“Cord, please don’t go, I want to talk more…”
But he grabbed Clari’s hand and pulled her up off the bench and toward the house. Halfway there he turned back to face the cottonwoods and shouted, “The pribir are wonderful!” before running the rest of the way inside, dragging Clari with him.
He learned more from the other children. At various times, their respective mothers had dropped bits of information about the pribir. Aunt Bonnie’s daughter Angie said that when she and her two brothers were born, their mother had had a very easy labor. This was important because recently Aunt Julie and Uncle Spring had had another baby, and Aunt Julie had screamed so much that Dr. Wilkins gave her a drug. Cord didn’t see why that was a problem, but Angie said importantly that Aunt Julie had wanted to do without drugs because they could be bad for the baby. Also, added Angie, who seemed to be a gush of information on birthing, Aunt Senni had had a very bad time with both Dolly and Clari.
“So the pribir made birthing easier with the babies they engineered. Less painful,” Cord said. He was very glad he was a boy and would never have to birth anybody at all.
“Yeah,” Angie said. “They sound like good people.”
“I think so, too,” said Taneesha, Aunt Sajelle’s daughter, who was listening in. Taneesha, Kezia, and Jason had a father, Uncle DeWayne. But he wasn’t their genetic father; the triplets had been engineered inside Aunt Sajelle, just like Cord had been. Cord thought Taneesha was the prettiest girl at the farm, not counting Clari. She had light brown skin and black curly hair and the biggest brown eyes Cord had ever seen. It made him uncomfortable, though, to think that Taneesha was so pretty. It seemed unfair to Clari.
But Taneesha was a good source of information. Aunt Sajelle apparently spoke to her kids much more frankly than anybody else’s mother. “The pribir messed with my mama’s genes, too. Not as much as with ours, of course. But Mama—and your mother, too, Cord —doesn’t get sick. You ever noticed that? The pribir did something to them so they don’t catch colds and stuff like Dolly and Clari and Angel do.”
It was true, Cord realized. Clari had had something just last month that made her head ache and her muscles hurt, and Dolly and Angel got it, too, but nobody else.
“And” Taneesha said, leaning in close to the other kids huddled together behind the barn, “the pribir put the babies inside my mama and the other women without any sex!”
Cord flushed. He’d only been told about sex a few months ago, and the whole idea made him uncomfortable.
Dakota, Julie’s son, was logical. “If there wasn’t any sex, then how did the babies get made? You need an egg and a sperm.”
Taneesha said triumphantly, “The pribir had a whole supply of sperm and eggs, and they just snipped out whatever genes they wanted from any of them and sewed them back together however they wanted.”
This explanation seemed lacking to Cord — no sperm or egg anywhere had genes for what he’d grown during the sandstorm. So the pribir had also built brand-new genes from scratch, or taken them from some other… thing. If so, that made the pribir more powerful than ever. And smart: They’d known what he might need to survive. And kind, because they wanted him to survive. Probably if she hadn’t already been a grown-up when she went to that Andrews place, they might have engineered his grandmother Theresa to survive the sandstorm, too.
Dakota said solemnly to Cord, “They saved your life, you know.”
“I know.”
“Well, I can’t wait till they come back.” This piece of Cord’s information had electrified them all.
“Me, neither,” said Kendra and Taneesha, simultaneously. Taneesha added kindly, “I’m sorry you’re not genetically engineered, too, Clari.”
Clari looked down at the ground and said nothing.
By summer of 2067 it still hadn’t rained much. Three years of drought. Wenton, which had over the years grown to look almost prosperous, didn’t look that way any more. Some people left. Others, from even more desperate places, arrived on the one train per day still arriving at the decaying station. One Thursday in April, two women, one man, and six children got off the train. They stood staring past the shrunken edge of Wenton to the flat, parched plains, stretching for miles and miles of nothing.
Cord, in town with Uncle DeWayne and Taneesha to buy cloth, spied the starers, skinny and battered-looking. City people, he thought. He knew cities from the Net shows and Net news, which was the way he knew about anything more than ten miles from the farm. Well, these people wouldn’t find whatever they were looking for, work or food or a new start, in Wenton.
Uncle DeWayne stopped walking.
“Daddy?” Taneesha said. But Uncle DeWayne ignored her, walking toward the strangers and leaving her and Cord behind.
“Oh oh,” Taneesha said.
“What?”
“Haven’t you got eyes, Cord? Six kids, two women—they’re more of us. Daddy must recognize one of them.”
Of course. Cord and Taneesha ran after Uncle DeWayne.
Uncle DeWayne said to the man, “Mike? Mike Franzi?”
The man said nothing, studying this well-dressed black man. One of the little girls shrank behind him.
Uncle DeWayne grinned hugely. “Sure it is. Mike Franzi, and you’ve forgotten all those basketball games at Andrews where I whipped your white ass. DeWayne Freeman!”
The stranger seized Uncle DeWayne’s hand. One of the women started to cry.
Taneesha said in a low voice to Cord, “Here’s trouble.”
“What? Who?”
Taneesha didn’t answer, but she stared back without flinching at one of the girls, who was giving her the finger.
It was another of those weird relationships. Two of the strangers, Mike Franzi and Hannah Reeder, were twenty-seven. They had been at Andrews Air Force Base with Uncle DeWayne and Dr. Wilkins, who were sixty-seven. So had the other woman, Robin Perry, but she hadn’t gone up to the pribir ship and so she was sixty-seven, too. Three of the kids were “Aunt Hannah’s,” as Cord was instructed to call her. The other three belonged to some woman named Sophie, who was dead, but now old “Aunt Robin” was taking care of her kids.
When he was a child, thought thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Cord, all this seemed normal. It was just the way things were. Now, after watching the Net, he saw how abnormal it was. Well, that was good! He and his “family” were abnormal because they were special, made that way by the pribir.
The strange thing was the way his mother reacted when they all went back to the farm in Uncle DeWayne’s truck.
Lillie — lately Cord had begun thinking of her that way, although he wasn’t sure why—took one look at Mike Franzi and stopped dead. Then a slow, long blush spread up from her neck over her face, turning it red as sunset. Lillie, who never blushed!
“Hello, Mike.”
“Hello, Lillie. Long time.”
“How many years? Twelve.”
“You look wonderful,” he said. Cord scowled. His mother looking ‘wonderful’? She was just his mother. Lillie said, “Tell me what happened.”
He smiled. “Direct as always. All right, the short version is, Hannah and I were in Philadelphia. It got impossible, food riots and burning. We found Robin and Sophie on the Net, living together with their kids in Denver. We went there because it sounded better, and for a while it was. But then it got as dangerous and hungry as Philly, no jobs. Two weeks ago Sophie was killed in a riot. By that time I recognized Rafe’s message on the Net, and here we are.”
Cord knew that message, although he didn’t understand it. It went: Do you remember Andrew? How about Pam and Pete? They’re still gone, of course, but their legacy remains. Sometimes it seems I can still smell them. So much is gone, but we’re here.