Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  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?”

  2

  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.

  3

  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.