Pre Partum

Thanks to Andrew Penn-Romine for an insightful first read of this, back when it was new.

 

He was just a dot in the sky at first, and I didn’t notice. I was enjoying the mild Victoria Island twilight on the porch, watching the lights flicker on in the US across the churning waters of the Haro Strait as the light faded. I was drinking my second (or maybe third) beer of what promised to be a six pack of an evening.

When the vague shape whisking silently through the sky registered on my brain, I could already see that it was a man, and there was only one man I knew who could fly and would also visit me unannounced. So, despite my initial surprise, I greeted him with a smile as he landed, going from silent levitation to a warning groan in the planks of my deck.

“Evening Tama,” I said, fishing a beer out of the cooler for him.

He grinned. A huge white grin over dark skin. He registered the creak in the deck and winced sheepishly, then lifted a few inches above it and settled into a bulky hover.

“Allen,” he greeted me with a nod. There was a beat, pregnant, then he added in his charming, Kiwi-for-Americans voice, “You ain’t been answering your phone, man.”

He took the beer I was still holding out to him, and his meaty hand effortlessly popped the cap with a delicate squeeze of thumb and forefinger, like picking a grape off the vine.

My familiarity with Tama Taumata, A.K.A. “Rapa”--one of the most powerful beings on earth--was a side effect of my fading celebrity. I’d known Tama since before he had any of his tattoos, when he was a young superhuman celebrity, doing the Tonight Show with me and Liz, she in her then record-breaking twenty-sixth month. We’d sat on that couch and joked about needing him to babysit for us, since at the time his mother’s twenty-five month pregnancy, and the immense powers he was already displaying at fourteen were unparalleled. Now he was … what … almost thirty years old? He had a web of half-finished traditional Maori designs, each fading off as the needles broke on his rock-hard skin. I noticed that some progress had been made since the last go, and pointed to the new ink on his bulging left forearm.

“How’d they manage that?”

He seemed distracted, but he glanced down and laughed. “Oh, Sumanus came up with some kind of super-poly-carbon whatsis and the needle hasn’t broken yet.” He rubbed his arm with a rueful smile. “Takes hours though. They have to position it with a hydraulic arm. Kinda takes the art out of it. Still, Little Axe is doing the work and he’s really into it. And they’re filming it for some reality show. ‘The Superb Life’ or something.”

I shrugged. “Looks good,” I said, and waited.

What was left of the smile on his face faded. He took a drink, absently finishing the beer at a drag.

“Allen, listen. Liz is--” he paused, and I could feel my own expression dropping four octaves of pain, or whatever measurement they use for that. He quickly shook his head. “No, she’s fine, but … she’s in labor, man.”

I just stared at him. He looked at me, eyes searching from his earnest, slightly pudgy face. His massive frame hunched toward me like a well-tanned, mostly-hairless grizzly bear. With an absurdly fragile smile on his face, he told me again that my wife, who had been in a coma for eight years, was in labor. The whole picture was completely absurd.

I suddenly felt like a small fish in very, very dark water. There was a light in the distance, but oh god, I thought, if I swim that way and it’s just more pain...

I laughed, practically barking. Tama looked stricken.

“Seriously, Allen. Not a joke. I would nev--”

“That’s impossible,” I cut him off. My voice was tight, but I tried to smile. I tried to think.  My hands curled into fists against my thighs as I tried not to break, tried not to weep like a child in front of an invincible man.

He shook his head, smiling again, gently. “Nothing’s impossible anymore, man.”

---

I’d never been carried by a flying superhuman. Very, very few people have, statistically. It was terrifying, even though Tama’s arms were like a goddamn lazy boy. He kept it slow, for my sake, though I knew he could crack the sound barrier if he needed to. Luckily, I was distracted.

Liz and I had crossed the border into Canada on the 360th day of her pregnancy. Four more days and the U.S. would have prevented a legal emigration. As it was, they were none too happy about it, and a lot of noise was made about “American citizens, American supers.”

At the time, we were full of all the rumors of the U.S. government taking long term infants away from their families for special monitoring. I’m thankful that those proved baseless hysteria, but I’ve never regretted moving away.

When Liz hit two years, right at the peak of the superbaby revolution, we couldn’t avoid the spotlight. She handled it well. Better than me, to be honest. Canada hadn’t had a pregnancy over 664 days. That was Tanya Montgomery. Tanya’s baby  who was born right after we emigrated, was all over the media back then, making her toys come to life and giggling as they entertained her.

The whole world was watching us when Liz hit 26 months. Magazine covers, talk shows, endless speculation. Everybody was excited.

Then Markus Visser stole the headlines. “Razernij,” the first true “super-villain.” I think I read that his mother had been pregnant for 21 months, which is definitely on the spectrum. His super name was dutch for “Frenzy”, and he was an overachiever even for a super. He moved faster than a normal human eye could follow and could tap some kind of kinetic field to protect himself and destroy anything in his way. The fact that he was a sociopath, and a nearly unstoppable one, became the biggest crisis of the Super Age.

Visser hunted down other supers. He used simple numbers. Anyone who was the product of a longer labor than him was in his sights. He killed eleven before his first defeat, at the hands of Krakatoa, the Indonesian super whose civilian identity is amazingly still a mystery to the general public.

Everybody thought Visser was dead, somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan. Then, three years later, he killed a pregnant woman in Switzerland. Thirty-one months. Then another in Cairo. Thirty-eight.

Visser was suddenly the world’s boogeyman, and every woman with a super-advanced pregnancy was terrified. Governments moved to protect national assets. Canada put two supers and eight full-time government agents on watch over Liz, and they did, for almost two years.

I don’t think it’s any dishonor to their memories when I say they did their best.

Tama was the one to finally stop Visser, but by the time he did, our neighborhood was a pile of rubble. He saved Liz, but she never woke up.

Super-advanced mothers are very resilient. Their changes are, in some ways, as profound as those of the children they carry -- they have to be. Liz survived, and it wasn’t even a matter of life support. She just … kept going. They have to feed her, of course. That’s a given. But it was the considered opinion of every doctor on the case that she’d eventually miscarry.

She didn’t.

She was frozen in time, and I was frozen with her. An eternity of bedside worry that eventually just became … life.

I stayed by her side for eight years before my doctor basically told me if she ever woke up she’d be a widow if I didn’t try to find some peace. But there was never any notion of me “moving on.” How could I?

---

As Tama set me down on the roof of the hospital, it started to rain. There were already reporters there. A pre-approved pool quickly assembled by the Board of Superhuman Affairs. I could see that look on their faces, the struggle to maintain an appearance of dignity warring with the thirst for the story. They shouted questions, which I ignored. What could I say?

Tama and three Vancouver police officers escorted me to the ward. A sea of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff drawn to the event parted before us. Televisions with muted volume but bold closed captions shouted silent questions and debates, but the same words over and over.

FIFTEEN YEARS
FIFTEEN YEARS
FIFTEEN YEARS

and

MIRACLE

Doctor Padeen, who had been with Liz and me for more than a decade, met Rapa and I on the ward, and took me aside. In urgent whispers he explained the situation, but I had trouble hearing him.

I was numb. I just looked at Padeen’s kind and careworn face, his grey hair.

“God,” I thought, as I followed him into Liz’s room, “he’s aged so much.”

But so have I. So has everyone. Fifteen years!

I was stupid to everything Padeen said. Reality had been jump-started again and I found I couldn’t handle it. My eyes kept moving to the bed, the feeding tube, Liz’s still-beautiful face, though so thin. The bulge of her belly beneath the sheet.

I stepped away from Padeen mid-sentence and walked toward the bed. Someone said something about a contraction, and I saw Liz’s face contort, just a little. The scar that ran from her right eye to her ear wrinkled. I took her good hand in mine.

God help me, her eyes opened.

She looked at me. The years fell away.

I felt her squeeze, and words appeared in my mind. Liz’s eyes widened a fraction. She could hear them too, and her face suddenly blurred with my tears.

The voice said,

*I am sorry to be so late, Papa, but everything will be alright now, for everyone. No one will ever hurt us again.*