Freedom's Choice

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Don’t say another word,” Beverly put in from a nearby table, “if you want to fly again.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Balenquah said. “We need a formal government, so you know who’s got the right to give orders.”

  “That’s enough out of you, Balenquah,” Scott said, seconding Beverly’s admonition.

  “You’re not an admiral of anything here, Scott,” Balenquah said.

  “Oh, booming,” drawled one of the “ladies” from two tables over. And she yawned ostentatiously, which made the others at her table howl with laughter.

  “You are, you know,” Marrucci said, shaking his head at Balenquah, who had colored with such open ridicule, “a real bore with all this gloom and doom and I’m obviously,” and now he turned to look at the ladies’ table, “not the only one who thinks so.”

  Balenquah rose, his right arm cocked, but even before Marrucci could rise to defend himself, Scott had nodded to the man beside him and they rose and captured Balenquah’s arm and were hustling him out of the mess hall and into the rain.

  “Add bouncer to my list of new-world occupations,” Scott said to Beverly as the two returned to their seats.

  At their table, Kris found herself sharing a bit of Balenquah’s pessimism. The problem of the Farmers was just beneath the surface of everyone’s thoughts, despite the fact that most people carried on as if there were not that threat hanging over them. Zainal kept insisting that the Farmers were benign. He could give no other reason for that than the way this planet had been tended for thousands of years, if the new forest of lodge-pole trees was any indication.

  “And it has been months since the Bubble was blown up,” he reminded her, as they walked back to their cabin when the rain had stopped. Flagstone pathways had been laid around much of Retreat Bay now, to hinder night crawlers, although walkers automatically stamped hard every third step.

  Kris let Zainal do it for them both as she didn’t like jarring the baby she could now feel move, in little flutters, within her: normal activity at five months. Sarah kept complaining that her little dear kicked like a soccer star, but she was eight months along. By now, almost every female of childbearing age, including the Deski and Rugarians, was expecting, which meant that Retreat Bay would have a baby boom of 2,103 new souls. Anna Bollinger may have given birth to the first human baby on Botany but there had since been thirty-four born to women who had been captured pregnant. Now the new crop—which had been plowed on Botany, as someone had remarked in a biblical fashion—were reaching term. Patti Sue was first, and prideful about producing a son for Jay Greene.

  Kris didn’t know which she wanted, apart from being healthy and not too much resembling its sire. Somehow she couldn’t ask Zainal what his preference would be. And yet, he would act in loco parentis to whatever she produced.

  Most of the pregnant women carried on in their specialty as long as possible: and Kris, Sarah, and Leila were no exceptions. In fact they had arguments with the sergeant that he was assigning the team the “easy” trips. So he organized Zainal to take Baby to the smallest continent—really more of a very large island than a continental landmass—to circumnavigate it, the coastline being the only part that was green.

  “Bit like Australian outback,” Sarah remarked as Zainal guided Baby crisscross the interior. “Like Nullarbor. Nothing for klicks! Not even mulga or brush…sand and rock,” she added in disgust.

  “Hmmm, yes, I see,” Joe said, without explaining his cryptic remark as he gazed out the starboard side in the pilot’s compartment. “Real rock!” He pointed now to a rocky ridge that ran obliquely across below them, like vertebrae, with dips and spires. “Dinosaur bones.”

  “Hmmm, that’s what they do look like,” Kris agreed.

  Whitby insisted that they land and spend one night at the base of that range, where the spatial maps indicated one of the ore deposits. “We should know where copper and zinc are and that’s what is down there. If the lodes are near the surface, it might be advantageous to take a week or so to work up a cargo.”

  So they landed, and it was hot.

  “Just like home in the dry,” Sarah said ecstatically, throwing her arms back, her gravid belly out, and turning her face up to the sun.

  “Good way to get sunstroke,” Joe said, and slammed her reed-weave hat on her head. “We are not, I repeat, we are not delivering you prematurely in the confines of Baby.”

  “Having the baby in the Baby?” Sarah was off on a fit of the giggles.

  Whitby, Leila, Joe, and Zainal went off to try and locate the ore, laden with bottles for samples and soil. Sarah and Kris, who found the heat especially enervating, found what shade they could in the lee of Baby by digging out enough soil under the landing vanes to sit on blankets. Kris dozed off while Sarah dragged her hands through the scattered rocks, trying to find interesting ones.

  Sarah, too, dozed off and they were both awakened by the laughter of the returning prospectors. Each carried some sort of dead animal resembling a large rat.

  Kris recoiled when Zainal plunked three brace beside her. The pelts caught her attention because they were mottled in soft sandy shades.

  “Camouflage? From what?” she said, venturing to touch the nearest. It was rough with dirt and sand.

  “Burrowers,” Joe said succinctly, “but they test edible. We thought we’d give them a try. Live on insects, of which this continent has a multitude. I saw twenty-five varieties and caught,” and he held up several bottles tied together to prevent breakage, “only a few for closer examination. You never know what might be useful.” He grinned wickedly. “Or tasty. And nutritious.”

  “How would you know? You never hunted outback with the aborigines,” Sarah said.

  “Neither did you.”

  “But I did a paper on the ones the aborigines favor,” she replied hotly, and they were off again.

  The desert burrowers—Kris declined to think of them as rats—were skinned and, after Joe did further tests on the equipment in Baby, were cooked in the galley and served as part of the evening meal. The flesh was different in texture and taste from anything else that Botany had provided: sort of nutty and sleek. Almost difficult to bite into.

  Twilight brought out their natural predators, batlike creatures who swooped on long triangular wings from rocky aeries to catch the burrowers. The cooler air encouraged a different set of insects to appear, ones that bit and itched and forced everyone to take refuge in the scout ship. But not before they saw the desert burrowers in action, making incredible leaps into the air to catch their meal on tongues that elongated to make the capture, and seeming to disappear from sight the moment they heard bat wings above them.

  “We’ve some like that on ol’ Earth,” Joe remarked, watching from the scout.

  The men were in general pleased with their prospecting and had marked the areas with the blue paint, though Whitby and Joe argued about its durability in the unremitting sun.

  “Well, we’ll wear-test it good, then,” Joe said, shrugging. “And we’ve the coordinates anyway.”

  Zainal made for the coast in the dawn light the next morning and, keeping the Baby at a low altitude, made a touchdown in those spots that looked different. This tropical area displayed fruits and nuts, not unlike citrus and coconut, and samples were gathered of everything, including a different variety of insect life. Kris found the smell of rotting vegetable and fruit unsettling but said nothing until the reserved Leila murmured a complaint.

  “There’re sort of plateaus up ahead,” Whitby pointed out. “Maybe cooler up there, with an offshore breeze to keep the gnats and nits away.”

  Kris disliked using pregnancy as an excuse to avoid any task, but she was glad enough to let the men rig a shelter of the thick-fronded vegetation on a height overlooking a rather lovely white-sanded bay. (On inspection, the white sands contained particularly vicious biting insects, so the charm of the area was considerably diminished and Sarah and Kris could lounge in comfort above that nuisance.) The
re were even smaller fronds to use as fans and the breezes were cooling and pleasantly scented with whatever was blooming farther inland.

  Leila took off to explore with Whitby but she came back, her face and bare arms blotchy from contact with plants they had had to cut their way through.

  “The sap which zapped me,” Leila said as Kris and Sarah washed her arms and face, “is very sticky and Joe is hoping we’ve found a rubber substitute.”

  “The hard way,” Sarah said in a droll tone of voice. “Is this helping?”

  Leila gave a little sigh. “Only as long as the wet’s on me.

  “What wouldn’t we give for a decent antihistamine!” Sarah said fervently.

  “We’ve chemists enough…” Kris said.

  “And only the one microscope, which evidently isn’t strong enough to do much, so it’s back to old trial and error.”

  So, since trial wet compresses helped, more were made of bandage strips in the first-aid kit and wrapped around her arms and laid on her face and neck.

  That was when Sarah’s baby decided to arrive. In fact, did before his father and the others returned, though Kris immediately called a Mayday for Joe over the hand unit.

  “I must’ve miscounted,” Sarah said apologetically to her midwives when she realized her labor had begun. “This business of thirty-hour days and seven-month pregnancies.”

  “Nonsense,” Kris and Leila retorted in the same breath. “It isn’t as if we don’t know what to do,” Kris added, though her mind was revolving in a panic over all the things they didn’t have on board the scout that might be needed.

  None were as Sarah’s fine lusty baby took the minimum of time in arriving. Both mother and child were all cleaned up when the father leaped into the clearing, red-faced with exertion and badly scratched in his effort to get back in time. Then Whitby and Zainal were congratulating him and Sarah, and admiring the baby. Kris had her eyes on Zainal, wondering if human babies were in any way different from Catteni newborns.

  “Small,” Zainal muttered, knowing some comment was needed.

  “Small?” exclaimed Joe indignantly, as his son squirmed in his arms in reaction to the sudden loud noise.

  “He’s not small at all,” Leila said emphatically, and startling the rest of the team since she rarely contradicted anyone. “He’s eight pounds and a few ounces. And healthy!”

  “And I feel fine,” Sarah said. “And it’s so good to do this,” she added, for she was sitting up, arms around her knees, a position she hadn’t been able to assume for several months.

  “How big are Catteni babies if you think this one’s small?” Kris asked, deciding she’d better straighten Zainal out before he could be disappointed in what she produced.

  Zainal measured a distance with his hands.

  “I pity the females who have to carry that much around,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

  “Bigger head, quite likely, and bigger bones,” Joe said sagely.

  “He’s healthy, that’s what matters,” Whitby remarked in a definitive tone.

  But young Anthony Marley caused the team to leave the insalubrious area and head back to Retreat Bay. Sarah tried to talk them out of an early return because she and Anthony were fine and the reconnaissance could continue, as far as she was concerned. Joe was having none of it, wanting both wife and child checked over by the medics.

  Leon Dane pronounced Sarah in excellent postnatal condition and Fawzia Johnston, the pediatrician on duty when they returned, said that young Anthony was as healthy and normal as any mother could wish. The Doyle brothers, who now spent more time as carpenters and joiners, instructing others in the art, presented Sarah and Joe with a cradle for the infant.

  “Working all the hours God gave Botany to keep up with the demand,” Lenny said, after duly admiring young Anthony and congratulating the parents. “You know, this place is getting more like home all the time, with the babies arriving.” He looked melancholy.

  “You miss your own?” Sarah said, putting a sympathetic hand on his arm.

  Lenny’s face brightened into a grin. “Sort’ve, but who’s got time to think of what we left behind with so much to do where we are!”

  CHAPTER 11

  Zane Charles Bjornsen arrived on Botany at dawn exactly 222 days after conception. He was a long child—in that he did resemble his father. He came with fingernails that had to be cut soon after his birth or he’d’ve scratched his fair face, and a mass of very dark hair.

  He was not, as Anthony Marley had been, red, wrinkled, and an object only his mother could love.

  “Zane is a perfectly good name,” Kris had told Zainal. “One of my favorite Western writers was a Zane Grey. And I admire Chuck Mitford.”

  “But he is not the father.” Zainal did no more than raise one eyebrow at her, tacitly asking the question she had refused to answer.

  “No, but I see no reason I…we…can’t do him the honor of being godfather.”

  “Godfather?” Zainal’s lips twitched. “Oh God, oh God…?”

  “Not that sort. The deity that Father Jacob reveres, the real God.”

  “There is one?”

  Zainal had trouble believing in the Almighty, though the several ministers who had been dropped were trying to establish services. The Protestants had no problems but Father Jacob did, since he had none of the accessories properly required to say Mass. He fretted about their lack and how he should manage without them.

  Marrucci proved to be a devout Catholic and did his best to console the good father in one of those role reversals which continually happened on Botany.

  “If God is everywhere, then He’s here, too, padre, and He’ll accept the worship of the sincere, dedicated to Him. The earliest Catholics had no altar or relics, and communion was bread and wine. We got them. We got the dedication. You say the words and I’ll be altar boy.”

  * * *

  Mitford was both pleased and alarmed to have a child named for him.

  “Everyone will think he’s mine and he isn’t,” the sergeant said at his gruffest. “Not that I wish he weren’t, Kris,” he added hastily. “I mean, I’d’ve been honored if you’d wanted to but…well, hell, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do, Chuck.”

  “So who is the lucky guy?”

  “Remember that hooch Leon and Mayock made, about the time I broke my arm?”

  “Yeah, I do,” and Mitford looked surprised, then scowled deeply. “You mean you got raped and never reported it?” His fists clenched as if he held the neck of the offender within them.

  Kris patted one such fist gently. “I don’t know about any rape. But I do know I was very, very drunk.”

  Chuck frowned. “Pete Easley took you back to your cabin, didn’t he?”

  “He may have, Chuck, but I don’t recall a thing and perhaps that’s as well, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Can’t do anything about it. But maybe when Zane grows up, we’ll know for sure. Zainal couldn’t care less.”

  “No, he couldn’t, and you know, the way he’s taken this hasn’t lost him any points.”

  Zainal was at that moment changing his foster son’s fluff diapers. The reeds which produced the useful material were being cultivated everywhere they would grow around Retreat Bay.

  The sticky sap that had been such a problem on their last reconnaissance trip had been harvested and, poured into a mold, made a reasonable facsimile of waterproof garments for baby use. They could be washed and reused four or five times but gradually dissolved, often at the wrong time.

  Mitford grinned, watching the anomaly of a Catteni Emassi acting the nursemaid.

  Twenty-one hundred and three new lives had been expected, and all but five made it: two human babies were stillborn; one of the Rugarian young lived three days and died but even the one Rugarian who understood his species’ needs could not give a reason; a fourth was unfortunately strangled by the umbilical cord during delivery; and the fifth, a Deski, was m
alformed when it hatched and did not survive.

  * * *

  The promised crèches were opened and every female had the right to leave her youngling in the general care for her day’s work or whatever community service she performed. Sometimes it was crèche duty. Kris started the fad of the papoose board, dredging that up from reading Westerns and historical novels about Indians. It worked well for babies up to three months, and for shorter periods after that.

  “I said you will be a good mother,” Zainal said with a touch of smug pride, when she showed him how she could carry Zane around.

  To Kris’ astonishment, she didn’t find caring for Zane as onerous as she had expected, and that had little to do with Zainal’s enthusiasm for the child. She had never had anything so completely dependent on her, so trusting, and so precious to her. Once or twice, she wondered if she was being unfair to Pete Easley by not telling him. But he and one of the Swedish Aggies had made bricks together, which was equivalent to becoming engaged on Botany. If Kris caught him looking very carefully at her son, she ignored the query in his eyes and babbled on about how good a father Zainal was, until even Pete Easley got bored.

  The baby boom sparked a lot of investigations and experiments—a fine powder for talcum, an ointment for diaper and other minor rashes, a way to weave some of the vegetable fibers into cloth for proper baby clothes, and a spinning wheel to make knitting yarn out of loo-cow hairs. The creatures had grown longer coats for protection during the colder weather. These were collected—before the night crawlers could get them—and spun, then washed and/or felted.

  The crops grew lush and green on both continents. The Catteni continued to do nothing in their valley. The miners excavated tons of iron, copper, tin, zinc, lead, gold, and silver and occasionally some unusual clear stones which the jewelers thought a variant of tourmaline. But then, no one was looking for gemstones or in the places where rubies, emeralds, sapphires, or diamonds—which would have been useful for their hardness—might be found.

  Bone was more useful, and the heavy bones in the four rear legs of the loo-cows were scrupulously cleaned and dried for carving.