shuffling through a post-party spill of perfumed crepe paper. I drank the scene in. It intoxicated me, but not in the way that puckerplums could do. I still had my basic motor skills, and with these intact I led Helen down the ridge from our camp into the holiday ground cover—into, it seemed, a garden.
We were not alone in this celebration, for the other Minids also came cavorting down the slope. Experimentally uprooting handfuls of scarlet or lavender, the children went sniffing from blossom to blossom, much in the way that kids in Florida frolic in the virgin white graupel of a rare February sleetfall. Groucho, Bonzo, Jocelyn, and Pebbles stayed the longest of all the habiline youngsters, but Helen and I outlasted even them, and when they had finally departed, we collapsed panting amid the luxuriant vegetable filigree of our narrow mountain valley.
Below, on the revivified pasturage of the plain, elephants, zebras, gazelles, and lanky giraffids grazed, but Helen and I ignored them in beatific contemplation of each other’s navels.
Literally.
I saw that Helen’s abdomen had taken on the contour, if not the coloring, of a cantaloupe. Astonished, I touched her taut tumescent tummy and searched her eyes for some sign that she understood the significance of this alteration in her figure. In the land of the lean of loin, the pot-bellied person is . . . well, pregnant.
“Helen, you’re going to be a mamma. A mamma, do you understand? Hell, I don’t understand—but it’s terrific, it’s great!”
“Mai mwah,” she replied, plucking a violet blossom between forefinger and crippled-looking thumb.
* * *
Pregnant? My Helen, pregnant? Once over my initial lethargic surprise, I accepted Helen’s pregnancy as natural, foreordained, and welcome. But surely a human-habiline union could not be fruitful because of a basic chromosomal incompatibility between our two species. Even with males of her own kind Helen had heretofore been barren.
How, then, had I overcome these formidable obstacles to getting her with child?
I do not really know. Much of what occurred during this period had the lazy inevitability of events in a vision or a fugue. Today, though, I can emphasize that barren does not necessarily mean sterile; it first implies the absence of offspring and only secondarily the inability to conceive them. Until she actually delivers a child, therefore, it is by no means incorrect to call a woman barren. Misleading, perhaps, but not incorrect.
Why did Helen not conceive a child by Alfie or one of the other male habilines, then?
Not being a gynecologist, a fertility researcher, or a certified expert in habiline insemination techniques, I must again confess ignorance. The most ingenious explanation I can hazard suggests that, genotypically, Helen was a forerunner of a hominid species closely resembling H. sapiens. Because her reproductive organs reposed farther forward than was usual among the females of her kind, she may have appeared too early to exploit this latent genetic potential—except, of course, by accident. I was Helen’s accident, an unforeseeable throwback from the future already encoded in her DNA. For which reason she conceived my child rather than Alfie’s, Malcolm’s, Roosevelt’s, or anyone else’s.
But members of distinct species—even within the same genus—are seldom interfertile.
Well, how often do they get a chance to be?
Still, it is said that apes and humans cannot profitably mate.
Profit is not always the primary motive in such encounters. Does this epigram constitute a statement of empirical fact, a pending piece of Natural Law, or an ethical imperative? None of the above, I’m afraid. Moreover, the expression “cannot profitably mate” runs headlong into the highly suggestive fact that a siamang and a gibbon of another species confined together several years ago at Atlanta’s Yerkes Primate Center surprised their keepers with a cuddly wee one. Admittedly, neither a siamang nor its gibbony lover is a human being, but by the same token the lady I called Helen Habiline was not an ape. That simple truth bears reiteration.
Now, years later, I have the words of the following unimpeachable scientific authorities, whom I cite to intimidate the untutored:
Eugene Marais, South African naturalist and primatologist: “I am strongly inclined to believe that the offspring of no two sub-races of the same anthropoid will be found to be sterile.” (Some of the terminology may be dated, but the sentiment is unequivocal.)
Carl Sagan, American astronomer and poet laureate of scientific syncretism: “For all we know, occasional viable crosses between humans and chimpanzees are possible. The natural experiment must have been tried very infrequently, at least recently.” (One can only speculate about the