He jiggled the infant in his lap. “It’s a good name, though. Suits him.”
The woman sighed. “Well, it had better perk him up before December,” she said, “if he wants to get a family. And right now,” she added, looking at the wall clock, “it’s going to be naptime soon, and we haven’t even finished the feeds.”
They had forgotten Claire was there. She rose from the rocker. It was true; the time had passed quickly. “I have to get back,” she told them. “I wonder: Would it be all right if I visit again?”
They were both silent for a moment. She realized why. It was an odd request. Children volunteered at many different places; it was required. But after the Assignments, after childhood, people worked at their assigned jobs. They didn’t visit around, or try out other things. She tried to come up, quickly, with an explanation that seemed logical.
“I have a lot of free time,” Claire said. “It’s a slow time of year at the Hatchery. So I wandered over today to visit Sophia. You know Sophia; she works down the hall, with the next older newchildren?”
They nodded. “Twenty-one to Thirty,” the man said. “That’s Sophia’s group.”
“Yes. Anyway, she showed me around a bit. And I can see that you can use an extra pair of hands from time to time. So I’m just offering to help out. If you’d like me to, of course.” Claire was aware that she was talking very fast. She was nervous. But the pair didn’t seem to notice.
“You know,” the man said, “if you wanted to do it on a regular basis, make it official, I think you’d have to fill out some forms.”
The young woman agreed. “Get permission,” she added.
Claire’s heart sank. She could never do that, never fill out official forms. They would identify her immediately as the Birthmother who had been reassigned.
Thirty-six wiggled and wailed. The man carried him to his crib and propped his bottle, but the wailing continued. The man patted the thrashing legs in a vain attempt to soothe him. He looked over at Claire with a wry smile.
“But come on over when you have free time,” he said. “Just on a casual basis.”
“Maybe I will,” Claire said, keeping her voice light, as his had been, “if I have a few moments sometime.”
She turned and fled. Thirty-six continued to cry. She could still hear him as she left the building.
* * *
Now she thought of nothing else, of no one else.
IT FELT VERY strange, to have this feeling—whatever this feeling was. Claire had never experienced it before, the yearning she had to be with the newchild, remembering his face—how the solemn light eyes had stared at her, the way his hair curved around at the top of his head and lifted into a curl there, the wrinkling of his forehead, and his quivering chin before he began to cry.
Each family unit was allotted two children, one of each gender, and she had been the younger. They had waited several years after receiving Peter before they had applied for their girl. So Claire had never known an infant or a small child well.
She asked her coworkers, trying to make it a casual question, at the evening meal. “Do any of you remember getting your sibling?”
“Sure,” Rolf said. “I was eight when we got my sister.”
“I was older,” Edith said. “My parents waited quite a long time before they applied for my brother. I think I was eleven.”
“I was the second child in my family,” Eric said. “Anyone want that last piece of bread?”
They all shook their heads, and Eric took the last slice from the serving plate. “My sister was only three when they got me. I think my mother actually liked little children.” He made a face, as if the idea mystified him.
“That’s what I was wondering about, actually,” Claire explained. “Is it, well, usual for people to become really fond of newchildren?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘fond,’” Dimitri said. The head of the entire Hatchery operation, Dimitri was an upper-level worker; he was older, and had studied science intensively. “But you know, of course, that infants of any species—”
He stopped and looked at the rest of them, at their blank expressions. “Didn’t you study this in evolutionary biology?” he asked.
Finally, at the silence, he chuckled. “All right, so you don’t know. I’ll explain. Infants are born with big wide-spaced eyes, generally, and large heads, because that makes them look appealing to the adults of the species. So it ensures that they will be fed and cared for. Because they look—”
“Cute?” Edith interrupted.
“Right. Cute. If they were born ugly, no one would want to pick them up, or smile at them, or talk to them. They wouldn’t get fed. They wouldn’t learn to smile or talk. They might not survive, if they didn’t appeal to the adults.”
“What do you mean by ‘any species’?” Eric asked.
“Well, we don’t have mammals anymore, because a healthy diet didn’t include mammal, and they detracted from the efficiency of the community. But in other areas there are wild creatures of all sorts. And even here, people once had things they called pets. Usually small things: dogs, or cats. It was the same in those species. The newborns were—well, cute. Big eyes, usually. Animals don’t smile, though. That’s a skill unique to humans.”
Claire was fascinated. “What did people do with ‘pets’?”
Dimitri shrugged. “Played with them, I think. And also, pets provided company for lonely people. We don’t have those now, of course.”
“Nobody’s lonely here,” Edith agreed.
Claire was quiet. She didn’t say this, but she was thinking: I am. I am lonely. Even as she thought it, though, she realized she didn’t really know what the term meant.
The first buzzer sounded, meaning time to finish up. They began to stack their trays. “Rolf? Edith?” Claire asked. “When you got your siblings—and they were infants, with big eyes, and big heads, and so they were cute …”
Both of her coworkers shrugged.
“I guess,” Edith said.
“Did you think about them all the time, and want to hold them and not ever leave them?”
They looked at Claire as if she had said something preposterous, or unintelligible. She hastened to rephrase her question. “Or maybe I meant your mothers. Did your mothers cuddle your siblings and rock them, and, well—”
“My mother worked, just like every other mother. She took very competent care of my sister, of course, and she took her to the Childcare Center every day,” Rolf said. “She wasn’t a cuddler, though. Not my mother.”
“Same with my mother and my brother,” Edith said. “My father and I helped her to take care of him, but both of my parents had very demanding jobs. And I had school, of course, and then my training. We were all happy to drop him off every day at the Center.
“We took great pride in him, of course. He was a very intelligent infant,” she added primly. “He’s studying computer science now.”
The final buzzer sounded, and they all rose to go back to work.
I must put Thirty-six out of my mind, Claire told herself.
* * *
But