Darwin''s Radio

  “Goddamn it!” she shouted at the onlookers. “Why didn’t you try to stop them?”

  Neither Kaye nor Mitch had an answer.

  The young man in the black robe stumbled and fell between the two officers supporting him. His face, warped by pain and shock, flashed white as the clouds against the hard-packed dirt and yellow grass.

  73

  Seattle

  Mitch drove them south on the freeway to Capitol Hill, then turned off and headed east on Denny. The Buick chugged up the grade.

  “I wish we hadn’t seen that,” Kaye said.

  Mitch swore under his breath. “I wish we’d never even stopped.”

  “Is everybody crazy? It’s just too much,” Kaye said. “I can’t figure out where we stand in all this.”

  “We’re going back to the old ways,” Mitch said.

  “Like in Georgia.” Kaye pressed a knuckle against her lips and teeth.

  “I hate to have women blame men,” Mitch said. “It makes me want to throw up.”

  “I don’t blame anybody,” Kaye said. “But you have to admit, it’s a natural reaction.”

  Mitch shot her a scowl that bordered on a dirty look, the first such he had ever given her. She sucked in her breath privately, feeling both guilty and sad, and turned to look out her window, peering down the long straight stretch of Broadway: brick buildings, pedestrians, young men wearing green masks, walking with other men, and women walking with women.

  “Let’s forget about it,” Mitch said. “Let’s get some rest.”

  The second-floor apartment, neat and cool and a little dusty from Mitch’s long absence, overlooked Broadway and gave a view of the brick-front post office, a small bookstore, and a Thai restaurant. As Mitch carried the bags through the door, he apologized for clutter that did not exist, as far as Kaye was concerned.

  “Bachelor digs,” he said. “I don’t know why I kept up the lease.”

  “It’s nice,” Kaye said, running her fingers along the dark wood trim of the windowsill, the white enamel on the wall. The living room had been warmed by the sun and smelled slightly stuffy, not unpleasant, just closed in. With some difficulty, Kaye opened the window. Mitch stood beside her and closed the window slowly. “Gas fumes from the street,” he said. “There’s a window in the bedroom that looks out over the back of the building. Gets a good draft.”

  Kaye had thought that seeing Mitch’s apartment would be romantic, pleasant, that she would learn a lot about him, but it was so neat, so sparely furnished, that she felt let down. She examined the books in a ceiling-high case near the kitchen nook: textbooks on anthropology and archaeology, some tattered biology texts, a box full of science magazines and photocopies. No novels.

  “The Thai restaurant is good,” Mitch said, putting his arms around her as she stood before the bookcase.

  “I’m not hungry. This is where you did your research?”

  “Right here. Stroke of lightning. You were inspirational.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Want to just take a nap? There are beers in the refrigerator—”

  “Budweiser?”

  Mitch grinned.

  “I’ll take one,” Kaye said. He let go of her and rummaged in the refrigerator.

  “Damn. There must have been an outage. Everything in the freezer melted . . .” A cool sour smell wafted from the kitchen. “The beer’s still good, though.” He brought her a bottle and deftly unscrewed the cap. She took it and sipped it. Barely any flavor. No relief.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” Kaye said. She felt numb, far from anything that mattered. She carried her purse into the bathroom and removed the pregnancy kit. It was sweet and simple: two drops of urine on a test strip, blue if positive, pink if negative. Results in ten minutes.

  Suddenly, Kaye was desperate to know.

  The bathroom was immaculately clean. “What can I do for him?” she asked herself. “He lives his own life here.” But she put that aside and dropped the lid on the toilet to sit.

  In the living room, Mitch turned on the TV. Through the old solid-pine door Kaye heard muffled voices, a few stray words. “. . . also injured in the blast was the secretary—”

  “Kaye!” Mitch called.

  She covered the strip with a Kleenex and opened the door.

  “The president,” Mitch said, his face contorted. He pounded his fists at nothing. “I wish I’d never turned the damned thing on!”

  Kaye stood in the living room before the small television, stared at the announcer’s head and shoulders, her moving lips, the run of mascara from one eye. “The count so far is seven dead, including the governors of Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama, the president, a Secret Service agent, and two not yet identified. Among the survivors are the governors of New Mexico and Arizona, director of the Herod’s Taskforce Mark Augustine, and Frank Shawbeck of the National Institutes of Health. The vice president was not in the White House at this time—”

  Mitch stood beside her, shoulders slumped.

  “Where was Christopher?” Kaye asked in a small voice.

  “No explanation has yet been given for how a bomb could have been smuggled into the White House through such intense security. Frank Sesno is outside the White House now.”

  Kaye pushed free of Mitch’s arm. “Excuse me,” she said, patting his shoulder nervously. “Bathroom.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She shut the door and locked it, took a deep breath, and lifted away the Kleenex. Ten minutes had passed.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Mitch called outside the door.

  Kaye held the strip up to the light, looked at the two test patches. The first test showed blue. The second test showed blue. She read the instructions again, the color comparisons, and leaned an elbow against the door, feeling dizzy.

  “It’s done,” she said softly. She straightened and thought, This is a horrible time. Let it wait. Let it wait if you can possibly wait.

  “Kaye!” Mitch sounded close to panic. He needed her, needed some reassurance. She leaned on the sink, could barely stay upright, she felt such a mix of horror and relief and awe at what they had done, at what the world was doing.

  She opened the door and saw tears in Mitch’s eyes.

  “I didn’t even vote for him!” he said, his lips trembling.

  Kaye hugged him tightly. That the president was dead was significant, important, it mattered, but she could not feel it yet. Her emotions were elsewhere, with Mitch, with his mother and father, with her own absent mother and father; she felt even a mild concern for herself, but curiously enough, no real connection with the life inside her.

  Not yet.

  This was not the actual baby.

  Not yet.

  Don’t love it. Don’t love this one. Love what it does, what it carries.

  Quite against her will, as she held Mitch and patted his back, Kaye fainted. Mitch carried her into the bedroom, brought a cold cloth.

  She floated for a while in closed darkness, then became aware of a dryness in her mouth. She cleared her throat, opened her eyes.

  She looked up at her husband, tried to kiss his hand as it passed the cloth over her cheeks and chin.

  “Such a fool,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Me. I thought I’d be strong.”

  “You are strong,” Mitch said.

  “I love you,” she said, and that was all she could manage.

  Mitch saw that she was sound asleep and pulled the blanket over her on the bed, turned out the light, and returned to the living room. The apartment seemed so different now. Summer twilight glowed beyond the windows, casting a fairy-tale pallor over the opposite wall. He sat in the worn armchair before the TV, its muted sound still clear in the quiet room.

  “Governor Harris has declared a state of emergency and called out National Guard troops. A curfew of seven P.M. has been declared for weekdays, five P.M. for Saturday and Sunday, and if martial law is declared
at the federal level, we presume by the vice president, as seems very likely, then throughout the state, no groups will be allowed to gather in public places without special permission from the Emergency Action Office in each community. This official state of emergency is open-ended, and is in part, so officials say, a response to the situation in the nation’s capital, and in part an attempt to bring under control the extraordinary and continuing unrest in Washington state itself . . .”

  Mitch tapped the plastic test strip on his chin. He switched channels just to have a feeling of control.

  “. . . is dead. The president and five out of ten visiting state governors were killed this morning in the situation room of the White House—”

  And again, punching the button on the small remote.

  “. . . The governor of Alabama, Abraham C. Darzelle, leader of the so-called States’ Revolt movement, embraced the president of the United States just before the explosion. Both the governors of Alabama and Florida, and the president, were blown apart by the blast—”

  Mitch turned the TV off. He returned the plastic strip to the bathroom and went to lie beside Kaye. He did not pull the covers back and did not undress, to avoid disturbing her. Kicking off his shoes, he curled up with one leg laid gently over her blanketed thighs, and pushed his nose against her short brown hair. The smell of her hair and scalp was more soothing than any drug.

  For far too short a moment, the universe once again became small and warm and entirely sufficient.

  PART THREE

  STELLA

  NOVA

  74

  Seattle

  June

  Kaye arranged her papers on Mitch’s desk and picked up the manuscript for The Queen’s Library. Three weeks ago, she had decided to write a book about SHEVA, modern biology, all she felt the human race might need to know in the coming years. The title referred to her metaphor for the genome, with all of its ferment and movable elements and self-interested players, rendering service to the genome queen with one side of their nature, selfishly hoping to be installed in the Queen’s Library, the DNA; and sometimes putting on another face, another role, more selfish than useful, parasitic or predatory, causing trouble or even disaster . . . A political metaphor that seemed perfectly apt now.

  In the past two weeks, she had written over a hundred and sixty pages on her laptop computer, printing them out on a portable printer, partly as a way of getting her thoughts together before the convention.

  And to pass the time. The hours sometimes drag when Mitch is away.

  She knocked the papers together on the wood, satisfied by the solid thunk they made, then placed them before the picture of Christopher Dicken that stood in a small silver frame near a portrait of Sam and Abby. The last picture in her box of personal items was a black-and-white glossy of Saul, taken by a professional photographer on Long Island. Saul appeared able, grinning, confident, wise. They had sent copies of that picture with the business prospectus for EcoBacter to venture capital firms over five years ago. An age.

  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 UW to 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’ll 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’ll 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.

  75

  Building 10, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

  July

  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 m
y 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 retrotransposons,” 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?”