Part One When Aila gave birth to Ziv she was unable to part from him for a moment; she felt he was a part of her - mentally, emotionally, even physically. In no way she would let anyone else of the Family help her look after him.
"You can't behave in this way, Aila, you know," Rina said in her cool, decisive voice; "we are responsible for him no less than you. You can't do everything on your own."
"He is so small," Aila murmured, her gaze turned away from the small, round, blond woman, toward the golden head and deep blue eyes in her lap; "they can harm him…"
Rina, some ten years older than Aila, having undergone two pregnancies and two births, regarded Aila calmly with her light blue eyes.
"Who?" she demanded; "me? Ron? Rose? With all the children we've brought together to the world, having taken care of them since they were born to the age of five?"
Aila did her best she could not to listen to Rina, absorbed as she was in looking after the baby. She nursed and washed him, played with him and talked to him as if there was no one else in the world. She even spent the nights with him, leaning back in a chair by the side of his cot in the children's room, instead of lying with the other parents in their large common bed. Such behavior was unacceptable in Gardenland, and the Water family turned for help to the local Council's Office of Rules and Customs.
That afternoon, Aila sat alone in the living-room with Ziv in her lap, not thinking where her Family member could be.
"Can I hold him for a moment?" The voice, low and vibrating, penetrated her body and shook her to the bones. Lifting her eyes, Aila saw a strange woman of indefinite age standing in front of her. Her dark ivory skin was tightly stretched over the delicate bones of her thin face; her elongated, slanted eyes shone deep black under her purple headscarf. The usual transparent scarves used as dress wear in Gardenland barely covered her thin body, fluttering in an unseen breeze and revealing parts of her small figure.
Aila, unaware of what she was doing, as if hypnotized by the dark gaze, gave her child over to the strange woman, who took and looked at him for a moment, saying, "I see an interesting future for him."
"What are you talking about?" Aila asked sharply. "Give him back to me! What do you want to do with him, anyway?"
"Don't worry so much," the woman said calmly, giving her back the child.
