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3: Midwife

n incubator was beeping. Jenna Parker moved to key in the sequences that would massage the Moonborn infant from its watery culturing chamber into the world. Her husband was sleeping soundly, she was sure. They lived separate lives, lived them contentedly. They each had their own passion for their careers, independent yet alongside the other. Neither was particularly interested in the work of the other, so they suffered no competition. At least professionally. After all, Elgin Parker held three PhD’s and was the Project Director. Jenna Parker was simply a biochemist and the Head Midwife to the Moonborn. Kind of like being the janitor—essential, but invisible unless inconveniencing someone.

The Moonborn Project was reaching critical mass. She’d tried to tell her husband five months ago. So many children, so many babies. So many more on the way, more than Terramoon could support for any length of time. And now, after today, no resources from Earth to help them. Anything and everything from below had to be considered contaminated.

Now she must sit here and monitor the equipment for the next five hours, as another perfect test tube child made a perfectly-controlled entrance into its perfectly-controlled world. A moon was not meant to be called a world. These children were meant to move on from here.

Three failed Mars colonies. The gravity difference was just enough to ruin human health. The soils and the atmosphere couldn’t be terraformed by machine. Not on the scale people usually thought of. Only soil-eating viruses and bacteria had the properties for such massive transformation within a human lifetime. If they could survive the initial environment and create the correct final state.

Apparently, something had gone deadly wrong with that part of the project.

The Moonborn, like the rampaging nano-terraformers, were still experimental. Or supposed to be. Their genetic code had been cross-indexed from millions of samples worldwide to reverse coding errors. That was the blank slate worked on by Ilsa Fridau, the team lead for the Moonborn Code. The Moonborn children were made for Mars — a Mars transformed by nanotechnology.

Jenna yawned and waited for the new child to be birthed from the machine into her arms. The Moonborn needed human touch. They must be raised and parented. Everyone took their turn. Everyone was wearing thin from the excessive burden. So many babies. Whatever Terracorp had been thinking—before its other pet project ate it alive — they were all stuck with the consequences now.

Anyone living permanently in Terramoon had made the choice to be artificially adapted — inoculated with DNA-altering viruses that changed their bone structure and their muscle-building capacity. They could never return to Earth. They’d also willingly subjected themselves to sterilization. The Moonborn were everyone’s children, psychologically.

Accordingly, some loved them, and others, after gushing at the novelty, barely tolerated the long-term responsibility.

The door slid open, startling Jenna. She raised her head and forced a weary smile for the burly Asian man who entered. “Dr. Liu. What brings you here tonight?”

Wesley Liu jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I was in the fertilization lab, and I heard the birth alarm. Thought I’d come over and see.”

“You should take a sleeping pill. You have a schedule to maintain.”

Liu glanced toward the porthole, where an Earthrise was cutting a thin line across the corner of the darkness. “Just for tonight, I’m letting myself be.”

Jenna nodded. She hadn’t been asleep either when the alarm had come in.

“I’ve never caught before. D’you think I could?”

Jenna raised her eyebrows, surprised. “Nobody out-of-area has ever asked. I don’t think we even have a policy on it. So . . . well . . . I don’t see why not.”

Dr. Liu was well-known as one of those who loved the children. The rumor mill said he’d been raised in a large family. Jenna outfitted him with gloves and a soft cloth smock. “They come out wet and sloppy. You have to support her head, like any newborn—”

“I know.”

Jenna stood with her mouth open for a second, then swallowed the rest of her instructions. “You do. Of course.”

Heart rate was perfectly within norms. The fetus’s head was engaged in the ejection tube. The incubator’s catch-table extended automatically, the heated, padded surface prepared to support the infant and the hands of the catcher.

She, the Head Midwife, stood by as the incubator gently squeezed the Moonborn infant out into Wesley Liu’s waiting hands. Liu caught his breath as the child jerked awake and mewled, reflexively pulling the tiny form against his massive chest and cradling her. Jenna blinked. She’d never seen a reaction like that—but then, her staff were all used to catching. They’d been psychologically prepared since before their first catch during midwifery training.

Jenna placed fingertips on Liu’s forearm and eased the child back to the catch table. She helped him tuck a soft blanket around the baby girl. “You display an interesting reflex. The sound of a heartbeat is soothing to newborns, and there’s evidence that it helps regulate their own heart rate and biorhythms. We have machines for that, these days — feel the pulse of the catch table? I wasn’t aware that it might be built in to human instinct.”

The baby cried again, her eyes closed tight. Jenna waited for the cord to empty and turn white, then severed it. “Usually, the catcher gives the name. Would you like to?”

Liu’s eyes widened. “Am I allowed to?”

Jenna smiled and repeated herself. “There’s no policy against it, so I don’t see why not.”

His mouth opened halfway and stalled. “I—uh—”

“Take your time thinking about it. I still have to check her for defects, and she can’t be named until I clear her.”

Again, a startled glance. “I didn’t know . . . I thought they were all born perfect.”

Jenna shook her head and busied herself setting the incubator to its cleaning cycle.