Equally conceivably the knowledge of what she had become—the knowledge she gleaned from the mutagen—terrified her beyond bearing.
Whatever the explanation, her “immortality” could be gauged by the fact that few texts on the subject mention her by name.
Or it could be gauged by this, that her final scribbles eventually led humankind into a fatal relation with the Amnion.
Mostly she had written numbers, strings of figures which had no meaning to anyone—or to any of Intertech’s computers—until a young astronomer as crucial, and as forgotten, as the volunteer herself thought to analyze them as galactic coordinates.
Those coordinates enabled Captain Sixten Vertigus and Deep Star to establish contact with the Amnion for the first time.
CHAPTER 13
Morn began drifting toward consciousness when the Amnioni eliminated anesthetic from the mix of air she took in through the breathing mask.
The process seemed to require a long time. Controlled by her zone implant as well as by alien drugs, she was helpless to bring herself back. Gradually she became aware of the numb ache in her loins—the stress of parturition muffled by some powerful analgesic. She felt the distension of her belly: the elasticity of her muscles had been strained away. But those things weren’t enough to focus her attention; she couldn’t concentrate on them.
Yet her body continued to throw off the effects of the anesthetic. Eventually she realized that she could hear Nick’s voice.
“Morn!” he demanded, “wake up! You said you weren’t afraid. Prove it. Come back!”
Some part of her heard his fury, recognized that he was in a killing rage. She could feel his hands shaking her shoulders, shaking her heart. She remembered that she hated him.
“Those bastards cheated us! They did something to him!”
He broke into a fit of coughing.
Another piece of her, a separate compartment, understood that she shouldn’t have been able to hear him. He was wearing an EVA suit, and she had no earphones. Nevertheless it wasn’t his voice or his coughing that snagged her attention.
They did something to him.
Him? Who?
Like a momentary gap in dense smoke, a glimpse of light, the answer came to her.
Davies. Her son.
The Amnion had done something to her son.
She lay still, as if she were deaf; as if she were lost. Nothing external showed that she was fighting urgently for the strength to open her eyes.
She had the impression that Nick pulled away from her. His voice went in a different direction as he snarled, “You cheated, you fucking sonofabitch. You did something to him.”
Davies Hyland. Her son. The reason she was here—the reason she’d surrendered herself.
Nick was answered by another voice she shouldn’t have been able to hear. It was full of pointed teeth and sulfuric light.
“Presumed human Captain Nick Succorso, that is a false statement. The Amnion do not accept false statements. You charge a betrayal of trade. It is established that the Amnion do not betray trade. Your own tests will demonstrate that the offspring is human. The genetic identity is exactly what it was in the female’s womb. Your statements are false.”
Another fit of coughing tore at Nick’s lungs. When he could talk again, he rasped, “Then why does he look like that?”
The alien voice conveyed a shrug. “Your question cannot be answered. Is there a flaw in the offspring’s maturation? It is not apparent. Tests indicate no genetic defect. However, if you wish the offspring altered, that can be done.”
“You bastard,” Nick spat, nearly retching. “He doesn’t look like me.”
“Presumed human Captain Nick Succorso,” the voice explained with what may have been Amnion patience, “your genetic identity has no point of congruence with that of this offspring. He is not your—translation suggests the word ‘son.’ Therefore resemblance would be improbable.”
Nick’s silence was as loud as a shout.
With an effort that seemed to drain the marrow from her bones, leaving her as weak as paper, Morn opened her eyes.
For a moment a flood of sulfur from the ceiling blinded her. But once her eyes opened they blinked on their own. Tears streaked the sides of her face, leaving damp, delicate trails that were more distinct to her nerves than any of the consequences of giving birth. She felt naked from her scalp to her toes; yet something kept her warm. By increments she moved closer to true consciousness.
Soon she was able to see.
A shape in an EVA suit with the faceplate open stood several paces away, near the other crèche. Sour yellow light gleamed up and down the mylar surface.
Nick.
He confronted a rusty and monstrous shape which must have been the Amnion doctor.
Towering over the crèche, the Amnioni said into its headset and the acrid air, “The offspring resumes consciousness. In humans a period of adjustment is required. The transfer of mind produces—translation suggests the word ‘disorientation.’ For a time the mind will be unable to distinguish itself from its source.
“Data is inadequate to predict the course of this disorientation. Speculation suggests that adjustment can be rapid with proper stimulation.”
The doctor moved one of its arms along the side of the crèche, and its protective cover opened.
Morn saw bare limbs twist, heard a wet cough. The sound was weak; it seemed to come from a baby who couldn’t get enough air.
Her baby.
She tried to move.
Some weight held her down. It wasn’t heavy, but it was too great for her. She couldn’t understand it. Had the Amnioni put her under restraint?
With an effort, she shifted her gaze to her own form.
There were no restraints. The weight was only the light fabric of her shipsuit. Presumably the doctor had stripped her so that her baby could be born. Then it must have dressed her again.
She was too weak to carry the burden of a mere shipsuit. Like an infant, she needed to come naked back to herself.
Somehow she turned her head so that she could look at the other crèche again.
The doctor put a breathing mask to the mouth of the body in the crèche; secured the mask with a strap. The coughing stopped, but the frail, uncertain movement of the limbs continued.
With three of its secondary arms, the Amnioni lifted her son into a sitting position. For a moment he remained there, breathing strenuously; then the doctor helped him move his legs off the crèche so that he could stand.
Except for the mask over his mouth and the relative slightness of his build, he might as well have been Angus Thermopyle.
The sight would have shocked her, if she’d been capable of shock. But her zone implant held her so close to blankness that she couldn’t react to the image of the man who’d ravaged her flesh, shattered her spirit.
He was only an hour old, and already he appeared like a bloated toad, dark and brutal. His arms and chest were built for violence; he stood with his legs splayed as if to withstand the abuse of the universe. His penis dangled from his crotch, as ugly as an instrument of rape.
Only his eyes betrayed the heritage of his mother. They were Morn’s color—and full of her dread.
His fear made him look as helpless as a child.
Davies Hyland. Her son.
Her mind in Angus’ body.
He needed her. For him this moment was worse than it could ever be for her. He suffered everything that had ever terrorized her—but he had no zone implant.
His extremity gave her the strength to slide one hand into the pocket of her shipsuit.
“Again,” said the Amnioni, “the offer is made to accept the female. A suitable recompense will be negotiated. Her usefulness to you is gone. The only means by which her reason can be restored requires alteration of her genetic identity.”
“In other words,” Nick snarled, “you want to make her Amnion.” His voice was raw with coughing. Through his open faceplate, Morn saw that his face
was slick with sweat or tears, the result of the bitter air he breathed so that she would be able to hear him.
Too weak and still too close to unconsciousness for subtlety, she didn’t try to adjust her black box; she simply switched it off.
Then she rolled over the edge of the crèche.
While the jolt of impact and transition slammed through her, she heard the doctor intone, “The procedure produces a total and irreparable loss of reason and function.”
At the edge of her vision, she saw Nick’s boots stamp toward her. He stopped at her side; his knees flexed.
“Get up,” he gasped.
She tried, but it was beyond her. Like a stretched elastic cord when it was released, her mind seemed to snap away—out of the void where it had been held; toward the need of her son. In her thoughts, she surged upright, hurried to his aid. For him an incomprehensible awakening would be made more terrible when he saw her and believed that she was himself. He would need help to absorb the truth; help to counter his fear; help to understand who and what he was, and not go mad.
Yet her body only lay on the floor, trembling. She braced her arms, but couldn’t lever her chest up. The pressure on her swollen breasts made them ache impersonally, like distant fire.
Coughing until his voice nearly failed, Nick croaked, “Get up, you bitch!”
She couldn’t.
As if she were weightless, he caught her by the fabric of her shipsuit and hauled her off the floor; he flung her against the edge of the crèche, then spun her to face him. From inside his helmet, his eyes glared: black; beyond appeal. His scars were flagrant with blood and rage.
“Goddamn it! You put me through all this, and he isn’t even mine! That’s Thermopyle! He isn’t even mine!”
Then he went down because Davies had come off the other crèche and punched him in the back with all Angus’ harsh force.
Unable to catch herself, Morn flopped on top of Nick.
Gasping, he arched his back and tried to squirm away from the pain as if his ribs were broken.
When she rolled off him, she found Davies stooping over her. As soon as she stopped moving, he bent closer, dropped to his knees. His eyes searched her face as if he were transfixed with horror.
More Amnion were there—the guards. Between them, they picked Nick up and held him so that he couldn’t attack. He struggled like a man whose ribs weren’t seriously damaged. Nevertheless the raw air ripped at his lungs, and every exertion made him cough harder, draining his strength.
“Restore the integrity of your suit,” the doctor told him, “so that breathing will be easy. Your words will be broadcast to each other.”
“He was going to hurt you,” Davies breathed. His vocal cords were sixteen years old, but his voice had the innocent inflections of a child; he sounded like a young, lost version of his father. Dismay as deep as the dimensional gap stared out of his eyes. “I couldn’t let him do that.
“You’re me.”
She wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and hug him against her sore breasts, but she was too weak. And other things were more important. “No,” she said through her mask and her frailty and the stress of transition. “That’s not true. You’ve got to trust me.”
His instinctive crisis showed on his face, the conflict between the impulse to believe in her because she was him and the need to reject her because she shouldn’t have been separate from him. It was the fundamental crisis of maturation made grotesquely, extravagantly worse by the way it came upon him—all in minutes, instead of slowly over sixteen years.
Reaching up to him, she gripped his arms—arms like his father’s; arms so strong that they’d once beaten Nick. “None of this makes sense to you,” she said as if she were pleading. “I know that. Everything feels wrong. If you think hard you may be able to remember what happened. I’ll explain it all—I’ll help you every way I can. But not now. Not here. You’ve got to trust me. You think you’re Morn Hyland, but you’re not. I’m Morn Hyland. You know what she looks like. She looks like me. You don’t.
“Your name is Davies Hyland. I’m your mother. You’re my son.”
Nick’s voice boomed as if it were playing over speakers large enough to fill an auditorium. “And Angus goddamn Thermo-pile is your fucking father!”
While he raged, the doctor—or the Enablement authorities—turned down the volume of their broadcast. He seemed to fade as he cursed.
Davies’ eyes flicked toward Nick. Morn saw them narrow with inherited revulsion. Then he looked back down at her. At once his disgust returned to panic.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered past his mask. “You’re me. You’re what I see in my head when I see myself. I can’t remember—Who is Angus Thermo-pile?”
“I’ll help you,” she insisted urgently. “I’ll explain everything. I’ll help you remember. We’ll remember it all together.” Her own mask seemed to hamper her voice; she couldn’t make it reach him. “But not now. Not here. It’s too dangerous.
“Just trust me. Please.”
“This does not conform to established reality,” said the doctor. Morn heard strange Amnion cadences with one ear, language she knew with the other. “The procedure produces total and irreparable loss of reason and function. Analysis is required.” As if speaking to one of the computers, the Amnioni instructed, “Complete physiological, metabolic, and genetic decoding, decisiveness high.”
Abruptly Davies took her in his arms and lifted her. He set her on her feet and started to let go of her; but when her knees buckled, he caught and supported her by her elbows. Like his father, he was an inch or two shorter than she.
Almost strangling on his distress, he murmured, “I’m Morn Hyland. You’re Morn Hyland. This is wrong.”
“I know,” she replied from the bottom of her heart. “I know. It’s wrong.” Desperately she tried to confirm his grasp on reality, so that he wouldn’t go mad. “But I didn’t have any other way to save your life.” Or my soul.
He continued to stare at her with his eyes full of bleak, unremitting fear.
“You better believe her,” Nick snarled viciously. “She’s never told me the truth, but she’s telling it to you. She damn near got us all dispersed to infinity in the gap so she could save your shit-miserable life.”
Morn ignored him. Her son needed her, her son; her mind in Angus’ body. His dread was as palpable to her as her own. She had no attention to spare for Nick’s outrage—or his grief.
The doctor came to stand beside her and Davies. “You wish to be clothed,” it said. “It is understood that humans require garments.” One of its arms offered a shipsuit and boots made of a strange material that appeared to absorb light. “The frailty of human skin is conducive to fear. This is a racial defect, correctable by Amnion.”
With a small shock, Morn realized that the doctor may have been trying to comfort Davies.
“Do it,” she urged him softly. “Get dressed. We’ll go back to Captain’s Fancy. We can talk there.”
Then she stepped back to show him that she could stand without his support.
He complied, not because he believed her, not because he set his fear aside in order to trust her—she knew this in the same way that she knew herself—but because his nakedness made him feel vulnerable to harm and manipulation. Awkwardly, as if his brain weren’t entirely in control of his movements, he accepted the shipsuit and put it on; he shoved his feet into the boots. The fit was approximate, but adequate.
The sulfuric light didn’t appear to touch him anywhere except on his face and hands; his clothes shed it like water. But it gave his face a jaundiced hue, and the contrast made him look at once more and less like his father: more malign, and less certain of it.
“Are you done?” Nick rasped. “I want to get out of here.”
“The return to your ship is acceptable,” said the Amnioni. “You will be escorted.” An instant later it added, “Further violence is not acceptable.”
The guards let go of Nick’s a
rms.
“Tell him to leave me alone.” Davies’ appeal sounded like that of a scared child—of the scared child inside Morn.
“I’m not going to touch you, asshole,” retorted Nick. “Not here. You’re coming back to my ship. Once you’re aboard, I’ll do anything I fucking want to you.”
Davies’ eyes turned to Morn in alarm and supplication.
“I can’t tell you not to be afraid,” she said unsteadily. “I’m scared of him, too. But we can’t stay here. You know that. Somewhere inside, you know that.” She was frantic for strength, for the ability to make her words reach him and be believed. “Somewhere inside, you know how to defend yourself. And I’m on your side. Completely.” She spoke to her son, but she wanted Nick to hear her and understand that she was threatening him. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
Davies held her gaze for a long moment as if without her he would drown in his dread. Then, slowly, he nodded.
One of the guards opened the door to the outer hall and the transport sled.
“Come on.” Nick turned and strode out of the lab.
The doctor picked up Morn’s EVA suit, gave it to her. She bundled it under one arm so that her other hand was free to reach into her pocket. Still wavering, she followed Nick.
The entire center of her being, from her crotch to her heart, ached dully, as if something essential had been torn away. She concentrated on that so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed by her concern for her son.
Ahead of her, Nick stepped into the sled. She did the same.
So did Davies.
Staring straight past the shoulders of the Amnioni driver as if he could no longer bear to look at her, he rode with her back through Enablement Station to Captain’s Fancy.
By the time they reached the high emptiness of the dock, he couldn’t conceal the fact that he was trembling. Already, she guessed, his grasp on what little he knew about himself had begun to fail, eroded not only by the shock of seeing himself in someone else and hearing his identity denied, but also by his father’s physical legacy—by testosterone and male endocrine balances. And then there were the unguessable aftereffects of his mother’s use of a zone implant while he was in her womb. In a short time, Morn realized, he would cease to think in ways she could predict or even understand.