by Greg Bear
Five years ago, the others had started arriving, and the town had slowly come alive once more.
Mr. and Mrs. Sakartvelo were in their sixties. Physically, they were obvious Shevites. They said others like them—not many—went back over two hundred years in Georgia and Armenia and Turkey. Stella Nova saw no reason not to believe them. Mitch had talked about such things.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, turning her face like a flower to soak up more sun before it dipped behind the trees. She listened for red-winged blackbirds and jays, mockingbirds and robins. Her cheeks freckled with butterflies of contentment.
A game for the younger kids was Rawshock—freckling up in symmetrical patterns and guessing what they meant. It trained them at cheek flashing. Some came to Oldstock freckle-dumb, with no knowledge of how to communicate with their own kind. Slowly, they learned. Stella and others taught the young ones.
The woods had been full of ticks this summer—and deer, as well—but ticks and even mosquitoes did not bother them much. The Sakartvelos taught them how to use fever-scenting to keep biting insects away, and also how to soothe animals—black bears in particular—that they might encounter. The two hundred Shevites in Oldstock were the only inhabitants for ten miles, and the woods were wild.
And of course, the Sakartvelos had taught the children how to keep Oldstock a secret, and trained them in what to do if humans came looking for them.
They had been taught well. No one had ever been taken away, and no one had ever been hurt—by animals or humans. Life had been pretty good, and Stella had started to forget the bad times and even the times with Mitch and Kaye, the good times, though sad. She had started to believe there was a life to live, rooted and real, among her own kind.
Then, Will had gone wrong.
Some still had nightmares of the schools and of living among humans. Stella did not dream about such things. Will had not been so lucky. He had hidden many things from all of them, things he had experienced, that had happened to him.
There were no radios or televisions in Oldstock, no telephones except for a single satellite phone in the main meeting hall, kept locked in a cabinet. It had not been used since Stella and Will had arrived, and probably not for a long time before that.
A breeze made the sheets and diapers flap. Stella wiped sweat from her forehead, got up, and started taking down and folding the dry pieces. She stacked them in a plastic tub and scented the tub by touching the ball of her thumb behind her ear and rubbing the handle.
Randolph—the only Randolph in Oldstock, so she did not know his human last name—came up and sparked a greeting. Randolph was four years younger than Stella, what some called an off-born, not part of the Waves. Those born during the three big Waves were called boomers, she did not know why. They talked with just their faces for a while as they plucked and folded pillowcases and dungarees and diapers. They exchanged pleasantries and imitated the scents of others, a kind of joking gossip that passed the time.
Randolph was being brought into the Blackbird Deme, not Stella’s but an offshoot of her group. They could talk openly about deme business, but not about personal affairs within the demes. That required triples, to prevent misunderstanding between the demes: three figures from each deme, engaging in full fever-scenting and sparking and facing. Triples looked like a weird dance to outsiders, but they solved a lot of problems and kept friction way down.
Oldstock had two children from the most recent Wave, foundlings aged two years and twenty-six months respectively. Stella cared for them sometimes in preparation, in training, and enjoyed their wild toddler scenting. Shevite infants raised among their own kind got enthusiastic sometimes and could emit a rank odor like dead skunks, and not from their dirty diapers.
Shevite babies knew how to swear with scent long before they could talk.
Everyone was learning. Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Sakartvelo were far from tyrants. They had been sterilized by the Communists in Tbilisi in the 1960s and could not have children of their own. In a strange way, that made them perfect to be everyone’s Shevite godparents, their guides in small, cloistered Oldstock.
Randolph finished folding a good share of the laundry and palmed Stella’s cheek in a brotherly fashion, with just a hint of the Question that the young males often asked, even of someone in her condition. Even of someone who still had a partner.
Stella responded with a little warning grumble under her throat and a polite chirrup. They smiled and parted, having spoken not a single word. Stella could go for days without speaking, and though sometimes she shouted out loud in her sleep, she could never recall why on waking.
Supper was being served in the refectory for those who had been cutting wood and planing boards starting early that morning. Males and females came out of the fresheners, stalls where they rubbed down with wet towels to take off the sweat—otherwise, most showered less than once a week. Cutting or hiding scent was considered rude. Smelling like heavy labor, however, could also hide scent.
Mr. Sakartvelo had told them, “We’re all French, at heart.” Stella did not know precisely what he meant. In France, Shevites were employed in perfume factories, they had heard. Maybe that was his meaning.
She felt so ignorant. She was hungry much of the time now, so she stood in line with the workers, hands on her stomach, trying to feel the shape beneath, but there was hardly even a bulge yet. Feeling her stomach made her a little sad. A cup of coffee would help. Caffeine made the day easier. Shevites reacted so strongly to caffeine that coffee and tea and even chocolate were only allowed between the hours of ten and five.
Stella’s mind raced all the time even without coffee. Half the time she wanted to cry, the other half just to suck it back and get on with the hours of each day and what they could bring. So much work to do. Months and years could go by and still she could not fit herself in completely. All those years away from her kind… Had they handicapped her, made her more human than Shevite?
But there were sweet moments, classes with the younger boomers and especially the babies.
She took her tray from the food line and walked into the refectory, large and quiet, twelve workers off duty, none speaking, gesturing and facing and flashing, pleasant odors of cocoa and yogurt and even jasmine—somebody was being very pleasant—mingled together and out of context at this distance, like words pulled out of a conversation and tossed together randomly, the discourse going on at the old wooden tables and benches.
Stella sat by herself, which she did often enough to elicit comments, kindly meant but a little critical. She ate her bowl of canned kidney beans and sprinkled or dribbled in the extra spices and flavorings that Shevites enjoyed, Indian black salt, extracts of broccoli raab and sour anchovy sauce.
Luce Ramone sat down beside her with a bowl of chips. Luce was more talkative than others, and Stella greeted her with a smile that showed some need.
“What, you want a chatty person?” Luce asked. She was a year younger than Stella, from the tail end of the first boomers, small for a Shevite and pale of skin, with thick black hair that tended to bristle. She smelled wonderful, however, and attracted much attention from males hoping to be peripheral to her deme. Stella’s deme and Luce’s were currently in merger, coalescing but still keeping their bounds. Nobody knew where that might lead, or what it might mean to the domestic anglers, hopeful males and females in either deme.
“I’d love a chatty person,” Stella said.
“Hair of the human/ I’m your girl. You’re down/ looking stretched.”
“I’m thoughtful.”
Both were cheek-flashing, but speech over and under was dominant for the time being.
“Joe Siprio, you know him?”
“Will’s friend,” Stella said.
“He’s angling for me. Should I?”
“No way/ too young,” Stella said.
“You were angled at my age/ hypocrite.”
“Look what happened to me.” Not emphasized, but standing alone, no un
der.
“He’s a total cheer-fly,” Luce said with a musing glance. “Our bodies like each other.”
“What’s that got to do with a cat’s fart?” Stella asked, irritated. “You’re moth. You need to rise to bee.” Moth and bee were names for two levels of menarche in the Shevites. Women passed through three stages: the first, moth, receptive to sexual overtures but not to actual intercourse; the second, bee, sexually active but infertile—and this was still a guess, even to the Sakartvelos—to allow more subtle hormonal and pheromonal samplings and communications; and the third, wasp, total fertility, leading to sexual activity with prospects of pregnancy. Shevite females could actually fall back into bee stage if a deme broke up or an angling failed.
Males started puberty at bee and from there went straight to wasp, sometimes within hours.
“Lemon and Lime are old notion about that,” Stella added. Lemon and Lime were the fundamentals of the Sakartvelos. “They think you should wait.”
“You didn’t,” Luce said.
“It was different,” Stella said, and freckled a warning that she did not like thinking about this, much less talking.
“Lemon and Lime support you,” Luce said testily.
“They didn’t have much choice, did they?”
A ten-year-old male named Burke walked to the end of the table and stood there shyly, hands folded in front of him, rocking on his heels.
“What?” Stella snapped, facing him with cheeks flashing full gold.
Burke backed off. “Lemon and Lime are down at the gate with some others. There’s humans down there.”
“So?”
“They say they’re your parents. Another brought them, the numb-nose delivery guy.”
Stella slapped her hands on the table, then drummed them, shaking her head, making the plates rattle. Heads turned in the cafeteria, and two stood in case intervention was the consensus.
Luce pushed back, never having seen her friend this disturbed.
“It’s not them,” Stella said, and swung her legs around on the bench, then got to her feet. “Not now.” She approached Burke, face and pupils ablaze in full accusative query, as if she wanted to punish him.
“The woman smells like you!” Burke wailed, and then others surrounded them and prodded Stella aside with gentle elbow nudges. Touching with angry hands was considered very bad. Burke ran off, crying.
“Go see,” Luce suggested, her own color flaring. Nobody was a better persuader than Luce. “If they’re not your parents, they’ll smoke them out of here and they’ll forget everything. If they are your parents, you have to go.” She held out her spit-damp palms, as did others who had formed a circle around the table, but Stella refused them all.
“I don’t want to know!” she wailed. “I don’t want them to know!”
4
Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Senator Laura Bloch greeted Christopher Dicken in the hall outside the courtroom. Dicken was dressed in his usual excuse for business wear, brown tweed jacket and corduroy pants with a wide tie completely out of fashion. Senator Bloch was dressed in a navy blue suit and carried a small briefcase. Behind her stood a younger balding man and a lone, harried-looking middle-aged woman, both wearing suits and carrying their own briefcases.
“She’s going to get off,” Bloch declared curtly. “She’s painting herself as the cop on the beat who protected us all.”
Dicken was not much on punishment, and did not look forward to having to testify.
“I wonder what Gianelli would think,” Bloch added softly, staring at the benches, the lines of lawyers and witnesses waiting to be allowed into the courtroom to sit and wait until called.
The sound of Mark Augustine’s cane was unmistakable. Dicken and Bloch turned to see him making his way down the hall toward the courtroom. He nodded to his attorneys, spoke to them for a few seconds, eyes turning to Dicken, then broke away and stepped gingerly toward them.
“Dr. Augustine,” Bloch said, and extended her hand.
“Senator, pleasure to see you.” Augustine smiled and shook her hand, but kept his eyes on Dicken. “Sorry duty, eh, Christopher?”
Dicken nodded. “How are you, Mark?”
“Steep learning curve for us all,” Augustine said.
Dicken nodded. He felt no triumph, only a hollow sensation of unfinished business.
Augustine pursed his lips and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Two items of news,” he said. “First, I’ve got Sumner’s chief of staff, Stan Parton, on board for a reconciliation joint session. We’re going to have a select few children in the House chambers, at the president’s invitation. The vice president will be there.”
“That’s great,” Senator Bloch said, her eyes brightening. “Dick would have loved to hear that. When?”
“Could be months. The other news is bad.”
The last thing the group wanted was bad news. Bloch sighed and rolled her prominent eyes.
“Let’s have it,” Dicken said.
“Mrs. Rhine slipped into a coma at six thirty this morning. She died at eleven fifteen.”
Dicken felt his breath hitch.
“She had been in pain for years,” Augustine said.
“A blessing, really,” Bloch said.
Dicken asked where a restroom was on this floor, then excused himself. In the echoing hollowness, he closed the door to a stall. No tears came. He did not even feel numb.
“Funny world,” he whispered, and looked up at the ceiling, as if Mrs. Rhine might be listening. “Funny old world. Wherever you are, Carla, I hope it’s better.”
Then he stepped out of the stall, washed his hands, and returned to stand with Bloch and Augustine outside the courtroom.
Rachel Browning and her attorneys had arrived and now huddled in a tight cluster about twenty feet from Augustine and Bloch. Her face had become deeply lined, pale as if cast in plaster, a death mask. She nodded to the tune of the attorneys’ back-and-forth. One stopped to whisper in her ear.
“I’m sorry for her,” Dicken said, vulnerable to the point of charity.
“Don’t be,” Augustine primly advised. “She’d hate that.”
The court clerk opened the doors.
“Let’s go, gentlemen,” Bloch said. She placed her hands on their elbows and escorted them, three abreast, into the courtroom.
5
LAKE STANNOUS, CALIFORNIA
Mitch held Kaye’s hand as a group of more than twenty youths tightened its gyre around them. Morgan had been drawn aside and now stood surrounded by three young men. He held out his hands and smiled nervously, face flushed, windbreaker pulled off one shoulder. He looked surprised.
Several other adolescents and a female in her late seventies were searching Morgan’s truck, looking, Mitch guessed, for communications or tracking equipment. They were all quiet and serious.
“We’re trying to find a girl named Stella Nova,” Kaye repeated. The air was thick with persuasion. Mitch felt woozy and confused already, despite the nose plugs they had manufactured in the motel bathroom out of toilet paper and vanilla-scented lip balm.
An older male, also in his seventies, with ruddy cheeks and an unruly halo of reddish hair shot with gray, came through the gyre and reached to take Mitch’s and Kaye’s hands in his. He wore a denim jacket with brass buttons. Except for his round face and SHEVA features, he might have been an itinerant farmworker. “There was no need for you to come,” he said pressing their hands to his chest.
“We’re her parents,” Kaye said, eyes pleading. “We’ve been looking for her for years.”
“She isn’t here.” The old man’s cheeks freckled in rapid patterns, unreadable, and his emerald green irises sparkled with yellow and brown. His accent was mild but Mitch could still detect a hint of eastern European. Mitch tried to think clearly, tried to resist the onslaught. Any minute now, he was certain, they would all get back in the truck and drive away, sure they
had made a mistake—no matter what Morgan would tell them had happened.
For the first time, Mitch felt frightened, being among his daughter’s people.
The old woman stood beside the old man and spoke a stream of over-under in another language.
“Georgian,” Kaye said to Mitch. Mitch and Kaye tried to pull their hands back, but the old man was strong and would not release them and Mitch did not want to start any kind of struggle. They stood in a tight triangle with the old man, who was no longer looking at them, but had focused on the old woman and the adolescents.
“They’re your friends!” Morgan shouted, struggling against the clasping arms, his voice breaking with anger and frustration. “I wouldn’t bring no enemies here, you know that. She’s famous! She’s been on Oprah!”
The old man let their hands go, but still the gyre of youths, red-headed, strawberry blond, sandy brunette, all colors—Mitch had never seen so many varieties of SHEVA child—stayed close and fever scented the air.
Mitch doubted he would ever enjoy chocolate again.
Kaye stammered a few words of Georgian, then asked the old couple, in English, “When did you come here? Where are you from?”
“Stella!” Mitch shouted at the buildings adjoining the turnaround.
The old man touched his finger to Mitch’s lips. Mitch bent his head like a submissive dog and fell silent.
“Please,” Kaye pleaded. Mitch supported her as her legs gave way.
“Go home,” the old man said.
“Go home,” the children said in many voices, over and under, a rising, singing, all-too-convincing and reasonable murmur in the late afternoon warmth.
Mitch saw something from the corner of his eye. He raised his head and stood on tiptoes to look over the crowd. A face he knew, like Kaye’s, like his mother’s, moved steadily toward the gyre from the direction of the gray buildings. He tried to keep the young woman in sight through the bobbing heads and singing mouths and gold-flecked eyes. She wore a baggy pair of black pants and clogs and a white sleeveless blouse. Her shoulders were narrow, like Kaye’s, and her arms were tanned to a reddish bronze, like a statue in a park. Her cheeks formed a butterfly pattern that Mitch recognized instantly, the complicated expression revealing both surprise and uncertainty, and then unwitting greeting.
