The Breeders Page 4

  It was Wednesday, the fifteenth of November, and they were each on their fourth drink at Sterile Me Susan’s. Fletch had left a message with his fellow government dissenter friend Sheila Willy three days before to ask if Diana’s supposed bleeding episode might mean anything to her. The woman had not yet returned his calls, so he and Dex were spending this Wednesday’s whiskey session discussing the next best thing: political and sociogenetic progression. It was Dex’s mom Roberta’s birthday, so their angle on the topic was lesbians.

  “Hell, I almost feel safe around them, compared to the fags,” Fletch continued. “I feel like they’ve been suppressed enough to know what it’s like for us. Except for the biker gangs, obviously. Thank God men still tend to be stronger.”

  Lesbians did not as a rule carry a stigma (despite there being a relatively small ratio of them in political and medical power), but as individuals, they were considered lesser citizens when it came to reproducing. Why? Because females carried two X chromosomes, which could only produce females, and males carried both X and Y chromosomes, which could produce either sex. Over the past thirteen years, the Queen had reduced the engineering quota of females to only one fourth of what it had been before his rise to power, and it was getting lower every year. As a result, most lesbian couples were being forced to engineer males, which was impossible without their borrowing Y chromosomes from male donors. Never mind that all human embryos still needed an ungeneticized ovum shell to develop, and this rendered males just as dependent on females for reproduction. It was as if the post-Bio War world had forgotten that the science behind this modern process was extreme to begin with; all combined same-sex genes inserted into an egg also had to undergo extensive manipulation in order to mimic the natural developmental process dictated by male and female genetics. But people turned a blind eye.

  Now, Mandate 43 was about to change everything. Soon, genetic material and eggs would be the only necessities. Female carriers, even homosexual ones, would be cast aside in favor of test tubes.

  The music in Sterile Me Susan’s was still low enough for Fletch’s voice to carry across it. His rant was becoming dangerous, even for a hetero bar.

  “Seriously, this stuff is getting scary, Dex! There’s no balance of power anymore. People, especially lesbians, have to stand up and do something about it! Do you realize Mandate 43 will single handedly put us all out of commission? They’re not just making heteros unnecessary, as if they are somehow immune to making a mistake and ever needing us to breed again, but they’re making females unnecessary. Where are the female politicians to stand up against this shit?”

  “Too scared to run for office,” Dex replied. “Ever since Luna Vega.”

  Luna Vega had been a lesbian who ran for the chair seat of the Intercontinental Social Council six years earlier. She won it, then was found dead in her apartment a day later. To this day, not even WorldCom had reported any official explanation of her death.

  Fletch shook his head. “They can’t possibly go through with it. I mean, phasing out carriers? That means they’ll just breed lesbian females and use them to harvest eggs! Doesn’t anyone care? You grew up seeing that discrimination happening, right? Weren’t your moms, like, some of the first dykes to be bred sterile?”

  “Yeah, at least in Minnesota,” Dex said, sipping his whiskey. The bar’s dim, red lighting was starting to spin. He felt both weightless and heavy. Drunk, or at least getting there.

  The extraction of mature female eggs had always been simple, the first part of the process either homosterile or heterosterile carriers-to-be went through to make their bodies viable for gestation. Fifty to a hundred eggs were always harvested, emptied of all their genetic material to become mere shells, and then frozen until the carrier’s body, six months off the Lrh1 gene switch, was menstruating and ready for embryos. Genetic re-engineering had become a well-oiled process.

  The seed for homosexual rule had been planted in the early 2000s, as far as Dex knew. While genetipolitics had always interested him as far as they concerned current events, his interest in political history had just recently blossomed. All he really knew (or needed to know) was that homosexuals had once been a repressed sector of society, a tarnish on what old-fashioned breeders had blanket termed “the family.” While the hushed-up United Nations mission to thin out Earth’s population by infecting humans with HIV had helped reduce the number of homosexuals, it had failed on a broader scale. Families in the developed world had still ballooned in numbers, eaten up the planet’s resources, and caused an international social collapse.

  It wasn’t until the development of God’s Army and the Bio Wars, however, that the effort to curb population actually succeeded. Again, the heterosexuals had been at fault; this time, they had perpetuated outright murder and terrorism in an effort to fight back against the homosexuals who had risen to power and begun to suppress them. Entire regions—continents, almost—had fallen to chemical and biological plagues that, in those final months, would have spread far enough to wipe out most of humanity were it not for the obstructer bombs dropped by the military to stop them. Cities that had once been power centers of the planet—New York, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, and countless others—were still in ruins.

  A history lesson not to be repeated.

  Fletch ran a hand through his black hair, which hung to his rounded shoulders. “I want to get my TruthChip replaced so nobody knows I’m a failsafe. People are talking, man. You know that group I was telling you about before? They said the NRO is going to stage a terrorist attack and use it as an excuse to blame it on heterosexuals, so it’s okay to round us up for mass killing. And you know what? I wouldn’t be surprised. I think we all know it’s coming, if it hasn’t started happening already. The Sanctuary won’t be able to handle everyone, you know? It’s big, but not that big. That’s why I want to beat the NRO to the punch. Cause some motherfucking damage!”

  Dex turned back to the bar to sip his drink, feeling his face flushing with self-consciousness. Not only was the possibility of genocide still a taboo subject to discuss in public, but any mention of resistance, particularly terrorism, could land the Bio Police on their backs in a matter of minutes. Dex drank, then said to Fletch in a low voice, “Shut up, Fletch. I mean it. Wrong person hears you talking like that, and we’re both fucked.”

  It was as if he had spoken the words to a brick wall.

  “I mean, look at what the fucking NRO is capable of, man!”

  “I said shut up,” Dex hissed.

  “They’re evil! Think about HIV, Dex! The fags used that shit to make chicks sterile, just to get back at the heteros. It was an RNA virus, and that United Nations group used it with gene therapy or whatever. This was, like, way before they figured out the whole zinc finger switch thing, but it just goes to show—”

  “I don’t really know the technicalities of genetics,” Dex said with a hushed voice, leaning over his drink. In his peripheral vision, he noticed the bartender Clara watching Fletch like a cow in heat.

  “Dex, dude, it’s history!” the man slurred. “You’ve got to know it, or you can’t back up your opinions about the now. I bet you don’t even know why mitochondrial DNA restructuring is important!”

  “You’re drunk, and no, I don’t. I bet you don’t either.”

  “It’s, like, that thing,” Fletch said before taking a gulp so large it barely stayed in his mouth. “I mean, so the chromosomes read right, and everything develops normally when they put same-sex genes together! Proteins, man! You gotta know this shit!”

  “Yep, proteins.”

  A hand, followed by an arm, floated through the air behind Fletch and tapped his shoulder. It looked like some sort of sea creature.

  I’m drunk, Dex thought.

  “Fletch, right?”

  A woman. Nervous voice, the meek type.

  He and Fletch turned at the same time.

  Standing behind them was a woman in a black pants suit—perfect breasts, not too large, not too small, a t
rim body, and a round face that complemented the innocence in her voice. Dex recognized her right away.

  It was the woman from the orgy two months ago.

  CHAPTER 7 (HER)

  HERE GRACE STOOD, in front of Salt and Pepper, about to destroy his life.

  What kind of awful person had she become?

  Their baby was perfectly alive. Her dad had confirmed the pregnancy the previous week. The bleeding, he thought, had been caused by a marginal placenta previa and subchorionic bleeding. Stuart had cared for enough carriers over his career to have a clue. His examination with the ultrascope had been hasty; he had not even given her a chance to look, because another patient had been due any minute. But he had seen the living being inside her, behind the ultrascope’s electronic glass visor. The vision had brought him to tears.

  Grace had found herself in the late hours of sleepless nights longing to talk with Salt and Pepper, to share the desperation and terror. Both had changed her. Anger had wrapped around fear and tricked her into justifying the desire to divide this burden. Salt and Pepper was half responsible, after all. Despite her dad’s recommendation to rest as much as possible, she had begun frequenting Sterile Me Susan’s. She knew Fletch Novotny was a regular patron, because the bartender had known him by name the two times she had met him here with Todd Bender. She had hoped to find him in order to learn more about Salt and Pepper.

  And yes, in the back of her mind, she had also hoped for this: to meet the beautiful, horrible stranger face to face.

  But anger and fear were not tools Grace had ever used to manipulate her world. She could no sooner hope ill for this man than watch herself sour from within. What had she planned to say? How had she ever thought this would be good, right, and satisfying?

  When Salt and Pepper recognized her, guilt began to run its course.

  CHAPTER 8 (HIM)

  EVEN IN THE DIMLY LIT BAR, the beauty that had drawn Dex to this woman two months ago was striking; only now, there was something melancholy coloring her expression. He had never learned her name. Embarrassed, he turned his face back to the bar, as if he had been in the process of waiting for another drink, despite the refill sitting in front of him.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he heard Fletch say in drunken surprise.

  “Yes, Grace Jarvis,” she said. “We met a couple of months ago through Todd Bender.”

  Grace. It was a nice name. Simple, to the point.

  “Of course,” Fletch said. “I remember. We all had some fun if I recall.”

  Behind the bar, Clara glared in Grace’s direction. Fletch was probably smothering the poor woman by now, so Dex turned to follow Clara’s glower.

  Grace was staring straight at him. A magnetic rush passed between them immediately: a trace of the lust that had brought them together the night of the orgy, but also something more. Something deeper. Heat rose in Dex’s face.

  Grace dipped into a nervous smile, then shook her head. “Sorry,” she said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, sit!” Dex jumped off his seat to offer it, but his foot curled around its wooden leg, and he went flailing into Fletch’s lap. Grace erupted in laughter as Fletch pushed Dex back toward the stool. Dex found his feet, but he knew there was no way he could hide the wobble in his legs. “What I meant to say was . . . I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye that night.”

  He was making a fool of himself, but Grace appeared to soften with relief. Despite her polite smile, however, there was a tightness in her face, as if her sudden jollity were masking some hidden anxiety. Grace reached for her rear left hip and itched it as she sat in his seat. A nervous quirk, Dex thought. She did that the night I had sex with her.

  “So, what brings you out tonight?” Dex asked, thankful for the tipsy grin helping to mask his shyness. “Looking for another party like last time?” The words spilled out as a joke, but they sounded perfectly horrid as they hit Grace’s gentle face.

  “Hot, you studbucket. Really hot,” Fletch said, chuckling.

  Grace swallowed, then offered a restrained grin. “Actually, no. I was just meeting with a coworker here, and I saw you two and wanted to say hi.”

  Fletch leaned forward and placed a hand on the woman’s knee. “What is it you do again, Grace Jarvis?” His eyes were flitting back and forth between her face and her breasts. Seemingly unaware of his need for a shower, he rested his free arm on the bar and tried to draw Grace’s gaze with a ripple of his bicep.

  Grace closed her eyes and shook her head, as if warding off tears. “Actually, it’s not looking too good. I work for the Minneapolis Neighborhood Development Council as a preservation specialist in charge of Obesaland.”

  Fletch shook his head and scoffed with an unbecoming spray of saliva. He tried to hide it by taking one last sip from his empty glass and using a napkin to wipe his mouth. “Obesaland? Christ, honey, let’s get you drunk. Or we could all go back to my place and do what we did last time.” Now he was staring straight at the crotch of her pants suit. “You need something nice to get that hellhole neighborhood out of your mind. Ugly people aren’t good for the soul. You game for some action tonight?”

  The young woman stiffened at this and dragged her legs out from under Fletch’s hand. She turned to her right, checking out the rest of the bar.

  “Fletch, get the hell off her.” Dex leaned carefully in toward Grace and pushed Fletch away. With a scowl, Fletch turned his flirtation to Clara while ordering another whiskey. “Sorry,” Dex continued. “Fletch can be kind of a prick.”

  Grace let out a nervous chuckle, then shook her head. “It’s okay. Just embarrassing.”

  “What’s embarrassing?”

  “Us, here. I mean, having come to say hello.”

  “Why, because of our . . . night together?”

  “Kind of. Group sex has never been my thing.”

  “It’s okay. We’ve all been there.”

  “I hadn’t.”

  Grace turned to him and smiled. She couldn’t be much older than twenty-five, unless she was simply extra good at looking vulnerable. He was closer now and could see her face jittering with nerves.

  Fletch scampered off to the back room, leaving them alone. Grace straightened a strand of her dark hair, twice. “So, you’re good friends with Fletch, then? The guy I was dating ran off with him and another girl that night, before you swooped in.”

  Dex sat on Fletch’s stool now and maintained a healthy but friendly distance from Grace. “Friends? I guess. More like acquaintances who just happen to hang out every Wednesday. Otherwise, I pretty much just keep to myself. Kind of hard being a failsafe these days. Don’t want to be caught in the wrong crowd.”

  With a hint of trepidation, Grace said, “Does Fletch know a lot of radicals then? He seems to.”

  “He talks like he wants to be one of them, but I’m not sure how serious he is about any of it. And I’m sorry he was hanging all over you.”

  Grace smiled, but it looked strained. “You seem like a gentleman. I thought that was something I’d only ever see in the old novels and movies. What did they call it . . . chivalry? Something like that.”

  An educated girl. But he could tell the small talk was an act.

  “Yeah, chivalry. A dead art of heterosexuals past.” Dex smiled, and Grace looked down at the bar top and traced the grain patterns in the wood with her index finger. Dex followed the tender motion, watching the finger blur lightly as Clara mixed a drink in the background.

  “I didn’t come up here to say hi to Fletch,” Grace said suddenly, clenching her hand into a fist. She was crying.

  Dex glanced around the bar, hoping for Grace’s sake that people were not already staring. “Whoa, whoa, did I say something? Are you all right?”

  “I shouldn’t be doing this. I need to go home,” was all she said before turning around and running out of the bar. Fighting his dizziness, Dex hopped off the stool, grabbed his jacket, and followed her. The crowd of people filled Grace’s wake almost as quickly as she left it,
but when he finally made it through them and stepped outside, she was under the street light, looking up. The first snowflakes Dex had seen all season were falling from the sky. Despite her tears, Grace seemed to be taking a moment to appreciate them.

  Dex hailed her a cab. Because he was drunk, he climbed in as well.

  A MEMORY (HER)

  GRACE IS SIX YEARS OLD, walking through her dad’s garden, which is nothing less than a magic wonderland, filled with beauty, secret passageways, trees that might just lean over and whisper in her ear, and flowers she imagines might someday start to sing. In her imagination, there are always little tiny people living in the garden, ducking out of sight whenever a normally-sized human comes trampling about. If she never sees them, how can she know they aren’t there?

  It is morning on a Sunday, and the garden sparkles under the rising sun. A rainbow hovers inside the spray of Stuart’s hose as he waters the bright orange lilies. Grace is walking over a brick pathway with her arms spread like wings, pretending the garden bridge is a tightrope over a craggy canyon.

  “Why do you like gardens, Daddy?” she says.

  “Because they keep me in touch with what matters most in the world,” Stuart answers.

  “And what matters most?”

  “Life!”

  “What’s that even mean?” Grace giggles. “Why does life matter?”

  “Because, without it, the world would be a cold, meaningless place. Don’t you think? What if there weren’t any people? What if we had never engineered you?”

  “I’d be sad,” Grace says, jumping off the stone walkway onto the cold, dew-covered grass. A butterfly passes in front of her, and she imagines being one of those tiny people, riding on its back. The garden must be a jungle to them.

  “You wouldn’t be sad, because you wouldn’t exist!” Stuart says, twitching his wrist so the hose water chases Grace for a moment. She giggles again and runs from it. A loose tooth moves as she presses her tongue against it. Today could be the day it comes out, and then the Tooth Fairy will visit. Maybe the Tooth Fairy lives in the garden!