Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  18

  ARIZONA

  At eleven in the morning, Stella walked with all the girls from their barracks through a gate in the razor wire fence to the open field, attended by Miss Kantor and Joanie and five other adults.

  Once a week, the counselors and teachers let the SHEVA children mingle coed on the playground and under the lunch table awnings.

  The girls were uncharacteristically quiet. Stella felt the tension. A year ago, going through the fence to socialize with the boys had been no big deal. Now, every girl who imagined herself a deme maker was plotting with her partners as to which boys would be best in their group. Stella did not know what to think about this. She watched the demes form and disintegrate and reform in the girl's dorms, and her own plans changed in her head from day to day; it was all so confusing.

  The sky was sprinkled with broken clouds. She shaded her eyes and looked up and saw the moon hanging in the pure summer blueness, a wan face blankly amused by their silliness. Stella wondered what the moon smelled like. It looked kindly enough. It looked a little simple, actually.

  “Single file. We're going to South Section Five,” Miss Kantor told them all, and waved her hand to give them direction. The girls shuffled where she pointed, cheeks blank.

  Stella saw the boys come through their own fence line from the opposite rows of barracks. They were more touching heads and weaving and pointing out the girls they noticed. They smiled like goofs, cheeks brown at this distance with indistinguishable color.

  “Oh, joy,” Celia said listlessly. “Same old.”

  The sexes would be allowed to mingle with heavy supervision for an hour.

  “Is he here?” Celia asked. Stella had told her last night about Will.

  Stella did not know. She hadn't seen him yet. She didn't think it likely. She indicated all this with a low whistle, a few desultory freckles, and a twitch of her shoulders. “My, you're-KUK touchy,” Celia said. She bumped shoulders with Stella as they walked. Stella did not mind.

  “I don't know what they expect us to do in an hour,” Stella said.

  Celia giggled. “We could try to-KUK kiss one of them.”

  Stella's brows formed an uneven pair of curves and her neck darkened. Celia ignored this. “I could kiss James Callahan. I almost let him hold my hand last year.”

  “We were kids last year,” Stella said.

  “What-KUK are we now?” Celia asked.

  Stella was looking down a line of boys drawn up in the sun beside the lunch table awnings. The tallest she recognized immediately.

  “There he is,” she said, and pointed him out to Celia. Three other girls moved in and followed her point, all smelling of aroused curiosity—smoke and earth.

  Will stood, looking at the ground with shoulders slumped and hands stuck firmly in his pockets. The other boys seemed to be ignoring him, which was to be expected; boys didn't cloud as quickly with newcomers as girls did. It would take Will a few days to form tight bonds with his barracks partners.

  Or maybe not, Stella thought, watching him. Maybe he never would.

  “He's not very pretty,” said Felice Miller, a small, brown-haired girl with thin, strong arms and thicker legs.

  “How do you know?” asked Ellie Gow. “You can't smell him from here.”

  “He wouldn't smell pretty, either,” Felice said disdainfully. “He's too tall.”

  Ellie winced. She was known for her sensitivity to sounds and a preference for talking while lying under a blanket. “What's that got to do with a cat's fart?”

  Felice smiled tolerantly. “Whiskers,” she said.

  Stella paid no attention to them.

  “Someone you met when you were young can exert a profound influence,” Felice continued.

  “I didn't see him for very long,” Stella admitted.

  Celia quickly told them the story of Stella and Will, speaking in her halting double, while the counselors and teachers huddled and arranged the rules of the confab. The rules changed week to week. Today, on the outskirts of the field, three men stood watching them with binoculars.

  Nine months ago, Stella had been taken aside and driven to the hospital with five other girls after such a meeting. They had all given blood and one, Nor Upjohn, had suffered other indignities she would not describe, and afterward she had smelled like a mildewed orange, a warning scent.

  The girls made their formation, four long columns of fifty each. The counselors did not try to stop them from talking, and Stella saw that some of them—possibly all—had turned off their nosies.

  Will looked across the brown grass and gravel at the lines of girls. His brows drew into a narrow straight line and he seemed to be sucking on something sour. His matted hair was cut jagged and his cheeks were hollow pits, as if he had lost some teeth. He looked older than the others, and tired. He looked defeated.

  “He's not pretty, he's ugly,” Felice said, and with a shrug turned her attention to the other boys they had not seen before. Stella had counted the new arrivals on the bus: fifty-three. She had to agree with Felice. Whatever her memory of Strong Will, this fellow was no one's idea of a good deme partner.

  “You want to cloud with him?” Celia asked in disbelief.

  “No,” Stella said, and looked away with a sharp pang of disappointment.

  The woods were far away now for both of them.

  “What's anything got to do with toad skin?” Ellie asked nervously as the teachers started to shoo the rows and columns toward each other.

  “Crow on the road,” Felice replied.

  “What's that have to do with apple feathers?” Ellie riposted by reflex.

  “Oh, just-KUK grow,” Celia said. Her face wrinkled like a dried peach in a sudden despair of shyness. “Grow big and hide me.”

  The lines drew up before the concrete lunch tables and the boys were pushed to go and sit, three to one side, leaving the opposite side of each table empty.

  “What'll we say?” Ellie asked, hiding her eyes as their turn approached.

  “Same thing we always say,” Stella said. “Hello and how are you. And ask how their demes are growing and what they're doing on the other side of the wire.”

  “Harry, Harry, quite contrary,” Felice sang in an undertone, “how does your garden grow? Pubic hairs and wanton stares, making the hormones flow.”

  Ellie told her to shush. Miss Kantor walked in front of the rows from their barracks. “All right, girls,” she said. “You may talk, you may look. You may not touch.”

  But the nosies are turned off, Stella thought. The girls fanned out from the lines. Stella looked up at the cameras mounted on the long steel poles, swinging slowly right and left.

  Ellie's turn came and she ran off to join a table of boys whom, as far as Stella knew, she had never visited before. So much for shyness. Stella's turn came, and of course whatever she had thought earlier, she moved toward the table where Will sat with two smaller boys.

  Will hunched over the table, looking at the old food stains. The two smaller and younger males watched her approach with some interest and freckled each other. She thought she heard some under, difficult to be sure at this distance, and Will looked up. He did not seem to recognize her.

  Stella was the only girl to sit at their table. She said hello to the two boys, and then focused on Will. Will rested his cheeks in the palms of his hands. She could not see his patterns, though she saw his neck darken.

  “He's in our barracks,” said the boy on the right, strong but short, Jason or James; the boy to the left of Will was named Philip. Stella had sat with Philip three weeks ago. He was pleasant enough, though she had learned quickly she did not want to cloud with him. Neither Jason/James nor Philip smelled right. She freckled Philip a butterfly greeting, friendly but not open, meaning no offense, etc.

  “Why did you sit here?” Philip asked with a frown. “Doesn't somebody else want to sit here?”

  “I want to talk to him,” Stella said. She was not very good at dealing with the boys, but the
n few of the girls were. There were unspoken, unwritten rules, rules yet to be discovered, but this way of doing things was never going to make the rules any plainer.

  “He doesn't talk much,” Jason/James said.

  “Girls play games,” Philip said resentfully.

  “Nothing like human girls,” Will murmured, and looked up at her. The glance was brief, but Stella knew he remembered their last meeting. “They cut you like knives and you never know why.”

  “Right,” Philip said. “Will lived among the savages.” Jason/James giggled at this, and made a gesture of tangled fingers Stella could not interpret.

  “I passed,” Will said.

  “Was it the woods?” Stella asked, hope flickering like a small ember.

  “What?” he asked.

  “They scrubbed him before he came to our barracks,” Philip said, just being informative. “His skin was red from soap.”

  “Did you stay with your parents?” Will asked. He looked up and let her see his cheeks. They were blank, dark and raw. Most of Will's neck and face were red and rough. Stella inhaled, only what was polite under the circumstances, and could still smell the Lysol and soap on his skin and clothes.

  “Only for a few days,” Stella said. “I got sick.”

  “I missed out on getting scabs,” Will said, touching between his fingers. The SHEVA kids referred to the disease that had killed so many of them as “scabs” or “the ache.”

  “We're going to another table,” Jason/James and Philip said, almost in unison.

  “You two should be alone,” Philip added brusquely. “We can tell.”

  Stella wanted to ask them to stay, but Will shrugged, so she shrugged as well. “They're breaking the rules,” she said after they were gone.

  “They can find a table with not enough boys,” Will suggested. “They're making up rules in the barracks. Something about demes. What are demes?”

  “Demes are families,” Stella said. “New families. We're trying to figure out what they'll look like when we're grown up.”

  Will looked directly at her once more, and Stella looked away, then covered her own cheeks. “It doesn't matter,” Will said. “I don't care.”

  “I came over to say hello,” Stella said. He could not know what his words had meant to her. “You must have got away.” She watched him eagerly, hoping for his story.

  “We're talking human talk. Do you know the under and the over?”

  “Yes,” Stella said. “Do you speak it the same way?”

  “Not the way they do in the barracks,” Will admitted with a twitch of one arm. “Out on the road . . . It's different. Stronger, faster.”

  “And in the woods?” Stella asked.

  “There are no woods,” Will said, face crinkling as if she had spoken some obscenity.

  “When you got away, where did you go?”

  Will looked up at the sky. “I can eat lots here,” he said. “I'll get better, stronger, learn the smell, talk the two tongues.” He balled up his hands and bounced them lightly on the table, then against each other, thumb to thumb, as if playing a game. “Why are they letting us get together, boy-girl?”

  “I don't know. Sometimes they draw blood and ask questions.”

  Will nodded.

  “Do you know what they're doing?” Stella asked.

  “Not a clue,” Will said. “They teach nothing, like all the schools. Right?”

  “We read some books and learn some skills. We can't cloud or scent or we're punished.”

  Will smiled. “Stupid blanks,” he said.

  Stella winced. “We try not to call them names.”

  Will looked away.

  “How long were you free?” Stella asked.

  “They caught me a week ago,” Will said. “I've lived on my own and with runaways and street kids. Covered my cheeks with henna tattoos. Neck, too. Some human kids mark their faces to look like us, but everyone knows. They also claim to read thoughts and have better brains. Like they think we do. They say it's cool, but their freckles don't move.”

  Stella could see some brown still staining the raw patches on Will's face. “How many of us are outside?”

  “Not many,” Will said. “I got turned in by a human for a pack of cigarettes, even after I saved him from getting beat up.” He shook his head slowly. “It's awful out there.”

  Stella smelled Joanie nearby, under her signature mask of baby powder. Will straightened as the stout young counselor approached.

  “No one-on-one,” Stella heard Joanie say. “You know the rules.”

  “The others left,” Stella said, turning to explain, stopping only when Joanie gripped Stella's shoulder. Touched and held, she refused to meet the counselor's eyes.

  Will stood. “I'll go,” he said.

  Then, speaking two streams at once, the over a flow of young gibberish, he said, “See you, say hi to Cory in Six” (there was no Cory and no Six) and “keep it low, keep it topped, shop with pop, nay?”

  The under:

  “What do you know about a place called Sandia?”

  He mixed the streams so expertly that it took Stella a moment to know he had delivered the question. To Joanie, it probably sounded like a slur in the gibberish.

  Then, with a toss of his hand, as Joanie led Stella away, Will said, in one stream, “Find out, hey?”

  Stella watched Ellie be led away to give blood. Ellie pretended it was no big deal, but it was. Stella wondered if it was because Ellie had attracted a lot of boys today, five at the table where she and Felice had sat. The rest of the girls went to their late morning classrooms, where they were shown films about the history of the United States, guys in wigs and women in big dresses, wagon trains, maps, a little bit about Indians.

  Mitch had taught Stella about Indians. The film told them nothing important.

  Felice was sitting in the aisle next to her. “What's a green bug got to do with anything?” she whispered, making up for Ellie's absence.

  Nobody answered. The game had gone sour. This time, being with the boys had hurt, and somehow Stella and the others knew it would only get worse. The time was coming when they would all need to be left alone, boys and girls together, to work things out for themselves.

  Stella did not think the humans would ever let that happen. They would be kept apart like animals in a zoo, forever.

  “You're scenting,” Celia warned in a whisper behind her. “Miss Kantor turned her nosey on.”

  Stella did not know how to stop. She could feel the changes coming.

  “You're doing it, too,” Felice whispered to Celia.

  “Damn,” Celia said, and rubbed behind her ears, eyes wide.

  “Girls,” Miss Kantor called from the front of the classroom. “Be quiet and watch the film.”

  19

  BALTIMORE

  Promptly at eleven, Kaye entered the Americol twentieth-floor conference room, Liz close behind. Robert Jackson was already in the room. His hair had turned salt and pepper over the years but otherwise he had not matured much either in behavior or appearance. He was still handsome, skin pale to the point of blueness, with a sharply defined nose and chin and a glossy five o'clock shadow. His quartzlike eyes, dark gray, bored into Kaye whenever they met, occasions she tried to keep to a minimum.

  Angled on either side of Jackson at the corner position he favored were two of his postdocs—research interns from Cornell and Harvard, in their late twenties, compact fellows with dark brown hair and the nervous aloofness of youth.

  “Marge will be here in a few minutes,” Jackson told Kaye, briefly half-standing.

  He had never forgiven her an awkward moment in the early days of SHEVA, sixteen years ago, when it seemed that Marge and Kaye had ganged up on him. Jackson had won that round in the long run, but grudges came naturally to him. He was as passionate about office politics and the social side of research as he was about science as an ideal and an abstraction.

  With so keen a sense of the social, Kaye wondered why Jackson had
been other than brilliant in genetics. To Kaye, the processes behind both were much the same; to Jackson, that idea was heresy of a disgusting magnitude.

  The representatives from three other research divisions had also arrived before Kaye and Liz. Two men and one woman, all in their late forties, bowed their heads as they pored over touch tablets, getting through the perpetual network-enabled tasks of their day. They did not look up as Kaye entered, though most of them had met her and conversed with her at Americol mixers and Christmas parties.

  Kaye and Liz sat with their backs to a long window that looked out over downtown Baltimore. Kaye felt a breeze go up her back from a floor vent. Jackson had taken pole position, leaving Liz and Kaye with the air conditioning.

  Marge Cross entered, alone for once. She seemed subdued. Cross was in her middle sixties, portly, her short-cut, scraggly hair brilliantly hennaed, her face jowly, her neck a landscape of hanging wrinkles. She possessed a voice that could carry across a crowded conference hall, yet carried herself with the poise of a ballet dancer, dressed in carefully tailored pant suits, and somehow could charm the butterflies out of the skies. It was difficult to know when she did not like what she was hearing. Like a rhino, Cross was said to be at her most dangerous when she was still and quiet.

  The CEO of Americol and Eurocol had grown stouter and more beefy-faced over the years, but still walked with graceful confidence. “Let the games begin,” she said, her voice mellow as she made her way to the window. Liz moved her chair as Cross passed.

  “You didn't bring your lance, Kaye,” Jackson said.

  “Behave, Robert,” Cross warned. She sat beside Liz and folded her hands on the table. Jackson managed to look both properly chastened and amused by the jabbing familiarity.

  “We're here to judge the success so far of our attempts to restrict legacy viruses,” Cross began. “We refer to them generically as ERV—endogenous retroviruses. We've also been concerned with their close relations, transgenes, transposons, retrotransposons, LINE elements, and what have you—all mobile elements, all jumping genes. Let's not confuse our ERV with someone else's ERV—equine rhinovirus, for example, or ecotropic recombinant retrovirus, or, something we've all experienced in these sessions, a sudden loss of expiratory reserve volume.”