They exchange a few words. I realize they speak very quickly. I can pick up the words “old-class-clone” and “Earth,” but the rest is too fast for me to understand. The one who smiled approaches the console of Prince’s sarcophagus.
“Hey, don’t you dare!” I snap, surprising even myself.
The clone faces me and talks to me slowly and patiently. “Don’t worry. Our orders don’t interfere with your task. We must simply bring this sarcophagus aboard our spacecraft.”
“My task is to watch over him,” I make clear.
“We know,” the second clone says, rolling his eyes.
“You will remain his guardian all the time,” the first clone continues. “We don’t want to steal him or take ownership or something. I assure you I don’t want to consider a frozen human more important than my own life. I haven’t been genetically modified for this.”
“Give it a rest,” the second clone says. “He understood. He’s not completely crazy. Yet.”
“Are you gone crazy?” the first clone asks, peering in my eyes.
“I… I don’t know…. Maybe a little….”
“If he were totally mad he’d have already jumped on us,” the second clone notes.
“All right.” The first clone removes the strap of a sort of weapon from his shoulder. I jump, scared, shielding the sarcophagus with my body.
“Don’t worry, it’s only a propellant engine,” the clone says. He shows me the object, keeping it on the palms of his hands: it’s a kind of dark metal pipe as big as my arm. “We put it under the sarcophagus to raise it and move it. Your frozen human won’t notice it. Do you trust me?”
“I… I….”
“You have to trust me,” the clone insists. “My name is Solartrance.”
The other clone startles. “No need to use your secret name!”
“He’s a clone, not a human!” Solartrance replies. Then, turning to me, he adds, “Humans still believe we call each other using our code number! Foolish, is it not? What’s your secret name?”
“Phaedrus….”
“Nice to meet you, Phaedrus. His name,” Solartrance adds, pointing to the second clone, “is Spacefrost. Appropriate. Right?”
Slowly, my mouth stretches in a hint of a smile.
I can’t believe I’m still able to smile.
I’D HAVE hardly allowed the two clones to do what they’re doing if I hadn’t known their secret names.
I stand and look while they attach the two dark metal cylinders under the edge of Prince’s sarcophagus. With astonishment, I see the tubes take life and emit a blue light. The coffin trembles and is lifted from the floor.
Spacefrost has a sort of remote control to direct the engines. The coffin moves in the air toward the elevator. The tubes emit only a low buzzing, and aside from the blue light, it seems the sarcophagus has begun to fly.
Solartrance smiles at me. “Come on. With all the transport systems turned off, we have to walk an hour to our rescue spacecraft.”
I follow them. We’re more than halfway when I realize I will probably leave Ship forever.
I wish I could have taken Book.
NOW I’M sitting here beside my Prince.
His new arrangement inside the little rescue spacecraft satisfies me. The ship is small, but some soft plastic dividers provide privacy. A thin layer of frost has formed on the outer surface of the lid, and I rub it with my fingertips to see Prince’s face.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right. This ship is smaller, but much more clean. No spiders.” I look around. “It’s so small, here. Obviously. The gravity is light and you have to be careful not to fly away, but in any case, the ceilings are so low there is no danger of getting hurt. They are also filled with a kind of foam. I haven’t seen everything yet, but the rest looks the same. The cot and sanitizer are just like mine. Here, of course, everything is new and working, but it’s more or less the same stuff I was used to. I don’t know what I expected, but I’m a little disappointed.”
I smile at him. “Do you know? I was scared like an idiot at the idea of leaving Ship. For all my life, Ship was my prison. But now I can’t help but think of Her, alone, empty, drifting in space….”
My eyes fill with tears.
“Crazy stuff, right?” I continue, my voice broken. “I know you’d laugh at this. I feel vulnerable and I suffer space sickness in this small spacecraft, and all I do is think about Outside pushing on this thin hull, but you’d laugh and say that mine is just a stupid reaction….”
Someone stands on the threshold of this small room. I fall silent.
It’s the clone named Solartrance. That is, I have no way of recognizing him, but he’s gentler than Spacefrost, so I think it’s him.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
I shrug. “Sure.”
He enters and looks at Prince for a while. “He’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” I say sorrowfully.
“You haven’t eaten your ration,” he says, pointing to the strange package they gave me. I simply placed it on the edge of the sarcophagus.
I shrug again. I don’t have the courage to tell him I didn’t know how to open the container.
Solartrance tilts his head and peers at me. “Can I sit down?”
“Yes,” I say, eyeing him. What does he want exactly? Why did he come? I’m not used to dealing with other people or other clones, apart from Blasius or Prince, and I don’t know how to behave.
He sits on the edge, beside me. “How many broad cycles have you been out there, Phaedrus?”
“Twenty-eight. All my life.”
“Without depressant rations?”
I frown. “What are they?”
Solartrance nods. “This is probably the reason why you suffer from space insanity, even if slightly.”
I blink.
“Listen, Phae,” the clone says, picking up my ration. “You have to open this container on top, tuck the straw inside, and drink it all. It contains everything your body needs: nutrients and vitamins and minerals. In addition, it also contains a drug that will make you sleep for a cycle of twenty-two hours.”
I gasp. “Twenty-two?”
“Yes,” he says, putting the ration in my hands. “During deep space travel, we sleep in cycles of twenty-two hours. The two remaining hours are more than enough to control all the systems, communicate our position, check that everything is working, use the sanitizer, and drink another ration.”
I look at him in wonder. I always slept in cycles of five hours. The pace was regulated by Ship. The lights went on for nineteen hours and remained off for five hours.
“It isn’t like sleeping inside a sarcophagus,” Solartrance says. “Your body ages anyway. But at least you avoid the space madness.”
He smiles at my bewildered expression. “Humans consider us clones expendable. They don’t use expensive technologies with the only purpose of not wasting our lives during space travel. But at least we are given the drug. In this way, humans avoid mutinies.”
“And clones are okay with this?” I ask naively.
Solartrance laughs. “No. How can we be? Humans want to believe we have no feelings and we are different from them. We were also equipped with different eyes so they can increase the distance between the two races.”
“How can you continue to serve humans?” I ask. “Why don’t you rebel?”
“Because humans are stronger and keep us under control. Not all the clones are aware of what I’m saying to you. Most are kept in ignorance.” Solartrance sighs, looking at his hands resting on his knees. “When we’re too old to carry out our tasks, we go to recycling. They put us into a capsule and a lethal gas kills our bodies. We are dismantled into proteins used in the amniotic fluid of the wombs in which other clone embryos grow.”
“Oh, Corp!” I exclaim, shocked.
Solartrance stares at me. “I want to believe that when I close my eyes in the recycling capsule, I’ll reopen them as a new clone.”
I think of Blasius, who told me n
ot to be sad for his death because we are the same person and he will live in me. My eyes fill.
“Maybe we are lucky enough to wake up in clones who make a better life,” Solartrance continues. “Or maybe one day things will change and we can finally start a revolution. Who knows? The important thing is, don’t lose hope.”
Solartrance grabs my ration out of my hands and opens it for me. “Drink this, Phae. Your journey will be more bearable.”
I take my ration of drug. “Thanks, Solartrance.”
He nods.
THE DRUG makes me dream of Prince. For another nine years.
At first the dream is a memory of the short time we spent together. Then it is enhanced with details, speeches, and situations, and I live a sort of parallel life in which, in my sleep, I deal and live and make love with my Prince again. We aren’t inside Ship, but inside the luxuriant page of Book. Mostly we walk hand in hand along the mysterious path, and the grass is soft beneath our bare feet. Sometimes we sit on the grassy bank and talk and make plans, and discuss the wonderful things that await us at the end of the trail, or we make love, or simply sit together in silence. The place is nice, the path promising, but the best thing is to have Prince with me. I don’t even care so much about what we’ll find at the end of the trail.
Because the important thing—the great gift—is just walking the path beside him.
Chapter 10
ONE CYCLE, at my awakening, Solartrance gives me a ration slightly different from the others. I examine the cubic package in my hands. Solid food.
For nine years I didn’t eat solid food.
“We need to stop taking drugs and start staying awake,” Solartrance explains to me when I stare at him in amazement, the package of dried food in my hand. “Our ship is in approaching route to the military base orbiting around Otherworld.”
I simply gaze at him, so Solartrance drags me to the cockpit. When I look out of the tiny porthole on the nose of our spacecraft, I almost scream.
A big, colorful celestial body floats in front of us. It’s so great, so damn huge, it fills the entire porthole. Its size makes me dizzy. I’m sure its orbit will swallow us.
But then another object comes between our spacecraft and the scary planet. A metallic, uneven cluster full of protrusions, turrets, and antennas, and the gleaming of assorted nuclear engines. It’s huge, too. Not as much as the planet, but bigger than our spacecraft.
“The orbiting base,” Solartrance says, pointing at the thing with his finger. “We’ll land there in three hours.”
So this is the end.
My body becomes ice. Thirty-seven years have passed since my birth, and now my trip is over. Prince’s body will arrive at his destination alive, young and perfect as when he left. My mission has been successfully completed.
I should be happy. I should be satisfied and proud of myself; instead, I’m tired and drained and deadly scared.
I run to the sarcophagus. I curl up on the metal edge, leaning to look at Prince’s icy face, at his eyes open and covered with frost.
“I did it,” I say. “We arrived, Prince. Now they’ll awaken you. And… and I don’t know what is going to happen. I hope you’ll remember me. I hope so.”
My heart hammers in anxiety and fear against my rib cage. Prince said he would find a way for us to be together. But he’ll remember the promise? He’ll remember me? And worse, is it fair, forcing him to maintain such a commitment? I shouldn’t interfere in his life, I know. He’s still a boy of twenty, and I’m an old battered clone of almost forty. Do I really have to afflict him with a promise he made me eighteen years ago, at a time when he was scared and upset?
“I can’t answer these questions, Prince. I’m just a poor stupid clone. What I really want is for you to be okay. And I’ll make sure they treat you the right way, I swear.”
I stay next to Prince, as always, for the time Spacefrost and Solartrance deal with the approaching maneuvers. I feel, however, our spacecraft bumping and jolting when we land inside the orbiting base. In a few minutes, some weird soldier clones flock into the cubicle and surround me.
I’ve never seen such scary clones. They are a full head taller than me, wearing dark, matte metal armors, their bare arms swollen with overdeveloped muscles, and strange things implanted in points of their bodies and faces, like breathing tubes and communication devices. All have elongated eyes completely black inside, like insects.
One of them looms over me. “Royal Guard of Senator Coburn,” he says, in a voice so low and deep it makes my stomach liquid. “You can get off the sarcophagus, guardian.”
Okay. There’s not much I can do. I get up and move away just one step, and I observe, anxious, as the soldiers stick some portable engines under the sarcophagus. Although the clones are big and spine-chilling, my instinct is to jump on them and get them to leave Prince alone, leave him to me. I have to repeat to myself that they aren’t here to hurt him.
The portable engines switch on, and the sarcophagus rises with all its precious cargo. Anguish grabs my throat. I remain stuck to the coffin while the senator’s soldiers direct it toward the door, and then toward an unloading ramp magically opened in the tail of our spacecraft.
At the bottom of the ramp, one of the clones puts his enormous hand on my chest. “From now on we deal with it. Your task is concluded, guardian.”
My blood turns to ice. I was afraid of this. I clench my fists. “He’s not yet awake!”
“Your task is to watch over the human during the trip, not to attend in his awakening.”
“But… but I have to! I promised!”
I practically shout the last sentence.
The clone peers at his companions. “We have to call the biomedical service. Another one is gone crazy.”
Heat begins to spread on my face. Oh no. They can’t. They can’t take Prince away from me like this. I take a step aside, in the hope of bypassing the big clone and continuing to follow the sarcophagus, which is dangerously moving away from me, and instead I find myself slammed to the ground, aching and stunned, not even remembering how or when the gigantic clone hit me.
They are really doing it. They are separating Prince from me.
I jump in assault, but someone clings to my waist, keeping me still.
Solartrance.
“Let me go!” I scream. “Let me, they’re taking him away!”
“They will kill you, Phae!”
“I don’t care! Let me go!”
Solartrance is perhaps my only friend. But I beat him. I hit him with my fists and kick and scream. He’s probably right, those monstrous clones will kill me, but I can’t remain here and watch while they take away my Prince. The sarcophagus enters the depths of the orbiting base and disappears from my view.
My heart breaks apart.
OTHER CLONES come, and they are too many. They immobilize me with a sort of cage that holds my arms clasped behind my back. I can’t do anything except scream and cry, my face pressed against the dirty floor.
“Phae?”
I blink. Solartrance kneels next to me. He bleeds. I split his lip with a punch.
“I want my Prince,” I mutter.
Solartrance sighs. “If you behave like that, they take you straight to recycling.”
“I don’t give a shit. I want my Prince!”
“I’ll deal with him,” Solartrance says to someone outside my field of vision. “I’ll calm him down.”
“Must be recycled, you know,” someone says.
“I got it!” Solartrance insists.
The others leave.
Solartrance turns me on my back, then drags me to sit up. My head whirls wildly for a moment. My face is caked with grease, tears, and mucus.
“Phae, look at me,” Solartrance says, shaking me slightly.
I focus on him. “You can’t understand. My life is useless without him!”
“I know. But your task is ended. You have to accept it. Please, Phae, prove you’re able to take another task, or you w
ill be recycled!”
“I don’t want another task! I want my Prince!”
Solartrance sighs. “You need to let your human go, Phae.”
“No!”
Spacefrost approaches from the chute of our spacecraft. “Leave him alone,” he says to Solartrance. “He’s just crazy.”
I clean my face on my shoulder. We are on a dark and crowded landing deck, a kind of platform for small vessels. In a lower level, in a darkness flashing with lights and strange machinery, I catch a glimpse of another huge deck where colossal, elongated spaceships are lined up, gleaming in the dim light. The open space and invisible ceiling, after nine years in a small ship, make me feel dizzy, but I’m too jumbled to care.
“You don’t understand,” I say, trying to stop the trembling in my voice. I appeal to Solartrance, looking directly in his eyes. “I have promised to be present at his awakening. I gave my word. And Prince said he would find a way to stay with me.”
Solartrance frowns. “It’s a dream, Phae. Your human can’t have spoken to you.”
“He spoke to me!” I yell. But then I realize my only hope to be believed is to not sound crazy. And I want them to believe me.
I take a breath. “We had an emergency and he woke up,” I continue, trying to maintain a firm tone. “He spoke to me. And I… I began to be in love with him.”
Solartrance stares at me, wide-eyed, in silence.
“Absurd,” Spacefrost snaps. In these years, he hasn’t been close to me like Solartrance. “Even if this really happened, which I doubt, you can’t mean anything to a human.”
“It’s not true! He’s different. It’s strange, I know, but he isn’t like the other humans.” My eyes fill with tears at the overwhelming memory of the short time I spent with Prince. After eighteen years, I still miss him excruciatingly. “He is special. He has feelings for me.”
“Are you saying that your human… reciprocates your feelings?” Solartrance asks.
“I hope so,” I say. I swallow back the tears. “No, I’m sure of this. He said he would find a way to keep me with him. Even if he has to marry the senator, he could keep me as a servant, or something like that. But first I have to be there when he wakes up, to find out if… if he really remembers me.”
Bright Star Page 10
