Greg Bear Darwin 01 Darwin's Radio

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windows, well away from the few other employees. "Specifically, it happened in
Georgia, in Gordi, or nearby."
Kaye's mouth made an O. "My God. The massacre..." Outside, sun broke through
low morning clouds, sending shadows and bright patches over the campus and
into the cafeteria.
"Their tissues all show SHEVA. I only got samples from three or four, but they
all had it."
"And you haven't told Augustine?"
"I've been relying on clinical evidence, fresh reports from hospitals...What
in hell difference would it make if I put SHEVA back a few years, a decade at
most? But two days ago I got some files from a hospital in Tbilisi. I helped a
young intern there make some contacts in Atlanta. He told me about some people
in the mountains. Survivors of another massacre, this one almost sixty years
ago. During the war."
"Germans never got into Georgia," Kaye said.
Dicken nodded. "Stalin's troops. They wiped out most of an isolated village
near Mount Kazbeg. Some survivors were found two years ago. The government in
Tbilisi protected them. Maybe they were fed up with purges, maybe...Maybe they
didn't know anything about Gordi, or the other villages."
"How many survivors?"
"A doctor named Leonid Sugashvili made it his own little crusade to
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investigate. It was his report the intern sent me-a report that was never
published. But pretty thorough. Between 1943 and 1991, he estimated, about
thirteen thousand men, women, and even children were killed in Georgia,
Armenia, Abkhazi, Chechnya. They were killed because somebody thought they
spread a disease that caused pregnant women to abort. Those who survived the
first purges were hunted down later...because the women were giving birth to
mutated children. Children with spots all over their faces, with weird eyes,
children who could speak from the moment they were born. In some villages, the
local police did the killing. Superstition dies hard. The men and women-
mothers and fathers-they were accused of consorting with the devil. There
weren't that many of them, over four decades. But...Sugashvili estimates there
might have been instances of this sort of thing going back hundreds of years.
Tens of thousands of murders. Guilt, shame, ignorance, silence."
"You think the children were mutated by SHEVA?"
"The doctor's report says that many of the women who were killed pleaded that
they had cut off sexual relations with their husbands, their boyfriends. They
did not want to bear the devil's offspring. They had heard about the mutated
children in other villages, and once they had their fever, their miscarriage,
they tried to avoid getting pregnant. Almost all the women who had the
miscarriages were pregnant thirty days later, no matter what they did or did
not do. Just as some of our hospitals are reporting now."
Kaye shook her head. "That is so completely unbelievable!"
Dicken shrugged. "It's not going to get any more believable, or any easier,"
he said. "For some time now, I just haven't been convinced that SHEVA is any
known kind of disease."
Kaye's lips tightened. She put down her cup of coffee and folded her arms,
remembering the conversation with Drew Miller in the Italian restaurant in
Boston, and Saul saying it was time they tackle the problem of evolution.
"Maybe it's a signal," she said.
"What sort of signal?"
"A code-key that opens up a genetic set-aside, instructions for a new
phenotype."
"I'm not sure I understand," Dicken said, frowning.
"Something built up over thousands of years, tens of thousands of years.
Guesses, hypotheses having to do with this or that trait, elaborations on a
pretty rigid plan."
"To what end?" Dicken asked.
"Evolution," Kaye said.
Dicken backed his chair away and placed his hands on his legs. "Whoa."
"You said it wasn't a disease," Kaye reminded him.
"I said it wasn't like any disease I know. It's still a retro-virus."
"You read my papers, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"I dropped a few hints."
Dicken pondered this. "A catalyst."
"You make it, we get it, we suffer," Kaye said.
Dicken's cheeks reddened. "I'm trying not to turn this into a man-woman
thing," he said. "There's enough of that going on already."
"Sorry," Kaye said. "Maybe I just want to avoid the real issue."
Dicken seemed to reach a decision. "I'm stepping out of line by showing this
to you." He dug into his valise and produced a printout of an e-mail message
from Atlanta. Four small pictures had been pasted on the bottom of the
message.
"A woman died in an automobile accident outside Atlanta. An autopsy was
performed at Northside Hospital, and one of our pathologists found she was in
her first trimester. He examined the fetus, clearly a Herod's fetus. Then he
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examined the woman's uterus. He found a second pregnancy, very early, at the
base of the placenta, protected by a thin wall of laminar tissue. The placenta
had already started to separate, but the second ovum was secure. It would have
survived the miscarriage. A month later..."
"A grandchild," Kaye said. "Released by the..."
"Intermediate daughter. Really just a specialized ovary. She creates a second
ovum. That ovum attaches to the wall of the mother's uterus."
"What if her eggs, the daughter's eggs, are different?"
Dicken's throat had grown dry and he coughed. "Excuse me." He got up to pour
himself a cup of water, then walked back between the tables to sit beside
Kaye.
He continued, speaking slowly. "SHEVA provokes the release of a complex of
polyproteins. They break down in the cytosol outside the nucleus. LH, FSH,
prostaglandins."
"I know. Judith Kushner told me," Kaye said, her voice little more than a
squeak. "Some of them are responsible for causing the miscarriages. Others
could change an ovum substantially."
"Mutate it?" Dicken asked, still clinging to the tatters of an old paradigm.
"I'm not sure that's the right word," Kaye said. "It sounds kind of vicious
and random. No. We may be talking about a different kind of reproduction
here."
Dicken finished his cup of water.
"This isn't exactly new to me," Kaye mused quietly. She clenched her fingers
into fists, then lightly, nervously, rapped her knuckles on the table. "Are
you willing to argue that SHEVA is part of human evolution? That we're about
to make a new kind of human?"
Dicken examined Kaye's face, her mixed wonder and excitement, the peculiar
terror of coming upon the intellectual equivalent of a raging tiger. "I
wouldn't dare to put it so bluntly. But maybe I'm a coward. Maybe it is
something like that. I value your opinion. God knows I need an ally here."
Kaye's heart thudded in her chest. She lifted her cup of coffee and the cold
liquid sloshed. "My God, Christopher." She gave a small, helpless laugh. "What
if it's true? What if we're all pregnant? The whole human race?"
PART TWO
SHEVA
SPRING
36
Eastern Washington State
Wide and slow, the Columbia River glided like a plain of polished jade between
black basalt walls.
Mitch pulled off state route 14, drove for half a mile on a dirt and gravel
road through scrub trees and bushes, then turned at a bent and rusted sheet-
metal sign that read IRON CAVE.
Two old Airstream trailers gleamed in the sun a few yards from the edge of the
gorge. Wooden benches and tables heaped with burlap sacks and digging tools
surrounded the trailers. He parked the car off the road.
A chill breeze picked at his felt Stetson. He gripped the hat with one hand as
he walked from the car to the edge and stared down upon Eileen Ripper's
encampment, fifty feet below.
A short young blond woman in frayed and faded jeans and a brown leather jacket
stepped down from the door of the nearest trailer. In the moist air off the
river, he instantly picked up the young woman's scent: Opium or Trouble or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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