She was actually talking baby talk to the infant. Genuine oogly-googly sounds without enough consonant8 m them. Then she lifted the child up in its little trailing baby dress and handed him over.
The kid's hairless little noggin was in a little gray skullcap, kind of like a stuffed baked mushroom. Alex was no connoisseur of infants, but even he could tell that his little nephew-Michael Gregory Mulcahey-was not an attractive child. It was hard to tell, with the baby's squashed, cartilaginous little face, but he seemed to have the worst features of both his parents: Juanita's square jaw and Mulcahey's odd, bull-like forehead.
"Gosh, he's really cute," Alex said. The child reacted with a fitful look and vigorous kicking. There was nothing wrong with the infant's legs. The kid had legs like a centaur.
"You can't believe it, can you?" Jane said, and smiled.
"No. Not really. I mean, not until now."
"Neither could I. I think of all the times I almost took that abortifacient thing, you know. I actually put that pill u~side my mouth once. I was gonna swallow it, and my period was gonna come back, and Jerry and me were gonna be exactly the same, and everything was going to be extremely lifelike. And if I didn't eat that pill, then the consequences were gonna be unimaginable and extremely grave! And I chose consequences, Alex, I did it all on purpose, just like I knew what I was doing. And now I have this little stranger in my life. Only he's not a little stranger at all. He's my baby."
"I 5CC."
"I love my baby, Alex. I don't just sort of love him, I really love my baby, I love him desperately, we both do. We dote on him. I want to have another baby."
"Really."
"Childbirth's not that bad. It's really interesting. I kind of liked childbirth actually. It felt really intense and important."
"I guess it would," Alex said. "I want Sylvia to see my nephew."
JANE FOLLOWED HER brother back to the living room. He carried the child as if Michael Gregory was a wet bag full of live frogs. The strange girl peeled her reptile gaze from the television, and her eyes shot from the baby, to Alex, to Jane, to the baby again, and then to Jane once more, with a look of such dark and curdled envy and hatred that Jane felt stunned.
"He's really cute," the girl said. "Thanks."
"That's a nice hat he's got too." "Thank you, Sylvia."
"That's okay." She started watching TV again.
Jane carried the baby back to the nursery and put him down. He'd just had his feeding. The baby was good about being handled. He liked to save his most energetic screamings for about 3 A.M.
"I guess her reaction seemed strange," Alex said. "But babies are kind of a funny topic for women with genetic disorders."
"She really wanted to see the baby, though. She said she did."
"It's okay. Sylvia is fine."
"Did you have the baby scanned for disorders?"
"Alex..." She hesitated. "That's kind of an expensive proposition."
"Not for me. I know ways, I have contacts. Really, it's no problem; just slip me a little sample, you know, a frozen scraping off the inside of the cheek, we can get a genome rundown started right away, hit the high points, all the major fault centers. Reasonable rates. You really ought to have him scanned, Jane. His uncle has a disorder."
"We're not very lucky people, are we, Alex?"
"We're alive. That's lucky."
"We're not lucky, Alex. This is not a lucky time. We're alive, and I'm glad we're alive, but we're people of disaster. We'll never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever."
"No," he said. He drew a breath. A good, deep breath. "jane. I came here to Austin because I needed to tell you something. I wanted to thank you, Jane. Thank you for saving my life."
"De nada."
"No, Jane, it was a hit. You could have let me be, like I was telling you to do, and those quacks would have killed me in that black-market clinica. But you came after me, and you got me, and you even looked after me. And even though we were close to death, and surrounded by death, and we chased deadly things, we both came out alive. We're survivors, and look, there's another one of us now."
She grabbed his arm. "You want to tell me something, Alejandro? All right. Tell me something that I really want to hear." She tugged him to the side of the baby's crib. "Tell me that's your family, Alex. Tell me you'll help me look after him, like he was family."
"Sure he's family. He's my nephew. I'm proud of him."
"No, not that way. I mean the real way. I mean look after him, Alex, really care about him, like when I'm dead, and Jerry's dead, and this city is smashed, and everyone is sick and dying, and you don't even personally like him very much. But you still care anyway, and you still save him."
"Okay, Janey," Alex said slowly. "That's only fair. It's a bargain."
"No! Not a bargain, not a money thing, I don't want that from you or from anyone. I want a real promise from you, I want you to swear to me so that I'll never doubt you.
He looked at her. Her face was tight and her eyes were clouded, and he realized, with a strange little jolt of surprise, that his sister was truly afraid. Juanita had come to know and understand real fear. She was more afraid for this little bundle in the crib than she had ever been for herself. Or for her friends, or for her husband, or for anyone. She had a hostage to fortune now. That baby's sweaty little monkey hands had gripped her soul.
"All right," he said. He raised his right hand, solemnly. "Juanita Unger Mulcahey, I promise you that I'll look after your son, and all your children. I swear it on our mother's grave. Te lo juro por Ia tumba de nuestra mad re."
"That's good, Alex." She relaxed, a little. "I really believed you when you said it that way."
Voices came from the front of the house. Jerry had come home.
Alex went to meet him in the front room.
"This is a pleasant surprise," Jerry boomed. He and Alex shook hands.
Jerry had lost weight. He'd lost the great heaps of muscle on his shoulders, and his arms and legs were of relatively normal dimensions, and his gut looked like the gut of a family man in his thirties. He'd lost more hair, and the sides of the beard were gone now; he had a professorial Vandyke, and a real haircut. He had a shirt, suit jacket and tie, and a leather valise.
"They must be keeping you busy, Jerry."
"Oh yes. And you?"
"I'm getting into genetics."
"Really. That's interesting, Alex."
"I felt I had to." He looked hard into Jerry's eyes. Maybe he could, for the first time ever, make some kind of human contact there. "You see, Jerry, genetic treatment changed me so profoundly, I felt I just had to comprehend it. And I mean really understand it, not just get my hands on it and hack at it, but genuinely understand the science. It's a difficult field, but I think I'm up to the challenge. If I work at it hard, I can really learn it." He shrugged. "Of course, ~I still have to go through all that equivalency nonsense first."
"Right," Jerry said, clear-eyed and nodding sympathetically, "the academic proprieties." Nothing was wrong, and no one was missing, and there were no ghosts at this banquet, and no deep dark secrets, and for good old brother-in-law Jerry, life was just life.
"Done any storm work lately, Jerry?"
"Of course! The F-6! Extremely well documented. Enough material there for a lifetime."
Jane spoke up. "Nobody believed it would happen, even though he said it would. And now he's trying to explain to them why it stopped."