—Joshua Lederberg
”Orthobiosis, the Perfection of Man"
4
Michael: 2025
WHEN Michael Swenson was small, too young for school and still attending the pre-school child care center, Paul had been a giant, striding through the rooms and hallways of the house as if it were a palace. He remembered big hands reaching down for him, a laugh that thundered around him as he was swooped up and the room spun in a bright swirl of colors. The floor was suddenly miles away and he would clutch his father’s arms, terrified but unwilling to make a sound. Then he would be on the floor again; knowing he was safe, he would shriek in delight.
“Do it again, Paul!”
But by then Paul would have picked up Kira or Ed. Paul had always been as impartial as possible, even in moments of spontaneity. Even now, Mike did not know if Paul once had a favorite among them. He bore no resentment toward his father for this perhaps forced impartiality. It had been the best way to handle what was at best a difficult situation. Besides, resenting the dead for their actions was a pointless exercise.
Zuñi and Bill had been impartial too, but in a different way. Zuñi in particular had thought nothing of spending a lot of time with only one or two of them. She had seemed supremely confident that everything would balance out eventually, and it usually did.
Once, in a fit of childish perversity, the others had gone off to play an elaborate game in the back yard, refusing to let him join them. Zuñi had found Mike alone in his room, brooding.
“Why aren’t you outside with the others?”
“They don’t want me. They say I don’t know how to play the game.” Mike had already forgotten that last week Al was the one who did not know how to play. Al had not seemed to mind. When they rejoined him, Al was in the kitchen with Bill, eating cookies and milk and looking as though he had put one over on them.
“The hell with them, then,” Zuñi said. “We’ll just have to walk down the street all by ourselves and get a fruit bar at the health food restaurant.”
So they had gone by themselves and Zuñi had told him stories about the clouds and the shadows cast by the trees. Of course the stories were completely fanciful, but they served their purpose. Mike forgot all about the game he could not play.
Mike rarely thought about his youth now. It was pointless to reminisce unless there was some purpose in so doing. Sometimes after work at his company’s research laboratory, he would go with a few of his fellow workers to a bar near the lab. Mike drank only enough to feel pleasant and relaxed; he had been drunk only once in his life and hated the loss of control over himself. He had stumbled around, babbling meaninglessly, unable to focus or to direct his body with any degree of accuracy. He had been sick the next day. He had never allowed himself to fall into that state again. He would sit in the bar with his co-workers, listening to them recount their lives, watching as they gradually became more incoherent.
Joe Lahani, a huge muscular Hawaiian, would usually start the reminiscences, bellowing stories about his exploits at Punahou High and his youthful golden days as an undergraduate. “Why the hell did I leave the islands?” Joe would invariably end. “Why the hell did I come here to a God-forsaken sinkhole like L.A.? I’m getting out of here at the end of the month, I’ll go home and live on the beach with the friendliest wahine I can find.”
By then the others would have started on the stories of their lives, talking at or through each other, unwilling to listen to each other’s tales but enjoying the shared drunken companionship.
Mike usually attended these drinking sessions in the company of Esther Pressman, an engineer, whom he liked for her serene attitude and businesslike demeanor. Esther was a small, slender woman whose brown hair and dark eyes gave her a quietly pretty appearance. She would usually nod gravely at Mike while the biographies were being told and shake her head disapprovingly.
Oddly enough, she usually drank as much as everyone else but she never betrayed it, becoming only more solemn and unusually articulate.
The morning after, Mike would hear the comments of his fellow workers:
“Never again.”
“Jesus, what a head! I’m killing myself.”
“I could drink twice as much ten years ago and never feel a thing.”
“Why do you keep doing it, then?” Mike would ask. The only reply he ever received was a shrug or a cryptic remark.
Mike went with his friends to the bar for one reason. He believed in having friendly relations with co-workers. People who got along worked better together. They did not waste time and money in personal gripes, usually disguised as procedural disagreements or bureaucratic disputes, at work. His tasks would be easier and more productive if the others liked him.
Yet he loathed the way they would wallow in their former lives while drinking. Open a bottle, he thought, and you wind up with a time machine plus pointless aggressiveness and silly ideas. His friends, normally intelligent and rational, became transformed. He could not understand why intelligent people would want to do such a thing. At times, he thought with a shudder, they reminded him of his brother Jim, self-indulgent, giving in to every mood and whimsy that passed through his mind.
He looked up from his desk at his sparsely populated bookshelf and remembered guiltily that he still had not read Jim’s novel. It had been published the year before under a pseudonym. Jim had not wanted to be associated with Paul or cloning, hoping that the novel would be judged on its own merits.
The paperback book sat on the shelf above Mike, silently rebuking him. Jim had been disappointed with the critical reaction. Only a few people had noticed the book, although those few had complimented him on his style and said he showed promise. He had been criticized for choosing an undemanding subject.
“They all want those goddamn cosmic visions now,” Jim had said to him over the holophone. “They said I was too twentieth-century American, too narrow, Nabokov cum Hemingway. What’s wrong with that? They expect a writer to integrate all knowledge every time he sets down a sentence. I’m doing something different, that’s what it comes to.”
Well, what did he expect with a first novel?, Mike thought. He looked away from his brother’s book. He enjoyed reading, but it took up time better spent in keeping up with the latest applications of fusion power. He had to be selective about the few books he read outside his field. As far as he knew, Jim had not written anything since the book came out, and the novel had not been picked up by a microfiche publisher. Jim was probably living on what Paul had left, small as it was.
Mike leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes to rest them. He found himself remembering something else from his childhood, one of the few incidents upon which he cared to dwell.
He was eight years old again, walking home from school across the playground. Jim and Al were being kept after school for programming obscene holograms into one of the computers. Kira and Ed were at the university swimming pool.
Three older boys were lounging next to the swings. Mike recognized only one, a big redheaded boy named Bucky. This was reason enough to avoid the group. He began to walk away from them toward the nearby road.
“Hey!” someone shouted. Mike kept walking. “Hey, clone!” The older boys left the swings and quickly surrounded him. They were all bigger than he was. The two with Bucky were a mean-looking blond boy and a kid with straight dark hair.
“He’s one of the clone kids,” Bucky said. “They grew him in a machine, guess his father don’t like fucking.” The other two giggled. “Well, does he?” Bucky continued, shoving Mike in the shoulder. “Does he like to do it? Maybe he likes machines more.” The redheaded boy shoved him again and he fell over on his side in the grass.
Mike, feeling frightened now, refused to answer. The blond boy grabbed his books.
“Wat here don’t think you need books,” Bucky said. “Do you, Wat.”
“Nope,” the blond said. “I mean, he can get the same ones from the other clones. Besides, they’re the same, him and
them, he knows what they know.” Wat threw the books down and began to stomp on them, crushing the tiny microfiche container and Mike’s reading machine.
Mike clenched his fists to keep his hands from trembling. His face flushed with anger. He wanted to punch Wat as hard as he could, but then the others would gang up on him. He said nothing.
“Quiet little bastard,” the dark-haired kid said.
“He won’t be quiet for long,” Bucky said. “Come on.” He and Wat began to drag Mike with them, pulling him first one way, then another. His arms hurt and it seemed they would come right out of their sockets. Mike bit his lip and kept silent.
They stopped. “See that hill?” Bucky shouted.
Mike looked down the small but rocky and steep hill at the edge of the playground. “You’re gonna roll down it as fast as you can go,” Bucky went on.
“No.”
“You’re gonna if I have to throw you down it.” He felt himself being lifted and then he was in the air. The ground rushed up to meet him and he rolled, tearing his overalls on some rocks as he hurtled to the bottom of the hill.
He got up. He had a cut on one knee and some bruises for sure, but luckily he had landed on a soft piece of ground. He stumbled back up the hill, forcing back tears.
“Roll!” And he was tumbling down the hill again, ripping his clothes and bumping his head against a rock when he reached bottom. He climbed up while his stomach burned and tightened inside him.
“Well, cloney, you’re just going right down again.” Down he rolled. Hours seemed to pass. He would be trapped here forever with the mad trio, rolling over and over. He was dizzy and wanted to vomit, but he managed to control himself. He wanted to cry but he would not let the boys see his tears.
Mike did not know how long they forced him to roll down the hill. But at last, as he stumbled up for what seemed the hundredth time, trying to ignore the pain of a twisted ankle, he noticed that the boys had stopped laughing. He stared at them steadily, as if daring them to do more.
“He didn’t cry once,” Wat said. “Jesus.”
“Not bad, cloney,” Bucky said. He sounded a little worried. “You must be crazy.” He said it as though it was a compliment. Then the three were gone, probably afraid a teacher might come outside and catch them.
Mike had been a mass of dirt, scratches, bruises, and torn clothing when he got home. Paul had been angry. Mike knew he did not believe him when he said he had tripped and fallen by accident. But Paul seemed to understand his need for keeping silent and stopped questioning him after a while. After that, Mike had not taken the obvious actions. He did not tell his teacher about the three boys. He did not ask the other clones to help him beat up the group, though they probably could not have beaten the older boys anyway. But Bucky and his friends never bothered him or the others again.
Mike was still, irrationally, proud of this distant exploit. It had proven something to him that he had attempted to follow ever since. He would not allow himself to give in to useless emotional responses, He would deal with things as they came along, doing what he could and expecting nothing from others except perhaps respect. Once he had been hurt by cruel remarks about himself and the others. He soon learned he could spend a lifetime in self-pity, a useless and unproductive enterprise. After a long time, he could listen to jokes about cloning and feel nothing except a mild boredom. He did whatever he had to do efficiently and as well as he knew how, wasting little time in worrying about it afterward.
When Paul died, he had grieved, and then locked up his grief in a small private chamber in his mind. He greeted the people who called or came by to offer condolences. He arranged for the small memorial service that Paul would have liked, inviting Paul’s close friends to give short reminiscences about him. Paul had never been one for prayers, religiosity or inordinate praise. Mike was relieved when his father’s friends spoke simply without mumbling words of an afterlife or calling Paul one of the great men of science.
Mike returned to school the day after the service. Jim and Ed, who were busy shuffling around the house feeling depressed, called him heartless. Al and Kira said nothing, but he could read what they felt in their eyes.
All he had said was, “Crying won’t bring him back. He would have wanted us to go on. “Eventually, of course, they realized he was right and returned to their own studies. Naturally, they had let him discuss the details of the estate with Paul’s lawyer. Between them, they had managed to set aside enough money to live on for some time in spite of the high inheritance tax, and there were Paul’s royalties plus the trust funds. Mike had organized all of it with the lawyer, even noting a couple of items the attorney missed. But the others had not been particularly grateful. In fact, they had not been interested in hearing about it. He wondered if they would have preferred getting by on the minimum income and student grants.
He had only slipped once. During a visit to Dr. Valois, he had told her about his attitude in greater detail than usual, expecting at least some understanding from her. He had not cried a tear for Paul and was proud of his forbearance.
But Dr. Valois had become concerned.
“Mike, I don’t want to tell you how to feel or behave. I’m certainly not recommending that you give way every time you feel depressed or unhappy about something. But emotions shouldn’t be repressed, to use an old term. There’s a time for joy and a time for sorrow.”
“And a time to live and a time to die,” he said mockingly.
“You can utilize your feelings, let them out in constructive ways. You’re just sitting on yours.”
“I don’t care to give in to them.”
“In other words, it’s a defense. You won’t get hurt.”
“I can’t feel certain things, that’s all.” He had said it calmly, vaguely disappointed in Emma Valois.
“You’re not letting yourself, you mean. Why, Mike?”
“What difference does it make, whether I can’t or I’m not letting myself? It’s the same thing. I’m not a sadist, I don’t go out of my way to hurt others. I get along. People who give in to such things make themselves and others miserable.”
It had been his last visit to Dr. Valois. There was obviously nothing more she could do for him. He had been tiring of the visits anyway. Occasionally she had called the house and spoken to him for a few moments. He had always been pleasant, cheerful, and noncommittal. He had written her a kind note when he left for California. He did not want her to think he did not care.
Mike heard the door of his apartment open and got up. His brother Ed passed his office, leaned in, and mumbled a greeting.
When Mike came out to California, Ed had come along. Mike had decided, a bit reluctantly, to share an apartment with his brother. Although he had looked forward to being on his own, it had been more practical to live with Ed. They had both been studying at the same university. They had shared their rented car and their home computer hook-up.
Kira had remained in Paul’s old house, continuing her studies with Takamura and his people. Al was on the moon and Jim was God knew where. Mike had received two calls from him in the past year, one from Toronto and another from Zimbabwe. Why Jim had gone to Zimbabwe, Mike did not know. Its citizens were still not overly enthusiastic about white visitors, but were starting to give in to the financial benefits of tourism.
Mike had finished his doctorate two years after coming to Los Angeles. Rather than staying on at the university for a post-doctoral degree, he had gone to work right away, anxious to apply what he had learned. He was now a member of a research group working on new applications of fusion power and ways to utilize it more efficiently. It was important work. The world had grown greedy for power. Poorer nations wanted their share of the wealth. Threats, unspoken and implicit, had existed beneath their requests for aid: Help us, or we shall not be responsible for the consequences. Some of our more impatient citizens may take matters into their own hands. It would have been easy to smuggle an atomic weapon into a large western city. Any country with
a city destroyed in this manner would have had impossible alternatives. They could acquiesce in the destruction, taking no action; they could go to war using ground forces and some tactical nuclear weapons; or they could decimate the offending country with atomic bombs, killing thousands of innocent people. The unspoken threat had been sidestepped. It was easier and more sensible for wealthier nations to volunteer their help.
It’s possible, Mike thought as he watched his brother in the doorway, that I may be heading to some place more distant than Zimbabwe to help technicians there. His company, one of many supra-national, multi-tentacled organizations, often sent its people to aid poorer nations. It was its way of doing good, gaining more power, and acquiring more wealth at the same time. He couldn’t very well drag Ed along with him. Yet he had grown used to his brother’s quiet presence. At times he felt he would be sorry to see Ed leave, though he usually tried to ignore such feelings.
“You got another letter from Arthur Gordon,” Mike said in response to his brother’s greeting. “I put it in your room on your desk.”
“Thanks,” Ed replied, turning to leave.
“Wait a minute. I assume it’s another offer. I don’t know why you’re still farting around here if you have a chance to study with a man like that.”
“There are good people here,” Ed said quietly. “I’m satisfied. Besides, with the computer booth, I can always tune in his lectures or discussions if I want to, and the print-outs keep me up to date on all the important papers. I might go East and wind up seeing Arthur Gordon twice a year. You know how it is, studying with people of his reputation.”
“I suppose that’s why he wrote you a personal letter with the formal offer. And you know goddamn well that a computer booth is no substitute for actually being at a school and being able to associate with certain people, though it’s probably good enough if you have no other choice. You mathematicians don’t have any practical sense sometimes.”
Cloned Lives Page 16
