Otherness (28 page)

The clash was fundamental. On one side an organ had been modified by premier industrial technicians and was now setting up to execute complex designer chemistry. At the same time, however, out from under her other arm protruded its conservative twin. Responding to pregnancy hormones, that breast was happily creating archaic precursors to next-to-useless fluids, screwing with her brain, making her imagine impossible things.

Though Io tried to hide her discomfort, her agent noticed as he performed her weekly checkup.

"I warned you against leaving one tit in natch-state," Joey reminded her while taking color readings and sonograms of each gland. "Here I get you a bid to produce a really choice secondary product, Mobil's latest lubricant for high-torque tools, and you insist on setting up at only half capacity! You know what that does to your rep, Io? It
advertises
that you aren't serious about going full-time pro. What am I to do with you?"

Io put her textbook aside. "You'll let me do it my way, Joey. That's what. Anyway, I'll be producing with my left breast, also."

"Producing what? Colostrum and homosap milk? What'll we do with that, make cheese? Have you seen the latest futures? With birthrates down again, they're a glut on the market!"

"They won't be when I deliver," she assured him. "Trust me."

The General Diagnostics surropreg monitor buzzed a reassuring, complacent sound where it would have blared for bad news. Pushing back a wisp of thinning blond hair, Io's agent tore free a printout of her checkup results, while still muttering irritably. "Trust me, she says! What are you doing, Io, reciting my lines? I'm the one who's supposed to say 'trust me.' You? You're supposed to say, 'Oh, Joey, I don't know what I'd ever do without you.'"

"That's what I like about you, Joey. You're even more old-fashioned than I am."

As if to confirm it, and apparently unaware of the irony, Joey put on archaic eye-spectacles to scan the test results. "You call it old-fashioned to retire on me, just when we've got that body of yours tuned to premium capacity? Whatever happened to the work ethic?"

"I
want
to work," Io affirmed as she craned to read the chart for herself. "I just want to move up to a more demanding job."

As expected, everything was nominal. Io took care of her body. She picked up her blouse. "So can I button up now? Or are you getting turned on by preggirls these days?"

"Sarcastic too. Just for that I won't tell you what I think you're carrying. You can find out on delivery day. Get dressed and out of here, Io."

One of Io's classes had recently covered status bluffing, so she wasn't drawn in by Joey's bait. Obviously he had no more idea what Technique Zaire had planted in her womb than she did. "You probably let them hire me to make a traffic cop," she sallied, reaching for her book and jacket.

"Smart-ass. Just be on time for your next checkup. And stay out of trouble. If your left tit makes you think any more weird thoughts, just remind yourself that toasters don't suckle; neither do traffic cops. And human milk fetches less than threepence a gram."

"Five," she said as she turned the antique doorknob. "You'll see, Joey. Five cents a gram, or I go back to knitting."

"Hah. That'll be the day."

But Io knew the price had to go up. It was just one reason for leaving her left mammary gland alone, no matter what unlikely illusions its archaic secretions sent churning through her head.

Some of her courses were clearly relevant to her chosen future profession. In other cases the applicability seemed less clear. Io had to fight ennui as her Industrial Reproduction lecturer droned on, covering stuff Io had learned way back during her apprenticeship in the egg trade.

". . . Until the 1980's," the elderly woman academic propounded at the front of the hall, "some still imagined that cloning human beings would be as simple as cloning, say, frogs. In theory all you had to do was replace the twenty-three chromosomes in the nucleus of a woman's ovum with a complete set of forty-six from, say, one of her skin cells. Implant this 'autofertilized egg' and nine months later you get a baby genetically identical to the donor. Voil'a.

"Then we found out just how different mammals really are from frogs. For it seems that, during conception, human sperm does more than just deliver twenty-three chromosomes to match the mother's contribution. It actually
preconditions
certain of those genes to leap into action during the critical moments after fertilization. These genes are activated only if delivered in a sperm. Similarly, other genes express working enzymes only if they originated in an egg. . . ."

A sudden throbbing from Io's bracelet told her of a message coming in. Normally, she would store it for later. But with the lecturer going on about ancient history, she felt safe to take a look. Carefully tuning down the brightness of her old communicator, she pressed the Read button and aimed the tiny holographic image onto her lap.

HAMPSTEAD TRAVEL AGENCY SPESHALIZES IN TOURS SPESHALLY SET UP FOR PIECEWORKERS.

The glowing letters were not an advertisement. Obviously, they were part of a message from Perseph. And Io knew it amounted to something of an ultimatum.

Io pressed the button again; another row of letters replaced the first.

TRIP ALL SET UP FOR YOUR TERM BREAK, SO SCHOOLS NO EXCUSE. NOR YOUR 'JOB.' YOU CANT CASH MORE VOUCHERS, SO COME ON!

Perseph was right. Io's own piecework delivery wasn't due for another six weeks or so. Also, the law limited how many travel vouchers one could exchange for cash, so her most recent one would go to waste if she didn't use it. Of course, Io's abdominal distension was already greater than most placental freelancers like Perseph ever reached, so walking long distances was out of the question. But Perseph had covered that excuse, too.

I really could do with a trip
, Io told herself.

Yet the idea left her uneasy. Her friendship with Perseph had begun in the back alleys of Liverpool when they were only girls, taking turns guarding each other's ration books, teaming up killing rats for bounty money. Still, their drift apart may have been foreordained from the beginning.

Once, she had hoped to draw her best friend into sharing her own enthusiasms—her ambitions for higher things. But each wistful attempt only served to anger Perseph. She inevitably misunderstood, assuming Io was putting on airs.

For her part, Perseph seemed as anxious in her own way to salvage something between them. That meant getting Io involved in the activities of her guildmates and her born social class.

Well
, Io thought.
If she can't or won't join me, I can still join her. At least this time
.

Suddenly the lights in the lecture hall dimmed as the lecturer began showing slides. Io hurriedly tuned down the brightness of her wrist projector.

". . . as you can see," the speaker enunciated as a holographic image took shape at the front of the auditorium. "If we try to clone a mouse
without
any sperm-preconditioned genes, what we get is a queerly warped embryo, one that dies quite soon in the womb because the
placenta
never gets started.

"Alternatively, when an egg is prepared using
only
genes taken from sperm nuclei, something radically different happens." The image in the tank shifted again. This time there was no embryo at all, only a tangled, exaggerated mass of folded fibers easily recognizable to anyone familiar with the modern filter trade.

". . . so while both the mother's and father's genes are equal in the final makeup of any infant mammal, at the beginning it is genes from the mother's egg that control how the embryo starts development, while genes from the sperm take charge of setting up the placenta, that organ lacking in fish or reptiles, whose complex organic filtration chemistry nourishes the mammalian fetus to term. . . ."

The same old stuff . . . Io pressed again to read the rest of Perseph's message.

COME, IO. JUST FOR THE FIRST WEEK. THAT'S ALL. YOU NEED THIS. PERS KNOWS WHAT YOU NEED.

The letters seemed to blur for a moment, and Io knew no flaw in her aged watchcom was at fault. She wiped her eyes while the lecturer's voice reverberated.

"At first this news, while astonishing, was of little interest outside the halls of science. Certain fanatical feminists were disappointed to learn that men weren't quite as nonessential as they'd hoped, but to most of the rest of humanity it seemed just another interesting fact of nature.

"Scarcely anyone guessed the long-range importance of this discovery, or its potential industrial applications. . . ."

Io touched the face of her watch. In rapid pulses she silently tapped out Perseph's private access code.

I'LL COME. AT LEAST PARTWAY. THANKS, PERS. YOU'RE A TRUE FRIEND.—IO.

True to its reputation, the travel agency set them up on a tour requiring no walking at all. It was a party train bound over the arctic, from Oslo via upper Norway and across the great fairy bridges spanning from the Faeroes to Iceland to Greenland to Labrador. It was a December journey into the heart of winter, a trek across a desert as romantic and empty as anything to be found anymore on the surface of overcrowded Earth.

Twin superconducting rails, hanging parallel two hundred meters above the frozen waves of tundra, looked like beaded strings of drawn dew that began in nothingness behind them and speared ahead to parallax union in the pure blackness ahead. Only the rhythmically reappearing pylons—lonely, slender stalks planted kilometers apart—reminded the passengers that there was any link at all with the death-gray ground.

Io, to be frank, preferred sunshine. But when Perseph showed her the tickets, Io had forced a smile and outward show of enthusiasm. After all, she could debark at Iceland or Greenland and still have enough vouchers left for a week in the Canaries.

Anyway, someone had once told her that aesthetic appreciation, while not exactly required for the certificate she sought, couldn't really hurt an applicant. So it was that Io found herself spending hours in the train's observation dome, watching and slowly learning to admire the daunting desolation.

Overhead auroras shaped ever-changing draperies of shimmering blue and yellow gauze, or—if one preferred—rippling currents of diffuse oxygen atoms, ionized by the sun's electric wind, sheeting along lines of magnetic force. Now and again those gaudy curtains would part unpredictably and reveal a slowly wheeling tableau of bitter-bright constellations, familiar, yet filled with eerie portent in this chilly, alien setting.

The caribou herds had long ago departed south for the season, along with a more mundane breed of tourist. During wintertime completely different tribes of itinerants moved in to share these rails with the freight-heavy transports. For instance those relying—like Perseph and Io—on state travel allotments to exercise their citizen's privilege to see the world—on off-peak hours.

Then there were others, folk whose manners told in ways more subtle than clothing or fashion that they were employed, that they had real jobs, that they had chosen this strange journey not for budgetary reasons but out of a taste for moody expanses, or perhaps a cherishing of night.

By unstated courtesy the partyers kept the raucous stuff to the other cars, though the observation dome was a favorite trysting spot for lovers. At times the closeness of such intertwined pairs made Io feel wistful and poignantly alone.

Unfortunately, such feelings weren't alleviated by Perseph's incessant attempt to match her up. Finally, one evening in the bistro car, Io's companion snapped at her irritably.

"Sometimes you just confuse the bloody hell out of me, Io! What does it take to turn you on, eh? We showed each other our charts. Yours was straight hetero, and I kept that in mind. I've introduced you to your type of guy."

My type
? Io bit back her initial response. Perseph's facial expression was friable. Exasperated. Irises and flesh tones showed clear signs of a hashtite high well past its peak and entering depressive phase. Perseph's once straight antenna-braids were drooping now as hairspray slowly gave way under assault from perspiration and a party running at desultory medium-broil.

"But you saw my profile also includes things like high selectivity an' strong bonding, Pers. I can't help bein' made that way. I sometimes envy you your chart, the freedom your personality gives you to come an' go as you like. Tease, squeeze, thank you please. But I've got no choice, Pers. I've got to hold out till the time's right for me."

"Hold out for Mr. Watch Fob Job, you mean," Perseph said bitingly.

"For when I've got a job of my own, Pers. An' for the sort of man who'll respect that in me. A codder would never understand what it is I'm after. You know that."

A tic manifested at the corner of Perseph's left eye. "And what's wrong with codders?" she asked. "Some of my best friends are codders!"

Io looked around nervously. The party crowd at nearby tables were watching an act onstage at the front of the oar, performing an amiably vulgar dance to the tempo of the gently thrumming rails. Once Io would have found the show, the tight, acrid atmosphere, the frenetic party odors, attractively distracting. But no more. Artificial highs had begun to pall on her years ago.

Smoke and garish lights made black sinkholes of the window behind Io's shoulder, yet she envied the quiet beyond those perspex panes.

"Hey." Io forced a grin, trying to cut through the bad mood. "Don't get me wrong, Pers. Codders are fine. It's just I can't ever get to know one for ten minutes before he offers to strip down and show me his specialty."

For an instant Perseph's eyes were as deep and untelling as the nightview outside. Then she seemed to come to a decision. Her laughter would have made a good dissertation topic in one of Io's classes.

"Yeah, they're like that, aren't they? Even when I'm halfway in the middle of a surropreg, waddling around like a Blackpool publican, half th' codders I know are always tryin' to talk me into tryin' out their wares in advance. I keep tellin' the ones I introduce to you that you're in the egg trade, and not interested in their merchandise. But I guess habit's hard to break."