"Morrow,_James_-_Auspicious_Eggs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)
Auspicious Eggs
by James Morrow
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Copyright (c)2000 by James Morrow
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 2000
Fictionwise
www.Fictionwise.com
Science Fiction
Locus Poll Award Nominee
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Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish, Connie to his friends, sets down the styrofoam chalice, turns from the corrugated cardboard altar, and approaches the two women standing by the resin baptismal font. The font is six-sided and encrusted with saints, like a gigantic hex nut forged for some obscure yet holy purpose, but its most impressive feature is its portability. Hardly a month passes in which Connie doesn't drive the vessel across town, bear it into some wretched hovel, and confer immortality on a newborn whose parents have grown too feeble to leave home.
"Merribell, right?" asks Connie, pointing to the baby on his left.
Wedged in the crook of her mother's arm, the infant wriggles and howls. "No -- Madelaine," Angela mumbles. Connie has known Angela Dunfey all her life, and he still remembers the seraphic glow that beamed from her face when she first received the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Today she boasts no such glow. Her cheeks and brow appear tarnished, like iron corroded by the Greenhouse Deluge, and her spine curls with a torsion more commonly seen in women three times her age. "Merribell's over here." Angela raises her free hand and gestures toward her cousin Lorna, who is balancing Madelaine's twin sister atop her gravid belly. Will Lorna Dunfey, Connie wonders, also give birth to twins? The phenomenon, he has heard, runs in families.
Touching the sleeve of Angela's frayed blue sweater, the priest addresses her in a voice that travels clear across the nave. "Have these children received the Sacrament of Reproductive Potential Assessment?"
The parishioner shifts a nugget of chewing gum from her left cheek to her right. "Y-yes," she says at last.
Henry Shaw, the pale altar boy, his face abloom with acne, hands the priest a parchment sheet stamped with the Seal of the Boston Isle Archdiocese. A pair of signatures adorns the margin, verifying that two ecclesiastical representatives have legitimized the birth. Connie instantly recognizes the illegible hand of Archbishop Xallibos. Below lie the bold loops and assured serifs of a Friar James Wolfe, M.D., doubtless the man who drew the blood.
With an efficiency bordering on effrontery, Henry Shaw offers Connie a second parchment sheet.
_Merribell Dunfey. Left ovary: 290 primordial follicles. Right ovary: 310 primordial follicles._ The priest is not surprised. What sense would there be in God's withholding the power of procreation from one twin but not the other? Connie now needs only to receive these barren sisters, apply the sacred rites, and furtively pray that the Fourth Lateran Council was indeed guided by the Holy Spirit when it undertook to bring the baptismal process into the age of testable destinies and ovarian surveillance.
He holds out his hands, withered palms up, a posture he maintains as Angela surrenders Madelaine, reaches under the baby's christening gown, and unhooks both diaper pins. The mossy odor of fresh urine wafts into the Church of the Immediate Conception. Sighing profoundly, Angela hands the sopping diaper to her cousin.
"Bless these waters, O Lord," says Connie, spotting his ancient face in the baptismal fluid, "that they might grant these sinners the gift of life everlasting." Turning from the font, he presents Madelaine to his ragged flock, over three hundred natural-born Catholics -- sixth-generation Irish, mostly, plus a smattering of Portuguese, Italians, and Croats -- interspersed with two dozen recent converts of Korean and Vietnamese extraction: a congregation bound together, he'll admit, less by religious conviction than by shared destitution. "Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity, and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water, I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through these baptisms, Madelaine and Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom." Connie faces his trembling parishioner. "Angela Dunfey, do you believe, by God's word, that children who are baptized, dying before they commit any actual evil, will be saved?"
Her "Yes" is begrudging and clipped.
Like a scrivener replenishing his pen at an inkwell, Connie dips his thumb into the font. "Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours."
"M-M-Madelaine Eileen Dunfey."
"We welcome this sinner, Madelaine Eileen Dunfey, into the mystical body of Christ" -- with his wet thumb Connie traces a plus sign on the infant's forehead -- "and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross."
Unraveling Madelaine from her christening gown, Connie fixes on the waters. They are preternaturally still -- as calm and quiet as the Sea of Galilee after the Savior rebuked the winds. For many years the priest wondered why Christ hadn't returned on the eve of the Greenhouse Deluge, dispersing the hydrocarbon vapors with a wave of his hand, ending global warming with a Heavenward wink, but recently Connie has come to feel that divine intervention entails protocols past human ken.
He contemplates his reflected countenance. Nothing about it -- not the tiny eyes, thin lips, hawk's beak of a nose -- pleases him. Now he begins the immersion, sinking Madelaine Dunfey to her skullcap ... her ears ... cheeks ... mouth ... eyes.
"No!" screams Angela.
As the baby's nose goes under, mute cries spurt from her lips: bubbles inflated with bewilderment and pain. "Madelaine Dunfey," Connie intones, holding the infant down, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The bubbles break the surface. The fluid pours into the infant's lungs. Her silent screams cease, but she still puts up a fight.
"No! Please! No!"
A full minute passes, marked by the rhythmic shuffling of the congregation and the choked sobs of the mother. A second minute -- a third -- and finally the body stops moving, a mere husk, no longer home to Madelaine Dunfey's indestructible soul.
"No!"
The Sacrament of Terminal Baptism, Connie knows, is rooted in both logic and history. Even today, he can recite verbatim the preamble to the Fourth Lateran Council's _Pastoral Letter on the Rights of the Unconceived._ ("Throughout her early years, Holy Mother Church tirelessly defended the Rights of the Born. Then, as the iniquitous institution of abortion spread across Western Europe and North America, she undertook to secure the Rights of the Unborn. Now, as a new era dawns for the Church and her servants, she must make even greater efforts to propagate the gift of life everlasting, championing the Rights of the Unconceived through a Doctrine of Affirmative Fertility.") The subsequent sentence has always given Connie pause. It stopped him when he was a seminarian. It stops him today. ("This Council therefore avers that, during a period such as that in which we find ourselves, when God has elected to discipline our species through a Greenhouse Deluge and its concomitant privations, a society can commit no greater crime against the future than to squander provender on individuals congenitally incapable of procreation.") Quite so. Indeed. And yet Connie has never performed a terminal baptism without misgivings.
He scans the faithful. Valerie Gallogher, his nephews' _zaftig_ kindergarten teacher, seems on the verge of tears. Keye Sung frowns. Teresa Curtoni shudders. Michael Hines moans softly. Stephen O'Rourke and his wife both wince.
"We give thanks, most merciful Father" -- Connie lifts the corpse from the water -- "that it pleases you to regenerate this infant and take her unto your bosom." Placing the dripping flesh on the altar, he leans toward Lorna Dunfey and lays his palm on Merribell's brow. "Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours."
"M-M-Merribell S-Siobhan..." With a sharp reptilian hiss, Angela wrests Merribell from her cousin and pulls the infant to her breast. "Merribell Siobhan Dunfey!"
The priest steps forward, caressing the wisp of tawny hair sprouting from Merribell's cranium. "We welcome this sinner -- "
Angela whirls around and, still sheltering her baby, leaps from the podium to the aisle -- the very aisle down which Connie hopes one day to see her parade in prelude to receiving the Sacrament of Qualified Monogamy.
"Stop!" cries Connie.
"Angela!" shouts Lorna.
"No!" yells the altar boy.
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