by Greg Bear
“You think the children were mutated by SHEVA?”
“The doctor’s report says that many of the women who were killed pleaded that they had cut off sexual relations with their husbands, their boyfriends. They did not want to bear the devil’s offspring. They had heard about the mutated children in other villages, and once they had their fever, their miscarriage, they tried to avoid getting pregnant. Almost all the women who had the miscarriages were pregnant thirty days later, no matter what they did or did not do. Just as some of our hospitals are reporting now.”
Kaye shook her head. “That is so completely unbelievable!”
Dicken shrugged. “It’s not going to get any more believable, or any easier,” he said. “For some time now, I just haven’t been convinced that SHEVA is any known kind of disease.”
Kaye’s lips tightened. She put down her cup of coffee and folded her arms, remembering the conversation with Drew Miller in the Italian restaurant in Boston, and Saul saying it was time they tackle the problem of evolution. “Maybe it’s a signal,” she said.
“What sort of signal?”
“A code-key that opens up a genetic set-aside, instructions for a new phenotype.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Dicken said, frowning.
“Something built up over thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. Guesses, hypotheses having to do with this or that trait, elaborations on a pretty rigid plan.”
“To what end?” Dicken asked.
“Evolution,” Kaye said.
Dicken backed his chair away and placed his hands on his legs. “Whoa.”
“You said it wasn’t a disease,” Kaye reminded him.
“I said it wasn’t like any disease I know. It’s still a retro-virus.”
“You read my papers, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I dropped a few hints.”
Dicken pondered this. “A catalyst.”
“You make it, we get it, we suffer,” Kaye said.
Dicken’s cheeks reddened. “I’m trying not to turn this into a man-woman thing,” he said. “There’s enough of that going on already.”
“Sorry,” Kaye said. “Maybe I just want to avoid the real issue.”
Dicken seemed to reach a decision. “I’m stepping out of line by showing this to you.” He dug into his valise and produced a printout of an e-mail message from Atlanta. Four small pictures had been pasted on the bottom of the message.
“A woman died in an automobile accident outside Atlanta. An autopsy was performed at Northside Hospital, and one of our pathologists found she was in her first trimester. He examined the fetus, clearly a Herod’s fetus. Then he examined the woman’s uterus. He found a second pregnancy, very early, at the base of the placenta, protected by a thin wall of laminar tissue. The placenta had already started to separate, but the second ovum was secure. It would have survived the miscarriage. A month later…”
“A grandchild,” Kaye said. “Released by the…”
“Intermediate daughter. Really just a specialized ovary. She creates a second ovum. That ovum attaches to the wall of the mother’s uterus.”
“What if her eggs, the daughter’s eggs, are different?”
Dicken’s throat had grown dry and he coughed. “Excuse me.” He got up to pour himself a cup of water, then walked back between the tables to sit beside Kaye.
He continued, speaking slowly. “SHEVA provokes the release of a complex of polyproteins. They break down in the cytosol outside the nucleus. LH, FSH, prostaglandins.”
“I know. Judith Kushner told me,” Kaye said, her voice little more than a squeak. “Some of them are responsible for causing the miscarriages. Others could change an ovum substantially.”
“Mutate it?” Dicken asked, still clinging to the tatters of an old paradigm.
“I’m not sure that’s the right word,” Kaye said. “It sounds kind of vicious and random. No. We may be talking about a different kind of reproduction here.”
Dicken finished his cup of water.
“This isn’t exactly new to me,” Kaye mused quietly. She clenched her fingers into fists, then lightly, nervously, rapped her knuckles on the table. “Are you willing to argue that SHEVA is part of human evolution? That we’re about to make a new kind of human?”
Dicken examined Kaye’s face, her mixed wonder and excitement, the peculiar terror of coming upon the intellectual equivalent of a raging tiger. “I wouldn’t dare to put it so bluntly. But maybe I’m a coward. Maybe it is something like that. I value your opinion. God knows I need an ally here.”
Kaye’s heart thudded in her chest. She lifted her cup of coffee and the cold liquid sloshed. “My God, Christopher.” She gave a small, helpless laugh. “What if it’s true? What if we’re all pregnant? The whole human race?”
PART TWO
SHEVA
36
Eastern Washington State
SPRING
Wide and slow, the Columbia River glided like a plain of polished jade between black basalt walls.
Mitch pulled off state route 14, drove for half a mile on a dirt and gravel road through scrub trees and bushes, then turned at a bent and rusted sheet-metal sign that read IRON CAVE.
Two old Airstream trailers gleamed in the sun a few yards from the edge of the gorge. Wooden benches and tables heaped with burlap sacks and digging tools surrounded the trailers. He parked the car off the road.
A chill breeze picked at his felt Stetson. He gripped the hat with one hand as he walked from the car to the edge and stared down upon Eileen Ripper’s encampment, fifty feet below.
A short young blond woman in frayed and faded jeans and a brown leather jacket stepped down from the door of the nearest trailer. In the moist air off the river, he instantly picked up the young woman’s scent: Opium or Trouble or some such perfume. She looked remarkably like Tilde.
The woman paused under the outstretched awning, then stepped out and shaded her eyes against the sun. “Mitch Rafelson?” she asked.
“None other,” he said. “Is Eileen down there?”
“Yeah. It’s falling apart, you know.”
“Since when?”
“Since three days ago. Eileen worked real hard to make her case. Didn’t make much difference in the long run.”
Mitch grinned sympathetically. “Been there,” he said.
“The woman from Five Tribes packed up two days ago. That’s why Eileen thought it would be okay for you to come out here. Nobody gets mad now if you show up.”
“Nice to be popular,” Mitch said, and tipped his hat.
The woman smiled. “Eileen is feeling low. Give her some encouragement. I think you’re a hero, myself. Except maybe for those mummies.”
“Where is she?”
“Just below the cave.”
Oliver Merton sat on a folding chair in the shadow of the largest canvas canopy. About thirty, with flaming red hair, a pale broad face and short pushed-up nose, he wore a look of utter and almost fierce concentration, his lips drawn back as he punched the keyboard of a laptop computer with his index fingers.
Hunt-and-peck, Mitch thought. A self-taught typist . He checked out the man’s clothes, distinctly out of place at a dig: tweed slacks, red suspenders, a white linen dress shirt with a banded collar.
Merton did not look up until Mitch was within touching distance of the canopy.
“Mitchell Rafelson! What a pleasure!” Merton shifted the computer to the table, jumped to his feet, and held out his hand. “It’s damned gloomy here. Eileen is up the slope by the dig. I’m sure she’s eager to see you. Shall we?”
The six other workers on the site, all young interns or graduate students, looked up in curiosity as the two men passed. Merton walked ahead of Mitch and climbed over natural shelves cut by centuries of river erosion. They paused twenty feet below the bluff where an old, rust-streaked cave dug into an outcrop of basalt. Above and east of the outcrop, part of an overlying ledge of weathered stone had collapsed, sc
attering large blocks down the gentle slope to the shore.
Eileen Ripper stood at the outside of a posted series of carefully excavated square pits marked with topometric grids — wire and string — on the western side of the slope. In her late forties, small and dark, with deep-set black eyes and a thin nose, Ripper’s most conspicuous beauty lay in her generous lips, which contrasted appealingly with a short, unruly cap of peppered black hair.
She turned at Merton’s hail. She did not smile or call out. Instead, she put on a determined face, walked gingerly down the talus, and held out her hand to Mitch. They shook firmly.
“We got radiocarbon figures back yesterday morning,” she said. “They’re thirteen thousand years old, plus or minus five hundred…and if they ate a lot of salmon, they’re twelve thousand five hundred years old. But the Five Tribes folks say that Western science is trying to strip them of the last of their dignity. I thought I could reason with them.”
“At least you made the effort,” Mitch said.
“I apologize for judging you so harshly, Mitch. I kept my cool for so long, despite little signs of trouble, and then this woman, Sue Champion…I thought we were friends. She advises the tribes. She comes back here yesterday with two men. The men were…so smug, Mitch. Like little boys who can piss higher up the barn door. They tell me I am fabricating evidence to support my lies. They say they have the government and the law on their side. Our old nemesis, NAGPRA.”
That stood for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Mitch was very familiar with the details of this legislation.
Merton stood on the loose slope, trying to keep from slipping, and made little darting glances between them.
“What evidence did you fabricate?” Mitch asked lightly.
“Don’t joke.” But Ripper’s expression loosened and she held Mitch’s hand between hers. “We took collagen from the bones and sent it to Portland. They did a DNA analysis. Our bones are from a different population, not at all related to modern Indians, only loosely related to the Spirit Cave mummy. Caucasoid, if we can use that loose term. But hardly Nordic. More Ainu, I believe.”
“That’s historic, Eileen,” Mitch said. “That’s excellent. Congratulations.”
Once started, Ripper couldn’t seem to stop. They walked down the trail to the tents. “We can’t even begin to make modern racial comparisons. That is what is so infuriating! We let our screwball notions of race and identity cloud the truth. Populations were so different back then. But modern Indians did not come from the people our skeletons belonged to. They may have competed with the ancestors of modern Indians. And they lost.”
“The Indians won?” Merton said. “They should be glad to hear it.”
“They think I’m trying to divide their political unity. They don’t care about what really happened. They want their own little dream world and the hell with truth!”
“You’re telling me?” Mitch asked.
Ripper smiled through tears of discouragement and exhaustion. “The Five Tribes have got counsel petitioning in federal court in Seattle to take the skeletons.”
“Where are the bones now?”
“In Portland. We packed them up in situ and shipped them out yesterday.”
“Across state lines?” Mitch asked. “That’s kidnapping.”
“It’s better than waiting around for a bunch of lawyers.” She shook her head and Mitch put an arm around her shoulders. “I tried to do it right, Mitch.” She wiped at her cheeks with a dusty hand, leaving muddy streaks, and forced a laugh. “Now I’ve even got the Vikings mad at us!”
The Vikings — a small group of mostly middle-aged men calling themselves the Nordic Worshippers of Odin in the New World — had come to Mitch as well, years before, to conduct their ceremonies. They had hoped that Mitch could prove their claims that Nordic explorers had populated much of North America thousands of years ago. Mitch, ever the philosopher, had let them conduct a ritual over the bones of Pasco man, still in the ground, but ultimately he had had to disappoint them. Pasco man was in fact quite thoroughly Indian, closely related to the Southern Na-dene.
After Ripper’s tests on her skeletons, the Worshippers of Odin had once again left in disappointment. In a world of fragile self-justification, the truth made no one happy.
Merton brought out a bottle of champagne and vacuum packs of smoked salmon and fresh bread and cheese as the daylight waned. Several of Ripper’s students built a large fire that snapped and crackled on the shore as Mitch and Eileen toasted their mutual insanity.
“Where’d you get this feed?” Ripper asked Merton as he spread the camp’s battered Melmac plates on the bare pine table beneath the largest canopy.
“At the airport,” Merton said. “Only place I had time to stop. Bread, cheese, fish, wine — what more does one need? Though I could use a good pint of bitter.”
“I’ve got Coors in the trailer,” a burly, balding male intern said.
“Breakfast of diggers,” Mitch said approvingly.
“Spare me,” Merton said. “And pardon me if I tell everyone to dig in. Everyone has a story to tell.” He took a plastic cup of champagne from Ripper. “Of race and time and migration and what it means to be a human being. Who wants to be first?”
Mitch knew he had only to keep silent for a couple of seconds and Ripper would start in. Merton took notes as she talked about the three skeletons and local politics. An hour and a half later, it was getting bitterly cold and they moved closer to the fire.
“The Altai tribes resent having ethnic Russians dig up their dead,” Merton said. “It’s an indigenous revolt everywhere. A slap on the wrist to the colonial oppressors. Do you think the Neandertals have their spokespersons in Innsbruck picketing right now?”
“Nobody wants to be a Neandertal,” Mitch said dryly.
“Except me.” He turned to Eileen. “I’ve been dreaming about them. My little nuclear family.”
“Really?” Eileen leaned forward, intrigued.
“I dreamed their people lived on a big raft in a lake.”
“Fifteen thousand years ago?” Merton asked, raising an eyebrow.
Mitch caught something in the reporter’s tone and looked at him suspiciously. “Is that your guess?” he asked. “Or have they got a date?”
“None they’re releasing to the public,” Merton said with a sniff. “I have a contact at the university, however…and he tells me they’ve definitely settled on fifteen thousand years. If, that is,” and he smiled at Ripper, “they didn’t eat a lot of fish.”
“What else?”
Merton punched the air dramatically. “Pugilism,” he said. “Raging arguments in the back rooms. Your mummies violate everything known in anthropology and archaeology. They’re not strictly Neandertal, so claim a few in the main research team; they’re a new subspecies, Homo sapiens alpinensis, according to one scientist. Another is betting they’re late stage gracile Neandertals who lived in a large community, got less stocky and robust, looked more like you and me. They hope to explain away the infant.”
Mitch lowered his head. They don ‘tfeel this the way I do. They don’t know the way I know. Then he drew back and blanketed these emotions. He had to keep some level of objectivity.
Merton turned toward Mitch. “Did you see the baby?”
This made Mitch jerk upright in his folding chair. Merton’s eyes narrowed. “Not clearly,” Mitch said. “I just assumed, when they said it was a modern infant…”
“Could Neandertal traits be masked by infant features?” Merton asked.
“No,” Mitch said. Then, with a squint, “I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so, either,” Ripper agreed. The students had gathered close around this discussion. The fire snapped and hissed and flung up tall yellow arms that grabbed at the cold, still sky. The river lapped the gravelly shore with a sound like a clockwork dog licking a hand. Mitch felt the champagne mellowing him after a long, tiring day of driving.
“Well, impl
ausible as it might be, it’s easier than arguing against a genetic association,” Merton said. “The people in Innsbruck pretty much have to agree that the female and the infant are related. But there are anomalies, pretty serious ones, that no one can explain. I was hoping Mitchell might be able to enlighten me.”
Mitch was saved from having to feign ignorance when a woman’s strong voice called from the top of the bluff.
“Eileen? You there? It’s Sue Champion.”
“Hell,” Ripper said. “I thought she was back in Kumash by now.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled upward, “We’re down here, Sue. We’re getting drunk. Want to join us?”
One of the male students ran up the trail to the top of the bluff with a flashlight. Sue Champion followed him back down to the tent.
“Nice fire,” she observed. Over six feet tall, slender to the point of thin, with long black hair arranged in a braid draped down the front shoulder of her brown corduroy jacket, Champion looked smart, classy, and a little stiff. She might have had a ready smile, but her face was lined with fatigue. Mitch glanced at Ripper, saw the fix in her expression.
“I’m here to say I’m sorry,” Champion said.
“We’re all sorry,” Ripper said.
“Have you been out here all night? It’s cold.”
“We’re dedicated.”
Champion walked around the canopy to be near the fire. “My office got your call about the tests. The chair of the board of trustees doesn’t believe it.”
“I can’t help that,” Ripper said. “Why did you just pull out all of a sudden and sic your attorney on me? I thought we had an agreement, and if they turned out to be Indian, we’d do basic science, with minimum invasion, then turn them over to the Five Tribes.”