“Thanks, but I don’t need parents at this late date.”
The older couple laughed, but the woman said, “She speaks very strangely, Challen.”
“It is a long story, mother.”
“Mother?” Tedra cut in, startled. “She’s yourmother?An actual mother?” And then to Haleste: “Oh, you poor woman.”
“Challen?” Haleste, asked, contused.
“Alongstory, mother,” Challen repeated, thought about putting his hand over Tedra’s mouth again, but tried jarring her memory first. “Parents? Relatives? You remember when you first met my uncle and we spoke of this?”
“I’ve made the connection, babe. I just forgot for a while that that kind of stuff goes on down here.”
“Stuff?”
“Women having babies. It’s—”
“What you will do as the mother of my children,” Challen finished for her.
“The wha—Oh, no.” She shook her head, wide-eyed. “Women don’t do that where I come from.”
Three pairs of eyes looked at her as if she’d gone off the deep end. “Then who does?” Challen filially got out. “Your men?”
“Real cute,” Tedra snorted. “No one does, of course.”
“Then how can your race survive?”
She finally realized where they were coming from. “Don’t get me wrong. We have children, we just don’t have to bear them.”
“Challen,wheredoes this woman come from that this can be so?” his father wanted to know.
But Haleste replied, taking his arm and leading him toward the door. “It indeed must be a long story, Chadar, as he has said, and we will hear it soon enough. Best we leave them alone now to decide the matter of our grandchildren.”
Challen hardly noticed their going. He had about lost his patience, but not the topic under discussion. “Woman, you contradict yourself. You cannot have children without bearing them.”
“We can,” Tedra said smugly now that they were alone. “An adult female can produce two or even a dozen babies a year, depending on how many are needed—Population Control is strictly monitored. All she has to do is donate the cells when she’s asked and then has nothing more to do with it.”
“Haveyoudone this?”
“No. Only cells from the most intelligent females are requested. I don’t fall into that category.”
“I will not believe you lack intelligence.”
“Thanks, but when I said most intelligent, I was talking certified geniuses. It doesn’t guarantee a child genius. It just betters the odds.”
“But how—who, then, bears the child?”
“Not who, what. If we can make a perfect simulation of a man or woman in android form, don’t you think we can simulate a perfect womb? Babies are the jurisdiction of Population Control. They go through gestation in an artificial womb we still call a tube, where their growth and development are under constant surveillance. Their education is begun even before they are ‘born’ from this, and continues in the Child Centers until they are old enough to have their interests and talents established and matched, between the ages of three and five. This is when they are sent to the appropriate schools for training in their life-careers.”
“This is how you were raised, in these centers and schools?”
“Certainly. It’s how every Kystrani is raised.”
“It is not howourchildren will be raised.”
She knew that this-is-the-end-of-the-discussion look. “All right, if it’s so important to you, when we get to Kystran we can donate our gene cells together. It’s never been done before, but I’m sure something can be worked out so the child can be turned over to you when it’s ready.”
“Youwould not want it?”
