Free Nancy Kress by Nothing Human Page A

of course we wouldn’t go forward without your consent.”
    Keith didn’t like this. Why was Lillie such an adventurer? He said warily, “Go ahead.”
    “You realize, of course, that the pribir’s communication with the children is one-way. They supply inhalant molecules that—”
    “Have you captured any of those molecules?” Keith asked. Might as well take advantage of temporarily being sought after.
    The doctor hesitated. “Well, no. Olfactory molecules must be dissolved in the lipids in the nose in order to be smelled, so after inhalation they don’t last long.”
    “I see.”
    “The pribir supply information to the children through the molecules, but there’s no way for the kids to supply information back. They’re just receptors.”
    Keith didn’t much like this description of Lillie, but he nodded.
    “What we’d like to do is take Lillie, and three others, into a negative-pressure room for two days. Air cannot come in from the outside. We want to see if they draw anything, if any drawings still match the kids’ outside. Also, see what changes occur in her neural firing patterns.”
    Keith thought it over. “The things you do to her will be noninvasive?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Then if Lillie wants to go, I’ll give my consent.” It couldn’t hurt to have her out of the pribir’s olfactory clutches for a while.
    “Good. Thank you,” the doctor said. “We’re not publicizing this test, by the way.”
    “I understand,” Keith said.
    Lillie and two other children disappeared for two and a half days. Theresa wasn’t one of them. In the negative-pressure building, the test subjects drew nothing. Neural activity in Lillie’s “anomalous brain area” subsided to nearly quiescent. The children on the outside produced three drawings.
    “I’m glad that’s done,” Lillie told Keith, Theresa, and Carlo when she returned. “It was boring. And I missed the pribir.”
    “Of course you did,” Theresa said.
     
    The media (and probably the FBI) had torn apart the life of Timothy Allen Miller. Reporters found huge numbers of irrelevant details, and no further information than Jamal had about why Miller had been selected by the pribir to create the “pribir children,” or how, or to what ultimate end. Depending on the channel, Miller was portrayed as a monster, a traitor, an egomaniac, or a Christ figure. The last came about because the pribir genetic construct derived from Sertoli cells did indeed prove to cure all cancers, all the time.
    More drawings, and more genetic knowledge, followed over the next few months. Sometimes a concept took twenty drawings to clarify; apparently cancer had been an easy problem. Huntington’s chorea, that terrible loss of brain cells leading to dementia and death, came with a person’s genes. The pribir sent detailed directions for how to keep affected brain cells from disintegrating. It involved, as Keith understood it, stimuli to switch on genes that switched other genes on or off that affected more genes making different proteins … He couldn’t follow the details. The effect was that those genetically fated to get Huntington’s would not get it at all.
    They identified and rectified the complex chemical imbalance responsible for schizophrenia.
    They gave instructions for the Holy Grail of tropical medicine, an immunity to malaria. The World Health Organization set about preparing to save a million lives every year.
    “I’ll tell you what bothers me about the pribir,” Dennis Reeder said to Keith. Reeder was preparing to move back home and resume his medical practice. Hannah, like a growing number of the other “pribir children,” would live in a supervised dormitory at Andrews. For Hannah’s safety or the medicos’ convenience? Probably both.
    “What bothers you about the pribir?” Keith asked. A lot about them still bothered him.
    “If they wanted to give all these ‘genetic gifts’ to humanity, and if they did once have Timothy Miller