“Really?” Juli breathed. She ran a few steps forward, then considerately slowed for Tam’s halting walk.
“What happened then?”
Tam shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. The Collapse happened.”
“So this egg, it just sat here since then? Come on, sweet one, I want to see it up close. It just sat here?
When women try so hard, us, to get pregnant?”
The boy didn’t like the skeptical tone in her voice. He was the one with the educated family. “You don’t understand, Juli. This thing didn’t make everybody pregnant, just that one princess. It was a special miracle from God.”
“I thought you told me that before the Collapse, nobody needed no miracles to get pregnant, because there wasn’t no pollutants in the water and air and ground?”
“Yes, but-”
“So then when this princess got herself pregnant, why was it such a miracle?”
“Because she was a virgin, loose-brain!” After a minute he added, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to look at the egg,” Juli said stiffly, and this time she ran ahead without waiting.
When Tam caught up, Juli was sitting cross-legged in prayer in front of the egg. It was smaller than he had expected, no bigger than a goat shed, a slightly irregular oval of dull silver. Around it the ground shimmered with heat. Minnesota hadn’t always been so hot, Gran had told Tam in her papery old-lady voice, and he suddenly wondered what this place had looked like when the egg fell out of the sky.
Could it be a polluter? It didn’t look like it manufactured anything, and certainly Tam couldn’t see any plastic parts to it. Nothing that could flake off in bits too tiny to see and get into the air and water and wind and living bodies. Still, if they were so very small, these dangerous pieces of plastic…“endocrine mimickers,” Gran had taught Tam to call them, though he had no idea what the words meant. Doctors in St. Paul knew, probably. Although what good was knowing, if you couldn’t fix the problem and make all babies as whole as Juli?
She sat saying her prayer beads so fervently that Tam was annoyed with her all over again. Really, she just wasn’t steady. Playful, then angry, then prayerful…she’d better be more reliable than that when the babies started to come. But then Juli raised her eyes to him, lake-blue, and appealed to his greater knowledge, and he softened again.
“Tam…do you think it’s all right to pray to it? Since it did come from God?”
“I’m sure it’s all right, honey. What are you praying for?”
“Twin sons, like the princess got.” Juli scrambled to her feet. “Can I touch it?”
Tam felt sudden fear. “No! No-better not.I will, instead.” When those twin sons came, he wanted them to be of his seed, not the egg’s.
Cautiously the boy put out one hand, which stopped nearly a foot away from the silvery shell. Tam pushed harder. He couldn’t get any closer to the egg. “It’s got an invisible wall around it!”
“Really? Then can I touch it? It’s not really touching the egg!”
“No! The wall is all the princess must have touched, too.”
“Maybe the wall, it wasn’t there a long time ago. Maybe it grew, like crops.”
Tam frowned, torn between pride and irritation at her quick thought. “Don’t touch it, Juli. After all, for all we know, you might already be pregnant.”
She obeyed, stepping back and studying the object. Suddenly her pretty face lit up. “Tam! Maybe it’s a miracle for us, too! For the whole family!”
“The whole-”
“For Nan and Calie and Suze! And your cousins, too! O, if they come here and touch the egg-or the egg wall- maybe they can get pregnant like the princess did, straight from God!”
“I don’t think-”
“If we came back before winter, in easy stages, and knowing ahead of time where the water was, they could all get pregnant! You could talk them into it, dear heart! You’re the only one they listen to, even your parents. The only one who can make plans and carry out them plans. You know you are.”
She looked at him with adoration. Tam felt something inside him glow and expand. And O, she really was quick, even if she couldn’t read or write. His parents were old, at least forty, and they’d never been as quick as Tam. That was why Gran had taught him so much directly, all sorts of things she’d learned from her grandmother, who could remember the Collapse.
He said, with slow weightiness, “If the workers in the family stayed to raise crops, we could bring the goats and the infertile women…in easy stages, I think, before fall. Provided we map ahead of time where the safe water is.”
“O, I know you can!”
Tam frowned thoughtfully, and reached out again to touch the silent, unreachable egg.
Just before the small expedition left the Wilkinson farm, Dr. Sutter showed up on his dirtbike.
Why did he have to come now? Tam didn’t like Dr. Sutter, who always acted so superior. He biked around the farms and villages, supposedly “helping people”-O, he did help some people, maybe, but not Tam’s family, whowere their village. Not really helped. O, he’d brought drugs for Gran’s aching bones, and for Suze’s fever, from the hospital in St. Paul. But he hadn’t been able to stop Tam’s sisters-or anybody else-from being born the way they were, and not all his “medical training” could make Suze or Nan or Calie fertile. And Dr. Sutter lorded it over Tam, who otherwise was the smartest person in the family.
“I’m afraid,” Suze said. She rode the family mule; the others walked. Suze and Calie; Nan, led by Tam’s cousin Jack; Uncle Seddie and Uncle Ned, both armed; Tam and Juli. Juli stood talking, sparkly eyed, to Sutter. To Tam’s disappointment, no baby had been started on the honeymoon.
He said, “Nothing to be afraid of, Suze. Juli! Time to go!”
She danced over to him. “Dave’s coming, too! He says he got a few weeks’ vacation and would like to see the egg. He knows about it, Tam!”
Of course he did. Tam set his lips together and didn’t answer.
“He says it’s from people on another world, not from God, and-”
“My gran said it was from God,” Tam said sharply. At his tone, Juli stopped walking.
“Tam-”
“I’ll speak to Sutter myself. Telling you these city lies. Now go walk by Suze. She’s afraid.”
Juli, eyes no longer sparkling, obeyed. Tam told himself he was going to go over and have this out with Sutter, just as soon as he got everything going properly. Ofcourse the egg was from God! Gran had said so, and anyway, if it wasn’t, what was the point of this whole expedition, taking workers away from the farm, even if it was the mid- summer quiet between planting and harvest.
But somehow, with one task and another, Tam didn’t find time to confront Sutter until night, when they were camped by the first lake. Calie and Suze slept, and the others sat around a comfortable fire, full of corn mush and fresh rabbit. Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled.
“Lots more of those than when I was young,” said Uncle Seddie, who was almost seventy. “Funny thing, too- when you trap ’em, they’re hardly ever deformed. Not like rabbits or frogs. Frogs, they’re the worst.”
Sutter said, “Wolves didn’t move back down to Minnesota until after the Collapse. Up in Canada, they weren’t as exposed to endocrine-mimicking pollutants. And frogs have always been the worst; water animals are especially sensitive to environmental factors.”
Some of the words were the same ones Gran had used, but that didn’t make Tam like them any better.
He didn’t know what they meant, and he wasn’t about to ask Sutter.
Juli did, though. “Those endo…endo…what are they, doctor?”
He smiled at her, his straight white teeth gleaming in the firelight. “Environmental pollutants that bind to receptor sites all over the body, disrupting its normal function. They especially affect fetuses. Just before the Collapse, they reached some sort of unanticipated critical mass, and suddenly there were worldwide fertility problems, neurological impairments, cerebral… Sorry, Juli, you got me started on my medical diatribe. I mean, pretty lady, that too few babies were born, and too many of those who were born couldn’t think or move right, and we had the Collapse.”
Beside him, Nan, born loose-brained, crooned softly to herself.
Juli said innocently, “But I thought the Collapse, it came from wars and money and bombs and things like that.”
