Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  Augustine knew he could take responsibility for a considerable share of that madness. He had once fanned the flames of fear himself, hoping to rise in the ranks to director of the National Institutes of Health and procure more funds from a reluctant Congress.

  Instead, the president's select committee on Herod's issues had promoted him laterally to become czar of SHEVA, in charge of more than 120 schools around the country.

  Parent opposition groups called him the commandant, or Colonel Klink.

  Those were the kind names.

  He finished reading, then crimped the corner of the e-paper until it broke, automatically erasing the memory strip. The display side of the paper turned orange. He handed the attendant the scrap and received his ginger ale in exchange.

  “Takeoff in six minutes, sir,” the attendant said.

  “Am I traveling alone?” Augustine asked, looking around the back of his seat.

  “Yes, sir,” the attendant said.

  Augustine smiled, but there was no joy in it. His face was lined and gray. His hair had turned almost white in the past five years. He looked twenty years older than his chronological age of fifty-nine.

  He peered through the window at the welcome storm blowing in fits and starts over most of Virginia and Maryland. Tomorrow was going to be dry once again and mercilessly sunny with a high of ninety-three. It would be warm when he gave his little propaganda speech in Lexington.

  The South and East were in the fourth year of a dry spell. Kentucky was no longer a state of blue grass. Much of it looked like California at the end of a parched summer. Some called it punishment, though there had been record corn and wheat crops.

  Jay Leno had once cracked that SHEVA had pushed global warming onto a back burner.

  Augustine fidgeted with the clasp on the attaché case. The plane taxied. With nothing but raindrop-blurred runway visible outside the window, he pulled out the paper edition of the Washington Post. That and the Cleveland Plain Dealer were the only two true newspapers he read now. Most of the other dailies around the country had succumbed to the deep recession. Even the New York Times was published only in an electronic edition.

  Some wags called the online journals “electrons.” Whereas paper had two sides, electrons were biased toward the negative. The online journals certainly had nothing good to say about Emergency Action.

  “Mea maxima culpa,” Augustine whispered, his nervous little prayer of contrition. Infrequently, that mantra of guilt changed places with another voice that insisted it was time to die, to put himself at the mercy of a just God.

  But Augustine had practiced medicine, studied disease, and struggled in politics too long to believe in a kind or generous deity. And he did not want to believe in the other.

  The one that would be most interested in Mark Augustine's soul.

  The plane reached the end of the runway and ascended quickly, efficiently, on the wind from a rich bass roar.

  The attendant touched his shoulder and smiled down on him. Augustine had somehow managed a catnap of perhaps ten minutes, a blessing. He felt almost at peace. The plane was at altitude, flying level. “Dr. Augustine, something's come up. We have orders to take you back to Washington. There's a secure satellite channel open for you.”

  Augustine took the handheld and listened. His face became, if that was possible, even more ashen. A few minutes later, he returned the phone to the attendant and left his seat to walk gingerly down the aisle to the washroom. There, he urinated, bracing the top of his head and one hand against the curved bulkhead. The plane was banking to make a turn.

  He was scheduled for an emergency meeting with the secretary of Health and Human Services, his immediate superior, and representatives from the Centers for Disease Control.

  He pushed the little flush button, zipped up, washed his hands thoroughly, rinsed his gray, surprisingly corpselike face, and stared at himself in the narrow mirror. A little turbulence made the jet bounce.

  The mirror always showed someone other than the man he had wanted to become. The last thing Mark Augustine had ever imagined he would be doing was running a network of concentration camps. Despite the educational amenities and the lack of death houses, that was precisely what the schools were: isolated camps used to park a generation of children at high expense, with no in and out privileges.

  No peace. No respite. Only test after test after cruel test for everyone on the planet.

  25

  SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

  Stella watched her parents strip the house. She wept silently.

  Kaye dragged a wooden box stacked high with the computer and the most important of their books and papers out to the Dodge. Mitch burned documents in a rusty oil drum in the backyard.

  Kaye tersely told Stella to throw the clothes she really wanted into a single small suitcase and anything else into a plastic garbage bag, which they would take if there was room left in the car.

  “I didn't mean to do this,” Stella said softly. Kaye did not hear or, more likely, did not think it best to listen to her daughter now. Louder, Stella added, “I like this house.”

  “So do I, honey. So do I,” Kaye said, her face stony.

  In the kitchen, Mitch smashed the cell phone and pulled out the little plastic circuit boards, then jammed them in his pocket. He would throw them out the window or drop them in a garbage can in another state. He then smashed the answering machine.

  “Don't bother,” Kaye said as she lugged the plastic bag full of clothes down the hall. “We're probably the most listened-to family in America.”

  “Old habit,” Mitch said. “Leave me to my illusions.”

  “I've made trouble and I'm putting you in danger,” Stella said. “I should just go away. I should just go into a camp.”

  “Us, in danger?” Kaye stopped and spun around at the end of the hall. “Are you testing me?” she demanded. “We are not worried for ourselves, Stella. We have never been worried about ourselves.” Her hands moved in small arcs from hips to shoulders, and then she crossed her arms.

  “I don't understand why this has to happen,” Stella said. “Please, let's stay here and if they come, they come, all right?”

  Kaye's face turned white.

  Stella could not stop talking. “You say you're afraid for me, but are you really afraid for yourselves, for how you'll feel if—”

  “Shut up, Stella,” Kaye said, shaking, then regretted the sharp words. “Please. We have to get out of here quickly.”

  “I'd know others like me. I could find out what we really need to do. They have to accept us someday.”

  “They could just as easily kill you all,” Mitch said, standing behind Kaye.

  “That's crazy,” Stella said. “Their own children?”

  Mitch and Kaye faced off against their daughter down the length of the hall. Kaye seemed to recognize this symbolism and turned halfway, not looking directly at Stella, but at the plasterboard, the cornice, the paint, her eyes searching these blank things as if they might be sacred texts.

  “I don't think they would,” Stella said.

  “That is not your concern,” Mitch said.

  Stella desperately wrinkled her face in what she hoped was a smile. Her tears started to flow. “If it isn't my concern, whose is it?”

  “Not yours, alone, not yet,” Mitch said, his voice many degrees softer, and so full of painful, angry love that Stella's throat itched. She scratched her neck with her fingers.

  Kaye looked up. “Damn,” she said, reminded of something. She stared at her fingers and her nails and rushed into the bathroom. There, she lathered and rinsed her hands for several minutes.

  Steam billowed from the sink as Stella stood by the door.

  “Fred stuff?” Stella asked.

  “Fred,” Kaye confirmed grimly.

  “You took a good swipe,” Stella said.

  “Mom cat,” Kaye said. She scrubbed back and forth with a stiff little bristle brush, then looked up at the ceiling through the steam and t
he lavender of the soap. “I'm going to wash that man right off of my hands,” she sang. This was so close to the edge, so fraught, that Stella forgot her guilt and frustration and reached out for her mother.

  Kaye knocked aside her daughter's long arms.

  “Mother,” Stella said, shocked. “I'm sorry!” She reached out again. Kaye let out a wail, slapping at Stella's hands until Stella caught her around her chest. As mother and daughter slumped to the ragged throw rug on the bathroom floor, too exhausted to do anything but shake and clutch, Mitch sucked in his breath and finished the work. He loaded a second suitcase with clothes, zipped it shut, and tossed it into the trunk of the Dodge along with the garbage bag. He imagined himself a rugged frontier father getting ready to pull out of the sod house and hightail it into the woods because Indians were coming.

  But it wasn't Indians. They had spent time with Indians—Stella had been born in a reservation hospital in Washington state. Mitch had studied and admired Indians for decades. He had also dug up ancient North American bones. That had been a long time ago. He didn't think he would do that now.

  Mitch was no longer a white man. He wanted little or nothing to do with his own race, his own species.

  It was the cavalry that he feared.

  They took the Dodge and left the old gray Toyota truck in the dirt driveway. Kaye did not look back at the house, but Stella, sitting beside her mother in the backseat, swung around.

  “We buried Shamus there,” she said. Shamus had come into their lives three years ago, an old, battered tomcat with a rope looped around his neck. Kaye had cut off the rope, sewn up a slashed ear, and put in a shunt to drain a pus-filled wound behind one eye. To keep the orange tabby from scratching out the stitches, Mitch had wrapped his head in a ridiculous plastic shield that had made him look, Stella said, like Frankenpuss.

  For a half-wild old tom, he had been a remarkably sweet and affectionate cat.

  One evening last winter, Shamus had not shown up for table scraps or his usual siesta on Kaye's lap. The tom had wandered off into the far corner of the backyard, well away from Stella's sense of smell. He had pushed his way under a swelling lobe of kudzu, hidden from crows, and curled up.

  Two days later, acting on a hunch, Mitch had found him there, head down, eyes closed, feet tucked under as if asleep. They had buried him a few yards away wrapped in a scrap of knitted afghan he had favored as a bed.

  Mitch had said that cats did that, wandered off when they knew the end was near so their bodies would not attract predators or bring disease to the family, the pride.

  “Poor Shamus,” Stella said, peering out the rear window. “He has no family now.”

  26

  They drove. Stella remembered many such trips. She lay in the backseat, nose burning, arms folded tightly, fingers and toes itching, her head in Kaye's lap and when Kaye drove, in Mitch's.

  Mitch stroked her hair and looked down on her. Sometimes she slept. For a time, the clouds and then the sun through the car windows filled her up. Thoughts ran around in her head like mice. Even with her parents, she hated to admit, she was alone. She hated those thoughts. She thought instead of Will and Kevin and Mabel or Maybelle and how they had suffered because their parents were stupid or mean or both.

  The car stopped at a service station. Late afternoon sun reflected from a shiny steel sign and hurt Stella's eyes as she pushed through the hollow metal door into the restroom. The restroom was small and empty and forbidding, the walls covered with chipped, dirty tile. She threw up in the toilet and wiped her face and mouth.

  Now the backs of her ears stung as if little bees were poking her. In the mirror, she saw that her cheeks would not make colors. They were as pale as Kaye's. Stella wondered if she was changing, becoming more like her mother. Maybe being a virus child was something you got over, like a birthmark that faded away.

  Kaye felt her daughter's forehead as Mitch drove.

  The sun had set and the storm had passed.

  Stella lay in Kaye's lap, face almost buried. She was breathing heavily. “Roll over, sweetie,” Kaye said. Stella rolled over. “Your face is hot.”

  “I threw up back there,” Stella said.

  “How far to the next house?” Kaye asked Mitch.

  “The map says twenty miles. We'll be in Pittsburgh soon.”

  “I think she's sick,” Kaye said.

  “It isn't Shiver, is it, Kaye?” Stella asked.

  “You don't get Shiver, honey.”

  “Everything hurts. Is it mumps?”

  “You've had shots for everything.” But Kaye knew that couldn't possibly be true. Nobody knew what susceptibilities the new children might have. Stella had never been sick, not with colds or flu; she had never even had a bacterial infection. Kaye had thought the new children might have improved immune systems. Mitch had not supported this theory, however, and they had given Stella all the proper immunizations, one by one, after the FDA and the CDC had grudgingly approved the old vaccines for the new children.

  “An aspirin might help,” Stella said.

  “An aspirin would make you ill,” Kaye said. “You know that.”

  “Tylenol,” Stella added, swallowing.

  Kaye poured her some water from a bottle and lifted her head for a drink. “That's bad, too,” Kaye murmured. “You are very special, honey.”

  She pulled back Stella's eyelids, one at a time. The irises were bland, the little gold flecks clouded. Stella's pupils were like pinpricks. Her daughter's eyes were as expressionless as her cheeks. “So fast,” Kaye said. She set Stella down into a pillow in the corner of the backseat and leaned forward to whisper into Mitch's ear. “It could be what the dead girl had.”

  “Shit,” Mitch said.

  “It isn't respiratory, not yet, but she's hot. Maybe a hundred and four, a hundred and five. I can't find the thermometer in the first aid kit.”

  “I put it there,” Mitch said.

  “I can't find it. We'll get one in Pittsburgh.”

  “A doctor,” Mitch said.

  “At the safe house,” Kaye said. “We need a specialist.” She was working to stay calm. She had never seen her daughter with a fever, her cheeks and eyes so bland.

  The car sped up.

  “Keep to the speed limit,” Kaye said.

  “No guarantees,” Mitch said.

  27

  OHIO

  Christopher Dicken got off the C-141 transport at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. At Augustine's suggestion, he had hitched a late-afternoon ride from Baltimore with a flight of National Guard troops being moved into Dayton.

  He was met on the concrete apron by a neatly dressed middle-aged man in a gray suit, the civilian liaison, who accompanied him through a small, austere passenger terminal to a black Chevrolet staff car.

  Dicken looked at two unmarked brown Fords behind the Chevrolet. “Why the escort?” he asked.

  “Secret Service,” the liaison said.

  “Not for me, I hope,” Dicken said.

  “No, sir.”

  As they approached the Chevrolet, a much younger driver in a black suit snapped to military attention, introduced himself as Officer Reed of Ohio Special Needs School Security, and opened the car's right rear door.

  Mark Augustine sat in the backseat.

  “Good afternoon, Christopher,” he said. “I hope your flight was pleasant.”

  “Not very,” Dicken said. He hunched awkwardly into the staff car and sat on the black leather. The car drove off the base, trailed by the two Fords. Dicken stared at huge billows of clouds piling up over the green hills and suburbs beside the wide gray turnpike. He was glad to be on the ground again. Changes in air pressure bothered his leg.

  “How's the leg?” Augustine asked.

  “Okay,” Dicken said.

  “Mine's giving me hell,” Augustine said. “I flew in from Dulles. Flight got bumpy over Pennsylvania.”

  “You broke your leg?”

  “In a bathtub.”

  Dicken conspi
cuously rotated his torso to face his former boss and looked him over coldly. “Sorry to hear that.”

  Augustine met his gaze with tired eyes. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I didn't come at your request,” Dicken said.

  “I know. But the person who made the request talked to me.”

  “It was an order from HHS.”

  “Exactly,” Augustine said, and tapped the armrest on the door. “We're having a problem at some of our schools.”

  “They are not my schools,” Dicken said.

  “Have we made clear how much of a pariah I am?” Augustine asked.

  “Not nearly clear enough,” Dicken said.

  “I know your sympathies, Christopher.”

  “I don't think you do.”

  “How's Mrs. Rhine?”

  The goddamned high point of Mark Augustine's career, Dicken thought, his face flushing. “Tell me why I'm here,” he said.

  “A lot of new children are becoming ill, and some of them are dying,” Augustine said. “It appears to be a virus. We're not sure what kind.”

  Dicken took a slow breath. “The CDC isn't allowed to investigate Emergency Action schools. Turf war, right?”

  Augustine tipped his head. “Only in a few states. Ohio reserved control of its schools. Congressional politics,” he said. “Not my wish.”

  “I don't know what I can do. You should be shipping in every doctor and public health worker you can get.”

  “Ohio school medical staff by half last year, because the new children were healthier than most kids. No joke.” Augustine leaned forward in the seat. “We're going to what may be the school most affected.”

  “Which one?” Dicken asked, massaging his leg.

  “Joseph Goldberger.”

  Dicken smiled ruefully. “You've named them after public health heroes? That's sweet, Mark.”

  Augustine did not deviate from his course. His eyes looked dead, and not just from being tired. “Last night, all but one of the doctors deserted the school. We don't yet have accurate records on the sick and the dead. Some of the nurses and teachers have walked, too. But most have stayed, and they're trying to take up the slack.”