by Larry Niven
It was good, Roy thought, watching. It was smooth. Getting it all had been rough enough. Before they were finished the colonists had become damn sick of Roy and Cynnie poking their cameras into their every activity. That sign above the auditorium toilet: Smile! Roy Is Watching!
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 fertilized 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 impossible 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 worship 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 infighting.” 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 incubation 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 speaking.
“We, uh,” he took off his glasses, polishing them on his shirt, then replaced 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 announcements? 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 simulate 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, someone 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 blankets, 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?”
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 themselves. All of them had bruises or blisters or calluses from weeding or harvesting. 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.
Six months after the birth of Eve, Doc was sure. There was a problem.
The children of Ridgeback totaled seven. Two of the women had miscarried, fewer than he might have feared, and without complications. Jill was still carrying hers, and Doc was beginning to wonder, but it wasn’t serious yet. Jill was big and strong with wide hips and a deep bust. Even now Greg was hard put to keep her from commandeering one of the little flyers and jouncing off to the coastline to check the soil, or inland to supervise the fresh water fish preserve. Give her another week…
The night Elise had delivered their child, it had been special. She had had a dry birth, with the water sack rupturing too early, and Doc had had to use a lubrication device. Elise was conscious during the entire delivery, eschewing painkillers for the total experience of her first birth. She delivered safely, for which Doc had given silent thanks. His nerves were scraped to supersensitivity, and he found himself just sitting and holding her hand, whispering affection and encouragement to her, while Greg did much of the work. With Elise’s approval he named their son Gerald, shortened to Jerry. Jerry was three weeks old now, healthy and squalling, with a ferocious grip in his tiny hands.
But even a father’s pride could not entirely hide the squarish jawline, the eyes, the…
All the children had it, all the six recent ones. And Eve hadn’t lost it. Doc continued his research in the microlibrary, switching from pediatrics to genetics. He had a microscope and an electron microscope, worth their hundreds of thousands of dollars in transportation costs; he had scrapings of his own flesh and Eve’s and Jerry’s. What he lacked was a Nobel Prize geneticist to stand behind his shoulder and point out what were significant deviations as opposed to his own poor slide preparation techniques.
He caught Brew looking at him at mealtimes, as though trying to raise the nerve to speak. Soon the big man would break through his inhibitions, Doc could see it coming. Or perhaps Nat would broach the question. Her eldest brother had been retarded, and Doc knew she was sensitive about it. How long could it be before that pain rose to the surface?
And what would he say to them then?
It was not a mutation. One could hardly expect the same mutation to hit all of seven couples in the same way.
It was no disease. The children were phenomenally healthy.
So Doc worked late into the night, sometimes wearing a black scowl as he retraced dead ends. He needed advice, and advice was 11.9 light years away. Was he seeing banshees? Nobody else had noticed anything. Naturally not; the children all looked normal, for they all looked alike. Only Brew seemed disturbed. Hell, it was probably Doc that was worrying Brew, just as it was Doc that worried Elise. He ought to spend more time with Elise and Jerry.
Jill lost her baby. It was stillborn, pitiful in its frailty. Jill turned to Greg as the dirt showered down on the cloth that covered her child, biting her lip savagely, trying to stop the tears. She and her husband held each other for a long moment, then, with the rest of the colonists, they walked back to the dwellings.
The colonists had voted early, and unanimously, to give up coffins on Ridgeback. Humans who died here would give their bodies to the conquest of the planet. Doc wondered if a coffin would have made this ceremony easier, more comforting in its tradition. Probably not, he thought. Dead is dead.
Doc went home with Elise. He’d been spending more time there lately, and less time with the microscop
es. Jerry was crawling now, and he crawled everywhere; you had to watch him like a hawk. He could pick his parents unerringly out of a crowd of adults, and he would scamper across the floor, cooing, his eyes alight…his deepset brown eyes.
It was a week later that Jase came to him. After eight hours of labor June had finally released her burden. For a newborn infant the body was big and strong, though in any normal context he was a fragile, precious thing. As father, Jase was entitled to see him first. He looked down at his son and said, “He’s just like the others.” His eyes and his voice were hollow, and at that moment Doc could no longer see the jovial colony leader who called squaredances at the weekly hoedown.
“Of course he is.”
“Look, don’t con me, Doc. I was eight when Cynnie was born. She didn’t look like any of them. And she never looked like Eve.”
“Don’t you think that’s for me to say?”
“Yes. And damned quick!”
Doc rubbed his jaw, considering. If he was honest with himself he had to admit he ached to talk to somebody. “Let’s make it tomorrow. In the ship’s library.”
Jase’s strong hand gripped his arm. “Now.”
“Tomorrow, Jase. I’ve got a lot to say, and there are things in the library you ought to see.”
“Here,” he said, dialing swiftly. A page appeared on the screen, three-quarters illustration, and one-quarter print to explain it. “Notice the head? And the hands. Eve’s fingers are longer than that. Her forehead slopes more. But look at these.” He conjured up a series of growth states paired with silhouettes of bone structure.
“So.”
“She’s maturing much faster than normal.”
“Oh.”
“At first I didn’t think anything about the head. Any infant’s head is distorted during passage from the uterus. It goes back to normal if the birth wasn’t difficult. And you can’t tell much from the features; all babies look pretty much alike. But the hands and arms bothered me.”