by Greg Bear
“They'll arrest me,” Will said, pointing at the blinking lights.
“No, they won't. They're from New Mexico.”
Hamilton did not explain why that was significant. Will stared at Hamilton and his face wrinkled in either anger or frustration.
“We're responsible,” Hamilton said quietly. “Please, come with us.” Even more quietly, focusing on Will, his voice deep, almost sleepy, Hamilton said again, “Please.”
Will stumbled as he took a step, and John helped him to the car with the orange-haired woman, Jobeth.
On the way, they came close to the red Buick that carried Celia, Felice, LaShawna, and two of the boys. LaShawna leaned back in the rear seat, in the shadow of the car roof, eyes closed. Felice sat upright beside her. Celia stuck her head out the window. “What-KUK a ride!” she crowed. A white bandage looped around her head. She had blood on her scalp and in her hair and she clutched a plastic bottle of 7-Up and a sandwich. “I guess no more school, huh?”
Will and Stella got in the car with Jobeth. John told Jobeth where they were going—a ranch. Stella did not catch the name, though it might have been George or Gorge.
“I know,” the woman said. “I love there.”
Stella was sure the woman did not say “live,” she said “love.”
Will leaned his head back on the seat and stared at the headliner. Stella took a bottle of water and a bottle of 7-Up from John, and the cars drove back on the road, leaving the wreck of the bus, two guards, and three drivers, all neatly tied and squatting on the shoulder.
The official vehicles turned out to be from the New Mexico State Police, and they spun off in the opposite direction, their lights no longer flashing.
“Won't be more than an hour,” Jobeth said, following the other two cars.
“Who are you?” Stella asked.
“I have no idea,” Jobeth said lightly. “Haven't for years.” She glanced back over the seat at Stella. “You're a pretty one. You're all pretty ones to me. Do you know my daughter? Her name is Bonnie. Bonnie Hayden. I guess she's still at the school; they took her there six months ago. She has natural red hair and her sparks are really prominent. It's her Irish blood, I'm sure.”
Will ripped a page out of his paperback and crumpled it, then waggled it under his nose. He grinned at Stella.
32
OREGON
They've been out hunting, the men, taking along the younger males, those near or beyond puberty; heading up to the high ground to see where there might be some game left after the ash fall. But the ash has covered everything with grit for a hundred miles and the game has moved south, all but the small animals still quivering in their burrows, in their warrens, waiting . . .
And then the men hear the lahar coming, see the pyroclastic cloud that has melted all the snow and ice rippling around the base of the mountain like a dirty gray shawl falling from the black Storm Bear whose claws are lightning . . . or the mountain goddess sitting and spreading her wrap, the edge of the soft skin rushing over the land tens of miles away with a sound like all the buffalo on Earth.
Beneath the wrap, the meltwater has mixed with hot gas and gathers ash and mud and trees, roaring toward where the men stand, pallid and weak with fear.
The chief, with the sharpest eyes, the quickest brain, the strongest arm, the most sons and daughters in this band, yet probably only thirty-five or forty years of age, at the oldest . . . The chief has never encountered anything like the approaching lahar. The ash was bad enough. The distant wall of gray smudge looks as if it might take days to reach them, rolling over and through the distant forests. How could it ever touch where he stands with his sons and hunters, no matter how furious and powerful?
But, just in case, he walks back to be with the women.
Mitch pushed on his knee to get up and started walking toward the camp.
The men lope down the hills, taking the short route from the high ground, puffs of ash rising around their feet as they run, and the chief looks up above the ash cloaking the tiny crew in a choking haze and sees that the cloud has come that much closer in just a few minutes. He trembles, knowing how ignorant he is. Death could be very near.
Mitch strode down into the swale, across the old mudstone and around the whistling patches of brush.
Big old splash coming. Hot breath out of hell unnamed, perhaps unthought of then. The chief runs faster as the roar grows louder, the sound bigger even than the biggest stampeding herd in the biggest hunt, the wall of cloud rampaging over the land with a swift but lumbering dignity, like a great bear.
For a moment, the chief pauses and points out that the gray cloud has stopped. They laugh and hoot. The gray cloud is thinning, breaking up. They cannot see the flood beneath.
Then comes the biggest ash fall yet, thick curtains and fat billows, blinding, stinging the eyes and catching in the nose and mouth, gritty between lips and gums, choking. They try to cover their eyes with their hands. Blind, they stumble and fall and shout hunting cries, identity cries, not yet names. The roar begins again, grows louder, rhythmic pounding, screaming of trees, ripping.
Mitch stopped briefly on the upslope of the swale, peering at the weathered layers, the broken, crumbling remains of the ancient lahar. He rubbed his eyes, trying to push back a sliver of light in his vision.
From the top of the crest, he half-slid, half-walked down to the edge of the Spent River, a bluff overlooking the dried-up watercourse. They might have been near the river, waiting to cross, in a straight line between the high ground where Mitch (and the chief) had been a few minutes before, not far from where Mitch stood now, his dead arm at his side, ignoring the tingling there as well as the precessing, aching silver crescent.
He walked along the bluff. His eyes swept the ground a few meters ahead, looking for that weathered-out phalange or even bigger bone or chip of bone not worried over by a coyote or hauled off by a ground squirrel, falling out of its little hollow in the ash, that hard little mold of death.
The roar is loud and growing louder, but the cloud seems to be dissipating. What they cannot see, from where they stand, is the lahar breaking up into long fingers, finding channels already carved and ripped in the land, blowing out the last of its energy, reaching, reaching, but growing weaker. What they cannot see clearly is that this new threat is trying with all of its fading might to kill them.
Perhaps they will live.
They would be on his right, if they were anywhere at all, if they were still here. Their bones might have weathered out and fallen from the bluff centuries ago. He was walking so near the edge that there might be nothing left. The river would have been higher then, its bed not so worn and deep; but the bluff might have been high enough to give them pause . . .
The chief looks northwest. The leading run of the dying lahar roars down the channel. His eyes grow wide, his nostrils flare in rage and disappointment. It is a fuming, curling, leaping torrent of mud and steaming water. It fills his eyes, his brain. It travels faster than they can run. They hunker down and it roars past, below their feet, digging out the embankment. They crawl up the bank to safety, but the lahar vaults up and the spill catches them as they raise their arms. The thick liquid scalds, and the chief hears the others screaming, but only for a moment.
Mitch's breath hitched.
Their women must have died at the same moment, or within seconds, across the Spent River.
The chief falls with his arms over his head. He and all his sons and the other hunters struggle for tenths of seconds against the scalding mud and then must lie still. It covers them, a blanket more than two feet thick, larded with sticks and chunks of log and rocks the size of fists, with bits of dead animals.
As Mitch walked, he grew calmer. Things seemed to fall into place. When the search was on, his mind became a quiet lake.
The land is hot and steaming. Nothing near the river lives that stood above ground. Bushes denuded of their leaves crouch smashed and wilted along the river course. Corpses lie baked and half-buried under gou
ts of steaming mud. The ground smells like mud and steamed vegetables. It smells like cooked herbs in a meaty stew.
The mud cools.
And then comes the third fall of ash, entombing the remains of the men, the women, and the ravaged land along the Spent River and for miles around.
It was over.
Mitch kept his head down and pressed one eye with a finger, but the pain was coming anyway. Price to be paid.
Rod Taylor pushes the lever forward on the old time machine. The mud hardens under the gray pall of falling ash. Time flies past. The bodies decay within their molds, staining the hard mud. The flesh seeps away and the bones rattle with earthquakes and the mud and stone cracks and fresh water and mud enters, filling the hollow with mud of different density, different composition, holding the bones, finally, still.
The men can rest.
Mitch knew they were still here, somewhere.
He stopped walking and looked to his right, into a step cut into the bluff by hundreds of centuries of erosion. At first he could not see what had attracted his attention; it was hidden by the painful little sliver of light.
The top of the mudstone step was at least six feet above his head. A streak of dark gray capped the step beneath a superficial wig of soil and brush. But his vision tunneled into a bright ball and all he saw was the shiny brown prominence lying horizontally in the stone.
He hardly dared to breathe.
Mitch stooped, arm hanging, propping his knees against the mound of weathered-out clods and pebbles. Reached out with his right finger and brushed along the compacted gray ash and caked mudstone.
The prominence was firm in the hardened layer. It could have been a bone from a deer, a mountain goat, or a bighorn sheep.
But it was not. It was a human shin, a tibia. In this layer, it had to be at least as old as the bones in the camp. He reached down with one hand, sparks flying in his right eye, and felt for the small piece he had seen there, a dark brown talus of bone amongst the rocky talus.
He held it up, turning it until he could see it clearly. It was small, but also from a human. Homo at least. He replaced it. Position would be important when they surveyed.
He took a dental pick from his jacket and worked at the hardened mud and ash around the tibia until he was sure, fighting the pain in his cranium for long minutes. Then he sat back and drew up his knees.
He could no longer put it off. The migraine had arrived. He hadn't had one this bad in more than ten years. The dental pick fell from his hand as he curled up on the ground, trying not to moan.
He managed to reach up with one finger and stroke the half-buried length of bone.
“Found you,” Mitch said. Then he closed his eyes and felt his own lahar wash over him.
33
NEW MEXICO
Dicken's monitor was filled with comparisons of protein expression in embryonic tissues at different stages of development, looking for the elusive retroviral or transposon trigger that might have crept into a complex of developmental genes, promoting the hymen in human females. Even using prior searches and comparisons—incredibly, he had found some in the literature—it looked as if this would take months or years.
Dr. Jurie had shunted Dicken into the safest and least interesting position at Sandia Pathogenics. Putting him in safe, cold storage until needed.
An odd little dance of utility and security. Jurie was keeping Dicken under his thumb, as it were, just to know where he was and what he was up to, and possibly to pick his brain.
But also to confess? To be caught out?
Dicken would not rule out anything where Aram Jurie was concerned.
The man had passed along a list of rambling, long e-mail messages, cryptic, elusive, and a little too evocative for Dicken's comfort. Jurie might be on to something, Dicken thought, a twisted and crazy but undeniably big insight.
Jurie held the belief—not exactly new—that viruses played a substantial but crude role in nearly every stage of embryonic development. But he had some interesting notions about how they did so:
“Genomic viruses want to play in the big game, but as genetic players go, they're simple, constrained, fallen from grace. They can't do the big stuff, so they engage in cryptic little elaborations, and the big game tolerates and then becomes addicted to their subtle plays . . .
“Weak in themselves, endogenous viruses may rely on a very different form of apoptosis, programmed cell suicide. ERVs express at certain times and present antigen on the cell surface. The cell is inspected by the agents of the immune system and killed. By coordinating how and which cells present antigen, genomic viruses can participate crudely in sculpting the embryo, or even the growing body after birth. Of course, they work to increase their numbers and their position in the species, in the extended genome. They work by maintaining a feeble but persistent control in the face of a constant and powerful assault by the immune system.
“And in mammals, they've won. We have surrendered some of the most crucial aspects of our lives to the viruses, just to give our babies time to develop in the womb, rather than in the constraining egg; time to develop more sophisticated nervous systems. A calculated gamble. All our generations are held ransom because of our indebtedness to the viral genes.
“Like getting a loan from the Mafia . . .”
Maggie Flynn knocked on the open door to Dicken's office. “Got a moment?” she asked.
“Not really. Why?” Dicken asked, turning in his rolling chair. Flynn looked flushed and upset.
“Something's come up. Jurie's off the campus. He tells us to sit tight. I don't think we can. We just aren't prepared.”
“What is it?”
“We need expert advice,” Flynn said. “And you could be the expert.”
Dicken stood and stuck his hands in his pants pockets, alert and wary. “What sort of advice?”
“We have a new guest,” Flynn said. “Not a monkey.” She did not appear at all happy with the prospect.
If Maggie Flynn believed Dicken had Jurie's confidence, who was he to correct her? Flynn's pass could clear them both if his own pass was blocked—he had learned that much yesterday, visiting Presky's monotreme study lab.
Flynn took him outside the building to a small cart and drove him around the five linked warehouses that contained the zoo. Out in the open, away from listening devices, she expressed herself more clearly.
“You've worked with SHEVA kids,” Flynn began. “I haven't. We have a tough situation, medically speaking, ethically speaking, and I don't know how to approach it. As the only married female in this block, Turner picked me to provide some moral support, establish a rapport . . . but frankly, I haven't a clue.”
“What are you talking about?” Dicken asked.
Flynn stopped the cart, even more nervous. “You don't know?” she asked, her voice rising a notch.
Dicken's mind started to race and he saw he was on the edge of screwing up a golden opportunity. You've worked with . . . As the only married female . . .
They're doing it. They've done it. He felt his pulse going up and hoped it did not show.
“Oh,” he said, with a fair imitation of casualness. “Virus children.”
Flynn bit her lip. “I don't like that phrase.” She pushed the cart forward again with the little control stick. “Jurie never worked directly with them. Only with specimens. Neither has Turner, and of course Presky is an animal guy, no bedside manner whatsoever. We thought of you. Turner said that must be why you're here, and why you're being given shit theoretical work—so you can be pulled loose for something like this when the time comes.”
“Okay,” Dicken said, putting on a mask of professional caution. He pressed his lips together to keep from saying anything revealing or stupid.
“Something's gone wrong at the border, I don't know what. I'm not in that particular loop. Jurie's in Arizona. Turner told me to bring you in before he gets back.” Her smile was fleeting and desperate. “The cat's away.”
It was a
n in-house conspiracy after all, and not a very convincing one. Flynn seemed to expect him to say something reassuring and glib. The whole damned lab functioned on a morphine high of glibness, as if to hide the gnawing awareness that what they were doing might someday attract the attention of The Hague.
“God bless the beasts and children,” Dicken said. “Let's go.”
On the north side of the array of Pathogenics warehouses, a segmented, inflatable silver enclosure perched on a black expanse of parking lot like some huge alien larva. An access tube led from the enclosure into Warehouse Number 5, which contained most of the primate study labs. Dicken noticed two outside compressors and a complicated, freshly assembled sterilization unit on the south end of the sausage.
He didn't realize how big the enclosure was until they were almost upon it. The whole complex was as big as one of the warehouses and covered at least an acre.
They parked the cart and entered Warehouse 5 through the delivery door. Turner met them in a small clinic inside the warehouse—a hospital clinic, obviously equipped for humans and not just for primates. “Glad you could make it, Christopher,” he said. “Jurie's dealing with some mess at the border. A bunch of protesters blocked a lab bus, refused to let it enter Arizona. They had help from the local police, apparently. Jurie had to order up another bus at the last minute and route it around the roadblocks.”
“No surprise,” Flynn said. Dicken glanced between them both. What he saw chilled him. The glibness had completely evaporated. They knew their careers were on the line.
“The preparations have been obvious, but Jurie only told us yesterday,” Turner said. Their statements piled together.
“She's a very unhappy girl,” Flynn said.
“I'm not sure we should even have her here,” Turner said.
“She's pregnant,” Flynn said.
“A rape, we're told. Her foster father,” Turner said.
“Oh, God, I didn't know it was rape,” Flynn said, and pressed her knuckles to her cheek. “She's only fourteen.”
“They brought her from a school in Arizona,” Flynn said. “Jurie calls it our school. That's where we've been getting most of our specimens.”