by Greg Bear
“All right,” Kaye said. She felt an immense sadness as he looked up and met her eyes.
“I try all the time,” he said. “I give you both all I have, all the time.”
“I know.”
“Without you and Stella, I am a dead man. You know that.”
“I know.”
“Don’t break me, Kaye.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
He stood. Kaye took his hand and led him into the bedroom like a frightened boy or an old, old man. She pulled back the down comforter and the blanket and top sheet. Mitch unbuttoned his shirt and removed his pants and stood by the side of the bed, lost.
“Just lie down and get some rest,” she said.
“Wake me if Stella gets any worse,” Mitch said. “I want to see her and tell her I love her.” He looked at her, eyes unfocused. Kaye tucked the sheets in around him, her heart thumping. She kissed him on the cheek. No tears, his face cold and hard as stone, all Mitch’s blood flowing away to somewhere far from her, taking him to where she could not go.
“I love you,” Kaye said. “I believe in you. I believe in what we’ve done.”
His eyes focused on hers, then, and she felt embarrassed at the power she had over this large, strong man. The blood returned to his face, and his lips came alive under hers.
Then, like a light going out, he was asleep.
Kaye stood beside the bed and watched Mitch, eyes wide. Her chest felt wrapped in steel bands. She was as frightened as if she had just missed driving them all off a cliff. She stood vigil over him for as long as she could before she had to leave and check on Stella. She hated the conflict, husband or daughter, but went with her judgment and the nature inside her, and crossed the few steps into the living room.
The cabin was completely dark.
“What?”
Kaye sat up on the floor. She had fallen asleep beside Stella, with only the flap of the sleeping bag between her and the hard wood, and now she had the distinct impression someone other than her daughter was in the room.
It wasn’t Mitch. She could see the blanketed hill of his toes through the bedroom door.
“Who’s there?” she whispered.
Crickets and frogs outside, a couple of large flies buzzing around the cabin.
She switched on a table lamp, checked her daughter for the hundredth time, found the fever way down, the breathing more regular.
She thought about moving Stella into the second bedroom, but the hook supporting the bag of Ringer’s solution would have to be moved as well, and Stella seemed comfortable on the sleeping bag, as comfortable as she would have been in a bed.
Kaye looked in on Mitch. He, too, was sleeping quietly. For a few minutes, Kaye stood in the short, narrow hallway, then leaned against the wall. “It’s better,” she said to the shadows. “It has got to be better.”
She turned suddenly. For a moment, she had thought she might see someone in the hall, someone beloved and familiar. Her father.
Dad is dead. Mom is dead. I’m an orphan. All the family I have is in this house.
She rubbed her forehead and neck. Her muscles were so tense, not least from sleeping beside Stella on the wooden floor. Her sinuses felt congested, as if she had been crying. It was a peculiar, not unpleasant sensation; the byproduct of some deeply buried emotion.
She needed to get some air. She checked Stella again, obsessive; knelt to touch her daughter’s forehead and feel her pulse, then walked around the couch, through the porch door, down the steps, and across the path through the grass to the boat dock.
The dock was thirty feet long and ten feet wide, ridiculously large on such a small lake. It supported a single overturned rowboat and a pile of moldy life vests. Grass blades poked out of the vests, shimmering in the moonlight.
Kaye stood at the end of the dock and crossed her arms. Absorbed the night. Crickets stroked out the degrees of heat, frogs thrummed with sexy, alien dignity out there in the shallows, among the reeds. Gnats hummed their desperate little ditties.
“Do any of you know what it is to be sad?” Kaye asked the lake and its inhabitants, then looked back toward the house. “Are you sad when your children are ill?” The single lamp in the living room burned golden through the windows of the porch.
She closed her eyes. Something large, completing a connection… something huge passing over, sweeping the lake, the forest—touching all the living things around her.
The frogs fell silent.
And touching her.
Kaye jumped as if someone had cracked through a flimsy wooden wall. Her shoulders rose and her fingers tensed. “Hello?” she whispered.
Any neighbors were at least a mile away, up the road, beyond the thick trees. She saw nothing, heard nothing.
“Wow,” she said, and immediately felt stupid. She looked around the lake, toward the reedy shallows, searching for the source of another voice, though no one had spoken. The reeds were empty. The lake fell silent, not even a breath of air. The night was so still Kaye could hear her heart beating in her chest.
Something had touched her, not her skin, deeper. At first it was just the awareness that she was not alone. By herself, on the dock, in her bare feet, she now shared her space with someone as real as she—as welcome and strangely familiar as a beloved friend.
She felt years of burden lift. For a moment, she basked in a warm sensation of infinite reprieve.
No judgment. No punishment.
Kaye shivered. Her tongue moved over her lips. A trickle of silvery water seemed to run through her head. The trickle became a rivulet, then an insistent creek flowing down the back of her neck into her chest. It was cool and electric and pure, like stepping out of the sweltering heat of a summer day into an underground spring. But this spring spoke, though never with words. It had a particular and distinctive perfume, like astringent flowers.
It was alive, and she could not shake the feeling that she had known about it all along. Like molecules finally fitting, making a whole—yet not. Nothing biological whatsoever. Something other.
Kaye touched her forehead. “Am I having a stroke?” she whispered. She fingered her lips. They were trying to form a smile. She bent them straight. “I can’t be weak. Not now. Who’s there?” she repeated, as if locked into a pointless ritual.
She knew the answer.
The visitor, the caller, possessed no features, no face or form. Nevertheless, being bathed in this cool, lovely fount was like having all of her great-grandmothers, her great-grandfathers, all the wise and sweet and wonderful and powerful members of her family whom she had never met, all at once and together bestowing the unconditional approval and love they would have bestowed had they cradled her as an infant in their sheltering arms. There was that much in it, and more.
But the caller, at once gentle and unbelievably intense, was nothing like her fleshly kin.
“Please, not now,” she begged. With relief came fear that she was losing her tenuous link to reality. The caller was known to her, yet long denied and evaded; but it showed no anger, no resentment. Its only response to her long denial was unconditional sympathy.
Yet was there also trepidation? The caller exposed an extraordinary longing to touch and show itself despite all the rules, the dangers. The caller quite charmingly yearned.
Kaye suddenly opened her mouth and let air fill her lungs. Funny, that she had stopped breathing for a moment. Funny, and not scary at all; like a personal joke. “Hello,” she said with the exhale, dropping her shoulders and relaxing, pushing aside the doubts and giving up to the sensation. She wanted this to last forever. She knew already it could not. To go back to the way she had felt just a few minutes ago, and all of her life before that, would hurt.
But she knew the pain was necessary. The world was not done with her, and the caller wanted her to be free to make her own choices, without its addictive interference.
Kaye walked back to the cabin to check on the sleeping Stella and to look in on Mitch. Both were quiet
. Stella’s color seemed to be stronger. Patches of freckles came and went on her cheeks. She was definitely past the crisis.
Kaye returned to the dock and stood staring into the early-morning forest, hoping that the loveliness, the peace, would never leave. She wanted it all, now and forever. There had been so much grief and pain and fear.
But despite her own yearning, Kaye understood.
Can’t go on. Not yet. Miles to go before I sleep.
Then, she lost track of time.
Dawn arrived in the east, on the other side of the trees, like gray velvet by candlelight.
She stood beside the overturned rowboat, shivering. How long had it been since she had returned to the dock?
Without words, the fount had spent hours sluicing her soul, (she was not comfortable using that word but there it was), wetting and revealing dusty thoughts and memories, becoming reacquainted in real and human time. Wherever it flowed, she knew its unalloyed delight.
It found her very good.
“Is Stella going to be all right?” Kaye asked, her voice soft as a child’s in the shaded close of the trees. “Are we all going to be together and well again?”
No response came to these specific questions. The caller did not deal in knowledge, as such, but it did not resent being asked.
She had never imagined such a moment, such a relationship. The few times she had wondered at all what this experience might be like, as a girl, she had conceived of it as guilt and thunder, recrimination, being assigned onerous tasks: a moment of desperate self-deception, justifying years of ignorance and misbegotten faith. She had never imagined anything so simple. Certainly not this intense yet amused upwelling of friendship.
No judgment. No punishment.
And no answers.
I did not call for this. The body has prayed the prayers of desperate flesh, not me.
Her conscious and discerning mind, most concerned with practicalities, the mistress in starched skirts who stared out sternly over Kaye’s life, told her, “You’re playing Ouija with your brain. It doesn’t make sense. This is going to mean nothing but trouble.”
And then, as if it were shouting a kind of curse, Kaye’s tense and adult voice flew to the trees, “You are having an epiphany.”
The crickets and frogs started their racket again, answering.
Finally, the conflict became too much. She dropped slowly to her knees on the dock, feeling that she carried precious cargo, it must not spill. She bent over and laid her hands flat on the rough, weathered wood.
She had to lie down to keep from falling over. With a long, slow release of breath, Kaye stretched out her legs.
47
OHIO
Augustine had divided them into two teams, the first with eight students, the second with seven. Toby’s team had worked first, from ten in the evening until three in the morning. Teachers and nurses carried those chosen by the team to an exercise field, laying them in rows under the blue glare of tall pole lamps, in the warm early-morning air.
Silently—with little more than a touch of palms and a whiff behind each ear—Toby passed his duties to a girl named Fiona, and the first team fell onto cots laid out in Trask’s office.
Fiona and the others on the second team went out with Augustine, back down the steel stairs to the main floor.
Until dawn, Fiona and the six helped Augustine sort through other buildings, walking up to each child on the cots or on bedding spread over concrete or wood floors, on bunks in the former cells and in the dormitories; bending over and smelling above the heads of the sick, showing with one finger, or two, who was strongest, who would probably live another day.
One finger meant the child was likely to die.
After eight hours of work, they had processed about six hundred children, starting with the worst, and consequently, had already visited the most dead and dying, and the children on both teams were quiet and tired.
More children volunteered, forming a third, fourth, and fifth team. Toby did not object, nor did Augustine.
While the first two teams slept, the new teams examined another nine hundred children, separating out four hundred, most of them able to walk with the teachers to the field, where they were assigned to old tents marked “Inmate Overflow.”
And round into the dawn and beyond ten o’clock, the kids worked with the remaining teachers, nurses, and security officers—the bravest of the brave—carrying bodies wrapped in sheets or in the last remaining body bags, or even in doubled plastic garbage bags, out to the farthest area within the fence, the employee parking lot, where the dead were laid out between the few and scattered cars.
Middleton worked to rearrange accommodations so that they could set up a morgue in the main gymnasium, adjacent to the infirmary. By eleven, the bodies had been removed from the parking lot and placed out of the sun.
Augustine estimated they had perhaps ten or fifteen hours before the dead would become a horrible nuisance, and twenty before they became a health hazard.
At noon, Augustine fell over after stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, between a row of inmate tents. The children carried him back to the infirmary, with the help of DeWitt.
There, DeWitt fed Augustine a little canned soup, gave him some water. He said he was feeling better and went back out with the rested first team.
All through the morning and afternoon, their labors were watched by rows of stone-faced National Guard troops patrolling beyond the razor wire perimeter fences.
At two in the afternoon, Augustine was compelled once again to go up to the office and lie down. Dicken emerged from the research lab with another bag full of specimen kits and met him there.
Four children who had worked with the teams slept in the corner, arms around each other, snoring lightly.
Dicken looked down on his former boss. Augustine was trembling, but his face had lost that distant, defeated look.
“You are a surprising fellow, Mark,” Dicken admitted.
“Not really,” Augustine croaked. He touched his throat. “Sorry. My voice is shot. How’s the lab work going?”
“Your turn,” Dicken said, and bent down to draw blood. When he was finished, he had Augustine scrape a plastic depressor on his tongue, and sealed that into a little plastic bag.
“Anything conclusive?” Augustine asked.
“Still getting specimens from the staff.”
“What next?”
“I’m going out into the field with Toby. Carry on while you rest. Can’t let an old bastard like you act the humanitarian all by your lonesome.”
Augustine nodded. “Conversion of Saul. Go forth,” he advised piously, and crossed the air between them.
Dicken stretched. His whole body felt stiff.
Augustine rolled on his side. “I’m not doing this out of pure charity, I confess,” he murmured. Dicken bent over to hear the soft words. “I have done a nasty thing, Christopher. I have played a card I vowed I would never play, to give my enemies—our enemies—the rope I need to hang them all.”
“What card?” Dicken said.
“I’m still a bastard. But I do begin to understand them, Christopher.”
“The children?”
“All our sweet little albatrosses.”
“Good for you,” Dicken said, his neck hair prickling, and turned to leave.
48
PENNSYLVANIA
The sun was high in the sky when Kaye raised her head. She might have slept for another hour or two; she did not remember.
She rolled over on the dock.
It’s gone, she said. It was a dream. Or worse.
She stood and brushed off her jeans, prepared to feel a resigned sadness. I should get a checkup. There’s been so much stress… Her nose and forehead still felt stuffy. Was that a symptom of embolism or a burst aneurysm? Had wires crossed in her head, pouring signals from one side of the brain to the other? A short circuit?
She turned to look back along the dock at the house, took a step…
<
br /> And let out a squeak like a surprised mouse. She stretched out her arms.
The presence was still with her. Quiet, calm, other; patient and real. At the same time Kaye was relieved and terrified.
She ran to the cabin. Mitch knelt on the floor beside Stella. He looked up as she came through the porch door. His hair was tousled and his face looked like a rumpled rag.
“Her fever’s gone, I think,” Mitch said, searching Kaye’s features. His brows twitched. “The spots are smaller. The spots on her butt are gone.”
Stella rolled over. Her cheeks had regained more of their color. The sleeping bag was gone, and in its place Mitch had laid out an air mattress covered with a bright yellow sheet and a lime green blanket.
Kaye stared at them both. Her hands hung by her sides, her shoulders slumped.
“Are you all right?” Mitch asked.
Stella rubbed her eyes and reached out to Kaye. Their fingers touched and Kaye moved in and gripped her hand.
“You smell different,” Stella said.
Kaye bent down and hugged her daughter as fiercely as she dared.
“She’s asleep again.” Mitch rejoined Kaye in the cabin’s small, neat kitchen. “She looks better, doesn’t she?”
“Yes. Much.” Kaye bit the inside of her lip and glanced at her husband. “The Mackenzies laid in a wide selection of teas,” she said. She opened the box of teabags, confused, desperate.
Mitch returned her look, patient but tired. “Does she need more medicine?”
“Her neck doesn’t hurt. Her head doesn’t hurt. She’s not feverish. I removed the needle because she drank some orange juice. I don’t think she’ll need any more antiviral.”
“She wet the sleeping bag.”
“I know. Thank you for changing it.”
“You were on the dock. You were asleep.”
Kaye looked out the kitchen window at the dock, now bright in the full sun. “You should have awakened me.”
“You looked peaceful. I’m sorry if I said anything strange last night.”