Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  And touching her.

  Kaye jumped as if someone had cracked through a flimsy wooden wall. Her shoulders rose and her fingers tensed. “Hello?” she whispered.

  Any neighbors were at least a mile away, up the road, beyond the thick trees. She saw nothing, heard nothing.

  “Wow,” she said, and immediately felt stupid. She looked around the lake, toward the reedy shallows, searching for the source of another voice, though no one had spoken. The reeds were empty. The lake fell silent, not even a breath of air. The night was so still Kaye could hear her heart beating in her chest.

  Something had touched her, not her skin, deeper. At first it was just the awareness that she was not alone. By herself, on the dock, in her bare feet, she now shared her space with someone as real as she—as welcome and strangely familiar as a beloved friend.

  She felt years of burden lift. For a moment, she basked in a warm sensation of infinite reprieve.

  No judgment. No punishment.

  Kaye shivered. Her tongue moved over her lips. A trickle of silvery water seemed to run through her head. The trickle became a rivulet, then an insistent creek flowing down the back of her neck into her chest. It was cool and electric and pure, like stepping out of the sweltering heat of a summer day into an underground spring. But this spring spoke, though never with words. It had a particular and distinctive perfume, like astringent flowers.

  It was alive, and she could not shake the feeling that she had known about it all along. Like molecules finally fitting, making a whole—yet not. Nothing biological whatsoever. Something other.

  Kaye touched her forehead. “Am I having a stroke?” she whispered. She fingered her lips. They were trying to form a smile. She bent them straight. “I can't be weak. Not now. Who's there?” she repeated, as if locked into a pointless ritual.

  She knew the answer.

  The visitor, the caller, possessed no features, no face or form. Nevertheless, being bathed in this cool, lovely fount was like having all of her great-grandmothers, her great-grandfathers, all the wise and sweet and wonderful and powerful members of her family whom she had never met, all at once and together bestowing the unconditional approval and love they would have bestowed had they cradled her as an infant in their sheltering arms. There was that much in it, and more.

  But the caller, at once gentle and unbelievably intense, was nothing like her fleshly kin.

  “Please, not now,” she begged. With relief came fear that she was losing her tenuous link to reality. The caller was known to her, yet long denied and evaded; but it showed no anger, no resentment. Its only response to her long denial was unconditional sympathy.

  Yet was there also trepidation? The caller exposed an extraordinary longing to touch and show itself despite all the rules, the dangers. The caller quite charmingly yearned.

  Kaye suddenly opened her mouth and let air fill her lungs. Funny, that she had stopped breathing for a moment. Funny, and not scary at all; like a personal joke. “Hello,” she said with the exhale, dropping her shoulders and relaxing, pushing aside the doubts and giving up to the sensation. She wanted this to last forever. She knew already it could not. To go back to the way she had felt just a few minutes ago, and all of her life before that, would hurt.

  But she knew the pain was necessary. The world was not done with her, and the caller wanted her to be free to make her own choices, without its addictive interference.

  Kaye walked back to the cabin to check on the sleeping Stella and to look in on Mitch. Both were quiet. Stella's color seemed to be stronger. Patches of freckles came and went on her cheeks. She was definitely past the crisis.

  Kaye returned to the dock and stood staring into the early-morning forest, hoping that the loveliness, the peace, would never leave. She wanted it all, now and forever. There had been so much grief and pain and fear.

  But despite her own yearning, Kaye understood.

  Can't go on. Not yet. Miles to go before I sleep.

  Then, she lost track of time.

  Dawn arrived in the east, on the other side of the trees, like gray velvet by candlelight.

  She stood beside the overturned rowboat, shivering. How long had it been since she had returned to the dock?

  Without words, the fount had spent hours sluicing her soul, (she was not comfortable using that word but there it was), wetting and revealing dusty thoughts and memories, becoming reacquainted in real and human time. Wherever it flowed, she knew its unalloyed delight.

  It found her very good.

  “Is Stella going to be all right?” Kaye asked, her voice soft as a child's in the shaded close of the trees. “Are we all going to be together and well again?”

  No response came to these specific questions. The caller did not deal in knowledge, as such, but it did not resent being asked.

  She had never imagined such a moment, such a relationship. The few times she had wondered at all what this experience might be like, as a girl, she had conceived of it as guilt and thunder, recrimination, being assigned onerous tasks: a moment of desperate self-deception, justifying years of ignorance and misbegotten faith. She had never imagined anything so simple. Certainly not this intense yet amused upwelling of friendship.

  No judgment. No punishment.

  And no answers.

  I did not call for this. The body has prayed the prayers of desperate flesh, not me.

  Her conscious and discerning mind, most concerned with practicalities, the mistress in starched skirts who stared out sternly over Kaye's life, told her, “You're playing Ouija with your brain. It doesn't make sense. This is going to mean nothing but trouble.”

  And then, as if it were shouting a kind of curse, Kaye's tense and adult voice flew to the trees, “You are having an epiphany.”

  The crickets and frogs started their racket again, answering.

  Finally, the conflict became too much. She dropped slowly to her knees on the dock, feeling that she carried precious cargo, it must not spill. She bent over and laid her hands flat on the rough, weathered wood.

  She had to lie down to keep from falling over. With a long, slow release of breath, Kaye stretched out her legs.

  47

  OHIO

  Augustine had divided them into two teams, the first with eight students, the second with seven. Toby's team had worked first, from ten in the evening until three in the morning. Teachers and nurses carried those chosen by the team to an exercise field, laying them in rows under the blue glare of tall pole lamps, in the warm early-morning air.

  Silently—with little more than a touch of palms and a whiff behind each ear—Toby passed his duties to a girl named Fiona, and the first team fell onto cots laid out in Trask's office.

  Fiona and the others on the second team went out with Augustine, back down the steel stairs to the main floor.

  Until dawn, Fiona and the six helped Augustine sort through other buildings, walking up to each child on the cots or on bedding spread over concrete or wood floors, on bunks in the former cells and in the dormitories; bending over and smelling above the heads of the sick, showing with one finger, or two, who was strongest, who would probably live another day.

  One finger meant the child was likely to die.

  After eight hours of work, they had processed about six hundred children, starting with the worst, and consequently, had already visited the most dead and dying, and the children on both teams were quiet and tired.

  More children volunteered, forming a third, fourth, and fifth team. Toby did not object, nor did Augustine.

  While the first two teams slept, the new teams examined another nine hundred children, separating out four hundred, most of them able to walk with the teachers to the field, where they were assigned to old tents marked “Inmate Overflow.”

  And round into the dawn and beyond ten o'clock, the kids worked with the remaining teachers, nurses, and security officers—the bravest of the brave—carrying bodies wrapped in sheets or in the last remaining body bags, or even in do
ubled plastic garbage bags, out to the farthest area within the fence, the employee parking lot, where the dead were laid out between the few and scattered cars.

  Middleton worked to rearrange accommodations so that they could set up a morgue in the main gymnasium, adjacent to the infirmary. By eleven, the bodies had been removed from the parking lot and placed out of the sun.

  Augustine estimated they had perhaps ten or fifteen hours before the dead would become a horrible nuisance, and twenty before they became a health hazard.

  At noon, Augustine fell over after stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, between a row of inmate tents. The children carried him back to the infirmary, with the help of DeWitt.

  There, DeWitt fed Augustine a little canned soup, gave him some water. He said he was feeling better and went back out with the rested first team.

  All through the morning and afternoon, their labors were watched by rows of stone-faced National Guard troops patrolling beyond the razor wire perimeter fences.

  At two in the afternoon, Augustine was compelled once again to go up to the office and lie down. Dicken emerged from the research lab with another bag full of specimen kits and met him there.

  Four children who had worked with the teams slept in the corner, arms around each other, snoring lightly.

  Dicken looked down on his former boss. Augustine was trembling, but his face had lost that distant, defeated look.

  “You are a surprising fellow, Mark,” Dicken admitted.

  “Not really,” Augustine croaked. He touched his throat. “Sorry. My voice is shot. How's the lab work going?”

  “Your turn,” Dicken said, and bent down to draw blood. When he was finished, he had Augustine scrape a plastic depressor on his tongue, and sealed that into a little plastic bag.

  “Anything conclusive?” Augustine asked.

  “Still getting specimens from the staff.”

  “What next?”

  “I'm going out into the field with Toby. Carry on while you rest. Can't let an old bastard like you act the humanitarian all by your lonesome.”

  Augustine nodded. “Conversion of Saul. Go forth,” he advised piously, and crossed the air between them.

  Dicken stretched. His whole body felt stiff.

  Augustine rolled on his side. “I'm not doing this out of pure charity, I confess,” he murmured. Dicken bent over to hear the soft words. “I have done a nasty thing, Christopher. I have played a card I vowed I would never play, to give my enemies—our enemies—the rope I need to hang them all.”

  “What card?” Dicken said.

  “I'm still a bastard. But I do begin to understand them, Christopher.”

  “The children?”

  “All our sweet little albatrosses.”

  “Good for you,” Dicken said, his neck hair prickling, and turned to leave.

  48

  PENNSYLVANIA

  The sun was high in the sky when Kaye raised her head. She might have slept for another hour or two; she did not remember.

  She rolled over on the dock.

  It's gone, she said. It was a dream. Or worse.

  She stood and brushed off her jeans, prepared to feel a resigned sadness. I should get a checkup. There's been so much stress . . . Her nose and forehead still felt stuffy. Was that a symptom of embolism or a burst aneurysm? Had wires crossed in her head, pouring signals from one side of the brain to the other? A short circuit?

  She turned to look back along the dock at the house, took a step . . .

  And let out a squeak like a surprised mouse. She stretched out her arms.

  The presence was still with her. Quiet, calm, other; patient and real. At the same time Kaye was relieved and terrified.

  She ran to the cabin. Mitch knelt on the floor beside Stella. He looked up as she came through the porch door. His hair was tousled and his face looked like a rumpled rag.

  “Her fever's gone, I think,” Mitch said, searching Kaye's features. His brows twitched. “The spots are smaller. The spots on her butt are gone.”

  Stella rolled over. Her cheeks had regained more of their color. The sleeping bag was gone, and in its place Mitch had laid out an air mattress covered with a bright yellow sheet and a lime green blanket.

  Kaye stared at them both. Her hands hung by her sides, her shoulders slumped.

  “Are you all right?” Mitch asked.

  Stella rubbed her eyes and reached out to Kaye. Their fingers touched and Kaye moved in and gripped her hand.

  “You smell different,” Stella said.

  Kaye bent down and hugged her daughter as fiercely as she dared.

  “She's asleep again.” Mitch rejoined Kaye in the cabin's small, neat kitchen. “She looks better, doesn't she?”

  “Yes. Much.” Kaye bit the inside of her lip and glanced at her husband. “The Mackenzies laid in a wide selection of teas,” she said. She opened the box of teabags, confused, desperate.

  Mitch returned her look, patient but tired. “Does she need more medicine?”

  “Her neck doesn't hurt. Her head doesn't hurt. She's not feverish. I removed the needle because she drank some orange juice. I don't think she'll need any more antiviral.”

  “She wet the sleeping bag.”

  “I know. Thank you for changing it.”

  “You were on the dock. You were asleep.”

  Kaye looked out the kitchen window at the dock, now bright in the full sun. “You should have awakened me.”

  “You looked peaceful. I'm sorry if I said anything strange last night.”

  “You?” She laughed and fumbled the box of tea bags, picked up the spilled ones, then took down two mugs from a rack over the kitchen window. One mug said Kiss a Clown, You Know You Want to. The other was from Smith College, gold emblem of a gate on dark blue. “Not at all,” Kaye murmured, and filled a kettle with water. Somewhere, a pump started chuckling, and the water jerked from the tap, finally flowing in a steady stream. She swished her hand back and forth, fingers spreading through the coldness.

  Not at all the same.

  “How are we, Kaye?” Mitch asked, standing beside her at the sink.

  “Stella is going to be fine,” Kaye said before she could think.

  “How are we, Kaye?”

  Kaye reached out and gripped Mitch's hand on the counter. She had not spent much time lately simply touching her husband. He had been gone so much, and so often, of course.

  She must have looked miserable and lost. But what she felt was very, very physical.

  Mitch pulled her close. He was always the one to make the first move; except that she had made the move that had produced Stella. Mitch had held back, worried about Kaye, or perhaps just scared at the thought of being a parent to a new kind of human being. They had been so in love, and the problem was, Kaye could not answer Mitch's question now, not truthfully, because she did not know.

  There was still love. What kind of love? “We are going to be better,” she said into his shoulder. “There is certainly better to be.”

  “They shouldn't hound us,” he said with the boyish sternness of the night before.

  “I don't think we have any control over that.”

  “We won't stay here long,” he said, and glared out the window at the woods, the dock, the sunshine. “This place is too nice. I don't trust it.”

  “It is nice. Why not stay a while? The Mackenzies would never tell anyone.”

  Mitch brushed her cheek with his palm. “Their son is in a camp. The children in the camps are getting sick.”

  Kaye drew her eyebrows together. She could not follow this line of reasoning.

  “Mark Augustine has been looking for you, for us. He's been waiting for the right moment to reel us in. The illness is scaring people badly. This is his moment.”

  Kaye squeezed his forearm hard, as if to punish him.

  “Ow,” he said.

  She loosened her grip. “We need to keep Stella quiet and calm. She needs to rest for a few days at least. She can't rest in a bounci
ng Jeep.”

  “All right,” Mitch said.

  “We'll stay here,” Kaye said. “Will it be okay?”

  “It'll have to be,” Mitch said.

  Kaye leaned her head against Mitch's chest. Her eyes lost focus and then closed. “Is she still asleep?” she asked.

  “Let's check,” Mitch said, and they walked together into the living room.

  She was. Kaye took Mitch's hand and led him into the bedroom. They took off their clothes, and Kaye pulled back the covers on the bed until the bottom sheet was completely revealed.

  “I need you,” she said.

  Her fingers on his lips smelled of tea leaves.

  49

  OHIO

  Dicken had prepared and racked up his seventy specimen sets. He used a Kim Wipe to take the sting of sweat out of his eyes. His sense of urgency was extreme but counterproductive. He could work no faster than produced good results. Anything less would be worse than not having worked at all.

  He had labored nine hours straight, first separating and classifying the specimens based on his labels and field notes, then preparing them for the automated lab equipment. Most of the manual labor involved preparing specimens and racking them up for runs through the instruments.

  PCR instruments had been the size of large suitcases when he had been a student. Now he could hold one in the palm of his hand. The racks carried what had been the equivalent of a whole building full of equipment fifteen years ago.

  Oligos—small but highly specific segments of DNA mounted in each tiny square cell of the whole-genome array chips—attached themselves to complementary segments of RNA expressed by the cell, including viral genes, if any, and labeled them with fluorescent markers. Scanners would count the markers and approximate their positions in the chromosome sequence.

  From a prepared set of serological fractions, the sequencers would amplify and analyze the exact genetic code of any viruses in the samples. The proteomizers would list all proteins found within the targeted cells—both viral and host proteins. Proteins could then be matched by the Ideator to the open reading frames of the sequenced genes.