No Other Love Read online

  “You still haven’t explained how Oressians reproduce,” Herne noted. “Obviously, you do reproduce, since the system you describe has been in place for centuries. As a doctor, and as a man, I find the question intriguing.”

  “Olekan decreed that the population of Oressia should remain stable, at the level best suited to our resources,” Merin said, evading a direct answer. “And so it has been done, since that time.”

  “How?” Herne demanded. “I doubt that even your Olekan could abolish all diseases, or accidental death, or the ravages of old age. How, then, can a stable population be maintained? Answer me, Merin, and tell me the truth, because I have a terrible feeling that what we are discussing is against Jurisdiction law.”

  “Oressia became a member of the Jurisdiction on condition that our planetary isolation and our ancient laws be preserved,” she reminded him. “The Jurisdiction needs Oressian metals. Our conditions were accepted.”

  “And every Oressian who leaves the planet is sworn never to reveal anything about Oressian culture, and never to return there,” Herne prompted softly, trying to encourage what was obviously going to be a difficult admission for her to make.

  “It is a rule I never broke until I came to Dulan’s Planet,” Merin said. “Great Olekan and the Elders were right. It took only the sight of your naked body and one kiss to lead me into moral degradation. I fell further from discipline and honor each time you touched me. See me now, unclothed, hair unbound, my body repeatedly opened to yours, unable to deny you anything you want of me, even to speaking our deepest secrets. By loving you, I have betrayed everything I was ever taught.” She stopped on a sob.

  “You are a perfectly normal human female,” Herne said, “capable of great passion, able to conceive and bear a child. I ask you again, Merin: would you bear my child? Would you want to?” He saw in her face wonder, hope, joy – and horror. It was that last emotion, unconcealed and painful, that decided his next words. He had to know, so he made his voice hard. “No more delaying, no more evasions. Tell me now how Oressians reproduce. Do they use artificial insemination? Or have they discovered a means to induce parthenogenesis, like the Riothans do? Is that it? Do your women not need the male seed? Do they literally get themselves pregnant?”

  For a long time he thought she would not answer him. He watched her struggle with this last, deepest restriction, watched tears fill her eyes while she gathered her courage to defy the final Oressian law. And he felt pride in her and a love so wide and deep it was beyond measuring when she began to speak again. But only until he understood what she was saying. Then his heart went cold.

  “We are grown from tissue stored in the BabyCompLab,” she said. “By Great Olekan’s order, fifty males and fifty females were chosen to be the progenitors of all future Oressians. The choices were carefully made for diversity of physical characteristics, for strength, endurance, lack of inherited diseases, and for comeliness. Olekan saw no reason to create an ugly race.”

  “Create? BabyCompLab?” Herne was shaken to his core. What Merin was explaining was absolutely forbidden by Jurisdiction law. No wonder Oressians were so secretive. Though he tried, he could not keep the distaste out of his voice. “When you once told me you had no mother, you were speaking the truth. You are a clone.”

  She bowed her head under that condemnation and Herne thought his own heart would break with the pain of it. This woman he came near to adoring was the product of a practice so abhorrent to all the Races of the Jurisdiction that he could not yet comprehend the horror of her confession. But then she raised her head and looked him straight in the eye.

  “I am a member of the five hundred and sixty-fifth generation of my original parents,” she said with an almost defiant air that touched him through his revulsion and disgust, and told him that whatever else Olekan’s laws had achieved, they had not entirely eliminated familial pride.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” he commanded.

  “We are raised under laboratory conditions, in isolated cubicles, where the master computer teaches us what we need to know at each stage of our development. At the age of ten, we are given our first clothing, removed from First Cubicles, and turned over to second Cubicles and advanced education. At the age of twenty, those needed to replace dead Oressians are sent into society.”

  “What about the extra children?” Herne tried to keep his voice calm, tried to hide the repugnance and anger he felt at what Merin was telling him. “Olekan must have provided for extras to be produced in case they were needed.” It made him sick to talk about humans in that way, as if they were components in a factory, waiting to be used on an assembly line to manufacture a product.

  “Those who are not needed as replacements on Oressia, but who have displayed exceptional abilities, are permitted to leave, to live on other worlds. I have an unusually retentive mind for details. That is why I was sent to the Archives at Capital.”

  “So, variations appear as you are trained. Interesting.” Herne stopped, aghast at his own words. “What about those who are not needed on Oressia but do not rate placement elsewhere? What happens to them?”

  “They are exterminated.”

  “But they are sentient beings!” This was too much. Herne was furious. “Willful destruction of intelligent life forms is forbidden by all the worlds in the Jurisdiction, and by overriding Jurisdiction laws!”

  “There are those who believe that life forms, sentient or not, that are produced by methods other than the natural manner for their species, have no souls and therefore are not protected by those laws,” Merin said quietly. “Which is one of many reasons why Oressians are bound to secrecy when they leave their own world. It is for our protection, Herne.”

  More likely, it was for the protection of the Oressian authorities, who certainly knew how many laws they were breaking.

  Herne staggered to the bench beside the tub. There he sat down and put his head in his hands. He could not blame Merin for what she was. The way she had been born – or, rather, created in a laboratory – was not her fault. Nor could she be blamed for her acceptance of one way of life when she had never been given the opportunity to know another. None of this was her fault. None of it, he told himself again. She was a victim of the Oressian system.

  His reaction to what she had revealed was physical. His head ached from the awfulness of it. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to leave her and never see her again.

  He loved her. He had repeatedly made love to her. To a clone.

  But she was a normal human female in every respect. His diagnostic rod had told him so each time he had examined her. His body had told him the same thing whenever he held her in his arms, when he had made her his while they made love. She was human, real, a courageous companion in their strange predicament. He admired her intelligence and her learning. She was a valuable contributing member of Tarik’s colony.

  She was a clone.

  He loved her.

  “I’ll need some time to digest all of this,” he said, his face still in his hands. He heard a movement, then saw her feet in front of him, delicate bones covered by creamy skin, with opalescent nails. She knelt and he saw her hands, slender and beautiful. He felt like crying. She took his hands in hers, pulling them away from his face.

  “Please look at me,” she said.

  “How many times have I begged you to do the same thing?” he countered, unable to meet her eyes.

  “Herne, I know I have shocked you beyond your ability to accept what I am. I wish it had not been necessary, but I could not agree to marry you and then live a lie. I love you too much to lie to you about something so important. If there is anything I can do to make acceptance easier for you, please tell me.”

  “Easy?” He gave a bitter laugh. “Nothing in my life has been easy, but this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. I’m not angry with you; I want you to know that. But I do need to be left alone until I think through everything you have said.”

  “I understand. I know
my revelations have made it impossible for you to continue our intimate relationship.” Her voice was amazingly cool, perfectly calm, like the Merin he had first known. And every word she said tore at his heart. He wondered how she could speak without breaking into tears.

  “Thank you for freeing my emotions, Herne. I will cherish the memory of our lovemaking for the rest of my life, though I know those same memories must disgust you.

  Nevertheless, I hope we will still be able to work together to achieve our mutual goal of a safe return to our own time.”

  Mutual goal? Cherish the memory? Herne nodded, unable to speak for the emotion that was choking him. She left him, going into the bedchamber, where he heard her moving about. After a few minutes he heard the door open and close. He assumed she had gone out, perhaps to walk along the path by the salt marsh, to breathe in the salty air that reminded her of her homeworld – her home!

  What kind of home was it that could treat its children so impersonally, so brutally? Though his own childhood had been anything but happy, still Sibirnan parents did see their children into the teen years with some show of concern for their welfare. It hurt him to think of Merin as a small, delicate-boned girl with dark curls, not running free and playing as children ought to do, but confined in a miserable, isolated cubicle, being fed information and food at predetermined intervals, by a computer. No human contact, no loving mother’s arms no brothers or sisters or playmates. Nothing but a machine to tend to her needs. No machine could be programmed to care if a little girl cried.

  That thought broke him. The picture in his mind of a tiny Merin, alone and weeping with no one to comfort her, brought him to the first real tears he had shed in more than thirty years. He wept for what had been done to her, for her loveless childhood and her lonely life since leaving Oressia. And he wept for himself, because no matter how much he loved her, he was not sure he could ever accept what she was.

  Chapter 15

  While Merin and Herne were talking, night had faded into misty dawn. The dull red of the sun’s disk moved steadily higher until a bank of heavy clouds obscured its heat and much of its light. The scene across the salt marsh matched Merin’s mood as she watched the fog roll in from the ocean beyond the dunes.

  “For one who is not a telepath, there is little to see,” said a quiet, scratchy voice.

  “I find the fog comforting,” she said, not needing to look around to know who the speaker was. “On my homeworld it is often foggy and there are many marshes at the edge of the sea.”

  “From what I know of Oressia,” said Dulan, falling into step with her on the path, “there is little on that world to comfort its citizens.”

  “Little?” Merin gave a harsh laugh. “There’s no comfort at all, Dulan, nor on any other world, either. Not for an Oressian.”

  “It takes no telepathy to recognize a troubled heart,” Dulan said. “Would it help you to confide in me? I keep secrets well and you may find it easier to speak where there is no visible face to show emotion in response to your words.”

  “I have already said to Herne every word that I can bear to speak,” Merin replied. “He is struggling now with my terrible truth.”

  They walked a little farther along the path, not talking.

  “I wish,” Merin began, then stopped. They walked a few paces more. “If only –“ She stopped again, uncertain how to ask for what she wanted. Dulan paused, waiting. Merin went on a step or two, then turned, looking hard at the blue-robed figure.

  “Speak freely and without fear,” Dulan said.

  “You have heard Herne mention Osiyar, the telepath who lived – who will live – in our own time,” Merin said. “Osiyar found it necessary to enter my mind. Thus, he was the first non-Oressian to learn the truth about my origin. He knew everything about me and still accepted me. He was my first friend.”

  A profound silence lay between Merin and Dulan. The incoming fog bank had covered the marsh as far as the path, and pale grey scarves of mist drifted around them. Merin felt moisture on her face and brushed it away, unsure if it was fog or her own tears.

  “Do you want me also to enter your mind?” Dulan’s voice was so soft it might have been a verbal extension of the fog surrounding them.

  “Please.” Merin’s own voice, not much louder than Dulan’s, cracked on the single word. The rest of her voice came out in a whispered rush. “Herne knows now, so there’s no point in hiding it from you or anyone else. And, oh, how I need someone to understand the truth, yet not turn from me in disgust as Herne has done. I thought if Osiyar could manage to be so tolerant, perhaps you could, too.”

  “Give me your hands,” said Dulan.

  “Don’t you have to look into my eyes?” For all she had asked for this, Merin was as frightened as she had been when Osiyar had touched her mind.

  “Not all telepaths must do so,” said Dulan. “I require only your consent. I will hold your hands to steady you should you grow faint, and because I sense a debilitating change in you. Physical contact will make recognition of any ailment easier.”

  Perhaps it was telepathy already working in her mind, but at Dulan’s softly spoken words Merin became absolutely calm and fearless, certain that whatever Dulan might learn of her, she would not be left without friendship. She put out both her hands and felt those pale, slender fingers fold around them.

  She experienced once again the unique prickling in her mind, but far more gentle, far more subtle than Osiyar’s entrance. Because she was unafraid this time she was fully aware of the instant when Dulan’s thoughts merged completely with her own. Trusting Dulan without reservation, she willingly allowed the blurring of her own self, until she knew Dulan as Dulan knew her. She sensed a power far beyond her comprehension, a power disciplined and channeled for the benefit of others, as great power ought always to be used. She touched memories of unbearable physical pain and emotional loss, followed by recollections of a broken life courageously rebuilt into dignity and usefulness. For one second of heart-stopping joy she saw what Dulan really was, and her heart and mind both overflowed with gratitude for the honor that had been granted to her with that revelation. Then, slowly and delicately, the connection between them was broken.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, knowing full well that words were unnecessary, and in her thoughts Dulan smiled at her.

  “There was a time in the history of mankind,” said Dulan, still holding her hands, “when men believed the females of their species had no souls, and therefore women were not people as men were. They know better now, but the learning was not an easy process. Telepaths have more recently been called soulless monsters and persecuted because of their abilities. You tell me that in your time the laws against telepathy have been repealed. Like women in ancient times, like telepaths in my own lifetime, clones are called by many pejorative terms; soulless, abominations, monstrosities, hideous aberrations. But you have a mind, a heart, and a spirit. You have a well-trained intelligence that you have placed at the service of others. I observed you closely in the Gathering Hall last night and saw how you respect other life forms. You have courage, you love, you fear, you hope. If all of those qualities do not make you a true human, then what will?”

  “A natural birth,” said Merin, knowing it was the one thing she could never claim.

  “No. Humanity lies here.” Dulan’s hand touched Merin’s bosom, then moved on to rest upon her bowed head. “And here.”

  “Herne does not think so.”

  “Ah, Herne.” Dulan sighed. “Sibirnans have their own problems in accepting unsimilar others, though Herne is more advanced than most. He will need time.”

  “Time.” Merin shook her head.

  “Time is not an enemy,” said Dulan, “but a healer, as I have learned.”

  They began walking back along the path, heading toward Dulan’s house.

  “My friend,” said Dulan, the simple words touching Merin deeply, “I ought to meet with Jidak and Imra. We have a large computer system installed underground
, and they are searching through the files there for any data that might be of help to you. I want to consult with them on a puzzle that has only now become clear to me, and I believe you would benefit from a little time spent alone while you consider what we have done here. Can you find your way to my house through the fog?”

  “Of course.” Merin lifted her head, smiling, watching as Dulan vanished into the mist.

  She found Herne lying naked on the bed, with his eyes closed. When she touched his cheek he did not respond. She decided he was either asleep, or he did not want to speak to her.

  “Oh, Herne,” she whispered, looking down at his pale, harsh features, “you said you would always love me no matter what, and I believed you. I broke every law of Oressia for your sake. Because of you I learned to trust and, finally, to love. I could accept anything you might tell me about yourself. I wouldn’t care if you were a clone, or an android, or a Jugarian crab in disguise, or even a Styxian! If I could go on loving you no matter what your outward form or origin, why can’t you love me? If Osiyar and Dulan can know me and still be my friends, why can’t you?”

  There was no answer. Herne slept on. Watching him, Merin became aware of her own fatigue. Between lovemaking and her confession to Herne, she had not slept at all the previous night. She was emotionally drained and physically exhausted. Without removing her treksuit or coif, she lay down on the opposite side of the bed from Herne. When she found her thoughts running over and over everything she had said to him, she made herself think instead about the communion with Dulan and what she had learned when their thoughts joined. If that kind and wise telepath could rebuild a useful life after dreadful torture and forcible separation from home and family, after the ruin of health and reputation, then Merin of Oressia ought to find in Dulan’s example the inspiration to go on with her own life. With thoughts of Dulan on her mind, and the fresh memory of friendship freely offered, she fell asleep.