The Song of the Earth
Page 3
Yes, exactly. You’re very astute. Yoshida once wrote: “Evolved by natural selection, the humin mind in turn is evolving metamorphic forms of life, which humins must think of as ‘natural.’ Nature makes no distinction between living things that we call natural and those we call artificial.”
From Jeanette Baker’s letter to Polly Baker, February 1, 2037:
This evening Fritz sat me down in the garden under the fig tree and said, “After you give birth I want you to lay off Euphorol for six months.”
I asked, “What for?”
Fritz: “So you’ll suffer a postpartum depression like Franziska Salomon, Anna van Gogh, Laura Munch, Regina Magritte, and Shizue Hara had.” He calls them “mother–artist-makers.” He believes their depression stimulated in their gifted infants a hyperdevelopment of the prefrontal lobe, the part of the brain that associates emotion and visual stimuli.
I pointed out that three out of the six wimin on his list eventually committed suicide. Regina Magritte drowned herself, and Shizue Hara jumped out of a window like Franzsika Salomon.
“But you’d only be at risk for six months.” he said. “Will you do it?”
Polly, dear, forgive me, I said, “Yes.”
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
After Fritz talked with Jeanette in the garden, he rushed me to the IVF lab, where I jerked him off into a test tube. He processed the sperm himself.
Polly Baker
I caught the 5 A.M. Tokyo Express out of Chicago on Monday, February 2, 2037, and arrived in Kyoto about 7 P.M. local time. I remember the air-conditioning at my hotel was on the blink.
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
Believe it or not, that same day, the 2nd, Jeanette met Mariko Tanaka, Yukio’s future mother, in an elevator at the Institute. I’m a witness. Fritz introduced them. They bowed to each other. Mariko, who was due in August, got off at our prenatal clinic on the fifth floor. Jeanette called out after her, “Good luck!”
Neither womin ever met Anya Kammerovska, the third mother chosen to take part in Ozaki’s Project. Fritz nicknamed them “The Three Fates.”
From the Letter of Agreement between Jeanette Baker and the Ozaki Metamorphic Institute February 2, 2037:
In connection with the undersigned’s participation in said Experiment, the undersigned does hereby hold the Institute and its employees, representatives, agents, and directors blameless for any liability, loss, damage, cost or expense, including reasonable attorney’s fees, arising out of or in connection with any personal injury to the undersigned arising out of or in connection with the undersigned’s participation in said Experiment.
From Frederick Rust Plowman’s Report on Ozaki’s Project:
On February 2, 2037, at 8 A.M. the subject’s ovum was extracted and then fertilized in vitro with one of my Y-sperm cells.
At 1:20 P.M., recombinant vectors containing purified DNA sequences that amplify the activity of those constellations of neuron-specific arsogenes (NSAGs) that stimulate the development of the talent to draw and increase color perception were microinjected into the pronuclei of the subject’s fertilized oocyte. The above arsogenes, from the Institute’s library, were harvested from four distinguished manual artists and reassembled in the standard 16-1 pattern of all O.P. subjects.
Analysis of the host genome ascertained its viability and indicated that the injected DNA had been integrated into it.
At 4:15 P.M. the male metamorphic embryo was implanted in the subject’s uterus.
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
Back at the house, I served Fritz and Jeanette a light supper of sweet bean soup with rice cakes. Fritz, who was a little drunk on Amae, called out to me, “Come join the celebration! You had a hand in this!”
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, February 3, 2037:
Amory Firth Baker
Andrew Firth Baker
Benjamin Firth Baker
Brian Firth Baker
Channing Firth Baker
Cullen Firth Baker
Denis Firth Baker
Frederick Firth Baker
Guy Firth Baker
Howard Firth Baker
Ian Firth Baker
James Firth Baker
John Firth Baker
John Henry Baker
Michael Firth Baker
Olin Firth Baker
Quincy Firth Baker
Sidney Firth Baker
Timothy Firth Baker
Varian Firth Baker
Vivien Firth Baker
William Firth Baker
John Firth Baker
Polly Baker
Jeanette told me she picked John because it resembles Jeanette.
We spent a couple of hours making the rounds of Kyoto hairstylists so I could write the trip off. My old friend Yoko Hibi, who ran the salon at the Miyako Inn, told us that the Emperor’s assassin hadn’t killed herself, but had bled to death after having been raped and then clitorectomized with a sliver of broken glass by two Imperial bodyguards.
Jeanette had a four o’clock appointment with Plowman to go over John’s genomic analysis. She invited me along. The leather sofa in Plowman’s office was cracked. I smelled Amae on his breath.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, February 4, 2037:
Johnny (!) will come into this world equipped with a grand total of 2,613 arsogenes, which should result in extensive development of the brain cells in his visual cortex. Johnny’s MMIQ will be around 152.
He’ll probably be gay and a risk-taker. He’s inherited my polygenic propensity towards Type A-2 unipolar depression.
He’s also got genes for light blue eyes, curly black hair, and male pattern baldness.
Johnny will have 20-20 vision and be right-handed. He’ll be muscular, have broad shoulders and flat feet. He’ll grow to between 5'11" and 6'1".
He’ll be allergic to chickpeas. In his fifties he’ll stand a 60% chance of developing high blood pressure and, if he smokes, a 90% chance of lung cancer. Thanks to Fritz (the gene is carried in the Y chromosome) Johnny during his fifties will grow hair in his ears.
If Johnny takes care of himself, he’s got an 83% chance to live a century.
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
Fritz gave Jeanette a farewell dinner on the night of February 7, 2038—the third anniversary of Ozaki’s death. Fritz got drunk on Amae and cried out, “Yoshida! You’re three years dead! Am I dreaming? It must be a dream.”
Then he said, “What do you think, Jeanette? Is all this a dream?”
She said, “No.”
Polly Baker
Jeanette and I got home early Monday morning.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, March 15, 2037:
Have settled in my three-and-a-half-room apartment above Polly in her redbrick house at 124 Kuttner Street in Cather Keep, Lancaster County, Nebraska. The Keep was designed by C. L. Moore and built in 2027. It was named for Willa Cather. The Keep is laid out around the artificial Lake Twilight in the shape of a rectangle ¾ mile wide and 1-⅓ miles long. It’s covered by a transparent and oval impermium dome, which reaches a height of 130 feet.
10,725 people live here. Most are skilled workers who belong to various Guilds. For example, our next door neighbor, Indira Rabindra, is a book repairer, and her husband, Ben Shrapnel, is the articles editor of Keepsake magazine.
There’s no poverty or violent crime in Cather Keep. The temperature is always 75°F. during the day and 50°F. at night. There are all kinds of trees and prairie flowers. These include the violet, wild rose, larkspur, phlox, spiderwort, blueflag, poppy, mallow, waterlily, petunia, columbine, and yellow ladyslipper as well as the goldenrod and sunflower. We live in a garden where spring stays put.
Indira Rabindra
Jeanette and I hit it off right away. I was her first Hindu friend. When she fixed up the small bedroom off her kitchen as a nursery, I put it under the protection of the Divine Mother, in the person of the Goddess Sati-Parvati, by giving Jeanette a drawing of Her by the turn-of-the-century Bengali artist Shubha R
oy. The drawing had been a wedding gift to me from my dear mother, who’s devoted to the Great Goddess.
Jeanette hung the drawing in a white enamel frame on the wall behind the crib.
Shubha Roy, 2027, Face of Parvati, scratchboard drawing
Shubha Roy’s biographical sketch:
Shubha Roy (2002–2029) was the only daughter of a Brahmin industrialist who built a temple for the Goddess Kali in the Janbazzar district of central Calcutta. Roy took an MFA in graphic design at the Pratt Institute in New York, then worked in New York for two years as an assistant art director at an ad agency.
On the night of November 22, 2025, Shubha Roy had a dream: “The Divine Mother commanded me: ‘From now on draw only Me in My myriad forms. I will manifest Myself in your pictures and accept worship and offerings.’”
Roy quit her job, returned to Calcutta, and rented a one-room studio near the Janbazzar temple, where over the next three years she made 1,012 scratchboard drawings of the Divine Mother in her various aspects.
Roy was a political activist and one of a growing number of religious intellectuals and artists known as “goddess wimin” who split with the secular Indian Gynarchist Party in 2027. A year later, she was exiled by the Lingamist coalition government to Nepal, where, weakened by malnutrition, she died of mycoplasmic pneumonia on April 3, 2029.12
Polly Baker
Jeanette worked hard as my apprentice. Part of her job was to offer each customer a free glass of wine. Around the middle of March, the smell suddenly nauseated her. She puked all over her own sneakers. Another time she vomited a little blood. Her hair went limp, but her face glowed. She yawned all morning and napped every afternoon. Her boobs got bigger.
Jeanette said, “I wish they’d stay this size.”
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, March 20, 2037:
Applied this morning for federal maternity benefits, to which I’m not entitled under the Created Equal Act. As required by health insurance regulations, I submitted a transcription of Johnny’s gen-pro, loaded with metamorphic arsogenes which, Fritz assured me, are indistinguishable from those acquired normally.
If I’m caught, I risk a $40,000 fine, a year in jail, or both.
After lunch, I enrolled at the Lake Twilight Street Childbearing Center, where I had a physical and attended an orientation session with six other pregnant Cather keepies. Our nurse-midwife is Aura Jones, who’s in her late thirties. She emphasizes that this is a self-help program. “Assume responsibility for your own health care. Educate yourselves about what’s happening to you!”
Polly Baker
Jeanette and I let it be known that she’d been artificially inseminated by an American friend who lived in Japan.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, April 4, 2037:
Today I posted the following on the Pregnant listserve:
Pregnant with talented artist. Seek confidential relationship with other mothers-to-be like me. Call me at 402-873-5193.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, April 6, 2037:
Got a call today from Cressanthia Thomas, who lives with her husband Alex in Crudge Keep, near Hartford, Conn. Married four years. They both market industrial robots and share a passion for African-American music. I liked her face, particularly her expressive eyes. She said, “I’m a little over a month pregnant with a musically gifted boy.”
“How did he come by his gift?”
She hesitated. Told her I was pregnant with an arsogenic metamorph, acquired at the Ozaki Institute, whom I hope to turn into a visual artist.
Cressanthia then confessed to me that her son’s genome was supplemented at l’Institut Metamorphique Génétique de Paris with musical arsogenes, which contribute to the acquisition of absolute pitch, an acute intervalic sense for musical harmonies and scales, and a propensity to develop auditory brain lateralization (aural dominance).
Cressanthia: “I don’t feel guilty about breaking the law. Americans should have the right to enhance their kids’ genomes.”
“I agree.”
“But I’m scared.”
“So am I.”
“Let’s keep in touch.”
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, April 9, 2037:
A long talk today with Cressanthia, who’s sympathetic to Gynarchism because of the sisters’ work organizing African-American wimin in the ghettos.
We’re both frightened of the possibility of being prosecuted for taking federal maternity benefits under false pretenses. I’ll get $1035 a month for the first four years after Johnny’s birth and $825 a month until he leaves school or home.
Cressanthia Thomas
The risks Jeanette and I took for the benefit of our kids bound us together and formed the basis of our friendship, the closest one I ever had with a white womin. Jeanette and I teleconferenced at least twice a week till two days before she gave birth.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, June 1, 2037:
WORLD HUMIN CHESS GRANDMASTERS’ ASSOCIATION PAYS
MEXICAN WOMIN $400,000 TO BE CLONED AS CAPABLANCA
METAMORPH—CHESS GENIUS WHO CAN ONE DAY
CHECKMATE IBM’S CHESS MAVEN
By Samantha Lyons
Special to IN-News
MEXICO CITY, June 1. The Humin Chess Grandmasters’ Association announced today that it recently paid $400,000 to Mal Teratol, a 22-year-old Zinacantec womin, to bear her own clone whose genome has been metamorphically enhanced in Japan at the Ozaki Institute of Metamorphic Genetics with genius genes associated with the ability to play championship chess.
Boris Chmeilniki, 37, president of the Grandmasters’ Association, said that Ms. Teratol is five weeks pregnant with what he termed “the world’s first Capablanca metamorph.” The term honors Jose Raul Capablanca (1888–1942), the greatest humin chess player of all time. Mr. Chmeilniki added that Ms. Teratol’s daughter will be raised and educated at the Association’s expense “with but one aim: to someday regain for the humin race the world chess championship, which has been held by IBM’s Chess Maven since 2009.”
Teratol, who formerly lived in El Dorado, a Mexico City slum, now resides in a suburb of Havana, Cuba.
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, June 1, 2037:
There was a young Mexican clone
Whose mother conceived her alone,
But added the gene
To beat the machine
We can’t checkmate on our own.
(limerick 767)
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, June 4, 2037:
His Eminence Hector Santana, Cardinal Archbishop of Havana: “Any unnatural enhancement of the humin genome is a sinful desecration of the sacred receptacle in which the Holy Spirit became incarnate as a Man.”
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, June 5, 2037:
TOP IN-NEWS STORY:
CUBA’S RULING CHRISTIAN COALITION EXPELS MAL TERATOL.
PREGNANT MOTHER-TO-BE OF CLONED CHESS GENIUS
IN-THE-MAKING HAS 48 HOURS TO LEAVE COUNTRY
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, June 6, 2037:
TOP IN-NEWS STORY:
TERATOL GIVEN REFUGE BY REGIONAL
GERMAN GYNARCHIST LEADER
HOHN, Schleswig-Holstein, June 6. Elsa Schminke, 44, a Regional Director of the German Gynarchist Federation (G.F.D.) said today that she has given refuge to Mal Teratol. Ms. Teratol, 22, is pregnant with the world’s first cloned Capablanca metamorph. Teratol, who is incommunicado, presently occupies a small suite of rooms on the second floor of Die Weisse Jungfrau, a moderately-priced hotel-restaurant that Ms. Schminke has owned and operated for six years in this medieval Schleswig-Holstein town.
“There’s always room at my inn for a homeless mother-to-be,” Ms. Schminke declared.
A Mexican Indian clone
Whose genome with genius was sown,
Was forced from her nest
At the Church’s behest,
And fled with her mother to Hohn.”
(limerick 767)
From Jeanette Baker’s journal,
August 30, 2037:
TOP IN-NEWS STORY:
TERATOL DECLARES HERSELF A GYNARCHIST;
JOINS BEIT TIAMAT, INTERNATIONAL GYNARCHIST KEEP UNDER
MEDITERRANEAN; DECLARES DAUGHTER WILL WIN WORLD
CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP FOR WOMINKIND
BEIT TIAMAT, MEDSEA, Aug. 30. Mal Teratol, 22, four months pregnant with daughter Ishtar, the world’s first cloned Capablanca metamorph, said today that she has joined this thriving Palestinian-Israeli Gynarchist communal keep situated 250 meters under the Mediterranean Sea, 9 miles southwest of Tel Aviv.
In a prepared statement, Ms. Teratol declared herself a Gynarchist, committed to the feminization of the humin race. “I have become a member of this commune of Palestinian and Israeli wimin, who renounced the warring tribal phallocracies into which they were born and live in peace. Here I will raise my daughter Ishtar to win back the world chess championship for Wominkind.”
Tried my hand at a limerick:
An undersea Gynarchist keep
Is now home to our hope in the deep.
She’ll play chess with the fishes
And do as she wishes,
(No last line. Am going to sleep.)
From Jeanette Baker’s journal, September 4, 2037:
METAMORPHIC MASTERMIND THANKS GYNARCHISTS
By Rebecca Hartog
Special to IN-News
KYOTO, Sept. 4. In an exclusive interview today, Dr. Frederick Rust Plowman, 29, the American director of the Ozaki Institute of Metamorphic Genetics, expressed his gratitude to the international Gynarchist community for its support of Mal Teratol, mother-to-be of the world’s first Capablanca metamorph. Dr. Plowman said, “I had the privilege of designing and building Ishtar Teratol’s genome. I’m not a Gynarchist; I’m neutral in the gender war. But I’m a genetic engineer. I believe that the humin race must direct its evolution, and I thank the International Gynarchists movement for helping me implement the Doctrine of Metamorphism.”
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
Make no mistake: Fritz loved publicity. His interview with IN-News got him into hot water with the powers that be at the Ozaki Institute. The Board of Directors had been gunning for him since Ozaki had handpicked him as his successor. Fritz was doubly—make that triply—resented: as a foreigner, because he was young, and because he’d been Ozaki’s lover. Behind his back Fritz’s underlings called him gaijin homodachi—“foreign faggot.”