Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,24

covered her hand with mine. "Tell me," I said.

Alexis tightened her lips and shook her head. "We haven't told another living soul," she said, reaching for the next cigarette. I hoped she wasn't smoking like this around Chris or the baby was going to need nicotine patches to get through its first twenty-four hours.

"You said a minute ago you wanted me working on this. If I don't know what's going on, there's not a lot I can do," I reminded her.

Alexis lifted her eyes and gazed into mine. "This has got to stay between us," she said, her voice a plea I'd never heard from her before. "I mean it, KB. Nobody gets to hear this one. Not Delia, not Ruth, not even Richard. Nobody."

"That serious, eh?" I said, trying to lighten the oppres¬siveness of the atmosphere.

"Yeah, that serious," Alexis said, not noticeably light¬ened.

"You know you can trust me."

"That's why I'm here," she admitted after a pause. The hand that wasn't hanging on to the cigarette swept through her hair again. "I didn't realize how hard it was going to be to tell you."

I leaned back against the sofa, trying to look as relaxed and unshockable as I could. "Alexis, I'm bombproof. Whatever it is, I've heard it before. Or something very like it."

Her mouth twisted in a strange, inward smile. "Not like this, KB, I promise you. This is one hundred percent one off." Alexis sat up straight, squaring her shoulders. I saw she'd made the decision to reveal what was eating her.

"This baby that Chris is carrying-it's ours." She looked expectantly at me.

I didn't want to believe what I was afraid she was trying to tell me. So I smiled and said, "Hey, that's a really healthy attitude, acting like you've really got a stake in it."

"I'm not talking attitude, KB. I'm talking reality." She sighed. "I'm talking making a baby from two women."

The trouble with modern life is that there isn't any eti¬quette anymore. Things change so much and so fast that even if Emily Post were still around, she wouldn't be able to devise a set of protocols that stays abreast of tortured human relationships. If Alexis had dropped her bombshell in my mother's day, I could have said, "That's nice, dear. Now, do you like your milk in first?" In my granny Bran-nigan's day, I could have crossed myself vigorously and sent for the priest. But in the face of the encroaching mil¬lennium, all I could do was gape and say, "What?"

"I'm not making this up, you know," Alexis said defen¬sively. "It's possible. It's not even very difficult. It's just very illegal."

"I'm having a bit of trouble with this," I stammered. "How do you mean, it's possible? Are we talking cloning here, or what?"

"Nothing so high tech. Look, all you need to make a baby are a womb, an egg, and something to fertilize it with."

"Which traditionally has been sperm," I remarked dryly.

"Which traditionally has been sperm," Alexis agreed. "But all you actually need is a collision of chromosomes. You get one from each side of the exchange. Women have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y. With me so far?"

"I might not have A Level Biology, but I do know the basics," I said.

"Right. So you'll know that if it's the man's Y chromo¬some that links up with the woman's X chromosome, you get a little baby boy. And if it's his X chromosome that does the business, you get a girl. So everybody knew that you could make babies out of two X chromosomes. Only they didn't shout too much about it, did they? Because if they did more than mention it in passing, like, it wouldn't take a lot of working out to understand that if all you need for baby girls is a pair of X chromosomes from two different sources, you wouldn't need men."

"You're telling me that after twenty-five years of femi¬nist theory, scientists have only just noticed that?" I couldn't keep the irony out of my voice.

"No, they've always known it. But certain kinds of experiments are against the law. That includes almost anything involving human embryos. Unless, of course, it's aimed at letting men who produce crap sperm make babies. So although loads of people knew that theoreti¬cally it was possible to make babies from two women, nobody could officially do any research on it, so the tech¬nology that would make it possible science instead of fantasy just wasn't happening." The journalist was in