They stood in front of the gate and listened to the crickets.
Back in the zoo, a macaw squawked. The sound carried all over Balboa Park.
“Diversity,” Kaye murmured. “Too much stress could be a sign of impending catastrophe. The twentieth century has been one long, frenetic, extended catastrophe. Let loose with a major change, something stored up in the genome, before the human race fails.”
“Not a disease, but an upgrade,” Mitch said.
Kaye looked at him again with the same brief chill. “Precisely,” she said. “Everyone travels everywhere in just hours or days. What gets triggered in a neighborhood is suddenly spread all over the world. The Wizard is overwhelmed with signals.” She stretched out her arms again, more restrained, but hardly sober. She knew Mitch was looking at her, and Dicken was watching them both.
Dicken peered up the drive beside the broad zoo parking lot, trying to find a cab. He saw one making a U-turn several hundred feet away and thrust out his hand. The cab pulled up at the loading zone.
They climbed in. Dicken took the front seat. As they drove, he turned to say, “All right, so some stretch of DNA in our genome is patiently building up a model of the next type of human. Where is it getting its ideas, its suggestions? Who’s whispering, ‘Longer legs, bigger brain case, brown eyes are best this year?’ Who’s telling us what’s handsome and what’s ugly?”
Kaye spoke rapidly. “The chromosomes use a biological grammar, built into the DNA, a kind of high-level species blueprint. The Wizard knows what it can say that will make sense for an organism’s phenotype. The Wizard includes a genetic editor, a grammar checker. It stops most nonsense mutations before they ever get included.”
“We’re off into the wild blue yonder here,” Mitch said, “and they’ll shoot us down in the first minute of any dogfight.” He whipped his hands through the air like two airplanes, making the cabby nervous, then dramatically plunged his left hand into his knee, crumpling his fingers. “Scrunch,” he said.
The cabby regarded them curiously. “You folks biologists?” he asked.
“Grad students in the university of life,” Dicken said.
“Got ya,” the cabby said solemnly.
“Now we’ve earned this.” Dicken took the third bottle of wine from the bag and pulled out his Swiss Army knife.
“Hey, not in the cab,” the cabby said sternly. “Not unless I go off duty and you share.”
They laughed. “In the hotel, then,” Dicken said.
“I’ll be drunk,” Kaye said, and shook her hair down around her eyes.
“We’ll have an orgy,” Dicken said, and then flushed bright pink. “An intellectual orgy,” he added sheepishly.
“I’m worn out,” Mitch said. “Kaye’s got laryngitis.”
She gave a small squeak and grinned.
The cab pulled up in front of the Serrano Hotel, just southwest of the convention center, and let them out.
“My treat,” Dicken said. He paid the fare. “Like the wine.”
“All right,” Mitch said. “Thanks.”
“We need some sort of conclusion,” Kaye said. “A prediction.”
Mitch yawned and stretched. “Sorry. Can’t think another thought.”
Kaye watched him through her bangs: the slim hips, the jeans tight around his thighs, the square rugged face with its single line of eyebrow. Not beautifully handsome, but she heard her own chemistry, a low breathy singing in her loins, and it cared little about that. The first sign of the end of winter.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Christopher?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Dicken said. “We’re saying the interim daughters are not diseased, they’re a stage of development we’ve never seen before.”
“And what does that mean?” Kaye asked.
“It means the second-stage babies will be healthy, viable. And different, maybe just a little,” Dicken said.
“That would be amazing,” Kaye said. “What else?”
“Enough, please. We can’t possibly finish it tonight,” Mitch said.
“Pity,” Kaye said.
Mitch smiled down on her. Kaye offered him her hand and they shook. Mitch’s palm was dry as leather and rough with calluses from long years of digging. His nostrils dilated as he was near her, and she could have sworn she saw his irises grow large, as well.
Dicken’s face was still pink. He slurred his words slightly. “We don’t have a game plan,” he said. “If there’s going to be a report, we have to get all our evidence together — and I mean all of it.”
“Count on it,” Mitch said. “You have my number.”
“I don’t,” Kaye said.
“Christopher will give it to you,” Mitch said. “I’ll be around for a few more days. Let me know when you’re available.”
“We will,” Dicken said.
“We’ll call,” Kaye said as she and Dicken walked toward the glass doors.
“Interesting fellow,” Dicken said on the elevator.
Kaye agreed with a small nod. Dicken was watching her with some concern.
“Seems bright,” he continued. “How in the world did he get in so much trouble?”
In her room, Kaye took a hot shower and crawled into bed, exhausted and more than a little drunk. Her body was happy. She twisted the sheets and blanket around her head and rolled on her side, and almost immediately, she was asleep.
44
San Diego, California
Kaye had just finished washing her face, whistling through the dripping water, when her room phone rang. She dabbed her face dry and answered it.
“Kaye? This is Mitch.”
“I remember you,” she said lightly, she hoped not too lightly.
“I’m flying north tomorrow. Hoped you might have some time this morning to get together.”
She had been so busy giving talks and serving on panels at the conference that there had been little time to even think about the evening at the zoo. Each night, she had fallen into bed, completely exhausted. Judith Kushner had been right; Marge Cross was absorbing every second of her life.
“That would be good,” she said cautiously. He was not mentioning Christopher. “Where?”
“I’m at the Holiday Inn. There’s a nice little coffee shop in the Serrano. I could walk over and meet you there.”
“I’ve got an hour before I have to be somewhere,” Kaye said. “Downstairs in ten minutes?”
“I’ll jog,” Mitch said. “See you in the lobby.”
She laid out her clothes for the day — a trim blue linen suit from the ever-tasteful Marge Cross collection — and was considering whether to block a small sinus headache with a couple of Tylenol when she heard muted yelling through the double-pane window. She ignored it for a moment and reached to the bed to flip a page on the convention program. As she carried the program to the table and fumbled for the badge in her purse, she grew tired of her tuneless whistling. She walked around the bed again to pick up the TV remote and pushed the power button.
The small hotel TV made the necessary background noise. Commercials for tampons, hair restorer. Her mind was full of other things; the closing ceremonies, her appearance on the podium with Marge Cross and Mark Augustine.
Mitch.
As she looked for a good pair of nylons, she heard the woman say, “…first full-term infant. To bring all our listeners up to date, this morning, an unidentified woman in Mexico City gave birth to the first scientifically recognized second-stage Herod’s baby. Reporting live from—”
Kaye flinched at the sound of metal crunching, glass breaking. She pulled back the window’s gauze curtain and looked north. West Harbor Drive outside the Serrano and the convention center was covered by a thick shag of people, a packed and streaming mass flowing over curbs and lawns and plazas, absorbing cars, hotel vans, shuttle buses. The sound they made was extraordinary, even through the double panes of glass: a low, grinding roar, like an earthquake. White squares flopped about over the mass, green ribbons flexed and rippled: placards and banners. From this angle, ten floors up, she could not read the messages.