Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Michael reached up and stroked her cheek, tweaked her nose playfully. “You were the first person in a long time who saw me, liked me, for what I was. You made me start liking myself the way I was, not for what I might be or should be. But then the residency started, and the compete, compete, compete, and the endless hours. I was judging myself by what they thought again—and I started judging you God knows how. Any which way, as long as you failed, so I’d be better than you.” Mike shrugged. “Real true confessions stuff, isn’t it?

  “When you up and left for the dig in Gowrie, and then went off to Africa, I suddenly realized I had really lost you. You weren’t coming back. I started worrying about you, off in the jungle, imagining all sorts of things that might happen to you. I worried that—that you might die. And I thought about how terrible that would be, how empty the world would be.” Mike stood up and crossed to the dresser on the other side of the room. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”

  Barbara got out of bed and went across the room to him. She threw her arms about him, felt the strength of being wrapped in his embrace. “It’s okay. I haven’t been the easiest person to deal with either. We take it from here, start over.”

  “Maybe there are other things we could make another try at,” Michael said. “Maybe we could try for children again. We didn’t have to give up quite so soon. You want to call the fertility clinic again, give it another shot?”

  Barbara looked up at his face, and thought she was going to cry. How could she tell him? “I’ve made an appointment already. For tomorrow.” He smiled, a beautiful, happy smile, and she buried her head in his chest so she would not have to see it. How could she do what she was going to do? But there was no other way.

  They made love that night, fierce, intense, gentle love, as if for the first and last time.

  <>

  The deeds, the acts themselves, were easy. She had no appointment, of course. What she had was a forged prescription, scribbled out on a sheet stolen from Michael’s prescription pad.

  She drove over to the hospital, parked, crossed the street, went inside, doing each of those routine, automatic things with preternatural care, watching over her own movements as if each was something special.

  She knew exactly where she was going. She had been there often enough. She knew where in the hospital the clinic was, which was the only comfortable chair in the waiting room, what station the duty nurse played on her desk radio. She had learned all about that place in the course of her unsuccessful struggle for a baby.

  The bored nurse took the prescription from her and headed back toward the freezer. Barbara knew just how long it would take her to get back. It should be enough time to get the other things she needed. Heart pounding, trying to watch behind herself every step of the way, she slipped into an empty exam room and scooped up the instruments she’d need. In thirty seconds, she had what she was after, and was back waiting for the nurse at the counter. Finally, the nurse returned with the small, cold package from the freezer, wrapped in insulation. Barbara was outside, on the street, in ten minutes, driving toward Saint E’s. No problem.

  Barbara had charted and timed her scheme carefully. The moment for the thing was right that same night. Even so, it would require some luck. Barbara knew the procedure by heart, through her own difficult experience. The sedative for the patient was easy to come by. No problem, she kept telling herself. Barbara felt a strange, dreamlike detachment as she worked, a comforting fog of unreality that settled over her and made the task seem less bizarre because it was not real.

  A half-hour’s work, and the job was done.

  Barbara left Saint Elizabeth’s quietly, unobtrusively, struggling to hold onto the fragile new composure she had built for herself. She wanted to cry, to scream, to confess, to vomit, but she refused to let herself. There was no turning back. If it failed this time, she would try again. And again.

  For there was no other way.

  <>

  Three weeks later, in the midst of giving Thursday her routine weekly physical, Mike noticed a few strange things about his patient, and ran some tests. He couldn’t believe the results.

  She was pregnant.

  April

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “You can just sit there and placidly admit you did it? A month or so back, I was arguing on the other side of the point, Barbara. But Jesus, why the hell shouldn’t they lock you up?” Rupert paced back and forth across the floor of the Digger’s Pit, the overcrowded office at the Natural History Museum where he had first seen Ambrose, where this whole insane thing had started for him. Livingston, Michael, and Dr. Grossington sat and leaned against various chairs and desks in the room. From the window, the sounds of wet-rubbered tires on slick streets hissed into the room from the rainy night.

  Barbara sat placidly at her desk, unperturbed by their anger. It seemed to her as if nothing could ever reach her, bother her, upset her again. The four of them had burst in on her while she was clearing up some paperwork. She had expected them to find out eventually. It was almost a relief that the waiting was over. Calmly, smoothly, she collected the papers into a tidy stack, slipped them into a folder, and dropped the folder into her out tray. She had found the courage to commit, and admit, the ultimate transgression, the ultimate sin. Nothing should frighten her anymore. She knew that she was lying to herself, that her mind was whirling and her hands were trembling, but she needed the lies to hold herself together. “Who knows?” she asked, staring with calm fixity at the desk top.

  Rupert stopped and glared at her. “What the hell do you mean, who knows?”

  “Michael told you.” She turned to her husband. “Who else? Who else did you tell?”

  “Livingston, Dr. Grossington, Rupert. That’s it, so far,” Michael answered, his voice hard and far off. No one spoke. “The fucking fertility ward,” Michael said at last. “The one we used. That’s it, isn’t it? You got the semen from my own damn hospital, right? It’s not enough that the damn ape is pregnant, not enough that it has to be by a human because she’s menstruated twice since she’s been here, but you had to do it out of my hospital. Any idea who the daddy is?” he asked sarcastically.

  She still did not look up, still stared at the blank center of the desk blotter. “You are,” she said in a small, still voice. Inside herself, it felt as if the world were whirling away from her, the last hopes thrown away. “You are.”

  “ME?” Michael screamed out. He lunged across the room for her, and Livingston almost couldn’t grab him in time, caught him just a step or two from Barbara. It took all Livingston’s strength to hold him back. “Me? You’ve made me the father of an ape?” He strained against Livingston’s grasp, leaned his face as close to Barbara as he could. She forced herself to look at him. Sweat sprang out on his forehead, and his eyes were wide and wild with anger. “This is going to be the child I’ve always wanted? You monster.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m truly, desperately sorry, but I needed to give them a registry number—and yours was the only one I knew! After all—” she broke down suddenly, at last, crying and laughing at same time “—where’s a woman going to get hold of sperm by herself?” She felt the tears flowing and fumbled in a drawer for a Kleenex. “It’s funny when you think of it. Isn’t it?” She collapsed into full-blown sobs. Finally, the tears subsided.

  “Let go of me, Livingston,” Michael said quietly. He sounded back in control, but Livingston hesitated for a moment. “Let go.”

  Liv released him, and Michael stood over Barbara. “Right now I want to do something I swore I’d never do—I want to strike you, hit you. I don’t even think anyone here would stop me. You deserve it. But I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do anything, but walk away from you and your sickness. I don’t want to get myself any dirtier by touching you or your work or your damn ape again.” He stood over her, and Livingston thought for a moment that he was going to hit her. “Everyone always thought I was the one with troubles, that I was the sick one. B
ut God and Jesus, now look. Now look. Goodbye, Barbara.”

  Barbara stared down at the desk, unable to took at him this time. He turned and left the room.

  No one spoke for a long time.

  Jeffery Grossington shifted himself uncomfortably in the hard wooden chair he found himself in. “Barbara, what in God’s name possessed you to do such a mad thing?” he demanded. “How could you—you pervert Michael, pervert yourself, pervert Thursday this way? How could you breed humans with beasts?”

  “Because, Jeffery. Because I care about human beings, and what happens to them.”

  “Yeah, what happens when you crossbreed them with animals,” Rupert said. “Jesus, Barbara.”

  “I did it because I didn’t want slavery back. You said it yourself, Liv, when you told us about the DNA comparisons. She is human—and there’s no better way to prove it than what I’ve done.”

  “But what the hell does that have to do with slavery?” Livingston demanded.

  “Have you read what Lowell is doing?” Barbara asked quietly. “Have you read about his setting up a camp for the boiseans?” she asked. “A camp with barbed wire fences and surveillance TV and dormitory barracks. He expects to have twenty boiseans, or whatever the damn word is, there by summer. He’s laying plans for a breeding stock. There’s another research team being set up in England, and another in Germany. Both of them will want captive boiseans to study. The British team plans to focus on seeing how educable, how trainable they are. Some of the scientists involved are already speculating about using them for manual labor, drudge work. Someone’s even worked out hypothetical formulae for price points. I saw it in a supposedly tongue-in-cheek article in the Wall Street Journal. They’re kidding about it now, but it’s on their minds. One day they’ll think about it seriously.” She looked up, finally, at all of them. “Don’t you get it? Price points, based on importation or breeding costs, training required, health maintenance costs, warranties, novelty value. The bastards want them for slaves.”

  “Damn it, Barb, we’ve been through this,” Livingston objected. “You have to be a person before you can be a slave—or are you calling every domestic animal on earth a slave, too?”

  “Stop and think about, Liv. Animals can’t do human work. Thursday can. Think about what will happen if we just slide into sharing the world with subhumans. Imagine migrant workers losing their jobs to boisean slaves. With a lot of training, with a lot of good, harsh beatings to punish mistakes, maybe Thursday could learn to be a janitor, or even an assembly line worker. Is that like any other domestic animal? But how could they be slaves, if they’re animals? Can you really believe that?!

  “Are you ready for anti-boisean riots ten years from now? And what will people think of work twenty years from now if it’s something slaves do? Liv, Rupe, you saw what the Utaani were like. Do you want our society to have those attitudes?”

  Barbara could feel her heart pounding, her body trembling with reaction and emotion. “And did you ever think about how those earlier ‘intrusions’ of human genes happened? You can bet they weren’t through artificial insemination. Think about it. Could there be anything more degrading than that? It’d make normal pimping and whoring seem downright wholesome by comparison. This won’t be the first hybrid born—but you can bet your ass it won’t be the last unless we do something.

  “The world needs a shock, something to make it sit up and think about this—before we all just slide down into a horrible social disaster without even noticing. This mess is our responsibility. We have to provide that shock, and I can’t think of any other way to do it besides what I’ve done. We, the people in this room right now, have the chance to decide what the world will be like from now on. This is the time, this is the place, and we are the people. I’m not going to be the one who let them crowd these creatures into concentration camps in the name of science, or set them loose to insult honest work and bring back the nightmare that’s in the back of every black person’s soul. Do any of you want to go down in history that way?” Barbara stopped, and sat back down. She took a deep breath, and ran a hand over her hair, trying to smooth it down. “I honestly wish we had never found Thursday. But we did, and we have to deal with the fact. And that one poor unborn child is the best chance we’ve got for a decent future.”

  “Barb,” said Livingston, “you don’t know that the boiseans will be made slaves, and even if that might happen, you can’t be sure that this birth, this stunt, could prevent it. This is a terrible, terrible crime—is it worth it just in case it might stop a hypothetical crime later on?”

  “Oh, slavery will happen, don’t you worry about that. Because if the boiseans aren’t human, they are animals, and animals can’t be slaves, just like you say. Anyone in the country or around the world who needs cheap labor could figure out that loophole. And if it’s legal, it’ll happen, believe me. So the question is, do you want slavery legal again, Livingston?” Barbara asked, venom in her voice. “Do you want to live in a world where it’s okay to buy a hominid, legal to work the creature to death, or to torture it, or to run experiments too dangerous for ‘real’ people on it?” She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a slim volume. “And slavery isn’t just bad for the slaves, Liv. Aunt Josephine mailed me the original of Zebulon’s journal a while back. It was something in the journal that decided me I had to do this thing. Listen to it.”

  <>

  . . . I was never beaten out of anger, but in a skilled, calm, scientific manner, nicely calculated to produced the desired results—as a blacksmith might pound a horseshoe on an anvil, bending the iron to his will without anger or emotion, without a thought that the metal he worked upon could possibly feel pain or fear or want. . .

  Better the furious punishment of an enraged Master than a calm man methodically forming a tool to suit his needs. Our Masters treated us not as men and women, not even as dumb creatures, but as objects, tools to be used up, patched up if it seemed worthwhile, but otherwise discarded without a care or thought. . . . How crippling to the heart and soul for a young white child to be raised and trained and schooled to believe that a human being could be less than an animal. How vile, to force oneself to believe that pain did not hurt, that cruelty was blameless. How evil to learn—and then to teach—the techniques of stripping a fellow man of all dignity. . . . How horrible to know at the back of one’s mind that all one’s wealth, all one’s peace and prosperity, had its foundations set on Blood, on the Lash, on barbarity carefully hidden from view beneath the most elaborate civility and courtliness. Guilt hung like a heavy, funereal shroud over the white man’s plantation.”

  <>

  She closed the book and put it away. “Do you want to live in a world like that one, the one your ancestors lived in? Do you want to live like one of the white men, the slavers in that world? Do you want to explain to your child why it was wrong that we used to be slaves, but go ahead and beat the boisean if you feel like it? Do you want to raise your child to think a creature that walks like us, looks like us, can talk with us if we teach it to, is an animal? Do you want to let him loose on a playground with kids who’ll notice he’s the same color as the boiseans? What would that alone do to black people?”

  She stood up and looked at each of them in turn. “Have any of you thought about the corrosive, degrading effect on society, on the world, on each of us, if we hold an inferior human race in bondage?”

  No one spoke.

  “If Thursday is an dumb animal, then so are all of us!” Barbara almost shouted. “Her kind is so close, so frighteningly close to ours. It’s just the littlest bits of DNA, one or two molecules built that way instead of this, that keeps us from being shambling, inarticulate, language-less, bipedal apes that can just about figure out how to dig with pointed sticks, who have trouble making sentences. One or two tiny gene changes, and our species would be like her—we were like her, not so very long ago.”

  “But Thursday is not a human being,” Grossington said. “She is not a person.”
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  “Prove it,” Barbara said. “Point to the part of yourself that makes you a person, and I’ll look and see if it’s missing on Thursday.”

  “How can you point to a man’s soul?” Grossington demanded.

  “You can’t. But before you tell me it won’t matter if her kind are treated like soulless, expendable robots for our dangerous work and experiments, first you prove to me she doesn’t have a soul. She might not be a human being, but I know she’s got a soul.”

  “Come on, Barb,” Rupert asked. “How do you know? Have you touched it?”

  “No, but it’s touched me,” Barbara snapped. “I know she’s got a kind heart, know she can love, and talk, and break the rules and try to get away with it. I know she loves me, trusts me. Trusted me when I promised her she’d never be a slave. She’s been a slave all her life, no question about it, and she’s just beginning to learn how to be free. I wasn’t going to let her turn back to slavery.”

  “So you made her a mother, instead,” Rupert said.

  “If we can breed together, then we are the same kind of creature. That’s the definition of a species,” Livingston said quietly. “And we then have the choice between saying that we are animals or that the boiseans are human. Neither choice is terribly pretty, but I think I’d like to go on being human. If there are consequences to that, okay, I’ll pay the price. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”

  Barbara looked her cousin in the eye and smiled sadly. “Thank you, Liv.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I’ll accept Thursday as human only if it’s a choice between that and my being an animal. But never mind that for the moment. Tell me something else: Why? Why did you do it?”