Nothing Human

CHAPTER 26

For the first few weeks, Lillie wondered what else the pribir might have done to her brain besides free it of the prions that were killing her. If they had changed her brain chemistry significantly, had altered her neurons or transmitters into those of a different person, how would she even know?

She seemed the same to herself. More significantly, how everyone at the farm treated her didn’t differ from her memories of how they’d treated her before her illness. No one reacted to her as if she were acting out of character. Her memories of past years matched others people’s recollections. And no amount of genetic tinkering could create memories, could it? Only erase them. So gradually Lillie began to believe she was still Lillie.

Whatever that might mean.

Maybe it meant only her memories. Maybe that’s all the essence of a person was: what she remembered, and how she felt about those memories. The mind’s eye, not the cell’s DNA.

Certainly memories thronged around her thickly. Why not before now? For the reason she’d given Cord: she’d been too busy with everyone’s survival. But now survival seemed to be in the hands of the pribir. So now, in the middle of a present tense with significant genetic futures, Lillie found herself caught by insignificant memories from a world past and gone.

Riding on the crosstown bus with Uncle Keith to the Museum of Modern Art. The feel of a cherry popsickle on her tongue. The smell of paste in art class at her elementary school on New York’s West Side. The sound of planes shrieking overhead as they took off and landed at Andrews. Giggling with Theresa behind the Youth Building when they’d found someone’s stash of illegal cigarettes behind a dumpster and they’d each taken a single disgusting puff. A dress Madison had once worn at Andrews, yellow and slinky, with tiny mirrors sewn around the neckline. A nurse she’d especially liked at Malcolm Grow, a big black woman with a huge laugh, whose name Lillie wished she could remember. Going to the movies, and trying to decode graffiti, and standing in the supermarket in front of seventeen brands of scented soap, trying to choose.

“Aunt Lillie,” Taneesha said, “Mom wants you right away. Aunt Lillie? Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Lillie said. Taneesha looked worried, her pretty brown face creased, an infant in her arms. A pretty child, and already a mother. Well, so had Lillie been.

“Mom says to come right away!” Taneesha said, and Lillie left the past.

“What does Sajelle want? Is Susie in labor?” Susie was the only one still pregnant, except Clari. All the rest had had healthy triplets. Once again the farm was overwhelmed with infants, and she, Lillie, had no business daydreaming over her work.

“No, Susie isn’t going over the top yet,” Taneesha said, and Lillie wondered if she knew the phrase had once belonged to men at war in muddy trenches with much different weapons than any war Taneesha had known. Probably not. “There’s a man here!”

“A man? What do you mean, a man?”

“Somebody not one of us! The pribir want to take him inside the ship.”

Lillie took off at a run. She was strong now, so strong that again she wondered what the pribir had tampered with while they cured her war-given disease. And what did they want to do with this man?

No one had come to the farm in at least three months. There were still pockets of survivors on the planet; Rafe monitored them on the Net. But each week the pockets were fewer, and no one had reported in from the rest of New Mexico. Which didn’t, of course, mean they weren’t out there.

Strength or not, Lillie was panting by the time she reached the ship. It was closed and no one was beside it. Lillie covered the short distance to the big house.

“They’re at Dr. Wilkins’s lab,” said Kendra, looking frightened. She sat in a deep chair nursing two babies at once. “Aunt Sajelle wants you right away!”

Scott wasn’t in the lab. Since the pribir had done something to his immune system, he could go anywhere again, despite whatever bioweapons might still exist. The pribir had done the same to everyone in Lillie’s generation who would consent. Not everybody would. Next the pribir had started on her generation’s children, Keith and Kella and the rest. After that would come the infants; no one had forgotten that one of Angie’s babies had died.

But now Pam and Pete were not escorting another sullen, frightened person into their ship. Instead they stood over a bed in Scott’s lab, staring at the man lying there. Sajelle spied Lillie, blew out a breath in relief, and pointed.

“He came in an hour ago, from God knows where. Or how. And I don’t even want to think about what he might be carrying. He was raving, and Dolly put him out.”

Dolly, Senni’s sulky daughter and Clari’s sister, was the only other person in the room. Lately she had been helping Emily in the lab, cleaning up and running simple tests. She was the only woman on the farm between fifteen and twenty-nine who wasn’t pregnant or nursing, and Emily had taken what help she could get. Everyone else was desperately needed to ensure food or to care for children.

Dolly said, “He needs a bath. He smells awful.”

A bath wasn’t all he needed. The stranger was so thin that his collarbones stood out like mountain ranges above the sere wasteland of his sunken chest. Forty? Thirty? Twenty-five? It was impossible to tell under the beard and dirt and sunburn. His shirt and pants were torn, probably by mesquite, and if he’d ever had a hat, he’d lost it. A purple skin cancer spread from the top of his forehead to under his hairline.

Lillie said, “Did anyone send for Scott or Emily?” and then realized how stupid that was. There was nothing Scott or Emily could do that the pribir couldn’t do infinitely better.

Pam and Pete had been gazing at the stranger with interest. Pete said, “We need him in the ship. He’s never had any engineering at all, not even the rudiments. He could be carrying really fascinating micros.”

Lillie said, “Will you cure him of that cancer? And whatever else he has?”

“Sure.”

Sajelle said, “We can each grab one end of that bed and carry it, he don’t look heavy at all. Skinny as wire.”

On impulse Lillie said, “Let Pam and Pete do it. I’m sure they’re engineered to be stronger than we are. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Pam said absently, “but he’s really one of yours.” And the two pribir walked out.

Sajelle blew a raspberry. “Come on, Lillie. Grab that other end. Dolly, you scrub this room down with disinfectant and air it out good.”

In twenty-four hours the stranger was back, cured and clean and sane, but still very weak. No engineered reserve strength, Lillie thought. He gazed fearfully at Lillie, Dolly, and Emily and tried to get out of bed.

“Lie still, please, I’m a doctor,” Emily said. She’d already performed her own tests on the man while he was still drugged, learning what she could from whatever the pribir had done to him. Picking up their crumbs, Lillie thought, and hoped Emily didn’t think of it that way. Pam and Pete had lost all interest in the stranger once they had their samples.

“Where… am I?” he said.

Dolly answered, “This is the farm,” and Lillie realized that to Dolly, born here and seldom off the farm, that was sufficient identification.

Lillie said, “We’re a group of survivors from the war who’ve been here many years before that. Who are you?”

“Martin Wade. Santa Fe.”

Emily said, “Is there still a Santa Fe?”

“No,” Martin said. Lillie saw the painful memories shadowed in his eyes.

Dolly said shyly, “Can we get you anything? Are you hungry?”

“Yeah, I am,” he said wonderingly. Lillie understood. He’d been at the edge of death, body too ravaged to keep food down, and now he found himself hungry again and food offered. A miracle.

“I’ll get you something!” Dolly said eagerly, and Emily’s eyes met Lillie’s across the bed.

Martin Wade proved resilient. He absorbed what he was told about the pribir without disbelief or horror. His body was too abused to recover rapidly, but he turned out to have a knack with babies and after he was moved to the big house, the harassed childminders were grateful to put one, two, or even three infants on the bed where he lay. He couldn’t nurse but he could change diapers, rock fretting infants, even sing to them in a low tuneless monotone. Watching him handle a baby, Lillie knew that he had been a father. She didn’t ask, and he said nothing about his past, ever. After Susie gave birth, the last of the triplets to be born, Martin was desperately needed.

Dolly developed a sudden interest in children. Whenever she could she helped Martin with his transient charges, considerably less skillfully than he. On a hot July night when Lillie couldn’t sleep, she went outside onto the porch and found Senni and Dolly screaming at each other in whispers.

Lillie had been hoping to find Mike. Since she had become well again they had said nothing, done nothing. But Hannah was dead, and Lillie knew that eventually, when Mike was ready, it would happen. She could wait. She had waited years already.

Instead of Mike, she blundered into mother-daughter anger, “—like some whore! Like those mutant whores, sleeping with just anybody, having their pups in litters!”

Lillie caught her breath. Senni never used this language around her, or around anyone else on the farm. She’d have been slapped down.

“He’s not just anybody! He’s… he’s…”

“Like a girl, tending those babies! You sure he’s not queer like Bonnie? Sure he wouldn’t rather be with Rafe or Alex?”

The sound of flesh slapping flesh. A gasp and a scream, not whispered. Then Senni stalked past, giving Lillie a look of such deep contempt that Lillie was startled. She knew Senni didn’t like her—hell, she didn’t like Senni either—but Senni was Tess’s daughter and for that reason alone, Lillie had been as kind to Senni as possible.

Dolly sobbed softly in the darkness. Lillie moved toward her. The girl said shrilly, “Who’s there?”

“Aunt Lillie. Don’t be scared. I overheard. I’m sorry.”

Lillie had expected Dolly, usually a sullen seventeen-year-old, to either storm past or turn sarcastic. Instead, Dolly grabbed at Lillie’s sleeve.

“It isn’t fair! Everybody else has somebody for love and sex, even Clari, and she’s two years younger than me! Nobody ever thinks about me, maybe I don’t want to be alone, and when somebody finally comes along who wants me, that bitch my mother… it isn’t fair!”

“No,” Lillie said calmly, trying to calm Dolly, “it isn’t.” Dolly peered like a frightened rabbit. “You… you agree with me? You think it’s all right for me to be with Martin?”

“Do you like him, Dolly?”

The girl let go of Lillie’s sleeve. “Yes. I do. He’s sort of soft, not like Keith or Dakota or Bobby—” Lillie heard the resentment that none of those had chosen Dolly “—but he’s nice. And I do like him. And he’s cured now, not carrying disease like she said, and forty-two isn’t that old! Bitch!”

“He likes you,” Lillie stated quietly.

“Yes! He does, which is more than anybody else around here… oh, Aunt Lillie, is it so terrible to want what everybody else already has?”

Lillie blinked at the transition from resentment to genuine despair. Seventeen. For the first time, she liked Dolly.

“No, it’s not terrible. Do you want to… I mean…”

“We want to get married,” Dolly said fervently. “Not just be together until I get pregnant and then forget it ever happened like those whor… like some of the others. We want a real wedding, with a white dress and flowers and a party!”

Like she’d seen on old Net shows, Lillie thought, and wondered if that was what Martin wanted, too, or if this was Dolly’s vision. Maybe she just wanted to one-up Clari, who had never actually married Cord. A wedding like that—any wedding—in the middle of the pribir’s attempt to remake humanity: how ludicrous was that? But Dolly was Tess’s granddaughter, and Dolly was filled with hope and pleasure for the first time that Lillie could remember. A white-dress antiquated wedding was no more ludicrous than anything else going on now. And maybe a wedding would… do what? Remind them all that they were human.

“You and Martin should talk to your Uncle Jody,” she told Dolly. Jody was the only one with influence over his sister. “I’ll bet he’ll be on your side.”

“You think so?” Dolly’s young voice vibrated with hope. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow!”

Poor Martin, Lillie thought. Tumbleweed in the gale. Well, Martin was gaining, too. Survival, for one thing, plus sex and probably devotion. Dolly seemed capable of complete, devouring devotion.

“Thank you, Aunt Lillie.”

“You’re welcome. Now go to bed. The mosquitoes are fierce tonight.”

The next day, Dolly announced that she and Martin were getting married on October 5, at six o’clock in the evening. Martin said nothing. The date tickled at Lillie’s mind. Only hours later did she realize that October 5 would have been Tess’s sixty-eighth birthday.

“We have something to tell you,” Pam told Lillie. The pribir had apparently decided that all their communication with humans would go through either Lillie or Scott, the only two humans who didn’t scowl or draw away when an alien approached. Cord’s generation had found the pribir of actuality to be too different from the pribir of imagination. They were grudgingly grateful for the genetic help, but awkward in talking to the helpers.

Lillie accepted the burden with resignation. So far, the pribir had not tried to do anything to any human without permission, or to smell to them in any way that manipulated human behavior.

So far.

“We want you to find Scott and Emily,” Pam continued. “They need to hear this, too. It’s important.”

“I don’t think Emily will come,” Lillie said. Emily learned everything second-hand, from Scott. The old man looked and acted twenty years younger since the aliens had done to him… whatever they had done.

“Make Emily come,” Pam snapped. “This is too important for her to miss.”

The meeting was held in Scott’s lab; Emily flatly refused to enter the pribir ship. Lillie looked around her curiously. She saw nothing that she could identify as a pribir machine, only the usual jumble of expensive, aging scientific equipment, none of which could ever be replaced again, with crude wooden boxes, vials labeled in Scott’s careful hand, Sajelle’s nursing equipment. This was also the hospital. Two neatly made beds stood against the far wall. On a separate shelf were Scott’s handwritten records on his precious supply of paper, encased in plastic boxes against damp, rodents, and time. Records that no one was left to read.

Emily sat stiffly on one of the beds, Scott beside her. Lillie seated herself on the other. Pam and Pete stood between them, holding what looked like a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit.

It was a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit. “Look at this,” Pam said. “Just look at it! This is what you people have done!”

Emily’s fist clenched. Scott put a restraining hand on her arm and said mildly, “Not us, Pam.”

“Your species!”

Pete, upset but calmer than Pam, said, “The rabbit’s genes have been damaged, in the germ line. It now carries a gene that expresses at death, making a kind of poison. The gene was adapted from plants that use poison to keep away predators. The gene turns on throughout the rabbit’s muscles and flesh, triggered by the reduction in oxygen. If humans eat this rabbit, they will die.”

Pete’s statement electrified the room. Lillie stood shakily. “I have to tell that to Sajelle, the kitchen crew fixes rabbit stew all the time, we had it two days ago—”

“Those rabbits weren’t poisoned or you’d already be dead,” Pam said crossly. “Don’t you listen, Lillie? And I already told Sajelle. The point is, you can’t eat any more rabbit at all. This genemod is dominant, and it’s coupled with other genes that confer a preferential evolutionary advantage on rabbits that have it. A nasty construction. Eventually every rabbit will have it.”

Rabbits currently formed a mainstay of the farm’s protein.

Scott said, “Are you sure, Pete?”

He looked surprised. “Of course we’re sure.”

Scott said, “Have you detected this gene in any other wildlife?”

“That’s just the point,” Pam said. “It’s already transmitted, probably by transposon in a parasite, to those little rodents in the desert, the small quick ones that jump so well.”

“Deermice,” Scott said. “We don’t eat those.”

“But the transposon might keep jumping species. And we’ve also detected something strange in the mesquite.”

In the mesquite. That meant plants… . Lillie was no scientist, but she understood that plants underlay everything, the whole food chain.

“It’s not interfering with basic plant functions,” Pete said, “photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixing, all that. We’re not even sure its expression could harm you, and anyway you don’t eat mesquite. But it’s a sign.”

Lillie said, although she was afraid to hear the answer, “Of what?”

Pam said, “Of the complete changing of Earth ecology. Between what you’ve done to the atmospheric gas balance, what that’s done to the climate, and what your perversions of the right way have done to the fauna and now even the flora… you people just aren’t worth our trouble!”

“But you’re our assignment,” Pete said. “So we’ll do what’s necessary. However, you can’t keep your current genome and hope to survive more than a few more generations. We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you. We have to rebuild from the beginning.”

Emily spoke for the first time. “‘Way back at your generation.’ You knew the human race was going to need genetic modifications to survive, didn’t you. You knew it seventy years ago, when you started all this with poor deluded Dr. Timothy Miller. You knew it.”

“Yes, of course,” Pete said.

“Did you know a war with bioweapons was going to happen?”

“With a sixty-seven percent probability,” Pete said. He flicked his hair off his sweaty forehead; the room was already stifling, and it wasn’t even noon.

Emily repeated carefully, “You knew there would be a devastating biowar. And you didn’t use us engineered kids to warn humanity, back in 2013, when it might have done some good.”

Pete said patiently, “That’s not the right way, Emily.”

“And now you want to ‘rebuild from the beginning.’ You mean, you want to take human genes and create some creature that can survive in the new ecology, but won’t look or act or function anything like human beings.”

Pete and Pam looked at each other, bewildered. Pam said, “How could they not be human? They’ll have mostly human genes. Of course they’ll be human.”

“Brewed up in some vat?”

Pam said, “Carried in human wombs, of course. It has to be a heritable germ-line rebuilding, you know that. Emily, you’re being ridiculous.”

Emily stood. “I’m being human. Which you are not. And before we’d let you turn our children into the kind of monsters you are, we’ll all die first and the whole race with us.” She walked past the pribir and out the door.

Scott said quietly, “What would the new ones look like?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ll try to preserve as much of your current appearance as we can, if you like, but, really, there are much better and more efficient designs.”

Lillie remembered the… thing she’d glimpsed, for a brief almost-sedated moment, behind the wall of the garden on the Flyer. A shapeless blob, flowing toward her…

The future of humanity. And just yesterday she had been regretting the loss of the crosstown bus, cherry popsickles, movies, graffiti. All nothing compared to the losses to come.

Or else the human race could die out completely.

Pete said, “We wanted to tell you three first, before we tell the others.” He looked proud of this piece of adaptation to local custom.

Scott said quickly, “Don’t tell the others, please, Pete. Let me do it.”

Pam frowned. “It’s our—”

“Of course it’s your project, your discovery, Pam. All the credit goes to you two. But just let Lillie and me present it to everybody else.

“Well, all right.”

Lillie said, “I have a question.”

“Yes?” Pam said. She even smiled. She still thought, Lillie knew, that she and Lillie had a special shared bond. It made Lillie’s skin prickle.

Lillie spoke very carefully. “If the others don’t like the idea of ‘rebuilding from the beginning’… if they refuse… will you go ahead and try to do it anyway? Without our consent?”

As you did on the ship when you made us all pregnant. She didn’t say it.

Pete said, “Why would you refuse?”

“If we do,” Lillie said. No use explaining; Pete would never get it.

Pam and Pete were silent. Smelling to each other, Lillie knew. Beside her, Scott’s body tensed.

Pam finally said, “This planet is our assignment. The sentient life on it is our project. You said that yourself, Lillie.”

It wasn’t an answer. And it was.

She said, “Tell me exactly how you would remake humans, all the survival advantages, so that I can tell the others.”

“Well, we’re not exactly sure yet of the—”

“Tell me what you can, Pete. It’s important. I have to have positive arguments, and I have to present them to everybody before Emily gets to them.”

Scott said, “Lillie…”

“I have to know, Scott. We have to know.”

The pribir told them.

“Oh my God,” Scott said.

Emily had had a chance to talk to no one yet. As she left the lab for the big house, Cord grabbed her to say that Clari had gone into labor. “She’s screaming, Emily… I can’t stand it!”

“Well, I don’t know why not,” Emily snapped. “You’re not in labor.”

“I’ll go get Mom—”

“Don’t bother. She’s too busy with the pribir. Take me to Clari.”

Cord did, then ran to fetch Sajelle and Carolina, and then ran to sit by Clari until she whimpered for him to get out.

So by the time Lillie reached the small house where Clari sat on the birthing stool Alex had built months ago, Clari was eight centimeters dilated. The girl squatted among the women, who wiped her face and gave her sips of water and held her hands when the pain came. “It’s going to break me in two,” Clari gasped. “Oh, save the baby if… if…”

“None of that talk,” Sajelle said, but she shot Lillie a worried look.

Clari had a very bad time. It wasn’t until midnight that Cord’s son slid out from her torn body, amid a wash of blood. Scott and Emily immediately sedated Clari and worked feverishly to repair the damage. Lillie held her breath until she heard the tiny, high wail. Carolina, she of the gentle hands, took the baby to the tub of heated water to be bathed, crooning to him in Spanish. “Primito, mi corazon…”

“Can I—”

“You get out of here, Lillie,” Sajelle ordered. “You never were any good at nursing.” Gratefully, Lillie went. She leaned against the side of the house and gulped the sweet fresh air. A figure hovered there.

“You have a son, Cord.”

“Can I—”

“Not yet. Scott and Emily are—”

It didn’t matter. He had bolted through the door. Well, sterility was a thing of the past, anyway. The pribir adjustments to the immune system made it able to fight off anything.

No. Not anything. If that were so, there would be no need for the pribir to go on being here. And God, what a blessing that would be.

Lillie made herself stay awake until Emily emerged. Lillie said only, “Wait until morning?”

Emily nodded wearily, her shirt splattered with blood. “Both of us, then. To everybody at once.”

“Okay.”

Emily stumbled toward the lab, where she often slept. Lillie longed for sleep, but she went once more into the house to check on Clari and to see her new grandson. Cord was holding the sleeping baby, his face suffused with wonder. So he was parental, after all, as she herself had not been. Lillie breathed in relief. The baby would enrapture Cord, and Clari would see that, and the tension Lillie had detected between them during Clari’s pregnancy might wither away.

Lillie dutifully inspected the infant. Clari’s abundant dark hair, a standard baby face. Lillie wasn’t sure she could have differentiated this child from Kella’s dark-haired one. Or maybe even from any dark-haired infant on the farm.

But this one was different. If the pribir had their way, it would be the last human-looking child ever born.

CHAPTER 27

It rained that next, crucial morning, a steady warm thunderless gift of water that greened the desert, filled the cisterns, and slid gracefully down the glass windows. Rafe and Spring planned on going to Wenton, eventually, to scavenge for anything useful, including more glass windows pried from the deserted buildings. Once they were convinced the town was truly deserted, for good.

Lillie and Emily stood by the cold fireplace, facing everyone else seated or standing around the great room. All the infants except Clari’s were in the adjoining den, with the childminders on duty hovering in the doorway between rooms. This early in the morning the room was at least cool, even with this many bodies packed in. It smelled of rain and cattle and babies and chicory coffee carried hot from the cookshack that kept cooking heat away from the big house.

Emily talked first, and Lillie had a sudden, useless flash of memory: Emily standing shyly alongside Rafe in the classroom aboard the Flyer, supplying Pam with the English words for genetic concepts. Emily blushing, proud of her ability to help these wonderful teachers in this most wonderful school.

Emily surveyed the tense faces in the great room and spoke with restraint. Lillie saw what that cost her. ” — and the rabbit population is poison to us now, or soon will be. There may or may not be difficulties with eating some plants, and more difficulties might develop later. The pribir say we can’t survive with all the changes that are going to happen on Earth. So they want to… want to…”

Emily licked her lips, and chose her words with care. “… to reengineer our genes again. To create embryos and implant them in fertile females, as they did aboard the ship fifteen years ago. But this time, the embryos will be much different from us. The pribir say they will have a different shape, different internal functions, different diets and… they’re not sure yet of all the necessary changes. But one thing the aliens are very clear on. These offspring we will give birth to will not be human, and they will eventually replace humans on the planet.”

There was stunned silence. Lillie stepped into it.

“Emily has told you the truth, but she’s left a few things out. First, the alternative to the pribir plan is death to the human race, forever. The genemods we already have, that the last two generations have, aren’t enough to let us adapt to what might happen to Earth. The bioweapons are too many and too persistent, and they’re mutating. Also, climate changes aren’t settling back down as we hoped they would. Rafe ran a computer simulation, and the global warming is caught in a feedback loop. All the sensors still transmitting from the upper atmosphere say the methane, ozone, and carbon dioxide are all increasing. Down here it’s only going to get worse. Our choice is simple: we do what the pribir suggest or our descendants all die.

“Second, there’s a big difference between this engineering and the last one. The pribir are asking our permission. They won’t go ahead with any embryo implants in anybody without consent.”

Scott stirred on his bench. Lillie met his eyes steadily, and held her breath. If he disputed that statement, the argument was over. Scott said nothing.

Rafe called out, “Lillie, you said ‘what might happen to Earth.’ Maybe the jackrabbits are the only thing that will be affected, and otherwise we can go on like we are now. Or the Earth’s natural homeostasis might kick in.”

“No homeostasis has kicked in so far. At all.”

Sajelle said, “I’d rather take our chances with Mother Nature than with the pribir!”

“Me, too!” Alex.

“And me!”

“And me!” The calling came faster, louder, angrier.

Spring, the peacemaker, stood. “I’m no scientist, God and everybody else knows, but couldn’t the pribir just… Emily said the rabbits and maybe the mesquite, couldn’t the pribir just reengineer those things? Instead of us?”

Shouted agreements. Lillie held up her hand, but it was a long time before she could get their attention. She said, “The problem with that idea is that other genetic changes might affect other foods, and not even the pribir know which ones. There are some nasty transposons out there, splicing genes into many different living things. The pribir can’t tell what will be next. The increased UV is causing a lot more mutations than ever before. Plus, the pribir are leaving soon, so they can’t go on fixing things for us.”

“Fucking things up, you mean,” Robin called bitterly.

“At least they’re leaving!”

“Maybe this time they’ll stay away!”

No chance at all, Lillie thought. A few more months in space for Pam and Pete, a few decades gone on Earth, and they’d be back.

Senni snarled, “Lillie, why are you on their side anyway? Deserting your own race?”

She’d expected this. “No. Trying to help it.”

Rafe stood, a far more dangerous opponent than Senni. “You hated what the pribir did to us as much as anybody. You were a major victim, remember? Rape, manipulation, experimenting on human beings… what happened to your outrage at those things, Lillie? Are the pribir manipulating you right this minute, with mind drugs?”

“No!”

“How would you know?”

Emily said harshly, “She wouldn’t.”

Julie stood. Julie, fearful, clutching Spring’s shoulder for support. “I think… I think Lillie’s right.” Everyone turned in amazement.

“I lost one of my babies, remember. Dakota and Felicity’s sister. We don’t even know what killed her. I held that little still body and… If the pribir can make it so no other mother loses a child… then it’s worth it. It is! None of the rest of you except Angie know that because you haven’t gone through it. But I did. It doesn’t matter what your children look like, as long as they get the chance to live.” She collapsed into her seat and buried her face in Spring’s chest.

Ashley shouted, “It matters to me whether what I give birth to is human. If it’s not, it’s not my child.”

Lillie said, “Who gets to define ‘human’?”

“It’s already defined!” Sam yelled. “If you can’t see that, Lillie, you’re a fucking idiot!”

Mike stood and started toward Sam. Only Scott’s urgent hand on Mike’s arm made him sit down again, glowering.

Emily said, “No personal attacks, Sam. I mean it. This is too important to decide that way. Put out reasonable arguments or leave.”

Lillie glanced at Emily in admiration. Emily did not return the look.

Cord stood. “Clari’s and my son has all the life-saving stuff the pribir built into my genes. Dr. Wilkins says so. That’s good enough to survive a lot of climate dangers. I should know, it saved me during a sandstorm in the desert. Is Earth going to get worse than that? I don’t think so. We already have enough genemods for our descendants to survive.”

He won’t look at me, Lillie thought. My son refuses to look at me. How had she and Cord changed sides? Once it had been she who feared the pribir and Cord who idealized them. Well, he’d met his ideal and changed his mind, and she was more afraid of the extinction of the human race than of the pribir. The pribir were bullies, tyrants even, short-sighted, selfish, uncaring. They were also the only antidote available to what humans themselves had done to their planet.

She tried to say all this, but the crowd had gone past lengthy, reasoned speech. They shouted and interrupted and no amount of calm orders from DeWayne or Scott or even Jody could stop them. Finally, Sam screamed for a vote.

“How many want to tell the pribir to leave us the hell alone?”

Every hand went up except four: Lillie, Scott, Spring, and Julie. And that was that.

Lillie, completely drained, left the big house to look again at her new grandson, sleeping peacefully beside Clari, unaware that the fate of his children and his children’s children had just been decided for him.

Lillie wasn’t present when Scott told the pribir of the farm’s decision. He emerged from the interview gray-faced, saying only, “They say we’re crazy.”

“But-“

“I’m going to lie down now. Don’t pull at me, any of you. All they say is that we’re crazy.” He stumbled down the hill toward the lab. Lillie, watching this old man bent and defeated, pushed down the impulse to offer him her arm. Scott wouldn’t take it.

Sajelle, standing beside Lillie, said, “What are you going to do now, Lillie?”

Lillie knew it was a challenge: Are you going to go on opposing your own? Stirring up trouble? Sajelle waited, looking scarcely older than when they’d left the ship together fifteen years ago, although both she and Lillie were grandmothers. At twenty-nine, to Scott’s sixty-nine.

Lillie said wearily, “I’m going to help prepare for Dolly’s wedding.”

“Good,” Sajelle said.

The whole farm was caught up in the preparation. The activity had a desperate edge, the gaiety not forced but brittle. Everyone wanted, needed this distraction, and yet no distraction would have been enough.

Hannah’s children played her music cube over and over, and every time Lillie heard it she was back on the Flyer, happy and excited, putting on Madison’s make-up for that first “dance,” making her way shyly to the ship’s garden, dancing in Mike’s arms. But she didn’t ask Frank, Bruce, or Loni to stop playing the music. They were mourning their mother’s death, even as they prepared for Dolly’s wedding.

Lupe and Kezia, the best needlewomen, took time away from babyminding to sew every bit of clean white cloth on the farm into a wedding dress for Dolly. Spring and Jody slaughtered and barbecued a cow. Sajelle and the kitchen crew made everything good possible out of the garden produce. Forage, and judicious amounts of the hoarded stuff that could not be replaced: sugar, baking powder, rice. There was even a wedding cake, decorated with fresh flowers that Carolina’s excited daughters picked by the creek.

The wedding was held at dusk, in the cool space between the dying of the wind and the dying of the light. The children had dragged every chair on the farm to the newly swept area between the big house and the barn and set them in rows on either side of a dirt-packed aisle. At the barn end, a table was draped with flowers, bright with candles. Dolly would come out of the big house, preceded by two little girls carrying more flowers, and walk to the table, where Martin waited with DeWayne, who would recite the ceremony. “Dearly beloved… .”

All of it off the Net, Lillie thought. Copied from countless old shows that had as much relevance to their lives now as the tribal rituals of Hottentots. And as for relevance to the lives they would be living ten years from now…

She kept her mouth shut. This was what Dolly wanted. And apparently few others thought as she did. Scott, maybe. Emily. DeWayne. Maybe even Cord, although he would never say so. The others were caught up, or made themselves be caught up, in the artificial excitement. Even Senni had been smiling the last few days, as she changed endless diapers or tended the pots kept constantly boiling outside to launder them.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together…”

Pam and Pete had not been invited.

The night was lovely, clear and starry. Afterward everyone moved inside, escaping the insects, to eat and dance. No, Lillie thought, don’t play it! But they did. “Don’t matter none to me, never really did…”

One of the small houses had been cleared out for Martin and Dolly’s “honeymoon.” No other couple had had such a thing… but no other couple of Dolly’s generation had come together slowly, voluntarily, free of pribir-engineered sex triggered at a pribir-chosen time and physiologically allowing no delay.

The day after the wedding, neither Martin nor Dolly emerged from the house for breakfast. Lillie happened to catch Mike’s eyes. Something in her expression (What? She didn’t know how her face looked) made his gaze deepen. He didn’t look away. Lillie caught her breath. He was ready, then, enough over Hannah’s death. She smiled at him, and the smile made her feel fourteen again.

Later. Soon.

Dolly and Martin didn’t come to the big house for lunch, either.

“Something’s wrong,” Senni said to DeWayne. “I left some breakfast for them outside the door, and nobody touched it. This isn’t just sex. I don’t believe it.”

Senni knocked on the door. When there was no answer, she pushed it open. She screamed.

Why screams? Lillie thought irritably. All she saw was that Martin lay asleep on the bed and Dolly wasn’t there. Dolly could have been in the latrine, for all Senni knew. Senni never considered the reasonable explanation.

But Dolly wasn’t in the latrine, and Martin couldn’t be wakened.

“He’s breathing normally,” Emily said, after examining him. “Nothing has been damaged. He’s drugged. Did anybody find Dolly?”

“Jody and Spring are still looking.” But after an hour the news had spread and everyone was looking. Martin did not wake up.

Sam said grimly, “The fucking pribir have her. In their ship. And Martin’s knocked out with the same stuff we always were on the Flyer—you telling me you don’t remember?”

Lillie, along with the others, remembered.

She slipped away, to the pribir ship. It was undoubtedly impregnable, but that wouldn’t stop Sam and the others like him from assaulting it. Lillie wanted to get there first.

She stood on the ship’s far side, where she couldn’t be seen from the big house. “Pam. This is Lillie. I need to talk to you.”

Immediately Pam’s disembodied voice sounded through the ship wall. “What do you want, Lillie? I’m busy.”

“Pam, you can’t implant engineered embryos in Dolly and pretend she got pregnant by Martin last night. I mean, you can physically do it. But everyone knows what happened. Senni found Martin before he revived and before you could get Dolly back beside him. Everybody else will be up here soon.”

“So?” Pam said.

“Scott will abort the fetuses. Or Emily will. Dolly herself will insist on it.”

Silence. Lillie thought she’d lost, but then a door appeared in the ship and Pam erupted through it. “Abort? You mean she would destroy our embryos?”

“Of course she would, Pam,” Lillie said. She struggled to keep control of her tone. “Scott told you we don’t want it.”

“But we saw! With your lot! Once the babies are growing inside the females, they let them grow! And after they were born, they nurtured them anyway! We saw it right here on this farm! You and Bonnie and Emily and Julie and Sajelle, and in the next generation Felicity and Kella and Taneesha and Angie and—”

“You didn’t see everybody from the ship, did you, Pam? Jessica aborted her triplets, fifteen years ago. So did Madison, and she died of the abortion.” All the memories back, after so many years not thinking of them. Tess’s story of Madison lying ashen and dead in an Amarillo basement, her legs caked with blood.

“What’s wrong with you people!” Pam screamed. “You refuse the only thing that will save your species, you piss on the right way, you disgust me! All of you!”

“Give Dolly back,” Lillie said, and heard her own voice rise. “You can’t succeed with this. Not against our will.”

“You ungrateful, impotent, stupid stupid stupid—”

Pam was seized from behind and her arms pinned to her sides. Sam. And behind him, Alex and Cord.

Lillie said levelly, “Let her go, Sam.”

“It’s not a ‘her.’ It’s a fucking thing, and she’s not going to turn us into fucking things, too.” He pulled a knife from his belt.

Not real. None of this was real. She made her tone stay calm. “Sam, think. If you hurt her—if you even can hurt her—Pete is in the ship and has control of machinery we can’t even imagine. He’ll fry you right where you stand, and maybe the rest of us, too.”

Pam said, “Sam, you’re stupider even than the rest. You always were.” She flexed her arms and Sam went flying through the air, landing hard on the ground a few feet away. “Now, about Dolly and our embryos—”

Alex threw another knife. It hit Pam square in the back.

She gasped and fell forward, onto her knees. The humans stood frozen. Now, Lillie thought, now Pete would —now—

Pam collapsed and lay still, the knife still protruding from her back. The next moment Lillie fell to the ground. Her last thought was Not Cord! But it was too late.

She awoke in twilight, lying in the same spot on the ground, Cord and Sam and Alex around her like folded dolls. Lillie shook off as much grogginess as she could and crawled over to Cord. Breathing. He was alive.

She lay gasping, pushing the last of the drug out of her lungs, gulping in the sweet night air. A hawk soared overhead, oblivious. For a moment, it was limned against the rising moon. Lillie saw Pam sitting to one side on a sleek green chair molded to her body, watching her.

“Pam… Cord…”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Pam snapped. “See? It’s just as I told you. You humans take care of your young, once they’re born. Cord isn’t anything like you genetically, but you nurture him. Dolly would nurture her embryos, too.”

“Dolly? The others? Where—”

“Everybody’s perfectly fine. And thank you about asking after me, Lillie. I thought we were friends.”

Pam, too, looked fine. She stood, and the green chair dissolved, seeping into the soil. The last thing Pam looked like was a woman who’d taken a knife in the back.

Lillie sat up. “Pam, are you and Pete immortal?”

“Our genes are. So are yours, so are all genes, only the bodies that hold them change. Unless a species stupidly allows itself to become extinct, of course!”

“But… are you the same Pam who just took a knife in the back? Or are you…” Lillie couldn’t say what she meant. Incoherent thoughts chased themselves through her head. Cloning, regeneration, what else?

“My genes are all on file with ship,” Pam said crossly, and Lillie gave it up. The basic assumptions were too different. She said, “Dolly―”

“Is back in her primitive house with her mate. Everybody will be waking up soon. I wanted to talk to you first. At least you tried to warn me, Lillie. Thank you.”

It was the first time Lillie had ever heard a pribir thank anyone for anything. And yet, at the same time Pam’s lovely face wore a slight triumphant smirk, as if she were congratulating herself on getting it right, this strange senseless human ritual.

Pam continued, “Yes, the embryo is still implanted in Dolly. Now we’ll have to engineer a permanent maternal virus to make the idea of abortion totally abhorrent to Dolly. Do you know how hard that is? Pete has the entire ship genetic library working on it, plus everyone in orbit. You people think it’s easy to engineer behavioral changes. Well, maybe it is if you can keep pumping olfactory molecules into a closed space, but it’s a lot harder to engineer a permanent brain change in behavior that doesn’t also affect other species-specific behavior. You can’t appreciate how difficult. We had no idea about Madison and Jessica. We had no idea how perverse and backward you people really are. Your males didn’t even mate with non-engineered women, except for Cord, in order to enlarge the gene pool as much as possible. They just wasted a dominant genome by mating with females who already had it to pass on. I don’t know why we even bother.”

Pam was back on full rant. Lillie said, “The embryos are still in Dolly?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“It won’t work, Pam. Even if Dolly now wants to have your… your creation, the others wouldn’t let her. They’d abort anyway. They’d think she was just being manipulated by you and Pete.” Which would be the truth.

Pam was speechless. A first, Lillie thought, and rushed in while there was still time.

“Listen, Pam, you have an alternative. Remove the embryos from Dolly. You can do that, can’t you? Don’t force or manipulate anyone to carry them. That will simply never work. Instead… instead…”

Lillie faltered. She wasn’t sure she could say it. “Instead what?” Pam demanded.

“Instead you’ll have a willing mother, without any weird viruses in her brain. We humans have voted against forced pregnancy. Well, that ought to mean we voted for unforced pregnancy. The others have no right to insist on abortion if the mother doesn’t want it. And I think they’ll see it that way. I really do.

“Take the embryos out of Dolly and plant them in me. I’ll carry the babies, and ‘nurture’ them, and start your new version of humans.

“I’ll do it.”

CHAPTER 28

No one believed her. They believed that the embryos nestled in her womb; Scott had verified that. Three fetuses. But no one believed that Lillie’s choice to carry them was voluntary. They thought, Emily and Sam and Rafe and DeWayne and maybe even Scott, that she’d been drugged, brainwashed into her decision. Lillie didn’t tell them about the “maternal virus” the pribir had been trying to concoct for Dolly. Instead she pointed out that no pribir olfactory drug had ever been known to affect only one person; the molecules always affected everyone who smelled them. This was not a coerced decision. She wanted to carry these embryos. It was her choice. “We all voted against it!” Bonnie said.

“I want to do it,” Lillie said, over and over and over. “And when we voted, we didn’t know how far the pribir would go to get this done. Look, people, say for the sake of argument that you’re right. This is a different species, not human. That doesn’t mean that the rest of you can’t go on breeding normal humans.”

Normal, she jeered at herself. Cord and his generation were already engineered so much they had once seemed monstrous to Jessica, to Madison. Too monstrous to give life to. Now Cord and the rest had become the norm. And so would this new child, at least to itself. Normal was whatever you yourself were.

There was no way most of them would see that. They didn’t want to see it.

“So you breed your race and we breed ours, and the best species wins, is that it, Lillie?” Rafe jeered. “Evolution in practice?”

“It’s a big planet, Rafe. And as far as we know, empty. You saying there’s no room for another intelligent species?”

“Mom,” Kella said, and her voice broke, “why are you doing this?”

Why was she? Because she was making herself a sacrifice, acting to save everyone from the kinds of coercion the pribir were capable of using if they were completely resisted. Because she was a pessimist, and believed the worst sim scenarios about where Earth was headed ecologically. Because she was an optimist, and believed that change could work out for the best. Because she was, and always had been, an outsider. Because she had always yearned for a mission in life, and this was one. How could you put all the reasons of a human heart into a few words?

She said to her children, Kella and Keith and Cord, “You never knew your great-uncle Keith. He was a wonderful person. He and I had a discussion once, a long time ago, about an orbiting nuclear power station. He said that unfortunately new technologies always seem to cost lives at first. Railroads, air travel, heart transplants. Probably even the discovery of fire.”

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

“We don’t look at it like that.”

“I see,” Lillie’s ten-year-old self said primly. And then, “I think two deaths is worth it.”

Kella and Keith stared at her with incomprehension. But in Cord, Lillie thought she saw a flash of reluctant understanding.

Eventually, during the arguing and shouting, Lillie asked the key question. “What are you going to do about it? Tie me down and abort, against my will? How does that make you different from the pribir?”

Even Emily and Rafe, the quick-witted ones, had no answer.

Finally, DeWayne came to her when she sat alone on the bench in the cottonwood grove by the creek. She’d gone there hoping that Mike would join her. But he’d seen her leave, and he’d turned away tight-lipped, and Lillie knew he never would be joining her, in any way.

That was part of the price she was paying.

She sat in the cottonwood shade, watching a lizard bask on a sunlit rock beside the creek. Lillie wasn’t much of a naturalist, and lizards interested her even less than jackrabbits or wildflowers, but it seemed to her there was something odd about this lizard. Its color? Shape? She didn’t know. She looked across the creek at the strip of wildflowers hugging the bank, and she felt reassured. Purple vervain, blue gila, yellow columbine. Tess had taught her the names. The flowers all looked normal.

“Lillie?”

“Hello, DeWayne.”

He sat down awkwardly beside her, pulling up the non-existent crease on his trousers—even, she thought, after a decade on the farm. Of everyone, DeWayne was the least comfortable out of doors. He said, “I think you know why I’m here, Lillie.”

“Yes. I do. When do they want me to leave?”

“Not until after the… your babies are born.”

She’d hoped for that. “Who’s going with me?”

“Keith and Loni. Spring and Julie and all their kids. Roy and Felicity. Lupe and Juan and Alex.”

Alex was a surprise. She said steadily, “Not Cord.”

DeWayne didn’t look at her. “He would have, I think. But Clari…”

“I know.” Timid Clari, who always let Cord have his way. But not now, not when she had her son to, as she saw it, protect. Lillie understood.

“And not Kella, either,” DeWayne said.

“I didn’t expect Kella. I’m glad to have Keith.” Always her most adventurous child.

DeWayne said, “You’ll have enough people to survive if you go up toward the mountains. There are so few people left that you can probably have your pick of houses. Jody is more than willing to supply you with a few cattle, plus chickens and seed. Rafe thinks he can get you on-line with us, using that old equipment in the storeroom, and you can summon help if you ever need it. We’ll do everything we can, Lillie.”

“Except let me stay here. You don’t want my kids around your kids.”

“No,” DeWayne said, and still he didn’t face her. “We don’t.”

“It isn’t your kids who will object to the new humans, you know. Kids accept whatever is around them as normal. It’s you adults.”

“I know,” DeWayne said. He hesitated. “Do you know what they’ll look like? Has Pam even told you?”

Pam had, but Lillie was not about to tell DeWayne. “No.”

He burst out suddenly, “Lillie—how can you?”

“DeWayne, look at me.” He did, reluctantly. She noticed for the first time how furrowed his brown face looked, as if it were he, and not Jody or Spring, who spent most of the time in the sun. Genes were strange things.

She said, “How can I? Because I have to. Or, rather, somebody has to, or we risk extinction. Like dinosaurs, like mastodons, like saber-toothed tigers. If I had another choice besides extinction, I’d take it. But I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. Go on adapting, the way we have been so far, maybe with a little help from the pribir. You don’t know that the climate’s going to make that impossible. You don’t know.”

I know, Lillie thought. The pribir, damn them, had never been wrong yet. Except about how human beings would behave, and Lillie wasn’t sure she could blame them for that. Humans themselves weren’t very good at predicting their own behavior.

Aloud she said, “Then call my choice an insurance policy. If humans in our present form go extinct, the new humans will take up where we left off. If we don’t, then surely the Earth is empty enough to hold two strains of humans.”

DeWayne said somberly, “It didn’t once before. Homo sapiens killed off the Neanderthals.”

So that was their real fear. Lillie could have told him it wouldn’t happen that way, but she knew that was the one piece of information about which she absolutely must lie. Would he ask the question?

He did. “Emily wanted me to ask you something, and I said I would. If…”

“Spit it out, DeWayne.”

“If they ever wanted to… will your ‘New Humans’ be able to mate with our descendants?”

“No,” Lillie lied. And if Emily actually believed that, she was a fool. The pribir would not only ensure compatibility, they would ensure genetic dominance, and Emily knew it. But Lillie wouldn’t give Emily that weapon for her arsenal.

Even DeWayne, no geneticist, looked unconvinced. He sighed heavily and stood. “I’m sorry about all this, Lillie.”

She merely smiled up at him.

“They won’t be human, you know. Your kids. No matter what you call them. There are limits.”

“And can you say for sure where they are, DeWayne? The limits of being human include Cord and Taneesha, with all their genemods, most of which we haven’t even seen expressed, but those limits don’t include the next batch of genetic engineering? Who decided that?”

He said nothing, turned and walked from under the shade of the cottonwoods and over the rise to the big house.

Lillie stayed on the bench. Sometime during the human conversation, the lizard had quietly left its rock. She should feel somber, Lillie thought, but she didn’t. Amusement flooded her like water.

All her life she’d wanted the universe to have a design, to make sense, and she herself to have a mission within that design. Now Pam and Pete, tunnel-visioned carriers of their own mission, had given her one: to save the human race. Or, at least, to play a part in that rescue. And it had nothing to do with any grand universal design anywhere.

Lillie had a sudden vision of the entire empty, depopulated planet, falling toward ecological ruin. Beyond it, the rest of the solar system, the galaxy, the local group… all that stuff they’d taught her in school. Huge unimaginable distances filled with an infinity of suns and worlds, and all of them were hurtling toward eventual ruin. Novas, burn-outs, maybe even—what had Rafe called it once? —she couldn’t remember the word but it meant that everything in the universe would eventually run down and stop. Everything was going to go extinct, and in the face of that there were no missions in life. Humanity, old or ‘new,’ was just an eyeblink that hardly anyone except two egomaniacal aliens would even notice.

Oddly, this not only amused Lillie but refreshed her. It was comforting. She’d never needed a grand mission at all. All she’d needed was to live whatever life circumstances presented to her, and she was automatically a part of the universe. Nothing she did could ever make that part any bigger, not on the true infinite scale of things. That implied that nothing could make her part any smaller, either. She was already as counted in the cosmic census as possible, already part of whatever salvation was possible. Not the religious salvation her mother had believed in, but the salvation of the great march of evolution, the only point the universe had.

She rose, stretched lazily, and watched a jackrabbit tear across the open spaces and into the mesquite. She felt amazingly refreshed. She wished she could tell Uncle Keith; he’d have enjoyed knowing.

With the careful gait of pregnancy, she walked up the rise toward the farm.

“Breathe, damn it!” Pam said. “Breathe harder, Lillie!”

She managed to get out, “You should have… made the head… smaller.”

“Can’t do that,” Pete said. “Not without loss of cranial capacity for intelligence. There are some design features we were stuck with, you know.” He sounded put out.

“Breathe, don’t push yet! Fuck it, Lillie, you’ve done this before!”

And it wasn’t any fun then, either, Lillie thought, between waves of pain. But Pam was right. It was too early to push.

She lay inside the ship, but that didn’t seem to make labor any easier. Pam had refused to give her any drugs. Surely the pribir could have created molecules to block pain centers in the brain without affecting the babies, but they hadn’t. Why? Lillie hadn’t thought to ask before, and now it was too late. Maybe they wanted to see how New Human births would go after the pribir departure.

Carolina put water to her lips. “Drink very small, carina.”

To please her, Lillie sipped the water. Carolina was the only person who had insisted on being present at the birth, although Lillie suspected that others waited outside to hear the outcome. Carolina had defied even Jody, unleashing torrents of Spanish and tossing her black hair defiantly until he had helplessly given up. Nothing could keep Carolina from babies, even non-human babies, or New Human babies, or whatever these three were going to be.

“Now push!” Pam commanded, and Lillie gratefully complied. She felt the equivalent of shitting a pumpkin, and gasped. “Is it… alive?”

No one answered her. “Here comes the second,” Pete said. “All right, push!”

“Is it…” She couldn’t get the rest of the words out.

“Aaaahhhhhh,” Carolina said, and Lillie fainted. A second later she was back, shocked into consciousness by some olfactory molecules from Pam, who said angrily, “Stay with us, Lillie! You’re not done!”

Like a car still good for another thousand miles, Lillie thought. These children would never see a car. “Are they…”

“Push!”

The third one finished her. She passed out, or fell asleep, but not before the unexpected came to her, startling as snow in ninety degrees. Oh, my God―

She woke all at once, undoubtedly by design. No one was in the room.

But I smelled it, Lillie thought, with complete clarity. I smelled them.

No. They, her babies, had smelled to her.

“Pam?” she called, and instantly a door melted from the wall and Pete bustled in, carrying a wrapped bundle. Lillie smelled it again.

Her child, emitting olfactory molecules as Pam and Pete did, molecules that created an image in Lillie’s mind. The image was fuzzy, mostly a smear of color, but the feeling that accompanied it was clear as spring water: distress. Too cold, too bright, not the womb. Her child, like all children, was protesting the birth experience.

Pete didn’t ask how Lillie felt. “Do you want to see her?”

“Yes,” Lillie said, and struggled to sit up.

Pete put the bundle on Lillie’s lap and unwrapped it. Lillie gasped. She’d been told, but still… Pete didn’t notice the gasp. He glowed with the satisfaction of the right way.

Pete said importantly, “The torso is tilted forward like that to relieve pressure on the vertebrae, and then the neck has that pronounced curve to counteract the tilt, so the adult form will still be able to face forward. The legs are so short in order to keep the center of gravity lower. Those short legs will be very strong. The knee bends backward like that to prevent the grinding and deterioration that you humans all get eventually. Including you, Lillie. This human will live about one hundred and sixty years, and we built everything to last. The bigger ears, of course, are better at gathering sound. We thought about eliminating the vocal chords, since essentially they’re unnecessary, but in the end—”

“Be quiet,” Lillie said.

Pete, unlike Pam, occasionally listened. He fell silent while Lillie studied the sleeping… baby.

A cross between a troll and a turtle, with the curved neck of a swan.

The baby’s skin was thick, gray-green, scaly. Its body, with all the features Pete had so clinically described, reminded Lillie of an illustration in a picture book she’d had as a child, a drawing of a stunted gnome. On the child’s back, however, was a very thin, flexible, hard shell, extending from tailbone to neck. The feet were webbed with more of the gray-green turtle skin. The hands had scaled skin, too, but ended in a mass of long, delicate tentacles.

Most awful was the face. The nose was a long snout. There was no mouth. Two eyes closed in sleep.

Pam bustled in. “Isn’t that a good engineering job, Lillie? She can survive in sand, dust, rain, heat, go into estivation in the cold. And―”

“How does she eat?” Lillie faltered, and a part of her brain not in shock was amazed that she got the words out at all.

“That’s the best part,” Pam said triumphantly. “We saved it as a surprise. There’s a slit just under the curve of the throat for conventional feeding; you can’t see it now because it seals completely when not used. But in an emergency, she can also send a tubule into the earth for water and nitrates and then synthesize ATP for energy from sunlight. It’s a limited function, only supplementary, of course, but an ingenious one. What Pete and I did was use halobacteria, which photosynthesizes not with chlorophyll but with retinal rhodopsin, and—”

Lillie scarcely listened. It didn’t stop Pam, who went on about halobacteria and photosynthesis before returning to her tour of Lillie’s child.

“That long nose allows for filters that should block nearly all pathogens before they get inside, but in case not, she’s got an immune system like you wouldn’t believe. She can also draw her entire body under that shell against really adverse conditions and just estivate for up to six months. Her—”

“How does she talk?” Lillie stared at the mouthless face.

“Why are you so interested in that?” Pam said, offended. “We almost didn’t give her your primitive communication system, since she has ours. But if she wants to, she can tilt her head back slightly and talk through her throatslit. The vocal chords are intact, as Pete told you. And of course, her hearing is excellent and she can hear your speech just fine.”

“Will she understand… is she…”

“She’s a lot more intelligent than you are,” Pam said. “Really, Lillie, don’t you think I know my profession?”

Lillie unwrapped the baby’s diaper. The baby had normal genitalia. Against the rest of her, the sight was terrible.

“Couldn’t do much about that,” Pete sighed. “The design has to stay cross-fertile with the old-style humans as long as they’re still around. Although maybe we can fix that next time through here.”

Lillie started to tremble. She was not this strong. She’d thought she was, but she made a terrible mistake, she couldn’t do this, it wasn’t possible, this thing was not human, oh God help me Uncle Keith ―

The baby opened her eyes.

“There!” Pam said in triumph. “Our other surprise for you!”

Under a thick nicitating membrane, the baby’s irises and pupils were a duplicate of Cord’s, of Lillie’s own. Deep gray flecked with gold, alert and bright. Human eyes. A smell came to Lillie, an image in the mind, a stirring in the heart. The baby looked at her.

Immediately, Lillie loved her fiercely.

A trick of the olfactory molecules.

So what? This was Lillie’s child.

Pam said, “Do you want to see the other two? Bring them in, Pete. Lillie, what are you going to name them? Lillie?”

Lillie didn’t answer. She gazed back at the baby, lost in the infant’s eyes, its helpless need of her. She would do anything to protect this child. Anything.

And oh God, the baby was so beautiful.

CHAPTER 29

Rafe said, “It’s a defense, isn’t it. Built in. Like a skunk’s bad smell.”

“Not the best comparison,” Lillie said acidly. They sat on chairs outside Scott’s lab, in the early evening. To the west the sun was setting amid piles of gold and orange clouds. Lillie’s infants were inside, being poked at by Scott, with Sajelle and Carolina in eager attendance.

Rafe continued, “When any of us are near the babies, we love them because they continuously send out pheromones to make us love them. It’s only when we’re out of that particular olfactory range that we remember what they really are.”

“When did you become a biologist, Rafe? You’re supposed to be our engineer.” Their engineer. Lillie was leaving with her children in another two weeks. Jody had found her an abandoned vacation house at the foot of the El Capitan mountains, north of what had once been the city of Ruidoso. The place had, he said, a good water supply, insulation, stored canned food, fertile soil. She wondered if Jody had had to bury the bodies of its previous owners, and what bioweapon they had died of.

“I’m not a biologist,” Rafe said. “Just an observer. The pribir can learn how we behave, even if they can’t anticipate it. They built in their secret protective weapon in the little mutants’ pheromones.”

“Don’t call them that,” Lillie said sharply.

Rafe grinned at her ruefully. “Even when you’re not smelling them, you can’t see them clearly, can you. Well, you’re their mother. I guess Pam and Pete couldn’t risk you going to the latrine and just deciding to never return. Lillie… do yourself a favor. Don’t ever be alone until Pam and Pete leave next week.”

She started in surprise. “You mean you think the pribir might—”

“They want as many of these… offspring as they can get. They could easily impregnate you again.”

Lillie considered. “No. It’s too soon. They know I’m nursing three kids. The strain on my body would be too great. It would endanger both sets of kids.”

Rafe looked unconvinced. He stood, gazing down at her. Abruptly he said, “You’re very brave.”

She said nothing.

“But, then, you always were. Even on the Flyer. Probably the bravest of all of us.” He turned and walked away very fast.

Lillie went inside. Sajelle sat holding one of the infants, crooning to it affectionately. Carolina changed another’s diaper. The third lay on Scott’s lab table, her gold-flecked gray eyes fastened on his face. Julie fussed with baby clothes. The room was very crowded.

Scott, delighted, said, “She’s smiling at me with her eyes!”

Lillie had been holding her breath, trying to assess her children objectively. Squat, gray-green, scaled hybrids…

“Scott,” she said, not exhaling, “Did Pam use reptile genes along with human ones? Did she?”

Scott looked startled. “Why, yes, she did. Does it matter?”

Lillie couldn’t hold her breath any longer. She let it out and gulped air, and with the air came the sweet baby smell.

“No,” she said, “it doesn’t.”

Sajelle said, “Have you decided yet what to name them?”

“The boy is Dionysus. The girls are Rhea and Gaia. You’re holding Gaia.”

“I never heard of names like that,” Sajelle complained. “What kind of names are those?”

“Very old ones,” Lillie said. “Scott, what have you learned about their genome?”

“Not a whole lot,” Scott said. “Four billion base pairs, a third more than we’ve got. I can only identify about twenty percent. Less than I can identify for your first lot of kids, Cord and Keith and Kella. We never even found out what all their genes can do, let alone this lots’. There’s just no match in the database. Maybe I’ll learn more over time. Here, take Rhea. I have to sit down.”

He eased himself into a chair. Lately Scott’s right knee had been bothering him. His hair was almost gone now, his face deeply lined. “Lillie, there’s been some shifts about your move. Lupe and Juan aren’t going.”

Well, that wasn’t unexpected. Neither Lupe nor Juan had builtin olfactory engineering. They never perceived the pheromones the babies sent out, and so their ridiculous prejudices must always be operating. The same was true for Martin and for Carolina, but Carolina was here anyway, calling Rhea “little cousin.” Evidently some people were naturally nurturing no matter what.

Scott continued. “Roy and Felicity also decided to stay here.”

Roy. The men weren’t around the babies as much as were the women, all with babies of their own. Roy may have persuaded Felicity to not go. Felicity was Julie’s daughter, did that mean —

“Spring and I aren’t going, either,” Julie said. She looked near tears. “I’m sorry, Lillie. But my own kids—”

“I understand,” Lillie said. Julie’s older children, Dakota and Felicity, and her six grandchildren would be here. Julie wanted to be near them.

“But,” Scott said, “Keith and Loni are still going. So is Alex. And also Cord, Clari, and the baby.”

Gladness flooded through her. Cord. “Did Clari—”

“I think it was actually her idea.”

“I’m glad I’ll have one of Tess’s grandchildren along.”

“You’ll be fine,” Scott said, wiping his forehead. He felt the ever increasing heat more than anyone except Robin. “As far as Rafe can tell over the Net, there’s nobody left in a hundred square miles of where you’ll be.

“And one more thing. I’m going, too.”

“You?”

“Don’t look at me like that. You neither, Sajelle and Julie. I know I look like an old wreck to you, but I’ll be better off at a higher, cooler elevation than I am here. And somebody should document as much as possible of the gene expression of Homo sapiens novus.”

Why? Lillie thought. Her children were not going to be building sequencers and analyzers any time soon. When they did, the design and data would be all different. She didn’t say this; she was too glad Scott was going with her. He was one of the few who could remember the world she had grown up in. One who could share those memories, that vanished life.

“I’m happy you’re coming, Scott.”

He said, “Emily can handle medical needs here.”

Sajelle said, “And all the rest of us will visit often, Lillie, and you can visit here. We don’t want to lose track of you, or these precious babies.” She gazed fondly at the infant in her arms.

Scott and Lillie looked at each other, and he made a complicated gesture not even Lillie could read.

The pribir ship lifted off in the middle of the night. No one heard it go. When Lillie came out of Scott’s lab in the morning, a knot of people stood behind the big house where the ship had been.

Lillie wasn’t really surprised. The last time, Pam and Pete had just ceremoniously dumped the humans in the desert, hardly saying goodbye. Farewell speeches apparently weren’t genetic.

She walked up to the group. A few people drew back, Sam and Senni and Kezia and, most hurtfully, Kella. Kella wouldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

Lillie said, “Where’s Jody?”

“Inside,” Gavin said. “Do you want me to get him?”

They didn’t want her to go inside the big house, even though she wasn’t carrying any of the babies. A strange pain slid through her. “Yes. Get him.”

Jody came out, a few minutes after the others had left. He looked embarrassed but stubborn. The look suddenly reminded Lillie of a very young Tess.

“Jody, I want to leave for the mountains tomorrow, not in a few weeks. There’s no reason to wait. The children and I are more than strong enough to travel — ” thanks to the pribir ” — and I think we should go.”

He looked relieved, and that, too, sent a pain through Lillie. He said, “Okay. Tomorrow is good. Can you be ready at four? I want to get there before the heat of the day.”

There and back, he meant. But she only nodded. “We’ll be ready. Send out Cord and Keith.”

It was a caravan, the next morning, peculiar but probably no more peculiar than other caravans that had crossed this desert. Covered wagons, prospectors on mules, oil-seeking geologists, nuclear-waste trucks. Lillie had spent last evening using the old computer they were taking with them, seeking information on the site of her new home. She’d been shocked to see how little was left to access. Most sites had just ceased. The electricity had gone, the batteries had gone, the people had gone. How had the big libraries continued, with no one running them? Maybe someone was running them. Or maybe the machines were self-running by now, providing data and services endlessly for users who no longer existed. Lillie could have asked Rafe, but she knew she wouldn’t.

Jody drove DeWayne’s truck, still in good condition. In the ample truck bed, under tarps, rode Lillie, Alex, and Scott, each holding one of Lillie’s triplets. Keith and Loni’s three ten-month-old children were, miraculously, all asleep. Clari sat close beside Cord, holding baby Raindrop. Keith’s children were named Vervain, Stone, and Lonette. Cord and Clari, Keith and Loni had spent their whole lives on the isolated New Mexico farm. Conventional names meant little to them, mostly associated with silly Net shows. They named their kids after things that mattered to them. And, Lillie thought, “Gaia,” “Rhea,” and “Dion” were hardly more conventional.

Somewhere behind DeWayne’s speedier truck, Taneesha and Bobby drove horse carts piled with bags of foodstuffs from the farm, kegs of salted or smoked meat, some of Scott’s lab equipment. He’d apparently had an argument with Emily over what went and what stayed, but Scott must have pulled rank because it seemed to Lillie that most of it was here. There was also a precious box of weapons and ammunition.

“We don’t want them,” Cord said, but Lillie had spoken to him quietly and changed his mind. The mountains, too, had warmed and changed their ecology, although not as much as the desert, and it was possible they might encounter black bears, mountain lions, wolves.

Or leftover humans.

She didn’t say this last to Cord. Her favorite child, still idealistic, still prickly. But all of them knew how to use a handlaser on a rattlesnake, and Alex and Keith could fire everything in that sealed box.

Somewhere behind the horse carts, Spring and Dakota rode herd on a few dairy cows that would be left with Lillie. So would two horses. Spring, Bobby, Dakota, and Taneesha would return with Jody at nightfall, in the empty truck. And after that Lillie would see them… when?

Not soon, she knew. Away from her newest babies, the others’ memories of the children’s monstrosity would grow. That’s the way the human mind worked. Unless Lillie sent someone on horseback to fetch help, it might be a very long time before she saw the people she’d lived with for fifteen years, including her daughter.

Not Lillie’s choice. But innocence never meant you were spared punishment.

“We’re nearly there,” Jody said from the driver’s console. “Does everybody understand the route back?”

Lillie didn’t answer.

Six thick-walled cottages, of roughly equal size. This place had been a vacation compound, maybe a tourist resort. Four of the cottages were guest houses, each with three small bedrooms, comfortable large living room, and spectacular glass-walled view. The roofs had working solar panels, although the windpowered electric generator was no longer functional. The fifth, slightly larger cottage was a communal dining room with the kind of kitchen Lillie hadn’t seen in decades: steel appliances, smart ovens, servos. None of them worked. But the dining room had a woodstove and a huge fireplace, and water still ran in the sinks and toilets and tubs.

“Nice big tubs,” Jody said, grinning without mirth, “and you should have enough water. It won’t be as hot up here, either. Good thing, with those glass walls. Stupid building design.”

There had once been air conditioning, Lillie thought but didn’t say. Possibly Jody had never experienced air conditioning.

“Jody,” Scott said, “why don’t you all move up to the mountains?”

A reasonable question. Once, Tess and her husband had had to live where they owned land, and it was their good luck that it was in an area that the warming had made wetter rather than drier. Then, the farm people had huddled together for defense. After that, isolation from the bioweapons. But now there was no reason to stay in that exposed, hot, drying place. The world, or most of it, was empty.

Jody said, “Oh, we’ve always been there.” To him, Lillie saw, it was a reason. His farm, his roots, his mother’s grave.

“When are you starting back?” Alex said. There was some tension between him and Jody. Alex had always idolized the older man. No longer.

“Can’t go until tomorrow,” Jody said. “There’s a big storm coming up”

“You should stay as long as you want,” Lillie said deliberately. “You’re always welcome with us.” Jody looked away.

Everyone helped unpack. Lillie and Scott took one cottage, with Gaia, Rhea, and Dion. Keith, Loni, and their children took another, as did Cord and Clari and little Raindrop. Alex was offered the third bedroom in Cord’s cottage but said he preferred to put a bunk in what they were already calling “the big house,” the dining room/kitchen. Scott declared the vacant cottage his laboratory. The sixth remained what it already was, a storehouse bursting with supplies.

Did Alex miss Kezia? It was hard to tell. She had refused to come with him, and Lillie knew that unlike some of the men, Alex had never felt much personal attachment to Kezia or to the children that the pribir-mandated sex had given him. Kezia didn’t seem to mind. For her, too, the driven interlude seemed to have been total hormonal. And maybe Alex simply wasn’t very parental.

She had known, once, what that felt like. No more.

When everyone was settled, dinner over, and the infants asleep, Lillie went outside. Scott remained in their cottage, using the ancient computer. For a brief moment she let herself imagine what it would be like if Mike sat there instead. She suppressed the thought. Don’t dwell on it. No use in pointless pain.

How strange it felt to be completely surrounded by trees again! Pine and spruce instead of cottonwood and cedar. But the ubiquitous pinons were here, too. The trees blocked sections of the sky, which Lillie was used to seeing whole and vast and limitless. Not here.

When she looked more closely, she could see that some of the trees were dying. The climate was starting to dry off, just as it was on the plains; the process just hadn’t yet advanced as far. She didn’t know which flora had migrated here when the warming accelerated and the rains increased, but those plants were probably again in retreat. How long would it take?

Lillie felt the wind rise: Jody’s storm. It whipped tree branches this way and that. She didn’t venture very far; she didn’t know either the terrain or the area’s vermin, and it was black as a pit in the windy dark. She stumbled back to the house and went inside. Two candles glowing in the living room, and Scott looking up from the computer with a weary smile, and, above all, the faint smell of her babies, asleep in the next room, as living and welcome as the scent of water.

At the end of October, three months after Lillie moved to the mountains, Spring and Jody and Kella visited overnight. Kella did not bring her triplets, Lillie’s grandchildren. The visitors didn’t bring much news, or carry any away, since the two homesteads communicated by computer almost every day. Kella exclaimed over how much her brothers’ children had all grown. She didn’t look at her mother’s children, and Lillie saw that Kella was trying to stay away from them. It was a miserable visit.

It was another year before Spring returned, and Kella didn’t come with him.

It was remarkably easy to live in the mountains. Crops grew easily. Water was more plentiful, although the growing season was shorter. Game was plentiful. Keith, Loni, and Alex learned to make snares. On the entire mountain, they never met another person.

Keith tended the cows, and Cord devoted himself to farming. Clari became pregnant again, and gave birth to a girl they named Theresa.

Scott grew frailer, but his mind was sharp and clear, mapping more of the children’s gene expressions every year. At the farm, Robin died. Natural causes, Emily e-mailed; Robin’s heart just gave out. Lillie wondered if anyone genuinely mourned. Angie bore another child, a single baby, not triplets. Evidently Pam had had some mercy. Susie had a baby; Felicity had identical twins boys. Kella had a baby Lillie had never seen.

In the mountains the four older children turned two, three, five. They ran barefoot through the woods and learned to trap, fish, farm, read, add, and write code. The old computer held out. “Cheap Japanese parts,” Scott joked, and only Lillie understood what he meant. The real miracle was that the Net still functioned. It would, Scott said, as long as the telecom satellites stayed functional in orbit.

It had been three years since they’d seen anyone from the farm. E-mail came once a week, then once every two weeks, then maybe once a month.

Alex and Lillie became lovers in a detached, considerate sort of way. Neither risked passion, but they were kind to each other.

Gaia, Rhea, and Dion stuck together from the time they were toddlers. They didn’t avoid the other children; they just preferred their own company. “They’re smelling to each other, aren’t they?” Cord said. “The way the pribir can. Even though they can talk normally. But this way, nobody else can listen.”

“I think so,” said Lillie, who knew so. Her hair had started to gray, pale strands glittering in the bright sunlight among the dark brown. She was thirty-four.

“Mom, I saw them eating something yesterday. A woody bush, not anything we can eat. They were nibbling the leaves and sort of laughing. I told Scott, and he said they’re probably engineered to digest a big range of plants that we can’t.”

“I know,” Lillie said. She’d observed it for a few months now, and had had her own talk with Scott. She had been concerned. Cord’s tone conveyed something else: doubt and distaste.

“They play well with Raindrop and the others, though,” Cord said, as much to reassure himself as anything. Then, “But they wouldn’t ever… turn on the others, would they?” He and Lillie were having this conversation away from the children, which was the only way they could have had it.

“Of course not,” Lillie said acidly. “Why would they? They’re all cousins.”

He didn’t answer.

“Cord,” Lillie said, “have you noticed that it’s getting hotter, even up here in the mountains?”

Cord looked at her as if she were crazy. “Of course I’ve noticed. Everybody has noticed. Clari and I were saying just last night that the vervain have all but disappeared. It’s drier, too. And the UV— we’re going to keep the kids inside even more than we do.”

His kids and Keith’s kids, he meant. Not Lillie’s.

Rhea, Gaia, and Dion went wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. They were only five, but Lillie had spent an entire week following them, and she had seen that they were safe without her. She had seen it graphically, during a thunderstorm that had sprung up on what had been a quiet afternoon.

“Rhea! Gaia! Dion! Come on, we’re going back to the house now.”

Rhea materialized at Lillie’s knees. Short and squat, her gray-green scaly skin blending in with the foliage, she could achieve near-perfect camouflage. She gazed up at Lillie from Lillie’s own eyes set above a large snout in that mouthless face and smelled to her mother.

“Not yet, Mommy! We want to stay here!”

“No. It’s going to thunderstorm. There could be flash flooding”

The feel of interest came to Lillie’s mind. The triplets were interested in everything. Intelligent and curious, they had learned to understand language at a precocious age, and they smelled back increasingly complex ideas. They differed more from each other in their thoughts than in their appearance. Rhea was the gentlest, meditating on butterflies, seldom disobeying. Dion was the most adventurous, and also the most loving. Gaia was the brightest but had a temper. Sometimes Lillie wondered if Pam’s own genes were in Gaia. She hoped not.

A surprise had been Gaia’s intense interest in Shakespeare. Scott had bought a few actual books with him, antiquated volumes on acid-free paper, including a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Even before she understood the words, Gaia delighted in the rhythms as Scott or Lillie read to her. Lillie was startled by how quickly Gaia remembered and recited long passages. It was disconcerting to see a snouted, scaled five-year-old making mudpies and singing to herself:

“‘Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange’… Mommy! Dion’s throwing mud at me!”

Where had Gaia’s interest in Shakespeare come from? Lillie had never particularly liked literature, nor had Uncle Keith.

Often Lillie wished she could show Gaia, Rhea, and Dion to Uncle Keith. They were children any mother would be proud of. But they were still children.

“Come on, Rhea, the storm is coming. Where are the others?”

Gaia emerged noiselessly from the brush. “I’m here,” she smelled. “I don’t know where Dion is.”

“Dion!” Lillie called, just as the first clap of thunder sounded. “Girls, smell to him, at far range.”

“We are, Mommy,” Gaia said. A second thunderclap, and two seconds later lightning split the sky.

“Where did he go?” she shouted. Gaia smelled her the direction.

Fear crept cold up Lillie’s spine. There was an arroyo that way, and it could flash flood in an instant. “Go back to the house!” she shouted over more thunder. “Hold hands and stay together!” She started off in the direction Gaia had pointed.

The rain came, lashing against Lillie’s face, making it difficult to see anything. She tried to run, clumsy against the wind, and stumbled over a dense knot of twisted vines. In less than a minute she was soaked to the skin. The solid sheet of rain blew almost sideways, warm and merciless, and she couldn’t make herself heard over the wind.

“Dion! Dion!”

He could smell to her, even over the storm… couldn’t he? Maybe not. She fell again, tearing open one pant leg. Blood ran down her calf, instantly sprayed off by the rain.

By the time she reached the arroyo, it was already flooding. Water tore along between the bare banks, washing down so much mud that the water looked like sludge. But it raced along at a speed no sludge could match, rising visibly as it was fed by countless flooding streams up the mountain.

“Dion!”

She saw him then, upstream on the opposite bank, a small,

squat, twisted figure watching the water. “Dion!” she screamed again, and he looked up, startled, and took a step forward. The bank gave way and he fell into the flood.

Lillie nearly jumped into the water but some native shrewdness stopped her. Not here, there was a place just a little ways down the arroyo where it turned sharply to follow the hidden rocks underneath. Dion would be slowed there, she’d have a better chance of getting him, his speed in the water would just about equal hers in reaching the place —

She thought all of these things, and none of them, even as she began to run. She reached the spot a few seconds too late. Dion’s body shot past her in the torrent.

Lillie screamed and ran alongside the banks. Now she had no chance of matching his speed. She ran anyway, lurching and stumbling, flogged by the horizontal rain. Later, she could never remember how far she’d gone, or how long. When she finally reached a flat place where the water spread out into a slower flood plain, Dion was already bobbing in the shallows, inert.

She splashed in and pulled him out. He was dead, he must be dead, she’d seen his body banged against the rocks… .

He wasn’t dead. His clothes had been entirely torn off, but his squat, fat-cushioned body had curled into a tight ball and the flexible thin shell on his back had curved around it. In the air he uncurled, opened his eyes, and smelled to her. “Hi, Mommy.”

“Dion!”

“I’m not hurt.” She felt puzzlement in her mind.

“I… see that,” she gasped, but there was no way he could have heard her because thunder split the sky, deafening as an explosion.

His big ears closed against the din. She saw his throat slit open again, without shedding water because none had gotten in. The big nostrils in his snout also opened. Dion stood.

Gaia and Rhea burst through the underbrush, obediently holding hands as Lillie had told them to. Their pink play suits were torn and soaked. Dion turned toward them and Lillie knew they were smelling furiously to each other, with those olfactory molecules meant only for each other.

All at once her leg hurt where she’d fallen, and she was drenched and cold.

“Come on, Mommy,” Rhea said, taking her hand. The little girl’s unfurled tentacles felt warm and soft. “We’ll take you home!

Gaia looked down at herself. She smelled in disgust, and then spoke aloud. “I’m not going to wear clothes any more. Stupid things! This pants got me caught on bushes!”

Dion clasped Lillie around the knees. “I’m not hurt, Mommy,” he repeated, this time aloud.

“No,” she said, and felt worn out by the gratitude, the strangeness, the sorrow that she was inevitably losing them and the sorrow that they were still hers to agonize over, a loving burden on her useless heart.

CHAPTER 30

They compromised on the clothes. The triplets agreed to wear tough canvas shorts to cover their genitals, which were both vulnerable to thorny bushes and embarrassing to the other children. Shorts, but nothing else.

Everyone else needed coverings from head to foot, as the UV increased.

That summer, the computer finally broke down for good. Neither Scott nor Loni could get it up again. This mattered greatly to Scott, but not, Lillie realized, to anybody else. When he wasn’t carefully noting data about the triplets in a crabbed longhand, or reading to them, Scott sat quietly in an old chair under the cooling shade of an oak tree, doing nothing. He wasn’t sick, he insisted. “I’m too old and it’s too hot,” was all he’d say. He ate less and less.

Rhea, Dion, and Gaia spent more and more time away from home, off somewhere on the mountain. The first time they stayed out overnight, Lillie was frantic. Oddly enough, it was Clari who reassured her. The young woman sat beside Lillie through the long dark hours, brewing chicory coffee, a wispy young figure in her brief white sleepgown. The cottage was slower to cool off these days, even though Lillie drew the curtains during the day. She could feel her shirt sticking to the small of her back.

“Rhea was talking to Vervain yesterday and I overheard,” Clari said, and Lillie thought how easily they all used “talking” and “overhearing” to describe conversations that may or may not have been one-way audio and one-way pheromonal. “Rhea said they had found eighteen different plants they could digest, and were looking for more. Also that Gaia could build a good campfire in their ‘special cave.’”

Lillie raised her hand helplessly, let it fall back to her lap. “Clari… are they going to revert to cavemen? Hunter-gatherers? Foraging for plants and building fires in caves?”

Clari laughed. “Lillie, they’re kids. Kids do that. Yours are just better at it than most. Besides, could cavemen solve square roots and recite Shakespeare? Scott says the triplets can do both.”

“You have no idea,” Lillie said, “how glad I am that you married Cord.”

Clari blushed with pleasure. She ducked her head, and in the gesture Lillie suddenly saw Tess, a Tess younger than Clari was now, and infinitely less experienced. Tess at Andrews Air Force Base, glitter in her masses of black hair, embarrassed at a compliment from some boy.

Some boy. All at once Lillie wondered: Was Clari so casual about the triplets staying away from home because she genuinely believed that they’d be safe? Or because it meant they would be spending less time around Raindrop and the others as adolescence approached?

Probably both. That’s how humans were, motives as knotted and twisted as mesquite. Anyway, adolescence was a long ways off.

Gaia, Rhea, and Dion straggled home the next afternoon, dirty and sleepy and hugely pleased with themselves. Immediately they fell asleep, and were still asleep when Jody rode up to the compound on horseback calling, “Lillie! Scott! Alex! Anybody home?”

“We’re here!” Alex called from the big house, and Jody dismounted and threw his horse’s reins over the porch railing. Everyone streamed out.

He looked much older. Sun lines, deep and deadly, creased even the skin on his thin cheeks. A purple carcinoma sat at one temple… did that mean Emily wasn’t there to keep up with cancer removal? Lillie’s chest tightened.

The five children at home, Keith’s three and Cord’s two, clustered on the porch behind their parents, peeping shyly. Lillie realized they hadn’t seen a stranger in… how many years? It was so easy to lose track.

Jody said abruptly, “I’ve got bad news.”

Keith said, “What? Shove it out, Jody.”

“Some sort of microbe got to the farm. Maybe engineered, maybe naturally mutated, Emily didn’t know. She said it might have lain dormant somehow, or jumped species, or anything.”

Alex said steadily, “Who? How many?”

“Bonnie. Dakota. Two of Gavin’s kids. Wild Pink.” He looked away, and the flesh in his throat worked. “And Carolina.”

Carolina. No engineering, no boosted immunity at all, nothing but her generous heart. Lillie felt more for Carolina’s death than she did for Wild Pink, Kella’s daughter, Lillie’s own grandchild. She’d barely known Wild Pink.

Clari said gently, “Come in, Jody.”

“No. I’m not staying. There’s no way of knowing who’s carrying what, Emily says. I just came to bring you this. It’s her genetic analysis and some doses that seemed to prevent dying from—where’s Scott? Is he dead?”

“No, no, just in bed. He feels his age.”

“It’s good he’s not dead because you might need him,” Jody said grimly. “Emily says if this can happen once, it can happen again, with a different micro.”

Just as Pete and Pam had said. “What your perversions of the right way have done to the planet… We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you!’ These days Lillie seldom thought of the pribir. They had said they’d return “soon,” but to pribir that didn’t mean the same thing as to humans.

She said, “Come in, Jody. We’ll take our chances with you if you will with us. We’re still family, and you look completely tired out. We have some very good stew left from dinner.”

Jody hesitated, then clumped wearily up the steps. He halted at the children clustered behind the adults: Vervain, Stone, Lonette, Raindrop, little Theresa. Lillie saw his eyes scan them, then look beyond them down the length of the porch. His face relaxed when he didn’t see her triplets.

He ate the stew greedily, the kids clustering wide-eyed around this new “uncle.” As Jody ate, he filled them in on news of the farm. There were only ten head of cattle left, but those were healthy as long as they stayed out of the daylight heat. Two years ago Sajelle and DeWayne had had another child, which shocked and pleased them both. DeWayne was seventy-seven now, as old as Scott, but going strong. (Scott grimaced.) The farm had two new windmills, but the generator no longer worked and so the windmills drove crankshafts. Rafe and Jason had built a better irrigation system, which conserved water from the storms better and also kept flooding down. A few Net sites were still responding on the old computer, there were people left in the world, but not in Wenton where Dakota and Susie and Sam had gone and brought back a great find of useful objects, all sorts of—

Dion stood in the doorway of the big house, blinking in the candlelight after the dark path up from the woods.

Jody put down his spoon and stood. He said nothing. Lillie saw that he was holding his breath against any olfactory molecules, and that although he hated himself for doing it, he couldn’t stop himself. Jody walked carefully past Dion, went down the porch steps, and mounted his horse. Several yards away he turned and looked at Lillie. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

“Jody―”

But he was gone, from embarrassment and guilt and old, old anger. Probably Jody wouldn’t try to get all the way to the farm tonight, in the dark. He’d camp somewhere not all that far from here, with the insects and vermin and possible rain, rather than be manipulated by scent into accepting Lillie’s children.

“Who was that?” Dion smelled to everyone at the same time that Lonette said plaintively, “Why did Uncle Jody go away?”

No one answered either of them.

The climate changes accelerated. The pounding rains all but ceased. Streams went dry. The winds still blew fiercely, but with each year they carried less moisture. Certain wildflowers retreated to growing only along streams or in run-off pockets of moisture. Others disappeared altogether.

Scott, now mostly bedridden but still clear-minded, said, “It all goes back to the oceans. If we had the computer, maybe we could tell what’s going on. But if the ocean gets warmer or colder in different places, or currents shift for any reason, then winds shift. If winds shift, everything else changes. Precipitation, evaporation, the whole nine yards.”

Lillie tried to remember the last time she had heard anyone say the whole nine yards. When Scott’s generation, which was also her generation, went, no one ever would again.

“Maybe the ocean currents will shift back,” Cord said.

Scott smiled sadly. “Did you know that during the last ice age, glaciers extended as far south as Ruidoso?”

“Glaciers,” Cord said wonderingly, and looked through the open door at the hot, parched pines.

Wildfires increased dramatically. Any stray bolt of lightning could start a fire. The first time one began several miles away, Lillie sat on the porch and watched the black clouds of smoke rise and blot out the sun. That fire didn’t last too long. Afterward, the sunsets and sunrises were glorious. There was still some rain in some months, and she thought they were probably safe for now.

The next year, there were more wildfires.

The triplets were ten years old. With the other children, they hauled water and gathered firewood and hoed crops and pounded chicory nuts. Their long, soft tentacles, seven on each hand, were good at using tools: sewing needles, meat grinders, knives. Like the others, they could skin an animal and debone a fish. They were better than the others at learning everything Scott could teach them about genetics, everything Alex knew about building things, all the poetry and history and physics from their few precious books. They worked cheerfully, played happily, and, always, kept their private “conversations” private. Lillie had no idea what they smelled among themselves. She didn’t even have any proof that they did, that any exchange of olfactory molecules existed except the ones that everyone could receive. No proof, but she knew it happened. She was their mother.

“I don’t like them anymore,” she once overheard Stone say to his sister.

“Oh, they’re all right,” Vervain replied. “They’re just different. Look… what’s that over those trees, up in the sky?”

Lillie’s breath caught. She whirled to look where Vervain pointed, but it was only a trick of the clouds, the light, the shimmering heat.

One blisteringly hot day in June, Gaia, Rhea, and Dion had been sent out to fill in the old latrine and dig a new one. Lillie felt vaguely guilty about assigning them this chore. But they seemed to mind it much less than anyone else did; in fact, it didn’t seem to bother them at all. Could they selectively close their receptors to certain odors? She didn’t know. Nor did they mind the sun streaming down on them, and Scott said they didn’t have to. Their gray-green scales, flexible carapace, and mysterious genetic cooling system meant they didn’t have to wear so much as a hat, although Dion often did. He said he liked the look of hats, and he tried to persuade his sisters to wear them, but the girls refused.

It was all right to assign them latrine duty three times in a row.

No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t fair. The other kids were inside, doing unstrenuous tasks. Lonette was actually asleep. Lillie decided to at least take the triplets a plate of cookies. The “cookies” were a recipe Clari had invented, using pounded acorn flour and agave syrup to create a sweet, sticky confection. All eight kids loved them.

Lillie put on a hat with neck shades, a jacket with long sleeves, and her boots, now so worn that any minute they were going to develop another hole to patch. She covered the plate of sticky cookies with a light cloth against bugs and set out for the main latrine. Unlike the nighttime privy, which was conveniently close to the house, the daytime latrine lay down the mountain beyond a grove of pines, below the water supply and downwind.

It was relatively cool under the pines. Lillie paused a moment, balancing her plate, breathing in the sweet clean fragrance. Then she heard the noise.

Rhea stood beside the shithole she had just filled in. The wooden seat had already been moved, and another hole was partially dug. Rhea held the shovel in her hand, its handle shortened for her squat frame. Rhea’s big ears had swiveled forward, and her mouthless head on its curving scaly neck jutted a foot in front of her forward-tilted body. Lillie smelled her surprise. Gaia and Dion weren’t in sight.

The men had stopped beside a creosote bush. There were three of them, dressed in what Lillie recognized from a long time ago as military camouflage. They were unshaven, unwashed. They carried guns.

“What the hell is that?” one of them cried. He raised his pistol.

Laser? Projectile? Something Lillie couldn’t even imagine?

She dropped the cookies and ran forward. Before she even broke cover from the pine grove, the other two men had leveled guns at Rhea. There was no sound, no flash of light. But Rhea dropped to the ground and a tree behind Lillie exploded.

Then all three men dropped their guns, shrieked in pain as they clutched their heads, and collapsed.

Lillie rushed to Rhea. The little girl, so flattened to the ground that she’d been nowhere higher than the thickness of her head, was already getting up. She smelled “Mommy!” and rushed to Lillie, clutching her mother’s knees. Lillie snatched her up and was starting to run when Gaia smelled to her, “Stop. They’re all dead.”

Slowly Lillie turned with Rhea awkwardly, heavily in her arms.

Gaia stood over the three men. Dion was emerging from brush a short distance away. Lillie smelled both of their grimness, their anger. She put Rhea on the ground and walked over to the men, bent, felt for pulses in their necks. They were dead.

“What… what did you do?”

Gaia tilted her head back to say aloud with stout determination, “They were going to kill Rhea!”

“What did you do, Gaia? Dion?”

Gaia said defensively, “Rhea did it, too.”

“No, I didn’t,” Rhea retorted. “Mommy was holding me wrong. Just you and Dion did it!”

“I don’t care,” Dion said. “They were going to hurt Rhea.”

“Dion, Gaia,” Lillie said, as carefully as she could manage, “what did you do?”

The two children looked at each other. Finally Dion said, “We noised them. Don’t be mad, Mommy.”

Gaia added, “We wouldn’t do it if they weren’t hurting Rhea!”

“I know,” Lillie said. “What do you mean, you ‘noised’ them?”

“We made the stopping noise,” Dion said. “Like bats do, except theirs doesn’t stop anything.”

“A very high-pitched noise,” Lillie said, and was met with dumb stares, which she didn’t believe. They understood pitch.

“If you did that,” she said, still very careful, “if you noised the men’s brains to make them fall over, why didn’t it stop me, too?”

“We wouldn’t hurt you!” Rhea said, shocked. She’d switched to smelling the concepts to Lillie, as all three children tended to do when emotional. “You’re our mommy!”

“But why didn’t it stop me?”

“We only aimed it at them,” Dion said.

A directed signal, like bats used for navigation. Lillie could understand that. Too high-pitched for her to hear, yes. Very loud, high sounds could cause enough pain to stop the men cold, make them fall down, and then —

Rhea, watching Lillie from gray gold-flecked eyes, said, “I made the defense poison, Mommy.”

Defense poison.

Dion said, “Don’t look like that, Mommy.”

Rhea smelled fearfully, “Are you mad at us?”

“No. No, I’m not. Those are bad men, they were going to kill Rhea―”

“Like Macbeth killed King Duncan,” Gaia said helpfully, and through her confusion and shock Lillie thought again what a heritage her children were getting, what a terrible jumble.

Gaia said, ”’ By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!’ It’s my turn to dig, Rhea.”

“I smell cookies,” Dion said. “Did you bring cookies?”

“Under the pines,” Lillie said, still shaky. Dion took off running. If the cookies were dirty from falling, it wouldn’t matter. The triplets could digest anything.

Rhea, the most thoughtful, said, “We need to dig a big hole to bury those bad people.”

“I’ll start the big hole,” Gaia said enthusiastically. “I like to dig.”

“Well, have a cookie first,” Rhea said.

Dion returned with the plate, its cookies covered with dried pine needles. The children ate eagerly. “Mommy, do you want one?” Gaia said.

“No, I… no, I don’t. I need to get out of the sun.” She retreated to the pine grove and lowered herself, trembling, to sit on the fragrant ground.

What were her children?

Not human, Emily had cried once. Once, twice, an infinity of times, from everyone who had stayed at the farm. A few minutes ago Gaia, Rhea, Dion had casually killed, without weapons, without contact. Now they sat gobbling sweets like any human children from any place, any time. They learned Shakespeare, history, algebra, their intellectual heritage. They played games with Raindrop and Theresa, Lillie’s grandchildren. They did their chores, sometimes grumbling, sometimes interested.

They had just casually killed three men. As casually as Alex or Loni killed game for dinner.

If they had to, if there was nothing else, would her children eat those three men for dinner? Why not? The men were another, lesser species.

No. Her children were human. The next step in humanity, yes, but human. What made them human was… was…

Eagerly Gaia began to dig a grave next to the three fallen bodies.

Not their genes. Not really. Everything on the planet shared the same DNA, base pairs and sugar phosphate spines and protein expression. Everything: bacteria and mesquite and gila monsters and Lillie. DNA didn’t make her children human; God knows what DNA they had in their genome, anyway. Pete and Pam could have put anything in there. Pam and Pete, who also shared this same DNA, and whom Lillie no longer considered human at all.

Intelligence? Did that make for being human? No. There could be—probably were —all sorts of alien beings out there who were highly intelligent (an oozing glob behind the ship’s garden wall, glimpsed for only a second…) Pam and Pete were intelligent, more so than Lillie, than Lillie’s children. Not intelligence.

Love? Even animals loved. Dogs, cats… . No. Too sentimental an answer.

Culture? Gaia could recite whole sections of Shakespeare. Rhea loved the abstract puzzles of geometry. Dion had begun to read Scott’s endless notes on genetics. But what if they couldn’t do those things? If they knew nothing at all of the vast human heritage, nothing, would that make them less human? No. Kalahari bushmen isolated and ignorant of the rest of the world were—had been —fully human.

Evolution, maybe. Gaia and Rhea and Dion were human because they were born of Lillie, who was born of Barbara, who if you went far enough back would end up sharing a common ancestor with apes, and that ancestor was certainly not human. One thing evolved into another, different thing.

Which was what was happening here, in front of her very eyes, with help from those who had already gone ahead, taking charge of their own evolution and so becoming something else in the process. Could you start a new race with only three people? Lillie vaguely remembered learning something about an “African Eve,” a single woman who had been the ancestor of everyone alive on Earth before the war. And Scott had told her once of a herd of feral English cattle that had had no new genes available to their tiny pool for over three hundred years, yet the herd had stayed healthy and growing.

And, of course, there might eventually be more than just Gaia, Rhea, and Dion to start this new race. The pribir had promised to return, and no one really knew what they could, or would, do next.

Maybe Emily and the others at the farm were right. Maybe Gaia and Rhea and Dion were not human. A new thought came to Lillie: Did it matter?

It was hard to accept.

How did you accept such rapid evolution, even if you yourself were causing it? Nations, states, villages had always had trouble accepting people who were “different.” Outsiders. Foreigners. But never before in history had the biological outsiders been your own children, so genetically different that you were watching your own extinction right before you, all at once, in an eyeblink.

Not human.

But still hers.

She got up off the ground to retrieve the discarded plate from the cookies, take it home, wash it, store it away for more sweets, another day, to give her children. They were digging earnestly, “conversing” with each other without sound, feeling the warm sun on bare heads; even Dion had lost his hat. None of them noticed Lillie leave.

But all of them would look for her when, tired and sweaty and satisfied, they made their way home.