“‘If you allow me to conduct this test of teaching very small groups of children in the home, I will do so using only volunteering parents and children. The results should be measurable, which should please the Administrators who have in the past year accepted other research conducted without the use of any volunteers—’ She’s alluding to my research, isn’t she?! Why, that little—”
Mal stopped him with a raised hand.
“Not that I don’t appreciate you making a diversionary case for keeping our population down—it’s not as if suddenly the women of the world had an outbreak of baby hunger and each wanted to have an unconscionable amount of children—but I’m curious, Doctor: who did you evaluate in this study of yours? I’m afraid I never took the time to read your full report, I only glanced at the notice we sent out. And since we don’t have any women that have more than two children, at least, not for long . . .” He waited for the doctor’s explanation.
Brisack guffawed, scoffed, and smacked his lips.
Mal grateful he still had the handkerchief available.
Brisack finally blurted, “Why, why I couldn’t study anyone in particular, now could I? Not without permanently maiming the mind of some poor woman, or destroying her body! Who’d volunteer for that? Instead I employed a method of exponential application.”
“Ah, the more syllables it has, the more legitimate your made-up conjecture is?” Mal leered.
“No, it’s valid,” Brisack said defensively. “I looked at the effect one child has on a mother, then, based on the few women I could find with two children,” his voice sped up, “extrapolated the effects of continued childbearing by applying a logic sequence that I created—” his tongue was now running a race with his lips, “—to gauge the changes and distortions to mind and body that one could reasonably and exponentially expect to occur with subsequent birthing!”
He paused only to take a breath, then exclaimed, “It was all quite carefully constructed!”
Mal’s smile continued to infect his entire body. “I have no doubt, my good doctor. But she makes an interesting point—you have no real proof. Nothing measurable, no one to really evaluate. It was all simply pure conjecture. Interesting—for a woman in the throes of the insanity caused by birthing two children in such a short amount of time, she’s rather insightful. Isn’t she?” Mal actually fluttered his eyelashes.
“How dare she?!” was all Brisack could froth.
“Yes, yes,” Mal said with malicious merriness, thoroughly enjoying his companion’s fury and divining new ways to prolong it. “I can’t help but consider, before child birthing, we never heard from the woman. And now, after two children, we get this most carefully crafted letter with alarming insights and subtle intimations that men with lesser minds couldn’t recognize.”
He tapped his lip as if in deep thought.
“Almost . . . almost as if giving birth has made her more intelligent,” Mal said slowly. “As if that letter on your lap has invalidated your study because everything you just claimed about the affects of birthing on women, she’s just proven to be—” his stomach-churning grin returned, “—completely false.”
It was the light that was bothering him, Brisack concluded later.
The vast library that used to be a throne room was always dim or dark when they met. But that night the faint glow of the candle cast an odd hue on every feature, causing shadows to occur where they never were before, making nothing look the way it should look, or the way the doctor assumed they should appear.
Instead, the tiny light that hurt his eyes twisted everything into different and strange shapes, yet at the same time they were also distantly familiar, and that threatened everything.
He blew out the candle.
The world became black enough for him to think again without annoying distractions, allowing him to see things precisely the way he needed them to be seen.
“In every study there’s an anomaly,” he declared, once again in complete control of his faculties, “which won’t conform to the norms and defies the accepted truth. Anomalies must be tossed out to clarify the study and develop the irrefutable results.”
“She’s also challenging the most recent findings of the expedition sent west by the Administrator of Science,” Mal reminded him. “Although Hitchin wouldn’t care. Like a good scientist he looks at the carefully selected evidence, makes up his mind about what it all means, then listens to nothing else than his own intelligence.” He almost chuckled.