Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“Oh, wow,” Delia said. “That would be so great.”

“You two look decent, hey, real nice,” Morgan said, staring up at the headliner again, this time for courage. “But I have to tell you, these girls are my friends. I don’t want you doing this just so he can see them without their clothes on. I won’t put up with that.”

“Don’t worry,” Kaye said. “If I were your mom, I’d be proud of you, Morgan.”

“Thanks,” Morgan said, and dropped his gaze to the window. The muscles on his narrow jaw clenched. “Hey, it’s just the way I feel. They’ve gone through enough shit. Her boyfriend got a mask, too, and he was really mad. Jayce says he blamed Delia.”

“He did,” Jayce said.

“He was a white boy,” Morgan continued, “and Delia is partly black.”

“I am black,” Delia said.

“They were living in a farmhouse for a while until he made her leave,” Jayce said. “He was hitting her, after the miscarriage. Then she was pregnant again. He said she was making him sick because he had a mask and it wasn’t even his baby.” This came out in a mumbled rush.

“My second baby was born dead,” Delia said, her voice distant. “He only had half his face. Jayce and Morgan never showed him to me.”

“We buried it,” Morgan said.

“My God,” Kaye said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was hard,” Morgan said. “But hey, we’re still here.” He clamped his teeth together and his jaw again tensed rhythmically.

“Jayce shouldn’t have told me what he looked like,” Delia said.

“If it was God’s baby,” Jayce said flatly, “He should have taken better care of it.”

Mitch wiped his eyes with a finger and blinked to keep the road clear.

“Have you seen a doctor?” Kaye asked.

“I’m okay,” Delia said. “I just want these marks to go away.”

“Let me see them up close, sweetie,” Kaye said.

“Are you a doctor?” Delia asked.

“I’m a biologist, but not a medical doctor,” Kaye said.

“A scientist?” Morgan asked, interest piqued.

“Yeah,” Kaye said.

Delia thought this through for a few seconds, then leaned forward, eyes averted. Kaye touched her chin to steady her. The sun had come out but a big panel truck growled by on the left and the wide tires showered the windshield. The watery light cast a wavering gray pall over the girl’s features.

Her face bore a pattern of demelanized, teardrop-shaped dapples, mostly on her cheeks, with several symmetrical patches at the corners of her eyes and lips. As she turned away from Kaye, the marks shifted and darkened.

“They’re like freckles,” Delia said hopefully. “I get freckles sometimes. It’s my white blood, I guess.”

Mitch and Morgan stood on the wide white-painted porch outside the office of James Jacobs, MD.

Morgan was agitated. He lit up the last of his pack of cigarettes and puffed with slit-eyed intent, then walked over to a rough-barked old maple and leaned against it.

Kaye had insisted after a lunch stop that they look up a family practice doctor in the white pages and take Delia in for a checkup. Delia had reluctantly agreed.

“We didn’t do anything criminal,” Morgan said. “We didn’t have no money, hey, and she had her baby and there we were.” He waved his hand up the road.

“Where was that?” Mitch asked.

“West Virginia. In the woods near a farm. It was pretty. A nice place to be buried. You know, I am so tired. I am so sick of them treating me like a flea-bitten dog.”

“The girls do that?”

“You know the attitude,” Morgan said. “Men are contagious. They rely on me, I’m always here for them, then they tell me I have real boy cooties, and that’s it, hey. No thanks, ever.”

“It’s the times,” Mitch said.

“It’s lame. Why are we living now and not some other time, not so lame?”

In the main examining room, Delia perched on the edge of the table, legs dangling. She wore a white flower-print open-backed robe. Jayce sat in a chair across from her, reading a pamphlet on smoking-related illnesses. Dr. Jacobs was in his sixties, thin, with a close-cut and tightly curled patch of graying hair around a tall and noble dome. His eyes were large, and both wise and sad. He told the girls he would be right back, then let his assistant, a middle-aged woman with a bun of fine auburn hair, enter the room with a clipboard and pencil. He closed the door and turned to Kaye.

“No relation?” he asked.

“We picked them up east of here. I thought she should see a doctor.”

“She says she’s nineteen. She doesn’t have any ID, but I don’t think she’s nineteen, do you?”

“I don’t know much about her,” Kaye said. “I’m trying to help them, not get them in trouble.”

Jacobs cocked his head in sympathy. “She gave birth less than a week or ten days ago. No major trauma, but she tore some tissue, and there’s still blood on her leggings. I don’t like to see kids living like animals, Ms. Lang.”

“Neither do I.”

“Delia says it was a Herod’s baby and that it was born dead. Second-stage, by the description. I see no reason not to believe her, but these things should be reported. The baby should have undergone a postmortem. Laws are being put in place right now, at the federal level, and Ohio is going along…She said she was in West Virginia when she delivered. I understand West Virginia is showing some resistance.”

“Only in some ways,” Kaye said, and told him about the blood test requirements.

Jacobs listened, then pulled a pen from his pocket and nervously clicked it with one hand. “Ms. Lang, I wasn’t sure who you were when you came in this afternoon. I had Georgina get on the Web and find some news pictures. I don’t know what you’re doing in Athens, but I’d say you know more about this sort of thing than I do.”

“I might not agree,” Kaye said. “The marks on her face…”

“Some women acquire dark markings during pregnancy. It passes.”

“Not like these,” Kaye said. “They tell us she had other skin problems.”

“I know.” Jacobs sighed and sat on the corner of his desk. “I have three patients who are pregnant, probably with Herod’s second-stage. They won’t let me do amnio or any kind of scans. They’re all churchgoing women and I don’t think they want to know the truth. They’re scared and they’re under pressure. Their friends shun them. They aren’t welcome in church. The husbands won’t come in with them to my office.” He pointed to his face. “They all have skin stiffening and coming loose around the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the corners of the mouth. It won’t just peel away…not yet. They’re shedding several layers of facial corium and epidermis.” He made a face and pinched his fingers together, tugging at an imaginary flap of skin. “It’s a little leathery.

Ugly as sin, very scary. That’s why they’re nervous and that’s why they’re shunned. This separates them from their community, Ms. Lang. It hurts them. I make my reports to the state and to the feds, and I get no response back. It’s like sending messages into a big dark cave.”

“Do you think the masks are common?”

“I follow the basic tenets of science, Ms. Lang. If I’m seeing it more than once, and now this girl comes along and I see it again, from out of state…I doubt it’s unusual.” He looked at her critically. “Do you know anything more?”

She found herself biting her lip like a little girl. “Yes and no,” she said. “I resigned from my position on the Herod’s Taskforce.”

“Why?”

“It’s too complicated.”

“It’s because they’ve got it all wrong, isn’t it?”