Rachel Kane dragged herself to wakefulness, because someone was telling her she had to do so. Dan. Dan, whose voice had been her anchor during the hours since she had awakened from the pseudo-slumber of stasis.
She was so heartily sick of having to be taken care of, and she was even more weary of having to base every decision she made on the welfare of the three small lives inside her. Until now everything had been so simple, compared to this.
She had spent her childhood, or what passed for a childhood among gens, learning at a rate that she now realized was at least twice as rapid as that of a bright but typical naturally conceived human child. Learning, exercising, practicing her skills; that had been her life, until the Academy.
There she had been placed among what she and her fellow gens had contemptuously called “wildlings” for the first time, and she had found out what unhappiness felt like. And because no one could become an officer without learning how to lead—even though all cadets would not eventually reach command status, still every one of them must be capable of giving orders and creating strategies—for the first time she had been required to think independently and creatively. Behavior that in the gen-creche had earned her correction, here was expected from her.
And young Rachel had discovered that she was not simply able to do that, she excelled at it. Although she was still required to report regularly to those HR Solutions scientists who were her creators and managers, although she knew she was unlike her classmates because even those whose parents were dead or estranged from them still knew who those parents had been, she tasted personal freedom for the first time; and that balanced the unhappiness of being different. That made up for the uncertainty of having to learn all over again where the limits on her behavior should be placed, and which of her personality traits she should squelch and which she should nurture.
The other way in which she was different from her classmates was that each of them, with a very few exceptions, had some plan—however vague, at that age—for eventually mating and reproducing. Rachel could not expect to do that. She was allowed, was even expected, to be sexually active; but her capacity to produce offspring did not belong to her. It belonged to the company, to HR Solutions, just as did her own life.
If a superior officer ordered a “wildling” human to his or her death, that individual experienced conflict in obeying. But in this way Rachel Kane was like her fellow gens who inhabited the crew quarters of starships instead of Officers’ Country, like those who worked in mines and factories where the tasks were particularly dangerous or particularly boring. When she was given an order, her instinct was to obey it. Period.
Or it had been, until she was encouraged to begin thinking creatively. Until fear that for her had been a purely animal reaction to physical danger, began to be the same as for the wildlings she once had scorned; until one day she realized, shaking in the aftermath of a particularly nasty brush with the end of her own existence, that she wanted to go on living just as much as did any of the wildlings who were now her daily associates. They, too, were willing to give their lives up in response to duty; but their instinctive drive to live was coupled with a longing for all the future’s imagined experiences, and that had always been a foreign concept (indeed, almost an unknown concept) for the gen called Rachel.
To be sorry you might die today, because a year from now you expected to return to a home where a civilian spouse waited? To realize that an elderly parent or a sibling would grieve for your loss, and hope not to be the cause of that pain? To think about the offspring you might have created, and never would if you died now?
Rachel Kane had never known parents or siblings, and of course she never would. But it had slowly dawned on her, as the years of her young womanhood slipped by, that it was not impossible that she might someday want one of her sexual liaisons to become more than just a safety valve. It had occurred to her that if she had not been geningeered to ovulate only when medically stimulated to do so, she might have had a child like any other female human being.
She had almost been glad the latter wasn’t going to be possible for her, though. And the former had been just an idle fantasy, really not something she ever expected to fulfill. She was lucky, and she knew she was lucky, just to have the freedom that she did; her life had much more scope than did that of her one-time creche-mates. She was fond of telling herself (although she had never dared voice the thought to anyone, not even to those she shyly began to refer to as her “friends”) that she had the best of both lives. She had a gen’s freedom from family entanglements, a gen’s absolute assurance that a massive economic power would take care of her all her days; yet she had a wildling’s ability to create, mentally if not physically, and she had a life of excitement and variety that even the gens who lived on a starship’s crew decks never tasted. The “ordinaries” who were gens rather than wildlings never left their ships, unless it was to go to a new assignment or to be cycled out of service when they grew too old to be useful and had to be disposed of.
That she had refused to anticipate. The chances were that she would die somewhere with honor, in the performance of her duty, long before she was a feeble old woman who could no longer perform as a command officer. She had hoped for that outcome, anyway; but only after she had lived as full and as long a life as possible, because life was something she had learned to savor.
And then had come this pregnancy. Not the familiar routine in which ripened ova were harvested from her body, to be taken away and used as the gengineers of HR Solutions saw fit; but three actual embryos, implanted and developing inside her womb.
Three creatures that while she understood they were not yet “babies,” nevertheless were lives that combined her characteristics with those of the man whose union with her body had called these zygotes into being.
She had been frightened, but far more than that she had been awed. And she had known, in those first moments after she astounded herself with the discovery of those new lives within her, that she wasn’t going to give them up without a fight.
Was what she felt for Daniel Archer what wildlings called “love”? She didn’t know, wasn’t even sure she was equipped to know. But she did understand that he felt something for her, something that went further than responsibility for what they had conceived together. She hadn’t led wildling humans (and assorted aliens and hybrids, as well) for a full decade, hadn’t become a heavy cruiser’s executive officer, without learning a thing or two about those wildlings’ emotions.
Duty might have made Dan Archer take care of her, but duty would never have caused him to hold her in the curve of his arm as he was holding her now. Gently, protectively, as the ancient railcar halted; and at the last moment before they were pulled bodily out of its cabin by people wearing Star Service uniforms, Dan murmured something she could not hear and swiftly touched his lips to her cheek.
A male human did that because he was emotionally attached to a female, not because he felt obligated toward her.
Now, what was her duty in this situation? To have her out of his way might make it possible for Dan to escape from the trap that was closing around them, and it would certainly be better for the lives she was carrying to die quickly than for them to be taken out of her (now, or when they had developed into viable infants) and used for the company’s purposes. What had not disturbed her at all on her own account, somehow horrified her on her children’s.
Yet she had not been trained to give up, not as a small gen in the creche nor as a Star Service cadet nor as a command officer. And although she had the capacity, as did all gengineered beings, to end her life swiftly and painlessly if she needed to do so—in fact, that was what she was supposed to do if the alternative was to let the technology that had made her fall into unlicensed hands—she was not ready to do that, not just yet anyway.