Nancy Kress by Nothing Human Read Free Book Online Page B

genes.”
    She looked, sounded, felt like Lillie. She was Lillie. But the words were not. For the first time, something deep inside Keith recoiled from her.
    Keith called SkyPower Corporation. But he was a secondary legal counsel, and the CEO and her staff had no time for him. They were “in meeting,” an assistant informed him neutrally.
    “Oliver Wendell, turn the TV on to NewsNet.”
    ” — no more than a silly hoax,” someone was saying, a wizened man with an indignant expression. “Elaborately organized, yes. But for a major transnational like SkyPower to listen to a bunch of children would be ridiculous. Nor is SkyPower going to ‘damage genes’ — anybody’s genes. Safety records show—”
    Lillie said, “Aren’t they going to send the people back to Earth?” She looked troubled. Was that her talking … or them?
    Did he believe there was a them?
    He stayed riveted to the TV, canceling all his meetings. No one disturbed him; evidently the media still did not have Lillie’s name. Lillie went back to her computer games. At noon she looked up, frowning.
    “Uncle Keith—they mean it about correcting SkyPower. Why are those people still on it?”
    He could only shake his head.
    “—NASA reporting that, like the Hubble, the Artemis II probe has detected no alien craft anywhere near Earth orbit—”
    “Lillie … where are the pribir? In a space ship?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “Where is the ship?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, not looking up from her game.
    At 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, SkyPower blew up. The corporation had not removed its personnel.
    Hysteria broke out on the Net. Terrorist acts, international provocation, cleverly obfuscated industrial sabotage … theories flew like bullets.
    Half an hour later, Keith’s secretary stuck a frightened face into his office. “Mr. Anderson … the White House is on the phone channel!”
    He picked up his phone, already knowing. They wanted Lillie, wanted all of them. As soon as possible, as anonymously as possible. In Washington. Highest national security. FBI agents on the way to his apartment.
    Lillie turned off her computer game. “Let’s go, Uncle Keith. I need to pack some stuff at home. Where’s that red suitcase I took to Kendra’s for my last sleep over?”
    No one spoke to them as they walked through the office. Everyone stared. Keith put an arm around Lillie.
    “It’s okay,” she told him. “They just don’t understand yet. About the right way, I mean. But it’s okay. The pribir can explain everything.”
     
    NASA announced the position of the spacecraft. Perhaps they’d just located it, perhaps they’d known all along. Keith knew he’d never find out which. The White House press secretary held a tense, almost belligerent session with the press in which he said, essentially, that he wasn’t going to say anything. He repeated only that the president would address the nation the following night. Condolences had gone out to the families of the seventy-three SkyPower employees killed in the explosion.
    Two FBI agents, male and female, waited at Keith’s apartment. Within twenty minutes he and Lillie had packed and been escorted by car to La Guardia. They were shown to a heavily guarded private room in the airport terminal, and for the first time Keith saw some of the other kids that the press was already calling “the pribir puppets.”
    They looked like any eighth grade class on a field trip.
    Seventeen of them had been collected at La Guardia. They were white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The girls appeared about two years older than the boys, although in fact the sexes were distributed evenly throughout ages eleven, twelve, and barely thirteen. Newly pubescent, which had triggered the latent engineered genes. Some of the girls, like Lillie, had lush figures and wore make-up. The boys’ voices cracked when they called out to each other. At one side of the room, the parents sat looking shell shocked.
    Lillie walked up to