by J. J. Green
Ethan was looking forward to taking Cariad for a ride. He’d packed some food so they wouldn’t have to return to the settlement to eat when they got hungry. Shuttle passengers began to emerge from the station exit, and Ethan smiled as he saw Cariad’s familiar figure among them.
She spotted him seated in the flitter and waved. “Hi,” she said as she approached. “How did you get permission to take one of these? I thought we were hiking out there. I wore my walking boots.”
“All the farmers can use them.”
Cariad’s eyebrows lifted. “All the farmers? But aren’t you supposed to be—?”
“Saving them for emergencies? Strictly speaking yes, but the roads out to the farms aren’t ready yet, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Besides, though the creatures from the First Night Attack are nocturnal, there’s always a chance something else might take an interest.”
“Have any other life forms been spotted?” Cariad asked.
“No, not yet. Xenozoologists have combed the farming districts but they didn’t find anything. We still put up electric fences around the farms just in case.”
Cariad opened the flitter door and climbed in. There were seats for six, but the rear four were folded down to make room for a load. The flitter briefly dipped under the extra weight then returned to its former elevation.
“What happened to your face?” Cariad asked when she saw Ethan close up.
He’d forgotten they hadn’t seen each other since the bombing at the stadium. She probably didn’t remember being rescued.
“Just an injury from the explosion,” he said. “The scar’s fading now. How’s your arm?”
“It’s getting better. The doctor said just another few days and it’ll be good as new.”
“Good. And your head?”
“It’s fine. I heard you pulled me out of the wreckage. I wanted to thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Anyone would have done it.”
“I know, but… ” She drifted to silence, apparently unsure how to frame what she wanted to say. “It’s good to be planetside again. I always feel a little claustrophobic aboard ship, even though it’s as big as a small town. There’s something weird about living in an entirely artificial environment. I’ve never quite gotten used to it.”
“I never minded it. Living aboard Nova Fortuna was all I knew before we came here. In fact, the first time I came planetside, I was nervous. The idea that I could walk for years and never walk in the same place twice freaked me out a little, though I wouldn’t admit it to Lauren.”
Cariad’s expression turned sympathetic, but the atmosphere between them became awkward. Ethan wondered if it was the first time he had mentioned Lauren to her. He couldn’t remember. Thinking about Lauren since she passed was almost unbearably painful. Maybe he hadn’t talked about her up until then.
“It’s about time we left,” he said, starting up the flitter. He reversed the machine from the curb and pulled out of the lot. Once they were through the gate in the electric fence, he set the flitter to automatic.
Cariad gave a surprised Oh, as it left the road and set off through the fern-like trees that surrounded the settlement.
Ethan chuckled. “We’re heading directly to my land. The flitter doesn’t pay much attention to roads. When you’re floating thirty centimeters high, there’s no need for them.”
“I would have thought there might be some need for them,” Cariad replied.
“Nope. Flitters go around anything that’s in the way, moving or not, or they rise up and pass over. They’re very safe. You never went in a flitter back on Earth?”
“I didn’t. They were new technology. Anti-gravity propulsion was newly invented and the engineers had barely run all the safety tests on the flitters before they were loaded onto the Nova Fortuna. I hadn’t even seen one in real life, only in vids. The FTL starship engine scientists had hopes that a-grav would lead them to a breakthrough, but that hadn’t come by the time we left.”
“This is really your first time in a flitter?” A wave of delight washed over Ethan. He’d always seen Cariad as smarter and more experienced than he was. He’d never thought he would be more accomplished at something than her.
“What are you thinking?” Cariad asked.
“Nothing much. Why?”
“You have a goofy grin on your face.”
“I do?”
“You do. Is it because I said it was my first time in a flitter?”
“No… well, yeah, actually. I didn’t think I’d ever have more experience in something than a Woken. You always seem to know everything and have done everything. Being around you makes most of us Gens feel stupid, if I’m honest.”
Cariad’s expression fell, and she turned to look out at the passing landscape.
“Is something wrong?” Ethan asked. “I didn’t mean anything by what I said. I was only talking about what it’s like being a Gen. I wasn’t criticizing you.”
When Cariad turned back to Ethan, her face remained sad. “Is that how you see me? Is that what I am to you? A Woken?”
“No. I didn’t mean it like that. I was only talking generally. I don’t think of you as just another Woken. You’re a friend, Cariad. A good friend.”
She appeared to feel a little happier. “You’re a friend, too. I don’t think of you as a Gen.” She returned her gaze to outside the flitter. They had left the forested area that surrounded the settlement and were traveling across an open plain, where rubbery ground cover grew waist high. The flitter adjusted its height accordingly. On the horizon lay the thin blue line of the lake that bordered Ethan’s land.
Ethan stole another look at Cariad. She seemed to have gotten over the downturn in her mood. He recalled her as he had first seen her in the First Night Attack, carrying a flaming brand in each hand. The image had remained in his mind and probably would forever, the light of the torches flickering across her face.
“I think I can see it,” she said. “That’s the lake, right? Is your land on this side of it?”
“Yes, it is. Of all the allotments, mine is farthest away from town. The land on the other side of the lake doesn’t belong to anyone yet.”
“Yes it does. It belongs to everyone,” Cariad said with a smile.
“Yeah, that’s right. Until it’s allocated.”
“Maybe if your farm does well, they’ll give you the land on the other side too. You could have a huge place.”
“I guess so.”
“Wouldn’t you like that?”
The only person Ethan had told about his dissatisfaction with the idea of becoming a farmer was Dr. Crowley, his other Woken friend who had also died that terrible first night of the settlement. The profession allocation system was intended to be flexible within the parameters set by academic achievement, strengths, and temperament., but refusing to choose any of the positions offered to you upon high school graduation was seen to be anti-social. Ethan was only going to be a farmer because he didn’t really have a choice. In another life, on Earth, he thought he would have done something quite different.
“Ethan?” Cariad said.
He realized he hadn’t replied to her question. “Sorry. No, I’m not very enthusiastic about farming. If I could choose, I’d rather explore this new world. I used to read a lot when I was a kid, mostly when I should have been doing my homework. I read about the great explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on Earth. They would go places where no human had ever set foot, like the southern pole. Then fewer and fewer of those places existed. Later on, people went to the summits of the highest mountains and deep into ocean trenches. They went to all the places on Earth where it used to be too hard for people to survive. They went to the Moon. Then by the twenty-second century, there wasn’t even anywhere on the colonized Solar planets that someone hadn’t explored.
“But this place… we know hardly anything about it. We only have information from probes to tell us what’s here, and we found out on the first nig
ht that information isn’t reliable. We need to know more about this planet. I want to find out more. But I’m going to be stuck here digging the ground and growing crops for the rest of my life.” His voice had risen. He paused and gave a wry smile. “Sorry. I guess I needed to vent.”
They had passed through the gate in the fence surrounding the farming district. Cariad looked out at the approaching lake in silence for a little while, then she said, “You know, you’re right. What if there’s some other menace out there that could destroy us? We need to know about it. If we don’t, how can we defend ourselves? We’re lucky that the electric fence seems to keep everything dangerous out of the settlement. What would we do if there’s a life form that isn’t affected by electricity? We need people like you to find out what the dangers are.”
“I’d love to do that,” Ethan said, “but I don’t see anyone giving the order any time soon.” A new Leader had yet to be elected after the bombing, and a date for a new Naming Ceremony hadn’t been set. “We’re nearly there. We might already be on my land, in fact. It isn’t easy to tell without boundary markers, but I think this is it.”
The lake stretched all the way to the horizon. If he had to be a farmer, Ethan counted himself lucky to have such a useful resource on his doorstep, though water channels to other farms would cut cross his land. Maybe the lake contained something like fish too, something that humans could eat.
He stopped the flitter a short distance from the shore, and they got out. The ground was spongy, and their footsteps left imprints as they walked across it, wading through the vegetation. Together, they went toward the wide stretch of water.
“I wanted to ask you,” Ethan said, “is this place very different from Earth?”
Cariad thought a while before replying. “On the surface it isn’t. The sky’s blue, the vegetation is green, there are mountains and oceans, rocks and soil, and the gravity is nearly the same. That was the main reason this planet was chosen. Once the colony arrived, it would be on its own. No request for help would even reach Earth until it was way too late. So we couldn’t commit to a colonization except on a world where conditions were as near perfect as possible.
“But now that I’m here, it’s different in so many ways. The plants look weird. The air smells funny. The sunlight isn’t quite right, and of course the night sky is totally different. And the sounds… Can you hear anything?”
“Only the noise of the wind.”
“On Earth, if we were out in the countryside we would hear birds and insects, maybe frogs and other animals depending on the time of day. This planet is almost entirely silent. If I don’t think about it, I don’t notice, but I guess I feel it on another level. Nothing is quite right about this place. I don’t dislike it, but I seem to always be a little bit aware that I’m someplace different.”
A warm, humid breeze came toward them from across the lake. The sun was still high. Its rays blazed across the water surface, creating a silver sheen on the smooth expanse.
They reached the lake’s edge where the vegetation gave way to black sand. Lazy ripples lapped at the shore. They were alone in the alien landscape.
“What do you think?” Ethan asked.
“It’s beautiful.”
Chapter Five
Cariad squatted down next to a gestation bag. Five trainee midwives stood in a half circle behind her. So far, none of them had volunteered to assist with a decanting.
“There really isn’t anything to be frightened of, you know,” she said. “Isn’t anyone willing to try? I know it seems scary, but the chances of losing a baby are vanishingly small. I don’t think a single one has been lost at the decanting stage aboard Nova Fortuna. It’s much safer than natural childbirth. We can see if the baby’s stuck or the umbilicus is wrapped around its neck or it’s passed meconium. We don’t have to rely on instruments to tell us what’s happening. Things are going to be a lot harder planetside when you’re assisting women giving birth.”
She shut her eyes. That was exactly the last thing she should have said to reassure these young women and men. When she opened her eyes, however, a fresh-faced man had raised his hand.
“Great,” Cariad said. “Step over here.”
“Oh, I er,” the man mumbled. “I just wanted to ask a question.”
Deflated, Cariad said, “Shoot.”
“I was wondering why you don’t just open up the bags and take the babies out. Wouldn’t that be a lot easier and safer?”
“Good question! So, it might seem easier to do it that way, but when the babies are squeezed out through the decanting channel the action forces mucus out of their lungs and respiratory tract, and that helps them breathe. There might be other benefits too. We try to mimic nature as much as possible because sometimes we can only guess why humans evolved to reproduce the way we do.
“That’s why we play the audio of a pregnant woman’s heartbeat to the babies from the embryo stage onward. Perhaps without it or other sounds their hearing won’t develop normally. We can’t be sure because it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment to find out, so we take the precaution of exposing them to noise. On the other hand, we’ve removed the known risks of natural childbirth like a too-narrow birth canal.”
“Is natural childbirth really risky?” asked a frightened-eyed young woman.
Cariad couldn’t tell if the trainee was asking in a professional or personal capacity. “It’s riski-er. I can’t deny it. Unfortunately, the reproductive technology that’s served us on Nova Fortuna won’t last forever. It’s already wearing out. We need to move reproduction planetside and increase the birth rate, which means that after this final decanting it’s down to you Gens to do things the old-fashioned way. But the settlement hospital will be equipped with birthing facilities of the best quality, and those facilities are going to be staffed with the best midwives, right?”
It was an unfortunate consequence of the impersonal replenishing of the Gen population that none of them had any experience of natural pregnancies or births. Up until then, reproductive technicians had been responsible for creating and gestating the project’s new babies. Working alongside the settlement doctors, the people she was training would be dealing with soon-to-be-new mothers who would probably be frightened if not terrified. What was more, the women might also have a higher risk of complications due to six generations without selective forces reducing the number of mothers who couldn’t give birth naturally from passing on their genes. Still, Cariad tried to give the students her most encouraging smile.
It seemed to do the trick. The man who had first asked a question stepped forward and said, “I’ll try.”
“Fantastic,” Cariad replied and waved him forward. “Come over here. You saw what I did, right? Make sure you have everything ready before you open the channel. I’m going to watch but I won’t intervene unless I see you need some help, okay?”
When she had studied human reproductive biology, Cariad only assisted with a decanting a few times in preparation for taking her finals. The students were supposed to experience the nitty gritty of practical applications of their subject. Later on, as a reproductive geneticist, she hadn’t been expected to actually decant babies. That was a job for technicians. Since being revived from cryonic suspension, however, she’d enjoyed bringing the little squirming, mewling infants into the world. She hoped she could pass on that enjoyment to these women and men.
Cariad moved out of the trainee’s way as he prepared the receiving dish and checked the emergency equipment. The baby he was about to decant was one of the less active ones. The female infant hung upside down in her gestation bag, her eyes closed, a serene expression on her tiny face. She was entirely unaware that her life was about to begin.
The man paused and half-turned toward Cariad for reassurance.
“Good,” she said. “You’re ready to go.”
He stood and activated the decant function on the panel at the top of the bag. Pulsations began to ripple the surface and fluid dripped from
the channel as, slowly, it opened. The student squatted as Cariad had and held his hands beneath the channel. It was a precaution in case a malfunction or a particularly wriggly infant caused the opening to suddenly burst wide.
Now that he’d found the courage to try, the man was doing well. Time wore on, and the gestation bag pushed the baby girl into the narrow, flexible channel at its base. The trainee was beginning to look uncomfortable, probably due to squatting for so long.
“You can kneel if you want,” Cariad told him. “It won’t be long now.”
The receiving dish gurgled as the fluid dripping from the bag was drained away.
The trainee midwives leaned closer. The moment of decanting was approaching. The baby was packed into a ball, her small, chubby arms wrapped up high around her chest. She gave a wriggle and the channel opened wider, spilling a gush of fluid into the dish below.
“Nearly there,” Cariad said to the kneeling student. “Get ready.”
He held his gloved hands beneath the baby’s crowning head. Pink liquid soaked his hands and wrists. The top of the baby’s head appeared. Centimeter by centimeter the head emerged from the channel. A small face came next, its eyes still closed. Then a tiny fist showed up, followed by one round shoulder, then another.
As the baby slid out of the collapsed bag, the man carefully took the weight of her head and body. He gently lay her down in the receiving dish. She took her first breath and a pink color suffused her skin.
“Great job,” Cariad said. “Do you remember the procedure for the placenta?”
The trainee nodded without turning around, apparently unable to take his eyes from the baby, who gently waved her arms and legs, testing out her new-found freedom. When the placenta was ejected from the gestation bag, he cut the umbilicus and picked up the baby to swaddle her. He turned around, his face wreathed in a beaming smile. “I did it!”
“You certainly did,” Cariad said. “Do you want to take her to the nursery?”
The baby was breathing well and didn’t seem to have any problems, but the duty doctor would check her over thoroughly.