He was at Dead Men’s Arroyo, sitting on a boulder, staring at the mass grave of the marauders dug fourteen years ago. A flash flood had carried away the stone marker and the grave was indistinguishable from the scrub around it. You had to know where to look.
“Cord.”
“Mom!” He jumped up, hugged her hard, blushed, and let her
“I’m fine, Cord. They repaired me.”
“Are they… is anybody…”
“They’re working, Cord. Doing what they came to do.”
He couldn’t tell anything from her tone. He burst out, “You were right, Mom! They’re monsters!”
“Yes.” She sat on the boulder, patted the place beside her. Reluctantly Cord sat down. He wasn’t in the mood for anybody else’s emotion except his own.
He said, “I should go check on Clari.”
“You haven’t thought about Clari in quite a while, it seems. She can wait a little longer. I want to talk to you.”
But then she said nothing. Silence dragged on. Cord recognized this trick from his childhood; sooner or later the other person, unable to stand the silence, would tell Lillie whatever she was after. Not this time.
More silence.
He said, “They’re horrible, Mom. They don’t care about all the people dead in the war, or about your generation —” only vessels ” — or about any human at all. They only care about our genes!”
“I know,” Lillie said.
“That’s why you hate them! And you’re right!”
“No, that’s not why. I don’t hate them. But I don’t trust them, because their goals aren’t ours. Their goal is to remake humanity in their own image. Like gods. And our goal—” She stopped.
“Is what?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never known. I don’t know why we’re here or what the purpose of life is. When I was your age, I worried about that a lot.”
“But not anymore?” Cord had never, he realized, thought about “the purpose of life.” He just lived it. This was a side of his mother he’d never seen, and it made him uneasy.
“Not any more. We’ve been too busy surviving. But I know this, Cord. The pribir know so much more than we do, but they can’t… see. No, that’s not right. Let me try again.”
Cord waited, wishing he were somewhere else.
“The pribir have a vision of the infinite manipulability of genes. Using genes to create anything, to accomplish anything. But they have no vision at all to give the bodies that house those genes. They don’t care about those bodies because they’re temporary and genes are not. I don’t even think they care about their own bodies. They’re shaped like us—for now, anyway—to help their work. But their real shape is probably far different. Once, I saw—”
Cord stood up. He didn’t want to know what his mother had seen once. He’d already seen enough himself, and none of it was what he’d imagined.
Lillie smiled. “Okay, Cord. This isn’t your kind of conversation. That’s all right. Help me back to the farm.”
Alarm ran through him, followed by suspicion: His mother never asked for help. But she leaned on him as they walked the mile to the farm, and he didn’t know if her grip on his arm was to ease herself or to lead him firmly, inescapably home.
PART V: LILLIE
“He who prepares for tomorrow, prepares for life.”
CHAPTER 26
For the first few weeks, Lillie wondered what else the pribir might have done to her brain besides free it of the prions that were killing her. If they had changed her brain chemistry significantly, had altered her neurons or transmitters into those of a different person, how would she even know?
She seemed the same to herself. More significantly, how everyone at the farm treated her didn’t differ from her memories of how they’d treated her before her illness. No one reacted to her as if she were acting out of character. Her memories of past years matched others people’s recollections. And no amount of genetic tinkering could create memories, could it? Only erase them. So gradually Lillie began to believe she was still Lillie.
Whatever that might mean.
Maybe it meant only her memories. Maybe that’s all the essence of a person was: what she remembered, and how she felt about those memories. The mind’s eye, not the cell’s DNA.
Certainly memories thronged around her thickly. Why not before now? For the reason she’d given Cord: she’d been too busy with everyone’s survival. But now survival seemed to be in the hands of the pribir. So now, in the middle of a present tense with significant genetic futures, Lillie found herself caught by insignificant memories from a world past and gone.
Riding on the crosstown bus with Uncle Keith to the Museum of Modern Art. The feel of a cherry popsickle on her tongue. The smell of paste in art class at her elementary school on New York’s West Side. The sound of planes shrieking overhead as they took off and landed at Andrews. Giggling with Theresa behind the Youth Building when they’d found someone’s stash of illegal cigarettes behind a dumpster and they’d each taken a single disgusting puff. A dress Madison had once worn at Andrews, yellow and slinky, with tiny mirrors sewn around the neckline. A nurse she’d especially liked at Malcolm Grow, a big black woman with a huge laugh, whose name Lillie wished she could remember. Going to the movies, and trying to decode graffiti, and standing in the supermarket in front of seventeen brands of scented soap, trying to choose.
“Aunt Lillie,” Taneesha said, “Mom wants you right away. Aunt Lillie? Are you listening?”
“Yes,” Lillie said. Taneesha looked worried, her pretty brown face creased, an infant in her arms. A pretty child, and already a mother. Well, so had Lillie been.
“Mom says to come right away!” Taneesha said, and Lillie left the past.
“What does Sajelle want? Is Susie in labor?” Susie was the only one still pregnant, except Clari. All the rest had had healthy triplets. Once again the farm was overwhelmed with infants, and she, Lillie, had no business daydreaming over her work.
“No, Susie isn’t going over the top yet,” Taneesha said, and Lillie wondered if she knew the phrase had once belonged to men at war in muddy trenches with much different weapons than any war Taneesha had known. Probably not. “There’s a man here!”
“A man? What do you mean, a man?”
“Somebody not one of us! The pribir want to take him inside the ship.”
Lillie took off at a run. She was strong now, so strong that again she wondered what the pribir had tampered with while they cured her war-given disease. And what did they want to do with this man?
No one had come to the farm in at least three months. There were still pockets of survivors on the planet; Rafe monitored them on the Net. But each week the pockets were fewer, and no one had reported in from the rest of New Mexico. Which didn’t, of course, mean they weren’t out there.
Strength or not, Lillie was panting by the time she reached the ship. It was closed and no one was beside it. Lillie covered the short distance to the big house.
“They’re at Dr. Wilkins’s lab,” said Kendra, looking frightened. She sat in a deep chair nursing two babies at once. “Aunt Sajelle wants you right away!”
Scott wasn’t in the lab. Since the pribir had done something to his immune system, he could go anywhere again, despite whatever bioweapons might still exist. The pribir had done the same to everyone in Lillie’s generation who would consent. Not everybody would. Next the pribir had started on her generation’s children, Keith and Kella and the rest. After that would come the infants; no one had forgotten that one of Angie’s babies had died.