Beta

by Rachel Cohn

  “Yes, Governor,” I say.

  He has not instructed me to call him “Father.”

  MOTHER BRUSHES MY HAIR UNTIL IT SHINES. “This is what I miss,” she sighs. “Astrid has beautiful golden hair just like yours.”

  I sit at the vanity in Astrid’s room while Mother stands behind me, observing me in the mirror. She is so content. It seems like a good time to ask the important questions about the birds and the bees.

  Not those birds and bees. I know about those.

  “Mother,” I say. “Are there clones on other island resorts?”

  She pats the top of my head affectionately. “No, pet. We’re more special here. Other island resorts use native human populations for workers, but that’s not possible here. Our island was formed relatively recently, so it has no native people. Except us, of course!” She winks at me in the mirror. “And it’s extremely costly to get passage here, so importing workers is not an option. Other, less special places use human workers. Only Demesne can have clone workers. Rules and laws, boring boring boring!”

  “Is there a boat that brings people here from the Mainland?”

  Mother smiles at me in the mirror. “At last, a daughter who doesn’t treat me like a major drag.” She laughs. “Perhaps you don’t know, but real teenagers have a way of treating their parents like they wish the creatures didn’t exist. I rather like having one who doesn’t ignore me and wants to ask me questions!” She pauses, struggling to remember my question. “Yes, Elysia! Residents come here by private plane, obviously, but Demesne’s treaty with the Mainland requires that a boat go back and forth from the Mainland, so Demesne doesn’t seem so exclusive and off-limits to nonresidents.” Mother teasingly places her hand over her mouth, as if to confide in me, and speaks in a lower voice. “Even though it is!”

  “So the boat is very expensive?”

  “No, dear. The boat is practically free. But the visas required for entry here cost quite a nifty sum. Visitors who come here need to get visas in order to stay at Haven, since we don’t have real hotels. We don’t want tourists running amok here.”

  “Then how come people can’t also fly to Demesne like the residents who have houses here?”

  “They can fly here. So long as they own a piece of the landing strip, which is required in order to own property here.”

  “Then people who want to come here buy landing-strip rights,” I say.

  Mother scoffs. “Sure, if you have that billion Uni-dollars to spare! My dear, the landing strip rights cost more than all the homes on this island combined.”

  “So that’s why workers aren’t ferried or flown in?”

  “My goodness, Betas are question-y. It’s almost cute, until it goes on too long and costs me my beauty sleep.” She pauses, as if gathering her energy, then explains. “Clones are very eco, you know.” She squeezes my arm affectionately. “You should be very proud to be one. Recycling dead people into clones is the ultimate scientific achievement. Your human First’s death was not wasted, and you are totally biodegradable after your term of service.”

  I do not ask how long my term of service will be. I’m not ready to address my own biodegradability—when I age too much, as happens to clones once their looks and abilities fade after their decade of service. I’ve only just started living. To put an end date on my term of service when I’m still under warranty seems premature.

  “I understand that I am fortunate to be here and I have gratitude to you for welcoming me, Mother,” I say.

  She gently rubs the backs of my shoulders. “My sweet girl. If you really want to know, we tried the human experiment, years ago. We brought in a real nanny for the children, who slept in what’s your room now. We thought it would give the children some true cachet—a real, live Mary Poppins! What a disaster she turned out to be. The exquisite atmosphere here made her feel so much better than she should have. Instead of being a disciplinarian and babysitter, she turned completely relaxed and happy. She let the children run wild while she sunbathed! Disgraceful, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  From behind me, Mother runs her fingers through my long hair, then she divides it into three sections and braids it. I smile at her in the mirror’s reflection. Mother says, “I used to braid Astrid’s hair before she went to bed. It was the one thing she’d let me do for her, independent little minx. She said she slept better when her hair wasn’t tangling up on her pillow.”

  “The braids feel nice, Mother. Thank you.”

  She kisses the top of my head. “You’re welcome. Now, there’s something you could do for me.”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “Sometimes when Liesel sleeps, she has nightmares. If you hear her, will you go to her until she falls back asleep? I take sleep aids at night and often don’t hear her. Astrid used to do it, but now Ivan does, and he just makes Liesel more anxious. Boys and their bedtime war games. He has no sense for how to soothe a scared child. You know how young men are.”

  I don’t know. Other than that they say, “Whoa.”

  “I will, Mother,” I say.

  “Good girl. Good night.”

  She walks toward the exit of my bedroom, pausing to stand in the doorway for a last moment to observe me. My feed recognizes her face reflecting human pride and affection as her gaze settles on me.

  “Mother?” I ask her.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “When Astrid got sick, what happened to her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she go to the infirmary?”

  Mother laughs softly. “No, of course not. We took care of her here when she got sick, as we would with all our children. Mercifully, none have ever been ill enough to require hospital care.”

  “So if I got sick, I would not go to the infirmary?”

  Mother turns out the light in my bedroom. “Go to sleep, Elysia. You are not capable of being sick. You’re just that perfect.”

  I HEAR LIESEL’S SCREAM IN THE MIDDLE OF the night. I jump out of bed and run to her room, as Mother requested. I turn on the light in her room and see that it is a shrine to the old-time princess vogue, with sparkling pink walls, a French vanity with drawers, and a four-poster canopy bed surrounded in pink tulle.

  I sit down on her bed. Liesel throws herself against me, burrowing her face against my chest. I stroke her hair, experiencing an overwhelming need to comfort this distressed child. Just like a real sister, I want to protect her from harm, real or imagined. My nightgown dampens from her tears.

  “What happened?” I ask Liesel.

  “I dreamed about the bad guys again. They were standing on the ground outside my bedroom, shooting bullets into my window. Just like in Ivan’s game.”

  “That’s terrible. That would never happen here.”

  “It could. The bad guys are everywhere.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Ivan. He said the protest people are getting stronger and they’re going to start coming after us, not just after Daddy.”

  “Who are the protest people?” I scan my internal database but find no information about such a sect.

  “Don’t you know anything, Elysia? The ones who are against cloning.”

  I kiss the top of Liesel’s head, the way Mother did mine. I set my tone to reassuring and tell Liesel, “How could anyone be against cloning? People would protest…me? I don’t think that’s possible.”

  She looks into my face and for a moment her stress appears to lessen. But my comforting face is apparently not enough. “But how do you know?” Liesel persists.

  “Know what?”

  “That no one will try to hurt me.”

  I datacheck this question, which provides the definitive answer. “Bad things don’t happen on Demesne,” I promise Liesel.

  Liesel whispers, “Are there bad clones out there?”

  “What do you mean?” I whisper back.

  “Defective ones. Clones that don’t work.”

  I lift her bedroom window
so that a stream of fresh Demesne air might soothe her. “I think you already know that this island is too perfect to allow anything defective to exist here.”

  But if there are defective clones, perhaps that is why they have an infirmary at Dr. Lusardi’s compound, so they can be tucked safely away from humans?

  I sit back down next to Liesel and pull her close. I softly rub her chin to offer solace.

  She burrows her head into my chest again, at last comforted. “You work good,” Liesel murmurs.

  Awake, she is pacified, but Liesel remains convinced that “someone bad” is coming to get her in her sleep. She begs, “Can I sleep with you, in Astrid’s bed? Astrid used to bring me to sleep with her when I was scared from nightmares. My bed’s too small for two people.”

  We return to Astrid’s room. I tuck Liesel into Astrid’s bed, then slip in alongside her. Liesel places her hand on my waist for reassurance and quickly drifts back to sleep, exhausted from the drama she created for herself.

  I cannot fall back to sleep so easily. Since I am filling in for Astrid, I figure it’s my job to get to know her better. I look at a holophoto on her nightstand, picturing Astrid and Liesel, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Liesel is smiling and Astrid is not. Astrid has light-blond shoulder-length hair like mine, and baby-blue eyes like Mother’s. Liesel looks carefree and happy, while Astrid looks tired and distracted.

  I open the drawer on Astrid’s nightstand. In it there are pieces of strawberry-flavored hard candy. I wonder if I will like strawberry candy as much as I like strawberry shakes. I reach for a piece of the candy but its wrapper is slightly undone, leaving the candy stuck to the bottom of the drawer. I pull at it, but what comes up is not just the candy, but a board that lines the drawer bottom. As the board comes up along with the candy stuck to it, I see there’s a drawer hidden beneath. The drawer contains notebooks filled with Astrid’s university entrance-exam practice tests. I pick up one of the notebooks and read through Astrid’s answers. Her scores at the beginning of the book are weak, but by the last one, she’s achieved near-perfect results. Even her handwriting has improved by the end. No wonder Mother is so proud of her. Astrid clearly worked very, very hard to attain the scores she’d need to gain admittance to the best universities.

  I place the notebook back in the drawer on top of the other items stored there. There’s a silver dagger with a red ribbon wrapped around it, and a note attached: Merry Christmas, Astrid. Love, Dad. The rest of Astrid’s drawer is filled with a dictionary and girl products—the ones for their cycle. I take out the dictionary to read later but leave the dagger and the girl products. Replicants are like humans biologically in every way except that we cannot replicate ourselves. I do not need girl products because I have no cycle. I wouldn’t know what to do with a dagger. But I can always learn new words.

  It occurs to me that there are only holophotos in Astrid’s room of herself and Liesel but no other family members. In fact, in comparison to Liesel’s room, which is decorated very pink and frilly, Astrid’s has minimal furnishings and decoration. It’s almost sterile. The only “art” hanging on her wall is a calendar, on which she X’d the days counting down to her departure.

  I am still awake in the morning when Xanthe comes into Astrid’s room. I close Astrid’s heavily marked-up dictionary that kept me engaged through the night and place it on the bed. I am surprised to have found so many words that appear on the printed page that I cannot find by scanning my database’s dictionary.

  I have just come across a word that Astrid highlighted.

  Insurrection [in-suh-REK-shuhn]: An act or instance of rising in revolt, rebellion, or resistance against civil authority or an established government.

  Insurrection strikes me as a threatening and unpleasant word, but next to this dictionary entry, Astrid scribbled, Yes!

  “There she is,” Xanthe says, looking at Liesel slumbering peacefully by my side. “It’s time to get her up and ready for school.”

  “There’s a school here?” I ask. “Will I go to it?”

  “If I had a sense of humor, I’d think you were funny,” Xanthe says.

  I guess this means I will not be going to school here. “Where is the school?” I ask.

  “Since there aren’t enough year-round residents on Demesne to support a school, the children who live here have tutors. The tutors work with students at Haven. They have regular school hours, as on the Mainland.”

  “Are the tutors clones?” I ask.

  “Of course. No human could be trusted to educate them thoroughly. But there are no other children her age on the island for her to socialize with and she gets lonely, so you will be her playmate after tutoring time.”

  Just months ago, my First was probably a student. Perhaps she lived somewhere on the Mainland. I wonder if she was a good student. As hard-working as Astrid, as eager to go off to university?

  “Do you wish for an education?” I ask Xanthe.

  She looks at me as if I had suddenly sprouted three heads, or suddenly announced my sincere and not just mimicked love for macaroni and cheese. “What could I possibly do with an education?” Xanthe asks.

  “Learn stuff? Change and grow better?” I surmise. “There is just so much to learn here and it’s just…” I start to say amazing but am cut short by Xanthe’s eyes narrowing suspiciously at me. I don’t have much education, but I know enough to know I should not desire to experience anything amazing; I should reflect that experience for humans, but not actually feel or desire it for myself. “It’s just…good to have information,” I conclude.

  Xanthe pronounces, “I do not wish for anything and I do not need to be better than I already am. I do not wish because I am made to serve, and all the information I need, I already have. As do you.” She goes to Astrid’s closet, where some of Liesel’s clothes are hanging, pulls out pieces of clothing, and assembles Liesel’s outfit for the day on a chair.

  I am about to nudge Liesel’s arm to gently wake her. I don’t want her to miss the privilege of her schooling. But Xanthe stops me from nudging Liesel. She leans in close to whisper to me.

  “Do you wish?” she asks.

  My heart suddenly beats faster, as if I am being threatened, when I know I am only being reassured about my duties. “I do not wish,” I state. “I serve.”

  “Correct,” says Xanthe, and nudges Liesel awake.

  PER THE GOVERNOR’S ORDERS, IVAN AND I BEGIN our workout regimen at eight in the morning. We do stretches and calisthenics on the patio, take a jog on a flat path, and end our regimen with a series of heart-racing, vigorous stair sprints up the cliff that goes from the beach to the Governor’s House.

  We are halfway up the cliff stairs for our fifth jaunt when Ivan stops us to survey the landscape below us. “Did you explore much on Demesne, before you came here?” he asks me between panted breaths.

  Again I am reminded of the miracle of this new moment. Before I came here, I was confined to closed spaces—Dr. Lusardi’s compound, the boutique—and could not suck in this sweet Demesne air or stare from the top of a cliff down to a magnificent vista of violet water, white sandy beach, palm trees, and divine perfection. And this is only what I can see right now. Who knows how much more spectacular the scenery will become as I explore this island more?

  I don’t answer Ivan’s question. There’s too much to say. I want to see everything!

  “Of course you didn’t. You probably weren’t allowed. I’m sorry,” Ivan says, unnecessarily. He reaches inside a deep hole in the cliff’s stone, within arm’s distance of the cliff stairs, and pulls out a magnification lens stored there. He hands it to me. “Check it out. Pretty amazing view, huh?”

  I look through the lens, inspecting the scenery, gulping in the honeysuckle-flavored air. The light blue of the sky is tinged with a rosy-orange haze, evidence of where the sun meets Demesne’s atmosphere. Surrounded by Io’s rippled violet waters, I see a landscape filled with villas nestled under a rainbow spectrum of trees. Farther o
ut is the mountain range from which Mount Orion, the highest of all, lords it over the island, billowing out volcanic smoke. Below the volcanic mountain is a forest so dense it appears to be a tangled jungle. In that jungle, under the smoky mountaintop, was Dr. Lusardi’s compound where I was made, but it is not visible through the binoculars.

  I focus the lens on a sandy beach spot at Haven in the distance. I watch as a heavyset woman steps into the water, dips under for a brief soak, then returns to her beach perch. She looks a size thinner and ten years younger as a result of that single dip, as if the sea offered a makeover boost from which she emerged as her more radiant self. Back on the sand, she straddles her male partner, who sets aside his reading material. He wraps his legs around her. They kiss slowly, longingly, as if for the first time, even though their physical familiarity with each other indicates they are longtime companions.

  Hovering in the background, the club’s servants carry drinks and plates of food to nearby sunbathers.

  “Good view of the good life, huh?” Ivan asks me. I know he means the good life intended for humans, but I nod in agreement anyway. For me too, I think.

  After our tenth sprint up and down the stairs, Ivan stops us for another rest at the bottom of the stairs, near the shoreline.

  “I can’t believe you can keep up with me,” he says.

  I can more than keep up with him. In fact, I easily could whip his time and speed, but Mother instructed me to let Ivan win. “His confidence needs to be bolstered before his military basic training,” she said. “Be a nice girl, darling Elysia. Let Ivan have his way.”

  A teen girl runs down the cliff stairs and approaches us.

  “Ivan! Hi!” She is a pert, freckle-faced redhead wearing a tennis costume. “They told me I could find you down here. Want to play doubles with me and Dementia?”