IGMS Issue 44 (7 page)

Jake didn't hear the rest. He looked at Malia sleeping in her bed, wondering how something twelve centimeters long could fit inside her skin without damaging her. He rubbed his eyes and felt like crying, but didn't.

"The operation should be a simple matter of extracting the fetus, much like a C-section."

"Let me get this straight," Andrea said. "You're going to weaken her immune system while she's got a parasite inside her? And then you're going to operate on her while she's prone to infections. And what about the other kids? They swap diseases every other month while we're cooped up in here."

"Her body mustn't reject the Bruma fetus," Dr. Venus said, nodding at the Major's contracting exit hole. "As for contagions, we'll keep her in isolation. That way she should be okay."

Should be, not will be. Jake's gaze sought the porthole to Lightspace. His mind gnawed at the thought that they were in a place without certainties.

The side effects of the immunosuppressives weren't as bad as they'd feared. Malia had to have plenty of blood samples taken, which she hated, and ultra sound scans, which Jake hated more than anything for fear of what they'd find. But she lost all contact with the other kids her age. Jake and Andrea had to take turns entertaining her during the day, and both discovered that playing was much, much easier for a five-year-old than for an adult.

Those problems would have been easy to bear if it hadn't been for the underlying fear that something could go wrong with Malia. That she'd get an infection, that the Bruma would damage her organs, that the operation would . . . but no, of course nothing would go wrong.

The thing that cheered him most in those days was to see Andrea's stomach grow with their new life. Andrea worried over the day when the baby arrived, but as they kept reminding each other, Malia would be clean by then, and everything would be fine.

Still, the three months of Malia's pregnancy passed in slow stress and increasing isolation. Jake was supposed to review schematics for the irrigation systems that the Blue Two agricultural board had sent him. Before Malia got infested, he'd started designing reservoirs that would be pumped full under solar power in the day and drain in the night under its own pressure, a low-tech solution that fitted Blue Two. Now he'd lost all passion for the project.

Andrea fared better at her job at the power plant construction team, exactly because it was a team. Her colleagues took turns to mind Malia so Andrea and Jake could go to the community meetings for their future region on Blue Two. These mass meetings with more than 5,000 attending colonists took place in large, oppressively brown chambers that the Bruma ship gorged out of its flesh for them. A lot of children attended, which made the meetings rather chaotic and made Jake miss Malia. And for the most part, he didn't find much understanding among the others. One colonist even had the gall to tell Jake he should be lucky he got to spend so much time with his daughter. He tended to avoid the meetings after that.

The truth was Jake did not feel lucky. He felt imprisoned by Malia's infection, and as the three months until the operation wore on, he found it harder and harder to plan for a future with so much uncertainty.

It got worse when Malia vomited blood three weeks before the operation. Doctor Venus told them it was an ulcer, a side effect of the immunosuppression drugs, but he deemed it safe to keep her on the medication.

The day after that, Major Blutnikov knocked on the wall to form the peephole that was the traditional request for access.

"I just wanted to check on Malia and her family," Major Blutnikov said. "May I come in?"

Jake almost stroked the wall to close the peephole, but somehow he had the feeling that the Major wouldn't take no for an answer. Besides, a boiling anger goaded him into showing the Major just what kind of life he'd condemned them to. He punched the wall twice, creating just enough of a doorway for the Major to squeeze through.

Major Blutnikov took a tour of the room as far as the furniture allowed. His eyes were on the walls, as if the table and chairs were nothing more than human detritus.

"Go ahead and check," Jake said. "You won't find any of the blood Malia vomits up from her ulcer, because your beloved Bruma sucks it all up for us, making our life so damn easy. And you can see she's not causing any trouble at all, because mostly she's watching TV shows instead of playing with her friends like a normal five-year-old. And you definitely won't find any coffee, because we drank it all just to stay awake. You know, the doctor says to make her food anytime she's hungry? It doesn't matter if it's three in the morning, we get out of bed and butter her biscuits whenever she hollers."

The Major finally turned and looked at Jake.

"Did you know my brother spawned two first-variety Brumas?"

Jake almost said, "Did you know I don't give a damn?" But something in the Major's pose said he didn't quite deserve that level of enmity.

"We were on a Bruma Lightspace transport nine years ago. My family was relocating to Green One when we found the passengers. Johnny had to put up with three months of drugs and threw up blood for nine weeks. He gave birth to two Brumas just before we were ready to land, and healing up after the c-section took him two weeks longer than planned. He was to land on a later shuttle, but he never made it downside. It turned out a third Bruma had been hatching in his brain."

"I'm sorry for your loss," Jake managed to say. "But why didn't the doctors find the Bruma in time?"

"The egg was too small to spot, but the doctors said afterwards that with regular brain scans things might have gone differently."

A new anxiety rolled through Jake's stomach. He was worried enough as it was about the operation, about the ulcer, about his sanity. Did he really have to worry about hidden fetuses too? And how come Doctor Venus hadn't told them of that risk?

"Well, Jake, now you know why I take such an interest in Malia. I'm worried for her."

The Major's gruff voice ought to cast him in a new light. Still, Jake sensed that something about the story didn't fit. This was a man who had caressed his way out of sick bay when Doctor Venus gave them the diagnosis, even though he could have just hit the wall.

"Don't you hate them?" Jake asked warily.

"What's the point? It'd be like hating the weather because hurricanes kill people. The Bruma are part of the universe we live in, something we can't control. We'll just have to deal with them the best way we can."

"But that doesn't mean you don't want revenge."

The Major's face tensed. "We're depending on them to take us to the stars. We need to learn everything about them, about their ability to fly through Lightspace. After that, we can liberate ourselves. If we don't, all humans will be at their mercy forever, particularly people like Malia and my brother. But until then we serve the human race by being friendly."

"Wait, does that mean you're studying them?"

"Them and everything I can get my hands on."

And while that should technically have made them allies, Jake heard the unsaid "and everyone." He was almost glad when Malia shouted in the other room. "Dad, I'm gonna be sick!"

"Then get back to liberating humanity," he said, pointing at the contracting wall. "I have to take care of my child."

"I don't believe it," Andrea said. "His brother?"

She had been sitting on the couch they'd formed out of the wall when Jake told her of the Major's visit, but now she was pacing their little cabin furiously, as if her huge stomach didn't weigh a thing.

"That's his story," Jake said.

"And he just happens to tell us that after Malia started throwing up blood?"

Jake got up. He wanted to hug Andrea and calm her, but she kept pacing. When she was in that mood she gestured as much as she talked, so he let her go.

"It's just too damn convenient," she said. "The Major hears we hit a bump on the road to bringing more Bruma into the world, so he invites himself over to see how we're doing. And while he's here just happens to strike a little fear into the hearts of Jake and Andrea Durow to keep them in line. How is that a coincidence, Jake?"

Her words stirred Jake's lingering desire for liberation, which had spurred him into leaving Earth. The dictatorships and police states had become increasingly adept at manipulating the media since the Bruma arrived. Truth? Truth never entered into it when the government wanted something.

"I hear you," he said to Andrea. "Loud and clear. But can we take the chance that he's telling the truth?"

Andrea stopped in her tracks, finally seeking out his embrace. She sobbed, and Jake felt his own irritation at the Major for making his wife cry.

"We don't have to decide anything yet," he said.

Her fist hit his chest with enough power to get his attention.

"That's not the point, Jake. If I find out he threatened our daughter, he'll need every last one of his Bruma friends to keep him safe."

He felt proud of Andrea just then. At the same time he wished he could muster the same kind of resistance. Because true or not, the Major's story had scared him worse than anything Doctor Venus had ever said.

Malia looked like a sleeping doll after the operation: a breathing, living, beautiful little doll that snored just enough to be extra cute. All the energy that had poured out of Jake while he waited on the couch (and the chair and, and, for a while, on the floor) in the hospital room, came crashing back at the sight of her in bed, in the form of love and relief. She'd be off the drugs now, and when they arrived on Blue Two she'd be able to play with the other kids. They'd all be settled in when the baby came.

"The operation went fine," Dr. Venus told them when he and the nurse came by for the post-op. "The Bruma is out and alive, a healthy first variety female. We looked over your daughter's organs and there's no visible damage."

He drew in breath and the pitch of his voice fell. "However . . . we found four more eggs nested in front of her liver. I expect Major Blutnikov will be able to identify the variety, but my best guess is they're third variety males. Quite small when they're born, so the pregnancy should be easy. Unfortunately the literature say they gestate slowly."

"Slowly?" Jake asked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"They'll be ready six months from now, and we'll need to operate on Malia again to get them out."

Six months. One hundred and eighty days. Three months and seven days after they arrived in orbit around Blue Two. They'd be stuck here long after the other colonists landed, staked out the best land, built a roof over their heads, and settled in. And what if they couldn't even leave then? What if the Major was right and Malia had to be checked again for more Bruma in her brain?

"She'll be on drugs for six months?" Andrea asked. Jake knew she was thinking about all the practical matters of caring for both a baby and a sick child. And he loved her for it. As long as she had day-to-day routines, she wouldn't go mad.

He wasn't so sure of his own sanity.

"And her head?"

"The scan came back clean."

Before Jake could say anything, Malia woke and started crying. He narrowly avoided crawling into bed to comfort her.