“It could be a few hours yet,” the Robot tells her. “When she’s fully dilated, the contractions will come a lot faster. And probably her waters will break.” Still nothing from Khan, not even a look.
Foss turns her attention back to Greaves. “Can you do the necessary?” she asks him. The Robot! She can’t believe the words that are coming out of her mouth. But what’s the alternative? Somehow she can’t imagine either Fournier or McQueen telling Khan to bear down—and the colonel and Sixsmith have other fish to fry. It’s going to be the two of them, God help them, and Foss has no idea which of them will turn out to be the better qualified. She’s pretty sure Greaves has never touched a woman in his life, but he sounds like he’s got the theory all down. They’ll just have to do the best they can.
She sticks around in the crew quarters, out of a general sense that Zero Hour won’t be long in coming. To pass the time she plays patience. McQueen has her loader, and in any case she’s stacked up all the ammo she needs.
About an hour into this vigil Khan starts to thrash and snarl. It’s not a symptom of imminent childbirth that Foss has ever heard of. The doctor sounds fucking alarming, no doubt about it. But Greaves runs to the lab and comes back a minute or so later with a hypo, which he empties into Khan’s arm, and she quietens down again.
“What was that?” Foss asks. She expects a one-word answer—painkiller, maybe, or sedative, or maybe some medical word she won’t understand. But the Robot doesn’t answer at all. He gives a low moan, as though he’s in pain, and rocks on the spot, from one foot to the other.
“Shit!” Foss exclaims. “Greaves …”
“Hold back the symptoms,” the Robot moans. His face flushes and his hands flutter in the air, describing some complicated, abstract shape. “The progression. It’s a suppressant. Palliative. Palliative care. Not … It’s not a cure.”
“Okay,” Foss says, softly softly. A cure for pregnancy? She’d love to see what that might look like. “I withdraw the question. Don’t sweat it.”
“Thank you,” Greaves mutters, his shoulders sagging a little. He actually looks relieved, as though her saying that was a real concession.
Foss changes the subject, for his sake. “Hey, should I boil some water? Is that a thing?”
“I’ve already sterilised the lab,” Greaves says, eyes intently down as though he’s checking that the deck plates are still there. “We don’t need water.”
“Okay then,” Foss agrees. “All good.”
And they’re all good for about three hours or so after that. It’s actually quite peaceful in the crew quarters. Foss playing endless games of patience, lost in the algorithmic flow like it’s a Zen meditation, and Khan pumping air through her teeth in a rhythm that accelerates and then falls back again and again like the tide hitting the base of a cliff.
Then, just as Foss is teasing out her third ace, Doctor Khan’s waters go like Niagara fucking Falls, dripping through her inch-thick mattress to rain down on the bottom bunk (which is Dr. Fournier’s, so no harm done).
“Looks like we’re on, sugar lump,” Foss says lightly.
When you’re a mile outside the limits of your competence, there is some comfort to be had in sounding like you know what you’re doing.
49
I’m still me, Khan thinks.
Checking. Making sure it’s true. It should be true by definition—she thinks therefore she is—but maybe the voice in your mind goes stumbling on after the lights go out, just doing its own thing because that’s all it knows.
So she forces herself to remember. Making love with John, the viva exam she gave when she delivered her doctoral thesis, fragments of her childhood. She reviews them in her mind and she goes over their meanings. Because if they have meanings then she is still human.
But she has to do these things in the gaps between the contractions, and the gaps are getting shorter. Every ten minutes, then every five, then every three, her body closes like a vice and the horizon rushes right in. There is nothing beyond the pain.
At the edges of it, something. The cold metal of the dissecting table under her back and her bum and the soles of her feet. The tang of disinfectant, her profession’s holy incense, in the air. She’s in the lab. They’ve brought her to the lab, because it’s her time.
She is sailing the ship out of the bottle, pushing another human being out of her body. A tiny, imperfect replica of herself, or it might be of John, whipped up out of whatever pieces of them were available, milled and ground and mixed and left to rise in the oven of her abdomen. And at the last moment, the extra, top-secret ingredient: Cordyceps.
She moans aloud.
“You’re doing fine, Doctor.” That’s Foss. Foss is here. And Stephen too, his touch taboo forgotten. Or not. His eyes are wide as he squeezes her hand, giving her the time signature for her breathing in a Morse code of pressure and release.
“Oh shit!” Foss says. “I can see the head. I can see the baby’s head!”
“You have to hold back,” Stephen murmurs urgently, leaning low over her with his eyes averted. “Use the breathing to get through it. Relax, Rina. Try to relax.”
When she was six, her father put her on her brand-new bike and rolled it down a hill. That’s how you learn, he said. The bike went faster and faster and she just held on to the handlebars for grim death, too terrified to brake or steer, until the bike strayed into a garden wall and she fell right off it, going full tilt. Her arm was broken. Her mother called her father a brainless bastard and he said again, stubbornly, That’s how you learn.
Quae nocent saepe docent. Pain is the great teacher.
“Okay, now push! Bear down, Doctor Khan!”
“Bear down, Rina!”
Pain has no agenda at all. It teaches us nothing, except what hurts. And if you can’t avoid the things that hurt then what use is the lesson?
Pain clenches in her, moves through her in drenching waves, until finally it finds an outlet.
Her baby cries.
“Holy fuck,” Lieutenant Foss shouts jubilantly. And then again, “Holy fuck, the eagle has landed!”
There is concerted movement in the space between Khan’s tented legs. Something parts from her. A fullness becomes a yawning absence. Cold air strums her sweat-soaked thighs.
“It’s a boy. And he looks healthy. Nice work, Doctor Khan.” Then, in a different tone, “He’s covered in this gunk. Is that normal?”
“Yes,” Greaves says. “It’s normal. Let her hold him.”
The baby is placed in her arms. He smells of blood and of her. Of sweetness and the slaughterhouse. He has fought his furious way into the world and now he lies exhausted on her breast. Red-brown smears mark where his tiny fist slides against her skin.
“John,” she whispers.
“No,” Greaves says. “It’s me. It’s Stephen.”