by Greg Bear
Roth pushed his chair back with an echoing scrape and pointed to a blue-and-green sagittal section of a head, small and oddly shaped. He filled in and rotated the image in 3-D, and Kaye made out the outlines of an infant's skull and the fog of the brain within. Radiating fields of mental activity spun within ghostly curves of bone and tissue.
An indefinite grayish mass seemed to issue from the infant's mouth.
“Not so much detail, but it's a pretty close match,” Roth said. “Famous experiment in Japan, about eight years ago. They scanned a normal birthing session. Woman had had four kids previously. She was an old pro. The machines didn't bother her.”
Roth studied the image. He hummed for a moment, then clicked his fingernails like castanets. “This is a scan of the infant's brain while he or she was getting acquainted with mom. Taking the teat, I'd say.” He used his finger to point out the gray mass, magnified the activity centers in the infant's brain, rotated them to the proper azimuth, then superimposed the baby's scan on Kaye's.
The activity centers lined up neatly.
Roth smiled. “What do you think? A match?”
Kaye was lost for a moment, remembering the first time Stella had suckled, the wonderful sensation of the baby at her nipple, of her milk letting down.
“They look the same,” she said. “Is that a mistake?”
“Don't think so,” Roth said. “I could make some animal brain comparisons. There's been some work in the last few years on bonding in kittens and puppies, even some in baboons, but not very good. They don't hold still.”
“What does it mean?” Kaye asked. She shook her head, still lost. “Whatever He is, He's not using speech—that much has been clear from the start. Irritating, actually.”
“Mumbles from the burning bush?” Roth said. “And no stone tablets.”
“No speeches, no proclamations, nothing,” Kaye confirmed.
“Look, this is the closest I can come to a match,” Roth said.
With her finger, Kaye traced the Rorschach birds inside the infant's brain. “I still don't understand.”
Roth tilted his head. “Looks to me like you've made a big connection. You're imprinting on someone or something big-time. You've become a baby again, Ms. Rafelson.”
16
Kaye unlocked her apartment, entered, and used her briefcase to block the front door from closing. She punched in her six-number code to deactivate the alarm, then took off her sweater, hung it in the closet, and stood in the hallway, breathing deeply to keep from sobbing. She wasn't sure how much longer she could endure this. The voids in her life were like deserts she could not cross.
“What about you?” she asked the empty air. She walked into the darkened living room. “The way I see it, if you're some kind of big daddy, you protect those you love, you keep them from harm. What's the God . . . what's the damned,” she finally shouted it, “the God damned excuse?”
The phone beeped. Kaye jumped, pulled her eyes away from the corner of the ceiling she had been addressing, stepped to the kitchen counter, and reached across to pick up the handset.
“Kaye? It's Mitch.”
Kaye drew in another breath, almost of dread, certainly of guilt, before speaking. “I'm here.” She sat stiffly upright in the easy chair and covered the mouthpiece as she told the lights to switch on. The living room was small and neat, except for stacks of journals and offprints arrayed at angles to each other on the coffee table. Other piles spilled across the floor beside the couch.
“Are you all right?”
“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I'm not. Are you?”
Mitch did not answer this. Good for him, Kaye thought.
“I'm on the road again,” he said.
A pause.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Oregon. My horse broke down and I thought I'd give you a call, ask if you had some extra . . . I don't know. Horseshoes.” He sounded even more exhausted than she was. Kaye intercepted something else in his tone and zeroed in with sudden hope.
“You saw Stella?”
“They let me see Stella. Lucky guy, right?”
“Is she well?”
“She gave me a big hug. She's looking pretty good. She cried, Kaye.”
Kaye felt her throat catch. She held the phone aside and coughed into her fist. “She misses you. Sorry. Dry throat. I need some water.” She walked into the kitchen to take a bottle from the refrigerator.
“She misses both of us,” Mitch said.
“I can't be there. I can't protect her. What's to miss?”
“I just wanted to call and tell you about her. She's growing up. It makes me feel lost, thinking that she's almost grown and I wasn't around.”
“Not your fault,” she said.
“How's the work?”
“Finished soon,” Kaye said. “I don't know if they'll believe it. So many are still stuck in old ruts.”
“Robert Jackson?”
“Yeah, him, too.”
“You're lucky to be working at what you do best,” Mitch said. “Listen, I'm—”
“You don't deserve what happened, Mitch.”
Another pause. You didn't deserve being dumped, she added to herself. Kaye looked back to that empty corner of wall and ceiling and continued, “I miss you.” She tightened her lips to keep them from trembling. “What's in Oregon?”
“Eileen's got something going, very mysterious, so I left the dig in Texas. I mistook a clamshell for a whelk. I'm getting old, Kaye.”
“Bullshit,” Kaye said.
“You give me the word, I'll drive straight to Maryland.” Mitch's voice steeled. “I swear. Let's go get Stella.”
“Stop it,” Kaye said, though with sudden gentleness. “I want to, you know that. We have to keep to our plan.”
“Right,” Mitch said, and Kaye was acutely aware he had had no part in making the plan. Perhaps until now Mitch had not really been informed there was a plan. And that was Kaye's fault. She had not been able to protect her husband or her daughter, the most important people on Earth. So who am I to accuse?
“What are the kids up to? How has she changed?” Kaye asked.
“They're forming groups. Demes, they call them. The schools are trying to keep them broken up and disorganized. I'd guess they're finding ways around that. There's a lot of scenting involved, of course, and Stella talks about new kinds of language, but we didn't have time for details. She looks healthy, she's bright, and she doesn't seem too stressed out.”
Kaye fixed on this so intensely her eyes crossed. “I tried to call her last week. They wouldn't put me through.”
“The bastards,” Mitch said, his voice grating.
“Go help Eileen. But keep in touch. I really need to hear from you.”
“That's good news.”
Kaye let her chin drop to her chest, and stretched out her legs. “I'm relaxing,” she said. “Listening to you relaxes me. Tell me what she looks like.”
“Sometimes she moves or acts or talks like you. Sometimes she reminds me of my father.”
“I noticed that years ago,” Kaye said.
“But she's very much her own person, her own type,” Mitch said. “I wish we could run our own school, bring lots of kids together. I think that's the only way Stella would be happy.”
“We were wrong to isolate her.”
“We didn't have any choice.”
“Anyway, that's not an issue now. Is she happy?”
“Maybe happier, but not exactly happy,” Mitch said. “I'm calling on a landline now, but let me give you a new phone code.”
Kaye took up a pad and wrote down a string of numbers keyed to a book she still kept in her suitcase. “You think they're still listening?”
“Of course. Hello, Ms. Browning, you there?”
“Not funny,” Kaye said. “I ran into Mark Augustine on Capitol Hill. That was . . .” It took her a few seconds to remember. “Yesterday. Sorry, I'm just tired.”
“What about him?”
/> “He seemed apologetic. Does that make sense?”
“He was busted to the ranks,” Mitch said. “He deserves to be apologetic.”
“Yeah. But something else . . .”
“You think the atmosphere is changing?”
“Browning was there, and she treated me like a Roman general standing over a dying Gaul.”
Mitch laughed.
“God, that is so good to hear,” Kaye said, tapping her pen on the message pad and drawing loops around the numbers, across the pad.
“Give me the word, Kaye. Just one word.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Kaye said, and sucked in a breath against the lump in her throat. “I hate it so much, being alone.”
“I know you're on the right course,” Mitch said, and Kaye heard the reserve in his voice, filling in, even if it means leaving me outside.
“Maybe,” Kaye said. “But it is so hard.” She wanted to tell him about the other things, the imaging lab, chasing down her visitor, the caller, and finding nothing conclusive. But she remembered that Mitch had not reacted well to her attempts to talk about it on their last night together in the cabin.
She remembered as well the love-making, familiar and sweet and more than a little desperate. Her body warmed. “You know I want to be with you,” Kaye said.
“That's my line.” Mitch's voice was hopeful, fragile.
“You'll be at Eileen's site. It is a site, I assume?”
“I don't know yet.”
“What do you think she's found?”
“She's not telling,” Mitch said.
“Where is it?”
“Can't say. I get my final directions tomorrow.”
“She's being more cagey than usual, isn't she?”
“Yeah.” She heard Mitch moving, breathing into the handset. She could hear as well the wind blowing behind and around him, almost picture her man, rugged, tall, his head lit up by the dome light in the booth. If it was a booth. The phone might be next to a gas station or a restaurant.
“I can't tell you how good this is,” Kaye said.
“Sure you can.”
“It is so good.”
“I should have called earlier. I just felt out of place or something.”
“I know.”
“Something's changed, hasn't it?”
“There's not much more I can do at Americol. Showdown is tomorrow. Jackson actually dropped off his game plan today, he's that cocky. They either listen to the truth or they ignore it. I want to . . . I'll just fly out to see you. Save me a shovel.”
“You'll get rough hands.”
“I love rough hands.”
“I believe in you, Kaye,” Mitch said. “You'll do it. You'll win.”
She did not know how to answer but her body quivered. Mitch murmured his love and Kaye returned his words, and then they cut off the connection.
Kaye sat for a moment in the warm yellow glow of the small living room, surveying the empty walls, the plain rented furniture, the stacks of white paper. “I'm imprinting,” she whispered. “Something says it loves me and believes in me but how can anything fill an empty shell?” She rephrased the question. “How can anyone or anything believe in an empty shell?”
Leaning her head back, she felt a tingling warmth. With some awe she realized she had not asked for help, yet help had arrived. Her needs—some of them, at least—had been answered.
At that, Kaye finally let down her emotions and began to weep. Still crying, she made up her bed, fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate, fluffed a pillow and set it against the headboard, disrobed and put on satin pajamas, then fetched a stack of reprints from the living room to read. The words blurred through her tears, and she could hardly keep her eyes open, but she needed to prepare for the next day. She needed to have all her armor on, all her facts straight.
For Stella. For Mitch.
When she could stand it no more and sleep was stealing the last of her thoughts, she ordered the light to turn off, rolled over in bed, and moved her lips, Thank you. I hope.
You are hope.
But she could not help asking one more question. Why are you doing this? Why talk to us at all?
She stared at the wall opposite the bed, then dropped her focus to the cover rising with her knees above the bed. Her eyes widened and her breath slowed. Through the shadowy grayness of the cover, Kaye seemed to look into an infinite and invisible fount. The fount poured forth something she could only describe as love, no other word was right, however inadequate it was; love never-ending and unconditional. Her heart thudded in her chest. For a moment, she was frightened—she could never deserve that love, never find its like again on this Earth.
Love without condition—without desire, direction, or any quality other than its purity.
“I don't know what that means,” she said. “I'm sorry.”
Kaye felt the vision, if that was what it was, withdraw and fade—not out of resentment or anger or disappointment, but just because it was time to end. It left a mellow, peaceful glow behind, like candles thick as stars behind her eyes.
The wonder of that, the awesome wonder, was too much for her. She laid her head back and stared into the darkness until she drifted off to sleep.
Almost immediately, it seemed, she dreamed of walking over a field of snow high in the mountains. It did not matter that she was lost and alone. She was going to meet someone wonderful.
17
OREGON
The high desert morning was warm and it was barely seven o'clock. Mitch walked across the motel parking lot, swung his bag into the battered old truck's side seat and shielded his eyes against the sun over the low, gray eastern hills. An hour to the Spent River. Half an hour to the outlying camp. He had his instructions from Eileen, and one more warning: Don't breathe a word to anyone. No students, no wives, no girlfriends, no dogs, no cats, no guinea pigs: Got it?
He got it.
He pulled out of the Motel 50 parking lot, scraping his bumper on the way. The old truck was on its last few thousand miles; it smelled of singed oil and was starting to cough blue smoke on the grades. Mitch loved big old trucks and cars. He would be sad to see the truck die.
The motel's red sign grew tiny in his mirror. The road was straight and on either side lay rolling brown terrain daubed with greasewood and sage and low, stubby pines and an occasional sketchy line of fence posts, leaning and forlorn, the wire broken and coiled like old hair.
The air got cooler as the truck climbed the gentle grade into the high country. The Spent River was not on the itinerary of most tourists. Surrounded by forest, in the long shadow of Mount Hood, it consisted of a winding, flat sandy bed cutting through black lava cliffs, leaving tufty islands and curving oxbows. The river itself hadn't flowed for many thousands of years. It was not well known to archaeologists, and with good reason; the geological history of alternating floods—gravel beds filled with pebbly lava and rounded bits of granite and basalt—and periodic eruptions of lava made it hellacious to dig and disappointing to those who did. Indians had not built or stayed much in these areas over the last few thousand years.
Out of time, out of human interest, but now Eileen Ripper had found something.
Or she had looked into the sun too long.
The road mesmerized him after a while, but he was jounced to full alertness when it started to get rough from washouts. The land had taken on a five o'clock stubble of trees and grass. The asphalt switched to gravel.
A small state sign came and went: spent river recreation area: three miles. The sign looked as if it had been out in the sun for at least fifty years.
The road curved west abruptly, and as he turned, Mitch caught a gleam about a mile ahead. It looked like a car windshield.
The old truck barked out blue smoke as he took a short grade, then he spotted a white Tahoe and saw a stocky figure standing up and waving from the open driver's door. He pulled over to the side of the road and draped his arm out the window. Enough grip remained in his hand to clutch the
door frame and make the gesture look casual.
Eileen had gone completely gray. Her clothes and skin and hair had weathered to the color of the land out here.
“I recognized your taste in trucks,” Eileen said as she walked across the gravel shoulder. “God, Mitch, you're as obvious as a sailor with a stack of two-dollar bills.”
Mitch smiled. “You're a regular Earth mother,” he said. “You should at least wear a red scarf.”
Eileen pulled a rag from her pocket and draped it from her belt. “Better?”
“Just fine.”
“How's your arm?” she asked, patting it.
“Limp,” Mitch said.
“We'll put you on toothbrush detail,” she said.
“Sounds good. What have you got?”
“It's dishy,” Eileen said. “It's grand.” She did a little jig on the gravel. “It's deadly dangerous. Want to come see?”
Mitch squint-eyed her for a moment. “Why not?” he said.
“It's just over there,” she said and pointed north, “about ten more miles.”
Mitch scowled. “I'm not sure my truck will make it.”
“I'll follow and scoop up parts.”
“How can you tell me when to turn?” Mitch asked.
“It's a game, old friend,” Eileen said. “You'll have to sniff it out, same as I did.” She smiled wickedly.
Mitch squinted harder and shook his head. “For Christ's sake, Eileen.”
“Older than Christ by at least eighteen thousand years,” she said.
“You should wear thicker hats,” he said.
Eileen looked tired beneath the bravado. “This is the big one, Mitch. In a couple of hours, I swear to God you won't even know who you are.”