Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“I don’t either,” Mitch said. “I know how to be careful, though.”

“It’s that kind of age, isn’t it?” Kaye said regretfully, and tugged his shirt from his pants.

In Mitch’s experience, Kaye was neither the most beautiful woman he had seen naked, nor the most dynamic in bed. That would have to have been Tilde, who, despite her distance, had been very exciting. What struck him most about Kaye was his complete acceptance of every feature, from her small and slightly pendulous breasts, her narrow rib cage, wide hips, thickly flossed pubis, long legs — better than Tilde’s, he thought — to her steady and examining gaze as he made love to her. Her scent filled his nose, filled his brain, until he felt as if he were drifting on a warm and supportive ocean of necessary pleasure. Through the condom, he could feel very little, but all his other senses compensated, and it was the touch of her breasts, her cherry-pit-hard nipples, on his own chest that propelled him up and over the wave. He was still moving in her, instinctively still supplying the last of his flow, when she looked very startled, thrashed underneath, squeezed her eyes shut, and cried, “Oh, God, fuck, fuck!”

She had been mostly silent until that moment, and he looked down on her in surprise. She turned her face away and hugged him tight against her, pulling him down, wrapped her legs around him, rubbed against him vigorously. He wanted to pull out before the condom spilled, but she kept moving, and he found himself firming again, and he obliged until she gave a small shriek, this time with eyes open, her face contorted as if in great need or pain. Then her expression went slack, her body relaxed, and she closed her eyes. Mitch withdrew and checked: the condom was still secure. He removed it and deftly tied it, dropped it over the side of the bed for disposal later.

“1 can’t talk,” Kaye whispered.

Mitch lay beside her, savoring their mingled scents. He did not want anything more. For the first time in years, he was happy.

“What was it like to be one of the Neandertals?” Kaye asked. The twilight deepened outside. The apartment was quiet but for the far and muffled sound of traffic on the streets below.

Mitch lifted up on his elbow. “We talked about that already.”

Kaye lay on her back, naked from the waist up, a sheet pulled to her navel, listening for something much farther away than the traffic.

“In San Diego,” she said. “I remember. We talked about them having masks. About the man staying with her. You thought he must have loved her very much.”

“That’s right “Mitch said.

“He must have been rare. Special. The woman on the NIH campus. Her boyfriend didn’t believe it was his baby.” The words started to pour out of her. “Laura Nilson — PR manager for Americol — told us that most men won’t believe it’s their baby. Most women will probably abort rather than take the risk. That’s why they’re going to recommend the morning-after pill. If the vaccine has problems, they can still stop this.”

Mitch looked uncomfortable. “Can’t we forget for a little while?”

“No,” Kaye said. “I can’t stand it anymore. We’re going to slaughter all the firstborn, just like Pharaoh in Egypt. If we keep this up, we’ll never know what the next generation looks like. They’ll all be dead. Do you want that to happen?”

“No,” Mitch said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not as frightened as the next guy.” He shook his head. “I wonder what I would have done if I were that man, back then, fifteen thousand years ago. They must have been thrown out of their tribe. Or maybe they ran away. Maybe they were just walking and they came upon a raiding party and she got hurt.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I really don’t know. I’m not psychic.”

“I’m spoiling the mood, aren’t I?”

“Mmm hmm,” he said.

“Our lives are not our own,” Kaye said. She ran her finger around his nipples, stroked the stiff hairs on his chest. “But we can build a wall for a little while. You’re going to stay here tonight?”

Mitch kissed her forehead, then her nose, her cheeks. “The accommodations are much nicer than the YMCA.” “Come here,” Kaye said. “I can’t get much closer.” “Try.”

Kaye Lang lay trembling in the dark. She was certain Mitch was asleep, but to make sure, she poked his back lightly. He squirmed but did not respond. He was comfortable. Comfortable with her.

She had never taken such a risk; from the time of her first dates she had always looked for safety and, she hoped, security, planning her safe haven where she could do her work, think her thoughts with minimal interference from the outside world.

Marrying Saul had been the ultimate achievement. Age, experience, money, business acumen — so she had thought. Now, to swing so far in the opposite direction, was all too obviously an overreaction. She wondered what she would do about it.

When he woke up in the morning, to simply tell Mitch it was all a mistake…

Terrified her. Not that she thought he would hurt her, he was the gentlest of men and showed few if any signs of the internal strife that had so troubled Saul.

Mitch was not as handsome as Saul.

On the other hand, Mitch was completely open and honest.

Mitch had sought her out, but she was fairly sure she had seduced him. Kaye certainly did not feel anything had been forced upon her.

“What in the hell are you doing?” she muttered in the dark. She was talking to another self, the stubborn Kaye that so seldom told her what was really going on. She got out of bed, put on her robe, went to the desk in the living room and opened the middle drawer, where she kept her record books.

She had six hundred thousand dollars, adding together income from the sale of her home and her personal retirement account. If she resigned from Americo\ and xYie Taskforce, she could live in moderately comfortable circumstances for years.

She spent a few minutes working out expenses, emergency budgets, food allowances, monthly bills, on a small piece of note paper, then stiffened in her chair. “This is stupid,” she said. “What am I planning?” Then, to that stubborn and secretive self, she added, “What in hell are you up to?”

She would not tell Mitch to go away in the morning. He made her feel good. Around him, her mind became quieter, her fears and worries less pressing. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, and maybe he did know. Maybe it was the world that was screwy, that set traps and snares and forced people to make bad choices.

She tapped the pen on the paper, pulled another sheet from the pad. Her fingers pushed the pen over the paper almost without conscious thought, sketching a series of open reading frames on chromosomes 18 and 20 that might bear a relation to the SHEVA genes, previously identified as possible HERVs but turning out not to have the defining characteristics of retrovirus fragments. She needed to look into these loci, these scattered fragments, to see if they might possibly fit together and be expressed; she had been putting this off for some time. Tomorrow would be the proper moment.

Before she followed through with anything, she needed ammunition. She needed armor.

She returned to the bedroom. Mitch seemed to be dreaming. Fascinated, she lay down quietly beside him.

At the top of a snow-covered rise, the man saw the shamans and their helpers following him and his woman. They could not avoid leaving tracks in the snow, but even on the lower grasslands, through the forest, they had been tracked by experts.

The man had brought his woman, heavy and slow with her child, to such heights in hope of crossing over into another valley where he had once gone as a child.