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| At 8 weeks. The baby has its own heart beat and all of its internal organs are already distinct and growing. |
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| Book 3 of the "Destiny's Child" series. |
I've been reading a science fiction book called "Transcendent" by Stephen Baxter this past month. He's one of my favorite sci-fi writers because he mixes real science and politics with his fictional stories so well. I haven't loved all of his books, but most of them I've really enjoyed. I've read 9 or 10 books of his so far over the years. He's definitely very much an evolutionist, but his stories often hint at the concept of Intelligent Design playing a role in the evolution of life on earth, especially with regards to mankind. Usually it's aliens manipulating or helping to push things (evolution) along, speeding it up, and stuff like that.
But yesterday I read a short chapter in the book "Transcendent" that absolutely floored me. I have NEVER read anything in a fiction story that so blatantly and powerfully hit the Pro-Life topic right out of the park. It's shocking to me because I never would have expected it, but suddenly there it was.
I'm going to try and write out the short chapter for you to read here, because I was so impressed and moved by it, but I need to give a quick little bit of background so this will make sense. The story jumps between two drastically different time periods, one not too far in the future from now, and one half a million years into the future where mankind is on the verge of reaching some sort of "higher plane" of existence, Transcendence.
Alia is a young woman in that future who is trying to join the Transcendent organization. She has to go through a number of trials and experiences before she can fully be accepted into the group. One of those experiences is being a "passenger" to people that have lived in the distant past. You basically share the body and mind of a person but get no control over anything they do. You experience the person's WHOLE life, from the very beginning to the very end. And that's the shocking first thunderbolt in the chapter. Life absolutely starts at conception!
Here's the chapter. I highly recommend everyone read this! It really blew me away.
But first, a warning. The descriptions here in Stephen Baxter's writing are very good and there is no doubt at all that the baby is very aware and conscious from beginning to end. That means that for anyone who has tragically suffered the loss of a baby through miscarriage or some other complications, reading this is probably going to stir up a lot of emotions and hit you deep and hard. It's emotional without having experienced such sadness. So I warn the reader ahead of time that this might trigger some very powerful emotions. You might want to read it when you're in a place where you're better prepared for it, or where you're free to cry without co-workers all around. Just in case.
(I typed this out myself from the book, so some spelling or word errors may have crept in).
There was no detail, nothing to be said about this which was separated from that. There was only the separateness itself, a relation between abstracts, beyond analysis or understanding. But that was something to cling to, a source of a deep formless pleasure - an exultance that I am.
Then something more. A king of growing. Splitting, budding, a complexifying of the I, of whatever it was that had separated out of the rest. The growth was geometrical: two, four, eight, sixteen, a doubling every time, rapidly exponentiating away to large numbers, astronomical numbers. Cells: they were the units of the dividing, specks of biological matter each with their walls and nuclei and complicated chemical machinery.
The cluster that was growing out of the doubling cells was an embryo.
But that was a wrong thought, an inappropriate thought. It was not something the I shoulder understand, not now, not yet. And that realization of wrongness was itself wrong. A recursion set in, a feedback loop that multiplied that awareness of wrong. Here was another sudden separating, a distancing. Within the I - or around it, or beside it - was another point of view, separated from the I by an awareness that could never be part of the I itself. The viewpoint was a witness to this growing thing, this budding coalescing entity. It felt everything the I felt; it was as close to it in every sense as it was possible to be. And yet it was not it.
The separated view was Alian. She knew herself, who she was. She even had a dim, abstract awareness of her other life, like a half-remembered dream.
And meanwhile the I, the subject of her inspection, continued to grow.
That relentless budding was not formless. In the final body there would be more than two hundred different kinds of cells, specialized for different purposes. Already an organization was emerging in this growing city of cells. Over there was a complicated cluster that might become a nervous system, with terminations flowering into what might become fingers, eyes, a brain. And over there were simpler clusters, blocks that might become kidneys and liver and heart.
This was a wondrous process, for there was nothing here to tell the cells how to organize themselves in this manner. As the cells split and grew and split again, they communicated with their neighbors through salts, sugars, amino acids passed from one cell's cytoplasm to another's. In this way the cells formed collectives, each dedicated to developing a special function - to become an eardrum or a heart valve - and, through a clustering of the collectives themselves at a higher level, to ensure that ears and hearts, arms and legs, all developed in the right place. Out of this mesh of interaction and feedback the organization of a human body developed.
The whole process was an emergence, an expression of a deep principle of the universe. Even the I, the wispy unformed mind that was lodged in this expanding, complixifying cluster, was itself an emergent property of the increasingly complex network of cells. And yet already there was consciousness here, and a deep, brimming, joyful consciousness of growth, of increasing potential, of being.
Now, strangely, death came to the differentiating cluster of cells. Succumbing to subtle pressures from their neighbors, cells in the shapeless hands and feed began to die, in waves and bands. It hurt, surprisingly, shockingly. But there was purpose to this dying; the scalpel of cellular death was finely shaping those tiny hands and feet, cleaving one finger from another.
The growing child lifted its new hand before its face. Not its, Alia thought - his. Already the processes of development had proceeded that far. His fingers were mere nerveless stumps yet, and could not be moved; and in this bloody dark nothing could be seen, even if the child had eyes to see. And yet he strained to see even so, motivated by a faint curiosity.
His curiosity, not Alia's.
She was embedded deeply in the machinery of the child's shaping body; she felt everything he did, shared every dim thought, every sensation. But she was somehow, subtly, separated from him, and always would be. She was a monitor, a watcher; she shared everything the child lived through - and would throughout his whole life - but not his will, his choice.
And there was something wrong, a note out of place in this great symphony of manufacture and assembly. There was something not quite right with the heart, she saw, a place where the mindless self-organization had gone awry. Nothing was perfect; this was not the only flaw in the growing body. Perhaps it would not matter.
As his body and nervous system developed, the child's mind continued to evolve.
At first there had been no sense of time, or space. There were only abstractions like separateness, one thing from another, and only events, disconnected, acausal. Time gradually emerged as a sense of events in sequence: first the hands, then the cellular Die-back, then the separating fingers, one after another. Space came after that, as the body itself grew in extent and emerged from formlessness into a tool that he could, in a limited fashion, use to explore the space around him. It was a passive exploration at first, not much more than a dim realization that the universe had to be at least big enough to encompass his body. But then he had fingers to stretch out, legs to kick with. Soon he could feel the sac that contained him, could kick against its walls, and he began to get the sense that even beyond this sac was a wider universe, perhaps including beings more or less like himself.
That sense deepened when sight arrived. He could make out a dim ruddy glow, that waxed and waned. Sometimes, when the light was at its brightest, he could even make out the pale fish-like shape that was his own body, the rope that anchored him to the walls around him.
But the light would dim and return, dim and return, and a new sense of time imposed itself on him: not a time dictated by the events of his own body, but a cycle that came from a wider world outside him. There were processes that went on independently of him, then; he was not the whole universe - even though it still felt like it.
Then there were sharper sensations, brought to him in a rich stream of blood. The nourishment he received could be rich or thin, familiar or strange. Sometimes it was even intoxicating, mildly, so that he trashed uncomfortably in his tank of flesh. This came from the mother, he knew on some deep level.
For the child in the womb, here was still another lesson to learn. Not only was there a universe outside this womb of his, but there were creatures out there who imposed their will on him: even his mother, who lived her own life, while cradling his. It was a gathering awareness of separateness that presaged the child's ultimate ejection from this crimson comfort into the harsher, much less sympathetic world beyond the walls of the womb.
But now came the pain.
It was extraordinary. It flooded the child's still-developing nervous system as if hot mercury had been injected into it. The walls of the womb flexed, pressing at the helpless body, over whelming his struggles. There was a new taste on his soft pink tongue, a taste he could not recognize, was not supposed to know, not yet. But Alia recognized its iron tang. It was blood.
Something was badly wrong.
The pain passed. The child relaxed, exhausted. Groping in the dark he pushed one tiny thumb into his mouth and sucked. Alia, floating with him, longed to comfort him. But the memory of the pain clung deep, and nothing was quite as it had been before, or ever could be.
Now there was another intrusion into his amniotic refuge. It was something sharp, and it was cold, unbelievably so in this little universe of soft, cushioning flesh. A probe, Alia thought, pushed in from outside. Was it possible somebody out there was trying to help this damaged child? But if so, how crude a way to do it! The child thrashed, distressed down to the core of his being. The probe sucked away some of the child's flesh and withdrew. The child folded over on itself, scrabbling at its small face with its hands. Again peace returned, like an echo of the endless tranquility from which the child had been separated at its conception. But it did not last long.
And when the pain came back, Alia knew that there would no respite. Again the child shrieked silently, but there was nobody to hear him; again the womb walls flexed helplessly, as if trying to crush the child out of existence.
There was another sharp intrusion from outside. But this was much more drastic than the earlier probing. A blade slashed uncompromisingly through the wall of the womb, and light poured in. The child thrashed and grasped; it was as shocking as if the sky itself had cracked open. Huge forms descended and something smooth and cold closed around his torso - hands, gloved perhaps? And now, the ultimate horror, he was lifted up, pulled away from the womb into a sharp coldness, a new realm of bitter light. But he could feel the cord in his belly tugging him back to the womb...
I'll end the copy from the book there. The baby was obviously born by c-section. It had problems and so the doctors had to get it out early. Another remarkable line shortly after that has Alia, the passenger witness to all this, thinking to herself (paraphrased by me), "I had seen the baby's entire life so far, from the very moment of its conception to it's harsh and shocking birth..."
Amazing right!? Like I said, I have never read such an obviously pro-life set of pages in a fiction novel before, and this from a writer who prides himself on being very scientifically accurate and knowledgeable. I've often times found myself disagreeing with some of his ideas and perspectives on things, such as sexuality, religion, evolution, etc. That's partly why seeing this in one of his books so surprised me.
Occasionally I've had other surprises reading his books too. For instance, the last book of his I read (which I thought was just ok, maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10) was all about a sudden global flood drowning the entire planet in a matter of years. This kind of amazed me because it actually gives some scientific credibility to the concept of a global flood that drowns all the land, even using some of the scientific ideas that modern Bible apologetics has put forth as explanations for the Biblical flood (ie. Fountains of the deep and plate tectonics).
All in all, if you're really into hard science mixed with skilled writing, creative concepts and an impressive merging of science fiction and science fact, Stephen Baxter is usually a pretty good read. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering (which comes out in his writing a lot).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter
And if you like Stephen Baxter, you'd probably also like Ben Bova who's writing is quite similar. I've mostly read his novels that focus around our solar system's planets (titles based off of the planets and moons that are the focal points of the stories, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, etc.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bova
