Free 2020 by Robert Onopa Page A

his face gruesome, the wrong side of his face bloody in the orange light. His other ear was gone now, his temple stringy with cartilage and slick with gore. . . .
    A gaff thrown like a harpoon hit him in the chest as he tried to step away, knocked him to his knees at the gunwale. . . .
    In the foreground of the shot, Voorst recognized the deck of the Swan , swarming with blue shirts, the red bowsprit gleaming in the lurid glow.
    And he recognized the tanned hand trembling on the tiller, the small bones on the inside of a wrist as delicate as a girl’s. The screen showed the Lydex igniting, a sun spinning into a whirlpool of light, bleaching the screen into fine atom snow, a vision of white light so pure that time, for a moment, seemed to stand still.

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