"I feel sorry for those poor miners. The ones in the newspaper."
"That's a very complicated tangle of issues. Mind you, what the Margrave did was wrong. But they should never have resorted to violence and sabotage. They should never have occupied the mines. What did they expect? That the soldiers would simply turn around and go away?"
"It sounds such a terrible way to die. It makes one feel funny, knowing that one's own companies produced the—"
"Aunt Penniger!"
She looked away. "Well, what do I know? I'm only an old woman." Then, more firmly, "Such atrocities never happened when I was young! Things were better managed then. Soldiers only killed other soldiers."
"That's sad, too, if you stop and think about it."
"It just seems that there's more sadness to go around these days. It's as if somebody had built a mill, like that little mill at the bottom of the sea churning out salt, only this one a mill of misery. So many troubles!" Aunt Penniger shook her head. "At any rate, it's a sorry business."
By which—Gretchen understood—she meant everything.
It was true. Polluted by a thousand untraceable sources, growing grimmer and more violent by the day for reasons nobody could adequately explain, the world was sliding into chaos and something worse than chaos, for which there was no name. Laughter was rarer than it had once been on the streets, marching societies more common. Everyone knew that the wooden rifles they drilled with were not the only weapons they possessed. Everyone knew that their bellowed pledges of fealty to an Emperor who was both weak and conveniently distant were a sham, and that their only loyalty was to themselves. Everyone knew their rude and unlettered leaders had political ambitions.
The telephone rang, but she did not answer it.
She was pregnant.
It was not supposed to be possible. Faust had told her so. He had promised she would not get pregnant. He had given her his explicit and most solemn word on it.
So how could this be?
For a time she had considered the possibility that Wulf had suborned a chemist and had her birth control pills replaced with placebos. It was exactly the kind of comic-opera plotting to which he was prone. But, no, really, it was her own fault. She hadn't read the documentation carefully. She hadn't kept an exact record of her menstrual cycle. More than once she had had too much to drink and forgotten to take them at all. There were few things she hadn't done, not many mistakes she'd failed to make.
Faust had assured her it wouldn't happen.
It wasn't his responsibility, though, was it?
Now she was crying. She had to consider the consequences, and she was alone and bereft of hope and without the benefit of Faust's advice.
The law was never easy on unmarried women who found themselves in such a state. She could be imprisoned until the child was born, then publicly whipped, and driven penniless out of Nuremberg, clutching her bastard in her arms. Then, if she survived the stone-throwers and lowlifes who thought a woman stripped of the protection of the law a jolly thing to hunt down, she could choose between living as a beggar or a whore. That or let her baby starve.
She thought about the baby, sleeping deep within her. She had wanted children someday. Not now.
What kind of life would her child have to look forward to? The bastard daughter of a whore grew up to become a whore. The fatherless son of a beggar might, if intelligent, become a card-sharp and confidence-trickster, or, if ambitious, a highwayman. Otherwise, a common thief. He was sure to die on the gallows.
Such grotesque scenarios were the stuff of a radio melodrama. Even though they were sober fact, she could not honestly believe in them. It was hard to imagine the wheel of fate plunging her so low after raising her to such wealth.
Money, of course, brought its own protections. If she could prove she was secretly pledged to be married, all charges would be dropped. The city fathers would not look too closely at the proof. A stammering swineherd's word that he was the father would be good enough to send the happy couple packing to the wedding chapel.
Gretchen had to laugh. There was no shortage of candidates, at least. And how many of them would refuse her?
Refuse her hand, her houses, her lands, her factories, her influence, her power, her wealth? Not many.
But she needed more than just a husband.
She needed someone who would raise over her the benevolent umbrella of his Y-chromosome, while leaving her in control of the family holdings. Someone secure enough in himself to trust her to run the day-to-day operations. Someone whose presence would not grow tedious in a week. Someone whose commands she would respect and gladly obey. Someone who would listen to her. Someone she could respect.
There was only one such man in existence, and he was living in permanent exile in London.
The bastard!
He should be here to comfort her. Just his presence would be enough to quell this unbearable panic, his arms about her, his murmured assurances ... It hardly mattered if they were lies. Oh, but she was the most wretched woman in existence! Even Mother, wrinkled and worn though she was, had had her great passion—she and Father had spent decades together. Their painful farewell was not an unreasonable price to pay for what they'd had. Gretchen, by contrast, had enjoyed only a handful of months with her love. In memory their time together had steadily diminished, months becoming weeks and weeks turned to days, until now all that remained were a few bright Arabian hours, like a child's recollection of the pictures in a book of wonder-tales read to her in a garden that had vanished long ago.
If Faust were to walk into the room at this very instant, she'd spit in his face. She would! It was criminal, what he'd done to her. She had trusted him. She had relied upon him. Now, when she needed him most, he was impossibly distant, in the faraway mists of England. He might as well be in Ultima Thule, for all the good he could do her. Even if she were to write him begging for aid, the letter would take a week to wend its way across the continent and into his office, with another week for his response to retrace its path to her.
She didn't have two weeks. Her belly had begun inexorably to swell. She had bound it down with swaths of cloth, and made small jokes about how chubby she'd grown from overeating. But people were beginning to wonder. Soon they'd begin to talk.
The future stretched before her, desolate and haunted with regret. She would hold this day and the guilt she now felt within her for the rest of her life. She was not the type who could forgive herself such a blunder.
Downstairs she had a Parisian fashion magazine with her picture on the cover, an advance copy sent as a courtesy to her by the publisher. Within was an article extolling her as the New Woman—chic, powerful, and in control.
She was not in control.
Just yesterday, she'd been going over the architectural models of the Reinhardt Pavilion for next year's Exposition of European Industry. The pilings for the exhibition halls were already being pounded into the fields outside of Amsterdam. Next summer hundreds of thousands of visitors would course through them. Since her companies had more new products to promote than any other corporation, they planned the most spectacular showcase. It was going to be a glass palace, all windows, demonstrating the structural freedom offered by steel-frame construction. Gretchen had briefly considered erecting a skyscraper, but there was neither the time nor a suitably bedrocked location.
"The labor unions have, of course, been, well. Paid off,"
Dreschler had commented in passing. "So there will be no trouble from that quarter."
"Paid off? Do you mean bribery?"
"That is, umm, not an entirely pleasant word for it." Dres-chler's doughy face took on a pained expression. "It is more in the nature of an advance payment to ensure the labor force will be satisfied with the negotiated wage schedules."
"But the men actually doing the work—how much of this advance money will they see?"
"That's up to their, ah, leaders. I didn't care to look into it too closely."
"Well, you sh
ould/" Gretchen exploded. Maybe it was the hormones flooding her body, rendering her own emotions unfamiliar and treacherous. Maybe it was just the tension of being in this terrifying fix and having to hide it from the world. Whatever the reason, she had flown off the handle, and lectured Dreschler for a good twenty minutes on corporate citizenship, responsibility, and why it was simply good business to keep their hands scrupulously clean. It was only when she was done that she looked around and actually saw the secretaries, designers, and model-makers, standing about red-facedly trying to pretend they had seen and heard nothing. Only then that she realized Dreschler should have been reprimanded in private, away from his underlings. Only then that she saw the rage and humiliation in his eyes.
"Yes," he'd said. "I understand, truly. I do."
One thinks of oneself as a good person. One is not an objective judge. Some of the things she'd done ... she didn't want to think about them. It was so easy to be corrupted by events. All it took was the decision, not necessarily conscious, not to bother thinking about the consequences.
How could she be pregnant?
She should never have relied on the assurances of a man. Men and women were cats and birds, really. There might be a fondness between one and the other, a temporary truce between individuals now and then. A goldfinch and a tortoiseshell might well fall in love. But the imbalance of power was always there, and it was not a wise little finch who went to sleep first.
She was crying again. It felt like she was being punished for some crime the nature of which nobody would inform her. When she had first begun dealing with governments and court royalty, Gretchen had been astounded by how callous those in power were—how ready to employ force and brutality, how easily they spoke of "collateral damage" and "battlefield statistics" when what they meant was human deaths. Every king in Christendom, and several from without, had sent envoys begging her to develop for them more effective ways of killing larger numbers of people.
What had she ever done that was half so evil?
She had worked so hard. She had dedicated herself to the material betterment of society. Late nights, twenty-hour days, missed meals—whatever was needed, that had she done. None of this had been for her own enrichment and aggrandizement; those had come to her, admittedly, but they had never been the purpose of her labor. She'd had the talent, and so she'd employed it.
She was exhausted with thought; she wanted never to think again. But she did not have that option. Her mind would not stop. Like a tongue to an aching tooth, it returned again and again to her predicament, poking and prodding and refreshing the pain. There were no answers. There were no solutions. Even the questions had grown stale and meaningless with repetition. But the hounds of thought insisted on yet again running her down the labyrinth of regret, whose passages led to no center and whose perimeter held no exit.
She could not flee.
There was nowhere to go. Nowhere she wasn't known. Nowhere the sudden appearance of a pregnant woman with money and no family wouldn't raise questions. There was that damned magazine with her picture on the cover, and it was only one of many. She was known everywhere. Anyway, and always, if she fled, what would become of Reinhardt Industries? It would collapse like a playing-card castle without her leadership. She owed her employees more than that.
The problem was, the world had grown small. Distances were not as great as they once were. A month-long wagon-trip could no longer hide one's past. Five hundred miles meant nothing to a determined prosecutor. Soon, the technocrats would connect and reconcile the hundreds of competing telegraph and telephone systems into one buzzing web of lines and information, intruding into every town and hamlet, rendering every part of the continent no more than a second away. There would be no more secrets then. It would pretty much put an end to privacy and personal liberty altogether.
She wasn't at all sure she wanted to live in such a world.
There never was an actual decision. One day she had simply gone to see Gunther Haaft. Haaft was a chemist and a gentle soul, one of the best researchers she had, and certainly the most discreet. She had asked him for the name of a man who could perform the operation.
"What an odd request. Whyever would you want to know such a thing?" Haaft had said. A little smile flickered like foxfire on his long plain features. "Were you of your mother's generation, I'd suspect that your daughter had—" He stopped.
The lies came so readily to her lips. No, of course not. Marketing requires certain information. One of our biologists has shown startling results on the treatment of senility utilizing fetal brain tissue. We're putting together an atlas of human anatomy and need input for the prenatal chapters. But the lies did not come quickly enough, for even as she began to speak them, a look of comprehension passed over Haaft's face, collapsing it into first unhappiness and then what could only be called compassion.
In Gretchen's experience, chemists were all stern men in white coats with wire-rimmed glasses and brutally short haircuts through which their pink scalps could be seen. They were fanatics in the service of an undiscovered ideology. Haaft, however, was the exception. Tall, horsy, aristocratic, he was disarmingly solemn, and yet quiet laughter always lurked just below the surface, waiting for his inevitable turn of wit to bring it out. Not now, though.
Gretchen stiffened. She did not want his damnable pity.
"Why should you care why I want it? I'm your superior. I sign your paychecks. I can fire you if I wish. The fact that I want it should be good enough for you."
Wordlessly, he got out a scrap of paper and scribbled down a name.
Haaft had been more than just a colleague. Gretchen considered him a friend, and one whose company she valued. Now she had lost that relationship. It was a pity. But only one among many.
How could she have been so stupid?
How could she have been so foolish and wicked and lazy and wasteful? There were no words harsh enough for her. If only she could travel back in time to have a few words with her younger self. She'd have something to say to herself! She'd drag the little bitch down the street by the roots of her hair and fling her in the horse-fountain. She'd thrash her within an inch of her life. Whatever it took to get her attention.
She had been given a pamphlet, privately printed and set into verse by a local semianonymous poetaster, to explain the operation:
First does the doctor clean the abdomen,
And then will he numb a small patch of skin Just below the navel with a local Anaesthetic—for it is the focal Point where the needle, without blood or fuss,
Glides gently down into the uterus,
That realm where all is warm and dark and damp —the patient may experience a cramp.
A dram of amniotic fluid's removed Into the barrel (some call it the tube)
Of the syringe, where it is inspected.
Prostaglandin is slowly injected.
Here some pressure or a bloated feeling May well occur—best stare at the ceiling.
Long hours will pass before the contractions can begin; you may avoid distractions (nausea, diarrhea, and other ills)
By letting your doctor prescribe you pills.
At first your contractions will not be great.
The pressure may cause your rectum to ache.
Waters gush freely from the vagina!
The patient may experience minor Pain. This means that the amniotic sac Has burst. Time for the patient to lie back For now does begin her induced labor;
Each woman's is different in flavor—
How it should feel and how long it should go,
These are things no one beforehand can know.
First leaves the fetus, as was expected,
In that hour placenta is ejected.
Now you are done, please keep in your prayers The poet who here has soothed all your cares And in nimble rhyme and right proportion Explained your prostaglandin abortion.
A. S.
She did not want to do this thing.
But it was not as if she had an
y choices or alternatives. There was no way out of this airtight chamber. She was put in mind of how her biologists had demonstrated to her the necessity of oxygen for respiration. They had placed a mouse within a bell jar, which they then sealed so that air could neither enter nor leave. At first the creature crouched, wary and alert, breathing deeply and looking about. Then, as the 02 dwindled and the C02 built up, the mouse suddenly began racing around and around the bottom of the jar, frantically scrabbling at the glass, trying to escape. It was excruciating to watch. As the oxygen waned, so too did the mouse's energy. Finally the pretty little thing simply lay down and accepted her fate.
All her choices had been made so very long ago.
There were protesters outside her window. She could hear them chanting. "Mur-der-ESS. Mur-der-ESS. Mur-der-ESS." When had that started? It had been morning when she entered the room; it had been full of light. Now the sun had shifted the world into shadow.
"Mur-der-ESS. Mur-der-ESS. Mur-der-ESS."
The chant abruptly stopped. Gretchen went to the blinds and parted two slats with her fingers. Outside, Brother Josaphat had come by in his motorcar, to dole out encouragement and fresh stacks of pamphlets. She saw him slapping backs and shaking hands. He was looking more prosperous than ever. When he spoke to a demonstrator, he maintained an eye contact so firm it could only be called practiced.
Reactionary politics had certainly done well by Brother Josaphat. He had his own weekly radio show, a newspaper column, and the ear of the regional nobility. He had been to Rome five times. The Pope solicited his advice. He was reputed to keep a mistress. If the modern world had benefitted but one man, it was him.
Friendly laughter floated up from the little group.
Then he was gone, leaving some doughnuts and a thermos of hot cider behind him.
Sometimes she wondered who these people were who came out every day to chant in front of her town house. How did they come to have so much free time? Did they even know why they were here? Why, when there were so many evils loose in the world, did they choose to fight this one? The Dominicans had organized the mission and named it Christian Crusade for Life. They could have chosen a better title, one that didn't bring to mind how many murders could be laid to the Church's credit. But it wasn't her place to advise them.
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 23