by Greg Bear
Mitch did not know whom to trust, whom to turn to. He had never felt more spooked or more helpless in his life.
No ESP, he thought. Please, let there be no such thing as ESP.
39
NEW MEXICO
Dicken sat beside Helen Fremont on the couch in the trailer. She was staring at the wall opposite the couch, fever-scenting, he suspected, but he could not tell what she was hoping to accomplish, if anything. The air in the trailer smelled of old cheese and tea bags. He had finished his story ten minutes ago, patiently going back over old history and trying to justify himself as well: his existence, his work, his loathing for the isolation he had felt all these years, buried in his work as if it were another kind of plastic suit, proof against life. There had been silence for several minutes now, and he did not know what to say, much less what would happen to them next.
The girl broke the silence. “Aren’t you at all afraid I’ll make you sick?” she asked.
“I’m stuck,” Dicken said, lifting his hands. “They won’t let me out until they can make other arrangements.”
“Aren’t you afraid?” she repeated.
“No,” Dicken said.
“If I wanted to, could I make you sick?”
Dicken shook his head. “I doubt it.”
“But if they know that, why keep me here? Why keep any of us away from people?”
“Well, we just don’t know what to do or what to believe. We don’t understand,” he added, speaking softly. “That makes us weak and stupid.”
“It’s cruel,” the girl said. Then, as if she was just coming to believe she was pregnant, “How will they treat my baby?”
The door to the trailer opened. Aram Jurie entered first and was almost immediately flanked by two security men armed with machine pistols. All wore white isolation suits. Even through the plastic cowl, Jurie’s pallid face was a pepperball of irritation. “This is stupid,” he said as the security men stepped forward. “Are you trying to sabotage everything we’ve done?”
Dicken stood up from the couch and glanced at the girl, but she did not seem at all surprised or disturbed. God help us, it’s what she knows. Dicken said, “You’re holding this young woman illegally.”
Jurie was comically incredulous for a man whose face was normally so placid. “What in God’s green Earth were you thinking?”
“You’re not an authorized holding facility for children,” Dicken continued, warming to his subject. “You illegally transported this girl across state lines.”
“She’s a threat to public health,” Jurie said, suddenly recovering his calm. “And now you’ve joined her.” He waved his hand. “Get him out of here.”
The security men seemed unable to decide how to react. “Isn’t he safe where he is?” one guard asked, his voice muffled inside the hood.
The girl reached up to Dicken and tightly gripped his arm. “There is no threat,” Dicken told Jurie.
“You do not know that,” Jurie said, staring hard at Dicken, but the comment was more for the benefit of the guards.
“Dr. Jurie has stepped way over the line,” Dicken said. “Kidnapping is a tough rap, guys. This is a facility doing contract work under EMAC, which is under the authority of the Department of Health and Human Services. All of them have strict guidelines on human experimentation.” And nobody knows whether those guidelines still apply. But it’s the best bluff we have. “You have no jurisdiction over the girl. We’re leaving Sandia. I’m taking her with me.”
Jurie shook his head vigorously, making his hood waggle. “Very John Wayne. You got that out very nicely. I’m supposed to growl and play the villain?”
The situation was incredible and tense and fairly funny. “Yeah,” Dicken said, abruptly breaking out in a shit-kicking, full-out hayseed grin. He had a tendency to do that when confronted by authority figures. It was one reason why he had spent so much of his life doing fieldwork.
Jurie misinterpreted Dicken’s smile. “We have an incredible opportunity here. Why waste it?” Jurie said, wheedling now. “We can solve so many problems, learn so much. What we learn will benefit millions. It could save us all.”
“Not this girl. Not any of them.” Dicken held out his hand. The girl got to her feet and together, hand in hand, they walked cautiously toward the door.
Jurie blocked their way. “How far do you think you’ll get?” he asked, livid behind the cowl.
“Let’s find out,” Dicken said. Jurie reached out to hold him, but Dicken’s arm snaked up and he grabbed the edge of the faceplate, as if to remind Jurie of their unequal vulnerability. Jurie dropped his hands, Dicken let go, and the man backed off, catching up against a chair and almost falling over.
The security men seemed rooted to the trailer’s floor. “Good for you,” Dicken murmured. “Hire some lawyers, gentlemen. Time off for good behavior. Mitigating factors in sentencing.” Still murmuring legal inanities, he peered through the door of the trailer and saw a cluster of scientific and security staff, including Flynn, Powers, and now Presky, hanging back beyond the open gate in the reinforced acrylic fence. “Let’s go, honey,” Dicken said, and they stepped out onto the porch.
Behind, he heard a scuffle and swiveled his head to see Jurie, his face contorted, trying to grab a pistol and the security guards doing an awkward little dance keeping their weapons out of his reach.
Scientists with guns, Dicken thought. That really was the living end. Somehow, the absurdity cheered him. He squeezed the girl’s hand and marched toward the others standing by the gate.
They did not stop him. Maggie Flynn actually held the gate open. She looked relieved.
40
CALIFORNIA
Stella and Will had left the car after it ran out of gas near a town called Lone Pine. They were in the woods now, but she did not feel any closer to freedom, or to where she wanted to be.
They had left Mrs. Hayden asleep in the car, drained after driving all night and then cutting back and forth across the state routes and freeways and back roads all morning. Will trudged ahead of Stella, carrying two empty plastic bottles.
At noon, the air was cool and hazy. Summer was turning into fall. The pines and larches and oaks seemed to shimmer as breezes blew and clouds raced over the low mountains.
They had seen very few houses along the road, but there were some. Will talked about a place that was in the middle of nowhere, with no humans for tens, if not hundreds, of miles. Stella was too tired to feel discouraged. She knew now they did not belong anywhere or to anyone; they were just lost, inside and out. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. The discomfort from her period was passing. That was a small blessing, but now she was beginning to wonder who and what Will really was.
He looked more than a little feral with his hair sweaty and sticking straight up at the back where he had leaned against the rear seat in Mrs. Hayden’s car. He smelled gamy, angry, and afraid, but Stella knew she did not smell any better.
She wondered what Celia and LaShawna and Felice were up to, what had happened to the drivers trussed up and left by the side of the road.
She had only a dim idea how the map in Will’s back pocket correlated with where they were. The road looked like a long black river rolling into the distance, vanishing around a tree-framed curve.
For a moment, she stopped and watched a ground squirrel. It stood on a low flat rock beside the shoulder, hunched and alert, with shiny black eyes, like the Shrooz in her room in Virginia.
She hoped they would end up on a farm and she could be with animals. She got along well with animals.
Will came back. The squirrel fled. “We should keep moving,” he said. They trotted clumsily into the trees as two cars rumbled by.
“Maybe we should hitchhike,” Stella suggested from behind a pine trunk. She smelled the cloying sweetness of the tree’s sap and it reminded her of school. She curled her lip and pushed away from the rough bark.
“If we hitchhike, they’ll catch us,” Will said. “We’re close. I know
it.”
She followed Will. She could almost imagine a big blue Chevy or a big pickup barreling down the road with Mitch behind the wheel. Mitch and Kaye, together, looking for her.
The next time they heard a car coming, Will ran into the trees but she kept walking. After the car had passed, he caught up with her and gave her a squinch-faced look.
“We’re helpless out here,” Stella said, squinching back at him, as if that were a reasonable explanation.
“More reason to hide.”
“Maybe somebody knows where this place is. If they stop we can ask.”
“I’m not very lucky,” Will said, his mouth twisting into a line that was not a smile and not quite a smirk. Wry and uncertain. “Are you lucky?” he asked.
“I’m here with you, aren’t I?” she asked, deadpan.
Will laughed. He laughed until he started waving his arms and snorting and had to stop to wipe his nose on his sleeve.
“Eeyeew,” Stella said.
“Sorry,” he said.
Against her better judgment, Stella liked him again.
The next car, Will stuck out his hand, thumb up, and gave his biggest smile. The car flashed by doing at least seventy miles an hour, smoked windows full of blurred faces that did not even look their way.
Will hunched his shoulders as he resumed walking.
They heard the next vehicle twenty minutes later. Stella looked over her shoulder. It was an old Ford minivan, cresting a rise in the two-lane road and laying down a thin cloud of oily white smoke. Neither she nor Will moved back from the road. Their water bottles were empty. It wouldn’t be long before they had to turn around and retrace their journey.
The minivan slowed, moved into the opposite lane to avoid them, and passed with a low whoosh. An older man and woman in the front seats peered at them owlishly; the back windows were tinted blue and reflected their own faces.
The minivan pulled over and stopped about two hundred feet down the road.
Stella hiccupped in surprise and crossed her arms. Will stood sideways, like a fencer expecting a strike, and Stella saw his hands shake.
“They don’t look mean,” Stella said, but she thought of the red truck and Fred Trinket and his mother who had cooked chicken, back in Spotsylvania County.
“We do need a ride,” Will admitted.
The minivan backed up slowly and stopped about twenty feet away. The woman leaned her head out of the right side window. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray and she had a square, strong face and direct eyes. Her arm, elbowing out, was covered with freckles, and her face was heavily wrinkled and pale. Stella saw she had lots of big silver rings on the fingers of her left hand, which rested on her forearm as she looked back at them.
“Are you two virus kids?” the older woman asked.
“Yeah,” Will said, hands shaking even harder. He tried to smile. “We escaped.”
The older woman thought about that for a moment, pursing her lips. “Are you infectious?”
“I don’t think so,” Will said, and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
The older woman turned back to the man in the driver’s seat. They shared a glance and reached a silent agreement possible only to a couple who had lived together a very long time. “Need a ride somewhere?” the woman asked.
Will looked at Stella, but all Stella could sniff was the thick fume of oil. The man was at least ten years older than the woman. He had a thin face, bright gray eyes, and a prominent nose, and his hands, on the wheel, were also covered with rings—turquoise and coral and silver, birds and abstract designs.
“Sure,” Will said.
The minivan’s side door popped and slid open automatically. The interior stank of cigarette smoke and hamburgers and fries.
Stella’s nose wrinkled, but the smell of food made her mouth water. They hadn’t eaten since the morning of the day before.
“We’ve been reading about kids like you,” the old man said as they climbed in. “Hard times, huh?”
“Yeah,” Will said. “Thanks.”
PART THREE
SHEVA + 18
“We’re in year eighteen of what some have called the Virus Century. The whole world is still running scared, though there are faint and tremulous hints of a political solution.
“Yet the majority of people polled today haven’t the faintest idea what a virus is. For most of us, ‘They’re small and they make us sick’ just about says it all.
“Most scientists insist that viruses are genetic pirates, hijacking and killing cells to reproduce: ‘Selfish genes with switchblades,’ ‘Terrorist DNA.’ Others say we’ve got it mostly wrong, that many viruses are genetic messengers, carrying signals between cells in the body and even between you and me: ‘Genetic FedEx.’
“The truth probably combines both views. It’s a weird old biological ballgame, and most scientists agree we’re not even in the second inning.”
—FoxMedia producer pitching a Floodnet Real Life, Real News special; rejected
“Who’ll buy ad time? It’s too scary. What the hell does ‘tremulous’ mean? I’m tired of all this science shit. Science ruins my day. Let me know if and when the president stays on the pot long enough to get his job done. He’s our boy. Maybe if, maybe then, but no promises.”
—Memo from FoxMedia CEO and program executive
1
FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND
Kaye stared into Mrs. Rhine’s darkened living room. The furniture had been rearranged in bizarre ways; a couch overturned, covered with a sheet, the bumps of its legs pointing into the air and pillows arranged in a cross on the floor around it; two wooden chairs leaning face-forward against the wall in a corner as if they were being punished.
Small white cardboard boxes covered the coffee table.
Freedman tapped the intercom button. “Carla, we’re here. I’ve brought Kaye Lang Rafelson.”
Mrs. Rhine walked briskly through the door, took a chair from a corner, swung it into the center of the room, two yards from the thick window, and sat. She wore plain blue denim coveralls. Gauze covered her arms and hands and most of her face. She wore a kerchief, and it did not look as if she had any hair. The little flesh that showed was red and puffy. Her eyes were intense between the mummy folds of gauze.
“I’ll turn my lights down,” she said, her voice clear and almost etched over the intercom. “You turn yours up. No need to look at me.”
“All right,” Freedman said, and brightened the lights in the viewing room.
The lights in Mrs. Rhine’s living room darkened until they could see her only in silhouette. “Welcome to my home, Dr. Rafelson,” she said.
“I was pleased to get your message,” Kaye said.
Freedman folded her arms and stood back.
“Christopher Dicken used to bring flowers,” Mrs. Rhine said. Her movements were awkward, jerky. “I can’t have flowers now. Once a week I have to go into a little closet and they send a robot in here to scrub everything. They have to get rid of all the little house-dust things. Fungus and bacteria and such that might grow from old flakes of skin. They can kill me now, if they build up in here.”
“I appreciated the letter you sent me.”
“The Web is my life, Kaye. If I may call you Kaye.”
“Of course.”
“I seem to know you, Christopher has spoken of you so often. I don’t get too many visitors now. I’ve forgotten how to react to real people. I type on my clean little keyboard and travel all around the world, but I never go anywhere or touch or see anything, really. I thought I had gotten used to it, but then I just got angry again.”
“I can imagine,” Kaye said.
“Tell me what you imagine, Kaye,” Mrs. Rhine said, head jerking.
“I imagine you feel robbed.”
The dark shadow nodded. “My whole family. That’s why I wrote to you. When I read what happened to your husband, to your daughter, I thought, she’s not just a scientist, or a symbol of a movement, or a cele
brity. She’s like me. But of course you can get them back, someday.”
“I am always trying to get back my daughter,” Kaye said. “We still search for her.”
“I wish I could tell you where she is.”
“So do I,” Kaye said, swallowing within the hood. The air flow in the stiff isolation suit was not the best.
“Have you read Karl Popper?” Mrs. Rhine asked.
“No, I never have,” Kaye said, and arranged a plastic wrinkle around her midriff. She noticed then that the suit was patched with something like duct tape. This distracted her for a moment; she had heard that funding had been cut, but she had not fully realized the implications.
“… says that a whole group of philosophers and thinkers, including him, regard the self as a social appurtenance,” Mrs. Rhine said. “If you are raised away from society, you do not develop a full self. Well, I am losing my self. I feel uncomfortable using the personal pronoun. I would go mad, but I… this thing I am…” She stopped. “Marian, I need to speak with Kaye privately. At least let me believe nobody is listening or recording us.”
“I’ll check with the technician.” Freedman spoke briefly with the safety technician. She then moved gingerly out of the viewing room, the umbilical coiling behind her. The door closed.
“Why are you here?” Mrs. Rhine asked in a low voice, barely audible. Kaye could see the reflections in the woman’s eyes from the brighter lights behind the glass.
“Because of your message. And because I thought it was time that I meet you.”
“You’re not here to reassure me that they’ll find a cure? Because some people come through here and say that and I hate it.”
“No,” Kaye said.
“Why, then? Why speak with me? I send e-mail letters to lots of people. I don’t think most of them get through. I’m surprised you got yours, actually.”
Marian Freedman had made sure of that.
