by Greg Bear
“Any news on what they’re doing inside me, all those viruses?”
“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.
“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses… are they still carrying pig messages?”
“I don’t know, Carla.”
Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “Please, Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams… anything.”
Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It’s the least she deserves.”
In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.
They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.
5
SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA
“I hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.
“She doesn’t smell good as a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”
“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.
“We’re just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.
“I’m warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he’s just fooling.”
Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.
They weren’t making much money and they weren’t very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.
“She doesn’t look infeckshus,” the second male said.
“I mean it, guys, she’s just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.
“What’s your name?” Stella asked the first male.
“I don’t care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.
“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”
The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let’s go, Dave.”
Dave was working himself up. “She doesn’t fucking belong here,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”
“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”
Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I’m Stella,” she said.
Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn’t touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain’t you in a camp?”
“Dave!” the stooped fellow snapped.
Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn’t wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk’s halfhearted defense rankled.
Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.
“It’s nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It’s cool.”
“You are something, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”
Dave’s friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man’s hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.
“Fuck it, Dave, let’s go! They’ll come get her and maybe they’ll take us, too, if we get too close.”
“My people aren’t really infeckshus,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”
The clerk sucked in her breath.
Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.
What came out of Stella’s mouth in a soothing alto murmur, her eyes focused on Dave’s, was, “Don’t worry. It’s safe. If you want to beat me up, my blood won’t hurt you. I could be your own little Jesus.”
The fever-scent did its thing. The glands behind her ears began to pump defensive pheromones. Her neck felt hot.
“Shit,” the clerk said, and bumped up against the tall rack of cigarettes behind her.
Dave showed the whites of his eyes like a skittish horse. He veered toward the door, giving her a wide berth, the deliberate smell of her in his nose. She had snuffed the fuse of his anger.
Dave joined his friend. “She smells like fucking chocolate,” he said, and they kicked the glass doors open with their boots.
An old woman at the back of the store, surrounded by aisles jammed with puffed bags of potato chips, stared at Stella. Her hand shook a can of Pringles like a castanet. “Go away!”
The clerk moved in to defend the old woman. “Take your Gatorade and go home!” she barked at Stella. “Go home to your mama and don’t you never come back here.”
6
The Longworth House Office Building
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“We’ve been over and over this,” Dick Gianelli told Mitch, dropping a stack of scientific reprints on the coffee table between them. The news was not good.
Gianelli was short and round and his usually pale face was now a dangerous red. “We’ve been reading everything you sent us ever since the congressman was elected. But they have twice as many experts, and they send twice as many papers. We’re drowning in papers, Mitch! And the language.” He thumped the stack. “Can’t your people, all the biologists, just write to be understood? Don’t they realize how important it is to get the word out to everybody?”
Mitch let his hands drop by his sides. “They’re not my people, Dick. My people are archaeologists. They tend to write sparkling prose.”
Gianelli laughed, stood up from the couch and shook out his arms, then tipped a finger under his tight collar, as if letting out steam. His office was part of the suite assigned to Representative Dale Wickham, D., Virginia, whom he had faithfully served as director of public science for two of the toughest terms in U.S. history. The door to Wickham’s office was closed. He was on the Hill today.
“The congressman has made hi
s views clear for years now. Your colleagues, scientists all, have hopped on the gravy train. They’ve joined up with NIH and CDC and Emergency Action, and they pay their visits mostly across the aisle. Wilson at FEMA and Doyle at DOJ have undercut us every step of the way, squirming like puppies to get their funding treats. Opposing them is like standing outside in a hail of cannonballs.”
“So what can I take home with me?” Mitch asked. “To cheer up the missus. Any good news?”
Gianelli shrugged. Mitch liked Gianelli but doubted he would live to see fifty. Gianelli had all the markers: pear shape, excessive girth, ghostly skin, thinning black hair, creased earlobes. He knew it, too. He worked hard and cared too much and swallowed his disappointments. A good man in a bad time. “We got caught in a medical bear trap,” he said. “We’ve never been prepared. Our best model for an epidemic was military response. So now we’ve had ten years of Emergency Action. We’ve practically signed away our country to Beltway bureaucrats with military and law enforcement training. Mark Augustine’s crew, Mitch. We’ve given them almost absolute authority.”
“I don’t think I’m capable of understanding how those people think,” Mitch said.
“I thought I did, once,” Gianelli said. “We tried to build a coalition. The congressman roped in Christian groups, the NRA, conspiracy nuts, flag burners and flag lovers, anybody who’s ever expressed a shred of suspicion about the guv’ment. We’ve gone hat in hand to every decent judge, every civil libertarian still above ground, literally and figuratively. We’ve been checked every step of the way. It was made very clear to the congressman that if he threw up any more dust, he, personally, all on his lonesome, could force the president to declare martial law.”
“What’s the difference, Dick?” Mitch asked. “They’ve suspended habeas corpus.”
“For a special class, Mitch.”
“My daughter,” Mitch growled.
Gianelli nodded. “Civil courts still operate, though under special guidelines. Nothing much has changed for the frightened average citizen, who’s kind of fuzzy about civil rights anyway. When Mark Augustine put together Emergency Action, he wove a tight little piece of legislative fabric. He made sure every agency ever involved in managing disease and preparing for natural disaster had a piece of the pie—and a very smelly pie it is. We’ve created a new and vulnerable underclass, with fewer civil protections than any since slavery. This sort of stuff attracts the real sharks, Mitch. The monsters.”
“All they have are hatred and fear.”
“In this town, that’s a full house,” Gianelli said. “Washington eats truth and shits spin.” He stood. “We can’t challenge Emergency Action. Not this session. They’re stronger than ever. Maybe next year.”
Mitch watched Gianelli pace a circuit of the room. “I can’t wait that long. Riverside, Dick.”
Gianelli folded his hands. He would not meet Mitch’s eyes.
“The mob torched one of Augustine’s goddamned camps,” Mitch said. “They burned the children in their barracks. They poured gasoline around the pilings and lit them up. The guards just stood back and watched. Two hundred kids roasted to death. Kids just like my daughter.”
Gianelli put on a mask of public sympathy, but underneath it, Mitch could see the real pain.
“There haven’t even been arrests,” he added.
“You can’t arrest a city, Mitch. Even the New York Times calls them virus children now. Everyone’s scared.”
“There hasn’t been a case of Shiver in ten years. It was a fluke, Dick. An excuse for some people to trample on everything this country has ever stood for.”
Gianelli squinted at Mitch but did not challenge this appraisal. “There isn’t much more the congressman can do,” he said.
“I don’t believe that.”
Gianelli reached into his desk drawer and took out a bottle of Tums. “Everyone around here has fire in the belly. I have heartburn.”
“Give me something to take home, Dick. Please. We need hope,” Mitch said.
“Show me your hands, Mitch.”
Mitch held up his hands. The calluses had faded, but they were still there. Gianelli held his own hands beside Mitch’s. They were smooth and pink. “Want to really learn how to suck eggs, from an old hound dog? I’ve spent ten years with Wickham. He’s the smartest hound there is, but he’s up against a bad lot. The Republicans are the country’s pit bulls, Mitch. Barking in the night, all night, every night, right or wrong, and savaging their enemies without mercy. They claim to represent plain folks, but they represent those who vote, when they vote at all, on pocketbooks and fear and gut instinct. They control the House and the Senate, they stacked the court the last three terms, their man is in the White House, and bless them, they speak with one voice, Mitch. The president is dug in. But you know what the congressman thinks? He thinks the president doesn’t want Emergency Action to be his legacy. Eventually, maybe we can do something with that.” Gianelli’s voice dropped very low, as if he were about to blaspheme in the temple. “But not now. The Democrats can’t even hold a bake sale without arguing. We’re weak and getting weaker.”
He held out his hand. “The congressman will be back any minute. Mitch, you look like you haven’t slept in weeks.”
Mitch shrugged. “I lie awake listening for trucks. I hate being so far from Kaye and Stella.”
“How far?”
Mitch looked up from under his solid line of eyebrow and shook his head.
“Right,” Gianelli said. “Sorry.”
7
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
The old frame house snapped and popped in the morning heat. A moist breeze blew through the small rooms in lazy swirls. Kaye walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. She had awakened from a peculiar dream in which she was an atom slowly rising to connect with a much larger molecule, to fit in and complete something truly impressive. She felt at peace for the first time in months, despite the barbed memory of last night’s fight.
Kaye massaged the fingers of her right hand, then wriggled her wedding ring over a swollen knuckle into its familiar groove. Bees droned in the oleanders outside the window, well into their day’s work.
“Some dream,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled down one eyelid with a finger and stared at herself speculatively. “Under a little stress, are we?”
A few freckles remained under each eye from her pregnancy with Stella; when she was upset, they could still change from pale tan to ruddy ocher. Now, they were darker but not vivid. She splashed water on her cheeks and clipped her hair back, preparing for the hot day, ready to face more difficulties. Families were about staying together and healing.
If the bees can do it, so can I.
“Stella,” she called, knocking on her daughter’s bedroom door. “It’s nine o’clock. We slept in.”
Kaye padded into the small office in the laundry room and switched on the computer. She read the lines she had written before the squabble last night, then scrolled back through the last few pages:
“The role of SHEVA in the production of a new subspecies is but one function performed by this diverse and essential class of viruses. ERV and transposons—jumping genes—play large roles in tissue differentiation and development. Emotion and crisis and changing environments activate them, one variety at a time, or all together. They are mediators and messengers between cells, ferrying genes and coded data around many parts of the body, and even between individuals.
“Viruses and transposons most likely arose after the invention of sex, perhaps because of sex. To this day, sex brings them opportunity to move and carry information. They may have also emerged during the tumultuous genetic shuffling of our early immune system, like soldiers and cops running wild.
“Truly they are like original sin. How does sin shape our destiny?”
Kaye used a stylus to circle that last awkward, overreaching sentence. She marked it out and read some more.
“One thing we know a
lready: We depend on retroviral and transposon activity during nearly every stage of our growth. Many are necessary partners.
“To assume that viruses and transposable elements are first and foremost causes of disease is like assuming that automobiles are first and foremost meant to kill people.
“Pathogens—disease-causing organisms—are like hormones and other signaling molecules, but their message is challenge and silence. Our own internal lions, pathogens test us. They winnow the old and weak. They sculpt life.
“Sometimes they bring down the young and the good. Nature is painful. Disease and death are part of our response to challenge. To fail, to die, is still to be part of nature, for success is built on many failures, and silence is also a signal.”
Her frame of mind had become increasingly abstract. The dream, the drone of the bees…
You were born with a caul, my dear.
Kaye suddenly remembered the voice of her maternal grandmother, Evelyn; words from nearly four decades ago. At the age of eight, Evelyn had told her something that her mother, a practical woman, had never thought to mention. “You came into this world with your tiny head covered. You were born with a caul. I was there, in the hospital with your mother. I saw it myself. The doctor showed it to me.”
Kaye remembered squirming with delicious anticipation in her grandmother’s ample lap and asking what a caul was. “A cap of loose flesh,” Evelyn had explained. “Some say it’s a mark of extraordinary understanding, even second sight. A caul warns us that you will learn things most others will never comprehend, and you will always be frustrated trying to explain what you know, and what seems so obvious to you. It’s supposed to be both a blessing and a curse.” Then the older woman had added, in a soft voice, “I was born with a caul, my dear, and your grandfather has never understood me.”
