The Centauri Conspiracy
Page 45
Chapter Forty-three
Bakman family picnic
After it was discovered in an employment record check that Laureena was a Clone, a friend at work told her the police were on their way up. Quickly, she abandoned her job in a hospital nursery and escaped arrest down a freight elevator. That afternoon she became a young Clone just starting out in the world of crime two weeks older than nineteen. Laureena hid in the basement levels at night, walked causeways in the day, and tried to survive on shoplifting and selling stolen items for food money. On her third day of stealing Laureena was captured in southeast New St. Paul, held three months in a detention cell with fourteen other older female clones, and was scheduled in eleven days to be shipped to Lunar Deep Mining Colony Number Eleven.
Three day before her departure the Great Basin Clone Colony was officially formed. Taken suddenly from her cell in the middle of the night with all the other Clones and forced to sign a paper made Laureena sure they were bound for a termination facility. All the way she cried.
To her great and wondrous surprise, Laureena arrived in a government shuttle on top of a building at dawn to a new world—to the Clone Colony. It was a wonderful free two building world. With the assistance of the Clone Relocation Services, she took a last name out of allowable names, found an apartment, and a job. Her papers listed her as average looking, average weight, short brown hair in the fashionable unisex style, and was a hyper-emotional clone apt to cry often. The only distinctive feature her papers listed was a quarter-inch oval black mole on her left temple an inch and one-sixteenth from her ear.
One morning while walking to work she met Woll. Laureena had watched a ReRun Screen story about a whistler before leaving for work. On the way she repeatedly tried and failed at whistling. Woll whistled and she laughed. After introductions, they talked. During their many months of talks walking on the Nineteen Causeway to the next building to work every morning and back from work in the evening a feeling developed.
Laureena cried when Woll asked her to marry him, cried the first time she met Bakman one of the two legendary founders of the Clone Colony, cried at her own wedding, cried the day they made Bakman an honorary Clone, and cried when each of her three sons were born.
Bakman was given a quiet middle management job with the colony’s utilities. He was highly respected for his help in saving clones, his two donation of five and seven billion, and in helping to start the colony. During the next four years, the Bakmans had a happy family life with two new children, a second son and a third daughter, born to the happy couple. Requests by the hundreds and thousands came into the Clone Colony Office for interviews by Informationalists. All were refused with the same words, “Bakman is not allowed to do interviews.”
The U.N. found the Clone Colony so successful in reducing crime that they purchased a third and built a fourth building, both thirty stories, to add to the colony as more and more Clones from around the planet turned themselves in to live openly as Clones in the Colony. Also, the Great Basin leased to Clone management a fifth and sixth building for ninety-nine years at a very reasonable yearly rate. And the Colony expanded even more by building another seventh building made possible by a secret gift of 179 flawless white diamonds, none smaller than three carats, and three million dollar donation in a three numbered accounts in a wire-tied cardboard box that once held a gross of small chocolate candy. Reading the address label on it showed that it had been thrown away by the Clone Colony Vice-President Mirrel Ray Baker two days earlier, but he denied making the gift.
Now, more and more corporations proudly mentioned on Information Screens the contracts that the Clones completed for them. It was good business. The U.N. promised free transportation to any clone and his or her family to the colony.
Six years after the launch, Bakman took his family and Woll Iversen's family to the South Pass Wind Farm for a picnic. Their Great Basin Police escorts stepped back a respectable distance to give them a little privacy. Dee and Laureena spread their blankets and laid out food from boxes Bakman and Woll had carried.
Both families enjoyed a happy picnic beside the rock that Mary Dae Iversen-OpDyke, Dee's and Woll's adopted mother, had called a whale surfacing out of the rock. They read the plaque dedicated to Mary and Harry OpDyke to the OpDyke grandchildren. For a few minutes Bakman spoke seriously to the children about both their grandparents, about their ashes being scattered around this rock, and asked that his ashes be too. So did all the others. After a good lunch, Bakman, like any parent, relaxed and enjoyed watching his children and Woll's scamper playfully around and climb on the OpDyke rock.
Thoughtfully, Bakman told them before they left, "The ship New Horizons launched on its journey on the third year. This is the ninth year. Let us in memory of that moment return here as a family for a picnic every third year."
And, it was agreed to by all.