Free Desolation Road by Ian McDonald Page B

Babooshka came to Heart of Lothian.
    "Madam, I have seen your wonders and your marvels, and yes, they are indeed wonderful and marvellous, the things that can be done these days, but I am wondering, madam, if it is possible for all this science and technology to give me what I want most in all the world, and that is a child."
    Heart of Lothian, great earth-mother of a woman, studied the Babooshka, small, tough as a desert sparrow.
    "Lady, there is no way you can bear a child. No way at all. But that doesn't mean you can't have one. It would have to be gestated out of the body, and I could do that by adapting one of my stock placentories, a bovine one, probably; cows used to commonly be used for surrogating human babies, did you know that? I could fertilize the egg in vitro , elementary stuff, you could even do it yourself; I should be able to find an egg in you somewhere; failing that, I could splice up some cell samples ... your husband, is he still potent?" "Pardon?"
    "Could I get a sperm sample off him, lady?"
    "That is for him to say. But tell me, it is possible to give me a child?"
    "Entirely so. Genetically, it will be yours, even though it will be impossible for you to bear it within you. If you want to go ahead with it, come and see me tomorrow, at nineteen, with your husband."
     
    "Madam, you are a treasure."
    "Just doing my job."
    The Babooshka crept away into the night and the Gallacelli brothers crept in out of the night. No one saw either the goings or the comings.
    Likewise, no one saw the Babooshka three days later carrying home the placentory in a Belden jar.
    "Husband Haran, we have our child!" she sighed, and swept off the discreet covering cloth to reveal the pulpy red pulsing thing in its glass jar.
    "That, that, that ... abortion, is our child?" roared Haran Mandella, reaching for a stout stick to smash the unclean thing. The Babooshka interposed herself between the outraged husband and the wet, sucking artificial womb.
    "Haran Mandella, husband, that is my child, more dear to me than anything in this world, and if you so much as lay one finger upon this jar without my consent, I will walk away and never come back."
    Grandfather Haran's resolve wavered. The stick quivered in his hand. The Babooshka stood before him, small and defiant as a blackbird. She sang him down.
    "She will be beautiful, our child, she will dance, she will sing, she will make the world bright with her beauty, our child; the child of Haran and Anastasia Tyurischeva Mandella." Grandfather Haran put the stick back in its stand and went to bed. In the window, where the dawning light could nourish it, the placentory belched and pulsed.
    But the Babooshka's midnight skulkings had not gone entirely unnoticed. Since they had heard that the Stalins were taking delivery of an order of huge and disgusting slugs from Heart of Lothian, the Tenebraes had been on constant guard against slug forays by their enemies. On the night the Babooshka took possession of the blastocyte, Genevieve had been on slug watch. She had seen the old woman and the bundle in her arms and she had known with a sure and certain insight the exact nature of the Babooshka's business with Heart of Lothian. And her own heart had crazed and cracked in envy.
    Genevieve Tenebrae did not trust her husband. She did not trust him because he refused to give her a child, the child which would have bound her family into a tight Gordian knot of cosiness, the child which would have made her the equal of those damned snobbish Stalins, and what had they to be so damn proud of anyway when their only son was a fat tub of lard, precocious, bad-tempered and spoiled to the point of ruination. A child would give Genevieve Tenebrae everything she wanted, but a child Gaston Tenebrae would never give her.
     
    "A child, a child, all I want is a child, why will you not give me one?" she would nag every day and every day Gaston Tenebrae would proffer some flimsy excuse, some thin tissue of