Perry slept on it. The immediate crush of thoughts and emotions that came to him had to do with the insanity of raising four infants alone; but after just a few minutes thinking this through, he arrived at a different state of dread that felt almost like a literal roadblock. It was one particular alarm, and he talked to Z about it the next day.
“Z,” he said. He was sitting just inside the doorway of the ship, on a rough stool he had made himself and carried up the ramp with him some weeks before.
“Listen, I don’t know how much you can tell about us humans from my DNA, and I don’t remember what all I’ve told you. But you know there are two sexes? I’ve mentioned that?”
“You have.”
“And the women give birth. So eventually, any girls that are – born, if that’s the word, these first ones you will create, will grow up to be women, and probably most of them will become pregnant.
“I mean,” Perry added, “who the hell knows. But you’ve got to assume. I won’t be touching them, they’ll be my daughters basically. But lots of young guys will be around. Eventually, anyway.”
“We agree.”
“And that was pretty dangerous for us. Childbirth, I mean. Many women died while giving birth. Well, maybe not ‘many,’ but it wasn’t uncommon. And we won’t have any obstetricians. Or midwives. People who assist with birth. It’s nice that you help me out with the fabricating of shovels, and gathering a lot of the food, but delivering babies – that will be something else.
“It’s just ridiculous, Z, how poorly humans seem to have evolved to give birth. Women would sometimes have pregnancies start outside their uterus, which kills them. And when the pregnancy does happen in there, it’s fairly common that the baby would not come out head first, which can be a problem. And no matter how the baby is born, the woman can bleed too much. In my time we had doctors operating on women fairly regularly to terminate pregnancies outside the uterus, or to deliver the baby by just cutting through the mother’s abdomen. Will your robots be able to do that? I certainly can’t. This is so much more than, you know, finding wild pears on a tree and bringing them here.
“Maybe all the kids born from now on should really be raised in vats, the way you’re talking about, but that won’t happen. Women will get pregnant. Trying to convince people to restrict their reproduction to babies in vats – all respect, but that would be just a recipe for disaster. I could imagine trying to enforce that. That would be some bizarre science fiction story. There’s no way.”
“We were not aware of these common complications with birth, as you describe them,” the reflection answered. “But yes, our robots could perform surgery.”
“Seriously? And you can – anesthetize people? Eliminate the pain?”
“We are capable of that. We are also essentially similar to mammals, Perry. Human bodies are quite different, but not so different that this would be completely new for us.”
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Perry leaned back and put his hands on his head.
“I hope we’re doing the right thing, Z. Well, at least these kids – women – should be healthy. Well-fed, I mean. And they won’t be having ten children each, which should help. And we’ll make them wait until they’re at least – well, who knows, but not fourteen or fifteen for sure. I know that was about a cutoff age for safe births. I’ll have to keep an eye on that, though. Hoo boy. Think of it. It’s going to be a nightmare enforcing that. Cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.”
*
Nine months later, four babies – two male, two female – were ready to be lifted out of the transparent cylinders of fluid where they had been grown.
Perry by now had a three-bedroom house, insulated and painted, ready for them. The gathering devices had done nearly all the work on it. With children on the way, he had dropped his desire to do everything himself. He had, however, planted a large garden with his own labor.
He had four cribs. He had bird mobiles over each of them. He had twelve thousand disposable diapers, in graduated sizes, stacked up inside the zhranmin ship. He had clothes. He had forty blankets. He had rattles, and stuffed animals.
(The first stuffed animals the zhranmin fabricator had made had been picture-perfect recreations of animals observed around the ship, only soft and smaller.
(“Z, these are almost creepy,” Perry had told the reflection. “Or scary. This badger thing looks exactly like a badger – it’s going to frighten them. This isn’t what I meant by ‘stuffed animal.’ My god. You’ve got to give it friendly eyes, make it plump, give it a smile. Come on.”)
He had tasted the artificial milk that zhranmin had fabricated, and had tested the bottles.
“Four at a time,” he said. “Or four in a row, I mean. Day after day after day. This is going to be insane. Good thing I’m unemployed.”
He had a stroller, a long one which could accommodate four babies, mounted on an antigravity platform.
And he had remembered the songs he had used to sing to Araceli. Goodnight, Irene; An Irish Lullaby; Over the Rainbow. The Spanish ones, also; the one about the market of San Jose, and the elephants swinging, and Arroz con Leche. Would he try to teach them as much Spanish as he knew, as well as English? What would be the point? But yet it seemed tragic not to pass on everything he could.
“I owe it to you all. Les debo el esfuerzo, mis compañeros.”
The plan was to raise these four until they were nine, or ten, or eleven, and then get a few more.
“Oh hell yes I’m going to take advantage of your free labor when you’re older,” he had told them at one point as they floated in their tanks. “You're going to be put to work taking care of your little fourth cousins or whatever. I’m not bringing back this race alone, kids. Enjoy that peace and quiet in there while you can.
“Z,” he had asked one day inside the ship, while he surveyed the stacks of diapers and other supplies he had directed them to fabricate. “What happens if something happens to me before these kids can fend for themselves? If I die? I don’t think all the gathering devices you could crank out will be able to raise functioning humans.”
“You will not die,” Z had answered. “Not before they can care for themselves, at the earliest. We will ensure that. And we will speak about your lifespan later.”
*
Perry got one last good night’s sleep, one last unrushed and uninterrupted breakfast. He instructed the gathering devices to water the garden. He then climbed up the ramp to the cylinder – pushing the antigrav stroller before him – to retrieve the next generation.