Darwin’s Children
Darwin’s Children
Greg Bear
Evolution is no longer just a theory – and nature is more of a bitch goddess than a kindly mother – in this tense science thriller from the author of the Nebula Award-winning Darwin’s RadioStella Nova is one of the ‘virus children’, a generation of genetically enhanced babies born a dozen years before to mothers infected with the SHEVA virus.In fact, the children represent the next great evolutionary leap and a new species of human, Homo sapiens novus, but this is officially denied. They’re gentle, charming and persuasive, possessed of remarkable traits. Nevertheless, they are locked up in special schools, quarantined from society, feared and reviled.‘Survival of the fittest’ takes on a new dimension as the children reach puberty. Stella is one of the first to find herself attracted to another ‘virus child’, but the authorities are watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike the next blow in their escalating war to preserve ‘humankind’ at any cost.
Darwin’s
Children
Greg Bear
To my father,
Dale Franklin Bear
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u2c3e85f2-8110-55ae-bd90-3e91a266577d)
Title Page (#udfc13c1f-199c-509c-969c-b70c01b7bbcf)
Dedication (#u68135f1c-bdc5-5f94-ab00-67ac971f2243)
PART ONE SHEVA +12 (#u35164c5e-48a9-5fa2-a97b-a82df7e1cccd)
CHAPTER ONE Spotsylvania County, Virginia (#ue3e93a7a-9a41-5f58-8727-c9ed78d79e2a)
CHAPTER TWO Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: USAMRIID FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND (#u869a2fa7-880c-5654-bd98-3315cacacbe9)
CHAPTER THREE Office of Special Reconnaissance LEESBURG, VIRGINIA (#u589dbb10-6d12-5b54-ba5e-441449b8e37d)
CHAPTER FOUR Maryland (#uafb8b5b1-f7fc-5a07-857f-913b1caed4e0)
CHAPTER FIVE Spotsylvania, Virginia (#ue1da6946-986b-5836-a0fc-c4fde285a937)
CHAPTER SIX The Longworth House Office Building WASHINGTON, D.C. (#u143e1c94-3bc7-5d48-96f8-4113041dddfd)
CHAPTER SEVEN Spotsylvania County (#ua3ee4775-32ab-5f38-a31d-9202668378b2)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u9462d0d9-4a79-5b03-b2a9-c2d4a74749ed)
CHAPTER NINE (#ue764c53d-d0c0-5a7c-96ea-6816960731cf)
CHAPTER TEN Washington, D.C. (#u64e213af-f721-5db2-839f-3301128b0307)
CHAPTER ELEVEN Spotsylvania County (#u89485395-9170-5234-bdc4-13653f5f123b)
CHAPTER TWELVE Leesburg (#u683a2baf-5e19-50dd-b42d-52d7a9fe7ff3)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Spotsylvania County (#u568975b2-c6b6-5d2c-8837-5ecaa0e48278)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#u31bf951c-197f-59cd-b63b-6e5fe43b3b67)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#u4a03a9e2-d484-5fc2-b964-6ce97cb2c3f8)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#uc4f07759-0444-59dc-8825-6391116be789)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#u0f94aa42-db94-5402-8dff-4b9c3c1447ac)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#u97fe1bac-d7ef-5b51-ad02-a6dd32a5bbb0)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#u24a44a57-542f-56de-bdc3-fe05fb11c966)
CHAPTER TWENTY Leesburg (#u78a4c2e1-6ed4-5e65-8636-ea79e829c345)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Spotsylvania County (#uf2b3577e-7334-558c-97c5-6b3106339c12)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Leesburg (#u99a64838-8a55-56d3-a7d0-e70699d48858)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Spotsylvania County (#u064752a7-fc9b-5757-849f-d8445bc23f8d)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Washington, D.C., Ohio (#ue41e69b7-e29e-5366-a43d-746baadd58d8)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Spotsylvania County (#ued599ed0-c87c-5d06-b47f-3477bb6bd68e)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#ucc348998-ef90-5483-8326-547ab6f14f8d)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Ohio (#u4b8f60ff-b2c0-5944-a6ee-432401532028)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Pennsylvania (#uc86c6562-2f48-594a-9b2f-7ee8e543c9ff)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Joseph Goldberger School for Children with Special Needs, Emergency Action Ohio, Central District Authority (#u633c06fb-475d-5899-aff7-2da2f7560eb5)
CHAPTER THIRTY Pennsylvania (#u5a034a34-596e-517d-b3d7-c027e83a2280)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Ohio (#u87657581-6626-56ec-8f45-05f4b3c24adc)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Pennsylvania (#u890e4bce-5e66-5235-96cc-51d9a668be03)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Ohio (#u44965755-0da3-53d4-83e8-5f379a8d0775)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Pennsylvania (#udd202353-52a0-533b-906e-1cb2b99b7a11)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Ohio (#u8d8aaa20-7ffb-5d06-9bc8-52ff1a2c137b)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Pennsylvania (#u40a7e6db-de1e-5db5-8e57-d1b951966d15)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Ohio (#u3cee9d63-58c7-569f-a4dd-15f299369aaf)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Pennsylvania (#u01c134d4-7e34-5db8-9cd9-11bfdac4f7cf)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Ohio (#ufd85f18d-dc2d-51b3-acb5-317abb47f5ba)
CHAPTER FORTY The Poconos, Pennsylvania (#u84264718-fa60-5818-9eaf-56b5cb609008)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Ohio (#u6bacb7b0-f2b9-5710-bba8-7c5a507cc0a3)
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Pennsylvania (#ue942f359-a6eb-5193-b615-fe1768b25afe)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE Ohio (#ue154d395-d51c-52aa-88f6-bf1b95c274be)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR The Poconos, Pennsylvania (#u9f412481-8f42-52d9-8da6-2a4940b3077a)
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE Ohio (#udabbdea2-64eb-57bc-8d51-bf1a3086e766)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX Pennsylvania (#u3ddcd4fe-2487-5778-9203-1e7b174d6a9f)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Ohio (#u33421dd0-74fb-59fa-b4be-608214d2670a)
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Pennsylvania (#u752ab2d7-7227-5316-bdb1-03eaab3b8a75)
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE Ohio (#u626034e0-5a74-57c0-8167-521165ec3690)
CHAPTER FIFTY Pennsylvania (#u46481e32-8182-5d7d-b152-52cd947d3ac5)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE Ohio (#u7a09add1-22f3-565f-b490-fc73e2fd3cce)
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO Pennsylvania (#u6fc46bbc-61f9-5349-83e7-b6df05602387)
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE Pennsylvania-Arizona (#u2bc710f3-ad36-5f64-b131-add0ebdc9750)
PART TWO SHEVA + 15 (#u1115c406-1254-521c-9a2f-aee0518db4f1)
CHAPTER ONE Washington, D.C. (#u9d3049d3-e2a3-5b70-b28f-0db44e5b8fba)
CHAPTER TWO Hart Senate Office Building Plenary session of the Senate Emergency Action Oversight Committee, closed hearing WASHINGTON, D.C. (#u366b2eeb-88f0-5e57-b9c8-d9f6b823ad19)
CHAPTER THREE Sable Mountain Emergency Action School ARIZONA (#u748fd0d9-b675-56c6-b853-88f20013e55a)
CHAPTER FOUR Pathogenics Center Viral Threat Assessment Division, Sandia Labs NEW MEXICO (#u608a304f-683f-50a6-99e6-d3deaa95542b)
CHAPTER FIVE Washington, D.C. (#u5e3cfdc5-0744-58f8-bb5a-ccd6fbdb7a59)
CHAPTER SIX New Mexico (#uf63a9010-91f2-597c-aaea-84bce8c90aaf)
CHAPTER SEVEN near Lubbock, Texas (#u7f7eb6b4-fcfc-5dcf-b4bd-a63923530b5a)
CHAPTER EIGHT Washington, D.C. (#u450823b6-2ab8-579f-a5af-ff6c4df1eb94)
CHAPTER NINE New Mexico (#u156cbc5f-5e88-5293-a4c5-7245e3d9d8bd)
CHAPTER TEN Arizona (#u7d48fb31-c91b-5941-b36f-e74dc64b2e5b)
CHAPTER ELEVEN Americol Research Headquarters BALTIMORE, MARYLAND (#u380ff1b4-0ede-55a9-9c65-41e786da0b7d)
CHAPTER TWELVE Arizona (#uc8b33767-a07c-5c25-b9cf-813fc3d6e537)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Baltimore (#u563cf685-aa44-56b6-b361-79db04535d85)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Arizona (#u0fc5709c-2e11-5455-a8b3-ca2cff46a50c)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Baltimore (#u4232e2d4-78f2-5c34-b6f1-ecac5e111c6e)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ufac157d1-0170-5dfb-857e-4e19c9b4a348)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Oregon (#u2dfe0ba4-2ffb-55c2-8ca6-cddecd750294)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Arizona (#u7cfe496c-9535-5066-abc6-ac676fab137f)
CHAPTER NINETEEN Baltimore (#u7b8ff1a5-3be0-5155-aac9-ec8eed33505a)
CHAPTER TWENTY Oregon (#uea4b004e-2b37-5a46-8bb5-5cfa7d48e39c)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Baltimore (#u67720a52-3725-5e42-a209-bf050fecc518)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Oregon (#ued8a2619-c53a-5d13-bbd4-3ef7457286c5)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE New Mexico (#u07a516b7-15fa-566d-b1a5-232cbdec4ae2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Arizona (#ue0a605f7-732f-5a03-873e-6351ae200cf2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Oregon (#u7686e961-7c29-5037-a2aa-1f3fde712a0e)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Baltimore (#ub5cc685f-d961-5de1-97cb-dc9000a0423e)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Arizona (#u085d835c-a248-5049-9739-6c03f7d451e5)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Baltimore (#ufef0babc-3c51-5c53-a778-ee5450fbab1b)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Arizona (#u85cbfd54-50db-5b7d-8d15-779b57cc7814)
CHAPTER THIRTY Oregon (#ue056df5f-34d4-5ad9-8685-bf527e907d99)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Arizona (#u4c8fe790-7d7b-5596-bbcb-4765fc25af3b)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Oregon (#uc51dd13e-1dd1-5dda-8770-f9c43484b205)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE New Mexico (#u9e92c7ba-989d-5582-99a5-c7cf3a90925a)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Baltimore-Washington (#ue747a41a-69e1-5ecc-be7e-91fe18abaa58)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE New Mexico (#u6b51e971-5577-5f43-9c84-a4d811a73d4e)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Arizona (#uf711d509-405e-59cc-b63d-58af525eaf7e)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Maryland (#uaa385c87-ae0b-52ff-b059-d7a9a42f561e)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Oregon (#u5cf02b48-a60f-5ddb-b3c4-013e30236385)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE New Mexico (#u474f5dac-ee39-53a2-b131-126813280175)
CHAPTER FORTY California (#u7c001593-d4bf-53a8-b326-e4434c8c7b94)
PART THREE SHEVA + 18 (#u6848f0f8-7569-5368-a6ac-eb69d7f8b925)
CHAPTER ONE Fort Detrick, Maryland (#u886bcc20-9144-5e91-b907-413cef9b7041)
CHAPTER TWO Central California (#u91cd209d-406d-5f02-a750-5269c6d250b6)
CHAPTER THREE Lake Stannous, Northern California (#ua200793a-bf04-53ee-923c-40d3c0584301)
CHAPTER FOUR Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA (#u0e4cc40a-62dc-57d0-ad18-8785e8d0f74d)
CHAPTER FIVE Lake Stannous, California (#u78e3053e-af8e-5164-823d-c81f9f2e1509)
CHAPTER SIX Spent River, Oregon (#ud8bef54d-d07c-57fd-8f6a-6cfea84e9edb)
CHAPTER SEVEN Lake Stannous (#u19db18d0-974a-5b5d-922c-ee090b5214c2)
EPILOGUE SHEVA2 + 1 LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA (#ub0bfa246-aca5-5943-8073-b2f463d32d72)
CAVEATS (#u687fd115-f48a-5f8e-8b4c-d2898ddb0de3)
A SHORT BIOLOGICAL PRIMER (#u3801c6d1-7d12-5b86-bb63-ec8c46680f83)
SHORT GLOSSARY OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS (#u2278538b-6dac-517a-831c-c62d064770eb)
A BRIEF READING LIST (#u29f0ce5a-9a72-5b73-906f-78bb89141cc0)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#u641cfc58-c2e6-5fae-89f7-45f2ba3ae9cf)
DARWIN’S CHILDREN (#ud7e2778a-416e-59b1-ab70-a78c42a89c71)
Also by Greg Bear (#uf4249b7c-7a1f-5bbd-bed5-e9ebe0c7d9f5)
Copyright (#u55ea2dbf-8fd2-519a-965c-00103bbe8c3b)
About the Publisher (#u415ab4b0-ef56-513b-82e9-662a2c6e9669)
PART ONE SHEVA +12 (#ulink_4b19cda2-b14a-593d-adbd-0a9584d8c0a0)
“America’s a cruel country. There’s a whole lot of people would just as soon stomp you like an ant. Listen to talk radio. Plenty of dummies, damned few ventriloquists.”
“There’s a wolf snarl behind the picnics and Boy Scout badges.”
“They want to kill our kids. Lord help us all.”
—Anonymous Postings, ALT.NEWCHILD.FAM
“Citing ‘severe threats to national security,’ Emergency Action this week has requested of the U.S. Justice Department the authority to hack and shut down SHEVA parent Web sites and even e-journals and newspapers guilty of spreading inaccurate information—‘lies’—against EMAC and the U.S. government. Some parent advocacy groups complain this is already the norm. Mid-level Justice Department officials have passed the request along to the office of the attorney general for further legal review, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.
“Some legal experts say that even legitimate newspaper sites could be hacked or shut down without warning should approval be granted, and the granting of such approval is likely in itself to be kept secret.”
—Seattle Times-PI Online
“God had nothing to do with making these children. I don’t care what you think about creationism or evolution, we’re on our own now.”
—Owen Withey, Creation Science News
CHAPTER ONE Spotsylvania County, Virginia (#ulink_18416528-a5cd-543e-b86b-1e7cf68d8d65)
Morning lay dark and quiet around the house. Mitch Rafelson stood with coffee cup in hand on the back porch, dopey from just three hours of sleep. Stars still pierced the sky. A few persistent moths and bugs buzzed around the porch light. Raccoons had been at the garbage can in back, but had left, whickering and scuffling, hours ago, discouraged by lengths of chain.
The world felt empty and new.
Mitch put his cup in the kitchen sink and returned to the bedroom. Kaye lay in bed, still asleep. He adjusted his tie in the mirror above the dresser. Ties never looked right on him. He grimaced at the way his suit hung on his wide shoulders, the gap around the collar of his white shirt, the length of sleeve visible beyond the cuff of his coat.
There had been a row the night before. Mitch and Kaye and Stella, their daughter, had sat up until two in the morning in the small bedroom trying to talk it through. Stella was feeling isolated. She wanted, needed to be with young people like her. It was a reasonable position, but they had no choice.
Not the first time, and likely not the last. Kaye always approached these events with studied calm, in contrast to Mitch’s evasion and excuses. Of course they were excuses. He had no answers to Stella’s questions, no real response to her arguments. They both knew she ultimately needed to be with her own kind, to find her own way.
Finally, too much, Stella had stomped off and slammed the door to her room. Kaye had started crying. Mitch had held her in bed and she had gradually slipped into twitching sleep, leaving him staring at the darkened ceiling. He tracking the play of lights from a truck grumbling down the country road outside, wondering, as always, if the truck would come up their drive, come for their daughter, come to claim bounty or worse.
He hated the way he looked in what Kaye called his Mr. Smith duds—as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He lifted one hand and rotated it, studying the palm, the long, strong fingers, wedding ring—though he and Kaye had never gotten a license. It was the hand of a hick.
He hated to drive into the capital, through all the checkpoints, using his congressional appointment pass. Slowly moving past all the army trucks full of soldiers, deployed to stop yet another desperate parent from setting off another suicide bomb. There had been three such blasts since spring.
And now, Riverside, California.
Mitch walked to the left side of the bed. “Good morning, love,” he whispered. He stood for a moment, watching his woman, his wife. His eyes moved along the sleeve of her pajama top, absorbing every wrinkle in the rayon, every silken play of pre-dawn light, down to slim hands, curled fingers, nails bitten to the quick.
He bent to kiss her cheek and pulled the covers over her arm. Her eyes fluttered open. She brushed the back of his head with her fingers. “G’luck,” she said.
“Back by four,” he said.
“Love you.” Kaye pushed into the pillow with a sigh.
Next stop was Stella’s room. He never left the house without making the rounds, filling his eyes and memory with pictures of wife and daughter and house, as if, should they all be taken away, should this be the last time, he could replay the moment. Fat good it would do.
Stella’s room was a neat jumble of preoccupations and busyness in lieu of having friends. She had pinned a farewell photo of their disreputable orange tabby on the wall over her bed. Tiny stuffed animals spilled from her cedar chest, beady eyes mysterious in the shadows. Old paperback books filled a small case made of pine boards that Mitch and Stella had hammered together last winter. Stella enjoyed working with her father, but Mitch had noticed the distance growing between them for a couple of years now.
Stella lay on her back in a bed that had been too short for over a year. At eleven, she was almost as tall as Kaye and beautiful in her slender, round-faced way, skin pale copper and tawny gold in the glow of the night-light, hair dark brown with reddish tints, same texture as Kaye’s and not much longer.
Their family had become a triangle, still strong, but with the three sides stretching each month. Neither Mitch nor Kaye could give Stella what she really needed.
And each other?
He looked up to see the orange line of sunrise through the filmy white curtains of Stella’s window. Last night, cheeks freckling with anger, Stella had demanded to know when they would let her out of the house on her own, without makeup, to be with kids her own age. Her kind of kids. It had been two years since her last “play date.”
Kaye had done wonders with home teaching, but as Stella had pointed out last night, over and over again, with rising emotion, “I am not like you!” For the first time, Stella had formally proclaimed: “I am not human!”
But of course she was. Only fools thought otherwise. Fools, and monsters, and their daughter.
Mitch kissed Stella on the forehead. Her skin was warm. She did not wake up. Stella as she slept smelled like her dreams, and now she smelled the way tears taste, tang of salt and sadness.
“Got to go,” he murmured. Stella’s cheeks produced waves of golden freckles. Mitch smiled.
Even asleep, his daughter could say good-bye.
CHAPTER TWO Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: USAMRIID FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND (#ulink_537badeb-e1a3-5906-b2d9-bce27647733c)
“People died, Christopher,” Marian Freedman said. “Isn’t that enough to make us cautious, even a little crazy?”
Christopher Dicken walked beside her, tilting on his game leg, staring down the concrete corridor to the steel door at the end. His National Cancer Institute ID badge still poked from his jacket pocket. He clutched a large bouquet of roses and lilies. The two had been engaged in debate from the front desk through four security checkpoints.
“Nobody’s diagnosed a case of Shiver for a decade,” he said. “And nobody ever got sick from the children. Isolating them is politics, not biology.”
Marian took his day pass and ran it through the scanner. The steel door opened to a horizontal spread of sunglass-green access tubes, suspended like a hamster maze over a two-acre basin of raw gray concrete. She held out her hand, letting him go first. “You know about Shiver firsthand.”
“It went away in a couple of weeks,” Dicken said.
“It lasted five weeks, and it damned near killed you. Don’t bullshit me with your virus hunter bravado.”
Dicken stepped slowly onto the catwalk, having difficulty judging depth with just one eye, and that covered by a thick lens. “The man beat his wife, Marian. She was sick with a tough pregnancy. Stress and pain.”
“Right,” Marian said. “Well, that certainly wasn’t true with Mrs. Rhine, was it?”
“Different problem,” Dicken admitted.
Freedman smiled with little humor. She sometimes revealed biting wit, but did not seem to understand the concept of humor. Duty, hard work, discovery, and dignity filled the tight circle of her life. Marian Freedman was a devout feminist and had never married, and she was one of the best and most dedicated scientists Dicken had ever met.
Together, they marched north on the aluminum catwalk. She adjusted her pace to match his. Tall steel cylinders waited at the ends of the access tubes, shaft housings for elevators to the chambers beneath the seamless concrete slab. The cylinders wore big square “hats,” high-temperature gas-fired ovens that would sterilize any air escaping from the facilities below.
“Welcome to the house that Augustine built. How is Mark, anyway?”
“Not happy, last time I saw him,” Dicken said.
“Why am I not surprised? Of course, I should be charitable. Mark moved me up from studying chimps to studying Mrs. Rhine.”
Twelve years before, Freedman had headed a primate lab in Baltimore, during the early days when the Centers for Disease Control had launched the task force investigating Herod’s plague. Mark Augustine, then director of the CDC and Dicken’s boss, had hoped to secure extra funding from Congress during a fiscal dry spell. Herod’s, thought to have caused thousands of hideously malformed miscarriages, had seemed like a terrific goad.
Herod’s had quickly been traced to the transfer of one of thousands of Human Endogenous Retroviruses—HERV—carried by all people within their DNA. The ancient virus, newly liberated, mutated and infectious, had been promptly renamed SHEVA, for Scattered Human Endogenous Viral Activation.
In those days, viruses had been assumed to be nothing more than selfish agents of disease.
“She’s been looking forward to seeing you,” Freedman said. “How long since your last visit?”
“Six months,” Dicken said.
“My favorite pilgrim, paying his respects to our viral Lourdes,” Freedman said. “Well, she’s a wonder, all right. And something of a saint, poor dear.”
Freedman and Dicken passed junctions with tubes branching southwest, northeast, and northwest to other shafts. Outside, the summer morning was warming rapidly. The sun hung just above the horizon, a subdued greenish ball. Cool air pulsed around them with a breathy moan.
They came to the end of the main tube. An engraved Formica placard to the right of the elevator door read, “MRS. CARLA RHINE.” Freedman punched the single white button. Dicken’s ears popped as the door closed behind them.
SHEVA had turned out to be much more than a disease. Shed only by males in committed relationships, the activated retrovirus served as a genetic messenger, ferrying complicated instructions for a new kind of birth. SHEVA infected recently fertilized human eggs—in a sense, hijacked them. The Herod’s miscarriages were first-stage embryos, called “interim daughters,” not much more than specialized ovaries devoted to producing a new set of precisely mutated zygotes.
Without additional sexual activity, the second-stage zygotes implanted and covered themselves with a thin, protective membrane. They survived the abortion of the first embryo and started a new pregnancy.
To some, this had looked like a kind of virgin birth.
Most of the second-stage embryos had gone to term. Worldwide, in two waves separated by four years, three million new children had been born. More than two and a half million of the infants had survived. There was still controversy over exactly who and what they were—a diseased mutation, a subspecies, or a completely new species.
Most simply called them virus children.
“Carla’s still cranking them out,” Freedman said as the elevator reached the bottom. “She’s shed seven hundred new viruses in the last four months. About a third are infectious, negative-strand RNA viruses, potentially real bastards. Fifty-two of them kill pigs within hours. Ninety-one are almost certainly lethal to humans. Another ten can probably kill both pigs and humans.” Freedman glanced over her shoulder to see his reaction.
“I know,” Dicken said dryly. He rubbed his hip. His leg bothered him when he stood for more than fifteen minutes. The same White House explosion that had taken his eye, twelve years ago, had left him partially disabled. Three rounds of surgery had allowed him to put aside the crutches but not the pain.
“Still in the loop, even at NCI?” Freedman asked.
“Trying to be,” he said.
“Thank God there are only four like her.”
“She’s our fault,” he said, and paused to reach down and massage his calf.
“Maybe, but Mother Nature’s still a bitch,” Freedman said, watching him with her hands on her hips.
A small airlock at the end of the concrete corridor cycled them through to the main floor. They were now fifty feet below ground. A guard in a crisp green uniform inspected their passes and permission papers and compared them with the duty and guest roster at her workstation.
“Please identify,” she told them. Both placed their eyes in front of scanners and simultaneously pressed their thumbs onto sensitive plates. A female orderly in hospital greens escorted them to the cleanup area.
Mrs. Rhine was housed in one of ten underground residences, four of them currently occupied. The residences formed the center of the most redundantly secure research facility on Earth. Though Dicken and Freedman would never come any closer than seeing her through a four-inch-thick acrylic window, they would have to go through a whole-body scrub before and after the interview. Before entering the viewing area and staging lab, called the inner station, they would put on special hooded undergarments impregnated with slow-release antivirals, zip up in plastic isolation suits, and attach themselves to positive pressure umbilical hoses.
Mrs. Rhine and her companions at the center never saw real human beings unless they were dressed to resemble Macy’s parade balloons.
On leaving, they would stand under a disinfectant shower, then strip down and shower again, scrubbing every orifice. The suits would be soaked and sterilized overnight, and the undergarments would be incinerated.
The four women interned at the facility ate well and exercised regularly. Their quarters—each roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment—were maintained by automated servants. They had their hobbies—Mrs. Rhine was a great one for hobbies—and access to a wide selection of books, magazines, TV shows, and movies.
Of course, the women were becoming more and more eccentric.
“Any tumors?” Dicken asked.
“Official question?” Freedman asked.
“Personal,” Dicken said.
“No,” Freedman said. “But it’s only a matter of time.”
Dicken handed the flowers to the orderly. “Don’t boil them,” he said.
“I’ll process them myself,” the orderly promised with a smile. “She’ll get them before you’re done here.” She passed them two sealed white paper bags containing their undergarments and showed them the way to the scrub stalls, then to the tall cabinets that held the isolation suits, as glossy and green as dill pickles.
Christopher Dicken was legendary even at Fort Detrick. He had tracked Mrs. Rhine to a motel in Bend, Oregon, where she had fled after the death of her husband and daughter. He had talked her into opening the door to the small, spare room, and had spent twenty minutes with her, unprotected, while Emergency Action vans gathered in the parking lot.
He had done all this, despite having already contracted Shiver from a woman in Mexico the year before. That woman, a plump female in her forties, seven months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her husband. A small, stupid, jackal-like man with a long criminal record, he had kept her alone and without medical help in a small room at the back of a shabby apartment for three months. Her baby had been born dead.
Something in the woman had produced a defensive viral response, enhanced by SHEVA, and her husband had suffered the consequences. In his darkest early morning vigils of pacing, tending phantom twitches and pains in his leg, alone and wide awake, Dicken had often thought of the husband’s death as natural justice, and his own exposure and subsequent illness as accidental blow-by—an occupational hazard.
Mrs. Rhine’s case was different. Her problems had been caused by an interplay of human and natural forces no one could have possibly predicted.
In the late nineties, she had suffered from end-stage renal disease and had been the recipient of an experimental xenotransplant—a pig kidney. The transplant had worked. Three years later, Mrs. Rhine had contracted SHEVA from her husband. This had stimulated an enthusiastic release of PERV—Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus—from the pig cells. Before Mrs. Rhine had been diagnosed and isolated at Fort Detrick, her pig and human retroviruses had shuffled genes—recombined—with latent herpes simplex virus and had begun to express, with diabolical creativity, a Pandora’s box of long-dormant diseases, and many new ones.
Ancient viral tool kits, Mark Augustine had called them, with true prescience.
Mrs. Rhine’s husband, newborn daughter, and seven relatives and friends had been infected by the first of her recombined viruses. They had all died within hours.
Of forty-one individuals who had received pig tissue transplants in the United States, and had subsequently been exposed to SHEVA, the women at the center were the only survivors. Perversely, they were immune to the viruses they produced. Isolated as they were, the four women never caught colds or flu. That made them extraordinary subjects for research—deadly but invaluable.
Mrs. Rhine was a virus hunter’s dream, and whenever Dicken did dream about her, he awoke in a cold sweat.
He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.
Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.
“Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to scrub.
Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove allowed them to pull up the other’s rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.
This took twenty minutes.
They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel hooks from an overhead track.
Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.
The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.
“You’re good for the inner,” the orderly told them through a bulkhead speaker.
The last hatch slid open with a silky whisper. Dicken walked ahead of Freedman into the inner station. In sync, they turned to the right and waited for the steel window blinds to ratchet up.
The few incidents of Shiver had started at least a hundred crash courses in medical and weapons-related research. If abused women, and women given xenotransplants, could all by themselves design and express thousands of killer plagues, what could a generation of virus children do?
Dicken clenched his jaw, wondering how much Carla Rhine had changed in six months.
Something of a saint, poor dear.
CHAPTER THREE Office of Special Reconnaissance LEESBURG, VIRGINIA (#ulink_40efcb7c-4a12-5d98-8de5-c93f4064f2e3)
Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.
The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use. Augustine’s hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.
“Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I’m tired. I’ve been traveling. There’s work to do.”
“Something’s developing, Mark. I’m sure you’ll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We’ve finally located a long-lost colleague.”
“Who?”
“Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.
Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.
The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and stupid, that gave him an advantage.
The maximum depth of Washington’s soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine’s assistant in EMAC—Emergency Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the National Reconnaissance Office.
Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.
“Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”
Browning rolled her eyes. “She’s not off limits according to any directive I’ve received. I certainly do not regard her as a sacred cow. It’s been seven years since she was on Oprah.”
“If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.
Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.
They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter greeted them with hard gray eyes.
Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed, sound-absorbing foam panels.
Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.
Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They’re living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.
“I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”
She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”
“A year and a half,” Augustine said.
“Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”
Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher Dicken. “I don’t see anything.”
“The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep Eye.”
“Lovely toys,” he commented.
“They were your idea.”
“I’ve just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”
“Oh. How was it?”
“Awful beyond belief.”
“No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”
“You’ll be the first to know, I’m sure,” Augustine said.
Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye’s lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.
“And…here’s Little Bird,” Browning’s voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.
The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightness to reveal the head and shoulders of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.
“Recognize her?” Browning asked.
“The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.
“That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”
“You’re right,” Augustine admitted.
The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from the house.
“I think that’s Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.
“Congratulations. You’re a voyeur,” Augustine said.
“I prefer ‘paparazzo.’”
The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.
“Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn’t she?”
Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.
Dark freckles, Augustine thought. She’s nervous.
“What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she’s going for a walk. And not to school, I’m thinking.”
Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if taking a morning stroll.
“Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don’t have anyone on site. I don’t want to lose the opportunity, so I’ve alerted a stringer.”
“You mean a bounty hunter. That’s not wise.”
Browning did not react.
“I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It’s the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly for these tactics.”
“It’s not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I’ve been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”
“By whom?” Augustine knew that his authority had been sliding of late, perhaps drastically since Riverside. But he had never imagined that Riverside would lead to an even more severe crackdown.
“It’s a sort of test,” Browning said.
The secretary of Health and Human Services shared authority over EMAC with the president. Forces within EMAC wanted to change that and remove HHS from the loop entirely, consolidating their power. Augustine had tried the same thing himself, years ago, in a different job.
Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don’t you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”
“They never married,” Augustine said.
“Well, well. The little bastard.”
“Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.
Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck you, Mark, for making me do your job.”
CHAPTER FOUR Maryland (#ulink_4555eb9e-a385-53f1-ad8f-10f0bfabcd30)
Mrs. Rhine stood in her living room, peering through the thick acrylic pane as if searching for the ghosts of another life. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, with stocky arms and legs but a thin torso, chin strong and pointed. She wore a bright yellow dress and a white blouse with a patchwork vest she had made herself. What they could see of her face between gauze bandages was red and puffy, and her left eye had swollen shut.
Her arms and legs were completely covered in Ace bandages. Mrs. Rhine’s body was trying to eliminate trillions of new viruses that could craftily claim they were part of her self, from her genome; but the viruses were not making her sick. Her own immune response was the principle cause of her torment.
Someone, Dicken could not remember who, had likened autoimmune disease to having one’s body run by House Republicans. A few years in Washington had eerily reinforced the aptness of this comparison.
“Christopher?” Mrs. Rhine called out hoarsely.
The lights in the inner station switched on with a click.
“It’s me,” Dicken answered, his voice sibilant within the hood.
Mrs. Rhine decorously sidestepped and curtsied, her dress swishing. Dicken saw that she had placed his flowers in a large blue vase, the same vase she had used the last time. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “White roses. My favorites. They still have some scent. Are you well?”
“I am. And you?”
“Itching is my life, Christopher,” she said. “I’m reading Jane Eyre. I think, when they come here to make the movie, down here deep in the Earth, as they will, don’t you know, that I will play Mr. Rochester’s first wife, poor thing.” Despite the swelling and the bandages, Mrs. Rhine’s smile was dazzling. “Would you call it typecasting?”
“You’re more the mousy, inherently lovely type who saves the rugged, half-crazed male from his darker self. You’re Jane.”
She pulled up a folding chair and sat. Her living room was normal enough, with a normal decor—couches, chairs, pictures on the walls, but no carpeting. Mrs. Rhine was allowed to make her own throw rugs. She also knitted and worked on a loom in another room, away from the windows. She was said to have woven a fairy-tale tapestry involving her husband and infant daughter, but she had never shown it to anyone.
“How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.
“As long as you’ll put up with me,” Dicken said.
“About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.
“They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can’t share it with me.”
“Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.
“I did. I loved Suddenly, Last Summer,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”
Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”
“Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I’m fine.”
“I know you are, Carla. You’re more sane than I am.”
“That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don’t have to worry about me, do I? Honestly, Marian’s been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she’d let me fix her hair.”
Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.
“They really aren’t treating me too badly, and I’m passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine’s face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the children doing, Christopher?”
Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.
“They’re doing okay,” Dicken said.
Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”
“Mostly. Some are hiding out.”
“What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I’m especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government’s help?”
“As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven’t kept in touch. She’s kind of gone underground.”
“You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”
“We were.”
“You shouldn’t lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.
“I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken’s busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.
“Any news on what they’re doing inside me, all those viruses?”
“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.
“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses…are they still carrying pig messages?”
“I don’t know, Carla.”
Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “Please, Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams…anything.”
Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It’s the least she deserves.”
In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.
They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.
CHAPTER FIVE Spotsylvania, Virginia (#ulink_f9bab310-e39d-5eef-a000-dd5b23763bb1)
“I hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.
“She doesn’t smell good as a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”
“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.
“We’re just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.
“I’m warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he’s just fooling.”
Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.
They weren’t making much money and they weren’t very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.
“She doesn’t look infeckshus,” the second male said.
“I mean it, guys, she’s just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.
“What’s your name?” Stella asked the first male.
“I don’t care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.
“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”
The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let’s go, Dave.”
Dave was working himself up. “She doesn’t fucking belong here,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”
“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”
Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I’m Stella,” she said.
Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn’t touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain’t you in a camp?”
“Dave!” the stooped fellow snapped.
Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn’t wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk’s halfhearted defense rankled.
Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.
“It’s nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It’s cool.”
“You are something, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”
Dave’s friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man’s hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.
“Fuck it, Dave, let’s go! They’ll come get her and maybe they’ll take us, too, if we get too close.”
“My people aren’t really infeckshus,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”
The clerk sucked in her breath.
Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.
What came out of Stella’s mouth in a soothing alto murmur, her eyes focused on Dave’s, was, “Don’t worry. It’s safe. If you want to beat me up, my blood won’t hurt you. I could be your own little Jesus.”
The fever-scent did its thing. The glands behind her ears began to pump defensive pheromones. Her neck felt hot.
“Shit,” the clerk said, and bumped up against the tall rack of cigarettes behind her.
Dave showed the whites of his eyes like a skittish horse. He veered toward the door, giving her a wide berth, the deliberate smell of her in his nose. She had snuffed the fuse of his anger.
Dave joined his friend. “She smells like fucking chocolate,” he said, and they kicked the glass doors open with their boots.
An old woman at the back of the store, surrounded by aisles jammed with puffed bags of potato chips, stared at Stella. Her hand shook a can of Pringles like a castanet. “Go away!”
The clerk moved in to defend the old woman. “Take your Gatorade and go home!” she barked at Stella. “Go home to your mama and don’t you never come back here.”
CHAPTER SIX The Longworth House Office Building WASHINGTON, D.C. (#ulink_075bfd5f-06ed-5815-ab2e-2257af33b84d)
“We’ve been over and over this,” Dick Gianelli told Mitch, dropping a stack of scientific reprints on the coffee table between them. The news was not good.
Gianelli was short and round and his usually pale face was now a dangerous red. “We’ve been reading everything you sent us ever since the congressman was elected. But they have twice as many experts, and they send twice as many papers. We’re drowning in papers, Mitch! And the language.” He thumped the stack. “Can’t your people, all the biologists, just write to be understood? Don’t they realize how important it is to get the word out to everybody?”
Mitch let his hands drop by his sides. “They’re not my people, Dick. My people are archaeologists. They tend to write sparkling prose.”
Gianelli laughed, stood up from the couch and shook out his arms, then tipped a finger under his tight collar, as if letting out steam. His office was part of the suite assigned to Representative Dale Wickham, D., Virginia, whom he had faithfully served as director of public science for two of the toughest terms in U.S. history. The door to Wickham’s office was closed. He was on the Hill today.
“The congressman has made his views clear for years now. Your colleagues, scientists all, have hopped on the gravy train. They’ve joined up with NIH and CDC and Emergency Action, and they pay their visits mostly across the aisle. Wilson at FEMA and Doyle at DOJ have undercut us every step of the way, squirming like puppies to get their funding treats. Opposing them is like standing outside in a hail of cannonballs.”
“So what can I take home with me?” Mitch asked. “To cheer up the missus. Any good news?”
Gianelli shrugged. Mitch liked Gianelli but doubted he would live to see fifty. Gianelli had all the markers: pear shape, excessive girth, ghostly skin, thinning black hair, creased earlobes. He knew it, too. He worked hard and cared too much and swallowed his disappointments. A good man in a bad time. “We got caught in a medical bear trap,” he said. “We’ve never been prepared. Our best model for an epidemic was military response. So now we’ve had ten years of Emergency Action. We’ve practically signed away our country to Beltway bureaucrats with military and law enforcement training. Mark Augustine’s crew, Mitch. We’ve given them almost absolute authority.”
“I don’t think I’m capable of understanding how those people think,” Mitch said.
“I thought I did, once,” Gianelli said. “We tried to build a coalition. The congressman roped in Christian groups, the NRA, conspiracy nuts, flag burners and flag lovers, anybody who’s ever expressed a shred of suspicion about the guv’ment. We’ve gone hat in hand to every decent judge, every civil libertarian still above ground, literally and figuratively. We’ve been checked every step of the way. It was made very clear to the congressman that if he threw up any more dust, he, personally, all on his lonesome, could force the president to declare martial law.”
“What’s the difference, Dick?” Mitch asked. “They’ve suspended habeas corpus.”
“For a special class, Mitch.”
“My daughter,” Mitch growled.
Gianelli nodded. “Civil courts still operate, though under special guidelines. Nothing much has changed for the frightened average citizen, who’s kind of fuzzy about civil rights anyway. When Mark Augustine put together Emergency Action, he wove a tight little piece of legislative fabric. He made sure every agency ever involved in managing disease and preparing for natural disaster had a piece of the pie—and a very smelly pie it is. We’ve created a new and vulnerable underclass, with fewer civil protections than any since slavery. This sort of stuff attracts the real sharks, Mitch. The monsters.”
“All they have are hatred and fear.”
“In this town, that’s a full house,” Gianelli said. “Washington eats truth and shits spin.” He stood. “We can’t challenge Emergency Action. Not this session. They’re stronger than ever. Maybe next year.”
Mitch watched Gianelli pace a circuit of the room. “I can’t wait that long. Riverside, Dick.”
Gianelli folded his hands. He would not meet Mitch’s eyes.
“The mob torched one of Augustine’s goddamned camps,” Mitch said. “They burned the children in their barracks. They poured gasoline around the pilings and lit them up. The guards just stood back and watched. Two hundred kids roasted to death. Kids just like my daughter.”
Gianelli put on a mask of public sympathy, but underneath it, Mitch could see the real pain.
“There haven’t even been arrests,” he added.
“You can’t arrest a city, Mitch. Even the New York Times calls them virus children now. Everyone’s scared.”
“There hasn’t been a case of Shiver in ten years. It was a fluke, Dick. An excuse for some people to trample on everything this country has ever stood for.”
Gianelli squinted at Mitch but did not challenge this appraisal. “There isn’t much more the congressman can do,” he said.
“I don’t believe that.”
Gianelli reached into his desk drawer and took out a bottle of Tums. “Everyone around here has fire in the belly. I have heartburn.”
“Give me something to take home, Dick. Please. We need hope,” Mitch said.
“Show me your hands, Mitch.”
Mitch held up his hands. The calluses had faded, but they were still there. Gianelli held his own hands beside Mitch’s. They were smooth and pink. “Want to really learn how to suck eggs, from an old hound dog? I’ve spent ten years with Wickham. He’s the smartest hound there is, but he’s up against a bad lot. The Republicans are the country’s pit bulls, Mitch. Barking in the night, all night, every night, right or wrong, and savaging their enemies without mercy. They claim to represent plain folks, but they represent those who vote, when they vote at all, on pocketbooks and fear and gut instinct. They control the House and the Senate, they stacked the court the last three terms, their man is in the White House, and bless them, they speak with one voice, Mitch. The president is dug in. But you know what the congressman thinks? He thinks the president doesn’t want Emergency Action to be his legacy. Eventually, maybe we can do something with that.” Gianelli’s voice dropped very low, as if he were about to blaspheme in the temple. “But not now. The Democrats can’t even hold a bake sale without arguing. We’re weak and getting weaker.”
He held out his hand. “The congressman will be back any minute. Mitch, you look like you haven’t slept in weeks.”
Mitch shrugged. “I lie awake listening for trucks. I hate being so far from Kaye and Stella.”
“How far?”
Mitch looked up from under his solid line of eyebrow and shook his head.
“Right,” Gianelli said. “Sorry.”
CHAPTER SEVEN Spotsylvania County (#ulink_748fe309-9d71-5dd0-ae94-fcb4ea19a539)
The old frame house snapped and popped in the morning heat. A moist breeze blew through the small rooms in lazy swirls. Kaye walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. She had awakened from a peculiar dream in which she was an atom slowly rising to connect with a much larger molecule, to fit in and complete something truly impressive. She felt at peace for the first time in months, despite the barbed memory of last night’s fight.
Kaye massaged the fingers of her right hand, then wriggled her wedding ring over a swollen knuckle into its familiar groove. Bees droned in the oleanders outside the window, well into their day’s work.
“Some dream,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled down one eyelid with a finger and stared at herself speculatively. “Under a little stress, are we?”
A few freckles remained under each eye from her pregnancy with Stella; when she was upset, they could still change from pale tan to ruddy ocher. Now, they were darker but not vivid. She splashed water on her cheeks and clipped her hair back, preparing for the hot day, ready to face more difficulties. Families were about staying together and healing.
If the bees can do it, so can I.
“Stella,” she called, knocking on her daughter’s bedroom door. “It’s nine o’clock. We slept in.”
Kaye padded into the small office in the laundry room and switched on the computer. She read the lines she had written before the squabble last night, then scrolled back through the last few pages:
“The role of SHEVA in the production of a new subspecies is but one function performed by this diverse and essential class of viruses. ERV and transposons—jumping genes—play large roles in tissue differentiation and development. Emotion and crisis and changing environments activate them, one variety at a time, or all together. They are mediators and messengers between cells, ferrying genes and coded data around many parts of the body, and even between individuals.
“Viruses and transposons most likely arose after the invention of sex, perhaps because of sex. To this day, sex brings them opportunity to move and carry information. They may have also emerged during the tumultuous genetic shuffling of our early immune system, like soldiers and cops running wild.
“Truly they are like original sin. How does sin shape our destiny?”
Kaye used a stylus to circle that last awkward, overreaching sentence. She marked it out and read some more.
“One thing we know already: We depend on retroviral and transposon activity during nearly every stage of our growth. Many are necessary partners.
“To assume that viruses and transposable elements are first and foremost causes of disease is like assuming that automobiles are first and foremost meant to kill people.
“Pathogens—disease-causing organisms—are like hormones and other signaling molecules, but their message is challenge and silence. Our own internal lions, pathogens test us. They winnow the old and weak. They sculpt life.
“Sometimes they bring down the young and the good. Nature is painful. Disease and death are part of our response to challenge. To fail, to die, is still to be part of nature, for success is built on many failures, and silence is also a signal.”
Her frame of mind had become increasingly abstract. The dream, the drone of the bees…
You were born with a caul, my dear.
Kaye suddenly remembered the voice of her maternal grandmother, Evelyn; words from nearly four decades ago. At the age of eight, Evelyn had told her something that her mother, a practical woman, had never thought to mention. “You came into this world with your tiny head covered. You were born with a caul. I was there, in the hospital with your mother. I saw it myself. The doctor showed it to me.”
Kaye remembered squirming with delicious anticipation in her grandmother’s ample lap and asking what a caul was. “A cap of loose flesh,” Evelyn had explained. “Some say it’s a mark of extraordinary understanding, even second sight. A caul warns us that you will learn things most others will never comprehend, and you will always be frustrated trying to explain what you know, and what seems so obvious to you. It’s supposed to be both a blessing and a curse.” Then the older woman had added, in a soft voice, “I was born with a caul, my dear, and your grandfather has never understood me.”
Kaye had loved Evelyn very much, but at times had thought her a little spooky. She returned her attention to the text on the monitor. She did not delete the paragraphs, but she did draw a large asterisk and exclamation point beside them. Then she saved the file and pushed the chair under the desk.
Four pages yesterday. A good day’s work. Not that it would ever see the light of day in any respectable journal. For the last eight years, all of her papers had appeared on clandestine Web sites.
Kaye listened closely to the morning house, as if to measure the day ahead. A curtain pull flapped against a window frame. Cardinals whistled in the maple tree outside.
She could not hear her daughter stirring.
“Stella!” she called, louder. “Breakfast. Want some oatmeal?”
No answer.
She walked in flapping slippers down the short hallway to Stella’s room. Stella’s bed was made but rumpled, as if she had been lying on it, tossing and turning. A bouquet of dried flowers, tied with a rubber band, rested on the pillow. A short stack of books had been tipped over beside the bed. On the sill, three stuffed Shrooz, about the size of guinea pigs, red and green and the very rare black and gold, hung their long noses into the room. More cascaded from the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Stella loved Shrooz because they were grumpy; they whined and squirmed and then groaned when moved.
Kaye searched the big backyard, tall brown grass faded into ivy and kudzu under the big old trees at the edge of the property. She could not afford to let her attention lapse even for a minute.
Then she returned to the house and Stella’s bedroom. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed. Stella had made a scent diary, a small blank book filled with cryptic writing and dated records of her emotions, scents collected from behind her ears and dabbed on each page. Stella kept it hidden, but Kaye had found it once while cleaning and had figured it out.
Kaye pushed her hands through the balls of dust and cat toys beneath the bed and thrust her fingers deep into the shadows. The book was not there.
Peace the illusion, peace the trap, no rest, no letting down her guard. Stella was gone. Taking the book meant she was serious.
Still shod in slippers, Kaye pushed through the gate and ran up the oak-lined street. She whispered, “Don’t panic, keep it together, God damn it.” The muscles in her neck knotted.
A quarter of a mile away, in front of the next house down the road in the rural neighborhood, she slowed to a walk, then stood in the middle of the cracked asphalt road, hugging herself, small and tense, like a mouse waiting for a hawk.
Kaye shaded her eyes against the sun and looked up at bloated gray clouds advancing shoulder to shoulder along the southern horizon. The air smelled sullen and jumpy.
If Stella had planned this, she would have run off after Mitch left for Washington. Mitch had left between six and seven. That meant her daughter had at least an hour’s head start. That realization shoved an icicle down Kaye’s spine.
Calling the police was not wise. Five years ago, Virginia had reluctantly acquiesced to Emergency Action and had begun rounding up the new children and sending them to camps in Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio. Years ago, Kaye and Mitch had withdrawn from parent support groups after a rash of FBI infiltrations. Mitch had assumed that Kaye in particular was a target for surveillance and possibly even arrest.
They were on their own. They had decided that was the safest course.
Kaye took off her slippers and ran barefoot back to the house. She would have to think like Stella and that was difficult. Kaye had observed her daughter as a mother and as a scientist for eleven years, and there had always been a small but important distance between them that she could not cross. Stella deliberated with a thoroughness Kaye admired, but reached conclusions she often found mystifying.
Kaye grabbed her handbag with her wallet and ID, pulled on her garden shoes, and exited through the back door. The small primer gray Toyota truck started instantly. Mitch maintained both their vehicles. She ground the tires down the dirt driveway, then caught herself and drove slowly along the country lane.
“Please,” she muttered, “no rides.”
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_eaae6d56-03ea-56de-a42f-91d96c88cc97)
Walking along the dirt margin of the asphalt road, Stella swung the plastic Gatorade bottle, rationing herself to a sip every few minutes. An old farm field plowed and marked for a new strip mall stretched to her right. Stella tightrope-walked a freshly cured concrete curb, not yet out of its mold boards. The sun was climbing in the east, black clouds stacked high in the south, and the air spun hot and full of the fragrances of dogwood and sycamore. The exhaust of cars going by, and a descending tail of carbon from a diesel truck, clogged her nose.
She felt at long last that she was doing something worthwhile. There was guilt, but she pushed aside concern for what her parents would think. Somewhere on this road she might meet someone who would not argue with her instincts, who would not feel pain simply because Stella existed. Someone like herself.
All her life she had lived among one kind of human, but she was another. An old virus called SHEVA had broken loose from human DNA and rearranged human genes. Stella and a generation of children like her were the result. This was what her parents had told her.
Not a freak. Just a different kind.
Stella Nova Rafelson was eleven years old. She felt as if she had been peculiarly alone all her life.
She sometimes thought of herself as a star, a bright little point in a very big sky. Humans filled the sky by the billions and washed her out like the blinding sun.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_5c612bc4-9166-5465-89c6-304e8b1ee40e)
Kaye swung left just beyond the courthouse, turned the corner, drove half a block, and pulled into a gas station. When she had been a child, there had been little rubber-coated trip wires that caused a bell to ding whenever a car arrived. There were no longer any wires, no bell, and nobody came out to see what Kaye needed. She parked by the bright red-and-white convenience store and wiped tears from her eyes.
She sat for a minute in the Toyota, trying to focus.
Stella had a red plastic coin purse that held ten dollars in emergency money. There was a drinking fountain in the courthouse, but Kaye thought Stella would prefer something cold, sweet, and fruity. Odors of artificial strawberry and raspberry that Kaye found repugnant, Stella would wallow in like a cat in a bed of catnip. “It’s a long walk,” Kaye told herself. “It’s hot. She’s thirsty. It’s her day out, away from mom.” She bit her lip.
Kaye and Mitch had protected Stella like a rare orchid throughout her short life. Kaye knew that, hated the necessity of it. It was how they had stayed together. Her daughter’s freedom depended on it. The chat rooms were full of the agonized stories of parents giving up their children, watching them be sent to Emergency Action schools in another state. The camps.
Mitch, Stella, and Kaye had lived a dreamy, tense, unreal existence, no way for an energetic, outgoing young girl to grow up, no way for Mitch to stay sane. Kaye tried not to think too much about herself or what was happening between her and Mitch, she might just snap, and then where would they be? But their difficulties had obviously had an effect on Stella. She was a daddy’s girl, to Kaye’s pride and secret sadness—she had once been a daddy’s girl, too, before both her parents had died, over twenty years ago—and Mitch had been gone a lot lately.
Kaye entered the store through the glass double doors. The clerk, a thin, tired-looking woman a little younger than Kaye, had out a mop and bucket and was grimly spraying the counter and floor with Lysol.
“Excuse me, did you see a girl, tall, about eleven?”
The clerk raised the mop like a lance and poked it at her.
CHAPTER TEN Washington, D.C. (#ulink_617627df-a247-5f3b-a74f-f47086d64853)
A tall, stooped man with thinning white hair sauntered into the office carrying a worn briefcase. Gianelli stood up. “Congressman, you remember Mitch Rafelson.”
“I do, indeed,” Wickham said, and held out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The hand was dry and hard as wood. “Does anybody know you’re here, Mitch?”
“Dick snuck me in, sir.”
Wickham appraised Mitch with a slight tremor of his head. “Come over to my office, Mitch,” the congressman said. “You, too, Dick, and close the door behind you.”
They walked across the hall. Wickham’s office was covered with plaques and photos, a lifetime of politics.
“Justice Barnhall had a heart attack this morning at ten,” Wickham said.
Mitch’s face fell. Barnhall had consistently championed civil rights, even for SHEVA children and their parents.
“He’s in Bethesda,” Wickham said. “They don’t hold out much hope. The man is ninety years old. I’ve just been speaking with the Senate minority leader. We’re going to the White House tomorrow morning.” Wickham laid his briefcase down on a couch and stuck his hands in the pockets of his chocolate brown slacks. “Justice Barnhall was one of the good guys. Now the president wants Olsen, and he’s a corker, Mitch. We haven’t seen his like since Roger B. Taney. A lifelong bachelor, face like a stoat, mind like a steel trap. Wants to undo eighty years of so-called judicial activism, thinks he’ll have the country by the balls, six to three. And he probably will. We’re not going to win this round, but we can land a few punches. Then, they’ll lash us on the votes. We’re going to get creamed.” Wickham stared sadly at Mitch. “I do love a fair fight.”
The secretary knocked on the door jamb. “Congressman, is Mr. Rafelson here?” She looked right at Mitch, one eyebrow cocked.
Gianelli asked, “Who wants to know?”
“Won’t use her name and sounds upset. System board says she’s on a disposable cell phone using an offshore line. That’s no longer legal, sir.”
“You don’t say,” Wickham said, looking out the window.
“My wife knows I’m here. No one else,” Mitch said.
“Get her number and call her back, Connie,” Wickham said. “Put it on the puzzler, and route it through, oh, Tom Haney’s office in Boca Raton.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wickham gestured toward his desk phone. “We can link her line to a special scrambler for congressional office communications,” he said, but tapped his wristwatch. “Starts and ends with garbage, and unless you know the key, it all sounds like garbage. We change the key every call. Takes NSA about a minute or so to break it, so keep it short.”
The secretary made the connection. Mitch stared between the two men, his heart sinking, and picked up the receiver on the desk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Spotsylvania County (#ulink_3c57f6e5-7a71-549e-98c3-58145dd538d8)
Stella sat in the shade of an old wooden bus shelter, clutching her book to her chest. She had been sitting there for an hour and a half. The Gatorade bottle was long since empty and she was thirsty. The morning heat was stifling and the sky was clouding over. The air had thickened with that spooky electric dampness that meant a big storm was brewing. All of her emotions had flip-flopped. “I’ve been really stupid,” she told herself. “Kaye will be so mad.”
Kaye seldom showed her anger. Mitch, when he was home, was the one who paced and shook his head and clenched his fists when things got tense. But Stella could tell when Kaye was angry. Her mother could get just as angry as Mitch, though in a quiet way.
Stella hated anger in the house. It smelled like old cockroaches.
Kaye and Mitch never took it out on Stella. Both treated her with patient tenderness, even when they clearly did not want to, and that made Stella feel what she called steepy, odd and different and apart.
Stella had made up that word, steepy, and lots of others, most of which she kept to herself.
It was tough to be responsible for a lot, and maybe all, of their anger. Hard to know she was to blame for Mitch not being able to go dig up pottery and middens, old garbage dumps, and for Kaye not being able to work in a lab or teach or do anything but write articles and books that somehow never got published or even finished.
Stella knit her long fingers and raised her knee, filling the hollow of the fingers and tugging her arms straight. She heard a vehicle and pushed back into the shadow of the enclosure, lifting her feet into the gloom. A red Ford pickup drove slowly by, clean, new, with a smooth white plastic camper on the back. The camper had a square shiny little door made of smoky plastic in the rear. It looked expensive, much nicer than the little Toyota truck or Mitch’s old Dodge Intrepid.
The red truck slowed, stopped, shifted smoothly into reverse, and backed up. Stella tried to squeeze into the corner, her back pressed against splintery wood. She suddenly just wanted to go home. She could find her way back, she was sure of it; she could find it by the smell of the trees. But car exhaust and pretty soon rain would make that harder. The rain would make it much harder.
The truck stopped and the engine switched off. The driver opened his door and got out on the side away from Stella. She could only see a little bit of him through the truck’s tinted windows. He had gray hair and a beard. He walked slowly around the truck bed and camper, the shadows of his legs visible under the frame.
“Hello, Miss,” he said, stopping a respectful four or five yards from where she was trying to hide. He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts. In his mouth he clenched an unlit pipe. He adjusted the pipe with one hand, removed it, pointed it at her. “You live around here?”
Stella nodded in the shadow.
His goatee was all gray and neatly trimmed. He was potbellied but dressed neatly, and his calf-high socks and running shoes were clean and white. He smelled confident, what she could smell behind thick swipes of deodorant and the rum-and-cherry-scented tobacco tamped into the pipe.
“You should be with your family and friends,” he said.
“I’m heading home,” Stella said.
“Bus won’t come by again until this evening. Only two stops a day here.”
“I’m walking.”
“Well, that’s fine. You shouldn’t take rides with strangers.”
“I know.”
“Can I help? Make a phone call to your folks?”
Stella said nothing. They had one secure phone at home, strictly for emergencies, and they bought disposable cell phones for occasional use. They always used a kind of family code when they talked, even with the disposables, but Mitch said they could identify your voice no matter how much you tried to change it.
She wanted the man in shorts to go away.
“Are your folks at home, Miss?”
Stella looked up at the sun peeking through the clouds.
“If you’re alone, I know some people who can help,” he said. “Special friends. Listen. I made a recording of them.” He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small recorder. He pressed a button and held out the machine for her to listen.
She had heard such songs and whistles before, on TV and on the radio. When she had been three, she had heard a boy sing songs like that, too. And a few years ago, in the house in Richmond, the big brick house with the iron gate and the guard dogs and four couples, nervous, thin people who seemed to have a lot of money, bringing their children together to play around an indoor swimming pool. She vividly remembered listening to their singing and being too shy to join in. Sweet interweaves of tunes, like meadowlarks singing their hearts out in a berry patch, as Mitch had said.
That was what she heard coming from the recorder.
Voices like hers.
Big drops of rain left crayon-jabs of wetness on the road and in the dirt. The sky and trees behind the man with the goatee flared icy white against the charcoal gray of the sky.
“It’s going to get wet,” the man said. “Miss, it isn’t good to be out here by yourself. Heck, this shelter could even attract lightning, who knows?” He pulled a cell phone from his back pocket. “Can I call someone for you? Your mom or dad?”
He didn’t smell bad. In fact, he did not smell of much at all except for the rum-and-cherry tobacco. She had to learn how to judge people and even take chances. It was the only way to get along. She made a decision. “Could you call?” Stella asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just tell me their number.”
CHAPTER TWELVE Leesburg (#ulink_14741ecb-5698-569d-97fe-474684585348)
Mark Augustine placed his hand on the back of Rachel Browning’s chair. The room was quiet except for the hum of equipment fans and a faint clicking noise.
They were watching the plump man in khaki shorts, the red truck, the lanky, awkward girl that was Kaye Lang Rafelson’s daughter.
A virus child.
“Is that your stringer, Rachel?”
“I don’t know,” Browning said.
“A good Samaritan, maybe?” Augustine asked. Internally, he was furious, but would not give Browning the satisfaction of showing it. “He could be a child molester.”
For the first time, Browning revealed uncertainty. “Any suggestions?” she asked.
Augustine felt no relief that she was asking his advice. This would simply involve him in her chain of decisions, and that was the last thing he wanted. Let her hang herself, all by herself.
“If things are going wrong, I need to make some calls,” he said.
“We should wait,” Browning said. “It’s probably okay.”
The Little Bird hovered about thirty feet above the red truck and the bus stop, the paunchy middle-aged man and the young girl.
Augustine’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Spotsylvania County (#ulink_59c89362-7342-5dfe-93ff-9269e4ae4c80)
The rain fell heavily and the air got darker as they climbed into the truck. Too late Stella noticed that the man had stuffed waxed cotton up his nose. He sat on the bench seat behind the wheel and offered her a mint TicTac, but she hated mint. He popped two into his mouth and gestured with the phone. “Nobody answers,” he said. “Daddy at work?”
She turned away.
“I can drop you at your house, but maybe, if it’s okay with you, I know some people would like to meet you,” he said.
She was going against everything her parents had ever told her, to give him the house number, to sit in his truck. But she had to do something, and it looked as if today was the day.
She had never walked so far from home. The rain would change everything about the air and the smells. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Fred,” the man answered. “Fred Trinket. I know you’d like to meet them, and they surely would like to meet you.”
“Stop talking that way,” Stella said.
“What way?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
Fred Trinket had clogged his nose with cotton and his mouth sang with shrill mint.
“Of course,” he said reasonably. “I know that, honey. I have a shelter. A place for kids in trouble. Would you like to see some pictures?” Trinket asked. “They’re in the glove box.” He watched her, still smiling. He had a kind enough face, she decided. A little sad. He seemed concerned about how she felt. “Pictures of my kids, the ones on the recorder.”
Stella felt intensely curious. “Like me?” she asked.
“Just like you,” Fred said. “You’re sparking real pretty, you know that? The others spark the same way when they’re curious. Something to see.”
“What’s sparking?”
“Your freckles,” Fred said, pointing. “They spread out on your cheeks like butterfly wings. I’m used to seeing that at my shelter. I could call your house again, see if somebody’s home, tell your daddy or mama to meet us. Should I?”
He was getting nervous. She could smell that much, not that it meant anything. Everybody was nervous these days. He did not want to hurt her, she was pretty sure; there was nothing horny about his scent or his manner, and he did not smell of cigarettes or alcohol.
He did not smell anything like the young men in the convenience store.
She told herself again she would have to take chances if she wanted to get anywhere, if she wanted anything to change. “Yes,” she said.
Fred pushed redial. The cell phone beeped the tune of the house number. Still no answer. Her mother was probably out looking for her.
“Let’s go to my house,” Fred said. “It’s not far and there are cold drinks in the ice chest. Strawberry soda. Genuine Nehi in long-necked bottles. I’ll call your mama again when we get there.”
She swallowed hard, opened the glove box, and pulled out a packet of color photos, five by sevens. The kids in the first photo, seven of them, were having a party, a birthday party, with a bright red cake. Fred stood in the background beside a plump older woman with a blank look. Other than Fred and the older woman, the kids at the party were all about her age. One boy might have been older, but he was standing in the background.
All like her. SHEVA children.
“Jesus,” Stella said.
“Easy on that,” Fred said amiably. “Jesus is Lord.”
The bumper sticker on Fred’s truck said that. On the tailgate was glued a golden plastic fish. The fish, labeled “Truth,” was eating another fish with legs, labeled “Darwin.”
Fred turned on the motor and put the truck in gear. The rain was falling in big hard drops, tapping on the roof and the hood like a million bored fingers.
“Battle of the Wilderness took place not far from here,” Fred said as he drove. He turned right carefully, as if worried about jostling precious cargo. “Civil War. Holy place in its way. Real quiet. I love it out this way. Less traffic, fewer condo-minimums, right?”
Stella leafed through the pictures again, found some more stuck in a plastic pocket. Seven different kids, mugging for the camera or staring at it seriously, some sitting in big chairs in a big house.
One boy had no expression at all. “Who’s this?” she asked Fred.
Fred spared a quick look. “That is Will. Strong Will, Mother calls him. He lived off snakes and squirrels before he came to our shelter.” Fred Trinket smiled and shook his head at the thought. “You’ll like him. And the others, too.”
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Greg Bear
Evolution is no longer just a theory – and nature is more of a bitch goddess than a kindly mother – in this tense science thriller from the author of the Nebula Award-winning Darwin’s RadioStella Nova is one of the ‘virus children’, a generation of genetically enhanced babies born a dozen years before to mothers infected with the SHEVA virus.In fact, the children represent the next great evolutionary leap and a new species of human, Homo sapiens novus, but this is officially denied. They’re gentle, charming and persuasive, possessed of remarkable traits. Nevertheless, they are locked up in special schools, quarantined from society, feared and reviled.‘Survival of the fittest’ takes on a new dimension as the children reach puberty. Stella is one of the first to find herself attracted to another ‘virus child’, but the authorities are watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike the next blow in their escalating war to preserve ‘humankind’ at any cost.
Darwin’s
Children
Greg Bear
To my father,
Dale Franklin Bear
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u2c3e85f2-8110-55ae-bd90-3e91a266577d)
Title Page (#udfc13c1f-199c-509c-969c-b70c01b7bbcf)
Dedication (#u68135f1c-bdc5-5f94-ab00-67ac971f2243)
PART ONE SHEVA +12 (#u35164c5e-48a9-5fa2-a97b-a82df7e1cccd)
CHAPTER ONE Spotsylvania County, Virginia (#ue3e93a7a-9a41-5f58-8727-c9ed78d79e2a)
CHAPTER TWO Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: USAMRIID FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND (#u869a2fa7-880c-5654-bd98-3315cacacbe9)
CHAPTER THREE Office of Special Reconnaissance LEESBURG, VIRGINIA (#u589dbb10-6d12-5b54-ba5e-441449b8e37d)
CHAPTER FOUR Maryland (#uafb8b5b1-f7fc-5a07-857f-913b1caed4e0)
CHAPTER FIVE Spotsylvania, Virginia (#ue1da6946-986b-5836-a0fc-c4fde285a937)
CHAPTER SIX The Longworth House Office Building WASHINGTON, D.C. (#u143e1c94-3bc7-5d48-96f8-4113041dddfd)
CHAPTER SEVEN Spotsylvania County (#ua3ee4775-32ab-5f38-a31d-9202668378b2)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#u9462d0d9-4a79-5b03-b2a9-c2d4a74749ed)
CHAPTER NINE (#ue764c53d-d0c0-5a7c-96ea-6816960731cf)
CHAPTER TEN Washington, D.C. (#u64e213af-f721-5db2-839f-3301128b0307)
CHAPTER ELEVEN Spotsylvania County (#u89485395-9170-5234-bdc4-13653f5f123b)
CHAPTER TWELVE Leesburg (#u683a2baf-5e19-50dd-b42d-52d7a9fe7ff3)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Spotsylvania County (#u568975b2-c6b6-5d2c-8837-5ecaa0e48278)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#u31bf951c-197f-59cd-b63b-6e5fe43b3b67)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#u4a03a9e2-d484-5fc2-b964-6ce97cb2c3f8)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#uc4f07759-0444-59dc-8825-6391116be789)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#u0f94aa42-db94-5402-8dff-4b9c3c1447ac)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#u97fe1bac-d7ef-5b51-ad02-a6dd32a5bbb0)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#u24a44a57-542f-56de-bdc3-fe05fb11c966)
CHAPTER TWENTY Leesburg (#u78a4c2e1-6ed4-5e65-8636-ea79e829c345)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Spotsylvania County (#uf2b3577e-7334-558c-97c5-6b3106339c12)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Leesburg (#u99a64838-8a55-56d3-a7d0-e70699d48858)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Spotsylvania County (#u064752a7-fc9b-5757-849f-d8445bc23f8d)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Washington, D.C., Ohio (#ue41e69b7-e29e-5366-a43d-746baadd58d8)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Spotsylvania County (#ued599ed0-c87c-5d06-b47f-3477bb6bd68e)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#ucc348998-ef90-5483-8326-547ab6f14f8d)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Ohio (#u4b8f60ff-b2c0-5944-a6ee-432401532028)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Pennsylvania (#uc86c6562-2f48-594a-9b2f-7ee8e543c9ff)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Joseph Goldberger School for Children with Special Needs, Emergency Action Ohio, Central District Authority (#u633c06fb-475d-5899-aff7-2da2f7560eb5)
CHAPTER THIRTY Pennsylvania (#u5a034a34-596e-517d-b3d7-c027e83a2280)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Ohio (#u87657581-6626-56ec-8f45-05f4b3c24adc)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Pennsylvania (#u890e4bce-5e66-5235-96cc-51d9a668be03)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Ohio (#u44965755-0da3-53d4-83e8-5f379a8d0775)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Pennsylvania (#udd202353-52a0-533b-906e-1cb2b99b7a11)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Ohio (#u8d8aaa20-7ffb-5d06-9bc8-52ff1a2c137b)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Pennsylvania (#u40a7e6db-de1e-5db5-8e57-d1b951966d15)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Ohio (#u3cee9d63-58c7-569f-a4dd-15f299369aaf)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Pennsylvania (#u01c134d4-7e34-5db8-9cd9-11bfdac4f7cf)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Ohio (#ufd85f18d-dc2d-51b3-acb5-317abb47f5ba)
CHAPTER FORTY The Poconos, Pennsylvania (#u84264718-fa60-5818-9eaf-56b5cb609008)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Ohio (#u6bacb7b0-f2b9-5710-bba8-7c5a507cc0a3)
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Pennsylvania (#ue942f359-a6eb-5193-b615-fe1768b25afe)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE Ohio (#ue154d395-d51c-52aa-88f6-bf1b95c274be)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR The Poconos, Pennsylvania (#u9f412481-8f42-52d9-8da6-2a4940b3077a)
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE Ohio (#udabbdea2-64eb-57bc-8d51-bf1a3086e766)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX Pennsylvania (#u3ddcd4fe-2487-5778-9203-1e7b174d6a9f)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Ohio (#u33421dd0-74fb-59fa-b4be-608214d2670a)
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Pennsylvania (#u752ab2d7-7227-5316-bdb1-03eaab3b8a75)
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE Ohio (#u626034e0-5a74-57c0-8167-521165ec3690)
CHAPTER FIFTY Pennsylvania (#u46481e32-8182-5d7d-b152-52cd947d3ac5)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE Ohio (#u7a09add1-22f3-565f-b490-fc73e2fd3cce)
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO Pennsylvania (#u6fc46bbc-61f9-5349-83e7-b6df05602387)
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE Pennsylvania-Arizona (#u2bc710f3-ad36-5f64-b131-add0ebdc9750)
PART TWO SHEVA + 15 (#u1115c406-1254-521c-9a2f-aee0518db4f1)
CHAPTER ONE Washington, D.C. (#u9d3049d3-e2a3-5b70-b28f-0db44e5b8fba)
CHAPTER TWO Hart Senate Office Building Plenary session of the Senate Emergency Action Oversight Committee, closed hearing WASHINGTON, D.C. (#u366b2eeb-88f0-5e57-b9c8-d9f6b823ad19)
CHAPTER THREE Sable Mountain Emergency Action School ARIZONA (#u748fd0d9-b675-56c6-b853-88f20013e55a)
CHAPTER FOUR Pathogenics Center Viral Threat Assessment Division, Sandia Labs NEW MEXICO (#u608a304f-683f-50a6-99e6-d3deaa95542b)
CHAPTER FIVE Washington, D.C. (#u5e3cfdc5-0744-58f8-bb5a-ccd6fbdb7a59)
CHAPTER SIX New Mexico (#uf63a9010-91f2-597c-aaea-84bce8c90aaf)
CHAPTER SEVEN near Lubbock, Texas (#u7f7eb6b4-fcfc-5dcf-b4bd-a63923530b5a)
CHAPTER EIGHT Washington, D.C. (#u450823b6-2ab8-579f-a5af-ff6c4df1eb94)
CHAPTER NINE New Mexico (#u156cbc5f-5e88-5293-a4c5-7245e3d9d8bd)
CHAPTER TEN Arizona (#u7d48fb31-c91b-5941-b36f-e74dc64b2e5b)
CHAPTER ELEVEN Americol Research Headquarters BALTIMORE, MARYLAND (#u380ff1b4-0ede-55a9-9c65-41e786da0b7d)
CHAPTER TWELVE Arizona (#uc8b33767-a07c-5c25-b9cf-813fc3d6e537)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Baltimore (#u563cf685-aa44-56b6-b361-79db04535d85)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Arizona (#u0fc5709c-2e11-5455-a8b3-ca2cff46a50c)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Baltimore (#u4232e2d4-78f2-5c34-b6f1-ecac5e111c6e)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ufac157d1-0170-5dfb-857e-4e19c9b4a348)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Oregon (#u2dfe0ba4-2ffb-55c2-8ca6-cddecd750294)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Arizona (#u7cfe496c-9535-5066-abc6-ac676fab137f)
CHAPTER NINETEEN Baltimore (#u7b8ff1a5-3be0-5155-aac9-ec8eed33505a)
CHAPTER TWENTY Oregon (#uea4b004e-2b37-5a46-8bb5-5cfa7d48e39c)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Baltimore (#u67720a52-3725-5e42-a209-bf050fecc518)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Oregon (#ued8a2619-c53a-5d13-bbd4-3ef7457286c5)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE New Mexico (#u07a516b7-15fa-566d-b1a5-232cbdec4ae2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Arizona (#ue0a605f7-732f-5a03-873e-6351ae200cf2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Oregon (#u7686e961-7c29-5037-a2aa-1f3fde712a0e)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Baltimore (#ub5cc685f-d961-5de1-97cb-dc9000a0423e)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Arizona (#u085d835c-a248-5049-9739-6c03f7d451e5)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Baltimore (#ufef0babc-3c51-5c53-a778-ee5450fbab1b)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Arizona (#u85cbfd54-50db-5b7d-8d15-779b57cc7814)
CHAPTER THIRTY Oregon (#ue056df5f-34d4-5ad9-8685-bf527e907d99)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Arizona (#u4c8fe790-7d7b-5596-bbcb-4765fc25af3b)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Oregon (#uc51dd13e-1dd1-5dda-8770-f9c43484b205)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE New Mexico (#u9e92c7ba-989d-5582-99a5-c7cf3a90925a)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Baltimore-Washington (#ue747a41a-69e1-5ecc-be7e-91fe18abaa58)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE New Mexico (#u6b51e971-5577-5f43-9c84-a4d811a73d4e)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Arizona (#uf711d509-405e-59cc-b63d-58af525eaf7e)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Maryland (#uaa385c87-ae0b-52ff-b059-d7a9a42f561e)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Oregon (#u5cf02b48-a60f-5ddb-b3c4-013e30236385)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE New Mexico (#u474f5dac-ee39-53a2-b131-126813280175)
CHAPTER FORTY California (#u7c001593-d4bf-53a8-b326-e4434c8c7b94)
PART THREE SHEVA + 18 (#u6848f0f8-7569-5368-a6ac-eb69d7f8b925)
CHAPTER ONE Fort Detrick, Maryland (#u886bcc20-9144-5e91-b907-413cef9b7041)
CHAPTER TWO Central California (#u91cd209d-406d-5f02-a750-5269c6d250b6)
CHAPTER THREE Lake Stannous, Northern California (#ua200793a-bf04-53ee-923c-40d3c0584301)
CHAPTER FOUR Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA (#u0e4cc40a-62dc-57d0-ad18-8785e8d0f74d)
CHAPTER FIVE Lake Stannous, California (#u78e3053e-af8e-5164-823d-c81f9f2e1509)
CHAPTER SIX Spent River, Oregon (#ud8bef54d-d07c-57fd-8f6a-6cfea84e9edb)
CHAPTER SEVEN Lake Stannous (#u19db18d0-974a-5b5d-922c-ee090b5214c2)
EPILOGUE SHEVA2 + 1 LONE PINE, CALIFORNIA (#ub0bfa246-aca5-5943-8073-b2f463d32d72)
CAVEATS (#u687fd115-f48a-5f8e-8b4c-d2898ddb0de3)
A SHORT BIOLOGICAL PRIMER (#u3801c6d1-7d12-5b86-bb63-ec8c46680f83)
SHORT GLOSSARY OF SCIENTIFIC TERMS (#u2278538b-6dac-517a-831c-c62d064770eb)
A BRIEF READING LIST (#u29f0ce5a-9a72-5b73-906f-78bb89141cc0)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#u641cfc58-c2e6-5fae-89f7-45f2ba3ae9cf)
DARWIN’S CHILDREN (#ud7e2778a-416e-59b1-ab70-a78c42a89c71)
Also by Greg Bear (#uf4249b7c-7a1f-5bbd-bed5-e9ebe0c7d9f5)
Copyright (#u55ea2dbf-8fd2-519a-965c-00103bbe8c3b)
About the Publisher (#u415ab4b0-ef56-513b-82e9-662a2c6e9669)
PART ONE SHEVA +12 (#ulink_4b19cda2-b14a-593d-adbd-0a9584d8c0a0)
“America’s a cruel country. There’s a whole lot of people would just as soon stomp you like an ant. Listen to talk radio. Plenty of dummies, damned few ventriloquists.”
“There’s a wolf snarl behind the picnics and Boy Scout badges.”
“They want to kill our kids. Lord help us all.”
—Anonymous Postings, ALT.NEWCHILD.FAM
“Citing ‘severe threats to national security,’ Emergency Action this week has requested of the U.S. Justice Department the authority to hack and shut down SHEVA parent Web sites and even e-journals and newspapers guilty of spreading inaccurate information—‘lies’—against EMAC and the U.S. government. Some parent advocacy groups complain this is already the norm. Mid-level Justice Department officials have passed the request along to the office of the attorney general for further legal review, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.
“Some legal experts say that even legitimate newspaper sites could be hacked or shut down without warning should approval be granted, and the granting of such approval is likely in itself to be kept secret.”
—Seattle Times-PI Online
“God had nothing to do with making these children. I don’t care what you think about creationism or evolution, we’re on our own now.”
—Owen Withey, Creation Science News
CHAPTER ONE Spotsylvania County, Virginia (#ulink_18416528-a5cd-543e-b86b-1e7cf68d8d65)
Morning lay dark and quiet around the house. Mitch Rafelson stood with coffee cup in hand on the back porch, dopey from just three hours of sleep. Stars still pierced the sky. A few persistent moths and bugs buzzed around the porch light. Raccoons had been at the garbage can in back, but had left, whickering and scuffling, hours ago, discouraged by lengths of chain.
The world felt empty and new.
Mitch put his cup in the kitchen sink and returned to the bedroom. Kaye lay in bed, still asleep. He adjusted his tie in the mirror above the dresser. Ties never looked right on him. He grimaced at the way his suit hung on his wide shoulders, the gap around the collar of his white shirt, the length of sleeve visible beyond the cuff of his coat.
There had been a row the night before. Mitch and Kaye and Stella, their daughter, had sat up until two in the morning in the small bedroom trying to talk it through. Stella was feeling isolated. She wanted, needed to be with young people like her. It was a reasonable position, but they had no choice.
Not the first time, and likely not the last. Kaye always approached these events with studied calm, in contrast to Mitch’s evasion and excuses. Of course they were excuses. He had no answers to Stella’s questions, no real response to her arguments. They both knew she ultimately needed to be with her own kind, to find her own way.
Finally, too much, Stella had stomped off and slammed the door to her room. Kaye had started crying. Mitch had held her in bed and she had gradually slipped into twitching sleep, leaving him staring at the darkened ceiling. He tracking the play of lights from a truck grumbling down the country road outside, wondering, as always, if the truck would come up their drive, come for their daughter, come to claim bounty or worse.
He hated the way he looked in what Kaye called his Mr. Smith duds—as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He lifted one hand and rotated it, studying the palm, the long, strong fingers, wedding ring—though he and Kaye had never gotten a license. It was the hand of a hick.
He hated to drive into the capital, through all the checkpoints, using his congressional appointment pass. Slowly moving past all the army trucks full of soldiers, deployed to stop yet another desperate parent from setting off another suicide bomb. There had been three such blasts since spring.
And now, Riverside, California.
Mitch walked to the left side of the bed. “Good morning, love,” he whispered. He stood for a moment, watching his woman, his wife. His eyes moved along the sleeve of her pajama top, absorbing every wrinkle in the rayon, every silken play of pre-dawn light, down to slim hands, curled fingers, nails bitten to the quick.
He bent to kiss her cheek and pulled the covers over her arm. Her eyes fluttered open. She brushed the back of his head with her fingers. “G’luck,” she said.
“Back by four,” he said.
“Love you.” Kaye pushed into the pillow with a sigh.
Next stop was Stella’s room. He never left the house without making the rounds, filling his eyes and memory with pictures of wife and daughter and house, as if, should they all be taken away, should this be the last time, he could replay the moment. Fat good it would do.
Stella’s room was a neat jumble of preoccupations and busyness in lieu of having friends. She had pinned a farewell photo of their disreputable orange tabby on the wall over her bed. Tiny stuffed animals spilled from her cedar chest, beady eyes mysterious in the shadows. Old paperback books filled a small case made of pine boards that Mitch and Stella had hammered together last winter. Stella enjoyed working with her father, but Mitch had noticed the distance growing between them for a couple of years now.
Stella lay on her back in a bed that had been too short for over a year. At eleven, she was almost as tall as Kaye and beautiful in her slender, round-faced way, skin pale copper and tawny gold in the glow of the night-light, hair dark brown with reddish tints, same texture as Kaye’s and not much longer.
Their family had become a triangle, still strong, but with the three sides stretching each month. Neither Mitch nor Kaye could give Stella what she really needed.
And each other?
He looked up to see the orange line of sunrise through the filmy white curtains of Stella’s window. Last night, cheeks freckling with anger, Stella had demanded to know when they would let her out of the house on her own, without makeup, to be with kids her own age. Her kind of kids. It had been two years since her last “play date.”
Kaye had done wonders with home teaching, but as Stella had pointed out last night, over and over again, with rising emotion, “I am not like you!” For the first time, Stella had formally proclaimed: “I am not human!”
But of course she was. Only fools thought otherwise. Fools, and monsters, and their daughter.
Mitch kissed Stella on the forehead. Her skin was warm. She did not wake up. Stella as she slept smelled like her dreams, and now she smelled the way tears taste, tang of salt and sadness.
“Got to go,” he murmured. Stella’s cheeks produced waves of golden freckles. Mitch smiled.
Even asleep, his daughter could say good-bye.
CHAPTER TWO Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: USAMRIID FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND (#ulink_537badeb-e1a3-5906-b2d9-bce27647733c)
“People died, Christopher,” Marian Freedman said. “Isn’t that enough to make us cautious, even a little crazy?”
Christopher Dicken walked beside her, tilting on his game leg, staring down the concrete corridor to the steel door at the end. His National Cancer Institute ID badge still poked from his jacket pocket. He clutched a large bouquet of roses and lilies. The two had been engaged in debate from the front desk through four security checkpoints.
“Nobody’s diagnosed a case of Shiver for a decade,” he said. “And nobody ever got sick from the children. Isolating them is politics, not biology.”
Marian took his day pass and ran it through the scanner. The steel door opened to a horizontal spread of sunglass-green access tubes, suspended like a hamster maze over a two-acre basin of raw gray concrete. She held out her hand, letting him go first. “You know about Shiver firsthand.”
“It went away in a couple of weeks,” Dicken said.
“It lasted five weeks, and it damned near killed you. Don’t bullshit me with your virus hunter bravado.”
Dicken stepped slowly onto the catwalk, having difficulty judging depth with just one eye, and that covered by a thick lens. “The man beat his wife, Marian. She was sick with a tough pregnancy. Stress and pain.”
“Right,” Marian said. “Well, that certainly wasn’t true with Mrs. Rhine, was it?”
“Different problem,” Dicken admitted.
Freedman smiled with little humor. She sometimes revealed biting wit, but did not seem to understand the concept of humor. Duty, hard work, discovery, and dignity filled the tight circle of her life. Marian Freedman was a devout feminist and had never married, and she was one of the best and most dedicated scientists Dicken had ever met.
Together, they marched north on the aluminum catwalk. She adjusted her pace to match his. Tall steel cylinders waited at the ends of the access tubes, shaft housings for elevators to the chambers beneath the seamless concrete slab. The cylinders wore big square “hats,” high-temperature gas-fired ovens that would sterilize any air escaping from the facilities below.
“Welcome to the house that Augustine built. How is Mark, anyway?”
“Not happy, last time I saw him,” Dicken said.
“Why am I not surprised? Of course, I should be charitable. Mark moved me up from studying chimps to studying Mrs. Rhine.”
Twelve years before, Freedman had headed a primate lab in Baltimore, during the early days when the Centers for Disease Control had launched the task force investigating Herod’s plague. Mark Augustine, then director of the CDC and Dicken’s boss, had hoped to secure extra funding from Congress during a fiscal dry spell. Herod’s, thought to have caused thousands of hideously malformed miscarriages, had seemed like a terrific goad.
Herod’s had quickly been traced to the transfer of one of thousands of Human Endogenous Retroviruses—HERV—carried by all people within their DNA. The ancient virus, newly liberated, mutated and infectious, had been promptly renamed SHEVA, for Scattered Human Endogenous Viral Activation.
In those days, viruses had been assumed to be nothing more than selfish agents of disease.
“She’s been looking forward to seeing you,” Freedman said. “How long since your last visit?”
“Six months,” Dicken said.
“My favorite pilgrim, paying his respects to our viral Lourdes,” Freedman said. “Well, she’s a wonder, all right. And something of a saint, poor dear.”
Freedman and Dicken passed junctions with tubes branching southwest, northeast, and northwest to other shafts. Outside, the summer morning was warming rapidly. The sun hung just above the horizon, a subdued greenish ball. Cool air pulsed around them with a breathy moan.
They came to the end of the main tube. An engraved Formica placard to the right of the elevator door read, “MRS. CARLA RHINE.” Freedman punched the single white button. Dicken’s ears popped as the door closed behind them.
SHEVA had turned out to be much more than a disease. Shed only by males in committed relationships, the activated retrovirus served as a genetic messenger, ferrying complicated instructions for a new kind of birth. SHEVA infected recently fertilized human eggs—in a sense, hijacked them. The Herod’s miscarriages were first-stage embryos, called “interim daughters,” not much more than specialized ovaries devoted to producing a new set of precisely mutated zygotes.
Without additional sexual activity, the second-stage zygotes implanted and covered themselves with a thin, protective membrane. They survived the abortion of the first embryo and started a new pregnancy.
To some, this had looked like a kind of virgin birth.
Most of the second-stage embryos had gone to term. Worldwide, in two waves separated by four years, three million new children had been born. More than two and a half million of the infants had survived. There was still controversy over exactly who and what they were—a diseased mutation, a subspecies, or a completely new species.
Most simply called them virus children.
“Carla’s still cranking them out,” Freedman said as the elevator reached the bottom. “She’s shed seven hundred new viruses in the last four months. About a third are infectious, negative-strand RNA viruses, potentially real bastards. Fifty-two of them kill pigs within hours. Ninety-one are almost certainly lethal to humans. Another ten can probably kill both pigs and humans.” Freedman glanced over her shoulder to see his reaction.
“I know,” Dicken said dryly. He rubbed his hip. His leg bothered him when he stood for more than fifteen minutes. The same White House explosion that had taken his eye, twelve years ago, had left him partially disabled. Three rounds of surgery had allowed him to put aside the crutches but not the pain.
“Still in the loop, even at NCI?” Freedman asked.
“Trying to be,” he said.
“Thank God there are only four like her.”
“She’s our fault,” he said, and paused to reach down and massage his calf.
“Maybe, but Mother Nature’s still a bitch,” Freedman said, watching him with her hands on her hips.
A small airlock at the end of the concrete corridor cycled them through to the main floor. They were now fifty feet below ground. A guard in a crisp green uniform inspected their passes and permission papers and compared them with the duty and guest roster at her workstation.
“Please identify,” she told them. Both placed their eyes in front of scanners and simultaneously pressed their thumbs onto sensitive plates. A female orderly in hospital greens escorted them to the cleanup area.
Mrs. Rhine was housed in one of ten underground residences, four of them currently occupied. The residences formed the center of the most redundantly secure research facility on Earth. Though Dicken and Freedman would never come any closer than seeing her through a four-inch-thick acrylic window, they would have to go through a whole-body scrub before and after the interview. Before entering the viewing area and staging lab, called the inner station, they would put on special hooded undergarments impregnated with slow-release antivirals, zip up in plastic isolation suits, and attach themselves to positive pressure umbilical hoses.
Mrs. Rhine and her companions at the center never saw real human beings unless they were dressed to resemble Macy’s parade balloons.
On leaving, they would stand under a disinfectant shower, then strip down and shower again, scrubbing every orifice. The suits would be soaked and sterilized overnight, and the undergarments would be incinerated.
The four women interned at the facility ate well and exercised regularly. Their quarters—each roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment—were maintained by automated servants. They had their hobbies—Mrs. Rhine was a great one for hobbies—and access to a wide selection of books, magazines, TV shows, and movies.
Of course, the women were becoming more and more eccentric.
“Any tumors?” Dicken asked.
“Official question?” Freedman asked.
“Personal,” Dicken said.
“No,” Freedman said. “But it’s only a matter of time.”
Dicken handed the flowers to the orderly. “Don’t boil them,” he said.
“I’ll process them myself,” the orderly promised with a smile. “She’ll get them before you’re done here.” She passed them two sealed white paper bags containing their undergarments and showed them the way to the scrub stalls, then to the tall cabinets that held the isolation suits, as glossy and green as dill pickles.
Christopher Dicken was legendary even at Fort Detrick. He had tracked Mrs. Rhine to a motel in Bend, Oregon, where she had fled after the death of her husband and daughter. He had talked her into opening the door to the small, spare room, and had spent twenty minutes with her, unprotected, while Emergency Action vans gathered in the parking lot.
He had done all this, despite having already contracted Shiver from a woman in Mexico the year before. That woman, a plump female in her forties, seven months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her husband. A small, stupid, jackal-like man with a long criminal record, he had kept her alone and without medical help in a small room at the back of a shabby apartment for three months. Her baby had been born dead.
Something in the woman had produced a defensive viral response, enhanced by SHEVA, and her husband had suffered the consequences. In his darkest early morning vigils of pacing, tending phantom twitches and pains in his leg, alone and wide awake, Dicken had often thought of the husband’s death as natural justice, and his own exposure and subsequent illness as accidental blow-by—an occupational hazard.
Mrs. Rhine’s case was different. Her problems had been caused by an interplay of human and natural forces no one could have possibly predicted.
In the late nineties, she had suffered from end-stage renal disease and had been the recipient of an experimental xenotransplant—a pig kidney. The transplant had worked. Three years later, Mrs. Rhine had contracted SHEVA from her husband. This had stimulated an enthusiastic release of PERV—Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus—from the pig cells. Before Mrs. Rhine had been diagnosed and isolated at Fort Detrick, her pig and human retroviruses had shuffled genes—recombined—with latent herpes simplex virus and had begun to express, with diabolical creativity, a Pandora’s box of long-dormant diseases, and many new ones.
Ancient viral tool kits, Mark Augustine had called them, with true prescience.
Mrs. Rhine’s husband, newborn daughter, and seven relatives and friends had been infected by the first of her recombined viruses. They had all died within hours.
Of forty-one individuals who had received pig tissue transplants in the United States, and had subsequently been exposed to SHEVA, the women at the center were the only survivors. Perversely, they were immune to the viruses they produced. Isolated as they were, the four women never caught colds or flu. That made them extraordinary subjects for research—deadly but invaluable.
Mrs. Rhine was a virus hunter’s dream, and whenever Dicken did dream about her, he awoke in a cold sweat.
He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.
Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.
“Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to scrub.
Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove allowed them to pull up the other’s rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.
This took twenty minutes.
They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel hooks from an overhead track.
Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.
The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.
“You’re good for the inner,” the orderly told them through a bulkhead speaker.
The last hatch slid open with a silky whisper. Dicken walked ahead of Freedman into the inner station. In sync, they turned to the right and waited for the steel window blinds to ratchet up.
The few incidents of Shiver had started at least a hundred crash courses in medical and weapons-related research. If abused women, and women given xenotransplants, could all by themselves design and express thousands of killer plagues, what could a generation of virus children do?
Dicken clenched his jaw, wondering how much Carla Rhine had changed in six months.
Something of a saint, poor dear.
CHAPTER THREE Office of Special Reconnaissance LEESBURG, VIRGINIA (#ulink_40efcb7c-4a12-5d98-8de5-c93f4064f2e3)
Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.
The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use. Augustine’s hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.
“Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I’m tired. I’ve been traveling. There’s work to do.”
“Something’s developing, Mark. I’m sure you’ll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We’ve finally located a long-lost colleague.”
“Who?”
“Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.
Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.
The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and stupid, that gave him an advantage.
The maximum depth of Washington’s soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine’s assistant in EMAC—Emergency Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the National Reconnaissance Office.
Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.
“Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”
Browning rolled her eyes. “She’s not off limits according to any directive I’ve received. I certainly do not regard her as a sacred cow. It’s been seven years since she was on Oprah.”
“If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.
Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.
They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter greeted them with hard gray eyes.
Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed, sound-absorbing foam panels.
Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.
Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They’re living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.
“I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”
She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”
“A year and a half,” Augustine said.
“Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”
Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher Dicken. “I don’t see anything.”
“The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep Eye.”
“Lovely toys,” he commented.
“They were your idea.”
“I’ve just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”
“Oh. How was it?”
“Awful beyond belief.”
“No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”
“You’ll be the first to know, I’m sure,” Augustine said.
Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye’s lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.
“And…here’s Little Bird,” Browning’s voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.
The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightness to reveal the head and shoulders of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.
“Recognize her?” Browning asked.
“The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.
“That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”
“You’re right,” Augustine admitted.
The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from the house.
“I think that’s Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.
“Congratulations. You’re a voyeur,” Augustine said.
“I prefer ‘paparazzo.’”
The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.
“Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn’t she?”
Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.
Dark freckles, Augustine thought. She’s nervous.
“What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she’s going for a walk. And not to school, I’m thinking.”
Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if taking a morning stroll.
“Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don’t have anyone on site. I don’t want to lose the opportunity, so I’ve alerted a stringer.”
“You mean a bounty hunter. That’s not wise.”
Browning did not react.
“I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It’s the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly for these tactics.”
“It’s not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I’ve been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”
“By whom?” Augustine knew that his authority had been sliding of late, perhaps drastically since Riverside. But he had never imagined that Riverside would lead to an even more severe crackdown.
“It’s a sort of test,” Browning said.
The secretary of Health and Human Services shared authority over EMAC with the president. Forces within EMAC wanted to change that and remove HHS from the loop entirely, consolidating their power. Augustine had tried the same thing himself, years ago, in a different job.
Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don’t you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”
“They never married,” Augustine said.
“Well, well. The little bastard.”
“Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.
Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck you, Mark, for making me do your job.”
CHAPTER FOUR Maryland (#ulink_4555eb9e-a385-53f1-ad8f-10f0bfabcd30)
Mrs. Rhine stood in her living room, peering through the thick acrylic pane as if searching for the ghosts of another life. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, with stocky arms and legs but a thin torso, chin strong and pointed. She wore a bright yellow dress and a white blouse with a patchwork vest she had made herself. What they could see of her face between gauze bandages was red and puffy, and her left eye had swollen shut.
Her arms and legs were completely covered in Ace bandages. Mrs. Rhine’s body was trying to eliminate trillions of new viruses that could craftily claim they were part of her self, from her genome; but the viruses were not making her sick. Her own immune response was the principle cause of her torment.
Someone, Dicken could not remember who, had likened autoimmune disease to having one’s body run by House Republicans. A few years in Washington had eerily reinforced the aptness of this comparison.
“Christopher?” Mrs. Rhine called out hoarsely.
The lights in the inner station switched on with a click.
“It’s me,” Dicken answered, his voice sibilant within the hood.
Mrs. Rhine decorously sidestepped and curtsied, her dress swishing. Dicken saw that she had placed his flowers in a large blue vase, the same vase she had used the last time. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “White roses. My favorites. They still have some scent. Are you well?”
“I am. And you?”
“Itching is my life, Christopher,” she said. “I’m reading Jane Eyre. I think, when they come here to make the movie, down here deep in the Earth, as they will, don’t you know, that I will play Mr. Rochester’s first wife, poor thing.” Despite the swelling and the bandages, Mrs. Rhine’s smile was dazzling. “Would you call it typecasting?”
“You’re more the mousy, inherently lovely type who saves the rugged, half-crazed male from his darker self. You’re Jane.”
She pulled up a folding chair and sat. Her living room was normal enough, with a normal decor—couches, chairs, pictures on the walls, but no carpeting. Mrs. Rhine was allowed to make her own throw rugs. She also knitted and worked on a loom in another room, away from the windows. She was said to have woven a fairy-tale tapestry involving her husband and infant daughter, but she had never shown it to anyone.
“How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.
“As long as you’ll put up with me,” Dicken said.
“About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.
“They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can’t share it with me.”
“Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.
“I did. I loved Suddenly, Last Summer,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”
Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”
“Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I’m fine.”
“I know you are, Carla. You’re more sane than I am.”
“That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don’t have to worry about me, do I? Honestly, Marian’s been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she’d let me fix her hair.”
Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.
“They really aren’t treating me too badly, and I’m passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine’s face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the children doing, Christopher?”
Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.
“They’re doing okay,” Dicken said.
Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”
“Mostly. Some are hiding out.”
“What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I’m especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government’s help?”
“As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven’t kept in touch. She’s kind of gone underground.”
“You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”
“We were.”
“You shouldn’t lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.
“I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken’s busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.
“Any news on what they’re doing inside me, all those viruses?”
“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.
“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses…are they still carrying pig messages?”
“I don’t know, Carla.”
Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “Please, Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams…anything.”
Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It’s the least she deserves.”
In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.
They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.
CHAPTER FIVE Spotsylvania, Virginia (#ulink_f9bab310-e39d-5eef-a000-dd5b23763bb1)
“I hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.
“She doesn’t smell good as a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”
“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.
“We’re just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.
“I’m warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he’s just fooling.”
Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.
They weren’t making much money and they weren’t very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.
“She doesn’t look infeckshus,” the second male said.
“I mean it, guys, she’s just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.
“What’s your name?” Stella asked the first male.
“I don’t care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.
“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”
The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let’s go, Dave.”
Dave was working himself up. “She doesn’t fucking belong here,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”
“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”
Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I’m Stella,” she said.
Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn’t touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain’t you in a camp?”
“Dave!” the stooped fellow snapped.
Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn’t wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk’s halfhearted defense rankled.
Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.
“It’s nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It’s cool.”
“You are something, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”
Dave’s friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man’s hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.
“Fuck it, Dave, let’s go! They’ll come get her and maybe they’ll take us, too, if we get too close.”
“My people aren’t really infeckshus,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”
The clerk sucked in her breath.
Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.
What came out of Stella’s mouth in a soothing alto murmur, her eyes focused on Dave’s, was, “Don’t worry. It’s safe. If you want to beat me up, my blood won’t hurt you. I could be your own little Jesus.”
The fever-scent did its thing. The glands behind her ears began to pump defensive pheromones. Her neck felt hot.
“Shit,” the clerk said, and bumped up against the tall rack of cigarettes behind her.
Dave showed the whites of his eyes like a skittish horse. He veered toward the door, giving her a wide berth, the deliberate smell of her in his nose. She had snuffed the fuse of his anger.
Dave joined his friend. “She smells like fucking chocolate,” he said, and they kicked the glass doors open with their boots.
An old woman at the back of the store, surrounded by aisles jammed with puffed bags of potato chips, stared at Stella. Her hand shook a can of Pringles like a castanet. “Go away!”
The clerk moved in to defend the old woman. “Take your Gatorade and go home!” she barked at Stella. “Go home to your mama and don’t you never come back here.”
CHAPTER SIX The Longworth House Office Building WASHINGTON, D.C. (#ulink_075bfd5f-06ed-5815-ab2e-2257af33b84d)
“We’ve been over and over this,” Dick Gianelli told Mitch, dropping a stack of scientific reprints on the coffee table between them. The news was not good.
Gianelli was short and round and his usually pale face was now a dangerous red. “We’ve been reading everything you sent us ever since the congressman was elected. But they have twice as many experts, and they send twice as many papers. We’re drowning in papers, Mitch! And the language.” He thumped the stack. “Can’t your people, all the biologists, just write to be understood? Don’t they realize how important it is to get the word out to everybody?”
Mitch let his hands drop by his sides. “They’re not my people, Dick. My people are archaeologists. They tend to write sparkling prose.”
Gianelli laughed, stood up from the couch and shook out his arms, then tipped a finger under his tight collar, as if letting out steam. His office was part of the suite assigned to Representative Dale Wickham, D., Virginia, whom he had faithfully served as director of public science for two of the toughest terms in U.S. history. The door to Wickham’s office was closed. He was on the Hill today.
“The congressman has made his views clear for years now. Your colleagues, scientists all, have hopped on the gravy train. They’ve joined up with NIH and CDC and Emergency Action, and they pay their visits mostly across the aisle. Wilson at FEMA and Doyle at DOJ have undercut us every step of the way, squirming like puppies to get their funding treats. Opposing them is like standing outside in a hail of cannonballs.”
“So what can I take home with me?” Mitch asked. “To cheer up the missus. Any good news?”
Gianelli shrugged. Mitch liked Gianelli but doubted he would live to see fifty. Gianelli had all the markers: pear shape, excessive girth, ghostly skin, thinning black hair, creased earlobes. He knew it, too. He worked hard and cared too much and swallowed his disappointments. A good man in a bad time. “We got caught in a medical bear trap,” he said. “We’ve never been prepared. Our best model for an epidemic was military response. So now we’ve had ten years of Emergency Action. We’ve practically signed away our country to Beltway bureaucrats with military and law enforcement training. Mark Augustine’s crew, Mitch. We’ve given them almost absolute authority.”
“I don’t think I’m capable of understanding how those people think,” Mitch said.
“I thought I did, once,” Gianelli said. “We tried to build a coalition. The congressman roped in Christian groups, the NRA, conspiracy nuts, flag burners and flag lovers, anybody who’s ever expressed a shred of suspicion about the guv’ment. We’ve gone hat in hand to every decent judge, every civil libertarian still above ground, literally and figuratively. We’ve been checked every step of the way. It was made very clear to the congressman that if he threw up any more dust, he, personally, all on his lonesome, could force the president to declare martial law.”
“What’s the difference, Dick?” Mitch asked. “They’ve suspended habeas corpus.”
“For a special class, Mitch.”
“My daughter,” Mitch growled.
Gianelli nodded. “Civil courts still operate, though under special guidelines. Nothing much has changed for the frightened average citizen, who’s kind of fuzzy about civil rights anyway. When Mark Augustine put together Emergency Action, he wove a tight little piece of legislative fabric. He made sure every agency ever involved in managing disease and preparing for natural disaster had a piece of the pie—and a very smelly pie it is. We’ve created a new and vulnerable underclass, with fewer civil protections than any since slavery. This sort of stuff attracts the real sharks, Mitch. The monsters.”
“All they have are hatred and fear.”
“In this town, that’s a full house,” Gianelli said. “Washington eats truth and shits spin.” He stood. “We can’t challenge Emergency Action. Not this session. They’re stronger than ever. Maybe next year.”
Mitch watched Gianelli pace a circuit of the room. “I can’t wait that long. Riverside, Dick.”
Gianelli folded his hands. He would not meet Mitch’s eyes.
“The mob torched one of Augustine’s goddamned camps,” Mitch said. “They burned the children in their barracks. They poured gasoline around the pilings and lit them up. The guards just stood back and watched. Two hundred kids roasted to death. Kids just like my daughter.”
Gianelli put on a mask of public sympathy, but underneath it, Mitch could see the real pain.
“There haven’t even been arrests,” he added.
“You can’t arrest a city, Mitch. Even the New York Times calls them virus children now. Everyone’s scared.”
“There hasn’t been a case of Shiver in ten years. It was a fluke, Dick. An excuse for some people to trample on everything this country has ever stood for.”
Gianelli squinted at Mitch but did not challenge this appraisal. “There isn’t much more the congressman can do,” he said.
“I don’t believe that.”
Gianelli reached into his desk drawer and took out a bottle of Tums. “Everyone around here has fire in the belly. I have heartburn.”
“Give me something to take home, Dick. Please. We need hope,” Mitch said.
“Show me your hands, Mitch.”
Mitch held up his hands. The calluses had faded, but they were still there. Gianelli held his own hands beside Mitch’s. They were smooth and pink. “Want to really learn how to suck eggs, from an old hound dog? I’ve spent ten years with Wickham. He’s the smartest hound there is, but he’s up against a bad lot. The Republicans are the country’s pit bulls, Mitch. Barking in the night, all night, every night, right or wrong, and savaging their enemies without mercy. They claim to represent plain folks, but they represent those who vote, when they vote at all, on pocketbooks and fear and gut instinct. They control the House and the Senate, they stacked the court the last three terms, their man is in the White House, and bless them, they speak with one voice, Mitch. The president is dug in. But you know what the congressman thinks? He thinks the president doesn’t want Emergency Action to be his legacy. Eventually, maybe we can do something with that.” Gianelli’s voice dropped very low, as if he were about to blaspheme in the temple. “But not now. The Democrats can’t even hold a bake sale without arguing. We’re weak and getting weaker.”
He held out his hand. “The congressman will be back any minute. Mitch, you look like you haven’t slept in weeks.”
Mitch shrugged. “I lie awake listening for trucks. I hate being so far from Kaye and Stella.”
“How far?”
Mitch looked up from under his solid line of eyebrow and shook his head.
“Right,” Gianelli said. “Sorry.”
CHAPTER SEVEN Spotsylvania County (#ulink_748fe309-9d71-5dd0-ae94-fcb4ea19a539)
The old frame house snapped and popped in the morning heat. A moist breeze blew through the small rooms in lazy swirls. Kaye walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. She had awakened from a peculiar dream in which she was an atom slowly rising to connect with a much larger molecule, to fit in and complete something truly impressive. She felt at peace for the first time in months, despite the barbed memory of last night’s fight.
Kaye massaged the fingers of her right hand, then wriggled her wedding ring over a swollen knuckle into its familiar groove. Bees droned in the oleanders outside the window, well into their day’s work.
“Some dream,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled down one eyelid with a finger and stared at herself speculatively. “Under a little stress, are we?”
A few freckles remained under each eye from her pregnancy with Stella; when she was upset, they could still change from pale tan to ruddy ocher. Now, they were darker but not vivid. She splashed water on her cheeks and clipped her hair back, preparing for the hot day, ready to face more difficulties. Families were about staying together and healing.
If the bees can do it, so can I.
“Stella,” she called, knocking on her daughter’s bedroom door. “It’s nine o’clock. We slept in.”
Kaye padded into the small office in the laundry room and switched on the computer. She read the lines she had written before the squabble last night, then scrolled back through the last few pages:
“The role of SHEVA in the production of a new subspecies is but one function performed by this diverse and essential class of viruses. ERV and transposons—jumping genes—play large roles in tissue differentiation and development. Emotion and crisis and changing environments activate them, one variety at a time, or all together. They are mediators and messengers between cells, ferrying genes and coded data around many parts of the body, and even between individuals.
“Viruses and transposons most likely arose after the invention of sex, perhaps because of sex. To this day, sex brings them opportunity to move and carry information. They may have also emerged during the tumultuous genetic shuffling of our early immune system, like soldiers and cops running wild.
“Truly they are like original sin. How does sin shape our destiny?”
Kaye used a stylus to circle that last awkward, overreaching sentence. She marked it out and read some more.
“One thing we know already: We depend on retroviral and transposon activity during nearly every stage of our growth. Many are necessary partners.
“To assume that viruses and transposable elements are first and foremost causes of disease is like assuming that automobiles are first and foremost meant to kill people.
“Pathogens—disease-causing organisms—are like hormones and other signaling molecules, but their message is challenge and silence. Our own internal lions, pathogens test us. They winnow the old and weak. They sculpt life.
“Sometimes they bring down the young and the good. Nature is painful. Disease and death are part of our response to challenge. To fail, to die, is still to be part of nature, for success is built on many failures, and silence is also a signal.”
Her frame of mind had become increasingly abstract. The dream, the drone of the bees…
You were born with a caul, my dear.
Kaye suddenly remembered the voice of her maternal grandmother, Evelyn; words from nearly four decades ago. At the age of eight, Evelyn had told her something that her mother, a practical woman, had never thought to mention. “You came into this world with your tiny head covered. You were born with a caul. I was there, in the hospital with your mother. I saw it myself. The doctor showed it to me.”
Kaye remembered squirming with delicious anticipation in her grandmother’s ample lap and asking what a caul was. “A cap of loose flesh,” Evelyn had explained. “Some say it’s a mark of extraordinary understanding, even second sight. A caul warns us that you will learn things most others will never comprehend, and you will always be frustrated trying to explain what you know, and what seems so obvious to you. It’s supposed to be both a blessing and a curse.” Then the older woman had added, in a soft voice, “I was born with a caul, my dear, and your grandfather has never understood me.”
Kaye had loved Evelyn very much, but at times had thought her a little spooky. She returned her attention to the text on the monitor. She did not delete the paragraphs, but she did draw a large asterisk and exclamation point beside them. Then she saved the file and pushed the chair under the desk.
Four pages yesterday. A good day’s work. Not that it would ever see the light of day in any respectable journal. For the last eight years, all of her papers had appeared on clandestine Web sites.
Kaye listened closely to the morning house, as if to measure the day ahead. A curtain pull flapped against a window frame. Cardinals whistled in the maple tree outside.
She could not hear her daughter stirring.
“Stella!” she called, louder. “Breakfast. Want some oatmeal?”
No answer.
She walked in flapping slippers down the short hallway to Stella’s room. Stella’s bed was made but rumpled, as if she had been lying on it, tossing and turning. A bouquet of dried flowers, tied with a rubber band, rested on the pillow. A short stack of books had been tipped over beside the bed. On the sill, three stuffed Shrooz, about the size of guinea pigs, red and green and the very rare black and gold, hung their long noses into the room. More cascaded from the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Stella loved Shrooz because they were grumpy; they whined and squirmed and then groaned when moved.
Kaye searched the big backyard, tall brown grass faded into ivy and kudzu under the big old trees at the edge of the property. She could not afford to let her attention lapse even for a minute.
Then she returned to the house and Stella’s bedroom. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed. Stella had made a scent diary, a small blank book filled with cryptic writing and dated records of her emotions, scents collected from behind her ears and dabbed on each page. Stella kept it hidden, but Kaye had found it once while cleaning and had figured it out.
Kaye pushed her hands through the balls of dust and cat toys beneath the bed and thrust her fingers deep into the shadows. The book was not there.
Peace the illusion, peace the trap, no rest, no letting down her guard. Stella was gone. Taking the book meant she was serious.
Still shod in slippers, Kaye pushed through the gate and ran up the oak-lined street. She whispered, “Don’t panic, keep it together, God damn it.” The muscles in her neck knotted.
A quarter of a mile away, in front of the next house down the road in the rural neighborhood, she slowed to a walk, then stood in the middle of the cracked asphalt road, hugging herself, small and tense, like a mouse waiting for a hawk.
Kaye shaded her eyes against the sun and looked up at bloated gray clouds advancing shoulder to shoulder along the southern horizon. The air smelled sullen and jumpy.
If Stella had planned this, she would have run off after Mitch left for Washington. Mitch had left between six and seven. That meant her daughter had at least an hour’s head start. That realization shoved an icicle down Kaye’s spine.
Calling the police was not wise. Five years ago, Virginia had reluctantly acquiesced to Emergency Action and had begun rounding up the new children and sending them to camps in Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio. Years ago, Kaye and Mitch had withdrawn from parent support groups after a rash of FBI infiltrations. Mitch had assumed that Kaye in particular was a target for surveillance and possibly even arrest.
They were on their own. They had decided that was the safest course.
Kaye took off her slippers and ran barefoot back to the house. She would have to think like Stella and that was difficult. Kaye had observed her daughter as a mother and as a scientist for eleven years, and there had always been a small but important distance between them that she could not cross. Stella deliberated with a thoroughness Kaye admired, but reached conclusions she often found mystifying.
Kaye grabbed her handbag with her wallet and ID, pulled on her garden shoes, and exited through the back door. The small primer gray Toyota truck started instantly. Mitch maintained both their vehicles. She ground the tires down the dirt driveway, then caught herself and drove slowly along the country lane.
“Please,” she muttered, “no rides.”
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_eaae6d56-03ea-56de-a42f-91d96c88cc97)
Walking along the dirt margin of the asphalt road, Stella swung the plastic Gatorade bottle, rationing herself to a sip every few minutes. An old farm field plowed and marked for a new strip mall stretched to her right. Stella tightrope-walked a freshly cured concrete curb, not yet out of its mold boards. The sun was climbing in the east, black clouds stacked high in the south, and the air spun hot and full of the fragrances of dogwood and sycamore. The exhaust of cars going by, and a descending tail of carbon from a diesel truck, clogged her nose.
She felt at long last that she was doing something worthwhile. There was guilt, but she pushed aside concern for what her parents would think. Somewhere on this road she might meet someone who would not argue with her instincts, who would not feel pain simply because Stella existed. Someone like herself.
All her life she had lived among one kind of human, but she was another. An old virus called SHEVA had broken loose from human DNA and rearranged human genes. Stella and a generation of children like her were the result. This was what her parents had told her.
Not a freak. Just a different kind.
Stella Nova Rafelson was eleven years old. She felt as if she had been peculiarly alone all her life.
She sometimes thought of herself as a star, a bright little point in a very big sky. Humans filled the sky by the billions and washed her out like the blinding sun.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_5c612bc4-9166-5465-89c6-304e8b1ee40e)
Kaye swung left just beyond the courthouse, turned the corner, drove half a block, and pulled into a gas station. When she had been a child, there had been little rubber-coated trip wires that caused a bell to ding whenever a car arrived. There were no longer any wires, no bell, and nobody came out to see what Kaye needed. She parked by the bright red-and-white convenience store and wiped tears from her eyes.
She sat for a minute in the Toyota, trying to focus.
Stella had a red plastic coin purse that held ten dollars in emergency money. There was a drinking fountain in the courthouse, but Kaye thought Stella would prefer something cold, sweet, and fruity. Odors of artificial strawberry and raspberry that Kaye found repugnant, Stella would wallow in like a cat in a bed of catnip. “It’s a long walk,” Kaye told herself. “It’s hot. She’s thirsty. It’s her day out, away from mom.” She bit her lip.
Kaye and Mitch had protected Stella like a rare orchid throughout her short life. Kaye knew that, hated the necessity of it. It was how they had stayed together. Her daughter’s freedom depended on it. The chat rooms were full of the agonized stories of parents giving up their children, watching them be sent to Emergency Action schools in another state. The camps.
Mitch, Stella, and Kaye had lived a dreamy, tense, unreal existence, no way for an energetic, outgoing young girl to grow up, no way for Mitch to stay sane. Kaye tried not to think too much about herself or what was happening between her and Mitch, she might just snap, and then where would they be? But their difficulties had obviously had an effect on Stella. She was a daddy’s girl, to Kaye’s pride and secret sadness—she had once been a daddy’s girl, too, before both her parents had died, over twenty years ago—and Mitch had been gone a lot lately.
Kaye entered the store through the glass double doors. The clerk, a thin, tired-looking woman a little younger than Kaye, had out a mop and bucket and was grimly spraying the counter and floor with Lysol.
“Excuse me, did you see a girl, tall, about eleven?”
The clerk raised the mop like a lance and poked it at her.
CHAPTER TEN Washington, D.C. (#ulink_617627df-a247-5f3b-a74f-f47086d64853)
A tall, stooped man with thinning white hair sauntered into the office carrying a worn briefcase. Gianelli stood up. “Congressman, you remember Mitch Rafelson.”
“I do, indeed,” Wickham said, and held out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The hand was dry and hard as wood. “Does anybody know you’re here, Mitch?”
“Dick snuck me in, sir.”
Wickham appraised Mitch with a slight tremor of his head. “Come over to my office, Mitch,” the congressman said. “You, too, Dick, and close the door behind you.”
They walked across the hall. Wickham’s office was covered with plaques and photos, a lifetime of politics.
“Justice Barnhall had a heart attack this morning at ten,” Wickham said.
Mitch’s face fell. Barnhall had consistently championed civil rights, even for SHEVA children and their parents.
“He’s in Bethesda,” Wickham said. “They don’t hold out much hope. The man is ninety years old. I’ve just been speaking with the Senate minority leader. We’re going to the White House tomorrow morning.” Wickham laid his briefcase down on a couch and stuck his hands in the pockets of his chocolate brown slacks. “Justice Barnhall was one of the good guys. Now the president wants Olsen, and he’s a corker, Mitch. We haven’t seen his like since Roger B. Taney. A lifelong bachelor, face like a stoat, mind like a steel trap. Wants to undo eighty years of so-called judicial activism, thinks he’ll have the country by the balls, six to three. And he probably will. We’re not going to win this round, but we can land a few punches. Then, they’ll lash us on the votes. We’re going to get creamed.” Wickham stared sadly at Mitch. “I do love a fair fight.”
The secretary knocked on the door jamb. “Congressman, is Mr. Rafelson here?” She looked right at Mitch, one eyebrow cocked.
Gianelli asked, “Who wants to know?”
“Won’t use her name and sounds upset. System board says she’s on a disposable cell phone using an offshore line. That’s no longer legal, sir.”
“You don’t say,” Wickham said, looking out the window.
“My wife knows I’m here. No one else,” Mitch said.
“Get her number and call her back, Connie,” Wickham said. “Put it on the puzzler, and route it through, oh, Tom Haney’s office in Boca Raton.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wickham gestured toward his desk phone. “We can link her line to a special scrambler for congressional office communications,” he said, but tapped his wristwatch. “Starts and ends with garbage, and unless you know the key, it all sounds like garbage. We change the key every call. Takes NSA about a minute or so to break it, so keep it short.”
The secretary made the connection. Mitch stared between the two men, his heart sinking, and picked up the receiver on the desk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Spotsylvania County (#ulink_3c57f6e5-7a71-549e-98c3-58145dd538d8)
Stella sat in the shade of an old wooden bus shelter, clutching her book to her chest. She had been sitting there for an hour and a half. The Gatorade bottle was long since empty and she was thirsty. The morning heat was stifling and the sky was clouding over. The air had thickened with that spooky electric dampness that meant a big storm was brewing. All of her emotions had flip-flopped. “I’ve been really stupid,” she told herself. “Kaye will be so mad.”
Kaye seldom showed her anger. Mitch, when he was home, was the one who paced and shook his head and clenched his fists when things got tense. But Stella could tell when Kaye was angry. Her mother could get just as angry as Mitch, though in a quiet way.
Stella hated anger in the house. It smelled like old cockroaches.
Kaye and Mitch never took it out on Stella. Both treated her with patient tenderness, even when they clearly did not want to, and that made Stella feel what she called steepy, odd and different and apart.
Stella had made up that word, steepy, and lots of others, most of which she kept to herself.
It was tough to be responsible for a lot, and maybe all, of their anger. Hard to know she was to blame for Mitch not being able to go dig up pottery and middens, old garbage dumps, and for Kaye not being able to work in a lab or teach or do anything but write articles and books that somehow never got published or even finished.
Stella knit her long fingers and raised her knee, filling the hollow of the fingers and tugging her arms straight. She heard a vehicle and pushed back into the shadow of the enclosure, lifting her feet into the gloom. A red Ford pickup drove slowly by, clean, new, with a smooth white plastic camper on the back. The camper had a square shiny little door made of smoky plastic in the rear. It looked expensive, much nicer than the little Toyota truck or Mitch’s old Dodge Intrepid.
The red truck slowed, stopped, shifted smoothly into reverse, and backed up. Stella tried to squeeze into the corner, her back pressed against splintery wood. She suddenly just wanted to go home. She could find her way back, she was sure of it; she could find it by the smell of the trees. But car exhaust and pretty soon rain would make that harder. The rain would make it much harder.
The truck stopped and the engine switched off. The driver opened his door and got out on the side away from Stella. She could only see a little bit of him through the truck’s tinted windows. He had gray hair and a beard. He walked slowly around the truck bed and camper, the shadows of his legs visible under the frame.
“Hello, Miss,” he said, stopping a respectful four or five yards from where she was trying to hide. He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts. In his mouth he clenched an unlit pipe. He adjusted the pipe with one hand, removed it, pointed it at her. “You live around here?”
Stella nodded in the shadow.
His goatee was all gray and neatly trimmed. He was potbellied but dressed neatly, and his calf-high socks and running shoes were clean and white. He smelled confident, what she could smell behind thick swipes of deodorant and the rum-and-cherry-scented tobacco tamped into the pipe.
“You should be with your family and friends,” he said.
“I’m heading home,” Stella said.
“Bus won’t come by again until this evening. Only two stops a day here.”
“I’m walking.”
“Well, that’s fine. You shouldn’t take rides with strangers.”
“I know.”
“Can I help? Make a phone call to your folks?”
Stella said nothing. They had one secure phone at home, strictly for emergencies, and they bought disposable cell phones for occasional use. They always used a kind of family code when they talked, even with the disposables, but Mitch said they could identify your voice no matter how much you tried to change it.
She wanted the man in shorts to go away.
“Are your folks at home, Miss?”
Stella looked up at the sun peeking through the clouds.
“If you’re alone, I know some people who can help,” he said. “Special friends. Listen. I made a recording of them.” He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small recorder. He pressed a button and held out the machine for her to listen.
She had heard such songs and whistles before, on TV and on the radio. When she had been three, she had heard a boy sing songs like that, too. And a few years ago, in the house in Richmond, the big brick house with the iron gate and the guard dogs and four couples, nervous, thin people who seemed to have a lot of money, bringing their children together to play around an indoor swimming pool. She vividly remembered listening to their singing and being too shy to join in. Sweet interweaves of tunes, like meadowlarks singing their hearts out in a berry patch, as Mitch had said.
That was what she heard coming from the recorder.
Voices like hers.
Big drops of rain left crayon-jabs of wetness on the road and in the dirt. The sky and trees behind the man with the goatee flared icy white against the charcoal gray of the sky.
“It’s going to get wet,” the man said. “Miss, it isn’t good to be out here by yourself. Heck, this shelter could even attract lightning, who knows?” He pulled a cell phone from his back pocket. “Can I call someone for you? Your mom or dad?”
He didn’t smell bad. In fact, he did not smell of much at all except for the rum-and-cherry tobacco. She had to learn how to judge people and even take chances. It was the only way to get along. She made a decision. “Could you call?” Stella asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just tell me their number.”
CHAPTER TWELVE Leesburg (#ulink_14741ecb-5698-569d-97fe-474684585348)
Mark Augustine placed his hand on the back of Rachel Browning’s chair. The room was quiet except for the hum of equipment fans and a faint clicking noise.
They were watching the plump man in khaki shorts, the red truck, the lanky, awkward girl that was Kaye Lang Rafelson’s daughter.
A virus child.
“Is that your stringer, Rachel?”
“I don’t know,” Browning said.
“A good Samaritan, maybe?” Augustine asked. Internally, he was furious, but would not give Browning the satisfaction of showing it. “He could be a child molester.”
For the first time, Browning revealed uncertainty. “Any suggestions?” she asked.
Augustine felt no relief that she was asking his advice. This would simply involve him in her chain of decisions, and that was the last thing he wanted. Let her hang herself, all by herself.
“If things are going wrong, I need to make some calls,” he said.
“We should wait,” Browning said. “It’s probably okay.”
The Little Bird hovered about thirty feet above the red truck and the bus stop, the paunchy middle-aged man and the young girl.
Augustine’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Spotsylvania County (#ulink_59c89362-7342-5dfe-93ff-9269e4ae4c80)
The rain fell heavily and the air got darker as they climbed into the truck. Too late Stella noticed that the man had stuffed waxed cotton up his nose. He sat on the bench seat behind the wheel and offered her a mint TicTac, but she hated mint. He popped two into his mouth and gestured with the phone. “Nobody answers,” he said. “Daddy at work?”
She turned away.
“I can drop you at your house, but maybe, if it’s okay with you, I know some people would like to meet you,” he said.
She was going against everything her parents had ever told her, to give him the house number, to sit in his truck. But she had to do something, and it looked as if today was the day.
She had never walked so far from home. The rain would change everything about the air and the smells. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Fred,” the man answered. “Fred Trinket. I know you’d like to meet them, and they surely would like to meet you.”
“Stop talking that way,” Stella said.
“What way?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
Fred Trinket had clogged his nose with cotton and his mouth sang with shrill mint.
“Of course,” he said reasonably. “I know that, honey. I have a shelter. A place for kids in trouble. Would you like to see some pictures?” Trinket asked. “They’re in the glove box.” He watched her, still smiling. He had a kind enough face, she decided. A little sad. He seemed concerned about how she felt. “Pictures of my kids, the ones on the recorder.”
Stella felt intensely curious. “Like me?” she asked.
“Just like you,” Fred said. “You’re sparking real pretty, you know that? The others spark the same way when they’re curious. Something to see.”
“What’s sparking?”
“Your freckles,” Fred said, pointing. “They spread out on your cheeks like butterfly wings. I’m used to seeing that at my shelter. I could call your house again, see if somebody’s home, tell your daddy or mama to meet us. Should I?”
He was getting nervous. She could smell that much, not that it meant anything. Everybody was nervous these days. He did not want to hurt her, she was pretty sure; there was nothing horny about his scent or his manner, and he did not smell of cigarettes or alcohol.
He did not smell anything like the young men in the convenience store.
She told herself again she would have to take chances if she wanted to get anywhere, if she wanted anything to change. “Yes,” she said.
Fred pushed redial. The cell phone beeped the tune of the house number. Still no answer. Her mother was probably out looking for her.
“Let’s go to my house,” Fred said. “It’s not far and there are cold drinks in the ice chest. Strawberry soda. Genuine Nehi in long-necked bottles. I’ll call your mama again when we get there.”
She swallowed hard, opened the glove box, and pulled out a packet of color photos, five by sevens. The kids in the first photo, seven of them, were having a party, a birthday party, with a bright red cake. Fred stood in the background beside a plump older woman with a blank look. Other than Fred and the older woman, the kids at the party were all about her age. One boy might have been older, but he was standing in the background.
All like her. SHEVA children.
“Jesus,” Stella said.
“Easy on that,” Fred said amiably. “Jesus is Lord.”
The bumper sticker on Fred’s truck said that. On the tailgate was glued a golden plastic fish. The fish, labeled “Truth,” was eating another fish with legs, labeled “Darwin.”
Fred turned on the motor and put the truck in gear. The rain was falling in big hard drops, tapping on the roof and the hood like a million bored fingers.
“Battle of the Wilderness took place not far from here,” Fred said as he drove. He turned right carefully, as if worried about jostling precious cargo. “Civil War. Holy place in its way. Real quiet. I love it out this way. Less traffic, fewer condo-minimums, right?”
Stella leafed through the pictures again, found some more stuck in a plastic pocket. Seven different kids, mugging for the camera or staring at it seriously, some sitting in big chairs in a big house.
One boy had no expression at all. “Who’s this?” she asked Fred.
Fred spared a quick look. “That is Will. Strong Will, Mother calls him. He lived off snakes and squirrels before he came to our shelter.” Fred Trinket smiled and shook his head at the thought. “You’ll like him. And the others, too.”
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Greg Bear
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Evolution is no longer just a theory – and nature is more of a bitch goddess than a kindly mother – in this tense science thriller from the author of the Nebula Award-winning Darwin’s RadioStella Nova is one of the ‘virus children’, a generation of genetically enhanced babies born a dozen years before to mothers infected with the SHEVA virus.In fact, the children represent the next great evolutionary leap and a new species of human, Homo sapiens novus, but this is officially denied. They’re gentle, charming and persuasive, possessed of remarkable traits. Nevertheless, they are locked up in special schools, quarantined from society, feared and reviled.‘Survival of the fittest’ takes on a new dimension as the children reach puberty. Stella is one of the first to find herself attracted to another ‘virus child’, but the authorities are watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike the next blow in their escalating war to preserve ‘humankind’ at any cost.