Thorns

EIGHT: STABAT MATER DOLOROSA

In the dark it was easy for Lona to pretend that she was dead. She often mourned at her own grave. She saw herself on a hillside, on a grassy breast of earth with a tiny plaque set in the ground at her feet.

She drew the coverlets up over her thin body. Her eyes, tightly closed, held back the tears. BLESSED REPOSE. HOPE OF REDEMPTION. What did they do with dead bodies nowadays? Pop them in the oven! A bright hot flash. Light, like the sun. And then dust. Dust to dust. A long sleep.

I was nearly dead once, Lona reminded herself. But they stopped me. They brought me back.

Six months ago, in the full blaze of summer. A good season for dying, Lona thought. Her babies had been born. It didn’t take nine months, the way they did it, bringing them along in bottles. More like six months. The experiment had taken place exactly a year back. Six months for the babies to hatch. Then the unbearable publicity—and the brush with deliberate death.

Why had they chosen her?

Because she was there. Because she was available. Because she could not object. Because she carried a bellyful of fertile eggs that she wasn’t likely ever to need.

“A woman’s ovaries contain several hundred thousand ova, Miss Kelvin. During your normal lifetime about four hundred of these will reach maturity. The rest are superfluous. These are the ones we wish to use. We need only a few hundred…”

“In the name of science…”

“A crucial experiment…”

“The ova are superfluous. You can dispense with them and feel no loss…”

“Medical history … your name … forever…”

“No effect on your future fertility. You can marry and have a dozen normal children…”

It was an intricate experiment with many facets. They had had a century or so to perfect the techniques, and now they were bringing them all together in a single project. Natural oogenesis coupled with synthetic ripening of the ova. Embryonic induction. External fertilization. Extramaternal incubation after reimplanting of fertilized ova. Words. Sounds. Synthetic capacitation. Ex utero fetal development. Simultaneity of genetic material. My babies! My babies!

Lona did not know who the “father” was, only that a single donor would contribute all of the sperm, just as a single donor would contribute all of the ova. She understood that much. The doctors were very good about explaining the project to her, step by step, speaking to her as they would to a child. She followed most of it. They patronized her because she had had no education to speak of and because she was timid of embracing tough ideas, but the raw intelligence was there.

Her part in the project was simple and ended at the first phase. They flushed from her ovaries several hundred fertile but immature eggs. So far as they were concerned, Lona could then drop into outer darkness. But she had to know. She followed the subsequent steps.

The eggs were coddled along in artificial ovaries until they were ripe. A woman could ripen only two or three ova at a time in the hidden greenhouse of her middle; the machines could and did handle hundreds. Came then the taxing but not essentially new process of microinjection of the eggs to strengthen them. And then fertilization. The swimming sperms wriggled toward their goal. A single donor, a single explosive burst at harvest-time. Many ova had been lost in the earlier stages. Many were not fertile or not fertilized. But a hundred were. The tiny wriggler reached its harbor.

Reimplantation of the fertilized ova now. There had been talk of finding a hundred other women to carry the hundred sprouting zygotes. Cuckoo fetuses, swelling the wrong bellies. In the end, though, that was considered excessive. A dozen women volunteered to carry to term; the rest of the fertilized ova went to the artificial wombs. A dozen pale bellies bare under the bright lights. A dozen pairs of smooth thighs opening not to a lover but to dull gray aluminum sheathing. The slow thrust, the squirting entry, the completion of implantation. Some attempts were failures. Eight of the sleek bellies soon were bulging.

“Let me volunteer,” Lona had said. Touching her flat belly: “Let me carry one of the babies.”

“No.”

They were gentler than that. They explained that it was unnecessary within the framework of the experiment for her to go through the bother of pregnancy. It had been shown long ago that an ovum could be taken from a woman’s body, fertilized elsewhere, and reimplanted in her for the usual term of nurture. Why repeat? That had been verified, confirmed. She could be spared the nuisance. They wished to know how well a human mother carried an intrusive embryo, and for that they did not need Lona.

Did anyone need Lona now?

No one needed Lona now.

No one. Lona paid heed to what was happening.

The eight volunteer mothers did well. In them pregnancy was artificially accelerated. Their bodies accepted the intruders, fed blood to them, folded them warmly in placentas. A medical miracle, yes. But how much more exciting to dispense with maternity altogether!

A row of gleaming boxes. In each a dividing zygote. The pace of cell-splitting was breathtaking. Lona’s head reeled. Growth was induced in the cortical cytoplasm of the zygotes as they cleaved, then in the main axial organs. “As gastrulation proceeds, the mesodermal mantle extends forward from the blastopore, and its anterior edge comes to lie just posterior to the future lens ectoderm. This edge is the future heart, and it, too, is an inductor of the lens. At the open-neural-plate stage of development, the future lens cells are located in two areas of the epidermis that lie just lateral to the anterior brain plate. As the neural plate rolls up into a tube, the future retinal cells evaginate from the prospective brain as part of the optic vesicle.”

In six months a hundred bouncing babies.

A word never before used in a human context now on the lips of all: centuplets.

Why not? One mother, one father! The rest was incidental. The carrier women, the metal wombs—they had lent warmth and sustenance, but they were not mothers to the children.

Who was the mother?

The father did not matter. Artificial insemination was a matter for yawns. Statistically, at least, one male could fertilize every woman in the world in two afternoons. If a man’s sperm had spawned a hundred babies at once, what of it?

But the mother…

Her name was not supposed to be released. “Anonymous donor”—that was her place in medical history. The story was too good, though. Especially that she was not quite seventeen. Especially that she was single. Especially that (so the physicians swore) she was technically virgin.

Two days after the simultaneous centuplet delivery, Lona’s name and achievement were matters of public record.

She stood slim and frightened before the flashing lights.

“Will you name the babies yourself?”

“What did it feel like when the eggs were taken from you?”

“What does it feel like to know that you’re the mother of the biggest family in human history?”

“Will you marry me?”

“Come live with me and be my love.”

“Half a million for the exclusive rights to the story!”

“Never with a man?”

“How did you react when they told you what the experiment was going to be?”

“Have you met the father?”

“.”

A month like that. Fair skin reddened by camera-glow. Eyes wide, strained, bloodshot. Questions. Doctors beside her to guide her answers. Her moment of glory, dazzling, bewildering. The doctors hated it nearly as much as she did. They would never have released her name: except that one of them had, for a price, and the floodgates had opened. Now they tried to ward off more blunders by coaching her in what to say. Lona said quite little, actually. Part of her silence rose from fright, part from ignorance. What could she tell the world? What did the world want from her?

Briefly she was a wonder of the world. They sang a song about her on the song machines. Deep thrumming of chords; sad lament of the mother of centuplets. It was played everywhere. She could not bear to listen. Come make a baby with me, sweetie. Come make a hundred more. Her friends, not many of them to begin with, sensed that it embarrassed her to talk of It, so they talked deliberately of other things, anything else at all, and finally they simply stopped talking. She kept to herself. Strangers wanted to know what it was like, with all those babies. How could she say? She scarcely knew! Why had they made a song about her? Why did they gossip and pry? What did they want?

To some, it was all blasphemy. There was thunder from the pulpits. Lona felt the tang of brimstone at her nostrils. The babies cried and stretched and gurgled. She visited them once, and wept, and picked one up to hug it. The child was taken from her and restored to its aseptic environment She was not permitted to visit them again.

Centuplets. A hundred siblings sharing the same group of codons. What would they be like? How would they grow? Could a man live in a world shared by fifty brothers and fifty sisters? That was part of the experiment. This experiment was to be a lifetime long. The psychologists had moved in. Much was known of quintuplets: sextuplets had been studied somewhat, and there had briefly been a set of septuplets thirty years before. But centuplets? An infinity of new research!

Without Lona. Her part had ended on the first day. Something cool and tingly swabbed across her thighs by a smiling nurse. Then men, staring without interest at her body. A drug. A dreamy haze through which she was aware of penetration. No other sensation. The end. “Thank you, Miss Kelvin. Your fee.” Cool linens against her body. Elsewhere they were beginning to do things to the borrowed ova.

My babies. My babies.

Lights in my eyes!

When the time came to kill herself, Lona did not quite succeed at it. Doctors who could give life to a speck of matter could also sustain life in the source of that speck. They put her back together, and then they forgot about her.

A nine days’ wonder is granted obscurity on the tenth day.

Obscurity, but not peace. Peace was never granted; it had to be won, the hard way, from within. Living again in darkness, Lona yet could never be the same, for somewhere else a hundred babies thrived and fattened. They had reached not only into her ovaries but into the fabric of her life itself to draw forth those babies, and she reverberated still with the recoil.

She shivered in the darkness.

Someday soon, she promised herself, I’ll try again. And this time no one will notice me. This time they’ll let me go. I’ll sleep a long time.