She swallowed, blinked back tears–of shame, although she wasn't quite sure why–and said, "No. I didn't want it like this. I didn't want you to be angry. I didn't want ScoopNet announcing it to the world."
"They would have anyway," he said, pleasantly enough. "This will save us the work. More efficient."
"Kevin, I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"Of you. The way you did that without thinking. Like you were lashing out. I've never seen you act that way." She realized that she was trembling. "I'rn afraid you hate me. I'm afraid you'll hate the baby."
He looked away. "I don't hate you, and I suppose I'll become fond of the kid. Anyway, really, Meredith, you should have thought of all of this before you ever went to the hospital in the first place."
Merry took a deep breath. "We're committed now. To the adoption."
"Isn't that what you want?"
She closed her eyes, and heard herself, as if from a great distance, saying, "They only release full medical records to serious prospective parents, for privacy reasons."
"Yes, of course. I thought nothing was wrong with him."
"Nothing visible is wrong with him. But if we learn about anything else, we can't back out, Kevin, or it's the PR problem again. We could have backed out before all the publicity. We can't now. I really wish you hadn't—"
"Well, I did. And you're happy that we can't back out. Aren't you?"
* * *
"The only clinically significant finding," a doctor told them cheerfully, "is some extremely minor brain damage. It's to a section of the brain called the caudate nucleus, and it means that little Nicholas could have an increased susceptibility to anxiety and OCD. Ah—you know what OCD is?"
"Yes," Merry said, her mouth dry. She sat there, frozen, while the doctor droned on about risk factors. She'd never told Kevin about her own brain damage. She'd never lied to him; she just hadn't told him every detail. She could never tell him now. He already thought her feelings about the child were obsessive.
"But that's all treatable," Kevin was saying. "I mean, there's medication, right?"
"Oh, yes," said the doctor. "We have very effective treatments. If anything happens, we should be able to handle it very easily."
"Well then," Kevin said. For once, he sounded cheerful. "It could be much worse. That doesn't sound like anything to worry about." He smiled at the doctor, and the doctor smiled at Merry, and Merry tried to smile back, tried to quell her rising panic.
Was that why she'd felt such a bond with Nicholas? Because they both had damaged brains? She suppressed a shudder, and thought fiercely, We'll be fine. I'm fine, and he's going to be fine too.
Sixteen
THE day Nicholas came home, he did nothing but cry. He started the minute he left the isolation unit, emerging into a swarm of cameras much like the one Meredith had confronted years earlier. Remembering how disorienting it had been when she was fourteen, she could only imagine the effect on an infant.
Nicholas was heavier than she'd expected, and her hand hurt from signing what had seemed like five thousand waivers and releases, promising that she wouldn't sue the hospital if the baby developed unforeseen medical complications. Each time she signed another piece of paper, she sent up a prayer. Please, Goddess, let this baby thrive. Please let him be happy. Please don't let me have to hear my family saying we told you so.
Flanked by Constance and Kevin, with Jack acting as a wedge to facilitate their escape, Meredith held the squalling bundle and tried to smile, tried to comfort the baby, tried to ignore the barrage of questions. The reporters had been told there wouldn't be any comment from anyone in the family; they kept asking anyway. She supposed it was what they were paid for. "Meredith, how does it feel to be a mommy?" "Kevin, how do you feel about your son?" "Merry, would you hold the baby up a bit more for the cameras, please?" "Mr. Adam, the decision of the African Consortium—"
"We're not here to discuss politics," Jack said sharply. The fact that he had said anything told Meredith the question had hit a nerve. The reporters doubled their questions; Nicholas tripled the volume of his wailing.
"Mr. Adam, do you personally consider AIs people?" "If Mexico follows suit–" "Sir, exactly how much money has MacroCorp gained from selling AI technology to–" "Meredith, where do AIs fit into your Gaia beliefs?"
"No comment," she said, and clutched Nicholas a bit more tightly. In the rush of preparations to bring Nicholas home, she'd been aware of the Consortium decision only as vague background noise, followed by a sudden sharp pain when she thought of Raji and his beloved AI goldfish. What would he have said about AIs being legally declared people? He'd have considered it only right and natural, surely. After Raji's death, Sonia and Ahmed had returned to Kenya to help care for CV orphans; Meredith could only imagine how they must be reacting to this news. Even if they saw it as a purely practical economic development, it had to reawaken their grief–if indeed their grief had ever slept. Goddess only knew what the Luddites would make of it, but then there probably weren't many Luddites in Africa, anyway. Luddism was a luxury of the First World.
"Maybe he'll quiet down in the car," Constance said into her ear. "Lots of babies like riding in cars, and anyway, it's an enclosed space. He's probably feeling pretty agoraphobic right now."
Meredith nodded and looked down at her cocooned son. The nurses had shown her how to swaddle the baby into a blanket so that his hands and feet were effectively bound. "Makes them feel safer," one had explained cheerfully. "It's like a papoose. Return-to-the-womb kind of thing." It didn't seem to have worked with Nicholas, who was now red in the face from howling. His screaming continued, enhanced by the stench of a soiled diaper, as Meredith scrambled into a MacroCorp limo, with its mercifully tinted windows.
When they were all inside, Constance laughed and said, "Well, his plumbing's working fine, at least. Kevin, would you hand us a diaper, please?"
Meredith wrinkled her nose, feeling ashamed of herself for not being more stoic, and realized again how little she knew about being a mother. "Mom, how do I change him in the car?"
"On your lap, silly. I'll get you a changing cloth."
With Constance's help, Meredith managed to get the baby changed and the diaper stowed in a trash bag. She hoped that Kevin was paying attention, but doubted it. He and Jack seemed to be talking about the scene back at the hospital. From Kevin's querulous tone, she suspected he was venting his irritation at being thrust into fatherhood.
"Why the hell is everyone so upset about Africa? They've been nearly wiped out by the pandemic. They need AIs to staff their factories, everybody knows that, and they're trying to increase their UN voting power while they're at it. The UN will never buy it, anyway, no matter what laws the Consortium passes internally."
"Dangerous precedent," Jack said. "People are afraid that once you grant personhood to AIs, they'll claim independence. It's the old Frankenstein problem. And the basic AI programs are so cheap now that even poor countries can afford them."
"Well, that was the idea, wasn't it? That's what you were trying to do? Get cheap labor to the countries hit hardest by CV?"
"Yup. But nobody expected the Consortium to grant them voting rights. "
"It's ridiculous," Meredith cut in, rocking Nicholas. Her arms already felt like lead, even though the baby only weighed fifteen pounds. Next to her, Constance hummed a lullaby, to little effect. "They might as well give the vote to trees or rocks. How can they expect anyone to take it seriously?"
"That's one opinion," Jack said drily. "There are others, even here. Look at Raji's friend, that performance artist, what's her name?"
"Zephyr," Meredith said in disgust. Zephyr had been making a name for herself doing dance routines with bots. Zephyr was crazy. She couldn't possibly represent any large segment of public opinion.
The car swerved suddenly, probably to avoid a press cavalcade, and Nicholas's squalling increased, making further conversation impossible. He continued at undiminished volume for the rest of the trip home and for most of the rest of the afternoon, stopping only for brief, blessed periods to eat and sleep. The rest of the time he howled, red-faced and inconsolable.
As the day dragged on, Meredith saw Kevin turning glacial, felt her own resolution eroding, watched her mother's frown deepen. Constance was already miserable from her allergies to the animals, even though she'd taken meds. Jack had escaped back to work. "It's okay," Meredith kept saying, near tears, to the baby and to Kevin and to herself. "He'll be okay. This is all too much for him, that's all, too much new stuff, and this is the only way he has to express it."
Finally, in desperation, she said, "All right. Look, the doctors tried to stimulate him in iso, but obviously he's blowing some circuits here. We need to create an environment that's more familiar for him." It was seven-thirty by then; they'd just finished a miserable dinner punctuated by Nicholas's screams. Meredith handed the shrieking bundle to Kevin, who looked as if he'd been asked to cuddle an armed nuclear warhead.
"Merry, why are you opening the coat closet? Don't tell me you're leaving me here with him!"
"Nope," Meredith said. She put on a vinyl raincoat, reclaimed the baby, and carried him into the bathroom. Enclosed by tiles, metal, rubber, and glass, he promptly calmed down and began to examine his surroundings with interest. He showed special enthusiasm for a red hand towel, which Meredith let him clutch as a security blanket.
"Got it," said Kevin, who'd followed her. Constance, still looking worried, peered over Kevin's shoulder. "Terry cloth. I bet he'd like it even better if it were wrapped around a bot."
"He's fine," Meredith said into the ringing, joyous silence. "He needs more time to adjust, that's all. He can sleep here for the time being, and then we'll gradually get him used to the rest of the house. How does that sound?"
"Anything would sound better than what he was doing a few minutes ago," Kevin said.
Constance edged into the room. "Now that he's stopped screaming, let me hold him a little. Hello, darling. Say hello to your grandma. Goodness, Merry, how he stares."
"Well, he's finally paying attention to us, instead of to being scared. Right, Nicholas?"
"Okay," said Kevin, "now let me try. Merry, we need a bigger bathroom."
"It's all right," Meredith said, enveloped in relief "He won't be in here forever."
* * *
Nicholas gradually became accustomed to places other than the bathroom; Merry and Kevin gradually became used to diapers, feeding schedules, and the sudden ubiquity of baby paraphernalia throughout the house. Meredith, finally giving into Kevin's insistence that they invest in a full housekeeping system, reluctantly came to admit that it made child rearing easier. "Merry, we can turn the housekeeping function off, and it doesn't have to be net-linked, but at least it will be there if we ever want it. We might, now that we have Nicholas. Taking care of a kid is a full-time job. You can't do that and all the cleaning too."
"Yes, I can. Other mothers have. They did for centuries."
"They had to. But they didn't exactly enjoy it, and they stopped as soon as labor-saving appliances were available. And you don't have to. And you might not want to. Look, let's just have the thing even if we never use it, all right?"
They finally compromised: the system would perform some housekeeping chores, but Meredith insisted that its AI capabilities be strictly functional–no interactive personality–and that it perform its tasks without remotes. But although she still scrubbed and dusted and vacuumed, chores the system couldn't perform without bots, she had to admit that she enjoyed waking up to fresh coffee, enjoyed discovering warm, clean laundry waiting for her, enjoyed the fact that rooms lit up to welcome her when she entered and that music followed her from room to room. She consoled herself with the knowledge that these were among the simplest, most basic house functions, already taken for granted by nearly everyone else. She hadn't completely betrayed her ideals; the house was still solar-powered, still ecoefficient. She wasn't a hypocrite, Meredith told herself She was simply a creature of her culture, and how, after all, could she be otherwise?
And anyway, she was a mother now. Nicholas had to be her first priority. After his initial resistance to the new environment, the boy was remarkably quiet and well behaved. He ate well, grew quickly, remained exceptionally healthy even compared with children who hadn't been exposed to CV, and did everything he was supposed to do exactly on schedule. He sat up at four months, crawled at six, walked at eight, said "Mommy" at nine and "Daddy" two weeks later. Meredith knew she was hopelessly besotted: she found Nicholas both beautiful and fascinating, missed him with a physical craving when they were apart, cheered each of his methodical bloomings into normalcy. No one doubted that he loved her. He behaved himself with Kevin and with Constance–and with everyone else, for that matter–and he enjoyed playing with Theo, but he displayed little dependence upon anyone but Merry. He and his mother were the world to one another. It was always to her that he ran with questions and appetites and scraped knees, her voice he wanted to hear reading bedtime stories and reciting nursery rhymes, her touch that soothed him when he was tired or frightened.
The only setback came when, at six months, he suddenly became terrified of Ashputtle and Marzipan. He'd liked the animals before, but now the sight of them sent him into paroxysms of fear. Merry, regretfully, found other homes for them with Temple friends. Nicholas would outgrow his phobia, and then she could have pets again. Once, losing the dog and cat would have devastated her, but Nicholas was more important.