The Ninth Orb (32 page)

Eden resisted the urge to glance toward Baen, but she saw in her peripheral vision that he was looking the array of equipment over with a thoroughness that probably missed very little. Apparently satisfied, he moved to a position along the wall that put him in direct line with her vision.

She wasn’t certain of whether he’d chosen that particular spot because it was the clearest, or because it gave him the clearest view of her and the monitors.

“It’s all right.”

“You’re sure? It would bother the hell out of me to be under watch at all times.”

Eden smiled wryly. “I am under watch at all times,” she reminded Deb.

Deb thought it over and finally shrugged. “The monitoring devices aren’t quite as intrusive, however.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re not under surveillance all the time.”

Deb chuckled. “With the weight of office …. It’s your fault you’re the most important person on the planet. That’s what you get for being so damned good at your job that everybody’s terrified to let you out of their sight.”

Eden knew she was teasing, but the comments warmed her. “It’s nice to get a pat on the back occasionally. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I’m going to start the scan now. Just close your eyes and try to relax and keep movements to a minimum.”

Eden nodded and closed her eyes as she felt the slight warmth of the laser touch the top of her skull, breathing slowly and evenly and counting off the seconds in her head as it moved slowly across her forehead and continued its journey down the length of her body. She was so totally relaxed by the time the scan reached her toes and started back up that she dozed for a handful of seconds.

A faint sound jolted her awake again moments later and she opened her eyes, blinked them several times to clear her vision and searched for Deb.

Deb, she saw, had moved around to study the readouts.

It was only then that she realized Deb had switched audio off and was reading the stats the system was displaying. Instantly, she tensed. “Anything interesting?” she asked when Deb simply stood staring at the display, her expression stern with either concentration or dismay. Eden wasn’t certain which, but she didn’t particularly like the idea that Deb was reluctant to tell her what the readings were. Deb glanced at her a little distractedly. “Nothing alarming,” she said soothingly. “Something a little unexpected--although I’m not sure why I’m surprised. That’s a shut out. Home team wins.”

Irritation surged through Eden, along with alarm. She surged upward. “In English, if you don’t mind,” she snapped irritably.

Deb grinned. “Patience. Lie still. I want to run another scan.”

“Why?” Eden demanded suspiciously.

“Because I’m the med tech and I get to be boss here.”

Resentfully, Eden settled again. “Is it something I’m eating that’s making me nauseous?”

“Shhh!”

Eden pursed her lips, but when the scan skipped her upper body and then slowed to scan her lower body, she tensed again. “What is it?”

“Four.”

Ignoring the order to lay still, Eden tried to struggle up again. Deb planted a hand on her shoulder and pushed her flat. “Be still!”

“Four what?” Eden demanded. “That’s what I’m trying to see here,” Deb said testily. “If you’ll be still, I’ll tell you in a minute.”

Eden stilled, but she found it impossible to relax.

“Wise woman,” Deb murmured after a moment. “Not that I’m completely certain you had anything to do with it. Ordinarily, of course, it would be entirely up to you, but this is just weird and totally out of my realm of understanding.”

“What is weird and beyond your understanding?”

Deb shrugged and finally swiveled the monitor so that Eden could see it. She might have saved herself the trouble. Eden had no idea what she was supposed to be looking at. The holographic 3D display just looked like layers and layers of flesh ghosted one on top of another. Deb took her pen and pointed to a roughly lozenge shape. “Male.” She pointed to another just a little distance away. “Male, female, female,” she added when she’d pointed out three more. “I’m going to have to order at least three more incu-sys … unless you don’t want to do one au naturale. Probably ought to order a dozen.”

Eden stared at the shapes Deb had pointed out blankly, glanced at Deb and then studied the monitor again. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Deb’s brows rose. “The babies.”

Shock instantly closed over Eden. “What?” she asked faintly.

Something about the tone of her voice penetrated Deb’s abstraction. She sent Eden a sharp look. “Breathe.”

Obediently, Eden sucked in a deep, gasping breath.

“Did you take the fertility drugs?”

Eden merely stared at her. “Fertility?” she echoed blankly.

Deb studied her a moment. “I didn’t think so.”

Eden’s mouth was desert dry. “You’re saying … you’re telling me that I’m … I’m ….”

“Yes, you are. Tired, nauseated, not sleeping well … My god, Eden. Don’t tell me you didn’t even suspect?”

“I thought I was being poisoned,” Eden said faintly.

Deb gaped at her in stunned disbelief, blinking rapidly. “Why would you think that?”

Eden closed her eyes. “Because I’m so popular around here? There’s no mistake?” she asked abruptly, opening her eyes again.

Deb gave her a look. “Nothing in the tox screen. You’re as healthy as you were the last time I checked you, which is to say in excellent condition. You’re pregnant. That’s all that’s wrong with you. Except … Well, I suppose it’s a matter of opinion whether it’s actually wrong. It just isn’t anything I’d expected and it’s unprecedented among us, that’s for sure. I should be used to it by now, though. Want to know who the fathers are?”

Eden stared at her blankly. “Fathers?”

Deb shrugged. “Well, can’t tell you exactly until I run some tests on the prospectives. But this little lady here,” she tapped one of the lozenges, “belongs to that great hulking brute standing over there like someone pole axed him.”

Eden’s gaze moved automatically to Baen. She saw that Deb was right. He was so pale that she thought for several moments that he was going to keel over. “Baen’s?” she asked faintly.

“Mmmhmm. DNA matches that sample you sent around a while back. The other three are his brothers’. I can tell you that much, at least. If you want to know which ones, you’ll have to get them to come in.”

The shock still hadn’t worn off and Eden couldn’t seem to gather her wits. The only thing that kept cycling in her brain was four--pregnant--and Baen. “That’s possible?”

“Ordinarily, no. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. From what I’ve been able to figure out the Xtanians aren’t the only ones ‘adjusting’. So far every female that I’ve checked that’s taken on a pazaan has turned up pregnant. I haven’t gotten the chance to test any of them, but I’m guessing they must secrete hormones during intercourse that rev up the female reproductive cycle--in our case that would be super revving since we, as you well know, are infertile most of the time due to the anti-aging drugs.”

She paused, studying Eden critically for several moments. “I think you need a little time to adjust to the news,” she said intuitively. “I can give you a few weeks--it’ll take that long to build the incu-sys, but you need to give some thought to which ones you want me to take.”

Eden merely stared at her blankly.

Deb patted her shoulder. “You can’t carry them all, you know.”

Nodding, Eden finally pushed herself upright, sat staring down at her toes for a few moments and finally slipped off the examination table. She didn’t look at Baen as she left the room. She didn’t hear what Deb called after her. She merely nodded and kept going.

It was fortunate, she supposed, that she was such a creature of habit. She found herself in her office without any memory of having headed that way. After looking around the room a little vaguely, she sat down at her desk. She merely stared at her computer monitor, however.

She was fairly certain she would not have been as shocked if Deb had told her it was poison that was causing the listlessness, the difficulty sleeping, the vague, and sometime very pronounced nausea.

She thought she had covered every possible scenario, but she had not considered that any of them were likely to conceive. She certainly hadn’t thought about the possibility for herself, although she had no reason to think she was any less likely to conceive than the others.

Four. Deb had said four. How could she have gotten pregnant at all? Let alone with four?

Infertile meant rare egg production, not a half a damned dozen at one cycle!

Deb hadn’t been surprised, though, and that wasn’t only because she’d thought the symptoms suggested pregnancy.

Everyone she’d checked was pregnant, and carrying more than one.

She felt a nearly overwhelming, and hysterical, urge to giggle. They were certainly going to have a bumper crop of new colonists!

She sobered after a moment, realizing she’d given the go ahead to the other colonists to choose men for themselves. The Xtanian men were more than potent. They had to be secreting something that was forcing the women to produce.

She still didn’t understand how, even if they’d boosted her reproduction, that four different males had managed to fertilize four different eggs.

That thought halted her in her rambling contemplation, though.

Baen had fathered a child on her. Baen who’d been certain he couldn’t, or least told her he couldn’t.

Who’d fathered the others?

Deb had said it was Baen’s brood, but that wasn’t good enough. She wanted to know who.

“Tell your brood that they must come into New Savannah and go to the clinic,” she told Baen without bothering to turn around.

It occurred to her almost at once that he might or might not understand since she wasn’t wearing her translator. Grabbing it off her desk, she set the device on her head and repeated the command. When Baen still didn’t move, she swiveled around to look at him.

He didn’t look as pale as he had earlier, but he looked stunned.

However well he usually pretended not to understand, she knew he had to have understood a good bit of what Deb had been telling her.

“Now, Baen,” she said in a tone that brooked no argue.

He swallowed a little sickly, nodded, and then frowned as if trying to recall what she’d said.

“Go and get them,” she said slowly.

“They are coming,” he responded.

Eden stared at him, feeling her jaw slowly go slack. She blinked several times. “I … uh … How do you know they’re coming?”

He touched his temple, rubbed it with his fingertips as if it hurt. “I summoned them.”

“How?” Eden demanded, wondering a little wildly if the shock had unhinged her mind.

He stared at her in confusion. “We are brood. We are as one,” he said slowly. “It is much like the thing on your wrist.”

“The communicator? You have one in your head? You communicate telepathically,” she guessed abruptly as it hit her suddenly why they worked so well together, why they always seemed to know what needed to be done without having to be told. They did communicate. They just didn’t need to verbalize to do so.

They hadn’t thought about it because they couldn’t.

She supposed the Xtanians had not told them because it had not occurred to them that the Earth women couldn’t.

Maybe.

Maybe they realized they had an advantage?

She considered it carefully for some time and finally dismissed it. He’d said brood. He hadn’t said pazaan. He could communicate with his brothers without speech, not the others.

That was the bond, she realized. They shared thoughts, maybe all thoughts. Maybe they couldn’t block the others from their minds at all? Did that mean they shared feelings, too? Knew about them? Or felt them?

The nerves might carry sensation, but it was the brain that translated. That was why Baen--all of them--usually said ‘we’.

She thrust that from her mind after a few moments. She had enough to deal with without trying to understand the confusing relationships of the Xtanains.

Most important at the moment was how, if at all, the discovery that they were pregnant impacted the colony. The pregnancy changed their situation drastically.

Moving would mean placing a high risk on the babies. Even if they could feel that they’d taken every possible precaution to protect them, unless they placed all of the developing fetuses in incu-sys, they would be at greater risk themselves, and perhaps not physically able to do the things they would need to do to survive, let alone flourish.

It occurred to her that they did not have to have the babies at all. There was another alternative, but it made her feel like throwing up.

She could not make this decision alone, she decided.

After a moment’s thought, she buzzed Deb. “Contact the other … uh … mothers,” she said, stumbling over the word. “They’re to meet with me in council chambers.”

Surprise flickered in Deb’s eyes, but after staring at her speculatively for several moments she nodded. “When?”

“Now.”

“It’ll take me a few minutes to locate them. Thirty minutes?”

“Fine.”

“Anything else?”

“Baen’s brothers will be coming for testing. Notify the guards at the gate and have them escorted to med lab, and when you’re done, have the ones that test positive wait.”

Deb’s brows rose at that, but she merely rang off without voicing any of the questions Eden could see buzzing through her mind.

A couple of the women were already in the council room when Eden arrived. They looked questioningly at her, but Eden ignored it, gesturing for them to be seated and then pacing to the window to stare down at the city while she waited for everyone else to arrive.

It was late afternoon, and many of the women had already ended their shift and were heading to their homes. A handful were headed toward the security passage and the new city that had sprung up between New Savannah and the Xtanian Citadel.

Either they hadn’t gotten word before they’d gone off the clock, or they weren’t pregnant--yet.

Eden hadn’t summoned the council, but Deb buzzed, appearing on her vid screen to inform her that she’d contacted the other nine women in question and to inform her that Baen’s brood brothers had arrived. When Eden rang off, she counted heads and discovered everyone had arrived.