Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  But before that day came, he would leave his mark.

  He wasn’t ready to retire. He could preach on this subject until his death if he needed to. He had stated his opinions on clones quite frankly; it went beyond good and evil into a place that was gray, and that scared him badly.

  His office door opened behind him. “Mother Rosalind, is that you?” he asked without looking up from his terminal. “Can I ask you to check some spelling for me?”

  He heard a chuckle, and then blinding pain exploded on the back of his head. Then nothing.

  It had been Mother Rosalind. That was the thing that shocked him for years afterward: It had been Mother Rosalind who had chuckled behind him, and then hit him. His second in command, a priestess from Earth who had learned under him, and was becoming his greatest confidante. A clone plant.

  He woke in a windowless lab, strapped to a cot. He struggled ineffectually, and nearly vomited from the pain on the back of his head. His fair hair felt wet. “Where—?” he managed to mumble.

  “You’re in one of the cloning labs,” Mother Rosalind said. She was out of her habit now and dressed in white pants and a red blouse, as per the latest Luna fashion, for all her Earth-born stocky proportions. In street clothes, her brown skin wasn’t so stark as it was against the light habit, and she looked much younger; Gunter guessed she must be about thirty-five. If this was her first life, of course.

  “Do you even have a soul?” he whispered, and she didn’t answer.

  She was talking to a tall man of Earth Indian descent, with a few generations on Luna making his bone length long. He towered over her as they whispered together, and Orman thought he heard the man chastise her for injuring him. “He could have brain damage from that concussion,” he said in the lilting accent of northern Luna, where most Southeast Asian–descended people settled.

  “He’s taller than I am,” she said. “I didn’t want to fight him.”

  “No excuse. You’re younger and stronger. I will have to examine him to make sure he is well enough to do the mindmap.”

  “Careful. He’ll fight you,” she said. “And he’s awake.”

  The man leaned over Gunter, smiling. “Hello Father Orman. How are you feeling?”

  Gunter closed his eyes and began muttering the Hail Mary.

  His eyes flew open again when he felt hands on his head. He squirmed in revulsion at first, and fear second as the hands slipped a copper band over his head. The room seemed to tip and spin as he struggled, and his head felt as if it were on fire. He turned his head to the side and vomited all over the man.

  Shaking and breaking out in a cold sweat, Gunter was unable to continue to fight the man tightening the band on his head. It quickly warmed to his skin. “This won’t hurt, just taking your vitals,” the man said, apparently not noticing the vomit on him.

  Gunter tried to speak but nothing could come out. His head swam, and as the band warmed past body temperature, he began remembering his life vividly, growing up on Luna, his first communion, the pain and wonder of visiting Earth for the first time, the day he was appointed to the only Catholic church on Luna.

  He drifted in and out of consciousness. He was pretty sure they drugged him, since he no longer felt pain.

  The sins came roaring back as well, the small thefts he did as a child, the sharp words that hurt people he loved, and the times his sermons had pushed someone toward something less than holy, when his intentions had been so pure. A bright spot of shame flared as he remembered the time he had gotten drunk in seminary and had fornicated with a friend bound for priestesshood. It had been her idea, “Just to make sure we know what we’re giving up,” but admittedly he hadn’t argued much.

  “Vitals.” It was a lie, he realized with a start. This wasn’t a device that took his vitals, they were taking his mindmap, trying to copy his very being, but releasing his soul. He tried to struggle again, the hair on the back of his head feeling thick and matted. Vertigo seized him and he dry-heaved, which only made the memories more vivid, the shameful ones seeming louder than the good ones.

  His last thought before he passed out was gratitude that the encroaching darkness might mean death.

  It was the absence of pain that made his eyes fly open some time later.

  The chronic pain of the elderly was something everyone accepted as a fact of life. Waking with your lower or upper back throbbing, having your joints greet you loudly once you stood for the first time in the morning, and other maladies of getting old. Gunter had heard it was worse on Earth, with the increased gravity, but he figured he had it bad enough as is.

  Only now he woke feeling good. Strong. His hands flew to the back of his head, expecting to find a bandage, but he only felt thick hair. He traced his face, finding no wrinkles, and the backs of his hands were pale white with no age spots.

  He wondered briefly what the sound was in the room until he realized the high-pitched whine, the sound of an animal in a trap, was himself.

  He flailed and fell off his bed, hitting the tiled floor in a way that would have broken his hip a day ago. He was naked, and saw that his whole body was young and strong.

  They did it, I can’t believe they did it, they will burn for this, burn for it, oh Lord, what have I done to displease You?

  Rosalind interrupted his panic by opening the door. He pushed himself away from her, against the cot, covering his genitals and avoiding her eyes.

  She gave him a sour look. “Please. It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before, many times,” she said.

  His outrage that she, a priestess, had seen a man intimately, rose briefly before he remembered that she was a sham. For all he knew, she could have been having carnal experiences while she was posing as a chaste member of the church.

  For his own modesty, he didn’t move his right hand, but reached up with his left and pulled the thin sheet from the bed to cover his lower half.

  Rosalind yanked the sheet off the bed and dropped it on him, dismissing his shame. “Whatever. You’ll get used to it. You’ll need time to acclimate to your first waking. How do you feel?”

  “You’ll die for this,” he whispered. “Murderer, soul slayer, abomination.”

  “Careful how you throw those words around, Gunter. Every word you sling against clones, you’re slinging against yourself,” she said. “Can’t you see now? I didn’t slay your soul; you’re just like you were before, only with a younger body.”

  “How could you do this to me? I supported you! I invited you into my church!” he asked.

  “All the while you were calling my kind abominations,” she said coldly. She took a chair from the table and sat down. “Anytime I started to develop any warm feelings of friendship toward you, you helped dampen them by telling me how I’m a soulless freak.”

  Adrenaline flared in his chest like fireworks. Dear God, he had forgotten what such strength felt like. “What do you think is going to happen now? You want me to stand up and say, Hello, I’m a clone priest and clones are not soulless, and God Himself approves!”

  “That’s a start,” she said. “Think, if you’re the first head of a church to welcome clones into the fold, you will have parishioners for centuries, tithing and supporting. Most clones are savvy with money and build wealth to support themselves through their lives. That’s what the church wants, right? Tithing?”

  “You think this is about money? You killed me for money?”

  “Oh, unclench, Gunter. You’ve been to the Vatican; of course it’s all about money. Clone money is the same color as anyone else’s. They figured it out when they finally accepted women and queers and”—she gasped, mimicking an outraged priest—“a queer woman like me. Now they can figure it out again. But we need your anecdotal evidence to support us.”

  “I won’t do it,” he said. “I will expose you.”

  She sighed. “Gunter, cloning you is not the only plan my organization has for you. You could help us now, or help us later, but you will end up helping us.”

 
; “I’ll die first!”

  She leaned forward, all warmth gone from her face. “Then we will clone you again. We can do this all day.”

  “Then do it,” he said, standing up and dropping the sheet. “I won’t break.”

  She stood. “You don’t know the first thing about clone technology, do you?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. Dinner will be served in an hour.” She reached into her bag. “In the meantime, I brought you some reading material.” She produced View from the Vat, the first memoir of the successful entrepreneur clone, Sallie Mignon. “See the story from another point of view. I hope you change your mind. The alternative won’t be pretty.”

  Breakdowns

  Wolfgang expected a more violent reaction to his statement, but Joanna just sat there, her dark skin growing ashen as she paled.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I remember the stories, of course. But God, cloned eight times in three days? It’s unbelievable what they did to you. I guess they broke you eventually.”

  “No,” he said. “They didn’t. After I was cloned the first time, they tortured me, then made a mindmap, then cut me while they were still making the map as I bled out. That was so I could wake up with full memory of my experiences. They did this six times.”

  She winced. “If you didn’t break, then what happened?” she asked.

  “In my eighth body I woke up remembering everything, except my desire to fight. They’d removed it. They welcomed me immediately, gave me good food, and they started their propaganda campaign. That’s when the clone riots of the Earth finally got to the moon.”

  “Oh. That’s when they brought in a hacker,” Joanna said flatly.

  He nodded. “I expect they had grown several bodies for me, and I’d forced them down to the last one. They could either start the process to make more bodies or just take the quick way.”

  “Quick, expensive, and highly dangerous,” Joanna said.

  The words tasted like sour lumps in his mouth, and he swallowed. “I retained all memory of my resistance, and I knew that I had changed my mind, but remembering my arguments against cloning didn’t make me want to bring them up again. I no longer believed.

  “They took my faith from me. I didn’t think that was possible.”

  He got up and walked to her kitchenette. He poured himself a cup of water from the tap. He drained it and refilled it. “They got one thing right: I no longer believe I became soulless when I was cloned. Now I know I became soulless when I was hacked.”

  He drank the water in his plastic cup and then threw it at the wall behind her bed. It bounced off and flew toward Joanna, who flinched and ducked.

  “You tipped the balance for cloning laws,” she said. “I remember seeing the news reports about you, and the more detailed report from some operatives we had on Luna. That night the Codicils passed.”

  He continued. “I was relieved when they passed, even though my new masters were not. I had been programmed to not care what had happened to me, but I saw enough of what they were doing to disagree with them. I broke from the group, took on a new name, got some protection, and started the University of Luna clone studies program. The church was no longer for a soulless man. I colored my hair and started wearing lenses, but I’ve dropped those in later years, certain no one would recognize me after those times so long in the past.”

  Joanna looked as if she wanted to hug him, and he very much hoped she wouldn’t. Thankfully she stayed in the chair. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she finally said.

  “Thank you.” He felt slightly lighter for some reason. “It’s not your fault. I’m over it now.”

  “I had a hand in it. If we hadn’t spent so much time debating all those months, maybe they wouldn’t have done that to you. I remember the news stories about you. It broke my heart that someone had to suffer like that in order to get a law passed.”

  “I wasn’t the only one.”

  She smiled slightly. “But you’re the only one here, now. So I’m apologizing to you. Politics is almost never violent toward the people who are actually making the political decisions.”

  “That is an understatement,” he said, frowning. He retrieved his cup and filled it again.

  “I need to know the rest,” she said. “I heard the rumors. You were a vigilante, weren’t you?”

  Shame flooded him. He hated that word. It made him sound like he had been dressing up in a child’s costume and pretending to be a hero. He had called himself a hunter at the time. Even now that sounded silly.

  “One of the few things I appreciated about cloning was the patience it gave you. I waited a few decades, learning how to protect myself. Keeping an eye on the people that kidnapped me and cloned me. And then, yes, I went after them. They fought back of course, and killed me seven times. I just wanted them to know what it was like. I killed the people who kidnapped me, the man behind it all, and whatever hacker I could find.”

  She cocked her head. “How do you feel knowing we have a hacker on board?”

  “Furious,” he said.

  “Knowing what was done to you by a hacker, why don’t you have more sympathy toward Hiro, who is clearly a victim of the same thing?”

  “Because logic doesn’t drive the desire for revenge,” he said.

  Her eyes grew wide. She stood up, swaying slightly on her prosthetic legs. He saw then how tired she was.

  “Wolfgang, logic has to be the dominant factor here, or else we’re all vigilantes.”

  “You know my stance on clones. I preached that they had no souls, that they were less than walking dead people. I never thought I was committing a crime when I removed a clone.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Besides, as I said, my faith was effectively gone by then.”

  “‘They’?” she asked, tilting her head. “You’ve been cloned more than anyone on this ship.”

  He rubbed his hands over his face. “Thinking about that time is difficult. The hacking, it turned my past life into a dream or someone else’s memory. Occasionally I’ll get strong feelings of who I was. I tried to tap into that when I hunted. One thing I remember is that we’re not meant to be God,” he said. “I don’t know if cloning kills the soul or not, but I do know the act of cloning is against His will.”

  Joanna now threw her own cup against the wall, startling him. “I’m so sick of that argument. I’ve been hearing it for centuries. Playing God. Wolfgang, we played God when people believed they could dictate their baby’s gender by having sex in a certain position. We played God when we invented birth control, amniocentesis, cesarean sections, when we developed modern medicine and surgery. Flight is playing God. Fighting cancer is playing God. Contact lenses and glasses are playing God. Anything we do to modify our lives in a way that we were not born into is playing God. In vitro fertilization. Hormone replacement therapy. Gender reassignment surgery. Antibiotics. Why are you fine with all of that, but cloning is the problem?”

  She continued before he could answer. “And you should know, you should know, that you’re no different. Traumatized, yes. Horribly treated, of course. Abused. You could probably benefit from a few decades of therapy. But you’re still you. Your soul hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, his voice tight. “It amazes me how people who have no faith in a higher power seem convinced that they know the absolute truth, that their opinion will sway thousands of years of deeply held belief. How do you know what’s in my soul?”

  “I know because I went through it too! I’ve been cloned multiple times, sometimes through difficult circumstances, and I know that I’ve remained the same!”

  His voice was low, his eyes narrow. “Have you ever been hacked?”

  Joanna stopped. She opened her mouth, then closed it.

  “That’s a no,” he said softly.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Then you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know how it feels to be
changed.”

  “It’s only numbers. If the concept of the soul is so powerful, then how can you reduce it to numbers and then allow math to fundamentally change who you are?”

  “I think we’re done here,” he said, retrieving both hurtled cups from their spots on the floor. He returned them to the kitchenette.

  “You came here! You wanted to unload secrets! Why are you letting your temper get the better of you?” she asked, staring up at him with her arms crossed.

  “This isn’t a discussion any longer, this is a religious persecution,” he said.

  “Clones have already been excommunicated! You fought for that yourself. You’re talking out of ten sides of your mouth! You’re a priest, but you’ve been thrown out of the church, but you still believe, but you don’t have a soul. You follow the religion that says ‘Thou shalt not kill’ but you hunted hackers. How can you reconcile all of those sides? Would a man with a soul worry about having one?”

  He took a deep breath, feeling rage unravel in his chest. “A man with no soul will mourn its loss, every day of every life. A man with a grudge and nothing to lose can hunt; it’s not like he fears hell anymore. I’m beyond saving, Joanna. You can’t confess the loss of a soul. You can’t do penance when there is nothing to heal inside you.”

  She did something unexpected, then. She put her arms around him. He froze, unsure what to do, but she held him. She was much shorter than he was, her head coming up to his chest. Her hair, in a soft halo, just managed to tickle his chin.