“I’ve that machinery right inside me,” she said. “I was… born with it.”
Harvey stared at her, shocked speechless.
“I don’t want the Cyborgs or the Opts controlling our son’s life,” she said, “regulating his mind with hypnotic gas, making duplicates of him for their own purposes, pushing him and leading him and -”
“Don’t work yourself into a state,” he said.
“You heard him,” she said. “Dopplegangers! They can regulate anything—our very being! They can condition us to… to… do anything! For all we know, we’ve been conditioned to be here right now!”
“Liz, you’re being unreasonable.”
“Unreasonable? Look at me! They can take a piece of my skin and grow an identical copy. Me! Identical! How do you know I’m me? How do you know I’m the original me? How do I know?”
He gripped her free arm and for a moment had no words. Presently, he forced himself to relax, shook his head. “You’re you, Liz. You’re not flesh grown from a cell. You’re… all the things we’ve shared… and been… and done together. They couldn’t duplicate memories… not that with a doppleganger.”
She pressed her cheek against the rough fabric of his jacket, wanting the comfort of it, the tactile sensation that told her body he was here and he was real.
“They’ll make dopplegangers of our son,” she said “That’s what they’re planning. You know it.”
“Then we’ll have many sons.”
“For what reason?” She looked up, at him, her lashes damp with unshed tears. “You heard what Glisson said. Something from outside adjusted our embryo. What was it?”
“How can I know?”
“Somebody must know.”
“I know you,” he said. “You want to think its God.”
“What else could it be?”
“Anything—chance, accident, some higher order manipulator. Maybe someone’s discovered something they’re not sharing.”
“One of us? They wouldn’t!”
“Nature, then,” he said. “Nature asserting itself in the interest of Man.”
“Sometimes you sound like a cultist!”
“It isn’t the Cyborgs,” he said. “We know that.”
’Glisson said it was beneficient.”
“But it’s genetic shaping. That’s blasphemy to them. Physical alteration of the bioframe, that’s their way.”
“Like Glisson,” she said. “That robot with flesh.” Again, she pressed her cheek against him. “That’s what I fear—they’ll do that to our son… our sons.”
“The courier service outnumbers the Cyborgs a hundred to one,” he said. “As long as we stick together, we’ll win.”
“But we’re just flesh,” she said, “and so weak.”
“And we can do something all those Sterries together can’t do,” he reminded her. “We can perpetuate our own kind.”
“What does it matter?” she asked. “Optimen never die.”
8.
Svengaard waited for night and checked the area through the observation screens in his office before going down to the vat room. In spite of the fact that this was his hospital and he had a perfect right here, he was conscious of doing a forbidden thing. The significance of the interview at Central hadn’t escaped him. The Optimen wouldn’t like this, but he had to look in that vat.
He paused in the darkness of the vat room, stood there near the door, realizing with a sense of detachment that he had never before been in here without the full blaze of lights. There were only the glow bulbs behind gauges and telltales now—faint dots and circles of luminescence by which to orient himself.
The thrap-thrap-thrap of viapumps created an odd contrapuntal rhythm which filled the gloom with a sense of urgency. Svengaard imagined all the embryos in there (twenty-one at the morning count) their cells reaching out, doubling and redoubling and re-redoubling in the strange ecstasy of growth—becoming unique, distinct, discrete individuals.
Not for them the contraceptive gas that permeated Folk breathing spaces. Not yet. Now, they could grow almost as their ancestors had grown before the genetic engineers.
Svengaard sniffed.
His nostrils, instinctively alerted by the darkness, sensed the amniotic saltiness of the air. From its odor, this room could almost have been a primal seashore with life burgeoning in its ooze.
Svengaard shuddered and reminded himself, I’m a sub-molecular engineer, a gene surgeon. There’s nothing strange here.
But the thought failed to convince him.
He pushed himself away from the door, headed down the line looking for the vat with the Durant embryo. In his mind lay the clear memory of what he had seen in that embryo—the intrusion that had flooded the cells with arginine. Intrusion. Where had it originated? Was Potter correct? Was it an unknown creator of stability? Stability… order… systems. Extended systems… infinite aspects of energy that left all matter insubstantial.
These suddenly were frightening thoughts here in the whispering gloom.
He stumbled against a low instrument stand, cursed softly. His stomach felt tight with the urgency of the viapumps and the real urgency in the fact that he had to finish here before the duty nurse made her hourly rounds.
An insect shape, shadow against shadows, stood out against the wall in front of him. He froze and it took a moment for him to recognize the familiar outlines of the meson microscope.
Svengaard turned to the luminous numbers on the vats—twelve, thirteen, fourteen… fifteen. Here it was. He checked the name on the tag, reading it in the glow of a gauge bulb: “Durant.”
Something about this embryo had the Optimen upset and Security in an uproar. His regular computer nurse was gone—where, nobody could say. The replacement walked like a man.
Svengaard wheeled out the microscope, moving gently in the darkness, positioned the instrument over the vat, made the connections by feel. The vat throbbed against his fingers. He rigged for scanning, bent to the viewer.
Up out of the swarming cellular mass came a hydrophilic gene segment. He centered on it, the darkness forgotten as he pushed his awareness into the scope-lighted field of the viewer. Meson probes slid down… down into the mitochondrial structure. He found the alpha-helices and began checking out polypeptide chains.
A puzzled frown creased his brow. He switched to another cell. Another,
The cells were low in arginine—he could see that. Thoughts brushed their way through his mind as he peered and hunted, How could the Durant embryo, of all embryos, be low on arginine? Any normal male would have more sperm protamine than this. How could the ADP-ATP exchange system carry no hint of Optiman? The cut wouldn’t make this much difference.
Abruptly, Svengaard sent his probes down into the sex identifiers, scanned the overlapping helices.