by Greg Bear
“You wrote that you felt you were getting smarter and more distant,” Kaye said, “but you were losing your self.” She stared at the shadowy figure in the dark room. The eczema had gotten very bad, so Kaye had been told in the briefing before joining Marian Freedman. “I’d like to hear more,” Kaye said.
Suddenly, Mrs. Rhine leaned forward. “I know why you’re here,” she said, her voice rising.
“Why?” Kaye asked.
“We’ve both had the virus.”
A moment’s silence.
“I don’t get you,” Kaye said softly.
“Ascetics sit on pillars of rock to avoid human touch. They wait for God. They go mad. That is me. I’m Saint Anthony, but the devils are too smart to waste their time gibbering at me. I am already in hell. I don’t need them to remind me. I have changed. My brain feels bigger but it’s also like a big warehouse filled with empty boxes. I read and try to fill up the boxes. I was so stupid, I was just a breeder, the virus punished me for being stupid, I wanted to live so I took the pig tissue inside of me and that was forbidden, wasn’t it? I’m not Jewish but pigs are powerful creatures, very spiritual, don’t you think? I am haunted by them. I’ve read some ghost stories. Horror stories. Very scary, about pigs. I’m talking a mile a minute, I know. Marian listens, the others listen, but it’s a chore for them. I scare them, I think. They wonder how long I’ll last.”
Kaye’s stomach was so tense she could taste the acid in her throat. She felt so much for the woman beyond the glass, but could not think of anything to say or do to comfort her. “I’m still listening,” she said.
“Good,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to die soon. I can feel it in my blood. So will you, though maybe not so soon.”
Mrs. Rhine stood and walked around the overturned and shrouded couch.
“I have these nightmares. I escape from here somehow and walk around and touch people, trying to help, and I just end up killing everybody. Then, I visit with God… and I make Him sick. I kill God. The devil says to Him, ‘I told You so.’ He’s mocking God while’s He’s dying, and I say, Good for you.”
“Oh,” Kaye said, swallowing. “That isn’t the way it is. It isn’t going to be that way.”
Mrs. Rhine waved her arms at the window. “You can’t possibly understand. I’m tired.”
Kaye wanted to say more, but could not.
“Go now, Kaye,” Carla Rhine insisted.
Kaye sipped a cup of coffee in Marian Freedman’s small office. She was crying so hard her shoulders were shaking. She had held back while removing the suit and showering, while taking the elevator, but now, it could not be stopped. “That wasn’t good,” she managed to say between sobs. “I didn’t handle that at all well.”
“Nothing we do matters, not for Carla,” Freedman said. “I don’t know what to say to her, either.”
“I hope it won’t set her back.”
“I doubt it,” Freedman said. “She is strong in so many ways. That’s part of the cruelty. The others are quiet. They have their habits. They’re like hamsters. Forgive me, but it’s true. Carla is different.”
“She’s become sacred,” Kaye said, straightening in the plastic chair and taking another Kleenex from the floral box on Freedman’s desk. She wiped her eyes and shook her head.
“Not sacred,” Freedman insisted, irritated. “Cursed, maybe.”
“She says she’s dying.”
Freedman looked at the far wall. “She’s producing new types of retroviruses, very together, elegant little things, not the patchwork monstrosities she used to make. They don’t contain any pig genes whatsoever. None of these new viruses are infectious, or even pathogenic, as far as we can tell, but they’re really playing hell with her immune system. The other ladies… the same.”
Marian Freedman focused on Kaye. Kaye studied her dark, drained eyes with a growing sense of dismay.
“Last time Christopher Dicken was through here, he worked with me on some samples,” Freedman said. “In less than a year, maybe only a few months, we think all our ladies will start showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, possibly lupus.” Freedman worked her lips, fell silent, but kept looking at Kaye.
“And?” Kaye said.
“He thinks the symptoms have nothing to do with pig-tissue transplants. The ladies may just be accelerated a little. Mrs. Rhine could be the first to experience post-SHEVA syndrome, a side effect of SHEVA pregnancy. It could be pretty bad.”
Kaye let that information sink in, but could not find any emotion to attach to it—not after seeing Carla Rhine. “Christopher didn’t tell me.”
“Well, I can see why.”
Kaye deliberately switched her thoughts, a survival tactic at which she had become adept in the last decade. “I’m flying out to California to meet with Mitch. He’s still searching for Stella.”
“Any signs?” Freedman asked.
“Not yet,” Kaye said.
She got up and Freedman held up a special disposal basket marked “Biohazard” to receive her tear-dampened tissue. “Carla might behave very differently tomorrow. She’ll probably tell me how glad she is you dropped by. She’s just that way.”
“I understand,” Kaye said.
“No, you don’t,” Freedman said.
Kaye was in no mood. “Yes, I do,” she said firmly.
Freedman studied her for a moment, then gave in with a shrug. “Pardon my bad attitude,” she explained. “It’s become an epidemic around here.”
Kaye boarded a plane in Baltimore within two hours, heading for California, denying the sun its chance to rest. Scents of ice and coffee and orange juice wafted from a beverage cart being pushed down the aisle. As she sat watching a news report on the federal trials of former Emergency Action officials, she clamped her teeth to keep them from chattering. She was not cold; she was afraid.
Nearly all of her life, Kaye had believed that understanding biology, the way life worked, would lead to understanding herself, to enlightenment. Knowing how life worked would explain it all: origins, ends, and everything in between. But the deeper she dug and the more she understood, the less satisfying it seemed, all clever mechanism; wonders, no doubt, enough to mesmerize her for a thousand lifetimes, but really nothing more than an infinitely devious shell.
The shell brought birth and consciousness, but the price was the push-pull of cooperation and competition, partnership and betrayal, success causing another’s pain and failure causing your own pain and death, life preying upon life, dragging down victim after victim. Vast slaughters leading to adaptation and more cleverness, temporary advantage; a never-ending process.
Viruses contributed to both birth and disease: genes traveling and talking to each other, speaking the memories and planning the changes, all the marvels and all the failures, but never escaping the push-pull. Nature is a bitch goddess.
The sun came through the window opposite and fell brilliant on her face. She closed her eyes. I should have told Carla what happened to me. Why didn’t I tell her?
Because it’s been three years. Fruitless, painful years. And now this.
Carla Rhine had given up on God. Kaye wondered if she had as well.
2
CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
Mitch adjusted his tie in the old, patchy mirror in the dingy motel room. His face looked comical in the reflection, tinted yellow around his left eye, spotted black near his right cheek, a crack separating neck and chin. The mirror told him he was old and worn out and coming apart, but he smiled anyway. He would be seeing his wife for the first time in two weeks, and he was looking forward to spending time alone with her. He did not care about his appearance because he knew Kaye did not care much, either. So he wore the suit, because all his other clothes were dirty and he had not had time to take them down to the little outbuilding and plug dollar coins into the washing machine.
The rumpled queen-sized bed was scattered with half-folded maps and charts and pieces of paper with phone numbers and a
ddresses, an imposing pile of clues that so far had gotten him nowhere. In the last three years of searching across the state, and finally zeroing in on Lone Pine, it seemed no one had seen Stella, no one had seen any youngsters traveling, and most certainly no one had seen any virus children playing hooky from school.
Stella had vanished.
Mitch could locate with stunning insight a cluster of men who had died twenty thousand years ago, but he could not find his seventeen-year-old daughter.
He pinched the tie higher and grimaced, then turned out the bathroom light and went to the door. Just as he opened the door, a young-looking man in a sweatshirt and gray windbreaker, with long blond hair, pulled back a knocking fist.
“Sorry,” the man said. “Are you Mitch?”
“Can I help you?”
“The manager says maybe I can help you.” He tapped his nose and winked.
“What’s that mean?”
“You don’t remember me?”
“No,” Mitch said, impatient.
“I deliver hardware and electrical supplies. I can’t smell a thing, never have, and I can’t taste much, either. They call it anosmia. I don’t like the taste of food much, and that’s why I stay skinny.”
Mitch shrugged, still at a loss.
“You’re looking for a girl, right? A Shevite?”
Mitch had never heard that word before. The sound of it—a right sound—gave him gooseflesh. He reappraised the thin young man. There was something familiar about him.
“I’m the only one my boss, Ralph, will send to deliver supplies, because all the other guys come back confused.” He tapped his nose again. “Not me. They can’t make me forget to pick up the money. So they pay us, and since I treat them with respect, they pay well, with bonuses. See?”
Mitch nodded. “I’m listening.”
“I like them,” the young man said. “They’re good folks, and I don’t want anybody to go up there and make trouble. I mean, what they do is sort of legal now, and it’s a big business around here.” He peered off into the bright morning sunshine heating up the small asphalt parking lot, the grassy field, and the scattered pines beyond.
“I’m interested in any information,” Mitch said, stepping out onto the porch, careful now not to spook the man. “She’s my daughter. My wife and I have been looking for her for three years.”
“Cool,” the man said, shuffling his feet. “I have a little girl myself. I mean, she’s with her mother, and we’re not married—” He suddenly looked alarmed. “I don’t mean she’s a virus kid, no, not at all!”
“It’s okay,” Mitch said. “I’m not prejudiced.”
The man looked strangely at Mitch. “Don’t you recognize me? I mean, okay, it’s been a long time. I thought I remembered you, and now that I see you, it’s all as clear as yesterday. Strange, how people come back together, isn’t it?”
Mitch made little motions of shoulder and head to show he still wasn’t clued in.
“Well, it might not have been you… but I’m pretty sure it was, because I saw your wife’s picture in the paper a few months later. She’s a famous scientist, isn’t she?”
“She is,” Mitch said. “Look, I’m sorry…”
“You picked up some hitchhikers a long time ago. Two girls and a guy. That was me, the guy.” He pointed a skinny finger at his own chest. “One of the girls had just lost a baby. They were called Delia and Jayce.”
Mitch’s face slowly went blank, with both astonishment and memory. He was surprised, but he remembered almost everything, perhaps because it had taken place in another small motel.
“Morgan?” he asked, stooping as if his arms were dragged down by weights.
The man broke into the broadest grin Mitch had seen in months. “Bless you,” Morgan said. There were actually tears in his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, shuffling his feet and backing off into the sunshine. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. “It’s just, after all these years… I’m sorry. I’m acting stupid. I am really grateful to you guys.”
Mitch reached out to save Morgan from falling off the curb. He pulled Morgan gently back into the shadow, and then, spontaneously, two men who had been through a lot over the years, they hugged. Mitch laughed despite himself. “Goddamnit, Morgan, how are you?”
Morgan accepted the hug but not the profanity. “Hey,” he said. “I’m with Jesus now.”
“Sorry,” Mitch said. “Where’s my daughter? What can you tell me? I mean, sounds like you’ve run into a group of people who don’t want to be found.” He felt the questions lining up, refusing to be slowed, much less stopped. “SHEVA people. Shevites, is that what you called them? How many? A commune? How did you find out I was looking for my daughter?”
“Like I said, the manager in the motel, he’s my girlfriend’s uncle. I deliver hardware to the garage he runs up on North Main. He told me. I wondered if it was you. You made some impression on me.”
“You want to take me out there, just in case I can’t be trusted?”
“I’m pretty sure you can be trusted, but… it’s hard to find. I’d like to take you there, just in case it is your daughter. I don’t know who she is, understand? But if she is out there… I’d like to return a favor.”
“I understand,” Mitch said. “Would you like to take my wife along, too? She’s the famous one.”
“Is she here?” Morgan asked, preparing to be stunned and shy again.
“She’ll be here in a couple of hours. I’m picking her up at the airport in Las Vegas.”
“Kaye Lang?”
“That’s her.”
“Wow!” Morgan said. “I’ve been watching the Senate hearings, the court stuff. When I’m not working. You know, I saw her on Oprah? That was a long time ago, I was still just a kid. But I really can’t promise anything.”
“We’ll go on faith,” Mitch said, happier than he had been in he did not remember how long. “Had some breakfast?”
“Hey, I earn my keep now,” Morgan said, straightening and sticking his finger tips into the pockets of his jeans. “I’ll buy you breakfast. What goes round, comes round.”
In the room, Mitch’s data phone rang. He half-closed the door as he loped to pick it up from the bed. Mitch pinched open the phone’s display door. The call was from Kaye. “Hello, Kaye! Guess—”
“I’m on the plane. What an awful, awful morning. I really need to hold someone,” Kaye said. Her image in the little screen looked pale. He could see a high seat back and people sitting behind her. “I need some good news, Mitch.”
He held back for a second, hand trembling, knowing how many times there had been false hopes. He did not want to add yet another disappointment.
“Mitch?”
“I’m here. I was just going out the door.”
“I just couldn’t stand not talking to you. Flight’s half full.”
“I think we’ve got something,” Mitch said, his voice rough and throat tight around the words. You know it’s right. You know this is it.
“Is that Dr. Lang? Say ‘hi!’” Morgan called brightly from the motel porch outside the door.
“What is it?” Kaye tried to make out Mitch’s expression on the little screen. “Is it a detective? Do we have that kind of money left?”
“Just get here safe. I’ve found an old friend. Or, rather, he’s found me.”
3
Lake Stannous
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
The air fell away from the heat of the afternoon. Through the pines Stella Nova could see thunderheads rising in silent, self-involved billows over the White Mountains. The woods were dry and full of the fragrances of lodgepole, spruce, and fir.
She had finished doing her share of the laundry in the big old concrete washhouse near the center of Oldstock. Now she sat on an empty oil drum beside the long lines hung with sun-drenched linens and underwear and some diapers and work clothes, smelling the laundry soap and bleach and steam, sipping a black cherry soda—a rare luxury here, she allowed herself
only one a week—and thinking, kicking her feet back and forth, scuffing the concrete slab around the washhouse with her clogs.
From where she sat, she could see the gravel turnaround beside the old abandoned bowling alley, painted gray decades ago, the paint now peeling; three long dark redwood-stained dormitories that used to house seminary students and pilgrims and a few tourists; and up north of that, the fuel cell and solar station that ran the medical center and nursery. Beyond the station and an old fenced-in compound for storing mining equipment stretched a debris field dominated by a small mountain of tailings. The mountain marked the old mine and made that end of the camp a no-man’s-land of heavy metals and cyanide. No one walked there unless they had to; sometimes after a heavy rain she could smell the poison in the air, but it wasn’t bad enough to make them sick, unless they did something stupid.
In the middle of the last century, humans had mined copper and tin and even some gold at Oldstock, and built a little town—that was where the bowling alley and the seminary buildings had come from. South of town, just off the main road down to the shore of Lake Stannous, you could find weed-grown streets and concrete foundations where houses had once stood, built by Condite Copper Company to house miners’ families. In the woods Stella had come across old refrigerators and washing machines and piles of bottles and bigger junk, abandoned steam and diesel engines like big iron spaceships, squat dark hopper cars, stacks of iron rails orange with rust, and creosote-dipped cross ties glistening with black beads from years in the sun.
Oldstock was a designated Superfund site, located on the north end of Lake Stannous, where fishing was poor, and that combination kept most humans away. But Oldstock was beautiful, and as long as it did not rain too much, the tailings did not wash out into the lake and the village’s water was fine. So far, they had been lucky. The weather had been dry for twenty years, ever since Mr. and Mrs. Sakartvelo had bought the place from a Lutheran church group.
Sakartvelo was not their real name. They had been immigrants from the FSU, the Former Soviet Union, the part now called the Republic of Georgia. The name they had adopted was the name of their country the way the natives said it. They had been hiding here for almost twenty years, knowing others would arrive eventually.