“There are no woods,” Will said, face crinkling as if she had spoken some obscenity.
“When you got away, where did you go?”
Will looked up at the sky. “I can eat lots here,” he said. “I’ll get better, stronger, learn the smell, talk the two tongues.” He balled up his hands and bounced them lightly on the table, then against each other, thumb to thumb, as if playing a game. “Why are they letting us get together, boy-girl?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes they draw blood and ask questions.”
Will nodded.
“Do you know what they’re doing?” Stella asked.
“Not a clue,” Will said. “They teach nothing, like all the schools. Right?”
“We read some books and learn some skills. We can’t cloud or scent or we’re punished.”
Will smiled. “Stupid blanks,” he said.
Stella winced. “We try not to call them names.”
Will looked away.
“How long were you free?” Stella asked.
“They caught me a week ago,” Will said. “I’ve lived on my own and with runaways and street kids. Covered my cheeks with henna tattoos. Neck, too. Some human kids mark their faces to look like us, but everyone knows. They also claim to read thoughts and have better brains. Like they think we do. They say it’s cool, but their freckles don’t move.”
Stella could see some brown still staining the raw patches on Will’s face. “How many of us are outside?”
“Not many,” Will said. “I got turned in by a human for a pack of cigarettes, even after I saved him from getting beat up.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s awful out there.”
Stella smelled Joanie nearby, under her signature mask of baby powder. Will straightened as the stout young counselor approached.
“No one-on-one,” Stella heard Joanie say. “You know the rules.”
“The others left,” Stella said, turning to explain, stopping only when Joanie gripped Stella’s shoulder. Touched and held, she refused to meet the counselor’s eyes.
Will stood. “I’ll go,” he said.
Then, speaking two streams at once, the over a flow of young gibberish, he said, “See you, say hi to Cory in Six” (there was no Cory and no Six) and “keep it low, keep it topped, shop with pop, nay?”
The under:
“What do you know about a place called Sandia?”
He mixed the streams so expertly that it took Stella a moment to know he had delivered the question. To Joanie, it probably sounded like a slur in the gibberish.
Then, with a toss of his hand, as Joanie led Stella away, Will said, in one stream, “Find out, hey?”
Stella watched Ellie be led away to give blood. Ellie pretended it was no big deal, but it was. Stella wondered if it was because Ellie had attracted a lot of boys today, five at the table where she and Felice had sat. The rest of the girls went to their late morning classrooms, where they were shown films about the history of the United States, guys in wigs and women in big dresses, wagon trains, maps, a little bit about Indians.
Mitch had taught Stella about Indians. The film told them nothing important.
Felice was sitting in the aisle next to her. “What’s a green bug got to do with anything?” she whispered, making up for Ellie’s absence.
Nobody answered. The game had gone sour. This time, being with the boys had hurt, and somehow Stella and the others knew it would only get worse. The time was coming when they would all need to be left alone, boys and girls together, to work things out for themselves.
Stella did not think the humans would ever let that happen. They would be kept apart like animals in a zoo, forever.
“You’re scenting,” Celia warned in a whisper behind her. “Miss Kantor turned her nosey on.”
Stella did not know how to stop. She could feel the changes coming.
“You’re doing it, too,” Felice whispered to Celia.
“Damn,” Celia said, and rubbed behind her ears, eyes wide.
“Girls,” Miss Kantor called from the front of the classroom. “Be quiet and watch the film.”
19
BALTIMORE
Promptly at eleven, Kaye entered the Americol twentieth-floor conference room, Liz close behind. Robert Jackson was already in the room. His hair had turned salt and pepper over the years but otherwise he had not matured much either in behavior or appearance. He was still handsome, skin pale to the point of blueness, with a sharply defined nose and chin and a glossy five o’clock shadow. His quartzlike eyes, dark gray, bored into Kaye whenever they met, occasions she tried to keep to a minimum.
Angled on either side of Jackson at the corner position he favored were two of his postdocs—research interns from Cornell and Harvard, in their late twenties, compact fellows with dark brown hair and the nervous aloofness of youth.
“Marge will be here in a few minutes,” Jackson told Kaye, briefly half-standing.
He had never forgiven her an awkward moment in the early days of SHEVA, sixteen years ago, when it seemed that Marge and Kaye had ganged up on him. Jackson had won that round in the long run, but grudges came naturally to him. He was as passionate about office politics and the social side of research as he was about science as an ideal and an abstraction.
With so keen a sense of the social, Kaye wondered why Jackson had been other than brilliant in genetics. To Kaye, the processes behind both were much the same; to Jackson, that idea was heresy of a disgusting magnitude.
The representatives from three other research divisions had also arrived before Kaye and Liz. Two men and one woman, all in their late forties, bowed their heads as they pored over touch tablets, getting through the perpetual network-enabled tasks of their day. They did not look up as Kaye entered, though most of them had met her and conversed with her at Americol mixers and Christmas parties.
Kaye and Liz sat with their backs to a long window that looked out over downtown Baltimore. Kaye felt a breeze go up her back from a floor vent. Jackson had taken pole position, leaving Liz and Kaye with the air conditioning.
Marge Cross entered, alone for once. She seemed subdued. Cross was in her middle sixties, portly, her short-cut, scraggly hair brilliantly hennaed, her face jowly, her neck a landscape of hanging wrinkles. She possessed a voice that could carry across a crowded conference hall, yet carried herself with the poise of a ballet dancer, dressed in carefully tailored pant suits, and somehow could charm the butterflies out of the skies. It was difficult to know when she did not like what she was hearing. Like a rhino, Cross was said to be at her most dangerous when she was still and quiet.
The CEO of Americol and Eurocol had grown stouter and more beefy-faced over the years, but still walked with graceful confidence. “Let the games begin,” she said, her voice mellow as she made her way to the window. Liz moved her chair as Cross passed.
“You didn’t bring your lance, Kaye,” Jackson said.
“Behave, Robert,” Cross warned. She sat beside Liz and folded her hands on the table. Jackson managed to look both properly chastened and amused by the jabbing familiarity.
“We’re here to judge the success so far of our attempts to restrict legacy viruses,” Cross began. “We refer to them generically as ERV—endogenous retroviruses. We’ve also been concerned with their close relations, transgenes, transposons, retrotransposons, LINE elements, and what have you—all mobile elements, all jumping genes. Let’s not confuse our ERV with someone else’s ERV—equine rhinovirus, for example, or ecotropic recombinant retrovirus, or, something we’ve all experienced in these sessions, a sudden loss of expiratory reserve volume.”
Polite smiles around the room. A little shuffling of feet.