“Light, Sacco‑Vanzetti. How’s it flying?” Luciente said.

The kid was maybe sixteen. Lank brown hair in braids, swarthy skin, the kid wore a yellow uniform much like everybody’s work clothes. “Is this the woman from the past?”

Luciente performed the introductions.

Sacco‑Vanzetti, whose sex she could not tell, stared. “Did you bear alive?”

“Come on Sacco‑Vanzetti, don’t be narrow!” Luciente made a face.

“If you mean have I had a baby, yes.” She stuck out her chin.

“Was there a lot of blood?”

“I was knocked out, so how do I know?”

“Was it exciting? Did it feel sexual?”

“It hurt like hell,” Connie snapped, turning back to the wall of babies. “Were you all born from this crazy machine?”

“Almost everybody is now,” the kid said. “I have to go down to threemonth to check the solutions. I’ll be in touch. If you remember more about live bearing, I’d be feathered to hear about it.” The kid went out.

Bee closed the viewing port. “Wamponaug Indians are the source of our culture. Our past. Every village has a culture.”

The way he picked up on that question as if it had just been asked, the way a question floated in him patiently until he was ready to answer it: a memory of sweet and of jagged pain. Maybe she just had a weakness for big black men soft in the belly who moved with that massive grace, although Claud had moved differently. Because of his blindness Claud had held his head a little to the side. She had always thought of a bird. Birds turned the side of the head toward you because their eyes were on the sides, and Claud saw with his ears. “I suppose because you’re black. In my time black people just discovered a pride in being black. My people, Chicanos, were beginning to feel that too. Now it seems like it got lost again.”

Luciente started to say something but visibly checked herself.

Bee beamed, ambling toward another tank where he opened the viewing port. “I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem‑Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won’t find everybody black‑skinned like her and me, any more than they’re all tall or all got big feet.” He paused, looking intently at a small embryo, fully formed and floating just at his shoulder level. “At grandcil–grand council–decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker‑skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don’t want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness.”

“It’s so … invented. Artificial. Are there black Irishmen and black Jews and black Italians and black Chinese?”

“Fasure, how not? When you grow up, you can stick to the culture you were raised with or you can fuse into another. But the one we were raised in usually has a … sweet meaning to us.”

“We say ‘we,’” Luciente began, “about things that happened before we were born, cause we identify with those decisions. I used to think our history was exaggerated, but I’m less sure since I time‑traveled.” Luciente drew them toward the next port.

“I don’t think I want to look at any younger … babies.” The little third‑month child the doctor had shown her in the basin. Her stomach lurched. “I don’t feel too good.”

“We’ll leave.” Bee took her arm. “Maybe it’s the filtered air? Grasp, the plasm is precious. Life flows through here for sixteen villages in all, the whole township.”

Outside she took a deep breath of salty air and detached herself from Bee. Claud’s sore delicate pride, like an orchid with teeth. What could a man of this ridiculous Podunk future, when babies were born from machines and people negotiated diplomatically with cows, know about how it had been to grow up in America black or brown? Pain had honed Claud keen. This man was a child by comparison. “You saying there’s no racism left? Paradise on earth, all God’s children are equal?”

“Different tribes have different rites, but god is a patriarchal concept.” Luciente took Bee’s arm and hers. “Our mems, our children, our friends include people of differing gene mixes. Our mothers also.”

“But Bee’s kids would be black. Yours would be brown.”

“My child Innocente has lighter skin than you do.” Bee stopped to admire a walk lined with rosebushes blooming in yellows and oranges and creamy whites. “There’s no genetic bond–or if there is, we don’t keep track of it.”

“Then this kid isn’t really your child?”

“I amInnocente’s mother.”

“How can men be mothers! How can some kid who isn’t related to you be your child?” She broke free and twisted away in irritation. The pastoral clutter of the place began to infuriate her, the gardens everyplace, the flowers, the damned sprightly looking chickens underfoot.

Luciente urged her along. “We’re walking Bee back to the lab. Where I’d be with the rest of our plant genetics base except for you. Bee and I work together. Maybe that’s why we’ve been sweet friends so long, twelve years already.”

“I thought it’s cause I’m too lazy to run from you the way any sane lug would. I never noticed other cores who worked in the same base stuck so long.”

“We’re so ill suited we can’t give up. Connie, apple blossom, listen to me–”

“Be on guard when Luci calls you soft names.” Bee managed to saunter more slowly than they walked and yet keep up.

“It was part of women’s long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding.”

“Three! That makes no sense! Three mothers!” She thought suddenly of Three Kings Day and the Anglo Christmas carol that Angelina had learned off the TV. She could hear Angie’s fluty voice singing monotonously but with a limpid joy in monotony (the security):

We three kings of Oregon are

bearing gifts we travels a far.

Tears burned her lids. Angelina, Angelina, if you had three mothers like me, you’d be dead instead of sold off to some clean‑living couple in Larchmont. They said you were lucky to be taken at four. I didn’t understand till I got out what they’d done! Lucky to be taken from me.

Angelina, child of my sore and bleeding body, child of my sad marriage that never fit right, like a pair of cheap shoes that sprouts a nail in the sole. But you fit right. The nurse said I would have to show you, but you reached right for my breast. You suckled right away. I remember how you grabbed with your small pursed mouth at my breast and started drawing milk from me, how sweet it felt. How could anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child. Who got that child out of a machine the way that couple, white and rich, got my flesh and blood. All made up already, a canned child, just add money. What do they know of motherhood?

She was sitting against the wall on the porch, tears trickling from her eyes. Had pain broken the hallucination? She did not care. She hated them, the bland bottleborn monsters of the future, born without pain, multicolored like a litter of puppies without the stigmata of race and sex.

SIX

“Now listen, ladies,” Mrs. Richard said, wagging her fat forefinger. “None of you are getting off this ward till you tell me who stuck that dope behind the radiator. And I mean it!”