A roundtable discussion with two scientists and a state representative followed the governor’s conference. The talk turned to SHEVA children as carriers of disease; this was utter nonsense and something she did not want or need to hear. She shut the television off.

The cell phone rang. Kaye flipped it open. “Hello?”

“Oh beauteous one…I’ve got Wendell Packer, Maria Konig, Oliver Merton, and Professor Brock, all sitting in the same room.”

Kaye’s face warmed and relaxed at the sound of Mitch’s voice.

“They’d like to meet you.”

“Only if they want to be midwives,” Kaye said.

“Jesus — do you feel anything?”

“A sour stomach,” Kaye said. “Unhappy and uninspired. But no, I don’t think it’s going to be today.”

“Well, be inspired by this,” Mitch said. “They’re going to go public with their analysis of the Innsbruck tissue samples. And they’re going to give papers at the conference. Packer and Konig say they’ll support us.”

Kaye closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to savor this. “And their departments?”

“No go. The politics is just too intense for department heads. But Maria and Wendell are going to work on their colleagues. We’re hoping to have dinner together. Are you up for it?”

Her roiling stomach had settled. Kaye thought she might actually be hungry in an hour or so. She had followed Maria Konig’s work for years, and admired her enormously. But in that masculine crew, perhaps Konig’s greatest asset was that she was female.

“Where are we eating?”

“Within five minutes of Marine Pacific Hospital,” Mitch said. “Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Maybe a bowl of oatmeal for me,” Kaye said. “Should I take the bus?”

“Nonsense. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Mitch kissed at her over the phone, and then, Oliver Merton asked to say something.

“We haven’t met yet, to shake hands,” Merton said breathlessly, as if he had just been arguing loudly or had run up a flight of stairs. “Christ, Ms. Lang, I’m nervous just talking with you.”

“You trounced me pretty badly in Baltimore,” Kaye said.

“Yes, but that was then,” Merton said without a hint of regret. “I can’t tell you how much I admire what you and Mitch are planning. I am agog with wonder.”

“We’re just doing what comes natural,” Kaye said.

“Wipe the past clean,” Merton said. “Ms. Lang, I’m a friend.”

“We’ll see about that,” Kaye said.

Merton chuckled and handed her back to Mitch.

“Maria Konig suggests a good Vietnamese pho restaurant. That’s what she craved when she was pregnant. Sound right?”

“After my oatmeal,” Kaye said. “Does Merton have to be there?”

“Not if you don’t want him.”

“Tell him I’m going to stare daggers at him. Make him suffer.”

“I’ll do that,” Mitch said. “But he thrives under criticism.”

“I’ve been analyzing tissues from dead people for ten years now,” Maria Konig said. “Wendell knows the feeling.”

“I do indeed,” Packer said.

Konig, sitting across from her, was more than just beautiful — she was the perfect model for what Kaye wanted to look like when she reached fifty. Wendell Packer was very handsome, in a lean and compact sort of way — quite the opposite of Mitch. Brock wore a gray coat and black T-shirt, dapper and quiet; he seemed lost in even deeper thought.

“Each day, you get a FedEx box or two or three,” Maria said, “and you open them up, and inside are little tubes or bottles from Bosnia or East Timor or the Congo, and there’s this little sad chunk of skin or bone from one or another victim, usually innocent, and an envelope with copies of records, more tubes, blood samples or cheek swabs from relatives of victims. Day after day after day. It never stops. If these babies are the next step, if they’re better than we are at living on this planet, I can’t wait. We’re in need of a change.”

The small waitress taking their orders stopped writing on her small pad. “You name dead people for UN?” she asked Maria.

Maria looked up at her, embarrassed. “Sometimes.”

“I from Kampuchea, Cambodia, come here fifteen years ago,” she said. “You work on Kampucheans?”

“That was before my time, honey,” Maria said.

“I still very mad,” the woman said. “Mother, father, brother, uncle. Then they let the murderers go without punishing. Very bad men and women.”

The table fell silent as the woman’s large black eyes sparked with memory. Brock leaned forward, clasping his hands and touching his nose with the knuckle of his thumb.

“Very bad now, too. I going to have baby anyway,” the woman said. She touched her stomach and looked at Kaye. “You?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“I believe in future,” the woman said. “It got to get better.”

She finished taking their orders and left the table. Merton picked up his chopsticks and fumbled them aimlessly for a few seconds. “I shall have to remember this,” he said, “the next time I feel oppressed.”

“Save it for your book,” Brock said.

“I am writing one,” Merton told them with raised brows. “No surprise. The most important bit of science reporting of our time.”

“I hope you’re having more luck than I am,” Kaye said.

“I’m jammed, absolutely stuck,” Merton said, and pushed up his glasses with the thick end of a chopstick. “But that won’t last. It never has.”

The waitress brought spring rolls, shrimp and bean sprouts and basil leaves wrapped in translucent pancake. Kaye had lost her urge for bland and reassuring oatmeal. Feeling more adventurous, she pinched one of the rolls with her chopsticks and dipped it into a small ceramic bowl of sweet brown sauce. The flavor was extraordinary — she could have lingered on the bite for minutes, picking out every savory molecule. The basil and mint in the roll were almost too intense, and the shrimp tasted rich and crunchy and oceanic.

All her senses sharpened. The large room, though dark and cool, seemed very colorful, very detailed.

“What do they put in these?” she asked, chewing the last bite of her roll.

“They are good,” Merton said.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Maria said apologetically, still feeling the emotion of the waitress’s bit of history.

“We all believe in the future,” Mitch said. “We wouldn’t be here if we were stuck in our own little ruts.”

“We need to figure out what we can say, what our limitations are,” Wendell said. “I can only go so far before I’m outside my expertise and way outside what the department will tolerate, even if I claim to speak for myself alone.”

“Courage, Wendell,” Merton said. “A solid front. Freddie?”

Brock sipped from his foamy glass of pale lager. He looked up with a hangdog expression.

“I cannot believe we are all here, that we have come this far,” he said. “The changes are so close, I am frightened. Do you know what is going to happen when we present our findings?”

“We’re going to get crucified by nearly every scientific journal in the world,” Packer said, and laughed.

“Not Nature ” Merton said. “I’ve laid some groundwork there. Pulled off a journalistic and scientific coup.” He grinned.

“No, please, friends,” Brock said. “Step back a moment and think. We are just past the millennium, and now we are about to learn how we came to be human.” He removed his thick glasses and wiped them with his napkin. His eyes were distant, very round. “In Innsbruck, we have our mummies, caught in the late stages of a change that took place across tens of thousands of years. The woman must have been tough and brave beyond our imagining, but she knew very little. Dr. Lang, you know a great deal, and you proceed anyway. Your courage is perhaps even more wonderful.” He lifted his glass of beer. “The least I can do is offer you a heartfelt toast.”

They all raised their glasses. Kaye felt her stomach flip again, but it was not a bad sensation.