Nonetheless, she insisted on her staff calling her “señora” rather than “señorita”, and in a sense she was entitled to the aura of maternity. She had stood proxy-mother, so to speak, to more than two thousand adoptees.
They had provided her with her floating home, the yacht Santa Virgen (a name from which she derived wry amusement); with the office-building she owned and operated from; with an international reputation; with all the comfort she could buy and a second fortune in reserve to purchase more.
It was just as well they had done all this before today.
Her office, windowed on all four sides, was decorated with dolls from every period of history: ancient Egyptian clay animals, Amerind toys of knotted and coloured straw, carved wooden manikins from the Black Forest, velvet teddy-bears, Chinese figurines made from scraps of priceless silk …
Imprisoned behind glass, too precious to be touched by the fingers of a child.
She said to the phone, staring out across the blue morning waters of the ocean, “What’s it going to do to us?”
A distant voice said it was too soon to tell.
“Well, work it out and do it fast! As if the trouble we’re having with the dichromatism bit wasn’t enough, these bleeders in Yatakang have to—ah, never mind. I guess we could always move to Brazil!”
She cut the connection with a furious gesture and leaned back in her polychair, swivelling it so that instead of the calm blue sea she faced the teeming city on the landward side.
After a while she pressed an intercom switch. She said, “I’ve made up my mind. Unship the Lucayo twins and the Rosso boy that they sent from Port-au-Prince. Before we dispose of them they’ll eat as much as we can make in profits.”
“What do you want us to do with them then, señora?” asked the voice from the intercom.
“Leave ’em on the steps of the cathedral—put ’em out to sea in a basket—why should I have to tell you what to do, so long as you unship them?”
“But, señora—”
“Do as I say or you’ll be out to sea in a basket yourself.”
“Very well, señora. It’s only that there’s this Yanqui couple who want to see you, and I thought perhaps…”
“Oh yes. Tell me about them.”
She listened, and within the minute had summed them up. Doubtless having given up everything at home—their jobs, their apt, their friends—for the sake of a legal conception in Puerto Rico, they had been cornered by the J-but-O State’s unexpected ratification of the dichromatism law and were now driven back to considering adoption, which they could have arranged without leaving the mainland.
I’m sick of them. The brown-noses are the worst, lording it over us spics when our ancestors came here as conquerors and theirs came as slaves, but just about any Yanqui gives me morning-sickness.
The silent joke lightened her mood enough to permit her to say, “All right, send them in. And what did you say was the name?”
“Potter,” said the intercom.
They came in holding hands, and stared at her covertly while settling in the chairs she waved them to. One could almost hear the mental comment: “so this is the famous Olive Almeiro!” After a while, the wife’s attention wandered to the display of dolls, and the husband cleared his throat.
“Señora Almeiro, we—”
“You got caught with your pants down,” Olive cut in.
Frank Potter blinked. “I don’t quite—”
“You don’t imagine you’re unique, do you? What’s your trouble—colour-blindness?”
“That’s right. And my wife is sure to pass it on, so—”
“So you decided to migrate and because Nevada is expensive and Louisiana doesn’t like being used as a conception refuge you chose Puerto Rico and the legislature shot your ship out from under. What do you want me to do about it?”
Taken aback by the baby-farmer’s curtness, Frank exchanged glances with his wife, who was very pale.
“It was on the spur of the moment,” he admitted. “We thought you might be in a position to help us.”
“To adopt? I doubt it. If you are willing to consider adoption you need have moved no further from New York than New Jersey.” Olive fingered her jowl. “You probably want me to disguise a child of your own as an adoptee. It’s already on the way, isn’t it?”
Frank flushed to the roots of his hair. He said, “How could you possibly—?”
“I told you you’re not unique. Was it intentional?”
“I guess so.” He stared at the floor, miserably. “We decided to celebrate our decision to move, you see. But we didn’t realise it had happened so quickly. We didn’t find out until we’d arrived here.”
“They didn’t spot it at Immigration? No, come to think of it, they only check women arriving from abroad and from the maverick states. In that case you’re already in a cleft stick. Either the prodgy was conceived in New York State where you’d been specifically forbidden to start one, or it was conceived here where transmission of your genes is now illegal, or between the two which makes it a prohibited immigrant the moment it leaves the womb. So…?”
“We thought maybe if we went out of the country altogether,” Sheena whispered.
“And got me to adopt it back in, and reunite you with it?” Olive gave a humourless chuckle. “Yes, I do that sort of thing. For a flat fee of a hundred thousand.”
Frank started. “But that’s far more than—!”
“Than the cost of a regular adoption? Certainly. Adoption is legal, subject to certain conditions. What you’re proposing is not.”
There was silence. Eventually Olive said, having savoured their discomfort, “Well, Mr. Potter, I’d suggest the only solution for you is to start over. I can recommend GT’s line of abortifacients, and I know a doctor who won’t insist on the kind of pregnancy check he’s supposed to carry out before prescribing them. Then I could put you on my regular waiting list. Beyond that I can’t be any help.”
“There must be something else we can do!” Frank almost jumped out of his chair. “We want our own prodgies, not someone else’s second-hand! Over in Yatakang they’ve just announced they can—”
Olive’s face went as hard as marble. She said, “You will oblige me by leaving, Mr. Potter.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” A podgy hand stabbed a button on her desk.
Sheena plucked at her husband’s arm. “She’s an expert, Frank,” she said in a dead voice. “You’ve got to take her word for it.”
“No, this is too much! We came in to make a civil inquiry and—”
“The door behind you is open,” Olive said. “Good morning.”
Sheena turned and headed for the exit. After a moment in which he looked ready to scream with fury, Frank let his shoulders droop and followed her.
* * *
When they had gone, Olive found herself panting from the effort of self-control. She pronounced a curse on the government of Yatakang and felt a little better.
But her hatred was new and raw; like a dressed burn it hurt despite salving.
Over the years she had built up a huge network of necessary contacts, expended a million dollars in bribes, risked prosecution a score of times, secure in the belief that products of contemporary tectogenetic skill such as cloned embryos could never compete with traditional “unskilled labour”. She had begun when only two states, California and New York, had eugenic legislation, and Puerto Rico was full of overburdened mothers with passable genotypes prepared to let a fifth or sixth baby go for adoption to some rich Yanqui. As the eugenics laws spread and grew teeth, as voluntary sterilisation after the third child became commonplace, she developed alternatives. A clean genotype, while still desirable, posed less of a problem than proving the adoptee was an American citizen when for brown-nose parents-to-be it hailed from Haiti, for gringos from Chile or Bolivia.