“That’s right “Mitch said.

“He must have been rare. Special. The woman on the NIH campus. Her boyfriend didn’t believe it was his baby.” The words started to pour out of her. “Laura Nilson — PR manager for Americol — told us that most men won’t believe it’s their baby. Most women will probably abort rather than take the risk. That’s why they’re going to recommend the morning-after pill. If the vaccine has problems, they can still stop this.”

Mitch looked uncomfortable. “Can’t we forget for a little while?”

“No,” Kaye said. “I can’t stand it anymore. We’re going to slaughter all the firstborn, just like Pharaoh in Egypt. If we keep this up, we’ll never know what the next generation looks like. They’ll all be dead. Do you want that to happen?”

“No,” Mitch said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not as frightened as the next guy.” He shook his head. “I wonder what I would have done if I were that man, back then, fifteen thousand years ago. They must have been thrown out of their tribe. Or maybe they ran away. Maybe they were just walking and they came upon a raiding party and she got hurt.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I really don’t know. I’m not psychic.”

“I’m spoiling the mood, aren’t I?”

“Mmm hmm,” he said.

“Our lives are not our own,” Kaye said. She ran her finger around his nipples, stroked the stiff hairs on his chest. “But we can build a wall for a little while. You’re going to stay here tonight?”

Mitch kissed her forehead, then her nose, her cheeks. “The accommodations are much nicer than the YMCA.” “Come here,” Kaye said. “I can’t get much closer.” “Try.”

Kaye Lang lay trembling in the dark. She was certain Mitch was asleep, but to make sure, she poked his back lightly. He squirmed but did not respond. He was comfortable. Comfortable with her.

She had never taken such a risk; from the time of her first dates she had always looked for safety and, she hoped, security, planning her safe haven where she could do her work, think her thoughts with minimal interference from the outside world.

Marrying Saul had been the ultimate achievement. Age, experience, money, business acumen — so she had thought. Now, to swing so far in the opposite direction, was all too obviously an overreaction. She wondered what she would do about it.

When he woke up in the morning, to simply tell Mitch it was all a mistake…

Terrified her. Not that she thought he would hurt her, he was the gentlest of men and showed few if any signs of the internal strife that had so troubled Saul.

Mitch was not as handsome as Saul.

On the other hand, Mitch was completely open and honest.

Mitch had sought her out, but she was fairly sure she had seduced him. Kaye certainly did not feel anything had been forced upon her.

“What in the hell are you doing?” she muttered in the dark. She was talking to another self, the stubborn Kaye that so seldom told her what was really going on. She got out of bed, put on her robe, went to the desk in the living room and opened the middle drawer, where she kept her record books.

She had six hundred thousand dollars, adding together income from the sale of her home and her personal retirement account. If she resigned from Americo\ and xYie Taskforce, she could live in moderately comfortable circumstances for years.

She spent a few minutes working out expenses, emergency budgets, food allowances, monthly bills, on a small piece of note paper, then stiffened in her chair. “This is stupid,” she said. “What am I planning?” Then, to that stubborn and secretive self, she added, “What in hell are you up to?”

She would not tell Mitch to go away in the morning. He made her feel good. Around him, her mind became quieter, her fears and worries less pressing. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, and maybe he did know. Maybe it was the world that was screwy, that set traps and snares and forced people to make bad choices.

She tapped the pen on the paper, pulled another sheet from the pad. Her fingers pushed the pen over the paper almost without conscious thought, sketching a series of open reading frames on chromosomes 18 and 20 that might bear a relation to the SHEVA genes, previously identified as possible HERVs but turning out not to have the defining characteristics of retrovirus fragments. She needed to look into these loci, these scattered fragments, to see if they might possibly fit together and be expressed; she had been putting this off for some time. Tomorrow would be the proper moment.

Before she followed through with anything, she needed ammunition. She needed armor.

She returned to the bedroom. Mitch seemed to be dreaming. Fascinated, she lay down quietly beside him.

At the top of a snow-covered rise, the man saw the shamans and their helpers following him and his woman. They could not avoid leaving tracks in the snow, but even on the lower grasslands, through the forest, they had been tracked by experts.

The man had brought his woman, heavy and slow with her child, to such heights in hope of crossing over into another valley where he had once gone as a child.

He glanced back at the figures a few hundred steps behind. Then the man \ooked at the crags and peaks ahead, like so many tumbled flints. He was lost. He had forgotten the way into the valley.

The woman said little now. The face he had once looked upon with so much devotion was hidden by her mask.

The man was filled with such bitterness. This high, the wet snow soaked through his thin shoes with their grass pads. The chill worked up his calves to his knees and made them ache. The wind cut through his skins, even with the fur turned inside, and sapped his strength, shortened his breath.

The woman plodded on. He knew he might escape if he abandoned her. The prospect made his anger darken. He hated the snow, the shamans, the mountains; he hated himself. He could not bring himself to hate the woman. She had suffered the blood on her thighs, the loss, and hidden it from him so as not to bring shame; she had daubed her face with mud to hide the marks, and then, when she could not hide, she had tried to save him by offering herself to the Great Mother, carved into the grass hillside of the valley. But the Great Mother had refused her, and she had come back to him, moaning and mewing. She could not kill herself.

His own face showed the marks. That puzzled and angered him.

The shamans and sisters of the Great Mother, of the Goat Mother, of the Grass Mother, the Snow Woman, Leopard the Loud Killer, Chancre the Soft Killer, Rain the Weeping Father, had all gathered and made their decision during the cooling times, taking painful weeks while the others — the others who had the marks — stayed in their huts.

The man had decided to run. He could not convince himself to trust the shamans and the sisters.

As they fled, they had heard the cries. The shamans and sisters had begun to kill the mothers and the fathers with the marks.

Everyone knew how the flatfaces were brought forth by the people. The women might hide, their men might hide, but all knew. Those who would bear flatface children could only make things worse.

Only the sisters of the gods and goddesses bred true, never bred flatfaces, because they trained the young men of the tribe. They had many men.

He should have let the shamans take his wife as a sister, let her train the boys, too, but she had wanted only him.

The man hated the mountains, the snow, the running. He plodded on, roughly grabbed the woman’s arm, pushed her around a rock so they could find a place to hide. He was not watching closely. He was too full of this new truth, that the mothers and fathers of the sky and the ghost world around them were all blind or just lies.

He was alone, his woman was alone, no tribe, no people, no helpers. Not even Long Hairs and Wet Eyes, the most frightening of the dead visitors, the most harmful, cared about them. He was beginning to think none of the dead visitors were real.