Death of a Clone

by Alex Thomson

  They are horrible places.

  Lily has a morbid fear of getting stuck down one, and avoids them at all possible cost. Just a few cycles ago, I remember we were both on shift at the same time—me in the ore depot, she in the stores—and she tapped into my suit channel.

  “Lei, did you see Aaron? He had a big red gash down his thigh. A strut collapsed—a big chunk of swag fell down and trapped his leg.”

  “Like Avery,” I said.

  “Yeah. But the thing about Aaron—it was the end of his shift, Andy came to find him. Imagine if that had happened at the start of your shift, and you were stuck down there for hours and hours. You can’t move in any direction, your face shoved up against the wall…” There was an audible shudder.

  “You’d just have to blank out,” I said. “Retreat somewhere else in your mind.”

  “Are you crazy? Just forget about it, ho-hum, let’s go to a pretty place in my head?”

  “It’s not so different from when we’re back in the cabin,” I pointed out. “You’ve got a bit more space to move your body, but not that much. I’d far rather spend the time in my head.”

  Lily made no reply, but I could hear her breathing, and I knew she was considering it; then the breathing stopped and I knew she was thinking about being trapped in a tunnel again.

  3

  AN UNFORTUNATE ACCIDENT

  THE ROTA TAKES pride of place in the Community cabin—a grid of three by six giant sheets of paper, showing the consecutive cycles, and what everyone is doing every hour of every cycle. Every five cycles, the leftmost pieces of paper are removed for archiving, and everything is shifted to the left. Only the Overseers can add to or amend the Rota (well, they’re the only ones who have learned to write). Notionally, all three Overseers are responsible, but it is Mr Ortiz’s labour of love, evident in every perfect line and immaculately shaded square.

  It is the single most boring thing ever created on Hell.

  I mean, I don’t object to a rota in principle, and I daresay Mr Ortiz’s scheduling is the most efficient way to go about our work, but there’s something about it that makes me want to vomit. The Ays treat it as their sacred text, and even the Bees have a tendency to be less cynical than usual when confronted with it.

  Mr Ortiz often overcomplicates the Rota, searching for the algorithms that will optimise our performance and keep up with our quotas. I have walked into the Community cabin before, to find him standing, hands on hips, surveying the Rota, eyebrows knitted in furious concentration. Personally, I think he has too much time on his hands. Unlike the Bees (or even we two Ells), the Ays don’t need a lot of guidance—there’s not a lot he can tell them. He strikes me as the most directionless person on the asteroid, desperately looking for a purpose here, a way to contribute.

  I HAVE WOKEN up from a sleep shift, and am standing by the Rota, figuring out when I will see Lil. She is due back in the next hour, leaving a window of two hours before my next work shift. I turn my back on the Rota, and decide to pay a visit to Mr Lee. Up the spine I go, past our tunnel, past the Ays’ and Bees’ tunnels—muffled, angry voices—to the end of the spine, which bifurcates twice into the tunnels for Messrs Ortiz, Reynolds and Lee—and Mr Fedorchuk’s old cabin.

  I take the far left tunnel, and knock three times briskly on the door of Mr Lee’s cabin.

  “Enter,” he says, and in I go.

  “Hello, Leila,” he says.

  “Hello.”

  His face is pale, and he is sat on his cot, palms on his knees.

  “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “Marvellous,” he says. “What news?”

  “Just wanted to check in. I need a recommendation.”

  One of the quirks of our relationship is that our interaction is largely via the medium of a sort of book club, discussing the literature of a culture (nineteenth, twentieth century Britain and America) that is barely relevant to contemporary Earth, let alone contemporary Hell.

  Before leaving Earth, Mr Lee managed to fill his reader with hundreds of old English language texts, from Hardy to Roth. At some point, after I’d been pestering him with questions about Earth, he lent the reader to me, and I greedily gobbled up The Go-Between, about a world he admitted bore no resemblance to the one he had left. But a beautiful world, all the same. From there, I never looked back. He let me borrow it again and again, working my way through Waugh, Austen, Orwell, Updike, and countless others I’ve forgotten.

  At the moment, I am going through an Agatha Christie phase. “I’ve finished Endless Night,” I say. “Need something new.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Loved it. The Poirots and Marples can be a bit neat, you know? A bit too pat.”

  “Like crossword puzzles.”

  “Right. But when she ditches the detectives, you really start to feel for the characters. I mean, with a Poirot murderer, they’re just a puzzle you’ve got to solve, you don’t really see them as people. But here, it’s sad, because you don’t want the murderer to be evil, and you realise it’s been staring at you in the face the whole time.”

  “You should try Dorothy Sayers,” he says, “or even Ngaio Marsh. They’re from the same era, I think you’d like them.”

  “How come there’s so many of these murder mystery books?” I ask. “Were there loads of murders back then?”

  “I don’t think so. Most people live pretty humdrum lives, you know. And a murder is a pretty horrific thing to happen.”

  He stands up abruptly. He always looks uneasy in his body, like it’s the wrong size for him or something. Mr Ortiz and Mr Reynolds look completely at home in their boiler suits and plain tunics, but with Mr Lee—dainty, even smaller than the Jays—you feel like he belongs in something tailored, in the bold colours you can see on the posters the Overseers brought with them.

  I wonder if he’s on the pills that the Overseers have—supposedly they’re just to help them sleep, though we all think they’re more than that; whenever Mr Reynolds has too many, he acts bizarrely, talking gibberish, and one of the Bees has to take him back to his cabin. Mr Lee and Mr Ortiz don’t seem to take them so much, but even they occasionally seem a bit out of it.

  Mr Lee wanders over to his filing cabinet, where a small photograph stands, of his wife and two children. He doesn’t talk about them much.

  He scratches at a point below his ear, a tic he does all the time. “I wish I’d brought a p-book with me,” he says. “They take a while to get used to, but you’d have liked them.”

  My reply is cut off as there is a knock at the door, and Mr Reynolds walks in, without waiting for a reply.

  “Wotcher,” he says. “Not interrupting anything, am I?” Even at the best of times, his voice is an ugly leer. When I hear it, my muscles tense and I find myself squeezing my fingers together.

  They try not to show it in front of us, but Mr Lee and Mr Reynolds heartily dislike each other. Mr Lee betrays himself with blank politeness, Mr Reynolds by the way he swaggers around him, like an animal squaring up for a fight. Mr Lee never says anything, but I can tell. Their faces both say they’re spoiling to thrash out an argument one of these cycles, but I guess when there are just three of you, you can’t afford to make enemies.

  “What can I do for you?” Mr Lee says, turning his back and busying himself with nothing.

  Mr Reynolds steps closer to him, ignoring me. His scraggy beard bristles, like it’s alive. He is the biggest person on Hell, but his movements are slow and ponderous—I’d fancy an Ay or a Jay in a fight with him.

  “One of your girls,” Mr Reynolds says, with a sideways glance at me, “never turned up for her shift.”

  Mr Lee turns. “What?”

  “L3,” he says, “she went AWOL—one of my girls was driving a shift over to East 9, they waited half an hour for her—she never showed.”

  “Who from your team?”

  “B4 and B6. They just got back.” He doesn’t always talk like this, sometimes he uses our names, but other times it’s
like he’s trying to make some kind of point—whatever it is, it’s too subtle for me to work out, or care.

  Mr Lee looks over at me. “You know anything about this?”

  I shrug. “I haven’t seen Lily”—I resist the impulse to meet Mr Reynolds’ eyes—for two cycles. Must be some cock-up with the Rota.”

  Mr Reynolds stares at me hard, then juts his chin in my direction. “Check her brand,” he says. “Make sure there’s no funny games going on.”

  My brand twitches. “That’ll do,” Mr Lee snaps. “This is Leila, I know my girls. Now, why don’t we go to the Rota, and see what we can see?”

  The three of us head out of Mr Lee’s cabin, into the spine, Mr Reynolds marching ahead.

  “Bess,” he barks, and I hear movement in the Bees’ cabin, and then unhurried footsteps, as Bess comes to follow us.

  Into the Community cabin, which is empty—though there are a few noises coming from the Leisure cabin, a few feet away from us. The four of us approach the Rota, and Mr Reynolds slaps a meaty finger on the relevant square, showing Lily on the shift, along with two Bees and two Ays. The Bees have since returned in Tomato (the red buggy), leaving the Ays working down the mineshafts.

  Mr Lee frowns. “She can’t have gone with the previous shift. The Jays have taken Banana and Cabbage out to the south.”

  Four of the Jays, with two Bees and Mr Ortiz, were scouting out a new site in South 4, and exploring how easy it was to dig there. There was no way Lily could have joined them by mistake—or that the others would have even let her.

  “In which case,” says Mr Reynolds, “she must be on the base somewhere.”

  “Did you try suit comms?” Mr Lee asks Bess sharply.

  “Of course,” she says. “Nothing.”

  “Let’s start looking, then,” says Mr Reynolds.

  “Leila and I will take care of it,” Mr Lee says.

  “Not at all,” says Mr Reynolds, grinning widely. “The more, the merrier.”

  We search in silence. ‘Search’ is perhaps over-egging it—we peer around the door of each cabin; there’s nowhere to hide in them, not really. In the Leisure cabin, Ashton is bench-pressing, while two of the Bees are talking. Our cabin is empty, the Jays’ cabin has two sleeping Jays (Jupiter and Jolly, supposedly). Likewise, Andy and Alistair are asleep in theirs, and in the Bees’ cabin, Betty is washing her face, suit half-removed after her shift.

  Bess stays with her sister, and I walk up the spine with the two Overseers. We check the empty cabin of Mr Fedorchuk, and Mr Lee raps on the locked door of Mr Ortiz (“Just in case,” he says), but there is no reply and we face each other.

  “What now?” says Mr Reynolds, and the weird mixture of Mr Lee’s irritation and Mr Reynolds’ glee is gone now. Both men look wary. Needles of pain flare up at the base of my skull, like they always do in moments of stress.

  “Let’s count the suits,” says Mr Lee, and off we go to the airlock where the suits are found, next to Mr Reynolds’ cabin. He types in the code, the doors open, and we step into the airlock—just one set of doors now separating us from Hell’s near-vacuum.

  There were originally thirty-five suits, for the team of twenty-eight, with seven spares. Three suits are no longer functioning, so we have thirty-two left, of which ten should be in use at the moment. We count and double-count, but there are only twenty-one suits in the airlock.

  “Okay,” says Mr Lee. “So, she’s out there somewhere. Leila, suit up, we’d better find her and make sure everything is alright.”

  “Well, hang on,” says Mr Reynolds, “are you taking Tomato? Won’t this mess up the Rota?”

  “Bugger the Rota,” says Mr Lee. “Go and inform the next shift of the changes.”

  Mr Reynolds retreats, with a glare at Mr Lee’s back, and the two of us change into our suits. I type in the code for the outer doors, and we head towards Tomato. Beyond the glare of the base lights, it’s dawn on Hell, another cycle fast beginning. As always, there’s that numb, ghostly sensation as you step outside, like breaching the skin of a giant bubble, and it sealing up again behind you. By an unspoken agreement, I climb into Tomato’s driving seat, and Mr Lee gets in next to me. He hates driving; he’ll do it if he has to, but with none of the relish that the other two Overseers display when controlling the jeeps.

  “Let’s check out the depots first,” Mr Lee says to me on my channel. “It’s got to be the most likely place.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Metal poles have been forced into the ground, pointing in different directions, acting as rough signposts. I do a U-turn, and set a course for the depots. Neither of us seems to be in the mood for conversation. I focus on driving Tomato, which for some reason feels more difficult in the sunlight, when you can see every bump and crack on the asteroid’s surface. I drive fast, and can see Mr Lee’s hand is gripping the door handle as we career down the slope to the depots.

  We arrive at the ore depot, and I clamber out of the jeep. There is no sign of life, but then there never is. Just having two of us walk into the depot feels crowded, quite frankly. This is my realm, mine and Lily’s, and on the rare occasions I have a visitor, I can barely stay still, so nervous I am about them moving some of the swag or knocking over the painstakingly arranged crates. Not that I’d ever say anything—I’m not that pathetic—but it’s an instinct I can’t fight. We don’t have much of our own, Lily and I, but we have this, the depot, and you mess with it at your peril.

  “Lily?” I call out loud, then realise I’m being stupid, then realise Mr Lee can’t hear me either so I can say whatever I damn well like. I try her channel, again, but the only noise is the dead hum of a closed channel. Mr Lee makes some hand gestures that aren’t very clear, I ignore them and we just spread out and walk up and down the rows of crates. Pretty soon, I know she’s not here; it’s a sense you get for these things when it’s your sister.

  The silence sounds the same as you always get on Hell, but it’s different somehow too, heavier, more stifling. I pass crate after crate, idly brushing my fingers against the black chips that poke over the edges. This is a waste of time, I know it. I see Mr Lee peering around the edge of a crate, as though she’s hiding there, legs tucked in, curled into herself like an embryo.

  I connect to his channel. “She’s not here,” I say. “Stores next.”

  He turns, sees me, and nods without speaking. We climb into Tomato, and take the short hop to the stores.

  As soon as we walk in, I see something’s wrong. Boxes have been opened, the contents spilled across the floor. On the rows of shelves, water drums and gas canisters are no longer in neat lines but roughly shoved apart, creating fissures all along the rows.

  “Someone’s been here,” I say to Mr Lee, and he raises his eyebrows.

  “Could it be Lily?” he asks.

  “Not impossible… but this mess—it’s like they were trying to find something. Lily would have known exactly where everything was.”

  “Okay. Who, then?”

  I shrug and take a look at the open boxes. Pouches of freeze-dried food lie scattered. Further into the stores, order seems to have returned, as though the intruder was hunting around and realised the impossible size of the task, so stormed out in frustration. The silence stretches out. And still no sign of Lily.

  WHEN WE ARRIVE at the site of South 4, two figures are standing, unmoving, by Banana, as our jeep pulls up with a flurry of ore dust. One of them has a grey stripe running down his boiler suit—it must be Mr Ortiz—and Mr Lee opens a three-way channel with me.

  “We’re looking for Lily,” he says. “Have you seen her?”

  “Lily?” says Mr Ortiz. “No, why? What would she be doing here?”

  “You didn’t see her around when you left base?”

  “Nope.” A slight pause. “Check the Rota, pal. How many times have I said it? The Rota is the final authority.”

  Mr Ortiz has been in a foul mood for the last few cycles, ever since his taser went missing. He threw some thre
ats around, mainly at the Jays—but the general consensus is that he mislaid it somewhere out in the tunnels. There’s a spare for him, but he’s clearly not happy at being made to look a fool.

  Mr Lee doesn’t bother to respond. He drums his fingers on the dashboard, I can’t hear it, but I feel the rhythm, da-da-da da, da-da-da da. “Okay,” he says. “Where next?”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “She can’t have just walked off by herself. What’s she playing at?”

  There’s a crackle as another channel is patched in, and the figure next to Mr Ortiz glances up at him. “Jolly, they’re looking for Lily,” Mr Ortiz says. “Any ideas?”

  All I can hear is the shallow breathing of the three men. “Lily… Lily…” Jolly muses. “Let me think. I’ve seen her before in the tunnels. Talking to the Ays. Maybe she’s there?”

  “Doesn’t sound much like Lily,” I say. “She hated the tunnels. Which ones?”

  “The warren in East 5,” he says.

  I glance at Mr Lee. It’s where the two Ays are to be found, still working and waiting for relief. “I guess we should check it out,” I say. “We’re running out of other options.”

  Jolly offers to come with us, and the three of us set off for East 5, along a craggy path that climbs through the black dunes. It is silent in the jeep. I keep my eyes on the path and try to ignore the rising panic in my gut.

  THERE IS NO sign of the Ays at East 5, nor even a hint as to which tunnel they’re working in. I try their channels, but there is no signal. I try Lily’s channel again, reflexively, hopelessly. Mr Lee seems to sense my nerves, and places his gloves on the small of my back. There’s a crackle as he patches through a three-way, and then he says: “If you find Aaron or Andrew, bring them back and ask for their help.”