Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  “NIH used to be an open campus,” Bao said. “Now we live with the National Guard watching our every move. I can’t even buy my granddaughter toys from the vendors. I used to love to see them on the sidewalks or in the hallways. Now they’ve been cleared out, along with the construction workers.”

  Dicken raised his shoulders, showing that these things were outside his control. His area of influence did not even include himself anymore. “I’ve come to listen,” he said. “I can take your opinions to Dr. Augustine, but I can’t guarantee he’ll agree.”

  “What happened, Christopher?” Bao asked plaintively. “Why do they not respond to what is so obvious? Why is Augustine so stubborn?”

  “You’re a far more experienced administrator than I am,” Dicken said. “I know only what I see and what I hear in the news. What I see is unbearable pressure from all sides. The vaccine teams haven’t been able to do anything. Mark will do everything he can, regardless, to protect public health. He wants to focus our resources on fighting what he believes is a virulent disease. Right now, the only available option is abortion.”

  “What he believes …” Bao said incredulously. “What do you believe, Dr. Dicken?”

  The weather was coming into a warm and humid summer mood that Dicken found familiar, even comforting; it made a deep and sad part of him think he might be in Africa, and he would have much preferred that to the current round of his existence. They crossed a temporary asphalt ramp to the next level of finished sidewalk, stepped over yellow construction tape, and walked into the main entrance of Building 10.

  Two months ago, life had begun to come apart for Christopher Dicken. The realization that hidden parts of his personality could affect his scientific judgment — that a combination of frustrated infatuation and job pressure could jolt him into an attitude he knew to be false — had preyed on him like a swarm of little biting flies. Somehow, he had managed an outward appearance of calm, of going with the game, the team, the Taskforce. He knew that could not go on forever.

  “I believe in work,” Dicken said, embarrassed that his thoughts had delayed a response for so long.

  Simply cutting himself off from Kaye Lang, and failing to support her in the face of Jackson’s ambush, had been an incomprehensible and unforgivable mistake. He regretted it more with each day, but it was too late to retie old and broken threads. He could still build a conceptual wall and work diligently on those projects assigned to him.

  They took the elevator to the seventh floor, turned left, and found the small staff meeting room in the middle of a long beige and pink corridor.

  Bao seated herself. “Christopher, you know Anita, Preston.”

  They greeted Dicken with little cheer.

  “No good news, I’m afraid,” Dicken reported, seating himself opposite Preston Meeker. Meeker, like his colleagues within the small, close room, represented the quintessence of a child health specialty — in his case, neonatal growth and development.

  “Augustine still at it?” Meeker asked, pugnacious from the start. “Still pushing RU-486?”

  “In his defense,” Dicken said, and paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, to present this old false face more convincingly, “he has no alternatives. The retrovirus folks at CDC agree that the expression and completion theory makes sense.”

  “Children as carriers of unknown plagues?” Meeker pushed out his lips and made a pishing noise.

  “It’s a highly defensible position. Added to the likelihood that most of the new babies will be born deformed—”

  “We don’t know that,” House said. House was the acting deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the former deputy director had resigned two weeks ago. A great many NIH people associated with the SHEVA Taskforce were resigning.

  With hardly a pang, Dicken thought that once again Kaye Lang had proved herself a pioneer by being the very first to leave.

  “It’s indisputable,” Dicken said, and had no trouble telling her this, because it was true: no normal infants had been born yet to a SHEVA-infected mother. “Out of two hundred, most have been reported severely deformed. All have been born dead.” But not always deformed, he reminded himself.

  “If the president agrees to start a national campaign using RU-486,” Bao said, “I doubt the CDC will be allowed to remain open in Atlanta. As for Bethesda, it is an intelligent community, but we are still in the Bible Belt. I have already had my house picketed, Christopher. I live surrounded by guards.”

  “I understand,” Dicken said.

  “Perhaps, but does Mark understand? He does not return my calls or my e-mail.”

  “Unacceptable isolation,” Meeker said.

  “How many acts of civil disobedience will it take?” House added, clasping her hands on the table and rubbing them together, her eyes darting around the group.

  Bao stood and took up a whiteboard marker. She quickly and almost savagely chopped out the words in bright red, saying, “Two million first-stage Herod’s miscarriages, as of last month. Hospitals are flooded.”

  “I go to those hospitals,” Dicken said. “It’s part of my job to be on the front.”

  “We also have visited patients here and around the country,” Bao said, mouth tight with irritation. “We have three hundred SHEVA mothers in this very building. I see some of them every day. We are not isolated, Christopher.”

  “Sorry,” Dicken said.

  Bao nodded. “Seven hundred thousand reported second-stage Herod’s pregnancies. Well, here the statistics fall apart — we do not know what is happening,” Bao said, and stared at Dicken. “Where have all the others gone? They are not reporting. Does Mark know?”

  “I know,” Dicken said. “Mark knows. It’s sensitive information. We don’t want to acknowledge how much we know until the president makes his policy decision on the Taskforce proposal.”

  “I think I can guess,” House said sardonically. “Educated women with means are buying black-market RU-486, or otherwise obtaining abortions at different stages of their pregnancy. There’s a wholesale revolt in the medical community, in women’s clinics. They’ve stopped reporting to the Taskforce, because of the new laws regulating abortion procedures. My guess is, Mark wants to make official what’s already happening around the country.”

  Dicken paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, shore up his sagging false front. “Mark has no control over the House of Representatives or the Senate. He speaks, they ignore him. We all know the rates of domestic violence are way up. Women are being forced out of their homes. Divorce. Murder.” Dicken let that sink in, as it had sunk in to his own thoughts and self in the last few months. “Violence against pregnant women is at an all-time high. Some are even resorting to quinacrine, when they can get it, to self-sterilize.”

  Bao shook her head sadly.

  Dicken continued. “Many women know the simplest way out is to stop their second-stage pregnancies before they go anywhere near full term and other side effects appear.”

  “Mark Augustine and the Taskforce are reluctant to describe these side effects,” Bao said. “We assume you refer to facial cauls and melanisms in both the parents.”

  “I also refer to whistling palate and vomeronasal deformation,” Dicken said.

  “Why the fathers, too?” Bao asked.

  “I have no idea,” Dicken said. “If NIH hadn’t lost its clinical study subjects, due to an excess of personal concern, we might all know a lot more, under at least mildly controlled conditions.”

  Bao reminded Dicken that no one in the room had had anything to do with the closure of the Taskforce clinical studies in this very building.

  “I understand,” Dicken said, and hated himself with a ferocity he could barely hide. “I don’t disagree. Second-stage pregnancies are being ended by all but the poor, those who can’t get to clinics or buy the pills…or…”

  “Or what?” Meeker asked.

  “The dedicated.”

  “Dedicated to what?
”

  “To nature. To the proposition that these children should be given a chance, whatever the odds of their being born dead or deformed.”

  “Augustine does not seem to believe any of the children should be given a chance,” Bao said. “Why?”

  “Herod’s is a disease. This is how you fight a disease.” This can’t go on much longer. You ‘II either resign or you ‘II kill yourself trying to explain things you don’t understand or believe.

  “I say again, we are not isolated, Christopher,” Bao said, shaking her head. “We go to the maternity wards and the surgeries in this clinic, and visit other clinics and hospitals. We see the women and the men in pain. We need some rational approach that takes into account all these views, all these pressures.”

  Dicken frowned in concentration. “Mark is just looking at medical reality. And there’s no political consensus,” he added quietly. “It’s a dangerous time.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Meeker said. “Christopher, I think the White House is paralyzed. Damned if you do, and certainly damned if you don’t and things go on the way they are.”

  “Maryland’s own governor is involved in this so-called States’ Health revolt,” House said. “I’ve never seen such fervor in the religious right here.”

  “It’s pretty much grass roots, not just Christian,” Bao said. “The Chinese community has pulled in its horns and with good reason. Bigotry is on the rise. We are falling apart into scared and unhappy tribes, Christopher.”

  Dicken stared down at the table, then up at the figures on the whiteboard, one eyelid twitching with fatigue. “It hurts all of us,” he said. “It hurts Mark, and it hurts me.”

  “I doubt it hurts Mark as much as it hurts the mothers,” Bao said quietly.

  71

  Oregon

  MAY 10

  ”I’m an ignorant man, and I don’t understand a lot of things,” Sam said. He leaned on the split-rail fence that surrounded the four acres, the two-story frame farmhouse, an old and sagging barn, the brick workshed. Mitch pushed his free hand into his pocket and rested a can of Michelob on the lichen-grayed fence post. A square-rump, black-and-white cow cropping a patch of the neighbor’s twelve acres regarded them with an almost complete absence of curiosity. “You’ve only known this woman for what, two weeks?”

  “Just over a month.”

  “Some whirlwind!”

  Mitch agreed with a sheepish look.

  “Why be in such a hurry? Why in hell would anyone want to get pregnant, now of all times? Your mother’s been over her hot flashes for ten years, but after Herod’s, she’s still skittish about letting me touch her.”

  “Kaye’s different,” Mitch said, as if admitting something. They had come to this topic on the backs of a lot of other difficult topics that afternoon. The toughest of all had been Mitch’s admission that he had temporarily given up looking for a job, that they would largely be living on Kaye’s money. Sam found this incomprehensible.

  “Where’s the self-respect in that?” he had said, and shortly after they had dropped that subject and returned to what had happened in Austria.

  Mitch had told him about meeting Brock at the Daney mansion, and that had amused Sam quite a bit. “It baffles science,” he had commented dryly. When they had gotten around to discussing Kaye, still talking with Mitch’s mother, Abby, in the large farmhouse kitchen, Sam’s puzzlement had blossomed into irritation, then downright anger.

  “I admit I may be stuck in abysmal stupidity,” Sam said, “but isn’t it just damned dangerous to do this sort of thing now, deliberately?”

  “It could be,” Mitch admitted.

  “Then why in hell did you agree?”

  “I can’t answer that easily,” Mitch said. “First, I think she could be right. I mean, I think she is right. This time around, we’ll have a healthy baby.”

  “But you tested positive, she tested positive,” Sam said, glaring at him, hands gripping the rail tightly.

  “We did.”

  “And correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s never been a healthy baby born of a woman who tested positive.”

  “Not yet,” Mitch said.

  “That’s lousy odds.”

  “She’s the one who found this virus,” Mitch said. “She knows more about it than anyone else on Earth, and she’s convinced—”

  “That everyone else is wrong?” Sam asked.

  “That we’re going to change our thinking in the next few years.”

  “Is she crazy, then, or just a fanatic?”

  Mitch frowned. “Careful, Dad,” he said.

  Sam flung his hands up in the air. “Mitch, for Christ’s sake, I fly to Austria, the first time I’ve ever been to Europe, and it’s without your mother, damn it, to pick up my son at a hospital after he’s…Well, we’ve been through all that. But why face this kind of grief, take this kind of chance, I ask, in God’s name?”

  “Since her first husband died, she’s been a little frantic about looking ahead, seeing things in a positive light,” Mitch said. “I can’t say I understand her, Dad, but I love her. I trust her. Something in me says she’s right, or I wouldn’t have gone along.”

  “You mean, cooperated.” Sam looked at the cow and brushed his hands free of lichen dust on his pants legs. “What if you’re both wrong?” he asked.

  “We know the consequences. We’ll live with them,” Mitch said. “But we’re not wrong. Not this time, Dad.”

  “I’ve been reading as much as I can,” Abby Rafelson said. “It’s bewildering. All these viruses.” Afternoon sun fell through the kitchen window and lay in yellow trapezoids on the unvarnished oak floor. The kitchen smelled of coffee — too much coffee, Kaye thought, nerves on edge — and tamales, their lunch before the men had gone out walking.

  Mitch’s mother had kept her beauty into her sixties, an authoritative kind of good looks that emerged from high cheekbones and deep-sunk blue eyes combined with immaculate grooming.

  “These particular viruses have been with us a long time,” Kaye said. She held up a picture of Mitch when he was five years old, riding a tricycle on the Willamette riverfront in Portland. He looked intent, oblivious to the camera; sometimes she saw that same expression when he was driving or reading a newspaper.

  “How long?” Abby asked.

  “Maybe tens of millions of years.” Kaye picked up another picture from the pile on the coffee table. The picture showed Mitch and Sam loading wood in the back of a truck. By his height and thin limbs, Mitch appeared to be about ten or eleven.

  “What were they doing there in the first place? I couldn’t understand that.”

  “They might have infected us through our gametes, eggs or sperm. Then they stayed. They mutated, or something deactivated them, or…we put them to work for us. Found a way to make them useful.” Kaye looked up from the picture.

  Abby stared at her, unfazed. “Sperm or eggs?”

  “Ovaries, testicles,” Kaye said, glancing down again.

  “What made them decide to come out again?”

  “Something in our everyday lives,” Kaye said. “Stress, maybe.”

  Abby thought about this for a few seconds. “I’m a college graduate. Physical education. Did Mitch tell you that?”

  Kaye nodded. “He said you took a minor in biochemistry. Some premed courses.”

  “Yes, well, not enough to be up to your level. More than enough to be dubious about my religious upbringing, however. I don’t know what my mother would have thought if she had known about these viruses in our sex cells.” Abby smiled at Kaye and shook her head. “Maybe she would have called them our original sin.”

  Kaye looked at Abby and tried to think of a reply. “That’s interesting,” she managed. Why this should disturb her she did not know, but that it did upset her even more. She felt threatened by the idea.

  “The graves in Russia,” Abby said quietly. “Maybe the mothers had neighbors who thought it was an outbreak of original sin.”

&nbs
p; “I don’t believe it is,” Kaye said.

  “Oh, I don’t believe it myself,” Abby said. She trained her examining blue eyes on Kaye now, troubled, darting. “I’ve never been very comfortable about anything to do with sex. Sam’s a gentle man, the only man I’ve felt passionate about, though not the only man I’ve invited into my bed. My upbringing…was not the best that way. Not the wisest. I’ve never talked with Mitch about sex. Or about love. It seemed he would do well enough on his own, handsome as he is, smart as he is.” Abby laid her hand on Kaye’s. “Did he tell you his mother was a crazy old prude?” She looked so sadly desperate and at a loss that Kaye gripped her hand tightly and smiled what she hoped was reassurance.

  “He told me you were a wonderful mother and caring,” Kaye said, “and that he was your only son, and that you’d grill me like a pork chop.” She squeezed Abby’s hand tighter.

  Abby laughed and something of the electricity fell from the air between them. “He told me you were headstrong and smarter than any woman he had ever met, and that you cared so much about things. He said I’d better like you, or he’d have a talk with me.”

  Kaye stared at her, aghast. “He did not!”

  “He did,” Abby said solemnly. “The men in this family don’t mince words. I told him I’d do my best to get along with you.”

  “Good grief!” Kaye said, laughing in disbelief.

  “Exactly,” Abby said. “He was being defensive. But he knows me. He knows I don’t mince words, either. With all this original sin popping out all over, I think we’re in for a world of change. A lot of ways men and women do things will change. Don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Kaye said.

  “I want you to work as hard as you can, please, dear, my new daughter, please, to make a place where there will be love and a gentle and caring center for Mitch. He looks tough and sturdy but men are really very fragile. Don’t let all this split you up, or damage him. I want to keep as much of the Mitch I know and love as I can, as long as I can. I still see my boy in him. My boy is strong there still.” There were tears in Abby’s eyes, and Kaye realized, holding the woman’s hand, that she had missed her own mother so much, for so many years, and had tried unsuccessfully to bury those emotions.