Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“Chex, please.”

“Well?”

Mitch smiled. “May I share breakfast with you for a thousand years.”

Kaye looked both confused and pleased. She placed the tray on the coffee table and smoothed her robe over her hips, primping with a kind of awkward self-consciousness that Mitch found very endearing. “You know what I like to hear,” she said.

Mitch gently pulled her down to the couch beside him. “Merton says there’s a breakdown in Innsbruck, a schism. An important member of the team wants to talk to me. Merlon’s going to write a story about the mummies.”

“He’s interested in the same things we are,” Kaye said speculatively. “He thinks something important is happening. And he’s following every angle, from me to Innsbruck.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Mitch said.

“Is he intelligent?”

“Reasonably. Maybe very intelligent. I don’t know; I’ve only spent a few hours with him.”

“Then you should go. You should find out what he knows. Besides, it’s closer to Albany.”

“That’s true. Ordinarily, I’d pack my small bag and hop the next train.”

Kaye poured her milk. “But?”

“I don’t just love and run. I want to spend the next few weeks with you, uninterrupted. Never leave your side.” Mitch stretched his neck, rubbed it. Kaye reached out to help him rub. “That sounds clinging,” he said.

“I want you to cling,” she said. “I feel very possessive and very protective.”

“I can call Merton and tell him no.”

“But you won’t.” She kissed him thoroughly and bit at his lip. “I’m sure you’ll have some amazing tales to tell. I did a lot of thinking last night, and now I have a lot of very focused work to do. When it’s all done, I may have some amazing tales to tell you , Mitch.”

Augustine jogged briskly along the Capitol mall, following the dirt jogging path beneath the cherry trees, now dropping the last of their blossoms. An agent in a dark blue suit followed at a steady lope, turning to run backward for a moment and scan the trail behind.

Dicken stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, waiting for Augustine to approach. He had driven in from Bethesda an hour earlier, braving rush-hour traffic, hating this clandestine nonsense with something approaching fury. Augustine stopped beside him and jogged in place, stretching his arms.

“Good morning, Christopher,” he said. “You should jog more often.”

“I like being fat,” Dicken said, his face coloring.

“Nobody likes being fat.”

“Well, in that case, I’m not fat,” Dicken said. “What are we today, Mark, secret agents? Informers?” He wondered why they had not yet assigned an agent to him. He concluded it was because he was not as yet a public figure.

“Goddamn damage control experts,” Augustine said. “A man named Mitchell Rafelson spent the night with dear Ms. Kaye Lang at her lovely condominium in Baltimore.”

Dicken’s heart sank.

“You walked around the San Diego Zoo with the two of them. Got him a badge into a closed Americol party. All very convivial. Did you introduce them, Christopher?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Dicken said, surprised at how miserable he felt.

“That wasn’t wise. Do you know his record?” Augustine asked pointedly. “The body snatcher from the Alps? He’s a nut case, Christopher.”

“I thought he might have something to contribute.”

“To support whose view in this mess?”

“A defensible view,” Dicken said vaguely, looking away. The morning was cool, pleasant, and there were quite a few* joggers on the mall, getting in a little outdoors activity before sealing themselves into their government offices.

“The whole thing smells. It looks like some kind of an end run to refocus the whole project, and that concerns me.”

“We had a point of view, Mark. A defensible point of view.”

“Marge Cross tells me there’s talk about evolution” Augustine said.

“Kaye has been putting together an explanation that involves evolution,” Dicken said. “It’s all predicted in her papers, Mark — and Mitch Rafelson has been doing some research along those lines, as well.”

“Marge thinks there will be severe fallout if this theory gets publicized,” Augustine said. He stopped windmilling his arms and performed neck-stretch exercises, grabbing each upper arm with the opposite hand, applying tension, sighting along the extended arm as he bent it back as far as it would go. “No reason for it to get that far. I’ll stop it right here and now. We got a preprint from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in Germany this morning that they’ve found mutated forms of SHEVA. Several of them. Diseases mutate, Christopher. We’ll have to withdraw the vaccine trials and start all over again. That pushes all our hopes onto a really bad option. My job might not survive that kind of upheaval.”

Dicken watched Augustine prance in place, pounding the ground with his feet. Augustine stopped and caught his breath. “There could be twenty or thirty thousand people demonstrating on the mall tomorrow. Somebody’s leaked a report from theTaskforce on the RU-486 results.”

Dicken felt something twist inside him, a small little pop, combined disappointment with Kaye and with all the work he had done. All the time he had wasted. He could not see a way around the problem of a messenger that mutated, changing its message. No biological system would ever give a messenger that kind of control.

He had been wrong. Kaye Lang had been wrong.

The agent tapped his watch, but Augustine screwed up his face and shook his head in annoyance.

“Tell me all about it, Christopher,” Augustine said, “and then I’ll decide whether I’m going to let you keep your goddamned job.”

Kaye walked with steady confidence from her building to Americol, looking up at the Bromo-Seltzer Tower — so named because it had once carried a huge blue antacid bottle on its peak. Now it carried just the name; the bottle had been removed decades ago.

Kaye could not shake Mitch from her thoughts, but oddly, he was not a distraction. Her thoughts were focused; she had a much clearer idea of what to look for. The play of sun and shadow pleased her as she walked past the alleys between the buildings. The day was so pretty she could almost ignore the presence of Benson. As always, he accompanied her to the lab floor, then stood by the elevators and the stairs, where everyone would have to pass his inspection.

She entered her lab and hung her purse and coat on a glassware drying rack. Five of her six assistants were in the next room, checking the results of last night’s electrophoresis analysis. She was glad to have some privacy.

She sat at her small desk and pulled up the Americol intranet on the computer. It was just a few seconds from the first screen to AmericoFs proprietary Human Genome Project site. The database was beautifully designed and easy to poke through, with key genes identified and functions highlighted and explained in detail.

Kaye plugged in her password. In her original work, she had tracked down seven potential candidates for the expression and reassembly of complete and infectious HERV particles. The candidate genes she had thought most likely to be viable had turned out — luckily, she would have thought — to be associated with SHEVA. In her months at Americol, she had begun to study the six other candidates in detail, and had planned to move on to a list of thousands of possibly related genes.

Kaye was considered an expert, but what she was an expert in, compared to the huge world of human DNA, was a series of broken-down and seemingly abandoned shacks in a number of small and almost forgotten towns. The HERV genes were supposed to be fossils, fragments scattered through stretches of DNA less than a million base pairs long. Within such small distances, however, genes could recombine — jump from position to position — with some ease. The DNA was constantly in ferment — genes switching locations, forming little knots or fistulas of DNA, and replicating, a series of churning and twisting chains constantly being rearranged, for reasons no one could yet completely fathom. And yet SHEVA had remained remarkably stable over millions of years. The changes she was looking for would be both slight and very significant.