Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  "What did it mean, broken?" he asked.

  "Teams break when they don't have a full complement. We have to add substitutes, but it's tricky. That's one of the reasons we requested you. Your doc file says you have experience with pheromones, scent alteration? That's how we get them to accept each other."

  "It's only a hobby," he said.

  "We're giving you a full team, just one to start with, but you can help with the other teams, fixing them. We supply two other bases with clones—new teams go out each week."

  They entered the canteen. He faced a phalanx of hostile stares. Whoever he was replacing had not been liked, and they expected the same of him. So he sat in a corner and watched for now. Should he try to make friends? Ghira seemed congenial enough, but everyone seemed to like her. Perhaps she'd be his passport to acceptance.

  In the days that came, though, he didn't find himself making friends. It was his background. They all assumed he'd disapprove of their words and actions, pre-emptively dismissed him. At night he tried to replicate the scents of home, cleanser and Abraham's slightly sweet, old-man smell but none of them were right.

  His clones, oddly enough, were the closest he had to friends. They called him sir, and did whatever he asked, cheerfully, uncomplainingly, six identical faces. He tried to give them names, but the concept seemed unfamiliar to them. Come evening, they ate and changed, and then piled into their tiny room. Sometimes they shared bunks, not so much for sex, as far as he could tell, but for the sake of skin against skin, like puppies in a pile. It seemed a human urge to him, but he knew they were not human. Just things, things that mimicked humanity.

  After a week, he found himself slightly more accepted by the four men who called themselves Sculptors, themselves regarded as odd by the others. Social misfits together. Their leader, Pat Brig, showed him creations as though daring him to protest, things worked in flesh that were not human so much as furniture. He steeled his face, did not recoil, even when Pat showed him what he called "a sleeve." The machine could be used to create the humanoid clones or it could create beings like this, all flesh and no soul.

  "Use that to satisfy yourself," Pat said. "Self lubricating. Better than a woman, doesn't talk back."

  He thrust it towards Sean, who took it reluctantly, a baby sized cylinder of flesh, its surface blood-warm.

  "Absorbs light and a feeding mist," Pat said. "You can have that one. I'm working on a better." He patted the machine beside him. "Put in a clone and the right instructions, and you can make them into whatever you want. You don't need to worry, I took all the brain out of that one, left only the autonomous functions."

  Sean searched for excuses, finally said, "I want to keep my quarters sterile, when I'm working on scents. Thanks though."

  He passed it back to Pat, who stood looking at it. Sean could tell he'd failed some test.

  "Man needs satisfaction some way," Pat said. "Everyone here's paired or hooked up that's going to be."

  It was true that he was frustrated. At night when he was showering, he touched himself and let his fantasies play out. The spaceship pilot, yielding to him in curlspace. Ghira, showing him exactly how friendly she could be. Women back home, the few he'd known.

  Sometimes, he thought about the clones. Their skin, vat fresh and taut. Muscular and lithe. He thought some of the others might use them that way, but if so, it was kept secret. Something everyone knew but didn't talk about. Or maybe they talked about it, but not to him. The outcast. The religious. They thought he'd disapprove.

  He had weekly letters from Abraham, hand-written, although printed out on plas. They always started with a Bible text, then related it to what had been happening at home. Crops failed because God was testing them. A girl was stoned because she was suspected of being a witch. At Exalted, a cabin of boys caught fire and they all died. More of God's tests. Always ending with an exhortation to pray, to ask God what He wanted of Sean.

  He tried, he really did. He would sit down at a canteen table and make conversation, but it was always stilted. They talked about recent vids, but he had no vid unit—they were forbidden on God's New Promise, and he had never acquired the habit. He watched some in the common area, and they just bewildered him. A wealth of flesh seemed to be the only coherent theme.

  He talked to Pat, not about the vid, but the sculptures. "Why do you make them into new things?"

  "It's a way to pass the time," Pat said. "I make ... well, you've seen the sort of things I like to make, conveniences. Vonda tries to make them beautiful. Avram wants to see if different shapes are better adapted to this place. And Lilo, he just likes to play."

  So he spent time working on the scent work. It was solitary, but it was useful, and the others approved when he succeeded on fixing a team, making a clone smell right to the others, letting them accept it as part of them. He was good at it, in a way the others were not—he could smell an individual and then replicate the scent.

  Pat liked it; he made two flesh sleeves that would interact with each other, drawn by the scent.

  "It's as though the team bond was instinctual," he said, watching them bump into each other. "Maybe that's part of the make-up. What do you think?"

  But Sean didn't reply. He was thinking about last night. He had stopped one of his clones before it went into the chamber.

  "Would you like to sleep in my quarters tonight?" he had whispered, feeling shame burn along his cheekbones. When he was a boy, he'd made money doing this for older men. Abraham would have killed him if he'd known. But he'd needed components for his perfumes, and the men paid well.

  And they had loved him, he thought, at least for a little while. And now the clone would love him for a little while, and he would touch it as they had him.

  But it only looked at him with a pleasant, uncomprehending smile, and went into the chamber where its brothers awaited. By now he was sure they shared sex, but not in pairs. All together. It ran through his veins, the realization.

  "I said, what do you think?" Pat repeated, and Sean pulled himself back.

  "I don't know," he said. "They guard the tech pretty carefully."

  Pat snorted. "Course the company does. Wouldn't want one of us escaping with trade secrets, taking them to some other corp."

  Sean looked at the machine.

  "Want to take a test spin?" Pat asked with a leer. "Works reshaping humans too. Give yourself a new package."

  He chuckled nervously. "People really do that?"

  "Sheila fixes her face in it all the time," Pat said cheerfully. "Watch her. One day blue eyes, the next green."

  He glanced back when they left the lab. The machine sat humming to itself. The sleeves were on the floor, nuzzling each other, rippling with the pleasure of touch. That was all any of them wanted, he thought. To touch. To be touched in turn.

  A company directive came around that they were supposed to refer to the clones as "units." Ghira read it aloud to them over dinner.

  "Don't want us getting them confused with humans," Pat sneered.

  There wasn't too much chance of that, Sean thought. But he wondered about the donors, the men or women whose genetic material had gone into developing the first units. Who were still being created, again and again.

  "What happens to the soul, when you make it over and over?" he asked Pat. "Your creatures ... isn't it a kind of slavery? Even if they don't know it?"

  Pat's face was angry.

  "Should have figured you'd revert to form, sooner or later," he said, and spat on the floor. "Fundie planets are all the same, full of soo-perior types."

  Sean gazed after Pat as he left, distressed. He hadn't meant to say anything. He looked around and all he saw were hostile eyes, even though they were doing the courtesy of pretending they hadn't heard the argument.

  Even Ghira looked away.

  Abraham's letter read: Elder Wilson came by to ask after you. You never told me you knew him, boy. I would have warned you off—his theology is shaky, his morals proven dubious. You remember th
e scandal, back when he was teaching. Even far away, you're causing me worry, Sean.

  Wilson's generosity had bought the tiny synthesizer that let him make pheromones. Without that, he might have never gotten away from God's New Freedom.

  But now that he was gone, he missed it. Everything was bewildering to him. Everything was different. Someone had put one of the flesh sleeves in his quarter. Threat? Hazing ritual? Message? You're not like us, it meant, perhaps. You can't touch any of us, here's a substitute.

  He put it out in the hallway, watched it slither away. It had been pleasant to touch it, but he didn't want to keep it, didn't want them thinking they were right, he was an outcast who could only touch made things. Never other people.

  Despite himself, he knelt in prayer beside the cot.

  "I don't know what to do," he said. "Please tell me, God."

  The door swung open and Pat was glaring at him. "You just threw it out in the hallway?" he shouted. "We have to account for materials, you know! It got outside, froze!"

  The mound of flesh in Pat's arms dripped with melting ice.

  Sean lurched to his feet.

  "No, no, you stay there and pray," Pat said sarcastically. The door swung shut behind him. Sean could only imagine the stories that would circulate. They'd think he'd reverted to form, that he'd be forcing his beliefs on them like the last one, who had vanished under slightly suspicious circumstances, from all he'd been able to tell.

  What was it about his faith that made them think he was sanctimonious? What was it about his faith that drove them away? He had never tried to spread the word, but he had still bowed his head in grace the first few meals until he had caught them staring. It had never occurred to him that some just began eating, without thinking about the meal, where it came from, how lucky they were to have it.

  He groaned aloud.

  No one spoke to him anymore, except to ask him to match a scent. He was useful for the moment. But useful could still mean untouchable.

  A black bordered envelope tucked in his mail slot. "We regret to inform you ... " He put it down. Uncle Abraham dead. All his ties to the past broken, and no new ones to tie him down, to keep him from flying into the future.

  There was a broken team that had lost a member. It was easy to program the machine. Easier yet to create the right scent. And then to enter the crowded room, not knowing if they would accept him.

  Hands were on him. They drew him down into the pile. Tears rolled down his face. Someone licked them away. Someone hugged him. He put his hands out and touched them, and was touched, and something in his soul relaxed with a shudder, even as something else howled and was cast out into the darkness.

  For a while Ghira wondered where Sean Marksman had gone. Speculation maintained that he had gone mad (if he wasn't already, bearing in mind his origin), gone out to freeze in the darkness, after fixing one last team. Rumor said Pat had killed him, recreated him. She didn't believe that. Pat would have known he couldn't get away with it again.

  But even as Ghira was dispatching the load of clones to another base, even when she passed close enough that he could have touched her sleeve, she did not look at them, and so he left, his clone brothers and he, and he never prayed again, as long as he lived.

  Afternotes

  Angry Rose reappears in this story, but isn't the focus. Having grown up in Indiana, I am both fascinated and repelled by fundamentalist Christianity, and the idea of a planet governed by such a group is a little scary. Touch is, to me, one of the basic human needs and so I wanted to write about being isolated from those around you, and how it's possible to be lonely even among a crowd.

  I wanted my hero to have an interesting hobby, and perfumery is something that's fascinated me ever since reading Patrick Suskind's novel, Perfume.

  This originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction, where it was selected by publication by editors Michele Barasso and Jonathan Laden.

  A QUERULOUS FLUTE OF BONE

  There are, wherever wealth has accumulated enough to create the idle, those who collect things. Such collections may vary from those who catalog every cast off bit of flesh or chitin they shed to those who look outside themselves for art, or titillation, or an oblivion in which they might forget everyday life. They may consist of the most mundane objects: string, or chewed up paper, or broken teacups, for example—or take on outré forms: dioramas made of Nihilex bone (death to be found with in certain areas), or squares of cloth exposed to the Smog, prized for the oracular patterns of dirt left deposited on the fabric, or the tiny snowflakes of metal that are said to have fallen into the world during an Opening over a century ago.

  Ector was such a collector. S/he was one of the Geniod, whose gender varies according to mood, and location, and other private considerations, and who are known, in the face of great trauma, to forget who they are and become entirely different personalities, their old selves never to be resumed or spoken of. Some races adulate them for this, others mock them, and such excess has driven the Geniod to be a race that keeps to itself, not by law, but by choice.

  Ector was an oddity in its own preferences, for it was willing to travel, to go farther than the rest of its race, driven by the desire to augment its collection, choosing to focus only on its quest.

  The items it sought, ranging up and down the Tube in expeditions funded by two sets of indulgent grandparents and a much less indulgent set of parents, were things that could be considered metaphors for the world and the state of those in it. In this pursuit, it followed the strictures of the philosopher-king Nackle, who described the emotions that such objects evoked in the beholder in one 500-page monograph and the intellectual effect of such exposure in a second, even longer, volume.

  Ector had studied at the knee of an ancient Human who had himself been instructed by Nackle, and the teaching had impressed it with a gravity and depth of the sort that scores the soul and directs all its movements in later years. Its search was a tribute to Nackle's ideas, for it looked for the things that Nackle posited existed, which could only be discovered by matching the emotion they evoked with that described in Nackle's pages, a task that required the laborious memorization of all of the philosopher's works.

  Nackle's theory, insofar as such a thing can be simplified, was this: twenty one types of emotion exist in the world. Certain artifacts create emotions in the viewer, emotions unaffected by the viewer's history or idiosyncrasies of personality, but which are basic to the existence of all intelligent creatures. There are literally hundreds of sub-emotions, ranging from a soul's regret when it wishes to sing but cannot, to the joy of carrying on one's ancestral line in the face of tremendous adversity. To find the artifacts that replicated the base emotion, the one from which all the smaller sub-emotions sprang, one must move through a progression of refinement of the senses, created by the search for and exposure to artifacts exemplifying the emotions Nackle described.

  This simplification would be objected to by most of Nackle's followers, who would point to subtleties of one kind or another, but truth be told, the theory was uncomplicated. It was the lengthy cataloging of emotions that gave the philosophy density rather than any complex thought.

  As such, it was relatively easy to follow and Ector intended to devote its life to the process. It demanded a certain purity of thought, a willingness not to mire oneself in the petty details of life that Ector was more than happy to embrace, even though at times it felt a little lonely in the superiority of its perceptions. It eschewed most pleasures, and had never moved beyond the simplest gender, the one that everyone has, and had never thought of itself as he or she.

  As is often the way in this world (or any other), Ector had a rival in its ambitions, Corint, another Geniod who had studied at the same philosopher's knee and delighted in challenging all of Ector's words in class, to the point where it sometimes feared to speak and would keep silent until the other's glee in pronouncements, often wrong, moved it to contradict what Corint said. The rivalry was bitter as tomb-wine,
as bright as the sunstrip at its most fervid mid-day heat.

  They thwarted each other whenever they could, until the action became second nature, unquestionable. Ector would search for the horn that had inspired melancholy for traditions that had faded into the past, only to find Corint there first, tucking it away in its pouch with a smile as greasy as the black oil that seeps near the rocks on which the iron and gears of the city of Indrus are perched. Or Corint would arrive at the Watershed shop rumored to hold the kaleidoscopic marble of joy in complexity of color and see Ector standing in the doorway, balancing it in his palm, watching hues roil in its depths.

  They had chased each other downward this time, a journey through nest villages and bridge towns and basket farms. While in a cavern city's tavern chamber, Ector had overheard a scrap of conversation indicating it might have stumbled across a trail that would lead to an artifact falling in a category that had previously proved frustrating with its elusiveness: appreciation. This artifact might, Ector thought, actually lead its perception to spring along the ladder more than a few rungs; it was supposed to induce the appreciation of something's innate qualities. Rumor held that those capable of mastering it became able to make wonderful things: paper masks that spoke, stews that made the eater capable of dancing all day and night, or clothing that concealed a wearer's every defect until they were so noble and upright in appearance that populaces flocked to elect them mayor or ruler or demagogue or whatever form of leadership they practiced.

  Paradoxically, the trail led Ector upward and back to a Geniod village, Halah, that it had not visited since a child so small that it had barely learned to walk on its own feet. The village was famed for its hot springs, and the baths that had been carved out of the rock in order to allow visitors to take the waters, some of which smelled of sulfur, others of copper, and others of harder to identify minerals. All that Ector remembered of the place was the scented moisture of the air, and the trouble that its occupants had to take to scrub the black mold off their doorsteps and walls and other surfaces, lest it grow so shaggy and furry that it overran the place until it became one of the ghost towns that sometimes can be found along the Tube, places where one problem or another has ousted the inhabitants: plague or parasites or over-eager bandits.