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"If I don't like it in the Ordnance I'll just go back into Kentucky, or sign on as an officer in a Grog unit."
"That's a waste. Any stump-tooth can fill out requisition forms for Grog infantry. You need to get yourself into a field Kur needs here. Something not just anyone can do. That's why I chose obstetrics. Kur looks ten thousand years into the future, and about the only certainty is that you need babies to get there."
"The kind of education I have doesn't lend itself to medical school," Valentine said. The bitterness came of its own accord, surprising him.
"There's nursing. You could put in a year here, then go off to Cleveland or Pittsburg for classroom work."
"You could arrange that?" Valentine said.
"I'll speak to the director. Be right back." She turned her back to him, then turned around again and sat on the bed.
"She said you might fit an opening," Fran Paoli said, patting the spot next to her. "Let's do a follow-up interview to be sure."
* * * *
Valentine managed to wheedle a job for Ahn-Kha out of it as well. Ahn-Kha went to work in the laundry of the main hospital building- the amount of clothing and linen generated by the hospital and the four Grands was formidable. Ahn-Kha discovered two other well-trained Grogs, the simpler Grey Ones, working in the bowels of the hospital, also filling and emptying the washers.
They left the grotty little hand housing and moved into the cleaner, but smaller, apartments for the service workers.
"Less than two weeks in Xanadu and already you're improved," the housing warden said. He carried an assortment of tools at his belt and a long-hosed can of bug spray in a hip holster. "I want your Grog to shower outside, though, or you're outta here. He can use the hose. First sign of fleas and you're outta here."
The room had a phone, and even more amazingly, it functioned. Valentine couldn't remember the last time he'd stayed in a room with a working phone.
They put Valentine to work in the South Grand to begin. His "nursing" duties involved bringing food and emptying the occasional urine bottle, and endless tubes of breast milk.
He learned a little more of the "baby factory" routine. The women had their children at an appointed date and time, always by caesarian. Up until that time they were two to a room, with high cubicle walls in between giving the illusion of individual apartments.
After giving birth, they were "rotated" to a new building and given a new room. If they hadn't had a window before, they got one the next time.
Each room had a single television.
A modicum of dealmaking took place having to do with television choice and the window side of the room The television had four channels; channel three exhibited a parade of tawdry dramas including the staple Noonside Passions. Would Ted turn Holly in to gain the brass ring he'd so long wanted, though he did not yet know she was carrying his child, and would her sister Nichelle ever get out of the handsome-yet-despicable black marketeer Brick's webs? Channel six showed a mixture of quiz shows, courtroom contests where curt, black-robed Reapers impassively heard evidence and assigned monetary damages, divorces, or inheritances, then self-help or skill-improvement sessions in the evening; channel nine broadcast children's programming in the day and then music, either with the musicians or with relaxing imagery at night; channel eleven was the only station that broadcast twenty-four hours a day, providing nothing but propagandistic Ordnance newscasts and bombastic documentaries about mankind's past follies.
Valentine worked four floors in his new blue scrubs, madly during mealtimes, slowly at other hours. Two days of twelve-hour shifts, then a day off, then two more days of twelve-hour shifts, then a day off and a half day-though the half day usually consisted of either training or NUC lectures or some kind of team-building make-work project. His charges were all in their second trimester. Though the women looked wan and drawn thanks to their pregnancies, they were cheerful and talkative, or spent long hours on sewing projects for Ordance soldiers (rumor had it the semen that fertilized them came from decorated combat veterans). He wondered if Malita Carrasca had been this upbeat during her pregnancy. He wondered at the weight loss; the mothers to be he'd met over the years had mostly put on weight.
"It's the quick succession of pregnancies," another nurse, an older woman with years of experience, told him as she lit up in the emergency exit stairway, the unofficial smoking lounge. Valentine had taken to carrying cigarettes, and even smoking one now and again-it was the easiest excuse to get away from his duties for a few minutes. "They have six and then they retire to the Ontario lakeshore and run a sewing circle or a craft workshop. Nice little payoff. But hell on the body while you're cranking them out."
"Diet, Tar," the hefty nurse who counted off meals as they went on Valentine's cart said. She was his immediate supervisor for mealtime duties. "These doctors are all protein-happy. Throwing pregnant women into ketosis. Protein, fats, fiber, and more protein is all they get. And enough iron for a suit of armor. Liver, onions, supplements."
"It gets results," Valentine said. "They're happy enough."
"That's the medication talking. Every woman here's buzzier than a beehive."
* * * *
Valentine got a chance to test his supervisor's opinion the next day. Every time Valentine got a chance, he looked out one of the windows facing the patio area and the greenhouse below, trying to get a feel for the rhythm of Gail Foster's schedule. Other than a trip to the pool every other day, she never seemed to join the other groups of pink mothers to be.
He wondered if there was a reason for that.
Then one day, as he served lunch, he saw her again, sitting at a table with a book open before her. She had one of the thick, white robes around her body and a towel around her neck.
Valentine finished passing out his meals to the women who ordered food delivered to their rooms-most ate on the second floor, in the cafeteria-and then hurried to the elevator and went outside, ostensibly for a smoke.
Gail Foster sat wrapped up in her book and white terrycloth. He tried to read the title, but it was in a cursive script hard to see at a distance. He walked up at an angle, getting out of the mild fall breeze so he could strike a match.
The smell of the match lighting reminded him of that long-ago escape from Chicago's Zoo.
It looked like the elaborate cursive script of her book read A Dinner of Onions, but Valentine couldn't be sure. Gail studied the pages before turning, as though she had to learn the first chapter for a test.
