On colony 357, the base of all Coalition activities, at three in the afternoon, a black LuxCarre left Arthur III’s estate in the direction of the city limits. Inside, Arthur and his wife, Marlisa, were sitting close to each other in the backseat, with the privacy screen down between them and their driver.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
Marlisa took her time with a response to her husband’s question, turning her sweet, pretty face to look out the window of the Carre. Was she sure? Maybe, maybe not. It was an unfair question for Arthur to ask, because Marlisa had tried not to think about what she was about to do and what the consequences might be if she succeeded—or even failed. All she based her actions on was the searing pearl of self-loathing she carried deep in her gut. More than anything she wanted to give her husband a child to carry on his legacy with the Coalition, as well as to save the other members of the ruling five the trouble of having to divide the sizeable estate of the family among cousins, distant relatives, and dodgy pretenders to the family name. If she, Marlisa, did not or could not have a child, she knew that it would be the first biological disruption of the carrying-on of the oligarchy that had occurred since the start of the war. How embarrassing! Who would they ever find to replace her husband’s authority—or, for that matter, financial backing? No, she had to give Arthur a child, no matter what the cost.
The other side to her dilemma was an intense feeling of longing for a baby to hold, something that older women had always told her she was well suited to do. Any child of hers and Arthur’s would be beautiful (what with their rosy, Aryan complexions) but Marlisa knew that even if her baby would come wrinkled as a raisin or missing an ear she would love it with the same full-hearted abandon that she lavished on her husband, her horses, and her home colony.
“Yes,” she finally replied, her voice so soft that it was like she hadn’t said anything at all. Arthur looked at her steadily, attempting to calm his own nerves. He was a tall man and already graying from stress, and at the moment his eyes were concernedly running over his wife. This was probably something he had made a habit of in the army—in the inspection of soldiers that had been Questioned. Check for tics and for trembling, because they don’t always realize they have gone insane.
“Marlisa. You don’t have to do this.” His fingers reached out and covered hers, a giant paw over her delicate, well-bred hand. “You know I would never think to abandon or judge you by this or anything else. I just know I couldn’t bear to lose you…if this went wrong, I just…” here he trailed off, because he was beginning to venture too deeply into how he really felt about the matter. Which was that he wanted a son, and in fact had two by other women. He had never been able to bring himself to tell Marlisa, though he could have just declared the whole thing over by bringing the two boys forward. It wasn’t that he did not also feel the weight of his position and responsibility weighing on the both of them—it was that Arthur was a man very deeply in love with his wife. And for a man that had spent his entire life being groomed for a war that his family had entwined its history with, there had to be an escape. Marlisa was his.
They had met at university, where she was studying to be a teacher. He had toiled away in the library: physics, engineering, and politics. While she worked very hard for her grades, stayed out of trouble, and did not go to parties, Arthur was touring the colonies with his father, seeing the way they worked, learning how to take apart and put back together an entire aero jet in four hours flat. As with most ultra-wealthy families, the union between Marlisa and Arthur had been planned from the start and only made to seem accidental. It was lucky that they had discovered closeness instead of repulsion.
“The doctor didn’t say that my eggs would fail in my body, only that they failed in a laboratory.” Marlisa turned a serene gaze upon her husband. She was not a very stolid type of woman, but years as an Elite in the ruling class had taught her the wisdom of poise in times of the most distress.
“Yes, but he also did not recommend actual pregnancy as a logical alternative.” Arthur sighed heavily and sat back again. Her expressionless face did not fool him; he didn’t look at her. He believed very firmly in logic--could not see anything beyond it, in fact. Every decision he made, every single minute of every single day, whether it was how he got out of bed or which missile he would order fired, was based exclusively on logic. He was often railed at in leftist newspapers for being too callous to the cause of his organization, but if he had to be honest, Arthur could only describe the cause of the Coalition as being more righteous than that of the Federation. He wasn’t entirely sure anymore about anything but winning, because losing would be illogical, destroying his world and the lives of everyone he was responsible for.
“Marlisa,” he said quietly. “What if you miscarried? Any way this went you would have to be tied up to machines for nine months, maybe more.”
“Would you rather adopt some lower child and raise it as our own? You couldn’t possibly survive the sheer indignity of it, Arthur,” Marlisa calmly murmured. Arthur smiled at her—a smile he kept reserved for only the most difficult diplomatic situations—and patted her hand twice. He removed his own to his lap.
“I think you could not, my dear. I’m sure I could find a way to live with it if it meant that you would be safe.”
Marlisa did not answer. She withdrew to the farthest corner of the backseat and closed her eyes, imagining the curl of tiny fingers in the sunlight.
“Well, everything seems in order, Madam,” the short, rotund doctor said with a nervous smile. He turned the screen of his MediBot around so that Marlisa and Arthur could see it. It pulsed with diagrams and numbers, as well as a full 360 body scan. “You’ve been taking vitamins, I assume?”
“Yes,” Marlisa responded. Her eyes scanned over the information on the Bot quickly, but found nothing to be alarmed about. Arthur stayed grimly silent—he was a fish out of water as far as medicine went, and he didn’t trust doctors at all.
“Well that’s wonderful, just wonderful,” the doctor agreed, and bobbed his head happily. “Just one thing, Madam. I did see on your chart—“ and here he touched the screen and it melted quickly into a running dialogue of Marlisa’s medical history”—that you have been pregnant before, both naturally and via tubes, and that you miscarried three times. I can’t guarantee that you will not miscarry again. This new drug is a revolutionary medicine, but it can’t counter genetics.”
“There is nothing the matter with my genetics,” Marlisa said regally. “I come from a long line of successful matriarchs. There is no reason I should not be able to, with the proper help, conceive and deliver, Dr. Brising.” She added his name as a low note to a very carefully worded sentence, as if to check if he was following her. Tad Brising resisted the urge to wince at her veiled insult to the medical care he provided. Arthur cleared his throat quietly, and the doctor was suddenly aware of how delicate the whole situation was becoming.
“I recommend that the doctor go speak with the head of his department,” Arthur intoned peaceably. “I’ve got a meeting, love, with the head of the infectious diseases department,” he added with a smile at his wife. “I’ll be by to see you in fifteen.” The smile fell away as he turned to Tad again. “I trust you will take care of my wife and answer her questions to the best of your knowledge.” It was never a question with Arthur, always a statement.
“Of course, Sir.” Tad forced a lump of bile back down his throat as Arthur swept out of the room. The Commander hadn’t shaken his hand as he left because, as Tad knew, he had a limp handshake and Arthur hated it. Marlisa had already lost interest in him and was giving a drink order to a good-looking nurse on the TeleCommunicator. He thought he might vomit out of sheer terror.
~*~
Dr. Demetrius Nois paced slowly around his office, shaking his head. In the room with him was Dr. Brising, looking pale and sweaty. The visit had gone quietly enough, but of course a decision had to be made one way or the other.
“What do you mean exactly, Dr. Brising, that Madam would fall apart if we went through with the procedure?” Dr. Nois sat down behind his desk, on his hands. He was extremely agitated, and when he was agitated, his fingers twitched in an unsettling way that embarrassed him to no end. “I hope you don’t mean emotionally. Surely she has more of a backbone than that…”
“You know what centuries of inbreeding has done to that family, Demetrius. She goes on and on about her bloodlines, but it’s all in the charts. They want to keep all of their hoo-hah money in the family, pass it right on down the line, and when they run out of people, they just start marrying cousins.” Now Dr. Brising began to pace. He was trembling a little from apprehension. “I’m telling you, I’ve been her personal physician for almost ten years now, and the older she gets, the worse it gets. Her uterine lining is just too thin. An active fetus could break through it easily, and then both she and the child would bleed to death. As her doctor, I cannot advise that she go through with the procedure.”
Demetrius Nois tapped his foot rapidly.
“You are aware that you do not tell Arthur ‘no’, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean? His wife is a patient of mine like anyone else.”
“He could have you fired, and your medical license revoked.”
“For refusing to artificially inseminate his wife?”
“For less, Tad.”
Dr. Brising scratched his head furiously, then tugged his white coat’s lapels down sharply. He had been hoping not to hear this.
“She would inevitably die. Even if she carried it to full term, she would bleed to death at birth. Who knows what the child would look like. Three ears, one eye, no heart. Losing my license is such a small thing compared to the political death we would both die for going through with this despite knowing its outcome. I won’t agree to it, Demetrius. I refuse to do this.”
Dr. Nois freed his hands slowly and stood up. His motions were very deliberate and calm.
“We could have her sign a paper.”
“Of what?”
Demetrius winced. Precisely of what was the issue. Arthur was the law. There wasn’t anything that could be done to protect from him or his cold way of dealing with those who offended him.
“Of liability.”
Tad laughed. “Like they told us about in medical school? Let’s be reasonable, O.K.? That’s ancient stuff. It wouldn’t protect anybody, just waste paper. He’d be able to tell we were pulling it out of our asses because something was bound to go wrong!”
“She really wants a child, Tad. Very badly. “
“Yes, but badly enough that we could convince her to sign, or otherwise commit herself to what is going to happen to her should she continue down this road?? You believe she would willingly commit to death, a proud woman like herself, with that beast for a husband?”
“Watch your tongue!” Dr. Nois snarled quickly. “These walls have ears.”
Tad Brising began to tremble even more violently at the reproach, and had to steady himself on a bookshelf.
“Yes, I believe she would,” Demetrius continued, pushing a hand through his hair. “I’ll write one up. We knew what we were getting into when we accepted their patronage at our hospital, and we’ve lived fairly good lives on their dollar for quite some time. It’s time we pay the interest we owe.”
“But Demetrius, you don’t mean with our lives!”
Dr. Nois rubbed his face hard. He was tired. This morning, he had delivered to a Lower woman a set of twins, then immediately had to lie that one of them had died. The other infant had gone in the stead of a stillborn Upper child, a trick that he made quite often with the full cooperation of his staff. A Lower’s grief was no less important than an Upper’s, but Dr. Nois knew that his own life hung on the balance each time an Upper pregnancy failed. He thought of his own wife at home with his twelve year old daughter, and wondered if she ever suspected that the son she had borne him—the one he had delivered with his own hands—was not dead, but instead a healthy, robust toddler living with an Upper family. It was a good arrangement and he still got to see the boy on his yearly checkups. But Demetrius’s marriage was falling apart after the miscarriage, and Souri knew he was hiding something. He tried his best to mend the broken pieces without having to tell the truth. Children were hard to come by, and he wanted to live to enjoy his retirement.
Turning his back to his colleague, he thrust his hands deep into his deep lab coat pockets and closed his fingers absentmindedly over his beeper. “I guess I do,” he sighed. “Yeah. What other choice do people like us have?”
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