Текст книги "Darwin's children"

Автор книги: Грег Бир

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“I'm offering you a unique opportunity.” Kaye felt impossibly nervous, but she was not going to let that stop her. As far as she knew, there had never been an opportunity like this in the history of science—nothing confirmed, at least, or even rumored. “I'm having an epiphany.”

Roth raised one eyebrow, bewildered.

“You don't know what an epiphany is?” Kaye asked.

“I'm Catholic. It's a feast celebrating Jesus' divinity. Or something like that.”

“It's a manifestation,” Kaye said. “God is inside me.”

“Whoa,” Roth said. The word hung between them for several seconds, during which time Kaye did not look away from Roth's eyes. He blinked first. “I suppose that's great,” he said. “What does it have to do with me?”

“God comes to most of us. I've read William James and other books about this kind of experience. At least half of the human race goes through it at one time or another. It's like nothing else I've ever felt. It's life changing, even if it is very . . . very inconvenient. And inexplicable. I didn't ask for it, but I can't, I won'tdeny that it is real.”

Roth listened to Kaye with a fixed expression, brow wrinkled, eyes wide, mouth open. He sat up in the chair and folded his arms on the desk. “No joke?”

“No joke.”

He considered further. “Everyone is under pressure here.”

“I don't think that has anything to do with it,” Kaye said. Then, slowly, she added, “I've considered that possibility, I really have. I just don't think that's what it is.”

Roth licked his lips and avoided her stare. “So what does it have to do with me?”

She reached out to touch his arm, and he quickly withdrew it. “Herbert, has anyone ever imaged a person who's being touched by God? Who's having an epiphany?”

“Lots of times,” Roth said defensively. “Persinger's research. Meditation states, that sort of thing. It's in the literature.”

“I've read them all. Persinger, Damasio, Posner, and Ramachandran.” She ticked the list off on her fingers. “You think I haven't researched this?”

Roth smiled in embarrassment.

“Meditation states, oneness, bliss, all that can be induced with training. They are under some personal control . . . But not this.I've looked it up. It can't be induced, no matter how hard you pray. It comes and it goes as if it has a will of its own.”

“God doesn't just talkto us,” Roth said. “I mean, even if I believed in God, such a thing would be incredibly rare, and maybe it hasn't happened for a couple of thousand years. The prophets. Jesus. That sort of thing.”

“It isn't rare. It's called many things, and people react differently. It does something to you. It turns your life around, gives it direction and meaning. Sometimes it breaks people.” She shook her head. “Mother Teresa wept because she didn't have God making regular visits. She wanted continuing confirmation of the value of her work, her pain, her sacrifices. Yet no one actually knows if Mother Teresa experienced what I'm experiencing . . .” She took a deep breath. “I want to learn what is happening to me. To us. We need a baseline to understand.”

Roth tried to fit this into some catalog of social quid pro quos, and could not. “Kaye, is this really the place? Aren't you supposed to be doing research on viruses? Or do you think God is a virus?”

Kaye stared at Roth in disbelief. “No,” she said. “This is not a virus. This is not something genetic and it's probably not even biological. Except to the extent that it touches me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Kaye closed her eyes again. She did not need to search. The sensation rolled on, coming in waves of amazement, of childlike glee and adult consternation, all of her emotions and reactions met not with tolerance, nor even with amusement, but with an equally childlike yet infinitely mature and wise acceptance.

Something was sipping from Kaye Lang's soul, and found her delicious.

“Because it's bigger than anything I know,” she said finally. “I have no idea how long it's going to last, but whatever it is, it's happened before to people, many times, and it's shaped human history. Don't you want to see what it looks like?”

Roth sighed as he examined the images on the large monitor.

Two and a half hours had passed; it was almost ten o'clock. Kaye had been through seven varieties of NMR, PET, and computerized tomography scans. She had been injected, shielded, injected again, rotated like a chicken on a spit, turned upside down. For a while, she wondered if Roth was bent on taking revenge for her imposition.

Finally, Roth had wrapped her head in a white plastic helmet and put her through a final and, he claimed, rather expensive CT-motion scan, capable, he muttered vaguely, of extraordinary detail, focusing on the hippocampus, and then, in another sweep, the brain stem.

Now she sat upright, her wrist wrapped in a bandage, her head and neck bruised from clamps, feeling a vague urge to throw up. Somewhere near the end of the procedures, the caller had simply faded, like a shortwave radio signal from across the seas. Kaye felt calm and relaxed, despite her soreness.

She also felt sad, as if a good friend had just departed, and she was not sure they would ever meet again.

“Well, whatever he is,” Roth said, “he isn't talking. None of the scans show extensive speech processing, above the level of normal internal dialog and my own datum of questions. You seem, no surprise, a little nervous—but less so than other patients. Stoic might be the word. You show a fair amount of deep brain activity, signifying a pretty strong emotional response. Do you embarrass easily?”

Kaye shook her head.

“There's a little indication of something like arousal, but I wouldn't call it sexual arousal, not precisely. Nothing like orgasm or garden-variety ecstasy such as, for example, you might find in someone using consciousness-altering drugs. We have recordings—movies—of people meditating, engaging in sex, on drugs, including LSD and cocaine. Your scans don't match any of those.”

“I can't imagine having sex in that tube.”

Roth smiled. “Mostly enthusiastic young people,” he explained. “Here we go—CT motion scans coming up.” He became deeply absorbed in the false-color images of her brain on the display: dark fields of gray overlaid with symmetric, blossoming Rorschach birds, touched here and there with little coals of metabolic activity, maps of thought and personality and deep subconscious processes. “All right,” he said to himself, pausing the scroll. “What's this?” He touched three pulsing yellow splotches, a little bigger than a thumbnail, points on a scan taken midway through their session. He made small humming sounds, then flipped through an on-line library of images from other explorations, some of them years and even decades old, until he seemed satisfied he had what he wanted.

Roth pushed his chair back with an echoing scrape and pointed to a blue-and-green sagittal section of a head, small and oddly shaped. He filled in and rotated the image in 3-D, and Kaye made out the outlines of an infant's skull and the fog of the brain within. Radiating fields of mental activity spun within ghostly curves of bone and tissue.

An indefinite grayish mass seemed to issue from the infant's mouth.

“Not so much detail, but it's a pretty close match,” Roth said. “Famous experiment in Japan, about eight years ago. They scanned a normal birthing session. Woman had had four kids previously. She was an old pro. The machines didn't bother her.”

Roth studied the image. He hummed for a moment, then clicked his fingernails like castanets. “This is a scan of the infant's brain while he or she was getting acquainted with mom. Taking the teat, I'd say.” He used his finger to point out the gray mass, magnified the activity centers in the infant's brain, rotated them to the proper azimuth, then superimposed the baby's scan on Kaye's.

The activity centers lined up neatly.

Roth smiled. “What do you think? A match?”

Kaye was lost for a moment, remembering the first time Stella had suckled, the wonderful sensation of the baby at her nipple, of her milk letting down.

“They look the same,” she said. “Is that a mistake?”

“Don't think so,” Roth said. “I could make some animal brain comparisons. There's been some work in the last few years on bonding in kittens and puppies, even some in baboons, but not very good. They don't hold still.”

“What does it mean?” Kaye asked. She shook her head, still lost. “Whatever He is, He's not using speech—that much has been clear from the start. Irritating, actually.”

“Mumbles from the burning bush?” Roth said. “And no stone tablets.”

“No speeches, no proclamations, nothing,” Kaye confirmed.

“Look, this is the closest I can come to a match,” Roth said.

With her finger, Kaye traced the Rorschach birds inside the infant's brain. “I still don't understand.”

Roth tilted his head. “Looks to me like you've made a big connection. You're imprinting on someone or something big-time. You've become a baby again, Ms. Rafelson.”

16

Kaye unlocked her apartment, entered, and used her briefcase to block the front door from closing. She punched in her six-number code to deactivate the alarm, then took off her sweater, hung it in the closet, and stood in the hallway, breathing deeply to keep from sobbing. She wasn't sure how much longer she could endure this. The voids in her life were like deserts she could not cross.

“What about you?” she asked the empty air. She walked into the darkened living room. “The way I see it, if you're some kind of big daddy, you protectthose you love, you keep them from harm. What's the God . . . what's the damned,” she finally shouted it, “the God damnedexcuse?”

The phone beeped. Kaye jumped, pulled her eyes away from the corner of the ceiling she had been addressing, stepped to the kitchen counter, and reached across to pick up the handset.

“Kaye? It's Mitch.”

Kaye drew in another breath, almost of dread, certainly of guilt, before speaking. “I'm here.” She sat stiffly upright in the easy chair and covered the mouthpiece as she told the lights to switch on. The living room was small and neat, except for stacks of journals and offprints arrayed at angles to each other on the coffee table. Other piles spilled across the floor beside the couch.

“Are you all right?”

“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I'm not. Are you?”

Mitch did not answer this. Good for him,Kaye thought.

“I'm on the road again,” he said.

A pause.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Oregon. My horse broke down and I thought I'd give you a call, ask if you had some extra . . . I don't know. Horseshoes.” He sounded even more exhausted than she was. Kaye intercepted something else in his tone and zeroed in with sudden hope.

“You saw Stella?”

“They let me see Stella. Lucky guy, right?”

“Is she well?”

“She gave me a big hug. She's looking pretty good. She cried, Kaye.”

Kaye felt her throat catch. She held the phone aside and coughed into her fist. “She misses you. Sorry. Dry throat. I need some water.” She walked into the kitchen to take a bottle from the refrigerator.

“She misses both of us,” Mitch said.

“I can't be there. I can't protect her. What's to miss?”

“I just wanted to call and tell you about her. She's growing up. It makes me feel lost, thinking that she's almost grown and I wasn't around.”

“Not your fault,” she said.

“How's the work?”

“Finished soon,” Kaye said. “I don't know if they'll believe it. So many are still stuck in old ruts.”

“Robert Jackson?”

“Yeah, him, too.”

“You're lucky to be working at what you do best,” Mitch said. “Listen, I'm—”

“You don't deserve what happened, Mitch.”

Another pause. You didn't deserve being dumped,she added to herself. Kaye looked back to that empty corner of wall and ceiling and continued, “I miss you.” She tightened her lips to keep them from trembling. “What's in Oregon?”

“Eileen's got something going, very mysterious, so I left the dig in Texas. I mistook a clamshell for a whelk. I'm getting old, Kaye.”

“Bullshit,” Kaye said.

“You give me the word, I'll drive straight to Maryland.” Mitch's voice steeled. “I swear. Let's go get Stella.”

“Stop it,” Kaye said, though with sudden gentleness. “I want to, you know that. We have to keep to our plan.”

“Right,” Mitch said, and Kaye was acutely aware he had had no part in making the plan. Perhaps until now Mitch had not really been informed there wasa plan. And that was Kaye's fault. She had not been able to protect her husband or her daughter, the most important people on Earth. So who am I to accuse?

“What are the kids up to? How has she changed?” Kaye asked.

“They're forming groups. Demes, they call them. The schools are trying to keep them broken up and disorganized. I'd guess they're finding ways around that. There's a lot of scenting involved, of course, and Stella talks about new kinds of language, but we didn't have time for details. She looks healthy, she's bright, and she doesn't seem too stressed out.”

Kaye fixed on this so intensely her eyes crossed. “I tried to call her last week. They wouldn't put me through.”

“The bastards,” Mitch said, his voice grating.

“Go help Eileen. But keep in touch. I really need to hear from you.”

“That's good news.”

Kaye let her chin drop to her chest, and stretched out her legs. “I'm relaxing,” she said. “Listening to you relaxes me. Tell me what she looks like.”

“Sometimes she moves or acts or talks like you. Sometimes she reminds me of my father.”

“I noticed that years ago,” Kaye said.

“But she's very much her own person, her own type,” Mitch said. “I wish we could run our own school, bring lots of kids together. I think that's the only way Stella would be happy.”

“We were wrong to isolate her.”

“We didn't have any choice.”

“Anyway, that's not an issue now. Is she happy?”

“Maybe happier, but not exactly happy,” Mitch said. “I'm calling on a landline now, but let me give you a new phone code.”

Kaye took up a pad and wrote down a string of numbers keyed to a book she still kept in her suitcase. “You think they're still listening?”

“Of course. Hello, Ms. Browning, you there?”

“Not funny,” Kaye said. “I ran into Mark Augustine on Capitol Hill. That was . . .” It took her a few seconds to remember. “Yesterday. Sorry, I'm just tired.”

“What about him?”

“He seemed apologetic. Does that make sense?”

“He was busted to the ranks,” Mitch said. “He deserves to be apologetic.”

“Yeah. But something else . . .”

“You think the atmosphere is changing?”

“Browning was there, and she treated me like a Roman general standing over a dying Gaul.”

Mitch laughed.

“God, that is sogood to hear,” Kaye said, tapping her pen on the message pad and drawing loops around the numbers, across the pad.

“Give me the word, Kaye. Just one word.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Kaye said, and sucked in a breath against the lump in her throat. “I hate it so much, being alone.”

“I know you're on the right course,” Mitch said, and Kaye heard the reserve in his voice, filling in, even if it means leaving me outside.

“Maybe,” Kaye said. “But it is so hard.” She wanted to tell him about the other things, the imaging lab, chasing down her visitor, the caller, and finding nothing conclusive. But she remembered that Mitch had not reacted well to her attempts to talk about it on their last night together in the cabin.

She remembered as well the love-making, familiar and sweet and more than a little desperate. Her body warmed. “You know I want to be with you,” Kaye said.

“That's my line.” Mitch's voice was hopeful, fragile.

“You'll be at Eileen's site. It is a site, I assume?”

“I don't know yet.”

“What do you think she's found?”

“She's not telling,” Mitch said.

“Where is it?”

“Can't say. I get my final directions tomorrow.”

“She's being more cagey than usual, isn't she?”

“Yeah.” She heard Mitch moving, breathing into the handset. She could hear as well the wind blowing behind and around him, almost picture her man, rugged, tall, his head lit up by the dome light in the booth. If it was a booth. The phone might be next to a gas station or a restaurant.

“I can't tell you how good this is,” Kaye said.

“Sure you can.”

“It is sogood.”

“I should have called earlier. I just felt out of place or something.”

“I know.”

“Something's changed, hasn't it?”

“There's not much more I can do at Americol. Showdown is tomorrow. Jackson actually dropped off his game plan today, he's that cocky. They either listen to the truth or they ignore it. I want to . . . I'll just fly out to see you. Save me a shovel.”

“You'll get rough hands.”

“I love rough hands.”

“I believe in you, Kaye,” Mitch said. “You'll do it. You'll win.”

She did not know how to answer but her body quivered. Mitch murmured his love and Kaye returned his words, and then they cut off the connection.

Kaye sat for a moment in the warm yellow glow of the small living room, surveying the empty walls, the plain rented furniture, the stacks of white paper. “I'm imprinting,” she whispered. “Something says it loves me and believes in me but how can anything fill an empty shell?” She rephrased the question. “How can anyone or anything believe in an empty shell?”

Leaning her head back, she felt a tingling warmth. With some awe she realized she had not asked for help, yet help had arrived. Her needs—some of them, at least—had been answered.

At that, Kaye finally let down her emotions and began to weep. Still crying, she made up her bed, fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate, fluffed a pillow and set it against the headboard, disrobed and put on satin pajamas, then fetched a stack of reprints from the living room to read. The words blurred through her tears, and she could hardly keep her eyes open, but she needed to prepare for the next day. She needed to have all her armor on, all her facts straight.

For Stella. For Mitch.

When she could stand it no more and sleep was stealing the last of her thoughts, she ordered the light to turn off, rolled over in bed, and moved her lips, Thank you. I hope.

You are hope.

But she could not help asking one more question. Why are you doing this? Why talk to us at all?

She stared at the wall opposite the bed, then dropped her focus to the cover rising with her knees above the bed. Her eyes widened and her breath slowed. Through the shadowy grayness of the cover, Kaye seemed to look into an infinite and invisible fount. The fount poured forth something she could only describe as love, no other word was right, however inadequate it was; love never-ending and unconditional. Her heart thudded in her chest. For a moment, she was frightened—she could never deserve that love, never find its like again on this Earth.

Love without condition—without desire, direction, or any quality other than its purity.

“I don't know what that means,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

Kaye felt the vision, if that was what it was, withdraw and fade—not out of resentment or anger or disappointment, but just because it was time to end. It left a mellow, peaceful glow behind, like candles thick as stars behind her eyes.

The wonder of that, the awesome wonder, was too much for her. She laid her head back and stared into the darkness until she drifted off to sleep.

Almost immediately, it seemed, she dreamed of walking over a field of snow high in the mountains. It did not matter that she was lost and alone. She was going to meet someone wonderful.

17

OREGON

The high desert morning was warm and it was barely seven o'clock. Mitch walked across the motel parking lot, swung his bag into the battered old truck's side seat and shielded his eyes against the sun over the low, gray eastern hills. An hour to the Spent River. Half an hour to the outlying camp. He had his instructions from Eileen, and one more warning: Don't breathe a word to anyone. No students, no wives, no girlfriends, no dogs, no cats, no guinea pigs: Got it?

He got it.

He pulled out of the Motel 50 parking lot, scraping his bumper on the way. The old truck was on its last few thousand miles; it smelled of singed oil and was starting to cough blue smoke on the grades. Mitch loved big old trucks and cars. He would be sad to see the truck die.

The motel's red sign grew tiny in his mirror. The road was straight and on either side lay rolling brown terrain daubed with greasewood and sage and low, stubby pines and an occasional sketchy line of fence posts, leaning and forlorn, the wire broken and coiled like old hair.

The air got cooler as the truck climbed the gentle grade into the high country. The Spent River was not on the itinerary of most tourists. Surrounded by forest, in the long shadow of Mount Hood, it consisted of a winding, flat sandy bed cutting through black lava cliffs, leaving tufty islands and curving oxbows. The river itself hadn't flowed for many thousands of years. It was not well known to archaeologists, and with good reason; the geological history of alternating floods—gravel beds filled with pebbly lava and rounded bits of granite and basalt—and periodic eruptions of lava made it hellacious to dig and disappointing to those who did. Indians had not built or stayed much in these areas over the last few thousand years.

Out of time, out of human interest, but now Eileen Ripper had found something.

Or she had looked into the sun too long.

The road mesmerized him after a while, but he was jounced to full alertness when it started to get rough from washouts. The land had taken on a five o'clock stubble of trees and grass. The asphalt switched to gravel.

A small state sign came and went: spent river recreation area: three miles .The sign looked as if it had been out in the sun for at least fifty years.

The road curved west abruptly, and as he turned, Mitch caught a gleam about a mile ahead. It looked like a car windshield.

The old truck barked out blue smoke as he took a short grade, then he spotted a white Tahoe and saw a stocky figure standing up and waving from the open driver's door. He pulled over to the side of the road and draped his arm out the window. Enough grip remained in his hand to clutch the door frame and make the gesture look casual.

Eileen had gone completely gray. Her clothes and skin and hair had weathered to the color of the land out here.

“I recognized your taste in trucks,” Eileen said as she walked across the gravel shoulder. “God, Mitch, you're as obvious as a sailor with a stack of two-dollar bills.”

Mitch smiled. “You're a regular Earth mother,” he said. “You should at least wear a red scarf.”

Eileen pulled a rag from her pocket and draped it from her belt. “Better?”

“Just fine.”

“How's your arm?” she asked, patting it.

“Limp,” Mitch said.

“We'll put you on toothbrush detail,” she said.

“Sounds good. What have you got?”

“It's dishy,” Eileen said. “It's grand.” She did a little jig on the gravel. “It's deadly dangerous. Want to come see?”

Mitch squint-eyed her for a moment. “Why not?” he said.

“It's just over there,” she said and pointed north, “about ten more miles.”

Mitch scowled. “I'm not sure my truck will make it.”

“I'll follow and scoop up parts.”

“How can you tell me when to turn?” Mitch asked.

“It's a game, old friend,” Eileen said. “You'll have to sniff it out, same as I did.” She smiled wickedly.

Mitch squinted harder and shook his head. “For Christ's sake, Eileen.”

“Older than Christ by at least eighteen thousand years,” she said.

“You should wear thicker hats,” he said.

Eileen looked tired beneath the bravado. “This is the big one, Mitch. In a couple of hours, I swear to God you won't even know who you are.”

18

ARIZONA

At eleven in the morning, Stella walked with all the girls from their barracks through a gate in the razor wire fence to the open field, attended by Miss Kantor and Joanie and five other adults.

Once a week, the counselors and teachers let the SHEVA children mingle coed on the playground and under the lunch table awnings.

The girls were uncharacteristically quiet. Stella felt the tension. A year ago, going through the fence to socialize with the boys had been no big deal. Now, every girl who imagined herself a deme maker was plotting with her partners as to which boys would be best in their group. Stella did not know what to think about this. She watched the demes form and disintegrate and reform in the girl's dorms, and her own plans changed in her head from day to day; it was all so confusing.

The sky was sprinkled with broken clouds. She shaded her eyes and looked up and saw the moon hanging in the pure summer blueness, a wan face blankly amused by their silliness. Stella wondered what the moon smelled like. It looked kindly enough. It looked a little simple, actually.

“Single file. We're going to South Section Five,” Miss Kantor told them all, and waved her hand to give them direction. The girls shuffled where she pointed, cheeks blank.

Stella saw the boys come through their own fence line from the opposite rows of barracks. They were more touching heads and weaving and pointing out the girls they noticed. They smiled like goofs, cheeks brown at this distance with indistinguishable color.

“Oh, joy,” Celia said listlessly. “Same old.”

The sexes would be allowed to mingle with heavy supervision for an hour.

“Is he here?” Celia asked. Stella had told her last night about Will.

Stella did not know. She hadn't seen him yet. She didn't think it likely. She indicated all this with a low whistle, a few desultory freckles, and a twitch of her shoulders. “My, you're-KUK touchy,” Celia said. She bumped shoulders with Stella as they walked. Stella did not mind.

“I don't know what they expect us to do in an hour,” Stella said.

Celia giggled. “We could try to-KUK kiss one of them.”

Stella's brows formed an uneven pair of curves and her neck darkened. Celia ignored this. “I could kiss James Callahan. I almost let him hold my hand last year.”

“We were kids last year,” Stella said.

“What-KUK are we now?” Celia asked.

Stella was looking down a line of boys drawn up in the sun beside the lunch table awnings. The tallest she recognized immediately.

“There he is,” she said, and pointed him out to Celia. Three other girls moved in and followed her point, all smelling of aroused curiosity—smoke and earth.

Will stood, looking at the ground with shoulders slumped and hands stuck firmly in his pockets. The other boys seemed to be ignoring him, which was to be expected; boys didn't cloud as quickly with newcomers as girls did. It would take Will a few days to form tight bonds with his barracks partners.

Or maybe not, Stella thought, watching him. Maybe he never would.

“He's not very pretty,” said Felice Miller, a small, brown-haired girl with thin, strong arms and thicker legs.

“How do you know?” asked Ellie Gow. “You can't smell him from here.”

“He wouldn't smell pretty, either,” Felice said disdainfully. “He's too tall.”

Ellie winced. She was known for her sensitivity to sounds and a preference for talking while lying under a blanket. “What's that got to do with a cat's fart?”

Felice smiled tolerantly. “Whiskers,” she said.

Stella paid no attention to them.

“Someone you met when you were young can exert a profound influence,” Felice continued.

“I didn't see him for very long,” Stella admitted.

Celia quickly told them the story of Stella and Will, speaking in her halting double, while the counselors and teachers huddled and arranged the rules of the confab. The rules changed week to week. Today, on the outskirts of the field, three men stood watching them with binoculars.

Nine months ago, Stella had been taken aside and driven to the hospital with five other girls after such a meeting. They had all given blood and one, Nor Upjohn, had suffered other indignities she would not describe, and afterward she had smelled like a mildewed orange, a warning scent.

The girls made their formation, four long columns of fifty each. The counselors did not try to stop them from talking, and Stella saw that some of them—possibly all—had turned off their nosies.

Will looked across the brown grass and gravel at the lines of girls. His brows drew into a narrow straight line and he seemed to be sucking on something sour. His matted hair was cut jagged and his cheeks were hollow pits, as if he had lost some teeth. He looked older than the others, and tired. He looked defeated.

“He's not pretty, he's ugly,” Felice said, and with a shrug turned her attention to the other boys they had not seen before. Stella had counted the new arrivals on the bus: fifty-three. She had to agree with Felice. Whatever her memory of Strong Will, this fellow was no one's idea of a good deme partner.

“You want to cloud with him?” Celia asked in disbelief.

“No,” Stella said, and looked away with a sharp pang of disappointment.

The woods were far away now for both of them.

“What's anything got to do with toad skin?” Ellie asked nervously as the teachers started to shoo the rows and columns toward each other.

“Crow on the road,” Felice replied.

“What's that have to do with apple feathers?” Ellie riposted by reflex.

“Oh, just-KUK grow,” Celia said. Her face wrinkled like a dried peach in a sudden despair of shyness. “Grow big and hide me.”

The lines drew up before the concrete lunch tables and the boys were pushed to go and sit, three to one side, leaving the opposite side of each table empty.

“What'll we say?” Ellie asked, hiding her eyes as their turn approached.

“Same thing we always say,” Stella said. “Hello and how are you. And ask how their demes are growing and what they're doing on the other side of the wire.”

“Harry, Harry, quite contrary,” Felice sang in an undertone, “how does your garden grow? Pubic hairs and wanton stares, making the hormones flow.”

Ellie told her to shush. Miss Kantor walked in front of the rows from their barracks. “All right, girls,” she said. “You may talk, you may look. You may not touch.”

But the nosies are turned off,Stella thought. The girls fanned out from the lines. Stella looked up at the cameras mounted on the long steel poles, swinging slowly right and left.

Ellie's turn came and she ran off to join a table of boys whom, as far as Stella knew, she had never visited before. So much for shyness. Stella's turn came, and of course whatever she had thought earlier, she moved toward the table where Will sat with two smaller boys.