Limits (29 page)

Six months after the birth of Eve, Doc was sure. There was a problem.

The children of Ridgeback totaled seven. Two of the women had mi
s
carried, fewer than he might have feared, and without complications. Jill was still carrying hers, and Doc was beginning to wonder; but it wasn’t serious yet. Jill was big and strong with wide hips and a deep bust. Even now Greg was hard put to keep her from commandeering one of the little flyers and jouncing off to the coastline to check the soil, or inland to supervise the fresh water fish preserve. Give her another week…

The night Elise had delivered their child, it had been special. She had had
a dry birth, with the water sack rupturing too early, and Doc had had to use a lubrication device. Elise was conscious during the entire delivery, eschewing painkillers for the total experience of her first birth. She delivered safely, for which Doc had given silent thanks. His nerves were scraped to supersens
i
tivity, and he found himself just sitting and holding her hand, whispering affection and encouragement to her, while Greg did much of the work. With Elise’s approval he named their son Gerald, shortened to Jerry. Jerry was three weeks old now, healthy and squalling, with a ferocious grip in his tiny hands.

But even a father’s pride could not entirely hide the squarish jawline, the eyes, the…

All the children had it, all the six recent ones. And Eve hadn’t lost it. Doc continued his research in the microlibrary, switching from pediatrics to g
e
netics. He had a microscope and an electron microscope, worth their hu
n
dreds of thousands of dollars in transportation costs; he had scrapings of his own flesh and Eve’s and Jerry’s. What he lacked was a Nobel Prize geneticist to stand behind his shoulder and point out what were significant deviations as opposed to his own poor slide preparation techniques.

He caught Brew looking at him at mealtimes, as though trying to raise the nerve to speak. Soon the big man would break through his inhibitions, Doc could see it coming. Or perhaps Nat would broach the question. Her eldest brother had been retarded, and Doc knew she was sensitive about it. How long could it be before that pain rose to the surface?

And what would he say to them then?

It was not a mutation. One could hardly expect the same mutation to hit all of seven couples in the same way.

It was no disease. The children were phenomenally healthy.

So Doc worked late into the night, sometimes wearing a black scowl as he retraced dead ends. He needed advice, and advice was 11.9 light years away. Was he seeing banshees? Nobody else had noticed anything. Naturally not; the children all looked normal, for they all looked alike. Only Brew seemed disturbed. Hell, it was probably Doc that was worrying Brew, just as it was Doc that worried Elise. He ought to spend more time with Elise and Jerry.

Jill lost her baby. It was stillborn, pitiful in its frailty. Jill turned to Greg
as the dirt showered down on the cloth that covered her child, biting her lip savagely, trying to stop the tears. She and her husband held each other for a long moment, then, with the rest of the colonists, they walked back to the dwellings.

The colonists had voted early, and unanimously, to give up coffins on Ridgeback. Humans who died here would give their bodies to the conquest of the planet. Doc wondered if a coffin would have made this ceremony easier, more comforting in its tradition. Probably not, he thought. Dead is dead.

Doc went home with Elise. He’d been spending more time there lately, and less time with the microscopes. Jerry was crawling now, and he crawled everywhere; you had to watch him like a hawk. He could pick his parents unerringly out of a crowd of adults, and he would scamper across the floor, cooing, his eyes alight…his deepset brown eyes.

It was a week later that Jase came to him. After eight hours of labor June had finally released her burden. For a newborn infant the body was big and strong, though in any normal context he was a fragile, precious thing. As father, Jase was entitled to see him first. He looked down at his son and said, “He’s just like the others.” His eyes and his voice were hollow, and at that moment Doc could no longer see the jovial colony leader who called squaredances at the weekly hoedown.

“Of course he is.”

“Look, don’t con me, Doc. I was eight when Cynnie was born. She didn’t look like any of them. And she never looked like Eve.”

“Don’t you think that’s for me to say?”

“Yes.
And damned quick!”

Doc rubbed his jaw, considering. If he was honest with himself he had to admit he ached to talk to somebody. “Let’s make it tomorrow.
In the ship’s library.”

Jase’s strong hand gripped his arm.
“Now.”

“Tomorrow, Jase.
I’ve got a lot to say, and there are things in the library you ought to see.”

“Here,” he said, dialling swiftly. A page appeared on the screen, three-quarters illustration, and one-quarter print to explain it. “Notice the head?
And the hands.
Eve’s fingers are longer than that. Her forehead slopes
more. But look at these.” He conjured up a series of growth states paired with silhouettes of bone structure.

“So?”

“She’s maturing much faster than normal.”

“Oh.”

“At first I didn’t think anything about the head. Any infant’s head is distorted during passage from the uterus. It goes back to normal if the birth wasn’t difficult. And you can’t tell much from the features; all babies look pretty much alike. But the hands and arms bothered me.”

“And now?”

“See for yourself. Her face is too big and her skull is too small and too flat. And I don’t like the jaw, or the thin lips.” Doc rubbed his eyes wearily. “And there’s the hair. That much hair isn’t unheard of at that age, but taken with everything else…you can see why I was worried.”

“And all the kids look just like her.
Even Jase Junior.”

“Even Jerry.
And Jill’s stillbirth.”

In the ship’s library there was a silence as of mourning.

Jase said, “We’ll have to tell Earth. The colony is a failure.”

Doc shook his head. “We’d better see how it develops first.”

“We can’t have normal children, Doc.”

“I’m not ready to give up, Jase. And if it’s true, we can’t go back to Earth, either.”

“What? Why?”

“This thing isn’t a mutation. Not in us, it can’t be. What it could be is a virus replacing some of the genes. A virus is a lot like a free-floating chr
o
mosome anyway. If we’ve got a disease that keeps us from having normal children—”

“That’s stupid. A virus here, waiting for us, where there’s nothing for it to live on but plankton? You—”

“No, no, no. It had to come with us. Something like the common cold could have mutated aboard ship. There was enough radiation outside the shielding. Someone sneezes in the airlock before he puts his helmet on. A year later someone else inhales the mutant.”

Jase thought it through. “We can’t take it back to Earth.”

“Right.
So what’s the hurry? It’d be twenty-four years before they could answer a cry for help. Let’s take our time and find out what we’ve really got.”

“Doc, in God’s name, what can we tell the others?”

“Nothing yet.
When the time comes I’ll tell them.”

Those few months were a busy time for Ridgeback’s doctor. Then they were over. The children were growing, and most of the women were pre
g
nant, including Angie and Jill, who had both had miscarriages. Never again would all the women of Ridgeback be having children in one ear-shattering population explosion.

Now there was little work for Doc. He spoke to Jase, who put him on the labor routines. Most of the work was agricultural, with the heavy jobs ha
n
dled by machines. Robot trucks, trailing plows, scored rectangular patterns across the land.

The fenced bay was rich in
Earthborn
plankton, and now there were larger forms to eat the plankton. Occasionally Greg opened the filter to let discolored water spread out into the world, contaminating the ocean.

At night the colonists watched news from Earth, 11.9 years in transit, and up to a year older before Roy boarded the starship to beam it down. They strung the program out over the year in hour segments to make it last longer. There were no wars in progress, to speak of; the Procyon colony project had been abandoned; Macrostructures Inc. was still trying to build an interstellar ramjet. It all seemed very distant.

Jase came whistling into Doc’s lab, but backed out swiftly when he saw that he had interrupted a counselling session with Cynnie and Roy. Doc was the closest thing the colony had to a marriage therapist. Jase waited outside until the pair had left, then trotted in.

“Rough day?”

“Yeah.
Jase, Roy and Cynnie don’t fight, do they?”

“They never did. They’re like twins. Married people do get to be like each other, but those two overdo it sometimes.”

“I knew it. There’s something wrong, but it’s not between them.” Doc rubbed his eyes on his sleeve. “They were sounding me out, trying to get me talking about the children without admitting they’re scared. An
y
way…what’s up?”

Jase brought his hands from behind his back. He had two bamboo poles rigged for fishing. “What say we exercise our manly prerogatives?”

“Ye gods!
In our private spawning ground?”

“Why not?
It’s big enough. There are enough fish. And we can’t let the surplus go; they’d starve. It’s a big ocean.”

By now the cultivated strip of topsoil led tens of miles north and south along the continent. Jill claimed that life would spread faster that way, ou
t
ward from the edges of the strip. The colony was raising its own chicken eggs and fruit and vegetables. On Landing Day they’d been the first in generations to taste moa meat, whose rich flavor had come
that
close to making the New Zealand bird extinct. Why shouldn’t they catch their own fish?

They made a full weekend of it. They hauled a prefab with them on the flyer and set it up on the barren shore. For three days they fished with the springy bamboo poles. The fish were eager and trusting. They ate some of their catch, and stored the rest for later.

On the last day Jase said, “I kept waiting to see you lose some of that uptight look. You finally have, a little, I think.”

“Yeah.
I’m glad this happened, Jase.”

“Okay. What about the children?”

He didn’t need to elaborate. Doc said, “They’ll never be normal.”

“Then what are they?”

“I dunno. How do you tell people who came twelve light years to build a world that their heirs will be…” he groped for words. “Whatever.
Changed.
Animals.”

“Christ. What a mess.”

“Give me time to tell Elise…if she hasn’t guessed by now. Maybe she has.”

“How long?”

“A week, maybe.
Give us time to be off with Jerry.
Might make it easier if we’re with him.”

“Or harder.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” He cast his line out again. “Anyway, she’ll keep the secret, and she’d never forgive me if I didn’t tell her first. And you’d better tell June the night before I make the big announcement.” The words seemed to catch in his throat and he hung his head, miserable.

Tentatively Jase said, “It’s absolutely nobody’s fault.”

“Oh, sure.
I was just thinking about the last really big announcement I helped to make.
Years ago.
Seems funny now, doesn’t it? ‘It’s safe, people.
You can start dreaming now. Go ahead and have those babies, folks. It’s all right…’” His voice trailed off and he looked to Jase in guilty confusion. “What could I do, Jase? It’s like thalidomide. In the beginning, it all looked so wonderful.”

Jase was silent, listening to the sound of water lapping against the boat. “I just hate to tell Earth, that’s all,” he finally said in a low voice. “It’ll be like giving up. Even if we solve this thing, they’d never risk sending another ship.”

“But we’ve got to warn them.”

“Doc, what’s
happening
to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“How hard have you—no, never
mind
.” Jase pulled his line in, baited it and sent it whipping out again. Long silences are in order when men talk and fish.

“Jase, I’d give anything I have to know the answer. Some of the genes look different in the electron microscope.
Maybe.
Hell, it’s all really too fuzzy to tell, and I don’t really know what it means anyway. None of my training anticipated anything like
this
.
You
try to mink of something.”