Scarecrows

I was five years old when Mom turned into a scarecrow. Everyone says I was too young to remember what happened that day, but they're wrong. I remember everything.

Mom was the fifth woman in our settlement to turn into a scarecrow and neighbors came from miles around to stand in front of the north field and watch Mom walk naked through the rows of beans.

Daddy told me to stay in the house, but he didn't say anything about not climbing up to the loft and looking out the cracked window. I stood there for hours, watching the neighborhood men, who would look at Mom and then back at their own wives like they were seeing their future in front of them.

The doctors and scientists from off world were watching too. They wore white suits that covered them from head to toe and they stood away from the crowd, eying the farmers as nervously as the farmers were eying them. Mostly, though, they just stared at Mom, scribbled notes, and took pictures.

I could see my family from the window, too. They stood in the field, halfway between the neighbors and the off worlders. Eli looked half a head taller than my father and more man than boy. Carrie and Tina stood to Dad's right, looking like teenage versions of Mom.

Except Carrie and Tina were pretty and Mom was not. She might have been, years ago, when the ship first landed; but she'd spent too many years in the hot sun, striving to turn a patch of hard clay into a viable farm.

All the first generation women – except the townspeople – had that same, tired look on their leathery faces. They also all wore the same style of faded brown Gore-Tex work jeans and jackets that protected their body from the harsh rays of a too-hot sun and a too-brisk wind.

The way you know a woman is becoming a scarecrow is that she stops wearing those jeans and starts wearing a loose-fitting skirt that ties around her waist. I know now why they wear them, although I didn't know it then, and I know now why Mom was dragging something that looked like a third leg from where I was standing. Her vulva had grown so huge and sagged so low that it literally dragged across the top of the ground as she walked through the field.

Standing there, looking out the window that day, I noticed three other women were wearing skirts. They would become scarecrows, too. Just like my mom.

Mom must have walked up and down through the North field for most of the day before stopping dead in her tracks in the middle of the field and stretching her arms out wide.

She rose up at least a good three feet above the beans as her vulva dug deep into the soil and sent dirt flying. While I watched, her entire body turned a faint shade of gray and grew a little bulkier and a little darker. Her legs thickened until they were as wide as her hips and everything blended into one large, gray mass of flesh. Within a few hours, my mom had turned into a large, T-shaped boulder in the middle of the field. A scarecrow

Then the really strange thing happened.

I slipped out of the house and ran outside to stand with the crowd and watch as the very ground around us changed from hard clay to rich, loamy soil as black as the night itself. Every row where Mom had walked turned under like tiny, invisible plows were working the soil.

The scientists gathered soil samples and one of them walked out to chip away at Mom with a chisel and hammer.

I hated them because they lived in town and had pale, wrinkle-free faces that spoke of an easier life. I hated them because they talked among themselves in polysyllable words that I'd never heard before and couldn't understand. But most of all, I hated them because they represented all the knowledge, all the tools, and all the skills that we had to stop anything bad from happening; and they had just stood there, watching my mother turn into a scarecrow, without doing anything to save her.

There were four of them, all male from what I could tell by their height and the faces showing through clear fabric. They carried tubes and a backpack that I learned later was to filter out the impurities in our air so they didn't have to risk breathing our contaminants.

"We're doctors," they told us later, when my family gathered inside our little shanty. "We're trying to learn what causes this disease and how to stop it."

"It's God's punishment." my father's voice sounded as bitter as the everberries that grew in wild patches where farmers hadn't yet cleared the land. "We put our faith in technology."

"The tallest of the men looked at the others with a glance that even I could tell meant he considered us all ignorant fools. "We've heard more than a few theories since we arrived and the best way to discover the true cause is to take some tissue samples from each of you."

"You should have taken them months ago," Father said. "When the symptoms first started."

"We weren't here then," one of the other men said. "But we are now and we want to help. The question is, will you help us help those who remain unafflicted?"

Father shrugged and looked out the open window towards the North field, where Mother stood, and said, "Do whatever you like. It doesn't matter anymore."

For a week, they lived among us -- never eating with us and never drinking what we drank -- but always around with their needles and their cameras. They slept, ate, and worked in that large, metal house of theirs that moved on wheels. I'd never seen anything like it before and I'd never met people like these before. Not even in town, where most of the people were craftsmen of one kind or another. I followed the off-worlders around as much as I could during that week, asking a thousand questions and getting maybe a dozen answers that made any sense.

When they went back to town, I felt a void in my life that wasn't satisfied by my learning modules. Those were designed for farming families and taught everything I would need to know about soil, fertilizer, cooking, water purification processing, and animal husbandry. They didn't contain any information at all about why women turned into scarecrows.

For the next four years, my life was just like the life of any other young girl in Haven whose mother had turned into a scarecrow. That designation became unfortunately common as one after another, all the mothers in our community turned into scarecrows. The town women escaped the curse, but that was just because the off-worlders declared them free of infection and sent them away. They proclaimed every single farm family infected except one: A widow, whose sons were born prior to arrival at New Haven and whose husband died before they could start their "second family". Not one of them had any trace of the disease, according to the doctors. The rest of us, however, were doomed. Or rather, the women were doomed. The men carried the same microbes in their bodies, but none of them ever turned into scarecrows. Just the women.

After the doctors announced we were all infected, a surge of quick marriages followed. Eli married Jenny Jackson from three farms over and started making babies like there would be no tomorrow. My sisters married within the same month and left to start new farms with their husbands. I grew up helping Jenny and keeping too busy to think much about scarecrows until the day that Jenny sat down at our kitchen table in a skirt. I knew what that meant and I dropped my request along with the meat onto the kitchen table.

"No." Father turned away and I saw him half-glance towards the window beside us, where he could see Mother out in the field. "You're a farmer, child, not an off worlder. You'd be reaching too high and doomed to failure. I won't request it."

"Now see what you've done." Eli stood up and followed his wife. The baby cried and the three other children started squirming even more than they usually did at mealtime.

They sat speechless for a moment before Katie picked up the baby and herded her brothers outside.

Dad turned towards me. "You're too young to remember when your mother turned into a scarecrow…"

I started to object, but thought better of it. I wanted something. This wasn't a good time to argue about something else.

"… But I know it hurts to walk past her every day." He stood up and walked to the window, leaving me to face his back.

"I've always hoped that they might find some way to change her back. Foolish of me, I guess, but I never was the sharpest knife in the drawer." He turned to me then.

"The people who prepared the world for us and brought us out here were the smart ones. We had the courage and the work ethnic, and they had the brains. We are plain folks. Farmers. Colonists."

"What I'm trying to say, in a way that I hope doesn't hurt your feelings, is that the smartest farmer around here is dumber than dirt compared to the doctors and scientists. The reason I don't want you to study those college prep courses is because it would be a waste of your time and would just leave you feeling frustrated and stupid. You're not smart enough to attempt what those people are doing."

His shoulders sagged a bit and I felt like someone had tossed me into a cold stream. I was drowning and couldn't move my arms to swim.

Dad sighed and stared out the window for a long time before saying, "They say intelligence is part inherited and part environment. You inherited from two of the farmers on the ship, not the scientists. You've learned how to work the soil, bathe a baby, and fix a good meal. The learning modules you've studied were designed to prepare people to be farmers, not scientists. You've never studied anything more than simple mathematics, algebra, and a little geometry. Leesa, they do things with math that I can't even begin to comprehend and they use devices that look like magic to me. I wish it wasn't this way. Honest, I do."

I looked out the window at the children outside. Their mother would turn into a scarecrow before the baby was walking and someday Katie would become a scarecrow, too.

I slammed both fists against the table and burst into tears. "Someone's got to stop it."

Dad leaned over and wrapped his arms around me. "Hush, little one. Stop those tears. Enjoy your life while you can. Live it to the fullest, like Jenny is doing. Leave the hard work for the scientists."

"No." I took a deep breath and met my father's gaze. "If you do not request this for me, I will request it for myself. I have the right."

He released me and sat back to stare into my eyes. I didn't blink. I didn't breathe. I just waited until he finally looked away and muttered, "If that's what you want, then I'll ask for it."

"But you're just going to hurt yourself." He turned and I could see tears in his eyes. "You're trying something that you just don't have the ability to accomplish. You'll fail."

"Oh, Leesa!" He looked at me pretty much the same way he'd looked at Bessie's last calf, which had died within a couple of days. "This is a hard task you've set yourself."

I hadn't realized that I would need to review all the basic mathematics I'd learned before stumbling forward in fits and spurts into algebra and geometry problems that never really made sense to me. Then came Calculus and I stayed up late and got up before dawn to struggle through those problems. When the tutor introduced the principles of differential equations, I finally understood what Dad had meant. No amount of effort can ever compensate for ability. Working ten times harder than anybody else just wore me out and meant I was doing ten times as much stuff wrong. All the tests showed I had no aptitude for science or math.

I could no more become a scientist and find a cure for this disease than I could spread my arms and fly.

Dad didn't say a word when I burst into tears and ran off to the barn to sulk. My teacher, however, had a great deal to say when I stopped using the tutor for a couple of days. He even made a rare, personal visit.

"There are over five thousand men, women, and children left in this community," Mr. Harris said, "and you've achieved more than any of the others academically. You've not failed. You've succeeded. You can do even more if you keep trying. You don't have to learn everything in a single day."

"Are not you. You work to your own abilities. Don't measure yourself by someone else's measuring rod."

"But I'll never be a scientist. I'll never be able to find the cure and save our world."

"Ah. You wanted to be the lone scientist who single-handedly finds the cure for the exotic disease." He tented his hands together and stared intently at them.

"Of course you can," he said in that too-cheery voice of his. "They're all specialists of one sort or another. They're tunnel-visioned. You can be the jack of all trades who points out the obvious that they miss because they're too specialized."

I must have looked as skeptical as I felt because he quickly added, "I'll talk to them and convince them to let you be their native guide on field trips. They're taking soil samples outside the settlement and trying to figure out why every farm around has these hibernating microbes in the soil, but they haven't found them in the soil in any of the uninhabited areas or even in town. At least, not yet. Interesting, isn't it?"

Katie was playing tag with the boys, totally oblivious to the death sentence that hung over her head.

"Let's take it one step at a time. For now, how about setting a goal of learning differential equations?"

"Then break it into smaller pieces and learn a little at a time, but don't ever give up. You've got more motivation than any student I've ever encountered. Don't let your father or anyone else tell you that you can't do this."

"Do you think I can do it?" I studied him carefully, knowing he had a way of blinking his eyes when he lied.

Through the window, I could see Katie, Eli, Jr., Andy, and Mike playing outside and I could see Jenny, Dad, and Eli in the field. I could also see my mother, standing tall and strong, with her arms spread wide. I couldn't save Mom. I couldn't save Jenny. Maybe I could save Katie.

I hooked into the learning module again and began the impossible task of learning differential equations one lesson at a time.

Jenny became a scarecrow right before I left on my first field trip. I barely had time to clean up the house after the wake and get the children settled down before the crew arrived for me. For the next three days, I drove one of those houses on wheels, which was filled with equipment and empty of any humans except me. I talked to everyone in the crew via headset and they seemed friendly enough… until we reached the site they planned to study. Then, I could see how they stared at me when I walked around outside without a contamination suit and how they eyed my trousers. Despite all their kind words and their good intentions, it was obvious the three women in the seven-man crew were terrified of me.

They had no reason to fear me. No one in town had ever developed the symptoms. This wasn't something that spread through casual human contact. Even I knew better than that.

Our culture was different from the off-worlders. They didn't marry for life. They put their babies in incubators instead of carrying them next to their hearts. Maybe that was part of why their ways were so different from our own. I viewed them as some kind of human aliens and they viewed me as something like a Neathendral. Still, I didn't realize just how little they thought of us until I walked back to the site after gathering some soil and vegetation samples and caught part of a conversation that I wasn't intended to hear.

"—A waste of time and money that could be better spent elsewhere." Sasha handed a box of soil samples up to Matt, who was loading them into the bus's storage section. "We should have sterilized them long ago. Give them enough supplies to live out their natural lives as comfortably as possible and start a settlement somewhere that's not contaminated."

"And how can we be certain another area wouldn't be contaminated?" That was Maya, the technician in charge of our little group. "The microbe is benign in the men and only activates in women during the hormone levels that exist during pregnancy…"

I nearly fell backwards when I heard those words. They knew the cause and that symptoms were triggered by pregnancy; yet they hadn't said a word to anyone. They hadn't warned us. They hadn't done anything to stop the disease from ravaging a woman's body and turning her into a scarecrow. They'd lied to us… at least by omission.

I leaned forward slightly. Maya's voice was soft and I could barely hear her above the wind.

"Colonists don't use replicators. They've got this odd fixation on DNA relationships. They don't even use incubators. I think it's a little sick."

She paused and I heard her moving around. I didn't dare step forward to see what she was doing. "You're absolutely certain no microbes are in these samples?"

""One hundred percent certain," Matt said. "You can run the tests again."

"I will. And these soil samples will be sent off for more tests off-world to verify the results before we make any decisions about how to terminate and sterilize this section. I swear it almost makes me ready to believe the theory that it wasn't a terraforming mistake, but a deliberate poisoning."

I had gripped the tube holding her soil sample so tightly that it cracked loudly and fell apart in my hand. I stood still, waiting to hear someone ask, "What was that?" But no one did.

"Leesa –" Matt started to say something, but Maya interrupted.

""...Is a girl terrified of becoming a woman because here, that means becoming a scarecrow," Maya finished for him. "Someone should warn her."

"You're not thinking of telling her?" Sasha sounded shocked.

"Of course not," Maya snapped back. "I don't know why they insisted on sending her out here with us. We're just the technicians. We follow orders and leave the important things to the doctors. No doubt, they know better than us lowly folk."

Sarcasm. Maya's voice was full of it. And pain, too. There was so much that was alien about these people. It was hard to believe we were the same species.

"They intend to use her as our go-between with the infected families," Matt said.

"How do you know that?" Sasha and Maya asked, their question barely discernible as their voices mixed together.

"I was cleaning one of the labs when they came in and started talking about it." Matt's voice shifted to a much lower tone, like it did sometimes when he was imitating one of the doctors to amuse his co-workers. "It'll be easier to control the population if one of their own is involved, dispensing advice, versus a group of outsiders telling them what to do. It's a technique which has worked well before in other places."

""I can't wait to get out of here," Sasha said. "I didn't realize how bad it was or how long it was going to last when I signed on for this. Those microbes can hibernate forever. I still say we should just wipe the place and be done with it. There are other worlds."

"I think it's a little too coincidental that they're only in the area of the settlement," Matt said. "It's like something the farmers are doing is drawing the microbes to them and they're really all around us, invisible until they show up in the soil sample or in the human population."

"You're suggesting that when farmers move into an area, microbes move through several feet of rock and soil to reach the surface and infect them?" Sasha asked. "We've taken soil samples ten feet down and found nothing."

I swallowed hard at the single word that had popped into my head while Matt talked. Water was under our feet. Not in town, though. They got their water from a reservoir. They had a nice filtration and purification system.

So did we… on our wells. Still, there was something about water that made my skin feel cold; like my subconscious was trying to tell me something I knew and didn't quite remember.

I brushed my hands against my jeans and tried to remember everything I'd learned about the underground streams on this planet and well water. You never took the first well because it contained soil run-off and the filtration systems would wear out faster. We took the second wells and those were filtered and free of microbes. The tests always came back negative.

But the microbes were in the soil and our soil was irrigated by the first well… which had no filtration system installed. Purification systems for irrigation systems were unnecessary expenses and farmers didn't waste funds on anything that wasn't vital.

These off-world technicians, scientists, and doctors had taken tissue samples, blood samples, soil samples, and well water samples, but they'd never once touched the irrigation systems or even asked any hard questions about them.

Matt was right; the microbes were beneath their feet, just waiting to be brought to the surface again. All they needed to do to eliminate the problem was filter the irrigation systems like they did the drinking water.

It would mean abandoning the current settlement or at least evacuating long enough to sterilize the soil and then insure that all irrigation systems were fitted with filtration systems.

I should have stood up and walked over to them to tell them what I suspected. Instead, I sat there, thinking about how they'd react when I told them.

They wouldn't believe me at first. I was a slow, native child who couldn't possibly have discovered a clue they'd all ignored.

When they finally believed me... and they would, eventually, believe me... then they would insure the next group of settlers filtered all their water and they'd pack up their bags to abandon us to our fate.

I walked far away from camp, to a place where I was certain no one would hear me, and then I buried my face in my hands and cried until there were no tears left.

I'd been back for a week when Dad caught me sitting at my desk, with the tutor turned off, staring at the wall. "If you're not studying, then get yourself out into the field with the rest of us before the weeds crowd out the corn.

I had no excuse, so I wandered outside and started hoeing along with everyone else. I hadn't been working more than an hour before I saw Katie cup her hands under one of the irrigation system's rubber hoses.

"No! Katie! Don't!" I screamed so loudly that Eli and Dad came running from the barn.

They both stared at me for the longest time before Dad said, "Leesa? It's not like you to get all worked up over something like that. What's really going on?"

I let out a deep sigh. It was probably too late for Katie... she must have been drinking from those hoses all along... but it wasn't too late for the neighborhood babies. "It's the water supply. I'm certain of it. The irrigation system isn't filtered."

Dad stared at me for the longest time before asking, "What about the irrigation system?"

He grabbed his stomach and doubled over until his hair touched the tops of the corn and he stayed there for a good, long minute before slowly raising his head to look up at me.

He looked down at his dirt-caked boots and didn’t look up again. "Mr. Harris says you're doing well in your studies; but you're no scientist."

"He said I was doing well." I choked back anger and tried to keep my voice low, because I didn't want to frighten the children. "You're the one who says I'm no scientist. Maybe I'm not now, but I could become one if I just had the chance."

We stared at each other again for the longest time, neither one of us willing to yield. Finally, I said, "The microbes are in the soil. They're not in our well water. They're not in the soil anywhere outside the settlement. Our drinking water is filtered. Our irrigation water isn't. You don't have to be a scientist to figure out how the microbes are getting into the soil and our bodies."

He looked down at the ground again. "There's one farm that put a filter on its irrigation well."

He nodded and I moaned softly. Pain and joy. Both from being right.

"Have you told them?" Dad asked.

"Don't. They'll just bring in new colonists to settle the rest of the world and abandon us to our fate." He paused before adding, "I'll pass the word along to everyone else so we can spare the next generation. In the meantime, I want you to continue trying to get them to find a cure for the rest of us."

I nodded and swallowed bitterness. Try to get them to find a cure. Not find a cure. Dad had no faith in my ability to solve anything.

Three weeks later, Dr. Allison interrupted me while I was studying the hardest lesson I'd hit yet. I was trying to make sense of Organic Chemistry when her image appeared between the text and me and I heard her words overriding those of the tutor.

Her image appeared and her lips were a straight line across her face. "I have a feeling that you discovered something while you were on that field trip and that you felt you couldn't share this information with us for some reason. I suspect that you've formed a theory that the infection is originating in the water supply, even though we've tested your wells numerous times. Would you confirm or reject my analysis and, if I'm correct, tell me why you think the problem is in the water supply?"

My fingers went numb. The pen slipped out of my hand and fell to the floor. The lie took a little more effort to push out. "I didn't think anyone would believe me."

You're more interested in saving the world than helping any of us!" Dad always had said my temper would be my downfall.

"I'm sorry you feel this way, but I assure you that we're interested in both saving the world and saving your family and neighbors. Why do they think filtering their well water with newer filters will help?"

I sighed and gave up. Dr. Allison had a reputation for seeing through anyone's lies. "Because they never filtered the wells that feed the irrigation systems."

Her eyes widened a little, but her expression remained as unreadable as ever. "So the source is water and it's in your soil because your fields are irrigated with unfiltered water?"

"Interesting. We were so intent upon the hard questions that we overlooked the simply ones. Congratulations, Leesa."

I must have looked as shocked as I felt because she added, "Don't worry. I'm not talking about changing mating habits. I'm thinking of ways that people could reproduce without the change in hormone levels. Incubators are expensive, but –"

"Your children are the people you parent regardless of biology, but I concede colonists treat the matter differently." Dr. Allison drummed on her desk for a few moments before asking, "If they could be assured that the children are their own biological offspring, would they accept incubators?"

And I couldn't understand how they could just put a child together from various tubes and call it their own. "Leesa, I'm going to be very blunt with you. We have limited funds and we've already exceeded our budget for this world. It's easier and cheaper to start another colony elsewhere on this world than to try to cure people who don't want to cooperate with us. Do you think you can at least persuade them to stop reproducing?"

"Ah. So that's why you're so suspicious. You overheard something?"

"I nodded and ducked my head. "I heard that you knew it was triggered by hormone levels during pregnancy. And you didn't tell us and let people keep having babies and turning into scarecrows."

I squirmed under her gaze. It would have kept me from having children, but not anyone else. Of course they wouldn't have changed their behavior.

"Short of sterilizing everyone without their consent, what would you suggest we do?"

But it was. Or it would be, for them. They were a thousand times smarter than me. All they lacked was the motivation.

How could I answer her question with words she would understand? It was unnatural and no one I knew could ever accept it. Even I couldn't accept it and I'd had far more education than anyone else on this planet.

I shook my head. "No." It never occurred to me that I was condemning my people with that single word.

"Then we have no alternative except to continue working and hoping for a breakthrough." Dr. Allison's voice sounded a little strained to my ears. She didn't understand. None of them would understand and they'd stop trying to find a cure.

The solution was so obvious. I didn't know why I didn't think of it earlier. All I had to do was find a way to infect the scientists and then they'd find a cure fast enough.

I sat there for hours. Never moving. Never saying a word. Letting everyone believe I was studying and not contemplating the greatest crime ever committed on our world.

We are plain people. Farmers. We don't even cheat at cards. Our children never fight except verbally. No adult ever raises a hand in anger against anyone else. Intentionally injuring someone else was unthinkable. We had a history of over a thousand years of pacifist behavior. Dr. Allison had once told me that we could never, ever physically injure anyone because we'd interbred so much for so long that there weren't any of us left who could do anything that we thought was morally wrong.

But I was thinking about it.

I should have expected, or at least suspected, what they would do next. After all, Dr. Allison had certainly hinted at the possibility.

Not two days later, a sweet-smelling cloud descended upon our farm during the night. We woke up to a dark world where the swirling gray mass was so thick that we couldn't even see Mom from the kitchen window. Later, we learned that everyone else had the same experience.

They had sterilized us. Customized, air-borne viruses, no doubt designed from all the DNA samples we'd given them over the years. Only the youngest generation was unaffected and that didn't become apparent for many years.

It was all my fault. If I'd just lied and had claimed that everyone would accept the incubators with me in charge, they might have delayed doing this or maybe even not done it at all.

There was only one thing I could do to save us. I had to infect all of them before they packed away their houses on wheels and all their other technology and left. It was the only way they'd stay and it was the only way to motivate them to find a cure. A cure that did not involve sterilization.

As soon as the cloud cleared, I headed out to the barn, where I knew I could find everything I needed. All farmers kept a good supply of livestock drugs, syringes, and vials.

Katie wandered into the barn not more than five steps behind me. No matter how many times we told her never to bother me there, she always followed me around like a little shadow.

Mixing poison. "Listening to a little girl who's in a place she's not supposed to be. Why don't you go outside and play with your brothers?"

I dropped one of the vials onto the ground and the liquid spilled across the dirt floor.

Katie plopped herself down on the floor, safely away form the spilled liquid and asked, "How come you're not wearing a skirt? Aunt Tina is."

She stood up and brushed off her jeans. "You're just mean because you no man will have you."

"Where did you hear that?" Katie would never have thought something like that by herself.

I stopped and thought about the boys I'd talked to there and then the men. Jerks! One of them had asked if I'd eaten a dictionary for breakfast… like it was bad to have a good vocabulary.

The words had just slipped out, but now I had to stop and think about them. If I didn't want any of the boys in New Haven, just how was I expecting to have the same life as my mom would have enjoyed if it hadn't been cut short by turning into a scarecrow? Those babies wouldn't happen without a husband. Not even if they found a cure and put everything back the way it was before. I might be able to manage a farm by myself – the widow had done well enough – but making babies took two people. At least, they did on this world.

Here, I was too smart. Off-world, I'd be too dumb. Since I didn't have any hope left, I might as well sacrifice myself to save my people.

Katie reached for one of the vials and I grabbed her hand. "If you don't want to play, then go plug into your studybook."

She made a face, but walked out the door. Not long after, I had five vials ready.

Now all I had to do was figure out how to get my blood into the five female off worlders so they'd be contaminated, too.

Most women didn't turn into scarecrows until after at least one pregnancy so I'd need to inject them with hormones, too. I could do this. It wasn't really hurting them. They were smart enough to save themselves and when they did, they'd save all of us as well.

But what if they couldn't find a cure? What if no one was smart enough? I'd be condemning them to the same fate as everyone else. It would be murder... something I'd only read about in history books and had never been able to contemplate.

The vials were still there, in the barn, inside an environmentally controlled storage unit three days later when a neighbor rode up on his horse and yelled, "It's Tina! She's about to scarecrow."

I stood up to gather everything together, just like I had when we went to Carrie's scarecrowing, but Dad grabbed my arm.

"I'm staying here with the children," he said. "Seeing Carrie go was like seeing your mother change. I can't do it again. Eli feels the same. But you go. Someone from our family should be there for her. I don't want her to change alone."

He turned away -- unable to meet my eyes -- and walked back into the field. Coward! They were all cowards! I saddled up a horse while cursing silently and shooing the children away when they showed up to beg to go along.

I think it was how I said it, more than what I said, that sent they running to the field to grab hold of Dad and Eli like a monster was chasing them. Right then, I felt like a monster. I would have injected every off-worlder with both the microbe and the hormones if I could have gotten my hands on them at that moment and I wouldn't have cared at all what they did to me

I wiped tears from my eyes, mounted the horse, and kicked her into a fast trot and then a canter and finally a full gallop. The horse was wet and tired when I reached Tina's home and I didn't dare take the time to cool her down.

"Tina?" I turned the corner and saw her standing there, wild-eyed. Her mind was almost gone. I recognized that look too well.

It was a lie. I could have done more. I could still do more. I had to do more. I had to infect all of them and force symptoms on them. Then we'd get our cure.

Tina screamed once. Loud and long. She screamed even louder and longer while she walked up and down the rows of beans, but it was that first scream that sent chills up and down my spine and haunted me for days afterwards.

I stood there and watched her walk the rows until the off-worlders' mobile laboratory arrived and Dr. Allison stepped out, threw her helmet aside, and rushed forward to embrace me.

I reached for her throat, wanting to strangle her, and instead, I collapsed into her arms and cried until my whole body shook. Dr. Allison took me into the laboratory and made me sit down while she gave me something that deadened the pain and made me sleep.

When I woke up, my sister was a cold, gray bolder standing in the field. A scarecrow.

They took me back to their laboratory and put me to bed in one of the homes closest to their main building. Everyone made a fuss over me and even Maya treated me like she cared about how I felt. It was a marvelous feeling, being the one waited upon rather than doing the waiting and cleaning up after everyone. I could get to like this kind of life and yet I dared not.

I feigned exhaustion and slept until night arrived and most of the others fell asleep. Then I wandered into the laboratory and talked to Matt, who was apparently the only person on night watch.

He wasn't the least bit suspicious of my questions. Not even when he showed me how to use a syringe to take a blood sample... something he should have expected me to know from years of working with the livestock.

None of them locked their doors. They had no reason to fear anyone inside their compounds. Injections were painless with their needles and I had no trouble filling another five vials with blood.

Dr. Allison looked human and vulnerable lying there in her pod. I reached for her arm and hesitated.

I don't know why I hesitated. I'll never know why. I just know that I stood there, wanting her infected and willing myself to do it, and yet I couldn't move.

I stood there all night, watching her chest rise and fall and listening to the soft whisper of her breath. I watched her eyes move back and forth underneath her eyelids and I thought of my sisters and Katie and everyone else who needed me to do this thing. I must have leaned forward to inject her a thousand times that night and yet... I couldn't do it.

I wanted to do it. I tried to do it. My hands wouldn't move and I finally sat down on the floor and cried until dawn.

There isn't a minute that I don't long for the chance to go back and do it over again and yet there's a part of me that knows that if I could go back, I'd do the same thing all over again.

We are plain people and no matter how different I might have become, I was still as much a part of this community as anyone. I could not injure another human... not even to save our way of life.

I don't know what it is about the off-worlders that is so different from us; but I recognize it's there. We may have been the same species once, but I really don't think we are anymore and the longer I live, the more convinced I am that this is so. I didn't even need to hear about the trial to recognize our differences.

Yes, there was a trial. We cannot hurt others but for reasons we'll never understand, some people want to hurt us. Maybe it's envy or jealousy or just something wrong about the off-worlders. They make babies with machines and they say they take all the bad things out but I think they take the good things out at well.

No. That is unfair. It was only one man and we never understood why he hated us so much that he designed the Scarecrow disease and inflicted it upon us, targeting us in a way that he thought would cause us the most pain and humilation.. None of us testified at his trial because it is not our way. We do not bear witness against others.

The trial brought a great deal of attention to our plight and that was both our salvation and our curse. The attention led authorities to revoke their quarrantine and to restore our ability to bear children. The attention also lead off-worlders to become so curious about us that they were willing to travel long distances to stare at us.

At first, my people refused to allow any of those tourists in their bubble cars to set one wheel inside our area, but there are things that wear out and need replacement and not everything a person needs can be grown from the soil. In the end, we worked out an arrangement that benefited all of us and gave me something to do with that odd education of mine.

I greet them wearing a skirt. It adds to the aura and mystery and gives us another product to sell in the souvenir shop along with our quilts and other handmade objects.

This is not the life I'd expected to live but I am not who I had expected to become.

I am the only plain person who ever contemplated harming another living being. It is my punishment to spend all the days of my life with off-worlders and scarecrows.