Darwin's Children

1

FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND

Kaye stared into Mrs. Rhine’s darkened living room. The furniture had been rearranged in bizarre ways; a couch overturned, covered with a sheet, the bumps of its legs pointing into the air and pillows arranged in a cross on the floor around it; two wooden chairs leaning face-forward against the wall in a corner as if they were being punished.

Small white cardboard boxes covered the coffee table.

Freedman tapped the intercom button. “Carla, we’re here. I’ve brought Kaye Lang Rafelson.”

Mrs. Rhine walked briskly through the door, took a chair from a corner, swung it into the center of the room, two yards from the thick window, and sat. She wore plain blue denim coveralls. Gauze covered her arms and hands and most of her face. She wore a kerchief, and it did not look as if she had any hair. The little flesh that showed was red and puffy. Her eyes were intense between the mummy folds of gauze.

“I’ll turn my lights down,” she said, her voice clear and almost etched over the intercom. “You turn yours up. No need to look at me.”

“All right,” Freedman said, and brightened the lights in the viewing room.

The lights in Mrs. Rhine’s living room darkened until they could see her only in silhouette. “Welcome to my home, Dr. Rafelson,” she said.

“I was pleased to get your message,” Kaye said.

Freedman folded her arms and stood back.

“Christopher Dicken used to bring flowers,” Mrs. Rhine said. Her movements were awkward, jerky. “I can’t have flowers now. Once a week I have to go into a little closet and they send a robot in here to scrub everything. They have to get rid of all the little house-dust things. Fungus and bacteria and such that might grow from old flakes of skin. They can kill me now, if they build up in here.”

“I appreciated the letter you sent me.”

“The Web is my life, Kaye. If I may call you Kaye.”

“Of course.”

“I seem to know you, Christopher has spoken of you so often. I don’t get too many visitors now. I’ve forgotten how to react to real people. I type on my clean little keyboard and travel all around the world, but I never go anywhere or touch or see anything, really. I thought I had gotten used to it, but then I just got angry again.”

“I can imagine,” Kaye said.

“Tell me what you imagine, Kaye,” Mrs. Rhine said, head jerking.

“I imagine you feel robbed.”

The dark shadow nodded. “My whole family. That’s why I wrote to you. When I read what happened to your husband, to your daughter, I thought, she’s not just a scientist, or a symbol of a movement, or a celebrity. She’s like me. But of course you can get them back, someday.”

“I am always trying to get back my daughter,” Kaye said. “We still search for her.”

“I wish I could tell you where she is.”

“So do I,” Kaye said, swallowing within the hood. The air flow in the stiff isolation suit was not the best.

“Have you read Karl Popper?” Mrs. Rhine asked.

“No, I never have,” Kaye said, and arranged a plastic wrinkle around her midriff. She noticed then that the suit was patched with something like duct tape. This distracted her for a moment; she had heard that funding had been cut, but she had not fully realized the implications.

“… says that a whole group of philosophers and thinkers, including him, regard the self as a social appurtenance,” Mrs. Rhine said. “If you are raised away from society, you do not develop a full self. Well, I am losing my self. I feel uncomfortable using the personal pronoun. I would go mad, but I… this thing I am…” She stopped. “Marian, I need to speak with Kaye privately. At least let me believe nobody is listening or recording us.”

“I’ll check with the technician.” Freedman spoke briefly with the safety technician. She then moved gingerly out of the viewing room, the umbilical coiling behind her. The door closed.

“Why are you here?” Mrs. Rhine asked in a low voice, barely audible. Kaye could see the reflections in the woman’s eyes from the brighter lights behind the glass.

“Because of your message. And because I thought it was time that I meet you.”

“You’re not here to reassure me that they’ll find a cure? Because some people come through here and say that and I hate it.”

“No,” Kaye said.

“Why, then? Why speak with me? I send e-mail letters to lots of people. I don’t think most of them get through. I’m surprised you got yours, actually.”

Marian Freedman had made sure of that.

“You wrote that you felt you were getting smarter and more distant,” Kaye said, “but you were losing your self.” She stared at the shadowy figure in the dark room. The eczema had gotten very bad, so Kaye had been told in the briefing before joining Marian Freedman. “I’d like to hear more,” Kaye said.

Suddenly, Mrs. Rhine leaned forward. “I know why you’re here,” she said, her voice rising.

“Why?” Kaye asked.

“We’ve both had the virus.”

A moment’s silence.

“I don’t get you,” Kaye said softly.

“Ascetics sit on pillars of rock to avoid human touch. They wait for God. They go mad. That is me. I’m Saint Anthony, but the devils are too smart to waste their time gibbering at me. I am already in hell. I don’t need them to remind me. I have changed. My brain feels bigger but it’s also like a big warehouse filled with empty boxes. I read and try to fill up the boxes. I was so stupid, I was just a breeder, the virus punished me for being stupid, I wanted to live so I took the pig tissue inside of me and that was forbidden, wasn’t it? I’m not Jewish but pigs are powerful creatures, very spiritual, don’t you think? I am haunted by them. I’ve read some ghost stories. Horror stories. Very scary, about pigs. I’m talking a mile a minute, I know. Marian listens, the others listen, but it’s a chore for them. I scare them, I think. They wonder how long I’ll last.”

Kaye’s stomach was so tense she could taste the acid in her throat. She felt so much for the woman beyond the glass, but could not think of anything to say or do to comfort her. “I’m still listening,” she said.

“Good,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to die soon. I can feel it in my blood. So will you, though maybe not so soon.”

Mrs. Rhine stood and walked around the overturned and shrouded couch.

“I have these nightmares. I escape from here somehow and walk around and touch people, trying to help, and I just end up killing everybody. Then, I visit with God… and I make Him sick. I kill God. The devil says to Him, ‘I told You so.’ He’s mocking God while’s He’s dying, and I say, Good for you.”

“Oh,” Kaye said, swallowing. “That isn’t the way it is. It isn’t going to be that way.”

Mrs. Rhine waved her arms at the window. “You can’t possibly understand. I’m tired.”

Kaye wanted to say more, but could not.

“Go now, Kaye,” Carla Rhine insisted.

Kaye sipped a cup of coffee in Marian Freedman’s small office. She was crying so hard her shoulders were shaking. She had held back while removing the suit and showering, while taking the elevator, but now, it could not be stopped. “That wasn’t good,” she managed to say between sobs. “I didn’t handle that at all well.”

“Nothing we do matters, not for Carla,” Freedman said. “I don’t know what to say to her, either.”

“I hope it won’t set her back.”

“I doubt it,” Freedman said. “She is strong in so many ways. That’s part of the cruelty. The others are quiet. They have their habits. They’re like hamsters. Forgive me, but it’s true. Carla is different.”

“She’s become sacred,” Kaye said, straightening in the plastic chair and taking another Kleenex from the floral box on Freedman’s desk. She wiped her eyes and shook her head.

“Not sacred,” Freedman insisted, irritated. “Cursed, maybe.”

“She says she’s dying.”

Freedman looked at the far wall. “She’s producing new types of retroviruses, very together, elegant little things, not the patchwork monstrosities she used to make. They don’t contain any pig genes whatsoever. None of these new viruses are infectious, or even pathogenic, as far as we can tell, but they’re really playing hell with her immune system. The other ladies… the same.”

Marian Freedman focused on Kaye. Kaye studied her dark, drained eyes with a growing sense of dismay.

“Last time Christopher Dicken was through here, he worked with me on some samples,” Freedman said. “In less than a year, maybe only a few months, we think all our ladies will start showing symptoms of multiple sclerosis, possibly lupus.” Freedman worked her lips, fell silent, but kept looking at Kaye.

“And?” Kaye said.

“He thinks the symptoms have nothing to do with pig-tissue transplants. The ladies may just be accelerated a little. Mrs. Rhine could be the first to experience post-SHEVA syndrome, a side effect of SHEVA pregnancy. It could be pretty bad.”

Kaye let that information sink in, but could not find any emotion to attach to it—not after seeing Carla Rhine. “Christopher didn’t tell me.”

“Well, I can see why.”

Kaye deliberately switched her thoughts, a survival tactic at which she had become adept in the last decade. “I’m flying out to California to meet with Mitch. He’s still searching for Stella.”

“Any signs?” Freedman asked.

“Not yet,” Kaye said.

She got up and Freedman held up a special disposal basket marked “Biohazard” to receive her tear-dampened tissue. “Carla might behave very differently tomorrow. She’ll probably tell me how glad she is you dropped by. She’s just that way.”

“I understand,” Kaye said.

“No, you don’t,” Freedman said.

Kaye was in no mood. “Yes, I do,” she said firmly.

Freedman studied her for a moment, then gave in with a shrug. “Pardon my bad attitude,” she explained. “It’s become an epidemic around here.”

Kaye boarded a plane in Baltimore within two hours, heading for California, denying the sun its chance to rest. Scents of ice and coffee and orange juice wafted from a beverage cart being pushed down the aisle. As she sat watching a news report on the federal trials of former Emergency Action officials, she clamped her teeth to keep them from chattering. She was not cold; she was afraid.

Nearly all of her life, Kaye had believed that understanding biology, the way life worked, would lead to understanding herself, to enlightenment. Knowing how life worked would explain it all: origins, ends, and everything in between. But the deeper she dug and the more she understood, the less satisfying it seemed, all clever mechanism; wonders, no doubt, enough to mesmerize her for a thousand lifetimes, but really nothing more than an infinitely devious shell.

The shell brought birth and consciousness, but the price was the push-pull of cooperation and competition, partnership and betrayal, success causing another’s pain and failure causing your own pain and death, life preying upon life, dragging down victim after victim. Vast slaughters leading to adaptation and more cleverness, temporary advantage; a never-ending process.

Viruses contributed to both birth and disease: genes traveling and talking to each other, speaking the memories and planning the changes, all the marvels and all the failures, but never escaping the push-pull. Nature is a bitch goddess.

The sun came through the window opposite and fell brilliant on her face. She closed her eyes. I should have told Carla what happened to me. Why didn’t I tell her?

Because it’s been three years. Fruitless, painful years. And now this.

Carla Rhine had given up on God. Kaye wondered if she had as well.

2

CENTRAL CALIFORNIA

Mitch adjusted his tie in the old, patchy mirror in the dingy motel room. His face looked comical in the reflection, tinted yellow around his left eye, spotted black near his right cheek, a crack separating neck and chin. The mirror told him he was old and worn out and coming apart, but he smiled anyway. He would be seeing his wife for the first time in two weeks, and he was looking forward to spending time alone with her. He did not care about his appearance because he knew Kaye did not care much, either. So he wore the suit, because all his other clothes were dirty and he had not had time to take them down to the little outbuilding and plug dollar coins into the washing machine.

The rumpled queen-sized bed was scattered with half-folded maps and charts and pieces of paper with phone numbers and addresses, an imposing pile of clues that so far had gotten him nowhere. In the last three years of searching across the state, and finally zeroing in on Lone Pine, it seemed no one had seen Stella, no one had seen any youngsters traveling, and most certainly no one had seen any virus children playing hooky from school.

Stella had vanished.

Mitch could locate with stunning insight a cluster of men who had died twenty thousand years ago, but he could not find his seventeen-year-old daughter.

He pinched the tie higher and grimaced, then turned out the bathroom light and went to the door. Just as he opened the door, a young-looking man in a sweatshirt and gray windbreaker, with long blond hair, pulled back a knocking fist.

“Sorry,” the man said. “Are you Mitch?”

“Can I help you?”

“The manager says maybe I can help you.” He tapped his nose and winked.

“What’s that mean?”

“You don’t remember me?”

“No,” Mitch said, impatient.

“I deliver hardware and electrical supplies. I can’t smell a thing, never have, and I can’t taste much, either. They call it anosmia. I don’t like the taste of food much, and that’s why I stay skinny.”

Mitch shrugged, still at a loss.

“You’re looking for a girl, right? A Shevite?”

Mitch had never heard that word before. The sound of it—a right sound—gave him gooseflesh. He reappraised the thin young man. There was something familiar about him.

“I’m the only one my boss, Ralph, will send to deliver supplies, because all the other guys come back confused.” He tapped his nose again. “Not me. They can’t make me forget to pick up the money. So they pay us, and since I treat them with respect, they pay well, with bonuses. See?”

Mitch nodded. “I’m listening.”

“I like them,” the young man said. “They’re good folks, and I don’t want anybody to go up there and make trouble. I mean, what they do is sort of legal now, and it’s a big business around here.” He peered off into the bright morning sunshine heating up the small asphalt parking lot, the grassy field, and the scattered pines beyond.

“I’m interested in any information,” Mitch said, stepping out onto the porch, careful now not to spook the man. “She’s my daughter. My wife and I have been looking for her for three years.”

“Cool,” the man said, shuffling his feet. “I have a little girl myself. I mean, she’s with her mother, and we’re not married—” He suddenly looked alarmed. “I don’t mean she’s a virus kid, no, not at all!”

“It’s okay,” Mitch said. “I’m not prejudiced.”

The man looked strangely at Mitch. “Don’t you recognize me? I mean, okay, it’s been a long time. I thought I remembered you, and now that I see you, it’s all as clear as yesterday. Strange, how people come back together, isn’t it?”

Mitch made little motions of shoulder and head to show he still wasn’t clued in.

“Well, it might not have been you… but I’m pretty sure it was, because I saw your wife’s picture in the paper a few months later. She’s a famous scientist, isn’t she?”

“She is,” Mitch said. “Look, I’m sorry…”

“You picked up some hitchhikers a long time ago. Two girls and a guy. That was me, the guy.” He pointed a skinny finger at his own chest. “One of the girls had just lost a baby. They were called Delia and Jayce.”

Mitch’s face slowly went blank, with both astonishment and memory. He was surprised, but he remembered almost everything, perhaps because it had taken place in another small motel.

“Morgan?” he asked, stooping as if his arms were dragged down by weights.

The man broke into the broadest grin Mitch had seen in months. “Bless you,” Morgan said. There were actually tears in his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, shuffling his feet and backing off into the sunshine. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. “It’s just, after all these years… I’m sorry. I’m acting stupid. I am really grateful to you guys.”

Mitch reached out to save Morgan from falling off the curb. He pulled Morgan gently back into the shadow, and then, spontaneously, two men who had been through a lot over the years, they hugged. Mitch laughed despite himself. “Goddamnit, Morgan, how are you?”

Morgan accepted the hug but not the profanity. “Hey,” he said. “I’m with Jesus now.”

“Sorry,” Mitch said. “Where’s my daughter? What can you tell me? I mean, sounds like you’ve run into a group of people who don’t want to be found.” He felt the questions lining up, refusing to be slowed, much less stopped. “SHEVA people. Shevites, is that what you called them? How many? A commune? How did you find out I was looking for my daughter?”

“Like I said, the manager in the motel, he’s my girlfriend’s uncle. I deliver hardware to the garage he runs up on North Main. He told me. I wondered if it was you. You made some impression on me.”

“You want to take me out there, just in case I can’t be trusted?”

“I’m pretty sure you can be trusted, but… it’s hard to find. I’d like to take you there, just in case it is your daughter. I don’t know who she is, understand? But if she is out there… I’d like to return a favor.”

“I understand,” Mitch said. “Would you like to take my wife along, too? She’s the famous one.”

“Is she here?” Morgan asked, preparing to be stunned and shy again.

“She’ll be here in a couple of hours. I’m picking her up at the airport in Las Vegas.”

“Kaye Lang?”

“That’s her.”

“Wow!” Morgan said. “I’ve been watching the Senate hearings, the court stuff. When I’m not working. You know, I saw her on Oprah? That was a long time ago, I was still just a kid. But I really can’t promise anything.”

“We’ll go on faith,” Mitch said, happier than he had been in he did not remember how long. “Had some breakfast?”

“Hey, I earn my keep now,” Morgan said, straightening and sticking his finger tips into the pockets of his jeans. “I’ll buy you breakfast. What goes round, comes round.”

In the room, Mitch’s data phone rang. He half-closed the door as he loped to pick it up from the bed. Mitch pinched open the phone’s display door. The call was from Kaye. “Hello, Kaye! Guess—”

“I’m on the plane. What an awful, awful morning. I really need to hold someone,” Kaye said. Her image in the little screen looked pale. He could see a high seat back and people sitting behind her. “I need some good news, Mitch.”

He held back for a second, hand trembling, knowing how many times there had been false hopes. He did not want to add yet another disappointment.

“Mitch?”

“I’m here. I was just going out the door.”

“I just couldn’t stand not talking to you. Flight’s half full.”

“I think we’ve got something,” Mitch said, his voice rough and throat tight around the words. You know it’s right. You know this is it.

“Is that Dr. Lang? Say ‘hi!’” Morgan called brightly from the motel porch outside the door.

“What is it?” Kaye tried to make out Mitch’s expression on the little screen. “Is it a detective? Do we have that kind of money left?”

“Just get here safe. I’ve found an old friend. Or, rather, he’s found me.”

3

Lake Stannous

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

The air fell away from the heat of the afternoon. Through the pines Stella Nova could see thunderheads rising in silent, self-involved billows over the White Mountains. The woods were dry and full of the fragrances of lodgepole, spruce, and fir.

She had finished doing her share of the laundry in the big old concrete washhouse near the center of Oldstock. Now she sat on an empty oil drum beside the long lines hung with sun-drenched linens and underwear and some diapers and work clothes, smelling the laundry soap and bleach and steam, sipping a black cherry soda—a rare luxury here, she allowed herself only one a week—and thinking, kicking her feet back and forth, scuffing the concrete slab around the washhouse with her clogs.

From where she sat, she could see the gravel turnaround beside the old abandoned bowling alley, painted gray decades ago, the paint now peeling; three long dark redwood-stained dormitories that used to house seminary students and pilgrims and a few tourists; and up north of that, the fuel cell and solar station that ran the medical center and nursery. Beyond the station and an old fenced-in compound for storing mining equipment stretched a debris field dominated by a small mountain of tailings. The mountain marked the old mine and made that end of the camp a no-man’s-land of heavy metals and cyanide. No one walked there unless they had to; sometimes after a heavy rain she could smell the poison in the air, but it wasn’t bad enough to make them sick, unless they did something stupid.

In the middle of the last century, humans had mined copper and tin and even some gold at Oldstock, and built a little town—that was where the bowling alley and the seminary buildings had come from. South of town, just off the main road down to the shore of Lake Stannous, you could find weed-grown streets and concrete foundations where houses had once stood, built by Condite Copper Company to house miners’ families. In the woods Stella had come across old refrigerators and washing machines and piles of bottles and bigger junk, abandoned steam and diesel engines like big iron spaceships, squat dark hopper cars, stacks of iron rails orange with rust, and creosote-dipped cross ties glistening with black beads from years in the sun.

Oldstock was a designated Superfund site, located on the north end of Lake Stannous, where fishing was poor, and that combination kept most humans away. But Oldstock was beautiful, and as long as it did not rain too much, the tailings did not wash out into the lake and the village’s water was fine. So far, they had been lucky. The weather had been dry for twenty years, ever since Mr. and Mrs. Sakartvelo had bought the place from a Lutheran church group.

Sakartvelo was not their real name. They had been immigrants from the FSU, the Former Soviet Union, the part now called the Republic of Georgia. The name they had adopted was the name of their country the way the natives said it. They had been hiding here for almost twenty years, knowing others would arrive eventually.

Five years ago, the others had started arriving, and the town had slowly come alive once more.

Mr. and Mrs. Sakartvelo were in their sixties. Physically, they were obvious Shevites. They said others like them—not many—went back over two hundred years in Georgia and Armenia and Turkey. Stella Nova saw no reason not to believe them. Mitch had talked about such things.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, turning her face like a flower to soak up more sun before it dipped behind the trees. She listened for red-winged blackbirds and jays, mockingbirds and robins. Her cheeks freckled with butterflies of contentment.

A game for the younger kids was Rawshock—freckling up in symmetrical patterns and guessing what they meant. It trained them at cheek flashing. Some came to Oldstock freckle-dumb, with no knowledge of how to communicate with their own kind. Slowly, they learned. Stella and others taught the young ones.

The woods had been full of ticks this summer—and deer, as well—but ticks and even mosquitoes did not bother them much. The Sakartvelos taught them how to use fever-scenting to keep biting insects away, and also how to soothe animals—black bears in particular—that they might encounter. The two hundred Shevites in Oldstock were the only inhabitants for ten miles, and the woods were wild.

And of course, the Sakartvelos had taught the children how to keep Oldstock a secret, and trained them in what to do if humans came looking for them.

They had been taught well. No one had ever been taken away, and no one had ever been hurt—by animals or humans. Life had been pretty good, and Stella had started to forget the bad times and even the times with Mitch and Kaye, the good times, though sad. She had started to believe there was a life to live, rooted and real, among her own kind.

Then, Will had gone wrong.

Some still had nightmares of the schools and of living among humans. Stella did not dream about such things. Will had not been so lucky. He had hidden many things from all of them, things he had experienced, that had happened to him.

There were no radios or televisions in Oldstock, no telephones except for a single satellite phone in the main meeting hall, kept locked in a cabinet. It had not been used since Stella and Will had arrived, and probably not for a long time before that.

A breeze made the sheets and diapers flap. Stella wiped sweat from her forehead, got up, and started taking down and folding the dry pieces. She stacked them in a plastic tub and scented the tub by touching the ball of her thumb behind her ear and rubbing the handle.

Randolph—the only Randolph in Oldstock, so she did not know his human last name—came up and sparked a greeting. Randolph was four years younger than Stella, what some called an off-born, not part of the Waves. Those born during the three big Waves were called boomers, she did not know why. They talked with just their faces for a while as they plucked and folded pillowcases and dungarees and diapers. They exchanged pleasantries and imitated the scents of others, a kind of joking gossip that passed the time.

Randolph was being brought into the Blackbird Deme, not Stella’s but an offshoot of her group. They could talk openly about deme business, but not about personal affairs within the demes. That required triples, to prevent misunderstanding between the demes: three figures from each deme, engaging in full fever-scenting and sparking and facing. Triples looked like a weird dance to outsiders, but they solved a lot of problems and kept friction way down.

Oldstock had two children from the most recent Wave, foundlings aged two years and twenty-six months respectively. Stella cared for them sometimes in preparation, in training, and enjoyed their wild toddler scenting. Shevite infants raised among their own kind got enthusiastic sometimes and could emit a rank odor like dead skunks, and not from their dirty diapers.

Shevite babies knew how to swear with scent long before they could talk.

Everyone was learning. Fortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Sakartvelo were far from tyrants. They had been sterilized by the Communists in Tbilisi in the 1960s and could not have children of their own. In a strange way, that made them perfect to be everyone’s Shevite godparents, their guides in small, cloistered Oldstock.

Randolph finished folding a good share of the laundry and palmed Stella’s cheek in a brotherly fashion, with just a hint of the Question that the young males often asked, even of someone in her condition. Even of someone who still had a partner.

Stella responded with a little warning grumble under her throat and a polite chirrup. They smiled and parted, having spoken not a single word. Stella could go for days without speaking, and though sometimes she shouted out loud in her sleep, she could never recall why on waking.

Supper was being served in the refectory for those who had been cutting wood and planing boards starting early that morning. Males and females came out of the fresheners, stalls where they rubbed down with wet towels to take off the sweat—otherwise, most showered less than once a week. Cutting or hiding scent was considered rude. Smelling like heavy labor, however, could also hide scent.

Mr. Sakartvelo had told them, “We’re all French, at heart.” Stella did not know precisely what he meant. In France, Shevites were employed in perfume factories, they had heard. Maybe that was his meaning.

She felt so ignorant. She was hungry much of the time now, so she stood in line with the workers, hands on her stomach, trying to feel the shape beneath, but there was hardly even a bulge yet. Feeling her stomach made her a little sad. A cup of coffee would help. Caffeine made the day easier. Shevites reacted so strongly to caffeine that coffee and tea and even chocolate were only allowed between the hours of ten and five.

Stella’s mind raced all the time even without coffee. Half the time she wanted to cry, the other half just to suck it back and get on with the hours of each day and what they could bring. So much work to do. Months and years could go by and still she could not fit herself in completely. All those years away from her kind… Had they handicapped her, made her more human than Shevite?

But there were sweet moments, classes with the younger boomers and especially the babies.

She took her tray from the food line and walked into the refectory, large and quiet, twelve workers off duty, none speaking, gesturing and facing and flashing, pleasant odors of cocoa and yogurt and even jasmine—somebody was being very pleasant—mingled together and out of context at this distance, like words pulled out of a conversation and tossed together randomly, the discourse going on at the old wooden tables and benches.

Stella sat by herself, which she did often enough to elicit comments, kindly meant but a little critical. She ate her bowl of canned kidney beans and sprinkled or dribbled in the extra spices and flavorings that Shevites enjoyed, Indian black salt, extracts of broccoli raab and sour anchovy sauce.

Luce Ramone sat down beside her with a bowl of chips. Luce was more talkative than others, and Stella greeted her with a smile that showed some need.

“What, you want a chatty person?” Luce asked. She was a year younger than Stella, from the tail end of the first boomers, small for a Shevite and pale of skin, with thick black hair that tended to bristle. She smelled wonderful, however, and attracted much attention from males hoping to be peripheral to her deme. Stella’s deme and Luce’s were currently in merger, coalescing but still keeping their bounds. Nobody knew where that might lead, or what it might mean to the domestic anglers, hopeful males and females in either deme.

“I’d love a chatty person,” Stella said.

“Hair of the human/ I’m your girl. You’re down/ looking stretched.”

“I’m thoughtful.”

Both were cheek-flashing, but speech over and under was dominant for the time being.

“Joe Siprio, you know him?”

“Will’s friend,” Stella said.

“He’s angling for me. Should I?”

“No way/ too young,” Stella said.

“You were angled at my age/ hypocrite.”

“Look what happened to me.” Not emphasized, but standing alone, no under.

“He’s a total cheer-fly,” Luce said with a musing glance. “Our bodies like each other.”

“What’s that got to do with a cat’s fart?” Stella asked, irritated. “You’re moth. You need to rise to bee.” Moth and bee were names for two levels of menarche in the Shevites. Women passed through three stages: the first, moth, receptive to sexual overtures but not to actual intercourse; the second, bee, sexually active but infertile—and this was still a guess, even to the Sakartvelos—to allow more subtle hormonal and pheromonal samplings and communications; and the third, wasp, total fertility, leading to sexual activity with prospects of pregnancy. Shevite females could actually fall back into bee stage if a deme broke up or an angling failed.

Males started puberty at bee and from there went straight to wasp, sometimes within hours.

“Lemon and Lime are old notion about that,” Stella added. Lemon and Lime were the fundamentals of the Sakartvelos. “They think you should wait.”

“You didn’t,” Luce said.

“It was different,” Stella said, and freckled a warning that she did not like thinking about this, much less talking.

“Lemon and Lime support you,” Luce said testily.

“They didn’t have much choice, did they?”

A ten-year-old male named Burke walked to the end of the table and stood there shyly, hands folded in front of him, rocking on his heels.

“What?” Stella snapped, facing him with cheeks flashing full gold.

Burke backed off. “Lemon and Lime are down at the gate with some others. There’s humans down there.”

“So?”

“They say they’re your parents. Another brought them, the numb-nose delivery guy.”

Stella slapped her hands on the table, then drummed them, shaking her head, making the plates rattle. Heads turned in the cafeteria, and two stood in case intervention was the consensus.

Luce pushed back, never having seen her friend this disturbed.

“It’s not them,” Stella said, and swung her legs around on the bench, then got to her feet. “Not now.” She approached Burke, face and pupils ablaze in full accusative query, as if she wanted to punish him.

“The woman smells like you!” Burke wailed, and then others surrounded them and prodded Stella aside with gentle elbow nudges. Touching with angry hands was considered very bad. Burke ran off, crying.

“Go see,” Luce suggested, her own color flaring. Nobody was a better persuader than Luce. “If they’re not your parents, they’ll smoke them out of here and they’ll forget everything. If they are your parents, you have to go.” She held out her spit-damp palms, as did others who had formed a circle around the table, but Stella refused them all.

“I don’t want to know!” she wailed. “I don’t want them to know!”

4

Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

Senator Laura Bloch greeted Christopher Dicken in the hall outside the courtroom. Dicken was dressed in his usual excuse for business wear, brown tweed jacket and corduroy pants with a wide tie completely out of fashion. Senator Bloch was dressed in a navy blue suit and carried a small briefcase. Behind her stood a younger balding man and a lone, harried-looking middle-aged woman, both wearing suits and carrying their own briefcases.

“She’s going to get off,” Bloch declared curtly. “She’s painting herself as the cop on the beat who protected us all.”

Dicken was not much on punishment, and did not look forward to having to testify.

“I wonder what Gianelli would think,” Bloch added softly, staring at the benches, the lines of lawyers and witnesses waiting to be allowed into the courtroom to sit and wait until called.

The sound of Mark Augustine’s cane was unmistakable. Dicken and Bloch turned to see him making his way down the hall toward the courtroom. He nodded to his attorneys, spoke to them for a few seconds, eyes turning to Dicken, then broke away and stepped gingerly toward them.

“Dr. Augustine,” Bloch said, and extended her hand.

“Senator, pleasure to see you.” Augustine smiled and shook her hand, but kept his eyes on Dicken. “Sorry duty, eh, Christopher?”

Dicken nodded. “How are you, Mark?”

“Steep learning curve for us all,” Augustine said.

Dicken nodded. He felt no triumph, only a hollow sensation of unfinished business.

Augustine pursed his lips and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Two items of news,” he said. “First, I’ve got Sumner’s chief of staff, Stan Parton, on board for a reconciliation joint session. We’re going to have a select few children in the House chambers, at the president’s invitation. The vice president will be there.”

“That’s great,” Senator Bloch said, her eyes brightening. “Dick would have loved to hear that. When?”

“Could be months. The other news is bad.”

The last thing the group wanted was bad news. Bloch sighed and rolled her prominent eyes.

“Let’s have it,” Dicken said.

“Mrs. Rhine slipped into a coma at six thirty this morning. She died at eleven fifteen.”

Dicken felt his breath hitch.

“She had been in pain for years,” Augustine said.

“A blessing, really,” Bloch said.

Dicken asked where a restroom was on this floor, then excused himself. In the echoing hollowness, he closed the door to a stall. No tears came. He did not even feel numb.

“Funny world,” he whispered, and looked up at the ceiling, as if Mrs. Rhine might be listening. “Funny old world. Wherever you are, Carla, I hope it’s better.”

Then he stepped out of the stall, washed his hands, and returned to stand with Bloch and Augustine outside the courtroom.

Rachel Browning and her attorneys had arrived and now huddled in a tight cluster about twenty feet from Augustine and Bloch. Her face had become deeply lined, pale as if cast in plaster, a death mask. She nodded to the tune of the attorneys’ back-and-forth. One stopped to whisper in her ear.

“I’m sorry for her,” Dicken said, vulnerable to the point of charity.

“Don’t be,” Augustine primly advised. “She’d hate that.”

The court clerk opened the doors.

“Let’s go, gentlemen,” Bloch said. She placed her hands on their elbows and escorted them, three abreast, into the courtroom.

5

LAKE STANNOUS, CALIFORNIA

Mitch held Kaye’s hand as a group of more than twenty youths tightened its gyre around them. Morgan had been drawn aside and now stood surrounded by three young men. He held out his hands and smiled nervously, face flushed, windbreaker pulled off one shoulder. He looked surprised.

Several other adolescents and a female in her late seventies were searching Morgan’s truck, looking, Mitch guessed, for communications or tracking equipment. They were all quiet and serious.

“We’re trying to find a girl named Stella Nova,” Kaye repeated. The air was thick with persuasion. Mitch felt woozy and confused already, despite the nose plugs they had manufactured in the motel bathroom out of toilet paper and vanilla-scented lip balm.

An older male, also in his seventies, with ruddy cheeks and an unruly halo of reddish hair shot with gray, came through the gyre and reached to take Mitch’s and Kaye’s hands in his. He wore a denim jacket with brass buttons. Except for his round face and SHEVA features, he might have been an itinerant farmworker. “There was no need for you to come,” he said pressing their hands to his chest.

“We’re her parents,” Kaye said, eyes pleading. “We’ve been looking for her for years.”

“She isn’t here.” The old man’s cheeks freckled in rapid patterns, unreadable, and his emerald green irises sparkled with yellow and brown. His accent was mild but Mitch could still detect a hint of eastern European. Mitch tried to think clearly, tried to resist the onslaught. Any minute now, he was certain, they would all get back in the truck and drive away, sure they had made a mistake—no matter what Morgan would tell them had happened.

For the first time, Mitch felt frightened, being among his daughter’s people.

The old woman stood beside the old man and spoke a stream of over-under in another language.

“Georgian,” Kaye said to Mitch. Mitch and Kaye tried to pull their hands back, but the old man was strong and would not release them and Mitch did not want to start any kind of struggle. They stood in a tight triangle with the old man, who was no longer looking at them, but had focused on the old woman and the adolescents.

“They’re your friends!” Morgan shouted, struggling against the clasping arms, his voice breaking with anger and frustration. “I wouldn’t bring no enemies here, you know that. She’s famous! She’s been on Oprah!”

The old man let their hands go, but still the gyre of youths, red-headed, strawberry blond, sandy brunette, all colors—Mitch had never seen so many varieties of SHEVA child—stayed close and fever scented the air.

Mitch doubted he would ever enjoy chocolate again.

Kaye stammered a few words of Georgian, then asked the old couple, in English, “When did you come here? Where are you from?”

“Stella!” Mitch shouted at the buildings adjoining the turnaround.

The old man touched his finger to Mitch’s lips. Mitch bent his head like a submissive dog and fell silent.

“Please,” Kaye pleaded. Mitch supported her as her legs gave way.

“Go home,” the old man said.

“Go home,” the children said in many voices, over and under, a rising, singing, all-too-convincing and reasonable murmur in the late afternoon warmth.

Mitch saw something from the corner of his eye. He raised his head and stood on tiptoes to look over the crowd. A face he knew, like Kaye’s, like his mother’s, moved steadily toward the gyre from the direction of the gray buildings. He tried to keep the young woman in sight through the bobbing heads and singing mouths and gold-flecked eyes. She wore a baggy pair of black pants and clogs and a white sleeveless blouse. Her shoulders were narrow, like Kaye’s, and her arms were tanned to a reddish bronze, like a statue in a park. Her cheeks formed a butterfly pattern that Mitch recognized instantly, the complicated expression revealing both surprise and uncertainty, and then unwitting greeting.

“She’s here!” Mitch said, choking.

Kaye saw Stella and stood up straight and tried to shove her way out of the circle. The youths crowded in to stop her.

Stella stopped outside the gyre, arms crossed, looking this way and that as if she had not found what she had come looking for, or did not want to see it.

Kaye beat at the young people to get free, using no words, just grunts and shrieks.

Stella suddenly dashed forward and grabbed at the members of the gyre.

The old man lifted his hands, the woman did the same, and the gyre dropped back, leaving Kaye and Mitch and Stella at the center of a loose and expanding crowd.

A breeze whispered through the trees and across the gravel turnaround and dispelled the scent. Stella hugged her mother, then reached around Kaye’s shoulder and grabbed Mitch’s arm and pulled him in, as well.

Other youths arrived, curious, waiting to join in and do whatever was necessary.

“See!” Morgan shouted triumphantly. “Would I shit you? Man, let them be! They’re family!”

They said good-bye and thanks to Morgan, and Mitch shook his hand. Morgan was sternly told by the old Shevite man that he was not to return again, ever.

“Hey, it was worth it,” Morgan said defiantly. He waved farewell as Stella led Mitch and Kaye to a small meeting room at the back of the old bowling alley.

“They’re unhappy that you’re here,” she said, pulling out chairs around a battered wooden table. She motioned for them to sit. The window at the back of the room was dark; night had fallen. “They don’t want us to be found.”

“Who are they?” Kaye asked, too sharply, but she could not help herself. “Cult leaders? What are their names, Bo and Peep?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Stella said.

“They wouldn’t talk with me,” Kaye said, trying to control her agitation. “Do they hate us so much?”

Stella shook her head, unable to answer for the moment. She could not easily explain how complicated an answer to that question might be.

“I sympathize with all of you,” Kaye said. “We both do, Stella. They have a marvelous story, I’m sure of it, but we have been looking for so long, we were so afraid!” She pounded the table hard enough to make the floor vibrate and the window rattle.

Mitch placed his hands over hers. “We’ve both been searching.” He watched Stella with alternating expressions of relief and anger.

“I’m sorry,” Stella said. “Will and I came here after the bus accident. It was for the best.”

“Will?” Mitch asked. “Was he the boy?” John Hamilton had told them about putting Stella and Will in the car with Jobeth Hayden. Hayden had been arrested by state police in Nevada and turned over to the FBI, but she had never been charged with anything.

She had had no idea where the children might have gone. Piles of crumpled paperback pages had been found in her car.

“You saw him in Virginia, in the long building where you found me. Where the girl died,” Stella said.

“I don’t remember much about him,” Mitch said.

“He was my friend,” Stella said. She turned to Mitch, examining his face with shy, flicking glances, her own face turning dark and her pupils dropping down to pinpricks. Mitch had never seen his daughter looking so down, so discouraged.

“Was?”

“He’s dead.”

“How did he die?” Kaye asked.

Stella shook her head and looked away.

“Did he fit in, here?” Kaye asked cautiously.

Stella shook her head once more. “He lived with humans too long. They hurt him. They made him wild. He couldn’t fit with any deme, not even mine.”

“You’ve lived with humans,” Kaye said softly.

“Not the same.”

“Stella, are you pregnant?” Mitch asked, and Kaye jerked as if kicked.

“Yes,” Stella said.

Kaye’s jaw clenched. Mitch moved his hand to Stella’s shoulder. “Will?”

“Yes,” Stella said.

Kaye moaned, then wrapped her hands around her mouth and jaw. Stella stared at the window, unwilling to witness her mother’s anguish.

“He’s the father,” Mitch said.

“I went to wasp so quickly,” Stella said. “It seemed so right, and he was sweet and gentle, with me, when he was away from the others.”

“Did they kill him?” Mitch asked.

Stella shook her head and her cheeks went a lovely shade of sienna, which, Mitch knew, signified a very unlovely emotion: grief. Her cheeks had taken a similar color when they had found Shamus huddled dead in the kudzu, years ago. Lifetimes away. “He stopped eating. Nobody could force him. Nobody would. I don’t know why; we can do so much with some who are ill. I stayed with him. We played games. It was his decision. He said he did not fit. He was in such pain, he became so far away.”

Kaye laid her head on the table. Mitch saw glints of tears falling from her eyes, darkening the scarred wood.

“He couldn’t be with us, and he couldn’t be anything he wanted to be away from us. Something was broken inside of him. He knew he would never be right with us or anybody else. Yevgenia and Yuri—our hosts—they tried everything they knew.”

“There is so much to learn,” Kaye murmured, and turned her head toward her daughter.

“He did not want to live, at the end,” Stella said. “We buried him in the woods.” She shook her head vigorously. “No more talk about Will.”

Kaye got up and stood behind her daughter. “Can we stay for a while?” she asked Stella. “Be with you? Help around here, maybe?”

“I don’t know,” Stella said.

“Do you want us to stay?” Mitch asked.

Stella stroked Kaye’s fingers where they rested on her collarbone. “Yes,” she said.

“Are we the first… from the old kind of people, to come here, to visit?” Kaye asked.

“No,” Stella said. “There are four more. An old man and three old women. They lived at Oldstock when Yevgenia and Yuri bought the place, and they stayed. The man does maintenance and they all work in the cafeteria.”

“So it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Maybe they can explain some things to us,” Kaye suggested.

“I’d like you to be here when the baby comes,” Stella said. “That would be good.”

Kaye lay her cheek on the crown of Stella’s head. “I would be so proud,” she said. “Is there a doctor here?”

“Yevgenia and Yuri were doctors in Russia,” Stella said. “Mine will be the first baby born here.”

“Like mother, like daughter,” Mitch said with a hint of his old reluctance. “Pioneers.” His wife and Stella ventured smiles.

“You could sing to the baby, like you did to me,” Stella said. “You have a good voice, for babies.”

“She’s right,” Kaye said. “What if it’s a boy?”

“It is,” Stella said. “I can smell him. He smells like Will, inside me.”

6

SPENT RIVER, OREGON

Some said the turning point had come. Kaye was not so sure. After all the years of struggle she could hardly imagine a time of reconstruction, of engagement and change. As she sat with her husband and the three girls in the back of the long passenger van, jouncing along the rutted trails beneath the white glare of Mount Hood, what she felt inside was a kind of frozen patience.

She held her husband’s arm and stared between the driver and the Secret Service agent sitting up front. Then she turned to look back at Stella and Celia and LaShawna, and John Hamilton behind them. The girls—young women now—were stiff as dolls, their eyes large. They had watched the landscape change from high arid brush to farms and pear orchards and then to thin forest; saying little, pushed close together on the bench seat. John was looking out the back window at where the long line of vans and cars had been.

He wants to be with Luella, Kaye thought. He’s tired of this fight and he wants to be with his wife. For the next fight.

No peace. No rest.

Mitch leaned forward to peer through the side window, looking for the first signs of the Spent River and the camp. He had not wanted to return here. “I’ve given up the dead,” he had told Kaye after the visit from Oliver Merton a week ago. “No more dirt and bones for me. Give me the living. They’re trouble enough.”

Mitch did not like the publicity aspect, nor the connection with William Daney, Eileen Ripper’s benefactor at the Spent River dig; it smacked too much of a stunt. None of this junket had appealed to him, and at first Kaye had shared his opinion. Why go forth into the world to help an administration that had come to the table so late, after so much destruction—one of three clueless, terrible administrations in a row?

What good to help the monsters understand? Best to stay in Oldstock, hidden away from everyone and wait for Stella’s baby.

But Oldstock was no longer hidden. Morgan had been doing a lot of talking. Reporters were arriving, pilgrims, parents searching for lost children.

It had taken a visit from Senator Bloch to finally persuade Kaye that this was a good idea. Troublesome gifts sometimes came out of left field; it was unwise to ignore them. Or impossible.

Kaye understood that better than most.

The EMAC schools were closing down or being converted to orphanages. Sandia Pathogenics was fighting for its existence and trying to redefine itself. Eileen’s Spent River site was about to become an object lesson. The president of the United States wanted it as a symbol for a country trying to come together after a long and awful battle between conscience and fear.

“There are always those who fear the future,” Bloch had told Kaye and Mitch. “They fear change, fear being replaced; one thing they do in their fear is kill children. They have to be left completely powerless, or the nastiness will start all over again.

“Either you join in, or you get left behind.” Bloch had said. “I think you should go. Fruits of victory. People want to know what Kaye thinks.” She had added, “You, too, Mitch.”

In the end, it was Stella who had tipped the scales.

“Let’s go,” she had said in the kitchen of the Oldstock cafeteria, wiping her hands on a dish towel and resting them on her prominent stomach. “I’ve always wanted to see where Dad worked.”

The line of cars and vans crested a rise and descended on the rough road to the dry meander of the ancient river bed. A few of the cars, with lower suspensions, were being left behind.

“There it is,” Mitch said. “They’ve taken off the camouflage.” The girls turned their heads to follow his finger. The site had expanded enormously. There were over thirty tents and shelters now on both sides of the old brush-strewn river bed.

Secret Service agents waited for them, checked with the drivers, then flagged them through, diverting the VIP vans to one area and the reporters to another.

The two long vans pulled into a makeshift parking lot marked by crumbling logs and shut off their engines. Senator Bloch waited for them under a white plastic awning. The sun poked through uncertain clouds and illuminated the covered H of the new main dig shelter. Again, linked Quonset huts provided cover. It lay at the end of a fenced pathway leading north.

“Is this where they died?” LaShawna asked.

Secret Service agents opened the van doors. Five photographers, led by a subdued Oliver Merton, surrounded the trucks and snapped pictures and made video. They concentrated on Stella.

Oliver smiled at Mitch and Kaye and stared at Stella with something like reverence. It was a quiet side of Oliver Kaye had never seen before.

“Just a year ago,” a reporter was saying into her lapel mike, staring earnestly into a tiny camera mounted on a curved pole poking from her belt, “the sight of a pregnant Shevite female would have caused panic. Now—”

Kaye turned away and refused to listen.

Mitch spotted Eileen Ripper walking along the trail from the big new shelter. He would have recognized her slow, deliberate saunter even had she worn a mask. She did not like this any more than he did, but it was indeed a triumph. A federal circuit court judge had ruled just three months before, after almost twenty years of litigation, that the Five Tribes had no standing—could claim no legitimate relationship to the remains of peoples physically and temporally so far from their own. The Department of the Interior would no longer halt these digs or return any remains found to the complaining tribes.

Thus had ended a long nightmare for North American archaeology.

Strange that Mitch did not feel any sense of victory.

The bones he had found, goaded on by Eileen’s challenge, had been just part of the story. He had not, after all, completely understood the motives of the ghosts flitting over the landscape.

Perhaps ghosts also lied to get their own way.

Eileen pushed through the photographers and past Bloch’s entourage with hardly a nod. She came straight to Mitch and Kaye, and her eyes lingered for a moment on the girls as she held out her hand to Kaye.

“Welcome,” she said with a broad, nervous smile. “And welcome back. Glad you could bring the family.”

She set about introducing the others, all moving forward with varying degrees of shyness or confidence or diffidence in front of the cameras.

Mitch was sure this was going to turn out badly.

At the airport, LaShawna and Celia had been glad to see Stella again. Breaking from John Hamilton’s protection, LaShawna had grabbed Celia and then Stella and they had all gone off together to the closest women’s restroom—a frightening place for them all, even more than the airplane, with the smells of so many humans.

LaShawna had dragged Stella into a stall and whispered fiercely at her, “What are you doing, girl, going wasp and getting yourself puffed! Was it that boy Will?”

Celia had called through the closed door, “She’ll explain later. Let’s go! I don’t like it in here.”

But there had been little time for talk, much less clouding and conveying the full story. The ride in the truck had made them all a little quiet, even with Kaye and Mitch and John along. LaShawna had whispered in Stella’s ear, “Your mother looks good.”

Stella had pulled back and looked LaShawna full in the face.

“Momma has it,” LaShawna had said sadly, dropping her chin to her chest and pulling up her knees, propping them against the seat back. “She’s in a wheelchair.”

Stella brushed the short hair from her eyes as the wind blew in her face. She stepped down from the truck and blinked at the cameras. Celia and LaShawna seemed to fall in place behind her like ducklings. Being pregnant gave her seniority, she wondered why; it was stupid the way it had happened, stupid losing Will. She had left Oldstock to come here in part to get perspective; she wondered how much longer she would live at the compound.

Without Will, she doubted she would ever find the childish freedom that had once seemed so important. As she smelled and felt the baby inside her, she thought of responsibility and getting things done.

Meeting with a senator and with all these other folks was a start.

The landscape around the dry river bed was somewhere between bleak and pretty and it smelled much like Oldstock though cooler; the trees knew less sun than the trees around Lake Stannous. Quiet, cool pines poked up through gray brush and hard, crusty dirt with broken pieces of purple-black and gray rock overlying.

There was something going on between the woman archaeologist, Eileen, and her father. They were old friends. Something had happened between them along ago; Stella was sure of it. She watched her mother, but Kaye did not seem bothered. In fact, Kaye and Eileen seemed to walk alike and to look around with the same dignified curiosity.

That pleased Stella.

Mitch put an arm around her shoulder. Stella leaned into his embrace and cameras whirred and flashed all around.

“They’re affectionate,” said a male newscaster to unseen eyes. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Mitch gently squeezed Stella. “Never mind,” he said in a low voice. “We’re going to visit the bones.” He sounded as if that would be like entering a church.

And it was. They walked down into the big shelter, following long plywood sheets, and reporters were instructed to turn off their bright lights. A large sunburned man, about thirty years old, in muddy jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, with dirty forearms and a bandanna around his head, and dental tools and brushes slung on his belt, made the reporters pass through inspection and a shoe scrub. They all donned plastic booties. “Dirt is important here,” the man explained, his voice a rich tenor. “We don’t want to add anything that doesn’t belong.”

Eileen broke from a small group of reporters and introduced him. “This is Carlton Fierro,” she said. “Carlton the Doorman. We call him that because he can hardly fit through most doors. He’s in charge of this dig now.”

Stella smiled at Carlton.

“Glad you could make it,” he told the girls.

Connie Fitz walked around a sculpted pillar of dirt and hooked arms with Eileen. “We need big boys to protect us when there are reporters around,” she said, and winked at Mitch.

Stella did not understand any of this. She focused on Carlton, who was shaking hands with Mitch. “We’ve got the biggest grouping over here,” Carlton said, and led them all along the boards and through a connecting corridor to the second wing of the shelter. They turned right and stood before a wide excavated mesa, sheared off about ten feet below the datum—the level of the surrounding land. Scaffolds had been erected around the mesa and filtered sunlight fell on them all through milky fiberglass sheets.

“Eight at a time,” Carlton instructed, “and that includes me.” The reporters pushed around him, trying to keep the girls and Kaye in direct view.

He made a path through the crowd for the people Eileen pointed out, holding her hand over their heads and nodding.

“Coming through,” Carlton said, and they climbed the aluminum steps. He was the last.

Stella looked down on the excavation. At first, all she saw was a large jumble of dark bones on hard planed dirt, mud, and what looked like old ash. She could smell the dust. Nothing more.

Mitch and Kaye stood across from her, Celia and LaShawna beside her; John Hamilton and Senator Bloch, both very quiet, were catercorner on the scaffold beside Carlton. Oliver Merton was staying out of the way, standing alone in one corner with arms crossed.

Eileen and Connie Fitz and Laura Bloch had also stayed below. It was now Carlton’s show.

“There are eight adult females and two children, one male and one female, in this grouping,” Carlton said. “A lahar of volcanic gas and mud and water came roaring down this river bed about twenty thousand years ago. They died together, covered with hot mud. One of them dropped a woven grass basket. Its mold is still in that cube of unexcavated mudstone to the right. The woman on top of the group—she’s marked with a red plastic square, and her outline is made more clear by the thin strip of blue tape—is taller and more robust; she’s Homo erectus, a late stage variety similar to heidelbergensis but as yet without a scientific designation. She appears to be in her forties, well past child bearing and very old for the time. A grandma type. We think she was protecting the children, and perhaps two other women. The female child and the other females are all Homo sapiens, virtually indistinguishable from you and me. The male child is another Homo erectus.

“At first, we thought—Connie and Eileen and the pioneers at this site thought, that is; I’m sort of late here—that there were only females, that the males had run off and abandoned them. Later, Mr. Rafelson found the first signs of the males, not far away and across the river. We thought they might have been out hunting and coming back to their females. Well, that may still be the case, but there was a lot more going on. We’ve since excavated thirteen sites around the Spent River, all within a thousand yards of here. We’ve found a total of fifty-three whole skeletons and perhaps seventy partials, a bit of femur or skull cap or tooth here and there.

“This was a kind of village, set up in the autumn to take advantage of salmon runs in the river. Family groups made camp along a loose network of trails, waiting for the run to begin. They were caught by the volcanic eruption and frozen in time, for us to find, and to reacquaint ourselves with… well, I think of them as old friends. Old teachers, actually.”

Stella glanced at Mitch and saw a tear on his cheek.

Carlton paused to gather his thoughts. Celia was transfixed and maybe a little frightened by this big, rough-looking male. Her jaw hung open. LaShawna was frowning in concentration.

“And what they teach us now is pretty simple. They were traveling as equals. Personally, I don’t know what they were offering each other. But we’ve found roughly equal numbers of both species, erectus and sapiens. There are children of both species, and males as well. Our first site was anomalous. If I could make a guess…”

“He’s a lot like you, Mitch,” Eileen called from the crowd below the scaffold.

Carlton smiled shyly. “I’d say maybe the erectus individuals worked as hunters, using tools made by the sapiens. We haven’t finished analyzing one of the outermost digs yet, a hunting party, but it looks like some of the erectus females served as lead hunters. They carried flint knapping tools and the heavy weapons and some stones that might or might not be hunting charms. That’s right. Tall girls with great sniffers leading the brainy boys.

“We’re looking for a central butchering ground for game—usually near where the large cutting tools were manufactured. In those days hunters tended to carry big game back to the village and butcher it in a protected area. We aren’t sure why—either they hadn’t yet thought of carrying the butchering tools with them, or they were trying to avoid attracting large predators.

“The sapiens females cooperated in weaving grass and leather and bark and preparing the fish and gathering berries and bugs and such around the camps. We’ve found beetles and grubs and grass and blackberry seeds in some of the baskets. Everyone had their place. They worked together.”

“So should we all,” said Senator Bloch, and Stella could see that she, too, was deeply moved.

Stella did not know what to think. The bones were still a tangle, as were her thoughts.

“As we reveal the bones, remove the overburden and brush them clean, we don’t know what beliefs they held, twenty thousand years ago,” Carlton said softly. “So basically we just respect them with silence, for a while, and gratitude. We get acquainted, as it were. They were not our direct ancestors, of course—we’ll probably never find direct ancestors that old. It would be like digging up needles in a mighty sparse and distributed haystack.

“But the people down here, and all around the Spent River, they’re still us. Nobody owns them. But they’re family.” Carlton nodded to his own strong convictions.

“Amen,” Eileen and Connie Fitz said simultaneously below the scaffold.

Stella saw her father’s hands on the rail. His knuckles were white and he was staring directly at her. Stella leaned her head to one side. He moved his lips. She could easily tell what he was saying.

Human.

Eileen and Laura Bloch and Mitch watched as the photographers arranged Kaye and the girls at the base of the mesa, standing in front of the scaffolding. No pictures of the bones were being allowed.

“Rumor has it Kaye met God,” Eileen said in a low voice to Mitch. “Is it true?”

“So she tells me.”

“That’s got to be awkward for a scientist,” Eileen said.

“She’s doing okay,” Mitch said. “She calls it just another kind of inspiration.”

Senator Bloch listened to this with a focused pug-dog expression.

“What about you?” Eileen asked.

“I remain blissfully ignorant.”

“Kind of a sometime thing, huh?”

Bloch weighed in. “That can’t be bad,” she mused. “Not for politics. Did she see Jesus?”

Mitch shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s not what she says, anyway.”

Bloch pouched out her lips. “If there’s no Jesus, we best keep it under our hats for now.”

“What does God tell her about all of this?” Eileen asked, sweeping her hand over the excavations, the revealed bones.

Mitch scowled. “Not much, probably. It doesn’t seem to be that kind of relationship.”

“What good is he, then?” Eileen asked petulantly.

Mitch had to look hard to tell if she was joking. She appeared to be, and she lost interest as some photographers came too near a grid square propped against a table and almost knocked it over.

After berating them and resetting the square, she came back and patted Mitch on the shoulder. “Good for Kaye,” she said. “Just proves that we’re a tough old species. We can survive anything, even God. How about you? Going to come back soon and dig with us?” Eileen asked.

“No,” Mitch said. “That’s over for me.”

“Shame. He was the best,” Eileen said to Bloch. “A real natural.”

Mitch helped Kaye back into the van. Kaye sat and massaged her calves. Her feet were numb and she had had a difficult time climbing the stairs out of the shelter.

Stella and Celia and LaShawna walked in a tight cluster to the van and climbed in behind her, then sat quietly. John Hamilton and Mitch stood talking as they waited for Bloch to rejoin them.

Kaye could hear her husband and John, but only a scatter of words between whisks of dusty wind.

John was saying, “… and bad. They say it’s worse with two. Summer in Maryland is going to be tough. She wanted to come here. Just couldn’t.”

Kaye licked her dry lips and stared forward. Stella placed her hand on Kaye’s shoulder and touched her cheek.

“How are you all doing?” Kaye asked abruptly, swiveling around despite the twinges in her thighs and surveying the girls—the young women.

“We’re just fine,” LaShawna said dreamily. “I wish I knew what this was all about.”

“I think-KUK I do,” Celia said. “Human politics.”

“How are you, dear?” Kaye asked Stella.

“We’re fine,” Stella said, and her cheeks flushed butterfly gold with something like fear, and something like joy.

She gets it, Kaye thought. What we just saw. She’s like her father that way.

She watched Stella lean back in the seat and put on a distant, thoughtful expression, cheeks paling to beige. Celia and LaShawna sat back with her.

Together, they all folded their arms.

That evening, Stella and Celia and LaShawna sat in their own room in a motel in Portland. Kaye and Mitch and John Hamilton were in other rooms in the same motel; the girls had asked to be together, alone, “To just lie back and revert,” Stella had explained.

They had eaten with the others and watched Senator Bloch and Oliver Merton leave in a limo to fly back on a red-eye to Washington, D.C., and now they were relaxing and thinking quietly.

Seeing the bones had bothered Stella. Will was not much more than bones now. All that time, all that life; gone, leaving nothing but scattered rubble. Celia and LaShawna were also quiet at first, absorbed in their own individual thoughts.

They were saddened by the prospect of parting, but they all had things to do at home, loved ones to attend to. Celia was living with the Hamiltons and working with Shevite outreach services in Maryland and had her own life. LaShawna was getting her general education requirements at a local high school and planned on going to a junior college to study nursing. With her father, she took care of her mother, who was not getting around on her own much now, and her baby sister.

So much had changed in a few short months.

Stella sat up from a pile of pillows and made a circling motion with her palm, dipping her head like a bird, and LaShawna seconded. Celia gave a little groan of weary protest but joined them on the bed farthest from the curtained window. They palm-touched and sat in a circle, and Stella felt her cheeks flush and her ears grow warm.

“Who we are,” LaShawna sang. “What we are/ who. What we are/ who. Get us in, get us out/ who.”

It was a chant that helped them focus; they had done it before at Sable Mountain when the teachers and counselors weren’t watching or listening, and especially after a difficult day.

The room filled with their scents. A little something like electricity passed between them and LaShawna started to hum two tunes, two sets of over and under. She was good at that, better than Stella.

The day seemed to melt away and Stella felt her neck and back loosen and they began to remember all the good they had experienced together.

“Lovely. We’re in it,” LaShawna said, and started to hum again.

“I can-KUK feel the baby,” Celia said. “He’s so small and quiet. He smells like Will, a little—if I remember, it’s been so long.”

“He smells like Will,” Stella agreed.

“It’s so good to be with both of you again,” Celia said.

“I had a dream about this, weeks ago,” LaShawna said. “I was awake, with my friends, but everything was dark, and I was looking so far down into myself it hurt. I saw something down there. A little glow hidden way at the bottom…”

“Like what?” Celia said, squirming in fascination.

“Let me show you,” LaShawna said, and squeezed their palms tightly.

Celia bit her lip and closed her eyes. “I’m looking deep.”

“Can you see them?” LaShawna whispered. She chanted softly, “If you take away/strip it down/ all the days and years/ all the thoughts… Who are we? Umm-hmm. Down there deep in a cave. Get us in, get us out/ Who?”

Stella reached down to where LaShawna was, using her palm-touch for guidance. She actually did see something at the bottom of a long, deep well, three somethings, actually, and then four, the baby within her joining. Like four luminous golden kernels of corn, hidden away at the bottom of four separate tunnels of memory and life.

“What are they?” Celia asked quietly, eyes still closed. Stella closed her own eyes now to see these peculiar things more clearly.

“They’re like us, part of us, but way below us,” LaShawna said.

“They’re so quiet-KUK, like they’re asleep. Peaceful.”

“The baby’s is not much different from ours,” Stella observed. “Why is that?”

“Maybe they’re the important ones and we’re just shadows trapped way up here. We’re ghosts to them, maybe. Ummm… I’m losing them… I can’t see them now,” LaShawna said, and opened her eyes with a sigh. “That was spooky.”

The waking dream ended and left Stella feeling a little woozy. The air in the room had turned cold and they shivered and laughed, then clasped hands tighter, listening to their own heartbeats.

“Spooky,” LaShawna said again. “I’m glad you see them, too.”

They sat that way for hours, just touching hands and scenting and being quiet together until the dawn came.

7

LAKE STANNOUS

The third snow of the year came in late October, fat flakes slipping down and nodding between the trees and over the dirt and gravel pathways throughout Oldstock. Kaye hurried from her classroom in the overheated school building, clutching a parka over her shoulders. Puffing, her lips and fingers numb, she met Mitch and Luce Ramone on the path to the infirmary—a name Kaye hated, with its emphasis on dysfunction. Mitch wrapped her in his arms and she marched quickly, close to his side, looking up at him with tight lips and large eyes.

“We have the partners and side mothers in the birthing room,” Luce said. Most of the children—the Shevites, Kaye corrected—did not speak in doubles, over-under, around them, more out of politeness than any obvious reserve or caution. Slowly, over the last four months, the Shevites had come to trust Kaye and Mitch, and together they had worked out procedures to calm mothers about to give birth. Kaye did not know whether it was mumbo jumbo or a new way of doing things. She was about to find out. Now there were twelve pregnancies in Oldstock and Stella was serving a very important function. Keep reminding yourself. Be proud. Be courageous. Oh, God.

So much was being learned. So many questions were being answered. But why my daughter? Why someone who, if she dies, takes me with her, soul if not body?

The last two months had been the happiest in Kaye’s life, and the most tense and awkward.

They gingerly climbed the snowy steps into the old infirmary and down the linoleum-tiled floors, along the plastered hallway lit with dim incandescent bulbs, into the delivery room.

Stella was sitting on the bent and padded bench, puffing and blowing. A rusty gurney covered with a foam mattress and clean white sheets waited for her if she wanted to sleep. She gritted her teeth into a contraction.

Kaye set about arranging the medical instruments, making sure they had been kept in the old autoclave long enough.

“Where did you get these antiques?” she asked Yuri Sakartvelos as he came in, hands held in the air, dripping from the scrub station. Yevgenia smiled at Kaye and her wrinkled cheeks grew golden-green as she slipped the gloves on Yuri’s hands.

“Pray they don’t have to do anything,” Kaye whispered grimly to Mitch.

“Shush,” Mitch warned. “They’re doctors.”

“From Russia, Mitch,” Kaye responded. “How long since they’ve done anything but set a broken leg or dress a wound?”

As Mitch caught a catnap, in the twelfth hour of Stella’s long delivery—that had not changed much, difficult births for babies with large heads—Kaye stood outside the infirmary and breathed the cold early morning air and watched the snow.

While Kaye taught in the village school, Mitch had helped the Shevites restore a small lumber mill and clear the debris from the old concrete foundations and start putting up new houses for the families.

It was not yet clear what shape those families would take; probably not just father, mother, and children, and on this score the Sakartvelos were as clueless as Kaye and Mitch. There had never been so many Shevites together before; though some said there were larger communities in the East and the South, perhaps in New Jersey or Georgia or Mississippi, lying low.

The young Shevites were designing the homes. They felt uncomfortable when deprived of company for more than a few hours. Large windows Kaye could certainly understand, after so many years in cramped dorms and even cells. But there was no double pane glass available, not yet, and winters in Oldstock could be cold. While the foundations provided some constraint on their imaginations, some of the drawings were looking very odd indeed: bathrooms and toilet facilities without walls—“Why privacy? We know what’s happening”—and narrow “scent shafts” connecting adjacent homes. The whole idea of privacy seemed up for grabs.

Kaye’s best moments were spent with Stella and Mitch and Stella’s deme. Most of the students in Kaye’s class were part of Stella’s deme. Her curiosity and relative ease with these intruder humans, her parents, seemed to blend over into those closest to her, and that extended family had adopted Kaye and Mitch.

The Sakartvelos, on the other hand, treated Kaye and Mitch civilly enough, but seldom socialized. They seemed a little standoffish even with the others in their community, perhaps because of early trauma and years of living alone, growing middle-aged with little company.

The concept and practice of demes was still growing, but the demes formed thus far made up the most stable of all the social structures and experiments going on in Oldstock, and the oldest. Stella’s deme consisted of seven permanent partners—three males and four females—and twelve exchange members.

Deme partners usually did not mate, though they could fall in love—Stella was very definite about that, but not very clear what it entailed. Romantic love was running wild in Oldstock, complete with exchanges of dried fruit, perfumes when available, carved wooden statues, but such infatuations seldom had anything to do with sex.

Sex, it seemed, was too important to be left to the whims of romance. Love, yes, but not this boiling torrent of fickle affection.

In late summer, the paths and woods had sometimes smelled like an explosion in a cocoa factory, mixed with shocking and eye-stinging hints of musk and civet. Couples, all combinations—and sometimes triples—could be seen wrapped in congeries of self-involved, fondling splendor, intertwined, giggling, fever-scenting, persuading—everything but having sex.

At first, Kaye and Mitch had speculated that some of the couples and triples were too young, but soon the sixteen-year-olds were proving them wrong, mating outside the romance, and almost always across demes.

Those who were still prepubescent could become juniors in romantic groups, but such relationships were less demonstrative, more reserved and instructional. Love, and new varieties of passion, it seemed, would find many new uses in Shevite society, and the homes had to reflect these novelties.

Kaye’s thoughts darted back to the one thing she did not want to think about, not now. She lifted her eyes to the dark sky. She wanted to be around for her daughter, to be useful to Mitch and to Stella for many years. But the CDC had confirmed that there was indeed a post-SHEVA syndrome. Luella Hamilton had it; so did many others.

The tips of Kaye’s fingers and portions of her calves were growing numb as the months passed, her walk less quick, her strength and stamina waning.

She had told nobody at Oldstock, though Mitch knew. Kaye could seldom hide important things from Mitch. Except, of course, for what he did not want to hear.

The caller had touched her just a week ago. A short visit, pleasant but not conclusive; a social call. She had asked if she might be allowed to live to see her grandson born.

As before, no answers.

Inside the delivery room, Stella was surrounded by all the females in her deme. They alternately sang and read stories from old children’s books and put their heads together, rubbing their damp palms on hers to calm her and relieve her pain.

Stella leaned back at the last and her eyes seemed to slip up into her head. She gave a long, loud shriek, operatic in its intensity, and the room smelled like saltwater and violets. Everyone moaned together, no signal, just the way it was, would be, moaning in an over-under song of sympathy and greeting.

Stella gave a vigorous wriggle and then a shove, and her son came into the larger world. The moaning softened as the child was examined, and then changed to delighted coos and chuckles.

Yevgenia and Kaye cooperated in lifting the baby onto Stella’s stomach. Yevgenia smiled at Kaye. “Now you are truly grandmother,” she said.

The afterbirth came. Yuri moved them urgently to one side and caught it in a steel basin lined with a plastic bag. To Kaye’s surprise, Yuri insisted on cutting the cord, then wrapping and removing the placenta right away. He cleaned up all the blood with a sponge soaked in bleach, then brought basins of soapy water and insisted the helpers wash their hands.

He bathed Stella solicitously. “It might be dangerous, no touching,” Yuri insisted, and left the infirmary with the tissue.

Kaye was beyond analysis or caring. She huddled with her daughter and the females in the deme, and Mitch, and one young male, the stand-in for Will, looking confused and bewildered at this unexpected role.

The infant, wrinkled and small, squirmed slowly in Stella’s arms, seeking the breast, then looked up at them all, drawing back his eyelids until it seemed his face was all eyes, wide, mobile, focused. His cheeks flared golden and pink, melanophores shaping at first a series of flower-petal rawshocks. All those in the room, except for Kaye and Mitch, responded to the newborn with the same colors and patterns, flower petals and butterflies, sparks and flares, and the baby saw this and smelled their pleasure and delight. He smiled with saintly ease and reassurance as he took the nipple.

That smile took Kaye’s breath away. She squeezed Mitch’s hand. Ever the anthropologist, Mitch was watching the deme, the side mothers, all the Shevites in the room, with a quizzical expression.

“Do you have a name yet?” Kaye asked Stella.

Stella shook her head dreamily. “Give us time. Something nice.”

Moments later, suckling her son, Stella relaxed and slept. Her cheeks kept showing patterns. Even asleep, the new mother could sign her love.

The infant released his mother’s nipple and looked up at Mitch. “Sing,” he said.

The deme laughed, and the young man who was standing in for Will, in a burst of emotion, hugged them and shook Mitch’s hand. Kaye touched his shoulder and smiled up at him, and Mitch knelt beside the bed and sang the alphabet song, the same he had sung for Stella. “Ah, beh, say, duh, eh, fuh, guh, huh, kuh, ih, juh, em…”

Mitch’s grandson relaxed and took Stella’s nipple. His large purple-flecked eyes became heavy-lidded, and then closed. He joined his mother in sleep before Mitch got to wuh.