CLONE SISTER
Pamela Sargent
Pamela Sargent has firmly established herself as one of the foremost writer/editors of her generation. Her well-known anthologies include Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, The New Women of Wonder—recently reissued in an omnibus volume as Women of Wonder: The Classic Years—and l995's follow-up volume Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years. Her other anthologies include Bio-Futures, Nebula Awards 29, and, with Ian Watson, Afterlives. Her critically acclaimed novels include Cloned Lives (one of the first SF novels to deal with clones), The Sudden Star, The Golden Space, Watchstar, Earthseed, The Alien Upstairs, Eye of the Comet, Homeminds, The Shore of Women, Venus of Dreams, and Venus of Shadows. Her short fiction has been collected in Starshadows and The Best of Pamela Sargent. She won a Nebula Award in 1993 for her story, "Danny Goes to Mars." Her most recent books are a critically acclaimed historical novel about Genghis Khan, Ruler of the Sky, and, as editor, the anthology Nebula Awards 30. She lives in New York.
Here she gives a novel and poignant SF twist to that old saying that insists that before you can love others, you must first love yourself . . .
After they made love, Jim Swenson leaned back on his elbóws and looked at Moira Buono. She was a slender dark-haired girl with olive skin and large black eyes. Her nose was a bit too large for her delicate face. As she lay at his side, her small breasts seemed flattened almost to nonexistence. Her abdomen was a concavity between two sharp hipbones. Her legs contrasted with the slenderness of her torso; they were short and utilitarian, well-muscled appendages that carried her around efficiently and without much strain. She was beautiful.
She watched him with dark eyes. Her black hair lay carelessly around her head in the green grass and her face bore a calm and peaceful smile. She reached out for his hand and drew it to her belly. In the distance he could hear the high-pitched laugh of Ilyasah Ahmal and the deeper rumblings of Walt Merton. He traced the outline of shadows on her body, shadows created by the summer sun's rays and the leafy branches of the trees overhead. A summer breeze stirred the branches, the shadows drifted and changed shape on Moira's body.
Jim took his hand away from her and got up. His penis felt cold and sticky. He pulled on his shorts and began to walk toward the clearing ahead. He knew Moira was watching him, probably puzzled, perhaps a little angry. He came to the clearing and walked toward the stone wall at its edge. The grass brushed against his feet, tickling his soles. Two grackles perched on the wall, cawing loudly at some sparrows darting overhead. As he approached, the two black birds lifted, cawed at him from above, and were gone.
Jim leaned against the wall and looked down at the automated highway two hundred feet below him. The cars fled along the road in orderly rows, punched into the automatic highway control. He watched them and thought of Moira. She had retreated from him again, hiding even at the moment he had entered her body. She had been an observer, looking on as he held her, sweating and moving to a lonely, sharp spurt of pleasure. She was an onlooker, smiling at him from a distance as he withdrew, her black eyes a shield between their minds.
They stood in a gray formlessness. "Moira," he said, and she looked at him, seeming to be perplexed, seeming to be impatient. She withdrew, and clouds of grayness began to cover her, binding her legs, then her face and shoulders.
His view of the highway was suddenly obstructed. "Are you trying to ruin today, too?" Moira's voice said. He pulled at the shirt she had draped over his head and put it on. She was sitting on the wall to his right. Her skin looked sallow next to her yellow shorts and shirt. She stared past him at the trees.
"I'm sorry," he said, "it's just a mood." He wanted to take her hand, touch her hair. Instead, he went back to leaning against the wall. He looked up at her face. Her eyes were pieces of onyx, sharp and cold. Her skin was drawn tightly across her cheekbones.
"I'm sorry, it's just a mood," she said. "How many moods do you have? Must be half a million by now. And they're always ones you have to apologize for."
Jim turned and saw Ilyasah coming toward them, black hair a cloud around her dark face. Jim forced himself to smile.
"You were right about this place," Ilyasah said. "Nice and quiet. Ever since they reclaimed that area up north, you can't go there without falling over bodies. Something wrong, Moira?"
"No," Moira muttered.
"Give us half an hour," Ilyasah went on, "and we'll get the food out."
Jim took the hint. "Sure," he said. Ilyasah left and disappeared among the trees. The black girl had still not shaken off the remnants of her rigid Muslim upbringing and wanted to be sure no one observed her with Walt. Moira had returned to her dormitory room with Jim one evening a little too soon. They had calmly excused themselves and gone to one of the lounges instead, but Ilyasah had been embarrassed for days afterward.
"I guess we'd better watch the path," he said to Moira. "I wouldn't want anyone else to embarrass your roommate." Moira shrugged and continued to sit on the wall.
He tried to fight the tightness in his stomach, the feeling of isolation that was once again wrapping itself around him. Talk to me, Moira, he thought, don't make me stand here guessing and worrying.
The dark eyes looked at him. "I'm leaving next week," she said quickly. "I'll probably come back in August, but my mother's fixing up her new studio and she needs some help." Her eyes challenged him to respond.
"Why?" he cried, suddenly realizing that he had shouted the word. "Why," he said more quietly, "didn't you tell me this before?"
"I didn't know before."
"Oh, you knew it before. She's been after you for a month about it, and you said she had enough help. Now all of a sudden you have to go home."
Moira hopped off the wall and paced in front of him. "I suppose," she said, "I have to go through a whole explanation."
"No," he said. Of course you do.
"All right," she went on. "I decided to go home a while ago. I would have told you before, but—"
"Why not? Why didn't you tell me before?"
Moira smiled suddenly. "You really don't understand, do you? If I had told you before, you would have gotten upset and tried to talk me out of it, or acted as though I did something terribly wrong. So I tell you now, so you don't have time to talk me out of it. I thought I was doing you a favor. But of course you're going to act the same way anyway."
"I want to be with you, is that so wrong?" Jim swallowed, worried that he had whined the words. "I don't like to be separated from you, that's all," he said in a lower tone.
"No, you'd rather be underfoot all the time," she said. "I can't even meet your brothers and sister. Every time I mention that I might like to talk to them, you evade the whole thing. Why?"
He was silent. He could feel sweat forming on his face and under his beard.
"I guess," she said, "you're jealous of your own family too."
He shrugged and tried to smile. "It isn't so bad," he said. "You'll be back in August, and we can—"
"No." She stopped pacing and stood in front of him, arms folded across her chest. "No, Jim. I don't know yet. I want to think about things. I don't want to make any promises now. I'll just have to see. Maybe that's hard on you, but . .
She sighed, then walked over to the trees. She stood there leaning against a trunk, her back to him.
"Moira."
No answer.
"Moira." She was gone again, having said what she had to say. He could stride over to her, grab her by the shoulders, shake the slender body while shouting at her, and she would look at him with empty eyes.
Do I love you, Moira? Do I even know you? He stared at the girl's back, stiff and unyielding under the soft yellow shirt. Am I too possessive, too demanding? Or is that just an excuse, a way to avoid telling me that you can't love a freak, that it would be as easy for you to love one of my cloned brothers if you knew them, that we're all interchangeable?
Moira, look at me, try to understand me, he wanted to shout. He walked over to her
, afraid to touch her, afraid to reach out and hold her. She was lost in her own world, and seemed unaware of his presence.
It was over. He was sure of that, in spite of Moira's comments about waiting until August.
She turned around and looked at him, black eyes expressionless. "Surer' you realize," she said, "that I'm getting a bit sick of the newsfax guys always asking for exclusive interviews on what it's like to be with a clone, that's one thing. The fact is, you're trying to use me to prove something to yourself to show everyone that you are an individual, that I only love you, that I'm completely yours. Well, I've got better things to do than build up your ego."
She still refused to speak. You could at least say what you mean, Jim thought as he looked at her back.
"Hey!" Jim turned and saw Walt Merton on the path leading into the woods. "Come on," Walt said, "we're getting the food out."
"Yeah," said Jim. "We'll be along in a minute."
Walt looked from Jim to Moira. "Sure," he said. His dark face showed concern. He looked doubtfully at Jim, then turned and went back down the path.
"Let's go," Moira said suddenly. "I'm starving." She smiled and took him by the hand. She was hiding behind a shield of cheerfulness now: Nothing's wrong, Jim; everything's settled. "Damn it, Moira," he said harshly, "can't you at least talk it over, or let me try to get through to you?"
She ignored his question. "Let's go," she said, still smiling, still holding his hand.
The rain had started as a summer shower, but was now coming down steadily, forming puddles on the lawn. Jim sat on the front porch of the large house he shared with his brothers and sister. The evening air was cooler and fresher than it had been for several days.
The large house stood at the end of a narrow road amid a grove of trees. Farther down the road, near one of the other houses, Jim could see a group of naked children dancing in the rain. On the lawn in front of him his brothers Al and Mike were throwing a football. Mike was always ready to use any excuse for fooling around and had dragged Al outside almost as soon as the rain began to fall.
Al's thick brown hair was plastered against the back of his neck and shoulders and Mike's mustache drooped on both sides of his mouth. "Whup," yelled Mike as he drew his arm back and made a forward pass. As the ball left Mike's arm, he slipped on the grass and landed on his buttocks, bare muddy feet poking high into the air. Al hooted and caught the ball. He began to run with it, laughing as Mike got up with mud on his shorts.
Jim watched his brothers. They had not insisted that he join them, understanding almost instinctively that he needed some solitude. He had gone to the university early that morning to drive Moira to the monorail that would take her home.
He had tried once again the night before to talk her out of leaving. "I can't believe your mother needs your help with all those others around," he had said. Moira's mother lived with five other women and Moira herself had been raised communally by the group with three other children. She saw her father only rarely. He had retreated to Nepal years before, emerging only occasionally to face a world that frightened him.
Moira shrugged. "She can still use some extra help," she said.
"Come on, Moira," he shouted. "Stop being so evasive and at least be honest about why you're really going."
She was silent as she packed her things. He had finally left her dormitory room, angrily telling her she could take the shuttle from the university to the monorail.
He had relented, of course, driving onto the automated highway, punching a button, leaning back in his seat as the highway took control of his car. He had reached for Moira, pulled her to him. She had watched him, her black eyes seemingly veiled. She unfastened her blue sari and draped it on the back of the seat. Then she unzipped his shorts, crawled onto him, holding his penis firmly with one hand. He was suddenly inside her, clutching her, gazing up at her face. Her eyes were closed.
"Moira," he had whispered to her. "Moira." He came quickly. She withdrew from him and moved back to her side of the seat.
Jim shivered in the air-conditioned car. He zipped up his shorts and looked over at the dark-haired girl. She was fastening her sari while staring out her window at the blurred scenery. What was it, Moira, a formality because you're leaving? a way of saying you still care? a way of saying, Goodbye, Jim, it's the last time? She gave him no answer, not even a clue. Once again she had remained unresponsive, giving him no sign that she had taken pleasure in the act.
He grabbed her, pulling her sari from her and pushed her against the seat. Her face was against the back of the seat, hidden from him. Her buttocks pointed up at his face. He crawled on top of her, pushing inside roughly. He pounded against her, waiting to hear her moans, waiting to see her abandon herself to him at last.
He continued to sit behind the wheel, still watching her. She had finished fastening her sari. She turned toward him, a tentative smile formed on her face. I've never reached you, Moira, he thought. At last he pulled her to him, and she lay there, head on his shoulder, her body stiff, her muscles tight. He was alone once again.
Al stumbled onto the porch, picked up his towel from the chair next to him, and massaged his head and shoulders vigorously. "Am I out of shape," Al said. "I'm going over to the gym tomorrow. I have to go to the library anyway, so I might as well work out."
"Yeah," Jim said.
"Want to come along? We can play some handball."
"No." Jim looked up at his brother. "I don't think so." He looked away, sensing what Al was probably thinking: Is it that girl, Jim? You've been sitting around for months, no interest in much else. You haven't even written any poetry for a while.
"Well, if you change your mind," Al said. He turned and went inside the house, towel draped over his shoulders.
"Catch," shouted Mike. He threw the football to Jim as he followed Al through the front door.
Jim tucked the football under his chair and continued to watch the rain. Again he felt separated from his brothers, seeing them as others might: identical people, clones of the same man, undifferentiated and interchangeable. Some had thought that they and their sister Kira would be identical in interests and achievements, as well as exactly like their father, Paul Swenson. But Paul, who had raised them and lived with them until his death in a monorail accident two years before, had different ideas. He had encouraged the five clones to develop individual interests. Al had become a student of astrophysics, Mike was studying physics, Ed was interested in both mathematics and music, and Kira, the only female clone, was a student of the biological sciences that had brought them into existence. Jim, however, had decided to study literature. Although he had been interested in the sciences and had studied them to some extent, it was to literature that he responded most deeply. He had often thought that he was the most emotional of the clones, that he had inherited somehow, or at least empathized with, a part of Paul's personality that had not been apparent to most of them who had known his father.
No, they had not been exactly like Paul. Instead, they were fragments of him. Paul Swenson had made his mark in astrophysics, his achievements culminating in the theoretical groundwork for a star drive that would take humanity beyond the solar system. But he had also studied other sciences, and was an accomplished violinist. In his later life Paul had written several books on the sciences, hoping to communicate what he had learned to others, and had even tried his hand at poetry. He had been honored and respected by the world until, at the very beginning of the century, he had allowed his friend Hidehiko Takamura to make an attempt to produce clones using Paul's genetic material. The scientific community throughout the world had placed a moratorium on cloning during the early 1980s, delaying any application of the procedure to human beings. The moratorium had been part of an automatic twenty-year delay period placed on the application of new scientific innovations. When that time had run out, Takamura had urged Paul Swenson to donate himself for duplication. Then Takamura and other biologists had taken nucleus materials from Paul and introduced th
em into eggs from which they had removed the nucleus, in order to insure that each potential child should inherit all of its genes from Paul Swenson.
The attempt had succeeded, and the world had been horrified. Legislation had been passed in the United States and Europe outlawing the application of cloning to human beings, and the artificial wombs used to nurture the clones before birth could no longer be used except to aid prematurely born infants. Newsfax sheets had made Paul Swenson out to be an egotist and megalomaniac, although in fact he had been gentle and self-effacing. The clones themselves were the subjects of stories claiming that they had telepathic powers or a communal mind. The stories had been discredited, but some people still believed them.
Jim sighed. His sister Kira, echoing Paul, often said that they all had a responsibility to use their talents as constructively as possible, to show the world that they were, after all, fellow human beings. Al, feeling the pressure of his father's reputation, did little but study. Ed had become shy, retreat-
ing from social contact. And I, Jim thought, have done almost nothing except sit around feeling sorry for myself But don't I have the right to, if I'm like everyone else? Why do I have to do anything noteworthy? Is it up to me to prove something about clones to everyone?
He had, after all, tried to make Moira understand, and he had failed completely at that. The thought of Moira suddenly saddened him. He had been numb for most of the day and now her absence hit him at last. I would have been with her now, he thought, we would have been running through the rain together. He felt purposeless, empty, and alone.
A car was coming along the narrow road, a light green Lear model. It stopped in front of the Swenson house, and he saw his sister and a short stocky figure get out. The two raced through the downpour to the porch. Kira was laughing as she shook the water from her hair. The short stocky person turned out to be Hidehiko Takamura.
Jim wanted to disappear, but he sat and nodded to Dr. Takamura.
"What a downpour!" Kira said. "Can I get you something—a beer maybe?"
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