Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

The reservation was under quarantine for not cooperating with Mark Augustine. Three Kumash County Sheriff’s Patrol pickups had been parked on the main road from the highway. They were providing backup for federal marshals enforcing an Emergency Action Taskforce health threat advisory that applied to the entire Five Tribes reservation.

There had been no business at the casino for over three weeks. The parking lot was almost empty and the lights on the signs had been turned off.

Mitch scuffed the hard-packed dirt with his boot. He had left the air-conditioned single-wide trailer and come up to the hill to be by himself and think for a while, and so, when he saw Jack walking slowly along the same trail, he felt a little sting of resentment. But he did not leave.

Neither Mitch nor Jack knew whether they were destined to like each other. Every time they met, Jack asked certain questions, by way of challenge, and Mitch gave certain answers that never quite satisfied.

Mitch squatted and picked up a round rock crusted with dry mud. Jack climbed the last few yards to the top of the hill.

“Hello,” he said.

Mitch nodded.

“I see you have it, too.” Jack rubbed his cheek with a ringer. The skin on his face was forming a Lone Ranger-like mask, peeling at the edges, but thickening near the eyes. Both men looked as if they were peering through thin mud packs. “It won’t come off without drawing blood.”

“Shouldn’t pick at it,” Mitch said.

“When did yours start?”

“Three nights ago.”

Jack squatted beside Jack. “I feel angry sometimes. I feel maybe Sue could have planned this better.”

Mitch smiled. “What, getting pregnant?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “The casino is empty. We’re running out of money. I’ve let most of our people go, and the others can’t come to work from outside. I’m not too happy with myself, either.” He touched the mask again, then looked at his finger. “One of our young fathers tried to sand it off. He’s in the clinic now. I told him that was stupid.”

“None of this is easy,” Mitch said.

“You should come to a trustees meeting sometime.”

“I’m grateful just to be here, Jack. I don’t want to make people angry.”

“Sue thinks maybe they won’t be angry if they meet you. You’re a nice enough guy.”

“That’s what she said over a year ago.”

“She says if I’m not angry, the others won’t be. That’s right, maybe. Though there is an old Cayuse woman, Becky. They sent her away from Colville and she came here. She’s a nice old grandmother, but she thinks it’s her job to disagree with whatever the tribes want. She might, you know, look at you, poke you a little.” Jack made a cantankerous face and stabbed the air with a stiff finger.

Jack was seldom so voluble and had never talked about affairs on the board.

Mitch laughed. “Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

Jack shrugged. “We want to have a meeting of fathers soon. Just the fathers. Not like the clinic birth classes with the women there. They’re embarrassing to the men. Are you going tonight?”

Mitch nodded.

“First time for me with this skin. It’s going to be rough. Some of the new fathers watch the TV and they wonder when they’ll get their jobs back, and then they blame the women.”

Mitch understood that there were three couples still expecting SHEVA babies on the reservation, besides himself and Kaye. Among the three thousand and seventy-two people on the reservation, making up the Five Tribes, there had been six SHEVA births. All had been born dead.

Kaye worked with the clinic pediatrician, a young white doctor named Chambers, and helped conduct the parenting classes. The men were a little slow and perhaps a lot less willing to accept things.

“Sue is due about the same time as Kaye,” Jack said. He folded his legs into a lotus and sat directly on the dirt, something Mitch was not good at. “I tried to understand about genes and DNA and what a virus is. It’s not my kind of language.”

“It can be difficult,” Mitch said. He did not know whether he should reach out and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He knew so little about the modern people whose ancestors he studied. “We might be the first to have healthy babies,” he said. “The first to know what they’ll look like.”‘

“I think that is true. It cou’d be very…” Jack paused, his lips turned down as he thought. “I was going to say an honor. But it isn’t our honor.”

“Maybe not,” Mitch said.

“For me, everything stays alive forever. The whole Earth is filled with living things, some wearing flesh, others not. We are here for many who came before. We don’t lose our connection to the flesh when we cast it off. We spread out after we die, but we like to come back to our bones and look around. See what the young ones are doing.”

Mitch could feel the old debate starting again.

“You don’t see it that way,” Jack said.

“I’m not sure how I see things anymore,” Mitch said. “Having your body jerked around by nature is sobering. Women experience it more directly, but this has got to be a first for the men.”

“This DNA must be a spirit in us, the words our ancestors pass on, words of the Creator. I can see that.”

“As good a description as any,” Mitch said. “Except I don’t know who the Creator might be, or whether one even exists.”

Jack sighed. “You study dead things.”

Mitch colored slightly, as he always did when discussing these matters with Jack. “I try to understand what they were like when they were alive.”

“The ghosts could tell you,” Jack said.

“Do they tell you?”

“Sometimes,” Jack said. “Once or twice.”

“What do they tell you?”

“That they want things. They aren’t happy. One old man, he’s dead now, he listened to the spirit of Pasco man when you dug him out of the riverbank. The old man said the ghost was very unhappy.” Jack picked up a pebble and tossed it down the hill. “Then, he said he didn’t talk like our ghosts. Maybe he was a different ghost. The old man only told that to me, not to anybody else. He thought maybe the ghost wasn’t from our tribe.”

“Wow,” Mitch said.

Jack rubbed his nose and plucked at an eyebrow. “My skin itches all the time. Does yours?”

“Sometimes.” Mitch always felt as if he were walking along a cliff edge when he talked about the bones with Jack. Maybe it was guilt. “No one is special. We’re all humans. The young learn from the old, dead or alive. I respect you and what you say, Jack, but we may never agree.”

“Sue makes me think things through,” Jack said with a shade of petulance, and glanced at Mitch with deep-set black eyes. “She says I should talk to you because you listen, and then you say what you think and it’s honest. The other fathers, they need some of that now.”

“I’ll talk with them if it will help,” Mitch said. “We owe you a lot, Jack.”

“No, you don’t,” Jack said. “We’d probably be in trouble anyway. If it wasn’t the new ones, it would be the slot machines. We like to shove our spears at the bureau and the government.”

“It’s costing you a lot of money,” Mitch said.

“We’re sneaking in the new credit-card roller games,” Jack said. “Our boys drive them over the hills in the backs of their trucks where the troopers aren’t watching. We may get to use them for six months or more before the state confiscates them.”

“They’re slot machines?”

Jack shook his head. “We don’t think so. We’ll make some money before they’re removed.”

“Revenge against the white man?”

“We skin ‘em,” Jack said soberly. “They love it.”