Helen’s time came upon her suddenly, on a night of cannonading thunderheads. In spite of the noise I had been sleeping—until Helen rose from our pallet of grasses and, one hand in the small of her back, ducked outside into the artillery din of the storm. I waited for her to return. She did not. At last, then, I blundered outside after her.
Far out on the northwestern horizon a carrier task force of clouds had just received several torpedoes amidships. Directly overhead, though, was a webwork of gauzy stars. The wind was beginning to blow spiritedly. An inauspicious night for the birth of a half-breed kid who was probably going to have plenty of troubles anyway. I called to Helen, but received no answer.
“Hunnnh!”
This was from Malcolm, who seemed to spend nine-tenths of his waking hours in trees. From his lookout in the Nandi flame, he pointed me to the clumsy windbreak in which Guinevere usually slept.
That made sense. During the delivery of her first child Helen would naturally go to her mother for help. I climbed through a rocky section of Shangri-la to Guinevere’s shelter.
Neither Helen nor her mother tried to keep me out, but they did practically ignore my arrival. The hovel had no roof, and starlight and torpedo bursts of sheet lightning served to illuminate its small interior. Helen was in pain, and Guinevere had shoved a great quantity of dry grass against a section of the windbreak to support her back. By the time Helen’s water burst, I reasoned, it was entirely possible that the gathering clouds would also split their containing membranes and inundate us.
Don’t let it rain, I supplicated Ngai, or whatever deity had tutelage over this ghostly dimension. Please don’t let it rain.
Helen did not have it easy. Intense, painful contractions came upon her. At every cramp her eyes disappeared behind her brow ridge (giving me to understand the horror that this sort of eyeball rolling had held for my adoptive mother) and her hand squeezed mine tightly. This repetitive ritual went on for at least an hour, Guinevere and I occasionally shifting places to allow the other a chance to shake the kinks out of our knuckles. While I was at Helen’s side, I kept up a steady, asinine murmur that was meant to be heartening and supportive.
“It’s gonna be okay, Helen, gonna be oh-so-fine. The monkey spit tobacco on the streetcar line. The streetcar it broke, and the monkey got choke’, and they all went to heaven in a little red boat,” et cetera and so forth, the more sinister implications of this refrain going completely over my head and fortunately over Helen’s and Guinevere’s too.
Although I am certain that Helen never understood the significance of the nausea early in her pregnancy, she knew what was happening to her now. She had seen others give birth; twice, at least, she had kidnapped the infants of vaguely collateral species to hold them in her arms; and she had felt her own baby kick. Motherhood was the reward for all this pain, the land-rush territory beckoning the battered buckboard of her body onward to a permanent homestead, and she knew what her pain signified.
Although the rain held off, over Lake Kiboko the lightning show was heating up, and admonitory rumbles made the horizon tremble. Everything was happening northwest of us, out where Zarakal, Ethiopia, and Somalia would one day put their troops in a deranged effort to establish borders where no one had ever observed any.
Helen paid no attention to the noise. She was trying to bear her child, but her body would not cooperate. The baby’s head, which had descended through the uterus as far as it could go unaided, was too big for Helen’s narrow pelvic structure. She was taller than any other female habiline, but her tallness was of the sylphid kind, loose and willowy. Because my endocranial volume outpointed hers by at least seven hundred centimeters, her baby had inherited from me a genetic template for a brain case perilously larger than the habiline norm.
In pain shalt thou bring forth children.
The price for the development of a mind capable of making abstract moral judgments is pain in childbirth, while the penalty for paying the price is expulsion from the Garden. Looking at Helen’s strobe-lit face, I knew that her expulsion would come not at the hands of dutiful cherubim but instead through the cold instrumentality of Death. She was not going to make it. Her eyes trembled in their sockets. Her naked forehead ran with sweat. The flashes of sheet lightning over the distant lake seemed to drain the indigo sheen of health from her face. Her skin was slack and gray.
I went back to our shelter and found my pocketknife. It had proved useful in separating Jomo from his ear, but now it must perform a more urgent task, saving Helen’s life. I gathered together all the dry grass in our hut, carried it outside, and set it afire with one of the last of my matches. Then, as Malcolm gazed down skeptically, I piled brushwood on the fire and sterilized my large pen blade in the unruly flames.
Snatching the knife out again, I blistered my fingers, but the pain was of no consequence, and I ignored it to get back to Helen.
Emily, Dilsey, and Alfie had also entered Guinevere’s semicircular windbreak. Their eyes turned toward me, going almost immediately to the knife. I gestured with it, eased my way inward, and knelt by Helen with a premonition of disaster settling in my belly. My entire body seemed to be held together by gummy resins and tangled strings.
Helen cried out, an inhuman cry of warning and pain. Everyone looked at her, then at me. I raised the knife and told the habilines in clear, calm, rational tones that it might be necessary to make an incision in the outer edge of Helen’s vagina to facilitate delivery. My fear was that this cut, even if I could make it cleanly, would prove an inadequate remedy for her troubles. In fact, I had brought the knife thinking that if she died in labor, I might be able to rescue the infant with a crude Caesarean section.
The clinical clarity of this plan broke down under the weight of Helen’s suffering. The idea of even touching her with the knife sickened me, and I dropped it into the dirt. In deepening perplexity four silent habilines looked on, consoling one another with embraces and absent-minded pats. I do not think that even Dilsey had ever witnessed so taxing a labor.
As the storm drifted southwest from the Horn—sheet lightning giving way to zigzag slashes of almost unendurable brilliance, thunder whip-cracking after every bolt—Helen somehow managed to evict the tiny torturer in her womb. Guinevere, not I, received the child. In the oppressive glow of the storm its body shone neither blue-black nor gray, but a startlingly phosphorescent white.
The baby’s skin was blancmange, the color of milk pudding. How could this unappetizing little grub be the issue of my lovemaking with Helen? The mired hippopotamus that the Minids had eaten had been a lovelier hue, a more comprehensible variety of mutant. I had refused to eat of it for fear of violating the integrity of one of my dreams—but this creature, my daughter, how was I ever going to be able to love her? Her head was too large for her gaunt body; her pallor suggested not merely albinism but illness.
“Mai mwah,” said Helen feebly from where she lay.
I placed the grub at full length between my wife’s breasts. Helen enfolded the child in her hairy arms, lifting her head to peer downward at the little creature. Her lips parted. “Mai mwah,” she said again. No one moved. The grub found one of Helen’s breasts and began to suckle: a small ivory incubus drinking the heart’s blood of the woman who had borne her.
Chapter Twenty-Seven