The Devil's Alphabet

by Daryl Gregory

  “People might think you’re a pervert,” the other one said. Travis, that was his name.

  Pax reached the edge of the driveway. His hands were shaking, and he felt ready to throw up. The girls in the backseat stared at him. The red-haired one was Doreen, the nurse who’d washed him at the clinic.

  “I’m just going to go home,” Pax said. From this close, the boys smelled of vintage, but vintage with a strange tang to it—nothing like his father’s scent.

  Clete said, “That’s good. That’s why they called us, to take you home. Before they shot your ass.”

  Travis aimed that light into his face. “It’s kind of a last-chance taxi service.”

  Pax said, “Look, my car’s right down there. I’ll drive home, and you can tell Rhonda that I’ll—”

  The punch seemed to come out of nowhere. Pax hit the ground. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he’d been hit. His nose burned.

  “I have to ask you,” Clete said. He picked up Pax under his arms and lifted him easily. Pax’s knees threatened to give out, but Clete steadied him. “What the hell was your plan? Carry your six-hundred-pound daddy down the hill by yourself?”

  “Clete, listen …” Pax said.

  “No, push him down the driveway in his hospital bed,” Travis said, laughing. “Get up to like sixty mile an hour, until he hits that first curve, then airborne!”

  “UFO!” Clete said. “Unidentified Fat Object.”

  Inside the car the chub girls whooped with laughter.

  Pax gripped Clete’s forearms. “I know people in Chicago. This is an incredible drug. You help me get him out, and I can help you, help you sell it.”

  “Really?” Clete said. “This stuff really got to you, huh?”

  “UFO,” Travis said, still laughing. “You kill me, man.”

  Clete said, “I gotta admit, your daddy makes some of the finest vintage I ever smelled. I’d love to try some on Doreen.”

  “Rhonda doesn’t have to keep all this to herself,” Pax said. “You could sell it.”

  Clete nodded. “I hear you, Cuz, I hear you. But right now?” He shrugged. “Right now I got to beat the living shit out of you.”

  Chapter 11

  DEKE KNOCKED ON the back door of the clinic, waited half a minute, knocked again. The door opened and he said, “Hey, Marla.”

  “We’re closed on Sundays,” Dr. Fraelich said.

  “I saw your car,” he said.

  He stooped to get under the doorway, then followed Marla to her office. “So did you look at them?” he asked.

  She sat at her desk and opened one of the drawers. She took out the plastic bag he’d given her when he picked up Paxton. “There’s nothing here I didn’t prescribe for her,” she said. “None of them have been switched.”

  “I had to check,” he said. He’d pulled the bottles from Jo Lynn’s medicine cabinet the first day he’d searched her house. The dates on the bottles were months old, and most of them were more than half-full. “It didn’t look like she was using them anyway.”

  “That’s because they weren’t working. She kept getting resistant to them. Betas have an amazing immune system.”

  “So if she wasn’t taking antidepressants, was she still depressed?”

  “I don’t think so,” Marla said. “She got over that too. She seemed fine whenever I talked to her.”

  Deke sighed. “Yeah. Me too.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed her two folded pieces of paper. “I want you to read something.” He sat down on the floor, which put him at eye level with her.

  She unfolded the pages, then read the top of the first page. “Who are these people?”

  “Brother Bewlay’s a screen name Jo was using,” he said. “Weygand is some guy she met online.” Marla looked surprised. “They wrote to each other for almost a year.”

  “She never told me that,” Marla said.

  Deke frowned. “I was hoping she had.”

  TO: aweygand

  Sorry, Andy, I don’t think you understand at all the mindset required for an asexual baby-making machine. Whether they’ve been genetically engineered this way or evolved to it, the beta is built for one purpose--breed at all costs. Asex makes things simple, but it strips away all the behavioral baggage that goes along with sexual selection. The only thing left is getting pregnant and taking care of the children. It’s monomania. It’s leaping over the rocks to lay your eggs and die.

  In that kind of brain, the eggs are everything. Beta women who even considered abortions would be considered deviants, the worst kind of criminal. Young beta girls who went through the Changes before puberty would be the most militant about this, I suspect. The beta body is the one they’ve grown into, the only sexual body they’ve known. I wouldn’t be surprised if beta women who weren’t “orthodox” enough would be killed to protect the purity of the race. Watch CNN for the first stoning in Switchcreek.

  --bb

  TO: brotherbewlay

  > The beta body is the only one they’ve known.

  You keep coming back to this biological determinism stuff. These are sweeping generalizations based on what hormones you THINK are brainwashing them. Based on what evidence? Opposition to abortion is a moral position, not a mood disorder.

  --Andy

  TO: brotherbewlay

  One more thing. Aren’t we ALL evolved to breed at all costs?

  --Andy

  TO: aweygand

  > Opposition to abortion is a moral position.

  It’s a moral issue _because_ it’s a biological issue. The intellect’s riding bareback on a brain hardwired to ensure our survival on the planet, and the poor thing thinks that it’s the one doing the steering. Think about it. The brain makes up its mind on moral issues immediately--It’s the intellect that has to go through contortions to reconcile emotional certainty with a philosophical position.

  Here’s a morality test: which is more wrong, swatting an insect or clubbing a baby seal?

  Human babies are the most successful manipulators of all—those big eyes, that layer of baby fat, that truckload of opiates they trigger in the lactating mother. You have to read Natalie Angier--it’s vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she didn’t choose, because evolution throws every trick at its disposal at the woman. Now think of those 13/14 year old beta girls, getting pregnant through no action of their own, raped by their own biology. What choice did they have? The only sane thing to do is put them on birth control automatically, age 10 on. Then let them choose to go OFF it--when they’re 16 at least. Maybe make them pass a test. A license to breed.

  > And say, aren’t we ALL evolved to breed at all costs? Exactly. If that doesn’t keep you up at night, Andy, I don’t know what will.

  --bb

  When Marla finished reading she said, “How did you get this?”

  He told her about Weygand driving down and breaking into Jo’s house. He left out the part about smashing Weygand’s windshield and threatening the man. “Most of it’s trading conspiracy theories about the Changes,” he said. “But this stuff about the young beta women …”

  “The white-scarf girls, obviously. She’s making it sound all hypothetical, but it’s them. Weygand seems clueless. Did he even know that she was a beta?”

  “He said he suspected it,” Deke said. “Though he didn’t know until after the funeral.”

  “So they weren’t that close,” Marla said.

  Deke almost smiled. “No, not that close.” Donna had told him that Marla was in love with Jo Lynn, and he hadn’t believed it, until now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone fell in love with Jo.

  Deke said, “So the white-scarf girls, the talk about stoning. I can’t tell if Jo was really afraid of them, or—”

  “Not afraid,” Marla said. “She just knew what they were capable of.”

  “Are you talking about the effigy?” Deke asked. “Come on, Marla. A fire’s one thing, but murder—”

  “You don’t think they wanted me dead?” Marla sa
id. “They tried to torch my house while I was asleep.”

  He felt his phone vibrate in his pants pocket but ignored it. Had to be Rhonda again. She’d called him twice already this morning.

  “They’re kids,” Deke said. “They got carried away. They weren’t trying to burn down the house.” A straw figure—dressed in a white doctor’s coat with a wooden knife taped to its hand—had been lit and thrown against the wall of Marla’s house. The flames had scorched the paint, little more, before Deke and some of the boys arrived to put the fire out. After Marla threatened to bring in the police, three teenage beta girls, white scarves in place, presented themselves to the reverend. The reverend promised to punish them, and Deke talked Marla into not pressing charges. She’d held that against him ever since.

  “It’s one step from bombing a clinic, Deke. You don’t understand these girls. They’re different.”

  “Because they don’t have sex? Do you believe this separate species stuff too—the teleportation stuff, the parallel universes, all that?”

  “It’s one theory.”

  “Jo’s theory,” he said. “That she got from real scientists, right?”

  “Yes, there are reputable people who think quantum calculation could explain what happened,” Marla said. “Most of the evidence is circumstantial, though. Statistical. TDS changed the chromosome so completely that they say it’s impossible to see how the new order could arise from the old. It’s like running a dictionary through a leaf shredder and spraying out Hamlet on your front lawn.”

  “You’re talking about introns.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading up.”

  “I got it from Weygand. Didn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Introns are the part of DNA that don’t code for proteins. Because they’re not needed, they can mutate faster than other parts of the DNA where a change in the protein could kill the creature. You can look at intron sequences within proteins to tell small differences between related species, like the differences between humans and chimps. Both may produce the same hemoglobin protein, and their DNA is mostly the same, but the introns are very different. Between the clades, we’ve found differences in every protein sequence we’ve looked at: hemoglobin chains, cytochromes, histones …”

  “Really,” Deke said. She wasn’t looking at him, and hadn’t heard the smile in his voice.

  “So while the sequences are a mystery, there’s no need to invoke quantum weirdness. Most people are looking for a more realistic, testable mechanism that would cause those changes—a retrovirus, maybe, something small we’ve overlooked. My bet is that it’ll be a variant of something we already know about, maybe a bacterial plasmid we’ve been carrying around dormant for thousands of years—something that’s been unable till now to inject its own set of genetic instructions. See, plasmids can’t usually get out of the cell they’re trapped in, so they require—why are you laughing?”

  Deke shook his head, still smiling. “This is what I felt like when I talked to Jo. You guys are just—” He fanned the top of his head. “Whoosh.” He got to his feet.

  “You asked,” she said.

  Not for all that, he thought, but let it pass.

  Marla handed back the bag of bottles and the papers. “How’s Donna doing?” she asked. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” he said. Then shrugged. “The waiting is hard.”

  “Jo Lynn was right about one thing,” Marla said. “Asexual reproduction would be a lot simpler.”

  “Amen,” he said.

  Rhonda’s Cadillac was parked in front of his shop. He sighed heavily, then pulled in beside the car.

  Rhonda stepped out from the passenger side. Everett, behind the wheel, lifted a hand in hello. “I didn’t see you in church,” Rhonda said. “Donna said you were working. I called, but you didn’t answer your phone.”

  “I was doing some errands,” Deke said. He unlocked the bay door and pushed it open. “Come on inside.”

  He flipped on the main lights and led Rhonda across the shop floor toward his plastic-draped office area. He planned to put up real walls, but he’d hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  Rhonda stopped at the first row of pews. “When you get these done you’ll have no excuse for backsliding,” she said. She rubbed the glossy back of one of the finished pews. “You do beautiful work, Deke. All your boys do.” She looked up at him. “Do you know who the Shakers were?”

  “Like Shaker furniture?”

  “Your work reminds me of theirs. Do you know why there aren’t any Shakers anymore?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t know they were gone.”

  “They didn’t believe in sex,” she said. “Not just premarital sex—any kind. That was kind of shortsighted, don’t you think? And they weren’t much good at evangelizing either. So when they started to get old and die off, that was it for the whole religion.” She smiled. “Left behind some beautiful furniture, though.”

  “So. You think argos should evangelize.”

  “Ha! I wish you could. Just do some preaching and have people start growing. You remember Ernest Angley? TV healer. He’d slap people’s foreheads—whap!—and they’d flop over, quivering like fish.” She hooted in laughter. “I used to love watching him. It was like professional wrestling for Baptists.” She wiped at an eye, still chuckling. “Oh law. Is this sturdy?” She touched a bookcase turned onto its side, one of the few things in the shop low enough for her to sit on.

  “Go ahead,” Deke said.

  He thought they’d talk in his office, but if Rhonda wanted to talk out here, then fine. He took a seat opposite her on one of the unfinished pews. “You said you wanted to talk about the school?”

  “The reverend’s on me again about her Co-op school. She wants to use part of the loan for the high school for it. She called it a ‘branch campus’ of the high school, so it wouldn’t be considered a separate expenditure.”

  “Is that legal? The grant’s for one school: the loan’s for one school …”

  “Oh, it may be unusual, but I looked into it and it’s legal. I found some other high schools that do it. Usually they’re for tech-ed programs or special ed, but there are also these ‘alternative schools’—for problem students, nontraditional learners. I think the betas would qualify as nontraditional.”

  “The whole town qualifies,” Deke said.

  “And if we think it will cause problems with the grant, we use the grant for the main school, and part of the loan for the Co-op school. Of course the town council would have to vote on it.”

  “Two separate schools,” Deke said evenly. “One for charlies, one for betas.”

  “I know, I know,” Rhonda said. “I told the reverend, it’s like a slap in the face to the argos. We’ve been telling everybody that the school is for everyone, that someday the argos are going to have children. But this way it looks too much like two clades grabbing all the money and telling the argos to go hang—and that’s not the way it’s intended. Still, you know how people are. I don’t like what that would do to the town. If I were you, I wouldn’t vote for it.”

  Deke leaned back in the pew. Whenever Rhonda told him what he shouldn’t do, he started checking the locks.

  “What would make me vote for it, Aunt Rhonda?”

  She smiled. “If I were you, I’d want some of that high school money to set up a fund, a fertility assistance fund. Just for argos.”

  “Really.”

  “If argos don’t have children, why should they pay for a school? I don’t blame them. That’s why every argo couple who wants to ought to be able to go to the fertility clinic at the university.”

  “Some of us are already doing that,” Deke said.

  Rhonda didn’t pretend ignorance. “And it’s expensive, isn’t it? I don’t have all the numbers, but I figure you’re spending twenty, thirty thousand every time you try to fertilize an egg, none of it covered by insurance. Is that right?”

  “You’re in the ballpark.”


  “We’re a poor little town,” Rhonda said. “That’s a lot of money even for someone with their own business, and most of your people aren’t even working. Tell them they have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars, you might as well tell them to build a rocket ship while they’re at it. No, they need assistance.”

  “This fund. Now that is illegal.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t hold up to an audit, that’s for sure. It would have to be unofficial. When we build the school, we’d go through Alpha Furniture for part of the construction, on account of you’re a local, minority-owned business, then we’d—”

  “We’re not minorities, Rhonda.”

  “Handicapped, then.” She grinned. “Certainly a class of people oppressed by prejudice and bias—whatever the government wants to hear. Work with me, hon.”

  Deke laughed. “Jesus, Rhonda …”

  “That money goes to Alpha, but a significant amount is for the fertility fund. I can show you how to set this up. The important thing is that you are the administrator of the fund. People trust you, Deke. You’re the Chief. They know you’ll divide up the money fair and square.”

  “I know what embezzlement is, Rhonda. And fraud.”

  “Pah! We’re talking about a higher law. I’m only suggesting this—and the only way the reverend would go along with it—because you’re an honest man. That’s the only way this would work. We trust you to do the right thing, especially for your people.” She held out a hand. “Now, pull me up.”

  Deke helped her to her feet and walked her to the front door. “I’ll come back around to hear your decision,” she said.

  “You can hear it now,” Deke said, and Rhonda held up a hand.

  “No,” she said. “You go home and think about it. Talk to Donna.” Everett hopped out to open the car door for her. “Oh, one more thing,” Rhonda said. “Paxton tried to climb over the wall to the Home last night.”

  “Come again?”

  “One of my boys almost shot him. They had to pull him down, and he went wild. Clete had to knock him down a peg.”