“Because I was angry. Because it hurt me.” Nyta sucked the wounded finger, feeling cold and empty. It was only four days before Lery’s birthday.
“What if I hurt you?”
“You wouldn’t hurt me, would you, baby?”
“Yeah!” He ran laughing back to the screen.
Again, Nyta lacked the quivering bag that held Rey ecstatic, alone. She aimed at where the bag had healed over the animal’s claw-holes. At the screen Lery giggled at incongruously tinted patterns. In front of her, Rey’s sack swung and bobbled. Nyta’s own container hung beside it on the matrix rack, dry and empty, waiting. She used it only for sleep, with minimum transition. Even then...
* * * *
“Do you have to buy animals? They’re so damn messy,” Rey said. “And you don’t even know how to take care of the things after you get them.” Rey hadn’t noticed Nyta’s new translucent beige drape. “You can wish them in the bag anyway, for free.”
“The bag. That’s all you ever say!” She glared at the food trays flashing in the sposal.
Lery jumped up, his eyes gleaming. “After I leave, will I have a bag then? Will I?”
“Sure you will,” Rey said. “No more bed, but a bag of your very own.”
Nyta bit her lip. “Do you have to talk about leaving now? There’s still a while yet.”
Lery marched around in a circle. “I’m gonna have a bag! I’m gonna have a bag! Four days, four days, I’m gonna have a bag!”
Nyta stood up.
“You look awful.” Rey tapped her hand lightly with his fingers still, always, slightly damp with remnant fluid. “Really, you ought to use your bag. For your own good.” He smiled the way he used to ... he was a baby himself, really, with his big head and small bottom. Nyta wanted to hug him, but knew that he’d pull away.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “I will, I promise. Tomorrow.”
* * * *
She hated climbing into the slack cavity, feeling the warm fluid rise around her, the faint sting of wire tentacles linking their poised charges to the nerves of her scalp. Floating in darkness, Nyta regretted her promise. The principle was simple—just wish for something, anything, and the bag would make it seem to happen. But her trances never went right
She wanted to climb out, but there was no choice. In three days the bag would be all she’d have. She loved Lery so much, more than she’d loved anyone, even Alba. He was too excited lately, but still...
Bobbing in tepid fluid, snared in an electrified silver web, Nyta wished: She was pregnant again. Her breasts swelled taut, her emptiness filled, her belly rose until it was hard to breathe. Months swept past as her womb crescendoed, and Nyta hummed and sang, brimful of life and melody. A fetus kicked under her ribs. And then it was time for pain, a surf of pain that tore her open and receded, leaving a baby, born in the caul, between her legs. And the caul was an elastic sack, opaque, gray, thick. Nyta slit it open with her fingernails. Inside was another bag, darker and tougher. This one she tore open with her teeth. Inside was another. And another. Nyta screamed.
But there was no sound.
* * * *
“Well, feeling better?” Rey was all loose joints and cool smile.
“It happened again.” Nyta shook. “I told you. I need something real.”
“Real? What’s the difference?” Rey’s smile became patronizing. “How do you know what’s real? For all I can tell, I’m in my bag right now, except I don’t think I’d wish to have you... like this.”
“I need something I can hug, like Lery. Something that hugs me back.”
“Then just wish for it, like me.”
“But I can tell the difference.”
“That’s crazy.” Rey walked to the matrix rack, punched for an indeterminate trance, and stepped inside his bag. “There is no difference,” he said.
* * * *
“You’re lucky,” Mercia told Nyta, “lucky to be getting free. The twins never give me a moment’s rest.” She rocked her babies, one nestled in the bend of each elbow, but did not manage to frown.
“You think so?” Nyta said.
“Of course, dear,” Simi interrupted. “You’ve done your maternal duty, grown your Lery from nothing at all. . .” Nyta noticed that Simi had replaced her furry animal with a gleaming green cylindrical one without legs. There was a bandage on Simi’s left forearm. “Not like some people who call themselves women, and never have any at all.”
“Why not?” the newlywed said. “We’ve got so many people anyway. According to Bupop—”
“Bupop,” Simi said in a haughty voice, “is not a mother. And neither are you yet, darling.”
Nyta kept stealing looks at Mercia’s twins. It wasn’t fair. There were two babies with round faces, smiling and sucking little mouths. Soon she wouldn’t have any. Lery...
Simi’s green animal kept trying to glide up her shoulder, and she batted it down with a scolding finger. “Naughty,” she said. “Listen to Mommy, now!”
There’s still two days with him, Nyta thought. Long, long days.
* * * *
Lery was at the screen almost all the time now, absorbing the pretransfer information in the shape of animated pastel spheres, obelisks and tetrahedrons. He watched with a new intensity, punctuated with gusts of laughter that seemed to Nyta to be sucked from her own lungs.
For no reason she fussed around the partment, pretending to clean its unsoilable interior. Rey had given up on her and was in his bag almost constantly. It sagged, pulsing slightly, and the circulation of the fluid hissed with a subdued whisper.
Nyta spent a long time wiping the sealed front door. Except for the delivery hatch, it hadn’t been open since her daughter was dragged out—how long ago? Alba, her blond hair trailing, had cried, much to Rey’s embarrassment. “She’s like you,” he had said, intending a rebuke.
Nyta had only nodded. “Yes, I know.”
Nyta loved that crying, loved comforting her babies when they had cried. Lery hardly cried at all any more.
She felt confused. Rey thought she was crazy, trying to hold onto her baby. Simi said she should feel proud. Here she was, doing cleaning when nothing gathered dust. Stains erased themselves, dirt disintegrated, anything broken healed itself within a few days. The translucent windows on which colored patterns changed endlessly were spotless: mauve, saffron, magenta, turquoise . . . Even without a baby she’d have the full screen and proscenium, the bags hanging from the matrix rack, food cooked to her whim in an instant, her friends on the screen every day, the sposal to annihilate whatever she didn’t want...
“Lery!” She felt a rush of affection. “Please!”
He came reluctantly, dragging his feet and glaring at her. “Tomorrow I can do what I want.”
Despite his words, Nyta wanted to bury him under her kisses. “But today we can talk. It’s our last day,” she said.
Lery sat beside her, really not much bigger than the wrinkled baby she had suckled almost five years ago. He fidgeted and craned his neck in the direction of the screen.
“Isn’t there anything you want to say?” she asked.
“No.”
“But, baby, today’s our last day.”
“No.” He refused to look at her. Even when he tried to be angry, he was beautiful. There was a cute tug at his lower lip, the wrinkling of his chin—that special look.
“Then suppose I ask you some questions?” Without an answer, she continued, “Do you remember the games we played with the food boxes? Do you remember when the stacks of them fell down, how much we laughed?” Nyta glowed with the memory. Lery had laughed like music then. He liked to hang gurgling from her neck and didn’t watch the screen.
“Those were baby games,” he said now.
“Then ... do you remember when you played magic and promised to break open the door? You said you’d take me out and we’d run all day and never see a wall Do you remember?”
“I was dumb then,” he said, giggling. “That sounds dumb!�
��
“Remember the fuzzy animal we had a few weeks ago? The one with the long white ears? It wiggled its whiskers and you liked to tickle it.”
“That an’mal was crummy. Its head broke and you couldn’t even make it fix itself.”
Nyta knew she should stop asking. Everything with Lery had always been so special... he was just excited now. She was spoiling everything, spoiling even the past.
“Then tell me,” her tightening voice kept on, “tell me what you’re going to do after you leave.”
Lery came alive. His small body weaved back and forth with anticipation. “I’m gonna get a bag. It’ll be like the ones you and Daddy have. And I’ll go in it and I’ll have anything I want in it and I could go in or out anytime I want to.”
“Oh.” Nyta saw that he meant it. In a flash his face seemed to merge with two others, just for an instant. No. A hard chill spread through her stomach. “Will you think of me when you’re in the bag?”
Her son laughed, a high unchildish cackle that cut her like teeth. “Course not! The bag’s not for that!”
Nyta tried to stop, but she had to know. “Then . . . when will you think of me?”
“I won’t.” Lery looked puzzled. “Will they make me?” Again his face blurred into others, a quick, buck-toothed boy, a girl with long brown hair and narrow lips. Not again ...
“No,” Nyta sighed. “They won’t make you.” She thought of the controller, his gray head humming, eyes slowly spinning, saying quota, my dear, quota. She pinched Lery’s arm, hard, digging in her long thumbnail, hoping that he would cry, become her baby again.
“Hey!” he shouted, and punched her in the breast. .
“Lery, I’m your mother. You will remember me, baby, you will, honey, won’t you?”
“You’re only my mommy,” he said, “till tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. Lery somewhere in a bag just like his father, floating and dreaming under silver mesh, forgetting everything. Forgetting her. Then just the partment left, the screen with her stupid friends, the hiss of Rey’s fluid, colors on the windows, treacherous animals. And her empty bag, waiting. She’d hoped to wish Lery back in the bag, to have him forever with his games, his tears and soft smile. Now there was no Lery.
“Mommy, why you lift me?”
For the first time she didn’t answer him.
The sposal opened as it always did, just wide enough, allowing Lery’s waving arms to clear by a fraction of an inch. The flash was so bright that for several minutes Nyta could see it etched in black wherever she looked. Just like the other two. The hole in her vision soon disappeared.
She forced herself to cry by singing the ancient, the incomprehensible lullaby. “Rock-a-bye baby...” She sang as she had sung to all her babies: first Alba, then Sundy, Krin, and, of course, Lery. Nyta enjoyed the crying and savored her feelings, a mixture of loss with a surge of depthless mothering warmth that would bring forth another baby. Inside, inside her.
* * * *
Rey was not surprised. “You might have saved us that embarrassing Bupop nonsense, though.” He agreed to replace Lery as soon as possible, and would arrange for his bag to collect semen from him and transfer it to Nyta in hers. Things would be better, he hoped, since a baby would keep her happy for another five years.
But Mercia was appalled. “I’d never abort my babies,” she said. “Especially not that old. How could you, Nyta!”
“Don’t be so quick to judge,” Simi told her. “I’ve aborted one too, you know, darling. Only six months old, but still . . .” Simi’s long green animal quivered its red tongue in the air.
“But three! What kind of woman would do that? Tell me, Nyta, what land of woman are you?”
“A mother,” Nyta said.
Already her thoughts were full of the new baby, its tiny sucking mouth, its miniature fingers and toes, its new skin under her hands. All hers, her baby. Before the end of the meeting she noticed Mercia tipping up the faces of her twins, looking first at one and then the other, as if she were thinking, Which? Which one?
<
* * * *
THE NIGHT WIND
by Edgar Pangborn
After some years away from the future world of his classic novel Davy, Edgar Pangborn has recently returned to it in stories such as “Tiger Boy” (Universe 2) and “The World Is a Sphere” (Universe 3). It’s a self-consistent background ranging over many centuries after the destruction of our present civilization and the slow growth of a new culture founded in superstitious fear of the holocaust that nearly annihilated humanity.
In that fear-ridden world Pangborn finds men and women who try to be as human as they can, and he tells their stories . . . such as the following warm and moving tale of a particular kind of monster, not really a mutant, and his coming of age.
* * * *
At Mam Miriam’s house beyond
Trempa, Ottoba 20,402
I will do it somewhere down this road, not yet but after dark; it will be when the night wind is blowing.
Always I have welcomed the sound of the night wind moving, as the leaves are passing on their secrets and sometimes falling, but falling lightly, easily, because their time to fall is come. Dressed in high colors, they fall to the day winds too this time of year, this autumn season. The smell of earth mold is spice on the tongue. I catch scent of apples ripening, windfalls rich-rotten pleasuring the yellow hornets. Rams and he-goats are mounting and crazy for it—O this time of year! They fall to the day winds echoing the sunlight, the good bright leaves, and that’s no bad way to fall.
I know the dark of autumn too. The night wind hurts. Even now writing of it, only to think of it. Ottoba was in me when I said to my heart: I will do it somewhere down this road, I will end it, my life, for they believe it should never have begun. (I think there may be good spirits down that road. Perhaps the people I met were spirits, or they were human beings and spirits too, or we all are.) And I remembered how Father Horan also believes I ought never to have been born. I saw that in. him; he believes it as the town folk do, and what we believe is most of what we are.
For three days I felt their sidelong stares, their anger that I would dare to pass near their houses. They called in their children to safety from me, who never hurt anyone. Passing one of those gray-eyed houses, I heard a woman say, “He ought to be stoned, that Benvenuto.” I will not write her name.
Another said, “Only a mue would do what he did.”
They call me that; they place me among the sad distorted things—armless or mindless or eyeless, somehow inhuman and corrupted—that so many mothers bear, or have borne, folk say, since the end of Old Time. How could a mue be called beautiful?
When I confessed to Father Horan, he shoved his hands behind his back, afraid he might touch me. “Poor Benvenuto!” But he said it acidly, staring down as if he had tasted poison in his food.
So I will end it (I told the hidden self that is me)— I will end it now in my fifteenth year before the Eternal Corruption that Father Horan spoke of can altogether destroy my soul; and so the hidden self that is me, if that is my soul, may win God’s forgiveness for being born a monster.
But why did Father Horan love me once, taking something like a father’s place, or seem to love me? Why did he teach me the reading of words and writing too, first showing me how the great words flow in the Book of Abraham, and on to the spelling book and so to all the mystery? Why did he let me see the other books, some of them, the books of Old Time forbidden to common people, even the poets? He would run his fingers through my hair, saying I must never cut it, or rest his arm on my shoulder; and I felt a need, I thought it was loneliness or love, in the curving of his fingers. Why did he say I might rise in the Holy Amran Church, becoming greater than himself, a bishop—Bishop Benvenuto!—an archbishop!
If I am a monster now, was I not a monster then?
I could ask him no such questions when he was angry. I ran out of the church though I heard him calling after me, commanding me
to return in God’s name. I will not return.
I ran through the graveyard, past the dead hollow oak where I saw and heard bees swarming in the hot autumn light, and I think he stood among the headstones lamenting for me, but I would not look back, no, I plowed through a thicket and ran down a long golden aisle of maple trees and into Wayland’s field (where it happened)—Wayland’s field all standing alive with the bound shocks of corn, and into the woods again on the far side, only to be away from him.
It was there in Wayland’s field that I first thought, I will do this to myself, I will end it, maybe in that wood I know of; but I was afraid of my knife. How can I cut and tear the body someone called beautiful? And so I looked at the thought of hiding in a shock of corn, the same one where I found Eden idle that day, and staying in it till I starved. But they say starving is a terrible death, and I might not have the courage or the patience to wait for it. I thought too, They will look for me when they know I’m gone, because they want to punish me, stone me, even my mother will want to punish me, and they would think of the cornfield where it happened and came searching like the flail of God.
Universe 5 - [Anthology] Page 9
