Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

“Doesn’t it happen in another room?” I asked. I was finally getting nervous about it. It was my first baby, and after all the tales I’d heard, I didn’t know for sure what to expect. They’d only warned me to look out for interns.

She rose from her chair, went to the blank-faced box on the wall directly in front of where I sat. She pressed its button, and the front lit up with a moving picture. A table. A huge central light like a sun. Around the table, an assortment of figures, male and female, dressed in pale green, and well masked. I lay on the table with my legs upheld.

“There you are,” the lady said, and added ungraciously, “Now that we’ve got that settled, would you like a cup of tea?”

Although my mouth felt dry, I didn’t think I could swallow a thing, so I replied, “No, thank you very much, though.”

I watched the screen, sliding down a bit more comfortably in the chair where I sat, my knees spread awkwardly apart. The baby gave a rip-snorting screech, the figures on the screen reached down between my legs and lifted up a dripping baby boy.

I said, “Ooof,” and pressed my hands against my belly. I took several deep breaths, still watching the screen where a female figure tied off the cord, cleaned the boy, and wrapped it in a cocoon of nylon.

The lady was back at her machine, one eye on the moving picture, her lips moving. I could hear her whisper, “One boy, normal, delivered in eight minutes,” as the machine tick-ticked the information into creased cards on the spindle.

Slowly, I began to draw myself up in the chair until I was sitting up straight. I felt breathless, but relieved, after carrying that burden all week. After a moment, I asked the lady, “Is that all now?”

“That’s it,” she said. “Except for our usual advice: don’t return before the end of next month. You must not use up all your privileges at once, no matter how many maternity pills you’re tempted to gobble. After all, you’ve got five years of childbearing ahead of you. If that’s what you want,” she added the last with a certain sneer which I knew had been practiced on many others.

She got up from her chair to file the cards. I got up, pressing my skirt down over my flat stomach. “Look,” I said, angered by her attitude, “as far as the law goes, I could come in here and have a baby every single week for a year. So don’t threaten me.”

She disdained to answer. I was on my way to the door when another woman came in, rushing, and plunged past me to the lady’s desk. She said, “I’m in labor!”

“Do sit down, you’ll have to wait until they clear the spools,” the lady said.

I looked back as the woman sat down, balancing her belly in her lap, and she caught my eye. “Did you have one yet?” she asked.

“Yes, a lovely boy. Good luck with yours.”

She said, “Thanks, I’ll need it. I’m having twins again.”

“Greedy, greedy,” said the lady disapprovingly to her, as I went out.

I remember the sky, and the sun burning in the sky like a golden penny flicked into a deep blue pool, and the scuttling white clouds that changed into magic ships and whales and turreted castles as they drifted up across that bottomless ocean and swam the equally bottomless sea of my mind’s eye. I remember the winds that skimmed the clouds, smoothing and rippling them into serene grandeur or boiling them into froth. I remember the same wind dipping low to caress the grass, making it sway and tremble, or whipping through the branches of the trees and making them sing with a wild, keening organ note. I remember the silence that was like a bronzen shout echoing among the hills.

—It is raining. The sky is slate-gray and grittily churning. It looks like a soggy dishrag being squeezed dry, and the moisture is dirty rain that falls in pounding sheets, pressing down the tall grass. The rain pocks the ground, and the loosely packed soil is slowly turning into mud and the rain spatters the mud, making it shimmer—

And I remember the trains. I remember lying in bed as a child, swathed in warm blankets, sniffing suspiciously and eagerly at the embryonic darkness of my room, and listening to the big trains wail and murmur in the freight yard beyond. I remember lying awake night after night, frightened and darkly fascinated, keeping very still so that the darkness wouldn’t see me, and listening to the hollow booms and metallic moans as the trains coupled and linked below my window. I remember that I thought the trains were alive, big dark beasts who came to dance and to hunt each other through the dappled moonlight of the world outside my room, and when I would listen to the whispering clatter of their passing and feel the room quiver ever so slightly in shy response, I would get a crawly feeling in my chest and a prickling along the back of my neck, and I would wish that I could watch them dance, although I knew that I never would. And I remember that it was different when I watched the trains during the daytime, for then even though I clung tight to my mother’s hand and stared wide-eyed at their steam-belching and spark-spitting they were just big iron beasts putting on a show for me; they weren’t magic then, they were hiding the magic inside them and pretending to be iron beasts and waiting for the darkness. I remember that I knew even then that trains are only magic in the night and only dance when no one can see them. And I remember that I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I was soothed by the muttering lullaby of steel and the soft, rhythmical hiss-clatter of a train booming over a switch. And I remember that some nights the bellowing of a fast freight or the cruel, whistling shriek of a train’s whistle would make me tremble and feel cold suddenly, even under my safe blanket-mountain, and I would find myself thinking about rain-soaked ground and blood and black cloth and half-understood references to my grandfather going away, and the darkness would suddenly seem to curl in upon itself and become diamond-hard and press down upon my straining eyes, and I would whimper and the fading whistle would snatch the sound from my mouth and trail it away into the night. And I remember that at times like that I would pretend that I had tiptoed to the window to watch the trains dance, which I never really dared to do because I knew I would die if I did, and then I would close my eyes and pretend that I was a train, and in my mind’s eye I would be hanging disembodied in the darkness a few inches above the shining tracks, and then the track would begin to slip along under me, slowly at first then fast and smooth like flowing syrup, and then the darkness would be flashing by and then I would be moving out and away, surrounded by the wailing roar and evil steel chuckling of a fast freight slashing through the night, hearing my whistle scream with the majestic cruelty of a stooping eagle and feeling the switches boom and clatter hollowly under me, and I would fall asleep still moving out and away, away and out.

—The rain is stopping slowly, trailing away across the field, brushing the ground like long, dangling gray fingers. The tall grass creeps erect again, bobbing drunkenly, shedding its burden of water as a dog shakes himself dry after a swim. There are vicious little crosswinds in the wake of the storm, and they make the grass whip even more violently than the departing caress of the rain. The sky is splitting open above, black rain clouds pivoting sharply on a central point, allowing a sudden wide wedge of blue to appear. The overcast churns and tumbles and clots like wet heavy earth turned by a spade. The sky is now a crazy mosaic of mingled blue and gray. The wind picks up, chews at the edge of the tumbling wrack, spinning it to the fineness of cotton candy and then lashing it away. A broad shaft of sunlight falls from the dark undersides of the clouds, thrusting at the ground and drenching it in a golden cathedral glow, filled with shimmering green highlights. The effect is like that of light through a stained-glass window, and objects bathed in the light seem to glow very faintly from within, seem to be suddenly translated into dappled molten bronze. There is a gnarled, shaggy tree in the center of the pool of sunlight, and it is filled with wet, disgruntled birds, and the birds are hesitantly, cautiously, beginning to sing again—