Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

She finished the laundry and sat on the end of the bed. “When she twitches like this, it makes me think I’ve started labor.”

Mitch bent down before her and placed his hand on her prominent stomach, his eyes bright and large. “She’s really moving around tonight.”

“She’s happy,” Kaye said. “She knows you’re here. Sing her the song.”

Mitch looked up at her, then sang his version of the ABCs tune. “Ah, beh, say, duh, ehh,fuh, gah, aitch, ihh.juh, kuh, la muh-nuh, ohpuh…”

Kaye laughed.

“It’s very serious,” Mitch said.

“She loves it.”

“My father used to sing it to me. Phonetic alphabet. Get her ready for the English language. I started reading when I was four, you know.”

“She’s kicking time,” Kaye said in delight.

“She is not.”

“I swear it, feel!”

She actually liked the small trailer with its battered light oak plywood cabinets and old furniture. She had hung her mother’s prints in the living room. They had enough food and it was warm enough at night, too hot in the daytime, so Kaye went to work with Sue in the Administration Building and Mitch walked around the hills with his cell phone in his pocket, sometimes with Jack, or spoke with the other fathers-to-be in the clinic lounge. The men liked to keep to themselves here, and the women were content with that. Kaye missed Mitch in the hours he was away, but there was a lot to think about and prepare for. At night, he was always with her, and she had never been happier.

She knew the baby was healthy. She could feel it. As Mitch finished the song, she touched the mask around his eyes. He did not flinch when she did this, though he used to, the first week. Their masks were both quite thick now and flaky around the edges.

“You know what I want to do,” Kaye said.

“What?”

“I want to crawl off into a dark hole somewhere when it’s time.”

“Like a cat?”

“Exactly.”

“I can see doing that,” Mitch said agreeably. “No modern medicine, dirt floor, savage simplicity.”

“Leather thong in my teeth,” Kaye added. “That’s the way Sue’s mother gave birth. Before they had the clinic.”

“My father delivered me,” Mitch said. “Our truck was stuck in a ditch. Mom climbed into the back. She never let him forget that.”

“She never told me that!” Kaye said with a laugh.

“She calls it ‘a difficult delivery,’ “ Mitch said.

“We’re not that far from the old times,” Kaye said. She touched her stomach. “I think you sang her to sleep.”

The next morning, when Kaye awoke, her tongue felt thick. She pushed out of bed, waking Mitch, and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of the flat-tasting reservation tap water. She could hardly talk. “Mitth,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Awh we gehhing somhinh?”

“Wha?”

She sat beside him and poked out her tongue. “Ih’s aw custy,” she said.

“My,hoo,”hesaid.

“Ih’s li owah faces,” she said.

Only one of the four fathers could talk that afternoon in the clinic side room. Jack stood by the portable whiteboard and ticked off the days for each of their wives, then sat and tried to talk sports with the others, but the meeting broke up early. The clinic’s head physician — there were four doctors working at the clinic, besides the pediatrician — examined them all but had no diagnosis. There did not seem to be any infection.

The other mothers-to-be had it, too.

Kaye and Sue did their shopping together at the Little Silver Market down the road from the resort’s Biscuit House coffee shop. Others in the market stared at them but said nothing. There was a lot of grumbling among the casino workers, but only the old Cayuse woman, Becky, spoke her mind in the trustee meetings.

Kaye and Sue agreed that Sue was going to deliver first. “I ca’t way,” Sue said. “Neither cah Jack.”

Mitch was there again. It began vague, and then clicked into a wicked reality. All his memories of being Mitch were tidily packed away in that fashion peculiar to dreams. The last thing he did as Mitch was feel his face, pull at the thick mask, the mask that sat on new and puffy skin.

Then he was on the ice and rock again. His woman was screaming and crying, almost doubled up with pain. He ran ahead, then ran back and helped her to her feet, all the time ululating, his throat sore, his arms and legs bruised from the beating, the taunting, back on the lake, in the village, and he hated them, all laughing and hooting, as they swung their sticks and sounded so ugly.

The young hunter who had pushed a stick into his woman’s belly was dead. He had beaten that one to the ground and made him writhe and moan, then stamped on his neck, but too late, there was blood and his woman was hurt. The shamans came into the crowd and tried to push the others away with guttural words, choppy dark singing words, not at all like the watery light bird noises he could make now.

He took his woman into their hut and tried to comfort her, but she hurt too much.

The snow came down. He heard the shouting, the mourning cries, and he knew their time was up. The family of the dead hunter would be after them. They would have gone to ask the permission of the old Bull-man. The old Bull-man had never liked masked parents or their Flat Face children.

It was the end, the old Bull-man had often murmured; the Flat Faces taking all the game, driving the people farther into the mountains each year, and now their own women were betraying them and making more Flat Face children.

He carried his woman out of the hut, crossed the log bridge to the shore, listening to the cries for vengeance. He heard the Bull-man leading the charge. The chase began.

He had once used the cave to store food. Game was difficult to find and the cave was cold, and he had kept rabbit and marmot, acorns and wild grass and mice there for his woman when he had been on hunting duty. Otherwise she might not have gotten enough to eat from the village rations. The other women with their hungry children had refused to care for her as she grew round-bellied.

He had smuggled the small game from the cave into the village at night and fed her. He loved his woman so much it made him want to yell, or roll on the ground and moan, and he could not believe she was badly hurt, despite the blood that soaked her furs.

He carried his woman again, and she looked up at him, pleading in her high and singing voice, like a river flowing rather than rolling rocks, this new voice he had, too. They both sounded like children now, not adults.

He had once hidden near a Flat Face hunting camp and watched them sing and dance around a huge bonfire in the night. Their voices had been high and watery, like children. Maybe he and his woman were becoming Flat Faces and would go and live with them when the child was born.

He carried her through the soft and powdery snow, his feet numb Hke logs. She was quiet for a time, asleep. When she awoke, she cried and tried to curl up in his arms. In the twilight, as the golden glow filled the snow-misted high rocky places, he looked down on her and saw that the carefully shaved furry parts on her temples and cheeks, where the mask did not cover, and all the rest of her hair, looked dull and matted, lifeless. She smelled like an animal about to die.

Up over rocky terraces slippery with new snow. Along a snow-covered ridge, and then down, sliding, tumbling, the woman still in his arms. He got to his feet again at the bottom, turned to orient himself to the flat walls of the mountain, and suddenly wondered why this seemed so familiar, like something he had practiced over and over again with the hunter-trainers in the mountain goat seasons.