by Greg Bear
Stella stood, her cheeks tawny with emotion. She kept her hands by her sides. Mitch walked across the room slowly, and she tracked him like a wild animal. Then the currents of air in the room brought his scent, and the cry came up out of her before she could stop it. Mitch took the last step and grabbed her and squeezed and Stella shook in his arms. Her eyes filled with tears that dripped on Mitch’s jacket.
“You’re so tall,” Mitch murmured, swinging her gently back and forth, brushing the tips of her shoes against the linoleum.
She planted her feet and pushed him back and tried to pack in her emotions, but they did not fit. They had exploded like popcorn.
“I’ve never given up,” Mitch said.
Stella’s long fingers clutched at his jacket. The smell of him was overwhelming, comfortable and familiar; it made her feel like a little girl again. He was basic and simple, no elaborations, predictable and memorable; he was the smell of their home in Virginia, of everything she had tried to forget, everything she had thought was lost.
“I couldn’t come to see you,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me. Part of probation.”
She nodded, bumping her chin gently against his shoulder.
“I sent your mother messages.”
“She gave them to me.”
“There was no gun, Stella. They lied,” Mitch said, and for a moment he looked no older than her, just another disappointed child.
“I know. Kaye told me.”
Mitch held his daughter at arm’s length. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, his thick brows drawing together. His face was sunburned. Stella could smell the damage to his skin, the toughening. He smelled like leather and dust above the fundamental of just being Mitch. In his smell—and in Kaye’s—she could detect a little of her own fundamental, like a shared license number in the genes, a common passkey to the emotions.
“They want us to sit… here?” Mitch asked, swinging one arm at the table.
Stella wrapped her arms around herself, still jammed up inside. She did not know what to do.
Mitch smiled. “Let’s just stand for a while,” he said.
“All right,” Stella said.
“Try to get used to each other again.”
“All right.”
“Are they treating you well?” Mitch asked.
“They probably think so.”
“What do you think?”
Shrug, long fingers wrapping around her wrists, making a little cage of her hands and arms. “They’re afraid of us.”
Mitch clenched his jaw and nodded. “Nothing new.”
Stella’s eyes were hypnotic as she tried to express herself. Her pupils shifted size and gold flecks passed like fizz in champagne. “They don’t want us to be who we are.”
“How do you mean?”
“They move us from one dorm to another. They use sniffers. If we scent, we’re punished. If we cloud-scent or fever scent, they break us up and keep us in detention.”
“I’ve read about that,” Mitch said.
“They think we’ll try to persuade them. Maybe they’re afraid we’ll try to escape. They wear nose plugs, and sometimes they fill the dorms with fake strawberry or peach smell when they do a health inspection. I used to like strawberry, but now it’s awful. Worst of all is the Pine-Sol.” She shoved her palm against her nose and made a gagging sound.
“I hear the classes are boring, too.”
“They’re afraid we’ll learn something,” Stella said, and giggled. Mitch felt a tingle. That sound had changed, and the change was not subtle. She sounded wary, more mature… but something else was at work.
Laughter was a key gauge of psychology and culture. His daughter was very different from the little girl he had known.
“I’ve learned a lot from the others,” Stella said, straightening her face. Mitch traced the faint marks of lines under and beside her eyes, at the corners of her lips, fascinated by the dance of clues to her emotions. Finer muscle control than she had had as a youngster… capable of expressions he could not begin to interpret.
“Are you doing okay?” Mitch asked, very seriously.
“I’m doing better than they want,” she said. “It isn’t so bad, because we manage.” She glanced up at the ceiling, touched her earlobe, winked. Of course, they were being monitored; she did not want to give away any secrets.
“Glad to hear it,” Mitch said.
“But of course there’s stuff they already know,” she added in a low voice. “I’ll tell you about that if you want.”
“Of course, sweetie,” Mitch said. “Anything.”
Stella kept her eyes on the top of the table as she told Mitch about the groups of twenty to thirty that called themselves demes. “It means ‘the people,’” she said. “We’re like sisters in the demes. But they don’t let the boys sleep in the same dorms, the same barracks. So we have to sing across the wire at night and try to recruit boys into our demes that way.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Mitch said. He lifted one eyebrow and pinched his lips together.
Stella shook her head. “But they don’t understand. The deme is like a big family. We help each other. We talk and solve problems and stop arguments. We’re so smart when we’re in a deme. We feel so right together. Maybe that’s why…”
Mitch leaned back as his daughter suddenly spoke in two bursts at once:
“We need to be together/We’re healthier together
“Everyone cares for the others/Everyone is happy with the others
“The sadness comes from not knowing/The sadness comes from being apart.”
The absolute clarity of the two streams astonished him. If he caught them immediately and analyzed, he could string them together into a serial statement, but over more than a few seconds of conversation, it was obvious he would get confused. And he had no doubt that Stella could now go on that way indefinitely.
She looked at him directly, the skin over the outside of her eye orbits drawing in with a pucker he could neither duplicate nor interpret. Freckles formed around the outside and lower orbits like little tan-and-gold stars; she was sparking in ways he had never seen before.
He shivered in both admiration and concern. “I don’t know what that means, when… you do that,” he said. “I mean, it’s beautiful, but…”
“Do what?” Stella asked, and her eyes were normal again.
Mitch swallowed. “When you’re in a deme, how many of you talk that way… at once?”
“We make circles,” Stella said. “We talk to each other in the circle and across the circle.”
“How many in the circle?”
“Five or ten,” Stella said. “Separately, of course. Boys have rules. Girls have rules. We can make new rules, but some rules already seem to be there. We follow the rules most of the time, unless we feel there’s an emergency—someone is feeling steepy.”
“Steepy.”
“Not part of cloud. When we cloud, we’re even more like brothers and sisters. Some of us become mama and papa, too, and we can lead cloud, but mama and papa never make us do what we don’t want to do. We decide together.”
She looked up at the ceiling, her chin dimpling. “You know about this. Kaye told you.”
“Some, and I’ve read about some of it. I remember when you were trying out some of these… techniques on us. I remember trying to keep up with you. I wasn’t very good. Your mother was better.”
“Her face…” Stella began. “I see her face when I become mama in cloud. Her face becomes my face.” Her brows formed elegant and compelling double arches, grotesque and beautiful at once. “It’s tough to explain.”
“I think I understand,” Mitch said. His skin was warming. Being around his own daughter made him feel left out, even inferior; how did it make the counselors feel, their keepers?
In this zoo, who were the animals, really?
“What happens when someone disagrees? Do you compel her? Him?”
Stella thought about this for a few second
s. “Everyone is free in cloud, but they cooperate. If they don’t agree, they hold that thought until the time is right, and then cloud listens. Sometimes, if it’s an emergency, the thought is brought up immediately, but that slows us down. It has to be good.”
“And you enjoy being in the cloud?”
“Being in cloud,” Stella corrected. “All clouds are part of each other, just smeared out. We sort the differences and stuff later, when the demes catch up. But we don’t get to do that often, so most of us don’t know what it’s really like. We just imagine. Sometimes they let it happen, though.”
She did not tell Mitch that those were the times when nearly everybody got taken to the hospital to be sampled, after.
“Sounds very friendly,” Mitch said.
“Sometimes there’s hate,” Stella said soberly. “We have to deal with it. A cloud feels pain just like an individual.”
“Do you know what I’m feeling, right now?”
“No,” Stella said. “Your face is kind of a blank.” She smiled. “The counselors smell like cabbages when we do something unexpected./ They smelled like broccoli when we caught colds a few days ago./
“I’m over my cold now and it wasn’t serious but we acted sicker to worry them.”
Mitch laughed. The crossed intonations of resentment and wry superiority tickled him. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “But don’t push it.”
“We know,” Stella said primly, and suddenly Mitch saw Kaye in her expression, and felt a rush of real pride, that this young woman still came of them, from them. I hope that doesn’t limit her.
He also felt a sudden burst of longing for Kaye.
“Is prison like this?” Stella asked.
“Well, prison is a bit harder than here, even.”
“Why aren’t you with Kaye, now?”
Mitch wondered how he could possibly explain. “When I was in prison—she was going through rough times, making hard decisions. I couldn’t be a part of those decisions. We decided we’d be more effective if we worked separately. We… couldn’t cloud, I guess you’d say.”
Stella shook her head. “That’s fit, like drops of rain hitting each other. Slipskin is when the drops fall apart. Cloud is a bigger thing.”
“Oh,” Mitch said. “How many words for snow?”
Stella’s expression became one of a simple lack of comprehension, and for a moment Mitch saw his daughter as she had been even ten years ago, and loved her fiercely. “Your mother and I talk every few weeks. She’s busy now, working in Baltimore. Doing science.”
“Trying to turn us back into humans?”
“You are human,” Mitch said, his face going red.
“No,” Stella said. “We aren’t.”
Mitch decided this wasn’t the time or the place. “She’s trying to learn how we make new children,” he said. “It’s not as simple as we thought.”
“Virus children,” Stella said.
“Yes, well, if I understand it correctly, viruses play all sorts of roles. We just discovered that fact when we looked at SHEVA. Now… it’s pretty confused.”
Stella seemed, if anything, offended by this. “We’re not new?”
“Of course you’re new,” Mitch said. “I really don’t understand it very well. When we all get together again, your mother will know enough to explain it to us. She’s learning as fast as she can.”
“We’re not taught biology here,” Stella said.
Mitch clamped his teeth together. Keep them down. Keep them under lock and key. Otherwise, you might prime their fuse.
“That makes you angry?” Stella asked.
He could not answer for a moment. His fists knotted on the top of the table. “Of course,” he said.
“Make them let us go. Get us all out of here,” Stella said. “Not just me.”
“We’re trying,” Mitch said, but knew he wasn’t being entirely truthful. As a convicted felon, he had a limited range of options. And his own sense of resentment and damage reduced his effectiveness in groups. In his darkest moods, he thought that was why he and Kaye were no longer living together.
He had become a political liability. A lone wolf.
“I have lots of families here, and they’re growing,” Stella said.
“We’re your family,” Mitch said.
Stella watched him for a moment, puzzled.
Joanie opened the door. “Time’s up,” she said.
Mitch spun around in his chair and tapped his watch. “It’s been less than an hour,” he said.
“There’ll be more time tomorrow if you can come back,” Joanie said.
Mitch turned to Stella, crestfallen. “I can’t stay until tomorrow. There’s something…”
“Go,” Stella said, and stood. She came around the table as Mitch got to his feet and hugged her father again, brisk and strong. “There’s lots of work for all of us.”
“You are so adult now,” Mitch said.
“Not yet,” Stella said. “None of us knows what that will be like. They probably won’t let us find out.”
Joanie tsked, then escorted Mitch and Stella from the room. They parted in the brick corridor. Mitch gave her a small wave with his good arm.
Mitch sat in the hot interior of his truck, under the low Arizona sun, sweating and near despair, lonelier than he had ever been in his life.
Through the fence and across the brush and sand, he saw more children—hundreds of them—walking between the bungalows. His hand drummed on the steering wheel.
Stella was still his daughter. He could still see Kaye in her. But the differences were startling. Mitch did not know what he had expected; he had expected differences. But she was not just growing up. The way Stella behaved was sleek and shiny, like a new penny. She was unfamiliar, not distant in the least, not unfriendly, just focused elsewhere.
The only conclusion he could come to, as he turned over the big engine in the old Ford truck, was a self-observation.
His own daughter scared him.
After the nurse filled another tube with her blood, Stella walked back to the bungalow where they would watch videos after dinner of human children playing, talking, sitting in class. It was called civics. It was intended to change the way the new children behaved when they were together. Stella hated civics. Watching people without knowing how they smelled, and watching the young human faces with their limited range of emotions, disturbed her. If they did not face the televisions, however, Miss Kantor could get really ugly.
Stella deliberately kept her mind clear, but a tear came out of her left eye and traveled down her cheek. Not her right eye. Just her left eye.
She wondered what that meant.
Mitch had changed so much. And he smelled like he had just been kicked.
15
BALTIMORE
The imaging lab office was separated from the Magnetic Resonance Imager—the Machine—by two empty rooms. The forces induced by the toroidal magnets of the Machine were awesome. Visitors were warned not to go down the hall without first emptying their pockets of mechanical and electronic devices, pocket PCs, wallets, cell phones, security name tags, eyeglasses, watches. Getting closer to the Machine required exchanging day clothes for metal-free robes—no zippers, metal buttons, or belt buckles; no rings, pins, tie clasps, or cuff links.
Everything loose within a few meters of the Machine was made of wood or plastic. Workers here wore elastic belts and specially selected slippers or athletic shoes.
Five years ago, right in this facility, a scientist had forgotten the warnings and had her nipple and clitoris rings ripped out. Or so the story went. People with pacemakers, optic nerve rewiring, or any sort of neural implants could not go anywhere near the Machine.
Kaye was free of such appliances, and that was the first thing she told Herbert Roth as she stood in the door to the office.
Slight, balding, in his early forties, Roth gave her a puzzled smile as he put down his pencil and pushed a batch of papers aside. “Glad to hear it, Ms. Rafe
lson,” he said. “But the Machine is turned off. Besides, we spent several days imaging Wishtoes and I already know that about you.”
Roth pulled up a plastic chair for Kaye and she sat on the other side of the wooden desk. Kaye touched the smooth surface. Roth had told her that his father had crafted it from solid maple, without nails, using only glue. It was beautiful.
He still has a father.
She felt the cool river in her spine, the sense of utter delight and approval, and closed her eyes for a moment. Roth watched her with some concern.
“Long day?”
She shook her head, wondering how to begin.
“Is Wishtoes pregnant?”
“No,” Kaye said. She took the plunge. “Are you feeling very scientific?”
Roth looked around nervously, as if the room was not completely familiar. “Depends.” His eyes squinched down and he could not avoid giving Kaye the once-over.
“Scientific and discreet?”
Roth’s eyes widened with something like panic.
“Pardon me, Ms. Rafelson—”
“Kaye, please.”
“Kaye. I think you’re very attractive, but… If it’s about the Machine, I’ve already got a list of Web sites that show… I mean, it’s already been done.” He laughed what he hoped was a gallant laugh. “Hell, I’ve done it. Not alone, I mean.”
“Done what?” Kaye asked.
Roth flushed crimson and pushed his chair back with a hollow scrape of the plastic legs. “I have no idea what in hell you’re talking about.”
Kaye smiled. She meant nothing specific by the smile, but she saw Roth relax. His expression changed to puzzled concern and the excess color faded from his face. There is something about me, about this, she thought. It’s a charmed moment.
“Why are you down here?” Roth asked.
“I’m offering you a unique opportunity.” Kaye felt impossibly nervous, but she was not going to let that stop her. As far as she knew, there had never been an opportunity like this in the history of science—nothing confirmed, at least, or even rumored. “I’m having an epiphany.”
Roth raised one eyebrow, bewildered.
“You don’t know what an epiphany is?” Kaye asked.
