Jack the Bodiless (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (45 page)

Teresa told him exactly what lay ahead of him. She also explained how the pangs of birth were known to help even ordinary babies, in a purely physical way. The squeezing forced fluid from new lungs, so that they would be better prepared for the first breath of air. The shock of bright light, the sudden chilling, and the unaccustomed handling he would experience were stresses that actually had been proved to benefit healthy newborns. As they raged against the deprivation of uterine comfort, there was a feedback to the brain that enabled the babies to better adapt to life in the outer world.

Jack, because he was already rational, would suffer mentally as well as physically during his birth. But Teresa told him she was certain that if he
prayed
with complete trust, the pain would bring him strength. If he exerted positive coercion
upon both himself and God—which was what “prayer” meant—then the birth ordeal would be in the end a triumphant experience for him, just as similar ordeals had been for mature humans all throughout history. Enduring the pain in the proper frame of mind could enhance his life in some mysterious way.

Birth, she explained to Jack, was a great transition—the first of many he would eventually pass through. He was about to lose forever the sheltered dimness, the suspended comfort and total security of the womb. He would come out into a world of light where there were opportunities for great joy and satisfaction, for individual types of accomplishment impossible for fetuses dependent upon their mothers. In this new world, suffering was commonplace—not because the Creator had maliciously planned it so, but because of the limitations of the physical universe and the imperfections of living things. Teresa warned her son that he would not only suffer at birth but also know pain of many different sorts during the independent life that lay ahead of him. It was part of being human.

But pain, she said, was a peculiar thing. Only higher living things had evolved the ability to suffer, and the higher the creature, the more intense its hurts might be—and so pain must have survival value. She explained to Jack some of its more elementary useful aspects, then went on to discuss the more difficult side of it. Intense pain could be, and perhaps most often was, degrading to the spirit of rational beings. However it might also be transformed by directed willpower—prayer—into a thing of great value, something that might enhance a person’s own self-worth if he suffered for love of himself, or something that might magnify the worth of the great Mind of the universe if the person was able to suffer for love of others.

Jack had already begun to assimilate, with her help, the abstract concept of an incarnate God. Now she attempted to amplify the divine absurdity to include the notion of God freely choosing to suffer and die in order to achieve a higher goal.

Teresa was no theologian, but she was (in spite of her protestations to the contrary) an educated woman and also a very talented artist who had endured much to enhance that art. Her own ability to love both her husband and her children was seriously flawed by the demands and distractions
of her singing; but the roles she had played had taught her well the extreme lengths to which love could drive the lover: to murder, to suicide, to madness, and even to greathearted sacrifice of one’s own life and happiness.

Teresa told Jack that suffering for the love of others was a concept he would have to learn about more fully later, when he was more mature. Now it could only be an abstraction to him, except perhaps for his imperfect understanding of what his mother and his Uncle Rogi had endured for his sake.

Suffering for love of himself, on the other hand, was an opportunity no other unborn child—with the exception of an incarnate God—had ever experienced. This kind of suffering could teach him things about his own soul. It could strengthen him and expand his conscious mentality in an extraordinary way.

“Bearing children and giving birth to them is a great ordeal for the mother,” she told the child in her womb. “But if she does it in the natural way, fully prepared and unafraid, then it’s not a horror at all but an exaltation. At the instant the child’s head is born, the discomforts of pregnancy and the difficult labor are completely forgotten, and the mother’s nervous system responds with a flood of ecstasy … And I hope it may be the same for you, my dear little son.”

Jack said only: I will think about this.

When he was asleep (fetuses do sleep, even precocious ones), she confided to me that Jack was particularly fearful that birth trauma might interfere with his intellectual and metapsychic functioning, which he called his High Self. (His Low Self was the animal part of his mentality.) He was afraid that if he was “badly disturbed” and lost control during the ordeal, his Low Self and High Self would be somehow disconnected, leaving him dangerously exposed to … something.

“The poor thing is only a baby,” I pointed out. “All very well for you to urge him to pray and be strong—but what if he can’t manage? This ‘High Self/Low Self’ talk of his reminds me of something I read about Native American initiation ordeals. If you panic, the demons can get you! I suppose Jack’s demons would only be subconscious ones—”

“I told him that we would guard him, Rogi.” Teresa was
quite serious. “That we would stay alert and keep his mind safe from outside threats if he should become vulnerable.” She eyed me in that oddly trusting way of hers. “I have no idea what he perceives this threat to be. It must be some monster of the id. Surely no hostile external metapsychic influence could touch him here … could it?”

“I don’t see how. Coercion can’t operate at long range. Neither can the harmful types of redaction or creativity. The most that could happen is that one of the family could watch the birth: you know—through EE.”

“I’m sure Jack’s fears are irrational—as you said, he is only a baby!—but we must respect them. If Denis or even Paul should farspeak you, don’t give any hint that I’m about to give birth. No one except you and I should witness my baby’s first experience with pain.”

Obscurely troubled, I agreed.

The weather had turned clear, and so hideously cold that when night came we heard trees exploding in the forest around us as freezing sap burst the wood fibers. Several of the roof timbers exploded as well, startling us out of our wits. When we awoke the next morning, the front door was covered with thick hoarfrost from top to bottom. Previously, it had never frosted more than halfway up. A long time later, I questioned Bill Parmentier as to the possible temperature on that day, based upon my environmental observations, and he had shrugged. “Mighta been thirty, forty below, maybe. Not really all that cold for these parts. Just a bit brisk.”

Naturally, that was the day young Ti-Jean, my great-grandnephew Jon Remillard, had to be born.

“Do you realize that today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas?” Teresa said, after she announced that her labor had begun. “Epiphany. A very auspicious time for Jack’s manifestation! But the Bigfeet will have to stand in for the Magi.” She laughed. “Be sure to farspeak them the big news after Jack arrives.”

The baby’s response to the beginning of labor was to virtually suspend communication with his mother, telling her that he needed to marshal all his mental resources to prevent, if possible, the separation of his two mystical selves. Teresa did not seem particularly worried about his withdrawal. Her mental state was one of great exhilaration—
almost euphoria—because her most difficult pregnancy was over at last. She told me she had an overwhelming desire now to see her son, to hold him in her arms and kiss him and nurse him, to experience the body as well as the mind of this child whose gestation had been so perilous.

Both of us had been able to visualize the fetus with our ultrasenses, and we knew he was normally formed, in spite of what the dire genetic assay had predicted. But we wanted to see him, to be
sure
.

During the morning and afternoon hours, when the contractions were still far apart, Teresa continued with her cooking and cleaning and other household chores, stopping only to close her eyes and breathe in a completely relaxed manner when the pangs came. She explained to both me and Jack that this first stage of labor involved the dilation of the cervix, the birth canal.

After I’d performed my usual hewing of wood and drawing of water, she put a childbirth fleck into the plaque-reader and demanded that I absorb every awful detail, so I’d know what to expect. She reminded both of us that she had already borne four babies using the techniques of natural childbirth, without any recourse to chemical or mental anesthetics or any unusual medical intervention. (But she said nothing about the stillbirths or the abortions, nor did she mention Marc’s twin, Matthieu, who had died in utero under very peculiar circumstances.)

According to Teresa, there was no need for us to worry overmuch about the “unsterile” conditions in our log cabin. Newborns were usually quite tough, and she herself was perfectly healthy. Only ordinary precautions of cleanliness were called for. She took lengths of flannelette and wool that she had prepared and baked them in batches in the Coleman oven, and she boiled a knife and some string and wrapped them in a clean cloth. A pailful of boiled water was covered with a foil lid and left ready near the stove for washing mother and baby after the birth. She had me bring in a large quantity of sawdust from the woodcutting area. Chopped-up lumps of this were laid to thaw on the floor beneath the lower half of the bed. (Teresa discreetly left me in ignorance of the sawdust’s function. So did the damned maternity fleck.)

When she began to approach the later stages of labor, she had me stoke up the fire until the stove was aglow and the
log cabin’s inside temperature approached that of a normal civilized room. Then we got her bed ready. She was going to lie with her head where her feet ordinarily were, in order to give me, the amateur accoucheur, more room to maneuver in. We arranged the folded air mattress and the pillows, first covered with plass and then with the wool duffel cloth, to form a slanted backrest. She would give birth in a half-sitting position, which was the most comfortable. On the half of the bed where the rope springs were exposed, she placed a pair of long wool pads she had made. They fitted into the bedframe rather like two small mattresses, with a slight gap between them down the middle of the bed. A large piece of sterile flannelette was laid atop the pads, making the bed’s lower end look more normal.

Teresa showered in our little bath cubicle, using warm water with a bit of chlorine bleach in it, and then put on her long Snegurochka undergown, warm from the oven. Facetiously commanding me to avert my eyes, she got into bed with the back of the gown hoicked up and made herself comfortable. The upper part of her body rested against the folded mattress and pillows, but from the rump down she lay on the pads, with the front of her gown drawn modestly over her knees, and her feet, with clean socks on, braced against the foot of the bedframe. She faced the north window and the large table, where the lamps were turned on at low intensity and all of the birthing supplies had been laid neatly out.

“Now cover me up,” she said, after pausing to endure a contraction. “First, the big flannelette sheet.”

I laid it over her reverently.

“Now my down comforter, with the excess rolled up against the wall. For God’s sake don’t let it drag on the floor in that damp sawdust.”

“Yes, ma’am. But the sawdust is really pretty clean.”

“It is
now.”
She gave a great contented sigh. “Oh, that’s better. Now all I have to do is wait. And when the time comes, all
you
have to do is help me the way I tell you.”

And avoid giving way to panic!

I grinned, putting on my best air of confidence. “Are you sure it isn’t drafty—uh—underneath?”

“Trust me. Everything is just fine.”

I pointed wordlessly to the swell beneath the covers and lifted my eyebrows.

“He’s … quiet,” she said. “I can sense his distress at the contractions. It’s his head, after all, that’s dilating the cervix. Poor little baby! It will be much harder on him than on me. But there’s no helping it. An ordinary baby would feel very little discomfort, and he’d forget it immediately. But the birth process just doesn’t take rational fetuses into account.”

Late in the evening, Denis farspoke me the details of the Conciliar Inauguration, including Paul’s election as First Magnate. Mercifully, he didn’t mention the warm cordiality so evident between Paul, presumed by all except the family cognoscenti to be a widower, and the lovely Laura Tremblay; nor did he discuss with me the murder of Margaret Strayhorn. (I was not to learn anything about the exploits of the being called Hydra until after my return to civilization.)

Denis wanted to know whether the birth was imminent and asked whether Teresa would farspeak with him or Paul after Jack was born. I lied brazenly, saying that there was no sign of labor as yet. I told Denis that Teresa was asleep, and that she still was afraid that farspeaking would betray her to her enemies, and so she probably would prefer not to attempt it. I said I would continue to be the conduit of maternity news. This seemed to satisfy Denis. Concilium Orb was so far from Earth that he would be unlikely to attempt casual EE. Even for a Grand Master, using the ultrasenses across a distance of 4000 lightyears was no trivial operation, and I didn’t think Denis would add to his exertions by trying to view us, as well as speak telepathically, unless he had a good reason to do so.

When Denis had finished with me, I reassured Teresa, who had been hiding anxiously behind the strongest mental screen she was able to conjure up. But her refusal to farspeak her kindly and solicitous father-in-law, who would probably play an important role in her upcoming reappearance and legal battles, worried me. And then there was Paul. He was just as expert as Denis—perhaps even more so—in fine-beaming his thoughts so that no Magistratum monitor would pick them up. If Teresa really loved him and hoped for a reconciliation, she would have to respond to his telepathic call. When she continued to demur, I told her I was
afraid that she had an entirely different reason for avoiding Paul.