Nancy Kress by Nothing Human Read Free Book Online

suggestion? The same thing that kid in Troy smelled?” The open window in the pink bedroom, the sealed one in Lillie’s hospital room.
    “Not hypnotic,” Asrani said. She looked visibly frayed. Keith knew there must be frantic medical conferences going on about this, on-and off-line. How could there not be? He didn’t ask, he didn’t want to know. Now that he had Lillie back, his previous thirst for information had transmuted to a desire to put the whole thing behind them and have their lives back.
    “Sit down, Keith,” Asrani said.
    “I’d rather stand.”
    She raised one arm. Let it fall again to her side. He thought he’d never seen such a helpless gesture. “Then listen standing. The usual human nose has fifty million bipolar receptor neurons inside each nostril. Inhaled molecules bind onto those receptor sites and trigger electrical signals. The brain is basically a chemical-electrical machine, you know. Each gets translated into the other all the time.
    “The electrical signals travel first to a tangle of nerves called the glomeruli, where undoubtedly selective processing of some sort goes on. Then those signals go out to major portions of the brain involved in memory, learning, emotion, fear responses—pretty much everything important except muscular control. Have you ever seen a dog excited by a scent?”
    “Of course,” Keith said.
    “Well, animals like dogs that rely on smell more than humans do have roughly the same setup as ours, plus an additional structure, the olfactory tubercle, that makes our sense of smell wishy-washy.
    “Lillie’s anomalous growth is in the same place as a tubercle would be, at the base of the frontal lobe, but much larger. Her glomeruli are firing in electrical patterns nobody has ever seen before. In each nostril she has not fifty million receptors but closer to five hundred million. Since each receptor site presumably binds a different molecule to it, she could be detecting molecules we have no idea of. And whatever information those molecules give her is going out to both her rational and emotional brain centers.”
    “Are you saying that Lillie is smelling molecules that tell her these ‘pribir’ are coming?”
    “I don’t know what they tell her. Obviously she’s not upset by whatever it is, so more than a simple exchange of information is going on. Her emotional centers are being soothed, conditioned to acceptance. She has a high measure of serotonin in her cerebrospinal fluid, much higher than she had before. Serotonin creates equilibrium.”
    “You mean they’re brainwashing her!”
    Dr. Asrani did something Keith had never expected: she lost her temper. The serene Indian woman shouted, “Don’t you get it? We don’t know! We don’t know anything!”
    After a moment she added, “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s all right. But … how did these theoretical molecules get into the air? And how could children scattered over four states smell the same ones?”
    “We don’t know how they got there. No more than we know how Lillie got to be what she is. But the distance is at least explicable. There are male moths that detect a single molecule of female moth sex pheromone and then zoom to the female moth from six miles away. A model something like that, but even more powerful, might be operating in Lillie and the others.”
    He couldn’t take it in. His mind rejected it. This was Lillie, his Lillie, Babs’s daughter… He walked over to the window and stared blindly out, seeing nothing.
    Dr. Asrani said, “You mentioned ‘brainwashing.’ There are as many definitions of that as there are so-called ‘experts.’ But looking at animal models again … there are a great many precedents for affecting behavior by manipulating smell. A certain kind of tapeworm in a moose will scent the moose’s breath so the breath attracts wolves. The tapeworm needs a wolf to finish its life cycle. So it gets a wolf to eat the moose, and it. And some ants —