The tops of some of the buildings had been planted with grass and trees to make pocket parks; after passing three or four of them-all devoid of activity save for their robot gardeners unobtrusively tending the plants-they stopped to sit in the grass beneath a young apple tree and look out over the city. Ariel had been quiet for a long time now, but Derec couldn’t take the silence anymore. He felt an incredible urge to babble.
“I’m still not sure I believe it’s really happening,” he said. “It’s crazy to think about. A new person. A completely new mind, with a new viewpoint, new thoughts, new attitudes, new everything. And we’re responsible for its development. It’s daunting.”
Ariel nodded, “I know what you mean. Who are we to be having a baby?”
“Better us than Lucius, at least,” Derec said with a grin.
“I suppose. At least we know what one is.” Ariel tried to smile, but hers was a fleeting smile at best. She turned away, said to the city, “Oh, Derec, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to do this. I keep thinking about having it, and then I keep thinking about not having it, and right now I’ve got to say that not having it sounds a lot better to me.” She looked back to Derec, and he could see the confusion written plain as words in her expression.
His own face must have mirrored her confusion. “Not having it,” he said. “You mean…you mean…aborting it?” The instincts, or hormones, or whatever they were, still had a strong grip on him. It was hard to even say the word that would take his child from him.
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Ariel. “Aborting it. Stopping it now, while we still can. It’s not like we wanted it, is it? We weren’t trying for one. We were happy without it. If we’d known I could get pregnant, then we would have been using birth control, wouldn’t we? So why should we change our entire lives because of some silly-accident?”
“Because it’s us! Our child. Because it’s a new person, a new mind, with a new viewpoint and all that. That’s why we should keep it.” Was that why? Derec fought for his own understanding even as he tried to explain it to Ariel. “It’s-do you remember what it was like when we first found ourselves here? Me without a memory at all, yours slowly slipping from you, neither of us with any idea what we were doing here? Remember how lost we felt?”
Ariel’s eyebrows wrinkled in concentration. “It’s fuzzy that far back. But I know what you’re talking about. I’ve felt lost often enough since then.”
“Right. We had no purpose; that’s why we felt that way. I spent my time trying to track down my father, thinking he could help restore my memory, but that was just a yearning for the past. We spent time searching for a cure for your disease, but that was just patching up the past, too. Now I find I’ve got a mother running around out here somewhere, too, and I was all set to spend however long it takes trying to find her, to see if she couldn’t do for me what Avery won’t, but now I don’t even care. Now all of a sudden we have something to look forward to, something in our future. Who cares about the past when we’ve got that?”
Ariel shook her head. “Why should we grab at the first thing that comes along? Derec, this is going to change our lives. Unless we want to put the baby in a nursery, and it’s obvious you don’t, then we’re going to have to take care of it. We’re going to have to live with it, like Earthers and settlers do. Do you really want that? I’m not so sure I do. And besides that-” she waved away his protest, “-it’s my body we’re talking about here. Pregnancy is dangerous. It can cause all sorts of problems in a woman; blood clots, kidney damage-you wouldn’t believe all the things that can go wrong. And for what? A future with a squalling brat in it? I can’t see risking my life for that.”
“But what about the baby’s life? Isn’t that a consideration?”
“Of course, it’s a consideration,” Ariel said angrily. “If it wasn’t, I’d have had the medical robot abort it this morning. I’m still trying to weigh it out; my life and my future versus the life and future of what at this point amounts to a few dividing cells. It’s a testament to how important I think it is that I’m considering it at all.”
Derec had been subliminally aware of the gardener going about its job somewhere behind him. The soft whirr of the robot’s grass-cutting blade had been a soothing noise at the edge of his perception, but the sudden silence when it stopped was enough to make him look around to the robot, just in time to see it topple onto its side, smashing a bed of flowers when it hit.
“What the-?” He stood, went over to the robot, and said, “Gardener. Do you hear me?”
No response.
Gardener,he sent via comlink.
Still nothing. He pulled it up to a sitting position, but it was like raising a statue. The robot was completely locked up. Derec let it fall on its side again. It made a quiet thud when it hit the ground.
“It couldn’t handle the conflict,” Derec said in wonder. “Its First Law obligation to protect you was fighting with its obligation to protect the baby, and it couldn’t handle it.”
“You sound surprised,” said Ariel. “I’m not. It’s tearing me apart, too.”
Derec left the robot and went back to Ariel, sitting beside her and wrapping her in his arms.
“I wish it wasn’t.”
“Me too.”
“What can I do to help?”
Ariel shook her head. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. Just don’t push me, okay? I know you want to keep it, but I’ve got to decide on my own whether or not I do. Once I know that, we can talk about what we’re actually going to do. Okay?”
“Okay.”
As if to confirm her independence, Ariel pulled away and closed her eyes in thought. Derec leaned back in the grass and looked up through a tangle of leaves at the sky. An. occasional cloud dotted the blue.
Did every new parent go through this? he wondered. Could what he and Ariel were feeling be normal? Did Avery and his mother agonize over whether or not to have him? He couldn’t imagine Avery agonizing over any decision. His mother must have, though. She must have wondered if Derec would be worth the effort of childbirth. Evidently she had decided so, probably before she became pregnant, come to think of it, since she’d had no reason to believe she was infertile as Ariel had.
She and Avery must have been in love then. What a concept; someone loving Avery. Or was she just like him? Had their decision to have a child been nothing more than the practical way to acquire someone to experiment on?
It didn’t matter. He and Ariel were in love; that was what mattered. The thought of staying with Ariel until their child grew up didn’t scare him. Derec knew that parents on most planets didn’t worry about that kind of responsibility-even parents more fond of one another than his own-but he intended to. The thought of raising a child gave his life direction, gave him a sense of purpose he hadn’t even realized until now he was missing.
Ariel, evidently realizing he wouldn’t pressure her whether he held onto her or not, lay down in the grass beside him, resting her head on his chest. His arms went around her automatically, and it felt perfectly natural to be holding her so. It felt right. For a time, as they watched the clouds drift past overhead, the rooftop garden seemed to become their whole universe, and it was a good universe.
Ariel’s thoughts had evidently been paralleling his own, but along a different track. “I’m glad we’re not on Earth any more,” she said suddenly. “I’d feel even worse there.”
“No kidding.” Derec shuddered. With a population in the billions, Earth was no place to be having children. There, where the population density in the enclosed cities could be measured easily in people per square meter, every new mouth to feed was a tragedy, not a blessing.
And what was worse, too few of the people there were worried enough to do anything about it. Here stood an entire planet covered with city, full of robots eager to share it, yet Derec doubted if he could find enough people in all of Earth to fill even the section he could survey from this one rooftop. Most of them hated space, hated robots, and on an even more fundamental level, hated change. They wouldn’t leave Earth even for a better world.