Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  Stella dipped her head and rubbed her nose. She touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye and then to her tongue, out of sight of the rearview mirror. Her eyes were moist and the tears tasted of bitter salt. She would not cry openly, however. Not in front of a human.

  Miss Kantor stopped the truck in the parking lot of the flat brick building, got out, and opened Stella's door. Stella followed her into the hospital. As they turned a corner, through a gap in the brick breezeway she saw a long yellow bus drawn up beside the processing office. A load of new kids had arrived. Stella hung back a few steps from Miss Kantor as they passed through the glass doors and walked to the detention center.

  The door to the secretary's office was always open, and through the wide window beyond, Stella thought she would catch a glimpse of the new kids from the shipment center. That would be something to take back to the deme; possible recruits or news from outside.

  Suddenly, irrationally, she hated Mitch. She did not want him to visit. She did not want any distractions. She wanted to focus and never have to worry about humans again. She wanted to lash out at Miss Kantor, strike her down to the linoleum floor, and run away to anywhere but here.

  Through Stella's brief, fierce scowl—a more intense scowl than most humans could manage—she caught a glimpse of the lineup of children beyond the secretary's window. Her scowl vanished.

  She thought she recognized a face.

  Stella dropped to remove her shoe and turned it upside down, shaking it. Miss Kantor looked back and stopped with hands on hips.

  The nosey on her belt wheeped.

  “Are you scenting again?” she asked.

  “No, ma'am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.

  She did know the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.

  She no longer worried about Mitch.

  The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket's shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye's and Mitch's house.

  It was Will. Strong Will.

  13

  BALTIMORE

  Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.

  Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.

  All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.

  Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.

  The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.

  “This isn't a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.

  “It feels like you love me,” she said, shaking with frustration. “So why do you torment me? Why don't you just tell me what you want me to do?” Kaye slid down the bench to a chair near a desk in the corner of the lab. She put her head between her knees. She did not feel weak or even woozy; she could have walked around and even gone about her daily work. She had before. But this time it was just too much.

  Her anger swelled even over the insistent waves of validation and approval. The first time the caller had touched her, Mitch and Stella had been taken away. That had been so bad, so unfair; she did not want to remember that time now. And yet this affirmation forced her to remember.

  “Go away. Please. I don't know why you're here. This world is cruel, even if you aren't, and I have to keep working.”

  She looked around, biting her lip, seeing the lab, the equipment, so neatly arranged, the dark beyond the window. The wall of night outside, the bright rationality within.

  “Please.”

  She felt the voice become smaller, but no less intense. How polite, she thought. Abruptly, panicked at this new loss, this possible withdrawal, she jumped to her feet.

  “Are you trying to clue me in to something?” she asked, desperate. “Reward me for my work, my discoveries?”

  Kaye received the distinct impression that this was not the case. She got up and made sure the door was locked. No sense having people wander in and find her talking to herself. She paced up and down the aisles. “So you're willing to communicate, just not with words,” she said, eyes half-closed. “All right. I'll talk. You let me know whether I'm right or wrong, okay? This could take a while.”

  She had long since learned that an irreverent attitude had no effect on the caller. Even when Kaye had loathed herself for what she had done by abandoning Mitch in prison and her daughter in the schools, ruining all their lives in a desperate gamble to use all the tools of science and rationality, the caller had still radiated love and approval.

  She could punish herself, but the caller would not.

  Even more embarrassing, Kaye had come to think of the caller as definitely not female, and probably not neuter—but male. The caller was nothing like her father or Mitch or any other man she had ever met or known, but it seemed strangely masculine nonetheless. What that meant psychologically, she was most unwilling to discover. It was a little too de rigueur, a little too churchy, for comfort.

  But the caller cared little about her qualms. He was the most consistent thing in her life—outside of her need to help Stella.

  “Am I doing the right thing?” she asked, looking around the lab. Her tremors stopped. She let the extraordinary calm wash over her. “That means yes, I suppose,” she said tentatively. “Are you the Big Guy? Are you Jesus? Or just Gabriel?”

  She had asked these questions before, and received no response. This time, however, she felt an almost insignificant alteration in the sensations flooding through her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “No. None of the above. Are you my guardian angel?”

  Again, a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and whispered, “No.

  “Then what are you?”

  No response at all, no change, no clues.

  “God?”

  Nothing.

  “You're inside me or up there or someplace where you can just pump out love and approval all day long, and then you go away and leave me in misery. I don't understand that. I need to know whether you're just something in my head. A crossed nerve. A burst blood vessel.
I need solid reassurance. I hope you don't mind.”

  The caller expressed no objection, not even to the extent of withdrawing under the assault of such questioning, such blasphemies.

  “You're really something else, you know that?” Kaye sat before the workstation and logged on to the Americol intranet. “There's nothing Sunday school about you.”

  She glanced at her watch—6 p.m.—and looked up the roster that recorded who was in the building at this hour.

  On the first floor, chief radiologist Herbert Roth was still at his post, working late. Just the man she needed. Roth was in charge of the Noninvasive Imaging Lab. She had worked with him two weeks ago taking scans of Wishtoes, their oldest female chimp.

  Roth was young, quiet, dedicated to his craft.

  Kaye opened the lab door and stepped out into the hall. “Do you think Mr. Roth will want to scan me?” she asked no one in particular.

  14

  ARIZONA

  They did not let Stella see Mitch for hours. First Stella was visited by a nurse who examined her, took a cheek swab, and drew a few cc's of blood.

  Stella looked away as the nurse lightly jabbed her with the needle. She could smell the nurse's anxiety; she was only a few years older than Stella and did not like this.

  Afterward, Miss Kantor took Stella to the visitor's area. The first thing Stella noticed was that they had removed the plastic barrier. Tables and chairs, nothing more. Something had changed, and that concerned her for a moment. She patted the cotton patch taped to the inside of her elbow. After an hour, Miss Kantor returned with a pile of comic books.

  “X-Men,” she said. “You'll like these. Your father's still being examined. Give me the cotton.”

  Stella pulled off the tape and handed it to Miss Kantor, who opened a plastic bag to store it.

  “He'll be done soon,” Miss Kantor said with a practiced smile.

  Stella ignored the comics and stood in the bare room with its flowered wallpaper and the single table and two plastic chairs. There was a water cooler in the corner and a couple of lounge chairs, patched and dirty. She filled a paper cup with water. A window opened from the main office, and another window looked out over the parking lot. No hot coffee or tea, no hot plate for warming food—no utensils. Family visits were not meant to last long or to be particularly comfortable.

  She curled the paper cup in her hand and thought alternately about her father and about Will. Thinking about Will pushed her father into the background, if only for a moment, and Stella did not like that. She did not want to be chaotic. She did not want to be unpredictable; she wanted to be faithful to the goal of putting together a stable deme, away from the school, away from human interference, and that would require focus and an emotional constancy.

  She knew nothing about Will. She did not even know his last name. He might not remember her. Perhaps he was passing through, getting a checkup or going through some sort of quarantine on his way to another school.

  But if he was staying . . .

  Joanie opened the door. “Your father's here,” she said. Joanie always tried to hide her smell behind baby powder. Her expression was friendly but empty. She did what Miss Kantor wanted and seldom expressed her own opinions.

  “Okay,” Stella said, and took a seat in one plastic chair. The table would be between them, she hoped. She squirmed nervously. She had to get used to the thought of seeing Mitch again.

  Joanie pointed the way through the door and Mitch came in. His left arm hung by his side. Stella looked at the arm, eyes wide, and then at Mitch's denim jacket and jeans, worn and a little dusty. And then she looked at his face.

  Mitch was forcing a nervous smile. He did not know what to do, either.

  “Hello, sweetie,” he said.

  “You can sit in the chair,” Joanie said. “Take your time.”

  “How long do we have?” Mitch asked Joanie. Stella hated that. She remembered him as being strong and in charge, and his having to ask about such a thing was wrong.

  “We don't have many visits scheduled today. There are four rooms. So . . . take your time. A couple of hours. Let me know if you need anything. I'll be in the office right outside.”

  Joanie shut the door and Mitch looked at the chair, the table. Then, at his daughter.

  “Don't you want a hug?” he asked Stella.

  Stella stood, her cheeks tawny with emotion. She kept her hands by her sides. Mitch walked across the room slowly, and she tracked him like a wild animal. Then the currents of air in the room brought his scent, and the cry came up out of her before she could stop it. Mitch took the last step and grabbed her and squeezed and Stella shook in his arms. Her eyes filled with tears that dripped on Mitch's jacket.

  “You're so tall,” Mitch murmured, swinging her gently back and forth, brushing the tips of her shoes against the linoleum.

  She planted her feet and pushed him back and tried to pack in her emotions, but they did not fit. They had exploded like popcorn.

  “I've never given up,” Mitch said.

  Stella's long fingers clutched at his jacket. The smell of him was overwhelming, comfortable and familiar; it made her feel like a little girl again. He was basic and simple, no elaborations, predictable and memorable; he was the smell of their home in Virginia, of everything she had tried to forget, everything she had thought was lost.

  “I couldn't come to see you,” he said. “They wouldn't let me. Part of probation.”

  She nodded, bumping her chin gently against his shoulder.

  “I sent your mother messages.”

  “She gave them to me.”

  “There was no gun, Stella. They lied,” Mitch said, and for a moment he looked no older than her, just another disappointed child.

  “I know. Kaye told me.”

  Mitch held his daughter at arm's length. “You're gorgeous,” he said, his thick brows drawing together. His face was sunburned. Stella could smell the damage to his skin, the toughening. He smelled like leather and dust above the fundamental of just being Mitch. In his smell—and in Kaye's—she could detect a little of her own fundamental, like a shared license number in the genes, a common passkey to the emotions.

  “They want us to sit . . . here?” Mitch asked, swinging one arm at the table.

  Stella wrapped her arms around herself, still jammed up inside. She did not know what to do.

  Mitch smiled. “Let's just stand for a while,” he said.

  “All right,” Stella said.

  “Try to get used to each other again.”

  “All right.”

  “Are they treating you well?” Mitch asked.

  “They probably think so.”

  “What do you think?”

  Shrug, long fingers wrapping around her wrists, making a little cage of her hands and arms. “They're afraid of us.”

  Mitch clenched his jaw and nodded. “Nothing new.”

  Stella's eyes were hypnotic as she tried to express herself. Her pupils shifted size and gold flecks passed like fizz in champagne. “They don't want us to be who we are.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They move us from one dorm to another. They use sniffers. If we scent, we're punished. If we cloud-scent or fever scent, they break us up and keep us in detention.”

  “I've read about that,” Mitch said.

  “They think we'll try to persuade them. Maybe they're afraid we'll try to escape. They wear nose plugs, and sometimes they fill the dorms with fake strawberry or peach smell when they do a health inspection. I used to like strawberry, but now it's awful. Worst of all is the Pine-Sol.” She shoved her palm against her nose and made a gagging sound.

  “I hear the classes are boring, too.”

  “They're afraid we'll learn something,” Stella said, and giggled. Mitch felt a tingle. That sound had changed, and the change was not subtle. She sounded wary, more mature . . . but something else was at work.

  Laughter was a key gauge of psychology and culture. His daughter was very differe
nt from the little girl he had known.

  “I've learned a lot from the others,” Stella said, straightening her face. Mitch traced the faint marks of lines under and beside her eyes, at the corners of her lips, fascinated by the dance of clues to her emotions. Finer muscle control than she had had as a youngster . . . capable of expressions he could not begin to interpret.

  “Are you doing okay?” Mitch asked, very seriously.

  “I'm doing better than they want,” she said. “It isn't so bad, because we manage.” She glanced up at the ceiling, touched her earlobe, winked. Of course, they were being monitored; she did not want to give away any secrets.

  “Glad to hear it,” Mitch said.

  “But of course there's stuff they already know,” she added in a low voice. “I'll tell you about that if you want.”

  “Of course, sweetie,” Mitch said. “Anything.”

  Stella kept her eyes on the top of the table as she told Mitch about the groups of twenty to thirty that called themselves demes. “It means ‘the people,’ ” she said. “We're like sisters in the demes. But they don't let the boys sleep in the same dorms, the same barracks. So we have to sing across the wire at night and try to recruit boys into our demes that way.”

  “That's probably for the best,” Mitch said. He lifted one eyebrow and pinched his lips together.

  Stella shook her head. “But they don't understand. The deme is like a big family. We help each other. We talk and solve problems and stop arguments. We're so smart when we're in a deme. We feel so right together. Maybe that's why . . .”

  Mitch leaned back as his daughter suddenly spoke in two bursts at once:

  “We need to be together/We're healthier together

  “Everyone cares for the others/Everyone is happy with the others

  “The sadness comes from not knowing/The sadness comes from being apart.”

  The absolute clarity of the two streams astonished him. If he caught them immediately and analyzed, he could string them together into a serial statement, but over more than a few seconds of conversation, it was obvious he would get confused. And he had no doubt that Stella could now go on that way indefinitely.