Alien Caller (54 page)

“She’ll like
fugue, and I’m sure she’ll work out the rules easily enough, unlike
her slow witted father. And after she’s played it a few times, well
baseball will just seem like a bad memory.” Finally he could hear
some laughter in her voice, just a hint, but it made his heart
sing.

“Why don’t we
let her decide? And when she chooses baseball as the ultimate
sport, you can cook and clean in the kitchen for a month.” If there
was one thing Cyrea wasn’t dedicated to, it was the kitchen, which
worked out well enough since he enjoyed cooking.

“But when she
chooses fugue, as she surely will, you get beds and bathroom for a
month.” Which was his weakness. Before Cyrea had come, he’d never
done any more than pull the bed together roughly, and the bathroom
was something he left until the grime forced him to deal with it.
Typical male.

“Deal.”

“But what if
she’s got problems?” Which was the other half of the nightmare.
That the baby would be a freak, or deformed, or simply would not
survive.

“Love, this
baby is a miracle. For me and for you. And I choose to think of her
as a gift from above. A present to say that even though I haven’t
done everything I should have in this life, I’ve done enough. So if
the baby’s already a miracle, I have to believe she’ll be perfect.
After all God doesn’t do half miracles.” Despite her fear there was
logic in what he said as well as love and she had to listen.

“Besides, they
said she was healthy. But even if she does need help, your doctors
can fix nearly anything. Look at me. They put me back together
after I looked like I’d been hit by a train. Twice. If they can do
that, they can do this too. So let’s just try to be positive. I
want this baby, and I want to be the best father I can be, and I
want to be your husband.”

“You are my
husband. We don’t have ceremonies and pieces of paper like you, but
the first day we chose to make love, we became man and wife in your
terms. And the union was witnessed meaning all my people now accept
us as a couple. Many may not think it was wise, but they accept it.
And we never chose to think about contraception. So in seven months
or less, we will be parents.” And then she stopped, and he could
see her thoughts moving in circles as she thought about what she’d
just said.

“Oh my Lord.
We’re going to have a baby.” She just choked it out, finally
knowing the truth, if only because she had finally heard herself
say it.

“Yes, we are.”
He kissed her firmly on the stomach once more. “Thank you.”

“What do we
do?”

“Exactly what I
just said Private. Were you not paying attention to your commanding
officer?!” He used his best drill sergeant major-with-piles voice,
and got another giggle out of her. “First we say thank you to God
for making this miracle happen. A very big thank you, and maybe ask
him or her for a brother or sister later, when you’re up to it.
Then we find out everything there is to know about having babies
for both humans and Leinians. By the time she’s ready to come out
into the world we will be the most clued up parents on Earth.”

“Brothers and
sisters?” Again he managed to shock her out of her panic, though
this time by accident. He smiled.

“If a miracle
can happen once, why not two or three times? And she’d be lonely
without a brother or a sister. Besides, I thought you’d like a
bigger family.”

“I, …. would.”
She stared at him doubtfully.

“Well it looks
like we can have one. As many children as we want.” He smiled
carefully at her and was rewarded with her somewhat worried
stare.

“And ahh, how
many is that?”

“Well it’d be
nice to have our own baseball team!” He smiled to let her know he
was only kidding, and for the first time managed to draw one back
from her.

“Not baseball
again!”

“Well I thought
it’d be easier on you than fugue. But if we must then I suppose,
twenty kids it is, plus extras.” Cyrea’s eyes practically popped
out of her head at the thought, but there was finally some laughter
in her face. She was still worried. So was he. But there was
hope.

Chapter
Twenty Four

The next
morning they were at the clinic early. They hadn’t slept well, they
were simply too nervous. They hadn’t eaten well either. For the
first time Cyrea felt nauseous, the result of tension rather than
morning sickness, and David was feeling a twinge of nausea as well,
something to do with stress.

But the doctors
were waiting for them and smiling. That more than anything else
reassured them. Having a fleet of doctors was good, but having them
smile was better.

This time they
weren’t asked to strip, which was a blessed relief for David.
Instead they found themselves hustled into the surgery at double
time, sat down in the only two chairs in the room, and then shown a
movie. But this was a movie like no other. It was a computer
recreation of their own daughter. They saw her in the womb as she
was, and listened as the doctors pointed out all her good points.
Then they saw her growing up, getting bigger and bigger in the womb
and then finally popping out and beginning to grow up.

She was
beautiful. The image of the daughter they were expecting was
beautiful, and she took their breath away. They held hands, unable
to contain their excitement when they saw her, and they barely
heard the voices around them.

As the doctors
had told them the previous day, she did have something of both
David and Cyrea. She was tall like David, with his hands and feet,
but she had her mother’s hair and tail, and she was also shaped
like a woman. Her colouring was unexpected. With David being almost
black in hair colour, and Cyrea a reddish brown with blond streaks
they would have expected her to be somewhere in the middle, but she
was actually a redhead. They ignored the doctors talking about
recessive genes for red heads, and just stared, only one real
thought in their minds. She was beautiful.

“Oh Lord. We’re
going to have our hands full, love. The boys will love her. They’ll
eat her alive.” Cyrea agreed instantly, in love with what she saw.
She wasn’t alone.

A series of
graphs shot up, and they watched with a complete lack of enthusiasm
as everything from her liver function to heart rate was discussed
in the most excruciating detail. All they really wanted to see was
their daughter again. But they did listen as time and again the
thousand and one doctors ended up by telling them she was perfect.
Her every function from renal absorption to lung development was
well within the normal range. ‘Perfect’ seemed to be their new pet
word for the day.

Then the
elderly scientist, Dr. Pearal as Cyrea had told him the previous
night, put up something completely different. Biology lessons from
school, and the fact that they’d seen them the previous day told
David what they were; pictures of DNA combining and
replicating.

“We’ve barely
begun our sequencing work. After all we never thought we’d have to.
But what we have done is to analyse the recombination of your two
DNA’s. We’ve put haploid strands of David’s DNA and yours together
exactly as it is in fertilization, and watched it replicate in
blank cells. And we’ve done it literally hundreds of times. Each
time it’s exactly the same; it replicates perfectly to form
perfectly normal new cells, with the characteristics of both
parents.”

“We’ve done it
in test cultures, chromosome by chromosome, watching under electron
microscopes as it combines, looking for the slightest sign of
mismatching of genes. There is none. Every single gene on every one
of Cyrea’s chromosome has its counterpart in David’s.”

“Based on this
alone, you two are more genetically alike then a full quarter of
Leinians are with each other naturally.”

“When we
discovered that, our first thought was that David was a Leinian,
abducted to Earth and somehow altered to look like a human.” David
would have snorted his denial at them, but held it in when he saw
the intense looks in their eyes. They really wanted him to be just
that. Anything to explain the impossibility.

“Our computer
people started hacking your adoption records last night. I’m sorry
to say that they didn’t get very far. But even so they found enough
to make that very unlikely.” David was briefly shocked as he
realized where their thoughts had led them. But he shouldn’t have
been. Their actions were completely logical. In their shoes he
would have done the same.

“We found your
mother’s records, and the details of your birth, and the one thing
we do know is that you were an absolutely normal child. Your mother
at least was human.” It was disturbing, as he wondered how far they
had gotten. How much more did they now know about his past than he
himself did? He had never tried to contact his birth parents,
believing instead that if they had chosen to give him up, that they
weren’t worth his time. Besides, he’d always imagined they were
probably teenagers having had kids far too young, probably after
experimenting with drugs and alcohol. It could of course be worse.
He could be a child of rape or incest. In truth, he wasn’t sure he
wanted to know about his past. But suddenly these people did know.
They could answer all the questions he’d never wanted to ask. All
he had to do was ask.

He held his
tongue, striving to keep control of his warring emotions, and let
them talk around him. He hoped none of them noticed. Cyrea squeezed
his hand though, understanding his distress and telling him one
thing more important than the rest. He was a very lucky man. He
squeezed her hand back, thanking her. Then he saw Dr. Pearal
staring at him, impatiently, and realized his lapse hadn’t gone
unnoticed. He nodded back, letting the man carry on with his
story.

“This morning,
when we’d gotten far enough to confirm that you are human, we
grabbed some of the other locals, and extracted samples from them,
making sure they knew the reason. And while we haven’t yet gotten
as far as we have with your samples, the signs are they are just as
fertile with our people.”

David groaned,
imagining the response when he next saw them. First they’d blame
him for having made them go through that same, painful procedure.
Then they’d embarrass him as a father to be. Something that would
no doubt involve endless gallons of alcohol, country dancing and
bad music. Then would come the practical jokes. Mountain humour
wasn’t exactly subtle.

“At least Alice
will be happy! Not only did she bring us together, now she’ll say
she expected this all along.”

“I suppose
she’ll expect to be a god-parent!” Cyrea kissed him tenderly,
trying not to laugh, understanding that he was finally going to be
subjected to at least a little of the same embarrassment as she had
suffered. But he was too happy to care. Their daughter was
beautiful.

“And have you
told Ayer and Rebecca, and also maybe, Dafi and Heather?” David
thought he had to ask, and from the looks on their faces saw that
they hadn’t even thought about it. He looked into Cyrea’s eyes as
she looked back into his, both realising the same thing. Again
there could be others going through this same thing, just like
them, never suspecting a thing.

“Dafi and
Heather?” Either the doctor wasn’t particularly good on gossip, or
else he didn’t watch the local Leinian news. While somehow having
managed to keep their relationship off the cameras, they had moved
in together at least a few months before, renting Mrs. Newman’s
cottage on the Green Lake. While they refused to say anything more,
they had been reported as being very happy.

Cyrea
explained, while David wondered if the pair had even considered the
possibility. Cyrea had told him on their very first day that
children weren’t a possibility. But now they were learning how
wrong they had been. But had Dafi and Ayer said the same thing to
their mates? And would they now suddenly be having kittens at the
thought and rushing out for contraception? It was in some ways
quite funny. But then it could already be too late.

Then he had his
own kittens at the thought of them not knowing. If they never
thought this was a possibility and the women started developing
morning sickness, they might go and visit the doctor, most likely a
human doctor. He didn’t want to imagine the reactions to the first
ultra-sound. No sooner had he explained then several pairs of feet
started running from somewhere behind the army of doctors facing
them.

“I suspect that
may not be as bad as you fear.” The dry tones of Ayn Lar came from
immediately beside them, and they realized her boss had joined them
while they were distracted by the doctors.

“Doctor Hayes
knows of us and even helps us with some of our research. He’s been
one of our strongest supporters almost since the beginning, and in
return we help him a little with his patients, granting him access
to some of our equipment. If either of the two women turned up, he
would know the story, and act properly.” David liked Lar. He had
done from the very first day he’d met him. There was something
about his completely matter of fact attitude that simply impressed
him. Even when he was being told off by him.