Free 2020 by Robert Onopa Page B

they’d driven from the airstrip. What she saw reassured her: an elegant Mission-style hotel, flanked on one side by pools and tennis courts, on the other by a hospital and labs. Nestled in groves against the hills sat the adobe nurseries with their red tile roofs.
    Before the bellboy could reach the skimmer, a tall fellow with a cream-colored Stetson and deep-set eyes reached into the trunk for her bags. He had a BioRange triangle embroidered on the pocket of his denim shirt, an easy smile, and a low whistle for her short silk jumpdress when she stepped onto the tiled foyer.
    “Saw you at the gate, ma’am. My name’s Cal.”
    “I’m sure it is,” she said, turning away without telling him her name, but smiling. She’d spent a summer in Wyoming once; there was something Disney City about this cowboy, though she couldn’t put her finger on just what.
    * * *
    Her pre-surgery screening was scheduled at four—the transplant would be performed the next day. Once she unpacked, Valerie decided to wash off the dust of Baja with a swim.
    Flowering mimosa trees lined the walkway to the pool, opposite Spanish fountains which spilled cooled air into the burning heat. At poolside she dropped her wrap on a chair near a group of women chatting under a market umbrella, then dove in.
    The water was in the low eighties, clean and sweet, the pool so large that when she swam under the waterfall at the far end she had to tread water for a minute to catch her breath. Everything seemed perfect now; even the anger of Kenneth, her child’s father, at her decision, even his threats, washed from her mind. As she climbed out she heard one of the women calling her name.
    It took Valerie a moment to place the blonde with the narrow hips. “I’ll be damned. Kai. It’s been ten years.”
    Kai Olsen had been a classmate at Dartmouth.
    Kai introduced her with some pride. “And Val’s the best advert lawyer on Wall Street. She’s been on SELF.”
    “I just found myself more comfortable in front of a console than anywhere else,” Valerie admitted, telling them the same thing she’d told the videozine.
    Kai had been at BioRange for two months, it turned out, staying on through her pregnancy like the other three women, all of whom had suffered previous miscarriages. It was one of the options at BioRange Cabo. “And you?” Kai asked.
    Val laughed tightly, feeling the rhythm of Manhattan still in her bones. “I’ll be back at work by the end of the week.”
    The women around the table looked at her with polite interest, as if they were impressed. But their eyes were glazing over, and one resumed her knitting.
    Val felt herself blush. Across the pool on the access road an old ATV had come to a stop, an odd-looking sort of truck without a windshield and crowned with a rack of spotlights. Kai and her friends smiled and watched. The cowboy stepped out, straining his jeans, and waved to them. Three of the women waved back, giggling flirtatiously.
    Walking quickly back to her room Val asked herself: why should I feel ashamed?
    * * *
    At her four o’clock appointment, her transplant specialist, a matronly female surgeon, completed her screening physical in under a half hour. In her cool office she shifted a flatscreen around to show Valerie a high-definition sonogram of the fetus in her womb. “Looks wonderful,” Dr. Levich said. “We’ll have a perfect match.”
    Val squinted. “So, um, the umbilical cord gets connected to the marsupial, um, pouch?” Now she wished she knew more.
    “It’s a bit more complicated. The macropodid pouch provides different kinds of teats for joeys at different stages of development. We use the one appropriate for a first phase joey, who’s continuously attached for several months. Our flyers have been genetically designed to retain that teat indefinitely. The point is to make the pouch a suitable environment for poikilothermic young.”
    “Poikilo . . . ?”
    “Poikilothermic. A human fetus, like the