“Lizzie!”
“It’s Lizzie and Vicki!”
“They’re back, them.”
“Lizzie and Vicki…”
Vicki said, “Release the door, Jackson.” How had she come to be the one in charge?
The horde threatened to spill into the car itself. Vicki handed Lizzie out; the girl grinned dopily as her all-but-naked belly tightened in another contraction. Jackson made himself climb out the other door. A young man—large, heavy, strong—glared at him. A teenage boy scowled and clenched his fists.
Vicki said, “He’s a doctor. Leave him alone, Scott. Shockey, you take Lizzie. Carry her carefully, she’s in labor.”
The boy said, “I don’t care, me, if he’s a doctor. What’d you bring one of them here for, Vicki? And where’s the cones, them?”
“Because Lizzie needs him. We didn’t get any cones.”
The crowd made a subverbal noise Jackson couldn’t interpret.
The inside of the building was dark—Jackson realized that the lights no longer worked, and the only illumination came from the plastic windows. It took his eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. The room was large, although not as large as the Willoughby factory. Three sides of the perimeter had been divided into curtained cubicles made of shelving, of old furniture, of broken sections of foamcast, of dead and gutted machinery, even of roughly cut logs. Inside each cubicle were makeshift pallets and personal possessions. Through the south window Jackson saw a tent of clear flexible plastic, probably stolen, stretched four feet above the churned-up earth. A natural-light feeding ground.
In the open middle of the floor sprawled dilapidated sofas, chairs, tables, all surrounding a small portable Y-energy cone of the sort used on camping trips. This communal room was warmer than the outside, but nowhere near what Jackson thought of as room temperature.
Vicki said, “That’s the only cone still working in the camp, and it’s not designed for a space this big. Fires are problematic because it’s so hard to ventilate properly through foamcast, Although we have a design for a Franklin stove, which is our auxiliary plan to TenTech cones. Meanwhile, we share the one cone we have. You, of course, would simply have had it seized by the richest family among you.”
“You could have migrated south,” Jackson retorted.
“Safer here. Everybody else is migrating south for the winter. We’re not heavily armed.”
“Ooohhhhhh,” Lizzie said, in hazy appreciation. “Ooohhhhh… I feel another one coming…”
A handsome middle-aged black woman came running across the floor. “Lizzie! Lizzie!”
“It’s all right, Annie,” Vicki said. “Doctor, this is Lizzie’s mother.”
Lizzie’s mother didn’t even glance at him. She grabbed whatever portion of Lizzie, still carried in the enormous young man’s arms, she could reach, and held on tight. “You bring her in here, Shockey—careful, you! She ain’t no gunnysack, her!” Jackson saw Vicki smile, an unamused, turned-down smile. Some history between the two women. Three women. Shockey concentrated on maneuvering his swollen, limp, smiling burden into one of the sleeping cubicles.
Annie blocked the narrow passage with her ample body. “Thank you, Doctor, but you can leave now, you. We don’t need no help, us, with our own. ’Bye.”
“Yes, you do, Ms… You do. It’s going to be a breech birth. I have to rotate the fetus at the proper times to—”
“Ain’t no fetus, it’s a baby!”
Vicki said, “For God’s sake, Annie, get out of the way. He’s a doctor.”
“He’s a donkey, him.”
“If you don’t move, I’ll move you myself.”
Despite himself—the scowling boy had moved closer—Jackson felt a surge of impatience. Were Livers always threatening physical violence? It was tiresome. He said firmly, “Madam, I will move you if you don’t let me at my patient.”
“Why, Jackson,” Vicki said, “I didn’t know you had it in you.” Her tone, so much like Cazie’s, infuriated him. He pushed Lizzie’s mother aside and knelt beside Lizzie, who lay smiling on her bed A thin mattress of nonconsumable plastic, blankets of recycled plastic jacks. The only other furniture was a battered chest and a molded plastic chair that looked like it had once been used for target practice. The walls were hung with the kind of gaudy-colored metal-on-fake-wood art that Livers liked, depicting a scooter race on fluffy yam clouds. On the bureau lay a Jansen-Sagura terminal and crystal library, of the kind used by the most well-funded scientists. Jackson blinked at it.
Lizzie’s dark eyes were merry with cheating pain. “It don’t hurt at all, me. When Sharon had her baby, she hollered, her…”
“No meds for Sharon,” Vicki said. “No profit in it for donkeys.”
Jackson said, “You people shouldn’t have destroyed the warehouses.”
“Why not? You people had stopped shipping to them.”
He hadn’t come here to argue politics with a renegade donkey. Jackson reached inside his bag. “What’s that, it?” Annie said. She loomed over the bed like an avenging angel. A strong female odor came from her, musky and strangely erotic. Jackson thought about what it would have been like trying to maintain asepsis in these conditions. Before the Cell Cleaner.
“It’s a local muscle-relaxant patch. To expand the vaginal opening as much as possible and prevent tearing before I do the episiotomy.”
“No knife,” Annie said. “Lizzie’ll be just fine, her! You get out!”
Jackson ignored her. A hand gripped his shoulder and jerked him backward just as he applied the patch to Lizzie. Then Vicki grabbed Annie and the two women tussled until behind him Jackson heard a voice say, “Annie. You stop that, love.”
Lizzie still smiled at Jackson in drugged serenity, while her enormous belly stretched and contracted, shuddering with fleshy quakes. She held his hand. Jackson turned to see a stately black man, at least eighty years old in the strong and healthy mode eighty had become, leading Annie firmly from the cubicle. Behind the retreating Annie stood a whole crowd of Livers, silent and hostile.
He turned back to Lizzie.
“What can I do?” Vicki said briskly.
“Nothing. Stay out of the way. Lizzie, turn on your left side… good.”
It was another hour before he had to do the episiotomy. Through his quick, large cut—there would be no infant head out first to widen the passage—Lizzie smiled and hummed. The old man, Billy, had miraculously kept Annie quiet. There, but quiet.
“Okay, Lizzie—push.” This was the drawback of the neuropharms swarming through her system. They were selected to not cross the placental barrier, but they vastly reduced Lizzie’s need, or desire, to do anything as focused as pushing. “Come on, push… pretend you’re shitting a pumpkin!”
Lizzie giggled. The baby’s little ass presented itself, through his mother’s blood. Jackson waited until the infant’s umbilicus had passed the perineum, then grasped the baby’s hips and applied downward traction until the scapulae appeared. Carefully he rotated the baby so its shoulders were anterior-posterior. When the shoulders were delivered, he rotated the squirming small body back, for a facedown delivery, the least likely to cause head trauma.
“Push again, Lizzie, harder… harder…”
She did. The baby’s head finally squeezed out. No visible head trauma, good muscle tone, minimal ecchymosis and edema. Cradling the baby’s soft wet buttocks in his hand, Jackson felt his throat suddenly tighten. He checked the child with his monitor and then laid him, slimed with blood and vernix, on his mother’s chest. The cubicle was again full of people. Privacy was evidently not a Liver value. He delivered the placenta, cut the cord. And drew a Change syringe from his bag.