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

"No." I set the cup down carefully, willing it not to chatter against the saucer. "Do you?"

"Gramma had records back to 1512."

"1512 is not 1988."

"Not as easy," Allyssa flashed. "What they went through, those women, our mothers-drowned as witches, put to the stake, condemned as adulterers-"

"And because of their troubles you think my daughters should go on reproducing like-like gussied-up paramecia?"

"Have you no sense of history?"

"Maybe not." I got up, put the cup in the sink, and faced her. "But I do have children. And you don't."

"If Mother were here-"

"But she's not." We both fell quiet. Mother's plane crashed into Boston Harbor, its engines stuffed with birds, just after I started college. Allyssa was a research technician in a hematology lab at the time; the cool blues and purples of the while cells she showed me through her microscope were what first pulled me toward genetics as a profession. That, and my own quandary as to what I am.

"If you don't tell them, I will," Allyssa said. "Get out of my house." She went, of course. I may be poker-faced, but I can be roused. I have the family temper. The family stubbornness. Pigheadedness, Gramma called it. The family. We are human, I am absolutely sure. Somehow, some centuries ago, some woman, our ancestor, yearned so strongly for a child that she learned to have one by herself. Perhaps she was isolated, alone, and too poor or proud to be married. Perhaps her husband preferred another. Perhaps she had access to some powerful form of self-shaping other humans have forgotten. I don't know. All I know is that her daughter was slender and agile, had neat round ears, eyebrows that swept upward at the outer end, eyes of a clear greenish brown, and hair that was glossy and dark. The girl would have tanned easily, if she'd exposed herself to the sun, and had a small straight nose and a wide mouth whose lower lip quirked inward as she smiled. Here is my evidence: I have 0 positive blood (the rhesus antigen for which I am positive is D). I lack no other human blood factors. Put a drop of my blood between two cover-slips and pull, stain the dried smear with Wright's, and under the microscope you will see biconcave red cells, polymor-pholcucocytes in their infinite variety, the dull-blue stodgi-ness of monocytes, lymphocytes with sky-clear cytoplasm. Hemoglobin prepared from what flows in my veins travels with normal hemoglobin A when electrophoresed. Doctors who order other biochemical assays for routine physicals have never found an abnormal value. My electrocardiogram is normal. The one chest X ray I had before they 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 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."

"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."