Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

Cross drummed her fingers on her knee and looked out the window at the highway, passing cars. A long semi rolled past with TRANS-NATIONAL BIRMINGHAM PORK emblazoned in huge red letters on the sides of its two trailers.

“Spent lots of money on that one,” Cross murmured.

Kaye assumed she was referring to pig tissue transplants. “Where are we going, Marge?” she asked.

“Just driving,” Cross said. Her chin bounced up and down, and Kaye could not be sure whether she was nodding or just moving her jaw in time to the truck ruts in the roadway.

“That address is in a residential neighborhood. I know Baltimore and Maryland pretty well,” Kaye said. “I assume you aren’t kidnapping me.”

Cross gave her a weak smile. “Hell, you’re paying,” she said. “There’s some people I think you’ll want to meet.”

“All right,” Kaye said.

“Lars came down pretty hard on Robert.”

“Robert’s a sanctimonious prick.”

Cross shrugged. “Nevertheless, I’m not going to take Lars’s advice.”

“I didn’t think you would,” Kaye said. She hated to lose her labs and her researchers, even now. Doing science was her last comfort, her lab the last place she could take refuge and lose herself in work.

“I’m letting you go,” Cross said.

To her surprise, the blow did not feel so heavy after all. It was Kaye’s turn to nod in time to the cab’s rubbery suspension.

“Your work with me is over,” Cross said.

“Fine,” Kaye said tightly.

“Isn’t it?” Cross asked.

“Of course,” Kaye said, her heart thumping. What I have been putting off doing. What I cannot do alone.

“What more would you do at Americol?”

“Pure research on hormonal activation of retroviral elements in humans,” Kaye said, still grasping at the past. “Focus on stress-related signaling systems. Transfer of transcription factors and regulating genes by ERV to somatic cells. Study the viruses as common genetic transport and regulatory systems for the body. Prove that the all-disease model is wrong.”

“It’s a good area,” Cross said. “A little too wild for Americol, but I can make some calls and get you a position elsewhere. Frankly, I don’t think you’re going to have time.”

Kaye lifted her eyebrows and thinned her lips. “If I’m no longer employed by you, how can you know how much time I’ll have?”

Cross smiled, but the smile vanished quickly and she frowned out the window. “Robert picked the wrong hammer to hit you with,” she said. “Or at least he did it in front of the wrong woman.”

“How’s that?”

“Twenty-three years ago come August, I was beginning to drum up venture capital for my first company. I was packing my schedule with meetings and heavy-duty lunches.” Her expression turned wistful, as if she were recalling an old, wonderful romance. “God dropped in. Bad timing, to say the least. He hit me so hard I had to drive to the Hamptons and hide out in a hotel room for a week. Basically I swooned.”

She was avoiding direct eye contact, like a little girl confessing. Kaye leaned forward to see her face more clearly. Kaye had never seen Cross look so vulnerable.

“I can’t tell you how scared I was that He was a sign of madness, epilepsy, or worse.”

“You thought it was a he?”

Cross nodded. “Doesn’t make sense for a couple of strong women, does it? It bothered me a lot, then. But no matter how bothered I was, how scared I was, I never thought about visiting a radiology center. That was brilliant, Kaye. Not cheap, but brilliant.”

Kaye glanced at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. He was obviously trying to ignore the words being spoken in the backseat, trying to give them privacy—and not succeeding.

“Love isn’t the word, but it’s all we have. Love without desire.” Cross reached up to wipe her perfectly manicured fingers beneath her eyes. “I’ve never told anybody. Someone like Robert would have used it against me.”

“But it’s the truth,” Kaye said.

“No, it isn’t,” Cross said peevishly. “It’s a personal experience. It was real to you and to me, but that doesn’t get us anywhere in this old, cruel world. That same vision might have compelled someone else to burn old women as witches or kill Englishmen, like Joan of Arc. Cranking up the old Inquisition.”

“I don’t think so,” Kaye said.

“How do you know the butchers and murderers didn’t get a message?”

Kaye had to admit that she did not.

Cross said, “I’ve spent so much of my time trying to forget, just so I could do the work I had to do to get where I wanted to be. Sometimes it was cruel work, stepping on other folks’s dreams. And whenever I remembered, it just crushed me again. Because I knew this thing, it, He, would never punish me, no matter what I did or how I misbehaved. Not just forgiveness— no judgment. Only love . He can’t be real,” Cross said. “What He said and what He did doesn’t make any sense.”

“He felt real to me,” Kaye said.

“Did you ever hear what happened to Thomas Aquinas?” Cross asked.

Kaye shook her head.

“The most admired theologian of all. Furiously adept thinker, logical beyond all measure—and pretty hard to read nowadays. But smart, no doubt about it, and a young fellow when he made his mark. Student of Albertus Magnus. Defender of Aristotle in the Church. He wrote big thick tracts. Admired throughout Christendom, and still revered as a thinker to this day. On the morning of December 6, 1273, he was saying Mass in Naples. He was older, about my age. Right in the middle of the sermon, he just stopped speaking, and stared at nothing. Or stared at everything . I imagine he must have gawped like a fish . ” Cross’s expression was quizzical, distant.

“He stopped writing, dictating, stopped contributing to the Summa , his life’s work. And when he was pressed to explain why he had stopped, he said, ‘I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.’ He died a few months later.” Cross snorted. “No wonder Aquinas was brought up short, the poor bastard. I know a hierarchy when I see one. I’m little better than a wriggly worm in a pond compared to what touched me. I wouldn’t dare try to tell God how to behave.” She smiled. “Yes, dear, I can be humble.” Cross patted Kaye’s hand. “And that’s that. You’re fired. You’ve done all you need to do, for now, at my company.”

“What about Jackson?” Kaye asked.

“He’s limited, but he’s still useful, and there’s still important work for him to do. I’ll have Lars watch over him.”

“Jackson doesn’t understand,” Kaye said.

“If you mean he’s narrowly focused, that’s just what I need right now. He’ll cross all the t ’s and dot all the i ’s, trying to prove he’s right. Good for him.”

“But he’ll get it wrong.”

“Then he’ll do it thoroughly.” Cross was adamant. “Robert’s problem was familiar to Aquinas. He called it ignorantia affectata , cultivated ignorance.”

“God should touch him,” Kaye said bitterly, and then flushed in embarrassment, as if that were any kind of punishment.

Cross considered this seriously for a moment. “I’m surprised God touched me ,” she said. “I’d be shocked if He wanted to have anything to do with Robert.”

NEW MEXICO

Inside the silver tent were eight single wide mobile home trailers, sitting up on blocks on a wrinkled and patched gray plastic floor and surrounded, at a distance of thirty feet, by a circle of transparent plastic panels topped with razor wire. The trailers did not look in the least comfortable or friendly.