Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“I doubt it hurts Mark as much as it hurts the mothers,” Bao said quietly.

”I’m an ignorant man, and I don’t understand a lot of things,” Sam said. He leaned on the split-rail fence that surrounded the four acres, the two-story frame farmhouse, an old and sagging barn, the brick workshed. Mitch pushed his free hand into his pocket and rested a can of Michelob on the lichen-grayed fence post. A square-rump, black-and-white cow cropping a patch of the neighbor’s twelve acres regarded them with an almost complete absence of curiosity. “You’ve only known this woman for what, two weeks?”

“Just over a month.”

“Some whirlwind!”

Mitch agreed with a sheepish look.

“Why be in such a hurry? Why in hell would anyone want to get pregnant, now of all times? Your mother’s been over her hot flashes for ten years, but after Herod’s, she’s still skittish about letting me touch her.”

“Kaye’s different,” Mitch said, as if admitting something. They had come to this topic on the backs of a lot of other difficult topics that afternoon. The toughest of all had been Mitch’s admission that he had temporarily given up looking for a job, that they would largely be living on Kaye’s money. Sam found this incomprehensible.

“Where’s the self-respect in that?” he had said, and shortly after they had dropped that subject and returned to what had happened in Austria.

Mitch had told him about meeting Brock at the Daney mansion, and that had amused Sam quite a bit. “It baffles science,” he had commented dryly. When they had gotten around to discussing Kaye, still talking with Mitch’s mother, Abby, in the large farmhouse kitchen, Sam’s puzzlement had blossomed into irritation, then downright anger.

“I admit I may be stuck in abysmal stupidity,” Sam said, “but isn’t it just damned dangerous to do this sort of thing now, deliberately?”

“It could be,” Mitch admitted.

“Then why in hell did you agree?”

“I can’t answer that easily,” Mitch said. “First, I think she could be right. I mean, I think she is right. This time around, we’ll have a healthy baby.”

“But you tested positive, she tested positive,” Sam said, glaring at him, hands gripping the rail tightly.

“We did.”

“And correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s never been a healthy baby born of a woman who tested positive.”

“Not yet,” Mitch said.

“That’s lousy odds.”

“She’s the one who found this virus,” Mitch said. “She knows more about it than anyone else on Earth, and she’s convinced—”

“That everyone else is wrong?” Sam asked.

“That we’re going to change our thinking in the next few years.”

“Is she crazy, then, or just a fanatic?”

Mitch frowned. “Careful, Dad,” he said.

Sam flung his hands up in the air. “Mitch, for Christ’s sake, I fly to Austria, the first time I’ve ever been to Europe, and it’s without your mother, damn it, to pick up my son at a hospital after he’s…Well, we’ve been through all that. But why face this kind of grief, take this kind of chance, I ask, in God’s name?”

“Since her first husband died, she’s been a little frantic about looking ahead, seeing things in a positive light,” Mitch said. “I can’t say I understand her, Dad, but I love her. I trust her. Something in me says she’s right, or I wouldn’t have gone along.”

“You mean, cooperated.” Sam looked at the cow and brushed his hands free of lichen dust on his pants legs. “What if you’re both wrong?” he asked.

“We know the consequences. We’ll live with them,” Mitch said. “But we’re not wrong. Not this time, Dad.”

“I’ve been reading as much as I can,” Abby Rafelson said. “It’s bewildering. All these viruses.” Afternoon sun fell through the kitchen window and lay in yellow trapezoids on the unvarnished oak floor. The kitchen smelled of coffee — too much coffee, Kaye thought, nerves on edge — and tamales, their lunch before the men had gone out walking.

Mitch’s mother had kept her beauty into her sixties, an authoritative kind of good looks that emerged from high cheekbones and deep-sunk blue eyes combined with immaculate grooming.

“These particular viruses have been with us a long time,” Kaye said. She held up a picture of Mitch when he was five years old, riding a tricycle on the Willamette riverfront in Portland. He looked intent, oblivious to the camera; sometimes she saw that same expression when he was driving or reading a newspaper.

“How long?” Abby asked.

“Maybe tens of millions of years.” Kaye picked up another picture from the pile on the coffee table. The picture showed Mitch and Sam loading wood in the back of a truck. By his height and thin limbs, Mitch appeared to be about ten or eleven.

“What were they doing there in the first place? I couldn’t understand that.”

“They might have infected us through our gametes, eggs or sperm. Then they stayed. They mutated, or something deactivated them, or…we put them to work for us. Found a way to make them useful.” Kaye looked up from the picture.

Abby stared at her, unfazed. “Sperm or eggs?”

“Ovaries, testicles,” Kaye said, glancing down again.

“What made them decide to come out again?”

“Something in our everyday lives,” Kaye said. “Stress, maybe.”

Abby thought about this for a few seconds. “I’m a college graduate. Physical education. Did Mitch tell you that?”

Kaye nodded. “He said you took a minor in biochemistry. Some premed courses.”

“Yes, well, not enough to be up to your level. More than enough to be dubious about my religious upbringing, however. I don’t know what my mother would have thought if she had known about these viruses in our sex cells.” Abby smiled at Kaye and shook her head. “Maybe she would have called them our original sin.”

Kaye looked at Abby and tried to think of a reply. “That’s interesting,” she managed. Why this should disturb her she did not know, but that it did upset her even more. She felt threatened by the idea.

“The graves in Russia,” Abby said quietly. “Maybe the mothers had neighbors who thought it was an outbreak of original sin.”

“I don’t believe it is,” Kaye said.

“Oh, I don’t believe it myself,” Abby said. She trained her examining blue eyes on Kaye now, troubled, darting. “I’ve never been very comfortable about anything to do with sex. Sam’s a gentle man, the only man I’ve felt passionate about, though not the only man I’ve invited into my bed. My upbringing…was not the best that way. Not the wisest. I’ve never talked with Mitch about sex. Or about love. It seemed he would do well enough on his own, handsome as he is, smart as he is.” Abby laid her hand on Kaye’s. “Did he tell you his mother was a crazy old prude?” She looked so sadly desperate and at a loss that Kaye gripped her hand tightly and smiled what she hoped was reassurance.

“He told me you were a wonderful mother and caring,” Kaye said, “and that he was your only son, and that you’d grill me like a pork chop.” She squeezed Abby’s hand tighter.

Abby laughed and something of the electricity fell from the air between them. “He told me you were headstrong and smarter than any woman he had ever met, and that you cared so much about things. He said I’d better like you, or he’d have a talk with me.”

Kaye stared at her, aghast. “He did not!”

“He did,” Abby said solemnly. “The men in this family don’t mince words. I told him I’d do my best to get along with you.”

“Good grief!” Kaye said, laughing in disbelief.