Axiomatic (36 page)

* * * *

In terms of bulk, I was five months pregnant.

In terms of weight, seven months.

For two years.

If Kafka had been a woman . . .

I didn’t grow used to it, but I did learn to cope. There were ways to sleep, ways to sit, ways to move that were easier than others. I was tired all day long, but there were times when I had enough energy to feel almost normal again, and I made good use of them. I worked hard, and I didn’t fall behind. The Department was launching a new blitz on corporate tax evasion; I threw myself into it with more zeal than I’d ever felt before. My enthusiasm was artificial, but that wasn’t the point; I needed the momentum to carry me through.

On good days, I felt optimistic: weary, as always, but triumphantly persistent. On bad days, I thought: You bastards, you think this will make me hate him? It’s
you
I’ll resent,
you
I’ll despise. On bad days, I made plans for Global Assurance. I hadn’t been ready to fight them before, but when Chris was safe, and my strength had returned, I’d find a way to hurt them.

The reactions of my colleagues were mixed. Some were admiring. Some thought I’d let myself be exploited. Some were simply revolted by the thought of
a human brain
floating in my womb — and to challenge my own squeamishness, I confronted these people as often as I could.

‘Go on, touch it,’ I said. ‘It won’t bite. It won’t even kick.’

There was a brain in my womb, pale and convoluted.
So what?
I had an equally unappealing object in my own skull. In fact, my whole body was full of repulsive-looking offal — a fact which had never bothered me before.

So I conquered my visceral reactions to the organ
per se —
but thinking about Chris himself remained a difficult balancing act.

I resisted the insidious temptation to delude myself that I might be ‘in touch’ with him — by ‘telepathy’, through the bloodstream, by any means at all. Maybe pregnant mothers had some genuine empathy with their unborn children; I’d never been pregnant, it wasn’t for me to judge. Certainly, a child in the womb could hear its mother’s voice — but a comatose brain, devoid of sense organs, was a different matter entirely. At best — or worst — perhaps certain hormones in my blood crossed the placenta and had some limited effect on his condition.

On his mood?

He was in a coma, he had no
mood.

In fact, it was easiest, and safest, not to think of him as even being
located
inside me, let alone experiencing anything there. I was carrying a part of him; the surrogate mother of his clone was carrying another. Only when the two were united would he truly exist again; for now, he was in limbo, neither dead nor alive.

This pragmatic approach worked, most of the time. Of course, there were moments when I suffered a kind of panic at the renewed realization of the bizarre nature of what I’d done. Sometimes I’d wake from nightmares, believing — for a second or two — that Chris was dead and his spirit had possessed me; or that his brain had sent forth nerves into my body and taken control of my limbs; or that he was fully conscious, and going insane from loneliness and sensory deprivation. But I wasn’t possessed, my limbs still obeyed me, and every month a PET scan and a ‘uterine EEC proved that he was still comatose

—undamaged, but mentally inert.

In fact, the dreams I hated the most were those in which I was carrying a child. I’d wake from
these
with one hand on my belly, rapturously contemplating the miracle of the new life growing inside me — until I came to my senses and dragged myself angrily out of bed. I’d start the morning in the foullest of moods, grinding my teeth as I pissed, banging plates at the breakfast table, screaming insults at no one in particular while I dressed. Lucky I was living alone.

I couldn’t really blame my poor besieged body for trying, though. My oversized, marathon pregnancy dragged on and on; no wonder it tried to compensate me for the inconvenience with some stiff medicinal doses of maternal love. How ungrateful my rejection must have seemed; how baffling to find its images and sentiments rejected as
inappropriate.

So ... I trampled on Death, and I trampled on Motherhood. Well,
hallelujah.
If sacrifices had to be made, what better victims could there have been than those two emotional slave-drivers? And it was easy, really; logic was on my side, with a vengeance. Chris was
not
dead; I had no reason to mourn him, whatever had become of the body I’d known. And the thing in my womb was
not
a child; permitting a disembodied brain to be the object of motherly love would have been simply farcical.

We think of our lives as circumscribed by cultural and biological taboos, but if people really want to break them, they always seem to find a way. Human beings are capable of anything: torture, genocide, cannibalism, rape. After which — or so I’d heard — most can still be kind to children and animals, be moved to tears by music, and generally behave as if all their emotional faculties are intact.

So, what reason did I have to fear that my own minor — and utterly selfless — transgressions could do me any harm at all?

* * * *

I never met the new body’s surrogate mother, I never saw the clone as a child. I did wonder, though —

once I knew that the thing had been born — whether or not she’d found her ‘normal’ pregnancy as distressing as I’d found mine. Which is easier, I wondered: carrying a brain-damaged child-shaped object, with no potential for human thought, grown from a stranger’s DNA — or carrying the sleeping brain of your lover? Which is the harder to keep from loving in inappropriate ways?

At the start, I’d hoped to be able to blur all the details in my mind — I’d wanted to be able to wake one morning and pretend that Chris had merely been
sick,
and was now
recovered.
Over the months, though, I’d come to realise that it was never going to work that way.

When they took out the brain, I should have felt — at the very least — relieved, but I just felt numb, and vaguely disbelieving. The ordeal had gone on for so long; it
couldn’t
be over with so little fuss: no trauma, no ceremony. I’d had surreal dreams of laboriously, but triumphantly, giving birth to a healthy pink brain — but even if I’d wanted that (and no doubt the process could have been induced), the organ was too delicate to pass safely through the vagina. This ‘Caesarean’ removal was just one more blow to my biological expectations; a good thing, of course, in the long run, since my biological expectations could never be fulfilled . . . but I still couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated.

So I waited, in a daze, for the proof that it had all been worthwhile.

The brain couldn’t simply be transplanted into the clone, like a heart or a kidney. The peripheral nervous system of the new body wasn’t identical to that of the old one; identical genes weren’t sufficient to ensure that. Also — despite drugs to limit the effect — parts of Chris’s brain had atrophied slightly from disuse. So, rather than splicing nerves directly between the imperfectly matched brain and body — which probably would have left him paralysed, deaf, dumb and blind — the impulses would be routed through a computerised ‘interface’, which would try to sort out the discrepancies. Chris would still have to be rehabilitated, but the computer would speed up the process enormously, constantly striving to bridge the gap between thought and action, between reality and perception.

The first time they let me see him, I didn’t recognise him at all. His face was slack, his eyes unfocused; he looked like a large, neurologically impaired child — which, of course, he was. I felt a mild twinge of revulsion. The man I’d seen after the train wreck, swarming with medical robots, had looked far more human, far more whole.

I said, ‘Hello. It’s me.’

He stared into space.

The technician said, ‘It’s early days.’

She was right. In the weeks that followed, his progress (or the computer’s) was astounding. His posture and expression soon lost their disconcerting neutrality, and the first helpless twitches rapidly gave way to coordinated movement; weak and clumsy, but encouraging. He couldn’t talk, but he could meet my eyes, he could squeeze my hand.

He was
in there,
he was
back,
there was no doubt about that.

I worried about his silence — but I discovered later that he’d deliberately spared me his early, faltering attempts at speech.

One evening in the fifth week of his new life, when I came into the room and sat down beside the bed, he turned to me and said clearly, ‘They told me what you did. Oh God, Carla, I love you!’

His eyes filled with tears. I bent over and embraced him; it seemed like the right thing to do. And I cried, too — but even as I did so, I couldn’t help thinking: None of this can really touch me. It’s just one more trick of the body, and I’m immune to all that now.

* * * *

We made love on the third night he spent at home. I’d expected it to be difficult, a massive psychological hurdle for both of us, but that wasn’t the case at all. And after everything we’d come through, why should it have been? I don’t know what I’d feared; some poor misguided avatar of the Incest Taboo, crashing through the bedroom window at the critical moment, spurred on by the ghost of a discredited nineteenth-century misogynist?

I suffered no delusion at any level — from the merely subconscious, right down to the endocrine — that Chris was
my son.
Whatever effects two years of placental hormones might have had on me, whatever behavioural programs they ‘ought’ to have triggered, I’d apparently gained the strength and the insight to undermine completely.

True, his skin was soft and unweathered, and devoid of the scars of a decade of hacking off facial hair. He might have passed for a sixteen-year-old, but I felt no qualms about
that
— any middle-aged man who was rich enough and vain enough could have looked the same.

And when he put his tongue to my breasts, I did not lactate.

We soon started visiting friends; they were tactful, and Chris was glad of that — although personally, I’d have happily discussed any aspect of the procedure. Six months later, he was working again; his old job had been taken, but a new firm was recruiting (and they wanted a youthful image).

Piece by piece, our lives were reassembled.

Nobody, looking at us now, would think that anything had changed.

But they’d be wrong.

To love a
brain
as if it were a
child
would be ludicrous. Geese might be stupid enough to treat the first animal they see upon hatching as their mother, but there are limits to what a sane human being will swallow. So, reason triumphed over instinct, and I conquered my inappropriate love; under the circumstances, there was never really any contest.

Having deconstructed one form of enslavement, though, I find it all too easy to repeat the process, to recognise the very same chains in another guise.

Everything special I once felt for Chris is transparent to me now. I still feel genuine friendship for him, I still feel desire, but there used to be something more. If there hadn’t been, I doubt he’d be alive today.

Oh, the signals keep coming through; some part of my brain still pumps out cues for
appropriate
feelings of tenderness, but these messages are as laughable, and as ineffectual, now, as the contrivances of some tenth-rate tear-jerking movie. I just can’t suspend my disbelief any more.

I have no trouble going through the motions; inertia makes it easy. And as long as things are working —

as long as his company is pleasant and the sex is good — I see no reason to rock the boat. We may stay together for years, or I may walk out tomorrow. I really don’t know.

Of course I’m still glad that he survived — and to some degree, I can even admire the courage and selflessness of the woman who saved him. I know that I could never do the same.

Sometimes when we’re together, and I see in his eyes the very same helpless passion that I’ve lost, I’m tempted to pity myself. I think: I was
brutalised,
no wonder I’m a cripple, no wonder I’m so fucked up.

And in a sense, that’s a perfectly valid point of view — but I never seem to be able to subscribe to it for long. The new truth has its own cool passion, its own powers of manipulation; it assails me with words like ‘freedom’ and ‘insight’, and speaks of the end of all deception. It grows inside me, day by day, and it’s far too strong to let me have regrets.

<>

* * * *

THE MORAL VIROLOGIST

Out on the street, in the dazzling sunshine of a warm Atlanta morning, a dozen young children were playing. Chasing, wrestling, and hugging each other, laughing and yelling, crazy and jubilant for no other reason than being alive on such a day. Inside the gleaming white building, though, behind double-glazed windows, the air was slightly chilly — the way John Shawcross preferred it — and nothing could be heard but the air conditioning, and a faint electrical hum.

The schematic of the protein molecule trembled very slightly. Shawcross grinned, already certain of success. As the pH displayed in the screen’s top left crossed the critical value — the point at which, according to his calculations, the energy of conformation B should drop below that of conformation A —

the protein suddenly convulsed and turned completely inside out. It was exactly as he had predicted, and his binding studies had added strong support, but to
see
the transformation (however complex the algorithms that had led from reality to screen) was naturally the most satisfying proof.

He replayed the event backwards and forwards several times, utterly captivated. This marvellous device would easily be worth the eight hundred thousand he’d paid for it. The salesperson had provided several impressive demonstrations, of course, but this was the first time Shawcross had used the machine for his own work. Images of proteins
in solution!
Normal X-ray diffraction could only work with crystalline samples, in which a molecule’s configuration often bore little resemblance to its aqueous, biologically relevant, form. An ultrasonically stimulated semi-ordered liquid phase was the key, not to mention some major breakthroughs in computing; Shawcross couldn’t follow all the details, but that was no impediment to using the machine. He charitably wished upon the inventor Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, viewed the stunning results of his experiment once again, then stretched, rose to his feet, and went out in search of lunch.