She turned her head almost upside down to read it. It sounded like Zen. She would have to look it up. She sat thinking of the thousands of things she had always meant to look up.
“What have you done with that crystal?” Jefferson asked.
Paula straightened on the bench. Bunker said, “What crystal?”
“The Styths gave her a huge energy crystal,” Jefferson said.
“Oh?”
“It’s in my luggage,” Paula said. She glanced over her shoulder. The other passengers were sleeping, or singing; no one was within hearing. She turned back to Jefferson. “He gave it to me. It’s mine.”
Bunker was frowning at her. The old woman said, “We paid for the knife.”
“Why did they give you something that rich?” Bunker said. “The knife is a bauble.”
“What do you think—that I took their bribe?” She looked from Jefferson to him. “Because he wanted to keep the knife. Therefore he had to give me something, or he’d have stood in my debt. Crystal isn’t worth that much to them.”
“Exactly,” Jefferson said. “He gave it in return for the knife, which we gave him, not you.”
Paula crossed her arms over her chest. She was already resigned to giving up the crystal. She thought of the baby, the Akellar’s other little present. She would rather have the crystal. Morose, she stared at the wall.
NEW YORK
April—May 1853
“If he won’t do it,” An Chu said, “you can go to the women’s center. They give you a pill and you go to sleep and when you wake up there’s no more baby and you hardly bleed at all.”
They walked down a flight of steep gray stairs into the doorway of the building. The corridor beyond was lined with doctors’ offices. Paula rubbed her palms on the thighs of her trousers. Her father had hated doctors. If you go in with a hangnail you have a fifty-fifty chance of coming out alive. On each door they passed, a white rectangle told the doctor’s name, followed by several letters. At Thomas Adena, M.D., O.B., GYM., she and An Chu went in.
The waiting room was divided in half. Three women sat on one side, all pregnant, so huge they could hardly sit up straight. Four little children climbed and screamed in the bright-painted bar-gym beyond the railing down the middle of the room. Paula sat on the couch and leafed through a magazine full of pictures of babies. An Chu told the enormous women a web of lies about her sex commune, her thirty-three friends, their fourteen mutual children. They shared recipes for baby food.
The doctor was a man. He took a blood sample and made her lie on her back on a white table so that he could feel around through her insides. An Chu followed them patiently from room to room until they reached his office again. The office walls were painted with sunflowers. On the shelves behind his desk were several models of human guts.
“How do you feel?” the doctor said.
“Awful. I can’t eat, I throw up all the time, my breasts are sore, I go to sleep in the middle of dinner. I feel terrible. Maybe I’m just sick.”
The doctor shook his head. He was almost as dark as a Styth. His trim little beard reminded her of Tony. “You’re two weeks’ pregnant. I gather this is unplanned?”
She nodded. Counting back on her fingers, she came to the Nineveh Club.
“Your friend didn’t warn you he was natural? He might not know, sometimes the valve opens spontaneously—”
She said, “The father is a Styth.” She was on the verge of a hot temper, for no reason, although the sudden hilarity on the doctor’s face was a reason.
“A Styth. Where did you find a Styth?” He reached for a long yellow notepad and a pencil.
“On Mars. I’m on the Committee.”
He scribbled. “Well, well. And this conception was in the course of a normal relationship?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean he didn’t attack you, or—”
“No.” She glared at him. “Would you ask that if he were Earthish?”
He smiled at her behind his prim little beard. “He isn’t Earthish.”
Behind her, An Chu whispered, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to the women’s center.”
“Are you planning an abortion?” the doctor asked. He rolled his pencil in his fingers. His eyes reflected two little sparks of lamplight.
“Yes.”
“Then let me offer you an alternative. I can transplant the fetus into an artificial uterus.” He got up. The back of his white coat was wrinkled from the chair. He took a clear plastic model down from a shelf over his head and put it on the desk. “This is constructed to allow the fetus to develop as normally as possible outside the mother. We can observe it at every stage.”
The model was threaded with tubes and chambers like a tiltball maze. An Chu whispered, “Come on, Paula, let’s go.”
The doctor sat down, one hand resting on his plastic mother. “I realize it’s a little hard to accept at first—”
Paula said, “What about when it’s born?”
“We’ll find a suitable foster home and continue observations.” His hand patted the uterus, which resounded softly. “You could be saving the lives of hundreds of babies. The first being your own.”
They were both watching her. After a while she looked up. “Is it alive?”
“It was alive from the moment of conception. I’d like to examine the father—”
She sat up straight. “He’s gone. He’s in space.”
“Oh. Is he a diplomat too?”
“No, he’s a pirate.” She was getting angry again, her mood boiling over. She could not look away from the chambered shell under the doctor’s hand. An Chu was tapping her foot on the floor. Paula said, “I’ll keep it.”
The doctor leaned back. His chair creaked. “That’s a risky—”
“I don’t care. If you can raise it, I can.”
“It might be a better idea to transplant it anyway—as it develops, it may—”
“No. I’ll keep it.”
His mouth crooked behind his mustache, and he took his hand off the plastic uterus. Standing, he put it up on the shelf again. “Do you want me to deliver it?”
“No,” An Chu said.
Paula said, “Yes.”
“Very well.” He sat. “My fee is three hundred fifty dollars.”
Paula leaned on the arm of the chair, her gaze on his face. “Why don’t you do it for free? After all, you’ll be able to observe it almost as well in me as in that thing.”
The doctor was writing on his yellow pad. “I’ll have to do a lot of tests. There will be some inconvenience.”
“Fine.”
“Half price. One hundred seventy-five dollars.”
“Fifty.”
“One hundred.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Agreed.” He nodded at her. “Come into the lab again and let me have a few more blood samples.”
“Does Daddy know yet?” Sybil asked. She was driving.
“No,” Paula said.
“When are you—”
“I’m not.” She crooked her arm over the back of her seat. Jefferson drove at an elephantine pace just above the trees. Other cars swerved in and out around them, barely missing them. In the back seat, Bunker was staring fixedly out the window. Paula had been watching Jefferson since they left the Committee building; the old woman had traveled three miles without referring to any of the side-view mirrors. They were lowering down over the park. Ahead was the beehive shape of the entry port. Sybil beat a long green taxi into the entrance to the parking lot.