Appropriate Love Greg Egan

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.Chris was not dead; I had no reason to mourn him, whatever had become of the body I’d known.And the thing in my womb was not a child; permitting a disembodied brain to be the object of motherly love would have been simply farcical.We think of our lives as circumscribed by cultural and biological taboos, but if people really want to break them, they always seem to find a way.Human beings are capable of anything: torture, genocide, cannibalism, rape.After which — or so I’d heard — most can still be kind to children and animals, be moved to tears by music, and generally behave as if all their emotional faculties are intact.So, what reason did I have to fear that my own minor — and utterly selfless— transgressions could do me any harm at all?* * * *I never met the new body’s surrogate mother, I never saw the clone as a child.I did wonder, though — once I knew that the thing had been born —whether or not she’d found her ‘normal’ pregnancy as distressing as I’d found mine.Which is easier, I wondered: carrying a brain-damaged child-shaped object, with no potential for human thought, grown from a stranger’s DNA — or carrying the sleeping brain of your lover? Which is the harder to keep from loving in inappropriate ways?At the start, I’d hoped to be able to blur all the details in my mind — I’d wanted to be able to wake one morning and pretend that Chris had merely been sick, and was now recovered.Over the months, though, I’d come to realise that it was never going to work that way.When they took out the brain, I should have felt — at the very least —relieved, but I just felt numb, and vaguely disbelieving.The ordeal had gone on for so long; it couldn’t be over with so little fuss: no trauma, no ceremony.I’d had surreal dreams of laboriously, but triumphantly, giving birth to a healthy pink brain — but even if I’d wanted that (and no doubt the process could have been induced), the organ was too delicate to pass safely through the vagina.This ‘Caesarean’ removal was just one more blow to my biological expectations; a good thing, of course, in the long run, since my biological expectations could never be fulfilled.but I still couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated.So I waited, in a daze, for the proof that it had all been worthwhile.The brain couldn’t simply be transplanted into the clone, like a heart or a kidney.The peripheral nervous system of the new body wasn’t identical to that of the old one; identical genes weren’t sufficient to ensure that.Also— despite drugs to limit the effect — parts of Chris’s brain had atrophied slightly from disuse.So, rather than splicing nerves directly between the imperfectly matched brain and body — which probably would have left him paralysed, deaf, dumb and blind — the impulses would be routed through a computerised ‘interface’, which would try to sort out the discrepancies.Chris would still have to be rehabilitated, but the computer would speed up the process enormously, constantly striving to bridge the gap between thought and action, between reality and perception.The first time they let me see him, I didn’t recognise him at all.His face was slack, his eyes unfocused; he looked like a large, neurologically impaired child — which, of course, he was.I felt a mild twinge of revulsion.The man I’d seen after the train wreck, swarming with medical robots, had looked far more human, far more whole.I said, ‘Hello.It’s me.’He stared into space.The technician said, ‘It’s early days.’She was right.In the weeks that followed, his progress (or the computer’s) was astounding.His posture and expression soon lost their disconcerting neutrality, and the first helpless twitches rapidly gave way to coordinated movement; weak and clumsy, but encouraging.He couldn’t talk, but he could meet my eyes, he could squeeze my hand.He was in there, he was back, there was no doubt about that.I worried about his silence — but I discovered later that he’d deliberately spared me his early, faltering attempts at speech.One evening in the fifth week of his new life, when I came into the room and sat down beside the bed, he turned to me and said clearly, ‘They told me what you did.Oh God, Carla, I love you!’His eyes filled with tears.I bent over and embraced him; it seemed like the right thing to do.And I cried, too — but even as I did so, I couldn’t help thinking: None of this can really touch me.It’s just one more trick of the body, and I’m immune to all that now.* * * *We made love on the third night he spent at home.I’d expected it to be difficult, a massive psychological hurdle for both of us, but that wasn’t the case at all.And after everything we’d come through, why should it have been? I don’t know what I’d feared; some poor misguided avatar of the Incest Taboo, crashing through the bedroom window at the critical moment, spurred on by the ghost of a discredited nineteenth-century misogynist?I suffered no delusion at any level — from the merely subconscious, right down to the endocrine — that Chris was my son.Whatever effects two years of placental hormones might have had on me, whatever behavioural programs they ‘ought’ to have triggered, I’d apparently gained the strength and the insight to undermine completely.True, his skin was soft and unweathered, and devoid of the scars of a decade of hacking off facial hair.He might have passed for a sixteen-year-old, but I felt no qualms about that — any middle-aged man who was rich enough and vain enough could have looked the same.And when he put his tongue to my breasts, I did not lactate.We soon started visiting friends; they were tactful, and Chris was glad of that — although personally, I’d have happily discussed any aspect of the procedure.Six months later, he was working again; his old job had been taken, but a new firm was recruiting (and they wanted a youthful image).Piece by piece, our lives were reassembled.Nobody, looking at us now, would think that anything had changed.But they’d be wrong.To love a brain as if it were a child would be ludicrous.Geese might be stupid enough to treat the first animal they see upon hatching as their mother, but there are limits to what a sane human being will swallow.So, reason triumphed over instinct, and I conquered my inappropriate love; under the circumstances, there was never really any contest.Having deconstructed one form of enslavement, though, I find it all too easy to repeat the process, to recognise the very same chains in another guise [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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