Auspicious Eggs

by JAMES MORROW

James Morrow is the author of the Godhead trilogy and seven other novels, including the World Fantasy Award-winning Only Begotten Daughter, This is the Way the World Ends, The Last Witchfinder, and The Philosopher's Apprentice. His novella Shambling Toward Hiroshima was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His short fiction — which has appeared The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and in many anthologies — has been collected in Bible Stories for Adults and The Cat's Pajamas & Other Stories.

Once a year, a person gets to celebrate a birthday. For children, it's the best day of the year. For most adults, it's something to pretend to forget or to celebrate with a quiet dinner out. After all, a birthday only means another year tacked on to an already large number. But no matter how old you are, a birthday is special because it marks the most important instance in a person's life: the moment of their birth.

In our next story, a birthday is hardly anything to celebrate. Life is as rainy and drear as the climate. The United States has been fragmented into a constellation of reefs and islands, the rest swallowed up by the rising oceans. And a new kind of church has mandated that the lives of those already born are less important than the lives of those who are as yet unconceived.

Here is a place overflowing with babies, packed with pregnant women, smothered by the stench of dripping diapers. It's a world where a menopausal woman might be put to death and an infertile baby drowned, because those who can't procreate are without value.

* * *

Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish, Connie to his friends, sets down the Styrofoam chalice, turns from the corrugated cardboard altar, and approaches the two young women standing by the resin baptismal font. The font is six-sided and encrusted with saints, like a gigantic hex nut forged for some obscure yet holy purpose, but its most impressive feature is its portability. Hardly a month passes in which Connie doesn't drive the vessel across town, bear it into some wretched hovel, and confer immortality on a newborn whose parents have grown too feeble to leave home.

'Merribell, right?' asks Connie, pointing to the baby on his left.

Wedged in the crook of her mother's arm, the infant wriggles and howls. 'No — Madeleine,' Angela mumbles. Connie has known Angela Dunfey all her life, and he still remembers the seraphic glow that beamed from her face when she first received the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Today she boasts no such glow. Her cheeks and brow appear tarnished, like iron corroded by the Greenhouse Deluge, and her spine curls with a torsion more commonly seen in women three times her age. 'Merribell's over here. ' Angela raises her free hand and gestures toward her cousin Lorna, who is balancing Madeleine's twin sister atop her gravid belly. Will Lorna Dunfey, Connie wonders, also give birth to twins? the phenomenon, he has heard, runs in families.

Touching the sleeve of Angela's frayed blue sweater, the priest addresses her in a voice that travels clear across the nave. 'Have these children received the Sacrament of Reproductive Potential Assessment?'

The parishioner shifts a nugget of chewing gum from her left cheek to her right. 'Y-yes,' she says at last.

Henry Shaw, the pale altar boy, his face abloom with acne, hands the priest a parchment sheet stamped with the Seal of the Boston Isle Archdiocese. A pair of signatures adorns the margin, verifying that two ecclesiastical representatives have legitimized the birth. Connie instantly recognizes the illegible hand of Archbishop Xallibos. Below lie the bold loops and assured serifs of a Friar James Wolfe, M. D., doubtless the man who drew the blood.

Madeleine Dunfey, Connie reads. Left ovary: 315 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 340 primordial follicles. A spasm of despair passes through the priest. The egg-cell count for each organ should be 180, 000 at least. It's a verdict of infertility, no possible appeal, no imaginable reprieve.

With an efficiency bordering on effrontery, Henry Shaw offers Connie a second parchment sheet.

Merribell Dunfey. Left ovary: 290 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 310 primordial follicles. The priest is not surprised. What sense would there be in God's withholding the power of procreation from one twin but not the other? Connie now needs only to receive these barren sisters, apply the sacred rites, and furtively pray that the Eighth Lateran Council was indeed guided by the Holy Spirit when it undertook to bring the baptismal process into the age of testable destinies and ovarian surveillance.

He holds out his hands, withered palms up, a posture he maintains as Angela surrenders Madeleine, reaches under the baby's christening gown, and unhooks both diaper pins. The mossy odor of fresh urine wafts into the Church of the Immediate Conception. Sighing profoundly, Angela hands the sopping diaper to her cousin.

'Bless these waters, O Lord,' says Connie, spotting his ancient face in the consecrated fluid, 'that they might grant these sinners the gift of life everlasting. ' Turning from the vessel, he presents Madeleine to his ragged flock, over three hundred natural-born Catholics — sixth-generation Irish, mostly, plus a smattering of Portuguese, Italians, and Croats — interspersed with two dozen recent converts of Korean and Vietnamese extraction: a congregation bound together, he'll admit, not so much by religious conviction as by shared destitution. 'Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity, and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water, I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through these baptisms, Madeleine and Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom. ' Connie faces his trembling parishioner. 'Angela Dunfey, do you believe, by God's word, that children who are baptized, dying before they commit any actual evil, will be saved?'

Her 'Yes' is begrudging and clipped.

Like a scrivener replenishing his pen at an inkwell, Connie dips his thumb into the font. 'Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours. '

'M-M-Madeleine Eileen Dunfey. '

'We welcome this sinner, Madeleine Eileen Dunfey, into the mystical body of Christ' — with his wet thumb Connie traces a plus sign on the infant's forehead—'and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross. '

Unraveling Madeleine from her christening gown, Connie fixes on the waters. They are preternaturally still — as calm and quiet as the Sea of Galilee after the Savior rebuked the winds. For many years the priest wondered why Christ hadn't returned on the eve of the Greenhouse Deluge, dispersing the hydrocarbon vapors with a wave of his hand, ending global warming with a Heavenward wink, but recently Connie has come to feel that divine intervention entails protocols past human ken.

He contemplates his reflected countenance. Nothing about it — not the tiny eyes, thin lips, hawk's beak of a nose — pleases him. Now he begins the immersion, sinking Madeleine Dunfey to her skullcap. her ears. cheeks. mouth. eyes.

'No!' screams Angela.

As the baby's nose goes under, mute cries spurt from her lips: bubbles inflated with bewilderment and pain. 'Madeleine Dunfey,' Connie intones, holding the infant down, 'I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. ' the bubbles break the surface. The fluid pours into the infant's lungs. Her silent screams cease, but she still puts up a fight.

'No! Please! No!'

A full minute passes, marked by the rhythmic shuffling of the congregation and the choked sobs of the mother. A second minute — a third — and finally the body stops moving, a mere husk, no longer home to Madeleine Dunfey's indestructible soul.

'No!'

The Sacrament of Terminal Baptism, Connie knows, is rooted in both logic and history. Even today, he can recite verbatim the preamble to the Eighth Lateran Council's Pastoral Letter on the Rights of the

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