“You and Martin should talk to your Uncle Jody,” she told Dolly. Jody was the only one with influence over his sister. “I’ll bet he’ll be on your side.”
“You think so?” Dolly’s young voice vibrated with hope. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow!”
Poor Martin, Lillie thought. Tumbleweed in the gale. Well, Martin was gaining, too. Survival, for one thing, plus sex and probably devotion. Dolly seemed capable of complete, devouring devotion.
“Thank you, Aunt Lillie.”
“You’re welcome. Now go to bed. The mosquitoes are fierce tonight.”
The next day, Dolly announced that she and Martin were getting married on October 5, at six o’clock in the evening. Martin said nothing. The date tickled at Lillie’s mind. Only hours later did she realize that October 5 would have been Tess’s sixty-eighth birthday.
“We have something to tell you,” Pam told Lillie. The pribir had apparently decided that all their communication with humans would go through either Lillie or Scott, the only two humans who didn’t scowl or draw away when an alien approached. Cord’s generation had found the pribir of actuality to be too different from the pribir of imagination. They were grudgingly grateful for the genetic help, but awkward in talking to the helpers.
Lillie accepted the burden with resignation. So far, the pribir had not tried to do anything to any human without permission, or to smell to them in any way that manipulated human behavior.
So far.
“We want you to find Scott and Emily,” Pam continued. “They need to hear this, too. It’s important.”
“I don’t think Emily will come,” Lillie said. Emily learned everything second-hand, from Scott. The old man looked and acted twenty years younger since the aliens had done to him… whatever they had done.
“Make Emily come,” Pam snapped. “This is too important for her to miss.”
The meeting was held in Scott’s lab; Emily flatly refused to enter the pribir ship. Lillie looked around her curiously. She saw nothing that she could identify as a pribir machine, only the usual jumble of expensive, aging scientific equipment, none of which could ever be replaced again, with crude wooden boxes, vials labeled in Scott’s careful hand, Sajelle’s nursing equipment. This was also the hospital. Two neatly made beds stood against the far wall. On a separate shelf were Scott’s handwritten records on his precious supply of paper, encased in plastic boxes against damp, rodents, and time. Records that no one was left to read.
Emily sat stiffly on one of the beds, Scott beside her. Lillie seated herself on the other. Pam and Pete stood between them, holding what looked like a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit.
It was a clear container stuffed with a mutilated rabbit. “Look at this,” Pam said. “Just look at it! This is what you people have done!”
Emily’s fist clenched. Scott put a restraining hand on her arm and said mildly, “Not us, Pam.”
“Your species!”
Pete, upset but calmer than Pam, said, “The rabbit’s genes have been damaged, in the germ line. It now carries a gene that expresses at death, making a kind of poison. The gene was adapted from plants that use poison to keep away predators. The gene turns on throughout the rabbit’s muscles and flesh, triggered by the reduction in oxygen. If humans eat this rabbit, they will die.”
Pete’s statement electrified the room. Lillie stood shakily. “I have to tell that to Sajelle, the kitchen crew fixes rabbit stew all the time, we had it two days ago—”
“Those rabbits weren’t poisoned or you’d already be dead,” Pam said crossly. “Don’t you listen, Lillie? And I already told Sajelle. The point is, you can’t eat any more rabbit at all. This genemod is dominant, and it’s coupled with other genes that confer a preferential evolutionary advantage on rabbits that have it. A nasty construction. Eventually every rabbit will have it.”
Rabbits currently formed a mainstay of the farm’s protein.
Scott said, “Are you sure, Pete?”
He looked surprised. “Of course we’re sure.”
Scott said, “Have you detected this gene in any other wildlife?”
“That’s just the point,” Pam said. “It’s already transmitted, probably by transposon in a parasite, to those little rodents in the desert, the small quick ones that jump so well.”
“Deermice,” Scott said. “We don’t eat those.”
“But the transposon might keep jumping species. And we’ve also detected something strange in the mesquite.”
In the mesquite. That meant plants… . Lillie was no scientist, but she understood that plants underlay everything, the whole food chain.
“It’s not interfering with basic plant functions,” Pete said, “photosynthesis, respiration, nitrogen fixing, all that. We’re not even sure its expression could harm you, and anyway you don’t eat mesquite. But it’s a sign.”
Lillie said, although she was afraid to hear the answer, “Of what?”
Pam said, “Of the complete changing of Earth ecology. Between what you’ve done to the atmospheric gas balance, what that’s done to the climate, and what your perversions of the right way have done to the fauna and now even the flora… you people just aren’t worth our trouble!”
“But you’re our assignment,” Pete said. “So we’ll do what’s necessary. However, you can’t keep your current genome and hope to survive more than a few more generations. We gave you all the adaptations we thought you’d need, starting way back at your generation, Lillie, but it isn’t going to be enough to protect you. We have to rebuild from the beginning.”
Emily spoke for the first time. “‘Way back at your generation.’ You knew the human race was going to need genetic modifications to survive, didn’t you. You knew it seventy years ago, when you started all this with poor deluded Dr. Timothy Miller. You knew it.”
“Yes, of course,” Pete said.
“Did you know a war with bioweapons was going to happen?”
“With a sixty-seven percent probability,” Pete said. He flicked his hair off his sweaty forehead; the room was already stifling, and it wasn’t even noon.
Emily repeated carefully, “You knew there would be a devastating biowar. And you didn’t use us engineered kids to warn humanity, back in 2013, when it might have done some good.”
Pete said patiently, “That’s not the right way, Emily.”
“And now you want to ‘rebuild from the beginning.’ You mean, you want to take human genes and create some creature that can survive in the new ecology, but won’t look or act or function anything like human beings.”
Pete and Pam looked at each other, bewildered. Pam said, “How could they not be human? They’ll have mostly human genes. Of course they’ll be human.”
“Brewed up in some vat?”
Pam said, “Carried in human wombs, of course. It has to be a heritable germ-line rebuilding, you know that. Emily, you’re being ridiculous.”
Emily stood. “I’m being human. Which you are not. And before we’d let you turn our children into the kind of monsters you are, we’ll all die first and the whole race with us.” She walked past the pribir and out the door.
Scott said quietly, “What would the new ones look like?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ll try to preserve as much of your current appearance as we can, if you like, but, really, there are much better and more efficient designs.”