Only Mountain, where I live, rises like an inverted pit, seven thousand, nine hundred and seventy-nine feet into the air on an otherwise flat plain opposite the sunset. It is an oddity, an extremity. Some early pioneer, surveying the vast flat nothingness around himself, had cried, "My God, that's the only mountain!" So it got its name. Into this inverted pit had fallen a ragged assortment of eccentrics, cave-dwellers, hermits, renegades and whole families of odd people, all on the run, one way or another, from one horror of civilization or another--from the law, from the lawless--to this strange refuge. Including me. This is where I moved to--or should I say, ran away to?--so many years ago, to become a midwife, as I had solemnly vowed that I would do. I fit right in with the place and the people.

But I don't know how much longer I'm to remain on Only Mountain. The strange things that happened here, during "the great flood"--the things that I'm now going to tell this page, and no one else--have left me in a limbo of uncertainty; not as to what happened, but as to what it means. So I'm just going to tell it, write it down, and maybe that will help. I remember a feeling of uneasiness--a pale shade of what I now feel--settling upon me even as I was driving up the mountain in that long early autumn twilight. I had been summoned late in the afternoon to one of the more remote forest regions near the top of the mountain--a place called Raveling Ridge--to assist at a birth. That was the beginning of it.

Uneasiness. The weather itself was uneasy. A distant fugitive cloud, where there had been no clouds for more than a year, sped across the sky, perhaps bringing rain, more likely not; more likely a mirage, a phantom--an illusory angel of the deathly dry air; then two of them, then three, appearing, disappearing along the horizon. A high wind was up, portent of a storm, with the air still droughty and bristly. And even the sun seemed doubtful, and appeared to be of two minds about going down; hesitating, widening, burning red at the bottom of the sky, and seeming to bounce like a balloon between coming and going. Then suddenly it was gone, like a ball lost in the neighbor's yard, and the stars one by one blinked on, as the sky grew dark blue, then black. And as I worried my station wagon from blacktop, to gravel, to dirt, up the steep winding mountain road that cuts its way back into Raveling Ridge, my thoughts became fugitive like the clouds, doubling back on themselves, speeding away, seeming to evaporate, then reforming in another spot, closer still. Such strange creatures we are, with so many layers of time tumbling around in our heads, so that everywhere we look we see some past bit of ourselves, or some future hope for ourselves, and are never securely in the present.

In the upper reaches of Only Mountain, the population thinned out and rarefied like the air. The people who lived there were very odd, indeed, extremely reclusive, and few in number--some two or three families, and a handful of hermits--some of whom hadn't been seen by other human beings for years, and were known only as rumors or memories.

I rolled up the window to avoid the dust my tires were kicking up, munched on an apple, and tried not to consider the possibility that I was lost. Roadsigns were non-existent in this wilderness. One went by other sorts of signs--the lay of the land, or if you were lucky, an occasional eccentric marker--a bit of cloth or other human artifact tied to a tree. Mostly you followed your nose.

I lived in Black Rock, a small village a quarter of the way up the mountain, and had visited the rarer region only once before, some months previous, when I had been summoned by Sabika Grady, first and oldest wife of one Mick Grady--patriarch, polygamist, and founder of his own unique religion of stars and space travel. I hadn't met Mick. But I'd heard plenty of stories about him. He was notorious, although remote--one of those who hadn't been seen in a while.

Sabika was six months pregnant with her thirteenth child when I met her. She had never had professional assistance at a birth before, but this time she wanted it, or she wanted to consider it. That visit was a blur of impressions of things I didn't understand and had yet to sort out. I had sensed a vague uneasiness among the women, to the effect that Mick wasn't supposed to know that Sabika had invited a midwife to visit, but this wasn't stated openly. Sabika herself had been busy with children and goats and chickens, at the time, and seemed to have little patience with my methods of preparation for birth. At the conclusion of our visit, I had been certain that she wasn't interested. However, she had handed me half my fee as I left, and asked for a copy of the birthing instructions. Then she told me not to return until I heard from her. I didn't hear from her for the next three months.

Another thing I had noticed during that visit was the attitude of Sabika's sister Alphecca. Mountain people are closed-mouthed, and these even moreso. And it wasn't easy to sort out relationships in a polygamous family. But I finally figured out that Alphecca was Mick Grady's second wife, that she lived in a trailer behind the big house, and that Alphecca was possibly jealous that Sabika was going to have a midwife. The two sisters seemed to have had a falling out.

Of Mick Grady I'd heard that he had at one time been an astronomer and a science fiction writer--a good astronomer, a bad science fiction writer, according to my friend, Dr. John Allen Kingman, who knew about such things. In town, it was said that Mick's father once owned the entire mountain on which we lived, but had sold the mountain piece by piece to pay off gambling debts, leaving his only son with a significantly reduced property--a big ramshackle house and its immediate grounds. His father had been Irish, his mother Egyptian. Mick's religion was a rare and hybrid flower of the patriarchal imagination, based on Genesis and astronomy, and having largely to do with increasing and multiplying and populating the universe with Grady progeny. To this end, he kept at least three wives that I knew of (there were two more) barefoot and pregnant, as the saying goes, and was said to be arranging the lives of his sons, daughters, and the other members of the clan, in a similar way, for maximum fertility.

There were at least fifty people living in and around the property, including some twenty-five children. None of the children were in school. From a social worker, I had heard that Mick brandished official looking papers that showed him to be a credentialed elementary school teacher and a doctor of theology. The authority behind these papers seemed to be a rifle. In any case, the county had scant interest in anything above three thousand feet of elevation that didn't have to do with the town's water supply or power stations. The Gradys were left alone to inseminate and educate each other.

Toward the top of the ridge, the curves became sharper, and the climb steeper and more perilous; no guardrails; sheer drops thousands of feet down to the bottoms of canyons; sudden envelopes of piney darkness--the mountain peak would come into view in the far distance, a jagged thrust of black rock against a starry patch of sky--then all at once I was in thick forest again, traveling through an ever narrowing tunnel of trees so tall that their tops seemed to touch one another high above me in the dark.

I turned cautiously off the road I was on, and drove down a bumpy winding backroad for several more miles, which brought me finally to the front of the Grady compound. A brisk wind sent the dust from my tires upward in swirls toward the yellow-orange light of a hurricane lamp on the porch of the big house. My headlights shone on three young children who sat still as statues on the steps in ascending order of size--a boy of about six at the top, two steps down a girl of about four, and, tied to a post by a rope around her waist and sitting on the bottom step was a child of about two. The two older ones stared for a moment like light-bedazzled deer, then, as I switched off lights and engine, shot up the stairs and into the house. In the sudden quiet, the little one crawled off the bottom step and hid herself under the porch, trailing her rope behind her. I got out of the car. I recognized this one as Sabika's youngest. She was possibly retarded--wasn't yet walking or talking--and was undoubtedly tied up for her own safety. Nevertheless, I couldn't abide the use of a rope. I leaned down, coaxed her out from under the porch, untied her and took her into the house. She didn't seem to mind.

The house was two stories and an attic high. The first story was wide and deep with makeshift extensions. Old bare mattresses that smelled damp and used littered the floor of the dark cavernous front room, where it seemed a goodly number of the family members slept in order to be near the wood stove. All was quiet, no one there. Then suddenly the kitchen door swung open and Alphecca barreled out. The two children from the porch ran past her out the front door. She stood regarding me coldly with small dark brown eyes in a gray face, a lesser version of Sabika.

"What are you going to do with her?" she challenged.

I was startled by her hostility. "Where's Sabika?" I asked.

At that moment, we heard a woman's scream from somewhere beyond the kitchen at the back of the house. My question was answered.

"Some say Sabika's thirteenth is going to bring bad luck. I say she used up all her bad luck on this one," said Alphecca, as she took the child from me, and headed toward the front door.

"I'm going to need some help," I said. "Where are you going? Is anybody with her?"

She banged the door open and went out onto the front porch. "Just that Nunki."

"Where's the father?" I called after her.

Alphecca stopped briefly, at the mention of this personage, and tossed me a disgusted look. It can't have been easy being the second wife--or any wife--of Mick Grady.

"Out hunting belly-crawlers," she said. She shut the door in my face, and was gone.

I moved in the direction the scream had come from, which took me into the kitchen, where every available surface was covered with garbage and dirty dishes; the shelves and floor were alive with cockroaches and ants; flies caked on open jars of jam and hardened beans in saucepans, some of them carrying their glutted bodies slowly through the air, flying in syncopation with the loose rattling window that groaned morosely as the wind opened and shut it over the sink. My stomach turned over at the stench, and I paused long enough to wonder what on earth I had gotten myself into.

It was difficult work, at best--attending the births of other women's children, as I had vowed, such a long time ago, that I would do--work that I performed with love and hope I didn't feel. I acted 'as if.' As if I cared. As if they were mine. That's all that can be required of such a vow, is it not? And I had learned some things of value. I had found out, for instance, that in the heart of every laboring woman there is a secret wish to keep her child from being born, as if she knew, deep down, that being born is the beginning of a life-long journey in the wrong direction.

And here I seemed to have stumbled across a deeper and even more bewildering truth--that this secret reluctance to give birth has its corollary in the reluctance of the present world to receive new life. Witness the garbage heap of a kitchen; the absence of celebrants; the foul feeling in the air--as if somehow the Gradys, reclusive as they were, manifested an early warning of the world's weariness with children. "No, not another one," said the disorderly kitchen. "Overcrowding," said the empty house.

I pushed through a back door, passed through a corridor piled with junk, decaying cardboard boxes, broken furniture and dirty laundry, and located the laboring mother in a clean tidy little room at the back of the house. What a surprise! The walls and floor of the room had been scrubbed clean. There was a fresh curtain on the window, beneath which stood a table holding neatly folded sheets and towels, a basin and other supplies for labor and delivery. Sabika Grady lay in a large, cleanly sheeted bed. Obviously, she had gone to some trouble to prepare this neat little nest while everything else in her household appeared to have gone to hell.

I leaned over her, in greeting, listened to her breathing, which came in short desperate puffs, and surveyed her condition. With effort, she opened her small dark eyes and looked at me for a moment.

"I'll tell you something, Abby," she said, shutting her eyes tight with the pain.

I placed my hand on her belly and glanced at my watch, as she grimaced and tightened her large body against the on-coming contraction. "What's that?" I asked.

"God isn't a woman!" she said, and then writhed, and groaned, and finally screamed her way through the contraction.

A thin, underfed-looking girl of about twelve years old sat quietly and expressionlessly beside her, dampening Sabika's face with a wet washcloth. At the end of the contraction, Sabika glanced at the girl and said to me, "She's the only one I'll have near me. The rest are good for nothing. Name's Nunki. She's as cool as a cucumber--and twice as smart!"

Sabika laughed then groaned. I nodded at Nunki who stared at me gravely with small dark eyes much like Sabika's.

"You look tired, Sabika," I said. "You aren't going to last if you keep this up. Let me help you."

"What in God's name do you mean?" she demanded.

"I mean you might pass out. We'd be in a fine fix then. So let's get to work. You remember what I told you about relaxing and breathing? Take a deep breath."

I took a stethescope and a blood pressure unit out of my bag.

"I want to be knocked out. I sent for the doctor, too. Don't they do that?"

"Yeah, and then it takes twice as long. But Doctor Kingman isn't going to knock you out."

"So what good is he?" she inquired irritably.

"You worried, Sabika?" I took hold of her wrist gently, to feel her pulse. She was a large-boned, overweight woman, like her sister Alphecca--and of a similar temperament.

"Worried!" She rose on her elbow, knocking my hand away. "I'm having his thirteenth child for the stars, and every one of 'em gave me a bad time! And this is what I get! Where is he? And those women of his! You can bet Rigel's in the middle of it! My own daughter! Where is everybody? Where are his 'children for the stars'?" She spat this last phrase out with contempt.

"You said you just wanted Nunki here."

"Where's Mick Grady that did this to me?" she wailed. "Nunki, go and find him this minute! No! No, I don't want him here!"

I had a time calming her down.

"Belly-crawling! That's what they're doing!" she yelled. She collapsed back onto the bed with a sigh, "May all his children's children fall into a black hole!"

Surprisingly, considering her weight and her state of agitation, her blood pressure was only a little above normal, and her pulse was quiet. I praised her for this.

"You're keeping yourself calm inside, even though you feel upset and you hurt. That's good. And that's your doing."

She looked at me incredulously.

"Really," I said, "You're doing fine. Just relax a little more."

"Relax!" she said ironically, then she was taken with another contraction, and moaned and rolled about, fighting the pain. Judging from the frequency of her contractions, she was well along in the labor; on the other hand, her water hadn't broken, and her cervix was only very slightly dilated. I felt we were in for a long night, and urged her to conserve her strength.

After a while, she began to respond to my instructions and to Nunki's wordless ministrations. I noticed that Nunki was breathing along with me.

"Deep breath in, let it all the way out, pant slowly with the contraction, quietly. Faster now. It's peaking. It's almost over. It's going down now." I said this over and over in the next half hour, to get Sabika into the rhythm of it, and Nunki followed right along with intense concentration. I handed the girl the stopwatch and a little book in which to record the contractions, and she took these silently.

"Is Nunki a nickname?" I asked her.

"By the time she came along," Sabika answered, "He'd run outa the better names." She looked at Nunki. "Tell Abby what it means."

Very shyly and speaking to the stopwatch, the girl said, "Nunki's the name of a star in the constellation Sagittarius. It's where my children will go."

"He's aimed all his children's children into outer space--the white dwarf!" declared Sabika bitterly, then the pain started up again. The contraction was long and hard, and the minutes stretched and distorted like the bulging perineum against which a baby's head was works and worries itself into the world. At the end of it, Sabika let out a great gasp of relief and for a few moments was speechless with fatigue.

"Relax your arms," I encouraged.

"What do my arms have to do with it!"

"Don't argue," I said softly.

She gazed up at me defiantly. I touched her arm, and felt it harden. I said, "Let go," and finally she did. The arm relaxed. She rested.

I wasn't alarmed by her suffering, nor did I wish to take it away from her. I had learned something more--that the help I offered came from somewhere other than myself, and whether a woman accepted it or not , it was best not to take this personally. Even willful suffering deserved respect, and, like the contractions themselves, shouldn't be fought, shouldn't be resisted. I myself needed to back off from my desire that she remain calm, for it was her choice whether to scream her way through this labor, or gain control of it. There was little I could do, and it was best not to be too insistent. Interestingly, the more I pulled back, in an inner way, and allowed for the possibility of eight to ten hours of struggle and pain, the more she calmed down.

As I watched this happening--the mysterious interaction of midwife, laboring mother, and girl attendant, the advent of calm and quiet in the labor room, the disappearance, really, of midwife and attendant, as everything centered upon the unseeable inner drama of the mother and her soon-to-be-born child--my thoughts traveled away again into memory, and I thought of Jesus crucified on the cross, and how much the image used to revolt me, as a girl, perhaps because it had been mis-conveyed to me by people who comforted themselves, and justified themselves, with this gruesome image of nails, whippings, blood, and crown of thorns. They talked about the Resurrection--the triumph over death--but you had the feeling they really didn't believe that part. They believed in suffering and death, and sin; and the good part--the transportation to Heaven--was just a fantasy. I wanted to take all the crosses off the churches--that's the sort of rebellious, odd-thinking little tyke I was--uncrucify the Lord and send him back to where he came from. What to put in place of the crosses, though--I had no idea. Neither did I know, at the time of Sabika's labor, that this might be more than my personal revery as to birth, suffering and death--that it might also be a second thought in the mind of the Great Universe.

- - -

Sabika's contractions eased off, became less frequent and less hard, a not uncommon thing for a woman who had had so many children. The labor proceeded in fits and starts, with a retrograde movement like a receding wave undoing the progress she had made. Her cervix closed up, the baby seemed to withdraw back up into her womb; and her mind turned again to Mick Grady. She demanded again that Nunki go find him. The trouble in her family--which I couldn't get a coherent sense of from Sabika--was causing her great anxiety. But I didn't want to lose my only assistant--and a perfect one she was, obedient and calm. So I said I had some things to do in the kitchen and went myself to find out what was going on.

The kitchen hadn't changed. It still stank of garbage, crawled with insects, and the table and counters were still covered with dirty dishes. I looked around vaguely hoping to locate some coffee and a coffee pot, turned the water faucet on, to drown some of the ants, and saw two children through the window.

"Hey, you two! Come in here, please!"

A few moments later, the boy and girl, aged approximately ten, slammed the front door open, then swung through the kitchen door. They looked at me without too much interest. I addressed the boy first.

"What's your name?"

"What's yours ?" he replied.

"Abby. I'm here to help your mother, Sabika. She's having a baby."

"She's not my mother," he said.

"Where's your mother?"

"Belly-crawling."

"What's that?"

The boy and girl exchanged glances. The girl then said to him, "Mick Grady said when the midwife comes, to go and get him, Castor."

"So where is Mick Grady?" I asked.

"Hunting belly-crawlers," Castor replied.

The girl nudged him hard in the ribs. Then she repeated more vehemently, exaggerating her brother's name in a whiny snarl, as only a ten-year-old can do, "Ca-a-astor, Mick Grady said to go and get him when the midwife is he-e-ere."

"First I want some wood," I said. "Don't you know I need wood to burn, to boil water, with a baby coming?"

"You going to boil the baby?" Castor asked without a trace of irony. The girl snickered at this.

"No," I said, "I need it to clean things. And to keep your mother. . .I mean, to keep Sabika warm. What are 'belly-crawlers'?"

Another exchange of glances. They weren't about to tell me.

"I can chop wood," Castor said.

I studied him for a moment, thinking of further questions, and listing, to myself, all the other things I wanted done, starting with a clean-up of the kitchen. I said, "Good," and turned my attention to the girl, who was beginning to pick around the garbage on the table, looking for something to eat. There was plenty of food on the shelves, both store-bought and homemade, but no one prepared it, and no one cleaned up.

"Where is your mother?" I asked her.

The girl pointed toward the back of the house.

"Sabika?" I asked.

She nodded.

"What's your name?"

"Rasalhague."

"Is that a star?"

"That's right."

"Is Castor a star, too?"

"Yeah. His star is forty-six light years from earth. Mine's closer."

Castor said, "It is not."

"It is too!" Rasalhague retorted.

"Listen," I told them, "I need lots of wood. Rasalhague, can you chop wood, too?"

"Better than him," she replied with a contempuous look at Castor. "I chop wood all the time. He can't even split a log."

"I can, too!" Castor defended himself.

I shooed them toward the door. "Chop me some wood--lots of wood, kindling and quarter logs. I'll see if I can fix something to eat. And then you can go and get Mick Grady, and tell him the midwife is here!"

A sudden gust of wind rattled the kitchen window. We heard the front door bang shut, and the heavy clomp of many boots across the wood floor. Castor pushed open the swinging door to the front room, and there stood a posse of eight or ten men, armed with rifles and hurricane lamps. They wore heavy wool jackets and thick mountain boots. Their faces were red with cold, and they brought the cold air in with them as they exhaled steam like horses. Mick Grady--it could be no other--stood at the head of them.

The mixture of Irish and Egyptian had produced in him a remarkable combination of black hair, swarthy skin and stunning turquoise eyes. Some of the others resembled him, obviously his sons; but he towered over them in stature and presence. I felt suddenly out of place--guilty of some unnamed transgression--a feeling I very intensely disliked, especially as it was difficult to say what caused it. Wasn't I there to help? Hadn't I been summoned? Why did I feel like a miscreant?

In the heavy silence before Mick Grady spoke, he was staring not at me but at the boy Castor. Then I saw my friend John Allen behind the group, looking rather out of place as well, in his black turtleneck sweater with his pale, civilized face, having arrived coincidentally with the posse. I was greatly relieved to see him. He smiled, raising his expressive black eyebrows, as he peered over the forest of Grady sons and sons-in-law.

Mick Grady was addressing the boy evenly.

"I told you to inform me of the presence of the midwife upon her arrival, Castor," said he, in a deep and commanding voice, that, for all its lack of direct threat, seemed to me to contain an element of barely suppressed violence.

Castor remained silent. He didn't seem fearful, but he'd learned not to offer excuses.

"I asked him to chop wood for me," said I, in Castor's defense.

The sharp turquoise eyes turned toward me. I had received no acknowledgement until then, but now I felt my spirit shrink just a little in response to Mick Grady's unblinking attention.

"There's no wood?" he asked simply, but in a tone that made one want very much not to be lacking in wood. I shook my head. He looked at one of the men, who understood a silent command to leave immediately for the wood pile. As he left, Castor and Rasalhague slipped out with him unnoticed by the men, and John Allen edged forward through the crowd.

I addressed Mick Grady with more boldness than I felt. "Your wife is having a hard labor," I said. "She's terribly worried. She'd like to know what's going on."

"Tell Sabika Grady to mind the business of population," said he.

I was speechless for a moment. I glanced at John Allen for moral support, and replied, "That's just what I told her. She shouldn't be worrying about. . . ." I was going to say, "What you're up to," but changed it to, "her family. She's very upset. This is making it very hard. She's worried about her daughter, Rigel."

"Neither is Rigel Grady the business of her mother," Mick declared, with increasing impatience and threat in his voice.

"Abby!" said John Allen, coming forward suddenly. He gave me a covert look of amused wonder at this imposing posse, with its rifles, hurricane lamps and its feeling of arrested alarm and emergency. "Good to see you. How's the mother?" he said. He squeezed my arm and looked into my eyes.

"She was having frequent hard contractions, but now it's petered out and she isn't making progress. She's forty-eight years old, and having babies isn't so easy any more."

"Was it ever?" John Allen asked, smiling.

"Where are your children?" Mick Grady asked me suddenly.

I stared at him a moment, surprised at this rudely stated question, and finally replied, "I don't have any," then, unable to contain my irritation, I added, ". . .if it's any of your business."

"You may wish yourself extinct," said he, with a piercing look. "Sabika Grady does not."

I resisted the urge to reply further. I felt willful, but also a bit fearful, and much bewildered. Mick's pronouncements seemed calculated to end conversation. But despite the formality of his talk, his presence dispensed with normal amenities. We hadn't even introduced ourselves. He was Patriarch. I was Midwife. It seemed to be a given that we were enemies, and further, that our respective positions superceded our mere personal names. John Allen blundered into this locked combat, and tried to deflect it with cheerful civility.

"Doctor Kingman. John Allen Kingman," he said to Mick, shifting his medical bag from his right hand to his left, and extending his hand to be shaken. "I understand you're Michael D. Grady. I know that name. I'm an amateur astronomer. I've come across references to your work on absolute and apparent magnitudes of stellar bodies. It's a privilege to meet you."

Mick moved his rifle and allowed his hand to be shaken, but he did so with no enthusiasm. He had entirely ignored John Allen, as he had ignored me, until each of us spoke. He seemed to have no sensitivity in either case to the silent presence of a stranger, as if he were blind, which he wasn't, or used his eyes for some other purpose than mere sight. I had never met anybody like him.

"Sabika Grady has a midwife!" Mick was saying to John Allen. "Now a doctor. Well, she's old. She can have two strangers here if that's what she wants."

"Strangers? I hope we won't be strangers for long," John Allen babbled bravely. "I understand this is your wife's thirteenth child. Where is this remarkable woman!" Mick was unmoved. John Allen took my arm. "Abby, introduce me to her."

"Yes, all right," I said. I turned to Mick, and with John Allen squeezing my arm encouragemently, I said, "But first we need some help. The wood stove should be kept burning all night. Two large kettles of water should be boiled. Put tops on the kettles. All this should be done quietly. And a pot of coffee would be nice. It's going to be a long night." Mick said nothing. He glanced at John Allen and nodded, as if I didn't exist.

"May we have another lamp?" I asked the men who stood behind Mick. One of them handed me a hurricane lamp, but not before glancing at Mick for his consent on the matter. Mick then turned to his sons, with whom he began talking in low tones as soon as John Allen and I were, to our great relief, out of their presence. We stopped in the cluttered corridor between the kitchen and the labor room, hearing fierce whispers behind us, and trying to eavesdrop on them, then the door to the front room was closed, and we could hear nothing more. John Allen raised his eyebrows. His look said, "what's going on?" I shrugged. I didn't know.

"How long you been here?" he whispered.

"Long enough to consider doing the dishes," I said. At last I felt easy enough to smile. I told him, "Sabika's upset because all the other wives and daughters have gone off somewhere, except her sister Alphecca. She's Mick's second wife. She's sulking in her trailer. Sabika's mad at her husband because he's not pacing up and down like a decent pa."

"Hard to do for the thirteenth," John Allen mused.

"Well, anyway, she's furious at him. Called him a 'white hole.'"

"A 'white hole'?" John Allen raised his eyebrows.

"I gather they're trying to round up the other women," I continued. "They're accused of something called 'belly-crawling.' I"ve yet to find out what that means."

"Sounds interesting," he said. His eyes danced with amusement. What a blessing he was in these circumstances.

"That's all I know--and that astronomy's a very serious business around here."

"Not for amateurs."

"Decidedly not, John Allen. He didn't seem impressed by your magnitudes of stellar bodies."

He smiled. He said, "I've always wanted to meet him. Hoped he'd break a leg or something. Did I ever tell you about his Egyptian mother?"

"The prophetess?"

"Yeah, L'Heur, the old doctor who was here before me, gave me a earful about her. She had a vision on her deathbed. The mountain's to be leveled. The human race exterminated. Some sort of gods arrive and find nobody here--to their great disappointment. Mick was just a kid then, sitting at his mother's bedside, drinking it all in. It's in one of his books." John Allen made a face, indicating his opinion of the book. "L'Heur went mad, you know, before he died."

"Only Mountain lonelies?"

"Something like that," he replied vaguely.

We heard noises from the labor room. The door opened wide. Sabika stood in the doorway in her nightgown, which was hitched by her huge belly almost up to her crotch. She gazed at John Allen in his black sweater.

"You the undertaker?" she asked.

"No," he laughed.

"Preacher?"

"I'm Doctor Kingman."

"Oh," she sighed, "Well, then do something about. . .about this! " She brushed her belly with her hand.

"What would you like me to do?" he asked.

"Get this kid out of me!" she said.

John Allen glanced at me.

"You have to do that yourself, Sabika," I told her.

"Then what good are you?" she said to John Allen.

He smiled. He said, "Not much, I guess. It's all up to you, really."

"It always is!" she retorted. We guided her back into the room, and as she was slowly lowering herself to sit on the mattress, she said, "I don't want to lie down. I hate lying down!"

"It's okay. You want to walk?" I said.

"Ah, no!" She lay down with a groan. Her eyes roamed the ceiling, then she was up on her elbow complaining, "Look what happens when I get laid up! The Daughters of the Universe go belly-crawling to God knows what asinine witchery and silliness! He makes 'em pray five times a day to the Five Infinities, and what does he expect these ignorant girls to do in revenge? I'm the one who keeps 'em in line. I get laid up, and what does he expect?"

I tried to answer her questions about the men who had come into the house, but this riled her up further. John Allen and I exchanged glances, agreeing to attempt a diversion. We would have loved to question her, but instead we talked about the weather. John Allen told us that a big storm was moving in. Flood and mudslide warnings were up in town. There was a mad scramble going on for sandbags and other drainage equipment; and the volunteer fire department had been put on alert, although nobody quite knew what they would be needed for in a rainstorm.

"Been to town but twice," said Sabika. "Mick Grady doesn't believe in women goin' to town."

"Do you?" I couldn't help asking.

"I'm moving to town after this," she said.

"Good. I'll help you find a place," I told her. "You have any money of your own?"

"I've got nothing of my own," said Sabika. She let out a groan as a contraction started. She sweated and panted her way through, and John Allen told her she was wonderful, had great control.

"That explains a feeling I've had, and the wind," she whispered somewhat incoherently.

"What's that, Sabika?"

"The storm."

"It'll be a relief, after all this drought," said John Allen. "They took the fire warnings down, and put the storm warnings up."

"'T'isn't one goddamn thing, it's another," Sabika chuckled and groaned. After a while, she said softly, "I heard that wind in here. Didn"t like the sound of it."

We were all quiet for a while, Nunki writing in the little book, recording a contraction, each of us listening to the wind that brushed, whistled and hooted through the tops of the dry pine trees outside. Then suddenly our repose was shattered by a loud crash overhead and a tat-tat-tattering sound like hail on a tin roof. Sabika rose up startled.

"Good God, what's that? What now?"

"Rain?" John Allen speculated.

"My goats! " Sabika cried. "What are they doing with my goats?"

I hurried out of the room, slammed open the kitchen door, and found my way through the dark dirty living room to the staircase. I raced up the stairs in a fury. At the top of the stairs, sure enough, I came right up against the horns of a frightened goat. It charged past me and went clattering down the stairs. Then I saw a whole herd of goats running hither and thither through the hallway, and in and out of rooms, chased by a troupe of wildly whooping children of all ages. One of the children carried a hurricane lamp which threw dim shafts of yellow light over the whole confusing scene. I yelled at them all for a few minutes, to no avail. Then I recognized Castor and grabbed him by the arm.

"Castor! Get these goats out of the house!" I shouted.

Castor ran toward us out of the darkness. "Pollux!" he shouted, "She jumped out of the window onto the roof! Go round her up!"

I looked at the boy I had grabbed, and did, for a moment, wonder if I was having a nightmare, before it dawned on me that Castor and the boy I held were twins. Castor ran off down the stairs after the goats.

"Pollux!" he yelled to the boy I still had by the arm, "Round up the she-goat. I'll run the rest of 'em into the kitchen!"

Pollux broke away from me, and ran off after Castor down the staircase. With a terrible picture in my mind of the goats breaking in on Sabika, I ran down the stairs to the kitchen. I pushed several goats, who had already begun to forage in the garbage on the table, back into the living room. Then I shut the kitchen door, and with a bit of scolding, herded children and goats through the front room until they all went outside. It was not yet the capping disorder in a household gone over to chaos.

I went back into the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and took a few puffs on it, to calm my nerves. I looked around hopelessly for an ashtray, and then, in disgust, crushed the cigarette out in a moldy piece of bread that lay on the counter. Then I laughed out loud, for it suddenly occurred to me that Castor and Pollux had the right idea for cleaning up the kitchen--it needed a herd of goats.

John Allen popped his head in, and saw me laughing to myself.

"Everything all right? Hey, look at that!"

In my fury, I hadn't noticed. The wood stove was blazing away. Beside the stove was stacked a great pile of firewood. And upon the stove stood two large kettles of hot water ready to boil. To my surprise, a pot of coffee had also been made. These minor miracles took me back to Sabika's room in a state of mild elation.

"What happened?" Sabika demanded.

"It's all over," I reassured her. "Relax now. The children let the goats in, that's all. They're gone now. Take it easy."

"No one's looking after my goats!" she moaned. "What are they doing out of the pen? Nunki, go see they're herded up. Go on! You're not going to miss anything. Go eat something. Look at you. You're a stick. Go on now. I don't need you. I've got a doctor and a midwife."

John Allen took over the stopwatch. Nunki went silently from the room. I thought I had better follow. In the corridor, I told her to come back to the kitchen after seeing to the goats, I wanted to talk to her.

"Yes, ma'm," she said. I don't know who taught her "Yes, ma'm," but there it was, polite as you please, isolated as she had been from all normal civilized society for all of her twelve years. Come to think of it, I thought, Mick Grady himself spoke in a stilted formal manner, as if he'd learned how to talk from old novels.

There was a loaf of bread, not fresh but not moldy, in a bread box. I located unopened jars of apple and peanut butter, cleaned off the table, and made a plateful of sandwiches. Then I sat down, ate one--not too bad--and sipped coffee for a few minutes, listening to the distant sounds of goats and children that came to me from somewhere in the dark. Presently, Nunki returned. She went by me without a word and down the corridor to report to Sabika, then came back to the kitchen.

"How are they doing?" I asked her, of Sabika and John Allen.

She didn't seem to know how to answer such a general question.

I said, "Well, I don't hear Sabika. That means the doctor's doing at least as well as you did." This compliment didn't seem to impress her. I offered her a sandwich, which she started to eat very hungrily standing up.

"Don't you want to sit down?" I asked her.

"Yes, ma'm." She obediently sat down.

"Coffee?"

"Yes, ma'm." She obediently drank.

She took another sandwich from the plate, and said, "We had a mouser ate all her babies."

"Your cat ate her kittens?" said I.

"She ate 'em up with the other end."

"The other end?"

"That they came out of."

"Hm?"

I struggled with this picture for a moment, studying her but trying not to appear too surprised. Nunki took a bite of sandwich and swallowed it. She told me, "They said Coz did it, because the mouser used to go up there to her house. There were three kittens came out of the mouser's baby hole. Then she ate 'em back up into the same hole."

"But that can't happen, Nunki," said I.

She gazed past me at the boiling cauldrons of water, chewing on her sandwich. Finally, she said, "But it did."

We were both silent for a time. Then I said, "Old Coz? The old woman who lives up at the top of the mountain?"

"They think she's an old witch," said Nunki.

"Who does?"

"The others."

"Do you?"

"I don't go up there. Mama told me not to go up there."

"Sabika?"

She nodded.

"Why do they think old Coz is a witch?" I asked.

"She has a baby."

"She does? Does that make her a witch?"

Nunki considered this for a moment, then said, "The fire burned all around her house but didn't burn her house."

"Yeah," said I, remembering the story from one of the big fires on the mountain, "I heard about that. That was very lucky for her. The fire swept up both sides of her house and left her house untouched. Tornadoes do that sometimes. They'll pick a neighborhood and tear every house in the neighborhood to pieces except one, which isn't touched. A big fire is like a burning tornado sometimes."

Nunki seemed to understand that I was saying, "Things like that don't mean people are witches." So she supplemented her evidence with, "The trees around her house are green again."

"Have you seen them?"

"I don't go up there."

"Trees do grow back after a fire."

She was silenced. And so I said, "Who told you Coz has a baby?"

To my surprise, she answered, "Rigel."

"Your older sister? Does she go up there?"

End of information. Apparently, she was afraid that she had said too much already.

"Where did old Coz get a baby?" I asked.

Nunki said, "Maybe if she's a witch, she made a baby out of mud."

The circle of her thinking was complete at least. Old Coz was a witch because she had a baby, and old Coz had a baby because she was a witch.

Our very interesting conversation was interrupted, of a sudden, by Regulus, Mick and Sabika's oldest son, who burst into the kitchen quite out of breath. He was carrying a rifle ready in his hand. Regulus was dark-skinned and blue-green eyed like his father; but, unlike his father, his eyes were close together, and I recognized in them, to my relief, a little bit of the mother. He had long silky brown hair. Before he realized to whom he was speaking, he blurted out, "I found them! They're out in the forest! All of them! Naked! All naked! And babbling crazy talk and dancing around. . ." At this point, he stopped and looked at me. His mouth fell open.

"Who are you ?" he asked me wildly.

"Your mother is having a baby--or hadn't you heard?" I replied. "I'm a midwife. My name's Abby. Put the gun down, please. And tell me, who is out in the forest all naked and babbling and dancing around?"

He looked desperately at Nunki. "Where's Mick Grady?"

"I don't know, Regulus," said Nunki.

He gazed at me.

"I've no idea," I said. "He was in here with the other. . .uh, hunters. . . about an hour ago. They chopped wood for me and disappeared. Is there a rebellion afoot?"

"I. . .I don't know what to call it!" he gasped.

"You haven't put your rifle down. And you haven't asked how your mother is."

It was easy to speak to him this way, for he was used to being ordered about. He was young and he was unsure of himself. Besides that, there was something nice about him, which told me that I could appeal to his feeling for his mother. It seemed that he hadn't yet separated the world into the men and the women.

He put his rifle against the wall, and said, "How's Sabika?"

"As well as can be expected," I replied, "Considering her age, and all this disturbance."

"You mean. . .." He gestured at the rifle.

"Yes. She's very upset and worried. It doesn't help. We're trying to keep her relaxed. What is going on? Why are you carrying guns going looking for your wives?"

"Oh," he said, "We wouldn't shoot 'em."

"That's nice of you," I replied, unable to contain myself. Then I said, "What's 'belly-crawling'?"

Nunki's eyes grew wide, and she sucked in her breath. She hadn't blanched when her mother had used the term, but she was apparently scandalized by my mentioning to Regulus.

"Is that a forbidden topic?" I asked, glancing between the two of them. Regulus seemed reluctant to speak, so I told Nunki to go take a sandwich to the doctor. After she left, I offered the young man a sandwich. He sat down and ate hungrily, as Nunki had.

"You really expect women to live this way?" I asked him.

He shrugged. Like Nunki, he had trouble with general questions.

"What have the women done?" I asked.

He answered, forthrightly enough, "They've gone off and prayed to the Devil."

I said, "Because they danced naked and babbled out in the forest? Really, if I lived here, I think I'd end up doing something like that. And belly-crawling, too! Anything--to get out from under. . . ." I almost said, 'the scrutiny of those devilish turquoise eyes of yours and your father's.' But I didn't say it. Instead, I said, ". . .to get loose, to feel free. What is it, anyway--'belly-crawling?'"

"They crawl like snakes, through the forest, to get to their filthy meeting place."

"Filthy!" I declared. "Tell me about filthy! This is filthy!" I gestured around the kitchen. "You want to clean something up, start here--with the dishes!"

"That's women's work," said Regulus.

Well, I had thought too soon that he was an exception. He was already a little Mick Grady. But I wasn't without resources. I had a plateful of sandwiches in a hungry wilderness. I offered him another one, and said, "Do you really believe in the Devil?"

He replied, "The Devil wants to keep us on the earth. The Devil wants to keep the population down, so we'll never have enough numbers to fill all the planets around all the stars in the sky."

"And so how does the Devil answer these women's prayers?" I couldn't help asking, "With diaphragms?"

He stared at me blankly.

"It seems to me that dancing naked might tend to increase the population," said I.

This remark was pretty much lost on him. He downed his second sandwich, followed it with a slurp of coffee, which I had poured for him, and was gazing at the plate of sandwiches. I pushed the plate across the table toward him.

"These women--these wives--are they here by choice?" I asked.

He gave me his father's "you are a creature from another planet" stare, and his convictions closed around him like a hard shell. I knew that I would have to lead him through simpler questions to an understanding of what I meant by "choice."

"You don't have much contact with the outside world, do you?" I inquired of him, "How did you meet your wife?"

"I met my first wife in town," said he.

Not twenty years old, and he spoke of his 'first wife.'

"Do you have a second wife?" I asked.

"Not yet," he said, without a trace of humor. He studied me a moment, working on his fourth sandwich, and seemed to relax just a trifle. He looked me up and down, as if I were a candidate for wife number two, then looked away quickly. It was a far more human look than his father's had been.

"Your first wife from around here?" I inquired.

"No, ma'm."

"How'd you meet her?"

"Her family was visiting Black Rock, from across the country."

"You steal her, or what?"

He stared at me. "No, ma'm. When they went home, she left them, and came back here, of her own."

"They ever visit her?"

"No, ma'm."

"Does she write to them?"

"No, ma'm."

"Do they know you believe in polygamy?"

He cast his shy eyes down upon the table. Finally he said, "What's polygamy?"

I was so taken aback that I didn't speak for a moment, as I tried to fathom the ignorance behind his question. I imagine he was trying to fathom the ignorance behind my questions as well. But didn't he know how most of the world's people arranged their marital lives, or was he simply unfamiliar with the word I had used?

Before I could reply, Nunki was at the door.

"The doctor says to come, Abby," she told me.

I couldn't imagine her deciding to address me by name. John Allen must have said, "Go tell Abby the doctor says to come," and she rearranged the words.

Regulus, apparently recollecting himself, immediately arose, grabbed his rifle, and left by the front door, taking a fifth sandwich with him.

- - -

John Allen met me in the corridor. He said, "She's cold. Have you got a hot water bottle?"

"Transition?" I asked.

He shook his head no. He said she had vomitted, and the trembling and vomiting indicated transition, but there was otherwise no indication of imminent birth. Her cervix had progressed only one centimeter, and the contractions, if anything, were milder and more widely spaced. She wanted something to eat, but we discouraged this, and brought her some honeyed tea instead. I sent Nunki to the kitchen to fill a hot water bottle, and when she returned, we put it in Sabika's bed and covered her with blankets warmed over the wood stove.

John Allen sat down on a chair against the wall and rested one arm on the table beside his uneaten sandwich. His sleeves were pushed up revealing a trail of needle marks from insulin shots; for John Allen, as long as I had known him--seven years altogether--suffered from acute diabetes, which was controllable only through daily injections of insulin. He was subject to occasional physical depressions, and sugar-imbalances, and sudden spells of weakness and dizziness, which he refused to consult another physician about; and no other physician was available, anyway, for a good one hundred miles in any direction.

"You all right?" I asked him. He nodded unconvincingly, got up, took the basin into which Sabika had vomited, and which hadn't been rinsed yet, and, looking at it dismally, left the room.

"The man can't take it!" Sabika cackled triumphantly.

He had tried to look as if he were going to clean the basin, but Sabika was right. I looked out into the corridor a few moments later, and saw him bending over the basin. I went out to speak to him, leaving Nunki temporarily in charge.

"What sort of doctor has a weak stomach?" he asked, grimacing into the basin.

"Is that a riddle?" I asked, and as he didn't answer, I said, "One who hasn't had any dinner."

He sat back on his haunches and looked at me a moment. Finally, he said, "That wasn't why I stopped terminating pregnancies--a weak stomach. I believed in what I was doing." He folded his arms and stared down at the basin. "Belief--that's a strong anaesthetic."

"I thought you'd made your peace with all that," I said.

He shook his head. He said, "It was a weak will. I didn't have the will to do what I believed should be done, though I did have the stomach for it. Or I thought I did." His eyes fell on a box of old moldy paperback science fiction books that lay crookedly beneath a pile of junk in the corridor, the boxes' sides caved in and some of the books spilling out. He pulled one of the books from the pile. Its cover came off in his hands. "Distinctions are important," he continued. "In fact, they're everything. Like 'terminating pregnancy.' There's a distinction. We don't say 'killing a fetus,' which is what we're doing, whatever one thinks about it. We make up a name for it that sounds clean--a clean distinction." He flipped through the pages of the unjacketed book he was holding. His skin looked pasty and damp.

"Is that why you came to Only Mountain, John Allen?" I asked him.

"Another distinction," he said. "There's only one mountain. A nice clear distinction. There's the mountain, then there's everything else. Not-mountain."

I smiled.

"You ever read this?" he asked. He picked the cover up off the floor and showed it to me--Childhood's End, by Arthur Clarke--and I shook my head no. He said, "Sir Arthur says that our children are going to make an evolutionary leap forward, a psychic leap to another form of existence--communal consciousness--leaving all the old folks behind, like so many dinosaurs. We're a dead end, in other words. But not our children. And it's very sad, when the children go off, leaving their unevolved parents and everybody else behind on a dying planet." He tossed the book onto the pile of junk. "Grady answers him, in a really stupid story, called 'Adulthood and Beyond,' in which he says that the reason we become dinosaurs is birth control."

I made a face at this.

"Well," he said, getting up gingerly, "Back to the population center."

"Vomiting makes you philosphical," I observed.

He threw me a somewhat wild glance, and pushed the sleeve of his sweater down one of his arms. "Just a little sympathetic magic," he said. "I have a rain dance and a fertility number coming up."

"This your first?" Sabika teased him, as we came back into the room.

- - -

She had dilated two centimeters in our absence, and was very proud of herself for having done this without our help, and nearly painlessly. "It's easier now," she said. But soon after this, her water finally broke, and the contractions started up again, harder and more frequent contractions than before.

In every uncomplicated labor I had attended, a moment came, toward the end of transition and the full opening of the cervix, when the mother resigned herself to giving birth--however much she may have fought the idea before that--and began to work with anticipation and withdrawn concentration and effort. Not Sabika. Birth, for her, had been a wild screaming catharsis by which she had established some measure of authority over her household. This time, though, the house was empty, and we had largely kept her quiet. She took her revenge on us now, abandoned the breathing techniques, and let fly with curses and screams. I became a little impatient, and even John Allen began to withdraw and to offer her less assistance. He had an excuse, feeling unwell. Only Nunki remained steady and consistently helpful in her eerily unspeaking way. I wondered, in view of her mouser story, what was going on in her head.

The struggle wasn't between Sabika and us, really, but rather between Sabika and her baby. She really didn't want to give birth to her thirteenth child. She wanted to remain pregnant, or to be un-pregnant, despite her baby's willful determination to be born. Screaming and thrashing about through one contraction, in the next she became a silent, teeth-gritting martyr to the pain, and refused to exert herself. She said she wanted to be "cut open," she didn't want to push the baby out. We told her it was too late for a caesarian birth, and that it would soon be over. And we finally got some cooperation from her, and a bit of the quiet, withdrawn concentration she had shown herself capable of earlier.

Then suddenly we heard the shouting and screaming of a crowd of people, banging of doors, the thumping of heavy boots. Sabika began yelling, demanding to know what was going on. I flew out of her room, stumbled through the corridor and into the kitchen where a gaggle of children were nervously smiling, peeking through a crack in the kitchen door into the front room. I waded through them, and ran into a wall of men--the family vigilante committee.

I heard another half-scream--a woman's voice-- but I couldn't see what was going on. The men formed a rough circle around the center of activity. I got up onto a chair and looked down over the men's heads. The kerosene lamps created a hot yellow inner circle of light cast on the pale flesh of a group of about eight women, all naked, who sat huddled on the floor, trembling from the cold, trying to hide themselves with their hands or with bits of clothing that they clutched nervously--all but one. That one, I guessed, was Rigel, who stood in the midst of all those accusatory male stares, facing her formidable father with a defiant uprightness that I could only admire. Her eyes were as black as her father's beard. Her pale rose skin seemed luminous in the lamplight. Her dark hair was wild and matted with leaves and vines down to her knees. She was quite lovely. Her father was pointing with his whole arm to a spot on her breast.

"There is the mark! There it is for all to see!" Mick Grady was saying, in his booming, metallic voice. He looked closely at Rigel. "Deny you the mark of Serpens?"

"The mark of what?" she asked incredulously.

Said Mick, darkly, "He who extinguishes the stars--that degenerate de-seminator who would denude the stars of life--who would de-populate the Universe, and squeeze it into a ball of nothing, emptying Heaven itself of souls!" He demonstrated with his hands, and one felt he would like to squeeze Rigel herself into a ball of nothing. "You!" he thundered. "He placed his mark on you for all to see!"

"I've had this mark all my life," Rigel replied cooly. "It's a birthmark." A few of the women nodded in agreement, while others looked on fearfully, clutching their bits of clothing. Rigel took the opportunity to draw a blanket from the floor and put it around her shoulders, hiding her birthmarked breast. Her father leaned over and ripped the blanket away from her.

"Uncover the mark of Satan's lips!" he roared.

I couldn't take any more. "Do you want Sabika to die?" I suddenly yelled, in a voice that seemed to come from someone other than me.

Mick shook his dark hairy head, as if bothered by a fly, and turned his attention to the darkness outside of his circle of lamps, where I stood, nearly invisilble to him, perched precariously on the rickety chair.

"I don't care a goddamn what you're doing here!" I found myself shouting. "Get out! Get out of here! You're threatening the life of Sabika Grady! I've had enough of this! Goats! A filthy house! A garbage heap of a kitchen!" I stepped down from the chair, awkwardly, and the men just in front of me moved out of the way. "You women, get clothes on! Now! Go to the kitchen! You men! Out! Out of the house!" I was trembling with rage.

The men looked to their leader to see what he would say. In this hesitation, complete quiet filled the front room, so that we could hear small movements and nervous titterings in the kitchen, and even John Allen's indistinct voice all the way from the back of the house.

"Midwife. . .," said Mick Grady, staring at me opaquely.

"Abby's my name! You really are the rudest man I ever met. You never even asked me my name!"

"Midwife," he repeated in a fierce whisper, hissing over the word, "Filthy midwife, know yet not the Serpent who swallows the Heavenly stars?"

"What kind of a father are you?" I inquired of him, angrily. "Your wife's in there giving birth! Don't you care?"

Then, suddenly, Sabika--bless her lack of control--screamed in pain, as if to stab my words into their hard hearts. Only her husband was unmoved. When Sabika stopped screaming, Mick said, in a most reasonable, even gentle, voice, "What is the life of one woman compared to the fall of the Daughters of the Universe into filthy witchcraft?"

I couldn't believe it. I said, or rather, I think I yelled, "Why don't you take your goddamn witch trial somewhere else? Get out of here! No, these women stay here! Go try yourself! Go burn yourself at the stake! I suppose you were once an intelligent man. Jesus Christ!" I was nearly incoherent with rage. "I need these women to help me. This place is a goddamn pigsty. And I don't care if they danced naked all the way to the moon!"

I heard a small giggle from one of the women. Rigel, I could see, had withdrawn to a far corner of the room, with a cynical look on her face. Mick, stunned for a moment, at being made a fool of, now took a menacing step toward me.

Into this madness came a voice bellowing from the kitchen. "Michael Gra-a-a-dy!"

It was Sabika, large gray mass of a woman, the more imposing for the sunken bulge at her hips. She swung open the kitchen door, scattering children this way and that, and placed her hands on either side of the doorjamb, as if to keep the house from falling down.

John Allen was right behind her, his face stricken with concern. He put his hands on Sabika's shoulders, and said something to Nunki who ran back toward the labor room.

Sabika uttered her husband's name again, "Michael Grady!", and sought him with a desperate effort of her eyes. "Wha...what are you doing?"

He, the only one in the room not struck dumb with awe at her great strength, replied, "What has your daughter done?"

"Rigel. . .foolishness. . .," Sabika gasped, sinking to her knees. John Allen eased her down to the floor. Nunki returned with a pillow and some towels.

"A lantern!" John Allen ordered. "Give us some light."

Someone placed a lantern beside him. I pushed my way through the crowd, and got down on my knees in front of Sabika, who was squatting. She held her breath. Her face turned red with effort. She uttered a deep, prolonged grunt. She was giving birth, not in the neat clean nest she had arranged at the back of the house, but right there in the cramped little passageway between the dirty kitchen and the front room packed with her family of naked witches and armed witchhunters.

I slipped a towel under her, for the baby's head was nearly born.

When Sabika had said, "Rigel. . .foolishness," I had caught sight of Rigel, who, upon hearing her name, had curled up into a ball on the floor, pulling the blanket over her head. She had looked like a sea anemone closing up. Now I felt a nudge behind me, and an arm--Rigel's--reached around me. She thrust her hand toward the head of the emerging baby. Instinctively, I pushed her hand away. I don't know what she intended--perhaps only to be the first to touch the new child. But Mick Grady, who was standing stiffly with the other men, all of whom looked on with wooden faces, suddenly cried, "Witch!", and stomped across the floor, grabbed the girl around the waist, and yanked her away. She struggled silently. He dragged her out to the front porch. I saw him throw her down the steps, then he burst back into the room, looking for another circumstance by which to assert himself. The other women scattered out of sight, and he spoke to two of the men, who followed after Rigel.

Sabika was turning the baby's head herself, so that its shoulders could come out. John Allen tried to place his hands over hers, to make sure the baby wouldn't hit the floor. She shoved his hands away. So I tried, and to my surprise, Sabika let me hold the baby's head, after which its slippery little body came out into the cold world. It was small, dark-haired, and not yet breathing. Still attached to the throbbing umbilical cord, the child had a few moments yet to get used to life on the outside, before we disconnected her from her mother.

"It's a girl," I said quietly to Sabika.

"Oh, no!" she moaned.

John Allen had sent Nunki back to the labor room for more supplies. She arrived with knife, string and more towels.

"Where's the syringe?" he asked.

Nunki left to go find it. John Allen lifted his sweater, put the hem of his T-shirt over the baby's tiny mouth, and I bent over and drew mucous from her throat. The umbilical cord had stopped pulsing. It was time for her to take her first breath. We turned her over and patted her firmly. She was turning blue, still unbreathing, still attached to the gray cord, when Sabika suddenly took the baby from us and held her up as high as the cord would reach.

"No!" John Allen gasped, at this new danger. Raised up high, the baby's blood might start flowing back into the cord.

"Take it!" Sabika cried to Mick. "Name it! Another puling girl for your pullulating harem! And just see if I raise it for you!"

Her husband had been standing sullenly by the door, heaving great sighs, while his sons and sons-in-law stood stupidly about, wondering what to do next. At Sabika's challenge, Mick un-froze, and took a step toward us.

"I'll charge you both with murder! Stop this!" John Allen ordered. He put his hands on the baby, but Sabika wouldn't let go of her. Meanwhile I hastily tied and cut the umbilical cord, so that we could get the baby away from these two mad people.

"Give her to me," I said firmly to Sabika. She let go. I handed the baby to John Allen, who clutched her to his chest, and fled into the kitchen with her, closing the door.

I was left with Mick and his fellow Inquisitors, and Sabika who was giving birth to the placenta. Now she collapsed backwards onto the floor, and I stopped her fall just barely, catching her head on the pillow.

Standing in the middle of the front room, with his eyes raised to Heaven, Mick delivered this speech in a sonorous voice, "Her name shall be Antares, opposite of Mars. Her children shall travel four hundred and twenty-four light years to Antares and shall then increase and multiply and fill the planets round the double-star Antares that are in preparation there this very day. And so their plan shall be fulfilled, those who came to us and said, 'Where are your children for the stars?'"

END OF CHAPTER ONE

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