“You’re turning on,” she noted softly.
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed.” He grew suddenly serious. “You know we may be here for the rest of our lives.”
“However long they may be,” she replied. “I’m making a personal decision right here and now. I’m not going to think about time at all. Not now, not unless I have to. There’s nothing else except now. There’s nobody else but us. There’s no place else but here.” And she meant it.
“That’s fair enough,” he agreed. “Maybe it all worked out for the best. Maybe this is the place for nightsiders. Let’s make the most of it.” And, with that, they kissed, and the kiss turned into what she had wanted from the start.
He was very, very good. And so was she.
At first, during their explorations of the island, he referred to the past and tried to get her to tell a little about her own, but that soon stopped. She had literally blocked the past from her mind and allowed her emotions full rule. He certainly was falling in love with her, and she worshipped him. Her whole life, the center of her universe, was him.
Eventually, of course, the playtime ended, and she grew pregnant. She was delighted, not fearful, of the prospect, since deep down, she knew it would come out all right.
About the only thing she hadn’t figured on was just how much outright terrible pain was involved in having the kid.
They named him Joseph, after Moosic’s father.
They didn’t roam so much after he was born, but set up housekeeping near the groves. With the birth of Ginny she became, in fact, a prehistoric homebody. She loved him and she loved the children and she loved having his children, no matter what the discomfort. It was, she felt, what she was meant to do. It was a busy time, and it was enough.
As she had Sarah, then Cathy, then Mark, she changed still more, but it was not something she noticed. Ron was getting old and his hair was turning white, but it was a gradual thing and not something either really paid any attention to. For her part, the plentiful fruits, vegetables, and the fish Ron brought from ocean traps caused her to gain more weight, and made her less and less ambitious about going very far from her tiny Eden-like world.
The fat and the fact that over the years her hair had grown in scraggly fashion down past her ass didn’t bother her, but her declining vision did. By the time Joseph’s voice had lowered and Ginny had experienced her First period, she was effectively blind.
Of course, the children were doing much of the work now, such as it was, under their father’s supervision, and the home itself was so fixed that she could navigate it and even do some cooking and cleaning without really having to see at all. She knew, though, that Joseph and Ginny were experimenting with each other, and it bothered her, although there seemed little to do or say about it. It was, after all, inevitable.
And then, finally, came the day of the storm when Joseph had not returned, and she’d nagged Ron until he’d gone out to look for the young man. And in a little more time Joseph ran back, screaming and crying, shouting that he’d killed his father.
It took much comforting as the storm blew in and washed by the island. She felt sad in one way that it was over now, for from the depths of her mind came almost instant understanding of the moment, an understanding she could not convey to the children—particularly the guilt-ridden Joseph.
“You didn’t kill him,” she soothed. “You just sent him away to a different place.”
“Then when will he be back?”
“He—he won’t be back.”
“ ’Cause he’s dead!”
“No, because they won’t let him come back—again.”
“Why?”
“I guess you’ll have to ask them. They’ll come for us soon.”
“I don’t want them here! Not if they took Dad!” The other children nodded in agreement.
“That’s all right. It’s for the best. You’ll have to grow up now, kids. I’m afraid it’s time.”
They came for them only two days after the storm let up. Three of them came, anyway—Doc and Chung Lind and Herb, the three who’d been closest to them. The children were hostile, and Doc, in particular, was taken aback by their accusations that the Outworlders had taken their father from them. It was particularly tough because it was true.
They used the belts to get back to the new base location. The basic medical problems could be taken care of, including her two cancerous growths. One of them, benign but still growing, was the reason why she believed herself pregnant once more. In truth, it would have prevented any such happening.
The Outworlders, it seemed, had a cure for cancer and much else.
The children, surprisingly, were in good shape, although Ginny, Sarah, and Mark were decidedly overweight. They all had, to Doc’s satisfaction, a natural extra skin layer with mild pigmentation that absorbed and diluted the most harmful radiation. The mutation did not seem natural, and was not. Doc had been unable to treat the adults for such protection, but she had been able to add the genetic instructions on both sides should children develop. The computer, of course, had provided the information and done the actual work.
From a civilization whose builders could fly through sand, stand crushing pressures and horrible heat, and take oxygen from the rocks, such a minor thing was child’s play.
The children never completely lost their feelings of hostility for the team, but concern for their mother and the wonders of the base soon diverted their minds. Rather quickly they were picking up a modern education, although, so far, it had been next to impossible to get them to wear any clothes at all. Ginny, however, more than appreciated the tiny absorbent material, vaginally inserted, that took away much of the problem of the monthly period. Doc had some pills that did away with the cramps and headaches.
Doc could fix almost everything that was wrong with Dawn, but the eyes defeated her. “I’m afraid you’ll need a full eye transplant, which is not only tricky but requires a perfect match,” she told her. “Either that, or you’ll have to trip.”
“I don’t want to trip—not yet,” Dawn responded. “The children are having a tough enough time getting over the loss of their father. And that transplant you talk about sounds like a pretty chancy thing.”
“It is, unless you went to the edge and had them grow a perfect pair and implant them with their equipment and facilities. The trouble is, not much is left up there that would be tolerable to normal humans. They will have to go, though. There are growths behind them that threaten the brain itself, and it’s too risky to use my ray surgery on it.”
Even though she had only a sense of light and dark and vague shapes, the prospect of that frightened her. “I—1 don’t want to lose them.”
“Don’t worry. First, we can replace them with inert copies fabricated here. You’ll look more normal than the current pair makes you look now. Then we’ll use a little device that I looked up in the computer banks. It’s being worked on now. It’ll allow you some vision, particularly in dim light.”
That excited her. “You mean I might be able to see the kids? Actually see them as they are now?”
“That’s about it.”
Dawn started to cry softly. “They’re what I have—now.”
The operation was, from Doc’s point of view, a simple one, and with her futuristic medical equipment and computer-guided and computer-operated surgical kit, it was not even all that painful. In fact, Dawn had not realized how much pain she’d been living with until it was all done and the relief swept through her.
She was already used to being blind, and now, during the healing period, she memorized every inch of the place. She spent most of the time Doc would allow with the children, of course, who were learning at a rapid pace, thanks to the teaching machines and computer-guided instruction. They had the best of both worlds, the most advanced technology together with a whole new wilderness to play in and explore outside.