by Eric Brown
It was the head of the same woman...
Lassolini left the room and strode to the next door. He paused on the threshold. “My dear...” I stumbled after him, amenable with shock.
Another atrocity. This time the woman had been lasered into bloody chunks and arranged on plinths around the room after the fashion of Dali.
“You’re mad!” I cried.
“That did occur to me, my dear. Though what you see here is not the cause or symptom of it, but an attempt to cure myself. A catharsis, if you like.”
“But... but which one is Stephanie Etteridge?”
“None of them is Stephanie,” he said. “She is alive and well and living in Paris. And yet... all of them were Stephanie.”
I took control of my shock, levelled the pistol and said with determination: “Look, Lassolini, I want answers. And if I don’t get them...”
He bowed. “Very well, my dear. This way—and I assure you, no more horrors.”
He strode down a long corridor. I had to run to keep up. We came to a pair of swing doors with circular portholes, and Lassolini pushed through. Another surprise: after the luxury of the ballroom, the stark and antiseptic utility of what looked like a hospital ward. Then I remembered that this place was once the city morgue.
We stopped at a line of horizontal silver tanks, and with an outstretched hand Lassolini invited me to inspect their contents.
I peered through the first frosted faceplate and made out the young, beautiful face of Stephanie Etteridge. In a daze I moved on to the next one, and the next: Etteridge, again, and again. Each tank contained a flawless replica of the actress.
I stared at him, and he smiled.
“Clones...” I murmured, and I experienced a curious vacuum within my chest.
“Perspicacious of you, my dear.”
“But I thought the science was still in its experimental stages. I thought the Kilimanjiro Corporation had the rights...”
Lassolini laughed. “The science is still in its experimental stages,” he said. “And I am the Kilimanjiro Corporation.”
I gestured in the direction of the ritually slaughtered Etteridge clones. “But you still murdered human beings,” I said. “Even clones are-”
Lassolini was shaking his head. “By no stretch of the imagination can they be considered human—as of yet. They are grown from DNA samples taken from the original Stephanie Etteridge, and their minds remain blank until the encoded identity of the subject is downloaded into them.”
“So those...?”
“Merely so much dead meat. But it pleased me to sacrifice Stephanie, if only in effigy. These bodies were the ones I kept in supply for the time when she aged and required her youth again.”
I looked into his youthful face. “So both you, and the Stephanie Etteridge I met, are clones?” I was beginning to understand.
He regarded me, as if calculating how much to divulge.
“We were married for five happy years,” he said. “When her career came to an end, and she began to show signs of age, I promised her a new lease of life. Virtual immortality. Perhaps only this kept her with me, until my scientists perfected the technique of cloning, and the more difficult procedure of recording and downloading individual identity from one brain to another.
“She was nearly seventy when we downloaded her into the body of her twenty year old clone. Then... and then she left me, and nothing I could do or say would make her return. I had such plans! We could have toured the Expansion together in eternal youth.” He seemed to deflate at the recollection of her betrayal.
“I considered hiring an assassin to kill the man she left me for, but as events transpired that proved unnecessary. She divorced me, and a matter of days before she was due to marry her lover he was arrested by the German police and charged with conspiring to sabotage a European military satellite. He was jailed for life.”
He paused there and licked his lips. When he spoke next it was in barely a whisper. “You mentioned that you were on her ‘case’ ?”
“That’s right.”
“Then... you’re in contact with her?”
I was guarded. “I might be.”
“Then bring her to me!” And I was shocked by the intensity of his emotion.
I glanced at the Etteridge clones, then back at the surgeon who had performed this miracle.
“I have a price,” I said.
“Name it!”
With trembling fingers I fumbled with the buttons of my cheongsam and revealed my body.
* * * *
Claude was snoozing in his flier when I jumped aboard and yelled at him to take off. I checked my watch. It was five-forty, and Etteridge and Dan were due to phase-out at six. We burned across Paris towards Passy.
Ten minutes later we sailed in over the Seine. Claude slowed and we cut across the corner of the Etteridge estate. I opened the hatch and prepared to jump. “See you later, Claude.”
His reply was lost as I dived.
This time I missed the marshmallow and fell through a bush with leaves like sabres. I picked myself up, bleeding from a dozen cuts, and limped through the jungle. It was three minutes to six when I emerged from the trees, and the smallship was still berthed inside the marquee. I ducked back into the vegetation and ran along the side of the tent. Once behind it I left the cover and dodged guy ropes.
I lifted the tarpaulin wall of the tent, squirmed through the gap and ran over to the dorsal escape chute. I palmed the sensor and waited for the hatch to cycle—ten seconds, though it seemed like as many minutes. I checked my watch: one minute to go. Then the hatch slid open and I jumped inside and curled in the darkness. Above me, the computerised locking system of the interior hatch rumbled away to itself and finally opened. I pulled myself into the carpeted, semi-lighted corridor. And I’d realised a childhood ambition: I was inside a smallship.
I could see along the corridor and into the bridge. Etteridge sat in a swivel-seat between the arms of a V-shaped instrument console, speaking to a soft-voiced computer. Beside her was the sen-dep tank, the hatch dogged and the alpha-numerics pulsing a countdown sequence. Dan was already in there.
I drew my pistol and started towards the bridge. If I could untank Dan before he fluxed-
Seconds later the ‘ship phased into the nada-continuum.
The ‘ship pitched, knocking me off my feet. I fell against a bulkhead, striking my head. I was out for only a matter of minutes, and when I came to my senses we were no longer flying through the nada-continuum.
I stared through the forward viewscreen and made out the concrete expanse of a penitentiary exercise yard. We were there for less than ten seconds. I heard the hatch wheeze open, and Stephanie’s cries as a prisoner ran towards the ship and scrambled aboard. Laser bolts ricocheted from the concrete and hissed across the skin of the ‘ship. Then the hatch slammed shut the ‘ship slipped again from this reality.
I giggled like a lunatic. If only my younger self, the kid who’d haunted the Orly star terminal just to get a glimpse of phasing starships, could see me now: stowaway on the craziest jailbreak of all time.
Three minutes became as many hours; time elasticated—then snapped back to normal as we re-emerged in the real world of the red-and-white striped marquee on the lawn of the riverbank mansion.
Through the viewscreen I could see Claude, waiting for me in his flier.
I ran.
The Etteridge clone and the escapee were in each others’ arms when I reached the bridge; they had time to look round and register surprise and shock before I raised my pistol and fired, sending them sprawling stunned across the deck.
I stood over the woman, smiling at the future she represented...
When I delivered Stephanie Etteridge, Lassolini would take from me the DNA which in four years, when cloned, would be a fully grown nineteen year-old replica of myself—with the difference that whereas now my body was a ninety percent mass of slurred flesh-and scars, my new cloned body would be pristine, unflawed, and maybe
even beautiful.
While Etteridge and her lover twitched on the deck, their motor neurone systems in temporary dysfunction, I untanked Dan. I hauled out the slide-bed, pulled the jacks from his occipital implant and helped him upright.
Of course, Lassolini had said nothing about what he intended to do with his ex-wife—and at the time I had hardly considered it, my mind full of the thought that in four years I would be whole again, an attractive human being, and the shame and regret would be a thing of the past.
Now I thought of Stephanie Etteridge in the clutches of Lassolini. I imagined her dismembered corpse providing the sick surgeon with his final cathartic tableau, a sadistic arrangement of her parts exhibited beneath the chandeliers of the ballroom in the ultimate act of revenge.
Etteridge crawled across the deck to the man she had saved. She clung to him, and all I could do was stare as the tears coursed down my cheeks.
What some people will do for love...
* * * *
I pulled Dan away from the tank. He was dazed and physically blitzed from his union with the infinite, his gaze still focused on some ineffable vision granted him in the nada-continuum.
“Phuong...?”
“Come on!” I cried, taking his weight as he stumbled legless across the bridge. I kicked open the hatch and we staggered from the smallship and out of the marquee. I had to be away from there, and fast, before I changed my mind.
Claude helped Dan into the flier. “I thought you said we were taking the woman?” he said.
“I’m leaving her!” I sobbed. “Just let’s get out of here.”
I sat beside Dan on the back seat and closed my eyes as the burners caught and we lifted from the lawn. We banked over the Seine and Dan fell against me,, his body warm and flux-spiced from the tank.
As we sped across Paris, I thought of Etteridge and her lover—and the fact that she would never realise the fate she had been spared. I wished them happiness, and gained a vicarious joy I often experience when considering people more fortunate than myself.
* * * *
I assisted Dan into the darkened office and laid him out on the chesterfield. Then I sat on the edge of the cushion and stared at the tape on the desk, set up two hours ago to record my last farewell.
I picked up the microphone, switched it on and began in a whisper. “I’ve enjoyed working for you, Dan. We’ve had some good times. But I’m getting tired of Paris. I need to see more of the world. They say Brazil’s got a lot going for it. I might even take a look at Luna or Mars. They’re always wanting colonists...” And I stopped there and thought about wiping it and just walking out. Even nothing seemed better than this bland goodbye.
Then Dan cried out and his arm snared my waist. I looked into his eyes and read his need, his fear after his confrontation with the infinite. And something more...
His lips moved in a whisper, and although I was unable to make out the words, I thought I knew what he wanted.
I reached out and wiped the tape, then lay on the chesterfield beside Dan and listened to his breathing and the spring rain falling in the boulevard outside.
* * * *
Elegy Perpetuum
It began one warm evening on the cantilevered, clover-leaf patio of the Oasis bar.
There were perhaps a dozen of us seated around the circular onyx table—fellow artists, agents and critics, enjoying wine and pleasant conversation. Beneath the polite chatter, however, there was the tacit understanding that this was the overture to the inevitable clash of opinions, not to say egos, of the two most distinguished artists present.
The artists’ domes, hanging from great arching scimitar supports, glowed with the pale lustre of opals in the quick Saharan twilight. The oasis itself caught the sunset and turned it into a million coruscating scales, like silver lamé made liquid.
This was my first stay at Sapphire Oasis, and I was still somewhat out of my depth. I feared being seen as an artist of little originality, who had gained admittance to the exclusive colony through the patronage of the celebrated Primitivist, Ralph Standish. I did not want to be known as an imitator—though admittedly my early work did show his influence—a novice riding on the coat-tails of genius.
I sat next to the white-haired, leonine figure of Standish, one of the last of the old romantics. As if to dissociate himself totally from the Modernists, he affected the aspect of a Bohemian artist of old. He wore a shirt splashed with oils, though he rarely worked in that medium, and the beret by which he was known.
Seated across from him was Perry Bartholomew.
The Modernist—he struck me more as a businessman than an artist—was suave in an impeccably cut grey suit. He lounged in his seat and twirled the stem of his wine glass. He seemed always to wear an expression of rather superior amusement, as if he found everything that everyone said fallacious but not worth his effort to correct.
I had lost interest in the conversation—two critics were airing their views on the forthcoming contest. I turned my attention to the spectacular oval, perhaps a kilometre in length, formed by the illuminated domes. I was wondering whether I might slip away unnoticed, before Ralph and Bartholomew began their inevitable sniping, when for the first time that night the latter spoke up.
He cleared his throat, and this seemed to be taken by all present as a signal for silence. “In my experience,” Bartholomew said, “contests and competitions to ascertain the merit of works of art can never be successful. Great art cannot be judged by consensus. Are you submitting anything, Standish?”
Ralph looked up, surprised that Bartholomew was addressing him. He suppressed a belch and stared into his tumbler of whisky. “I can’t. I’m ineligible. I’m on the contest’s organising committee.”
“Ah...” Bartholomew said. “So you are responsible?” His eyes twinkled.
Ralph appeared irritated. “The Sapphire Oasis Summer Contest is a long-standing event, Perry. I see nothing wrong in friendly competition. The publicity will help everyone. Anyway, if you’re so against the idea, why have you submitted a piece?”
The crowd around the table, swelled now by a party that had drifted up from the lawns below, watched the two men with the hushed anticipation of spectators at a duel.
“Why not?” Bartholomew asked. “Although I disagree in principle with the idea of the contest, I see no reason why I should not benefit by winning it.”
Ralph laughed. “Your optimism amazes me, sir.”
Bartholomew inclined his head in gracious acknowledgement.
The resident physician, a man called Roberts, asked the artist if he would be willing to discuss his latest creation.
“By all means,” Bartholomew said. “It is perhaps my finest accomplishment, and has also the distinction of being totally original in form.” Just when he was becoming interesting, if pompous, he damned himself by continuing, “It should make me millions—which might just satisfy the demands of my wife.”
There was a round of polite laughter.
Ralph exchanged a glance with me and shook his head, despairing.
Perry Bartholomew’s separation from his wife, also an artist of international repute, had made big news a couple of years ago. Their ten year marriage had been a constant feature in the gossip columns, fraught as it was with acrimony and recriminations before the final split. He had, it was reported, taken it badly—even an arch-cynic like Bartholomew had a heart which could be hurt—unless it was his ego that had suffered. For a year he had lived as a recluse, emerging only when he moved to the Oasis for an extended period of work.
Tonight Bartholomew looked far from well. He was a handsome man in his early fifties, with a tanned face and dark hair greying fashionably at the temples—but now he looked drawn, his dark eyes tired.
Someone asked, “You said, ‘totally original in form’?” in a tone of incredulity which prompted a sharp response.
“Of course!” Bartholomew stared at the woman. “I am aware that this is a bold claim to make, but it is neverthele
ss true, as you will learn when I exhibit the piece. I have utilised a prototype continuum-frame to harness an electro-analogue of my psyche.”
There was an instant babble of comment. A critic said, “Can we have that again?” and scribbled it down when Bartholomew patiently repeated himself.
“But what exactly is it?” someone asked.
Bartholomew held up both hands. “You will find out tomorrow. I assure you that its originality of form will be more than matched by its content.”
