The Weight of Her World, and Another
/CW: Discussion of pregnancy and miscarriage
Josya is coming back to the Hidden World. However far she travels, however much time stretches between her returns, she has always, always, been coming back here.
This will be her thirteenth trip to the goddess's planet, and the ninth birth for which she will be present. As the landing module plummets, she remembers a time when she felt more confident, more assured in her work, with each passing visit. She doesn't remember when that time ended. To be there for a birth, to open the doors upon a new life, this should be the simplest thing in the universe, and yet so fraught with fear and danger. And of course, the life awaiting Josya and her apprentice today is no mere human infant.
Ato's helmet bobs in time with Josya's as the rockets fire. Ato is a new Servant, barely out of primary Instruction, with no midwife training beyond what Josya has lobbed at her on their journey. Her visor's reflective sheen gives her the appearance of faceless calm; if Josya could see beneath, her face itself would betray little more emotion. She said nothing even when their parentship passed through the Veil, a sight which filled Josya's mouth with praises for hours the first time she bore witness. It's fashionable these days for the High Houses of Qish to send a youngest child into Service; their deity, one of the goddess's eldest, presides over the song and sport that are so prized in Qish's famous family houses.
Usually these highborn Servants are shuffled off into library work or the Chorus of Creation. Josya doesn't know what elder Servant she must have offended to get a baby-faced, broad-shouldered lout like Ato apprenticed to her. As if she'll last beyond this one trip before going back to her House to brag about her exploits! The girl's previous career was as a mediocre Zherek player in Qish's lunar arenas, and she seems as reverent as Josya's left boot. When she speaks, it's usually to share her opinions on this new Zherek rule or that new virtual port.
That's fine. All she has to do is stay out of the way. Josya just wants to see the goddess's face again.
"Impact imminent," Josya announces, scanning the console. Beside her, Ato's head lifts. "Four… three…" The rockets scream one last time and the module judders. Josya's countdown is lost to the cacophony, physics versus engineering. But the module stills, engines fading to a whine, then to silence. Josya unlatches her restraints, then pushes up from the entry couch on legs that protest gravity's sudden advent. "Ato, module diagnostics. I'll unload."
Ato is still fumbling with her restraints. Cry of Creation, how did she ever maneuver a Zherek ball with such clumsy fingers? No wonder her family relegated her into Josya's care. "Some of the equipment is heavy, Elder. I can haul it, if you want to run the landing checklist instead."
"Was your training deficient?" Josya snaps. "Instructions are not open for debate."
Ato slouches in her chair and calls up the checklist as Josya pops the hatch and drops the ladder. Ridiculous child. At least the others she's sent packing after their failures of midwifery knew to obey without quibbling. Josya might get an angry letter from the Eldest if she sent a girl from the High Houses packing—but what more could they do? Replace Josya? No chance of that, not now. No one else has the long experience of Creation's labor to match.
Nor the profundity of adoration. There is nothing Josya wouldn't do, in Service to the goddess.
Josya's hips complain of the long trip when she hikes down the ladder, but at least the parentship is on level ground: the verdant plains surrounding the goddess's mountain. Once, a few trips back, the parentship dropped the module in the crystal forests five hundred miles west of here. The goddess was still laboring by the time Josya made the hike, though the offspring inside her had long since ceased to be.
The goddess's last four pregnancies have ended in stillbirth or miscarriage. The white mountain peak cuts Josya's eyes as she stares. Then she blinks, and straightens, and hurries to haul the equipment down out of its stowage.
*
After Ato has gotten the all-clear on her checklist, she joins Josya, doffing her helmet and hovering about Josya's careful piles. Josya's work in the years between births is to travel the known worlds searching for new ways to ease a weary goddess through the act of creation. There are nerve-nanos and spheres of healing; there is a blessing from one of the last priests of Ssein, whispered into a glass bottle; there is a pressure-point birthing stool that folds up small enough for a Servant to carry.
Twice Josya has to snatch a nano-tube or a phial of benediction out of Ato's roving hands. "These aren't toys," she snaps. Wanting for patience, surely, but the girl is wanting for common sense. Ato fidgets instead with her discarded vac-suit, folding and refolding it distractingly on Josya's periphery. Finally Josya lets her start filling their packs carefully with the assorted equipment while Josya finishes checking through her inventory. When she looks up, though, Ato is quietly stuffing some of the largest, most delicate pieces into her own pack.
"What do you think you're doing!" Josya snatches the spear-sized transmembrane fusion wand out of Ato's grasp before she can settle it on top of the healing spheres, of all things. "They would have been crushed!"
Ato stands up straight, a great granite plinth of petulance. Cry of Creation, she must be eight inches taller than Josya. "Don't act surprised that I don't know how to handle this junk—you won't tell me what it is."
"It's time for us to go to the goddess. You might at least feign a more reverential attitude by the time we get there." The fusion wand goes into Josya's pack, and the rest of the equipment besides, while Ato sulks. Various straps bite hard into Josya's shoulders, but the load is no heavier than on any other trip. "Come on," she says, and under her watchful eye Ato carefully lifts her delicately-filled pack. "She'll be waiting."
*
One particular encumbrance bumps unpleasantly against Josya's thigh and her attention as she walks. Hopefully the plasma rifle will only be dead weight for the duration of their visit. Only once in her Service has a cadre of cultists found their way to the goddess's secret world. That pilgrimage was Josya's first; she had not Served long enough then to carry a rifle of her own, nor to appreciate the one on her Elder's back. The god who now bears the crown of Ranak Esh survived the incursion, and Josya bears the scars of it, both inside and out.
She does not like her rifle, but she respects its necessity. The gods born here are not for private consumption, to be locked away behind the gates of golden palaces for only those who hold the key of a certain creed. Or a certain quantity of wealth.
Seeing only memory, Josya slams face-first against those broad shoulders of Ato's. Ato has stopped atop a foothill, staring upward. "It's her," she says.
Josya looks up, finds the goddess's mottled glow halfway up the slope. The lines in her brow carve themselves deeper than ever. "Something's wrong."
"How can you know that from here?" Ato challenges, Qish haughtiness all over, but Josya pushes wordlessly past. Heaving a sigh, Ato follows, double-time now, up the steep slope. Each breath is a blow to Josya's chest, and the rifle slaps her thigh with the off-beats: one-two, one-two, one-two.
*
Josya has known from the moment she was called that this would be a difficult birth; how could it not be? All the goddess's recent births have been difficult--if a word like difficult can be stretched wide enough to cover the feeling of cradling a lifeless infant-god in her arms.
The goddess sprawls on a broken slope, naked atop her torn, fluid-soaked robe of nebulae and light. She had not even made it inside to the privacy of her holy chambers before her labor seized her. Even on her elbows and knees she towers over Josya; four Atos standing one atop the other would not match the goddess for size. Her fingers grind mountain-stone into gravel; her toes dig into the rocky face for purchase. Her shoulders strain, as if under the weight of her world and another. And yet she seems … smaller than Josya remembers. Wearier. It is well: Josya is smaller and wearier than the last time she touched the goddess, too. How could they be otherwise, with all that has passed here?
At the sound of footfalls, the goddess looks up. Her onyx-carved face, spangled with starlike opals and sweat alike, pulls into a rictus of a smile. "It's all right," Josya says. She doesn't stop running until she's under the goddess, close enough to reach up and wipe away the bead that has collected on the point of that fearsome chin. It rolls down her arm and breaks over her shoulder, its salty tang soaking into her shirt. "It's all right. We're here."
The goddess's mouth and mind were not made for the constraints of human words. She utters an incomprehensible sound in the arcane ur-language, one that resonates in every crevice of Josya's soul and leaves her staggering. She may not know the goddess's ancient tongue, but she reads the fear and pain written upon that beautiful, sun-crowned brow. She starts chanting a Stebren healing-litany, whose syllables are calculated to soothe the nervous systems of sentient species. As she sings, she reaches up to lay a reassuring hand once more on the inside of the goddess's arm before hurrying to join her compatriot. Ato stands to the side, gawking like the foolish teenager she is. Well, if she stays out of the way, she's the least of Josya's worries. "Help get these things unpacked," she says, and the goddess winces in the litany's lapse.
Josya purifies her body through prayer and seven sacred antiseptics. Then she commandeers Ato's strong broad back to boost her up to examine the goddess's laboring body. Kneeling on Ato's shoulders, Josya pushes one arm inside her goddess's body. At the very extent of her reach, her fingertips brush the fruit-ripe cervix. Does the infant locked inside yet live? Impossible to say, but it is something to know that there is an infant-god inside. Last time, the goddess miscarried early. When that tangled, shapeless mass of concepts and possibilities slithered out of her in formless screaming noise—the taste of Josya's own vomit still sears her throat in memory.
She jumps down from Ato's back. Ato grunts as she stands; she looks to Josya, who beckons sharply toward the discarded equipment packs. "You wait there." She launches into another loop of the litany as she goes to evaluate her equipment for what will be most needful. She settles gratefully into the sturdiness of ritual, the reliability of routine. Ritual and routine have carried the goddess through more difficult births than this. At the closure of ritual, at the end of routine, the goddess always remains. Nothing matters more than that.
Josya's mind careens from grateful need into unexpected blasphemy. What if there is no fragment of the universe that has yet to be suffused by a godling's light and life? What if the goddess's children wither, infinite lives left empty and uninhabited, because there is no dark corner left for them to shine into?
Stilled by this unworthy thought, she does not notice Ato sidling up. "Can I do something?" the youth says, without looking Josya full in the face, and shifts her weight from one leg to the other. "Since I'm here."
Josya moves past her, toward the goddess, toward what she knows best and dearest. "Here is enough, for now."
*
After all these years, Josya still has no idea what constitutes a normal birth for the goddess, not when so many of these labors have ended fruitlessly. Time contracts and expands: passing slowly in the great silent spaces between contractions, then spilling too quickly between her fingers as she tries this meditation or that medication to ease the birth-pains and speed the infant's arrival.
The goddess's labor often endures for days; once, a full week. Josya takes long shifts and sleeps in snatches while the goddess rests between seismic contractions. Ato can wake her if something happens. Ato can, though Josya wonders whether she will have the sense to do so.
Weary duty soon washes away the tally marks of days scratched in Josya's mind. Then there is only the goddess's keening, and Ato's restless footsteps in rings around their position.
It's a moon-silvered night when the ground beneath her feet trembles. The goddess lies prone now, resting but not restful; her eyes follow Josya as she approaches and she spreads her legs. Again Josya reaches inside, and this time within the peeled-back cervix she brushes up against the familiar curve of a small head. Egg-hard, and just as fragile, and she prays to the goddess whose body warms her arm for this child's life. "It's coming," she says. She pulls back from the goddess and wipes sweat from her own forehead. Dark beads—of blood or prayer-paint, she cannot tell in the graying light—streak her palm. "It's coming."
It. So cold, so clinical, but it puts some distance between her and a babe that has likely already passed from its before-life to the after. Bracing her feet between the goddess's sweat-slicked thighs, Josya shakes out her wrists and shoulders, preparing to catch the child. Nothing left to do now but wait, and hope that it is shaped like a child and not a mind-twisting horror of failed gestation.
"I want to help." Lost in thought, Josya hasn't heard Ato coming up behind her. The girl leans into Josya's shoulder. "Please. Let me see."
Thirsty for a spectacle to spill to her Zherek-player friends later. Josya elbows her back. "Not now, girl! Get back over by the packs where you'll do the least harm!" Ato withdraws but only as far as the goddess's knee. Josya crushes a curse against the roof of her mouth as the goddess groans. No time for Service discipline now; a head, still encased in its nebula-streaked caul, has emerged from inside the goddess's body. One shoulder follows, then the other; Josya's stomach twists with the tension of possibility.
One last terrible push, and Josya catches a tangle of fluid-slicked limbs that bears her to the ground under its weight. Though shaped like the newborn babe it is, it has the size of a human child of some eight or nine years, and a mass even greater.
The caul! Josya draws her knife, forged from catalytic metal and blessed by the seven Silent Mothers of the Observatory. The blade bites through the fragile tissue, and sparks of lightning trace its path. Here and there they nip into Josya's hand, but she does not flinch.
The child's features are perfect, skin space-black like her mother's. But there is no light from within to ignite the suns that freckle her. Her eyes are still beneath faded lids; her mouth does not stir or squall. Josya makes herself calm while she swipes out the infant's mouth, while she tries to strike the force of life into her at each of the four sacred cross-points of the body.
Nothing happens. Nothing works.
The brief burn of panic quickly dies down. Naive to expect anything more. She should know better than to submerge herself in a sea of foolish hope. Hope is the providence of the young, and Josya is too old for that. The placenta has dropped thickly from the goddess's body and there's more work to do, to make sure it is whole. To look, perhaps, for some fault that might explain another loss.
But when she sets back on her heels, drawing the caul back over the lifeless body to spare the goddess the sight, Ato's there again. "Oh," she says, and shoves Josya aside. "It's her."
Josya overbalances and falls on her back and one elbow. Mud, mingled soil and blood and amniotic fluid, soaks into her sleeve and trousers. What is the girl babbling about? Josya grabs for Ato's elbow, but Ato shakes her off without effort. The mountainside beneath Josya groans as the goddess shifts her weight, leaning up to sit. "Don't let her see!" Josya cries, kicking out at Ato's backside. She has already failed the goddess once. Let her not fail again in shielding her from this fresh hurt, from the insult of her lifeless child being gawked over by a spoiled Qish brat. "That's an Instruction! Are you listening?"
But by the time Josya manages to regain her feet, Ato has cast the torn caul aside, and clutches the stillborn god by her shoulders. Oh. So that's what Josya has to deal with. The worst kind of relic-seeker and heterodoxist, this one. Josya tries once more to push past her, to wrest the godling away from her callous grasp.
In answer Ato strikes Josya under the chin with her elbow, like a Zherek player intent on the goal. She is a mountain of her own and there is no moving her. Josya staggers back, spitting blood.
Overhead, the goddess eclipses the moon. Darkness veils her face, unlit by its customary glow from within. Something blazing bright streaks downward; Josya jumps back as the molten tear strikes the ground and quickly cools to opalescent stone. Hot tears of her own prickle her eyes in answer.
If Ato is indeed a relic-hunter, a would-be cultist, she knows how to deal with those.
Josya strikes Ato in the shoulder with the muzzle of her rifle. The weapon feels solid, familiar, in Josya's hands. It ought to, after all this time. Her boots find purchase in the dry gravel beneath the mud. "You will release her to her mother's mourning," she orders. "Or I'll shoot you and leave you to the worms."
She wouldn't really desecrate the goddess's mountain with a rotting corpse but Ato need not know that. The stupid girl is rocking, muttering to herself. If she can't be reasoned with... Josya's finger strokes the trigger. Poor discipline, and yet this is the brink to which Ato has pushed her. "This is your last warning," she says, spittle flying from her lips.
<EA EA I NNHI O>
Ur-language hammers Josya to the ground. Her mind screams with reverberations of chaos and creation, structure and desolation, and she spits dirt and gravel. The rifle. Where is the rifle?
Ato sprawls beside her. The rifle lies between them. Josya snatches for it while the girl only lies groaning. But before she can bring it to bear, a shadow passes before her eyes. The rifle jerks in her grip. She holds on till her feet leave the ground and then drops back into the dirt. When she cranes her neck, the goddess holds the gun like a twig between thumb and forefinger. Its snap sends shockwaves through Josya's chest. The goddess lets it fall, and it tumbles down the broken slopes like a child's lost toy. She does not speak again, but the sigh that grinds out of her adds years of weight to Josya's shoulders, it brings her chin to her chest.
The slow burn of shame turns her head away from her goddess, but a flicker of movement, a snippet of song, seduce her attention. Ato has not recovered enough to regain her feet—the child has never heard the ur-language before, has no immunity to its power. But she has crawled to half-cover the godling's body with her own, and still, again, she speaks.
No: she sings. Something old, some rhyme Josya half-remembers from her years of travel, a cradle song that the great-parents of lost Kven carried with them to Nyo and Am. And Qish, of course.
Just an old cradle song. Nothing special. And yet beneath the broad curve of Ato's body, something impossible is happening.
The god-child's scrawny legs move first, feet rubbing one against the other. Josya blinks, disbelieving. Blood from Ato's split lip streaks the crystal-pale vernix on the infant's abdomen but does not hide the gentle light that suffuses it from beneath. Soft hands flex and squeeze; the small mouth puckers.
The godling opens her mouth and a star-shattering squall breaks free.
Ato screams, and her scream is a song too. Her head drops as she surrenders wholly to the language beyond language; even Josya sees black. But she keeps her feet as the goddess scrapes to a stand and lifts the infant in her arms. Her enormous shadow does not dim the burgeoning starlight that shines outward from her newborn daughter. When she puts the godling to her breast, she latches quickly. Josya scarcely dares breathe until those greedy gulps slow and stop. The baby's mouth still runs silver-white as the opals of her eyes take in the strange world around her. Her gaze falls on Josya and holds there a long moment.
Guilt rings in the hollow spaces left inside her by what she has lost today—what she has surrendered. But then the godling belches, and burbles a tiny sound of delight, and even that echo of her mother's mind-shattering tongue is enough to set Josya's world spinning.
The goddess stoops, the child cradled in the crook of her elbow. Bent low and lit from beneath by her daughter, her face is still carved deep with tear tracks. She straightens her discarded cloak and lays the infant upon it. Over her shoulder, she looks at Josya. Without judgment; without anger. Only a certain entreaty, a distant politeness, which burns hotter than any rage could have done.
It has been a long time, but Josya knows what comes next. She does as the goddess desires and drags Ato backward over the slope. Ato's huge boots bump over the rocks as she goes, but she does not wake till Josya settles her to the ground. "No," she says, and the word breaks on her lips in a sticky red bubble.
"Yes." Josya holds her down successfully this time, as the goddess picks up her cloak by each end and lifts the infant.
"Wait!" Ato wails. At the sound, Josya's heart doesn't break, but old fault lines deepen. The goddess doesn't heed the cry either, but dances away from them, whipping the infant-weighted robe about her as she goes. Three, four, five times she spins, and at the apogee of the movement she opens her hands and the robe flies free.
There is a spark of light on the horizon as the infant-god breaks the atmosphere. Bound for the western arm, Josya guesses, or parts farther beyond that.
The goddess stoops to gather the wind-fluttering robe. Her eyes are on that distant point, but she approaches the waiting midwives, and drops to one knee beside them. Her palm slides under Ato and she lifts her, cradling her against one shoulder as if she is an overgrown infant herself. The goddess's thighs, streaked with radiant blood, slide one against the other as she walks away from the birthing-place. She does not look back at Josya as she goes, but Ato does, her broad face small in the shelter of that towering neck.
Josya walks back to the module.
*
It's some hours before Ato comes stomping back down the slope. Josya sets aside an open but uneaten ration-pack, watching warily. Most of the blood has been wiped from her face, and now streaks her sleeves instead. Her gaze falls on Josya, through Josya, a million miles past her, and her pupils are vast and dark. "Well," Josya says, and takes some small selfish pleasure in Ato's confused blink as that terrible distance compresses down to a human scale. She finds she has nothing else to say, so she repeats again: "Well."
Ato sits beside Josya and picks up her discarded ration. "Did you signal the parentship?"
"Not yet." She was thinking of it, before Ato returned. There had been stories, when she was a young midwife herself, of apprentices who foundered when deprived of a new godling to worship. She shifts, stretching out her bad knee, and spits out the broken-glass words that have been cutting her mouth while she waits. "If you're wondering, I won't get in the way after we return to the Observatory. I'm not as young as I used to be and clearly you..." Words fail her. "... you have something I lost along the way."
"It's not your fault. She's all you've ever known." Ato draws cold noodles up with her fingers and drops them into her mouth. "No one ever told you that you'd have to let her go."
Josya's promise to surrender her position peacefully founders in the sea of Ato's arrogance. She kicks out, and the rest of the rations go flying into the dirt. Ato’s fists clench. "Let her go! You'd have me expelled from the Service entirely?"
Ato's silence is terrible. Finally she speaks, without the decency to look Josya in the face. "The goddess is dying," she tells her own straining knuckles. "That's why the births have been so hard, of late. Because of what she's trying to do first, and with so little of herself left."
The pillars of Josya's faith tremble. What is the Service, after the death of Creation? What is the universe, without the divine spark of the new and unknown? She retreats into denial. "As if she'd entrust such a thing to you, who can't even dignify Her with a little respect when you speak of it! That's Creation you're talking about! When she's gone—" Speaking such a thing aloud breaks Josya's voice. "When she's gone, we are nothing."
"But her daughter." Ato's hand tracks upward, against the grain of the galaxy. At an acute angle above the plane of the west arm, one star gleams bluer and brighter than the rest. "There is a new Creation and we'll Serve her as we always have."
It's too much information crashing in on her. Josya struggles to breathe, to carve off a corner small enough to understand. "I almost destroyed Creation," she says. The words are muffled, and damp. Her hands are over her face.
Ato's grasp on her shoulder is warm and sparrow-light. "Creation can't be destroyed," she says, and Josya's hands come down. Ato looks back up the mountain, and Josya's eyes follow. Near the top, the goddess stands like a beacon, always pointing true, always guiding Josya back. "And you still have something important to tend to."
"What?" When Josya realizes what Ato means, she brays a wet laugh. "No! She'd never let me near. Not again." And besides, Josya is a midwife. A giver of life, not a taker.
"She would." Ato stands, pillar-solid, and offers Josya a hand up. There is something of the goddess about her that Josya has not noticed before; size and strength, certainly. Sadness, too. "She wants you, Josya. One last time." For a moment, only a moment, she is that callow girl again, not the shadow of the goddess. "Then you have to come back, and show me what to do next."
Josya nods, and Ato puts one arm around her warmly, briefly. Then Josya is alone, only the thunder of blood in her ears and the crunch of soil beneath her boots for company. The goddess loves her still; the goddess will love her last, last among all beings. Her head is too light and her heart is too heavy. But if the goddess must learn how to die, then surely Josya can learn how to let her. It is a midwife's work to open the doors to life. It is not such a different thing to open them, one last time, from the other side.