A figure slogged down the lane, slumpshouldered and forlorn, and that was Bob Davies, another of the casualties. Davies worked the labor accounts, kept the supply books, and went off the rejuv of his own choice and over the surgeons’ protests. So there were two of them getting old. Maybe it showed more on Davies than on him–balding and growing bowed and thin in the passage of only a few months.
“Morning,” Conn wished him. Davies came out of his private reverie long enough to look up as he went by. “Morning,” Davies said absently, and went back to his computers and his books and his endless figuring.
That was the way of it now, that as fast as they built, the old pieces fell apart. Conn turned his mind back to the permafax sheets in his lap and made more adjustments in the plans which had once been so neatly drawn.
Two things went well. No, three: the crops flourished in the fields, making green as far as the eye could see. And Hill’s fish came up in the nets so that a good many of them might be sick of fish, but they all ate well. The plumbing and the power worked. They had lost some of the tape machines; but others worked, and the azi showed no appreciable strain.
But the winter–the first winter…
That had to be faced; and the azi were still under tents.
x
Day 346 CR
The wind blew and howled about the doors of the med dome. Jin sat in the anteroom and wrung his hands and fretted, a dejection which so possessed him it colored all the world.
She’s well, the doctors had told him; she’s going to do well. He believed this on one level, having great trust in Pia, that she was very competent and that her tapes had given her all the things she had to know. But she had been in pain when he had brought her here; and the hours of her pain wore on, so that he sat blank much of the time, and only looked up when one of the medics would come or go through that inner corridor where Pia was.
One came now. “Would you like to be with her?” the born‑man asked him, important and ominous in his white clothing. “You can come in if you like.”
Jin gathered himself to unsteady legs and followed the young born‑man through into the area which smelled strongly of disinfectants–a hall winding round the dome, past rooms on the left. The born‑man opened the first door for him and there lay Pia on a table, surrounded by meds all in masks. “Here,” said one of the azi who assisted here, and offered him a gown to wear, but no mask. He shrugged it on, distracted by his fear. “Can I see her?” he asked, and they nodded. He went at once to Pia and took her hand.
“Does it hurt?” he asked. He thought that it must be hurting unbearably, because Pia’s face was bathed in sweat. He wiped that with his hand and a born‑man gave him a towel to use.
“It’s not so bad,” she said between breaths. “It’s all right.”
He held onto her hand; and sometimes her nails bit into his flesh and cut him; and betweentimes he mopped her face…his Pia, whose belly was swollen with life that was finding its way into the world now whether they wanted or not.
“Here we go,” a med said. “Here we are.”
And Pia cried out and gave one great gasp, so that if he could have stopped it all now he would have. But it was done then, and she looked relieved. Her nails which had driven into his flesh eased back, and he held onto her a long time, only glancing aside as a born‑man nudged his arm.
“Will you hold him?” the med asked, offering him a bundled shape: Jin took it obediently, only then realizing fully that it was alive. He looked down into a small red face, felt the squirming of strong tiny limbs and knew–suddenly knew with real force that the life which had come out of Pia was independent, a gene‑set which had never been before. He was terrified. He had never seen a baby. It was so small, so small and he was holding it.
“You’ve got yourselves a son,” a med told Pia, leaning close and shaking her shoulder. “You understand? You’ve got yourselves a little boy.”
“Pia?” Jin bent down, holding the baby carefully, oh so carefully–“Hold his head gently,” the med told him. “Support his neck,” and put his hand just so, helped him give the baby into Pia’s arms. Pia grinned at him, sweat‑drenched as she was, a strange tired grin, and fingered the baby’s tiny hand.
“He’s perfect,” one of the meds said, close by. But Jin had never doubted that. He and Pia were.
“You have to name him,” said another. “He has to have a name, Pia.”
She frowned over that for a moment, staring at the baby with her eyes vague and far. They had said, the born‑men, that this would be the case, that they had to choose a name, because the baby would have no number. It was a mixing of gene‑sets, and this was the first one of his kind in the wide universe, this mix of 9998 and 687.
“Can I call him Jin too?” Pia asked.
“Whatever you like,” the med said.
“Jin,” Pia decided, with assurance. Jin himself looked down on the small mongrel copy Pia held and felt a stir of pride. Winter rain fell outside, pattering softly against the roof of the dome. Cold rain. But the room felt more than warm. The born‑men were taking all the medical things away, wheeling them out with a clatter of metal and plastics.
And they wanted to take the baby away too. Jin looked up at them desperately when they took it from Pia’s arms, wanting for one of a few times in his life to say no.
“We’ll bring him right back,” the med said ever so softly. “We’ll wash him and do a few tests and we’ll bring him right back in a few moments. Won’t you stay with Pia, Jin, and keep her comfortable?”
“Yes,” he said, feeling a tremor in his muscles, even so, thinking that if they wanted to take the baby back again later, after Pia had suffered so to have it, then he wanted very much to stop them. But yes was all he knew how to say. He held on to Pia, and a med hovered about all the same, not having gone with the rest. “It’s all right,” Jin told Pia, because she was distressed and he could see it. “It’s all right. They said they’d bring it back. They will.”
“Let me make her comfortable,” the med said, and he was dispossessed even of that post–invited back again, to wash Pia’s body, to lift her, to help the med settle her into a waiting clean bed; and then the med took the table out, so it was himself alone with Pia.
“Jin,” Pia said, and he put his arm under her head and held her, still frightened, still thinking on the pleasure they had had and the cost it was to bring a born‑man into the world. Pia’s cost. He felt guilt, like bad tape; but it was not a question of tape: it was something built in, irreparable in what they were.
Then they did bring the baby back, and laid it in Pia’s arms; and he could not forbear to touch it, to examine the tininess of its hands, the impossibly little fists. It. Him. This born‑man.
xi
Year 2, day 189 CR
Children took their first steps in the second summer’s sun…squealed and cried and laughed and crowed. It was a good sound for a struggling colony, a sound which had crept on the settlement slowly through the winter, in baby cries and requisitions for bizarre oddments of supply. Baby washing hung out in the azi camp and the central domes in whatever sun the winter afforded–never cold enough to freeze, not through all the winter, just damp; and bonechilling nasty when the wind blew.
Gutierrez sat by the roadside, the road they had extended out to the fields. In one direction the azi camp fluttered with white flags of infant clothing out to dry; and in the other the crawlers and earthmovers sat, shrouded in their plastic hoods, and flitters nested there.
He watched–near where limestone blocks and slabs and rubble made the first solid azi buildings, one‑roomed and simple. They had left some chips behind, and an ariel was at its stone‑moving routine. It took the chips in its mouth, such as it could manage, and moved them, stacked them, in what began to look like one of the more elaborate ariel constructions, in the shadow of the wall.