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Weber grabbed the walkie-talkie from him.
I remember what it’ll be like watching you when you are a day old. Your father will have gone for a quick visit to the hospital cafeteria, and you’ll be lying in your bassinet, and I’ll be leaning over you.
So soon after the delivery, I will still be feeling like a wrung-out towel. You will seem incongruously tiny, given how enormous I felt during the pregnancy; I could swear there was room for someone much larger and more robust than you in there. Your hands and feet will be long and thin, not chubby yet. Your face will still be all red and pinched, puffy eyelids squeezed shut, the gnome-like phase that precedes the cherubic.
I’ll run a finger over your belly, marveling at the uncanny softness of your skin, wondering if silk would abrade your body like burlap. Then you’ll writhe, twisting your body while poking out your legs one at a time, and I’ll recognize the gesture as one I had felt you do inside me, many times. So that’s what it looks like.
I’ll feel elated at this evidence of a unique mother-child bond, this certitude that you’re the one I carried. Even if I had never laid eyes on you before, I’d be able to pick you out from a sea of babies: Not that one. No, not her either. Wait, that one over there.
Yes, that’s her. She’s mine.
That final “gift exchange” was the last we ever saw of the heptapods. All at once, all over the world, their looking glasses became transparent and their ships left orbit. Subsequent analysis of the looking glasses revealed them to be nothing more than sheets of fused silica, completely inert. The information from the final exchange session described a new class of superconducting materials, but it later proved to duplicate the results of research just completed in Japan: nothing that humans didn’t already know. We never did learn why the heptapods left, any more than we learned what brought them here, or why they acted the way they did. My own new awareness didn’t provide that type of knowledge; the heptapods’ behavior was presumably explicable from a sequential point of view, but we never found that explanation.
I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods’ world-view, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as they must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life. But that will never come to pass. I will continue to practice the heptapod languages, as will the other linguists on the looking glass teams, but none of us will ever progress any further than we did when the heptapods were here.
Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.
From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?
These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.
END