Designer Genes. Brian Stableford

Although he still felt in need of someone to listen, someone to sympathize, he knew that none of them could fulfill that role.

      Steven opened his eyes, met Rick’s eyes momentarily, and began to wail.

      Rick looked down at the child, and his heart sank. Forty-eight hours, he thought, remembering what the visitors had said. It would be forty-eight hours before the nursery nook was safe for normal use. Until then.…

      He got up and went into the kitchen, to salvage the bottle and the teat. It was a bit twenty-first century, but he figured that with luck it ought to work, now that Steven was hungry enough.

      It did. After spitting it out once, Steven compromised and started sucking. Silence fell.

      Rick stroked the baby’s head with the hand that the doctor had dressed and sealed with syntho-flesh. It felt very odd.

      “We really were in trouble down there, you know,” said Rick, levelly. “Not that anybody gives a damn one way or the other, now it’s all come out okay. I was trying to save our lives, because I had every reason to think they needed saving.”

      Steven didn’t even spare him a glance, but that didn’t matter.

      “You understand, don’t you?” Rick continued. “You were there, and you were yelling even louder than I was. You knew what we were going through. You know what I did, and why. It’s our secret, kid—just yours and mine. We understand.”

      He had started saying it simply in order to have something to say, but as he spoke the words aloud he realized that they were true—or, at any rate, nearly true.

      He had not been alone in the cellar; he had not panicked entirely on his own behalf. He had been scared for Steven too. He had been right to be scared for Steven, to panic for Steven, to go to the limit…for Steven. Whatever his co-parents thought of him, he’d done what he had to do, and he didn’t have to apologize to anyone.

      Steven spat out the teat, and gathered himself for a whimper, which would inevitably turn to a whine, which would turn to a.…

      Rick stood up, and took the baby and the bottle into the nursery, hoping that the sight of familiar surroundings would help to set Steven’s mind at rest. A dozen roses had been picked and taken away, but there were hundreds left; not one of them looked sick.

      “Look,” Rick murmured into the baby’s ear. “Look at all the beautiful roses. Everything’s okay.”

      He tried to push the teat back into the baby’s mouth, but Steven resisted. The baby was crying now—building up yet again towards that frightful note.

      “At the end of the day,” Rick went on, stubbornly, “Murgatroyd was right, wasn’t he? We just have to stop thinking about it as a disaster, and start thinking about it as a beginning, don’t we? A miracle happened here today, and you and I were here to see it. We should be grateful for that. We are grateful for that, aren’t we?”

      Again, he had said it just to have something to say, but again he realized that it was true. As Steven began to yell, and the pitch of his yelling cut through to the very heart of him, Rick suddenly realized that it would not and could not affect him the way it did unless there was some special bond between them, some indefinable but unique harmony. If one only looked at it sensibly it was not, after all, some malevolent worm gnawing at his soul, but an affirmation of the fact that they meant something to one another…that they had an understanding.

      Rick pressed the makeshift teat into the baby’s mouth, gently but insistently fighting the baby’s refusal to make it welcome.

      “Take your time, son,” said Rick, soothingly. “Take your time. There’s no hurry at all. We have all the time in the world, if we need it…all the time in the world.”

      And he looked around, at all the beautiful roses—all the bright pink roses, which, with tender loving care and a little luck, would live for centuries.