Only Begotten Daughter Read Online Free

glass. A large wet slab of protoplasm—it looked like a flounder wearing a silk scarf—filled the jar. Clear plastic tubes flowed into the soft flesh from all directions. “A what?”
    “Artificial uterus,” Frostig explained, “prototype stage. We weren’t planning to gestate any human embryos for at least five years. It’s been strictly a mouse and frog operation around here. But when Karnstein spotted your blastocyte, we said to ourselves, all right …” The doctor squinted and grimaced, as if examining an ominous biopsy drawn from his own body. “Besides, we thought maybe you expected us to let it die, so you could go running to the newspapers—am I right?—telling ’em how we like to butcher embryos.” He jabbed his index finger contemptuously toward the front lawn. “You one of those Revelationists, Mr. Katz?”
    “No. Jewish.” Murray cocked an ear to the protesters’ chants, a sound like enraged surf. “And I’ve never run to a newspaper in my life.”
    “Damn lunatics—they should go back to the Middle Ages where they belong.”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute, are you saying there’s a baby growing in that thing?”
    Frostig nodded. “Inside that uterine tissue.”
    Murray pressed closer. The glass widened his face, making his already considerable jaw look like a sugar bowl.
    “No, don’t go looking,” said the doctor. “We’re talking about a cell cluster no bigger than a pinhead.”
    “ My cell cluster?”
    “Yours and somebody else’s. You didn’t by any chance introduce an ovum into your sample?”
    “How could I do that? I’m no biologist. I don’t even know very many women.”
    “A dead end. We figured as much.” Frostig opened the top drawer of his filing cabinet, grabbing a stack of printed forms, carbon paper sandwiched between them like slices of black cheese. “In any event, we need your signature on this embryo release. We weren’t born yesterday—we know people form weird attachments in this world. Last weekend I spent about twenty hours convincing a surrogate mother to hand a newborn over to its parents.”
    A baby, thought Murray as he took the embryo release. Someone had given him a baby. He’d feared it was cancer, and instead it was a baby. “If I sign, does that mean I—?”
    “Forfeit all claims to the cluster. Not that you have any. Far as the law’s concerned, it’s just another sperm donation.” Frostig pulled a fountain pen from his coat as if unsheathing a dagger. “But that egg’s a real wild card—inverse parthenogenesis, we’re calling it at the moment. On the whole it never happens. So for the protection of all concerned …”
    “Inverse partheno … what?” An unprecedented situation, Murray thought, and what accompanied it seemed equally unprecedented, a strange amalgam of confusion, fear, and the treacly warmth he reflexively felt around puppies.
    “In conventional parthenogenesis, an ovum undergoes meiosis without fertilization. Aberrant, but well documented. Here we’re talking sperm development without an ovum.” Frostig ran his fingers along the tube connecting blood to womb, checking for kinks. “Frankly, it’s got us spooked.”
    “Isn’t there some scientific explanation?”
    “We’re certainly looking for one.”
    Murray examined the embryo release, dense with meaningless print. Did he in fact want a baby? Wouldn’t a baby pull his books off the shelves? Where did you get their clothes?
    He signed. Georgina Sparks’s lover had called it right. Babies were grotesque.
    “What will happen to the cell cluster?”
    “We usually carry frogs to the second trimester,” said Frostig, snatching up the embryo release and depositing it on his desk, “a bit longer with the mice. The really key data doesn’t come till we sacrifice them.”
    “Sacrifice them?”
    “Ectogenesis machines are still very crude. Next year we might, just might, bring a cat to term.” Frostig guided Murray toward the door, pausing to