“Mr. Montray-Lanart? Your wife is well; you can see her in a few minutes,” she said, and I whispered a prayer of thanks to the Mother Avarra, a prayer I had not known I remembered. Then I said, “Our child?”
She bent her head and already I knew—I thought, the worst. “Dead?”
“It was simply too soon,” she said, “and we could do nothing.”
“But,” I protested, like a fool, “the life-support, the artificial wombs—babies born even more prematurely than this have lived…”
She waved that aside. She looked strained. She said, “We did not let your wife see. The minute we knew, we—drugged her. I am sorry, but I felt it the safest way; she was very agitated. She should be coming out of the anesthetic any moment, now, and you should be with her. But first—” she said, and looked at me with what I recognized, uncomfortably, as pity, “you must see. It is the law, so that you cannot accuse us of making away with a healthy child—” and I remembered there was a thriving market in adoptive children, for women who did not want to be bothered bearing their own. I sensed the young doctor’s distress, and somehow it made me remember a dream—I could not remember the details, something about the doctor who had said to me here, a few days ago, that I should be prepared for some degree of deformity… something dreadful, blood, horror…
She took me into a small bare room, with cabinets and closed doors and sinks, and a tray lying covered with a white cloth. She said, “I am sorry,” and uncovered it.
Once I came up through the veils of the drug and saw the horror which had grown at the end of my arm. The messages, deep within the cells, which bid a hand be a hand and not a foot or a hoof or a bird’s wing…
I had screamed my throat raw—
But no sound escaped me this time. I shut my eyes, and felt the young doctor’s compassionate hand on my shoulder. I think she knew I was glad our child lay there, lifeless, for I would surely—I could not have let it live. Not like that. But I was glad it was not my hand which had…
… thrust through Dio’s body and wrenched the child forth bloody, clawed, feathered, a horror past horror…
I drew a long breath and opened my eyes, looking stony-eyed at the dreadfully deformed thing lying lifeless before me. My son. Had Kennard felt like this when he saw what Sharra had left of me? For a moment I wished I could still take refuge in the darkness of insanity. But it was too late for that. I said meaninglessly, “Yes, yes, I see,” and turned away from the thing. So the damage, cell-deep, had gone deeper than I knew, into the very germ plasm of my seed.
No son of mine would ever sit on my shoulder and watch the horses at Armida— turned away, I still seemed to see the horror behind my eyes. Not even human. And yet, monstrously, it had been alive as recently as last night—
The Goddess has shown us mercy…
“Does Dio know?”
“I think she knows it was—too deformed to live,” said the doctor gently, “but she does not know quite how, and if you are wise you will never tell her. Tell her some quite simple lie—she will believe you; women do not want to know, I think, beyond what they must. Tell her a simple truth, that the child’s heart stopped.” She led me out of that room, away from the thing I would see again and again in nightmares. She touched me again compassionately on the shoulder and said, “We could have— re-started the heart. Would you have wanted that? Sometimes a doctor must make such decisions.”
I said, heartfelt, “I am very grateful to you.”
“Let me take you to your wife.”
Dio was lying in the bed where they had brought her, looking stunned and very small, like a child who had cried herself to sleep, with traces of tears still on her face. They had covered her hair with a white cap, and tucked her up warmly under blankets; one of her hands gripped the softness of the blanket like a child clutching a toy. I could smell the sharpness of the drug all around her; her skin smelled of it when I bent to kiss her.
“Preciosa…”
She opened her eyes and started to cry again.
“Our baby’s dead,” she whispered. “Oh, Lew, our baby, it couldn’t live—”
“You’re safe, darling. That’s all that matters to me,” I whispered, gathering her into my arms.
But behind my eyes it was still there, that thing, the horror, not human…She reached in her weakness for the comfort of rapport, she who had always been the stronger of us two, reached for my mind…
I could feel her recoil from what she saw there, see it lying cold and impersonal in that cold bare room on a surgical tray, not human, terrible, nightmare—
She screamed, struggling away from me; she screamed and screamed, as I had screamed when I saw what had taken the place of my hand, screamed and screamed and fought to be free of me when I would have comforted her, struggled away from the horror—
They came and drugged her, afraid she would hurt herself again, and they sent me away from her. And when, having shaved and washed and eaten and made grotesque legal arrangements for the cremation of what should have been our son, I went back, resolved that if she wished to blame me I could bear it… she had lived with me through all of my horrors and nightmares— I could be strong for her now— She was not there.
“Your wife checked out of the hospital hours ago,” the doctor told me, when I made a scene and demanded to know what they had done with my wife. “Her brother came, and took her away.”
“She could be anywhere,” I said, “anywhere in the Empire.”
My father sighed, leaning his head on his thin distorted hand. “She should not have done that to you.”
“I don’t blame her. No man should do that to any woman…” and I clenched my teeth against the flood of self-blame. If I had been able to barricade my thoughts. If I had had myself monitored to be sure there was no such damage to the germ plasm…! could have known; I should have known, seeing that my hand had not grown back as a hand, but as a nightmare—the pain in the arm was nightmarish now, distant, dreadful, welcome, blurring the pain of losing Dio. But I did not blame her. She had borne so much for me already, and then this… no. If I had been Dio I would not have stayed for a tenday, and I had had her presence, her comfort, for a year and a half…
“We could have her found,” my father said. “There are detectives, people who specialize in tracing the lost; and citizens of Darkover do not find it exactly easy to blend into the general citizenry of the Empire—”
But he had spoken diffidently, and I shook my head.
“No. She is free to come and go. She is not my prisoner or my slave.” If the love between us had crashed in the wake of tragedy, was she to blame? Even so I was grateful to her. Two years ago, something like this would have broken me, sent me into a tailspin of agony and despair and suicidal self-pity. Now I felt grief immeasurable, but what Dio had given me could not be destroyed by her absence. I was not healed— I might never heal—but I was alive again, and I could live with whatever happened. What she had given me was a part of me forever.
“She is free to go. Someday, perhaps, she may learn to live with it, and come back to me. If she does, I will be ready. But she is not my prisoner, and if she returns it must be because she wishes to return.”