Cloning the King by Timothy B. Brown

Author:Timothy B. Brown [Brown, Timothy B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2024-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

1

Megan had mixed feelings about staying in Ithaca for the holidays. Even though she was well past her student days with its semester-end, all-nighter exam cramming and paper writing — the air of relief that came with fall term’s eventual completion seemed to permeate campus and relax everyone — students, faculty, administrators, and postdocs alike.

She’d had her own stresses, of course. Three weeks earlier, Claire had harvested seven eggs from Megan’s ovaries, and then, once Lisa had replaced the eggs’ own haploid DNA with the full complement of forty-six chromosomes from the cultured and cloned specimen, they reimplanted them into Megan’s uterus. It wasn’t painful, just slightly uncomfortable, both physically and emotionally. Until all of this started, her body was her own guarded space — her little fortress from which she planned and executed an ambitious assault on any challenge that faced her. Men had gotten close but never breached the defenses; doctors were accepted only on her terms, and only when necessary.

Since deciding to use her body as part of the great experiment, Megan had needed to see the doctor very often. In all, between mid-November and mid-December, she had been to Claire’s office at least once every week, yet even by the sixth and last visit, she was not used to swinging her legs up onto the examination table and hooking her feet in the cold metal stirrups. Now two weeks past the implantation, she was just beginning to reclaim her dignity, hoping that at least one of the eggs would take hold so that she wouldn’t have to go through it all over again. If she were pregnant, there would be more examinations, to be sure, yet perhaps with a baby inside, Claire wouldn’t prod and poke so much.

Claire had left Megan with the choice of going home to visit her parents for Christmas and New Years. The doctor had said that either the eggs would take hold to the uterine lining and begin growing further, or they would fail and be flushed out with Megan’s next menses at the end of December. There wasn’t a lot that Megan could do either way, Claire said, other than taking it easy and laying off the alcohol during the innumerable holiday parties her ex-hippy parents were sure to host.

However, Megan thought it would be too strange to be home among her parents and siblings. She hadn’t told them that she was serving as a surrogate mother to her friend and mentor (not to mention, employer) as well as acting as a living test tube for one of the most exciting experiments in the history of science. Sure it would be awkward to be turning down the spiked eggnog and goblets of wine, but that wasn’t what kept her in Ithaca. Instead, it was the prospect of missing her period and thus launching her quest to serve both Lisa and science — but being too far away from the only people who could celebrate with her.

However, as she passed

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