Brave New Worlds

a plus sign on the infant's forehead—"and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross. "
    Unraveling Madeleine 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 Madeleine 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. "Madeleine 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 Madeleine 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 Eighth 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.
    For someone who has recently given birth to twins, Angela is amazingly spry, rushing pell-mell past the stupefied congregation and straight through the narthex.
    "Please!" screams Connie.
    But already she is out the door, bearing her unsaved daughter into the teeming streets of Boston Isle.

    At 8:17 P. M. , Eastern Standard Time, Stephen O'Rourke's fertility reaches its weekly peak. The dial on his wrist tells him so, buzzing like a tortured hornet as he scrubs his teeth with baking soda. Skreee , says the sperm counter, reminding Stephen of his ineluctable duty. Skreee , skreee : go find us an egg.
    He pauses in the middle of a brush