Bonnie said, appalled, “You mean the girls… my Angie… she’s going to get pregnant no matter what we do?”
“We did,” Lillie said, still angry.
Julie —quiet, timid Julie!—said, “Damn the pribir all to hell forever,” and Cord crept away. He didn’t want to hear that.
And he had to find Clari.
She was in the washhouse, doing laundry. The windpowered generator made limited amounts of non-emission electricity, which powered select machines in order of necessity. The washing machine was not a high priority, but nothing else was running right now and Clari, Dolly, and Aunt Carolina’s eight-year-old, Elena, were doing laundry. Dolly looked up as soon as Cord blundered in.
“Come to help, Cord?” she sneered. “You haven’t been much use otherwise lately.”
“Clari,” he said humbly, “can I talk to you?” Her nose was red and swollen; she’d been crying.
Dolly said, “Leave her alone. We know where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing!”
“What was he doing?” said little Elena with interest.
“Please, Clari,” Cord begged.
She put down sopping clothes and followed him outside. Glaring sun cast stunted shadows.
“Come under the trees, Clari.” He led her to a nearby stand of young juniper that had been carefully nurtured through the long drought. “I… I…”
She looked at him miserably, and his words burst out.
“Oh, Clari, I’m so sorry. It was you I wanted, not Taneesha, but you were asleep in the middle of the night and… Clari, I heard the grown-ups talking. Aunt Emily said we’ve been engineered to do this, to be driven to sex right now so the girls will get pregnant—” At the look on her face he stopped.
She said, “Engineered? To have sex and get pregnant, and you can’t help it?”
“Yes! I mean, no!”
“That’s evil, Cord! That’s genuinely evil. To use people like that.”
Cord didn’t feel used. Looking at her swollen, dear face, he felt more lust. His groin swelled and all he wanted was to —
“Come with me,” he said desperately. “To the barn. Or someplace. It’s you I want, not Taneesha, but if I can’t have you I will do it again with her. I know it. Oh, please, Clari, we belong together, we always have, I want to marry you…”
He didn’t know what he was saying. Marry? Now, at fourteen? But he dimly realized that he would say anything, anything at all, to get Clari to go with him to the barn.
She looked scared. “Cord, I… don’t want to. Not yet. Someday—”
“I can’t wait until someday!”
“Then you don’t love me very much, if you won’t wait for me,” she said sadly, and walked away.
Cord stood there, wretched and angry and ashamed and driven, and after a minute he went to find Taneesha.
For forty-eight hours he avoided Clari and had sex with Taneesha every chance he could. The range crew came in, or rather part of them did. Alex said, “I brought the kids back. They were no use. They…”
“I know,” Lillie said.
“Me, too,” Alex said, not looking at her. “I remember. Jody is upset and angry.”
“He doesn’t have to be, Alex. His and Carolina’s kids aren’t engineered.”
“What about Julie’s kids with Spring, when they’re older? Will they inherit it? The sex drive could be dominant.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lillie said slowly.
“I’ll bet Scott has. Lillie… I’m going to ask you because you’re the most level-headed woman here. There are more girls than boys. Do you think Kezia… I mean, does it have to be one of their own… God, Lillie, it’s been so long!”
“She’s fourteen, Alex.”
“I know. So were we.”
“You’re twenty-eight.”
“I know!”
“It’s up to you and her,” Lillie said wearily. “And, I guess, to Sajelle. Sajelle’s her mother. You can ask. Sajelle’s always been clear-eyed.”
Alex said, “I hate this. But in Wenton now there are mostly… I’d be good to Kezia, Lillie.”
“I believe it,” Lillie said.
The next day Kezia left to go back with Alex to the cattle on the range.
Cord said to Taneesha, “Tannie… I’m sorry. You’re great, and beautiful, and I always liked you. But me and Clari—”
Taneesha’s dark eyes flashed. “Yeah? You and Clari? It’s Clari you want to have sex with, not me?”
Cord said nothing, staring at his stupid goddamn feet in their stupid goddamn boots.
Taneesha was Sajelle’s daughter, clear-eyed. She sighed. “Okay, Cord. I guess I knew that. I just… I just…”
“Don’t cry!” he begged.
“I don’t ever cry, Cord Anderson, and don’t you forget it! You aren’t the only male in the whole sorry world, you know! Anyway,” she said, changing mood again, “does Clari want to?”
“No.”
“Then why are you—”
“I don’t know!” he shouted, and to his surprise, she actually chuckled.
“I know. You love her, you always did. Go find Clari and talk her into it, Cord. I’ll be fine.”
She was. The next time Cord saw her, she was with Rafe, who looked just as embarrassed and uneasy and pleased as Alex.
Cord found Clari and pleaded and coaxed until Clari said yes. But it wasn’t like with Taneesha. Clari didn’t seem to enjoy it and the first time hurt her a lot. Cord hated himself, and couldn’t stop, and vowed in his heart that he would make it up to Clari. He would get for her anything, everything, she might ever want. If it took the whole rest of his life, he would make it up to her.
By year’s end, all eleven of the girls engineered aboard the pribir ship, plus Clari, were pregnant. On January 7, war was declared with China. Within the first hour, missiles delivered bioweapons into the atmosphere over forty-seven targets in the United States.
The U.S. defense system, more obsolete than the government had even realized, shot down only eight. The Defense Department retaliated with bioweapons of their own.
Net news reported deaths in the millions, then the tens of millions. The camvids on the Net, the posted recordings of the dying, the roboviews of entire cities, were horrifying.
Then the Net sites, one by one, ceased to record, or post, or move from the frozen agony of whatever they’d been displaying last.
“It’s a mixed lot, from the little definitive information I can get on the medical list serves still running,” Uncle Scott said. “It’s possible not all the bioweapons are Chinese. There’s anthrax and Ebola, for sure, possibly modified. The Ebola may have been made airborne. There are also engineered bacteria and viruses and even spores, which present a special problem because they remain viable so long. One in particular we want to watch out for—it induces your cells to produce TP53 in enormous quantities, and that in turn induces apoptosis.”
“What’s that?” Sajelle said.
“It makes your cells commit suicide.”
Emily, very pale, added, “We want more samples from each of you.”
Cord had already given so many samples of blood and tissue that he felt like he’d run into a cactus. Poke here, pierce there, scrape somewhere else. Not that there was much choice.
Kendra said, “What about the babies? How can you tell if they’re going to be all right?”
“We’re going to take amniotic samples from each of you,” Emily said.
Cord put his arm around Clari. Guilt, a constant cloud, settled into his bones. Unlike the other pregnant girls, Clari hadn’t sought the sex that led to this. And unlike the other pregnant girls, she wasn’t engineered for a super-boosted immune system. Julie and Sajelle, pribir-blessed women married to normal men, had passed on their lesser protection to their new babies. But would it work for Cord to pass on his unfathomable genes to Clari’s children? Was his total engineering, like the previous generation’s milder version, dominant? Nobody knew.