The Terranauts

  The instructor was a comfort too—a sweet-faced, fiftyish woman in sweats who was able to walk us through the stages of labor, massage techniques, use of the birth ball, squat bar and strategically placed pillows, and, of course, the breathing exercises, without getting either too clinical or too saccharine either. If it was hard on her, having to communicate through the phone at the visitors’ window and deal with the press of photographers our security guards tried to keep at a respectful distance, she never showed it. As for Richard, despite my case of nerves and the fact that as we got closer to term I kept pushing him away, give him credit here—he was totally conscientious, poring over the literature on breech births and other nightmares, consulting regularly with the expert from Johns Hopkins, doing everything he could to try and put me at ease. And when we were two weeks out, he sat me and Vodge down to watch a video relayed over from Mission Control that painted the whole process of natural birth in what was meant to be a reassuring way.

  The thing is, it didn’t really seem to have the desired effect—if I was scared before the film, I was terrified after it. Not so much with the process itself, which I felt I had a pretty good grip on at that point, but with the whole series of decisions that had led up to my sitting there in the command center watching it in the first place. With my husband. I’d never dreamed I’d have a husband before reentry—just the term itself and all it conveyed was enough to make me feel as if I were taking a leap every time I pronounced it aloud (mainly to the press)—and if I’d imagined a husband somewhere down the road, it certainly wasn’t Vodge. Or Johnny. Somebody like Gavin, maybe, but he was too young and really hadn’t come aboard in time to make a difference.

  So here was this film playing on the computer monitor, normal mothers, normal pregnancies, hospitals, nurses, dietary charts, and all I could think was I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. And no, I wasn’t going to go back and blame myself for falling in love with Vodge or being careless that first night—that was done, that was over, and I’d already tortured myself enough on that account—but I kept asking myself how I could ever have defied Vodge and Mission Control and everybody else to insist on going through with this. Was I out of my mind? These were normal mothers smiling at me from the depths of the screen, but I wasn’t a normal mother, I was starved, scrawny, fighting each day to make sure I got enough protein to keep my baby healthy, and I have to say, more and more, it had begun to feel like a losing battle.

  If I was dying inside, Vodge was a mess. He had to excuse himself and get up in the middle of the film and he didn’t return till the end, when the baby, cleaned and swaddled, was blinking its eyes in its mother’s arms—which was all right, I suppose, since he still hadn’t committed to being there in the delivery room when the time came and I really wasn’t going to press him on that score. (Typical Vodge: he tried to turn everything into a joke to cover the fact that he was as scared as I was, maybe even more so. “This New Age consciousness thing where the father’s expected to be there gets it all wrong—it ought to be the way it was in the old movies, a bunch of guys in big-shouldered suits and hats sitting in the waiting room, passing a bottle around until the nurse pops her head in and chirps, ‘It’s a boy!’ I mean, that’s civilized.”)

  There came a morning in late August when I couldn’t seem to get out of bed. I opened my eyes and couldn’t think where I was, still lost in the dream I’d been having over and over lately, of me, unpregnant, wearing nothing but my two-piece and lying stretched out on the deck of The Imago under the real sun, the actual sun, and then slipping stealthily overboard and stroking my way across the flat belly of the sea toward the horizon that just seemed to open up forever. But there I was, staring up at the familiar ceiling, tentative in my own body, as if I’d borrowed it from somebody else. Vodge wasn’t there. He’d taken to sleeping in his own room most nights, claiming I was keeping him awake with my tossing and turning (“It’s like sleeping with a beached whale,” he told me, and if it was meant as a joke, I have to say I really didn’t find it all that funny). We hadn’t had sex since maybe the seventh month, though certainly I wanted to—and wanted him to hold me, if nothing else—but he kept saying it was bad for the baby, when of course that was just nonsense. Both Richard and Dr. Reston—I asked them—said sex is fine right up until your water breaks. Vodge never said as much, but I think he was turned off by the way I looked and just decided to go back to being celibate (and yes, it did occur to me that he might be sneaking back to Gretchen, who did seem, I don’t know, softer toward him all of a sudden, but that was probably just my own paranoia).

  Anyway, I woke up from my dream and immediately felt myself clench as if there was a punch-press stamping away inside me and realized I must be having—had just had—a contraction. I waited for another one, counting one-a-thousand, two-a-thousand, but it didn’t come, and then it did. Which scared me. It was too early yet, nearly a month before my due date, and here was what we’d all been afraid of from the beginning: a premature baby. Underweight. Underdeveloped. A damaged baby, even—one that wouldn’t represent E2 and its lifestyle the way Mission Control expected it to. A baby that had come prematurely because E2 couldn’t provide enough calories for its mother to sustain it. Another contraction, then nothing. I pushed myself up, though my body felt like a sack of bowling balls, listened for Richard next door, then used the toilet, brushed my teeth and hair and sat heavily on the couch in the living room, waiting.

  What was happening to me, though I didn’t realize it yet, was what’s called false labor (or Braxton Hicks contractions—named after a man, if you can believe it). I had another contraction while I was pulling on my shorts, then another two minutes later, then nothing. This went on, erratically, through the morning milking, breakfast and team meeting, and by that point I was in a state. The pain kept coming in waves. Somebody asked me something and I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. All I could do was clench my teeth and hold on. Still, I didn’t want to go to Richard, not yet, not until it was absolutely necessary, so I pulled Vodge aside in the hallway just after the meeting and told him I thought it was time.

  It took him a minute to process what I was saying, his face gone slack and his shoulders collapsed, one hand snatching at the air as if he were on a crowded bus and fumbling for a strap to hang on to. He looked lost. Looked as if he were the one having the contractions. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know. I think”—and here came another contraction, sharp and sudden, the punch-press stamping away so that he could see it in my face—“I think the baby’s coming.”

  He just stood there, looking hopeless, and then his lips were moving, silently counting off the months and days. “But that can’t be. It’s not due for like a month yet—”

  “Three and a half weeks.”

  “But still . . . You’re telling me you’re having contractions?”

  I nodded. The pain made me want to sit down, collapse, grovel, but we were in the hall and there was nowhere to sit. “I think so. I mean, it hurts—it really hurts.”

  “Think so? What the hell are you talking about? Either you’re having them or not—”

  We were alone in the hallway. The morning light gilded the plants, clung to the spaceframe till it shone like something out of a sci-fi movie, which, in a way, I suppose it was. I felt . . . not sick, not exactly—more as if I were having my period and cramping, but cramping really badly. Was this what it was going to be like? Was this it? I didn’t have a clue. What I said was, “Actually? I’m not sure.”

  He let out a curse. “What are you doing here then? And why the hell are you telling me—isn’t it Richard you ought to be talking to? I mean, do I look like a doctor to you? Jesus!”

  So I went to Richard—or actually, Vodge just about frog-marched me into his office, startling Richard, who’d been bent over one of the petri dishes in which he was cultivating a sample of the fungal matter he’d scraped off the glass in a back corner of the rain forest.

  “You’ve got t
o do something!” Vodge shouted, his frame rigid now and his face drained of color but for its residue of carotene orange—Vodge, my Vodge, all in a panic.

  Richard barely gave him a glance. It was me he looked to, swiping the little black-framed glasses from his face so he could focus on what mattered here, and if he looked as alarmed as Vodge, it was only in that moment. “Are you having contractions?” Richard asked.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Regular?”

  “No. Or I don’t think so—I’m just, it hurts.”

  That was when Vodge said, “Okay, okay,” then repeated it twice more before stepping back out into the hall and pulling the door shut behind him.

  We both watched him go. Then Richard, totally composed now—all business—said, “Let’s have a look.”

  As just about anybody with access to a TV, radio or newspaper will know, our daughter, Eve, was born full-term, on September 20, 1995, and despite all our fears and the hand-wringing in the press, weighed in at a respectable six pounds, fourteen ounces. I don’t remember much of the birth itself, except that the pain was at a level I thought I could bear (and no, there would be no epidural, no drugs of any kind, not even oxytocin, which we wouldn’t have had in any case, because to my mind natural means natural, period), but by the third hour of labor I felt as if somebody was tearing me open and then cauterizing everything inside me, over and over again. I didn’t cry out, not that I can remember, but I was right there, right on the cusp of it the whole time, thinking I was going to die, thinking the baby was going to die—or worse, come out all twisted and deformed like the little monster in Eraserhead.

  I tried to be strong, tried to push all that negativity out of my mind, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, and by the end all I wanted to do was die. Say what you will about Vodge, but he was there for me, right there beside me through the better part of my eight hours of labor, trying his best to comfort me and coach me through the breathing exercises, though that sort of thing—patience, loving care, the conventional reaction to a conventional situation—didn’t come naturally to him. He was like Johnny in that regard, more concerned about keeping his cool or being cool to worry overmuch about other people and their feelings. Again, I was pretty far gone by the time the baby came, but I do know it was Diane there assisting the physician and not Vodge. Vodge didn’t have the strength for it. I’m not saying he wasn’t capable in so many other ways or that he was less a man for being—what, squeamish?—but that this was a kind of intimacy he just couldn’t seem to handle.

  Richard could, though. And so could Diane. Richard did put his hands on me, of course he did, and I was glad of it. In fact, for a while there, after the baby came out, the whole issue was in doubt because the placenta wouldn’t drop and I was bleeding heavily, big gouts of material, blood clots, and Richard finally had to go inside me and manually remove it, which opened up a whole new avenue of pain, pain that was far worse than the childbirth itself. That was no fun. And I didn’t realize how close I’d come to passing out from blood loss until well after the fact. But the point is, I didn’t bleed to death and the baby—our daughter, Eve—was healthy, normal, perfect, and the only people who knew Vodge wasn’t present in the delivery room weren’t about to say anything about it. And did it really matter all that much? My parents’ generation certainly didn’t think so. The men were strictly excluded—forcibly, if necessary—and the women had their epidurals and went under and woke up with a clean pink squalling baby in their arms.

  So no, it didn’t bother me, even when it came out that Vodge had got cold feet at the end and shirked his duty, because we were pioneers of a new world and a new way of thinking and people can’t expect a kind of rigid mind-control over everything and everybody, whether it’s laid down by society at large or Mission Control in microcosm—we were Terranauts, yes, but we were individuals too, now more than ever. We never did discover who’d ratted him out, incidentally—not that it mattered. What mattered was what we presented at the glass not two hours after Eve was born (and she’d not only come right on her due date but at four-forty-seven in the afternoon, as if she was already geared to the prime-time viewing schedule).

  G.C. presided, as usual, while Vodge and I posed for pictures at the visitors’ window, Eve cuddled in my arms with her little monkey face in repose, looking like nobody yet, not Vodge or me or my mother or any of my aunts either. Richard, calm and collected and with a celebratory dose of E2 arak running through his veins, took a bow and posed for photos with Vodge, Eve and me, then responded to questions from the press, both at the glass and later in the command center, via PicTel. He was clearly beat (and, if you knew what to look for, showing signs of the early stages of inebriation, his voice slowing to a crawl and his eyes focusing high over the heads of the crowd gathered there in the courtyard). Vodge was beat too—and under the influence of his own commemorative dose. I was the one who’d done all the work and yet the funny thing was I didn’t feel tired at all—just the opposite: I was exhilarated, feeling higher than I’d ever felt in my life, and I hadn’t needed any arak to get me there either.

  After ten minutes or so, Little Jesus herded everybody away from the glass so we could do the network TV interviews he and Judy had set up, and Vodge and I sat there at the phone, alternately answering the queries they put to us, which were purely ritualistic and soft as baby powder. No one asked about diet or how we expected to feed our daughter or whether we’d be tempted to import food or anything like that. They wanted the good news only, the positive news, and that was just what we were there to give them.

  Q: You’ve been through a lot, Dawn—how do you feel? And congratulations, by the way.

  ME (hair snarled dramatically, lipstick and eye shadow freshly applied): Thank you so much—everybody. I feel great, I feel blessed, as we all do, the whole E2 family, both inside the Ecosphere and out there in Mission Control.

  Q: You’ve got a beautiful daughter—have you given her a name yet?

  ME (I’ve seen this tape probably twenty times): Eve.

  Q: Eve?

  RAMSAY (leaning in to share the phone): If it’d been a boy, we would have called him Adam.

  Q: How about the reaction of your crewmates? I’ll bet they’re happy for you.

  ME: Never happier.

  Q: Were you at all concerned about not having the kind of care you’d get at a hospital?

  ME: No. I had complete confidence in Dr. Lack. He’s our medical officer. He’s our crewmate. Anything happens, he’s there for us. And, as you can see (angling the baby toward the camera) he’s shown himself to be more than capable. Wouldn’t you say?

  And I stopped right there, letting Eve—whose eyes blinked open at that very moment—do the rest.

  So we had an extra Terranaut—where once we were eight, now we were nine. It didn’t happen right away, but most of my crewmates, I think, eventually came to see Eve’s value to the mission. In a sense, she was the human experiment, or the result of it anyway, and nothing anyone had done through the course of Mission One and now Mission Two could even begin to touch the tsunami of publicity she generated. There were photography sessions every day, interviews, thousands upon thousands of people worldwide tracking each ounce and inch she put on and every hair that sprouted on her head, and forget the galagos—half the schoolchildren in the country were now drawing, coloring and painting pictures of little Princess Eve in her towering glass castle. Mission Control rushed an Eve doll into production for sale in the gift shop alongside the galago toys and went into negotiations to generate a line of coloring books for the younger kids. Vodge—and he was as charged up as I’d ever seen him—called it marketing the brand, and if that tended to distract people from the real science, Mission Control was on top of that too, bringing in a team of sociologists, anthropologists and early-childhood psychologists to weigh in on Eve and document her first five and a half months under glass. I’m sure every mother must feel her baby is unique, the apex of life on earth and the apple of e
verybody’s eye, but in this case it was true.

  What I didn’t want was for people to defer to me in any way—my crewmates, I mean. There was already enough resentment, and for the first week or so after Eve was born people did have to cover for me, because, as I’ve said, it took eight of us working full-time, working to exhaustion, just to keep E2 up and running, and there was no provision for downtime. I wasn’t really up to strength those first couple of days, which even the pettiest amongst us (I won’t name names) had to appreciate, but still I didn’t feel right about it. Richard insisted I take it easy—and Dr. Reston and G.C. backed him up—but even so there were all those interviews and, of course, adjusting to the new baby, what with breast-feeding, changing diapers (which we fashioned from a couple of old towels and things in the discarded clothes bin, mainly worn T-shirts doubled up, sewed into shape and washed and rewashed) and worrying about the baby sleeping through the night. (If you’re curious, Vodge was no help there at all—he slept in his own room exclusively now, claiming he couldn’t be expected to take up the slack for me in the IAB and animal pens, not to mention shoulder the ever-expanding PR burden he had to carry, if he couldn’t get a full night’s rest. Do I sound peeved? Maybe I am. At least a bit. It was all on me, always on me.)