“Wait, wait. I’m not trying to scare you.” He flipped his wrist downward, toward the strawberries. It was a classic homosexual mannerism, but on him, it looked unnatural. Grace sat straight up on the bench, itching to turn away but deciding to give this man a chance. He glanced around and, seeing that they were alone, said, “I’m Clarence Helio. Lieutenant Clarence Helio, rather.”
“Nice to meet you, Lieutenant. I was just going back to my cot.”
“I’ve been noticing you. And the woman with the curls. And some of the others.”
“Noticing us? Okay.” Grace’s attempt at indifference tumbled forth in a bundle of nerves, and she knew Lieutenant Helio was not buying it. Trying to channel the tension into curiosity, she added, “Is there a problem?”
“I know you’re pregnant.”
Grace’s chest did a double flip, and it took only a second for sweat to break out on her exposed arms and hands. She glanced down at them to see their color draining away. In a sad attempt to appear blasé, she scratched the top of her leg.
This is it. I’m dead. Everything I left for, all for nothing.
“I’m a carrier. We both were.” It was a hasty, unconvincing lie.
“And all the other women?”
“I don’t know anything about that. We were on our way to New Zealand to visit our friend’s resort.”
Clarence shrugged, then nodded. “Fair enough. But if you want to know what I think, here it is: you’re pregnant, and for whatever reason, you’re trying to get the hell out of Dodge. I can’t say I blame you. Now, will you listen to what I have to say? Because I think all your lives depend on it.”
Grace’s hands were shaking now, and she clasped them together. It was gesture enough for Lieutenant Helio to continue.
“Thank you.” He leaned back in a more relaxed manner, but his gaze was still darting in all directions. “I need for you to continue to act as if we’re strangers, and I’m simply here keeping you company. Frankly, nobody has really taken to suspecting you passengers of anything, especially the ones from your plane. People from your plane are here because of Frederik Carnevale, and that’s all anybody cares to know for now. We don’t question orders from that high up.”
“So what’s your point?”
“My point is that, in a month, you’re going to be too obvious. Most of the men here haven’t even looked at you chicks, because they’re too focused on getting laid by all the new dick. It’s not going to last, once you start getting bigger. If air travel remains restricted, it’s going to present a problem. My problem is that I did notice, and I want to get you on your way. I’m not part of this army because I had a choice, and if I had, I’d be working on your side.”
“I don’t know if I’m on any side,” Grace said.
“I’m on the side that doesn’t want to kill people,” Lieutenant Helio continued. “I’m lucky you decided to come late to dinner. Now, you and that woman with the curls were not really married. If you were, you wouldn’t both be legal carriers, and both of you were pregnant. I can tell the difference between a pregnant woman and a fatty. It’s rare I get to see one, and when I do . . .” His gaze wandered down Grace’s neck, over her breasts, and down.
Her defenses blurred as she realized there was something comforting in the lieutenant’s youthful display of indulgence. “What, are you hetero or something?” she whispered, reaching for the last strawberry.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he replied.
“And you’re in the military? They let you in?”
“My father ranks high, and let’s just say I was an accident.” He pushed Grace’s empty bowl off to the side and leaned closer again. “You know genetic mistakes? Well, they aren’t limited just to females. As far as my TruthChip is concerned, I’m as gay as you are. I could tell you and that woman weren’t lovers.”
Grace was trapped, and the lieutenant had forced this conversation on her so suddenly. They were too deep into it now for her to turn and run. And perhaps he was trying to prevent that. She had heard of the possibility of male genetic mistakes, but she had never met one in person.
“How far along are you?” he asked.
“Just past four months.”
“Jesus Christ,” Lieutenant Helio whispered. “You’re walking a tight rope, you know that? You’re already becoming obvious, and wearing big clothes won’t help you a month from now.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Grace said. “I’m just taking it a day at a time.”
“Doing that will get you killed. We need to get you on your way, which is why I’m talking to you. Can we take a ride? If anyone asks, we can say you dropped your com on the beach today.”
Grace barely affirmed his suggestion, but within five minutes, they were in a hydro truck, driving down the taxiway toward the fenced gate to World Way West, the broken road leading toward the ocean. The sun had just set, and the sky was a deep, cool purple. The first of the night’s stars, her last link to Marvel, were peeking through it. Now, yet another random life was crossing her own, changing her from the inside out. Grace no longer cared for the coincidence, the luck, the strangeness of it all. She simply longed to be safe, at peace.
“Now, do you want to know why you can trust me?” Lieutenant Helio said.
Grace nodded, and the lieutenant explained:
He was going to blow up one of the four landed hydro planes, blame it on the natives, and inspire the Queen to lift air travel restrictions from the LAX base.
“The Queen has no love for civilians, but I don’t think he and his military are ready to strand two hundred of them in the Unrecoverable Territories, in a place being attacked by natives. It would give people reason to question his motives, and word about his true agenda could get out too early, which is why I think they’ll lift the restriction. One of my fathers is General Tom Helio, and I can get him to set you civilians free.”
Grace almost hissed out her next breath. I knew this guy’s name sounded familiar. General Helio was the Queen’s combative arm, and his name was a quasi-permanent fixture in the movement to forcefully relegate heterosexuality to a dying evolutionary track. Never was he seen without his peroxide-blonde hair, a rainbow band around his arm, and a bulging crotch. It was rumored he stuffed his pants with a sock to convey a sense of power.
Lieutenant Helio drove Grace to the beach, where they sat in the parked truck surrounded by the darkening sea and its salty, organic aroma. There, he explained who he was, how he came to be stationed in Los Angeles, and why he was now an enemy of the dictatorship symbolized by his very uniform. A career outside the military had never once been an option for Lieutenant Clarence Helio. His other father, while not a prominent public figure like Tom Helio, was still a high-ranking commander in the Recovered Europe branch of the New Rainbow Air Force. Both his parents had unofficial but secretly lauded instances of anti-heterosexual violence decorating their reputations, and being forced into the military (and by extension, sexual activity with other males) had been the least of the Lieutenant’s worries.
“There were probably five Christmases when all of us were together under the same roof,” he told Grace. “On one of them, we had a steak dinner delivered from the Bull’s Ball, and the delivery guy was obviously hetero. Hung his eyes on the ground when talking to my dads . . . you know. Wasn’t checking them out and obviously wanted to get out of there. They asked him flat out if he was a failsafe, and he answered yes. You want to know what they did to him?”
Grace neither nodded nor shook her head. Outside, the purple waves crashed, one after the other, in a constant rage.
“My father the Air Force commander held him while my father the general ripped his clothes and shoes off, kicked his penis and testicles until they were a bloody mess, and sent him back to his car. I was fourteen. The next week, I started hanging holopanels of naked men on my bedroom wall so I could hide the fact that I’d been jerking off to thoughts of naked heterosteriles for the previous three years.”
&nbs
p; Lieutenant Helio had a habit of blinking when he did not need to, Grace noticed. It was a nervous tick, perhaps his version of being emotive. He continued telling Grace about being filtered into Sean Cody Military Academy, graduating with top honors and his insidious secret still intact, and joining the military ranks in the Los Angeles Unrecoverable Effort. The general had pushed for early promotions for his son, escalating him to Lieutenant in just four years.
“Now, here’s the clincher, and this is why I want to get you out of Los Angeles before you’re found out by anyone else. Trust me, if they were looking, they’d notice. The NRO put a silent hold on legal carrying almost a year ago.”
This was news to Grace. Nobody affiliated with the Opposition had mentioned this. Not even the pilot had known. If Albert Redmond had made the Cliff House visitors privy to this information, he had done so when Grace was not present. Did that mean Frederik Carnevale, a supposed premiere-fucking-fag of the New Rainbow Order, did not know either? Or—and this would be far more menacing—had he kept the hushed ban on carriers a secret from the Opposition?
“But . . .” Grace was about to express her concerns before she stopped herself for fear of exposing Carnevale.
Lieutenant Helio had already connected the dots. “If your plane was truly chartered by Frederik Carnevale, it means something big is going on, and I want in. I can’t do my job here without somehow doing my part to save humanity as well.”
Save humanity. He sounds like Albert Redmond.
There was a truth beating under the surface here, something Grace had not yet learned enough about to put her finger on. Lieutenant Helio was hinting at some missing, ever-important piece to the puzzle.
“What do you mean, ‘save humanity’?”
The lieutenant took a deep breath. “I mean there are those of us in the military who are aware of what the New Rainbow Order thinks of as its noble cause. They’re not just trying to do away with human procreation. They’re trying to give our planet a second chance by doing away with the human species.”
Grace searched the lieutenant’s eyes for any glint of humor, but under the day’s dying light, his stony countenance made it obvious he believed his words. Two of them had been very indicative: noble cause. The homosexuals had risen to power under the guise of being the collective underdog with all the answers to humanity’s struggles. Human population, which had been their planet’s most serious hazard, had since decreased to a mere fraction of what it had once been. Now, Lieutenant Helio explained, they were pushing that agenda to the very end. According to his fathers, the clinics promised by Mandate 43 were a joke, and the Queen had a high and mighty vision of humanity dying out and nature reclaiming the earth.
“The Queen thinks it’s his spiritual duty to rid the world not just of the breeders but of everyone. According to him and the men working under him, we’re all nothing but a stain on this beautiful planet.”
There it was: the numbing truth. Grace’s hands were bunched into cold, white fists. Her throat was dry when she continued. “But what about the Queen and all the other homos? Why don’t they just nuke us all? Make it quick?”
“Because their interest is an earth without humanity. Not a destroyed earth. They want peace, and they don’t see peace in humanity’s future. Their answer of genetic engineering for human reproduction was never supposed to be a fool-proof way of preserving humanity with total control. It was just a way to set the parameters for human extinction. The Queen thinks he is doing God’s work, and the secretary generals after him will further that work. Mandate 43 has effectively ended human engineering, and once all the heterosexuals are gone, including all those ones we’re hunting out there . . .” Lieutenant Helio waved a hand, gesturing down the beach. “The remaining homosexuals will die off naturally, one by one, ultimately leaving the earth peacefully, and in peace.”
“But killing off humanity isn’t peace!”
“Isn’t it? The Queen and his executives count themselves as part of the human threat, albeit a part that has the ultimate answer. The rainbow. God’s promise of faithfulness toward all living things. They simply want to remove us from that group, because we’re the only living things who can’t stop hating each other and destroying everything around us. The only ones who laugh at God’s rainbow. Why shouldn’t we die off?”
The lieutenant was being the devil’s advocate, but Grace chuckled now at the grand sense in it. Everything was falling into place. And here she was, a victim of coincidence, sitting on the edge of one of the lost oceans with a perfect stranger who just happened to have all the answers. Yet she had heard it from Sheila Willy as well. Mandate 43 was just cover for something bigger. Sheila, however, seemed to have been blissfully unaware of how drastic the Queen’s plan really was. That it was, as the lieutenant said, noble.
“Is that why they stopped sending people to the Sanctuary?” Grace asked.
For the first time that night, she saw a shred of uncertainty in Lieutenant Helio’s eyes.
He shook his head. “That’s something I’ve been wondering about. Rumors are flying everywhere, but even my fathers are tight-lipped about it. All I’ve gathered is that something happened down there, and the NRO doesn’t want anybody to know about it.”
“Why do you suppose?”
“My guess? They’re scared. Whatever happened down there, it changed their grip on the future.” Lieutenant Helio let his right arm fall from the hydro truck’s steering wheel onto the cab’s empty center seat. For a moment, they sat listening to the waves, feeling the wind’s constant urgency flutter through the open windows.
And then he wrapped Grace’s hand in his own. At first it was a shock, and Grace’s initial reaction was to recoil. But then she realized she had nothing to lose, that there was no reason to deflect this sudden display of affinity. She was all alone in this Unrecoverable Territory, and here was a man trying to save her life, to share a gesture likely sparked by a lifetime of loneliness, grief, and desire to expose the affection so skillfully hidden in his heart.
“I’ve never been this intimate with a woman before,” he said, turning his face to Grace with a sheepish grin. “I think you’re the most beautiful one I’ve ever met, and I don’t want to see what would happen if you’re found out. I also think you and this Carnevale crew are somehow part of what happened in Antarctica, which means I have no idea if blowing up this plane will actually help you or somehow make it worse. All I know is that if you women don’t get out of here soon, you won’t get out of here at all.”
Grace surprised herself by squeezing the lieutenant’s hand, holding it tight. There were chances to be taken here, some big, some small. They were alone; nobody was watching. They could run right now, abandon everyone back at the base, and seek a life among Marvel and the natives. They could make love, take this fleeting opportunity to forge a connection that would cure their distress, if only for a night. Or, they could sit here on the beach until the sky grew black, dreaming of all other possible futures, but only dreaming. Lieutenant Helio was a good man, perhaps the best kind. But she could not forget Dex Wheelock. She could not forget the miracle they had created, the miracle growing between her and the lieutenant now.
“Blow up the plane,” she whispered. “Let’s get me and these other breeders the fuck out of here.”
A MEMORY (HIM)
DEX AND BOBBY SALINGER often spend their after-school hours behind the gym, hanging out on the small knoll where all the smokers spend their break times. Three weeks ago, Dex started smoking, much to Bobby’s disgust, but it’s okay. He and Bobby complement each other well: Dex is becoming a cynic; Bobby, a star-crossed idealist, even at age sixteen.
“Straight Alliance is for goody-goodies,” Dex says, taking a drag off his marijuana cigarette. These days he feels angry most of the time. “Besides, it’s no use if they’re going to shut it down anyway. You heard about Mr. Cormick filing a complaint, right?”
Bobby balls his fists. “Yeah. But I still think we need to join. We’v
e got to meet more people like us, man.”
“Staying invisible is the best bet in this dump. God, I hope I can get into a college.”
“Come to police school with me. My dad will get you in. He really wants to get the police force integrated, and he knows chiefs all over. Bio and normal police,” Bobby replies. “I’m totally going to do it.”
Dex laughs, then shakes his head. “No thanks. No way I’d go work with all those fags and risk getting raped every day. You can’t get a badge without scanning your wrist and all them knowing you’re a failsafe. What then?”
“Not going to stop me. Attitudes like that are what make it okay for the NRO to let discrimination happen all over the place. I want to stop that kind of shit.”
Bobby’s desire to go to police school makes little sense to Dex, as law enforcement is the very embodiment of the discrimination he is talking about. There are still laws to protect heterosteriles and failsafes from violence, but to Dex, they have become little more than smokescreens for the scary things happening every day. All one has to do is consider Delilah Jacoby, a heterosterile who was recently raped with a cucumber by a group of fags. She was in Dex’s art class until it happened but hasn’t been to school since. All five fags are remaining hush-hush, and the police have made no arrests.
North American departments are also pushing to reimplement TruthChip tracking, an anti-privacy measure that was abolished with the Spatial Freedom Act after four decades of martial law following the Bio Wars. Now, the recent terrorist attacks in Australia, which the secretary general is attributing to a resurgence of God’s Army, are bringing the issue to the forefront once again. Dex mentions this, but Bobby shakes his head.
“No, man. It would take twenty years at least to go through the legislation for that, because nobody would stand for it. People would rip their chips out and revolt on a mass level.”
The Breeders Page 21