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

"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. Back around Valentine's Day she began signing her name T'Ami, Vulcan-style. Some of my fears were allayed: Julie remained her usual active self. She couldn't possibly have had time for the requisite meditation.

July 12-Tammie's water broke yesterday morning, two weeks early. She said nothing about it. Therefore, no one called the doctor. In the early stages of labor she was able to conceal the contractions long enough to camp in front of the TV for Star Trek reruns; once hard labor set in, she locked herself in her room. Only when the baby was nearly crowning did she drag herself off her bed and let me into the room to help. I wish I hadn't. I wish I had sent her far away to have this baby, where no one we know ... no. No. No, I don't. My life, the whole structure of what I am, has fallen apart. The child, thank Heaven, lived only a minute or two. Why, I'm not sure. He seemed perfectly formed, from his tiny toe-nails to the tips of his pointed ears. The placenta was a sappy green; it smelled like sweet corn just torn from its stalk, the tang of crushed grass with a musty undertone. "Copper instead of iron in the hemoglobin," Tammie informed me smugly. "Type T negative," whatever that may be. Well, why not? If a plant can put magnesium where iron should be and get a type of chlorophyll, if a horseshoe crab can similarly use copper and come up with the blue blood of a nobleman ... oh, Tammie! Is that it? Did you get the valence of the copper wrong? Tammie also told me her son's heart would be where one would expect the liver; she was quite correct. About the other internal organs, she wasn't sure. They were rather a mishmash, but I saw no obvious reason why they shouldn't have worked. Everything connected. Later, once she's rested, I'll try to get her to tell me how she did it. How she arranged the chromosomes she came with to construct this semi-Vulcan child born of a popular fiction and a-a what? Later, we will make a plan. How to conceal this birth, how to divert suspicion. Tammie can't help with that, not yet. Just now, she is upstairs, weeping. Х Am I? All this time, these years, I've thought that somehow I was human, like all of you around me. That if I wanted, anytime I wanted, I could slip into the great stream of human history and take my place, like any woman with forty-six chromosomes in all but a few hundred of her cells. My own "normality," the long unimaginative line of women exactly like myself, the occasional fertile marriages among them, seemed proof enough. That's the trouble with scientific hypothesis, I tell myself bitterly. It is always vulnerable to the counterexample. What am I? Where could I have come from, those generations ago? And why?

Women have had children alone since recorded time began. How many others, with other builds and other features, are like me? Do they know? They must!

Sisters, please, show me your faces! Soon!



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About L. A. Taylor and "Counterexample"


After a quarter of a century I thought I had seen every possible variation on the Star Trek story. Star Trek was responsible for the entry of many women into science fiction because the first television series of Star Trek presented many women. Not only in starring but in supporting roles; perhaps it was the wholesale entry of such women as "Christine Chapel"-actress Majel Barrett (in private life Mrs. Gene Roddenberry) or the singularly beautiful black actress Nichelle Nichols, as Uhura, both of them there on the bridge of the Enterprise, every week, and whatever people said, they were doing more than "opening hailing frequencies." And both women were definitely people in their own right and not just love objects for the men involved-women found for the first time serious science fiction role models of their own, not just the array of wives, daughters, and little sisters of the men involved. Well, after that, women came into science fiction in droves. Many readers, many fans, many artists, and more to the point here, from the ranks of Star Trek enthusiasts many excellent writers both amateur and professional.

Star Trek and my own Darkover share one thing; it seems to be easier, especially among women writers, to write of already familiar characters-be they from Darkover or Star Trek-than to create one's own. After a very bad experience I have most reluctantly had to close the Darkover universe to other writers, and now I belatedly understand Roddenberry's intransigence-like that of Conan Doyle-with his literary property. However, this story infringes no literary copyright in Star Trek, nor, as far as I know, anywhere else. This story is just good fun about a young girl who went a bit far in her enthusiasm for the Star Trek characters. Be all that as it may, I am presenting probably the most interesting spin-off of the Star Trek universe ever to come to my attention. Laurie Aylma Taylor likes to explore that no-man's-land between genres; she writes mainstream fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy. In addition to her short fiction, she has published nine novels, and her next novel, Cat's Paw, will be out from Berkley Books in March 1995.