“Governor Harris has declared a state of emergency and called out National Guard troops. A curfew of seven P.M. has been declared for weekdays, five P.M. for Saturday and Sunday, and if martial law is declared at the federal level, we presume by the vice president, as seems very likely, then throughout the state, no groups will be allowed to gather in public places without special permission from the Emergency Action Office in each community. This official state of emergency is open-ended, and is in part, so officials say, a response to the situation in the nation’s capital, and in part an attempt to bring under control the extraordinary and continuing unrest in Washington state itself…”

Mitch tapped the plastic test strip on his chin. He switched channels just to have a feeling of control.

“…is dead. The president and five out often visiting state governors were killed this morning in the situation room of the White House—”

And again, punching the button on the small remote.

“…The governor of Alabama, Abraham C. Darzelle, leader of the so-called States’ Revolt movement, embraced the president of the United States just before the explosion. Both the governors of Alabama and Florida, and the president, were blown apart by the blast—”

Mitch turned the TV off. He returned the plastic strip to the bathroom and went to lie beside Kaye. He did not pull the covers back and did not undress, to avoid disturbing her. Kicking off his shoes, he curled up with one leg laid gently over her blanketed thighs, and pushed his nose against her short brown hair. The smell of her hair and scalp was more soothing than any drug.

For far too short a moment, the universe once again became small and warm and entirely sufficient.

PART THREE

STELLA NOVA

74

Seattle

Kaye arranged her papers on Mitch’s desk and picked up the manuscript for The Queen’s Library. Three weeks ago, she had decided to write a book about SHEVA, modern biology, all she felt the human race might need to know in the coming years. The title referred to her metaphor for the genome, with all of its ferment and movable elements and self-interested players, rendering service to the genome queen with one side of their nature, selfishly hoping to be installed in the Queen’s Library, the DNA; and sometimes putting on another face, another role, more selfish than useful, parasitic or predatory, causing trouble or even disaster…A political metaphor that seemed perfectly apt now.

In the past two weeks, she had written over a hundred and sixty pages on her laptop computer, printing them out on a portable printer, partly as a way of getting her thoughts together before the convention.

And to pass the time. The hours sometimes drag when Mitch is away.

She knocked the papers together on the wood, satisfied by the solid thunk they made, then placed them before the picture of Christopher Dicken that stood in a small silver frame near a portrait of Sam and Abby. The last picture in her box of personal items was a black-and-white glossy of Saul, taken by a professional photographer on Long Island. Saul appeared able, grinning, confident, wise. They had sent copies of that picture with the business prospectus for EcoBacter to venture capital firms over five years ago. An age.

Kaye had spent very little time looking back on her past, or gathering memorabilia. Now she regretted that. She wanted their baby to have a sense of what had happened. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she appeared almost peachlike in her health and vitality. Pregnancy was treating her very well.

As if she could not get enough of writing, recording, she had begun a diary three days ago, the first diary she had ever kept.

June 10

We spent last week preparing for the conference and looking for a house. Interest rates have gone through the roof, now at twenty-one percent, but we can afford something larger than the apartment, and Mitch isn ‘t particular. I am. Mitch is writing more slowly than I am, about the mummies and the cave, sending it page by page to Oliver Merton in New York, who is editing it, sometimes a little cruelly. Mitch takes it quietly, tries to improve. We have become so literary, so self-observant, maybe a little self-important, since there is not much else to keep us occupied.

Mitch is gone this afternoon talking to the new director of the Hayer, hoping to get reinstated. (He never travels more than twenty minutes from the apartment, and we bought another cell phone the day before yesterday. I tell him I can take care of myself, but he worries.)

He has a letter from Professor Brock describing the nature of the current controversy. Brock has been on a few talk shows. Some newspapers have carried the story, and Merton s piece in NATURE is drawing a lot of attention and a lot of criticism.

Innsbruck still holds all the tissue samples and will not comment or release, but Mitch is working on his friends at UWto get them to go public with what they know, to undermine Innsbruck’s secrecy. Merton believes the gradualists in charge of the mummies have at most another two or three months to prepare their reports and make them public, or they ‘II be removed, replaced, Brock hopes, by a a more objective team, and clearly he hopes to be in charge. Mitch might be on that team, too; though that seems too much to hope for.

Merton and Daney were unable to convince the New York Emergency Action Office to hold the conference in Albany. Something about 1845 and Governor Silas Wright and rent riots; they don’t want a repeat under this “experimental “ and “temporary “ Emergency Act.

We petitioned the Washington Emergency Action Office through Maria Konig at UW, and they allowed a two-day conference at Kane Hall, one hundred attendees maximum, all to be approved by the office. Civil liberties haven’t been completely forgotten, but almost. Nobody wants to call it martial law, and in fact the civil courts are still in full operation, but they work with approval of the Office in each state.

Nothing like it since 1942, Mitch says.

I feel spooky: healthy, vital, energetic, and I don’t look very pregnant. The hormones are the same, the effect the same.

I go in for my sonogram and scan tomorrow at Marine Pacific, and we ‘II do amnio and chorionic villi despite the risks because we want to know the character of the tissues.

The next step won’t be so easy.

Mrs. Hamilton, now I’m a lab rat, too.

75

Building 10, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Dicken propelled himself with one hand down the long corridor on the tenth floor of the Magnuson Clinical Center, spun around with what he hoped was true wheelchair grace — again, with one hand — and dimly saw the two men walking in his return path. The gray suit, the long, slow stride, the height, told him one of the men was Augustine. He did not know who the other might be.

With a low moan, he lowered his right hand and pushed himself toward the pair. As he got closer, he could see that Augustine’s face was healing well enough, though he would always have a slightly rugged look. What was not covered with the bandages of continuing plastic surgery, crossing his head laterally over his nose and in patches on both cheeks and temples, still bore the marks of shrapnel. Both of Augustine’s eyes had been spared. Dicken had lost one eye, and the other had been hazed by the heat of the blast.

“You’re still a sight, Mark,” Dicken said, braking with one hand and lightly dragging a slippered foot.

“Ditto, Christopher. I’d like you to meet Dr. Kelly Newcomb.”