'Yes. Honestly and openly. But she'll be all right now. I'm glad Margaret Kelly's news about her second-child approval stripped off a few masks. What Patti saw gave her the courage to make up her mind — and made her see that the Pat-Pat league should have dissolved naturally when they all left college, if not high school'
They were only trying to hang on to their youth,' said Mary. 'It's not much fun these days to be an adult.'
'I do like Patti Fane!' said Martha, contributing an unexpected mite.
Dr Christian leaned forward, smiling into the wide grey eyes he compelled to meet his; since early childhood he had been able to marshal his will, bend it upon an unsuspecting person, and literally force that person to meet his gaze. 'Oh, my Mouse! Don't you like all our patients?' he asked reproachfully.
Pinned helplessly and hopelessly by his eyes, she blushed painfully. 'Oh, yes! Of course!' she gasped.
'Stop teasing the Mouse, Josh!' snapped Mary, always ready to spring to Martha's defence.
'Fancy none of those artificial sisters admitting to any of the others that she'd been applying to the SCB each year,' mused James. 'Just goes to show how furtively women approach the whole problem of the SCB.'
'Well, James, between the odds against winning and the means test, the SCB is guilt personified.'
Dr Christian would have expounded upon this theme, and not for the first time, but Mama got in too quickly, hungry for a display of real fireworks. Aside from listening to this nightly shop, Mama's contact with the clinic consisted of the tours of the bottom floor of 1047 Dr Christian felt all their new patients should experience, wanting them to see what could be done with an unheated, naturally lightless, largely airless house through the long months of winter.
'The SCB is vile!' cried Mama now, summoning tears. 'What do those heartless wretches of men in Washington know about the needs of women?'
'Mama, Mama, why do you persist in saying such things?' asked Dr Christian, irritated. 'Why shouldn't they know, for pity's sake? For that matter, how do you know they're men? And why, even if they are men, should any man feel the sorrow of enforced barrenness less than a woman? Do I have a clinic full of women patients? Do I? Mama, next door is fifty-fifty, women and men! And railing against fate is not the answer. The Second Child Bureau was a sop they threw us in return for our peacefully signing the Delhi Treaty, and in my opinion the SCB has turned out the worst feature of that whole miserable, humiliating decade! You should remember the time a great deal better than I do, Mama, you were a grown woman where I was a child.'
'Augustus Rome sold us out,' she said, teeth clenched.
'Oh, Mama! We sold ourselves out! Listen to one of your generation talk, and you'd swear it fell on us like a bolt out of the blue. It did not! We sowed the seeds of Gus Rome and the Delhi Treaty way back in the past. Ninety years ago, when our population stood at a hundred and fifty million, we were at the apex of our power — and our pride. We had everything. And what did we do? We threw our money around like it was going out of style, and the world hated us for it. We held up our know-how as the ultimate, and the world hated us for it. We offered the peoples of the world a way of life they had neither the means nor the talent to imitate, and the world hated us for it. We fought foreign wars in the names of justice and freedom, and the world hated us for it, not least the peoples we fought for — and I'm not thereby saying the wars we fought were always altruistic, but a great many of our little folk believed they were. And even as we went on deluding ourselves with outmoded thinking — martial and altruistic! — at one and the same time we were busy making orthodox war an impossibility, plague a thing of the past, religion a laughing stock, and people into digital ciphers.'
He was away, and the sofa was too confining, so he got to his feet in the ungainly yet oddly graceful series of unwindings his abnormally long bones demanded, and he paced a room never designed for pacing, in and out of leaves that shuddered in the breeze of his fevered progress, rattling pots, sending pedestals a-quaking, while his family sat in utter thrall, pinned on the thunder of his voice and the lightning of his eyes; his sister stunned by fear of him and shame of herself, his sisters-in-law consumed with admiration, his brothers incapable of resenting him, and his mother — ah! his mother screaming away inside her quiet face with a gargantuan triumph. For when his passions cohabited with his intellect and he began to speak, he worked a magic on his listeners that galvanized them. Even in this most intimate of circles, composed solely of the people who had been hearing him in full spate for years on years, still he had the power to transfix.
'I don't remember the dawn of the third millennium, because I was literally born in it. But what did it bring? There were those who sang hymns and prepared to die in the blaze of the Second Coming, there were those who sang anthems and prepared to live in the blaze of technological mastery of the universe. But what did it bring? Pain. Impotence. Anticlimax. Reality! A reality harder and crueller and more unendurable than any reality in the history of our planet since the Black Death. We were cooling down in a hurry. God knows why! No one else seems to. The best explanation the best men can offer is a mini ice age. Oh, they talk of currents and atmospheric layers, continental plates and reversing magnetic poles, solar force fields and tilting axes, but it's all pure speculation. However — however! They assure us that in a few more decades or maybe centuries they'll have enough data to tell us exactly why, and in the meantime, God at least knows. We are assured it's not going to last too long, a matter of a mere millennium or two — the most infinitesimal mote in the eye of time! But the reality we face is quite long enough to outlast us and our posterity for many generations to come. The land mass we can use fruitfully to live on is shrinking rapidly, most of our available water is on its way to imprisonment in the polar ice cap, and the population of the world is still far too large. That's what the dawn of the third millennium brought us! And no matter how we might try, we can't get around it.'
He shrugged and stopped for perhaps ten seconds, a pause exquisitely but quite instinctively gauged to be exactly the right length for maximum effect; and when he continued, his voice had dropped both in volume and tone, drawing his audience along with his change in mood.
'Not that we Americans were very worried. We were the most advanced nation on earth, we knew we could cope. We didn't think we'd even need to pull in our belts more than a couple of notches. But what we forgot was the rest of the world. And the rest of the world ganged up on us! One in, all in. Permit the United States of America to grow and multiply while the other major powers brought in population reduction programmes they had to bring in? No way! One-child families for every single country in the world for a minimum of four generations and then a two-child maximum in perpetuity, that was the agreement. Well, we stood out against it utterly alone. And when the chips were down, we discovered we didn't have enough of anything to take on the rest of the world united against us. We couldn't have fought a war that big even at our peak, and let's face it, we were not at our peak. We had wasted so terribly much of what we once had to waste, most of all the spirit, and the strength of our people. We'd fried our brains on dope and our hearts on loveless copulation and our souls on trash.
'When the borders of the Eurocommune met the borders of the Arabicommune — and try as we did, there was nothing we could do to prevent that — we had nowhere left to go except the treaty table at Delhi.'
His voice had dwindled to whispering sadness; the pyrotechnics were over. Or they would have been over had Mama been content to let them die; she, who knew with unerring exactitude where the goad pricked worst, wanted more fireworks.
'I will never believe we had to sign or perish!' she cried. 'Old Gus Rome sold us out for a Nobel Peace Prize.'
'Mama, you are typical of your whole generation! Why will you not see that on your generation fell the blow to pride, the loss of face, the humiliation? It's done! It's done, done, done, done! But it's my generation that has to pick up the pieces, get things going again, li
e low and guard everything America was and will be again! You suffered the injury to pride. I have no pride! So do I care whether Gus Rome was right or wrong in committing us to the Delhi Treaty rather than to a war we couldn't win? No! I don't!'
His brain — it was going to burst, come spewing out of the sutures of his skull and the orifices of his head… Slow down, slow down, Joshua Christian! He took his fiery face between his cold hands and held it, rocking it between them until the tiny cords under the skin of his temples dwindled away. And then he dropped his hands back to his sides and resumed his pacing, but more slowly now, his dark eyes flashing in the grottoes of their sockets.
Suddenly he stopped and turned to look at his family, still sitting rapt.
'Why do I keep thinking it has to be me?' he asked them.
No one replied, least of all he himself. This was a new question he had only begun to ask in recent weeks, and the other Christians were not yet sure what he meant by it. However, each night that went by saw him less concerned with the abstract, and more concentrated upon the personal.
'How can it be me?' he asked. 'I am here in Holloman, and is Holloman the centre of the human universe? No! It's just one of a thousand old industrial assholes pathetically farting their way into a mass grave, waiting for the bulldozers of some future time to push them down and plant forests. They tell us we have a few centuries to go yet before the glaciers bulldoze the trees down. Time enough for forests. But once — ah, once Holloman made shirts as well as scholars, it made typewriters and guns, scalpels and piano wire. It fuelled learning, it clothed bodies, it propagated words, it mowed men down, it cut out cancers and it made music possible. Holloman was a distillation of where Man had arrived at the dawn of the third millennium. And that's why maybe it's fitting that a man from Holloman could be chosen.'
No one knew what to answer, but three of them tried.
'We're with you, Josh,' said James softly.
'Every inch of the way,' said Andrew.
'And may God have mercy on us,' said Mary.
'Sometimes,' said Miriam slowly, teeth chattering as she divested herself of her layers of clothing and climbed into her Dr Denton's, 'I think he cannot possibly be human.'
'Oh, Mirry, you've known him for so many years, and still you can say that?' asked James, already in the bed with his feet hogging the hot-water bottle. 'Joshua is the most human person I've ever known.'
'In an inhuman way,' she insisted, then added quietly, 'He's getting worse. There's been a change this winter. Now he's coming straight out and asking how can it be him?'
'He's not getting worse, he's getting better,' James said drowsily. 'Mama says he's coming into his full strength.'
'I don't know which one of them frightens me more, Joshua or Mama, so I'm going to echo Mary's comment. May God have mercy on us, Jimmy-boy! Oh, oh, where are you? Put your arms right around me, I'm so cold!'
Martha the Mouse scurried into the kitchen, terrified that she might find Mama still reigning there; every night she waited patiently until she thought Mama must surely have lain down her sceptre and gone regally upstairs, then she would make her foray kitchenward to prepare the hot chocolate Andrew liked to drink once he was tucked up in bed.
At first she thought the big black shadow on the white wall was Mama, and her heart galloped, took a flying jump and missed, pittered away faintly.
But the shadow was Mary's, its author standing at the stove watching a saucepan of milk.
'No need to go, little one,' said Mary, tender-toned. 'Keep me company and I'll make your chocolate for you.'
'Oh, no! Don't trouble — I'll do it, honestly!'
'How can it be trouble when I'm making some for myself anyway? And why don't you send Drew down for a change? Do him good to wait on you. You spoil him as much as Mama used to, Mouse.'
'No! No! It — he — I volunteered, honestly!'
'Oh, honey, why are you always so scared?' Mary smiled into the surging contents of the saucepan, added powdered chocolate, stirred well, turned the gas off, and demonstrated that she had anticipated Martha's advent by pouring not one but three, full mugs of hot drink. 'You're such a nice little thing,' she said, putting two of the mugs on a small tray. 'Too nice for us. Far too nice for Drew. And our Joshua will end up making mincemeat out of you.'
The meek little face lit at mention of the magical name. 'Oh, Mary, isn't he wonderfull?'
The moment the Mouse uttered her ecstatic superlative, all the animation died out of Mary. 'Yes, indeed, he is certainly that,' she said tiredly.
Her reaction was not lost on Martha, whose face dimmed. 'I've often wondered—' But she lost courage, couldn't finish.
'Wondered what?'
'Don't you like Joshua?'
And Mary went stiff, trembled. 'I hate him!' she said.
Mama was excited. Somehow this winter Joshua had been different. More alive, more enthusiastic, more sure of himself, more — mystical? Maturity. It had to be maturity. He was thirty-two now, just about the age when a man or woman tied and neatly spliced the final cords that bound together brain with hands as one integral unit. He was very like his father, a late bloomer. Oh, Joe, why did you have to die? You were finally coming into your own, you were going to make it after all. And yet, isn't it typical of you that you didn't have the sense to find a Holiday Inn before death found you?
Only that wouldn't happen to Joshua. For one thing, he was more than his father. He was her as well. In that lay his greatest advantage. And she was still young enough to be of help to him. Years and years of work left in these arms yet. A ton of spirit left, too.
Every night she dealt as efficiently with her bed as she did with the house. First the hot-water bottle, filled to the last gasp of steam with boiling water, the hell with what they said about leaky caps; she screwed hers down and then tightened it by sticking a spoon handle through the loop in its top and levering it an extra half-turn. Next she wrapped it in a thick towel, two layers of terry between the scalding rubber and her skin, and fixed the fabric securely around it with diaper pins. And after that she put the bottle right near the top of the bed, just where her shoulders would rest, placed her pillow over it, and pulled the covers over the pillow. Five minutes by the clock, and down would go the bottle by its own width but leaving the pillow behind, down would go the bottle five minutes at a time all the way from where her shoulders would rest to where her feet came. At which moment in time she took off cardigan, sweater, skirt, petticoat (she detested trousers and only wore them outdoors), undervest, long woolly drawers, thick pantyhose and bra, sliding like an eel — nothing middle-aged about the movement, either — into the fleecy nightgown she wore in defiance of the cold. She would not wear Dr Denton's. Dreadful things they were, like long johns with feet; though she would not admit it even to herself, she was beginning to suffer from urgency of micturition in the very cold weather, and not for anything would she have permitted herself to soil a garment while fumbling with its trapdoor.
The last task was to lever the top bedclothes back just far enough to insert herself beneath them and simultaneously to turn upward the warmed underside of her pillow. Then into the bed like a flash, and warm warm warm warm warm. The greatest luxury of the day, contact of herself with an actual radiator of tangible heat. She would lie, mindless in bliss, and let the warmth soak through her skin and flesh into her bones, as ecstatic as a child with its first ice cream. And then, with her warmed feet encased in knitted bootees, she would ease the hot-water bottle slowly up the bed until she could reach to drag it, beautiful warm radiant thing, up across her chest, where it remained cradled within her arms for the rest of the night. In the morning she used it, still faintly tepid, to wash her hands and face.
Yes. He was growing into his strength at last. He was a great man, this senior son. From the moment she had known he was conceived she had also known that no matter how many other children came out of her body, he was the one. And so she had geared her whole life, and the lives of her othe
r children, to a single purpose — assisting her firstborn to fulfil his destiny.
After Joe died it had been hideously hard — oh, not so much from the money point of view, because Joe's people had money and she came into his share of it, but from the fact that she was not by nature cut out to be father as well as mother. Still, it had been done, the paternal aspect of her troubles largely solved when she thrust the role of father onto Joshua almost immediately. And undoubtedly that had helped Joshua develop by obliging him from early childhood to assume the role of man rather than boy. Not ever one to shirk responsibility, her firstborn. Not one to complain, either.
And in the big front room of the second floor (he shared this floor with his mother and sister, leaving the top floor to be divided between his married brothers), Dr Joshua Christian prepared for bed. His mother always put a hot-water bottle in the middle of it, but the moment he climbed in he always shoved it down indifferently to his feet and lay without feeling the cold, even on the thirty-below nights when on waking he found his hair frozen to the fabric of his pillow. He did wear his Dr Denton's, and a pair of hand-knitted socks, but no nightcap ever invented remained on his head, and his sleep pattern was so restless his mother had been obliged to deal with his down bedclothes by sewing them up into a kind of sleeping bag, much narrower and more confining than the German down cocoons the rest of the family — and the rest of America — used.
Someone had to tell them, all those bewildered people wandering out there afraid and crying in this craven new world. If you cannot grow babies, grow potted plants in the winter and vegetables in the summer, find work for your hands and plenty of challenge for your brains. And if the God of your church no longer seems to bear any relationship to your plight and your way of seeing the universe, have the courage to strike out to find your own God. Don't waste your years in grief! Don't curse a central government that has no choice, only remember that the choice was forced upon it. Only remember that you can keep yourself and America alive if you give the children of the future an ethic and a dream tailored to suit them. Don't wish for what might have been, for what your mother and grandmother had in plenty and your great-grandmother in excess. One is infinitely better and greater than none! One is a hundred percent more than zero. One is beauty. One is love. One perfect one is worth a hundred genetically warped ones. One is one is one is one is one is…