Darwin's Children Part 33

She wondered what that meant.

Mitch had changed so much. And he smelled like he had just been kicked.

15.

BALTIMORE.

The imaging lab office was separated from the Magnetic Resonance Imager-the Machine-by two empty rooms. The forces induced by the toroidal magnets of the Machine were awesome. Visitors were warned not to go down the hall without first emptying their pockets of mechanical and electronic devices, pocket PCs, wallets, cell phones, security name tags, eyegla.s.ses, watches. Getting closer to the Machine required exchanging day clothes for metal-free robes-no zippers, metal b.u.t.tons, or belt buckles; no rings, pins, tie clasps, or cuff links.

Everything loose within a few meters of the Machine was made of wood or plastic. Workers here wore elastic belts and specially selected slippers or athletic shoes.

Five years ago, right in this facility, a scientist had forgotten the warnings and had her nipple and c.l.i.toris rings ripped out. Or so the story went. People with pacemakers, optic nerve rewiring, or any sort of neural implants could not go anywhere near the Machine.

Kaye was free of such appliances, and that was the first thing she told Herbert Roth as she stood in the door to the office.

Slight, balding, in his early forties, Roth gave her a puzzled smile as he put down his pencil and pushed a batch of papers aside. "Glad to hear it, Ms. Rafelson," he said. "But the Machine is turned off. Besides, we spent several days imaging Wishtoes and I already know that about you."

Roth pulled up a plastic chair for Kaye and she sat on the other side of the wooden desk. Kaye touched the smooth surface. Roth had told her that his father had crafted it from solid maple, without nails, using only glue. It was beautiful.

He still has a father.

She felt the cool river in her spine, the sense of utter delight and approval, and closed her eyes for a moment. Roth watched her with some concern.

"Long day?"

She shook her head, wondering how to begin.

"Is Wishtoes pregnant?"

"No," Kaye said. She took the plunge. "Are you feeling very scientific?"

Roth looked around nervously, as if the room was not completely familiar. "Depends." His eyes squinched down and he could not avoid giving Kaye the once-over.

"Scientific and discreet?"

Roth's eyes widened with something like panic.

"Pardon me, Ms. Rafelson-"

"Kaye, please."

"Kaye. I think you're very attractive, but . . . If it's about the Machine, I've already got a list of Web sites that show . . . I mean, it's already been done." He laughed what he hoped was a gallant laugh. "h.e.l.l, I've done it. Not alone, I mean."

"Done what?" Kaye asked.

Roth flushed crimson and pushed his chair back with a hollow sc.r.a.pe of the plastic legs. "I have no idea what in h.e.l.l you're talking about."

Kaye smiled. She meant nothing specific by the smile, but she saw Roth relax. His expression changed to puzzled concern and the excess color faded from his face. There is something about me, about this, There is something about me, about this, she thought. she thought. It's a charmed moment. It's a charmed moment.

"Why are you down here?" Roth asked.

"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. "G.o.d 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?"

"G.o.d 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't won't deny that it is real." deny 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 G.o.d? 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 embarra.s.sment.

"Meditation states, oneness, bliss, all that can be induced with training. They are under some personal control . . . But not this. 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." 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."

"G.o.d doesn't just talk talk to us," Roth said. "I mean, even if I believed in G.o.d, 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." to us," Roth said. "I mean, even if I believed in G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, but with an equally childlike yet infinitely mature and wise acceptance. 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 pa.s.sed; 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 embarra.s.s easily?"

Kaye shook her head.

"There's a little indication of something like arousal, but I wouldn't call it s.e.xual arousal, not precisely. Nothing like o.r.g.a.s.m 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 s.e.x, on drugs, including LSD and cocaine. Your scans don't match any of those."

"I can't imagine having s.e.x 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 ma.s.s seemed to issue from the infant's mouth.

"Not so much detail, but it's a pretty close match," Roth said. "Famous experiment in j.a.pan, 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 ma.s.s, 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 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 protect protect those you love, you keep them from harm. What's the G.o.d . . . what's the those you love, you keep them from harm. What's the G.o.d . . . what's the d.a.m.ned d.a.m.ned," she finally shouted it, "the G.o.d d.a.m.ned G.o.d d.a.m.ned excuse?" excuse?"

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, Good for him, Kaye thought. 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?"