by Greg Bear
Will came back. The squirrel fled. “We should keep moving,” he said. They trotted clumsily into the trees as two cars rumbled by.
“Maybe we should hitchhike,” Stella suggested from behind a pine trunk. She smelled the cloying sweetness of the tree's sap and it reminded her of school. She curled her lip and pushed away from the rough bark.
“If we hitchhike, they'll catch us,” Will said. “We're close. I know it.”
She followed Will. She could almost imagine a big blue Chevy or a big pickup barreling down the road with Mitch behind the wheel. Mitch and Kaye, together, looking for her.
The next time they heard a car coming, Will ran into the trees but she kept walking. After the car had passed, he caught up with her and gave her a squinch-faced look.
“We're helpless out here,” Stella said, squinching back at him, as if that were a reasonable explanation.
“More reason to hide.”
“Maybe somebody knows where this place is. If they stop we can ask.”
“I'm not very lucky,” Will said, his mouth twisting into a line that was not a smile and not quite a smirk. Wry and uncertain. “Are you lucky?” he asked.
“I'm here with you, aren't I?” she asked, deadpan.
Will laughed. He laughed until he started waving his arms and snorting and had to stop to wipe his nose on his sleeve.
“Eeyeew,” Stella said.
“Sorry,” he said.
Against her better judgment, Stella liked him again.
The next car, Will stuck out his hand, thumb up, and gave his biggest smile. The car flashed by doing at least seventy miles an hour, smoked windows full of blurred faces that did not even look their way.
Will hunched his shoulders as he resumed walking.
They heard the next vehicle twenty minutes later. Stella looked over her shoulder. It was an old Ford minivan, cresting a rise in the two-lane road and laying down a thin cloud of oily white smoke. Neither she nor Will moved back from the road. Their water bottles were empty. It wouldn't be long before they had to turn around and retrace their journey.
The minivan slowed, moved into the opposite lane to avoid them, and passed with a low whoosh. An older man and woman in the front seats peered at them owlishly; the back windows were tinted blue and reflected their own faces.
The minivan pulled over and stopped about two hundred feet down the road.
Stella hiccupped in surprise and crossed her arms. Will stood sideways, like a fencer expecting a strike, and Stella saw his hands shake.
“They don't look mean,” Stella said, but she thought of the red truck and Fred Trinket and his mother who had cooked chicken, back in Spotsylvania County.
“We do need a ride,” Will admitted.
The minivan backed up slowly and stopped about twenty feet away. The woman leaned her head out of the right side window. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray and she had a square, strong face and direct eyes. Her arm, elbowing out, was covered with freckles, and her face was heavily wrinkled and pale. Stella saw she had lots of big silver rings on the fingers of her left hand, which rested on her forearm as she looked back at them.
“Are you two virus kids?” the older woman asked.
“Yeah,” Will said, hands shaking even harder. He tried to smile. “We escaped.”
The older woman thought about that for a moment, pursing her lips. “Are you infectious?”
“I don't think so,” Will said, and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
The older woman turned back to the man in the driver's seat. They shared a glance and reached a silent agreement possible only to a couple who had lived together a very long time. “Need a ride somewhere?” the woman asked.
Will looked at Stella, but all Stella could sniff was the thick fume of oil. The man was at least ten years older than the woman. He had a thin face, bright gray eyes, and a prominent nose, and his hands, on the wheel, were also covered with rings—turquoise and coral and silver, birds and abstract designs.
“Sure,” Will said.
The minivan's side door popped and slid open automatically. The interior stank of cigarette smoke and hamburgers and fries.
Stella's nose wrinkled, but the smell of food made her mouth water. They hadn't eaten since the morning of the day before.
“We've been reading about kids like you,” the old man said as they climbed in. “Hard times, huh?”
“Yeah,” Will said. “Thanks.”
PART THREE
SHEVA + 18
“We're in year eighteen of what some have called the Virus Century. The whole world is still running scared, though there are faint and tremulous hints of a political solution.
“Yet the majority of people polled today haven't the faintest idea what a virus is. For most of us, ‘They're small and they make us sick’ just about says it all.
“Most scientists insist that viruses are genetic pirates, hijacking and killing cells to reproduce: ‘Selfish genes with switchblades,’ ‘Terrorist DNA.’ Others say we've got it mostly wrong, that many viruses are genetic messengers, carrying signals between cells in the body and even between you and me: ‘Genetic FedEx.’
“The truth probably combines both views. It's a weird old biological ballgame, and most scientists agree we're not even in the second inning.”
—FoxMedia producer pitching a Floodnet Real Life,
Real News special; rejected
“Who'll buy ad time? It's too scary. What the hell does ‘tremulous’ mean? I'm tired of all this science shit. Science ruins my day. Let me know if and when the president stays on the pot long enough to get his job done. He's our boy. Maybe if, maybe then, but no promises.”
—Memo from FoxMedia CEO and program executive
1
FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND
Kaye stared into Mrs. Rhine's darkened living room. The furniture had been rearranged in bizarre ways; a couch overturned, covered with a sheet, the bumps of its legs pointing into the air and pillows arranged in a cross on the floor around it; two wooden chairs leaning face-forward against the wall in a corner as if they were being punished.
Small white cardboard boxes covered the coffee table.
Freedman tapped the intercom button. “Carla, we're here. I've brought Kaye Lang Rafelson.”
Mrs. Rhine walked briskly through the door, took a chair from a corner, swung it into the center of the room, two yards from the thick window, and sat. She wore plain blue denim coveralls. Gauze covered her arms and hands and most of her face. She wore a kerchief, and it did not look as if she had any hair. The little flesh that showed was red and puffy. Her eyes were intense between the mummy folds of gauze.
“I'll turn my lights down,” she said, her voice clear and almost etched over the intercom. “You turn yours up. No need to look at me.”
“All right,” Freedman said, and brightened the lights in the viewing room.
The lights in Mrs. Rhine's living room darkened until they could see her only in silhouette. “Welcome to my home, Dr. Rafelson,” she said.
“I was pleased to get your message,” Kaye said.
Freedman folded her arms and stood back.
“Christopher Dicken used to bring flowers,” Mrs. Rhine said. Her movements were awkward, jerky. “I can't have flowers now. Once a week I have to go into a little closet and they send a robot in here to scrub everything. They have to get rid of all the little house-dust things. Fungus and bacteria and such that might grow from old flakes of skin. They can kill me now, if they build up in here.”
“I appreciated the letter you sent me.”
“The Web is my life, Kaye. If I may call you Kaye.”
“Of course.”
“I seem to know you, Christopher has spoken of you so often. I don't get too many visitors now. I've forgotten how to react to real people. I type on my clean little keyboard and travel all around the world, but I never go anywhere or touch or see anything, really. I thought I had gotten used to it, but then I just g
ot angry again.”
“I can imagine,” Kaye said.
“Tell me what you imagine, Kaye,” Mrs. Rhine said, head jerking.
“I imagine you feel robbed.”
The dark shadow nodded. “My whole family. That's why I wrote to you. When I read what happened to your husband, to your daughter, I thought, she's not just a scientist, or a symbol of a movement, or a celebrity. She's like me. But of course you can get them back, someday.”
“I am always trying to get back my daughter,” Kaye said. “We still search for her.”
“I wish I could tell you where she is.”
“So do I,” Kaye said, swallowing within the hood. The air flow in the stiff isolation suit was not the best.
“Have you read Karl Popper?” Mrs. Rhine asked.
“No, I never have,” Kaye said, and arranged a plastic wrinkle around her midriff. She noticed then that the suit was patched with something like duct tape. This distracted her for a moment; she had heard that funding had been cut, but she had not fully realized the implications.
“. . . says that a whole group of philosophers and thinkers, including him, regard the self as a social appurtenance,” Mrs. Rhine said. “If you are raised away from society, you do not develop a full self. Well, I am losing my self. I feel uncomfortable using the personal pronoun. I would go mad, but I . . . this thing I am . . .” She stopped. “Marian, I need to speak with Kaye privately. At least let me believe nobody is listening or recording us.”
“I'll check with the technician.” Freedman spoke briefly with the safety technician. She then moved gingerly out of the viewing room, the umbilical coiling behind her. The door closed.
“Why are you here?” Mrs. Rhine asked in a low voice, barely audible. Kaye could see the reflections in the woman's eyes from the brighter lights behind the glass.
“Because of your message. And because I thought it was time that I meet you.”
“You're not here to reassure me that they'll find a cure? Because some people come through here and say that and I hate it.”
“No,” Kaye said.
“Why, then? Why speak with me? I send e-mail letters to lots of people. I don't think most of them get through. I'm surprised you got yours, actually.”
Marian Freedman had made sure of that.
“You wrote that you felt you were getting smarter and more distant,” Kaye said, “but you were losing your self.” She stared at the shadowy figure in the dark room. The eczema had gotten very bad, so Kaye had been told in the briefing before joining Marian Freedman. “I'd like to hear more,” Kaye said.
Suddenly, Mrs. Rhine leaned forward. “I know why you're here,” she said, her voice rising.
“Why?” Kaye asked.
“We've both had the virus.”
A moment's silence.
“I don't get you,” Kaye said softly.
“Ascetics sit on pillars of rock to avoid human touch. They wait for God. They go mad. That is me. I'm Saint Anthony, but the devils are too smart to waste their time gibbering at me. I am already in hell. I don't need them to remind me. I have changed. My brain feels bigger but it's also like a big warehouse filled with empty boxes. I read and try to fill up the boxes. I was so stupid, I was just a breeder, the virus punished me for being stupid, I wanted to live so I took the pig tissue inside of me and that was forbidden, wasn't it? I'm not Jewish but pigs are powerful creatures, very spiritual, don't you think? I am haunted by them. I've read some ghost stories. Horror stories. Very scary, about pigs. I'm talking a mile a minute, I know. Marian listens, the others listen, but it's a chore for them. I scare them, I think. They wonder how long I'll last.”
Kaye's stomach was so tense she could taste the acid in her throat. She felt so much for the woman beyond the glass, but could not think of anything to say or do to comfort her. “I'm still listening,” she said.
“Good,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I just wanted to tell you that I'm going to die soon. I can feel it in my blood. So will you, though maybe not so soon.”
Mrs. Rhine stood and walked around the overturned and shrouded couch.
“I have these nightmares. I escape from here somehow and walk around and touch people, trying to help, and I just end up killing everybody. Then, I visit with God . . . and I make Him sick. I kill God. The devil says to Him, ‘I told You so.’ He's mocking God while's He's dying, and I say, Good for you.”
“Oh,” Kaye said, swallowing. “That isn't the way it is. It isn't going to be that way.”
Mrs. Rhine waved her arms at the window. “You can't possibly understand. I'm tired.”
Kaye wanted to say more, but could not.
“Go now, Kaye,” Carla Rhine insisted.
Kaye sipped a cup of coffee in Marian Freedman's small office. She was crying so hard her shoulders were shaking. She had held back while removing the suit and showering, while taking the elevator, but now, it could not be stopped. “That wasn't good,” she managed to say between sobs. “I didn't handle that at all well.”
“Nothing we do matters, not for Carla,” Freedman said. “I don't know what to say to her, either.”
“I hope it won't set her back.”
“I doubt it,” Freedman said. “She is strong in so many ways. That's part of the cruelty. The others are quiet. They have their habits. They're like hamsters. Forgive me, but it's true. Carla is different.”
“She's become sacred,” Kaye said, straightening in the plastic chair and taking another Kleenex from the floral box on Freedman's desk. She wiped her eyes and shook her head.
“Not sacred,” Freedman insisted, irritated. “Cursed, maybe.”
“She says she's dying.”
Freedman looked at the far wall. “She's producing new types of retroviruses, very together, elegant little things, not the patchwork monstrosities she used to make. They don't contain any pig genes whatsoever. None of these new viruses are infectious, or even pathogenic, as far as we can tell, but they're really playing hell with her immune system. The other ladies . . . the same.”
Marian Freedman focused on Kaye. Kaye studied her dark, drained eyes with a growing sense of dismay.
“Last time Christopher Dicken was through here, he worked with me on some samples,” Freedman said. “In less than a year, maybe only a few months, we think all our ladies will start showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, possibly lupus.” Freedman worked her lips, fell silent, but kept looking at Kaye.
“And?” Kaye said.
“He thinks the symptoms have nothing to do with pig-tissue transplants. The ladies may just be accelerated a little. Mrs. Rhine could be the first to experience post-SHEVA syndrome, a side effect of SHEVA pregnancy. It could be pretty bad.”
Kaye let that information sink in, but could not find any emotion to attach to it—not after seeing Carla Rhine. “Christopher didn't tell me.”
“Well, I can see why.”
Kaye deliberately switched her thoughts, a survival tactic at which she had become adept in the last decade. “I'm flying out to California to meet with Mitch. He's still searching for Stella.”
“Any signs?” Freedman asked.
“Not yet,” Kaye said.
She got up and Freedman held up a special disposal basket marked “Biohazard” to receive her tear-dampened tissue. “Carla might behave very differently tomorrow. She'll probably tell me how glad she is you dropped by. She's just that way.”
“I understand,” Kaye said.
“No, you don't,” Freedman said.
Kaye was in no mood. “Yes, I do,” she said firmly.
Freedman studied her for a moment, then gave in with a shrug. “Pardon my bad attitude,” she explained. “It's become an epidemic around here.”
Kaye boarded a plane in Baltimore within two hours, heading for California, denying the sun its chance to rest. Scents of ice and coffee and orange juice wafted from a beverage cart being pushed down the aisle. As she sat watching a news report on the federal trials of former Emergency Action
officials, she clamped her teeth to keep them from chattering. She was not cold; she was afraid.
Nearly all of her life, Kaye had believed that understanding biology, the way life worked, would lead to understanding herself, to enlightenment. Knowing how life worked would explain it all: origins, ends, and everything in between. But the deeper she dug and the more she understood, the less satisfying it seemed, all clever mechanism; wonders, no doubt, enough to mesmerize her for a thousand lifetimes, but really nothing more than an infinitely devious shell.
The shell brought birth and consciousness, but the price was the push-pull of cooperation and competition, partnership and betrayal, success causing another's pain and failure causing your own pain and death, life preying upon life, dragging down victim after victim. Vast slaughters leading to adaptation and more cleverness, temporary advantage; a never-ending process.
Viruses contributed to both birth and disease: genes traveling and talking to each other, speaking the memories and planning the changes, all the marvels and all the failures, but never escaping the push-pull. Nature is a bitch goddess.
The sun came through the window opposite and fell brilliant on her face. She closed her eyes. I should have told Carla what happened to me. Why didn't I tell her?
Because it's been three years. Fruitless, painful years. And now this.
Carla Rhine had given up on God. Kaye wondered if she had as well.
2
CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
Mitch adjusted his tie in the old, patchy mirror in the dingy motel room. His face looked comical in the reflection, tinted yellow around his left eye, spotted black near his right cheek, a crack separating neck and chin. The mirror told him he was old and worn out and coming apart, but he smiled anyway. He would be seeing his wife for the first time in two weeks, and he was looking forward to spending time alone with her. He did not care about his appearance because he knew Kaye did not care much, either. So he wore the suit, because all his other clothes were dirty and he had not had time to take them down to the little outbuilding and plug dollar coins into the washing machine.