Cloned Lives

by Pamela Sargent

  Joey fell into a chair across from the sofa and put his hands behind his blond head. Joey was a tall, big-boned boy with large brown eyes set above broad cheekbones. Olive presented a contrast to him with her small-boned, almost fragile, build and dark hair. She perched on the arm of Joey’s chair, folding her arms across the front of her red tunic. “You’re not supposed to come here,” Jim continued.

  “What difference does it make? Your father’s upstairs with the loonies, so who’s to know?” Joey grinned. “Unless Eddie here calls him up long distance, and he wouldn’t do that.” Ed did not reply. He took a seat by one of the two computer booths in the corner of the room.

  “We just wanted to see you, Jim,” Olive said in her husky voice. “We haven’t seen you for a while. I might almost think you don’t like us any more.” She stood up, lit a cigarette and dropped the match in one of Eviane’s ashtrays.

  “Am I dead!” Joey said. “We must have spent all night on the road. You missed a good car party, we must have had eight people inside, friends from the city. One guy was this great big wrestler. I thought he was after Olive, turned out he was after me.” Joey snorted. “His mind got so mangled we had to shove him out at this exit a hundred miles away, I don’t know how he got back home, probably went to sleep right there.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Jim said.

  “You got a whole damn house to yourself, you should have invited us,” Joey said. Olive drifted around the living room, running her hands over the furniture, before settling in a seat next to Ed.

  “Are you on the soccer team?” she asked softly.

  “No, that’s Al and Mike,” Ed answered. He clasped his hands together. His arms and legs were suddenly heavy, obstacles to movement. He wanted to get up and flee from the room, retreat upstairs. He was locked to the chair and he could feel himself blushing.

  “What do you do?” the girl asked. He found himself staring at her feet.

  “I’m interested in math,” he answered. “I play the violin and I’m taking some math at the university.” Sounds pretty boring, doesn’t it? He found himself grasping for something else to say. “I’m in the chess club,” he added, and immediately felt that made things worse.

  “You are?” she said tonelessly. He chanced a quick glance at her face. He met her eyes and quickly looked away again. “I like chess,” she went on. Surprised, Ed looked back up. “I’m not very good at it though, so I didn’t join the club.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ed said. “If you practice, you’ll get better. That’s mainly what the club is for.”

  “Olive’s after Eddie,” Joey said loudly. “She’s moving on you, boy.” He began to smack his lips.

  “Shut up and stop acting like a turd,” Olive shouted angrily. She turned back to Ed. “Don’t pay any attention to him.

  “I’m hungry,” Joey announced. He got up and went with Jim to the kitchen. Ed waited for Olive to follow them so he could make his departure. Instead she remained seated, still watching him.

  “I don’t like to do things I’m not good at,” Olive said. “I’d rather not do them at all. I’m not good at much so I don’t do much.” She blew some cigarette smoke toward him. “My mother says I’m incompetent. I think the only reason she had me was so she would have someone to show off in front of. She’s a doctor in one of the orbiting sanatoriums so luckily I don’t see her much.”

  Ed felt embarrassed. “If you work at something,” he said, “you’ll get better at it.” The words seemed obvious and trite.

  “You sound like Elise,” Olive muttered. “She’s my father’s other partner, she’s always telling me that. I have to listen to it every time I go home, so I live in the car most of the time.”

  “Isn’t that expensive?”

  “My father’s a stormrider, he can afford it.” She must not see her father often either, Ed thought. Stormriders spent most of their time in space, watching the weather, ready to harness severe hurricanes magnetically and steer them away from populated areas.

  Ed felt warm and closed in by the walls. He prepared to leave the room, searching his mind for an excuse.

  “What’s it like, being a clone?” Olive asked. The question was a splash of cold water. “I asked Jim once, but he wouldn’t say, he didn’t want to talk about it. He really got upset.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t it weird, I mean, being just like your father and the others?”

  “I’m not just like them,” he managed to say, swallowing his anger. “We all do different things, we have different interests.”

  “You’re all alike physically.” “So are twins. We’re just twins, that’s all.” “That isn’t the same at all.” He looked over at the girl and thought he detected a gleam in her eye.

  She’s not interested, it’s just one more weird thing for her to do, hanging around with clones.

  He could hear someone at the front door and he quickly jumped up, glad for an excuse to leave the room.

  Kira entered the house, shaking moisture from her hair. “Hey, who’s here? I got a ride home and we noticed a car when we pulled up…”She took off her coat and looked past Ed at Olive. Ed made a face and Kira contorted her own in response before hanging up her coat.

  Joey suddenly burst into the living room, clutching the remains of a sandwich. “Look who’s here! Hello, sweetheart.” He darted toward the hallway and circled around Kira, waving his velveteen-covered arms. He stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth and managed to swat her on the ass before she pushed him away.

  “Go to hell,” Kira said.

  “Joey, stop acting like a turd,” Olive shouted. Ed glanced at Jim, who was standing silently in the doorway leading to the dining room. Why doesn’t he say something? He waited for his brother to act but was already convinced he would do nothing. Jim was too much like Ed, too intimidated by others, wanting them to accept him as a person like themselves but also convinced that the only people who would ever really know him were the clones.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Kira said, in effect throwing the situation to her brothers for solution. She turned and Ed listened to her tramp upstairs in heavy-footed, angry fashion. Joey wandered over to Olive and sat in the chair next to her. “What have we here?” he asked, fondling one of her breasts. “What have we here?”

  The girl pushed his hand away. “You make me sick sometimes,” she murmured to him. Ed, sensing the undercurrent of violence in her tone, almost shuddered. Olive turned her hazel eyes toward Jim. “And you and your brother give me the creeps,” she went on. “Look at you, you’re even standing the same way.” Ed quickly altered his stance and then realized that Jim was doing the same thing. “You try so hard to be different, going to different classes, wearing different clothes, doing different things, trying to be like everybody else. Well, it won’t work. You’re still freaks. Your father must be the biggest egomaniac that ever lived.”

  Ed noticed that Joey, his face flushed, had subsided into a shocked silence. Jim’s face had grown pale. The veins in his neck seemed to bulge and his hands trembled slightly.

  Ed moved toward Olive, his fears temporarily forgotten. Get out of here. He opened his mouth to say the words. Olive’s eyes suddenly turned to him and the hatred flowing from them paralyzed his vocal chords.

  “Jesus, Olive,” Joey mumbled. The hatred drained from her face, leaving only a cold and empty mask. Ed began to speak once again, then heard his brother’s voice.

  “I think you’d better go, Olive,” Jim was saying. “I know what you really hate. I’ve been around you long enough. Counting Elise, you have three parents and maybe we only have one, but he cares about us, he wanted us. You can’t stand that, can you? And maybe we’re physically alike, and we have our problems, I grant you, but we also have someone we can go to when things are bad.” Jim paused for breath and leaned dramatically against the dining room entrance. Ed could tell that Jim, although angry, was savoring his words, trying to shape them into weapons that woul
d tear at the girl. Ed knew that his brother, in his strange way, was also enjoying the scene. Jim wanted to strike back at Olive but he wanted the event to be aesthetically pleasing in some way.

  “I feel sorry for you,” Jim went on. “I can’t even get that angry.” Ed, watching the tightness of the skin across Jim’s face, knew that to be a lie. “Someone cares about us and no one cares about, you. Well, I could have cared. I could have been your friend but I won’t now. Joey doesn’t care, you’re just entertaining to him.”

  Ed saw Olive look at Joey quickly, as if fearing the words were true. The tall blond boy turned away.

  “You know something?” Jim said, smiling slightly. “You would have been better off being a clone, Olive. Then someone might have paid attention to you. You’re the freak, not us, You’re so bad off no one wants to be with you except a bored rich guy and a clone.”

  Olive choked. A few tears ran down her impassive face as she struggled to control them. Ed, watching her, felt sick.

  “You’d better go,” Jim said.

  “I need a drink,” Olive shouted, even now apparently trying to intimidate Ed and his brother into passivity. The picture-phone next to the wall began to buzz. Ed ignored it, waiting to see what else Jim would say.

  “You know where the liquor is,” Jim said, gesturing with his arm. “Joey, give her a drink and then get her out of here. I don’t want to throw you out, but I will.”

  Ed turned from them and hurried to the buzzing phone. He picked up the receiver and saw the almost life-size face of Jonathan Aschenbach on the large flat screen. The minister’s face seemed contorted somehow. His gray eyes stared ahead sadly.

  “Hello, Dr. Aschenbach,” Ed said. Behind him, he could hear Olive and Joey rummaging through the liquor cabinet in the dining room.

  “I just found out, from the latest newsfax sheet,” Dr. Aschenbach said. The older man spoke with difficulty. “If there’s anything I can do…I was just on my way over.” He paused and peered out at Ed from the screen. “Oh, dear God. You don’t know yet, do you.”

  “Know what?” Ed clutched at the phone. A hammer seemed to hang over him, ready to smash.

  “It’s Paul.” The minister’s eyes filled with tears.

  Ed froze. Background noises, the clanking of glasses in the dining room, Jim’s muffled pacing on the living room carpet, a low humming sound upstairs, seemed suddenly sharper. “An accident, he was on his way to one of the Russian labs and his flittercraft crashed into a mountainside. There was a quake earlier, they think the driver might not have…”

  Ed opened his mouth. Is he all right? Is he hurt? The words were locked up and refused to come out.

  “He’s gone, the Russians got to him and the crew, there were only a few other passengers. They managed to get them all into cryonic storage, but…” Dr. Aschenbach too was groping for words, “They were badly hurt, they can’t do anything.”

  “No.” Ed forced the word out. “No.” He damped his mouth shut, afraid a stream of words would flow from him.

  “I’ve called a car, I’ll be over there in a few minutes,” Dr. Aschenbach continued.

  Ed nodded and hung up the phone. The air seemed thick and his body was numb. He turned to Jim.

  “Paul’s dead,” he managed to say, hurling the words at his brother. Then he walked into the dining room. Olive was sipping a pale brown liquid from one of his father’s glasses.

  “You better leave now,” he said. He pulled the glass from Olive’s fingers and smashed it against the floor. She retreated toward Joey. “Leave,” he shouted.

  “But…”Olive murmured. She threw up her hands as if to ward him off.

  “Get out, getoutgetoutgetout.” The room spun past him. He suddenly found himself at the back door, slamming his fist against the wall. Olive and Joey were running through the yard in the rain, holding their coats.

  “Ed,” Jim was saying. Ed spun around and saw his own mirrored grief-stricken face.

  “I should have told him not to go,” he heard himself say. “I should have insisted. You should have insisted. You all let him go, you wanted him to.”

  “Ed.”

  He pushed past Jim and ran through the dining room, up the stairs, into his room, where he closed the door and stood silently against it. He searched for his sorrow and found only a dull ache. He could not accept it. Paul could not be gone. If he were truly dead, he would feel the pain lacerate him, would feel more than this numbness, dead at the center. He pressed against the door, waiting for the tears to come from his dry eyes, waiting for some way to release his grief, waiting.

  They had left it to Mike to slam the door on reporters, to arrange some sort of memorial ceremony, to handle whatever friends came by to offer condolences. Mike was the practical one. He would grieve in his own way while taking care of whatever was necessary. The reporters had to content themselves with shots of the clones greeting Paul’s friends at the door.

  Ed, alone in his room, could hear Mike and Kira talking downstairs with Emma Valois and Hidehiko Takamura. Nearer to him, on the stairs, he heard Bill and Zuñi Hathaway murmuring to Al. Jim had hidden himself in his own room.

  Paul had been dead for five days. Even now, Ed’s mind sought a way out. He had picked up the phone when the Russian called. He could not remember his name, but he remembered the face; a thin, pointed face, not at all Slavic, and he remembered the broken phrases. The Russian’s English had failed him finally and he had continued in Russian, unashamed of the tears flowing over his cheeks. All the Lunar scientists were grieving, mourning their departed colleague. The man had left unsaid what everyone knew; that the bodies in the cold Lunar crypts could contribute organs to those who might need them.

  Ed had thanked the man for calling. The Russian had not been the only one to call from the moon. Others, ignoring the cost of calls, had spoken to them.

  Or Paul was dead, and the Russians who stored him only sentimental fools who refused to accept it. He thought of them carrying Paul’s lifeless body across the barren moonscape toward their cryonic chambers. Paul’s frozen body was their monument to him, the ultimate expression of their feeling for him and their regard for his work.

  Ed slumped over his desk and placed his head on his arms. He would have to accept Paul’s death, deal with it somehow, then go on. He could not stand the limbo in which he had remained for the past days much longer. He would have to accept it and watch part of himself and the others die with that acceptance. He would be deluding himself with anything else.

  He did not realize he was crying until he felt the moisture on his face and arms. He managed to wipe the tears away and reached over for his violin case. He removed the instrument, tuned it, and rubbed some resin on his bow. Then he lifted the violin to his shoulder.

  He drew the bow over the strings, losing himself in the music, trying to become a part of it, retreating from the confusion around him to another world, a more precise, ordered one, a world of structured beauty where death, at least for a time, did not exist.

  “Another source of irreversibility is the changes in the most fundamental aspects of human existence, such as man’s biology, or his psychology, that the decisions may involve. As we shall see in some specific instances, such changes necessarily intensify certain aspects of human life at the expense of others. In the new situation that will then be created, some new possibilities will exist, but some old ones will vanish.”

  —Gerald Feinberg

  THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT

  “Each of us is someone’s monster,”

  —Paul Chauchard

  3

  James: 2020

  AS Jim Swenson left the brightly lit doorway and walked outside, the shadows embraced him, hiding him from the girl he knew was watching him. He looked back and saw her raise an arm. Her face was hidden. She was a black shape outlined by the lights behind her. “Moira,” a voice called from inside the dormitory, and she disappeared. Jim walked toward the path leading through the wooded area around the
dormitory, then stopped and looked back. The circular building was surrounded on three sides by trees and faced a large courtyard. Other cylindrical dormitories, several stories high, overlooked the courtyard. Beyond them, in the distance, Jim could see the tall towers that housed the library and various research facilities of the university. His birthplace was among those towers.

  Jim turned and walked on through the woods. The shadows beneath the trees shielded him from the moon, where scientists lived and labored in an attempt to carry on the work of his father, where Paul Swenson lay in a cryonic vault colder than that rocky and desolate surface.

  They should have buried him here, in the earth, among trees and flowers, not left him in the sterility of that dead world. On the earth his spirit, if it existed, might roam its old haunts, warming itself in the sun. But perhaps Paul’s spirit had outwitted its captors after all, returning to a sphere of souls around the world, watching over the children who were pieces of itself.

  They had left the memorial service almost four years before, where Paul’s friends had spoken a few simple words, Jim holding Kira’s arm, his three brothers following closely behind. Looking up, Jim had seen them, as he knew he would, crowded in a herd a short distance away. The newspeople did not have to come close to record accurately the grief written on his face. Their equipment would memorize every detail of his sorrow and transmit it to a billion newsfax sheets and millions of holographic screens. The news-people had huddled in the distance, ready to swoop.

  He thought of Moira.

  “A newsfax man came around,” Moira had said, her black eyes smiling at Jim. “I guess someone told him we were seeing each other, and he wanted a personal story or something, what it’s like to go with a guy who…”

  “What did you tell him?” Jim asked, grabbing her arm. Moira looked at him, her eyes wide.

  “Why, nothing,” she said. “I have better things to do than discuss my personal life with the press.”