“It’s called a baseball,” she’d said. “Young people from your time, they played with it.” She held it out, smiling. “Who knows, maybe your original did.”
Jack had looked up a description of baseball in one of the books that filled the little cottage he and Sam and Inga-296 had shared back then, before Sam brought Jack to live in the labs in town. Before she died. The book said you needed nine people to make a team, so now he just tossed the ball at the side of the house. If the clones ever wanted to play, even with their lousy coordination, they already had their nine models. They wouldn’t include him.
Sam stopped watching the ball. He frowned at Jack while Jack ignored him, each trying to outlast the other. Sam finally heaved a breath and gave in.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said. “It’s not safe outside the wall. You need to come home.”
“This is my home.” Jack felt familiar resentment welling in his veins.
“This hasn’t been your home for years. Your home is in Vispera.”
Jack tossed the ball. “You should have told me.”
“My brother told you.”
“You should have told me. You act like you’re all the same person, but you’re not. You’re different from them.”
Sam bristled. “I’m not different from them. They’re Samuels, and I’m a Samuel.”
“They’re Samuels. You’re Sam. Don’t send them to me thinking I can’t tell the difference. They don’t care about me. They wouldn’t care if I died.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Jack knew Sam didn’t really believe they’d care, but he let the man lie to him.
“I’m sorry, Jack. The Council won’t budge.”
“You’re on the Council. Did you even try?”
“Of course I did.”
“It’s that fat Carson, isn’t it? He thinks I’m a freak, and the others listen to him.”
“It’s all of them. They think it’d be disruptive.”
It wasn’t fair. He was turning seventeen, just like the Gen-310s, and he should be in the Declaration with them. He’d had as much of an education sitting in the labs as they had at school. More, he’d guess. It was just like last year, when they wouldn’t let him participate in the Gen’s first Pairing Ceremony. He’d wanted to, desperately, but the Council had said no, citing that disastrous day at the school.
That night, when everyone had Paired for the first time except him, he’d watched their celebration hidden in the branches of a tall tree. They’d danced and eaten colorful foods he’d never seen before. The girls wore gauzy dresses, and the boys wore the ceremonial robes tied with leather belts, and in the evening they’d all chosen their partner for the first Pairing and then spent the rest of the evening laughing together and talking. Jack wasn’t even allowed to sit at the table with the Gens in the Commons for their meal. Sam would bring him potatoes and carrots from the dining halls, or rice and lentils, and sometimes Sam would stay and eat with him, but mostly he was alone. For Jack, those nights were the worst. And it would all happen again tonight after the Declaration. They would eat and dance and laugh, they would Declare and let the community know what apprenticeship they’d chosen, and then they’d Pair in the evening.
The laughter of the children in the schoolyard carried up the hill on a breeze. Usually they romped on climbing ropes, swings, and slides that the Ingas had made for them, but today they played a game. The children stood in a row with their fisted hands extended, while a single girl walked down the line and cupped their hands in her own one by one. Jack had seen this game before. Sam had told him it was called Button. One child would hold a button in his hand, and the rest would pretend they also had a button. The finder had to guess who actually had it. When Jack had first seen it, he’d thought the point of the game was to keep the secret of having the button, but he’d been wrong. He slowly figured out that the child wanted to be found out. If they played the game well, everyone would know where the button was. It was a way for them to practice communing, not just with their siblings, which seemed to come easily to them, but with the other children in their Gen.
The laughter stopped as abruptly as it’d started, and even from a distance Jack could tell that smiles had spread across their faces as if they’d all heard the same joke at the same time, though nothing had been said. There were no words in this game. Another eruption of laughter ran through the group in eerie unison.
Sam had once tried to describe communing to Jack. He’d had difficulty finding the right words, like describing colors to someone who’d never seen them. He said communing was like a murmuring, a sort of whisper of emotions passing from one clone to another when they touched or were close. They didn’t know each other’s thoughts, but they sensed each other’s feelings.
Jack couldn’t commune, of course. He could never play their strange, silent games, and maybe they’d never let him participate in their rituals and ceremonies. But why shouldn’t he be in the Declaration? It only happened once, and then they could send him back to his room in the labs and forget again that he ever existed. What harm would it do to let him be part of the community in this small way? He hadn’t asked to exist. He’d heard the Council talk. They called him an experiment, like one of their genetically modified cows. They called him a de-extinction project, and maybe they called him an accident, but they had created him.
Earlier that morning, the jagged cliffs in the distance had been covered in gray mist, now burned away. They’d looked like prehistoric beasts hiding under the earth. Jack wondered, as he always did, what lay beyond those hills.
“I could leave,” Jack said. “Grab supplies, go to the jungle. Nobody would care anyway.”
“You can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Sam said, puffing out his cheeks, “you would die in the jungle. You can’t survive out there alone. I’ve kept you safe here because Inga-296 asked me to. I’m not going to stop now. She said we needed you.”
“That’s a joke, Sam. No one here needs me.”
Sam’s eyes lingered on the baseball that had fallen idle in Jack’s hands. “I know you come here because of the Inga. I know you miss her.”
Jack touched the bead around his neck. He was surprised Sam had mentioned her. Inga-296 had called herself Jack’s mother, even though mothers didn’t exist in Vispera. Jack hadn’t cried about her in years, not since he was little, because early on he’d sensed too keenly Sam’s discomfort with Jack’s emotions at losing her. It was one of the many things that kept Jack apart from everyone else. The clones didn’t miss anyone. They saw themselves as the countless iterations that they were. A part of a whole. Replaceable. But Inga, his mother, had been different from anyone else in Vispera. She’d been different from the other Ingas. She had loved him.
“Of course I miss her. She was my mother.”
“Yes, your mother.” Jack noticed how the word mother rolled in Sam’s mouth, foreign and strange. Not unpleasant, just something to work his tongue around, like a sour candy. “I didn’t agree with her using that term, but she’d taken charge of the experiment, so I didn’t argue. Now I think perhaps I should have.” Sam spoke more to himself than to Jack. “And maybe it was a mistake for her to give you all those books.”
Sam was talking about the human books. The ones Sam never read. Jack had learned about humans by reading those books, and one of the things he’d learned was how, even though the humans couldn’t commune, they still cared about each other. Maybe it would never be enough to tell Sam how he felt and Sam was capable of caring about someone only if emotions emanated from them like a cloud of reeking smoke.
Deep down, even Jack sometimes wished his mother hadn’t given him the books. According to Sam, she’d been the one who wanted to raise him in the cottage on the edge of the jungle, outside the walls of Vispera. She’d wanted to raise him the way his original might have been, the way a human boy would have been raised in human times—with a home
, parents, with human books and games and his own bedroom instead of a line of beds in a dorm. She’d raised him to give him some sense of who he was as a human, when really all he wanted was to be like everyone else and have friends his own age. Sometimes he resented all the ways his mother had made him different. And then, in the process, she’d made herself different too, and that had ended in the worst possible way.
“I’m sorry you won’t be part of the ceremony, Jack. But listen, I do have good news. The Council has agreed to let you have an apprenticeship. We’ll meet with you after the ceremony, and they’ll let you Declare.”
“Declare an apprenticeship?” Jack hadn’t considered this possibility that they might let him have a job in town, serve some useful purpose. He stood. “I’ll show them my music,” he said, thinking of the instrument Sam had given him years ago that was tucked away in the lab.
It’s a guitar, Sam had said back then. At least, that’s what the catalogue in the Tunnels called it. As a child, Jack had built a crude wooden box with strings pulled across the top, trying to mimic the sound of the human recordings his mother had given him. Once Sam had figured out what he was trying to do, he’d brought Jack the guitar from the Tunnels. From the beginning, Jack had been entranced.
“I can tell them how it works,” Jack said. “I’ll explain the history and play for them.”
“That’s a bad idea,” Sam said, eyeing him worriedly. “They won’t understand. I don’t even understand it, and I’ve been listening to you play for years.”
Jack had learned a long time ago that the guitar mystified the clones. He played it sometimes in his room during the day as the lab workers outside the door peered into their microscopes. They’d cast him sideways glances, grumbling under their breaths, but the resonant sounds and the strings under his fingers soothed him. Sometimes playing his guitar was the only thing that made him feel sane, the only thing that made him feel like he could keep trying for another day.
In the beginning, watching Sam’s reaction to the sound, it had taken a while before Jack understood. The clones actually couldn’t hear the music. No, that wasn’t right. They could hear it, but they couldn’t hear it. They called it noise and compared it to the drone of insects outside in the forest. Once or twice, as if they felt like they should research the question, the clones in the lab had asked him why he sat on his bed for hours, making that racket on a hollow piece of wood. How could he explain that, from the first time he’d held an instrument and strummed his fingers over it, he’d felt the pulse of the strings like it was his own beating heart?
When Jack realized the clones couldn’t hear music, he’d grasped for the first time how different he was from them. He’d always known they communed with each other and he couldn’t, but somehow, their inability to hear music made him feel even more of an outsider. He’d put the guitar away then. But now, with an apprenticeship, it could be different.
“Don’t you see?” Jack said. “I’ll teach them, really help them understand. I’ll show the Council what I can contribute to the community.”
“No, I’ve already thought about this. You’ll Declare an apprenticeship in the clinic, work with me. You’ll learn medicine, something useful.”
“The clinic?” Jack said.
“Of course.” Sam stood, done with the conversation. “Just be ready. You’ll talk to the Council tomorrow, after the ceremony’s done.”
Jack chewed the inside of his lip, thinking.
“Don’t look so worried. This is a good thing. And I’ll be there to help. It’ll all be fine.”
Sam walked down the hill, back toward town. Jack’s gaze followed the man’s path until he reached the school, where something had happened in the children’s game. They’d clustered together, their hands resting on each other’s shoulders, and seemed to collectively sigh into each other as if they were one body. Then, just like that, they broke apart and ran across the field, as sudden and synchronized as a flight of birds.
The next day, Jack sat in the chairs facing the outdoor stage in the Commons, waiting for the ceremony to end so he could make his presentation to the Council.
The Gen-310s had each Declared already. The Meis would apprentice in the kitchens, working on the menus for the dining hall and telling the Hassans, who had Declared as livestock managers and field planners, what food they would need and what to cook. The Viktors, as always, were order keepers. They’d never Declared anything else. The Carsons would work with the Kates and Nylas in the labs, monitoring the tanks, researching genetics, and preparing for the next Gen to be born in three years. The Samuels, as always, Declared as doctors. The Ingas would be designers, keeping the open spaces in town manicured and beautiful, and the dorms comfortable and clean. The Altheas Declared as record keepers.
They carried on with the ceremony as if everyone didn’t already know what the models would Declare, as if the community hadn’t gone through the exact same motions of the Declaration every ten years. Samuels never worked in the kitchens, as far as Jack knew. But it didn’t matter. Every ten years, they played out the ritual.
With the Declaration over, the Gen was performing the dance now. Jack would speak with the Council when it was done. His guitar lay next to him on the ground, and he tapped his foot nervously. He’d thought about making graphs and charts, but had decided in the end to just play for them, and talk to them about the history of music, about how it was a vestige of human history. For some reason, it had been forgotten, but they could get it back again. Jack would help. He had a skill, an ability, and it wasn’t new or strange. It was old, had been around for millennia. It was simply waiting to be picked up and dusted off.
Sam still thought he was going to Declare to work in the clinic. He wouldn’t be happy about this, but Jack didn’t want to work in the clinic. He had to show them that they didn’t need to be afraid or repulsed, or think he was strange for offering something like music to them. It could make them better. He could make them better by giving them back something they’d lost.
Jack wiped damp hands across his pants. He felt the inhaler tucked in his pocket and took a deep breath in and out, searching for any telltale signs that his lungs were going to betray him. He watched the dance. The Gen-310s traded partners and moved silently across the stage, their performance punctuated only by the sound of their tapping, shuffling feet and the birds in the distant trees.
The clones had many dances. The Pairing dance, for one, and the dances for the Binding Ceremony, or the Yielding Ceremony. The one being performed now wasn’t particular for the Declaration, it was simply a dance of contentment, meant to express a kind of pleasure or happiness that things were as they should be, and as the Original Nine intended. The Carsons grasped the Altheas and moved in quick, sure steps, holding the girls’ hands with a certain confident authority.
Jack pushed down his dislike for the Carsons. He had to learn. He had to get along with them if the Council was finally going to allow him to have a real purpose in the community. He’d made a mistake when he was fifteen, fighting with the Carson-312, and the Carsons had spent the past two years making sure he didn’t forget it. They taunted him, tripped him on his way through town, or acted as if he was invisible, knocking into him as they walked past.
They weren’t all like that, though.
Jack searched through the ten Altheas, looking for the 310. The Altheas were graceful as they danced. They moved with a fluid ease that left their dresses flowing behind their legs like birds’ wings. They were pretty, with their long dark hair and smooth limbs. He liked the way their mouths turned down in a flat, serious line when they were thinking hard about something.
He always remembered Althea-310 from that day at school. She’d been the only clone that whole day who’d looked at him and smiled. He’d search for her anytime he walked through town. He’d see her, sometimes with one of the Nylas, or he’d pick her out from her group of sisters by searching for the scar on her wrist. She never spoke to him. He’d tried a few tim
es to talk to her, but she always scurried off or was pulled away by her sisters. There were times, though, he was sure of it, when he caught her staring at him, and there was something in her eyes. It wasn’t pity. It was something else, something better. Like maybe she understood him.
The Altheas’ long sleeves covered their arms and the scar that would be on her wrist, and as they swirled together in the dance, it was impossible to tell which one was her.
Jack kept watching, though, and as he did, his foot tapped to their movements. It was a struggle for them, learning these dances. It reminded Jack of Sam trying to figure out the rhythm of catching and throwing a baseball. None of it came naturally to them, and their only hope of learning the intricate moves was through rote practice, memorization, or careful counting in their heads. Dances for the clones were an exercise in mathematics as much as anything. Jack never let on how different it was for him, the way he could hear music in his head pulsing steadily in time to the steps.
He picked up his guitar, getting ready for the end of the dance and to speak to the Council. He was second-guessing whether he should actually play for them. They wouldn’t enjoy the music, after all. Maybe he would just show them the instrument and introduce the concept. He would Declare as a teacher, perhaps, rather than a musician, but he would teach them music.
His fingers brushed the strings absently as his eyes lingered on the dark hair of the Altheas all spinning with the other clones. The pad of his palm thumped lightly against the wood, and he strummed the strings again. Slowly, he picked up the movement of the dance, and without thinking about it at all, he plucked the strings in time until a soft melody only he could hear synced with the dance.
It was several moments before he realized a hush had spread across the crowd, and the dance he’d been lost in came to a confused, disjointed halt. A Mei bumped into a Carson, who had stopped suddenly. They all stared at him. Not just the Gen-310s onstage, but the entire audience of all the other Gens in Vispera. The 290s, 280s, the old 240s at the food table, even the little 320s. And the line of Council members, seated in the front row, who’d twisted around to see what was going on. And they weren’t just staring. They were glaring, their eyes cold and resentful. The last reverberations of the guitar faded away as his fingers stilled, and the echo was loud enough for him to understand that he’d been playing much louder than he intended. They’d heard him. He hadn’t meant to play at all. He’d assaulted their ears with a noise that to them sounded like no more than wasps droning in the roof of a barn, and he’d done it without thinking. He’d just ruined everything.
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