More silence.
Keira spoke again softly. "I'm sorry I had to hit you." She hesitated. "But I did have to. You told me I couldn't have you, then you made me choose between the little I could have and my father and sister. What would you have done?" For a long while, there was no sound at all. Then it seemed to Blake in his pain, in his confusion at what he had heard his daughter say, he heard three evenly timed shots.
PART 5: JACOB PAST 23
Meda wanted a girl.
Eli merely wanted Meda to survive and be well. When that was certain, he would concern himself with the child.
He worried about her in spite or his confidence in the organism's ability to keep its hosts alive. This was something new, after all. None of the Ark's crew had been able to have children during the mission. Their anticonception implants had been timed to protect them and had worked in spite of the organism since no doctor had survived to remove them. Before the Ark left, there had been discussion of the unlikely possibility (emphasized by the media and de-emphasized by everyone connected with the program) that the crew might find itself stranded and playing Adams and Eves on some alien world. Thus, the effectiveness of the implants was intended to last only through the time allotted to the mission and the quarantine period scheduled to follow it. In spite of everything, Eli had been pleased to discover that his had worn off right on time.
Another fear played up by the media and down by everyone in the program was the possibility that faster-than-light travel might have some negative effect on conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The Dana Drive that powered the Ark involved an exotic combination of particle physics and psionics. Parapsychological mumbo jumbo, it had been called when Clay Dana presented it. Even when he was able to prove everything he said, even when others were able to duplicate his work and his results, there were outspoken skeptics. After years of tedious, uncertain observation of so- called psychic phenomena, after years of trickery by "psychic" charlatans, some scientists in particular found their prejudices too strong to overcome.
But the majority were more Hexible. They accepted Dana's work as proof of the psionic potential-specifically, the psychokinetic potential-of just about everyone. Some saw this potential in military terms-the beginnings of a weapons delivery system as close to teleportation as humanity was likely to come. Others, including Clay Dana himself, saw it as a way to the stars. Clay Dana and his supporters demanded the stars. They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality-religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological
intolerance and corporate greed. The Dana faction feared humanity would extinguish itself on Earth, the only world in the solar system that could support human life. There were always hints that the Dana people knew more than they were saying about this possibility. But what they said in Congress, in the White House, to the people by way of the media, turned out to be enough-to the amazement of their opposition. The Dana faction won. The Ark program was begun. The first true astronauts-star voyagers-began their training.
Because of the psychokinetic element, a human crew was essential. The Dana drive amplified and directed human psychokinetic ability. Surprisingly, some people had too much psychokinetic potential. These could not be trusted with the drive. They over-controlled it, affected it when they did not intend to, made prototypes of the Clay's Ark "dance" off course. Only strange, old Clay Dana tested out as having too much ability, yet was able to control his drive with a psionic feather touch. Both Eli and Disa had been able to pilot the prototypes and later the Ark itself. This meant they were psionically ordinary. And for some reason, old Dana had taken a liking to them, though Disa admitted to being a little afraid of him. And what she felt about Dana, was what a lot of people watching their TV walls felt about the Ark crew and backup crew. People were curious, but a little afraid-and envious. Earth was becoming less and less a comfortable place to live. Thus it was necessary that the crew have weaknesses and face serious dangers. People knew children had been born on the moon and in space safely, but the gossip networks with their videophone-in shows and their instant polls, their interviews and popular education classes, jacked up their ratings with hours of discussion of whether or not faster-than-light travel could be dangerous to pregnant women and their children. There was even a retrogressive women's protection movement intended to keep women off the Ark.
Eli and Disa were too busy to pay much attention to TV nonsense, as they thought of it, but they went along when the implants were proposed. And Eli left frozen sperm behind-just in case-and Disa left several mature eggs.
Now, Eli wished somehow that his frozen sperm could have been used to impregnate Meda. He knew this was not a
reasonable wish, under the circumstances, but he was not feeling very reasonable. He watched Lorene walk Meda back and forth across the room. Meda did not want to walk, but she had tried both sitting and lying down. These, she said, made her feel worse. Lorene walked her slowly, said it would not do her any harm. Lorene had had some nursing experience at a birth center before she married. She had trained to be a midwife to women too poor to go to the better hospitals and too frightened to go to the others.
Meda stopped for a moment beside Eli's chair, rested her hand heavily on his shoulder. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Feeling guilty and helpless?"
He only looked at her.
She patted his shoulder. "Men are supposed to feel that way. They do in the books I've read."
He could not help himself. He laughed, stood up, kissed her wet forehead, then walked with her a little until she wanted to sit down in the big armchair. He was surprised she did not want to lie down, but Lorene did not seem surprised so he said nothing. He pulled another chair over and sat beside her, holding her hand and listening as she panted and sometimes made low noises in her throat as the contractions came and went. He was terrified for her, but he sat still, trying to show strength and steadiness. She was doing all the work, after all, pushing, enduring the pain and risk, giving birth to their child without the medical help she might need. If she could do that and hold together, he could hold together, too.
She never screamed or used any of the profanity she had picked up from him. In fact, she seemed surprised that the birth happened so easily. The baby, when it came, looked like a gray, hairless monkey, Eli thought. By the time Lorene had tied and cut the cord and cleaned the baby up, it was not gray any longer, but a healthy brown. Lorene wrapped it in a blanket and handed it to Meda, still in her chair. Meda examined it minutely, touching and looking, crying a little and smiling. Finally, she handed the child to Eli. He took it eagerly, needing to hold it and look at it and understand that this was his son.
The baby never cried, but it was clearly breathing well. Its eyes were calm and surprisingly lively. Its arms were long and slender-without the baby pudgyness Eli had expected, but he had no real idea how a newborn should look. Maybe they grew pudgy later, or maybe Clay's Ark babies never grew pudgy. It was enough that this baby seemed healthy and
alert. Its legs were doubled against its body, but freed of the blanket, they straightened a little and kicked in the air.
They were as long and slender as the arms. And the feet were long and narrow. Eli looked at the little face and the child seemed to look back curiously. He wondered how much it could see. It had a full head of thick, curly black hair and large ears. When it yawned, Eli saw that it already had several teeth. That could make nursing hard on Meda.