They didn't stop thinking about it, though. Long after Estrella had gone to sleep, Stan lay awake, thinking, until he heard the sound of one of the handling machines coming, then going away again, heard no sound of anyone else getting up to see what the machine had left, and dismissed it from his mind until he had to get up to pee.
It was, he thought, pretty nearly time to fill in this slit trench and start a new one. Wondering if some of the Old Ones could be taught to dig a latrine, he was strolling back under the stars when he caught sight of what the machines had left. It was a simple record fan, set down next to the desk, on top of a sheet of blue-glowing Heechee metal so that it was conspicuous in the dark.
Estrella was still sound asleep, her cheek on her two joined hands and very faintly snoring. He debated waking her up to see. Curiosity won out. He juggled the fan into the flower-holder receptacle as he had been taught, and at once a picture sprang up.
What he had there, he discovered, was an actual book. A book that was in the English language, perhaps once the property of one of Wan's organic lovers, back when they were all still organic. And its title was From Zero to Thirty-nine: The Weeks of a Pregnancy.
It was the work he had longed for, the gift of one of Wan's people. Which one Stan could not guess, but whoever it was had earned a deep gratitude. He couldn't wait until morning to dip into it.
His intention was to read it from the beginning, but as he scrolled through the pages it became evident that the beginning dealt with things that had already happened. Trying to read about them made his own eyelids droop. He promised himself that one day quite soon he would read every word, but meanwhile he sped through the chapters. There was one for each week, and each chapter had a drawing of what the unborn child should look like ill that point. The book was no Stork, of course. But it was a lot better than anything he had had before. He scrolled right through to the end of that part with pleasure.
Then he turned to another page and the pleasure rapidly diminished. The next chapter was on the possibility of miscarriages.
Stan was astonished to find how many things could cause a woman to lose her baby, from lupus (whatever that was) to congenital heart disease. As well as bacterial vaginosis (whatever that was), and even things like high fever and smoking (whatever that was.) Furthermore, the immune systems of some women might mistake the embryo for an invading microorganism, and do their best to destroy it. Some women might have a malformed uterus, or some sort of growth there, and that might be just as deadly.
How could he tell if Estrella had any of those things? He couldn't. Sigfrid might have been able to tell, or Dr. Kusmeroglu, but neither of them was present.
He turned the book off and stared up at the unfamiliar stars in the night sky of Arabella. He was no longer at all sleepy. He was worried. It occurred to him that there was more to the book, possibly even some healing thing for it to say. He scrolled through the book again, looking for cheer.
It wasn't there.
What he found was even worse than the chapter on miscarriages. It wasn't just that a baby might be lost. It was more horrible by far. The baby might be born, but born as a monster. Born with two heads! Or born as a Cyclops, with a single great central eye. Or as a kind of preparation for a student course in anatomy, with the internal organs on the outside of the body; or with a tiny head that held no brain at all; or—
Oh, there was no limit to the things that could go wrong! For instance, what about twins? They did not always turn out to be a lovably cute pair. Sometimes what you got was two babies joined together at skull or spine. Or one twin so ravaged by the other's hunger that it was born no bigger than a finger, sometimes as a tiny, hideous animalcule still attached to the larger twin.
And even if none of those terrible disasters happened, what could occur if the baby simply took a little longer to be born? With no more than an extra week or two in the womb it could arrive with skin cracked or peeling, or thin and wrinkled, likely enough having moved its little bowels while still unborn, so that it was stained green with meconium, which it might well have inhaled ... likely gasping for breath ... likely born with a more difficult labor, and thus with the greater chance of the baby twisting itself into strangulation inside the coils of the umbilical cord.
Stan raised his horrified eyes from the book because, two meters away, Estrella was stirring. He quickly turned the book off again, debated destroying it, but was too late. "Hon?" she said drowsily. "What are you doing?"
"I had to pee," he told her, desperately looking for a hiding place for the book.
"Well, come back to bed," she ordered.
"In a minute." The only place to put the book was in one of those little closets at the base of the desk. He shoved it in, hoping to find a better place in the morning, and slid into the sleeping bag next to her warm, soft body.
It was becoming a tight fit, but she commanded, "Put your arms around me," and he did, the two of them spooned together under the bright stars of no constellations Stan had ever seen before. Over the top of the mountain the sky was paling, the sun—whatever nameless sun that was— almost ready to rise.
Estrella was asleep again already. Not Stan. Stan had lost any desire to sleep at all, his mind filled with thoughts about the woman next to him, and the growing organism in her belly, and how he was going to deal with such matters as the kind of pregnancy disorders he had been reading about, or indeed with simple childbirth and infant care, in this place where no baby had been born for thousands of years.
There was no good answer to that. And half an hour later, leaving Estrella sleeping behind him, Stan began the long climb up the mountain.
Climbing the slope was harder than he had expected. Forty-five minutes later he was covered with dirt and blood from the dozen slips and slides that had come when he lost footing on a rock, or tripped over some of the tangled undergrowth. Most of the scratches were still bleeding. .
But now in the dawnlight the ship, bright red and icy blue, gleamed clearer than he had ever seen it before. Panting, he paused for a moment before his last push. Between him and the ship was that outcrop of tumbled rocks, edges ominously jagged. There was an excellent chance of slipping and falling as he tried to cross it. More than that, he was right about where Wan's punishing nerve weapon felled the others who had tried the climb.
He had not forgotten that the punishment could be death.
He stopped cold. It had just penetrated his mind that the word "death," so easily spoken by those who had no immediate fear of it, might have a quite literal meaning for him. He might not be alive when the sun rose at the end of this night. Nor was there any Here After down the hill, nor was it likely that any of Wan's people would risk displeasure by attempting to machine-store him.
No. What dead meant to him in this place was never being alive in any form ever again. It meant never touching his living daughter, never finishing his lessons with Socrates—never doing anything at all that took an act on his part, nothing but lying forever in Arabella's unfriendly soil until all the parts of him had decayed away.
He swallowed, and then he found another fear.
Even if he did gain entrance to the spacecraft, what would happen then? The little bit he remembered of the Gateway ships and of Achiever's instructions to Geoffrey no longer seemed even remotely adequate. He might inadvertently fly the ship a thousand kilometers away and be unable to get back. Or crash it into the mountain. Or, most likely of all, never get it off the ground in the first place. Every one of those modes of failure seemed more likely than that he would somehow succeed in flying it, landing it and boarding all the captives—or at least boarding Estrella, with either Salt or Achiever to fly the thing home. He considered all those chances, then sighed and got back in crawling position—