Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

He had dreamed about the bones in the night. He did not know whether artists dreamed their work—or whether detectives dreamed solutions to their cases. But the way he worked was, he often dreamed of the people he found, in their graves or where they had fallen and died.

  And sometimes he was right.

  Often he was right.

  Hell, nine times out of ten, Mitch's dreams turned out to be right—so long as he waited for them to evolve, to ripple through their necessary variations and reach their inevitable conclusion. That was how it had been with the Alpine mummies. He had dreamed about them for months.

  But now there was not enough time. He had to rely on what amounted to a hunch.

  The Australians had clued him, even more than the Homo erectus skeletons. They were very far north. Only now was anthropology accepting the many tides and clashes of peoples in the Americas—the early arrival by storm-driven boats of a few Australians in the south, the later and frequent arrivals of the Asians moving along and over the land and ice bridges in the north.

  The Australoids had been in South America—and now it was apparent North America—for tens of thousands of years before they met the Asians. The Asians conquered and killed, subdued, pushed them back south from whatever northern territories they might have explored. It must have been a monumental war, spread out over millions of square miles and many thousands of years, race-based and violent.

  In the end, the Australians had all but vanished—leaving only a few mixed-race descendants on the eastern coast of South America: the Tierra del Fuegans familiar to Darwin and other explorers.

  They were being chased. They partnered with the Homo erectus individuals because they faced a common enemy.

  Mitch stepped out like an automaton, eyes sweeping the ground ahead, ignoring everything but the pound of his boots on the old rounded river rocks. It was no place to take a tumble, especially with one bum arm.

  Too far north. In dangerous territory, surrounded by Asians. They had come up here for the rich runs of fish, following the bears; men and women, an extended family group. Perhaps united under one powerful male—and maybe he did like dabbling with the Homo erectus females. No sense being naÏve.

  But his women did not care. No babies ever resulted. Mitch could almost see the Homo erectus males and females tagging along, behind the Australians, begging at first, then being set up to do work for the women, then offering themselves to the men, their own males indifferent to the exchange. Attitudes of a hungry, dying people.

  In the end, there had been some measure of affection, perhaps more than masters for their pets. Equals? Probably not. But the Homo erectus members of the group were not stupid. They had survived for more than a million years. Homo sap was just a newcomer in the equation.

  Mitch snuffed air and blew his nose into his handkerchief; the warming air was thick with grass pollen. He was not normally susceptible, but his years in prison, with musty air and lots of mold, had exaggerated his reactions.

  If the men are out here—and no guarantee of that—they couldn't save the women. They failed, and they probably died, too. Or they hightailed it out of this miserable place ahead of the wave of hot mud—leaving the women behind.

  How am I any better?

  I left my women behind, and they took Stella.

  What if I do find the males, what of it? What in hell am I looking for? Salvation? An excuse?

  He glanced up at the sun, then shaded and dropped his eyes. The thickest deposit of mudstone had set in a dark brown layer all around the banks of the old river, weathered in spots to soil rich enough to support shrubs and trees, hard and stripped and barren elsewhere. Boulders the size and shape of soccer balls pocked the ground, and nowhere any clue as to where an elusive collection of fossils might just poke up underfoot.

  He sat on a weather-split boulder and lifted his left elbow onto his knee to get the tingle out of his slack arm. Sometimes the blood just cut off in that arm, and then the nerves, and after a while the arm jerked awake and hurt like hell.

  It wasn't easy staying attentive and on point. Something insisted on getting in the way, perhaps an all-too-real sense of the complete futility of what he was trying to do. “Where would you go?” he whispered. He hunched his knees slowly around the rock, turning his eyes to sweep the rugged land, up the high ground and down into the swales filled with brush. “Where would you weather out twenty thousand years after you died? Come on, guys. Help me out.”

  A light breeze whistled through the brush and touched his hair like phantom fingers. He blew a fly away from his lips and brushed the hair out of his eyes. Kaye had always chided him about getting haircuts. After a while she had just let it drop, giving up, and Mitch wondered what he resented more—being treated like a little boy or being given up on by his own wife.

  His teeth ground lightly, like a beast scaring away enemies. His chest ached from loneliness and guilt.

  Wandering.

  His eyes could tell a chip of bone from a pebble at a dozen paces, even now. He could set mental filters to ignore squirrel and rabbit bones, any recent subset of bleached, chewed, or sinew-darkened remnant.

  His eyes narrowed to slits.

  An experienced band of males might have seen or heard the lahar and become frightened, tried to make it to high ground. That's where he was now, where his feet had taken him, to the highest ground in the area, a ridge of hard rock and cupped pockets of soil and brush. He could see the camp, or at least where he knew it was, about half a mile away, obscured by tall brush and trees.

  And north, the ever-present sentinel of Mount Hood, a quiet, squat dunce cap of repressed Earth energy, hissing faint plumes of steam but confessing nothing about past tantrums, past crimes.

  Mitch closed his eyes completely and visualized the head male of the band. The picture cleared. Mitch went away, and in his place stood the band's lead hunter, the chief.

  The chief's face was dark and intent, hair flecked with ash, skin streaky gray with ash, like a ghost. In Mitch's imagination, the chief started out purple-brown and quite naked, but pieced skins suddenly appeared on his lanky, stooped frame, not crude rags even twenty thousand years ago, because people were savvy about fashion and utility even then; leggings and tunic tied at the waist, pouch for flints and obsidian tips or whatever they might have with them.

  Their hearts beat fast seeing the pallor on their skins, they already look dead. They're afraid of each other. But the chief holds them together. He jumps and makes faces until they crow at their ashen complexions. The chief is more than smart; he cares about the anomalous little group of males, partners in this harsh land; and he is solicitous of the females, the chewers of skins and makers of the clothing he wears.

  Never underestimate your ancestors, your cousins. They lasted a long, long time. And even then they loved, they cared, they protected.

  31

  ARIZONA

  The bus cut through a Flagstaff suburb, low, flat, brown brick and stucco houses surrounded by dusty gravel yards. Stella had lived in such a suburb as a girl. She laid her head back on the plastic seat and stared at the passing homes. Even with air-conditioning, the bus was hot inside and her water was running out fast.

  The boys had stopped talking and Will seemed to be asleep next to a small pile of crumpled yellow pages from his old paperback book.

  Someone tapped her shoulder. It was the male guard. He had a larger plastic bag from which he pulled another bottle of water.

  “Not long now,” he said, and stuck the bottle into her hand. “Give me the empties.” The girls handed him their empties and he passed them to the female guard, who stuck them into another bag and sealed it. Then he stepped around the curtain at the front of the bus and gave the boys fresh bottles, again collecting the empties.

  The male guard shook his head and glared down disapprovingly at Will's mess before giving the boy a bottle.

  “Having fun?” he asked Will.

  Will stared up at him and shook his head slowly.

>   The bus driver was making lots of turns, taking them up and down many streets as if he were lost. Stella did not think the driver was lost. They were trying to avoid someone or something.

  That made her sit up. She looked behind. The bus was being followed by a small brown car. Up front, as they turned a corner she saw another car, this one green, with two people in the front seat. The bus was following the lead car. They had escorts.

  Nothing too unexpected about that. Why, then, did Stella feel that none of this had been planned out well, that something had gone awry?

  Will was watching her. He pushed close to the plastic curtain and moved his lips but she could not hear what he was saying over the road noise; they were on gravel now, rumbling across a farm track through a fallow dirt field to a state road. The bus bounced up onto the asphalt and swung left. The lead car slowed for the bus to catch up.

  She tracked Will's lips more carefully now that the bouncing had stopped: Sandia, he was mouthing silently. She remembered him asking earlier if she had heard of it, but she still did not know what Sandia was.

  Will drew his finger across his throat. Stella closed her eyes and turned away. She could not watch him now. She did not need to be any more scared than she already was.

  Another hour, and they rode on a straight stretch of highway between rocky desert with low red mountains on the horizon. The sun was almost directly overhead. The trip was taking a lot longer than Joanie had said it would.

  The highway was almost empty, only a few cars going either way. A small red BMW with New Mexico plates swung around to the left of the short caravan and zoomed by. The boys tracked its speedy passage listlessly, then held up their hands with crooked finger signs and laughed.

  Stella did not know what they meant. The laughter sounded harsh. The boys worried her. They seemed wild.

  The long, sandy, rocky stretches beside the highway hypnotized her. The mountains were always far away. She wondered what Sandia meant once more, then stuffed the word away, hating the sound of it, more so because it was actually a pretty word.

  Screech of tires.

  She was jerked up out of a doze by a sudden swerve. Stella clung to the seat back in front of her as the bus veered left, then right, then tilted. Tires kept on screaming over the asphalt. Celia's head and shoulders bounced one way then another, and as Stella looked right, the outside world flew up and dropped down, mountains and desert and all. Then everything shoved sideways, and she slipped along the plastic seat and crashed down on the window, jamming her head, neck, and shoulder against the plastic. Plastic crazed and peeled away in wire-clasped ripples and her shoulder pressed into dirt and gravel.

  For a moment, the bus was very quiet. It seemed to be lying on one side, the right side, her side. The light was not very good and the air was thick and still and full of the smell of burned rubber.

  She tried to move and found that she still could, which caused a surge of excitement. Her body was still working, she was still alive. She pushed up slowly and heard jingling and ripping sounds. Then, a boy fell onto the curtain and jammed his knee into her side. Through the taut veil of plastic above her, she saw another boy's denim-clad butt and a vague, contorted face. Will, she thought, and with a grunt, pushed up against the body, but could not move it.

  “Please, get off,” she demanded, her voice muffled.

  Stella was in pain. She thought for a minute she was going to panic, but she closed her eyes and made that go away. She could not bring her hand around to feel her shoulder, but she thought it might be bleeding, and her blouse seemed to be ripped. She could feel gravel or something sharp against her bare skin.

  Outside, she heard some voices, men talking, one man yelling. They seemed far away. Then a door squealed open. The knee on her chest drew up and a foot came down hard on her ankle, pressing it into the frame of the seat in front. She screamed; that really hurt.

  “Sorry,” a boy said, and the foot was lifted. She saw shadows moving over her, clumsy, dazed, pressing against the plastic curtain. Will's face seemed to blur and fade, and he was gone. The curtain lay lightly around her. Something sighed, a brake cylinder maybe, or a boy. She rolled enough to finally touch her shoulder and lifted her hand against the curtain to see a bit of blood there, not a lot. Light filtered around the seat back behind her. Someone had opened the bus's rear emergency door, and maybe a ceiling hatch as well.

  “We'd better get you out of there,” a man called congenially. “Everybody hear me?”

  Stella lay on her back now against the gravel and the dirt and the side of the bus. She rolled over completely and did a kind of knee-up, arm-up between the seats, which were jammed together closer than they had been before the crash. A feathery, leafy branch somehow got into her mouth and she spit it out, then finished wriggling until she was on her knees.

  She had cuts all over, but none of them were bleeding a lot. Stella flailed against the plastic curtain until someone pulled it away with a jingle of hooks.

  “Who's in here? LaShawna? You in here?” A man's voice, deep and distinct.

  And someone else, “Celia? Hugh Davis? Johnny? Johnny Lee?”

  “It's me,” Stella said. “I'm here.”

  Then she heard LaShawna call out. The girl began crying. “My leg is hurt,” she wailed.

  “We're going to get you, LaShawna. Be brave. Help is coming.”

  Someone cursed loud and long at someone else.

  “You just back off. You stay away from here. This is horrible, but you back off.”

  “You drove us the fuck off the road!”

  “You went into a skid.”

  “Well, what the hell else could I do? There were cars all over the road. Jesus, we need an ambulance. Call an ambulance.”

  Stella wondered if perhaps she should just stay where she was for the time being, in the half-dark, and nobody knowing she was there.

  Suddenly, someone was pulling on her arm, tugging her out from between the seats and into the space between the top of the seats and the roof of the bus, now a kind of hallway with windows on the floor. It was Will. He crouched and peered at her like a frazzle-haired monkey, his face smeared with blood.

  “We can go now,” he said.

  “Where?” Stella asked.

  “It's people coming for us. Humans. They want to rescue us. But we can leave.”

  “We have to help.”

  “What can we do?” Will asked.

  “We have to help.”

  For a passing moment, she wanted to smear her hand on his face. Her ears felt hot.

  Will shook his head and scrambled in a half-hunch to the front of the bus. He looked for a moment as if he were just going to climb out through a window, but then two pairs of arms stretched down, and he glanced back at Stella. A sour look came to his face.

  “There's a girl back there; she's okay,” he said. “Take care of her, but leave me alone.”

  Stella sat by the side of the long two-lane highway with her face in her hands. She had banged her head pretty hard in the wreck and now it throbbed. She peeked between her fingers at the adults walking around the bus. About twenty minutes had passed since the crash.

  Will lay beside her, hand tossed casually over his eyes as if he were taking a nap. He had ripped his pants and a long scratch showed through. Otherwise, they both seemed to be okay.

  Celia and LaShawna and the three other boys were already sitting in the backs of two cars, not the escort cars. Both of the escort cars had run off into a culvert and were pretty banged up—crumpled grilles, steam hissing, trunk lids popped.

  She thought she heard the two security guards on the other side of the bus, and possibly the bus driver as well.

  Parked by the side of the road about a hundred yards behind were two law enforcement vehicles. She could not see the insignia but their emergency lights were blinking. Why weren't they helping out, getting ready to take the children back to the school?

  Would there be an EMAC van coming soon, or an ambulance?<
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  A black man in a rumpled brown suit approached Stella and Will. “The other girls and boys are pretty badly bruised, but they're going to be fine. LaShawna is fine. Her leg is okay, thank God.”

  Stella peered up at him doubtfully. She did not know who he was.

  “I'm John Hamilton,” he said. “I'm LaShawna's daddy. We've got to leave here. You have to come with us.”

  Will sat up, his cheeks almost mahogany from the combination of sun and defiance. “Why?” he said. “Are you taking us to another school?”

  “We have to get you to a doctor for checkups. The closest safe place is about fifty miles from here.” He pointed back down the road. “Not back to the school. My daughter will never go there again, not while I'm alive.”

  “What's Sandia?” Stella asked John, on impulse.

  “It's some mountains,” John said, with a startled expression, and swallowed something that must have been bitter. “Come on, let's get going. I think there's room.”

  A third car pulled up, and John talked to the driver, a middle-aged woman with large turquoise rings on her fingers and brilliant orange hair. They seemed to know each other.

  John came back. He was irritated.

  “You'll go with her,” he said. “Her name is Jobeth Hayden. She's a mom, too. We thought her daughter might be here, but she isn't.”

  “You ran the buses off the road?” Stella asked.

  “We tried to slow down the lead car and take you off the bus. We thought we could do it safely. I don't know how it happened, but one of their cars spun out and the bus plowed into it and everyone went off the road. Cars all over. We're damned lucky.”

  Will had retrieved his battered and torn paperback book from the dirt and clutched it in his hand. He peered at the rip in his jeans, and the scratch. Then he stared back down the road at the cars with the emergency lights. “I'll just go by myself.”

  “No, son,” John Hamilton said firmly, and he suddenly seemed very large. “You'll die out here, and you won't hitch any rides because they'll know what you are.”