“At least the seats are shaped right,” Jason said. “Ow, Alex, get off my foot, you dork!”
They had all wondered what the pribir looked like. No pictures had come. That was something Lillie didn’t think she’d ever gotten Uncle Keith to understand: that the information the pribir smelled to them was pictures. The pictures formed in the brain somehow; they were just there, in exactly the same way a picture of an ice cream cone would be there if someone told you to think of an ice cream cone. “But what does it smell like?” everybody asked. It didn’t smell like anything. “Smelling to” someone wasn’t the same as “smelling.”’
“Everybody strap in,” Jon said.
Each seat had straps dangling from its sides. Lillie squeezed into a seat next to Julie, and immediately the seat molded itself to her shape. She jerked up, startled, then settled back down. The straps, which felt like firm jelly, also molded themselves around her.
Rafael, who wanted to be a physicist some day, said, “I wonder how this thing avoided all Earth’s radar setups?”
“However they did it, I’ll bet the military would like to take this baby apart,” Jason said.
Rebecca said severely, “Remember, this isn’t the right way. Genes are the right way. This is only dead materials.”
“Maybe,” said Rafe, “but what materials! Whoooeee!”
Jessica snarled, “Elizabeth, if you don’t stop that stupid praying, I’m going to unstrap and come over there and whip your religious ass.”
“Don’t anybody unstrap!” Jon said.
“Jessica, leave her alone,” Bonnie said. “God, even on a major occasion you have to be an asshole.”
“Better that than a lezzie.”
Lillie said, “We’re rising!”
There was no abrupt liftoff, no noise, no windows. At first Lillie didn’t even know how she knew they were rising. Then she realized breathing was harder. Her chest felt constricted, and everything on her body felt heavier.
“I hope,” Rafe said, with difficulty, “that they understand… how many gees… we can… take.”
Of course they understood, Lillie thought. They understood everything about human bodies. Their DNA was her DNA, only they had control of theirs, which meant they had control of everything. The right way. She closed her eyes.
The pressure on her chest never became unbearable, and after a while it went away completely. A series of clear images formed in her mind, one after another. She opened her eyes but didn’t see the source of the smells. Somewhere in the bus.
She saw a human being, a man, naked except for some cloth around his hips, standing beside an ocean. The only thing weird was that the sky was pink, not blue. Next she saw him looking taller, stronger, healthier somehow. Genetics had done that.
Next came a man underwater. Parts of him, legs and arms, looked sort of like a fish, but he was still a man. Lillie understood that he had been genetically changed to live in the ocean.
A woman floated in a spaceship. The ship was vague but the woman clear. She had arms where her arms should be and arms where her legs should be, giving her four hands.
“Gross,” someone behind Lillie said.
The next images showed humans changing even more. They didn’t look human anymore. They grew tentacles, or shrank to circles, or had hard shells… all sorts of weird stuff. Then, quickly, came a series of images showing one of these monsters turned back into a human being. Children trooped up to her. Everyone smiled.
“They’ve made themselves look like us, just for our sake,” Emily said. She sounded cheerful. Lillie felt the same way. The pribir could change their babies’ genes to look or do anything they chose. And they had built some to look like Lillie and the others, so their visitors wouldn’t feel too scared. It was a nice thing to do, and it reassured Lillie.
Now, was that gratitude or chemical brainwashing? It sure felt like gratitude.
Jason, the clown, growled in a deep voice like General Richerson’s, ” ‘When you push the envelope of technology, you take major risks with personnel. It’s inevitable.’ ” Someone laughed.
All at once they were all light hearted. Even Elizabeth lowered her rosary, and Julie smiled tremulously.
“Everybody ready to walk into the future?” Jon called.
“I’m going be turned into Charlize Theron,” Madison said.
“I want Isaac Newton’s brain!” Rafe.
“Engineer me a bodacious bod, baby!”
“It’s not us… it’s our kids. Make mine geniuses!”
“Make mine rich!”
“Forget the kids… I want mine now! Give me sex hormones to kayak night and day!”
“Jason, you’d be lucky to get to kayak once,” Derek laughed. “Now me…”
“Hush your mouth,” Sajelle said suddenly. “We here.”
The door to the bus opened. The mood changed abruptly.
Lillie unstrapped herself. Julie sat frozen, looking up at her piteously. Lillie said, “Come on, Julie. You can do it. Just stay by me. Emily, help Susan, she’s tangled up. Elizabeth, pray to yourself.”
Jon went first. Lillie followed, pulling Julie. She stood in a large, empty, completely featureless room with a light source she couldn’t identify. There would have been room for three times as many kids. When everyone was in, the door to the bus closed.
For a long sudden moment, Lillie was afraid. What was she doing here, away from her friends and her school and Uncle Keith and even Earth? What if she died here? What if the Net postings and the freak channels were right and the pribir wanted to experiment on humans, to torture them…
She was being stupid. And anyway, there wasn’t anything she could do except face whatever was coming. She was here.
A second door slid upwards at the other end of the room. A man and a woman came through, then stopped. They looked like normal people dressed in normal jeans and T-shirts, except… better. The woman had a perfect body, high breasts and slim waist and long, long legs. Her shoulder-length hair bounced and shone. The man was hot, with great shoulders and deep brown eyes. Lillie breathed in and suddenly she knew everything they wanted to tell her about themselves.
They had been engineered to match the television broadcasts the pribir had intercepted from Earth. All their lives they had trained for this moment. They knew everything about Earth that it was possible to learn from either TV or high-resolution satellites. They had all the abilities Lillie had, plus more that could be made to fit with these bodies. They would live and die in these bodies, and the purpose of their lives was to bring to Earth genetic gifts —so many genetic gifts!—that would help humans have all the freedom and adaptability and health that they did.
“Fucking A,” Jason said softly.
The man and woman came forward. They spoke carefully, as if the language was familiar but the act of speaking by voice was not.
“Hello. I am Pete.”
“I am Pam.”
Lillie giggled. She couldn’t help it. Pete and Pam! Humans finally met aliens and their names were Pete and Pam, like some dorky TV sitcom! She laughed, and Jason laughed, and suddenly nearly all of them were laughing, whooping and hollering, unable to stop. It was so ridiculous, it was such a release from tension, it was just hilarious. Lillie tried to stop laughing, couldn’t, and leaned on Emily, weak with hilarity. Only Sam, Elizabeth, and Julie weren’t laughing. Sam, Lillie had always suspected, had no sense of humor. Elizabeth was lost in some religious fog. And Julie was too scared to laugh, although how anybody could be scared… “Pete” and “Pam”! And she was off again.