CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT – THE HYBRID CHILD

Aurora is pregnant and Umbaga, Neanderthal, was the father.

That first winter with her Neanderthal companions was one Aurora would never forget, and in her past there had been winters on Terra that had been memorable.

Two things marked it as being the most precious season in her life.

Firstly, she made fire and was hailed as a goddess by all of the tribe, men, women and little Neanderthal children. She had brought a simple device for creating hot flames when she had gone to the damaged spacecraft, flames that could be transferred to piles of tinder and cause a blaze like few others. And she demonstrated it on a neat pile of dry sticks and tufts of hay and moss that had withered in autumn.

And she taught them other ways to make a blaze.

She showed them (again, like she had when Juju had been alive) how rubbing two dry sticks together violently would eventually cause wisps of smoke and then, if blown on carefully, a little flame.

“Sticks must be dry,” she said to the little group of curious onlookers who had gathered round her.

Then she showed them how flint, if hit with accuracy, could cause a spark which might eventually ignite a small pile of dried grass and moss.

“When my lighter has all been used up you must do this,” she said, in conclusion. Umbaga translated her words, and the gathering erupted in cheers that echoed through her mind for ages. She had never felt so proud, yet all she had done was trawl through her memories of childhood education and pass simple information on to those who would benefit from it.

But her childhood education had been more advanced and sophisticated than the experiences of these people.

The second thing that marked it as being the most precious season in her life was the way her stomach swelled and she knew she was pregnant. And not just any old pregnant but one brought about by the love from a Neanderthal man.

She was still young enough, even without the medical skills available to women on Terra, to be safely pregnant. She knew that and she also knew that those with the skills on Terra were a vast distance away both in space and time, and that if she had any midwife at all when her time came it would either be herself or Umbaga.

But she had that thought without giving any consideration to the local people, many of whom she had barely met. But she did know Carpa and Bibi, and it filled her with a sense of huge fondness for this fresh world she was stranded on when they gathered to her, advised her (a language of sorts, marrying Terran with Neanderthal words, was already spreading amongst the people, and with that language came comprehension.)

So Bibi guided her with such things as care for herself, diet (the Neanderthals were especially advanced when it came to understanding the needs of expectant mothers) and the steps she could take that would reduce any chance of infection. There were herbs and plants a-plenty, and Aurora was beginning to learn that many of them had qualities other than merely being essential as food.

Meanwhile, Umbaga went out and about ensuring that two things happened. Firstly, that there was plenty of fresh meat for his expectant woman and secondly that danger was kept well at bay. And in those days there was always the threat of danger, because it was not only Neanderthal men who went a-hunting in the wild woods, but all manner of other creatures, many of which would have looked on a nice joint of Neanderthal meat as a particularly welcome gift.

And the glory of it was the meat could be cooked! Aurora supervised the preparation and cooking of fresh meat over hot flames, and everyone rejoiced. As has been noted earlier, fire was not unknown for cooking, but it depended on the chance discovery of a wildfire, and such things were rare. Cooked meat had always been a special change, a gift almost from the gods, and now it could become the standard.

Aurora had come from a society that had rigid conventions and one of them was the expectation that men and women producing offspring would make some kind of commitment to each other. There had, almost lost in time, been the convention of marriage in which solemn vows were exchanged and promises made. But vows can always be broken and promises unmade, especially if they have a life-long string attached to them.

So instead there had developed the Ceremony of the Rites.

It was a simple affair. It acknowledged that the only real purpose behind the by-then defunct marriage ceremony was a means of keeping parents together for as long as their offspring might need them, and not even that worked well because it was quite common for marriages to split up whilst children were still young, and that was deemed to be a bad thing.

The Ceremony of the Rites went some way to negating the downside of marriage, being a promissory system in which there was a time factor, based on an ancient measuring period called a “decade”. The odd thing was people tended to stick to promises in which there was a visible end-game when they had split apart at the first breath of disharmony in marriage. Daft as it sounds, the system worked well.

And Aurora wanted to explain this to Umbaga.

“On Terra,” she murmured, and paused. Umbagae knew that Terra was another world, the one from which this woman had come, but that’s all he knew and he was truly anxious to learn more. It wasn’t easy for a man with his extremely limited cosmic knowledge to get his head round planets and orbits and solar systems, but he could look around at his world and imagine there might be another one that was similar in some respects. He could see the trees with their green leaves and seasonal changes that dominated his entire surroundings and imagine the leaves being blue and the seasons at odds with the familiar.

So he listened to Aurora, greedy for other hints that might fill in his concept of her past.

“On Terra we have Ceremony of the Rites,” she murmured.

“What is?” he asked, frowning.

“Man and woman make promises,” she said quietly, and struggled to express an alien concept in the limited vocabulary of the primitive Umbaga.

“Promises?” he asked.

“Words of … saying would stay together, saying would help, saying that share bringing up babies, boys, girls...” she said.

He nodded. “Oh that!” he said, smiling, “We do same. You have child, me stay with you and help you and bring food … always.”

That wasn’t what she meant. She looked at him and knew that it was better than what she meant.

She looked at him again, took in every detail of his rugged face, the features she had once thought primitive and now saw as manly and handsome, and smiled.

She wanted to stay with this man for always. She wanted his help, his strength, for always.

She said,

“Hold my hand...”

And he did. He took her by the hand, his skin and fingers almost gnarled already, and she led him to the back of their cave, out of sight of passers by.

“We do it again,” she whispered, and he knew what she meant. And he knew how to be gentle to a woman well into her pregnancy. He knew how to do it again, all right.

“I love Umbaga,” she said with a shudder as they lay together on a straw palliasse and his body quivered next to hers.

“Me love … Aurora...” he whispered, sighing.

© Peter Rogerson 13.11.16