Nothing Human

  Keith didn’t answer.

  “Are you going home, too, Anderson? You must have a law practice begging for your return.”

  “Not exactly.” He could have gone back, of course. But by now, after months away, his cases had all been reassigned to other attorneys, just as if Keith had died. And for reasons he couldn’t explain, reasons connected somehow to his guilt about Barbara, he couldn’t leave Lillie.

  “Uncle Keith,” she said shyly a few weeks later, “do you mind if I move to the dorm with the other girls? Not that I don’t love living here with you,” she added hastily, “but all my friends are already in the dorm, Emily and Madison and Julie, and Tess and I are missing stuff.”

  He looked at her hopeful face. How quickly the young could transplant their lives. He remembered doing it himself: for college, for law school, for the job in New York. “No, honey. I don’t mind.”

  “You could stay on base. I’m sure they’d let you.” She glanced doubtfully around the three-bedroom bungalow, empty of the Romeroes. “Maybe in a smaller place.”

  “I’ll see.”

  The Andrews Housing Office assigned him a one-bedroom house across Perimeter Road from the Malcolm Grow Medical Center. He gathered that he was an exception; usually “unaccompanied military personnel” lived in a dormitory and civilian personnel lived off base. Keith knew his life was an exception long before the Housing Office told him so.

  He saw Lillie every day, read a lot, hung around Malcolm Grow to learn what he could. The doctor assigned to Lillie, a woman in her sixties named Elena Rice, decided that Keith was both trustworthy and needy. She kept him accurately informed about the information the children were receiving and about medicine’s attempts to put it to use.

  The media were not accurately informed. Inflated stories spread like the infectious diseases the pribir were curing. The children had been told the secret of immortality. The children had been taught to levitate, to fly, to master telekinesis, to communicate by ESP. The pribir were going to land tomorrow, next week, when humanity had been all remade in their image. The pribir were already here, disguised as humans. The pribir had already left and a mad genius was giving the children the genetic gifts, just before he destroyed us all with a horrific plague.

  “People can really be stupid,” Lillie said in disgust. She and Keith sat on her dorm steps, shaded from the sultry July sun by a building overhang.

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to see media stories.”

  “Oh, they changed the rules a while ago. I guess they decided we weren’t going to get too scared or weird or something.”

  “They were right,” Keith said. Lillie didn’t look scared or weird. She looked like a normal thirteen-year-old girl. That was what was scary and weird.

  “But, you know, Uncle Keith, human people do all this stupid stuff, but pribir people don’t.”

  Something inside Keith tightened. He was going to hear something important.

  “That’s because the pribir people control their own genes. They made themselves work right, and they got rid of everything on their planet that could damage genes. Like nuclear reactors and chemicals and stuff.”

  He said carefully, “They control all their own genes?”

  “Yes. They go the right way, and that’s why they’re showing us how to control ours. We’re them, you know.”

  “What do you mean, ‘We’re them’?”

  “They have our DNA and stuff. They’re just humans who are way ahead of us on the right way.”

  Humans. People. That’s why she had always, from the start, called them “people.”

  He said, “Why didn’t you tell me—or anybody—this before? That the pribir are human beings far advanced in science?”

  “I didn’t know it before,” she said, as if this should be obvious. She stood. “I’m sorry, I have to find Major Fenton. To tell her this stuff. The pribir need some things done.”

  “Do you need paper?” Usually the first thing the children did was draw, then hand the drawings to what Keith suspected was a growing cadre of doctors, military intelligence, CIA, and State Department types.

  “No, I don’t need to draw this. Just to say it. Bye, Uncle Keith, log you later.” She ran off across the grass, a long-legged hair-streaming figure somewhere between child and woman.

  Keith remained sitting on the shaded steps, sniffing the air. It didn’t smell of anything.

  CHAPTER 6

  After Lillie and the other children explained the “things the pribir need done,” the media stories changed again.

  “Destroy all our nuclear power plants? Stop using that long list of chemicals in manufacturing?” Carlo demanded, on a visit to Theresa at Andrews. “Who the hell do they think they are?”

  “They’re the pribir,” Theresa said witheringly. “I thought you at least knew that much.”

  Relations between Theresa and her parents had deteriorated lately. Lillie had insisted that she and Keith accompany Theresa to this lunch at a base restaurant. “She shouldn’t have to deal with them all by herself,” was Lillie’s explanation, which made Keith uneasy. Was he, too, going to move from being Lillie’s confidante to being something distasteful to deal with?

  Carlo said, “I don’t like your tone, young lady!”

  “Well, I don’t like yours!” Theresa retorted. “The pribir are good people, better than us, and they want to help us on the right way!”

  “Why? So we become weak in industry and military and they can take us over easier?”

  “You don’t know anything, Dad!”

  “You watch your mouth, Theresa Victoria Romero!”

  Now Rosalita broke in with a long stream of Spanish. Keith, who spoke no Spanish, could nonetheless see that Rosalita’s rant was a mixture of anger and grief. Theresa folded her arms across her chest and listened in stony silence.

  Lillie said carefully, “Mr. Romero, the pribir really are people. They have the same DNA as us, that’s how they know what to tell us to do with ours. And they just want us to protect it from the radiation and chemical stuff that damages it, so we can make ourselves strong in the right way.”

  “So now foreign policy is being set by thirteen-year-olds,” Carlo sneered.

  Keith said abruptly, “Lillie … when you say ‘the right way,’ is that capitalized?”

  The others stared at him dumbly.

  “I mean, is it like … like ‘The Path’ of Taoists? Is it a religion the pribir have?”

  “No,” Lillie said.

  “Yes,” Theresa said.

  The girls looked at each other and broke out laughing. Finally Lillie said, “I guess it depends on the person. How you smell it.”

  But Carlo had his justification. “A religious war. That fits. Weaken us industrially for a religious war. They had to come here for some goddamn reason.”

  Theresa stood up so fast her chair clattered backwards. Other diners turned to look.

  “You don’t know anything!” she yelled at her father, “And you don’t want to know! You’re ignorant and suspicious and … and … don’t come here anymore!”

  In sudden tears, Theresa fled the restaurant. Rosalita started talking rapidly in Spanish to Carlo. Lillie turned apologetically to Keith. “I’m sorry but I have to go, Uncle Keith, she’s really upset.”

  He nodded, and she hurried after Theresa. The three adults were left looking at their half-eaten dinners with nothing to say to each other.

  He didn’t believe the pribir had come to Earth to wage a holy war. Neither could he quite share Lillie’s and Theresa’s—and all the other children’s—faith that the pribir were interstellar Florence Nightingales, here merely to relieve human suffering. He couldn’t forget that they had blown up SkyPower.

  Nor could many others. Almost overnight the country erupted in violent groups at such cross-purposes that at times the pribir were reduced almost to irrelevancy, footnotes to pre-existing concerns.

  Environmental groups, raging for years against nuclea
r plants and chemical dumps, gained new legitimacy: Even aliens know we’re damaging ourselves! Protests swelled. Protests became activism, and a factory that made tool-and-die equipment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was bombed. Thirty-two people died.

  Groups who had resented America’s slow, gradual powering-down of the defense budget seized on both the bombing and the pribir to scream for a military build-up.

  Many religious leaders had always been uneasy with the pribir’s instructions for gene tampering. Because the engineering instructions had been aimed only at curing diseases, these conservative ministers and priests and rabbis and shaikhs had felt only limited support. It was difficult to persuade an American public that curing disease was against God’s wishes. And so far the pribir had not touched inheritable, germ-line genetic changes.

  But now it was different. The aliens were preparing to force a new religion on us! All the so-called genetic gifts had merely been a softening up, the honeyed words dripping from the mouth of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon. The pribir were indeed Satan!

  Blow it out your ear, indignantly replied America’s liberal religious, backed by agnostics and atheists. You guys on the religious right are the ones using this to build your power base! You’d like to brainwash us all against the pribir for your own grandiose ends!

  Sometimes it seems as if a religious war was going to occur without involving the pribir at all.

  And then, on August 8, a day so hot and humid that after only five minutes outdoors Keith’s shirt stuck to both his chest and back, Lillie fired the opening shot of her personal war.

  She’d been unusually quiet for a few days. Three days a week, Wednesday-Friday-Sunday, Keith took Lillie to lunch at the base’s best restaurant. He jeered at himself for the choice, knowing she’d have been just as happy with hamburgers, but the formal, adult atmosphere was obscurely necessary to Keith.

  Lillie wore a pale blue lipstick, matching a dress he hadn’t seen before, bare legs, and high-heeled white sandals. Her hair had grown and she’d done it in a complicated arrangement of puffs and braids that he’d noticed on other teenage girls. Her round cheeks looked childlike beside the adult trappings. She ate with gusto, finishing everything, including most of Keith’s dessert.

  “Sure you’re full, honey?” he teased.

  “Yes. But why don’t you order some … some coffee or something.”

  He never drank coffee at lunch. He saw she wanted more time to say something uncomfortable. Flagging the waiter, he ordered coffee.

  “Go ahead and tell me, Lillie. Whatever it is.” She smiled at him with grateful constraint. “Yes. Well, it’s the pribir. Something the pribir are going to do.” His stomach made a fist. “What?”

  “They’ve given us so much. All the genetic gifts, and the greater knowledge of ourselves — “

  “That’s not you talking, Lillie. That’s a PR statement. I think I even know which press release.”

  She grinned at him, a much more honest grin than her previous smile. “Major Connington, right? Okay, I’ll tell you straight. The pribir have given us a lot, and now they want something in return. They want some of us kids to go up aboard their ship. I want to go.”

  Whatever he’d vaguely expected, it hadn’t been that. Never that. For a moment all he could do was stare, stunned. Her wide gray eyes, gold-flecked, stared back.

  “Uncle Keith—”

  “No. Absolutely no. Under all circumstances, no.”

  “Now you sound like Mr. Romero.”

  “Lillie, you’re thirteen years old!”

  She said reasonably, “I can’t help that.”

  “Think. To go blindly aboard some spacecraft you never saw, to some aliens…” He couldn’t even finish. They weren’t the kinds of words you ever thought you’d have to say in real life. Comic-book words, video-game words. Yet the chair under him was solid as ever, and the ordinary silverware gleamed on the white tablecloth.

  “I told you,” she said patiently, “they’re not aliens. They’re people. Humans.”

  He grasped at anything. “What on Earth makes you think the president, or whoever, would let you go?”

  “Well, we don’t know that,” she admitted.

  “What if the military said no? Then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He had a sudden terrifying thought. The pribir dispensed molecules, undetected by anyone on Earth, to give the children information. Could the pribir just as easily dispense molecules to make Washington agree to this plan? Brainwashing government to release children? No, no one except the children could even smell the pribir’s molecules. No one else had the necessary, genetically engineered equipment.

  He said, stalling, “What do the ali … the pribir allegedly want you there for, anyway?”

  “To teach us,” she said.

  “Teach you what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Fear got the better of him. “You don’t know much!”

  “I know this,” Lillie said. “I’m going.”

  For once, the press didn’t get the story. Keith didn’t know how many children the pribir wanted aboard their ship … It was too surreal to even think about. No one had ever seen their ship from the inside. It was in orbit around the moon, not the Earth, and although satellites, the Hubble, the International Space Station, and various space shuttles from three countries had of course photographed it when it was visible and they were in position, the photographs were all classified. An entire amateur following had grown up on the Net, posting its orbit with precision accuracy and speculating on its size and composition, but not much could actually be known from Earth.

  The two big questions were: How did the pribir get close enough to Earth to drop their “inhalant molecules” over Washington? And was their ship reachable with nuclear missiles, or some equivalently deadly weapon?

  Someone might know the answers. Keith didn’t.

  For the next few days, he and Lillie didn’t refer to their discussion at the restaurant. She was pleasant, slightly distant, seemingly absorbed in her schoolwork and friends. But Keith was beginning to suspect that he had simplified Lillie in his mind, and that the Lillie he thought he knew, although genuine, concealed caverns he did not know.

  A boy in her group of friends, Mike Franzi, had a birthday. Lillie confided shyly to Keith that she “liked” Mike. His friends at the boys’ dorm gave him a raucous party that reportedly went on all night. Some of the girls, including Lillie and Theresa, sneaked into the party. Keith was informed of this transgression and was expected to discipline his niece.

  He met with her at a picnic area beside the Youth Center. In the hectic heat, August flowers bloomed in a riot of color: chrysanthemums, asters, black-eyed Susans. Lillie had brought Theresa with her, presumably for moral support.

  “You weren’t supposed to be in the boys’ dorm after hours, Lillie.”

  “We didn’t do anything, Uncle Keith.”

  “We’re not like that,” Theresa said, earnestly if vaguely.

  Keith felt helpless. What did he know about disciplining teenage girls, even under normal circumstances? The two sat across the picnic table from him, dressed in shorts and brief red tops with strange little mirrors sewn around the necklines. Two pretty young girls with round, unlined faces, their long hair caught back with red leather clips. Both wore hideous purplish lipstick. He had no idea what to say to them.

  Lillie helped him out. “I know it was against the rules, Uncle Keith, but we were careful and anyway we won’t do it again.”

  “Well, uh, I believe you.”

  “Then can I ask you something else?”

  “Of course.” Now what?

  The girls exchanged a glance. Then Lillie said in a rush, “Tess’s family has a vacation place in New Mexico!”

  “It’s not really fancy or anything,” Theresa said. “It’s just a lot of empty land in the desert. Bare, so my father got it
real cheap. But there’s a cabin and my mother likes it ‘cause she’s from New Mexico, so we go there sometimes in October to hike and stuff. Over Columbus Day vacation from school.”

  “And Tess asked me to go with her! Can I?”

  Keith thought rapidly. October. New Mexico. Death threats on the Net. He said, “Well, we can talk about it, at least.”

  “That’s just a delayed ‘no,’ ” Lillie said flatly.

  “Not necessarily.”

  Theresa said shrewdly, “It’s really safe out there in the desert, Mr. Anderson. Believe me, there’s nothing near my folks’ property. The cabin doesn’t even have a computer.”

  He said, “You don’t even know if you’ll be done here at Andrews by October, or if the government will permit you off base by then.”

  “I know all that,” Lillie said. “Of course I’m only hoping to go if we’re finished here at Andrews and if I’m back in time from the pribir ship.”

  Keith felt his temper rise, pushed it back down. “You are not going on a pribir ship.”

  Lillie stood. The tiny mirrors on her shirt flashed in shards of sunlight. She said calmly but distantly, “I guess you’re right, Uncle Keith—we should talk about this some other time.”

  “I agree. Meanwhile, do you ladies want to go out for a Coke?”

  “I’m sorry, I have to study,” Lillie said. “But thanks.”

  “Kind of tough on you keeping school going the whole year around,” he said, wanting to keep the conversation going. She seemed so remote.

  “I don’t mind. But Tess and I have a big French test tomorrow.”

  French. For children who communicated in an exotic molecular language with aliens.

  “Lillie … we used to be able to talk to each other.”

  “We can still talk. What do you want to talk about?”

  A polite wall. Did this happen with all teenagers, or was it a product of the situation? He had no way to tell. Theresa stared down at the picnic table, embarrassed.

  “Nothing,” Keith said. “You better study now.”

  He watched the two girls walk away.