Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Saul wagged his head from side to side, acknowledging her criticism. “You’re smarter than I’ll ever be, Kaye Lang,” Saul said. She watched him closely, and saw only what she admired in Saul. The ideas had taken hold of him; he was not interested in attribution, merely in seeing a new truth. Her eyes misted, and she remembered with an almost painful intensity the emotions Saul had aroused in their first year together. Goading her, encouraging her, driving her nuts until she spoke clearly and understood the full arc of an idea, a hypothesis. “Make it clear, Kaye. That’s what you’re good at.”

“Well…” Kaye frowned. “That’s the way the human brain works, or a species, or an ecosystem, for that matter. And it’s also the most basic definition of thought. Neurons exchange lots of signals. The signals can add or subtract from each other, neutralize or cooperate to reach a decision. They follow the basic actions of all nature: cooperation and competition: symbiosis, parasitism, predation. Nerve cells are nodes in the brain, and genes are nodes in the genome, competing and cooperating to be reproduced in the next generation. Individuals are nodes in a species, and species are nodes in an ecosystem.”

Saul scratched his cheek and looked at her proudly.

Kaye waggled her finger in warning. “The Creationists will pop out of the woodwork and crow that we’re finally talking about God.”

“We all have our burdens.” Saul sighed.

“Miller talked about SHEVA closing the feedback loop for individual organisms — that is, individual human beings. That would make SHEVA a neurotransmitter of sorts,” Kaye said, mulling this over.

Saul pushed closer to her, his hands working to describe volumes of ideas. “Let’s get specific. Humans cooperate for advantage, forming a society. They communicate sexually, chemically, but also socially — through speech, writing, culture. Molecules and memes. We know that scent molecules, pheromones, affect behavior; females in groups come into estrus together. Men avoid chairs where other men have sat; women are attracted to those same chairs. We’re just refining the kinds of signals that can be sent, what kinds of messages, and what can carry the messages. Now we suspect that our bodies exchange endogenous virus, just as bacteria do. Is it really all that startling?”

Kaye had not told Saul about her conversation with Judith. She did not want to take the edge off their fun just yet, especially with so little actually known, but it would have to happen soon. She sat up. “What if SHEVA has multiple purposes,” she suggested. “Could it also have bad side effects?”

“Everything in nature can go wrong,” Saul said.

“What if it actually has gone wrong? What if it’s been expressed in error, has completely lost its original purpose and just makes us sick?”

“Not impossible,” Saul said in a way that suggested polite lack of interest. His mind was still on evolution. “I really think we should work this over in the next week and put together another paper. We have the material almost ready — we could cover all the speculative bases, bring in some of the folks in Cold Spring Harbor and Santa Barbara…Maybe even Miller. You just don’t turn down an offer from someone like Drew. We should talk to Jay Niles, too. Get a real firm base laid down. Shall we go ahead, put our money on the table, tackle evolution?”

In truth, this possibility scared Kaye. It seemed very dangerous, and she wanted to give Judith more time to learn what SHEVA could do. More to the point, it had no connection with their core business of finding new antibiotics.

“I’m too tired to think,” Kaye said. “Ask me tomorrow.” Saul sighed happily. “So many puzzles, so little time.” Kaye had not seen Saul so energetic and content in years. He tapped his fingers in rapid rhythm on the armrest and hummed softly to himself.

Sam, Mitch’s father, found him in the hospital lobby, his single bag packed and his leg wrapped in a cumbersome cast. The surgery had gone well, the pins had been removed two days before, his leg was healing on schedule. He was being discharged.

Sam helped Mitch out to the parking lot, carrying the bag for him. They pushed the seat all the way back on the passenger side of the rented Opel. Mitch fitted his leg in awkwardly, with some discomfort, and Sam drove him through the light midmorning traffic. His father’s eyes darted to every corner, nervous.

“This is nothing compared to Vienna,” Mitch said.

“Yes, well, I don’t know how they treat foreigners. Not as bad as they do in Mexico, I guess,” Sam said. Mitch’s father had wiry brown hair and a heavily freckled, broad Irish face that looked as if it might smile easily enough. But Sam seldom smiled, and there was a steely edge in his gray eyes that Mitch had never learned to fathom.

Mitch had rented a one-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Innsbruck, but had not been there since the accident. Sam lit up a cigarette and smoked it quickly as they walked up the concrete stairwell to the second floor.

“You handle that leg pretty well,” Sam said.

“I don’t have much choice,” Mitch said. Sam helped him negotiate a corner and stabilize himself on the crutches. Mitch found his keys and opened the door. The small, low-ceilinged flat had bare concrete walls and hadn’t been heated for weeks. Mitch squeezed into the bathroom and realized he would have to take his craps from a certain angled altitude; the cast didn’t fit between the toilet and the wall.

“I’ll have to learn to aim,” he told his father as he came out. This made his father grin.

“Get a bigger bathroom next time. Spare-looking place, but clean,” Sam commented. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Your mother and I assume you’re coming home. We’d like you to.”

“I probably will, for a while,” Mitch said. “I’m a bit of a whipped puppy, Dad.”

“Bullshit,” Sam murmured. “Nothing’s ever whipped you.”

Mitch regarded his father with a flat expression, then swiveled around on the crutches and looked at the goldfish Tilde had given him months before. She had provided a little glass bowl and a tin of food and had set it on the counter in the small kitchen. He had cared for it even after the relationship was over.

The fish had died and was now a little raft of mold floating on the surface of the half-filled bowl. Lines marked the levels of scum as the water evaporated. It was pretty gruesome.

“Shit,” Mitch said. He had completely forgotten about the fish.

“What was it?” Sam asked, peering at the bowl.

“The last of a relationship that almost killed me,” Mitch said.

“Pretty dramatic,” Sam said.

“Pretty anticlimactic,” Mitch corrected. “Maybe it should have been a shark.” He offered his father a Carlsberg from the tiny refrigerator beside the kitchen sink. Sam took the beer and swallowed about a third as he walked around the living room.

“You got any unfinished business here?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said, carrying his suitcase into the ridiculously small bedroom with bare concrete walls and a single ceiling light fixture of clear ribbed glass. He tossed it on the sleeping mat, squidgied his way around on the crutches, returned to the living room. “They want me to help them find the mummies.”

“Then let them fly you back here,” Sam said. “We’re going home.”

Mitch thought to check the answering machine. The little message counter had gone to its maximum, thirty.

“It’s time to come home and get your strength back,” Sam said.

That sounded pretty good, actually. Go back home at age thirty-seven and just stay there, let Mom cook and Dad teach him how to tie flies or whatever Sam was into now, visit with their friends, become a little kid again, not responsible for anything very important.