"Taylor, L A - Counterexample" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor L A)

Counterexample
by L. A. Taylor

"What? You mean you haven't told them?" Allyssa strolled toward me, thumbs hooked over her hipbones and fingers spread on her back. The old scowl creased her forehead.

"That's right." I leaned forward and set my glass of sherry on the coffee table.

"Don't you think you've left it a little late? Tammie's nearly sixteen already."

"No, I don't think I've left it a little late." Slightly cowed, as usual, by my big sister, I glanced regretfully at the glass I'd just set down. Too soon to pick it up, and I'd probably gulp the whole thing at a swallow if I did. "I'm not sure I'm going to tell them at all."

"What?"

We could be twins, if Allyssa weren't two years older than me. Does that mean we have to think exactly the same way? Not if I can help it. "Can you give me any good reason?"

"Well, but, but-"

"You aren't the one with children," I pointed out as she sputtered.

"I chose not to have daughters. You know that."

Allyssa sounded defensive. Maybe I'd get out of this yet. "So don't tell me how to handle mine." Through her teeth, hissing, a threat: "Husbands. Lovers. Semen-engendered sons!" Shaking inside, I raised one eyebrow casually. "Women have lived with them for generations."

"Other women! Not us!" The front door slammed. "Mom? I'm home," called my youngest. Allyssa whirled and pretended to be pulling dead leaves out of the spider plant hanging in the wide east window. A round red spot, like inexpertly applied blusher, burned on the cheek I could see. Julie dropped a stack of books onto the coffee table and plunked down beside me on the couch. "Hey," she said. "What's up?"

"Nothing much," my sister said steadily. "Why don't you go find yourself a snack?" With Julie safely in the kitchen, Allyssa flashed me a glance that would have left me trembling twenty years before. "We will continue this discussion later," she said, and reached for the green sherry bottle. I am still ill-suited to being the mother of three female Trekkies, which, alas, I am. Their discovery of, and enthusiasm for, what in my estimation is a rather mundane television series, its spin-offs, and endless, endless reruns, has led me into a year of serious self-examination, as I suppose was both inevitable and overdue. Still: what girls think significant is really quite minor-the two in love with Mr. Spock, for instance, are thrilled to have inherited my upswept brows, but are disappointed in my neat round ears; the one who favors Captain Kirk resents the browline she must carry but finds the ears quite pleasing. Amusing, in a way. When my hand falls naturally to lap or knee or over one of my daughters' shoulders, a space appears between the ring and middle fingers and the outer pairs of fingers lie together. Somehow none of them noticed this in pre-Trek days. Now- "Will you stop making fun of Spock!" Tammie demands, with all evidence of the family temper. "Mom, do you have to do that?" Kendra whines. The one raised brow-a signal Tammie knew perfectly well at the age of three meant 'stop what you're doing this instant and mind your manners'-she now takes to be derision, directed at her hero. When enlightened I raised both eyebrows slightly, chin rising. When presented with a new idea, I am likely (like my grandmother) to murmur, "Interesting ..." I am poker-faced. I am solitary. Need I say more? Any human mother of a teenage girl will know my Spock fans barely tolerate what they believe to be sneering at the Vulcan, and that the Kirk fan, for different reasons, likes none of it any better. Fortunately, when cut I bleed as red as any woman ever did. If my blood were as green as Spock's, they'd probably think I'd arranged that to mock the Vulcan, too.

And then, I am a scientist.

This gives me little trouble with my Kirk fan, who is mostly concerned to retrain the way her fingers fall when her hand relaxes. The-what shall I call them? Spockies? Spock-ettes?-are of the impression that their hero represents the highest reach of scientific endeavor known to man. True, Spock shows curiosity, essential to any scientist, but, so far as I can see in my occasional trips past the television when the nightly rerun is on, he does so only when convenient to the plot line. His celebrated "logic-alone" is a poor tool for real inquiry, which proceeds by hunch and hump, and drags in design and argument as necessary afterthought. The burning desire to know, to figure it out, Spock seems to lack. Through his example my daughters believe that science proves things, and remain quite unaware of the power of the counterexample to demolish an otherwise attractive hypothesis.

Infuriating. Well, I'll allow that science does establish facts, as I have established to my satisfaction that my mother's conjecture was correct: like summer aphids, I and mine are haploid in every cell.

Now you know: I'm a geneticist.

I have three haploid daughters-that is, they, too, have only twenty-three chromosomes in each cell, half the normal number for a human being. I can only conclude that our egg cells are formed through mitosis rather than the usual meio- sis, which would more or less halve the number of chromosomes yet again: how else to explain generation upon generation of parthenogenesis? I suppose I might mate with a human male and conceive a child. The sexual act is not only possible but enjoyable, the number of my chromosomes would be correct, and so far as I can determine they would form the proper pairs. I have no direct proof of this. I can't exactly pop a laparoscope through my own belly button and prise out an egg to slosh in a dish with stolen sperm; the more direct form of the experiment does not appeal to me at the age of forty-five. Such a pairing would also be the end of the line of my kind, whatever we may be. Strangers who meet me with my daughters and turn, smiling, to say, "You must have strong genes," have put their innocent fingers directly on the problem. I was born in April of 1943. My "father," a fictional creation, was supposed to have died in the Pacific. Wars have, historically, always provided us with good excuse for fatherless children. (My mother was born in 1917.) I used the Vietnam War to explain my oldest (1971); its extension, post-traumatic stress syndrome, to explain the "desertion" by the "father" of the middle one (1972); and plain brazened it out with the last (1974). Fifteen months apart is close spacing-ask anyone with three kids in diapers-but I wanted three, and I wasn't getting any younger. We, like normal human women, have our menopause, our imperfect copies. Given present mores, my daughters, should they choose to have girls of their own-sons, you understand, are impossible-will have less trouble. Should they choose. The meditation needed is arduous even to learn. Perhaps they'll just find fathers for their children and our line will simply cease. As Allyssa discovered this afternoon, I haven't yet decided to tell my daughters how different they are from their friends. In a way I suppose I should be grateful to Leonard Nimoy for creating Mr. Spock to absorb the affections of my oldest. He's given me more time to dither. Watching my children grow has proven-ah, hell, I'll say it-fascinating. I have filled dozens of notebooks showing the effects of nature versus nurture, studies on these clones of myself that I can never publish. Genes, for example, determine that moles will appear on the skin, but not where; they determine build, but not the fine detail of skeletal structure that sets one of my children off from the others; they determine the outline of personality, but not the ways in which it is expressed. All of us are intelligent although our interests vary; none of us .has ever been tidy, not even those few adopted out.

"Well," Allyssa said when the door closed behind the last of the girls the next morning. "Have you come to your senses since yesterday?"

"Have you come to yours?" I coolly-I hoped-poured another cup of coffee and sat down with it. "And aren't those my jeans?"

Allyssa glanced down at her long pinstriped legs. "It's just until I get my laundry done."

"You could have asked," pressing my advantage.

"I didn't think you'd be so stingy." Parry and riposte. En garde! Mother of Trekkies.

I let my right eyebrow rise slightly, unhampered by cries of Oh, Mother!, and sipped at the coffee. Allyssa glanced at me and walked away, down the length of the kitchen, her hands cupped behind her back, head down. Like our mother, like our grandmother. Like every one of us forever, for all I know. Are family gestures genetic? Or something imprinted on the infant brain? I know no way to tell without giving myself away. At the end of the kitchen my sister wheeled on one heel and came back.

"Do you have any idea what you'd be ending?"