Cloned Lives

by Pamela Sargent

  Al’s room was at present divided in half by a retractable wall. Since each of the rooms in the living quarters housed two people, such a wall insured privacy when needed. Liu Ching had once commented that hardly any of the Chinese used this wall because it was assumed that anyone would do his best to get along with a roommate. Those who did not were considered self-indulgent or egotistical. She had smiled when Al recounted tales of some who, without the wall, could not have stood the sight of their roommates for long periods of time. Most of these problems were solved by a change of rooms.

  Al sat at his desk top, reading a paper on the space ship engines that Ahmed had recommended to him earlier. On the other side of the wall, the voices of Simone and Liu Ching murmured in Chinese, providing a soothing background noise. There was no computer outlet in Al’s room; when he needed print-outs, he had to use the one located next to the sitting room. He completed his reading and deposited the paper in a recycling slot just above the desk top. Then he pushed the desk top into the wall and got up. He grasped the dividing wall at the end nearer the door and began to push it toward the back of the room.

  “At last!” Simone said.

  “What were you reading?” Liu Ching asked.

  “A paper by one of Ahmed’s colleagues on some details of the space ship engine designs. I thought it might get me going on some thoughts about a space drive, and there is one interesting detail…”

  “Ah!” Simone interrupted as she turned back to the Chinese woman. “Une fois lancé sur le sujet…we shall be sitting here all night listening to a discourse.”

  “You’re not being fair,” he said, leaning over the back of Simone’s chair. “I never talk about my work for more than four hours at a time.”

  “I would like to discuss it,” Liu Ching said, “but I cannot stay.” She stood up and straightened her baggy gray shirt and trousers. Al had no notion of what the Chinese woman’s figure was like; her compatriots rarely wore the more revealing t-shirts and shorts worn by most here. But her face was lovely enough to cause frequent glances. Liu Ching’s eyes were large, almost black onyx-like gems, and her nose was small and perfectly straight. Her skin was ivory, burnished with a golden hue, her mouth full and sensual, and her hands long and slender. Her thick dark hair, like Simone’s and almost everyone’s on the moon, was cropped close to her head; long hair was bothersome here and could be dangerous in space.

  “I must go to a political education session,” Liu Ching continued. “We are truly fortunate in having the presence of Dr. Cheng, who arrived from Shanghai only a week ago. If his scientific training were the equal of his political correctness, he would be an even more remarkable man.” She glanced at Al and her eye twitched in what looked suspiciously like a wink. Simone guffawed. “So I must go. I cannot be late, I would not wish anyone to conclude that I assign these sessions less than their proper place.” She smiled and stepped into the hallway as the door slid open. “I hope to see you again soon.”

  The door slid shut. “Can’t we fix the divider?” Simone asked, gesturing at the back wall. The top part of the retractable wall still protruded into the room.

  “Nope. Shoddy construction, that’s what it is. I’ll have to get someone to make repairs.” He sat down in the inflatable chair that Liu Ching had vacated and promptly sagged into it. “And this chair needs some air.”

  Simone got up and sat on his lap, twining her arms around his neck. “I should be nervous,” she said. “I have my interview tomorrow.”

  “It’s just a formality.”

  “Sean Carmody said that if the interview is short, it means that they have already decided against you.”

  “And Juana Delgado told me that if it’s very long, they haven’t yet made up their minds. I don’t imagine the length of the interview has anything to do with it.” The interview, after all, would only confirm whatever impressions the interviewers already had of a person.

  Those who had volunteered for the long space flight had given up most of their privacy during the past three years. All of their medical records had been handed over to the committees making the selection and all of them had been subjected to both physiological and psychological tests. The work they had done in their chosen fields was being surveyed and their minds had been probed by machines designed to translate every subconscious urge. Even their personal lives were being dissected. Many of the applicants had been weeded out early; those who were adventure-seekers, unstable, those who were too weak physically or who had special problems of one sort or another.

  Al had survived the early weeding-out process, as had about ten thousand others. There was no telling when the final determination would be made and announced. Although aided by computers, the selection was bound to be a complicated procedure. The ship would be finished and ready for some testing in another five years, but the selections would be made earlier than that. Al had heard rumors that the decisions would be announced sooner rather than later, to allow enough time to train and prepare those who would go. Two people would be chosen for each available place, in case something happened to one of them. Both would undergo training, but the alternate would be only an understudy. Al wondered which would be worse; not being chosen at all, or being an alternate, forced to go through the training process perhaps hoping that some disaster would befall the chosen crew member, or that the selected one would not do as well in training.

  Al had gone to his own interview two weeks earlier. It had lasted for about two hours, the average length of time. He could barely remember what the five interviewers were like; at the time he had wondered whether the interviewers had any personal biases that might eliminate him from consideration. It had been a foolish thought. The entire interview had been monitored by small devices humming softly on the desk in front of him, recording various physical reactions. The interview itself had been recorded on tape. Those not at the interview would be able to view it; any personal prejudices on the part of the interviewers would become evident.

  He had felt off balance almost from the beginning. He could not remember who said it:

  “Albert Swenson?”

  “Yes?”

  “Part of the Swenson clone,” another had muttered. Yep, Al had wanted to holler, just another chip off the old goddamn block. He had restrained himself. They had not pursued the matter of his birth, but they did not really need to do so. They would have access to any information about him that they wanted, including the files of Emma Valois.

  “I had better rest,” Simone said as she eased herself off his lap. “I want to look well tomorrow.”

  “Simone,” he said as he leaned forward and took her by the hips, “what if you’re chosen and I’m not?”

  She released his hands and moved away from him. “Why do you ask me this now, Al? You never have before. You are being foolish. We are lovers, they would pick both of us or neither of us, I think.”

  “We assume that because we don’t want to think about the alternatives. I don’t think the committees will let romantic sentiment prevent them from picking the best crew available.”

  “I thought we had agreed not to talk about it until it was a real problem. We gain nothing by…”

  “I know, I know.” He wanted to let the matter drop, but was afraid to let go. As if sensing that, Simone moved to his side and rested a hand on his shoulder.

  “Consider something else, Al,” she said softly. “I am no longer a young woman. Bearing children would be risky at my age. The journey will be long and it will be expected that some will bear children in case others should die. There will be many options for the travelers, they may have to settle a new world if something should go wrong, or live on the ship for longer than expected. They will have to be prepared for almost anything. Every older woman applying for the journey knows that the cards are stacked against her. It may not be fair but that is how it is. Each older woman closes off certain alternatives. It is the same with older men who are nor as strong and vigorous as younger ones.”

&
nbsp; “No, Simone, that’s not a problem, not now. There’ll be plenty of equipment along, ectogenetic chambers, trained biologists. There’ll be too much work to do for women to be limited by nine months of pregnancy. It would-n’t matter if you were sixty.”

  “But what if something goes wrong? I’m sure the committees involved are thinking of that. Natural processes must be relied upon if all else fails.”

  “I think you’re inventing difficulties.”

  “Is it any more ridiculous than you thinking that I may have a better chance of going because of my race? You conveniently forget that there are many more of my race to choose from. And I am French by nationality and culture, so I must compete with that group as well.” She had moved away from him again, shuffling lightly over the floor. She pulled off her shirt and he watched it drift slowly downward. “You brought up the problem, tell me.” She pulled off her shorts, pulled her bed out of the wall, and lay down, bouncing slightly. “What will you do if you are chosen and I am rejected?”

  “I don’t know,” he lied.

  “Certainly you do and so do I. And if you told me you wanted to stay, I should refuse to have anything more to do with you. And you know what I would do.” She folded her arms under her head. “I left a husband and child to come here. Dinh was a good husband and a fine man but his work was elsewhere. I am sometimes sad that it had to be so, but I have never regretted my decision, not even when my son cried and asked me not to go. There are others who can care for him and I know he will understand when he is grown. So you know what I would do, Albert, and you would do the same. We need not discuss it further.”

  He had known it before she spoke. He looked away from Simone, down at his hands, curled loosely around the edges of his shorts. He had known it already and knew that she was right about his feelings. But he could not help thinking that the words should have been left unsaid, that he should never have asked the question. Something between them had died with the words, only an illusion, perhaps, something that people might fool themselves into believing in order to remove some of the harsher edges from their lives, something that made the world softer and more pleasant.

  He looked back at Simone. She had turned on her side, her back to him. He was being foolish. Did it really mean that they loved each other less? Only if he believed that a person should make the loved one the most important thing in life, sacrificing everything else if necessary. A romantic ideal, but one which in life more often produced resentment and bitterness than undying love. He knew perfectly well that if Simone chose not to go and stayed with him, she would in time see him as a stone around her neck; whenever there were problems, there would be the inevitable if unspoken accusation: Remember what I gave up for you. And if he chose to stay, he knew what he would be thinking: You cannot be as interesting, as fascinating to me as new worlds and new suns. He was fortunate that Simone had enough sense to realize this, that the situation he envisioned would never come about.

  But he also knew that a world without Simone would be a darker and sadder place for him. He might in time adjust to it, but he would not forget her. He was, he thought, altogether too much like his father. Perversely, he hoped that the world would be equally dark for Simone without him. That had been the real question, not the one he had spoken.

  He got up and moved across the room. “Simone?” he whispered. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her hips. He would take each day as it came, knowing that there might not be many of them left to spend with her, and hope that there might be more. “Simone?”

  She was already asleep.

  Al had passed one of the incomplete starships on his way to the Lagrange space colony. The dark metal globe which comprised most of its body, which would contain the frozen deuterium that would power the vessel, seemed to mirror the hopes and fears of those who had planned the voyage. The tiny pinpricks of reflected starlight on the globe’s surface were isolated points adrift in a vast, black expanse. The ship’s living quarters, still mostly a latticework of girders, seemed almost an afterthought, a cork on a round bottle.

  It had been more practical, he knew, to build the ships in an orbit around the Moon rather than nearer to Earth. Metals mined on Luna and parts manufactured by the moon’s growing industries could be catapulted to the construction crews at little cost. The moon, once primarily a scientific outpost, was becoming an industrial center: its residents were paying back the investment Earth had made in them, with interest. Although most of the workers building the ships still lived on Earth when not working, a few of them had moved their families to the moon. More underground dwellings were being hollowed out beneath the lunar surface, and Al could imagine a time when Luna would be honeycombed with mazes containing thousands of tunnels.

  His personal desires had crystallized when he saw the partially built ship. He had to be on board when they left. He was convinced that whatever he might do if he stayed behind would not be anywhere near what he might accomplish on the journey.

  Paul’s dream. Once this had weighed heavily on him when he was much younger; why had he, among all the clones, elected to carry out his father’s dreams so overtly? He had not attained the stature of Paul Swenson’s name in astrophysics and this had made him depressed for a while. After his first two years on the moon, he had toyed with the idea of giving up research altogether; or perhaps going back to Earth to teach and write, hoping to find someone in his classes with a mind capable of fulfilling Paul’s dream, lifting it from Al’s shoulders. His common sense had made him remain on the moon. Probably even Paul, if he had been born fifty years later, could have done no more than Al himself.

  The ship he had seen and now recollected had, oddly enough, at least to his way of thinking, been named the Nikita S. Khrushchev. Even the naming of the vessel had been the cause of some acrimonious debating. The problem was finally resolved when it was decided to name the ships after world leaders who had been in power during the earliest days of space flight. The pioneers who had died in space and the people whose scientific work had enabled humanity

  to leave the earth already had half of the lunar installations, craters, mountain peaks, and assorted space stations named after them, so their names had not been considered. The suggestion that the ships be named after twentieth century leaders who had first placed a high priority on space travel had been made, Al was sure, almost sarcastically. But the suggestion had been taken seriously and the ships had been named, in a compromise that fully satisfied few but at least enabled the debators to put their time to more constructive uses. The other two ships had been named the John F. Kennedy and the Mao Tse-Tung.

  Al, whose knowledge of history was shaky, was not sure if Mao had much to do with space flight. But the Chinese had made it into space eventually and since they still, in a more or less ritual fashion, attributed much of their success to him and since he had been a contemporary of the other two, Al supposed that his name had as much right to be on a ship as anyone else’s. At any rate; one could not insult the Chinese.

  The French, the Brazilians, the Japanese and a few other nations had been annoyed by all this but were soothed by having various parts of the ships named after their own twentieth-century leaders. The passengers would be wending their way to the Charles de Gaulle Observatory or the Mobutu Sese Seko Engineering Compartment, but would no doubt come up with their own names for these places in time. Al found himself wondering why the ships and their very names had to be symbols of humanity’s bickering, the kind of bickering that would have to be absent if the ships were to complete successful missions. Why couldn’t they have been named after constellations or figures from myth, something more in keeping with the awesomeness of the undertaking? But there would have been arguments over that too; which constellations, which mythologies?

  Al waited for Ahmed Maheib to finish dressing. The two men had exercised earlier while wearing weighted suits; after that workout, the simulated gravity of Lagrange, half that of Earth, seemed bearable; “Just think of it,
no politicians,” Ahmed murmured as if paralleling Al’s thoughts. “No politicians on board. They would have little power, no chance to seize it or to run for reelection or to collect their rewards for years of service. It might almost be worth the journey for that alone.” The Arab smiled as he tucked his cranberry-colored pullover into the waistband of his black slacks. “Perhaps some day we might let the synthesists and speculators run things, but then I am being too optimistic.”

  “Unfortunately, the ships will probably grow their own politicians in time,” Al replied. “Wait and see.” He stood up and smoothed down his short brown hair.

  “I shall not be going,” Ahmed said fatalistically. “I may settle down with Jane and lead the life of an English country gentleman. I have made great progress with her mother, Lady Gardiner. At our last meeting, she actually greeted me with courtesy. You and Simone must come with us on our next trip. I would marry Jane for her estate alone, even if she resembled her mother.” Ahmed ran a comb through his unruly black hair. “Which reminds me, we were supposed to meet our two loves in one of the lounges.”

  The two men left the locker room and walked along the passageway leading to the lounge. The Lagrange space colony was a cylinder almost four miles long and one mile in diameter. It was located at the L5 libration point, a location where the gravitational forces of the Earth and Moon cancelled each other out. Lagrange, at L5, was on the moon’s orbital path but situated 240,000 miles behind the moon; it would remain fixed in its relative position between Earth and Luna. A somewhat more spacious colony, Descartes, had been built at the L4 libration point 240,000 miles ahead of the moon. The colonies had been made primarily of materials mined on the moon and transported to the libration points. Al had been on Descartes before, spending a day or two adjusting to its three-fourths of Earth gravity before returning home.