Darwin's Radio

  Sue was not with him. The truck’s brakes squealed as Jack stopped in the drive, just to one side of the van. Mitch walked over to talk as Jack opened the door. He did not get out.

  “How’s Sue?”

  “Still holding,” Jack said. “Chambers can’t use any drugs to get her going. Dr. Galbreath is watching things. We’re just waiting.”

  “We’d like to see her,” Mitch said.

  “She’s not happy. She snaps at me. Maybe tomorrow. Now I’m going to smuggle your friends back out on the old wash road.”

  “We appreciate this, Jack,” Mitch said.

  Jack blinked and turned down his lips, his way of shrugging. “There was a special meeting this afternoon,” he said. “That Cayuse woman is at us again. Some of the casino workers formed a little group. They’re mad. They say the quarantine is going to ruin us. They wouldn’t listen to me. They say I’m biased.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Sue calls them hotheads, but they’re hotheads with a real cause. I just wanted to let you know. We all got to be prepared.”

  Mitch and Kaye waved and watched their friends drive off down the road. Night settled over the country. Kaye sat in the last of the warmth in the folding chair under the oak tree, nursing Stella until it was time for a diaper change.

  Changing diapers never failed to bring Mitch down to earth. As he wiped his daughter clean, she sang sweetly, her voice like finches among windblown branches. Her cheeks and brow flushed almost red with her new comfort, and she gripped his finger tightly.

  He carried Stella around, swaying gently from his hips, and followed Kaye as she packed dirty diapers into a plastic bag to take them to the laundry. Kaye looked over her shoulder as they walked to the shed where the machines were kept. “What did Jack say?” she asked.

  Mitch told her.

  “We’ll live out of our bags,” she said matter-of-factly. She had been expecting worse. “Let’s pack them again tonight.”

  91

  Kumash County, Eastern Washington

  Mitch awoke from a sound and dreamless sleep and sat up in bed, listening. “What?” he murmured.

  Kaye lay beside him, motionless, snoring softly. He looked across the bed to Stella’s small shelf bolted against the wall, and the battery-powered clock that sat there, its hands glowing green in the dark. It was two-fifteen in the morning.

  Without thinking, he pushed down to the end of the bed and stood, naked except for his boxers, rubbing his eyes. He could have sworn somebody had said something, but the house was quiet. Then his heart started to race and he felt alarm pump through his arms and legs. He looked over his shoulder at Kaye, thought about waking her, and decided against it.

  Mitch knew he was going to check the house, make sure it was secure, prove to himself that nobody was walking around outside, preparing to lay an ambush. He knew this without thinking much about it, and he prepared by grabbing a piece of steel rebar he had stashed under the bed for just such an eventuality. He had never owned a gun, did not know how to use one, and wondered as he walked into the living room whether that was stupid.

  He shivered in the cold. The weather was turning cloudy; he could not see any stars through the window over the couch. He stumbled on a diaper pail in the bathroom. Then, abruptly, he knew he had been summoned from inside the house.

  He returned to the bedroom. Half in, half out of the shallow closet at the end of the bed, on Kaye’s side, the baby’s bassinet seemed somehow outlined in the dark.

  His eyes were growing more accustomed to the dark, but he was not sensing the bassinet with his eyes. He sniffed; his nose was running. He sniffed again and leaned over the bassinet, then recoiled and sneezed loudly.

  “What is it?” Kaye sat up in bed. “Mitch?”

  “I don’t know,” Mitch said.

  “Did you ask for me?”

  “No.”

  “Did Stella?”

  “She’s quiet. I think she’s asleep.”

  “Turn on the light.”

  That seemed sensible. He switched on the overhead light. Stella looked up at him from the bassinet, tawny eyes wide, her hands forming little fists. Her lips were parted, giving her a babyish, pouting Marilyn Monroe aspect, but she was silent.

  Kaye crawled to the end of the bed and looked down at their daughter.

  Stella made a small coo. Her eyes tracked them intently, going in and out of focus and sometimes crossing, as was her way. Still, it was obvious she was seeing them, and that she was not unhappy.

  “She’s lonely,” Kaye said. “I fed her an hour ago.”

  “So what is she, psychic?” Mitch asked, stretching. “Calling us with her mind?” He sniffed again, and again he sneezed. The bedroom window was closed. “What is it in here?”

  Kaye squatted before the bassinet and picked up Stella. She nuzzled her and then looked up at Mitch, her lips drawn back in an almost feral snarl. She sneezed, too.

  Stella cooed again.

  “I think she has colic,” Kaye said. “Smell her.”

  Mitch took Stella from Kaye. The baby squirmed and looked up at him, brows wrinkled. Mitch could have sworn she became brighter, and that someone was calling his name, either in the room or outside. Now he was really spooked.

  “Maybe she is out of Star Trek,” he said. He sniffed her again and his lips curled.

  “Right,” Kaye said skeptically. “She isn’t psychic.” Kaye took the baby, who was waving her fists, quite happy with the commotion, and carried her into the kitchen.

  “Humans aren’t supposed to have them, but a few years ago, scientists found that we do.”

  “Have what?” Mitch asked.

  “Active vomeronasal organs. At the base of the nasal cavity. They process certain molecules . . . vomerophrins. Like pheromones. My guess is, ours just got a whole lot better.” She hefted the baby on her hips. “Your lips drawing back—”

  “You did it, too,” Mitch said defensively.

  “That’s a vomeronasal response. Our family cat used to do that when she smelled something really interesting—a dead mouse or my mother’s armpit.” Kaye lifted the baby, who squealed softly, and sniffed at her head, her neck, her tummy. She sniffed behind the baby’s ears again. “Sniff here,” she said.

  Mitch sniffed, drew back, stifled a sneeze. He delicately felt behind Stella’s ears. She stiffened and started to be unhappy, giving little pre-crying gurks. “No,” she said quite distinctly. “No.”

  Kaye loosed her bra and gave Stella suck before she became really upset.

  Mitch withdrew his finger. The tip was slightly oily, as if he had touched behind the ear of a teenager, not a baby. But the oil was not precisely skin oil. It felt waxy and a little rough as he rubbed, and it smelled like musk.

  “Pheromones,” he said. “Or what did you call them?”

  “Vomeropherins. Baby-type come-hither. We have a lot to learn,” Kaye said sleepily as she carried Stella into the bedroom and lay down with her. “You woke up first,” Kaye murmured. “You always had a good nose. Good night.”

  Mitch felt behind his own ears and sniffed his finger. Abruptly, he sneezed again, and stood at the end of the bed, wide awake, his nose and palate tingling.

  It was no more than an hour after he managed to get back to sleep that he came awake again and jumped out of bed and instantly started slipping on his pants. It was still dark. He tapped Kaye’s foot with his hand.

  “Trucks,” he said. He had just finished buttoning the front of his shirt when someone banged on the front door. Kaye pushed Stella to the middle of the bed and quickly put on slacks and a sweater.

  Mitch opened the front door with his shirt cuffs still undone. Jack stood on the porch, his lips forming a hard, upside-down U, his hat pulled low, almost hiding his eyes. “Sue’s gone into labor,” he said. “I got to go back to the clinic.”

  “We’ll be right down,” Mitch said. “Is Galbreath there?”

  “She won’t be coming. You should get out of here
now. The trustees voted last night while I was with Sue.”

  “How—” Mitch began, and then saw the three trucks and seven men on the gravel and dirt of the front yard.

  “They decided the babies are sick,” Jack said miserably. “They want them taken care of by the government.”

  “They want their damned jobs back,” Mitch said.

  “They won’t talk to me.” Jack touched his mask with a strong, thick finger. “I persuaded the trustees to let you go. I can’t go with you, but these men will take you up a dirt road to the highway.” Jack held out his hands helplessly. “Sue wanted Kaye to be with her. I wish you could be there. But I gotta go.”

  “Thanks,” Mitch said.

  Kaye came up behind him, carrying the baby in the car seat. “I’m ready,” she said. “I want to go see Sue.”

  “No,” Jack said. “It’s that old Cayuse woman. We should have sent her to the coast.”

  “It’s more than her,” Mitch said.

  “Sue needs me!” Kaye cried.

  “They won’t let you into that part of town,” Jack said miserably. “Too many people. They heard it on the news—dead Mexicans near San Diego. No way. It’s hard, like stone, what they think now. They’ll go after us next, probably.”

  Kaye wiped her eyes in anger and frustration. “Tell her we love her,” she said. “Thanks for everything, Jack. Tell her.”

  “I will. I gotta go.”

  The seven men backed away as Jack walked to his truck and got in. He started the engine and spun out, throwing a plume of dust and gravel.

  “The Toyota’s in better shape,” Mitch said. He hefted their two suitcases to the trunk under the watchful eyes of the seven men. They muttered to each other and stayed well clear as Kaye carried Stella out in her arms and fastened her into the car seat in the back. Some of the men avoided her eyes and made small signs with their hands. She slid in beside the baby.

  Two of the pickups had gun racks and shotguns and hunting rifles. Her throat closed as she settled into the back of the Toyota beside Stella. She rolled up the window and buckled her seat belt and sat with the meaty sour smell of her own fear.

  Mitch carried out her laptop and box of papers and pushed them into the back of the trunk, then slammed the lid. Kaye was pushing buttons on her cell phone.

  “Don’t do that,” Mitch said gruffly as he got into the driver’s seat. “They’ll know where we are. We’ll call from a pay phone someplace when we’re on the highway.”

  Kaye’s dapples flared red for an instant.

  Mitch watched her with a stricken, wondering face. “We’re aliens,” he muttered. He started the engine. The seven men got into the three trucks and led them down the road.

  “You have any cash for gas?” Mitch asked.

  “In my purse,” Kaye said. “You don’t want to use credit cards?”

  Mitch avoided answering that. “We got almost a full tank.”

  Stella squalled briefly, then grew quiet as a pink dawn started over the low hills and behind the scattered oak trees. The overcast lay open and ragged on the horizon and they saw curtains of rain ahead. The dawn light was bright and unreal against the low black clouds.

  The dirt road north was rough but not impassable. The trucks accompanied them to the very end, where a sign marked the edge of the reservation and also, coincidentally, advertised the Wild Eagle Casino. Scrub and tumbleweeds lay sad and battered against a bent and twisted barbed wire fence.

  The thick underbellies of the clouds drizzled light rain on the windshield, turning the dust into wiper-whipped mud as they came off the dirt road, up an embankment, and onto the state highway heading east. A brilliant shaft of morning light, the last they saw that day, caught them like a searchlight as Mitch brought the Toyota up to speed on the two-lane asphalt.

  “I liked that place,” Kaye said, her voice rough. “I was happier in that trailer than I can remember ever being, anywhere else in my life.”

  “You thrive in adversity,” Mitch said, and reached over his shoulder to grasp her hand.

  “I thrive with you,” Kaye said. “With Stella.”

  92

  Northeastern Oregon

  Kaye walked back from the phone booth. They had parked in a strip mall parking lot in Bend to buy food at a market. Kaye had done the shopping and then had called Maria Konig. Mitch had stayed in the car with Stella.

  “Arizona still hasn’t set up an Emergency Action Office,” Kaye said.

  “What about Idaho?”

  “They have one as of two days ago. Canada, too.”

  Stella coo-whistled in her safety seat. Mitch had changed her a few minutes before and she usually performed for a short while afterward. He was almost getting used to her musical sounds. She was already adept at making two different notes at once, splitting one note away, raising and lowering it; the effect was uncannily like two theremins arguing. Kaye looked through the window. The baby seemed in another world, lost in discovering what sounds she could make.

  “They stared at me in the market,” Kaye said. “I felt like a leper. Worse, like a nigger.” She kicked out the word between clenched teeth. She shoved the grocery bag into the passenger seat and dug into it with a tense hand. “I took out money at the ATM and got food and then I got these,” she said, and pulled out bottles of makeup, foundation and powder. “For our dapples. I don’t know what I’ll do about her singing.”

  Mitch got behind the wheel.

  “Let’s go,” Kaye said, “before somebody calls the police.”

  “It isn’t that bad,” Mitch said as he started the car.

  “Isn’t it?” Kaye cried. “We’re marked! If they find us, they’ll put Stella in a camp, for Christ’s sake! God knows what Augustine has planned for us, for all the parents. Get sharp, Mitch!”

  Mitch pulled the car out of the parking lot in silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Kaye said, her voice breaking. “I’m sorry, Mitch, but I’m so frightened. We have to think, we have to plan.”

  Clouds followed them, gray skies and light rain without break. They crossed the border into California at night, pulled off onto a lonely dirt road, and slept in the car with rain drumming on the roof.

  Kaye applied makeup to Mitch in the morning. He clumsily painted her face with foundation and she touched up in the rearview mirror.

  “We’ll rent a room today in a motel,” Mitch said.

  “Why take the risk?”

  “We look pretty good, I think,” he said, smiling encouragement. “She needs a bath and so do we. We are not animals and I refuse to act like one.”

  Kaye thought about this as she nursed Stella. “All right,” she said.

  “We’ll go to Arizona, and then, if necessary, we’ll go to Mexico or even farther south. We’ll find someplace we can live until things get settled down.”

  “When will that be?” Kaye asked softly.

  Mitch did not know, so he did not answer. He drove back along the deserted farm road onto the highway. The clouds were breaking up now and brilliant morning light fell on the forests and fields of grass to either side of the highway.

  “Sun!” said Stella, and waved her fists lustily.

  EPILOGUE

  Tucson, Arizona

  Three Years Later

  A plump little girl with short brown hair and brown skin and sweated streaks of powder on her face stood in the alley and peered between the dust-colored garages. She whistled softly to herself, interweaving two variations of a Mozart piano trio. Someone who did not look too closely might have mistaken her for one of the many Latino children who played along the streets and ran through the alleys.

  Stella had never been allowed to go this far from the small house her parents rented, a few hundred steps away. The world of the alley was fresh. She sniffed the air lightly; she always did that, and she never found what she wanted to find.

  But she heard the excited voices of children playing, and that was enticement enough. She walked on red concrete squares
along the stucco side wall of a small garage, pushed open a swinging metal gate, and saw three children tossing a half-inflated basketball in a small backyard. The children paused their game and stared at her.

  “Who are you?” asked a black-haired girl, seven or eight.

  “Stella,” she answered clearly. “Who are you?”

  “We’re playing here.”

  “Can I play?”

  “You got a dirty face.”

  “It comes off, look,” and Stella wiped at the powder with her sleeve, leaving fleshy stains on the cloth. “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”

  A boy about ten looked her over critically. “You got spots,” he said.

  “They’re freckles,” Stella said. Her mother had told her to tell people that.

  “Sure, you can play,” said a second girl, also ten. She was tall and had long skinny legs. “How old are you?”

  “Three.”

  “You don’t sound three.”

  “I can read and whistle, too. Listen.” She whistled the two tunes together, watching their reactions with interest.

  “Jesus,” the boy said.

  Stella felt proud at his amazement. The tall skinny girl threw her the ball and Stella caught it deftly and smiled. “I love this,” she said, and her face flushed a lovely shade of pale beige and gold. The boy stared after her with jaw agape, then sat down to watch as the girls played together on the dry summer grass. A sweet musky scent followed Stella wherever she ran.

  Kaye searched all the rooms and the closets frantically, twice, calling out her daughter’s name. She had been absorbed reading a magazine article after putting Stella down for a nap and had not heard the girl leave. Stella was smart and not likely to walk out into a road or get into any obvious danger, but the neighborhood was poor and there was still strong prejudice against children like her, and fear about the diseases that sometimes followed in the wake of SHEVA pregnancies.

  The diseases were real; ancient recurrences of old retroviruses, sometimes fatal. Christopher Dicken had discovered that in Mexico three years ago, and it had almost cost him his life. The danger passed a few months after birth, but Mark Augustine had been right. Nature was never other than two-faced about her gifts.