There, she’d said it, in a rush but without a quaver. She leaned back on the pillows, abruptly exhausted. “You’ve heard this?” she whispered.
“Yes, I was in communication the whole while I drove here.” Edmond paused. “They think medications can be developed to compensate and make birth possible.”
“I know,” she sighed. “I also know it’d be unpleasant and expensive and condemn the next generation to the same. No.”
She saw and felt how he tautened. “Dagny,” he said, word by word, “we can move to Earth … before we are too old.”
“You were prepared to do that for Juliana right away, if need be,” she answered low.
“I was. For children born—I do want children for us.
She shook her head. Calm welled up in her, and with it a new, quiet strength. “Juliana was. She had happened, and we would not kill her nor forsake her. But I saw—You were so kind, so gentle in your gruff way. You never hinted what it would mean to you, tossing out this top-level scientific career of yours and returning to where everything’s cut and dried, where you could hope for no more than to drone through a professorship in a mediocre academic department. But I knew, ‘Mond. I knew how you’d be taking long walks by yourself so you could shout your blasphemies, and you’d drink hard and your wholesome cynicism would sour into alienation—and you’d stand by me, because you said you would, and you’d never blame the child. ‘Mond, I wished I could believe in God, so I could pray we wouldn’t have to return. Well, we don’t.”
“Bienaimge,” he said shakenly.
The strength rose higher. She sat straight. “It does not follow that we have to be sterile.” No, “barren” was the word she wanted, dead end, double death, and to hell with the population-reduction fanatics.
His bowed head lifted. “Qu’est-ce—what do you mean?”
“Obvious,” she said. “Genetics. A race for which the Moon is the normal environment. I began investigating this damn near as soon as I knew I was pregnant, because—It can be done, ‘Mond. The knowledge is there, in genome maps, molecular biology, histology, plain old-fashioned anatomy and physiology. The computers have shown what changes in the DNA are necessary, practically atom by atom. How to do it, that’s no different in principle from what’s standard in biotech when they want any special kind of new organism. The whole thing’s been roughed out, as a scientific exercise and a contingency measure. The details can be refined in a year or two, once the project is go.”
“And you, you would—”
“Why not? Why the hell not? Take a fertilized ovum, treat it, implant it.” Impulse swept her along. “Why, I’ll bet we can do the fertilizing in the usual way.”
“No! The risk to you. And … the cost, we could not afford this.”
“Nonsense. No more risky than an outing topside. I’ve studied the matter, I tell you. A, a Lunarian fetus would interact differently. I’d need chemical support, true, but far less than for our kind of child, nothing that’d handicap me in any way. As for cost, why, as long as the Guthries are in charge, Fireball will look beyond the annual profit sheet. In fact, it underwrote the research to date. It’ll cheerfully pungle up to produce a next generation that won’t need help.”
“You are too crazy sure,” he growled.
“Oh, maybe it won’t work out every time. That’ll hurt, but I’m willing to take the chance if you are, because we’ll be on the way to our kids, our Lunarian children, ‘Mond. Our blood living here forever.”
Hers drummed in her veins. She gripped both his hands. For a moment more he hung back. “Dagny, it “ has powerful opposition, experimenting with humans.
Me, I feel trouble in my conscience. What of the people and politicians on Earth?”
“If anybody can get approval pushed through, the Guthries can. Darling, say yes, do say yes, and I’ll send them a private-coded message tomorrow.”
Anson Guthrie’s blood alive on the Moon.
That he was her grandfather was the last real secret she kept from Edmond. She hoped that now he would let her share it.