Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  “My treat,” Kaye said, and handed the driver her credit card. The cab pushed off through traffic.

  “What was it like, having those cheeks—like signboards?” Cross asked.

  “It was a revelation,” Kaye said. “When my daughter was young, we practiced cheek-flashing. It was like teaching her how to speak. I missed them when they faded.”

  Cross watched her absorbedly, then gave a little start and said, “I learned I couldn't have children when I was twenty-five. Pelvic inflammatory disease. I was a big, ungainly girl and had a hard time getting dates. I had to take my men where I found them, and one of them . . . Well. No children, and I decided not to reverse the scarring, because there was never a man I trusted enough to be a father. I got rich pretty early and the men I was attracted to were like pleasant toys, needy, eager to please, not very reliable.”

  “I'm sorry,” Kaye said.

  “Sublimation is the soul of accomplishment,” Cross said. “I can't say I understand what it means to be a parent. I can only make comparisons with how I feel about my companies, and that probably isn't the same.”

  “Probably not,” Kaye said.

  Cross clucked her tongue. “This isn't about funding or firing you or anything so simple. We're both explorers, Kaye. For that reason alone, we need to be open and frank.”

  Kaye peered out the taxi window and shook her head, amused. “It isn't working, Marge. You're still rich and powerful. You're still my boss.”

  “Well, hell,” Cross said with mock disappointment, and snapped her fingers.

  “But it may not matter,” Kaye said. “I've never been very good at concealing my true feelings. Maybe you've noticed.”

  Cross made a sound too high-pitched to be a laugh, but it had a certain eccentric dignity, and probably wasn't a giggle, either. “You've been playing me all along.”

  “You knew I would,” Kaye said.

  Cross patted her cheek. “Cheek-flashing.”

  Kaye looked puzzled.

  “How can something so wonderful be an aberration, a disease? If I could fever scent, I would be running every corporation in the country by now.”

  “You wouldn't want to,” Kaye said. “If you were one of the children.”

  “Now who's being naÏve?” Cross asked. “Do you think they've left our monkey selves behind?”

  “No. Do you know what a deme is?” Kaye asked.

  “Social units for some of the SHEVA kids.”

  “What I'm saying is a deme might be the greedy one, not an individual. And when a deme fever scents, we lesser apes don't stand a chance.”

  Cross leaned her head back and absorbed this. “I've heard that,” she said.

  “Do you know a SHEVA child?” the driver asked, looking at them in the rearview mirror. He did not wait for an answer. “My granddaughter, a SHEVA girl, is in Peshawar, she is charmer. Real charmer. It is scary,” he added happily, proudly, with a broad grin. “Really scary.”

  29

  ARIZONA

  Stella sat with Julianne Nicorelli in a small beige room in the hospital. Joanie had separated them from the other girls. They had been waiting for two hours. The air was still and they sat stiff as cold butter on their chairs, watching a fly crawl along the window.

  The room was still thick with strawberry scent, which Stella had once loved.

  “I feel awful,” Julianne said.

  “So do I.”

  “What are they waiting for?”

  “Something's screwy/ Made a mistake,” Stella said.

  Julianne scraped her shoes on the floor. “I'm sorry you aren't one of my deme,” she said.

  “That's okay.”

  “Let's make our own, right here. We'll/ Like us/ join up with anyone else/ locked away/ who comes in.”

  “All right,” Stella said.

  Julianne wrinkled her nose. “It stinks so bad/ Can't smell myself think.”

  Their chairs were several feet apart, a polite distance considering the nervous fear coming from the two girls, even over the miasma of strawberry. Julianne stood and held out one hand. Stella leaned her head to one side and pulled back her hair, exposing the skin behind her ear. “Go ahead.”

  Julianne touched the skin there, the waxy discharge, and rubbed it under her nose. She made a face, then lowered her finger and frithed—pulling back her upper lip and sucking air over the finger and into her mouth.

  “Ewww,” she said, not at all disapprovingly, and closed her eyes. “I feel better. Do you?”

  Stella nodded and said, “Do you want to be deme mother?”

  “Doesn't matter,” Julianne said. “We're not a quorum anyway.” Then she looked alarmed. “They're probably recording us.”

  “Probably.”

  “I don't care. Go ahead.”

  Stella touched Julianne behind her ear. The skin was quite warm there, hot almost. Julianne was fever scenting, desperately trying to reach out and both politely persuade and establish a bond with Stella. That was touching. It meant Julianne was more frightened and insecure than Stella, more in need.

  “I'll be deme mother,” Stella said. “Until someone better comes in.”

  “All right,” Julianne said. It was just for show, anyway. No quorum, just whistling down the wind. Julianne rocked back and forth. Her scent was changing to coffee and tuna—a little disturbing. It made Stella want to hug somebody.

  “I smell bad, don't I?” Julianne said.

  “No,” Stella said. “But we both smell different now.”

  “What's happening to us?”

  “I'm sure they want to find out,” Stella said, and faced the strong steel door.

  “My hips hurt,” Julianne said. “I am so miserable.”

  Stella pulled their chairs closer. She touched Julianne's fingers where they rested on her knee. Julianne was tall and skinny. Stella had more flesh on her frame though as yet no breasts, and her hips were narrow.

  “They don't want us to have children,” Julianne said, as if reading her mind, and her misery crossed over into sobs.

  Stella just kept stroking her hand. Then she turned the girl's hand over, spit into her palm, and rubbed their palms together. Even over the strawberry smell, she got through to Julianne, and Julianne began to settle down, focus, smooth out the useless wrinkles of her fear.

  “They shouldn't make us mad,” Julianne said. “If they want to kill us, they better do it soon.”

  “Shhh,” Stella warned. “Let's just get comfortable. We can't stop them from doing what they're going to do.”

  “What are they going to do?” Julianne asked.

  “Shh.”

  The electronic lock on the door clicked. Stella saw Joanie in her hooded suit through the small window. The door opened.

  “Let's go, girls,” Joanie said. “This is going to be fun.” Her voice sounded like a recording coming out of an old doll.

  A yellow bus, like a small school bus, waited for them on the drive in front of the hospital. The bus that had brought Strong Will had been a different bus, secure and shiny, new; she wondered why they were not using that bus.

  Four counselors in suits moved five girls and four boys forward, toward the door of the bus. Celia and LaShawna and Felice were in the group once again. Julianne walked ahead of Stella, her loose clogs slapping the ground.

  Strong Will was among the boys, Stella saw with both apprehension and an odd excitement. She was pretty sure it wasn't a sexual thing—based on what Kaye had told her—but it was something like that. She had never felt such a thing before. It was new.

  Not just to her.

  She thought maybe it was new to the human race, or whatever the children were. A virus kind of thing, maybe.

  The boys walked ten feet apart from the girls. None of them were shackled, but where would they run? Into the desert? The closest town was twenty miles away, and already it was a hundred degrees.

  The counselors held little gas guns that filled the air with a citrus smell, oranges and limes, and a
perennial favorite, Pine-Sol.

  Will looked dragged down, frazzled. He carried a paperback book without a cover, its pages yellow and tattered. He did not look at the girls; none of the boys did. They appeared to be okay physically, but shuffled as they walked. She could not catch their scent.

  The door to the bus opened and the boys were led in first, taking seats on the left-hand side. Through the windows, Stella saw plastic curtains being drawn and fastened. They looked flimsy, like shower curtains. Joanie moved the girls up to the door. They walked to the right of the curtain and sat in the five middle rows of slick blue plastic bench seats, one girl to each seat.

  Stella squirmed and her pants stuck to the plastic. The seat felt funny, tacky and oily. It exuded a peculiar smell, like turpentine. They had sprayed the interior of the bus with something.

  Celia sat directly in front of her and leaned forward to talk to LaShawna.

  “Stay where you are,” Joanie instructed them in a monotone. “No talking.” She surveyed the children on both sides of the curtain, then walked forward and took Julianne by the arm. She removed Julianne, backing out of the bus. Julianne shot a frightened but relieved look at Stella, then stood outside, arms straight by her sides, shivering.

  A security guard came aboard. He was in his middle forties, stocky and bare-armed, wearing a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt that clung to his shoulders. He carried a small machine pistol in a holster on his belt. He glanced back at the boys, then leaned to one side, and peered along the right side of the bus at the girls.

  Everyone on the bus was silent.

  Stella's stomach seemed to shrink inside her.

  The door closed. Will swung his hand against the plastic curtain and made the hooks rattle on the rail bolted to the roof. The guard leaned forward and frowned.

  Stella couldn't smell a thing now. Her nose was completely clogged.

  “Am I allowed to read on the bus?” Will yelled.

  The guard shrugged.

  “Thank you,” Will shouted, and the girls giggled. “Thank you very much.”

  The man obviously did not like this duty. He faced forward, waiting for the driver.

  “What about lunch?” Will shouted. “Are we going to eat?”

  The boys laughed. The girls sank back into their seats. Stella thought maybe they were being taken away to be killed and dissected. Felice was clearly thinking the same thing. Celia was shivering.

  Finally, Will stopped yelling. He pulled a page from the paperback, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it over three seats into the well next to the driver's window. Tongue between his lips and making a clownish grin, he pulled out another page, crumpled it, and lobbed it into the empty driver's seat. Then another, which fell to the floor in front of the driver's seat. Stella watched through the transparent sheeting between the rows, embarrassed and exhilarated by this show of defiance.

  The driver climbed up the steps. He picked up the crumpled paper with his gloved hand, made a face, then tossed it out the door. It bounced from the chest of the second security guard as she came aboard. She was also large and in her forties. The female guard muttered something Stella could not hear. Both guards were equipped with noseys pinned to their breast pockets. The noseys were switched off, Stella noticed.

  The driver took his seat.

  “Let's go!” Will shouted. Behind him, one of the boys began to hoot. The female guard swiveled and glared at them, just in time to be hit by another crumpled ball of paper.

  The male guard walked to the back along the boys' side of the plastic barrier.

  “Go! Go!” Will shouted, and bounced in his seat.

  “Sit down, damn it,” the first guard said.

  “Why not tie us down?” Will asked. “Why not strap us in?”

  “Shut up,” the guard said.

  Stella felt a chill. They were being taken somewhere by a team that had had little experience with SHEVA children. She had an instinct for such things. These two, and the driver, looked even dumber than Miss Kantor. None of the humans inside or outside of the bus looked happy; they looked as if something had gone wrong.

  Stella wondered what had happened to that other bus, the one they usually used.

  Will was watching the guards and the driver like a hawk, eyes steady. Stella tried to keep his face in focus through the plastic, but he leaned back and got fuzzy.

  The wire-reinforced plastic windows were locked shut from the outside; this was the kind of bus she had seen as a child carrying prisoners to pick up trash or cut down brush along the highways. She stared out through the window and shivered.

  Her body ached. In front of her, Celia hunched forward, whispering to herself, her hands clasping the padded rail. LaShawna was yawning, pretending not to care. Felice had wrapped herself in her arms and was trying to go to sleep.

  “Go, go, go!” the boys hooted, bouncing in their seats. Felice laid her head against the window. Stella wanted the boys to be quiet. She wanted everything to be quiet so she could close her eyes and pretend she was somewhere else. She felt betrayed by the school, by Miss Kantor, by Miss Kinney.

  That was stupid, of course. Being at the school was a betrayal in the first place. Why would leaving be any worse? She leaned her head back to keep from feeling nauseated.

  The female guard told the driver to close and lock the door. The driver started the bus and put it in gear. It lurched forward.

  Celia began to throw up. The driver jerked the bus to a halt at the end of the concrete apron before the main road.

  “Never mind!” the female guard shouted, her face a mask of disgust. “We'll clean it up when we get there. Just go!”

  “Go, go, go!” the boys chanted. Will glanced at Stella, straightened his lips, and began to peel another page from the paperback.

  Once the bus was under way, air began to move through small vents above the windows and Stella felt better. Celia stayed quiet, and the two other girls sat stiffly in their seats. Stella was thinking over their situation and decided it was all very clumsy and badly planned, probably last-minute. They were being transported like lobsters in a tank. Time was of the essence. Someone was eager to get to them while they were still fresh.

  Stella tried to make some spit to moisten her mouth. The taste on her tongue was terrible.

  “This will take about an hour and ten minutes,” the driver said as they pulled out of the school parking lot. “There's water in bottles below each seat. We'll make one bathroom stop.”

  Stella reached below the blue seat and picked up a plastic bag with a bottle of water inside. She looked down at it, wondering what it held besides water; what was going to happen at the end of the ride, their treat for being such good little boys and girls? To stay calm, she thought of Kaye, and then she thought about Mitch. Last, but not least, she remembered holding their old orange cat, Shamus, and stroking him while he purred.

  If she was going to die, she could at least be as dignified as old Shamus.

  30

  OREGON

  Mitch got up before sunrise, dressed without waking Merton, and left the tent they shared to stand at the rim of the Spent River gulley. He watched the early-morning sun try to spread light over the shaded landscape. He could clearly see Mount Hood, twenty miles away, its snows purple in the dawn.

  He found a twig and stuck it between his lips, then bit it with his teeth.

  Mitch had never thought he was prescient, sensitive, psychic, whatever name one gave to having second sight. Kaye had told him, years ago, that scientists and artists shared similar origins for creative thinking—but that scientists had to prove their fancies.

  Mitch had never told Kaye what he had gotten out of that conversation, but in a way it had helped him put things in perspective—to see the artistic side of how he came to his own, often logically unsupportable conclusions. It wasn't ESP.

  He was just thinking like an artist.

  Or a cop. Nature was the world's most efficient serial killer. An anthr
opologist was a kind of detective, not so much interested in justice—that was entirely too abstract in the face of time's immensity and so many deaths—but in figuring out how the victims had died and, more important, how they had lived.

  He wiped his eyes with one finger and looked north along the gulley, to the deeper gorge that had long ago been cut through alternating layers of mud and lava and ash. Then he turned and peered at the L-shaped site with its array of canvas and plastic covers, concealed by camouflage netting.

  “Shit,” he said, almost in wonder at the way his feet began to walk him along the rim of the gulley, away from the main dig.

  That bear. That damned, enigmatic bear that had started it all.

  The bear had come down to the river to do some fishing and had been suffocated by a fall of ash—but several days before the humans had arrived. The humans typically tracked bears, he was almost sure of it, relying on them to find good fishing. Someone had claimed the skull, but had not butchered the carcass—there were no cut marks on the bones—which meant it was probably in an unappetizing condition by the time they found it.

  Salmon came back in the spring, summer, and fall to spawn and die, different groups and different species at different seasons. Nomadic bands had timed their journeys and arranged their settlements to take advantage of one or more of these returns, when the rivers ran thick with rich, red-fleshed fish.

  Leaves changing color. Water running crisp and cold. Salmon wriggling over the rocky streambeds like big red pull toys. Bears waiting to march across the stream and grab them.

  But most of the bears had probably left with the first ash fall, leaving behind one old male too sick to travel far, maybe chewed up in a fight, waiting to die.

  Guessing. Just guessing, goddamnit.

  Why would people walk up the river and ignore the ash fall? Not even hunger could have driven them into that landscape, or made them stay once there. Unless it had been raining, every step would have brought up a cloud of choking ash. Setting up a fishing camp would have been stupid in the extreme.

  Like the bear, they were being followed.