Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [91]
with black eyes and sulky lips
that taste of hidden memories.
Give me a dark woman
with straight shoulders and swinging hips
who vanishes unsmiling in the darkness
when the lights are out.
Poem for a Barbarian Lady, feLi-!xi-kat-xi
Dep is staring into a reflective hologram. It is positioned over and behind the forcefield funnel that passes for a sink in her bathroom. She is using it to help her concentrate inwards, to exercise mental control over her body. She should be able to do without the mirror; body-management was one of the first things she learnt at school along with finger painting and interpersonal ethics, but she is nervous. Outside Chris is waiting in her sleep field, a pale shape floating amongst the intricate clockwork angles of her flying machines.
She manages the thought sequence easily enough. The thought sequence becomes a message encoded as a series of pulses down the major nerve cluster that links her brain with the oversized gland that sits under her brain stem. There the message is translated into a series of complex organic molecules that are released into her bloodstream.
Dep has three ovaries, two more than her mother and one less than her father. The central ovary responds first to the chemical messengers immediately releasing a specific fertility suppressant to prevent the other two from following suit. The ovary then contracts slightly and expels an egg into the pre-fallopian duct where Dep's own autonomic immune system checks it for defects. There is no degradation of the egg, no genetic damage or rogue enzymes. The immune system signals its approval with an enzyme of its own causing the very small muscles surrounding the pre-fallopian duct to ripple in sequence and propel the egg into the fallopian tube proper. With the egg goes a wash of chemical messengers and enzymes generated by the ovary. Some of these messengers rush on ahead of the egg to trigger changes in the womb, while others cling to the egg like scaffolding around a ship, transmitting the precise codes that Dep formulated in her mind only minutes earlier.
The egg hurtles down the fallopian tube, ripening at a rate that would have a human gynaecologist reaching for her medical database. The scaffolding enzymes, their job done, detach and whirl away. By the time it reaches the womb the egg is primed, programmed and fertile.
Dep feels a moment of slight discomfort in her lower abdomen as, for the first time in her life, the neck of her womb unseals itself and flowers open.
It is much later and they hang together in the bedfield. Chris has fallen asleep, an occurrence that Dep has now accepted as an apparent design fault in barbarian males. Her hair is waving gently in the still air of her bedroom.
Deep inside her a cloud of Chris's microgametes are swimming through the opening of her cervix, tails thrashing like there's no tomorrow, which of course for most of them there isn't. A larger cloud of specialized B-cells converges with the spermatozoids, picking off ones that fail to meet the criteria specified by Dep's mental impulse two hours ago. As the first microgametes are absorbed the species-specific structure of their DNA triggers off another enzyme release which in turn trips the appropriate cluster of plasma cells embedded in the endometrium lining of the uterus. These plasma cells begin to produce a fast-acting metamorphic catalysing enzyme that over the next two hours will change the very nature of the endometrium cells and provide a protective barrier against Dep's ferocious auto-immune system.
Later.
Artificial selection has pared down the number of the microgametes to a mere couple of hundred. The surviving spermatozoids have almost expended their glycogen reserves and are making the final dash for the egg that lies nestling in the newly mutated endometrium lining. The egg absorbs every single one of them and starts the process of sifting through their precious bundles of DNA. Chris's grandfather's colour blindness is discarded, a faulty sequence that predisposes the male line of Cwejs