Time Enough for Love (32 page)

For a selected gene site and an assumption of 50-50 in the Mendelian distribution of 25-50-25, this pre-experiment testing would chop off the 25 percent chance of reinforcement of a bad recessive and leave a distribution of one-third bad, two-thirds good, at the parent generation—possible parents of possible Joes and Llitas, that is.

Now I start putting together mirror twins in my
persona
as a priest-experimenter. What happens? If we consider the minimum number of gametes needed to represent this one-third and two-thirds distribution, we get eighteen possible “Joes,” eighteen possible “Llitas”—but in both male and female two of them show up as “bad”—the bad recessive has reinforced and the zygote is defective; the experimenter eliminates them…or he may not need to; the reinforcement may be lethal.

We wind up at this point with an 8 & 1/3 percent improvement, or a total improvement of 25 percent in favorable chances for Llita’s baby. I felt better. If you add the fact that I am the sort of a midwife who is too busy helping the mother to stop to spank a monster, the favorable chances went way up.

But all that this shows is that bad genes tend to be eliminated at each generation—with the tendency greatest with the worst genes and reaching 100 percent whenever reinforcement produces a lethal-in-womb—while favorable genes are conserved. But we knew that—and it applies also to normal outbreeding and even more strongly to inbreeding, although the latter is not well thought of for humans as it hikes up the chances of a defective by precisely the same amount that it weeds—that being the hazard that I was afraid of for Llita. Everybody wants the human gene pool cleaned up, but nobody wants its tragic aspects to take place in his own family. Minerva, I was beginning to think of these kids as “my family.”

I still did not know anything about “mirror twins.”

I decided to investigate a more probable incidence of bad recessives at a given site. Fifty-fifty is far too high for a really bad gene; the weeding is drastic, and the incidence drops to a lower percentage each generation, until the incidence of a particular bad gene is so low that reinforcement at fertilization is a rare event, as reinforcement is the square of the incidence; e.g., if one-in-a-hundred haploids carry this bad gene, then it will be reinforced one-in-ten-thousand fertilizations. I speak of the total gene pool, or in this case a minimum of two hundred adult zygotes, female and male; random breeding in such a pool will bring together that bad reinforcement only by that long chance—a chance happy or unhappy depending on whether you look at it impersonally in terms of cleaning the gene pool or personally in terms of individual human tragedy.

I looked at it very personally; I wanted Llita to have a healthy baby.

Minerva. I’m sure you recognized that 25-50-25 distribution as representing the most drastic case of inbreeding, one which can happen only half the time with line breeding, only a quarter of the time with full siblings, in both cases through chromosome reduction at meiosis. A stockbreeder uses this drastic measure regularly—and culls the defectives and winds up with a healthy stabilized line. I have a nasty suspicion that such culling after inbreeding was sometimes used among royalty back on old Earth—but certainly such culling was not used often enough or drastically enough. Royalism might work quite well if kings and queens were treated like race-horses—but regrettably they never were. Instead, they were propped up like welfare clients, and princelings who should have been culled were encouraged to breed like rabbits—bleeders, feebleminded, you name it. When I was a kid, “royalty” was a bad joke based on the worst possible breeding methods.

Captain Sheffield investigated next a lower incidence of a bad gene: Assume a lethal gene in the gene pool from which Joe and Llita’s parents were derived. Being lethal, it could exist in an adult zygote only if it was masked in gene-pair by its benign twin. Assume a 5 percent masked incidence in zygotes—still too high to be realistic for a lethal gene—but check it anyhow. What trend would show?

Parent zygote generation: 100 females, 100 males, each a possible parent for Llita and for Joe—and 5 of the females and 5 of the males carry the lethal gene, masked.

Parent haploid stage: 200 ova, 5 of which carry the lethal gene; 200 spermatozoa, 5 of which carry the lethal gene.

Son-and-daughter zygote generation (possible “Joes” and possible “Llitas”): 25 dead through reinforcement of lethal gene; 1,950 carrying the lethal gene masked; 38,025 “clean” at that site.

Sheffield noted that a hypothetical hermaphrodite had crept in through not doubling his sample size in order to avoid anomaly through odd numbers. Oh, the hell with!—it did not change the statistical outcome. No,
do
it!—start with a sample of 200 males and 200 females with the same lethal-gene incidence for that site. This gave him:

—which gave in the next zygote generation (possible “Joes” and “Llitas”): 100 dead, 7,800 carriers, 152,100 “clean”—which changed no percentages but got rid of that imaginary hermaphrodite. Sheffield considered briefly the love life of an hermaphrodite, then got back to work. The numbers became very cumbersome, jumping to the billions in the next zygote generation (i.e., Little Nameless, now just started in Llita’s belly)—15,210,000 culled by reinforcement, 1,216.800,000 carriers, 24,336,000,000 “clean”—and again he wished for a clinic computer and tediously converted the unhandy numbers into percentages: 0.059509 percent, 4.759 percent, 95.18 percent plus.

This showed a decided improvement: approximately 1 defect out of 1,680 (instead of 1 out of 1,600), the percentage of carriers decreased to below 5 percent and the number of “clean” increased to above 95 percent in one generation.

Sheffield worked several such problems to confirm what he had seen by inspection: A child from complementary diploids (“mirror twins”) had at least as much chance of being healthy as did the offspring of unrelated strangers—plus the happy fact that such a baby’s chances were improved by culling at one or more stages by the priest-scientist who had initiated the experiment—an almost certain assumption and one that made Joe the best possible mate for his “sister” rather than the worst.

Llita could have her baby.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Valhalla to Landfall

—the best I could for them, Minerva. Every so often some idiot tries to abolish marriage. Such attempts work as well as repealing the law of gravity, making pi equal to three point zero, or moving mountains by prayer. Marriage is not something thought up by priests and inflicted on mankind; marriage is as much a part of mankind’s evolutionary equipment as his eyes, and as useful to the race as eyes are to an individual.

Surely, marriage is an economic contract to provide for children and to take care of mothers while they bear kids and bring them up—but it is much more than that. It is the means this animal, Homo sap., has evolved—quite unconsciously—for performing this indispensable function
and be happy while doing so.

Why do bees split up into queens, drones, and workers, then live as one big family? Because, for them, it
works.
How is it that fish do okay with hardly a nodding acquaintance between mama fish and papa fish? Because the blind forces of evolution made that way work for
them
. Why is it that “marriage”—by whatever name—is a universal institution among human beings everywhere? Don’t ask a theologian, don’t ask a lawyer; this institution existed long before it was codified by church or state. It
works
, that’s all; for all its faults it works far better by the only universal test—survival—than any of the endless inventions that shallow-pates over the millennia have tried to substitute for it.

I am not speaking monogamy; I mean
all
forms of marriage—monogamy, polyandry, polygyny, plural and extended marriages with various frills. “Marriage” has endless customs, rules, arrangements. But it is “marriage” if-and-only-if the arrangement both provides for children and compensates the adults. For human beings, the only acceptable compensation for the drawbacks of marriage lies in what men and women can give each other.

I don’t mean “Eros,” Minerva. Sex baits the trap, but sex is not marriage, nor is it reason enough to stay married. Why buy a cow when milk is cheap?

Companionship, partnership, mutual reassurance, someone to laugh with and grieve with, loyalty that accepts foibles, someone to touch, someone to hold your hand—these things are “marriage,” and sex is but the King on the cake. Oh, that icing can be wonderfully tasty—but it is
not
the cake. A marriage can lose that tasty “icing”—say, through accident—and still go on and on and on, giving deep happiness to those who share it.

When I was a rutty and ignorant youngster, this used to puzzle me—

(Omitted)

—as solemnly ceremonious as I could swing. Man lives by symbols; I wanted them to remember this occasion. I had Llita dress in her notion of fanciest best. She looked like a bloomin’ Christmas tree, but I told her she looked beautiful—which she did; brides can’t help it. Joe I dressed in some of my clothes and gave them to him. Me I dressed in a preposterous ship’s-captain uniform, one I had for use on planets where such nonsense is customary—four wide gold stripes on my cuffs, chest spangled with decorations bought in hockshops, a cocked hat Admiral Lord Nelson would have envied, and the rest as fancy as any grand master of a lodge.

I preached ‘em a sermon loaded with solemn amphigory most of it lifted from the only church they knew, the established religion of Blessed—easy for me, having been a priest there myself—but I added all sorts of things, telling her what she owed him, telling him what he owed her, telling them both what they owed the child in her belly and the other children they would have—and tacked on, for both but primarily for her, a warning that marriage was not easy, not to be entered into lightly, because there would be troubles they must face together, grave troubles that would require the courage of the Cowardly Lion, the wisdom of the Scarecrow, the loving heart of the Tin Woodsman, and the indomitable gallantry of Dorothy.

That got her to weeping, so Joe started to drip tears—which was just what I wanted, so I had ‘em kneel and prayed over them.

Minerva, I make no apology for hypocrisy. I didn’t care whether some hypothetical God heard me or not; I wanted Llita and Joe to hear it—first in that jargon of Blessed, then in English and Galacta, then topped it off by intoning as many lines of the Aeneid as I could remember. When I got stuck I closed with a schoolboy song:

—and ended with a resounding “So mote it be!” Had ‘em stand, take each other’s hands, and declared that, by the supreme authority vested in me as master of a vessel in space, they were now and forever husband and wife—kiss her, Joe.

All to a muted background of Beethoven’s Ninth—

That doggerel got in by accident when I had run out of “punishment lines” of Virgil and needed a few more impressive sounds. But when I thought about it later, I saw that it translated as appropriately for their honeymoon as for a school holiday. All was indeed well, now that I knew that this joining of siblings could take place
sine poena
—without fear of genetic punishment. And
ludendi
translates as “amorous play” or “Eros” as readily as “gambling” or “children’s play” or any other frolic. And I had declared a four-day ship’s holiday, no work for them, no study hours—
libros deponendi
—starting at once. Sheer accident, Minerva. It was simply a bit of Latin verse that came into my head—and Latin is majestic, especially when you don’t understand it.

We had a fancy supper, cooked by me, that lasted about ten minutes—for them. Llita could not eat, and Joe reminded me of Johnny’s wedding night and why his mother-in-law fainted. So I piled a tray with tasty rations and handed it to Joe, and told ‘em to get lost; I didn’t want to see hide n’r hair of ’em for four days—

(Omitted)

—on to Landfall as fast as I could pick a cargo. I could not leave them on Valhalla; José was not yet able to support a family, and Llita was going to be limited in what she could do, either pregnant or with a new baby. Nor would I be on hand to pick ’em up if they fell down; they
had
to go to Landfall.

Oh, Llita could have survived on Valhalla, because there they have the healthy attitude that a pregnant woman is prettier than the other sort and that the farther along she is, the more beautiful she is—true in my opinion and especially true in Llita’s case. She had been passable when I bought her; when we grounded at Valhalla, she was almost five months gone and radiantly beautiful. If she went dirtside unescorted, the first six men she encountered would want to marry her. If she had had one on her back as well as one in her belly, she could have married well the day we arrived; fertility was respected there and the planet wasn’t half filled up.

I didn’t think she would jilt Joe that quickly, but I did not want her head turned by too much male attention. I did not want to risk even an outside chance that Llita might leave him for some wealthy bourgeois or freeholder; I had gone to much trouble to build up Joe’s ego, but it was still fragile and such a blow could kill it. He was standing tall and proud now—but his pride was based on being a married man, with a wife, and a child on the way. Did I mention that I had given them one of my names on their marriage certificate? They were now Friherr og Fru Lang, Josef og Stjerne, for the duration of our stay on Valhalla, and I wanted them to remain Mr. and Mrs. Long for some years at least.

Minerva, I had them take lifetime vows never believing that they would keep them. Oh, ephemerals often stay married for life, but as for the rest—you don’t find feathers on frogs very often, and Llita was a naïve, friendly, sexy little tart whose short heels would cause her to trip and land with her legs open without planning it—I could see it coming. I did not want it to happen before I had a chance to indoctrinate Joe. Horns need not give a man a headache. But he does need time to grow up and mellow and acquire self-confidence before he can wear them with tolerance and dignity—and Llita was just the girl who could outfit him with a fine rack of antlers.