“Hardly fair,” she’d muttered, wanting to weep. “Sexist!”
He’d smiled charmingly, the way he did. Fastigats were almost always charming. “Not my fault, Lutha. I didn’t design it. It’s sex-linked, that’s all.”
“You’d think biologists—”
He hadn’t let her finish. “Well, of course our women say attempting to make female Fastigats is meaningless, because any normal woman is a sensitivity match for a male empath, any day.”
He’d made her laugh, hiding his own disappointment. Perhaps even then he’d known—or at least suspected—this disappointment wasn’t to be the only one.
Time came soon enough, of course, when suspicion was fulfilled and Leelson went away. Unforgivably away. Without announcement or preamble. One morning she had wakened to find him gone. He’d left a note, of course, if one could call five words a note. Not much after their years together.
“You must feel abandoned. Betrayed!” This from Lutha’s older sister, Yma, sector-famed, thespian absolute.
The accuracy of this made Lutha blaze hotly as she denied it. “I do not! Leelson’s and my relationship lasted a long time. Neither of us is from a contractual culture, so why would I feel betrayed!” She said it as though she meant it. In fact, she did feel betrayed and abandoned, not that she could possibly admit it to Yma. How could he? She couldn’t have left Leelson! How could he have left her?
Yma went on. “Perhaps not a contract, but still …”
“But still nothing, Yma. I had a child because I wanted a child.” That was partly true. She kept her lip from trembling with considerable effort. After the initial shock, she had wanted a child.
“Well, of course you did, darling, but it was a genetic risk. With him.”
“Fastigat men father normal children on non-Fastigat women all the time!”
Yma couldn’t leave it at that. “Well, there are no aberrations in your family line.”
“You don’t know that!” Lutha cried.
“Oh, yes I do and so do you. Even though we’ve never met them, we know all about Papa’s side of the family. They’re all totally ordinary, ordinary, ordinary!” To Yma, nothing could be worse.
Lutha did indeed know a great deal about Papa’s family, and his many siblings and half siblings out on the frontier. Frontier worlds began with a colony ship, a few hundred crew members, and a hundred thousand human embryos. Thirteen or fourteen years later the original embryos were boys and girls who began procreating on their own, using the crèche equipment on the ship. A few decades, the colony might number in the millions! Twenty children per woman was not uncommon, virtually all of them crèche-born. In a homo-normed world, there were few impediments. No dangerous diseases, little danger from weather, no danger from plants or animals—in fact few plants and no animals at all.
“Mama Jibia does go on and on about the kinfolk,” Lutha admitted.
“She’s never said anything indicating they’re anything but boring. And Mama’s family, we know all about, both sides, four generations back. Her mother is Lucca Fineapple, and we’ve met her. Remember?”
“The religious grandma,” said Lutha with vague discomfort at the memory. “Who visited us on her way through the sector.”
“Exactly. You do remember! We thought her very strange! Well, women who depilate and tattoo their entire bodies are strange. But that’s simply attitudinal; biologically she’s quite all right. And Mama Jibia is always telling stories about Lucca’s mother—Nitha Bonetree, remember, the one who first ran away to the frontier?”
“Which is where Lucca was born, and Mama too. I guess I remember some of that. Mama Jibia always said we’d inherited our talents from Nitha’s line.”
“It isn’t the detail that matters in any case! The only thing that matters is there’s no problem in your family on either side back four generations. And Leelson should not have left you to provide the entire care for the boy, as though it were somehow your fault!”
Lutha felt herself turning red, felt the tears surging, heard the anger in her words. “I had always intended to be responsible for my child. It was my choice.”
Was it? Was it indeed? Then why couldn’t she remember making it! She asked me this and I laughed. I couldn’t remember either. It had just happened. One couldn’t really question it. Lutha said even Yma knew she’d gone too far. Wisely she let the matter drop.
Lutha never mentioned to Yma the credit drafts regularly deposited to her account from Fastiga. Fastigats did not father by chance. As a society, they fathered no unknown or unacknowledged children, and all children fathered by Fastigats received support from Fastiga. It was a matter of honor, one of the primary differences, so said Fastigats, between Fastigats and lesser men.
Fastigats didn’t even sign certificates of intent. Their honor was so untarnished they were exempt from the requirement imposed on all other citizens of Central, to have five responsible, self-supporting coparents on record by the fourth month of pregnancy.
Lutha and Yma and Mama Jibia and two male cousins had signed for Leely. No one cared who had children, or how many, but one of the basic rights of Alliance citizens was not to be responsible for other people’s. The penalties for dereliction of responsibility were severe, and the credit drafts from Fastiga were infuriatingly beyond the call of duty. Even more infuriating were the Fastigat uncles and male cousins who visited at intervals, observed Leely’s growth and development, then went away again. Meantime, Leely grew bigger and stronger and older and Lutha became more tired and desperate.
“You ought to consider the alternatives,” Yma said, every time they met. “Really, Lutha. You ought to.…”
The Fastigat uncles and cousins also urged her to consider alternatives. Santeresa’s World, they’d suggested, where the whole planet made its living caring for the sick, the injured, the disabled. It was expensive, but Fastiga would pay for it.
