Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

Kaye shook her head.

“There’s a little indication of something like arousal, but I wouldn’t call it sexual arousal, not precisely. Nothing like orgasm or garden-variety ecstasy such as, for example, you might find in someone using consciousness-altering drugs. We have recordings—movies—of people meditating, engaging in sex, on drugs, including LSD and cocaine. Your scans don’t match any of those.”

“I can’t imagine having sex in that tube.”

Roth smiled. “Mostly enthusiastic young people,” he explained. “Here we go—CT motion scans coming up.” He became deeply absorbed in the false-color images of her brain on the display: dark fields of gray overlaid with symmetric, blossoming Rorschach birds, touched here and there with little coals of metabolic activity, maps of thought and personality and deep subconscious processes. “All right,” he said to himself, pausing the scroll. “What’s this?” He touched three pulsing yellow splotches, a little bigger than a thumbnail, points on a scan taken midway through their session. He made small humming sounds, then flipped through an on-line library of images from other explorations, some of them years and even decades old, until he seemed satisfied he had what he wanted.

Roth pushed his chair back with an echoing scrape and pointed to a blue-and-green sagittal section of a head, small and oddly shaped. He filled in and rotated the image in 3-D, and Kaye made out the outlines of an infant’s skull and the fog of the brain within. Radiating fields of mental activity spun within ghostly curves of bone and tissue.

An indefinite grayish mass seemed to issue from the infant’s mouth.

“Not so much detail, but it’s a pretty close match,” Roth said. “Famous experiment in Japan, about eight years ago. They scanned a normal birthing session. Woman had had four kids previously. She was an old pro. The machines didn’t bother her.”

Roth studied the image. He hummed for a moment, then clicked his fingernails like castanets. “This is a scan of the infant’s brain while he or she was getting acquainted with mom. Taking the teat, I’d say.” He used his finger to point out the gray mass, magnified the activity centers in the infant’s brain, rotated them to the proper azimuth, then superimposed the baby’s scan on Kaye’s.

The activity centers lined up neatly.

Roth smiled. “What do you think? A match?”

Kaye was lost for a moment, remembering the first time Stella had suckled, the wonderful sensation of the baby at her nipple, of her milk letting down.

“They look the same,” she said. “Is that a mistake?”

“Don’t think so,” Roth said. “I could make some animal brain comparisons. There’s been some work in the last few years on bonding in kittens and puppies, even some in baboons, but not very good. They don’t hold still.”

“What does it mean?” Kaye asked. She shook her head, still lost. “Whatever He is, He’s not using speech—that much has been clear from the start. Irritating, actually.”

“Mumbles from the burning bush?” Roth said. “And no stone tablets.”

“No speeches, no proclamations, nothing,” Kaye confirmed.

“Look, this is the closest I can come to a match,” Roth said.

With her finger, Kaye traced the Rorschach birds inside the infant’s brain. “I still don’t understand.”

Roth tilted his head. “Looks to me like you’ve made a big connection. You’re imprinting on someone or something big-time. You’ve become a baby again, Ms. Rafelson.”

Kaye unlocked her apartment, entered, and used her briefcase to block the front door from closing. She punched in her six-number code to deactivate the alarm, then took off her sweater, hung it in the closet, and stood in the hallway, breathing deeply to keep from sobbing. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could endure this. The voids in her life were like deserts she could not cross.

“What about you ?” she asked the empty air. She walked into the darkened living room. “The way I see it, if you’re some kind of big daddy, you protect those you love, you keep them from harm. What’s the God… what’s the damned ,” she finally shouted it, “the God damned excuse?”

The phone beeped. Kaye jumped, pulled her eyes away from the corner of the ceiling she had been addressing, stepped to the kitchen counter, and reached across to pick up the handset.

“Kaye? It’s Mitch.”

Kaye drew in another breath, almost of dread, certainly of guilt, before speaking. “I’m here.” She sat stiffly upright in the easy chair and covered the mouthpiece as she told the lights to switch on. The living room was small and neat, except for stacks of journals and offprints arrayed at angles to each other on the coffee table. Other piles spilled across the floor beside the couch.

“Are you all right?”

“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I’m not. Are you?”

Mitch did not answer this. Good for him, Kaye thought.

“I’m on the road again,” he said.

A pause.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Oregon. My horse broke down and I thought I’d give you a call, ask if you had some extra… I don’t know. Horseshoes.” He sounded even more exhausted than she was. Kaye intercepted something else in his tone and zeroed in with sudden hope.

“You saw Stella?”

“They let me see Stella. Lucky guy, right?”

“Is she well?”

“She gave me a big hug. She’s looking pretty good. She cried, Kaye.”

Kaye felt her throat catch. She held the phone aside and coughed into her fist. “She misses you. Sorry. Dry throat. I need some water.” She walked into the kitchen to take a bottle from the refrigerator.

“She misses both of us,” Mitch said.

“I can’t be there. I can’t protect her. What’s to miss?”

“I just wanted to call and tell you about her. She’s growing up. It makes me feel lost, thinking that she’s almost grown and I wasn’t around.”

“Not your fault,” she said.

“How’s the work?”

“Finished soon,” Kaye said. “I don’t know if they’ll believe it. So many are still stuck in old ruts.”

“Robert Jackson?”

“Yeah, him, too.”

“You’re lucky to be working at what you do best,” Mitch said. “Listen, I’m—”

“You don’t deserve what happened, Mitch.”

Another pause. You didn’t deserve being dumped, she added to herself. Kaye looked back to that empty corner of wall and ceiling and continued, “I miss you.” She tightened her lips to keep them from trembling. “What’s in Oregon?”

“Eileen’s got something going, very mysterious, so I left the dig in Texas. I mistook a clamshell for a whelk. I’m getting old, Kaye.”

“Bullshit,” Kaye said.

“You give me the word, I’ll drive straight to Maryland.” Mitch’s voice steeled. “I swear. Let’s go get Stella.”

“Stop it,” Kaye said, though with sudden gentleness. “I want to, you know that. We have to keep to our plan.”

“Right,” Mitch said, and Kaye was acutely aware he had had no part in making the plan. Perhaps until now Mitch had not really been informed there was a plan. And that was Kaye’s fault. She had not been able to protect her husband or her daughter, the most important people on Earth. So who am I to accuse?

“What are the kids up to? How has she changed?” Kaye asked.

“They’re forming groups. Demes, they call them. The schools are trying to keep them broken up and disorganized. I’d guess they’re finding ways around that. There’s a lot of scenting involved, of course, and Stella talks about new kinds of language, but we didn’t have time for details. She looks healthy, she’s bright, and she doesn’t seem too stressed out.”