The Chromosome Game (5 page)

But our prevailing mood is not one only of embarrassment; we are, given that this is a miracle, nevertheless perplexed. Knowing what we shadows know about the breed of Man who made all this possible, why are we not afraid? Why no premonition of disaster? Why this sense of beatification?

We should not search too deep for an answer to the riddle. We shadows cannot predict beyond what we see and feel and sense by instinct. We are the shadows of men and women; and like men and women we are filled with optimism and hope. We cannot bury these instincts — it is impossible. Those of us who are men are conscious of our own store of semen, our own response to the female. Those of us who are women find our vaginas moist; we are aware of the role of our sex, and we are ready for the creation of life. We are not here, in the pre-maternity ward, to cast gloom on the children of the future, to demoralize the mothers, scorn the nurses, spread cynicism where members of our own species are to be formed. Our smiles are for the present: the facts are before us: children of Futureworld shall have their playthings and their joy. We are not here to anticipate the fate of the few who may fall short of their own child-expectations. We have caught the bug of hope and we can’t rid ourselves of it.

So we forget our doubts and our premature judgment and, instead, take heed of all that
Kasiga
must mean here and now, rather than when it was constructed. Our fears must slide away lest we infect the souls of the young and the hopeful — not the old and the cynical.

We are shadow-parents, unable to repress our delight in this electronically-nourished Hot-house.

But even now, we are freshmen. We have no idea of the prolific detail of this macro-womb. The wonders we are seeing now are nothing compared with the wonder that will light the eyes of the children, once they emerge.

*

Aboard
Kasiga
there came the Beginning; a re-genesis as true to nature as the seeding of new wheat. The illusion was that the miracle was mechanical and manmade. The illusion was false; all that had happened was that Man, equipped as he had been before with the achievements of his intellect, had delayed but not fundamentally changed the processes of conception. No doubt Man had praised himself, but only in the sense that some demented magician might be deceived by his own sleight of hand. Indeed, if the conjurers had maintained a proper humility their direct progeny might have spanned the centuries uninterrupted until the sons and daughters of the Old Age could actually witness the outcome of the trick.

They were not there.

Each set of chromosomes, still separated within each cube, liked and loved their environment and found it warming and nutritious.

At a command from the Conception Program loaded onto Tape Deck One, a chemical was released into each of the hundreds of cubes, so that the translucent membrane dividing them began to shrink and tear, like hymens of nymph-girls. There seemed to be, on Deck ZD-One, the long withheld release of intense eroticism, each coitus-cube an assignation tree, where notionally the yielding skins of men and women contrived patterns which have never changed, not even now, when machinery stirred genetic memories within a billion genes, and the bodies were remembered, and cherished, and carnally moulded within hungry hands.

Yet the machines were only catalysts, not even capable of intruding upon the forming of human life, even if they’d had the conscious urge to do so. Like watering cans in the hot-house, they irrigated but did not intervene. They could not: the instincts were unerringly coded within the organic structure of each chromosome, folding now, feeling and searching for the equivalent that swirled within the acids from the other half of the cube, then meeting, for the first time, paralleling, pairing off two-by-two, life leading to life.

In each cube, the helix formed.

Entwined in sub-microscopic coil-springs, each helix located, compound by compound, the chemical ciphers of transfer.

Reproduction began and cell-division proceeded.

The first tiny beginnings of pre-embryonic Beings could feel and respond to the echo of the wombs from which they had been taken, centuries before. They lived in comfort.

They were warm and they nourished.

And after four months, they began to be Creatures.

Minus Eleven

As the laser sun rose over the cyclorama horizon the infant immersed in Delivery-Incubator Number 484 kicked healthily and felt the pressure increase inside the membrane bubble. The waters broke and were sucked through the exhaust trap. A throbbing began: artificial womb contractions were set in motion and on the computer indicators the light ‘484’ came up.

This was the first.

Baby-484 felt a kind of squeezing, the sensation of passing through a tight-gripping muscular corridor. The umbilical cord passed through the canal and 484 came close to the end of the tube.

At this cue, the ‘run’ light showed on Cassette playdeck A.

The loading system selected Mother-tape 01-484 and slapped it into the machine.

As if passing from the mother’s bone structure to the womb walls, birth-pains reached the interior of Delivery-incubator 484. They were happy cries of pain, spasm and effort, pushing cries, gasps of breath, sudden laughter, then a sort of fun-countdown, and a sharp intake of breath again, then just fast breathing.

As the glistening head of 484 emerged through the delivery tube, so the filter in the sound system that was there to synthesize womb-wall reverberation was automatically taken out. The mother’s voice rang out clear and fresh. Alive.

Evidently mother and computer alike knew that 484 was a boy, but the mother could not, it seemed from the recording, resist whispering the fact. She said it several times, it’s a boy, it’s a boy …

Gently, the baby was driven forward by a sponge-rubber piston onto a chute. This chute vibrated sharply, once, twice, three times.

Respiration Normal.

Baby 484 was breathing independently of the ‘iron lung’ device inside the incubator, and the vibrator that started the lungs ceased its churning action, as warm water was released from a spray-pipe, washing away the mucus cocoon.

Baby 484 arrived delicately on the sorbo-rubber inspection mat, as two closed-circuit television cameras swung on the ends of articulated arms to take a look.

The videotapes were computer-analysed for birth-flaws, as a brightly coloured mobile was lowered to within two feet of Baby-484’s eyes.

The eyes were not yet open, but they were being gently douched, whilst leaving the tiny nose and mouth free to breathe.

Pulse Normal.

Apparently without purpose, the video screens on the Master Monitor Console displayed for nobody the birth details: Sex: Male. Weight: 7 pounds 4 ounces. Eyes: Brown. Birthmarks: Nil. Name …

But the mother uttered it, whispered it, just before the display confirmed identification.

Her whisper was gentle but excited, breathy but jubilant, exhausted and filled with delight.

‘Trell? Darling Trell? You’re born. You’re
born
!’

Softly came the exquisite melody of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in greeting, and the baby began to cry in recognition of his surroundings.

Delicately guided by the cameras, a Finisher was manoeuvred into place, clamping the umbilical cord and — with loving precision — helping nature in the final act of physical severance, with a neat finish at the navel.

‘Trell? What do you think of your world?’

Trell-484 cried approvingly. He seemed content with Futureworld. He could, in his subconscious, hear his mother’s voice together with something his neuronic lattice could certainly not process: the lullaby of strings. Yet, whatever this strange sound was, sound that could in no way be interpreted within his open-circuited brain, it was good. Why, didn’t it make him holla all the better, didn’t it make him kick, and move those tiny arms?

Did he feel the warm water washing the residual blood from his hair? — the holding pads moving in from either side to ensure that he was in a safe position? — the Caressor giving him an early sense of touching and stroking? … contact, contact.

Trell liked it. He stopped crying and considered it all.

*

The automatic milk supply had been prepared, perfectly synchronized with the delivery segment of the program. Now, the teat was guided to Trell’s mouth.

‘That’s right, Trell. You’re a strong ’un, you are. Look how you’re sucking away at it. You’re going to grow up strong, you are …’

And Trell opened his eyes.

Although they did not focus, did not process what they saw except in an intensely primitive sense, something inside Trell knew there was sunshine, and colour, and a pleasant spring scent in the air he breathed. Though he could not exactly ‘see’ the mobile which twirled about his head, it seemed to glisten in a funny way, and it made him feel good inside, it made him feel hungry, and he sucked well at the teat.

The holding pads rocked him, rocked him, and somehow within he knew that he was alive. He didn’t know what he was, who he was, where he was, but he liked Being. It seemed to be Fun. It was a good thing to be.

What he proposed to do was to go to sleep.

Which he did.

And only three days behind him in development was Kelda-275.

Sex: Female. Weight: 7 pounds 1 ounce. Eyes: Green.

Respiration Normal.

Pulse Normal.

Kelda was a long way down the row of Laypads. Her number, 275, denoted to the computer exactly where she was and who she was.

The computer also noted, just for the record, that the Rhesus sign of her blood was compatible with 484’s.

And that they were not blood-related.

Soon, it was necessary for all three of the main computers to network-run the Production Program. The nursery was awake … Very much so. Auto-nurses, caring for the infants, washing them, keeping up with their bowel and urine effluence, maintaining sweet air, labelling the children, watching for any sign of ill-health and removing the still-born.

There were only two of these to pass out of the Ejector Chute Aft.

For these there were sorrowful heart-cries, and a pause in the music, and a change in the lighting.

For the rest there was health, and crying and sleeping and feeding, and comfort and warmth.

*

If there had existed anyone who could observe the deathly husk of
Kasiga’s
body, it would have been totally beyond their grasp that a huge nursery, deep within her shell, was so rich in human activity. Conceivably, such an individual might have imagined that the rusting remains of recognizable machines might still be found atrophying below. But the notion that immensely intricate machinery and electronics, functioning with perfection and to full capacity, was aiding and abetting nature to this extent would have seemed not merely ludicrous, but even revolting.

For it seemed, within ZD-One, that machines must necessarily understand the secrets of the origins of life. They did not; and even the auto-nurses did not act with consciousness in any meaningful sense of the word.

True, they were ingenious tools. And since they had hundreds of babies to tend it appeared miraculous that they didn’t get in each other’s way.

But their guidance systems were disarmingly simple, at least in principle.

They ran on overhead tracks.

High over the entire array of Child Care equipment ran a monorail system that would have made the complexities of a large marshalling yard look like the toys of a simpleton. For not only could the tracks be switched; the rails themselves could be raised or lowered at the command of any of the computers and comprised, in effect, a junction extended into three dimensions.

The auto-nurses themselves were not, of course, robot caricatures of sprucely-dressed females, but Intensive Care black boxes, each fitted with remotely-controlled handling arms. Packed out with everything from heated towels to soothing voices, they each had enough electronics stuffed in them to match the automatic flight systems of huge airliners. They could cope without getting irritable, without needing sleep, rest, or a night at the disco.

For human recognition purposes the nurses, of course, were useless.

And so that the infants could get used to the moving human form, both of mother and father, laser-created holograms moved freely around the nursery.

They were just like people … not flat, projected images on a screen, but free figures that could react to a randomizing program so that they didn’t just repeat the same actions over and over again, but ran through an infinitely variable repertoire, responding, in so doing, to something very like videotape, except that the movement segments were short and interchangeable. Thus, adults were there to tend. They spoke and calmed, and scolded and hummed with the music, and taught the infants to fix their eyes on them, and take in their shapes and movement and method of cerebral/muscular integrity.

Since holograms are purely laser-projected images poised in space, they are not endowed with the ability to touch and feel, nor to carry objects. Certainly they cannot pick up babies.

So the Laserpeople and the auto-nurses worked in tightly-coupled collaboration to such a point that they seemed, in the developing brains of the infants, to be an integrated whole. To ensure that each baby was able to assemble a concept of unified care from these two sources, the Cerebral Integration Program was permanently kept running. This permitted the deceit that when an auto-nurse tended a particular child, an appropriate Laserperson mimed the actions. This, combined with pleasing bodily smells emitted from the autonurse’s black box, completed the circuit in the child’s mind.

Thus, they were not orphans.

Take Trell-484 and Kelda-275.

Each grew to know their respective mothers’ voices and scents. Nor did they ever hear the outcome of irritation or parental exhaustion. Nothing around them was capable of being exasperated. So their development was rapid and well-oriented.

Unlike Scorda-099.

Accidents can happen, even in the most well-organised nursery — automated or not.

It is arguable that Scorda would in any case have been a bit of a menace — he showed signs early on of a smouldering temper and this was duly recorded within the main computers.

But, during the course of nursing Scorda-099, there was a mishap.

*

The Laypads have become cots.

Although the auto-nurses and Laserpeople are busier than ever, they have switched their activities in synchronism with the development of the babes. Where the turret-clasped incubators had been racked, stretching the whole length of the Delivery Section, now there are Mickey Mousified cradles spaced out to give maximum air, space, and view of the environment and of each other. The incubators themselves, constructed out of self-reducing plastic, have simply disappeared, their crumbling remains vacuumed neatly out of Ejector Chute Aft. The components still needed — oxygen supply-lines, milk dispensers, temperature and humidity controls — have been cybernetically salvaged and are now installed in a configuration appropriate to the age of the offspring.

ZD-One is busy indeed. And as the radio-caesium clock pulses on, driven by the very processes that date the real-time stars glistening unseen, so the incubant-children develop.

Already they can manage simple words; these are the same gurgling approximations to English Syntax that mothers used to hear in the Old World; there is no change, this environment was devised by Twentieth Century people; and, unlike the evolving species outside the shell of the ship. Twentieth Century rulebooks call the tune.

But they do it by proxy. Cassette tapes run and the infants respond. They hear sounds and attempt to emulate them. They see sights and learn shape-recognition. What child is there that cannot appreciate a teddy bear? — a brightly coloured assembly-puzzle? — a toy plastic telephone? …

And they learn to react to touch. The Tactilators — a most important feature of the auto-nurses — stroke them, bathe them, rock them, and tenderly touch fingers and toes, counting them aloud. The Laserpeople smile on — maybe a little too much but it seems just fine to the children — and their lips are synchronized with the words spoken in stereo by the auto-nurses’ inset loudspeakers, cassette to child, child to cassette, the computer changing each segment to suit the progress recorded deep in its main store. Each child has a case-record … Health, Learning-Curve, Traits and Trends, Preferences and Dislikes, Aptitude and Incompetence, Willingness and Reluctance.

The children discover how to move. It is easy for them. Holographic children mixed in among them are fractionally ahead of the living ones. Synthetic babyplay is almost indistinguishable from the real thing; the sounds uttered are the same sounds, but just two, three, four weeks advanced in development.

The Laserbabies lead; the Incubants follow.

Until there comes a delightful change.

The situation, quite abruptly, gets reversed.

For the Cerebral Integration Program has worked just as visualised over three hundred years before.

Now, the toddlers are leading the holograms.

And, out of the blue, as if it were the most ordinary event in Futureworld, Trell smiles at Kelda and speaks.

‘Telephone,’ says Trell.

Kelda smiles back. She picks up her plastic phone with a sure, accurate grip and speaks into the wrong end of the instrument.