by Greg Bear
Kaye wanted desperately to speak to Mitch, but he was in the University district, trying to finalize hotel arrangements for the conference. She did not want to break in on that.
Galbreath handed Kaye a pen. She filled out the form, slowly. Galbreath took it back. “They would have found out one way or another,” she said tightly.
Kaye carried the report out of the hospital and walked to the brown Toyota Camry they had purchased two months ago. She sat in the car for ten minutes, numb, bloodless fingers clutching the wheel, and then turned the key in the ignition.
She was rolling down her window for air when she heard Galbreath calling after her. She gave half a thought to simply pulling out of the parking space and driving on, but she reap-plied the emergency brake and looked left. Galbreath was running across the parking lot. She put her hand on the door and peered in at Kaye.
“You wrote down the wrong address, didn’t you?” she asked, huffing, her face red.
Kaye simply looked blank.
Galbreath closed her eyes, caught her breath. “There’s nothing wrong with your baby,” she said. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. I don’t understand anything. Why aren’t you rejecting her as foreign tissue — she’s completely different from you! You might as well be carrying a gorilla. But you tolerate her, nurture her. All the mothers do. Why doesn’t the Taskforce study thatl”
“It’s a puzzle,” Kaye admitted.
“Please forgive me, Kaye.”
“You’re forgiven,” Kaye said with no real conviction.
“No, I mean it. I don’t care if they take away my license — they could be wrong about this whole thing! I want to be your doctor.”
Kaye hid her face in her hands, exhausted by the tension. Her neck felt like steel springs. She lifted her head and put her hand on Galbreath’s. “If it’s possible, I’d like that,” she said.
“Wherever you go, whatever you do, promise me — let me be there to deliver?” Galbreath pleaded. “I want to learn everything I can about SHEVA pregnancies, to be prepared, and I want to deliver your daughter.”
Kaye parked across the street from the old, square University Plaza Hotel, across the freeway from the University of Washington. She found her husband on the lower level, waiting for a formal bid from the hotel manager, who had retired to his office.
She told him what had happened at Marine Pacific. Mitch banged the door of the meeting room with his fist, furious. “I should never have left you — not for a minute!”
“You know that’s not practical,” Kaye said. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I handled it pretty well, I think.”
“I can’t believe Galbreath would do that to you.”
“I know she didn’t want to.”
Mitch circled, kicked at a metal folding chair, waved his hands helplessly.
“She wants to help us,” Kaye said.
“How can we trust her now?”
“There’s no need to be paranoid.”
Mitch stopped short. “There’s a big old train rolling down the tracks. We’re in its headlights . I know that, Kaye. It’s not just the government. Every pregnant woman on Earth is suspect. Augustine — that absolute bastard — he’s making sure that you’re all pariahs! I could kill him!”
Kaye took hold of his arms and tugged gently, then hugged him. He was angry enough to try to shrug her off and continue stalking around the room. She held on tighter. “Please, enough, Mitch.”
“And now you’re out here — exposed to anybody who might walk by!” he said, arms quivering.
“I refuse to become a hothouse flower,” Kaye said defensively.
He gave up and dropped his shoulders. “What can we do? When are they going to send police vans with thugs in them to round us up?”
“I don’t know,” Kaye said. “Something’s got to give. I believe in this country, Mitch. People won’t put up with this.”
Mitch sat in a folding chair at the end of an aisle. The room was brightly lit, with fifty empty chairs arranged in five rows, a linen-covered table and coffee service at the back. “Wen-dell and Maria say the pressure is just incredible. They’ve filed protests, but no one in the department will admit to anything. Funding gets cut, offices reassigned, labs harassed by inspectors. I’m losing all my faith, Kaye. I saw it happen to me after…”
“I know,” Kaye said.
“And now the State Department won’t let Lrock return from Irnrbruck.”
“When did you hear that?”
“Merton called from Bethesda this afternoon. Augustine is trying to shut this down completely. It’ll be just you and me — and you’ll have to go into hiding!”
Kaye sat beside him. She had heard nothing from any of her former colleagues back East. Nothing from Judith. Perversely, she wanted to talk with Marge Cross. She wanted to reach out for all the support left in the world.
She missed her mother and father terribly.
Kaye leaned over and put her head on Mitch’s shoulder. He rubbed her scalp gently with his big hands.
They had not even discussed the real news of the morning. Important things got lost so quickly in the fray. “I know something you don’t know,” Kaye said.
“What’s that?”
“We’re going to have a daughter.”
Mitch stopped breathing for a moment and his face wrinkled up. “My God,” he said.
“It was one or the other,” Kaye said, grinning at his reaction.
“It’s what you wanted.”
“Did I say that?”
“Christmas Eve. You said you wanted to buy dolls for her.”
“Do you mind?”
“Of course not. I just get a little shock every time we take a new step, that’s all.”
“Dr. Galbreath says she’s healthy. There’s nothing wrong with her. She has the extra chromosomes…but we knew that.”
Mitch put his hand on her stomach. “I can feel her moving,” he said, and got on the floor in front of Kaye to lay his ear against her. “She’s going to be so beautiful .”
The hotel manager walked into the meeting room with a clutch of papers and looked down on them in surprise. In his fifties, with a full head of curly brown hair and a plump, nondescript face, he could have been anyone’s mediocre uncle. Mitch got up and brushed offhis pants.
“My wife,” Mitch said, embarrassed.
“Of course,” the manager said. He narrowed his pale blue eyes and took Mitch aside. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she? You didn’t tell me about that. There’s no mention in here…” He shuffled through the papers, looked up at Mitch accusingly. “None at all. We have to be so careful now about public gatherings and exposures.”
Mitch leaned against the Buick, chin in hand, rubbing. His fingers made a small rasping sound though he had shaved that morning. He pulled his hand back. Kaye stood before him.
“I’m going to drive you back to the house,” he said.
“What about the Buick?”
He shook his head. “I’ll pick it up later. Wendell can give me a ride.”
“Where do we go from here?” Kaye asked. “We could try another hotel. Or rent a lodge hall.”
Mitch made a disgusted face. “The bastard was looking for an excuse. He knew your name. He called somebody. He checked up, like a good little Nazi.” He flung his hands in the air. “Long live America the free!”
“If Brock can’t enter the country again—”
“We’ll hold the conference on the Internet,” Mitch said. “We’ll figure out something. But it’s you I’m concerned about right now. Something’s bound to happen.”
“What?”
“Don’t you feel it?” He rubbed his forehead. “The look in that manager’s eyes, that cowardly bastard. He’s like a frightened goat. He doesn’t know jack shit about biology. He lives his life in small safe moves and he doesn’t buck the system. Nearly everybody is like him. They get pushed around and they run in the direction they’re pushed.”
“That sounds so
cynical,” Kaye said.
“It’s political reality. I’ve been so stupid up until now. Letting you travel alone. You could be picked up, exposed—”
“I don’t want to be kept in a cave, Mitch.”
Mitch winced.
Kaye put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. You know what I mean.”
“Everything’s in place. Kaye. You saw it in Georgia. I saw it in the Alps. We’ve become strangers . People hate us.”
“They hate me,” Kaye said, her face going pale. “Because I’m pregnant.”
“They hate me, too.”
“But they’re not asking you to register like you were a Jew in Germany.”
“Not yet,” Mitch said. “Let’s go.” He wrapped his arm around her and escorted her to the Toyota. Kaye found it awkward to match his long stride. “I think we may have a day or two, maybe three. Then…somebody’s going to do something. You’re a thorn in their sides. A double thorn.”
“Why double?”
“Celebrities have power,” Mitch said. “People know who you are, and you know the truth.”
Kaye got into the passenger side and rolled down the window. The inside of the car was warm. Mitch closed the door for her. “Do I?”
“You’re damn right you do. Sue made you an offer. Let’s look into it. I’ll tell Wendell where we’re going. Nobody else.”
“I like the house,” Kaye said.
“We’ll find another,” Mitch said.
82
Building 52, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda
Mark Augustine seemed almost feverish in his triumph. He laid the pictures out for Dicken and slipped the videotape into the office player. Dicken picked up the first picture, held it close, squinted. The usual medical photo colors, strange orange and olive flesh and bright pink lesions, out-of-focus facial features. A man, in his forties perhaps, alive but far from happy. Dicken picked up the next picture, a closeup of the man’s right arm, marked with roseate blotches, a yellow plastic ruler laid alongside to indicate size. The largest blotch spread over a diameter of seven centimeters, with an angry sore at the center, crusted with thick yellow fluid. Dicken counted seven blotches on the right arm alone.
“I showed these to the staff this morning,” Augustine said, holding out the remote and starting the tape. Dicken went on to the next few pictures. The man’s body was covered with more large roseate lesions, some forming huge blisters, proud, assertive, and no doubt intensely painful. “We have samples in for analysis now, but the field team did a quick serology check for SHEVA, just to confirm. The man’s wife is in her second trimester with a second-stage SHEVA fetus and still shows SHEVA type 3-s. The man is now clear of SHEVA, so we can rule out the lesions are caused by SHEVA, which we wouldn’t expect at any rate.”
“Where are they?” Dicken asked.
“San Diego, California. Illegal immigrant couple. Our Commissioned Corps people did the investigation and sent this material to us. It’s about three days old. Local press is being kept out for the time being.”
Augustine’s smile came and went like small flashes of lightning. He turned in front of his desk, fast-forwarding through scenes of the hospital, the ward, the room’s temporary containment features — plastic curtains taped to walls and door, separate air. He lifted his finger from the remote and returned to play mode.
Doctor Ed Sanger, Mercy Hospital’s Commissioned Corps Taskforce member, in his fifties, with lank and sandy hair, identified himself and droned self-consciously through the diagnosis. Dicken listened with a rising sense of dread. How wrong I can be. Augustine is right. All his guesses were dead on.
Augustine shut off the tape. “It’s a single-stranded RNA virus, huge and primitive, probably around 160,000 nu-cleotides. Like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We’re working to match its genome with known HERV coding regions. It’s incredibly fast, it’s ill-adapted, and it’s deadly.”
“He looks in bad shape,” Dicken said.
“The man died last night.” Augustine turned off the tape. “The woman seems to be asymptomatic, but she’s having the usual trouble with her pregnancy.” Augustine folded his arms and sat on the edge of the desk. “Lateral transmission of an unknown retrovirus, almost certainly excited and equipped by SHEVA. The woman infected the man. This is the one, Christopher. This is the one we need. Are you up to helping us go public?”
“Go public, how?”
“We’re going to quarantine and/or sequester women with second-stage pregnancies. For that kind of violation of civil liberties, we have to lay some heavy foundations. The president is prepared to go forward, but his team says we need personalities to put the message across.”
“I’m no personality. Get Bill Cosby.”
“Cosby is signing off on this one. But you…You’re practically a poster child for the brave health worker recovering from wounds inflicted by fanatics desperate to stop us.” Augustine’s smile flickered again.
Dicken stared down at his lap. “You’re certain about this?”
“As certain as we’re going to be, until we do all the science. That could take three or four months. Considering the consequences, we can’t afford to wait.”
Dicken looked up at Augustine, then moved his gaze to the patchy clouds and trees in the sky through the office window. Augustine had hung a small square of stained glass there, a fleur-de-lis in red and green.
“All the mothers will have to have stickers in their houses,” Dicken said. “Q, or S, maybe. Every pregnant woman will have to prove she isn’t carrying a SHEVA baby. That could cost billions.”
“Nobody’s concerned about funding,” Augustine said. “We’re facing the biggest health threat of all time. It’s the biological equivalent of Pandora’s box, Christopher. Every retroviral illness we ever conquered but couldn’t get rid of. Hundreds, maybe thousands of diseases we have no modern defenses against. There’s no question of our getting enough funding on this one.”
“The only problem is, I don’t believe it,” Dicken said softly.
Augustine stared at him, strong lines forming beside his lips, brows drawing inward.
“I’ve chased viruses most of my adult life,” Dicken said. “I’ve seen what they can do. I know about retroviruses, I know about HERV I know about SHEVA. HERV were probably never eliminated from the genome because they provided protection against other, newer retroviruses. They’re our own little library of protection. And…our genome uses them to generate novelty.”
“We don’t know that,” Augustine said, his voice grating with tension.
“I want to wait for the science before we lock up every mother in America,” Dicken said.
As Augustine’s skin darkened with irritation, then anger, the patches of shrapnel scars became vivid. “The danger is just too great,” he said. “I thought you’d appreciate a chance to get back into the picture.”
“No,” Dicken said. “I can’t.”
“Still holding on to fantasies about a new species?” Augustine asked grimly.
“I’m way beyond that,” Dicken said. The weary gravel in his voice startled him. He sounded like an old man.
Augustine walked around his desk and opened a file drawer, pulling out an envelope. Everything in his posture, the small, self-conscious strut in his walk, the cementlike set of his features, evoked a kind of dread in Dicken. This was a Mark Augustine he had not seen before: a man about to administer the coup de grace. “This came for you while you were in the hospital. It was in your mail slot. It was addressed to you in your official capacity, so I took the liberty of having it opened.”
He handed the thin papers to Dicken.
“They’re from Georgia. Leonid Sugashvili was sending you pictures of what he called possible Homo superior specimens, wasn’t he?”
“I hadn’t checked him out,” Dicken said, “so I didn’t mention it to you.”
“Wisely. He’s been arrested for fraud in Tbilisi. For bilking families of those missing in the troubles
. He promised grieving relatives he could show them where their loved ones were buried. Looks like he was after the CDC, too.”
“That doesn’t surprise me, and it doesn’t change my mind, Mark. I’m just burned out. It’s hard enough healing my own body. I’m not the man for the job.”
“All right,” Augustine said. “I’ll put you on long-term disability leave. We need your office at the CDC. We’re moving in sixty special epidemiologists next week to begin phase two. With our space shortage, we’ll probably put three in your office to start.”
They watched each other in silence.
“Thanks for carrying me this long,” Dicken said without a hint of irony.
“No problem,” Augustine said with equal flatness.
83
Snohomish County
Mitch piled the last of the boxes near the front door. Wendell Packer was coming with a panel truck in the morning. He looked around the house and set his lips in a wry, crooked line. They had been here just over two months. One Christmas.
Kaye carried the phone in from the bedroom, line dangling. “Turned off,” she said. “They’re prompt when you’re dismantling a home. So — how long have we been here?”
Mitch sat in the worn lounge chair he had had since his student days. “We’ll do okay,” he said. His hands felt funny. They seemed larger, somehow. “God, I’m tired.”
Kaye sat on the arm of the chair and reached around to massage his shoulders. He leaned his head against her arm, rubbed his bristly cheek against her peach cardigan.
“Damn,” she said. “I forgot to charge the batteries in the cell phone.” She kissed the top of his head and returned to the bedroom. Mitch noticed she walked straight enough, even at seven months. Her stomach was prominent but not huge. He wished he had had more experience with pregnancy. To have this be his first time -
“Both batteries are dead,” Kaye called from the bedroom. “They’ll take an hour or so.”
Mitch stared at various objects in the room, blinking. Then he held out his hands. They seemed swollen, stuck on the ends of Popeye-like forearms. His feet felt large, though he did not look at them. This was extremely discomfiting. He wanted to go to sleep but it was only four in the afternoon. They had just eaten a dinner of canned soup. It was still bright outside.