“We are.”
“No. I don’t think we are. I think you’re being dickish cause I’m not your girlfriend.”
“No. No no. It’s an Indian thing. The way that stuff’s moving—it’s like a mood ring, kind of. There’s an oil inside it, or a gas or something that my pulse and my skin warmth cause to form shapes because what it’s doing is, the oil or gas I mean, is it’s trying to form a very specific kind of shape, a shape that’ll be symbolic of my life or my spirit or something. Crazy, right? But it’s what my uncle told me, and he made me promise to wear it nonstop til the shape finished forming.”
“Okay then, weirdo. That all sounds like bullshit, but whatever. I’ll believe you.”
I didn’t like being dishonest with Stevie, and had I only been afraid that removing the IncuBand would slow down the hatch, I probably wouldn’t have stopped her from removing it, much less gone on to lie so clumsily about why she shouldn’t, but even if I hadn’t lied about what the ovum was, I’d still have had to lie about how I’d gotten it—I’d have much preferred that she catch me in a lie than she find out I was officially crazy—so I’d figured it was safest to lie about everything. This was, in a way, a less deceitful approach than that which I took with the rest of my schoolmates, some of whom I worried might try to steal the ovum regardless of whether they knew what it was; I didn’t even allow them a chance to see it. I’d walked Washington’s hallways with my sleeves stretched long, the cuffs in my fists, and whenever I stole a glance at my wrist, I made sure to obstruct all other points of view with a wall, a desktop, or my cupped right hand. In PE, I claimed to have forgotten my gym clothes, climbed ropes and did sprints in my hoodie and jeans, and, despite the disgust and homophobic accusations of the boys who noticed, refused to take a shower in the locker room afterward.
All worries seemed distant, though, out by the dumpsters; the ovum was slotted, safe in my room, and I was feeling a lot less security-minded, a lot more capable of joking around. Flirting, even.
“The specific shape of my spirit…” I said, and I stepped on our Quill, which was down to the feather, lit up a fresh one, and handed it to Stevie. “The specific shape of my spirit,” I told her, “is so fucking pretty it would blind you at a glance.”
* * *
My mother was there when I got back from school, and she said I shouldn’t hug her; that she might have the flu. Soon after I’d left for the bus stop that morning, she’d begun, she said, to feel how she’d felt at Science and Industry. She didn’t look sick, though, and I told her as much, smiling to suggest that I believed she’d been faking, that she’d stayed home from work in order not to miss my first encounter with the baby Botimal in case it hatched before the end of her workday.
“I feel better, now,” she said, as we ran up the stairs. “It passed like last time.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “Good. I mean: weird. But good. I’m glad you’re—”
“Oh,” said my mother. “Oh my, oh my…”
We were kneeling by my night table, temple-to-temple, looking down into the PillowNest—I’d opened it—at a pale-skinned, single-legged, flesh-and-bone robot the width of my thumb and the length of my ring finger (plus a couple phalanges, with its tail extended). It was lying on its side and looking back up at us—at me—through glistering, orange- and gold-shot blue eyes. A plus-sign-shaped parcel of matte black velvet—the crux just above the barely prominent snout, the crossbar reaching to the edges of the orbits, as if aspiring to eyebrowhood—wrinkled and lifted toward the top of its head as the hatchling struggled to raise itself up on hands and foot without unlocking our mutual gaze.
“Hi. I’m Belt,” I said, once it stood steady. “Hi. Hello.”
Dropping and raising its lower jaw—trying, it seemed, to repeat what I’d said—it emitted a sequence of breathy schwas.
I simplified a little. I said, “I’m Belt.”
“ə ə,” it said.
“Belt.”
“ə.”
“Hello. Hi?”
“ə-ə. ə?”
I thought maybe it still had yet to develop all the parts of the larynx human language required—it wouldn’t be full-grown for another three weeks—but it was trying so hard, and I didn’t want failure to stain our introduction. I remembered Manx said that some were better at whistling, so I gave that a go; five or six hard-hat construction-man wolf-calls, a couple or three corner-gangster over-heres.
It pursed its lips and replied with more schwas, albeit of mimetic tone and duration.
My mother, her right hand hiding her mouth—as if to halt the oh-mys at their point of egress—extended her left, fingers flapping, to the hatchling. I did the same thing and the hatchling reached up—reached out—to mimic the gesture. The muscles of its leg and the arm it still stood upon trembled and flexed beneath the weight of its body, but it got a few flaps in before falling sideways. Just ahead of the fall, it looked away from my eyes, at the back of the hand with which it gestured. Though I could never, obviously, know such a thing, at the time I was sure that that’s why it fell; that seeing four digits there, rather than five, shocked it a little, surprised it off-balance.
Giving out little hums of exertion or sorrow, it thrashed its arms and bicycled its leg til I gently, gently pinched its shoulders between my thumb and index finger, lifted it over the walls of the PillowNest, and laid it facedown, in the cup of my palm. It crawled a couple centimeters closer to my arm, and pressed a cool, soft cheek to my pulse. With its tail curled around the base of my pinkie, it sighed a couple times, embraced my wrist, and started to nap.
I brought it nearer to my face, to get a closer look. Flecks of goop, blue and green, had dried inside its hollows—the spaces between its toes and fingers, the creases on the backs of its knee and neck—and fragments of pink-white ovum casing dotted its foot and the crown of its skull, but I wasn’t grossed out. Not even a little. It smelled like a pouch of grape Big League Chew. Its lips were as thin as ballpoint pen strokes, its nares’ diameters a twelve-point umlaut’s. Had I not seen them rising and falling with breath, I would not have believed that such tiny ribs—no single one larger than a thumbnail clipping—could cage a set of lungs, let alone as complex a machine as a heart. And the buttons of its fragile, curving spine—how could there be so many, so small, so perfectly aligned?
“I wish I could hold it,” my mother said.
“Me too,” I said, and I was going to let her. It was too good and strange a thing not to share. I said, “Maybe you should.”
“It’s probably better we follow the instructions,” she said. “I only have to wait a couple weeks or so, right?”