Freedom’s Choice (32 page)

“Hmmm, yes, I see,” Joe said, without explaining his cryptic remark as he gazed out the starboard side in the pilot's compartment. “Real rock!” He pointed now to a rocky ridge that ran obliquely across below them, like vertebrae, with dips and spires. “Dinosaur bones.”

“Hmmm, that's what they do look like,” Kris agreed.

Whitby insisted that they land and spend one night at the base of that range, where the spatial maps indicated one of the ore deposits. “We should know where copper and zinc are and that's what is down there. If the lodes are near the surface, it might be advantageous to take a week or so to work up a cargo.”

So they landed, and it was hot.

“Just like home in the dry,” Sarah said ecstatically, throwing her arms back, her gravid belly out, and turning her face up to the sun.

“Good way to get sunstroke,” Joe said, and slammed her reed-weave hat on her head. “We are not, I repeat, we are not delivering you prematurely in the confines of Baby.”

“Having the baby in the Baby?” Sarah was off on a fit of the giggles.

Whitby, Leila, Joe, and Zainal went off to try and locate the ore, laden with bottles for samples and soil. Sarah and Kris, who found the heat especially enervating, found what shade they could in the lee of Baby by digging out enough soil under the landing vanes to sit on blankets. Kris dozed off while Sarah dragged her hands through the scattered rocks, trying to find interesting ones.

Sarah, too, dozed off and they were both awakened by the laughter of the returning prospectors. Each carried some sort of dead animal resembling a large rat.

Kris recoiled when Zainal plunked three brace beside
her. The pelts caught her attention because they were mottled in soft sandy shades.

“Camouflage? From what?” she said, venturing to touch the nearest. It was rough with dirt and sand.

“Burrowers,” Joe said succinctly, “but they test edible. We thought we'd give them a try. Live on insects, of which this continent has a multitude. I saw twenty-five varieties and caught,” and he held up several bottles tied together to prevent breakage, “only a few for closer examination. You never know what might be useful.” He grinned wickedly. “Or tasty. And nutritious.”

“How would you know? You never hunted outback with the aborigines,” Sarah said.

“Neither did you.”

“But I did a paper on the ones the aborigines favor,” she replied hotly, and they were off again.

The desert burrowers—Kris declined to think of them as rats—were skinned and, after Joe did further tests on the equipment in Baby, were cooked in the galley and served as part of the evening meal. The flesh was different in texture and taste from anything else that Botany had provided: sort of nutty and sleek. Almost difficult to bite into.

Twilight brought out their natural predators, batlike creatures who swooped on long triangular wings from rocky aeries to catch the burrowers. The cooler air encouraged a different set of insects to appear, ones that bit and itched and forced everyone to take refuge in the scout ship. But not before they saw the desert burrowers in action, making incredible leaps into the air to catch their meal on tongues that elongated to make the capture, and seeming to disappear from sight the moment they heard bat wings above them.

“We've some like that on ol' Earth,” Joe remarked, watching from the scout.

The men were in general pleased with their prospecting and had marked the areas with the blue paint, though
Whitby and Joe argued about its durability in the unremitting sun.

“Well, we'll wear-test it good, then,” Joe said, shrugging. “And we've the coordinates anyway.”

Zainal made for the coast in the dawn light the next morning and, keeping the Baby at a low altitude, made a touchdown in those spots that looked different. This tropical area displayed fruits and nuts, not unlike citrus and coconut, and samples were gathered of everything, including a different variety of insect life. Kris found the smell of rotting vegetable and fruit unsettling but said nothing until the reserved Leila murmured a complaint.

“There're sort of plateaus up ahead,” Whitby pointed out. “Maybe cooler up there, with an offshore breeze to keep the gnats and nits away.”

Kris disliked using pregnancy as an excuse to avoid any task, but she was glad enough to let the men rig a shelter of the thick-fronded vegetation on a height overlooking a rather lovely white-sanded bay. (On inspection, the white sands contained particularly vicious biting insects, so the charm of the area was considerably diminished and Sarah and Kris could lounge in comfort above that nuisance.) There were even smaller fronds to use as fans and the breezes were cooling and pleasantly scented with whatever was blooming farther inland.

Leila took off to explore with Whitby but she came back, her face and bare arms blotchy from contact with plants they had had to cut their way through.

“The sap which zapped me,” Leila said as Kris and Sarah washed her arms and face, “is very sticky and Joe is hoping we've found a rubber substitute.”

“The hard way,” Sarah said in a droll tone of voice. “Is this helping?”

Leila gave a little sigh. “Only as long as the wet's on me.

“What wouldn't we give for a decent antihistamine!” Sarah said fervently.

“We've chemists enough…” Kris said.

“And only the one microscope, which evidently isn't strong enough to do much, so it's back to old trial and error.”

So, since trial wet compresses helped, more were made of bandage strips in the first-aid kit and wrapped around her arms and laid on her face and neck.

That was when Sarah's baby decided to arrive. In fact, did before his father and the others returned, though Kris immediately called a Mayday for Joe over the hand unit.

“I must've miscounted,” Sarah said apologetically to her midwives when she realized her labor had begun. “This business of thirty-hour days and seven-month pregnancies.”

“Nonsense,” Kris and Leila retorted in the same breath. “It isn't as if we don't know what to do,” Kris added, though her mind was revolving in a panic over all the things they didn't have on board the scout that might be needed.

None were as Sarah's fine lusty baby took the minimum of time in arriving. Both mother and child were all cleaned up when the father leaped into the clearing, red-faced with exertion and badly scratched in his effort to get back in time. Then Whitby and Zainal were congratulating him and Sarah, and admiring the baby. Kris had her eyes on Zainal, wondering if human babies were in any way different from Catteni newborns.

“Small,” Zainal muttered, knowing some comment was needed.

“Small?” exclaimed Joe indignantly, as his son squirmed in his arms in reaction to the sudden loud noise.

“He's not small at all,” Leila said emphatically, and startling the rest of the team since she rarely contradicted anyone. “He's eight pounds and a few ounces. And healthy!”

“And I feel fine,” Sarah said. “And it's so good to
do this,” she added, for she was sitting up, arms around her knees, a position she hadn't been able to assume for several months.

“How big are Catteni babies if you think this one's small?” Kris asked, deciding she'd better straighten Zainal out before he could be disappointed in what she produced.

Zainal measured a distance with his hands.

“I pity the females who have to carry
that
much around,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

“Bigger head, quite likely, and bigger bones,” Joe said sagely.

“He's healthy, that's what matters,” Whitby remarked in a definitive tone.

But young Anthony Marley caused the team to leave the insalubrious area and head back to Retreat Bay. Sarah tried to talk them out of an early return because she and Anthony were fine and the reconnaissance could continue, as far as she was concerned. Joe was having none of it, wanting both wife and child checked over by the medics.

Leon Dane pronounced Sarah in excellent postnatal condition and Fawzia Johnston, the pediatrician on duty when they returned, said that young Anthony was as healthy and normal as any mother could wish. The Doyle brothers, who now spent more time as carpenters and joiners, instructing others in the art, presented Sarah and Joe with a cradle for the infant.

“Working all the hours God gave Botany to keep up with the demand,” Lenny said, after duly admiring young Anthony and congratulating the parents. “You know, this place is getting more like home all the time, with the babies arriving.” He looked melancholy.

“You miss your own?” Sarah said, putting a sympathetic hand on his arm.

Lenny's face brightened into a grin. “Sort've, but who's got time to think of what we left behind with so much to do where we are!”

Z
ane Charles Bjornsen arrived on Botany at dawn exactly 222 days after conception. He was a long child—in that he did resemble his father. He came with fingernails that had to be cut soon after his birth or he'd've scratched his fair face, and a mass of very dark hair.

He was not, as Anthony Marley had been, red, wrinkled, and an object only his mother could love.

“Zane is a perfectly good name,” Kris had told Zainal. “One of my favorite Western writers was a Zane Grey. And I admire Chuck Mitford.”

“But he is not the father.” Zainal did no more than raise one eyebrow at her, tacitly asking the question she had refused to answer.

“No, but I see no reason I…we…can't do him the honor of being godfather.”

“Godfather?” Zainal's lips twitched. “Oh God, oh God…?”

“Not that sort. The deity that Father Jacob reveres, the real God.”

“There is one?”

Zainal had trouble believing in the Almighty, though the several ministers who had been dropped were trying to establish services. The Protestants had no problems but Father Jacob did, since he had none of the accessories properly required to say Mass. He fretted about their lack and how he should manage without them.

Marrucci proved to be a devout Catholic and did his best to console the good father in one of those role reversals which continually happened on Botany.

“If God is everywhere, then He's here, too, padre, and He'll accept the worship of the sincere, dedicated to Him. The earliest Catholics had no altar or relics, and communion was bread and wine. We got them. We got the dedication. You say the words and I'll be altar boy.”

* * *

Mitford was both pleased and alarmed to have a child named for him.

“Everyone will think he's mine and he isn't,” the sergeant said at his gruffest. “Not that I wish he weren't, Kris,” he added hastily. “I mean, I'd've been honored if you'd wanted to but…well, hell, you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do, Chuck.”

“So who is the lucky guy?”

“Remember that hooch Leon and Mayock made, about the time I broke my arm?”

“Yeah, I do,” and Mitford looked surprised, then scowled deeply. “You mean you got raped and never reported it?” His fists clenched as if he held the neck of the offender within them.

Kris patted one such fist gently. “I don't know about any rape. But I do know I was very, very drunk.”

Chuck frowned. “Pete Easley took you back to your cabin, didn't he?”

“He may have, Chuck, but I don't recall a thing and perhaps that's as well, don't you think?”

“No, I don't.”

“Can't do anything about it. But maybe when Zane grows up, we'll know for sure. Zainal couldn't care less.”

“No, he couldn't, and you know, the way he's taken this hasn't lost him any points.”

Zainal was at that moment changing his foster son's fluff diapers. The reeds which produced the useful material were being cultivated everywhere they would grow around Retreat Bay.

The sticky sap that had been such a problem on their last reconnaissance trip had been harvested and, poured into a mold, made a reasonable facsimile of waterproof garments for baby use. They could be washed and reused four or five times but gradually dissolved, often at the wrong time.

Mitford grinned, watching the anomaly of a Catteni Emassi acting the nursemaid.

Twenty-one hundred and three new lives had been expected, and all but five made it: two human babies were stillborn; one of the Rugarian young lived three days and died but even the one Rugarian who understood his species' needs could not give a reason; a fourth was unfortunately strangled by the umbilical cord during delivery; and the fifth, a Deski, was malformed when it hatched and did not survive.

* * *

The promised crèches were opened and every female had the right to leave her youngling in the general care for her day's work or whatever community service she performed. Sometimes it was crèche duty. Kris started the fad of the papoose board, dredging that up from reading Westerns and historical novels about Indians. It worked well for babies up to three months, and for shorter periods after that.