Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Kaye had spent very little time looking back on her past, or gathering memorabilia. Now she regretted that. She wanted their baby to have a sense of what had happened. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she appeared almost peachlike in her health and vitality. Pregnancy was treating her very well.

As if she could not get enough of writing, recording, she had begun a diary three days ago, the first diary she had ever kept.

June 10

We spent last week preparing for the conference and looking for a house. Interest rates have gone through the roof, now at twenty-one percent, but we can afford something larger than the apartment, and Mitch isn ‘t particular. I am. Mitch is writing more slowly than I am, about the mummies and the cave, sending it page by page to Oliver Merton in New York, who is editing it, sometimes a little cruelly. Mitch takes it quietly, tries to improve. We have become so literary, so self-observant, maybe a little self-important, since there is not much else to keep us occupied.

Mitch is gone this afternoon talking to the new director of the Hayer, hoping to get reinstated. (He never travels more than twenty minutes from the apartment, and we bought another cell phone the day before yesterday. I tell him I can take care of myself, but he worries.)

He has a letter from Professor Brock describing the nature of the current controversy. Brock has been on a few talk shows. Some newspapers have carried the story, and Merton s piece in NATURE is drawing a lot of attention and a lot of criticism.

Innsbruck still holds all the tissue samples and will not comment or release, but Mitch is working on his friends at UWto get them to go public with what they know, to undermine Innsbruck’s secrecy. Merton believes the gradualists in charge of the mummies have at most another two or three months to prepare their reports and make them public, or they ‘II be removed, replaced, Brock hopes, by a a more objective team, and clearly he hopes to be in charge. Mitch might be on that team, too; though that seems too much to hope for.

Merton and Daney were unable to convince the New York Emergency Action Office to hold the conference in Albany. Something about 1845 and Governor Silas Wright and rent riots; they don’t want a repeat under this “experimental “ and “temporary “ Emergency Act.

We petitioned the Washington Emergency Action Office through Maria Konig at UW, and they allowed a two-day conference at Kane Hall, one hundred attendees maximum, all to be approved by the office. Civil liberties haven’t been completely forgotten, but almost. Nobody wants to call it martial law, and in fact the civil courts are still in full operation, but they work with approval of the Office in each state.

Nothing like it since 1942, Mitch says.

I feel spooky: healthy, vital, energetic, and I don’t look very pregnant. The hormones are the same, the effect the same.

I go in for my sonogram and scan tomorrow at Marine Pacific, and we ‘II do amnio and chorionic villi despite the risks because we want to know the character of the tissues.

The next step won’t be so easy.

Mrs. Hamilton, now I’m a lab rat, too.

Dicken propelled himself with one hand down the long corridor on the tenth floor of the Magnuson Clinical Center, spun around with what he hoped was true wheelchair grace — again, with one hand — and dimly saw the two men walking in his return path. The gray suit, the long, slow stride, the height, told him one of the men was Augustine. He did not know who the other might be.

With a low moan, he lowered his right hand and pushed himself toward the pair. As he got closer, he could see that Augustine’s face was healing well enough, though he would always have a slightly rugged look. What was not covered with the bandages of continuing plastic surgery, crossing his head laterally over his nose and in patches on both cheeks and temples, still bore the marks of shrapnel. Both of Augustine’s eyes had been spared. Dicken had lost one eye, and the other had been hazed by the heat of the blast.

“You’re still a sight, Mark,” Dicken said, braking with one hand and lightly dragging a slippered foot.

“Ditto, Christopher. I’d like you to meet Dr. Kelly Newcomb.”

They shook hands gingerly. Dicken sized up Newcomb for a moment, then said, “You’re Mark’s new traveler.”

“Yes,” Newcomb said.

“Congratulations on getting the appointment,” Dicken said to Augustine.

“Don’t bother,” Augustine said. “It’s going to be a nightmare.”

“Gather all the children under one umbrella,” Dicken said. “How’s Frank doing?”

“He’s leaving Walter Reed next week.”

Another silence. Dicken could think of nothing more to say. Newcomb folded his hands uncomfortably, then adjusted his glasses, pushing them up his nose. Dicken hated the silence, and just as Augustine was about to speak again, he broke in with, “They’re going to keep me for another couple of weeks. Another surgery on my hand. I’d like to get off the campus for a while, see what’s going on in the world.”

“Let’s go into your room and talk,” Augustine suggested.

“Be my guests,” Dicken said.

When they were inside, Augustine asked Newcomb to shut the door. “I’d like Kelly to spend a couple of days talking with you. Getting up to speed. We’re moving into a new phase. The president has put us under his discretionary budget.”

“Great,” Dicken said thickly. He swallowed and tried to bring up some spit to wet his tongue. Drugs for pain and antibiotics were playing hell with his chemistry.

“We’re not going to do anything radical,” Augustine said. “Everyone agrees we’re in an incredibly delicate state.”

“State with a capital S,” Dicken said.

“For the moment, no doubt,” Augustine said quietly. “I didn’t ask for this, Christopher.”

“I know,” Dicken said.

“But should any SHEVA children be born alive, we have to move quickly. I have reports from seven labs that prove SHEVA can mobilize ancient retroviruses in the genome.”

“It kicks around all manner of HERV and retrotrans-posons,” Dicken said. He had been trying to read the studies on a special viewer in the room. “I’m not sure they’re actually viruses. They may be—”

“Whatever you call them, they have the requisite viral genes,” Augustine interrupted. “We haven’t faced them for millions of years, so they’ll probably be pathogenic. What worries me now is any movement that might encourage woman to bring these children to term. There’s no problem in Eastern Europe and Asia. Japan has already started a prevention program. But here, we’re more cussed.”

That was putting it mildly. “Don’t cross that line again, Mark,” Dicken advised.

Augustine was in no mood for wise counsel. “Christopher, we could lose more than just a generation of children. Kelly agrees.”

“The work is sound,” Newcomb said.

Dicken coughed, controlled the spasm, but his face flushed with frustration. “What are we looking at…Internment camps? Concentration nurseries”?”

“We estimate there will be one or two thousand SHEVA children born alive in North America by the end of the year, at most. There may be none, zero, Christopher. The president has already signed an emergency order giving us custody if any are born alive. We’re working out the civil details now. God only knows what the E.U. is going to do. Asia is being very practical. Abortion and quarantine. I wish we could be so bold.”

“To me, this does not sound like a major health threat, Mark,” Dicken said. His throat caught again and he coughed. With his damaged eyesight, he could not make out Augustine’s expression behind the bandages.