Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  Stella's bunkmate, black-haired Celia Northcott, wandered into the gym fifteen minutes later. Celia was a year younger but seemed more mature. She had been born as a twin but her sister had died while only a few months old. This was common among SHEVA twins; usually, only one survived. Celia made up for a tendency toward sadness with a brittle cheer that sometimes irritated Stella. Celia was full of schemes, and was probably the most avid constructor of demes—social groupings of SHEVA children—and plans about how to live when they grew up.

  She was nursing her arm—a bandage covered her wrist—and grimaced as Stella held the ball and queried her with a freckle flash and stare.

  “Blood,” Celia said, and sat cross-legged on the side of the court. “About a gallon.”

  “Why?” Stella asked.

  “How should I know? KUK/ I had a nightmare last night.” Celia's tongue caught and she made her signature glottal click, which almost obscured her underspeech. Celia was not very good at double speaking. Someone, she never said who, had tried to mutilate her tongue when she was eight years old. This she had revealed to Stella late at night, when Stella had found her huddled in a corner of the barracks, crying and smelling of electric onions. The facile ridge found in most of the children was a white scar on Celia's tongue, and she sometimes slurred her words, or inserted a hard clucking sound.

  Stella squatted beside Celia and lightly bounced her palm off the ball, held in the nest of her legs. Nobody knew why the counselors took so much blood, but visits to the hospital usually followed upsets or unusual behavior; that much Stella had deduced. “How long did they keep you?”

  “Until morning.”

  “Anything new in the hospital?” That was what they called the administration building, adjacent to the counselor and teacher dormitories, all beyond a razor-wire topped fence that surrounded the boys' and girls' compounds.

  Celia shook her head. “They gave me oatmeal and eggs for breakfast,” she said. “And a big glass of orange juice.”

  “Did they do a biopsy?”

  Celia bit her lip and let her eyes grow large. “No. Who's had-KUK a biopsy?”

  “Beth Fremont says one of the boys told her. Right out of his . . . you know.” She pointed down and tapped the basketball.

  “Kweeee,” Celia whistle-tongued.

  “What did you dream?” Stella asked.

  “I don't remember. I just woke up with a screech.”

  Stella licked her palms, tasting the paint on the court and the old rubber of the ball and a little of the dust and dirt of other shoes, other players. Then she held out her palms for Celia to clasp. Celia's palms were damp. Celia squeezed and rubbed their hands together, sighed, and let go after a moment. “Thanks,” she said, eyes downcast. Her cheeks turned a steady mottled copper and stayed that way for a while.

  Stella had learned the spit trick from another girl a few weeks after her arrival.

  The door to the gym opened and Miss Kinney came in with ten other girls. Stella knew LaShawna Hamilton and Torry Butler from her dorm; she knew most of the others by name, but had never shared a deme with any of them. And she knew Miss Kinney, the girl's school coach. Miss Kinney led the other girls onto the court. Slung over her shoulder was a duffel bag filled with more balls.

  “How about a little practice?” she asked Celia and Stella.

  “Her arm hurts,” Stella said.

  “Can you bounce and throw?” Miss Kinney asked Celia. Miss Kinney stood about five feet nine inches tall, a little shorter than Stella. The gym teacher was thin and strong, with a long, well-shaped nose and large green eyes, like a cat's.

  Celia got to her feet. She never turned down a challenge from a counselor or a teacher. She thought she was tough.

  “Good,” Miss Kinney said. “I brought some jerseys and shorts. They're ragged, but they'll pass. Let's go put them on. Time to see what you can do.”

  Stella adjusted the baggy shorts with a grimace and tried to focus on the ball. Miss Kinney shouted encouragement from the sidelines to Celia. “Don't just sniff the breeze. Take a shot!”

  All the girls on the court had come to a halt in the middle of hoop practice. Stella looked to Celia, the best at sinking baskets in her group of five.

  Miss Kinney strode forward, exasperated, and put on her best I'm being patient face. Stella would not meet her steady gaze.

  “What is so hard about this?” Miss Kinney asked. “Tell me. I want to know.”

  Stella lowered her eyes farther. “We don't understand the point.”

  “We're going to try something different. You'll compete,” Miss Kinney said. “You'll play against each other and get exercise and learn physical coordination. It's fun.”

  “We could all make more baskets if we formed our own teams,” Stella said. “One team could have three slowing others down, if they were coming in too fast. Seven could play opposite and make baskets.” Stella wondered if she sounded obtuse, but she truly wasn't understanding what Miss Kinney expected of them.

  “That isn't the way it's done,” Miss Kinney said, growing dangerously patient. Miss Kinney never got really angry, but it bothered Stella that she could hold in so much irritation and not express it. It made the teacher smell unpleasant.

  “So, tell us how it's-KUK done,” Celia said. She and LaShawna approached. Celia stood an inch taller than Stella, almost five eleven, and LaShawna was shorter than Miss Kinney, about five seven. Celia had the usual olive-to-brown skin and flyaway reddish hair that never seemed to know what to do or how to hold together on her head. LaShawna was darker, but not much, with finely kinked black hair that formed a slumped nimbus around her ears and down to her shoulders.

  “It's called a game. Come on, girls, you know what a game is.”

  “We play,” Stella said defensively.

  “Of course you play. All of us monkeys play,” the teacher said.

  Stella and LaShawna smiled. Sometimes Miss Kinney was more open and direct than the other teachers. They liked her, which made frustrating her even more distressing.

  “This is organized play. You guys are good at organizing, aren't you? What's not to understand?”

  “Teams,” LaShawna said. “Teams are like demes. But demes choose themselves.” She lifted her hands and spread them beside her temples, making little elephant ears. It was a sign; many of the new children did such things without really understanding why. Sometimes the teachers thought they were acting smart; but not Miss Kinney.

  She glanced at LaShawna's “ears,” blinked, and said for the tenth time, “Teams are not demes. Work with me here. A team is temporary and fun. I choose sides for you.”

  Stella wrinkled her nose.

  “I pick players with complementary abilities. I can help sculpt a team. You understand how that works, I'm sure.”

  “Sure,” Stella said.

  “Then you play against another team, and that makes all of you better players. Plus, you get exercise.”

  “Right,” Stella said. So far, so good. She bounced the ball experimentally.

  “Let's try it again. Just the practice part. Celia, cover Stella. Stella, go for the basket.”

  Celia stood back and dropped into a crouch and spread her arms, as Miss Kinney had told her to do. Stella bounced the ball, made a step forward, remembered the rules, then dribbled toward the basket. The floor of the court was marked with lines and half circles. Stella could smell Celia and knew what she was going to do. Stella moved toward her, and Celia stepped aside with a graceful sweep of her arms, but without any signs or suggestions for adjustment, and Stella, in some confusion, threw the ball. It bounced off the backboard without touching the basket.

  Stella made a face at Celia.

  “You are supposed to try to stop her,” Miss Kinney told Celia.

  “I didn't help her.” Celia glanced apologetically at Stella.

  “No, I mean, actively try to stop her.”

  “But that would be a foul,” Celia said.

  “Only if you cho
p her arms or push her or run into her.”

  Celia said, “We all want to make baskets and be happy, right? If I stop her from getting a basket, won't that reduce the number of baskets?”

  Miss Kinney raised her eyes to the roof. Her face pinked. “You want to get the most baskets for your team, and keep the other team from getting any baskets.”

  Celia was getting tired of thinking this through. Tears started in her eyes. “I thought we were trying to get the most baskets.”

  “For your team,” Miss Kinney said. “Why isn't that clear?”

  “It hurts to make others fail,” Stella said, looking around the court as if to find a door and escape.

  “Oh, puh-leeze, Stella, it's only a game! You play against one another. It's called sport. Everyone can be friendly afterward. There's no harm.”

  “I saw soccer riots on TV once,” LaShawna said. Miss Kinney lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “People got hurt,” LaShawna added doubtfully.

  “There's a lot of passion in sport,” Miss Kinney admitted. “People care, but usually the players don't hurt each other.”

  “They run into each other and lay down for a long time. Someone should have warned them they were about to collide,” said Crystal Newman, who had silver-white hair and smelled like some new kind of citrus tree.

  Miss Kinney motioned the twelve girls to go over to the metal chairs lined up outside the lines. They pulled the chairs into a circle and sat.

  Miss Kinney took a deep breath. “I think maybe I'm missing something,” she said. “Stella, how would you like to play?”

  Stella thought about this. “For exercise, we could push-pull and swing, mosey, you know, like a dance. If we wanted to learn how to run better, or make baskets better, we could set up running academies. Girls could form wavy channels and ovals and others could run the channels. The girls in the wavy channels could tell them how they aren't doing it right.” She pointedly did not tell Miss Kinney about spit-calming, all the players slapping palms, which she had seen athletes do in human games. “Then the runners could shoot baskets from inside the channels and at different distances, until they could sink them from all the way across the court. That's more points, right?”

  Miss Kinney nodded, going along for the moment.

  “We'd switch out a runner and a channel each time. In a couple of hours, I bet most of us could sink baskets really well, and if we added up the points, the teams would have more points than if they, you know, fought with each other.” Stella thought this over very earnestly for an instant and her face lit up. “Maybe a thousand points in a game.”

  “Nobody would want to watch,” Miss Kinney said. She was showing her exhaustion now, but also making a funny little grin that Stella could not interpret. Stella looked at the blinking red light on the nosey on Miss Kinney's belt. Miss Kinney had turned off the nosey before practice, perhaps because the girls often triggered its tiny little wheeping alarm when they exercised, no matter how much self-control they displayed.

  “I would watch!” Celia said, leaning into the words. “I could learn how to train people in motion with, you know, signs.” Celia glanced at Stella conspiratorially, and undered, /Signs and smells and spit, eyes that twirl and brows that knit. It was a little song they sometimes sang in the dorm before sleep; softly. “That would really be fun.”

  The other girls agreed that they understood that sort of game.

  Miss Kinney lifted her hand and twisted it back and forth like a little flag. “What is it? You don't like competition?”

  “We like push-pull,” Stella said. “We do it all the time. On the playground, in the walking square.”

  “Is that when you do those little dances?” Miss Kinney asked.

  “That's mosey or maybe push-pull,” said Harriet Pincher, the stockiest girl in the group. “Palms get sweaty with mosey. They stay dry with push-pull.”

  Stella did not know how to begin to explain the difference. Sweaty palms in a group touch could make all sorts of changes. Individuals could become stronger, more willing to lead, or less aggressive in their push to lead, or simply sit out a deme debate, if one happened. Dry palms indicated a push-pull, and that was less serious, more like play. A deme needed to adjust all the time, and there were many ways to do that, some fun, some more like hard work.

  Rarely, a deme adjustment involved stronger measures. The few attempts she had seen had resulted in some pretty nasty reactions. She didn't want to bring that up now, though Miss Kinney seemed genuinely interested.

  Adjusting to humans was a puzzle. The new children were supposed to do all the adjusting, and that made it hard.

  “Come on,” said Miss Kinney, getting up. “Try again. Humor me.”

  4

  Pathogenics Centers

  Viral Threat Assessment Division

  Sandia Labs

  NEW MEXICO

  “We trade a lot of aptronyms to let off steam,” Jonathan Turner said as he spun the golf cart up to the concrete guard box.

  “Aptronyms?” Christopher Dicken asked.

  The sun had set in typical New Mexico fashion—suddenly and with some drama. Halogen lamps were switching on all over the facility, casting the plain and often downright ugly architecture into stark artificial day.

  “Names that suit the job. I'll give you an example,” Turner said. “We have a doctor here at Sandia named Polk. Asa Polk.”

  “Ah,” Dicken said. The guard box stood empty. Something small and white moved back and forth behind smoked glass windows. A long steel tube jutted from the side. He used a handkerchief to wipe sweat from his cheeks and forehead. The sweat was not just from the heat. He did not like this new role. He did not like secrets.

  In particular, he did not like stepping into the belly of the beast.

  Turner followed his gaze. “Nobody home,” he said. “We still use people at the main gates, but here it's an automated sentry.” Dicken caught a glimpse of a grid of purple beams scooting over Turner's face, then his own.

  A green light glowed beside the gate.

  “You are who we say you are, Dr. Dicken,” Turner said. He reached into a small box under the dash and took out a plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD. “The rag, please, Kleenex in your pockets, anything used to sop. Nothing like that is allowed in or out. Clothing is bad enough.”

  Dicken dropped the handkerchief into the bag, and Turner sealed it and slipped it into a small metal drop box. The concrete and iron barriers sank and drew back.

  “In accounting, we have Mr. Ledger,” Turner said as he drove through. “And in statistics, Dr. Damlye.”

  “I once worked with a pathologist named Boddy,” Dicken said.

  Turner nodded provisional approval. “One of our arbovirus geniuses is named Bugg.”

  The cart hummed past a dark gray water tower and five pressurized gas cylinders painted lime green, then crossed a median to a fenced enclosure containing a large white satellite dish. With a flourish, Turner did a 360 around the dish, then drove up to a row of squat bungalows. Behind the bungalows, and beyond several electrified fences topped with razor wire, lay five concrete warehouses, all of them together code-named Madhouse. The fences were patrolled by squat gray robots and soldiers toting automatic weapons.

  “I once knew a plastic surgeon named Scarry,” Dicken said.

  Turner smiled approval. “An auto mechanic named Torker.”

  “A nuclear chemist named Mason.”

  Turner grimaced. “You can do better. It may be essential to your sanity, working here.”

  “I'm fresh out,” Dicken admitted.

  “I could go on for days. Hundreds and hundreds, all on file and verified. None of this urban legend crap.”

  “I thought you said just personal acquaintances.”

  “I may have been handicapping you,” Turner admitted, and pulled the cart into a parking space marked in cargo letters on a white placard: #3 madhouse honcho. “A gynecologist named Box.”

  “An anthropologist named Mann,” Di
cken said, peering right at the sunning cages for the more hirsute residents of the Madhouse, now empty. “Mustn't let down the team.”

  “A dog trainer named Doggett.”

  “A traffic cop named Rush.” Dicken felt himself warming to the game.

  “A cabby named Parker,” Turner countered.

  “A compulsive gambler named Chip.”

  “A proctologist named Poker,” Turner said.

  “You used that one.”

  “Scout's honor, it's another,” Turner said. “And I was a scout, believe it or not.”

  “Merit badge in hemorrhagic fevers?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  They walked toward the plain double doors and the white-lit corridor beyond. Dicken's brow furrowed. “A pathologist named Thomas Shew,” he said, and smiled sheepishly.

  “So?”

  “T. Shew.”

  Turner groaned and opened the door for Dicken. “Welcome to the Madhouse, Dr. Dicken. Initiation begins in half an hour. Need to make a pit stop first? Restrooms to your right. The cleanest loos in Christendom.”

  “Not necessary,” Dicken said.

  “You should, really. Initiation begins with drinking three bottles of Bud Light, and ends with drinking three bottles of Becks or Heinekens. This symbolizes the transition from the halls of typical piss-poor science to the exalted ranks of Sandia Pathogenics.”

  “I'm fine.” Dicken tapped his forehead. “A libertarian named State,” he offered.

  “Ah, that's a different game entirely,” Turner said.

  He rapped on the closed door to an office and stood back, folding his hands. Dicken looked along the cinder block hallway, then down to the concrete gutters on each side, then up at sprinkler heads mounted every six feet. Long red or green tags hung from the sprinkler heads, twisting in a slow current of air flowing north to south. The red tags read: caution: acid solution and detergent. A second pipe and sprinkler system on the left side of the corridor carried green tags that read: Extreme caution: chlorine dioxide.

  At the southern end of the corridor, a large fan mounted in the wall slowly turned. During an emergency, the fan would switch off to allow the corridor to fill with sterilizing gas. Once the area had been decontaminated, the fan would evacuate the toxic atmosphere into big scrubbing chambers.