Stephen raises him high as he descends from the platform again. He walks to where the scarred girl stands, in the midst of her people. He turns slowly, letting all of them see baby Khan and smell him.
Moving as slowly and smoothly as he can he goes down on one knee, then on both. He holds out the fragile bundle for the scarred girl to take. She examines baby Khan critically for the space of two, three, four heartbeats.
She tucks Captain Power’s voice box back into her belt.
She takes the baby from him. With one hand, she unwraps the blanket and casts it aside—almost with distaste. Her nostrils flare. The tableau holds, for one heartbeat and then another.
Finally she speaks: a melodious stream of sounds with no consonants in it, no hidden rocks to break the flow. One of the other children, a boy older and taller than her, shrugs off a woollen shawl he is wearing as a sash and offers it up. The scarred girl takes it and swaddles the baby in it. She licks the tip of her thumb and anoints his forehead very gently with her spit. A baptism.
And since it’s a baptism, Stephen takes the risk of speaking. “Sam,” he says. He points to the baby. Nods. Smiles. “Sam.”
The boy who gave up his shawl goes to take up the fallen blanket—waste not, want not—but the scarred girl shakes her head and he backs away. Clearly there are boundaries here that matter.
“Thank you,” Stephen says.
The girl answers him, but he doesn’t understand her any more than she understood him.
And now comes the hard part.
He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to the elbow. Taking the canteen of water from his shoulder, he unscrews the cap and pours the water over his exposed forearm. He rubs the whole area with the palm of his other hand, wiping away the e-blocker gel that disguised his scent. He holds up his wrist, which now (he hopes) smells of all things that are good to eat.
“Go ahead,” he says.
The scarred girl stares at him in perplexity. Her severe stare seems to ask a question: Is this how we treat our friends?
“You have to,” Stephen explains, knowing the words are futile. He is relying on her instincts, not her understanding. “Otherwise, when they ask me, I’ll tell them. That there’s a cure. How to make it. Men with weapons will come after you—many, many more than are here now. They’ll take you and turn you into medicine. Kill you all, just so they can have a few more years of life themselves. They won’t even feel sorry about it.”
The scarred girl seems to listen. Her mouth is bent into a trembling gull-wing scowl but she doesn’t move. Greaves wonders how much control that takes, how much strength. And how much authority to make the others hold back, though they tilt their heads to catch the smell of him on the still air. The baby stirs and utters a thin wail of complaint, made suddenly aware of its hunger.
Helpless, Stephen plunges on. “I can’t kill myself. There are ways to do it without hurting, but … it’s not one of the things I can do. So we have to do this instead.” He offers his arm again. The words are just a spur for his own faltering resolve: his dilemma would be almost impossible to explain even if they spoke the same language. He needs her to wipe the hard drive of his mind, so he can’t give her and her people up to the dubious mercy of their predecessors, humanity 1.0.
Part of this is the promise he made to Rina. Keep him safe. It doesn’t matter what happens to me so long as you keep him safe. And that means keeping the whole tribe safe. Which in turn means not letting out into the world the knowledge that will destroy them.
But it goes beyond even that strict imperative. Greaves has been thinking it through ever since he first met the scarred girl and her people. On one of the lowest levels of his mind, in a sub-routine set up for this alone, he has been working out the terms of the problem all this time. The solution is here. Now. It takes the form of a Venn diagram, two circles intersecting. The world of Beacon, dying slowly every year even before it decided to dismember and eat itself; and the world of these children, which whatever it might be now has at least the potential to be something else. It’s a seed. A dead tree can stand for years or decades as it hollows out. A seed has places to be and things to do.
Stephen has made up his mind. He’s with the seeds, the scarred girl’s tribe. He can’t be one of them, but he has chosen his allegiance. The children are all that matters. And right now, though he’s on their side he is the plague, the pathogen that could destroy them. The knowledge in his mind has to be safely disposed of.
“Please,” he begs.
The scarred girl makes a gesture. Her hand raised towards him, closed and then open. She knows what he wants her to do, but she won’t do it.
It’s a complex problem with a simple, inelegant solution. Stephen extends his hand to touch baby Khan’s forehead.
“Sam,” he reminds them all. “His name is Sam.”
He puts the tip of his thumb against the baby’s lips. The baby’s jaws work back and forth, sawing at Greaves’ flesh. It’s very hard for the tiny teeth to get a purchase, but once they do they punch through his skin cleanly and quickly. They’re very sharp.
The baby takes its first meal.
Stephen lets go of his humanity with much more relief than fear. It was an awkward burden to carry at the best of times.
61
The colonel returns to Rosie across a field strewn with the bodies of the dead. All of the corpses he sees are adults and half-devoured. Brigadier Fry’s troops seem to have given a poor account of themselves. Of course the children won the field and therefore have had the opportunity to take their dead away with them.
Certainly there is no sign of them now. Rosie’s airlock still stands open, but the area around it is deserted. Carlisle is not surprised. He saw the moment when Stephen Greaves handed over Dr. Khan’s baby, and the moment shortly after when—in a different sense—he surrendered himself.
If Greaves were still present, Carlisle would shoot him just as he shot Samrina. Whatever the children are, or may become, an adult human on exposure to Cordyceps dies in that moment, or else becomes an unwilling passenger in a hijacked body. In the second case, the bullet is a mercy; in the first, it’s probably an irrelevance but it feels to the colonel like a mark of respect akin to covering the faces of the dead.
But there is no sign of Greaves. Perhaps when the children melted away into the dark he trailed along in their wake, moved by some half-remembered impulse. More likely he is out on the parade ground somewhere, feeding.
The whup whup whup of a helicopter’s blades makes Carlisle look to the sky momentarily. Sixsmith is hovering the Little Bird about twenty feet up, right above his head. She gestures. A thumbs-up. She has her work to do, and he has his. He waves back, wishing her and the others well.