Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

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.”

“Is it very deadly?”

“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, masculine scream, 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.