Death of a Clone

by Alex Thomson

  LILY’S BURIAL TAKES place the following cycle. Two of the Overseers are there—Mr Lee and Mr Reynolds—and around ten assorted Ays, Bees and Jays. The rest are on shift, I guess. Lily is dressed in a plain tunic, and I cleaned her and washed her hair, so she looks brand new, like a virgin Ell fresh from the vats. Two Ays are carrying her on a white sheet—one of them could do it alone comfortably, but it would just look a bit odd.

  In our small group, Mr Lee and I in the lead, we troop off towards the burial site. It feels like we’re marching in a dignified silence, though of course any number of the group behind me could be patched in to each other, joking or muttering. After about one hundred metres, we come to the hole in the ground, marked with a metal pole. The Jays had gouged it out earlier, with some heavy-duty drills, and a mound of ore is lying to one side.

  Without much ceremony, the two Ays lower Lily’s body into the hole, still laid out on the sheet. Then they take shovels from their brother Alistair, and the three of them start to fill in the hole. I have to look away as a rock lands smack into my sister’s face. It’s not the most sensitively handled burial, compared with the ones you read about in books, but they mean well.

  Soon Lily is gone, and that is that. There isn’t really anything to say, and in an unspoken consensus, everyone starts to turn around at the same time, to return to the base. As I turn, I happen to glance at one of the Jays, right on my shoulder, and to my surprise I see tears filling his bloodshot eyes, and an expression of such grief that I’ve never seen on an Jay before—or on anyone, for that matter. We lock gazes for a moment, staring right into each other’s visors, then he suddenly wrenches away, and disappears into a group with the three other Jays.

  “Hey,” I say, and start off after him, but the Jays mingle together as they make their way to the base, and soon I have no idea which one it was. They set a fast pace, and I hurry after them, leaving behind the others. I get through the airlock with them, but as I remove my suit, Judas approaches me and engages me in a stilted conversation of such insincerity about Lily, and how now she’ll always be a part of Hell, that I nearly tell him to stop talking and get out my way. But it doesn’t seem to be quite the thing to do, so I nod and thank him for his words. By the time he’s finished, all the other Jays have disappeared. I’m tempted to confront him, to find out why he was blocking me from talking to one of his brothers. But that would just sound paranoid and petty, so I keep schtum.

  I LIE AWAKE at dusk, failing to sleep. I try to remember Avery’s burial and whether it was any different to this, but all I come up with is a foggy half-picture. I can see myself—or was it Lily?—standing at the back of a huddle, much like the one today for Lily’s burial, while the Ays filled in their brother’s grave. I remember noticing they had shaved off his ridiculous sideburns, and having to stifle a laugh. Did I feel any sadness at his death? I’ve got no special attachment to Avery or any of the Ays, but there’s still a loyalty there, a bond with a fellow resident of Mizushima-00109 that is stronger than any mild personal indifference. Still, I can’t imagine that I would have wept for him, the way that Jay did earlier.

  I jump up, drag my cot back and look again through the gloom at the scratches. I count up the tallies of scratches again—5, 2, 2, 6. If there’s a message there, I can’t fathom it. My head falls back on the pillow and I softly repeat the numbers to myself, waiting for sleep to come.

  5

  PAWNS

  I FIND JEREMY in the Leisure cabin with the chessboard laid out, practising his openings. He is the current Holder of the Board, or whatever stupid title they give themselves.

  “Jeremy,” I say, “I’d like to ask you a favour.”

  “You may ask.”

  “I would like—and don’t freak out—to borrow your chess pieces.”

  He frowns. “Would you like to challenge me? That’s the only legitimate way to take ownership of the pieces.”

  He delivers this completely deadpan, so I know he’s probably going to relent, unless he’s in a really perverse mood.

  “Come on, Jeremy. You’d destroy me. I’m just asking for a favour. Been a rough few cycles, cut me some slack?”

  “Hmm. What are you going to do with them?”

  “Just an experiment.”

  He looks dubious, no doubt contemplating the horror of being the first board-holder to lose any pieces since Rookgate, many cycles ago.

  “Look, you can watch if you like. I just need to go next door. One hour, tops.”

  Jeremy shrugs, and carefully, piece by piece, clears the board, then piece by piece puts them into the upturned board and snaps it shut.

  “Show me,” he says.

  The two of us walk out of Leisure and into the Community cabin. Two Bees—Brenda and Beatrice—are opening some vacuum-packed food pouches and preparing a meal. I lead Jeremy over to a table by the Rota.

  “So this,” I say, gesturing at the table, “is Hell.”

  He leans down on it, arms outstretched, like a general surveying a map. “In what way?”

  “In a representative way,” I say. “It’s a shrunk-down icon of the asteroid. All right with you?”

  He sits down on a stool next to the table. “Go on.”

  I go to the shelves on the wall and take a plate. “Here’s the base.” I put it down in the middle of the table. Next, I go to the shelves and grab three bowls. “East, North and South dig sites. Should be enough for this.” They go into the three corners of the table.

  “So… can you guess what I want your chessmen for?”

  “You want my chessmen to beicons… of all of us here. The little people on your little map. But …”

  “But?”

  “I don’t see why you can’t just use some spoons.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t be such a sourpuss, Jeremy! The chessmen would be perfect! I’ll even let you choose which piece you want to be.”

  He puffs out his cheeks. “Seriously? You’d let me choose which chess piece is going to represent me on your little map? You’d really do that for me? Earth!”

  The Jays like to be sarcastic, but when there are no other Jays around to enjoy it, it falls flat.

  “I will do you that honour, Jeremy.”

  “Go on, then.” He hands over the board with a smirk. “My brothers and I can be the black pawns.”

  “Six black pawns,” I say, counting them off, and they make a ching as I drop them into the plate. “And if I may, I’ll be the black bishop.”

  “Powerful pieces, bishops,” Jeremy says. “Only worth three points, but often they make the difference in the endgame.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Spare me the phony insights and cod psychology. They’re only chess pieces.”

  I pick up the second black bishop, and my nerve endings tingle. “And that one,” I say, “is Lily.”

  “Ok, I’m with you,” Jeremy says after a pause. “We’re going back in time, aren’t we? Trying to figure out where everyone was. Deducting the identity of your sister’s killer.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  I start to pick up the white pawns. “Ays? Bees?” Jeremy asks.

  The two Bees look our way and giggle. I decide to make them the white pawns, and the Ays can be a mixture of white bishops, knights and the remaining rook.

  “It makes sense to have Mr Lee the black king,” I say, “and the other two Overseers the white king and queen.”

  “Rather unoriginal,” says Jeremy. “But easy to remember, I suppose.”

  I put all the pieces on my plate, and riffle through them with my fingers. “Is that everything?”

  Jeremy slides down onto the chair next to me. “Well, I don’t mean to tell you your business, Lei,” he says, staring right into my eyes, and I suddenly realise he’s been trying to flirt with me; what is he playing at?

  “But, if I were running this investigation, I’d have some icons for the jeeps. So you can figure out when we all had access to transport. And who could have got around Hell quickly.”

 
“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Good one.” I point at some coloured cups on the shelf. “Perfect.”

  So three cups go next to the plate—yellow, red and green to represent Banana, Tomato and Cabbage.

  My map is now complete, my cast is ready, and all that is needed is to direct everyone into their correct positions. I go to the Rota archive, and pull out the sheets that started just a few cycles ago, from when I last saw Lily and she went off on shift. Piece by piece, the inhabitants of Hell are moved to where they should have been.

  I move everything forward a few hours, and extract Aaron, Barbara and Betty from the plate, placing them into the green cup, ready for their trip to the south bowl where Alistair and Jeremy are already working. Fast forward a few hours, and Lily returns from her shift in Banana, around the same time as Tomato is heading out to East 3. Banana is carrying Lily, Mr Lee, Beatrice, Joseph and Jupiter; while Tomato has myself, Juan and Jolly, who I had that weird conversation with, plus Brenda and Bess. Mr Reynolds and Andrew were waiting for us at the East 3 site, which leaves Mr Ortiz, Andy and Ashton, Judas and Becci at the base until Lily’s jeep returned.

  So Lily must have disappeared sometime between this point, and nine hours later, when I returned from East 3. I check the Rota, move the clock forward four hours, when the five on the southern team returned in Cabbage.

  From which I can suppose three explanations:

  Lily went off to East 5 with her killer in Tomato before the return of Cabbage.

  Lily went off to East 5 with her killer in Tomato or Cabbage, after the return of the southern expedition.

  Lily went to East 5 alone, for a rendezvous at East 5 with one of my group, who dashed the few hundred metres from East 3 to East 5.

  Jeremy was watching me carefully. “So?” he said. “What does it tell us?”

  “Well,” I say. “It tells me that pretty much anyone could, hypothetically, have had the opportunity to kill Lily. It tells me who were the last people to speak to Lily. It tells me that whoever did this had a lot of chutzpah and wasn’t afraid to take a big gamble.”

  Jeremy sniffs and picks up the black king, rolling it between his fingers. “You want my opinion?” he says. Typically, he doesn’t wait for my response. “No brother or sister is going to have done this thing. Why would one of us take the risk? You know you want to look at the Overseers. They think we’re animals, freaks—they wouldn’t think twice.”

  “I hear you, brother Jeremy. But you know what is bothering me?”

  “What’s bothering you, sister Leila?”

  I pick up a handful of black pawns. “Identical twins. Classic Christie. I mean, this whole thing screams impersonation, sneaky alibis—a couple of Bees or Jays working together to have an extra pair of hands to commit the murder.”

  “How refreshingly open of you to discuss your accusation with the person you’re accusing. Though I’m not clear what kind of trickery or impersonation you think took place.”

  “Neither am I, really. I’m just saying. If it was a couple of your brothers… I’m onto them.”

  “And not our dear brother Ays?”

  “I suppose they could have—Aaron or Ashton, perhaps, swapping their glasses and cap. But…”

  “But you don’t think they’ve got the imagination.”

  “Frankly, no. Which doesn’t preclude them committing a straightforward murder, with no trickery.”

  I stare at the table, my map of the asteroid, willing the clues to come out and reveal themselves. This was a great idea. A great idea. I totally feel like Miss Marple now (not that this was her way of solving a murder, this is more Sherlock Holmes’ methods, but I never liked him). But for a moment I feel like a detective and not an Ell who’s been bred to stack piles of ore.

  Another Jay enters the Community cabin, and wanders over to join his brother. He raises his eyebrows at my little diorama, turns to Jeremy, and says, “Challenge.”

  “Ah, Judas,” says Jeremy. “Somehow I knew it would be you next.” He looks at me. “May I?”

  I nod my assent and watch as he scoops all the pieces back into the folding board, leaving the plates and cups in position. The two Jays exit the cabin, and I follow them into the Leisure cabin. The Jays are the key to knowing what goes on in Hell, I’ve decided—the Overseerless, mischievous Jays—far more likely to help me than the Overseers or even the Ays and Bees.

  They take their seats and start to set up the board in a desultory fashion. I perch on a crate and twiddle my thumbs. Without any ceremony or warning, Jeremy moves a white pawn forward (the Holder of the Board is always white—of course he is). Judas studies the board with furious animation.

  “Listen,” I say, “was there anything going on between Lily and one of your brothers?”

  “Why do you ask?” Jeremy says. Judas is studying the board, but I can feel the sudden tension in the cabin.

  “Just a hunch,” I say. “It’s not that unlikely. They’d only be obeying their programming.”

  Judas snorts. “We’re not robots, Leila. And—no offense—but we all know that going down that road only leads to trouble.”

  “Do we?” says Jeremy.

  “I’m not having this fight again, brother,” Judas replies. “Your Family is all you need.” He toys with a pawn.

  Jeremy looks sulky. “Earth knows I’m loyal to my Family. But you need to broaden your horizons, brother.”

  They’ve stopped playing chess now and Judas surveys me coldly. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. They sow dissension amongst us. They don’t mean to, but they do.”

  “Charming,” I say.

  There is a glowering silence between the Jays, and then Judas makes his move. I wait for a few minutes.

  “Thing is,” I say, as they suddenly up their pace, exchanging a flurry of moves, “if a Jay was seeing Lily, he might know what she was up to, what was on her mind in the cycles before she was killed.”

  “Surely you spoke to her plenty yourself?” Jeremy says.

  “I didn’t see her that much—blame the Rota and the fact there were only two of us. And though it pains me to say it, maybe we weren’t as tight as I thought—unlike your wonderful band of brothers.”

  Jeremy brings a knight into play. He ruffles his kinky hair, a tangle of stubby black curls. “Let me ask around. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Judas sighs, shakes his head. They play in silence for a while, probing, swapping a pair of pawns.

  “I know you just want to find some sort of meaning in her death, Leila,” Judas says. “But are you sure it wasn’t just an accident, a fault with a piece of equipment? Maybe whoever was with her panicked, and thought they’d be blamed?”

  “I dunno, Judas. It still leaves too many questions unanswered, like what they were doing out the base, off-Rota.”

  “Well, if you do find out who it was,” Jeremy says, “and you need a bit of muscle, you know you can count on us. The Jays have got your back.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy. And what if I find out it was one of your brothers, have you got my back then?”

  “I’m uniquely qualified to say it could never happen. A Jay would never kill an Ell; we couldn’t do it.”

  I look into his brown eyes, and he stares right back, cool as you like, the beautiful bastard.

  THE PACE OF the game slows to a crawl, then Judas forks both Jeremy’s bishops with a knight, and regretfully, Jeremy abandons one.

  Another Jay—if I had to guess, I’d say Joseph—wanders in, and after surveying the board, says to Jeremy: “C3 to E4. Surely.”

  “Bugger off,” Jeremy murmurs. “That’d leave my left flank exposed and you know it.”

  “C3 to E4? What does that mean?” I say.

  “It’s a way to identify squares,” says Judas. “The letters A to H go along the columns, and the numbers 1 to 8 up the rows. C3 is…” He drags his fingers down the rows. “There.”

  And that’s when it hits me—what Lily was doing with the scratches. 5, 2, 2, 6. It’s a remin
der to herself—row 52, column 26, in the stores depot. That’s how we locate all the boxes in the stores, it’s a giant grid. And in a box on row 52, column 26, she had hidden… what? Something, anyway: the intruder ransacked those front boxes, trying to find it, before giving up at the scale of the task.

  Lily hid it well, and in the absence of writing, left herself a scrawled tally to guide her back. Not the most secure note in cryptographic history, but good enough to baffle me at first, and I was the only other person who knew the stores grid.

  I never thought chess would have any practical value, but it turns out I was wrong.

  LATER, HALF-ASLEEP, I drift in and out of a dream about my sisters and me. The kind of dream that’s so real that when you wake, your brain desperately tries to convince you to go back in; and when cold reality finally hits, you can’t help but be cross at it. Six Ells together—Leila, Lily, Lolita, Lilith, Lara, Lucia—and where the heck did those names come from? We’re in a spartan grey room, all sleek lines, and somehow I know we’re in a ship, a million miles above Hell. I can’t hear anything of what my sisters are saying, but it doesn’t matter, I know what they mean.

  And Lily’s head is in Lilith’s lap, and Lucia is spread-eagled out on the floor, yawning, stretching, and it’s such a perfect domestic scene that I just want to weep. Most of my dreams are pretty tedious—the water purifier breaking down, or walking down never-ending rows in the ore depot. Barbara once claimed to me that she would regularly dream of Earth, though I don’t get how her brain has managed to come up with an image of what Earth looks like. Especially since she’s not even a big reader like me, constantly drinking in descriptions of life on the planet. But that’s the Bees all over, always romanticizing Earth, even in their sleep.

  Eventually, I wake up, and my brain won’t let itself drag me back into the dream any more, and I remember where I am, and I remember Lily’s blue lips, and my eyelashes are wet with tears. I reach beneath my bunk, take a pipe joint and angrily chuck the bastard thing at the wall.