by Greg Bear
“Ellie Ann Garcia.”
“Here.”
“Stella Nova Rafelson.”
“Here,” Stella called out, her voice silvery in the cool desert air.
“How’s your cold, Stella?” Miss Kantor asked as she walked down the row.
“Done,” Stella answered.
“Eight days, wasn’t it?” Miss Kantor tapped her pen on the daybook page.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s the fifth wave of colds we’ve had this year.”
Stella nodded. The counselors kept careful and tedious track of all infections. Stella had spent several hours being examined, five days ago; so had two dozen other children with similar colds.
“Kathy Chu.”
“Here!”
Miss Kantor walked by Stella again after she had finished. “Stella, are you scenting?”
Stella looked up. “No, Miss Kantor.”
“My little sensor tells me you are.” She tapped the nosey on her belt. Stella was not scenting, and neither was anybody around her. Miss Kantor’s electronic snitch was wrong, and Stella knew why; Miss Kantor was having her period and that could confuse the nosey. But Stella would never tell her that.
Humans hated to be clued when they produced revealing odors.
“You’ll never learn to live in the outside world if you can’t control yourself,” Miss Kantor said to Stella, and knelt in front of her. “You know the rules.”
Stella got to her feet without being prompted. She did not know why she was being singled out. She had done nothing unusual.
“Wait over by the truck,” Miss Kantor said.
Stella walked to the truck, brilliant white under the morning sun. The air over the mountains was intense and blue. It was going to be hot in a few hours, but it might rain heavily later; that would make the late-afternoon air perfect for catching up. She did not want to miss that.
Miss Kantor finished her count and the kids filed off to the morning classes in the trailers and bungalows scattered over the dusty grounds. The counselor and her assistant, a quiet, plump young woman named Joanie, walked across the gravel to the truck. Miss Kantor would not look straight at Stella.
“I know it wasn’t just you,” Miss Kantor said. “But you’re the only one I could catch. It has to stop, Stella. But I’m not going to punish you this time.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Stella knew better than to argue. When things went her way, Miss Kantor was reasonable and fairly easygoing, but any show of defiance or contradiction and she could get harsh. “Can I go to classes now?”
“Not yet,” Miss Kantor said, placing her notepad in the truck. She opened the rear door of the truck. “Your father is visiting,” she said. “We’re going back to the infirmary.”
Stella sat in the back of the truck, behind the plastic barrier, feeling confused. Miss Kantor climbed into the front seat. Joanie closed the door for her and went back to the tent. “Is he there, now?” Stella asked.
“He’ll arrive in an hour or so,” Miss Kantor said. “You two just got approval. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”
“What do they want?” Stella asked suddenly, before she could control her tongue.
“Nothing. It’s a family visit.”
Miss Kantor switched on the truck motor. Stella could feel her disapproval. Parental visits were futile at the best of times, Miss Kantor believed. The children would never be fully integrated into human society, no matter what the school policy said. She knew the children too well. They just could not behave appropriately.
Worse still, Miss Kantor knew that Stella’s father had served time in prison for assaulting Emergency Action enforcement officers. Having him as a visitor would be something of an affront to her. She was a holdover from the times when Sable Mountain School had been a prison.
Stella had not seen Mitch in three years. She hardly remembered what he smelled like, much less what he looked like.
Miss Kantor drove over the gravel to the paved road, and then between the brush half a mile to the brick building they called the hospital. It wasn’t really a hospital. As far as Stella knew, for sure, the hospital was just the administration and detention center for the school. It had been a hospital once, for the prison. Some kids claimed the hospital was where they injected salt into your cheeks, or resected your tongue, or Botoxed the new facial muscles that made your expressions so compelling.
It was the place they tried to turn SHEVA kids into humans. Stella had never met a kid who had undergone such torments, but that was explained, some said, by the fact that they sent those kids away to Suburbia, a town made up of nothing but SHEVA kids trying to act just like humans.
That was not true, as far as Stella knew, but the hospital was where they sent you when they wanted to draw blood. She had been there many times for that purpose.
There were lots of stories in the camps. Few of them were true, but most were scary, and the kids could get ominously bored.
As they drove through a razor-wire fence and over a moat, Stella felt something sad and cold grow in her.
Memory.
She did not want to lose her focus. She stared through the window, resenting Mitch for coming. Why now? Why not when she had her act together and could tell him she had accomplished something worthwhile? Life was still too confused. The last visit with her mother had been painful. Stella had not known what to say. Her mother had been so sad and full of needs neither could satisfy.
She hoped Mitch would not just sit and stare at her over the table in the family conference room. Or ask pointed questions. Or try to tell Stella there was hope they would get together again. Stella did not think she could stand that.
Stella dipped her head and rubbed her nose. She touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye and then to her tongue, out of sight of the rearview mirror. Her eyes were moist and the tears tasted of bitter salt. She would not cry openly, however. Not in front of a human.
Miss Kantor stopped the truck in the parking lot of the flat brick building, got out, and opened Stella’s door. Stella followed her into the hospital. As they turned a corner, through a gap in the brick breezeway she saw a long yellow bus drawn up beside the processing office. A load of new kids had arrived. Stella hung back a few steps from Miss Kantor as they passed through the glass doors and walked to the detention center.
The door to the secretary’s office was always open, and through the wide window beyond, Stella thought she would catch a glimpse of the new kids from the shipment center. That would be something to take back to the deme; possible recruits or news from outside.
Suddenly, irrationally, she hated Mitch. She did not want him to visit. She did not want any distractions. She wanted to focus and never have to worry about humans again. She wanted to lash out at Miss Kantor, strike her down to the linoleum floor, and run away to anywhere but here.
Through Stella’s brief, fierce scowl—a more intense scowl than most humans could manage—she caught a glimpse of the lineup of children beyond the secretary’s window. Her scowl vanished.
She thought she recognized a face.
Stella dropped to remove her shoe and turned it upside down, shaking it. Miss Kantor looked back and stopped with hands on hips.
The nosey on her belt wheeped.
“Are you scenting again?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.
She did know the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.
She no longer worried about Mitch.
The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket’s shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye’s and Mitch’s house.
<
br /> It was Will. Strong Will.
13
BALTIMORE
Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.
Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.
All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.
Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.
The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.
“This isn’t a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.
“It feels like you love me,” she said, shaking with frustration. “So why do you torment me? Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do?” Kaye slid down the bench to a chair near a desk in the corner of the lab. She put her head between her knees. She did not feel weak or even woozy; she could have walked around and even gone about her daily work. She had before. But this time it was just too much.
Her anger swelled even over the insistent waves of validation and approval. The first time the caller had touched her, Mitch and Stella had been taken away. That had been so bad, so unfair; she did not want to remember that time now. And yet this affirmation forced her to remember.
“Go away. Please. I don’t know why you’re here. This world is cruel, even if you aren’t, and I have to keep working.”
She looked around, biting her lip, seeing the lab, the equipment, so neatly arranged, the dark beyond the window. The wall of night outside, the bright rationality within.
“Please.”
She felt the voice become smaller, but no less intense. How polite, she thought. Abruptly, panicked at this new loss, this possible withdrawal, she jumped to her feet.
“Are you trying to clue me in to something?” she asked, desperate. “Reward me for my work, my discoveries?”
Kaye received the distinct impression that this was not the case. She got up and made sure the door was locked. No sense having people wander in and find her talking to herself. She paced up and down the aisles. “So you’re willing to communicate, just not with words,” she said, eyes half-closed. “All right. I’ll talk. You let me know whether I’m right or wrong, okay? This could take a while.”
She had long since learned that an irreverent attitude had no effect on the caller. Even when Kaye had loathed herself for what she had done by abandoning Mitch in prison and her daughter in the schools, ruining all their lives in a desperate gamble to use all the tools of science and rationality, the caller had still radiated love and approval.
She could punish herself, but the caller would not.
Even more embarrassing, Kaye had come to think of the caller as definitely not female, and probably not neuter—but male. The caller was nothing like her father or Mitch or any other man she had ever met or known, but it seemed strangely masculine nonetheless. What that meant psychologically, she was most unwilling to discover. It was a little too de rigueur, a little too churchy, for comfort.
But the caller cared little about her qualms. He was the most consistent thing in her life—outside of her need to help Stella.
“Am I doing the right thing?” she asked, looking around the lab. Her tremors stopped. She let the extraordinary calm wash over her. “That means yes, I suppose,” she said tentatively. “Are you the Big Guy? Are you Jesus? Or just Gabriel?”
She had asked these questions before, and received no response. This time, however, she felt an almost insignificant alteration in the sensations flooding through her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “No. None of the above. Are you my guardian angel?”
Again, a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and whispered, “No.
“Then what are you?”
No response at all, no change, no clues.
“God?”
Nothing.
“You’re inside me or up there or someplace where you can just pump out love and approval all day long, and then you go away and leave me in misery. I don’t understand that. I need to know whether you’re just something in my head. A crossed nerve. A burst blood vessel. I need solid reassurance. I hope you don’t mind.”
The caller expressed no objection, not even to the extent of withdrawing under the assault of such questioning, such blasphemies.
“You’re really something else, you know that?” Kaye sat before the workstation and logged on to the Americol intranet. “There’s nothing Sunday school about you.”
She glanced at her watch—6 p.m.—and looked up the roster that recorded who was in the building at this hour.
On the first floor, chief radiologist Herbert Roth was still at his post, working late. Just the man she needed. Roth was in charge of the Noninvasive Imaging Lab. She had worked with him two weeks ago taking scans of Wishtoes, their oldest female chimp.
Roth was young, quiet, dedicated to his craft.
Kaye opened the lab door and stepped out into the hall. “Do you think Mr. Roth will want to scan me?” she asked no one in particular.
14
ARIZONA
They did not let Stella see Mitch for hours. First Stella was visited by a nurse who examined her, took a cheek swab, and drew a few cc’s of blood.
Stella looked away as the nurse lightly jabbed her with the needle. She could smell the nurse’s anxiety; she was only a few years older than Stella and did not like this.
Afterward, Miss Kantor took Stella to the visitor’s area. The first thing Stella noticed was that they had removed the plastic barrier. Tables and chairs, nothing more. Something had changed, and that concerned her for a moment. She patted the cotton patch taped to the inside of her elbow. After an hour, Miss Kantor returned with a pile of comic books.
“X-Men,” she said. “You’ll like these. Your father’s still being examined. Give me the cotton.”
Stella pulled off the tape and handed it to Miss Kantor, who opened a plastic bag to store it.
“He’ll be done soon,” Miss Kantor said with a practiced smile.
Stella ignored the comics and stood in the bare room with its flowered wallpaper and the single table and two plastic chairs. There was a water cooler in the corner and a couple of lounge chairs, patched and dirty. She filled a paper cup with water. A window opened from the main office, and another window looked out over the parking lot. No hot coffee or tea, no hot plate for warming food—no utensils. Family visits
were not meant to last long or to be particularly comfortable.
She curled the paper cup in her hand and thought alternately about her father and about Will. Thinking about Will pushed her father into the background, if only for a moment, and Stella did not like that. She did not want to be chaotic. She did not want to be unpredictable; she wanted to be faithful to the goal of putting together a stable deme, away from the school, away from human interference, and that would require focus and an emotional constancy.
She knew nothing about Will. She did not even know his last name. He might not remember her. Perhaps he was passing through, getting a checkup or going through some sort of quarantine on his way to another school.
But if he was staying…
Joanie opened the door. “Your father’s here,” she said. Joanie always tried to hide her smell behind baby powder. Her expression was friendly but empty. She did what Miss Kantor wanted and seldom expressed her own opinions.
“Okay,” Stella said, and took a seat in one plastic chair. The table would be between them, she hoped. She squirmed nervously. She had to get used to the thought of seeing Mitch again.
Joanie pointed the way through the door and Mitch came in. His left arm hung by his side. Stella looked at the arm, eyes wide, and then at Mitch’s denim jacket and jeans, worn and a little dusty. And then she looked at his face.
Mitch was forcing a nervous smile. He did not know what to do, either.
“Hello, sweetie,” he said.
“You can sit in the chair,” Joanie said. “Take your time.”
“How long do we have?” Mitch asked Joanie. Stella hated that. She remembered him as being strong and in charge, and his having to ask about such a thing was wrong.
“We don’t have many visits scheduled today. There are four rooms. So… take your time. A couple of hours. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be in the office right outside.”
Joanie shut the door and Mitch looked at the chair, the table. Then, at his daughter.
“Don’t you want a hug?” he asked Stella.
