has happened before, then?”
“Oh yes. The first reported case was in the late nineteenth century, when the French surgeon Dupuytren found an apparently-entire fetus in the body of a thirteen-year-old boy. In England at a slightly later date Blundell tracked the development of a similar fetus in a nine-year-old, which was contained in a sac and connected to the abdominal wall by an umbilical cord. At thirty-one you might be the oldest person on record to have the problem, but you’re certainly not the first.”
“What happened to the two boys?”
“Those particular ones both died. But you needn’t worry about that, Mr. Duncan; this is the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. You’re in no danger at all. The twentieth-century cases fared better. A surgeon named McIntyre operated to remove a similar fetus from an eleven-year-old boy in the 1920s; the boy made a full recovery. I found records of three later operations, all successful—but the last one was in 1992, before the first successful experiments in tissue-reconstruction.”
Gerald found a lump in his throat, which he couldn’t quite contrive to swallow. He was possessed by a perverse mix of emotions. On the one hand, he was deeply relieved that the tumor had turned out not to be malign; on the other hand, he was horrified by the revelation that it wasn’t really a cancer tumor at all, but the phantom embryo of a twin brother he’d never had. He pressed his right hand to the bulge that was distending his abdomen to the side of his navel. Four months had passed since he first noticed the swelling—two since he had belatedly become anxious enough to seek medical advice.
“How soon will you need to operate?” he asked, numbly.
“It’s not as simple as that,” replied McClelland, patiently. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. It has to go to the Ethics Committee—but I really am certain that the final decision will be left to you.”
“What decision?”
“What will happen to the embryo, of course. That’s why there’s a new precedent to be established, you see. In none of the cases I’ve cited could there be any question of the embryo surviving and coming to term, so the only possible course of action in each case was to remove it. Nowadays, though, we have other options. If we act promptly, it’s possible that we could transplant the embryo into a host mother. On the other hand, we could use tissue-reconstruction to stimulate your own cells so that they’d develop a viable placenta. In fact, the Ethics Committee might take the view that the one thing we can’t do is to treat the fetus as if it were a tumor—they could well conclude that an operation to remove it would count as an abortion, in which case it would be illegal by reason of the twenty-week time-limit.
“As far as I can tell, the fetus is at the same developmental stage one would expect of a twenty-four- or twenty-five-week embryo. It’s smaller, of course, but I have no evidence to suggest that it’s damaged. In my experience, Ethics Committees always look for the closest thing to a precedent they can find—and they’re likely to take the view that you should be viewed as if you were a pregnant mother who, for some reason, can’t actually give birth.”
“I’m pregnant,” said Gerald, feeling that the notion was more than slightly surreal, “and I can’t get an abortion.”
“That’s not unprecedented either,” said the doctor. “In fact....”
“Never mind the precedents,” Gerald interrupted him. “Let’s stick to me. Are you telling me that I might be forced to carry this fetus until it’s capable of independent life—that you won’t cut it out until you’re sure that it can survive in an incubator?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” replied McClelland, testily. “The fetus is still viable now, but that doesn’t guarantee that you can carry it to term—not, at any rate, without considerable tissue-restructuring to make sure that you can sustain it while it grows. It might be better—indeed, it might be a matter of some urgency—to transplant it into a woman’s womb, or into one of the new artificial wombs under test at St. Mary’s. That’s a decision you’ll have to make, but it must be an informed decision, morally as well as medically—which is where the Ethics Committee comes in.
“I’ve already sent in my preliminary report, but the committee will want a more detailed one as soon as I’ve collated all the data. We can’t discharge you—and we must respectfully demand that you don’t discharge yourself—until the committee has met and made its views known to you. But you really mustn’t worry; what we all want is to figure out where your best interests lie, and where the best interests of your brother lie.”
The vital phrase—”the best interests of your brother”—lingered in Gerald’s mind long after the doctor had gone.
* * * * * * *
“I’m pregnant” said Gerald, flatly.
“If that’s a joke, dear heart,” said Mark Cleminson, “it’s in very bad taste, and it isn’t even funny.”
“It’s not a joke,” Gerald assured him. “It’s a fetus in fetu.”
While he explained, with painstaking patience, he studied Mark’s face very carefully.
Mark and Gerald had been together for five years, and married for two. They had married, in fact, a mere three days after the law had at last been amended to permit same-sex marriages. They had—not unnaturally—been carried away by the triumphant feeling that a great victory had been won for justice and equality, and that its potential must be exploited to the full. Alas, Gerald sometimes felt that their relationship had failed to live up to the expectations into which that moral and political victory had seduced them. Like most marriages made on earth, theirs had fared no better than those supposedly made in Heaven, and he was no longer sure whether or not Mark still loved him—or, for that matter, whether Mark had ever really loved him. He couldn’t help wondering whether this might be the acid test which would reveal the truth of the matter.
“It’s a trifle macabre,” said Mark, when the explanation was complete, “to think of you swallowing up your little brother-to-be like that. One expects a certain amount of sibling rivalry, of course, but prenatal cannibalism is taking things a little too far, don’t you think?”
Gerald pursed his lips, but dutifully suppressed his impatient ire. “It’s not a joke, Mark,” he repeated, patiently.
“Oh, cheer up,” Mark retorted. “Yesterday we thought you might have some dreadful cancer devouring you from the bowel outwards. I’m sorry if I sound flippant, but it’s mostly relief, I assure you. You did say that it isn’t dangerous, didn’t you?”
“It isn’t dangerous,” admitted Gerald, “but it isn’t straightforward either.” He explained about the Ethics Committee, carefully gauging Mark’s reaction to every point in the chain of argument. He knew that he was going to have to go through this whole thing again, at least twice more. His parents would have to know, and so would his employers. He hoped that it might not be necessary to tell anyone else, but he could hardly avoid the dreadful fear that the media might get hold of the story. It would be news anyhow, but the fact that he was married to another man would give the headline-writers a field day.
He already knew how his parents would react to the story, because they always reacted the same way to everything he did—with pain, shock and horror. They subscribed very heavily to the where-did-we-go-wrong school of rhetoric, and they would try to make him feel as guilty about this as every other respect in which he offended them. In fact, he had a nasty suspicion that his mother, at least, would instantly begin to believe
