The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

  By and large I know very little about the practice of medicine, let alone the architecture, staffing and running of gynae/androcology units, but of late my second-hand pregnancy has sharpened my interest. Having a smart touchboard helps.

  Quite illegally and unobtrusively, it patches me into the heart of the Right To Life Maternity Hospital’s environment comptroller menu. I study maps and coded diagrams. It is designedly user-friendly, once you have authorization to enter it.

  There is only one place the non-human babies can be: a mnemonically labelled special intensive care section on the fifth floor.

  Chilled, I touch my belly. So it is true: the plague of what the Health Department has dubbed ‘Intermittent Uterine Intervention’ is spreading, numbers multiplying. An entire unit floor given over to them. Christ. What happens to the ones born in hospitals governed by alternative ideologies? Literally, I find that I have bared my teeth. I know what I’d do, what I intend to do.

  Some kind of creepy social contract of complicity has crept up on us, an agreement to keep our silence— almost, God help us, to welcome the plague—but I have never signed up. It seems to me like some grey choking fog out of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Kafka. I focus myself through grief and exhaustion to anger. Perhaps the difference is my shock and guilt at Jane’s death, in an accident I failed to prevent. A psychotherapist—Dr Dwyer, say—might attribute this to an over-developed sense of responsibility for the fate of others. Ha.

  It is all irrelevant. What matters is the fact that a monster has killed my mother, and that I mean to return the favour.

  ~ * ~

  My private tap into AussieNet makes it easy. It helps to be one of the custodians.

  The special unit at RTL Maternity is wired in a maze of cybernetic monitoring devices. It looks to me as if the hospital authorities want to minimize direct human contact with the new-born monsters. I have no trouble insinuating several sub-routine loops into the system. They’ll get me in, cover for me, get me out again, and then expunge themselves. I hope. You can never be sure, no matter how sublime and intuitive your resonance with computer logics.

  I catch a tram back into town along St Kilda Rd, all flickery with trees beside the road and mirrored office blocks set back in a summer mirage, and enter the hospital by a side door, the location and low visibility of which I noted while we waited for confirmation that my mother had become the drained, discarded compost of a non-human parasite which metastasized inside her for nine months.

  There is a way of walking which tells organizational staff, including medicos, that you are one of them. Done at an exact pitch of hauteur, you can persuade those whose business it is to be officious that you are their superior in rank and station. It helps, however, to be at least in your mid-thirties. I do what I can and it seems to be working, though I’m feeling sick and stunned and ready to give it all up and go home again and put myself to bed for two days with a handful of hypnotic tranquillizers.

  When I reach the ward where the monsters are kept I walk straight past a nurse conferring with a colourful diagnostic display, stride into the dull blue lighting of the place, into its faintly seaside smells and the clicking of the hands and feet of the things inside their cribs. I do not avert my eyes, though I want to.

  They are all alike in their deformity.

  On my understanding of genetics, this is impossible. Mutation is a random thing. Were this malediction an accidental by-product of our foul world, it would not show itself in a single form, any more than victims of haphazard radiation are born with a common, identifiable deficit.

  So is this, in the true sense, a plague? Some viral instruction to the hapless genes of the pre-born? Yet what I see before me is too complex for that, too ornate. Surely no single virus can build viable gargoyles out of human flesh.

  I stare around me in the blue light. In all truth, what I see does not look like anything the theory of evolution can cope with, no matter with what ingenuity it is modified. This is something more, an infestation of demons. They look like some proof of pre-scientific metaphysics, an adaptation to the future, a form of life fit for the Apocalypse.

  Yes. They look to me as if they have been designed to live with gusto in a world ruined by catastrophe.

  I find a touchboard and bypass the monitor programming, call up the fancy loops I inserted from my apartment terminal. When I punch my name— Mum’s name—an indicator lights on one of the cribs. I go straight to it and open it up, and take out the small pink thing that lies there.

  It is loathsome, like the rest of them. But plainly viable. Given normal care, it will undoubtedly survive, it will thrive.

  It will not be given normal care. My arms, holding it, begin to shake.

  Have they been inflicted on us?

  Is that why the authorities keep them alive, spiriting them away?

  No. Unbelievable. Genetic engineering has not attained that boldness, that mastery. The biologists are smug enough in their modest achievement of allowing men like me to bear children. That technical triumph is itself so recent the stigma has still not worn off. The grins, the muttered remarks in the street.

  I cannot tear my eyes from it. Oh God. There must be places crammed with others of its kind, older, crawling on hands and knees, toddling, learning to run, singing with their terrible voices. After all, the phenomenon has been known for at least five years, even if no one dares talk about it.

  This one is female. I will not think of it as my baby sister.

  It opens its eyes, as I hold it in my trembling hands, and gazes at me.

  New-born babies cannot focus their gaze. This does.

  It looks at me and whimpers, as if it is attempting to speak.

  It seems to say my name.

  I run with sweat. It mewls and chitters, clamping my finger.

  I kill it as quietly as I can.

  The others I leave undisturbed. I really don’t care about them.

  One of my loops blips out false vital signs, pretending to be a baby monster breathing. Nobody stops me as I leave the section.

  ~ * ~

  Dad is awake, querulous and ruined, and I have no love or patience left for him. I shoulder my way past and swallow a bunch of pills and go to sleep with the light on.

  ~ * ~

  After Mum’s funeral, I make arrangements to keep the old man together in body and soul, then repack and fly out again in a big airforce jet, back to the scouring wind and ice of Mawson and the joint US-Australasian Defence Station under Mount Menzies, and the joyous programming of those big machines which control the so-called ‘Star Wars’ X-ray lasers and thus do their bit toward keeping the Southern Hemisphere from blistering ionisation.

  That takes care of the next four months.

  Input/black box/Output.

  You can consider me the black box, figuratively on my hands and knees in the bowels of the processor.

  ~ * ~

  Press and electronic media maintain their discreet and dignified profile on the matter of ‘Intermittent Uterine Intervention’. Women’s groups that try to go public in a big way get stomped: pre-emptively, savagely, quietly, effectively. I know this much, if little more, from the privilege of my seat of power, such as it is. Occasionally I’m able to pull demographic figures through my own number-cruncher peripherals, and the curves look bad to me.

  As my own belly swells I have to give up my weekend tromps through the extended dawn dazzle of Lambert Glacier, a four hundred kilometre slippery slide to the Amery Ice Shelf and off the edge of the world. It is murder out there, slush and glare and dreadful Fimbulwinter summer cold. I find myself lying awake all night, shivers of sweat soaking my outsize pyjamas.

  There is simply no safe way to tell if I have a thing inside me instead of the child I made, with love, with my dead wife.

  There’s a forty per cent chance that laparoscope insertion will trigger lethal anaphylactic shock syndrome, if what I harbour is not a human baby. That
was one of the first findings they announced, before the pall of silence closed on the media. Strangely enough, gross biochemical assays have not to date yielded true distinguishing markers. Still, I piss into bottles and send them north with the penguins for NMR determination and mass spectrography examination and, for all I know, blue litmus tests.

  My obstetricians and androcologists simply shrug when I speak to them face to face through a satellite link. Too early, Keith. Hang in there.

  To my astonishment, I receive two friendly postcards from Susan Dwyer. I send her a plastic stuffed penguin with a roguish leer.

  At seven months I am deemed too delicate for continued security work and fly home to prepare for my accouchement. Everyone is very bracing and gung-ho and not one word is said which even remotely hints that I might be being gnawed on from within, husked, flayed and consumed. It’s not the kind of thing you joke about. Like cancer until recently, consumption last century.

  ~ * ~

  ‘You look done in, son.’

  ‘It’s a long flight, Dad.’

  Speculatively, warily, we regard one another. My tweed smock sticks out; the placental prolactin hormones make my damn tits protrude visibly. It suddenly comes to me that the old fool is embarrassed, that he perceives me from his twenty-year time warp as some kind of secret gay or trans-sexual jumping out of the closet into his defenceless hearth. ‘Give me a hand with this suitcase, sport,’ I say briskly, and bang him smartly on the back. He picks it up with a sigh of relief. I refrain from breaking his reactionary old heart by telling him that all the truly macho Ubermenschen at Mawson are queer as thirty dollar bits.

  ~ * ~

  In the apartment, looking across the autumnal colours of Albert Park and the press of late afternoon traffic on the freeway below, it pleases me in my masochism to identify with van Gogh. I find Dad’s scratched-out analogue disc of Don Maclean’s American Pie and cue up ‘Vincent’. Starry starry night. Mad as a cut snake, but globs and swirls of truth. There’s a Brett Whiteley hommage (Mum’s, not his) on the living room wall. I salute it with a finger. Self-mutilators, Vincent, you and I.

  ‘Get you something to drink, Keith?’

  ‘I’m keeping off it until the baby’s born.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’ He sits down and toys with a dusty, pitted golf trophy.

  We are maudlin together, after our separate styles.

  ‘Females,’ he says, with bone-deep misery. First he has lost his daughter-in-law, then his wife and baby have been taken from him. ‘I never thought about dying, you know, Keith? Always had it in the back of my mind that I’d go first.’

  They’ve told him about the death of the thing, of course, but they have not explained the irregular manner of its passing. Not that they’ve let me in on that, either, for all my exalted security standing.

  Dad makes two martinis, a taste he contracted in Vietnam, excessively dry, passes me one, gets downcast when I hand it back, drinks them both. His mood blurs. Mine remains spiky.

  He leaves his second olive. I fish it out and eat it.

  ~ * ~

  It’s my first pregnancy, and my back is starting to kill me. All the computer-designed, carbon filament trusses and supports do little enough, it seems to me, to compensate for my essential anatomical inadequacies as a mother.

  Computer hackers usually play a lot of hard squash; it balances out all the sitting and staring. (No matter how ergonomically the terminal touchboards are arranged, the human backbone was not selected by evolution to deal with long term trunk immobility.) Now all my regular ironman exercise routines are contraindicated, and the mass in my abdomen presses more fiercely with each new day. Into the bargain, I’m as randy as a rat, despite the nurturant oestrogen and progesterone analogues. (Expecting mothers dote on medical jargon, especially male mothers. Ghosts and echoes of all those doctor shows on the box.)

  There are women, it turns out, who get off on heavily gravid men, and I find more than one, in bars I never quite identified before, parallel invisible culture like S&M gays and herpes clubs I suppose. They repel me.

  ‘My wife,’ I try to explain to one of them. ‘I was driving the car.’ Small and gaunt, second-generation gook migrant, a crip lover, aching for something beyond deformity. ‘The head of my department made no objection to the implant.’ She scowls as I talk about it, hating the dead. ‘Good publicity, open-minded government policy.’ But her head is moving away from me, and her ears hum with songs I don’t know.

  Beggars and choosers? Well, perhaps, but there is something unpleasant, perfervid, about those hungry mouths. Have they hated their mothers so badly? Still, their attentions quickly sicken me, and I am left swollen high and low, burning, pissed off. Drinking mineral water, no booze, no dope.

  ~ * ~

  Some clichés are true, no matter how tiresome it might be when you find yourself reacting in a stock manner. A cornering car comes within a hair of running you down, your mind reacts, gets you smoothly out of the way, that should be the end of it. It’s not, though. Minutes later, you begin to tremble. The internal chemistry has caught up.

  I start to waken in the night with my jaw jammed rigid open, and my mouth parched out with uncompromising terror. Bad dreams. Hamlet was right about bad dreams.

  A week after I get back from Antarctica, I have a foully gruesome nightmare about Mum. Through the melting Dali landscape shrills a teeth-grating whine, which is unusual—I rarely insert acoustic imagery into my dreamwork. And hooves of goats. Click click, through the irritating buzz. Snap snap of lobster claws. Hairs in my mouth, crunch of crustacean shell, red and yellow. The stench. Mum shrieking. All the noises a garbage disposal hole cries out as it goes bad. I turn into Mum. So I guess it’s about me, after all.

  ~ * ~

  Birth will be by Caesarean section (how else, since my genes neglected to provide the appropriate natural exit?). So I book one of the Right To Life Hospital’s delivery rooms on a precise date in July, the middle of what is forecast to be a mild, dry winter, at a precise hour, my O&A team logged months in advance with no excuses available if they decide the day is made in heaven for golf or skiing at Buller.

  I tend to drop in once a week for endocrinological sampling (no one’s saying anything; maybe they don’t know anything), and make a point of sticking my head around Susan Dwyer’s door. Forestall the psycho-van; show them you have nothing to hide, ha ha.

  Even so, it startles the hell out of me to answer my security buzzer on the crisp morning four days before I am due and find Susan blushing in the lobby with a wonderfully fragrant bunch of dewy roses, flown from somewhere warmer, gold and rose and thorny green.

  ‘You must be bored out of your mind, Keith.’

  I peck her on the cheek, swing out of the way and draw her inside, pulling her against my ponderous and brassiered chest, kick the door shut, release her.

  ‘Susan, they’re lovely. Thank you. Hey, Dad,’ I yell. He comes out of his room pushing earphones up on top of his balding head, nods to Dr Dwyer without recognition. ‘Put these in water, would you?’

  ‘I can do that, Keith,’ Susan says, looking for the nearest tap.

  ‘No. Sit down here with me.’ I prop myself on the couch, hitch up, sit her next to me. ‘Is this by way of a service call? Six months, six thousand klicks, whichever runs out first?’

  ‘We aim to please,’ she says with a grin. Her hair is cut differently and streaked with blonde, but she remains a plain, honest woman in her late twenties. Her fingertips dance on my knee. ‘You look good.’

  ‘Ah, the flush of pregnancy. It fills all us blokes with a profound luminous beauty, doctor.’ I’ve begun to shake again and the more I try to master it the worse it gets. My father takes himself back to his room, immersed in the endless bubblegum music of his youth. It comes to me abruptly that she knows I killed it.

  No, that’s not correct: Susan Dwyer would not be sitting beside me, ready to hug me as hard as she can, if she suspected consc
iously what my hands did six months ago.

  Yet it seems to me that a part of her does know, and makes her nervous, that it agrees with my act without informing the portion of her in the front of the shop. Some part of her so profoundly fears the impulse behind its tacit endorsement of murder that she quivers at my side like a program hung on a loop. Holding my arm she says, ‘I want to discuss the possibility that your baby has been affected by what we call Uterine Intervention.’

  ‘Everyone’s been avoiding the topic like the . . . plague.’ I hook a lever of gallows humour under the edge of the weight pressing on her spirit. On both of us.

  ‘The statistics seem pretty much in our favour, Keith.’

  I meet her eyes. ‘Even when you factor in the contagion incidence?’