Chapter 24: The Battered Earth — Part 9

Loka was calm, her voice soothing, and Susan listened to her orders as if Loka were her Chieftain, and not the reverse. Robert was covered in blood before the birth of the first child, and Susan thought only of freeing the second child from her womb when her discipline broke. Pain combined with blood loss sent her into a semiconscious state. With the birth of the final, beautiful child, Susan’s brain stopped signaling, and her heart stopped beating. Though she had been standing just moments before, she fell forward, sliding down the wall she had braced herself against, Loka and Robert’s hands were still holding babies, and their minds, numb from hours of labor, were not quick enough to register and counter Susan’s collapse.

Once Robert had the children in his arms, Loka pulled Susan to her chest, trying to sense any signs of life. For nearly a minute, Loka stared at her, wondering what to do. Resuscitation procedures meant to work on normal humans had never been needed on Antans, and Susan had always been certain such basic life saving methods would be useless, since the symbiont could act on every cell on the body to bring it back online. A minute and a half after she stopped breathing, Susan’s heart started back up, slowly, and her ragged breathing began as a halfhearted effort. She reached out delicately, weakly, the oldest medic on any planet inhabited by humans, forced by circumstance give advice to two people whose knowledge had been drawn unconsciously from Susan’s mind.

“Low blood pressure . . . ” She lost consciousness before Loka could fully comprehend.

“She’s lost a lot of blood.” Robert said, realizing, as if for the first time, that nearly all of it was on him.

While Loka cleaned the infants and wrapped them in layers of satin and silk, Robert pulled on the collective minds until he found somebody who could confirm the risks of blood transfusion among the adapted. What he got back was astonishing. Nobody had ever checked, because the need had never come up. Erring on the side of caution, he called out across the network for somebody with access to the old records, as he could not recall his blood type. As it turned out, the natives had all the records of every ship ever crashed stored away, and had long archived and organized it. Blood types having been identified for every invading survivor, it took a few minutes to index and determine the blood type of every person on Antans. A match was quickly found, and Susan’s O Negative match arrived in short order from a village nearly a quarter of the way around the planet, dropping through a gravity well at several times the speed of sound.

Laughing from the excitement, the teenage boy looked at the gape in the muck his impact had made, and wondered if he might be in trouble. Susan had set up something similar to a garden near her tree, and the plants and fungus once residing there had been thrown out hundreds of feet in every direction. Though none of them could be said to be dead, finding them and bringing them back would be more than a chore. His fall through the atmosphere came at the front of a rainstorm, and he made quick use of it to rinse the slick mud from his body.

Once he was clean enough to enter Susan’s house, and properly settled, Robert hooked him up via needle and tube, elbow to elbow with Susan. The gravity driven transfusion would take three pints from him before another could arrive to replace him. The second woman was calm and dignified, and while the teenager slept on Susan’s bed, she fell asleep in the chair over Susan’s body. Two people had lost nearly seven pints of blood before Susan regained consciousness, staying awake long enough to say “enough” and slip back into the deep sleep of healing. Susan would have to heal, and quickly, as in here conscious absence the entire human alliance of Antans felt as if part of them were missing, and though they lay close to their mother’s body, the recently born twins seemed to feel it most of all. Robert could not imagine two such beautiful children being forced to face the world and its troubles without their mother.