Orphan of Creation (36 page)

Barbara looked at her friend. That was the first time she had described an intangible thing as good. Another breakthrough.

“Damn straight it’s good,” she said out loud, not bothering to sign what she was saying, simply talking so the sound of her own voice would make her feel better. “No matter what we have to do to get it done.” Was she as brave as she was trying to sound? “No matter what,” she repeated. “Come on, let’s get back inside.”

<>

THURSDAY A LEGAL HOT POTATO

(UPI) WASHINGTON, D.C. No one in government knows what to do with Thursday, the australopithecine recently presented to the public. Is she an animal or a person? That question must be answered before anything can be done about her, and pressure to do something is growing from a number of groups.

Neither Thursday herself nor the people who are, depending on your point of view, either caring for her or imprisoning her, think that anything much needs to be done about her, but that hasn’t stopped the legal speculation.

If she is an animal, she was imported to this country illegally, and either the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Customs Service might claim jurisdiction and impound or destroy her, according to several legal scholars.

If she is a human being, a person, then, since she seems to have come to this country willingly but in apparent violation of the law, arguably she is an illegal alien, under the jurisdiction of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, unless she is a political refugee, in which case the Department of State is in charge. Even if jurisdiction were established, however, what action the responsible agency could or would take is not obvious.

It can be argued that she was gulled into following Dr. Marchando out of the jungle, and so was abducted by the Federal Government. Some legal scholars, following that line of reasoning, claim that she should be repatriated to Gabon and granted monetary restitution for her illegal abduction and detention. A petition demanding her release from federal ‘custody’ and repatriation to Gabon was circulated by the American Civil Liberties Union, the World Wildlife Fund, and several other organizations. Copies of the petition, with over 100,000 signatures attached, were delivered to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But not every one of Thursday’s well-wishers want her sent home. Others, pointing to her willing departure from Gabon, regardless of destination, and also noting that she was held in a form of slavery in Gabon, have claimed she should be regarded as a political refugee and granted asylum, and indeed, papers to that effect have been filed in federal court.

Despite all the hypothetical legal arguments, no government agency seems at all willing to take the lead in this case. . . .

<>

“Ahhh. God bless the man who invented the brewski.” Rupert lifted his bottle again and took another long slug. “This is just what the doctor ordered, isn’t it, Doctor?”

Mike grinned. “Actually, I believe I prescribed Heineken, not Bud.”

“Don’t bother me with details,” Rupert said.

“This is a weird place, Rupert,” Livingston announced, having taken a good look around. He settled back a little deeper into the blown-out springs of the booth’s ancient bench seat. “Why the hell do they call it the Tune Inn?”

“‘Cause it’s got a jukebox, I guess,” Rupert said.

“Every place has a jukebox,” Livingston protested.

“Yeah, but not every place has surly help, big cheeseburgers, the decor of a backwoods cracker bar four blocks from the Capitol Building, or a clientele of yuppies who don’t understand that they’re not welcome.”

“Or the wrong end of a deer stuffed and mounted on the wall,” Livingston muttered. “So this is life in the big city.”

The jukebox started up again, playing so loudly it was impossible to identify the song. “Shut up and enjoy the atmosphere,” Rupert shouted cheerfully. The wizened old man behind the bar cursed to himself, came out from behind the bar and reached down the back of the jukebox. The noise subsided enough that normal conversation was just barely possible.

Mike Marchando grinned and took a sip of his own beer. In the midst of the turmoil over Thursday, he had found greater self-satisfaction, a better and clearer view of himself, than he had ever had. For the first time he could remember, his own struggling to get ahead was not, even in his own mind, the most important thing—and somehow, not being the least bit important in all the crises had taught him something without his noticing the lesson. Maybe it was simply that the grand questions Thursday inspired made his own endless struggles to prove himself and test those around him seem a lot less important. Maybe it was being part of a team, a group of equals all working toward the same thing, rather than one of a hundred medical students competing against each other. It didn’t matter. For once, Michael wasn’t interested in analyzing things too closely. He was happy with himself, and that was enough.

“So what’s up at your end of the shop, Liv?” Mike asked.

“Same old thing we’ve been tossing around for weeks now. What to do with the information about Thursday’s DNA. It’s got a few pretty weird implications. According to the molecular anthro honchos, it requires us to regard
Homo sapien sapiens
and
Australopithecus boisei
as conspecific.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Mike asked.

“It means we’re all one big happy species,” Liv answered. “The definition of a species is that it be a population capable of producing fertile offspring, reproductively isolated from all other species. The long human DNA-sequences in Thursday’s genes say pretty clearly that there was at least one fertile union. We can tell there was an interbreeding at least a few generations back, and Thursday herself is pretty clearly fertile. Even if she wasn’t, the DNA says she’s at least as close to humans as donkeys are to horses.
They
can breed to produce a hybrid, a mule—but mules are sterile. According to definition, that means horses and donkeys aren’t in the same species—but they are very close, plenty damn close enough to freak everybody out. No one has the guts to release that kind of information. I guess the most honest way to regard her would be as a subspecies
of Homo sapiens
. Call her
Homo sapiens boisei
—but are
you
ready for that? No one else is. If Thursday is a specimen of a subspecies of ours—then, if
she
is an animal, so are we all.
You
try selling that to John Q. Public without causing a riot.”

“Can you get anywhere with the idea of chronospecies?” Rupert asked.

“What’s a chronospecies?” Michael asked.

“A species is a breeding population, right?” Rupert said. “But you couldn’t have kids with a woman who died two hundred years ago; her genes are no longer directly available. You also can’t breed with a woman who hasn’t been born yet. Both women are reproductively isolated from you by time. A chronospecies is a species projected through time, to take into account such cases. Of course, no one gets that persnickety about it. Obviously, a human being is still the same species across the distance of a few lousy centuries, and only the most anal-retentive among us would insist on saying ‘chrono’ species to talk about your grandmother.

“But if you go back far enough, enough parent-offspring cycles for some real evolution to take place, the earliest member of the line couldn’t breed with the latest member, even if you could get them in the same room. In theory, you could trace my ancestry back through twenty million years of successful matings. If they weren’t successful, I wouldn’t be here to buy the next round. But ten million years ago, my great-great-great-and-so-on gramma looked like a lemur, and
no
one would say we were in the same species. Somewhere in between a hundred years back and twenty million year ago, we stopped being the same species—several times, in fact. So they cooked up the rather fuzzy idea of chronospecies to account for such paradoxes. Clear as mud?”

“Just about,” Mike said. “You going to eat those fries?”

“Help yourself,” Rupert replied, shoving his plate into neutral territory in the middle of the table. “Anyway, Liv, maybe you can call the boiseans an earlier phase of our chronospecies. It doesn’t mean a hell of a lot, but it sounds better than saying it’s okay for your sister to marry one.”

Livingston grinned and reached for a few of the last remaining french fries. “I’ll pass that suggestion along.”

<>

Sunday night was when Barbara liked to read the newspaper, lolling back in bed with the front page and the comics and the ads and the
Style
and
Outlook
sections strewn about the covers, slopping over onto the floor. For the first time in what seemed a long time, there wasn’t anything about herself, or Thursday, or australopithecines in the
Post
—not even a turgidly written and inaccurate piece about evolution. It was nice to be a normal, un-famous, anonymous person again. Michael wandered in from the bathroom in his boxer shorts, toweling off his face. She looked up and smiled at him. “Hi there, big boy,” she said. “Come here often?”

He smiled back and shoved the comics out of the way to sit down on the edge of the bed. “Not often enough. I’ve missed you.”

“I hate to admit it,” she said a bit sadly, “but I’ve missed you too. It’s nice to see you—and nice to have a little bit more of the old you back. Not worrying about what other people are thinking so much, just relaxing and being yourself.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s kind of a relief in a way. But—I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of time for thinking the last few months, and I’m not so sure this
is
the old me—or a new one you helped make, one that I lost for a while. Growing up, all I cared about was not getting trapped in that slummy old neighborhood. Fight, struggle, study, work late, work harder than everyone else, get that scholarship. It was always others who judged me, not myself. It was what
they
thought that mattered. Even the people who thought well of me treated me like a hot prospect, a great investment who would
probably
pay off—but maybe not. I had to impress everybody.”

Michael reached up and stroked her cheek, tweaked her nose playfully. “You were the first person in a long time who saw me, liked me, for what I
was
. You made me start liking myself the way I was, not for what I might be or should be. But then the residency started, and the compete, compete, compete, and the endless hours. I was judging myself by what
they
thought again—and I started judging you God knows how. Any which way, as long as you failed, so I’d be better than you.” Mike shrugged. “Real true confessions stuff, isn’t it?

“When you up and left for the dig in Gowrie, and then went off to Africa, I suddenly realized I had
really
lost you. You weren’t coming back. I started worrying about you, off in the jungle, imagining all sorts of things that might happen to you. I worried that—that you might die. And I thought about how terrible that would be, how empty the world would be.” Mike stood up and crossed to the dresser on the other side of the room. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”

Barbara got out of bed and went across the room to him. She threw her arms about him, felt the strength of being wrapped in his embrace. “It’s okay. I haven’t been the easiest person to deal with either. We take it from here, start over.”

“Maybe there are other things we could make another try at,” Michael said. “Maybe we could try for children again. We didn’t have to give up quite so soon. You want to call the fertility clinic again, give it another shot?”

Barbara looked up at his face, and thought she was going to cry. How could she tell him? “I’ve made an appointment already. For tomorrow.” He smiled, a beautiful, happy smile, and she buried her head in his chest so she would not have to see it. How could she do what she was going to do? But there was no other way.

They made love that night, fierce, intense, gentle love, as if for the first and last time.

<>

The deeds, the acts themselves, were easy. She had no appointment, of course. What she had was a forged prescription, scribbled out on a sheet stolen from Michael’s prescription pad.

She drove over to the hospital, parked, crossed the street, went inside, doing each of those routine, automatic things with preternatural care, watching over her own movements as if each was something special.

She knew exactly where she was going. She had been there often enough. She knew where in the hospital the clinic was, which was the only comfortable chair in the waiting room, what station the duty nurse played on her desk radio. She had learned all about that place in the course of her unsuccessful struggle for a baby.

The bored nurse took the prescription from her and headed back toward the freezer. Barbara knew just how long it would take her to get back. It should be enough time to get the other things she needed. Heart pounding, trying to watch behind herself every step of the way, she slipped into an empty exam room and scooped up the instruments she’d need. In thirty seconds, she had what she was after, and was back waiting for the nurse at the counter. Finally, the nurse returned with the small, cold package from the freezer, wrapped in insulation. Barbara was outside, on the street, in ten minutes, driving toward Saint E’s. No problem.