"Brennert, Alan - Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brennert Alan)

hand. "What does anyone want?" she said quietly, looking away. "To be loved
unconditionally. To be loved, despite who I am, all that I've done . . ."

She looked back at the lights. "That's all," she said, and it was the truth.

Chernow took her hand again; she looked up at him. Centuries of reading men's
faces as they gazed at her told her, clearly and sadly, what was in his. They
both knew he could not love her in the way she needed; no mortal could.

"Then you won't mind," he said gently, "if I destroy my notes afterward ?"

Marguerite smiled. "If that makes you feel better," she said, "by all means."

The procedure did, in fact, proceed as planned; Sondra's "decoded" ova were
imprinted, successfully, with Marguerite's exotic DNA, fertilized by the donor
sperm, and implanted once again in Sondra's womb. Fourteen weeks later,
ultrasound revealed a fetal skeleton, normal in all ways for that stage of
development, a week later, amniocentesis confirmed the fetus was male. In the
sixteenth week, the first fetal heartbeat could be heard, faint but thrilling to
Marguerite, who had no heartbeat, no pulse of her own: her child was alive. It
would breathe [already the placental villi were enlarged, drawing oxygen from
the maternal blood), its heart would pump blood [unlike hers, merely a conduit
through which blood moved by preternatural means: almost a living fluid that
animated her, instead of itself being animated). Her son would be human.

Chernow was not so sure. Alive, yes; human, not necessarily. A hybrid, perhaps,
of the living and the undead . . . with certain characteristics of both.

Marguerite knew this, intellectually, but the first time she placed her hand on
Sondra's stomach--the first time she felt the baby move inside the womb--all
such thoughts became remote. Something lived inside there: for the first time in
two hundred years, something of Marguerite lived. That was all she knew.

It was in the eighteenth week the first complications appeared. Normally, a
pregnant woman's blood volume increases by twenty-five per cent by the time of
delivery, while her red blood cell count actually decreases, as the fetus
absorbs maternal blood through the placenta. Sondra's blood volume increased by
twenty-five percent within the first trimester alone, and her red cell and
hemoglobin counts plunged to nearly half their normal levels. She began
experiencing acute anemia: attacks of vertigo, extreme fatigue, drowsiness, a
constant ringing in her ears.

Tests showed Sondra's bone marrow producing staggering numbers of red cells in
response to a vastly increased appetite for blood protein and nitrogen on the
part of the fetus; it was literally sucking the blood from its mother's body at
a prodigious -- and alarming -- rate. Her body was producing all the blood it
could, but it wasn't enough; Chernow began augmenting this with weekly
transfusions of plasma, as well as mega-doses of calcium to fortify her bone
marrow.