The three men surprised him. He did not see them until they came from a cleft in the mountain and thrust their sticks at his woman. He knew them but no longer belonged to them. One had been a brother, another a Wolf Father. They were none of these things now and he wondered how he even recognized them.

Before they could run, one thrust a burned and sharpened stick and pushed it into the woman’s full stomach. She spun around, reaching under the skins with scrabbling hands, cried out, and he had rocks in his hand and was throwing them, grabbed a stick from one man and thrust blindly with it, poked one in the eye, drove them off whining and yelping like pups.

He yelled at the sky, held his woman while she kept trying to catch her breath, then carried her and dragged her higher. The woman told him with her hands and her eyes that behind the blood, behind the pain, it was her time. The new one wanted to come.

He looked higher for a place to hide and watch the new one come. There was so much blood, more than he had ever seen except from an animal. As he walked and carried the woman, he looked over his shoulder. The shamans and the others were not following now.

Mitch cried out, thrashing through the covers. He threw his legs off the bed, hands clutching the sheets, confused by the curtains and the furniture. For a moment he did not know who or where he was.

Kaye sat beside him and held him.

“A dream?” she asked, rubbing his shoulders.

“Yeah,” he said. “My God. Not psychic. No time travel. He didn’t carry any firewood. But there was a fire in the cave. The masks didn’t seem right, either. But it felt real.”

Kaye laid him back on the bed and smoothed his damp hair, touched his bristled cheek. Mitch apologized for waking her.

“I was already awake,” she said.

“Hell of a way to impress you,” Mitch murmured.

“You don’t need to impress me,” Kaye said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he said. “It was only a dream.”

51

Richmond, Virginia

Dicken pushed open the car door and stepped out of the Dodge. Dr. Denise Lipton handed him a badge. He shaded his eyes against the bright sun and looked up at the small sign over the clinic’s bare concrete wall: VIRGINIA CHATHAM WOMENS HEALTH AND FAMILY CENTER. A face briefly peered at them through a tiny wire-mesh glass window in the heavy blue-painted metal door. The intercom switched on, and Lipton gave her name and her contact at the clinic. The door opened.

Dr. Henrietta Paskow stood with thick legs planted wide apart, her calf-length gray skirt and white blouse emphasizing a strong stout plainness that made her seem older than she actually was. “Thanks for coming, Denise. We’ve been very busy.”

They followed her through the yellow and white hallway, past the doors of eight waiting rooms, to a small office in the rear. Brass-framed portraits of a large family of young children hung on the wall behind the plain wooden desk.

Lipton sat in a metal folding chair. Dicken remained standing. Paskow pushed two boxes of folders at them.

“We’ve done thirty since Infant C,” she said. “Thirteen D and Cs, seventeen morning-afters. The pills work for five weeks after the rejection of the first-stage fetus.”

Dicken looked through the case reports. They were straightforward, concise, with attending physician and nurse practitioner notes.

“There were no severe complications,” Paskow said. “The laminal tissue protects against saltwater lavage. But by the end of the fifth week, the laminal tissue has dissolved, and the pregnancy appears to be vulnerable.”

“How many requests so far?” Lipton asked.

“We’ve had six hundred appointments. Nearly all of them are in their twenties and thirties and living with a man, married or otherwise. We’ve referred half of them to other clinics. It’s a significant increase.”

Dicken laid the folders facedown on the desk.

Paskow scrutinized him. “You don’t approve, Mr. Dicken?”

“I’m not here to approve or disapprove,” he said. “Dr. Lipton and I are doing field interviews to see how our figures match the real world.”

“Herod’s is going to decimate an entire generation,” Paskow said. “A third of the women coming to us don’t even test positive for SHEVA. They haven’t had a miscarriage. They just want the baby out, then wait a few years and see what happens. We’re doing a land-office business in birth control. Our clinic classes are full. We’ve put on a third and fourth classroom upstairs. More men are coming with their wives and their girlfriends. Maybe that’s the only good thing about all this. Men are feeling guilty.”

“There’s no reason to terminate every pregnancy,” Lipton said. “The SHEVA tests are highly accurate.”

“We tell them that. They don’t care,” Paskow said. “They’re scared and they don’t trust us to know what might happen. Meanwhile, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have ten or fifteen Operation Rescue pickets outside yelling that Herod’s is a secular humanist myth, that there is no disease. Only pretty babies being needlessly killed. They claim it’s a worldwide conspiracy. They’re getting shrill and they’re very scared. The millennium is young.”

Paskow had copied key statistical records. She handed Lipton these papers.

“Thank you for your time,” Dicken said.

“Mr. Dicken,” Paskow called after them. “A vaccine would save everyone a lot of grief.”

Lipton saw Dicken to his car. A black woman in her thirties walked past them and stood at the blue door. She had wrapped herself in a long wool coat, though the day was warm. She was more than six months pregnant.

“I’ve had enough for one day,” Lipton said, her face pale. “I’m going back to the campus.”

“I have to pick up some samples,” Dicken said.

Lipton put her hand on the door and said, “The women at our clinic have to be told. None of them have STDs, but they’ve all had chicken pox and one has had hepatitis B.”

“We don’t know that chicken pox causes problems,” Dicken said.

“It’s a herpes virus. Your lab results are scary, Christopher.”

“They’re incomplete. Hell, almost everyone has had chicken pox, or mono, or cold sores. So far, we’re only positive about genital herpes and hepatitis and possibly AIDS.”

“I still have to tell them,” she said, and closed the door for him with a definite slam. “It’s about ethics, Christopher.”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. He kicked at the emergency brake release and started the engine. Lipton walked toward her own car. After a few seconds, he made a disgusted face, shut the engine off again, and sat with his arm out the window, trying to decide how he could best spend his time in the next few weeks.

Things were not going at all well in the labs. Fetal tissue and placenta analysis on samples sent from France and Japan showed vulnerability to all manner of herpes infections. Not a single second-stage pregnancy had survived birth, of the 110 studied thus far.

It was time to make up his mind. Public health policy was in a critical state. Decisions and recommendations would have to be made, and politicians would have to react to those recommendations in ways that could be explained to clearly divided constituencies.

He might not be able to salvage the truth. And the truth seemed remarkably remote at this point. How could something as important as a major evolutionary event be sidetracked so effectively?

On the seat beside him he had dumped a pile of mail from his office in Atlanta. There had been no time to read it on the plane. He pulled out an envelope and swore under his breath. How had he not seen it right away? The postmark and handwriting were clear enough: Dr. Leonid Sugashvili, writing from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

He tore open the envelope. A snapshot-size black-and-white photograph on slick paper fell into his lap. He picked it up and examined the image: figures standing before a ramshackle old wood-frame house, two women in dresses, a man in overalls. They looked slender, perhaps even slight, but there was no way to be sure. The faces were indistinct.