But I’m not like my mother. I’m like my father, aren’t I? Selfish and self-absorbed, destroying something soft and helpless so I can be free to do as I please. I feel dark inside, like something that should never have been born.
“Blessing! This way, please…”
The nurse takes me back to the exam room, and a different doctor rolls in. I sit there staring at the jars of industrial-strength disinfectant, the steel instruments, and the four-color posters of SCUD attacking the male and female reproductive systems while Dr. Janigar checks my IDENT database to make sure I’ve never had an abortion before (“Only one per lifetime allowed now, you know”) and explains the different procedures.
Dr. Janigar’s young and sleazily handsome, his black slicked-back hair unsuccessfully hiding a cowlick. He’s wearing this snazzy black tie with little stethoscopes imprinted on it and a teal Mercedes tattoo on his left cheek. The whites of his eyes are yellow.
I glance away when I notice the left one twitching rhythmically, and see spots on his tie that look like dried blood.
I stand up suddenly. “I’m sorry, I can’t go through with it.”
Dr. Janigar, old hand that he is, isn’t terribly surprised. “Yeah. Well, be sure to come back and get a free Negg patch right after the birth. That way, you won’t ever have to worry about the unreliability of other methods. Now, for your mandatory SCUD test…”
“Got my home test kit, thanks.” I’m out the door like a shot. Forget that stupid patch. I’m not having sex ever again, and even if I did, I wouldn’t come back here for the tobacco franchise on a Tennessee Reservation Trading Post. (I don’t smoke, but if I had a franchise like that I’d be rich, wouldn’t I? Then I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.)
To my relief, Dr. Janigar doesn’t chase after me screaming about my mandatory SCUD test. He’s probably still sitting there, smiling vaguely at the wall.
I slip out the back way, avoiding the protesters. The bright afternoon sunlight hits me like a blow, and I shiver, wondering what I’m going to do, how I’ll live. Then I see two cadaverous Lucys ambling down the alley toward me. With their slicked-down, shoulder-length hair they resemble some anthropomorphized cartoon of the Lucifer sticks they live to inhale.
I don’t understand much about Lucy psychology. They’ve got a religion built around it, claiming they’re all visited by the same God. There’s some South American tribe, I forget the name, that uses massive doses of tobacco to see their God, too.
Lucys are crazy as an outhouse rat when they’re down, and sweet as kittens when their God is visiting. Nicotine’s a poison, but somehow they manage to build up a tolerance; the Supreme Court hasn’t ruled yet on whether the Substance War violates their freedom of religion.
I wonder what it would be like to sniff the smoke from freebased heroin-nicotine, burning my fingers in religious ecstasy.
Nah.
“Peace be unto you, Sister,” says one of the Lucys, a reddish-haired boy with one brown and one blue eye.
“The King-of-Light brings the one true Peace,” I tell him in standard Lucy parlance, implying that I’m one of them, and therefore not a proper subject for robbery.
The boy nods gravely. “Celebration tonight on South Mountain.”
“Good news,” I say, hiding a shiver. I mean, what if there really is a God, and He’s it? Horrible thought. Lucys give me the willies—is that a word, Lucywillies?
The second one bobs his head, his eyes fervent and happy, and they amble calmly away, thank goodness, before I start laughing. Or crying. What were these two like when they were little? I can’t believe anyone ever read to them.
Thinking about Lucys, and what utter slaves they are, made me think of Second Chance. I start thinking about how wealthy they are from slave-trading, and how having a child out of wedlock is the single biggest guarantor of poverty there is.
I can’t think of a bad enough word to describe them. Their stores should be taken apart brick by brick, and the ground beneath sown with salt, like Rome did to Carthage.
My dendrites giving off small, dark sparks, I storm off up the narrow crooked street leading north, away from ROE Center. The street gets kinkier and the houses draw back, shaded by more and more trees. Presently it gives out onto Camelback.
Camelback is like Park Avenue used to be—dignified, niche shops catering to the idle rich. Across the street, I can see Literati, and for the hundredth time I wish I worked there. Their science fiction section is small, but solid, and the antique section is fantastic. Audiobooks? Literati’s never heard of them.
I’ll never work at a place like that now. Hey, maybe if I got a job as a stripper, 1 could afford my own apartment, college and a kid! Tiger Gil, the stripper with stretch marks. No, thanks.
Feeling incredibly stupid and irresponsible, I blaze down the sidewalk, a blur of adoption horror stories cycling through my brain.
My blob of protoplasm will be “disadvantaged.” I don’t trust State Adoption to do an adequate job, and I don’t have the resources to do it myself. What really grinds me? The inevitability of it all.
I suspect that the only way to be responsible is to relinquish my dream of writing and get a practical job… say, selling TEMPEST-proof computer equipment to government hacks. The agony of this thought cannot be adequately described.
Presently, I found myself looking in a curved, invisible-glass window. The sign is in prim Times Roman lettering on a narrow dark-blue ribbon. Second Chance.
There’s a golf ball-sized lump in my throat. I wish I had a second chance. I’m not that practical, I can’t be; I’ll expend my last breath tilting at windmills. But at least I’ll have the satisfaction of doing the right thing.
I peer through the glass at the photographs arranged on the navy-blue velvet. Smiling couples holding babies, six assorted and extraordinarily handsome children, and three young women in graduation caps and gowns. One looks familiar, but 1 can’t place her. You’d never guess these people were slavers, would you?
Next to the photos is a small, discreet manila card: A. Harriman, M.D.
Harriman must be a DNA specialist in designer offspring for the rich, but the three graduates puzzle me. Surrogates rarely go to college.
I push open the heavy glass door and walk inside. There’s a low sofa sitting on a bare parquet floor done in four shades of gold, with a counter, a curtain, and two oil paintings on the walls. The paintings have the look of Renaissance originals, and are probably worth a fortune.
Next to the paintings is a vanishingly small sign listing services with prices.
Defect-free sperm—either your own, or someone else’s—costs anywhere from one hundred to ten thousand Newdollars per successful insemination. I heard somewhere that most people carry around five to ten lethal genes, so there must be a base price for engineering those out, and then they go on up from there.
They offer both in-vivo and in-vitro fertilization, the latter with the Harriman Method, which has been shown to decrease the chances of a “yield” greater than twins by 86 percent over conventional treatment.
They contract host-mother services, of course, as well as frozen defect-free eggs, with a differential price for frozen embryos and frozen fetuses. Monozygotic twins and clones are double and triple price. Base price includes genotypic analysis with computer imaging, no extra cost for age progression through adulthood. Listing for personality traits and behaviors which have a strong genetic component are shown with statistics from the Tokyo-Austin-London Twin Study, along with percentage of Second Chance children who exhibit them. Traits cannot be guaranteed, etc., etc., see our home environment consultant for optimizing intelligence and learning skills.