The months between Christmas and Easter, though I spent them mainly on the grounds of the Executive Palace and under unnerving circumstances, were nevertheless happy ones in many ways.
Mainly this was because I could be close to Calyxa. She remained under the Ecclesiastical Writ, and could not leave the enclosure, but her pregnancy would have kept her largely confined in any case; and we had Julian’s assurances that he would shelter her from the Deacon’s henchmen, and that she would receive the best medical attention doctors of the Eupatridian class could provide.
At the same time I was working on the novel I had promised to Mr. John Hungerford, the publisher of the Spark. The title I settled on was A Western Boy at Sea; or, Lost and Found in the Pacific. In part I had taken the advice Theodore Dornwood gave me after the Battle of Mascouche, to “write what you know,” and I had made the hero a young man much like myself, if somewhat more innocent and trusting. Much of the narrative, however, concerned Pacific islands, and pirates, and sea adventures in general. For these passages I employed what I had learned of sailing from my time aboard the Basilisk, along with some generous borrowing from the work of Charles Curtis Easton, whose stories had taught me all I knew about the business of Asiatic piracy.
The book was a pleasure to write, and I thought it both original and good, though what was original about it was not necessarily good, and what was good about it was not always original. The chapters I showed to Mr. Hunger-ford pleased him, and he declared that the finished product would probably sell briskly, “given the popular taste in such things.”
Most mornings I wrote until noon, and then took lunch with Calyxa. During the afternoon I would walk for exercise, sometimes in the streets of Manhattan but more often, as the weather improved, on the Palace grounds. The ancient “Park,” as some of the groundsmen still called it, was full of peculiarities to interest the casual stroller. There was, for instance, an elderly male Giraffe—last descendant of a family of those unlikely creatures, donated by an African prime minister during the days of the Pious Presidents—who was allowed to wander freely, eating leaves from trees and hay from the lofts of the horse-barns. It was best not to approach the animal too closely, for he was evil-tempered and would stampede anyone who annoyed him. But he was beautiful when apprehended from a distance, where his shabbiness and bile were less distinct. He especially liked to pass time on the Statuary Lawn, and it was fascinating to see him taking the shade of Cleopatra’s Needle, or standing next to the copper torch of the Colossus of Liberty as if he expected it to sprout green and edible shoots, which of course it never did.
On rainy days he sheltered in the ailanthus grove near the Pond. There were fences to keep him out of the Hunting Grounds, so he wouldn’t be accidentally shot. His name, the grounds-keepers told me, was Otis. He was a noble bachelor Giraffe, and I admired him.
There were occasions that winter when Julian, weary of the distractions of the Presidency, came to the guest house and asked me to go rambling with him. We spent several sunny, chilly afternoons walking the preserve with rifles, pretending to hunt but really just reliving the simple pleasures we had shared in Williams Ford. Julian continued to talk about Philosophy, and the Fate of the Universe, and such things—interests which had been rekindled by his exploration of the Dominion Archive and deepened by the tragedies he had experienced at war. A certain tone entered his conversation—melancholy, almost elegiac—which I had not heard before, and I put this down to his experiences during the Goose Bay Campaign, which had hardened him considerably.
He visited the liberated Archive often. One Saturday in March I went with him to that contested building, at his invitation. The building’s marbled facade, one of the oldest standing structures in the city, was still ringed with armed guards, to prevent any attempt at re-occupation by the Ecclesiastical Police. We arrived under the careful escort of the Republican Guard, but once inside we were able to roam unaccompanied in what Julian called “the Stacks”—room after room of tightly-packed and closely-arranged shelves, on which books from the days of the Secular Ancients were arrayed in startling numbers.
“It’s a good thing for us the Ancients were so prolific in their publishing,” Julian said, his voice echoing among the dusty casements. “During the Fall of the Cities books were often burned for fuel. Millions of them must have been lost in that way—and millions more to neglect, mildew, floods, and so on. But they were produced in such numbers that many still survive, as you can see. The Dominion did us a noble service by preserving them, and committed a heinous crime by keeping them hidden.”
The titles I inspected seemed random, and the books, long neglected by their Dominion caretakers, had not been arranged according to any rational scheme, though Julian had initiated the work of having them catalogued and itemized. “Here,” Julian said, drawing my attention to a particular shelf which his small army of clerks and scholars had begun to arrange, labeled Scientific Subjects. It held not one but three copies of the History of Mankind in Space, all of them pristine, covers and bindings intact.
He took one down and handed it to me. “Keep it, Adam—your old copy must be getting ragged by now, and there are duplicates. It won’t be missed.”
This book, unlike the one recovered from the Tip at Williams Ford, possessed a brightly colored paper wrapper, with a picture of what I recognized from previous study as the Plains of Mars, dusty under a pinkish sky. The printed image was so crisp and clear it made me shiver, as if the ethereal winds of that distant planet were blowing out of it. “But it must be very valuable,” I said.
“There are things in this building far more valuable than that. Authors and texts from the Efflorescence of Oil and before. Think about the Dominion-approved literature we were raised on, Adam, all that nineteenth-century piety the clergy admire so—Susan Warner and Mrs. Eckerson and Elijah Kellog and that crew—but the Dominion readers don’t include Hawthorne from that era, or Melville, or Southworth, just to begin with. And as for the twentieth century, there’s a whole world we haven’t been allowed to see—scientific and engineering documents, works of unbiased history, novels in which people curse like sailors and fly in airplanes …. Do you know what we found locked away in the cellar, Adam?”
“I’m sure I don’t.”
“Movies!” He grinned. “At least a dozen of them—movies on celluloid film, in metal canisters, from the days of the Secular Ancients!”
“I thought none had survived.”
“I thought so too, until we uncovered these.”
“Have you seen any of them?”
“Not yet. They’re fragile, and they don’t run in the simple projection machines we use. But I assigned a group of mechanics to study them and work on the problem of duplicating them for posterity, or at least rendering them into a form more easily viewed.”
This was all wonderful and daunting. I took books from the shelves and handled them reverently, fully conscious that they had not been regarded by sympathetic eyes since before the Fall of the Cities. Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.
It was dark by the time we left, and I was dazed by what I had seen. We were silent for a time as the carriage and its military escort passed along Broadway and into the grounds of the Presidential Palace. But I had been thinking about what Julian had said regarding movies, and I was reminded of that project he used to talk about so passionately, namely The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. “What about your movie, Julian?” I asked. “Have you made any advancement on that front?” Julian was busy these days with matters of State; but in his spare time, he had admitted to me, he still contemplated the project, which might now be within practical reach; and he had begun writing a script for it.
On this occasion he was evasive. “Certain things are difficult to work out. Details of plot and so forth. The script is like a horse with a nail in its hoof—it isn’t dead, but it won’t move forward.”
“What are the problems exactly?”
“I make Darwin the hero of it, and we see his fascination with beetles, as a child, and he talks about the relationship of all living things, and then he gets on a boat and goes looking at finches—”
“Finches?”
“For the shape of their beaks and such, which leads him to certain conclusions about heredity and environment. All this is important and true, but it lacks …”
“Drama,” I suggested.
“Drama, possibly.”
“Well, the boat is a good touch. You can’t go wrong with a boat.”
“The heart of the thing eludes me. It won’t settle down on paper the way I want it to.”
“Perhaps I can help you with it.”
“Thank you, Adam, but no. I would rather keep the business to myself, at least for now.”
If Julian’s cinematic work-in-progress lacked drama, the incidents of daily life did not, especially regarding his increasingly hostile relations with the Dominion of Jesus Christ in general and Deacon Hollingshead in particular.
Sam told me he feared Julian was involving himself in a battle he could never win. The Dominion had a devious history and deep pockets, he said, and Julian’s best bet would be to ingratiate himself with the Senate, and be sure to keep the Army on his side, which would give him greater leverage in any political wrestling match with Colorado Springs.
But that was strategy for the long run; in the short term it was the threat to Calyxa that concerned us. Julian’s capture of the Dominion Archive did not result in the withdrawal of the Writ against Calyxa … nor did it seem that Julian would be willing to surrender his prize, now that he had it in his possession, even if such a bargain had been offered. But he continued to insist that Calyxa was safe; and I could hardly believe otherwise, since it would require a wholesale revolution before the Dominion could march onto the grounds of the Executive Palace and take her into their custody. In all likelihood, Julian said, Deacon Hollingshead wouldn’t even issue a summons to court; if he did, Julian would see that it was quashed.
In light of all this he began to take a greater interest in the events that had resulted in the Writ of Ecclesiastical Quarantine in the first place. “This Church where you were Found In,” he asked Calyxa, “is it still in operation or did Hollingshead shut it down completely?”
The Parmentierist friends Calyxa had made in the city continued to keep her informed of developments. She sat on a sofa in the guest-house (this was late in March, on a windy night), her swollen belly prominent under a maternity dress Mrs. Comstock had obtained for her. She looked beatific, I thought, with her coiled hair for a halo; and I could not so much as glance at her without smiling to myself.*
“Its former location has been seized and put up for auction,” she said. “But Pastor Stepney managed to avoid arrest. The Church of the Apostles Etc. continues to meet, at a new location … and with a different congregation, since the first batch are still in prison.”
“I’m curious about this church. We might do ourselves a favor by learning more about the case, as a way of anticipating any new move Hollingshead might make.”
“Stepney seems like a good man,” Mrs. Comstock remarked, “though I only saw him from a distance. I was impressed with him, despite his radical doctrines.”
(She said this even though she knew the words would make Sam, who was also visiting us that evening, shudder and scowl. She gave him sidelong glances to gauge his reaction, which I suspect she found entertaining.)
“I could take you there,” Calyxa said, “if I were allowed to travel freely in the city.”
She was far too close to her term to entertain any such idea, and Julian quickly demurred. Then Mrs. Comstock said, “Well, I for one would like a chance to speak to Pastor Stepney, and get to know him. Perhaps I could go with you, Julian, if Calyxa will tell us the current address.”
“The last thing we need,” Sam growled, “if for you to be ‘Found In’ a second time. I won’t sanction it.”
“I didn’t ask for your sanction,” Mrs. Comstock said stiffly.
Julian forestalled the argument with a wave of his hand. “I’m the one who’s curious,” he said. “And I’m the one Deacon Hollingshead wouldn’t dare to arrest. Perhaps Adam and I can go to this man’s church, with enough Republican Guards to warn us if the Dominion tries some trick.”
“It would be dangerous even so,” said Sam.
“Is it Hollingshead you’re afraid of, Sam, or the charismatic Mr. Stepney?”
Sam didn’t respond to Julian’s impertinent question, but lapsed into a brooding silence.
“It might be a fascinating Expedition,” Julian repeated. “Will you come with me, Adam? Tomorrow, say?”
I said I would. In fact I wasn’t much interested in Pastor Stepney’s apostate church. But I was interested in Julian’s interest in it.
“Stepney is just the type to intrigue Julian,” Calyxa said as I climbed into bed beside her that night. March breezes rattled the big bedroom windows, and it was pleasant to huddle under the thick blankets with my arm around my wife. “Probably a fraud, like most of these unaffiliated pastors, and his doctrines don’t interest me. But he was generous to the Parmentierists who met at his church, and he talked a good line, whenever I happened to overhear him. Not the usual small-church fanaticism. Much about Time and Evolution and such topics, the sort of thing Julian likes to babble about, and he’s as eloquent as any Aristo.”
“Julian thinks of it as Philosophy more than Babble,” I said.
“Maybe so. Either way, it’s thin gruel for a working woman or a mechanic with a grievance. Here, fold yourself around me, Adam—I’m cold.”
I did as she asked, and we grew warm together.
Pastor Stepney’s former church in the Immigrant District having been seized and sold, he had moved his enterprise to the loft of a crumbling warehouse alongside one of the canals of Lower Manhattan. Julian disguised himself in the clothing of an ordinary working man, and I wore the same, and we walked up the wooden steps to the loft by ourselves, though there were Republican Guards in plain clothes outside, ready to warn us if the Dominion’s men arrived in any force.
A sign had been tacked to the door at the top of the stairs, engraved in an ornate script with the words:
CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES ETC.
GOD IS CONSCIENCE
—HAVE NO OTHER—
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOUR BROTHER
“That’s a noble sentiment,” I said.
“I suppose it is. More often honored in the breach, though, I imagine. We’ll see.” Julian knocked at the door.
It was answered by a woman in a tight red dress and a heavy shawl. In appearance she resembled one of the less virtuous women who frequented the neighborhood, perhaps a few years past her peak of desirability; but I don’t meant to insult her character, only to offer a description. “Yes?” she said.
“We would like to meet Pastor Stepney,” said Julian.
“There’s no service on at the moment.”
“That’s all right. We don’t require one.”
“Well, come in.” The woman admitted us into a small, barely-furnished room. “I’ll tell him you’re here, if you tell me who you are.”
“Pilgrims in search of enlightenment,” Julian said, smiling.
“We get five or six of those a day,” the woman said. “Pilgrims are cheap as fleas around here. Sit down, I’ll find out if he has time for you.”
She vanished through another door, and we perched ourselves on the small bench that was the only available seat. A few pamphlets had been left on the rough pine table in front of us. The Evolving God was the title of one. “He takes an interest in Evolution,” I said. “That’s unusual for a clergyman.”
“I doubt he knows what he’s talking about. These impostors seldom do.”
“But perhaps he’s sincere.”
“Even worse,” said Julian.
Then the adjoining door opened, and Pastor Stepney himself came into the room.
He was a handsome man. Mrs. Comstock and Calyxa had already testified to that effect, and I could not say they were wrong. Stepney was a tall, slender youth—he looked no older than Julian—with lustrously dark skin and wiry hair. But his most arresting feature was his eyes, which were penetrating, opulent, and of a shade so dark it was almost umber. He gave us a benevolent smile and said in a soothing voice, “How can I help you boys? Come for some spiritual wisdom, have you? I’m at your service, as long as you don’t forget the donation-box on the way out.”
Julian stood up at once. His demeanor had utterly changed. His eyes grew wide with astonishment. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Of all the Stepneys in New York City—is that you, Magnus?”
“Magnus Stepney, yes,” the pastor said, backing off warily.
“Don’t you know me, Magnus? Though we’re both years older now!”
The young pastor frowned a moment more; then his own eyes expanded in astonishment. “Julian!” he cried, a grin breaking out on his face. “Julian Comstock, by the grace of God! But aren’t you President now?”
It took me a while to sort out this unexpected development, but I won’t compel the reader to share my own confusion. It was obvious that Julian and Stepney had met before, and from listening to their conversation I garnered a few salient facts.
Stepney invited us into his sanctuary—which was the greater part of the warehouse loft, fixed up with benches and a makeshift altar—so that we could talk more comfortably. I use the collective “we,” but in fact it was Julian and the pastor who talked—I kept out of it. They had embarked on a series of reminiscences even before Julian remembered to introduce me.
“This is Magnus Stepney, an old acquaintance of mine,” he said eventually. “Magnus, this is Adam Hazzard, another friend.”
Pastor Stepney shook my hand, and his grip was strong and genial. “Pleased to meet you, Adam. Are you also some high functionary in the Executive Branch, operating in disguise?”
“No, just a writer,” I said.
Julian explained that he had gone to school with this man (boy, in those days) before he was sent to Williams Ford to protect him from his uncle. The school they had attended was a Eupatridian institution in which bright Aristo children were taught whatever it was considered decorous to know about arithmetic and literature. Julian and Magnus had been fast friends, I gathered, and a continual terror to their overseers. Both had been intelligent in advance of their years and impudent in their relations with authority. The friendship had been prematurely severed by Julian’s evacuation to Athabaska, and Julian had lost track of his former acquaintance. “How on earth did you come to be a pastor of a scofflaw Church?” Julian asked.
“My father wouldn’t toady to the Senate in some conflict over a dockside property,” Stepney said, “and he was punished for it, and forced to flee to Mediterranean France for his own safety. My mother and I would have followed after a prudent time, but his ship was lost at sea. My mother was all the family I had after that, and smallpox took her in ’72. I was reduced to accepting any work I could find, or making it for myself.”
“And this is the result?” Julian asked. “The Church of the Apostles Etc.?”
“By a long and winding road, yes,” said Stepney.
He gave Julian an abbreviated account of those difficult years, while I listened with half an ear. I supposed all this meant that Pastor Stepney was a fraud, and his Church nothing more than a vehicle for extracting cash donations from gullible parishioners. But Stepney spoke modestly and apparently sincerely about his religious beliefs, and how they had moved him to create the apostate sect of which he was the master.
This caused Julian and Stepney to launch into a vigorous discussion of Theology, the Existence of God, Evolution by Natural Selection, and such topics as that, which I inferred had been the subject of their childhood conversations as well. I was necessarily left out of such talk, and I passed the time by looking over the crudely-printed pamphlets Pastor Stepney had left scattered about the place.
Between the pamphlets and the conversation I began to assemble an outline of Magnus Stepney’s unusual doctrines. He was a true apostate, in that he denied the legitimacy of the Dominion of Jesus Christ as a worldly power, and his ideas about God were profoundly unorthodox. God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed. What else could you call an Invisible Entity who said the same thing to members of every diverse branch of humanity, regardless of class, geography, or language? Because that Voice was not contained in any single mind, but experienced consistently by all sane minds, it must be more than merely human, and therefore a God.
Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium—our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew. There were other Gods beside Conscience; but Conscience was the one worth worshipping, because its commandments, if universally obeyed, would usher us into a veritable Eden of mutual trust and universal charity.
(I don’t offer these notions to the reader with my endorsement, but only as a sample of Magnus Stepney’s peculiar doctrines. At first encounter the ideas seemed to me both eccentric and alarming.)
Julian’s discussion with Stepney covered much of the same ground, though at greater length. Julian was obviously entertained by these airy abstractions, and enjoyed pressing the pastor with logical objections, which Stepney, for his part, equally enjoyed parrying.
“But you’re a Philosopher!” Julian exclaimed at one point. “This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!”
“I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle,” Stepney conceded. “But there’s no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.”
“Yes, until the Dominion takes your Church away. My mother and Adam’s wife were caught up in that trouble, you know.”
“Were they? Are they all right?” Stepney asked, with a concern that did not seem feigned.
“Yes; but only because I took them under my wing.”
“The President’s wing must be a reasonably reliable shelter.”
“Not as sturdy as it could be. Don’t you fear the Dominion at all, Magnus? You’d be in prison yourself, if you hadn’t escaped the raid.”
Pastor Stepney shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m not the only unaffiliated church in town. The business is only dangerous when the Dominion is in a vindictive mood, and the Deacons take up these crusades just once or twice in a decade. A few weeks or months will pass; then they’ll declare the city sanctified, and the rogue Churches will spring up again like mushrooms after a rain.”
The chapel of the Church of the Apostles Etc. contained one single high window, and through it I could see the daylight beginning to ebb. I pointed this out to Julian, and reminded him that I had promised to be back with Calyxa by nightfall (as she preferred during the nervous last weeks of her pregnancy).
Julian seemed reluctant to leave—he was enjoying the pastor’s company, and sat so close to him that their knees touched—but he looked at the window and nodded. Julian stood up, and Pastor Stepney stood up, and they embraced as two old friends.
“You ought to come to the Palace,” Julian said. “My mother would be pleased to see you.”
“Do you think that would be wise?”
“I think it might be fascinating,” said Julian. “I’ll send you a note, discreetly.”
Pastor Magnus Stepney did come to the Executive Palace, more than once in the ensuing months, often for overnight visits. And Julian’s renewed acquaintance with his old friend produced two immediate and unanticipated results.
One was that Julian was moved to meddle even further in the relations between the civil authority and the Dominion. He summoned lawyers, and made himself knowledgeable about ecclesiastical law, and came to certain conclusions. The fact was, he said, the Dominion had no real jurisdiction over the non-affiliated churches, except to deny them membership in its organization. What gave the Deacons their power was the legal consequence of that denial. A rogue church could not be a registered charity, nor were its tithes and properties tax-exempt. In fact its possessions were taxed at a punitive rate, forcing such institutions into bankruptcy if they attempted to comply with the law, or into an outlaw existence if they did not. Those regulations had been put in place by a compliant Senate, and they were enforced by civil, not religious, authorities.
Julian objected to such laws, believing they conferred an undue power on the Dominion. To remedy the injustice he composed a Bill to moderate the levies on such churches and place the burden of proof of “apostasy” on the complainant Deacons. He felt he had enough popularity to shepherd the bill through the Senate, though he knew the Dominion would oppose it bitterly, for it constituted nothing less than an assault on their long-standing Clerical Monopoly. Sam didn’t approve of this maneuver—it was sure to rake up another fight—but Julian would not yield to argument, and tasked his subordinates with introducing the measure before the Senate as soon as possible.
The second visible result worked indirectly by the visits of Pastor Stepney was a change in Sam’s relationship to Emily Baines Comstock. Mrs. Comstock was attentive to Magnus Stepney during his visits (although he was only a fraction of her age), complimenting his appearance within the hearing of others, and saying she was not surprised that he came of Eupatridian stock, and making other such flattering comments as that. This effusive praise wore on Sam like a saw-blade on a piece of rough lumber. Sam did not care to see Mrs. Comstock so patently charmed by another and younger man. Her affections ought to be channeled more in his direction, he believed. Therefore, after what must have been much deliberation, he summoned up his courage, and suppressed his embarrassment, and barged into her presence one night while she was dining with Calyxa and me.
He arrived trembling and sweating. Mrs. Comstock stared at him as if he were a strange apparition, and asked what was wrong with him.
“Conditions,” he began—then he hesitated, shaking his head as if he was appalled at his own effrontery.
“Conditions?” Mrs. Comstock prompted him. “What conditions, and what about them?”
“Conditions have changed …”
“Be specific, if it’s within your power.”
“Before Julian assumed the Presidency I could never—that is, it wasn’t within my compass to ask—although I’ve always admired you, Emily—you know I’ve admired you—our stations in life are different—I don’t have to tell you so—me a soldier, and you high-born—but with the recent changes in all our fortunes—I can only hope that my feelings are reciprocated—I don’t mean to presume to speak for you—only to ask—to ask hopefully—to ask humbly—”
“Ask what? Arrive at a point, Sam, or give it up. You’re incoherent, and we’re ready for dessert.”
“Ask for your hand,” he finished in an uncharacteristically meek and breathless voice.
“My hand!”
“In marriage.”
“Good Lord!” said Mrs. Comstock, standing up from her chair.
“Will you give it to me, Emily?”
“What an awkward proposal!”
“But will you give me your hand?”
She reached out to him, frowning. “I expect I’ll have to,” she said, “since you’ve gone and lost one of your own.”
Sam and Emily set their wedding date for mid-May, and it was to be a quiet ceremony, since she was a widow and he was of uncertain lineage (as the Eupatridians would say). I would forever mark that ceremony as the end of a brief “golden era” in the reign of Julian Conqueror—but not before the advent of some events even more historical, at least from my point of view. On Tuesday, April 11th, two days after we celebrated Easter, I finished writing A Western Boy at Sea; or, Lost and Found in the Pacific. I presented the typewritten manuscript in person to Mr. Hungerford at the offices of the Spark. He thanked me and told me he would bring the book to press quickly, to capitalize on the recent success of The Adventures of Captain Commongold. It might see print by mid-summer, he said.
Even more significantly, Calyxa went into labor on the 21st—a Friday afternoon, as sunny and pleasant as any day that season, with a high blue sky and a warm wind blowing.
The doctor who attended Calyxa was a man named Cassius Polk. Dr. Polk was a white-haired venerable of the highest respectability, who carried himself with immense dignity and didn’t smoke or drink. Toward the end of Calyxa’s term he began to spend much of his time at the guest-house, even sleeping there on occasion. Julian had enrolled him to attend exclusively to Calyxa, and paid him generously for his time.
On that particular afternoon he was sitting with me at a table in the kitchen of the house. Calyxa was resting upstairs, as she did most days. We knew her hour was near. Her belly was drum-taut, and when I held her at night I could feel the child kicking and moving about inside her with surprising vigor and determination. Its entrance into the world seemed, if anything, slightly overdue.
Dr. Polk sipped a glass of water I had given him. He was a discursive man, and liked to talk about his work. He specialized in obstetrics and female problems, and kept an office in a desirable section of Manhattan when he was not attending the births of high Eupatridians. Many of his clients, he told me, were young women of wealth, “the kind who insist on daring the devil by patronizing vaccination shops. I give them my advice on the subject, but of course they ignore it.”
I told him I knew very little about the business of vaccination.
“Oh, it’s fine in principle. Vaccination has been a useful preventative for certain diseases since before the Efflorescence of Oil. But it has to be scientifically applied, you see. The problem with fashionable vaccination is precisely that it is fashionable. A scar on the arm is imagined to make a woman more attractive to suitors, and it advertises her wealth, in addition, since the shops charge absurd amounts of money for their services.”
“Still, if it’s an effective treatment—”
“Sometimes it is—more often it’s fraudulent. A syringe full of creek water and a sharpened knitting needle. The field is rife with profitable fraud, and more likely to spread disease than prevent it. Just this month a new Pox has broken out, especially severe among the high-born, probably as a result of just such unhygienic practices.”
“Can’t the Senate make a law against it?”
“Against vaccination shops? I suppose it could; but the Senators are wedded to the idea of Free Trade, and the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace, and all those shibboleths. Of course they feel the consequences too—or will, when their daughters begin to sicken. Fifteen cases this week alone. Ten the week before. Not a Pox that’s familiar to me, either. A little like Dog Pox, a little like Denver Pox in its signs and indications.”
“Fewer than half my patients have recovered.”
That was alarming. “Do you fear an epidemic, then?”
“I’ve seen Pox sweep through this city half a dozen times in my career. I fear an outbreak of it every day of my life, Mr. Hazzard. We don’t know where epidemics come from and we don’t know how to stop them. If it were up to me—”
But I never learned what the doctor would do, if it were up to him, for Calyxa called out anxiously from upstairs. Her labor had begun, and Polk dashed off to attend her.
I didn’t follow him. He had told me to keep clear during the delivery. It wasn’t a difficult promise to make. All I knew of the act of birth was what I had learned as a stable-boy in Williams Ford. I understood, abstractly, that Calyxa would be enduring the same trials the brood mares in the Duncan-Crowley barns suffered when they foaled; but I could not juxtapose those memories with my intimate knowledge of Calyxa—the resulting image was distasteful, at best.
The sound of Calyxa’s cries came down from the bedroom at increasingly frequent intervals. Dr. Polk had sent for a female accoucheur (as the Eupatridians called their midwives) as soon as the labor began, and when this nurse arrived she took note of my anxiety and tried to ameliorate it by giving me a tincture of hemp oil and opium in a glass of water.
I wasn’t accustomed to the medication. It took effect within the hour, and the result was not altogether calming. I lost direction of my thoughts; and before long I had invested all my attention in a survey of the doors of the kitchen cupboards. The oiled oaken doors became a kind of Movie Screen, to my eyes, on which the grain of the wood evolved into images of animals, steam engines, tropical forests, scenes of war, etc. These impressions were elastic, and each one flowed into the next like water in a rocky stream. I laughed at some of the visions, and recoiled at others—an observer might have mistaken me for feeble-minded. And while the effect was distracting, it was less than reassuring.
Dr. Polk and his nurse passed in and out of the kitchen like wraiths during this interval, drawing pans of water or rinsing out towels. Hours passed, though they might have been minutes or months, in so far as I could calculate time in my intoxicated state. I did not entirely wake from my reveries until I heard a prodigious scream from the upstairs bedroom—a deep, masculinescream, in the voice of Dr. Polk.
I stood up shakily. I hadn’t forgotten my promise to keep out of the doctor’s way. But this seemed like an exceptional circumstance. Had Dr. Polk really cried out in terror, or had I imagined it? Uncertainty retarded my step. Then there was another cry, neither Calyxa’s nor the doctor’s—the nurse had joined the chorus. A cold dread came over me, and I rushed to the stairs.
Dire fantasies played about my imagination. Monstrous births and miscarriages had been common during the Plague of Infertility, and they still occurred from time to time, even in the second half of the twenty-second century. I refused to permit myself the thought that Calyxa might have given birth to some creature so unusual that even a hardened physician would cry out and recoil from it. But the possibility haunted me. The stairs seemed absurdly steep, and I was breathless by the time I reached the landing. I found the bedroom ajar. Unsteadily, I lunged for it.
The cause of the excitement was immediately obvious, though at first I doubted what I was seeing.
Dr. Polk and his nurse stood with their backs to the wall, expressions of stark terror distorting their faces. They were staring at the bedroom’s large double window. Earlier in the day Dr. Polk had thrown open the shutters, as he often did, in the belief that fresh air is an invalid’s best friend. Just now that same window was filled with an enormous, foul-smelling, bestial Head.
I was not so intoxicated that I didn’t grasp what had happened. The Head belonged to Otis. Otis, being a bachelor Giraffe, must have been attracted by the unusual sounds and smells of childbirth. Wandering close to the house, he had put his head inside the open window as a natural means of satisfying his curiosity. But Dr. Polk didn’t know that an adult Giraffe was allowed to roam the Palace grounds, and he was understandably startled by such a development. His nurse shared his astonishment and terror.
Calyxa was well enough acquainted with Otis not to be frightened, but his arrival had unfortunately coincided with the penultimate moments of her labor. Her face was red and dewed with perspiration, and she shouted “Virez-moi cette girafe d’ici!” in a fierce and desperate voice.
I went as close to the window as I dared and made remonstrances with Otis by shouting and waving my arms. This annoyed him enough that he eventually obliged me by withdrawing. I quickly closed the windows and latched the shutters. Otis bumped his nose against these barriers once or twice, then abandoned his inquiries in disgust.
“Only a Giraffe,” I said to Dr. Polk—apologetically, though I was not responsible for Otis.
“Keep it away, please,” he said, struggling to recover his dignity.
“Otis is his name. He won’t bother you any more, if you keep the window shut.”
“I wasn’t warned about Giraffes,” the doctor growled. Then he regained a degree of composure, and told me I was the father of a baby girl.
* The glances she returned were not always equally warm, for carrying a child to term is a cumbersome job, which can wear down a person’s good spirits.