Playing God(8)

David brought her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. “We're going.”





Chapter II



Lynn stared at her freshly depilated self in the mirror. She ran her fingers across her bare, pale, still-tingling scalp. Her hair had been the functional, unenhanced auburn she'd been born with. The sink and the carpeting had absorbed it as it fell. Her fingers drifted across the ridges where her eyebrows had been five minutes before. She traced the visible stiffness on her temple indicating the memory works for her camera eye beneath her skin. She thought about David, still asleep in the other room, and how he would be seeing this sight as soon as he woke up. Her heart rose into her throat, and she seriously considered grabbing her clothes and hiding in the closet.

“Vanity, thy name is Nussbaumer.” She tossed the microshaver onto the counter next to the vacuum sink and dissolution cream.

“Hi.”

Lynn spun. David stood in the bathroom doorway, as naked as she was, but considerably hairier. During the three-week flight to the Dedelphi system from Mars, he had let his beard grow into a golden brown fuzz and allowed his brash cut to start looking more like a hedge.

He'd be shaving again after his shower. For three weeks they had been on their way to work. Today they would finally get down there, a year and five months after they'd both accepted Bioverse's citizenship offer.

David blinked sleepily at her and lounged against the threshold. He smiled and met her eyes. He was very carefully not looking at her scalp, or anywhere else she had just shaved. The only hair she had left on her body was her eyelashes, which were not considered to carry any dander worth worrying about.

Good bedside manner, Doctor, she thought with twinges of both love and exasperation. Put them at ease, whoever they are.

“Hi.” She plucked her robe off the towel bar and shrugged into it. The silk felt too slick and cool against her completely bare skin. David caught her hand as she tied the sash and pulled her gently toward him.

She looked up at his soft, brown eyes. “David, if you say this suits me, I will beat you, hard. In anatomically sensitive places.”

David smoothed her hand between both of his. “I wasn't going to say that.”

She ran the knuckles of her free hand along his chin, savoring the familiar line of his jaw, even under all the bristles. She knew what he was thinking. David had been assigned to one of the t'Therian hospitals. Lynn, on the other hand, would be island-hopping, when she wasn't in her headquarters a full continent away. They hadn't split up for this long since they'd gotten married.

David did not lift his gaze from her fingernails. “I've just been thinking about … What do they call their world again?”

Lynn's mouth twisted into a half smile. He spoke and read three Dedelphi languages. She spoke five and read four. She'd trotted the fact out once at a meeting, and he'd never let her forget it.

“The t'Theria call it All-Cradle. The Getesaph call it Ground, or Earth, if you like, although that gets confusing,” she added. “The Shi Ia call it Our Pouch, the Fil call it Everywhere, and the Chosa Ty Poroth call it …” She hesitated. The amber words THE PARENT flashed in front of her right eye. “The Parent.”

“I'll defer to our landing point.” David cleared his throat. “I've just been thinking about All-Cradle and”—he raised his gaze to her face—“how very much I'm going to miss you.”

“It's only for a few months,” she reminded him. “Until the evacuation's complete. Then we even get our own house again.”

“I know.” He reached around her waist under her robe and pulled her close to him. “But hold me for a while anyway, Lynn,” he whispered, as her cheek brushed his. “It's still going to be too long.”


The dining room of Dedelphi Base I was huge. It had a full-service cafeteria and garden attached to a honeycomb of dining cubicles. A view screen threaded to the outside cameras dominated the longest wall. This morning, it showed the Ur, one of the two city-ships already in-system and awaiting the evacuation of the first of a billion Dedelphi. Each city-ship was two pairs of glittering domes set on opposite sides of a silver plate. The engineering and command centers were encased in two smaller domes, one over each nozzle cluster. Against the vacuum, it looked as if a city had been built on a black lake and now sat on its own reflection. The projection had zoomed in just far enough that they could see the gleaming buildings and green trees on both sides.

Three Dedelphi stood with their arms around one another looking at the projection. Even from the back, Lynn recognized Praeis Shin t'Theria and her daughters. She grinned and touched David's arm. He nodded and waved her on while he headed for the dining cubes.