Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

“This is really intolerable,” Mrs. Hayden said, but her head straightened and she did not sound angry. She reached over, opened up the glove box, and handed Will an Auto Club map of Arizona and New Mexico. “I don’t use them often,” she said. “They’re pretty old.”

Will opened the map and spread it across their knees. His finger followed highways going north and west. Stella leaned into the corner where the seat met the door and folded her arms.

“You’ll have to sit up straight, sweetie,” Mrs. Hayden told her. “The car has side airbags. It’s not safe to slump over.”

Stella sat up. Will looked at her. Her back was really hurting now. Calmly, he reached over and touched her hands, her legs, then her back.

“What are you doing back there?” Mrs. Hayden asked, dimly concerned.

Will did not answer, and she did not press the question. His fingers marched lightly up Stella’s spine, and she rolled over to let him examine her back.

“You’ll be okay,” Will said.

“How do you know?” Stella asked.

“You’d smell different if you were bleeding inside, or if something was broken. You’re just suffering from a little whiplash, and I don’t think there’s any nerve damage. I smelled a boy with a broken back once, and he had a sad, awful smell. You smell good.”

“I don’t like you telling us what to do,” Stella said.

“I’ll stop once she takes us to California,” Will said. He did not seem very confident, and he did not smell sure of himself. This was one nervous young man.

“It’s a beautiful day/ I learned a lot in North Carolina,” Will doubled. “I’m glad you’re here/ That was before they burned our camp.”

Stella had never met anyone more adept at persuasion. She wondered whether his talent was natural, or whether he had been taught somewhere. She also wondered whether they would be in any danger. But Stella was not willing, not yet anyway, to tell Mrs. Hayden her suspicions. She apparently had suspicions of her own. “I’d like to roll down the windows,” Mrs. Hayden said. “It’s getting stuffy in here.”

“It’s fine, really,” Will said. At the same time, he undered to Stella, “/I need your help. Don’t you want to see what we can do?”

Stella shook her head, thinking of Mitch and Kaye, thinking irrationally of the house in Virginia, the last place she had really felt safe, though that had been an illusion.

“Didn’t you ever want to run away?” Will asked in a near whisper.

“It really is stuffy,” Mrs. Hayden said. Will was running out of pages.

“Help me,” Will pleaded softly, earnestly.

“What is this place?” Stella asked.

“I think it’s in the woods,” Will said. “It’s hidden, far from the towns. They have animals and grow their own food./ They raise marijuana and sell it to make money to buy stuff.”

Marijuana was legal now in most states, but still that sounded dangerous. Stella suddenly felt very cautious. Will looked and smelled scary, with his jumbled hair and cocoa-powder richness, his face that seemed capable of so many expressions. He’s been with others and they’ve taught him so much. What could they teach me—and what could I add?

“Would I be able to call my parents?”

“They’re not like us/ They’d take you back,” Will replied. “We need to be with our own people/ You’ll grow and learn who you really are.”

Stella felt her stomach knot with confusion and indecision. It was what she had been thinking about in the school. Forming demes was impossible with humans around; they always found ways to interfere. For all she knew, demes were just what children tried on for practice. Soon they would be adults, and what would they do then?

How would they ever find out if humans kept clinging to them?

“It’s time to grow up,” Will said.

“Why, you’re so young,” Mrs. Hayden said dreamily. She was driving straight and steadily, but her voice sounded wrong, and Stella knew they had to do something in concert soon or Mrs. Hayden could go one way or the other.

“I’m only fifteen,” Stella said. Actually, she had not yet had her fifteenth birthday, but she always added in the time her mother had been pregnant with the first-stage embryo.

“There’s supposed to be a man there in his sixties, one of us,” Will said.

“That’s impossible,” Stella said.

“That’s what they say. He’s from the south, from Georgia. Or maybe Russia. They weren’t sure which.”

“Do you know where this place is?”

Will tapped his head. “They showed us a map before the camp was burned.”

“Is it real?”

Will could not answer this. “I think so./ I want it to be real.”

Stella closed her eyes. She could feel the warmth behind her eyelids, the sun passing over her face, the suspended redness, and below that the rising up of all her minds, all the parts of her body that yearned. To be alone with her own kind, making her own way, learning all she needed to learn to survive among people who hated her…

That would be an incredible adventure. That would be worth so much danger.

“It’s all you’ve wanted, I know it,” Will said.

“How do I know you’re not just persuading me?” Her cheeks added unconscious quotes to the emphasis on that word, which sounded so wrong, so lacking in nuance, so human.

“Look inside,” Will said.

“I have, ” Stella said, a little wail that brought Mrs. Hayden’s head around.

“I’m fine,” Stella said, arms folded tightly across her chest. The tires squealed as Mrs. Hayden straightened the car out on the road.

Stella gripped the arm of her seat.

“I’m sweating like a bastard,” she told Will with a little giggle.

“So am I,” Will said, and smiled crookedly.

There was one last question. “What about sex?” she asked, so quietly Will did not hear and she had to repeat herself.

“Don’t you know?” Will said. “Humans can rape us, but we don’t rape each other. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“What if it happens anyway, and we don’t know what we’re doing, or how to stay out of trouble?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Will said. “Does anybody? But I know one thing. With us, it doesn’t happen until it’s right. And now it isn’t right.”

That was honest enough. She could feel her independence returning, and all the answers were the same.

She was strong. She was capable. She knew that.

She focused on fever-scenting for Mrs. Hayden.

“Whoo,” Will said, and waved his hand in the air. “You strong, lady.”

“I am woman , / I am strong ,” Stella sang softly, and they giggled together. She leaned forward. “Please, would you take us to California?” she asked Mrs. Hayden.

“We’ll have to stop for gas. I only brought a little money.”

“It’ll be enough,” Will said.

“Do you need the book?” Stella asked him. It was a yellowed, dog-eared, and now thoroughly reduced paperback called Spartacus by Howard Fast .

“Maybe,” Will said. “I really don’t know.”

“Did you learn that in the woods, too?”

Will shook his head. “I made it up myself,” he said. “We have to be smart. They were taking us to Sandia. They wanted to kill us all. We have to think for ourselves.”

MARYLAND

The cab dropped off Kaye and Marge Cross at a single-story brick house on a pleasant, slightly weedy street in Randallstown, Maryland. The grass in the front yard stood a foot high and had long since turned straw yellow. A big old Buick Riviera from the last century, covered with rust and half-hearted patches of gray primer, sat up on blocks in the oil-stained driveway.