Claus: The Trilogy

by Tony Bertauski

  The yellow-hats poke Sura and Joe like wranglers guiding cattle.

  “Stop.” Sura slaps at them.

  They jabber at each other and keep pushing. “Gogogogogo.”

  Sura’s head is swimming. It’s the weird body on the table and the damp room that makes the room sway. It’s the smell. The rich, organic aroma fills her head.

  Joe pushes off the wall. Two of the yellow-hats prod him to go faster, but he ignores them. He stops at the table, staring at the body.

  “What is it?” Sura asks.

  “I don’t know. It looks sort of like the Grinch, only shorter.” He leans over and sniffs. “Smells like algae.”

  Sura braces herself against the wall. The yellow-hats leave her alone. They go to a door at the far end of the room that’s between cluttered workbenches with glass tanks much smaller than the ones standing in the room.

  “You all right?” Joe asks, short of breath.

  “It’s something about this room.” Sura steps carefully, the rubber spikes gripping the floor. “Have you been here?”

  He shakes his head.

  She approaches the table with short steps. The hair on the body is wet and matted. The lights above it are bright, the hairs sort of pointed at them.

  “It’s him.” She steps back, hand over her mouth. “The guy we picked up after the dance, that’s him.”

  Joe investigates again. The hair is shorter and there are no patches of blue skin. “I don’t know,” he says. “It looks sort of like him, but maybe elven all look the same.”

  “You’re saying we picked up a different elven?”

  But it’s not the same guy, not exactly. He’s different. He’s newer, greener. More hair. Sura touches one of the tanks, the surface smooth and cold. There’s a row on each side of the center aisle, and smaller ones lined up on shelves attached to the walls. Hundreds of them.

  “What are these?” she asks.

  “Come on.” Joe touches her elbow, his hand quivering. “They want us to go.”

  The yellow-hats are pushing again. Sura ignores their gibberish and goes to one of the tanks. Their tiny hands feel like pool cues. She touches the glass tank nearest her. The inside is frosted. Some of the tanks are shorter than others. Some are slightly taller than her. There’s something inside the one she’s looking at: a dark form, like something standing up.

  She cups her hands against the glass. The yellow-hats aggressively poke, knocking her off-balance. She kicks at them, but they deftly avoid her like martial artists, jabbing at her weak knees.

  “It’s all right,” a voice says weakly. “She can look.”

  Sura jerks back.

  Mr. Frost is standing in the doorway at the far end. The Arctic fox sits next to him, his bushy, white tail sweeping the floor. Mr. Frost’s cheeks—what little can be seen between his beard and eyes—look haggard. His eyes, once sharp blue, are dull and gray. He slumps like a man that’s carried a heavy weight all his life.

  Sura puts her hand on the tank to steady herself. There’s the man that created her and she can’t form a single word. It takes all her strength just to stand up.

  Joe grunts like he was kicked in the stomach. He’s at one of the tanks, his face near a clear spot on the glass. His eyes are wide; his bluish lips flutter wordlessly.

  “What is it?” Sura asks.

  He shakes his head. The yellow-hats prod him away from the tank, but the shock remains. They come for Sura, but Mr. Frost lifts his hand.

  “She wants to wake up,” he says.

  Wake up.

  Is this what her mom meant? Discover who you are no matter what the answer. The truth doesn’t always feel good. It’s truth.

  Sura turns to a tank behind her. She rises on her toes. The form looks like another clump of algae with shoulders. The facial features are subtle. The eyes closed.

  This is where he grows us.

  The yellow-hats keep her from falling. Mr. Frost says something. Sura slides to the floor. An acrid bulge rises in her throat. She forces it down while the room begins to spin.

  “They’re not awake, Sura.” Mr. Frost’s voice is out there, somewhere. “They are simply empty vessels. In fact, they are more like plants. The chlorophyll spliced into their DNA stabilizes their bodies while they remain in terrariums.”

  He says all this like a gardener explaining the workings of his greenhouse. Sura shakes her head to stop the room-spins. She pinches the skin on the back of her hand, twisting it like a key.

  She grabs the edge of the table and puts a hand on Joe. He looks chalky, still no words. She crawls past the table and palms the tank behind him. The yellow-hats help her stand up.

  They help her look inside it.

  Joe.

  It’s him. Joe’s inside the tank. A green-matted version of the way he is right now: same age, same size.

  How can that be? He grew up on the plantation; he went to school and grew up with Jonah. He can’t be in the tank like that. Not like that.

  She remembers, in a haze of memories, when she looked him up in the database. It was like he just started school. She thought, maybe, he was just homeschooled before that.

  Or maybe he just came out of the tank.

  “Where am I?” Sura waves at the tanks. “Which one is me?”

  “Are you your body?” Mr. Frost answers.

  “You know what I mean! Where am I?”

  The yellow-hats stand back. No one answers.

  Sura walks numbly down the aisles, peering into tank after tank. Face after face looks back, vaguely human and unrecognizable. They could be her. They could be anyone. She slaps the tanks, pushes against them, but they’re too solid to rock off their foundations.

  “Where is it?” she shouts.

  The yellow-hats and Mr. Frost watch. Behind them, on shelves above the workbenches, are the small tanks. They are slimmer and clear.

  Something floats inside them.

  Mr. Frost slowly closes his eyes. A nod.

  Sura palms the tanks as she fumbles her way to the end of the room, her legs almost useless. She grasps one of the workbenches before losing her balance. A rack of beakers falls over. She leans closely.

  Six little tanks. Six little, floating infants.

  Infants with round faces.

  Six of me.

  “It has been a long journey, my dear,” Mr. Frost says.

  She towers over the portly elven. “Why would you do this?”

  Mr. Frost nods slowly, like he understands. Her question makes perfect sense. He pushes with his left foot, slowly sliding away. The white fox follows.

  “Once upon a time”—his voice floats around the room—“I tried to help a… man, shall we say.”

  “An elven,” Sura says.

  “Yes, an elven. This bit of lore I don’t expect you to understand, but let’s say he had not a friend in the world. And neither had I. Our friendship was not perfect, but it was better than being alone. Unfortunately, it brought us here.”

  He holds his arms out, palms up.

  “When I arrived here, it was just me. I was being forced to do something that I couldn’t do alone, so I gave birth.”

  “You grew us,” Joe says before she can.

  “Humans have been fertilizing embryos outside the womb for quite some time,” Mr. Frost says. “I did not grow you.”

  “You called these terrariums!” Joe slaps the tank behind him. “You grew us!”

  “No,” Sura says, strangely calm. “You cloned us.”

  Mr. Frost grunts. “I gave birth,” he says. “I needed help, not children. I developed adult bodies in vitro and then I gave them a mind.”

  “Memories.” Joe stalks him, despite shaky legs. “You programmed us with memories, made us think we had a past. I remember growing up. I remember the helpers and… and…” He looks back at the tank. “And none of that’s real.”

  “My boy, the mind is much more than memories.”

  “When did you take me out of the tank?”

&n
bsp; “What matters is that you’re here.”

  “WHEN DID YOU TAKE ME OUT?”

  Joe punches the tank. Mr. Frost silently watches. The glass rings but doesn’t move. He hits it again and again. His knuckles swell. The yellow-hats push him away, grabbing his arms. He tries to hit them.

  Joe grabs the table, his chest heaving, head hung low.

  “You are real,” Mr. Frost says calmly. “You are as real as any human on this planet.”

  “We never left you,” Joe says. “You programmed us to stay on the plantation like helpers.”

  “You have an instinct to stay here. This is home.”

  Joe shakes his head, glaring at the wet body on the table.

  “What about me?” Sura asks. “Why am I an infant?”

  A light returns to Mr. Frost’s eyes, briefly and brightly. A smile grows somewhere beneath his whiskers. He bends over to pet the fox.

  “Time had eroded my sense of being. Loneliness has that effect. I had lost touch with the essence of life; my identity was dying. I had been robbed of free will and was becoming numb. I still breathed, my heart still beat, but I was dead, child. I didn’t care anymore and the world needed me to care.”

  He says it like a fact.

  “You see, Jonah, May, and Templeton have a sense of duty, an unbending dedication to service. They are strong and dependable. But you, Sura… you were born with human frailty. You experience the full range of life, all the love and hate, the sadness and joy. You encompass the essence of humanity. You are vulnerable.”

  He opens his hand like releasing a dove.

  “You are truth.”

  Joe looks at her blankly. She recognizes that look. It’s one of alienation and abandonment. Now he wonders if he matters like she has all her life.

  “And Joe?” she asks. “You wanted me to love him.”

  Mr. Frost looks at the boy. He smiles with the same degree of warmth.

  “I am elven,” he says. “We are vastly advanced in spirit and body. But we are not perfect. We are vulnerable to self-centeredness and self-pity. What I’ve done… well, it was not without a degree of self-indulgence. I needed to care again. I needed to understand humanity. I needed to feel what it’s like to be human. I wanted to experience life through you. I watched you learn how to walk, struggle with your first words, suffer through sickness, and stumble your way through the human condition. It has been a gift. A selfish one.”

  Mr. Frost slides closer to the table. He says gently, as if the words would land softer, “But Joe arrived in consciousness about the age of… well, the age he is now, and you fall in love. I’ve watched your affection bloom and fade as you age. Your relationship encompasses the full spectrum of life.”

  That’s why Joe just started going to high school. He wasn’t homeschooled; he just came out of the tank with programmed memories. Joe just woke up in bed one day like it was another day.

  Joe’s anger fades.

  He backs into the glass tank, his head hitting with a hollow bonk, and slides down, eyes glassy and distant. His world has turned into quicksand.

  “This is sick,” Sura says. “You pretended my clone was my mom. I raised myself.”

  He nods with a smile. “You are responsible for your own growth, my dear. You raised yourself.”

  “We didn’t ask for this.”

  “No one asks to be born.”

  “This is wrong.”

  “Sometimes life is impossible.”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to play God.”

  “You can’t possibly understand the circumstances I have faced, and you don’t know the peril the world faces right now. You should know that, despite all my actions, all my greed, you have been a gift to the world, Sura. Not just to me but to the world. You possess something the others don’t.”

  He slides around the table.

  “You have the ability to grow, my dear. Every time you woke into another life, you evolved and transformed.” He throws out his hands. “Your understanding of life and the world around you increased, your presence of mind expanded. You denied your desire to love Jonah so that you could understand yourself.”

  “My mom did that, not me.”

  “Your growth isn’t selfish. It has spread to the others. The others have transformed, too.”

  Mr. Frost stops a few feet away from her. His presence is chilly, but his face beaming. The color has returned to his cheeks; his eyes sparkle.

  “You’ve changed us all, Sura.”

  Sura is numb. It’s not the room or the temperature; it’s the thoughts swirling in her head that steal her presence.

  “Let’s go.” Joe is emotionless. He holds out his shivering hand. “Let’s get out of here, Sura.”

  The yellow-hats are gone. Mr. Frost folds his hands on top of his belly.

  “Come on, Sura!” Joe shouts.

  She moves half a step. Mr. Frost doesn’t try to stop her. Joe takes her by the wrist. His fear is palpable. She’s seen that look before. She saw it on Jonah.

  Hurt. Pain.

  Maybe he’s afraid Sura will leave him like her mom left Jonah. Maybe he’s afraid of this place. Either way, Joe holds on tightly. He’s never going to let go. He pulls her away from Mr. Frost, around the stainless steel table and the sleeping body. They won’t make it far, but they’ll try.

  Frosty trails creep from under the door, racing across the floor like jagged snakes. Joe grabs the handle. Sura feels the temperature in his fingers plummet. Her foot turns painfully cold as one of the icy cracks runs beneath her shoe.

  She catches Joe before he falls. His cheeks are stiff and shiny.

  The door crashes open.

  A blue elven looks down at them with a smile much different than Mr. Frost’s.

  -------------------------

  Jack plants his size-twenty-five foot on the door. It breaks open with ease. Subzero trails crackle across the floor, preceding his entrance into the room.

  Smells like dirt.

  He halts inside the doorway and almost tips over. A girl is on the floor with a boy across her lap. One sight of Jack and she tries to push away. She looks like a wounded animal.

  “I know you.” Jack snaps his fingers. “You had the sweet truck, right?”

  But something’s different. Something is missing. He doesn’t feel her, not like when he saw her at the megastore or in the truck. Before, she lit him up with swirling currents of sweetness, branded him with a permanent smile, and filled him with the urge to hug every warmblood within reach. He had never felt that before.

  Not ever.

  Now she’s just some dirty little warmblood giving him that look of fear and hate. She’s just like all the others now. Just another warmblood.

  “You!” she screams. “You did this!”

  “Pipe down, fancy pants. Your boyfriend will be fine.”

  Joe’s eyes are squeezed shut, his body rigid. His lips are sort of blue.

  “Or not,” Jack adds.

  Sura’s shoes squeak on the floor, the rubber-tipped soles giving her enough traction to scoot against a tank. She pulls Joe along, palming his cheek against her lips, whispering in his ear.

  “Listen,” Jack says, “if you didn’t want to taste the cold, why’d you come down here?” He cocks his head, lifting an eyebrow. “Actually, how’d you get down here?”

  “She’s your daughter, Janack.” Pawn stands in front of a table.

  “What?”

  “She’s family,” Pawn says. “So is Joe. They belong to you. They’re your family.”

  “Pawn, you need a refresher on the birds and bees. How can I put this? I’m elven.” Jack flattens his hand over his chest. “And they’re warmblood. Two different species, see what I’m saying?”

  “All of this is yours, Janack.” Pawn spreads his arms. “The children were born because of you. They are part of you, and you are part of them. Can’t you feel it?” Pawn thumps his chest. “The connection with them, I know you feel it.”

  Ja
ck grimaces. He felt something in the truck and, come to think of it, there was no way he could harm her when he felt that. But it’s gone now. He’s empty. Dead inside.

  “Wait!” Jack holds up a finger, looking for an idea on the ceiling. “No, nothing. I’ve got nothing. They’re warmbloods, Pawn. Just like the rest.”

  He claps twice.

  “Haul them to the back,” Jack calls. “Can’t have her blubbering all over the place; I’d like to relax. Daddy’s had a long day—long couple of centuries, really.”

  A brigade of twenty or so helpers slide into the room, their tiny hands snatching the girl’s coat and pants. She fights them off, but they’re persistent. Another twenty helpers file inside and soon lift the boy and girl off the floor.

  Sura fights them and makes a move for Jack. She uses every cuss word Jack learned at the shelter.

  “Honey, you ain’t that tough,” Jack says.

  The helpers struggle to move them. They shove Pawn to the side and drag Joe in after Sura is in the back room. Her fists pound the locked door. Her profanity is distant but sharp.

  “You teach her those words?” Jack asks. “Because I know I didn’t.”

  “Why are you treating them like prisoners?”

  “Why are they here?” Jack shouts. “Someone tell me how those punk kids got in my basement!”

  I let them down there, sir, Freeda says.

  “What?” Jack’s eyes bulge.

  They are Pawn’s pets, sir. It was his plan to dissuade you from carrying out the master plan.

  Pawn stays rooted in front of the table, looking at the floor, where he sees defeat fast approaching. There’s a body behind him, lying as still as death on a metal slab. Jack cruises around to find his likeness breathing easy.

  “What am I doing there?” Jack says.

  It’s taken some time for me to understand Pawn’s motivation for raising children. I was fooled into believing that they brought him happiness and, as a result, he worked harder and more efficiently. He claimed to understand warmbloods now that he felt them, and that’s when I understood what he was planning.

  Jack waits. His body—the one on the table—breathes with a slight smile. Or maybe the lips are stuck.