Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

In the end, it was Stella who had tipped the scales.

“Let’s go,” she had said in the kitchen of the Oldstock cafeteria, wiping her hands on a dish towel and resting them on her prominent stomach. “I’ve always wanted to see where Dad worked.”

The line of cars and vans crested a rise and descended on the rough road to the dry meander of the ancient river bed. A few of the cars, with lower suspensions, were being left behind.

“There it is,” Mitch said. “They’ve taken off the camouflage.” The girls turned their heads to follow his finger. The site had expanded enormously. There were over thirty tents and shelters now on both sides of the old brush-strewn river bed.

Secret Service agents waited for them, checked with the drivers, then flagged them through, diverting the VIP vans to one area and the reporters to another.

The two long vans pulled into a makeshift parking lot marked by crumbling logs and shut off their engines. Senator Bloch waited for them under a white plastic awning. The sun poked through uncertain clouds and illuminated the covered H of the new main dig shelter. Again, linked Quonset huts provided cover. It lay at the end of a fenced pathway leading north.

“Is this where they died?” LaShawna asked.

Secret Service agents opened the van doors. Five photographers, led by a subdued Oliver Merton, surrounded the trucks and snapped pictures and made video. They concentrated on Stella.

Oliver smiled at Mitch and Kaye and stared at Stella with something like reverence. It was a quiet side of Oliver Kaye had never seen before.

“Just a year ago,” a reporter was saying into her lapel mike, staring earnestly into a tiny camera mounted on a curved pole poking from her belt, “the sight of a pregnant Shevite female would have caused panic. Now—”

Kaye turned away and refused to listen.

Mitch spotted Eileen Ripper walking along the trail from the big new shelter. He would have recognized her slow, deliberate saunter even had she worn a mask. She did not like this any more than he did, but it was indeed a triumph. A federal circuit court judge had ruled just three months before, after almost twenty years of litigation, that the Five Tribes had no standing—could claim no legitimate relationship to the remains of peoples physically and temporally so far from their own. The Department of the Interior would no longer halt these digs or return any remains found to the complaining tribes.

Thus had ended a long nightmare for North American archaeology.

Strange that Mitch did not feel any sense of victory.

The bones he had found, goaded on by Eileen’s challenge, had been just part of the story. He had not, after all, completely understood the motives of the ghosts flitting over the landscape.

Perhaps ghosts also lied to get their own way.

Eileen pushed through the photographers and past Bloch’s entourage with hardly a nod. She came straight to Mitch and Kaye, and her eyes lingered for a moment on the girls as she held out her hand to Kaye.

“Welcome,” she said with a broad, nervous smile. “And welcome back. Glad you could bring the family.”

She set about introducing the others, all moving forward with varying degrees of shyness or confidence or diffidence in front of the cameras.

Mitch was sure this was going to turn out badly.

At the airport, LaShawna and Celia had been glad to see Stella again. Breaking from John Hamilton’s protection, LaShawna had grabbed Celia and then Stella and they had all gone off together to the closest women’s restroom—a frightening place for them all, even more than the airplane, with the smells of so many humans.

LaShawna had dragged Stella into a stall and whispered fiercely at her, “What are you doing, girl, going wasp and getting yourself puffed! Was it that boy Will?”

Celia had called through the closed door, “She’ll explain later. Let’s go! I don’t like it in here.”

But there had been little time for talk, much less clouding and conveying the full story. The ride in the truck had made them all a little quiet, even with Kaye and Mitch and John along. LaShawna had whispered in Stella’s ear, “Your mother looks good.”

Stella had pulled back and looked LaShawna full in the face.

“Momma has it,” LaShawna had said sadly, dropping her chin to her chest and pulling up her knees, propping them against the seat back. “She’s in a wheelchair.”

Stella brushed the short hair from her eyes as the wind blew in her face. She stepped down from the truck and blinked at the cameras. Celia and LaShawna seemed to fall in place behind her like ducklings. Being pregnant gave her seniority, she wondered why; it was stupid the way it had happened, stupid losing Will. She had left Oldstock to come here in part to get perspective; she wondered how much longer she would live at the compound.

Without Will, she doubted she would ever find the childish freedom that had once seemed so important. As she smelled and felt the baby inside her, she thought of responsibility and getting things done.

Meeting with a senator and with all these other folks was a start.

The landscape around the dry river bed was somewhere between bleak and pretty and it smelled much like Oldstock though cooler; the trees knew less sun than the trees around Lake Stannous. Quiet, cool pines poked up through gray brush and hard, crusty dirt with broken pieces of purple-black and gray rock overlying.

There was something going on between the woman archaeologist, Eileen, and her father. They were old friends. Something had happened between them along ago; Stella was sure of it. She watched her mother, but Kaye did not seem bothered. In fact, Kaye and Eileen seemed to walk alike and to look around with the same dignified curiosity.

That pleased Stella.

Mitch put an arm around her shoulder. Stella leaned into his embrace and cameras whirred and flashed all around.

“They’re affectionate ,” said a male newscaster to unseen eyes. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Mitch gently squeezed Stella. “Never mind,” he said in a low voice. “We’re going to visit the bones.” He sounded as if that would be like entering a church.

And it was. They walked down into the big shelter, following long plywood sheets, and reporters were instructed to turn off their bright lights. A large sunburned man, about thirty years old, in muddy jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, with dirty forearms and a bandanna around his head, and dental tools and brushes slung on his belt, made the reporters pass through inspection and a shoe scrub. They all donned plastic booties. “Dirt is important here,” the man explained, his voice a rich tenor. “We don’t want to add anything that doesn’t belong.”

Eileen broke from a small group of reporters and introduced him. “This is Carlton Fierro,” she said. “Carlton the Doorman. We call him that because he can hardly fit through most doors. He’s in charge of this dig now.”

Stella smiled at Carlton.

“Glad you could make it,” he told the girls.

Connie Fitz walked around a sculpted pillar of dirt and hooked arms with Eileen. “We need big boys to protect us when there are reporters around,” she said, and winked at Mitch.

Stella did not understand any of this. She focused on Carlton, who was shaking hands with Mitch. “We’ve got the biggest grouping over here,” Carlton said, and led them all along the boards and through a connecting corridor to the second wing of the shelter. They turned right and stood before a wide excavated mesa, sheared off about ten feet below the datum—the level of the surrounding land. Scaffolds had been erected around the mesa and filtered sunlight fell on them all through milky fiberglass sheets.

“Eight at a time,” Carlton instructed, “and that includes me.” The reporters pushed around him, trying to keep the girls and Kaye in direct view.