SHEVA + 15
“Activist SHEVA parents held in federal detention for two years or more without charges, under Emergency Action rules, may finally have their cases reviewed by state circuit courts, in apparent defiance of secret Presidential Decision Directives, says an unnamed source in the office of California's attorney general.”
“Visitation rights for SHEVA parents at EMAC schools may be restored on a case-by-case basis, according to Cabinet-level administration officials testifying before Congress. No further details have been made available. Civilian Review of National Health and Safety, a government watchdog group associated with the Green Party, says it will protest this change in policy.”
—New York Times E-line National Crisis Shorts
“ ‘They set off bombs. They torch themselves and block traffic. Their children carry diseases we can't begin to imagine. Hell, the parents themselves can make us sick and even kill us. If it's a choice between their civil liberties and keeping my own beautiful, normal children disease free, then to hell with liberty. I say screw the ACLU. Always have, always will.’ ”
—Representative Harold Barren, R-North Carolina;
speaking for the House Floor Liberty Minute
“Fifteen years and the strain is killing us. It cannot go on.
“When we suspend habeas corpus and nobody blinks, when our neighbors and relatives and even our children are hauled away in unmarked trucks and we huddle in fearful relief, the end of an entire way of life, of the American philosophy and psychology, is near, too near, perhaps upon us already.
“A government based on fear attracts the worst elements, who corrupt it from within. A shaky edifice, a government against its people, any of its people, must soon collapse.”
—Jeremy Willis, The New Republic
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The clouds over the capital were swollen and green with rain. The air felt close and sticky. Kaye took a government car from Dulles. She wore a trim gray suit with a pale yellow blouse, ruffled collar and sleeves, sensible walking shoes, dress pumps in her bag. She had carefully made up her face late in the morning and touched up in a restroom at Dulles. She knew how she looked: pale, thin, face a deeper shade of powdery beige than her wrists. Middle-aged and frail. Too much time spent in laboratories, not enough looking at the sun or seeing the sky.
She could have been any one of ten thousand professional workers leaving the long blocky tan-and-gray buildings around Washington, waiting for traffic to clear, stopping off for a drink or a coffee, meeting coworkers for dinner. She preferred the anonymity.
Last night, Kaye had carefully studied the briefing folio from Senator Gianelli's office. What she had read in that folio she could clearly see on the drive from Dulles. The capital was losing the last of its self-respect. On some streets, garbage pickups had been delayed for weeks without explanation. National guard and regular army troops walked around the streets in trios, firearms slung and clips loaded. Military and security vehicles—Humvees, bomb-squad trucks, armored personnel carriers—sat on key streets, humped up on sidewalks or blocking intersections. Concrete barriers that shifted every day and multiple checkpoints with armored ID kiosks made travel to government buildings tortuous.
The capital even smelled sick. Washington had become a city of long, sad lines, drawn faces, rumpled clothing. Everyone feared people in long coats, delivery trucks, boxes left on streets, and posters taped to walls demanding obscure justice and hiding thin, nasty bombs beneath to blow up those who would try to take them down.
Only the clowns and the monsters looked healthy and happy. Only clowns and monsters found their careers advancing in Washington, D.C., in the fifteenth year of SHEVA.
The driver told her the hearing had been delayed and they had some time to kill. Kaye asked him to stop in front of a Stefano's bookstore on K Street. She thought about eating but she could not rouse an appetite. She just wanted to be alone for a few minutes to think.
Kaye pulled up the strap on her shoulder bag and entered the retail-grade checkpoint outside the bookstore. A large, heavy guard in an ill-fitting uniform with all the buttons straining looked her over with a blank expression and motioned for her to apply thumb to scanner, then waved her through the metal detector. Sniffers whuffed, checking for traces of explosives or suspicious volatiles.
Perfume had become a no-no in the city.
“Clear,” the guard said, his voice like soft thunder. “Y'all have a good evening.”
Outside, the rain began to fall. Kaye looked back through a display window and saw trash floating down the gutters, paper bags and cups bobbing along. The gutters were clogging and water would soon back up.
She knew she needed some food. She should not attend the hearing on an empty stomach, and she had not eaten since ten that morning. It was five now. Soup and sandwiches were available at a small café inside the store. But Kaye walked past the menu board without stopping, on some sort of autopilot. Her walking shoes made damp sucking sounds on the linoleum as she passed several deep aisles of bookshelves. Fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed overhead. A young man with long felted hair sat on a patched chair, half-empty knapsack crumpled in his lap, asleep. A paperback Bible lay open facedown on the arm of the chair.
God sleeping.
Without thinking, Kaye turned right and found herself in the religion section. Most of the shelves were filled with brightly colored apocalypse novels. E-paper holograms leaped from lurid covers as she passed: end time, rapture, revelation, demons and dark angels. Most of the books had speaker chips that could read out the entire story. The same chips replaced jacket copy with vocal come-ons. The shelves murmured softly in a wave, like ghosts triggered by Kaye's brief passage.
Serious theology texts had been crowded out. She found a single shelf concealed high in the back, near the brick wall. It was cold in that corner and the books were worn and dusty.
Eyes wide, ill at ease, Kaye touched the spines and read one title, then another. None seemed right. Most were contemporary Christian commentaries, not what she was looking for. Some lashed out angrily at Darwinism and modern science.
She turned slowly and looked down the aisle, listening to the books, their competing voices sibilant like falling leaves. Then she frowned and returned to the lone shelf. She was determined to find something useful. She tugged out a book called Talking With the Only God. Skimming through five pages, she found big print, wide margins, self-righteous but simple instructions on how to live a Christian life in troubled times. Not good. Not what I need.
She replaced the book with a grimace and turned to leave. An older man and woman blocked the aisle, smiling at her. Kaye held her breath, eyes shifting. She was sure her driver had come into the store but could not remember seeing him.
“Are you seeking?” the man asked. He was tall and skeletally thin with a short cap of braided white hair. He wore a black suit. The way his coat sleeves rode up his wrists reminded Kaye of Mitch, but the man himself did not. He looked determined and a little fake, like a mannequin or a bad actor. The woman was equally tall, thin through the waist but with fleshy arms. She wore a long dress that clung to her thighs.
“I beg your pardon?” Kaye asked.
“There are better places to seek, and better texts to find,” the man said.
“Thanks, I'm fine,” Kaye said. She looked away and reached for another book, hoping they would leave her alone.
“What are you seeking?” the woman asked.
“I was just browsing. Nothing specific,” Kaye said, avoiding their eyes.
“You won't find answers here,” the man said.
The driver was not in sight. Kaye was on her own, and this probably wasn't serious anyway. She tried to appear friendly and unconcerned.
“There's only one valid translation of the Lord's words,” the man said. “We find them in the King James Bible. God watched over King James like a holy flame.”
“I've heard that,” Kaye said.
“Which church do you attend?”
“No church,” she said. She had come to the end of the aisle and the pair had not moved. “Excuse me. I have an appointment.” Kaye clutched her purse to her side.
“Have you made peace with God?” the woman asked.
The man lifted his hand as if in benediction. “We lose our families, the families of God. In our sin, in homosexuality and promiscuity and following the ways of the Arab and the Jew, the pagan gods of the Web and TV, we stray from the path of God and God's punishment is swift.” He swept his hand with a scowl at the whispering books on the shelves. “It is useless to seek His truth in the voices of the devil's machines.”
Kaye's eyes crinkled. She suddenly felt angry and perversely in control, even predatory, as if she were the hawk and they were the pigeons. The woman noticed the change. The man did not. “Terence,” the woman said and touched the man's elbow. He looked down from the ceiling, meeting Kaye's steady glare and reeling in his spiel with a surprised galumph and a bobble of his Adam's apple.
“I'm alone,” Kaye said. She offered this like bait, hoping they would bite and she would have them. “My husband just got out of prison. My daughter is in a school.”
“I'm so sorry. Are you all right?” the woman asked Kaye with an equal mix of suspicion and solicitude.
“What kind of daughter?” the man asked. “A daughter of sin and disease?” The woman tugged hard on his sleeve. His Adam's apple bobbled again, and their eyes darted over her clothes as if looking for suspicious bulges.
Kaye squared her shoulders and shoved out her hand to get through.
“I know you,” the man continued, despite his wife's tugging. “I recognize you now. You're the scientist. You discovered the sick children.”
Confined by the aisle, Kaye's throat closed in. She coughed. “I have to go.”
The man made one last attempt, brave enough, to get through to her. “Even a scientist in self-centered love with her own mind, suffocating in the fame of television exposure, can learn to know God.”
“You've spoken to Him?” Kaye demanded. “You've talked to God?” She grabbed his arm and dug into the fabric and the flesh beneath with her fingernails.
“I pray all the time,” the man said, drawing back. “God is my Father in Heaven. He is always listening.”
Kaye tightened her grip. “Has God ever answered you?” she asked.
“His answers are many.”
“Do you ever feel God in your head?”
“Please,” the man said, wincing.
“Let him go,” the woman insisted, trying to push her arm between them.
“God doesn't talk to you? How weird.” Kaye advanced, pushing both back. “Why wouldn't God talk to you?”
“We fear God, we pray, and He answers in many ways.”
“God doesn't stick around when things get ugly. What kind of God is that? He's like a recorded message, some sort of God service that puts you on hold when you're screaming. Explain it to me. God says he loves me but dumps me into a world of pain. You, so full of hate, so ignorant, he leaves alone. Self-righteous bigots he doesn't even touch. Explain that to me!”
She let go of the man's arm.
The couple turned with stricken looks and fled.
Kaye stood with the murmuring books lapsing into silence behind her. Her chest heaved and her cheeks were flushed and moist.
“All right,” she said to the empty aisle.
After a decent interval, to avoid meeting the couple outside, she left the store. She ignored the guard's irritated glower.
She stood under the eaves breathing in the heat and the humidity and listening to real thunder, far off over Virginia. The government car came around the corner and stopped at the black-striped yellow curb in front of the store. “Sorry,” the driver said. Kaye looked through the limo's window and saw for the first time how young the driver was, and how worried. “Store security ignored my license. No place to park. Goddamned guard fingered his holster at me. Jesus Christ, Mrs. Rafelson, I'm sorry. Is everything okay?”
Hart Senate Office Building
Plenary Session of the Senate Emergency Action Oversight Committee,
Closed Hearing
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mark Augustine waited patiently in the antechambers until called to take his seat. It was duly noted that he was the former director of Emergency Action. The nine senators assembled for this unusual evening session—five Republicans and four Democrats—exchanged edgy pleasantries for a few minutes. Two of the Democrats observed, for the record, that the current director was late. As well, Senator Gianelli was not present.
The chair, Senator Julia Thomasen of Maryland, expressed her aggravation and wondered who had called the meeting. No one was clear on that.
The meeting began without the director and Gianelli, and lacking any obvious point or focus, soon devolved into a testy debate about the events that had led to Mark Augustine's dismissal three years earlier.
Augustine sat back in his chair, folded his hands in his lap, and let the senators argue. He had come to the Hill to testify fifty-three times in his career. Power did not impress him. Lack of power impressed him. Everyone in this room, as far as he was concerned, was almost completely powerless.
And—if the rumors were true—what they did not know was about to bite them right on the ass.
The minority Democrats held sway for a few minutes, deftly entering their comments into the record. Senator Charles Chase of Arizona began the questioning of Augustine as a matter of senatorial courtesy. His questions soon led to the role of the state of Ohio in the death of SHEVA children.
“Madam Chair,” bellowed Senator Percy from Ohio, “I resent the implication that the state of Ohio was in any way responsible for this debacle.”
“Senator Percy, Senator Chase has the floor,” Senator Thomasen reminded him.
“I resent the entire subject area,” Percy bellowed.
“Noted. Please continue, Senator Chase.”
“Madam Chair, I am only following the line of questioning begun last week by Senator Gianelli, who is not, I hope, indisposed today, not with a virus, at least.”
No laughter in the Senate chamber. Chase continued without missing a beat. “I mean no disrespect to the honorable senator from Ohio.”
Senator Percy flipped his hand out over the chamber as if he would have gladly tossed them all through a window. “Personal corruption should not reflect ill on such a fine state.”
“Nor am I impugning the reputation of Ohio, which is where I was born, Madam Chair. May I continue my questions?”
“What in hell made you move, Charlie?” Percy asked. “We could use your eagle eye.” He grinned to the nearly empty room. Only a grandstanding senator—or an aging vaudevillian—could imagine an audience where there was none, Augustine mused. He unfolded his hands to tap his finger lightly on the table.
“Chair asks for a minimum of unchecked camaraderie.”
“I'm done, Madam Chair,” Percy announced, sitting back and wrapping his hands behind his neck.
Augustine sipped slowly from a glass of water.
“Perhaps our questions should be more pointed, dealing more with responsibility and less with geography,” Thomasen suggested.
“Hear, hear,” Percy said.
“When you were in charge of the school system for Emergency Action, did you supply all schools—even state-controlled schools—with the federally mandated allotments for medical supplies?” Chase continued.
“We did, Senator,” Augustine said.
“These supplies included the very antivirals that might have saved these unfortunate children?”
“They did.”
“In how many states was there sufficient supply of these antivirals to treat sick children?”
“Five; six, if we include the territory of Puerto Rico.”
“My state, doctor, was one of those five?”
“It was, Senator,” Augustine said.
The senator paused to let that sink in. “The supply of antivirals was sufficient to take care of the children in our custody—our care. Arizona did not lose nearly as many children as most. And that supply was insured because Arizona did not seek to control and divert the federal allotments and allocations for Emergency Action schools, a hijacking sponsored by the Republican majority, if I remember correctly?”
“Yes, Senator.” Augustine tapped his finger again on the table. Now was not the time to bring up Arizona's current record. There were rumors that the children of dissidents were being warehoused in schools there. He no longer had access to the lists, of course.
“Is it fair to say that you lost your job because of this fiasco?” Chase asked.
“It was part of the larger picture,” Augustine said.
“A large part, I presume.”
Augustine gave the merest nod.
“Do you continue to consult for the Emergency Action Authority?”
“I serve as adviser on viral affairs to the director of the National Institutes of Health. I still have an office in Bethesda.”
Chase searched his papers for more material, then added, “Your star is not completely out of the firmament in this matter?”
“I suppose not, Senator.”
“And what is the authority's budget this year?” Chase looked up innocently.
“You of all people should know that, Charlie,” Senator Percy grumbled.
“Emergency Action's budget is not subject to yearly congressional review, nor is it available for direct public scrutiny,” Augustine said. “I don't have exact figures myself, but I would estimate the present budget at over eighty billion dollars—double what it was when I served as director. That includes research and development in the private and public sector.”
Thomasen looked around the room with a frown. “The director is tardy.”
“She is not here to defend herself,” Percy observed with amusement. Thomasen nodded for Chase to continue, and then conferred with an intern.
Chase closed in on his favorite topic. “Emergency Action has become one of the biggest government programs in this nation, successfully fighting off all attempts to limit its scope and investigate its constitutionality in a time of drastic fiscal cutbacks, has it not?”
“All true,” Augustine said.
“And with this budget, approved by both Republican and Democratic administrations year after year, EMAC has spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers to defend its questionable legality, has it not?”
“The very best, Senator.”
“And does it pay any attention to the wishes of Congress, or of this oversight committee? Even to the extent that the director arrives on time when summoned?”
Senator Percy from Ohio exhaled over his microphone, creating the sensation of a great wind in the chamber. “Where are we going, Madam Chair? Haven't we enough black eyes to go around?”
“We lost seventy-five thousand children, Senator Percy!” Chase roared.
Percy riposted immediately. “They were killed by a disease, Senator Chase, not by my constituents, nor indeed by any of the normal citizens—the true citizens—of my great state, or this fine country.” Percy avoided the hawklike gaze of the senator from Arizona.
“Dr. Augustine, is it not the scientific conclusion that this new variety of virus—hand, foot, and mouth disease—arose within the so-called normal adult population, in part through recombination of ancient viral genes not found within SHEVA children?” Chase asked.
“It is,” Augustine said.
“Many prominent scientists disagree,” Percy said, and lifted his hand as if to fend off the sudden rap of the gavel.
“And did you predict that just the reverse would happen, fourteen years ago, a statement that practically led to the creation of Emergency Action?”
“The reverse being . . .” Augustine said, lifting his brows.
“That the children would create new viruses that would kill us, Doctor.”
Augustine nodded. “I did.”
“And is that not still a scientific possibility, Dr. Augustine?” Percy demanded.
“It hasn't happened, Senator,” Augustine said mildly.
Percy moved in. “Come on, Dr. Augustine. It's your theory. Is it not likely that this deadly viral outbreak will happen soon, given the possibility that these children might perceive that they are under threat, and that many of these old viruses respond to the chemicals, steroids, or whatever, that we make when we are unhappy or stressed?”
Augustine subdued a twitch of his lips. The senator was showing some education. “I suggest that perhaps the children have already turned the other cheek, and it is time now for us to show some charity. We could relieve some of their stress. And we should recognize them for what they are, not what we fear they might become.”
“They are the mutated products of a deadly viral disease,” Percy said, straightening his microphone with a scraping noise.
“They are our children,” Augustine said.
“Never!” Percy shouted.
Sable Mountain Emergency Action School
ARIZONA
Without explanation, Stella's evening study hour had been canceled and she had been told to go to the gym. The building was empty and the basketball made a clapping echo with each resonant bounce.
Stella ran toward the end of the court, worn sneakers squeaking on the rubbery paint that covered the hard concrete. She spun around for a layup and watched the ball circle the hoop, hiccup, then drop through. There was no net to slow its fall. She deftly grabbed the ball as it fell and ran around the court to do it again. Mitch had taught her how to shoot hoops when she was eight. She remembered a little about the rules, though not much.
Stella's bunkmate, black-haired Celia Northcott, wandered into the gym fifteen minutes later. Celia was a year younger but seemed more mature. She had been born as a twin but her sister had died while only a few months old. This was common among SHEVA twins; usually, only one survived. Celia made up for a tendency toward sadness with a brittle cheer that sometimes irritated Stella. Celia was full of schemes, and was probably the most avid constructor of demes—social groupings of SHEVA children—and plans about how to live when they grew up.
She was nursing her arm—a bandage covered her wrist—and grimaced as Stella held the ball and queried her with a freckle flash and stare.
“Blood,” Celia said, and sat cross-legged on the side of the court. “About a gallon.”
“Why?” Stella asked.
“How should I know? KUK/ I had a nightmare last night.” Celia's tongue caught and she made her signature glottal click, which almost obscured her underspeech. Celia was not very good at double speaking. Someone, she never said who, had tried to mutilate her tongue when she was eight years old. This she had revealed to Stella late at night, when Stella had found her huddled in a corner of the barracks, crying and smelling of electric onions. The facile ridge found in most of the children was a white scar on Celia's tongue, and she sometimes slurred her words, or inserted a hard clucking sound.
Stella squatted beside Celia and lightly bounced her palm off the ball, held in the nest of her legs. Nobody knew why the counselors took so much blood, but visits to the hospital usually followed upsets or unusual behavior; that much Stella had deduced. “How long did they keep you?”
“Until morning.”
“Anything new in the hospital?” That was what they called the administration building, adjacent to the counselor and teacher dormitories, all beyond a razor-wire topped fence that surrounded the boys' and girls' compounds.
Celia shook her head. “They gave me oatmeal and eggs for breakfast,” she said. “And a big glass of orange juice.”
“Did they do a biopsy?”
Celia bit her lip and let her eyes grow large. “No. Who's had-KUK a biopsy?”
“Beth Fremont says one of the boys told her. Right out of his . . . you know.” She pointed down and tapped the basketball.
“Kweeee,” Celia whistle-tongued.
“What did you dream?” Stella asked.
“I don't remember. I just woke up with a screech.”
Stella licked her palms, tasting the paint on the court and the old rubber of the ball and a little of the dust and dirt of other shoes, other players. Then she held out her palms for Celia to clasp. Celia's palms were damp. Celia squeezed and rubbed their hands together, sighed, and let go after a moment. “Thanks,” she said, eyes downcast. Her cheeks turned a steady mottled copper and stayed that way for a while.
Stella had learned the spit trick from another girl a few weeks after her arrival.
The door to the gym opened and Miss Kinney came in with ten other girls. Stella knew LaShawna Hamilton and Torry Butler from her dorm; she knew most of the others by name, but had never shared a deme with any of them. And she knew Miss Kinney, the girl's school coach. Miss Kinney led the other girls onto the court. Slung over her shoulder was a duffel bag filled with more balls.
“How about a little practice?” she asked Celia and Stella.
“Her arm hurts,” Stella said.
“Can you bounce and throw?” Miss Kinney asked Celia. Miss Kinney stood about five feet nine inches tall, a little shorter than Stella. The gym teacher was thin and strong, with a long, well-shaped nose and large green eyes, like a cat's.
Celia got to her feet. She never turned down a challenge from a counselor or a teacher. She thought she was tough.
“Good,” Miss Kinney said. “I brought some jerseys and shorts. They're ragged, but they'll pass. Let's go put them on. Time to see what you can do.”
Stella adjusted the baggy shorts with a grimace and tried to focus on the ball. Miss Kinney shouted encouragement from the sidelines to Celia. “Don't just sniff the breeze. Take a shot!”
All the girls on the court had come to a halt in the middle of hoop practice. Stella looked to Celia, the best at sinking baskets in her group of five.
Miss Kinney strode forward, exasperated, and put on her best I'm being patient face. Stella would not meet her steady gaze.
“What is so hard about this?” Miss Kinney asked. “Tell me. I want to know.”
Stella lowered her eyes farther. “We don't understand the point.”
“We're going to try something different. You'll compete,” Miss Kinney said. “You'll play against each other and get exercise and learn physical coordination. It's fun.”
“We could all make more baskets if we formed our own teams,” Stella said. “One team could have three slowing others down, if they were coming in too fast. Seven could play opposite and make baskets.” Stella wondered if she sounded obtuse, but she truly wasn't understanding what Miss Kinney expected of them.
“That isn't the way it's done,” Miss Kinney said, growing dangerously patient. Miss Kinney never got really angry, but it bothered Stella that she could hold in so much irritation and not express it. It made the teacher smell unpleasant.
“So, tell us how it's-KUK done,” Celia said. She and LaShawna approached. Celia stood an inch taller than Stella, almost five eleven, and LaShawna was shorter than Miss Kinney, about five seven. Celia had the usual olive-to-brown skin and flyaway reddish hair that never seemed to know what to do or how to hold together on her head. LaShawna was darker, but not much, with finely kinked black hair that formed a slumped nimbus around her ears and down to her shoulders.
“It's called a game. Come on, girls, you know what a game is.”
“We play,” Stella said defensively.
“Of course you play. All of us monkeys play,” the teacher said.
Stella and LaShawna smiled. Sometimes Miss Kinney was more open and direct than the other teachers. They liked her, which made frustrating her even more distressing.
“This is organized play. You guys are good at organizing, aren't you? What's not to understand?”
“Teams,” LaShawna said. “Teams are like demes. But demes choose themselves.” She lifted her hands and spread them beside her temples, making little elephant ears. It was a sign; many of the new children did such things without really understanding why. Sometimes the teachers thought they were acting smart; but not Miss Kinney.
She glanced at LaShawna's “ears,” blinked, and said for the tenth time, “Teams are not demes. Work with me here. A team is temporary and fun. I choose sides for you.”
Stella wrinkled her nose.
“I pick players with complementary abilities. I can help sculpt a team. You understand how that works, I'm sure.”
“Sure,” Stella said.
“Then you play against another team, and that makes all of you better players. Plus, you get exercise.”
“Right,” Stella said. So far, so good. She bounced the ball experimentally.
“Let's try it again. Just the practice part. Celia, cover Stella. Stella, go for the basket.”
Celia stood back and dropped into a crouch and spread her arms, as Miss Kinney had told her to do. Stella bounced the ball, made a step forward, remembered the rules, then dribbled toward the basket. The floor of the court was marked with lines and half circles. Stella could smell Celia and knew what she was going to do. Stella moved toward her, and Celia stepped aside with a graceful sweep of her arms, but without any signs or suggestions for adjustment, and Stella, in some confusion, threw the ball. It bounced off the backboard without touching the basket.
Stella made a face at Celia.
“You are supposed to try to stop her,” Miss Kinney told Celia.
“I didn't help her.” Celia glanced apologetically at Stella.
“No, I mean, actively try to stop her.”
“But that would be a foul,” Celia said.
“Only if you chop her arms or push her or run into her.”
Celia said, “We all want to make baskets and be happy, right? If I stop her from getting a basket, won't that reduce the number of baskets?”
Miss Kinney raised her eyes to the roof. Her face pinked. “You want to get the most baskets for your team, and keep the other team from getting any baskets.”
Celia was getting tired of thinking this through. Tears started in her eyes. “I thought we were trying to get the most baskets.”
“For your team,” Miss Kinney said. “Why isn't that clear?”
“It hurts to make others fail,” Stella said, looking around the court as if to find a door and escape.
“Oh, puh-leeze, Stella, it's only a game! You play against one another. It's called sport. Everyone can be friendly afterward. There's no harm.”
“I saw soccer riots on TV once,” LaShawna said. Miss Kinney lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “People got hurt,” LaShawna added doubtfully.
“There's a lot of passion in sport,” Miss Kinney admitted. “People care, but usually the players don't hurt each other.”
“They run into each other and lay down for a long time. Someone should have warned them they were about to collide,” said Crystal Newman, who had silver-white hair and smelled like some new kind of citrus tree.
Miss Kinney motioned the twelve girls to go over to the metal chairs lined up outside the lines. They pulled the chairs into a circle and sat.
Miss Kinney took a deep breath. “I think maybe I'm missing something,” she said. “Stella, how would you like to play?”
Stella thought about this. “For exercise, we could push-pull and swing, mosey, you know, like a dance. If we wanted to learn how to run better, or make baskets better, we could set up running academies. Girls could form wavy channels and ovals and others could run the channels. The girls in the wavy channels could tell them how they aren't doing it right.” She pointedly did not tell Miss Kinney about spit-calming, all the players slapping palms, which she had seen athletes do in human games. “Then the runners could shoot baskets from inside the channels and at different distances, until they could sink them from all the way across the court. That's more points, right?”
Miss Kinney nodded, going along for the moment.
“We'd switch out a runner and a channel each time. In a couple of hours, I bet most of us could sink baskets really well, and if we added up the points, the teams would have more points than if they, you know, fought with each other.” Stella thought this over very earnestly for an instant and her face lit up. “Maybe a thousand points in a game.”
“Nobody would want to watch,” Miss Kinney said. She was showing her exhaustion now, but also making a funny little grin that Stella could not interpret. Stella looked at the blinking red light on the nosey on Miss Kinney's belt. Miss Kinney had turned off the nosey before practice, perhaps because the girls often triggered its tiny little wheeping alarm when they exercised, no matter how much self-control they displayed.
“I would watch!” Celia said, leaning into the words. “I could learn how to train people in motion with, you know, signs.” Celia glanced at Stella conspiratorially, and undered, /Signs and smells and spit, eyes that twirl and brows that knit. It was a little song they sometimes sang in the dorm before sleep; softly. “That would really be fun.”
The other girls agreed that they understood that sort of game.
Miss Kinney lifted her hand and twisted it back and forth like a little flag. “What is it? You don't like competition?”
“We like push-pull,” Stella said. “We do it all the time. On the playground, in the walking square.”
“Is that when you do those little dances?” Miss Kinney asked.
“That's mosey or maybe push-pull,” said Harriet Pincher, the stockiest girl in the group. “Palms get sweaty with mosey. They stay dry with push-pull.”
Stella did not know how to begin to explain the difference. Sweaty palms in a group touch could make all sorts of changes. Individuals could become stronger, more willing to lead, or less aggressive in their push to lead, or simply sit out a deme debate, if one happened. Dry palms indicated a push-pull, and that was less serious, more like play. A deme needed to adjust all the time, and there were many ways to do that, some fun, some more like hard work.
Rarely, a deme adjustment involved stronger measures. The few attempts she had seen had resulted in some pretty nasty reactions. She didn't want to bring that up now, though Miss Kinney seemed genuinely interested.
Adjusting to humans was a puzzle. The new children were supposed to do all the adjusting, and that made it hard.
“Come on,” said Miss Kinney, getting up. “Try again. Humor me.”
Pathogenics Centers
Viral Threat Assessment Division
Sandia Labs
NEW MEXICO
“We trade a lot of aptronyms to let off steam,” Jonathan Turner said as he spun the golf cart up to the concrete guard box.
“Aptronyms?” Christopher Dicken asked.
The sun had set in typical New Mexico fashion—suddenly and with some drama. Halogen lamps were switching on all over the facility, casting the plain and often downright ugly architecture into stark artificial day.
“Names that suit the job. I'll give you an example,” Turner said. “We have a doctor here at Sandia named Polk. Asa Polk.”
“Ah,” Dicken said. The guard box stood empty. Something small and white moved back and forth behind smoked glass windows. A long steel tube jutted from the side. He used a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his cheeks and forehead. The sweat was not just from the heat. He did not like this new role. He did not like secrets.
In particular, he did not like stepping into the belly of the beast.
Turner followed his gaze. “Nobody home,” he said. “We still use people at the main gates, but here it's an automated sentry.” Dicken caught a glimpse of a grid of purple beams scooting over Turner's face, then his own.
A green light glowed beside the gate.
“You are who we say you are, Dr. Dicken,” Turner said. He reached into a small box under the dash and took out a plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD. “The rag, please, Kleenex in your pockets, anything used to sop. Nothing like that is allowed in or out. Clothing is bad enough.”
Dicken dropped the handkerchief into the bag, and Turner sealed it and slipped it into a small metal drop box. The concrete and iron barriers sank and drew back.
“In accounting, we have Mr. Ledger,” Turner said as he drove through. “And in statistics, Dr. Damlye.”
“I once worked with a pathologist named Boddy,” Dicken said.
Turner nodded provisional approval. “One of our arbovirus geniuses is named Bugg.”
The cart hummed past a dark gray water tower and five pressurized gas cylinders painted lime green, then crossed a median to a fenced enclosure containing a large white satellite dish. With a flourish, Turner did a 360 around the dish, then drove up to a row of squat bungalows. Behind the bungalows, and beyond several electrified fences topped with razor wire, lay five concrete warehouses, all of them together code-named Madhouse. The fences were patrolled by squat gray robots and soldiers toting automatic weapons.
“I once knew a plastic surgeon named Scarry,” Dicken said.
Turner smiled approval. “An auto mechanic named Torker.”
“A nuclear chemist named Mason.”
Turner grimaced. “You can do better. It may be essential to your sanity, working here.”
“I'm fresh out,” Dicken admitted.
“I could go on for days. Hundreds and hundreds, all on file and verified. None of this urban legend crap.”
“I thought you said just personal acquaintances.”
“I may have been handicapping you,” Turner admitted, and pulled the cart into a parking space marked in cargo letters on a white placard: #3 madhouse honcho. “A gynecologist named Box.”
“An anthropologist named Mann,” Dicken said, peering right at the sunning cages for the more hirsute residents of the Madhouse, now empty. “Mustn't let down the team.”
“A dog trainer named Doggett.”
“A traffic cop named Rush.” Dicken felt himself warming to the game.
“A cabby named Parker,” Turner countered.
“A compulsive gambler named Chip.”
“A proctologist named Poker,” Turner said.
“You used that one.”
“Scout's honor, it's another,” Turner said. “And I was a scout, believe it or not.”
“Merit badge in hemorrhagic fevers?”
“Lucky guess.”
They walked toward the plain double doors and the white-lit corridor beyond. Dicken's brow furrowed. “A pathologist named Thomas Shew,” he said, and smiled sheepishly.
“So?”
“T. Shew.”
Turner groaned and opened the door for Dicken. “Welcome to the Madhouse, Dr. Dicken. Initiation begins in half an hour. Need to make a pit stop first? Restrooms to your right. The cleanest loos in Christendom.”
“Not necessary,” Dicken said.
“You should, really. Initiation begins with drinking three bottles of Bud Light, and ends with drinking three bottles of Becks or Heinekens. This symbolizes the transition from the halls of typical piss-poor science to the exalted ranks of Sandia Pathogenics.”
“I'm fine.” Dicken tapped his forehead. “A libertarian named State,” he offered.
“Ah, that's a different game entirely,” Turner said.
He rapped on the closed door to an office and stood back, folding his hands. Dicken looked along the cinder block hallway, then down to the concrete gutters on each side, then up at sprinkler heads mounted every six feet. Long red or green tags hung from the sprinkler heads, twisting in a slow current of air flowing north to south. The red tags read: caution: acid solution and detergent. A second pipe and sprinkler system on the left side of the corridor carried green tags that read: Extreme caution: chlorine dioxide.
At the southern end of the corridor, a large fan mounted in the wall slowly turned. During an emergency, the fan would switch off to allow the corridor to fill with sterilizing gas. Once the area had been decontaminated, the fan would evacuate the toxic atmosphere into big scrubbing chambers.
The office door opened a crack. A plump man with thick black hair and beard and critical dark green eyes watched them suspiciously through the crack, then smiled and stepped into the hall. He quietly closed the door behind him.
“Christopher Dicken, this is Madhouse Honcho number five, or maybe number four, Vassili Presky,” Turner said.
“Proud to meet you,” Presky said, but did not offer his hand.
“Likewise,” Dicken said.
“He happens not to be a computer geek,” Turner added.
Dicken and Presky stared at him with quizzical half-smiles. “Pardon?” Presky said.
“Press-key,” Turner explained, astounded by their density.
“We will pardon Dr. Turner,” Presky said with a pained expression.
“We're at step two of the initiation,” Turner said. “On our way to the party. Vassili is Speaker to Animals. He runs the zoo and does research, as well.”
Presky smiled. “You want it, we have it. Mammals, marsupials, monotremes, birds, reptiles, worms, insects, arachnids, crustaceans, planaria, nematodes, protists, fungi, even a horticultural center.” He snapped his fingers and opened his door again. “I forgot, this is formal. Let me get my coat.”
He emerged wearing a gray tweed jacket with worn cuffs.
The labs spun out like spokes from a hub. Turner and Presky led Dicken through broad double glass doors, then navigated in quicktime a maze of corridors, guiding him toward the center of Sandia Pathogenics. Dicken's ears throbbed with the surge in air pressure as the doors hissed shut behind them.
All the buildings and connecting corridors were equipped with sprinklers and evacuation fans, emergency personnel showers—stainless steel–lined alcoves with multiple showerheads, decontamination rooms with remote manipulators, color-coded red-and-blue containment and isolation suits hanging behind plastic doors, and extensive collections of emergency medical supplies.
“Pathogenics is bug motel,” Presky said. Dicken was trying to place his accent: Russian, he thought, but modified by many years in the U.S. “Bugs come in, they do not go out.”
“Dr. Presky never gets our jingles right,” Turner said.
“I have no mind for trivia,” Presky agreed. Then, proudly, “Also, not watching TV all my life.”
A group of five men and three women awaited them in the lounge. As Dicken and his two escorts entered, the group lifted bottles of Bud Light in salute and gave him a rousing, “Hip, hip, hurrah!”
Dicken stopped in the doorway and rewarded them with a slow, awkward grin. “Don't scare me,” he admonished. “I'm a shy guy.”
“Wouldn't dream of it,” said a very young man with long blond hair and thick, almost white eyebrows. He wore a well-tailored gray suit that took a stylish drape on his substantial frame, and Dicken pegged him as the dandy. The others dressed as if they wanted covering and nothing more.
The dandy whistled a short tune, held out a strong, square-fingered hand, crossed two fingers, shook the hand in the air before Dicken could grip it, then backed away, bowing obsequiously.
“The secret handshake, unfortunately,” Turner said, lips pressed together in disapproval.
“It symbolizes lies and deceit and no contact with the outside world,” the dandy explained.
“That's not funny,” said a tall, black-haired woman with a distinct stoop and a pleasant, homely face with beautiful blue eyes. “He's Tommy Powers, and I'm Maggie Flynn. We're Irish, and that's the extent of what we share. Let me introduce you to the rest.”
They passed him a bottle of beer. Dicken made his greetings all around. Nobody shook hands. This close to the center, it was apparent people avoided direct contact as much as possible. Dicken wondered how much their love lives had suffered.
Thirty minutes into the party, Turner took Dicken aside, using the pretext of swapping the half-consumed Bud for a bottle of Heineken. “Now, Dr. Dicken,” he said. “It's official. How do you like our players?”
“They know their stuff,” Dicken said.
Presky approached, bottle of Becks lifted in salute. “Time to meet the master, gentlemen?”
Dicken felt his back stiffen. “All right,” he said.
The group fell silent as Turner opened a side door leading off the lounge and marked by a large red square at eye level. Dicken and Presky followed him down another corridor of offices, innocuous in itself but apparently rich in symbolism.
“The rest back there don't usually get this far,” Turner said. He walked slowly beside Dicken, allowing for his pace. “It's tough recruiting for the inner circle,” he admitted. “Takes a certain mindset. Curiosity and brilliance, mixed with an absolute lack of scruples.”
“I still have scruples,” Dicken said.
“I had heard as much,” Turner said, dead serious and a little critical. “Frankly, I don't know why in hell you're here.” He grinned wolfishly. “But then, you have connections and a certain reputation. Maybe they balance out.”
Presky tried for an ironic smile. They came to a broad steel door. Turner ceremoniously removed a plastic tag from his pocket and let it dangle from the end of a red lanyard imprinted with Sandia in white letters. “Never tell the townies you work here,” he advised.
He lifted his arms. Dicken lowered his head, and Turner slung the lanyard around his neck, then backed off. “Looks good on you.”
“Thanks,” Dicken said.
“Let's make sure you're in the system before we enter.”
“And if I'm not?”
“If lucky,” Presky said, “you are hit by Tazer before they use bullets.”
Turner showed him how to press his palm against a glass pad and stare into a retinal scanner. “It knows you,” Turner said. “Better still, it likes you.”
“Thank god,” Dicken said.
“Security is god here,” Turner said. “The atomic age was a firecracker compared with what's on the other side of that door.” The door opened. “Welcome to ground zero. Dr. Jurie is looking forward to meeting you.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Gianelli swept through the waiting room of his office, accompanied by Laura Bloch, his chief of staff. His face was red and he looked just as Mitch had once described him: on the edge of a heart attack, with a big, friendly expression topped by shrewd eyes.
Kaye stood up beside the long wrought iron-and-marble coffee table that held center position in the lobby. Even though she was alone, she felt like a card being forced from a deck.
“They're wrangling,” Laura Bloch told Gianelli in an undertone. “The director is late.”
“Perfect,” Gianelli said. He looked at a clock on the wall. It was eleven. “Where's my star witness?” He gave Kaye a lopsided smile, his expression combining both sympathy and doubt. She knew she did not look prepared. She did not feel prepared. Gianelli sneezed and walked into his office. A young male Secret Service agent closed the door and stood guard beside it, hands folded in front of him, eyes unreadable behind smoked glasses.
Kaye let out her breath.
The maple-and-glass door opened almost immediately and the senator poked his head out.
“Dr. Rafelson,” he called, and crooked his finger.
The office beyond was stacked with newspapers, magazines, and two antiquated desktop computers perched on three desks. The huge desk nearest the window was covered with law books and leftover boxes of Chinese food.
The agent closed the door behind Kaye. The air was close and mustily cool. Laura Bloch, in her forties, small and plump, with intense, bulging black eyes and a halo of frizzy black hair, stood and handed papers from a briefcase to Gianelli.
“Pardon our mess,” he said.
“He says that to everyone,” Bloch said. Her smile was at once friendly and alarming; her expression reminded Kaye of a pug or a Boston terrier, and she could not seem to look directly at anyone.
“This has been my home away from home the last few days. I eat, drink, and sleep here.” Gianelli offered his hand. “Thank you for coming.”
Kaye shook the hand lightly. He let her determine the strength and duration of the grip.
“This is Laura Bloch. She's my right hand . . . and my left hand.”
“We've met,” Bloch said, and smiled. Kaye shook Laura's hand; it was soft and dry. Laura seemed to stare at Kaye's forehead and her nose. Suddenly, irrationally, Kaye liked and trusted her.
Gianelli she was not so sure about. He had moved up awfully fast in the last few years. Kaye had become suspicious of politicians who prospered in bad times.
“How's Mitch?” he asked.
“We haven't spoken for a few weeks,” Kaye said.
“I like Mitch,” Gianelli said with an undulating shrug of his shoulders, apropos of nothing. He sat behind his desk, stared over the crusted boxes, and frowned. “I hated to hear about what happened. Awful times. How's Marge?”
Kaye could tell he did not really give a damn about Marge Cross, not at the moment. He was mentally preparing for the committee meeting.
“She sends her regards,” Kaye said.
“Good of her,” Gianelli said.
Kaye looked up at a framed portrait to the right of the big desk. “We were sorry to hear of Representative Wickham's death,” she said.
“Shook up everything,” Gianelli murmured, appraising her. “Gave me the boost I needed, however, and here I am. I am a whelp, and many kind folks in this building are bound and determined to teach me humility.”
He leaned forward, earnest now and fully focused. “Is it true?”
Kaye knew what he meant. She nodded.
“Based on what data sets?”
“Americol pharmacy tracking reports. Drop-in data collection systems in two thousand area hospitals servicing epidemiology contracts with Americol.” Kaye swallowed nervously.
Gianelli nodded, his eyes shifting somewhat spookily over her shoulder as he thought this through. “Any government sources?” he asked.
“RSVP Plus, Air Force LEADER 21, CDC Virocol, NIH Population Health Monitor.”
“But no sources exclusive to Emergency Action.”
“No, though we suspect they listen in on some of our proprietary tracking systems.”
“How many will there be?” Gianelli asked.
“Tens of thousands,” Kaye said. “Maybe more.”
“Jesus, Homer, and Jethro Christ,” Gianelli said, and leaned back, his tall chair creaking on old steel springs. As if to calm himself, he raised his arms and folded his hands behind his head. “How's your daughter?”
“She's in a camp in Arizona,” Kaye said.
“Good old Charlie Chase and his wonderful state of Arizona. But how is she, Dr. Rafelson?”
“Healthy. She's found friends.”
Gianelli shook his head. Kaye could not tell what he was thinking or feeling. “It could be a rough meeting,” he said. “Laura, let's give Dr. Rafelson a quick tour of the subcommittee's players.”
“I was briefed in Baltimore,” Kaye said.
“Nobody knows ‘em better than we do, right, Laura?”
“Nobody,” Laura Bloch said.
“Laura's daughter, Annie, died at Joseph Goldberger,” the senator said.
“I'm sorry,” Kaye said, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears.
Bloch patted Kaye's arm and set her face in grim reserve. “She was a sweet kid,” she said. “A little dreamy.” She drew herself up. “You are about to testify before a baboon, two cobras, a goose, a certified bull ape, and a spotted leopard.”
“Senator Percy is the baboon,” Gianelli said. “Jakes and Corcoran are the cobras, lying low in the grass. They hate being on this committee, however, and I doubt they'll ask you anything.”
“Senator Thomasen is chairperson. She's the goose,” Bloch said. “She likes to think she's keeping the other animals in order, but she has no fixed opinions herself. Senator Chase claims to be on our side—”
“He's the bull ape,” Gianelli said.
“But we don't know how he'll vote, push comes to shove,” Bloch finished.
Gianelli glanced at his watch. “I'm going to bring you in first. Laura tells me the director is still stuck in traffic.”
“Twenty minutes away,” Bloch said.
“She's working hard to get the directorship of EMAC legislated into a Cabinet-level position, giving her sole budgetary control. The director is our leopard.” Gianelli scratched his upper lip with a forefinger. “We expect you to help us counter her suggestions, which are bound to be nasty beyond belief.”
“All right,” Kaye said.
“Mark Augustine will be there,” Bloch said. “Any problem with that?” she asked Kaye.
“No,” Kaye said.
“You two get along?”
“We disagreed,” said Kaye, “but we worked together.”
Bloch made a fleeting face of dubiety.
“We'll take our chances,” Gianelli said with a snuffle.
“You should never take chances,” Bloch advised, producing another handkerchief from her purse.
“I always take chances,” Gianelli said. “That's why I'm here.” He blew his nose. “Goddamned allergies,” he added, and watched Kaye's reaction. “Washington is full of snotty noses.”
“No problem,” Kaye said. “I'm a mommy.”
“Good,” Bloch said. “We need a pro.”
NEW MEXICO
Dr. Jurie's office was small and crammed with boxes, as if he had arrived only a few days before. Jurie pushed back his old Aeron chair as Dicken and Turner entered.
The shelves around the office were lightly populated with a few battered college texts, favorites for quick reference, and binders filled with what Dicken assumed were scientific papers. He counted seven metal lab stools in the small room, arranged in a cramped half-circle around the desk. The desk supported a flat top computer with two panels popped up, displaying results from two experiments.
“Acclimatizing, Dr. Dicken?” Jurie asked. “Altitude treating you well?”
“Doing fine, thank you,” Dicken said. Turner and Presky assumed relaxed hunched positions on their stools.
Jurie motioned for Dicken to sit in a second old Aeron, on the other side of the desk. He had to push past a stack of boxes to fit into the chair, which bent his leg painfully. Once he sat, he wondered if he would be able to get up again.
Jurie wore brown oxfords, wool slacks, a dark blue shirt with a broad collar, and a sleeveless, cream-colored knit sweater, all clean but rumpled. At fifty-five, his features were still youthfully handsome, his body lean. He had the kind of face that would have fit well right above the collar of an Arrow shirt in a magazine ad. Had he smoked a pipe, Dicken would have thought him a cliché scientist. His body was too small, however, to complete the Oppenheimer effect. Dicken guessed his height at barely five feet three inches.
“I've invited more of our research group heads to join us. I apologize for showing you off, Dr. Dicken.” Jurie reached over to send the flat top into sleep mode, then rotated in his chair, back and forth.
A woman's head poked through the door and pushed a fist in to rap on the inside wall.
“Ah,” Jurie said. “Dee Dee. Dr. Blakemore. Always prompt.”
“To a fault,” the woman said. In her late thirties, comfortably rotund, with long mousy hair and a self-assured expression, she pushed through the door and sat with some difficulty on a stool. In the next few minutes, four others joined them in the room, but remained standing.
“Thank you all for coming,” Jurie started the meeting. “We are all here to greet Dr. Dicken.”
Two of the men had entered holding cans of beer, apparently cadged from the party. Dicken noted that one—Dr. Orlin Miller, formerly of Western Washington University—still favored Bud Light over Heineken.
“We're a relaxed group,” Jurie said. “Somewhat informal.” He never smiled, and as he spoke, he made small, unexpected hesitations between words. “What we're essentially interested in, here at Pathogenics, is how diseases use us as genetic libraries and reservoirs. Also, how we've adapted to these inroads and learned to use the diseases. It doesn't really matter whether viruses are rogue genes from inside us, or outside invaders—the result is the same, a constant battle for advantage and control. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, right?”
Dicken could not disagree.
“I've listened to all the media babble about virus children, and frankly I don't give a damn whether they're the products of disease or evolution. Evolution is a disease, for all I know. What I want to learn is how viruses can recombine and kill us.
“Not coincidentally, if we learn how that works, we have a pretty important weapon for both national defense and offense. This is the age of gene and germ, and whatever subtle little perversions we can think of, our enemies can also think of. Which is a pretty good reason to keep Sandia Pathogenics funded and running at fool steam, which we all will benefit from.”
“Amen,” said Turner.
I heard “fool steam,” Dicken thought, and looked around the room. Did anybody else? Fool steam ahead.
“Dr. Presky, shall we show Dr. Dicken our zoo?” Jurie asked.
NEAR LUBBOCK, TEXAS
Mitch had lost everything important, but once again he had dirt and bone chips and pottery. He was back in the field, carrying a small spade and a kit full of brushes. Starting from scratch was an archaeologist's definition of workaday life, and he was definitely starting from scratch, all over again.
Around him, a neat square hole in the earth had been sculpted into many terraces on which sat fragments of flint, the crushed remains of what might have once been a wicker basket, a rough oval of shards from a small pot, and the thing that had absorbed his attention all day: an engraved shell.
The sun had set several hours ago and he was working by the light of a Coleman lantern. Down in the hole, all colors had long since turned to gray and brown. Brown was the color he knew best. Beige, gray, black, brown. The brown dust in his nose made everything smell like dry earth. A brown, neutral smell.
The shell lay in three pieces and was crudely engraved with what looked like a crosshatched bird's wing. Mitch had a hunch it might be similar to the shells found at the Craig mound in Spiro, Oklahoma. If it was, that might generate enough publicity that they could persuade the contractors to pause for a few weeks.
The generator in the back of the truck had broken down the night before. Now, the lantern's gas was running out.
With a sigh, he turned the lantern off, laid his spade and kit on the side of the hole and climbed out carefully, feeling his way in the dark, putting a strain on his good arm.
As with most university-sponsored digs, the budget was minimal and equipment was precious, usually secondhand, and seldom reliable. Time was important, of course. In two more weeks bulldozers would move in and cover hundreds of acres with fill and concrete slabs for a housing tract.
The twelve students working the site had gathered under a tent and were sipping beer in the cooling twilight. Some things never changed. He accepted a freshly popped can from a twenty-year-old brunette named Kylan, then sat with a groan in a camp chair reserved for him in part because he was the most experienced and in part because he was the oldest and the kids thought he might require the bare minimum of comfort to keep functioning.
The gimpy arm drew sympathy, too. Mitch could only dig effectively with one hand, propping the handle of the shovel under his armpit.
The others squatted on the dirt or on the two rugged wooden benches pulled from the back of the single battered pickup, the same one that held the useless generator.
“Any luck?” Kylan asked. They were not very talkative this evening, perhaps because they saw the imminent dashing of their hopes and dreams. This dig had become their lives in the past few weeks. Two couples were already lovers.
Mitch held up his hand, made a grasping motion. “Flashlight,” he said.
Tom Pritchard, twenty-four, skinny, with a head of dusty and tousled blond hair, tossed him a black aluminum flashlight.
The students looked at each other, blank-faced in the way kids have of hiding what might be an inappropriate emotion: hope.
“What is it?” asked tall, stout Caitlin Bishop, far from her native New York.
Mitch lifted his head and sighed. “Probably nothing,” he said.
They crowded around, all pretense and weariness gone. They needed hope as much as they needed rehydrating fluids. “What?” “What is it?” “What did you find?”
Mitch said it was probably nothing; probably not what he thought it was. And even if it was, how did that figure into his plans? There were hundreds of shells from Spiro scattered in private and university collections. So what if he had just found one more?
What sort of prize was that to replace his family?
He waved them off with the flashlight, then aimed the beam up at the first star to appear in the sky. The air was dry and the beam was only visible because the dust they had been raising all day lingered in the still air.
“Anyone know about Spiro, Oklahoma? The Craig mound?” he asked.
“Mississippian civilization,” said Kylan, the best student in the group but hardly the best digger. “Opened during the nineteen thirties by the Pocola Mining Company. A disaster. Burials, pottery, artifacts, all gone, all sold to tourists.”
“A famous source for engraved conch shells,” Mitch added. “Decorated with birds and snakes and such, vaguely Mesoamerican designs. Probably part of an extensive bartering community spread through a number of cultures in the East and South and Midwest. Anybody know about these shells?”
They all shook their heads.
“Show us,” said Bernard Rowland and stepped forward, as tall as Mitch and broader across the shoulders. He was a Mormon and did not drink beer; Iced Sweat, a wickedly green drink in a large plastic bottle, was his liquid of choice.
Mitch led them back through the ranks of holes in the ground. Flies were starting to zizz and hum after hiding out during the heat of the day. The cattle feed lots near Lubbock were less than ten miles away. When the wind was right, the smell was impressive. Mitch wondered why anyone would want to build homes here, so close to that smell and the flies.
They came to his hole and the students stood a foot back from the dry edges. He climbed into the hole and pointed the flashlight at the terrace that held the shell, painstakingly revealed by his brush and dental pick work of the last six hours.
“Wow,” Bernard said. “How did it get out here?”
“Good question,” Mitch said. “Anybody have a camera?”
Kylan handed him her digital, Dyno-labeled “Potshooter.” Mitch drew out the marker strings with length measurements in small squares of tape, handed them to the students, who set them at right angles and weighted them with rocks, and then snapped a series of flash pictures.
Bernard helped Mitch out of the hole. They stood solemnly for a moment.
“Our treasure,” Mitch said. Even to himself, he sounded cynical. “Our only hope.”
Fallon Dupres, a twenty-three-year-old from Canada, who looked like a fashion model and kept severely aloof from most of the men, handed him another can of Coors. “Actually, the Craig mound shells weren't conchs,” she told Mitch in an undertone. “They were whelks.”
“Thanks,” Mitch said. Fallon tilted her head, blasé. She had made a pass at Mitch three days before. Mitch had suspected her of being the type of attractive woman that instantly gravitated to age and authority, however weak that authority might be. In the near vacuum of the little dig, he was the most authoritative male, and he was certainly the oldest. He had politely declined and told her she was very pretty, and under other circumstances he might oblige. He had hinted, in as roundabout a way as possible, that that part of his life was over. She had ignored the evasions and told him bluntly that his attitude was not natural.
In fact, Mitch had not had a woman since he and Kaye had parted last year in Phoenix, shortly after his release from prison. They had agreed to go their strategic ways. Kaye had gone to work for Americol in Maryland, and Mitch had gone on the road, looking for holes in the Earth to hide in.
“I thought Spiro was, like, a corrupt vice president,” said Larry Kelly, the dimmest and funniest of the crew. “How's a shell going to save our dig?”
Fallon, surprisingly, set herself to gently explain.
Mitch wandered off to check his cell phone. He had turned it off for the morning work hours, and forgotten to switch it on during the nap he had taken at the burning center of the day. There was one message. He vaguely recognized the number. With an awkward pass, he punched in the retrieval code.
The voice was instantly recognizable. It was Eileen Ripper, a fellow archaeologist and friend. Eileen specialized in Northwestern digs. They had not spoken in more than ten years. “Mitch, something dishy. Are you busy? Better not be. This is, as I said, dishy. I am stuck here with a bunch of women, can you believe it? Want to upset some more apple carts? Call me.”
Mitch looked across the darkening plateau and the black ditches to where Fallon was explaining the Spiro shells to a group of bone-weary students, about to have their dig closed and covered over by lawns and concrete slabs. He stood with the phone in his weak hand, clenching his strong hand. He could not stand the thought of having this dig closed, however trivial it was, of having another part of his life be judged useless.
He had been put away for two years for assault with a deadly weapon—a large wood chip. He had not seen Kaye for more than a year. She was working on viruses for Marge Cross, and in Mitch's judgment, that was a kind of defeat as well.
And there was Stella, stashed away by the government in a school in Arizona.
Fallon Dupres walked up behind him. He turned just as she folded her arms, watching him carefully. “It isn't a whelk, Mitch,” she said. “It's a broken clamshell.”
“I could have sworn,” he said. He had seen the Mesoamerican design so plainly.
“It's scratched up like a doodle pad,” the young woman said. “But it's not a whelk. Sorry.” She turned away, glanced at him one more time, smiled perhaps more in regret than pity, and walked off.
Mitch stood under the blue-black sky for a few minutes, wondering how many wish-thinks he had left in him before he lost it completely. Another door closing.
He could head north. Drop off and visit Stella along the way—if they let him. You could never find out in advance.
He called Eileen's number.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Gianelli entered at the back of the chamber, carrying a stack of papers. Thomasen looked up. Augustine glanced over his shoulder. The last senator on the committee was followed by a Secret Service agent, who took a position with another agent by the door, and then by a small, intense-looking woman. Augustine recognized Laura Bloch. She was the main reason Gianelli was a senator, and she was a formidable political mind.
Augustine had also heard that Bloch was a bit of a spymaster.
“Glad you could make it, Dick,” Chase called out across the chamber. “We were worried.”
Gianelli smiled foxily. “Allergies,” he said.
Kaye Lang Rafelson entered after Bloch. Her presence surprised Augustine. He recognized a setup and suspected that the current director of EMAC would regret not arriving on time.
Kaye moved up to the witness table. A chair and microphone awaited her. She was introduced to the committee, all of whom knew her by name and reputation.
Senator Percy looked disconcerted. He, too, could smell a setup. “Dr. Rafelson is not on our list, Dick,” he said as Bloch helped Gianelli settle himself at the dais.
“She brings important news,” Gianelli said brusquely.
Kaye was sworn in. Not once did she look at Augustine, though he sat fewer than five feet away.
Senator Thomasen stifled a yawn. She seemed perfectly happy to take her cues from Gianelli. There was some procedural wrangling, more interruptions by Percy and counterarguments by Chase, and finally Percy held up his hands and let her testimony proceed. He was clearly unhappy that the director was still not present.
“You work at Americol, correct, Dr. Rafelson?” Thomasen said, reading from the witness sheet handed to her by Gianelli.
“Yes, Senator.”
“And what is your group doing?”
“We're studying ERV knockout techniques in mice and chimpanzees, Senator,” Kaye said.
“Bravo,” Senator Percy said. “A worthy effort, to rid the world of viruses.”
“We're working to understand the roles viruses play in our genome and in our everyday lives,” Kaye corrected. The distinction seemed lost on Percy.
“You also work with the Centers for Disease Control,” Thomasen continued. “Serving as a go-between for Marge Cross and Fern Ridpath, the director of SHEVA affairs at the CDC?”
“Occasionally, but Dr. Ridpath spends more time with our PI.”
“PI?”
“Principal Investigator.”
“And that is?”
“Dr. Robert Jackson,” Kaye said.
Thomasen looked up, as did the others, at the sound of the door at the back of the chamber opening once more. Rachel Browning marched down the aisle, wearing a black dress with a wide red belt. She glanced at Augustine, then looked over the senators on the dais with what she meant to be a puzzled smile. To Kaye, the smile appeared predatory. Two steps behind walked her counsel, a small, gray-haired woman in a beige cotton summer suit.
“You're late, Ms. Browning,” Senator Thomasen said.
“It was my understanding Dr. Browning was to be testifying alone to the committee, in closed session,” the counsel said, her voice commanding.
“The hearing is closed,” Gianelli said with another sniff. “Senator Percy invited Dr. Augustine, and I invited Dr. Rafelson.”
Browning sat at the end of the table and smiled calmly as her counsel leaned over to set up a small laptop on the desk. The counsel then unfolded blinders, to prevent the computer display from being visible to either side, and took her seat on Browning's left.
“Dr. Rafelson was interrupted,” Senator Gianelli reminded the chair.
Thomasen smirked. “I'm not sure which tune we're supposed to be dancing to. Who's the fiddler?”
“You are, as always, Madam Chair,” Gianelli said.
“I sincerely doubt that,” Thomasen said. “All right, go ahead, Dr. Rafelson.”
Kaye did not like going up against the director of Emergency Action in this way, but she clearly had no choice. She was being squeezed between lines of scrimmage in a game far rougher than football.
“Yesterday evening, a meeting was held in Baltimore to discuss the results of a proprietary Americol health survey. You were present,” Gianelli said. “Tell us what's happening, Kaye.”
Browning's look was a warning.
Kaye ignored her. “We have conclusive evidence there have been new first-stage SHEVA deliveries, Senator,” she said. “Expulsion or abortion of interim daughters.”
A hush fell over the chamber. All the senators looked up and around, as if a strange bird had flown into the room.
“I beg your pardon?” Chase said.
“There will be new SHEVA births. We are now in our third wave.”
“Is there not a security protocol?” Percy asked, regarding his fellow senators on the committee with a look of astonishment. “This committee is not known for its discretion. I ask you to consider the political and social fallout—”
“Madam Chair,” the senator from Arizona demanded, exasperated.
“Dr. Rafelson, please explain,” Gianelli said, ignoring the ruckus.
“Blood samples from more than fifty thousand males in committed relationships are again producing SHEVA retroviruses. Current CDC estimates are that more than twenty thousand women will give birth to second-stage SHEVA infants over the next eight to twelve months in the United States. In the next three years, we may have as many as a hundred thousand SHEVA births.”
“My God,” Percy called out, “Will it never end?” His voice made the sound system ring.
“The big ball rolls again,” Gianelli said.
“Is this true, Ms. Browning?” Senator Percy demanded.
Browning drew herself up. “Thank you, Senator. Emergency Action is well aware of these cases, and we have prepared a special plan to counteract their effect. True, there have been miscarriages. Subsequent pregnancies have been reported. There is no proof that these children will have the same kind of virally induced mutations. In fact, the retrovirus being shed by males is not homologous to the SHEVA viruses we are familiar with. We may be witnessing a novel resurgence of the disease, with new complications.”
Senator Percy moved in. “This is awesome and awful news. Ms. Browning, don't you think it is high time that we free ourselves of these invaders?”
Browning arranged her papers. “I do, Senator Percy. A vaccine has been developed that confers substantial resistance to transmission of SHEVA and many other retroviruses.”
Kaye held onto the edge of the table to keep her hands from shaking. There was no new vaccine; she knew that for a fact. This was the purest scientific bullshit. But now was certainly not the time to call Browning to account. Let her spin her web.
“We expect to be able to stop this new viral phase in its tracks,” Browning continued. She slipped on granny reading glasses and read from notes on her data phone. “We are also recommending quarantine and GPS-chipping and tracking of all infected mothers, to prevent further outbreaks of Shiver. We hope to eventually get court permission to chip all SHEVA children.”
Kaye looked along the row of faces behind the dais, seeing only fear, and then turned to Browning again.
Browning held Kaye's gaze for a long moment, eyes square and forthright over the granny glasses. “Emergency Action has the authority, under Presidential Decision Directives 298 and 341, and the authority conferred by Congress in our original charter, to announce a full quarantine of all affected mothers. We are ordering separate house arrest for males shedding the new retrovirus, removing them from households where they may infect their partners. The bottom line is we do not want any more SHEVA-affected children to be born.”
Chase had gone pale. “How do we prevent that, Ms. Browning?” he asked.
“If chipping cannot be implemented immediately, we'll resort to older methods. Ankle bracelets will be attached to monitor the activities of affected males. Other plans are being drawn up even now. We will prevent this new surge of disease, Senator.”
“How long until we can cleanse our bodies of these viruses completely?” Senator Percy asked.
“That's Ms. Lang's area of expertise,” Browning said, and turned to her with an ingenuous expression, one professional to another. “Kaye? Any progress?”
“Our division is trying new procedures,” Kaye said. “So far, we have been unable to remove legacy retroviruses—ERVs—from mouse or chimpanzee embryos and proceed to live birth. Removing most or all of the ancient viral genes, including SHEVA genes, produces gross chromosomal abnormalities following mitosis, failure of fertilized eggs to implant, early absorptions, and miscarriages. As well, we have not made progress at Americol with any effective vaccine. There's a lot to be learned. Viruses—”
“There it is,” Browning interrupted, turning back to the senators. “Utter failure. We have to move now with practical remedies.”
“One wonders, Dr. Rafelson, whether or not you are to be trusted with this work, given your sympathies?” Senator Percy said, and mopped his forehead.
“That's uncalled for, Senator Percy,” Gianelli said sharply.
Browning swept on. “We hope to share all scientific data with Americol and with this committee,” she said. “We sincerely believe that Ms. Lang and her fellow scientists should be as forthcoming with us, and perhaps a tad more diligent.”
Kaye folded her hands on top of the table.
After the session was gaveled to a close, Augustine sipped a glass of water in the waiting room. Browning walked briskly by.
“Did you have anything to do with this, Mark?” she asked in an undertone, pouring herself a glass from the frosted pitcher. Three years ago, he had underestimated the fear and hatred of which Americans were capable. Rachel Browning had not. If the new director of Emergency Action trailed any rope, Augustine could not see it.
Many more years might pass before she hanged herself.
“No,” Augustine said. “Why would I?”
“Well, the news will get out soon enough.”
Browning turned away from the door to the waiting room as Kaye was ushered in by Laura Bloch, and slipped away with her counsel. Bloch quickly secured Kaye a cup of coffee. Augustine and Kaye stood less than a pace apart. Kaye lifted her cup. “Hello, Mark.”
“Good evening, Kaye. You did well.”
“I doubt that, but thank you,” Kaye said.
“I wanted to tell you I'm sorry,” Augustine said.
“For what?” Kaye asked. She did not know, of course, all that had happened on that day when Browning had called and told him about the possible acquisition of her family.
“Sorry you had to be their decoy,” he said.
“I'm used to it,” Kaye said. “It's the price I'm paying for being out of the loop for so long.”
Augustine tried for a sympathetic grin, but his stiff face produced only a mild grimace. “I hear you,” he said.
“Finally,” Kaye said primly, and turned to join Laura Bloch.
Augustine felt the rebuff, but he knew how to be patient. He knew how to work in the background, silently and with little credit.
He had long since learned how to emulate the lowly viruses.
NEW MEXICO
To enter the Pathogenics zoo, they had to pass through a room with bare concrete walls painted black and dip their shoes in shallow trays of sweet, cloying yellow fluid—a variation on Lysol, Turner explained.
Dicken awkwardly swirled his shoes in the fluid.
“We do it on the way out, too,” Presky said. “Rubber soles last longer.”
They scraped and dried their shoes on black nylon mats and slipped on combination cotton booties and leggings, cinched around the calf. Presky gave each a snood and fine mesh filter masks to cover their mouths, and instructed them to touch as little as possible.
The zoo would have made a small town proud. It filled four warehouses covering several acres, steel and concrete walls lined with enclosures containing loose facsimiles of natural environments. “Comfortable, low stress,” Turner pointed out. “We want all our ancient viruses calm and collected.”
“Dr. Blakemore is working with vervets and howler monkeys,” Jurie said. “Old World and New World. Their ERV profiles are vastly different, as I'm sure you know. We hope soon to have chimps, but perhaps we can just piggyback on Americol's chimp project.” He glanced at Dicken with speculative brown eyes. “Kaye Lang's work, no?”
Dicken nodded absently.
The five large primate cages had most of the amenities: tree limbs, swings and rings, floors covered with rubber matting, multiple levels for pacing and climbing, a wide selection of plastic toys. Dicken counted six howler monkeys segregated male and female in two cages, with perforated plastic sheeting between: They could see and smell each other, but not touch.
They walked on and paused before a long, narrow aquarium containing a happily swimming platypus and several small fish. Dicken loved platypuses. He smiled like a little boy at the foot-long juvenile as it breached and dove several times through the clear green water, silvery lines of bubbles streaming from its slick fur.
“Her name is Torrie,” Presky said. “She's pretty, no?”
“She's wonderful,” Dicken said.
“Anything with fur, scales, or feathers, has viral genes of interest,” Jurie said. “Torrie's rather a dud, at the moment, but we like her anyway. We've just finished sequencing and comparing the allogenomes of echidnas and, of course, platypuses.”
“We're taking a census of monotreme ERVs,” Turner explained. “ERVs are useful during viviparous development. They help us subdue our mothers' immune systems. Otherwise, her lymphocytes would kill the embryos, because in part they type for the father's tissue. However, like birds, monotremes lay eggs. They should not use ERVs so extensively during early development.”
“The Temin-Larsson-Villarreal hypothesis,” Dicken said.
“You're familiar with TLV?” Turner asked, pleased. TLV stood for a theory of virus-host interactions concocted from work done over decades, at different institutions, by Howard R. Temin, Eric Larsson, and Luis P. Villarreal. TLV had gained a lot of favor since SHEVA.
Dicken nodded. “So, do they?”
“Do who, what?” Presky asked.
“Do echidnas and birds express ERV particles to protect their embryos?”
“Ah,” Presky said, and smiled mysteriously, then wagged his finger. “Job security.” He faced Turner. Wherever his head moved, his body moved as well, like a clocktower figure. “Torrie will have a mate soon. That effects many changes intriguing to us.”
“Intriguing to Torrie, as well, presumably,” Jurie added, deadpan.
They moved on to a concrete enclosure with a convincing, though small grove of conifers. “No lions or tigers, but we have bears,” Presky said. “Two young males. Sometimes they're out sparring with each other. They are brothers, they like to play fight.”
“Bears, raccoons, badgers,” Turner added. “Peaceful enough critters, virally, at least. Apes, including us, seem to have the most active and numerous ERV.”
“Most plants and animals have their own capabilities in biological propaganda and warfare. War happens only if the populations are pressed hard,” Jurie said. “Shall we hear Dr. Turner's favorite example?”
Turner took them across to a large enclosure containing three rather mangy-looking European bison. Four large, shaggy animals, fur hanging in patches, regarded the human onlookers with ageless placidity. One shook its head, sending dust and straw flying. “Fresh in modern memory, for hamburger eaters anyway: Toxin gene transfer to E. coli bacteria in cattle,” Turner began. “Modern factory farming and slaughterhouse technique puts severe stress on the cattle, who send hormonal signals to their multiple tummies, their rumen. E. coli react to these signals by taking up phages—viruses for bacteria—that carry genes from another common gut bacteria, Shigella. Those genes just happen to code for Shiga toxin. The exchange does not hurt the cow, fascinating, no? But when a predator kills a cow-like critter in nature, and bites into the gut—which most do, eating half-digested grass and such, wild salad it's called—it swallows a load of E. coli packed with Shiga toxin. That can make the predators—and us—very sick. Sick or dead predators reduce the stress on cows. It's a clever relief valve. Now we sterilize our beef with radiation. All the beef.”
“Personally, I never eat rare meat,” Jurie said with a contemplative arch of his brows. “Too many loose genes floating around. Dr. Miller, our chief botanist, tells me I should be concerned about my greens, as well.”
Orlin Miller raised his hands in collegial defense. “Equal time for veggies.”
They entered Building Two, the combination aviary and herpetarium. Mounted on benches beside the large sliding warehouse door, glass boxes housed king snakes coiled beneath red heat lamps.
“We have evidence of a slow but constant lateral flow of genes between species,” Jurie said. “Dr. Foresmith is studying transfer of genes between exogenous and endogenous viruses in chickens and ducks, as well as in the Psittaciformes, parrots.”
Foresmith, an imposing, gray-haired fellow in his early fifties, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—Dicken knew him for his work on minimum genome bacteria—took up the topic. “Flu and other exogenous viruses can exchange genes and recombine within host or reservoir populations,” he said, his voice a bass rumble. “New strains of flu used to come rumbling out of Asia every year. Now, we know that exogenous and endogenous viruses—herpes, poxviruses, HIV, SHEVA—can recombine in us. What if these viruses make a mistake? Slip a gene into the wrong location in a cell's DNA . . . A cell starts to ignore its duties and grows out of control. Voilà, a malignant tumor. Or, a relatively mild virus acquires one crucial gene and flips from a persistent to an acute infection. One really big mistake, and pow,” he slapped his fist into his palm, “we suffer one hundred percent mortality.” His smile was at once admiring and nervous. “One of our paleo guys figures we can explain a lot of mass extinctions that way, in theory. If we could resurrect and reassemble the older, extremely degraded ERVs, maybe we would learn what actually happened to the dinosaurs.”
“Not so fast,” Dicken said, raising his hands in surrender. “I don't know anything about dinosaurs or stressed cows.”
“Let's hold off on the wilder theories for now,” Jurie admonished Foresmith, but his eyes gleamed. “Tom, you're next.”
Tom Wrigley was the youngest in the group, in his mid-twenties, tall, dark-haired, and homely, with a red nose and a perpetually pleasant expression. He smiled shyly and handed Dicken a coin, a quarter. “That's roughly what a birth control pill costs. My group is studying the effect of birth control on endogenous retrovirus expression in women between the ages of twenty and fifty.”
Dicken rolled the quarter in his hand. Tom held out his palm, lifting his eyebrows, and Dicken returned the coin.
“Tell them why, Tom,” Jurie prodded.
“Twenty years ago, some researchers found that HIV infected pregnant women at a higher rate. Some human endogenous retroviruses are closely related to HIV, which goes after our immune systems with a vengeance. The fetus within the mother expresses lots of HERV from its placenta, which some think helps subdue the mom's immune system in a beneficial way—just enough so that it won't attack the developing fetus. TLV, as you know, Dr. Dicken.”
“Howard Temin is a god in this place,” Dee Dee Blakemore said. “We've set up a little shrine in C wing. Prayers every Wednesday.”
“Birth control pills produce conditions in women similar to pregnancy,” Wrigley said. “We decided that women on birth control would make an excellent study group. We have twenty volunteers, five of them our own researchers.”
Blakemore raised her hand. “I'm one,” she said. “I'm feeling testy already.” She growled at Wrigley and bared her canines. Wrigley held up his hands in mock fright.
“Eventually, SHEVA females will be getting pregnant,” Wrigley said, “and some may even use birth control pills. We want to know how that will effect production of potential pathogens.”
“Sexual maturity and pregnancy in the new children is likely to be a time of great danger,” Jurie said. “Retroviruses released in the natural course of a second generation SHEVA pregnancy could transfer to humans. The result could be another HIV-like disease. In fact, Dr. Presky here, among others, believes something similar explains how HIV got into the human population.”
Presky weighed in. “A hunter in search of bush meat could have slaughtered a pregnant chimp.” He shrugged; the hypothesis was still speculation, as Dicken knew well. As a postdoc in the late 1980s, Dicken had spent two years in the Congo and Zaire tracking possible sources for HIV.
“And last but not least, our gardens. Dr. Miller?”
Orlin Miller pointed to flats of greenery and flower gardens spread out under skylights and artificial sun bulbs hanging in imposing phalanxes, like great glassy fruit, on the north side of the warehouse. “My group studies transfer of viral genes between plants and insects, funguses and bacteria. As Dr. Jurie hinted earlier, we're also studying human genes that may have originated in plants,” Miller added. “I can just see the Nobel hanging from that one.”
“Not that you'll ever go up on stage to collect,” Jurie warned.
“No, of course not,” Miller said, somewhat deflated.
“Enough. Just a taste,” Jurie said, stopping in front of a basin containing a thick growth of young corn. “Seven other division heads who could not be here tonight extend their congratulations—to me, for landing Dr. Dicken. Not necessarily do they congratulate Dr. Dicken.”
The others smiled.
“Thanks, gentlemen,” Jurie said, and waved bye-bye, as if to a group of school children. The directors said their farewells and filed out of the warehouse. Only Turner remained.
Jurie fixed Dicken with a gaze. “NIH tells me I can find a use for you at Pathogenics,” Jurie said. “NIH funds a substantial portion of my work here, through Emergency Action. Still, I'm curious. Why did you accept this appointment? Not because you love and respect me, Dr. Dicken.” Jurie loosely crossed his arms and his bony fingers engaged in a fit of searching, marching along toward the elbows, drawing the arms into a tighter hug.
“I go where the science is,” Dicken said. “I think you're primed to discover some interesting things. And I think I can help. Besides . . .” He paused. “They gave you a list. You picked me.”
Jurie lifted one hand dismissively. “Everything we do here is political. I'd be a fool not to recognize it,” he said. “But, frankly, I think we're winning. Our work is too important to stop, for whatever reason. And we might as well have the best people working with us, whatever their connections. You're a fine scientist, and that's the bottom line.” Jurie strolled before a plastic-wrapped greenhouse filled with banana trees, obscured by the translucent plastic. “If you think you're ready, I have a theoretical problem for you.”
“Ready as I'll ever be,” Dicken said.
“I'd like for you to start with something a little off the beaten path. Up for it?”
“I'm listening,” Dicken said.
“You can work with Dr. Wrigley's volunteers. Assemble a staff from our resident postdocs under Dee Dee's supervision, no more than two to begin with. They're analyzing ancient promoter regions associated with sexual characteristics, physiological changes in humans possibly induced by retroviral genes.” Jurie swallowed conspicuously. “Viruses have induced changes quite evident in our SHEVA children. Now, I'd like to study more mundane instances in humans. Can you think of the fold of tissue of which I'm suspicious?” Jurie asked.
“Not really,” Dicken said.
“It's like an alarm mounted on a gate kept closed until maturity. When the gate is breached, that announces a major accomplishment, a crucial change; announces it with a burst of pain and a whole cascade of hormonal events. The hormones generated by this experience appear to activate HERV and other mobile elements, preparing our bodies for a new phase of life. Reproduction is imminent, this breach tells the body. Time to prepare.”
“The female hymen,” Dicken guessed.
“The female hymen,” Jurie said. “Is there any other kind?” He was not being sarcastic. It was a straight question. “Are there other gates to be opened, other signals? . . . I don't know. I'd like to know.” Jurie studied Dicken, eyes glittering with enthusiasm once again. “I'm supposing that viruses have altered our phenotype to produce the hymen. Rupturing the hymen gives them warning that sex is taking place, so they can prepare to do all that they do. By altering expression of key genes, promoting or blocking them, the viruses may change our behavior as well. Let's find out how.” He reached into his jacket pocket, removed a small plastic case, and handed the case to Dicken. “My notes. If you find them useful, I'll be content.”
“Good,” Dicken said. He knew very little about hymens; he wondered what his other resources would be.
“SHEVA females don't have hymens, you know,” Jurie said. “No such membranes. Comparison should bring up fascinating divergences in hormonal pathways and viral activations. And viral activations are what concern me.”
Dicken found himself nodding. He was almost hypnotized by the audacity of the hypothesis. It was perverse; it was perversely brilliant. “You think menarche in SHEVA females will switch on viral mutations?” he asked.
“Possibly,” Jurie said evenly, as if discussing the weather. “Interested?”
“I am,” Dicken said after a thoughtful pause.
“Good.” Jurie reached up and pulled his head to one side, making the bones in his neck pop. His eyes turned elsewhere, and he nodded once and walked away, leaving Turner and Dicken alone in the warehouse between the trailers and the gardens.
The interview was over.
Turner escorted Dicken back through the zoo, the foot baths, and the corridors to the steel door. They stopped off at the maintenance office to get the key to Dicken's dorm room.
“You've survived meeting the Old Man,” Turner said, then showed Dicken the way to the dorm wing for new residents. He held up a key, pinched the key's tag, turning it from blue to red, and dropped it into Dicken's palm. He stared at Dicken for a long, uncomfortable moment, then said, “Good luck.”
Turner walked back down the hall, shaking his head. Over his shoulder, he called out, “Jesus! Hymens. What next?”
Dicken closed the door to the room and switched on the overhead light. He sat on the narrow, tightly made-up bed, and rubbed his temples and jaw muscles with trembling fingers, dizzy from repressed emotion.
For the first time in his life, the prey Dicken was after was not microbial.
It was a disease, but it was entirely human.
ARIZONA
Stella awoke to the sound of an over-under songfest between barracks. The wake-up bell had not yet rung. She rolled between the crisp white sheets of the top bunk and stared up at the ceiling tiles. She was familiar with the routine: A few dozen boys and girls were hanging out of the windows of their barracks, singing to each other across the razor-wire fence. The over was loud and almost tuneless; the under was subtle and not very clear from where she lay. She had no doubt it carried a lot of early-morning gossip, however.
She closed her eyes for a moment and listened. The singers in the barracks tended to slip into harshly sweet and sky-shaking laments, pushing sounds around both sides of their ridged tongues, circulating breath through nose and throat simultaneously. The two streams of song began to play counterpoint, weaving in and out in a way designed to prevent any eavesdropping by the counselors.
Not that the counselors had yet figured out how to interpret underspeech.
Stella heard loud clanging. She closed her eyes and grinned. She could see it all so clearly: Counselors were going through the barracks, banging metal trash-can lids and shouting for the children to shut up. Slowly, the songs scattered like gusts of scented air. Stella imagined the heads withdrawing from the windows, children rushing to their bunks, climbing under their covers.
Tomorrow, other barracks would take their turns. There was a kind of lottery; they tried to predict how long it would take the counselors to get from their compound to the guilty barracks, and how long they could be fooled as to which were the offending barracks. Her barracks might join in and undergo the same trash-can-lid response. Stella would be part of the songfest. She did not look forward to the challenge. She had a high, clear overvoice, but needed work on her underspeech. She was not quite as facile as the others.
Silence returned to the morning. She sank under the covers, waiting for the alarm bell. New uniforms had been deposited at the end of each bunk. The bunks were stacked three high, and the kids began each morning with a shower and a change of clothes, to keep the scent from building on their bodies or what they wore.
Stella knew that her natural smell was not offensive to humans. What concerned the camp counselors and captains was persuasion.
The girls below her, Celia and Mandy, were stirring. Stella preferred to be among the first in the showers. The wake-up bell at the south end of the hall went off as she ran toward the gate to the showers. Her thin white robe flapped at mid-thigh level.
Fresh towels and brushes were provided every day. She took a towel and a toothbrush but avoided using toothpaste. It had a lingering smell that she suspected was meant to confuse. Stella stood at the long basin with the polished steel mirror and ran the moist brush over her teeth, then massaged her gums with one finger, as Mitch had showed her how to do almost ten years ago.
Twenty other girls were already in the shower room, most from other barracks. Stella's building—barracks number three—tended to be slow. It contained the older girls. They were not as chipper or enthusiastic as the younger girls. They knew all too well what the day had in store—boredom, ritual, frustration. Stagnation.
The youngest girl in the camp was ten. The oldest was fifteen.
Stella Nova was fourteen.
After she finished, Stella returned to her bunk to dress. She looked down the lines of bunks. Most of the girls were still in the showers. It was her day to act as monitor for the barracks. She had to be inconspicuous—simply walking from bunk to bunk, bending over, and taking a big whiff would probably land her in detention, with Miss Kantor asking pointed questions. But it had to be done.
Stella carried a stack of school newspapers printed the day before. She walked from bunk to bunk, placing a paper on each bunk and gently sniffing the unmade sheets without bending over.
Within ten minutes, as the girls returned from the showers and began to dress, Stella had a good picture of the health and well-being of the barracks. Later, she would report to her deme mentor. The mentors changed from day to day or week to week. Underspeech or cheek-flashes would tell her who was responsible today. She would make a quick report with underspeech and scenting, before the heavily supervised, once-a-week, coed outdoor activity began.
The girls had thought this procedure up all by themselves. It seemed to work. The bed check was not just useful in knowing how each member was faring, it was also an act of defiance.
Defiance was essential to keeping their sanity.
Perhaps they would have early warning if the humans passed along any more diseases. Perhaps it was just a way of feeling they had some control over their lives. Stella didn't care.
Catching the scent of her barracks mates was reward enough. It made her feel as if she were a part of something worthwhile, something not human.
Americol Research Headquarters
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
“Elcob hobe!”
Liz Cantrera rushed past Kaye, a rack of clear plastic trays clattering in her arms beneath the flopping edge of a folder clamped between her teeth. She deposited the rack near the safety sink and pulled the black-bound folder from her mouth. “This just in from La Robert.”
Kaye hung her coat on the knobs behind the lab door. “Another salvo?”
“Mm hmm. I think Jackson is jealous you were asked to testify and not he.”
“Nobody should envy me that.” Kaye waggled her fingers. “Give it to me.”
Cantrera smirked and handed her the folder. “He'll be pushing a disease model long after the Karolinska hangs gold on you.”
Kaye leafed through the fifty-page brief and response to their work of the last two years. This was the big one. Robert Jackson, PI for the larger group and in some respects her boss, was working very hard to get Kaye out of his labs, out of the building, out of the way.
The expected publication date for Jackson's paper in the Journal of Biologics and Epigenetics was sticky-tabbed to the last page: December. “How nice he's passed peer review,” Kaye said.
Liz put her hands on her hips and stood in an attitude of defiant expectation. She pushed back a strand of curly strawberry blonde hair and loudly chewed a wad of gum. Her eyes were bright as drops of fresh blue ink. “He says we're removing necessary transcription factors surrounding our ERV targets, throwing out the baby with the contaminated bathwater.”
“A lot of those factors are transactivated by ERV. You can't have it both ways, Dr. Jackson. Well, at least we can shoot that one down.” Kaye slumped on a stool. “We're not getting anywhere,” she muttered. “We're taking out the viruses and not getting any baby chimps. What does it take for him to come around?” She glanced up at Liz, who was still waggling her hips and snapping her chewing gum in mock defiance of La Robert.
Liz cracked a big sappy smile. “Feel better?”
Kay shook her head and laughed despite herself. “You look like a Broadway gamine. Who are you supposed to be, Bernadette Peters?”
Liz cocked her hips and fluffed her hair with one hand. “She's a corker. Which play?” she demanded. “Revival of Mame?”
“Sweeney Todd,” Kaye said.
“That would be Winona Ryder,” Liz countered.
Kaye groaned. “Where do you get so much energy?”
“Bitterness. Seriously, how did it go?”
“I'm being used as a prop by one side and a patsy by the other. I feel like Dorothy in the tornado.”
“Sorry,” Liz said.
Kaye stretched and felt her back pop. Mitch used to do that for her. She riffled through Jackson's folder again and found the page that through instinct, and a touch of luck, had caught her eye a moment before: suspect lab protocols.
As ever, Jackson was trapped in a maze of in vitro studies—test-tube and petri dish blind alleys using Tera2 tumor cell lines—proven traps for making mistakes with ERV. Hell, he's even using chicken embryos, she thought. Egglayers don't use ERVs the same way we do.
“Jackson's vaccines kill monkeys,” Kaye said softly, tapping the page. “Marge doesn't like projects that never get past animal studies.”
“Shall we play another game of Gotcha with Dr. Jackson?” Liz asked innocently.
“Sure,” Kaye said. “I am almost cheered by this.” She dropped the folder on her small, crowded desk.
“I'm off to check our arrays, and then I'm going home,” Liz called out as she pushed through the door with the tray. “I've been working all night. You in for the week?”
“Until they fire me,” Kaye said. She rubbed her nose reflexively. “I need to look over the fragile site studies from last week.”
“Prepped and digitized. They're on the photobase,” Liz said. “There's some leftover spaghetti in the fridge.”
“Heavenly,” Kaye said.
“Bye,” Liz called as the door swung closed behind her.
Kaye got up and rubbed her nose again. It felt slightly stuffy, not unpleasantly so. The lab smelled unusually sweet and fresh, not that it ever smelled dirty. Liz was a stickler for cleanliness.
The scent was hard to place, not at all like perfume or flowers.
There was a long day's work ahead, preparing for tomorrow's morning meeting. Kaye closed her eyes, hoping to find her calm spot; she needed to focus on the chromosome results from last week. Get the sour clamp of Washington off her gut.
She pulled the stool over to the workstation and entered her password, then called up the tables and photos of chimpanzee chromosome mutations.
Early-stage embryos modified for lab work had had all of their single-copy ERVs deleted, but all multicopy ERVs, LINEs, and “defective” ERVs left intact. They had then been allowed to develop for forty-eight hours. The chromosomes, bunched up by mitosis, were removed, photographed, and crudely sequenced. What Kaye was looking for were anomalies around fragile sites and hot spots in the chromosomes—regions of genes that responded quickly to environmental change, suggesting rapid adaptive response.
The modified chimp chromosomes were severely distorted—she could tell that just by looking at the photos. The fragile sites were all screwed up, broken and rearranged incorrectly. The embryos would never have implanted in the womb, much less gone to term. Even single-copy ERVs were important to fetal development and chromosome adaptation in mammals, perhaps especially so in primates.
She looked over the analysis and saw random and destructive methylation of genes that should be actively transcribing, necessary lengths of DNA mothballed like a fleet of old ships, curling the chromatin into an agony of alternating misplaced activity and dark, inactive lassitude.
They looked ugly, those chromosomes, ugly and unnatural. The early-stage embryos, growing under the tutelage of such chromosomes, would die. That was the story of everything they had done in the lab. If, by rare chance, the ERV-knockout embryos managed to implant and begin development, they were invariably resorbed within the first few weeks. And getting that far had required giving the chimp mothers massive drug regimens developed for human mothers at fertilization clinics to prevent miscarriages.
The ERVs served so many functions in the developing embryos, including mediating tissue differentiation. And it was already obvious that TLV—the Temin-Larsson-Villarreal conjecture—was correct. Highly conserved endogenous retroviruses expressed by the trophectoderm of the developing embryo—the portion that would develop into the surrounding amnion and placenta—protected against attacks by the mother's immune system. The viral envelope proteins selectively subdued the mother's immune response to her fetus without weakening the mother's defenses against external pathogens, an exquisite dance of selectivity.
Because of the protective function of legacy retroviruses, ERV knockout—the removal or stifling of most or all of the genome's “original sins”—was invariably fatal.
Kaye vividly remembered the chill she had felt when Mitch's mother had described SHEVA as “original sin.” How long ago had that been—fifteen years? Just after they had conceived Stella.
If SHEVA and other ERV constituted original sin, then it was starting to look as if all placental mammals, perhaps all multicelled life forms, were filled with original sin, required it, died without it.
And wasn't that what the Garden of Eden was all about? The beginning of sex and self-knowledge and life as we know it.
All because of viruses.
“The hell with that,” Kaye muttered. “We need a new name for these things.”
ARIZONA
Roll call was Stella's least favorite time of day, when the girls were all gathered together and Miss Kantor walked between the rows under the big tent.
Stella sat cross-legged and drew little figures of flowers and birds in the dust with her finger. The canvas flapped with the soft morning breeze. Miss Kantor walked between the lines of seated, cross-legged adolescents and leafed through her daybook. She relied entirely on paper, simply because losing an e-pad or laptop in the reserve was a severe offense, punishable by dismissal.
The dormitories held no phones, no satellite feeds, no radios. Television was limited to educational videos. Stella and most of the other children here had come to abhor television.
“Ellie Ann Garcia.”
“Here.”
“Stella Nova Rafelson.”
“Here,” Stella called out, her voice silvery in the cool desert air.
“How's your cold, Stella?” Miss Kantor asked as she walked down the row.
“Done,” Stella answered.
“Eight days, wasn't it?” Miss Kantor tapped her pen on the daybook page.
“Yes, ma'am.”
“That's the fifth wave of colds we've had this year.”
Stella nodded. The counselors kept careful and tedious track of all infections. Stella had spent several hours being examined, five days ago; so had two dozen other children with similar colds.
“Kathy Chu.”
“Here!”
Miss Kantor walked by Stella again after she had finished. “Stella, are you scenting?”
Stella looked up. “No, Miss Kantor.”
“My little sensor tells me you are.” She tapped the nosey on her belt. Stella was not scenting, and neither was anybody around her. Miss Kantor's electronic snitch was wrong, and Stella knew why; Miss Kantor was having her period and that could confuse the nosey. But Stella would never tell her that.
Humans hated to be clued when they produced revealing odors.
“You'll never learn to live in the outside world if you can't control yourself,” Miss Kantor said to Stella, and knelt in front of her. “You know the rules.”
Stella got to her feet without being prompted. She did not know why she was being singled out. She had done nothing unusual.
“Wait over by the truck,” Miss Kantor said.
Stella walked to the truck, brilliant white under the morning sun. The air over the mountains was intense and blue. It was going to be hot in a few hours, but it might rain heavily later; that would make the late-afternoon air perfect for catching up. She did not want to miss that.
Miss Kantor finished her count and the kids filed off to the morning classes in the trailers and bungalows scattered over the dusty grounds. The counselor and her assistant, a quiet, plump young woman named Joanie, walked across the gravel to the truck. Miss Kantor would not look straight at Stella.
“I know it wasn't just you,” Miss Kantor said. “But you're the only one I could catch. It has to stop, Stella. But I'm not going to punish you this time.”
“Yes, ma'am.” Stella knew better than to argue. When things went her way, Miss Kantor was reasonable and fairly easygoing, but any show of defiance or contradiction and she could get harsh. “Can I go to classes now?”
“Not yet,” Miss Kantor said, placing her notepad in the truck. She opened the rear door of the truck. “Your father is visiting,” she said. “We're going back to the infirmary.”
Stella sat in the back of the truck, behind the plastic barrier, feeling confused. Miss Kantor climbed into the front seat. Joanie closed the door for her and went back to the tent. “Is he there, now?” Stella asked.
“He'll arrive in an hour or so,” Miss Kantor said. “You two just got approval. That's pretty good, isn't it?”
“What do they want?” Stella asked suddenly, before she could control her tongue.
“Nothing. It's a family visit.”
Miss Kantor switched on the truck motor. Stella could feel her disapproval. Parental visits were futile at the best of times, Miss Kantor believed. The children would never be fully integrated into human society, no matter what the school policy said. She knew the children too well. They just could not behave appropriately.
Worse still, Miss Kantor knew that Stella's father had served time in prison for assaulting Emergency Action enforcement officers. Having him as a visitor would be something of an affront to her. She was a holdover from the times when Sable Mountain School had been a prison.
Stella had not seen Mitch in three years. She hardly remembered what he smelled like, much less what he looked like.
Miss Kantor drove over the gravel to the paved road, and then between the brush half a mile to the brick building they called the hospital. It wasn't really a hospital. As far as Stella knew, for sure, the hospital was just the administration and detention center for the school. It had been a hospital once, for the prison. Some kids claimed the hospital was where they injected salt into your cheeks, or resected your tongue, or Botoxed the new facial muscles that made your expressions so compelling.
It was the place they tried to turn SHEVA kids into humans. Stella had never met a kid who had undergone such torments, but that was explained, some said, by the fact that they sent those kids away to Suburbia, a town made up of nothing but SHEVA kids trying to act just like humans.
That was not true, as far as Stella knew, but the hospital was where they sent you when they wanted to draw blood. She had been there many times for that purpose.
There were lots of stories in the camps. Few of them were true, but most were scary, and the kids could get ominously bored.
As they drove through a razor-wire fence and over a moat, Stella felt something sad and cold grow in her.
Memory.
She did not want to lose her focus. She stared through the window, resenting Mitch for coming. Why now? Why not when she had her act together and could tell him she had accomplished something worthwhile? Life was still too confused. The last visit with her mother had been painful. Stella had not known what to say. Her mother had been so sad and full of needs neither could satisfy.
She hoped Mitch would not just sit and stare at her over the table in the family conference room. Or ask pointed questions. Or try to tell Stella there was hope they would get together again. Stella did not think she could stand that.
Stella dipped her head and rubbed her nose. She touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye and then to her tongue, out of sight of the rearview mirror. Her eyes were moist and the tears tasted of bitter salt. She would not cry openly, however. Not in front of a human.
Miss Kantor stopped the truck in the parking lot of the flat brick building, got out, and opened Stella's door. Stella followed her into the hospital. As they turned a corner, through a gap in the brick breezeway she saw a long yellow bus drawn up beside the processing office. A load of new kids had arrived. Stella hung back a few steps from Miss Kantor as they passed through the glass doors and walked to the detention center.
The door to the secretary's office was always open, and through the wide window beyond, Stella thought she would catch a glimpse of the new kids from the shipment center. That would be something to take back to the deme; possible recruits or news from outside.
Suddenly, irrationally, she hated Mitch. She did not want him to visit. She did not want any distractions. She wanted to focus and never have to worry about humans again. She wanted to lash out at Miss Kantor, strike her down to the linoleum floor, and run away to anywhere but here.
Through Stella's brief, fierce scowl—a more intense scowl than most humans could manage—she caught a glimpse of the lineup of children beyond the secretary's window. Her scowl vanished.
She thought she recognized a face.
Stella dropped to remove her shoe and turned it upside down, shaking it. Miss Kantor looked back and stopped with hands on hips.
The nosey on her belt wheeped.
“Are you scenting again?” she asked.
“No, ma'am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.
She did know the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.
She no longer worried about Mitch.
The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket's shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye's and Mitch's house.
It was Will. Strong Will.
BALTIMORE
Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.
Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.
All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.
Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.
The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.
“This isn't a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.
“It feels like you love me,” she said, shaking with frustration. “So why do you torment me? Why don't you just tell me what you want me to do?” Kaye slid down the bench to a chair near a desk in the corner of the lab. She put her head between her knees. She did not feel weak or even woozy; she could have walked around and even gone about her daily work. She had before. But this time it was just too much.
Her anger swelled even over the insistent waves of validation and approval. The first time the caller had touched her, Mitch and Stella had been taken away. That had been so bad, so unfair; she did not want to remember that time now. And yet this affirmation forced her to remember.
“Go away. Please. I don't know why you're here. This world is cruel, even if you aren't, and I have to keep working.”
She looked around, biting her lip, seeing the lab, the equipment, so neatly arranged, the dark beyond the window. The wall of night outside, the bright rationality within.
“Please.”
She felt the voice become smaller, but no less intense. How polite, she thought. Abruptly, panicked at this new loss, this possible withdrawal, she jumped to her feet.
“Are you trying to clue me in to something?” she asked, desperate. “Reward me for my work, my discoveries?”
Kaye received the distinct impression that this was not the case. She got up and made sure the door was locked. No sense having people wander in and find her talking to herself. She paced up and down the aisles. “So you're willing to communicate, just not with words,” she said, eyes half-closed. “All right. I'll talk. You let me know whether I'm right or wrong, okay? This could take a while.”
She had long since learned that an irreverent attitude had no effect on the caller. Even when Kaye had loathed herself for what she had done by abandoning Mitch in prison and her daughter in the schools, ruining all their lives in a desperate gamble to use all the tools of science and rationality, the caller had still radiated love and approval.
She could punish herself, but the caller would not.
Even more embarrassing, Kaye had come to think of the caller as definitely not female, and probably not neuter—but male. The caller was nothing like her father or Mitch or any other man she had ever met or known, but it seemed strangely masculine nonetheless. What that meant psychologically, she was most unwilling to discover. It was a little too de rigueur, a little too churchy, for comfort.
But the caller cared little about her qualms. He was the most consistent thing in her life—outside of her need to help Stella.
“Am I doing the right thing?” she asked, looking around the lab. Her tremors stopped. She let the extraordinary calm wash over her. “That means yes, I suppose,” she said tentatively. “Are you the Big Guy? Are you Jesus? Or just Gabriel?”
She had asked these questions before, and received no response. This time, however, she felt an almost insignificant alteration in the sensations flooding through her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “No. None of the above. Are you my guardian angel?”
Again, a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and whispered, “No.
“Then what are you?”
No response at all, no change, no clues.
“God?”
Nothing.
“You're inside me or up there or someplace where you can just pump out love and approval all day long, and then you go away and leave me in misery. I don't understand that. I need to know whether you're just something in my head. A crossed nerve. A burst blood vessel. I need solid reassurance. I hope you don't mind.”
The caller expressed no objection, not even to the extent of withdrawing under the assault of such questioning, such blasphemies.
“You're really something else, you know that?” Kaye sat before the workstation and logged on to the Americol intranet. “There's nothing Sunday school about you.”
She glanced at her watch—6 p.m.—and looked up the roster that recorded who was in the building at this hour.
On the first floor, chief radiologist Herbert Roth was still at his post, working late. Just the man she needed. Roth was in charge of the Noninvasive Imaging Lab. She had worked with him two weeks ago taking scans of Wishtoes, their oldest female chimp.
Roth was young, quiet, dedicated to his craft.
Kaye opened the lab door and stepped out into the hall. “Do you think Mr. Roth will want to scan me?” she asked no one in particular.
ARIZONA
They did not let Stella see Mitch for hours. First Stella was visited by a nurse who examined her, took a cheek swab, and drew a few cc's of blood.
Stella looked away as the nurse lightly jabbed her with the needle. She could smell the nurse's anxiety; she was only a few years older than Stella and did not like this.
Afterward, Miss Kantor took Stella to the visitor's area. The first thing Stella noticed was that they had removed the plastic barrier. Tables and chairs, nothing more. Something had changed, and that concerned her for a moment. She patted the cotton patch taped to the inside of her elbow. After an hour, Miss Kantor returned with a pile of comic books.
“X-Men,” she said. “You'll like these. Your father's still being examined. Give me the cotton.”
Stella pulled off the tape and handed it to Miss Kantor, who opened a plastic bag to store it.
“He'll be done soon,” Miss Kantor said with a practiced smile.
Stella ignored the comics and stood in the bare room with its flowered wallpaper and the single table and two plastic chairs. There was a water cooler in the corner and a couple of lounge chairs, patched and dirty. She filled a paper cup with water. A window opened from the main office, and another window looked out over the parking lot. No hot coffee or tea, no hot plate for warming food—no utensils. Family visits were not meant to last long or to be particularly comfortable.
She curled the paper cup in her hand and thought alternately about her father and about Will. Thinking about Will pushed her father into the background, if only for a moment, and Stella did not like that. She did not want to be chaotic. She did not want to be unpredictable; she wanted to be faithful to the goal of putting together a stable deme, away from the school, away from human interference, and that would require focus and an emotional constancy.
She knew nothing about Will. She did not even know his last name. He might not remember her. Perhaps he was passing through, getting a checkup or going through some sort of quarantine on his way to another school.
But if he was staying . . .
Joanie opened the door. “Your father's here,” she said. Joanie always tried to hide her smell behind baby powder. Her expression was friendly but empty. She did what Miss Kantor wanted and seldom expressed her own opinions.
“Okay,” Stella said, and took a seat in one plastic chair. The table would be between them, she hoped. She squirmed nervously. She had to get used to the thought of seeing Mitch again.
Joanie pointed the way through the door and Mitch came in. His left arm hung by his side. Stella looked at the arm, eyes wide, and then at Mitch's denim jacket and jeans, worn and a little dusty. And then she looked at his face.
Mitch was forcing a nervous smile. He did not know what to do, either.
“Hello, sweetie,” he said.
“You can sit in the chair,” Joanie said. “Take your time.”
“How long do we have?” Mitch asked Joanie. Stella hated that. She remembered him as being strong and in charge, and his having to ask about such a thing was wrong.
“We don't have many visits scheduled today. There are four rooms. So . . . take your time. A couple of hours. Let me know if you need anything. I'll be in the office right outside.”
Joanie shut the door and Mitch looked at the chair, the table. Then, at his daughter.
“Don't you want a hug?” he asked Stella.
Stella stood, her cheeks tawny with emotion. She kept her hands by her sides. Mitch walked across the room slowly, and she tracked him like a wild animal. Then the currents of air in the room brought his scent, and the cry came up out of her before she could stop it. Mitch took the last step and grabbed her and squeezed and Stella shook in his arms. Her eyes filled with tears that dripped on Mitch's jacket.
“You're so tall,” Mitch murmured, swinging her gently back and forth, brushing the tips of her shoes against the linoleum.
She planted her feet and pushed him back and tried to pack in her emotions, but they did not fit. They had exploded like popcorn.
“I've never given up,” Mitch said.
Stella's long fingers clutched at his jacket. The smell of him was overwhelming, comfortable and familiar; it made her feel like a little girl again. He was basic and simple, no elaborations, predictable and memorable; he was the smell of their home in Virginia, of everything she had tried to forget, everything she had thought was lost.
“I couldn't come to see you,” he said. “They wouldn't let me. Part of probation.”
She nodded, bumping her chin gently against his shoulder.
“I sent your mother messages.”
“She gave them to me.”
“There was no gun, Stella. They lied,” Mitch said, and for a moment he looked no older than her, just another disappointed child.
“I know. Kaye told me.”
Mitch held his daughter at arm's length. “You're gorgeous,” he said, his thick brows drawing together. His face was sunburned. Stella could smell the damage to his skin, the toughening. He smelled like leather and dust above the fundamental of just being Mitch. In his smell—and in Kaye's—she could detect a little of her own fundamental, like a shared license number in the genes, a common passkey to the emotions.
“They want us to sit . . . here?” Mitch asked, swinging one arm at the table.
Stella wrapped her arms around herself, still jammed up inside. She did not know what to do.
Mitch smiled. “Let's just stand for a while,” he said.
“All right,” Stella said.
“Try to get used to each other again.”
“All right.”
“Are they treating you well?” Mitch asked.
“They probably think so.”
“What do you think?”
Shrug, long fingers wrapping around her wrists, making a little cage of her hands and arms. “They're afraid of us.”
Mitch clenched his jaw and nodded. “Nothing new.”
Stella's eyes were hypnotic as she tried to express herself. Her pupils shifted size and gold flecks passed like fizz in champagne. “They don't want us to be who we are.”
“How do you mean?”
“They move us from one dorm to another. They use sniffers. If we scent, we're punished. If we cloud-scent or fever scent, they break us up and keep us in detention.”
“I've read about that,” Mitch said.
“They think we'll try to persuade them. Maybe they're afraid we'll try to escape. They wear nose plugs, and sometimes they fill the dorms with fake strawberry or peach smell when they do a health inspection. I used to like strawberry, but now it's awful. Worst of all is the Pine-Sol.” She shoved her palm against her nose and made a gagging sound.
“I hear the classes are boring, too.”
“They're afraid we'll learn something,” Stella said, and giggled. Mitch felt a tingle. That sound had changed, and the change was not subtle. She sounded wary, more mature . . . but something else was at work.
Laughter was a key gauge of psychology and culture. His daughter was very different from the little girl he had known.
“I've learned a lot from the others,” Stella said, straightening her face. Mitch traced the faint marks of lines under and beside her eyes, at the corners of her lips, fascinated by the dance of clues to her emotions. Finer muscle control than she had had as a youngster . . . capable of expressions he could not begin to interpret.
“Are you doing okay?” Mitch asked, very seriously.
“I'm doing better than they want,” she said. “It isn't so bad, because we manage.” She glanced up at the ceiling, touched her earlobe, winked. Of course, they were being monitored; she did not want to give away any secrets.
“Glad to hear it,” Mitch said.
“But of course there's stuff they already know,” she added in a low voice. “I'll tell you about that if you want.”
“Of course, sweetie,” Mitch said. “Anything.”
Stella kept her eyes on the top of the table as she told Mitch about the groups of twenty to thirty that called themselves demes. “It means ‘the people,’ ” she said. “We're like sisters in the demes. But they don't let the boys sleep in the same dorms, the same barracks. So we have to sing across the wire at night and try to recruit boys into our demes that way.”
“That's probably for the best,” Mitch said. He lifted one eyebrow and pinched his lips together.
Stella shook her head. “But they don't understand. The deme is like a big family. We help each other. We talk and solve problems and stop arguments. We're so smart when we're in a deme. We feel so right together. Maybe that's why . . .”
Mitch leaned back as his daughter suddenly spoke in two bursts at once:
“We need to be together/We're healthier together
“Everyone cares for the others/Everyone is happy with the others
“The sadness comes from not knowing/The sadness comes from being apart.”
The absolute clarity of the two streams astonished him. If he caught them immediately and analyzed, he could string them together into a serial statement, but over more than a few seconds of conversation, it was obvious he would get confused. And he had no doubt that Stella could now go on that way indefinitely.
She looked at him directly, the skin over the outside of her eye orbits drawing in with a pucker he could neither duplicate nor interpret. Freckles formed around the outside and lower orbits like little tan-and-gold stars; she was sparking in ways he had never seen before.
He shivered in both admiration and concern. “I don't know what that means, when . . . you do that,” he said. “I mean, it's beautiful, but . . .”
“Do what?” Stella asked, and her eyes were normal again.
Mitch swallowed. “When you're in a deme, how many of you talk that way . . . at once?”
“We make circles,” Stella said. “We talk to each other in the circle and across the circle.”
“How many in the circle?”
“Five or ten,” Stella said. “Separately, of course. Boys have rules. Girls have rules. We can make new rules, but some rules already seem to be there. We follow the rules most of the time, unless we feel there's an emergency—someone is feeling steepy.”
“Steepy.”
“Not part of cloud. When we cloud, we're even more like brothers and sisters. Some of us become mama and papa, too, and we can lead cloud, but mama and papa never make us do what we don't want to do. We decide together.”
She looked up at the ceiling, her chin dimpling. “You know about this. Kaye told you.”
“Some, and I've read about some of it. I remember when you were trying out some of these . . . techniques on us. I remember trying to keep up with you. I wasn't very good. Your mother was better.”
“Her face . . .” Stella began. “I see her face when I become mama in cloud. Her face becomes my face.” Her brows formed elegant and compelling double arches, grotesque and beautiful at once. “It's tough to explain.”
“I think I understand,” Mitch said. His skin was warming. Being around his own daughter made him feel left out, even inferior; how did it make the counselors feel, their keepers?
In this zoo, who were the animals, really?
“What happens when someone disagrees? Do you compel her? Him?”
Stella thought about this for a few seconds. “Everyone is free in cloud, but they cooperate. If they don't agree, they hold that thought until the time is right, and then cloud listens. Sometimes, if it's an emergency, the thought is brought up immediately, but that slows us down. It has to be good.”
“And you enjoy being in the cloud?”
“Being in cloud,” Stella corrected. “All clouds are part of each other, just smeared out. We sort the differences and stuff later, when the demes catch up. But we don't get to do that often, so most of us don't know what it's really like. We just imagine. Sometimes they let it happen, though.”
She did not tell Mitch that those were the times when nearly everybody got taken to the hospital to be sampled, after.
“Sounds very friendly,” Mitch said.
“Sometimes there's hate,” Stella said soberly. “We have to deal with it. A cloud feels pain just like an individual.”
“Do you know what I'm feeling, right now?”
“No,” Stella said. “Your face is kind of a blank.” She smiled. “The counselors smell like cabbages when we do something unexpected./ They smelled like broccoli when we caught colds a few days ago./
“I'm over my cold now and it wasn't serious but we acted sicker to worry them.”
Mitch laughed. The crossed intonations of resentment and wry superiority tickled him. “That's pretty good,” he said. “But don't push it.”
“We know,” Stella said primly, and suddenly Mitch saw Kaye in her expression, and felt a rush of real pride, that this young woman still came of them, from them. I hope that doesn't limit her.
He also felt a sudden burst of longing for Kaye.
“Is prison like this?” Stella asked.
“Well, prison is a bit harder than here, even.”
“Why aren't you with Kaye, now?”
Mitch wondered how he could possibly explain. “When I was in prison—she was going through rough times, making hard decisions. I couldn't be a part of those decisions. We decided we'd be more effective if we worked separately. We . . . couldn't cloud, I guess you'd say.”
Stella shook her head. “That's fit, like drops of rain hitting each other. Slipskin is when the drops fall apart. Cloud is a bigger thing.”
“Oh,” Mitch said. “How many words for snow?”
Stella's expression became one of a simple lack of comprehension, and for a moment Mitch saw his daughter as she had been even ten years ago, and loved her fiercely. “Your mother and I talk every few weeks. She's busy now, working in Baltimore. Doing science.”
“Trying to turn us back into humans?”
“You are human,” Mitch said, his face going red.
“No,” Stella said. “We aren't.”
Mitch decided this wasn't the time or the place. “She's trying to learn how we make new children,” he said. “It's not as simple as we thought.”
“Virus children,” Stella said.
“Yes, well, if I understand it correctly, viruses play all sorts of roles. We just discovered that fact when we looked at SHEVA. Now . . . it's pretty confused.”
Stella seemed, if anything, offended by this. “We're not new?”
“Of course you're new,” Mitch said. “I really don't understand it very well. When we all get together again, your mother will know enough to explain it to us. She's learning as fast as she can.”
“We're not taught biology here,” Stella said.
Mitch clamped his teeth together. Keep them down. Keep them under lock and key. Otherwise, you might prime their fuse.
“That makes you angry?” Stella asked.
He could not answer for a moment. His fists knotted on the top of the table. “Of course,” he said.
“Make them let us go. Get us all out of here,” Stella said. “Not just me.”
“We're trying,” Mitch said, but knew he wasn't being entirely truthful. As a convicted felon, he had a limited range of options. And his own sense of resentment and damage reduced his effectiveness in groups. In his darkest moods, he thought that was why he and Kaye were no longer living together.
He had become a political liability. A lone wolf.
“I have lots of families here, and they're growing,” Stella said.
“We're your family,” Mitch said.
Stella watched him for a moment, puzzled.
Joanie opened the door. “Time's up,” she said.
Mitch spun around in his chair and tapped his watch. “It's been less than an hour,” he said.
“There'll be more time tomorrow if you can come back,” Joanie said.
Mitch turned to Stella, crestfallen. “I can't stay until tomorrow. There's something . . .”
“Go,” Stella said, and stood. She came around the table as Mitch got to his feet and hugged her father again, brisk and strong. “There's lots of work for all of us.”
“You are so adult now,” Mitch said.
“Not yet,” Stella said. “None of us knows what that will be like. They probably won't let us find out.”
Joanie tsked, then escorted Mitch and Stella from the room. They parted in the brick corridor. Mitch gave her a small wave with his good arm.
Mitch sat in the hot interior of his truck, under the low Arizona sun, sweating and near despair, lonelier than he had ever been in his life.
Through the fence and across the brush and sand, he saw more children—hundreds of them—walking between the bungalows. His hand drummed on the steering wheel.
Stella was still his daughter. He could still see Kaye in her. But the differences were startling. Mitch did not know what he had expected; he had expected differences. But she was not just growing up. The way Stella behaved was sleek and shiny, like a new penny. She was unfamiliar, not distant in the least, not unfriendly, just focused elsewhere.
The only conclusion he could come to, as he turned over the big engine in the old Ford truck, was a self-observation.
His own daughter scared him.
After the nurse filled another tube with her blood, Stella walked back to the bungalow where they would watch videos after dinner of human children playing, talking, sitting in class. It was called civics. It was intended to change the way the new children behaved when they were together. Stella hated civics. Watching people without knowing how they smelled, and watching the young human faces with their limited range of emotions, disturbed her. If they did not face the televisions, however, Miss Kantor could get really ugly.
Stella deliberately kept her mind clear, but a tear came out of her left eye and traveled down her cheek. Not her right eye. Just her left eye.
She wondered what that meant.
Mitch had changed so much. And he smelled like he had just been kicked.
BALTIMORE
The imaging lab office was separated from the Magnetic Resonance Imager—the Machine—by two empty rooms. The forces induced by the toroidal magnets of the Machine were awesome. Visitors were warned not to go down the hall without first emptying their pockets of mechanical and electronic devices, pocket PCs, wallets, cell phones, security name tags, eyeglasses, watches. Getting closer to the Machine required exchanging day clothes for metal-free robes—no zippers, metal buttons, or belt buckles; no rings, pins, tie clasps, or cuff links.
Everything loose within a few meters of the Machine was made of wood or plastic. Workers here wore elastic belts and specially selected slippers or athletic shoes.
Five years ago, right in this facility, a scientist had forgotten the warnings and had her nipple and clitoris rings ripped out. Or so the story went. People with pacemakers, optic nerve rewiring, or any sort of neural implants could not go anywhere near the Machine.
Kaye was free of such appliances, and that was the first thing she told Herbert Roth as she stood in the door to the office.
Slight, balding, in his early forties, Roth gave her a puzzled smile as he put down his pencil and pushed a batch of papers aside. “Glad to hear it, Ms. Rafelson,” he said. “But the Machine is turned off. Besides, we spent several days imaging Wishtoes and I already know that about you.”
Roth pulled up a plastic chair for Kaye and she sat on the other side of the wooden desk. Kaye touched the smooth surface. Roth had told her that his father had crafted it from solid maple, without nails, using only glue. It was beautiful.
He still has a father.
She felt the cool river in her spine, the sense of utter delight and approval, and closed her eyes for a moment. Roth watched her with some concern.
“Long day?”
She shook her head, wondering how to begin.
“Is Wishtoes pregnant?”
“No,” Kaye said. She took the plunge. “Are you feeling very scientific?”
Roth looked around nervously, as if the room was not completely familiar. “Depends.” His eyes squinched down and he could not avoid giving Kaye the once-over.
“Scientific and discreet?”
Roth's eyes widened with something like panic.
“Pardon me, Ms. Rafelson—”
“Kaye, please.”
“Kaye. I think you're very attractive, but . . . If it's about the Machine, I've already got a list of Web sites that show . . . I mean, it's already been done.” He laughed what he hoped was a gallant laugh. “Hell, I've done it. Not alone, I mean.”
“Done what?” Kaye asked.
Roth flushed crimson and pushed his chair back with a hollow scrape of the plastic legs. “I have no idea what in hell you're talking about.”
Kaye smiled. She meant nothing specific by the smile, but she saw Roth relax. His expression changed to puzzled concern and the excess color faded from his face. There is something about me, about this, she thought. It's a charmed moment.
“Why are you down here?” Roth asked.
“I'm offering you a unique opportunity.” Kaye felt impossibly nervous, but she was not going to let that stop her. As far as she knew, there had never been an opportunity like this in the history of science—nothing confirmed, at least, or even rumored. “I'm having an epiphany.”
Roth raised one eyebrow, bewildered.
“You don't know what an epiphany is?” Kaye asked.
“I'm Catholic. It's a feast celebrating Jesus' divinity. Or something like that.”
“It's a manifestation,” Kaye said. “God is inside me.”
“Whoa,” Roth said. The word hung between them for several seconds, during which time Kaye did not look away from Roth's eyes. He blinked first. “I suppose that's great,” he said. “What does it have to do with me?”
“God comes to most of us. I've read William James and other books about this kind of experience. At least half of the human race goes through it at one time or another. It's like nothing else I've ever felt. It's life changing, even if it is very . . . very inconvenient. And inexplicable. I didn't ask for it, but I can't, I won't deny that it is real.”
Roth listened to Kaye with a fixed expression, brow wrinkled, eyes wide, mouth open. He sat up in the chair and folded his arms on the desk. “No joke?”
“No joke.”
He considered further. “Everyone is under pressure here.”
“I don't think that has anything to do with it,” Kaye said. Then, slowly, she added, “I've considered that possibility, I really have. I just don't think that's what it is.”
Roth licked his lips and avoided her stare. “So what does it have to do with me?”
She reached out to touch his arm, and he quickly withdrew it. “Herbert, has anyone ever imaged a person who's being touched by God? Who's having an epiphany?”
“Lots of times,” Roth said defensively. “Persinger's research. Meditation states, that sort of thing. It's in the literature.”
“I've read them all. Persinger, Damasio, Posner, and Ramachandran.” She ticked the list off on her fingers. “You think I haven't researched this?”
Roth smiled in embarrassment.
“Meditation states, oneness, bliss, all that can be induced with training. They are under some personal control . . . But not this. I've looked it up. It can't be induced, no matter how hard you pray. It comes and it goes as if it has a will of its own.”
“God doesn't just talk to us,” Roth said. “I mean, even if I believed in God, such a thing would be incredibly rare, and maybe it hasn't happened for a couple of thousand years. The prophets. Jesus. That sort of thing.”
“It isn't rare. It's called many things, and people react differently. It does something to you. It turns your life around, gives it direction and meaning. Sometimes it breaks people.” She shook her head. “Mother Teresa wept because she didn't have God making regular visits. She wanted continuing confirmation of the value of her work, her pain, her sacrifices. Yet no one actually knows if Mother Teresa experienced what I'm experiencing . . .” She took a deep breath. “I want to learn what is happening to me. To us. We need a baseline to understand.”
Roth tried to fit this into some catalog of social quid pro quos, and could not. “Kaye, is this really the place? Aren't you supposed to be doing research on viruses? Or do you think God is a virus?”
Kaye stared at Roth in disbelief. “No,” she said. “This is not a virus. This is not something genetic and it's probably not even biological. Except to the extent that it touches me.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Kaye closed her eyes again. She did not need to search. The sensation rolled on, coming in waves of amazement, of childlike glee and adult consternation, all of her emotions and reactions met not with tolerance, nor even with amusement, but with an equally childlike yet infinitely mature and wise acceptance.
Something was sipping from Kaye Lang's soul, and found her delicious.
“Because it's bigger than anything I know,” she said finally. “I have no idea how long it's going to last, but whatever it is, it's happened before to people, many times, and it's shaped human history. Don't you want to see what it looks like?”
Roth sighed as he examined the images on the large monitor.
Two and a half hours had passed; it was almost ten o'clock. Kaye had been through seven varieties of NMR, PET, and computerized tomography scans. She had been injected, shielded, injected again, rotated like a chicken on a spit, turned upside down. For a while, she wondered if Roth was bent on taking revenge for her imposition.
Finally, Roth had wrapped her head in a white plastic helmet and put her through a final and, he claimed, rather expensive CT-motion scan, capable, he muttered vaguely, of extraordinary detail, focusing on the hippocampus, and then, in another sweep, the brain stem.
Now she sat upright, her wrist wrapped in a bandage, her head and neck bruised from clamps, feeling a vague urge to throw up. Somewhere near the end of the procedures, the caller had simply faded, like a shortwave radio signal from across the seas. Kaye felt calm and relaxed, despite her soreness.
She also felt sad, as if a good friend had just departed, and she was not sure they would ever meet again.
“Well, whatever he is,” Roth said, “he isn't talking. None of the scans show extensive speech processing, above the level of normal internal dialog and my own datum of questions. You seem, no surprise, a little nervous—but less so than other patients. Stoic might be the word. You show a fair amount of deep brain activity, signifying a pretty strong emotional response. Do you embarrass easily?”
Kaye shook her head.
“There's a little indication of something like arousal, but I wouldn't call it sexual arousal, not precisely. Nothing like orgasm or garden-variety ecstasy such as, for example, you might find in someone using consciousness-altering drugs. We have recordings—movies—of people meditating, engaging in sex, on drugs, including LSD and cocaine. Your scans don't match any of those.”
“I can't imagine having sex in that tube.”
Roth smiled. “Mostly enthusiastic young people,” he explained. “Here we go—CT motion scans coming up.” He became deeply absorbed in the false-color images of her brain on the display: dark fields of gray overlaid with symmetric, blossoming Rorschach birds, touched here and there with little coals of metabolic activity, maps of thought and personality and deep subconscious processes. “All right,” he said to himself, pausing the scroll. “What's this?” He touched three pulsing yellow splotches, a little bigger than a thumbnail, points on a scan taken midway through their session. He made small humming sounds, then flipped through an on-line library of images from other explorations, some of them years and even decades old, until he seemed satisfied he had what he wanted.
Roth pushed his chair back with an echoing scrape and pointed to a blue-and-green sagittal section of a head, small and oddly shaped. He filled in and rotated the image in 3-D, and Kaye made out the outlines of an infant's skull and the fog of the brain within. Radiating fields of mental activity spun within ghostly curves of bone and tissue.
An indefinite grayish mass seemed to issue from the infant's mouth.
“Not so much detail, but it's a pretty close match,” Roth said. “Famous experiment in Japan, about eight years ago. They scanned a normal birthing session. Woman had had four kids previously. She was an old pro. The machines didn't bother her.”
Roth studied the image. He hummed for a moment, then clicked his fingernails like castanets. “This is a scan of the infant's brain while he or she was getting acquainted with mom. Taking the teat, I'd say.” He used his finger to point out the gray mass, magnified the activity centers in the infant's brain, rotated them to the proper azimuth, then superimposed the baby's scan on Kaye's.
The activity centers lined up neatly.
Roth smiled. “What do you think? A match?”
Kaye was lost for a moment, remembering the first time Stella had suckled, the wonderful sensation of the baby at her nipple, of her milk letting down.
“They look the same,” she said. “Is that a mistake?”
“Don't think so,” Roth said. “I could make some animal brain comparisons. There's been some work in the last few years on bonding in kittens and puppies, even some in baboons, but not very good. They don't hold still.”
“What does it mean?” Kaye asked. She shook her head, still lost. “Whatever He is, He's not using speech—that much has been clear from the start. Irritating, actually.”
“Mumbles from the burning bush?” Roth said. “And no stone tablets.”
“No speeches, no proclamations, nothing,” Kaye confirmed.
“Look, this is the closest I can come to a match,” Roth said.
With her finger, Kaye traced the Rorschach birds inside the infant's brain. “I still don't understand.”
Roth tilted his head. “Looks to me like you've made a big connection. You're imprinting on someone or something big-time. You've become a baby again, Ms. Rafelson.”
Kaye unlocked her apartment, entered, and used her briefcase to block the front door from closing. She punched in her six-number code to deactivate the alarm, then took off her sweater, hung it in the closet, and stood in the hallway, breathing deeply to keep from sobbing. She wasn't sure how much longer she could endure this. The voids in her life were like deserts she could not cross.
“What about you?” she asked the empty air. She walked into the darkened living room. “The way I see it, if you're some kind of big daddy, you protect those you love, you keep them from harm. What's the God . . . what's the damned,” she finally shouted it, “the God damned excuse?”
The phone beeped. Kaye jumped, pulled her eyes away from the corner of the ceiling she had been addressing, stepped to the kitchen counter, and reached across to pick up the handset.
“Kaye? It's Mitch.”
Kaye drew in another breath, almost of dread, certainly of guilt, before speaking. “I'm here.” She sat stiffly upright in the easy chair and covered the mouthpiece as she told the lights to switch on. The living room was small and neat, except for stacks of journals and offprints arrayed at angles to each other on the coffee table. Other piles spilled across the floor beside the couch.
“Are you all right?”
“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I'm not. Are you?”
Mitch did not answer this. Good for him, Kaye thought.
“I'm on the road again,” he said.
A pause.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Oregon. My horse broke down and I thought I'd give you a call, ask if you had some extra . . . I don't know. Horseshoes.” He sounded even more exhausted than she was. Kaye intercepted something else in his tone and zeroed in with sudden hope.
“You saw Stella?”
“They let me see Stella. Lucky guy, right?”
“Is she well?”
“She gave me a big hug. She's looking pretty good. She cried, Kaye.”
Kaye felt her throat catch. She held the phone aside and coughed into her fist. “She misses you. Sorry. Dry throat. I need some water.” She walked into the kitchen to take a bottle from the refrigerator.
“She misses both of us,” Mitch said.
“I can't be there. I can't protect her. What's to miss?”
“I just wanted to call and tell you about her. She's growing up. It makes me feel lost, thinking that she's almost grown and I wasn't around.”
“Not your fault,” she said.
“How's the work?”
“Finished soon,” Kaye said. “I don't know if they'll believe it. So many are still stuck in old ruts.”
“Robert Jackson?”
“Yeah, him, too.”
“You're lucky to be working at what you do best,” Mitch said. “Listen, I'm—”
“You don't deserve what happened, Mitch.”
Another pause. You didn't deserve being dumped, she added to herself. Kaye looked back to that empty corner of wall and ceiling and continued, “I miss you.” She tightened her lips to keep them from trembling. “What's in Oregon?”
“Eileen's got something going, very mysterious, so I left the dig in Texas. I mistook a clamshell for a whelk. I'm getting old, Kaye.”
“Bullshit,” Kaye said.
“You give me the word, I'll drive straight to Maryland.” Mitch's voice steeled. “I swear. Let's go get Stella.”
“Stop it,” Kaye said, though with sudden gentleness. “I want to, you know that. We have to keep to our plan.”
“Right,” Mitch said, and Kaye was acutely aware he had had no part in making the plan. Perhaps until now Mitch had not really been informed there was a plan. And that was Kaye's fault. She had not been able to protect her husband or her daughter, the most important people on Earth. So who am I to accuse?
“What are the kids up to? How has she changed?” Kaye asked.
“They're forming groups. Demes, they call them. The schools are trying to keep them broken up and disorganized. I'd guess they're finding ways around that. There's a lot of scenting involved, of course, and Stella talks about new kinds of language, but we didn't have time for details. She looks healthy, she's bright, and she doesn't seem too stressed out.”
Kaye fixed on this so intensely her eyes crossed. “I tried to call her last week. They wouldn't put me through.”
“The bastards,” Mitch said, his voice grating.
“Go help Eileen. But keep in touch. I really need to hear from you.”
“That's good news.”
Kaye let her chin drop to her chest, and stretched out her legs. “I'm relaxing,” she said. “Listening to you relaxes me. Tell me what she looks like.”
“Sometimes she moves or acts or talks like you. Sometimes she reminds me of my father.”
“I noticed that years ago,” Kaye said.
“But she's very much her own person, her own type,” Mitch said. “I wish we could run our own school, bring lots of kids together. I think that's the only way Stella would be happy.”
“We were wrong to isolate her.”
“We didn't have any choice.”
“Anyway, that's not an issue now. Is she happy?”
“Maybe happier, but not exactly happy,” Mitch said. “I'm calling on a landline now, but let me give you a new phone code.”
Kaye took up a pad and wrote down a string of numbers keyed to a book she still kept in her suitcase. “You think they're still listening?”
“Of course. Hello, Ms. Browning, you there?”
“Not funny,” Kaye said. “I ran into Mark Augustine on Capitol Hill. That was . . .” It took her a few seconds to remember. “Yesterday. Sorry, I'm just tired.”
“What about him?”
“He seemed apologetic. Does that make sense?”
“He was busted to the ranks,” Mitch said. “He deserves to be apologetic.”
“Yeah. But something else . . .”
“You think the atmosphere is changing?”
“Browning was there, and she treated me like a Roman general standing over a dying Gaul.”
Mitch laughed.
“God, that is so good to hear,” Kaye said, tapping her pen on the message pad and drawing loops around the numbers, across the pad.
“Give me the word, Kaye. Just one word.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Kaye said, and sucked in a breath against the lump in her throat. “I hate it so much, being alone.”
“I know you're on the right course,” Mitch said, and Kaye heard the reserve in his voice, filling in, even if it means leaving me outside.
“Maybe,” Kaye said. “But it is so hard.” She wanted to tell him about the other things, the imaging lab, chasing down her visitor, the caller, and finding nothing conclusive. But she remembered that Mitch had not reacted well to her attempts to talk about it on their last night together in the cabin.
She remembered as well the love-making, familiar and sweet and more than a little desperate. Her body warmed. “You know I want to be with you,” Kaye said.
“That's my line.” Mitch's voice was hopeful, fragile.
“You'll be at Eileen's site. It is a site, I assume?”
“I don't know yet.”
“What do you think she's found?”
“She's not telling,” Mitch said.
“Where is it?”
“Can't say. I get my final directions tomorrow.”
“She's being more cagey than usual, isn't she?”
“Yeah.” She heard Mitch moving, breathing into the handset. She could hear as well the wind blowing behind and around him, almost picture her man, rugged, tall, his head lit up by the dome light in the booth. If it was a booth. The phone might be next to a gas station or a restaurant.
“I can't tell you how good this is,” Kaye said.
“Sure you can.”
“It is so good.”
“I should have called earlier. I just felt out of place or something.”
“I know.”
“Something's changed, hasn't it?”
“There's not much more I can do at Americol. Showdown is tomorrow. Jackson actually dropped off his game plan today, he's that cocky. They either listen to the truth or they ignore it. I want to . . . I'll just fly out to see you. Save me a shovel.”
“You'll get rough hands.”
“I love rough hands.”
“I believe in you, Kaye,” Mitch said. “You'll do it. You'll win.”
She did not know how to answer but her body quivered. Mitch murmured his love and Kaye returned his words, and then they cut off the connection.
Kaye sat for a moment in the warm yellow glow of the small living room, surveying the empty walls, the plain rented furniture, the stacks of white paper. “I'm imprinting,” she whispered. “Something says it loves me and believes in me but how can anything fill an empty shell?” She rephrased the question. “How can anyone or anything believe in an empty shell?”
Leaning her head back, she felt a tingling warmth. With some awe she realized she had not asked for help, yet help had arrived. Her needs—some of them, at least—had been answered.
At that, Kaye finally let down her emotions and began to weep. Still crying, she made up her bed, fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate, fluffed a pillow and set it against the headboard, disrobed and put on satin pajamas, then fetched a stack of reprints from the living room to read. The words blurred through her tears, and she could hardly keep her eyes open, but she needed to prepare for the next day. She needed to have all her armor on, all her facts straight.
For Stella. For Mitch.
When she could stand it no more and sleep was stealing the last of her thoughts, she ordered the light to turn off, rolled over in bed, and moved her lips, Thank you. I hope.
You are hope.
But she could not help asking one more question. Why are you doing this? Why talk to us at all?
She stared at the wall opposite the bed, then dropped her focus to the cover rising with her knees above the bed. Her eyes widened and her breath slowed. Through the shadowy grayness of the cover, Kaye seemed to look into an infinite and invisible fount. The fount poured forth something she could only describe as love, no other word was right, however inadequate it was; love never-ending and unconditional. Her heart thudded in her chest. For a moment, she was frightened—she could never deserve that love, never find its like again on this Earth.
Love without condition—without desire, direction, or any quality other than its purity.
“I don't know what that means,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
Kaye felt the vision, if that was what it was, withdraw and fade—not out of resentment or anger or disappointment, but just because it was time to end. It left a mellow, peaceful glow behind, like candles thick as stars behind her eyes.
The wonder of that, the awesome wonder, was too much for her. She laid her head back and stared into the darkness until she drifted off to sleep.
Almost immediately, it seemed, she dreamed of walking over a field of snow high in the mountains. It did not matter that she was lost and alone. She was going to meet someone wonderful.
OREGON
The high desert morning was warm and it was barely seven o'clock. Mitch walked across the motel parking lot, swung his bag into the battered old truck's side seat and shielded his eyes against the sun over the low, gray eastern hills. An hour to the Spent River. Half an hour to the outlying camp. He had his instructions from Eileen, and one more warning: Don't breathe a word to anyone. No students, no wives, no girlfriends, no dogs, no cats, no guinea pigs: Got it?
He got it.
He pulled out of the Motel 50 parking lot, scraping his bumper on the way. The old truck was on its last few thousand miles; it smelled of singed oil and was starting to cough blue smoke on the grades. Mitch loved big old trucks and cars. He would be sad to see the truck die.
The motel's red sign grew tiny in his mirror. The road was straight and on either side lay rolling brown terrain daubed with greasewood and sage and low, stubby pines and an occasional sketchy line of fence posts, leaning and forlorn, the wire broken and coiled like old hair.
The air got cooler as the truck climbed the gentle grade into the high country. The Spent River was not on the itinerary of most tourists. Surrounded by forest, in the long shadow of Mount Hood, it consisted of a winding, flat sandy bed cutting through black lava cliffs, leaving tufty islands and curving oxbows. The river itself hadn't flowed for many thousands of years. It was not well known to archaeologists, and with good reason; the geological history of alternating floods—gravel beds filled with pebbly lava and rounded bits of granite and basalt—and periodic eruptions of lava made it hellacious to dig and disappointing to those who did. Indians had not built or stayed much in these areas over the last few thousand years.
Out of time, out of human interest, but now Eileen Ripper had found something.
Or she had looked into the sun too long.
The road mesmerized him after a while, but he was jounced to full alertness when it started to get rough from washouts. The land had taken on a five o'clock stubble of trees and grass. The asphalt switched to gravel.
A small state sign came and went: spent river recreation area: three miles. The sign looked as if it had been out in the sun for at least fifty years.
The road curved west abruptly, and as he turned, Mitch caught a gleam about a mile ahead. It looked like a car windshield.
The old truck barked out blue smoke as he took a short grade, then he spotted a white Tahoe and saw a stocky figure standing up and waving from the open driver's door. He pulled over to the side of the road and draped his arm out the window. Enough grip remained in his hand to clutch the door frame and make the gesture look casual.
Eileen had gone completely gray. Her clothes and skin and hair had weathered to the color of the land out here.
“I recognized your taste in trucks,” Eileen said as she walked across the gravel shoulder. “God, Mitch, you're as obvious as a sailor with a stack of two-dollar bills.”
Mitch smiled. “You're a regular Earth mother,” he said. “You should at least wear a red scarf.”
Eileen pulled a rag from her pocket and draped it from her belt. “Better?”
“Just fine.”
“How's your arm?” she asked, patting it.
“Limp,” Mitch said.
“We'll put you on toothbrush detail,” she said.
“Sounds good. What have you got?”
“It's dishy,” Eileen said. “It's grand.” She did a little jig on the gravel. “It's deadly dangerous. Want to come see?”
Mitch squint-eyed her for a moment. “Why not?” he said.
“It's just over there,” she said and pointed north, “about ten more miles.”
Mitch scowled. “I'm not sure my truck will make it.”
“I'll follow and scoop up parts.”
“How can you tell me when to turn?” Mitch asked.
“It's a game, old friend,” Eileen said. “You'll have to sniff it out, same as I did.” She smiled wickedly.
Mitch squinted harder and shook his head. “For Christ's sake, Eileen.”
“Older than Christ by at least eighteen thousand years,” she said.
“You should wear thicker hats,” he said.
Eileen looked tired beneath the bravado. “This is the big one, Mitch. In a couple of hours, I swear to God you won't even know who you are.”
ARIZONA
At eleven in the morning, Stella walked with all the girls from their barracks through a gate in the razor wire fence to the open field, attended by Miss Kantor and Joanie and five other adults.
Once a week, the counselors and teachers let the SHEVA children mingle coed on the playground and under the lunch table awnings.
The girls were uncharacteristically quiet. Stella felt the tension. A year ago, going through the fence to socialize with the boys had been no big deal. Now, every girl who imagined herself a deme maker was plotting with her partners as to which boys would be best in their group. Stella did not know what to think about this. She watched the demes form and disintegrate and reform in the girl's dorms, and her own plans changed in her head from day to day; it was all so confusing.
The sky was sprinkled with broken clouds. She shaded her eyes and looked up and saw the moon hanging in the pure summer blueness, a wan face blankly amused by their silliness. Stella wondered what the moon smelled like. It looked kindly enough. It looked a little simple, actually.
“Single file. We're going to South Section Five,” Miss Kantor told them all, and waved her hand to give them direction. The girls shuffled where she pointed, cheeks blank.
Stella saw the boys come through their own fence line from the opposite rows of barracks. They were more touching heads and weaving and pointing out the girls they noticed. They smiled like goofs, cheeks brown at this distance with indistinguishable color.
“Oh, joy,” Celia said listlessly. “Same old.”
The sexes would be allowed to mingle with heavy supervision for an hour.
“Is he here?” Celia asked. Stella had told her last night about Will.
Stella did not know. She hadn't seen him yet. She didn't think it likely. She indicated all this with a low whistle, a few desultory freckles, and a twitch of her shoulders. “My, you're-KUK touchy,” Celia said. She bumped shoulders with Stella as they walked. Stella did not mind.
“I don't know what they expect us to do in an hour,” Stella said.
Celia giggled. “We could try to-KUK kiss one of them.”
Stella's brows formed an uneven pair of curves and her neck darkened. Celia ignored this. “I could kiss James Callahan. I almost let him hold my hand last year.”
“We were kids last year,” Stella said.
“What-KUK are we now?” Celia asked.
Stella was looking down a line of boys drawn up in the sun beside the lunch table awnings. The tallest she recognized immediately.
“There he is,” she said, and pointed him out to Celia. Three other girls moved in and followed her point, all smelling of aroused curiosity—smoke and earth.
Will stood, looking at the ground with shoulders slumped and hands stuck firmly in his pockets. The other boys seemed to be ignoring him, which was to be expected; boys didn't cloud as quickly with newcomers as girls did. It would take Will a few days to form tight bonds with his barracks partners.
Or maybe not, Stella thought, watching him. Maybe he never would.
“He's not very pretty,” said Felice Miller, a small, brown-haired girl with thin, strong arms and thicker legs.
“How do you know?” asked Ellie Gow. “You can't smell him from here.”
“He wouldn't smell pretty, either,” Felice said disdainfully. “He's too tall.”
Ellie winced. She was known for her sensitivity to sounds and a preference for talking while lying under a blanket. “What's that got to do with a cat's fart?”
Felice smiled tolerantly. “Whiskers,” she said.
Stella paid no attention to them.
“Someone you met when you were young can exert a profound influence,” Felice continued.
“I didn't see him for very long,” Stella admitted.
Celia quickly told them the story of Stella and Will, speaking in her halting double, while the counselors and teachers huddled and arranged the rules of the confab. The rules changed week to week. Today, on the outskirts of the field, three men stood watching them with binoculars.
Nine months ago, Stella had been taken aside and driven to the hospital with five other girls after such a meeting. They had all given blood and one, Nor Upjohn, had suffered other indignities she would not describe, and afterward she had smelled like a mildewed orange, a warning scent.
The girls made their formation, four long columns of fifty each. The counselors did not try to stop them from talking, and Stella saw that some of them—possibly all—had turned off their nosies.
Will looked across the brown grass and gravel at the lines of girls. His brows drew into a narrow straight line and he seemed to be sucking on something sour. His matted hair was cut jagged and his cheeks were hollow pits, as if he had lost some teeth. He looked older than the others, and tired. He looked defeated.
“He's not pretty, he's ugly,” Felice said, and with a shrug turned her attention to the other boys they had not seen before. Stella had counted the new arrivals on the bus: fifty-three. She had to agree with Felice. Whatever her memory of Strong Will, this fellow was no one's idea of a good deme partner.
“You want to cloud with him?” Celia asked in disbelief.
“No,” Stella said, and looked away with a sharp pang of disappointment.
The woods were far away now for both of them.
“What's anything got to do with toad skin?” Ellie asked nervously as the teachers started to shoo the rows and columns toward each other.
“Crow on the road,” Felice replied.
“What's that have to do with apple feathers?” Ellie riposted by reflex.
“Oh, just-KUK grow,” Celia said. Her face wrinkled like a dried peach in a sudden despair of shyness. “Grow big and hide me.”
The lines drew up before the concrete lunch tables and the boys were pushed to go and sit, three to one side, leaving the opposite side of each table empty.
“What'll we say?” Ellie asked, hiding her eyes as their turn approached.
“Same thing we always say,” Stella said. “Hello and how are you. And ask how their demes are growing and what they're doing on the other side of the wire.”
“Harry, Harry, quite contrary,” Felice sang in an undertone, “how does your garden grow? Pubic hairs and wanton stares, making the hormones flow.”
Ellie told her to shush. Miss Kantor walked in front of the rows from their barracks. “All right, girls,” she said. “You may talk, you may look. You may not touch.”
But the nosies are turned off, Stella thought. The girls fanned out from the lines. Stella looked up at the cameras mounted on the long steel poles, swinging slowly right and left.
Ellie's turn came and she ran off to join a table of boys whom, as far as Stella knew, she had never visited before. So much for shyness. Stella's turn came, and of course whatever she had thought earlier, she moved toward the table where Will sat with two smaller boys.
Will hunched over the table, looking at the old food stains. The two smaller and younger males watched her approach with some interest and freckled each other. She thought she heard some under, difficult to be sure at this distance, and Will looked up. He did not seem to recognize her.
Stella was the only girl to sit at their table. She said hello to the two boys, and then focused on Will. Will rested his cheeks in the palms of his hands. She could not see his patterns, though she saw his neck darken.
“He's in our barracks,” said the boy on the right, strong but short, Jason or James; the boy to the left of Will was named Philip. Stella had sat with Philip three weeks ago. He was pleasant enough, though she had learned quickly she did not want to cloud with him. Neither Jason/James nor Philip smelled right. She freckled Philip a butterfly greeting, friendly but not open, meaning no offense, etc.
“Why did you sit here?” Philip asked with a frown. “Doesn't somebody else want to sit here?”
“I want to talk to him,” Stella said. She was not very good at dealing with the boys, but then few of the girls were. There were unspoken, unwritten rules, rules yet to be discovered, but this way of doing things was never going to make the rules any plainer.
“He doesn't talk much,” Jason/James said.
“Girls play games,” Philip said resentfully.
“Nothing like human girls,” Will murmured, and looked up at her. The glance was brief, but Stella knew he remembered their last meeting. “They cut you like knives and you never know why.”
“Right,” Philip said. “Will lived among the savages.” Jason/James giggled at this, and made a gesture of tangled fingers Stella could not interpret.
“I passed,” Will said.
“Was it the woods?” Stella asked, hope flickering like a small ember.
“What?” he asked.
“They scrubbed him before he came to our barracks,” Philip said, just being informative. “His skin was red from soap.”
“Did you stay with your parents?” Will asked. He looked up and let her see his cheeks. They were blank, dark and raw. Most of Will's neck and face were red and rough. Stella inhaled, only what was polite under the circumstances, and could still smell the Lysol and soap on his skin and clothes.
“Only for a few days,” Stella said. “I got sick.”
“I missed out on getting scabs,” Will said, touching between his fingers. The SHEVA kids referred to the disease that had killed so many of them as “scabs” or “the ache.”
“We're going to another table,” Jason/James and Philip said, almost in unison.
“You two should be alone,” Philip added brusquely. “We can tell.”
Stella wanted to ask them to stay, but Will shrugged, so she shrugged as well. “They're breaking the rules,” she said after they were gone.
“They can find a table with not enough boys,” Will suggested. “They're making up rules in the barracks. Something about demes. What are demes?”
“Demes are families,” Stella said. “New families. We're trying to figure out what they'll look like when we're grown up.”
Will looked directly at her once more, and Stella looked away, then covered her own cheeks. “It doesn't matter,” Will said. “I don't care.”
“I came over to say hello,” Stella said. He could not know what his words had meant to her. “You must have got away.” She watched him eagerly, hoping for his story.
“We're talking human talk. Do you know the under and the over?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “Do you speak it the same way?”
“Not the way they do in the barracks,” Will admitted with a twitch of one arm. “Out on the road . . . It's different. Stronger, faster.”
“And in the woods?” Stella asked.
“There are no woods,” Will said, face crinkling as if she had spoken some obscenity.
“When you got away, where did you go?”
Will looked up at the sky. “I can eat lots here,” he said. “I'll get better, stronger, learn the smell, talk the two tongues.” He balled up his hands and bounced them lightly on the table, then against each other, thumb to thumb, as if playing a game. “Why are they letting us get together, boy-girl?”
“I don't know. Sometimes they draw blood and ask questions.”
Will nodded.
“Do you know what they're doing?” Stella asked.
“Not a clue,” Will said. “They teach nothing, like all the schools. Right?”
“We read some books and learn some skills. We can't cloud or scent or we're punished.”
Will smiled. “Stupid blanks,” he said.
Stella winced. “We try not to call them names.”
Will looked away.
“How long were you free?” Stella asked.
“They caught me a week ago,” Will said. “I've lived on my own and with runaways and street kids. Covered my cheeks with henna tattoos. Neck, too. Some human kids mark their faces to look like us, but everyone knows. They also claim to read thoughts and have better brains. Like they think we do. They say it's cool, but their freckles don't move.”
Stella could see some brown still staining the raw patches on Will's face. “How many of us are outside?”
“Not many,” Will said. “I got turned in by a human for a pack of cigarettes, even after I saved him from getting beat up.” He shook his head slowly. “It's awful out there.”
Stella smelled Joanie nearby, under her signature mask of baby powder. Will straightened as the stout young counselor approached.
“No one-on-one,” Stella heard Joanie say. “You know the rules.”
“The others left,” Stella said, turning to explain, stopping only when Joanie gripped Stella's shoulder. Touched and held, she refused to meet the counselor's eyes.
Will stood. “I'll go,” he said.
Then, speaking two streams at once, the over a flow of young gibberish, he said, “See you, say hi to Cory in Six” (there was no Cory and no Six) and “keep it low, keep it topped, shop with pop, nay?”
The under:
“What do you know about a place called Sandia?”
He mixed the streams so expertly that it took Stella a moment to know he had delivered the question. To Joanie, it probably sounded like a slur in the gibberish.
Then, with a toss of his hand, as Joanie led Stella away, Will said, in one stream, “Find out, hey?”
Stella watched Ellie be led away to give blood. Ellie pretended it was no big deal, but it was. Stella wondered if it was because Ellie had attracted a lot of boys today, five at the table where she and Felice had sat. The rest of the girls went to their late morning classrooms, where they were shown films about the history of the United States, guys in wigs and women in big dresses, wagon trains, maps, a little bit about Indians.
Mitch had taught Stella about Indians. The film told them nothing important.
Felice was sitting in the aisle next to her. “What's a green bug got to do with anything?” she whispered, making up for Ellie's absence.
Nobody answered. The game had gone sour. This time, being with the boys had hurt, and somehow Stella and the others knew it would only get worse. The time was coming when they would all need to be left alone, boys and girls together, to work things out for themselves.
Stella did not think the humans would ever let that happen. They would be kept apart like animals in a zoo, forever.
“You're scenting,” Celia warned in a whisper behind her. “Miss Kantor turned her nosey on.”
Stella did not know how to stop. She could feel the changes coming.
“You're doing it, too,” Felice whispered to Celia.
“Damn,” Celia said, and rubbed behind her ears, eyes wide.
“Girls,” Miss Kantor called from the front of the classroom. “Be quiet and watch the film.”
BALTIMORE
Promptly at eleven, Kaye entered the Americol twentieth-floor conference room, Liz close behind. Robert Jackson was already in the room. His hair had turned salt and pepper over the years but otherwise he had not matured much either in behavior or appearance. He was still handsome, skin pale to the point of blueness, with a sharply defined nose and chin and a glossy five o'clock shadow. His quartzlike eyes, dark gray, bored into Kaye whenever they met, occasions she tried to keep to a minimum.
Angled on either side of Jackson at the corner position he favored were two of his postdocs—research interns from Cornell and Harvard, in their late twenties, compact fellows with dark brown hair and the nervous aloofness of youth.
“Marge will be here in a few minutes,” Jackson told Kaye, briefly half-standing.
He had never forgiven her an awkward moment in the early days of SHEVA, sixteen years ago, when it seemed that Marge and Kaye had ganged up on him. Jackson had won that round in the long run, but grudges came naturally to him. He was as passionate about office politics and the social side of research as he was about science as an ideal and an abstraction.
With so keen a sense of the social, Kaye wondered why Jackson had been other than brilliant in genetics. To Kaye, the processes behind both were much the same; to Jackson, that idea was heresy of a disgusting magnitude.
The representatives from three other research divisions had also arrived before Kaye and Liz. Two men and one woman, all in their late forties, bowed their heads as they pored over touch tablets, getting through the perpetual network-enabled tasks of their day. They did not look up as Kaye entered, though most of them had met her and conversed with her at Americol mixers and Christmas parties.
Kaye and Liz sat with their backs to a long window that looked out over downtown Baltimore. Kaye felt a breeze go up her back from a floor vent. Jackson had taken pole position, leaving Liz and Kaye with the air conditioning.
Marge Cross entered, alone for once. She seemed subdued. Cross was in her middle sixties, portly, her short-cut, scraggly hair brilliantly hennaed, her face jowly, her neck a landscape of hanging wrinkles. She possessed a voice that could carry across a crowded conference hall, yet carried herself with the poise of a ballet dancer, dressed in carefully tailored pant suits, and somehow could charm the butterflies out of the skies. It was difficult to know when she did not like what she was hearing. Like a rhino, Cross was said to be at her most dangerous when she was still and quiet.
The CEO of Americol and Eurocol had grown stouter and more beefy-faced over the years, but still walked with graceful confidence. “Let the games begin,” she said, her voice mellow as she made her way to the window. Liz moved her chair as Cross passed.
“You didn't bring your lance, Kaye,” Jackson said.
“Behave, Robert,” Cross warned. She sat beside Liz and folded her hands on the table. Jackson managed to look both properly chastened and amused by the jabbing familiarity.
“We're here to judge the success so far of our attempts to restrict legacy viruses,” Cross began. “We refer to them generically as ERV—endogenous retroviruses. We've also been concerned with their close relations, transgenes, transposons, retrotransposons, LINE elements, and what have you—all mobile elements, all jumping genes. Let's not confuse our ERV with someone else's ERV—equine rhinovirus, for example, or ecotropic recombinant retrovirus, or, something we've all experienced in these sessions, a sudden loss of expiratory reserve volume.”
Polite smiles around the room. A little shuffling of feet.
Cross cleared her throat. “We certainly wouldn't want to confuse anybody,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. Most of the time, it hovered between a quavering soprano and a mellow alto. Many had compared her to Julia Child, but the comparison was surface only, and with age and hennaed hair, Cross had gone well beyond Julia and into her own stratospheric realm of uniqueness. “I've looked over the team reports from our vaccine project, and of course the chimpanzee and mouse ERV knockout projects. Dr. Jackson's report was very long. Also, I've looked over the research reviews and audits from the fertility and general immunology groups.” Cross's arthritis was bothering her; Kaye could tell from the way she massaged the swollen knuckles on her hands. “The consensus is, we seem to have failed at everything we set out to do. But we're not here for a postmortem. We need to decide how to proceed from where we are at this moment. So. Where are we?”
Glum silence. Kaye stared straight ahead, trying to keep from biting her lip.
“Usually, we toss a coin and let the winner start. But we're all familiar with this debate, up to a point, and I think it's time we begin with some probing questions. I'll choose who goes first. All right?”
“Fine,” Jackson said nonchalantly, lifting his hands from the tabletop.
“Fine,” Kaye echoed.
“Good. We all agree it sucks,” Cross said. “Dr. Nilson, please begin.”
Lars Nilson, a middle-aged man with round glasses, had won a Nobel twenty years ago for his research in cytokines. He had once been heavily involved in Americol's attempts to resolve retroviral issues in xenotransplants—the transplanting of animal tissues into human recipients—a prospect that had come to a drastic halt with the appearance of SHEVA and the case of Mrs. Rhine. He had since been reassigned to general immunology.
Nilson peered around the room with a wry expression, looking to Kaye like a gray and disconsolate pixie. “I presume I'm expected to speak first out of some notion of Nobel oblige or something more awful still, like seniority.”
A small, very slim elderly man in a gray suit and yarmulke entered the room and looked around through friendly, crinkled brown eyes, his face wreathed in a perpetual smile. “Don't mind me,” he said, and took a chair in the far corner, crossing his legs. “Lars is no longer senior,” he added quietly.
“Thank you, Maurie,” Nilson said. “Glad you could make it.” Maurie Herskovitz was another of Cross's Nobel laureates, and perhaps the most honored biologist working at Americol. His specialty was loosely labeled “genomic complexity”; he now functioned as a roving researcher. Kaye was startled and a little unnerved by his presence. Despite his smile—built-in, she suspected, like a dolphin's—Herskovitz was known to be a demanding tyrant in the lab. She had never seen him in person.
Cross folded her arms and breathed loudly through her nose. “Let's move on,” she suggested.
Nilson looked to his right. “Dr. Jackson, your SHEVA vaccines have unexpected side effects. When you work to block transmission of ERV particles between cells in tissue, you kill the experimental animals—apparently in part because of a massive overreaction of their innate immune system—whether they be mice, pigs, or monkeys. That seems counterintuitive. Can you explain?”
“We believe our efforts interfere with or mimic some essential processes involving the breakdown of pathogenic messenger RNA in somatic cells. The cells seem to interpret our vaccines as a byproduct of the appearance of viral RNA, and stop all transcription and translation. They die, apparently to protect other cells from infection.”
“I understand there may also be a problem with shutting down function of transposases in T cells,” Nilson continued. “RAG1 and RAG2 are apparently affected by nearly all the candidate vaccines.”
“As I said, we're still tracking that connection,” Jackson said smoothly.
“Most expression of ERVs doesn't trigger cell suicide,” Nilson said.
Jackson nodded. “It's a complicated process,” he said. “Like many pathogens, some retroviruses have developed a cloaking ability and can avoid cell defenses.”
“So the model that all viruses are interlopers or invaders may not apply in these cases?”
Jackson vehemently disagreed. His argument was rigidly traditional: DNA in the genome was a tightly constrained and efficient blueprint. Viruses were simply parasites and hangers-on, causing disorder and disease but, in rare instances, also creating useful novelty. He explained that putting viral promoters in front of a necessary cellular gene could cause more of that gene's products to be manufactured at a key moment in the cell's history. More rarely, within germ cells—egg or sperm progenitors—they might land, randomly, in such a way as to cause phenotypic or developmental variation in the offspring. “But to call any such activity orderly, part of some cellular reaction to the environment, is ridiculous. Viruses have no awareness of their actions, nor are the cells specifically activating viruses for some wonderful purpose. That has been obvious for more than a century.”
“Kaye? Do viruses know what they're doing?” Cross asked, turning in her chair.
“No,” Kaye said. “They're nodes in a distributed network. Greater purpose as such lies with the network, not the node; and not even the network can be described as self-aware or deliberately purposeful, in the sense that Dr. Jackson has purpose.”
Jackson smiled.
Kaye went on. “All viruses appear to be descendants, directly or indirectly, of mobile elements. They did not pop up from outside; they broke free from inside, or evolved to carry genes and other information between cells and between organisms. Retroviruses like HIV in particular seem closely related to retrotransposons and ERV in the cells of many organisms. They all use similar genetic tools.”
“So a flu virus, with eight genes, is derived from a retrotransposon or retrovirus with two or three genes?” Nilson asked with some disdain. His brows dropped into a puzzled and stormy expression at this patent absurdity.
“Ultimately, yes,” Kaye said. “Gaining or mutating genes, or losing them, is mediated by necessity. A virus entering a new and unfamiliar host might take up and incorporate useful genes found within the host cell, but it's not easy. Most of the viruses simply fail to replicate.”
“They go in, hoping for a handout at the gene table?” Jackson asked. “That's what Dr. Howard Urnovitz believed, isn't it? Vaccinations led to HIV, Gulf War Syndrome, and every other illness known to modern man?”
“Dr. Urnovitz's views seem closer to yours than to mine,” Kaye replied evenly.
“That was more than twenty years ago,” Cross said, yawning. “Ancient history. Move on.”
“We know many viruses can incorporate genes from ERVs,” Kaye said. “Herpes, for example.”
“The implications of that process are not at all clear,” Jackson said, a rather weak-kneed response, Kaye thought.
“I'm sorry, but it simply is not controversial,” she persisted. “We know that is how Shiver arose in all its variety, and that is how the virus mutated that gave our children lethal HFMD. It picked up endogenous viral genes found only in non-SHEVA individuals.”
Jackson conceded these points. “Some of our children,” he amended quietly. “But I'm willing to concede that viruses may be enemies from within. All the more reason to eradicate them.”
“Just enemies?” Cross asked. She propped her chin in one palm, and looked up at Jackson from beneath her bushy eyebrows.
“I did say ‘enemies,’ not handmaids or subcontractors,” Jackson said. “Jumping genes cause problems. They are rogues, not handmaids. We know that. When they're active, they produce genetic defects. They activate oncogenes. They're implicated in multiple sclerosis and in schizophrenia, in leukemia and all manner of cancers. They cause or exacerbate autoimmune diseases. However long they can lie dormant in our genes, they're part of a panoply of ancient plagues. Viruses are a curse. That some are now tame enough to get by without causing their hosts major damage is just the way disease evolution works. We know that HIV retroviruses mutated and jumped from one primate species to another, to us. In chimps, the HIV precursor evolved to be neutral, a genetic burden and little more. In us, the mutation proved to be highly immunosuppressive and lethal. SHEVA is little different. The ERV we are fighting are simply not useful to the organism in any fundamental way.”
Kaye felt as if she had traveled back in time, as if thirty years of research had never happened. Jackson had refused to change despite massive strides; he simply ignored what he could not believe in. And he was not alone. The number of papers produced each year in virology alone could fill the entire meeting room. To this day, most such papers stuck to a disease model for both viruses and mobile elements.
Jackson felt safely enclosed by thick walls of tradition, away from Kaye's mad, howling winds.
Cross turned to the sole woman on the review committee, Sharon Morgenstern. Morgenstern specialized in fertility research and developmental biology. A nervous-looking, thin woman, reputedly a spinster, with a withdrawn chin, prominent teeth, wispy blonde hair, and a soft North Carolina accent, she also chaired the Americol jury that approved papers before they were submitted to the journals—in-house peer review set up in part to quash publications that might reveal corporate secrets. “Sharon? Any questions while we're jumping up and down on Robert?”
“Your test animals, when given candidate vaccines, have also been known to suffer the loss or reduction of key sexual characteristics,” Morgenstern began. “That seems exceptionally odd. How do you plan to get around those problems?”
“We have noticed reduction of certain minor sexual characters in baboons,” Jackson said. “That may have no relevance to human subjects.”
Nilson moved in once more, ignoring Morgenstern's irritated expression. Let the woman finish, Kaye thought, but said nothing.
“Dr. Jackson's vaccine could be of immense importance in our attempts to neutralize viruses in xenotransplant tissues,” Nilson said. “Dr. Rafelson's endeavors also hold tremendous promise—to knock out all ERV genes in these tissues has been one of our holy grails for at least fifteen years. To say we're disappointed by these failures is an understatement.” Nilson shifted in his seat and referred to his notes by leaning over sideways and looking through the edge of his glasses, like a bird examining a seed. “I'd like to ask some questions about why Dr. Jackson's vaccines fail.”
“The vaccines do not fail. The organisms fail,” Jackson said. “The vaccines succeed. They block intercellular transmission of all ERV particles.”
Nilson smiled broadly. “All right. Why do the organisms fail, time after time? And, in particular, why do they become sterile if you're blocking or otherwise frustrating a viral load—all the disease-causing elements within their genomes? Shouldn't they experience a burst of energy and productivity?”
Jackson asked that the overhead projector be lowered. Liz sighed. Kaye kicked her gently under the table.
Jackson's presentation was classic. Within three minutes, he had used nine acronyms and six made-up scientific terms with which Kaye was unfamiliar, without defining any of them; he had entangled them all in an ingenious map of pathways and byproducts and some deep evolutionary suppositions that had never been demonstrated outside a test tube. When he was on the defensive, Jackson invariably reverted to tightly controlled in vitro demonstrations using the tumor cell cultures favored for lab research. All the experiments he cited had been tightly designed and controlled and had, all too often, led to predicted results.
Marge Cross gave him five minutes. Jackson noticed her impatience and drew his sidebar to a close. “It's obvious that ERVs have devised ways to worm themselves into the machinery of their host's genome. We know of many instances in nature where trying to remove a parasite can kill a host. It's even likely they've created safeguards against removal—pseudogenes, multiple copies, disguised or compressed copies that can be reassembled later, methylation to prevent restriction enzyme activity, all sorts of clever tricks. But the prime proof of the malevolent nature of all retroviruses, even the so-called benevolent or benign, is what HIV and SHEVA have done to our society.”
Kaye looked up from her notes.
“We have a generation of children who can't fit in,” Jackson continued, “who arouse hatred and suspicion, and whose so-called adaptive characteristics—randomly invoked from a panoply of possible distortions—only cause them distress. Viruses cause us grievous harm. Given time, our group will overcome these unfortunate delays and eliminate all viruses from our lives. Genomic viruses will be nightmares from a rough and nasty past.”
“Is that a conclusion?” Cross asked without letting Jackson's dramatic effect sink in.
“No,” Jackson said, leaning back in his chair. “Something of an outburst. I apologize.”
Cross looked at the questioners. “Satisfied?” she asked.
“No,” Nilson said, once again with that special Olympian frown Kaye had only seen in older male scientists, winners of Nobel prizes. “But I have a question for Dr. Rafelson.”
“Lars can always be relied upon to keep these sessions lively,” Cross said.
“I'm hoping Dr. Nilson will ask equally probing questions of Kaye,” Jackson said.
“Count on it,” Nilson said dryly. “We realize how difficult it is to work with early-stage embryos in mammals, mice for example, and how much more difficult it is to work with primates and simians. As far as I have been able to review, your lab techniques have been creative and skilled.”
“Thank you,” Kaye said.
Nilson waved this off with another frown. “We also know that there are many ways in which embryos and their hosts, their mothers, work together to prevent rejection of the paternal components of embryonic tissues. Isn't it possible that by removing known ERVs in chimpanzee embryos, you have also shut down genes crucial to these other protective functions? I am thinking in particular of FasL, triggered by CRH, corticotropin releasing hormone, in the pregnant female. FasL causes cell death in maternal lymphocytes as they move in to attack the embryo. It is essential to getting born.”
“FasL is unaffected by our work,” Kaye said. “Dr. Elizabeth Cantrera, my colleague, spent a year proving that FasL and all other known protective genes remain intact and active after we knock out ERVs. In fact, we're tracking the possibility now that a LINE element transactivated by the pregnancy hormone in fact regulates FasL.”
“I do not see that in your references,” Nilson said.
“We published three papers in PNAS.” Kaye gave him the citations, and Nilson patiently wrote them down. “The immunosuppressive function of particles derived from endogenous retroviruses is indisputably part of an embryo's protective armament. We've proven that over and over.”
“I'm concerned in particular about evidence that a drop in corticotropin releasing hormone after pregnancy induces rapid expression of ERV responsible for triggering arthritis and multiple sclerosis,” Nilson said. “The ERV in this case are reacting to a sharp drop in hormones, not a rise, and they appear to cause disease.”
“Interesting,” Cross said. “Dr. Rafelson?”
“It's a reasonable hypothesis. The triggering of autoimmune disorders by ERV is a rich area for research. Such expression could be regulated by stress-related hormones, and that would explain the role such hormones—and stress in general—play in such disorders.”
“Then which is it, Dr. Rafelson?” Nilson asked, his eyes sharp upon her. “Good virus, or bad virus?”
“Like everything else in nature, one or the other or even both, depending on the circumstances,” Kaye said. “Pregnancy is a tough time for both the infant and the mother.”
Cross turned to Sharon Morgenstern. “Dr. Morgenstern showed me some of her questions earlier,” she said. “They are cogent. They are in fact excellent.”
Morgenstern leaned forward and looked at Kaye and Liz. “I will state up front that although I often agree with Dr. Nilson, I do not find Dr. Rafelson's laboratory procedures free from bias or error. I suspect that Dr. Rafelson came here to prove that something could not be done, not that it could be done. And now we are supposed to believe that she has proven that embryos cannot proceed to live birth, or even grow to pubescence, without a full complement of old viruses in their genes. In short, working backwards, she is trying to prove a controversial theory of virus-based evolution that could conceivably elevate the social status of her own daughter. I am suspicious when such strong emotional motivations are involved in a scientist's work.”
“Do you have a specific criticism?” Cross asked mildly.
“A number of them, actually,” Morgenstern said. Liz handed Kaye a note. Kaye looked over the quickly scrawled message. Morgenstern published twenty papers with Jackson over the last five years. She's his contact on the Americol jury.
Kaye looked up and stuffed the note in her coat's side pocket.
“My first doubt—,” Morgenstern continued.
This was the true beginning of the frontal assault. All that had come before was just the softening up. Kaye swallowed and tried to relax her neck muscles. She thought of Stella, far across the continent, wasting her time in a school run by bigots. And Mitch, driving to rejoin an old lover and colleague on a dig in the middle of nowhere.
For one very bad moment, Kaye felt she was about to lose everything, all at once. But she drew herself up, caught Cross's gaze, and focused on Morgenstern's stream of precisely phrased, mind-numbing technicalities.