“You are not compre’ending. I am never inoculated.”
“What?” Caitlin was downright shocked.
“My parents- I am not angry wiz them. They are adorable. But living at
‘ome, if I took my shot before marrying, they would ‘ave t’ought it like a declaration I mean to… to make me cheap like most girls.”
Caitlmn scowled. “That’s their attitude.”
“I do not condemn you,” Susanne said hurriedly. “It is just I ‘ave been raised to the making of a different choice. On Eart’ too, going to a doctor for this, it would ‘ave felt – sneaky?” A rueful chuckle. “No need any’ow. The problem did not come.”
“And you returned, and hung around patiently in love with Dan – oh, I saw, I saw – till Carlos and you – What you fear is pregnancy.”
“Yes. Abortion is ‘omicide. When it is not necessary for the saving of the mother’s life or ‘ealt’, it is murder.”
“Agreed. Furthermore, we’re not equipped to perform it safely.
Infanticide, no! Sooner would I throw myself out an airlock.”
“And we c-cannot bring children… into this lost ship… to need rations and shorten the few years our mates probably ‘ave left to them-” Su straightened in her chair. The hand Caitlin was not holding smote the tabletop, a lonely noise. “I told ‘im no. ‘E wanted to talk more, but I ran away. Per’aps now I can meet ‘im again. T’ank you. Do you know Dan was kind to me in this same room?”
“Hold on.” Caitlin tugged her chin and frowned at the universe. “Let me think. Faith, many an agonizing human dilemma has turned out to have what our skipper calls an engineering solution… I’ve not the kit or the competence to sterilize either of you. But there were once mechanical contraceptives. Maybe Phil and I between us can reinvent a thing that won’t be too unpleasant.” She felt resistance. “Don’t get bashful. Would you not sacrifice a grain of what you consider your dignity, for your happiness and your man’s?”
Susanne must struggle before she could say, “Yes. Yes.”
“And it may not be needed.” As ideas came to Caitlin, enthusiasm arose and bloomed into joy. “I’ll ask the data bank. It may well know of procedures –
aye, vasectomy ought to be simple enough surgery if I can find out how to do it, and reversible by a bit of cloning if ever we get home – or I seem to remember reading once about intrauterine devices – or something in the chemistry – Och, we can consider details later. The point is, you poor innocent, you are not helpless. Go on! Wed him and be blessed!”
The linker seemed stunned. “No, what if we do fail and ‘ave a conception?”
“Why, then,” Caitlin replied, and a trumpet might have spoken, “it’s no failure at all, at all. It’s a triumph. It says we do not surrender to death, no, not though he offer to let us march forth with full military honors. We fight on, live on, search on – your child beside us!”
Slowly began to grow in Susanne a brightness to equal the stars.
Side 163
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The XL
Jump.
The stellar host was less myriad and brilliant than before, though more than around Sol or Phoebus – save that in one direction towered vast thunderheads of night, relieved only by a few gleams in their foreground. No sun was in view. The T machine had for a satellite a great ellipsoid much like that at the pulsar. It orbited something which the eye perceived as a quivering bluewhite spark, Joelle and the instruments as a hellish fountainhead of hard radiation.
Her judgment came to them like God’s: “We’ve approached the core of the galaxy. Those are the dust clouds that have always hidden it from us. Here is a black hole.”
The ultimate collapsar, a supernova remnant so massive that its gravitational force upon itself compressed it to a smallness, a field strength, such that light could no longer escape… The known laws of physics were superseded, and matter shrank down and down toward a geometrical point, a singularity, at which no laws whatsoever would prevail. But none of this might the seekers observe. Nothing but an infinitesimal wave-mechanical leakage could return from that all-devouring potential well. Interstellar material, sucked in, gave up energy as a last despairing cry before it vanished – for eternity?