“Isn’t it? My younger sister, Sheridan, is on Mars wearing armor my Mom helped build.” Jackson looked like he might burst with pride. “My older sister, Cheyenne? We tease her that she jumped ship to piss on the family tradition. She’s over at Lockheed, building rockets. Literal fucking rocket scientist. She’s the head of new space tech.”
Another perfect segue for me to slip in my past bona fides, now that I look back on it. His family had a pedigree almost as significant as mine. Instead, I let out a low whistle. “Your family packs a punch.”
“Damn straight.” He glanced over at me to grin with more of that infectious pride. “My youngest brother, Laramie, just finished basic. He’ll be headed to Mars to back Sheri up, as soon as he passes the mandatory training for Mars deployment.”
I paused. “Areallthe kids in your family named after cities in Wyoming?”
He cleared his throat. “My parentsreallylike Wyoming.”
“I had not noticed that. I guess we’re lucky you aren’t named Teton.”
“That’s the dog.”
“Of course it is.”
Once we’d passed the state line and put a few miles between it and us, Jackson reached for the radio with a sense of long-held ritual. Classic rock thumped out of the speakers as the knob clicked on. “I grew up listening to this station!” he said over the wail of an electric guitar. “It’s the first sign I’m home, you know? Drive into range, turn on the radio, and it’s like walking into your childhood bedroom. You justfeellike you’re back where you belong.”
That little touchstone hit me in the feels. I didn’t have that kind of ritual. No emotional connections to Boulder, where my parents lived, no remembrances from my childhood except the smell of my father’s aftershave as an undercurrent in his office. Ihatedthat smell.
This one, simple circumstance showcased the differences between us. Jackson was always running towards his past and returning to his roots, which twined around these touchstones for strength. I was always running away from mine, branching ever higher as I tried to escape the roots that sought to anchor me in rocky soil.
That difference will tear you apart,whispered the jaded pessimist who rented the run-down room next to my better nature.How will he feel when he knows who you really are, and just how far you’ve run from your past?
Not as though that hadn’t happened before. I found I wasn’t any more ready for Jackson to walk away than I was for him to die in combat. Somehow, when I’d planned this whole arranged-marriage maneuver, I hadn’t counted on handing my heart over into another man’s care.
Don’t borrow trouble,I told my bad mental renter, and pushed the thoughts away.
“Then turn it up and let’s drive home!” I called.
Flashing white teeth in a grin, he reached for the knob, cranked it to the right, and we rocked up the interstate.
We’d driven another thirty minutes when the first ad break broke into their snappily-named “Big Block of Rock” Friday programming. Two ad breaks per hour, and music the rest of the time. Jimi Hendrix faded into the tooth-grinding jingle for Kelson Genetics.
“When your chromosomes won’t fill your homes, there’s Kelson!
When you want a baby, and it’s ‘no’, not ‘maybe’, there’s Kelson!”
The television commercial was worse, if you can believe that. As the song plays, two attractive men stand, arms around each other, in front of an empty crib. They wear exaggerated expressions of longing and disappointment, as if their crib has failed to magically produce a small human and they’d like to see if it’s still under warranty.
A flash of light surprises them! They gasp, reeling back as what I can only describe as a Science Fairy arrives, wearing a lab coat emblazoned with the Kelson Genetics name and logo. There are two different versions of the commercial, even, one with a male Science Fairy and one with a female.
The fairy waves a beaker in the air, which leaves behind a trail of sparkles, andbling!A baby appears in the crib. The men find themselves in T-shirts that say “Dad One” and “Dad Two”! It’s a science miracle!
Our fairy friend turns to the camera, and, with an exaggerated wink, makes the universal, thumb and index finger together in a circle and the other three fingers upright sign for “okay”. As the fairy signs, a slogan writes itself across the screen, and a voiceover reads it to us. It’s the same voiceover that talks to us at the end of the radio commercial.
“Kelson Genetics - Where XY is A-OK”
* * *
Allow me to digress for a moment, if you will. Our population problems haven’t yet hit critical mass, or critical lack of mass, I guess, but they’re headed that way just like the planet’s headed for an inconvenient climate apocalypse. Mail Call Mates is only half the solution. The other half rests in the heroic beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks of overworked men and women in genetics labs across the United States.
The ability to create children out of pure genetic material has existed for decades. Similarly, the ability to create children out of more than two genetic donors has also waited in the wings, content to poke its head out onto the world stage in the form ofshocked, shocked I tell you!exposés.
Heavy traditionalists and prurient people desperate to maintainAdam and EvenotAdam, Eve, and Stevevalues from within the wombs of others stopped this from growing more popular. Immoral! Unethical! An abomination against God and man, clutch pearls, faint onto divan, swoon. Roll credits.
Until scientists started publishing data. Too many countries sending too many wombs to Mars leads to not enough children or viable baby-makers to keep your planet’s population out of the danger zone. You bet there was a push to try to stop that. One filled with sanctimonious screaming about a woman’s place in the home.
A funny thing happens when you give women heavy weapons, battle armor, and no reason to maintain a fuck about anyone else’s opinions: they start informing people that their place isanywhere they goddamn want it to be.Then they go to other planets to kick ass.