Darwin's Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

frame house snapped and popped in the morning heat. A moist breeze blew through the small rooms in lazy swirls. Kaye walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. She had awakened from a peculiar dream in which she was an atom slowly rising to connect with a much larger molecule, to fit in and complete something truly impressive. She felt at peace for the first time in months, despite the barbed memory of last night’s fight.
    Kaye massaged the fingers of her right hand, then wriggled her wedding ring over a swollen knuckle into its familiar groove. Bees droned in the oleanders outside the window, well into their day’s work.
    “Some dream,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled down one eyelid with a finger and stared at herself speculatively. “Under a little stress, are we?”
    A few freckles remained under each eye from her pregnancy with Stella; when she was upset, they could still change from pale tan to ruddy ocher. Now, they were darker but not vivid. She splashed water on her cheeks and clipped her hair back, preparing for the hot day, ready to face more difficulties. Families were about staying together and healing.
    If the bees can do it, so can I.
    “Stella,” she called, knocking on her daughter’s bedroom door. “It’s nine o’clock. We slept in.”
    Kaye padded into the small office in the laundry room and switched on the computer. She read the lines she had written before the squabble last night, then scrolled back through the last few pages:
    “The role of SHEVA in the production of a new subspecies is but one function performed by this diverse and essential class of viruses. ERV and transposons—jumping genes—play large roles in tissue differentiation and development. Emotion and crisis and changing environments activate them, one variety at a time, or all together. They are mediators and messengers between cells, ferrying genes and coded data around many parts of the body, and even between individuals.
    “Viruses and transposons most likely arose after the invention of sex, perhaps because of sex. To this day, sex brings them opportunity to move and carry information. They may have also emerged during the tumultuous genetic shuffling of our early immune system, like soldiers and cops running wild.
    “Truly they are like original sin. How does sin shape our destiny?”
    Kaye used a stylus to circle that last awkward, overreaching sentence. She marked it out and read some more.
    “One thing we know already: We depend on retroviral and transposon activity during nearly every stage of our growth. Many are necessary partners.
    “To assume that viruses and transposable elements are first and foremost causes of disease is like assuming that automobiles are first and foremost meant to kill people.
    “Pathogens—disease-causing organisms—are like hormones and other signaling molecules, but their message is challenge and silence. Our own internal lions, pathogens test us. They winnow the old and weak. They sculpt life.
    “Sometimes they bring down the young and the good. Nature is painful. Disease and death are part of our response to challenge. To fail, to die, is still to be part of nature, for success is built on many failures, and silence is also a signal.”
    Her frame of mind had become increasingly abstract. The dream, the drone of the bees . . .
    You were born with a caul, my dear.
    Kaye suddenly remembered the voice of her maternal grandmother, Evelyn; words from nearly four decades ago. At the age of eight, Evelyn had told her something that her mother, a practical woman, had never thought to mention. “You came into this world with your tiny head covered. You were born with a caul. I was there, in the hospital with your mother. I saw it myself. The doctor showed it to me.”
    Kaye remembered squirming with delicious anticipation in her grandmother’s ample lap and asking what a caul was. “A cap of loose flesh,” Evelyn had explained. “Some say