“Yes, if you want to.”
“Good. And oh, Uncle Keith—”
“What?” He was trying to remember where, in his headlong blind haste, he’d parked the car, and if it had been a legal spot.
“The pribir are coming.”
CHAPTER 4
By the next day, the Troy Record had the story. One of the parents of a newly wakened child had evidently called them, full of joy at the “miracle” that God had brought about in order to return their son. The paper sent a reporter for a human-interest story, but the reporter was less intrigued by the religious angle than by the strange utterance that more than one just-coma-free child had made simultaneously: “The pribir are coming.” The reporter only had three names, and Dennis Reeder was furious that the parents had divulged those three, but the parents swore there were seventeen more. The wire services picked up the story, and suddenly it was all over the Net and the papers and the TV news.
Nobody knew what the pribir were.
“Well, they’re not angels or ghosts,” Lillie said with disgust. She had the TV on while she ate a bowl of cereal and a Fun Bun for breakfast. Hers was not one of the names on the Net.
“What are they, Lillie?”
“I told you. I told everybody, at the hospital. They’re people coming soon.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. We’re out of Fun Buns, Uncle Keith.”
Her nonchalance was, somehow, the part of the whole thing. She was so casual. Some information, some idea (posthypnotic?) had been planted in her brain, and to her it was as ordinary, as much a given, as breakfast cereal and rock music and warm spring weather.
“The anomalous structure is now active,” Shoba Asrani had said when Keith took Lillie back to the hospital the next day.
“It happened when we went outside,” Keith said.
“That fits with it being olfactory activity,” Dr. Asrani said.
“You mean she smelled something?” Keith said incredulously. “And it gave her some hypnotic 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—”
“Enough,” Keith said. “I understand.”
Which was probably the stupidest thing anyone had said all day. Of course he didn’t understand.
He turned to face Dr. Asrani. “The names of all the children won’t stay secret long, you know. There have been too many medical people involved. Lillie and the other twenty kids—”
“Eighty,” she interrupted him. “We have a fuller roster than Dr. Reeder.”
“I’ll bet you do. Anyway, what do you recommend I do for Lillie? Bring her here?”
“No,” she said, suddenly looking very tired. “Not here. If you want, you can take her to some friend or relative whom you can trust. But frankly, Keith, I don’t think it matters where you take her.
“I’m afraid that before long, Lillie may be telling you where she has to go.”
The first indication anyone had that the pribir did indeed exist came when they blew up SkyPower.
Keith, not knowing what else to do with Lillie, brought her with him to Wolf, Pfeiffer. They arrived by 7:00. He told the hotshots already in and working that his niece had the day off from school and he would be taking her to lunch, so she would spend the day in his office. The assistants and associates looked askance, but he was a partner and nobody objected. The other partners didn’t notice. He installed her at his computer, where she promptly began manipulating software he didn’t know he had. She found games and programming languages and video feeds and settled in happily.