Greg Bear: Darwin's Children

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.”

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY

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.