Supplejack
Page 27
“That’s fathers for you,” she said sadly. “Always trying to do the impossible.”
I smiled and gave her a squeeze. Sam nodded gently against my shoulder and we sat and waited for the local authorities to come and question us, or for SmartGuy’s rescue to arrive.
Epilogue
Four years have passed and Sam and I are expecting our first child. Shotgun has kindly offered to teach it how to dance the Polka, which he insists should be the national dance of our new independent state. Gilamens has promised to make him, or her, a household name and Barb and Malachite are already choosing names for their God-child. Cleopatra seems to be the preferred option if the child is a girl. Harry, of course, if it is a boy. Barb and Malachite want to have a child of their own as well and they’re practising as hard as they can.
The news of the moment is that Bell and New Grendel have merged after a long stand-off. Not a take-over as they shaped up to have, but a union of strength against Firestorm. They still have not located the Baeder Box, but without Kren and Shahn they do not have their hearts in the search. SmartGuy and Loni are keeping us well protected in case the new joint corporation thinks to visit us, but I don’t think they will.
Mind you, I don’t really care about it anymore. I’m a family man now and my life is lived more in reality than in virtual. So, things have changed and will continue to change. I don’t drink as much, I don’t take Gracelands and I’ve even learnt to enjoy sunlight on my skin. Though I really miss saunas and electric fans and cappuccino makers and…
But this life has its compensations. And when I look at Sam, I see how happy she is carrying the child and I think how marvellous it is to have our own flesh reborn. She glows with life and joy like a radiant sun.
I don’t know how I’ll be with a child, to be honest, not after having met my own clone. It is almost as if I can’t separate the child in Sam’s womb from the clone who insisted he was my son. There is a link there, somehow, which I can’t really explain. It is as if I felt in Patroclus the child who had died –, which doesn’t make sense when I say it out loud. Maybe it’s an aura thing. Or a reincarnation thing. As if there’s a continuation of my family tree in this child that Sam bears, but the clone is also a kind of limb grafted on the broken branch of the family tree that was the child Shahn bore.
See? I told you it didn’t make sense. I’ll have to ask Barb about it sometime, if I can get past Malachite’s evil-eyed looks. He’s still jealous of me.
Still, I feel pity for Patroclus because he was made in my image, not as the random merging of two lines of ancestors. He must feel the difference. I would if I was he. At least the lucky devil has my good looks!
Another thing I discovered about myself – once I had recovered from the whole ordeal – was how much of a gullible fool I was. I received a letter from Patroclus the other day, which showed me my folly – snail mail with no trace; just an envelope with my name and address dropped into the local Post Office who brought it out to me. It contained a media still labelled “Jack”. It was of a young boy, five years old and handsome and strong. Bright blue eyes and blonde hair. Long limbs and flashing smile. Shahn’s smile on my features.
I sat and stared at the image. He was not my own son, which I had first thought the photo contained –, but their son. The child was not a clone of my child at all, but something much more personal they had tried to trade.
I stared at the smiling face and tried imagining how I might have treated Jack as he got older and I became aware of him as Kren’s son and not mine. I wonder if I would have been tempted to try to keep the magical child on the knife blade like my father did, rocking it slowly along the knife, trying to keep it from an early demise by manipulating it to do things different from the parent flesh, to think differently, be different from what they were – even though I wasn’t its parent., but then I realised they had one strength that I never did. They made decisions that defied what their flesh was first created as, and they did so with minds alive and willing to go where I was too afraid to go. They, like Patroclus had said, knew Existence is in our mind, where the real person is. They created themselves, as we all do, from what they experienced rather than leaving it to some random event of birth.
I felt foolish then. Knew I’d been gullible. That I had wanted something so fiercely I wasn’t looking at the periphery while it all went wrong. I knew I’d been tunnelled. Used.
It was a hard lesson to take in. It must have been ten minutes before I realised that in a mirror on a shelf behind the boy was a blurred image of another, older child. No enhancing could pull out the details, but I did notice the child had Medusa tucked into his belt.
It was like looking through tear-filled eyes, but I knew that it was my child. This was Harry.
My first thought was at least Medusa was a good start to his own PAN, quickly followed by the thought that maybe Medusa would get back in touch with me later in his life.
But that wasn’t really all I thought when I looked at the image. It was more subtle than an Empty Nest syndrome type of reflection. I was thinking that Jack was a brother to my son., which meant, with Patroclus and Jack, Harry had a family who could love and care for him. Things would be okay for him. He’d make his own life. He’d find his own way.
But maybe all parents think that when their child leaves home. Even the parents of a clone.
The only thing I haven’t been able to work out is why Shahn and Kren gave me their child. Why did they not keep it themselves? Did they know they’d not succeed in their venture, or was there something else they had planned I’m unaware of? I got paranoid on that thought. I’ve had Sansan and the PAN running checks to find DNA matches since the question first popped into my mind because I have this terrible feeling they were clones as well.
As yet, there are no results.
So, things have changed. Not just in how I act, but in the way I think. Now, when I look down into a cutlery drawer and I see the cutlery in their little cubicles – father knife, mother fork, child spoon – ordered, segregated and lonely without each other – that’s when I reach down and pull out the tray and toss it away, leaving the cutlery lying in the bottom of the drawer in a happy family muddle.
The End
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue