The Stars Blue Yonder (34 page)

The bed didn't feel strong enough to support her. Jodenny imagined it splintering out from under her, and the floor breaking as well, and then the foundation of the continent itself.

“He's not dead,” she said. “I know he's not.”

She knew it even without Darling's story; she knew it in her heart, and in the beat of Junior's heart as well.

Osherman gave her a bleak look. “How long do we have to be stranded here for you to accept that he's not coming back?”

Jodenny twisted her wedding ring.

“Until my dying breath,” she said.

Any hopes she had of returning to Lady Darling's hotel the next day were dashed by Osherman, Lilly, Sarah, and Lady Scott, all of them determined to hover over Jodenny until she squeezed junior out in sheer exasperation.

“I'm fine!” she told them

None of them believed her.

“Best that you rest in bed all day,” Lady Scott said. “Did wonders for me during my childbearing years. I added it up. I spent over three years in bed while in your condition!”

“But I want to walk around,” Jodenny protested.

Osherman said, “You can walk anywhere you want, as long as one of us is with you. What if you faint in the street?”

Jodenny seethed, but she didn't see any clever way around their
helpfulness and truth be told, her back and legs did ache. But she was desperate to see Lady Darling and hear more about Myell, as well as dig for more inconsistencies.

It was obvious, in retrospect, that Darling had been vague in some areas and downright deceptive in others. The question was why, and what secrets she was holding back.

“I'm at least going downstairs,” Jodenny insisted. “It's cooler down there, and I can sit by the parlor windows.”

The breeze through the front was thin, but much better than no breeze at all. The morning paper had come in. The pages were full of announcements and classifieds, notices from ship's captains, tales of crime or social news. Junior was kicking up a storm and breakfast was giving her heartburn. She wanted to take Lady Scott's advice and go back to bed, but pride kept her on the sofa. Osherman was writing out notes on a desk, something for his shipping business. When he was done he called on Tulip to deliver a batch of them to the post office.

“Can't,” Tulip said, worrying his hat between his fingers.

Sarah, who was dusting Admiral Scott's portrait, offered more of an explanation. “They don't let Aboriginals into the post office, sir.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Osherman said. He looked as if he wanted to say more but was holding himself back.

Jodenny said, “Go take them yourself. I'll be fine here.”

“I don't trust you to stay put,” he said.

She sent him a scowl that would have made her sailors scurry for cover, if she were still a division officer.

Hastily he said, “I'll be back soon.”

Jodenny did not take his absence as an opportunity to go off to Lady Darling's hotel, but she did pen a hasty note and asked Tulip to deliver it. It took him an hour to go there and return, but at least he did it before Osherman made it back to the house.

“The clerk said Lady Darling had to go away,” Tulip told Jodenny. “Very quick, this morning.”

Dismayed, Jodenny asked, “Where did she go?”

“Maybe Melbourne, he said. Wasn't sure.”

Melbourne was hundreds of miles away. Devastated, Jodenny slowly paced around the room. Her back hurt from Junior's weight but sitting
was proving to be just as uncomfortable these days. She needed to talk to Darling, needed to know more. About why she'd lied, for instance. Myell and Cappaletto couldn't have come to 1855 by the blue ring. It was before Myell's date of birth by hundreds of years, and the cone of space-time that Perry had drawn on the
Confident
didn't allow for that.

Either Perry was wrong, or Darling had come to Australia's past by some other means.

Maybe she'd gone not to Melbourne but back into the future.

Jodenny's worried thoughts were interrupted by Sarah, who'd been in the kitchen fixing supper. Now she was standing in the doorway with an unhappy frown and her hands knotted together. “I hate to bother you, ma'am . . .”

“Yes?”

“It's Molly. One of my other sisters. Maybe you could help her?”

Jodenny followed Sarah to the kitchen, where a redheaded girl was sitting on the floor with her legs drawn up and spread wide. Molly was younger than Sarah, with a strong family resemblance in the nose and jawline. Molly was also extremely pregnant, with both hands clenched around her tummy and air bellowing in and out of her lungs.

“Stop pushing,” Lilly was ordering, from between Molly's knees. “It's not time!”

“The midwife's drunk,” Sarah explained. “She had nowhere else to go.”

Lilly surrendered a brief glance toward Jodenny. “I don't need any fancy help. I helped bring you into this world, Sarah-girl, and aside from dropping you on your head, look how you turned out.” Turning back to Molly she said, “Just push when I tell you to and not just because you want to.”

Another contraction gripped Molly. Sarah clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle the scream. “Not yet,” Lilly warned. When the spasm passed, Molly panted and gasped for air.

“Let's get her to your room,” Jodenny suggested.

The airless room behind the kitchen was barely big enough for Lilly and Sarah's single beds, but Molly was happy to be off the floor and said so. Sarah lit a lantern, then bathed her sister's head with a cold cloth. When another contraction hit, Lilly shook her head.

“That baby just doesn't want to come out,” Lilly said.

Jodenny checked with the Digital Duola. “Maybe her cervix isn't fully dilated.”

“Her what?” Sarah asked.

Damn this era, and the prurients who kept women ignorant of their own body parts. Jodenny said, “If she rests on her hands and knees, that'll take the pressure of the baby off. The swelling will go down and her opening might get wider.”

“I'll do anything if it'll help,” Molly panted.

Jodenny guided her up on her hands and knees with her head down and her butt sticking up in the air. “It's indecent,” Lilly said, with a sniff, but she didn't stop it. The Digital Duola instructed Jodenny on how to do a vaginal exam but she held off, afraid of spooking the girl more.

“Now what?” Sarah asked, her voice a whisper.

Jodenny said, “We wait. Boil some water, won't you? We need clean cloths, too.”

Sarah looked at Lilly, who nodded in agreement.

They didn't wait long. Within an hour the cervix had opened, Molly was unable to stop pushing, and the baby's head was crowning. Jodenny let Lilly take over for that part. “You're doing fine,” Lilly said, as the tiny head emerged facing sideways. Lilly glanced up at Jodenny, fear in her eyes. Sideways wasn't a good position at all. The next few contractions didn't push the baby out any further, and his skin began to turn blue.

Jodenny forced herself to sound calm. “His shoulders are stuck.”

“I'll pull him out by the head,” Lilly said.

“No, wait.” Jodenny bent low. “See if you can get your finger up there and find his arm. If you get the arm out, the rest may follow. But you need to wash your hands first. Sarah, here, hold the head up.”

While Lilly washed up, Molly sobbed and sweated and swore in fear. Jodenny looked her straight in the eyes and addressed her like any young sailor. “Listen to me. The baby's stuck. It happens all the time. But we're going to get him out, okay?”

Molly nodded.

Five minutes later, her baby was born. Alive and kicking. Jodenny
sagged back on the other bed, her hands leaving prints on her dress. She felt exhausted, and this wasn't even her delivery. And as far as deliveries went, it hadn't even been a bad one. A hundred different things could have gone wrong. Without medicine, equipment, or any kind of decent hospital, Molly and the child could have both died.

“What should I call him, miss?” Molly asked. “You pick. You saved him.”

“I couldn't,” Jodenny said.

“Please. For good luck.”

“Terry,” she said. “Call him Terry.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Myell blinked his eyes open to find himself covered with a bright yellow bedspread. He bolted upright so fast the room spun out from underneath him, and the next time he woke, his daughter Lisa was peering down at him in concern.

“That was a nasty dizzy spell, wasn't it?” she said. “Feeling a bit better?”

“There was someone with me,” Myell said. “Right? Someone else?”

“Two of you,” Lisa confirmed. “Showed up here stark naked and bleeding. You don't get that around here every day.”

“Cappaletto?”

“That's him,” she said. “Quite a fellow.”

Myell sank back into the mattress in relief.

Lisa said, “I know who you are, and maybe you know who I am.
You've obviously been through hell but there's nothing wrong with you a nice stretch of bed rest wouldn't cure. Still, I want to ask. Why did you scratch the name ‘Kay' into your arm?”

“I promise I'll tell you everything later,” he said. “Where's Cappaletto now?”

“He's off with the sheriff and my mother and the town council, telling them about the Roon.”

The meeting, as such, was taking place under the metal roof of the town pub. A dozen people were drinking beer as Cappaletto regaled them with stories of the Roon mines and their escape from the Flying Doctor. By the time Myell reached them, his head pounding and borrowed clothes hastily thrown on, Cappaletto had almost finished the tale.

“There he is,” Cappaletto said, raising his mug. “The man who took on the Roon and lived to tell the tale.”

Baylou Owenstein said, “Man of the hour! Even if you are, you know, dead.”

“Especially since you're dead,” seventy-year-old Jodenny said, giving him a suspicious look.

Teresa Romero, her feet propped up and hands laced across her small pregnant belly, said, “He doesn't look very dead to me, Mom.”

Myell took a cold mug and downed some of the beer. Everyone looked at him as if expecting him to speak, but when he opened his mouth a burp startled him and his audience both.

“Good one,” Baylou said.

Someone offered him a stool. Myell sat. He felt refreshingly light, surprisingly at ease. “What did you tell them?” he asked Cappaletto.

Cappaletto passed his mug to get refilled. He was pale in the sunlight, thin from his captivity, but still cheerful. “Everything, of course.”

Everything turned out to be the awful mines, yes, and the Flying Doctor and Anna Gayle for sure, though only Jodenny cared about Gayle. Cappaletto had also touched on the sad tale of the Roon ambush at Kultana, and the legends about Burringurrah and the
Kamchatka
from his perspective in the timeline.

“What you're talking about all happened twenty-five years or so ago,” Jodenny said, her gaze going briefly to the clouds. “Are you
saying all of mankind has fallen under the Roon? That there's nothing left?”

The mood around the table shifted, darkened.

“I don't know,” Myell admitted. “It's possible.”

“Possible, my ass,” Cappaletto said. “I'm sure we've kicked their asses by now.”

Silence as they grimly considered the possibilities.

Baylou raised a toast. “Here's to kicking their asses!”

The beer ran freely all night long, and Myell didn't remember much about stumbling off to bed at Lisa's house. Cappaletto, who was bedding down at Sheriff Alice's house, had disappeared an hour earlier. At breakfast, nursing his hangover, Myell was startled when Lisa casually said, “We're having trouble deciding who you're going to take with you.”

Myell's water glass paused halfway to his lips. “Sorry?”

“Who you're going to take,” Baylou repeated. He was sitting with his tree bark coffee, which Myell knew better than to taste. “With you. When the ring comes.”

“I think Mom would like to go,” Lisa said. “She and Sam. I mean, it's not the fairest thing that they've been stuck here all these years and won't ever get to see the rest of the universe. But they're also a bit old. Might slow you down.”

Myell very carefully spread some butter on a roll. It tasted like cardboard in his mouth. “You understand that it doesn't really change anything? If I took you, Lisa, you'd still be here. It's just another copy of you that would be floating around time and space.”

“I know.” Lisa cut an apple into slices and popped a slice into her mouth. “But it's something, right? A way of living on. And maybe there's a way to send back help anyway.”

Baylou said, “I think you should take me. I'm not much use to anyone here, after all! No one would miss me.”

“That's the point,” Myell said, but it was useless; they either didn't want to understand what the blue ring would do, or didn't care anyway. Cappaletto's honesty and witty tales had hurt the situation all around.

“We'll figure it out,” Lisa said. She looked at the clock. “Round noon, right? That's when it's coming for you?”

“It'll come for both me and Chief Cappaletto,” Myell said. “Where is he?”

“Oh, you'll see him,” Baylou said.

“I'd like to see him now.”

“Around noon,” Lisa repeated. Not for the first time he saw Jodenny in her, and under other circumstances might have been pleased.

“Noon,” he said. Sure.

Lisa patted his hand. “Maybe you should go back to bed for a while. Rest up. We'll sort this out and come get you.”

It was almost nine o'clock. Myell couldn't be sure how short this eddy would be with Cappaletto's weight changing the window, but he wasn't about to wait around and find out. He retired to the guest room, climbed out the window, and made his way to Sheriff Alice's house. He didn't have the time or inclination for anything but the direct approach, so he knocked on the door. Alice answered.