“Are you scenting again?” she asked.
“No, ma'am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.
She didknow the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.
She no longer worried about Mitch.
The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket's shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye's and Mitch's house.
It was Will. Strong Will.
13
BALTIMORE
Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.
Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.
All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.
Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.
The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.
“This isn't a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.
“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.