Darwin's Radio

74 Seattle

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 UWto get them to go public with what they know, to undermine Innsbruck’s secrecy. Merton believes the gradualists in charge of the mummies have at most another two or three months to prepare their reports and make them public, or they ‘II be removed, replaced, Brock hopes, by a a more objective team, and clearly he hopes to be in charge. Mitch might be on that team, too; though that seems too much to hope for.

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

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

Nothing like it since 1942, Mitch says.

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

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

The next step won’t be so easy.

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

75 Building 10, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Newcomb said.

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

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

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

“He’s leaving Walter Reed next week.”

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

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

“Be my guests,” Dicken said.

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

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

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

“State with a capital S,” Dicken said.

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

“I know,” Dicken said.

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

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

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

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

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

“The work is sound,” Newcomb said.

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

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

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

“They’re reservoirs, Christopher,” Augustine said. “If the babies get out in the general public, they’ll be vectors. All it took for AIDS was a few.”

“We admit it stinks,” Newcomb said, glancing at Augustine. “I feel that in my gut. But we’ve done computer analysis on some of these activated HERV Given expression of viable env andpol genes, we could have something much worse than HIY The computers point to a disease like nothing we’ve seen in history. It could burn the human race, Dr. Dicken. We could just flake away like dust.”

Dicken pushed up out of his chair and sat on the edge of his bed. “Who disagrees?” he asked.

“Dr. Mahy at the CDC,” Augustine said. “Bishop and Thorne. And of course James Mondavi. But the Princeton people agree, and they have the president’s confidence. They want to work with us on this.”

“What do the opponents say?” Dicken asked Newcomb.

“Mahy thinks any released particles will be fully adapted retroviruses, but nonpathogenic, and that the worst we’ll see is a few cases of some rare cancers,” Augustine said. “Mondavi also sees no pathogenesis. But that’s not why we’re here, Christopher.”

“Why, then?”

“We need your personal input. Kaye Lang has gotten herself pregnant. You know the father. It’s a first-stage SHEVA. She’ll have her miscarriage any day now.”

Dicken turned away.

“She’s sponsoring a conference in Washington state. We tried to get the Emergency Action Office to shut it down—”

“A scientific conference?”

“More mumbo-jumbo about evolution. And, no doubt, encouragement for new mothers. This could be a PR disaster, very bad for morale. We don’t control the press, Christopher. Do you think she’ll be extreme on the subject?”

“No,” Dicken said. “I think she’ll be very reasonable.”

“That could be worse,” Augustine said. “But it’s also something we can use against her, if she claims the support of Science with a capital S. Mitch Rafelson’s reputation is pure mud.”

“He’s a decent fellow,” Dicken said.

“He’s a liability, Christopher,” Augustine said. “Fortunately, he’s her liability, not ours.”

76 Seattle

Kaye carried her yellow legal pad from the bedroom to the kitchen. Mitch had been at the University of Washington since nine that morning. The first reaction to his visit at the Hayer Museum had been negative; they were not interested in controversy, whatever his support from Brock or any other scientist. Brock himself, they had sagely pointed out, was controversial, and according to unnamed sources had been “let go from” or even “forced out of” the Neandertal studies at the University of Innsbruck.

Kaye had always loathed academic politics. She set the notebook and a glass of orange juice on a small table by Mitch’s worn chair, then sat down with a small moan. With nothing coming to her this morning and no sense of where to take the book next, she had started a general short essay that she might use at the conference in two weeks…

But the essay had abruptly stalled as well. Inspiration was simply no competititon for the peculiar tangled feeling in her abdomen.

It had been almost ninety days. Last night, in her journal, she had written, “Already it is about the size of a mouse.” And nothing more.

She used Mitch’s remote to turn on the old TV Governor Harris was giving yet another press conference. He went on the air every day to report on the Emergency Act, how Washington state was cooperating with Washington, D.C., what measures he was resisting — he was very big on resistance, playing to the rugged individualists east of the Cascades — and explaining very carefully where he thought cooperation was beneficial and essential. Once more he went through a bleak litany of statistics.

“In the Northwest, from Oregon to Idaho, the law enforcement officials tell me there have been at least thirty acts of human sacrifice. When we add this to the estimated twenty-two thousand incidents of violence against women around the country, the Emergency Act seems long overdue. We are a community, a state, a region, a nation, out of control with grief and panicked by an incomprehensible act of God.”

Kaye rubbed her stomach gently. Harris had an impossible job. The proud citizens of the U.S.A., she thought, were adopting a very Chinese attitude. With the favor of Heaven so obviously withdrawn, their support for any and all governments had diminished drastically.

A roundtable discussion with two scientists and a state representative followed the governor’s conference. The talk turned to SHEVA children as carriers of disease; this was utter nonsense and something she did not want or need to hear. She shut the television off.

The cell phone rang. Kaye flipped it open. “Hello?”

“Oh beauteous one…I’ve got Wendell Packer, Maria Konig, Oliver Merton, and Professor Brock, all sitting in the same room.”

Kaye’s face warmed and relaxed at the sound of Mitch’s voice.

“They’d like to meet you.”

“Only if they want to be midwives,” Kaye said.

“Jesus — do you feel anything?”

“A sour stomach,” Kaye said. “Unhappy and uninspired. But no, I don’t think it’s going to be today.”

“Well, be inspired by this,” Mitch said. “They’re going to go public with their analysis of the Innsbruck tissue samples. And they’re going to give papers at the conference. Packer and Konig say they’ll support us.”

Kaye closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to savor this. “And their departments?”

“No go. The politics is just too intense for department heads. But Maria and Wendell are going to work on their colleagues. We’re hoping to have dinner together. Are you up for it?”

Her roiling stomach had settled. Kaye thought she might actually be hungry in an hour or so. She had followed Maria Konig’s work for years, and admired her enormously. But in that masculine crew, perhaps Konig’s greatest asset was that she was female.

“Where are we eating?”

“Within five minutes of Marine Pacific Hospital,” Mitch said. “Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Maybe a bowl of oatmeal for me,” Kaye said. “Should I take the bus?”

“Nonsense. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Mitch kissed at her over the phone, and then, Oliver Merton asked to say something.

“We haven’t met yet, to shake hands,” Merton said breathlessly, as if he had just been arguing loudly or had run up a flight of stairs. “Christ, Ms. Lang, I’m nervous just talking with you.”

“You trounced me pretty badly in Baltimore,” Kaye said.

“Yes, but that was then,” Merton said without a hint of regret. “I can’t tell you how much I admire what you and Mitch are planning. I am agog with wonder.”

“We’re just doing what comes natural,” Kaye said.

“Wipe the past clean,” Merton said. “Ms. Lang, I’m a friend.”

“We’ll see about that,” Kaye said.

Merton chuckled and handed her back to Mitch.

“Maria Konig suggests a good Vietnamese pho restaurant. That’s what she craved when she was pregnant. Sound right?”

“After my oatmeal,” Kaye said. “Does Merton have to be there?”

“Not if you don’t want him.”

“Tell him I’m going to stare daggers at him. Make him suffer.”

“I’ll do that,” Mitch said. “But he thrives under criticism.”

“I’ve been analyzing tissues from dead people for ten years now,” Maria Konig said. “Wendell knows the feeling.”

“I do indeed,” Packer said.

Konig, sitting across from her, was more than just beautiful — she was the perfect model for what Kaye wanted to look like when she reached fifty. Wendell Packer was very handsome, in a lean and compact sort of way — quite the opposite of Mitch. Brock wore a gray coat and black T-shirt, dapper and quiet; he seemed lost in even deeper thought.

“Each day, you get a FedEx box or two or three,” Maria said, “and you open them up, and inside are little tubes or bottles from Bosnia or East Timor or the Congo, and there’s this little sad chunk of skin or bone from one or another victim, usually innocent, and an envelope with copies of records, more tubes, blood samples or cheek swabs from relatives of victims. Day after day after day. It never stops. If these babies are the next step, if they’re better than we are at living on this planet, I can’t wait. We’re in need of a change.”

The small waitress taking their orders stopped writing on her small pad. “You name dead people for UN?” she asked Maria.

Maria looked up at her, embarrassed. “Sometimes.”

“I from Kampuchea, Cambodia, come here fifteen years ago,” she said. “You work on Kampucheans?”

“That was before my time, honey,” Maria said.

“I still very mad,” the woman said. “Mother, father, brother, uncle. Then they let the murderers go without punishing. Very bad men and women.”

The table fell silent as the woman’s large black eyes sparked with memory. Brock leaned forward, clasping his hands and touching his nose with the knuckle of his thumb.

“Very bad now, too. I going to have baby anyway,” the woman said. She touched her stomach and looked at Kaye. “You?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“I believe in future,” the woman said. “It got to get better.”

She finished taking their orders and left the table. Merton picked up his chopsticks and fumbled them aimlessly for a few seconds. “I shall have to remember this,” he said, “the next time I feel oppressed.”

“Save it for your book,” Brock said.

“I am writing one,” Merton told them with raised brows. “No surprise. The most important bit of science reporting of our time.”

“I hope you’re having more luck than I am,” Kaye said.

“I’m jammed, absolutely stuck,” Merton said, and pushed up his glasses with the thick end of a chopstick. “But that won’t last. It never has.”

The waitress brought spring rolls, shrimp and bean sprouts and basil leaves wrapped in translucent pancake. Kaye had lost her urge for bland and reassuring oatmeal. Feeling more adventurous, she pinched one of the rolls with her chopsticks and dipped it into a small ceramic bowl of sweet brown sauce. The flavor was extraordinary — she could have lingered on the bite for minutes, picking out every savory molecule. The basil and mint in the roll were almost too intense, and the shrimp tasted rich and crunchy and oceanic.

All her senses sharpened. The large room, though dark and cool, seemed very colorful, very detailed.

“What do they put in these?” she asked, chewing the last bite of her roll.

“They are good,” Merton said.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Maria said apologetically, still feeling the emotion of the waitress’s bit of history.

“We all believe in the future,” Mitch said. “We wouldn’t be here if we were stuck in our own little ruts.”

“We need to figure out what we can say, what our limitations are,” Wendell said. “I can only go so far before I’m outside my expertise and way outside what the department will tolerate, even if I claim to speak for myself alone.”

“Courage, Wendell,” Merton said. “A solid front. Freddie?”

Brock sipped from his foamy glass of pale lager. He looked up with a hangdog expression.

“I cannot believe we are all here, that we have come this far,” he said. “The changes are so close, I am frightened. Do you know what is going to happen when we present our findings?”

“We’re going to get crucified by nearly every scientific journal in the world,” Packer said, and laughed.

“Not Nature ” Merton said. “I’ve laid some groundwork there. Pulled off a journalistic and scientific coup.” He grinned.

“No, please, friends,” Brock said. “Step back a moment and think. We are just past the millennium, and now we are about to learn how we came to be human.” He removed his thick glasses and wiped them with his napkin. His eyes were distant, very round. “In Innsbruck, we have our mummies, caught in the late stages of a change that took place across tens of thousands of years. The woman must have been tough and brave beyond our imagining, but she knew very little. Dr. Lang, you know a great deal, and you proceed anyway. Your courage is perhaps even more wonderful.” He lifted his glass of beer. “The least I can do is offer you a heartfelt toast.”

They all raised their glasses. Kaye felt her stomach flip again, but it was not a bad sensation.

“To Kaye,” Friedrich Brock said. “The next Eve.”

77 Seattle

Kaye sat in the old Buick to stay out of the rain. Mitch walked along the row of cars in the small lot off Roosevelt, searching for the kind she had specified — small, late nineties, Japanese or Volvo, maybe blue or green — and looked up to where she sat curbside, window rolled down for air.

He pulled off his wet felt Stetson and smiled. “How about this beauty?” He pointed to a black Caprice.

“No,” Kaye said emphatically. Mitch loved big old American cars. He felt at home in their roomy interiors. Their trunks could carry tools and slabs of rock. He would have loved to buy a truck, and they had discussed that for a few days. Kaye was not averse to four-wheel-drive, but they had seen nothing she thought they could afford. She wanted a huge reserve in the bank for emergencies. She had set a limit of twelve thousand dollars.

“I’m a kept man,” he said, holding his hat mournfully and bowing his head before the Caprice.

Kaye pointedly ignored that. She had been in an ill humor all morning — had snapped at him twice over breakfast, chastisements that Mitch had accepted with infuriating commiseration. What she wanted was a real argument, to get her blood going, her thoughts moving — to get her body moving. She was sick of the gnawing sensation in her gut that had persisted for three days. She was sick of waiting, of trying to come to grips with what she was carrying.

What Kaye wanted above all else was to lash out at Mitch for agreeing to get her pregnant and start this awful, dragged-out process.

Mitch strode over to the second row and peered at stickers. A woman with an umbrella came down the wooden steps from the small office trailer and conferred with him.

Kaye watched them suspiciously. She hated herself, hated her screwball and chaotic emotions. Nothing she was thinking made any sense.

Mitch pointed to a used Lexus. “Way too expensive,” Kaye murmured to herself, biting her cuticle. Then, “Oh, shit.” She thought she had wet her panties. The trickle continued, but it was not her bladder. She felt between her legs.

“Mitch!” she yelled. He came running, flung open the driver’s-side door, jumped in, started the motor when the first poked fist of blunt pain doubled her over. She nearly slammed her hand against the dash. He pulled her back with one hand. “Oh, God! “she said.

“We’re going,” he said. He peeled out along Roosevelt and turned west on 45th, dodging cars on the overpass and swinging hard left onto the freeway.

The pain was not so intense now. Her stomach seemed filled with ice water and her thighs trembled.

“How is it?” Mitch asked.

“Scary,” she said. “So strange.”

Mitch hit eighty.

She felt something like a small bowel movement. So rude, so natural, so unspeakable . She tried to clamp her legs together. She was not sure what she felt, what exactly had happened. The pain was almost gone.

By the time they pulled into the emergency entrance at Marine Pacific, she was reasonably sure it was all over.

Maria Konig had referred them to Dr. Felicity Galbreath after Kaye met resistance from several pediatricians reluctant to take on a SHEVA pregnancy. Her own health insurance had canceled her; SHEVA was covered as a disease, a prior condition, certainly not as a natural pregnancy.

Dr. Galbreath worked at several hospitals but kept her offices at Marine Pacific, the big brown Depression-era Art Deco hospital that looked down across the freeway, Lake Union, and much of west Seattle. She also taught two days a week at Western Washington University, and Kaye wondered where she found time to have any other life.

Galbreath, tall and plump, with round shoulders, a pleasantly unchallenging face, and a tight, short head of mousy blond hair, came into Kaye’s shared room twenty minutes after she was admitted. Kaye had been cleaned up and briefly examined by the resident nurse and an attending physician. A nurse midwife Kaye had never met before also checked on her, having heard about Kaye’s case from a brief article in the Seattle Weekly.

Kaye sat up in her bed, her back aching, but otherwise comfortable, and drank a glass of orange juice.

“Well, it’s happened,” Galbreath said.

“It’s happened,” Kaye echoed dully.

“They tell me you’re doing fine.”

“I feel better now.”

“Very sorry not to be here sooner. I was over at UW Medical Center.”

“I think it was over before I was admitted,” Kaye said.

“How do you feel?”

“Lousy. Healthy enough, just lousy.”

“Where’sMitch?”

“I told him to bring me the baby. The fetus.”

Galbreath glared at her with mixed irritation and wonder. “Aren’t you taking this scientist bit too far?”

“Bullshit,” Kaye said fiercely.

“You could be in emotional shock.”

“Double bullshit. They took it away without telling me. I need to see it. I need to know what happened.”

“It’s a first-stage rejection. We know what they look like,” Galbreath said softly, checking Kaye’s pulse and looking at the attached monitor. As a precaution, she was on saline drip.

Mitch returned with a small steel pan covered with a cloth. “They were sending it down to…” He looked up, his face pale as a sheet. “I don’t know where. I had to do some yelling.”

Galbreath looked at them both with an expression of forceful self-control. “It’s just tissue, Kaye. The hospital has to send them to an approved Taskforce autopsy center. It’s the law.”

“She’s my daughter” Kaye said, tears trickling down her cheeks. “I want to see her before they take her.” The sobs began and she could not control them. The nurse looked in, saw Galbreath was with them, stood in the doorway with a helpless and concerned expression.

Galbreath took the pan from Mitch, who was happy to be relieved of it. She waited until Kaye was quiet.

“Please,” Kaye said. Galbreath placed the pan gently on her lap.

The nurse left and shut the door behind her.

Mitch turned away as she pulled back the cloth.

Lying on a bed of crushed ice, in a small plastic bag with a Ziploc top, no larger than a small lab mouse, lay the interim daughter. Her daughter. Kaye had been nurturing and carrying and protecting this for over ninety days.

For a moment, she felt distinctly uneasy. She reached down with a finger to trace the outline in the bag, the short and curled spine beyond the edge of the torn and tiny amnion. She stroked the comparatively large and almost faceless head, finding small slits for eyes, a wrinkled and rabbitlike mouth kept tightly closed, buttons where arms and legs might be. The small purple placenta lay beneath the amnion.

“Thank you,” Kaye said to the fetus.

She covered the tray. Galbreath tried to remove it, but Kaye gripped her hand. “Leave her with me for a few minutes,” she said. “I want to make sure she isn’t lonely. Wherever she’s going.”

Galbreath joined Mitch in the waiting room. He sat with his head in his hands in a pale bleached-oak armchair beneath a pastel seascape framed in ash.

“You look like you need a drink,” she said.

“Is Kaye still asleep?” Mitch said. “I want to be with her.”

Galbreath nodded. “You can go in any time. I examined her. Do you want the details?”

“Please,” Mitch said, rubbing his face. “I didn’t know I’d react that way. I’m sorry.”

“No need. She’s a bold woman who thinks she knows what she wants. Well, she’s still pregnant. The secondary mucus plug seems to be in position. There was no trauma, no bleeding; the separation was textbook, if anybody has bothered to write a textbook about this sort of thing. The hospital did a quick biopsy. It’s definitely a first-stage SHEVA rejection. Chromosome number is confirmed.”

“Fifty-two?” Mitch asked.

Galbreath nodded. “Like all the others. It should be forty-six. Gross chromosomal abnormalities.”

“It’s a different kind of normal,” Mitch said.

Galbreath sat beside him and crossed her legs. “Let’s hope. We’ll do more tests in a few months.”

“I don’t know how a woman feels after something like this,” he said slowly, folding and unfolding his hands. “What do I say to her?”

“Let her sleep. When she wakes up, tell her that you love her, and that she’s brave and magnificent. This part will probably feel like a bad dream.”

Mitch stared at her. “What do I tell her if the next one doesn’t work, either?”

Galbreath leaned her head to one side and smoothed her cheek with one finger. “I don’t know, Mr. Rafelson.”

Mitch filled out the discharge papers and looked over the attached medical report, signed by Galbreath. Kaye folded a nightgown and put it into the small overnight case, then walked stiffly into the bathroom and packed up her toothbrush. “I ache all over,” she said, her voice hollow through the open door.

“I can get a wheelchair,” Mitch said. He was almost out the door before Kaye left the bathroom and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I can walk. This part is done with, and that makes me feel much better. But…Fifty-two chromosomes, Mitch. I wish I knew what that meant.”

“There’s still time,” Mitch said quietly.

Kaye’s first impulse was to give him a stern look, but his expression told her that would not be fair, that he was as vulnerable as she. “No,” she said, simply and gently.

Galbreath knocked on the door frame.

“Come in,” Kaye said. She closed and latched the lid on the overnight case. The doctor entered with a young, ill-at-ease man dressed in a gray suit.

“Kaye, this is Ed Gianelli. He’s the Emergency Action legal representative for Marine Pacific.”

“Ms. Lang, Mr. Rafelson. I’m sorry for the difficulty. I have to obtain some personal information and a signature, under the state of Washington compliance agreements with the federal Emergency Act, as agreed to by the state legislature on July 22 of this year, and signed by the governor on July 26. I apologize for the inconvenience during a painful time—”

“What is it?” Mitch asked. “What do we have to do?”

“All women carrying SHEVA second-stage fetuses should register with the state Emergency Action Office and agree to follow-up medical tracking. You can arrange to have those visits with Dr. Galbreath, as the obstetrician of record, and she will carry out the standardized tests.”

“We won’t register,” Mitch said. “Are you ready to go?” he asked Kaye, putting his arm around her.

Gianelli shifted his stance. “I won’t go into the reasons, Mr. Rafelson, but registration and follow-up are mandated by the King County Board of Health, in agreement with state and federal law.”

“I don’t recognize the law,” Mitch said firmly.

“The penalty is a fine of five hundred dollars for each week you refuse,” Gianelli said.

“Best not to make a big deal out of it,” Galbreath said. “It’s a kind of addendum to a birth certificate.”

“The infant hasn’t been born yet.”

“Then think of it as an addendum to the postrejection medical report,” Gianelli said, his shoulders rising.

“There was no rejection,” Kaye said. “What we’re doing is natural.”

Gianelli held out his hands in exasperation. “All I need is your current residence and a waiver to access your pertinent medical records, with Dr. Galbreath and your lawyer, if you wish, overseeing what we look at.”

“My God,” Mitch said. He moved Kaye past Galbreath and Gianelli, then paused to say to the doctor, “You know what this means, don’t you? People will stay away from hospitals, from their physicians.”

“My hands are pretty much tied,” Galbreath said. “The hospital fought this until just yesterday. We still plan to appeal to the Board of Health. But for now—”

Mitch and Kaye left. Galbreath stood in the doorway, face mottled.

Gianelli followed them down the hall, agitated. “I have to remind you,” he said, “that these fines are cumulative—”

“Give it up, Ed!” Galbreath shouted, slamming her hand on the wall. “Just give it up and let them go, for Christ’s sake!”

Gianelli stood in the middle of the hallway, shaking his head. “I hate this shit!”

“You hate it?” Galbreath shouted at him. “Just leave my patients the hell alone!”

78 Building 52, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Your face looks pretty good,” Shawbeck said. He advanced into Augustine’s office on a pair of crutches. His aide helped him lower himself into the chair. Augustine was finishing a corned beef sandwich. He wiped his lips and folded the top of the foam box, latching it.

“All right,” Shawbeck said when he was seated. “Weekly meeting of the survivors of July twentieth, der Fuhrer presiding.”

Augustine lifted his eyes. “Not a bit funny.”

“When’s Christopher going to join us? We should keep a bottle of brandy, and the last survivor gets to toast the departed.”

“Christopher is getting more and more disaffected,” Augustine said.

“And you aren’t?” Shawbeck asked. “How long since you met with the president?”

“Three days,” Augustine said.

“Black budget discussions?”

“Emergency Action reserve finances,” Augustine said.

“He didn’t even mention them to me,” Shawbeck said.

“It’s my ball now. They’re going to hang the old toilet seat around my neck.”

“Because you put together the rationale,” Shawbeck said. “So — these new babies are not only going to be born dead, but if any happen to be born alive, we take them away from their parents and put them into specially financed hospitals. We’ve gone pretty far on this one.”

“The public seems to be with us,” Augustine said. “The president’s describing it as a major public health risk.”

“I wouldn’t be in your shoes for anything on Earth, Mark. It’s going to be political suicide. The president has to be in shock to be promoting this.”

“To tell the truth, Frank, after all those years in the White House’s shadow, he’s feeling his oats a little. He’s going to drag us around the old bridle path getting past mistakes straightened out, and pushing through a martyr’s agenda.”

“And you’re going to spur him on?”

Augustine angled his head back. He nodded.

“Incarcerate sick babies?”

“You know the science.”

Shawbeck smirked. “You get five virologists to agree that it’s possible that these infants — and the mothers — could be breeding grounds for ancient viruses. Well, thirty-seven virologists have gone on record saying it’s bogus.”

“Not as prominent, and not nearly as influential.”

“Thorne and Mahy and Mondavi and Bishop, Mark.”

“I have my instincts, Frank. Remember, this is my area, too.”

Shawbeck dragged his chair forward. “What are we now, petty tyrants?”

Augustine’s face went livid. “Thanks, Frank,” he said.

“The public starts to turn against the mothers and the unborn children. What if the babies are cute? How long until they swing back, Mark? What will you do then?”

Augustine did not answer.

“I know why the president refuses to meet with me,” Shawbeck said. “You tell him what he wants to hear. He’s afraid, and the country’s out of control, so he picks a solution and you back him up. It isn’t science, it’s politics.”

“The president agrees with me.”

“Whatever we call it — July twentieth, the Reichstag fire — the bombing doesn’t give you carte blanche,” Shawbeck said.

“We’re going to survive,” Augustine said. “I didn’t deal us this hand.”

“No,” Shawbeck said. “But you’ve sure stopped the deck from being dealt out fairly.”

Augustine stared straight ahead.

“They’re calling it ‘original sin,’ you know that?”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Augustine said.

“Tune in the Christian Broadcasting Network. They’re splitting constituencies all across America. Pat Robertson is telling his audience these monsters are God’s final test before the arrival of the new Kingdom of Heaven. He says our DNA is trying to purge itself of all our accumulated sins, to…what was his phrase, Ted?”

The aide said, “Clean up our records before God calls Judgment Day.”

“That was it.”

“We still don’t control the airwaves, Frank,” Augustine said. “I can’t be held responsible…”

“Half a dozen other televangelists say these unborn children are the devil’s spawn,” Shawbeck continued, building up steam. “Born with the mark of Satan, one-eyed and hare-lipped. Some are even saying they have cloven hooves.”

Augustine shook his head sadly.

“They’re your support group now,” Shawbeck said, and waved his arm for the aide to step forward. He struggled to his feet, shoved the crutches into his armpits. “I’m tendering my resignation tomorrow morning. From the Taskforce and from the NIH. I’m burned out. I can’t take any more of this ignorance — my own or anybody else’s. Just thought you should be the first to know. Maybe you can consolidate all the power.”

When Shawbeck was gone, Augustine stood behind his desk, hardly breathing. His knuckles were white and his hands shook. Slowly, he took control of his emotions, forcing himself to breathe deeply and evenly.

“It’s all in the follow-through,” he said to the empty room.

79 Seattle

They moved the last of the boxes out of Mitch’s old apartment in the snow. Kaye insisted on carrying a few small ones, but Mitch and Wendell had done all the heavy hauling in the early morning hours, packing everything into a big orange-and-white U-Haul rental truck.

Kaye climbed into the truck beside Mitch. Wendell drove.

“Good-bye, bachelor days,” Kaye said.

Mitch smiled.

“There’s a tree farm near the house,” Wendell said. “We can pick up a Christmas tree on the way in. Should be terrifically cozy.”

Their new home stood in a patch of low brush and woods near Ebey Slough and the town of Snohomish. Rustic green and white, with a single front-facing gable window and a large screened-in porch, the two-bedroom house lay at the end of a long country road surrounded by pines. They were renting from Wendell’s parents, who had owned the house for thirty-four years.

They were keeping their change of address a secret.

As the men unloaded the truck, Kaye made sandwiches and slipped a six-pack of beer and a few fruit drinks into the freshly scrubbed refrigerator. Inside the bare and clean living room, standing in her socks on the oak floor, Kaye felt at peace.

Wendell carried a lamp into the living room and set it on the kitchen table. Kaye handed him a beer. He took a deep swallow gratefully, his throat bobbing. “Did they tell you?” he asked.

“Who?Tell us what?”

“My folks. I was born here. This was their first house.” He waved his hands around the living room. “I used to carry a microscope outside in the garden.”

“That’s wonderful,” Kaye said.

“This is where I became a scientist,” Wendell said. “A sacred place. May it bless you both!”

Mitch lugged in a chair and a magazine rack. He accepted a Full Sail ale and toasted them, clinking his glass against Kaye’s Snapple.

“Here’s to becoming moles,” he said. “To going underground.”

Maria Konig and half a dozen other friends came four hours later and helped arrange furniture. They were almost done when Eileen Ripper knocked on the door. She carried a lumpy canvas bag. Mitch introduced her, then saw two others waiting on the outside porch.

“I brought some friends,” Eileen said. “Thought we’d celebrate with news of our own.”

Sue Champion and a tall older man with long black hair and a well-disciplined barrel of a belly stepped forward, more than a little ill at ease. The tall man’s eyes glinted white like a wolf’s.

Eileen shook hands with Maria and Wendell. “Mitch, you’ve met Sue. This is her husband, Jack. And this is for the wood stove,” she said to Kaye, dropping the bag by the fireplace. “Scrap maple and cherry. Smells wonderful. What a beautiful house!”

Sue nodded to Mitch and smiled at Kaye. “We’ve never met,” Sue said. Kaye opened and closed her mouth like a fish, at a loss for words, until they both laughed nervously.

They had brought baked ham and steelhead for dinner.

Jack and Mitch circled like wary boys sizing up each other. Sue seemed unconcerned, but Mitch did not know what to say. A little tipsy, he apologized for not having any candles and decided the occasion called for Coleman lanterns.

Wendell switched off all the lights. The living room became a camp tent with long shadows and they ate in the bright center amid the stacked boxes. Sue and Jack conferred for a moment in a corner.

“Sue tells me she likes you both,” Jack said when they returned. “But I’m the suspicious type, and I say you’re all crazy.”

“I won’t disagree,” Mitch said, lifting his beer.

“Sue told me about what you did on the Columbia.”

“That was a long time ago,” Mitch said.

“Be good, now,” Sue warned her husband.

“I just want to know why you did it,” Jack said. “He might have been one of my ancestors.”

“I wanted to know whether he was one of your ancestors,” Mitch said.

“Was he?”

“I think so, yes.”

Jack squinted at the Coleman’s bright hissing light. “The ones you found in the cave in the mountains. They were ancestors to all of us?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Jack shook his head quizzically. “Sue tells me the ancestors can be brought back to their people, whoever their people might be, if we learn their real names. Ghosts can be dangerous. I’m not so sure this is the way to keep them happy.”

“Sue and I have drummed up another agreement,” Eileen said. “We’ll get it right eventually. I’m going to be a special consultant to the tribes. Whenever anyone finds old bones, I’ll be called in to take a look at them. We’ll do quick measurements and take a small sample, and then return them to the tribes. Jack and his friends have put together what they call a Wisdom Rite.”

“Their names lie in their bones,” Jack said. “We tell them we’ll name our children after them.”

“That’s grand,” Mitch said. “I’m pleased. Flabbergasted, but pleased.”

“Everybody thinks Indians are ignorant,” Jack said. “We just care about some different things.”

Mitch leaned across the lantern and held out his hand to Jack. Jack looked up at the ceiling, his teeth working audibly. “This is too new,” he said. But he took Mitch’s extended hand and shook it so firmly they almost knocked the lantern over. For a moment, Kaye thought it might turn into an arm-wrestling contest.

“But I’m telling you,” Jack said when they were done. “You should behave yourself, Mitch Rafelson.”

“I’m out of the bone business for good,” Mitch said.

“Mitch dreams about the people he finds,” Eileen said.

“Really?” Jack was impressed by this. “Do they talk to you?”

“I become them,” Mitch said.

“Oh,” Jack said.

Kaye was fascinated by them all, but in particular by Sue. The woman’s features were more than strong — they were almost masculine — but Kaye thought she had never met anyone more beautiful. Eileen’s relationship with Mitch was so easy and intuitive that Kaye wondered if they might have been lovers once.

“Everybody’s scared,” Sue said. “We have so many SHEVA pregnancies in Kumash. That’s one of the reasons why we’re working with Eileen. The council decided that our ancestors can tell us how to survive these times. You’re carrying Mitch’s baby?” she asked Kaye.

“I am,” Kaye said.

“Has the little helper come and gone?”

Kaye nodded.

“Me, too,” Sue said. “We buried her with a special name and our gratitude and love.”

“She was Tiny Swift,” Jack said quietly.

“Congratulations,” Mitch said, just as softly.

“Yes, that is right,” Jack said, pleased. “No sadness. Her work is done.”

“The government can’t come and take names on the council lands,” Sue said. “We won’t let them. If the government becomes too scary, you come stay with us. We’ve fought them off before.”

“This is so wonderful,” Eileen said, beaming.

But Jack looked over his shoulder into the shadows. His eyes narrowed, he swallowed hard, and his face became deeply lined. “It’s so hard to know what to do or what to believe,” he said. “I wish the ghosts would speak more clearly.”

“Will you help us with your knowledge, Kaye?” Sue asked.

“I’ll try,” Kaye said.

Then, to Mitch, hesitantly, Sue said, “I have dreams, too. I dream about the new children.”

“Tell us about your dreams,” Kaye said.

“Maybe they’re personal, honey,” Mitch warned her.

Sue put her hand on Mitch’s arm. “I’m glad you understand. They are personal, and sometimes they’re frightening, too.”

Wendell came down from the attic on a ladder with a cardboard box in one arm. “My folks said they were still here, and they are. Ornaments — God, what memories! Who wants to put the tree up and decorate it?”

80 Building 52, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

“Here are your meetings for the next two days.” Florence Leighton gave Augustine a small sheet of paper he could fit in his shirt pocket for instant reference, as he liked. The list was growing; this afternoon he would be seeing the governor of Nebraska, and if there was time, he would meet with a group of financial columnists.

And he was looking forward to dinner at seven with a lovely woman who cared not a damn for his prominence in the news and his reputation as a tireless workaholic. Mark Augustine squared his shoulders and ran his finger down the list before he folded it, which was his way of telling Mrs. Leighton the list was approved and final.

“And here’s an odd one,” she added. “He has no appointment but says he’s sure you’ll want to see him.” She dropped a business card onto his desk and gave him an arch look. “A pixie.”

Augustine stared down at the name and felt a small twinge of curiosity.

“You know him?” she asked.

“He’s a reporter,” Augustine said. “A science writer with his finger in a number of steaming pies.”

“Fruit or cow?” Mrs. Leighton asked.

Augustine smiled. “All right. I’ll call his bluff. Tell him he has five minutes.”

“Bring in your coffee?”

“He’ll want tea.”

Augustine arranged his desk and put two books into a drawer. He did not want anyone snooping on what he was currently reading. One was a thin monograph, Movable Elements as Sources ofGenomic Novelty in Grasses. The second was a popular novel by Robin Cook, just published, about the outbreak of a major and unexplained disease by a new kind of organism, possibly from space. Augustine generally enjoyed outbreak novels, though he had stayed away from them for the past year. Reading this one was a sign of his new confidence.

He stood and smiled as Oliver Merton entered. “Good to see you again, Mr. Merton.”

“Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Augustine,” Merton said. “I’ve been through quite the shakedown outside. They even took my notepad.”

Augustine made an apologetic face. “There’s very little time. I’m sure you have something interesting to say.”

“Right.” Merton glanced up as Mrs. Leighton entered with a tray and two cups.

“Tea, Mr. Merton?” she asked.

Merton smiled sheepishly. “Coffee, actually. I’ve been in Seattle the last few weeks and I’m rather off tea.”

Mrs. Leighton stuck her tongue out at Augustine and went back for a cup of coffee.

“She’s bold,” Merton observed.

“We’ve worked together through some tough times,” Augustine said. “Pretty dark times, too.”

“Of course,” Merton said. “First, congratulations on getting the University of Washington conference on SHEVA postponed.”

Augustine looked puzzled.

“Something about NIH grants being withdrawn if the conference proceeded, is all I’ve managed to winkle out of a few sources at the university.”

“It’s news to me,” Augustine said.

“Instead, we’re going to hold it at a little motel off campus.

And maybe have it catered by a famous French restaurant with a sympathetic chef. Sweeten the lemon juice. If we’re going to be complete and unaffiliated rogues, we’ll enjoy ourselves.”

“You sound less than objective, but I wish you luck,” Augustine said.

Merton’s expression shifted to a challenging grin. “I’ve just heard this morning from Friedrich Brock that there’s been a wholesale rearrangement of the staff overseeing the Neandertal mummies at the University of Innsbruck. An internal scientific review concluded that key facts were being ignored and that gross scientific errors had been made. Hen-Professor Brock has been summoned to Innsbruck. He’s on his way there now.”

“I don’t know why I should be interested,” Augustine said. “We have about two minutes.”

Mrs. Leighton returned with a cup of coffee. Merton took a strong swallow. “Thank you. They’re going to treat the three mummies as a family group, related genetically. And that means they’re going to acknowledge the first solid evidence of human speciation. SHEVA has been found in these specimens.”

“Very good,” Augustine said.

Merton pressed his palms together. Florence watched him with a kind of idle curiosity.

“We’ve arrived at the verge of the long fast slope to the truth, Dr. Augustine,” Merton said. “I was curious how you would take the news.”

Augustine sucked in a small breath through his nose. “Whatever happened tens of thousands of years ago doesn’t affect our judgment about what is happening now. Not a single Herod’s fetus has gone to full term, hi fact, yesterday, we were told by scientists working with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that not only are these second-stage fetuses subject to first trimester rejection at a catastrophic rate, but that they are especially vulnerable to virtually every known herpes virus, including Epstein-Barr. Mononucleosis.

Ninety-five percent of everyone on Earth has Epstein-Barr, Mr. Merton.”

“Nothing will change your views, Doctor?” Merton asked.

“My one good ear still rings from the bomb that killed our president. I’ve rolled with every punch. Nothing can shake me but facts, present-day, relevant facts.” Augustine came around the desk and sat on the corner. “I wish the Innsbruck people all the best, whoever does the investigating,” he said. “There are enough mysteries in biology to last us until the end of time. The next time you’re in Washington, drop by again, Mr. Merton. I’m sure Florence will remember — no tea, coffee.”

Tray balanced on his lap, Dicken pushed his wheelchair through the Natcher Building cafeteria, saw Merton, and rolled himself to the end of the table. He set his tray down with one hand.

“Good train ride?” Dicken asked.

“Glorious,” Merton said. “I thought you should know that Kaye Lang keeps a photo of you on her desktop.”

“That’s an odd sort of message, Oliver,” Dicken said. “Why in hell should I care?”

“Because I believe you felt something more than scientific camaraderie for her,” Merton said. “She sent you letters after the bombing. You never answered.”

“If you’re going to be bloody-minded, I’ll eat elsewhere,” Dicken said, and lifted the tray again.

Merton raised his hands. “Sorry. My slash and reveal instincts at work.”

Dicken pushed the tray in and arranged his wheelchair. “I spend half my day waiting for myself to heal, worried that I’ll never recover full use of my legs or my hand…Trying to have faith in my body. The other half of the day I’m in rehab, pushing until it hurts. I don’t have time to moon over lost opportunities. Do you?”

“My girl in Leeds dumped me last week. I’m never at home. Besides, I turned positive. Scared her.”

“Sorry,” Dicken said.

“I just stopped by Augustine’s inner sanctum. He seems cocky enough.”

“The polls support him. Public health crisis blossoms into international policy. Fanatics push us into repressive legislation. It’s martial law in all but name, and the Emergency Action Taskforce sets down the medical decrees — which means they rule nearly everything. Now that Shawbeck has stepped down, Augustine is number two in the country.”

“Frightening,” Merton said.

“Show me something now that isn’t,” Dicken said.

Merton conceded that. “I’m convinced that Augustine is pulling strings to get our Northwestern conference on SHEVA shut down.”

“He’s a consummate bureaucrat — which means, he’ll protect his position using all the tools available.”

“What about the truth?” Merton said, his brow wrinkling. “I’m just not used to seeing government manage scientific debate.”

“You’re not usually so naive, Oliver. The British have done it for years.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve dealt with enough cabinet ministers to know the drill . But where do you stand? You helped bring Kaye’s coalition together — why doesn’t Augustine just fire you and move on?”

“Because I saw the light,” Dicken said glumly. “Or rather, the dark. Dead babies. I lost hope. Even before that, Augustine worked me around pretty well — kept me on as an apparent balance, let me be involved in policy meetings. But he never gave me enough rope to make a noose. Now…I can’t travel, can’t do the research we need to do. I’m ineffective.”

“Neutered?” Merton ventured.

“Castrated,” Dicken said.

“Don’t you at least whisper in his ear, ‘It’s science, O mighty Caesar, you could be wrong’?”

Dicken shook his head. “The chromosome numbers are pretty damning. Fifty-two chromosomes, as opposed to forty-six. Trisomal, tetrasomal…They could all end up with something like Down syndrome or worse. If Epstein-Barr doesn’t get them.”

Merton had saved the best for last. He told Dicken about the changes in Innsbruck. Dicken listened intently, with a squint in his blind eye, then turned his good eye to stare off at the wall of windows and the bright spring sunshine beyond.

He was remembering the conversation with Kaye before she had ever met Rafelson.

“So Rafelson is going to Austria?” Dicken poked with a fork at the steamed sole and wild rice on his plate.

“If they invite him. He might still be too controversial.”

“I await the report,” Dicken said. “But I’m not going to hold my breath.”

“You think Kaye is making a terrible leap,” Merton suggested.

“I don’t know why I even bought this food,” Dicken said, laying down the fork. “I’m not hungry.”

81 Seattle

The baby seems to be doing fine,” Dr. Galbreath said. “Second trimester development is normal. We’ve done our analysis, and it’s what we expect for a SHEVA second-stage fetus.”

This seemed a little cold to Kaye. “Boy or girl?” Kaye asked.

“Fifty-two XX,” Galbreath said. She opened a brown cardboard folder and gave Kaye a copy of the sample report. “Chromosomally abnormal female.”

Kaye stared at the paper, her heart thumping. She had not told Mitch, but she had hoped for a girl, to at least remove some of the distance, the number of differences, she might have to contend with. “Is there any duplication, or are they new chromosomes?” Kaye asked.

“If we had the expertise to decide that, we’d be famous,” Galbreath said. Then, less stiffly, “We don’t know. Cursory glance tells us they may not be duplicated.”

“No extra chromosome 21?” Kaye asked quietly, staring at the sheet of paper with its rows of numbers and brief string of explanatory words.

“I don’t think the fetus has Down syndrome,” Galbreath said. “But you know how I feel about this now.”

“Because of the extra chromosomes.”

Galbreath nodded.

“We have no way of knowing how many chromosomes Neandertals had,” Kaye said.

“If they’re like us, forty-six,” Galbreath said.

“But they weren’t like us. It’s still a mystery.” Kaye’s words sounded fragile even to her. Kaye stood up, one hand on her stomach. “As far as you can tell, it’s healthy.”

Galbreath nodded. “I have to ask, though, what do I know? Next to nothing. You test positive for herpes simplex type one, but negative for mono — that is, Epstein-Barr. You never had chicken pox. For God’s sake, Kaye, stay away from anyone with chicken pox.”

“I’ll be careful,” Kaye said.

“I don’t know what more I can tell you.”

“Wish me luck.”

“I wish you all the luck on Earth, and in the heavens. It doesn’t make me feel any better as a doctor.”

“It’s still our decision, Felicity.”

“Of course.” Galbreath flipped through more papers until she came to the back of the folder. “If this were my decision, you’d never see what I have to show you. We’ve lost our appeal. We have to get all our SHEVA patients to register. If you don’t agree, we have to register for you.”

“Then do so,” Kaye said evenly. She played with a fold on her slacks.

“I know that you’ve moved,” Galbreath said. “If I hand in an incorrect registration, Marine Pacific could get in trouble, and I could be called up before a review board and have my license revoked.” She gave Kaye a sad but level look. “I need your new address.”

Kaye stared at the form, then shook her head.

“I’m begging you, Kaye. I want to remain your doctor until this is over.”

“Over?”

“Until the delivery.”

Kaye shook her head again, with a stubbornly wild look, like a hunted rabbit.

Galbreath stared down at the end of the examination table, tears in her eyes. “I don’t have any choice. None of us has any choice.”

“I don’t want anyone coming to take my baby,” Kaye said, her breath short, hands cold.

“If you don’t cooperate, I can’t be your doctor,” Galbreath said. She turned abruptly and walked from the room. The nurse peered in a few moments later, saw Kaye standing there, stunned, and asked if she needed some help.

“I don’t have a doctor,” Kaye said.

The nurse stood aside as Galbreath entered again. “Please, give me your new address. I know Marine Pacific is fighting any local attempts by the Taskforce to contact its patients. I’ll put extra warnings on this file. We’re on your side, Kaye, believe me.”

Kaye wanted desperately to speak to Mitch, but he was in the University district, trying to finalize hotel arrangements for the conference. She did not want to break in on that.

Galbreath handed Kaye a pen. She filled out the form, slowly. Galbreath took it back. “They would have found out one way or another,” she said tightly.

Kaye carried the report out of the hospital and walked to the brown Toyota Camry they had purchased two months ago. She sat in the car for ten minutes, numb, bloodless fingers clutching the wheel, and then turned the key in the ignition.

She was rolling down her window for air when she heard Galbreath calling after her. She gave half a thought to simply pulling out of the parking space and driving on, but she reap-plied the emergency brake and looked left. Galbreath was running across the parking lot. She put her hand on the door and peered in at Kaye.

“You wrote down the wrong address, didn’t you?” she asked, huffing, her face red.

Kaye simply looked blank.

Galbreath closed her eyes, caught her breath. “There’s nothing wrong with your baby,” she said. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. I don’t understand anything. Why aren’t you rejecting her as foreign tissue — she’s completely different from you! You might as well be carrying a gorilla. But you tolerate her, nurture her. All the mothers do. Why doesn’t the Taskforce study thatl”

“It’s a puzzle,” Kaye admitted.

“Please forgive me, Kaye.”

“You’re forgiven,” Kaye said with no real conviction.

“No, I mean it. I don’t care if they take away my license — they could be wrong about this whole thing! I want to be your doctor.”

Kaye hid her face in her hands, exhausted by the tension. Her neck felt like steel springs. She lifted her head and put her hand on Galbreath’s. “If it’s possible, I’d like that,” she said.

“Wherever you go, whatever you do, promise me — let me be there to deliver?” Galbreath pleaded. “I want to learn everything I can about SHEVA pregnancies, to be prepared, and I want to deliver your daughter.”

Kaye parked across the street from the old, square University Plaza Hotel, across the freeway from the University of Washington. She found her husband on the lower level, waiting for a formal bid from the hotel manager, who had retired to his office.

She told him what had happened at Marine Pacific. Mitch banged the door of the meeting room with his fist, furious. “I should never have left you — not for a minute!”

“You know that’s not practical,” Kaye said. She put a hand on his shoulder. “I handled it pretty well, I think.”

“I can’t believe Galbreath would do that to you.”

“I know she didn’t want to.”

Mitch circled, kicked at a metal folding chair, waved his hands helplessly.

“She wants to help us,” Kaye said.

“How can we trust her now?”

“There’s no need to be paranoid.”

Mitch stopped short. “There’s a big old train rolling down the tracks. We’re in its headlights . I know that, Kaye. It’s not just the government. Every pregnant woman on Earth is suspect. Augustine — that absolute bastard — he’s making sure that you’re all pariahs! I could kill him!”

Kaye took hold of his arms and tugged gently, then hugged him. He was angry enough to try to shrug her off and continue stalking around the room. She held on tighter. “Please, enough, Mitch.”

“And now you’re out here — exposed to anybody who might walk by!” he said, arms quivering.

“I refuse to become a hothouse flower,” Kaye said defensively.

He gave up and dropped his shoulders. “What can we do? When are they going to send police vans with thugs in them to round us up?”

“I don’t know,” Kaye said. “Something’s got to give. I believe in this country, Mitch. People won’t put up with this.”

Mitch sat in a folding chair at the end of an aisle. The room was brightly lit, with fifty empty chairs arranged in five rows, a linen-covered table and coffee service at the back. “Wen-dell and Maria say the pressure is just incredible. They’ve filed protests, but no one in the department will admit to anything. Funding gets cut, offices reassigned, labs harassed by inspectors. I’m losing all my faith, Kaye. I saw it happen to me after…”

“I know,” Kaye said.

“And now the State Department won’t let Lrock return from Irnrbruck.”

“When did you hear that?”

“Merton called from Bethesda this afternoon. Augustine is trying to shut this down completely. It’ll be just you and me — and you’ll have to go into hiding!”

Kaye sat beside him. She had heard nothing from any of her former colleagues back East. Nothing from Judith. Perversely, she wanted to talk with Marge Cross. She wanted to reach out for all the support left in the world.

She missed her mother and father terribly.

Kaye leaned over and put her head on Mitch’s shoulder. He rubbed her scalp gently with his big hands.

They had not even discussed the real news of the morning. Important things got lost so quickly in the fray. “I know something you don’t know,” Kaye said.

“What’s that?”

“We’re going to have a daughter.”

Mitch stopped breathing for a moment and his face wrinkled up. “My God,” he said.

“It was one or the other,” Kaye said, grinning at his reaction.

“It’s what you wanted.”

“Did I say that?”

“Christmas Eve. You said you wanted to buy dolls for her.”

“Do you mind?”

“Of course not. I just get a little shock every time we take a new step, that’s all.”

“Dr. Galbreath says she’s healthy. There’s nothing wrong with her. She has the extra chromosomes…but we knew that.”

Mitch put his hand on her stomach. “I can feel her moving,” he said, and got on the floor in front of Kaye to lay his ear against her. “She’s going to be so beautiful .”

The hotel manager walked into the meeting room with a clutch of papers and looked down on them in surprise. In his fifties, with a full head of curly brown hair and a plump, nondescript face, he could have been anyone’s mediocre uncle. Mitch got up and brushed offhis pants.

“My wife,” Mitch said, embarrassed.

“Of course,” the manager said. He narrowed his pale blue eyes and took Mitch aside. “She’s pregnant, isn’t she? You didn’t tell me about that. There’s no mention in here…” He shuffled through the papers, looked up at Mitch accusingly. “None at all. We have to be so careful now about public gatherings and exposures.”

Mitch leaned against the Buick, chin in hand, rubbing. His fingers made a small rasping sound though he had shaved that morning. He pulled his hand back. Kaye stood before him.

“I’m going to drive you back to the house,” he said.

“What about the Buick?”

He shook his head. “I’ll pick it up later. Wendell can give me a ride.”

“Where do we go from here?” Kaye asked. “We could try another hotel. Or rent a lodge hall.”

Mitch made a disgusted face. “The bastard was looking for an excuse. He knew your name. He called somebody. He checked up, like a good little Nazi.” He flung his hands in the air. “Long live America the free!”

“If Brock can’t enter the country again—”

“We’ll hold the conference on the Internet,” Mitch said. “We’ll figure out something. But it’s you I’m concerned about right now. Something’s bound to happen.”

“What?”

“Don’t you feel it?” He rubbed his forehead. “The look in that manager’s eyes, that cowardly bastard. He’s like a frightened goat. He doesn’t know jack shit about biology. He lives his life in small safe moves and he doesn’t buck the system. Nearly everybody is like him. They get pushed around and they run in the direction they’re pushed.”

“That sounds so cynical,” Kaye said.

“It’s political reality. I’ve been so stupid up until now. Letting you travel alone. You could be picked up, exposed—”

“I don’t want to be kept in a cave, Mitch.”

Mitch winced.

Kaye put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. You know what I mean.”

“Everything’s in place. Kaye. You saw it in Georgia. I saw it in the Alps. We’ve become strangers . People hate us.”

“They hate me,” Kaye said, her face going pale. “Because I’m pregnant.”

“They hate me, too.”

“But they’re not asking you to register like you were a Jew in Germany.”

“Not yet,” Mitch said. “Let’s go.” He wrapped his arm around her and escorted her to the Toyota. Kaye found it awkward to match his long stride. “I think we may have a day or two, maybe three. Then…somebody’s going to do something. You’re a thorn in their sides. A double thorn.”

“Why double?”

“Celebrities have power,” Mitch said. “People know who you are, and you know the truth.”

Kaye got into the passenger side and rolled down the window. The inside of the car was warm. Mitch closed the door for her. “Do I?”

“You’re damn right you do. Sue made you an offer. Let’s look into it. I’ll tell Wendell where we’re going. Nobody else.”

“I like the house,” Kaye said.

“We’ll find another,” Mitch said.

82 Building 52, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Mark Augustine seemed almost feverish in his triumph. He laid the pictures out for Dicken and slipped the videotape into the office player. Dicken picked up the first picture, held it close, squinted. The usual medical photo colors, strange orange and olive flesh and bright pink lesions, out-of-focus facial features. A man, in his forties perhaps, alive but far from happy. Dicken picked up the next picture, a closeup of the man’s right arm, marked with roseate blotches, a yellow plastic ruler laid alongside to indicate size. The largest blotch spread over a diameter of seven centimeters, with an angry sore at the center, crusted with thick yellow fluid. Dicken counted seven blotches on the right arm alone.

“I showed these to the staff this morning,” Augustine said, holding out the remote and starting the tape. Dicken went on to the next few pictures. The man’s body was covered with more large roseate lesions, some forming huge blisters, proud, assertive, and no doubt intensely painful. “We have samples in for analysis now, but the field team did a quick serology check for SHEVA, just to confirm. The man’s wife is in her second trimester with a second-stage SHEVA fetus and still shows SHEVA type 3-s. The man is now clear of SHEVA, so we can rule out the lesions are caused by SHEVA, which we wouldn’t expect at any rate.”

“Where are they?” Dicken asked.

“San Diego, California. Illegal immigrant couple. Our Commissioned Corps people did the investigation and sent this material to us. It’s about three days old. Local press is being kept out for the time being.”

Augustine’s smile came and went like small flashes of lightning. He turned in front of his desk, fast-forwarding through scenes of the hospital, the ward, the room’s temporary containment features — plastic curtains taped to walls and door, separate air. He lifted his finger from the remote and returned to play mode.

Doctor Ed Sanger, Mercy Hospital’s Commissioned Corps Taskforce member, in his fifties, with lank and sandy hair, identified himself and droned self-consciously through the diagnosis. Dicken listened with a rising sense of dread. How wrong I can be. Augustine is right. All his guesses were dead on.

Augustine shut off the tape. “It’s a single-stranded RNA virus, huge and primitive, probably around 160,000 nu-cleotides. Like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We’re working to match its genome with known HERV coding regions. It’s incredibly fast, it’s ill-adapted, and it’s deadly.”

“He looks in bad shape,” Dicken said.

“The man died last night.” Augustine turned off the tape. “The woman seems to be asymptomatic, but she’s having the usual trouble with her pregnancy.” Augustine folded his arms and sat on the edge of the desk. “Lateral transmission of an unknown retrovirus, almost certainly excited and equipped by SHEVA. The woman infected the man. This is the one, Christopher. This is the one we need. Are you up to helping us go public?”

“Go public, how?”

“We’re going to quarantine and/or sequester women with second-stage pregnancies. For that kind of violation of civil liberties, we have to lay some heavy foundations. The president is prepared to go forward, but his team says we need personalities to put the message across.”

“I’m no personality. Get Bill Cosby.”

“Cosby is signing off on this one. But you…You’re practically a poster child for the brave health worker recovering from wounds inflicted by fanatics desperate to stop us.” Augustine’s smile flickered again.

Dicken stared down at his lap. “You’re certain about this?”

“As certain as we’re going to be, until we do all the science. That could take three or four months. Considering the consequences, we can’t afford to wait.”

Dicken looked up at Augustine, then moved his gaze to the patchy clouds and trees in the sky through the office window. Augustine had hung a small square of stained glass there, a fleur-de-lis in red and green.

“All the mothers will have to have stickers in their houses,” Dicken said. “Q, or S, maybe. Every pregnant woman will have to prove she isn’t carrying a SHEVA baby. That could cost billions.”

“Nobody’s concerned about funding,” Augustine said. “We’re facing the biggest health threat of all time. It’s the biological equivalent of Pandora’s box, Christopher. Every retroviral illness we ever conquered but couldn’t get rid of. Hundreds, maybe thousands of diseases we have no modern defenses against. There’s no question of our getting enough funding on this one.”

“The only problem is, I don’t believe it,” Dicken said softly.

Augustine stared at him, strong lines forming beside his lips, brows drawing inward.

“I’ve chased viruses most of my adult life,” Dicken said. “I’ve seen what they can do. I know about retroviruses, I know about HERV I know about SHEVA. HERV were probably never eliminated from the genome because they provided protection against other, newer retroviruses. They’re our own little library of protection. And…our genome uses them to generate novelty.”

“We don’t know that,” Augustine said, his voice grating with tension.

“I want to wait for the science before we lock up every mother in America,” Dicken said.

As Augustine’s skin darkened with irritation, then anger, the patches of shrapnel scars became vivid. “The danger is just too great,” he said. “I thought you’d appreciate a chance to get back into the picture.”

“No,” Dicken said. “I can’t.”

“Still holding on to fantasies about a new species?” Augustine asked grimly.

“I’m way beyond that,” Dicken said. The weary gravel in his voice startled him. He sounded like an old man.

Augustine walked around his desk and opened a file drawer, pulling out an envelope. Everything in his posture, the small, self-conscious strut in his walk, the cementlike set of his features, evoked a kind of dread in Dicken. This was a Mark Augustine he had not seen before: a man about to administer the coup de grace. “This came for you while you were in the hospital. It was in your mail slot. It was addressed to you in your official capacity, so I took the liberty of having it opened.”

He handed the thin papers to Dicken.

“They’re from Georgia. Leonid Sugashvili was sending you pictures of what he called possible Homo superior specimens, wasn’t he?”

“I hadn’t checked him out,” Dicken said, “so I didn’t mention it to you.”

“Wisely. He’s been arrested for fraud in Tbilisi. For bilking families of those missing in the troubles. He promised grieving relatives he could show them where their loved ones were buried. Looks like he was after the CDC, too.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, and it doesn’t change my mind, Mark. I’m just burned out. It’s hard enough healing my own body. I’m not the man for the job.”

“All right,” Augustine said. “I’ll put you on long-term disability leave. We need your office at the CDC. We’re moving in sixty special epidemiologists next week to begin phase two. With our space shortage, we’ll probably put three in your office to start.”

They watched each other in silence.

“Thanks for carrying me this long,” Dicken said without a hint of irony.

“No problem,” Augustine said with equal flatness.

83 Snohomish County

Mitch piled the last of the boxes near the front door. Wendell Packer was coming with a panel truck in the morning. He looked around the house and set his lips in a wry, crooked line. They had been here just over two months. One Christmas.

Kaye carried the phone in from the bedroom, line dangling. “Turned off,” she said. “They’re prompt when you’re dismantling a home. So — how long have we been here?”

Mitch sat in the worn lounge chair he had had since his student days. “We’ll do okay,” he said. His hands felt funny. They seemed larger, somehow. “God, I’m tired.”

Kaye sat on the arm of the chair and reached around to massage his shoulders. He leaned his head against her arm, rubbed his bristly cheek against her peach cardigan.

“Damn,” she said. “I forgot to charge the batteries in the cell phone.” She kissed the top of his head and returned to the bedroom. Mitch noticed she walked straight enough, even at seven months. Her stomach was prominent but not huge. He wished he had had more experience with pregnancy. To have this be his first time -

“Both batteries are dead,” Kaye called from the bedroom. “They’ll take an hour or so.”

Mitch stared at various objects in the room, blinking. Then he held out his hands. They seemed swollen, stuck on the ends of Popeye-like forearms. His feet felt large, though he did not look at them. This was extremely discomfiting. He wanted to go to sleep but it was only four in the afternoon. They had just eaten a dinner of canned soup. It was still bright outside.

He had hoped to make love to Kaye in the house for the last time. Kaye returned and pulled up the footstool.

“You sit here,” Mitch said, starting to get out of the chair. “More comfortable.”

“I’m fine. I want to sit up straight.”

Mitch paused half out of the chair, woozy.

“Something wrong?”

He saw the first jag of light. He closed his eyes and fell back into the chair. “It’s coming,” he said.

“What?”

He pointed at his temple, and said, softly, “Bang.” He had had bodily distortions occur before and during his headaches when he had been a boy. He remembered hating them, and now he was almost beside himself with resentment and foreboding.

“I’ve got some Naproze in my purse,” Kaye said. He listened to her walking around the room. With his eyes closed, he saw ghostly lightning and his feet felt as big as an elephant’s. The pain was like a round of cannon fire advancing across a wide valley.

Kaye pressed two tablets into his hand and a tumbler full of water. He swallowed the tablets, drank the water, not at all confident they would do any good. Perhaps if he had had any decent warning, taken them earlier in the day…

“Let’s get you into bed,” Kaye said.

“What?” Mitch asked.

“Bed.”

“I want to go away,” he said.

“Right. Sleep.”

That was the only way he might even hope to escape. Even then, he might have horrid and painful dreams. He remembered those, as well; dreams of being crushed beneath mountains.

He lay down in the cool of the bare bedroom, on the linens they had left here for their last night, beneath a comforter. He pulled the comforter up over his head, leaving a small space to breathe through.

He barely heard Kaye tell him she loved him.

Kaye pulled back the comforter. Mitch’s forehead felt clammy, cold as ice. She was concerned, guilty that she could not share his pain; then, could not help rationalizing that Mitch would not share the pain of bringing their baby into the world.

She sat on the bed beside him. His breath came in shallow pants. She reflexively felt her tummy beneath the cardigan, lifted up the sweater, rubbed her skin, stretched so smooth it was almost shiny. The baby had been subdued for several hours after a bout of kicking this afternoon.

Kaye had never felt her kidneys being pummeled from the inside; she didn’t relish the experience. Nor did she enjoy going to the bathroom every hour on the hour, or the continuous rounds of heartburn. At night, lying in bed, she could even feel the rhythmic motion of her intestines.

All of it made her apprehensive; it also made her feel intensely alive and aware.

But she was pulling away from thinking about Mitch, about his pain. She settled down beside him and he suddenly rolled over, tugging the comforter and turning away.

“Mitch?”

He didn’t answer. She lay on her back for a moment, but that was uncomfortable, so she shifted on her side, facing away from Mitch, and backed into him slowly, gently, for his warmth. He did not move or protest. She stared at the gray-lit and empty wall. She thought she might get up and try to work on the book for a few minutes, but the laptop computer and her notebooks were all packed away. The impulse passed.

The silence in the house bothered her. She listened for any sound, heard only Mitch’s breathing and her own. The air was so still outside. She couldn’t even hear the traffic on Highway 2, less than a mile away. No birds. No settling beams or creaking floors.

After half an hour, she made sure that Mitch was asleep, then sat up, pushed herself to the edge of the bed, stood, and went into the kitchen to heat a kettle of water for tea. She stared out the kitchen window at the last of the twilight. The water in the kettle slowly came to a whistling boil and she poured it over a bag of chamomile in one of the two mugs they had left out on the white tile counter. As the tea steeped, she felt the smooth tiles with her finger, wondering what their next home would be like, probably within hailing distance of the Five Tribes’ huge Wild Eagle casino. Sue had still been making the arrangements this morning and promised only that eventually there would be a house, a nice one. “Maybe a trailer at first,” she had added over the phone.

Kaye felt a small throb of helpless anger. She wanted to stay here. She felt comfortable here. “This is so strange,” she said to the window. As if in response, the baby kicked once.

She picked up the mug and dropped the tea bag in the sink. As she took her first sip, she heard the sound of engines and tires on the gravel driveway.

She walked into the living room and stood, watching headlights flash outside. They were expecting no one; Wendell was in Seattle, the truck would not be available at the rental agency until tomorrow morning, Merton was in Beresford, New York; she had heard that Sue and Jack were in eastern Washington.

She thought of waking Mitch, wondered if she could wake him in his condition.

“Maybe it’s Maria or somebody else.”

But she would not approach the door. The living room lights were off, the porch lights off, the kitchen lights on. A flash played through the front window against the south wall. She had left the drapes open; they had no near neighbors, nobody to peer in.

A sharp rap rattled the front door. Kaye looked at her watch, pushed the little button to turn on its blue-green light. Seven o’clock.

The rap sounded again, followed by an unfamiliar voice. “Kaye Lang? Mitchell Rafelson? County Sheriff’s Department, Judicial Services.”

Kaye’s breath caught. What could this be? Surely nothing involving her! She walked to the front door and twirled the single dead bolt, opened the door. Four men stood on the porch, two in uniform, two in civilian clothes, slacks and light jackets. The flashlight beam crossed her face as she switched on the porch light. She blinked at them. “I’m Kaye Lang.”

One of the civilians, a tall, stout man with close-cut brown hair on a long oval face stepped forward. “Miz Lang, we have—”

“Mrs. Lang,” Kaye said.

“All right. My name is Wallace Jurgenson. This is Dr. Kevin Clark of the Snohomish Health District. I’m a Commissioned Corps public health service representative for the Emergency Action Taskforce in the state of Washington. Mrs. Lang, we have a federal Emergency Action Taskforce order verified by the Olympia Taskforce office, state of Washington. We’re contacting women known to be possibly infectious, bearing a second-stage—”

“That’s bull,” Kaye said.

The man stopped, faintly exasperated, then resumed. “A second-stage SHEVA fetus. Do you know what this means, ma’am?”

“Yes,” Kaye said, “but it’s all wrong.”

“I’m here to inform you that in the judgment of the federal Emergency Action Taskforce Office and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—”

“I used to work for them,” Kaye said.

“I know that,” Jurgenson said. Clark smiled and nodded, as if pleased to meet her. The deputies stood back beyond the porch, arms folded. “Miz Lang, it’s been determined that you may present a public health threat. You and other women in this area are being contacted and informed of their choices.”

“I choose to stay where I am,” Kaye said, her voice shaky. She stared from face to face. Pleasant-looking men, clean shaven, earnest, almost as nervous as she was, and not happy.

“We have orders to take you and your husband to a county Emergency Action shelter in Lynnwood, where you will be sequestered and provided medical care until it can be determined whether or not you present a public health risk—”

“No,” Kaye said, feeling her face heat up. “This is absolute bullshit. My husband is ill. He can’t travel.”

Jurgenson’s face was stern. He was preparing to do something he did not like. He glanced at Clark. The deputies stepped forward, and one nearly stumbled on a rock. After swallowing, Jurgenson continued. “Dr. Clark can give your husband a brief examination before we move you.” His breath showed on the night air.

“He has a headache? Kaye said. “A migraine. He gets them sometimes.” On the gravel drive waited a sheriff’s department car and a small ambulance. Beyond the vehicles, the scrubby wide lawn of the house stretched to a fence. She could smell the damp green and the country soil on the cold night air.

“We have no choice, Miz Lang.”

There was not much she could do. If Kaye resisted, they would simply come back with more men.

“I’ll come. My husband shouldn’t be moved.”

“You may both be carriers, ma’am. We need to take both of you.”

“I can examine your husband and see whether his condition might respond to medical treatment,” Clark said.

Kaye hated the first sensation of tears coming. Frustration, helplessness, aloneness. She saw Clark and Jurgenson look over her shoulder, heard someone moving, whirled as if she might be taken by ambush.

It was Mitch. He walked with a distinct jerk, eyes half-closed, hands extended, like Frankenstein’s monster. “Kaye, what is it?” he asked, his voice thick. Simply talking made his face wrinkle with pain.

Clark and Jurgenson moved back now, and the nearest deputy unlatched his holster. Kaye turned and glared at them. “It’s a migraine! He has a migraine]”

“Who are they?” Mitch asked. He nearly fell over. Kaye went to him, helped him remain standing. “I can’t see very well,” he murmured.

Clark and Jurgenson conferred in whispers. “Please bring him out on the porch, Miz Lang,” Jurgenson said, his voice strained. Kaye saw a gun in the deputy’s hand.

“What is this?”

“They’re from the Taskforce,” Kaye said. “They want us to come with them.”

“Why?”

“Something about being infectious.”

“No,” Mitch said, struggling in her grasp.

“That’s what I told them. But Mitch, there isn’t anything we can do.”

“No!” Mitch shouted, waving one arm. “Come back when I can see you, when I can talk! Leave my wife alone, for God’s sake.”

“Please come out on the porch, ma’am,” the deputy said. Kaye knew the situation was getting dangerous. Mitch was in no condition to be rational. She did not know what he might do to protect her. The men outside were afraid. These were awful times and awful things could happen and nobody would be punished; they might be shot and the house burned to the ground, as if they had plague.

“My wife is pregnant,” Mitch said. “Please leave her alone.” He tried to move toward the front door. Kaye stood beside him, guiding him.

The deputy kept his gun pointed toward the porch, but held it with both hands, arms straight. Jurgenson told him to put the gun away. He shook his head. “I don’t want them doing something stupid,” he said in a low voice.

“We’re coming out,” Kaye said. “Don’t be idiots. We’re not sick and we’re not infectious.”

Jurgenson told them to walk through the door and step down off the porch. “We have an ambulance. We’ll take you both to where they can look after your husband.”

Kaye helped Mitch outside and down the porch steps. He was sweating profusely and his hands were damp and cold. “I still can’t see very well,” he said into Kaye’s ear. “Tell me what they’re doing.”

“They want to take us away.” They stood in the yard now. Jurgenson motioned to Clark and he opened the back of the ambulance. Kaye saw there was a young woman behind the wheel of the ambulance. The driver stared owlishly through the rolled-up window. “Don’t do anything silly,” Kaye said to Mitch. “Just walk steadily. Did the pills help?”

Mitch shook his head. “It’s bad. I feel so stupid…leaving you alone. Vulnerable.” His words were thick and his eyes almost closed. He could not stand the glare of the headlights. The deputies turned on their flashlights and aimed them at Kaye and Mitch. Mitch hid his eyes with one hand and tried to turn away.

“Do not move!” the deputy with the gun ordered. “Keep your hands in the open!”

Kaye heard more engines. The second deputy turned. “Cars coming,” he said. “Trucks. Lots of them.”

She counted four pairs of headlights moving down the road to the house. Three pickup trucks and a car pulled into the yard, kicking up gravel, brakes squealing. The trucks carried men in the back — men with black hair and checkered shirts, leather jackets, windbreakers, men with ponytails, and then she saw Jack, Sue’s husband.

Jack opened the driver’s-side door of his truck and stepped down, frowning. He held up his hand and the men stayed in the backs of the pickups.

“Good evening,” Jack said, his frown vanishing, his face suddenly neutral. “Hello, Kaye, Mitch. Your phones aren’t working.”

The deputies stared at Jurgenson and Clark for guidance. The gun remained pointed down at the gravel drive. Wendell Packer and Maria Konig got out of the car and approached Mitch and Kaye. “It’s all right,” Packer told the four men, now forming an open square, defensive. He held up his hands, showing they were empty. “We brought some friends to help them move. Okay?”

“Mitch has a migraine,” Kaye called. Mitch tried to shrug her off, stand on his own, but his legs were too wobbly.

“Poor baby,” Maria said, walking in a half circle around the deputies. “It’s all right,” she told them. “We’re from the University of Washington.”

“We’re from the Five Tribes,” Jack said. “These are our friends. We’re helping them move.” The men in the pickups kept their hands in the open but smiled like wolves, like bandits.

Clark tapped Jurgenson on the shoulder. “Let’s not make any headlines,” he said. Jurgenson agreed with a nod. Clark got into the ambulance and Jurgenson joined the deputies in the Caprice. Without another word, the two vehicles backed up, turned, and grumbled down the long gravel drive into the twilight.

Jack stepped forward with his hands in his jeans pockets and a big, energized smile. “That was fun,” he said.

Wendell and Kaye helped Mitch squat on the ground. “I’ll be fine,” Mitch said, head in hands. “I couldn’t do anything. Jesus, I couldn’t do anything.”

“It’s all right,” Maria said.

Kaye knelt beside him, touching her cheek to his forehead. “Let’s get you inside.” She and Maria helped him to his feet and half carried him toward the house.

“We heard from Oliver in New York,” Wendell said. “Christopher Dicken called him and said something ugly was coming down fast. He said you weren’t answering your phones.”

“That was late this afternoon,” Maria said.

“Maria called Sue,” Wendell said. “Sue called Jack. Jack was visiting Seattle. Nobody had heard from you.”

“I was out here taking a meeting at the Lummi Casino,” Jack said. He waved at the men in the trucks. “We were talking about new games and machines. They volunteered to come along. Good thing, I suppose. I think we should go to Kumash now.”

“I’m ready,” Mitch said. He walked up the steps on his own power, turned, and held out his hands, staring at them. “I can do this. I’ll be fine.”

“They can’t touch you there,” Jack said. He stared down the drive, eyes glittering. “They’re going to make Indians out of everybody. Godamn bastards.”

84 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

Mitch stood on the crest of a low chalky mound overlooking the Wild Eagle Casino and Resort. He tilted his head back and squinted at the bright sun. At nine in the morning, the air was still and already hot. In normal times the casino, a gaudy bunch of red and gold and white in the bleached earth tones of southeastern Washington, employed four hundred people, three hundred from the Five Tribes.

The reservation was under quarantine for not cooperating with Mark Augustine. Three Kumash County Sheriff’s Patrol pickups had been parked on the main road from the highway. They were providing backup for federal marshals enforcing an Emergency Action Taskforce health threat advisory that applied to the entire Five Tribes reservation.

There had been no business at the casino for over three weeks. The parking lot was almost empty and the lights on the signs had been turned off.

Mitch scuffed the hard-packed dirt with his boot. He had left the air-conditioned single-wide trailer and come up to the hill to be by himself and think for a while, and so, when he saw Jack walking slowly along the same trail, he felt a little sting of resentment. But he did not leave.

Neither Mitch nor Jack knew whether they were destined to like each other. Every time they met, Jack asked certain questions, by way of challenge, and Mitch gave certain answers that never quite satisfied.

Mitch squatted and picked up a round rock crusted with dry mud. Jack climbed the last few yards to the top of the hill.

“Hello,” he said.

Mitch nodded.

“I see you have it, too.” Jack rubbed his cheek with a ringer. The skin on his face was forming a Lone Ranger-like mask, peeling at the edges, but thickening near the eyes. Both men looked as if they were peering through thin mud packs. “It won’t come off without drawing blood.”

“Shouldn’t pick at it,” Mitch said.

“When did yours start?”

“Three nights ago.”

Jack squatted beside Jack. “I feel angry sometimes. I feel maybe Sue could have planned this better.”

Mitch smiled. “What, getting pregnant?”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “The casino is empty. We’re running out of money. I’ve let most of our people go, and the others can’t come to work from outside. I’m not too happy with myself, either.” He touched the mask again, then looked at his finger. “One of our young fathers tried to sand it off. He’s in the clinic now. I told him that was stupid.”

“None of this is easy,” Mitch said.

“You should come to a trustees meeting sometime.”

“I’m grateful just to be here, Jack. I don’t want to make people angry.”

“Sue thinks maybe they won’t be angry if they meet you. You’re a nice enough guy.”

“That’s what she said over a year ago.”

“She says if I’m not angry, the others won’t be. That’s right, maybe. Though there is an old Cayuse woman, Becky. They sent her away from Colville and she came here. She’s a nice old grandmother, but she thinks it’s her job to disagree with whatever the tribes want. She might, you know, look at you, poke you a little.” Jack made a cantankerous face and stabbed the air with a stiff finger.

Jack was seldom so voluble and had never talked about affairs on the board.

Mitch laughed. “Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

Jack shrugged. “We want to have a meeting of fathers soon. Just the fathers. Not like the clinic birth classes with the women there. They’re embarrassing to the men. Are you going tonight?”

Mitch nodded.

“First time for me with this skin. It’s going to be rough. Some of the new fathers watch the TV and they wonder when they’ll get their jobs back, and then they blame the women.”

Mitch understood that there were three couples still expecting SHEVA babies on the reservation, besides himself and Kaye. Among the three thousand and seventy-two people on the reservation, making up the Five Tribes, there had been six SHEVA births. All had been born dead.

Kaye worked with the clinic pediatrician, a young white doctor named Chambers, and helped conduct the parenting classes. The men were a little slow and perhaps a lot less willing to accept things.

“Sue is due about the same time as Kaye,” Jack said. He folded his legs into a lotus and sat directly on the dirt, something Mitch was not good at. “I tried to understand about genes and DNA and what a virus is. It’s not my kind of language.”

“It can be difficult,” Mitch said. He did not know whether he should reach out and put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He knew so little about the modern people whose ancestors he studied. “We might be the first to have healthy babies,” he said. “The first to know what they’ll look like.”‘

“I think that is true. It cou’d be very…” Jack paused, his lips turned down as he thought. “I was going to say an honor. But it isn’t our honor.”

“Maybe not,” Mitch said.

“For me, everything stays alive forever. The whole Earth is filled with living things, some wearing flesh, others not. We are here for many who came before. We don’t lose our connection to the flesh when we cast it off. We spread out after we die, but we like to come back to our bones and look around. See what the young ones are doing.”

Mitch could feel the old debate starting again.

“You don’t see it that way,” Jack said.

“I’m not sure how I see things anymore,” Mitch said. “Having your body jerked around by nature is sobering. Women experience it more directly, but this has got to be a first for the men.”

“This DNA must be a spirit in us, the words our ancestors pass on, words of the Creator. I can see that.”

“As good a description as any,” Mitch said. “Except I don’t know who the Creator might be, or whether one even exists.”

Jack sighed. “You study dead things.”

Mitch colored slightly, as he always did when discussing these matters with Jack. “I try to understand what they were like when they were alive.”

“The ghosts could tell you,” Jack said.

“Do they tell you?”

“Sometimes,” Jack said. “Once or twice.”

“What do they tell you?”

“That they want things. They aren’t happy. One old man, he’s dead now, he listened to the spirit of Pasco man when you dug him out of the riverbank. The old man said the ghost was very unhappy.” Jack picked up a pebble and tossed it down the hill. “Then, he said he didn’t talk like our ghosts. Maybe he was a different ghost. The old man only told that to me, not to anybody else. He thought maybe the ghost wasn’t from our tribe.”

“Wow,” Mitch said.

Jack rubbed his nose and plucked at an eyebrow. “My skin itches all the time. Does yours?”

“Sometimes.” Mitch always felt as if he were walking along a cliff edge when he talked about the bones with Jack. Maybe it was guilt. “No one is special. We’re all humans. The young learn from the old, dead or alive. I respect you and what you say, Jack, but we may never agree.”

“Sue makes me think things through,” Jack said with a shade of petulance, and glanced at Mitch with deep-set black eyes. “She says I should talk to you because you listen, and then you say what you think and it’s honest. The other fathers, they need some of that now.”

“I’ll talk with them if it will help,” Mitch said. “We owe you a lot, Jack.”

“No, you don’t,” Jack said. “We’d probably be in trouble anyway. If it wasn’t the new ones, it would be the slot machines. We like to shove our spears at the bureau and the government.”

“It’s costing you a lot of money,” Mitch said.

“We’re sneaking in the new credit-card roller games,” Jack said. “Our boys drive them over the hills in the backs of their trucks where the troopers aren’t watching. We may get to use them for six months or more before the state confiscates them.”

“They’re slot machines?”

Jack shook his head. “We don’t think so. We’ll make some money before they’re removed.”

“Revenge against the white man?”

“We skin ‘em,” Jack said soberly. “They love it.”

“If the babies are healthy, maybe they’ll end the quarantine,” Mitch said. “You can reopen the casino in a couple of months.”

“I don’t count on nothing,” Jack said. “Besides, I don’t want to go out on the floor and act like a boss if I still look like this.” He put his hand on Mitch’s shoulder. “You come talk,” he said, standing. “The men want to hear.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” Mitch said.

“I’ll tell them to forgive you for that other stuff. The ghost wasn’t from one of our tribes anyway.” Jack pushed to his feet and walked off down the hill.

85 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

Mitch worked on his old blue Buick, parked in the dry grass of the trailer’s front yard, while afternoon thunderheads piled up to the south.

The air smelled tense and exciting. Kaye could hardly bear to sit. She pushed back from the desk by the window and left off from pretending to work on her book while spending most of her time watching Mitch squint at wire harnesses.

She put her hands on her hips to stretch. This day had not been so hot and they had stayed at the trailer rather than ride down to the air-conditioned community center. Kaye liked to watch Mitch play basketball; sometimes she would go for a swim in the small pool. It was not a bad life, but she felt guilty.

The news from outside was seldom good. They had been on the reservation for three weeks and Kaye was afraid the federal marshals would come and gather up the SHEVA mothers at any time. They had done so in Montgomery, Alabama, breaking into a private maternity center and nearly causing a riot.

“They’re getting bold’’ Mitch had said as they watched the TV news. Later, the president had apologized and assured the nation that civil liberties would be preserved, as much as possible, considering the risks that might be faced by the general public. Two days later, the Montgomery clinic had closed under pressure from picketing citizens, and the mothers and fathers had been forced to move elsewhere. With their masks, the new parents looked strange; judging from what she and Mitch heard on the news, they were not popular in very many places.

They had not been popular in the Republic of Georgia.

Kaye had learned nothing more about new retroviral infections from SHEVA mothers. Her contacts were equally silent. This was a charged issue, she could tell; nobody felt comfortable expressing opinions.

So she pretended to work on her book, drafting perhaps a good paragraph or two every day, writing sometimes on the laptop, sometimes in longhand on a legal pad. Mitch read what she wrote and made marginal notes, but he seemed preoccupied, as if stunned by the prospect of being a father…Though she knew that was not what concerned him.

Not being a father. That concerns him. Me. My welfare.

She did not know how to ease his mind. She felt fine, even wonderful, despite the discomforts. She looked at herself in the spotted mirror in the bathroom and felt that her face had filled out rather well; not gaunt, as she had once believed, but healthy, with good skin — not counting the mask, of course.

Every day the mask darkened and thickened, a peculiar caul that marked this kind of parenthood.

Kaye performed her exercises on the thin carpet in the small living room. Finally, it was just too muggy to do much of anything. Mitch came in for a drink of water and saw her on the floor. She looked up at him.

“Game of cards in the rec room?” he asked.

“I vant to be alone,” she intoned, Garbo-like. “Alone with you, that is.”

“How’s the back?”

“Massage tonight, when it’s cool,” she said.

“Peaceful here, isn’t it?” Mitch asked, standing in the door and flapping his T-shirt to cool off.

“I’ve been thinking of names.”

“Oh?” Mitch looked stricken.

“What?” Kaye asked.

“Just a funny feeling. I want to see her before we come up with a name.”

“Why?” Kaye asked resentfully. “You talk to her, sing to her, every night. You say you can even smell her on my breath.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said, but his face did not relax. “I just want to see what she looks like.”

Suddenly, Kaye pretended to catch on. “I don’t mean a scientific name ,” she said. “Our name, our name for our daughter.”

Mitch gave her an exasperated look. “Don’t ask me to explain.” He looked pensive. “Brock and I came up with a scientific name yesterday, on the phone. Though he thinks it’s premature, because none of the—”

Mitch caught himself, coughed, shut the screen door, and walked into the kitchen.

Kaye felt her heart sink.

Mitch returned with several ice cubes wrapped in a wet towel, knelt beside her, and dabbed at the sweat on her forehead. Kaye would not meet his eyes.

“Stupid,” he murmured.

“We’re both grownups,” Kaye said. “I want to think of names for her. I want to knit booties and shop for sleepers and buy little crib toys and behave as if we’re normal parents and stop thinking about all that bullshit .”

“I know,” Mitch said, and he looked completely miserable, almost broken.

Kaye got up on her knees and laid her hands lightly on Mitch’s shoulders, sweeping them back and forth as if dusting. “Listen to me. I am fine. She is fine. If you don’t believe me…”

“I believe you,” Mitch said.

Kaye bumped her forehead against his. “All right, Kemosabe.”

Mitch touched the dark, rough skin on her cheeks. “You look very mysterious. Like a bandit.”

“Maybe we’ll need new scientific names for us, too. Don’t you feel it inside…something deeper, beneath the skin?”

“My bones itch,” he said. “And my throat…my tongue feels different. Why am I getting a mask and all the rest, too?”

“You make the virus. Why shouldn’t it change you, too? As for the mask…maybe we’re getting ready to be recognized by her. We’re social animals. Daddies are as important to babies as mommies.”

“We’ll look like her?”

“Maybe a little.” Kaye returned to the desk chair and sat. “What did Brock suggest for a scientific name?”

“He doesn’t foresee a radical change,” Mitch said. “Subspecies at most, maybe just a peculiar variety. So…Homo sapiens novus.”

Kaye repeated the name softly and smirked. “Sounds like a windshield repair place.”

“It’s good Latin,” Mitch said.

“Let me think on it,” she said.

“They paid for the clinic with the money from the casino,” Kaye said as she folded towels. Mitch had carried the two baskets back to the trailer from the laundry shed before sundown. He sat on the queen-size bed in the tiny little bedroom of the single-wide because there was hardly any room to stand. His big feet could barely wedge between the walls and the bed frame.

Kaye took four panties and two new nursing bras and folded them, then laid them to one side to put in the overnight case. She had been keeping the case handy for a week, and it seemed the right time to pack it.

“Got a dopp bag?” she asked. “I can’t find mine.”

Mitch pushed and crawled off the end of the bed to dig around in his suitcase. He came up with a battered old brown leather bag with a zipper.

“Army Air Force bomber’s shaving kit?” she asked, lifting the bag by its strap.

“Guaranteed authentic,” Mitch said. He watched her like a hawk and that made her feel both reassured and a little bitchy. She continued to fold laundry.

“Dr. Chambers says all the mothers-to-be look healthy. He delivered three of the others. He could tell there was something wrong with them months before, so he says. Marine Pacific sent him my records last week. He’s filling out some of the Taskforce forms, but not all. He had a lot of questions.”

She finished the laundry and sat on the end of the bed. “When she twitches like this, it makes me think I’ve started labor.”

Mitch bent down before her and placed his hand on her prominent stomach, his eyes bright and large. “She’s really moving around tonight.”

“She’s happy,” Kaye said. “She knows you’re here. Sing her the song.”

Mitch looked up at her, then sang his version of the ABCs tune. “Ah, beh, say, duh, ehh,fuh, gah, aitch, ihh.juh, kuh, la muh-nuh, ohpuh…”

Kaye laughed.

“It’s very serious,” Mitch said.

“She loves it.”

“My father used to sing it to me. Phonetic alphabet. Get her ready for the English language. I started reading when I was four, you know.”

“She’s kicking time,” Kaye said in delight.

“She is not.”

“I swear it, feel!”

She actually liked the small trailer with its battered light oak plywood cabinets and old furniture. She had hung her mother’s prints in the living room. They had enough food and it was warm enough at night, too hot in the daytime, so Kaye went to work with Sue in the Administration Building and Mitch walked around the hills with his cell phone in his pocket, sometimes with Jack, or spoke with the other fathers-to-be in the clinic lounge. The men liked to keep to themselves here, and the women were content with that. Kaye missed Mitch in the hours he was away, but there was a lot to think about and prepare for. At night, he was always with her, and she had never been happier.

She knew the baby was healthy. She could feel it. As Mitch finished the song, she touched the mask around his eyes. He did not flinch when she did this, though he used to, the first week. Their masks were both quite thick now and flaky around the edges.

“You know what I want to do,” Kaye said.

“What?”

“I want to crawl off into a dark hole somewhere when it’s time.”

“Like a cat?”

“Exactly.”

“I can see doing that,” Mitch said agreeably. “No modern medicine, dirt floor, savage simplicity.”

“Leather thong in my teeth,” Kaye added. “That’s the way Sue’s mother gave birth. Before they had the clinic.”

“My father delivered me,” Mitch said. “Our truck was stuck in a ditch. Mom climbed into the back. She never let him forget that.”

“She never told me that!” Kaye said with a laugh.

“She calls it ‘a difficult delivery,’ “ Mitch said.

“We’re not that far from the old times,” Kaye said. She touched her stomach. “I think you sang her to sleep.”

The next morning, when Kaye awoke, her tongue felt thick. She pushed out of bed, waking Mitch, and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of the flat-tasting reservation tap water. She could hardly talk. “Mitth,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Awh we gehhing somhinh?”

“Wha?”

She sat beside him and poked out her tongue. “Ih’s aw custy,” she said.

“My,hoo,”hesaid.

“Ih’s li owah faces,” she said.

Only one of the four fathers could talk that afternoon in the clinic side room. Jack stood by the portable whiteboard and ticked off the days for each of their wives, then sat and tried to talk sports with the others, but the meeting broke up early. The clinic’s head physician — there were four doctors working at the clinic, besides the pediatrician — examined them all but had no diagnosis. There did not seem to be any infection.

The other mothers-to-be had it, too.

Kaye and Sue did their shopping together at the Little Silver Market down the road from the resort’s Biscuit House coffee shop. Others in the market stared at them but said nothing. There was a lot of grumbling among the casino workers, but only the old Cayuse woman, Becky, spoke her mind in the trustee meetings.

Kaye and Sue agreed that Sue was going to deliver first. “I ca’t way,” Sue said. “Neither cah Jack.”

86 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

Mitch was there again. It began vague, and then clicked into a wicked reality. All his memories of being Mitch were tidily packed away in that fashion peculiar to dreams. The last thing he did as Mitch was feel his face, pull at the thick mask, the mask that sat on new and puffy skin.

Then he was on the ice and rock again. His woman was screaming and crying, almost doubled up with pain. He ran ahead, then ran back and helped her to her feet, all the time ululating, his throat sore, his arms and legs bruised from the beating, the taunting, back on the lake, in the village, and he hated them, all laughing and hooting, as they swung their sticks and sounded so ugly.

The young hunter who had pushed a stick into his woman’s belly was dead. He had beaten that one to the ground and made him writhe and moan, then stamped on his neck, but too late, there was blood and his woman was hurt. The shamans came into the crowd and tried to push the others away with guttural words, choppy dark singing words, not at all like the watery light bird noises he could make now.

He took his woman into their hut and tried to comfort her, but she hurt too much.

The snow came down. He heard the shouting, the mourning cries, and he knew their time was up. The family of the dead hunter would be after them. They would have gone to ask the permission of the old Bull-man. The old Bull-man had never liked masked parents or their Flat Face children.

It was the end, the old Bull-man had often murmured; the Flat Faces taking all the game, driving the people farther into the mountains each year, and now their own women were betraying them and making more Flat Face children.

He carried his woman out of the hut, crossed the log bridge to the shore, listening to the cries for vengeance. He heard the Bull-man leading the charge. The chase began.

He had once used the cave to store food. Game was difficult to find and the cave was cold, and he had kept rabbit and marmot, acorns and wild grass and mice there for his woman when he had been on hunting duty. Otherwise she might not have gotten enough to eat from the village rations. The other women with their hungry children had refused to care for her as she grew round-bellied.

He had smuggled the small game from the cave into the village at night and fed her. He loved his woman so much it made him want to yell, or roll on the ground and moan, and he could not believe she was badly hurt, despite the blood that soaked her furs.

He carried his woman again, and she looked up at him, pleading in her high and singing voice, like a river flowing rather than rolling rocks, this new voice he had, too. They both sounded like children now, not adults.

He had once hidden near a Flat Face hunting camp and watched them sing and dance around a huge bonfire in the night. Their voices had been high and watery, like children. Maybe he and his woman were becoming Flat Faces and would go and live with them when the child was born.

He carried her through the soft and powdery snow, his feet numb Hke logs. She was quiet for a time, asleep. When she awoke, she cried and tried to curl up in his arms. In the twilight, as the golden glow filled the snow-misted high rocky places, he looked down on her and saw that the carefully shaved furry parts on her temples and cheeks, where the mask did not cover, and all the rest of her hair, looked dull and matted, lifeless. She smelled like an animal about to die.

Up over rocky terraces slippery with new snow. Along a snow-covered ridge, and then down, sliding, tumbling, the woman still in his arms. He got to his feet again at the bottom, turned to orient himself to the flat walls of the mountain, and suddenly wondered why this seemed so familiar, like something he had practiced over and over again with the hunter-trainers in the mountain goat seasons.

Those had been good times. He thought of those times as he carried his woman the final distance.

He had used the rabbit atlatl, the smaller throwing-stick, since childhood, but had never been allowed to carry the elk and bison atlatl until the itinerant hunter-trainers had come to the village in the year his balls had ached and he had spewed seed in his sleep.

Then he had gone with his father, who was with the dream people now, and met the hunter-trainers. They were lone and ugly men, unkempt, scarred, with thick locks of hair. They had no village, no laws of grooming, but went from place to place and organized the people when the mountain goats or the deer or the elk or the bison were ready to share their flesh. Some grumbled that they went to the Flat Face villages and trained them to hunt in one season, and indeed, some of the hunter-trainers might have been Flat Faces who covered their features with matted beard and hair. Who would question them? Not even the Bull-man. When they came, everyone ate well, and the women scraped the skins and laughed and ate irritating herbs and drank water all day, and all pissed together in leather buckets and chewed and soaked the skins. It was forbidden to hunt the big animals without the hunter-trainers.

He came to the mouth of the cave. His woman whined softly, rhythmically, as he carried and rolled and pushed her inside. He looked back. The snow was covering the drops of blood they left behind.

He knew then that they were finished. He hunkered down, his thick shoulders barely fitting, and rolled her gently onto a skin he used to cover the meat while it froze in the cave. He slid and pushed and then pulled her back into the cave, and went out to get moss and sticks from an overhang where he knew they would be dry. He hoped she would not die before he came back.

Oh, God, let me wake up, I do not want to see.

He found enough sticks for a small fire and carried them back to the cave, where he lined them up and then spun the stick, first making sure the woman could not see. Making fire was man’s stuff. She was still asleep. When he was too weak to twirl the stick anymore, and still there was no curl of smoke, he took out a flint and chipped it. For a long time, until his fingers were bruised and numb, he struck the flints into the moss, blew on the moss, and suddenly, the Sun Bird opened its eye and spread little orange wings. He added sticks.

His woman moaned again. She curled up on her back and told him in her watery squeaky voice to go away. This was woman’s stuff. He ignored her, as was sometimes allowed, and helped her bring the baby.

It was very painful for her and she made loud noises, and he wondered how she had so much life left in her, with so much blood gone, but the baby came out quickly.

No. Please, let me wake up.

He held the baby, and showed it to the woman, but her eyes were flat and her hair was stiff and dry. The baby did not cry or move, no matter how he kneaded it.

He put the baby down and slammed his fist on the rock walls. He screamed hoarsely and curled up beside his woman, who was quiet now, and tried to keep her warm as smoke filled the top of the cave and the embers began to gray and the Sun Bird folded its wings and slept.

The baby would have been his daughter, supreme gift from the Dream Mother. The baby did not look so very different from other babies in the village, though its nose was small and its chin stuck out. He supposed it would have grown up to be a Flat Face. He tried to stuff dry grass into the hole in the back of the baby’s head. He thought maybe the stick had punched the baby there. He took his neck skin, the finest and softest, and wrapped the baby in that and then pushed it to the back of the cave.

He remembered the dumb man’s groans as he had stamped on his neck, but it did not help much.

Everything was gone. Caves had been proper places for burial since the times of story, before they had moved to wooden villages and lived like the Flat Faces, though everyone said the People had invented wooden villages. This was an old way to die and be buried, in the back of a cave, so it was okay. The dream people would find the baby and take it home, where it would have been missing for only a little while, so maybe it would be born quickly again.

His woman was growing as cold as the rock. He arranged her arms and legs, her tousled furs and skins, pushed back the loose mask still stuck to her brows, peered into her dull and blind eyes. No energy to mourn.

After a while he felt warm enough not to need the skins, so he pushed them off. Maybe she was warm, too. He pushed the skins off his woman so she would be almost naked, easier for the dream people to recognize.

He hoped the dream people of her family would make an alliance with the dream people of his family. He would like to be with her in the dream place, too. Maybe he and his woman would find the baby again. He believed the dream people could do so many good things for you.

Maybe this, maybe that, maybe so many things, happier things. He grew warmer.

For a little while, he didn’t hate anyone. He stared at the darkness where his woman’s face was and whispered flint words, words against dark, as if he could strike up another Sun Bird. It was so good not to move. So warm.

Then his father strolled into the cave and called his true name.

Mitch stood in his shorts in front of the trailer and stared up at the moon, the stars over Kumash. He blew his nose quietly. The early morning was cool and still. The sweat on his face and skin dried slowly and made him shiver. He was covered with goose bumps. A few quail rustled in the bushes alongside the trailer.

Kaye pushed open the screen door with a squeak and a hiss of the cylinder and walked out to stand beside him in her nightgown.

“You’ll get cold,” he said, and put his arm around her. The swelling on his tongue had gone down in the last few days. There was a peculiar ridge on the left side of his tongue now, but talking was easier.

“You soaked the bed with sweat,” she said. She was so round, so different from the small, slender Kaye he still pictured in his head. Her heat and her smell filled the air like vapor from a rich soup. “Dream?” she asked.

“The worst,” he said. “I think it was the last one.”

“They’re all the same?”

“They’re all different,” Mitch said.

“Jack’ll want to hear the gory details,” Kaye said.

“And you don’t?”

“Uh uh,” Kaye said. “She’s restless, Mitch. Talk to her.”

87 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

Kaye’s contractions were coming regularly. Mitch called to make sure the clinic was ready and Dr. Chambers, the pediatrician, was on his way from his brick house on the north end of the reservation. As Kaye put the last toiletry items in the dopp bag and found a few pieces of clothing she thought might be nice to wear after, Mitch called Dr. Galbreath again, but the answering service picked up.

“She must be on her way,” Mitch said as he folded the phone. If the deputies would not let Galbreath through the checkpoint off the main road — a real possibility that infuriated Mitch — then Jack had arranged for two men to meet her five miles south and smuggle her in on a wash road through the low hills.

Mitch pulled out a box and dug for the small digital camera he had once used to record site details. He made sure the battery was charged.

Kaye stood in the living room holding her stomach and breathing in small huffs. She smiled at him as he joined her.

“I am so scared,” she said.

“Why?”

“Goo; you ask why?”

“It’s going to be fine,” Mitch said, but he was pale as a sheet.

“That’s why your hands are like ice,” Kaye said. “I’m early. Maybe it’s a false alarm.” Then she made a funny grunt and felt between her legs. “I think my water just broke. I’ll get some towels.”

“Never mind the damned towels!” Mitch shouted. He helped her to the Toyota. She pulled the seat belt low around her stomach. Nothing like the dreams, he thought. The thought became a kind of prayer, and he repeated it over and over.

“Nobody’s heard from Augustine,” Kaye said as Mitch pulled onto the paved road and began the two-mile drive to the clinic.

“Why would we?”

“Maybe he’ll try to stop us,” she said.

Mitch gave her a funny look. “That’s as crazy as my dreams.”

“He’s the bogeyman, Mitch. He scares me.”

“I don’t like him either, but he’s no monster.”

“He thinks we’re diseased,” she said, and there were tears on her cheeks. She winced.

“Another?” Mitch asked.

She nodded. “It’s okay,” she said. “Every twenty minutes.” They met Jack’s truck coming from the East Ridge Road and stopped long enough to confer through the windows. Sue was with Jack. Jack followed them.

“I want to have Sue help you coach me,” Kaye said. “I want her to see us. If I’m okay, it will be so much easier for her.”

“Fine with me,” Mitch said. “I’m no expert.”

Kaye smiled and winced again.

Room number one in the Kumash Wellness Clinic was quickly being converted into a labor and delivery room. A hospital bed had been rolled in, and a bright round surgical lamp on a tall steel pole.

The nurse midwife, a plump, high-cheeked, middle-aged woman named Mary Hand, arranged the medical tray and helped Kaye change into a hospital gown. The anesthesiologist, Dr. Pound, a young, wan-looking man with thick black hair and a pug nose, arrived half an hour after the room was prepared and conferred with Chambers while Mitch crushed ice in a plastic bag in the sink. Mitch put ice chips into a cup.

“Is it now?” Kaye asked Chambers as he checked her.

“Not for a while,” he said. “You’re at four centimeters.”

Sue pulled up a chair. On her tall frame, her pregnancy seemed much less obvious. Jack called to her from the door, and she turned. He tossed her a small bag, stuffed his hands in his pockets, nodded to Mitch, and backed out. She placed the bag on the table next to the bed. “He’s embarrassed to come in,” she told Kaye. “He thinks this is woman stuff.”

Kaye lifted her head to peer at the bag. It was made out of leather and tied with a beaded string.

“What’s in the bag?”

“All sorts of things. Some of them smell good. Some don’t.”

“Jack’s a medicine man?”

“God, no,” Sue said. “You think I’d marry a medicine man? He knows some good ones, though.”

“Mitch and I thought we’d like this one to come naturally,” Kaye told Dr. Pound as he brought in a rolling table with his tanks and tubes and syringes.

“Of course,” the anesthesiologist said, and smiled. “I’m here just in case.”

Chambers told Kaye and Mitch there was a woman living about five miles away who was going into labor, not a SHEVA birth. “She insists on a home delivery. They have a hot tub and everything. I may have to go there for a while this evening. You said Dr. Galbreath would be here.”

“She should be on her way,” Mitch said.

“Well, let’s hope it works out. The baby’s head down. In a few minutes we’ll attach a fetal health monitor. All the comforts of a big hospital, Ms. Lang.”

Chambers took Mitch aside. He glanced at Mitch’s face, his eyes tracking the outline of the skin mask.

“Fetching, isn’t it?” Mitch said nervously.

“I’ve delivered four SHEVA second-stage babies,” Chambers said. “I’m sure you know the risk, but I have to spell out some complications that might happen, so we can all be prepared.”

Mitch nodded, gripped his trembling hands.

“None of them were born alive. Two looked perfect, no visible defects, just…dead.” Chambers stared at Mitch with a critical expression. “I don’t like these odds.”

Mitch flushed. “We’re different,” he said.

“There can also be a shock response in the mothers if the delivery gets complicated. Something to do with hormone signals from a SHEVA fetus in distress. Nobody understands why, but the infant tissues are so different. Some women do not react well. If that happens, I’m going to do a C-section and get the baby out as quickly as possible.” He put a hand on Mitch’s shoulder. Chambers’s pager beeped. “Just as a precaution, I’m going to take extra care with spilled fluids and tissues. Everybody will wear viral filter masks, even you. We’re in new territory here, Mr. Rafelson. Excuse me.”

Sue was feeding Kaye ice and they were talking, heads together. It seemed to be a private moment, so Mitch backed out, and besides, he wanted to sort through some difficult emotions.

He walked into the lobby. Jack sat in a chair by the old card table there, staring at a pile of National Geographies. The fluorescent lights made everything seem blue and cold.

“You look mad,” Jack said.

“They’ve almost got the death certificate signed,” Mitch said, his voice trembling.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Sue and I think maybe we’ll have the birth at home. No doctors.”

“He says it’s dangerous.”

“Maybe it is, but we did it before,” Jack said.

“When?” Mitch asked.

“Your dreams,” Jack said. “The mummies. Thousands of years ago.”

Mitch sat in the other chair and put his head on the table. “Not a happy time.”

“Tell me,” Jack said.

Mitch told him about the last dream. Jack listened intently.

“That was a bad one,” he said. “I won’t tell Sue about it.”

“Say something comforting,” Mitch suggested wryly.

“I’ve been trying to have dreams to help me figure out what to do,” Jack said. “I just dream about big hospitals and big doctors poking at Sue. The white man’s world gets in the way. So I’m no help.” Jack scratched his eyebrows. “Nobody is old enough to know what to do. My people have been on this land forever. But my grandfather tells me the spirits have nothing to say. They don’t remember either.”

Mitch pushed his hand through the magazines. One slid off and hit the floor with a smack. “That doesn’t make any sense, Jack.”

Kaye lay back and watched Chambers attach the fetal health monitors. The steady beep and pulse of the tape on the machine by the bed gave her confirmation, another level of reassurance.

Mitch came back with a Popsicle and unwrapped it for her. She had emptied her cup and took the sweet raspberry ice gratefully.

“No sign of Galbreath,” Mitch said.

“We’ll manage,” Kaye said. “Five centimeters and holding. All this for just one mother.”

“But what a mother,” Mitch said. He started working on her arms, pushing the tension out, and then moved to her shoulders.

“The mother of all mothers,” she muttered as another contraction hit. She bore down into it, held up the bare Popsicle stick. “Another, please,” she grunted.

Kaye had become acquainted with every inch of the ceiling. She got off the bed carefully and walked around the room, gripping the metal rolling stand that held the monitoring equipment, wires trailing from beneath her gown. Her hair felt stiff, her skin oily, and her eyes stung. Mitch looked up from the National Geographic he was reading as she duck-walked into the rest room. She washed her face and he was by the door. “I’m fine,” she said.

“If I don’t help you, I’ll go nuts,” Mitch said.

“Don’t want that,” Kaye said. She sat on the side of the bed and took several deep breaths. Chambers had told them he would be back in an hour. Mary Hand entered with her filter mask on, looking like a high-tech soldier prepared for a gas attack, and told Kaye to lie back. The midwife inspected her. She smiled beatifically and Kaye thought, Good, I’m ready , but she shook her head. “Still at five centimeters. It’s okay. Your first baby.” Her voice was muffled beneath the mask.

Kaye stared up at the ceiling again and bore into a contraction. Mitch encouraged her to take puffing breaths until the wave passed. Her back ached abominably. For a bitter moment at the end of the contraction she felt trapped and angry, and wondered what it would be like if everything went wrong, if she died, if the baby was born alive but without a mother, if Augustine was right and both she and her child were a source of horrible disease. Why no confirmation ? she wondered. Why no science one way or the other on that? She calmed herself with slow breaths and tried to rest.

When she opened her eyes again, Mitch was dozing in the chair beside the bed. The clock said it was midnight. I will be in this room forever .

She needed to go to the bathroom again. “Mitch,” she said. He didn’t wake up. She looked for Mary Hand or Sue, but he was the only one in the room. The monitor beeped and rolled its tape. “Mitch!”

He jerked and stood up and sleepily helped her into the bathroom. She had wanted to have a bowel movement before going to the clinic, but her body had not cooperated, and she worried about that. She felt a mix of anger and wonder at her present state. The body was taking charge, but she was not at all sure it knew what to do. I am my body. Mind is the illusion. The flesh is confused.

Mitch walked around the room, sipping a cup of bad coffee from the clinic lounge. The cold blue fluorescent lights were etched into his memory. He felt as if he had never seen bright sun. His eyebrows itched abominably. Go into the cave. Hibernate and she‘II give birth while we sleep. That’s the way bears do it. Bears evolve while they ‘re asleep. Better way.

Sue came to be with Kaye while he took a break. He walked outside and stood beneath the clear, starry sky. Even out here, with so few people, there was a streetlight to blind him and cut back on the immensity of the universe.

God, I’ve come so far, but nothing has changed. I’m married, I’m going to be a father, and I’m still unemployed, living on the -

He blocked that line of thought, waved his hands, shook out the nervous jangles from the coffee. His thoughts drifted all over, from the first time he had had sex — and worried about the girl getting pregnant — to the conversations with the director of the Hayer Museum before he was fired, to Jack, trying to put all this into an Indian perspective.

Mitch had no perspective other than the scientific. All his life he had tried to be objective, tried to remove himself from the equation, to see clearly what his digging had revealed. He had traded bits of his life for what were probably inadequate insights into the lives of dead people. Jack believed in a circle of life where no one was ever truly isolated. Mitch could not believe that. But he hoped Jack was right.

The air smelled good. He wished he could take Kaye out here and let her smell the fresh air, but then a pickup truck drove by, and he smelled exhaust and burned oil.

Kaye dozed off between contractions but for only a few minutes. Two o’clock in the morning, and she was still at five centimeters. Chambers had come before her little nap, inspected her, peered at the monitor tape, smiled reassurance. “We can try some pitocin soon. That will speed things up. We call it Bardahl for babies,” he said. But Kaye did not know what Bardahl was and did not understand.

Mary Hand took her arm, swabbed it down with alcohol, found a vein and introduced a needle, taped it off, attached a plastic tube, hung a bottle of saline on another stand. She arranged little vials of medicine on a blue sheet of disposable paper on the steel tray beside the bed.

Kaye normally hated shots and needle pricks, but this was nothing compared to the rest of her discomfort. Mitch seemed to grow more distant, though he was right by her side, massaging her neck, bringing more ice. She looked at him and saw not her husband, not her lover, but just a man, another of the figures coming in and out of her squeezed-down and compressed and endless life. She frowned, watching his back as he spoke with the nurse midwife. She tried to focus and find that emotional component necessary to fit him into the puzzle, but it had been lifted away. She was liberated of all social sensibilities.

Another contraction. “Oh, shit!” she cried.

Mary Hand checked her and stood with a concerned expression. “Did Dr. Chambers say when he would administer pitocin?”

Kaye shook her head, unable to respond. Mary Hand went off to find Chambers. Mitch stayed with her. Sue came in and sat on the chair. Kaye closed her eyes and found that the universe in that personal darkness was so small she almost panicked. She wanted this to be over. No menstrual cramps had ever had the authority of her contractions. In the middle of the spasm, she thought her back might break.

She knew that flesh was all and spirit was nothing.

“Everyone is born this way,” Sue told Mitch. “It’s good you’re here. Jack says he’ll be with me when I deliver, but it’s not traditional.”

“Woman’s stuff,” Mitch said. Sue’s mask fascinated him. She stood, stretched. Tall, stomach prominent but balanced, she seemed the essence of strong womanhood. Assured, calm, philosophical.

Kaye moaned. Mitch leaned over and caressed her cheek. She was lying on her side, trying to find some position that was comfortable. “God, give me drugs,” she said with a weak smile.

“There’s that sense of humor,” Mitch said.

“I mean it. No, I don’t. I don’t know what I mean. Where is Felicity?”

“Jack came by a few minutes ago. He sent some trucks out, but he hasn’t heard from them.”

“I need Felicity. I don’t know what Chambers is thinking. Give me something to make this happen.”

Mitch felt miserable, helpless. They were in the hands of the Western medical establishment — such as it was in the Five Tribes Confederation. Frankly, he was not at all confident about Chambers.

“Oh, goddamn SHIT,” Kaye yelled, and rolled on her back, her face so contorted Mitch could not recognize her.

Seven o’clock. Kaye looked at the clock on the wall through slitted eyes. More than twelve hours. She did not remember when they had arrived. Had it been in the afternoon? Yes. More than twelve hours. Still no record. Her mother had told her, when she was a little girl, that she had been in labor for over thirty hours with Kaye. Here’s to you, Mother. God, I wish you could be here.

Sue was not in the room. There was Mitch, working on her arm, easing the tension, moving to the other arm. She felt a distant affection for Mitch, but doubted seriously she would ever have sex with him again. Why even think about it. Kaye felt she was a giant balloon trying to burst. She had to go pee and the thought equaled the deed and she did not care. Mary Hand came and removed the soaked paper pad and replaced it.

Dr. Chambers came in and told Mary to start the pitocin. Mary inserted the vial into the appropriate receptacle and adjusted the machine that controlled the drip. Kaye took an extreme interest in the procedure. Bardahl for babies. She could vaguely remember the list of peptides and glycoproteins Judith had found in the large protein complex. Bad news for women. Maybe so.

Maybe so.

The only thing in the universe was pain. Kaye sat on top of the pain like a small, stunned fly on a huge rubber ball. She vaguely heard the anesthesiologist moving around her. She heard Mitch and the doctor talking. Mary Hand was there.

Chambers said something completely irrelevant, something about storing cord blood for a transfusion later if the baby needed it, or to pass on to science: blood from the umbilical cord, rich with stem cells.

“Do it,” Kaye said.

“What?” Mitch asked. Chambers asked her if she wanted to have an epidural.

“God, yes,” Kaye said, without the least guilt at having failed to stick it through.

They rolled her on her side. “Hold still,” said the anesthesiologist, what was his name. She couldn’t remember. Sue’s face appeared before her.

“Jack says they’re bringing her in.”

“Who?” Kaye asked.

“Dr. Galbreath.”

“Good.” Kaye thought she should care.

“They wouldn’t let her through the quarantine.”

“Bastards,” Mitch said.

“Bastards,” Kaye mouthed.

She felt a prick in her back. Another contraction. She started to tremble. The anesthesiologist swore and apologized. “Missed. You’ll have to hold still.” Her back hurt. Nothing new about that. Mitch applied a cold cloth to her forehead. Modern medicine. She had failed modern medicine.

“Oh, shit.”

Somewhere way outside her sphere of consciousness, she heard voices like distant angels.

“Felicity is here,” Mitch said, and his face, hovering right over her, shone with relief. But Dr. Galbreath and Dr. Chambers were arguing, and the anesthesiologist was involved, too.

“No epidural,” Galbreath said. “Get her off the pitocin, now. How long? How much?”

While Chambers looked at the machine and read off numbers, Mary Hand did something to the tubes. The machine wheeped. Kaye looked at the clock. Seven-thirty. What did that mean? Time. Oh, that.

“She’s going to have to go it on her own,” Galbreath said. Chambers responded with irritation, sharp quiet words behind his awful filter mask, but Kaye did not listen to him.

They were denying her drugs.

Felicity leaned over Kaye and entered her visual cone.

She was not wearing a filter mask. The big surgical light was turned on and Felicity was not wearing a filter mask, bless her.

“Thank you,” Kaye said.

“You may not thank me for long, dear,” Felicity said. “If you want this baby, we can’t do anything more with drugs. No pitocin, no anesthetic. I’m glad I caught you. It kills them, Kaye. Understand?”

Kaye grimaced.

“One damned insult after another, right, dear? So delicate, these new ones.”

Chambers complained about interference, but she heard Jack and Mitch, voices fading, escorting him from the room. Mary Hand looked to Felicity for guidance.

“The CDC is good for something, dear,” Felicity told her. “They sent out a special bulletin about live births. No drugs, particularly no anesthetics. Not even aspirin. These babies can’t stand it.” She worked busily for a moment between Kaye’s legs. “Episiotomy,” she said to Mary. “No local. Hold on, honey. This will hurt, like losing your virginity all over again. Mitch, you know the drill.”

Push to ten. Let breath out. Bear down, puff, push to ten. Kaye’s body like some horse knowing how to run but appreciating a little guidance. Mitch rubbing vigorously, standing close to her. She clenched his hand and then his arm until he winced. She bore down, push to ten. Let breath out.

“All right. She’s crowning. There she is. God, it’s taken so long, such a long, strange road, huh? Mary, there’s the cord. That’s the problem. A little dark. One more, Kaye. Do it, honey. Do it now.”

She did it and something released, a massive rush, pumpkin seed between clenched fingers, a burst of pain, relief, more pain, aching. Her legs shivered. A charley horse hit her calf but she hardly noticed. She felt a sudden shove of happiness, of welcome emptiness, then a knifelike stab in her tailbone.

“She’s here, Kaye. She’s alive.”

Kaye heard a thin wail, a sucking sound, and something like a musical whistle.

Felicity held up the baby, pink and bloody, cord dangling down between Kaye’s legs. Kaye looked at her daughter and felt nothing for a moment, and then something large and feathery, enormous, brushed her soul.

Mary Hand laid the baby on a blue blanket on her abdomen and cleaned her with quick swipes.

Mitch looked down on the blood, the baby.

Chambers returned, still wearing his mask, but Mitch ignored him. He focused on Kaye and on the baby, so small, wriggling. Tears of exhaustion and relief flowed down Mitch’s cheeks. His throat hurt it was so tight and full. His heart pounded. He hugged Kaye and she hugged him back with remarkable strength.

“Don’t put anything in her eyes,” Felicity instructed Mary. “It’s a whole new ball game.”

Mary nodded happily behind the filter mask.

“Afterbirth,” Felicity said. Mary held up a steel tray.

Kaye had never been sure she would make a good mother. Now, none of that mattered. She watched as they lifted the baby to the scales and thought, I didn’t get a good look at her face. It was all wrinkled.

Felicity wielded a stinging swab of alcohol and a large surgical sewing needle between Kaye’s legs. Kaye did not like this, but simply closed her eyes.

Mary Hand performed the various small tests, finished cleaning the baby, while Chambers drew cord blood. Felicity showed Mitch where to cut the cord, then carried the baby back to Kaye. Mary helped her pull her gown up over her swollen breasts and lifted the baby to her.

“It’s okay to breastfeed?” Kaye asked, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper.

“If it isn’t, the grand experiment might as well be over,” Felicity said with a smile. “Go ahead, honey. You have what she needs.”

She showed Kaye how to stroke the baby’s cheek. The small pink lips opened and fastened onto the large brown nipple. Mitch s mouth hung loose. Kaye wanted to laugh at his expression, but she focused again on that tiny face, hungry to see what her daughter looked like. Sue stood beside her and made small, happy sounds to the mother and the baby.

Mitch looked down on the girl and watched her suckle at Kaye’s breast. He felt an almost blissful calm. It was done; it was just beginning. Either way, this was really something he could fasten onto, a center, a point of reference.

The baby’s face was red and wrinkled but the hair was abundant, fine and silky, pale reddish brown. Her eyes were shut, lids pressed together in concern and concentration.

“Nine pounds,” Mary said. “Eight on the Apgar. Good, strong Apgar.” She removed her mask.

“Oh, God, she’s here,” Sue said, hand going to her mouth, as if suddenly shocked into awareness. Mitch grinned like a fool at Sue, then sat beside Kaye and the baby and put his chin on Kaye’s arm, his face just inches from his daughter’s.

Felicity finished cleaning up. Chambers told Mary to put all the linens and disposables in a special hazards bag for burning. Mary quietly complied.

“She’s a miracle,” Mitch said.

The girl tried to turn her head at the sound of his voice, opened her eyes, tried to locate him.

“Your daddy,” Kaye said. Colostrum dribbled thick and yellow from her nipple. The girl dropped her head and fastened on again with a little push from Kaye’s finger. “She lifted her head,” Kaye said in wonder.

“She’s beautiful,” Sue said. “Congratulations.”

Felicity spoke to Sue for a moment while Kaye and Mitch and the baby filled the spot of solar brightness beneath the surgical lamp.

“She’s here,” Kaye said.

“She’s here,” Mitch affirmed.

“We’ve done it.”

“You sure did,” Mitch said.

Again, their daughter lifted her head, opened her eyes, this time wide.

“Look at that,” Chambers said. Felicity bent over, nearly knocking heads with Sue.

Mitch met his daughter’s stare with fascination. She had tawny brown pupils flecked with gold. He leaned forward. “Here I am,” he said to the baby.

Kaye reached out to show her the nipple again, but the baby resisted, head bobbing with surprising strength.

“Hello, Mitch,” his daughter said, her voice like the mewing of a kitten, not much more than a squeak, but very clear.

The hair rose on the back of his neck. Felicity Galbreath gasped and backed away as if stung.

Mitch pushed against the edge of the bed and stood. He shivered. The infant resting on Kaye’s breast seemed for a moment more than he could stand; not just unexpected, but wrong. He wanted to run. Still, he could not take his eyes off the little girl. Heat rose into his chest. The shape of her tiny face came into a kind of focus. She seemed to be trying to speak again, her lips pushing out and drawing to one side, small and pink. A milky yellow bubble appeared in the corner of her mouth. Small dapples of fawn-color, lion-color, flushed across her cheeks and brows.

Her head rolled and she stared up at Kaye’s face. A puzzled frown wrinkled the space between her eyes.

Mitch Rafelson reached with his big, raw-boned hand and callused fingers to touch the little girl. He bent over to kiss Kaye, then the baby, and stroked her temple with great gentleness. With a touch of his thumb, he turned her rose-colored lips back to the rich nipple. She gave a breathy sigh, a small whistling sound, and with a squirm, fastened onto her mother’s teat and suckled vigorously. Her tiny hands flexed perfect golden-brown fingers.

Mitch called Sam and Abby in Oregon and told them the news. He was barely able to focus on their words; his father’s trembling voice, his mother’s piercing squeal of joy and relief. They spoke for a while and then he told them he could barely stand. “We need to sleep,” he said.

Kaye and the baby were already asleep. Chambers told him they would stay there for two more days. Mitch asked for a bunk to be brought into the room, but Felicity and Sue persuaded him that everything would be all right.

“Go on home and rest,” Sue said. “She’ll be fine.”

Mitch shifted uncertainly on his feet. “They’ll call if there’s any trouble?”

“We’ll call,” Mary Hand said as she walked past with a bag oflinens.

“I’ll have two friends stay outside the clinic for the day,” Jack said.

“I need a place to stay tonight,” Felicity said. “I want to check them over tomorrow.”

“Stay in our house,” Jack suggested.

Mitch’s legs wobbled as he walked with them from the clinic to the Toyota.

In the trailer, he slept through the afternoon and evening. When he awoke, it was twilight. He knelt on the couch and stared out the wide picture window at the scrub and gravel and distant hills.

Then he showered, shaved, dressed. Looked for more things Kaye and the baby might need that had been forgotten.

Looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.

Wept.

Walked back to the clinic alone, in the lovely gloaming. The air was clean and clear and carried smells of sage and grass and dust and water from a low creek. He passed a house where four men were removing an engine from an old Ford, using an oak tree and a chain hoist. The men nodded at him, looked away quickly. They knew who he was; they knew what had happened. They were not comfortable with either him or the event. He picked up his pace. His eyebrows itched, and now his cheeks. The mask was very loose. Soon it would come off. He could feel his tongue against the sides of his mouth; it felt different. His head felt different.

More than anything, he wanted to see Kaye again, and the baby, the girl, his daughter, to make sure it was all real.

88 Arlington, Virginia

The wedding party spread out over much of the half-acre backyard. The day was warm and misty, alternating patches of sun and light overcast. Mark Augustine stood in the reception line beside his bride for forty minutes, smiling, shaking hands, giving polite hugs. Senators and congressional representatives walked through the line, chatting politely. Men and women in unisex black-and-white livery carried trays of champagne and canapes over the golf-green manicured lawn. Augustine looked at his bride with a fixed smile; he knew what he felt inside, love and relief and accomplishment, all slightly chilled. The face he showed to the guests, to the few reporters who had picked winning tickets in the press pool lottery, was calm, warmly loving, dutiful.

Something had occupied his mind all day, however, even through the wedding ceremony. He had flubbed his simple lines of declaration, provoking mild laughter in the front rows in the chapel.

Babies were being born alive. In the quarantine hospitals, in specially appointed Taskforce community clinics, and even in private homes, new babies were arriving.

The possibility that he was wrong had occurred to him lightly, in passing, a kind of itch, until he heard that Kaye Lang’s baby had been born alive, delivered by a doctor working from emergency bulletins issued by the Centers for Disease Control, the very same epidemiological study team that had been put in place at his orders. Special procedures, special precautions; the babies were different.

So far, twenty-four SHEVA infants had been dropped off at community clinics by single mothers or parents the Task-force had not been tracking.

Anonymous, alive foundlings, now under his care.

The reception line came to an end. Feet aching in the tight black dress shoes, he hugged his bride, whispered in her ear, and motioned for Florence Leighton to join him in the main house.

“What did Allergy and Infectious Diseases send us?” he asked. Mrs. Leighton opened the briefcase she had carried all day and handed him a fresh fax page.

“I’ve been waiting for an opportunity,” she said. “The president called earlier, sends his best wishes, and wants you at the White House sometime this evening, earliest convenience.”

Augustine read the fax. “Kaye Lang had her baby,” he said, looking up at her, eyebrows peaking.

“So I heard,” Mrs. Leighton said. Her expression was professional, attentive, and revealed nothing.

“We should send her congratulations,” Augustine said.

“I’ll do that,” Mrs. Leighton said.

Augustine shook his head. “No, you won’t,” he said. “We still have a course to follow.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Tell the president I’ll be there by eight.”

“What about Alyson?” Mrs. Leighton asked.

“She married me, didn’t she?” Augustine answered. “She knows what she’s getting into.”

89 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

Mitch supported Kaye by one arm as she walked and waddled from one side of the room to the other.

“What are you going to call her?” Felicity asked. She sat in the room’s single blue vinyl chair, rocking the sleeping baby gently in her arms.

Kaye looked up at Mitch expectantly. Something about naming her child made her feel vulnerable and pretentious, as if this was a right even a mother did not deserve.

“You did most of the work,” Mitch said with a smile. “You have the privilege.”

“We need to agree,” Kaye said.

“Try me.”

“She’s a new kind of star,” Kaye said. Her legs were still wobbly. Her stomach felt slack and sore, and sometimes the pain between her legs made her feel a little ill, but she was improving rapidly. She sat on the side of the bed. “My grandmother was named Stella. That means star. I was thinking we’d name her Stella Nova.”

Mitch took the baby from Felicity. “Stella Nova,” he repeated.

“Sounds bold,” Felicity said. “I like it.”

“That’s her name,” Mitch said, lifting the baby close to his face. He smelled the top of her head, the moist rich heat of her hair. She smelled of her mother and much more. He could feel cascades of emotions like tumbling blocks falling into place inside, laying a firm foundation.

“She commands your attention even when she’s asleep,” Kaye said. Half-consciously, she reached up to her face and removed a dangling piece of mask, revealing the new skin beneath, pink and tender, with a radiance of tiny melanophores.

Felicity walked over and bent to examine Kaye more closely. “I don’t believe I’m seeing this,” she said. “I’m the one who should feel privileged.”

Stella opened her eyes and shuddered as if in alarm. She gave her father a long and puzzled look, then began to cry Her cry was loud and alarming. Mitch quickly handed Stella to Kaye, who pulled aside her robe. The baby settled in and stopped crying. Kaye again savored the wonder of her milk letting down, the sensual loveliness of the child at her nipple. The child’s eyes surveyed her mother, and then she turned her head, tugging the breast with her, and peered around the room at Felicity and Mitch. The tawny gold-flecked eyes made Mitch’s insides melt.

“So advanced,” Felicity said. “She’s a charmer.”

“What did you expect?” Kaye asked softly, her voice taking on a faint warble. With a small shock, Mitch recognized some of the baby’s tone in her mother’s.

Stella Nova warbled lightly as she suckled, like a small sweet bird. She sang as she nursed, showing her contentment, her delight.

Mitch’s tongue moved behind his lips in restless sympathy. “How does she do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Kaye said. And it was evident that for the moment she did not care.

“She’s like a baby of six months, in some ways,” Felicity said to Mitch as he carried the bags in from the Toyota to the trailer. “She seems to be able to focus already, recognize faces…voices…” She hmmed to herself, as if avoiding the one thing that really separated Stella from other newborns. “She hasn’t spoken again,” Mitch said.

Felicity held the screen door open for him. “Maybe we were hearing things,” she said.

Kaye laid the sleeping child in a small crib in the corner of the living room. She arranged a light blanket over Stella and straightened with a small groan. “We heard right,” she said. She went to Mitch and lifted a patch of mask from his face.

“Ow,” he said. “It’s not ready.”

“Look,” Kaye said, suddenly scientific. “We have mela-nophores. She has melanophores. Most if not all of the new parents are going to have them. And our tongues…Connected to something new in our heads.” She tapped her temple. “We’re equipped to deal with her, almost as equals.”

Felicity appeared baffled by this shift from new mother to objective, observing Kaye Lang. Kaye returned her look with a smile. “I didn’t spend my pregnancy like a cow,” she said. “Judging from these new tools, our daughter is going to be a very difficult child.”

“How so?” Felicity asked.

“Because in some ways she’s going to run rings around us,” Kaye said.

“Maybe in all ways,” Mitch added.

“You don’t mean that, literally,” Felicity said. “At least she wasn’t born mobile. The skin color — the melanophores, as you call them — may be…” She waved her hand, unable to finish her thought.

“They’re not just color,” Mitch said. “I can feel mine.”

“So can I,” Kaye said. “They change. Imagine that poor girl.” She glanced at Mitch. He nodded, then explained to Felicity their encounter with the teenagers in West Virginia.

“If I were in the Taskforce, I’d be setting up psychiatric stations for parents whose new children have died,” Kaye said. “They might face a new kind of grieving.”

“All dressed up, and no one to talk to,” Mitch said.

Felicity took a deep breath and held her hand to her forehead. “I’ve been in pediatrics for twenty-two years,” she said. “Now I feel like I should give up and go hide in the woods.”

“Get the poor lady a glass of water,” Kaye said. “Or would you like wine? I need a glass of wine, Mitch. I haven’t had a drink in over a year.” She turned to Felicity. “Did the bulletin mention no alcohol?”

“No problems. Wine for me, too, please,” Felicity said.

Kaye put her face close to Mitch’s in the small kitchen. She stared at him intently, and her eyes lost their focus for a second. Her cheeks pulsed fawn and gold.

“Jesus,” Mitch said.

“Get that mask off,” Kaye said, “and we’ll really have something to show each other.”

90 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

”Let’s call it a Brave New Species party,” Wendell Packer said as he came in through the screen door and handed Kaye a bouquet of roses. Oliver Merton followed with a box of Go-diva chocolates and a big smile and eagerly darted his eyes around the inside of the trailer.

“Where’s the little wonder?”

“Asleep,” Kaye said, accepting his hug. “Who else is here?” she called out, delighted.

“We smuggled in Wendell and Oliver and Maria,” Eileen Ripper said. “And, lo and behold…”

She swung out her arms to the dusty old van sitting on the gravel drive under the lone oak tree. Christopher Dicken was climbing down from the front passenger side with some difficulty, his legs stiff. He took a pair of crutches from Maria Konig and turned to the trailer. His one good eye met Kaye’s and for a moment she thought she was going to cry. But he lifted a crutch and waggled it at her and she smiled.

“It’s bumpy out here,” he called.

Kaye ran past Mitch to gingerly hug Christopher. Eileen and Mitch stood together as Kaye and Christopher talked.

“Old friends?” Eileen asked.

“Probably soul mates,” Mitch said. He was glad to see Christopher, as well, but could not help feeling a little twinge of masculine concern.

The living room was too small to hold them all, so Wendell braced his arm against the cabinet in the hall and looked down on the rest. Maria and Oliver sat together on the couch under the picture window. Christopher sat in the blue vinyl chair, with Eileen perched on one arm. Mitch came in from the kitchen with bouquets of wine glasses in each fist and a bottle of champagne under each arm. Oliver helped set them down on the round table beside the couch, and carefully popped the corks.

“From the airport?” Mitch asked.

“Portland airport. Not as big a selection,” Oliver said.

Kaye brought out Stella Nova in a pink bassinet and placed her on the small, scuffed coffee table. The baby was awake. Her eyes moved sleepily around the room and she blew a tiny bubble of spit. Her head wobbled a bit. Kaye reached down to adjust her pajamas.

Christopher stared at her as if she were a ghost. “Kaye…” he began, his voice breaking.

“No need,” Kaye said, and touched his red-scarred hand.

“There is a need. I feel like I don’t deserve to be here with you and Mitch, with her.”

“Shush,” Kaye said. “You were there at the beginning.”

Christopher smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

“How old is she?” Eileen whispered.

“Three weeks,” Kaye said.

Maria reached out first and tucked her finger into Stella’s hand. The baby’s fingers closed tightly around it, and she tugged gently. Stella smiled.

“That reflex is still there,” Oliver said.

“Oh, shut up,” Eileen said. “She’s still a baby, Oliver.”

“Yes, but she looks so…”

“Beautiful!” Eileen insisted.

“Different,” Oliver persisted.

“I don’t see it much now,” Kaye said, knowing what he meant, but feeling a little defensive.

“We’re different, too,” Mitch observed.

“You both look fine, even stylish,” Maria said. “It’s going to be all the rage once the fashion magazines see you. Petite, beautiful Kaye…”

“Rugged, handsome Mitch,” Eileen said.

“With squid cheeks,” Kaye finished for them. They laughed, and Stella jerked in her bassinet. Then she warbled, and again the room fell silent. She honored each of the guests in turn with a second, lingering look, her head wobbling as she tracked them around the room, coming full circle to Kaye and then jerking again as she saw Mitch. She smiled at Mitch. Mitch felt his cheeks flush, like warm water running beneath his skin. The last of the skin masks had fallen away eight days before, and looking at his daughter was something of an experience.

Oliver said, “Oh, my God.”

Maria stared at all three of them, her jaw open.

Stella Nova sent waves of fawn and gold over her cheeks, and her pupils dilated slightly, the muscles around her eyes and eyelids drawing the skin down in delicate and complex curves.

“She’s going to teach us how to talk,” Kaye said proudly.

“She is absolutely stunning,” Eileen said. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful baby.”

Oliver asked permission to get closer and leaned in to examine Stella. “Her eyes really aren’t that large, they just look large,” he said.

“Oliver thinks the next humans should look like UFO aliens,” Eileen said.

“Aliens?” Oliver said indignantly. “I deny that statement, Eileen.”

“She’s totally human, totally now,” Kaye said. “Not separate, not distant, not different. She’s our child.”

“Of course,” Eileen said, blushing.

“Sorry,” Kaye said. “We’ve been out here for too long, with too much time to think.”

“I know about that” Christopher said.

“She has a really spectacular nose,” Oliver said. “So delicate, yet broad at the base. And the shape — I do believe she’s going to be a spectacular beauty.”

Stella watched him soberly, her cheeks colorless, then looked away, bored. She tried to find Kaye. Kaye moved into the baby’s field of view.

“Mama,” Stella chirped.

“Oh, my God,” Oliver said again.

Wendell and Oliver drove out to the Little Silver store and bought sandwiches. They all ate at a small picnic table behind the trailer in the cooling afternoon. Christopher had said very little, smiling stiffly as the others spoke. He ate his sandwich on a patch of straw-dry lawn, sitting in a rickety camp chair.

Mitch approached and settled down beside him on the grass. “Stella’s asleep,” he said. “Kaye’s with her.”

Christopher smiled and took a sip from a can of 7UP. “You want to know what brings me all this way out here,” he said.

“All right,” Mitch said. “That’s a start.”

“I’m surprised Kaye was so forgiving.”

“We’ve gone through a lot of changes,” Mitch said. “I must say it seemed you abandoned us.”

“I’ve gone through a lot of changes, too,” Christopher said. “I’m trying to piece things back together. I’m going down to Mexico day after tomorrow. Ensenada, south of San Diego. On my own.”

“Not a vacation?”

“I’m going to look into the lateral transmission of old retroviruses.”

“It’s bullshit,” Mitch said. “They made it up to keep the Taskforce going.”

“Oh, something’s real enough,” Christopher said. “Fifty cases so far. Mark’s not a monster.”

“I’m not so sure of that.” Mitch stared grimly at the desert and the trailer.

“But I am thinking it may not be caused by the virus they’ve found. I’ve been looking over old files on Mexico. I found similar cases from thirty years ago.”

“I hope you set them straight soon. It’s been nice here, but we could have done a lot better…under other circumstances.”

Kaye came out of the trailer holding a portable baby monitor. Maria handed her a sandwich on a paper plate. She joined Mitch and Christopher.

“What do you think of our lawn?” she asked.

“He’s looking into the Mexican illnesses,” Mitch said.

“I thought you quit the Taskforce.”

“I did. The cases are real, Kaye, but I don’t think they’re directly related to SHEVA. We’ve been through so many twists and turns on this — herpes, Epstein-Barr. I guess you got the bulletin from the CDC on anesthesia.”

“Our doctor did,” Mitch said.

“We might have lost Stella without it,” Kaye said.

“More SHEVA babies are being born alive now. Augustine’s got to deal with that. I just want to level the field a little by finding out what’s going on in Mexico. All the cases are down there.”

“You think it’s from another source?” Kaye asked.

“I’m going to find out. I can walk a little now. I’m hiring an assistant.”

“How? You’re not rich.”

“I’ve got a grant from a rich eccentric in New York.”

Mitch’s eyes widened. “Not William Daney!”

“The same. Oliver and Brock are trying to put together a journalistic coup. They thought I could gather evidence. It’s a job, and hell, I believe in it. Seeing Stella… Stella Nova…really brings it home. I just didn’t have the faith.”

Wendell and Maria walked over from the oak tree and Wendell pulled a magazine out of a paper sack. “Thought you might like to see this,” Maria said, handing it to Kaye.

She looked at the cover and laughed out loud. It was a copy of WIRED, and on the brilliant orange cover was printed the black silhouette of a curled fetus with a green question mark across the middle. The log line read “Human 3.0: Not a Virus, but an Upgrade?”

Oliver joined them. “I’ve seen that,” he said. “WIRED doesn’t have much clout in Washington these days. The news is almost all grim, Kaye.”

“We know,” Kaye said, brushing back a wisp of hair as the breeze picked up.

“But here’s some good. Brock says National Geographic and Nature have finished peer review on his piece on the Innsbruck Neanderthals. They’re going to publish jointly in six months. He’s going to call it a confirmed evolutionary event, a subspeciation, and he’s going to mention SHEVA, though not prominently. Did Christopher tell you about Daney?”

Kaye nodded.

“We’re going to make an end run,” Oliver said, his eyes fierce. “All Christopher has to do is track down this virus in Mexico and out-think seven national laboratories.”

“You can do it,” Mitch said to Christopher. “You were there first, even before Kaye.”

The visitors were packing up for their long trip through the northern badlands and out of the reservation. Mitch helped Christopher into the passenger seat and they shook hands. As Kaye held a sleepy Stella and hugged the others, Mitch saw Jack’s pickup rolling down the dirt road.

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

“How’s Sue?”

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

“We’d like to see her,” Mitch said.

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

“We appreciate this, Jack,” Mitch said.

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

“What can we do?”

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

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

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

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

Mitch told her.

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

91 Kumash County, Eastern Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” Mitch said.

“Did you ask for me?”

“No.”

“Did Stella?”

“She’s quiet. I think she’s asleep.”

“Turn on the light.”

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

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

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

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

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

Kaye squatted before the bassinet and picked up Stella.

She nuzzled her and then looked up at Mitch, her lips drawn back in an almost feral snarl. She sneezed, too.

Stella cooed again.

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

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

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

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

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

“Have what?” Mitch asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks,” Mitch said.

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

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

“It’s more than her,” Mitch said.

“Sue needs me!” Kaye cried.

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

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

“I will. I gotta go.”

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

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

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

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

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

Kaye’s dapples flared red for an instant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

92 Northeastern Oregon

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

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

“What about Idaho?”

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

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

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

Mitch got behind the wheel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why take the risk?”

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

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

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

“When will that be?” Kaye asked softly.

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

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