The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

‘Good God. That’s a Prohibited—’

  ‘I snuck into the World Health Organization files while I was running the machines at Mt Erebus. And that’s Prohibited Information too, sweetheart. I felt the need for cheering up, and Intermittent Uterine Intervention seemed a marginally more cheerful topic,’ I say bitterly, fuck security, ‘than the imminence of total nuclear war.’

  She lets it pass. Another kind of grey pall, of automatic denial. ‘And?’

  ‘And the data trends suggest rather strongly to me that contagion is most likely if a close relative has died during your first trimester.’

  ‘That’s not part of the WHO file, Keith.’

  ‘I know. I ran the search myself, on their data base.’

  ‘What in heaven’s name made you think of looking for a correlation like that?’

  I lie back against the couch and sigh. ‘I was thinking about slow viruses. A sort of Thalidomide infection.’

  ‘Thalidomide was a chemical teratogen, not a microorganism.’

  ‘A virus with that sort of effect, Susan.’

  For six months I have been worrying the data nets on the topic of evolution and its aberrations. I’d gone back to my machines with ideas exploding through my head like the vomit I’d spewed across Susan Dwyer’s couch.

  ‘It’s not a virus, Keith. We know that much.’

  She and I are talking the same shorthand; my heart starts pounding hard. ‘Nearly neutral mutations, then?’

  Clearly it is not out of the question. The DNA which gets expressed in organic structure, and in tendencies to behave in characteristic ways, is only the lesser part of the coding wired into each cell. Nobody knows the function of the remainder, the apparently useless ‘introns’. The standard view sees it as a storeroom for half-baked ideas. So could minor mutations have been accruing in the twentieth century gene pool? Unexpressed, almost undetectable, below the level of the scythe of natural selection, a hundred thousand tiny alterations of redundant DNA introns wrought by the same chemical poisons, the toxins, the wastes, radiations, stresses with which, heedlessly, we blanket the globe?

  Susan says nothing. I push her. ‘That was Gould’s idea, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Come off it, doctor. Stephen Jay Gould, father of meta-Darwinism. The great unpredictable leaps up the evolutionary tree.’ Not the slow, aeons-long accretion of adaptations envisaged by Darwin, but abrupt discontinuities.

  She frowns. ‘Hasn’t that been disproven? “Punctuated equilibrium”?’

  ‘It’s fallen out of fashion, but it certainly still has its current supporters,’ I say. Why is she resisting the obvious? ‘Sounds plausible to me. Long stretches of conservative rule punctuated by bursts of creative frenzy. “Saltations”, he called them.’

  ‘Like the politics in this country.’

  ‘Well. Perhaps. I’ll tell you one thing,’ I say, ‘it’s exactly the way each computer generation surpasses its predecessor.’

  Subversive introns. The baby is kicking vigorously at my sac, agitated by the hormones leaking from my bloodstream. Yes. Masked by the presence of dominant genes, there, in the centre of our cells, biding their time, they’d lurk: the most furtive of selfish genes, lingering in a kind of malign hibernation until the critical number came together to congeal into . . . what? Something new. Something murderous.

  Susan has been looking down at her white knuckles. I feel a tremendous, ghastly excitement. ‘Keith, they’ll hang me up by my toes and flay all the skin off me if you breathe a word of this.’

  I close my own hand over her fingers. ‘I’m right?’

  ‘What? No, Christ! Listen to me. The confirmation study at the hospital presented its report to the Minister of Health last night. I don’t know how long we can keep the lid on it, but right now it’s absolutely embargoed. I’m only talking to you about it because I know your security clearance is—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Susan—’

  ‘It’s rebirth.’

  I cannot take it in.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Reincarnation, Keith.’

  ‘Life after death, you mean?’

  ‘The possibility’s been discussed for years—’

  ‘Discussed?’ My voice is shrill, I hardly recognize it.

  ‘Not in this context of course, but the evidence never really added up until the morphological changes started to appear.’

  ‘What do you mean, “discussed”? Jesus Christ, Susan, crackpots and spiritualists and starving Hindus—’

  ‘Serious medical research,’ she tells me, sighing. ‘Hypnotic regression, field investigations with infants. Arnold Bloxham in Britain, Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia—’

  I block it out, I can’t handle the concept. Jesus. But the claws. It was not human. The vile thing I strangled, snapping its neck to make sure, was not human. It was a thing.

  I heave myself off the couch, hang across the touchboard of the sound system, running the menu for Wagner. ‘No, you’re wrong. They’re Midwich cuckoos, Susan.’ Melodrama palace, the blazing emotions of catastrophe. The incineration of Valhalla from the close of Gotterdammerung. ‘Oh. That’s what you mean. My sweet God. Non-human rebirth. Foetal radio receivers. We’re tuning in the dead from Mars or some bloody star on the edge of the universe.’

  Through my agitation she reaches out and takes my hand, leads me back across the room, says softly, ‘Come and sit with me, Keith.’ I slump on the accepting cushions. A pulse at the side of my neck beats a drum. ‘Human, Keith.’ But the gargoyle voice, trying to speak. ‘Not any sort of human we’re used to. The morphology seems to be the output of a string of genetic coding that’s been blocked from protein expression until now. Would you mind if I turned that down a little, I can’t hear myself think?’

  ‘Sorry, it is a bit grandiose.’

  She crosses to the board and lowers the volume. Those dumb endless Creationist debates at high school, the paradoxes we loved to provoke both sides with, the anomalies. The famous case of the eyeless fish that swim blindly in lightless caverns, generations beyond number. Return the stock to sunlit pools and streams, they spawn offspring with eyes. The information has always been there in the DNA of the maimed fish, merely suppressed by conditions which had no place for it.

  We are all unread volumes, waiting for the ideal reader.

  ‘What we’re seeing now looks pre-programmed,’ Susan says. I nod, dazed and fragile, my head swarming with kobolds, gnomes, the vile twisted dwarfs out of legend. ‘Not mutations or disease. The DNA coding must have been there for a million years. More. There’s no lack of conjectures, Keith. Sir Fred Hoyle’s silly hypothesis about genetic information tumbling in from space. Or some protohuman variant from before the ice ages, I don’t know. One of the researchers thinks there is a connection with sunspot cycles. Something to do with solar neutrinos. The sun’s only been producing half the usual number of neutrinos until recently. Now the flux-density’s risen back to the historically normal level, maybe—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Susan, give me a break.’ Burning in my brain. Blurred out. ‘Hang on a moment, let me digest this.’ Why monsters? And the answer’s obvious enough, and I don’t want to think about this, I do not.

  They are not monsters, not really. So who did I kill?

  Monsters are damaged freaks. These . . . babies, damn it, babies ... are just different, that’s all.

  The transitions of growth. Children change: they pass through growth spurts, lose their chubby fat, get gangly and noisy and then oddly shy and after a while they’re noisy again, they develop tits and hair and muscles and if we weren’t thoroughly conditioned to take all this for granted those changes would look monstrous, inexplicable.

  As, it comes to me suddenly, perhaps they do look, to children themselves. I cannot remember, precisely, but wasn’t it so?

  ‘No wonder children hate and fear us,’ I mutter.

  Susan is taken aback. ‘
Hate us? Keith, they love us and depend on us. What makes you—’

  No. I cover my face with my hands, feeling my child kicking within me. They eat their hosts. Don’t they? Isn’t that the dark thing unspoken, the terror which everyone conceals behind silence and statistics and acronyms which mean nothing?

  ‘You think they’re a . . . next step?’ I ask. ‘Foetus to newborn to baby to child to adolescent to adult to senility and death to—what? Rebirth as something further along the line? A . . . different kind of foetus, the second time around?’

  Susan stared at me. ‘Lord, you’re quick. It took me hours to take it in.’

  Do you suppose they let any random cretin into the prime fire control data headquarters for Southern Hemisphere nuclear defence? But I do not voice it.

  ‘Reincarnation,’ I mumble. ‘Rebirth. So the doctrine of transmigration of souls was a mistake. Until now.’

  Patiently, a little puzzled, Susan says, ‘If you’re really interested I can show you the studies by Bloxham and—’

  ‘Errors,’ I say. ‘Like a reptile trying to fly with cooling vanes that haven’t yet evolved fully into feathers. It’d glide and crash. You need wings. For effective rebirth you probably need to become one of ... them.’

  A baby’s brain is incapable of thinking like an adult’s. A child’s body is not yet fertile and cannot reproduce, though the potentiality is there, in the genes, in the eliciting environment.

  ‘Look at it this way—the soul can’t be implanted into an ordinary embryo,’ I say, checking Susan’s gaze for confirmation of my logic. ‘A sort of tissue rejection.’ I laugh. Ectoplasm rejection. ‘An alien mind would be sloughed off from a standard model zygote, discarded.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Susan says, frowning. ‘But when rebirth does happen that way, the soul becomes a prisoner. No memory.’

  ‘Hang on, that can’t be right. You were using the results of hypnotic regression a moment ago to support your theory. And those were perfectly ordinary children and adults, I take it?’

  ‘Hmm. But half those “memories” turn out to be fantasies and constructs. The really impressive Stevenson cases were infants—and recall always seemed to fade away as the kids got older.’

  The record stops. I don’t care; we’re on a loftier branch of the golden bough. ‘So up to now, any amount of souls might have been reborn, but the hosts weren’t suitable for implant. A reborn soul lost its previous history.’

  ‘Well, that’s obvious enough, isn’t it? I can’t remember any past life. Can you?’

  ‘No,’ I agree. And get awfully cold, sick to the pit of my belly. ‘Are you telling me that these monsters do?’

  ‘They’re not monsters, Keith.’ She hesitates. ‘There’s some evidence for the hypothesis.’

  Some evidence. I get up, reset the track in pique, push the volume level high again so Wagner thunders, batters my two-person’d body, cascading like torrents of light from the insulated walls of the apartment living room. Tears flood down my cheeks, and the compulsive words flood out of my mouth. Thinking, talking, talking, weeping. ‘It’s got to be linked with the genes, though, doesn’t it? I mean, I can’t believe it’s just random. Surely your nice Christian Right To Life embryo doesn’t cop the next soul coming down the Third World starvation shute from Accra. I mean, Suze, shit, where’s the justice of it, otherwise? The sins of the parent have got to be visited upon the child.’

  Susan considers me with compassion and a tincture of alarm.

  ‘It must be like that,’ I say, weeping, hurting, angry, sick, ‘or Darwin would go straight out the window. And we haven’t reached that point, have we, doctor? You Right To Lifers aren’t mindless Creationists, I think.’

  She takes refuge from my cruelty. ‘There’s a Darwinian element, of course. But reincarnation became basically dysfunctional once humans developed cultures which evolve faster than genes. That’s why immortality gets selected out. It’d lock in bad habits. Any big change in environment and an immortal species has had it. Actually,’ she says, testy, getting her own back, ‘in this case the inheritance factors probably go way beyond simple gametes. I’m sure a smart-arse like you has read E. O. Wilson and John Maynard Smith.’

  ‘My God,’ I cry, with a burst of laughter. ‘The sociobiology of karma?’

  ‘If you like. It can’t be just biochemistry, Keith. There seems to be a sort of non-genetic kinship affinity.’

  ‘That’s an abstract bloody ludicrous way to put it,’ I yell over the top of Wagner, and really have to restrain myself from belting her. ‘You mean if your old granny dies, she has to hang around in limbo waiting for the next available foetus to come on line from the family stock?’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean,’ Susan says, equally angry at me and not disguising the fact. ‘I mean it might work sideways across the family tree. When you think about it, Granny might feel right at home in the kids of the men and women who’ve married into the family, mightn’t she?’ Her gaze slips and her voice loses its edge, but she says it anyway: ‘Not to mention daughters-in-law.’

  Jane. Yes, this is what I’ve been pushing away. I push it away. ‘Christ, what a merry nightmare for the lawyers when word of this gets out.’ I swipe at my wet face with the back of my hand. ‘And when does this little spiritual jaunt take place, Dr Dwyer? The end of the first trimester? That’s when my wife died, you see.’

  Susan’s own face looks as it would have done had I literally battered it, or so it seems to me. ‘We don’t have enough evidence yet,’ she says. ‘The Fathers of the Church taught that the soul enters the foetus at the twelfth week.’

  ‘And they’d know, wouldn’t they, the dumb smelly crazy fuckers in the desert with their fucking temptations of the flesh and their crazy shit ideas, they’d be right up to the mark on embryology and phylogenesis and ontogenesis and Thomian catastrophe theory?’

  She makes no reply to my furious ranting and I don’t really expect her to. Yes. Yes. Mum had been pregnant three months when I lost control of the Toyota and killed my wife. My little sister had been swimming within my mother’s womb like a fish, mindless and soulless, if the Fathers of the Church had their timing straight, nosing through the swamps of recapitulated time.

  Twelve months ago my dead beloved went like an arrow into my mother’s rich internal gravies, looking for a home, lured not by genetics but by that equally potent reality, affinity.

  So when I crashed my way through the defences of the hospital unit hours after Mum’s death, when I murdered the monster, the creature I had refused to acknowledge as my sister, it was Jane I’d killed. Again.

  I utter a groan, the words of guilt and confession locked in my mouth forever, and Susan holds my sweating face against her small breasts.

  Madness presses down on my head, squeezes the light in my swollen eyes until it streams with streaks and splatters of random colour. I cannot dispute the final link in the chain of logic, or turn my gaze away from it.

  Jane had been pregnant less than four weeks. Remembering, I convulse with physical shock: Jane in the mess of blood which had been her head. Dark and sticky, pumping, ebbing. They got the embryo, though. Froze it down and popped it into storage until I was ready for the complex operation which would tuck it into me.

  Pressing Susan’s hand against my trussed belly, I whimper: ‘This is my mother in here. Isn’t it?’

  ‘We can’t tell yet, Keith. It might be an ordinary baby.’

  ‘But if it’s a Uterine Intervention, it will be my mother?’

  She shakes her head, but not in denial, ‘It seems likely.’

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ She is in there gnawing at me, eating the guts of me. A suppressed image bursts up, from, the old movie: the blue thing with teeth and blood in its dreadful mouth, erupting from its host’s living chest. We have always known.

  I start to cry. ‘I’m going to die.’

  Susan looks at me, pained. ‘No, you’re not, Keith. For heaven�
��s sake. Why should you die?’

  Something breaks, something shatters, like a shell around a white around a yolk, and the yolk floods like soothing sanity. Finally, I understand that she is telling me the truth. I have encased myself in a delusional fantasy, a half-mad protective metaphor locked like armour around the insupportable reality of the gargoyle creature in my guts. Yes, and I am smart enough and strong enough to know that it is so, to know when the metaphor has failed, has become a threat to my survival.

  That doesn’t stop me being surly. ‘You’ll tell me I’ve been projecting my feelings about my mother onto the world.’

  ‘Not me, chum. I’m your friend, not your psychiatrist.’

  Controlled insanity. It is not a restful way of life, feeding Moloch. Programming the machineries of doomsday. Crouched there under the eternal ice, in the womb of the earth, gnawing at the world’s lifeline.