Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  “I see. How’s the vaccine coming?”

  “We’re well into preclinical trials. Some fast-track clinical trials in Britain and Japan, but I’m not happy about them. Jackson — he’s in charge of the vaccine project — wants me moved out of his division.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I spoke out in the dining room three days ago. Marge Cross couldn’t use our theory. Doesn’t fit the paradigm. Not defensible.”

  “Quorum sensing,” Mitch said.

  Kaye brought him a glass of water. “How’s that?”

  “A chance discovery in my reading. When there’s enough bacteria, they change their behavior, get coordinated. Maybe we do the same thing. We just don’t have enough scientists to make a quorum.”

  “Maybe,” Kaye said. She stood, once more, about a step away from him. “I’ve been working in the HERV and genome labs at Americol most of the time. Finding out where other endogenous virus like SHEVA might express, and under what conditions. I’m a little surprised that Christopher—”

  Mitch looked up at her and interrupted. “I came to Baltimore to see you,” he said.

  “Oh,” Kaye said softly.

  “I can’t stop thinking about our evening at the zoo.”

  “It doesn’t seem real now,” Kaye said.

  “It does to me,” Mitch said.

  “I think Marge is moving me off the press conference schedule,” Kaye said, perversely trying to shift the conversation, or to see if he would allow it to be shifted. “Wean me away from being a spokeswoman. It’ll take me some time to earn her trust again. Frankly, I’m glad to be away from the public eye. There’s going to be a—”

  “In San Diego,” he interrupted, “I reacted pretty strongly to your presence.”

  “That’s sweet,” Kaye said, and half turned, as if to run away. She did not run, but she walked around the table and stopped on his other side, again, just a step away.

  “Pheromones,” Mitch said, and stood tall beside her. “The way people smell is important to me. You aren’t wearing perfume.”

  “I never do,” Kaye said.

  “You don’t need it.”

  “Hold it,” Kaye said, and backed off one more step. She raised her hands and stared at him intently, lips pressed together. “I can be easily confused now. I need to keep my focus.”

  “You need to relax,” Mitch said.

  “Being around you is not relaxing.”

  “You’re not sure about things.”

  “I’m certainly not sure about you.”

  He held out his hand. “Want to smell my hand first?”

  Kaye laughed.

  Mitch sniffed his palm. “Dial soap. Taxi cab doors. I haven’t dug a hole in years. My calluses are smoothing over. I’m out of work, in debt, and I have a reputation as a crazy and unethical son of a bitch.”

  “Stop being so hard on yourself. I read your papers, and old news stories. You don’t cover up and you don’t lie. You’re interested in the truth.”

  “I’m flattered,” Mitch said.

  “And you confuse me. I don’t know what to think about you. You’re not much like my husband.”

  “Is that good?” Mitch asked.

  Kaye looked him over critically. “So far.”

  “The customary thing would be to try things out slowly. I’d ask you out to dinner.”

  “Dutch treat?”

  “My expense account,” Mitch said wryly.

  “Karl would have to come with us. He’d have to approve the restaurant. I usually eat up here, or at Americol’s cafeteria.”

  “Does Karl eavesdrop?”

  “No,” Kaye said.

  “The doorman said he was serious beef,” Mitch said.

  “I am still a kept woman,” Kaye said. “I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. Let’s stay here and eat. We can walk in the roof garden later, if it’s stopped raining. I stock some really good frozen entrees. I get them from a market in the mall down below. And salad in a bag. I’m a good cook when there’s time, but there hasn’t been any time.” She walked back to the kitchen.

  Mitch followed, looking at the other pictures on her walls, the little ones in cheap frames that were probably her own contribution to the decor. Small prints of Maxfield Parrish, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham; photos of family groups.

  He did not see any pictures of her dead husband. Perhaps she kept them in the bedroom.

  “I’d like to cook for you some time,” Mitch said. “I’m pretty handy with a camp stove.”

  “Wine? With dinner?”

  “I need some now,” Mitch said. “I’m very nervous.”

  “So am I,” Kaye said, and held up her hands to show him. They were trembling. “Do you have this effect on all women?”

  “Never,” Mitch said.

  “Nonsense. You smell good,” Kaye said.

  They were less than a step apart. Mitch closed the gap, touched her chin, lifted it. Kissed her gently. She pushed back a few inches, then grasped his own chin between thumb and forefinger, tugged it down, kissed him more forcefully.

  “I think it’s okay to be playful with you,” she said. With Saul, she could never be sure how he would react. She had learned to limit her range of behaviors.

  “Please,” he said.

  “You’re solid,” she said. She touched the sun wrinkles in his face, premature crow’s feet. Mitch had a young face and bright eyes but wise and experienced skin.

  “I’m a madman, but a solid one.”

  “The world goes on, our instincts don’t change,” Kaye said, eyes losing their focus. “We’re not in charge.” A part of her she had not heard from in a long time liked his face very much.

  Mitch tapped his forehead. “Do you hear it? From the deep inside?”

  “I think so,” Kaye said. She decided to fish. “What do I smell like?”

  Mitch leaned into her hair. Kaye gave a little gasp as his nose touched her ear. “Clean and alive, like a beach in the rain,” he said.

  “You smell like a lion,” Kaye said. He nuzzled her lips, laid his ear against her temple, as if listening. “What do you hear?” she asked.

  “You’re hungry,” Mitch said, and smiled, a full-bore, thousand-watt, little-boy smile.

  This was so obviously unrehearsed that Kaye touched his lips with her ringers, in wonder, before his face returned to that protective, endearing, but ultimately disguising, casual grin. She stepped back. “Right. Food. Wine first, please,” she said, and opened the refrigerator. She handed him a bottle of semillon blanc.

  Mitch pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his pants pocket, extended the corkscrew, extracted the cork deftly. “We drink beer on a dig, wine when we finish,” he said, pouring her a glass.

  “What kind of beer?”

  “Coors. Budweiser. Anything not too heavy.”

  “All the men I’ve known preferred ales or microbrews.”

  “Not in the sun,” Mitch said.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “The YMCA,” he said.

  “I’ve never met a man who stayed at the YMCA.”

  “It isn’t so bad.”

  She sipped her wine, wet her lips, moved up closer, lifted on her toes, and kissed him. He tasted the wine on her tongue, still slightly chilled.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  “What will serious beef think?”

  She shook her head, kissed him again, and he wrapped his arms around her, still holding his glass and the bottle. A little wine spilled on her dress. He turned her and put the glass on the counter, then the bottle.

  “I don’t know where to stop,” she said.

  “I don’t either,” Mitch said. “I know how to be careful, though.”

  “It’s that kind of age, isn’t it?” Kaye said regretfully, and tugged his shirt from his pants.

  In Mitch’s experience, Kaye was neither the most beautiful woman he had seen naked, nor the most dynamic in bed. That would have to have been Tilde, who, de
spite her distance, had been very exciting. What struck him most about Kaye was his complete acceptance of every feature, from her small and slightly pendulous breasts, her narrow rib cage, wide hips, thickly flossed pubis, long legs — better than Tilde’s, he thought — to her steady and examining gaze as he made love to her. Her scent filled his nose, filled his brain, until he felt as if he were drifting on a warm and supportive ocean of necessary pleasure. Through the condom, he could feel very little, but all his other senses compensated, and it was the touch of her breasts, her cherry-pit-hard nipples, on his own chest that propelled him up and over the wave. He was still moving in her, instinctively still supplying the last of his flow, when she looked very startled, thrashed underneath, squeezed her eyes shut, and cried, “Oh, God, fuck, fuck!”

  She had been mostly silent until that moment, and he looked down on her in surprise. She turned her face away and hugged him tight against her, pulling him down, wrapped her legs around him, rubbed against him vigorously. He wanted to pull out before the condom spilled, but she kept moving, and he found himself firming again, and he obliged until she gave a small shriek, this time with eyes open, her face contorted as if in great need or pain. Then her expression went slack, her body relaxed, and she closed her eyes. Mitch withdrew and checked: the condom was still secure. He removed it and deftly tied it, dropped it over the side of the bed for disposal later.

  “1 can’t talk,” Kaye whispered.

  Mitch lay beside her, savoring their mingled scents. He did not want anything more. For the first time in years, he was happy.

  “What was it like to be one of the Neandertals?” Kaye asked. The twilight deepened outside. The apartment was quiet but for the far and muffled sound of traffic on the streets below.

  Mitch lifted up on his elbow. “We talked about that already.”

  Kaye lay on her back, naked from the waist up, a sheet pulled to her navel, listening for something much farther away than the traffic.

  “In San Diego,” she said. “I remember. We talked about them having masks. About the man staying with her. You thought he must have loved her very much.”

  “That’s right “Mitch said.

  “He must have been rare. Special. The woman on the NIH campus. Her boyfriend didn’t believe it was his baby.” The words started to pour out of her. “Laura Nilson — PR manager for Americol — told us that most men won’t believe it’s their baby. Most women will probably abort rather than take the risk. That’s why they’re going to recommend the morning-after pill. If the vaccine has problems, they can still stop this.”

  Mitch looked uncomfortable. “Can’t we forget for a little while?”

  “No,” Kaye said. “I can’t stand it anymore. We’re going to slaughter all the firstborn, just like Pharaoh in Egypt. If we keep this up, we’ll never know what the next generation looks like. They’ll all be dead. Do you want that to happen?”

  “No,” Mitch said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not as frightened as the next guy.” He shook his head. “I wonder what I would have done if I were that man, back then, fifteen thousand years ago. They must have been thrown out of their tribe. Or maybe they ran away. Maybe they were just walking and they came upon a raiding party and she got hurt.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” Mitch said. “I really don’t know. I’m not psychic.”

  “I’m spoiling the mood, aren’t I?”

  “Mmm hmm,” he said.

  “Our lives are not our own,” Kaye said. She ran her finger around his nipples, stroked the stiff hairs on his chest. “But we can build a wall for a little while. You’re going to stay here tonight?”

  Mitch kissed her forehead, then her nose, her cheeks. “The accommodations are much nicer than the YMCA.” “Come here,” Kaye said. “I can’t get much closer.” “Try.”

  Kaye Lang lay trembling in the dark. She was certain Mitch was asleep, but to make sure, she poked his back lightly. He squirmed but did not respond. He was comfortable. Comfortable with her.

  She had never taken such a risk; from the time of her first dates she had always looked for safety and, she hoped, security, planning her safe haven where she could do her work, think her thoughts with minimal interference from the outside world.

  Marrying Saul had been the ultimate achievement. Age, experience, money, business acumen — so she had thought. Now, to swing so far in the opposite direction, was all too obviously an overreaction. She wondered what she would do about it.

  When he woke up in the morning, to simply tell Mitch it was all a mistake…

  Terrified her. Not that she thought he would hurt her, he was the gentlest of men and showed few if any signs of the internal strife that had so troubled Saul.

  Mitch was not as handsome as Saul.

  On the other hand, Mitch was completely open and honest.

  Mitch had sought her out, but she was fairly sure she had seduced him. Kaye certainly did not feel anything had been forced upon her.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” she muttered in the dark. She was talking to another self, the stubborn Kaye that so seldom told her what was really going on. She got out of bed, put on her robe, went to the desk in the living room and opened the middle drawer, where she kept her record books.

  She had six hundred thousand dollars, adding together income from the sale of her home and her personal retirement account. If she resigned from Americo and xYie Taskforce, she could live in moderately comfortable circumstances for years.

  She spent a few minutes working out expenses, emergency budgets, food allowances, monthly bills, on a small piece of note paper, then stiffened in her chair. “This is stupid,” she said. “What am I planning?” Then, to that stubborn and secretive self, she added, “What in hell are you up to?”

  She would not tell Mitch to go away in the morning. He made her feel good. Around him, her mind became quieter, her fears and worries less pressing. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, and maybe he did know. Maybe it was the world that was screwy, that set traps and snares and forced people to make bad choices.

  She tapped the pen on the paper, pulled another sheet from the pad. Her fingers pushed the pen over the paper almost without conscious thought, sketching a series of open reading frames on chromosomes 18 and 20 that might bear a relation to the SHEVA genes, previously identified as possible HERVs but turning out not to have the defining characteristics of retrovirus fragments. She needed to look into these loci, these scattered fragments, to see if they might possibly fit together and be expressed; she had been putting this off for some time. Tomorrow would be the proper moment.

  Before she followed through with anything, she needed ammunition. She needed armor.

  She returned to the bedroom. Mitch seemed to be dreaming. Fascinated, she lay down quietly beside him.

  At the top of a snow-covered rise, the man saw the shamans and their helpers following him and his woman. They could not avoid leaving tracks in the snow, but even on the lower grasslands, through the forest, they had been tracked by experts.

  The man had brought his woman, heavy and slow with her child, to such heights in hope of crossing over into another valley where he had once gone as a child.

  He glanced back at the figures a few hundred steps behind. Then the man ooked at the crags and peaks ahead, like so many tumbled flints. He was lost. He had forgotten the way into the valley.

  The woman said little now. The face he had once looked upon with so much devotion was hidden by her mask.

  The man was filled with such bitterness. This high, the wet snow soaked through his thin shoes with their grass pads. The chill worked up his calves to his knees and made them ache. The wind cut through his skins, even with the fur turned inside, and sapped his strength, shortened his breath.

  The woman plodded on. He knew he might escape if he abandoned her. The prospect made his anger darken. He hated the snow, the shamans, the mountains; he hated himself. He could not bring himself to hate the wom
an. She had suffered the blood on her thighs, the loss, and hidden it from him so as not to bring shame; she had daubed her face with mud to hide the marks, and then, when she could not hide, she had tried to save him by offering herself to the Great Mother, carved into the grass hillside of the valley. But the Great Mother had refused her, and she had come back to him, moaning and mewing. She could not kill herself.

  His own face showed the marks. That puzzled and angered him.

  The shamans and sisters of the Great Mother, of the Goat Mother, of the Grass Mother, the Snow Woman, Leopard the Loud Killer, Chancre the Soft Killer, Rain the Weeping Father, had all gathered and made their decision during the cooling times, taking painful weeks while the others — the others who had the marks — stayed in their huts.

  The man had decided to run. He could not convince himself to trust the shamans and the sisters.

  As they fled, they had heard the cries. The shamans and sisters had begun to kill the mothers and the fathers with the marks.

  Everyone knew how the flatfaces were brought forth by the people. The women might hide, their men might hide, but all knew. Those who would bear flatface children could only make things worse.

  Only the sisters of the gods and goddesses bred true, never bred flatfaces, because they trained the young men of the tribe. They had many men.

  He should have let the shamans take his wife as a sister, let her train the boys, too, but she had wanted only him.

  The man hated the mountains, the snow, the running. He plodded on, roughly grabbed the woman’s arm, pushed her around a rock so they could find a place to hide. He was not watching closely. He was too full of this new truth, that the mothers and fathers of the sky and the ghost world around them were all blind or just lies.

  He was alone, his woman was alone, no tribe, no people, no helpers. Not even Long Hairs and Wet Eyes, the most frightening of the dead visitors, the most harmful, cared about them. He was beginning to think none of the dead visitors were real.

  The three men surprised him. He did not see them until they came from a cleft in the mountain and thrust their sticks at his woman. He knew them but no longer belonged to them. One had been a brother, another a Wolf Father. They were none of these things now and he wondered how he even recognized them.