“I cannot help but wonder if that other one and you are the same. There was a human one with an invisible soul and a beetle-like one with an invisible soul, the souls affecting me in the same exact way. The human one was, I think, called Sylvia. What is your name?”
Chapter 49: Sylvia’s Disclosure
On one of the six evenings each week that they slept together, Sylvia whispered into Peter’s ear, “Something has happened that I have put off telling you until now because I was not sure.” Peter was struck by the solemnity with which she said those words. He had been about to fall asleep but was made wide awake by the seriousness of Sylvia’s tone. He was worried that she was ill or had changed the way she felt about him. He sat up in bed, faced her, took her hands in his, and said, “Tell me.”
She said, “I am pregnant.” He did not say anything in response for a while. He just looked dumbfounded at her. He still held her hands in his. She said, “You look pale. Is anything the matter?” When he still did not say anything or do anything except hold her hand, she spoke to him as if he had forgotten how to speak or understand the English language. “Pregnant” she said and, pointing to herself, said, “me,” and, still not getting a reaction, said, “baby come…baby inside of me.” She was partly joking.
In the meantime, Peter got control of himself enough to ask, “Are you sure?”
She breathed a sigh of relief that he had come back from wherever it was that he had gone and said, “I’ve missed two periods. Unless the food they gave us makes me miss periods which I doubt since I ate it for two years without missing periods, I am sure that I’ve missed two periods and therefore that I am pregnant.”
“Wow,” Peter said. His mind was racing as he thought about all of the implications of what she said. He thought of two different kinds of implications, one kind having to do with being on Earth and another kind having to do with being on an asteroid millions of miles away from Earth and inhabited by non-human creatures.
He worried, for instance, about possible medical complications sometimes associated with childbirth. Would these creatures be able to help him help her under such circumstances, given that they are not human and have no experience dealing with human ailments? He imagined the creatures wearing gowns and having little plastic gloves at the tips of each of their little limbs and making their strange noises back and forth. He imagined strange wheeled instruments being rolled into a bizarre birthing room.
The thought of such what childbirth would be like among creatures playing the roles of doctors and nurses and anesthesiologists struck Peter as funny. He laughed.
Noticing that he laughed, Sylvia was offended, thinking he laughed at her and at how she would change as the pregnancy progressed. She pointed with her index finger at him and then drove the finger into his chest while asking, “You laugh? Do you think this is funny?”
Peter was quick to try to soothe what he could see were very ruffled feathers. “Not at all,” Peter said, “I just got a weird picture in my mind just then that made me laugh. Or maybe I laughed out of happiness. I have been so much alone in my life. Then I met you. And now, out of you, might come another who I believe will be a second very good friend of mind.
“So, you see, my point has become a circle. And the circle widens. My joy, which I had thought was complete, becomes ever fuller. I don’t know why the thought of that happening made me laugh, but it did. Joy became laughter that you seem to have interpreted the wrong way.”
“I am glad you are happy,” Sylvia said. “That is a relief. The first hurdle has been crossed. A lot more hurdles remain.” Though he knew what she meant, Peter decided that, rather than imposing his own concerns on her, he’d feign ignorance so he asked, “What exactly are those hurdles you are thinking of?”
Her answer indicated with how much more detail she had thought about the implications of childbirth than he had. Of course, part of the reason that she had given the subject more thought than he had was that she suspected she was pregnant when the thought was, to him, a mere remote possibility.
She said, “We’ll have to tell the teacher. The teacher’s reaction will be the second hurdle. Will the teacher be happy or not? And what about the other creatures in authority with whom he will undoubtedly consult and to whom he will undoubtedly report?”
“Maybe,” Peter said, “they will not like the idea and will do something to induce an abortion.” “Or maybe,” Sylvia said, “this new development will delight them. It will give them a chance to see an aspect of human life they would otherwise not see, at least not up close. I’ve thought about this a lot and feel very strongly that delight is the more likely reaction. I am counting on it, in fact; otherwise, I might try to hide my condition from them and ask to return home sooner than we had planned.”
Peter said, “I think your sense of things is right. I too feel that the teacher and the others will be delighted. If not, we can ask to leave earlier but, if so, we can expect a lot of help with the whole drawn-out process of pregnancy, birth, and the first months of child raising. We have to tell the teacher. Let’s not put off telling the teacher. Let’s tell the teacher first thing tomorrow morning.”
Sylvia agreed and put her arms around him. He could feel her body against his and felt the spasm of her breathing and felt her tears on his cheek and listened to the sounds she made as she wept.
Peter said, “See what strange and disparate feelings and actions follow joy. I laughed and now you cry.” When her crying didn’t taper off, he said, “Don’t cry, darling—not when such a wonderful thing is about to happen. I was just thinking how we will both have to be careful not to do anything that will cause you to exert yourself too much.”
She stopped crying and laughed and wiped her eyes and said, “That is the last thing I have to worry about. As it is, I’m being waited on hand and foot. We’re treated like royalty here.” “True enough,” Peter said. “I supposed I was imagining us living on Earth. When we go there and if you become pregnant again, we’ll have to make sure you don’t exert yourself too much.” She laughed. He wiped her eyes. He was already being very solicitous. “Don’t cry, darling,” he said. “Don’t cry, my baby.”
The very next morning before class began, they did what they decided the night before they had to do. They walked up to the teacher, the two of them together, and explained that they had something to tell the teacher that might come as a surprise. Before they had a chance to say anything more, the teacher said, “I know. You (and it pointed with one of its upper legs at Sylvia) are pregnant. We have known that for quite a while. It will be, by the way, a boy. I was about to talk to you about it. Arrangements, after all, have to be made.”
The creature then made the combination of sounds that indicated it was very happy. It also brought the four scrawny legs on one side of its shell against the scrawny legs on the other side in a kind of clapping gesture. “Very good,” it said. “We are very happy. We will learn much.”
It added, “We will take very good care of you. Because of our close acquaintanceship with you and Peter and also because of information gleaned from other sources, we know quite a lot about human physiology.
“We can now put what we have learned into practice. So rest assured that you, Sylvia, will come out of this just fine and that your fetus will turn into a healthy infant very well taken care of by us as well as by the two of you. I speak not only for myself but also for my colleagues.”
Sylvia felt so comforted by those words that she forgot for a moment that she was speaking to a creature shaped like an octagon and encased by a shell and with eyes that jutted out of its head and with four arms. She walked around the desk and turned the rolling cart the creature sat inside of around (the creature letting her do that) until the creature faced her. She then put her arms around the creature despite not being exactly sure where to put her arms. She ended up putting her arms around the space that existed between the uppermost two legs and the ones that came next.
“Thank you, dear tea
cher, for reassuring me. I was worried you or others might not approve of my having a child and do something to hurt it,” she said. “I can’t thank you enough.”
Peter, who was standing next to Sylvia while this was going on, echoed her sentiments. He said, “We both thank you.” But, even as he said that, he was very jealous because he wanted to take a primary role in taking care of Sylvia during her pregnancy and in taking care of the child after it was born. Instead, because they lived in an environment dominated by caring and competent though weird-looking others, he had to resign himself to the fact that his role would be secondary. He had to resigning himself to looking on when he should be studying up on what was needed and doing whatever was necessary. Instead, he’d have to practice being at most supportive.
He knew that his feelings were senseless and pathetic, but he could not help the way he felt—not at least under these circumstances. He tried to reason with himself, saying something very primitive inside of himself was at war with a more reasonable part that recognized that the circumstances of his and Sylvia’s life demanded an accommodation different from anything the primitive being living inside of himself could possibly comprehend. He told the reasonable part of himself, “You have to conquer the primitive feelings while maintaining your composure in the face of these strange circumstances.” He answered himself, “I will.”
In the meantime, Sylvia kept hugging the creature. She had to lean over slightly to do it. She had to be careful to keep from pushing the wheeled cart backwards. She had to be careful not to crush the teacher’s carapace.
The creature squirmed under her hug. It obviously felt very uncomfortable being hugged but allowed the hugging to happen because it was aware that hugging was important to humans—signifying, among other things, gratitude. Nevertheless, the teacher felt uncomfortable because crawling on top of or being beneath other creatures and not hugging was what came more naturally to it. So the teacher felt very relieved when she backed away but said nothing to indicate how uncomfortable it felt.
Things changed after they had their talk with the teacher. For instance, that very night, the creatures that escorted them to dinner carried two soup tureens with them instead of just one as had been the case until that time. One tureen was put in front of Peter and the other in front of Sylvia. She smelled it and told the creature that set it down in front of her and removed the lid, with Peter listening and understanding every word, that this new soup smelled very fine and looked creamier and richer than the soups she had been given before though those soups were fine in every way.
She told the creatures with Peter listening and understanding each word that she liked the smell so much that she felt as if she might live off the aroma alone.
The new soup looked different from the soups she had been given before. There was a circle of red stuff on the surface inside a circle of green stuff. She described it to Peter and asked the creatures if he could come over to her side of the table and look at the soup. They told her that would be alright. Peter came over and, looking down into the bowl, said, “It’s a work of art.”
He leaned forward so that he could catch a whiff of the new soup. The aroma sent him into a kind of ecstasy. He had to hold onto the corner of the table to keep from keeling over. “I could easily get addicted to this,” he said and added, “Too bad I’m not pregnant.”
Sylvia said, this time to Peter and in English, “I feel as if I could live off of just the aroma.” “Me too,” he said. He then went back to his side of the table.
Peter and Sylvia did not allow this new development to change their routine. It was time for one of them to recite a poem. It was Peter’s turn to recite a poem. He picked one he had read before and that in some indeterminable way seem somehow to fit the occasion. It was about a whale and its offspring swimming side by side through long strands of seaweed and occasionally breaching, the mother whale always at the side of the baby whale.
Sylvia liked the choice. She asked him if he made it up and, when he said he did, she said, “How good it made me feel to hear it! Will you recite it again the night after tomorrow?” He said he would. “And again?” she asked, adding, “And again and again.”
When they signaled to the creatures that they were ready to drink the soup, two creatures came forward, one to pour Sylvia’s soup out of her tureen and another to pour Peter’s soup out of his tureen. When Sylvia’s soup was poured, the red and the green mingled in very complicated and beautiful swirling patterns. “My pregnancy diet,” she whispered and winked at Peter.
She took a taste and swirled the soup around the inside of her mouth rather than swallowing it right away. She said to Peter, “This is really delicious.” She asked the creature who put the soup in front of her if she could give Peter a taste, but the creature said no. She said to Peter, “I think they are fattening me up now that I have announced my pregnancy. And, whatever this soup is made of, the ingredients must be very precious for them not to allow me to give you a taste of it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter said. “The main thing is that you like it and that it helps you make it successfully through your pregnancy. Just to smell it was enough for me. If I drank it, I think I’d die and go to heaven.”
Her morning energy drink too was different from that time on also. Instead of a homogeneous color, there were layers of different colors, ranging from two to five layers, depending on the day.
After dinner, Peter, who had evidently thinking a lot about what having a baby would entail, asked this question, “When the time comes for us to go home and we get to the surface and don our spacesuits, what would the baby wear? It cannot fit inside your spacesuit. Yet it will need some kind of heated and airproof shield.”
Sylvia said, “You’re getting too far ahead of yourself. Let’s just take each thing as it comes.” Sylvia was already evincing the air of distance, tranquility, and tranquil recognition that he remembered people saying was one of the signs of a contented healthy woman part of the way through a good pregnancy.
He decided she was right to say he was worrying too much about what lay in the future and didn’t say anything more.
That night, they did not talk much. They slept in Sylvia’s room that night. They did not make love but were just content to hug and kiss and lie side by side, each one excited by the prospect of having a baby join them.
Peter wished the teacher had not denied them the chance to wonder what its sex would be. He thought it would be nice to find out what the baby’s sex was when it was born.
But, as he thought more about this matter of knowing ahead of time the sex of the child, he decided that it was nice too to know that the child would be a boy. He thought, “Whether boy and girl, the child would be very special not only because it was theirs. It would be an offspring for all of humanity—the first human child born in space—humanity’s first star-child.
Chapter 50: Two Essays
As time went on, the nervousness and novelty and anticipation of having a child gave way to a more relaxed attitude towards what they came to regard as an inevitable development though one behind which possible dangers lurked. It helped that the creatures seemed so comfortable with the idea and seemed to have taken everything in hand.
The one most lasting and powerful effect the idea of having a child had on them was that it made them think more than before about getting back to Earth and about how the time between any present time and the future time when they would return to Earth was getting ever narrower. This made them want to learn as much as possible about the creatures, their ideas, their customs, and their language.
They wanted especially to understand and translate the inscriptions they had found during their first few days on the asteroid. They made a lot of progress and, in the evenings, spent a lot of time sitting at one of the desks they found in the closets of their bedrooms, poring over their drawings for the purpose of teasing out the translations.
Slowly, they managed to translate the symbols that they had drawn
and, after doing nearly all of the translating, discovered that the order of the sets of symbols was all wrong. They asked the teacher for a supply of cards and wrote on separate cards what was found on each part of each wall, door, and room. Then, by trying various ways of arranging the cards, they arrived at what they were sure was the proper sequence when what had seemed originally to be disconnected ideas got transformed into what now seemed to be (and they felt sure was) fairly long, complicated, and profound essays.
There were two essays on two entirely different subjects. The essays that emerged from the inscriptions Peter found in his maze had to do with “special connections,” that is, the special connections that beings can feel for one another. As they put the essay that resulted from what they were sure was the proper arrangement of the symbols Peter found, both Sylvia and Peter felt enriched by what they were reading. And they were very pleased to find that what some creature or creatures living long ago in this faraway place applied to their own lives, feelings, problems and challenges.
The essay that Peter and Sylvia was able to assemble from the inscriptions Sylvia found inside of the spiraling ramp which she had entered had more physics in it than psychology or spirituality. The subject of that essay was gravity. A theory of gravity was presented.
Chapter 51: Special Connections
What follows is a brief summary of the contents of the essay that Peter and Sylvia assembled out of the scattered inscriptions that Peter found and made hand-drawn copies of. The essay started by asserting that “it is indisputable and based on much experience that some beings feel specially connected to other beings.
A Theory of Gravity Page 32