Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  “We’re off into the wild blue yonder here,” Mitch said, “and they’ll shoot us down in the first minute of any dogfight.” He whipped his hands through the air like two airplanes, making the cabby nervous, then dramatically plunged his left hand into his knee, crumpling his fingers. “Scrunch,” he said.

  The cabby regarded them curiously. “You folks biologists?” he asked.

  “Grad students in the university of life,” Dicken said.

  “Got ya,” the cabby said solemnly.

  “Now we’ve earned this.” Dicken took the third bottle of wine from the bag and pulled out his Swiss Army knife.

  “Hey, not in the cab,” the cabby said sternly. “Not unless I go off duty and you share.”

  They laughed. “In the hotel, then,” Dicken said.

  “I’ll be drunk,” Kaye said, and shook her hair down around her eyes.

  “We’ll have an orgy,” Dicken said, and then flushed bright pink. “An intellectual orgy,” he added sheepishly.

  “I’m worn out,” Mitch said. “Kaye’s got laryngitis.”

  She gave a small squeak and grinned.

  The cab pulled up in front of the Serrano Hotel, just southwest of the convention center, and let them out.

  “My treat,” Dicken said. He paid the fare. “Like the wine.”

  “All right,” Mitch said. “Thanks.”

  “We need some sort of conclusion,” Kaye said. “A prediction.”

  Mitch yawned and stretched. “Sorry. Can’t think another thought.”

  Kaye watched him through her bangs: the slim hips, the jeans tight around his thighs, the square rugged face with its single line of eyebrow. Not beautifully handsome, but she heard her own chemistry, a low breathy singing in her loins, and it cared little about that. The first sign of the end of winter.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “Christopher?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Dicken said. “We’re saying the interim daughters are not diseased, they’re a stage of development we’ve never seen before.”

  “And what does that mean?” Kaye asked.

  “It means the second-stage babies will be healthy, viable. And different, maybe just a little,” Dicken said.

  “That would be amazing,” Kaye said. “What else?”

  “Enough, please. We can’t possibly finish it tonight,” Mitch said.

  “Pity,” Kaye said.

  Mitch smiled down on her. Kaye offered him her hand and they shook. Mitch’s palm was dry as leather and rough with calluses from long years of digging. His nostrils dilated as he was near her, and she could have sworn she saw his irises grow large, as well.

  Dicken’s face was still pink. He slurred his words slightly. “We don’t have a game plan,” he said. “If there’s going to be a report, we have to get all our evidence together — and I mean all of it.”

  “Count on it,” Mitch said. “You have my number.”

  “I don’t,” Kaye said.

  “Christopher will give it to you,” Mitch said. “I’ll be around for a few more days. Let me know when you’re available.”

  “We will,” Dicken said.

  “We’ll call,” Kaye said as she and Dicken walked toward the glass doors.

  “Interesting fellow,” Dicken said on the elevator.

  Kaye agreed with a small nod. Dicken was watching her with some concern.

  “Seems bright,” he continued. “How in the world did he get in so much trouble?”

  In her room, Kaye took a hot shower and crawled into bed, exhausted and more than a little drunk. Her body was happy. She twisted the sheets and blanket around her head and rolled on her side, and almost immediately, she was asleep.

  44

  San Diego, California

  Kaye had just finished washing her face, whistling through the dripping water, when her room phone rang. She dabbed her face dry and answered it.

  “Kaye? This is Mitch.”

  “I remember you,” she said lightly, she hoped not too lightly.

  “I’m flying north tomorrow. Hoped you might have some time this morning to get together.”

  She had been so busy giving talks and serving on panels at the conference that there had been little time to even think about the evening at the zoo. Each night, she had fallen into bed, completely exhausted. Judith Kushner had been right; Marge Cross was absorbing every second of her life.

  “That would be good,” she said cautiously. He was not mentioning Christopher. “Where?”

  “I’m at the Holiday Inn. There’s a nice little coffee shop in the Serrano. I could walk over and meet you there.”

  “I’ve got an hour before I have to be somewhere,” Kaye said. “Downstairs in ten minutes?”

  “I’ll jog,” Mitch said. “See you in the lobby.”

  She laid out her clothes for the day — a trim blue linen suit from the ever-tasteful Marge Cross collection — and was considering whether to block a small sinus headache with a couple of Tylenol when she heard muted yelling through the double-pane window. She ignored it for a moment and reached to the bed to flip a page on the convention program. As she carried the program to the table and fumbled for the badge in her purse, she grew tired of her tuneless whistling. She walked around the bed again to pick up the TV remote and pushed the power button.

  The small hotel TV made the necessary background noise. Commercials for tampons, hair restorer. Her mind was full of other things; the closing ceremonies, her appearance on the podium with Marge Cross and Mark Augustine.

  Mitch.

  As she looked for a good pair of nylons, she heard the woman say, “…first full-term infant. To bring all our listeners up to date, this morning, an unidentified woman in Mexico City gave birth to the first scientifically recognized second-stage Herod’s baby. Reporting live from—”

  Kaye flinched at the sound of metal crunching, glass breaking. She pulled back the window’s gauze curtain and looked north. West Harbor Drive outside the Serrano and the convention center was covered by a thick shag of people, a packed and streaming mass flowing over curbs and lawns and plazas, absorbing cars, hotel vans, shuttle buses. The sound they made was extraordinary, even through the double panes of glass: a low, grinding roar, like an earthquake. White squares flopped about over the mass, green ribbons flexed and rippled: placards and banners. From this angle, ten floors up, she could not read the messages.

  “ — Apparently born dead,” the TV announcer continued. “We’re trying to get an update from—”

  Her phone rang again. She pulled the receiver from its cradle and stretched the cord to reach the window. She could not stop watching the living river below her window. She saw cars being rocked, flipped on their backs as the crowd surged, heard more sounds of glass breaking.

  “Ms. Lang, this is StanThorne, Marge Cross’s chief of security. We want you up here on the twentieth, in the penthouse.”

  The writhing mass below cheered with one animal voice.

  “Take the express elevator,” Thorne said. “If that’s blocked, take the stairs. Just get up here now.”

  “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  She put on her shoes.

  “This morning, in Mexico City—”

  Even before she boarded the elevator, the bottom seemed to fall out of Kaye’s stomach.

  Mitch stood across the street from the convention center, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, trying to look as unin-volved and anonymous as possible.

  The crowd sought out scientists, official representatives, anyone involved in the convention, flowing toward them, waving signs, shouting at them.

  He had removed the badge Dicken had provided him, and with his faded denims, suntanned face, and windblown, sandy hair, did not at all resemble the hapless pasty-skinned scientists and pharmaceutical representatives.

  The demonstrators were mostly women, all colors, all sizes, but nearly all young, between the ages of eighteen and forty. They seemed to have lost all sense of discipline
. Anger was quickly taking over.

  Mitch was terrified, but for the moment, the crowd was moving south, and he was free. He walked with quick, stiff steps away from Harbor Drive and ran down a parking ramp, jumped a wall, and found himself in a planter strip between high-rise hotels.

  Out of breath, more from alarm than exertion — he had always hated crowds — he trudged through the ice plant, climbed another wall, and lowered himself onto the concrete floor of a parking garage. A few women with stunned expressions ran awkwardly to their cars. One of them carried a drooping and battered placard. Mitch read the words as they swept by: OUR DESTINY OUR BODIES.

  The aching sound of sirens echoed through the garage. Mitch pushed through a door to the elevator cubicle just as three uniformed security guards came thumping down the stairs. They rounded the corner, guns drawn, and glared at him.

  Mitch held up his hands and hoped he looked innocent. They swore and locked the double glass doors. “Get up there!” one shouted at him.

  He climbed the stairs with the guards close behind.

  From the lobby, looking out upon West Harbor Drive, he saw small riot trucks skirt the crowd, pushing slowly and steadily into the women. The women cried out in chorus, compressed and angry voices like a crashing wave. Water cannons twisted on top of a truck like antennae on a bug’s head.

  The lobby’s glass doors opened and closed as guests waggled keys at staff and were allowed in. Mitch walked to the middle of the lobby, standing in an atrium, feeling the air from outside brush past. A sharp tang caught his attention: odors of fear and rage and something else, acrid, like dog piss on a hot sidewalk.

  It made his hair stand on end.

  The smell of the mob.

  Dicken met Kaye on the penthouse floor. A man in a dark blue suit held open the door to the penthouse level and checked their badges. Tiny voices chattered in his earplug.

  “They’re already in the lobby downstairs,” Dicken told her. “They’re going nuts out there.”

  “Why? “ Kaye asked, baffled.

  “Mexico City,” Dicken said.

  “But why riot?”

  “Where’s Kaye Lang?” a man shouted.

  “Here!” Kaye held up her hand.

  They pushed through a line of confused and chattering men and women. Kaye saw a woman in a swimsuit laughing, shaking her head, clutching a large white terry cloth towel. A man in a hotel bathrobe sat in a chair with his legs drawn up, eyes wild. Behind them, the guard yelled, “Is she the last one?”

  “Check,” another answered. Kaye had never known there were so many of Marge’s security people in the hotel — she guessed twenty. Some wore sidearms.

  Then she heard Cross’s high-pitched bellow.

  “For Christ’s sake, it’s just a bunch of women! Just a bunch of frightened women!”

  Dicken took Kaye’s arm. Cross’s personal secretary, Bob Cavanaugh, a slender man of thirty-five or forty with thinning blond hair, grabbed both of them and ushered them through the last cordon into Cross’s bedroom. She was sprawled across a king-size bed, still in her silk pajamas, watching closed circuit television. Cavanaugh draped a fringed cotton wrap over her shoulders. The view on the screen swayed back and forth. Kaye guessed the camera was on the third or fourth floor.

  Riot control vehicles sprayed selective shots from water cannons and forced the mass of women farther down the street, away from the convention center entrance. “They’re mowing ‘em down!” Cross shouted angrily.

  “They trashed the convention floor,” the secretary said.

  “We never expected this kind of reaction,” Stan Thorne said, thick arms folded across a substantial belly.

  “No,” Cross said, her voice like a low flute. “And why in hell not? I always said it was a gut issue. Well, here’s the gut response! It’s a goddamned disaster!”

  “They didn’t even present their demands,” said a slender woman in a green suit.

  “What in hell do they hope to accomplish?” someone else said, not visible to Kaye.

  “Dropping a big fat message on our doorstep,” Cross grumbled. “Something’s kicked the body politic in the groin. They want fast, fast relief, and screw the process.”

  “This could be just what we needed,” said a small, thin man whom Kaye recognized: Lewis Jansen, the marketing director for Americol’s pharmaceutical division.

  “The hell you say.” Cross cried out, “Kaye Lang, I want you!”

  “Here,” Kaye said, stepping forward.

  “Good! Frank, Sandra, get Kaye on the tube as soon as they clear the streets. Who’s the talent here?”

  An older woman in a bathrobe, carrying an aluminum briefcase, named from memory the local television commentators and affiliates.

  “Lewis, have your folks work up some talking points.”

  “My folks are at another hotel.”

  “Then call them! Tell the people we’re working as fast as we can, don’t want to move too fast on a vaccine or we’ll harm folks — shit, tell them all the stuff we were saying down on the convention floor. When in hell will people ever learn to sit back and listen? Are the phones out of order?”

  Kaye wondered whether Mitch had been caught in the riot, if he was okay.

  Mark Augustine entered the bedroom. It was getting crowded. The air was thick and hot. Augustine nodded to Dicken, smiled genially at Kaye. He seemed cool and collected, but there was something about his eyes that betrayed this camouflage.

  “Good!” Cross roared. “The gang’s all here. Mark, what’s up?”

  “Richard Bragg was shot to death in Berkeley two hours ago,” Augustine said. “He was out walking his dog.” Augustine tilted his head to one side and drew his lips together into a wry expression for Kaye’s benefit.

  “Bragg?” someone asked.

  “The patent asshole,” another answered.

  Cross stood up from the bed. “Related to the news about the baby?” she asked Augustine.

  “You might think so,” Augustine said. “Somebody at the hospital in Mexico City leaked the news. La Prensa reported the baby was severely malformed. It was on every channel by six A.M.”

  Kaye turned to Dicken. “Born dead,” he said.

  Augustine pointed to the window. “That might explain the mob. This was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration.”

  “Let’s get to it, then,” Cross said, subdued. “We have work to do.”

  Dicken looked downcast as they walked to the elevator. He spoke in an undertone to Kaye. “Let’s forget the zoo,” he said.

  “The discussion?”

  “It was premature,” he said. “Now is no time to stick our necks out.”

  Mitch walked along the littered street, boots crunching through shards of glass. Police barricades marked by yellow ribbon closed off the convention center and the front entrances of three hotels. Overturned cars were wrapped in yellow ribbon like presents. Signs and banners littered the asphalt and sidewalks. The air still smelled of tear gas and smoke. Police in skintight dark green pants and khaki shirts and National Guard troops in camouflage stood with folded arms along the street while city officials disembarked from vans and were led off to tour the damage. The police watched the few unofficial bystanders through dark glasses, silently challenging.

  Mitch had tried to get back to his hotel room at the Holiday Inn and had been turned away by unhappy clerks working with the police. His luggage — one bag — was still in his room, but he had the satchel with him, and that was all he really cared about. He had left messages for Kaye and Dicken, but there was no fixed place for them to return his calls.

  The convention appeared to be finished. Cars were being released from hotel garages by the dozens, and long lines of taxis waited a few blocks south for passengers dragging wheeled suitcases.

  Mitch could not pin down how he felt about all this. Anger, jerks of adrenaline, a bitter surge of animal exultation at the damage — typical residues of being so near mob violence. Shame, the single thin coati
ng of social veneer; after hearing about the dead baby, guilt at perhaps being so wrong. In the middle of these flashing emotions, Mitch felt most acutely a wretched sense of displacement. Loneliness.

  After this morning and afternoon, what he regretted most was missing his breakfast with Kaye Lang.

  She had smelled so good to him in the night air. No perfume, hair freshly washed, richness of skin, breath smelling of wine, but flowery and hardly offensive. Her eyes a little drowsy, her parting warm and tired.

  He could picture himself lying next to her on the bed in her hotel room with a clarity more like memory than imagination. Forward memory .

  He reached into his jacket pocket for his airline tickets, which he always carried with him.

  Dicken and Kaye made up a lifeline, an extended purpose in his life. Somehow, he doubted Dicken would encourage that continued connection. Not that he disliked Dicken; the virus hunter seemed straightforward and very sharp. Mitch would like to work with him and get to know him better. However, Mitch could not picture that at all. Call it instinct, more forward memory.

  Rivalry.

  He sat on a low concrete wall across from the Serrano, gripping his satchel in two broad hands. He tried to summon the patience he had used to stay sane on long and laborious digs with contentious postdocs.

  With a start, he saw a woman in a blue suit coming out of the Serrano lobby. The woman stood for a moment in the shade, speaking with two doormen and a police officer. It was Kaye. Mitch walked slowly across the street, around a Toyota with all its windows smashed. Kaye saw him and waved.

  They met on the plaza in front of the hotel. Kaye had circles under her eyes.

  “It’s been awful,” she said.

  “I was out here, I saw it,” Mitch said.

  “We’re going into high gear. I’m doing some TV interviews, then we’re flying back East, to Washington. There has to be an investigation.”

  “This was all about the first baby?”

  Kaye nodded. “We got some details an hour ago. NIH was tracking a woman who got Herod’s flu last year. She aborted an interim daughter, got pregnant a month later. She gave birth a month premature and the baby is dead. Severe defects. Cyclopia, apparently.”