IN ONE GENERATION: A Fantasy

A DIFFERENT WORLD

I had just turned ten that December evening. As the commentators started their drivel my 15 year old brother stalked off to his room and slammed the door. I looked back from where I sat cross-legged on the floor to see my 13 year old sister and my mother quietly weeping in each other's arms. I scooted around to face my father and asked him, "Dad, what did they just say?"

"They were saying that you and your brother and sister are the last of your breed."

"What's that mean, Daddy?"

"It means that your children will be like Jamie, Rory's godson."

"You mean everybody's going to be black?"

"No, it means they will all have flippers instead of legs, like him."

I looked down at my legs, folded in front of me, and ran my hands across them, trying to imagine life without them. "Wow," I exclaimed as I tried to absorb this news.

Now I am eighty-five years old and need a wheelchair to get around. I remember how each year as I grew up more and more of the "new-type" children as they were mostly called, began to appear in school and on the street. The geneticists had said that one in four children of the first generation of mothers carrying the mutant gene would be born with legs. What happened was that most children with what was called the "old trait" miscarried in the first trimester. Medicine and science lacked a clear explanation of the phenomenon, but the fact was that fewer than one in two hundred of old-type children were born alive and healthy.

My Sandy, God rest her soul, and I married when she was 22 and I 23. She, like virtually every woman in the world her age, carried the mutant gene. We had four children, two boys and two girls, all born with the new trait. We lost one old-type boy to miscarriage. We lived in a new subdivision and almost all our neighbors were young couples like ourselves. Nearly all the children our kids played and went to school with were new-type. They tended to think of the few children they encountered walking on legs as somehow part of our generation, belonging to the past.

There were lots of government and commercial schemes to develop sophisticated mobility aids for the new-type people, but in the end the lightweight rigid-frame hand powered wheelchair proved the most practical for everyday getting around, and the handcycle for fun. Handwalking was the norm around the home. Simple rounded wooden blocks shaped to the hand, with a leather or fabric strap to fit across the top, became the twenty-first century's answer to shoes.

Now, at the dawn of the twenty-second century, everyone under fifty is new-type. An unexpected benefit of the new trait was the practical elimination of cardiac and circulatory problems, since the new way of mobility led to greater everyday fitness. The new-type people can't imagine why we put up with legs so long - as if we had somehow engineered the mutation.

I often think of that evening three-quarters of a century ago, when the good sense and courage of President McDonough and his family led the world to face the challenge of a whole new way of life with optimism and firmness of purpose. It used to sadden me that Rory did not live to see the world undertake this change so positively and peacefully. He and his cousin Mike died in 2040 when the car Rory was driving hit a curve too fast and slid into a tree. The world grieved for a long time, but in the end the event perhaps imprinted more firmly into our minds what Rory and his family stood for. Not having legs is not the end of the world.