reasoning, but I may have found some loose threads. With these in hand, we can begin the unraveling process.
'The question is: Was Sharon Crayne bent? The probable answer: Not in the sense of selling us out for money. She worked too hard, for too long, and her basic reward seemed to be the work itself. Her personal liaisons were usually brief, intense relationships connected with work, perhaps reinforcing her conception of Job as Family.'
'What about her real family?' Millicent asked.
'This is where the pieces began to come together. But remember, please: this is a fabric of supposition.'
'Understood,' Harmony said. 'Please proceed.'
'All right. Sharon Crayne, twenty-six years old. Never married. Little contact with her family, especially her father. There is strong evidence of guilt or shame in connection with her relationship with her mother. Strained. Competitive 'outsider' would probably best describe her relationship with her two sisters and brother. Second of four children. Eldest daughter. Evidence that she assumed many maternal roles around the house when her mother, an architect, buried herself in her projects. During the latter years of her family's stable period, her father was unemployed.'
Vail paused, focusing upon his guests as if just discovering their presence in the room. 'Does any of this strike a pattern?'
An unpleasant notion surfaced in Millicent's mind and then submerged again, like some particularly large and ugly serpent.
'All right, then.' Vail tapped a button on his desk, and a color image of Sharon Crayne's naked body appeared behind his back. Harmony was aghast. Vail barely seemed to notice that it was there. 'Full autopsy of Sharon Crayne noted a fully healed, professionally rendered surgical scar, approximately ten centimeters long, in the abdominal cavity. The scar would have been made when Sharon was approximately fourteen years old. According to a medical interview at the time, she claimed it was an appendectomy scar.'
'Ah… is that unreasonable?' Harmony choked.
'Dr. Eva Reeves, the pathologist, noted that the scar is atypical in size, shape, and location for appendectomy although the appendix went, too.'
Tony McWhirter wrenched his gaze away from the levitated dead woman. He looked pale. 'I don't get it.'
'I believe I'm prepared to offer an opinion.'
Harmony felt embarrassed and nauseated. Sharon's body rotated in front of them like a Thanksgiving turkey.
'Dr. Vail,' Tony asked, voice strained. 'Would you please provide some shielding for that hologram?'
Vail looked back over his shoulder. 'Is there something-oh. I see.' He tapped a few buttons, whispered a few words, and Sharon's body became an anatomy text, a technical drawing just as explicit, but quite impersonal.
And that might have been even worse.
'Now this was the clue. Dr. Reeves performed a standard tissue-typing for the transplant banks. Since Sharon had been dead for hours before discovery, it was unlikely that much could be recovered. The body changes rapidly at room temperature.'
McWhirter looked a little green.
'But when Dr. Reeves typed the placenta, here-' The illustration expanded. 'She found that Sharon's DNA fingerprints didn't match.'
Harmony leaned forward, and Millicent shook herhead. 'Oh, shit,' she whispered.
McWhirter asked, 'Mill? What?'
'Placental transplant?'
Vail looked at her the way a teacher might beam at a promising student. 'And how far can you take that?'
She paused, thinking.
'Here's a hint: in her fourteenth year, her mother and father were separated.'
'Fourteen. Twelve years since then.' Millicent said, and her face went into her hands.
For almost a minute there was no sound in the room. Then Millicent looked up. 'Ugly,' she said.
'Yes?' Vail said encouragingly.
'Catholic family. Sharon adopting the maternal role. Her parents, Catholic parents, divorcing at the same time that Sharon got that scar. The placental transplant.'
McWhirter was almost livid. 'For God's sake, will you stop talking in code?'
'Fetal transplantation,' Vail said, and for once his voice was gentle. 'Very much an accepted alternative to abortion-an expensive one, though.'
Harmony was fascinated but still confused. 'How exactly did you come to this conclusion?'
'When Dr. Reeves got odd results for the DNA scan, she went looking for clues and found them. A surgical scar, on the uterus near the cervix. You see, abortion is easy; the techniques are thousands of years old. The process of reducing the risk for the mother was gradual but sure but the possibility of keeping the fetus itself alive existed by the end of the last century.
'One answer was to transplant the fetus's entire support mechanism, placenta and all. Rather than remove the baby from the uterus, the entire uterus is transplanted. An extracorporeal oxygenation device is needed, but that's just engineering. A new uterus is sewn in and attached to the fallopian tubes.'
'Where was the operation performed?'
'Here's the clue: Nowhere.'
'I don't understand.'
'Sharon and her family lived in Utah. The operation was illegal there. Chances are that she went out of state and had it performed by the Embryadopt foundation. Sealed files.'
Millicent seemed to have gotten herself together. 'Another clue that Embryadopt was involved is the cost. Of removal, of the new uterus. They must have pre-sold the embryo. Healthy white fetuses are at a premium.'
'Their security is complete,' Vail said. 'We can't get to their files, and no private agency can.'
Harmony thought, Tony.
'No,' Vail said, as if reading his mind. 'McWhirter can't get at them. The files are physically isolated. No direct phone or computer lines into the banks.'
Millicent began talking, almost to herself. 'A Catholic family with a successful mother and an unemployed father.'
'A father who probably stayed around the house a lot,' Vail suggested.
'Sharon became pregnant, and gave her baby away. Something happened during the same period of time that was so traumatic that the
… mother?'
Vail nodded.
'— sued for divorce.''
'Sharon was raped by her father,' Vail said quietly. 'Probably repeatedly, over a period of years. When she became pregnant she gave the baby away.'
Millicent continued in a pained voice. 'So when Sharon Crayne was fourteen years old, she underwent a live fetal removal?'
'She fits many of the classic patterns. It would explain a lot. Her psychological tests from as far back as college imply a cyclical depression centering around March. Her parents were separated in April of '47. I'd bet that the surgical procedure was performed sometime in March of Sharon Crayne's fourteenth year. Her family was destroyed by the incident. Typical of incest victims, Sharon may well have blamed herself.'
'And this might give a blackmailer material?' Harmony asked. 'That she was an incest victim?'
For the first time Vail looked annoyed. 'I would have thought bribery, not blackmail. If no legitimate private- party query can break through Embryadopt's legal shield, and even computer theft would fail, someone who could deliver such data would have an irresistible lure. Sharon lost a family over this trauma and has never been able to sustain another relationship. Every year, on the anniversary of the operation, she plunged into depression, regretting her past and yearning to see that child. Someone with the right connections, and no scruples at all, might
