Gurgeh continued up the street. Screams came from high up in a grimy housing block on the far side of the street. “Just some apex beating up his woman. You know for millennia females were thought to have no effect on the heredity of the children they bore? They’ve known for five hundred years that they do; a viral DNA analogue which alters the genes a woman’s impregnated with. Nevertheless, under the law females are simply possessions. The penalty for murdering a woman is a year’s hard labor, for an apex. A female who kills an apex is tortured to death over a period of days. Death by
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