Noumenon

by Marina J. Lostetter

  “I get all that. They tell us that in school all the time.”

  “Well, then don’t be mad that you’ve got a sister. We need our siblings. All of them, understand?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Listen—I get it. Early on, in your eyes she’ll be a cooing, pooping annoyance, and then one day she’ll become a person. Not really, though, because she’s always been a person. It’s actually you who will change. You will understand that you’ve been blinded by that thing you called ‘stupid.’”

  “Yeah, all right,” Jamal conceded. “I’ll try ’n’ like her.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “Can I not like her if she’s annoying?”

  Diego considered for a moment. “Yes. But I still suggest you try.”

  “Fine.” Jamal sighed, then perked up. “So what’s the movie you were gonna watch?”

  “It’s old, I have to warn you.”

  Oh, no. Not like Afi old, he hoped.

  “It’s about space travel. Before they’d had much space travel.” Diego dimmed the lights and accessed the computer.

  Before they’d had much space travel? Jamal couldn’t even imagine such a time. “Like a million years ago?”

  “No, not quite,” Diego chuckled. “You sit right there. This is the best of the series—classic lines in this one. You’ll like it. There’s a bold captain, a first officer with pointy ears, and a villain you’ll love to hate.”

  “That was awesome!” Jamal said when the credits rolled. “They were so—weird. They really thought you could chop people into tiny little bits and send them through space? And get a person on the other side, not a pile of guts?”

  Diego nodded, as though he weren’t really listening. “Glad you enjoyed it. Better run along home. Your parents will probably want to head down to the mess soon.”

  Jamal prepared to leave. Diego stopped him just before he went out the door. “Jamal, do you know what your sister’s serial number is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s her production number. It’s how we keep track of how many babies are being born. Can you ask your padre—your pabbi for me?”

  What’s he want that for? “Okay,” he said slowly. “I’ll ask.”

  “Don’t forget. It’s important.”

  “Okay. I won’t forget.”

  Hippocrates loomed before their shuttle, the second biggest ship in the convoy. It looked . . . intimidating. Especially with all of its arms sticking out all over the place.

  Pabbi explained that the arms—medical “wings” he said, though they definitely looked more like legs than wings—were retractable. They were all umbilical; they could dock with the other ships during emergencies.

  The ship reminded Jamal of a dead bug. Or the prickly shell of a nut. Maybe a sea creature—they had an aquarium on Shambhala. Sea urchins were supposedly high in protein. How much protein did he need every day? Well, he was only four foot eleven, so . . .

  He tried to keep up with the wandering train of thought. He wanted his mind to stay away from the pending sister-assault for as long as possible. Figures and calculations for caloric intake swarmed through his brain.

  Diego had made him feel a little better about the idea of having a sister, but not much.

  Other shuttles zipped by outside, white and silvery against the blackness of space. Light from external LEDs bounced off hulls and windows, producing a glare that kept all natural starlight at bay. The ships and shuttles were bright objects in a dark cocoon.

  Out of food-related numbers, his thoughts shifted. The classroom butterflies would be free of their cocoons soon. Then the class would ferry over to Eden and release the bugs in their appropriate climate zones. Butterflies helped pollinate the plants. Plants were a good source of fiber . . .

  The med ship swelled before the shuttle and soon blotted out the rest of the convoy. Near its bottom a bay door opened, ready to gulp up their little shuttle—and Jamal’s dreams of being an only child.

  His family was greeted inside by a lady with very round cheeks, wearing a seafoam green jumpsuit wrapped in a white smock. A paper mask, held on by bands around her ears, rested awkwardly beneath her chin; she looked like she had a bulbous, snowy beard, and it took all Jamal had to not giggle.

  None of this is funny, he rebuked himself.

  “Hello,” she said warmly, “I’m Sailuk Okpik. You’re here to pick up an infant who’s come to term?” His parents indicated they had. “This way,” she directed.

  Jamal had visited Hippocrates many times before. Yearly physicals, mental checkups, when he broke his leg—they’d all required trips to the med ship. But he’d never been to the growing rooms or the birthing chambers.

  The kids told all types of stories about the spooky tubes. About the half-grown babies with their guts hanging out, and the two-headed flukes they had to discard in secret. Some said the accidental deformities got ground up and put in kid’s lunches. Others said they grew them to adults anyway and had them work in secret.

  Still, others said the doctors tried to kill the mistakes, but that they lived and formed their own society in the ships’ walls. There they lurked, watching, waiting—ready to strangle healthy crew members in their sleep whenever they got their chance.

  Jamal didn’t believe those stories.

  Not really.

  “Would you like a full tour?” asked Sailuk. “You probably took it when you picked up your son, but some second-timers like to see it again. Though, I have to warn you, some children don’t react well.” She turned her round face toward Jamal. “Do you scare easy?”

  “I don’t know,” said his aðon. “The fetus tanks were a bit much for me when I first saw them, and I was twelve.”

  “I think he can handle it,” said his pabbi. “What do you think, Jamal? Are you up for learning where babies come from?”

  “Is it gross?” he asked, turning to Sailuk.

  “Sure is,” she said frankly.

  What would the other kids say, if they found out he’d gone all wimpyfied? “I can take it,” he said, puffing out his chest.

  “Are you sure?” Aðons could be so stuffy sometimes.

  “Yeeeees,” he said in a tone that conveyed how tiresome her question was. “I’m not a baby.”

  That settled that.

  On their way they passed various people dressed as Sailuk—all sanitary-looking. Hippocrates had to be the cleanest ship in the fleet. In which case Aesop had to be the dirtiest. Or maybe Mira. His room certainly wasn’t clean, as his parents were fond of pointing out.

  Jamal wondered if this new sister was punishment for not picking up after himself.

  A wide lift at the end of a long hall took them to the very top deck level. When the doors opened Jamal was immediately surprised by the lighting. Instead of a cold white, everything was bathed in pinkish-purple.

  “The lighting helps protect the babies’ skin,” said Sailuk. “In most fetal stages it can’t handle the rays included in our normal lighting. Most of the convoy lights were developed to mimic actual sunlight as closely as possible, to prevent problems like seasonal affective disorder. But these lights screen out anything that would be harmful to the undeveloped infant. They work like an old-fashioned dark room for developing photographs—or, of course, a mother’s womb.”

  The first room they went into was bright again. White, normal light.

  “Here we do the actual cloning. It’s slightly different than traditional Earth cloning, in that instead of using DNA from the original, we build chromosomes identical to the original’s and then insert them into a healthy ovum. So over here—” she led them to the left “—you can see Amit analyzing a newly formed molecule strand to make sure it is identical to the original pattern.”

  A man in a clean room bent over a microscope and manipulated something on the slide before him.

  This was boring so far. Not scary. If Jamal wanted to watch people play with molecules he could just go back to class.

  Sailuk ran them through the rest o
f the first stages, using weird, gibberish words like histone and zygote. Jamal didn’t understand how goats had anything to do with making babies.

  They moved on to another purple room. This one was lined with tubes behind a glass window. In each tube sat one worm, suspended in some strange, snot-like solution. Jamal and his parents had entered a viewing cubicle.

  Jamal ran to one of the closest tubes before Sailuk could explain what they were. He wandered along the line until one worm caught his eye. It was different from the rest. “This one has legs!” he said. How weird.

  “Those are babies,” his aðon said. “They’re only a few weeks old.”

  “Ew,” he said curtly. “But they don’t look anything like a baby. Look, this one has a tail.” It was more like a smooth, rubbery lizard than a human. “Ach, and big glassy eyeballs, too.” There was no way these were people.

  On they went, through more rooms with viewing cubicles, and he began to see the connection. The more the worms came to look like the thing with legs, the more the thing with legs came to look like a salamander, the more the salamander came to look like a wrinkly naked thing . . . the more creeped out Jamal got.

  Babies weren’t just annoying, they were freaky. Like aliens. And here they were displayed in jars like specimens of dead animals. The whole thing felt . . . unnatural.

  “What’s ‘the old-fashioned way’?” he asked suddenly.

  His parents stopped scrutinizing a tube that held a baby with head stubble. “What?”

  “Diego said his sister was born the old-fashioned way, but he wouldn’t say what that was.”

  The adults shared a look. “People used to be born and die a little different than on board,” said his mother. “I suppose that’s the way they still do it on Earth. It was messier, and less efficient.”

  “Moms carried the babies in their bellies,” Pabbi said, patting Aðon’s stomach.

  “Uh . . .” was all Jamal could say. That would be even weirder than all this. “Oh, and he wanted me to ask what the baby’s number is.”

  His parents eyed each other again. What was all this look-passing and eyebrow-raising about?

  “He must be close,” said Pabbi. “I wonder how many more he has.”

  “Far fewer than your dad,” said Aðon.

  Annoyingly, they let the matter drop without explaining their cryptic chatter to Jamal.

  Finally, the bulk of the freak show was over. Time to get the baby and head home.

  “We’d like to attend the birthing,” insisted Pabbi. “We were there for Jamal’s first breath. We’d like to be there for Akane’s.”

  “We’re going to watch her come out of the tube and get all cleaned up,” Jamal’s aðon said to him, overly perky. “Look, there she is.” They entered one last room, this one with normal light again. One tube occupied the space, surrounded by four technicians. This baby looked like the ones in the previous room—you know, actually like a baby. Like a real little person instead of a funky, slimy thing. She had hair and eyelashes and fingernails and everything.

  She still creeped him out, though.

  Two of the technicians held the tube in place while the other two unhooked it from its wires and apparatuses. Eventually they popped the top off and tipped it over. The baby came spilling out onto a thick, foam-looking pad that sucked up most of the liquid.

  A man came at the baby with a hose, the tip of which looked like the plastic vacuum the dentist used. The man pushed it up the baby’s nose and in her mouth and soon she was crying. A horse, squeaky cry that didn’t sound anything like the crying Jamal had expected.

  She looked a lot smaller now that she was out of the tube, wiggling and naked on a table under the lights. She looked vulnerable. And for the first time since he’d heard about the possibility of her, he felt something other than loathing.

  Jamal felt a pang of protectiveness.

  “Can’t they get her a blanket or something?”

  “They will,” Sailuk assured him. “They have to clean her up first.”

  After the baby was prepped and swaddled, Sailuk went into the room to retrieve her.

  When the crying Akane was brought before her new family, Sailuk asked, “Who would like to hold her first?”

  Jamal tentatively raised his hand. “Can I?”

  “Not so bad as you feared, eh?” asked Diego, packing a trowel and a small shovel in his bag.

  “No, guess not. She’s kind of nice. Except when she cries while I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Did you get the number?” he asked casually, opening the door to his quarters and ushering Jamal out. They were going to Eden together to work in the convoy’s communal vegetable garden.

  “Oh, yeah, here.” Jamal pulled a small ‘flex-sheet out of his pocket. “She’s S8-F94–3–16008.”

  “Five more until I get my notice, then,” Diego said.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll tell you about it when we get to Eden. I’ll feel more comfortable with some dirt under my nails.”

  “Okay.” Unlike other adults, who sometimes just ignored Jamal’s questions, when Diego said he’d answer something, he always did.

  The artificial sun hung high overhead, and the cows mooed in a bored sort of way. The weather planners were pretending it was hot today. The thermostat must have read at least eighty-eight Fahrenheit.

  Luckily a large part of the garden sat in the shade of a big tree. A few butterflies flitted by, and Jamal thought he recognized one from his classroom.

  The air smelled sweet here. But he was pretty sure the scent wasn’t emanating from the flowers or the grass—it was one more illusion. They pumped in the smell to make the space seem bigger and more open than it was.

  Diego dug right in. Only a few minutes passed before his hands, forearms, and boots were caked with enriched soil. “That’s better. Get a bit of this mud on you, it’s nice and cool.” He drew a dirty line down the arch of Jamal’s nose. “Good war paint,” he said with a wink.

  Getting into the spirit, Jamal put a dirty hand print on Diego’s cheek. “Looks like I whacked you one.”

  “Let me return the favor.” Jamal’s face now sported two handprints that mirrored each other. The dirt might as well have been face paint, and the handprints butterfly wings. “Can’t forget to wash that off before you go home. Otherwise your madre will have my hide. With a new baby to think about she doesn’t need to be giving you extra baths as well.”

  “What were you saying before?” Jamal asked, looking over a bowl of seeds they’d picked up at the entrance to the field. “About Akane’s number?”

  “I should probably make you ask your parents,” said Diego. He dug a small hole and gestured for Jamal to sprinkle in a few seeds. “But that would be for their sake, not yours. Jamal, I’m going to retire soon.”

  The smile slumped off the boy’s face. “What?” He stood up straight. “Why?”

  No. No. No. Diego wasn’t old enough to retire. Only really old people retired. And it wasn’t something you talked about. It just happened, they disappeared one day. Said goodbye and left for . . . somewhere.

  “What does Akane’s number have to do with that?” he added.

  “Sit back down so we can talk about this rationally,” Diego ordered, patting the ground.

  Jamal narrowed his eyes. Anything Diego said from this moment on would be held under the highest scrutiny. Sick people retired, frail people retired, incapable people retired—Diego was none of those things.

  “You’re eight. You’re big enough to understand about retirement. On Earth I learned about it a whole lot sooner than eight. And we didn’t have that nice euphemism for it. We just called it what it was.”

  No one had ever explained it, but Jamal wasn’t stupid. He knew where retirees went. He knew. He just didn’t like to think about it. If no one ever talked about the truth, if everyone always glossed over the facts, why couldn’t he? “I do understand,” he said.

  “Then sit down. You know I’m going to die
, but you don’t understand the how or why of it. So let me tell you.”

  Jamal finally sat and said in a small voice, “Did the doctors find something?”

  “No. Nothing like that. I’m as healthy as a—as one of those bovine over there. But my number is about to come up, quite literally. You see, everything on the convoy’s got to balance out. All that’s ever here is all there ever will be. Even if we find an asteroid to mine, we can only carry so much. We’re a closed environment. We have to scrimp and save and control and manage. So, we have to pick and choose when it comes to some things. And you know where we put our resources, don’t you?”

  Jamal picked at a strand of grass and it gave him a thin cut—it didn’t bleed but it smarted. What did this mumbo jumbo about management have to do with Diego dying?

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” Jamal mumbled.

  “Where do we put our resources?”

  “‘Toward the future,’” Jamal quoted.

  “Correct. To conserve our resources, then, birthing can never get out of synch with dying. We can’t have more babies born than people who die. So, everyone on board has a number. Two numbers—a number that corresponds with their birth and one that corresponds with their death. When the 16013th baby of the third generation is born, I’ll get my notice. It’ll let me know that after another three clones are brought to term I’ll be scheduled for official retirement. They’ll set a date, and I’ll go over to Hippocrates and they’ll—”

  Jamal’s hands flew to his ears. “Shut up. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to know how they’ll kill you.”

  “Oh, stop it now.” Diego pried Jamal’s hands from his head.

  Fire and water surged inside Jamal’s brain. His face grew hot and swollen. “But why? You’re still a perfectly good person. There’s nothing wrong with you. Retirement is for people who have problems that can’t be reversed.”

  “Yes, I know. And a lot of people go that way. They get some sort of terminal or chronic problem and never see their end-number. But I’m lucky, Jamal. I got to live my full life.”

  “It’s all Akane’s fault,” Jamal realized. “If parents stopped asking for babies then they wouldn’t have to kill you. It’s not fair! Why grow a new person when you have to kill a perfectly good person to get it? It’s not right!”