Seed of Stars

by Dan Morgan;John Kippax

  Mia clapped her hands. "Oh, how lovely! Let's have a picnic right here. I'm hungry."

  Piet grinned. "Both of you." He pulled onto the parking place and dived into the back of the car for the food basket, while Mia got out and walked towards the edge of the steep slope. The basket had jammed somehow against the back of a seat, and he had to kneel on the seat to get it out. Eventually, heaving it up, he placed it down beside him and looked across towards where he had last seen Mia.

  She was not there.

  For a moment he thought nothing of it; then with a whimper of fear, he leaped from the car, the door crashing behind him. His feet rattled on the rocky debris as he dashed to the edge and looked down.

  The slope was, maybe, sixty degrees at its steepest, with stunted bushes and outcrops of rock. Twenty meters down, buttressed by a rock, Mia lay with arms outspread, her eyes closed and her swollen belly an awful reminder of the complications which could result from such an accident.

  Should we not sound them,

  Assume they care there, and call into the black?

  But we have—and no one answers back.

  There's this conclusion then, that if they hear,

  They're saying nothing. More than this,

  Maybe they don't have to say a word,

  Maybe they can just listen, and so learn

  All they want.

  Are you shivering?

  Kilroy: I. Kavanin

  Jiro Osuragi, the local doctor in Nisuno, was a small, gray-haired man in his late fifties. Quietly matter-of-fact in his attitude, he took in the situation at a glance, and Mia was soon installed in a private ward of the small local clinic.

  At first he seemed inclined to reject Piet's claim to be a doctor, but as, on Piet's insistence, they examined the patient together, he was gradually convinced. Her injuries were fortunately minor, amounting to nothing more than a suspected cracked rib, multiple bruises of the legs and a slight concussion.

  She recovered consciousness. "Oh, Piet, love, I'm an old silly. I leaned on that boulder and it just rolled away—and I rolled with it. Am I... ooh!" Her hand moved upwards towards the rib.

  "You'll live," Piet said, smiling his reassurance. "But just scare me like that once more and I'll sue for divorce. My nerves won't stand it"

  He had just finished attending to the cracked rib and dressed her abrasions when she had the first contraction.

  "Piet, love, I think. . . ." She gritted her teeth against the pain.

  "Don't try to talk," he said. "You're in a safe place, with two doctors in attendance. Everything is going to be all right"

  Leaving her for a moment he went outside the ward to confer with Doctor Osuragi on preparations for the delivery. When he came back she was lying still, her face screwed up with anxiety.

  "Am I going to be all right?"

  "Of course," he reassured her.

  "How long?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised if you managed it in three hours."

  She shuddered and stiffened as a second contraction hit her. "Ooh—there it goes again," she gasped.

  "Nothing to worry about." He saw that she was tense, and determined to give her something to relax her. "You know, Mia, there were times when—" he smiled broadly at her—"when I thought maybe you didn't need me much. It's good in a way to be quite sure again that you do."

  "You thought I didn't—oh, Piet, how could you?"

  "Well, never mind. I know you do now."

  She gave a little shudder, and a gasp. "Oh . .. what was that?"

  "You're doing fine. Cervical dilation beginning." He cleaned up, and Osuragi brought in the rest of the hardware he needed for the delivery, excusing himself afterwards to attend to other patients, now that he was confident that Mia was in capable hands.

  After the doctor had gone, Piet said: "Now, let's get this trembling done with, shall we? A little jab, and then you'll feel all warm and cozy, and we can talk and squeeze, and talk and squeeze together."

  Some time later, he said: "You're presenting fine."

  A dozy giggle. "I'm what?"

  "Presenting. He's in the right position. Exactly."

  "A doctor's son, naturally."

  "Like the tide coming in, Mia."

  "What?"

  "A little further each time, love, and he goes back a little."

  He was so occupied with her needs that he mentally glimpsed only in the tiniest flashes who he was, and what he was—a man of Earth who had deserted his companions with a woman who had done the same. But she—she was now in her finest moment. His beloved Mia, strained, messy, utterly dependent on him, and he loved her more deeply than ever before....

  It was odd. Sometimes he saw himself doing a textbook job of delivery, sometimes as the loving husband who was miraculously able to do this important thing for his wife, and at others he saw himself as a man trapped by elemental forces, trapped by the very act that he had regarded as an exciting sport from his early teens—copulation.

  She slid her hand down her belly. "Hey—what happened here?"

  "What do you expect, girl? I shaved you."

  She giggled again, and then her face twisted. When the spasm was past she relaxed again, and said: "I can't remember that."

  And so it went on. The doctor was satisfied with his patient's progress. He could hear the textbook in his head . . . extension round subpubic arch begun . . . forward movement of the head satisfactory . .. time to move her left lateral, buttocks over edge ... she was so light to him... and the first sight of the top of the little head, with the birth canal a tight ring....

  She was in a gentle, painless haze, but the husband thought in agony, God, what a terrible thing to be woman! and refused to be comforted by the assurances of the doctor....

  And then, with the next contraction, the confidence of the doctor too was shattered, as he saw that, easy though the birth might be, that which was being born was an offense to humanity.

  She had a small shivering attack after the baby was out, but it soon passed. She was deeper in her hazy sleep, and he attended to her carefully. No tearing, blood clot out, cleaned and comfortable.

  The noise he kept hearing was the grinding of his own teeth, as he did what was necessary. He felt the tears start at the thought that when she awoke she would want to hold her baby....

  He steeled himself to look again on what she had borne, trying to maintain the calm of the impartial doctor as he stared at the awful thing that had sprung from his seed.

  Mia was not infected with Johannsen's disease, could not have been, as far as he knew. And himself—was he, perhaps, responsible?

  Or was it perhaps that Sato had been completely wrong about the connection between Johannsen's disease and the monstrous births on Kepler III? Piet had no way of knowing it, but the ugly, short-legged, thick-bodied, four-armed thing which lay pink and quivering before him was the same kind of creature to which the unhappy Yoko had given birth.

  Then, as he looked, it came to Piet what this thing really was. And with that knowledge, he knew quite clearly what he had to do. To him, with his medical training not long behind him, the hideous truth was apparent, and that truth must be told, whatever the cost.

  Mia . . . there could be no question of moving her for the time being. She would have to remain here under the care of Doctor Osuragi while he did what he must.

  Killing the nonhuman thing was not difficult. He no longer looked on it as part of himself or Mia.

  She was still sleeping when he wrapped the body in a plastic sheet, and put it in a bag. He looked at her for a moment, then hurried out with his burden to the car.

  Within five minutes he was out of the fertile valley, driving at top speed along the highway south, through the bleak, volcanic landscape. And he found himself wondering which was the more important; the call of duty that he, Piet Huygens, deserter, was obeying by returning in this way—or the escape that he, Piet Huygens, coward, was making from the questioning eyes of Mia when she awoke and asked for her ba
by. Perhaps it was neither, he reflected, perhaps what he was really obeying was a masochistic need to be punished for the crime he had committed in the name of love, because he was going to be punished, wanted it, and deserved it, and wanted to deserve it

  And Mia? He would probably never see her again, and perhaps it was best that way....

  He drove on, a bloody sun sagging into the primitive horizon on his left, staining the sky of Kepler III with its dreadful omen of horror as yet unrealized. . . .

  Commander Bruce was jolted awake by the urgent voice issuing from the loudspeaker at his bedside. He sat up, automatically thumbing the "send" button. "Do you know I've been in this bed only two hours?"

  "I'm sorry, sir, but I think you ought to come to the duty officer's room right away." Lee Ching's voice was firm.

  "You think, Lieutenant?"

  "I can't say any more over the intercom," said Lee Ching. "But this is an emergency." He broke contact.

  Emergency . . . Bruce clawed out of bed, reaching for his zip suit, muttering to himself: "Emergency . . . I'll have his balls for gyros if it's anything less than an AAA distress. . . ."

  By the time he reached the duty officer's room he was fully awake, the internal grumbling quieted, but what he found there puzzled him nevertheless. Lee Ching was standing by the desk, facing a man in the clothes of a Keplerian civilian. On the desk was a bundled zip bag, the presence of which brought about a sudden resurgence of Bruce's anger. If Lee Ching had got him out of bed to deal with a case of petty pilfering from ship's stores by some wretched civilian worker----

  This train of thought was broken off abruptly as both men saluted. Acknowledging curtly, Bruce walked round the desk and turned to face the prisoner; a black-haired man with the eyes of an Asiatic, who was taller than the average Keplerian by about thirty centimeters.

  "It's Lieutenant Huygens, sir," explained Lee Ching. "He insisted that he had to see you personally."

  It was so long since Bruce had seen the defecting medical officer, and the man's appearance was so different, that he had difficulty in squaring the situation up in his mind. Yes ... it was Huygens, but the changes in this man were deeper than the mere cosmetic touches of coloring and eye-shape.

  "All right, Huygens. So you've seen me. You've got yourself my undivided, personal attention." Bruce's voice was a quiet whiplash. "But before you say anything, anything at all, I'd advise you to think carefully." To Lee Ching, he said: "Get Maseba."

  "Sir... my reasons ..."

  "Tell them to the court martial."

  "But, sir..."

  "You snivelling, undisciplined son of a bitch! Do you imagine that I'm interested in hearing your reasons?"

  "Sir, I didn't come back just to give myself up..."

  Bruce's green eyes were hard as slate. "I don't want to hear it, Huygens. You're under close arrest, as of now, and when we're back in space you'll be court-martialed. Not here, on Kepler, where you might attract some misguided sympathy. And when we get back to Earth, you'll get a dishonorable discharge and then serve out your sentence in a civilian jail. I loathe and detest you for what you've done to the Corps, Huygens, and you're never going to be allowed to forget that crime..."

  "Commander Bruce . . . sir!" It was a cry for help, but Bruce was too preoccupied with his righteous rage to recognize it as such.

  Maseba came into the room, nodded to Lee, and stood listening.

  Bruce continued, his voice harsh, uncompromising. "There are some people in this crew who have made excuses for you, Huygens, but I'm not one of them. They've adduced various so-called reasons for what you did. But as far as I'm concerned the facts speak for themselves. You're a disgrace ..."

  "Sir! For God's sake!" Huygen's voice was a strangled shout. "Listen to me! I didn't have to come back. I could have stayed out there, and you would never have found me. But I did come back, and you've got to listen to me! Look at this!" Tension in the room increased, as he stepped forward and unzipped the bag. Lee Ching moved to restrain him, then stopped as Huygens removed the transparent plastic container and held it up in full view. "Look, damn you! Mia—my wife—this is the thing she gave birth to!"

  Bruce looked at the terrible, unhuman shape, the impetus of his rage faltering. "You mean your . . . Mizuno? Maseba said that a Comp. Ab.—"

  Piet cried out in anguish. "I wish to God she'd had that Comp. Ab.! Anything, if she could have been spared this. I wish we'd never. . . ." He swayed for a moment, then choked back his sobs. "No, maybe I don't, because if I hadn't seen this one, then none of us would have been given the opportunity of seeing one of these . . . things. Sato covered up the whole affair, because he thought in his ignorance that they were due to the effects of Johannsen's disease—because, well-meaning fool that he was, he could see no further than the goal of Keplerian independence."

  Maseba was looking at the creature closely, his eyes filled with alarm.

  "But you recognize it, commander, don't you?" Huygens continued. "You should know better than any of us, if I remember my medical history. This is one of the things which the Kilroys were trying to make when they experimented with the colonists on Minos IV— the rejects which you shot out of mercy, all that long time ago, when I was just a little boy at school... the ones they showed pictures of at the Athena inquiry. We all know those pictures, those dissections, and what they represent..."

  "Gods of all the tribes defend us!" Maseba spoke quietly; the brown-flecked whites of his eyes showing boldly as he bent forward. He slipped his pink palms

  under the specimen and lifted it out of Huygen's grasp.

  Bruce said: "What are you talking about? Those things I found on Minos IV were produced by surgery on adult humans."

  "That's right, they were," agreed Huygens, "but now the Kilroys must have gone a stage further. Using Johannsen's disease, which we already know to have an affinity for human reproductive cells, they have restructured the virus, inserting specific episomes which are capable of altering the human genetic code and causing these creatures to be produced by human mothers. Kepler III is, in effect, an experimental farm."

  Bruce looked towards Maseba. "This is possible?"

  Maseba, still holding the terrible evidence in his hands, nodded. "Ruthless genetic engineering on a massive scale. Creatures of one species molded out of the living cells of another ... for the Kilroys, yes, this would be possible."

  "But for what reason... ?"

  "Can we even begin to understand the motivation of a completely nonhuman race, with whom we have never made direct contact?"

  Brace's lean face was grave as he stared at the dreadful thing in Maseba's hands. "We may be reaching the crisis point of that situation too," he said.

  Maseba frowned. "Commander?"

  "I was thinking," said Bruce. "Assuming that this theory of Kepler III being an experimental farm is correct—then surely the Kilroys will be along some time soon to see how their crop is coming along?"

  Maseba's office was darkened, and quiet save for the small whirring of the cooling fan on the projector which was being operated by Leela De Witt. Apart from the two medics, there were four people present; Charles

  Magnus, his assistant Ichiwara, Bruce, and Helen Lindstrom. Seated next to her commander she felt a prickling down her spine as she looked at the black paper-doll things on the screen and considered the idea of a war whose battleground was the microscopic genetic inheritance of the human race.

  Maseba touched the screen with his light pointer. "Here you see the karotype of a normal human chromosome pattern. Using the Denver Classification System, the chromosomes are lined up by size and shape into seven groups of autosomes and two gonosomes, which determine the sex of the embryo. When a sperm fertilizes an ovum, each supplies half the forty-six chromosomes for the combination of cells that will grow into a baby. To give you some idea of the complexity of this process, I should add that each of these chromosomes contains up to one thousand two hundred and fifty genes, and each of these genes determines so
me factor, or combination of factors, in the makeup of the individual. Despite the eugenics laws, which as you know require persons intending to breed to submit themselves for genetic examination, et cetera, in a growth disorder like Mongolism, something goes wrong with the process of cell division in the embryo and such patients are found to have forty-seven chromosomes instead of the normal forty-six. Another common abnormality is concerned with the gonosomes, where instead of splitting into two neat rows of twenty-three each, an extra X or Y chromosome is left in one row. If the supernumerary is an X, the baby has an XXY pattern. It will grow into a sterile, asthenic 'male,' usually with some breast enlargement and mental retardation—the condition known as Klinefelter's syndrome. If the extra chromosome is a Y, then the baby gets an XYY pattern and is unquestionably male, but over-aggressive and potentially criminal. Right, Leela."

  In response to Maseba's command, another picture appeared on the screen beneath the first one.

  "Now," he continued, "the abnormalities I have mentioned so far are already well-known to us. They have no direct bearing on our present problem, except as an illustration of the terrible effects that may occur as a result of the tiniest rearrangement of genetic material. The karotype you now see beneath our original has been produced from the white blood cells of Mia Mizuno's child. In this case we see that, instead of the normal three pairs of autosomes in the fourth group, there are in fact four pairs; additional to this, instead of there being one pair of gonosomes, either XY or XX, that is male or female, there are two pairs, XX and XY. Thus, instead of the normal total of forty-six we have a being whose cell structure contains fifty chromosomes—the extra pair of autosomes in the fourth group, presumably governing the growth process which produces the physical abnormalities found in Mia's child, and the extra pair of gonosomes indicating that on maturity this creature would probably become a male/ female creature capable of fulfilling either function in the breeding process."