racked the poor woman, not the pain of labor.
The woman had been one of the millions of lower class workers who lived on barges in the khlongs , the canals that crisscrossed Bangkok. Dr. Damrong had immediately performed an autopsy, right there in the delivery room, and sent scraps of tissue samples to the university laboratory for analysis.
Now he stood at the parapet at the roof’s edge, leaning heavily on his thin arms and staring out at the tower of the Temple of the Dawn, across the river, as it caught the first rays of the golden sunlight.
The first time he had seen a patient with her innards eaten away, a month earlier, he had been curious. It reminded him of something from one of his biology classes, years ago, about a certain species of spider that laid its eggs inside the paralyzed body of a living wasp. When the eggs hatched, the baby spiders ate their way through their host to enter the world.
How grisly, he had thought as a student. Now he had seen three such cases. And these were human beings, mothers dying in the attempt to give birth, destroyed from within.
Dr. Damrong watched the sunlight slowly extend across the teeming city. Cooking fires rose from the canals and the crowded houses and apartment blocks. He could hardly see the curving river, there were so many barges clustered on it. Another day was starting. The darkness of the night had been dispersed.
But still his hands trembled. Three women eaten away from within their own wombs. As if the fetuses within them had turned to murderous acid.
For the first time since he had been a child, Dr. Damrong felt afraid.
CHAPTER 7
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”
Stoner tried his best to look surprised, but everyone knew he wasn’t, and he knew that they knew.
But it did not matter.
That morning Jo had begged him to stay up in his office, on the top floor of the spacious stucco house, as far away from the pool and patio as could be. Stoner spent the hours there speaking with people in Brazil and India and Thailand on the videophone. He read a few reports and tried to ignore the cars and limos that pulled up to the front door and discharged men, women, and children laden with brightly-wrapped packages.
Household robots buzzed and bumped up and down the front steps repeatedly, discreetly scanning each new arrival for weapons as they accepted suitcases and garment bags.
No matter how hard Stoner tried to concentrate on his reading, a part of his mind reached out inquisitively to sense the people arriving. That’s my son Douglas, he said to his star brother, with his wife and children. And later, Claude Appert, flown all the way from Paris. Then he recognized his daughter Eleanor and her new husband, whom he had not yet met. His grandchildren were teenagers now, and trying their best to be quiet and secretive. Stoner smiled to himself and went back to his reading.
The world’s fundamental problem was the result of cultural lag. Stoner had decided that fifteen years earlier, but here in his hands was a detailed academic study by a team of researchers from half a dozen universities that came to the same inescapable conclusion—in ten thousand turgid words and computer-generated graphs.
In a world where modern medicine had reduced the age-old agony of infant mortality to negligible proportions, many cultures still drove their people to have large families. The poorer the people, the more children they begat. The higher a nation’s birthrate, the poorer the nation became. There were almost ten billion people living on Earth. Too many of them were hungry, diseased, and ignorant. And with the ability to select the sex of their babies, too many lagging cultures produced an overabundance of males, far too many for the available jobs in their economies. It had been this overabundance of young men, boiling with testosterone, that had led to wars and terrorism in the past several decades.
Most of the world’s experts knew the answer to this problem: Lower your
The woman had been one of the millions of lower class workers who lived on barges in the khlongs , the canals that crisscrossed Bangkok. Dr. Damrong had immediately performed an autopsy, right there in the delivery room, and sent scraps of tissue samples to the university laboratory for analysis.
Now he stood at the parapet at the roof’s edge, leaning heavily on his thin arms and staring out at the tower of the Temple of the Dawn, across the river, as it caught the first rays of the golden sunlight.
The first time he had seen a patient with her innards eaten away, a month earlier, he had been curious. It reminded him of something from one of his biology classes, years ago, about a certain species of spider that laid its eggs inside the paralyzed body of a living wasp. When the eggs hatched, the baby spiders ate their way through their host to enter the world.
How grisly, he had thought as a student. Now he had seen three such cases. And these were human beings, mothers dying in the attempt to give birth, destroyed from within.
Dr. Damrong watched the sunlight slowly extend across the teeming city. Cooking fires rose from the canals and the crowded houses and apartment blocks. He could hardly see the curving river, there were so many barges clustered on it. Another day was starting. The darkness of the night had been dispersed.
But still his hands trembled. Three women eaten away from within their own wombs. As if the fetuses within them had turned to murderous acid.
For the first time since he had been a child, Dr. Damrong felt afraid.
CHAPTER 7
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”
Stoner tried his best to look surprised, but everyone knew he wasn’t, and he knew that they knew.
But it did not matter.
That morning Jo had begged him to stay up in his office, on the top floor of the spacious stucco house, as far away from the pool and patio as could be. Stoner spent the hours there speaking with people in Brazil and India and Thailand on the videophone. He read a few reports and tried to ignore the cars and limos that pulled up to the front door and discharged men, women, and children laden with brightly-wrapped packages.
Household robots buzzed and bumped up and down the front steps repeatedly, discreetly scanning each new arrival for weapons as they accepted suitcases and garment bags.
No matter how hard Stoner tried to concentrate on his reading, a part of his mind reached out inquisitively to sense the people arriving. That’s my son Douglas, he said to his star brother, with his wife and children. And later, Claude Appert, flown all the way from Paris. Then he recognized his daughter Eleanor and her new husband, whom he had not yet met. His grandchildren were teenagers now, and trying their best to be quiet and secretive. Stoner smiled to himself and went back to his reading.
The world’s fundamental problem was the result of cultural lag. Stoner had decided that fifteen years earlier, but here in his hands was a detailed academic study by a team of researchers from half a dozen universities that came to the same inescapable conclusion—in ten thousand turgid words and computer-generated graphs.
In a world where modern medicine had reduced the age-old agony of infant mortality to negligible proportions, many cultures still drove their people to have large families. The poorer the people, the more children they begat. The higher a nation’s birthrate, the poorer the nation became. There were almost ten billion people living on Earth. Too many of them were hungry, diseased, and ignorant. And with the ability to select the sex of their babies, too many lagging cultures produced an overabundance of males, far too many for the available jobs in their economies. It had been this overabundance of young men, boiling with testosterone, that had led to wars and terrorism in the past several decades.
Most of the world’s experts knew the answer to this problem: Lower your
Similar Books
