Darwin's Radio d-1

by Greg Bear

  “You should come to a trustees meeting sometime.”

  “I’m grateful just to be here, Jack. I don’t want to make people angry.”

  “Sue thinks maybe they won’t be angry if they meet you. You’re a nice enough guy.”

  “That’s what she said over a year ago.”

  “She says if I’m not angry, the others won’t be. That’s right, maybe. Though there is an old Cayuse woman, Becky. They sent her away from Colville and she came here. She’s a nice old grandmother, but she thinks it’s her job to disagree with whatever the tribes want. She might, you know, look at you, poke you a little.” Jack made a cantankerous face and stabbed the air with a stiff finger.

  Jack was seldom so voluble and had never talked about affairs on the board.

  Mitch laughed. “Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

  Jack shrugged. “We want to have a meeting of fathers soon. Just the fathers. Not like the clinic birth classes with the women there. They’re embarrassing to the men. Are you going tonight?”

  Mitch nodded.

  “First time for me with this skin. It’s going to be rough. Some of the new fathers watch the TV and they wonder when they’ll get their jobs back, and then they blame the women.”

  Mitch understood that there were three couples still expecting SHEVA babies on the reservation, besides himself and Kaye. Among the three thousand and seventy-two people on the reservation, making up the Five Tribes, there had been six SHEVA births. All had been born dead.

  Kaye worked with the clinic pediatrician, a young white doctor named Chambers, and helped conduct the parenting classes. The men were a little slow and perhaps a lot less willing to accept things.

  “Sue is due about the same time as Kaye,” Jack said. He folded his legs into a lotus and sat directly on the dirt, something Mitch was not good at. “I tried to understand about genes and DNA and what a virus is. It’s not my kind of language.”

  “It can be difficult,” Mitch said. He did not know whether he should reach out and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He knew so little about the modern people whose ancestors he studied. “We might be the first to have healthy babies,” he said. “The first to know what they’ll look like.”‘

  “I think that is true. It cou’d be very…” Jack paused, his lips turned down as he thought. “I was going to say an honor. But it isn’t our honor.”

  “Maybe not,” Mitch said.

  “For me, everything stays alive forever. The whole Earth is filled with living things, some wearing flesh, others not. We are here for many who came before. We don’t lose our connection to the flesh when we cast it off. We spread out after we die, but we like to come back to our bones and look around. See what the young ones are doing.”

  Mitch could feel the old debate starting again.

  “You don’t see it that way,” Jack said.

  “I’m not sure how I see things anymore,” Mitch said. “Having your body jerked around by nature is sobering. Women experience it more directly, but this has got to be a first for the men.”

  “This DNA must be a spirit in us, the words our ancestors pass on, words of the Creator. I can see that.”

  “As good a description as any,” Mitch said. “Except I don’t know who the Creator might be, or whether one even exists.”

  Jack sighed. “You study dead things.”

  Mitch colored slightly, as he always did when discussing these matters with Jack. “I try to understand what they were like when they were alive.”

  “The ghosts could tell you,” Jack said.

  “Do they tell you?”

  “Sometimes,” Jack said. “Once or twice.”

  “What do they tell you?”

  “That they want things. They aren’t happy. One old man, he’s dead now, he listened to the spirit of Pasco man when you dug him out of the riverbank. The old man said the ghost was very unhappy.” Jack picked up a pebble and tossed it down the hill. “Then, he said he didn’t talk like our ghosts. Maybe he was a different ghost. The old man only told that to me, not to anybody else. He thought maybe the ghost wasn’t from our tribe.”

  “Wow,” Mitch said.

  Jack rubbed his nose and plucked at an eyebrow. “My skin itches all the time. Does yours?”

  “Sometimes.” Mitch always felt as if he were walking along a cliff edge when he talked about the bones with Jack. Maybe it was guilt. “No one is special. We’re all humans. The young learn from the old, dead or alive. I respect you and what you say, Jack, but we may never agree.”

  “Sue makes me think things through,” Jack said with a shade of petulance, and glanced at Mitch with deep-set black eyes. “She says I should talk to you because you listen, and then you say what you think and it’s honest. The other fathers, they need some of that now.”

  “I’ll talk with them if it will help,” Mitch said. “We owe you a lot, Jack.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jack said. “We’d probably be in trouble anyway. If it wasn’t the new ones, it would be the slot machines. We like to shove our spears at the bureau and the government.”

  “It’s costing you a lot of money,” Mitch said.

  “We’re sneaking in the new credit-card roller games,” Jack said. “Our boys drive them over the hills in the backs of their trucks where the troopers aren’t watching. We may get to use them for six months or more before the state confiscates them.”

  “They’re slot machines?”

  Jack shook his head. “We don’t think so. We’ll make some money before they’re removed.”

  “Revenge against the white man?”

  “We skin ‘em,” Jack said soberly. “They love it.”

  “If the babies are healthy, maybe they’ll end the quarantine,” Mitch said. “You can reopen the casino in a couple of months.”

  “I don’t count on nothing,” Jack said. “Besides, I don’t want to go out on the floor and act like a boss if I still look like this.” He put his hand on Mitch’s shoulder. “You come talk,” he said, standing. “The men want to hear.”

  “I’ll give it a shot,” Mitch said.

  “I’ll tell them to forgive you for that other stuff. The ghost wasn’t from one of our tribes anyway.” Jack pushed to his feet and walked off down the hill.

  85

  Kumash County, Eastern Washington

  Mitch worked on his old blue Buick, parked in the dry grass of the trailer’s front yard, while afternoon thunderheads piled up to the south.

  The air smelled tense and exciting. Kaye could hardly bear to sit. She pushed back from the desk by the window and left off from pretending to work on her book while spending most of her time watching Mitch squint at wire harnesses.

  She put her hands on her hips to stretch. This day had not been so hot and they had stayed at the trailer rather than ride down to the air-conditioned community center. Kaye liked to watch Mitch play basketball; sometimes she would go for a swim in the small pool. It was not a bad life, but she felt guilty.

  The news from outside was seldom good. They had been on the reservation for three weeks and Kaye was afraid the federal marshals would come and gather up the SHEVA mothers at any time. They had done so in Montgomery, Alabama, breaking into a private maternity center and nearly causing a riot.

  “They’re getting bold’’ Mitch had said as they watched the TV news. Later, the president had apologized and assured the nation that civil liberties would be preserved, as much as possible, considering the risks that might be faced by the general public. Two days later, the Montgomery clinic had closed under pressure from picketing citizens, and the mothers and fathers had been forced to move elsewhere. With their masks, the new parents looked strange; judging from what she and Mitch heard on the news, they were not popular in very many places.

  They had not been popular in the Republic of Georgia.

  Kaye had learned nothing more about new retroviral infections from SHEVA mothers. Her contacts were equally silent. This was a charged issue,
she could tell; nobody felt comfortable expressing opinions.

  So she pretended to work on her book, drafting perhaps a good paragraph or two every day, writing sometimes on the laptop, sometimes in longhand on a legal pad. Mitch read what she wrote and made marginal notes, but he seemed preoccupied, as if stunned by the prospect of being a father…Though she knew that was not what concerned him.

  Not being a father. That concerns him. Me. My welfare.

  She did not know how to ease his mind. She felt fine, even wonderful, despite the discomforts. She looked at herself in the spotted mirror in the bathroom and felt that her face had filled out rather well; not gaunt, as she had once believed, but healthy, with good skin — not counting the mask, of course.

  Every day the mask darkened and thickened, a peculiar caul that marked this kind of parenthood.

  Kaye performed her exercises on the thin carpet in the small living room. Finally, it was just too muggy to do much of anything. Mitch came in for a drink of water and saw her on the floor. She looked up at him.

  “Game of cards in the rec room?” he asked.

  “I vant to be alone,” she intoned, Garbo-like. “Alone with you, that is.”

  “How’s the back?”

  “Massage tonight, when it’s cool,” she said.

  “Peaceful here, isn’t it?” Mitch asked, standing in the door and flapping his T-shirt to cool off.

  “I’ve been thinking of names.”

  “Oh?” Mitch looked stricken.

  “What?” Kaye asked.

  “Just a funny feeling. I want to see her before we come up with a name.”

  “Why?” Kaye asked resentfully. “You talk to her, sing to her, every night. You say you can even smell her on my breath.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch said, but his face did not relax. “I just want to see what she looks like.”

  Suddenly, Kaye pretended to catch on. “I don’t mean a scientific name ,” she said. “Our name, our name for our daughter.”

  Mitch gave her an exasperated look. “Don’t ask me to explain.” He looked pensive. “Brock and I came up with a scientific name yesterday, on the phone. Though he thinks it’s premature, because none of the—”

  Mitch caught himself, coughed, shut the screen door, and walked into the kitchen.

  Kaye felt her heart sink.

  Mitch returned with several ice cubes wrapped in a wet towel, knelt beside her, and dabbed at the sweat on her forehead. Kaye would not meet his eyes.

  “Stupid,” he murmured.

  “We’re both grownups,” Kaye said. “I want to think of names for her. I want to knit booties and shop for sleepers and buy little crib toys and behave as if we’re normal parents and stop thinking about all that bullshit .”

  “I know,” Mitch said, and he looked completely miserable, almost broken.

  Kaye got up on her knees and laid her hands lightly on Mitch’s shoulders, sweeping them back and forth as if dusting. “Listen to me. I am fine. She is fine. If you don’t believe me…”

  “I believe you,” Mitch said.

  Kaye bumped her forehead against his. “All right, Kemosabe.”

  Mitch touched the dark, rough skin on her cheeks. “You look very mysterious. Like a bandit.”

  “Maybe we’ll need new scientific names for us, too. Don’t you feel it inside…something deeper, beneath the skin?”

  “My bones itch,” he said. “And my throat…my tongue feels different. Why am I getting a mask and all the rest, too?”

  “You make the virus. Why shouldn’t it change you, too? As for the mask…maybe we’re getting ready to be recognized by her. We’re social animals. Daddies are as important to babies as mommies.”

  “We’ll look like her?”

  “Maybe a little.” Kaye returned to the desk chair and sat. “What did Brock suggest for a scientific name?”

  “He doesn’t foresee a radical change,” Mitch said. “Subspecies at most, maybe just a peculiar variety. So…Homo sapiens novus.”

  Kaye repeated the name softly and smirked. “Sounds like a windshield repair place.”

  “It’s good Latin,” Mitch said.

  “Let me think on it,” she said.

  “They paid for the clinic with the money from the casino,” Kaye said as she folded towels. Mitch had carried the two baskets back to the trailer from the laundry shed before sundown. He sat on the queen-size bed in the tiny little bedroom of the single-wide because there was hardly any room to stand. His big feet could barely wedge between the walls and the bed frame.

  Kaye took four panties and two new nursing bras and folded them, then laid them to one side to put in the overnight case. She had been keeping the case handy for a week, and it seemed the right time to pack it.

  “Got a dopp bag?” she asked. “I can’t find mine.”

  Mitch pushed and crawled off the end of the bed to dig around in his suitcase. He came up with a battered old brown leather bag with a zipper.

  “Army Air Force bomber’s shaving kit?” she asked, lifting the bag by its strap.

  “Guaranteed authentic,” Mitch said. He watched her like a hawk and that made her feel both reassured and a little bitchy. She continued to fold laundry.

  “Dr. Chambers says all the mothers-to-be look healthy. He delivered three of the others. He could tell there was something wrong with them months before, so he says. Marine Pacific sent him my records last week. He’s filling out some of the Taskforce forms, but not all. He had a lot of questions.”

  She finished the laundry and sat on the end of the bed. “When she twitches like this, it makes me think I’ve started labor.”

  Mitch bent down before her and placed his hand on her prominent stomach, his eyes bright and large. “She’s really moving around tonight.”

  “She’s happy,” Kaye said. “She knows you’re here. Sing her the song.”

  Mitch looked up at her, then sang his version of the ABCs tune. “Ah, beh, say, duh, ehh,fuh, gah, aitch, ihh.juh, kuh, la muh-nuh, ohpuh…”

  Kaye laughed.

  “It’s very serious,” Mitch said.

  “She loves it.”

  “My father used to sing it to me. Phonetic alphabet. Get her ready for the English language. I started reading when I was four, you know.”

  “She’s kicking time,” Kaye said in delight.

  “She is not.”

  “I swear it, feel!”

  She actually liked the small trailer with its battered light oak plywood cabinets and old furniture. She had hung her mother’s prints in the living room. They had enough food and it was warm enough at night, too hot in the daytime, so Kaye went to work with Sue in the Administration Building and Mitch walked around the hills with his cell phone in his pocket, sometimes with Jack, or spoke with the other fathers-to-be in the clinic lounge. The men liked to keep to themselves here, and the women were content with that. Kaye missed Mitch in the hours he was away, but there was a lot to think about and prepare for. At night, he was always with her, and she had never been happier.

  She knew the baby was healthy. She could feel it. As Mitch finished the song, she touched the mask around his eyes. He did not flinch when she did this, though he used to, the first week. Their masks were both quite thick now and flaky around the edges.

  “You know what I want to do,” Kaye said.

  “What?”

  “I want to crawl off into a dark hole somewhere when it’s time.”

  “Like a cat?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can see doing that,” Mitch said agreeably. “No modern medicine, dirt floor, savage simplicity.”

  “Leather thong in my teeth,” Kaye added. “That’s the way Sue’s mother gave birth. Before they had the clinic.”

  “My father delivered me,” Mitch said. “Our truck was stuck in a ditch. Mom climbed into the back. She never let him forget that.”

  “She never told me that!” Kaye said with a laugh.

  “She calls it ‘a difficult delivery,�
� “ Mitch said.

  “We’re not that far from the old times,” Kaye said. She touched her stomach. “I think you sang her to sleep.”

  The next morning, when Kaye awoke, her tongue felt thick. She pushed out of bed, waking Mitch, and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of the flat-tasting reservation tap water. She could hardly talk. “Mitth,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Awh we gehhing somhinh?”

  “Wha?”

  She sat beside him and poked out her tongue. “Ih’s aw custy,” she said.

  “My,hoo,”hesaid.

  “Ih’s li owah faces,” she said.

  Only one of the four fathers could talk that afternoon in the clinic side room. Jack stood by the portable whiteboard and ticked off the days for each of their wives, then sat and tried to talk sports with the others, but the meeting broke up early. The clinic’s head physician — there were four doctors working at the clinic, besides the pediatrician — examined them all but had no diagnosis. There did not seem to be any infection.

  The other mothers-to-be had it, too.

  Kaye and Sue did their shopping together at the Little Silver Market down the road from the resort’s Biscuit House coffee shop. Others in the market stared at them but said nothing. There was a lot of grumbling among the casino workers, but only the old Cayuse woman, Becky, spoke her mind in the trustee meetings.

  Kaye and Sue agreed that Sue was going to deliver first. “I ca’t way,” Sue said. “Neither cah Jack.”

  86

  Kumash County, Eastern Washington

  Mitch was there again. It began vague, and then clicked into a wicked reality. All his memories of being Mitch were tidily packed away in that fashion peculiar to dreams. The last thing he did as Mitch was feel his face, pull at the thick mask, the mask that sat on new and puffy skin.

  Then he was on the ice and rock again. His woman was screaming and crying, almost doubled up with pain. He ran ahead, then ran back and helped her to her feet, all the time ululating, his throat sore, his arms and legs bruised from the beating, the taunting, back on the lake, in the village, and he hated them, all laughing and hooting, as they swung their sticks and sounded so ugly.