Nancy Kress (24 page)

“You can’t,” Scott said. “You don’t even know that those refugees are going to attack here!”

“I know. And so do you. They’re camped closest to us, we’re on a line from the other two attacks, people don’t carry around missile-launchers for fun. And anyway,” she said, her voice rising in fury, “what if the attack isn’t on us? What if it’s on the Graham farm, or even on Wenton? Is it the moral high ground to let those people die because we’re not the direct target?”

Scott said, “You’re going to kill — “

“Yes! Would you rather sacrifice these kids and unborn babies and my sons and daughter and grandchildren? Would you, Scott? Because if the answer is no, you better not judge what I’m doing.”

“You’re not the law, Tess!”

Abruptly the fury went out of her. “Yes. I am. Out here, now, I am.”

She put her hands over her face. Jody took them down, gently. “I’ll do it, Mom. Tell me where the canister is.”

She gazed at her first-born. Yes, he was the right person. Spring was too sweet-natured, Carlo too entangled in religious conflict. Carlo sat in a corner, his face gray. Well, she couldn’t talk to him now. At least he wasn’t interfering.

She led Jody out to the porch. Scott took a step as if to follow her, then didn’t. Outside, the infernal wind howled around the barn, blew her hair into her mouth, sent a chair carelessly left outside flying across the yard. Night wind, hot angry breath of the violated land. Well, the wind was her ally now.

“You’ll have to circle around the far side of the arroyo to get downwind of them,” she told Jody. “The dispersion distance is supposed to be only a mile, but I don’t trust it. Some micro might reach here. I only have six masks. I think I better take everybody in the bus, maybe three miles out into the desert.”

“All right,” Jody said neutrally.

“If they catch you — “

“They won’t catch me.”

They walked hand-in-hand to the barn, Jody keeping Theresa upright against the wind and her own trembling. She showed him where the canister was buried and gave him the code to activate it. His horse was already saddled from looking for Lillie. In ten minutes he was gone.

Theresa fought her way back to the house. “All right, everybody, into the bus. Now. We need to get out past the dispersion distance. Come on, we don’t have time to waste.” She didn’t look at any of them directly.

They crowded into the ancient bus, eerily silent. The only noise was the wind. Theresa drove until she reached the start of a patch of desert, a reverse oasis in the greening land. When she turned off the engine, it was pitch dark.

Julie sobbed softly.

Someone cleared his throat.

The baby, carried in Senni’s arms, woke and whimpered for the breast.

Then she heard Lillie’s clear voice. “How long before we can return, Tess?”

“I’m going to give it five hours.” Twenty minutes per replication, ten replications. After that, even if remnants did reach the house, the virus would be inactive.

They would all have to endure five hours here. So they would.

Maybe a few of the kids would be able to fall asleep.

When they returned to the farm, Jody was there. He nodded at her. Carlo pushed past his brother and headed for the barn. Scott went directly to his room, looking suddenly much older than his fifty-three years.

Jody and Spring sat with her, drinking coffee, saying nothing, until Theresa told them she could sleep now, from sheer exhaustion.

When she woke late the next morning, all three of her sons were gone, plus, surprisingly, Sam. They’d taken the cart and the decrepit horse that drew it. Carlo must have been driving; Jody’s and Spring’s horses were gone but Carlo’s bay snorted in its stall. Theresa thought of saddling him, but she was at best an indifferent rider and the wind blew at its full force. She returned to the house.

They came in after sunset, filthy and silent. She had already brought the well hose to the back shed and filled the two oversize plastic garbage cans sometimes used as vertical bathtubs. When the men were washed, she had their dinner ready. She’d sent everyone else to their rooms or the “den,” damn if she cared how cramped they were in there for an entire evening. Scott had left a day early to do his doctoring in Wenton, leaving word with Senni that he’d spend several nights there. Just as well.

After he’d eaten ferociously, Jody said, “We buried them all. Mass grave. The weapons, plus anything else I thought we could use, we brought back on the cart. It’s all in the barn. You can look it over tomorrow.”

Theresa nodded. Slowly she said, “I never wanted this for my children. Not for any of you.”

“We know,” Spring said. He smiled. “Stop feeling guilty, Mom. You’re not responsible for every single bad thing that happens to us for our entire lives, you know.”

Jody said, “Motherhood is powerful.”

“But not that powerful,” Spring added.

“I want to say,” Jody added, “that Sam was an enormous help to us. He more than carried his share.”

Sam flushed with pleasure. He was sunburned, a whole day spent in that dangerous high-UV sun. Not good. But his angry, sullen look was gone. He’d been needed, and praised.

She said, “Carlo?”

He looked at her directly. Seeing the pain in his eyes, she could have wept. Carlo said, “We did what we had to. But I don’t have to pretend it wasn’t a mortal sin.” Abruptly he pushed his chair from the table, stood, and strode out.

Spring said, “He had a funeral. A mass, or whatever you call it, over the grave. Prayers and crosses in the air. I thought he’d never get done.”

“Let him have it, if it helps him,” Theresa said.

“Mom, he’s going into Wenton to that priest’s church, Father What’s-His-Name, spending the entire day with him, every Sunday. Did you know?”

She hadn’t. “I thought he was seeing some girl.”

“Carlo?” Jody laughed. “No. But I am.”

She was caught by surprise. “Well, you certainly took time for it that I didn’t notice. Who?”

He said defiantly, “Her name is Carolina Mendoza.”

Mexican. From the new encampment, growing larger every month, a few miles beyond Wenton. The source of migrant labor, especially at harvest… but of brides? How had Jody even met her? The Mexicans guarded their women zealously. Theresa didn’t ask. She said carefully, “Do her people mind you seeing her?”

“She doesn’t have any people,” Jody said. “Just a cousin. She’s been knocked around a lot. But she’s sweet and good and beautiful and very soon I’m going to marry her and bring her here.”

Careful, be careful.
“Have you thought this through, Jody? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ve thought.”

But about what? Theresa wanted to say. Jody had been a teenager during the war with Mexico, which had been a confused and misbegotten side conflict to the global biowar. The warming, the depression, the greenhouse gases, the UV exposure —all of it had been harder on Mexico than on the United States. More people had starved, had died of diseases, had died of floods and storms and wildfires, had died period. Mexico had been desperate. Mexicans had flooded over the border in numbers too big to stop, or to economically tolerate. The state of Texas had gone to war, using illegal bioweapons in defiance of Congress and the entire federal government, and in a week the war was over. The anger and fear, on both sides, were not.

The bioweapon Jody had just used at the arroyo came from that war.

He said tightly, “Say it, Mom.”

Say what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking. No, just answer one question. Is Carolina welcome here?”

Even brief hesitation would be fatal. She said, “Of course.”

The relief that flooded Jody’s eyes made her chest tighten.

Spring said, “Of course she’s welcome, if you’re marrying her. But Senni won’t like it.”

“Senni never likes anything,” Jody said.

Spring grinned. “Well, tell her that if we can have five pregnant genetically engineered girls carrying fifteen mutated babies, then we can have one senorita. But I have something to say, too, Mom.”

Theresa groaned. “No, Spring, no. She’s only fourteen years old!”

“Fifteen last month. And I want to marry her, Mom.”

“Who?” Jody demanded, and despite herself, Theresa laughed. “Jody, you’ve been so wrapped up in your own girl that you haven’t even noticed your brother falling all over Julie.”

“Julie?
She’s fourteen!”

“Fifteen. You going to give me a hard time, big brother?” Jody shook his head.

“Well, then,” Spring said, “we can go to Wenton together and have a double wedding. I hear Father What’s-His-Name is back in the marrying business. And that will please Carlo. Hey, maybe Carlo can marry Emily or Sajelle!”

“Ha ha,” Theresa said. “Now get to bed. It’s back to the cows in the morning.”

Somehow they had moved from murder to marriage. Theresa shook her head to disperse the sense of unreality. It didn’t go away. But, then, she was getting used to that.

Lillie went into labor the second week in December, in the aftermath of a storm so severe it knocked down the wellhouse. Flash flood in the arroyo carried off and killed two head of cattle. The men, plus Senni and Carolina, were all out on the farm, repairing damage. Theresa was minding her grandchildren, Dolly and baby Clari. Lillie, Emily, Sajelle, Bonnie, and Julie all worked at tasks near the house, so Theresa could keep an eye on them, too.

Lillie looked up from making tortillas at the wooden table. “Oh!”

“What is it, Lil?” Bonnie said.

“I think it’s starting. A sort of sharp pain in my gut, here.”

Theresa said, “You can’t be up to sharp pains yet, Lillie. Your water hasn’t even broken.”

“It just did. And we don’t know what the pribir did to change labor,” Lillie said logically, then doubled over with a look of surprise that was half comical, half pain.

Theresa got her into bed. Eight months, shouldn’t be a problem. Eight months was perfectly viable. Everything was ready. Except maybe Theresa and Lillie.

“Get that sheet of plastic on the bed first, Emily, there’s going to be blood and I want to save as many sheets as possible. Bonnie, heat water and boil the scissors and the string. Sajelle, warm blankets and line three of those baskets I bought in Wenton. Keep the blankets warm. Julie, watch Dolly and Clari. If Lillie starts screaming, take the kids out to the barn.”

“I’m not going to scream,” Lillie said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t scream,” Lillie said.

And she didn’t, although at one point she bit her bottom lip almost through. Labor lasted only thirty minutes. Theresa couldn’t believe it; she’d been twenty-seven hours with Jody.

Sajelle turned out to be invaluable. Steady, quick, unsqueamish. Theresa sent Emily and Bonnie away; no use cluttering up the tiny room with more people than necessary.

“You doing good, Lillie,” Sajelle said.

“Talk to me,” Lillie said, her face horribly contorted.

“Remember the garden on the ship?” Sajelle said. The pribir seemed a strange subject for Sajelle to choose, until Theresa realized that the aliens were the only experience the two girls had in common. “Them gorgeous flowers by the pool, yellow and red, smelling like heaven? Remember that music cube of Hannah’s that we played over and over? ‘Don’t Matter None to Me.’ ” She began to hum.

“Keep talking,” Lillie grunted.

“Okay. Remember the day we all swapped make-up and tried on different colors? Or the time Rafe took apart the lawn robot thing and Pam was so mad? Lillie?”

“Keep
talking,”
Lillie gasped, and Sajelle did, talking her friend through it, talking her on, talking her down from the bad heights and the worse depths, until it was over and three babies lay in the warmed baskets, two boys and a girl.

“They’re human,” Sajelle said, and Theresa looked up, startled at the deep relief in Sajelle’s voice. Sajelle cradled her own belly.

“Lillie,” Theresa said, “you have three beautiful children.” But Lillie was already asleep, her face turned toward the wall.

Lillie named the babies Keith, Cord, and Kella. She nursed them with a puzzled look on her face. “What is it, Lillie?” Theresa said.