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BRIGHT ISLANDS
BY FRANK RILEY
When the two Geno-Doctors were gone, Miryam took the red capsule from under the base of the bedlamp and slipped it between her dry lips.
Reason told her to swallow the capsule quickly, but instead she held it under her tongue, clinging, against her will, to the last few moments of life.
She knew she was being weak, that she was still seeking hope where there was no hope, and she prayed to the ancient God of the Ghetto that the gelatin coating would dissolve quickly.
Pain interrupted the prayer, spreading like slow fire from deep within her young body, where the unwanted child of Genetics Center stirred so restlessly, so impatient to be born.
The white walls of her Center room blurred in and out of focus. Shadows merged together in brief, uncertain patterns. Lights flickered where there were no lights, and the darkness was so intense it had a glare of its own.
At the worst of the pain cycle, Miryam bit down on her under lip until the flesh showed as white as her teeth. She fought off temptation to crunch the capsule and put an end to all pain, all fear.
No, she would not go that way. She would go in a moment of blinding clarity, knowing why, savoring the last bitter sweet second of her triumph.
With a subconscious gesture of femininity, Miryam brushed the dark, damp hair from her forehead, and wiped the perspiration from her lips.
"Pretty little thing," one of the Geno-Service agents had called her, when she was arrested last fall in the Warsaw suburb where she had taught nursery school since escaping from the Ghetto.
"Doesn't look a bit like one of her kind," another agent had said, putting his hand under her chin and turning her face to the glare of his flashlight. "No wonder she fooled the Psycho and Chemico squads.... Lucky for us!"
"What's the matter, little one?" the first agent had spoken again. "Didn't you know we were coming? I thought all of you people were supposed to be telepaths.... Or doesn't it work when you're asleep?"
He flipped the covers off her trembling body and whistled.
"Hands off!" the Geno-Sergeant had warned sharply. "She's for Center!"
Now the capsule under her tongue was moist and soft. Time fled on swift, fluttering wings. Soon the horror would be done.
But the stubborn spark still glowed, and Miryam allowed her mind to drift down the long, shining corridor to the room where the younger of the two Geno-Doctors was changing into a white coat. The older man, who wore the gold trefoil of Geno-Sar on his collar, tilted back in his chair.
"She should be just about due," he said cheerfully.
"Yes, Sir," replied the young doctor, sounding the proper note of deference for a man who communed daily with the political elite.
"What do you think of her?"
"Well, Sir, frankly--I was surprised--" The young doctor twisted muscular arms to button the back of his jacket. He had but recently come from the Genetics Sanitarium on the Black Sea, and his face was tanned deep brown. "From reading the weekly reports of your staff, I didn't know she was that--that young--"
Miryam trembled with a hope she dared not recognize, but it was crushed out of her by the Geno-Sar's booming voice.
"Not only one of the youngest--but one of the very best specimens we've had to work with at Center! You read her psi rating?"
"Yes, Sir. Seventy-two point four, wasn't it?"
"Seventy-two point six! Absolutely phenomenal! Closest thing to a pure telepath our agents have ever turned up for us! This could be a big night for Center, my boy.... A big night!"
The young doctor shook his head to clear away the lingering image of a tragic, lovely face against a tear-stained pillow. Miryam was startled to find this image in his mind, and her pulse leaped again.
In a carefully professional tone, the young doctor asked:
"What was her rating after insemination? Did the emotional shock...?"
"Not at all! Oh, naturally, she was uncooperative in the tests, but pentathol and our cross-references gave us a true picture!"
"And the spermatozoa?"
"Best we could get! Refrigerated about thirty years ago from a specimen that tested forty-seven point eight."
The Geno-Sar paused, and because a comment was obviously in order, the young doctor said:
"This certainly could be a big night for Center!"
The Geno-Sar snapped his cigarette lighter with an expansive flourish.
"All the sciences have been taking a crack at psi--ever since the last Politbureau directive gave it number one priority. You should have heard the talk at Sar-Bureau meeting this afternoon! The Math-Sar actually laughed at Genetics ... told us to stick to our white mice!"
The young doctor made a polite cluck of disapproval.
"Those stupid mathematicians could learn something of heredity from their own ancients," the Geno-Sar continued, growing heated. "Think of Liebnitz, gifted at 14--Galois, a genius before he was 21!"
The Geno-Sar recovered his temper, and winked.
"Of course, I didn't say that at the meeting--the Bureau chief is very partial to Math--but I did remind them, most pointedly, of the known data on inherited sensory differences between individuals. And you should have seen the squirming! Especially when I got into the taste studies and the phenyl-thio-carbamide tests! Then, when I told of Genetics research on sense of time--sense of direction--sensitivity to pain, sound and smells--Well, the Chief was hanging on my every word! The Psycho-Sar became desperate to the point of rashness, and he jibed at me about our ancient master, Profim Lysenko." The Geno-Sar's head inclined slightly as he pronounced the name. "But the Chief himself gave the correct answer! He quoted from a Bureau directive which stated clearly that sensory characteristics, like any others, could well have been acquired in the first place, and then passed on through heredity! Oh, I tell you, it was a heart-warming afternoon!"
The younger man had been paying him only half attention.
"It's strange we should find some cases of psi among her people," he mused. "When I was at the University I always meant to study something about the--" he hesitated and searched for the approved term, "--the specimen races, but I never had time...."
For an instant the Geno-Sar's steel-blue eyes narrowed, and Miryam was shocked to find him appraising the young man for possible heresy. She had always regarded the scientific mind as something remote, cold, but never as something that could commit a heresy.
However, the Geno-Sar decided to table the subject.
"Of course you didn't!" he boomed. "You couldn't have made such a splendid record without total specialization! Each to his own, that's how science has prospered under the benevolence of our party!" He glanced up at the clock. "Well, aren't we just about ready for this delivery?"
Miryam drew back her mind. What a fool she was to go on seeking!
The child resumed its inexorable turning within her swollen body, and she knew she could never give to the world a life conceived so terribly, so coldly, without love or passion or tenderness.
Even in these final moments, with the gelatin melting under her tongue, Miryam shuddered with the remembered anguish of struggling up from the depths of anaesthesia to find herself bearing the seed of a child, from a faceless man who had died long ago.
Often, during the carefully guarded months of pregnancy, she had wondered about that man, who he had been, how his talent had compared with hers.
Miryam knew little about genetics, or any other science. The scientific mind had always frightened her, and she had feared to explore it. But she knew there was no truth to the folklore that psi was a characteristic of her people. She knew of only a few cases outside her own family, although within her family it seemed to have been a characteristic that had recurred frequently for many generations. Her father had cautioned her about selecting a husband, and pleaded with her not to flee the Ghetto.
For the past three days, since the nurse had momentarily left the cabinet at the end of the corridor unlocked and unguarded, Miryam had known that she need not be concerned about the success or failure of this terrible experiment. From the nurse's mind she had plucked the essential facts about the potency of the red capsule. This knowledge, for all its loneliness, had been something to cherish, to press to her full breasts, as she would never hold that child of horror.
Tears filled her eyes, squeezed in droplets between the closed lids. Tears because she was so alone. Tears of unbearable sadness and pity, for her people, for her youth and her young body, for the warmth that would be eternally cold, for the unnatural child that squirmed and turned, and would never cry.
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