by Greg Bear
Only three people accompanied Cross. Two handsome young men in charcoal gray suits made notes on e-tabs. A slender young woman with long, thin blonde hair and a short, upturned nose took photos with a pen-sized camera.
Liz kept to the background, conspicuously allowing Kaye the point position. She gave them all a brief tour, well aware they were taking inventory in preparation for a transfer or a shutdown.
“We’ve lost,” Cross said. “Everything this company has been charged to do by the government and by the people has turned into a can of worms,” she added quietly, and chewed her lower lip. “I hear you did a good job on the Hill this week.” Cross regarded Kaye with a faint smile.
“It went okay.” Kaye shifted her eyes to one side and shrugged. “Rachel Browning tried to pull down my shorts.”
“Did she succeed?” Cross asked.
“Got them down to my curlies,” Kaye said.
The young men looked ready to appear shocked, should Cross be. Cross laughed. “Jesus, Kaye. I never know what I’m going to hear from you. You drive my PR folks nuts.”
“That’s why I try to keep my head down and stay quiet.”
“We’re not learning how to stop SHEVA,” Cross said reflectively, still examining the ceiling pipes.
“That’s true,” Kaye said.
“You’re glad.”
Once again, Kaye felt it was not her place to answer, that she had responsibilities to others besides herself.
“La Robert is failing, too, but he won’t admit it,” Cross said. She waved her hands at the others in the lab. “Time to go, kiddies. Leave us sacred monsters alone for a while.”
The young men filed through the door. The slender blond tried to remind Cross of appointments later in the morning.
“Cancel them,” Cross instructed her.
Liz had stayed behind, solicitous of Kaye. The way she twitched, Kaye thought her assistant might try to physically intervene to protect her.
Cross smiled warmly at Liz. “Honey, can you add anything to our duet?”
“Not a thing,” Liz admitted. “Should I go?” she asked Kaye.
Kaye nodded.
Liz picked up her coat and purse and followed the blond through the door.
“Let’s take the express to the top floor,” Cross suggested pleasantly, and put her arm around Kaye’s shoulder. “It’s been far too long since we put our heads together. I want you to explain what happened. What you thought you’d find in radiology.”
The Americol boardroom on the twentieth floor was huge and extravagant, with a long table cut lengthwise from an oak trunk, handmade William Morris–style chairs that seemed to float on their slender legs, and walls covered with early twentieth-century illustrative art.
Cross told the room what to do and two of the walls folded up, revealing electronic whiteboards. Sections of the table rose up like toy soldiers, thin personal monitors.
“If I were starting over again,” Cross said, “I’d turn this into a kindergarten classroom. Little chairs and wagons with little cartons of milk. That’s how ignorant we are. But… We do cling to our beauty and wealth. We like to feel we are in control and always will be.”
Kaye listened attentively, but did not respond.
Cross pushed another button and the whiteboards replayed long strings of scrawled notes. Kaye guessed these were a frozen record of several late-night and early-morning pacing sessions, Cross alone up here in the heights, wielding her little pen wand, moving along the boards like a sorcerous queen scattering spells on the walls of her castle.
Kaye could decipher very few of the scrawls. Cross’s handwriting was notorious.
“Nobody’s seen this,” Cross murmured. “It’s hard to read, isn’t it?” she asked Kaye. “I used to have perfect penmanship.” She held up her swollen knuckles.
Kaye wondered where Cross intended to go with this. Was it all some devious way of letting her go gracefully, with a hearty handshake?
“The secret of life,” Cross said, “lies in understanding how little things talk to each other. Correct?”
“Yes,” Kaye said.
“And you’ve maintained, from before the beginnings of SHEVA, that viruses are part of the arsenal of communications our cells and bodies use to talk.”
“That’s why you brought me to Americol.”
Cross dismissed that with a slight frown and a lift of one shoulder. “So you turned yourself into a laboratory to prove a point, and gave birth to a SHEVA child. Gutsy, and more than a little stupid.”
Kaye clenched her jaw.
Cross knew she had touched an exposed nerve. “I think the Jackson clique is right on the money. Experience biases you in favor of believing SHEVA is benign, a natural phenomenon that we’ll just have to knuckle under and accept. Don’t fight it. It’s bigger than all of us.”
“I’m fond of my daughter,” Kaye said stiffly.
“I don’t doubt it. Hear me out. I’m going somewhere with this, but I don’t know where just yet.” Cross paced along the whiteboards, arms folded, tapping one elbow with the remote. “My companies are my children. That’s a cliché, but it’s true, Kaye. I am as stupid and gutsy as you were. I have turned my companies into an experiment in politics and human history. We’re very much alike, except I had neither the opportunity—nor, frankly, the inclination—to put my body on the line. Now, we both stand to lose what we love most.”
Cross turned and flicked the whiteboards clean with the press of a button. Her face curled in disgust. “It’s all shit. This room is a waste of money. You can’t help but think that whoever built all this knew what they were doing, had all the answers. It’s an architectural lie. I hate this room. Everything I just erased was drivel. Let’s go somewhere else.” Cross was visibly angry.
Kaye folded her hands cautiously. She had no idea what was going to happen, not now. “All right,” she said. “Where?”
“No limos. Let’s lose the luxuries for a few hours. Let’s get back to little chairs and cookies and cartons of milk.” Cross smiled wickedly, revealing strong, even, but speckled teeth. “Let’s get the hell out of this building.”
A gray, drizzly light greeted them as they pushed through the glass doors to the street. Cross hailed a cab.
“Your cheeks are pinking,” she told Kaye as they climbed into the backseat. “Like they want to say something.”
“That still happens,” Kaye admitted with some embarrassment.
Cross gave the driver an address Kaye did not recognize. The gray-haired man, a Sikh wearing a white turban, looked over his shoulder.
“I will need card in advance,” he said.
Cross reached for her belt pouch.
“My treat,” Kaye said, and handed the driver her credit card. The cab pushed off through traffic.
“What was it like, having those cheeks—like signboards?” Cross asked.
“It was a revelation,” Kaye said. “When my daughter was young, we practiced cheek-flashing. It was like teaching her how to speak. I missed them when they faded.”
Cross watched her absorbedly, then gave a little start and said, “I learned I couldn’t have children when I was twenty-five. Pelvic inflammatory disease. I was a big, ungainly girl and had a hard time getting dates. I had to take my men where I found them, and one of them… Well. No children, and I decided not to reverse the scarring, because there was never a man I trusted enough to be a father. I got rich pretty early and the men I was attracted to were like pleasant toys, needy, eager to please, not very reliable.”
“I’m sorry,” Kaye said.
“Sublimation is the soul of accomplishment,” Cross said. “I can’t say I understand what it means to be a parent. I can only make comparisons with how I feel about my companies, and that probably isn’t the same.”
“Probably not,” Kaye said.
Cross clucked her tongue. “This isn’t about funding or firing you or anything so simple. We’re both explorers, Kaye. For that reason alone, we need to be ope
n and frank.”
Kaye peered out the taxi window and shook her head, amused. “It isn’t working, Marge. You’re still rich and powerful. You’re still my boss.”
“Well, hell,” Cross said with mock disappointment, and snapped her fingers.
“But it may not matter,” Kaye said. “I’ve never been very good at concealing my true feelings. Maybe you’ve noticed.”
Cross made a sound too high-pitched to be a laugh, but it had a certain eccentric dignity, and probably wasn’t a giggle, either. “You’ve been playing me all along.”
“You knew I would,” Kaye said.
Cross patted her cheek. “Cheek-flashing.”
Kaye looked puzzled.
“How can something so wonderful be an aberration, a disease? If I could fever scent, I would be running every corporation in the country by now.”
“You wouldn’t want to,” Kaye said. “If you were one of the children.”
“Now who’s being naÏve?” Cross asked. “Do you think they’ve left our monkey selves behind?”
“No. Do you know what a deme is?” Kaye asked.
“Social units for some of the SHEVA kids.”
“What I’m saying is a deme might be the greedy one, not an individual. And when a deme fever scents, we lesser apes don’t stand a chance.”
Cross leaned her head back and absorbed this. “I’ve heard that,” she said.
“Do you know a SHEVA child?” the driver asked, looking at them in the rearview mirror. He did not wait for an answer. “My granddaughter, a SHEVA girl, is in Peshawar, she is charmer. Real charmer. It is scary,” he added happily, proudly, with a broad grin. “Really scary.”
29
ARIZONA
Stella sat with Julianne Nicorelli in a small beige room in the hospital. Joanie had separated them from the other girls. They had been waiting for two hours. The air was still and they sat stiff as cold butter on their chairs, watching a fly crawl along the window.
The room was still thick with strawberry scent, which Stella had once loved.
“I feel awful,” Julianne said.
“So do I.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“Something’s screwy/ Made a mistake,” Stella said.
Julianne scraped her shoes on the floor. “I’m sorry you aren’t one of my deme,” she said.
“That’s okay.”
“Let’s make our own, right here. We’ll/ Like us/ join up with anyone else/ locked away/ who comes in.”
“All right,” Stella said.
Julianne wrinkled her nose. “It stinks so bad/ Can’t smell myself think.”
Their chairs were several feet apart, a polite distance considering the nervous fear coming from the two girls, even over the miasma of strawberry. Julianne stood and held out one hand. Stella leaned her head to one side and pulled back her hair, exposing the skin behind her ear. “Go ahead.”
Julianne touched the skin there, the waxy discharge, and rubbed it under her nose. She made a face, then lowered her finger and frithed—pulling back her upper lip and sucking air over the finger and into her mouth.
“Ewww,” she said, not at all disapprovingly, and closed her eyes. “I feel better. Do you?”
Stella nodded and said, “Do you want to be deme mother?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Julianne said. “We’re not a quorum anyway.” Then she looked alarmed. “They’re probably recording us.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t care. Go ahead.”
Stella touched Julianne behind her ear. The skin was quite warm there, hot almost. Julianne was fever scenting, desperately trying to reach out and both politely persuade and establish a bond with Stella. That was touching. It meant Julianne was more frightened and insecure than Stella, more in need.
“I’ll be deme mother,” Stella said. “Until someone better comes in.”
“All right,” Julianne said. It was just for show, anyway. No quorum, just whistling down the wind. Julianne rocked back and forth. Her scent was changing to coffee and tuna—a little disturbing. It made Stella want to hug somebody.
“I smell bad, don’t I?” Julianne said.
“No,” Stella said. “But we both smell different now.”
“What’s happening to us?”
“I’m sure they want to find out,” Stella said, and faced the strong steel door.
“My hips hurt,” Julianne said. “I am so miserable.”
Stella pulled their chairs closer. She touched Julianne’s fingers where they rested on her knee. Julianne was tall and skinny. Stella had more flesh on her frame though as yet no breasts, and her hips were narrow.
“They don’t want us to have children,” Julianne said, as if reading her mind, and her misery crossed over into sobs.
Stella just kept stroking her hand. Then she turned the girl’s hand over, spit into her palm, and rubbed their palms together. Even over the strawberry smell, she got through to Julianne, and Julianne began to settle down, focus, smooth out the useless wrinkles of her fear.
“They shouldn’t make us mad,” Julianne said. “If they want to kill us, they better do it soon.”
“Shhh,” Stella warned. “Let’s just get comfortable. We can’t stop them from doing what they’re going to do.”
“What are they going to do?” Julianne asked.
“Shh.”
The electronic lock on the door clicked. Stella saw Joanie in her hooded suit through the small window. The door opened.
“Let’s go, girls,” Joanie said. “This is going to be fun.” Her voice sounded like a recording coming out of an old doll.
A yellow bus, like a small school bus, waited for them on the drive in front of the hospital. The bus that had brought Strong Will had been a different bus, secure and shiny, new; she wondered why they were not using that bus.
Four counselors in suits moved five girls and four boys forward, toward the door of the bus. Celia and LaShawna and Felice were in the group once again. Julianne walked ahead of Stella, her loose clogs slapping the ground.
Strong Will was among the boys, Stella saw with both apprehension and an odd excitement. She was pretty sure it wasn’t a sexual thing—based on what Kaye had told her—but it was something like that. She had never felt such a thing before. It was new.
Not just to her.
She thought maybe it was new to the human race, or whatever the children were. A virus kind of thing, maybe.
The boys walked ten feet apart from the girls. None of them were shackled, but where would they run? Into the desert? The closest town was twenty miles away, and already it was a hundred degrees.
The counselors held little gas guns that filled the air with a citrus smell, oranges and limes, and a perennial favorite, Pine-Sol.
Will looked dragged down, frazzled. He carried a paperback book without a cover, its pages yellow and tattered. He did not look at the girls; none of the boys did. They appeared to be okay physically, but shuffled as they walked. She could not catch their scent.
The door to the bus opened and the boys were led in first, taking seats on the left-hand side. Through the windows, Stella saw plastic curtains being drawn and fastened. They looked flimsy, like shower curtains. Joanie moved the girls up to the door. They walked to the right of the curtain and sat in the five middle rows of slick blue plastic bench seats, one girl to each seat.
Stella squirmed and her pants stuck to the plastic. The seat felt funny, tacky and oily. It exuded a peculiar smell, like turpentine. They had sprayed the interior of the bus with something.
Celia sat directly in front of her and leaned forward to talk to LaShawna.
“Stay where you are,” Joanie instructed them in a monotone. “No talking.” She surveyed the children on both sides of the curtain, then walked forward and took Julianne by the arm. She removed Julianne, backing out of the bus. Julianne shot a frightened but relieved look at Stella, then stood outside, arms straight by her sides, shivering.
&
nbsp; A security guard came aboard. He was in his middle forties, stocky and bare-armed, wearing a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt that clung to his shoulders. He carried a small machine pistol in a holster on his belt. He glanced back at the boys, then leaned to one side, and peered along the right side of the bus at the girls.
Everyone on the bus was silent.
Stella’s stomach seemed to shrink inside her.
The door closed. Will swung his hand against the plastic curtain and made the hooks rattle on the rail bolted to the roof. The guard leaned forward and frowned.
Stella couldn’t smell a thing now. Her nose was completely clogged.
“Am I allowed to read on the bus?” Will yelled.
The guard shrugged.
“Thank you,” Will shouted, and the girls giggled. “Thank you very much.”
The man obviously did not like this duty. He faced forward, waiting for the driver.
“What about lunch?” Will shouted. “Are we going to eat?”
The boys laughed. The girls sank back into their seats. Stella thought maybe they were being taken away to be killed and dissected. Felice was clearly thinking the same thing. Celia was shivering.
Finally, Will stopped yelling. He pulled a page from the paperback, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it over three seats into the well next to the driver’s window. Tongue between his lips and making a clownish grin, he pulled out another page, crumpled it, and lobbed it into the empty driver’s seat. Then another, which fell to the floor in front of the driver’s seat. Stella watched through the transparent sheeting between the rows, embarrassed and exhilarated by this show of defiance.
The driver climbed up the steps. He picked up the crumpled paper with his gloved hand, made a face, then tossed it out the door. It bounced from the chest of the second security guard as she came aboard. She was also large and in her forties. The female guard muttered something Stella could not hear. Both guards were equipped with noseys pinned to their breast pockets. The noseys were switched off, Stella noticed.
