There was another silence.
‘I can’t believe they all revert,’ I said.
Careful, Jo, warned homunculus, she’s a fruitcake. It needn’t have worried, she continued as though I hadn’t spoken.
‘That’s why I believe.’ she said, ‘that the time has come for women to find a completely new basis for their relationship with men. One genuinely based on equality.’
‘Dr Kent. what have you been doing to me?’ I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Why am I here. You must tell me.’
‘You must trust me.’
As I looked back at her, I found myself actually wanting to.
I said, ‘I don’t think I can bear much more of this.’
‘I’m going to leave you with some sleeping pills tonight, in case you can’t sleep.’
‘I don’t want any more drugs.’
‘I’ll leave them with you anyway. It will be your choice.’
*
I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, new thoughts, new possibilities grew behind them. What had she been doing—above all to me?
My worst fear was that she’d replaced eggs in me. But she’d told me the day before she hadn’t and I’d believed her.
I had the impression that she always told the truth where possible. And even if she had implanted eggs, why did she keep scanning me? It takes at least two weeks before pregnancy can be confirmed, either by scanning or urine analysis, and I simply hadn’t been here long enough.
Can you be sure of that? asked homunculus.
Not sure, no, but I didn’t think so.
Was she planning to replace eggs at a later date?
Whatever it was, she was clearly insane and I hoped desperately that Tom and Marcus would find me soon.
But would they? Yes, because it’s virtually impossible to hide in this country for any length of time, there are too many nosy people. But are you still in this country?
I realised that I could be anywhere…anywhere.
I took the sleeping pills and tried to read more of Tess while I waited for them to work.
*
I didn’t waken until she came to examine and scan me the next morning. I was uncomfortable, still half asleep, and wished she’d just go away. As soon as she had gone, I used the chamber pot and drank the coffee, and ached for a cigarette.
Breakfast didn’t appeal and even the bath left me feeling scratchy and irritable. Back in my room, the day stretched drearily ahead and I was at a complete loss to know what to do when the key rattled and she came in.
‘Come and sit down, Miss Farewell.’ There was something different about her. Yesterday, she’d been unsure of herself at times, veering between diffidence and certainty; now her self-confidence overflowed, she was almost—triumphant.
‘I’m going to complete the story I began telling you yesterday.’
24
Are you sitting comfortably? homunculus drolly enquired. ‘With my aunt’s help,’ Dr Kent began, ‘I escaped to medical school in Liverpool, where I devoted myself to my studies and tried to forget the past. I qualified as a doctor in the early sixties and specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology. As part of my fellowship training. I worked for a period in a community clinic where I saw things that brought my past back all too clearly.’ Her voice became slower, her eyes faraway. ‘Women beaten in the final stages of pregnancy because they didn’t want sexual intercourse. Women with prolapses brought about by the way they were forced to work before and after childbirth. Women enduring hell from violent, drunken husbands. Women used up before they were thirty.’
‘It’s not like that anymore,’ I said feebly.
‘Oh, where have you been living for goodness’ sake?’ she snapped. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said with a little smile, ‘Latchvale. Middle England, middle class.’ The smile faded and she continued, more quickly, ‘I thought at first that education and contraception were the answers, and to that end, started a self-help group for women in that position. It was a success and we did some very good work, but after a while, I found myself dissatisfied and wanting to make a more significant contribution. Self-help groups, useful though they are, are merely palliatives. I had to do something to change the basic attitudes that have perpetuated the subjugation of women. To do this, I had to become a consultant.’ She sighed. ‘This took time and a great deal of effort, but eventually, I succeeded. Once established, I began to make changes in the way obstetrics was practised to make it…more user friendly, shall we say? My male colleagues took a dim view of this and began trying to discredit my methods and undermine my position. Then, one of my patients unfortunately died, a case was trumped up against me and I was suspended pending enquiry.’
‘What did she die of?’ I asked.
‘Eclampsia. The enquiry mostly absolved me’ (mostly?) ‘but I was told privately that there was no future for me in that hospital. As a sop, I was offered a job in another hospital, at the newly created fertility clinic.’ She smiled, reminiscently. ‘Curiously, this was perhaps the happiest period of my life. I became an acknowledged expert in fertility techniques and, although I wasn’t directly involved, no one cheered louder than me when Louise Brown was born in 1978.’
Fleetingly, I remembered Professor Fulbourn’s reference to this, about a hundred years earlier.
‘Then, in 1982, I was approached by a homosexual woman who was desperate for a baby, but for whom the thought of sexual intercourse was anathema. After interviewing her, I saw no reason why she shouldn’t make an excellent parent and arranged for her to have donor insemination. Others followed. Homosexual women with blocked tubes were referred to me and I arranged for them to have IVF. Then, one of the homosexual women I had helped was charged with abusing and killing her son. It transpired that she had a rare form of schizophrenia, undetectable when I interviewed her, which led to the tragedy. Once again, the Male Medical Mafia struck, and I was suspended pending enquiry. I took sabbatical leave and went to America, to stay with Carla Goldberg, whom I already knew slightly. She was at that time a researcher at a fertility clinic in Baltimore. We discovered that we had a great deal in common.’
She paused and studied me for a moment. When she began speaking again, it was as though she was delivering a lecture, an incantation, something she’d gone over time and again.
‘It has become almost a cliché that men cause all the misery and suffering in the world through their ridiculous need to compete and the violence that springs from it, while women have to endure and repair; but clichés tend to become clichés because they are apposite.’
‘I thought that men competed in order for the species to evolve.’ I felt I had to keep up a presence in order not to be swamped by her.
‘Now that we have a stable environment, that function is redundant.’ She leant forward. ‘Throughout recorded history, the Genesis theory has been accepted and it has been assumed that women are an offshoot of man, merely the means by which he reproduces himself. Men have been able to impose this spurious philosophy through their superior size and strength, and their willingness to use them.’ She took a breath and released it. ‘Science and logic have now turned this theory on its head. Science has proved that in terms of the multi-celled animal, it the female form that is the basic form, and the male which is an offshoot, evolved solely for the purpose of genetic variability. This perhaps goes some way to explaining why women live longer than men and are less prone to genetic disorders.’
‘You could well be right, Dr Kent,’ I said. ‘But what possible relevance does it have for human beings today?’
‘Every relevance. It is the female who provides the material for existence, the ovum, the womb, the sustenance. The male is a parasite on the female; all he provides is a half-complement of genes.’
‘Isn’t that rather an essential “all”?’
‘Men cannot possibly reproduce without women. Women, in theory at least, can reproduce without men.’
There was a silence and I felt suddenly very tired.
‘Is this some kind of weird plot to get rid of men, Dr Kent?’
‘No. I don’t wish to harm men in any way. All I wish is to give women the choice as to whether or not they allow men into their lives.’
‘Surely, that choice already exists.’
‘It does not and will not until women have the power, the right, to procreate without men. Then and only then will they be able to make that choice.’
I had already seen where this was leading and was sick to my soul. I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘It’s not possible. It’s been tried with animals and it hasn’t worked.’
‘On the contrary, it is possible. Frogs and toads were successfully cloned a long time ago, and more recently, so have sheep.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Not only is it possible, Miss Farewell,’ she bit off the words, poking her head at me, ‘but it happened in nature long before it was ever brought about in the laboratory.’ She took another deep breath and moderated her tone. ‘Some creatures, a fish known as the Amazon Molly, for instance, have dispensed with the male altogether and reverted to asexuality, to cloning if you like, because their environment has become stable and there is no longer any need for biological variety. The same applies to the rest of life—we go on using sex out of biological habit. We are trapped by it.’
‘Some creatures may have changed genetically in nature,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘but to bring it about in the laboratory is not right, not natural.’
‘The very fact that we are here at all is not natural. Humans have used genetic manipulation ever since they discovered the mutant strains of grass we now call wheat. We rely on technology to feed, clothe and keep ourselves alive, so why should we not use it to enhance ourselves?’
‘Because it’s not natural,’ my voice rose to a squeak. ‘If you push nature too hard, it hits back.’
‘Really? Well, it seems to me that we’ve pushed nature a long way already and we’re five billion and growing.’
‘Just what have you been doing, Dr Kent?’ I demanded.
‘I will tell you. Carla and I quickly discovered that we had been thinking along the same lines and we formed a group whose aim was to enable women to reproduce without men. Carla had already done some clandestine research, but had realised she needed a much larger pool of subjects, the size of pool coming to a fertility clinic, for instance. Although Carla did have some money of her own, it wasn’t enough for us to start our own clinic, so we contented ourselves with experiments in the laboratory, and on eggs from each other.
‘Then my father died. He had sold Catcott Manor to National Heritage and then leased it back for a period to cover his lifetime. I inherited all his money and the remaining five years of the lease. National Heritage wanted to buy me out, and I was about to sell when it occurred to us that it was just the sort of site we needed. It was also a form of poetic justice. It took us nearly a year to set it up, equip it and pass inspection. We decided we would experiment on suitable patients once only before using conventional treatment for the next cycle. Carla had already performed experiments stimulating the human ovum to start replicating on its own without any sperm, so this is what we did first.’
‘Stimulated DNA,’ I breathed.
‘As you say. These experiments ultimately didn’t work. We grew viable embryos in vitro to the four-cell stage and replaced them. They would embed in the womb and grow, but there were problems with the forming of the placenta which led to early spontaneous abortion. We were not entirely surprised, and had besides always been aware of the dangers of a diminishing gene pool, which would have led eventually to recessive gene disorders.’
‘How many women did you do this to?’ I asked in a hushed voice.
‘About twenty.’
‘And they never realised?’
‘No. Many of them became pregnant in a later cycle of conventional treatment, so they had nothing to complain about.’
‘That’s outrageous—’ I began, but she overrode me.
‘By this time, we had our first microinjection equipment, so we tried cloning proper. We would take an unfertilised egg, remove the haploid nucleus, which contains only half the human complement of chromosomes and replace it with the nucleus from a diploid cell, which contains the full complement of forty-six chromosomes.’
‘Replaced DNA. Did it work?’
‘Yes, eventually, although only if egg and nucleus came from the same person and were replaced in that person.’
‘So you’re saying that a cloned human being is actually in existence?’
‘Not as yet, although the mother is pregnant. And you needn’t say it so reprovingly. An identical twin is a cloned human being, and we don’t regard them as freaks.’
‘But they occur naturally.’
‘When it became obvious that we could make this work, we moved on to our third project.’
The words Nuclear DNA flashed in my brain, but I was past speaking. I stared at her in sick fascination.
‘There is nothing remarkable or magic about the male set of haploid chromosomes other than the possession of the Y chromosome, which codes for another male in approximately half the sets. There is no reason why a haploid set from one female egg should not integrate with the haploid set from another thus also ensuring genetic variability. The only difference would be that all the resulting offspring would be female. The problem was getting the two haploid sets to integrate. Whole nuclei didn’t work, so we had to disrupt the nuclear membrane of the donor nucleus before injecting it into the recipient, not easy, even with an operator as skilled as Chrystal. I won’t go into all the experimental detail, but we did eventually succeed in getting the nuclei to fuse and form an embryo.’
She seemed now to be staring past my shoulder, as though telling the story to someone behind me.
‘We then tried implanting the embryos at different stages of development, but none of them grew in vitro.’
I relaxed a little at this, although it was obvious they were going to try some kind of experiment on me.
‘Why me?’ I asked.
She started slightly as though becoming aware of my existence again. ‘Because we then tried a novel procedure. Nobody can be sure why the GIFT procedure, placing egg and sperm together in the Fallopian tube, should work any better than placing an embryo in the womb, but sometimes it does. So we tried the same with freshly microinjected eggs, replacing them in the tubes in the same operation. It has achieved one pregnancy, a pregnancy that went to three months.’
‘Denny,’ I whispered…
‘Indeed, which is why we broke our rule with her, and tried again.’
‘Is that what you’ve done to me?’
‘Yes. We replaced six DNA microinjected eggs in your tubes, within two hours of taking them from your ovaries.’
‘It won’t work…it can’t work…’
‘It has worked.’
‘You can’t possibly know that.’ I found a straw and clung to it. ‘It takes at least two weeks to confirm. You can’t possibly—’
‘You’re forgetting the Colour Flow Doppler scanning equipment you showed such an interest in at the clinic. Last Wednesday, at the manor, I detected two poly-celled embryos in your tubes. One of these has embedded in your womb and has now formed its own blood supply. You’re pregnant, Miss Farewell, a pregnancy that will make history. With DNA from an egg donated by me.’
25
She’s put you in the family way…homunculus said, and watched as I launched myself at her. I caught her completely by surprise, the look of astonishment on her face would have been comical in any other situation. She just had time for one gurgle before my thumbs pressed into her windpipe and I felt a surge of primeval joy. I was going to kill her.
Her hands fumbled at my wrists, then, with surprising speed, her fingers jabbed into my eyes and my own hands flew up to them.
‘Calvin!’ she screeched, ‘Calvin!’
We struggled, then Cal’s fi
ngers dug into my upper arms, paralysing them. I let go and was lifted bodily away from her. I shouted, screamed, struggled—God, he was strong.
‘Shuddup,’ he said in my ear, ‘or I’ll really hurt you.’ His breath stank of garlic. I let myself go limp.
Dr Kent was dark-faced and coughing. She struggled out of the chair.
‘That was a very stupid thing to do.’ Her voice came out as a croak.
I shouted at her, ‘If I can’t kill you, then I’ll kill myself.’
‘You will not.’
‘You’ve raped me,’ I screamed. ‘You’re no better than your father.’
She smacked the side of my face with all her might. I would have collapsed but for Cal holding me up.
I raised my head and looked at her but didn’t say anything.
My cheek stung abominably and I knew if I said another word, she’d hit me again. She stared back, challenging me.
At last she said. ‘Do you want sedation?’ It was a serious question. Her voice wasn’t so croaky now.
‘No.’ I gulped. ‘I just want to left alone.’
To my surprise, she said, ‘Yes, that might be best for now.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I meant what I said earlier, I mean you no harm. Whatever the outcome, if you co-operate, you’ll be released afterwards, if that’s what you want. D’you understand?’
I nodded dumbly.
‘Let her go, Calvin.’
I swayed, but remained upright.
‘Within reason. I’ll discuss any aspect with you, help you in any way I can, provided you co-operate.’
‘Can I sit down?’
‘Of course.’
I sat down on the side of the bed.
‘I’ll leave you now, although I shall look in at intervals to make sure you don’t try anything stupid.’ She glanced round the room. ‘Not that you have much scope here.’ She cleared her throat again. ‘Try to come to terms with this. I’m available if you need to talk. All right?’
‘All right.’ I just wanted her to go.
Deliver Them From Evil Page 18
