“Wishful thinking, because it was curable. We should have known better. We should have known much better. Alzheimer’s genetics were well known by the time we were made, and that would never have been allowed to slip into our makeup.” He shrugged and looked at the bottle of brandy as though contemplating drinking more. He must have decided against it, because instead of uncapping it, he sat there, playing with the top, making a sound of glass-on-glass that set my teeth on end. “Hampson’s destroys the connectivity between the neurons. Not the cells, but the synapses that store information—all of the memories, skills and experiences. Little by little, it severs them. It doesn’t actually liquify the brain, because the brain cells are still there, it just starts breaking down the proteins that form the synapse connections between neurons. It destroys personality and knowledge and mind. It is a disease of extreme old age, though in homo sapiens that can be around a hundred or so. Which is why it wasn’t discovered till the mid-twenty-first.”
He pulled the decanter’s top off, then slammed it back in, and held his palm across the top as though preventing it from jumping out on its own. “It is irreversible. Or at least it is irreversible by any methods that…that we could think of. Jarl modified the nanoscale emitter/nanoscale assembler prophylactic treatments we had, in an attempt to stop the illness. They are nanocytes that, once inhaled, can go to work on the brain and modify it to resemble what it once was. It means you lose memories since, since they work according to pattern, but it’s better than the alternative. They are programmed to activate stem cells and…recreate the brain as it once was. The NSEs—that’s the nanoscale emitters—map all of the connections. They were invented as a substitute for medical diagnostic imaging—sort of like a super MRI. The NSAs—the assemblers—read the map and can rebuild it when damaged. It’s not…it’s not as obvious as this, but if you think of the brain as a datagem in which knowledge is stored, where part of it has been erased due to magnetic activity, the NSEs…nessies, we call them, can restore the shape that was in the gem before, which restores the memories that were there—anything from the history of Earth memorized in primary instruction, to how to tap dance, learned at eighty.”
He waved his hand again, and met Kit’s eyes. “We made an imprint of Jarl’s brain using nessies.” He stopped. “At any rate, it wasn’t perfect; by then, he’d suffered some degeneration due to Hampson’s. He said he wished he still had the copy of his alpha pattern, but I have no idea what he meant. It was still close enough. Little memories might vanish, like names and faces—in other words, retrograde amnesia. But the means to make new memories and recall what remained was still intact. Enough that if his brain could be made healthy, he could have gone on living without much problem. He might suffer such indignities common to the rest of mankind as having to, occasionally, read over a book that he’d read once, or perhaps lose his codes to some of his locks. But he would be normal otherwise.
“Only we could not make his brain healthy. Just replacing cells was not enough, the synapses are where the real memories and skills are stored. The thousands of synapses each neuron makes are why we could never build a computer comparable to the human brain. It’s not just the billions of processors that are needed, it’s the quadrillions of connections that those processors require. His synapses kept failing, and his brain kept degenerating, faster than we could restore it with the nessies. He kept resetting his memories and losing days, weeks, months, years. And fresh inhalations didn’t help, because there is a saturation point. Because the NSAs require a healthy brain map, and the NSEs were working on an already damaged brain. Which is why we came up with another plan.”
“Oh, Light!” Kit said. It was said with feeling and emphasis, even though a little slurred, and I didn’t ask him what he meant, because I thought I knew. Although I couldn’t quite see what Doctor meant, I was starting to get the shape of it—the contours, as it were. And I didn’t like it any better than Kit did.
The doctor didn’t ask what Kit meant, either. He just said, “Quite,” and continued. “See, we had figured out, ten or twenty years before, I don’t remember, in our research, which we did mostly because his social life was rather limited in Eden, and what there was of it was with people who tended to fawn over him…Anyway, in our research, we’d figured out the way to clone ourselves, and had in fact created a couple of clone embryos—”
“What?” from Kit.
“We had created a couple of clone embryos of Jarl’s. Just to prove we could. They were deep frozen and carefully stored, though I don’t think either of us intended on their being used. Not then.” He frowned. “The way we were brought up, or perhaps…perhaps something about us…We weren’t, then, particularly interested in offspring, or in raising children or…” He shook his head. “It never occurred to us we would eventually die, I think, until Jarl…until Hampson’s. And then it seemed too late to start, except…except that Jarl thought he could marry. A pretense marriage. Mostly. He was very fond of Irena, but…She knew who he was, and of course, it would never be a relationship of equals. But he thought he would marry her, and tell her that he wanted to raise his clone, that this would give him a new lease on life. Because everyone in Eden had noticed he wasn’t exactly himself those days.”
“That’s what you told me,” I said. “That he did it for a new lease on life. You mean it wasn’t the truth?”
“Not…exactly. You see, he planned to introduce the nessies to the womb at a critical point in the development. A modified set of nessies with no mapping capability, only the ‘repair’ nanocytes. That was part of the reason that we decided Christopher would be a Cat, because that gave us an excuse to introduce a virus to the womb and…and other things could be sneaked in along with it.”
“Modified how?” Kit managed to say, in a voice that was all rasp, seeming to issue from his throat without modulation.
“Modified so that as you…as the embryo grew, it would replicate Jarl’s brain.”
“But it would be the same brain, anyway,” I said. “Kit is his clone.”
“Don’t be puerile, child,” Doctor Bartolomeu snapped. “I don’t mean his…blank brain, the structure of his brain as an infant. I mean Jarl’s brain, with all the connections, all the…all the data that was in it when we took the impression.”
“How? How?” Zen sank to sitting on the carpet, and looked up at Doc. She was taking this much harder than I expected from an uninvolved participant. “The infant brain doesn’t have the same structures, the same connections…”
“No, that’s why the nessies were modified,” Doctor Bartolomeu said. “They would lie dormant until the infant brain started to form its own synapses. Jarl had a program to time the actions of the nessies not to make too many changes at once. As Chri—as the child grew, it would slowly change his brain, so that by the time he was thirteen or so, he would effectively be Jarl. During childhood, the nessies would start to work on the prefrontal and parietal cortex, laying down the connections that created the personality, so that the eventual emergence of Jarl’s personality would not be sudden. The onset of puberty would trigger the rest of the nessies to start forming the connections that underlay Jarl’s memories. Puberty would also provide a perfect mask for the personality change as the child, as…Chris—as he turned into Jarl.”
“Damn,” Kit said. He scooted to the end of the bed and reached for the decanter from Doctor Bartolomeu’s hands.
Doctor Bartolomeu extended the liquor, but I intercepted it, my hand around the neck of the decanter. “Is this going to hurt it? To speed up the nessies’ actions or…”
Doctor Bartolomeu made a face. “Hey, it could even help. Suppress synapse formation for a few hours.”
I removed my hold on the decanter, and he passed it to Kit, who took a deep swig from it, swallowed hard as he capped it again and said, But I’m not Jarl. Or am I?
Doc Bartolomeu shook his head, smiled a little, then looked grave again. “You are not Jarl. You see, things went wrong, and I swear
by all that’s holy if I’d known that there was the slightest danger…”
“Never mind that,” I snapped. “Why isn’t he Jarl?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was because Irena found out. I don’t know how. Either the house was bugged, something I’ve started suspecting just lately, or…or she overheard us accidentally. Her reaction shocked Jarl. It surprised me. It had never occurred to us we were doing anything wrong, let alone immoral. I still don’t fully understand it. We grow other body parts via cloning when they break down, or against the possibility of their breaking down. So…why not a brain? The answer had always been because we couldn’t replace the brain and have the same thoughts, personality and memory. But the nessies solved that, so…why not? And if in the process we could pretend that this was not Jarl’s clone, but just another human among humans, why not do it and free him from being known as a Mule throughout Eden? Being known for what he was had made his life odious.
“But Irena went berserk at the thought. She said it was immoral. She said it was wrong. That the child would develop, and then Jarl would just take over and destroy him. Despite being an extremely rational person, smart, really—Jarl wouldn’t have chosen her otherwise—she could never give a coherent reason. She could just express disgust and repulsion.
“Because the emb…Christopher was not supposed to be a genetic relation of Jarl’s, he was not Jarl’s property. Irena had sole proprietorship over the contents of the biowomb, and she could order whatever she wanted done with them. And what she ordered done with them was to have them decanted. Prematurely. Two months of gestation. Killed.”
He took the brandy from Kit and took another swig. “I never knew what happened exactly, because it happened, as these things normally do, in the middle of the night. It was…” He compressed his lips, his eyes suspiciously shiny. “It was impossible to deny, on forensic evidence alone, that Jarl killed Irena, and then he killed himself. Both burner shots through the head. Very thorough. Very final.
“Of course, because there was no doubt he had survived her, and he was her sole heir. He inherited the contents of the womb, and he’d left a note saying Chri—Kit was not to be decanted until term. And because I was his heir, I inherited responsibility for Christopher. I went to the scene as soon as I could, but I couldn’t tell what happened. There was a…womb injector on the floor, but part of the contents had dried around it, so I didn’t know if any made it into the womb. I didn’t know if Christopher had in fact ever been infected with nessies or not. I didn’t know if the embryo growing in the womb was a new person or an exact replica of my old friend…and I’d have to wait at least thirteen years to find out.” He shrugged. “I arranged for the Denovos to adopt him. I was not married and not in a position to raise a child, and they were the happiest family I knew. I wasn’t sure what we’d do if he turned out to be Jarl’s replica, but the Denovos stood as much or more chance of hiding that as anyone else. And they might even accept it, at least when there was nothing else they could do. Of all of Jarl’s servants and dependents, their family had maintained the most loyalty to him.”
“But Kit wasn’t Jarl,” Zen said.
“No. Christopher wasn’t Jarl. By two that was very evident, and it only became more so as he became an adult. So I thought that Jarl hadn’t got the fluid into the womb. I swear if I had known…”
“Were you disappointed?” I asked. It sounded vicious and I couldn’t help it. The idea of two old Mules, plotting to create a new body and brain for one of them, was too much like what my father and his co-conspirators had done. Oh, okay, so perhaps not, not in a rational light.
After all, my father and his friends, because cloning was illegal on Earth, had to keep up the pretense of normal dynastic succession. They had to let an independent person grow and develop to teenage years, and then commit murder to get the younger body.
I suspected even if the same biological industry—including at nano level—were available on Earth as on Eden, they wouldn’t have availed themselves of it. Think about it. If you create a replica of yourself, all you have is an identical twin who shares your memories. It doesn’t mean you, as an individual, get to go on living. No, you’ll still get old and die, beside your younger replica. Dying of old age was not what Daddy Dearest and his cronies wanted. In fact they changed, normally, before old age, when mild degeneration set in.
What Jarl had wanted, what Doc had helped him do, was more akin to creating an afterlife or a legacy—the sort of thing most normal humans can look for in their normally begotten descendants. The sort of thing that is the foundation of every human society.
Only they weren’t considered human, or they had been taught they weren’t. Was it so wrong for Jarl not to want to vanish utterly? Was it so wrong for Doc not to have wanted to lose the only friend he had who remembered him as a boy? Given Jarl’s gifts, his technological work that few could emulate, was it so wrong, even for him, to wish to be around and continue working? Didn’t his work benefit all of humanity?
The two things felt different. One was the killing of a person. The other, simply, the perversion of a new personality forming. And yet, both left a bad taste in the mouth. Both felt wrong in the pit of my stomach.
I understood Irena Alterman Ingemar. The personality would form until age thirteen. Taking it over would be like possession. Corruption of the innocent. Clearly, Doc Bartolomeu hadn’t understood it, and he was the only witness surviving. But I could feel the recoil she had felt.
Were Jarl and Doc evil and wrong?
I didn’t know. I’d never taken advanced metaphysics. I’d never taken any metaphysics at all. The closest I’d come to metaphysics and solving the unsolvable were late night discussions in my broomers’ lair or aboard the Cathouse, when all other subjects are exhausted and the mind veered that way. But either with my broomers’ lair, or with Kit, we’d been discussing in the absence of reasoned discourse by previous generations. We’d been trying to figure out these dilemmas armed with nothing but our minds and our life experience, and what felt wrong and what felt right.
In this case all of it felt wrong—anything that Jarl could have done to escape death was wrong. And dying might have been wrong too, considering his knowledge and abilities which Eden desperately needed. Perhaps that’s the definition of a tragedy. That there is nothing one can do to find a way out that won’t be wrong. Sometimes there isn’t even something that is less wrong.
POP GOES THE SHIP
“So you assumed that Jarl had never used the nessies?” I asked. I was only channeling the question that Kit had shot at my mind.
“What else could I assume?” Doc asked. “Christopher developed normally, and even though, eventually, I…well…Eventually I mourned for Jarl. I missed him. Miss him still. He was my only connection to everything that happened, to everything we were in our childhood. No one else on Eden even knew about Earth, except through historical holos. They…had no idea. Even those who thought they did. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, anymore; anyone who would unquestioningly understand my jokes when they referred to things long past. Of course I missed and miss Jarl but I…I found out that Mules too could take interest in a new generation. There was Kit and…” He slid his gaze sideways to Zen.
Zen sighed. She’d been sitting in lotus on the floor, her hands resting on her lap. “I suppose,” she said, “I might as well tell you, Thena.” And, as she said it, I remembered that Doc had said she’d heard the mental shout in the strange voice. And about her sending the alarm, when Kit was wounded, via Mule telepathy. She’d heard it; she’d sent it and so…She continued, “Kit and Doc already know, but you don’t, and it’s been very difficult spending as much time working with you as I have, and trying not to fall into easy conversation because it might all come spilling out. I’ve known since I was five or so because my adoptive parents told me—”
“Your adoptive parents?” I asked. “You’re…” I remembered Jean saying that Doc Bartolomeu had suspected I was my father’s
female clone, because—and then cutting off abruptly.
“Jarl’s other clone. Zenobia. Spirit of Zeus. Christopher. Christ bearer.” She flashed me a bright and embarrassed smile. “I sometimes wonder what Doc and Jarl were smoking when they came up with this stuff. It must have been extremely good, and clearly they weren’t sharing. Or did you name us alone, Doc, in homage to your lost friend? Never mind.”
Doctor Bartolomeu blushed, a dusky tone on his wrinkled skin. “It seemed…There is such a thing as folie à deux, and we’d been alone with our own ideas far too long, talking to each other only. I think other people…No. Other people were still real and people, but we weren’t. Or those we could create weren’t. The idea was that each of us would be cloned twice, in male and female form, and that each of them would marry the other’s clone and then we’d build another ship and go to the stars, in search of our kind. With us as sort of avuncular protectors to the young people. Before Hampson’s became manifest, of course.”
I started to open my mouth, but Doctor Bartolomeu waved his hand. “I said it was insane. A shared folly. The two of us talked too much to each other and too little to anyone else, and both of us so badly wanted to escape. Not Eden, as such. We each wanted to escape who we were. We each wanted to have a future and a family and to be…normal. We…” He shrugged. “It was a dream. I don’t think either of us intended to do anything with it, except prove we could do it. Not really. Once we knew the escape hatch was there, we would have no need to take it. But then Jarl became ill and…We started growing Christopher and we thought we might as well grow Zenobia.” The blush intensified. “And yes, I named you both, after Jarl’s death. I was…grieving.”
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