Unnaturals by Lynna Merrill Page A

despite the pain in her chest, lifted her head, and then hit her again, and again, until all the water had gone out through her mouth and nose. Mel coughed again. It hurt. She was weak and dizzy, and she could not get up.
    "Say again that water can't harm people. No? You won't say any such stupidity? Good. Fix her up, medstat."
    She got up. Then she had to sit again, on the floor, because there were no chairs in this large room full of tables and bright white glass boxes.
    "Enough, medstat," Doctor Jerome said. "The hurt is in your mind now, Meliora" he added gently. "I am not denying you needed medical care. I am just not letting it give you relaxation pills. I am sorry, but you need your mind with you. No relaxation pills while you're my student."
    "In Lucasta, water does not harm people," Mel whispered, "only because of these machines. Is it so, Doc? Otherwise..."
    "Otherwise more fools would be drowning than now, true. It happens very rarely now; people are rarely out of the range of a medstat. But, Meliora, now you seem to think that, if not for the medstats, we would all be dead. Not exactly so. But we depend on our machines, true. We depend on them a lot. And this is a good thing. Without them, life would be a theater of wonderful experiences."
    He took her to the next room. It was much smaller, but its walls were covered by screens. The screens showed a room with vials—small glass containers, perhaps no bigger than Mel's fists. Medstats walked among them, sometimes touching them, inserting tiny, precise metal fingers into the liquid inside.
    Doctor Eryn's eyes sometimes looked like the bare, cold stone of an intercity underground. Doctor Jerome's, on the other hand, glowed like brightlights while he watched those screens.
    "This, Meliora, is the creation of life."
    Life started with cells from both parents, the doctor said, combined inside the vials. A child could have just one parent, or more than two, but time and experience had shown that two parents gave the optimal results most often.
    "Unless, girl, a minor correction is needed for a minor genetic defect, or if two women want to have a boy. Then, we reach into the bank of stored genes—of perfect genes that we've gathered and keep gathering. There are no major defects any more, and even minor defects are very, very rare—because, of course, after every correction the new person doesn't carry the defect and can't propagate it further."
    "I thought everyone had two parents."
    "Almost everyone, as I said. Indeed, once upon a time, before Lucasta even existed, two parents was the only way and besides, one of them had to be female and the other one male."
    "Why?" Mel asked.
    "Because people didn't yet know how to make life, and had to rely on the only method, a clumsy and fallible one, that nature had provided for them," Jerome replied.
    "Nature?" She could guess about nature. It had something to do with sheep, farms, and grass. Perhaps it also had to do with famine, sickness, and war. But she could only guess. She didn't know.
    "You'll be a Doctor of Nature in addition to your other titles."
    "No one told me such a Doctor existed!"
    He shrugged. "Few people are Doctors of Nature, and all are doctors of something else first. But the pressure of being a Doctor of People or Computers is enough for most."
    "So will I learn to select genes for people?"
    "Among other things. It's the baby corporation's job. Some of our doctors work there, though these days the breeding medstats are mostly good enough to do this by themselves. The corporation is obliged to tell the parents that they can make their own choices, too, within certain limits. Propagating a disease that has somehow sneaked into the parents themselves, or sociopathy, greed or another such detrimental divergence, is not to be tolerated—but who wants their child to carry anything like this, anyway? Of course, these days what we call disease is so minor that a person can live a whole life and never notice, but