Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  “Quite a few. Some were very, very sick, and they got better.”

  “And some died.”

  “Yes,” Dicken said. “Some died.”

  “I don't feel that sick, other than wanting to throw up.”

  “That might be your baby.”

  The girl opened her mouth wide and her cheeks went pale. “I'm pregnant?” she asked.

  Dicken suddenly felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. “They didn't tell you?”

  “Oh, my God,” the girl said and curled up, facing away from him. “I knew it. I knew it. I could smell something. It was his baby inside of me. Oh, my God.” The girl sat up abruptly. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  Dicken must have showed his concern even through the hood.

  “I'm not going to hurt myself. I have to throw up. Don't look. Don't watch me.”

  He said, “I'll wait for you in the living room.”

  She swung her legs out over the side of the bed and stood, then paused, arms held out as if to keep her balance. She stared down at the fake wooden floor. “He used nose plugs and scrubbed me with soap, and then he covered me with cheap perfume. I couldn't make him stop. He said he wanted to learn whether he would ever have grandchildren. But he wasn't even my real father. A baby. Oh, my God.”

  The girl's face wrinkled up in an expression so complex Dicken could have studied it for hours and not understood. He knew how a chimpanzee must feel, watching humans emote.

  “I'm sorry,” Dicken said.

  “Have you met anyone else like me who was pregnant?” the girl asked, holding, compelling his gaze through the plastic.

  “No,” Dicken said.

  “I'm the first?”

  “You're the first in my experience.”

  “Yeah.” She got a panicky look and walked stiffly into the bathroom. Dicken could hear her trying to throw up. He went into the living room. The smell of his sorrow and loathing filled the helmet and there was no way to wipe his eyes or his nose.

  When the girl came out, she stopped in the doorway, then sidled through, as if afraid to touch the frame. She held her arms out to her side like wings. Her cheeks were a steady golden brown and the yellow flint-sparks in her eyes seemed even larger and brighter. More than ever, she looked like a cat. She glared at him quizzically. She could see his puffy eyes and wet cheeks through the plastic. “What do you care?” she asked.

  Dicken shook his head inside the helmet. “Hard to explain,” he said. “I was there at the beginning.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I'm not sure there's time,” he said. “We need to find out why you're sick.”

  “Explain it to me, and then you can look at me,” the girl said.

  Dicken wondered how they would react outside if he spent a couple of hours in the trailer. If Jurie should happen to come back . . .

  None of that mattered. He had to do something for the girl. She deserved so much more than this.

  He pulled up the covering seal and unzipped his helmet, then removed it. It certainly wasn't the worst risk he had ever taken. “I was one of the first to know,” he began.

  The girl lifted her nose and sniffed. The way her upper lip formed a V was so strangely beautiful that Dicken had to smile.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “You're not afraid, you're angry,” the girl said. “You're angry for me.”

  He nodded.

  “Nobody's ever been angry for me. It smells kind of sweet. Sit in the living room. Stay a few feet away, in case I'm dangerous.”

  They walked into the living room. Dicken sat on a dinette chair and she stood by the couch, arms folded, as if ready to run. “Tell me,” she said.

  “Can I examine you while I talk? You can keep your clothes on, and I won't stick you with anything. I just need to look and touch.”

  The girl nodded.

  Rumors and half-truths were all she had ever heard. She remained standing for the first few minutes, while Dicken pressed his fingers gently under her jaw, into her armpits, and looked between her fingers and toes.

  After a while, she sat on the vinyl couch, listening closely and watching him with those incredible flint-spark eyes.

  36

  ARIZONA

  The three cars split off at a crossroads going through a small desert town. Stella looked through the rear window at the diminishing dot of the car that contained Celia and LaShawna and two of the boys. Then she turned to look at Will, who seemed to have fallen asleep.

  JoBeth Hayden had talked about her daughter for the first half hour or so, about how she had been glad Bonnie was not on the bus, being taken to Sandia, yet how disappointing it was not to see her and have her be free.

  After a while, Stella had felt her muscles tighten from the aftereffects of the crash, and she had tuned out Jobeth, focusing instead on the pile of crumpled pages that Will had arranged on the seat between them.

  Will opened his eyes and leaned forward. “Mrs. Hayden,” he said, and ran his tongue over dry lips, avoiding Stella's curious stare.

  “Yes. Your name is William, isn't it?”

  “Will. I'd like to put these up by you.” He dropped some crumpled pages in the middle of the front bench seat.

  “That's trash,” Jobeth Hayden said disapprovingly.

  “I can't keep it back here,” Will said.

  “I don't see why not.”

  Stella could not figure out what Will was up to. She rubbed her nose. The front bench seat was in direct sunlight. Will was fever-scenting. She could smell him now, subtle but direct, like cocoa powder and butter. She had never smelled anything exactly like it.

  “Can I?” Will asked.

  Jobeth Hayden shook her head slowly. Stella saw her eyes in the rearview mirror; she looked confused. “All right,” she said.

  Stella picked up a crumpled page and smelled it. She drew back, rejecting the urge to frith, and stared at Will resentfully. The paperback was a reservoir. Will had been rubbing the pages behind his ears, storing up scent. She poked him with her finger and flashed a query with her cheeks. He took the paper from her hands.

  “We don't want to go to this ranch,” Will said to Mrs. Hayden.

  “That's where we're going. There's a doctor there. It's a safe place, and they're expecting you.”

  “I know a better place,” Will said. “Could you drive us to California?”

  “That's silly,” Jobeth Hayden said.

  “I've been trying to get there for more than a year now.”

  “We're going to the ranch, and that's that.”

  Will dropped another wadded-up page onto the pool of sun on the front seat. Stella could smell Will's particular form of persuasion very clearly now, and however much she fought against it, what he said was beginning to seem reasonable.

  Mrs. Hayden continued to drive. Stella wondered if too much persuasion would confuse her and make her drive off the road.

  Will cradled his head in his arms. “We're fine. I don't need a doctor./ She's fine, she can still drive.”

  “We're going to see a doctor in a small town in Arizona, and then we're going straight to the ranch,” Mrs. Hayden said.

  “It's right across the state line. You have to drive through Nevada, though. Can I see the map?”

  Mrs. Hayden was frowning deeply now, and she started to toss back the pieces of crumpled paper. “I don't think that's a good idea,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “I just want to see the map,” Will said.

  “Well, I suppose that's okay, but no more of this trash, please. I thought you children behaved better.”

  Stella touched Will's arm. “Stop it,” she whispered, leaning forward so only he would hear.

  Will ignored Stella and tossed the paper again onto the front seat, in the pool of sunshine that warmed it and made it release its scent.

  “This is really intolerable,” Mrs. Hayden said, but her head straightened and she did not sound angry. She reached over, opened up the glove
box, and handed Will an Auto Club map of Arizona and New Mexico. “I don't use them often,” she said. “They're pretty old.”

  Will opened the map and spread it across their knees. His finger followed highways going north and west. Stella leaned into the corner where the seat met the door and folded her arms.

  “You'll have to sit up straight, sweetie,” Mrs. Hayden told her. “The car has side airbags. It's not safe to slump over.”

  Stella sat up. Will looked at her. Her back was really hurting now. Calmly, he reached over and touched her hands, her legs, then her back.

  “What are you doing back there?” Mrs. Hayden asked, dimly concerned.

  Will did not answer, and she did not press the question. His fingers marched lightly up Stella's spine, and she rolled over to let him examine her back.

  “You'll be okay,” Will said.

  “How do you know?” Stella asked.

  “You'd smell different if you were bleeding inside, or if something was broken. You're just suffering from a little whiplash, and I don't think there's any nerve damage. I smelled a boy with a broken back once, and he had a sad, awful smell. You smell good.”

  “I don't like you telling us what to do,” Stella said.

  “I'll stop once she takes us to California,” Will said. He did not seem very confident, and he did not smell sure of himself. This was one nervous young man.

  “It's a beautiful day/ I learned a lot in North Carolina,” Will doubled. “I'm glad you're here/ That was before they burned our camp.”

  Stella had never met anyone more adept at persuasion. She wondered whether his talent was natural, or whether he had been taught somewhere. She also wondered whether they would be in any danger. But Stella was not willing, not yet anyway, to tell Mrs. Hayden her suspicions. She apparently had suspicions of her own. “I'd like to roll down the windows,” Mrs. Hayden said. “It's getting stuffy in here.”

  “It's fine, really,” Will said. At the same time, he undered to Stella, “/I need your help. Don't you want to see what we can do?”

  Stella shook her head, thinking of Mitch and Kaye, thinking irrationally of the house in Virginia, the last place she had really felt safe, though that had been an illusion.

  “Didn't you ever want to run away?” Will asked in a near whisper.

  “It really is stuffy,” Mrs. Hayden said. Will was running out of pages.

  “Help me,” Will pleaded softly, earnestly.

  “What is this place?” Stella asked.

  “I think it's in the woods,” Will said. “It's hidden, far from the towns. They have animals and grow their own food./ They raise marijuana and sell it to make money to buy stuff.”

  Marijuana was legal now in most states, but still that sounded dangerous. Stella suddenly felt very cautious. Will looked and smelled scary, with his jumbled hair and cocoa-powder richness, his face that seemed capable of so many expressions. He's been with others and they've taught him so much. What could they teach me—and what could I add?

  “Would I be able to call my parents?”

  “They're not like us/ They'd take you back,” Will replied. “We need to be with our own people/ You'll grow and learn who you really are.”

  Stella felt her stomach knot with confusion and indecision. It was what she had been thinking about in the school. Forming demes was impossible with humans around; they always found ways to interfere. For all she knew, demes were just what children tried on for practice. Soon they would be adults, and what would they do then?

  How would they ever find out if humans kept clinging to them?

  “It's time to grow up,” Will said.

  “Why, you're so young,” Mrs. Hayden said dreamily. She was driving straight and steadily, but her voice sounded wrong, and Stella knew they had to do something in concert soon or Mrs. Hayden could go one way or the other.

  “I'm only fifteen,” Stella said. Actually, she had not yet had her fifteenth birthday, but she always added in the time her mother had been pregnant with the first-stage embryo.

  “There's supposed to be a man there in his sixties, one of us,” Will said.

  “That's impossible,” Stella said.

  “That's what they say. He's from the south, from Georgia. Or maybe Russia. They weren't sure which.”

  “Do you know where this place is?”

  Will tapped his head. “They showed us a map before the camp was burned.”

  “Is it real?”

  Will could not answer this. “I think so./ I want it to be real.”

  Stella closed her eyes. She could feel the warmth behind her eyelids, the sun passing over her face, the suspended redness, and below that the rising up of all her minds, all the parts of her body that yearned. To be alone with her own kind, making her own way, learning all she needed to learn to survive among people who hated her . . .

  That would be an incredible adventure. That would be worth so much danger.

  “It's all you've wanted, I know it,” Will said.

  “How do I know you're not just persuading me?” Her cheeks added unconscious quotes to the emphasis on that word, which sounded so wrong, so lacking in nuance, so human.

  “Look inside,” Will said.

  “I have,” Stella said, a little wail that brought Mrs. Hayden's head around.

  “I'm fine,” Stella said, arms folded tightly across her chest. The tires squealed as Mrs. Hayden straightened the car out on the road.

  Stella gripped the arm of her seat.

  “I'm sweating like a bastard,” she told Will with a little giggle.

  “So am I,” Will said, and smiled crookedly.

  There was one last question. “What about sex?” she asked, so quietly Will did not hear and she had to repeat herself.

  “Don't you know?” Will said. “Humans can rape us, but we don't rape each other. It just doesn't work that way.”

  “What if it happens anyway, and we don't know what we're doing, or how to stay out of trouble?”

  “I don't know the answer to that,” Will said. “Does anybody? But I know one thing. With us, it doesn't happen until it's right. And now it isn't right.”

  That was honest enough. She could feel her independence returning, and all the answers were the same.

  She was strong. She was capable. She knew that.

  She focused on fever-scenting for Mrs. Hayden.

  “Whoo,” Will said, and waved his hand in the air. “You strong, lady.”

  “I am woman,/ I am strong,” Stella sang softly, and they giggled together. She leaned forward. “Please, would you take us to California?” she asked Mrs. Hayden.

  “We'll have to stop for gas. I only brought a little money.”

  “It'll be enough,” Will said.

  “Do you need the book?” Stella asked him. It was a yellowed, dog-eared, and now thoroughly reduced paperback called Spartacus by Howard Fast.

  “Maybe,” Will said. “I really don't know.”

  “Did you learn that in the woods, too?”

  Will shook his head. “I made it up myself,” he said. “We have to be smart. They were taking us to Sandia. They wanted to kill us all. We have to think for ourselves.”

  37

  MARYLAND

  The cab dropped off Kaye and Marge Cross at a single-story brick house on a pleasant, slightly weedy street in Randallstown, Maryland. The grass in the front yard stood a foot high and had long since turned straw yellow. A big old Buick Riviera from the last century, covered with rust and half-hearted patches of gray primer, sat up on blocks in the oil-stained driveway.

  They walked up the overgrown path to the front porch. Kaye stood on the lower step, unsure where to look or what to expect. Cross punched the doorbell. Somewhere inside the house, electronic chimes played the four opening notes from Beethoven's Fifth. Kaye stared at a plastic tricycle with big white wheels almost lost in the grass beside the porch.

  The woman who opened the door was Laura Bloch, from Senator Gianelli's office. She smiled at
Kaye and Cross. “Delighted you could be here,” she said. “Welcome to the Maryland Advisory Group on National Biological Policy. We're an ad hoc committee, and this is an exploratory meeting.”

  Kaye looked at Cross, lips downturned in dubious surprise.

  “You belong here,” Cross told her. “I'm not sure I do.”

  “Of course you do, Marge,” Bloch said. “Come on in, both of you.”

  They entered and stood in the small foyer opposite the living room, separated by a low wall and a row of turned wooden columns. The inside of the house—brown carpet, cream-colored walls decorated with family pictures, colonial-style maple furniture and a coffee table covered with magazines and a flattop computer—could have been anywhere in the country. Typical middle-class comfort.

  In the dining room, seven people sat around a maple table. Kaye was not acquainted with most of them. She did recognize one woman, however, and her face brightened.

  Luella Hamilton walked across the living room. They stood apart for a moment, Kaye in her pants suit, Mrs. Hamilton in a long orange and brown caftan. She had put on a lot of weight since she and Kaye had last seen each other, and not much of it from her pregnancy.

  “Dear baby Jesus,” Mrs. Hamilton let out with a small, wild-eyed laugh. “We were just on the phone. You were going to stay put. Marge, what is this all about?”

  “You know each other?” Cross asked.

  “We sure do,” Kaye said. But she did not explain.

  “Welcome to the revolution,” Luella said, smiling sweetly. “You know Laura. Come meet the others. Quite a high-toned group we have here.” She introduced Kaye to the three women and four men seated at the table. Most were in their middle years; the youngest, a woman, appeared to be in her thirties. All were dressed in suits or stylish office work clothes. All looked like Washington insiders to Kaye, who had met plenty. She saw gratefully that they were all wearing name tags.

  “Most of these folks come from the offices of key senators and representatives, eyes and ears, not necessarily proxies,” Laura Bloch explained. “We won't connect the dots until later. Ladies and gentlemen, Kaye is both a working scientist and a mommy.”

  “You're the one who discovered SHEVA,” said one of the two gray-haired men. Kaye tried to demur, but Bloch shushed her.