NaNo 2007: Chapter 13

Chapter 13: Giving Birth

This birth is much different than D'Argo's had been. The first, and most obvious, difference, is that she isn't participating in a war this time. Instead she's in a nice, quiet medtech station, being attended to by people who have nothing to do but attend to her. None of them have to suddenly run off and help defend their position, and she doesn't have to shoot over anybody's head while she's in labor. This baby doesn't have to be turned, like D'Argo had, so on a physical level it's a lot less complex: just pop the baby out and that's it. But John isn't here, like he had been when D'Argo was born, and she feels his absence in her heart like the ice cream John had talked her into trying on his planet.

It doesn't take as long as it would take if she hadn't been born a Peacekeeper, because Peacekeepers give birth easily and quickly; to go along with the geometric pregnancy, it lowers recovery time to have quick births, and easy births reduce complications and lower the number of Peacekeepers who have long recovery times or die in childbirth.

The problem comes once she's had her baby, and one of the attending medtechs (not the one she'd been speaking to before, Medtech Garza, but somebody else), presumably thinking she's a Peacekeeper (she hopes he wouldn't take just any baby away from its mother) tries to take her baby away from her and out of the room before she's even seen it, before she even learns its sex.

"Where are you taking my baby?" she demands, pointing her pulse pistol at him even though it would be a bad idea to shoot him while he's holding the baby.

He looks terrified; as a medtech, and especially one who's obviously never been anywhere near the front lines, he's probably never had a pulse pistol pointed at him since the early training and testing that separates Peacekeepers into the types of advanced training they'll receive. "I, I was just going to take the baby to the crèche," he stammers. "Like I always do?"

"I'll handle this," Medtech Garza tells him, entering Aeryn's line of fire to take the baby from him. "I believe this is yours," she says to Aeryn, turning and waiting patiently for her to put the pulse pistol away.

Aeryn accepts the baby and is struck by how small it seems after the rapidly growing D'Argo. John and I made this, she thinks, looking at its perfect little fingers and features. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asks.

"It's a girl," the medtech says, not as enraptured as she is. "Healthy weight, healthy size, healthy everything as far as we can tell."

"As far as you can tell?" Aeryn asks sharply, picking up on that phrase.

"She's only half Sebacean," the medtech says. "We don't even know what the other species is."

"Oh, that's all right then," Aeryn says. "D'Argo, do you want to meet your new little sister?"

D'Argo runs over, finally freed from the grasp of his watcher, and stand on tiptoes to look at his baby sister. He wrinkles his nose. "She looks funny."

"That's because she's a baby," Aeryn tells him. "You looked funny when you were this little too."

"I was never that little," D'Argo declares. "And I didn't look that funny. What's her name?" he asks with the abrupt subject changes of the young.

Aeryn had considered naming her with a Sebacean name, but John hadn't liked any of the ones she'd suggested for D'Argo so she had abandoned that idea. She had considered the names of John's sisters, Olivia and Susan, but as much as she had liked them when she had been on Earth, their names still sound too alien to her ears to call her daughter by. There's only one choice, really, and she knows it's one John will approve of when he returns from wherever he went in the wormhole.

"Zhaan," she tells D'Argo and the universe, hoping that somehow John will hear her, against all logic and possibility. "Her name is Zhaan."