Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  “Great,” Dicken said thickly. He swallowed and tried to bring up some spit to wet his tongue. Drugs for pain and antibiotics were playing hell with his chemistry.

  “We’re not going to do anything radical,” Augustine said. “Everyone agrees we’re in an incredibly delicate state.”

  “State with a capital S,” Dicken said.

  “For the moment, no doubt,” Augustine said quietly. “I didn’t ask for this, Christopher.”

  “I know,” Dicken said.

  “But should any SHEVA children be born alive, we have to move quickly. I have reports from seven labs that prove SHEVA can mobilize ancient retroviruses in the genome.”

  “It kicks around all manner of HERV and retrotrans-posons,” Dicken said. He had been trying to read the studies on a special viewer in the room. “I’m not sure they’re actually viruses. They may be—”

  “Whatever you call them, they have the requisite viral genes,” Augustine interrupted. “We haven’t faced them for millions of years, so they’ll probably be pathogenic. What worries me now is any movement that might encourage woman to bring these children to term. There’s no problem in Eastern Europe and Asia. Japan has already started a prevention program. But here, we’re more cussed.”

  That was putting it mildly. “Don’t cross that line again, Mark,” Dicken advised.

  Augustine was in no mood for wise counsel. “Christopher, we could lose more than just a generation of children. Kelly agrees.”

  “The work is sound,” Newcomb said.

  Dicken coughed, controlled the spasm, but his face flushed with frustration. “What are we looking at…Internment camps? Concentration nurseries”?”

  “We estimate there will be one or two thousand SHEVA children born alive in North America by the end of the year, at most. There may be none, zero, Christopher. The president has already signed an emergency order giving us custody if any are born alive. We’re working out the civil details now. God only knows what the E.U. is going to do. Asia is being very practical. Abortion and quarantine. I wish we could be so bold.”

  “To me, this does not sound like a major health threat, Mark,” Dicken said. His throat caught again and he coughed. With his damaged eyesight, he could not make out Augustine’s expression behind the bandages.

  “They’re reservoirs, Christopher,” Augustine said. “If the babies get out in the general public, they’ll be vectors. All it took for AIDS was a few.”

  “We admit it stinks,” Newcomb said, glancing at Augustine. “I feel that in my gut. But we’ve done computer analysis on some of these activated HERV Given expression of viable env andpol genes, we could have something much worse than HIY The computers point to a disease like nothing we’ve seen in history. It could burn the human race, Dr. Dicken. We could just flake away like dust.”

  Dicken pushed up out of his chair and sat on the edge of his bed. “Who disagrees?” he asked.

  “Dr. Mahy at the CDC,” Augustine said. “Bishop and Thorne. And of course James Mondavi. But the Princeton people agree, and they have the president’s confidence. They want to work with us on this.”

  “What do the opponents say?” Dicken asked Newcomb.

  “Mahy thinks any released particles will be fully adapted retroviruses, but nonpathogenic, and that the worst we’ll see is a few cases of some rare cancers,” Augustine said. “Mondavi also sees no pathogenesis. But that’s not why we’re here, Christopher.”

  “Why, then?”

  “We need your personal input. Kaye Lang has gotten herself pregnant. You know the father. It’s a first-stage SHEVA. She’ll have her miscarriage any day now.”

  Dicken turned away.

  “She’s sponsoring a conference in Washington state. We tried to get the Emergency Action Office to shut it down—”

  “A scientific conference?”

  “More mumbo-jumbo about evolution. And, no doubt, encouragement for new mothers. This could be a PR disaster, very bad for morale. We don’t control the press, Christopher. Do you think she’ll be extreme on the subject?”

  “No,” Dicken said. “I think she’ll be very reasonable.”

  “That could be worse,” Augustine said. “But it’s also something we can use against her, if she claims the support of Science with a capital S. Mitch Rafelson’s reputation is pure mud.”

  “He’s a decent fellow,” Dicken said.

  “He’s a liability, Christopher,” Augustine said. “Fortunately, he’s her liability, not ours.”

  76

  Seattle

  AUGUST 10

  Kaye carried her yellow legal pad from the bedroom to the kitchen. Mitch had been at the University of Washington since nine that morning. The first reaction to his visit at the Hayer Museum had been negative; they were not interested in controversy, whatever his support from Brock or any other scientist. Brock himself, they had sagely pointed out, was controversial, and according to unnamed sources had been “let go from” or even “forced out of” the Neandertal studies at the University of Innsbruck.

  Kaye had always loathed academic politics. She set the notebook and a glass of orange juice on a small table by Mitch’s worn chair, then sat down with a small moan. With nothing coming to her this morning and no sense of where to take the book next, she had started a general short essay that she might use at the conference in two weeks…

  But the essay had abruptly stalled as well. Inspiration was simply no competititon for the peculiar tangled feeling in her abdomen.

  It had been almost ninety days. Last night, in her journal, she had written, “Already it is about the size of a mouse.” And nothing more.

  She used Mitch’s remote to turn on the old TV Governor Harris was giving yet another press conference. He went on the air every day to report on the Emergency Act, how Washington state was cooperating with Washington, D.C., what measures he was resisting — he was very big on resistance, playing to the rugged individualists east of the Cascades — and explaining very carefully where he thought cooperation was beneficial and essential. Once more he went through a bleak litany of statistics.

  “In the Northwest, from Oregon to Idaho, the law enforcement officials tell me there have been at least thirty acts of human sacrifice. When we add this to the estimated twenty-two thousand incidents of violence against women around the country, the Emergency Act seems long overdue. We are a community, a state, a region, a nation, out of control with grief and panicked by an incomprehensible act of God.”

  Kaye rubbed her stomach gently. Harris had an impossible job. The proud citizens of the U.S.A., she thought, were adopting a very Chinese attitude. With the favor of Heaven so obviously withdrawn, their support for any and all governments had diminished drastically.

  A roundtable discussion with two scientists and a state representative followed the governor’s conference. The talk turned to SHEVA children as carriers of disease; this was utter nonsense and something she did not want or need to hear. She shut the television off.

  The cell phone rang. Kaye flipped it open. “Hello?”

  “Oh beauteous one…I’ve got Wendell Packer, Maria Konig, Oliver Merton, and Professor Brock, all sitting in the same room.”

  Kaye’s face warmed and relaxed at the sound of Mitch’s voice.

  “They’d like to meet you.”

  “Only if they want to be midwives,” Kaye said.

  “Jesus — do you feel anything?”

  “A sour stomach,” Kaye said. “Unhappy and uninspired. But no, I don’t think it’s going to be today.”

  “Well, be inspired by this,” Mitch said. “They’re going to go public with their analysis of the Innsbruck tissue samples. And they’re going to give papers at the conference. Packer and Konig say they’ll support us.”

  Kaye closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to savor this. “And their departments?”

  “No go. The politics is just too intense for department heads. But Maria and Wendell are going to work on their colleagues. We’
re hoping to have dinner together. Are you up for it?”

  Her roiling stomach had settled. Kaye thought she might actually be hungry in an hour or so. She had followed Maria Konig’s work for years, and admired her enormously. But in that masculine crew, perhaps Konig’s greatest asset was that she was female.

  “Where are we eating?”

  “Within five minutes of Marine Pacific Hospital,” Mitch said. “Other than that, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe a bowl of oatmeal for me,” Kaye said. “Should I take the bus?”

  “Nonsense. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Mitch kissed at her over the phone, and then, Oliver Merton asked to say something.

  “We haven’t met yet, to shake hands,” Merton said breathlessly, as if he had just been arguing loudly or had run up a flight of stairs. “Christ, Ms. Lang, I’m nervous just talking with you.”

  “You trounced me pretty badly in Baltimore,” Kaye said.

  “Yes, but that was then,” Merton said without a hint of regret. “I can’t tell you how much I admire what you and Mitch are planning. I am agog with wonder.”

  “We’re just doing what comes natural,” Kaye said.

  “Wipe the past clean,” Merton said. “Ms. Lang, I’m a friend.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Kaye said.

  Merton chuckled and handed her back to Mitch.

  “Maria Konig suggests a good Vietnamese pho restaurant. That’s what she craved when she was pregnant. Sound right?”

  “After my oatmeal,” Kaye said. “Does Merton have to be there?”

  “Not if you don’t want him.”

  “Tell him I’m going to stare daggers at him. Make him suffer.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mitch said. “But he thrives under criticism.”

  “I’ve been analyzing tissues from dead people for ten years now,” Maria Konig said. “Wendell knows the feeling.”

  “I do indeed,” Packer said.

  Konig, sitting across from her, was more than just beautiful — she was the perfect model for what Kaye wanted to look like when she reached fifty. Wendell Packer was very handsome, in a lean and compact sort of way — quite the opposite of Mitch. Brock wore a gray coat and black T-shirt, dapper and quiet; he seemed lost in even deeper thought.

  “Each day, you get a FedEx box or two or three,” Maria said, “and you open them up, and inside are little tubes or bottles from Bosnia or East Timor or the Congo, and there’s this little sad chunk of skin or bone from one or another victim, usually innocent, and an envelope with copies of records, more tubes, blood samples or cheek swabs from relatives of victims. Day after day after day. It never stops. If these babies are the next step, if they’re better than we are at living on this planet, I can’t wait. We’re in need of a change.”

  The small waitress taking their orders stopped writing on her small pad. “You name dead people for UN?” she asked Maria.

  Maria looked up at her, embarrassed. “Sometimes.”

  “I from Kampuchea, Cambodia, come here fifteen years ago,” she said. “You work on Kampucheans?”

  “That was before my time, honey,” Maria said.

  “I still very mad,” the woman said. “Mother, father, brother, uncle. Then they let the murderers go without punishing. Very bad men and women.”

  The table fell silent as the woman’s large black eyes sparked with memory. Brock leaned forward, clasping his hands and touching his nose with the knuckle of his thumb.

  “Very bad now, too. I going to have baby anyway,” the woman said. She touched her stomach and looked at Kaye. “You?”

  “Yes,” Kaye said.

  “I believe in future,” the woman said. “It got to get better.”

  She finished taking their orders and left the table. Merton picked up his chopsticks and fumbled them aimlessly for a few seconds. “I shall have to remember this,” he said, “the next time I feel oppressed.”

  “Save it for your book,” Brock said.

  “I am writing one,” Merton told them with raised brows. “No surprise. The most important bit of science reporting of our time.”

  “I hope you’re having more luck than I am,” Kaye said.

  “I’m jammed, absolutely stuck,” Merton said, and pushed up his glasses with the thick end of a chopstick. “But that won’t last. It never has.”

  The waitress brought spring rolls, shrimp and bean sprouts and basil leaves wrapped in translucent pancake. Kaye had lost her urge for bland and reassuring oatmeal. Feeling more adventurous, she pinched one of the rolls with her chopsticks and dipped it into a small ceramic bowl of sweet brown sauce. The flavor was extraordinary — she could have lingered on the bite for minutes, picking out every savory molecule. The basil and mint in the roll were almost too intense, and the shrimp tasted rich and crunchy and oceanic.

  All her senses sharpened. The large room, though dark and cool, seemed very colorful, very detailed.

  “What do they put in these?” she asked, chewing the last bite of her roll.

  “They are good,” Merton said.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Maria said apologetically, still feeling the emotion of the waitress’s bit of history.

  “We all believe in the future,” Mitch said. “We wouldn’t be here if we were stuck in our own little ruts.”

  “We need to figure out what we can say, what our limitations are,” Wendell said. “I can only go so far before I’m outside my expertise and way outside what the department will tolerate, even if I claim to speak for myself alone.”

  “Courage, Wendell,” Merton said. “A solid front. Freddie?”

  Brock sipped from his foamy glass of pale lager. He looked up with a hangdog expression.

  “I cannot believe we are all here, that we have come this far,” he said. “The changes are so close, I am frightened. Do you know what is going to happen when we present our findings?”

  “We’re going to get crucified by nearly every scientific journal in the world,” Packer said, and laughed.

  “Not Nature ” Merton said. “I’ve laid some groundwork there. Pulled off a journalistic and scientific coup.” He grinned.

  “No, please, friends,” Brock said. “Step back a moment and think. We are just past the millennium, and now we are about to learn how we came to be human.” He removed his thick glasses and wiped them with his napkin. His eyes were distant, very round. “In Innsbruck, we have our mummies, caught in the late stages of a change that took place across tens of thousands of years. The woman must have been tough and brave beyond our imagining, but she knew very little. Dr. Lang, you know a great deal, and you proceed anyway. Your courage is perhaps even more wonderful.” He lifted his glass of beer. “The least I can do is offer you a heartfelt toast.”

  They all raised their glasses. Kaye felt her stomach flip again, but it was not a bad sensation.

  “To Kaye,” Friedrich Brock said. “The next Eve.”

  77

  Seattle

  AUGUST 12

  Kaye sat in the old Buick to stay out of the rain. Mitch walked along the row of cars in the small lot off Roosevelt, searching for the kind she had specified — small, late nineties, Japanese or Volvo, maybe blue or green — and looked up to where she sat curbside, window rolled down for air.

  He pulled off his wet felt Stetson and smiled. “How about this beauty?” He pointed to a black Caprice.

  “No,” Kaye said emphatically. Mitch loved big old American cars. He felt at home in their roomy interiors. Their trunks could carry tools and slabs of rock. He would have loved to buy a truck, and they had discussed that for a few days. Kaye was not averse to four-wheel-drive, but they had seen nothing she thought they could afford. She wanted a huge reserve in the bank for emergencies. She had set a limit of twelve thousand dollars.

  “I’m a kept man,” he said, holding his hat mournfully and bowing his head before the Caprice.

  Kaye pointedly ignored that. She had been in an ill humor all morning — had s
napped at him twice over breakfast, chastisements that Mitch had accepted with infuriating commiseration. What she wanted was a real argument, to get her blood going, her thoughts moving — to get her body moving. She was sick of the gnawing sensation in her gut that had persisted for three days. She was sick of waiting, of trying to come to grips with what she was carrying.

  What Kaye wanted above all else was to lash out at Mitch for agreeing to get her pregnant and start this awful, dragged-out process.

  Mitch strode over to the second row and peered at stickers. A woman with an umbrella came down the wooden steps from the small office trailer and conferred with him.

  Kaye watched them suspiciously. She hated herself, hated her screwball and chaotic emotions. Nothing she was thinking made any sense.

  Mitch pointed to a used Lexus. “Way too expensive,” Kaye murmured to herself, biting her cuticle. Then, “Oh, shit.” She thought she had wet her panties. The trickle continued, but it was not her bladder. She felt between her legs.

  “Mitch!” she yelled. He came running, flung open the driver’s-side door, jumped in, started the motor when the first poked fist of blunt pain doubled her over. She nearly slammed her hand against the dash. He pulled her back with one hand. “Oh, God! “she said.

  “We’re going,” he said. He peeled out along Roosevelt and turned west on 45th, dodging cars on the overpass and swinging hard left onto the freeway.

  The pain was not so intense now. Her stomach seemed filled with ice water and her thighs trembled.

  “How is it?” Mitch asked.

  “Scary,” she said. “So strange.”

  Mitch hit eighty.

  She felt something like a small bowel movement. So rude, so natural, so unspeakable . She tried to clamp her legs together. She was not sure what she felt, what exactly had happened. The pain was almost gone.

  By the time they pulled into the emergency entrance at Marine Pacific, she was reasonably sure it was all over.