Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  “Where was that?” Mitch asked.

  “West Virginia. In the woods near a farm. It was pretty. A nice place to be buried. You know, I am so tired. I am so sick of them treating me like a flea-bitten dog.”

  “The girls do that?”

  “You know the attitude,” Morgan said. “Men are contagious. They rely on me, I’m always here for them, then they tell me I have real boy cooties, and that’s it, hey. No thanks, ever.”

  “It’s the times,” Mitch said.

  “It’s lame. Why are we living now and not some other time, not so lame?”

  In the main examining room, Delia perched on the edge of the table, legs dangling. She wore a white flower-print open-backed robe. Jayce sat in a chair across from her, reading a pamphlet on smoking-related illnesses. Dr. Jacobs was in his sixties, thin, with a close-cut and tightly curled patch of graying hair around a tall and noble dome. His eyes were large, and both wise and sad. He told the girls he would be right back, then let his assistant, a middle-aged woman with a bun of fine auburn hair, enter the room with a clipboard and pencil. He closed the door and turned to Kaye.

  “No relation?” he asked.

  “We picked them up east of here. I thought she should see a doctor.”

  “She says she’s nineteen. She doesn’t have any ID, but I don’t think she’s nineteen, do you?”

  “I don’t know much about her,” Kaye said. “I’m trying to help them, not get them in trouble.”

  Jacobs cocked his head in sympathy. “She gave birth less than a week or ten days ago. No major trauma, but she tore some tissue, and there’s still blood on her leggings. I don’t like to see kids living like animals, Ms. Lang.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Delia says it was a Herod’s baby and that it was born dead. Second-stage, by the description. I see no reason not to believe her, but these things should be reported. The baby should have undergone a postmortem. Laws are being put in place right now, at the federal level, and Ohio is going along…She said she was in West Virginia when she delivered. I understand West Virginia is showing some resistance.”

  “Only in some ways,” Kaye said, and told him about the blood test requirements.

  Jacobs listened, then pulled a pen from his pocket and nervously clicked it with one hand. “Ms. Lang, I wasn’t sure who you were when you came in this afternoon. I had Georgina get on the Web and find some news pictures. I don’t know what you’re doing in Athens, but I’d say you know more about this sort of thing than I do.”

  “I might not agree,” Kaye said. “The marks on her face…”

  “Some women acquire dark markings during pregnancy. It passes.”

  “Not like these,” Kaye said. “They tell us she had other skin problems.”

  “I know.” Jacobs sighed and sat on the corner of his desk. “I have three patients who are pregnant, probably with Herod’s second-stage. They won’t let me do amnio or any kind of scans. They’re all churchgoing women and I don’t think they want to know the truth. They’re scared and they’re under pressure. Their friends shun them. They aren’t welcome in church. The husbands won’t come in with them to my office.” He pointed to his face. “They all have skin stiffening and coming loose around the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the corners of the mouth. It won’t just peel away…not yet. They’re shedding several layers of facial corium and epidermis.” He made a face and pinched his fingers together, tugging at an imaginary flap of skin. “It’s a little leathery.

  Ugly as sin, very scary. That’s why they’re nervous and that’s why they’re shunned. This separates them from their community, Ms. Lang. It hurts them. I make my reports to the state and to the feds, and I get no response back. It’s like sending messages into a big dark cave.”

  “Do you think the masks are common?”

  “I follow the basic tenets of science, Ms. Lang. If I’m seeing it more than once, and now this girl comes along and I see it again, from out of state…I doubt it’s unusual.” He looked at her critically. “Do you know anything more?”

  She found herself biting her lip like a little girl. “Yes and no,” she said. “I resigned from my position on the Herod’s Taskforce.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too complicated.”

  “It’s because they’ve got it all wrong, isn’t it?”

  Kaye looked aside and smiled. “I won’t say that.”

  “You’ve seen this before? In other women?”

  “I think we’re going to see more of it.”

  “And the babies will all be monsters and die?”

  Kaye shook her head. “I think that’s going to change.”

  Jacobs replaced his pen in his pocket, put his hand on the desktop blotter, lifted its leather corner, dropped it slowly. “I won’t file a report on Delia. I’m not sure what I’d say, or who I’d say it to. I think she’d vanish before any authorities could come along to help her. I doubt we’d ever find the infant, where they buried it. She’s tired and she needs steady nourishment. She needs a place to stay and rest. I’ll give her a vitamin shot and prescribe antibiotics and iron supplements.”

  “And the marks?”

  “Do you know what chromatophores are?”

  “Cells that change color. In cuttlefish.”

  “These marks can change color,” Jacobs said. “They’re not just a hormonally induced melanosis.”

  “Melanophores,” Kaye said.

  Jacobs nodded. “That’s the word. Ever seen melanophores on a human?”

  “No,” Kaye said.

  “Neither have I. Where are you going, Ms. Lang?”

  “All the way west,” she said. She lifted her wallet. “I’d like to pay you now.”

  Jacobs gave her his saddest look. “I’m not running a goddamned HMO, Ms. Lang. No charge. I’ll prescribe the pills and you pick them up at a good pharmacy. You buy her food and find her a clean place to get a good night’s sleep.”

  The door opened and Delia and Jayce emerged. Delia was fully dressed.

  “She needs clean clothes and a good soak in a hot tub,” Georgina said firmly.

  For the first time since they had met, Delia smiled. “I looked in the mirror,” she said. “Jayce says the marks are pretty. The doctor says I’m not sick, and I can have children again if I want.”

  Kaye shook Jacobs’s hand. “Thank you very much,” she said.

  As the three of them left through the front office, joining Mitch and Morgan on the front porch, Jacobs called out, “We live and we learn, Ms. Lang! And the faster we learn, the better.”

  The little motel sported a huge red sign with TINY SUITES and $50 crowded onto it, clearly visible from the freeway. It had seven rooms, three of them vacant. Kaye rented all three and gave Morgan his own key. Morgan lifted the key, frowned, then pocketed it.

  “I don’t like being alone,” he said.

  “I couldn’t think of another arrangement,” Kaye said.

  Mitch put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with you,” he said, and gave Kaye a level look. “Let’s get cleaned up and watch TV”

  “We’d like you to stay in our room,” Jayce told Kaye. “We’d feel a lot safer.”

  The rooms were just on the edge of being dirty. Draped on beds with distinct hollows, thin and worn quilted coverlets showed unraveled nylon threads and cigarette burns. Coffee tables bore multiple ring marks and more cigarette burns. Jayce and Delia explored and settled in as if the accommodations were royal. Delia took the single orange chair beside a table-lamp combo hung with black metal cone-shaped cans. Jayce lounged on the bed and switched on the TV. “They have HBO,” she said in a soft and wondering voice. “We can watch a movie!”

  Mitch listened to Morgan in the shower in their room, then opened the front door. Kaye stood outside with her hand up, about to knock.

  “We’re wasting a room,” she said. “We’ve taken on some responsibilities, haven’t we?”

  Mitch hugged her. “Your instincts
,” he said.

  “What do your instincts tell you?” she asked, nuzzling his shoulder.

  “They’re kids. They’ve been out on the road for weeks, months. Someone should call their parents.”

  “Maybe they never had real parents. They’re desperate, Mitch.” Kaye pushed back to look up at him.

  “They’re also independent enough to bury a dead baby and stay on the road. The doctor should have called the police, Kaye.”

  “I know,” Kaye said. “I also know why he didn’t. The rules have changed. He thinks most of the babies are going to be born dead. Are we the only ones with any hope?”

  The shower stopped and the stall door clicked open. The small bathroom was filled with steam.

  “The girls,” Kaye said, and walked over to the next door. She gave Mitch a hand-open sign that he instantly recognized from the marching crowds in Albany, and he understood for the first time what the crowds had been trying to show: strong belief in and a cautious submission to the way of Life, belief in the ultimate wisdom of the human genome. No presumption of doom, no ignorant attempts to use new human powers to block the rivers of DNA flowing through the generations.

  Faith in Life.

  Morgan dressed quickly. “Jayce and Delia don’t need me,” he said as he stood in the small room. The holes in the sleeves of his black pullover were even more obvious now that his skin was clean. He let the dirty windbreaker dangle from one arm. “I don’t want to be a burden. I’ll go now. Give my thanks, hey, but—”

  “Please be quiet and sit down,” Mitch said. “What the lady wants, goes. She wants you to stick around.”

  Morgan blinked in surprise, then sat on the end of the bed. The springs squeaked and the frame groaned. “I think it’s the end of the world,” he said. “We’ve really made God angry.”

  “Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Mitch said. “Believe it or not, all this has happened before.”

  Jayce turned on the TV and watched from the bed while Delia took a long bath in the chipped and narrow tub. The girl hummed to herself, tunes from cartoon shows — Scooby Doo, Anima-niacs, Inspector Gadget. Kaye sat in the single chair. Jayce had found something old and affirming on the TV: Pollyanna, with Hayley Mills. Karl Maiden was kneeling in a dry grassy field, berating himself for his stubborn blindness. It was an impassioned performance. Kaye did not remember the movie being so compelling. She watched it with Jayce until she noticed that the girl was sound asleep. Then, turning down the volume, Kaye switched over to Fox News.

  There was a smattering of show business stories, a brief political report on congressional elections, then an interview with Bill Cosby on his commercials for the CDC and the Taskforce. Kaye turned up the volume.

  “I was a buddy of David Satcher, the former surgeon general, and they must have a kind of ol’ boy network,” Cosby told the interviewer, a blond woman with a large smile and intense blue eyes, “ ‘cause years ago they got me, this ol’ guy, in to talk about what was important, what they were doing. They thought I might be able to help again.”

  “You’ve joined quite a select team,” said the interviewer.

  “Dustin Hoffman and Michael Crichton. Let’s take a look at your spot.”

  Kaye leaned forward. Cosby returned against a black background, face seamed with parental concern. “My friends at the Centers for Disease Control, and many other researchers around the world, are hard at work every day to solve this problem we’re all facing. Herod’s flu. SHEVA. Every day. Nobody’s gonna rest until it’s understood and we can cure it. You can take it from me, these people care, and when you hurt, they hurt, too. Nobody’s asking you to be patient. But to survive this, we all have to be smart”

  The interviewer looked away from the big screen television on the set. “Let’s play an excerpt from Dustin Hoffman’s message…”

  Hoffman stood on a bare motion picture sound stage with his hands thrust into the pockets of tailored beige pants. He smiled a friendly but solemn greeting. “My name is Dustin Hoffrnan. You might remember I played a scientist righting a deadly disease in a movie called Outbreak. I’ve been talking to the scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they’re working as hard as they can, every day, to fight SHEVA and stop our children from dying.”

  The interviewer interrupted the clip. “What are the scientists doing that they weren’t doing last year? What’s new in the effort?”

  Cosby made a sour face. “I’m just a man who wants to help us get through this mess. Doctors and scientists are the only hope we’ve got, and we can’t just take to the streets and burn things down and make it all go away. We’re talking about thinking things through, working together, not engaging in riots and panic.”

  Delia stood in the bathroom doorway, plump legs bare beneath the small motel towel, head wrapped in another towel. She stared fixedly at the television. “It’s not going to make any difference,” she said. “My babies are dead.”

  * * *

  Mitch returned from the Coke machine at the end of the line of rooms to find Morgan pacing in a U around the bed. The boy’s hands were knots of frustration. “I can’t stop thinking,” Morgan said. Mitch held out a Coke and Morgan stared at it, took it from his hand, popped the top, and chugged it back fiercely. “You know what they did, what Jayce did? When we needed money?”

  “I don’t need to know, Morgan,” Mitch said.

  “It’s how they treat me. Jayce went out and got a man to pay for it, and, you know, she and Delia blew him, and took some money. Jesus, I ate some of that dinner, too. And the next night. Then we were hitching and Delia started having her baby. They won’t let me touch them, even hug them, they won’t put their arms around me, but for money, they blow these guys, and they don’t care whether I see them or not!” He pounded his temple with the ball of his thumb. “They are so stupid, like farm animals.”

  “It must have been tough out there,” Mitch said. “You were all hungry.”

  “I went with them because my father’s nothing great, you know, but he doesn’t beat me. He works all day. They needed me more than he does. But I want to go back. I can’t do anything more for them.”

  “I understand,” Mitch said. “But don’t be hasty. We’ll work this through.”

  “I am so sick of this shit!” Morgan howled.

  They heard the howl in the next room. Jayce sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. “There he goes again,” she murmured.

  Delia dried off her hair. “He really isn’t stable sometimes,” she said.

  “Can you drop us off in Cincinnati?” Jayce asked. “I have an uncle there. Maybe you can send Morgan back home now.”

  “Sometimes Morgan’s such a child,” Delia said.

  Kaye watched them from her chair, her face pinking with an emotion she could not quite understand: solidarity compounded with visceral disgust.

  Minutes later, she met Mitch outside, under the long motel walkway. They held hands.

  Mitch pointed his thumb over his shoulder, through the room’s open door. The shower was running again. “His second. He says he feels dirty all the time. The girls have played a little loose with poor Morgan.”

  “What was he expecting?”

  “No idea.”

  “To go to bed with them?”

  “I don’t know,” Mitch said quietly. “Maybe he just wants to be treated with respect.”

  “I don’t think they know how,” Kaye said. She pressed her hand on his chest, rubbed him there, her eyes focused on something distant and invisible. “The girls want to be dropped off in Cincinnati.”

  “Morgan wants to go to the bus station,” Mitch said. “He’s had enough.”

  “Mother Nature isn’t being very kind or gentle, is she?”

  “Mother Nature has always been something of a bitch,” he said.

  “So much for Rocinante and touring America,” Kaye said sadly.

  “You want to make some phone calls, get involved again,
don’t you?”

  Kaye lifted her hands. “I don’t know” she moaned. “Just taking off and living our lives seems wildly irresponsible. I want to learn more. But how much will anybody tell us — Christopher, anybody on the Taskforce? I’m an outsider now.”

  “There’s a way we can stay in the game, with different rules,” Mitch said.

  “The rich guy in New York?”

  “Daney. And Oliver Merton.”

  “We’re not going to Seattle?”

  “We are,” Mitch said. “But I’m going to call Merton and say I’m interested.”

  “I still want to have our baby,” Kaye said, eyes wide, voice fragile as a dried flower.

  The shower stopped. They heard Morgan toweling off, alternately humming to himself and swearing.

  “It’s funny,” Mitch said, almost too softly to hear. “I’ve been very uncomfortable about the whole idea. But now…it seems plain as anything, the dreams, meeting you. I want our baby, too. We just can’t be innocent.” He took a deep breath, raised his eyes to meet Kaye’s, added, “Let’s go into that forest with some better maps.”

  Morgan stepped out onto the walkway and stared at them owlishly. “I’m ready. I want to go home.”

  Kaye looked at Morgan and almost flinched at his intensity. The boy’s eyes seemed a thousand years old.

  “I’ll drive you to the bus station,” Mitch said.

  70

  The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

  MAY 5

  Dicken met the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Dr. Tania Bao, outside the Natcher Building, and walked with her from there. Small, precisely dressed, with a composed and ageless face, its features arranged on a slightly undulating plain, nose tiny, lips on the edge of a smile, and slightly stooped shoulders, Bao might have been in her late thirties but was in fact sixty-three. She wore a pale blue pantsuit and tasseled loafers. She walked with small quick steps, intent on the rough ground. The never-ending construction on the NIH campus had been brought to a halt for security purposes, but had already torn up most of the walkways between the Natcher Building and the Magnuson Clinical Center.