She gasped, inhaling a mouthful of dust.
It was Cord… and it wasn’t. He crouched on his stomach, head tucked forward as much under his chest as possible, facing away from the wind. His arms and legs were drawn under him. His thin shirt had torn, and Theresa could see that over his back and neck and head had grown a sort of… shell. A thin membrane, tough and flexible as plastic when she touched it.
Water. He had grown a temporary shell to keep water from evaporating.
The sand was blowing harder now. Theresa closed her eyes against its sting and groped for Cord’s pulse along his neck. She found it through the membrane and counted: ten pulses per minute, slow and even. Her fingers groped underneath the boy, and touched something hard and thin at his belly. She felt it, dug with her nails where it entered the soil. She knew what it was, had encountered it her whole life on the range. All cacti had them. A taproot, sent deep into the soil to tap whatever water might be buried far down.
Behind the membrane, Cord’s eyes were closed. His child’s face had evened out in his deep sleep, hibernation, estivation, whatever the right word was. Or maybe there was no right word for this.
The storm was building fiercely now. Theresa drank the last of her water, feeling it mix with the grit in her mouth and scrape down her throat, knowing it wouldn’t make much difference. Everything depended now on how long and hard the wind blew, obscuring visibility, accelerating dehydration. She lay down beside Cord and put her arms around him.
Scott, I know what all the extra genes are for. They’re for adapting to whatever we do to fuck up the planet.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Grit ground under the lids, making her gasp with pain and open them. A mistake. Now she could barely see the mesquite a foot away.
Was Cord human? Yes, yes, yes, her fading mind said. She didn’t know why or how she knew, but she did. Cord, all of the children engineered on that alien ship, were human. She would bet her life on it.
Which was pretty funny, actually—
The wind mounted in fury. Theresa’s arms loosened, unable to hold their grip.
Her last thought was for Cord: Pribir, wherever you are, thank you.
The storm blew till night fell. The winds brought clouds in their wake, fierce black clouds like a tarp under the sky. Clouds, but no rain. It was twenty-four hours before they could find and retrieve Theresa’s body. By that time, there wasn’t much left of it. Weather and coyotes.
Lillie spent the twenty-four convinced that both Cord and Theresa were dead. Theresa, who had been first a friend and then a mother to Lillie, far more of a mother than Barbara had ever been. Theresa, who had taken Uncle Keith’s place so naturally, so unobtrusively that Lillie had hardly even noticed.
For those two days Keith and Kella had clung to her, crying for their brother. Awkwardly she held them to her, struggling with her own pain. Cord, dead out on the range somewhere in this terrible storm. Cord, her little boy… oh, God, at least let them be together. Let him have Theresa in his last hours. He’d never had his mother.
Keith and Kella slept with her, for the few hours she could sleep. Lying in the narrow bed with a child pressed up close to her on either side, clutching at her even in sleep, Lillie realized for the first time the terrible burden of being a real parent. It was not that she didn’t love her children, but that she did. She was hostage to their fortune, her life’s outcome dependent on theirs, as Keith’s had been on Lillie’s. She had never known. She had never understood, not any of it.
Theresa had known. Theresa had always known.
When Spring found Cord, he was still “dormant.” That’s what Scott called it. Scott, fascinated and grateful and appalled, took cells from all of Cord’s adaptations, including the “taproot” that Spring had sliced through because it went too deep to pull up. Then, holding his breath, he’d poured water over Cord.
As Scott and Lillie watched, the membrane around the child dissolved. The base of the taproot fell off as easily as an outgrown umbilical. Cord’s breathing quickened. He opened his eyes, saw his mother’s face, and started to cry.
Lillie gathered him into her arms, wet and filthy and smelling of what Scott would later determine was a skin repellent against predators. She held him tightly against her, and for the first time in years she cried, too. Scott left the room with his collected samples, softly closing the door. Lillie cradled her pribir-created son and knew for the first time not only what he was, but also that through him she, too, was becoming, finally, fully human.
PART IV: CORD
“If this is the best of all possible worlds, then where are the others?”
CHAPTER 19
After his grandmother died, nothing was the same for Cord, except Clari. Everything else turned itself inside out, like a sock.
“Tell me about the pribir,” he demanded of Dr. Wilkins. It seemed all Cord could do lately was demand, as if he were a three-year-old like Aunt Julie’s newest baby. He knew it, and regretted it, and couldn’t stop it.
Dr. Wilkins, gray-haired and a bit stooped, said, “What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Grandma didn’t talk to me about them. All she said was they changed the genes for my mother and then for all us kids.”
“All of you born to the girls—women—who went up to the spaceship. Not Dolly or Clari or…”
“I know that. But what did they do on the ship?”
Dr. Wilkins said gently, “I wasn’t there, Cord. I stayed behind, like your grandmother.”
“But―”
“You should ask your mother.”
“Okay,” Cord said. “But you’re the one who can tell me about genetics.”
Dr. Wilkins looked startled. He was really old, as old as Grandma had been. But he knew things, and Cord wanted to learn them.
“Cord, you never showed any interest in genetics before.”
“Well, I am now,” he said stubbornly. But when Dr. Wilkins started to explain messenger RNA and transcription and protein formation, Cord’s mind wandered. This wasn’t what he thirsted for, after all. Even he could see that. Bobby and Angie and Taneesha were much more interested, working at the school software in biology, clustering around Dr. Wilkins and Uncle Rafe to learn to use the complicated, expensive engineering equipment.
Cord turned instead to his mother. That was another thing that had changed. His mother used to mostly ignore him, busy with the farm’s bills and income and boring stuff like that. But now she was home for dinner every night, listening to Cord and Keith and Kella, asking about their day, touching them on the arm or cheek. It made Cord uncomfortable. He didn’t know why she was behaving like this, like all of a sudden she was Grandma. Well, she wasn’t. Grandma was dead. Nobody else was Grandma and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
Still, she was the one to ask about the pribir. He waited until late afternoon on a hot, dry, June day. June was supposed to bring rain, Uncle Jody said. That was the old way for this country; the new way was rain all year long. But now they didn’t have either way. The drought continued, and every night his mother walked out to watch the sunset with her face calm and hard.
On the porch Cord passed Clari coming up to the big house. “Cord? Where are you going?”
“I want to ask my mother about the pribir.”