Houston, Houston, Do You Read?

by James Tiptree Jr.

  When he finds that Lady Blue likes chess, they form 'f a routine of biweekly games. Her personality intrigues him; she has reserve and an aura of authority. But she quickly stops Bud when he calls her "Captain"

  "No one here commands in your sense. I'm just the.' oldest." Bud goes back to "Ma'm."

  She plays a solid positional game, somewhat more erratic than a man but with occasional elegant traps. Lorimer is astonished to find that there is only one new chess opening, an interesting queen-side gambit called N the Dagmar. One new opening in three centuries? He mentions it to the others when they wine back from helping Andy and Judy Paris overhaul a standby converter.

  "They haven't done much anywhere," Dave says. "Most of your new stuff dates from the epidemic, Andy, if you'll pardon me. The program seems to be stagnating. You've been gearing up this Titan project for eighty years"

  "We'll get there." Andy grins.

  "C'mon, Dave," says Bud. "Judy and me are taking on you two for the next chicken dinner, we'll get a bridge team here yet. Woo-ee, I can taste that chickenl Losers get the iguana."

  The food is so good. Lorimer finds himself lingering around the kitchen end, helping whoever is cooking, munching on their various seeds and chewy roots as he listens to them talk. He even likes the iguana. He begins to put on weight, in fact they all do. Dave decrees double exercise shifts.

  "You going to make us climb home, Dave-o?" Bud groans. But Lorimer enjoys it, pedaling or swinging easily along the rungs while the women chat and listen to tapes. Familiar music: he identifies a strange spectrum from Handel, Brahms, Sibelius, through Strauss to ballad tunes and intricate light jazz-rock. No lyrics. But plenty of informative texts doubtless selected for his benefit.

  From the promised short history he finds out more about the epidemic. It seems to have been an airborne quasi-virus escaped from Franco-Arab military labs, possibly potentiated by pollutants.

  "It apparently damaged only the reproductive cells," be tells Dave and Bud. "There was little actual mortality, but almost universal sterility. Probably a molecular substitution in the gene code in the gametes. And the main effect seems to have been on the men. They mention a shortage of male births afterwards, -which suggests that the damage was on the Y-chromosome where it would be selectively lethal to the male fetus."

  "Is it still dangerous, Doc?" Dave asks. "What happens to us when we get back home?"

  "They can't say. The birthrate is normal now, about

  two percent and rising. But the present population may: be resistant. They never achieved a vaccine."

  "Only one way to tell," Bud says gravely. "I volunteer."

  Dave merely glances at him. Extraordinary bow he-. still commands, Lorimer thinks. Not submission, for Pete's sake. A team.

  The history also mentions the riots and fighting which swept the world when humanity found itself. sterile. Cities bombed, and burned, massacres, panics,:. mass rapes and kidnapping of women, marauding armies of biologically desperate men, bloody cults. The;. crazies. But it is all so briefly told, so long ago. Lists of honored names. "We must always be grateful to the brave people who held the Denver Medical Laboratories-2' And then on to the drama of building up the helium supply for the dirigibles.

  In three centuries it's all dust, he thinks. What do-. I know of the hideous Thirty Years War that was three centuries back for me? Fighting devastated Europe for two generations. Not even names.

  The description of their political and economic, structure is even briefer. They seem to be, as Myda. had said, almost ungoverned.

  "It's a form of loose social credit system run by consensus," he says to Dave. "Somewhat like a permanent:' frontier period. They're building up slowly. Of course they don't need an army or air force. I'm not sure if they even use cash money or recognize private ownership of land. I did notice one favorable reference to early Chinese communalism," he adds, to see Dave's mouth set. "But they aren't tied to a community. They, travel about. When I asked Lady Blue about their police anal legal system she told me to wait and talk, real historians. This Registry seems to be just that, it's not a policy organ."

  "We've run into a situation here, Lorimer," Dave ` says soberly. "Stay away from it. They're not telling` the story."

  "You notice they never talk about their husbands?"Bud laughs. "I asked a couple of them what their husbands did and I swear they had to think. And they all have kids. Believe me, it's a swinging scene down there, even if old. Andy acts like he hasn't found out what it's for."

  "I don't want any prying into their personal family lives while we're on this ship, Geirr. None whatsoever. That's an order."

  "Maybe they don't have families. You ever hear'em mention anybody getting married? That has to be the one thing on a chick's mind. Mark my words, there's been some changes made."

  "The social mores are bound to have changed to some extent," Lorimer says. "Obviously you have women doing more work outside the home, for one thing. But they have family bonds; for instance Lady Blue has a sister in an aluminum mill and another in health. Andy's mother is on Mars and his sister works in Registry. Connie has a brother or brothers on the fishing fleet near Biloxi, and her sister is coming out to replace her here next trip, she's making yeast now."

  "That's the top of the iceberg."

  "I doubt the rest of the iceberg is very sinister, Dave."

  But somewhere along the line the blandness begins to bother Lorimer too. So much is missing. Marriage, love affairs, children's troubles, jealousy squabbles, status, possessions, money problems, sicknesses, funerals even-all the daily minutiae that occupied Ginny and her friends seems to have been edited out of these women's talk. Edited… Can Dave be right, is some big, significant aspect being deliberately kept from them?

  "I'm still surprised your language hasn't changed more," he says one day to Connie during their exertions in the gym.

  "Oh, we're very careful about that." She climbs at an angle beside him, not using her hands. "It would be a dreadful loss if we couldn't understand the books. All the children are taught from the same original tapes, you see. Oh, there's faddy words we use for a

  while, but our communicators have to learn the old texts by heart, that keeps us together."

  Judy Paris grunts from the pedicycle. "You, my dear children, will never know the oppression we suffered," she declaims mockingly.

  "Judys talk too much," says Connie.

  "We do, for a fact." They both laugh.

  "So you still read our so-called great books, our fiction and poetry?" asks Lorimer. "Who do you read, H. G. Wells? Shakespeare? Dickens, ah, Balzac, Kipling, Brian?" He gropes; Brian had been a bestseller Ginny liked. When had he last looked at Shakespeare or the others?

  "Oh, the historicals," Judy says "It's interesting, I guess. Grim. They're not very realistic. I'm sure it was to you," she adds generously.

  And they turn to discussing whether the laying hens are getting too much light, leaving Lorimer to wonder how what he supposes are the eternal verities of human nature can have faded from a world's reality. Love, conflict, heroism, tragedy-all "unrealistic"? Well, flight crews are never great readers; still, women read more… Something has changed, he can sense it. Something basic enough to affect human nature. A physical development perhaps; a mutation? What is really under those floating clothes?

  It is the Judys who give him part of it.

  He is exercising alone with both of them, listening to them gossip about some legendary figure named Dagmar.

  "The Dagmar who invented the chess opening?" he asks.

  "Yes. She does anything, when she's good she's great."

  "Was she bad sometimes?"

  A Judy laughs. "The Dagmar problem, you can say. She has this tendency to organize everything. It's fine when it works but every so often it runs wild; she thinks she's queen or what. Then they have to get out butterfly nets." All in present tense-but Lady Blue has told him the Dagmar gambit is over a century old.

  Longevity, he thinks; by god,
that's what they're hiding. Say they've achieved a doubled or tripled life span, that would certainly change human psychology, affect their outlook on everything. Delayed maturity, perhaps? We were working on endocrine cell juvenescence when I left. How old are these girls, for instance?

  He is framing a question when Judy Dakar says, "I was in the creche when she went pluggo. But she's good, I loved her later on."

  Lorimer thinks she has said "crash" and then realizes she means a communal nursery. "Is that the same Dagmar?" he asks. "She must be very old."

  "Oh no, her sister."

  "A sister a hundred years apart?"

  "I mean, her daughter. Her, her grand-daughter." She starts pedaling fast.

  "Judys," says her twin, behind them.

  Sister again. Everybody he learns of seems to have an extraordinary number of sisters, Lorimer reflects. He hears Judy Paris saying to her twin, "I think I remember Dagmar at the creche. She started uniforms for everybody. Colors and numbers."

  "You couldn't have, you weren't born," Judy Dakar retorts.

  There is a silence in the drum.

  Lorimer turns on the rungs to look at them. Two flushed cheerful faces stare back warily, make identical head-dipping gestures to swing the black hair out of their eyes. Identical… But isn't the Dakar girl on the cycle a shade more mature, her face more weathered?

  "I thought you were supposed to be twins."

  "Ah, Judys talk a lot," they say together-and grin guiltily.

  "You aren't sisters," he tells them. "You're what we called clones."

  Another silence.

  "Well, yes," says Judy Dakar. "We call it sisters.

  Oh, mother! We weren't supposed to tell you, Myda said you would be frightfully upset. It was illegal in your day, true?"

  "Yes. We considered it immoral and unethical, experimenting with human life. But it doesn't upset me, personally."

  "Oh, that's beautiful, that's great," they say together,, "We think of you as different," Judy Paris blurts,;; "you're more hu- more like us. Please, you don't: have to tell the others, do you? Oh, please don't."

  "It was an accident there were two of us here," says. Judy Dakar. "Myda warned us. Can't you wait a little while?" Two identical pairs of dark eyes beg him.

  "Very well," he says slowly. "I won't tell my friends= for the time being. But if I keep your secret you have' to answer some questions. For instance, how many, of your people are created artificially this way?"

  He begins to realize he is somewhat upset. Dave is right, damn it, they are hiding things. Is this brave new world populated by subhuman slaves, run by master brains? Decorticate zombies, workers without stomachs or sex, human cortexes wired into machines. Monstrous experiments rush through his mind. He has been… naive again. These normal-looking women could be fronting for.a hideous world.

  "How many?"

  "There's only about eleven thousand of us," Judy, Dakar says. The two Judys look at each other, trans-, parently confirming something. They're unschooled in deception, Lorimer thinks; is that good? And is diverted by Judy Paris exclaiming, "What we can't figure out is, why did you think it was wrong?"

  Lorimer tries to tell them, to convey the horror of manipulating human identity, creating abnormal life. The threat to individuality, the fearful power it would put in a dictator's hand.

  "Dictator?" one of them echoes blankly. He looks at their faces and can only say, "Doing things to people without their consent. I think it's sad."

  "But that's just what we think about you," the younger Judy bursts out. "How do you know who you are? Or who anybody is? All alone, no sisters to share with! You don't know what you can do, or what would be interesting to try. All you poor singletons, you why, you just have to blunder along and die, all for nothing!"

  Her voice trembles. Amazed, Lorimer sees both of them are misty eyed.

  "We better get this m-moving," the other Judy says.

  They swing back into the rhythm and in bits and pieces Lorimer finds out how it is. Not bottled embryos, they tell him indignantly. Human mothers like everybody else, young mothers, the best kind. A somatic cell nucleus is inserted in an enucleated ovum and reimplanted in the womb. They have each borne two "sister" babies in their late teens and nursed them a while before moving on. The creches always have plenty of mothers.

  His longevity notion is laughed at; nothing but some rules of healthy living have as yet been achieved. "We should make ninety in good shape," they assure him. "A hundred and eight, that was Judy Eagle, she's our record. But she was pretty blah at the end."

  The clone-strains themselves are old, they date from the epidemic. They were part of the first effort to save the race when the babies stopped and they've continued ever since.

  "It's so perfect," they tell him. "We each have a book, it's really a library. All the recorded messages. The Book of Judy Shapiro, that's us. Dakar and Paris are our personal names, we're doing cities now." They laugh, trying not to talk at once about how each Judy adds her individual memoir, her adventures and problems and discoveries in the genotype they all share.

  "If you make a mistake it's useful for the others. Of course you try not to-or at least make a new one."

  "Some of the old ones aren't so realistic," her other self puts in. "Things were so different, I guess. We make excerpts of the parts we like best. And practical things, like Judys should watch out for skin cancer."

  "But we have to read the whole thing every ten years," says the Judy called Dakar. "It's inspiring. As you get older you understand some of the ones you didn't before."

  Bemused, Lorimer tries to think how it would be, hearing the voices of three hundred years of Orren Lorimers. Lorimers who were mathematicians or plumbers or artists or bums or criminals, maybe. The continuing exploration and completion of self. And a dozen living doubles; aged Lorimers, infant Lorimers. And other Lorimers' women and children… would he enjoy it or resent it? He doesn't know.

  "Have you made your records yet?"

  "Oh, we're too young. Just notes in case of accident."

  "Will we be in them?"

  "You can say!" They laugh merrily, then sober. "Truly you won't tell?" Judy Paris asks. "Lady Blue, we have to let her know what we did. Oof. But truly;,' you won't tell your friends?" '

  He hadn't told on them, he thinks now, emerging. back into his living self. Connie beside him is drinking cider from a bulb. He has a drink in his hand too, he 4' finds. But he hasn't told.

  "Judys will talk." Connie shakes her head, smiling. Lorimer realizes he must have gabbled out the whole thing.

  "It doesn't matter," he tells her. "I would have guessed soon anyhow. There were too many clues. Woolagongs invent, Mydas worry, Jans are brains, Billy Dees work so hard. I picked up six different stories of hydroelectric stations that were built or improved or are being run by one Lala Singh. Your whole s way of life. I'm more interested in this sort of thing than a respectable physicist should be," he says wryly."You're all clones, aren't you? Every one of you. What do Connies do?"

  "You really do know." She gazes at him like a mother whose child has done something troublesome and bright. "Whew! Oh, well, Connies farm like mad,; we grow things. Most of our names are plants. I'm Veronica, by the way. And of course the cr6ches, that's hour weakness. The runt mania. We tend to focus on anything smaller or weak."

  Her warm eyes focus on Lorimer, who draws back involuntarily.

  "We control it." She gives a hearty chuckle. "We aren't all that way. There's been engineering Connies, and we have two young sisters who love metallurgy. It's fascinating what the genotype can 'do if you try. The original Constantia Morelos was a chemist, she weighed ninety pounds and never saw a farm in her life." Connie looks down at her own muscular arms. "She was killed by the crazies, she fought with weapons. It's so hard to understand… And I had a sister Timothy who made dynamite and dug two canals and she wasn't even an andy."

  "An andy," he says.

  "Oh, dear."

  "I guessed
that too. Early androgen treatments."

  She nods hesitantly. "Yes. We needed the muscle power for some jobs. A few. Kays are quite strong anyway. Whew!" She suddenly stretches her back, wriggles as if she'd been cramped. "Oh, I'm glad you know. It's been such a strain. We couldn't even sing."

  "Why not?"

  "Myda was sure we'd make mistakes, all the words we'd have to change. We sing a lot." She softly hums a bar or two.

  "What kinds of songs do you sing?"

  "Oh, every kind. Adventure songs, work songs, mothering songs, roaming songs, mood songs, trouble songs, joke songs-everything."

  "What about love songs?" he ventures. "Do you still have, well, love?"

  "Of course, how could people not love?" But she looks at him doubtfully. "The love stories I've heard from your time are so, I don't know, so weird. Grim and pluggy. It doesn't seem like love… Oh, yes, we have famous love songs. Some of them are partly sad too. Like Tamil and Alcmene O, they're fated together. Connies are fated too, a little." She grins bashfully. "We love to be with Ingrid Anders. It's more one sided. I hope there'll be an Ingrid on my next hitch…; She's so exciting, she's like a little diamond."

  Implications are exploding all about him, sparkling with questions. But Lorimer wants to complete the' darker pattern beyond.

  "Eleven thousand genotypes, two million. people: that averages two hundred of each of you alive now." She nods. "I suppose it varies? There's more of some?"

  "Yes, some types aren't as viable. But we haven't lost any since early days. They tried to preserve all the genes they could. We have people from all the major races and a lot of small strains. Like me, I'm the Carib Blend. Of course we'll never know what was', lost. But eleven thousand is a lot, really. We all try to know every one, it's a life bobby."

  A chill penetrates his ataraxia. Eleven thousand, j period. That is the true population of Earth now. He thinks of two hundred tall olive skinned women named after plants, excited by two hundred little bright Ingrids; two hundred talkative Judys, two hundred self possessed Lady Blues, two hundred Margos and Mydas and the rest. He shivers. The heirs, the happy pallbearers of the human race.