“This female is doing well,” Carlo said, pointing to Benigna asleep in the cage to his left. Almost hidden behind her, a smaller form clung to the same branch. “She’s been feeding her child regularly, though her co is still ignoring it.”
“Her child?” Tosco sounded neither amused by the claim nor incredulous, so it was unlikely he was hearing it for the first time. He must have had a chance to get used to the idea before coming to see the evidence with his own eyes.
“I don’t expect she thinks of it that way,” Carlo replied. “I believe she’s treating it as she’d treat any orphaned relative; it’s like the niece she never knew she had. And she’s not such a stickler for logical niceties that it makes any difference that she never had a sister.”
Tosco hadn’t come here to discuss kinship-based altruism in arborines. “You’ve found a way to trigger the formation of a survivable blastula?”
“Survivable with surgical intervention,” Carlo said. “I wouldn’t put it more strongly than that.”
“How many times have you done this?”
“Just three.”
“Oh, is that all?” Tosco had finally found something funny in the situation. “When were you going to tell me? After a dozen?”
“I wanted to be sure of the results before I made too much of them,” Carlo explained. “If Benigna here was just an accident, it would hardly have been worth publishing.”
“No? I think that sounds like exactly the right thing to publish.”
“Well, that’s not how it’s turned out.”
“Kill her,” Tosco said bluntly. “Then the other two, after a suitable interval. When you dissect them, you need to find that all three bodies were riddled with malformations.”
Carlo hesitated, trying to think of a way to phrase his reply that avoided a flat out refusal. “Amanda and Macaria aren’t stupid,” he said. “If I tried to fake something like that, they’d spot it—and who knows what kind of fuss they’d make?”
Tosco wasn’t stupid either; if he knew that one of the women would make no fuss at all, he wasn’t offering any hints. “How many copies of the light tapes are there?”
“A few.”
“How many, exactly?” Tosco pressed him. “Where are they being stored?”
Carlo gave up on the idea that he could get through this without a confrontation. “There are dozens, and they’re very widely scattered. You can forget about destroying them.”
“You’ve lost your mind, Carlo,” Tosco declared. “This was supposed to be about biparity.”
“And it might yet be,” Carlo replied. “In a stint or two, when Benigna’s gained enough body mass I’m going to see if she can produce a second child the same way. Now there’s a nice title for a paper: ‘Light-induced facultative serial biparity in arborines’. We ought to start a competition, to find the phrase in reproductive biology that the ancestors would find maximally oxymoronic.”
Tosco’s curiosity got the better of him. “What about her co? Has he tried to breed with her?”
“Yes.”
“And what? She fought him off?”
“No, she cooperated. But nothing happened. In that sense at least, she’s infertile. It’s possible that she’s lost the ability for spontaneous division too, though we’ll have to wait a year or two to be sure.”
Tosco’s interest in the biology vanished. “You can forget about another year or two. I want all the females dead within six days, and all the offspring. I want all the tapes destroyed—”
“That’s not going to happen,” Carlo said firmly.
Tosco dragged himself closer. “Have you forgotten who you’re working for? Who got you permission to take these arborines from the forest in the first place?”
“Do you want to put this to the Council?” Carlo asked him. “I’ll be happy to accept their decision.”
“Maybe we should do that,” Tosco replied. “There are five women on the Council, and seven men—and not all the women will see it your way.”
“Nor all the men yours.” In any case, Carlo was sure that he was bluffing. He wanted the possibility Benigna represented buried immediately, not debated throughout the Peerless.
Tosco turned to examine Benigna’s cage. “That’s the future you want to force on us? A world of women, reproducing by machine?”
“That doesn’t have to be the end point,” Carlo said. “It’s possible that we can learn to trigger survivable male births as well. And in the long run it’s possible that we could integrate the whole thing back into the body, via influences: no machines, just co mating with co again—leading to births without the death of the mother.”
Tosco was unswayed. “That’s generations away, if it can be done at all.”
“You’re probably right,” Carlo conceded. “I’m just trying to be clear that we’re not carving anything in stone. Nothing in this process can determine the way things happen for all time. Suppose a few children are born by this method. If they decide that they want to reproduce the old way, they’ll be no worse off than solos are now: they’ll be free to go and find a co-stead.”
“Just ‘a few’?” Tosco asked sardonically. “So are you going to help a few friends survive childbirth, and leave the rest of the women on the Peerless to follow their mothers?”
“Of course not. But as you said about the Councilors, not every woman will be in favor of this. No compulsion, no restrictions—we should just work to make this safe, then give people the choice.”
“Most women can handle the fast,” Tosco said. “Most births are already biparous. I’m sorry about the burdensome task you were given by your friend, but you have no right to destroy a whole society just to ease your conscience.”
Carlo had never told him about Silvano’s children. He wasn’t surprised that word of it had spread, once Silvano became a Councilor and every aspect of his life gained new currency. But he’d never expected it to be thrown in his face.
“How many years is it now, since you murdered your co?” he asked. “Five? Six?”
Tosco buzzed derisively. “Murdered her? We made the choice together.”
“What choice? Between slaughtering her then, or letting her starve for a few more years?”
“You’re like an infant!” Tosco sneered. “Still humming at night about your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow up and face the real world.”
“I have,” Carlo replied. “I faced it, and now I’m going to change it.”
“This is finished,” Tosco said. “It’s over.” He started dragging himself out of the chamber.
Carlo clung to the rope, shaking with anger, trying to decide what to do. Tosco wouldn’t go to the Council; he’d round up a group of allies and come back to kill the arborines and smash the equipment.
Carlo wondered how long he had to prepare for that. A few bells? A few chimes? The news of what he’d done here might enrage many people, but it was a complicated message to get across; Tosco couldn’t just shout a few slogans in a food hall and find himself the leader of a rampaging mob. He was more likely to start with fellow biologists, who’d understand the arborine experiments and their implications. But they wouldn’t all share Tosco’s view of the matter—and even those who did would take some persuading that violence was called for.
The biggest risk, Carlo decided, would arise if he panicked and went to summon help immediately, leaving the arborines unprotected. He needed to stay calm and wait for Amanda to start her shift.