The child resumed its inexorable turning within her swollen body, and she knew she could never give to the world a life conceived so terribly, so coldly, without love or passion or tenderness.
Even in these final moments, with the gelatin melting under her tongue, Miryam shuddered with the remembered anguish of struggling up from the depths of anaesthesia to find herself bearing the seed of a child, from a faceless man who had died long ago.
Often, during the carefully guarded months of pregnancy, she had wondered about that man, who he had been, how his talent had compared with hers.
Miryam knew little about genetics, or any other science. The scientific mind had always frightened her, and she had feared to explore it. But she knew there was no truth to the folklore that psi was a characteristic of her people. She knew of only a few cases outside her own family, although within her family it seemed to have been a characteristic that had recurred frequently for many generations. Her father had cautioned her about selecting a husband, and pleaded with her not to flee the Ghetto.
For the past three days, since the nurse had momentarily left the cabinet at the end of the corridor unlocked and unguarded, Miryam had known that she need not be concerned about the success or failure of this terrible experiment. From the nurse's mind she had plucked the essential facts about the potency of the red capsule. This knowledge, for all its loneliness, had been something to cherish, to press to her full breasts, as she would never hold that child of horror.
Tears filled her eyes, squeezed in droplets between the closed lids. Tears because she was so alone. Tears of unbearable sadness and pity, for her people, for her youth and her young body, for the warmth that would be eternally cold, for the unnatural child that squirmed and turned, and would never cry.
In a last forlorn gesture, in a final seeking before the darkness closed, Miryam let her mind stray out of the white room, out of the marble magnificence of Center. She let her thoughts escape on the soft breeze of the early summer evening.
How beautiful it was, even here in the city, amid the science buildings that formed bright islands of light around the minarets and vaulted domes of Government Square.
Even these awesome buildings were lovely in the purple dusk. Their windows were like scattered emeralds of light.
How could there be so much beauty without compassion? So much knowledge without understanding? So much human genius without humanity?