“I ran back outside, startled.
“Another crew noticed, and they took the trouble to yell some abuse my way. What kind of slayer got scared like a little boy? I laughed off the jokes, and when they returned to their work, I began to study the stomach and intestines. Corona guts are usually a nice round ring, simple and tidy. But not inside her. There were turns I’d never seen before. There was a giant pocket full of acid and bad stinks and I don’t know how many kinds of filth. The mystery object was tucked inside that pocket, and beside it were three odd shapes, each quite a bit smaller than the one that I saw first. I don’t know why, but I picked up the tiniest specimen. It was round and warm and very hard on the outside, like callused skin, and it smelled wicked as can be. Nobody was watching me. I stripped off my shirt and wrapped the object inside it before walking outside and over the next ridge, then down into a gully where nobody was watching, where coral sands made a soft flat space.
“That’s where I put down what I had taken. What wasn’t mine. Not even slayers are allowed to claim any part of the corona without permission, but I was angry about the bonuses, and I was very, very curious. That simple chunk of meat was something that the corona had eaten but never digested, which was bizarre, and I had never seen such a thing, and I had never heard of such of thing, and I wanted one good long look before I surrendered the prize.”
Father hesitated, and he sighed. The approaching ship was too big to be a blimp. It had a framework made of corona bones, and it was big enough to seem big though it was still a long ways off. Steady strong engine sounds gave the air a slight and very pleasant hum.
“What happened?” Seldom asked.
“Yeah, what?” Elata asked.
Father used a voice that would never stop being amazed. “I knelt down in the dark and watched that little blob,” he said, staring at Diamond. “I saw its shape change. The transformation took time. There didn’t seem to be any sense to what I was watching. But there were differences in its appearance, and new shapes emerged, and I touched the object on one end and felt what could have been bone where twenty recitations earlier there was nothing. Then the little arms pulled free, and legs that were bent back and newly born straightened out suddenly and this sweet, half-formed face looked up at me. And then you coughed—a hard big cough that threw stinking liquids over my face—and as soon as your lungs cleared, you said words to me. Words I’ve never heard before, or since.”
Diamond kept watching his toes. Pieces of this story seemed familiar, or his imagination was painting pictures.
“Night ended,” his father said. “The corona forest that grew in a day turned to steam and burst through the demon floor. Warm water rose over the reef and me, and over you, and I sheltered you with my body. When the worst of the rain passed, you looked like a two-hundred-day old baby—oddly shaped but healthy enough to smile at me—and I hid you under my coat again and walked past the remains of the corona. The stomach was still exposed, but those other three mysteries were gone. I never found out who took them. I emptied my toolbox and set you inside, wrapped in a towel, and you were quiet enough to scare me on the journey home. But nobody noticed how I carried that old box, carefully and with both hands. I carried it all the way to our house, and I stepped through the curtain you saw today for the first time, and your mother looked at me and knew something was happening. The first words that I said were, ‘You aren’t going outside for a few days.’
“ ‘Why not?’ she asked.
“ ‘You’re pregnant. Not far along, and you’re going to give birth early.’
“She stared at the toolbox, and I opened it. And there you lay, smiling and patient and peculiar beyond belief. This was nine hundred and eighty-three days ago. And when your mother looked at me again, I knew. I just knew. You were ours, and we belonged to you, and we would never surrender one another. Certainly not without waging a war, I would think.”
THIRTEEN
Diamond memorized each word and the shifting sounds of his father’s steady urgent voice, and he saw the keen amazement of the other faces hearing the same story. There was deep importance in what had just been told but he understood very little. This day was already full of complications and the unexpected, and no matter how bright he might be, this was too much. Yes, his father discovered him inside a corona’s stomach. That seemed incredible to others but felt utterly reasonable to him. Seldom might have nodded smartly and said such things happen every day, and Diamond would have believed him. “I could never, ever have dreamed this,” said Master Nissim. Yet the miracle boy had no doubts, no complaints. This was just another ingredient to a world too big to comprehend. It didn’t even occur to Diamond that Father wasn’t his true father. No story could diminish the man’s importance in his life. “You were ours, and we belonged to you, and we would never surrender one another.” Mother was just as real, just as vital, and he was thinking only about her when the long silver airship let loose a shrill wail, announcing its momentous arrival.
“Come on,” Father said, leading them back up the valley.
Nobody else spoke. Faces thoughtful and looking at the ground, no one ready to look Diamond in the eyes. He stared at the spent, badly eroded coral. He couldn’t remember walking here before. And he had no memory of riding inside the closed toolbox, much less being trapped in the belly of a monster. But he saw his mother’s face hovering, and Father kneeling beside her, and it was possible to believe that he could feel the cold metal against his bare feet and baby hands. Maybe it wasn’t a genuine memory but it felt authentic, and he clung the image, convincing himself that it was his birth, or at least his beginning.
The airship passed directly overhead, the air drumming and the ground shaking as the vast engines throttled down.
The men from Father’s crew were running away from the dead corona, running straight at them.
The horn sounded once again, followed by an explosion and bright flash. A steel anchor was catapulted at the ground, slicing into the coral and biting hard, and then a thick steel rope fell after it, building a gray pile taller than any man.
The running men dropped their heads and ran faster. Father waved and shouted a warning as two more anchors were launched, one from the bow and one from close to the stern.
The ground to their right exploded—dust and gravel lifting high and falling down on them.
Then the propellers reversed, screaming with a different voice as they killed the last of the momentum.
Father cursed and looked up.
His men came close, and he told them, “They just want us scared.”
“We are scared,” one man said.
The others laughed.
Father kept looking up.
“We’re done with the chores,” said the first man. He was oldest and seemed in charge of everyone but Father. “What’s next?”
A few breaths of hydrogen were vented and the metal ropes were winched tight, killing the slack and testing the anchors before the ship was yanked low enough to deploy the gangway.
“Where do you want the glands?” the man asked.
Father looked at them, considering.
The men smiled at him and at Diamond, every one of them did, and the youngest face said, “Show us that foot again.”
Diamond lifted his leg, drawing circles with his toes.