Get Off the Unicorn (16 page)

“What is it?” His voice was clinical.

“The waters broke.”

He got her back to the bed, on her back, and examined her with the deftness of her obstetrician.

“The head is in the birth canal,” he said just as she experienced the first of the second-stage contractions. “That's right. Push down!”

She fought the hand that pressed down on the upper part of her belly.

“No, no Roy. Leave me alone. Get a doctor. Please, Roy!”

His face loomed suddenly above her so that she was forced to open her eyes wide and look at him.

“I know what to do, Claire. The child is
mine
!”

“But you could have assisted at the hospital, Roy,” she cried, slowly perceiving through her pain and anxiety what motivated him.

“With Chess listed as your legal spouse?
We
haven't that right yet. No, Claire, this is
my
child.”

“It's mine, too,” she screamed.

“Is the pain unbearable? I'll fix the mask for you.”

“Mask?”

“I have assembled everything that might be needed,” he told her in that odd flat voice. “Do you need the mask now?”

“No, no. No!” She couldn't succumb to the desire for relief from the pain, though it was fierce now, fierce and inexorable, convulsing her body, seizing her with a steadily increasing rhythm, permitting her not so much as a moment to relax straining muscles.

“Good. Press harder. Press downward.” She heard his voice through a mist of sweat and tears and pain.

She grabbed at the bed, flailed wildly around for something to hang onto and was rewarded with a strong wrist to grasp. But for that hand, she was lost in a nightmare of stretch, strain, pant and gasp, of a body that was not hers, that responded to primal urgings. The comforting hand, the reassuring voice were part of it and apart from it. The rhythm increased, unbearable, constant, exhausting, and then, wrenched by a terrible spasm, her body arched. She was sure she had been torn apart.

The pain was gone. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She felt almost lifeless, certainly weightless but . . . serene, strangely enough. Her legs were spread wide, the thigh muscles ached, her vagina throbbed, and all pain was replaced by the languor of exhaustion. She became conscious of movement within the room, of a harsh breathing, a wet splat, and then the tiny gasp as infant lungs sucked in air and complained mewlingly.

She raised herself on her elbow, one hand reaching for the sound.

“Roy?” She dashed sweat and damp hair from her eyes.

Roy's back was to her. When he turned, she was startled to see a surgical mask across his face, the translucence of plastic gloves high up his muscled forearms. And, dangling from his left hand, a tiny, arm-waving inverted form, the cord still attaching it to her.

“Oh, God, Roy, give him to me.”

Roy's eyes were full of tears as he laid the child on her belly.

“I have delivered my son,” Roy said in the gentlest voice. “Don't touch him,” he added, knicking her hand away with the bare part of his forearm. “You're not sterile.”

“He's mine, too,” she protested, but did not reach out.

She watched as Roy deftly tied off the umbilical cord, swabbed the child's mouth, painted his eyes. As he tenderly oiled the reddish skin, Claire craned her neck to glimpse with greedy eyes at the perfection of the tiny form.

And the baby was perfect, from the delicate kicking feet to the twitching fists. His head bones were still pointed, but there was a fineness about the angrily screwed features. Despite the unconventionality of his birth, he was alive and obviously healthy. She did not protest when Roy swathed the child in a receiving blanket and laid him in the portable crib that he pushed gently to one side of the bed.

“Now, you.” Again all emotion was leached from his voice.

With the heel of his hand, he pressed into her flattened belly. She screamed for the pain of it and was seized, to her horror, with another contraction that brought a flood of tears to her eyes.

“You leave me alone!” she cried, feebly batting at his arms.

“The afterbirth!”

And it was delivered.

Utterly exhausted, she lay back. She felt but did not move as he sewed the torn skin of her, only vaguely wondering that he knew how. She was too weary to help as he cleaned her, changed the soiled sheets. She was only grateful that the pain and the shame were over as he covered her tightly bound body with a light blanket. She could hear the baby snuffling somewhere in the room and his continuing vigor was more reassuring than anything else. She felt herself drifting off into sleep and tried to fight it. She must stay awake. She couldn't afford to sleep. He might try to leave her now he had the child he had wanted so desperately.

And that thought stuck in her mind. The child Roy wanted so desperately was born. That was why he had acted so rashly. His child. His child! She had, after all, and however deviously, become the mother of his child.

A tiny voice, insistent and undeniable for all its lack of volume, roused her. She felt hands turn back the covers that lay so comfortingly around her. She felt her upper body lifted, supported with pillows. Drowsily, she evaded full consciousness until she felt her arm crooked, felt the scrape of linen against her skin, the warmth of a small rounded form, hands against her right nipple, the coolness of a wet sponge, then the fumbling of small wet lips and the incredible pleasurable pain caused by a suckling child.

She opened her eyes to the dim light. Roy was sitting on the edge of her bed, his hand securing her lax hold on the child. She was fully aware in that instant, aware and awake. She glanced down at the tiny face, eyes tight, lips working instinctively for the nourishment she could feel it drawing from her breast.

Roy did not remove his hand, yet it was not as if he did not trust Claire. And suddenly she understood all that must have been driving him since she had blithely announced her desire to have his child first. She had taken him, of them all, by surprise. She had astounded and startled him. She had given him a hope, a promise that Roy Beach had never even considered, given the circumstances of his sexuality. She had given him the child of his own flesh, yet she had not soiled him with her femininity.

She understood now why he had been unwilling to trust anyone but himself with the responsibility of delivering his child.

The pressure in her other breast was painful. She disengaged the nipple from the searching, protesting mouth and quickly shifted the babe, taking a sensuous delight in the tug and pull of the eager lips as they fastened on the new food source.

Then she looked up at Roy. She smiled at him as their eyes met. She felt that she saw directly into his heart and soul for the first time in their long association. With her free hand, she reached for his and placed it on their son.

“I called Chess, and told him where you are. He said Ellyot made him understand.”

Claire tried to tell him with her eyes that she did, too, but all she could say was, “Does he plan to come here?”

There was a quick start in Roy's body and his eyes plowed deep into hers as if he, too, had to know her heart, at least this once.

“It would be more peaceful,” she added, holding onto his gaze, “to have the first few days alone, if you can stand it.”

“
If I
can stand it . . .”

Claire had to close her eyes against the look of intense joy, of almost painful jubilation in Roy's face. She felt him lean toward her, across the child, so that the baby kicked against the constriction. She felt his lips on hers, her body responding unreasonably to his benediction.

When she opened her eyes again, he was smiling down at the babe with untroubled pride and affection.

And that was how it must be forever, Claire reflected and deliberately put aside that brief, tantalizing glimpse of the forbidden paradise.

 

“Weather on Welladay” stands alone. Judy-Lynn del Rey when she was
Galaxy Magazine's
energetic Gal Friday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday, gave me a future cover for the magazine around which to write a story. Not as easy as it might seem. A helicopter and a tall man stood among what looked like Christmas-tree decorations on the deck of a great whaleboat. Surrounded by lots of water! So pick up the ball and throw it, because you
have
to account for every element in that cover somewhere in your story.

It was a mystery to me how to do it, so I made the story a mystery.

 

 

Weather on Welladay

W
ELLADAY WAS INDEED
a watery world, Shahanna thought as the day side of the planet turned under her ship. Good thing that explorers were obstinate creatures; otherwise the hidden riches of this stormy world would have gone unnoticed.

She checked her location visually as the ship's computer began to print landing instructions.

“I'm not that stupid,” she murmured, noticing the turbulence of several storm centers that blossomed in the northern hemisphere of Welladay. She tapped out
Locate
for the Rib Reefs, the rocky spine of the planet that stretched from north to south and broadened into the Blade, the one permanent installation on the watery world. “At sunrise, hmmm? Wouldn't you know. And right in the path of one storm. Well, let's beat it in.” She began to punch out landing coordinates.

At that moment, the proximity alarm rang. She hit the
Enlarge
toggle of the screen control just in time to see two telltale blips—the small satellite that ought to be in orbit near her, and the larger one that certainly ought not to be in Welladan skies. Suddenly her ship rocked with the violence of a direct hit. Shahanna remained conscious just long enough to hit the survival button on the armrest.

 

Odis planted his flippered foot on the young whale's blunt snout and shoved.

“This is no time for nuzzling, nuisance,” he roared, as the force of his thrust sent the baby backfinning. Whales liked to be talked to—roared at—though there was little chance they understood more than the tone of voice. Some fishmen denied even that much comprehension. “Almost finished now, Mother,” Odis bellowed reassuringly at the massive creature whose thyroid glands he was tapping.

The indicator dial of the long-beaked suction pump reached the red area, whereupon, with more deftness than others gave him credit for, Odis broke the connection and sealed the beaker. He closed the tap mouth and noted the date of this tap in paint-pen above the metal insert. Old tap-dates had faded but the new paint would glow for the three months necessary for a mature whale to generate more vital radioactive iodine in its thyroid gland.

Odis touched the zoom button on the drone's remote control, then scrawled the whale's registry number beside the luminous date on the beaker before holding it for the drone to record. That formality observed, he scratched the female's rubbery upper lip where the scales had been torn. What kind of a fight had she been in? Well, at least the wound had healed.

Once again her child tried to nose Odis' fishboat out of the way. Chuckling over the creature's antics, Odis climbed up the boat's ventral fin and over the back to the hatch. Ducking below, he stored the precious beaker of radioactive iodine in the chemfoam-protected carrier.

Back on the fishboat's snub-nosed brow, Odis frowned at the sight of the school of whales beginning to melt away from the neighborhood. He had been out since early morning, tracking them down, and spent a good hour easing into the herd before he had tried to tap one. First, he'd pounded affectionately on the snouts of the mammals he knew as well by scar marks as by registration code. Two had shied away from him so wildly that he began to worry that this group had already been milked by that fardling pirate. When he was finally able to draw alongside the old blue-scarred cow and do a light tap, he had decided that their weather-sense was all that was making them skittish.

Between the freakish storms of Welladay and the fardling pirates, Odis growled to himself as he squinted toward the darkening horizon, they might as well pull the plug on operations here. He frowned. Where else would he find a world more to his liking? A task more suited to him, a man born and bred on a high-gravity planet? Or creatures big enough not to suffer from his inordinate strength?

Pleased with himself, he stepped on the release for the outboard panel and began to beam toward Shoulder Blade for a weather report.

The instrumentation was on a pole that looked like a colorful Christmas tree when it was lit up—which was now. It was recording various local indications of the weather. But when he tried to reach Okker in his harbormaster's lookout at the Eye of the lagoon, the beam crackled with interference. So the easterly storm had hit them. Even with a band of weather satellites, one couldn't always be sure of weather on Welladay.

Odis tagged the playback in case Okker had broadcast while he was tapping the whale. He whistled as he listened to Okker's sour report of mach-storm warnings, the advice that all vessels return to Shoulder at cruising depth and hold at shelf-level until recall—the local storm over Shoulder seemed to be only a squall. The warning was repeated twice with additional ominous details on the mach-storm's wind velocity, estimated drift, and duration.

Odis grunted. He could just imagine Okker's disgust at relaying such a message. Tallav, the maggoty Planetary Administrator, had probably been at Okker's elbow. With the exercise of tolerance, Odis could understand the reasons for Tallav's ineffectualness. A meek man, he was not suited to a blustery, stormy world like Welladay, even if affairs proceeded normally. But Tallav was caught in a fladding bind. Someone was pirating the main source of Welladan wealth so that no substantial revenue had been garnered from the whales in months. Result: Supplies could not be paid for, and credit had been suspended. What with the depredations caused by pirates and various natural catastrophes, only three fishboats were operable. Requests from legitimate sources for the priceless radioactive iodine had become demands: Urgent!
Top Priority.
Gray phage was endemic and periodically epidemic. The only specific vaccine was a dilute suspension of the radioactive iodine. In addition to the risk of tapping to death the few whales they could now find, Welladan fishmen were constricted by lack of operable craft.

The two best fishmen, Odis and Murv—a newcomer on a Debt-Contract—had been sent out in an attempt to find and tap enough of the valuable substance to make up at least one critically needed shipment. Whatever Odis and Murv could get today, therefore, was crucial. Fleetingly, Odis wished they could charge a hardship premium, but the price of the iodine had been fixed by Federation officials who evidently were too concerned with other crises to pay attention to repeated Welladan requests to investigate piracy.

So here was timid Tallav, calling the fishmen back because there was a mach-storm brewing in the west. Odis ran a quick check of the instrumentation on the approaching storm, now boiling black and ochre on the horizon.

As he evaluated the readings, he maneuvered his ship toward the nearest adult whale. He could get one more tap completed before he would have to duck and run home. Fishboats were sturdily designed for Welladan waters, to race on hydrofoils with the scaly spawn of her seas, to plunge trenchward with the whales, to endure the savagery of a sudden squall, to wallow, whalelike, within the school itself without being attacked by a nervous male.

He coasted along the port side of the mammal, rather pleased that the creature was not shying off as did its schoolmates. The painted code above the tap-vent had faded completely, so Odis toyed with the idea of getting at least a beaker and a half, as he made his preparations to tap.

It was then that he noticed the strange color of the scales. At first, he thought it was caused by the light—the sky had already changed with the approach of the storm. As he looked around, there wasn't another whale in sight; they'd all raced away, north and south, deep from the storm center. This whale wasn't moving because it was close to death.

Cursing with pent-up anger, Odis stomped below, retrieved the beaker he had just drawn, and prepared to pump the contents into the sick mammal. Would it be enough? Was the gesture merely a waste of fluid now—fluid as precious to the life of Welladay as to this mammal? Odis refused to consider this a waste. In an angry scrawl he painted the date and the circumstances on the whale, adding a crude skull and crossbones.

He stepped back then, clenching his teeth, railing against the brutality of the pirates. He wondered bitterly just how many more beasts had been tapped dry, just how many more black, bloated corpses would roll in on the fresh tides after the storm?

He waited, hoping for some sign of change in the creature. There was no way of knowing how long ago the tap had occurred—hours, days? Or how swiftly the infusion would correct the whale's deficiency.

A fresh wind came up, and the outboard panel chattered metallically, then began to crackle with an authoritative noise. A craft approaching? Odis scanned the clouds. Suddenly a second drone broke into view, higher and north of him. He glanced down at the sea-viewer, waiting for the indication that another fishboat approached. The drone whistled overhead, but the sea-viewer remained empty.

Murv was the only other fishman out! Where was he that he would send his drone back alone? Had he been caught by mach-violence? A wilder shriek tore the air; and the whale reacted with a nervous bobbing, then pulled away from the fishboat.

Odis swung the Christmas tree, got a fix on the sound, and followed it. The intruder was high up but lancing downward, downward and right into the mach-storm. He flipped the track toggle, keeping the outboard panel lined up with the visual trace of the spaceship until it disappeared into the clouds.

That boiling trail had come from nothing based on Welladay. And it was heading away from the only settlement on the water world. Odis retracted the outboard panel. As he climbed down the ladder, he shot a final look at the whale, now moving slowly in a northerly direction. No, the iodine had not been a waste. If the creature could just make it out of the storm's path, it could feed itself back to strength on the plankton in the northern waters.

Odis slammed the hatch down and searched the pilot's couch just as the computer printed out the intruder's course: straight into the storm, directly in line with the only other permanent landfall, Crown Lagoon. The realization was particularly bitter to Odis, for that was the direction from which Murv's drone had just come.

Slowly, Odis tapped out a new course for the fishboat. Not back to the safety of Shoulder Blade, but straight into the storm, directly on the intruder's tail. Then he fed into the computer the details that Okker had transmitted on the mach-storm. As the printout chattered, Odis sank back into the padded couch, his suspicions confirmed. In approximately five hours, the eye of the mach-storm would be centered over the gigantic old volcano whose mouth formed a twenty-kilo-wide lagoon. The shards and lava plateaus of its slopes were like a galactic­sized crown, thrown down just above the equator of Welladay in the shallow meadows of the western seas.

Murv could hold up in the deep beyond the island's shores—safe enough even with a mach-storm lashing deep into the ocean—until the eye of the storm covered Crown. Murv could then surface, deliver the stolen iodine to the ship which had sneaked in under cover of the storm. Well, Murv would do well to leave with that pirate. Once the Investigator got here—and the planet was registered as bankrupt and taken over by the Federation, Welladay would be no place for any freedom-loving man.
Flads
! Murv must have enough of the iodine on him to buy a planet. He sure had sold out Welladay!

Grimly Odis settled down for the long run. He'd stay on the surface and run on the hydrofoil as long as he could, at least until the storm's violence forced him to the relatively quieter, but slower depths. He had to intercept Murv before the traitor got the iodine off-planet.

But where had the man hidden the valuable substance all this time? Every possible crevice on Shoulder Blade had been searched repeatedly once the fishermen realized what was happening. Hadn't Tallav initiated the drone-escort to prevent any fishman from tapping too deeply? How the flads had Murv managed?

True, he had sent his drone back. But you couldn't tap a whale in the midst of a storm and he was within his rights. Indeed, Tallav would have screamed if Murv had kept the drone.

Odis leaned forward, tapped his own drone's controls. He printed out a message for it to transmit once the squall lifted over Shoulder Blade, then sent it to track him miles above the coming storm. He might just find it useful to have a drone in the eye. He would risk Tallav's tantrums.

As there was nothing more he could do now, Odis settled down to a short nap.

 

The old survey charts had better be right about that underwater channel into the lagoon, Murv thought as he listened to the stress noises of the fishboat and grimly watched the danger lights blink warnings. The fathometer marked the unsteady ascent as the craft bucked tidal pulls and storm rips. He must be nearing the archipelago.

The straps that held Murv firmly to the pilot's seat cut into his flesh and he cursed absently as he began to match the chart to sea-viewer.

Blighted planet! The whole thing had appeared so fardling simple. He was used to risks, trained to surmount them. So he had opted to contract as a fishman, to look around for a while, spot the trouble, and then back out again, ready for more demanding work. On a watery planet, with only one permanent settlement, and only one product that was in great demand throughout the galaxy, what could have been simpler? He had not, however, counted on such a trivial detail as weather. Nor had he counted on the mimsy-pimsy fardling parasite of a Planetary Administrator coming up with a drone escort to prove
his
fishmen were not the murdering pirates. That wrinkle had restricted Murv's investigations, but it didn't make him trust Tallav. Murv knew better than to trust anyone.

Furthermore, Murv had not counted on sympathizing with the great whales. After he had been taught to milk them, after he had been assigned a school, it had annoyed the hell out of him to see the rotting carcasses of whales that had trustingly let humans tap them to death. They even lined up to get milked. No, the waste—the fladding waste of it—galled Murv the most.