Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Now the cart was on a descending ramp. Impossible to judge whether it went down one meter or three. When it stopped and the doctor pulled the sheet down from Art’s face, the two of them were alone in a kind of laboratory or treatment room crowded with a jumble of shelves and boxes and equipment, lighted by some old-fashioned overhead fluorescents. The windowless walls were lined nearly from floor to ceiling with shelving, loaded with boxes and bottles labeled in what seemed to be the jargon of medical technology. The nearby door through which they had evidently just entered was now closed. It was hard to guess the size of the room because sections of it to both right and left were cut off by portable white screens.

  “Now where is the damned film?” The doctor was ruffling through stacks of paper, journals, printouts, and other impedimenta that covered a large desk-like metal table. “They told me that they left it here.” Somehow the archaic swearword, the like of which Art had not heard since the tridi play went dead on the tube train, sounded natural coming from this man.

  After fruitlessly searching a few moments longer, the doctor muttered an excuse and went out impatiently, closing the door of the room behind him. Art heard another door open and close some distance off.

  Apart from his continuing headache, he now felt pretty good. Good enough to have a sense of awkwardness and vague shame at lying here on a cart like an invalid. He raised himself on an elbow and looked about. There on the foot of the cart were his clothes. Should he dress and stagger out into the street, calling for the police? That certainly wouldn’t win Rita over to his point of view. No, he had tipped his king and resigned the game.

  Near at hand he recognized a portable X-ray machine, a familiar sight from visits to other physicians’ offices. An unobtrusive background hum of electric power and electronics permeated the room. And now he became aware of another sound, an old-fashioned watch tick-tick-ticking, except this was a little faster and more irregular than a watch would be.

  Still alone, Art swung his feet over the side of the cart and sat up. His head ached, but he felt able to stand and walk. Now if that was a bathroom over there, as a tiled interior glimpsed beyond the top of a white screen deemed to promise, then his physical comfort might soon be brought back close to normal. He slid off the cart and walked around the screen, past glassy tanks and a maze of piping and a portable computer terminal set up on a dimly lighted workbench, and found the hoped-for toilet.

  He was on his way back to sit on his cart like a good patient when, just around the shadowed workbench, he came to a full stop. “Ah,” he said aloud.

  The fetus was in the central glassy tank atop the bench . . .

  TO BE CONTINUED

  Part III of III

  WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE

  By the twenty-first century the earlier revolution in sexual morals had advanced to the point where chastity, and the repression or sublimation of sexual impulses were considered social offenses if not actual crimes, but were still sought by many as secret pleasures. Most members of the Establishment belonged to the Church of Eros. Concurrently, crowding and hunger in the world had led to severe restrictions on reproduction even among the wealthy. A woman who had borne two children was required by law to have any subsequent pregnancies aborted.

  ART RODNEY, California electronics engineer and chessmaster, finds that his wife, RITA, has fled to Chicago to locate a midwifer and bear a third child rather than have the abortion required by law. Art pursues Rita to convince her that her plan is both wrong and dangerous before it is too late.

  Art’s transcontinental tube train is halted at the Mississippi. Under attack there by rioters is a monastery of Christians (a sect long in decline) where experiments on preserving life in freshly aborted fetuses are thought to be under way. Art helps a distraught girl named ROSAMOND JAMISON get-on the train for Chicago.

  In Chicago, Rita’s brother GEORGE PARR, a karate master, and his wife ANN, LIVE LIKE many other city dwellers in a complex of townhouses fortified against the random violence of the age. Art arrives to find that Rita has come and gone, leaving the two Rodney children with Ann, a militant free-birth advocate and Christian.

  Art convinces the Parrs that he must be allowed to talk to Rita face to face. George takes him on a tour of the city, supposedly to arrange the contact but really to confuse any Family Planning agents who might be watching them. High points on the tour are a stadium where the unemployed are paid to watch baseball, and a slumburb tavern where Art hears a disheartening broadcast of world news. George takes Art to his karate dojo where Fred, who wants George to hire him as an instructor, has come to be evaluated. Fred fails in combat against humanoid karate-machines. One of George’s students, Dr. Hammad, is introduced to Art as the man who can arrange his meeting with Rita . . .

  Fred, gloomy and wounded, goes in search of some gladrags (opaque plastic cloaks) to facilitate his planned sublimation-affair with Marjorie. At the Megiddo Coffee House Fred falls in with some apish companions.

  A meeting is arranged between Art and his wife, who is in hiding while her anonymous doctor, an acquaintance of Dr. Hammad’s, makes preliminary tests. Art is blindfolded and driven to see Rita in the former nurses’ quarters of a maternity hospital—that with the changing times has been converted into a sublimation-brothel. When Art realizes his beloved wife is staying in a whorehouse he tries to drag her out by force but the bouncers subdue him. Exhausted, he is almost seduced into sublimation by one of the girls, who takes him for a customer. Desperate now, he decides to take his problems to Family Planning and throw himself and Rita on their mercy.

  Outside, opposing picket lines of the Homo League and the radical Young Virgins clash as Art arrives at the building. In the lobby, he finds he cannot betray Ann and George to the law as the midwifery conspirators they are; he dashes out again, and is knocked unconscious in the riot.

  Musing at home about Art’s and Rita’s problems, George and Ann hark flashback to their own meeting and early life together; George’s saving Ann from apes on a California bus, and their first sublimation together, on the night she missed her high school’s orgiastic Senior Prom. We see what has only been implied earlier, that to members of this society the deliberate refusal (repression, sublimation) of a sexual impulse can sometimes be a transcendental experience, intense and important as orgasm was in an earlier age.

  Art wakes up in a hideout where the Young Virgins have brought him, having mistaken him for one of their own casualties as they fled the riot scene with the arrival of the police. Art is being treated by a Christian priest-doctor on the lam for midwifery—in fact the very man who is about to deliver and freeze Rita’s fetus. While waiting for a skull X-ray, Art notices a glassy tank and, peering within, discovers a three-month-old human fetus . . .

  THE surrounding light was quite dim, and the tank’s only window a tiny aperture that allowed a clear view of the thing only from certain angles.

  Art stepped closer, staring, then abruptly relaxed. There was no umbilical cord, only a blind knot of tissue at the navel. For a moment he had thought that the complex of equipment before him (besides the tanks and piping, there were three oscilloscopes, counters, and other gear that Art could not immediately identify) was in feet an artificial womb, and that the fetus before him had been frozen and revived, or was at any rate in some sense viable. But now he realized that it must be only an abortus being used in some experiment. Tubes, or only wires perhaps (he could not be sure in the dim light) were attached to it inside the tank, but without an umbilical cord, he supposed, it could not be receiving oxygen and nourishment. And he could see no placenta, or analogue of one.

  There it sat, or rather floated in an upright sitting posture. The thing that so much fuss was made about. It was small, only about the length of Art’s middle finger. Its proportions were much different from those of a normal full-term infant, and of course even further from those of an adult, but the thing was unmistakably genus homo all the same. What other species would develop a bulging brow like t
hat, or hold up two such human hands? When Art bent closer, the fingers were fully distinguishable, as were the toes at the end of the insignificant legs and feet. What with the shadows and the angle of his view, the sex was not quite visible.

  He jumped back a step with a quick intake of breath, and only then was aware of the doctor standing watching him at the corner of the screen a couple of steps away.

  “Feel all right?” the doctor asked. “You shouldn’t be on your feet unnecessarily.”

  Art raised a hand to gently touch the side of his head, at a good safe distance from the wound. He turned his gaze back to the tank. “It moved.”

  “Oh yes, they move. I’ve located the X-ray film at last. Get back on the cart if you will and we’ll finally be able to make sure about that head of yours. Yes, the little girl in there happens to be about the same developmental age as Rita’s fetus is right now . . . About three months as near as I can tell. At that age they’ve usually been moving spontaneously for several weeks, though the mother usually can’t feel the movements yet.”

  Art walked away, pausing at the corner of the screen to look back once. “I didn’t know it was . . . there was no cord.”

  The doctor held out a hand to give support if needed. “Oh. But we usually take that off at parturition. Tapping into the circulatory system elsewhere serves the purpose, and has some technical advantages. Yes, she’s very much alive and growing. That’s her heartbeat you can hear in the background, sounds like a clock or watch? And with those scopes back there we’re continually monitoring brain activity; that won’t settle into the regular rhythms for a few more weeks.”

  Art lay back carefully on the cart, settling his head down gently on the pillow. “Is that a living human being?” he asked the fluorescent lights above. The vision of the grotesque, half fish-like head was still before him, and the tiny hands, that seemed about to be raised secretively, protectively, before the face. “Is it?”

  “You tell me,” the doctor grunted, moving the cart in the direction of the X-ray. Art now noticed the thick shielding hung between the machine and the artificial womb at the end of the laboratory. The doctor continued: “Frankly, I’ve had my doubts. Sometimes I feel I don’t know where to start in thinking about it anymore.” His tone was mild and preoccupied; now he had begun a delicate positioning of Art’s head beneath the X-ray snout.

  Art, still looking at the ceiling, said: “Maybe it doesn’t matter if a fetus is a human being or not. Maybe such a question is meaningless.”

  “Take a deep breath—hold it, don’t move.” There came the usual audible hum. “All right, you can move. What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? You know, if these embryos and fetuses turn out not to be individual human beings after all, then I and some of my friends have gone to a hell of a lot of trouble and broken a hell of a lot of laws for nothing.”

  Art twisted on his cart. “You just said that you yourself have doubts.”

  “Doubts, yes!” The man was vexed. He waved a piece of blackened film. “I might have very strong doubts that there’s a child under that overturned box I see in the middle of the road, but that doesn’t justify my running over it with a truck, not without some life-or-death reason to run it over. Damn, this one didn’t come out as clearly as I’d like. Let’s try again. Turn on your right side this time, if you will.”

  “How about the welfare of society as a whole? How about over-population, people starving? Aren’t those life-or-death reasons?”

  “To cut off the life of that little girl in there? In a word, no. Take a deep breath, hold it. That’s fine.”

  Allowed to move again, Art got up on one elbow. “I suspect neither of us is going to be able to change the other’s mind on this by arguing.”

  Art said: “All right, I know that thing in the tank has the potential for someday being a full human being, with all the rights thereof. But not yet, surely not yet. It may generate a brain wave or two but it can’t think, it may twitch but it can’t act. It couldn’t survive for three minutes without artificial help.”

  “Neither could you if you had a really massive coronary. And she could have survived quite well in her natural environment, had we been able to leave her there.” The gray-green eyes gave the pictures a final stare and then turned to Art with evident relief. “You’re all right. This second picture makes it unanimous. No fracture. You ought to take things easy for a while, but you can go.”

  “Tell me. Why does that have to be a baby? Why must you break the laws, as you admit doing, to make that point?”

  THE doctor sighed, and let himself down in a chair beside the paper-burdened table, as Art sat up on the cart and reached for his shirt. “Art, I can’t make it a baby or not a baby. I can only try to determine which category it already belongs to, and conduct myself accordingly.” He wearily rubbed his eyes. “Damn it, it looks like a baby now, right? In a few weeks it may begin to suck its thumb. A cute little human touch, hey? Not necessarily convincing.”

  “Wait a minute. How about gill-slits? Doesn’t it still have those, or didn’t it at an earlier stage? Are they cute little proofs of humanity too?”

  “All right, the gill slits. What do you think they prove?”

  “I . . . nothing. How am I supposed to know?

  You’re the scientist, or at least the expert, though most of the scientists and experts don’t seem to agree with you on this. What has you so convinced?”

  “Art, I know of no solid scientific definition of man. What can I communicate to you? Only facts, and people interpret them in different ways. Both parents of that organism in the tank were human, of course. But its cells are different from either of its parents’ cells; it is now a genetically unique individual.

  “It . . . no, I have to say she. What you see as a thing in a tank I see as a little girl. But if you try to pin me down on when she began to be a little girl, I’ll have to admit that I just don’t know. Teilhard says that the beginnings of all things tend to be out of sight. Was a unique human soul infused when the sperm first pierced the egg? When the nuclei of the two parent cells were first completely united? With implantation of the blastocyst in the uterine wall? Maybe a few days after that, when the time of possible twinning had passed.”

  “If you’re bringing souls into it, you’re leaving me out.” Art was off the cart now, getting dressed. In the background the steady tick-tick-tick went on, soft and rapid. “Just let me get out of here.”

  “Of course.” As if caught derelict in his duty, the doctor jumped up and went to push a Button near the door. “I can’t help bringing souls into it, though I tried. I’m a Christian priest as well as a doctor, you see. I suppose if one’s humanity is questioned one must try to prove it by appealing either to God or to a board of review of other human beings, who sit in judgment. I know which I prefer to do.”

  “No one is questioning your humanity, doctor.”

  “Not now. But some future government might decide that I belong to an inferior race. Governments in the past have made such pronouncements about people. Or, if I suffered a stroke tonight and still hadn’t come to by next week, my fellow physicians might by then be questioning my continued humanity.” He rose from his chair, hands clenching. The naturally fierce look in his eyes grew more intense. “Maybe it would be the kindest thing in such a case to let me die. But I would still be a human being dying, not a—a specimen reacting!”

  “All right,” said Art, in slight alarm, speeding up the fastening of his shorts. “Take it easy.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.” The tall man let himself slump back into his chair. “In my opinion there are a few rare situations where abortion may be justified, at least if there’s not an artificial womb available. But it’s still a human being dying, being killed, and there’s not many reasons to justify that. Surely not some non-specific good intended for the world in general.”

  Art, dressed now and putting on his watch, shook his head. “Do you think a single human being dying matters that much to the univ
erse? Appeal to your God if you want, the rest of us haven’t heard anything from him lately. We have to look out for ourselves as best we can.”

  The priest-doctor pulled himself to his feet once more. “Let me go and find someone to drive you home. We’ll feed you something first if you care to wait for it.”

  “No, I’m not quite through talking yet.” Art moved to stand between the other and the door. “You are about to inflict a third child on me and my wife, because your God wants you to. The least you can do is listen to me for a minute longer.”

  Abruptly the priest turned fierce again. “I am sincerely sorry for the danger and expense and inconvenience that the third child is going to cause you. But it is still better than inflicting death on your third child. If you find his presence unendurable, why there are people in the world who will take him in.”

  “People in the world! Yes, I’ll say there are.” Now they were standing almost toe to toe, Art with his arms folded like an umpire. “About eight or nine billion at last count. And how many of them are starving now?”

  “Quite a few are starving, Art, quite a few. Maybe you’ve seen more of them than I have. Maybe you’ve fed more of them. Maybe you promote contraception more enthusiastically than I do.”

  BUT Art seemed to have stopped listening. He stood-staring, with an altered expression, into a corner of the room. The priest looked there and saw only a red picnic cooler with a white handle.

  “Art, here, sit down again. I’m sorry, we shouldn’t have been arguing.”

  “No, I’m all right,” said Art. But then he did sit down in the chair the other brought for him. “That cooler over there. I believe I may have carried that across the Mississippi a few days ago. It was very heavy and very cold. Now I’m just realizing what must have been inside it. That was while your monastery out there was burning down.”

  “You were there?” The priest sat down again too, and leaned anxiously toward him. “Can you tell me anything of what happened? I’ve seen and read the news stories, but . . .”