Inside her mind, in the semi-trance she now assumed, she stepped smilingly down through her own fluid layers of protection and conformation, to where her baby lay, healthy and growing, half awake, half asleep, wholly beautiful.

Her own genetically altered body gently interrogated the placental processes protecting the joined but subtly different chemistries and inheritance of her child’s body from her own immune system and carefully, fairly managing the otherwise selfishly voracious demands the baby made upon her body’s resources of blood, sugars, proteins, minerals and energy.

The temptation was always to tamper, to fiddle with the settings that regulated everything, as though by such meddling one proved how carefully painstaking and watchful one was being, but she always resisted, content that there were no warning signs, no notice that some imbalance was threatening either her health or that of the fetus and happy to leave the body’s own systemic wisdom to prevail over the brain’s desire to intervene.

Shifting the focus of her concentration, she was able to use another designed-in sense no creature from any part of her typically distributed Cultural inheritance had ever possessed to look upon her soon-to-be child, modelling its shape in her mind from the information provided by a subset of specialised organisms swimming in the as yet unbroken water surrounding the fetus. She saw it; hunched and curled in an orbed spectrum of smooth pinks, crouched round its umbilical link with her as though it was concentrating on its supply of blood, trying to increase its flow-rate or nutritional saturation.

She marvelled at it, as she always did; at its bulbously headed beauty, at its strange air of blankly formless intensity. She counted its fingers and toes, inspected the tightly closed eyelids, smiled at the tiny budded cleft that spoke of the cells’ unprompted selection of congenital femaleness. Half her, half something strange and foreign. A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn would be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.

Reassured that all was well, she left the dimly aware being to continue its purposeful, unthinking growth, and returned to the part of the real world where she was sitting on the pebbled beach and the waves fell loud and foaming amongst the tumbled, rumbling rocks.

Byr was there when she opened her eyes, standing knee-deep in the small waves just in front of her, wet-suited, golden hair damply straggled in long ringlets, face dark against the display of ruddy sunset behind, found just in the act of taking off the suit’s face-mask.

‘Evening,’ she said, smiling.

Byr nodded and splashed up out of the water, sitting down beside her and putting an arm round her. ‘You okay?’

She held the fingers of the hand over her shoulder. ‘Both fine,’ she said. ‘And the gang?’