Cloned Lives

by Pamela Sargent

  “Who knows?” Hidey said. “They might, just to demonstrate their point, that it doesn’t matter.”

  “Well,” Paul said, “I’d better get going. I have an appointment to interview a young couple at my house. I’ll be by tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” Hidey said. “I’ll see you.”

  Paul left the office and walked down the circular hall toward the lobby of the building. His house was close enough to the campus to walk. Paul enjoyed walking, listening to the snow crunch under his boots and breathing the cold clean air. As he stopped near the door to adjust his coat something caught his eye. He turned his head slightly.

  The tall blond man, the same man Paul had met in the faculty lounge a month earlier, was standing near a display case. The man glanced at Paul and nodded. He nodded back, then hurried out the door.

  Paul hung up the two coats in the closet near the stairs, then wandered back into the living room. The couple seated on his overstuffed blue sofa were a study in contrasts. The young woman was short and stocky with a broad friendly face and straight black hair. Her husband was a tall bony brown-haired fellow with pale gray eyes. He looked almost morose, but then Paul noticed the wrinkles around his eyes and the smile lines near his mouth.

  Paul settled into an easy chair across the room from the couple. “I’m Bill Hathaway,” the man said, “and this is my wife, Zuñi.”

  “Except I’m Apache, not Zuñi, unless you count my great-grandfather,” the young woman said. “That’s just what everyone calls me.”

  Paul had read their resumé the day before. It was almost faultless. Both Hathaways had worked in the child-care center in the Alasand arcology for almost five years after graduating from college. Recommendations from their co-workers and friends had stressed the couple’s friendliness, love of children, and ability to work hard. They had apparently decided to return to school for degrees in linguistics and wanted to work nearer the campus. They would be studying during alternate semesters, so their studies would not interfere with their work.

  So far, so good. Paul wasn’t satisfied with the previous applicants he had interviewed. One couple had interest but no experience, another couple had experience but had looked dubious about caring for children whom Paul suggested might have “special problems.” The third couple had been somewhat nervous, and the man had suggested he would be willing to let his wife handle most of the drudgery and be content with giving orders.

  “You already know something about this job,” Paul said. “You’ll be caring for six infants for three or four years while living in this house. Of course, you’ll get time off and a vacation each year, and I’ll want the kids to spend time in the university day-care center to get used to other children. But most of the time you’ll be full-time parents, along with me. You might get tired of it after a while.”

  “I doubt it,” Bill said. “If we thought so, we wouldn’t be here. We like kids, and it’ll take us about four years to finish our degrees anyway. We would have had our own by now, but I’m sterile and we’ve been turned down for artificial insemination, the waiting lists are too long.” Bill said this quite openly and apparently without shame. The man did not shy away from unpleasant facts, and Paul liked that. The clones, if they were anything like Paul had been, would be inquisitive and would not take well to having their questions ignored or pushed aside. “Eventually, we’ll adopt,” Bill went on, “but you know how long that takes. Or we’ll become professional parents. When we heard about your job offer, it sounded ideal.”

  “I won’t be able to pay you as much as you’re getting now,” Paul said.

  “We’re not in it for the money,” Zuñi said. “If we were interested in that, we would have gone into child care administration a long time ago. We happen to like working with kids.”

  “All sorts of kids, I trust,” Paul said cautiously. “Even children who might have special problems?” He watched the faces of the couple in front of him carefully. Bill’s gray eyes and Zuñi’s black ones stared back at him steadily.

  “Don’t all children have special problems of some sort?” Bill replied. “We’ve cared for crippled kids, emotionally disturbed kids, retarded kids and kids that throw temper tantrums every five minutes.”

  “I expected you might want a couple to care for kids with ‘special problems,’ as you put it,” Zuñi said. “I mean, six infants all at once, it is a little unusual.” Paul realized that the pair were drawing some tentative conclusions about him at the same time as he was trying to judge them.

  “What sort of problems,” Paul said quickly, “did you think they might have?” The question was a shot in the dark, a way of finding out just what the Hathaways might be thinking.

  “We don’t know,” Bill answered. “At one point I thought they might be the fruit of several affairs, believe it or not, or that you had somehow defied

  bureaucracy and managed to adopt some South African war orphans. Then Zuñi had an idea that seemed pretty wild at first, but began to seem more plausible after a while.”

  “What idea was that?”

  “The moratorium on genetic research has run out,” Zuñi said softly. Paul’s muscles tensed and he could feel himself sweating. “I know you don’t work in that area, but friends of ours at the university know people who do. They told us once, just in passing, that you had some close friends there. So I thought...it is a wild idea...I thought maybe you might have offered to help raise some experimental subjects.”

  Paul managed to restrain himself from gasping aloud. He was dealing with an intuitive and intelligent couple who had come uncomfortably close to the truth. He began to wonder how many others might have reached the same conclusions.

  “But that was just a crazy idea,” Zuñi went on. I’d better say something, Paul thought to himself. “We shouldn’t be speculating about it when you can fill us in on the facts.”

  “We still want the job,” Bill said, “but I don’t think it’s fair to you to say we’ll definitely take it if you want us until we know more about what’s involved. It’s easy to say you’re willing to do anything when you’re in ignorance about what’s going on. I doubt that we would turn it down in any case, but we should know more.” Zuñi was nodding her head in agreement.

  “I’ll be as honest as I can,” Paul said, deciding to take a calculated risk. “Zuñi’s on the right track, but I can’t tell you any more than that, at least not right now. First, I have to send you to a friend of mine for psychological testing. I hope you’re not offended by that. To be honest, I get a good feeling from you two, but we can’t afford to take chances. I need as much objective evidence as possible that you two are right for this job.”

  “You’re being sensible,” Bill said. “We were given a few tests before we took our present jobs. Personally, I don’t think you’ll find much wrong, but no one knows everything about himself.”

  “We’ll keep the results confidential, of course,” Paul said, “and I trust you’ll do the same with what I’ve told you. I promise to fill you in as soon as the psychological testing is over, assuming the results are favorable.”

  “You can trust us,” Zuñi said, “but you must know there are others, not many but a few, who are drawing the same conclusions about what’s going on in the biological laboratories.”

  Paul considered this, and felt even more worried than usual. How would people react when they knew? Again he started to fear for his unborn children.

  Paul felt a twinge of guilt as he hurried through the spring rain to the lab. He had been gone almost a month, visiting his sister Sonia in New York and giving a couple of seminars at Columbia. The seminars went well, although Paul was a little unnerved by the sight of armed guards in the lecture halls and around the periphery of the campus. He had not been greatly calmed when he was told that things had been fairly quiet since the New Year. The scars of New Year’s Eve were still apparent: partially burned buildings, broken windows, ruined offices and hallways.

  Sonia at least looked wel
l. She had divorced her second husband six months before, but it had been an amiable divorce and the two still worked together for a firm that specialized in providing book manuscripts and taped lectures to computer complexes all over the world. It had dismayed Sonia more when her teenaged son Jerry chose to exercise his legal rights and left with her husband. Jerry visited her frequently and usually spent his weekends at her apartment, but she had been hurt by his action.

  Paul ducked into the doorway of the biological sciences building and strode through the lobby. He was glad to be back. Hidey had encouraged him to go on the trip to New York, thinking the change would do him good. Paul had worried about leaving while his offspring were still gestating but Hidey had pointed out, quite reasonably, that there was really nothing for him to do until they were born. “You’ll be tied down then,” Hidey had said. “Right now you’re not, and you said your students have all those taped lectures by other professors to keep them busy for the time being. You’d better visit your sister while you’ve got the chance.”

  Paul was thinking now that he had overstayed his welcome at Sonia’s. Things had been fine for the first two weeks, and then Sonia had begun to reminisce about her marriages.

  “I tried twice,” she said, “once when I was young and foolish and again when I was older and more stable, and I’ve never found what you had with Eviane.”

  Paul mumbled something about it not being too late, she still had a good chance, and so on. But privately he doubted it, and wondered now whether or not it would be a good thing if she did. He had felt like half a man for too long now, feeling that he should have kept part of himself from Eviane so that he could have survived her death with something whole. They had shared everything, their work, their free time, all of their feelings, and with her death he had lost part of all he had. The doubts about the cloning experiment returned now, the notion that he had agreed to take part in it for neurotic reasons of his own, to assuage the loneliness which was his constant companion.

  “Did you get my message, Paul?” Emma Valois asked. She was standing in the doorway of Hidey’s office, arms folded across her chest. “I taped it on your phone.”

  “No, I didn’t.” They entered the office and sat down. “I should have checked, but I was tired when I got in last night.”

  “Well, it looks good on the Hathaways, they’re so well adjusted they make me feel unbalanced.” Emma crossed her legs and tugged at her dark green slacks. “I don’t know how many others you talked to, but I’d wager a year’s salary on the Hathaways. I can’t be specific about anything without violating their confidence, but I’d hire them in a minute to look after my kids, and they’re a handful sometimes, believe me.”

  “Good, at least that’s one less problem for me. I just hope they take the job. Where’s Hidey?”

  “He just went to the lab to check on things. I’ve been trying to convince him he needs more for breakfast than coffee and a cigarette, maybe you can...”

  “Paul.” Hidey was at the door, his face anxious. “Come to the lab, we’ve got trouble.” Hidey disappeared down the hall. Paul rose from his seat and followed him, with Emma close behind.

  As he entered the lab, he could see Nancy Portland and another assistant, Jake Keleshian, cowering near the wall by the door. On the other side of the room near the chambers, Elijah Jabbar was holding the shoulders of a small pale man. “I ought to punch your face in,” Jabbar was shouting as he shook the man. “You stupid son of a bitch, I’ll see you blacklisted at every lab in the country.”

  Hidey began to pull at Jabbar’s arm. “Come on, Eli,” he pleaded, “that’s not going to help us now. Let him go.”

  “What happened?” Paul asked, hurrying to the three men.

  Jabbar released the small man. “Tell him, Hidey.” Hidey turned and looked up at Paul.

  “It’s one of the clones, Paul.” Hidey seemed to be saying the words only with great difficulty. “The umbilical, well, it got clogged somehow, we’re still not sure how. Johnson here was on night duty. He should have noticed it right away and taken emergency measures, spliced in a new section of tubing.”

  “The computer was flashing an emergency signal,” Jake Keleshian muttered. He clutched at his curly dark hair. “It must have tried to handle it alone, then found that it couldn’t.” He looked over at the computer sadly. Jake had helped to program the machine and now seemed to be sympathizing with it.

  “He was asleep,” Jabbar said. “Nancy found him in her office when she came in this morning. The bastard was asleep.”

  “It was a mistake,” the man named Johnson protested. “It could happen to anybody. Nancy told me I could use her coffee machine so I could keep near here. I felt kind of tired, I only dozed off for a couple of minutes, it seemed like, and then when Nancy came in, we hurried as fast as we could with a new tube...”

  “A couple of minutes,” Jabbar shouted. “You must have slept half the fucking night away.”

  “Which one?” Paul asked. He felt stunned, as if someone had just hit him in the stomach. “Which one?”

  “Number six,” Hidey answered. “The female we were a little worried about.” He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one, apparently oblivious to restrictions. No one stopped him.

  “Is she all right? Is she going to be all right?”

  Jabbar turned away from Johnson. “No,” he said. “I checked. That fetus was deprived of oxygen for quite a while, it’s been damaged. It’s barely alive now.”

  “She’s still alive then.” Paul wiped his face with his sleeve. He wandered over to the side of the sixth chamber and stared at the tiny fetus. It seemed defenseless, curled up in its womb.

  “...with brain damage,” Hidey was saying. “I think it’s dying now, Paul, and even if it doesn’t it won’t be normal.”

  “At least she’s alive.”

  “Paul, are you listening to me?” Hidey was at his side, holding his arm. “We have to make a decision. Do you want this fetus to survive in that state? Wouldn’t it be more merciful not to allow it to? You’re going to have plenty of problems as it is. I think we should abort.”

  “No.”

  “Paul, consider the child, what things will be like for her.”

  “No.”

  Johnson was wringing his hands. “I’m sorry, Dr. Swenson,” he said. “It was an accident.”

  Paul turned away from the wombs and stared at the pale laboratory walls. He was acting unreasonably, he knew. This was still an experiment and he had known there would be risks and possibly mistakes. There were problems enough with natural children. It would be nothing more than an abortion, perhaps more like a miscarriage. Yet he felt a sense of loss.

  “I’m sorry,” Johnson muttered.

  “It’s settled,” Jabbar suddenly said. His deep voice drummed at Paul’s ears. “It’s dead. No life functions.”

  Paul turned back to Hidey and could think of nothing to say.

  “I’ll take care of things here,” Jabbar said. “Why don’t you two go back to the office.”

  “Stay here, Johnson,” Hidey said. “I’ll talk to you later.” Paul left with his friend, joining Emma at the doorway of the laboratory. She said nothing, quietly following them back to Hidey’s office.

  When they were seated, Hidey pulled a bottle from his desk. “Have some whiskey, Paul, you’ll feel better.”

  “No thanks.” Hidey poured some for himself and Emma. Paul looked away from his friend and around the small windowless office. A folded cot leaned against the wall on his left and several books rested on a makeshift bookcase on the wall to his right. Hidey’s desk was covered with neatly stacked papers and journals, three empty coffee cups and two ashtrays, carved out of marblelike green and brown rocks. The ashtrays were filled with small mounds of cigarettes and some of the gray ashes had drifted across the desk top.

  “I can’t help feeling a little sad about the whole business,” Paul said at last. “Number six. She didn’t even have a name. I guess she’ll just go d
own the chute with all the other failed experiments.”

  “Come on, Paul, you know we’re not that callous. She’ll go to the crematorium and we can bury her ashes somewhere if you like. I’ve been working with life for too long now not to feel a lot of respect for it, or sorrow when it dies, in whatever form.” Hidey drummed on his desk top with his fingers. “God, how I hate death. This may be an important step in the battle against it. Someday maybe we’ll beat death altogether, and I hope we’re all around to see it. That fetus didn’t die for nothing.”

  “I know,” Paul said. “Considering the circumstances, I guess it’s just as well.” He wondered how the other clones would feel when they learned about the death of their sister, as they were bound to some day.

  “Now I’ve got another problem.” Hidey dragged thoughtfully on his cigarette. “That idiot Johnson. If I can keep Eli from committing homicide, I have to keep Johnson around until we release this story. If we fire him now, he may start talking. I’ve got to convince him that we won’t and give him something innocuous to do until I can bounce him out of here.” Hidey sighed. “I just hope he buys it, that’s all.”

  “And we’ve got to tell the Hathaways about the clones,” Emma said. “I think we can trust them, though. We’d better do it soon, in case they have second thoughts about your offer, Paul.”

  “I’ll tell them,” he said.

  “That’s everything, up to this point,” Paul said. He had invited the Hathaways to his house for dinner, but had eaten almost nothing himself while relating the story. Now he stared at his still full plate, hesitating to look at them. Finally he forced his head up. He had left out nothing, not even the fate of the sixth clone.

  Zuñi was sipping her wine. She put the glass down. Raising her head, she looked across the round oak table at him. “It sounds,” she said, “as though you want us to take care of identical quintuplets. It’s about the same thing, isn’t it?”