2020 Page 7

  It took Valerie a moment to place the blonde with the narrow hips. “I’ll be damned. Kai. It’s been ten years.”

  Kai Olsen had been a classmate at Dartmouth.

  Kai introduced her with some pride. “And Val’s the best advert lawyer on Wall Street. She’s been on SELF.”

  “I just found myself more comfortable in front of a console than anywhere else,” Valerie admitted, telling them the same thing she’d told the videozine.

  Kai had been at BioRange for two months, it turned out, staying on through her pregnancy like the other three women, all of whom had suffered previous miscarriages. It was one of the options at BioRange Cabo. “And you?” Kai asked.

  Val laughed tightly, feeling the rhythm of Manhattan still in her bones. “I’ll be back at work by the end of the week.”

  The women around the table looked at her with polite interest, as if they were impressed. But their eyes were glazing over, and one resumed her knitting.

  Val felt herself blush. Across the pool on the access road an old ATV had come to a stop, an odd-looking sort of truck without a windshield and crowned with a rack of spotlights. Kai and her friends smiled and watched. The cowboy stepped out, straining his jeans, and waved to them. Three of the women waved back, giggling flirtatiously.

  Walking quickly back to her room Val asked herself: why should I feel ashamed?

  * * *

  At her four o’clock appointment, her transplant specialist, a matronly female surgeon, completed her screening physical in under a half hour. In her cool office she shifted a flatscreen around to show Valerie a high-definition sonogram of the fetus in her womb. “Looks wonderful,” Dr. Levich said. “We’ll have a perfect match.”

  Val squinted. “So, um, the umbilical cord gets connected to the marsupial, um, pouch?” Now she wished she knew more.

  “It’s a bit more complicated. The macropodid pouch provides different kinds of teats for joeys at different stages of development. We use the one appropriate for a first phase joey, who’s continuously attached for several months. Our flyers have been genetically designed to retain that teat indefinitely. The point is to make the pouch a suitable environment for poikilothermic young.”

  “Poikilo . . . ?”

  “Poikilothermic. A human fetus, like the first phase joey, is unable to control its body heat, so it needs a host who’ll do so with her nutrient supply. Secondary to the teat, we attach the umbilical cord of your fetus to a tiny umbilicus the marsupial produces when her joey’s embryonic. So we tap into the blood supply as well as the nutrient loop before we suture the pouch. Given bodyweight and chemistry, and one antibodies injection, we can duplicate the conditions of your womb perfectly. Though we want just the right blue flyer, of course.” Dr. Levich looked at her watch. “Would you like to see her? The Carrier we’ve selected for you?”

  Valerie agreed and finished dressing. During the walk from the hospital building to the nurseries, she told Dr. Levich how Kenneth had objected to the procedure, how he’d filed a restraining order to keep her from leaving New York, how he’d threatened her. “He’s a younger attorney in my firm. But we’re not married, of course, so . . .”

  “Only one in six children is born to married couples these days,” Dr. Levich told her sympathetically. “And only one in four is delivered vaginally. What does he want, an abnormal child?”

  Her blue flyer was lying in a clean stall on the ground floor. Val remarked her broad, flat feet, like those of an oversized rabbit, her substantial haunches, her immaculate blue-grey fur, her narrow shoulders, her long neck. When the lab attendant opened the Dutch top-of-cage door for them, the animal lurched up and moved to the rear of the stall. She kept her eyes on Dr. Levich for a minute, then seemed to grow curious. Bent over, not quite on all fours, balancing with her tail, she shuffled closer and worked her lips.

  “Notice the shaved patch at the pouch,” Dr. Levich said, leaning over the gate and holding out a handful of meter-long grass. “She’s been prepped for a week. That’s our standard window to see if there are any complications.” Dr. Levich bunched the grass and tossed it along the steel wall and the kangaroo stretched over to reach for it with her snout.

  The way she worked the grass in her mouth reminded Valerie of a cow. In fact, there was something very docile, bovine, about this blue flyer. Like her Aunt Nell, Val decided with a smile—and the ’roo had her aunt’s smoky blue hair. “How soon do you know after the surgery if everything’s going to be O.K.?”

  “We usually know within twenty-four hours, but technically the window is ten days. Of course we have back-up animals.”

  With a metallic clang that startled the three of them, a door on the outside wall of the stall opened. Hot air wafted through the nursery and from outside came a series of harsh, explosive coughs.

  “Ach,” Dr. Levich muttered. “Exercise time. We have a yard with a controlled mob. They’re nocturnal animals, of course, so we send them out late in the day for an hour. Wonderful for circulation—in the wild kangaroos will carry a joey to fifteen pounds, easily.”

  The kangaroo had come bipedally alert and frozen. She was making a soft sucking sound. Valerie saw some feral quality in the marsupial’s brown eyes now. She remembered the animal she had seen at the entrance gate: gentle as a deer but there’d been something hidden in her intelligent eyes. Val leaned over to see out of doors.

  “Stay back,” Dr. Levich warned. “A cornered kangaroo can lash up with its hindpaws. The males can disembowel an attacker at close range.”

  Val’s stomach fluttered; she was afraid for her child in an irrational way she never expected of herself.

  Back in her room she phoned the desk clerk, then punched up her office number in New York. She left a voice mail message to tell her partners that she was extending her leave for a week.

  * * *

  Under general anesthesia, her surgery proceeded as if in a dream. But her sleep afterwards was disturbed by strange visions. She heard screaming, saw vivid colors. When Dr. Levich spoke to her post-op, the grey-haired physician suggested that she’d been mildly hallucinating—a side effect of the new delta-series anesthetics.

  Her suture line was just an inch long. They’d gone in with a laparoscope, a small, flexible surgical instrument that had penetrated her abdominal wall. In a week, the nurse told her, she wouldn’t feel a thing. In the meantime she felt a deep local pain, and when they transferred her back to her room, she felt woozy stepping from the wheelchair to her bed. She was glad she’d elected to stay.

  * * *

  The next morning she was up and around, even polished off a room-service plate bright with papayas and huevos rancheros. True to form, the moment of the transplant Kenneth had filed a lawsuit for custody of the fetus, but a judge had already dismissed it. Her abdominal pain persisted but was bearable.

  Over at the nursery she found that the blue flyer wasn’t doing as well. The kangaroo—whom she’d come to think of as Nell, after her aunt—lay panting on her side in her stall, listless and indifferent to the fresh grass lying nearby. The suture line closing her pouch ran as wide as Val’s outstretched hand; she’d obviously had a far more serious operation. Val was alarmed by the thick yellow fluid which oozed from the marsupial’s pouch.

  “Perfectly normal,” Dr. Levich told her when she came in for rounds. With Nell so tractable, Dr. Levich brought Val into the stall during the examination.

  “Her eyes look so . . . vacant,” Val murmured. A scorched, medicinal odor pervaded the room; it seemed an effort for the kangaroo to breathe, and her muscles were slack.

  “Would you like to help with her care?” Dr. Levich asked. “Some mothers find doing so very reassuring. You see the recovery for yourself.”

  A veterinary nurse, a young man with a mustache, taught Val how to sponge off the animal’s forearms to cool her, how to massage her neck. He showed her how to hold Nell still while he injected antibiotics. Nell’s blue fur was as soft as down, her body hot, rising and falling
with her breath.

  For several days Val stayed close to the blue flyer, nursing her, grooming her, even cleaning smeared feces from her tail. She watched her regain her appetite, felt her muscle tone return. Once, as the kangaroo nibbled hormone supplements from the palm of her hand, she experienced an intimacy, she thought, with some intelligence behind the bovine brown eyes. Love my baby, she wanted to tell her; love my baby as your own. But a moment later the marsupial carrying her child nipped her thumb so hard she tore flesh, drew blood, and bruised her to the bone.

  * * *

  Late the next day an ozone-sharp thunderstorm turned the exercise yard briefly into mud. Nell had been let out before Val arrived, and cleaning her was a wet, messy, tedious operation. The odor of the yellow fluid still oozing from her suture line was particularly noxious. When she kicked Val in the thigh Val’s instincts—even a slight disgust—told her it was time to back off from the nursing.

  Still, she felt vindicated: her child’s Carrier was feeding well and regaining vitality. That morning’s HD sonogram had shown her fetus to be thriving, perfectly indifferent to the change of place. As Valerie Rampling locked the stall behind her, she realized that her own condition was better, too. Her head felt remarkably clear; her stomach muscles rippled painlessly under her hand. It was time to get on with life.

  Just outside, the cowboy, Cal, was hosing down the muddy ramp from the exercise pen, managing to stay spotless in the process. The night before, at a torchlit dinner, Kai had alluded to his sexual prowess with lurid motions of her long-fingered hands, butter from a lobster sauce glistening on her silver nails.

  Now as Val passed, he smiled at her broadly, as if he’d shared the secret with her himself.

  Her first impulse was to be offended, but the truth was she felt sexy for the first time in weeks. “So what goes on around here?” she asked.

  “Offrange,” he grinned, his jaws tight with the effort of shutting down the high-pressure hose. He pushed his Stetson back, looked up to the hills. In the aftermath of the thunderstorm the bruised red light over the hills was giving way to a clear evening sky, vast and sublime. “If you’re interested, we can go for a cruise in the ATV, take a ride.”

  She took a deep breath. “I’m game,” she decided, even though there was something wrong about the way he looked: his face was pale. All the cowboys she’d ever seen had dark tans that ended only at the precise lines at which they wore their Stetsons. His face wasn’t tanned at all.

  The walk to the motor pool took them through the clinic complex. As they passed behind the surgery Val heard a high-pitched scream that made her shiver. “Doesn’t sound human,” she said.

  “ ’S not.” Cal told her that the flyers didn’t take happily to implanting; beyond a certain point in the procedure, the use of anesthetics endangered the human fetus, and so . . . Even though her sympathy was checked by the throbbing in her thumb, Val felt her face flush. “Best not think of it,” he advised, reading her mind. “This time of day, prob’ly just new animals settlin’ in.” With his soothing voice, with his deep set eyes, with the way his muscles moved beneath his clothes like some sensuous dream, she understood now what the other women saw in him.

  The truck-like ATV was spartan, its suspension so stiff it made her teeth chatter, but it was refreshing to ride in a vehicle without restraining belts or a windshield. As the sun set with tropical swiftness they rattled overland through the hills. Fifteen minutes beyond the BioRange border they spotted a mob of wild kangaroos beginning their nightly rounds. “They got a territory,” Cal told her, coming to a stop, “couple hundred square clicks. No electric fence from here to the gulf.”

  “Could they get away?” she wondered in the deep twilight. “I mean, if we tried to catch them with this ATV?”

  “They make sixty, seventy clicks an hour, don’t care what they get into—a ’roo can jump a ten-meter gully easy. But we don’t have to chase ’em.”

  Cal flipped a switch on the dash and with a high amperage thump the rack of lights above the cab burst into illumination, freezing the animals in their tracks like deer caught in a skimmer’s headlights.

  It took her breath away to see them standing like statues. He pulled up close enough for her to see the light reflecting off the pupils of their eyes.

  Cal pointed out the dominant male, a broad-chested red among a half-dozen blues.

  His size and belligerent stance made her think immediately of Kenneth. And the ’roo’s fur was long and shaggy, like Kenneth’s hair.

  Yesterday she’d learned that her console at the office had been trashed—Kenneth was her prime suspect. This morning the electronic mail had brought the news that he’d entered a writ in the Circuit Court of Manhattan to deny her maternity leave when the child was born. And her apartment had been broken into. All this while claiming he wanted to get back together with her.

  Cal was still running on about the bull male kangaroo. “. . . almost seven feet. That boomer’ll go 200 pounds.”

  There was something about the way he spoke, the way he was pointing his right arm through the windshield. Now she recognized the contours of the locked case behind their heads. “You hunt them, don’t you,” she said, half to herself.

  Cal just stared straight ahead, chewing the inside of his cheek.

  Dominant males, she sighed. The kangaroo, his sex hung between his massive haunches, barred his teeth. She could almost see Kenneth out there glaring back at them.

  Cal, taking her silence for an argument, finally cleared his throat and muttered a few sentences about wildlife management.

  She laughed. What would it be like, what would it be like, she wondered, to kill a boomer, to kill one of the bulls?

  * * *

  They drove into Cortez, a village whose inhabitants had been displaced some years before by the construction of BioRange. She discovered in its dirty cantina a side of Cabo she hadn’t been prepared for: a cracked holoscreen, flies around the food, homemade tequila and a genetically mutated wallaby in a cage behind the bar, its double tail flecked iridescent green. The locals spoke a Spanish-English dialect she could barely understand, but Cal seemed at home.

  Shabby customers drifted in and out. A man with a pock-marked face tried to sell them a laserblade which sputtered defectively as he tried to demonstrate its ability to cut through a thousand-peso coin. When he said he’d throw in a vial of drugs, Cal laughed him away.

  “Had enough excitement?” Cal asked after her fourth tequila, stroking her forearm.

  She hadn’t, not by a long shot. She felt free now. She’d been released from her pregnancy by the transplant, extricated from the confines of the stall by Nell’s recovery, liberated from her anxiety by the alcohol—and now, she decided, she was finished entirely, irrevocably, with Kenneth. Even when the pale cowboy told her “it might get rough,” she wanted to stay.

  Still she was shocked when only a few tequilas later, the cantina filled with tough-looking men, two kangaroos in harnesses were dragged out from a back room, live kangaroos with harried eyes. They were herded into a makeshift ring that materialized between the bar and the tables. The adolescent boomers were goaded electronically—she watched the bartender operate a joystick, watched the kangaroos twitch under the harnesses—and set to boxing amid shouted bets.

  “This is . . . cruel,” she said in the din.

  “Com’on,” Cal answered mildly. “They’re only animals.”

  A dirty boy hopped around the perimeter of the ring making fun of the creatures. An old man with brown teeth badgered her and Cal for drinks, pointing to the boy, yelling, as far as she could make out, that there were wild boys out in the scrub hopping around in the moonlight like kangaroos, village legends the gringos never heard but which for the price of a bottle of tequila he could tell. By the end of the second fight she was too drunk to stand. She eventually found herself behind the cantina watching two kangaroos have sex. “Rough enough for you?” Cal asked, running his hands under her dress. In the uneven
light the bull mounted the flyer brutally, filling the air with explosive coughs.

  She pushed Cal away. She was disgusted by how aroused she’d become, by the gamy kangaroos, by the leering crowd who watched them. “No,” she said. “Take me home. Take me home or I’ll have you arrested for goddamned assault.”

  And then she passed out.

  * * *

  The next day, her head ached and pain began to migrate through her midsection in slow searing waves, doubling her up with cramps so excruciating that she skipped a late breakfast to wait an hour in an outpatient lounge while the receptionist tried to fit her into Dr. Levich’s schedule. Val sat feeling oily with shame, though in the moon-blue light of the ride back to Cabo, she’d recovered consciousness—Manhattan tough, after all. But the pain near her suture line alarmed her.

  Dr. Levich diagnosed no medical problem beyond the severe gastrointestinal effects of a hangover about whose origins Val had to be purposely vague—the terms of her medical agreement with BioRange were technically voided beyond its borders. “If you celebrate with village tequila,” the gray-haired woman said with a knowing smile, “you feel this way again. Yes?” As Dr. Levich rattled on about the benefits of transplants in avoiding fetal alcohol syndrome, Val half-listened, dressing with relief in an examining room whose walls were covered with anatomical charts.

  One of the mauve charts caught her attention. A quick study of “The Macropodid Reproductive System” confirmed that the introductory holotapes didn’t tell you everything. Each of the Carriers had to be pregnant already, pregnant with a joey, when the human fetus was introduced. The joey was terminated. According to fine mauve print, in that way the nutritional systems were in place and the hormonal levels appropriate to carrying young. “Is this right?” she asked the doctor. “When the human fetus is implanted, the joey is destroyed?”

  “Mmmm. Yes.”

  “So my own blue flyer, last week?”