Limits by Larry Niven (tohfa e dulha read online TXT) 📗

has to be done that way. I know it. I’m just thinking about nine months from now. Oh boy.”

So it was announced that evening. As Doc might have expected, someone had already cheated. Somehow Nat, the midwestern earthmother blond, had taken a contraceptive pill and, even with Doc watching, had avoided swallowing it. Doc was fairly sure that her husband Brew knew nothing of it, although she was already more than four months along when she confessed.

Nat had jumped the gun, and there wasn’t a woman on Ridgeback who didn’t envy her. A year and eleven months after Landing Day, Doc delivered Ridgeback’s first baby.

Sleepy, exhausted by her hours of labor, Nat looked at her baby with a pride that was only half maternal. Her face was flushed, yellow hair tangled in mats with perspiration and fatigue. She held her baby, swaddled in blankets, at her side. “I can hear them outside. What do they want?” she asked drowsily, fighting to keep her eyelids open.

Doc breathed deeply. Ridiculous, but the scentless air of Ridgeback seemed a little sweeter. “They’re waiting for a glimpse of the little crown princess.”

“Well, she’s staying here. Tell them she’s beautiful,” Ridgeback’s first mother whispered, and dropped off to sleep.

Doc washed his hands and dried them on a towel. He stood above the slumbering pair, considering. Then he gently pried the baby from her mother’s grip and took her in his arms. Half-conscious mother’s wish or no, the infant must be shown to the colony before they could rest. Especially Brew. He could see the Swede’s great broad hands knotting into nervous fists as he waited outside. And the rest of them in a half-crescent around the door; and the inevitable Cynnie and Roy with their holotape cameras.

“It’s a girl,” he told them. “Nat’s resting comfortably.” The baby was red as a tomato and looked as fragile as Venetian glass. She and Doc posed for the camera, then Doc left her with Brew to make a short speech.

Elise and Greg, Jill’s husband, had both had paramedic training. Doc set up a rotating eight-hour schedule for the three of them, starting with Elise. The group outside was breaking up as he left, but he managed to catch Jase.

“I’d like to be taken off work duties for a while,” he told the colony leader, when the two were alone.

Jase gripped his arm. “Something’s wrong with the baby?” There was a volume of concern in the question.

“I doubt it, but she is the first, and I want to watch her and Nat. Most of the women are pregnant now. I want to keep an eye on them, too.”

“You’re not worried about anything specific?”

“No.”

When Elise left her shift at the maternity ward, she found him staring at the stone ceiling. She asked, “Insomnia again? Shall I get a ‘russian sleep’ set?”

“No.”

She studied his face. “The baby?”

She’d seen it too, then. “You just left the baby. She’s fine, isn’t she?”

“They’re both fine. Sleeping. Harry?” She was the only one who called him that. “What is it?”

“No, nothing’s bothering me. You know everything I know. It’s just that…”

“Well?”

“It’s just that I want to do everything right. This is so important. So I keep checking back on myself, because there’s no one I can call in to check my work. Can you understand what I’m getting at?”

She pursed her lips. Then said, “I know that the only baby in the world could get a lot more attention than she needs. There shouldn’t be too many people around her, and they should all be smiling. That’s important to a baby.”

Doc watched as she took off her clothes and got into bed. The slight swell of her pregnancy was just beginning to show. Within six months there would be nine more children on Ridgeback, and one would be theirs.

Predictably, Brew’s and Nat’s daughter became Eve.

It seemed nobody but Doc had noticed anything odd about Eve. Even laymen know better than to expect a newborn child to be pretty. A baby doesn’t begin to look like a baby until it is weeks old. The cherubs of the Renaissance paintings of Foucquet or Conegliano were taken from two-year-olds. Naturally Eve looked odd, and most of the colony, who had never seen newborn children, took it in their stride.…

But Doc worried.

The ship’s library was a world’s library. It was more comprehensive, and held more microfilm and holographically encoded information than any single library on earth. Doc spent weeks running through medical tapes, and got no satisfaction thereby.

Eve wasn’t sick. She was a “good baby”; she gave no more trouble than usual, and no less. Nat had no difficulty nursing her, which was good, as there were no adult cows available on Ridgeback.

Doc pulled a microfiche chip out of the viewer and yawned irritably. The last few weeks had cost him his adjustment to Ridgeback time, and gained him…well, a kind of general education in pediatrics. There was nothing specific to look for, no handle on the problem.

Bluntly put, Eve was an ugly baby.

There was nothing more to say, and nothing to do but wait.

Roy and Cynnie showed their tapes for the year. Cynnie had a good eye for detail. Until he watched the camera view trucking from the landing craft past the line of houses on Main Street, to Brew, to a closeup of Brew’s house, Doc had never noticed how Brew’s house reflected Brew himself. It was designed like the others: tall and squarish, with a sloped roof and small window. But the stones in Brew’s house were twice the size of those in Doc’s house. Brew was proud of his strength.

Roy was in orbit on Year Day, but Cynnie stayed to cover the festivities, such as they were. Earth’s hypothetical eager audience still hadn’t seen Year Day One. Jase spoke for the camera, comparing the celebration with the first Thanksgiving Day in New England. He was right: it was a feast, a display of the variety of foods Ridgeback was now producing, and not much more