The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  “What for?”

  “Just give me a minute,” she said, and I watched as she walked quickly up the central aisle through the nave towards the chancel. Anna slipped into a pew near the front. She sat for a few minutes—I could just see the back of her head—then came back down the aisle, her head slightly bowed, the posture and the walk unmistakable. Watching her it came to me—news, I’m sure, only to me—that the word “prayer” can be used to denote what is prayed and the person who prays it.

  “You were praying,” I said.

  “Yes. Do you mind?”

  “No. Did you put in a word for me?”

  “I did,” she said. “I always do.”

  When we got back to the Bonsecours it was midafternoon. A large manila envelope had been left for Jane Grey at the reception desk. My driver’s license and passport, under the name Oliver Grey, were inside, along with a hand-drawn street map and a note giving us our instructions. We were to leave Montreal the next day at noon. We were to drive west to Ottawa, making no stops, and, at precisely three o’clock, show up at the address given. The note stipulated that Anna was to do the driving, which stipulation, a deliberate insult, I was determined we would not heed.

  Sunday night, our last in Montreal, after an early dinner, during which neither of us spoke about the next day, we returned to the hotel and packed our bags. It was the right time, Anna said, for her to brief me on what it was like for a clone inside the Clearances. What it would have been like for my clone. I told her I was sleepy. She said I wasn’t sleepy, that I’d slept most of the day. With that, the idyll, such as it was, ended, and class began.

  “From the start of the government’s program,” Anna said, “as I believe I’ve told you, we have tried to think, as near as we could come to it, the way the government thinks. All the evidence points to thinking that is pragmatic, self-interested, and venal, but who can be sure how the government thinks? All I can tell you is what seems to us the most probable of what has been guessed, deduced, imagined. We believe we have come close to the truth.”

  Although I had slept most of the day, I was tired. My feet hurt. My scalp itched. I was worried about my heart. I wanted to be in bed, in the dark, alone in the room. I wanted to think about things—however beside the point—without Anna’s voice in my head. Why did I need to know this? I would meet the clone. I would see what I would see. I would do what I could for him. I would stand beside Anna. If I still saw the reason for it, I would write the report.

  “Everything within the Clearances,” she told me, “the most densely populated area on earth, is designed and engineered to keep the clones physically healthy and emotionally placid, to keep them manageable and docile, without the instinct or means for procreation, or self-preservation, or aggression. Every day the clones get long bouts of regimented exercise, though there is no game-playing, no sports, no activity that might encourage a spirit of collaboration or teamwork, nothing to inspire a collective sense. They get an optimally balanced, low-calorie, inexpensively delivered diet. They eat vegetables and fruits grown on the Clearances by the clones themselves. They eat very little meat, and no red meat. The poultry and pork they eat is from pigs and fowl raised inside the Clearances. The fish, too, is farmed there. No sweets. No coffee or tea; nothing that might jazz them up. Plenty of water. Wholegrain breads. A glass of purple grape juice with supper. They eat the way we might eat if our one concern was maximum health and longevity. So that, on average, the health of the clones is far better than that of their originals. It is certain,” Anna said, “that the government cares far more about the health of the clones than it does about the health of its citizens, in whom it has little investment.

  “As long as they live, adult male clones are administered daily a massive and uniform course of psychotropic drugs meant to keep them subdued, oblivious of sex (homoerotic), well-rested, and not discontent. I’m sure my group will have analyzed samples of blood taken from your clone, and will know the nature and extent of this medication. In any case,” Anna said, “I have witnessed the horrific emotional and physical effects of its withdrawal.

  “At birth, each clone is tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, with what appears to be a scannable identification number. Though it is not, in fact, scannable, at least not with any of the equipment we tried, the number simply and unmistakably identifies the clone with its original.”

  One way or another I already knew this, and I told her so.

  “Clones are not given names,” she said, “just these ID codes. They live in enormous prefabricated hangar-like structures, barracks, each of which houses ten thousand clones.”

  “That number can’t be anything but arbitrary,” I said.

  “Our best guess,” she said.

  “Adult male clones and adult female clones never see one another; the male and female barracks are set hundreds of miles apart. The clones are warehoused, inventoried, grouped by age, according not to their date of birth, which might vary some from those of their barracks-mates, but to the birth date of their original. Before he got out, however that happened, your clone lived with other male clones whose originals were all were born on November 23, 2004.”

  “You remember my birthday?”

  “When you need a part, your clone is easy to locate.”

  “He’s not now,” I said.

  “When the male clones have finished their exercise and their work, whatever that is, for the day, they are sedated. Either they are working, exercising, eating, or they are sleeping.”

  “What does your group think?” I said, without facetiousness. “Do clones dream?”

  “I can tell you they do,” Anna said. “At least when they are coming off drugs.

  “That the clones do not have names, that there are so many of them in any one ‘residence,’ that they have no ‘free’ time—we don’t have the language to describe this universe—would certainly discourage,” she said, “if not absolutely prevent, anything that resembles social interaction.

  “When they reach the age of twelve or thirteen, male clones are put to work. Some do agricultural work on farms inside the Clearances. Some work at the cleaning and upkeep of the buildings and grounds. Some do road and infrastructure repair. Some see to the maintenance of vehicles and equipment. Some prepare the food. And some are involved in the process of cloning itself, so contrived that the fewest possible originals need be connected with it.

  “Female clones require very little medication to keep them pacific and are not sedated at night. They do only one sort of work: they carry and give birth to infant clones, and they nurse them and care for them through infancy and childhood. The process is designed to obliterate the dangerous mother-child bond. Each female nurses and tends to a different child each day. An infant clone might, on any given day or night, be assigned to one of ten thousand ‘mothers’ who reside in a particular ‘rearing’ complex. As the clones are not named, the transient mother would call her charge ‘Boy’ or ‘Girl’ (or some version thereof in the language given the clones to use), and the child, when he or she was old enough, would use the appellation ‘Nurse.’ We find some comfort,” Anna said, “in the belief that, under even the most severe and harassing of circumstances, the maternal instinct will prove irrepressible, and that a certain portion of mother-love, of tenderness and kindness, could not be rigged out of the situation.

  “Among the clones, children have no fathers. This will be important for you to keep in mind, Ray. The boy clones have no interaction with adult males, until they leave the world of female clones. The girl clones never in their lives see an adult male.

  “Artificial means of inducing and sustaining lactation, and of delaying menopause, will have been developed. When she is no longer able to give birth, the female clone is shifted to the care of young clones, between the ages of three and thirteen. After which, clones are no longer considered children. The male clones are moved to residences for adult males and committed to adult male work. At the age of twelve or thir
teen, the female clone’s life is given over, for as many as forty years, exclusively to child-bearing. She becomes an incubator, a factory for producing babies. When she is not having them, she is nursing them (though never her ‘own’). She is almost continuously pregnant, with a respite between pregnancies just long enough to prevent the process from becoming life-threatening.”

  I understood, and Anna was at some pains to make this clear, that when she spoke about what went on inside the Clearances, she was dealing almost entirely in speculation, however reasoned and astute it might have been. For instance: this conception of the life of a female clone had to be, at this point in the history of the enterprise, purely speculative, as the first generation of clones, of which my clone was a member, was just now reaching adulthood. Still, when she spoke this way, declaratively, authoritatively, using the present tense as she did, it was hard to keep from taking speculation for fact.

  And I wondered if she, and her group, were afflicted by the same confusion. “If a female clone is pregnant, and her original needs a part, the extraction of which would jeopardize her life and, perhaps, that of the fetus, the original is given a compatible part from a store of spare parts frozen and warehoused for this purpose, and allowed to believe it comes from her clone. Except in the most extraordinary cases, the babies are delivered by clone midwives (who train by watching other clone midwives). Pain medication is liberally administered; the notion of natural childbirth is irrelevant. Caesarean sections are rare. For emergencies, and for serious illnesses, the government operates within the Clearances’ two hundred and fifty hospitals—we estimate one for every million clones—staffed by doctors and nurses and support personnel taken from the U.S. military, and sworn to the strictest secrecy.”

  “Anna. I haven’t given this any thought, and even I can see there’s a hitch here.”

  “There are a lot of hitches,” she said. “We’re guessing.”

  “Okay, but you put enough chickens in the coop and they’ll get aggressive. In addition to all those medical people, your guess would require a great many others, originals, working inside the Clearances in supervisory and security positions, folks who know what goes on there, who’ve seen the clones, engaged with them. How does the government make sure none of these people talks?”

  “We don’t know what the mechanism is,” Anna said, “but given that whatever goes on in there has been going on for more than twenty years without a hint of disclosure, it must be pretty near foolproof. Besides, we assume the clones are kept tractable by other means, and also that the clones, themselves, are used as guards, as police.”

  “It would only take one.”

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” she said. “Sadly.”

  “Well, somebody screwed up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The clone is out,” I said.

  “Yes. He’s out. Will you give me a second?” Anna said. “I need a sip of water.” She got up off the bed and went into the bathroom. I stood up and stretched. I went to the window and looked out. The view was dismal: on the opposite side of a dark alley a line of derelict sheds.

  “I’m almost finished,” she said when she came out.

  I sat back down on the bed. “Take your time. I’m interested.”

  “They closely examined your clone,” she said, “and found no tracking device. In case you were worried.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” I said. “Not about that.”

  “Anyway, when a clone is used, and if, after surgery, the clone remains viable, still able to provide spare parts, he is not returned to his original residence. This is true, whether or not the loss suffered by the clone is conspicuous and disfiguring, or unobtrusive, as in the removal of a kidney or a lung, where only an incision scar is visible. In all cases, the clone is taken to one of many special residences, postsurgical holding pens, set apart. For a clone who is intact to see a clone who has been harvested is to confront his own destiny. For obvious reasons,” Anna said, “an unused clone must never know what he has been made for.

  “When an original dies, his or her copy is summarily put to death, no matter what its age. Everything that can be used for spare parts is salvaged and banked. What happens to the body of that clone? What happens to the body of the clone who can no longer survive repeated surgical diminishment? Or to the body of the clone who dies of ‘natural’ causes? Is it buried? Burned? Our current thinking about this is that it is composted, fermentation in some way accelerated so as efficiently to produce methane, which, converted to methanol, the government exports beyond the Clearances and sells at enormous profit.”

  “Waste not,” I said.

  “As you may not know, Ray, those who could not afford hospital birth, or those unable to pay the steep original cloning fee, were, from the start of the program, ‘permitted to opt out.’ Despite the strong correlation between poverty and the need for serious health care, it was rationalized that the poor—we’re talking here about a quarter of the population—would not have the means to afford a procedure that required a replacement part and, thus, could make no use of a clone.

  “As human beings, the clones would have an instinct and congenital capacity for language. In any human society, the rise of language is pretty much unstoppable. In any case, the clones would require a minimal language for their work, and for simple communication having to do with exercise and eating and rest. The government’s problem is that once the clones get this much language, they would inevitably develop more. Would a clone dialect evolve in spite of the government’s efforts to prevent it? What if a language of feelings was to appear? A language of desires? We had thought the government might be compelled to cut out the clones’ tongues. Now we have empirical evidence they do not, and we wonder why. I have not yet heard your clone speak. I heard him moan and grunt and howl. Not quite animal sounds, but not quite human. I heard him cry. But I heard nothing from him that even approximated language. Do clones talk to one another, or is verbal communication, outside of what is needed for work, proscribed? It would be far easier to prohibit access to information and knowledge than it would be to stop the spread of language and speech. And with language, ineluctably, comes thought and, possibly, understanding.

  “Right there, for the clones,” Anna said, “is the hope, and the horror.

  “The clones get no education. They are trained to do only the work they are assigned. Once a month, male and female, adult and child, they are given haircuts. Male clones shave once a week. Clones brush and floss their teeth twice a day, and the water they drink is heavily fluoridated. Menstruation is a significant problem for the government: of the ten thousand post-pubescent female clones in any residence, most get their periods on the same day.

  “Do clones love? Do they know love? About love? Do they have a word for love, or any sense of the concept? We couldn’t even begin to speculate about this.

  “Here’s the catch,” she said. “The government’s cloning operation is still in its infancy. What I’ve drawn for you is the shape we think things will take inside the Clearances if the program is allowed to continue, as all indications suggest it will be. You wouldn’t need to be a mathematician to have figured out that most of this could not have happened yet. The ‘mandatory’ program for all new births began in 2049, the year you signed up for CNR. Your copy, Ray, will be, give or take a year, among the oldest copies in existence. Except for the relative few made prior to the government’s institution of the process, no clone will be older than twenty-two. This first generation of clones will have been produced without human mothers. There will have been no female copies old enough to carry the cloned fetuses. Until there was a sufficient number of female clones of child-bearing age, another method of incubation would have been found. The generation of clones to which your clone belongs was gestated in synthetic womb environments. The more ‘natural,’ less expensive gestation process will have been in place, now, less than ten years. There would have been no female clones old enough to care for you
r clone as an infant or young child. We don’t know who raised your clone, or if he was cared for at all. In every meaningful sense, he, like his coevals, was born without parents. Orphans all. Adams and Eves. It is possible that, until he came to me, your clone had never even seen a woman. If anything, your clone’s life inside the Clearances, lived in the main before things had coalesced, might well have been worse than it would be were he to be born there today.”

  Nine

  In the more than a year, now, Anna and I have spent with him, we have not learned from the clone enough about his life inside the Clearances for me to say how close Anna’s group was in its speculations to being right. By the time the clone had acquired language skills necessary for him to speak usefully about his experience, he was unwilling—maybe still unable—to do so. Who could blame him? Judging by his behavior early on, and from several things he said in less guarded moments—later in the year, when he’d grown more comfortable speaking to us, especially to Anna—I can say that on at least two counts, in their efforts to think as the government thinks, Anna’s group did not go far enough to get the details—where the devil, indeed, was—quite right.

  To take one instance of their coming up short: Anna’s group imagined there would be special, separate, segregated residences for clones that remained viable after being harvested for parts. The group assumed that, thinking pragmatically, towards the end of keeping the clones oblivious and docile and manageable, the government would not incur the risk of inciting the clones by letting them live among their counterparts returned from surgery. From what Anna and I were able to gather, there are within the Clearances no such special residences. However mutilated, used clones are sent back to live among their unused fellows, who, seeing the disfigured, maimed, to varying degree diminished clones in their midst, could think only: “This is what happens to some of us from time to time.” Having known no other order, no other world but theirs, they would have no way of knowing, of imagining why it happened to them, or what it meant, no way of conceiving the single reason for their existence. The effect of this grisly, ruthless practice, which would certainly have been calculated, would be—far from riling the clones, provoking in them protest or rebellion, or even revelation—to dispirit the clones, to bring them to a kind of apathy and despair, in which state, as the government would surely know, the clones, used and unused alike, would be all the more subjugateable.