Grace shot a meaningful glance at her husband, who nobly stepped in. “Babies are like that,” he informed the orthogel entity. “They need a lot of attention.”
Arcan scintillated. “Your evolutionary path is flawed. It cannot be energy efficient to have to look after the offspring for twelve years or more. I don’t understand it.”
Ledin, at that moment rather laden down with various bags and the painting, rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it!”
Grace looked at him sharply.
“What? It is true! Look at the Dessites – they just detach a bud and anchor it to the seabed somewhere. The visitor was telling me all about it. When the bud is capable of mature movement it dedicates all of its own youth to providing its parent with food. You have to admit, it sounds a lot more appealing.”
Judging by the look she gave him, his wife was not in agreement. Ledin shrugged at Arcan, as if to say ‘See? This is the sort of thing a man has to put up with’, which earned him another severe look from his life partner.
“Well, it is! I bet Six would know what I mean!” Ledin looked around the room, as if hoping his friend would suddenly appear from nowhere to agree with him. Seeing he didn’t, the Kwaidian gave a slight sigh. “Anyway, we wanted to take enough for a night. I know you are planning on visiting Enara today. You might not be able to transport us back tonight.”
Arcan, who was able to do several thousand things at once, looked rather insulted and seemed on the point of saying something. Then he remembered what had happened the first time he had taken them to Coriolis and thought better of it.
Grace picked a sleeping Temar out of the cradle, the bubble moved quickly over to encompass the three of them, and the next thing they knew they were standing on the hard metal plating of the Kwaide Orbital Space Station.
Samoso was waiting to take Grace and the baby down to the surface of Kwaide by shuttle, where Cimma reached out eager hands to lift her grandson high in the air.
“How big he is! Is he crawling yet? Can he talk?”
Grace giggled. “What are you expecting? Some sort of superbaby? He still hasn’t reached 6 months, you know. He can’t crawl properly and he can’t talk, but he does babble to himself, and he can sit up and seems to recognize people he knows well. When Ledin comes in his whole little face lights up.”
“When he’s old enough, I hope you will let him spend some time here each year for combat training.”
“Of course. I can’t think of anyone better to teach him.”
“I will look forward to that.” Cimma smiled and began the long walk to her wooden cabin, chattering to her new grandson and pointing out all the landmarks to the baby, who was looking about him with a serious expression on his face. He seemed unimpressed by the unfamiliar place.
When they reached Cimma’s draughty log cabin, however, his eyes lit up at the sight of the blazing fire in the hearth, and he tried to tip himself over from Grace’s arms in its direction. She caught at him hastily.
“Temmy! Stop it! You can’t touch the fire; it will burn you.”
Cimma laughed, and indicated a small wooden cot with vertical bars. “I borrowed this. Pop him in there. There are a few toys, too.”
Grace did as suggested, and Temar instantly began to try to put the toy he liked best in his mouth.
Cimma watched him for a moment before beginning to open her present.
“I must say, Grace, it has taken you long enough. I was starting to think—” she broke off suddenly as the picture was uncovered.
Grace grinned. “ …That I would never finish it? There were times I thought I wouldn’t, either.” Then she saw that her mother was crying. “Maestra? Is there something wrong? Do you not like it?”
Cimma shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “I love it!” she said simply. “I absolutely love it. But why … why did you make me the centre of the painting?”
“Because I wanted you to know how much I love you … how grateful I am for everything. How much it means to me that you came to Kwaide with us, that you adapted so well to such a different life. When I started the painting I realized that although it was my lifesharing ceremony, it was about you too. It was about continuance and change. This is the way I want to remember you. This is the picture of you I want to hold in my mind forever.”
Cimma was staring at the painting. “You have captured my feelings. I … I remember being really happy.”
“Yes. You looked so pleased for me, so proud. That is what I had to paint.”
“I shall treasure it. Thank you.”
Grace saw that her mother’s hands were shaking. She grinned. “It doesn’t have a cost-to-bulk proportion of over 5000 to 1,” she teased. “Not even 300 to 1, like your Xianthan lowland paintings, remember?”
Cimma was brushing the tears away, rather embarrassed to have been caught showing so much emotion. “It is the most beautiful painting I have ever owned. It will remind me every day of you, of Valhai, of that ceremony, of … of everything that has happened. And it is exquisite – I knew that you would still be able to paint, despite the hands, but I never expected anything like this!”
Grace had gone slightly pink. “Anyway,” she said, rather uncomfortably, “enough of that! Tell me all the news about New Kwaide. How is combat training going?”
ARCAN AND THE visitor landed close to the heated pools on Enara and waited. It didn’t take very long for the Ammonites to appear. They formed an astrand almost immediately, clearly feeling threatened by the orthogel entity.
“Why have you come?”
“I have come to tell you that an alliance with the Dessites would be a mistake.”
“You dare to tell us what we should or should not do? You are not one of us. We do not want you to come here.”
“Then I shall simply ask you. We should all work together. There are only a very few quantum beings in the universe. It is not acceptable for them to try to destroy one another. It is a terrible waste of millions of years of evolution. You must not do it!”
“Will you give us the canths?”
“The canths will make up their own minds. I have no say in what they decide to do.”
“You are the cause of their reluctance. They clearly believe that you are more powerful than we are.”
“No! I don’t believe that to be true! You are wrong about me. And I believe you are wrong about the sumand, as well. I believe that we must accept evolution, even if it comes in a form we are not expecting.”
“You put yourself forwards as part of the evolutive process?”
“Well, not perhaps as such, although—”
“We are unsure of your powers. How did you escape Kintara as it was engulfed by the black hole? You must be able to transport quantically.”
Arcan said nothing. He didn’t want them to see quite how strong he was.
Then he felt a strange touch inside his own mind. He struggled, but it was useless. The onslaught was ferocious. It was as if thousands of small teeth were ravaging through his cells, searching, trying to find something in particular—
GRACE HAD JUST arrived back on the Kwaide Orbital Space Station, after her short visit with Cimma. She was walking with the baby back towards Ledin’s quarters, where she planned to give him an early bath and then settle him into his portable basket for a rest.
Without warning Grace’s eyes glazed over, and she dropped Temar. The baby fell like a stone onto the hard plating and roared with anger and fright, but his mother took no notice. As if sleepwalking, she turned away from him, leaving him yelling on the cold metal deck plating of the space station.
She walked across the few metres which separated her from the nearest exterior hatch and began to open it. Warning bells sounded, but she ignored them. Indeed, it was probable that she never even heard them.
When
Ledin came hurtling into the passageway he could hardly believe his eyes. His son was screaming, hurt, abandoned to his fate on the metal floor, and the girl he loved was in the process of climbing out of the space station without a mask pack or bodywrap. He felt a sudden twist of sheer panic in his stomach.
“Grace! GRACE!”
The figure in front of him took no notice. Ledin went cold.
“COME BACK! PLEASE, GRACE!”
Ledin swooped down on the baby, checked him over quickly, gave him a small hug and then handed him to one of the Kwaidians who had followed him to the source of the alarm bells.
“Get him to the infirmary, will you? Call Vion. I can feel a large bump on the back of his head, and he is bleeding.”
Samoso grabbed the boy and disappeared in the direction of the small medical facility, at a run.
Ledin turned back to where Grace was struggling to open the hatch. She had the first lock open and was pulling herself up into the space inside, into the air lock which separated the two hatches. With a leap, he pulled himself inside the tube with her, and then reached back to close the hatch through to the space station. If she opened the outer hatch without doing that … the consequences were too terrible to think of.
So he concentrated on shutting the first lock, making the space station safe for all the other people on board, including his own son. He knew he had to get his priorities right, had to consider all the people on board the station, not just his own family.
At last it was closed, and Ledin could turn to his wife. He pulled her down towards him, but she fought, scratching with the few fingers she still had, kicking desperately to avoid being dragged away from the outer hatch.
Ledin tried to control her, but she was out of her senses, coming at him with the intention of doing him permanent damage. It made it hard to subdue her.
She gave an eerie scream, one which resounded in the tube, making him shiver. He had no idea what it was that had occurred, but one thing was certain: his wife was not in control of her own body. Grace would never, ever have allowed harm to come to Temar.
Ledin punched at the face he knew so well, his heart heavy at the necessity. As his fist connected, she gave a shriek of anger at being thwarted, and lashed out savagely with her feet. He was forced to duck, and the narrow confines of the small tube did the rest.
It gave her the few small seconds she needed to drag open the wheel which kept the hatch closed. Now the cry she gave was one of pleasure as she pushed it open and launched herself out into space.
Ledin instinctively grabbed hold of her feet and was pulled out from the space station with her. He tried to catch a hold of the open hatch as they floated past, but she twisted away and his hand couldn’t quite reach the wheel.
As they drifted away from the space station Ledin stared around him. In a split second his whole life had fallen apart. What had happened? What would happen?
He knew that Samoso would be launching a shuttle, and would have people suiting up to come out for them. He also knew, deep inside his soul, that help would be too late. He had only been out of the hatch for a split second, and already he could feel the effects.
One of the legs he was holding onto jerked, and Ledin looked up. Grace was staring down at him, complete incomprehension on her face. Whatever had been controlling her actions was gone. He held up a hand, and she reached down gratefully.
Her eyes were white with panic, pleading with him to tell her what had happened.
He shook his head and then gestured to her to exhale as much as she could, doing it himself to show her. She frowned in confusion, but did as he asked. That was emergency protocol; it would stop their lungs from bursting as the air inside them expanded and threatened to rupture.
That, Ledin knew, would only give them seconds. He remembered Cimma, when she had been exposed to outer space on Valhai. She had swollen out to nearly twice her normal size. His brain was slamming through options one after another, but he could think of no way to survive this.
He knew he had only seconds to think. Already his nose and mouth felt frozen, and Grace’s face was beginning to waver in front of him as hypoxia began to set in.
Grace stared sadly at Ledin. From one moment to the next their whole life had vanished, for some reason was coming to a bitter end out here in the airless confines of outer space. She was bemused, but knew that she had herself, somehow, been to blame. She shook her head slightly to try to clear it, and then bent closer to Ledin, until their foreheads met. His skin was cold to the touch, and dry. Where their heads touched they clung together, as if the laws of physics wanted to keep them in contact with each other.
Grace closed her eyes, and waited to die, her face gradually turning blue.
Ledin wrapped his swelling arms around his wife, and wondered if his son would be happy. Would Temar have that luxury in his own life? He hoped so. He looked down at the ice-capped mountains of New Kwaide. He had lived to see good times, he realized. But now he would never see Hanna’s Ridge again.
ON ENARA, ARCAN suddenly turned black. The visitor looked towards him, worried. He could feel Arcan’s pain and anger, but it was taking him long seconds to see exactly what the matter was.
Then he was sharing the contents of Arcan’s mind. He could see Grace and Ledin floating together in space, their arms wrapped around each other, their foreheads touching. They were both swelling up alarmingly, and their hands and faces were blue.
The visitor darkened too. In a split second he was back above Kwaide, hovering beside them, but there was nothing he could do to stop the process which had been initiated.
Arcan could hear a soft jeering, coming from the Ammonites. “So, entity known as Arcan, what are you going to do? Can you save your friends? We know you have more power than the ortholiquid itself. You should stop trying to hide your abilities from us. Now, perhaps, we shall see what you are really capable of.”
He flipped part of himself towards the silhouetted figures and enfolded them inside his body. Then he transported them to the 1st skyrise on Valhai, locating Vion at the same time on Coriolis and transporting him to the medical facility too. Arcan realized that Temar should have been with them, went back to the Space Station and brought the ominously still baby over to the medical skyrise too, after explaining what he was doing to a relieved Samoso.
“They have been out in space for over a minute,” Arcan told Vion curtly.
Vion moved immediately to Grace and Ledin, “I need to get them on oxygen, fast. Bring my father down here, will you, Arcan?”
A very irate man appeared in their midst. “Now, look here, I can’t just … Vion? What has happened?” Vion 48 took in the situation with a glance and moved immediately to his son’s side. Together, working side by side as if the younger doctor had never been away, they began to tend to Grace and Ledin, the older of the two Vion’s muttering his displeasure as he did so.
“… Never had to do this in the old days. And it would be that trouble-maker Grace again. She ruined her family, you know, and—”
“Be quiet, father.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said, be quiet. I brought you here to work, not to talk.”
“Well, I … If you think you can talk to your father like that, I …”
“I will talk to you however I like, Father. I will try to maintain respect for the man who sired me, but you make it very difficult sometimes.”
“I … I …” Vion 48 had gone red.
“—The thing is, Father, that I won’t let you run my life anymore. I shouldn’t have let you do it – was it four? – years ago, either, but I thought I might bring the whole of our house down if I didn’t. I am going to live my life the way I want to. And I should tell you, while we are on the subject, that Mercy and I are going to have as many children as we want, and that, if she is
lucky enough to get pregnant again after this baby, we will not be accepting genetic enhancement.”
“Well!” The old man seemed flabbergasted. “I won’t allow it! That would go against centuries of tradition. I think I might have something to say about that!”
“I doubt it.” Vion turned away, picking up a syringe and rapidly filling it out of a vial. He paused for a second. “I’m afraid your Valhai has gone, you see, and it won’t be coming back. We need to adapt with the times.”
His father gave him a strong look and then raised one eyebrow. “I won’t say you are wrong. But I never thought I would hear a son of mine say something like that. Never.”
Vion grinned. “Times change. We should too.”
His father turned back to Grace. “I’m too old to change.”
“Nobody is ever too old to change.”
“Well, we’ll see. Now, this man is stabilized. These Kwaidians are a sturdy race, aren’t they? What else do you want me to do?”
Arcan almost pushed the older doctor towards Temar, who was now suspiciously quiet. “Look at the baby, please. I think he fell, and he may have hit his head.”
In a second, Temar was in questing hands, which poked and prodded him. The baby reacted with extreme displeasure.
“Yes, he has cracked his skull. Here, in the parietal area. I need to run tests. It looks like a linear fracture.”
Six and Diva had been brought over by Arcan just in time to hear that last comment. Diva gave a small gasp. “W-will it heal?”
The Sellite doctor looked disapproving. “In a baby as young as this, it should heal itself, given time. It depends on what genes he inherited. Sellite skulls are rather delicate, but Kwaidians can be very thick-headed.”
He gave a nod at the unconscious Ledin as he said this but Six just gave a grin. He and Ledin had always been rather proud of their reinforced skulls.
The Namura Stone Page 12