by John Boyd
He left too quickly to recommend Freda’s exile to Flora, but he did leave her with some rather curious additions to her library. Even Wilma was interested enough to borrow her copy of The Well of Loneliness.
Her Frommian was replaced by a Freudian named Smith, who brought her a copy of The Theory of the Neuroses, which was invaluable in helping her to help him think that he understood himself, but he resigned under peculiar circumstances. In the intense concentration on her psyche, the hospital staff had completely ignored her soma, and halfway through her third month in Houston, Freda was found to be two months pregnant. Her Freudian, Smith, who was poorly informed outside of his field, resigned her case, thinking himself responsible.
At least that was the reason he gave her. She had her doubts. Her condition was becoming apparent to a charwoman, and Smith told her he would become a sculptor and spend the remainder of his days re-creating her torso in marble. “No arms, no heads, Freda,” he told her. “Just breasts.”
She bade good-bye to one more humanist, feeling he had undertaken a fitting line of work. Smith had strong Oedipus tendencies.
For three full weeks Freda suffered a hiatus in which she had no analyst at all. Wilma, through channels, kept her posted. The hospital staff, concerned by the rate at which she used up analysts and by her pregnancy, caused, the staff assumed, by a hospital employee, was bringing in a Pavlovian from Cape Cod. The Pavlovian, Wilma understood, conditioned his patients with a form of continuing shock treatment so obnoxious that they fled into sanity to escape therapy.
Doctor Watts was his name. She feared to ask him his given name. He was a New Englander carved in Midwestern Gothic, prim-lipped, sandy-haired, square-jawed, with pale blue eyes that stared through her when he spoke. He had the commanding presence of a Captain Bligh, and he was in his late sixties. His age did not put him outside of her range of effective action, but her pregnancy had turned her thoughts inward. Her awareness of the needs of others was not blunted but merely set aside as she contemplated the growing fulfillment of her love for Paul Theaston.
She hoped her baby was Paul Theastons. Her period of hibernation between Paul and Hans left the matter in doubt. In any event, the child could have a father it could be proud of. Since she had substituted as a father image for Jimmy Campbell, it was highly unlikely that she could mother his child.
She did not even superimpose the image of an orchid on Doctor Watts, mostly because of his policy. He cultivated an obnoxiousness that stretched her understanding to such limits that she could not find the motive to comfort him, especially since she was fast losing the use of her primary means of extending comfort. The torso that had turned the Freudian to sculpture was becoming, in a word, unshapely.
Watts had read her case history carefully, listened to all the tapes, and had deduced much which Freda felt positive was not in the record. His greeting, when he entered her room, revealed the extent of his bookwork.
“You’ve been assigned to me, Miss Caron,”—he accented the “Miss” as he cast a scornful glance at her maternity gown—“because you acquired a taste for the florid on an alien planet which has thrown your stimulus-response reactions heavily to the response side. Fruits of your behavior are apparent from your appearance, but I’m here to help, not to pass judgment. If I were to blame you for this travesty on Christian motherhood, some of my blame might reflect on brother members of a profession devoted to alleviating human suffering, or perhaps an array of otherwise innocent male nurses, janitors, delivery boys, or whatever else might have crawled from the woodwork. I’m no namby-pamby do-gooder who blames society for the sins of its members. The sin is yours, Miss Caron.”
“Aren’t you being unkind, Doctor?”
“Not unkind. Truthful! The truth shall make you free, and the truth is that you’ve perverted every noble sentiment of womanhood to a loin-oriented pleasure principle. Repentance will help; atonement will cure. Humanists, Miss Caron, are lepers of the twenty-third century, and I’m not Saint Francis.”
“Yes, Doctor Watts.”
“To guard against your further depredations to our staff, I have assigned Doctor Harold Franks as your obstetrician. Doctor Franks is eighty-eight years old.”
In subsequent interviews Freda probed beneath the ice of Watts to find a vein of New Hampshire granite, stratified in layers of home, church, motherhood, and country. He resented her pregnancy as an affront to decent motherhood, but she was too involved within herself to point out a conflict between his attitude and his religious nature: motherhood, under any circumstances, could not be indecent, since it was an Act of God. Besides, she was also immersed in books on international law that Wilma brought her from the hospital library.
Hans Clayborg had a word about an Act of God when he called on her a week before the USSS Botany left on its final voyage to Flora. “Freda, your pregnancy ruined us. I’m convinced there is a possibility of DNA linkage in a pregnancy-pollination series between an orchid, you, an orchid, and Paul. Here are my formulae describing how the linkup could occur, but now it would take an Act of God or an edict from the President to get you to Flora. Congress would never cooperate, because Heyburn draws a big vote from legally married housewives.”
“Hans, I don’t think pregnancy has ruined me. By terms of the International Agreement of 1998, the spouse of a defector can choose to live with the defector.”
“You and Theaston aren’t married.”
“The treaty allows for common-law marriages, since marriage customs differ from country to country, and I have proof of my relationship with Paul.” She patted her stomach.
“Possibly,” he agreed. “But what are the odds?”
“Fifty-fifty, between you and Paul.”
He seemed startled. “What about the psychiatrist who put the lock on the inside?”
Freda blushed slightly, but the truth was the truth. “I was his father image, and his abreaction to his father was such that it would not make a woman pregnant.”
She knew she had convinced Hans, because he grew suddenly solicitous. He took her hand and asked gently, “How do you feel, darling?”
“Like a chorus from Euripides,” she had to admit. “But you are my deus ex machina. I’m depending on you, Hans.”
“Freda, you split me down the middle! Of course I want to help, but if you’re the mother of my child, I’ll never let you go to Flora. There’s no woman on earth I adore as much as I—” He was holding her hand and leaning toward her, and she was enjoying the intimacy in his voice, when suddenly he jerked back. An idea had struck him.
“There’s possibility of a gene swap,” he said excitedly. “It’s retrograde, but it’s there! If the child is mine, you’ll be able to tell right away by its fully grown head of hair. All Clayborgs are born with long hair, but if the hair’s a bright red, or if the baby has bright green eyes, if its fingertips are dented inward, if it has an odor of vanilla, if it has any one of these indices, get a blood test made immediately. Tell them to look for trace amounts of chlorophyll. If there is, we’ll both go to Flora.”
Hans was not merely trying to cheer her. His fervor was too genuine, and it made her pray that the child be Paul’s. Hans had another mistress, his mind. He had completely forgot the sweet nothing he was about to whisper in her ear. Perhaps it was her pregnancy, she thought, but she craved sweet nothings.
He left her a copy of his calculations, which were as clear to her as the Goldberg Theory of Diminishing Entropy. Since she was a cystologist, she might have analyzed the equations, but at the moment she was occupied with knitting a bootee.
Days passed in tranquility toward her delivery date. Doctor Franks was a kindly old man who insisted on calling her “Mrs.” He was so far advanced in age that she might have questioned his ability to deliver had not Watts thawed enough to tell her that a younger doctor would be on hand to assist. “You’ll get full benefit of the civilization you reject,” he said.
It was pleasant to strip and undergo inspection by Doctor Frank
s. With him she felt appreciated as a noun rather than as an active verb. Despite his failing senses—he wore magnifying glasses in his spectacles’ rims and had to turn the amplifier of his stethoscope to maximum to pick up the baby’s heartbeat—his hands pummeled and probed with the deftness of an expert. And she enjoyed his sense of humor. Invariably he hobbled into her room, shouting in his high falsetto, “Hot-diggety-dog! Inspection time!”
Most of the time Freda sat alone, knitting, engrossed in her bodily processes, which acted as an anodyne to nostalgia. Yet she was aware always that in the far reaches of her consciousness the little winds of Flora were rustling through the groves, and the snow cone on Tropica rose silver in the sun. At night she sometimes awakened weeping for Paul, and in her dreams she was borne again between the ranks of her orchid lovers to a scarlet prince, well met by mellow-yellow moonlight.
Meanwhile, the Botany lifted off. Charlie Section returned to earth, and the Planet of Flowers was placed forever, by order of the United Nations, on the list of pariah planets. Outside the window, the hazy sun of summer faded to the smoky sun of autumn and merged into the leaden sun of winter. Freda, in her swelling loneliness, meditated on Time, which had carried her, in the space of three seasons, from an eager young junior executive to the stamen of an orchid on Flora and back again to the stigma of the bar sinister on earth, where she waited, incarcerated, famous to science but bearing a name that had fallen so low that a song of the same name had been barred from the airwaves.
If she had a son, she decided, she would call him Edmund, after the character in King Lear. A daughter she would call Florina.
As she sipped the vinegar and wine, time continued to sweep her along, into the delivery room, where masked faces floated above her in an anesthetic fog. Her last coherent thought was a prayer that the child be Paul’s.
Perhaps as a part of Watts’s continuing shock therapy, Freda felt, they brought the baby to her in her room, not in a bassinet but upon a white pillow. They prepared her formally, dressing her in an orchid-colored nightgown. Both Doctor Watts and Doctor Franks were in attendance, filing in ahead of the maternity nurse who carried the baby to place it in Freda’s arms. Technically, she carried the pillow on which the baby rested and placed the pillow in Freda’s arms.
Freda’s baby was a reddish-mahogany seed in the shape of a small, elongated football, almost six inches around the girth, where its umbilicus had been carefully knotted. There was a faint blond fuzz at one end, and Freda thrilled to the knowledge that Paul Theaston had at least contributed to her baby’s DNA.
“Freda,” Doctor Franks piped from the foot of her bed, “the standard remark at such times is: it’s a beautiful boy, or girl, as the case may be. By golly, I don’t know what that is!”
Freda hardly heard him, gazing down enraptured upon the fruit of her womb. She marveled at its iridescence. She loved its faint fragrance of vanilla. She was entranced by its almost perfectly formed oval shape. It was her baby, conceived in beauty and delivered at a moment unique in the history of mankind, a nonmewling, nonpuking, no-diapers-to-clean baby which carried its own formula with it wherever it went. More important, in her arms lay a bridge between the life and death of universes, and who could deny her pride in an offspring destined for immortality?
The voice of Doctor Watts grated through the nimbus of her joy, asking, “Freda, do you feel maternal pride in that?”
Freda lifted glowing eyes to the psychiatrist. “Doctor Watts, every mother thinks her baby unique among the babies of the world. I’ve settled that argument forever.”
“As an obstetrician, danged if I won’t vouch for that,” Doctor Franks said. “But there’s one thing I’d like to check, Freda. I swear I heard a heartbeat.”
While Freda held its pillow, Doctor Franks bent down and placed his stethoscope halfway between the umbilicus and the blond fuzz and listened intently. “Heck fire! I do hear a heartbeat.”
“Doctor Franks,” Doctor Watts said, “the volume’s up so high your stethoscope is picking up your wristwatch.”
Watts turned to Freda with a strange gentleness in his voice. “What do you want done with it, Freda? Shall we bury it or cremate it?”
“Neither,” Freda answered. “We’ll plant it. But not here. Air-express it to Doctor Clayborg at Santa Barbara. He’ll know how to prepare the soil. But let me hold it a little while longer.”
She returned her gaze to the ovate sphere, feeling the universal adoration of all motherhood, supported by a more personal joy of recognition. It was more than the world’s most unique baby she held in her arms; it was the Act of God that Clayborg had requested, and it would be followed, as the night the day, by an edict from the President.
On the pillow in her arms lay her reddish-mahogany passport to Flora.
Curtly now, Doctor Watts instructed the nurse to wrap the seed in tissue paper and send it to Santa Barbara. He dismissed the nurse and the seed and aided Doctor Franks, slightly confused, from the room. Watts quietly closed the door and locked it from the inside.
When he turned to Freda, Doctor Watts’s face was no longer frozen in lines of moral rectitude. Its ice had broken, and it was twisting and untwisting as he fought to keep his composure. As if staggering under a burden, he walked over and knelt beside her bed, taking her hand and burying his face beside it in the bedclothes. Suddenly she realized he was weeping, that his stratum of New Hampshire granite had cracked. With her free hand, she twisted over and patted his head, and he looked up at her through tearstained eyes.
“Freda, forgive me. You are the Earth Mother. I’ve never seen such a beautiful maternal glow in the eyes of a woman, and under such adverse conditions. I have wronged you, Freda.”
“Before you became a psychiatrist, Doctor Watts, what did your friends call you?”
“Ronnie.”
Freda superimposed the image of a red orchid around the face lifted to her. One of his problems, as she had sensed, was deep-seated though simple: he had been weaned too early. Although his immediate reaction had been triggered by the proximity of lactose, what startled her was the depth of the Oedipus complex beneath his vein of granite. Her austere Pavlovian was in secret and in truth what she had often called him in private, a mother-lover.
Self-knowledge was not a necessary part of the therapy for Pavlovians, she recalled. All Ronnie must do was to learn new habits to replace his old, and she could retrain him in a trice. Meanwhile, he could help her with a minor but pressing problem. Bearing a seed, in Hal Polino’s words, had been “no strain, no pain,” but there were attendant discomforts.
“Ronnie,” she said, stroking lightly the underjaw of his now radiant face, “ours is a world of reciprocal agreements. Generosity is so rare that the generous are confined to institutions and called by long Latin names. I wish to do something for you, but first you must do something for me.”
“Anything, Freda. I’ll do anything to atone.”
What she proposed was less a reciprocal agreement than three gifts in succession, but she wanted him to think that he was contributing, and she did not want to leave the earth with any loose ends dangling. While he was bending to kiss her hand, she made a slight adjustment to her nightgown.
When Ronnie raised his eyes, one glimpse of their glow told her that her analysis of his needs had been correct. As he raised himself slightly and bent over her, she knew that earth was bidding hello to its latest humanist and farewell to its last Puritan.
FROM: The President of the United States
TO: The Commanding Officer, NASA
To his good and faithful servant, the President sends greetings. At the request of our beloved minister without portfolio, Doctor Hans Clayborg, IAS, who assumes full responsibility for any failures of this mission, you are hereby charged to release and transport Freda Janet Caron, patient, and to transport Wilma Rose Firbank, RN, and Ruby May Washington, dietician, to the planet known variously as Flora, the Flower Planet, or the Planet of Flowers. Upon arrival, you are dire
cted to deposit the named females upon the fourth terrace of the island of Tropica, there to remain forever.
You are further directed to assign each female one machete, such machetes to be purveyed in accordance with Naval Regulation #376,854,329.
We are desirous that the long-term gains of this project shall redound to the benefit of all peoples, on earth and in the high heavens, and to the everlasting credit of the undersigned Chief Executive.
The President
