Bear,Greg - Darwin's Children

DARWIN'S

CHILDREN

GREG

BEAR

BALLANTINE BOOKS

NEW YORK

TO MY FATHER,

DALE FRANKLIN BEAR

PART ONE

SHEVA + 12

“America's a cruel country. There's a whole lot of people would just as soon stomp you like an ant.

Listen to talk radio. Plenty of dummies, damned few ventriloquists.”

“There's a wolf snarl behind the picnics and Boy Scout badges.”

“They want to kill our kids. Lord help us all.”

—Anonymous Postings, ALT.NEWCHILD.FAM

“Citing ‘severe threats to national security,’ Emergency Action this week has requested of the U.S.

Justice Department the authority to hack and shut down SHEVA parent Web sites and even e-journals

and newspapers guilty of spreading inaccurate information—’lies’—against EMAC and the U.S.

government. Some parent advocacy groups complain this is already the norm. Mid-level Justice

Department officials have passed the request along to the office of the attorney general for further legal

review, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.

“Some legal experts say that even legitimate newspaper sites could be hacked or shut down without

warning should approval be granted, and the granting of such approval is likely in itself to be kept secret.”

—SeattleTimes-PI Online

“God had nothing to do with making these children. I don't care what you think about creationism or

evolution, we're on our own now.”

—Owen Withey,Creation Science News

1

SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY, VIRGINIA

Morning lay dark and quiet around the house. Mitch Rafelson stood with coffee cup in hand on the back

porch, dopey from just three hours of sleep. Stars still pierced the sky. A few persistent moths and bugs

buzzed around the porch light. Raccoons had been at the garbage can in back, but had left, whickering

and scuffling, hours ago, discouraged by lengths of chain.

The world felt empty and new.

Mitch put his cup in the kitchen sink and returned to the bedroom. Kaye lay in bed, still asleep. He

adjusted his tie in the mirror above the dresser. Ties never looked right on him. He grimaced at the way

his suit hung on his wide shoulders, the gap around the collar of his white shirt, the length of sleeve visible

beyond the cuff of his coat.

There had been a row the night before. Mitch and Kaye and Stella, their daughter, had sat up until two

in the morning in the small bedroom trying to talk it through. Stella was feeling isolated. She wanted,

needed to be with young people like her. It was a reasonable position, but they had no choice.

Not the first time, and likely not the last. Kaye always approached these events with studied calm, in

contrast to Mitch's evasion and excuses. Of course they were excuses. He had no answers to Stella's

questions, no real response to her arguments. They both knew she ultimately needed to be with her own

kind, to find her own way.

Finally, too much, Stella had stomped off and slammed the door to her room. Kaye had started crying.

Mitch had held her in bed and she had gradually slipped into twitching sleep, leaving him staring at the

darkened ceiling, tracking the play of lights from a truck grumbling down the country road outside,

wondering, as always, if the truck would come up their drive, come for their daughter, come to claim

bounty or worse.

He hated the way he looked in what Kaye called his Mr. Smith duds—as inMr. Smith Goes to

Washington . He lifted one hand and rotated it, studying the palm, the long, strong fingers, wedding ring

—though he and Kaye had never gotten a license. It was the hand of a hick.

He hated to drive into the capital, through all the checkpoints, using his congressional appointment pass.

Slowly moving past all the army trucks full of soldiers, deployed to stop yet another desperate parent

from setting off another suicide bomb. There had been three such blasts since spring.

And now, Riverside, California.

Mitch walked to the left side of the bed. “Good morning, love,” he whispered. He stood for a moment,

watching his woman, his wife. His eyes moved along the sleeve of her pajama top, absorbing every

wrinkle in the rayon, every silken play of pre-dawn light, down to slim hands, curled fingers, nails bitten

to the quick.

He bent to kiss her cheek and pulled the covers over her arm. Her eyes fluttered open. She brushed the

back of his head with her fingers. “G'luck,” she said.

“Back by four,” he said.

“Love you.” Kaye pushed into the pillow with a sigh.

Next stop was Stella's room. He never left the house without making the rounds, filling his eyes and

memory with pictures of wife and daughter and house, as if, should they all be taken away, should this

be the last time, he could replay the moment. Fat good it would do.

Stella's room was a neat jumble of preoccupations and busyness in lieu of having friends. She had pinned

a farewell photo of their disreputable orange tabby on the wall over her bed. Tiny stuffed animals spilled

from her cedar chest, beady eyes mysterious in the shadows. Old paperback books filled a small case

made of pine boards that Mitch and Stella had hammered together last winter. Stella enjoyed working

with her father, but Mitch had noticed the distance growing between them for a couple of years now.

Stella lay on her back in a bed that had been too short for over a year. At eleven, she was almost as tall

as Kaye and beautiful in her slender, round-faced way, skin pale copper and tawny gold in the glow of

the night-light, hair dark brown with reddish tints, same texture as Kaye's and not much longer.

Their family had become a triangle, still strong, but with the three sides stretching each month. Neither

Mitch nor Kaye could give Stella what she really needed.

And each other?

He looked up to see the orange line of sunrise through the filmy white curtains of Stella's window. Last

night, cheeks freckling with anger, Stella had demanded to know when they would let her out of the

house on her own, without makeup, to be with kids her own age. Her kind of kids. It had been two

years since her last “play date.”

Kaye had done wonders with home teaching, but as Stella had pointed out last night, over and over

again, with rising emotion,“I am not like you!” For the first time, Stella had formally proclaimed:“I am

not human!”

But of course she was. Only fools thought otherwise. Fools, and monsters, and their daughter.

Mitch kissed Stella on the forehead. Her skin was warm. She did not wake up. Stella as she slept

smelled like her dreams, and now she smelled the way tears taste, tang of salt and sadness.

“Got to go,” he murmured. Stella's cheeks produced waves of golden freckles. Mitch smiled.

Even asleep, his daughter could say good-bye.

2

Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious

Diseases: USAMRIID

FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND

“People died, Christopher,” Marian Freedman said. “Isn't that enough to make us cautious, even a little

crazy?”

Christopher Dicken walked beside her, tilting on his game leg, staring down the concrete corridor to the

steel door at the end. His National Cancer Institute ID badge still poked from his jacket pocket. He

clutched a large bouquet of roses and lilies. The two had been engaged in debate from the front desk

through four security checkpoints.

“Nobody's diagnosed a case of Shiver for a decade,” he said. “And nobody ever got sick from the

children. Isolating them is politics, not biology.”

Marian took his day pass and ran it through the scanner. The steel door opened to a horizontal spread of

sunglass-green access tubes, suspended like a hamster maze over a two-acre basin of raw gray

concrete. She held out her hand, letting him go first. “You know about Shiver firsthand.”

“It went away in a couple of weeks,” Dicken said.

“It lasted five weeks, and it damned near killed you. Don't bullshitme with your virus hunter bravado.”

Dicken stepped slowly onto the catwalk, having difficulty judging depth with just one eye, and that

covered by a thick lens. “The man beat his wife, Marian. She was sick with a tough pregnancy. Stress

and pain.”

“Right,” Marian said. “Well, that certainly wasn't true with Mrs. Rhine, was it?”

“Different problem,” Dicken admitted.

Freedman smiled with little humor. She sometimes revealed biting wit, but did not seem to understand

the concept of humor. Duty, hard work, discovery, and dignity filled the tight circle of her life. Marian

Freedman was a devout feminist and had never married, and she was one of the best and most

dedicated scientists Dicken had ever met.

Together, they marched north on the aluminum catwalk. She adjusted her pace to match his. Tall steel

cylinders waited at the ends of the access tubes, shaft housings for elevators to the chambers beneath the

seamless concrete slab. The cylinders wore big square “hats,” high-temperature gas-fired ovens that

would sterilize any air escaping from the facilities below.

“Welcome to the house that Augustine built. How is Mark, anyway?”

“Not happy, last time I saw him,” Dicken said.

“Why am I not surprised? Of course, I should be charitable. Mark moved me up from studying chimps

to studying Mrs. Rhine.”

Twelve years before, Freedman had headed a primate lab in Baltimore, during the early days when the

Centers for Disease Control had launched the task force investigating Herod's plague. Mark Augustine,

then director of the CDC and Dicken's boss, had hoped to secure extra funding from Congress during a

fiscal dry spell. Herod's, thought to have caused thousands of hideously malformed miscarriages, had

seemed like a terrific goad.

Herod's had quickly been traced to the transfer of one of thousands of Human Endogenous Retroviruses

—HERV—carried by all people within their DNA. The ancient virus, newly liberated, mutated and

infectious, had been promptly renamed SHEVA, for Scattered Human Endogenous Viral Activation.

In those days, viruses had been assumed to be nothing more than selfish agents of disease.

“She's been looking forward to seeing you,” Freedman said. “How long since your last visit?”

“Six months,” Dicken said.

“My favorite pilgrim, paying his respects to our viral Lourdes,” Freedman said. “Well, she's a wonder,

all right. And something of a saint, poor dear.”

Freedman and Dicken passed junctions with tubes branching southwest, northeast, and northwest to

other shafts. Outside, the summer morning was warming rapidly. The sun hung just above the horizon, a

subdued greenish ball. Cool air pulsed around them with a breathy moan.

They came to the end of the main tube. An engraved Formica placard to the right of the elevator door

read, “MRS. CARLA RHINE.” Freedman punched the single white button. Dicken's ears popped as

the door closed behind them.

SHEVA had turned out to be much more than a disease. Shed only by males in committed relationships,

the activated retrovirus served as a genetic messenger, ferrying complicated instructions for a new kind

of birth. SHEVA infected recently fertilized human eggs—in a sense, hijacked them. The Herod's

miscarriages were first-stage embryos, called “interim daughters,” not much more than specialized

ovaries devoted to producing a new set of precisely mutated zygotes.

Without additional sexual activity, the second-stage zygotes implanted and covered themselves with a

thin, protective membrane. They survived the abortion of the first embryo and started a new pregnancy.

To some, this had looked like a kind of virgin birth.

Most of the second-stage embryos had gone to term. Worldwide, in two waves separated by four

years, three million new children had been born. More than two and a half million of the infants had

survived. There was still controversy over exactly who and what they were—a diseased mutation, a

subspecies, or a completely new species.

Most simply called them virus children.

“Carla's still cranking them out,” Freedman said as the elevator reached the bottom. “She's shed seven

hundred new viruses in the last four months. About a third are infectious, negative-strand RNA viruses,

potentially real bastards. Fifty-two of them kill pigs within hours. Ninety-one are almost certainly lethal to

humans. Another ten can probably kill both pigs and humans.” Freedman glanced over her shoulder to

see his reaction.

“I know,” Dicken said dryly. He rubbed his hip. His leg bothered him when he stood for more than

fifteen minutes. The same White House explosion that had taken his eye, twelve years ago, had left him

partially disabled. Three rounds of surgery had allowed him to put aside the crutches but not the pain.

“Still in the loop, even at NCI?” Freedman asked.

“Trying to be,” he said.

“Thank God there are only four like her.”

“She's our fault,” he said, and paused to reach down and massage his calf.

“Maybe, but Mother Nature's still a bitch,” Freedman said, watching him with her hands on her hips.

A small airlock at the end of the concrete corridor cycled them through to the main floor. They were

now fifty feet below ground. A guard in a crisp green uniform inspected their passes and permission

papers and compared them with the duty and guest roster at her workstation.

“Please identify,” she told them. Both placed their eyes in front of scanners and simultaneously pressed

their thumbs onto sensitive plates. A female orderly in hospital greens escorted them to the cleanup area.

Mrs. Rhine was housed in one of ten underground residences, four of them currently occupied. The

residences formed the center of the most redundantly secure research facility on Earth. Though Dicken

and Freedman would never come any closer than seeing her through a four-inch-thick acrylic window,

they would have to go through a whole-body scrub before and after the interview. Before entering the

viewing area and staging lab, called the inner station, they would put on special hooded undergarments

impregnated with slow-release antivirals, zip up in plastic isolation suits, and attach themselves to positive

pressure umbilical hoses.

Mrs. Rhine and her companions at the center never saw real human beings unless they were dressed to

resemble Macy's parade balloons.

On leaving, they would stand under a disinfectant shower, then strip down and shower again, scrubbing

every orifice. The suits would be soaked and sterilized overnight, and the undergarments would be

incinerated.

The four women interned at the facility ate well and exercised regularly. Their quarters—each roughly

the size of a two-bedroom apartment—were maintained by automated servants. They had their hobbies

—Mrs. Rhine was a great one for hobbies—and access to a wide selection of books, magazines, TV

shows, and movies.

Of course, the women were becoming more and more eccentric.

“Any tumors?” Dicken asked.

“Official question?” Freedman asked.

“Personal,” Dicken said.

“No,” Freedman said. “But it's only a matter of time.”

Dicken handed the flowers to the orderly. “Don't boil them,” he said.

“I'll process them myself,” the orderly promised with a smile. “She'll get them before you're done here.”

She passed them two sealed white paper bags containing their undergarments and showed them the way

to the scrub stalls, then to the tall cabinets that held the isolation suits, as glossy and green as dill pickles.

Christopher Dicken was legendary even at Fort Detrick. He had tracked Mrs. Rhine to a motel in Bend,

Oregon, where she had fled after the death of her husband and daughter. He had talked her into opening

the door to the small, spare room, and had spent twenty minutes with her, unprotected, while Emergency

Action vans gathered in the parking lot.

He had done all this, despite having already contracted Shiver from a woman in Mexico the year before.

That woman, a plump female in her forties, seven months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her

husband. A small, stupid, jackal-like man with a long criminal record, he had kept her alone and without

medical help in a small room at the back of a shabby apartment for three months. Her baby had been

born dead.

Something in the woman had produced a defensive viral response, enhanced by SHEVA, and her

husband had suffered the consequences. In his darkest early morning vigils of pacing, tending phantom

twitches and pains in his leg, alone and wide awake, Dicken had often thought of the husband's death as

natural justice, and his own exposure and subsequent illness as accidental blow-by—an occupational

hazard.

Mrs. Rhine's case was different. Her problems had been caused by an interplay of human and natural

forces no one could have possibly predicted.

In the late nineties, she had suffered from end-stage renal disease and had been the recipient of an

experimental xenotransplant—a pig kidney. The transplant had worked. Three years later, Mrs. Rhine

had contracted SHEVA from her husband. This had stimulated an enthusiastic release of PERV—

Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus—from the pig cells. Before Mrs. Rhine had been diagnosed and

isolated at Fort Detrick, her pig and human retroviruses had shuffled genes—recombined—with latent

herpes simplex virus and had begun to express, with diabolical creativity, a Pandora's box of

long-dormant diseases, and many new ones.

Ancient viral tool kits,Mark Augustine had called them, with true prescience.

Mrs. Rhine's husband, newborn daughter, and seven relatives and friends had been infected by the first

of her recombined viruses. They had all died within hours.

Of forty-one individuals who had received pig tissue transplants in the United States, and had

subsequently been exposed to SHEVA, the women at the center were the only survivors. Perversely,

they were immune to the viruses they produced. Isolated as they were, the four women never caught

colds or flu. That made them extraordinary subjects for research—deadly but invaluable.

Mrs. Rhine was a virus hunter's dream, and whenever Dicken did dream about her, he awoke in a cold

sweat.

He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do

with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or

died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been

subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.

Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.

“Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small

video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to

scrub.

Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic

gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual

dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected

visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove

allowed them to pull up the other's rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a

sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.

This took twenty minutes.

They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost

airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second

airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel

hooks from an overhead track.

Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.

The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had

saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.

“You're good for the inner,” the orderly told them through a bulkhead speaker.

The last hatch slid open with a silky whisper. Dicken walked ahead of Freedman into the inner station. In

sync, they turned to the right and waited for the steel window blinds to ratchet up.

The few incidents of Shiver had started at least a hundred crash courses in medical and weapons-related

research. If abused women, and women given xenotransplants, could all by themselves design and

express thousands of killer plagues, what could a generation of virus children do?

Dicken clenched his jaw, wondering how much Carla Rhine had changed in sixth months.

Something of a saint, poor dear.

3

Office of Special Reconnaissance

LEESBURG, VIRGINIA

Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed

woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was

warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from

the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.

The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use.

Augustine's hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The

woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.

“Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I'm tired. I've been traveling. There's work to do.”

“Something's developing, Mark. I'm sure you'll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We've

finally located a long-lost colleague.”

“Who?”

“Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.

Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with

vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only

remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career

bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.

The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and

stupid, that gave him an advantage.

The maximum depth of Washington's soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel

Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in

Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine's assistant in EMAC—Emergency

Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency

and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had

started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and

subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the

National Reconnaissance Office.

Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.

“Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just

another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”

Browning rolled her eyes. “She's not off limits according to any directive I've received. I certainly do not

regard her as a sacred cow. It's been seven years since she was on Oprah.”

“If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent

undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.

Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.

They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter

greeted them with hard gray eyes.

Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose

on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed,

sound-absorbing foam panels.

Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last

eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.

Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over

the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They're

living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.

“I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”

She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”

“A year and a half,” Augustine said.

“Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”

Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon

his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White

House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher

Dicken. “I don't see anything.”

“The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep

Eye.”

“Lovely toys,” he commented.

“They were your idea.”

“I've just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”

“Oh. How was it?”

“Awful beyond belief.”

“No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one

nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”

“You'll be the first to know, I'm sure,” Augustine said.

Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she

said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees

and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye's lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a

driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.

“And . . . here's Little Bird,” Browning's voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.

The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a

small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightness to reveal the head and shoulders

of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.

“Recognize her?” Browning asked.

“The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.

“That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”

“You're right,” Augustine admitted.

The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and

waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from

the house.

“I think that's Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.

“Congratulations. You're a voyeur,” Augustine said.

“I prefer ‘paparazzo.’ ”

The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front

porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.

“Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn't she?”

Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and

magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it

halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.

Dark freckles,Augustine thought.She's nervous.

“What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she's going for a walk. And not to school, I'm

thinking.”

Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if

taking a morning stroll.

“Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don't have anyone on site. I don't want to lose the

opportunity, so I've alerted a stringer.”

“You mean a bounty hunter. That's not wise.”

Browning did not react.

“I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It's the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly

for these tactics.”

“It's not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I've been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”

Bear, Greg - Darwin's Children

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