Clones

by Gardner Dozois

  "Good, good—now you can go to your little meeting and be perfectly safe. Enjoy yourself!" Beaming, he closed his bag and went away.

  On the high Plaza of Fountains, overlooking the quayside and the sea, feasts of shrimp and wine, seaweed salad, caviar, pasta, iced sweets had been laid out under canopies of green glass. Orchestrinos were playing. Couples were dancing on the old ceramic cobbles, white skirts swinging, hair afloat in the brilliant air. Farther up, Mary and her Fisher had found a place to be alone.

  Under the bower in the cool shade, they lay clasped heart to heart, their bodies still joined so that in her ecstasy she could not tell where hers ended or his began.

  "Oh, I love you, I love you!" she murmured.

  His body moved, his head drew back a little to look at her. There was something troubled in his gray eyes. "I didn't know this was going to be your first time," he said. "How is it that you waited so long?"

  "I was waiting for you," she said faintly, and it seemed to her that it was so, and that she had always known it. Her arms tightened around him, wishing to draw him closer to her body again.

  But he held himself away, looking down at her with the same vague uneasiness in his eyes. "I don't understand," he said. "How could you have known I was coming?"

  "I knew," she said. Timidly her hands began to stroke the long, smooth muscles of his back, the man's flesh, so different from her own. It seemed to her that her fingertips knew him without being told; they found the tiny spots that gave him pleasure, and lingered there, without her direction.

  His body stiffened; his gray eyes half closed. "Oh, Mary," he said, and then he was close against her again, his mouth busy on hers: and the pleasure began, more piercing and sweet than she had ever dreamed it could be. Now she was out of herself again, half aware that her body was moving, writhing; that her voice was making sounds and speaking words that astonished her to hear .. .

  Near the end she began to weep, and lay in his arms afterward with the luxurious tears wetting her cheeks, while his voice asked anxiously, "Are you all right? Darling, are you all right?" and she could not explain, but only held him tighter, and wept.

  Later, hand in hand, they wandered down the bone-white stairs to the quayside strewn with drying nets, the glass floats sparkling sharp in the sun, spars, tackle and canvas piled everywhere. Only two boats were moored at the floating jetty below; the rest were out fishing, black specks on the glittering sea, almost at the horizon.

  Over to eastward they saw the desolate smudge of the mainland and the huddle of stones that was Porto. "That's where you live," she said wonderingly.

  "Yes."

  "What do you do there?"

  He paused, looked down at her with that startled unease in his glance. After a moment he shrugged. "Work. Drink a little in the evenings, make love. What else would I do?"

  A dull pain descended suddenly on her heart and would not lift its wings. "You've made love to many women?" she asked with difficulty.

  "Of course. Mary, what's the matter?"

  "You're going back to Porto. You're going to leave me."

  Now the unnamed thing in his eyes had turned to open incredulity. He held her arms, staring down at her. "What else?"

  She put her head down obstinately, burying it against his chest. "I want to stay with you," she said in a muffled voice. "But you can't. You're an Islander—I'm a Mainlander." "I know."

  "Then why this foolishness?"

  "I don't know."

  He turned her without speaking, and they stepped down from the promenade, went into the shadow of some storehouses that abutted on the quayside. The doors were open,

  breathing scents of spices and tar, new cordage, drying fish. Beyond them was a pleasant courtyard with boats piled upside down on one side, on the other a table, an umbrella, chairs, all cool in the afternoon shadow. From there they took a shallow staircase up into a maze of little streets full of the dim, mysterious blue light that fell from canopies of tinted glass between roofs. Passing a house with open shutters, they heard the drone of childish voices. They peered in: it was the nursery school—forty young Bakers, Chemists, Mechanics, fair skins and dark, each in a doll-like miniature of his clan costume, all earnestly reciting together while the shovel-hatted Teacher stood listening at the greenboard. Cool, neutral light came from the louvered skylights; the small faces were clear and innocent, here a tiny Cook in his apron, there two Carters sitting together, identical in their blue smocks, there a pale Doctor, and beside him Mary saw with a pang, a little Weaver in white. The familiar features were childishly blunted and small, the ivory skin impossibly pure, the bright eyes wide. "Look—that one," she whispered, pointing.

  He peered in. "She looks like you. More like you than the others. You're different from all the rest, Mary—that's why I like you." He looked down at her with a puzzled expression; his arms tightened around her. "I've never felt quite this way about a girl before; what are you doing to me?" he said.

  She turned to him, embracing him, letting her body go soft and compliant against his. "Loving you, darling," she said, smiling up, her eyes half-closed.

  He kissed her fiercely, then pushed her away, looking almost frightened. "See here, Mary," he said abruptly, "we've got to understand something."

  "Yes?" she said faintly, clinging to him.

  "I'm going to be back in Porto tomorrow morning," he said.

  "Tomorrow!" she said. "I thought—"

  "My work was done this morning. It was a simple adjustment of the sonics. You'll catch plenty of fish from now on . . . There's nothing more for me to do here."

  She was stunned; she could not believe it. Surely there would be at least another night . . . that was little enough to ask.

  "Can't you stay?" she said.

  "You know I can't." His voice was rough and strained. "I go where they tell me, come when they say come."

  She tried to hold back the time, but it slipped away, ran through her fingers. The sky darkened slowly from cerulean to Prussian blue, the stars came out and the cool night wind stirred over the jetty.

  Below her, in a cluster of lights, they were making the boat ready. Orchestrinos were playing up the hillside, and there was a little crowd of men and women gathering to say good-bye. There was laughter, joking, voices raised good-naturedly in the evening stillness.

  Klef, pale in the lights, came up the stairs to where she stood, his head tilted as he came, his grave eyes holding hers.

  "I'm not going to cry," she said.

  His hands took her arms, gripping her half in tenderness, half impatiently. "Mary, you know this is wrong. Get over it. Find yourself other men—be happy."

  "Yes, I'll be happy," she said.

  He stared down at her in uncertainty, then bent his head and kissed her. She held herself passive in his arms, not responding or resisting. After a moment he let her go and stepped back. "Good-bye, Mary."

  "Good-bye, Klef."

  He turned, went quickly down the steps. The laughing voices surrounded him as he went toward the boat; after a moment she heard his voice, too, lifted in cheerful farewells.

  In the morning she awoke knowing that he was gone. A frightening knowledge of loss seized her, and she sat up with her heart leaping.

  Down the high dormitory, smelling faintly of cinnamon oil and fresh linens, the sisters were beginning to rustle sleepily out of their cubicles, murmuring and yawning. The familiar hiss of the showers began at the far end of the room. The white-curtained windows were open, and from her bed Mary could see the cream and terra-cotta roofs spread out in a lazy descent. The air was cool and still and mysteriously pure: it was the best moment of the day.

  She rose, washed herself and dressed mechanically. "What is it, dear?" asked Mia, bending toward her anxiously.

  "Nothing. Klef is gone."

  "Well, there'll be others." Mia smiled and patted her hand, and went away. There was a closeness between them, they were almost of an age, and yet even Mia could not be comfortable long i
n Mary's company.

  Mary sat with the others at table, silent in the steaming fragrances of coffee and new bread, the waves of cheerful talk that flowed around her. Carrying her loom, she went down with the rest into the court and sat in her usual place. The work began.

  Time stretched away wearily into the future. How many mornings in her life would she sit here, where she sat now, beginning to weave as she did now? How could she endure it? How had she ever endured it? She put her fingers on the controls of the loom, but the effort to move them appalled her. A tear dropped bright on the keyboard.

  Mia leaned over toward her. "Is there anything the matter? Don't you feel well?"

  Her fists clenched uselessly. "I can't—I can't—" was all she could utter. Hot tears were running down her face; her jaw was shaking. She bowed her head over the loom.

  Iliria was neither wearisomely flat, nor cone-shaped nor pyramidal in its construction, like some of the northern islands, but was charmingly hollowed, like a cradle. The old cobblestoned streets rose and fell; there were stairways, balconies, arcades; never a vista, always a new prospect. The buildings were pleasingly various, some domed and spired, others sprawling. Cream was the dominant color, with accents of cool light blue, yellow, and rose. For more than three hundred years the island had been afloat, just as it now was: the same plazas with their fountains, the same shuttered windows, the same rooftops.

  During the last century, some colonies had been creeping back onto the land as the contamination diminished; but every Ilirian knew that only island life was perfect. Above, the unchanging streets and buildings served each generation as the last; down below, the storage chambers, engine rooms, seines, preserving rooms, conveniently out of sight and hearing, went on functioning as they always had. Unsinkable, sheathed in ceramic above and below, the island would go on floating just as it now was, forever.

  It was strange to Mary to see the familiar streets so empty. The morning light lay softly along the walls; in corners, blue shadow gathered. Behind every door and window there was a subdued hum of activity; the clans were at their work. All the way to the church circle, she passed no one but a Messenger and two Carters with their loads: all three looked at her curiously until she was out of sight.

  Climbing the Hill of Carpenters, she saw the gray dome of the church rising against the sky—a smooth, unrelieved ovoid, with a crescent of morning light upon it. Overhead, a flock of gulls hung in the air, wings spread, rising and dipping. They were gray against the light.

  She paused on the porch step to look down. From this height she could see the quays and the breakwater, and the sun on the brightwork of the moored launches; and then the long rolling back of the sea, full of whitecaps in the freshening breeze; and beyond that, the dark smudge of the land, and the clutter of brown windowed stone that was Porto. She stood looking at it for a moment, dry-eyed, then went into the shadowed doorway.

  Clabert the Priest rose up from his little desk and came toward her with ink-stained fingers, his skirt flapping around his ankles. "Good morning, cousin, have you a trouble?"

  "I'm in love with a man who has gone away."

  He stared at her in perplexity for a moment, then darted down the corridor to the left. "This way, cousin." She followed him past the great doors of the central harmonion.

  He opened a smaller door, curved like the end of an egg, and motioned her in.

  She stepped inside; the room was gray, egg-shaped, and the light came uniformly from the smooth ceramic walls. "Twenty minutes," said Clabert, and withdrew his head. The door shut, joining indistinguishably with the wall around it.

  Mary found herself standing on the faintly sloping floor, with the smooth single curve of the wall surrounding her. After a moment she could no longer tell how far away the big end of the ovicle was; the room seemed first quite small, only a few yards from one end to the other; then it was gigantic, bigger than the sky. The floor shifted uncertainly under her feet, and after another moment she sat down on the cool hollow slope.

  The silence grew and deepened. She had no feeling of confinement; the air was fresh and in constant slight movement. She felt faintly and agreeably dizzy, and put her arms behind her to steady herself. Her vision began to blur; the featureless gray curve gave her no focus for her eyes. Another moment passed, and she became aware that the muffled silence was really a continual slow hush of sound, coming from all points at once, like the distant murmuring of the sea. She held her breath to listen, and at once, like dozens of wings flicking away in turn, the sound stopped. Now, listening intently, she could hear a still fainter sound, a soft, rapid patterning that stopped and came again, stopped and came again . . . and listening, she realized that it was the multiple echo of her own heartbeat. She breathed again, and the slow hush flooded back.

  The wall approached, receded . . . gradually it became neither close nor far away; it hung gigantically and mistily just out of reach. The movement of air imperceptibly slowed. Lying dazed and unthinking, she grew intensely aware of her own existence, the meaty solidness of her flesh, the incessant pumping of blood, the sigh of breath, the heaviness and pressure, the pleasant beading of perspiration on her skin. She was whole and complete, all the way from fingers to toes. She was uniquely herself; somehow she had forgotten how important that was . . .

  "Feeling better?" asked Clabert, as he helped her out of the chamber.

  "Yes . . ." She was dazed and languid; walking was an extraordinary effort.

  "Come back if you have these confusions again," Clabert called after her, standing in the porch doorway.

  Without replying, she went down the slope in the brilliant sunshine. Her head was light, her feet were amusingly slow to obey her. In a moment she was running to catch up with herself, down the steep cobbled street in a stumbling rush, with faces popping out of shutters behind her, and fetched up laughing and gasping with her arms around a light column at the bottom.

  A stout Carter in blue was grinning at her out of his tanned face. "What's the joke, woman?"

  "Nothing," she stammered. "I've just been to church . . .

  "Ah," he said, with a finger beside his nose, and went on.

  She found herself taking the way downward to the quays. The sunlit streets were empty; no one was in the pools. She stripped and plunged in, gasping at the pleasure of the cool fresh water on her body. And even when two Baker boys, an older one and a younger, came by and leaned over the wall shouting, "Pretty! Pretty!" she felt no confusion, but smiled up at them and went on swimming.

  Afterward, she dressed and strolled, wet as she was, along the sea-wall promenade. Giddily she began to sing as she walked, "Open your arms to me, sweetheart, for when the sun shines it's pleasant to be in love . . ." The orchestrinos had been playing that, that night when—

  She felt suddenly ill, and stopped with her hand at her forehead.

  What was wrong with her? Her mind seemed to topple, shake itself from one pattern into another. She swung her head up, looking with sharp anxiety for the brown tangle of buildings on the mainland.

  At first it was not there, and then she saw it, tiny, almost lost on the horizon. The island was drifting, moving away, leaving the mainland behind.

  She sat down abruptly; her legs lost their strength. She put her face in her arms and wept: "Klef! Oh, Klef!"

  This love that had come to her was not the easy, pleasant thing the orchestrinos sang of; it was a kind of madness. She accepted that, and knew herself to be mad, yet could not change. Waking and sleeping, she could think only of Klef.

  Her grief had exhausted itself; her eyes were dry. She could see herself now as the others saw her—as something strange, unpleasant, ill-fitting. What right had she to spoil their pleasure?

  She could go back to church, and spend another dazed time in the ovicle. "If you have these confusions again," the Priest had said. She could go every morning, if need be, and again every afternoon. She had seen one who needed to do as much, silly Marget Tailor who always nodded and smi
led, drooling a little, no matter what was said to her, and who seemed to have a blankness behind the glow of happiness in her eyes. That was years ago; she remembered the sisters always complained of the wet spots Marget left on her work. Something must have happened to her; others cut and stitched for the Weavers now.

  Or she could hug her pain to herself, scourge them with it, make them do something . . . She had a vision of herself running barefoot and ragged through the streets, with people in their doorways shouting, "Crazy Mary! Crazy Mary!" If she made them notice her, made them bring Klef back...

  She stopped eating except when the other sisters urged her, and grew thinner day by day. Her cheeks and eyes were hollow. All day she sat in the courtyard, not weaving, until at length the other women's voices grew melancholy and seldom. The weaving suffered; there was no joy in the clan house. Many times Vivana and the others reasoned with her, but she could only give the same answers over again, and at last she stopped replying at all.

  "But what do you want?" the women asked her, with a note of exasperation in their voices.

  What did she want? She wanted Klef to be beside her every night when she went to sleep, and when she wakened in the morning. She wanted his arms about her, his flesh joined to hers, his voice murmuring in her ear. Other men? It was not the same thing. But they could not understand.

  "But why do you want me to make myself pretty?" Mary asked with dull curiosity.

  Mia bent over her with a tube of cosmetic, touching the pale lips with crimson. "Never mind, something nice. Here, let me smooth your eyebrows. Tut, how thin you've got! Never mind, you'll look very well. Put on your fresh robe, there's a dear."

  "I don't know what difference it makes." But Mary stood up wearily, took off her dress, stood thin and pale in the light. She put the new robe over her head, shrugged her arms into it.

  "Is that all right?" she asked.

  "Dear Mary," said Mia, with tears of sympathy in her eyes. "Sweet, no, let me smooth your hair. Stand straighter, can't you, how will any man—"

  "Man?" said Mary. A little color came and went in her cheeks. "Klef!"