Cloned Lives

by Pamela Sargent

  Al had not been fooled by Ahmed’s comments about settling down with Jane. Both Ahmed and Jane had put in their applications for the interstellar flight. Ahmed too had watched the orbiting ship with longing and Al was sure that, given the choice, his friend would not settle for an English estate.

  Ahmed, although primarily an engineer, also had a lively interest in astrophysics. He had accompanied Al and other astrophysicists to Lagrange to participate in a series of seminars and discussions, the first of which had been held the day before. Since two of the most well-known people in the field, Herbert Mallory and Irina Rostova, were living in Lagrange and could not travel without difficulty because of their physical ailments, the gathering was being held here. Al supposed that the meetings could have been held over a holovision link-up, but the change of scenery would probably be beneficial to the lunar scientists.

  He thought of Rostova, whom he had met at the first meeting. Even with her parchmentlike skin, crippled arthritic limbs, and clouded eyes, she was able to make everyone in the room almost tongue-tied. Her dark eyes, however clouded, would burn when she made a point or attacked an erroneous assumption. The woman must be, he had thought, at least one hundred.

  Mallory, in contrast, had been meek, almost obsequious. Dmitri Grol, who had met both people before, had told Al what to expect. “Mallory,” he had said, “is a wild speculator without a brain in his head who is unfortunately correct much of the time. Rostova hasn’t an idea to speak of, but she’ll get rid of a lot of deadwood in everyone’s thinking, as you say, cut through the crap.” The two old scientists had decided to live together when they came to Lagrange. Although Rostova had been as hard on Mallory as on anyone else

  at the first meeting, Al had noticed that she tempered her criticisms of the old man with a gentle hand on his arm, which Mallory would reward with an adoring smile. The unlikely pair seemed to get along and, in spite of their “retirement,” were still contributing papers to the field. Al imagined that the two were still intellectually active because neither of them, with their particular approaches to astrophysics, felt the need to defend old theories or to rest on past achievements. The anti-aging serum, unable to heal their bodies, had at least arrested their aging somewhat and kept their minds clear. They had, unaccountably to Al, refused any other therapy. “They’re from another age,” Dmitri had said. “They believe, I think, that it’s time for them to die.”

  He and Ahmed entered the lounge, a brightly lit, pale green room with round clear plastic tables and inflatable chairs in dark green and blue. Several sturdy individuals in tight overalls, probably workers helping to build a new cylindrical colony, Pascal, next to Lagrange, were enjoying a liquid lunch at the bar.

  Simone and Jane were at the other end of the room, seated next to a window panel. The window overlooked a curving, concave landscape of forests and planted fields. The colony was run by solar power; a large, aluminum mirror outside Lagrange captured the solar energy. Parabolic mirrors at both ends of the cylinder provided sunlight for the fields outside and could be closed during the “night.” The colony, with its fields and small lakes created by combining liquid hydrogen from Earth with oxygen from lunar oxides, would soon be self-sufficient.

  Simone smiled at Al as he seated himself next to her. “You look tired,” he said.

  “I am tired. Jane and I have been lifting weights. I shall awaken during our discussions this evening, of that I am sure. The voice of Irina Rostova will be a splash of cold water.”

  Ahmed was whispering something in Jane’s ear. The English woman bobbed slightly in her chair as she laughed. “You are wicked, Ahmed,” She said. Jane Gardiner was a pale, slender young woman with gray eyes and a mouth and nose that were a shade too large. Her fine brown hair, unusually long, almost to her shoulders, seemed to float loosely around her head. She was gazing at Ahmed with a frankly sexual look.

  Jane was still in her early twenties, having finished most of her studies at an unusually early age. She had lived on the moon for two years. The first of those years had been a disappointment to those who had expected great things of her. She had gained some notoriety, even in the fairly relativistic lunar settlement, taking and abandoning lovers in rapid succession, restless, perhaps, after years of concentrated study. But at last she had grown calmer and Al, working with her in recent months, had come to respect her mind.

  Jane leaned over and rumpled Ahmed’s hair. “When we get married, you must learn to ride,” she said to him. “You’re the worst rider I’ve ever seen. I always thought of Arabs as fine horsemen.”

  “I never saw a horse until we visited your mother.”

  “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to learn, I suppose,” Jane said. Al, looking up, could tell that the young woman did not believe a word of that statement. Jane, unlike most of the others, fully expected to be chosen for the expedition. And why not? Al thought to himself. She’s had everything else she ever wanted.

  “I was telling Al earlier,” Ahmed said, “that he and Simone should come with us to see your estate.”

  “He calls it an estate,” Jane said. “One house in London, a drafty old stone house in the country, and a cottage in Scotland that’s likely to fall around our ears. Mother’s never recovered from the confiscation of our lands, all we have now are the grounds around the houses. Of course I know the land was needed for agriculture, but to Mother it was all one huge conspiracy, giving female peers the same rights of inheritance as males and then leaving them nothing to inherit except a title.”

  “You are exaggerating,” Ahmed replied. “To me, it seemed a spacious estate.”

  “What did you two do this morning?” Jane asked. Not waiting for an answer, she plunged on. “I spent a wonderfully dreary time with an old cousin who unfortunately happens to be residing here. It was almost a relief to lift weights afterward. Old Edgar looked better than he has any right to expect at his age.” Jane paused for breath. “He’s convinced himself that his grandson will be chosen for the stellar expedition, but then they would hardly pick two people from the same family, now would they?”

  Al restrained himself from commenting. He had met, briefly, the grandson of Jane’s cousin, a noted physicist named Lord Anthony Hartford. Privately, he considered Lord Hartford’s chances better than Jane’s.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t come with me, Simone,” Jane went on. “I had to listen to a recounting of Tony’s accomplishments plus a depiction, in detail, of Edgar’s new therapy. I tried to engage Edgar in some sort of theoretical discussion, but of course he wasn’t interested. The whole conversation was about Tony and this new therapy.”

  “For the love of God, Jane,” Simone said wearily. “I cannot understand how you can be so concise in your papers and so verbose in your discussions.”

  “I’m so foolish,” Jane continued. “I didn’t even tell any of you what happened to Edgar, I suppose it’s history of a sort, everyone will know soon. He was given some new medical treatment, they’ve been working on him for months. He looks at least fifteen years younger and his arthritis isn’t nearly as bad. It’s your sister that’s responsible, Al, the doctor or whatever she is.”

  Al was immediately attentive. “Kira? Is she here?”

  “She’s been here for a while.” Jane shrugged. “Lord, I would have told you straightaway, but I thought you knew.”

  Kira had grown even thinner.

  That was the first thing Al noticed as he entered her quarters. She was sitting in front of a desk top in the corner. She stood up quickly, almost too quickly. He moved across the room and took her hands.

  She actually looked better at thirty-six than she had when she was younger. Her face was more angular and the green eyes seemed much larger. Her long hair, piled loosely on her head, had not yet started to gray. But there were dark shadows under her eyes and an air of intensity about her, as if some obsession was burning inside, threatening to consume her.

  She looks like Jim, he thought suddenly, at least as Jim had
looked when he last saw him, six years before. Jim had disappeared after that with his friend Carole Elashvili into some unknown corner of the earth. Al had not heard from him again until a novel was published three years after that. The notes at the end of the microfiche copy said only that the author lived in Caracas. Al had assumed that it was Jim who had sent him the book, although there was no letter enclosed. When he tried to contact his brother, he was no longer in Venezuela; Jim had disappeared once again.

  The novel had at first irritated Al, then began to disturb him. Its central character had been obsessed by something also, moving through a fantasy world lined with mirrors and fractured pieces of glass. The book had done relatively well.

  Looking at his sister, Al remembered the novel and felt a trickle of fear. Come on, he told himself. He must look the same way to Kira as she did to him. He too was thinner, having lost some of his body weight in the lower lunar gravity in spite of exercising; and he too had his own obsession. We need each other now, he thought, all of us. They had all retreated. Their respect for each other’s privacy had grown to such an extent that they hesitated even to talk to each other on the phone. We should care more, he thought, not be so afraid of each other’s feelings and so worried about interfering with each other that we scarcely talk at all. Of course, they lived in different places, they could hardly get together very often. And it was impossible to keep up with each other’s fields; they were all more specialized. Or maybe, he told himself, we just haven’t made time for that.

  “Kira,” he managed to say, somewhat clumsily, “Jane Gardiner told me you were here, working with her cousin. On him, I should say. How are Hidey and Rina?”

  “Rina’s fine. I had to leave her with some people down the street, they take care of quite a number of kids, some of whom just need time away from their

  parents. But I’m afraid she may be forgetting who I am. At that age, a person’s memory isn’t exactly long,” She released his hands and sat down again. “At least that way, Hidey can see her every day, it’s a short walk so it doesn’t tire him. He’s still a little weak. That coronary didn’t help him much.”

  “A coronary’s not that serious,” Al said, settling into a chair across from her.

  “Not by itself, perhaps. The pacemaker’s working beautifully and the new artery helps. But he’s tired, Al, he’s worn out. His lungs aren’t in good shape, he needs an oxygen machine part of the time. He has to rest, but he hates that, he hates having to eat regular meals, taking mild exercise, having to go to bed on a regular schedule. He wants to keep working. He can keep up with everything using the computer and he’s even held some seminars over the holo. But he’s an old man, he abused his body for so many years and it finally caught up with him.”

  Kira sighed, and looked even more tired. She had been working hard for the past few years, even taking three years off to get a medical degree, apparently feeling she needed it for her work. She had her hands full. When Al had last visited her, she was working at the university, teaching, doing her research, working four evenings a week helping to administer some of the paramedical teams operating in the community. He had suggested she was spreading herself too thin. She had retorted: “What good is it for us to do our research, finding new things, if we can’t get them to the people who need them?” She was functioning as a liaison between the researchers and the medics, giving the medics information that they might not otherwise have until later, when it might be too late for some of the patients.

  She smiled suddenly, as if trying to shake off some of her worries. “Hidey was kind of mad when I decided Rina should stay with the Reedys. He didn’t see why he couldn’t look after her, especially since she’s at the university child center for most of the day. But she needs to live with other children for a while. She has no social sense at all.” Kira shrugged. “You know what kids her age are like, but she was really starting to think the world revolved around her. With Hidey home a lot of the time, she thought he had nothing better to do than cater to her whims. Well, at least the Reedys will give her enough attention when she needs it and maybe she’ll learn, with other kids around all the time, that she can’t have everything her own way. Hidey, of course, is convinced the Reedys might sit on her too hard, you know, repress her curiosity. She is awfully inquisitive. But I think she’ll come through it. She hasn’t asked to live at home again and the last time I talked to her, she seemed as curious as ever.”

  “I’m curious. You haven’t said a word about why you’re here.”

  She seemed to tense slightly, and Al realized that whatever she might say would be in some sense a mask, designed to hide from him the real importance of what she was doing. She would tell him almost everything but not the purpose, not what had burned her into the thin, intense woman she had become. And that’s the real reason we don’t talk to each other, Al thought. We’re afraid we might see too much, read each other’s minds.

  “You must know some of it already,” she replied. “I’ve been working on Lord Edgar Hartford. Well, actually two doctors and two technicians have been doing most of it, I’ve just been supervising. We’ve been using clonal cell injections, the project Hidey really started. We were fairly successful with two subjects at the university, but Lord Hartford seemed ideal for a crucial test. He’s very old, he has many chronic ailments which are related to the aging process. We thought if we could help him, it might be a truly demanding test of the process.”

  “How long have you been here, working on this?”

  “Almost four months. We’ve been working on it longer than that, though, the others came to Lagrange eight months ago. We had to clone various cells and prepare the injections of serum. We’ve refined that process; we don’t clone a fetus of the subject, only the various organs, brain cells, and so on. We prepared Lord Hartford with a long series of injections, anti-aging shots, cleared out the cross-linked protein, then injected the prepared serum, replacing the old cells with new ones. So far Lord Hartford’s doing pretty well, he looks years younger and he’s feeling better. He’s a fine historian and he knows something about the sciences, so he’s promised to write about the experience. Now what else can I tell you? Do you want to hear all the details?”

  “Later, maybe. You should have told me you were here. I probably could have got some time off to visit.”

  “I was too busy. We wouldn’t have had much time to talk anyway. Is Simone with you?”

  “Yeah, I would have brought her along, but she was feeling tired. I figured she should rest.”

  Kira took a deep breath, as if trying to decide whether or not to say more. Then she proceeded. “I’ll get a chance to see you again later anyway. If everything goes as I expect it to, I’ll be on the moon in a couple of months, sometime in January.”

  “What for?”

  “Some more work.” She shut her mouth tightly and he knew she would tell him no more.

  “Why?” He would pursue the matter anyway, even knowing that he was unlikely to hear any more. “As far as I know, the biologists on Luna haven’t done any more than what’s going on below. Considerably less, I should imagine. Most of them are specialists in space medicine.”

  “I may have another subject there.”

  Al had temporarily forgotten about the older people on the moon. There were, of course, a fair number of them. Functioning in lunar gravity was easier than living on Earth, and there was growing evidence that Moon-dwellers had longer life spans. Kira would find plenty of subjects there.

  “I’ve said enough,” she went on. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing?”

  He looked at his sister and felt a flicker of resentment. Kira was supervising an important project, more important even than she was letting him know. He was familiar enough with the biological sciences to realize that. She was the de facto head of her department at the university; even though a man named Ramsey was officially chairman, he merely took care of administrative matters that Kira and Hidey could not handle. She ha
d her M.D. and had earned her doctorate long ago. She had advanced rapidly through the university’s academic structure. She had, he thought for a moment, gone farther than he had.

  He forced himself to ignore that feeling. What do you want? he thought ruefully. It was difficult to advance to so-called eminent positions on Luna, in spite of the fact that there were so few people there in comparison with Earth. Everyone there, including the paramedics, food processors, maintenance people, technicians, and workers responsible for constructing and maintaining the living complexes, was one of the best Earth could send. There was little room for personal advancement in an environment that had to stress cooperation if anything was to be done. His own doctorate, compared to Kira’s, Ed’s, or Mike’s, had been an informal affair, based on his work on Luna plus an examination given there, but a lunar degree beating the official stamp of Goddard University or the Tsiolkovsky Institute was the equal of any on Earth and probably better.

  He shrugged off his personal concerns. He began to tell her about the work they were doing in gravitational collapse, the bodies they had observed, the tentative conclusions they had drawn, and was soon lost in his recital.

  After leaving Kira’s room, Al headed for the nearby cafeteria. It was getting close to suppertime, as his stomach, with its rumblings, reminded him. He would call Simone from the dining area and ask her to join him there.

  When he entered the cafeteria, he noticed Dmitri Grol talking excitedly to some people just inside the door. The short blond man spotted him right away and grabbed his arm, almost making Al stumble backward.

  “You have heard? You are still on the list?”

  “No. What do you mean?”

  Dmitri lowered his voice, looking almost conspiratorial.

  “You do not know. They have narrowed down the list for the star flight crews. It is down to five thousand now. They have not announced the list yet, they want to give people time to find out if they are on it,” The Russian tugged at his short goatee. “No one expected it this soon. It is said they will announce the final choices and the alternates before long.”