Clone

By Leo Cappel

Imagine a new virus: PIV –Parthenogenesis Inducing Virus. The virus causes young women to become pregnant spontaneously, even if still virgins, and without a man.

(Characteristic of parthenogenesis is that the offspring is always identical to the mother. Always daughters, never sons!)

Linda gets pregnant while her husband, Brian, is away on a refresher course. After their daughter Jenny is born, they hope to avoid further pregnancies by living apart. Brian attempts to bring up his daughter on his own, but with Linda's support.

Society changes, many women seek solace in the newly formed 'Church of the blessed Virgin Mothers.' Others try and continue the old ways.

The second part of the novel is largely in the form of Jenny's diary. Fewer and fewer boys are born, but in spite of that Jenny lives a reasonably happy and positive life.

In the third part Jenny starts her career as a tourist bus driver. As she and the tourist guide Martha return the empty bus to the depot, they get trapped by a flooding river in the Waihi Gorge, in the east of New Zealand.. Martha discovers she is pregnant. Even though both are heterosexual, they decide on a 'marriage of friendship;' to give their daughters a two-parent family.

The novel is easy reading. Most of the story takes place in a small New Zealand town, Whangarei, and the area is described unobtrusively but with interesting details..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leo Cappel
• Release date: Jun 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310559457

Book preview

Clone

Leo Cappèl

Copyright 2015 by Leo Cappèl

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

BOOK ONE: VIRUS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

BOOK TWO: JENNY

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

BOOK THREE: PARTHOS

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

About the Author

BOOK ONE: VIRUS

Chapter 1

‘You’re seven weeks pregnant? You can’t be! That’s impossible.’

‘Of course I can be, silly. Aren’t you happy?’

‘Happy? You tell me you’re seven weeks pregnant and you expect me to be happy about it?’

‘I know we hadn’t planned to have a baby yet, but I’m a woman and women do get pregnant.’

‘Yes, but ... ’

‘Sure, it’s kind of unexpected. I could hardly believe it myself when the doctor told me this morning. But it’s true. Oh darling, we’re going to have a baby.’

‘Don’t you darling me!’

‘Why? What’s wrong Brian? Just because it’s a bit sooner than we had planned? That’s no reason to get so upset.’

‘No reason to be upset? You dare to tell me I should be happy because you’re pregnant? You hussy!’

‘Hussy? You call me a hussy? What’s wrong with you? What are you trying to do to me?’

‘I don’t understand you anymore. You expect me to be jumping with joy because you got yourself pregnant while ... ’ Brian can’t go on.

Linda stares at Brian through her tears. ‘Why are you so mean to me? I thought you would be pleased to be a father. You always said … ’

Brian interrupts her, still more bewildered than angry: ‘A father? How could I be the father? I can’t be the father.’

‘Of course you’re the father, you always wanted to be a father.’

‘Sure I wanted to be a father. But wanting to be a father doesn’t make me one. Dammit Linda, you insisted I go to that refresher course, you said it would be good for our future.’

Brian turns round, looks out over the harbour. He looks out over the harbour, but he doesn’t see anything. ‘What future? While I was away you got yourself pregnant. Some future! And I trusted you!’

Linda hears only those last words: I trusted you. It echoes through her mind. I trusted you, I trusted you. ‘Brian trusted me,’ she thinks. ‘Does that mean he doesn’t trust me anymore? What does he mean?’ She yells at Brian’s back: ‘Are you saying I slept with someone else? Is that what you are saying? You bastard! You mean bastard!’

‘What else can I think? And don’t you call me a bastard! I didn’t sleep with anyone else.’

‘Well I didn’t either. There is no-one else. So keep your dirty accusations to yourself!’

Brian looks at her again. He can’t believe what is happening. They have had arguments before, who hasn’t? But never anything as serious, as real as this. Linda stands there, facing him, looking as if she is ready to scratch his eyes out.

‘What other way can you get pregnant?’ he asks her. ‘Just by watching TV all on your own? Well? Tell me!’

‘You insinuating dirty bastard! There is no other man. There is no-one else, I told you a thousand times, there is no-one else!’

‘Don’t you get mad at me, girl. I haven’t done anything wrong. I didn’t get pregnant all on my own.’

‘You, you, you!’ Linda stutters. Suddenly she runs out of the room. Brian follows her for a few steps, hesitates, stops. A moment later the front door slams shut.

The road is deserted. On Linda’s left, next to the road, is the beach. Linda never notices the container ship going past only a few hundred meters away. On her right, on the front lawn of one of the houses, two children are playing with a large beach ball. They see Linda, call out to her. Linda does not hear them. All she hears is Brian’s angry voice: ‘How did you get pregnant? Just by watching TV all on your own? I trusted you, I trusted you.’

A dog runs up to Linda, barks, follows her. Linda only hears Brian: ‘How did you get pregnant while I was away? While I was away? While I was away?’

Linda stops dead. ‘While he was away? That’s what he said. He said I got pregnant while he was away.’ Now it really penetrates. Linda had been so excited about being pregnant, she never gave the date a thought. Not the date that she got pregnant anyhow, only the date that her baby will get born.

‘While he was away?’

Alongside the road, bordering one of the gardens, is a long row of large rocks. Linda flops down on the very first one, drops her handbag on the ground. Her handbag? She must have picked it up from the little table in the hallway when she run out off the house.

‘While he was away,’ she keeps thinking. She takes her diary from her handbag. That very morning she had shown that diary to her doctor, shown the dates and the doctor had said: ‘Seven weeks. It’s been seven weeks.’ And it’s true, seven weeks ago Brian was still in Christchurch. It can’t be. The doctor must have had it wrong. It must have been earlier. Linda looks at the dates again. But that can’t be either!

She sits there for a long time.

Go home? No, she can’t, Brian does not trust her any more. Brian believes she has slept with another man while he was away. Brian accused her of being unfaithful. Brian does not want her any more. She can’t go home any more. She can’t go home.

‘So now she runs out on me as well,’ Brian thinks. ‘Bloody woman. What the hell am I going to do now? Why won’t she bloody well listen? It couldn’t have been any other way, no matter what she says. Either she slept with some other man or she’s been pregnant for more than seven weeks. But no, she says, my doctor says it’s been seven weeks. Seven weeks. She must be mad!’

Brian stares at the large photograph on the wall above the TV. A photo of a huge, grotesquely twisted hunk of driftwood, washed up on a beach, silhouetted against the white surf and an angry, almost black sky. That photo had earned him the second prize in the yearly photo competition in Forum North. Afterwards Linda had spent a whole Sunday on the beach, looking for tiny shells to decorate the frame with. That was only three months ago. Three short months ago. How could things have turned sour so quickly? Had he been wrong in going to that refresher course after all? That decision was taken about that time too, wasn’t it?

‘Let’s go for a walk, Brian.’ That is what Linda had said, that fateful day, three months ago. Whenever Linda suggested going for a walk, she meant going across the road, down to the beach.

Linda and Brian lived on Beach Road and from their lounge they overlooked the whole of the Whangarei Harbour, all the way to Marsden Point. Brian’s favourite chair always faced the big picture window: he could happily spend hours sitting there, looking at the view. All the same, whenever they wanted to discuss something, or when they needed to get away from the pressures of work, Linda would suggest a walk along the beach. She loved the smell of the sea, the sound of the waves and the crimson clouds behind Limestone Island at sunset.

‘Sure, Linda, we’ll go for a walk.’

So she had checked the stew in the crock pot, slowly simmering away. Safe enough for another hour or so.

‘I’ve been thinking about that refresher course they want you to go to.’ Linda picked up a small, delicately shaped piece of driftwood, stroked it with one finger. ‘It will make a big difference, won’t it? I mean better chances of promotion and a better salary and that kind of thing?’

‘Yeah, but it also means I’ll be away from you for four weeks. You’ll be on your own all that time. You’ve never been on your own since we got married.’

Brian had kept wondering why he felt that way, why having to leave her to fend for herself bothered him that much.

‘No, I won’t be on my own. Not really. I’ll go to Mum and Dad’s for tea. I’ll sleep at home, but I’ll stay with Mum and Dad during the day. And you’ll be so busy learning about those new teaching methods, you’ll have no time to feel lonely. Not with all those other teachers there as well anyhow. You’ll be too busy.’

They had sat down on one of the big boulders high up on the beach. Brian was still unhappy with the whole idea. The school board had offered to reimburse him for the enrolment fee, but that left the travel expenses and all the extras. Yet was it the money that made him feel uncomfortable? Or was there more to it?

‘Come on, Brian, don’t worry so much. We can use the money we had set aside for the kitchen ceiling. We don’t need to renovate the whole house all at once, do we? I mean we can finish the kitchen later, when we have saved some more.’ Linda nodded to emphasize her words. ‘Yeah, and if you get a bigger salary that’ll get easier anyhow.’

Brian didn’t know what to answer. In the distance a fishing boat was steaming up the channel. The sun had almost set and the channel markers were lit. Red and green flashing lights. Brian shrugged his shoulders, sighed. Then he couldn’t help smiling. He knew Linda, and he knew he always gave in to her.

‘Brian? Don’t you worry.’ Linda said again. ‘It’s no big deal. I’ll be all right.’

‘All right then. If you insist. I’ll tell the principal tomorrow and she can make the arrangements. Happier now?’

They had walked back to the house, arms around each other.

Every second day, shortly after dinner, Brian had rang Linda from his small hotel room in Christchurch. Linda’s Mum always made sure she had cleared the dishes away by then, and was working in the kitchen while Allister, Linda’s Dad, had been told to stay in the other room to watch TV.

Linda felt more lonely than she had expected. Even Brian’s phone calls didn’t seem to bring him much closer to her. Not enough anyhow, Linda had told him last time. ‘So,’ she had said, ‘I’ll do something about it.’

She was waiting next to the phone, answering after only one ring: ‘Brian, is that you?’

‘Who else did you expect? Of course it’s me, love. How are you coping?’

‘Not too bad now, and you know, Mum and Dad are really supportive. As long as it helps your career. That will make it all worthwhile, won’t it? Only two weeks to go. And, eh, don’t laugh, but I brought your portrait with me, so I’m looking at you right now.’ Linda stopped to look over her shoulder at the kitchen door. No, the door was closed and Rosalie, her Mum, had the small radio going. She couldn’t listen in. ‘You know, I do the same thing at night. Then I put your portrait next to my bed on that little table. That way I can say good night to you before I fall asleep.’

Linda looked around once more: Dad was in the next room, watching TV and Mum was still in the kitchen. She lowered her voice, almost whispered into the phone, portrait in her hands. At the end of the call she was blushing furiously. Brian, down in Christchurch, was glad he was sitting in his hotel room, where no-one could see him.

Onerahi Airport, on the outskirts of Whangarei, is only small. A single runway, a few parked planes on the tarmac and a terminal building hardly the size of a small home. And of course the windsock, without which no airport is ever complete. To Linda’s relief the windsock was hanging straight down, no wind at all. Allister couldn’t help grinning. He put his arm around Linda’s shoulders: ‘See, Brian will have had a perfect flight. He should be here any moment now.’

Right on cue the small plane appeared over the hills, banked slightly to line up with the runway, and moments later it touched down. Linda hardly dared to breath. She hated flying herself, but hated it even more when Brian had to fly. That was the way she was. There was so much that she hated, that worried her. Mostly things that might hurt other people though. Even little things like having to take a splinter out of a child’s finger. She simply couldn’t help it.

Slowly the plane turned off the runway, taxied towards the terminal.

Linda gripped the wire mesh fence. ‘What if Brian is not on the plane?’ she thought. ‘If he missed the plane in Auckland? Or even worse, what if he had missed the large plane from Christchurch to Auckland? It could have been that the last session of the refresher course had taken longer than planned and Brian could not get away in time? That could have been, couldn’t it?’ The roar of the plane’s engines eased up, became a soft hissing, the props were slowing down and stopped, but still nothing happened.

A young woman in uniform wheeled a luggage trolley to the plane. The door opened. Brian was the third passenger to come down the short set of steps.

‘It feels good to be home again,’ Brian thought later that evening. He sat in front of the big window and looked at the red and green lights in the harbour. ‘This is where I belong.’

‘Yeah,’ Brian thinks, ‘That’s how it was.’

A harbour board tug pulls an unusually large container ship along the channel not far from the beach. Brian never even sees it.

‘What am I going to do now?’ he asks the driftwood in the photo. ‘Linda pregnant? It must have been more than seven weeks. That stupid doctor must have got it wrong. Linda wouldn’t have, surely ... would she? No. But what now? I must talk with her. Yeah, but how the hell am I going to get her to listen? She’s bound to have gone to her mother, but if I ring her there she’ll just slam the phone down. No good talking to her mother either. Mum would always take Linda’s side.’

He is not sure how long he has been sitting there when something on the screen catches his eye. The TV had been on all the time, murmuring in the background. He turns the sound up a bit. A popular reporter, Tania, is talking with someone in a white coat.

‘We have with us in our studio Dr. Bradley of the Department of Medicine at the Auckland University.’ she says.

‘Blow you,’ Brian mutters.

‘Dr. Bradley is the head of their research unit, and he has recently discovered a sexually transmitted virus, to which he has given the name PIV. Dr. Bradley, good morning.’

‘Good morning, Tania,’ the man answers in a deep voice.

‘Dr. Bradley, I’m intrigued by this name PIV, but let’s discuss first your reasons to go and look for something.’

‘There were actually two factors which alerted us to the fact that something was amiss,’ the man lectures. ‘The first was a very definite change in the ratio of girls and boys being born. Over the last decade the proportion of girls has been rising steadily.’

Brian begins to lose what slight interest he might have had, stares at the photo on the wall again.

Dr. Bradley is rumbling on in that weird low voice of his: ‘The second reason was a report from the National Women’s Hospital about two pregnant women. Both women were adamant that they had not had sexual intercourse at the time of conception.’

When Brian hears the word pregnant, he looks back at the TV, turns up the volume even more. ‘Weird,’ he thinks.

Tania snorts at Dr. Bradley: ‘I can think of a whole range of reasons why a young woman would want to deny that she had been with a man. Of course nobody would believe her.’

‘Well, Tania, this time it was different.’

‘You mean you people really believed them? You’re joking!’

‘Certainly we believed them: one was fanatically lesbian, and the other had been a member of an all-female crew on a yacht doing a long ocean passage.’

Brian scowls at the screen. Tania, for once without her usual aplomb, can only say: ‘Gosh.’

‘Yes Tania, indeed. Fortunately for us, both women were more than willing to cooperate with our researchers to get to the bottom of the mystery and one of the first things we discovered was that in both cases mother and daughter were absolutely identical.’

‘Like identical twins?’

‘Correct. Of course in theory that’s impossible.’

‘But it happened. Why?’

‘That’s a very good question. Indeed, it happened, and that’s why we kept searching for clues.’

‘Fair enough, Dr. Bradley. Go on.’

‘The only abnormality we could find for a long time was that both women had ova with rather unusual sets of chromosomes, 48 instead of the normal 24.’

He is beginning to irritate Brian. Why couldn’t the man talk so other people could understand him? Tania seems to feel the same way about him, going by the way she asks him: ‘And what does that mean?’

‘Well, Tania, to keep it simple, ...’

‘Please do,’ Tania snaps. She is getting just as annoyed as Brian.

‘They can get pregnant without ever getting near a man.’

‘Oh, dear!’ says Tania.

‘We are not sure yet what triggered a pregnancy in their case, although the lesbian lady seems to have had some intense sexual experience at the time she became pregnant. But certainly without a man having been present.’

Brian is suddenly reminded of Linda and just about crawls right into the TV set, but somehow manages to miss the first few words of Tania’s next question.

‘strange. But how does this relate to that new virus you have isolated, the PIV virus? It sounds like the aids virus, HIV. They are not the same, are they?’

‘No indeed, there are quite pronounced differences. As a matter of fact, they are not related at all. No, PIV stands for Parthenogenesis Inducing Virus. Rather a mouthful I’m afraid.’

‘Partheno-what? Did you invent that word?’

‘Parthenogenesis? No, that’s an existing word. Anyway, the most important difference with the aids virus is that as far as we know PIV causes no diseases. None whatsoever. The virus is sexually transmitted at first contact, both man and women become carriers, but adults show no ill effects, no symptoms. No detectable antibodies even, neither in the parents, nor in their offspring, which is unusual too. Our studies indicate that the only effect the virus seems to have is on female embryos. Female babies, if they’re infected long before birth, will have damaged ova, but apart from that they remain perfectly healthy.’

‘And it’s that damage to their ova that makes them get pregnant all on their own when they grow up? How horrible!’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Then if I understand you right, Dr. Bradley, those two unfortunate ladies at the National Women’s would have been second generation? It would have been their parents who had caught the PIV virus? That would seem to indicate the virus has been around for rather a long time?’

‘Correct, Tania. PIV is very difficult to identify, so we can do no large scale screening, but our research indicates that at present more than two thirds of the population are infected.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Mostly first generation, mind you.’

‘So? You’re telling me two out of every three people now carry the virus and they won’t even find out until they become grandparents? Is that what you are saying? In the meantime that PIV virus will keep spreading and spreading!’

‘Correct.’

‘Dr. Bradley, would it be possible to vaccinate against PIV? I find the prospect of lots of young women getting pregnant all on their own rather repulsive.’

‘Sorry Tania, but as the human body does not seem to produce any antibodies against this particular virus, vaccination won’t be an option. But what bothers me most, far more than young women getting pregnant spontaneously, is that they will get identical daughters only.’

Tania sounds puzzled: ‘What’s so dreadful about that? Children often look like their parents.’

‘I didn’t mean daughters who just look like their mothers.’ Dr. Bradley is talking in capitals: ‘These women can’t have anything but