"Knocked righteously up. You did a good job there. Three weeks pregnant, and she's healthy as a horse, and I'll bet it's a boy."
"What do you mean, ‘you bet'? Isn't there a test or something?"
"Spoilsport. Half the fun is the speculation. She almost glows. She's so in love with you, Cadmann. So..."
Cadmann watched the slow rise and fall of Sylvia's belly. "Do you suppose that she'll be as beautiful as you are?"
"All pregnant women are beautiful. And think that they're ugly. Didn't you know that?"
Cadmann turned, staring out into the wall as though there were answers scrawled on the far side. "I'm changing, Sylvia. I can feel it. It's this planet. There are so few of us, and we know nothing about this place. When Mary Ann said that she was pregnant, I was happy... but it was different. I have a daughter—you didn't know that, did you?"
Sylvia looked at him, startled. "No—it isn't on any of the records."
He grinned. "You've been spying on me."
She reached out and took his hand. Her thumb rubbed the soft webbing between his knuckles. "I missed you too, big man."
"I was only about eighteen. Elva was twenty-four, and wanted the kid. Wanted to have it by herself. Picked me. Said that she thought I would probably make pretty good basic daddy material."
"I'd say she was right."
"I only know she had it, Sylvia. And on the little girl's third birthday, Elva sent me a holo. That was it—she didn't want to be bothered with a husband."
"Would you have married her?"
"I suppose so. And resented the hell out of her."
"There you go."
"But still, to know. To know that you have a child somewhere. Learning to walk and talk and swim and read, and everything else, and you're not there. It's a little crazy-making. Anyway, that's just background."
"What's the payoff?" Her hand closed gently on his. So warm.
"That I was shocked at how hard it hit me. The thought that Mary Ann is the mother of my child. It doesn't matter how much or how little I love her. What matters is that she's going to be the mother of my child."
"I see." Sylvia released his hand and stood up. "Well, that's what she's going to be, all right, and if preliminary workup indicates anything, she's going to be a damned healthy one. Take care of her, Cadmann. She really cares for you."
"I know." Sylvia moved a step back, just out of touching range. "I love you," he said quietly. "I wish that it meant something."
"Shh," she whispered. "We don't just belong to ourselves, Cadmann. This isn't an ordinary situation, and we're not ordinary people. It's wonderful, and it's terrible, and it makes me feel old sometimes. But it's what I chose when I came here, and I can't back out now."
"And if it was different?"
"Then... it would be different. Lay off."
"All right." The moment was past, and he let the atmosphere lighten again.
"Waking Day is day after tomorrow. Won't you stay?"
"So that's why Zack loaned me a Skeeter. It's a conspiracy. We'll be back. Right now, I think that I need to be alone. With Mary Ann."
"I understand." She held out her hands to him, and he took them. She was so close, and so achingly far away.
"Goodbye, Sylvia."
"Goodbye, Cad."
He bent and touched her lips with his, barely repressing an urge to taste more deeply, knowing that here, in the shadowed clinic, she would have resisted for only a moment, and then held him, even with the swell of another man's child between their bodies.
We're not ordinary people...
Cadmann turned and left.
Mary Ann was outside, waiting for him, and he was suddenly very happy that he hadn't given in to that impulse. He was able to meet her eyes squarely and to hold her.
Please. Let me learn to love her. God knows I need to.
But for now, the light in her eyes was enough love for the both of them, and together they headed for the Skeeter pad.
Mama had never toured the island. The others of her kind did not like visitors. The map in Mama's mind was not made up of distances, but of the changing taste of the river.
The pond reeked of samlon blood when Mama departed. She staggered with the fullness of her belly. Three days later she was hungry but hopeful. Four mud-sucking alien fish had fallen foul of her. There would be more.
The water ran clean again. Mama understood that lesson. She had tasted the burnt meat of her daughter in the water; but the decaying corpse was gone almost immediately. Whatever killed her daughter had eaten the corpse.
Once she was able to streak off the edge of a low bluff and catch a flyer rising from below. She caught another hovering just above the water. The flyers weren't timid enough here between territories. She fed when she could. If her enemy were to find her half starved, her body might betray her, holding her slow while her enemy boiled with speed. If she did not find enough food she would turn back.
She moved cautiously, in fear of ambush. For long stretches she paralleled the river, moving among rocks or trees or other cover where she could find it, returning to the river only when she must.
None of this was carefully thought out. Mama was not sapient. Emotions ran through her blood like vectors, and she followed the vector sum. Anger against the creature who killed her daughter. Hunger: the richly, interestingly populated territory upstream. Curiosity: the urge to learn and explore. Lust: the urge to mate with a gene pattern other than her own. And fear, always fear.
She moved slowly enough to learn the terrain as she traveled. Rocks, plains, grassland; a waterfall to be circled. She found fish of interesting flavor before she would have had to turn back.
Farther upstream, things began to turn weird. There were intermittent droning sounds. Chemical tastes in the water and smells on the wind: tar and hot metal and burning, unfamiliar plants, pulverized wood. Her progress slowed even farther. She kept to rocky terrain or crawled along the bottom where the river ran deep and fast. Sounds of an alien environment might cover her enemy's approach. Her enemy must come. She would find Mama; she could be watching her now; she would come like a meteor across terrain she knew like the inside of her mouth. Mama's life would depend on also knowing the terrain.
There was a cliff of hard rock, and softer rock below, and caverns the river had chewed below the waterline. One of the caverns became her base. Life was plentiful, foraging was easy; she might wait here for the enemy, for a time.
She found things pecking on dry ground. They tried to run (badly), they tried to fly (badly). She ate them all. There were bones all through the meat, and half of it was indigestible feathery stuff.
On another day she saw something far bigger flying too far away to smell. It veered away before she could study it. If she could catch something like that, the meat would surely sustain her until her quarry must come to deal with an invader.
The next day something came at her across the water.
Chapter 15
YEAR DAY
The hour when you go to learn that all is vain
And this Hope sows when Love shall never reap.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, "The House of Life
By ten in the morning, the small white disk of Tau Ceti had burned the eternal mist into fluffy white clouds that drifted across the startlingly blue sky like flocks of sheep.
It was appropriate, almost as though their sun were cooperating with the festivities, had offered them the first vivid day of the year.
In the ribboned and bannered quad beneath that hard, clear sky, a dozen food and drink booths had been erected, and from them curled the sweet aromas of half a dozen international cuisines. The stands were all but deserted now, most of the colonists drawn by the sound and movement within the dining hall.