Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

She closed her eyes for a moment and listened. The singers in the barracks tended to slip into harshly sweet and sky-shaking laments, pushing sounds around both sides of their ridged tongues, circulating breath through nose and throat simultaneously. The two streams of song began to play counterpoint, weaving in and out in a way designed to prevent any eavesdropping by the counselors.

Not that the counselors had yet figured out how to interpret underspeech.

Stella heard loud clanging. She closed her eyes and grinned. She could see it all so clearly: Counselors were going through the barracks, banging metal trash-can lids and shouting for the children to shut up. Slowly, the songs scattered like gusts of scented air. Stella imagined the heads withdrawing from the windows, children rushing to their bunks, climbing under their covers.

Tomorrow, other barracks would take their turns. There was a kind of lottery; they tried to predict how long it would take the counselors to get from their compound to the guilty barracks, and how long they could be fooled as to which were the offending barracks. Her barracks might join in and undergo the same trash-can-lid response. Stella would be part of the songfest. She did not look forward to the challenge. She had a high, clear overvoice, but needed work on her underspeech. She was not quite as facile as the others.

Silence returned to the morning. She sank under the covers, waiting for the alarm bell. New uniforms had been deposited at the end of each bunk. The bunks were stacked three high, and the kids began each morning with a shower and a change of clothes, to keep the scent from building on their bodies or what they wore.

Stella knew that her natural smell was not offensive to humans. What concerned the camp counselors and captains was persuasion.

The girls below her, Celia and Mandy, were stirring. Stella preferred to be among the first in the showers. The wake-up bell at the south end of the hall went off as she ran toward the gate to the showers. Her thin white robe flapped at mid-thigh level.

Fresh towels and brushes were provided every day. She took a towel and a toothbrush but avoided using toothpaste. It had a lingering smell that she suspected was meant to confuse. Stella stood at the long basin with the polished steel mirror and ran the moist brush over her teeth, then massaged her gums with one finger, as Mitch had showed her how to do almost ten years ago.

Twenty other girls were already in the shower room, most from other barracks. Stella’s building—barracks number three—tended to be slow. It contained the older girls. They were not as chipper or enthusiastic as the younger girls. They knew all too well what the day had in store—boredom, ritual, frustration. Stagnation.

The youngest girl in the camp was ten. The oldest was fifteen.

Stella Nova was fourteen.

After she finished, Stella returned to her bunk to dress. She looked down the lines of bunks. Most of the girls were still in the showers. It was her day to act as monitor for the barracks. She had to be inconspicuous—simply walking from bunk to bunk, bending over, and taking a big whiff would probably land her in detention, with Miss Kantor asking pointed questions. But it had to be done.

Stella carried a stack of school newspapers printed the day before. She walked from bunk to bunk, placing a paper on each bunk and gently sniffing the unmade sheets without bending over.

Within ten minutes, as the girls returned from the showers and began to dress, Stella had a good picture of the health and well-being of the barracks. Later, she would report to her deme mentor. The mentors changed from day to day or week to week. Underspeech or cheek-flashes would tell her who was responsible today. She would make a quick report with underspeech and scenting, before the heavily supervised, once-a-week, coed outdoor activity began.

The girls had thought this procedure up all by themselves. It seemed to work. The bed check was not just useful in knowing how each member was faring, it was also an act of defiance.

Defiance was essential to keeping their sanity.

Perhaps they would have early warning if the humans passed along any more diseases. Perhaps it was just a way of feeling they had some control over their lives. Stella didn’t care.

Catching the scent of her barracks mates was reward enough. It made her feel as if she were a part of something worthwhile, something not human.

Americol Research Headquarters

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

“Elcob hobe!”

Liz Cantrera rushed past Kaye, a rack of clear plastic trays clattering in her arms beneath the flopping edge of a folder clamped between her teeth. She deposited the rack near the safety sink and pulled the black-bound folder from her mouth. “This just in from La Robert.”

Kaye hung her coat on the knobs behind the lab door. “Another salvo?”

“Mm hmm. I think Jackson is jealous you were asked to testify and not he.”

“Nobody should envy me that.” Kaye waggled her fingers. “Give it to me.”

Cantrera smirked and handed her the folder. “He’ll be pushing a disease model long after the Karolinska hangs gold on you.”

Kaye leafed through the fifty-page brief and response to their work of the last two years. This was the big one. Robert Jackson, PI for the larger group and in some respects her boss, was working very hard to get Kaye out of his labs, out of the building, out of the way.

The expected publication date for Jackson’s paper in the Journal of Biologics and Epigenetics was sticky-tabbed to the last page: December. “How nice he’s passed peer review,” Kaye said.

Liz put her hands on her hips and stood in an attitude of defiant expectation. She pushed back a strand of curly strawberry blonde hair and loudly chewed a wad of gum. Her eyes were bright as drops of fresh blue ink. “He says we’re removing necessary transcription factors surrounding our ERV targets, throwing out the baby with the contaminated bathwater.”

“A lot of those factors are transactivated by ERV. You can’t have it both ways, Dr. Jackson. Well, at least we can shoot that one down.” Kaye slumped on a stool. “We’re not getting anywhere,” she muttered. “We’re taking out the viruses and not getting any baby chimps. What does it take for him to come around?” She glanced up at Liz, who was still waggling her hips and snapping her chewing gum in mock defiance of La Robert.

Liz cracked a big sappy smile. “Feel better?”

Kay shook her head and laughed despite herself. “You look like a Broadway gamine. Who are you supposed to be, Bernadette Peters?”

Liz cocked her hips and fluffed her hair with one hand. “She’s a corker. Which play?” she demanded. “Revival of Mame ?”

“Sweeney Todd,” Kaye said.

“That would be Winona Ryder,” Liz countered.

Kaye groaned. “Where do you get so much energy?”

“Bitterness. Seriously, how did it go?”

“I’m being used as a prop by one side and a patsy by the other. I feel like Dorothy in the tornado.”

“Sorry,” Liz said.

Kaye stretched and felt her back pop. Mitch used to do that for her. She riffled through Jackson’s folder again and found the page that through instinct, and a touch of luck, had caught her eye a moment before: suspect lab protocols.

As ever, Jackson was trapped in a maze of in vitro studies—test-tube and petri dish blind alleys using Tera2 tumor cell lines—proven traps for making mistakes with ERV. Hell, he’s even using chicken embryos, she thought. Egglayers don’t use ERVs the same way we do.

“Jackson’s vaccines kill monkeys,” Kaye said softly, tapping the page. “Marge doesn’t like projects that never get past animal studies.”