Woman on the Edge of Time

“A mob of kids?” Luciente shook her hair back roughly. “I puzzle, I admit … . We think about kids so different it makes us crosstalk, my friend … . We ask a lot of our kids but … politely? It’s not the one-to-one bind you had with your daughter, from what you say. We have more space, more people to love us. We grow up closest to our mothers, but we swim close to all our mems—or some, at least!” Luciente grinned. “We have handfriends and pillowfriends among other children in the children’s house … . It’s hard for me to inknow what it would feel like to love only oneand have only onesoul to love me.”

Wandering through the rooms, she found some low-ceilinged, some opening into fisheye windows, into greenhouses and porches. Some rooms crept into nooks and crannies, small staircases. Others led them to courts full of plants, delicate apparatus, sundials and water clocks, star maps and telescopes. A fountain gurgled. In it three naked children waded with a curly puppy. Birds hopped in the vines, carp lazed in a small stream that flowed through a room whirring with machines into a courtyard, where a construction project was going on with children of seven or eight wielding miniature hammers, planes, and saws.

In a dark room that smelled fresh and cool, a naked girl was listening to what she said shortly was a Bach sonata for unaccompanied flute. How … fancy it was in here. Room where the walls were mosaics of old bottles. Room of stark white blocks with rude mats on the floor. Room where a thin film of gauze like those spidery fences was all that separated inside and outside. Everywhere children went about their play and their business with adults, with older and younger children, with dogs, with rabbits, children with what Luciente told her were powerful microscopes, spectroscopes, molecular scanners, gene readers, computer terminals, light pencils, lightweight sound and light holi cameras and transmitters that created an image so real she could not believe till she passed her hand through that the elephant in the center of the room was only a three-dimensional image. She walked through the elephant unable to prevent her heart from racing as it raised its huge tusked head and trumpeted.

“You think because we do not bear live, we cannot love our children,” Luciente said in a soft, husky voice, cupping Connie’s elbow in her big calloused hand. “But we do, with whole hearts.”

The nursery: round high room on the ground floor, room with a circle of windows and a small floating dome in the ceiling; here babies babbled, cried, spat, cooed. A young person in a long green loose gown slit up the sides to the thighs sat barefoot, playing a stringed instrument and singing in a sweet alto, and with a treadle board rocking a brace of cradles. A child was playing with one of the babies, tickling and making faces. The infants lay in low cradles with slatted sides that moved on runners to and fro. Connie counted five babies, including one yelling its lungs out, and then three empty cradles, also rocking.

Barbarossa burst in, out of breath. “I hear you, I hear you. You almost blew the kenner off my wrist, you rascal! What a pair of lungs.” He picked up the crying baby. “They can hear you ten miles out on the shelf farm, you hairy little beast!” He sat down with the baby on a soft padded bench by the windows and unbuttoned his shirt. Then she felt sick.

He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat-chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty-five-year-old man, stern-visaged, long-nosed, thin-lipped, he began to nurse. The baby stopped wailing and begun to suck greedily. An expression of serene enjoyment spread over Barbarossa’s intellectual schoolmaster’s face. He let go of the room, of everything, and floated. Her breasts ached with remembrance. She had loved breastfeeding—that deep-down warm milky connection that seemed to start in her womb and spread up through her trunk into her full dark-nippled breasts. Her heavy breasts opened to Angelina’s flower face, the sweet sunflower cradled in her arm. She had been borne on the currents of that intimate sensual connection, calmer, gentler than making love but just as enormous and satisfying. She had nursed Angelina until Eddie had absolutely insisted that she stop; for eight months she had nursed her. Angie had been a fat healthy baby. Only after Eddie had made her stop breast-feeding had Angie turned cranky about eating and become the thin doelike child of the photographs.

She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk.

“I suppose you do it all with hormones,” she said testily.