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She had the bumpy, downy skull of a pod from a baobab tree, and funny squashed
features which I supposed would sort themselves out in time into an
approximation of myself and Klimt. Her limbs were floppy and elastic, she
would be a tall woman. Her skin was a light milky coffee colour, mild, smooth,
with the only blemish on the back of her left thigh -a little maroon trefoil.
The
Barefoot Midwife said it would fade in a few weeks. Blue eyes stared up
vaguely into mine. The world was still One to her. Her separation from me had
hardly had time yet to be filtered through to her whole being. So she
squalled, she sucked at me, she slept. And I called her Yungi.
Yungiyungi is
Swahili for water-
lily. I thought of her floating in that lake within me, growing, budding,
expanding, flowering-
I bathed her, and dabbed surgical spirit on the scab of blood in her navel
where the cord had been. But as I watched her, sleeping with lightly
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flickering eyelids, I couldn't stop myself wondering whether she would carry
another deeper stain, the stain of the alien which wouldn't fade as the weeks
went past- Why did the
Midwife take so many smears of blood in the first three days, till the soles
of
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy
Yungi's feet were all pinpricks?
Feng came to congratulate me on the birth and tell me that I would be
recommencing training exercises for flights to the 'Rakshasa World', with a
Tibetan partner, and that my daughter would spend the day in the Palace
creche.
Horror welled up again.
'Your daughter's just busy dreaming,' said Feng, about her flickering, closed
eyes. 'Babies dream all the time during the first few days. They have to set
the world in order. The blood tests are just routine precautions against
jaundice. And we do need to be specially careful with lowland babies. The
altitude, you know.
Their bodies need to manufacture more red blood cells. Why didn't you ask the
Midwife? Stop worrying. You've a fine baby. She's perfect. Be proud.'
'What about her mind!'
'Her mind is still only an idea of a mind.'
'Will it be human, Feng?'
He laughed. 'It ought to be! Seeing she's a human being. What else do you
expect? Mind is a product of evolution as much as toes or teeth are.'
'If it's stained by the alien thing- if some of the Beast leaked down the
radar web into her! Yungi was only a code for a human being when I flew. That
was her most vulnerable time! My body-field was being manipulated while I
flew, wasn't it? The genetic code is such a tiny thing, in the egg or the
sperm.'
'I would say it is vast.'
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy
'Vast, but so delicate.'
'Oh, very resilient, Lila! Or we wouldn't be here, would we? We would have
mutated all over the place, long ago. She's an utterly normal human being.
Can't you see that, you perverse girl? Perhaps it's that that disappoints
you.'
'I don't see into her mind. Now I have to fly again, and become pregnant
again.
To make another "utterly normal" baby? Then another? How many years, how many
babies? I feel like a cow!'
Feng looked exasperated. 'We're expanding Bardo as fast as we can, to save you
this sort of thing.'
A Barefoot carried Yungi off to the creche; while Feng took me to meet Kushog,
my Tibetan lover.
Once more I practised the mental exercises I'd learnt in Miami. I reduced
golden pagodas in the Funerary Halls to a line, then to a point. Wearing a
Bardo helmet, I entered the yantra nest while the earphones hummed and trammed
and hrihed
.
After a few weeks, I was ready to undertake the tantric yoga of love with
Kushog-
What a fat unctuous overgrown child this Kushog was!
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Seemingly composed of soft rubber, his bones included, he could master any
love position. He spoke English quite fluently but utterly monotonously -
chanting his sentences at me as though every sentence was a sacred
incantation.
All the words ran into each other. I could just imagine him five hundred years
ago, the Chosen Blessed One from. a community of yak-herders, drawing magic
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Ian Watson - Alien Embassy mandalas to ward off bloat and murrain from the
herds, tussling with invisible demons, sweating himself into a self-induced
terror as the imaginary devils nipped his folds of pampered flesh. Talkative
as he was, it was worse communicating with him than it had been with the
taciturn Klimt.
On and on he chanted at me about the perils to sanity from the Star Beast.
Proudly and maniacally he demonstrated an old Tibetan ritual called
Chod
, in which a lama persuaded himself that he's genuinely being devoured, flesh,
blood and bones, by ravenous demons : crying out in sweaty terror that his
bones were being cracked open and all the marrow sucked out, hooting as the
wind whistled through the hollow bones, squealing as his skull was sawn open
and his brains gnawed. After a while I understood only too well how the fat
boy really loved
the idea of the beastly thing behind the Rakshasa facade. That was more sexual
to him than I was. He made love to , turning our intercourse into a kind of
vile it chod ceremony, I met Maimouna again. She too was retraining for Bardo
flight, having given birth to a son.
She'd called him Doudou, and didn't seem to think very much of him.
We were thrown together now by lectures on the 'Rakshasa world'. Maimouna
complained about these at first, both in and out of class, on the grounds that
they were a farce since all of us knew that the Rakshasa moon was just a
programmed illusion, masking the horrid reality of the Star Beast. The Dobdob
Instructor, a patient but insistent Chinese called Chang, was lecturing a
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