But even if it had...
Chapter 25
LIFE CYCLE
And now the matchless deed's achieved,
Determined, dared, and done!
CHRISTOPHER SMART, "Song to David"
Mary Ann pushed Cadmann away. "I can do it myself. I'm having a baby, not an operation." Clumsily, she pulled her legs up onto the delivery table.
Cadmann hovered nervously. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"Fine, darling. You look a little sick, though."
"I just hate leaving the important things to someone else."
"Trust me." She inhaled harshly, then released the breath as a contraction wracked her body. "Not much—uhhh—longer now."
Jerry patted her stomach comfortingly. "Just a few minutes, little soldier. We're almost ready for you."
"It's all right." She fought to stabilize her breathing, felt her pelvis stretch painfully, then release. She gasped for breath. "Ten light-years from home and—" she labored for another breath—"we still don't have a better way to do this."
"Well, there's a Caesarean—"
"Invented in B.C. times for God's sa—ugh!" The pain stabbed again, increasing in intensity and frequency. She gripped Cadmann's hand hard as Jerry seated her on the delivery table. She settled down into the saddle at the edge that would allow her to sit up and push, with gravity assisting her pelvic muscles.
"Now breathe."
All of Mary Ann's world contracted to a pinpoint centered on the ripple of pain that started deep inside her, then blossomed as her hips stretched to make room for the new life. The feeling intensified until it was neither agony or pleasure but merely sensation—
Dimly she heard Jerry say, "Cadmann, get the hell out of here."
"But—"
"But what? Get lost. Colonel, This is probably the only place on Avalon that you aren't needed."
"Mary Ann—"
"Go, stupid," she managed to say before another wave of pain hit her. Then another, and a third that broke like a receding wave, leaving her exhausted upon the shore.
"Breathe!" Marnie urged, and wiped Mary Ann's forehead. The pain was deep and vast, but not like a pain that would mean she was hurt. Her body was built for this. There was a burning, stretching sensation that receded and then strengthened, and she wanted to scream—
"Breathe!" With a start, she realized that she had literally forgotten to inhale. Everything vanished from her universe but the killing pressure in her abdomen, the sensation of a new life struggling through the darkness.
The light separated into coherent dots, floated away. Then they weren't dots at all.
They looked like tiny fish.
Samlon?
She almost laughed. What a time to think about—
"Breathe!"
This time the sensation was strong, almost like being pulled inside out, a long, shudderingly exquisite moment beyond time. The breaths and the minutes blurred, each a discrete entity, each forgotten as soon as it was gone. Consciousness fogged. How could she stretch so, without tearing? She would die. She would faint. The moment would never end, would go on and on—
A terrified Joe swam through the darkness, followed and swallowed by a larger something, just a shadowy glass fish shape, a samlon shape, swallowed in turn by something else, larger and more voracious. A grendel swallowed them both. It looked at her with blazing diamond eyes, challenging her. It fluxed like something out of an M.C. Escher painting, and was swallowed in turn by a mere samlon, but the legs of the grendel burst through its body, its teeth pierced through, so that as she watched, as she screamed, the samlon became—
"Breathe!"
"Push!"
The fragile hallucination vanished, wavered like steam above a hot spring and was gone, and there was only the reality of breathing. She held and pushed with the strong lower abdominal muscles.
There was a shared exclamation of relief in the room, and suddenly the stretching relaxed, the burning cooled. The pain was over. An unbelievably powerful wave of physical relief swept through her.
A sensation, cool, moist, rough terry cloth against her face.
A sound: a baby... her baby, crying.
Her vision was still blurry, but she saw Marnie cleanse a squiggling red-skinned thing that wailed like a siren, and Mary Ann's heart melted.
She closed her eyes again, and a moment later Jerry pressed a warm bundle into her arms. Its face was still daubed with blood and fluid, its eyes shut tightly against the strange and terrible world it had suddenly been thrust into. Its hands, just the size of walnuts, were fisted tightly.
And Marnie whispered, "It's a girl."
She tried to speak, to say. Thank you for my daughter, or anything at all. Nothing emerged but tears.
Just north of the Colony the Miskatonic had been dammed. The new lake rippled blue in the hazy light of Tau Ceti. A half mile across the lake the water spilled over a dam. When engineering completed the new construction, power would flow from a hydroelectric plant.
The dam. The solar cells. The fusion plant. Together they would make the colonists the wealthiest human beings in the history of mankind. They would have energy, and land, and the lessons of three hundred years of industrial Earth to guide them. A few more years, and wealth untold...
"I love it," Cadmann said, looking out over their artificial lake. "Hendrick has created a miracle. It's the only lake on the island fit to swim in."
Sylvia nodded. She shielded her eyes as she peered down the asphalt shoreline.
Two vehicles came toward them at high speed. On the straight flat road they moved faster than the designers had expected, or wanted. Mary Ann and Terry were racing motorized wheelchairs. Mary Ann was a meter ahead. Avalon's newest mother didn't need the chair, but it was fun to be babied.
Cadmann seemed more at peace with the Colony since Jessica's birth. His hair was a little grayer than it had been a year ago, but he stood taller, leaner, an animate extension of this hard and beautiful land. He gazed out over the lake, to where the iron peaks of the northern mountains rose up and tickled the clouds.
"Our work is never going to be finished," he said confidently. "Think of what we found lurking in our little corner of this planet."
"Terry's worked out plans for an expedition to the mainland."
"We should go as soon as we finish some of the other work. There's a lot to catch up on."
Her eyes searched the sky, "God, I feel so tied to this planet now. I wouldn't want to leave. I really wouldn't."
There was a shout from the edge of the lake. Mary Ann had pulled ahead of Terry.
"It's all right, isn't it?" Cadmann asked. "About us. About them."
"Absolutely."
"I look at Mary Ann. I think about Jessie, a bit of me that will go on after I'm gone. Everything just seems a lot righter. And she gave me that gift."
"I'm glad that we're friends."
"We couldn't be anything else, Sylvia."
She jumped: a shock wave as loud and sudden as a clap of thunder reverberated across the plain.
Mary Ann shrieked and pointed up into the sky. Cadmann whipped his binoculars up. "There she is. Don't you just love rocket ships? Bring her down, Stu!"
Sylvia spotted a thread of vapor trail as the Minerva began its descent. Now its shape could be seen: bastard birth of airplane and insurance building, the blunt bucket of a craft that had brought them down a precious few at a time, and delivered them to Avalon without an injury or mishap.
It hit the lake and skimmed across it like a drop of water on a white-hot plate. It had almost reached shore before its wings touched the glistening blue surface. Then clouds of steam rose up with a roar like a muted waterfall. It maneuvered the rest of the way in short bursts.