The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [22]
I backed away from him and we regarded each other. "But I want a family," I said after a moment. "At least one child of ours, our genes. We can adopt another one or two."
Nothing was settled that day. We went back to the A-frame and banged pots and pans and argued and I told him to get lost, to get out of my life, and he said it would be criminal to bring another child into the world and I was being selfish, and the much-touted maternal urge was cultural, and I said people like us owed it to children to give them the same advantages we had, education, love, care... It went on into the night, when I told him to sleep on the couch, and the next day, until I stomped out of the house and came up here to glare at the ocean and its incessant racket. He came after me. "Christ," he said. "Jesus. One." Two months later we were married and I was pregnant.
When Mikey was two he got a big sister, Sandra, who was three and a half, and a year later he got a bigger brother, Chris, who was five. Our family.
Mikey was four when they all had chicken pox at the same time. One night Warren was keeping them entertained, coloring with them at the table while I made dinner.
"Why did you make him green?" Chris demanded.
"Because he has artificial blood," Warren said.
"Why?"
"Because something went wrong with his blood and they had to take it out and put in artificial blood."
Mikey began to cry. "Is that what they'll do to us?"
"Nope. You're not sick enough. You've just got spots on your face. You call that sick? I call it kvetching."
"What's that?" Sandra asked. She had fallen in love with Warren the day we met her, and he loved all three children.
"That's when you grow spots on your face, and itch, and pretend you're sick so your mother will let you eat ice cream all day if you want. And your dad plays silly games with you when he should be at work. That's kvetching."
They liked kvetching. Later they got into my lipstick and tried to make it all happen again, spots, whining for ice cream, laughing.
Later it was funny, but that night, with my sick children at the table, itching, feverish, it was not funny. I froze at the sink with water running over lettuce. Artificial blood? We were still in the cold war; atomic war was still possible, anything was possible. Even artificial blood.
"Why?" I asked, after the children were in bed.
He had to start way back. "Remember in the movie Dracula how the good doctor transfused one of the women over and over with whole blood, and it took? Pure luck. Lucy was probably an A-group type, and so was the guy. If he had put blood from an O group in her, she probably would have died on him. That's how it was. One took, another one, then bingo, it didn't. Then they found out about the blood groups, and later on about how the agglutinogens combine with certain agglutinins, and not others. And we've been learning ever since. The body treats the wrong blood type just like any other invading organism, bacterium, virus, whatever, and rejects it. But in the case of a major catastrophe you can't count on the lab facilities to handle the typing, the storage, all the mechanics of transfusions. The labs might not be there. We've got artificial blood now, you know, but it's pretty high-tech stuff."
I hadn't known until then. I shuddered, and he grinned. "So what's wrong with being green? Don't worry, it's still experimental, and very, very temporary. Anyway, if we could get away from some of the really high-tech stuff and simply transfuse from any healthy person to one who is ill... see?"
"But wouldn't that be just as high tech?"
He shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not.
There are genetic blood characteristics that get passed on from parent to child, you know. Sickle cell anemia, which, by the way, comes in a package that includes resistance to malaria. Hemophilia gets passed on..." Whatever expression my face was registering made him stop. "Hey," he said softly. "I'm just spitballing."
I jerked upright so fast, I bumped into the steering wheel. I must have been dozing, dreaming.