2020 (7 page)

Blue Flyers

T
HE KANGAROO, A YOUNG FEMALE,
gazed at them from just beyond the electric fence which ran parallel to the tarmac at the entrance to the resort. She had liquid brown eyes with long lashes and dilated pupils. Bipedally erect, alert, she stared with inscrutable wariness at the two women who’d stopped their bright red electric skimmer on the shoulder. The older woman, who’d pulled back the skimmer’s reflective cover, tried to meet the animal’s untamed eye.

Valerie Rampling shivered. “Is she . . . ?

“No, she hasn’t been implanted,” her Latino driver smiled. “She’s freerange out here. In another year she’ll be ready, I suspect.” The driver—her pale plum safari shirt was adorned with the triangular BioRange symbol which crowned the entrance gate—waved a manicured hand over the scrubby Cabo San Lucas landscape toward the groups of three or four kangaroos scattered on a low hillside a click away. Some were larger animals with reddish fur and white faces. “She belongs to that mob over there—the word for a herd of kangaroos is ‘mob,’ yes? With those boomers. Males. In that species, the males are redder, the females bluer, you see?”

“You keep them with males?” The kangaroo she was watching at the silver wire spooked her. Above its outsized haunches its tiny, perfectly articulated forepaws picked slowly at a patch of chest fur, too slowly for grooming. The blue flyer had the face of a deer or a pony. But the twitchiness of her large ears and the intensity in her eyes made Valerie think: a monkey, she reminds me of a monkey, an intelligent monkey. Valerie took a deep breath of the overheated Baja air. Under the circumstances, she decided, she should be relieved, even pleased. But she hadn’t expected to be surprised this way, especially since she’d been looking at so many pictures of kangaroos lately.

“Under BioRange protocol,” the Latino driver said, “we don’t use freerange flyers to carry an individual fetus to term.” She laughed. “So nobody’s baby’s out there. The Carriers, the marsupials whose pouches have been genetically designed for use as surrogate human wombs, they’re kept under quite controlled conditions.”

“Yes. Of course.” Valerie felt briefly ashamed: she knew all these things from the introductory holotapes she’d seen in New York. She remembered shots of the nurseries, buildings which were half-barn, half-hospital ward, where the implanted animals were kept in great security and health while within their pouches the human fetuses became full-sized, normal infants.

Her OB-Gyn had agreed that having her baby this way was a particularly fine idea. Very practical. At twelve weeks her pregnancy hadn’t, except for this flight down to Baja, interrupted her legal practice for a day. Tomorrow her fetus would be transferred to the marsupial’s pouch where it would mature without another bout of morning sickness for her, much less the loss of a single billable hour for her firm.

Twenty minutes later the resort and clinic buildings came into view beyond a green patch of woods in a wide groin formed at the base of two hills, a change of scenery from the deserty scrub through which they’d driven from the airstrip. What she saw reassured her: an elegant Mission-style hotel, flanked on one side by pools and tennis courts, on the other by a hospital and labs. Nestled in groves against the hills sat the adobe nurseries with their red tile roofs.

Before the bellboy could reach the skimmer, a tall fellow with a cream-colored Stetson and deep-set eyes reached into the trunk for her bags. He had a BioRange triangle embroidered on the pocket of his denim shirt, an easy smile, and a low whistle for her short silk jumpdress when she stepped onto the tiled foyer.

“Saw you at the gate, ma’am. My name’s Cal.”

“I’m sure it is,” she said, turning away without telling him her name, but smiling. She’d spent a summer in Wyoming once; there was something Disney City about this cowboy, though she couldn’t put her finger on just what.

* * *

Her pre-surgery screening was scheduled at four—the transplant would be performed the next day. Once she unpacked, Valerie decided to wash off the dust of Baja with a swim.

Flowering mimosa trees lined the walkway to the pool, opposite Spanish fountains which spilled cooled air into the burning heat. At poolside she dropped her wrap on a chair near a group of women chatting under a market umbrella, then dove in.

The water was in the low eighties, clean and sweet, the pool so large that when she swam under the waterfall at the far end she had to tread water for a minute to catch her breath. Everything seemed perfect now; even the anger of Kenneth, her child’s father, at her decision, even his threats, washed from her mind. As she climbed out she heard one of the women calling her name.

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.