Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  “You sent samples to the Ohio Department of Health and the CDC?”

  “They're waiting to go out now,” Trask said.

  “You should have sent them as soon as the first child became ill,” Dicken said.

  “There was complete confusion,” Trask explained, and smiled. Dicken could tell Trask was the sort of man who hid doubt and ignorance behind a mask of pleasantry. Nothing wrong here, friends. All is under control. As if expressing a confidence, Trask added, “We are used to them being so healthy.”

  Dicken glanced at Augustine, hoping for some clue as to what was really going on here, what relationship or control Augustine had over a person like Trask, if any. What he saw frightened him. Augustine's face was as calm as a colorless pool of water on a windless day.

  This was not the Mark Augustine of old. And who this new man might become was not something Dicken wanted to worry about, not now.

  They passed an elevator and a flight of stairs.

  “My office is up there, along with the communications and command center,” Trask said. “Dr. Augustine, please feel free to use it. It's on the second floor, with the best view of the school, well, besides the view from the guard towers, which we use mostly for storage now. First, we'll visitthe medical center. You can begin work there immediately—away from the confusion.”

  “I'd like to see the children right away,” Dicken insisted.

  “By all means,” Trask said, eyes shifting. “It will be hard to miss the children.” The director walked ahead at a near lope, then looked over his shoulder, saw that Dicken was not nearly as nimble, and doubled back.

  DeWitt seemed eager to say something, but not while Trask was in earshot.

  “Let me describe our facilities,” Trask said. “Joseph Goldberger is the largest school in Ohio, and one of the largest in the country.” His hands waved as if outlining a box. “It was built six years ago on the site of the Warren K. Pernicke Corrections Center, a corporate facility administered by Namtex Limited. Pernicke was shut down after the change in drug laws and the subsequent twenty percent drop in the prison population.” He was sounding more and more like a tour guide working from a prepared lecture, adding to the surreality. “The contract to convert the complex to hold SHEVA children was let out to CGA and Nortent, and they finished their work in nine months, a record. Four new dorms were erected a hundred yards east of the maximum security building, which was first constructed in 1949. The old hospital and farm buildings were made into research and clinical facilities. The business training building was converted into a nursery, and now it's an education center. The four-hundred-bed special offenders compound now holds our mentally ill and developmentally disabled. We call it our Special Treatment Facility. It's the only one in the state.”

  “How many children are kept there?” Dicken asked.

  “Three hundred and seven,” Trask said.

  “They were more isolated,” Middleton said.

  “Dr. Jurie or Dr. Pickman can tell you more about that,” Trask said. For the first time, his pleasant demeanor flickered. “Although . . .”

  “I haven't seen them,” Middleton said.

  “Someone told me they left early this morning,” DeWitt said. “Perhaps to get supplies,” she added hopefully.

  “Well.” Trask's Adam's apple bobbed like a swallowed walnut and he shook his head with a waxy kind of concern. “As of yesterday, the school housed a total of five thousand four hundred children.” He stole a quick look at his watch. “We simply don't have what we need.” He escorted them to the west end of the building, and then down a wide connecting corridor lined with old refrigerators. The old white boxes were sealed with black and yellow tape. Empty equipment carts and stacked steel trays littered the passageway. The air was redolent of Pine-Sol.

  DeWitt walked beside Dicken like a shipwrecked passenger hoping for a scrap of wood. “They use the Pine-Sol to disrupt scenting and frithing,” she said in an undertone. Frithing was a way SHEVA children drew scent into their mouths. They lifted their upper lips and sucked air through their teeth with a faint hiss. The air passed over their vomeronasal organs, glands for detecting pheromones far more sensitive than those found in their parents. “The security and many of the staff wear nose plugs.”

  “That's pretty standard in the schools,” Middleton said to Dicken, with a fleeting look at Augustine. She opened a battered steel storage cabinet and pulled out scrub uniforms and surgical masks. “So far, thank God, none of the staff has gotten sick.”

  Dicken and Augustine put the uniforms on over their street clothes, strapped on the masks, and slipped their hands into the sterile gloves. They paused as an older man, in his late sixties or early seventies, stooped and eagle-nosed, pushed through the swinging doors at the end of the hall.

  “Here's Dr. Kelson now,” Trask said, his back stiffening.

  Kelson wore a surgical gown and cap, but the gown hung on him, straps loose, and his hands were bare. He approached Augustine, gave him a brusque nod, then turned to Middleton. “Gloves,” he demanded. Middleton reached into the locker and handed him a pair of examination gloves. Kelson snapped them on and held them up for inspection. “No go with Department of Health. I asked for a NuTest, antivirals, hydration kits. Not available, they claimed. Hell, I know they have what we need! They're just holding on to them in case this breaks loose.”

  “It will not break loose,” Trask said, his smile faltering.

  “Did Trask tell you about our shortage?” Kelson inquired of Augustine.

  “We understand it's a crisis,” Augustine said.

  “It's goddamned murder!” Kelson roared. DeWitt jumped. “Three months ago, state Emergency Action officials stripped us of more than half of our medical equipment and drugs. Our entire emergency supply was looted. We have ‘healthy children,’ they told us. The supplies could be better used elsewhere. Trask did nothing to stop them.”

  “I would disagree with that characterization,” Trask said. “There was nothing I could do.”

  “Last ditch effort, I took a truck into town,” Kelson continued. “I smeared mud on the doors and the license plates but they knew. Dayton General told me to stay the hell away. I got nothing. So I came back and slipped in through the Miller's Road entrance. Now even that is blocked.” Kelson waved his hand, drunk with exhaustion, and turned his heartsick, skim-milk blue eyes on Dicken. “Who are you?”

  Augustine introduced them.

  Kelson pointed a knobby gloved finger at Dicken. “You are my witness, Dr. Dicken. The infirmary filled first. It's down this way. We're removing bodies by the hundreds. You should see. You should see.”

  32

  PENNSYLVANIA

  Mitch tended to Stella in the bedroom's dim light. She would not hold still. He used all the gentle phrases and tones of voice he could muster; none of them seemed to get through to her.

  George Mackenzie watched from the doorway. He was in his early forties and beyond plump. He had a young face with inquiring eyes, his forehead overarched by a styled shock of premature gray hair, and his lip sported a light dust of mustache.

  “I need an ear or rectal thermometer,” Mitch said. “She might convulse and bite down on an oral one. We'll have to hold her.”

  “I'll get one,” George said, and was gone for a moment, leaving Mitch alone with the tossing child. Her forehead was as dry as a heated brick.

  “I'm here,” Mitch whispered. He pulled the covers back completely. He had undressed Stella and her bare legs looked skeletal against the pink sheets. She was so sick. He could not believe his daughter was so sick.

  George returned holding a blue plastic sheath in one hand and the thermometer in the other, followed by the women. Kaye carried a basin of water filled with ice cubes, and Iris held a washcloth and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. “We never bought an ear thermometer,” George said apologetically. “We never felt the need.”

  “I'm not afraid now,” Iris said. “George, I was afraid to touch their little gir
l. I am so ashamed.”

  They held Stella and took her temperature. It was 107. Her normal temperature was 97. They frantically sponged her, working in shifts, and then moved her into the bathroom, where Kaye had filled a tub with water and ice. She was so hot. Mitch saw that she had bleeding sores in her mouth.

  Grief looked on, dark and eager.

  Kaye helped Mitch take Stella back to the bed. They did not bother to towel her off. Mitch held Kaye lightly and patted her back. George went downstairs to heat soup. “I'll put on some chicken broth for the girl,” George said.

  “She won't take it,” Kaye said.

  “Then some soup for us.”

  Kaye nodded.

  Mitch watched his wife. She was almost not there, she was so tired and her face was so drawn. He asked himself when the nightmare would be over. When your daughter is gone and not before.

  Which of course was no answer at all.

  They ate in the darkened room, sipping the hot broth from cups. “Where's the doctor?” Kaye asked.

  “He has two others ahead of us,” George said. “We were lucky to get him. He's the only one in town who will treat new children.”

  33

  OHIO

  The infirmary was on the first floor of the medical center, an open room about forty feet square meant to house at most sixty or seventy patients. The curtained separators had been pushed against the walls and at least two hundred cots, mattresses, and chair pads had been moved in.

  “We filled this space in the first six hours,” Kelson said.

  The smell was overwhelming—urine, vomit, the assaulting miasma of human illness, all familiar to Dicken, but there was more to it—a tang both sharp and foreign, disturbing and pitiful all at once. The children had lost control of their scenting. The room was thick with untranslatable pheromones, vomeropherins, the arsenal and vocabulary of a kind of human communication that was, if not new, at least more overt.

  Even their urine smelled different.

  Trask took a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his already masked mouth and nose. Augustine's Secret Service agent took a position in the corner and did the same, visibly shaken.

  Dicken approached a corner cot. A boy lay on his side, his chest barely moving. He was seven or eight, from the second and last wave of SHEVA infants. A girl the same age or a little older squatted beside the cot. She held the boy's fingers around a tiny silvery digital music player, to keep him from dropping it. The headphones dangled over the side of the bed. Both were brown-haired, small, with brown skin and thin, flaccid limbs.

  The girl looked up at Dicken as he came near. He smiled back at her. Her eyes rolled up and she tipped her tongue through her lips, then dropped her head on the cot beside the boy's arm.

  “Bond friends,” DeWitt said. “She has her own cot, but she won't stay there.”

  “Then move the cots together,” Augustine suggested with a brief look of distaste or distress.

  “She won't move more than a few inches away from him,” DeWitt said. “Their health probably depends on each other.”

  “Explain,” Dicken said softly.

  “When they're brought here, the children form frithing teams. Two or three will get together and establish a default scenting range. The teams coalesce into larger groups. Support and protection, perhaps, but mostly I think it's about defining a new language.” DeWitt shook her head, wrapped her masked mouth in the palm of one hand, and gripped her elbow. “I was learning so much . . .”

  Dicken took the boy's chin and gently turned it: head flopping on a scrawny neck. The boy opened his eyes and Dicken met the blank gaze and stroked his forehead, then ran his rubber-gloved finger over the boy's cheek. The skin stayed pale.

  “Capillary damage,” he murmured.

  “The virus is attacking their endothelial tissues,” Kelson said. “They have red lesions between the fingers and toes, some of them vesicular. It's goddamned tropical in its weirdness.”

  The boy closed his eyes. The girl lifted her head. “I'm not his perf,” she said, her voice like a high sough of wind. “He lost his perf last night. I don't think he wants to live.”

  DeWitt knelt beside the girl. “You should go back to your cot. You're sick, too.”

  “I can't,” the girl said, and again lay down her head.

  Dicken stood and tried desperately to clear his mind.

  The director tsked in pity. “Absolute confusion,” Trask said, voice muffled by the handkerchief. His phone rang in his pocket. He apologized, lowered the cloth, then half turned to answer it. After a few mumbled replies, he closed the phone. “Very good news. I'm expecting a truck filled with supplies from Dayton any minute, and I want to be there. Dr. Kelson, Ms. Middleton—I leave these people with you. Dr. Augustine, do you want to work from my office or would you prefer to stay here? I imagine you have many administrative duties . . .”

  “I'll stay here,” Augustine said.

  “Your privilege,” Trask said. With some astonishment, they watched the director toss a nonchalant, almost dismissive wave and make his way around the rows of cots to the door.

  Kelson rolled his milky eyes. “Good fucking riddance,” he murmured.

  “The children are losing all social cohesion,” DeWitt said. “I've tried to tell Trask for months that we needed more trained observers, professional anthropologists. Losing bond friends—sometimes they call them perfs—do you realize what that means to them?”

  “Diana's their angel,” Kelson said. “She knows what they're thinking. That may be as important as medicine in the next few hours.” He shook his head, jowls jiggling beneath his chin. “They are innocents. They do not deserve this. Nor do we deserve Trask. That state-appointed son of a bitch is in on this, I'm sure of it. He's squeezing profits somewhere.” Having said his piece, Kelson looked up at the ceiling. “Pardon me. It's the goddamned truth. I have to get back. The medical center is at your disposal, Dr. Dicken, such as it is.” He turned and walked down a row of cots, through the door on the opposite side of the infirmary.

  “He's a good man,” Middleton said. She used a key to open the back door to the main compound, opening on to the infirmary loading dock. She lifted an eyebrow at Dicken. “Used to be pretty cushy around here, room and board, easy work, best school in the world, the kids were so easy, we said. Then they up and ran, the bastards.”

  Middleton led them down the loading ramp to a golf cart parked in the receiving area. DeWitt sat beside her. “Get on, gentlemen.”

  “Any guesses?” Augustine asked Dicken in an undertone as they climbed onto the middle bench seat. The Secret Service agent, now almost invisible to Dicken, sat on the rear-facing backseat and murmured into a lapel mike.

  Dicken shrugged. “Something common—coxsackie or enterovirus, some kind of herpes. They've had trouble with herpes before, prenatal. I need to see more.”

  “I could have brought a NuTest, if there had been some warning,” Augustine said.

  “Wouldn't help us much,” Dicken said. Something new and unfamiliar had struck the children. If a new virus flooded the first rank of a person's defenses—the innate immune system—and spread to others quickly enough, in close quarters, among confined populations, it could overwhelm any more refined immune response and bring down a huge number of victims in days. He doubted that contact immunity could have had any influence in this outbreak. Another of Mother Nature's little screwups. Or not. He still had a lot to unlearn when it came to viruses and disease, a lot of assumptions to reexamine.

  Dicken needed to map the river of this illness before he would venture an answer, chart it back from whatever tributary they were at now to its source. He wanted to know the virus when it was asleep, what he called glacial virus—learn where it hid as frozen snow in the high valleys of the human and animal population, before it melted and became the torrent they were now seeing.

  If he found anything closer to that ideal source, that beginning, things might fall into place. He might understand.r />
  Or not.

  What they all needed to know as a practical matter was whether this flood would jump its banks and find another run. Taking specimens from the staff would begin to answer that question. But he already had a gut feeling that this disease, attacking a new and juicy population, would not readily cross over to old-style humans.

  Proving that would, in any sane world, stop the political nightmare building outside.

  They passed a crate of body bags the end of the loading dock.

  “No trouble getting those,” Middleton said. “They're going to be filled in a couple of hours.”

  34

  PENNSYLVANIA

  Mitch washed his face for the fourth or fifth time in the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. He stared at the brass light fixtures, the antique gold faucets, the tile floor. He had never been much for luxuries, but it would have been nice to provide more than just a run-down shack in the Virginia countryside. They had been plagued by ants and by roaches. The big yard had been nice, though. He had liked to sit there with Stella and drag a string for the ever-willing Shamus.

  The doctor arrived. He was in his early thirties, hair spiked and frosted. He looked very young. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and carried a black bag and a NuTest diagnostic unit the size of a data phone. He was as worn-out as they were, but he immediately inspected Stella. He took blood and sputum from the girl, who hardly noticed the prick of the little needle. The spit was harder to obtain; Stella's mouth was as dry as a bone. He smeared these fluids on the business end of the NuTest arrays—little sheets of grooved plastic—then inserted them. A few minutes later, he read the results.

  “It's a virus,” he said. “A picornavirus. No surprise there. Some sort of enterovirus. A variety of Coxsackie, probably. But . . .” He looked at them with a quizzical, worried expression. “There are some polymorphisms that aren't in the NuTest library. I can't make a final determination here.”