Semiosis: A novel of first contact. Sue Burke
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of the Commonwealth of Pax
HIGGINS
Beck did right to invite me to the birth of his third child, since I’ve helped at two dozen other births, including a fippolioness once, almost my last mistake. Beck and I are best friends and besides, I was the real father and would’ve made a far better father and husband than him.
There’s a stage in childbirth just before the real pushing starts when women often panic, and they don’t mean the things they do and yell, although if it were me going through all that, I might turn homicidal. Women are more solid than men that way. Indira—beautiful brown-eyed Indira, with hair that swirls and curls like water in a brook—Indira had endured hormones, heartburn, headaches, and hemorrhoids for 325 days and then a half day of labor. She was curled up like a baby herself, teary and trembling in her always tidy house, where a crib waited for the wonderful moment. Beck hovered near the door for a fast escape if necessary; not the best husband, as I said, though a square-shouldered man, very fit for repairing brickwork and turning over soil. (I’m much handsomer, ask anyone, and, better still, perfectly symmetrical from head to toe, which indicates very fine genes.)
Indira commanded Beck to open the door to the sleety weather because she was hot. She shrieked that her back had never hurt that way before so something must be wrong.
“Here?” I asked, caressing her backbone. She wailed something I decided was yes, and I glanced at the old medic, Blas.
“Probably just the baby’s head pushing against the spine, nothing dangerous,” he said. “Everything’s normal.” To his relief, too.
I began to rub just above those beautiful round hips, hands sliding on the sweat. “Here?”
“Don’t stop!” she said.
“Soon, the baby will come soon, soon, soon,” I crooned. “You’ll hold it in your arms, soon, soon, soon.”
Just relax, just relax. Indira wasn’t the relaxing type …
But fippolionesses usually are, so a few months earlier when I heard Clay mewling deep-down tired and hopeless, I’d have run because I’d guessed her problem, but I didn’t want to spook her. We kept a herd of a dozen adult lions and their young a bit upstream to fell pines for firewood and to clear new fields, and I was coming for my evening check, being the animal-responsible guy. People worry most about a lion’s front claws, and they should, agile scythes that they are, but they do mere detail work when the lions dig up roots. The back claws are only as long as your fingers but they inhabit the end of those muscular hopping legs. A lion can rip out your intestines and toss them over the dome of a house with one kick. Or, with a bit more effort, it can knock over a tree.
Clay lay on her side, curled up and twitching in a nest of logs and leaves. Lions don’t have the brains to need a big head, so births shouldn’t be hard—and generally, the big fipps and I kept a respectful distance from each other. The rest of the herd was keeping a respectful distance from her that night, too. Idiot that I am, I approached, mimicking the coos of their chatter: “What’s wrong, Clay? What’s your problem, honey? Things aren’t working right? Let me take a look, I won’t hurt you, just relax, just relax.”
I touched her claws the way they do for greetings and cooed and petted her long fur and let her sniff my face. Her prehensile lips curled in pain with a contraction, her eyes blinked exhausted and drooping, and she mewled again, terrible breath, which isn’t at all characteristic of a healthy lion. She held her back legs tight to her chest, and her fur dripped with blood and birth fluids.
“Don’t worry, Clay, we’re fine here, let me look, let me look.” I pushed on the legs, and she opened up a bit. “Just relax, just relax.” A little arm covered with slicked blond fur stuck out of the slit just below her sternum, three precious fingers tipped with pearls ready to grow into claws. Lions should be born headfirst, like humans. This was bad. I touched the hand. The fingers flexed. Maybe there was a chance. I stroked the abdomen to get a feel for how the cub was located. Mama’s claws began to stroke my back, very gentle, just returning the gesture. The cub wasn’t fully transverse, near as I could tell, unless I was mistaking a tense stomach wall muscle for its head, very possibly so, but she was dilated and maybe, maybe I could ease the baby out.
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