Free Nancy Kress by Nothing Human Page B

upstairs on some craft to engineer our kids, then why not just give the ‘gifts’ directly to Miller? He was a geneticist, he would have understood what he was looking at a hell of a lot better than Hannah does.”
    “I don’t know,” Keith said.
    “It makes me wonder what else the pribir have in store for our children.”
    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