said that Ashley showed “self-hatred,” but this was deemed silly by the others. Why would anyone hate themselves?

Five of them were whispering about this in the den at the big house, with Cord trying to ignore them and do his schoolwork on the computer, when Dr. Wilkins walked in. “Come to the great room. Now,” he said, and walked out again. The five kids looked at each other. Dr. Wilkins was old and wrinkled and tired, but his face didn’t usually look that gray. Something had happened.

Cord sat on the floor next to Clari and whispered, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. More people are coming.”

When nearly everyone had squeezed into the great room, Dr. Wilkins said, “China and European Federation are at war. They’re using bioweapons. We’re too far away for viable micros to affect us here, but I don’t have any idea what the weapons are. There are micros that can encyst and then vitiate after they’re breathed in. Also, if China decides to include us in the war—either because they’re winning and can or are losing and are desperate —or even to include Mexico, we could have a problem. I want everybody to be completely alert to any changes in your physical functioning. And I mean anything: diarrhea, constipation, a cough, a pain, a headache, a muscle twitch, anything. Tell me or Emily.” Dr. Wilkins was training Emily in medicine.

Spring said, “Hell, if I reported every muscle spasm, I’d never have time to get on a horse. Hey—what about the horse’s muscle spasms?”

“It isn’t funny, Spring,” Dr. Wilkins said, which wasn’t fair because Spring was probably serious. Sometime it was hard to tell. “You and other non-engineered are at special risk. I think.”

Cord took Clari’s hand. She wasn’t engineered. Lillie was, sort of, like the others in the first generation the pribir had helped. Could Cord himself withstand all bioweapons? Nobody knew. That was probably another reason that Dr. Wilkins wanted to hear about any symptoms. He could learn more about what all Cord’s extra genes were supposed to do.

But that wouldn’t be as good as learning it from the pribir themselves. Aunt Sajelle had said that the last two pribir visits were forty years apart. God, he wasn’t going to have to wait another twenty-nine years, was he?

“Cord,” Dr. Wilkins said, “are you listening?”

“Yes,” he lied. Across the room, Taneesha made a face at him, her eye still half closed and her lip swollen from the fight. Cord smiled despite himself. She was healing very fast, Emily said. Taneesha would be all right. Everyone would be all right. China and Europe were an unthinkable distance away.

Finally, three and a half years after the drought began, the rains returned. All that spring and summer majestic thunder clouds formed over the high plain, towering black piles that sometimes let down moisture and sometimes didn’t. “Much better than before the warming or the last three years,” Uncle DeWayne said, “but not as good as the best years.”

The following summer, Cord abruptly grew four inches. His voice cracked. He spent a lot of time in the fields, since he didn’t like to ride, and the work turned him strong and, even with precautions against UV, brown. When he looked in the mirror, he frowned. Was that him? “You look wonderful,” his mother said, and he felt himself go hot with embarrassment and pleasure.

The kids all seemed to fly apart that summer. Instead of spending their time together playing Hot Rocks, each of them began to spend more time with adults, working hard. Dr. Wilkins was training Emily in science and genetics. Keith spent more and more time with Uncle Jody and the cattle. Kendra started learning poetry by heart—why would anybody want to do that? Kezia and Roy hung around the hot cookhouse, and Roy learned to make a chili stew that was better than Aunt Sajelle’s or Aunt Carolina’s. He wouldn’t tell anybody what he put into it.

Aunt Hannah had brought an old music cube with her, and her kids played it over and over. Ashley’s favorite song was “Don’t Matter None to Me.” The first time Cord’s mother heard the cube play that song, she froze, a strange look on her face. But the look passed, and Cord forgot about it.

Small biowars went on breaking out over the globe, but Cord didn’t pay much attention. Nobody in New Mexico got sick, and that was all he really cared about.

The pribir did not come.

Later, it seemed to him that the three years between Grandma Theresa’s death and Cord’s fourteenth birthday had passed in one long, unbroken, monotonous, peaceful stretch. Nothing seemed to have happened, even though he could recite events that had. But he walked through them half-conscious, maybe, or encased in some sort of childish membrane. Nothing got through unfiltered, undiluted. Nothing upset his internal chemistry.

In December 2067, Cord and the others turned fourteen.

CHAPTER 21

Cord awoke abruptly, his heart pounding. Second time tonight! He could take care of it in the usual way… but he didn’t want to. He wanted to go outside. Why? He just did. Damn it, did he have to have a reason for everything he did?

Throwing on his clothes, he left the room where Keith, Bobby, and Gavin slept fitfully in their bunks. Jason, Roy, and Dakota had gone on the cattle drive, along with some of the girls, Kendra and Kella and maybe Felicity.

At the thought of girls, the problem got worse.

The night was cool and starry, moonless. An owl hooted in the dark. Cord smelled sage and mint on the fresh breeze. Maddened by the sweetness, he paced restlessly out to the barn, didn’t go inside, paced back. He didn’t want to go in. He headed for the bench under the cottonwood grove by the creek, stumbling and cursing in the dark.

Two figures sat there, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Cord couldn’t tell who they were, not even by straining his eyesight. Suddenly he was ashamed of himself for even trying. Not his business. Only… why would any of the married couples be kissing outside at two in the morning? They could be warm in their beds, touching each other in comfort and…

He ached with envy.

Cord turned toward the smaller houses set up the slope. At Senni’s place, he stopped. Clari was in there. God, to sit with Clari under that tree and do what that couple were doing! He would wake Clari.

He couldn’t wake Clari. She would be upset and if Aunt Senni ever found out… Cord shuddered.

Totally frustrated, he smacked his fist into the side of his head and again started toward the big house. He hadn’t even put shoes on, his feet were freezing, he was the world’s biggest idiot…

Someone stood in the shadows on the porch, a dark figure in a white nightdress. Cord moved cautiously closer. He had to practically walk into her before he could see who it was. Taneesha.

The two stared at each other, inches apart. Cord could hear himself breathing. Finally Taneesha said, “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.” His voice came out ragged.

“Cord, I…” She took a step toward him.

Cord couldn’t help himself. As if propelled by some sort of motor, a will-less machine, he reached for her. She lunged toward him with a sort of small hop, and then they were kissing and his hands were on her breasts through her thin nightdress and nothing else existed in the world.

“Where… can we go?” Taneesha breathed when he pulled his mouth away from hers to breathe. “Oh, Cord…”

She was as driven as he was. He gasped, “Wait here a minute,” went back inside and pulled the blankets off his bunk. He thought Gavin opened his eyes but Cord wasn’t sure and he didn’t care.

They took the blankets to the wellhouse and threw them on the floor of hard-packed dirt. It was even colder in here, plus damp; neither noticed. They went at each other with a fierceness beyond control. Not even breaking Taneesha’s hymen, and her brief cry of pain, stopped either one of them. Afterward, they both fell asleep, only to wake sometime in the predawn and do it again.

It wasn’t until he woke for the second time, shivering under the inadequate blanket with Taneesha rumpled beside him, that Cord thought in anguish: Clari.

Sex happened to all of them at once. That was how Cord thought of it: “Sex happened.” Like thunderstorms or earthquakes.

Keith and Loni, Bobby and Maya, Gavin and Susie, Frank and Patty, Bruce and Ashley. Kezia, unpaired, looked angry and desperate. She asked often when the range crew was returning.

It took the adults twenty-four hours to notice what was happening. Work was neglected, couples disappeared, all the kids looked dazed and wobbly. Dr. Wilkins was appalled. “They’re not even using birth control!”

“Then give them some,” Sajelle said wearily. “Scott, you don’t know. They can’t help it.”

“Of course they can help it!” snapped Robin, old and outraged. “They’re not animals!”

“Robin, you weren’t on the ship,” Emily said. “You don’t know. For us the pribir did it with olfactory molecules. For this generation, it’s apparently built in.”

“I don’t believe—”

“I don’t care what you believe, Robin,” Lillie said, and Cord, who overheard this and knew he was not supposed to, was surprised at the rare anger in his mother’s voice. Why?

Keith, Lillie’s son, was having sex with Loni, Mike’s daughter. Was that it? That whole episode with Lillie and Mike under the cottonwood three years ago looked entirely different now. Had his mother and Mike felt like he did with Taneesha? Don’t think about it.

Lillie added, still angry, “Scott, give them some birth control.”

Emily said, “I’m not sure it will do any good. I can run some tests, but the pribir knew their genetics. My guess is that the girls’ Fallopian tubes are designed to counteract any birth control we can manage.”

Bonnie said, appalled, “You mean the girls… my Angie… she’s going to get pregnant no matter what we do?”

“We did,” Lillie said, still angry.

Julie —quiet, timid Julie!—said, “Damn the pribir all to hell forever,” and Cord crept away. He didn’t want to hear that.

And he had to find Clari.

She was in the washhouse, doing laundry. The windpowered generator made limited amounts of non-emission electricity, which powered select machines in order of necessity. The washing machine was not a high priority, but nothing else was running right now and Clari, Dolly, and Aunt Carolina’s eight-year-old, Elena, were doing laundry. Dolly looked up as soon as Cord blundered in.

“Come to help, Cord?” she sneered. “You haven’t been much use otherwise lately.”

“Clari,” he said humbly, “can I talk to you?” Her nose was red and swollen; she’d been crying.

Dolly said, “Leave her alone. We know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing!”

“What was he doing?” said little Elena with interest.

“Please, Clari,” Cord begged.

She put down sopping clothes and followed him outside. Glaring sun cast stunted shadows.

“Come under the trees, Clari.” He led her to a nearby stand of young juniper that had been carefully nurtured through the long drought. “I… I…”

She looked at him miserably, and his words burst out.

“Oh, Clari, I’m so sorry. It was you I wanted, not Taneesha, but you were asleep in the middle of the night and… Clari, I heard the grown-ups talking. Aunt Emily said we’ve been engineered to do this, to be driven to sex right now so the girls will get pregnant—” At the look on her face he stopped.

She said, “Engineered? To have sex and get pregnant, and you can’t help it?”

“Yes! I mean, no!”

“That’s evil, Cord! That’s genuinely evil. To use people like that.”

Cord didn’t feel used. Looking at her swollen, dear face, he felt more lust. His groin swelled and all he wanted was to —

“Come with me,” he said desperately. “To the barn. Or someplace. It’s you I want, not Taneesha, but if I can’t have you I will do it again with her. I know it. Oh, please, Clari, we belong together, we always have, I want to marry you…”

He didn’t know what he was saying. Marry? Now, at fourteen? But he dimly realized that he would say anything, anything at all, to get Clari to go with him to the barn.

She looked scared. “Cord, I… don’t want to. Not yet. Someday—”

“I can’t wait until someday!”

“Then you don’t love me very much, if you won’t wait for me,” she said sadly, and walked away.

Cord stood there, wretched and angry and ashamed and driven, and after a minute he went to find Taneesha.

For forty-eight hours he avoided Clari and had sex with Taneesha every chance he could. The range crew came in, or rather part of them did. Alex said, “I brought the kids back. They were no use. They…”

“I know,” Lillie said.

“Me, too,” Alex said, not looking at her. “I remember. Jody is upset and angry.”

“He doesn’t have to be, Alex. His and Carolina’s kids aren’t engineered.”

“What about Julie’s kids with Spring, when they’re older? Will they inherit it? The sex drive could be dominant.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lillie said slowly.

“I’ll bet Scott has. Lillie… I’m going to ask you because you’re the most level-headed woman here. There are more girls than boys. Do you think Kezia… I mean, does it have to be one of their own… God, Lillie, it’s been so long!”

“She’s fourteen, Alex.”

“I know. So were we.”

“You’re twenty-eight.”

“I know!”

“It’s up to you and her,” Lillie said wearily. “And, I guess, to Sajelle. Sajelle’s her mother. You can ask. Sajelle’s always been clear-eyed.”

Alex said, “I hate this. But in Wenton now there are mostly… I’d be good to Kezia, Lillie.”

“I believe it,” Lillie said.

The next day Kezia left to go back with Alex to the cattle on the range.

Cord said to Taneesha, “Tannie… I’m sorry. You’re great, and beautiful, and I always liked you. But me and Clari—”

Taneesha’s dark eyes flashed. “Yeah? You and Clari? It’s Clari you want to have sex with, not me?”

Cord said nothing, staring at his stupid goddamn feet in their stupid goddamn boots.

Taneesha was Sajelle’s daughter, clear-eyed. She sighed. “Okay, Cord. I guess I knew that. I just… I just…”

“Don’t cry!” he begged.

“I don’t ever cry, Cord Anderson, and don’t you forget it! You aren’t the only male in the whole sorry world, you know! Anyway,” she said, changing mood again, “does Clari want to?”

“No.”

“Then why are you—”

“I don’t know!” he shouted, and to his surprise, she actually chuckled.

“I know. You love her, you always did. Go find Clari and talk her into it, Cord. I’ll be fine.”

She was. The next time Cord saw her, she was with Rafe, who looked just as embarrassed and uneasy and pleased as Alex.

Cord found Clari and pleaded and coaxed until Clari said yes. But it wasn’t like with Taneesha. Clari didn’t seem to enjoy it and the first time hurt her a lot. Cord hated himself, and couldn’t stop, and vowed in his heart that he would make it up to Clari. He would get for her anything, everything, she might ever want. If it took the whole rest of his life, he would make it up to her.

By year’s end, all eleven of the girls engineered aboard the pribir ship, plus Clari, were pregnant. On January 7, war was declared with China. Within the first hour, missiles delivered bioweapons into the atmosphere over forty-seven targets in the United States.

The U.S. defense system, more obsolete than the government had even realized, shot down only eight. The Defense Department retaliated with bioweapons of their own.

Net news reported deaths in the millions, then the tens of millions. The camvids on the Net, the posted recordings of the dying, the roboviews of entire cities, were horrifying.

Then the Net sites, one by one, ceased to record, or post, or move from the frozen agony of whatever they’d been displaying last.

“It’s a mixed lot, from the little definitive information I can get on the medical list serves still running,” Uncle Scott said. “It’s possible not all the bioweapons are Chinese. There’s anthrax and Ebola, for sure, possibly modified. The Ebola may have been made airborne. There are also engineered bacteria and viruses and even spores, which present a special problem because they remain viable so long. One in particular we want to watch out for—it induces your cells to produce TP53 in enormous quantities, and that in turn induces apoptosis.”

“What’s that?” Sajelle said.

“It makes your cells commit suicide.”

Emily, very pale, added, “We want more samples from each of you.”

Cord had already given so many samples of blood and tissue that he felt like he’d run into a cactus. Poke here, pierce there, scrape somewhere else. Not that there was much choice.

Kendra said, “What about the babies? How can you tell if they’re going to be all right?”

“We’re going to take amniotic samples from each of you,” Emily said.

Cord put his arm around Clari. Guilt, a constant cloud, settled into his bones. Unlike the other pregnant girls, Clari hadn’t sought the sex that led to this. And unlike the other pregnant girls, she wasn’t engineered for a super-boosted immune system. Julie and Sajelle, pribir-blessed women married to normal men, had passed on their lesser protection to their new babies. But would it work for Cord to pass on his unfathomable genes to Clari’s children? Was his total engineering, like the previous generation’s milder version, dominant? Nobody knew.

By summer, the only people transmitting live on the Net lived in isolated pockets in rural areas. Rafe monitored every waking hour. Grimly he reported that some of those people were falling ill, too, from a dozen different diseases.

“The winds go everywhere,” Clari said. She was having a very bad pregnancy, morning sickness and anemia and edema and half a dozen other things Cord couldn’t name. He wanted to spend every minute with her, and he wanted, from guilt, to never see her at all. Fortunately, the decision was not his. Every person on the farm was working as hard as possible all day, every day, to make the place self-sufficient. There were a lot of things they were going to have to do without, but right now the aim was simple survival.

Taneesha said, “You mean… everybody in the world might die?”

“Except us,” Emily said. She was too thin. She hadn’t eaten more than snatched mouthfuls in days. Neither had Dr. Wilkins, who was much older and looked much worse.

Clari said, “How would we know if anybody else survives?”

Lillie said, “Rafe will hang onto the Net until nobody at all posts or until the satellites fall out of the sky. But there might be really isolated groups that survive who don’t have Net access. Inuit or Laplanders or someone.”

Cord didn’t know who those people were, and he didn’t ask. It wouldn’t help anything. And the truth was, he didn’t really care.

Uncle Scott cared. He said somberly, “When I was born, the world held six billion people. After the first biowar there were two billion left, about the same as there had been in 1900. Today there’s maybe two hundred million people on Earth. I’m estimating, of course, extrapolating from what few figures I have. Two hundred million is the same number as when Christ was born. And the number is going down.”

Emily said gently, “Scott, the changed ecosystems probably can’t support many more than that, anyway.”

“And who changed them? Us. Humans. We’re all as guilty of these deaths as the people who fired those bioweapons.”

To Cord, that was just silly. He and Uncle Scott and Aunt Emily hadn’t killed anybody. Somebody in one of the back bedrooms began to play the music cube: “Don’t Matter None to Me.”

“Population projections for this year,” Uncle Scott said, “once were ten billion people. Instead, we have suigenocide.” He walked heavily to his room and closed the door.

Cord didn’t know what “suigenocide” was. He didn’t ask Aunt Emily. She and Uncle Scott were talking about the past, and the past was over and gone. Cord honestly couldn’t see the point. “We’ve lost so much,” Aunt Robin constantly whined. But Cord couldn’t see that, either.

Everything that mattered to him was here, now.

Then, in April, the cattle suddenly began to die.

CHAPTER 22

“Oh, God,” Lillie said. “Scott, what can we do?”

“Nothing until we figure out what’s killing them,” Scott said testily. “Send the range crew out for blood and tissue samples. Mark each cow carefully so we know what came from whom. Emily and I will get to work as soon as you bring the samples back.”

“No,” Emily said.

It was another farm meeting in the great room. As usual, only about half were present; the rest couldn’t be spared from vital work, or were grabbing a few hours of sleep, or, in the case of Clari and Felicity, were throwing up from pregnancy. Another meeting, but different, Cord thought. He could remember when farm meetings had announced new income, new cattle purchases, new gains in water supplies. Now all the news was bad.

The room even looked different. The windows were closed tightly, a minor effort to keep out windborne micros. Alex and Dakota had built a series of entryways with shallow pans of chemicals in each to wash off your boots. People kept their outdoor clothes there, and only there, stripping to light inner layers and washing their hands before they came into the big house. The house had acquired an unaired, stale smell. And hot; this was July. Not even the thick walls could keep the house cool.

Dr. Wilkins said harshly, “What do you mean, ‘no’? Don’t go difficult on me, Emily!”

The young woman, her blond hair dirty and lank, faced the old man who had been born the same year she had. With difficulty she said, “Scott, listen. The people who never went up to the pribir ship… all that you got for genetic modifications was the olfactory alterations. You remember, at Andrews no doctors could find any other expressed alterations, and you and I haven’t found any either. That means you and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin don’t have enhanced immune systems. Yours are no better than Jody’s or Carolina’s, and you’re much older. I don’t think you should handle any of the cattle samples, in order to avoid infection. I can do it all.”

“You can’t! You don’t know enough to—”

“Yes,” Emily said. “I do.”

Dr. Wilkins looked at her for a long time. Finally he nodded, saying nothing. Then he turned and walked slowly out of the room, closing the door. Cord thought of a cow he’d once seen, old and unable to keep up with the herd, lumbering away from the herd to lie down in shade.

Emily said, “I—” and stopped.

Cord’s mother said clearly, “You did the right thing, Em. Now everybody get back to work. DeWayne, Robin, you stay indoors, just in case.”

Ashley muttered, “Like anybody cares if that old bag Robin gets infected.”

“Shut up,” Taneesha said. The two girls glared at each other. At least, Cord thought, they couldn’t have another fight. Both their bulging bellies would keep them from getting close enough to each other to swing.

The cattle samples showed an engineered virus that Emily had never seen before. She took printouts in to Scott, who hadn’t seen them either. Scott chafed at not being able to work with the live samples, but Lillie, DeWayne, and Emily remained firm. Scott never left the big house to go anywhere, especially not down to the small house taken over as Emily’s laboratory.

“It kills bovine cells, all right,” Emily said, “but I think it’s species specific. Look, here—”

Scott listened. “I think you’re right.”

Jody, hovering in the doorway, said, “How many head are we going to lose?”

Emily answered. “All of them.”

“All? The entire herd?”

“Yes.” Her thin face looked pinched. She knew what it meant. They were all going to have to survive on corn, chickens, and hunted game… unless that went, too. What then? There was enough food stored for maybe six months, but no more than that. The corn, genetically enhanced, gave a high yield as long as it was irrigated constantly. But no more food was going to come in to Wenton for trade.

Jody said, “It’s almost calving time. Will the calves—”

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “Isolate the calves as soon as they’re born, and wash each with dip right away. Keep them from contamination from their mothers.”

He stared at her. “Emily, how the hell can we do that? You’ve never done a calving. There’s blood and what you’d call ‘tissues’ all over the place. You can’t keep the calves from ‘contamination by the mothers.’ And even if they could, the calves have to nurse, for God’s sake. How can we—”

“I don’t know how!” Emily shouted. “That’s your job! Just do it!”

Emily never lost her temper. Dr. Wilkins put a hand on her arm. Emily shook it off. Cord, listening, went to find Keith and Spring, to tell them the herd was going to die and the calves had to be isolated from the milk that would maybe have kept them from dying, too.

Both range crews worked night and day at calving, and they pulled in people who usually had other tasks. Cord, so exhausted that if he stopped moving he fell asleep standing up, had never seen a calving like this. Even Spring, perpetually cheerful, went grimly about the grim business. They were shorthanded because all the female teenagers who usually worked range crew were pregnant. The only women were Lillie, Senni, and Bonnie. Twice Cord caught Bobby, who had a sensitive stomach, vomiting.

Cows, pre-delivery, post-delivery, and not pregnant at all, died constantly. First the animal began to tremble as its nervous system was affected. A few hours later it lay down, lowing in pain. Half an hour after that the cow thrashed on the ground, desperately gasping for air, often breaking its legs in the process. A few minutes later it died.

Dakota and Keith, both good riders, tried to cut the trembling cows out of the herd and drive the animals away from the rest. It seemed to hurt them to walk, but the men kept at it anyway. They forced the cows as far away as possible, then shot them to spare the animals their inevitable agony. The rifle shots terrified the others, as did the smell of the rotting carcasses of the dead.

If the cow was pregnant, Jody and his crew induced labor, trying to get the calf out before the mother started to tremble. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes not. A few cows died, thrashing, with calves halfway born, and most of these calves died, too. Cord saw his mother stick her hand up a cow whose induced-labor calf hadn’t turned properly and turn it by sheer force. He looked away.

The surviving calves were carried, bleating for their dying mothers, to the antiseptic dip. There was no time to clean up anything. The ground was slippery with blood, placentas, death. The reek and noise were indescribable.

Cord, covered with blood, finally could work no longer. Jody said roughly, “Go lie down, Cord. Now.”

“I can’t, the—”

“Do it!” He pushed Cord toward the bedrolls set upwind. “I’ll wake you in two hours.”

Cord collapsed onto the blankets, not washing first, and was asleep instantly, the smell of dead cattle in his nostrils.

When Lillie woke him, he put out his hand to ward her off, unsure where he was, who she was. “Cord, wake up. We need you to take charge of getting the surviving calves onto the truck and back to the barn.”

He nodded, stumbled upright, lurched back to the pens. The sky had clouded over, low angry clouds, and Cord didn’t know if it was morning or afternoon, or of what day. He set to work. The small, slippery calves, some premature from the induced labor, bleated piteously. One died on the way, falling to the truck bed where the others, packed in, crushed it with their tiny, deadly hoofs. At the barn, taking the calves off the truck and finding the dead one staring at him with open eyes, Cord succumbed. Ashamed of himself, he cried.

Emily, Sajelle, Julie, Carolina, Hannah, and Lupe waited at the barn. Emily showed them how to wash the calves again with the brew she’d concocted, and Cord showed them how to grasp the animals to carry them inside.

“Cord, you smell awful,” Hannah said distastefully, and he was too tired to feel his own anger.

Lupe had learned somewhere how to feed calves. She’d prepared bottles of warm solution designed by Emily for maximum nutrition. Under Lupe’s instruction, the women awkwardly began to hold bottles for the calves, two at a time, while Emily efficiently gave each a shot in the neck from prepared syringes.

“This is a gene sequence delivered by a bovine version of an adeno-type viral vector,” she said to Cord. “It’s tailored to this specific pathogen. It’ll splice in genes to create T-cells with receptors for the pathogenic virus. There’s also expo molecules to drastically increase the frequency of gene expression so that—Cord, are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” said Cord, who wasn’t. He couldn’t focus enough to understand her.

“Never mind,” she said kindly. “Go in and sleep. But wash first. Do you hear me? Don’t go in like that.”

He fell asleep in the yard, beside the outside pump, before he even had his clothes off. Somebody rigged a tarp over him to shield from UV, and he slept.

They saved only twenty calves. Three of those died despite attempts to nurse them. The others fought off the bioweapon micro even when they contracted it. There were seven bulls and ten cows. Eventually they castrated three of the males. Four bulls were a lot, but Jody and Spring didn’t want to risk being without any sperm for the next generation.

That decision was, Emily said, an act of pure unjustified faith that there would be a next generation.

Cord wondered about that. Staring at the surviving calves, he remembered the huge herd of his early childhood, when Grandma Theresa had been alive. It had seemed to Cord then, held firmly on the front of Uncle Jody’s saddle, that the world had been full of living, breathing cattle. All gone.

He turned away from the pen and stumbled toward the house.

CHAPTER 23

Sajelle, thinking ahead to winter, put everyone on rationing, the calories carefully worked out for men, women, pregnant women, children. Cord always felt slightly hungry. He assumed that everyone else did, too, but not even Dolly complained. Even the youngest children understood how close to the edge the farm might be balanced. But there were still—for now, anyway—enough game to trap, enough plants to gather. Wild onion, chicory for coffee, salad greens, agave to make the sweet syrup that Cord loved. Plus, this year’s harvest would be good, thanks to careful irrigation. The chickens, mercifully, didn’t contract any diseases from bioweapons.

“Well, that makes sense,” Emily said. “You start fooling around with avian pathogens, you could infect all birds and really ruin the ecology.” She fell silent, realizing that it was she who was not making sense.

“Aunt Emily, how many other people are left alive near us?” Kezia asked plaintively.

Uncle DeWayne said, “There are still some groups posting. A large one in Colorado, one in east Texas, one in the Arizona mountains. A few more, farther away. Then there are groups in the East, plus a few overseas. But there are fewer every month.”

Dr. Wilkins said, “Nobody else has the enhanced immune systems of our people.”

But not all enhanced equally, Cord thought. His generation, built genetically by the pribir, could probably survive in ways they didn’t even know about, as he had during the sandstorm four years ago. The men and women who had gone up to the pribir ship, including his mother, at least never got sick with anything. But DeWayne, Robin, and Dr. Wilkins had no engineered protection. Neither did Grandma Theresa’s children, Senni and Jody and Spring. Spring’s kids had boosted immune systems from their mother, Julie, but Jody’s and Senni’s children were vulnerable. Including Clari.

Cord went into their bedroom. Clari wasn’t there.

She, like Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins and Aunt Robin, wasn’t supposed to go outside. But sometimes she did anyway, dressed in a plastic rig Sajelle had created, with a mask over her face. Cord knew where to look for her.

The sun was setting in the west, fanning theatrical rays of gold and orange over a purple sky. A full moon shone gloriously on the eastern horizon. Over it passed momentarily the silent silhouette of a hawk. With the return of rain, some of the plants new since the warming had revived. Cord smelled the cool fragrance of sage, the stronger odor of cedars brought to him on a shifting breeze. Grandma Theresa had been buried under a stand of cedars, a quarter mile from the house.

Clari, in her weird plastic covering, stood in the shadow of the cedars, gazing at the stone marker. The bulge of her pregnancy made her look even more grotesque. How much longer? Two months, unless the baby came early. Clari, unlike the girls engineered by the pribir, carried only one child. Cord’s son.

He didn’t feel like a father. He felt like a boy looking at the girl he loved, who inexplicably was carrying around a hay bale under her smock.

“Clari,” he said softly.

“Hey, Cord.”

“Are you cold?”

“In this plastic? No.” She laughed, without pleasure.

“Are you… can I do anything for you?”

“Yes,” she said, which surprised him. He asked, often and helplessly, and the answer was always no.

“What? Anything, Clari, you know that.”

She didn’t answer. He peered at the semi-transparent face mask, but couldn’t make out her expression. Finally she said, “It’s going to sound terrible. I don’t mean to be gloomy or to upset you, but if… if anything happens…”

“What?”

“If anything happens while I’m in labor, would you please bury me and the baby here, next to Grandma?”

He didn’t understand why he felt anger. “Nothing is going to happen to you or the baby!”

“You don’t know that. It might. I’m not made like the other girls. And sometimes — ” She dropped her voice so low he could hardly hear her, ” — sometimes I hope it does.”

“Don’t say that! What’s wrong with you, to say that? I don’t want you to die!”

She clutched at his hand. “Don’t be mad, Cord. Please don’t be mad. It’s just that I don’t believe… everybody is so optimistic. They say we’ll get through this. But, Cord, almost everybody in the world is dead! Everybody! Don’t you think about that… a whole planetful of people just gone?”

Cord didn’t usually think about that, although he knew that others did. What good did thinking about it do?

She rushed on. “I have trouble believing this farm is going to make it when no one else did. And sometimes I think that if we’re all going to die anyway, I’d rather it happened to the baby now, before he’s properly born, so he doesn’t suffer. I don’t want him to suffer, Cord.”

So many conflicting feelings swamped Cord that he couldn’t answer. He didn’t have to. A figure came running toward them from the big house, calling, “Cord! Cord!”

“Who is it?”

“It’s Keith.” His brother tore up to Cord and Clari, and at the look on Keith’s face in the moonlight Cord’s chest tightened.

“Cord, come quick. It’s Mom. She’s sick!”

Lillie? Sick? They were none of them sick, that generation! “You’re lying!”

Keith didn’t even counterattack. “Come quick! Now!” And he was off, back to the house.

Cord ran after him, remembered Clari, stopped and turned.

“Go, go,” she said. “I’m coming.”

He raced away, leaving her lumbering after.

Lillie sat on the bed in her room at the big house. She didn’t look sick to Cord. Emily, masked, had just handed her a homemade plastic suit like the one Clari wore. Even through the mask Cord could see Emily’s fear. If Lillie could get sick, then any of her generation could.

“Mom?” Cord said from the doorway.

“Get out, Cord, and close the door,” Emily said. “I’m taking your mother down to my lab, in quarantine. You can talk to her there if you wear a mask.”

“I’m not going to get sick,” Cord said, before he thought. “I’m pribir-engineered from scratch!”

“Good for you,” Emily said acidly. “But it doesn’t look like the pribir knew what they were doing after all, does it? Lillie’s supposed to have a much boosted immune system, too.”

Not like mine, Cord didn’t say, because he was too worried about his mother. She smiled at him.

“I’m all right, Cord. Get out now and I’ll see you and Keith at the lab. Don’t let Kella come, though, or any of the pregnant girls.”

“They’re not coming, Lillie,” Emily said. “Cord, close the door.”

He did, feeling relieved. His mother didn’t look sick at all. Whatever it was, the pribir would have guarded against it. They wouldn’t let Lillie die. They were too good for that.

For the next two weeks, it looked as if Cord were right. Lillie started with merely a headache, which wouldn’t have even been noticed except that none of that group, the twenty-nine-year-olds, ever got headaches. And she couldn’t seem to sleep, not even fitfully. A few days later those symptoms disappeared, and Emily would have let Lillie out of quarantine if she and Scott hadn’t already discovered the problem.

“Oh my dear God,” Scott said.

“I found it on the Net medical library, what’s still functioning of the Net medical library, but I hoped I was wrong,” Emily said, white as bleached bone.

“No. You’re not wrong.”

“Can we—”

“No. I don’t know how to fight this in the brain, Emily. No one does. We’ll have to rely on Lillie’s own immune system.”

“What is it?” Kella demanded. “Tell me!”

Lillie’s two sons had waited outside Emily’s lab. They insisted on going with her to Dr. Wilkins in the big house where Kella, eight months pregnant, had joined them. The five people crowded into Dr. Wilkins’s little room, crushing each other between bed and crude dresser, knocking elbows into the enormous curve of Kella’s belly.

Dr. Wilkins said, “It’s an induced variant of a prion disease.”

Cord and Keith looked blank. Kella, visibly dredging her memory, said, “That’s… wait a minute… that’s a disease where a protein changes its form and it… does what?”

Emily said, “Clumps together in sticky, aggregate lumps that disrupt cell structure. And resists all efforts to destroy it. Lillie’s prion changes are in the brain, uninduced by her genes. Something else caused it.”

“Wait” Kella repeated. “Prion disease… I remember now. That’s no choice for a bioweapon! It takes months to kill, sometimes even years!”

Dr. Wilkins said, “Ordinarily, yes. But whatever is inducing Lillie’s proteins to refold, it’s designed to act fast. The only reason she isn’t dying now is her boosted immune system. Whatever the pribir did to it, it’s fighting like hell now.”

Keith, always direct, said, “Well, find whatever’s causing the protein refolds and kill it!”

Emily said gently, “That’s just it, Keith. There’s nothing there, now. Whatever the agent was, it’s gone, destroyed by Lillie’s immune system. It just left this process going on.”

“Then stop the process!”

“We don’t know how,” Emily said, and Cord heard the frustration and anger in her voice.

Cord stared hard at the rough wooden surface of Dr. Wilkins’s dresser. There wasn’t anything on the dresser, not even a hairbrush. Barren. Knotty-grained. Splintery.

“She’s not contagious, at least,” Dr. Wilkins said wearily. “You can see her. She can come out”,

“But what’s going to happen to her?” Cord burst out. “No, damn it, tell us! Don’t give me that shit about protecting us!”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Emily said. “Lillie’s prions are forming in her thalamus. She’ll get more headaches. Have increasing insomnia. Eventually dementia will set in. If we’re lucky, coma.”

And then death. Cord pushed his way to the door.

“Cord!” Kella said angrily, because she needed to be angry at someone. “Aren’t you even going to—”

“Tell Mom I’ll see her later,” Cord said. He had to get out of that room, that house. Lillie would understand. That he was sure of, in a world where nothing else was any longer sure: his mother would understand.

Lillie couldn’t sleep. At night Cord, lying sleepless himself in the room in the big house where he’d moved Clari to be near Dr. Wilkins, heard Lillie moving around the great room. It didn’t matter what hour he woke; she was there. She would walk restlessly, sometimes stumbling. As August wore on, she stumbled more often. By day she looked dazed, pale, and filmy-eyed from lack of sleep. She never complained.

One night he heard her cry out. Cord leapt up from his pallet and tore into the room. She gazed at him wild-eyed. “Uncle Keith!”

“It’s me, Mom. Cord.”

“Uncle Keith, Mom’s killed herself!”

Cord didn’t know what to do. He tried to put his arms around her, but she pushed him away, stronger than he could have imagined. “Get away! Don’t drug my mind, Pam! I’m not part of your mission!”

“Mom…”

“Get away!” she screamed, so loud that Cord thought half the house would rush in. But no one else awoke. Lillie started to moan. “Uncle Keith, help me, she didn’t mean it, Mom didn’t mean it…”

Again Cord tried to approach her, and again she shoved him off with that startling strength.

“Tess, Tess, don’t let Pam make me… don’t let…”

“Mom!” Cord said, his despair dwarfed by horror. This wasn’t his mother. Her body, her face, her voice, and not his mother not his mother… .

“Okay, Lillie,” another voice said behind him, deep and soothing, and Cord spun around. Mike Franzi. Cord hadn’t even heard the man come in.

“It’s all right, Cord, I’ll take it from here,” Mike said. He reached for Lillie.

“Get away!” she shrieked.

Mike ignored her, folding her close to his chest. “Lillie, it’s all right. You’re safe now, nobody will mess with your mind. I’ve got you now, it’s all right…”

“Mike? They’re inside the walls, they took me there, I saw… I saw…”

“I know.” To Cord, over Lillie’s shoulder, he said, “She’s back aboard the ship. Go back to bed, Cord. I’m here.”

And Hannah? Cord didn’t say. His jumbled feelings of relief, rage, and guilt left him no room for speech. He went back to bed, creeping in beside Clari. She moaned softly in her sleep and he turned away, his face toward the wall.

When it happened, it all happened at once.

Two days later, when Lillie seemed again to have rallied, Angie went into labor. “Not quite eight months,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Come on down to the birthing house. You can walk.”

“Of course I can,” Angie said. “Who said I couldn’t?”

“Nobody, dear. Come on.”

Dr. Wilkins sent Carolina’s son Angel to find Emily. Gently Dr. Wilkins took Angie’s arm and walked her to the small house that Emily had cleared out and prepared as a maternity ward. Halfway down the well-worn dirt path, Angie suddenly pulled away from the old man. “You’re not supposed to be outside!”

“I’m not missing this,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Don’t baby me, you baby. And anyway, Emily may very well have her hands full and need help. When you lot were born, all the girls went into labor at once.”

“But… even so… if you got a micro…” A sudden pain hit Angie and she bent over, straightened up, put a hand on her swollen belly, her face a sculpture of comic surprise.

“Come on, Angie, almost there…”

“What is it?” Cord called, coming out of the barn and running toward them when he saw Dr. Wilkins outdoors.

“Angie’s going to have her triplets,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Go get Sajelle, she’s the steadiest for this sort of thing.”

But instead Cord went to check on Clari. She stood at the wood stove, boiling down agave syrup, a shapeless mound with the moody face of the woman he thought he’d loved.

“Oh, leave me alone, Cord, I’m not going into labor just because the others are. I’m only carrying one child, remember, and it’s only been eight months.” She stirred the syrup harder.

Cord hastily withdrew and went to find Sajelle. She was walking Loni toward the birthing house. Loni, unlike Angie, looked panicked. Her round face, still not shed of all its own baby fat, jerked around to scan the farm.

“Where’s Mother? I want Mother!”

Sajelle said to Cord, “Go find Hannah.” When he didn’t move, she snapped, “Don’t just stand there! Find Loni’s mother!”

Everybody was telling him to find somebody else! Well, he didn’t know where Hannah was. Cord had never been comfortable with Hannah, and after the scene with Mike and the raving Lillie in the middle of the night, he’d avoided Hannah altogether.

Loni cried out and Cord suddenly found himself willing to look for Hannah. Anything rather than listen to that animal cry. Anything rather than spend the day around girls giving birth.

He ran back to the barn, even though he knew Hannah wasn’t there. Next he checked the vegetable gardens, with their system of irrigation ditches to bring water from the increasingly sparse creek. Bonnie, Sam, and Lupe were weeding the vegetables. Cord remembered to call to them, “Angie and Loni are having babies!” before he took off for the spring house.

Hannah wasn’t there. Carolina was putting eggs into the half-buried plastic boxes used as coolers. Cord paused a moment, grateful for the damp coolness under the thick adobe walls. “Carolina… where’s Hannah?”

Carolina answered with a burst of Spanish in which Cord discerned “eggs” and “broken” and “clumsy child.”

“Carolina—where’s Hannah? Loni’s in labor!”

Now he had her full attention. A smile like spring sunlight broke over her face. “Babies? Now?”

“Yes, and she wants her mother! Where’s Hannah?”

“I don’t know,” Carolina said. “Here, put these eggs in, I am need!” And Carolina was off, leaving Cord with the eggs.

He shoved them into the box, breaking only two, and pushed the lid on. Where the hell was Hannah? Not with the pitifully reduced range crew; Hannah was afraid of cattle.

He looked in the smokehouse, the privies, the windmills, everywhere he could think of. Finally he turned toward the cottonwood grove. It wasn’t likely she’d be here, in the middle of a workday. Over the long months that generation had gone outside more and more, simply because the work there needed to be done. But they didn’t just sit outside by choice.

Hannah wasn’t on the bench in the grove. Cord stood still, listening to the creek murmur over its bleached stones. A jackrabbit broke cover and streaked past him. He had looked everywhere possible. No one went to town anymore; no one went anywhere, for fear of infection. So where was she?

A tiny flash of blue across the creek caught his eye. The flat land there, once thick with pine saplings and wildflowers, was reverting to mesquite and yucca. He waded through the water and bent down.

A bit of blue cloth, snagged on mesquite. Silky blue cloth, cloth such as it wasn’t possible to make anymore. A durable microfiber synthetic, his mother had told him the first time he’d seen the beautiful blue-and-pink scarf around Hannah’s neck, the colors shading into each other so subtly that the fluttering scarf looked to him like a piece of sky. A piece of Hannah’s old life, like her music cube and silver hair brush, that life she’d shared with Lillie and Mike and Emily and the others long ago. Cord held the piece of silky material clenched in his fist and shouted Hannah’s name. No answer. He waded into the mesquite, under the grilling sun.

It took him an hour to find the next fragment of cloth, but after that it was easy. The buzzards circled the place.

Cord scared them away. He took off his jacket, long-sleeved and high-necked to keep the dangerous UV at bay, and wrapped it around Hannah’s torso. She was heavier than he expected. Too late, he realized that he shouldn’t be exposing himself to whatever she had died of. Well, fuck that. He had survived the sandstorm on the desert that had killed Grandmother Theresa, his immune system could probably handle this bioweapon. It was Lillie who was sick, Hannah who was dead, not anyone from his generation. His generation had the durable, subtle, silky genetic alterations from the pribir.

Halfway to the big house, Hannah a boulder in his arms and the sun beating down on his head, Cord began to cry.

He couldn’t brush away the tears. He let them run, along with his nose, finally stumbling clear of the mesquite when he returned to the creek. He lay Hannah down for a minute on the rough grass. He had to; his arms ached. Then, as he straightened, swiping at the snot on his face, something happened.

A picture. In his mind. Clear as if he’d seen it out a window, accepted as matter-of-facfly as the day’s work schedule. There could be no doubt, no mistake. The picture in his mind was a message.

The pribir were coming.

CHAPTER 24

Frank, Loni’s brother, stood outside the birthing house with Keith, the father of Loni’s babies. Jason, the father of Angie’s children, was out on the range. Frank and Keith looked at Cord, and he saw from their faces that they’d received the image, too.

Frank said simply, “The pribir are coming.”

Cord nodded. What he had to say next tore at him. Frank was Hannah’s son. Cord had left Hannah’s body, still wrapped in his jacket, on the bench under the cottonwood grove. Frank and Keith didn’t even notice that Cord was without his jacket, or that he had blood on his light undershirt. They were too bemused.

A baby’s cry shrilled into the air.

Keith jumped as if he’d been shot. Against orders, he flung open the door of the birthing house. “Loni!”

“She good, she fine, go away,” Carolina yelled, and shut the door again. Another baby cried, or the same baby again.

Cord looked at Frank, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say, Your mother died of a bioweapon and buzzards have been at her and somebody has to go bring her body up from the creek before other scavengers find it. He couldn’t do it.

Emily was the doctor. Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne were in charge of the farm. This was their job. All Cord had to do was tell Dr. Wilkins and Emily and the whole burden would be shifted to them, who would at least know what to do. They would know how to find out what micro had killed Hannah, what to do with the body, how to tell Hannah’s children and Mike. This was their job, babies or no babies. And the pribir was coming—he had to tell them that, too!

Cord pushed open the door and did not let Carolina close it until he was inside.

The room smelled of blood and sweat. It was infernally hot, the windows shut tight against infection. At a far bed Sajelle bent over Angie, who was panting like a coyote in August desert. Emily waited at Angie’s feet. At a table Dr. Wilkins stood over a newborn baby, collecting stem cells from its umbilical cord. Carolina put something in a basket, and Sajelle fussed over more baskets. Thin high wails pierced the fetid air. In a bed closer to the door Loni lay, evidently finished. Her hair stuck to her scalp in sweaty coils. A bloody sheet had been thrown over her, and her eyes were closed.

A gust of air blew in with Cord, hot dry high-plains air but not as hot as this terrible room. Instantly Loni opened her eyes. Feebly she tried to raise her head, let it drop back to the bed, sniffed the air. She looked straight at Cord.

“The pribir are coming,” she said.

Six beautiful infants. Two boys and four girls, born with minimal labor of mothers who immediately fell into deep, healing sleep. Two sets of perfect triplets, and the adults hardly mentioned the children. The pribir were coming.

They had all smelled it, Cord’s generation and their parents and even the white-haired Dr. Wilkins and Uncle DeWayne and Aunt Robin. “It’s like the first time,” DeWayne said quietly, holding Sajelle’s hand.

Emily held one of the new babies against her shoulder, patting the baby’s back. “Only we didn’t know if you young ones would smell it, too.”

“‘Young ones,’” spat Aunt Robin. “You’re what, twenty-nine yourself, Emily? Why shouldn’t the ‘young ones’ be able to smell the pribir? They’re the ones that got everything, all the fancy genemods to survive.”

Nobody answered her. Instead they looked at each other, glanced away, were drawn back to stare again into each other’s eyes. The pribir were coming. They were really coming.

“I wish they’d just stay away,” Alex said in a low voice, and there it was, out in the open, filling up all the space in the great room. The older generations thought the pribir would bring only more trouble. “Controlling our minds, slicing into our bodies… they better not try that shit again,” Alex added, still in that quiet, menacing tone. Sam and Bonnie and Sajelle nodded. Emily looked fearfully into the infant’s face.

Everyone of Cord’s generation, except the perverse Ashley, was filled with eagerness and hope.

They knew better than to say so. Not even Taneesha or Bobby, usually so scrappy, did anything but let their eyes meet, wide and wondering. All rejoicing had to be silent. Hannah had been hastily buried under the cedars beside Grandmother Theresa. Dr. Wilkins, gray-faced, had done a quick blood analysis and identified the engineered virus that killed her. Hannah’s sons and Mike were absent from this meeting, grieving privately, remembering years no one else had shared. Lillie, worse again and given a sedative by Emily, slept heavily in a back room.

“So what are we going to do about the bastards?” Sam said.

Uncle DeWayne said, “You’re kidding yourself if you think you can do anything. You should know that even better than I. You were aboard their ship.”

“I won’t let them use us again! Not us, not the kids, not these new babies! Not any humans!”

Sajelle said sharply, “How you going to stop them, Sam? You got a plan, hmmm? You going to just develop ways to block out those smells that control our minds?”

“I can at least wear a filter!”

‘Yes,” Emily said thoughtfully. “And perhaps stay outside. Their most concentrated effects were in the ship, a closed system. Out here the winds will dilute the olfactory molecules.”

“Oh, yeah, like they did fifteen years ago at Andrews,” Bonnie said sarcastically. “The pribir had no trouble getting their message through then, and they can do it now.”

“Still,” Emily said, “filter masks might help.”

Sam said, “The only thing that’s going to help is to kill them the second they step off their shuttle.”

Kella gasped. And Cord, unable to contain himself any longer, burst out, “Don’t you touch them!”

Deep silence fell over the room.

Cord looked at the faces. Keith, his brother, nodding slightly. Kella, with Lillie’s gold-flecked gray eyes, creasing her forehead in anxiety. The bitter downturning curves of Aunt Robin’s mouth. Rafe, his face clouded, remembering some past event unimaginable to Cord. Jody, who neither had known the pribir nor was their product, warily waiting. Emily, her pale skin mottled with suppressed emotion. And Dr. Wilkins, tired, his neck marred by the start of still another purplish skin cancer that he hadn’t yet had time to inject.

Spring, their eternal peacemaker, had the last word. “Maybe the aliens won’t come down, after all.” But no one believed him.

One day, two days, and the pribir didn’t come down. Cord could no longer smell their image. Felicity gave birth to triplets, all girls. An easy birth, said Carolina, smiling hugely. Not even the threat of aliens could overcome her delight in babies. “Primita,” she crooned over one of the small wailing bundles. Little cousin.

Kella had two boys and a girl in the middle of the night. Cord hadn’t even known his sister was in labor.

“Bring Mom to see them,” Kella said to her brothers. She’d already left the birthing house and was sharing one of the small, shifting-occupant houses with Carolina, Jody, and their children, none of whom were present just now. Kella sat up in bed, surrounded by infants. One was asleep, one was nursing, and one lay at the foot of the bed gazing up at Cord from enormous blue eyes exactly like Dakota’s. Cord gazed back because he didn’t want to stare at his sister’s exposed breast. Keith, never modest, said, “I didn’t know you had such great bulbs, sis.”

“Shut up,” Kella said. “Bring Mom.”

“Kella,” Cord said, “we can’t. She’s sedated again. Dr. Wilkins says she might… last longer that way.”

Until the pribir can get here, they all understood.

Keith said, “Which kid is named after me?”

“None of them, buttlips. This is Sage, that’s Wild Pink, and he’s Dakkie. After his father. Cord, Clari says you’re neglecting her.”

Cord said coldly, “Is that any of your business?”

“Yes. I like Clari. I thought you did, too.”

Cord was silenced. It was hard to be around Clari. Cord couldn’t feel any connection with this new pregnant person Clari had become: weepy, frightened, sometimes even irritable. Clari, who was never irritable. Worse, Cord couldn’t feel any connection with the baby that was supposedly his. Although in truth all the babies seemed to pretty much belong to everybody. The older generation all assumed equal care and interest and responsibility as the infants’ mothers. Kella acted as if her triplets should be just as exciting to Cord and Keith, to Susie and Cavin, as to Dakota. Cord looked resentfully at his sister, in her newfound happy maternal bossiness, and felt more like an outsider than ever.

Keith said, “Not to change the subject, but what’s going on with Mike? Jody says he’s no help with the work because he’s always running off to check on Mom.”

Cord felt warmth flood his face. He’d never told Keith or Kella about their mother and Mike. They both turned to him. “What is it? Cord, you know something!”

“No, I don’t.”

Kella bit her lip critically. “Yes, you do. What’s wrong with you lately? You don’t sit with Clari, you blush about Mike, you skulk around here like a wounded coyote. What’s wrong?”

Cord couldn’t help it; he laughed. ‘“What’s wrong?’ The pribir aren’t arriving, Hannah died of some micro that could still be around, the farm is failing, Sam’s group is ready to shoot the only people who can help us, and Lillie is dying! What’s wrong?”

Kella said hotly, “I meant with you!”

Keith, in a rare moment of social observance, said, “Cord, why do you always call Mom ‘Lillie’? Like she’s not your mother?”

Cord didn’t answer. He didn’t know why. It had something to do with her remoteness when he was small, or their special understanding after that, or Clari, or something. Before Keith could press him, Emily burst into the room.

“Keith! Shut that window!”

“Why?” Kella demanded. “It’s hot as hell in here already. The babies—”

“The babies are my concern,” Emily said grimly. “And you. We miscalculated. Your generation isn’t safe after all, and… and…” She broke down, gasped for air, pulled herself together.

“One of Angie’s babies just died of a micro. Mutated from the war, Scott says. A micro that must have just blown in on yesterday’s shift in the wind.”

Cord moved slowly to the window and closed it.

If a mutated micro could kill one of Angie’s babies, a baby that had inherited all the protection built into her pribir-designed genes, then it could kill any one of them. Any one of them at all.

“Clari,” he said aloud, and pushed past his brother toward the door. It was blocked by Taneesha, still widely pregnant, her brown eyes opened so wide the whites glittered against her dark skin.

“Cord,” she said, and then stopped.

“What? Get out of my way!”

But she gripped his sleeve, and something in her face stopped him from shaking her off. Her eyes slid sideways toward Emily.

“Let me past!” Emily snapped. “I have to get everybody else inside with closed windows!”

When she was gone, Taneesha clumsily kicked the door closed. “Cord,” she said hoarsely, “they’re here. Down by Dead Men’s Arroyo. A space ship, Gavin saw it come down. They’re here.”

Cord went, and Keith, and Dakota, the only other one of their generation they could instantly find who wasn’t having babies. He’d been on his way to see Kella. Gavin had whispered the news to Taneesha and immediately gone back to the arroyo, to watch the ship. None of the older ones knew yet.

“Just a minute, I have to get something at the big house,” Keith said.

“What? You don’t need anything!” Dakota snapped. “Just go ahead, I’m right behind you.”

Cord and Dakota slipped away from the farm and raced the mile to the arroyo. Late afternoon shadows slanted purple over the ground. The wind had picked up, and Cord felt it blow hot against his face, stinging skin with bits of grit. Keith, a fast runner, caught up with them at the edge of the arroyo.

The ship sat on the far side, motionless. Cord gaped. Used to rough wood, stone, adobe, with small machines hoarded carefully and cared for devotedly, he had never seen so much metal in one place. It was beautiful. Dull silver, or maybe more of a pewter color. Hannah had had pewter candlesticks, heirlooms brought with her from the cities. They were Loni’s now. This ship would make a million candlesticks, Cord thought. As large as the big house, it had what was clearly a door on the side facing away from the farm.

“How did it get down without us seeing it?” Dakota whispered. Cord understood. He felt like whispering, himself.

Gavin said, “It didn’t. It came in… sideways. Riding low over the ground from the east, I don’t know from how far away. It came in so fast.” His voice held awe.

Cord slid down into the dry arroyo and started to climb up the opposite side. After a moment, the others followed him. Hesitantly he put one hand on the ship. It felt warm, but no warmer than saddle fittings got from the sun. But this wasn’t saddle fittings, this was a space ship, and it had come from somewhere out there among the stars. He was the first human being to touch it.

If Keith hadn’t dragged him to see Kella’s babies… if Gavin hadn’t encountered Taneesha first in his mad rush to inform somebody, anybody, at the farm… if Emily hadn’t rounded up everybody to go inside and shut the windows…

Inside. They would all be in the big house now, and they’d have already noticed the four boys were missing. They’d make Taneesha tell. Or Spring would track them to the arroyo; Spring could track anything.

“We have to make the pribir come out!” he said. “Or go inside ourselves. We have to warn them the others are mad at them and might—”

“Shit, yes,” Dakota breathed. “How?”

Cord looked at the pewter ship. He walked around to the door and knocked, feeling an absolute fool. Well, the pribir were human, weren’t they? That’s what Dr. Wilkins had said: human DNA. So would they recognize knocking?

“Pam! Pete!” Keith bawled. “We’re here! Can you guys come out a minute?”

“Shit, Keith!” Dakota said. “They’re not kids!”

Keith wasn’t deterred. “Miss Pam! Mr. Pete! Can you come out here a minute? We got something you should know!”

Cord held his breath. Nothing happened.

Keith yelled, “We got sick people who need your gene help! Hannah died, and my mother is sick. Lillie… you remember Lillie, she was on your ship before!”

“And she isn’t going in there again,” another voice said.

Cord whipped around. Sam stood across the arroyo, holding a gun. Behind him were Alex, Bonnie, and Rafe.

Time seemed to stop. Cord took a step forward, then didn’t know what to do. But Sam did. He led the others down the arroyo and up the other side. Unerringly he walked to the side of the ship with the door. Dakota, Cord, and Gavin looked at each other. Keith had disappeared.

“Go back home, you boys,” Sam said.

“We―”

“Go! This hasn’t got a damn thing to do with you. You weren’t even born when those aliens… go home.”

Cord had never liked Sam. Rafe and Alex were all right. Mike — Cord’s feelings about Mike were complicated. But he’d always considered Sam a loudmouth, a bully if anyone would have let him be one, and not even very smart. Cord caught Gavin’s and then Dakota’s eyes, and Gavin started talking.

“Rafe, Alex, Bonnie… you don’t want to hurt the pribir. You know you don’t. Whatever they did before, they might be able to cure Lillie. And maybe prevent another baby dying, like Angie’s baby did. And anyway, do you really think a gun could hurt them? They came all the way from the stars in a ship that twists time! Do you think a Smith & Wesson can stop people like that? You’ll only get yourself killed, maybe.”

Bonnie said, “He’s right, Sam. Rafe and I told you this isn’t the way. We—”

Sam fired at the ship, an obscenely loud sound in the gathering dusk. The bullet ricocheted, not even denting the metal, and flew out over the mesquite. Rafe shouted, “You crazy son of a bitch!” and the door of the ship began to open.

Sam stepped back and prepared to fire again. Before he could, another shot sounded and Sam screamed. He dropped the gun and clutched his right arm. Keith stepped from behind a boulder, holding Jody’s cherished Braunhausen. At the same time a cloud of blue gas jetted out of the ship into Sam’s face. Instantly he crumpled to the ground. Rafe, standing closest to him, swayed and also fell. The door finished opening and two people, a young man and young woman dressed in khaki pants and yellow T-shirts, stepped out. They completely ignored Sam and Rafe on the ground, and Keith holding the gun.

“What have you people been doing!” Pam screamed. “How could you have ruined everything in only fifteen fucking years?”

CHAPTER 25

They were people, Cord would think later. They were humans, or made in the shape of humans, with human brains and human feelings. And they were young, Lillie had said so, said that this was their first job of engineering. Human, young, furious that their work was being ruined. Like little kids when a fort was destroyed by the wind, branches and mesquite and an old blanket all blown and scattered over the ground. So they got mad, they… they had a tantrum. The pribir had a tantrum. They were alien kids.

Cord didn’t think this while he stood gaping at Pam and Pete. He couldn’t think anything. Pam looked in her twenties, maybe, her beautiful face a light brown color framed by soft brown hair parted in the middle and falling to her shoulders. Her skin was flawless: no purplish skin cancers, no lines from squinting into the sun, no windbum, no rough patches from harsh soap. Pete, too. Their clothes looked like something on Net shows from decades ago. They carried nothing.

None of it felt real.

Keith recovered first. He walked straight over to Sam and stood over the body. Cord saw his brother’s lip tremble. Keith said, “Is Sam dead?” He still held Jody’s gun.

Pete snapped, “Of course he’s not dead. Neither of them are. They’ll revive in a few minutes. Give me that ridiculous weapon, please!”

After a moment Keith handed Pete the gun. Where did his brother get the courage? Or maybe Keith just didn’t want to end up on the ground like Sam and Rafe. Pam, still scowling and glaring, held out her hand to Gavin and hesitantly he put Sam’s pistol into it.

Cord heard himself say, “Sam didn’t mean to…” Stupid! Of course Sam meant to. “I mean, he just wasn’t sure about… you.”

Dakota said in a sudden burst, “None of them are. The ones who were on your ship before. They say you manipulated them and used them. But we young ones don’t think that. We’ve been waiting for you!”

“You have?” Pam’s face softened. Was she that easy to flatter? Cord thought dazedly. And yet Dakota had only spoken the truth. It was just that this whole thing was not at all what Cord had expected.

Pete said, “Well, of course we would plan to come for the birth of the next generation, next month. You must have known that.”

They knew when the girls would all get pregnant. Which meant they’d known exactly when those temporarily unstoppable sexual feelings would overwhelm the farm. They’d designed all that frantic, driven sex into Cord’s genes. He felt his face grow hot.

Dakota said, “Most of the babies are already born.”

Gavin added, “And one already died.”

Pam’s face darkened again. She was moodier than Ashley, even. “Born? Died? Your gestation period is supposed to be nine months!”

“Yeah, well,” Dakota mumbled.

Gavin added, more helpfully, “Dr. Wilkins says they come early when there’s three at a time.”

Pam and Pete looked at each other. Cord saw that they hadn’t known that. Doubt hit him like a blast of hot air. They were supposed to know all about humans! What else didn’t they know?

Pete said, “One offspring died? Of what?”

“Of this perversion of the right way!” Pam said. She was back to full anger. “This fucking ‘war’! How dare you misuse the right way!”

Keith, now also riled, said, “We didn’t! We’re just trying to survive it!”

“Oh,” Pam said, and subsided again. After a moment she seemed to remember. “You said Lillie was sick?”

Cord nodded, unable to speak. Keith said eagerly, “You remember our mother? Lillie?”

“Of course,” Pam said, “we’ve only been gone a few months. Now let’s go to your home base. Get in the ship.”

Nothing was like Cord imagined it would be. Nothing.

He was the only one who would ride to the farm in the ship. Keith, Dakota, and Gavin refused. Instead they ran home. “Should we tell everybody you’re here?” Gavin asked uncertainly.

“Of course,” Pete said.

Keith said, “But… they might try to kill you again.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Pete said.

Keith’s eyes narrowed. “Why not? What are you going to do?”

The pribir didn’t answer. Cord looked again at their healthy human good looks, their casual old-fashioned clothing, and a kind of dizziness came over him. It was like a dream, or a Net show. It wasn’t real.

Pam said, “We’ll just smell to them before we open the ship.”

Cord finally had to say something. “Miss Pam, Mr. Pete—”

“Just ‘Pam’ and ‘Pete,’” Pam said smiling, and she reminded Cord of Spring’s ten-year-old daughter, Terri, playing grown-up. The thought horrified him.

He tried again. “If you drug our families… the people at the farm… they’re going to be even madder and want even more to hurt you back. They resent you fooling around with their feelings.”

“Really?” Pete said. He sounded genuinely interested. “Why?”

Cord stared at him, dumbfounded. He had championed the pribir, believed in them… he still believed in them! But even he understood their parents’ objections to what Dr. Wilkins called “mood manipulation.”

Keith said shortly, “They’ll resent it because their feelings are their own.”

Pam said thoughtfully, “But it would be all right to smell information to them? Why is that different? Surely their ideas are just as much their own as their feelings.”

The boys were silent.

“You can’t explain it?” Pam said, and Cord heard triumph in her voice. “See, Pete? They don’t understand their own irrationality any better than we do!”

Keith said hotly, “It’s not irrationality! It’s… it’s…” But he couldn’t explain what it was.

Neither could Cord. He said, “Send them just information, not feelings. Send them information that you can cure my mother and you can stop more babies from dying. Then they’ll accept you.

Pete said, “At least they can understand that much of the right way. Do you humans even realize how perverted your misuse of it has been?”

Pam said, more practically, “What if we can’t cure Lillie or save more babies? Pete’s right, you know. You people exceeded all genetic perversions that we’d planned for. I’m not even sure you’re worth this much trouble at all. We have other planets we’re working on, you know.”

Other planets. Cord clung desperately to the here and now. He repeated, “Just send them information. Say you can cure my mother and you can stop more babies from dying.”

“Well, all right, if you insist,” Pam said sulkily.

Sam and Rafe stirred on the ground. Pete said, “Do you want to dump those two in the ship? We can bring them.”

“I think,” Gavin said quickly, “they’d rather walk.”

“All right. Come on, Lillie’s offspring… what’s your name?”

“Cord,” he said, and his voice came out strangled. The ship door opened.

Nothing was like Cord imagined it would be.

The inside of the ship was small and blank. He was bewildered until he realized this was only one small section, even though he saw nothing that could be called a door. Pete spoke some high-pitched sounds no human throat could ever make, and the ship lifted slightly. A window appeared —just appeared!—in the front and Cord saw they were following Keith and Dakota, moving toward the farm at a fast jog. Gavin must be waiting for Rafe and Sam to wake up. How was Keith going to explain to Jody that the pribir were now in possession of Jody’s cherished gun?

Pam was studying Cord intently. “So you’re Lillie’s offspring.”

“I’m her son, yes. So is Keith.”

She didn’t ask which one was Keith. “You’re the child I built with her eye genes, that gray with gold flecks. And the girl, your… sister? Has she had her offspring yet?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I wanted to be there for the birth. I was very close to your mother, you know. She admired me intensely. We had a special relationship, aboard our ship.”

Fifteen years ago. Didn’t they realized how much that generation had changed in ways that weren’t physical?

Pam continued, “What is she sickening of?”

“A micro. One genetically engineered to kill people in the war. Airborne.”

“Well, I guessed that much. What is the micro’s genome? I wish you could smell me its prabisirks.”

Cord had no idea what a “prabisirk” was. He said helplessly, “You need to ask Dr. Wilkins. Or Emily. They’re our geneticists.”

“I remember Emily,” Pam said. “An intelligent girl. But who is Dr. Wilkins?”

“Scott Wilkins. He was… was one of the kids at Andrews Air Force Base but he didn’t go with my mother and the rest on your ship.”

“Oh, one of those,” Pam said, clearly losing interest in Scott Wilkins. “They don’t matter.”

Cord had to ask. “Don’t matter how?”

“They’re not carrying the engineered genes, the right way,” Pam asked, clearly surprised by the question. “Like you and your children.”

“But…” He couldn’t find words for what he wanted to say. The best he could do was, “But my mother doesn’t have my engineered genes, either. All she got was that she can smell your information. And a boosted immune system.” But not boosted enough.

“Well, that’s true,” Pam said judiciously. “Lillie was only one of the vessel generation, but I became fond of her. Still, you’re right. She doesn’t really matter, either.”

He couldn’t manage an answer. Lillie, Dr. Wilkins, Grandmother Theresa, who had died trying to save Cord’s life . . .“They don’t matter.”

Nothing was like he imagined it would be.

The pribir had another tantrum inside the big house.

Cord had been right; Dr. Wilkins had convinced everyone to let the aliens in without violence. Cord had still been on the ship, but he could easily imagine the arguments Dr. Wilkins used: Angie’s dead baby, Lillie, Hannah, maybe even the dead cattle. He could imagine, too, who had lined up against Dr. Wilkins, who for. Keith and Dakota would have been asked to tell their story over and over. When Sam and Rafe and Gavin straggled in from the arroyo, an arrival that Cord saw on the ship’s monitor, they would have added their voices. In all, the pribir sat waiting for an hour.

It didn’t seem to bother them. Pete had disappeared through a “door” that was there one moment, gone the next. Pam sat doing something incomprehensible with a small piece of machinery she held on her lap. She sat on a low chair, while Cord stood tensely by the monitor.

Cord ventured, “What’s that?”

“An analyzer.” She looked up, scowling. “You people really have created some perversions. What’s wrong with you? Ship plucked this microorganism out of the air right here, by your dwelling, and it’s packed with enough genetic monstrosities to kill every cow on half this continent.”

“It did,” Cord said. “Well, not all. Dr. Wilkins and Emily identified it and made something to cure it, so we saved twenty head of cattle. Out of a herd of three hundred.”

Pam didn’t seem impressed. “Yes, the righter wouldn’t be that difficult.”

“The what?”

“The righter. The organism to destroy the perversion and return the planetary genome to the right way.”

Cord left the window and squatted by her chair. It seemed important to meet her eyes directly, on the same level. “Miss… I mean, Pam, do you know that nearly the entire planet was killed in the last war?”

“Oh, yes. We know. Ship monitors thermal signatures from orbit.”

Cord didn’t know what a thermal signature was, but he was staggered by her casual unconcern. She must not have understood. He tried again. “I mean, did you know that almost all humans everywhere are dead?”

“Yes,” she said absently, turning back to her machine. “Oh, look, this allele is at least interesting.”

Something in Cord’s stillness finally caught her attention. She gazed at him with impersonal kindness. “You’re bothered, aren’t you, by all those deaths. Don’t be. Do you know what the right way really is, Cord? It’s what you’ve named ‘evolution.’ The organisms that can best adapt and breed survive, and others disappear. If they disappear, it means they weren’t fit to survive in the first place. Every species eventually gets to the point of directing their own evolution, and our mission is to help species get there faster. That inevitably means that lesser species disappear faster. But it’s nothing to mourn over, no more than was the disappearance of those big reptiles, I don’t remember the word for them.”

“Billions of people died! Billions!” What was happening here? This was the same argument Cord had had with Dr. Wilkins, only then it was Cord who hadn’t cared. But that was before he’d seen how indifference looked on somebody else.

“Yes, billions died,” Pam said with a brilliant smile, “but you won’t, nor your children. We’ve returned in time to ensure that, I think, even with the perversions that have been added to the environment. You and your children will survive and evolve.”

He could scarcely get words out. “And… and my mother…”

“Oh, yes, we’ll save her and any other remnants of the old species that we come across, anybody that gets to this ‘farm.’ At least, we’ll save them to the extent that non-germ-line alteration is possible. We’ll rehabilitate their genes so they don’t join the billions of obsolete dead. Yet. Of course we’ll do that.” Her voice took on tones of reproach.

“After all, Cord, we’re human, too.”

Uncle DeWayne eventually came out of the big house. It was full dark now, and he carried a powerful flashlight. These hoarded relics were usually saved for emergencies. DeWayne illuminated the ship, a straight-backed dignified black man with gray hair, and spoke without raising his voice. “My name is DeWayne Freeman. I’m addressing the pribir in the ship. You’re welcome at this farm. Come out of the ship and inside, please. No one will try to harm you if you don’t harm us, and everyone will be grateful for your help.”

“It’s about time,” Pete said. He’d returned fifteen minutes ago from wherever he’d been. Cord had the impression that he and Pam were communicating furiously, although they neither spoke nor looked at each other.

Pam made unreplicable sounds at the door and it opened. Cord emerged behind them.

The flashlight caught them full in the eyes and DeWayne courteously lowered it. The upward light cast weird shadows on DeWayne’s lined face, so that to Cord he suddenly looked more alien than the pribir. Cord looked away.

The only people in the great room were Dr. Wilkins, Emily, and Jody. How had Uncle DeWayne persuaded the others to retreat to the back rooms or the other houses? Or maybe Jody had, he was supposed to be the boss of the farm. Jody, who had never seen a pribir, never been smelled to by one, looked both apprehensive and curious. Emily, who had been aboard the ship, looked as if she was trying hard not to glare. Dr. Wilkins was expressionless.

“Hello, Emily,” Pam said. “You haven’t changed very much, dear.”

Emily scowled.

Pete said genially, “You must be Scott Wilkins.” He held out his hand and Dr. Wilkins took it. Pete looked expectantly at Jody.

Dr. Wilkins said, “This is Jody Romero Ridley, the son of Theresa Romero, who was at Andrews Air Force Base with me. Jody runs this farm.”

Pete and Pam smiled at Jody without interest. Pam said, “Where’s Lillie, Scott? Cord says she’s contracted one of your perverse bioweapons.” She pronounced the word with distaste.

How strange, Cord thought somewhere in the depths of his dazed mind. She can’t stand the thought of bioweapons, but she doesn’t care at all about the billions they killed.

“Yes,” Dr. Wilkins said, “Lillie is sick. The micro is out of her system. It started prion conversion to cause an accelerated form of fatal familial insomnia. It—”

” ‘Prions’?” Pam said. “We didn’t learn that word from Rafe or Emily. We’ll do our own analysis. Bring Lillie aboard the ship.”

“No,” Emily said, and Cord saw that she hadn’t been able to help herself. Were the memories of pribir ship that bad? For his mother, too? Emily pressed her lips together tightly and looked at the wall.

“Jody,” Dr. Wilkins said, “tell Mike to bring Lillie out.”

“Oh, Mike is here, too,” Pete said, sounding pleased. “You really must give us a complete list of our old friends.”

Emily started to leave the room.

“Emily,” Dr. Wilkins said, “come back. We both have to go aboard, too. To learn.”

Pam said doubtfully, “It’ll be very crowded.”

Pete added, “And you won’t learn anything, anyway. You couldn’t possibly build our equipment. That’s why we’re building the alterations right into your genes, to compensate for your ignorance. You know that.”

Emily slammed the door behind her.

Mike appeared, carrying Lillie. Cord felt tears prick his eyelids. Lillie was so thin her elbows were visible knobs. Much of her hair had fallen out. She was asleep, or drugged.

“Well, good heavens,” Pam said.

Pete added, “It appears our immune engineering was inadequate.”

Pam turned on him. “Who expected them to fuck up the environment this badly? The only genetic thing they are good at is perversions. All right, Mike, bring her along.” She stamped out, followed by Pete, Mike, and Dr. Wilkins.

Cord went with them. He couldn’t help himself. The procession went into darkness thick as mud, without DeWayne’s flashlight. Pete made a noise and the ship began to glow, guiding them. The door opened.

This time they went through the blank room and into one that made Cord blink. Machines lined all the walls —or were they machines? No, they were the actual walls, studded with projections and indentations, and as Cord watched, the walls slithered. Not slithering. Breathing.

Not breathing. Some other movement, unnamable but unmistakable. The walls were alive.

Pete made another sound and a wall indentation grew longer, higher, deeper. “There,” Pete said to Mike.

Mike stood unmoving.

“Oh, for—” Pam said, and effortlessly took Lillie from Mike’s arms. He tightened his grip for a moment, then let Lillie go. Pam laid her in the indentation and its back wall began to mold itself around her.

Cord broke and ran. This was not right. This was not human. As he fled through the blank outer room to the outdoors, he knew that he was being watched. He exploded into the darkness—the ship had stopped glowing—and bent over, gasping.

A moment later he was ashamed of himself. He was a coward. It was only technology, just machines using genetics instead of motors, just the right way, what did he fucking expect…

Not this. Not this.

How did Mike and Dr. Wilkins stay? Of course, they were older, they were more used to the pribir… They were brave. He was a coward.

For the first time, Cord understood why Emily, Lillie, all that generation hated the pribir. They had done this sort of thing to them aboard the first ship, without the humans’ consent, without telling them what would happen to them. The pribir had even made the girls pregnant, had taken sperm from the boys… that was rape.

He’d never seen it before. If anyone had done that to Clari, had handled her body and put babies in her that weren’t Cord’s…

Cord straightened in the darkness. He knew he wasn’t going to go back into that ship. Neither was he going to tell the pribir to leave his mother alone… not that the aliens would obey him! But the point was that he wasn’t going to do it. He was going to go along with whatever Pam and Pete did, and don’t fool yourself, Cord: it’s not like with the older generation. They’d had no choice. His going along was a choice. He, Cord Anderson, was choosing to let aliens rape his people.

He couldn’t go back inside. Shivering even though it wasn’t cold, he blundered in the dark toward the bench under the cottonwoods and sat there, hearing the creek trickle over stones, staring anywhere except at the ship he couldn’t see anyway through the thick night.

Twenty-four hours later, Lillie emerged from the ship walking steadily, her gray eyes clear as her mind. She hugged Kella, still pregnant, and Keith. She listened as DeWayne and Spring filled her in on everything that Scott Wilkins hadn’t already told her. She stood for a long moment in Mike’s arms, neither of them needing to say anything about Hannah’s death or their future. Then she went to find Cord, who had slept alone in the barn, who had refused to come anywhere near the house or the ship or any person, human or pribir.

He was at Dead Men’s Arroyo, sitting on a boulder, staring at the mass grave of the marauders dug fourteen years ago. A flash flood had carried away the stone marker and the grave was indistinguishable from the scrub around it. You had to know where to look.

“Cord.”

“Mom!” He jumped up, hugged her hard, blushed, and let her

“I’m fine, Cord. They repaired me.”

“Are they… is anybody…”

“They’re working, Cord. Doing what they came to do.”

He couldn’t tell anything from her tone. He burst out, “You were right, Mom! They’re monsters!”

“Yes.” She sat on the boulder, patted the place beside her. Reluctantly Cord sat down. He wasn’t in the mood for anybody else’s emotion except his own.

He said, “I should go check on Clari.”

“You haven’t thought about Clari in quite a while, it seems. She can wait a little longer. I want to talk to you.”

But then she said nothing. Silence dragged on. Cord recognized this trick from his childhood; sooner or later the other person, unable to stand the silence, would tell Lillie whatever she was after. Not this time.

More silence.

He said, “They’re horrible, Mom. They don’t care about all the people dead in the war, or about your generation —” only vessels ” — or about any human at all. They only care about our genes!”

“I know,” Lillie said.

“That’s why you hate them! And you’re right!”

“No, that’s not why. I don’t hate them. But I don’t trust them, because their goals aren’t ours. Their goal is to remake humanity in their own image. Like gods. And our goal—” She stopped.

“Is what?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never known. I don’t know why we’re here or what the purpose of life is. When I was your age, I worried about that a lot.”

“But not anymore?” Cord had never, he realized, thought about “the purpose of life.” He just lived it. This was a side of his mother he’d never seen, and it made him uneasy.

“Not any more. We’ve been too busy surviving. But I know this, Cord. The pribir know so much more than we do, but they can’t… see. No, that’s not right. Let me try again.”

Cord waited, wishing he were somewhere else.

“The pribir have a vision of the infinite manipulability of genes. Using genes to create anything, to accomplish anything. But they have no vision at all to give the bodies that house those genes. They don’t care about those bodies because they’re temporary and genes are not. I don’t even think they care about their own bodies. They’re shaped like us—for now, anyway—to help their work. But their real shape is probably far different. Once, I saw—”

Cord stood up. He didn’t want to know what his mother had seen once. He’d already seen enough himself, and none of it was what he’d imagined.

Lillie smiled. “Okay, Cord. This isn’t your kind of conversation. That’s all right. Help me back to the farm.”

Alarm ran through him, followed by suspicion: His mother never asked for help. But she leaned on him as they walked the mile to the farm, and he didn’t know if her grip on his arm was to ease herself or to lead him firmly, inescapably home.