Arnie fixed me with a disgusted stare and said, “I don’t have time for your games. If you’re up to it, get to work. What I need is for you to hold her hand like the decent guy you are, okay? Encourage her? And await instructions. I’ll need your help with the umbilical cord and the placenta.”
I was humbled, because I hadn’t intended to be the wretch I had become on Mars. I got down on the soil and dust that formed the floor of the greenhouse. I became an eager toiler in the delivery room.
“Laurie,” I said, delicately, “how you doing?”
Between hurried breaths, she said, “Worse than the first day of zero gravity training.”
“It’s going to be over soon,” I said. “Look at it that way. And you won’t have to smile for the cameras after.”
Arnie was nervously mumbling orders, as if he had a phalanx of trained residents behind him, awaiting his instruction, all of the mumbling orbiting around this question: Why had labor begun so early? It would take a while, it would take several more births, before it would be possible to say whether environmental factors played some kind of role in how children were born on Mars. We just don’t know yet, he was saying nervously. It could, of course, he muttered to himself, just be this particular fetus. “Come on, honey, another push, if you can manage, and the head will be—”
I held Laurie’s hand. She wept. And cried out. “The second’s supposed to be easier!”
I said, “It’s a moment in history, Laurie. A moment in history. Think of what you’re doing for everyone. People back home. This is a great and selfless act. This is something that was going to happen, that had to happen, and you’re the person who’s doing it. You’re bringing into being the first Martian of higher intelligence. The first mammalian Martian. Did you think this was going to happen back when you were a kid? Growing up in… Where did you grow up, again? I don’t think you had any idea.” And I just kept blathering, though it was hard to feel as upbeat as required. I could see that Arnie, despite his worry, was also excited, in the way an expectant father might be, even when that father is on a deserted planet with a dwindling supply of food, fuel, and allies. It’s just hard not to think of a baby as some kind of optimistic statement. I don’t know if NASA felt that way about it, but still. The baby’s head, in due course, emerged from the squatting, contracting Laurie. Then it was just about getting the shoulders through.
“Laurie,” I went on, “they’re preparing the online news portfolios back home. I swear they are. I actually talked to them. Did I tell you that? The boobs at the agency. Did I tell you? I talked to them, and so they are up to speed. On the developments. Anyway, you can bet they know about this. They have their ways, apparently, of knowing everything that’s going on. They have their overflights. Just keep breathing, that’s it. Push a little harder now. This is the hard part, Laurie, just push a little harder. On Earth people are going to be making films about this, and writing testimonials, singing songs.”
“Jed,” she said, “please be quiet?”
I was thinking about Ginger, I guess. I was assisting, but I was thinking about my daughter. I was wondering if Ginger was worrying, because Ginger kept up on the Mars mission. Or she used to. Maybe now her teenage life was too consuming, with its many gossipy e-mails and videoconferencing conversations rocketing around the globe, conversations her mother wasn’t keeping up on.
Perhaps it will come as no surprise that I was late for Ginger’s birth. Let me use this space to atone. I was in the armed forces at the time. I left behind a spring offensive in Tajikistan, where we were guarding the natural-gas pipelines with 50,000 NATO troops under German command. I’d been involved in covert operations but had been wounded in action. In a ridiculous way. A scimitar had been applied to me as I walked down a busy street in that nation’s capital. There’d been some haggling over a black market case of vodka. The outcome of this haggling did not favor the peddler. Anyway, this injury, which left a rather sexy scar on my left shoulder blade, was enough to allow me to return home to see the miraculous birth of Ginger Stark-Richards. Have I mentioned how much I loved my wife, Pogey Stark-Richards, in those days? My wife’s strength was immense; she just put up with a lot, in her pursuit of this idea of family, kids. She put up, I mean, with me.
I knew that there was much about me that repelled the average person, things that I seemed powerless to correct, no matter my efforts. My wife still looked at me with a brightened smile when I came home from whatever dangerous foreign adventure I was on. I’d seen guts spilling out of every friend and enemy. I’d seen men tortured until they begged to die. There were things about my character that were annealed in the foundry of international conflict, things that resisted civilizing. I was, moreover, responsible for my brother’s death, or that was the burden that I had carried around so many years, on bombing raids near and far. My wife was the only one who could see through the craggy, dangerous straits of my character to know of my many regrets and my earnest desire to improve.
Maybe she would have hung in there a little longer had I turned up to see the baby whelped. But there were a solid twenty-four hours’ worth of flights required to get me from Tajikistan to Gainesville, FL, where we were living. It took blizzard conditions in only one of the relevant locations to make the trip a bust. But in addition to blizzard conditions, I spent three hours in an airport in Estonia, doubled over on a commode, wondering which bits of my brains were being shat out. By the time I changed planes in New York, I had that feeling that everything boorish about me had been evacuated. And yet despite all this, I did come running into the delivery room to find little Ginger, fully rinsed of her glutinous body shampoo and wrapped in some baby’s textile, resting on my wife’s bosom. My wife was smiling her exhausted smile, and she welcomed me though I deserved no welcome.
Back here on Mars, Laurie gave one last mighty heave in her pelvic girdle, straining at her ligaments, and the shoulders of the child seemed to pass through. So it seemed from where I knelt, which admittedly was not an obstetrical angle. Arnie’s demeanor, at once methodical and professional, lightened considerably, as the rest of the child transited quickly out. Soon there was a bloody papoose in Arnie’s lap, by which humankind proved that it could, after all, be Martian.
He said, while toweling off the dumpling, “Jed, help her with the afterbirth, please.” There was the requisite cutting of the cord. And Arnie plunged his little girl into a bucket. Pulled her out of the bath and then warmed her in his arms until she gasped her first breath.
I suppose I was not prepared for the amount of efflux that still remained to pass from the mother, attached to the cord, and probably this is because I had conspired to miss out on Ginger’s birth. Laurie elected again to bite down on a piece of rawhide that had been produced from some interplanetary valise, and in this posture she rid herself of the afterbirth. She was sweating and weeping. With joy, I suppose.
“It’s a girl?” I said.
“It’s a girl,” Arnie said.
“It’s a girl,” Laurie said, as if somehow reassuring herself. “Just what we don’t need around here, more men.”
I took to cleaning up the various rags and towels. Out the window of the greenhouse, I could see Phobos, looking every bit the Idaho potato, crossing east over our city of the plains. “Does she have a name?”
“She does,” Arnie said, suturing up a spot in Laurie, who was holding the baby and managing to be uncomplaining.
“And are you going to tell me the name?”
Arnie said, “Her name is Prima.”