Bradley, Marion Zimmer Anthology The Best of MZ Bradley's Fantasy

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went out of style showed ribs, lungs, the dome of the diaphragm and liver,
and spleen nestled beneath it. I nursed my babies, six months each. Nothing,
other than a chromosome study, would show me to be what I am. Then, the
long line of women so alike-we must be derived from human beings. What
else could we be?
A month gone since those meanderings. Allyssa has sent me a copy of our
grandmother's records. Just as I suspected, every third or fourth generation,
the sad little note: someone got married, had a son, had a daughter that more
resembled first one parent and then the other, in the ordinary way.
It has been nearly four months since I wrote those words. I am so furious, I
can barely hold my pen.
Allyssa has made good her threat. How could she think she knows my
daughters better than I do myself? Has she forgotten how stubborn we can be,
the risks we sometimes take? How often we demand proof, the proof that
things are as someone has stated them to be? She must be insane!
The upshot of it is that Tammie is pregnant. Her grades have fallen this
semester; she's been spending her time in meditation. I have demanded that
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she abort. She refuses. She says, quite coolly, that the school has made
provisions for girls who get pregnant and that she can continue to attend. She
is due at the end of July; she will have the rest of the summer to make
arrangements for someone to keep the baby while she is in school. Her
devoted aunt calls me, crestfallen and apologetic, and what the hell good is
that supposed to do? The other two are all agog: I suspect that Julie, at the
age, God help us, of fourteen is also plotting reproduction. I have talked
myself blue about the problems of teenage pregnancies-the greater
probability of birth defects, the effects upon the mother's education and
career, to say nothing of her health...
And to top it off comes the school social worker with a sticky frosted pink
smile and "If you could please just try to persuade Tamara to tell us the name
of the father, we feel the boys need counseling too ..." She was lucky to get out
of my house alive, although she probably doesn't realize it. What, dear
Allyssa, am I to do? What could I do but continue to work? Go to the lab every
day for the past four months, play with frogs, unravel their dumb DNA.
Parthenogenesis has been known to occur in frogs. A clue. Hah! And
meanwhile, attempt to educate my child. I can't imagine what the schools in
this country are coming to. Just before New Year's, during school vacation,
Tammie came dreamily downstairs one morning and said, "I can't wait to see
my son."
"Tammie," I pulled out the chair at her place. "Sit down." She sat, with a
sweet patient smile. "You will have a daughter."
"No."
"Daughter. Girl. Female-type person."
"No."
"Look," I sighed. "In normal human beings, the sex of the child is
determined by the father. He contributes either an X or a Y chromosome-X
for female, Y for male-and one single gene on the Y chromosome, not
anything that comes from the mother, is what decides whether the baby is a
boy or a girl."
"I know that," Tammie replied, still sweet, still patient. "I learned that
years ago, Mother." She got up and pulled the Cheerios out of the cupboard.
"We only have X chromosomes," I said. "So we can only have girls. It's always
that way, throughout the animal kingdom. When parthenogenesis occurs, the
children are always daughters."
"Are you going to tell me about aphids again? I'm not an aphid."
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"Look," I said. Tammie poured Cheerios into a bowl, added 2% milk and
put the bottle back into the refrigerator, sprinkled half the brown sugar she'd
normally use onto the cereal. "Mom," she said. "The trouble with you is that
you have no imagination."
"Darling," I said-sometimes I can't help sarcasm-"I do have history!"
"History is what's done with." Tammie tilted her chair onto its hind legs
and leaned back to open the silverware drawer for the forgotten spoon. "My
son isn't history. Not yet."
"Don't do that. You'll wreck the chair," was what came out of my mouth.
Tarnmie let it thump back down with a grin, and started to eat. Over the next
few weeks I tried everything I could think of to shake her conviction. I
brought books home from my office-"Mother, that's human biology," Tammie
protested.
"We are human."
"How could we be?"
"How could we not?"
She smiled, so sweet, so patient I could have smacked her. I marshaled my
evidence. My child-who is at least as intelligent as any of the rest of us-refused
to be swayed. I discoursed upon the nature of inquiry. Upon inductive
reasoning in general. I even took her into the lab and showed her my frogs,
squatting droopily in their tanks, waiting for someone to toss a crumb of
hamburger into the air for them.
Tammie enjoyed feeding the frogs.
Spring came. My daughter rounded out, first a thickening of her waist, then
a gentle mounding below her navel, pressing ever higher. She studied
dutifully, daydreamed about her "son," watched Star Trek with her sisters. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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