Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  Thorn asked, “How can a man be just friends with somebody so beautiful?”

  “We were lovers once when we were very young. But that was long ago and the flame has long burned out.”

  “Who is she lovers with now?”

  “Nobody. The man she was with last left her for another woman.”

  Thorn gasped. “How can a man leave a woman who is so perfectly beautiful?”

  “You should meet the woman he left her for.”

  “Is she even more beautiful?”

  “No… she is nice.”

  Thorn looked pained. “It’s been many hours since I’ve been able to have my body rights. I feel so pent up and testy. And now that I’ve seen how beautiful Eleven Jane is I think I’m going to go crazy.”

  Malbri Three sternly ordered him, “Whatever you do, dude, don’t slosh your cloned fluids back and forth with anybody out here. We don’t want your super whatever DNA dots and robot bugs and virus things mixed with ours. You’re not like us. You’re not a hippistick.”

  “I’ve no disease. I’m a perfect organism. I’ve lived too long in this skin as a billy boy not to know it.”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “My eyes have never turned yellow.”

  Malbri Three said, “Do you think the doctors would let you clones just run around for no reason? Did you think you were in some mere pleasure dome and nothing more? The experiments are multilayered.”

  “There was more to the testing?” Thorn asked, his head re-reeling, now remembering the bright yellow eyes he’d seen on a poor norm mole now and again.

  “To get more bang for their buck,” Malbri Three explained, “and a buck is pretty scarce in space. The doctors did a whole plethora of tests on you clones, often all at the same time.”

  “Like what?” Thorn started feeling sick.

  “You’ve been shot up with fake blood, gasses, weird bacteria and viruses, and micro robots that breed just as fast. There are tests that would never have been allowed on Earth for safety reasons. But that’s all fair game up here. So whatever you do, don’t touch Eleven Jane. I saw how you looked at her. Don’t touch anybody like that or we’ll just drop dead from you, for sure.”

  “So… will I ever get sick?” he asked in a panic, only seeing yellow eyes in his memory again. “I suddenly feel a bit sick at the thought of it.”

  Malbri Three shrugged. “Who knows what the doctors did and how long all that disease takes to kick in, just keep it away from us. Some diseases take ten years to kick in. They have to lie dormant for a while first. So you might feel well now but who knows what’s in store for you anyway even though you’ve escaped the lab.”

  “But my body rights!”

  “You can take care of that by yourself. Alone!”

  Thorn gasped. “And have wild thoughts?”

  Malbri Three grinned lewdly. “You’re not where there’s wild thoughts anymore. Here, you’ll find that the wild thoughts you can come up with when you’re all by yourself can be very satisfying.”

  “I think you’re all too selfish and savage for me to deal with. You’re all a bunch of animals. You all look like werewolves!” He touched his own head and felt where his own hair was quickly growing back. “I need time to adjust to all this crazy open-minded thinking.”

  Malbri Three chuckled. “Suit yourself.”

  They walked back to the cave of tents. Thorn asked, “They don’t like me. Do they think I’m real? Do they think I’m just an animal? A pet? A toy? A monster?”

  “You’re real. And yes, we have long made up our own prejudices about clones. The prejudice actually isn’t aimed at you, directly, personally. The bad feelings are actually aimed at the robber scientists. They’re the ones who have no soul, and the prejudice is against our great grandparents who lost their way in mindless labor, vanity and greed. We’re hippisticks and we value meaning above all else.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Whatever it is, religion, the humanities.” Malbri Three folded his arms righteously over his chest and stuck out his chin. “Understanding that death is not something to run from through soulless science but death is something to accept as a part of the grand holistic grind of evolution.”

  Thorn let out a sob.

  “That wasn’t that sad.”

  Thorn shook his head and sobbed again. “This whole day has been horrible! I’m not in heaven! New memories and feelings have come to me! I feel a whole new world of emotions crashing down on me. It makes me feel terrible! It hurts!” He hit his fist over his heart. “It damn hurts!”

  “You’ve only been walking around for four years. You’re emotionally immature. And needing some sleep isn’t helping you.”

  “I’m not tired. I feel far more terrified… of something.”

  “You’re just more exhausted than you realize, I’m sure.” Malbri Three pushed Thorn toward a tent. “You sleep here, dude.”

  Thorn slept for a few hours above the ground on a thick soft web and then sat up confused. He felt frightened not knowing where he was. When he remembered it took a while for his heart to slow down. He watched Malbri Three sleeping and pondering how fragile all these firstborns were. He leaned over and tried to smell Malbri Three’s breath. He tried to smell his hair. He tried to remember his own firstborn past life and tried to remember how different things smelled. He carefully sniffed at Malbri Three’s ear. Did ears have smell? He pinched the back of his own hand and the pain gave him comfort that he was a life form.

  Thorn suddenly felt useless and unreal. A numbing sadness seeped deep into him. With tears dropping out of his eyes he looked around at the children sleeping in their webs and he could almost see through their skin to their veins where blood pumped in a furious determination to feed rapidly multiplying cells that were screaming for the fueling sugar and oxygen.

  He remembered floating in a fishtank. His gills opened and closed and radio voices went through his head with his own voice talking to him, but it being a voice from the past before he’d been born this time around. “On my fifth birthday I rode my zippy off the edge of the patio and broke my nose since I’d been assuming my zippy was the kind that could fly. I wonder why they never told me it wasn’t. I didn’t even feel the pain, I was so stunned. I saw the blood dropping down all over my blue shirt and then I woke up in the clinic with human nurses smiling at me. My parents weren’t there. They were busy working night and day trying to pay for the house. I wonder what they were doing, they never talked about their jobs.” The message repeated itself many times and then Thorn became aware that this was playing at a very fast speed but his brain was still able to hear it and race along with it.

  Shaking from horrible sensations clawing up and down the inside of his body, feeling diseased and stuffed full of tiny metal spiders, he quietly snuck out of the tent. He spent the rest of the sleep-time laying alone on one of the floating docks on the lake, letting the gentle water rock him to some semblance of calm, finally slowing his breathing to match it.

  The thoughts that repeated the most in his head were, “I want Eleven Jane. I want to be important. I want to find heaven. I hope the union meeting helps me find heaven. I hope I don’t die, first. I hope I’m not crushed dead by all my feelings. I feel like I’m being crushed to death!” He let out a sob.

  * *

  Hours later when everybody else finally awoke and milled about, acting drugged, Thorn sat at a tent door and watched them all, amazed at how slowly life returned to these firstborns. First they needed drinks and snacks, and idle chat, before coming together as an entire tribe to gather again at the stadium where they’d danced the night before.

  “Get your happy face on.” Venus said. “Happy happy. Damn happy. I hope you slept good outside of your little clown kennel. We don’t have any thermometers in your ears, here, to keep you comfortable.”

  “I slept fine.”

  “Good. Now put your sparkly eyes on and join us in our Joy of Morning.”

  “Anoth
er dance?” Thorn asked, always ready to jump up and down at a moment’s notice but he noted that these people still looked groggy.

  Venus shook her head at him. “These kids are all crazy but they only dance at night. So I guess they’re not at all that crazy.”

  “What are you talking about, then?”

  “Morning vespers,” Eleven Jane explained, haughtily tossing her long ruby hair behind her shoulders. “Of course.”

  Thorn walked up to her to walk alongside her, looking mostly at her body beneath a diaphanous vest. “Vespers? What’s that?”

  Eleven Jane explained, “We must not forget ourselves and become greedy or careless. We must remember to worship ourselves. We must always worship the gods we make in our own image or else we just become soulless automons like the union workers. Or monsters like the robber scientists. Or snakes who hide deep in the cave’s cracks like the grad schoolers. Heaven is within you. Learn to enjoy it.”

  Thorn argued, “No, heaven is…” He looked up. He looked around.

  Venus ordered him, “Now sit and get some religion since you’re not going to get any on an elevator.”

  He looked shocked. “What? You have no elevator?”

  Eleven Jane turned and blinked at him in aggravation. “Tents do not have elevators.”

  “Not anywhere else around here?”

  “No.”

  “But, but then… you’re damned!”

  Venus made a snide expression. “Maybe, maybe not, but we do know the hippisticks live more than four years.”

  Eleven Jane repeated, “Heaven is within us.”

  Thorn took Eleven Jane’s hand. “I will find heaven and I’ll take you there with me. I’ll find it today. We’ll live together forever in paradise and be perfect together forever, you and me together forever and ever.”

  She kindly pulled her hand away and looked at him oddly. He blushed, starting to feel rather stupid.

  A brilliant movie of the sun came out over the arena. Giggling children ran around in a frenzy of energy trying to catch the fleeting illusions of sun photon sparkles and fragments of rainbows in their hands. Thorn shivered, the effect being so vibrant and stunning. The joy from the crowd was contagious. He hadn’t seen the sun since he’d been blasted into space. He wept at the beauty of all the light. He remembered swimming in water with the real sun in his eyes. He wondered where he’d been on Earth to have that memory or if it was only a scene from somebody else’s radio waves.

  “Hey space-head!” Venus hollered in his ear, nudging his arm. “It’s over. Now we’re gonna go and have a little union meeting and we’re gonna see if you’re really worth your damn weight in clone meat.”

  “Where?” he asked, looking around at the hippisticks who were slowly leaving the stadium. “Here?”

  “No.” Venus nodded in the direction of the city. “The labor union rank and file thinks of these lazy kids as tent trash to put it bluntly. The lazy hippisticks think of the union as soulless grubbers as I’ve heard it said directly to my damn face. No, we’ll meet over there in Metroplex like civilized people where there’s proper vending machines and furniture. And there’s elevators. You’ll like that. They don’t go to heaven but you can ride up and down them all you’d like and pretend.” They walked to the waterfall.

  “Are you coming?” he asked Eleven Jane.

  She firmly shook her head no.

  Thorn looked pleading. “It might be a way for me to get us to heaven. I do want to go there with you! I do! Forever and ever!”

  “Anybody who goes there is a sinful sloppy greedy whore to the machine.”

  Venus explained to him, “These kids will only come as far as the bridge so they don’t drop dead with sin, or something stupid like that.”

  “Funny, ha ha,” Eleven Jane replied to her, frowning. She flipped her hair behind her shoulders. Thorn stared at her vest again.

  Malbri Three stepped in front of her. “The other side is unhallowed ground. Where the spirit stops.”

  Thorn turned to look at the city. “Buildings are buildings. Those look pretty.”

  As they went to the lake, Malbri Three and Eleven Jane talked quietly amongst themselves until Thorn asked, “The city of Metroplex is so big and beautiful. There’s so much room for everybody, why don’t you just…”

  “Why not live there in our own separate building?” Eleven Jane finished for him, but sarcastically, “with beautifully even windows and doors? With beautifully even hallways and stairs all in even straight lines? With pretty beds, potties, vending machines and bathtubs all in a row?” She bitterly shook her head. “In our tent town we live in organically drawn circles that we have formed ourselves over time in the images of our soul and our nature. If we need to we can change the tents around to reflect the needs of the present moment.”

  Malbri Three pointed to the city. “That big place over there isn’t real but is hollow. And all of its straight lines and square corners pull people’s eyes psychologically ahead of themselves and out of themselves and into a manic energy. There’s no peace there.”

  Thorn questioned, “Peace can be made with circles instead of lines?”

  Eleven Jane nodded. “The space we fill during our life is very important. The wrong space, and soulless space, causes anxiety, and the feeling of not being in yourself, but pulled out and needing to move. It’s all a matter of balance.”

  Thorn shrugged. “Then fill it up.”

  Eleven Jane argued, “It’s hollow in more ways than that.”

  “It’s unhaunted,” Malbri Three said.

  “What?” Thorn questioned.

  “Unhaunted,” he repeated. “Empty in the first place.”

  Eleven Jane gave a rude gestured at it. “It was built for sooooo many but few showed up. It was designed in an instant by a generic computer chip programmed with standard plans of architectural form. It arrogantly assumes it’ll wow simple people by formula.”

  “It wows me.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “Of course. The computer was smart. The city was calculated to stimulate and amuse and pacify workers. The robber scientists only care about crass placation and phony market life.”

  Malbri Three added, “It was built to keep people dull and docile and on a machine’s schedule. It wasn’t built wall by wall over real time to fit the real needs of the present tense mind, the mind of the present moment. It controls people using the illegitimate power of convenience and awe.”

  Eleven Jane said, “The real power of a real society is the free mind making its own way along the way, learning from mistakes, becoming wise, having a history.”

  “And… tents do that?” Thorn doubted, remembering how on Earth he willfully followed all the opinions of the One Corporate Senate because it made him feel legal and loyal and part of something big, powerful and legitimate.

  “Yes our tents do that.” Eleven Jane smugly smiled. “We put them there with our own two hands. We feel them. We control them. We put them around us in our own sized circles. We adjust them when we feel the need. If there’s a wedding, tents can be sewn together. If there’s a funeral, a tent can be removed. They are our own personal nests that are people sized. We sew them ourselves, we embroider on them ourselves, they come from our own hands.”

  Thorn said, “You can personalize a prefab space easy enough.”

  “Our philosophy fits better in tents!” Eleven Jane narrowed her eyes. “How does the expression go? When you are in a hippistick camp then you are a big fish in a little pond. When you are in the city then you are a little fish in a big pond.”

  Malbri Three said, “Shakespeare said that it was better to be number one in a village than number two in Rome.”

  Eleven Jane turned to him. “I’m pretty sure that was Julius Caesar.”

  As they walked up a path to the bridge that linked the opposing shores, Venus waved hello at Lady Hatchet who was already up there waiting for them. “Hey you damn slog.”

  As Thorn stepped onto the bridg
e, Malbri Three added, “Take care of yourself now that you’re free from that puppy mill. Don’t go crazy with freedom. There’s more to this place than meets the eye. And I don’t just mean the microscopic one.”

  Thorn said, “There’s more to anyplace than meets the eye.”

  Lady Hatchet pointed to the lake. “You mean the monkey mob out there, all our monsters out there in the dark? Has he been filling your fool head?”

  “Don’t just run off!” Malbri Three warned Thorn. “There’s grad schoolers also sneaking around that would love to get their hands on your dots and slice you down to study them.”

  Thorn asked, “Grad schoolers? Who? Who are they exactly?”

  Malbri Three said, “More offspring. You don’t think we all turned out hippistick do you? Who’s to rebel against us?”

  Thorn looked into the far shadows of the cave. “What do they do? Why should I care about them?”

  Lady Hatchet said, “They’re the new cloners and they’re vicious. Or so they want to be cloners. They’re the rebel cloners. They stole some of the robber scientist’s work. The grad schoolers got their own ideas and some of them started their own clone program… somewhere.”

  “Why?” Thorn asked her. “Why not work together? Seems counterproductive to me.”

  Lady Hatchet winced. “That’s why I use the word rebel. They hide from us. They have their own agenda that’s different than the main one and they keep it a secret.”

  Venus said, “Those damn kids won’t even talk to us.”

  “As if they’re any damn better than us.” Lady Hatchet nervously pushed at the back of her hair.

  Malbri Three turned away to go back to the camp. “Gotta go!” he hollered over his shoulder. Eleven Jane left with him.

  Thorn asked the two old women, “Why do you call them robber scientists?”

  “Robbed it,” Lady Hatchet said. “The damn bandits stole this whole damn place. That’s what they really did. Steal it, like damn dirty pirates and bandits and greedy bullies! The corporations weren’t happy fighting over all of what had been built up on Earth, they had to grab what they could out here, too.”