He found her in the kitchen, carefully feeding some sort of mashed vegetable to the baby from next door. Matya was at work, she explained, and Lupe had taken the older ones to the lake for an early-morning swim. The conference of the six races? Oh, sure, she told him, that was what Matya was doing this morning, overseeing construction of new and better quarters for the dignitaries from Earth. She thought Giyt must have known about that. Everybody did. And listen, as long as he was here, what would he think if they invited Lupe and Matya over for dinner some evening soon?
He paused in the middle of lifting the lid of something that was simmering on the stove. Here was another surprise; they had never had dinner guests before. “With the five kids?”
“Maybe after the kids are asleep; they get one of the Donar girls to babysit for them sometimes. Or we could bed the kids down here, for that matter.” She picked up the baby and held it to her shoulder, gently massaging its back as she-studied Giyt’s face. “I’m just thinking we ought to get to know more people socially. Of course, if you don’t want to—”
“No, that would be fine,” he said hastily. “Maybe we should invite the Hagbarths, too.”
The baby emitted a moist burp; satisfied, Rina replaced it in its chair and resumed the feeding. After a moment she said, “Maybe . . . Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not that crazy about the Hagbarths.”
“Oh?”
“We can have them if you want them, but—well, I’ve known guys like Hoak Hagbarth. When I was hooking, you know? There was this one guy, good-looking, nice body, good manners; it made you wonder why he wanted to pay for it. We didn’t just jump in the sack. He made it like a date, brought a bottle of wine and everything, and when we got to bed he was sweet and so, well, loverly that I almost didn’t want to charge him. And then before he left he beat the shit out of me.”
“Oh,” he said again, though this time his tone was quite different—having nothing more useful to say. He got up and walked aimlessly to the door, pausing to kiss the top of Rina’s head on the way. Among the other things he didn’t know, he reflected, was much about Rina’s life before she turned up in Bal Harbor. She certainly had concealed little from him, but he had not encouraged her to talk about it beyond the simple synopsis: poor family, no future, prostitution the easiest way to make a living.
He stood on his little porch, gazing unseeingly out at the street. Down the road a pair of Slugs were running a digging machine, checking some problem with the drains. One of them turned an eyestalk on Giyt, who waved a greeting, admiring their dexterity with the tiny limbs usually concealed inside their slimy integument. He wasn’t really paying attention. Something had changed about his relationship with Rina. Was it just the fact that now they were “married”? He hadn’t thought very much about that before he popped the question, and maybe—
He turned, startled. From the kitchen Rina was screaming his name. “It’s the baby, Shammy! He’s choking! Come help me, please!”
It wasn’t really a big problem. From high school days Giyt remembered the old Heimlich maneuver, remembered to be gentle with the baby’s tiny body, on the first try got the child to cough a plug of something wet and nasty halfway across the room, and then he was fine. But Rina wasn’t satisfied. Was overcome with guilt, in fact; begged Giyt to help her rush the baby to the hospital for a checkup. Then she got on the communicator and told Lupe what had happened, wringing her hands until Lupe arrived and the doctor had reassured them both. “Ah, no, Rina,” Lupe said consolingly, “it’s not your fault. I made the damn goo; I must’ve left some lumps in it. But you did just the right thing, Evesham, and Matya and I owe you.”
And on the way out of the hospital Rina paused in front of the nursery—two tiny infants in the twenty beds for newborns—deep in thought.
“The baby’s fine,” Giyt informed her, holding her hand.
“Yes, I know,” she said, and then looked up at him. “Shammy? I might as well tell you now. I hope you won’t get sore. I’m pregnant.”
That stopped him in his tracks. “You’re pregnant?”
She looked embarrassed. “What can I tell you? I guess I forgot to renew the patch.” Then she corrected herself bravely. “No, Shammy, that’s a lie. I didn’t forget. I threw the damn things away a month ago.”
XI
The first sentients to visit the planet which Earth humans call Tupelo came from a moon of the sixth planet of the star Alpha Centauri. It appears to he inevitable in the development of any technological civilization that sooner or later it will explore space for other habitable worlds. The Centaurians, however, had a stronger motive for such projects than most. For more than five centuries they had been intermittently at war with the inhabitants of their sun’s fourth planet. The casualties had been great, the costs enormous. In desperation the Centaurians sent probes out to every nearby star in search of a habitable world that they could make their new home. Most stars had no suitable planet. The first four planets that might have been livable were ruled out because races of sentient beings already lived there; the Centaurians did not want to flee one war to risk fighting another. When they discovered Tupelo it was everything they had dreamed of: thoroughly habitable, totally uninhabited. But their colony had just begun to feel at home when another race appeared, with the same designs.
For Evesham Giyt the news of Rina’s pregnancy took considerable thinking over. He had dreamed many dreams in his life, but not one of those dreams, ever, had been about fatherhood.
Giyt didn’t find the prospect overwhelming, quite, but it was certainly well and truly whelming. It contained so many consequences and ramifications: The raising of a kid. The changing of its diapers. Teaching it the facts of life. Teaching it how to throw a ball. Carving the bird at the head of the table at Sunday dinners, with the wife at the other end and the kid in between (or might it not be the kids, plural? because once you started on that track, didn’t it get harder and harder to stop?). Babysitters; school; helping with homework; nursing through usual childhood diseases. The list was endless, because this baby business wasn’t one of those things you could just grit your teeth and get through. It entailed a total reconsideration of your whole life, and it was permanent—or at least it was likely to last as long as Giyt himself did. What it came to was a whole and totally demanding new career, and Giyt was a long way from sure how he felt about it. Sometimes he glowered dismally at the wall as he thought of all that time taken up. Sometimes he felt a curious and wholly unexpected thrill of excitement.
He wasn’t even really sure how Rina felt about it. Oh, she was conspicuously happy about being pregnant, sure. She smiled a lot, kissed him a lot, went out of her way to find excuses to mind the neighbor kids for Matya and Lupe a lot. But how did pregnancy feel? He kept stealing glances at Rina when she was looking the other way to see if she showed any signs of—of what? Of morning sickness? Of strange food cravings? Actually, of being different in any detectable way at all. He couldn’t find any such signs. Except for this boundless affectionate cheer—not all that different from her usual state—she was just the same as ever. She kept right on with her studies and her volunteer work at the human hospital and her attempts to coax the bizarre plants in their front yard to produce flowers. She hadn’t changed a thing.