Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

Mitch placed his hands over hers. “We’ve both been searching.” He watched Stella with alternating expressions of relief and anger.

“I’m sorry,” Stella said. “Will and I came here after the bus accident. It was for the best.”

“Will?” Mitch asked. “Was he the boy?” John Hamilton had told them about putting Stella and Will in the car with Jobeth Hayden. Hayden had been arrested by state police in Nevada and turned over to the FBI, but she had never been charged with anything.

She had had no idea where the children might have gone. Piles of crumpled paperback pages had been found in her car.

“You saw him in Virginia, in the long building where you found me. Where the girl died,” Stella said.

“I don’t remember much about him,” Mitch said.

“He was my friend,” Stella said. She turned to Mitch, examining his face with shy, flicking glances, her own face turning dark and her pupils dropping down to pinpricks. Mitch had never seen his daughter looking so down, so discouraged.

“Was?”

“He’s dead.”

“How did he die?” Kaye asked.

Stella shook her head and looked away.

“Did he fit in, here?” Kaye asked cautiously.

Stella shook her head once more. “He lived with humans too long. They hurt him. They made him wild. He couldn’t fit with any deme, not even mine.”

“You’ve lived with humans,” Kaye said softly.

“Not the same.”

“Stella, are you pregnant?” Mitch asked, and Kaye jerked as if kicked.

“Yes,” Stella said.

Kaye’s jaw clenched. Mitch moved his hand to Stella’s shoulder. “Will?”

“Yes,” Stella said.

Kaye moaned, then wrapped her hands around her mouth and jaw. Stella stared at the window, unwilling to witness her mother’s anguish.

“He’s the father,” Mitch said.

“I went to wasp so quickly,” Stella said. “It seemed so right, and he was sweet and gentle, with me, when he was away from the others.”

“Did they kill him?” Mitch asked.

Stella shook her head and her cheeks went a lovely shade of sienna, which, Mitch knew, signified a very unlovely emotion: grief. Her cheeks had taken a similar color when they had found Shamus huddled dead in the kudzu, years ago. Lifetimes away. “He stopped eating. Nobody could force him. Nobody would. I don’t know why; we can do so much with some who are ill. I stayed with him. We played games. It was his decision. He said he did not fit. He was in such pain, he became so far away.”

Kaye laid her head on the table. Mitch saw glints of tears falling from her eyes, darkening the scarred wood.

“He couldn’t be with us, and he couldn’t be anything he wanted to be away from us. Something was broken inside of him. He knew he would never be right with us or anybody else. Yevgenia and Yuri—our hosts—they tried everything they knew.”

“There is so much to learn,” Kaye murmured, and turned her head toward her daughter.

“He did not want to live, at the end,” Stella said. “We buried him in the woods.” She shook her head vigorously. “No more talk about Will.”

Kaye got up and stood behind her daughter. “Can we stay for a while?” she asked Stella. “Be with you? Help around here, maybe?”

“I don’t know,” Stella said.

“Do you want us to stay?” Mitch asked.

Stella stroked Kaye’s fingers where they rested on her collarbone. “Yes,” she said.

“Are we the first… from the old kind of people, to come here, to visit?” Kaye asked.

“No,” Stella said. “There are four more. An old man and three old women. They lived at Oldstock when Yevgenia and Yuri bought the place, and they stayed. The man does maintenance and they all work in the cafeteria.”

“So it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Maybe they can explain some things to us,” Kaye suggested.

“I’d like you to be here when the baby comes,” Stella said. “That would be good.”

Kaye lay her cheek on the crown of Stella’s head. “I would be so proud,” she said. “Is there a doctor here?”

“Yevgenia and Yuri were doctors in Russia,” Stella said. “Mine will be the first baby born here.”

“Like mother, like daughter,” Mitch said with a hint of his old reluctance. “Pioneers.” His wife and Stella ventured smiles.

“You could sing to the baby, like you did to me,” Stella said. “You have a good voice, for babies.”

“She’s right,” Kaye said. “What if it’s a boy?”

“It is,” Stella said. “I can smell him. He smells like Will, inside me.”

SPENT RIVER, OREGON

Some said the turning point had come. Kaye was not so sure. After all the years of struggle she could hardly imagine a time of reconstruction, of engagement and change. As she sat with her husband and the three girls in the back of the long passenger van, jouncing along the rutted trails beneath the white glare of Mount Hood, what she felt inside was a kind of frozen patience.

She held her husband’s arm and stared between the driver and the Secret Service agent sitting up front. Then she turned to look back at Stella and Celia and LaShawna, and John Hamilton behind them. The girls—young women now—were stiff as dolls, their eyes large. They had watched the landscape change from high arid brush to farms and pear orchards and then to thin forest; saying little, pushed close together on the bench seat. John was looking out the back window at where the long line of vans and cars had been.

He wants to be with Luella, Kaye thought. He’s tired of this fight and he wants to be with his wife. For the next fight.

No peace. No rest.

Mitch leaned forward to peer through the side window, looking for the first signs of the Spent River and the camp. He had not wanted to return here. “I’ve given up the dead,” he had told Kaye after the visit from Oliver Merton a week ago. “No more dirt and bones for me. Give me the living. They’re trouble enough.”

Mitch did not like the publicity aspect, nor the connection with William Daney, Eileen Ripper’s benefactor at the Spent River dig; it smacked too much of a stunt. None of this junket had appealed to him, and at first Kaye had shared his opinion. Why go forth into the world to help an administration that had come to the table so late, after so much destruction—one of three clueless, terrible administrations in a row?

What good to help the monsters understand? Best to stay in Oldstock, hidden away from everyone and wait for Stella’s baby.

But Oldstock was no longer hidden. Morgan had been doing a lot of talking. Reporters were arriving, pilgrims, parents searching for lost children.

It had taken a visit from Senator Bloch to finally persuade Kaye that this was a good idea. Troublesome gifts sometimes came out of left field; it was unwise to ignore them. Or impossible.

Kaye understood that better than most.

The EMAC schools were closing down or being converted to orphanages. Sandia Pathogenics was fighting for its existence and trying to redefine itself. Eileen’s Spent River site was about to become an object lesson. The president of the United States wanted it as a symbol for a country trying to come together after a long and awful battle between conscience and fear.

“There are always those who fear the future,” Bloch had told Kaye and Mitch. “They fear change, fear being replaced; one thing they do in their fear is kill children. They have to be left completely powerless, or the nastiness will start all over again.

“Either you join in, or you get left behind.” Bloch had said. “I think you should go. Fruits of victory. People want to know what Kaye thinks.” She had added, “You, too, Mitch.”