Lillie couldn’t sleep. At night Cord, lying sleepless himself in the room in the big house where he’d moved Clari to be near Dr. Wilkins, heard Lillie moving around the great room. It didn’t matter what hour he woke; she was there. She would walk restlessly, sometimes stumbling. As August wore on, she stumbled more often. By day she looked dazed, pale, and filmy-eyed from lack of sleep. She never complained.
One night he heard her cry out. Cord leapt up from his pallet and tore into the room. She gazed at him wild-eyed. “Uncle Keith!”
“It’s me, Mom. Cord.”
“Uncle Keith, Mom’s killed herself!”
Cord didn’t know what to do. He tried to put his arms around her, but she pushed him away, stronger than he could have imagined. “Get away! Don’t drug my mind, Pam! I’m not part of your mission!”
“Mom…”
“Get away!” she screamed, so loud that Cord thought half the house would rush in. But no one else awoke. Lillie started to moan. “Uncle Keith, help me, she didn’t mean it, Mom didn’t mean it…”
Again Cord tried to approach her, and again she shoved him off with that startling strength.
“Tess, Tess, don’t let Pam make me… don’t let…”
“Mom!” Cord said, his despair dwarfed by horror. This wasn’t his mother. Her body, her face, her voice, and not his mother not his mother… .
“Okay, Lillie,” another voice said behind him, deep and soothing, and Cord spun around. Mike Franzi. Cord hadn’t even heard the man come in.
“It’s all right, Cord, I’ll take it from here,” Mike said. He reached for Lillie.
“Get away!” she shrieked.
Mike ignored her, folding her close to his chest. “Lillie, it’s all right. You’re safe now, nobody will mess with your mind. I’ve got you now, it’s all right…”
“Mike? They’re inside the walls, they took me there, I saw… I saw…”
“I know.” To Cord, over Lillie’s shoulder, he said, “She’s back aboard the ship. Go back to bed, Cord. I’m here.”
And Hannah? Cord didn’t say. His jumbled feelings of relief, rage, and guilt left him no room for speech. He went back to bed, creeping in beside Clari. She moaned softly in her sleep and he turned away, his face toward the wall.
When it happened, it all happened at once.
Two days later, when Lillie seemed again to have rallied, Angie went into labor. “Not quite eight months,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Come on down to the birthing house. You can walk.”
“Of course I can,” Angie said. “Who said I couldn’t?”
“Nobody, dear. Come on.”
Dr. Wilkins sent Carolina’s son Angel to find Emily. Gently Dr. Wilkins took Angie’s arm and walked her to the small house that Emily had cleared out and prepared as a maternity ward. Halfway down the well-worn dirt path, Angie suddenly pulled away from the old man. “You’re not supposed to be outside!”
“I’m not missing this,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Don’t baby me, you baby. And anyway, Emily may very well have her hands full and need help. When you lot were born, all the girls went into labor at once.”
“But… even so… if you got a micro…” A sudden pain hit Angie and she bent over, straightened up, put a hand on her swollen belly, her face a sculpture of comic surprise.
“Come on, Angie, almost there…”
“What is it?” Cord called, coming out of the barn and running toward them when he saw Dr. Wilkins outdoors.
“Angie’s going to have her triplets,” Dr. Wilkins said. “Go get Sajelle, she’s the steadiest for this sort of thing.”
But instead Cord went to check on Clari. She stood at the wood stove, boiling down agave syrup, a shapeless mound with the moody face of the woman he thought he’d loved.
“Oh, leave me alone, Cord, I’m not going into labor just because the others are. I’m only carrying one child, remember, and it’s only been eight months.” She stirred the syrup harder.
Cord hastily withdrew and went to find Sajelle. She was walking Loni toward the birthing house. Loni, unlike Angie, looked panicked. Her round face, still not shed of all its own baby fat, jerked around to scan the farm.
“Where’s Mother? I want Mother!”
Sajelle said to Cord, “Go find Hannah.” When he didn’t move, she snapped, “Don’t just stand there! Find Loni’s mother!”
Everybody was telling him to find somebody else! Well, he didn’t know where Hannah was. Cord had never been comfortable with Hannah, and after the scene with Mike and the raving Lillie in the middle of the night, he’d avoided Hannah altogether.
Loni cried out and Cord suddenly found himself willing to look for Hannah. Anything rather than listen to that animal cry. Anything rather than spend the day around girls giving birth.
He ran back to the barn, even though he knew Hannah wasn’t there. Next he checked the vegetable gardens, with their system of irrigation ditches to bring water from the increasingly sparse creek. Bonnie, Sam, and Lupe were weeding the vegetables. Cord remembered to call to them, “Angie and Loni are having babies!” before he took off for the spring house.
Hannah wasn’t there. Carolina was putting eggs into the half-buried plastic boxes used as coolers. Cord paused a moment, grateful for the damp coolness under the thick adobe walls. “Carolina… where’s Hannah?”
Carolina answered with a burst of Spanish in which Cord discerned “eggs” and “broken” and “clumsy child.”
“Carolina—where’s Hannah? Loni’s in labor!”
Now he had her full attention. A smile like spring sunlight broke over her face. “Babies? Now?”
“Yes, and she wants her mother! Where’s Hannah?”
“I don’t know,” Carolina said. “Here, put these eggs in, I am need!” And Carolina was off, leaving Cord with the eggs.
He shoved them into the box, breaking only two, and pushed the lid on. Where the hell was Hannah? Not with the pitifully reduced range crew; Hannah was afraid of cattle.
He looked in the smokehouse, the privies, the windmills, everywhere he could think of. Finally he turned toward the cottonwood grove. It wasn’t likely she’d be here, in the middle of a workday. Over the long months that generation had gone outside more and more, simply because the work there needed to be done. But they didn’t just sit outside by choice.
Hannah wasn’t on the bench in the grove. Cord stood still, listening to the creek murmur over its bleached stones. A jackrabbit broke cover and streaked past him. He had looked everywhere possible. No one went to town anymore; no one went anywhere, for fear of infection. So where was she?
A tiny flash of blue across the creek caught his eye. The flat land there, once thick with pine saplings and wildflowers, was reverting to mesquite and yucca. He waded through the water and bent down.
A bit of blue cloth, snagged on mesquite. Silky blue cloth, cloth such as it wasn’t possible to make anymore. A durable microfiber synthetic, his mother had told him the first time he’d seen the beautiful blue-and-pink scarf around Hannah’s neck, the colors shading into each other so subtly that the fluttering scarf looked to him like a piece of sky. A piece of Hannah’s old life, like her music cube and silver hair brush, that life she’d shared with Lillie and Mike and Emily and the others long ago. Cord held the piece of silky material clenched in his fist and shouted Hannah’s name. No answer. He waded into the mesquite, under the grilling sun.
It took him an hour to find the next fragment of cloth, but after that it was easy. The buzzards circled the place.
Cord scared them away. He took off his jacket, long-sleeved and high-necked to keep the dangerous UV at bay, and wrapped it around Hannah’s torso. She was heavier than he expected. Too late, he realized that he shouldn’t be exposing himself to whatever she had died of. Well, fuck that. He had survived the sandstorm on the desert that had killed Grandmother Theresa, his immune system could probably handle this bioweapon. It was Lillie who was sick, Hannah who was dead, not anyone from his generation. His generation had the durable, subtle, silky genetic alterations from the pribir.