Infringement! Infringement! Rules are clear. Rules are meant for your protection, Sterekanda.
Steven looked innocently up at the green cube, which flickered as sound waves passed beneath its glassy surface. The spaceship, where he now sat, was the same as always. Steven had paid frequent visits over the past three years, and had carried out all instructions to the very letter.
So where was the infringement?
The infringement lay in his arms. A baby was snuggled up close to him, swaddled in a white silk shawl. It began to whimper.
‘Hush,’ said Steven softly. ‘Hushaby.’
Children of mixed parentage do exist. But they should never be presented. The communicator made its pronouncement flatly.
Steven let the baby grasp his forefinger. He looked down at the helpless, pale little face and stooped to kiss its broad brow. The grating voice of the machine was no lullaby for a sick child.
An Earth womb birthed this infant. He is Earthling.
‘He is my son,’ said Steven firmly. ‘His mother is my wife.’
Ormingatriga who unite with Earth ones are not approved.
‘But allowed,’ said Steven quickly. ‘It is allowed. I have consulted the rules.’
‘It was unspoken,’ said Steven, ‘till necessity drove me to this. Without our help, my son would have died.’
Children die. Life loses infants on Earth. That is known.
‘But infants are not lost on Ormingat,’ said Steven. ‘On Ormingat no child is lost.’
He said this with conviction and the machine did not contradict him. The knowledge on which his statement was built was pure intuition. He had lived on Earth for three years, and was expected to live here for a further seventeen. As with all visitors from Ormingat, the peaceful planet, he had lost most of his memories of the place and of its language. These would be stored against his return, when his body would revert to being an Ormingat body, and his brain would be once more an Ormingat brain. On Earth he needed Earth memories and an Earthly mother tongue. So he was an Englishman, living in London and working as a freelance computer expert, well respected for his talents, and never lacking the normal Earth employment that covered his real reason for being here.
Steven was not primarily an observer, as others were. He was an arranger, a facilitator. Those he helped he would never meet. It was all down in the rule book: Ormingat workers on the planet Earth, whatever their function, should never connect. It was no part of their brief to make any change to the planet that was not within the capacity of ordinary human beings.
‘I brought Jacob here that his life might be saved,’ said Steven. ‘Earth does not possess the medicine we need.’
It is a misuse of power. You must know that.
Jacob had ceased to whimper and had fallen into a calm, sweet sleep. The mativil was working. The baby’s tiny system was settling into comfort as the elixir Steven had fed him cruised gently round inside his body. Spaces were filled up. Gaps were repaired. In his sleep he still held tightly on to his father’s finger.
‘It is I who have misused it then,’ he said. ‘Without mativil my son would have died. He is not just any child on Earth. He is mine, and I am a son of Ormingat.’
For some time the machine remained silent, as if its thought banks were constructing some very complex algorithm.
Steven too was thinking of what to say next. He knew what needed to be said, but he was anxious to find the proper words. He laid the baby gently down on a cushion in the corner of the sofa. They were in the half of the ship that was Earth-simulated, a room that could have been in any ordinary English house. There was even a standard lamp behind the sofa, a bookcase full of Earthly books, and a small round table where one might sit to eat a meal. On the floor were rugs just like those you have at home.
The other half of the ship was pure laboratory, almost empty, but with the suggestion that necessary things could be made to appear at short notice and occupy the space. The only permanent features were the green cube high up in the dome of the ship, and a great disc that seemed to lie below the level that one’s feet might reach. This disc was a clock of stars, a dial with bright points of light over which a wand swung like a single pointer.
The green cube ceased to throb and went totally blank for at least half a minute. Then it glowed clear again.
You have broken rule.
On one level of thought Steven was still puzzling what to say; on a second level his mind came up with: That’s not much of a return on all your thinking, o voice of Ormingat! He had enough sense not to say it, of course. Instead, he pulled his own thoughts together and gave them expression.
‘What I have done,’ he said, ‘I have done for love. And now, because Jacob has come with me into this ship and has diminished just as I have, he must be recognized as Ormingatrig. Otherwise the risk of returning to the outside world would be too great. Entwine him with his name, I beg you.’
You have broken rule.
Steven had a sudden, sickening fear that the communicator had somehow crashed under the effort of solving a problem beyond its capability. Was this cube-failure? He hoped and prayed that it wasn’t. His baby was asleep in the corner of the sofa. His wife was in bed in the Whittington Hospital, totally unaware of what was happening. The science of Ormingat must not fail!
So it was with relief that he heard the cube grate out the words: What would you?
‘Give my child an Ormingat name. Entwine him with it. He has the right. I have presented him.’
Sterekonda, said the communicator, with heavy emphasis upon Steven’s Ormingat name in token of the seriousness of this request, what you ask is a distortion.
Steven reminded himself that this was a machine after all, however well stocked its databanks. One does not argue with machines; one presses on regardless. Just as they for their part obey inner circuits and hear only what has been taught to them.
‘My son’s Earth name is Jacob,’ said Steven as coolly as he could. ‘What will you call him in the Ormingat tongue? With what name will you entwine him?’
Steven picked the child up from the cushion, unwrapped the shawl, and held Jacob up to the cube as if he were being presented in the temple. The child awoke and his thin, bare arms swayed about above his head, like weeds in water. He did not cry.
From green, the cube turned to grey and then to yellow. That signalled a great computer dipping back into an even greater system. That was the path of entwining. Steven saw it and knew.
‘His Earth name is Jacob,’ he said with increased confidence. ‘Tell me his name on Ormingat.’
The cube paused as if undecided, the waves on its surface flattening out into long undulations.
‘Give me his name,’ said Steven steadily, ‘his Ormingat name.’
He is Javayl, throbbed the machine reluctantly, child of the broken word. He is Javayl, the outsider.
At that moment an orb of silver light surrounded the child and he floated free from his father’s arms. Steven knew a moment of terror till the baby was returned to him. He had never witnessed an entwining before, but he knew that this was what he was witnessing now.
In the maternity ward at the Whittington Hospital, Lydia slept, knowing nothing of Steven’s actions. They had been told, very gently, that their baby was in grave danger of dying. All that could be done would be done, but hopes were not high. Lydia had been allowed to hold the child very briefly in her arms, and the sadness was unbearable. He looked so perfect that it was incredible he should be so ill.
‘I’d like to keep him with me,’ she said. ‘Just a little longer.’
But the masked nurse shook her head and, taking the infant gently back into her gloved hands, she placed him in the tent that was to be his protection for however long he might survive. ‘That would only put him at greater risk, Mrs Bradwell,’ she said sadly. ‘He must be kept in isolation.’
They wheeled Lydia away to her own bed in the ward. She looked back over her shoulder towards the cot and her eyes were blurred with tears.
Two hours later, Steven had gone into the nursery, unobserved, unobservable, and removed his baby from the incubator. He wrapped him in the shawl brought from home for the purpose, and simply walked out of the nursery, out of the ward and into the night. No one stopped him. No one noticed the empty cot. No one would notice it. That was the power of Ormingat, even stronger in Steven than in the other visitors to Earth. Deflection was, after all, an important part of his job.
His return would be just as simple. Then the baby would be seen again, mysteriously fit and well.
You are released. Now you must go.
Steven turned to face the centre of the rear wall on the Earth side of the ship. This was familiar ground, a situation he had encountered many times over the past three years. A semi-circular door opened fanlike and from the opening the pull, as of a magnet, drew them towards it. Then, with a rush, Steven and the child were sucked out into the night. Up through a layer of soil they went, out into the air of North London, on to the wall of a cemetery. For a few seconds they were no more than tiny dots on the weathered old brick at the base of a rusty railing.
Then the dots flew through the air and increased in size till they became a man holding a baby in his arms. Steven was now standing in Swains Lane, just outside the cemetery. It was nine o’clock on a cool autumn evening. All he had to do now was take the child back to the hospital, and return him to his cot as if he had never been away.