by Greg Bear
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.
15
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.
