TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY: Snow XII

270

 

Alden volunteered at the hospital on Sunday. He spent most of the morning cleaning things and begging for errands. His thoughts went around and around in circles while his hand did the same, wiping smudges off steel and glass.

It’s not fair that I’m hiding what I am. It’s not fair that if I stop hiding what I am I might lose everything. It’s not fair that I’ve got a tattoo that makes me hide even more of what I am. It’s not fair that Artonans and humans can just decide hugely important things for me about my own life. Not fair that there are smudges.

It. Sucks.

He was so sick of the litany. It wasn’t even interesting at this point. Nothing new. Just a broken record he couldn’t stop playing.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” he muttered.

The island was dreary today, and he was outside, scrubbing a tall, narrow window beside one of the hospital’s exterior doors so hard that the cloth squeaked against the pane.

He tried to point his attention toward anything else. What Lind-otta had said to him at the Christmas market seemed like a better direction. She’d been giving him advice, and if an old knight who’d helped save his life did that, he should contemplate it as hard as Stuart tended to contemplate things.

What did she say?

You can’t fight every darkness or bask in every light. Suck it up, and stop complaining about how hard your choosing season is so that you can actually function and do something with your life.

Her wording was better. Less harsh. I should remember it. Let’s see….I think she said, “You can’t fight every darkness or bask in every light, Alden. Accept this, so—”

A purplish hand slapped the other side of the glass near his face. It left a conspicuous print as it pulled away and made a beckoning gesture.

“I just wiped the inside!” Alden exclaimed before he recognized the culprit. It was the surly, overprotective assistant from the dispensary. “Panna-ser? Do you or Master Ladda-ser need something? Is it the artificial heart project?”

The System hadn’t called him, but he’d rather hold an experiment than wash windows.

He stepped inside and got an explanation from Panna-ser that involved too many words being crammed into too few breaths. Alden had to read the translations to get the gist of it all.

Master Ladda-ser was working on the heart again. She’d been interrupted four times since she came in last night. And now, now, those ignoramuses down in F-city expected her to spend hours traveling there to fix something. They didn’t even want to use the teleportation allotment for her. It was too inconsiderate to comprehend.

Panna-ser had the solution, though. Alden Thorn, who understood the importance of their work, would go instead. He would collect the device, bring it back here, then return it. Master Ladda-ser would repair it in minutes without leaving her office. The interruption to her day, and her brilliance, would be as minimal as possible.

“So it’s a delivery job?” Not an emergency one, or the System would just shoot the wizard toward the problem without asking. Alden supposed this really was a conflict about whether a teleport was more valuable or Ladda-ser’s research time. “Does the thing need me to use my skill on it in transit?”

“That would be ideal, and it is small enough for you to hold. Why else would I ask you to do it?”

“Just because I’m convenient? I don’t mind. I came here on Esh-erdi’s Nine-Edged Son Whose Own Mother Forsakes Him today, so I can fly down there and back. I won’t have to wait for the ferry.”

“Very good,” Panna-ser said approvingly. He was wearing his white angel robe, and he shook out the sleeves in a satisfied-looking way. “Call me when you arrive. I will tell them to give you the package.”

 

******

 

Alden was grateful to have a mission, and he pushed the edges of the speed limit he’d been given by Sky Traffic Control. His destination was the pediatric hospital in F, where he expected to stop by a desk somewhere and pick up a broken alien medical device that was delicate enough to require his skill and portable enough for him to fly with.

That was what Panna-ser had described to him.

So when he called the assistant to let him know he’d arrived, and Panna-ser gave him further directions to go to a different place adjacent to the main hospital, he didn’t have any concerns. He was mostly thinking about how nice it was that the womb vault on Anesidora could be housed in such a lovely, conspicuous building instead of being in a nondescript fortress like in some other places. It was pearly green and lotus-shaped. He was a little excited that he’d get to see inside, even if it was only to stop by the front desk.

He was only a few steps from the dimple in the building’s exterior that marked the entrance when a neighborhood Watcher made her presence known with a sharp whistle. Surprised, he looked up and saw her crouched above the nearest lotus petal on a disc-shaped Meister tool just big enough for both her feet.

She shook her head at him. Strands of her dark ponytail were streaming in the breeze.

“It’s all right,” said Alden, raising his voice to be heard. “I was sent here by Master Ladda-ser’s assistant. To pick up something for her.”

The Watcher’s disc dropped down toward him. She hopped off onto the walkway and frowned. “Are you sure this is the right place? No one told me, and they usually would have.”

“They’re expecting Master Ladda-ser instead. But she’s busy with something, so her assistant said I should do it. It’s just picking up a broken device of some kind and keeping it safe with my skill on the way to Central Crescent. I’ll bring it back here when it’s repaired.”

“Let me call inside. They really should have told me…”

Her eyes went distant for a moment, and then she was talking to someone in Chinese. Alden had to repeat everything Panna-ser had told him twice for her, while she explained it to whoever was within the building. It was starting to drizzle.

“Go stand just inside the entrance,” she said finally. “You don’t need to get wet. Tell the System you want to volunteer here.”

Alden did as instructed. He wasn’t too concerned about any of this. Panna-ser not calling ahead and everyone being confused about why they’d gotten a delivery Rabbit instead of a fixer wizard seemed like it might be business as usual when it came to dealing with the assistant.

There was no front desk within the lotus, like he’d imagined. The entrance led right into a small round lobby. Very comfortable looking furniture filled the room, more like what he’d expect to see in a rich person’s house than a hospital waiting area, but there were no people here. Not until a camouflaged door in one of the cream-colored walls slid aside, and a clean-shaven middle-aged man in a sweater vest appeared.

“Oh my many alien gods, he’s twelve,” the man said loudly before Alden could greet him. He was speaking over his shoulder, toward the open door. “He’s twelve, people!”

“I’m not twelve,” Alden said, shocked. “I’m sixteen. Sixteen and three quarters.”

“That’s much too close to twelve,” said the man. “I don’t care if the System says you can technically do it. Does that insane wizard’s insane assistant really think we’re going to hand you an artificial womb like it’s a pizza?”

“I get to carry one of the actual wombs? Do they look like they do on TV?”

The man’s expression downgraded him from twelve to ten in an instant.

“I meant,” said Alden, straightening his polo shirt and attempting to look professional, “I’ll be responsible with it, sir. I think this could really help out Master Ladda-ser and contribute to her work on an external artificial heart. And I’ve carried expensive devices before.”

“Were there unborn babies inside any of them?”

Alden blinked.

What the fuck, Panna-ser?! You said it was a package! You kept calling it a device!

But he’d just decided to be professional, so all he said was a very polite, “Hm? No, sir. But I would be extremely responsible. With something like that.”

There was a long pause. Alden adjusted his polo shirt again.

“Um…like…a human baby, right? Not some other kind of baby.”

The man crossed his arms over his chest. “You look scared to death.”

“I’m not. I just…I was told, explicitly, that I was picking up a package. A device. He very definitely described it as an object, and I don’t think he’s stupid, so…he did that on purpose so that I wouldn’t say no.” Alden frowned. “I’m traveling on a flying vehicle, though. I’m not carrying a baby on that. You need to get me a car. A safe car.”

A baby seemed like something he should watch closely, hold with both hands, and not drop in the Pacific due to a freak gust of wind.

“I’m not sure I’d let you carry the pizza, kiddo.”

Alden resisted the call of a really adolescent eye roll.

“You were pretty excited when you thought you’d get to see some of our equipment in person, though. And you’re spending your weekend working for free. Want to come take a look in the back?”

“Can I?”

The guy waved him in.

 

******

 

An hour later, Alden found himself disappointed. In several womb vault employees, a couple of Artonans, and the entire way things were turning out in this place.

From where he sat in the building’s break room, he could hear the mumble of voices in the meeting room next door. Because he’d been in there with them a short while ago, he could imagine the scene well. They were calling Central Crescent to talk to Ladda-ser, or to talk to someone about Ladda-ser. The man in the sweater vest was in there. He was a doctor. There was also an equipment specialist, the womb vault’s director, and a guy who worked for the hospital system but not usually here at the vault. That man’s role had been described to Alden with a laugh as, “He spends all his time disagreeing with the wizards so the rest of us don’t have to.”

After a quick tour, the doctor had taken Alden in there for introductions. To help explain what everyone who worked here did, he’d also shown him some of the notes from this morning’s staff planning session. This wasn’t a facility where major medical procedures happened daily. The doctor was here for urgent situations that rarely arose. He signed off on incoming and outgoing wombs and made decisions whenever soon-to-be parents had special requests or concerns. Others handled the rest of the work—parent education, outreach, carrying wombs next door to the hospital and overseeing the births for local families who were having a child this way.

Getting to look around and hear about jobs at the vault, and thinking about how someone with his skill might be able to help out in this environment, had been nice. But on a white table in a room across the hall, there was a cradle with a damaged womb inside it, and inside the damaged womb there was a premature baby, and nobody but Alden felt like this was the most important thing going on today.

Apparently, what really mattered was the hospital system making sure Ladda-ser learned to come down to F-city in person whenever they told her to. Either on the ferry or using the Artonan portion of Earth’s teleportation allotment rather than the hospital’s.

They cared about the principle of the thing. She couldn’t be allowed to pick and choose her work based on what she felt like doing while she was here in their world. And they said she needed to learn to take her own calls because her assistant was a menace. Panna-ser would find twenty excuses or workarounds before he even told her someone wanted her for something, and sending Alden to fetch the artificial womb was just the latest example of that. The guy whose job was Artonan wrangling refused to have it anymore.

It really doesn’t matter that I’m a teenager, thought Alden, fiddling with a snack-sized bag of potato chips while he tried to make out what they were saying in there. If I was the most trustworthy and capable person on Anesidora, they still wouldn’t have let me help because it’s the way Panna-ser wants things done, not the way the hospital wants them done.

Because everyone but the doctor had been talking in a roundabout way and reassuring him that this was not an emergency, it had taken Alden too long to grasp their priorities. He’d annoyed them, or at least he’d annoyed the guy whose whole mission in life was disagreeing with wizards, by continuing to propose ways he could help with their problem.

“I could cut down Master Ladda-ser’s travel time a lot,” he’d suggested. “Instead of taking the artificial womb to her, I could bring her down here on the nonagon—the flying platform I was loaned—much faster than the ferry. And I could hold whatever project she’s working on, too, so that she doesn’t lose her place.”

<<We’re not trying to show them new ways we can accommodate them,>> the man had snapped. <<We’re trying to teach them to accommodate us here in our healing hospital. The next time Panna-ser asks you for anything, have a spine and tell him no. I know you’re a Rabbit, but he’s not even an official hospital worker. He just comes with her.>>

“I was washing windows. It’s not like he interrupted something major.”

<<Washing windows was more useful than you being here.>>

The doctor had jumped in at that point and told Alden to head to the break room and grab a snack. So here he was, holding chips he didn’t want and imagining things he’d like to say but knew he shouldn’t.

If you think that washing windows is more important than getting a life support device for someone’s unborn child repaired as quickly as possible, then you’re too stupid for your job.

He tossed the chips down onto the table.

Realistically, when a bunch of adult professionals agree on something, and I’m the only person in the building who thinks they’re being crazy, it’s probably me who’s wrong.

So he tried to adjust his thinking. He even looked up information on the internet to prove to himself that he was ignorant.

“Tears in artificial wombs almost never lead to serious complications for the developing fetus,” he read. “Thanks to round-the-clock monitoring and quick intervention…”

“Nothing quick about this,” he said under his breath. “Who wants to be quick? Instead, we can sit around talking about teleportation allotments and who’s the real boss.”

“Find any good snacks in here?”

Alden shut his mouth and dismissed the search window. The doctor in the sweater vest had just stepped into the break room.

“I’m not hungry.”

The man walked over to the counter and grabbed a yellow apple from beside the espresso machine. “I expected to develop an aversion to these when I became an MD, but I still like them.”

Alden watched him bite into it.

“That was a joke,” he said after he’d swallowed.

“I got it. An apple a day doesn’t keep you away,” Alden said. “It was a decent joke.”

“Kid…” He set the apple back down. “Never mind. Want to watch me put the womb back to bed until the wizard can get down here to fix things?”

“So Master Ladda-ser’s still not coming right away?”

“No. But we did finally talk to her instead of her brother.”

“And you’re still not going to let me carry it to her?”

“Afraid not.”

“What if I just sit here in your break room holding the pod until she shows up? That way there would be a zero percent chance of anything going wrong. It’s cool what I can do. It’ll be like no time at all passed for the baby, and then Ladda-ser will be here doing the repair.”

“You offered that earlier…. It won’t work because I would have to call the parents and explain this whole situation to them. Their fetal health monitors would alert them when your skill cut off the connection. The problem we have here isn’t urgent enough to justify stressing them out for hours and making them doubt we’re taking good care of their offspring.”

“So they don’t even know that their artificial womb is messed up?”

“You think I should call them and tell them there’s a problem, but we’re not doing anything about it yet because the wizard on duty who can fix it is more interested in a different project?”

Alden stared at him. “Well…I guess that’s better than telling them that the wizard would fix it right away if you used the hospital’s nonemergency teleportation allotment for her travel, but you won’t because…you won’t.”

“It’s a flawed universe,” said the doctor, heading for the door again. “But they don’t need to be worried. And if the parents don’t need to be worried, you definitely don’t have any business worrying about it. I’ve been doing this whole doctor thing for a while, you know, and I hate emergencies where I have to stuff my patients into new wombs. If I thought there was any real chance I’d have to do that today, I wouldn’t be letting everyone hold meetings about this or giving a sixteen-and-three-quarter-year-old volunteer the personal tour. Are you coming?”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Alden got up to follow him into the room that held the source of the day’s conflict.

The pods that protected and monitored the wombs were called cradles. They were ovoid, and their default exterior setting was an opaque tan color. But this one was in display mode, showing what the womb inside currently looked like. The material that surrounded the growing fetus reminded Alden of a wet tomatillo husk, only red. Even though it was supposed to be sturdier and safer than the wombs nature had given humanity, it looked fragile. And this one’s pod was showing a bright highlight over an area where it had detected a flaw in the husk, a spot in danger of tearing.

Alden studied it, trying to decide if it was any bigger than when he’d first seen it. He didn’t think it was.

“Maybe there was some mishap during the transfer,” the doctor said, looking at the problem area, too. “A smaller hospital, a practitioner who isn’t as familiar with the procedure…anything really. Things happen.”

The womb moved suddenly, and Alden jumped, his hands coming out of his pockets, ready for the catastrophe.

“That’s a little foot,” said the doctor, chuckling as he pointed at the new lump where the resident was pressing against the womb. “We’re getting some exercise right now.”

He changed a setting on the cradle, and the life inside it was displayed. Alden had seen images like this before. He’d watched television on multiple worlds and had sex ed classes in two different countries. But none of that was the same as standing in this room, only a step away from such a spectacular thing.

The baby was a boy. A few weeks ago, in a hospital in Barbados, he’d been transferred from his mother to the artificial womb after medical issues had put them both at risk. A couple of months from now, he and his pod would be sent back there, and the womb would be opened by his parents.

He’d be born just like that, a brand new human being. Someone’s son.

But for now he was here, in front of Alden Thorn. Tiny, thin-limbed, and kicking.

You should stop that. You’re so small. There’s plenty of room for you to chill in there without taking your feelings out on the walls. They’re not great walls. Your cradle says you’re in a rickety apartment.

“All right,” said the doctor, picking the whole cradle up. “Let’s go put him back with the others.”

“Why not keep him in here?”

“We could. Some of the enchantments on the cradles support each other when they’re all hanging together, though, so it’s slightly more ideal.”

At least they’re letting the little guy have one ideal situation today.