Shelter (26 page)

    "Your dad can patch me in," Raji said, and she could tell from his tone that he was grinning.

    "Stop it," she said, kicking his shin with her heel, and he laughed and tugged gently on the tress of hair he'd been using to tickle her shoulder. "I swear, sometimes I think you'd have yourself translated now if you could."

    "No," he said, "because then I wouldn't get to do this anymore—"

    "Raji! Don't tickle me! I hate that! It feels like you're a bot!"

    "Okay," he said, and kissed her neck instead. "Is that better?"

    "Anything but tickling," she said, but gently pushed his head away. They'd already had sex, and she didn't want to do it again; she wanted to talk. "Look, help me figure this out. "Why do I want to see Theo being born?"

    She felt Raji shrug. "Well, it's pretty simple, isn't it?"

    "It is?"

    "Merry, you don't want to feel left out again."

    "Oh," she said, and knew immediately that he was right. As usual, other people could read her much better than she could read herself. Am I really that stupid? she thought. How can I be that stupid? Was the brain damage worse than Honoli told me?

    "I mean," Raji went on, "you've felt left out through the whole pregnancy, right? And even your father's going to be at the birth. And when your mother's uploaded, she won't be able to remember when you were born, but at least she'll be able to remember that you were there when Theo was born."

    "Okay, okay, I get it. I understand now. Let's talk about something else."

    "Merry," he said, and extricated his arm from underneath her head. She thought he was going to leave, but instead he turned her body to face him and said, "Merry, why are you crying?"

    "I don't know," she said crossly, and buried her head in his chest so he'd stop wiping the tears away with his fingers. His gentleness only made her cry more, for reasons she also didn't understand: because it didn't feel like a bot, maybe, because it was what she had craved all the months she was in iso, with no human hands but her own to dry her tears.

    "Look, it'll be really nice. You and your mom and Jack and your dad will all be in the same room, with no walls, while something great happens. Of course you want to be there. It would be weird if you didn't."

    "My mother doesn't think so," Merry said, her words muffled against Raji's chest. "She keeps telling me I don't have to be there."

    "And you feel left out," he said. "Well, tell her you don't want to be left out, that's all. You know she's just saying it because she knows you don't like hospitals."

    "Okay," she'd said, and he'd started kissing her neck again, and this time she'd kissed him back, until soon enough they'd created a damp, heaving tangle of sheets and blankets and Dave, of all people, had yelled at them please to keep it down or he'd have to snitch on them to Matt, and Gwyn chimed in sleepily that Matt already knew, Matt wasn't stupid, and why didn't Dave let the kids have some fun, and Anna wondered aloud when Gwyn had become such a youth-rights advocate. Hortense and Harold and Johann and Fergus were evidently already asleep, or they would have said something too. It occurred to Merry that if she disliked being left out, staying in the novitiate had certainly been the right decision.

    At least the conversation had made some sense of why she was actually willing to spend time in a hospital while a squalling lump emerged from between her mother's legs. She discovered that she wasn't quite willing to explain it to Constance, though, if only because she was too proud to admit that it hurt her to be on the outside of her mother's idyllic new marriage. So instead she just said, "Mom, let's do this, okay? I'll try to stay for the whole thing, and if I can't, then I'll wait outside."

    Constance's face softened. "All right, Merry. Thank you. Thank you very much."

    For the first few hours, it was fine; Constance grimaced and grunted, but between contractions, she was cheerful and funny, cracking jokes with the nurses and warning Merry whenever a bot was headed to her side of the room. As the first few hours lengthened into the first ten, Merry began to feel trapped, short on air and horribly tired, even when the nurses gave her a chair. Midway through hour fifteen, the nurses kicked her and Jack out to go get something to eat. "Nothing's going to happen in the next half hour," the head nurse said briskly, "and if it does, we'll page you. You guys need to refuel. Come on, don't argue. Scat, get out of here!"

    "She sounds like Gwyn," Merry said blearily as she and Jack took the elevator down to the cafeteria.

    "Who's Gwyn?"

    "The archbitch from my dorm. I've told you about her."

    "That's right, you have. I'm sorry I forgot, Merry." Jack, disheveled, wasn't himself; he kept drumming his fingers against the wall. Maybe he has OCD, Merry thought grimly. "Damn! I hope they serve us quickly."

    "It's a cafeteria. They will." Merry wondered fleetingly if it bothered him to leave Constance with only her tireless, disembodied first husband in attendance, but she wasn't sure she knew Jack well enough to ask. And anyway, ScoopNet probably had the elevator bugged.

    The meal restored them both. Later, Merry realized that she never would have made it through the second fifteen hours without that sandwich and cup of coffee, and praised the nurse's foresight. Later still, she tried to remember the last time she'd been up for thirty hours straight, and realized that there hadn't been a last time. She'd never been awake that long, and if she had anything to say about it, she never would be again.

    By the end of it, her vision blurred around the edges as her mother's hoarse cries echoed surreally in the small room. The medibots had begun to assume the monstrous, arachnoid aspect they'd worn in the worst fever dreams of Merry's CV, and even the kind nurses seemed slightly sinister. Jack and Constance both looked completely exhausted; only Preston, hovering on the screen overhead, seemed unchanged, although even he wore a slight, anxious frown.

    Finally the doctors went into a huddle with the nurses, and announced that they were going to do a C-section. "The baby's just fine," one of the doctors explained. "Good vitals, good position—but Constance is too weak to keep pushing."

    "Meredith should leave," Constance whispered, her voice a hoarse croak. "She nearly fainted during the C-section in the childbirth film."

    "I did not, Mom! I just got a little dizzy." But she felt someone firmly take her elbow and begin pulling her toward the door.

    A nurse. It was a nurse, the same one who'd told her to get something to eat before. The Gwyn nurse. "Honey, you look like you're about to faint now even without watching a C-section. You've been a trooper, but we don't need to have to give emergency first aid during surgery, okay? Out you go. This won't take long. Don't worry."

    Merry found herself, blinking, outside the room, and then sitting on a bench in the hallway. All she wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep, but she had to wait for the baby. She leaned forward and rested her head in her hands. She missed Raji desperately. She would have given anything to have him here right now, his arm around her so she could rest her head on his shoulder. Swamped by a wave of longing so intense it made her hands shake, she began to weep. This was stupid. She was being stupid again. She'd see him tomorrow. It wasn't like he'd gone away; he was back at the Temple.

    "Everything is all right," someone said over her head. "Meredith, why are you crying?"

    It was the same question Raji had asked. Merry, sniffling, looked up to find her father's face peering down at her from a tiny security monitor near the ceiling. She wondered hazily how he'd gotten permission to use that monitor, to come out here to talk to her. "Hi, Daddy. I'm just-tired."

    "Your mother is fine, sweetheart. They just took the baby out, and now they are closing the incision. The baby is fine, a strong big boy. Look: I will show you." As she squinted at the tiny screen, he showed her a series of video clips: the doctors lifting the bloody baby out of Constance's draped abdomen, the baby crying for the first time, the nurses weighing him. Merry felt a surge of light-headedness; it was good she hadn't stayed in the room.

    "That's great, Daddy." Her mouth tasted like mothballs and battery acid. "Thank you."

    "You are very brave to be here, Meredith. You were very brave to stay for as long as you did. No one will blame you for having to leave."

    "I know," she said, so tired she could hardly form the words. "The nurses told me to leave. It's not my fault."

    "Your mother just wanted to make sure you were safe and comfortable, Meredith. That is why she said you should leave. She loves you very much."

    "I know," Meredith said, blinking back more tears. Goddess, was she that easy to see through, even by her father, who hardly knew her at all? Or—no, Raji couldn't have told her father about the conversation. He wouldn't do that. Would he?

    "I just gave ScoopNet the news about the birth," Preston said, "and told them that everyone was very tired, and asked them please to leave. They have done so. I also informed your friends at the Temple. Raji has been asking for updates."

    "Ah," Merry said. "Daddy, did Raji tell you—"

    "We do not ordinarily talk about you. We know you do not want us to. But in this case it seemed appropriate for me to give him the news."

    "Okay," she said. She wasn't sure which made her feel worse: the idea that the two of them might discuss her, or the idea that they discussed everything else. "Well, thank you for getting rid of the media vultures, anyway."

    "You are welcome. Your brother has now been cleaned and weighed, and given an initial neurological evaluation. He is being injected with GPS tracer cells and outfitted with a temporary recording rig."

    "What?" Despite her exhaustion, Meredith found herself standing, glaring at the monitor. "He's a baby! How can they give him a rig? He can't consent to a rig! He's not even ten minutes old! He—"

    "It is only a temporary, external rig. He will, of course, undergo no surgical implantation until his neurological system has matured."

    "This is sick. It's sick! Why does a baby need a rig?"

    "To remember being a baby," Preston said. "When Theo is uploaded—"

    "And when will that be? At his first birthday party?"

    "After he dies, of course. We hope that will be when he is a very old man. But when it happens, he will have nearly complete memories."

    "What if he doesn't want to be uploaded?"

    "Then, of course, he can choose not to be. Without a rig, he would not even have the choice."

    Her mother had said almost exactly the same thing just after getting her own rig. Meredith swallowed bile. "I'm surprised you didn't have him rigged in the womb so he could remember being born."

    "That technology is not yet available. Look, Meredith. Your brother is nursing."

    Meredith glanced warily at the screen. Constance was sitting up nowamazing things they could do with site-specific anesthetics these days-and had a tiny red, wrinkled head pressed to her bosom. Jack, behind Constance, rested his chin on her shoulder and gazed down at Theo. Constance, even after thirty hours of labor followed by surgery, was beaming. She's going to hurt like hell when the drugs wear off, Meredith thought, and was ashamed that the thought made her happy.

    * * *

    "He's beautiful, isn't he?" Fifteen hours later, Constance was still beaming. Meredith doubted that she'd stopped beaming once, even in her sleep, and now that she was nursing again, the wattage had gone up. "Isn't he gorgeous?"

    "Sure, Mom." Theo looked like any old baby to her, wizened as a raisin and doughy as new bread, but Merry was feeling a little more human after getting some sleep of her own, and wanted to be kind to her mother.

    She'd gone back to the Temple and crashed hard, collapsing in her cubicle for twelve hours. When she woke up, Raji had brought her a bowl of steaming oatmeal, and fed it to her spoonful by spoonful, as gently as if she were the one who'd had a baby. All her anger at him for being friends with her father had dissolved in a rush of love; she could afford to be charitable to her mother.

    From this angle, she could barely even notice the baby's external rig, a net of fine fiber-optic cables snaking around his head. "He's gorgeous."

    "He has Jack's eyes and my nose, don't you think?"

    "I think it's too soon to tell."

    Jack, sitting at Constance's bedside, holding her hand, nodded in agreement, rolling his eyes, and Constance laughed, a delighted burble. "Cynics!"

    "Realists," Jack said with a smile, and bent to kiss Theo's head.

    "I think Constance is right," Preston said from the television set. "I have analyzed Theophilus's facial structure, and his nose is indeed more similar to Constance's than to Jack's. But his eyes are not Jack's; they are Meredith's. "

    Jack's face twitched. "Which makes them what, yours? Genetically improbable, to say the least, Preston."

    "No, Jack. I meant no offense. They are the eyes of Constance's mother. A recessive gene."

    "Squinty and nearsighted," Merry said, trying to lighten some of the sudden tension in the room. It occurred to her again, as it had in the elevator, that maybe Jack wasn't as comfortable with Preston's hovering presence as he seemed. "Daddy, maybe you and I should leave the new parents and the new baby—"

    "No," Constance said, reaching out for Meredith's hand. "Not you, Merry. You just got here again."

    "I am sorry to have intruded," the television said. "I will leave you."

    Meredith felt a sudden unexpected stab of pain for her father, the eternal outsider, locked out of flesh forever. She wondered if he missed it. How could he not?

    The television clicked off, and suddenly the silence in the room seemed enormous, filled only with Theo's contented suckling. "Did Daddy like holding me?" Merry asked. "When I was a baby?"