“We never installed it in orbit because we never got the surface grid in place that would make it useful to us. We've had it for at least ten years, and I can't even promise you it'll work if someone tries to use it now. But after everything you've done for us, Katy and Linc—in the past and today, both—it's yours to take to Narsai, if you think it might do anyone any good there.” Nadja Nah Trang, listening in on the comm, spoke from elsewhere on the SHIP. Her voice carried embarrassment, as well as vast gratitude.
“Where is it?” Ewan asked. He had his hands on the command console's set of navigational controls, since with this small a crew he was obliged to do his own piloting.
“I can bring it up here and set it down inside a cargo bay,” Astin Fort answered, with the Mistworlder he still carried inside his body making use of his voice. But this time, with Fort's full consent. “There. I just did. We're ready to go!"
“Set us up for transition, Ewan.” The Matushka put an arm around her daughter, and guided Maddy to a jump seat. “Strap in, everyone! Maddy, we'll have you home in about ten minutes. Is that soon enough?"
“How?” asked the girl, who clearly still didn't understand how she'd come to be here in the first place.
And no wonder, Romanova thought as she traded glances with Casey. Because neither, actually, did her elders; including those who had brought her.
* * *
Chapter 28
“Granma! Granfer! Aunt Maddy!” Three children, each recently turned four years old by the Standard calendar, dashed from the stone cottage long before Catherine Romanova, Lincoln Casey, and Romanova's daughter reached it. It was in most ways a typical Mistworld dwelling, but larger than usual. It was also new, relative to the others in the seaside village.
Madeleine Romanova, who never had gone back to calling herself Maddy Fralick, used arms strengthened by four years of pre-military training—part of the coursework at the Lycée, now, under the instruction of Public Safety Commissioner Casey—to catch her niece from mid-air. She laughed as she hugged the child to her, and asked, “Paula, how much do you weigh now?"
“More than Lincoln, and more than Ewan! And I'm taller, too!” the little girl answered, as her brothers leaped into their grandparents’ arms. Lincoln, as always, going to the Morthan man whose name he bore; and Ewan to Katy Romanova. “I won't be the only girl for much longer, you know. Tania/Lee is having her baby today!"
“Oh, what timing!” Maddy's mother rolled her eyes. “Maybe we ought to arrange to stay somewhere else, Linc."
“Don't you dare.” Rachel Kane appeared in the cottage's doorway. “Dan would shoot me if I let you do that! He's not back from the mine yet. We're both looking forward to having you under our roof for the next few days. Not someone else's!"
“Who's helping Tania/Lee give birth?” Katy Romanova asked, thinking as she spoke that she was never going to get used to calling blended folk (of which Mistworld now had quite a contingent, including three young men known as Ewan/Ishi, Bryce/Chad, and Marcus/Dram) by their double names. The mother-to-be in question lived under Dan and Rachel's roof because for the past year, Tania/Lee Alleluyeva/Granholm had been married to Rachel's genetic “brother” Randall. Who'd lived there ever since he met the couple—although he and Tania/Lee spent a lot of time, of course, on board the SHIP that she still commanded.
Rachel Kane with not just a family of her own, but a “brother,” too. Plus a sister-in-law, and (very soon now) a niece. Dan Archer, who'd escaped into the Star Service from a miner's harsh existence on Sestus 4, running a mine on this world now that his Service days were done. Who could have imagined such things? Katy asked herself that question as she carried small Ewan, slung on one hip as she'd long ago carried the man for whom he was named, inside the cottage.
“Nadja's on her way up from the Arm,” Rachel answered her foster mother-in-law's question, and reached out to take her daughter away from Maddy. “Astin's taking care of a patient in another settlement, and besides that Nadja was a midwife for years before she married a Morthan doctor. I think Cash's walking with her. Why don't you go out and meet them?” She directed those words to the girl who, at eighteen, was really a grown woman now. “He's been talking about your visit every time I've seen him, for the past month and more."
I hope that boy matures before he's forty, or I may have an awfully long wait for my next crop of grandchildren! Katy thought, in an aside to Linc. She really likes him, you know.
Yes, I know she does. And I also know that if he's on the same schedule I was, like every other part-Morthan male, she'll have to make do with his friendship for a couple of decades to come. At least! That's the way it is, and no one can change it. Linc's reply held no resentment, because there was no condescending or belittling note in his wife's unspoken words. They were only an observation, and—since she was Maddy's mother, and wanted to see her daughter settled happily—an expression of hope, too.
As long as she doesn't find herself a George Fralick while she's waiting for Cash, Katy added, this time waspishly. That's all I ask!
Sounds reasonable to me. After all, she hasn't been teased at school about being single “at her age"! Being Farren's legal widow fixed that much for her, anyway. Linc smothered a grin, because the others present (even Maddy, from whom they'd shielded their exchange) would have been puzzled by it otherwise. “Why don't you go meet Nadja, too, Katy?” he asked aloud. “Sounds like you may not get to talk to her for awhile, otherwise."
Romanova, standing with the others now in the cottage's common room, cast a glance toward the door that she knew led to the laboring woman's bedroom. She thought of reminding him that a first child would probably take its own sweet time about arriving, and she thought about going to that door and asking Tania/Lee if she wanted company. But for all the four times that she'd given birth (counting the twins separately, which was most certainly how they'd arrived!), she still felt uneasy about doing that. So she said, “I think I will. Maddy? Shall we get started?"
Her daughter who would be one of her students when the University's next term began, and who had briefly but colorfully held Katy's current seat on the Narsai Council, nodded eagerly. “Good!” she said. Clearly realizing that if their mothers walked together, she and Cash Nah Trang could slip off by themselves.
Maddy looked up at the sky as the two women, sixty-something and just turned eighteen, retraced their steps across the cottage's patch of grass and started down the graveled road toward the shore. She asked, “Mum, do you know what? I haven't heard anyone at school calling Morthans ‘mindfuckers’ once, since the Mistworlders all vanished and we found out that Morthans working together can handle SHIP transitions and interplanetary teleporters. Isn't that great?"
“Yes. Of course it is.” But I'd much rather they'd stopped using that word because they realized it was ugly and completely undeserved, Katy added silently. Just as I'd much rather have had Narsai get rid of its occupiers without losing your grandparents, and Cab Barrett, and all the others I think about when I pass the spot where the building I grew up in used to stand. Just as I'd much rather have seen the Commonwealth return to its original structure, with all of its member worlds regaining sovereign status, than see it broken apart by a gen rebellion ... not that I'm sorry the gens who came out of that revolt alive can live free now, of course.
She wouldn't pretend, either, that she was sorry they'd lost Farren Kourdakov. Nor could she make herself suppose, despite Maddy's account and those of others who'd witnessed the young man's death, that he really had heroically sacrificed himself to save his betrothed's life. That, Katy Romanova firmly believed, must have been a mistake. But what really mattered was having her daughter, her precious only daughter, alive when all was over.
Or rather, when Narsai's new era began. With thirteen tiny Star Service vessels, orphaned by the Benedon battle group's destruction, as the foundation for its “space navy,” and with Mistworld's mind-driven technology—left behind by the now vanished “Cloud-Folk"—secure in th
e hands of its allies.
“Katy!” Nadja Nah Trang's welcoming call put an end to her musings, and sent Maddy loping away from her side—like the girl she still was, in so many ways—to unabashedly embrace Nadja's son.
“So on top of everything else you do around here, you're a midwife? You never stop surprising me, old friend.” Narsai's senior chair councilor embraced Mistworld's administrator, and then the two powerful women stood for a moment and watched while their offspring dashed off up the hill. “Things certainly have changed since the days when I knew your voice, but not your face."
“Since when we and the Misties negotiated, and made peace. Before your husband showed up and took the credit for everything you and I did.” Nah Trang spoke wryly, and softened the blunt words with a smile. “It seems strange that now we don't have to worry, when conventional shipping's passing through the upper atmosphere, about who or what we might hurt. Do you ever wonder what really happened to them, Katy? To the Misties, when they left all of us who'd been hosting them while they needed that—and just, well, disappeared?"
“Most people think they died, Nadja. That they found out, too late, they still needed bodies after all. And I suppose that must be what happened, since we certainly haven't seen or heard anything to indicate otherwise. And since when our own people die on Mistworld, now, it's always the same as when we die anywhere else. No more of what happened to my boys!” Katy slowed her steps deliberately. Not because she was tired (although she was that, too, as another of her life's long days moved toward its end), but because she wanted to have this conversation without someone interrupting it by rushing out from the cottage to greet them. “That makes me sad in a way, you know. I'll never forget how I felt, that day on Narsai when I realized I hadn't lost them forever, after all. But on the other hand, I always did wonder what would happen when people elsewhere figured out that if they settled here they just might be able to cheat death."
“I wondered that, too. And I can't help thinking that this way is better. More natural, somehow.” Nah Trang agreed, but with a regretful sigh. “Anyway, what happened is what happened! And you and I can't change it. Not to give your sons back their ‘immortality,’ if that's what it was; and not to bring the Misties back to us, either. But we ought not to be talking about death today, Katy! Today's the day when a new life's being added to your family. And I think we'd better hurry, because Linc's telling me that I'm going to be needed sooner than I thought."
That was one of the other great changes, after the second galaxy-to-galaxy transition that put not only Ewan/Ishi's SHIP, but the whole Mistworld system, back where (as far as Katy was concerned) it belonged. The Cloud-Folk left; and those colonists who carried another Human or Morthan consciousness, that of a person rescued at the moment of physical death, found themselves forever blended with their supposedly temporary passengers. And, after serving as the conduit for unimaginable flows of telepathic and telekinetic power, Linc could now drop a thought into Nadja Nah Trang's familiar mind just as easily as he could do it to his wife. Katy sometimes felt a twinge of jealousy over that....
Yet he felt whole at last, now that he'd been effectively transformed from second-wave to first-wave Morthan; and she loved him too much to wish him crippled, as he would view it, again. With every change in a sapient being's life came losses as well as gains, and gains in addition to losses. The same thing was true for societies, for species, and—Katy thought, as her companion broke into a trot and she matched the other woman's up hill gait somewhat less easily than she would have in her youth—for everything that lived. For all that ever had lived, or ever would.
* * * *
Birth is very much like death. It's painful, and it's frightening. But until it happens, life can't begin.
They'll be better off without us, because now they can find their own destiny just as we've found ours. Leaving them alone to do that is the thanks we'll give them for being our midwives. For forcing us past our mortality's final limits, and setting us free.
Unseen visitors hovered above the cottage to hear the newborn infant's first squall—its mother's relieved, triumphant cry—and the welcoming murmurs of those attending her. They felt the baby's confusion and fear, the woman's mingled exhaustion and exaltation, and the assembled family's pride. They remembered all of it, from long ago and impossibly far away, when they'd lived such things in their own bodies; and they envied the currently mortal beings nothing.
But neither did they dream of taking any of those pains and joys away, from those whose time it was to live them now.
The End
2006 Nina M. Osier
About the Author
Nina M. Osier, author of SECOND CHANCES, EXILE'S END, and MATUSHKA, as well as many other books, was born with a sun tan in the village of Camden, Maine. Her first home was on Friendship Long Island, off the Maine coast. She started “writing” at the age of two, when her parents decided to write down her stories and read them back to her. A librarian in the central Maine town of Gardiner, where the family lived during Nina's school years, introduced her at age 11 to the novels of Andre Norton, Madeleine L'Engle, and Alan E. Nourse—after which science fiction became her genre of choice.
Nina's first novel, EXILE'S END, was published in 1998 by Electra-Light Books of London, Ontario. She has completed several science fiction and mainstream fiction manuscripts that are in search of homes, and is currently at work on another in spite of the best efforts of her three cats.
Nina graduated from New Hampshire College, and has worked as a high school teacher and as an accountant. She now directs the Division of Records Management Services at the Maine State Archives, where she gets some of her best ideas! She lives in a turn-of-the-century Victorian house in Augusta, Maine, where she writes, gardens, and wishes humans didn't have to waste time sleeping. You can visit her webpage at www.geocities.com/ninaosier/ or email her at [email protected].
* * *
Visit www.ebooksonthe.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Mistworld Page 23