Woman on the Edge of Time

As they came to the brooder, everyone fell back except the three of them, who entered. They stood under the sterilizer, helping each other out of the robes and hanging them on hooks to the side. Naked they went into the center chamber, where Barbarossa, the birther, was waiting for them. Dressed in his brooder uniform of yellow and blue, he embraced each. As she looked down at herself, she felt her breasts, swollen from the shots, already dribbling colostrum. She and Jackrabbit were to breast-feed. Sojourner explained she had decided not to try it.

“I didn’t have my first child till I was fifty-five,” she said. “I fought in the battle of Space Platform Alpha. And in the battle of Arlington and Fort Bragg. Long, long before we had brooders, I had myself sterilized so that I wouldn’t be tempted to turn aside from the struggle. I thought I had left my sex behind me. Now I am seventy-four and my family does me the honor of believing there’s enough life in me to make a mother a second time.”

Now all three knelt, the old woman getting down slowly but stubbornly on her gnarled knees. Barbarossa stood before them like a priest officiating at Mass. “Do you, Sojourner, desire this baby to be born?”

“I, Sojourner, desire to mother this child”

“Do you, Jackrabbit, desire this baby to be born?” and then “Do you, Connie, desire this baby to be born?”

She said softly, “I do. I, Connie, desire to mother this child.”

Barbarossa turned. The gawky teen-age assistant she had met in the brooder was delivering the baby from the strange contracting canal while Barbarossa stood by to tie the cord and hold it squalling up, screaming and squirming. A small black girl whose skin gleamed waxy and bright.

“Do you, Sojourner, accept this child, Selma, to mother, to love, and then to let go?”

Sojourner held out her old black arms for the baby, nestling it to her. “I’ll mother you, love you, and let you go, Selma.”

“Do you, Jackrabbit, accept this child to mother, to love, and then to let go?”

Jackrabbit received the baby from Sojourner. “I’ll mother you, love you, and let you go, Selma.”

At last Connie held the baby and its small ruby-red mouth closed around her nipple, sucking deep. Black, like Bee: she was sure she was given this baby from her time with Bee, a baby black and velvety with huge eyes to drink in the world.

She woke in the dark. The fire was dead and cold. Clouds covered the sky. She rubbed her legs till she felt less numb. Then she put on her dry shoes and straightened herself as well as she could and headed for the highway. In the dark she thrashed awkwardly through the brush and for a long time she couldn’t find the road, until she stumbled out almost in the path of a car.

Then she got oriented and began walking in the ditch. Here it was shallow and she did not feel well hidden.

“Birth! Birth! Birth!” Luciente seemed to sing in her ear. “That’s all you can dream about! Our dignity comes from work. Everyone raises the kids, haven’t you noticed? Romance, sex, birth, children—that’s what you fasten on. Yet that isn’t women’s business anymore. It’s everybody’s.”

With a heavy whoosh a diesel, unloaded and going too fast, careened down the road way out in the center. Smell of partly combusted fuel. She stumbled to her feet again.

“Take for instance Gray Fox. Last month that person was chairing the economic planning council of Massachusetts-Connecticut-Rhode Island. What Gray Fox normally does is fish-farming out on the shelf. That’s per work, per center. But after a year on the economic council and ninemonth chairing it, Gray Fox may come to identify with that job. A job that affects the lives of many people. May come to feel that it’s part of the essence of Gray Fox to make big decisions while others look up to per. May come to feel that being Gray Fox involves being such a decider, such a big visible doer. So right now Gray Fox is on sixmonth sheepherding duty. After we’ve served in a way that seems important, we serve in a job usually done by young people waiting to begin an apprenticeship or crossers atoning a crime. When you are taking on a coordinating job, you say this pledge: ‘The need exists. I serve the need. After me the need will exist and the need will be served. Let me do well what has and will be done as well by others. Let me take on the role and then let it go.’”

A voice in her ears, good-natured, chiding: Luciente as a fraction of her mind, as a voice of an alternate self, talking to her in the night Perhaps she was mad. Perhaps she was merely close to exhaustion and strung out on Thorazine and barbiturate withdrawal. She trudged on, wishing for a clock in the sky, a wristwatch. Wishing for a visible moon to mark time by. She did not even know if the moon would be waxing or waning; Luciente always knew those things. The moon seemed to hang over Mattapoisett the way the street lamps hung over El Barrio till the kids shot them out. The night was muggy. She heard thunder to the west and feared rain, but nothing happened.