“Our child won’t be a monster. He’ll be ours, the symbol of our linked destinies. I believe this is what the ghost referred to, when he said the future would contain ‘marvels and illuminations.’ Our child will astonish the world.”
Lazorg jumped up. “No! I won’t let you!”
“You can’t stop me. It’s my choice, my body, my sacrifice.”
Lazorg looked at her imploringly, then rushed from the room, overcome by his emotions.
Crutchsump picked up his plate of food and followed him.
He would need to keep up his strength to be a good father.
That night in bed, Lazorg held Crutchsump tightly, and they wept together.
The full term for a pregnancy was, of course, four months. And the final month after Crutchsump’s visit to the chirurgeon passed all too quickly.
Lazorg had insisted on further immediate medical consultations, once he knew the truth. Various high-priced experts were brought onto the case, but all eventually concurred with Moffoletto’s initial diagnosis: the invasive womb and its unseen occupant’s metabolism were now too intricately entwined with Crutchsump’s physiology to permit severing. Any attempt at excision would be fatal to the mother, as fatal as giving birth would be. But allowing the fetus to mature would at least preserve one life out of the inexorably linked pairing of mother and child.
Crutchsump had accepted the latest findings calmly. Nothing she heard changed her certitude about the rightness of her actions. She felt radiant, blessed.
Lazorg, however, raged like a madman in the privacy of their home.
“It’s not fair! Not fair to anyone! I lost my woman once already, paid the highest price! Why again! Why me!”
He berated himself for infidelity.
“If only I hadn’t frightened you with my attentions to Serrapane. None of this would have happened! How I detest her now!”
Crutchsump said nothing, but was quietly pleased.
The artist was not totally egocentric, though.
“You don’t deserve this, Moley! Not at all. You saved me when I was lost and friendless, and this is your reward. It’s too cruel, too mean! Just when we had a good life together, after all your suffering in poverty. Why? Why! Maybe you’re just too fine for this world. That’s how it often worked in mine.”
Crutchsump would hold Lazorg’s hand and stroke his arm, or his naked face. “No one’s to blame, Lazorg. We fashion our own destinies. I invited the ghost to descend on me. I alone am to blame, if there is any blame at all. You never thought you could impregnate me after a barren year. And no one knew our child would be so vigorous in the womb. But that’s all good! He’ll be a sturdy youth.”
Lazorg failed to take solace from this line of reasoning.
The only time he troubled Crutchsump was when he delved into blasphemy.
“I curse the Conceptus! Goddamn him! Worm in the rose, he is! Hiding at the nub of creation. All this is his fault! He made the universe, he sent the ghost. I hold him responsible, for all our suffering! If I could, I’d kill him!”
“No, no, Lazorg, you mustn’t say that. Promise me you’ll forget such thoughts. They do you no honor.”
But Lazorg would make no such promise.
In the final week of her fourth month, her neck and introciptor grossly enlarged and “teratological,” according to Moffoletto, Crutchsump had to take permanently to bed.
She had a momentary pang about her appearance. She had never been a beauty like Serrapane, but her average features had been familiar and attractive enough to satisfy herself. But when she weighed the loss of her modest beauty against the nurturing of her child, she didn’t really mind. And Lazorg did not seem to be repulsed.
(Were all the inhabitants of this plane, she wondered, still so alien to him that even major abnormalities were elided in his vision?)
Pirkle responded to his mistress’s dilemma with utmost devotion. He climbed into bed with her and simply refused to leave, except to deposit his scat lozenges in a nearby sand box. He began to emit a constant, plangent, wavering, almost subliminal drone that had a soothing effect on all who heard it.
Crutchsump remained fairly robust physically. But her mind was going, as the rogue womb expanded inward into her brain.
Her powers of speech left her before her rationality departed, trapping her in noncommunicativeness. But she didn’t really mind, as she was still able to clutch Lazorg’s hand as he sat for hours beside her, and she could still listen to his voice, even if she didn’t always comprehend him anymore.
Livewater sustained her, and the child, and that was good.
Then, in her final days, a strange thing happened.
As her rational brain lost its functions one by one, in the face of colonizing extensions by the womb, her gut brain began to assume a new prominence, a leading role in her minute-by-minute awareness and stream of quasi-consciousness. Her distributed enteric neurons rose to the challenge, and assumed new roles different from the gut brain’s traditional function of subconscious guidance and inspiration.
This novel form of sentience did not exactly mirror her old awareness, but it was an intriguing substitute. Crutchsump still had access to many of her memories, and these continuing connections allowed her to appreciate people and her situation, such as when Palisander or Arbogast came to visit.
Moreover, she began to experience a new talent, that of remote viewing. With physical eyes closed, she could direct her mind’s eye and mind’s ear to roam at will, disclosing happenings anywhere she wished.
Perhaps this ability was latent in everyone, but was generally subsumed and squelched in the workings of the higher brain, and only emerged now in her unique case, as her higher brain relinquished dominance. Perhaps it was an incidental ghost-given talent. Perhaps she was only hallucinating.
But whatever the explanation, Crutchsump enjoyed the freedom afforded by these audiovisual panorama.
Not that every moment of eavesdropping was reassuring.
One such unsettling moment concerned a conversation between Lazorg and Palisander, at the latter’s shrine.
“Is it possible to reach the Conceptus physically?” asked Lazorg. “To confront that demiurge directly?”
“He resides so deep within the Cosmocopia, beyond so many multiple universes, that if you could traverse one universe a day, it would take you millennia to reach him. And how can you punch through the skin of each plane? You saw what was necessary to bring you from your home to here. Absolute mental derangement and chemical enhancement. You could not induce multiple thousands of such incidents of such magnitude and survive.”
Lazorg pondered this response. Back in her bed, Crutchsump felt glad that any insane plans of Lazorg’s to wreak vengeance on the Conceptus were doomed to failure.
But then Palisander, intellectually bemused, offered this: “You know the interstitial realm, of course, from which you draw the nacre for your ideations. Well, some say that this realm connects every plane intimately, a kind of rat’s maze between all the walls of the Cosmocopia, and that travel through it is possible, and less time-consuming than a blunt path across every intervening dimension. But what its features are, or how one would traverse it—Well, even legends don’t offer much advice.”
Lazorg nodded sagely, and Crutchsump, watching from afar, was dismayed.
Another interview, this time with Arbogast, did nothing to alleviate her trepidations.
The two ideation makers were speaking in Lazorg’s studio, just a floor away from where Crutchsump lay, both men thinking her unwitting of their conversation.
“If I disappear one day after Crutchsump dies,” said Lazorg, “I want you to assume control of all our properties. Do whatever you wish with them. I doubt I’ll ever be back.”
“Where are you going? What do you intend?”
“I can’t say. You’ll think me mad.”
Arbogast didn’t press the matter. “As you wish.”
> Lazorg made one final stipulation. “If I succeed at one final ideation, you’ll recognize that I’ve done something grand and unprecedented. I’d like you to honor my last artistic accomplishment as you think best.”
“Of course.”
Lazorg’s nebulous plans raised a diffuse alarm in Crutchsump’s gut brain. But it was overwhelmed by other, more urgent sensations.
She knew herself ready to deliver their child.
Pirkle was the one who brought Lazorg running into Crutchsump’s bedroom. The wurzel had dashed into the studio and dragged him with mandibles until he got the message. Both Lazorg and Arbogast hastened downstairs, and arrived just in time to witness the delivery.
No time to fetch Moffoletto. But his professional obstetric experience would have availed naught.
Crutchsump felt massive contractions inside her sinusoidal womb that sent the flesh of her face quivering. Her introciptor began to pulse and throb, seeking to eject what should have been a tiny fingerling. But the hybrid child conceived by Crutchsump and Lazorg was ten times bigger. It stalled at the inner mouth of the birth canal. Pressure mounted.
Her gut brain autonomously pumped out endogenous opiate chemicals that muted any pain. Oh, please, let my child be born safely!
The stressed flesh of Crutchsump’s face could no longer hold.
In an explosion of blood and fluids, her whole rotted countenance sloughed off, revealing her cratered insides, and the child sluiced out from the cranial womb and down her chest in a gush.
Blinded, dying, Crutchsump nonetheless looked down on herself from a ghostly vantage near the ceiling, thanks to her odd new talent.
The abnormally large fingerling possessed the immature features and form of all babies, still more a larva than a true imago. But this was as it should be, and Crutchsump had innate, immense, intuitive confidence that her child would grow up whole and healthy.
Her life force ebbing, she watched as Lazorg bent down and picked up the baby. He brought it to his bosom, and began to weep.
Then Crutchsump performed her final action. Out of her ruined lipless mouth she forced a last message, ingrained in her gut brain by days of silent repetition and practice, to be triggered by this final carnal sprint.
“Lazorg, I love you. Take care of our son. His name is Slug.”
PART THREE
10. Into the Nacre
STEPPING INSIDE, LAZORG SWUNG shut the front door to his home.
He was alone.
Alone and awakened.
Awakened to the foundational reality of his situation, the bedrock ontological substratum of his current existence.
Since his primitive existence in the Shulgin Mudflats, he had been operating within the mental paradigm of this alien gyre of the Cosmocopia.
But now, as if a dream had shattered, Crutchsump’s death had remade Lazorg’s consciousness. Jerked his mentality out of its domestic, art-obsessed, ego-boosting groove, a rut that had bred in him an acceptance of his surroundings.
He had truly come back to himself and his larger responsibilities, he felt, for the first time since he had been propelled into this mad world adjacent to his own.
And he knew what constituted his ultimate goal, after the disposition of a few more mundane tasks here.
An explanation, and revenge.
Revenge on the Conceptus, author of all the troubles heaped on the backs of innumerable sentients across the Cosmocopia.
The funeral for his strange lover was over.
Crutchsump’s body had been consigned to the Pools of Forgetting and the Flowers of Oblivion, that swampy, primeval region on the outskirts of Sidetrack City whose subtle brines and acid-chromatic flora dissolved all that which lacked the spark of life. The entourage that had accompanied her to her boggy interment would have pleased her, Lazorg speculated, consisting as it had of scores of rich and important people; in attendance, if truth be told, more to honor a well-known artist than his meek, undistinguished concubine of lowly origins.
Concubine, and fearless birther of his child.
Lazorg could not yet parse the depths of what Crutchsump had done, and generally held the memories of her final month of life at sanity-preserving mental arm’s length.
After the disposal of Crutchsump’s corpse, wrapped completely from ruined head to strong feet in pastel swallow-silks, the funeral attendees had repaired to a memorial banquet held at Spurback’s Rotunda. Lazorg had not the least interest any longer in cultivating these people, but had bowed to this final conventional ceremonial gathering, partly to extend the honor paid to Crutchsump, partly to preserve his (posthumous?) reputation, so that Arbogast could ultimately benefit as Lazorg’s heir. He endured the elegiac banquet stoically, with no little boredom.
But now all social duties were behind him, and he could concentrate on immediately fulfilling his heart’s quest.
Now that the fateful moment was here, Lazorg experienced some slight trepidations. But any unease was vastly counterbalanced by a mix of despair, determination, disgust and deranged, demanding anger.
A sudden firm but bloodless pincering of Lazorg’s left ankle caused him to look down.
Pirkle was demanding his attention, and for an obvious reason.
The wurzel wanted Lazorg to visit Slug.
Fingerlings in this world emerged paradoxically both more self-sufficient than infants in Lazorg’s home plane, and yet more undeveloped. That is, the form they exhibited upon birth possessed superior powers of survival, but did not yet fully reflect the mature adult.
Therefore, Lazorg had not bothered to hire a nurse or nanny for his son. Fitted immediately to eat many common foodstuffs, Slug could best and most safely feed himself from a large sippy flask of livewater. Unable to escape his cradle, he could not get into trouble. (Placed on the floor, Slug could maintain a fairly swift pace by a kind of inchworm-like behavior.) Thus Lazorg felt justified in leaving him alone for long intervals.
Not precisely alone. Pirkle had appointed himself the child’s guardian, as if honoring the legacy of his mistress in the only way he knew how. Except for his own necessities, the wurzel stationed himself by the cradle, alert for any disaster. Lazorg was certain that if, say, fire struck, Pirkle would have Slug out of the house faster than Lazorg could manage.
But sensing the return of Lazorg, the wurzel deemed some fatherly attention in order.
“All right, all right, I’m coming. Let go of me.”
In his recently altered consciousness, the words he spoke sounded immeasurably foreign compared to English. Yet on another level, they came as instinctively as that old natal tongue.
Pirkle released his grip, and the two went upstairs to the nursery.
Although Slug could not see over the edge of his cradle, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling, he sensed Lazorg’s arrival and called out, “Poppa!”
Lazorg came up to the cradle and regarded its contents.
When Slug had been born three days ago, he had fit inside Lazorg’s two scooped hands.
(So big for a fingerling! No wonder Crutchsump’s cranial womb had exploded. The miracle was that she had been able to carry to term. Lazorg knew only her devotion to him had sustained her. The knowledge pierced him.)
Now Slug was as long and wide as Lazorg’s forearm.
Slug possessed only nubbins appropriately sited where his four limbs would eventually appear. His face was a cartoon: eyes twice as big as an adult’s, large rubbery gash of a mouth. Where his nose or introciptor should be was a mere bud. The crown of his head showed a row of bumps whose ultimate function Lazorg was unsure of.
Slug began to squirm with excitement and utter small yelps. He managed to upset his sippy cup and dribble livewater in his bedding.
Lazorg swore. “Damn it! Calm down! Now I’ve got to change you and your bed.”
Lazorg picked up his son. The muscular squirmy body settled contentedly into the crook of one arm.
�
�Poppa.”
With his free hand Lazorg stripped the bedding and dumped it on the floor. Pirkle gathered it up and dragged it to the laundry.
As Lazorg unbuttoned Slug’s onesie, he wondered why he was even bothering. Let Arbogast handle the child’s wants and needs when he dropped by tonight and thereafter, once he found Slug an orphan.
But some wordless impulse to honor Crutchsump’s sacrifice would not let Lazorg leave Slug dirty.
With only livewater input, the infant made very little waste, just a slight pasty film from his defecatory organ. Lazorg cleaned the boy and dressed him. He refashioned the bedding of the cradle. He placed Slug in it.
Slug began to wail. “Poppa, poppa, poppa!”
Pirkle came running, stridulating with alarm.
Lazorg made it as far as the doorway before the intensity of both summoners drew him back.
He picked up Slug and carried him to his studio, Pirkle following. Let both of them watch his mad assault on the Cosmocopia. What did it matter?
Lazorg set Slug down on the cushions where, normally, finished ideations dropped from the tranche.
Defiantly, he ripped off his caul, crumpled it and flung it to the floor, exposing his face to the world. No more cloaking of his true nature.
Then he went to his rack of tranches and selected his two largest and most powerful, a Jakbrite and a Pompion.
Moving to the center of the large room, Lazorg hefted both tranches high. He paused a moment.
This was farewell.
Then he ripped the biggest slit in the fabric of the continuum he had yet essayed, a veritable door.
Plunging the tips of the tranches in, he hauled out an enormous mass of nacre.
The effort corded his muscles, bulged his veins, drew sweat from his skin. He bellowed with the strain. The nacre fought back, but Lazorg didn’t relent. Muscles toughened by much prior ideational work now fulfilled their role. He pulled and pulled, using finesse as well as brute strength.
Soon he had detached a mass of nacre large as a person. On this he began to impose his will and imagination.
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