Darwin's children

“How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.

“As long as you'll put up with me,” Dicken said.

“About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.

“They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can't share it with me.”

“Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.

“I did. I loved Suddenly, Last Summer,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”

Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”

“Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I'm fine.”

“I know you are, Carla. You're more sane than I am.”

“That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don't have to worry about me, do I? Honestly, Marian's been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she'd let me fix her hair.”

Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.

“They really aren't treating me too badly, and I'm passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine's face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the childrendoing, Christopher?”

Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.

“They're doing okay,” Dicken said.

Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”

“Mostly. Some are hiding out.”

“What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I'm especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government's help?”

“As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven't kept in touch. She's kind of gone underground.”

“You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”

“We were.”

“You shouldn't lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.

“I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken's busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.

“Any news on what they're doing inside me, all those viruses?”

“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.

“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses . . . are they still carrying pig messages?”

“I don't know, Carla.”

Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “ Please,Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams . . . anything.”

Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It's the least she deserves.”

In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.

They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.

5

SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA

“Ihear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.

“She doesn't smell good asa dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”

“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.

“We're just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.

“I'm warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he's just fooling.”

Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and te

They weren't making much money and they weren't very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.

“She doesn't look infeckshus,” the second male said.

“I mean it, guys, she's just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.

“What's your name?” Stella asked the first male.

“I don't care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.

“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”

The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let's go, Dave.”

Dave was working himself up. “She doesn't fucking belonghere,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”

“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”

Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I'm Stella,” she said.

Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn't touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain't you in a camp?”

“Dave!”the stooped fellow snapped.

Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn't wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk's halfhearted defense rankled.

Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.

“It's nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It's cool.”

“You are something, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”

Dave's friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man's hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.

“Fuck it, Dave, let's go! They'll come get her and maybe they'll take us, too, if we get too close.”

“My people aren't really infeckshus,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”

The clerk sucked in her breath.

Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.