by Greg Bear
“We're just fine,” LaShawna said dreamily. “I wish I knew what this was all about.”
“I think-KUK I do,” Celia said. “Human politics.”
“How are you, dear?” Kaye asked Stella.
“We're fine,” Stella said, and her cheeks flushed butterfly gold with something like fear, and something like joy.
She gets it, Kaye thought. What we just saw. She's like her father that way.
She watched Stella lean back in the seat and put on a distant, thoughtful expression, cheeks paling to beige. Celia and LaShawna sat back with her.
Together, they all folded their arms.
That evening, Stella and Celia and LaShawna sat in their own room in a motel in Portland. Kaye and Mitch and John Hamilton were in other rooms in the same motel; the girls had asked to be together, alone, “To just lie back and revert,” Stella had explained.
They had eaten with the others and watched Senator Bloch and Oliver Merton leave in a limo to fly back on a red-eye to Washington, D.C., and now they were relaxing and thinking quietly.
Seeing the bones had bothered Stella. Will was not much more than bones now. All that time, all that life; gone, leaving nothing but scattered rubble. Celia and LaShawna were also quiet at first, absorbed in their own individual thoughts.
They were saddened by the prospect of parting, but they all had things to do at home, loved ones to attend to. Celia was living with the Hamiltons and working with Shevite outreach services in Maryland and had her own life. LaShawna was getting her general education requirements at a local high school and planned on going to a junior college to study nursing. With her father, she took care of her mother, who was not getting around on her own much now, and her baby sister.
So much had changed in a few short months.
Stella sat up from a pile of pillows and made a circling motion with her palm, dipping her head like a bird, and LaShawna seconded. Celia gave a little groan of weary protest but joined them on the bed farthest from the curtained window. They palm-touched and sat in a circle, and Stella felt her cheeks flush and her ears grow warm.
“Who we are,” LaShawna sang. “What we are/ who. What we are/ who. Get us in, get us out/ who.”
It was a chant that helped them focus; they had done it before at Sable Mountain when the teachers and counselors weren't watching or listening, and especially after a difficult day.
The room filled with their scents. A little something like electricity passed between them and LaShawna started to hum two tunes, two sets of over and under. She was good at that, better than Stella.
The day seemed to melt away and Stella felt her neck and back loosen and they began to remember all the good they had experienced together.
“Lovely. We're in it,” LaShawna said, and started to hum again.
“I can-KUK feel the baby,” Celia said. “He's so small and quiet. He smells like Will, a little—if I remember, it's been so long.”
“He smells like Will,” Stella agreed.
“It's so good to be with both of you again,” Celia said.
“I had a dream about this, weeks ago,” LaShawna said. “I was awake, with my friends, but everything was dark, and I was looking so far down into myself it hurt. I saw something down there. A little glow hidden way at the bottom . . .”
“Like what?” Celia said, squirming in fascination.
“Let me show you,” LaShawna said, and squeezed their palms tightly.
Celia bit her lip and closed her eyes. “I'm looking deep.”
“Can you see them?” LaShawna whispered. She chanted softly, “If you take away/strip it down/ all the days and years/ all the thoughts . . . Who are we? Umm-hmm. Down there deep in a cave. Get us in, get us out/ Who?”
Stella reached down to where LaShawna was, using her palm-touch for guidance. She actually did see something at the bottom of a long, deep well, three somethings, actually, and then four, the baby within her joining. Like four luminous golden kernels of corn, hidden away at the bottom of four separate tunnels of memory and life.
“What are they?” Celia asked quietly, eyes still closed. Stella closed her own eyes now to see these peculiar things more clearly.
“They're like us, part of us, but way below us,” LaShawna said.
“They're so quiet-KUK, like they're asleep. Peaceful.”
“The baby's is not much different from ours,” Stella observed. “Why is that?”
“Maybe they're the important ones and we're just shadows trapped way up here. We're ghosts to them, maybe. Ummm . . . I'm losing them . . . I can't see them now,” LaShawna said, and opened her eyes with a sigh. “That was spooky.”
The waking dream ended and left Stella feeling a little woozy. The air in the room had turned cold and they shivered and laughed, then clasped hands tighter, listening to their own heartbeats.
“Spooky,” LaShawna said again. “I'm glad you see them, too.”
They sat that way for hours, just touching hands and scenting and being quiet together until the dawn came.
7
LAKE STANNOUS
The third snow of the year came in late October, fat flakes slipping down and nodding between the trees and over the dirt and gravel pathways throughout Oldstock. Kaye hurried from her classroom in the overheated school building, clutching a parka over her shoulders. Puffing, her lips and fingers numb, she met Mitch and Luce Ramone on the path to the infirmary—a name Kaye hated, with its emphasis on dysfunction. Mitch wrapped her in his arms and she marched quickly, close to his side, looking up at him with tight lips and large eyes.
“We have the partners and side mothers in the birthing room,” Luce said. Most of the children—the Shevites, Kaye corrected—did not speak in doubles, over-under, around them, more out of politeness than any obvious reserve or caution. Slowly, over the last four months, the Shevites had come to trust Kaye and Mitch, and together they had worked out procedures to calm mothers about to give birth. Kaye did not know whether it was mumbo jumbo or a new way of doing things. She was about to find out. Now there were twelve pregnancies in Oldstock and Stella was serving a very important function. Keep reminding yourself. Be proud. Be courageous. Oh, God.
So much was being learned. So many questions were being answered. But why my daughter? Why someone who, if she dies, takes me with her, soul if not body?
The last two months had been the happiest in Kaye's life, and the most tense and awkward.
They gingerly climbed the snowy steps into the old infirmary and down the linoleum-tiled floors, along the plastered hallway lit with dim incandescent bulbs, into the delivery room.
Stella was sitting on the bent and padded bench, puffing and blowing. A rusty gurney covered with a foam mattress and clean white sheets waited for her if she wanted to sleep. She gritted her teeth into a contraction.
Kaye set about arranging the medical instruments, making sure they had been kept in the old autoclave long enough.
“Where did you get these antiques?” she asked Yuri Sakartvelos as he came in, hands held in the air, dripping from the scrub station. Yevgenia smiled at Kaye and her wrinkled cheeks grew golden-green as she slipped the gloves on Yuri's hands.
“Pray they don't have to do anything,” Kaye whispered grimly to Mitch.
“Shush,” Mitch warned. “They're doctors.”
“From Russia, Mitch,” Kaye responded. “How long since they've done anything but set a broken leg or dress a wound?”
As Mitch caught a catnap, in the twelfth hour of Stella's long delivery—that had not changed much, difficult births for babies with large heads—Kaye stood outside the infirmary and breathed the cold early morning air and watched the snow.
While Kaye taught in the village school, Mitch had helped the Shevites restore a small lumber mill and clear the debris from the old concrete foundations and start putting up new houses for the families.
It was not yet clear what shape those families would take; probably not just father, mother, and children, an
d on this score the Sakartvelos were as clueless as Kaye and Mitch. There had never been so many Shevites together before; though some said there were larger communities in the East and the South, perhaps in New Jersey or Georgia or Mississippi, lying low.
The young Shevites were designing the homes. They felt uncomfortable when deprived of company for more than a few hours. Large windows Kaye could certainly understand, after so many years in cramped dorms and even cells. But there was no double pane glass available, not yet, and winters in Oldstock could be cold. While the foundations provided some constraint on their imaginations, some of the drawings were looking very odd indeed: bathrooms and toilet facilities without walls—“Why privacy? We know what's happening”—and narrow “scent shafts” connecting adjacent homes. The whole idea of privacy seemed up for grabs.
Kaye's best moments were spent with Stella and Mitch and Stella's deme. Most of the students in Kaye's class were part of Stella's deme. Her curiosity and relative ease with these intruder humans, her parents, seemed to blend over into those closest to her, and that extended family had adopted Kaye and Mitch.
The Sakartvelos, on the other hand, treated Kaye and Mitch civilly enough, but seldom socialized. They seemed a little standoffish even with the others in their community, perhaps because of early trauma and years of living alone, growing middle-aged with little company.
The concept and practice of demes was still growing, but the demes formed thus far made up the most stable of all the social structures and experiments going on in Oldstock, and the oldest. Stella's deme consisted of seven permanent partners—three males and four females—and twelve exchange members.
Deme partners usually did not mate, though they could fall in love—Stella was very definite about that, but not very clear what it entailed. Romantic love was running wild in Oldstock, complete with exchanges of dried fruit, perfumes when available, carved wooden statues, but such infatuations seldom had anything to do with sex.
Sex, it seemed, was too important to be left to the whims of romance. Love, yes, but not this boiling torrent of fickle affection.
In late summer, the paths and woods had sometimes smelled like an explosion in a cocoa factory, mixed with shocking and eye-stinging hints of musk and civet. Couples, all combinations—and sometimes triples—could be seen wrapped in congeries of self-involved, fondling splendor, intertwined, giggling, fever-scenting, persuading—everything but having sex.
At first, Kaye and Mitch had speculated that some of the couples and triples were too young, but soon the sixteen-year-olds were proving them wrong, mating outside the romance, and almost always across demes.
Those who were still prepubescent could become juniors in romantic groups, but such relationships were less demonstrative, more reserved and instructional. Love, and new varieties of passion, it seemed, would find many new uses in Shevite society, and the homes had to reflect these novelties.
Kaye's thoughts darted back to the one thing she did not want to think about, not now. She lifted her eyes to the dark sky. She wanted to be around for her daughter, to be useful to Mitch and to Stella for many years. But the CDC had confirmed that there was indeed a post-SHEVA syndrome. Luella Hamilton had it; so did many others.
The tips of Kaye's fingers and portions of her calves were growing numb as the months passed, her walk less quick, her strength and stamina waning.
She had told nobody at Oldstock, though Mitch knew. Kaye could seldom hide important things from Mitch. Except, of course, for what he did not want to hear.
The caller had touched her just a week ago. A short visit, pleasant but not conclusive; a social call. She had asked if she might be allowed to live to see her grandson born.
As before, no answers.
Inside the delivery room, Stella was surrounded by all the females in her deme. They alternately sang and read stories from old children's books and put their heads together, rubbing their damp palms on hers to calm her and relieve her pain.
Stella leaned back at the last and her eyes seemed to slip up into her head. She gave a long, loud shriek, operatic in its intensity, and the room smelled like saltwater and violets. Everyone moaned together, no signal, just the way it was, would be, moaning in an over-under song of sympathy and greeting.
Stella gave a vigorous wriggle and then a shove, and her son came into the larger world. The moaning softened as the child was examined, and then changed to delighted coos and chuckles.
Yevgenia and Kaye cooperated in lifting the baby onto Stella's stomach. Yevgenia smiled at Kaye. “Now you are truly grandmother,” she said.
The afterbirth came. Yuri moved them urgently to one side and caught it in a steel basin lined with a plastic bag. To Kaye's surprise, Yuri insisted on cutting the cord, then wrapping and removing the placenta right away. He cleaned up all the blood with a sponge soaked in bleach, then brought basins of soapy water and insisted the helpers wash their hands.
He bathed Stella solicitously. “It might be dangerous, no touching,” Yuri insisted, and left the infirmary with the tissue.
Kaye was beyond analysis or caring. She huddled with her daughter and the females in the deme, and Mitch, and one young male, the stand-in for Will, looking confused and bewildered at this unexpected role.
The infant, wrinkled and small, squirmed slowly in Stella's arms, seeking the breast, then looked up at them all, drawing back his eyelids until it seemed his face was all eyes, wide, mobile, focused. His cheeks flared golden and pink, melanophores shaping at first a series of flower-petal rawshocks. All those in the room, except for Kaye and Mitch, responded to the newborn with the same colors and patterns, flower petals and butterflies, sparks and flares, and the baby saw this and smelled their pleasure and delight. He smiled with saintly ease and reassurance as he took the nipple.
That smile took Kaye's breath away. She squeezed Mitch's hand. Ever the anthropologist, Mitch was watching the deme, the side mothers, all the Shevites in the room, with a quizzical expression.
“Do you have a name yet?” Kaye asked Stella.
Stella shook her head dreamily. “Give us time. Something nice.”
Moments later, suckling her son, Stella relaxed and slept. Her cheeks kept showing patterns. Even asleep, the new mother could sign her love.
The infant released his mother's nipple and looked up at Mitch. “Sing,” he said.
The deme laughed, and the young man who was standing in for Will, in a burst of emotion, hugged them and shook Mitch's hand. Kaye touched his shoulder and smiled up at him, and Mitch knelt beside the bed and sang the alphabet song, the same he had sung for Stella. “Ah, beh, say, duh, eh, fuh, guh, huh, kuh, ih, juh, em . . .”
Mitch's grandson relaxed and took Stella's nipple. His large purple-flecked eyes became heavy-lidded, and then closed. He joined his mother in sleep before Mitch got to wuh.
EPILOGUE
SHEVA2 + 1
LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA
Kaye tried to move her lips. Such wonderful thoughts. So simple, so clear. If she could only speak to her husband.
Mitch looked at the lamp on the table, brows knit; he could hear his wife's steady breath and the hum of the medical monitor and little more. When her breath changed its rhythm, he slowly turned his head and saw her lips move. He leaned forward, wondering if she was coming back, but her eyes stared out into space and blinked only once while he watched.
Still, the lips moved. That hurt. Any expectations were painful. Kaye's periods of paralysis had been coming with greater frequency. He leaned forward, hoping with childish hope to see his wife, his woman, return to him, beginning with that small motion. He brought his ear down to her lips and felt the breath against the little hairs on the skin of his lobe. Kaye's breath puffed, worked, to shape a few words.
Mitch could not be sure what he heard, if he heard anything at all. He pulled back to look at Kaye's face and realized she was trying with superhuman effort to communicate something she thought was important. The slightest coming together of
her brows, stiffening of her cheeks, set of her eyelids, reminded him of earnest conversations years past, when she struggled to convey something not quite within her grasp or authority. That had been his Kaye, always reaching beyond what words could do.
He placed his ear close, almost blocking her lips. He fancied he heard, for a moment, his name, and then,
“Something's . . . going on.”
He listened again.
“Something's . . . happening.”
Then she lay still. Breath lifted the sheets but her eyes were still. Her face was blank.
She seemed to be listening.
She felt the love rolling over her in waves, the yearning that was at once so powerful and frightening, the sweetness that lay behind the power. Her death would not come yet, not this minute, not this hour, this she knew, but she was no longer much of this world.
And so she could be embraced and told all.
No fear of addiction now.
Stella brought the baby and sat with them. She wore simple clothes and held the boy in a loose knit wrap, because, she said, he was such a warm-blooded creature, he hardly ever got chilly and fussed if he was covered.
“We've chosen a talking name,” Stella said. Then, looking at her mother, she asked Mitch if Kaye could hear them.
“I don't know,” Mitch said. His face was so lost. Stella let him hold his grandson and adjusted her mother's covers.
“Nothing's fair, is it?” she asked Kaye softly, leaning over, her cheeks golden. “She looks peaceful. I think she can hear us.”
Mitch watched Kaye breathe in and out, slowly, simply.
“What's his name?” he asked.
“We're going to call him Sam,” Stella said. “I can't think of anything better. The deme thinks it's good.”
Sam was Mitch's father's name. “Not Samuel?”
“Just Sam. He likes the name already. It's strong and short and doesn't interfere with saying other things.”
Sam squirmed and wanted to get down. At six months, he was already walking a little, and speaking, of course; but only when he wanted to, which was seldom.
