She did not. At last, then, I blundered outside after her.
Far out on the northwestern horizon a carrier task force of clouds had just received several torpedoes amidships. Directly overhead, though, was a webwork of gauzy stars. The wind was beginning to blow spiritedly. An inauspicious night for the birth of a half-breed kid who was probably going to have plenty of troubles anyway. I called to Helen, but received no answer.
“Hunnnh!”
This was from Malcolm, who seemed to spend nine-tenths of his waking hours in trees. From his lookout in the Nandi flame, he pointed me to the clumsy windbreak in which Guinevere usually slept. That made sense. During the delivery of her first child Helen would naturally go to her mother for help. I climbed through a rocky section of Shangri-la to Guinevere’s shelter.
Neither Helen nor her mother tried to keep me out, but they did practically ignore my arrival. The hovel had no roof, and starlight and torpedo bursts of sheet lightning served to illuminate its small interior. Helen was in pain, and Guinevere had shoved a great quantity of dry grass against a section of the windbreak to support her back. By the time Helen’s water burst, I reasoned, it was entirely possible that the gathering clouds would also split their containing membranes and inundate us.
Don’t let it rain, I supplicated Ngai, or whatever deity had tutelage over this ghostly dimension. Please don’t let it rain.
Helen did not have it easy. Intense, painful contractions came upon her. At every cramp her eyes disappeared behind her brow ridge (giving me to understand the horror that this sort of eyeball rolling had held for my adoptive mother) and her hand squeezed mine tightly. This repetitive ritual went on for at least an hour, Guinevere and I occasionally shifting places to allow the other a chance to shake the kinks out of our knuckles. While I was at Helen’s side, I kept up a steady, asinine murmur that was meant to be heartening and supportive.
“It’s gonna be okay, Helen, gonna be oh-so-fine. The monkey spit tobacco on the streetcar line. The streetcar it broke, and the monkey got choke’, and they all went to heaven in a little red boat,” et cetera and so forth, the more sinister implications of this refrain going completely over my head and fortunately over Helen’s and Guinevere’s too.
Although I am certain that Helen never understood the significance of the nausea early in her pregnancy, she knew what was happening to her now. She had seen others give birth; twice, at least, she had kidnapped the infants of vaguely collateral species to hold them in her arms; and she had felt her own baby kick. Motherhood was the reward for all this pain, the land-rush territory beckoning the battered buckboard of her body onward to a permanent homestead, and she knew what her pain signified.
Although the rain held off, over Lake Kiboko the lightning show was heating up, and admonitory rumbles made the horizon tremble. Everything was happening northwest of us, out where Zarakal, Ethiopia, and Somalia would one day put their troops in a deranged effort to establish borders where no one had ever observed any.
Helen paid no attention to the noise. She was trying to bear her child, but her body would not cooperate. The baby’s head, which had descended through the uterus as far as it could go unaided, was too big for Helen’s narrow pelvic structure. She was taller than any other female habiline, but her tallness was of the sylphid kind, loose and willowy. Because my endocranial volume outpointed hers by at least seven hundred centimeters, her baby had inherited from me a genetic template for a brain case perilously larger than the habiline norm.
In pain shalt thou bring forth children.
The price for the development of a mind capable of making abstract moral judgments is pain in childbirth, while the penalty for paying the price is expulsion from the Garden. Looking at Helen’s strobe-lit face, I knew that her expulsion would come not at the hands of dutiful cherubim but instead through the cold instrumentality of Death. She was not going to make it. Her eyes trembled in their sockets. Her naked forehead ran with sweat. The flashes of sheet lightning over the distant lake seemed to drain the indigo sheen of health from her face. Her skin was slack and gray.
I went back to our shelter and found my pocketknife. It had proved useful in separating Jomo from his