“It feels like you love me,” she said, shaking with frustration. “So why do you torment me? Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do?” Kaye slid down the bench to a chair near a desk in the corner of the lab. She put her head between her knees. She did not feel weak or even woozy; she could have walked around and even gone about her daily work. She had before. But this time it was just too much.
Her anger swelled even over the insistent waves of validation and approval. The first time the caller had touched her, Mitch and Stella had been taken away. That had been so bad, so unfair; she did not want to remember that time now. And yet this affirmation forced her to remember.
“Go away. Please. I don’t know why you’re here. This world is cruel, even if you aren’t, and I have to keep working.”
She looked around, biting her lip, seeing the lab, the equipment, so neatly arranged, the dark beyond the window. The wall of night outside, the bright rationality within.
“Please.”
She felt the voice become smaller, but no less intense. How polite, she thought. Abruptly, panicked at this new loss, this possible withdrawal, she jumped to her feet.
“Are you trying to clue me in to something?” she asked, desperate. “Reward me for my work, my discoveries?”
Kaye received the distinct impression that this was not the case. She got up and made sure the door was locked. No sense having people wander in and find her talking to herself. She paced up and down the aisles. “So you’re willing to communicate, just not with words,” she said, eyes half-closed. “All right. I’ll talk. You let me know whether I’m right or wrong, okay? This could take a while.”
She had long since learned that an irreverent attitude had no effect on the caller. Even when Kaye had loathed herself for what she had done by abandoning Mitch in prison and her daughter in the schools, ruining all their lives in a desperate gamble to use all the tools of science and rationality, the caller had still radiated love and approval.
She could punish herself, but the caller would not.
Even more embarrassing, Kaye had come to think of the caller as definitely not female, and probably not neuter—but male. The caller was nothing like her father or Mitch or any other man she had ever met or known, but it seemed strangely masculine nonetheless. What that meant psychologically, she was most unwilling to discover. It was a little too de rigueur, a little too churchy, for comfort.
But the caller cared little about her qualms. He was the most consistent thing in her life—outside of her need to help Stella.
“Am I doing the right thing?” she asked, looking around the lab. Her tremors stopped. She let the extraordinary calm wash over her. “That means yes, I suppose,” she said tentatively. “Are you the Big Guy? Are you Jesus? Or just Gabriel?”
She had asked these questions before, and received no response. This time, however, she felt an almost insignificant alteration in the sensations flooding through her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “No. None of the above. Are you my guardian angel?”
Again, a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and whispered, “No.
“Then what are you?”
No response at all, no change, no clues.
“God?”
Nothing.
“You’re inside me or up there or someplace where you can just pump out love and approval all day long, and then you go away and leave me in misery. I don’t understand that. I need to know whether you’re just something in my head. A crossed nerve. A burst blood vessel. I need solid reassurance. I hope you don’t mind.”
The caller expressed no objection, not even to the extent of withdrawing under the assault of such questioning, such blasphemies.
“You’re really something else, you know that?” Kaye sat before the workstation and logged on to the Americol intranet. “There’s nothing Sunday school about you.”
She glanced at her watch—6 p.m.—and looked up the roster that recorded who was in the building at this hour.
On the first floor, chief radiologist Herbert Roth was still at his post, working late. Just the man she needed. Roth was in charge of the Noninvasive Imaging Lab. She had worked with him two weeks ago taking scans of Wishtoes, their oldest female chimp.
Roth was young, quiet, dedicated to his craft.
Kaye opened the lab door and stepped out into the hall. “Do you think Mr. Roth will want to scan me?” she asked no one in particular.
14
ARIZONA
They did not let Stella see Mitch for hours. First Stella was visited by a nurse who examined her, took a cheek swab, and drew a few cc’s of blood.
Stella looked away as the nurse lightly jabbed her with the needle. She could smell the nurse’s anxiety; she was only a few years older than Stella and did not like this.
Afterward, Miss Kantor took Stella to the visitor’s area. The first thing Stella noticed was that they had removed the plastic barrier. Tables and chairs, nothing more. Something had changed, and that concerned her for a moment. She patted the cotton patch taped to the inside of her elbow. After an hour, Miss Kantor returned with a pile of comic books.
“X-Men,” she said. “You’ll like these. Your father’s still being examined. Give me the cotton.”
Stella pulled off the tape and handed it to Miss Kantor, who opened a plastic bag to store it.
“He’ll be done soon,” Miss Kantor said with a practiced smile.
Stella ignored the comics and stood in the bare room with its flowered wallpaper and the single table and two plastic chairs. There was a water cooler in the corner and a couple of lounge chairs, patched and dirty. She filled a paper cup with water. A window opened from the main office, and another window looked out over the parking lot. No hot coffee or tea, no hot plate for warming food—no utensils. Family visits were not meant to last long or to be particularly comfortable.
She curled the paper cup in her hand and thought alternately about her father and about Will. Thinking about Will pushed her father into the background, if only for a moment, and Stella did not like that. She did not want to be chaotic. She did not want to be unpredictable; she wanted to be faithful to the goal of putting together a stable deme, away from the school, away from human interference, and that would require focus and an emotional constancy.
She knew nothing about Will. She did not even know his last name. He might not remember her. Perhaps he was passing through, getting a checkup or going through some sort of quarantine on his way to another school.
But if he was staying…
Joanie opened the door. “Your father’s here,” she said. Joanie always tried to hide her smell behind baby powder. Her expression was friendly but empty. She did what Miss Kantor wanted and seldom expressed her own opinions.
“Okay,” Stella said, and took a seat in one plastic chair. The table would be between them, she hoped. She squirmed nervously. She had to get used to the thought of seeing Mitch again.
Joanie pointed the way through the door and Mitch came in. His left arm hung by his side. Stella looked at the arm, eyes wide, and then at Mitch’s denim jacket and jeans, worn and a little dusty. And then she looked at his face.
Mitch was forcing a nervous smile. He did not know what to do, either.
“Hello, sweetie,” he said.
“You can sit in the chair,” Joanie said. “Take your time.”
“How long do we have?” Mitch asked Joanie. Stella hated that. She remembered him as being strong and in charge, and his having to ask about such a thing was wrong.
“We don’t have many visits scheduled today. There are four rooms. So… take your time. A couple of hours. Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be in the office right outside.”