Except that she didn’t. After six months, she went to the doctor for a checkup. The doctor ran tests and filled out a long questionnaire and asked her to have her husband come in for a sperm test. Marla tried to explain about Leksy, who wouldn’t submit to a sperm test in a million years, while the doctor muttered something about ritual and superstition and being back in the Dark Ages.
“Well, since I can’t find anything obviously wrong with you,” he said at last, “next time you have intercourse in the morning, come on in as soon afterward as you can. We’ll take a smear and try to determine from that.”
Which meant waiting until the next time Leksy had a weekday off, so they could stay in bed almost until the doctor’s office hours, and then pretending she had an appointment with the dentist to explain her rushing off, even before breakfast. And it turned out useless, after all. “Enough sperm to populate the planet,” grumbled the doctor into his microscope. “All flapping around like trout.”
So another six months went by, and still no pregnancy. Leksy’s relatives were beginning to look at her funny. Father Jabowsky came right out and asked her during her confession if she was using birth control, which made Marla very upset with him, and she called him something—well, not him exactly, she just said people who suspected things like that had dirty minds—so he ended up loading her penance. That certainly wasn’t fair. He was the one with the nasty uncharitable thoughts.
After that, she stopped going to St. Seraph’s and started going across the parish line to Holy Redeemer. A lot of the younger people did, so that was all right. Even Leksy knew that, and he didn’t say a word about it.
She had the doctor repeat the tests when they’d been married a year and a half, even going so far as to have him look at Leksy’s sperm again, just to be sure. By this time she was so upset she spent almost an hour crying in the doctor’s office.
“You’re trying too hard,” he told her.
“Relax.” Relaxing wasn’t exactly what she was able to do. Leksy kept at her and kept at her. She told him he was wearing her out, but he said marriage was for babies, so until she got pregnant, it was his moral duty to keep at it and there was no sin involved. Besides, since she’d quit working at the lumberyard—Leksy had thought maybe it was her job that kept her from getting pregnant—she could always take a nap in the afternoon. Leksy wasn’t worried. He had it all worked out with the Virgin, and nobody was accusing him of using birth control.
At the end of two years, Marla was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“Three and four times a day,” she said. “I can’t even turn around if he’s in the house or he drags me into the bedroom. I like sex, Doctor, or I used to, but this is getting ridiculous.”
“There’s this new drug,” he told her. “Ovitalibon. Made by one of the big European drug companies, just recently released for use in this country. I’ve used it with some success in situations like yours, cases of unattributable subfertility.”
“I’ve read about those drugs,” she said. “Women pregnant with nine babies, like a mama dog with a litter. All of the babies die. Or they have to abort some to let the others live. Leksy wouldn’t do that in a million years. He’d leave me first.”
“No, no,” the doctor huffed, making pursey little lines around his mouth. “By this time I’m well aware of your husband’s religious hangups, Marla. No. That’s a different drug you’re talking about. Ovitalibon doesn’t do that. It does slightly increase the incidence of twins, but it doesn’t cause multiple births. In fact, we’re not entirely sure how it works.”
By which Marla understood that the drug had probably been invented for some other condition entirely, then had been found to have fertility effects, but nobody knew why. Just like the birth control pill had originally been invented for infertility. Watching Donahue kept her well informed, though it had also made her slightly cynical.
“You’re sure it won’t give me like five or six babies all at once.”
“I’m sure,” he said. And he was. About that.
The drug was miraculous. Within two months she was pregnant. As soon as she was sure, she told everyone and peace descended like a dove. She told herself peace came exactly like a white-winged dove. Fluttering down. All soft and cooing. Leksy let her alone. Her relatives let her alone. For the first time since their wedding, she got a full night’s sleep. For the first time since their wedding, she found herself ecstatically, totally content.
Everything, so says Jordel of Hemerlane (whom you will meet in due time), is connected to everything else. Time imposes no limitation on this rule. Everywhen is connected to every-other-when. Tit floweth from tat, tut floweth from tit. Past, present, future, are not disparate things but a continuum, a recoiled helix of interconnections in which time no more serves to sever than does distance. Here and there are not separable. Now and then are not divisible. Everything burrows through the myriad wormholes of reality to become part of everything else. Time and space are coiled like some unimaginable DNA, pregnant with both possibility and certainty. In this multidimensional womb, separation is a fiction, all things are adjacent, and twentieth-century Earth snuggles close against the warm cheeks of the planet Elsewhere….
… Elsewhere, at the far end of an attenuated galactic arm, surrounded by a clutter of cosmic debris. Elsewhere, lit by one middle-sized yellow sun and accompanied by a scattered handful of heavy little planets and moons. Elsewhere, which had been set up—so said Council Supervisory—as the last refuge of humanity from enslavement by the Hobbs Land Gods,
