“Kira?”
Surprised, she looked up. Jim was standing in the doorway. She motioned to him and he entered, seating himself on the edge of her desk.
“What is it, Jim?” The approaching meeting prodded at the edge of her mind. Damn it, I don’t care, I can at least give Jim some of my time.
“Ellie went back to New York, I took her to the train this morning.”
“You don’t seem too upset.”
“Why should I be? She’ll be happier doing that anyway. Ellie had to work hard all her life, that was one of the problems. She decided she didn’t want to give up her job after all, and she was starting to resent me and my book. Maybe she was right about some things, I don’t know. She wasn’t mad when she left, she told me to keep in touch.”
“What are you going to do now?” Jim had obviously decided something, she could tell that. He seemed calmer, more in control of himself.
“I’ll be leaving.” He smiled slightly, then shrugged. “Not right away. I’ll finish the book, or at least figure out where it’s going, then leave. I’ll be gone by the end of the month. I’ll look for a quiet place where I can work for a while.”
How long that feeling would last, she did not know. But she could at least encourage him until he was gone, and hope that he would persist.
“Carole said she’d come with me. I didn’t expect her to, but she will.”
“You’ll do fine,” Kira said. “I shouldn’t have worried.” She should have been pleased. Instead, she felt vaguely let down. She had not really helped Jim that much; it was easier to evade the situation. She would be a spectator of her brother’s life and something inside her was objecting to that, saying it’s not right, things should be different. But Jim did have to lead his own life. We have our own lives, that’s what we all say, and the ones who can’t make it alone fall by the wayside.
“I think we’ve played this scene before,” he said.
“Yes, we have.” She had cried then. Now she extended a hand and managed to smile. He took her hand and pressed it.
“I’ll see you at home.” He paused before going on. “Maybe you can bring Hidey along. Carole would probably like him.”
The words had cost him a lot to say, how much she was not sure.
“Maybe, Jim. I know he’d like to talk to both of you.”
He released her hand. Suddenly she felt as though she were inside him, slipping over the edge of a precipice, unable to get a foothold, sliding downward. Something’s lost, something’s gone forever. Jim could not find what he wanted in the present or the future. He would always be looking behind him, trying to weld bits of the past into a coherent and pleasing life. Her mind seemed to grasp his, pulling him up from the abyss, at least for a moment.
His eyes held hers and he smiled briefly, then retreated from her again. “I’ll see you later, Kira.”
He left the office, fumbling for a moment with the door, then vanished into the hallway. She heard his footsteps echo on the floor.
Kira was late to the meeting. She entered the room quickly, nodding a silent apology while noting the expressions on the faces around the table.
Kurt was speaking. She sat down and waited for him to finish.
“You’ve heard my objections,” Kurt said. “I do not think we can accomplish what Hidey so fervently desires.” He paused. “In spite of that, I would be interested in pursuing the matter, as long as we keep our goals within reasonable limits.”
Jonis glanced at Kira, apparently as surprised as she was. Bert leaned forward and squinted at Kurt skeptically.
Hidey was smiling. “I realize that those who give grants have the foolish idea that we can always predict our results.” he said, “but those of us who have done research before, as few of us as there are left now, learned a long time ago that you don’t always come up with exactly what you expect.” He put out his cigarette and immediately lit another. “Well, we’ll satisfy the grant-givers, we’ll make some notation about medical benefits.” He leaned back in the chair. “We’d better discuss the mundane details of how to approach this now. I have a feeling we might be engaging in quite an adventure.”
An adventure. Kira found her mind wandering back to her brother. He might live to benefit from whatever they discovered, but she wondered if it would make any difference to him. He seemed to be seeking death as ardently as Hidey sought life by looking through death, retreating from the world which was already starting to change before his eyes. And it would get worse for him. Kira wondered if people, used to a somewhat static world for a while now, might be frightened again when they began to realize what might happen. There was no way to tell. She could only hope that the rewards would be more alluring than the fears.
Jonis was speaking now. Kira forced her attention back to the present.
“...exploration of space beyond the planetary system is a dead-end occupation.”
—Dennis Gabor
INNOVATIONS
Scientific, Technological, and Social
“Where there is no vision the people perish.”
— Proverbs 29:18
6
Albert: 2036
ALBERT Swenson was at peace as he moved across the lunar landscape, lumbering a bit in his spacesuit as his feet pushed lightly against the dust. The deep black shadows at the foot of the mountains to his left were lengthening as the two-week-long lunar day drew to its close. Behind him, three large, concave metal disks captured the last of the sunlight. The underground lunar settlement, housing about fifty thousand people, was run primarily by solar power. Another fifty thousand lived in a settlement to the south of this one and two thousand miners spent most of their time in a camp two hundred miles away. Yet few of them came here intending to settle permanently; most still returned to Earth after one or two years. No children had yet been born here. That was too final a step; the children, raised in lunar gravity, would never be able to go to Earth. Their lighter bones and slimmer bodies would make them perpetual exiles.
But there was a growing number of people who, like himself, had grown accustomed to the austerity of the life here. Many of them regarded the moon as their real home. It was only a matter of time before some of them chose to settle here with families permanently. What did it matter if their children could not live on Earth when there was all of space to explore? What did it matter when there were asteroids, brought into lunar orbit to be mined and now being transformed into hollowed-out living places? When there was Mars with its small but growing settlements not unlike those here? When there would someday be spaceships attempting to travel the vast distances between stars?
Al looked up at the blue-green, cloudy roundness of Earth, hanging in its accustomed place overhead in the black sky. It was an ever-present sight, never moving from that spot, always beckoning to the people who had abandoned it. Yet the Moon-dwellers almost never saw it, living underground as they did, unless they chose to come to the surface to pay Earth their respects. And the radio astronomers, working at their lonely tasks on the other side of the moon, never saw Earth at all.
Al had gone home twice. He had visited Kira and Ed after their marriages six years ago; two years later, he had journeyed to some of the places on Earth he had never visited. These were the reasons he had given himself for the two trips; in fact, he had been almost forced to go by the administrators at the astronomical observatory where he worked. He had been on the moon too long, they had told him, and too long a stay might be disorienting, physically and mentally.
It had been the journey to Earth that was disorienting. The space station was bad enough, but the sensations that assaulted him when he reached Earth itself were dizzying. It was not the gravity that bothered him; he had kept himself fit and suffered only a sense of fatigue and weariness that left him after a few days. It was the sights: people moving through the terminal dressed in red, violet, orange, green, blue, yellow; the sounds: a cacaphony of voices shouting, whispering, chattering, booming from the intercom; the smells:
sweat, hamburgers, perfume, tobacco, marijuana, coffee. The earth suddenly seemed overwhelmingly crowded; a peculiar loneliness had seized him. He could not shake it off, even by the end of his visits. He slept badly at first, feeling as though an unseen hand was pressing him into the bedclothes. He was also reluctant to leave the enclosed space of houses and hotel rooms for the open, almost unpredictable outdoors. Although he had recovered from the sleeplessness in time, he had been relieved to get back to the moon.
He would, he was sure, have to visit Earth again sometime soon. But at least he could look forward to acquainting himself with his niece and nephew, who had been little more than infants on his last trip. Isaac, his nephew, born to Ed and his wife Sheila a few months before their marriage, would be almost seven by now. Al had spoken with Isaac briefly over the holophone; the boy, bearing a marked resemblance to Ed, seemed a serious and introverted child.
Rina Takamura-Swenson was apparently quite different. Al had shamelessly spoiled his niece while on Earth and still indulged himself with frequent calls to her and her parents. The lively inquisitive little girl, he was sure, was one of the brightest kids he had ever seen. It was not long before Rina understood the reason for the three-second delay in talking to her uncle and began to make a game out of it. She was now, at the age of five, able to carry on what Al considered a fairly sophisticated dialogue for a child.
Kira, of course, had always been sterile, a byproduct of being the clone of a male. But she and Hidey had obtained permission to clone a child of their own. Rina had been produced by the same process that had produced the Swensons. The difference was that both Kira’s and Hidey’s germ plasm had been used. Rina had been born from an ectogenetic chamber; although still not common, the procedure was becoming more usual as a convenience for mothers. People who wanted only clones of themselves were still frowned upon, unless the circumstances were unusual. But there were other children like Rina; children of homosexual couples, of sterile couples, or of groups who raised children communally. Permission to use such processes was not as difficult to get now. In spite of Al’s impressions, the earth was becoming less crowded. As more of its six billion people had become reasonably well off, the birth rate had dropped. Almost one-sixth of the world was too busy with other pursuits to bother having children at all. Young women were not pressured into fulfilling themselves through childbirth; among some young men, sterilization had become popular, a way of asserting their masculinity, of showing people that they were secure enough in their manhood not to require the perpetuation of their genes. A growing industry catered to childless people; among many others, having only one child was increasingly common.
Al knew that this pattern might change if the population declined too rapidly. But right now there were too many other things for people to do. Travel was common among young people undecided about their lives. Scholarly sorts could spend a lifetime in study without ever leaving their home computer complexes. Less scholarly types could find a variety of entertainments. Various groups were experimenting with different social structures, some of them based on older models, others entirely new. Those who looked outward could work in space, on the moon, or on Mars. Those who looked inward could care for the wilderness areas set aside for recreation. Those who wanted a change of scenery could live in space communities, underwater domes, towering cities, rural communes, or arcologies.
There were drawbacks, of course. If there were those who enjoyed exploring alternatives, there were also those whose lives were bounded by one pointless pursuit after another. If there were older people who were integrated into society, some of them beginning new careers in old age, there were others who felt isolated and banded together defensively. There were children who, although wanted by their parents, sometimes suffered the disdain of those among whom a dislike of children had become stylish. Although almost everyone could be assured of a place to live and food to eat, almost no one could ever hope to become wealthy; those who were worse off would still steal from those who were better off. Some people could get along with others different from themselves; others were overwhelmed by diversity. Computers and communication equipment, while linking the world and providing education and entertainment, had also, in spite of legal safeguards, robbed everyone of some personal privacy.
Ahead of him, on a barren plain, Al saw a small group of people in spacesuits. It was difficult to tell how far away they were; in spite of some time spent on the lunar surface, he was still not completely accustomed to its peculiar perspective. The horizon was not far enough away; there were few landmarks by which to gauge distance.
The suited people were lumbering fatly and clumsily about, aiming cameras at two people who stood at the center of the activity. Al approached, waving silently at a small bulky figure hovering near them. The figure raised one finger, indicating that he should maintain radio silence. Then it moved toward him, bouncing slightly, kicking up dust which began to settle slowly back on the plain.
The figure reached him and they touched helmets as Al checked to be sure his radio was off. “Je t’ aime,” he heard through the helmet, and then, after a pause, “What are you doing here, Al?”
“I missed you, Simone.”
“I cannot believe that. I have been gone for two hours at the most.”
“Well, I thought it was time to reacquaint myself with the surface.”
“Oh, Al, I missed you too. This film has become even more ridiculous. Do you see the two people standing there? They are being pursued by a miner who has sworn to kill them for…” Simone Tran lifted her head and waved her arms slowly. He motioned to her and they touched helmets again. “I have been trying to tell the director,” she went on, “that the lovers would be dead by now for lack of air, but he refuses to listen.”
“I don’t know why you bother.”
“There is money in it. When I get paid, I will have some good wine shipped up here and we shall celebrate.”
The film crew, cameras lowered, began to stumble toward a small dome near the solar disks, a dome which housed one of the entrances to the underground lunar complex. They were filming their adventure story on location, an expensive process, but not nearly as costly as duplicating the moon believably with a set. Lunar adventures had become a popular form of entertainment, even more popular than the romanticized stories about twentieth-century truck drivers that Al remembered from his childhood. The films, however, por
trayed lunar life as more violent and exciting than it actually was; their plots tended to resemble those of the trucker films, which in turn had been modeled on stories of the old American West. Simone had managed to get a small job as scientific advisor to the director; it paid a lot for very little work, since the director ignored most of Simone’s advice anyway.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Al thought. Humanity’s ventures into the solar system were having an effect on the arts, opening up new themes and settings. The results were Nikita Rogov’s “free-fall” ballets, Ramon Hernandez’s “space-scapes” which suggested the distances between stars, Althea Rhadames’s so-called “Martian poems,” and adventurous yarns such as the one being filmed on the moon now.
Simone moved away and turned on her radio; he did the same. They followed the crew toward the settlement, bounding lightly over the ground. It was probably just as well that Simone did not spend much time with the film crew. Dmitri Grol and some of the others on the space flight project already resented the amount of time she was spending on the film. They had wanted her, like Al, to visit Earth. Simone had not seen Paris, or any other part of Earth, for almost three years. She too regarded the moon as her home.
They shuffled into the dome behind the film crew and descended into a small waiting-room-sized airlock below the surface. They closed the sliding panel above them, an extra precaution in case the dome was accidentally punctured, waited until air had cycled into the room, then proceeded into a vestibule, where they began to peel off their suits.
Simone lifted the helmet off
her head and Al smiled at the familiar sight of her face; almond-shaped brown eyes, a wide mouth, framed by short, straight black hair. She, like him, was dressed in a loose, short t-shirt and shorts. The film crew was, like most visitors, overdressed.
Al had decided, after working with Simone Tran for almost a year, that she was the woman with whom he would most like to spend the rest of his life. His love for her had grown gradually; the realization that he loved her had been sudden. Two years ago, while sitting in a dining room discussing his work with Simone, he had understood that he needed her and wanted her desperately. They had spent almost three months in a sexual daze before the passion had subsided enough to reveal to them both how deep their feelings really were.
Simone, almost forty-five, had divorced her husband before coming to the moon, unable to resist the opportunity to work with the scientists there. She was a Vietnamese, but her grandparents had emigrated to Paris and her parents had known no other home. She waved to the film crew as they left the room, then made a face at Al.
“Idiots,” she muttered. “Fortunately, they will return to Earth soon. They will have my credit line in very small letters and perhaps I shall not have too
much shame to bear. The public will forget their entertainment after they have seen it and no one will be the wiser.”
They left the vestibule and walked through a corridor carved out of the lunar rock, moving through it in a peculiar stride that lifted them off the ground slightly with each step. At the end of the corridor, they emerged into a huge, cavernous courtyard. A few small trees and shrubs lined the center pathway, lit by lights set into the rock overhead. The plants, as well as providing some oxygen, were meant to give a less alien feeling to the lunar settlement. But it was the trees and shrubs themselves that seemed alien in this underground setting.
Cloned Lives Page 24
