It was darker now, and a wind had started to whip the trees along the side of the house. Artie had brought out a sweater for Mark and handed it to him, then leaned on the railing beside him and looked down the block at the decorations on the houses and the flickering Christmas lights in the windows. A few doors away a window sign was blinking MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY YOU-ALL.
It wasn’t like back East, where he’d grown up as a kid. In Chicago there would be a foot of snow on the ground and he’d be bundled up to his ears with a thick coat and gloves stiff from making snowballs, plus a woolen cap and earmuffs and heavy galoshes. He missed it, but if he ever moved back there, he knew the winters would kill him.
“I heard some of the argument,” Mark said.
He had to talk to Mark about it sooner or later, Artie thought.
“Your mother and I—”
“Yeah, I know.” Then, curious: “Are you and Mom still friends?”
Artie felt defeated. “I don’t know, Mark. I just don’t know. She doesn’t—”
“Has she asked for a divorce?”
Artie suprised himself with the answer.
“No she hasn’t.”
“Maybe you asked the wrong questions,” Mark said quietly.
He would have to think about that. Marriages among the Old People were usually arranged, they were seldom for love. Why should he and Susan have the same frame of reference? She had married him because she had wanted a father for Mark and protection for them both. He had married her because he had wanted a family. Both of them had gotten what they wanted.
“I don’t know if I ever thanked you.”
“For what?” Mark asked.
“Saving my life. Here on the porch.”
Mark grunted.
“Susan told me there were other times,” Artie said.
“Yeah.” Mark laughed quietly at the memory. “You almost ran into me at the museum that first day. I thought for sure you’d seen me.”
Artie remembered the hour spent with the Tribe in the Visions of the Past room and he was suddenly uneasy.
“Those were your memories, weren’t they? Racial memories?”
Mark shrugged.
“You were there to find out about us, where we came from. I thought I ought to show you. It was pretty grim, but I thought you needed to know about us, what it had been like for us back then.”
It had all been part of his education as a watchdog. You have to know who you’re guarding—and against what. He was suddenly puzzled.
“I used to have dreams—”
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Mark smile.
“Those were supposed to be my wet dreams, not yours. I was broadcasting in my sleep and didn’t realize it.”
Artie laughed and then immediately sobered.
“You placed the phone call to me when I was about to leave the museum that day with Dr. Hall.”
He could sense Mark nod in the dark.
“I followed you when you drove away. Chandler almost got you then—you would have killed the guy in the car.”
“How did you stop him?”
“Set up an interference pattern. That was about the only thing I could ever do … . And I was at the zoo, admiring the Siberian tiger. I almost got to the station parking lot too late.” He was silent, remembering. “It was the same thing at the library. And I had Charlie Allen chase after you early in the morning when you went to Chandler’s apartment. His wife didn’t want him to go.” Another silence. “He could do what I couldn’t.”
“There’s a lot that Charlie is going to insist on knowing.”
“He won’t remember,” Mark said gently. “I’ll see that he doesn’t.”
He had a lot to ask Mark, Artie thought, but he didn’t know where to begin.
“I gave you the guided tour of the city when you were staying at Levin’s house,” Mark continued. “Maybe I should have stuck around longer, but I was pretty tired by then. I read about the fire later.”
“I was worried about you,” Artie said slowly. “You could have let me know you were still alive.”
Mark laughed in the darkness. “I was too busy keeping you alive. And I had Collins tell you his father was in dry wall. I guess you didn’t pick up on that one—I thought you were sharper than that.”
“You arranged with Collins to tell me at the end, didn’t you?”
“It was time you found us; it was time you came up to Willow. I knew Chandler was dead, that you were no longer in danger. And I knew your friend”—Mark paused, aware he had used the wrong word—“was
looking for Mom and me. I knew he would come to Willow searching for us.” He suddenly sounded distant, remote. “I had done my best to save you. It was time for you to save us. You just made it.”
All his married life he had been their faithful Hound. And to save them he had killed his best friend. But that wasn’t true. Mitch hadn’t had any friends, only patients and old army buddies.
Cautiously: “Collins struck me as a decent kid.”
“Collins likes me too well,” Mark said easily.
“I guessed that.”
“I think the world of Collins—I wouldn’t have turned him down. But what he wanted meant so much to him and so little to me his pride would have been hurt. I could have lied to him but he would have known.” Mark hesitated. “A friend of his loves him, but Collins doesn’t realize it yet.”
Artie didn’t say anything. It wasn’t any of his business—and then he realized that of course it was. If it mattered to Mark, it mattered to him. He stared into the gathering night and after a moment said, “Susan claims the war is over. That it was over before it really began. That we lost—that is, Homo sapiens lost.”
It was Mark’s turn to be quiet, and Artie had a sudden premonition about what he was going to say.
“Doc Ryan talked to me about it before we left Willow. He’d just gotten a message from a friend at the Centers for Disease Control.”
Artie was silent, waiting.
“He said it was in the papers, though they didn’t print everything. Maybe they couldn’t. Rift Valley TB. That’s where they found ‘Lucy,’ isn’t it? One of the earliest fossils? In the Great Rift Valley?”
“I think so.” It took a moment for Artie to recall where he’d heard of the disease, then he had it. A TV news show in the hotel room with Mitch. And Watch Cap—Chandler—had mentioned it.
He knew Mark was looking at him in the dark, uneasy.
“Where the Rift Valley cuts through Ethiopia … there were a lot of mercenaries involved in their latest civil war and they were the first to come down with it. You go fighting in old boneyards and I guess you run the risk of catching whatever killed the owners of those bones to begin with.”
“What’s it like?”
“Doc Ryan said it’s something like TB—but a lot worse. He said it was multidrug resistant and ultraviolet radiation doesn’t kill it. Incubation period of a month or so, then a week of vomiting blood and that’s it.”
“They’ll find something for it.”
Mark shook his head.
“Doc didn’t think so. Said there’s only one drug that’s good for TB now and it doesn’t touch this. It’s incurable.”
Artie felt the first touch of fear.
“Did he say anything else?”
Mark cleared his throat. He suddenly seemed reluctant to talk about it.
“That it’s species specific. That we’re immune.”
But Homo sapiens wasn’t. Mary had been right. They had done it to themselves. But if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. TB was airborne and by now it would have spread all over the world, mercenaries going home and passing through Heathrow—all of London would have been exposed. You couldn’t quarantine a city, and it was too late now, anyway. After that, New York, Paris—wherever the flights went. There were no oceans to protect them, no mountain ranges that would seal it off.
“Doc said the Old People are withdrawing. Moving out of the cities into the country, into uninhabited areas. Collins knows of a little town in Alaska, about a hundred miles out of Anchorage. Kodiak Creek. It’s
one of ours.” Mark looked over at Artie. “We could move there.”
“Maybe,” Artie said. He’d like it in Alaska, he thought. “And maybe we’ll be lucky.”
But he knew they wouldn’t be.
Mark changed the subject.
“Did you love your grandfather?” he asked.
Artie turned, surprised, trying to read his face in the darkness.
“Yes, of course.”
“And your father?”
Artie smiled. “Him, too.”
“Neither one of them were like you, were they?”
“In some,ways, of course they were. In a lot of other ways, I suppose not. But that didn’t affect my loving them.”
“I’m not like you,” Mark said.
“I know that.”
“I’m not like Mom, either.”
Something was bothering Mark, and Artie remembered what Susan had said: “He doesn’t have the genes for it … .”
“Susan told me that. I didn’t understand her.”
Mark walked over to the porch light and stood beneath it.
“Look me in the eyes,” he said quietly.
Mark’s eyes were just as gray as Collins’, but there was a depth to them that Artie had never seen in anybody’s eyes before. Mark was suddenly more naked than if he had stripped off all his clothes. The only thing Artie could compare it to was when he was on the line in ’Nam and friends who were scared shitless talked to each other about themselves and their lives with absolutely no pretense and no lies. How they felt, things they had done, what they thought. It was when they were in extremis that you finally saw the real person beneath all the bullshit and the real person was usually … beautiful.
He was seeing everything Mark was or ever would be. Mark could show his soul at will and it was overwhelming.
And there was something else.
Mark could also see him as he really was, without the mask that everybody wore almost all their lives.
Artie looked away.
He had been staring into the eyes of the Buddha.
How long had Susan known? he wondered. Probably shortly after Mark was born. She had kept his secret ever since. Mark was the person who meant the most to her, the one person she could never betray, the one person she would gladly die for. She had never lied to him about that.
Mark suddenly yawned.
“Would you have shot Collins?”
Artie shook his head. “I was trying to bluff him. That was silly, I know.”
“Yeah. He thought so, too.” Mark opened the sliding glass doors and stepped inside.
“Good night, Dad.”
Ever since he was a kid, he had thought it would be fun to play God. Most kids probably did.
But he’d had his chance.
And it hadn’t been fun at all.
Artie leaned against the railing and looked out at the city below, the lights winking in the darkness. The streets downtown would be jammed with last-minute shoppers, the restaurants crowded, the theaters filled. It was probably the same across the country, around the entire world. Homo sapiens going about its business of shopping, eating, making children, making war, making plans for a thousand tomorrows that would steadily diminish until finally there were no more.
A few might linger for a while in small patches here and there. The species was too genetically diverse to be wiped out by a single bug. There might be a few
farmers, maybe even a tiny village. An insignificant self-endangered species dependent upon the kindness of the other species surrounding them. Chances were they would still be warring among themselves until Cain once again slew Abel and they vanished for good.
They were going to go away. All of them. How many years? He didn’t know. But sooner rather than later.
Something would take their place. Something that had been in hiding for thousands of years. Mankind would dwindle, realizing what was happening but powerless to stop it. As powerless as the dinosaurs had been when the meteorite had plunged into the sea millions of years ago and they had gone away, leaving their world to the tiny mammals hiding under the leaves of the forest.
But of all the teeming billions, he was the one truly Damned because in whatever small way, he had been the Instrument. He’d had to make a choice: his best friend or his family, his species or theirs.
But even if he had chosen Mitch—and he knew he never could have—it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference in the outcome, only in how bloody it might have been. The Old People would have been blamed for spreading Rift Valley TB, and the pogrom that followed would have been everything that Mary feared.
Perhaps the Old People deserved the earth. Perhaps they had been meant to own it after all, at least for a while. Evolution had stopped for Homo sapiens; there were no isolated pockets of them that could throw up a mutation and then breed true. The world of Homo sapiens was all one; the constant mixing would have diluted it all too soon. But it hadn’t been like that for the Old People. They had lived in tiny patches scattered around the world, isolated socially if not geographically. Evolution might have hesitated for them, but it had never stopped. And they’d had thirty-five thousand years for a change to show up. Time enough plus the tides of chance.
Artie turned away from the railing. The world would continue. The genus would continue. Hominids would continue. But Homo sapiens would disappear and so, eventually, would the Old People. Mark’s genes would dominate, and after so many millennia the Old People would be replaced themselves, like every species was slated to be.
With Mark, nature had thrown the dice once again, willing to try a new combination rather than giving up the game altogether.
Artie smiled to himself.
Mark would be a surprise to them, one the Old People hadn’t counted on. But at least they would let him live rather than burn him at the stake or dissect him in a laboratory or cage him in a zoo.
He wondered what their scientists would call Mark.
Homo what?