Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Marian approached the clamper and touched the chimp’s extended hand. “There, Kiki. There, girl. That’s my girl. We’re sorry, sweety.”

The chimp’s fingers brushed Marian’s palm repeatedly. The chimp grimaced and squirmed but no longer shrieked. When she was returned to her enclosure, Marian swiveled to face the worker and the technician.

“I’ll can the next son of a bitch that treats these animals as if they’re machines,” she said in a low, harsh growl. “You understand? She’s socializing. She’s been violated and she wants to touch somebody to feel reassured. You’re the closest thing she’s got to friends and family. Understand me?”

The worker and technician sheepishly apologized.

Marian steamed past Dicken and jerked her head for him to follow.

“I’m sure it’s going great,” Dicken said, distressed by the scene. “I trust you implicitly, Marian.”

Marian sighed. “Then come back to my office and let’s talk some more there.”

The corridor back to the office was empty, doors closed at both ends. Dicken made broad gestures as he spoke. “I’ve got Ben on my side. He thinks this is a significant event, not just a disease.”

“So will he go up against Augustine? All our funding is predicated on finding a treatment, Christopher! If it isn’t a disease, why find a treatment? People are unhappy, sick, and they think they’re losing babies.”

“These rejected fetuses aren’t babies, Marian.”

“Then what in hell are they? I have to go with what I know, Christopher. If we get all theoretical—”

“I’m canvassing,” Dicken said. “I want to know what you think.”

Marian stood behind her desk, put her hands on the Formica top, tapped her short fingernails. She looked exasperated. “I am a geneticist and a molecular biologist. I don’t know shit about much else. It takes me five hours each night just to read a hundredth of what I need to keep up in my own field.”

“Have you logged on to MedWeb? Bionet? Virion?”

“I don’t get on the net much except to get my mail.”

“Virion is a little informal netzine out of Palo Alto. Private subscription only. It’s run by Kiril Maddox.”

“I know. I dated Kiril at Stanford.”

This brought Dicken up short. “I didn’t know that.”

“Don’t tell anybody, please! He was a brilliant and subversive little shmuck even then.”

“Scout’s honor. But you should check it out. There are thirty anonymous postings there. Kiril assures me they’re all legitimate researchers. The buzz is not about disease or treatment.”

“Yes, and when they go public, I’ll join you and march in to Augustine’s office.”

“Promise?”

“Not on your life! I am not a brilliant researcher with an international reputation to protect. I’m an assembly-line kind of gal with split ends and a lousy sex life who loves her work and wants to keep her job.”

Dicken rubbed the back of his neck. “Something’s up. Something really big. I need a list of good people to back me when I tell Augustine.”

“Try and set him straight, you mean. He will kick your ass right out of CDC.”

“I don’t think so. I hope not.” Then, with a twinkle and a squint, Dicken asked, “How do you know? Did you date Augustine, too?”

“He was a medical student,” Freedman said. “I stayed the hell away from medical students.”

Jessie’s Cougar was half a flight down from the street, fronted by a small neon sign, a cast faux-wood plaque, and a polished brass handrail. Inside the long, narrow showroom, a burly man in a fake tux and black pants served beer and wine at tiny wooden tables, and seven or eight naked women, one after another, made generally unenthusiastic attempts to dance on a small stage.

A small hand-lettered sign on a music stand beside the empty cage said that the cougar was sick this week, so Jessie wouldn’t be performing. Pictures of the limp cat and its pumped-up, smiling blond mistress lined the wall behind the small bar.

The room was cramped, barely ten feet across, and smoky, and Dicken felt bad the moment he sat down. He looked around the gawker’s side of the floor and saw older men in business suits in groups of two or three, young men in denims, alone, all white, nursing beers in small glasses.

A man in his late forties approached a dancer just going off stage and whispered something to her and she nodded. He and his companions then filed off to a back room for some private entertainment.

Dicken had not had more than a couple of hours to himself in a month. By chance, he had this evening free, no social connections, nowhere to go but a small room at the Holiday Inn, so he had walked to the club district, past numerous police cars and a few beat cops on bike and on foot. He had spent a few minutes in a big chain bookstore, found the prospect of spending his free night just reading almost unbearable, and his feet had moved him automatically where he knew he had intended to go in the first place, if only to look upon a woman he was not connected with by business.

The dancers were attractive enough, in their early to late twenties, startling in their blunt nudity, breasts rarely natural, as far as he could judge, with pubic hair shaved to a universal small exclamation point. Not one of them looked at him as he entered. In a few minutes it would be money smiles and money eyes, but from the start, there was nothing.

He ordered a Budweiser — the choices were Coors or Bud or Bud Lite — and leaned back against the wall. The woman currently on stage was young, thin, with dramatically projecting breasts that did not match her narrow rib cage. He watched her with little interest, and when she was finished with her ten-minute gyration and a few marble-eyed glances around the room, she donned a rayon thigh-high robe and descended the ramp to mingle.

Dicken had never quite learned the ropes in these clubs. He knew about the private rooms, but not about what was allowed there. He found himself thinking less about the women and the smoke and his beer than about the Howard University Medical Center tour the next morning, and about the meeting with Augustine and the new team members in the late afternoon…Another very full day.

He looked at the next woman on stage, shorter and a little more filled out, with small breasts and a very narrow waist, and thought of Kaye Lang.

Dicken finished his beer and dropped a couple of quarters on the scuffed little table and pushed his chair back. A half-naked redheaded woman offered him her stocking for money, her robe draped over a lifted leg. Like a fool, he stuffed twenty into the garter belt and looked up at her with what he hoped was nonchalant command, and what he suspected was nothing more than a stiff little glance of uncertainty.

“That’s a start, honey,” she said, her voice small but assured. She looked around quickly. He was the biggest unaccompanied fish currently swimming in the pool. “You been working too hard, haven’t you?”

“I have,” he said.

“A little private dance is all you need, I think,” she added.

“That would be nice,” he said, his tongue dry.

“We got a place,” she said. “But you know the rules, honey? I do all the touching. Management wants you to stay in your seat. It’s fun.”

It sounded awful. He went with her anyway, into a small room near the back of the building, one of eight or ten on the second floor, each the size of a bedroom and empty of furniture except for a small stage and a folding chair or two. He sat in the folding chair as the woman let slip her robe. She wore a tiny thong.

“My name is Danielle,” she said. She put her finger to her lips when he started to speak. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I like mystery.”