That’s what I’ve been worrying about, Valy. For a long “me there’s been something at the back of my mind, something buried and forgotten, and I can’t help feeling it has to do with mortics.”
Valinia smiled. “You’re crazy, Aubry.”
“Yes, I must be.”
“About me.”
“Mm.”
Valinia seized her partner possessively. Aubretia sighed gently and squeezed Valinia’s arm.
Aubretia followed her out of the room.
V
The weeks passed by smoothly, in a routine pattern, hazy and pleasurable. The world was kind and beautiful in its own unchanging way. The world was Valinia and beyond her was the rest of womankind, shadows against a mellow golden backdrop that was contemporary society. Life was a relationship between two people, and the relationship was warm and fruitful and reassuring. Even the morbid problem of mortic revenue clicked suddenly into a more comforting perspective, for she realized that control of death was just as logical as control of birth; indeed, the two were an intimately related function of the balanced state. And there was satisfaction in the thought that by a long term process of selection and elimination the human race itself would inevitably be improved, both physically and spiritually.
Then, one evening, the unexpected happened. Valinia had gone to Lon for three days on some vague government assignment, and Aubretia was alone in her apartment, missing the solace of her friend’s company, but making the best of what entertainment the video system had to offer. At nine o’clock the doorbell intoned a solemn chime.
Aubretia opened the door and found herself face to face with Aquilegia. There was no instant shock of recognition. She was initially aware of an albino face and dark subdued clothing, and it seemed to her that the face was familiar. It was a face that had impressed itself on her memory at some remote instant in time past.
“Aubry,” breathed the visitor. “Remember me?”
Aubretia stared for a few moments, her mind quite blank but racing wildly through patterns of recollection and association to no avail. Recognition was concealed behind an elusive dark barrier in the unexplored depths of her consciousness.
“I’m Aquilegia,” said the albino woman urgently. “I must come in.”
Aubretia stood aside, closing the door behind the intruder.
“Lock it, please.”
She locked the door, not understanding why, but fascinated by the pale waxen skin and the pink eyes of the other woman.
Aquilegia removed her drab gray cloak. The short white skirt she wore beneath was creased and dirty. The white lacquer that had covered her breasts had cracked and peeled here and there. Her hair was longer and more tangled than taste permitted. She looked like a hunted woman.
“Who did you say you are?” Aubretia asked.
Aguilegia’s eyes became morose and melancholy. “Then you don’t recognize me, Aubry. That’s what I was afraid of. They did a good job on you, didn’t they?”
Aubretia sat down, motioning her visitor to an adjacent chair. “Should I know you?” she enquired.
Aquilegia smiled ruefully. “We were lovers once, only a few months ago.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“Please believe me; it’s true. You don’t remember it be cause the memory has been erased from your mind. I warned you, long ago. There are ways and means — hypnotic techniques…”
Aubretia stroked her lips thoughtfully. “Nothing you say makes sense,” she murmured. “When did I know you, and where?”
“In Lon, about nine months ago. When you were Press Policy Officer in the Department of the Written Word.”
“No.” Aubretia shook her head slowly. “I never knew an albino. On the other hand, your name has a faintly familiar sound. Aquilegia.” She repeated the name two or three times, as if trying to pinpoint the phantom recollection that hovered in the deep shadows of her brain.
“You used to call me Quilly.”
No reaction.
“Why did you come here?” Aubretia asked.
Aquilegia sighed and leaned back in her chair. “It’s a long story, and I could do with a drink.”
“Ambrosia?”
“Fine, thanks. I’ll take it neat, Aubry.”
Aubretia produced a bottle of blue gin and two glasses. They drank in silence for a few minutes, studying each other covertly: Aubretia, clean and elegant and surrounded by an intangible aura of exquisite perfume, and Aquilegia, shabby and pale and wearied, bearing the marks of strain and deprivation.
“I have a confession to make,” Aquilegia said presently. “I’m not who I said I am. I’m not Aquilegia. But neither you nor anyone else could tell the difference.”
“Then who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I want you to think of me as Aquilegia. She and I are alike in every smallest detail, physically and mentally. You see, she was my parthenogentic twin.”
Aubretia pursed her lips and sipped her drink, but said nothing.
“As you know, Aubry, parthenogentic twins are identical. I knew about you and Quilly, and I knew she always had a high opinion of you. That’s why I came here.”
“You keep referring to this — this ‘Quilly’ in the past tense.”
“Because she’s dead. I thought that might mean something to you.”
Aubretia stood up and walked purposelessly around the room. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t know you and I don’t know your sister. I can’t understand why you came here or what I could possibly do for you.”
“Then let me refresh your memory,” Aquilegia said ominously.
“I am a scientist,” Aquilegia explained. “I work, or rather I worked for the Department of Biophysics. I used to be a trusted member of a secret government research unit, but I was also a member of a subversive organization. I worked in an underground laboratory on experimental cytology. Doing what? Simple enough, obvious enough, if you stop to think about it. I was trying to create a synthetic gamete with twenty-three chromosomes.
“You see the point, don’t you, Aubry? A gamete with twenty-three chromosomes is a male gamete, and you can use it to fertilize a twenty-four chromosome ovum and produce a male child. But it’s not so easy. The only living cells we have to deal with are female, and in five thousand years no one has ever succeeded in getting rid of the unwanted sex chromosome.
“And then the man arrived. You remember the man, don’t you, Aubry? The man they found inside the rocket that was buried in the polar ice cap. He was dead, of course; dead for more than five thousand years, but in deep freeze all that time. You ought to remember, because you were the one who tried to break the news of the man on the National Broadcast Network. Only it didn’t come off. Your news story never got any further than the memory banks in the news offices, and the Department of the Written Word cancelled it within seconds. And then they took you in for interrogation and questioning, Aubry. They stripped your mind bare of all it contained and they rebuilt it to their own specifications. They had nothing against you for they realized you weren’t one of the subversive group. But from you they learned about my sister. She disappeared the next day. She was passed to the Department of Mortic Revenue and she paid the tax in full.
“You’re beginning to understand, aren’t you, Aubry. They learned about Aquilegia from you, and they learned about me from her. I was one jump ahead. I managed to get away and I’ve been on the run ever since. That’s why I’ve come here — for refuge. I need help, and because of what Aquilegia was to you, I have the right to ask your help.
“You still don’t see the whole picture, do you? The man in deep freeze was the answer to the problem. I spent ten years in the secret laboratory making cytological tests on thousands and thousands of male remains, the majority no more than dehydrated skeletons. And then we found a man in a state of good preservation. He was dead, admittedly, but whole and undecayed, with a cellular structure giving for the first time a real chance of carrying out practical work on the chromosome structure of the cell nucleus.