Only Superhuman by Christopher L. Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

been left with no choice but to anesthetize her and perform a C-section. The baby’s head had been transverse, and through it all she’d never left the womb. The doctors hadn’t told Lyra for fear of making her tense. They’d hoped her contractions would turn the baby’s head into better alignment. And to be fair, she had insisted on the most natural childbirth possible. So she could forgive them for not telling her. Especially since she now had the most beautiful baby in the universe to hold in her arms. She’d missed greeting the little girl at the moment of her arrival, but it made little difference; they still bonded almost instantly.
    The baby had inherited her mother’s elfin features, but had her father’s Irish coloring. Her name became obvious to Richard as soon as she first opened her enormous eyes: Emerald, after his ancestral isle. Lyra couldn’t argue; it was a perfect name for her perfect jewel of a daughter.
    *   *   *
    Emerald Rhea Blair-Shannon was a precocious baby in many ways, her development well ahead of the norm. Her physical vigor didn’t seem at all attenuated by her mother’s blood—and Richard insisted that her intelligence, curiosity, and vitality came mainly from Lyra’s side. But the distinction didn’t matter to Lyra. The ordeal of Emry’s birth had created a profound bond between mother and child, especially since Lyra knew it would be unwise for her and Richard ever to conceive another. She and Emry had such a close rapport that, to Richard’s amusement, she tended to refer to the two of them as a single composite person, a shared soul, using “we” to describe Emry’s feelings and actions without any trace of pretension. On some level Richard envied them their bond; but he had his own close relationship with the child, if in a less holistic way. Emry and Lyra were like a single person, but Richard was the love of that person’s life, and he felt it doubly now. When Lyra brought the baby to bed with them, Richard sometimes bemoaned the loss of privacy; but the miraculous sensation of Emry’s tiny fingers clinging to his, of her eyes watching him raptly when he awoke, more than made up for it.
    Indeed, Richard knew that as the child grew into her abilities, she would need him to guide her through it as his parents had for him. It wouldn’t be easy—not here, where there was no system of support for a transhuman child or even acceptance for her specialness. He had his cousins and kin, who would feel obliged to the child as one of their own; but they couldn’t truly understand her needs or teach her to see her uniqueness as a positive thing. Only her father could give her that.
    As Emry grew older, Lyra and Richard always encouraged her to play with other children, but her rapid advancement made it difficult to gain their acceptance or form lasting bonds. Her parents remained her closest friends, their home her safe haven. Emry always loved their periodic trips to Davida, the “county seat” for Greenwood and other small Outers habitats on similar orbits. She was enthralled by its urban habitats, its bustling crowds, its diverse population and entertainments. But that was nothing compared to her excitement at visiting the Central and Inner Belt when Lyra booked a performance tour or Richard went to help with a disaster. She devoured the history and cultural diversity of the Ceres Sheaf, the glamour and glitz of Vestalia and Rapyuta. Once they even went to Earth to visit her mother’s family in Tennessee, though Emry was uncomfortable in a place where the ground curved the wrong way and there was nothing holding in the air but gravity. Still, she wanted to go everywhere and see everything, so long as she was always with her parents. She felt no particular ties to Greenwood; outside her house, it was never a place where she felt at home. But to Lyra, for all its problems it was a haven from the chaos of the Belt. And for Richard, it was the one place where he could