He had rented a central post-office box, and replies came by the thousands. The letters he ignored, which sped up the process immeasurably; the pictures were all he was interested in. The pictures told the true story, even if the tale was rarely heard.
Three. He turned up three…
One of whom he tried to contact and was never able to reach. The other two he courted slowly, eventually verifying them as genuine Helverson's subjects through Stanley Wyzkall at MacNealy Biotech. Of those, however, another turned rabbit after being informed of the diagnosis, and wanted nothing further to do with him. Only Ellie Pratt, formerly of an Atlanta suburb, hung in with him for the duration, although she more than compensated for the loss of the other two.
She was, after all, a rarity.
She was just that: a she.
In Ellie's picture had been the first page of the story: an unmistakable resemblance. Valentine had long since gotten used to the idea that Helverson's traits transcended ethnic boundaries, but it was dizzying to see them borne by a young woman. Softened by femininity somewhat, but there they were: the same streamlined contours of her bone structure, and eyes wolflike in their bright awareness. Her razored violet hair made her features all the more striking, angular.
In contrast to the males, Ellie had never exhibited much of a pattern of overt violence, although if she was ever truly angered, Valentine didn't think it would be wise to turn an unguarded back on her. Where the males lacked impulse control, she did not, reserving her anger for maximum impact, and forgetting nothing, ever. The first time Teddy met her, he'd chuckled heartily at her choice of hair dye. She waited four months, until overhearing him consider plugs to combat his own receding hairline, then sliced out two quick handfuls of what he had left. She then held the tip of the knife to Teddy's eye until he apologized for an insult he didn't even remember making.
Valentine supposed there would be ample Helverson's females to monitor, in time, once the dozens of infant girls found in the past two years had grown older. For now, though, there was but one identified Helverson's woman. And I found her.
Valentine had neither the training nor inclination to understand the intricacies of the genetic dance, but it had never seemed reasonable to him that Helverson's would exclusively target males. Wyzkall had, years ago, speculated that the trisome of number twelve might be interactive in some way, yet to be spotted, with the male Y-chromosome. Valentine accepted this on purely hypothetical terms, never believing it to be the actuality.
He could not have been more pleased to prove Wyzkall wrong.
Nor could he have been more pleased to find Ellie Pratt amenable to the proposal of motherhood-for-hire that spirited her from her dead-end life in Georgia.
Valentine found the irony irresistible: Money he made from the sale of mass destruction was now being funneled toward the propagation of the species — more to the point, the newest variant of the species.
Truly, science made for strange bedfellows.
"Listen, Patrick?" said Daniel. "I want to get something cleared up."
Valentine looked at him with expectation. He nodded once, yielding the floor.
"If I do get her pregnant" — all stone-cold business behind dark lenses — "I want a guarantee that I don't have any obligations to the kid. None. Okay?"
"I already told you, you never even have to hear about it if you don't want to."
"Not good enough." Daniel smiled from across the living room, a thin and simmering smile. "I want something more binding than your word. This goes wrong somehow, bam, and I get hit with a paternity suit, I'm fucked, I've got no way out of that. They'll prove it with one test and there I am stuck owing child support."
He did have a point. Were their positions reversed, Valentine liked to think he would have enough presence of mind to cover his backside for just this possibility. This was good thinking.
"So you want a contract freeing you from all obligations and responsibilities, then."
Daniel nodded. "Absolutely."
"I know a lawyer I can call tomorrow. We should be able to get it taken care of quickly, just have him change the gender bias in a standard surrogate-motherhood contract."
"Good. Good. I'm just the cum donor." Daniel stretched one leg out upon the floor, hung an elbow off the other propped knee, and seemed to regard him with fresh curiosity. "I'm wondering one thing, though. Why aren't you? Save you a lot of trouble with me."
Valentine sat frozen in his chair, even the mere mention of the subject enough to bring on a dull, hollow pounding in his groin, like the beat of an empty heart. He'd thought he might avoid this with Daniel, thought him incurious enough to never bring it up.
"I would if I could," was all he said.
Daniel grinned, pointed down below. "Shooting blanks, huh?"
He should have been angry, furious even, should have clouted Daniel across the jaw for making a mockery of what malignancy had stolen. But fury was far away, and he supposed he had the TV to thank for that — seeing the face of the one condemned to death, without having had a chance to meet him. The lost sheep. And contemplating, too, what might have become of the newest lamb, who had promised nearly a week ago to find his way here.
As Daniel sat on the floor, tiring of no response to his prod, Valentine stared at him and had to wonder if this was how fathers felt, real fathers, who looked into the faces of their sons and saw not only themselves, but that one final chance to vicariously achieve those precious goals that had exceeded their grasp. Fathers could be sad that way, and stoic.
He supposed it had always been that way.
He supposed that, whatever else changed in the world, it always would.
Thirty-Three
Adrienne was proud of herself. Up before nine, a shower and a hurried breakfast in the room, twenty minutes on the road to Kendra Madigan's home, and not a single derisive comment the whole time. She was either growing up or becoming inured to this odyssey of Clay's. Certainly her stake in it had dwindled with each day and passing mile, until there were moments when she felt like little more than a concerned bystander.
"It's after ten," she said along the way. "What do you want to bet there's a supervisor or two in Tempe who'll be wondering where I am before the day's out?"
"It's Monday morning," Sarah chimed. "Do you know where your job is?"
Kendra Madigan lived in a quiet neighborhood with a great many trees. The homes were modern but tried not to be. A screened porch here, a row of columns there, a backyard gazebo visible up the block … small touches of an elder South that appeared stapled onto the new, rather than serving as parts of a genuine whole.
She answered her own door, which briefly took Adrienne by surprise. Subconsciously awed, perhaps, that the woman had thrice published controversial — and best-selling — books on the shadowy layers of the human mind. Didn't people of her ilk employ assistants to dispose of such trivialities as doorbells? Kendra Madigan didn't, and that made her somehow more real, more — dare she entertain the thought? — potentially likable. But even charlatans had their charms, did they not?
She looked much as Adrienne recalled from her appearance in Tempe, if sporting a touch more gray in her closely trimmed hair. At the moment she wore light yellow sweat-clothes that fit her impeccably. Her skin was richly black and she was in her late forties, given to posture and a gait that Adrienne persisted in seeing as statuesque. She did not so much walk as glide, would not so much sit as levitate.