Part one of three...


On Thorns Stands the Rose

The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both,
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 99


It is not uncommon for men of note to become concerned with the propagation of their genes. Our forefathers were hardly immune to the specter of an heirless death and worked to ensure the furtherance of the genetic line and family name. And fortunes have been spent, make no mistake, in securing those same fortunes. Assuring a legacy and attesting to precious manhood by the breeding of sons. For me, those reasons were but a trivial grasp for immortality.

It was the work.

A child was needed to carry on the important strides my science had made. This was crucial, for outsiders could hardly be trusted with the building blocks of life itself. They'd make a mess of it, likely for the sake of profit and certainly vanity has been the knife our colleagues put to their own throats. I was not alone in this belief, my partner being something of a cheerleader for the cause of childbearing. Not his, naturally. For all of Belly's miracles, he could not reproduce. I'm told many women went into the proving of that hypothesis. No, it was laid upon me to create the future custodian of our research. Decades of secret knowledge would be the child's mantle. And for this, we preferred a male.

She was not informed.

That would have been counterproductive. That I was no longer opposed to contributing to the world population failed to raise her alarms, despite years of protesting the infringement on my time. Her biological clock, unscientific fable though it seems to men, was ticking loud enough for even myself to hear. A smart woman I married and one well equipped for the duty. Born to it, as it were. And unexpectedly, my son's arrival stirred something within me that I shall never be able to quantify. It went beyond chemical reactions or brain waves, something I consider instinctual. This being was mine; mine to educate and to elevate. The baby was my new source of pride, ascended above awards and progress. But those first impressionable years saw pride disintegrate into a shadow infinitely hollow.

Disappointment.

A terrible thing to admit, but though the boy had all the attributes of a curious tike, he was not promising. We'd crafted a male successfully, but had not engineered a prodigy. It's fair to say I loved the boy, enjoying his forays into bipedal locomotion and babbling efforts at speech. That he said 'mama' first was an unfortunate predictor. I have little interest in the sort of fate typically personified by a floating woman who extols the supposed virtues of letting something else control our path, but there are certain things that can be discerned by the unfolding of events. Predestination isn't just for religion.

Peter wasn't my heir.

My wife had experienced great difficulty in bringing the boy into the world and while Belly and I had developed methods for easing the process, she refused a second attempt. Peter was her universe and as such, sufficient to fill it. And in the time that eclipsed the most significant fight of our marriage, I came to agree. While he showed no early aptitude for the sciences, my son began finding interests beyond those consuming his peers. An interest in pennies was nursed at age four, recognizing dates and comparing them to printed guides increased his reading proficiency. The hobby would become a blanket in later times. The first time the boy with the light green eyes asked to accompany me to the lab I hugged him until he squirmed.

Pride was reborn.

He fell behind in school, a product of what the neanderthals of the education system labeled dyslexia. I disagreed, citing his comfort with numbers as a sign that simple practice would cure letter-dysfunction. But they wanted to medicate the child with primitive drugs, calm his propensity for rambunction as though crude chemicals could solve a stumbling mind. Quite the opposite, I insisted even as I freely indulged in private concoctions myself. In our lab I rewired his thinking using variant wavelengths. It was during these sessions that I truly bonded with the boy. I had plans to begin a new therapy, one that would conceivably expand Peter's mind so that I could yet mold him into the guardian of our work that Belly and I once envisioned. When he fainted one afternoon, I feared my first attempt had harmed him. My blame was misplaced.

Science has no heart.

It acts indiscriminately, a sword slashing carelessly through our ranks. I believed the armor of my intellect was enough to shield him from such a defeatable disease. Modern medicine had its inadequate answer but I was sure I possessed the only key to the question. Peter declined rapidly, though time is subject to the observer's interpretation. It forced us into the role of backseat passengers as the illness drove the healthy from him. Belly remained confident, working on a radical theory that sounded promising when it dropped from his smiling lips. The frown came all too soon. I held the boy's hand as tightly as his fragile bones permitted.

And I begged.