Darkover: First Contact (18 page)

 

Camilla came into the hospital slowly and rebelliously, clutching the examination slip. It was a comforting hangover from ship routine, but when, instead of the familiar face of Medic Chief Di Asturien (
at least he speaks Spanish!
) she was confronted with young Ewen Ross, she frowned with irritation.

“Where’s the Chief? You haven’t the authority to do examinations for Ship personnel!”

“The Chief’s operating on that man who was shot in the kneecap during the Ghost Wind; anyway I’m in charge of routine examinations, Camilla. What’s the matter?” His round young face was ingratiating, “won’t I do? I assure you my credentials are wonderful. Anyhow, I thought we were friends—fellow victims from the first of the Winds! Don’t damage my self-esteem!”

Against her will she laughed. “Ewen, you rascal, you’re impossible. Yes, I guess this is routine. The Chief announced the contraceptive failure a couple of months ago, and I seem to have been one of the victims. It’s just a case of putting in for an abortion.”

Ewen whistled softly. “Sorry, Camilla,” he said gently; “can’t be done.”

“But I’m
pregnant!”

“So congratulations or something,” he said, “maybe you’ll have the first child born here, or something, unless one of the Commune girls gets ahead of you.”

She heard him, frowning, not quite understanding. She said stiffly, “I guess I’ll have to take it up with the Chief after all; you evidently don’t understand the rules of the Space Service.”

His eyes held a deep pity; he understood all too well. “Di Asturien would give you the same answer,” he said gently. “Surely you know that in the Colonies abortions are performed only to save a life, or prevent the birth of a grossly defective child, and I’m not even sure we have facilities for
that
here. A high birth rate is absolutely imperative for at least the first three generations—you surely know that women volunteers aren’t even accepted for Earth Expeditionary unless they’re childbearing age and sign an agreement to have children?”

“I would be exempt, even so,” Camilla flashed, “although I didn’t volunteer for the colony at all; I was crew. But you know as well as I do that women with advanced scientific degrees are exempt—otherwise no woman with a career she valued would ever go out to the colonies! I’m going to fight this, Ewen! Damn you, I’m not going to accept forced childbearing! No woman is
forced
to have a child!”

Ewen smiled ruefully at the angry woman. He said, “Sit down, Camilla; be sensible. In the first place, love, the very fact that you have an advanced degree makes you valuable to us. We need your genes a lot more than we need your engineering skills. We won’t be needing skills like that for half a dozen generations—if then. But genes for high intelligence and mathematical ability have to be preserved in the gene pool, we can’t risk letting them die out.”

“Are you trying to tell me I’ll be
forced
to have children? Like some savage woman, some walking womb from the prehistoric planets?” Her face was white with rage. “This is completely unendurable! Every woman on the crew will go out on strike when they hear that!”

Ewen shrugged. “I doubt it,” he said. “In the first place, you’ve got the law wrong. Women are not allowed to volunteer for colonies unless they have intact genes, are of childbearing age and sign an agreement to have children—but women
over
childbearing age are
occasionally
accepted if they have medical or scientific degrees. Otherwise the end of your fertile years means the end of your chance to be accepted for a Colony—and do you know how long the waiting lists are for the Colonies? I waited four years; Heather’s parents put her name down when she was ten, and she’s twenty-three. The Over-population laws on Earth mean that some women have been on waiting lists for twelve years to have a
second
child.”

“I can’t imagine why they’d bother,” Camilla said in disgust. “One child ought to be enough for any woman, if she has anything above the neck, unless she’s a real neurotic with no independent sense of self-esteem.”

“Camilla,” Ewen said very gently, “this is biological. Even back in the twentieth century, they did experiments on rats and ghetto populations and things, and found that one of the first results of crucial social overcrowding was the failure of maternal behavior. It’s a pathology. Man is a rationalizing animal, so sociologists called it ‘Women’s Liberation’ and things like that, but what it amounted to was a pathological reaction to overpopulation and overcrowding. Women who couldn’t be allowed to have children, had to be given some other work, for the sake of their mental health. But it wears off. Women sign an agreement, when they go to the colonies, to have a minimum of two children; but most of them, once they’re out of the crowding of Earth, recover their mental and emotional health, and the average Colony family is four children—which is about right, psychologically speaking. By the time the baby comes, you’ll probably have normal hormones too, and make a good mother. If not, well, it will at least have your genes, and we’ll give it to some sterile woman to bring up for you. Trust me, Camilla.”

“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve
got
to have this baby?”

“I sure as hell am,” Ewen said, and suddenly his voice went hard, “and others too, provided you can carry them to term. There’s a one in two chance that you’ll have a miscarriage.” Steadily, unflinching, he rehearsed the statistics which MacAran had heard from Moray earlier that same day. “If we’re lucky, Camilla, we have fifty-nine fertile women now. Even if they all became pregnant this year, we’ll be lucky to have twelve living children . . . and the viable level for this colony to survive means we’ve got to bring our numbers up to about four hundred before the oldest women start losing their fertility. It’s going to be touch and go, and I have a feeling that any woman who refuses to have as many children as she can physically manage, is going to be awfully damned unpopular. Public Enemy Number One isn’t in it.”

Ewen’s voice was hard, but with the heightened sensitivity he had known ever since the first Wind blasted him wide open to the emotions of others, he realized the hideous pictures that were spinning in Camilla’s mind:
not a person, just a thing, a walking womb, a thing used for breeding, my mind gone, my skills useless . . . just a brood mare . . .

“It won’t be that bad,” he said in deep sympathy. “There will be plenty for you to do. But that’s the way it’s got to be, Camilla. I’m sure it’s worse for you than it is for some others, but it’s the same for everyone. Our survival depends on it.” He looked away from her; he could not face the blast of her agony.

She said, her lips tightening to a hard line, “Maybe it would be better
not
to survive, under conditions like that.”

“I won’t discuss that with you until you’re feeling better,” Ewen said quietly, “it’s not worth the breath. I’ll set up a prenatal examination for you with Margaret—”

“—I
won’t!”

Ewen got quickly to his feet. He signalled to a nurse behind her back and gripped her wrist in a hard grip, immobilizing her. A needle went into her arm; she looked at him with angry suspicion, her eyes already glazing slightly.

“What—”

“A harmless sedative. Supplies are short, but we can spare enough to keep you calmed down,” Ewen said calmly. “Who’s the father, Camilla? MacAran?”

“None of your affair!” she spat at him.

“Agreed, but I ought to know, for genetic records. Captain Leicester?”

“MacAran,” she said with a surge of dull anger, and suddenly, with a deep gnawing pain, she remembered . . .
how happy they had been during the Winds
. . .

Ewen looked down at her senseless form with deep regret. “Get hold of Rafael MacAran,” he said, “have him with her when she comes out of it. Maybe he can talk some sense into her.”

“How can she be so selfish?” the nurse said in horror.

“She was brought up on a space satellite,” Ewen said, “and in the Alpha colony. She joined the space service at fifteen and all her life she’s been brainwashed into thinking childbearing was something she shouldn’t be interested in. She’ll learn. It’s only a matter of time.”

But secretly he wondered how many women of the crew felt the same—sterility could be psychologically determined too—and how long it would take to overcome this conditioned fear and aversion.

Could it even be done, in time to bring them up to a viable number, on this harsh, brutal and inhospitable world?

MacAran sat beside the sleeping Camilla, thinking back over the hospital interview just past with Ewen Ross. After explaining about Camilla, Ewen had asked him only one further question:

“Do you remember having sex with anyone else during the Wind? I’m not just being idly curious, believe me. Some women, and some men, simply can’t remember, or named at least half a dozen. By putting together everything that anyone
does
remember, we can eliminate certain people; that is, for genetic records later on. For instance, if some woman names three men as
possibly
responsible for her pregnancy, we only need to blood-test three men to establish—within rough limits, that is—the actual father.”

“Only Camilla,” MacAran said, and Ewen had grinned. “At least you’re consistent. I hope you can talk that girl into some sense.”

“I can’t somehow see Camilla as much of a mother,” MacAran said slowly, feeling disloyal, and Ewen shrugged. “Does it matter? We’re going to have plenty of women either wanting children and unable to have them, miscarrying during pregnancy or losing them at birth. If she doesn’t want the child when it’s born, one thing we’re
not
going to be short of is foster mothers!”

Now that thought stirred Rafael MacAran to a slow resentment as he sat watching the drugged girl. The love between them, even at best, had arisen out of hostility, been an up-and-down thing of resentment and desire, and now the anger got out of control.
Spoiled brat,
he thought,
she’s had everything her own way all her life, and now at the first hint she might have to give way to some consideration other than her own convenience, she starts making a fuss! Damn her!

As if the violence of his angry thoughts had penetrated the thinning veils of the drug, Camilla’s gray eyes, fringed by heavy dark lashes, flicked open, and she looked around, in momentary bewilderment, at the translucent walls of the hospital dome, and MacAran by the side of her cot.

“Rafe?” A look of pain flicked over her face, and MacAran thought,
at least she’s not calling me MacAran any more.
He spoke as gently as he could. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, love. They asked me to come and sit with you a while.”

Her face hardened as memory came back; he could feel her anger and misery and it was like pain inside him, and it turned off his own resentment like a switch being turned.

“I really am sorry, Camilla. I know you didn’t want this. Hate me, if you’ve got to hate someone. It’s my fault; I wasn’t acting very responsibly, I know.”

His gentleness, his willingness to take all the blame, disarmed her. “No, Rafe,” she said painfully, “that’s not fair to you. At the time it happened I wanted it as much as you did, so there’s no point in blaming you. The trouble is, we’ve all gotten out of the
habit
of connecting pregnancy and sex, we all have a civilized attitude about it now. And of course none of us could have been
expected
to know that the regular contraceptives weren’t working.”

Rafe reached out to touch her hand, “Well, we’ll share the blame, then. But can’t you try to remember how you felt about it during the Wind? We were so happy then.”

“I was
insane
then. So were you.” The deep bitterness in her voice made him flinch with pain, not only for himself but for her. She tried to pull her hand free, but he held on to the slim fingers.

“I’m sane now—at least I think I am—and I still love you, Camilla. I haven’t words to tell you how much.”

“I should think you’d hate me.”

“I couldn’t hate you. I’m not happy that you don’t want this child,” he added, “and if we were on Earth I’d probably admit that you had a right to choose—not to bear it, if you didn’t want to. But I wouldn’t be happy about that either, and you can’t expect me to be sorry that it’s going to have a chance to live.”

“So you’re glad I’m going to be trapped into bearing it?” she flung at him, furious.

“How can I be glad about anything that makes you so miserable?” MacAran demanded in despair. “Do you think I get any satisfaction out of seeing you unhappy? It tears me up, it’s killing me! But you’re pregnant, and you’re sick, and if it makes you feel any better to say these things—I love you, and what can I do about it, except listen and wish I could say something helpful? I only wish you felt happier about it, and I wasn’t so completely helpless.”

Camilla could feel his confusion and distress as if they were her own, and this persistence of an effect she had associated only with the time of the winds shocked her out of her anger and self-pity. Slowly, she sat up in bed and reached for his hand.

“It’s not your fault, Rafe,” she said softly, “and if it makes you so unhappy for me to act like this, I’ll try to make the best of it. I can’t pretend I
want
a child, but if I have to have one—and it seems I do—I’d rather it was yours than someone else’s.” She smiled faintly, and added, “I suppose—the way things were going then—it could have been anyone, but I’m glad it was you.”

Rafe MacAran found himself unable to speak—and then realized he didn’t have to. He bent down and kissed her hand. “I’ll do everything I can to make it easier,” he promised, “and I only wish it were more.”