When he delivered his cup the nurses thanked him as if he’d brought them donuts. “Don’t use it all at once,” he said.
“Pardon?” the young woman asked.
“Never mind.” He waved good-bye and left his boys in their care. The UT doctors would count and evaluate them-were their heads properly bulbous, their tails sufficiently whiplike? did they swim like salmon, or laze about like carp at a dock?-and then ship them off to Boston and Barcelona. Once a month Donna came in for a date with a long needle, and the extracted eggs would be mailed off too. Sperm and eggs would rendezvous at a swank petri dish in a foreign city, where the close quarters and forced intimacy would hopefully lead to wanton permeability and penetration. So far the orgies had been a bust. Either his boys lost their nerve or Donna’s girls rebuffed their advances, or something went wrong down the line. The few times when fertilization had taken hold, the subdivision had ground to a halt a few hours later. No one could tell them why.
He clumped downstairs, crouched to make it under the exit door, and walked out into sunlight. He should be thankful that anybody at all was taking an interest in their problem. Two different research teams were working on argo fertility. The geneticists had figured out ten years ago that while none of the clades could cross-fertilize with unchanged people, the clades could breed with their own kind. So chubs made more chubs and blanks pumped out two or three bald girls at a time-but argos remained as barren as winter trees.
It was becoming clearer and clearer that nobody had the slightest clue about how to fix the problem. TDS had rewritten their genes, and nobody knew how to read the new language. Deke and Donna were considered “mature onset”-the Changes had caught them after they’d gone through puberty-so maybe the problem wasn’t that they’d been changed, but that they hadn’t changed enough. The younger argos had grown taller, stronger, more “purely” argo. Maybe their odds of reproducing would be better. But so far only two other argo couples had volunteered for the fertility study. The costs were tremendous, and the young couples either couldn’t afford it or weren’t desperate enough yet. The old ones, the people over forty who’d spent most of their lives as normals, had no desire to make more freaks.
He paid the parking lot attendant, a black kid about twenty years old who didn’t look too happy either. Deke thought about saying,
Sure, it would go just like that.
The argos weren’t a minority-you had to be human to be part of that pie. Down deep the normals understood that they were a separate species altogether, a race of predators, and any one of them could slaughter a human with a swipe of an arm. The humans knew it, and no argo could afford to forget it either.
He drove fast, anxious to get home. He was happy to have the wind beat him around the head.
Not long ago he couldn’t understand why Donna wanted to go through all this fertility nonsense. They didn’t need children to
But he came to share the ache. Maybe it was the species thing. Something in his cells that demanded to go on, to not let the humans win.
Jo Lynn had given him a picture once, something she’d found on the web and printed out for him. She’d given it to him and said,
“Shit!”
The photographs of Donna.
He slapped his shirt pocket, dug into his pants pockets as best he could while keeping the Jeep on the road, but of course the pictures weren’t there. They were laid out on the donation room coffee table. He swung into the left lane and braked hard. He dropped the Jeep into the wide, shallow ditch dividing the interstate, turned around, and accelerated hard to rejoin the traffic heading back into town. Maybe the nurses hadn’t gone into the room yet. Maybe they’d gone to lunch.
Twenty seconds later he saw the lights flashing in his rearview mirror and he swore again.
Chapter 6
THE MOSQUITO, INVISIBLE in the dark, tiptoed across the skin of his biceps.
Pax sat on the front stoop, all the house’s lights turned off, and stared at the moonlit tops of the trees, waiting. When the bite came he didn’t flinch. It was a kind of pleasure to keep his arm perfectly still, to let the little thing insert its needle snout and drink from him. He could almost feel its tiny body fill up with blood.
Behind him his father’s snores augered through the walls. Last night the sound had gnawed at him, keeping him awake until the early morning. Pax didn’t fall asleep so much as lie still until sleep fell on him. Now the snoring seemed less like a personal attack. Not quite background noise yet, but getting there. A couple more nights, Pax thought, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it, like those people in Chicago with their bedrooms next to the El.
A couple more nights. He hadn’t called his manager to tell him he wasn’t coming back soon. He knew he should call in, negotiate for more time. But fuck it, his father was sick, and if they didn’t give him his shitty job back when he got back to town, well, there were plenty of shitty jobs.
So instead of thinking about his nonlife in Chicago he’d spent the day doing everything required of a dutiful son. He made Harlan breakfast, helped him to the toilet, even finished cutting his hair. His father’s size complicated everything. The quarter ton of flesh didn’t seem to be part of his father at all, but some great cargo he was forced to carry, a penitential weight. Pax knew that his body was an effect of the Changes, a symptom as inarguable as Deke’s powdered skin, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking, Jesus, Dad, how did you let yourself get like this?
Pax helped him navigate back to the living room. Every movement had to be strategized, paced, evaluated. What would happen if he fell? There was no way Pax could get him up on his own. Finally he settled onto and into the creaking couch. Another task accomplished, another checkmark in Paxton’s column. When I leave, Pax thought, he won’t be able to say I didn’t help him. He won’t be able to say I didn’t try.
Harlan napped, and then in the afternoon Pax sat beside him and they watched TV together the way they always had, talking only during the commercials and saying nothing of consequence. His father liked the Discovery Channel. Animals killing animals and being killed, having sex, raising animal babies.
Paxton’s thoughts kept returning to the stack of legal papers he’d hidden under the bed. If his father sensed that Pax was distracted he didn’t mention it. He didn’t ask where Pax had been with Rhonda the day before, or when Pax was going back to the city. Both of them seemed determined to prove that they needed nothing of each other.
For dinner Pax made spaghetti and they ate on the couch together. His father fell asleep watching the news. Pax got a blanket from the hall closet and tucked it around his father’s shoulders. Harlan’s skin had started to swell and blister. Liquid gleamed on the backs of his hands.
When the snoring reached full production, Pax went into the kitchen and tore off a square of paper towel from the roll. He went back to the living room and crouched next to his father. A blister near his father’s knuckles had already split, weeping vintage. Pax touched a corner of the towel to the spot, let it soak up the substance. Then holding the darkened tip away from his fingers as if it were a lit match, he walked out to the front porch. It was evening but not yet fully dark.
He held the paper towel for a long time, not looking at it. He felt like he was readying himself to jump into a cold pool. He laughed at himself, then quickly opened his mouth and touched the tip of paper to his tongue-a quick, light tap. He felt nothing. After thirty seconds he touched it to his tongue again. Then he sat and waited for something to happen.
His arm itched, but he let the mosquito finish its meal. He felt its happy fullness as it lifted off from his skin. He
