Only Superhuman by Christopher L. Bennett Read Free Book Online

seemed to the young couple like a safe, peaceful place: it orbited in one of the Outer Belt’s emptiest Kirkwood gaps, cleared of potentially hazardous debris by Jupiter’s gravitational resonance and comfortably removed from the postwar tensions of the Inner and Central Belt. The abundance of icy minor stroids and comets in the Outers made it easy for isolated habitats to exist self-sufficiently, and so the region proliferated with small, independent communities, whether fringe groups undertaking novel genetic or social experiments, extremists unwilling to assimilate within mainstream society, or just traditionalists seeking a quiet, small-town way of life like the Greenwooders. But the trade-off was that such compact, isolated habitats demanded conformity and conservatism within themselves, lest the balance of ecology and society be disrupted. The locals had been uncomfortable with Lyra’s Wicca-based spirituality (her own unorthodox version, but deeply devout nonetheless) and downright scandalized by her skyclad performance art that overtly celebrated sexuality as a vehicle for spreading peace and unity.
    The Greenwooders also disapproved of “playing God” with the human genome—a very Terran attitude, but one growing necessarily more common in the Belt as habitats with Earthlike gravity and radiation shielding became more numerous and immigration from Earth accelerated. But they did value family, and Richard had relatives here. So they strove to accept him and his “unconventional” wife, assuring him that he wasn’t to blame for his parents’ choice to migrate to the Vanguard habitat and let them tamper with the family genes. The Blair-Shannons had been good neighbors and mostly won the Greenwooders over, so long as they didn’t proselytize their eccentricities. Lyra was confident that within a couple of hours, the doctors would be won over as well.
    The baby, however, wasn’t inclined to cooperate. Hours passed and no labor came. Eventually Lyra let the doctors talk her into induced labor and spent hours more bearing down, though she still refused painkillers, wanting her little girl to be alert and undrugged when she entered the world. Until this day, Lyra had thought she knew pain and hardship from her years as a dancer. But this was beyond anything she’d ever imagined. Each individual contraction wasn’t necessarily so bad, but they kept up relentlessly, leaving her no time to rest, to think. Once she’d seen Richard hold up a toppling wall for several minutes, pushing his augmented bones and muscles past their limits, while his fellow rescue workers freed trapped victims. Lyra had never imagined she could endure anything remotely like that. Yet now she felt like she was doing it every few minutes for a full day and more. It was more than her delicate frame could stand. But she would bear it gladly, and a hundred times more, for her daughter.
    She heard Richard and doula Margarethe talking to her, soothing her, but she spent most of the ordeal within herself, praying to the Goddess, feeling for the novice soul inside her and urging her to let go, to let herself be born and discover the glorious new universe the Goddess had prepared for her. A part of her wanted to beg the child to stop demanding so much, to end this torture before she killed them both. But she loved the girl too much to begrudge her anything. So she reached out to the Goddess, felt Her pure, unconditional love, and did her best to feed it to her child, to be a conduit for that overpowering goodness even if it destroyed her. All that mattered was creation and the love that powered it. Everything else—all her everyday concerns and hang-ups and discomforts, all the slights and contempt from the Greenwooders beneath their polite façades—was all burned away. Lyra had never known such clarity. And she loved her baby desperately for bringing it to her.
    Finally, Lyra awoke to find that she’d missed the child’s birth. The doctor had