you think she will go to court, now that you’ve decided?”
“I hope not. I hope Dad will talk her out of it. But if she does, so be it. After all, I can hardly hope to avoid publicity now that I’ve made my decision, can I?”
“No,” said the doctor, pensively. “I dare say you can’t.”
* * * * * * *
“You can’t” said Leonie Duncan, angrily. “It’s preposterous. You can’t do it.”
“Yes I can,” said Gerald, patiently. “It’s perfectly feasible, and it avoids the worst aspects of both the other solutions. Tissue reconstruction is done all the time—it’s just a matter of switching the right genes on and off.”
“It’s obscene,” she said. “It’s unnatural.”
“Mother,” he said, quietly, “everything that enables us to be human and civilized is unnatural. Wearing clothes is unnatural; speaking languages is unnatural; building houses and roads is unnatural; medicine is unnatural; in fact, every god-damned thing that makes life worth living is unnatural. The only natural thing in this whole affair is that ridiculous freak of a baby brother, which is slowly turning into a king-sized pain in my gut. Nature is all stupid accidents, mother—human life is about taking reasoned decisions to oppose and overcome the waywardness of nature. That’s what I’ve done. I won’t say that it will be easy, but I will defend the reasonableness of my decision in any and every court in the land, if I have to. So you’ll just have to go away, and decide what you’re going to do, and then do it, won’t you?”
Leonie Duncan burst into tears. “Whatever did we do wrong?” she wailed.
* * * * * * *
“You can’t,” said Mark Cleminson, in utter disbelief. “It’s preposterous. You can’t do it.”
“Yes I can,” said Gerald, patiently, conscientiously repeating himself. “It’s perfectly feasible, and it avoids the worst aspects of both the other solutions. Tissue reconstruction is....”
Mark didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. “But what about us!” he complained. “Don’t I figure in this at all?”
“Of course you do,” said Gerald. “We’re married, aren’t we? That doesn’t have to change, unless you want it to.”
“Doesn’t have to change! You’re mad, do you know that? Mad!”
Gerald studied those hard grey eyes. They looked like the eyes of a blind man, staring but not seeing.
“I suppose you’ll tell me now that this is what you’ve always wanted,” said Mark, converting his sense of injury into a sneer. “I suppose you’ve decided that you were never genuinely gay—that you were really a heterosexual woman in the wrong body. Well I’m gay, and there is no way I’m going to put up with this nonsense. I’m telling you straight: get this thing transplanted—I don’t give a damn whether it ends up in your mother, or a machine, or any place else—or we’re through. Finished. Kaput.”
“Suit yourself,” said Gerald, with a lack of remorse that surprised him more than a little. “It’s only tissue-replacement, you know, not an identity transplant. It needn’t even be permanent—I could change back after I stop breast-feeding. I’d still be me.”
“Like hell you would,” said Mark, as though he were spitting out powdered glass. “Like hell.”
* * * * * * *
Afterwards, when Gerald was alone—at last!—the doubts began to creep in. He laid his hand yet again on the fetus in fetu, wondering anxiously what the pangs of birth would actually be like. Like the torments of hell, perhaps...very possibly, in fact. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to. It wasn’t something he could look forward to—but women did it all the time, and by the time he had to do it, he’d be a woman too, at least for a while.
It wasn’t simply that he had to become a mother in order to compete with his own mother. It wasn’t that at all. It was the fetus in fetu whose needs had to be given top priority. Viable it might be, but it was facing a prospect that no proto-human individual had ever faced before in the history of the world. It had to be given every chance; he thought that he owed it everything he could give.
So he’d made his decision.
The trouble with informed decisions, he thought, is that there’s too much bloody information by half.
But it wasn’t heavy, and it was his brother...and sometimes, he figured, a man just had to do what a man had to do....
That was all there was to it, really.
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