The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [111]
Myra nodded absently. “Sounds like a good possibility.” Then, shading her eyes as she looked toward the pool and raising her voice, she said, “Better take a break, Tashy! You don’t want to get overtired.”
Ranjit was quick to meet his daughter with a towel, but he was looking at his wife. Finally he said, “Myra? You sound a little bit distracted. Is anything wrong?”
She gave him a fond look, and then a real laugh. “Wrong? Not at all, Ranj. It’s just that—Well, I haven’t seen the doctor yet, but I’m pretty sure. I think I’m pregnant again.”
31
SKYHOOK DAYS
For Myra de Soyza Subramanian, caring for her second infant was even more of a breeze than caring for her first. Her husband, for example, did not now come home depressed from a job he thought irrelevant; his students liked him, he liked his students, and Dr. Davoodbhoy was unfailingly pleased. The outside world was easier to take now, too. Oh, a few nations could not seem to break the habit of making threatening noises at their neighbors. Hardly anyone was actually getting killed, though.
And, over Beatrix Vorhulst’s protest, they had finally moved into their own little house—“little” only by comparison with the Vorhulst mansion—just steps from one of the island’s beautiful broad beaches, where the water was as warm and welcoming as ever. By the time they were settled in their new house, the world outside no longer seemed as threatening. Little Robert splashed in the shallowest part of the pool, while Natasha found deeper water to demonstrate her considerable (and, Ranjit maintained, clearly inherited) skill at swimming—or any other way—when she wasn’t taking sailing lessons from a neighbor who owned a little Sunfish. What made being in their own home particularly pleasant was that Mevrouw Vorhulst had parted with her favorite cook and Natasha’s favorite maid to save Myra the trouble of housework.
Another way in which Myra’s second pregnancy was unlike the first went by the name of Natasha—well, more often it was Tashy. Tashy wasn’t a problem. When she wasn’t winning ribbons for swimming—only in children’s events so far, but she was seen to watch adult races with narrowed eyes and obvious intentions—she was busy at being her mother’s assistant, deputy, and sous-chef. Thus aided, Myra had a gratifying number of hours each day to spend catching up on what was going on in the field of artificial intelligence and autonomous prostheses.
That was quite a lot. By the time Myra had begun to evaluate each muscle twinge in the hope that it might be the beginnings of labor, she was pretty nearly up to speed again.
Of course, that wouldn’t last. By the time the new baby was birthed, weaned, toilet trained, and off to school, Myra would have slipped behind her cohort again. That was inevitable.
Was Myra angry at this tyrannical law of childbearing? It was clearly unjust. It dictated that any woman who wanted a baby had to accept Mother Nature’s inflexible decree that, for a period of time, the cognitive functions of her mind would have to take second place to mothering. It would have to be a fairly significant period, too. Ten years was the accepted minimum before a female AI nerd (or medical doctor or politician or, for that matter, pastry chef) could get back to her career.
Obviously that was unfair. But the world was chronically unfair in so many ways that Myra de Soyza Subramanian had no patience for wasting time in resentment. That was the unchangeable way the world was. What was the point in complaining? There would be a time when both her children were in college. Then she would be as free as any human could ever get, and then she would have twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty years of productive life in which to unravel the riddles of her chosen profession.
Deferred gratification was the name of that game. You didn’t have to like its rules to play by them. And, one way or another, you might even win.
Both Myra and Ranjit considered themselves big winners when Robert Ganesh Subramanian was born.