Juliana, she said within herself. It was going to be a girl. Juliana, Moon baby, welcome to the future.
Enough remembrance, enough sentiment. If you wanted to maximize the benefits of high-# and minimize the time you must spend under it, you didn’t only stand or sit, you exercised.
Hunkering down, Dagny unfastened the bar bells and rose holding them. She moved with care, to avoid dizziness. The Terrestrial pseudo-weight was a waistline average, the differential between head and feet nearly ten percent. Coriolis force posed less of anuisance; still, you had to allow for it too. The big centrifuges were far more comfortable in both respects. Downright luxurious, the largest at Port Bowen—private compartments, couches—Dagny grinned. She strongly suspected Juliana was begotten there.
Raise the bells, lower them, raise, lower, swing them crossways, commence the stationary jogging. Flex, tense, flex, let your body enjoy while your mind rides the carousel of stars. Breathe deep, flush out the lungs, smell the sweet sweat, savor the growing warmth. The heart beats high, the blood quickens, and is that another quickening below, does Juliana also dance?
No, Dagny remembered, way too early, not yet, not yet.
The pain went through her like a harrow through a field.
The hospital in Port Bowen was small, austere, and superbly equipped. By the time Edmond Beynac got there from his current expedition, his wife was almost ready for discharge.
“You needn’t come,” she had said to him over the phone when first he caHed. “I’m okay. I’ll be out of here fast.”
“Bloody ‘ell!” he had replied, his accent thickened. “Yoij ‘ave—un avortement—se meescarriage, een a, a God damn spacesuit—and I should stay from you?” While the radio link carried an image, it was poor and the screen tiny. She couldn’t be certain, but thought she saw tears on his cheeks. She never had before.
Aborting as convulsively as she did, incompletely till her team got her inside and the armor off, had in fact torn her up considerably. She was young and vigorous, though, and the hospital staff had more than _ surgery at their command, they had the latest molecular biotech.
She was sitting up in bed after a walk along the corridors when he arrived. The reader in her hands displayed The Sea-Wolf; she liked adventure stories, and hardly any were being written these days. The room was private, but on that account a cubicle. Edmond’s bulk crowded her. Not that she minded. His arms went strong around her, trembling a bit, and his kiss gave her a dear scratch of stubble, and when she laid her head against his breast she felt the slugging behind the ribs.
After a while he sat on the edge of the bed and simply held her hand. “Honest, ‘Mond, you poor worrymaker, I’m fine,” she insisted. “They tell me I can be back on the job in two weeks, this time with no personal deadline on me.” That last was a mistake. Her voice cracked. Immediately, she lowered her lashes and made a purr. “Before then, I’ll be fit to screw. I have missed you, darling.”
Starkness remained in him. “We will be careful, always.”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes.”
His look dwelt on her. Silence lengthened.
“But you wish for children,” he said at last.
“Well—Not unless you do, really, truly.”
“Two have you lost.” He had not hitherto spoken of the one adopted away since she told him, that evenwatch when he asked her to marry him. Then he had likewise been still for a while, until he said that it didn’t matter, that it was long past, and changed the subject.
“Do not lie to me,” he ordered rather than begged; but how compassionate was his tone. “I know very well you have wept, alone in this bed.”
“That’s done with” was all she could find to say.
“There shall not be a third loss.”
“No.” Resolution held firm. She had done much thinking. “We want the Moon more than anything else.”
“Including children?”
“Yes, if it comes to that.”
“You understand the trouble, no?”
She nodded and spoke quickly. “Dr. Nguyen drew me the picture. Computer models flipflop when you input changed data. They took those data off me. Examinations, tests, specimens, electrochemical monitoring, my God, I’ll be in the scientific journals for the next five years. Sure, I’m the single case, but I seem to have supplied critical information that was missing. The revised opinion is that what happened was inevitable. Contraceps wear off before they would on Earth, with a random time distribution, and no pregnancy will go to term. The lab animals fooled us. For one thing, humans are a lot bigger, which makes fluid management an entirely different engineering problem, at least in a weak grav field. For another thing, the human brain, as complicated as it is, gets tricked into sending the wrong signals to the whole muscular-glandular-nervous female reproductive system. The placenta’s chemical defenses break down, allergic reactions build up, the fetus gets expelled but it’s dead or dying anyway. Our kind will never breed naturally on Luna.”