Station Of Seers : 20

Hirrilow presided over the trial held in the sanctum with Gyrun taking the part of prosecutor. Admitting his crime in simple sentences, Crinomu gave no defence. Instead he offered an explanation and a plea for mercy.
"You may think that you know Orietta but you do not know how she longed for a child and the true strength of that longing. On many occasions I told her that it could not be, but each time I told her, the reasons the Guardians forbade it seemed weaker and weaker. She did not berate me or any of you. You must understand that. But I sensed her growing sadness and I knew that all the good work that had been achieved would be as nothing if this one great need in her could not be met. It grew painful for me to see her melancholy when she thought I was not looking. I resolved to address the problem directly and I did. I am guilty then! Punish me if you must, but understand that Orietta did not urge me to my crime and bears no part of the blame."
Then Hirrilow understood the fateful line which Crinomu had crossed and that he had come to love the Rider woman in truth and not simply as it was expedient for the Council of Kalonia. This relationship between human and artilect was genuine and mutual. It had always been a danger. Of all the seers Hirrilow was the keenest observer of the sleeping giant History, that mighty foe of all the Guardian's Conclaves on Earth. In wrestling with History he had learnt of the origins of artilects and how from the beginning a love of the real and the human was built into them so that they were as men once would have thought, like artificial angels. With the strength of feelings permitted to the decanted a platonic sense of abstract love could change into something more painful and more specific. It had happened before and clearly it had happened here. Hirrilow felt sorry that they had not warned Crinomu in much stronger terms when he had volunteered to seduce Orietta. Yet perhaps it would have done no good.
"It has to end now," Gyrun said, gesturing flamboyantly at the accused. "And this criminal may not take the punishment alone. The foetus must be aborted! If the Rider woman cannot live with this, the plan to make her happy here was always doomed."
There was a stir from the Council and Hirrilow tried to gauge the mood - much genuine outrage yet some sympathy.
"I must tell you one more thing before you pronounce my fate," Crinomu declared. "Orietta's unborn baby is mine but only mine to this extent; when I mixed the genes that fathered the infant, I used the Utrian method and I pushed it to a new level. I combined the creative essence of every seer in the station. You are ALL fathers to this child, every last one of you!"