Darwin's Radio

by Greg Bear

  The police officer followed. “Does your husband have a history of self-mutilation, Missus Lang?”

  “No,” Kaye said through clenched teeth. “He bit his fingernails.”

  The house was quiet but for the tread of another police officer descending the stairs. Someone had opened the living room windows. White curtains billowed over the overstuffed couch. The second officer, in his fifties, thin and pale, slouched at the shoulders, his face seamed with perpetual worry, looked more like a mortician or a coroner. He started to talk, his words distant and liquid, but Kaye pushed up the stairs past him. The bull-bellied man followed.

  Saul had hit their bedroom hard. The drawers had been pulled out and his clothes were scattered everywhere. She knew without really thinking that he had been searching for the right piece of underwear, the right pair of socks, appropriate to some special occasion.

  An ashtray on the window sill was filled with cigarette butts. Camels, unfiltered. The hard stuff. Kaye hated the smell of tobacco.

  The bathroom had been lightly sprayed with blood. The tub was half-filled with pinkish water, and bloody footprints went from the yellow bath mat across the black and white checkerboard tile to the old teak floor and then into the bedroom, where they stopped showing traces of blood.

  “Theatrical,” she murmured, glancing up at the mirror, the thin spray of blood over the glass and across the sink. “God. Not now, Saul.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” the bull-bellied officer asked. “Did he do this to himself, or is there someone else involved?”

  This was certainly the worst she had seen. He must have been concealing the worst of his mood, or the break had come with vicious speed, occluding every bit of sense and responsibility. He had once described the arrival of an intense depression as long dark blankets of shadow dragged by slack-faced devils in rumpled clothing.

  “It’s just him, just him,” she said, and coughed into her fist. Surprisingly, she did not feel sick. She saw the bed, neatly made, white cover drawn up and folded precisely under the pillows, Saul trying to make order and sense out of this darkened world, and she stopped by a small circle of splatted drops of blood on the wood beside her nightstand. “Just him.”

  “Mr. Madsen can be quite sad at times,” Caddy said from the bedroom door, long-fingered hand pressed flat and white against the dark maple jamb.

  “Does your husband have a history of suicide attempts?” the medic asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Never this bad.”

  “Looks like he cut his wrists in the tub,” said the sad thin police officer. He nodded sagely. Kaye decided she would call him Mr. Death, and the other Mr. Bull. Mr. Bull and Mr. Death could tell just as much about the house as she could, possibly more.

  “He got out of the tub,” Mr. Bull said, “and . . .”

  “Bound his wrists again, like a Roman, trying to draw out his time on Earth,” Mr. Death said. He smiled apologetically at Kaye. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “And then he must have gotten dressed and left the house.”

  Just so, Kaye thought. They were so right.

  Kaye sat on the bed, wishing she were the fainting type, blank this scene here and now, let others take charge.

  “Mrs. Lang, we might be able to find your husband—”

  “He did not kill himself,” she said. She waved her hand at the blood, pointed loosely toward the hall and the bathroom. She was looking for a tiny shred of hope, thought for a moment she had grasped it. “This was bad, but he . . . as you said, he stopped himself.”

  “Missus Lang—” Mr. Bull began.

  “We should find him and get him to the hospital,” she said, and with this sudden possibility, that he might still be saved, her voice broke and she began to quietly weep.

  “The boat’s gone,” Caddy said. Kaye stood up abruptly and walked to the window. She knelt on the window seat and looked down on the small dock thrusting from the rocky sea wall into the gray-green water of the sound. The small sailboat was not at its moorage.

  Kaye shook as if with chill. She could slowly accept now that this was going to be it. Bravery and denial could no longer compete with blood and things out of place, Saul gone awry, in the control of Sad/Bad, blanketed Saul.

  “I can’t see it,” Kaye said shrilly, looking out across the choppy water. “It has a red sail. It’s not out there.”

  They asked her for a description, a photograph, and she provided both. Mr. Bull went downstairs, out the front door, to the police car. Kaye followed him part of the way and turned to go into the living room. She was unwilling to stay in the bedroom. Mr. Death and the paramedic stayed to ask more questions, but she had very few answers. A police photographer and a coroner’s assistant went up the stairs with their equipment.

  Caddy watched it all with owlish concern and then cattish fascination. Finally, she hugged Kaye and said some more words and Kaye said, automatically, that she would be fine. Caddy wanted to leave but could not bring herself to do so.

  At that moment, the orange cat Crickson came into the room. Kaye picked him up and stroked him, suddenly wondered if he had seen, then stooped and slipped him gently back on the floor.

  The minutes seemed to last for hours. Daylight faded and rain spatted against the living room windows. Finally, Mr. Bull returned, and it was Mr. Death’s turn to leave.

  Caddy watched, made guilty by her horror and fascination.

  “We can’t clean this up for you,” Mr. Bull told her. He handed her a business card. “These folks have a little business. They clean up messes like this. It’s not cheap, but they do a good job. Husband and wife. Christians. Nice people.”

  Kaye nodded and took the card. She did not want the house now; thought about just locking the door and leaving it.

  Caddy was the last to go. “Where you going to spend the night, Kaye?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kaye said.

  “You’re welcome to come stay with us, dear.”

  “Thank you,” Kaye said. “There’s a cot at the lab. I think I’ll sleep there tonight. Could you take care of the cats? I can’t . . . think about them now.”

  “Of course. I’ll round them up. You want me to come back?” Caddy asked. “Clean up after . . . you know? The others are done?”

  “I’ll call,” Kaye said, close to breaking down again. Caddy hugged her with painful intensity and then went to find the cats. She left ten minutes later and Kaye was alone in the house.

  No note, no message, nothing.

  The phone rang. She did not answer for a time, but it continued to ring, and the answering machine had been turned off, perhaps by Saul. Perhaps it was Saul, she realized with a shock, hating herself for having briefly lost hope, and instantly picked up the phone.

  “Is this Kaye?”

  “Yes.” Hoarsely. She cleared her throat.

  “Mrs. Lang, this is Randy Foster at AKS Industries. I need to speak with Saul. About the deal. Is he home?”

  “No, Mr. Foster.”

  Pause. Awkward. What to say? Who to tell just now? And who was Randy Foster, and what deal?

  “Sorry. Tell him we’ve just finished with our lawyers and the contracts are done. They’ll be delivered tomorrow. We’ve scheduled a conference call for four P.M. I look forward to meeting you, Mrs. Lang.”

  She mumbled something and put the phone down. For a moment she thought now she would break, a really big break. Instead, slowly and with great deliberation, she went back up the stairs and packed a large suitcase with the clothes she might need for the next week.

  Then she left the house and drove the car to EcoBacter. The building was mostly empty by dinnertime, and she was not hungry. She used her key to open the small side office where Saul had placed a cot and blankets, then hesitated a moment before opening the door. She pushed it slowly inward.

  The small windowless room was dark and empty and cool. It smelled clean. Everything in order.

  Kaye undressed and got under the
beige wool blanket and crisp white sheets.

  That morning, early, before dawn, she awoke in a sweat, shivering, not ill, but horrified by the specter of her new self, a widow.

  20

  London

  The reporters finally found Mitch at Heathrow. Sam sat across from him at a small table in the court around the open seafood bar while five of them, two females and three males, clustered just outside a low barrier of plastic plants surrounding the eating area and peppered him with questions. Curious and irritated travelers watched from the other tables, or brushed past carting their luggage.

  “Were you the first to confirm they were prehistoric?” the older woman asked, camera clutched in one hand. She self-consciously pushed back wisps of hennaed hair, her eyes twitching left and right, finally zeroing in on Mitch for his answer.

  Mitch picked at his shrimp cocktail.

  “Do you think they have any connection with Pasco man in the U.S.A.?” asked one of the males, obviously hoping to provoke.

  Mitch could not tell the three men apart. They were all in their thirties, dressed in rumpled black suits, carrying steno pads and digital recorders.

  “That was your last debacle, wasn’t it?”

  “Were you deported from Austria?” another man asked.

  “How much did the dead climbers pay you to keep their secret? What were they going to charge for the mummies?”

  Mitch leaned back and stretched ostentatiously, then smiled. The hennaed female duly recorded this. Sam shook his head, hunkered down as if under a rain cloud.

  “Ask me about the infant,” Mitch said.

  “What infant?”

  “Ask me about the baby. The normal baby.”

  “How many sites did you plunder?” Henna-hair asked cheerily.

  “We found the baby in the cave with its parents,” Mitch said, and stood, pushing back the cast-iron chair with an ugly scraping sound. “Dad, let’s go.”

  “Fine,” Sam said.

  “Whose cave? The cavemen’s cave?” the middle male asked.

  “Caveman and cavewoman,” the younger woman corrected.

  “Do you think they kidnapped it?” Henna-hair asked, licking her lips.

  “Kidnapped a baby, killed it, carried it for food perhaps into the Alps . . . Got caught in a storm, died!” Left-side-male enthused.

  “What a story that would be!” Number-three-male, on the left, said.

  “Ask the scientists,” Mitch said, and worked his way to the counter on crutches to pay the check.

  “They give out news like it was holy dispensation!” the younger woman shouted after them.

  21

  Washington, D.C.

  Dicken sat beside Mark Augustine in the office of the surgeon general, Doctor Maxine Kirby. Kirby was of medium height, stout, with discerning almond eyes set in chocolate skin that bore only a few character lines and belied her six decades; those lines had deepened in the last hour, however.

  It was eleven P.M. and they had gone through the details twice now. For the third time, the laptop automatically cycled through its slide show of charts and definitions, but only Dicken was watching.

  Frank Shawbeck, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, returned to the room through the heavy gray door after having made a visit to the lavatory down the hall. Everyone knew that Kirby did not like others using her private washroom.

  The surgeon general stared up at the ceiling and Augustine gave Dicken a small, quick scowl, concerned that the presentation had not been convincing.

  She lifted her hand. “Shut that down, please, Christopher. My brain is spinning.” Dicken hit the ESCAPE key on the laptop and turned off the overhead projector. Shawbeck turned up the office lights and shoved his hands into his pockets. He took a position of loyal support on the corner of Kirby’s broad maple desk.

  “These domestic stats,” Kirby said, “all from area hospitals—that’s a strong point, it’s happening in the neighborhood . . . and we’re still getting reports from other cities, other states.”

  “All the time,” Augustine confirmed. “We’re trying to be as quiet as we can, but—”

  “They’re getting suspicious.” Kirby grabbed hold of her index finger and stared at a chipped, painted nail. The nail was teal blue. The surgeon general was sixty-one years old, but she wore teenager’s enamel on her nails. “It’ll be on the news any minute now. SHEVA is more than just a curiosity. It’s the same as Herod’s flu. Herod’s causes mutations and miscarriages. By the way, that name . . .”

  “Maybe a bit on the nose,” Shawbeck said. “Who made it up?”

  “I did,” Augustine said.

  Shawbeck was acting watchdog. Dicken had seen him play the adversary with Augustine before, and never knew how genuine the role was.

  “Well, Frank, Mark, is this my ammunition?” Kirby asked. Before they could answer, she made an approving and speculative face, pouching out her lips, and said, “It’s damned scary.”

  “It is that,” Augustine said.

  “But it doesn’t make any sense,” Kirby said. “Something pops out of our genes and makes monster babies . . . with a single huge ovary? Mark, what in hell?”

  “We don’t know what the etiology is, ma’am,” Augustine said. “We’re way behind, down to minimum staff on any single project as it is.”

  “We’re asking for more money, Mark. You know that. But the mood in Congress is ugly. I do not want to be caught in anything like a false alarm.”

  “Biologically, the work is top notch. Politically, this is a ticking bomb,” Augustine said. “If we don’t go public soon—”

  “Damn it, Mark,” Shawbeck said, “we have no direct connection! People who get this flu—all of their tissues are suffused with SHEVA, for weeks after! What if the viruses are old and weak and don’t have any oomph? They express because, what,” he waved his hand, “there’s less ozone and we’re all getting more UV or something, like herpes coming out in a lip sore? Maybe they’re harmless, maybe they have nothing to do with the miscarriages.”

  “I don’t think they’re coincidence,” Kirby said. “The figures look too close. What I want to know is, why doesn’t the body eat up these viruses, shed them?”

  “Because they’re released continuously for months,” Dicken said. “Whatever the body does with them, they’re still being expressed by different tissues.”

  “Which tissues?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Augustine said. “We’re looking at bone marrow and lymph.”

  “There’s absolutely no sign of viremia,” Dicken said. “No swelling of the spleen and lymph nodes. Viruses all over, but no extreme reaction.” He rubbed his cheek nervously. “I’d like to go over something again.”

  The surgeon general returned her gaze to him, and Shawbeck and Augustine, seeing her focus, grew quiet.

  Dicken pulled his chair forward a couple of inches. “The women get SHEVA from steady male partners. Women who are single—women without committed partners—don’t get SHEVA.”

  “That’s stupid,” Shawbeck said, his face curled in disgust. “How in hell does a disease know whether a woman is shacked up with somebody or not?” It was Kirby’s turn to frown. Shawbeck apologized. “But you know what I mean,” he said defensively.

  “It’s in the stats,” Dicken countered. “We checked this out very thoroughly. It’s transmitted from males to their female partners, over a fairly long exposure. Homosexual men do not transmit it to their partners. If there is no heterosexual contact, it is not passed along. It’s a sexually transmitted disease, but a selective one.”

  “Christ,” Shawbeck said, whether in doubt or awe, Dicken could not tell.

  “We’ll accept that for now,” the surgeon general said. “What’s made SHEVA come out now?”

  “Obviously, SHEVA and humans have an old relationship,” Dicken said. “It might be the human equivalent of a lysogenic phage. In bacteria, lysogenic phages express themselves when the bacteria are subjected to s
timuli that could be interpreted as life-threatening—stress, as it were. Maybe SHEVA reacts to things that cause stress in humans. Overcrowding. Social conditions. Radiation.”

  Augustine shot him a warning glance.

  “We’re a hell of a lot more complicated than bacteria,” he concluded.

  “You think SHEVA is expressing now because of overpopulation?” Kirby asked.

  “Perhaps, but that isn’t my point,” Dicken said. “Lysogenic phages can actually help bacteria. They sometimes serve a symbiotic function. They help bacteria adapt to new conditions and even new sources of nutrition or opportunity by swapping genes. What if SHEVA serves a useful function in us?”

  “By keeping the population down?” Shawbeck ventured skeptically. “The stress of overpopulation causes us to express little abortion experts? Wow.”

  “Maybe, I don’t know,” Dicken said, nervously wiping his hands on his pants. Kirby saw this, looked up coolly, a little embarrassed for him.

  “Who does know?” she asked.

  “Kaye Lang,” Dicken said.

  Augustine made a small gesture with his hand, unseen by the surgeon general; Dicken was on very thin ice. They had not discussed this earlier.

  “She does seem to have gotten a leg up on SHEVA before everybody else,” Kirby said. Her eyes wide, she leaned forward over her desk and gave him a challenging look. “But Christopher, how did you know that . . . Way back in August, in the Republic of Georgia? Your hunter’s intuition?”

  “I had read her papers,” Dicken said. “What she wrote about was intrinsically fascinating.”

  “I’m curious. Why did Mark send you to Georgia and Turkey?” Kirby asked.

  “I seldom send Christopher anywhere,” Augustine said. “He has a wolf’s instincts when it comes to finding our kind of prey.”

  Kirby kept her gaze on Dicken.

  “Don’t be shy, Christopher. Mark had you out scouting for a scary disease. I admire that—like preventive medicine applied to politics. And in Georgia, you encountered Ms. Kaye Lang, by accident?”

  “There’s a CDC office in Tbilisi,” Augustine said, trying to be helpful.