2020 (8 page)

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?”

“Yes. It is not a problem. The mother still has a fetus, you see? There’s no enzyme spike, no change in blood volume. So she misses nothing.”

A kind of remorse led her back to the nursery. Today she found Nell lying on her side in the stall bloated with supplements, her suture line an angry red from being picked at. Val changed her straw, cleaned her water dish, and groomed her with a fine-toothed steel comb. She caught up with the changes in her chart and talked with the veterinary nurse about treating the swelling with a diuretic—already on his mind, he told her. With her help he injected the medication into the animal’s forearm. Its onset was rapid: brighter eyes, less labored respiration. But within hours Nell turned hostile again, fouling the stall, baring her teeth beneath an inscrutable gaze. Val wished the nursing was as easy as law; she could handle cool screens and paperwork better than an animal’s waste. At least, she told herself, she had the sense to leave Nell in the hands of BioRange personnel. Her own child was doing well; the word they used after the last sonogram was “thriving”; that was what mattered.

What she hadn’t counted on was the power Kenneth still had over her. She’d thought she was immune.

His Holofax Tableau was delivered to her at poolside while she was sharing a good-bye margarita with Kai. Kenneth apparently now was into guerrilla theater. The Tableau, breathtakingly expensive to transmit even at off-peak rates, was time-stamped the night before. Val and Kai watched Kenneth perform in bed with a short brunette, a tart Val recognized from research. The scene shimmered obscenely from atmospheric signal noise generated by a high inversion layer over the desert.

She’d been naive enough to believe him when he’d said he still wanted to see her. Naked, he looked like a bull, like the boomer she’d seen on the hillside near Cortez.

The Latino driver who’d brought her in on the first day stopped her in the lobby, saw she’d been crying. “Don’t let him get the better,” the girl in the plum-colored shirt said after she’d sat Val down and they’d talked. “You have to be strong.”

* * *

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” Cal said when she located him in the motor pool.

“Tell me about the hunting,” she said.

“Now don’t get excited. We only cull the wild mobs, the surplus animals destroyin’ the range. They overgraze like goats. That’s why the ranchers wiped them clean out of Australia, if you wanna look into it.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I want to ride with you tonight.”

Cal gave her a wry smile and sucked his teeth.

“Don’t be nervous. I just want to take one shot. If you let me ride with you, listen: I’ll make it up to you in a way you’ll never forget.” She stepped close, placed her palm flat on his chest, slipped her fingers between two buttons. “That’s a contract. You take me and I’ll take you—on another ride.”

Cal passed her a bottle of tequila when they set off.

She could see the inversion layer to the north, the bruised quality in the twilight sky against which helicopters hovered in the distance. At one point in the holofax Kenneth had looked straight into the ’corder, his eyes blank as shell casings, between rounds of frantic sex. “This is for you, Val,” he’d said, pointing his index finger at the lens, pulling his third finger like the trigger of a pistol. “This is for you.”

* * *

Under infrared nightscope Val watched the kangaroos grazing in groups of three to five, munching vegetation like cows. Their oversize ears tracked the low rumble of the ATV, but they weren’t afraid. They didn’t run away.

“I see why you don’t have a tan,” she said flatly, “why you’re never around until mid-afternoon. You’re out here at night, like them.”

Cal shifted into low gear and moved within 50 meters of the central group, composed of a large male and five females. Then he froze them with the jacklight. The huge male could have been the same boomer they’d seen before: shaggy hair, his sex heavy between his muscular loins.

“You know how to handle that thing?” he asked when she’d pulled the weapon from the case. “That’s an old-fashioned rifle you got there. No laserscope or anything.”

Swinging its barrel through the windshield space, she pulled the Mauser up to her shoulder and smelled gun oil. “I took lessons in Wyoming. I’m an old-fashioned kind of girl.”

“Whoa . . . That’s the bull you’re aimin’ at. You’ll spook the whole herd.”

She squeezed the trigger gently, exhilarated, blinked when something in the crosshairs shimmered. Then the ATV cab filled with noise and 50 meters away a kangaroo slammed backward, stood erect one last time, and folded to the ground.

Val pulled the rifle down with a flush of success. The rest of the kangaroos took off with great graceful jumps. She caught a flash of red.

“You missed ’em. You got yourself the flyer behind ’em.”

“What?”

“Give you a good skin, though. I could never hit anything with that damned thing either.”

Val was numb with confusion. She shivered in the cool night air when they walked over, only then realized her skin was covered with a sheen of perspiration. Her mouth was dry.

The blue flyer was stone dead, her chest blown out. Something moved at her pouch, something small, smaller than her thumb. It was only the size of a mouse when it emerged, pink and hairless. The immature joey had arms and legs, articulated digits.

“Oh God.”

“You wanna step on the skull,” Cal said. “It’s the best way. No chance it’d survive, see? You wanna be quick.”

Its pink flesh was like gum rubber. She couldn’t do it—when she turned away her stomach burned with pain.

In the still of the night, she heard a sound like the crushing of an eggshell.

* * *

She was back at her wing of the hotel by one-thirty in the morning. In the end, she’d been saved from her sexual promise to Cal by a fluke: the alarm on his pager had gone off, and he’d just had time to drop her at the foyer before he drove off into the night. A night clerk’s leer, for which she might have slapped him two days ago, now seemed hopelessly innocent.