Brave New Worlds

'Please. ' Connie's voice is hoarse and jagged, as if he's been shot in the larynx. 'Please. please,' he beseeches. Tears roll from his eyes, tickling his cheeks as they fall.

'It's not her job to absolve you,' says Valerie.

Connie snuffles the mucus back into his nose. 'I know. '

'The boat leaves tomorrow. '

'Boat?' Connie runs his sleeve across his face, blotting his tears.

'A rescue vessel,' his parishioner explains. Sliding her hands beneath his armpits, she raises him inch by inch to his feet. 'Rather like Noah's Ark. '

'Mommy, I want to go home. '

'Tell that to your stepfather. '

'It's cold. '

'I know, sweetheart. '

'And dark. '

'Try to be patient. '

'Mommy, my stomach hurts. '

'I'm sorry. '

'My head too. '

'You want an aspirin?'

'I want to go home. '

Is this a mistake? wonders Stephen. Shouldn't they should all be in bed right now instead of tromping around in this nocturnal mist, risking flu and possibly pneumonia? And yet he has faith. Somewhere in the labyrinthine reaches of the Hoosac Docks, amid the tang of salt air and the stink of rotting cod, a ship awaits.

Guiding his wife and stepchildren down Pier 7, he studies the possibilities — the scows and barges, the tugs and trawlers, the reefers and bulk carriers. Gulls and gannets hover above the wharfs, squawking their chronic disapproval of the world. Across the channel, lit by a sodium-vapor searchlight, the U. S. Constitution bobs in her customary berth beside Charlestown Navy Yard.

'What're we doing here, anyway?' asks Beatrice.

'Your stepfather gets these notions in his head. ' Kate presses the baby tight against her chest, shielding him from the sea breeze.

'What's the name of the boat?' asks Roger.

'Mayflower,' answers Stephen.

Epigaea repens, trailing arbutus, mayflower.

'How do you spell it?' Roger demands.

'M-a-y. '

'. f-l-o-w-e-r?'

'Good job, Roger,' says Stephen.

'I read it,' the boy explains indignantly, pointing straight ahead with the collective fingers of his right mitten.

Fifty yards away, moored between an oil tanker and a bait shack, a battered freighter rides the incoming tide. Her stern displays a single word, Mayflower, a name that to the inhabitants of Boston Isle means far more than the sum of its letters.

'Now can we go home?' asks Roger.

'No,' says Stephen. He has taught the story countless times. The Separatists' departure from England for Virginia. Their hazardous voyage. Their unplanned landing on Plymouth Rock. The signing of the covenant whereby the non-Separatists on board agreed to obey whatever rules the Separatists imposed. 'Now we can go on a nice long voyage. '

'On That thing?' asks Willy.

'You're not serious,' says Laura.

'Not me,' says Claude.

'Forget it,' says Yolanda.

'Sayonara,' says Tommy.

'I think I'm going to throw up,' says Beatrice.

'It's not your decision,' Stephen tells his stepchildren. He stares at the ship's hull, blotched with rust, blistered with decay, another victim of the Deluge. A passenger whom he recognizes as his neighbor Michael Hines leans out a porthole like a prairie dog peering from its burrow. 'Until further notice, I make all the rules. '

Half by entreaty, half by coercion, he leads his disgruntled family up the gangplank and onto the quarterdeck, where a squat man in an orange raincoat and a maroon watch cap demands to see their ticket.

'Happy Saint Patrick's Day,' says Stephen, flourishing the preserved blossom.

'We're putting you people on the fo'c'sle deck,' the man yells above the growl of the idling engines. 'You can hide behind the pianos. At ten o'clock you get a bran muffin and a cup of coffee. '

As Stephen guides his stepchildren in a single file up the forward ladder, the crew of the Mayflower reels in the mooring lines and ravels up the anchor chains, setting her adrift. The engines kick in. Smoke pours from the freighter's twin stacks. Sunlight seeps across the bay, tinting the eastern sky hot pink and making the island's many-windowed towers glitter like Christmas trees.

A sleek Immortality Corps cutter glides by, headed for the wharfs, evidently unaware that enemies of the unconceived lie close at hand.

Slowly, cautiously, Stephen negotiates the maze of wooden crates — it seems as if every piano on Boston Isle is being exported today — until he reaches the starboard bulwark. As he curls his palm around the rail, the Mayflower cruises past the Mystic Shoals, maneuvering amid the rocks like a skier following a slalom course.

'Hello, Stephen. ' A large woman lurches into view, abruptly kissing his cheek.

He gulps, blinking like a man emerging into sunlight from the darkness of a copulatorium. Valerie Gallogher's presence on the Mayflower doesn't surprise him, but he's taken aback by her companions. Angela Dunfey, suckling little Merribell. Her cousin, Lorna, still spectacularly pregnant. And, most shocking of all, Father Monaghan, leaning his frail frame against his baptismal font.

Stephen says, 'Did we.? Are you.?'

'My blood has spoken,' Valerie Gallogher replies, her red hair flying like a pennant. 'In nine months I give birth to our child. '

Whereupon the sky above Stephen's head begins swarming with tiny black birds. No, not birds, he realizes: devices. Ovulation gauges sail through the air, a dozen at first, then scores, then hundreds, immediately pursued by equal numbers of sperm counters. As the little machines splash down and sink, darkening the harbor like the contraband tea from an earlier moment in the history of Boston insurgency, a muffled but impassioned cheer arises among the stowaways.

'Hello, Father Monaghan. ' Stephen unstraps his sperm counter. 'Didn't expect to find you here. '

The priest smiles feebly, drumming his fingers on the lip of the font. 'Valerie informs me you're about to become a father again. Congratulations. '

'My instincts tell me it's a boy,' says Stephen, leaning over the rail. 'He's going to get a second candy cane at Christmas,'asserts the bewildered pilgrim as, with a wan smile and a sudden flick of his wrist, he breaks his bondage to the future.

If I don't act now, thinks Connie as he pivots toward Valerie Gallogher, I'll never find the courage again.

'Do we have a destination?' he asks. Like a bear preparing to ascend a tree, he hugs the font, pulling it against his chest.

'Only a purpose,'Valerie replies, sweeping her hand across the horizon. 'We won't find any Edens out there, Father. The entire Baltimore Reef has become a wriggling mass of flesh, newborns stretching shore to shore. ' She removes her ovulation gauge and throws it over the side. 'In the Minneapolis Keys, the Corps routinely casts homosexual men and menopausal women into the sea. On the California Archipelago, male parishioners receive periodic potency tests and—'

'The Atlanta Insularity?'