Greg Bear: Darwin's Children

Kaye could hear her husband and John, but only a scatter of words between whisks of dusty wind.

John was saying, “… and bad. They say it’s worse with two. Summer in Maryland is going to be tough. She wanted to come here. Just couldn’t.”

Kaye licked her dry lips and stared forward. Stella placed her hand on Kaye’s shoulder and touched her cheek.

“How are you all doing?” Kaye asked abruptly, swiveling around despite the twinges in her thighs and surveying the girls—the young women.

“We’re just fine,” LaShawna said dreamily. “I wish I knew what this was all about.”

“I think-KUK I do,” Celia said. “Human politics.”

“How are you, dear?” Kaye asked Stella.

“ We’re fine,” Stella said, and her cheeks flushed butterfly gold with something like fear, and something like joy.

She gets it, Kaye thought. What we just saw. She’s like her father that way.

She watched Stella lean back in the seat and put on a distant, thoughtful expression, cheeks paling to beige. Celia and LaShawna sat back with her.

Together, they all folded their arms.

That evening, Stella and Celia and LaShawna sat in their own room in a motel in Portland. Kaye and Mitch and John Hamilton were in other rooms in the same motel; the girls had asked to be together, alone, “To just lie back and revert,” Stella had explained.

They had eaten with the others and watched Senator Bloch and Oliver Merton leave in a limo to fly back on a red-eye to Washington, D.C., and now they were relaxing and thinking quietly.

Seeing the bones had bothered Stella. Will was not much more than bones now. All that time, all that life; gone, leaving nothing but scattered rubble. Celia and LaShawna were also quiet at first, absorbed in their own individual thoughts.

They were saddened by the prospect of parting, but they all had things to do at home, loved ones to attend to. Celia was living with the Hamiltons and working with Shevite outreach services in Maryland and had her own life. LaShawna was getting her general education requirements at a local high school and planned on going to a junior college to study nursing. With her father, she took care of her mother, who was not getting around on her own much now, and her baby sister.

So much had changed in a few short months.

Stella sat up from a pile of pillows and made a circling motion with her palm, dipping her head like a bird, and LaShawna seconded. Celia gave a little groan of weary protest but joined them on the bed farthest from the curtained window. They palm-touched and sat in a circle, and Stella felt her cheeks flush and her ears grow warm.

“Who we are,” LaShawna sang. “What we are/ who. What we are/ who. Get us in, get us out/ who.”

It was a chant that helped them focus; they had done it before at Sable Mountain when the teachers and counselors weren’t watching or listening, and especially after a difficult day.

The room filled with their scents. A little something like electricity passed between them and LaShawna started to hum two tunes, two sets of over and under. She was good at that, better than Stella.

The day seemed to melt away and Stella felt her neck and back loosen and they began to remember all the good they had experienced together.

“Lovely. We’re in it,” LaShawna said, and started to hum again.

“I can-KUK feel the baby,” Celia said. “He’s so small and quiet. He smells like Will, a little—if I remember, it’s been so long.”

“He smells like Will,” Stella agreed.

“It’s so good to be with both of you again,” Celia said.

“I had a dream about this, weeks ago,” LaShawna said. “I was awake, with my friends, but everything was dark, and I was looking so far down into myself it hurt. I saw something down there. A little glow hidden way at the bottom…”

“Like what?” Celia said, squirming in fascination.

“Let me show you,” LaShawna said, and squeezed their palms tightly.

Celia bit her lip and closed her eyes. “I’m looking deep.”

“Can you see them?” LaShawna whispered. She chanted softly, “If you take away/strip it down/ all the days and years/ all the thoughts… Who are we? Umm-hmm. Down there deep in a cave. Get us in, get us out/ Who?”

Stella reached down to where LaShawna was, using her palm-touch for guidance. She actually did see something at the bottom of a long, deep well, three somethings, actually, and then four, the baby within her joining. Like four luminous golden kernels of corn, hidden away at the bottom of four separate tunnels of memory and life.

“What are they?” Celia asked quietly, eyes still closed. Stella closed her own eyes now to see these peculiar things more clearly.

“They’re like us, part of us, but way below us,” LaShawna said.

“They’re so quiet-KUK, like they’re asleep. Peaceful.”

“The baby’s is not much different from ours,” Stella observed. “Why is that?”

“Maybe they’re the important ones and we’re just shadows trapped way up here. We’re ghosts to them, maybe. Ummm… I’m losing them… I can’t see them now,” LaShawna said, and opened her eyes with a sigh. “That was spooky.”

The waking dream ended and left Stella feeling a little woozy. The air in the room had turned cold and they shivered and laughed, then clasped hands tighter, listening to their own heartbeats.

“Spooky,” LaShawna said again. “I’m glad you see them, too.”

They sat that way for hours, just touching hands and scenting and being quiet together until the dawn came.

LAKE STANNOUS

The third snow of the year came in late October, fat flakes slipping down and nodding between the trees and over the dirt and gravel pathways throughout Oldstock. Kaye hurried from her classroom in the overheated school building, clutching a parka over her shoulders. Puffing, her lips and fingers numb, she met Mitch and Luce Ramone on the path to the infirmary—a name Kaye hated, with its emphasis on dysfunction. Mitch wrapped her in his arms and she marched quickly, close to his side, looking up at him with tight lips and large eyes.

“We have the partners and side mothers in the birthing room,” Luce said. Most of the children—the Shevites, Kaye corrected—did not speak in doubles, over-under, around them, more out of politeness than any obvious reserve or caution. Slowly, over the last four months, the Shevites had come to trust Kaye and Mitch, and together they had worked out procedures to calm mothers about to give birth. Kaye did not know whether it was mumbo jumbo or a new way of doing things. She was about to find out. Now there were twelve pregnancies in Oldstock and Stella was serving a very important function. Keep reminding yourself. Be proud. Be courageous. Oh, God.

So much was being learned. So many questions were being answered. But why my daughter? Why someone who, if she dies, takes me with her, soul if not body?

The last two months had been the happiest in Kaye’s life, and the most tense and awkward.

They gingerly climbed the snowy steps into the old infirmary and down the linoleum-tiled floors, along the plastered hallway lit with dim incandescent bulbs, into the delivery room.

Stella was sitting on the bent and padded bench, puffing and blowing. A rusty gurney covered with a foam mattress and clean white sheets waited for her if she wanted to sleep. She gritted her teeth into a contraction.

Kaye set about arranging the medical instruments, making sure they had been kept in the old autoclave long enough.

“Where did you get these antiques?” she asked Yuri Sakartvelos as he came in, hands held in the air, dripping from the scrub station. Yevgenia smiled at Kaye and her wrinkled cheeks grew golden-green as she slipped the gloves on Yuri’s hands.