John Varley - Steel Beach

But this particular corner-and I wondered how Walter had known this-I'd always thought of as Maria's Cavern. There really was a cave in it, just a few hundred meters from where I now stood, and I had made it into my playhouse when I was very young and still known as Maria Cabrini.

So it was to Maria's Cavern I now went, and in Maria's Cavern that I desultorily scraped together a mat of dry moss to lie down on, and on the canvas bag Walter had given me that I intended to rest my head and sleep for at least a week, only I never saw if my head actually made it there because I fell asleep as my head was on the way down.

I actually did get about three hours' sleep. I know, because I checked the clock in my head-up display when the first labor pain woke me up.

If theoretical physics and mathematics had been the realm of females, the human race would have reached the stars long ago.

I base this contention on personal experience. No dedicated male could ever have the proper insight into the terrible geometry of parturition. Faced with the problem of making an object of size X appear on the other side of an opening of size X/2, and armed with the knowledge to enable her to view it as a problem in topology or Lobachevskian geometry, I feel sure one of the billions of women in the thrall of labor would have had an insight involving multiple dimensions on hyperspace if only to make it stop hurting . FTL travel would have been a cinch. As for Einstein, some woman a thousand years his junior could easily have discovered the mutability of time and space, if only she had the tools. Time is relative? Hah ! Eve could have told you that. Take a deep breath and bear down , honey, for about thirty seconds or an eternity, whichever comes last.

I didn't describe the injuries I received on my second Direct Interface with the Central Computer for a lot of reasons. One is that pain like that can't be described. Another: the human mind doesn't remember pain well, one of the few things God got right . I know it hurt; I can't recall how much it hurt, but I'm pretty sure giving birth hurt more, if only because it never seemed to stop. For these reasons, and others involving what privacy one can muster in this open age, I will not have much to say here about the process about which God had this to say in Genesis 3, verse sixteen: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…" All this for swiping one stinking apple ?

I went into labor. I continued laboring for the next thousand years, or well into that same evening.

There are no real excuses for most of my ignorance of the process. I'd seen enough old movies and should have remembered the-mostly comic-scenes where the blessed event arrives ahead of schedule. In my defense I can only plead a century of ordered life, a life wherein when a train was supposed to arrive at 8:17:15 it damn well arrived at 8:17:15. In my world postal service is fast, cheap, and continuous. You expect your parcels to arrive across town within fifteen minutes, and around the planet in under an hour. When you place an interplanetary call, the phone company had better not plead a solar storm is screwing things up; we expect them to do something about it, and they do. We are so spoiled by good service, by living in a world that works , that the most common complaint received by the phone company-and I'm talking thousands of nasty letters each year-concerns the time lag when calling Aunt Dee-Dee on Mars. Don't give me this speed-of-light shit, we whine; get my call through .

That's why I was caught off-guard by the first contraction. The little bastard wasn't due for two weeks yet. I knew it had always been possible that it would start early, but then I'd have phoned the doctor and he'd have mailed me a pill and put a stop to that . And on the proper day I'd have walked in and another pill would have started the process and I could have read a book or watched the pad or graded papers until they handed me the suitably cleaned and powdered and swaddled and peacefully sleeping infant. Sure, I knew how it used to be, but I was suffering from a delusion that most of you probably share with me. I thought I was immune , damn it. We put all this behind us when we started hatching our kids out of bottles, didn't we? If our minds know this, how would our bodies dare to betray us? I felt all these things in spite of recent events, which should have taught me that the world didn't have to be as orderly a place as I had thought it was.

So my uterus declared its independence, first with a little twitch, then with a spasm, and in no time at all in a tidal wave of hurting like the worst attack of constipation since the fellow tried to shit that proverbial brick.

I'm no hero, and I'm no stoic. After the fortieth or fiftieth wave I decided a quick death would be preferable to this, so I got up and walked out of the cave with the intention of turning myself in. How bad could it be? I reasoned. Surely me and the CC could work something out.

But because I'm no heroic stoic, my life was saved; after the forty-first or fifty-first pain threw me down to grovel in the dirt, I did a little arithmetic and figured I'd have about three hundred contractions before I reached the nearest exit, so I stumbled back to the cave as soon as I could walk again, figuring I'd prefer to die in there than out in the mud.

I used the decreasing periods of rationality between pains to think back to my only source of folk wisdom in the matter of childbirth: those good old movies. Not the black and white ones. If you watch those you might come to believe babies were brought by the stork, and pregnant women never got fat. You would surely have to conclude that birthing didn't muss your hair and your make-up. But in the late twentieth there were some movies that showed the whole ghastly process. Recalling them made me even queasier. Hell, some of those women died . I brought back scenes of hemorrhage, forceps delivery, and episiotomy, and knew that wasn't the half of it.

But there were constants in the process of normal birth, which was about all I could plan for, so I set about doing that. I rummaged in Walter's rucksack and found bottled water, gauze, disinfectants, thread, a knife. I laid them out beside me like a grisly home surgery kit lacking only the anesthetic. Then I waited to die.

That's the bad side of it. There was another side. Let's just skip over fevered descriptions of the grunting and groaning, of the stick I bit in half while bearing down, of the blood and slime. A moment came when I could reach down and feel his little head down there. It was a moment balanced between life and death. Maybe as near to a perfect moment as I ever experienced, and for reasons I've never quite been able to describe. The pain was still there, maybe even at a peak. But continual pain finally exerts its own anesthetic; maybe neural circuit breakers trip, or maybe you just learn to absorb the pain in a new way. Maybe you learn to accept it. I accepted it at that moment, as my fingers traced the tiny facial features and I felt his tiny mouth opening and closing. For a few more seconds he was still a part of my body.

At that moment I first experienced mother love. I didn't want to lose him. I knew I'd do anything not to lose him.

Oh, I wanted him to come out , right enough… and yet a part of me wanted to remain poised in that moment. Relativity. Pain and love and fear and life and death moving at the speed of light, slowing time down to the narrow focus of that one perfect moment, my womb the universe, and everything outside of it suddenly inconsequential.