Calypso Outward Bound

by D G Hervey

  “Thank you,” Ykon responded. “Marie has told me about you and your offer to use your winery as a setting for this party. You are very kind to go to such trouble for us.”

  Vrike responded, “It has expanded the circle of my acquaintances. That is a wonderful thing for me.”

  Moving on to the second quilt on display, Vrike asked Ykon, “Do you know who made this one?”

  Onaho spoke up, “It is mine.”

  “Hello, and welcome,” she responded, “I am Vrike and do you know Ykon. What is your name?”

  “I am Onaho. Yes, I know Ykon. We worked on quilts at the same time in Marie’s quilting room. Aren’t you the one who runs the winery?”

  “Yes,” she responded, “It’s been fun and unusual preparing for this event. I see you have made what one might call a traditional baby quilt for a girl, pink and white squares, with the quilting in each square being the outline of gentle things. I see a puppy, a kitten, a butterfly, a baby bird in a nest, a calf, a colt, a lamb, and the last one must be a baby goat. They are all babies, excepting perhaps the butterfly.”

  “Speaking of babies,” Onaho responded, “we have a puppy in our pod. It’s a cocker spaniel. That is what prompted me to start with baby animals. And I just love butterflies. I like to visit our butterfly garden with all of its flowers and the wide variety of butterflies that emerge there. I appreciate that there are windows that are sometimes opened to let the butterflies fly into other spaces to pollinate fruit trees and other crops. It is a wonder that so many of the cocoons end up back into the butterfly garden for the next emergence of each species. The bots must help find them.”

  “I like the time when the butterflies are among my fruit trees,” replied Vrike. “I have trees that produce a small plum that some butterflies especially like. Or perhaps it is just that those trees bloom so profusely. I’ve had a couple of courses in entomology and an still interested in the pollinators of our fruit trees. The trees attract solitary bees, honey bees, and butterflies but, it seems to me, not bumblebees.”

  Onaho stated, “Along that line, I understand that Calypso has all twelve native milkweeds that monarch butterflies require as their sole caterpillar host plant.”

  “I’ve heard that’s true,” agreed Vrike. “But, I’m not functioning as an entomologist striving to ensure the survival of that species. So I don’t actively track the status of that effort. We all understand how important it is to protect the variety of life that we have. I’m not indifferent. I wonder how many of the species we started out having won’t survive our journey. That will be true for plants and animals. Of course we have our seed repository. It even contains seeds for plants that we are not actively growing on Calypso. There are several other kingdoms of life besides plants and animals, each one is a story unto itself. Certainly, we have not codified all the types we have on Calypso. So it is not possible for us to accurately track any decline the others may experience.”

  “Here is Holza,” observed Onaho. “She has the next quilt. It is similar to mine, but she’s used some nice powder blue fabrics, giving it a calming, peaceful feel.”

  “It is similar,” agreed Holza, “in that I’ve used pink and white satin fabrics, but different in that the primary impression is that the quilt blocks are hexagons, not squares. So it is sort of like a honey bee’s comb. Instead of quilting in the designs, Marie talked me into doing applique for the figures. That way I could get more colors into the quilt.”

  Haley walked up, heard the last comment, and commended, “I admired your courage to try both the hexagons and the applique.”

  Vrike observed, “Yes, it is beautiful. Binding the uneven sides of the quilt must have been challenging.”

  “Marie had done a similar quilt back on Earth,” informed Holza. “She had good tutorials she brought with her. I would not have tried it without her encouragement and advice.”

  “Holza,” Haley asked, “I like to learn about my fellow passengers on this spaceship. Do you mind me asking, what is your career on Calypso?”

  Holza responded, “I like to learn what others are doing, too. I’m part of a group that keeps us abreast of Earth’s computer manufacturing capabilities. It is a rapidly evolving technology. Back in 1965 Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel made an observation that has been generalized into a law which holds that Earth’s computing capabilities double about every two years. This exponential growth is called Moore’s Law. It initially included only the doubling of components on an integrated circuit or computer chip. Now it includes the doubling of computational speeds, and of the adoption of new technologies which further advance computer technology.”

  Haley replied, “That must be fascinating to see unfold year after year.”

  “While Calypso may be reasonably reached by the Earth-based opponents of ML seeking to do us harm,” Holza continued, “it is paramount that we keep pace with our computing capabilities. We could not possibly do all of the research ourselves that would advance us ahead of Earth in these three arenas. Earth has far more people working this problem than our entire population. But ML tries to ensure that all of the relevant information is in her updated feed to our database. So we study the database and work to incorporate into Calypso’s manufacturing technology Earth’s latest developments that ML feeds us in the database updates. Keeping up is a struggle.”

  “I am just amazed at what Calypso manages to accomplish,” remarked Haley. “There is so much happening. There is so much that needs to be accomplished. On top of it all, we need to exponentially increase our population, be good mothers, and see to the education of all of our children.”

  “Yes,” agreed Vrike, “and we need to instill in our children the sense of urgency to maintain this pace of accomplishment without having them decide that it is a futile effort. There are many challenges. It will be how we meet the little daily challenges that will determine our fate. I expect that somewhere along our journey, the updates of our database will stop. Then, we’ll truly be on our own. We need to be ready when that day comes.”

  -

  The group kept examining the quilts until they arrived at the last one. It was Jon’s quilt, made to his design, with fabrics he selected, with Marie’s approval, and hand quilted for him by Marie.

  Jon stood by, drinking from a large tumbler in his hand. In the tumbler was his own concoction of juices. It was similar to the concoctions he used to make for parties that Marie and he hosted. He started with white grape juice and added bits of guava nectar, apple juice, mango nectar, pear juice, pineapple and, papaya juice.

  “Jon,” inquired Vrike, “are you standing by to overhear the comments of the women about the quilt Marie made for you?”

  Jon responded, “And feeling a bit nostalgic for the parties she and I used to have. I’d make a punch out of juices such as these and keep the punch bowl cold with a frozen ring of the punch. I used to say that no two batches were ever alike. They were mixed to my whim of the moment, which of course depended to some extent on what I had on hand just then.”

  “I think my customers would enjoy getting you to mix up punches for the winery,” proposed Vrike. “You should make a habit of it. We’d all enjoy it. There will be times when many of them will be obliged to forego drinking anything alcoholic.”

  “I know that I would enjoy it as well,” he replied. “I’ll be pleased as punch to do that - pun fully intended.”

  Chapter 15 - Birth

  Jon and Marie were in bed asleep when a bot entered and turned the lights up bright. This woke Jon up.

  “This is unusual,” commented Jon. “What’s going on?”

  The bot replied, “Dr. Cuadro requests your presence in the delivery room. Ykon is in labor and she wants you to be there for the delivery of her daughter.”

  The conversation awoke Marie. “We’ll be right along,” Marie responded. “Please let them know we are heading that way.”

  The bot left. Marie and Jon got dressed and took the moving walkways to the delivery room o
n Deck 4, which experiences slightly less than 1 G.

  -

  Jon and Marie scrubbed and got into surgeon’s attire. They put gowns over their underwear, surgical masks covering their noses, caps covering their hair, gloves on their hands, and coverings over their socks. Then Marie went to keep Ykon company. Jon checked the electronically posted information outside of the ‘private’ ‘hospital’ room, where Ykon’s labor was progressing. Jon understood that he would not be allowed in Ykon’s room when Dr. Cuadro examined her. So he waited patiently, figuring out what the posted information could convey. From that he understood that Ykon’s cervix dilation was already 7 cm. It was almost time for her to be taken to the delivery room. Dr. Cuadro had not had them awakened too far ahead of time.

  Where Jon waited, there was ‘elevator’ music playing, which he decided must have been recorded by Calypso’s orchestra and other Calypso instrumentalists. He liked the technology that played this ‘elevator’ music. When he tired of hearing the music here all he had to do was speak, ordering the music to stop, and it would. Back on Earth, he’d avoided, when possible, the ubiquitous programs and music in waiting rooms. He much preferred reading material, if there was anything that interested him.

  A bot came into the area where Jon was waiting and told him that he could go into the delivery room.

  Ykon was on the delivery table, prepared for the delivery, with her feet and legs in the stirrups. Her labor pains were a little over two minutes apart with contraction duration of almost a minute. Marie was seated on Ykon’s left side by her head. Dr. Cuadro was carefully positioning a mirror so that Ykon and Marie could observe the proceedings. There were instruments on Ykon to monitor her contractions, her blood pressure, and the baby‘s, Zarifa’s, heart rate. Jon positioned himself, as instructed, some three to five meters past the foot of the table, waiting until there was something for him to do.

  Marie understood her job was to keep Ykon distracted from her pain. She had decided she would do this by getting Ykon to talk about herself and her background. She knew much about Ykon from sharing the pod’s common room with her for about three months, but Marie would delve into some details she did not know. She would also have Ykon provide some background which she believed Dr. Cuadro would not know.

  When Ykon’s current labor pain passed, Marie asked her, “Ykon, where in the Sudan are you from?”

  “I was raised just outside of Wad Medani,” replied Ykon, “which is the second most modern city of Sudan.”

  Marie asked, “Is that where you were born?”

  “I was born in my parents’ home,” she answered, “on our farm.”

  “Was there a doctor there at your birth?”

  “I understand that there was a midwife there to take care of my mother and me,” she responded. “My father was there, but from mother’s account, he did nothing.”

  Ykon then had another labor pain. It lasted for about one minute. When it was over, Ykon commented, “That was a big one.”

  “What sort of a farm,” asked Marie, “was it where you were born?”

  “It was irrigated farmland,” she replied. “Commercially, we raised cotton and peanuts.”

  “Irrigated, you say.” Marie asked, “What was the source of the water you used for irrigation, wells?”

  “You don’t know the geography of Sudan,” laughed Ykon. “Wad Medani is on the Blue Nile River not far south of where it joins the White Nile at Khartoum, the capital and most modern city of Sudan. The Blue Nile, and a lake that is fed by it, are the source for irrigation water there. It irrigates about 10,000 square kilometers of land.”

  The attending nurse got between Ykon, Marie and the mirror. Dr. Cuadro told her to move so as not to obstruct their view.

  “So,” questioned Marie, “is irrigation a recent innovation in Sudan?”

  “No,” responded Ykon. “It started about 1925 with the Gezira Scheme when the British ruled the area. It expanded a lot in the 1950s. It again expanded substantially after a dry spell led to the building of a dam that made a lake. The lake ensures the availability of sufficient water to keep the irrigation economy going.”

  Ykon had another labor pain.

  Dr. Cuadro commented, “It won’t be long now.”

  The labor pain passed.

  “So,” inquired Marie, “what languages do you speak?”

  “Although it is rare,” beamed Ykon, “I speak Coptic. I also speak Arabic and, obviously, English.”

  “Where,” inquired Marie, “did you go to school?”

  Ykon responded, “There were satisfactory local schools through high school. My undergraduate years were at the University of al-Gezira, which is in the vicinity. Then I attended Oxford for my graduate level work.”

  “So what is your religion,” asked Marie, “Islam?”

  “No,” Ykon chided, “I am a Copt. My people have been Coptic Christians for over two thousand years. We are a minority in Sudan, about one percent.”

  Ykon had another labor pain.

  Dr. Cuadro instructed Ykon, “Now. Push.”

  Marie saw Zarifa’s head come out.

  Zarifa made a couple of little cries.

  Ykon asked, “Should I push now?”

  Dr. Cuadro replied, “That won’t be necessary.”

  Dr. Cuadro cupped her gloved hands, one under Zarifa’s head and the other behind the back of her chin. Dr. Cuadro then pulled gently. Zarifa’s shoulders emerged, then her whole body easily came out. Zarifa cried a bit more.

  Dr. Cuadro placed Zarifa, with soft white material under her, on Ykon’s stomach, and Zarifa quieted down a good bit. Dr. Cuadro then put two clamps close together on the umbilical cord. She then cut the cord between the clamps.

  When Dr. Cuadro cut the umbilical cord, Zarifa began crying again, but there was no bleeding at the cord.

  Dr. Cuadro commented almost immediately, “As expected, she is a girl.”

  Then Marie saw Jon lift Zarifa and the white cloths off of Ykon’s stomach to take her over to a brightly illuminated incubator. Zarifa stopped crying while Jon caressed her head and stomach, as he had been instructed to do. Under the bright lights of the incubator, Zarifa kept her eyes tightly closed.

  Dr. Cuadro pulled gently on the clamp that was still attached to the umbilical cord, and remarked, “Here comes the placenta.”

  The nurse took charge of the placenta and umbilical cord. Marie thought that the nurse would, no doubt, see to the recovery of the umbilical-cord blood that seemed to be so anticipated.

  Dr. Cuadro then examined Zarifa in the incubator, checking her feet and her hands. She observed, “Zarifa has a strong grip.”

  Then Dr. Cuadro lifted Zarifa out of the incubator to check her eyes. They opened promptly once she was out from under the bright lights.

  When the doctor returned to the delivery table, the nurse reported, “Zarifa was born at 4:18 AM this morning.”

  “Thanks for noticing,” remarked Dr. Cuadro. “I’ll include that on her birth certificate.”

  “What,” asked Jon, “will be done with the vernix caseosa covering Zarifa’s skin? Will it be washed off?”

  The nurse responded, “It provides a variety of potential benefits to Zarifa. It will be a while before she gets her first bath, which will wash off what is not rubbed in by then.”

  With a bot ready to assist, if needed, the nurse transferred Ykon from the delivery table to a gurney to be wheeled back to her room. The bot’s assistance was not needed.

  As Ykon was about to be wheeled out, Dr. Cuadro commended, “Ykon, you’ve initiated our delivery room quite nicely. May all of the succeeding mothers do as well as you have done.”

  After Ykon was gone, Dr. Cuadro turned to Marie and complimented her, “You did an outstanding job of keeping her mind occupied. She easily went through natural child birth. Yes, she had an IV drip in her arm in case something was needed. But the IV was just glucose. We never had to add any drugs to it.”

  “You told me to keep her m
ind occupied,” replied Marie, “so I did. Most people love to talk about themselves. Ykon is not an exception to that generalization. It was easy and I got to learn more about about her and Sudan than I already knew.”

  Dr. Cuadro responded, “Listening to your conversation I also learned some things. This has been a wonderful morning. I love my profession.”

  Although he had been awakened early for this delivery, Jon did not feel tired. He felt touched that Ykon had wanted his presence for the birth of her daughter and invigorated by getting to witness it.

  Smiling from ear to ear Jon remarked to Marie, “Calypso’s mission has truly begun. The reason we were brought here can really begin to be fulfilled. Thanks to Ykon, I have stood in as Zarifa’s father. The creation of life is beautiful. Consider a fetus moves from a liquid existence in the womb to an air-breathing, independent baby. Aren’t you amazed by that? I am.”

  Marie responded, “We are living ML’s dream. Calypso is heading to a distant star to give humanity a fresh start.”

  Jon replied, “Ykon just began a new generation. She has started Calypso’s population explosion. These children will become colonists instead of just space-farers. They will be the frontiersmen of the homeland they select. It will be a joy to try to be a positive influence on their development. I am eager to get started.”

  Marie responded, “The next generation will surely outnumber the original few hundred who started out on this adventure.”

  Jon agreed, “They will live well beyond the lifetime that you and I can expect. Perhaps a few of ML’s founders may survive to tell their offspring about life on the surface of a planet and try to help them adapt to it, if that is what this new generation decides they want to do. It won’t be easy for those born in space.”

  Marie stated, “I would love to know the outcome of this quest. But as you say, we are finally, really started.”

  Jon replied, “I hope we do succeed in taking the next step in the domestication of humanity that ML envisioned. I wonder what aspect of existence will be manifested by such a step. I can think of many possibilities.”