“I saw your car,” he said.
He stooped to get under the doorway, then followed Marla to her office. “So did you look at them?” he asked.
She sat at her desk and opened one of the drawers. She took out the plastic bag he’d given her when he picked up Paxton. “There’s nothing here I didn’t prescribe for her,” she said. “None of them have been switched.”
“I had to check,” he said. He’d pulled the bottles from Jo Lynn’s medicine cabinet the first day he’d searched her house. The dates on the bottles were months old, and most of them were more than half-full. “It didn’t look like she was using them anyway.”
“That’s because they weren’t working. She kept getting resistant to them. Betas have an amazing immune system.”
“So if she wasn’t taking antidepressants, was she still depressed?”
“I don’t think so,” Marla said. “She got over that too. She seemed fine whenever I talked to her.”
Deke sighed. “Yeah. Me too.” He reached into his breast pocket and handed her two folded pieces of paper. “I want you to read something.” He sat down on the floor, which put him at eye level with her.
She unfolded the pages, then read the top of the first page. “Who are these people?”
“Brother Bewlay’s a screen name Jo was using,” he said. “Weygand is some guy she met online.” Marla looked surprised. “They wrote to each other for almost a year.”
“She never told me that,” Marla said.
Deke frowned. “I was hoping she had.”
TO: aweygand
Sorry, Andy, I don’t think you understand at all the mindset required for an asexual baby-making machine. Whether they’ve been genetically engineered this way or evolved to it, the beta is built for one purpose-breed at all costs. Asex makes things simple, but it strips away all the behavioral baggage that goes along with sexual selection. The only thing left is getting pregnant and taking care of the children. It’s monomania. It’s leaping over the rocks to lay your eggs and die.
In that kind of brain, the eggs are everything. Beta women who even considered abortions would be considered deviants, the worst kind of criminal. Young beta girls who went through the Changes before puberty would be the most militant about this, I suspect. The beta body is the one they’ve grown into, the only sexual body they’ve known. I wouldn’t be surprised if beta women who weren’t “orthodox” enough would be killed to protect the purity of the race. Watch CNN for the first stoning in Switchcreek.
– bb
TO: brotherbewlay
› The beta body is the only one they’ve known.
You keep coming back to this biological determinism stuff. These are sweeping generalizations based on what hormones you THINK are brainwashing them. Based on what evidence? Opposition to abortion is a moral position, not a mood disorder.
– Andy
TO: brotherbewlay
One more thing. Aren’t we ALL evolved to breed at all costs?
– Andy
TO: aweygand
› Opposition to abortion is a moral position.
It’s a moral issue _because_ it’s a biological issue. The intellect’s riding bareback on a brain hardwired to ensure our survival on the planet, and the poor thing thinks that it’s the one doing the steering. Think about it. The brain makes up its mind on moral issues immediately-It’s the intellect that has to go through contortions to reconcile emotional certainty with a philosophical position.
Here’s a morality test: which is more wrong, swatting an insect or clubbing a baby seal?
Human babies are the most successful manipulators of all-those big eyes, that layer of baby fat, that truckload of opiates they trigger in the lactating mother. You have to read Natalie Angier-it’s vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she didn’t choose, because evolution throws every trick at its disposal at the woman. Now think of those 13/14 year old beta girls, getting pregnant through no action of their own, raped by their own biology. What choice did they have? The only sane thing to do is put them on birth control automatically, age 10 on. Then let them choose to go OFF it-when they’re 16 at least. Maybe make them pass a test. A license to breed.
› And say, aren’t we ALL evolved to breed at all costs? Exactly. If that doesn’t keep you up at night, Andy, I don’t know what will.
– bb
When Marla finished reading she said, “How did you get this?”
He told her about Weygand driving down and breaking into Jo’s house. He left out the part about smashing Weygand’s windshield and threatening the man. “Most of it’s trading conspiracy theories about the Changes,” he said. “But this stuff about the young beta women…”
“The white-scarf girls, obviously. She’s making it sound all hypothetical, but it’s them. Weygand seems clueless. Did he even know that
“He said he suspected it,” Deke said. “Though he didn’t know until after the funeral.”
“So they weren’t
Deke almost smiled. “No, not that close.” Donna had told him that Marla was in love with Jo Lynn, and he hadn’t believed it, until now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Everyone fell in love with Jo.
Deke said, “So the white-scarf girls, the talk about stoning. I can’t tell if Jo was really afraid of them, or-”
“Not afraid,” Marla said. “She just knew what they were capable of.”
“Are you talking about the effigy?” Deke asked. “Come on, Marla. A fire’s one thing, but murder-”
“You don’t think they wanted me dead?” Marla said. “They tried to torch my house while I was asleep.”
He felt his phone vibrate in his pants pocket but ignored it. Had to be Rhonda again. She’d called him twice already this morning.
“They’re kids,” Deke said. “They got carried away. They weren’t trying to burn down the house.” A straw figure-dressed in a white doctor’s coat with a wooden knife taped to its hand-had been lit and thrown against the wall of Marla’s house. The flames had scorched the paint, little more, before Deke and some of the boys arrived to put the fire out. After Marla threatened to bring in the police, three teenage beta girls, white scarves in place, presented themselves to the reverend. The reverend promised to punish them, and Deke talked Marla into not pressing charges. She’d held that against him ever since.
“It’s one step from bombing a clinic, Deke. You don’t understand these girls. They’re different.”
“Because they don’t have sex? Do you believe this separate species stuff too-the teleportation stuff, the parallel universes, all that?”
“It’s one theory.”
“Jo’s theory,” he said. “That she got from real scientists, right?”
“Yes, there are reputable people who think quantum calculation could explain what happened,” Marla said. “Most of the evidence is circumstantial, though. Statistical. TDS changed the chromosome so completely that they say it’s impossible to see how the new order could arise from the old. It’s like running a dictionary through a leaf shredder and spraying out Hamlet on your front lawn.”
“You’re talking about introns.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been reading up.”
“I got it from Weygand. Didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Introns are the part of DNA that don’t code for proteins. Because they’re not needed, they can mutate faster than other parts of the DNA where a change in the protein could kill the creature. You can look at intron sequences within proteins to tell small differences between related species, like the differences between humans and chimps. Both may produce the same hemoglobin protein, and their DNA is mostly the same, but the introns are very different. Between the clades, we’ve found differences in every protein sequence we’ve looked at: hemoglobin chains, cytochromes, histones…”
“Really,” Deke said. She wasn’t looking at him, and hadn’t heard the smile in his voice.
“So while the sequences are a mystery, there’s no need to invoke quantum weirdness. Most people are looking for a more realistic, testable mechanism that would cause those changes-a retrovirus, maybe, something small
