Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

“No,” Kaye said.

“Why, then? Why speak with me? I send e-mail letters to lots of people. I don’t think most of them get through. I’m surprised you got yours, actually.”

Marian Freedman had made sure of that.

“You wrote that you felt you were getting smarter and more distant,” Kaye said, “but you were losing your self.” She stared at the shadowy figure in the dark room. The eczema had gotten very bad, so Kaye had been told in the briefing before joining Marian Freedman. “I’d like to hear more,” Kaye said.

Suddenly, Mrs. Rhine leaned forward. “I know why you’re here,” she said, her voice rising.

“Why?” Kaye asked.

“We’ve both had the virus.”

A moment’s silence.

“I don’t get you,” Kaye said softly.

“Ascetics sit on pillars of rock to avoid human touch. They wait for God. They go mad. That is me. I’m Saint Anthony, but the devils are too smart to waste their time gibbering at me. I am already in hell. I don’t need them to remind me. I have changed. My brain feels bigger but it’s also like a big warehouse filled with empty boxes. I read and try to fill up the boxes. I was so stupid, I was just a breeder, the virus punished me for being stupid, I wanted to live so I took the pig tissue inside of me and that was forbidden, wasn’t it? I’m not Jewish but pigs are powerful creatures, very spiritual, don’t you think? I am haunted by them. I’ve read some ghost stories. Horror stories. Very scary, about pigs. I’m talking a mile a minute, I know. Marian listens, the others listen, but it’s a chore for them. I scare them, I think. They wonder how long I’ll last.”

Kaye’s stomach was so tense she could taste the acid in her throat. She felt so much for the woman beyond the glass, but could not think of anything to say or do to comfort her. “I’m still listening,” she said.

“Good,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to die soon. I can feel it in my blood. So will you, though maybe not so soon.”

Mrs. Rhine stood and walked around the overturned and shrouded couch.

“I have these nightmares. I escape from here somehow and walk around and touch people, trying to help, and I just end up killing everybody. Then, I visit with God… and I make Him sick. I kill God. The devil says to Him, ‘I told You so.’ He’s mocking God while’s He’s dying, and I say, Good for you .”

“Oh,” Kaye said, swallowing. “That isn’t the way it is. It isn’t going to be that way.”

Mrs. Rhine waved her arms at the window. “You can’t possibly understand. I’m tired.”

Kaye wanted to say more, but could not.

“Go now, Kaye,” Carla Rhine insisted.

Kaye sipped a cup of coffee in Marian Freedman’s small office. She was crying so hard her shoulders were shaking. She had held back while removing the suit and showering, while taking the elevator, but now, it could not be stopped. “That wasn’t good,” she managed to say between sobs. “I didn’t handle that at all well.”

“Nothing we do matters, not for Carla,” Freedman said. “I don’t know what to say to her, either.”

“I hope it won’t set her back.”

“I doubt it,” Freedman said. “She is strong in so many ways. That’s part of the cruelty. The others are quiet. They have their habits. They’re like hamsters. Forgive me, but it’s true. Carla is different.”

“She’s become sacred,” Kaye said, straightening in the plastic chair and taking another Kleenex from the floral box on Freedman’s desk. She wiped her eyes and shook her head.

“Not sacred,” Freedman insisted, irritated. “Cursed, maybe.”

“She says she’s dying.”

Freedman looked at the far wall. “She’s producing new types of retroviruses, very together, elegant little things, not the patchwork monstrosities she used to make. They don’t contain any pig genes whatsoever. None of these new viruses are infectious, or even pathogenic, as far as we can tell, but they’re really playing hell with her immune system. The other ladies… the same.”

Marian Freedman focused on Kaye. Kaye studied her dark, drained eyes with a growing sense of dismay.

“Last time Christopher Dicken was through here, he worked with me on some samples,” Freedman said. “In less than a year, maybe only a few months, we think all our ladies will start showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, possibly lupus.” Freedman worked her lips, fell silent, but kept looking at Kaye.

“And?” Kaye said.

“He thinks the symptoms have nothing to do with pig-tissue transplants. The ladies may just be accelerated a little. Mrs. Rhine could be the first to experience post-SHEVA syndrome, a side effect of SHEVA pregnancy. It could be pretty bad.”

Kaye let that information sink in, but could not find any emotion to attach to it—not after seeing Carla Rhine. “Christopher didn’t tell me.”

“Well, I can see why.”

Kaye deliberately switched her thoughts, a survival tactic at which she had become adept in the last decade. “I’m flying out to California to meet with Mitch. He’s still searching for Stella.”

“Any signs?” Freedman asked.

“Not yet,” Kaye said.

She got up and Freedman held up a special disposal basket marked “Biohazard” to receive her tear-dampened tissue. “Carla might behave very differently tomorrow. She’ll probably tell me how glad she is you dropped by. She’s just that way.”

“I understand,” Kaye said.

“No, you don’t,” Freedman said.

Kaye was in no mood. “Yes, I do,” she said firmly.

Freedman studied her for a moment, then gave in with a shrug. “Pardon my bad attitude,” she explained. “It’s become an epidemic around here.”

Kaye boarded a plane in Baltimore within two hours, heading for California, denying the sun its chance to rest. Scents of ice and coffee and orange juice wafted from a beverage cart being pushed down the aisle. As she sat watching a news report on the federal trials of former Emergency Action officials, she clamped her teeth to keep them from chattering. She was not cold; she was afraid.

Nearly all of her life, Kaye had believed that understanding biology, the way life worked, would lead to understanding herself, to enlightenment. Knowing how life worked would explain it all: origins, ends, and everything in between. But the deeper she dug and the more she understood, the less satisfying it seemed, all clever mechanism; wonders, no doubt, enough to mesmerize her for a thousand lifetimes, but really nothing more than an infinitely devious shell.

The shell brought birth and consciousness, but the price was the push-pull of cooperation and competition, partnership and betrayal, success causing another’s pain and failure causing your own pain and death, life preying upon life, dragging down victim after victim. Vast slaughters leading to adaptation and more cleverness, temporary advantage; a never-ending process.

Viruses contributed to both birth and disease: genes traveling and talking to each other, speaking the memories and planning the changes, all the marvels and all the failures, but never escaping the push-pull. Nature is a bitch goddess.

The sun came through the window opposite and fell brilliant on her face. She closed her eyes. I should have told Carla what happened to me. Why didn’t I tell her?

Because it’s been three years. Fruitless, painful years. And now this.

Carla Rhine had given up on God. Kaye wondered if she had as well.

CENTRAL CALIFORNIA

Mitch adjusted his tie in the old, patchy mirror in the dingy motel room. His face looked comical in the reflection, tinted yellow around his left eye, spotted black near his right cheek, a crack separating neck and chin. The mirror told him he was old and worn out and coming apart, but he smiled anyway. He would be seeing his wife for the first time in two weeks, and he was looking forward to spending time alone with her. He did not care about his appearance because he knew Kaye did not care much, either. So he wore the suit, because all his other clothes were dirty and he had not had time to take them down to the little outbuilding and plug dollar coins into the washing machine.