Ed was speaking now, gesturing to Lilo, Sheila, and Isaac, introducing them. A look of pain passed over Jim’s face as he looked at his nephew.
Jim was old. For some reason, this was terrifying to Mike. His face reflected years of suffering, his hair had become spotted with gray. He looked at Al and Ed more closely. Yes, there were almost invisible gray hairs on their heads. They too were thinner, almost alike with their clean-shaven faces and closely cropped hair. Ed had a small roll of fat around his middle, the legacy of too little exercise. Al was almost as pale as Jim, with his years on the moon and only ultraviolet lamps for sunlight.
Mike pulled at his moustache nervously. I don’t look like any of them, I can’t. His body was firm from regular workouts and any gray hairs he possessed were hidden in his sun-streaked hair. His skin was a healthy bronze tone and if he sometimes heightened its color artificially, what of it? But looking at his brothers made him more conscious of his age, of the passage of time, of the increasing effort it would take to maintain his appearance. He caught a glimpse of the blue-veined network on Jim’s bony arms and thought, I’m getting old, we’re all aging. There was a pause in the conversation and Mike heard himself filling it with inconsequential phrases and questions. He was beginning to grow calmer now. He reached across the table and clasped his brother’s hand while thinking, never again, I won’t let any of them do this to me again.
“Oh, Jim,” Kira said, and felt the tears trickling down her face. She gestured with her hands and at last felt a handkerchief pressed into her palm. She wiped her eyes and saw her brother reseating himself next to the computer console.
“It really put the finishing touches on the evening,” Jim said. “It was bad enough before, but telling them about Carole really finished it. Everybody sat around, and Mike’s wife, whatever her name is…”
“Lilo.”
“Lilo tried to make conversation, but she and Isaac pretty much had to take care of it themselves. I shouldn’t have come.” His voice trembled. “None of us should have. I know Mike doesn’t want to be here.”
She found herself remembering a moment years ago, Jim’s face, his voice: You could help me, Kira, l know you could. Maybe we could do some traveling…
How could she help him now? She had turned him away when she might have made a difference and would have to live with that.
“We shouldn’t be here,” she said angrily. Jim looked up in surprise. “I shouldn’t be here. I must be mad.” She rubbed at her eyes. Everything was becoming blurred now, she was tired and would need all her strength for the next few days. She could not afford to listen to these interfamily discords, not now. She could not sit with Jim and mourn for Carole. “I’m tired,” she murmured, trying to explain her outburst.
“I’ll go,” she heard him say sadly.
“Go to the observatory tomorrow,” she said quickly. “Go on the tour. Go see the stars shining steadily instead of winking, it’s a sight you won’t forget. And please stay for a while. Things’ll be different. We all feel a little awkward, we have to get acquainted again.”
“We’re almost too well acquainted as it is.”
“Go on the goddamn tour.” Kira rubbed her forehead. “It’ll be worth it. It takes you out of yourself, seeing those thousands of constellations, millions of miles away, shining for millions of years.”
She watched her brother move toward the doorway. She grew afraid. She would be alone again, and would have to consider what it was she was doing as she struggled to sleep.
Liu Ching was sitting in Simone’s chair when Al entered his room. “She’s gone, isn’t she?” he heard himself say. “She’s not coming back.”
“She is still here, Al. She wishes only to stay with some friends for a while. Soon she will accept it, and come back to you.”
“So they finally told her she wouldn’t be going.” He sat down, watching the Chinese woman. Liu Ching sat with her legs folded in front of her and her black eyes almost devoid of any expression. “I tried. I asked them to let us go together. Simone didn’t know. Well, maybe I won’t be leaving either.”
“You will leave and so will I. It is almost certain, Al.” Liu Ching smoothed down her brown shirt. “But do not think time will stand still here. We shall go out on those clunking dinosaurs of ships and we may find, by the tune we reach our destination, that those back here have caught up with us, have found back here what we went out to discover. They may be waiting for us there. We may become the ones who are left behind.”
He listened to her quiet, steady speech and remembered Simone’s musical voice, the restless hands which fluttered as she spoke. He wondered if Liu Ching would also be leaving someone behind. He had seen her several times with a young Chinese technician in the dining hall. Simone had told him the two were thinking of marriage.
As if answering his unspoken question, Liu Ching stood up and came over to him. She placed her small hands on his shoulders. “Simone asked me to stay with you for a few days. She thought you might wish to have a companion. To be honest, I would prefer to stay here, for my own reasons, but I shall leave if you want.”
“Stay,” he said. He looked up at her perfectly proportioned face and thought of Simone’s crooked smile and slightly flattened nose. He had occasionally entertained thoughts of how Liu Ching might be in bed, but now he felt nothing other than a desire for a confidant. “You can stay,” he repeated. Almost against his will, he pulled her to him and felt her arms move around his neck in response. Simone, he thought.
Liu Ching was loosening his shirt. “I can’t,” he whispered. But his body was responding on its own, his hands were unbuttoning her shirt. At last he drew her over to his bed.
He was at peace at last, hovering over the lunar surface, his body separated from him. Wedged under the wreckage of the surface vehicle, he saw it move slightly and seemed to feel his broken leg, his crushed ribs, but from a distance: he pulled one string and breathed, he pulled another and his hand clutched a nearby rock.
He had felt panic at first and had struggled against his death. He had watched the vehicle crash into a mountainside that should not have been where it was, then felt it lurch toward the ground. He had listened to the cries of three children in the back, each cry a crystalline note threatening to shatter the clear helmet that surrounded his head. In font of him, two young men, who had disregarded the suggestion that they don space suits at the beginning, of the trip, began to scream as the vehicle smashed into the small crater ahead of them. The moon-bus had spun around him and at last he had found himself under it, half of his body protruding from a broken window. He fought then, struggling for life, searching-for rips in his suit with his free right hand, waiting for a rescue team to arrive.
He was now dimly aware of the fact that air was leaking from his suit, but the thought did not disturb him. He saw Sonia in front of him, pitching a baseball to him as he swung his bat. He was eight again, playing with his sister on their grandfather’s farm in Minnesota. The clarity of the blue sky above him, the green grass beneath his feet, the odor of sweat and dung emanating from the cows in the nearby pasture was almost too sharp for him to bear. He swung the bat and connected with the ball, watched it arc over the field in front of him as Sonia squealed.
He stood in the Chicago night and waited for the policemen to attack. He watched one policeman, no more than twenty feet away, tapping his club lightly against his hand, and suddenly realized that the man would kill him if he could, would in fact take pleasure in injuring him or those around him. Perhaps the man had children of his own, perhaps he prayed every Sunday and was respected by his neighbors, but he would attack and beat him because he stood with the crowd, because he was young, because he wore a blue and white button with the name of a man who seemed to threaten everything the policeman believed, because he and those with him symbolized disorder.
He turned on the bed and reached for Julia, drawing her to him, searching her face for a response. He entered her and saw her close her eyes,
groan, then open them again. They seemed lifeless, dark mud-eyes staring at him while her body writhed under him and her hands clutched at his back.
He saw the frothy substance of the Crab Nebula before him, and around it the black nothingness of space. He turned for a moment from the telescope’s eyepiece and saw his wife below him, making her notations. The observatory’s light had transformed her hair to gold, and for a moment his perceptions centered on her. She glanced up at him and smiled. He smiled back and calmly returned to his observations.
He was at peace. He lay under the wreckage and almost smiled, felt the strings attached to his face turn up the corners of his mouth. Darkness covered him now, and ahead of him he saw only a deep tunnel leading to blackness. He was not fearful of oblivion but, for a second, felt a small regret. He had not wanted to leave so soon. He thought of his children: Mike, almost too practical and sensible for his age; Jim, ruled by the extremes of adolescent emotion; Al, drawn by the brightness of the stars and the blackness of space, as he had been; Kira, whose love of life and desire to penetrate nature’s secrets might lead her to question what once were unalterable facts; Ed, lonely and shy, drawn to a clearer, purer realm of ideas. He hoped they would not waste too much time in tears. He moved into the tunnel, leaving the broken body and its loosened strings behind.
He had been sleeping.
As he awoke, he felt pain in his ribs and legs, then a tingling along all his limbs. His breathing was shallow and he fought for each bit of air, taking it in slowly and then expelling it. He struggled, feeling as though a weight on his chest would crush him. He groaned and felt his head move.
“Paul?” A voice was questioning him. Eviane watched him, tilting her head to one side. Who was she? Sonia reached for his hand. He was supposed to know her, he was sure. Wife? Relative? He did not know.
He became aware of the fact that he was lying down, that liquid was seeping into his arm. He tried to move but could not. He forced an eye open and saw a glaring whiteness. He closed it quickly.
“Paul?” And then another voice: “Dr. Swenson?” He opened both eyes and squinted. Some people were standing by his bed, clad in white coats. He tried to focus on them. One moved closer to him; a brown-haired woman, slender high-checked face, large green eyes. He lay under the craft, pressed against the dead ground, hopelessly waiting. He watched the woman and suddenly felt spasms of bewilderment and fear.
Her lips moved. “Paul?” The word had some kind of significance and he knew he must concentrate on it. Paul. A name. Perhaps his name. Paul. Yes, he had been called that. He closed his eyes again and waited.
“It’s Kira, Paul. I’m here. Rest if you need to, I’ll be here.”
Kira. Who was Kira? He concentrated, trying to summon up an image. A child sat on his lap as he spoke of a farm in Minnesota and the white-haired woman who baked apple pies. Kira. She was a child, then. But this woman was also Kira.
He was suddenly tired, The room around him seemed to recede. He drifted into a gray world spotted with scarlet stabs of pain. Dimly, he perceived a dark and empty terror circling him, waiting to seize him when he emerged once again into consciousness.
“He’s awake again,” Juan Colòn said. “He’s very weak, but I think he’ll be all right. He seems to have a strong will to live, even in this state.”
“I know,” Kira said wearily. She rubbed at a dark spot on the clear table top in front of her. “I went in before. I don’t know if he was fully conscious the first time. I waited. When he became conscious again, I talked to him, but I don’t know how much he understood.” She stared at some of the print-outs on the table, then looked up at Juan. “I don’t know what we’ve done,” she said to the young surgeon. “After all the plans, all the work, I don’t know what we’ve done.”
“We all feel that way,” Juan replied. He closed the door to the conference room and sat down beside her. “May I speak frankly to you? At first, I was concerned only with the surgery, with the injections, replacing his damaged kidney with our cloned one, all of that. But then, when the medical computer revealed activity in the brain…I became terrified. I began to pray. Can you believe that? I prayed that I had not committed a sin. Yet this is little different from operating on critically ill patients frozen for an hour or a day, and I have brought them back from that state before.” The young man pressed his hands together as if praying now. “I found myself wondering where this man’s soul had been for twenty years, if he were now a soulless being. I had to tell myself that this was idiocy, an hour or a year makes no difference to God.”
“My problem isn’t theological,” Kira said. She looked at Juan’s dark, expressive eyes and slender hands. It was not hard for her to imagine him as a priest; in a former time, he probably would have been one. “He’s my father. I saw him look at me and he didn’t know me, Juan, I know he didn’t. I tried to explain who I was, and told him he’d been sick for a long time or words to that effect, but he didn’t know me or didn’t understand. I don’t even know if he realized who he is, or where he is, or…”
“You can’t expect that he would know, Kira. You know what would probably happen to a brain cryonically suspended for all that time. Memories are gone, whole tracks are erased by random noise or whatever, and even if his mind is still fairly well integrated, it will take time for it to heal. Some memories may return when he’s had a chance to read, talk to people, undergone some therapy. He’s had broken limbs repaired, a damaged kidney replaced, injections of serum from your cloned cells, all of that. It would take time for a normal patient to recover from that, and this isn’t a normal situation. I think you may be too close to all of this.”
“I was too close from the start,” she said. Juan gestured as if to take her hand, then seemed to reconsider.
“I’ll leave you alone, if you want,” he said finally. “Do you want me to get you some coffee or anything else?”
“No, thanks. I guess I do want to do some thinking for a while.”
Juan got up and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Paul isn’t dead now, she heard her mind say. The thought was shocking, almost as startling as the news of his death had been more than twenty years before. Perhaps he remembered enough of the past, or would recover enough of his memories in time to retain his identity. Perhaps he did not remember and never could, in which case he had been reincarnated, born into a new life, or was a different being altogether. In either case, she had wrestled with Death and brought him at least to a temporary standstill, shoulders on the mat, and might have defeated him.
Kira began to shiver. How would people react to the news? Death had been a given, assumed in every structure of society, a part of the unconscious of every person now alive. There had been a peculiar consolation in the knowledge for many. No matter what one did, or failed to do, there was the ever-present certainty that everyone, high or low, famous or forgotten, would have the same end, that they would all become equal in the grave. For those who believed in a life beyond this one, there was a comfort in knowing that justice, rarely present during this existence, would be meted out in the hereafter.
Jim had once remarked to her: “There’s a consolation in knowing that eventually you’ll die, that you don’t even have to do anything about it and eventually you’ll go. You don’t even have to make a decision about it. Even if you try, it’ll catch up with you sooner or later and at last you’ll be out of it, oblivious, unconcerned, nonexistent, and at peace. And no one really mourns you, if you think about it. They only mourn the place you once had in their own lives, a place that you once filled, if you die in the normal course of things.” It had been easy for her brother to say that before experiencing the death of those close to him.
But what would people do when they heard about Paul? How would they react if they came to believe that they could choose to live on? It would be terrifying. Even fearful people, or those who felt as Jim did, might choose to go on, no matter how unhappy they were, rather than deciding to die �
�in the normal course of things,” which would itself become a form of suicide. People would have another choice to make, a fundamental one, on top of all the choices available to them now. It was easier not to have choices. It was easier to follow a preordained path; no matter how difficult, it was easier to travel on such a road, laid down by others, than to decide what one wanted. Better not to live with the consequences of freely chosen actions; one could not blame one’s failings on anyone else.
Kira knew, however, that such thoughts were a useless luxury. She, after all, had been given alternatives that others, even now, did not have. Paul had once told her that she, and others equally fortunate, had a responsibility to help provide others with the same choices they had, and maybe other choices as well. She had given Paul another chance at life, something no human being had ever had before.
She would have even more work ahead of her, apart from what she was already doing. She could not abandon the responsibility for what she had accomplished with her father; Paul had not abandoned her and her brothers. He had hoped that his children would achieve something with their lives; now she had to hope that Paul’s second life might be an example to others.
She must try to make sure that everyone had a chance at what might be immortality, not just a select or wealthy few. She and others would have to make the choice available. A society of people hoarding their money, fearful of physical danger, living only for the times they would be renewed biologically, might be worse than not having the choice at all. Or they might grow careless and reckless, unconcerned with danger in a world where death had no lasting significance. They might become thoughtless, unconcerned with the feelings of others, in the crucible of eternity, the effects of cruel acts or damaged emotions might fade in time. People might become procrastinators, forever putting off today what could be accomplished in an almost endless tomorrow. Perhaps most of them, after absorbing the shock of the new discovery and its implications, would not change but would only continue in an endless repetition of what they had previously done.
Cloned Lives Page 31
