Counterexample by L. A. Taylor "What? You mean you haven't told them?" Allyssa strolled toward me, thumbs hooked over her hipbones and fingers spread on her back. The old scowl creased her forehead. "That's right." I leaned forward and set my glass of sherry on the coffee table. "Don't you think you've left it a little late? Tammie's nearly sixteen already." "No, I don't think I've left it a little late." Slightly cowed, as usual, by my big sister, I glanced regretfully at the glass I'd just set down. Too soon to pick it up, and I'd probably gulp the whole thing at a swallow if I did. "I'm not sure I'm going to tell them at all." "What?" We could be twins, if Allyssa weren't two years older than me. Does that mean we have to think exactly the same way? Not if I can help it. "Can you give me any good reason?" "Well, but, but-" "You aren't the one with children," I pointed out as she sputtered. "I chose not to have daughters. You know that." Allyssa sounded defensive. Maybe I'd get out of this yet. "So don't tell me how to handle mine." Through her teeth, hissing, a threat: "Husbands. Lovers. Semen-engendered sons!" Shaking inside, I raised one eyebrow casually. "Women have lived with them for generations." "Other women! Not us!" The front door slammed. "Mom? I'm home," called my youngest. Allyssa whirled and pretended to be pulling dead leaves out of the spider plant hanging in the wide east window. A round red spot, like inexpertly applied blusher, burned on the cheek I could see. Julie dropped a stack of books onto the coffee table and plunked down beside me on the couch. "Hey," she said. "What's up?" "Nothing much," my sister said steadily. "Why don't you go find yourself a snack?" With Julie safely in the kitchen, Allyssa flashed me a glance that would have left me trembling twenty years before. "We will continue this discussion later," she said, and reached for the green sherry bottle. I am still ill-suited to being the mother of three female Trekkies, which, alas, I am. Their discovery of, and enthusiasm for, what in my estimation is a rather mundane television series, its spin-offs, and endless, endless reruns, has led me into a year of serious self-examination, as I suppose was both inevitable and overdue. Still: what girls think significant is really quite minor-the two in love with Mr. Spock, for instance, are thrilled to have inherited my upswept brows, but are disappointed in my neat round ears; the one who favors Captain Kirk resents the browline she must carry but finds the ears quite pleasing. Amusing, in a way. When my hand falls naturally to lap or knee or over one of my daughters' shoulders, a space appears between the ring and middle fingers and the outer pairs of fingers lie together. Somehow none of them noticed this in pre-Trek days. Now- "Will you stop making fun of Spock!" Tammie demands, with all evidence of the family temper. "Mom, do you have to do that?" Kendra whines. The one raised brow-a signal Tammie knew perfectly well at the age of three meant 'stop what you're doing this instant and mind your manners'-she now takes to be derision, directed at her hero. When enlightened I raised both eyebrows slightly, chin rising. When presented with a new idea, I am likely (like my grandmother) to murmur, "Interesting ..." I am poker-faced. I am solitary. Need I say more? Any human mother of a teenage girl will know my Spock fans barely tolerate what they believe to be sneering at the Vulcan, and that the Kirk fan, for different reasons, likes none of it any better. Fortunately, when cut I bleed as red as any woman ever did. If my blood were as green as Spock's, they'd probably think I'd arranged that to mock the Vulcan, too. And then, I am a scientist. This gives me little trouble with my Kirk fan, who is mostly concerned to retrain the way her fingers fall when her hand relaxes. The-what shall I call them? Spockies? Spock-ettes?-are of the impression that their hero represents the highest reach of scientific endeavor known to man. True, Spock shows curiosity, essential to any scientist, but, so far as I can see in my occasional trips past the television when the nightly rerun is on, he does so only when convenient to the plot line. His celebrated "logic-alone" is a poor tool for real inquiry, which proceeds by hunch and hump, and drags in design and argument as necessary afterthought. The burning desire to know, to figure it out, Spock seems to lack. Through his example my daughters believe that science proves things, and remain quite unaware of the power of the counterexample to demolish an otherwise attractive hypothesis. Infuriating. Well, I'll allow that science does establish facts, as I have established to my satisfaction that my mother's conjecture was correct: like summer aphids, I and mine are haploid in every cell. Now you know: I'm a geneticist. I have three haploid daughters-that is, they, too, have only twenty-three chromosomes in each cell, half the normal number for a human being. I can only conclude that our egg cells are formed through mitosis rather than the usual meio- sis, which would more or less halve the number of chromosomes yet again: how else to explain generation upon generation of parthenogenesis? I suppose I might mate with a human male and conceive a child. The sexual act is not only possible but enjoyable, the number of my chromosomes would be correct, and so far as I can determine they would form the proper pairs. I have no direct proof of this. I can't exactly pop a laparoscope through my own belly button and prise out an egg to slosh in a dish with stolen sperm; the more direct form of the experiment does not appeal to me at the age of forty-five. Such a pairing would also be the end of the line of my kind, whatever we may be. Strangers who meet me with my daughters and turn, smiling, to say, "You must have strong genes," have put their innocent fingers directly on the problem. I was born in April of 1943. My "father," a fictional creation, was supposed to have died in the Pacific. Wars have, historically, always provided us with good excuse for fatherless children. (My mother was born in 1917.) I used the Vietnam War to explain my oldest (1971); its extension, post-traumatic stress syndrome, to explain the "desertion" by the "father" of the middle one (1972); and plain brazened it out with the last (1974). Fifteen months apart is close spacing-ask anyone with three kids in diapers-but I wanted three, and I wasn't getting any younger. We, like normal human women, have our menopause, our imperfect copies. Given present mores, my daughters, should they choose to have girls of their own-sons, you understand, are impossible-will have less trouble. Should they choose. The meditation needed is arduous even to learn. Perhaps they'll just find fathers for their children and our line will simply cease. As Allyssa discovered this afternoon, I haven't yet decided to tell my daughters how different they are from their friends. In a way I suppose I should be grateful to Leonard Nimoy for creating Mr. Spock to absorb the affections of my oldest. He's given me more time to dither. Watching my children grow has proven-ah, hell, I'll say it-fascinating. I have filled dozens of notebooks showing the effects of nature versus nurture, studies on these clones of myself that I can never publish. Genes, for example, determine that moles will appear on the skin, but not where; they determine build, but not the fine detail of skeletal structure that sets one of my children off from the others; they determine the outline of personality, but not the ways in which it is expressed. All of us are intelligent although our interests vary; none of us .has ever been tidy, not even those few adopted out. "Well," Allyssa said when the door closed behind the last of the girls the next morning. "Have you come to your senses since yesterday?" "Have you come to yours?" I coolly-I hoped-poured another cup of coffee and sat down with it. "And aren't those my jeans?" Allyssa glanced down at her long pinstriped legs. "It's just until I get my laundry done." "You could have asked," pressing my advantage. "I didn't think you'd be so stingy." Parry and riposte. En garde! Mother of Trekkies. I let my right eyebrow rise slightly, unhampered by cries of Oh, Mother!, and sipped at the coffee. Allyssa glanced at me and walked away, down the length of the kitchen, her hands cupped behind her back, head down. Like our mother, like our grandmother. Like every one of us forever, for all I know. Are family gestures genetic? Or something imprinted on the infant brain? I know no way to tell without giving myself away. At the end of the kitchen my sister wheeled on one heel and came back. "Do you have any idea what you'd be ending?" "No." I set the cup down carefully, willing it not to chatter against the saucer. "Do you?" "Gramma had records back to 1512." "1512 is not 1988." "Not as easy," Allyssa flashed. "What they went through, those women, our mothers-drowned as witches, put to the stake, condemned as adulterers-" "And because of their troubles you think my daughters should go on reproducing like-like gussied-up paramecia?" "Have you no sense of history?" "Maybe not." I got up, put the cup in the sink, and faced her. "But I do have children. And you don't." "If Mother were here-" "But she's not." We both fell quiet. Mother's plane crashed into Boston Harbor, its engines stuffed with birds, just after I started college. Allyssa was a research technician in a hematology lab at the time; the cool blues and purples of the while cells she showed me through her microscope were what first pulled me toward genetics as a profession. That, and my own quandary as to what I am. "If you don't tell them, I will," Allyssa said. "Get out of my house." She went, of course. I may be poker-faced, but I can be roused. I have the family temper. The family stubbornness. Pigheadedness, Gramma called it. The family. We are human, I am absolutely sure. Somehow, some centuries ago, some woman, our ancestor, yearned so strongly for a child that she learned to have one by herself. Perhaps she was isolated, alone, and too poor or proud to be married. Perhaps her husband preferred another. Perhaps she had access to some powerful form of self-shaping other humans have forgotten. I don't know. All I know is that her daughter was slender and agile, had neat round ears, eyebrows that swept upward at the outer end, eyes of a clear greenish brown, and hair that was glossy and dark. The girl would have tanned easily, if she'd exposed herself to the sun, and had a small straight nose and a wide mouth whose lower lip quirked inward as she smiled. Here is my evidence: I have 0 positive blood (the rhesus antigen for which I am positive is D). I lack no other human blood factors. Put a drop of my blood between two cover-slips and pull, stain the dried smear with Wright's, and under the microscope you will see biconcave red cells, polymor-pholcucocytes in their infinite variety, the dull-blue stodgi-ness of monocytes, lymphocytes with sky-clear cytoplasm. Hemoglobin prepared from what flows in my veins travels with normal hemoglobin A when electrophoresed. Doctors who order other biochemical assays for routine physicals have never found an abnormal value. My electrocardiogram is normal. The one chest X ray I had before they went out of style showed ribs, lungs, the dome of the diaphragm and liver, and spleen nestled beneath it. I nursed my babies, six months each. Nothing, other than a chromosome study, would show me to be what I am. Then, the long line of women so alike-we must be derived from human beings. What else could we be? A month gone since those meanderings. Allyssa has sent me a copy of our grandmother's records. Just as I suspected, every third or fourth generation, the sad little note: someone got married, had a son, had a daughter that more resembled first one parent and then the other, in the ordinary way. It has been nearly four months since I wrote those words. I am so furious, I can barely hold my pen. Allyssa has made good her threat. How could she think she knows my daughters better than I do myself? Has she forgotten how stubborn we can be, the risks we sometimes take? How often we demand proof, the proof that things are as someone has stated them to be? She must be insane! The upshot of it is that Tammie is pregnant. Her grades have fallen this semester; she's been spending her time in meditation. I have demanded that she abort. She refuses. She says, quite coolly, that the school has made provisions for girls who get pregnant and that she can continue to attend. She is due at the end of July; she will have the rest of the summer to make arrangements for someone to keep the baby while she is in school. Her devoted aunt calls me, crestfallen and apologetic, and what the hell good is that supposed to do? The other two are all agog: I suspect that Julie, at the age, God help us, of fourteen is also plotting reproduction. I have talked myself blue about the problems of teenage pregnancies-the greater probability of birth defects, the effects upon the mother's education and career, to say nothing of her health... And to top it off comes the school social worker with a sticky frosted pink smile and "If you could please just try to persuade Tamara to tell us the name of the father, we feel the boys need counseling too ..." She was lucky to get out of my house alive, although she probably doesn't realize it. What, dear Allyssa, am I to do? What could I do but continue to work? Go to the lab every day for the past four months, play with frogs, unravel their dumb DNA. Parthenogenesis has been known to occur in frogs. A clue. Hah! And meanwhile, attempt to educate my child. I can't imagine what the schools in this country are coming to. Just before New Year's, during school vacation, Tammie came dreamily downstairs one morning and said, "I can't wait to see my son." "Tammie," I pulled out the chair at her place. "Sit down." She sat, with a sweet patient smile. "You will have a daughter." "No." "Daughter. Girl. Female-type person." "No." "Look," I sighed. "In normal human beings, the sex of the child is determined by the father. He contributes either an X or a Y chromosome-X for female, Y for male-and one single gene on the Y chromosome, not anything that comes from the mother, is what decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl." "I know that," Tammie replied, still sweet, still patient. "I learned that years ago, Mother." She got up and pulled the Cheerios out of the cupboard. "We only have X chromosomes," I said. "So we can only have girls. It's always that way, throughout the animal kingdom. When parthenogenesis occurs, the children are always daughters." "Are you going to tell me about aphids again? I'm not an aphid." "Look," I said. Tammie poured Cheerios into a bowl, added 2% milk and put the bottle back into the refrigerator, sprinkled half the brown sugar she'd normally use onto the cereal. "Mom," she said. "The trouble with you is that you have no imagination." "Darling," I said-sometimes I can't help sarcasm-"I do have history!" "History is what's done with." Tammie tilted her chair onto its hind legs and leaned back to open the silverware drawer for the forgotten spoon. "My son isn't history. Not yet." "Don't do that. You'll wreck the chair," was what came out of my mouth. Tarnmie let it thump back down with a grin, and started to eat. Over the next few weeks I tried everything I could think of to shake her conviction. I brought books home from my office-"Mother, that's human biology," Tammie protested. "We are human." "How could we be?" "How could we not?" She smiled, so sweet, so patient I could have smacked her. I marshaled my evidence. My child-who is at least as intelligent as any of the rest of us-refused to be swayed. I discoursed upon the nature of inquiry. Upon inductive reasoning in general. I even took her into the lab and showed her my frogs, squatting droopily in their tanks, waiting for someone to toss a crumb of hamburger into the air for them. Tammie enjoyed feeding the frogs. Spring came. My daughter rounded out, first a thickening of her waist, then a gentle mounding below her navel, pressing ever higher. She studied dutifully, daydreamed about her "son," watched Star Trek with her sisters. Back around Valentine's Day she began signing her name T'Ami, Vulcan-style. Some of my fears were allayed: Julie remained her usual active self. She couldn't possibly have had time for the requisite meditation. July 12-Tammie's water broke yesterday morning, two weeks early. She said nothing about it. Therefore, no one called the doctor. In the early stages of labor she was able to conceal the contractions long enough to camp in front of the TV for Star Trek reruns; once hard labor set in, she locked herself in her room. Only when the baby was nearly crowning did she drag herself off her bed and let me into the room to help. I wish I hadn't. I wish I had sent her far away to have this baby, where no one we know ... no. No. No, I don't. My life, the whole structure of what I am, has fallen apart. The child, thank Heaven, lived only a minute or two. Why, I'm not sure. He seemed perfectly formed, from his tiny toe-nails to the tips of his pointed ears. The placenta was a sappy green; it smelled like sweet corn just torn from its stalk, the tang of crushed grass with a musty undertone. "Copper instead of iron in the hemoglobin," Tammie informed me smugly. "Type T negative," whatever that may be. Well, why not? If a plant can put magnesium where iron should be and get a type of chlorophyll, if a horseshoe crab can similarly use copper and come up with the blue blood of a nobleman ... oh, Tammie! Is that it? Did you get the valence of the copper wrong? Tammie also told me her son's heart would be where one would expect the liver; she was quite correct. About the other internal organs, she wasn't sure. They were rather a mishmash, but I saw no obvious reason why they shouldn't have worked. Everything connected. Later, once she's rested, I'll try to get her to tell me how she did it. How she arranged the chromosomes she came with to construct this semi-Vulcan child born of a popular fiction and a-a what? Later, we will make a plan. How to conceal this birth, how to divert suspicion. Tammie can't help with that, not yet. Just now, she is upstairs, weeping. • Am I? All this time, these years, I've thought that somehow I was human, like all of you around me. That if I wanted, anytime I wanted, I could slip into the great stream of human history and take my place, like any woman with forty-six chromosomes in all but a few hundred of her cells. My own "normality," the long unimaginative line of women exactly like myself, the occasional fertile marriages among them, seemed proof enough. That's the trouble with scientific hypothesis, I tell myself bitterly. It is always vulnerable to the counterexample. What am I? Where could I have come from, those generations ago? And why? Women have had children alone since recorded time began. How many others, with other builds and other features, are like me? Do they know? They must! Sisters, please, show me your faces! Soon! *************************************** About L. A. Taylor and "Counterexample" After a quarter of a century I thought I had seen every possible variation on the Star Trek story. Star Trek was responsible for the entry of many women into science fiction because the first television series of Star Trek presented many women. Not only in starring but in supporting roles; perhaps it was the wholesale entry of such women as "Christine Chapel"-actress Majel Barrett (in private life Mrs. Gene Roddenberry) or the singularly beautiful black actress Nichelle Nichols, as Uhura, both of them there on the bridge of the Enterprise, every week, and whatever people said, they were doing more than "opening hailing frequencies." And both women were definitely people in their own right and not just love objects for the men involved-women found for the first time serious science fiction role models of their own, not just the array of wives, daughters, and little sisters of the men involved. Well, after that, women came into science fiction in droves. Many readers, many fans, many artists, and more to the point here, from the ranks of Star Trek enthusiasts many excellent writers both amateur and professional. Star Trek and my own Darkover share one thing; it seems to be easier, especially among women writers, to write of already familiar characters-be they from Darkover or Star Trek-than to create one's own. After a very bad experience I have most reluctantly had to close the Darkover universe to other writers, and now I belatedly understand Roddenberry's intransigence-like that of Conan Doyle-with his literary property. However, this story infringes no literary copyright in Star Trek, nor, as far as I know, anywhere else. This story is just good fun about a young girl who went a bit far in her enthusiasm for the Star Trek characters. Be all that as it may, I am presenting probably the most interesting spin-off of the Star Trek universe ever to come to my attention. Laurie Aylma Taylor likes to explore that no-man's-land between genres; she writes mainstream fiction, mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy. In addition to her short fiction, she has published nine novels, and her next novel, Cat's Paw, will be out from Berkley Books in March 1995.