by Greg Bear
“I’m Catholic. It’s a feast celebrating Jesus’ divinity. Or something like that.”
“It’s a manifestation,” Kaye said. “God is inside me.”
“Whoa,” Roth said. The word hung between them for several seconds, during which time Kaye did not look away from Roth’s eyes. He blinked first. “I suppose that’s great,” he said. “What does it have to do with me?”
“God comes to most of us. I’ve read William James and other books about this kind of experience. At least half of the human race goes through it at one time or another. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever felt. It’s life changing, even if it is very… very inconvenient. And inexplicable. I didn’t ask for it, but I can’t, I won’t deny that it is real.”
Roth listened to Kaye with a fixed expression, brow wrinkled, eyes wide, mouth open. He sat up in the chair and folded his arms on the desk. “No joke?”
“No joke.”
He considered further. “Everyone is under pressure here.”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” Kaye said. Then, slowly, she added, “I’ve considered that possibility, I really have. I just don’t think that’s what it is.”
Roth licked his lips and avoided her stare. “So what does it have to do with me?”
She reached out to touch his arm, and he quickly withdrew it. “Herbert, has anyone ever imaged a person who’s being touched by God? Who’s having an epiphany?”
“Lots of times,” Roth said defensively. “Persinger’s research. Meditation states, that sort of thing. It’s in the literature.”
“I’ve read them all. Persinger, Damasio, Posner, and Ramachandran.” She ticked the list off on her fingers. “You think I haven’t researched this?”
Roth smiled in embarrassment.
“Meditation states, oneness, bliss, all that can be induced with training. They are under some personal control… But not this. I’ve looked it up. It can’t be induced, no matter how hard you pray. It comes and it goes as if it has a will of its own.”
“God doesn’t just talk to us,” Roth said. “I mean, even if I believed in God, such a thing would be incredibly rare, and maybe it hasn’t happened for a couple of thousand years. The prophets. Jesus. That sort of thing.”
“It isn’t rare. It’s called many things, and people react differently. It does something to you. It turns your life around, gives it direction and meaning. Sometimes it breaks people.” She shook her head. “Mother Teresa wept because she didn’t have God making regular visits. She wanted continuing confirmation of the value of her work, her pain, her sacrifices. Yet no one actually knows if Mother Teresa experienced what I’m experiencing…” She took a deep breath. “I want to learn what is happening to me. To us. We need a baseline to understand.”
Roth tried to fit this into some catalog of social quid pro quos, and could not. “Kaye, is this really the place? Aren’t you supposed to be doing research on viruses? Or do you think God is a virus?”
Kaye stared at Roth in disbelief. “No,” she said. “This is not a virus. This is not something genetic and it’s probably not even biological. Except to the extent that it touches me.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Kaye closed her eyes again. She did not need to search. The sensation rolled on, coming in waves of amazement, of childlike glee and adult consternation, all of her emotions and reactions met not with tolerance, nor even with amusement, but with an equally childlike yet infinitely mature and wise acceptance.
Something was sipping from Kaye Lang’s soul, and found her delicious.
“Because it’s bigger than anything I know,” she said finally. “I have no idea how long it’s going to last, but whatever it is, it’s happened before to people, many times, and it’s shaped human history. Don’t you want to see what it looks like?”
Roth sighed as he examined the images on the large monitor.
Two and a half hours had passed; it was almost ten o’clock. Kaye had been through seven varieties of NMR, PET, and computerized tomography scans. She had been injected, shielded, injected again, rotated like a chicken on a spit, turned upside down. For a while, she wondered if Roth was bent on taking revenge for her imposition.
Finally, Roth had wrapped her head in a white plastic helmet and put her through a final and, he claimed, rather expensive CT-motion scan, capable, he muttered vaguely, of extraordinary detail, focusing on the hippocampus, and then, in another sweep, the brain stem.
Now she sat upright, her wrist wrapped in a bandage, her head and neck bruised from clamps, feeling a vague urge to throw up. Somewhere near the end of the procedures, the caller had simply faded, like a shortwave radio signal from across the seas. Kaye felt calm and relaxed, despite her soreness.
She also felt sad, as if a good friend had just departed, and she was not sure they would ever meet again.
“Well, whatever he is,” Roth said, “he isn’t talking. None of the scans show extensive speech processing, above the level of normal internal dialog and my own datum of questions. You seem, no surprise, a little nervous—but less so than other patients. Stoic might be the word. You show a fair amount of deep brain activity, signifying a pretty strong emotional response. Do you embarrass easily?”
Kaye shook her head.
“There’s a little indication of something like arousal, but I wouldn’t call it sexual arousal, not precisely. Nothing like orgasm or garden-variety ecstasy such as, for example, you might find in someone using consciousness-altering drugs. We have recordings—movies—of people meditating, engaging in sex, on drugs, including LSD and cocaine. Your scans don’t match any of those.”
“I can’t imagine having sex in that tube.”
Roth smiled. “Mostly enthusiastic young people,” he explained. “Here we go—CT motion scans coming up.” He became deeply absorbed in the false-color images of her brain on the display: dark fields of gray overlaid with symmetric, blossoming Rorschach birds, touched here and there with little coals of metabolic activity, maps of thought and personality and deep subconscious processes. “All right,” he said to himself, pausing the scroll. “What’s this?” He touched three pulsing yellow splotches, a little bigger than a thumbnail, points on a scan taken midway through their session. He made small humming sounds, then flipped through an on-line library of images from other explorations, some of them years and even decades old, until he seemed satisfied he had what he wanted.
Roth pushed his chair back with an echoing scrape and pointed to a blue-and-green sagittal section of a head, small and oddly shaped. He filled in and rotated the image in 3-D, and Kaye made out the outlines of an infant’s skull and the fog of the brain within. Radiating fields of mental activity spun within ghostly curves of bone and tissue.
An indefinite grayish mass seemed to issue from the infant’s mouth.
“Not so much detail, but it’s a pretty close match,” Roth said. “Famous experiment in Japan, about eight years ago. They scanned a normal birthing session. Woman had had four kids previously. She was an old pro. The machines didn’t bother her.”
Roth studied the image. He hummed for a moment, then clicked his fingernails like castanets. “This is a scan of the infant’s brain while he or she was getting acquainted with mom. Taking the teat, I’d say.” He used his finger to point out the gray mass, magnified the activity centers in the infant’s brain, rotated them to the proper azimuth, then superimposed the baby’s scan on Kaye’s.
The activity centers lined up neatly.
Roth smiled. “What do you think? A match?”
Kaye was lost for a moment, remembering the first time Stella had suckled, the wonderful sensation of the baby at her nipple, of her milk letting down.
“They look the same,” she said. “Is that a mistake?”
“Don’t think so,” Roth said. “I could make some animal brain comparisons. There’s been some work in the last few years on bonding in kittens and puppies, even some in baboons, but not very good. They
don’t hold still.”
“What does it mean?” Kaye asked. She shook her head, still lost. “Whatever He is, He’s not using speech—that much has been clear from the start. Irritating, actually.”
“Mumbles from the burning bush?” Roth said. “And no stone tablets.”
“No speeches, no proclamations, nothing,” Kaye confirmed.
“Look, this is the closest I can come to a match,” Roth said.
With her finger, Kaye traced the Rorschach birds inside the infant’s brain. “I still don’t understand.”
Roth tilted his head. “Looks to me like you’ve made a big connection. You’re imprinting on someone or something big-time. You’ve become a baby again, Ms. Rafelson.”
16
Kaye unlocked her apartment, entered, and used her briefcase to block the front door from closing. She punched in her six-number code to deactivate the alarm, then took off her sweater, hung it in the closet, and stood in the hallway, breathing deeply to keep from sobbing. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could endure this. The voids in her life were like deserts she could not cross.
“What about you?” she asked the empty air. She walked into the darkened living room. “The way I see it, if you’re some kind of big daddy, you protect those you love, you keep them from harm. What’s the God… what’s the damned,” she finally shouted it, “the God damned excuse?”
The phone beeped. Kaye jumped, pulled her eyes away from the corner of the ceiling she had been addressing, stepped to the kitchen counter, and reached across to pick up the handset.
“Kaye? It’s Mitch.”
Kaye drew in another breath, almost of dread, certainly of guilt, before speaking. “I’m here.” She sat stiffly upright in the easy chair and covered the mouthpiece as she told the lights to switch on. The living room was small and neat, except for stacks of journals and offprints arrayed at angles to each other on the coffee table. Other piles spilled across the floor beside the couch.
“Are you all right?”
“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I’m not. Are you?”
Mitch did not answer this. Good for him, Kaye thought.
“I’m on the road again,” he said.
A pause.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Oregon. My horse broke down and I thought I’d give you a call, ask if you had some extra… I don’t know. Horseshoes.” He sounded even more exhausted than she was. Kaye intercepted something else in his tone and zeroed in with sudden hope.
“You saw Stella?”
“They let me see Stella. Lucky guy, right?”
“Is she well?”
“She gave me a big hug. She’s looking pretty good. She cried, Kaye.”
Kaye felt her throat catch. She held the phone aside and coughed into her fist. “She misses you. Sorry. Dry throat. I need some water.” She walked into the kitchen to take a bottle from the refrigerator.
“She misses both of us,” Mitch said.
“I can’t be there. I can’t protect her. What’s to miss?”
“I just wanted to call and tell you about her. She’s growing up. It makes me feel lost, thinking that she’s almost grown and I wasn’t around.”
“Not your fault,” she said.
“How’s the work?”
“Finished soon,” Kaye said. “I don’t know if they’ll believe it. So many are still stuck in old ruts.”
“Robert Jackson?”
“Yeah, him, too.”
“You’re lucky to be working at what you do best,” Mitch said. “Listen, I’m—”
“You don’t deserve what happened, Mitch.”
Another pause. You didn’t deserve being dumped, she added to herself. Kaye looked back to that empty corner of wall and ceiling and continued, “I miss you.” She tightened her lips to keep them from trembling. “What’s in Oregon?”
“Eileen’s got something going, very mysterious, so I left the dig in Texas. I mistook a clamshell for a whelk. I’m getting old, Kaye.”
“Bullshit,” Kaye said.
“You give me the word, I’ll drive straight to Maryland.” Mitch’s voice steeled. “I swear. Let’s go get Stella.”
“Stop it,” Kaye said, though with sudden gentleness. “I want to, you know that. We have to keep to our plan.”
“Right,” Mitch said, and Kaye was acutely aware he had had no part in making the plan. Perhaps until now Mitch had not really been informed there was a plan. And that was Kaye’s fault. She had not been able to protect her husband or her daughter, the most important people on Earth. So who am I to accuse?
“What are the kids up to? How has she changed?” Kaye asked.
“They’re forming groups. Demes, they call them. The schools are trying to keep them broken up and disorganized. I’d guess they’re finding ways around that. There’s a lot of scenting involved, of course, and Stella talks about new kinds of language, but we didn’t have time for details. She looks healthy, she’s bright, and she doesn’t seem too stressed out.”
Kaye fixed on this so intensely her eyes crossed. “I tried to call her last week. They wouldn’t put me through.”
“The bastards,” Mitch said, his voice grating.
“Go help Eileen. But keep in touch. I really need to hear from you.”
“That’s good news.”
Kaye let her chin drop to her chest, and stretched out her legs. “I’m relaxing,” she said. “Listening to you relaxes me. Tell me what she looks like.”
“Sometimes she moves or acts or talks like you. Sometimes she reminds me of my father.”
“I noticed that years ago,” Kaye said.
“But she’s very much her own person, her own type,” Mitch said. “I wish we could run our own school, bring lots of kids together. I think that’s the only way Stella would be happy.”
“We were wrong to isolate her.”
“We didn’t have any choice.”
“Anyway, that’s not an issue now. Is she happy?”
“Maybe happier, but not exactly happy,” Mitch said. “I’m calling on a landline now, but let me give you a new phone code.”
Kaye took up a pad and wrote down a string of numbers keyed to a book she still kept in her suitcase. “You think they’re still listening?”
“Of course. Hello, Ms. Browning, you there?”
“Not funny,” Kaye said. “I ran into Mark Augustine on Capitol Hill. That was…” It took her a few seconds to remember. “Yesterday. Sorry, I’m just tired.”
“What about him?”
“He seemed apologetic. Does that make sense?”
“He was busted to the ranks,” Mitch said. “He deserves to be apologetic.”
“Yeah. But something else…”
“You think the atmosphere is changing?”
“Browning was there, and she treated me like a Roman general standing over a dying Gaul.”
Mitch laughed.
“God, that is so good to hear,” Kaye said, tapping her pen on the message pad and drawing loops around the numbers, across the pad.
“Give me the word, Kaye. Just one word.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Kaye said, and sucked in a breath against the lump in her throat. “I hate it so much, being alone.”
“I know you’re on the right course,” Mitch said, and Kaye heard the reserve in his voice, filling in, even if it means leaving me outside.
“Maybe,” Kaye said. “But it is so hard.” She wanted to tell him about the other things, the imaging lab, chasing down her visitor, the caller, and finding nothing conclusive. But she remembered that Mitch had not reacted well to her attempts to talk about it on their last night together in the cabin.
She remembered as well the love-making, familiar and sweet and more than a little desperate. Her body warmed. “You know I want to be with you,” Kaye said.
“That’s my line.” Mitch’s voice was hopeful, fragile.
“You’ll be at Eileen’s site. It is a site, I assume?”
; “I don’t know yet.”
“What do you think she’s found?”
“She’s not telling,” Mitch said.
“Where is it?”
“Can’t say. I get my final directions tomorrow.”
“She’s being more cagey than usual, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.” She heard Mitch moving, breathing into the handset. She could hear as well the wind blowing behind and around him, almost picture her man, rugged, tall, his head lit up by the dome light in the booth. If it was a booth. The phone might be next to a gas station or a restaurant.
“I can’t tell you how good this is,” Kaye said.
“Sure you can.”
“It is so good.”
“I should have called earlier. I just felt out of place or something.”
“I know.”
“Something’s changed, hasn’t it?”
“There’s not much more I can do at Americol. Showdown is tomorrow. Jackson actually dropped off his game plan today, he’s that cocky. They either listen to the truth or they ignore it. I want to… I’ll just fly out to see you. Save me a shovel.”
“You’ll get rough hands.”
“I love rough hands.”
“I believe in you, Kaye,” Mitch said. “You’ll do it. You’ll win.”
She did not know how to answer but her body quivered. Mitch murmured his love and Kaye returned his words, and then they cut off the connection.
Kaye sat for a moment in the warm yellow glow of the small living room, surveying the empty walls, the plain rented furniture, the stacks of white paper. “I’m imprinting,” she whispered. “Something says it loves me and believes in me but how can anything fill an empty shell?” She rephrased the question. “How can anyone or anything believe in an empty shell?”
Leaning her head back, she felt a tingling warmth. With some awe she realized she had not asked for help, yet help had arrived. Her needs—some of them, at least—had been answered.
At that, Kaye finally let down her emotions and began to weep. Still crying, she made up her bed, fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate, fluffed a pillow and set it against the headboard, disrobed and put on satin pajamas, then fetched a stack of reprints from the living room to read. The words blurred through her tears, and she could hardly keep her eyes open, but she needed to prepare for the next day. She needed to have all her armor on, all her facts straight.
