For Love of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online

striping his face impressive. The dark-haired woman who joined him in staring at the screen was equally imposing.
    The chamber in which the three of them worked was situated in a small, nondescript office building located in an unimportant city on a backwater world. For all that the equipment they hovered over had a cobbled-together appearance, most of it was still of a type requiring enormous expertise to operate and great expense to fund.
    Both the knowledge and the money came from scattered, seemingly unrelated locations throughout the Commonwealth. To the men and women who practically lived in the room, isolation was their honored burden, obscurity their most potent weapon. For they were members of a uniquely despised and persecuted minority, at war with the tenets of civilized society. Truly were their hearts pure and their purposes of noble mien—it was just their methodology that the rest of civilization questioned.
    The three staring intently at the computer screen certainly did not look like candidates for such special attention. The tall man, Cruachan, had the look of a kindly grandfather; the Oriental lady seated before the console would have seemed more at home in an ancient era, clad in flowing silks and wooden shoes. Only the tall black woman standing opposite Cruachan showed some of her inner hardness in her face.
    That hardness and cold resolve lived in each of them, however, fostered and intensified by two decades of persecution. They saw themselves as men and women apart from the common herd. Their aim was nothing less than the improvement of mankind in spite of itself. That their methods might result in damage to the innocent was something they had known from the beginning. They had put that and other conventionally moral beliefs aside, believing that such sacrifices were necessary that the majority might benefit. They called their group the Meliorare Society, an innocent-sounding name drawn to mask the intention of improving humanity via the artificial manipulation of genetic material.
    Their troubles began when several of their less successful experiments came to light, whereupon the outcry over the revelations had been enormous. Now they were compelled to work in scattered outposts instead of in a single research installation, always barely a jump ahead of pursuing government authorities. They were looked down upon and viewed with horror by the general populace.
    Many of their associates had already vanished, having been discovered and taken into custody by the relentless minions of an ignorant officialdom: martyrs to science, the survivors knew—inhuman monsters, according to the media reports.
    Of course, the aims of the Meliorare Society were dangerous! Improvement—change—was always viewed as dangerous by the shortsighted. The members had steeled themselves to that way of thinking, and it no longer affected them. What mattered were results, not the opinions of the ignorant masses.
    So they did not fear dying, did not fear the even more horrible punishment of selective mindwipe, because they believed in the rightness of their cause. If only one of theirexperiments turned out successfully, it would vindicate the work propounded on Terra some forty years earlier by the Society’s founder. Then they would be able to re-emerge into the scientific community that had disowned them. They would be able to point with pride to a mature, noticeably improved human being.
    The air of excitement that pervaded the room was restrained but clearly felt as they gathered around the computer screen.
    “This had better live up to its readout, Nyassa-lee,” Cruachan warned. “I have half a volume of information to process from the Cannachanna system, and as you know, we’re likely going to have to abandon this place and move on within the month. That means reset, breakdown of equipment, and all the difficulties moving entails.”
    “You know me better than that, Cruachan,” said the woman seated in the chair.