O Brave New Eve: Genetic Fantasy

By Donald L. Kaufmann

This novel ironically explores the demise of maternal instinct through DNA-inspired altered human reproduction. Human birthing is spliced from the uterus and the maternal mind. Future Mother provides the egg and evolving biomedical engineering does the rest. A dramatic benefit of the process will be a permanent amnesia of the birth itself. No more nine-month discomfort, unsightly bulges, water retention, messy labor, or later responsibility because there is no memory of having given birth. Doctor Victor’s altered Eve can eat all the apples she wants.

“Doctor Munch was much beloved. This she craved because she was a ‘born orphan,’ which was her quirky way of saying that her parentage was unknown. She had never forgotten being deprived of parental bonding and she had compensated by seeking love by giving it, openly and professionally. This was her work ethic and she gave herself to it, utterly.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Feb 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483439976

Book preview

O Brave

New Eve

Genetic Fantasy

DONALD L. KAUFMANN

Copyright © 2016 Donald L. Kaufmann.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3998-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3999-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3997-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015917044

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 02/11/2016

CONTENTS

SEEDING

FOREPLAY

FIRST VICTOR EXCERPT

1. - Female Genesis

2. - Male Genesis

3. - Prep Talk

4. - First Date

5. - Altered Apple

SECOND VICTOR EXCERPT

6. - Consummation

THIRD VICTOR EXCERPT

7. - Trimester Express

8. - Embryo End

FOURTH VICTOR EXCERPT

9. - Bruno and Rosetta: A Love Story

FIFTH VICTOR EXCERPT

10. - Cloned Butterfly

11. - In the Land of Tish

12. - Sophie Mignon

SIXTH VICTOR EXCERPT

13. - The Von Harvey Factor

SEVENTH VICTOR EXCERPT

14. - Love Among the Mutants

15. - Suitcase City, We Love You

16. - The Synder Factor

17. - Bank Birth: An Interlude

18. - The Porcine Smile

19. - Home Delivery

20. - Egypt Lake, We Love You

EIGHTH VICTOR EXCERPT

21. - Shadow Mother

22. - Pre-Labor

23. - Birth(s)

NINTH VICTOR EXCERPT

24. - Blessed Events

TENTH VICTOR EXCERPT

25. - A Penumbra Visit to Grandmother’s House

SIGHTINGS

Theme:

As the title (echoes of Shakespeare and Huxley) indicates, the novel, drawing upon recent advances in the bio-sciences, ironically celebrates the gradual demise of maternal instinct through DNA-inspired altered human birthing. Doctor Victor (the novel’s off-beat genome hero) envisions a future when human birthing will be spliced from the uterus and the maternal mind. Future Mother will offer the egg and the Victor Genome Project will do the rest. The most significant benefit of the project will be an instant and permanent amnesia of the birth itself. What a blessing for the liberated mother, muses Victor: no more nine-month discomfort and unsightly bulges, no water retention, no messy labor and, best of all, no maternal responsibility because there will be no memory of having given birth. Victor’s altered Eve can eat all the apples she wants.

Major Characters:

(1) Doctor Victor -- A hyper-romantic genetic engineer -- the creator of award- winning altered vegetables (the Victor Carrot and the Victor Onion) who yearns for a Nobel award and hatches a project that will free womankind from the womb and enhance human birthing for the new world.

(2) Sybil Munch -- Director of a Female Surviva1 Center -- a gynecologist extraordinaire who, despite her love for paperback romances, is a true revolutionary and mega-heart to the Victor Project. She is, in short, the altered mother’s best friend.

(3) Sophie -- the Project Mother and new Eve -- the orphan of a French aristocratic mother and a Tunisian soldier-scholar father who has been reared on American streets. Her sporadic air-headedness makes her an excellent candidate for Victor’s project, and after many funny adventures during gestation, Sophie gives birth and predictably forgets all about it.

(4) Harry Lehr -- the Project Father -- the son of the historical figure, Harry Lehr, of the Gilded Age, the confidant of the Mrs. Astor, who turned the 400 into a circus and a joke and helped kill Society. The son, in the novel, is a 60-year old total Asexual (never masturbated, never ejaculated) and, thus, is full of pure untapped fossilized Lehr sperm - a genome reminder when money and motherhood talked the loudest - which marks the son as the new Adam.

Two other characters are worth special mention.

(a) Phineas Synder - for neuropsychologists a genuine human freak - zero memory - a man born with ongoing terminal amnesia - he literally keeps forgetting everything. In the novel, Synder serves as a link between Mother Sophie and the genome altered pig, and becomes the midwife for the big birth.

(b) Kathryn Jayne - a young wholesome female from a bygone age - who lives with her 100-year old great grandmother and who inherits the forgotten newborn.

Minor Characters:

(a) Bathroom Eddie - Tampa’s Suitcase City’s ebony-skinned stud and Sophie’s pre-Project lover.

(b) Tish - the Queen of Suitcase City, malformed, booze and pot loving nympho- maniac who becomes Sophie’s off-and-on live in best friend.

(c) Doctor Von - Victor’s rival who runs Maryland’s Future Farm and whose prize genome specimen is the Trans-Human Pig (with an implant human gene) that interacts with both Sophie and Synder.

(d) Robert Hope - (not Bob) - who owns Tampa’s most family oriented auto agency.

(e) Bruno and Rosetta - a muscle-bound Firebird and a ladylike Toyota – and how they meet and fall in love - an obvious spoof on America’s love affair with the automobile.

Structure:

1. Frame Device:

(a) Opens with cluster Seeds - 6 brief intro sketches of the key characters: Victor - Munch - Sophie - Lehr - Synder - Kathryn Jayne.

(b) Ends with another cluster - Sightings of the same 6 characters and how they have been altered by the big birth.

2. Middle Action: (20 chapters)

(1) The genesis of the Project (the Victor brainchild)

(2) Selection of the new age Adam and Eve

(3) The Victor Agenda for Courtship and Consummation

(all this is absurd high-tech a la Rube Goldberg)

(4) The Gestation: Nine months of Sophie gypsy misadventures in a Tampa lakefront condo, and in the notorious Suitcase City and on streets and in cars and up at Maryland’s Future Farm.

(5) the Big Birth: more genome absurdity, a la Rube Goldberg with more missing links than Darwin could imagine.

(6) the aftermath - parental oblivion and the final disposing of the newborn and the setting up of those 6 final cluster Sightings.

3. Plot-Lines: Main - the Project and Birth

Sub - the Bruno and Rosetta automotive love affair

Setting

Time: Very recent past. Call it Generalized Yesterday.

Place: Mostly in Tampa, Florida - condo on Egypt Lake and the gypsy district known as Suitcase City.

Also a few key scenes with the Trans-Pig at Maryland’s Future Farm.

Also, interspersed excerpts from the posthumous Lehr Diary - flash scenes of the Gilded Age and its wild excesses.

Point of view:

Third Person (voice over) Omniscience - selective ongoing spotlighting and probing of the major characters.

Mood and Tone:

Wild and woolly comedy that builds toward a satiric and sardonic view on human reproduction in the DNA Brave New World. Mark Twain said, There is no humor in heaven but in the Victor heaven of humanoid pigs and petri dishes, there can be laughs galore.

SEEDING

Doctor Victor

Mendel had his peas, and Victor had his onion.

He saw himself as a man of the future in more ways than one, this Doctor Victor, who had already made genome history with the altered onion, destined to bear his name.

His breakthrough with recombinant DNA, especially his indelible art of splicing within the vegetable family (the Victor Carrot already a biochem artifact) had brought him some in-house acclaim, and yet some within the genome community looked down upon those who labored among lowly vegetables. Animal experimentation played much better in the genome gallery. Victor alone could appreciate the miracle he had wrought. It was both nutritional and aesthetic. The Victor Carrot would soon be mass-produced, vitamin-enhanced, and marketed with a color choice of every conceivable hue on the yellow-to-red spectrum, midnight pineapple being the creator’s personal favorite. The lady homemaker would no longer regard the carrot as a mere edible. The carrot already had a trial market run, the beauty-conscious artsy-domestic female being the target consumer. The surplus vitamins made minimal impact, but the color choice (as many colors as ice cream had flavors) was all the rage. Consumer love was in the air. A color-coordinated edible, designed to meet the exigencies of room décor or dinnerware or milady’s hair and face. Women en masse, in the near future, would hold the Victor namesake, cooked or raw, up to the vanity table mirror to see if there was a match. What a delightful adjunct to the beauty parlor or the cosmetic counter, and tasty and healthy besides. Victor and his carrot were destined to become two of womankind’s best friends.

I’m unstoppable, Victor said as he measured his first mouthful of chocolate-nut candy bar. There would be others; at times, many others. Victor was addicted to sugar love, a periodic craving for wrapped candy, his only overt sign of human frailty. Victor himself saw nothing humanly amiss about his intake of a dozen or more candy bars, during or after long, mind-drenching hours at his Tampa home-based laboratory. He had worked some of his best genome miracles when he had excess sugar on the brain.

His love, on this and other occasions, activated Victor the romantic. He was a man of core beliefs, one being that a person could not be a great scientist without first being a true romantic. Imagination, inspiration, illumination—without these, one could not take the leap into the genome unknown. Victor believed, truly believed, that sugar (the ordinary twelve-carbon sucrose that Homo sapiens ate) could transform a lab homebody (he called where he lived and worked his home lab) into a visionary adventurer. Move over, Mendel. Move over, Darwin. Romance, otherwise, seemed foreign to a middle-aged man whose past was virtually womanless and sex-free, and yet, when his mouth was full of unwrapped chocolate, he felt he was being spliced with those gents of yore, in periwig and panty hose, who jumped off and on balconies and rescued ladies in distress, holding on to them and kissing them forever with sugar breath.

Victor, in his home lab, swallowed. It was at such times that he came closest to having sex. Victor was not being fickle. He was born with sugar love, he liked to think. What a blessing, not having been reared by his mother. Had she lived, mothers being mothers, she would suffocated his love by scaring and nagging him with stories about how sugar rotted teeth, caused acne, and did other dirt to little Victor’s body; he would have grown up to become a genetic engineer, devoid of romance and content with playing god among the vegetables.

The Victor Onion.

Womankind was about to see their peri-wigged and panty-hosed friend come to their rescue once again. When milady from the dawn of time made incisions into the godsent onion, her eyes sprang a leak. That would soon stop. The Victor creation had just passed its final lab tests. They showed the altered onion to be tear proof, and Victor had added a scented bonus—no more onion breath. This romantically inclined geneticist, over the months, had labored long but tenderly with onions galore to find the gene or genes best endowed to cross over and get recombined. Think, feel, be, empathize with tear ducts and bad breath. Snip, paste. Transcribe, translate. Snip, paste until … a pinch of phages, a tad of plasmids, a squirt of ligase. Shake, stir once, and pour … voila! Milady, dry-eyed, and no-run cosmetic-made face, and kissable breath, could slice and slash this altered onion to her heart’s content.

I’m unstoppable! Victor cried aloud, but he had stopped eating chocolate, and the lesser sugar on the brain could not withstand an onrush of doubt and discontent. Miracles among carrots and onions would not do, and he would fall behind in the race to win Nobels and make breakthrough history.

Sybil Munch, his friend from the Tampa Female Survival Center, recently said, You need a breakthrough project, Vic. Something in my line.

The Munch line was Homo sapien.

The home lab now took on the atmosphere of a monastery—neo-Tibetan rather than Middle Ages—because Victor had bitten into two chocolate bars at once. A man of the future chewed and succumbed to quietude. No outside mundane noise allowed. Silence of his own making opened vistas of a genome project, risky and flashy, which, if successful, would bypass in a wink all those accomplishments of those myriad geneticists laboring Frankenstein-like among trivial bacteria, those small-minded colleagues directing and redirecting messenger RNA among E. coli or unleashing recombinant magic on the wing and buzz of the fruit fly. They would labor a lifetime and never measure up to history-makers like Darwin and Mendel and those double-helix newcomers, Watson and Crick. To join such a genome elite, Victor had to abort any further adventures with super-vegetables, such as cucumbers without warts or lettuce that would not wilt. The new Victor would lose himself in the Munch line.

He ate himself into sleep, profound and peaceful, and as he nodded off, he saw himself as the one destined to make the human womb feel right at home in the lab. He knew that his mother, had she survived, would not have interfered with his vision.

Sybil Munch

The midlife crisis of Sybil Munch had little or nothing to do with ordinary women.

She alone was not surprised. She alone understood.

Sybil Munch, to the outside world, was a professional woman with success to spare and a mind of her own. She was a master gynecologist and founder and director of the Tampa Female Survival Center, a community-endowed facility with the most advanced technology, both medical and psychological, for female complaints, with abortion the house specialty. Machines (a first-time patient might think) took up the most space and worked overtime. But Director Munch was adamant on one point: the Center (and that included her) had a heart.

Patients responded in kind to such heartfelt treatment, and Doctor Munch was much beloved. This she craved because she was a born orphan, which was her quirky way of saying that her parentage was unknown. She had never forgotten being deprived of parental bonding, and so she had compensated by seeking love, by giving it, openly and professionally. This was her work ethic, and she gave herself to it utterly. She put in overtime at the Center, weekends and holidays included, even emergencies in the middle of the night. Doctor Munch certainly knew how to lose herself in her work.

As for affairs of the heart, which brought most patients to the Center, Doctor Munch was once again adamant. Overt romance, in her middle years, would continue to be housed exclusively at the Center. This explained why Sybil’s own sex life recently had been clocked at near zero. Matters of the flesh seldom aroused her. Ordinary lust, its joys and pains, was for ordinary women. Sybil, early on, did do some low-level flirting and dating and had a couple of near misses in near-conjugal beds, but more recently, nothing, absolutely nothing.

From the ashes of early-on mundane romance there arose the living-loving Doctor Munch. Ask her patients where the good doctor’s heart now resided, and all (walk-ins and repeats alike) would reply, Why, the stirrup, at or in or near the stirrup. Old-time physicians on house calls had their bedside manner, and Doctor Munch, likewise, at the stirrup where patients spread and got heart, while those with multiple abortions got more, got love.

A midlife crisis for such a woman as Sybil Munch apparently did not pertain to the medical journal or marriage altar or menopausal blues. The Munch crisis was linked to a friend, the visionary Doctor Victor, who wanted her to sign on to a project that could revolutionize human reproduction.

The two of us, Victor had said, can start making the human womb into a museum piece. Abortions will be a thing of the past. Victor then smiled, Sybil thought, somewhat crookedly. Who knows? You and your staff at the Center might be put out of business.

Sybil did not like to be rushed; she felt put upon, and the female within somehow felt violated. Victor, at times, could be such a typical male—blind and dumb toward the miracle of natural birth. Genetic engineers tended to overstate the manmade, and those who were male often misunderstood abortion which, unlike sterilization, was woman’s way of meeting nature halfway. Abortions, at stirrup eye level, were not dead ends but interrupted middles of unwanted beginnings. The birthing process was not terminated, merely postponed and renewed. Sybil was proud of what she did at the Center, and she resented Victor’s jest that it might be an endangered profession. Victor could be so typically unaware and insensitive, and his overnight chocolate breath didn’t help.

Are you a woman of the future?

Of course I am.

Then act like it.

Sibyl had nodded her willingness to sign on but at some emotional expense. The Munch heart, so alive at the Center, came under siege. Had it betrayed the spirit of stirrup romance that now made dead ends seem inevitable? Doctor Munch needed to allay such professional self-doubt, an outlet, not too alien and exotic, ideally one that would restore the Munch faith in job and self.

She came upon it by chance -— or was it good old dependable in-house instinct? At closing time at the Center, she found what one patient (the one with four prior abortions?) had left behind. It was a common variety paperback romance. Doctor Munch, at first touch, experienced an onrush of titillation and embarrassment, emotions deemed unworthy on the part of a professional on these premises. Doctor Munch secreted the book beneath her uniform and hurried home.

At bedtime, she had a first time, and at her age there were not many of those times left. Like many an ordinary woman with or without a male alongside her, she curled up in bed with a good book, and she found the most pleasure reading in the fetal position, and she couldn’t stop until the final page when the leading man finally gave the heroine a kiss-that-was-more-than-a-kiss, and Sybil Munch put out the light and fell asleep with the knowledge that she had found the first of many happy endings to what the blind and dumb might otherwise misinterpret as dead ends.

KATHERYN JAYNE

Naptime on Tampa’s oldest cobblestone street was anytime.

In an old pink stucco house, there lived an ancient woman (a century old or older) who was too sleepy for words and yet had to say,

Wake up, Katheryn Jayne, you’re doing windows in your sleep.

The sleeper, the granddaughter, instantly stopped. Her right hand, dream locked, high above her raven-haired head, had been wiping and buffing a window, also dream-locked, high above ground level.

Gosh, grandmother, I can’t stop myself.

But she had. Katheryn Jayne rubbed windowless afternoon light back into her eyes. She had surprised herself. She seldom dozed off while sitting in the parlor with her grandmother; rather, she was the one who stayed awake while grandmother passed in and out of sleep.

Such was life in this pink stucco house which was built (grandmother said born) during the 1920’s when its new owner and her five senses were still in their prime, when she could navigate, unaided, up to bedtime for eight good uninterrupted hours. Now, seventy odd years later, cataracts reigned and ear canals shut down as brain cells, and grandmother couldn’t tell day from night or hour from day. Katheryn Jayne, fortunately, lived with her and watched over her.

There was almost eighty years difference in their ages, but grandmother never had to say, Why don’t you go out and play with people your own age?

Katheryn Jayne, at twenty-one, was remarkably naive; some might say not of this world. She was estranged from her own generation; in fact, she seemed more at home back when grandmother got born in a four-poster amid gaslight and cedar chests and excess lace, back when women were more apt to give their life to the home.

Land sakes, child, I remember when I first got you.

Grandmother, forgetful most of the time, was remarkably lucid about a few select past events, one being the little dark-eyed bundle that came her way when her daughter and son-in-law, Katheryn Jayne’s parents, were instantly killed in an auto accident. Grandmother, then, was almost eighty, but that didn’t stop her from saying when little Katheryn Jayne could walk and talk, Your parents, child, made a wrong turn and, God preserve them and you, you were made an orphan under my care, but I’m spry. Hear me, little one, I’m spry.

Katheryn Jayne, as she grew to be a strikingly comely young woman, never doubted grandmother’s spryness, even though on reaching one-hundred, grandmother nodded off sitting in her favorite parlor chair dozens of times each day.

Sometimes, when she jerked back to being awake, her cataracts took command: I wish, child, I could see what you look like.

I keep telling you, grandmother, I take after you.

But grandmother vas remarkably aware of Katheryn Jayne’s grand passion. Windows, you do them all the day. Must you do them in your sleep?

I can’t help myself.

Now, now, child, I don’t like to disturb you when you’re doing the ground floor. But when you clean too high, I begin to worry. You might fall.

Afternoon light was beginning to die. Upstairs, but too far away, was the four-poster where grandmother spent the nights. One trip up and down the stairs was all she could manage. In the daytime she was confined to the ground floor and windows too spotless for words.

Rest easy, grandmother. I’ll watch over your nap.

I declare, child, those windows will be the end of you. Sleep was already in her voice. In my day, women stayed home and had babies and reared them, and left an honest day’s work to their men.

Katheryn Jayne stood next to grandmother and tried to visualize pioneers in candlelit cabins who churned butter with one hand, and had a baby with the other. Golly, she said to herself, as she leaned down and kissed eyes that had seen gaslight days and live babies coming out of live wombs.

HARRY

Not until Harry sensed that he was a carrier of history-making semen did he begin his passionate visits at the Maryland grave of his father, Harry Lehr, one of history’s most misunderstood men. American historians had dubbed him the Clown Prince of the Gilded Age High Society, the parasitic lackey of the Astors and the Vanderbilts, the human virus that spelled the end of The Four Hundred. Mention of such a tawdry career, historians maintained, deserved but a few sentences in the text proper or a Lehr footnote. On January 3, 1929, Harry Lehr had died childless. Historians were adamant on this point. No son could possibly exist, and yet, here he stood at a father’s gravesite, lamenting a miscarriage of history.

Father, this I pledge. I will right your name, and you can take your place among the greats.

He had doubted history’s verdict on his father ever since the secret diary came into his hands, almost forty years ago when he turned twenty-one. The Harry Lehr diary that the son received was the original, much more complete than those censored excerpts that the good wife, Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, had included in her book -- King Lehr And The Gilded Age -- published in 1935. The original and complete so-called locked diary was thought by historians to have been forever lost, and yet, it had been mysteriously mailed to a nonexistent son. It had been postmarked Tampa, Florida. That was the only clue as to its origins.

For almost forty years, Harry had read, studied, memorized, absorbed, head and heart, what his father had meant to be kept under lock and key; and lately, on his daily visits to the grave site, Harry read aloud certain underlined passages in the hope there might be echoes from the grave.

There were none.

So much was missing. Talk about obscure origins. His were near zero. All that he could piece together was that a mystery woman (thought to be a nurse) had christened him Harry Lehr and had given him away at birth; but she (or someone else) had set up a trust fund (money source unknown) to keep the Lehr child from want for the rest of his life. Harry, thus, bore the fruits of first class foster homes and private schools and an ample monthly allowance, and had grown into an elderly bachelorhood; one who preferred to live alone, tastefully unemployed, a man of leisure, who now half-believed that he was half-born … intimations of the father, but no trace of the mother. Darwin and the evolutionists had their missing link, and Harry now had his, two times over. Mother was a void; father, at best, a shadow. The son was only told that his father once knew the most powerful ladies in the land. And then the diary arrived and as a shadowy father took on more light, a son slowly began to realize that his birth had been an accident, and he didn’t need a grave to tell him that.

Such half knowedge, of somehow being conceived from shadowy egg and sperm, also led to awareness why an accidental son had lived a life for almost sixty years of profound asexuality. A lifelong celebrate, a consummate virgin, Harry neither knew nor cared about sex. Even masturbation was taboo. His seed was his alone, utterly within, untapped. Semen preservation, of course, was impossible. Urination took its toll; micro-milky sperm being passed and lost, and who could say what went on when one was asleep? Harry, nonetheless, could not imagine any other extant male with such large reservoir of resplendent untapped semen; he was, by every known standard, asexual beyond compare.

But to what purpose?

Now when he read the diary aloud at grave site, a rumble echoed down there where Lehr seed, a mega-million worth, was stored, and Harry swore that he could hear one sperm, the biggest and bravest of them all, say, Find the mother seed, and who can say how that may illuminate a son’s origins and a father’s final splendiferous resting place in history?

He had but one clue. A forty-year-old Tampa postmark.

He smiled down at the grave. It was time to move onto the womb.

The move to Tampa caused tingling in his loins and, for the first time in his life, he desired to drive and own a car. He never had because his father’s diary mentioned over and over how the early automobile had helped kill Society, especially Henry Ford’s horrid Model-T.

But Harry’s loins now sang otherwise. He took hurry-up driving lessons, got his license and immediately, to soothe his loins, sought out Maryland’s most grossly masculine auto mart, MACHISMO MOTORS.

Its proprietor both smoked and chewed cigars. Our specialty is power, pre-1973 converter, gas-guzzling power, before Detroit and those Japs turned us into six and four-cylinder pansies.

Harry found himself drawn to a Firebird Formula 400, vintage 1972, with Amazonian gold body and yellow vinyl top, built low and wide with scoops on the hood.

I can see you got class, Mister. Bruno’s caught your eye.

It has a name?

Its one owner, a killer with the ladies, called it Bruno.

Does it talk?

It talks with its speedometer, Mister, zero to 60 in 6 seconds, and it roars at 130, and if you floor it at 160, it double roars. This car is phallic.

You don’t say.

I do say, and, if you shift gears too hard, it’ll ejaculate.

Do tell.

The proprietor chewed and smoked at the same time.

The deal was struck. The handshake was clammy and had hair on it. Bruno was Florida-bound.

Harry decided to drive just under the speed limit, and he would shift gently. Ejaculations, if there were to be any, must wait for the maximal opportune time.

PHINEAS SYNDER

Up in the snowy wilds of Montana, the temperature at 40 below, on a road that didn’t know whether to be dead-end or one-way, a state trooper came upon a sight, incredible, nonhuman.

A man with outsized eyes lay near-frozen. He was dressed for springtime.

You must be drunk or crazy. The state trooper had a habit of talking to himself.

It was, indeed, a mutant sight, a bulgy-headed man, curled up coatless in shirt sleeves on bedded snow.

The state trooper knelt and wrapped the other in a blanket and gave first aid. It took almost a minute to revive him. His bug-eyes popped open. They seemed to be looking everywhere at once.

Mister. Your overcoat?

Did I have one? I forgot. I must have left it somewhere.

Are you lost?

If you say so.

Montana’s most renowned neuropsychologist, two days later, was summoned to the medical facility where the pig-eyed patient had been taken for observation, and where he was diagnosed as suffering from massive ongoing amnesia.

The neuropsychologist took one look and said, That’s Phineas Synder.

That was the equivalent of saying The Synder Factor. In the world of neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry, among all known cases of amnesia, the case of Phineas Synder was singular. Amnesia was profound and terminal. Zero memory was its lab code name. The Synder Factor, theoretically, was one of kind, a case of amnesia beyond words, an on-going memory loss, amnesia perpetually renewing itself. Some said that Synder was the one homo sapien devoid of memory from birth; some thought him a mutant.

The neuropsychologist had a female associate with big busts, and he, with her at his side, was welcomed everywhere. On this particular occasion, when he uttered, That’s Phineas Synder, she countered with, Those eyes, and her sigh reached down to where the busts began, those eyes.

Yes, those eyes -— the neuropsychologist knew well the Synder lore -— eyes that bulged mightily, as if the retinal link with the memory center had uncoiled and was ready to spring loose every which way at once. But the neuropsychologist had to keep his mind on higher matters. Phineas Synder live and in captivity. What a find. Synder tended to be much more lost than found. If he never knew where he was, how could anyone else be expected to know. Found one moment. Gone the next. Phineas Synder had the best vanishing act among amnesiacs.

Watch him, the neuropsychologist said to his associate. Don’t let him out of your sight.

He, a man of science, must act. He must place Synder under maximum security; and he must contact the Tampa-based Memory Center where his friend and associate, the Memory Man, was on the alert for rare specimens for memory disorders.

He was gone, it seemed, but a moment, and when he returned with security attendants, Phineas Synder was nowhere to be seen. The associate was slumped, trancelike, in a chair. Her breasts had been altered. Smaller or larger, one could not tell. It took but moments to revive her. Her first words were as red as her face.

Honestly, Doctor, I don’t know what came over me. I got lost in those big eyes, and my own eyes got smaller and smaller, and I nodded off.

It was to be lost-found-lost all over again.

The neuropsychologist must give the alarm and give chase, but first he was puzzled by an odor that had not vanished.

You can smell it, he said aloud. What is it?

There was more to the associate than big breasts. She also had the best nose at the Montana Memory Center.

The smell, I do believe it’s pig smell.

I can’t make up my mind whether it is human or porcine, but, if you say so.

SOPHIE

My mom died from a fall.

That was what Sophie said, at age twenty-one, when she signed her first rental lease for her first apartment. It was for 90 days, excruciatingly long in Suitcase City.

Of all Tampa districts, Suitcase City was the one that vintage European gypsies would love. Its denizens were American nomads, those who lived out of suitcases. Northwest of downtown, Suitease City catered to the hordes of college and university students and other transients, week-enders, one-nighters. Apartments and rooms were rented by the month, week, day or hour. Holding a 90-day apartment lease within such a fluid environment was, indeed, an act of permanency, and when Sophie acquired hers, she had broken with her genome history.

Sophie was made to be homeless and rootless. Her seed said as much. Sperm and egg came from different worlds, incompatible in or out of the womb.

The mother was of the French aristocracy, the House of Cafay, one of Brittany’s oldest and finest. Historians said that the family was prominent at the Sun King’s court. Family records said that when Annette Cafay (the only child) was born, our stable-horses, both show and work, whinnied in delight. Little Annette was reared at the Brittany chateau where she played on manicured gardens with her multilingual nanny.

Such a wellborn woman seemed destined to marry one of her kind, and keep the Cafay blood blue and pure.

But love, true love, made its move.

It moved in the guise of a Tunisian soldier-scholar who could kill and read at the same time. He was, in between colonial wars, studying Geopolitics at the Sorbonne where he met Annette Cafay, a part-time dabbler in International Arts. Geopolitics and International Arts, after two talky dates, went to bed, and Sophie got made.

The Cafay household, when Annette began to show, went into shock. How could you, Annette? Mother and father took turns with anguished frowns. Your ancestors, yes yours, danced with the Sun King. Pedigreed mating had gone into reverse. Skin colors failed to match, as did class and caste and geopolitics. Mother country had bedded down with a colony, aristocrat with plebeian, light with dark, manicured garden with plain sand.

Such a union was spared legitimacy when the dusky, sandy plebeian colonial warrior had the good decency (under the circumstances) to die in battle, befittingly done in by a French bullet. Sophie, then, was a third trimester fetus and, at best, had but a prenatal glimpse of a father between bullet and burial in Tunesia. Annette’s own mother and father thought it too unseemly to say good riddance.

Mother Annette, however, did not repent; after her lover’s death, she grew bitter and rebellious. When she gave birth to Sophie, she wore black. The House of Cafay again went into shock. It now had a half-and-half granddaughter, simultaneously wanted and unwanted.

Mother Annette, meanwhile, took the first of many serious drinks. By the time Sophie said her first word and took her first step, mom had turned into a serious alcoholic. The Sorbonne, with its memories of love, true love, again beckoned. Annette this time decided to major in both Geopolitics and International Arts. She and Sophie would have a new home, hotel-styled student housing; and for the next few years, while mom went from classrooms to barrooms, night and day, Sophie was left on her own to learn how to play and have fun on the streets.

A nomad was in the making. The House of Cafay (and that included Annette when sober) wanted Sophie to become, preferably, a decent French woman, or at least a good Arab girl, but certainly not a denizen of Suitcase City.

The Americanization of Sophie the Gypsy came about incessantly and relentlessly, and turned inward and terminal when at age sixteen she broke free of her mother and grandparents and ran off into the wilds of America. She made airy moves through dozens of cities until her gypsy soul (which got its start in the womb) and the American street made peace.

Sophie during her first twenty-one years had shown no signs of permanency.

And then, mom did both the expected and unexpected.

When the bottle got to be too much, with blackouts every now and then, Annette found herself on dangerous descents, from high upstairs to the downstairs liquor cabinet. One night, she saw black and fell to her death.

Sophie couldn’t be found; she missed the funeral and burial in lush leafy Brittany. She was indisposed, having her sixth abortion, six times in six different places, this one in Tampa’s Suitcase City. A month later, when she found out about mom accidentally (she had phoned Grandmother Cafay for emergency money), Sophie for once in her life did not feel space-lost, time-free.

… mom died from a fall.

A daughter would do penance. She had her first apartment lease. She would settle down and get a job and make mom in the Brittany afterlife feel good, and that meant space-lost and time-free.

A daughter might go further.

She looked down at her stomach that six times had showed and no-showed. Maybe next time … and … Sophie felt transported, more French, more Tunisian, less American, and she wondered for the first time what it would feel like to be a mother.

FOREPLAY

Consummation. Pay attention, project witness. It’s consummation time. Mister Know-All had spoken.

Who was being addressed? Himself? The world?

Pay attention because he, Doctor Victor, had given birth to a Project, and tonight was the night when ideal human specimens, Harry and Sophie, would couple, not to make a better baby, but to alter human motherhood for the better or for the best.

This momentous event (what the genome academy would eventually call the birth of births) was the brainchild of Doctor Victor, and who else was better qualified to bear witness to the definitive union, and separate fancy from fact, and make certain that the act, from start to finish, remain whole-heartedly scientific. This could only be achieved through omniscience, the superhuman gift of knowing all, of being everywhere, of seeing everything, of hearing …

PING

That was the sound of a pebble, the first of three, hitting center pane on Harry’s bedroom window that overlooked Tampa’s Egypt Lake, noted for its overabundant talky ducks and frogs and, at feeding times, gulls. Up there, Harry and Sophie were at a crucial point in their history-making copulation; up there, in the larger of Harry’s two bedrooms, the one with the king-sized bed, the guest room that had never had a guest, that is until now. Harry much preferred the smaller front bedroom, the one with the more manageable and comfy queen-sized bed, the one that housed at bedside a father’s diary that each night put Harry into a deep virginal sleep.

But not tonight.

Tonight was meant for romance, but only the kind that Darwin somehow experienced on Galipagos, or was it, premature, on the Beagle?

Victor omniscience tonight was in full play, and Nature (call it Mother or Father, Victor being gender-blind on higher matters) joined in too. The sky was cloud free and the moon shone full, and Victor had taken full advantage and had stationed himself in Harry’s lakefront patio, directly below the bedroom window, so that its light could come down and join the moonlight in full play on and around his feet.

The feet of Victor’s one helper, a mere one-night hireling, stayed in the shadows. Bathroom Eddie, his skin black-on-black, had to dress a shade lighter than the night. He was the designated window-pelter, and he had to be partially visible to Victor who feared that the villainy in Eddie’s heart toward the elderly rival for Sophie’s sexual favors might result in a fourth murderous pellet.

There would be three, so said the Victor Agenda, no more than three.

Pebble One had just been fired. It signified what Victor foresaw, male sexual dysfunction, akin to coitus interruptus.

The second and third pebbles would later be fired at exactly thirty minutes apart and would signify the beginning and end of that phase of the Victor Agenda most likely to be botched by the prime Lehr specimen upstairs. Harry was a near sixty-year old virgin, and his first time was with a female homo sapiens with a mutant mind, and Victor had doubts if Harry (such an untried specimen) could sustain for the minimal thirty minutes what Victor called intrauterine intravenous, a phrase likely to find a home among Pavlovian dog and Skinner rat people, a Victor innovative touch that some might say made this sex act too abstract to be thought human. So be it. The evolutionary enhancement of human procreation deserved no less.

Precision was the Victor watchword. Three pebbles, hand-launched-spacedmissiles, and each time Bathroom Eddie had to be watched. He had already proved villainous and had provided an unhappy ending for Harry’s and Sophie’s first date, but Eddie had been pacified by being generously paid for his short stint as pebble-man, and by being promised by Victor that he could reclaim Sophie as his own at daybreak if not earlier. Bathroom Eddie, nonetheless, was a born go-getter, who was also color conscious (what with his ebony penis being far outnumbered by off-black variants), but as long as the color of money remained green, Victor thought that Eddie would serve the Project this one night. He had received his instructions but he seemed impatient. Bathroom Eddie wanted his night’s work to pass as quick as light.

Victor smiled a smile that could only be measured in light-years. Omniscience is as omniscience does, he said to himself. Smugness was the new watchword. Never had human mating been so squeezed to its essence and subject to the iron whims of utter science. Nothing had been left to chance. Harry had been thoroughly briefed. Victor was adamant. There must be no deviations from the following Agenda:

1. Foreplay optional

2. Strictly employ the missionary position, and, absolutely no contraceptives

3. Ejaculate with style

4. Let mate count to ‘one,’ then, sedate, and, ‘put her under’

5. Maintain penetration (the more erection enhancement the better) and keep her hips pillowed and elevated, and let yourself drain (intrauterine intravenous) for at least thirty minutes

6. And, stamina permitting, perform the ultimate gesture, and be a gentleman-missionary, and stay the course and spend the night

Nothing was left to chance and yet …

Victor omniscience flaked and flickered as did the moonlight. Could this be the first of many clouds? Harry with zero-sex experience and Sophie with a mind, as yet, uncharted on the human psych-map. Victor the Romantic needed a boost. He had not forgotten to bring the favorite embodiment of his lifelong sugar love. The chocolate covered nut candy bar felt good in his breast coat pocket close to his heart. He pressed it until it threatened to melt.

Victor, his omniscience back on track, was now in the throes of romance. Whoever said that he was nothing but a lab-fed Frankenstein when it came to matters of the human heart? His own mother had said as much. On her deathbed, fresh from his birth, she had accused him of being a prenatal number addict. I could feel his gills turn to lungs … I could hear him count past ‘one,’ far beyond the number of fingers and toes that he would soon sprout. This she had told her sister who passed it on to Little Victor. You are a born number lover and you will come to no good, his aunt had said, but she was batty (she preferred cats and snow to people) and Little Victor grew up to believe that his mother had been deficient in womb-wisdom because he, in the prenatal state, had not only counted his fingers and toes and ribs but he had also counted his mother’s heartbeats from first to last, and thus, when he came out of the womb, it was only natural that he had numbers on the brain, a sign that his origins were blessed and that he would evolve into what he had become tonight -— a revolutionary geneticist with a sweet tooth and all heart.

As a result of tonight’s definitive union, Doctor Victor, smitten with high romance, was about to take a quantum step outside the genome community. He had lab-labored among lowly E. coli and fruit flies, and then, his genius flared and changed the inner map of the carrot and onion, and he had won a Charley (the genome academy’s equivalent of the Hollywood Oscar or TV Emmy) but Victor wanted more: he wanted the Nobel, he wanted to be up there with the starry ones … shine on Darwin and Mendel but shine on alongside his name, in bigger letters, and he was about to switch on the heavenly light show. He was about to invade homo sapiens with his DNA charm.

Victor, a prototype of a future too high-tech for words, didn’t need any bedside audio-visual implant to film and record what was being said and done up there in a master bedroom between an updated mutant Adam and Eve, minus angels and serpents and fig leafs. Omniscience, chocolate inspired or otherwise, was a habit Victor picked up during his romantic trysts with the carrot and onion when he sweet-talked them into becoming altered creations. The switch to human specimens had not diminished the Victor power over the environment, on this occasion his uncanny presence in a lakefront patio, a recombinant force amid moonshine and window shine that remade him into a know-all.

Should he, under such superhuman circumstances, caution himself against complacency or smugness? Tonight’s watch, thus far, was void of surprises, except for the discovery of a naked squat manly automobile, poised half out of Harry’s carport, its storage wraps off, seemingly hair-triggered to go. What would a prissy old-line male like Harry, with six decades of virginity behind him, do with such a monstrous Detroit product? This car (those scoops on the Amazon gold hood could pass for tanned muscles) looked as if it could, if floored, outspeed and overtake any heavenly light show.

Bedroom window light, once more, shagged and jiggled.

The Victor smile said it all.

Interruptus was no more.

Harry had an operative scoop (color optional) on his unhooded penis, after all.

Ejaculation, Victor-style, was in the works.

Until then, Victor could enjoy what nature had to offer, endless Egyptian water music, unlimited moonlight, multilingual ducks and frogs, and just as the lakefront had its final say, Victor for the first time tonight could say what he had said many times before,

Let nature take its course, as long as you made sure it knows what course to take.

Who had paid attention?

Mister Know-All had, and when it mattered the most, at the beginning.

From the Victor Papers

Excerpt from Project Sophie Final Report:

…Sybil Munch, in her official capacity, made genesis contact with female specimen some thirty-odd days before the engineered union at the Lehr condo where I acted as outside observer. I will, herewith, designate this thirty-odd day period as Month Zero so as to isolate it from the pregnancy period, the nine-month germination to termination.

I must add a regret, personal and professional.

Doctor Munch did not immediately inform me of her initial genesis contact, and such a delay could have jeopardized both the start and outcome of the Project. Gender delicacies was the rationale offered by Sybil for this professional indiscretion. And I can only hope (and pray) that with the success of the Project and with the enhancement of human reproduction that Doctor Munch and other scientists of like gender need no longer be enslaved to such demeaning female-oriented sensibility.

This I earnestly hope and pray …

1. - FEMALE GENESIS

I came here to get an abortion and not to talk about my dead mom.

But you just told me, Doctor Munch was adamant, that you never called your mother, ‘mother.’ Never ever?

Never. Just ‘Annette.’ Always ‘Annette.’

How appallingly inhumane. A mother and daughter only on a first name basis. This was the beginning of Month Zero, but there was no Victor presence and certainly no Victor omniscience. Tampa’s Female Survival Center was strictly female terrain, ideal for genesis contact. Sybil’s and Sophie’s first time at the Center would be given full treatment in the Project Final Report, nothing less for Sybil Munch’s female find.

The reception had said that this patient had no last name. She was simply Sophie.

First name relationships at the Center were not only permitted but encouraged. The Director took the lead. You may call me Sybil, she said to first time patients, and to repeats, Call me Sib. Such was part of the heart logic of Tampa’s foremost female survivalist. A gynecologist of the first rank, with a national reputation (her book Bad Flows had been a bestseller two Christmas times ago), Doctor Munch could have opted for a plush office and practice in one of Tampa’s better neighborhoods, Hyde Park or Carrolwood or Egypt Lake; but instead, she had heeded her heart and had raised funds, with city fathers’ help, and had founded in the heart of Suitcase City a community medical facility dedicated to the betterment of womankind. Come one, come all. She welcomed those with female complaints most in need. Come one, come all. Fee optional. Pay-what-you-can or just drop in for free heart-to-heart chats in the stirrups.

Sophie had come in by accident.

I usually make the rounds.

Those were Sophie’s first words in the stirrups.

The eminent Doctor Munch took one eminent look and said, Pregnancy. Unwanted?

What else.

A singular specimen, Sybil said to herself, as she put her eyes on instrument control and probed Sophie’s innards. What a patchwork of scar tissue.

How many abortions have you had?

Six. I think this is seven. How should I know? After the second or third time, everything down there starts feeling the same.

One more abortion, and it might start raining inside. Do you know what I mean by ‘body rain’?

You talk like my grandmother. The one from Tunisia. When my period comes, she says ‘body rain.’

Well, then I mean ‘thunder rain.’ I mean internal hemorrhage. Why endanger yourself? Why not have the child?

That patient named Sophie looked blank. The father half I don’t want. It’s half or none, okay?

Doctor Munch paused. This patient was a curiosity. A seventh abortion walk-in (a Center record), one of a kind. Sybil sensed that her mind was outstripping her heart. The scientist within grew covetous. This patient’s sex life might be worth a paragraph or two in a new revised edition of Bad Flows.

Why didn’t you use the pill? Sybil finally asked.

I break out in body hair.

There’s diaphragms.

They itch and scratch.

There are other ways.

You’re funny.

This was the first time Sybil heard this funny phrase, which she soon discovered to be a staple of Sophie language, a tease-refrain, an end-stop, when you seemed on the verge of breakthrough communication, of massive insight into the Sophie mindscape, but always you’re funny, a hint of the profound or the inane, and you never knew which.

And, this Sybil would long remember, the moment she first heard the funny phrase was the moment that the Victor shadow first fell on the stirrup and on doctor and patient, and Sybil became aware for the first time that Sophie might become what Victor called female genesis.

Bring me a mutant, tried and true, female, fertile. That was the Victor mock-plea. Your Center is ideal breeding ground. Find one for me, Sybil.

And she was tempted to join the Victor obsession to bring human birthing more in line with post-Darwinian genome magic. High romance and the resultant busy, busy womb would come to an end if Victor had his way. That brought about Munch ambivalence. She was still slavish to some of the old ways. Nurturing still sang in her blood. At the Center, she was both mother and sister to Tampa’s poor female unfortunates. That had sustained her. Not every woman scientist had to be a Madame Curie. And yet,