She walked hurriedly over to the toppled fence. A broken sign in color was lying on the ground in front of it. Nicole knelt down and picked up a piece of the sign. When she recognized the octospider colors for “zoo,” her heart rate surged. Richard heard the cry when he was at the zoo, she remembered.
There was an explosion about a kilometer away to her left, and then another, much closer. The helicopters had returned for another sortie. The baby’s wail became continuous. Nicole tried to keep moving in the direction of the cry, but her progress was slow. It was difficult to isolate the wail amid the noise from the explosions.
A bomb burst in front of her less than a hundred meters
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away. In the silence that followed, Nicole heard nothing. Oh, no, her heart cried out, not now. Not when I am this close. There was another explosion in the distance, followed by another period of quiet. It might be some other kind of animal, she remembered telling Richard. Somewhere in the universe there may be a creature that sounds like a human baby.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the return of the piercing wail. Nicole moved as fast as she dared. No, she kept saying to herself, her mother’s heart torn apart by the desperate cry, it’s unmistakable. There cannot be any other sound like that. A battered fence ran along the right side of the narrow lane. She crossed through it. In the shadows ahead of her Nicole saw some movement.
The crying baby was sitting on the ground next to the lifeless form of an adult human, presumably its mother. The woman was lying facedown on the dirt. Blood covered the lower half of the adult’s body. After quickly determining that the woman was indeed dead, Nicole reached down gingerly and picked up the dark-haired child. Astonished by the action, the baby fought against her and split the night with a powerful bawl. Nicole put the child against her shoulder and patted it lightly on the back. ‘There, there,” she said as the baby continued to shriek, “everything is going to be all right.”
In the dim light Nicole could see that the child’s bizarre clothes, which were little more than two layers of heavy sacks with holes cut in appropriate places, were smeared with blood. Despite the baby’s protests and thrashing, Nicole gave the child a quick examination. Except for a flesh wound in the leg and the filth that covered her entire body, the little girl appeared to be all right. Nicole estimated that she was about a year old.
Ever so gently, Nicole laid the girl down on a small fresh cloth taken from the medical bag. While Nicole was cleaning up the child, she felt the giri jerk and recoil each time a bomb exploded in the vicinity. Nicole tried to soothe her by singing Brahms’s Lullaby. Once during the time that Nicole was dressing the leg wound, the girl stopped crying temporarily and stared at Nicole with her huge, surprisingly
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blue eyes. She offered no protest even when Nicole took a damp cleansing pad and began to wipe the dirt off her skin. A little later, however, when Nicole was cleaning underneath the girl’s shirts of sackcloth and found, to her astonishment, a small rope necklace against the baby’s tiny chest, the child started howling again.
Nicole gathered the crying baby in her arms and stood up. She is undoubtedly hungry, Nicole thought, looking around the area for some kind of hut or shelter. There must be some food nearby. Under a deep overhanging rock about fifteen meters away, which had clearly been an enclosed area before the bombing raids began, Nicole found a large pan of water, some small objects of unknown purpose, a sleeping pad, and several more of the sacks out of which the clothing of both the woman and the child were made. But there was no food. Nicole tried unsuccessfully to get the girl to drink from the pan. Then she had another idea.
Returning to the body of the dead mother, Nicole determined that there was still some good milk left in her breasts. The woman had obviously died recently. Nicole lifted the mother’s torso and slid in behind her on the ground. Supporting the mother’s body against her own, Nicole held the baby girl against her mother’s breasts and watched her suck.
The child ate hungrily. In the middle of the feeding, a bomb blast illuminated the dead woman’s features. It was the same face Nicole had seen in the octospider painting in Artisan’s Square. So I did not imagine it, Nicole thought.
The baby girl fell asleep when she was finished nursing. Nicole wrapped her in one of the extra sacks and placed her softly on the ground. Nicole now examined the dead mother thoroughly for the first time. Based on the gaping wounds in the woman’s lower midsection and right thigh, Nicole surmised that two large pieces of a single bomb had torn through her and that she had subsequently bled to death. While she was inspecting the thigh wound, Nicole felt a strange bulge in the woman’s right buttock. Curious, she lifted the woman’s body slightly off the ground and ran her
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fingers over and around the bulge. It felt as if some hard object had been implanted underneath the skin.
Nicole retrieved her medical bag and then, with her small scissors, made an incision just to one side of the bulge. She pulled out an object that appeared to be silver in the dim light. It was the size and shape of a small cigar, twelve to fifteen centimeters in length, and about two centimeters in diameter. A puzzled Nicole twirled the object around in her right hand and tried to imagine what it could be. It was incredibly smooth, with no discernible breaks anywhere. Probably this is some kind of identifier for the zoo, she was thinking when a bomb exploded nearby, waking the sleeping girl.
Over in the direction of the Emerald City, bombs were falling with increasing intensity. While Nicole comforted the child, she thought about what she should do next. A large fireball raced toward the sky as one of the falling bombs caused an even larger explosion on the ground. In the temporary light, Nicole could see that she and the child were on the top of a small hill, very close to the edge of the developed part of the Alternate Domain. The Central Plain began no more than a hundred meters to the west.
Nicole stood up with the girl on her shoulder. She was near exhaustion. “We’re going out there, away from the bombs,” she said out loud to the baby, motioning in the direction of the Central Plain. Nicole tossed die cylindrical object in her medical bag and grabbed a pair of the clean sacks. These may be useful in the cold, Nicole thought, throwing the heavy sacks over her shoulders.
It took an hour for her to trudge with the baby and the sacks to a spot in the Central Plain that Nicole thought was far enough away from the bombs. She lay down on her back, the child cradled on her chest, and wrapped the sacks around both of them. Nicole was asleep in seconds.
Nicole was awakened by the movement of the girl. She had been having a conversation with Katie in her dream, but Nicole could not recall what they had been saying to each other. She sat up and changed the baby, using a clean cloth
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from her medical bag. The child stared at Nicole curiously with her wide blue eyes. “Good morning, little girl, whoever you are,” Nicole said brightly. The child smiled for the first time.
It was no longer completely dark. Firefly clusters illuminated the Emerald City in the distance, and the gaping holes in the dome allowed the light to shine on the surrounding area of Rama. The war must have ended, Nicole thought, seeing the light, or at least the raids have been suspended.
“Well, my newest friend,” Nicole said, standing up and stretching after placing the baby carefully on one of the clean sacks, “let’s see what adventures are in store for us today.”
The girl quickly crawled off the sack into the dirt of the Central Plain. Nicole picked her up and replaced her in the middle of the sack. Again she crawled toward the dirt. “Whoa, there, little one,” Nicole said with a laugh, picking the girl up a second time.
It was difficult for Nicole to gather up their belongings while she was holding the child in her arms. Eventually she succeeded and began walking slowly toward civilization. They were about three hundred meters from the closest buildings of the Alternate Domain. During her walk, Nicole decided that she would go first to the hospital to find Dr. Blue. Assuming that she had correctly concluded that the war was over or at least had been temporarily halted, Nicole planned to spend the morning finding out everything she could about the child. Who were her parents, Nicole formed the questions in her mind, and how long ago were they kidnapped from New Eden? She was angry with the octospiders. Why didn’/ you tell me there were other human beings in the Emerald City? Nicole intended to ask the Chief Optimizer. And how can you defend the way you treated this child and her mother?