Mutant Star

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

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MUTANT STAR

KAREN HABER

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

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Mutant Star
by Karen Haber. Introduction copyright
©
1991 by Agberg Ltd. Text copyright
 © 
1992
by
Karen Haber.
All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, Phoenix Rider, The Stellar Guild Series, Manor Thrift and logos associated with those
imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor, LLC, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without
any warranties (implied or otherwise) as
to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

Digital Edition

ISBN (Digital Edition): 
978-1-61242-193-3

ISBN (Paper Edition): 
978-1-61242-192-6

Published by Phoenix Pick

an imprint of Arc Manor

P. O. Box 10339

Rockville, MD 20849-0339

www.ArcManor.com

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For my brother, Mark

.

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What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,

This fallen star my milk sustains,

This love that makes my heart’s blood stop

Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones

And bids my hair stand up?

—W. B. Yeats

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INTRODUCTION

GENETICS IS DESTINY: that is the truism that underlies Karen Haber’s four-volume saga of the emerging mutant subculture of twenty-first-century America. And we see a dramatic confirmation of that truism as the series moves along into its third volume and we encounter a pair of strikingly different twins with significantly different genetic endowments.

A generation has passed since the previous volume,
The Mutant Prime
. At the close of that book, we saw how the challenge of the false supermutant Victor Ashman was resolved by Ashman’s violent death. And just afterward, Melanie Ryton, the troubled mutant girl who was instrumental in bringing the flamboyant career of the impostor Ashman to an end, had come forward to announce before the assembled meeting of the Mutant Council that she intended to marry the nonmutant composer Yosh Akimura.

Melanie is a “null,” in the lingo of the mutant clan—someone in whom the mutant powers never developed—but she carries recessive mutant genes. These, she assumes when she falls in love with Yosh, will be lost to the mutant clan’s gene-pool: and a small loss at that, she thinks.

But Yosh is not only not a mutant, he is sterile besides. If Melanie is to bear children at all, artificial insemination will be necessary. Since the mutants are a small group within American society, painfully aware of their need to be fruitful and multiply if they are to keep from being submerged in the normal world about them, the Mutant Council maintains a sperm bank for just such situations.

So Melanie agrees to be impregnated with the sperm of an unknown mutant donor—and brings forth Rick and Julian Akimura, the twin boys who, now grown to manhood, are the central figures of
Mutant Star
.

Julian has the mutant powers.

Rick does not. Like his mother, he is a null.

Genetics is destiny.

***

Rick and Julian are, of course, fraternal twins, not identical ones. If they had been identical, they would have been similar in all respects—with identical genetic endowments, including that of mutancy. That’s an important distinction; it bears a moment of close examination here.

Identical twins are the kind we tend to be most familiar with, because of their startling mirror-image resemblance. They are known technically as
monozygotic
(MZ) twins, because they result from the union of a single egg and a single sperm. At some point in the development of that fertilized egg, it divides into two fetuses, which continue to grow side by side within the womb until the time of birth. Why twinning takes place is still uncertain, though its tendency to recur frequently in certain families and in certain racial groups (blacks, for instance, bear more twins than whites) inclines biologists to think that some genetic predisposition toward twinning must exist.

MZ twins, since they spring from the same package of genetic material, are, in essence, clones of each other. They are always of the same sex. They have the same blood type. They bear a marked physical similarity, down to such details as handprints and footprints. Their eyes are the same color; their hair has the same texture. Where some physical differences do exist between identical twins, they are caused, apparently, by modifications occurring in the womb during the period of embryonic development. But as a rule such differences are minor ones. (Identical twins do differ in such things as handedness: one will be right-handed and the other left-handed. This seems to be nothing more than a function of the original division of the fertilized egg into opposing halves.)

A pair of MZ mutant twins, therefore, would inherit identical complements of mutant abilities. If one twin was capable of mindspeech, the other one would be also. If one could levitate, so could the other. And if one twin turned out to be a null, unable to perform any of the mutant wonders, the other would likewise have to be a null.

But Rick and Julian are fraternal twins. And thereby hangs this tale.

***

Fraternal twins—
dizygotic
(DZ) twins—are actually a much more common phenomenon than the MZ kind, although, because their twinship is usually not so readily apparent it is easy to overlook the fact that so many twinned siblings of the fraternal kind exist. In the United States, nearly one birth out of a hundred results in twins; of these, there are almost three times as many fraternal pairs as identical ones.

Dizygotic twins come into being when two eggs are fertilized at the same moment by two sperm cells, and both zygotes survive and grow to maturity. Since fraternal twins have the same father and the same mother, they will bear the sort of resemblance to each other that any two siblings of the same family would bear—which is to say, they may look very much like each other indeed, or they may be quite dissimilar. It’s all a matter of the random distribution of the genetic mix in the sperm and eggs from which they spring.

Therefore DZ twins may be of differing sexes. They may belong to different blood groups. Their fingerprints and footprints may be quite similar, or not similar at all. The color of their eyes and hair will be no more likely to be the same than those of a pair of children born to the same parents ten years apart.

In the world of mutant genes, one member of a pair of DZ twins may be gifted with mutant genes, and the other a null.

Which is the case with the two very different twin brothers of
Mutant Star.
The twin relationship is complex enough even in our normal world, difficult beyond that of ordinary sibling existence: two children who come into being virtually at the same moment, who are by heritage of birth each other’s closest allies and yet who must nevertheless be rivals from their very first instant of life for the parental care that they must have. Throughout the years that follow, that double-edged paradox of alliance and rivalry exerts its force. How much more intricate the problems are when one twin is equipped with the astonishing powers of a mutant, and the other is not!

Conventional, studious, hard-working Julian, the mutant brother, finds it easy to fit into the tight-knit family structure of mutant society. His turbulent, unruly twin Rick, deprived by birth of mutant powers but nevertheless bearing the startling golden mutant eyes that make his ancestry unmistakable to any outsider, has grown up deeply embittered, uncertain of his place in the world.

In effect neither mutant nor nonmutant, Rick has struggled all his life without success to find his bearings. To the world of normals, his golden eyes mark him indelibly as a member of that strange subspecies of extraordinarily gifted human beings who, emerging from seclusion late in the twentieth century, have made a profound mark on every aspect of twenty-first-century life. But to the mutants themselves, Rick Akimura is something incomplete, something handicapped, a man to be pitied—and, perhaps, to be feared.

The story of that troubled man—and of his very different twin brother—forms the core of this third volume of Karen Haber’s
Mutant Season
series. Rick’s struggle to adapt to a world that has no room for him, and Julian’s efforts to comprehend the nature of the man who once shared his mother’s womb with him, illuminate this dark new phase of the epic of the emerging mutants. Genetics is destiny, indeed: and we see in the newest
Mutant Season
novel how closely the genes that shaped Rick Akimura will control the destiny of the entire mutant race.

— Robert Silverberg

Oakland, California

February 1991

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1

I’m the man in the moon.

Ethan Hawkins stared at the silver-white, pockmarked surface of Earth’s one natural satellite and saw himself—dark face, tightly curled dark hair just showing gray at the temples—reflected back through the metal-impregnated safety glass. The inscrutable, ancient lunar surface formed a frame—a glowing halo—for his lean, muscular features.

He frowned as the view gradually changed to show dense velvety blackness pricked by the cold white stars. Then he shrugged. The constant rotation of the doughnut-shaped structure that housed Hawkins’s corporate headquarters and private rooms provided a regular lunar audience. Patience, he told himself. It’s a quality that some folks even consider to be a virtue.