Taylor Five

by Ann Halam

  Morning came early to the clearing. Before six A.M. the gibbons in the bamboo stand outside Tay’s bedroom window began hooting and singing to greet the new day. She lay listening to them, the way she did every morning: remembering that Donny was home, and wondering why she didn’t feel happy. Then it came back to her.

  She got up, showered and went along to the Walkers’ family kitchen, feeling ashamed of her behavior last night. Donny was eating breakfast with Mum and Dad. They all looked at her uneasily and said “Hello, Tay,” “Good morning Tay,” in subdued voices. Tay fetched herself a glass of juice and a sweet roll from the fridge (all perishable food had to be kept in the fridge, to protect it from the ants).

  “How is Harimau?” she said casually. “I forgot to ask.”

  “He’s fine,” said Mum. “Just a touch of diarrhea. No sign of worms, but he might have an amebic parasite. I have a sample to analyze—”

  “Mum,” protested Donny. “Do you mind. I’m eating.”

  “You’d better get used to it,” said Dad. “City slicker. Diarrhea and worms is all we talk about here, except for tropical ulcers—” He grinned at Tay, who didn’t grin back.

  “What are you two going to do today?” Mum asked hopefully. “First day of the holidays, I bet you have something planned for him, Tay, don’t you?”

  “No. I have homework to finish,” said Tay. “Even famous freaks have homework.”

  She rinsed her glass and plate, and walked out.

  She went to the schoolroom. Until Donny started at his boarding school, they’d both done their lessons here, in this airy, high-ceilinged room with the polished wooden floor and the tall cupboards full of books, art materials and science equipment. No expense spared, she thought bitterly, looking at all the wealth. It’s as if I was dying.

  She sat down at her computer, chin on her hands.

  She’d been seven when Mum and Dad told her the truth about herself. Not the whole truth, of course: she wouldn’t have been able to understand. . . . They’d told her that she was a test-tube baby, and explained what that meant. Though she’d come out of Mummy’s tummy, the little egg that had turned into Tay had come from somebody else—and that somebody else was Mummy and Daddy’s best friend, Pam Taylor. Pam couldn’t have babies of her own, and neither could Mummy (that was what they’d thought at the time). So they’d decided to have Tay, each of them doing the part of having-a-baby that they could do. . . . Tay hadn’t been too upset. She liked Pam very much. As long as she was still Mummy and Daddy’s little girl, and Donny was still her brother, she didn’t mind if Pam was sort of her second mum. But that had been seven years ago, half her lifetime—

  Tay and Donny Walker were Lifeforce kids. Their parents were wildlife wardens now, but they’d worked for the biotech company as scientists before that. Tay had never been frightened by the idea that she had “come out of a test tube.” It had never struck her as odd that she didn’t go to school either. She much preferred working at home and sharing Mum and Dad’s adventures. Before Borneo there’d been a post in Geneva. Before Geneva there’d been Canada: she’d never known any other way of life. Her classmates in the online International School were dead impressed that she had Pam for a godmother (they didn’t know about the test-tube baby part: it was none of their business), because Dr. Pam Taylor was the head of Lifeforce’s Conservation Projects and a famous scientist: sometimes you saw her on TV. But to Tay, having Pam for a grown-up friend was just normal life. It wasn’t normal that she had to give blood and tissue samples every month, to be sent off to the biotech labs: but it was something Tay’d always had to do. They’d told her it was nothing bad, it was because she was a “special sort of test-tube baby” and Lifeforce wanted to monitor her development. It didn’t hurt much (although a few times a year the tissue sampling was quite painful); and she’d just accepted it.

  By the time she was twelve, she had known exactly what a test-tube baby was, what it meant to say someone was your biological mother and someone else was your genetic mother; and what surrogacy meant. . . . Sometimes she’d lain awake at night, wondering about those blood and tissue samples and wishing Mum and Dad would tell her if she had cancer or something. Sometimes she’d brooded about being Pam’s “sort of” baby. A woman’s egg cell has to be fertilized by a man’s sperm. Who had her father been? Was it her own dad who had provided the sperm? Or someone else, some stranger? And why did Pam decide to have a test-tube baby and then let the surrogate mother keep the child? Had she decided a child would cramp her famous-scientist lifestyle? But Tay, unlike Donny, tended to keep quiet about things that upset her or frightened her. She wanted to be a wildlife scientist like her mum and dad and work somewhere like the refuge; or maybe do marine conservation biology like Pam. That was her ambition, and that was what was important. When Mum and Dad had tried to talk to her about where she had come from, she had always said she thought she knew enough.

  Maybe she’d guessed, deep down, that the things they wanted to say would destroy her peace of mind.

  Then Mum and Dad had decided that Donny had to go away to school. He hadn’t been doing very well. Tay was in top sets for everything in the online International School, in which they were both enrolled, but Donny was struggling. He needed a different kind of education. Tay had felt very sorry for him, having to leave the forest and go and live with strangers.

  But it was Tay who was the stranger.

  A year and a half ago, soon after Donny had left for his first term at the new school, Pam Taylor had come to the refuge, and Pam and Mum and Dad had told Tay the real truth. She was a very special kind of test-tube baby. She had no biological father.

  In vitro fertilization means that eggs are gathered from the woman’s ovaries and mixed with the man’s sperm in a dish in the laboratory. In vitro is a Latin term meaning “in glass.” The process usually happens in a dish, but people say “test-tube baby,” maybe because they feel that sounds more scientific. Then the embryo is implanted in the mother’s womb and grows there. But a normal in vitro baby has two parents. Tay was different. Lifeforce scientists had taken one of Mary Walker’s egg cells and replaced the nucleus (the package where the cell’s DNA is stored) with the nucleus from one of Pam Taylor’s ordinary body cells (a bone marrow cell, in fact). Then they’d treated this egg cell so it would behave as if it had been fertilized. Tay was not just Pam’s daughter. She was genetically the same person as Pam Taylor.

  Lifeforce had created human clones years before anyone had believed it was possible.

  There were four other teenagers like Tay, with four different gene parents, all of them created at the same time. All of them were Lifeforce kids. Their gene parents and their surrogate families were part of the Lifeforce company, like everyone else involved with the clone project. The existence of the clones had been kept secret. Now that they were healthy teenagers and the success of the experiment was beyond doubt, the company thought it was time to break the silence.

  Tay’s identity would be protected. The company would prove their amazing claim by scientific means: by letting other scientists examine tissue samples from clones and gene parents. Tay’s picture wouldn’t be in the papers, and she wouldn’t have to appear on TV. She might never even know the names of the other four clones. But Mum and Dad and Pam had thought she ought to know the truth—before the rest of the world found out.

  Tay had been stunned, and bewildered, but she’d been determined not to get upset. She felt like the same person she’d always been: except now she had an explanation for the blood tests and tissue samples, so she didn’t have to worry about having cancer. Mum and Dad and Pam had been puzzled but relieved because Tay was so calm. She’d been secretly very proud that she’d been able to take this strange bombshell so well. She’d been a Lifeforce kid all her life, she knew about the miracles of modern biotech. She’d refused to feel sorry for herself, or weirded out. She’d convinced Mum and Dad, and everyone, that she was fine.

  The only thing was that after
the big revelation, she’d stopped writing to Pam.

  She’d been truly friends with her test-tube mum. Wherever Pam’s work took her, she had always stayed in e-mail contact. They’d talked on the phone when they could, as often as if they were friends of the same age. Somehow that had stopped. Tay hadn’t meant it to happen, she just . . . didn’t have anything to say.

  Since that time, life had carried on as normal. Tay had done her schoolwork and helped out as much as she was allowed with the apes. There’d been school holidays, and she’d had great times with Donny. There’d been a visit to England (which Donny and Tay had both hated). There’d been trips to Singapore. Tay had often almost forgotten about the secret, and she’d almost started hoping that Lifeforce had decided to keep the clones’ existence a secret forever.

  But now the news was out, on the TV and on the radio, on the Internet and in the papers, all over the world. Tay was very thankful that she lived in the middle of the rain forest and she didn’t have to know a thing about all the publicity.

  She just wished she knew why she suddenly felt so bad.

  What does it mean to be a clone? How is a clone supposed to feel?

  She switched on her computer, chose a picture file and sat looking at video clips of Pam Taylor, shrinking and copying them until the screen was a photomosaic of Pam’s tanned face: smiling, laughing, using her hands to talk, the way Pam always did. . . . And so did Tay. She clicked with the mouse, enlarging one detail and then another, studying the way Pam’s hair grew. The shape of her nose. The color of her eyes.

  Every little bit of me is exactly the same as that. That’s exactly what I will look like.

  Tay knew it was Mum and Dad who’d come into the room before she looked round. Too late to switch off the screen. . . . They sat down on either side of her.

  “Hi,” Mum said quietly.

  “Hi,” said Dad. He took Tay’s hand.

  “Hi, you,” said Tay. “I’m all right, honestly. I’m sorry I was snappish.”

  “Tay—” said Mum. “You’re not a freak. Everyone you know . . . everyone who matters knows you are a wonderful, brave, clever, excellent young woman.”

  “It’s okay, Mum. I understand what a big deal it is. I know that me being a clone is an amazing triumph, and it will have huge benefits for medicine, and I’m fine. I just wish . . . Oh, Mum. If I had to be a copy of someone, why couldn’t I be a copy of you?”

  “It didn’t work out that way,” said Mum. “Tay . . . I was nearly forty, and—”

  “We thought we couldn’t have children,” said Dad. “We were contemplating fertility treatment. The clone project came along, and they were asking for volunteers—”

  “I wasn’t sure, but I tested,” put in Mum. “I was histo-compatible with one of the donors. You know what that means: I had the right kind of cell profile, like a biochemical fingerprint: and it turned out to be Pam, who was our dear friend. We thought about it long and hard, but we’ve been so glad we said yes.”

  “Because it gave us you,” said Dad. “Just the way you are. You were a miracle to us.”

  “And then you had Donny.”

  Mum nodded. “Yes. It sometimes happens. A test-tube pregnancy and then an ordinary one, when there’s been unexplained infertility before. No one understands why, not yet. So we had two miracles.”

  Every time Mum and Dad told her the story (and they’d told it to her over and over, in different ways, since they’d told her the truth) she could see in their eyes how much they loved her, and how much they wanted her to say everything was okay.

  “In the Straits Times it said something about a ‘human photocopy.’ I didn’t want to read any of it, but I saw that.”

  “Well, the Straits Times got it wrong,” said Dad. “You are not a copy. You are an original. It isn’t the DNA that counts: it’s what you do with it. It’s the person. You aren’t a photocopy of Pam. You are our daughter, and our proudest achievement.”

  “Yes,” sighed Tay. “And I love you too. True.”

  “Do you want to see Pam?” suggested Mum. “She could be here in a few hours.”

  Tay’s gene mother was working on the Marine and Shore Station—another part of the biotech company’s conservation work. The floating research lab was moored off the northeast coast of Kandah State just now. Tay knew this wasn’t an accident. It had been arranged so that Pam would be nearby if Tay wanted to see her when the story broke.

  But she didn’t want to see Pam.

  Not now, maybe not ever . . .

  “N-no. I’ll talk to her soon, honest. Just not right now. Right now, er, I really do have homework to finish. I ought to have done it before Donny came home—”

  “Okay,” said Mum.

  “Okay,” said Dad. “We’ll leave you in peace.”

  They hugged her, and left her in peace.

  The ceiling fans ticked around and around. The refuge buildings had air-conditioning, but Donny and Tay made it a point of honor not to use aircon, except in their bedrooms on unbearably sticky nights. It was better to learn to accept the heat as normal, so that you could be free and comfortable outdoors. She switched off Pam Taylor’s face and took out her art portfolio from one of the drawers in the worktable that stretched down the middle of the room. She began to work on coloring some sketches she’d done of a spray of orchids. It wasn’t urgent, but it soothed her mind.

  About half an hour later Donny arrived. He plonked an untidy parcel on the table.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Are you still miserable about being in the papers? Are you afraid the journalists will track you down, like a celebrity?”

  Donny knew, of course. Mum and Dad had said it was Tay’s choice and he didn’t have to be told, but she couldn’t have imagined keeping a secret like that from him.

  “Nah,” said Tay. “The Lifeforce Teenage Clone Protection Program will look after me. I’m like someone giving evidence against the Mob. The newspapers and the TV will never find me. . . . Is that the frog?”

  “Yes.” He unwrapped his parcel, revealing a splendid tree frog standing on its back legs. It was varnished in red and green and fixed to a bamboo stand. There was a perpetual calendar fitted into the frog’s belly, and the frog had a wide, gaping mouth for holding letters. One of the frog’s back feet was missing.

  “I’ve got her foot. But the clamp I made for holding the letters has come unsprung.”

  “Right,” said Tay. “The doctor is in.”

  They fixed the frog (as well as could be expected for a papier-mâché model that had spent time knocking around in an airplane hold with Donny’s socks). Then they checked the status of Mum’s big present: which was a dozen Old English rosebushes, specially genetically adapted for the tropics, that Tay had ordered on the Internet (she’d got Dad to do the ordering on his credit card and promised to pay him back).

  The bushes wouldn’t look like much, but there would be pictures of how the flowers were going to look: and Mum would love them. She was the one with the green fingers who was responsible for the success of all the flower beds in the refuge clearing. They ought to be arriving with the next mail drop. Donny and Tay would have to make sure they got to the mail parcel (however it reached the refuge) before their mother.

  “If they don’t come because of the rebels,” said Donny cheerfully, “at least she’s got my frog. It can be from both of us if you like.”

  “Thanks. Did you buy her a card?”

  “I thought I’d make one. She likes homemade things.”

  “Me too. Let’s get to it. Then it’ll be done and we’ll be all set.”

  The schoolroom grew busy, and cozy and quiet: the two children working together, tearing up colored tissue paper, passing the glue, asking for the scissors, like long ago. In two years, thought Tay, I’ll be sixteen. I’ll be old enough to go away to college, and then I’ll face my destiny. People will find out I’m a clone, but I won’t mind. I will be the second Pam Taylor. I will be a brilliant success. Mum and Da
d won’t have to blame themselves for how they had me, and everything will turn out well. But I’m not going to think about it until then. Until then I’m just going to be Tay.

  When they’d finished the cards, they left them to dry and went over to the observation studio. The baby apes spent all their time with their carers, the way orangutan babies live alone with their mothers in the wild. The older apes had an enclosure on the edge of the clearing so that they could start learning to forage and look after themselves. They also had a suite of indoor pens, which the refuge staff called the clubhouse, where they were free to come and go and socialize with each other—and where the scientists could observe their behavior on closed-circuit TV.

  Sometimes there was a proper experiment. One of the visiting primatologists (people who study apes), or the graduate students, might be observing how the apes solved a puzzle. But there was always something going on, and even though everything was being videotaped, usually one of the scientists would be watching. Today they found Dr. Suritobo, the refuge’s animal psychologist, on his own in front of the monitor screens—like a security guard watching some very hairy teenagers hanging out in a shopping mall.

  “Hi, Clint,” said Tay. “What’s up?”

  Dr. Suritobo was Indonesian. He’d been with Lifeforce as long as Mum and Dad had, and he’d written a shelfful of books, but he never seemed entirely like a grown-up. He could make bows and arrows that really worked; and strange musical instruments out of bamboo. He was the best guide for jungle walks too. No one called him anything but Clint because he was a fanatical Clint Eastwood fan. He even had a poncho (a striped, handwoven Dyak poncho; but it looked the part). You’d find him loping around with his hat brim pulled down over his narrowed eyes, chewing on a thin black cheroot, obviously deep in some The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fantasy. . . . The children loved him, though they sometimes wondered how he managed to hold down a responsible job.

  But Clint had told them there should be no difference between work and play anyway.

  He was pleased to see them. He stretched his arms above his head and ran his hands through his hair, which was already standing on end.