Operation Chaos

XVIII

After we returned to our apartment we took summer jobs, quitting when classes reopened in fall. Like most newlyweds, we ran into budgetary difficulties: nothing too serious, but we had to sell the carpet, for instance, when Ginny got pregnant. Otherwise, that first couple of married years, we lived unspectacular lives, except when we were alone together.

And then a nurse led me to the bed where my darling lay. Always fair-hued, she was white after her battle, and the beautiful bones stood sharply in her face. But her hair was fire across the pillow, and though the lids drooped on her eyes, that green had never shone brighter.

I bent and kissed her, as gently as I could. “Hi, there,” she whispered.

“How are you?” was the foolish single thing that came to me to say.

“Fine.” She regarded me for a moment before, abruptly, she grinned. “But you look as if couvade might be a good idea.”

As a matter of fact, some obstetricians do put the father to bed when a child is being born. Our doctor followed majority opinion in claiming that I’d give my wife the maximum possible sympathetic help by just sweating it out in the waiting room. I’d studied the subject frantically enough, these past months, to become somewhat of an authority. A first birth for a tall slim girl like Ginny was bound to be difficult. She took the prospect with her usual coolness, unbending only to the extent of casting runes to foretell the sex of the child, and that only so we wouldn’t be caught flat-footed for a name.

“How do you like your daughter?” she asked me.

“Gorgeous,” I said.

“Liar, she chuckled. “The man never lived who wasn’t horrified when they told him he’d sired that wrinkled blob of red protoplasm.” Her hand reached for mine. “But she will be lovely, Steve. She can’t help being. It’s so lovely between us.”

I told myself that I would not bawl right in front of the mothers in this room. The nurse saved me with a crisp: “I think we had better let your wife rest, Mr. Matuchek. And Dr. Ashman would like to finish things so he can go home.”

He was waiting for me in the naming office. When I had passed through the soundproof door, the nurse , sealed it behind me with wax and a davidstar. This t was an up-to-date hospital where they took every care. Thomas Ashman was a grizzled, craggy six-footer with =’ a relaxed manner, at present a bit droopy from weariness. I saw that beneath the impressive zodiacal traceries on his surgical gown, he’d been wearing white duck pants and a tee shirt-besides his amulet, of .~ course.

We shook hands. “Everything’s good,” he assured: me. “I’ve gotten the lab report. You understand that, with no therianthropes on the maternal side, none of your children will ever be a natural werewolf. But: since this one has inherited the complete recessive, gene complex from you, she’ll take transformation spells quite easily. A definite advantage, especially if she goes in for a thaumaturgic career like her mother. It does mean, however, that certain things should be guarded against. She’ll be more subject to paranatural influences than most people are.”

I nodded. Ginny and I had certainly had an undue share of adventures we didn’t want.

“Marry her off right,” Ashman joked, “and you’ll have werewolf grandchildren.”

“If she takes after her old lady,” I said, “Lord help any poor boy we tried to force on her!” I felt as idiotic as I sounded. “Look, Doctor, we’re both tired. Let’s make out the birth certificates and turn in.”

“Sure.” He sat down at the desk. The parchments were already inscribed with parental names, place and date, and the file number they bore in common. “What’re you calling her?”

“Valeria.”

“Yes, I suppose your wife would pick something like that. Her idea, wasn’t it? Any middle name?”

“Uh . . . Mary. My decision-for my own mother—” I realized I was babbling again.

“Good thought. She can take refuge in it if she doesn’t like the fancy monicker. Though I suspect she will.” He typed out the information, signed, gave me the document, and dropped the carbon in an out box. Rather more ceremoniously, he laid down the primary certificate that bore her fingerprints. “And the true name?”

“Victrix.”

“Hm?”

“Ginny always liked it. Valeria Victrix. The last Roman legion in Britain.” The last that stood against Chaos, she had said in one of her rare wholly serious moments.

Ashman shrugged. “Well, it isn’t as if the kid’s going to use it.”

“I hope she never has to!”

“That’d imply a bad emergency,” he agreed. “But don’t fret. I see too many young husbands, shaken up by what they’ve undergone, be knocked for a loop at the grim possibilities they have to face now. Really, though, this is nothing more, than another sensible precaution, like a vaccination.”

“I know,” I said. “Wish they’d had the idea when I was born.” It isn’t likely that anyone will try nymic tricks against an ordinary peaceful citizen, but you’ve seen how my career has gotten turbulent every once in a while, and maintaining the counterspells is a bloody nuisance-not always reliable, either. Medical science is one of the few areas where I’ll admit that genuine progress gets made.

Ashman dipped an eagle quill in a well of oak-gall ink. “By the bird of thy homeland and the tree of the lightning,” he intoned, “under their protection and God’s, child of this day, be thy true name, known on this earth but to thy parents, thy physician, and thee when thou shaft come of age: Victrix; and may thou bear it in honor and happiness while thy years endure. Amen.” He wrote, dusted sand from Galilee across the words, and stood up again. “This one I’ll file personally,” he said. Yawning. “Okay, that’s all.”

We repeated our handshake. “I’m sorry you had to deliver her at such an unsanctified hour, I said.

“Nothing we GP’s aren’t used to,” he answered. The sleepiness left him. He regarded me very steadily. “Besides, in this case I expected it.”

“I—Huh?”

“I’d heard something about you and your wife already,” Ashman said. “I looked up more. Cast a few runes of my own. Maybe you don’t know it yourself, but that kid was begotten on the winter solstice. And, quite apart from her unusual heredity, there’s something else about her. I can’t identify it. But I felt pretty sure she’d be born this night because a full moon was due on Matthewsmas. I’m going to watch her with a great deal of interest, Mr. Matuchek, and I suggest you take extra special care of her .... Good night, now.”