But it wasn't he. It wasn't any he, it was six-year-old Molomy, one of Flo's numerous children and, I had always thought, about the sweetest of them. She popped her head out of the coverlet, grinning, as pretty a poppet as Flo had ever pupped. "S'prise, Aunt Evel" she cried. "Can I come back and work for you some more?"
I pulled my shorts on under my robe (how they laughed at Aunt Eve's robe!), dropped a blouse over my head, and sat down beside her. "Well, sure you can, honey," I said, extremely pleased. Molomy had been one of my very favorites, and it was quite a blow when, at four and a half or so, she had decided farming was too dumb for her to stay with and switched over to Shef and orbital dynamics. "I'm a little surprised, though," I added.
"I'm pregnant!" she said proudly. "So I want to tend my own baby the first time—isn't that the way you all used to do it, back on Earth?"
By the time I had explained to her that, yes, we all used to tend our own babies before they were born, but not exactly in the same way, I had got some more information out of her. She wasn't shy about it. She prattled gaily all the way to the farm plots. She just wasn't sure. She thought Jeron was the father, but of course she couldn't be positive until Aunt Flo or Uncle Ski removed the embryo and put it in the cabbage patch, when they would test it and let her know—and change it around any way she wanted, if she wanted, but she didn't really think she wanted to edit it, did I agree?, except of course to make sure that it had her aptitude for navigation and maybe a handful of other useful traits, because your first baby always ought to be kind of natural, as much as possible, didn't I agree?
I agreed. I put her to work, in charge of all ten of the other little girls, to keep them busy while I thought things out.
Actually Molomy was not the first of the girls to come up pregnant, or even the twentieth. Some of the others had been younger at the time than she. It wasn't Molomy I was worried about. Eight weeks after conception someone would take the fetus and implant it in a vegetable womb, and Molomy would be none the worse. What I was worried about was Jeron. He was so awfully young to be a father!
I was not getting much work out of my team that morning; Molomy's news was too exciting. They were all patting her belly and listening to her navel, and I could see the jealousy growing behind their pretty, bright, two-year-old eyes. I could even feel a little jealousy growing behind my own.
Maybe not really jealousy. I certainly didn't want to change places with them! But something unwelcome.
Was it because I felt threatened—because I was not ready to be a grandmother? (But actually I had been at least twice before that—but not with Jeron as the father.) Was it just that I was sorry for them, losing their childhood so early?
Only none of them were really children. They began to talk at six months, to read at two, to write legibly at two and a half—to make love at six or seven, sometimes earlier than that.
Early sexual maturity was bred into almost all the kids, from the fifth cohort on. Back in the early days when we were all primaparas and the simple common miracle of a child was excitement enough, we took what came. But then Flo and my quirky husband decided to play a more complicated game. They spliced and blended and turned out fifteen identical sibs from four mothers and three fathers. It was an experiment, Jim said (he was still talking in those days),-to see if tailored genes could indeed produce absolute genetic clones, and so they did. I could not tell my own babies from the other twelve, and all fifteen were cross-tolerant of implants and transfusions. After that we got all sorts of things, but one of the designed traits for almost everybody was rapid maturation.
Which Ringo now proved—two years old, remember! Her nose was out of joint with Molomy's news, and she stood up and walked toward me: "I can't work anymore, Eve," she piped in her clear, sweet voice, bending her neck to look up at me, "because I have to go pick a tampon. I decided to menstruate today."
"Me too!" cried Odd, delighted by the idea, and so did two or three of the others, crowding around me and all chirping at once.
I started to give them my little menarche speech, about how it was all a natural function and they shouldn't worry (but who could think they were worrying?), and it should not interfere with most of their normal activities, especially including doing their work (but they had other ideas than that!) . . . and discovered none of them were listening.
So I dismissed them all for the day, my temper ragged. I had a small new agricultural experiment of my own that had looked as though it was ripening nicely, and I decided it was as good a time as any to test it out.
We had four sections added onto the habitat by then— nearly a mile along its axis—and the internal diameter was fifteen hundred feet. After the tenement squalor of the Constitution even the first section we moved into seemed like the endless plains of Iowa; by now every one of us, kids and all, had about seven acres to play with. So I hadn't had any trouble finding a section, a quarter of the way around the swell of the third section, where soil was laid and dewposts were moistening it from the water in the air (we didn't have much rain, you see, so we had to trick the water out another way)—and nobody usually came.
Nobody would have done anything to my crops, of course. But I do have this primitive need for privacy now and then, and some of my needs I am not proud of.
This particular patch was planted in a little invention of my own. It started out, basically, as watermelons; but I put a hard shell on them like coconuts, sweetened the pulp a little, injected each one with yeasts and a few other things—and, just the way I wanted it to come out, when I poked a hole in one end. of the nuts, what came out was a really very satisfactory kind of beer.
I had planted rhubarb trees around for privacy, and they already made a sort of grove twice as tall as I was, and I lay back in the stripy sunlight from Alpha and tried another nut, and another, and with each one I felt a little better . . . up until the time I saw somebody sailing purposefully in my general direction, big, bounding leaps of ten yards at a time, and observed that it was Jeron.
I used the word "privacy," but in fact there's not a lot of it in Alpha-Aleph. Not counting the little bit that the old Constitution hid by being suspended at the center of the cylinder, there was hardly any part of the habitat that was not directly visible to every other part. I could see my own little house, with the blue and white honeysuckle growing over it, and the garden plots where the experimental plantings took place, and motionless Ann, still silent in her padmasana position; I could even see the bright red bounding dot that was Flo, pursuing some other bounding dot that I could not recognize for sure, but looked a lot like my husband; and the bad part of all that was that, if it were not for the rhubarb trees, they could all see me, too. Especially Jeron would, as soon as he got a little closer, and I didn't want to see Jeron. More accurately, I didn't want him to see his mother drunk.
Uncle Ghost saved me. Jeron brought up short, listening to what 1 could not see, scowling. "You sure?" he demanded. "I thought I saw her in her malt-nuts." He listened again, to a whisper I could not hear, said something annoyed and turned away.
I cracked another malt-nut and lay back, relaxing.
I was feeling grouchy, and even the malt-nuts were only blurring my discontent, not curing it. Discontent with what? With everything. With our habitat, with my work, with everyone around me. With myself. I was about as close to a hermit as a human being could get in Alpha-Aleph, and I was getting tired of it. If Shef and Ski, sometimes even Jim, had not come calling every once in a while at night, I would have had almost no contact with my own age group. And with Shef and Ski and Jim I rarely did much talking. I knew most of what was going on in our little community; we were too small for anything to be remote. But I knew it in the way I used to know what was happening in Washington by watching the network news. Most of it seemed no more relevant to personal me.