Limits (28 page)

He’d tried to tell them. “Don’t you know who it is that builds starships?
It’s
taxpayers, that’s who! And they’ve got to get something for their money. Sure we’re putting on a show for them. If we don’t, when election time comes around they may ask for a refund.”

Oh, they probably believed him. But the sign was still up.

Roy watched Cynnie interview Jase and Brew in the fields; watched Angie and Chris constructing the animal pens. Jill thawed some of the fert
i
lized goat eggs and a tape was shown of the wriggling embryos.

“At first,” Cynnie reminisced, “Ridgeback was daunting. There was no sound: no crickets, no birdsongs, but no roar of traffic either. By day, the sky is Earthlike enough, but by night the constellations are brighter. It’s impo
s
sible to forget how far from home we are—we can’t even see Sol, invisible somewhere in the northern hemisphere. It’s hard to forget that no help of any kind could come in much less than twenty-five years. It would take five years just to refuel the ship. It takes fourteen years to make the trip, although thanks to relativity it was only three years ‘ship time.’

“Yes, we are alone.” The image of Cynnie’s sober face segued to the town hall, a geodesic dome of metal tubing sprayed with plastic. “But it is heartening that we have found, in each other, the makings of a community. We come together for midday meal, discussions, songfests and group wo
r
ship services.”

Cynnie’s face was calm now, comforting. “We have no crime, and no unemployment. We’re much too busy for marital squabbles or political i
n
fighting.” She grinned, and the sparkle of her personality brought pleasure to Roy’s analytical mind. “In fact, I have
work
to do myself. So, until next year, this is Cynnie Mitchell on Ridgeback, signing off.”

A year and a half after landing, a number of animals were out of inc
u
bation with a loss of less than two percent. The mammals drank synthetic milk now, but soon they would be milling in their pens, eating Ridgeback grass and adding their own rich wastes to the cooking compost heaps.

Friday night was community night at the town hall.

From the inside the ribs of the dome were still visible through the sprayed plastic walls, and some of the decorations were less than stylish, but it was a warm place, a friendly, relaxing place where the common bond between the Ridgebackers was strengthened.

Jill, especially, seemed to love the stage, and took every opportunity to mount it, almost vibrating with her infectious energy.

“Everything’s right on schedule,” she said happily. “The fruit flies are breeding like mad.”
(Booo!)
“And if I hear that again I’m gonna break out the mosquitoes. Gang, there are things we can live without, but we don’t know what they are yet. Chances are we’ll be raising the sharks sooner or later. We’ve been lucky so far.
Really lucky.”
She cleared her throat dramatically. “And speaking of luck, we have Chris with some good news for the
farmers,
and bad news for the sunbathers. Chris?”

There was scattered applause, most vigorously from Chris’s tiny wife Angie. He walked to the lectern and adjusted the microphone before spea
k
ing.

“We, uh,” he took off his glasses, polishing them on his shirt,
then
r
e
placed them, smiling nervously. “We’ve been having good weather, people, but there’s a storm front moving over the mountains. I think Greg can postpone the irrigation canals for a week, we’re going to get plenty wet.”

He coughed, and moved the microphone close to his mouth. “June and I are working to program the atmospheric model into the computer. Until we do, weather changes will keep catching us unaware. We have to break down a fairly complex set of thermo and barometric dynamics into something that can be dealt with systematically—wind speed, humidity, vertical motion, friction, pressure gradients, and a lot of other factors still have to be fed in, but we’re making progress. Maybe next year we’ll be able to tell you how to dress for the tenth anniversary of Landing Day.”

There were derisive snorts and laughter, and Chris was applauded back into his seat.

Jase bounded onto the stage and grabbed the mike.
“Any more a
n
nouncements?
No? All right, then, we all voted on tonight’s movie, so no groans, please.
Lights?”

The auditorium dimmed. He slipped from the stage and the twin beams of the holo projector flickered onto the screen.

It was a war movie, shot in flatfilm but optically reconstructed to sim
u
late depth. Doc found it boring. He slipped out during a barrage of cannon fire. He headed to the lab and found Jill there already, using one of the small microscopes.

“Hi hon,” he called out, flipping on his desk light. “Working late?”

“Well, I’m maybe just a wee bit more bugged than I let on.
Just a little.”

“About what?”

“I keep thinking that one day we’ll find out that we left something out of our tame ecology. It’s just a feeling, but it won’t go away.”

“Like going on vacation,” Doc said, deliberately flippant. “You know you forgot something. You’d just rather it was your toothbrush and not your passport.”

She smeared a cover glass over a drop of fluid on a slide and set it to dry. “Yes, it feels like that.”

“Do you really have mosquitoes in storage?”

She twinkled and nodded.
“Yep.
Hornets too.”

“Just how good is it going? You know how impatient everyone is.”

“No real problems. There sure as hell might have been, but thanks to my superior planning—” she stuck out her tongue at Doc’s grimace. “We’ll have food for ourselves and all the children we can raise. I’ve been getting a little impatient myself, you know?
As if there’s a part of me that isn’t functioning at full efficiency.”

Doc laughed. “Then I think you’d better tell Greg.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll announce it tonight and let all the fathers-to-be catch the tidings in one shot.”

“Oh boy.”

“What?”

“No, it has to be done that way. I know it. I’m just thinking about nine months from now.
Oh boy.”

So it was announced that evening. As Doc might have expected, som
e
one had already cheated. Somehow Nat, the midwestern earthmother blond, had taken a contraceptive pill and, even with Doc watching, had avoided swallowing it. Doc was fairly sure that her husband Brew knew nothing of it, although she was already more than four months along when she confessed.

Nat had jumped the gun, and there wasn’t a woman on Ridgeback who didn’t envy her. A year and eleven months after Landing Day, Doc delivered
Ridgeback’s first baby.

Sleepy, exhausted by her hours of labor, Nat looked at her baby with a pride that was only half maternal. Her face was flushed, yellow hair tangled in mats with perspiration and fatigue. She held her baby, swaddled in bla
n
kets, at her side. “I can hear them outside. What do they want?” she asked drowsily, fighting to keep her eyelids open.

Doc breathed deeply. Ridiculous, but the scentless air of Ridgeback seemed a little sweeter. “They’re waiting for a glimpse of the little crown princess.”

“Well, she’s staying here. Tell them she’s beautiful,” Ridgeback’s first mother whispered, and dropped off to sleep.

Doc washed his hands and dried them on a towel. He stood above the slumbering pair, considering. Then he gently pried the baby from her mother’s grip and took her in his arms. Half-conscious mother’s wish or no, the infant must be shown to the colony before they could rest. Especially Brew. He could see the Swede’s great broad hands knotting into nervous fists as he waited outside.
And the rest of them in a half-crescent around the door; and the inevitable Cynnie and Roy with their holotape cameras.

“It’s a girl,” he told them. “Nat’s resting comfortably.” The baby was red as a tomato and looked as fragile as Venetian glass. She and Doc posed for the camera,
then
Doc left her with Brew to make a short speech.

Elise and Greg, Jill’s husband, had both had paramedic training. Doc set up a rotating eight-hour schedule for the three of them, starting with Elise. The group outside was breaking up as he left, but he managed to catch Jase.

“I’d like to be taken off work duties for a while,” he told the colony leader, when the two were alone.

Jase gripped his arm. “Something’s wrong with the baby?” There was a volume of concern in the question.

“I doubt it, but she is the first, and I want to watch her and Nat. Most of the women are pregnant now. I want to keep an eye on them, too.”

“You’re not worried about anything specific?”

“No.”

When Elise left her shift at the maternity ward, she found him staring at the stone ceiling. She asked, “Insomnia again? Shall I get a ‘russian sleep’ set?”

“No.”

She studied his face.
“The baby?”

She’d seen it too, then. “You just left the baby. She’s fine, isn’t she?”

“They’re both fine.
Sleeping.
Harry?” She was the only one who called him that. “What is it?”

“No, nothing’s bothering me. You know everything
I
know. It’s just that…”

“Well?”

“It’s just that I want to do everything right. This is so important. So I keep checking back on myself, because there’s no one I can call in to check my work. Can you understand what I’m getting at?”

She pursed her lips. Then said, “I know that the only baby in the world could get a lot more attention than she needs. There shouldn’t be too many people around her, and they should all be smiling. That’s important to a baby.”

Doc watched as she took off her clothes and got into bed. The slight swell of her pregnancy was just beginning to show. Within six months there would be nine more children on Ridgeback, and one would be theirs.

Predictably, Brew’s and Nat’s daughter became Eve.

It seemed nobody but Doc had noticed anything odd about Eve. Even laymen know better than to expect a newborn child to be pretty. A baby doesn’t begin to look like a baby until it is weeks old. The cherubs of the Renaissance paintings of Foucquet or Conegliano were taken from two-year-olds. Naturally Eve looked odd, and most of the colony,
who
had never seen newborn children, took it in their stride.…

But Doc worried.

The ship’s library was a world’s library. It was more comprehensive, and held more microfilm and holographically encoded information than any single library on earth. Doc spent weeks running through medical tapes, and got no satisfaction thereby.

Eve wasn’t sick. She was a “good baby”; she gave no more trouble than usual, and no less. Nat had no difficulty nursing her, which was good, as there were no adult cows available on Ridgeback.

Doc pulled a microfiche chip out of the viewer and yawned irritably. The last few weeks had cost him his adjustment to Ridgeback time, and gained him…well, a kind of general education in pediatrics. There was nothing
specific to look for, no
handle
on the problem.

Bluntly put, Eve was an ugly baby.

There was nothing more to say, and nothing to do but wait.

Roy and Cynnie showed their tapes for the year. Cynnie had a good eye for detail. Until he watched the camera view trucking from the landing craft past the line of houses on Main Street, to Brew, to a closeup of Brew’s house, Doc had never noticed how Brew’s house reflected Brew himself. It was designed like the others: tall and squarish, with a sloped roof and small window. But the stones in Brew’s house were twice the size of those in Doc’s house. Brew was proud of his strength.

Roy was in orbit on Year Day, but Cynnie stayed to cover the festivities, such as they were. Earth’s hypothetical eager audience still hadn’t seen Year Day One. Jase spoke for the camera, comparing the celebration with the first Thanksgiving Day in New England. He was right: it was a
feast,
a display of the variety of foods Ridgeback was now producing, and not much more than that.

His wife June sang a nondenominational hymn, and they all followed along, each in his own key. Nat fed Eve a bit of corncake and fruit juice, and the colonists applauded Eve’s gurgling smile.

The folks back on Earth might not have thought it very exciting, but to the Ridgebackers it meant everything. This was food they had grown the
m
selves. All of them had bruises or blisters or calluses from weeding or ha
r
vesting. They were more than a community now, they were a world, and the fresh fruit and vegetables, and the hot breads, tasted better than anything they could have imagined.