TEN MONTHS LATER

Cammy screamed.

Alisa leaned over her. She'd shifted her grip on Cammy's hand after the last one to avoid having her hand crushed. "Okay, honey, breathe, remember, breathe. Think about breathing. Be your breath."

Cammy's pinched face was covered in sweat. "That was a bad one."

Alisa held Cammy's right hand in her right, and used a folded towel in her left to wipe away sweat from Cammy's forehead that was dripping into her eyes. "No, honey, it was a good one. They're all good ones."

Alisa grimly maintained a smile, though Cammy could read what was behind it. Cammy herself smiled behind gritted teeth. "See what you're going to be going through?"

Alisa raised Cammy's hand and kissed the back of it. "I won't want to miss a minute of it." She absently rubbed her own tummy, which looked as if she'd swallowed a beach ball. The two of them had attracted a lot of attention and questions lately, walking around campus holding hands, wearing tent-like shirts that did nothing to hide the shape of their huge baby bumps. Even with ordinary insemination, female couples very rarely chose to be pregnant together.

Looking out from between Cammy's spread legs, Dr. Shelton said, "Okay, head is out. Stop trying to push, Cammy. Just let the baby come."

"And breathe, honey." Alisa held tightly to Cammy's hand, ready for a renewal of Cammy's crushing grip.

Cammy grimaced and screamed again.

Dr. Shelton said through the scream, "Coming, coming... Here we are!"

Moments later the sound of a baby's cry filled the room. The population of the room had increased by one. Dr. Shelton looked at the clock on the wall and said to the nurse, "Put the time of birth as 11:15 a.m."

Cammy asked, crying, "Is she okay? Okay? Okay?"

Dr. Shelton said, with a beaming smile, "She's perfect." She held the squalling baby up so Cammy could see.

Cammy giggled. "Where'd that hair color come from?" The baby had a full head of dark red-brown hair.

Alisa, also crying and laughing, leaned down and pressed the side of her head against Cammy's. "Must be in her genes somewhere."

Cammy held her arms out to Dr. Shelton. Alisa rearranged the pillows behind her so she could sit up.

The doctor motioned towards Cammy. "Alisa, why don't you get that shirt off her?" They'd been in bed early this morning when Cammy's labor started. She'd only taken time to throw on one of her baggy pregnancy shirts and a pair of shorts before the rush to the university hospital.

A moment later, Dr. Shelton carefully put the baby in Cammy's arms.

Cammy started crying again. "She's so beautiful! So beautiful!"

Dr. Shelton said, "Let her lie against your stomach, Cammy. She should manage to find your nipple on her own if you get her close enough."

A few minutes later, the doctor clamped and cut the umbilical cord.

Alisa asked the doctor, "Can I get in the bed with her?"

Dr. Shelton laughed. "Go for it. But no funny business."

Alisa laughed and wiped away tears. "Promise." Cammy scooted slightly to the far side of the bed, as Alisa awkwardly, maneuvering her beach ball, climbed in next to her, careful not to disturb the baby as she sought out Cammy's breast.

As Alisa stroked Cammy's hair, which was disheveled from exertion and drenched in sweat, Cammy said "She's latching! I can do this!"

Dr. Shelton beamed at her, and said, "Congratulations, Cammy. Your placenta should come out in a little while. I'm going to make arrangements to get the baby to the neonatal unit. Not the intensive care one, just the one for one hundred percent healthy, perfect, totally normal-in-every-way babies." She knew new mothers loved hearing that. "Nurse Morris will stay to help you finish up." She left the room.

The nurse, picking up a clipboard, said, "Can I get the baby's name for the birth certificate?" She smiled. "Is this going to be another Jenna?" Jenna was by far the most popular female baby name at the moment. Jenna the Ponygirl was a huge star, her races on television followed by record audiences. All around the university, the high schools, even elementary schools, one could see girls wearing white t-shirts with symbolic ponygirl-harness patterns in light violet, with the name "Jenna" spelled out across the top in back.

Cammy smiled first at Alisa, and then looked at the nurse. "First name Sandra. Middle is Alisa, A-L-I-S-A. Last name is Atwater-Felton. With a hyphen. Oh, and for partner's name, put Alisa Atwater-Felton." The City Council had recently given official approval to the new form of birth certificate, listing the "mother's genetic partner."

Some female married couples each kept their own names, sometimes one took the other's name. Some hyphenated. Cammy and Alisa were both using Atwater-Felton as their last names now. They'd talked about it. Both agreed that joining their names reflected the joining of their lives, and that Felton-Atwater sounded too much like a law firm, while Atwater-Felton, somehow, did not. And it would give their daughters an alphabetical advantage.

That was one in a long series of decisions. They loved deciding things together. Life is full of decisions, and they talked about all of them, even the not-really-consequential ones: they had decided, for example, never to trim their pubic hair, because it always reminded them of that bonding moment together up on the Hanging Roulette platform.

They had decided to have the babies together, rather than one after the other. They were the first married couple to both go through Dr. Colton's procedure simultaneously.

Continuing their studies while caring for the babies would be challenging, but the accommodations by the university for new parents were generous. The timing was ideal: the babies were coming with a month still remaining in summer break. Once classes started for fall semester, Cammy and Alisa would be able to take all of their classes without leaving their tiny apartment provided through the Housing Office, streaming class lectures onto their laptops -- even able to pause the professors whenever motherly duties arose -- and taking exams online. When they had courses that required labs, there would be no substitute for attending physically, but they had none of those in the upcoming semester. By the time they did need to include labs in their schedule, they would schedule them separately, much as they hated being apart, so that one of them could always be home with the babies. In case of emergencies, there were two women who lived on the same floor who'd said they'd be happy to watch the girls for an hour or two.

They had decided to raise the girls as sisters, as in fact they literally were genetically, despite having different birth-mothers. They wouldn't hide from the girls which of them had given birth to which, but would always tell the girls that when playmates or classmates were sisters, or talked about sisters, or when the two of them read about sisters, that term applied to them, and that when teachers asked if they were sisters, the answer was yes. As often as possible, when talking to either of the girls, Cammy and Alisa would describe the other girl as "your sister."

They had decided that, to both girls, Cammy would be "Mama," and Alisa would be "Mommy," and that neither Cammy nor Alisa would take priority as either girl's mother. For all of these decisions, in the unprecedented situation Cammy and Alisa were in, there were no standards to go by. They were on their own.

The choice of a major at the university would be coming up during their sophomore year. They had decided long ago to declare for pre-med. They were excited by the chance to make a contribution to the lives of women. For example, the Mermaid Program was still in progress, still working on full surgical conversion of women to mermaids. They hoped to be part of the program, though leaving themselves open if still more exciting opportunities arose.

The only thing each had decided alone, without input from the other, was the babies' names, and somehow they had done it without clashing, and had achieved a sort of symmetry. Cammy chose the name Sandra, explaining that Alisa was her Sandra, from that moment on the hanging platform when she had taken such a daring chance for Cammy. Cammy said Sandra should never become Sandy, at least not in their house. Sandra was never Sandy in the books. Alisa would name her baby Selena, after the author of those books that had brought the two of them together -- in full, Selena Camilla Atwater-Felton.

Alisa lay on her left side facing Cammy, her left hand steadying her own bulging tummy while her right patted to still-gooey bottom of Sandra, who was industriously sucking on Cammy's farther breast. For now it was the first version of milk, colostrum, which Cammy and Alisa had each found was dribbling from their nipples in the last few days. A few days from now Cammy's regular milk would start coming in. Cammy and Alisa had decided to share nursing duties, each of them breastfeeding both Sandra and Selena -- and each other, whenever one of them felt full of milk when neither girl seemed hungry. "Honey, I was thinking we need to decide something."

Cammy looked at her, smiling. "What's that, sweetie?"

"I know you'll probably think this is nuts to talk about so far in advance -- I mean, obviously it's years down the road -- but we should talk about what we want to do when it's time to go."

Cammy nodded, not thinking it strange at all to talk about anything and everything with Alisa. "I told you what my mom said."

Alisa nodded in return. "I know, and that was really smart. She had a good way to say it. But we've got an extra concern she didn't have. When you ate her, there was still your dad to take care of you. But when both of us go, the girls won't have any parents. Unless we go... separately." Clearly Alisa wasn't sure how Cammy felt about that.

"Well..." Cammy paused, thinking it over. "One thing is, we're both only nineteen, so we could wait until the girls will be fine on their own. When they're eighteen, we'll still only be thirty-seven. Some women wait until they're forty."

Alisa nodded again. "We can do that. But there's still the question of which of us goes first. We could be snuffed together, but then neither one of us gets to eat any of the other. So there's always that question. We saw that some women leave it up to chance. We could do that."

Cammy winced. "But not in Hanging Roulette."

Alisa shuddered. "Noooo. Not that."

Cammy suddenly gasped and looked wide-eyed at Alisa. "Oh, sweetie, I just remembered something I was thinking that day!"

"What, honey?" Alisa never had to ask what day Cammy meant.

"When we were watching the ponygirls, I was remembering how the groom and her pony both eat the pony's arms, and how I thought that would be such a wonderful sharing experience..."

Alisa blinked. "We kind of need our arms, honey."

Cammy shook her head excitedly. "Not arms, I'm thinking legs! We'd get them amputated, both of us! We could manage to get around in wheelchairs for a while. And they'd last us a long time..."

Alisa caught Cammy's excitement. "Oh, and mix them together in that girlmeat casserole you make, for you and me and the girls, and maybe some friends. We wouldn't know which chunk of meat came from which one of us, and it wouldn't matter! I don't want to know! It would be the two of us becoming one in food!" She reached up to stroke Cammy's hair. "Because we've always been one, not two."

Cammy nodded vigorously. "So then we can get snuffed together, because we've already eaten each other so we don't have that to worry about. Should we decide now how we want to do it?"

Alisa thought a moment, and shook her head. "The who-goes-first thing was what I was really worried about. As far as the method goes, in eighteen years there might be something new we can't even imagine now, so it's too early to decide on that."

Cammy grinned. "That almost makes me want to fast forward eighteen years to see how we'll do it, but I don't want to skip past our girls growing up."

Alisa beamed at her. "Neither do I." She scooted towards Cammy on the bed and kissed her, with all the love she felt.

Dr. Colton appeared at the door. "Knock knock."

Cammy, nearly asleep, opened her eyes and smiled tiredly. "Hey!" Alisa sat upright beside her. "You missed all the fun!"

Colton bit her lip. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here. I was teaching a class, and I found out right after." She looked around the room. "Everything okay?"

Alisa beamed at her. "Sandra's in the nursery."

Cammy added, "She's perfect! And so beautiful!" Her tears started flowing again.

Alisa, with careful and awkward effort, got out of the bed, came over and gave Colton a warm, tight hug, a little bent forward because her bump didn't let her hug upright. "Thank you so much, Mona."

Suddenly Alisa winced, then doubled over and cried out.

Cammy's eyes lit up. "They're going to have the same birthday! Genuine twins!" She pointed to the side. "Mona, you've done so much for us, but could you do one more thing and push that bed over this way? I don't feel like I can get out of bed yet, but I've got to be holding her hand." She laughed. "Busy, busy day."

Alisa walked gingerly through the space between the now-relocated bed and Cammy's, as the nurse rushed into the room. Alisa, steadying her bump, bent and kissed Cammy before climbing into her own bed, and said, "You said it that day, honey, and it got us both through."

Cammy gave her a smile. "What was that, sweetie?" She knew what Alisa meant, but wanted to hear the words again.

Alisa took Cammy's offered hand. "It's our time to make a family." She settled back to wait for her labor to start in earnest.