“Could you move over a little? You’re blocking the sun.” He moved over to his left until he no longer cast a shadow on her. “You must not have been here long. You’re kind of pale. My name’s Marlena.”
“I’m Jim. Are you visiting too, or do you live here?”
“I’m a resident. I work over at the spaceport air traffic control. They give us a lot of time off so we don’t get crazy. I work on my tan a lot, I don’t like doing anything that takes effort. I get enough tension on my job.” She brushed away a stray lock of hair from her forehead and he saw a thin white scar near her hairline. An electronic implant. Air traffic controllers, like many other technicians, had to become part of the computers that aided them in their tasks.
“What’s it like, having an implant in your head?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“A lot of people ask that. You don’t even notice it most of the time. The implant’s only activated when you’re working. But I’ll tell you something, Jim.” Marlena turned over on her stomach and propped herself up on her elbows. “There’s nothing else like being tied into a big machine like that, seeing everything it sees, being part of a tremendous mind. I can’t describe it. Actually, the computer mind does most of the work; we just have to be there to override or take over in case of an emergency. But it’s exciting, I’ll tell you. Everything else seems kind of boring afterwards.”
He shuddered. “Don’t you have to have a lot of training?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve been training ever since I was fifteen, and I only started working this year. You have to learn how to be aware of a lot of different things at once, plus training your body so that your physical reactions don’t affect you on the job. We slow down our physical processes to the minimum when we’re tied in, but we have to be ready to act instantly if something goes wrong. It can be a strain, I’ll tell you.” She sprayed some oil into her hand and rubbed it on her nose: “Jesus, I should shut up a minute and let you say something. What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for an opening on a moon flight.” Remembering his purpose in being here suddenly made him depressed again.
“You going to work up there?”
“No, just visiting.” He grew silent and Marlena folded her arms and lowered her head. They’ll all be surprised to see me, Jim thought, Hidey was shocked when l called him up. He had told Hidey nothing about Carole or his plans after discovering that all the others were on the moon. He had not even known, until he arrived in Florida, that he would attempt to join them. It had been an impulse. He had nothing else to do, and he could hope that the alien environment might heal him somehow. Perhaps he could find something there that had eluded him throughout all his travels on Earth. For him, the trip would be a pilgrimage.
Or maybe he was simply trying to escape the punishment he kept meting out to himself in his sober moments. Carole was gone and he was to blame. His mind’s pain was at once so sharp that tears sprang to his eyes. If this was physical pain, I could not bear it, I would be dead by now. But the mind, that traitorous torturer, the mind can suffer anything, for any length of time, over and over again.
“What do you do?” Marlena said, raising her head slightly
He closed his eyes and waited for his pain to pass. “Nothing,” he answered at last. He opened his eyes again. “I wander a lot. I was living about a mile outside a village in Bhutan for a while. It was the most peaceful place I’d ever known. I felt calm for the first time in my life but, believe it or not, I couldn’t write there. I could hardly write at all, except for some poems, they’ll be published soon.”
“You’re a writer?”
He nodded.
“Maybe you didn’t have much there to write about. Maybe you needed some feedback or something, like I need when I’m working.”
“I don’t know. There were the Himalayas, and the villagers. I guess others have done better writing about them.”
“Did you live there alone?”
“The woman I loved was with me, but she died.” His voice shook as he said it. He looked down at the sand, then back at Marlena, who was now sitting on her towel, legs folded in front of her.
“Jesus,” she muttered. “I’m sorry.”
“It was my fault,” Jim heard himself saying. “I shouldn’t have brought her there in the first place. She didn’t belong there. She came because I wanted her to.”
Marlena looked puzzled. “I don’t know why you’re saying that. If she went with you, she must have wanted to go there too. Otherwise she would have talked you out of it or refused to go along. It was her choice too, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t understand,” he replied. He clutched a handful of sand and watched the grains trickle out between his fingers. “Carole followed me, she never gave any thought to herself. I knew that, and I never even encouraged her to be different. I never even asked what she thought, I just let her follow me. It was easy. At least I knew she cared about me.”
He looked at Marlena and felt almost gratified when he saw the expression of puzzled disapproval on her face. “That’s sick,” she said softly. “You ought to see a doctor or something.”
He ran down the mountain road toward the village. He had to find help there, he had to find somebody. He would go to the group of Japanese mountain climbers there, a vacationing doctor was with them. He would know what to do. He ran, straining his lungs in the high altitude, gasping for breath.
“I never thought she would die,” Jim went on. “I didn’t think anything would go wrong. We were going to have our first child. Once she got over feeling nauseous in the morning, she was fine. I should have taken her away as soon as I knew.”
“Yes, you should have,” Marlena said harshly. He waited for her accusations passively, almost wanting to hear them. “Who ever heard of somebody dying in childbirth? This isn’t the Middle Ages, you know. What the hell do you think paramedics and artificial wombs are for?”
He was holding Carole in his arms. Behind him, he could hear the doctor and two villagers murmuring over the body of his stillborn son. At last she opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her face had grown extremely pale and her dark hair hung heavily over his arm.
The red stain on the front of her tunic grew larger in spite of the injection the doctor had given her.
“Jim,” she whispered. He leaned closer. “Can we leave now? I want to go home, I miss it. Is it all right?”
“Sure,” he replied, not trying to hide the tears that ran from his eyes. “As soon as you’re well.” He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I shall go to the village and radio for a plane,” the doctor said. Jim glanced at the man and saw the look of hopelessness on his face. At that moment, Carole sighed. He continued to hold her, brushing the hair back from her face, before he realized she was gone.
Marlena was folding her towel. She stood up suddenly and pulled a shift over her nude body. “I don’t understand people like you,” she said as she picked up her towel. “You think everything is better somewhere else.” He became aware again of the implant in her head and thought of it correlating data, coding his experiences and filing them away. “You ought to get some help.” She walked away, weaving a path among the other sunbathers farther up on the beach, and was soon a speck near the rows of hotels and apartment buildings.
He traced a figure in the sand, then erased it with a violent sweep. The Himalayas had mocked him with their majesty, towering around him as he walked with the village procession to the place where they would build a small pyre and burn the bodies of Carole and his son. Some of the people wailed, granting that courtesy to the outsider they had hardly known. A mist shrouded the village behind them as they wound their way along the dirt path. He would keep his promise to Carole in the only way he could, by taking her ashes with him when he left and burying them near the Michigan town where she had grown up.
Jim got to his feet and began to walk back to his hotel. As he passed a group of nude sunbathers, the smell of lotion and sweat mingled with the salt of the sea
and the odor of the dead, decaying fish at the water’s edge. This part of Florida was still a cesspool after all this time, the home of the old and a vacation spot for those who could not afford to go elsewhere. Only the areas around the spaceport, and the cities and towns which housed the workers who built and serviced the aircraft and space shuttles, showed any vitality at all. But it was a machine-like vitality unfamiliar to Jim, filled with calm, orderly sorts who satisfied themselves by working with their hands, conservative engineers, or technicians with implants. Many of the younger people did not seem that different from some of the villagers he had known in Bhutan. The technicians too were in harmony with their environment and seemed to have a sense of their own place in the world. It was the Florida of decaying hotels and sun following transients that Jim preferred.
Once he had sat in a hotel bar in Bali, speaking to a young Balinese man who had studied in North America. “You wanderers puzzle me,” the man had said. “You come to a place and marvel at the serenity of its inhabitants, forgetting that you see the face of a stoicism needed to endure an always present and often unpredictable natural order. You arrive at another place and find healthy people and forget about all those who died as children or were weeded out along the way by natural selection. You delight in the interesting beliefs and customs you find and do not understand the role ignorance and fear play in their perpetuation. We do not want to lose our culture and our roots, but we do not want to exist only as living museums for you to gape at. The past does not work. Cultures change and evolve. We want and need the machines and the knowledge you are so ready to reject. We should at least be given a choice between the old ways and other ways, and be allowed to contribute what is good and valuable in our culture to yours.”
Jim passed a group of brown children and heard their cries as they chased after a large red beach ball. He had wanted to apologize to Carole. He had tried as her body burned on the pyre and he had tried again while he watched the urn of ashes being lowered into her shallow grave. He had not found the words.
If it was true that Carole chose to follow him, it was also true that he had never questioned the wisdom of that course. He had been satisfied because his needs had been fulfilled and had never thought about what Carole’s might have been. For a moment he hated the technological world around him with an intensity that made his knees tremble and bathed his face in sweat. The technology that seemed to surround him on all sides, he thought perversely, had made what would have been in former times an almost normal occurrence, something unavoidable, an incident that need never have happened. His decisions had become the agents of Carole’s death, and not nature or the world.
At this thought he felt shame and a hatred of himself that made him long to trade his life for Carole’s. Would it have mattered to Carole which of the two worlds she had lived in? She would still be gone. But at least in this one, she could still have been at his side, possibly with his son as well, that poor, dead, flesh of potentialities that would never be realized. He did not know how he would ever come to live with that fact. But he felt he deserved the punishment with which his regrets would chastise him.
Mike sat in the hotel dining room, feeling apprehensive and trying to ignore that feeling. Across the table, his nephew Isaac, dressed in a dark blue t-shirt and shorts, was fidgeting restlessly. Al sat on his left, a silent gray presence. Lilo, overdressed as usual in a shiny green gown, was on his right, talking to Ed. Their words seemed to float around him, providing background noise for his thoughts.
“…wanted to have the experience,” Ed was saying. “Sheila doesn’t regret that at all, but she says the next one, if we have another, goes into the ectogenetic chamber.”
Oddly enough, Lilo had not yet been bored. She was always off on some expedition, learning how to fly, exploring the lunar surface, talking to a group of actors making a film. Mike found all this activity almost as disturbing as her boredom might have been. He was beginning to realize that Lilo was changing, that she was not the same person with whom he had come here originally. He might have to make adjustments in his expectations. He almost sighed with exasperation. Well, if I have to, I will. It would be too time-consuming to go through another ruined marriage. Lilo was still young and she had the right, after all, to discover her own interests and pursuits.
She looked toward him and smiled suddenly. He smiled back and took her hand. I don’t want to lose you, he found himself thinking, startled by the intensity of that desire. He held her hand more tightly, then released it.
“You’re late,” Ed was saying. Mike looked up and saw Sheila standing at Ed’s side. “Did you get the permission?”
“He isn’t there,” Sheila Sonnefeld replied, seating herself next to Ed. “Your father isn’t there. An attendant told me it was only a temporary move, maintenance or some such thing, but I got the feeling he didn’t really know why. He’s in a chamber near the medical research center.” She tugged at her white shirt, then rested her elbows on the table.
“You’d think,” Mike said, “that they could let Paul rest in peace.”
“I don’t know why they would move him,” Al said, speaking at last. “Maintenance is no reason for moving someone. In fact it’s risky, considering the equipment needed to maintain the body in its frozen state.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes if a person’s already dead,” Lilo blurted out, then looked around at the others as if embarrassed. She was talking about Paul, after all.
“Some people are donors,” Al said. “They left instructions in their wills that parts of their bodies could be used for emergency organ transplants. So far they haven’t been needed, but you never know, so their bodies have to be maintained. Kira could tell you more about it if she were here.”
“She’s been working too hard,” Ed said. “I’ve hardly seen her at all since arriving. I don’t like to call on her when she’s not busy because I know she’d be better off resting. I have to force her to come to dinner and eat once in a while. Jim’s awfully late, isn’t he.”
“I hope he gets here soon,” Al replied. “I’m kind of nervous, I don’t know what to expect. I wonder what he’s been doing these past few years.”
Mike glanced around the small dining room. Most of the people here were tourists or visiting scientists. The room was simple in design, containing only round tables, plastic booths next to the walls and a small bar in the back. At the tables next to them, three middle-aged couples were sampling the plain lunar cuisine. The lunar communities produced most of their own food, growing it in hydroponic vats and synthesizing the rest from soybeans and protein compounds. It was usually cooked in a simple Chinese manner, making it taste better than it otherwise would, and none of it was wasted. Mike had learned from Al that certain dishes on the menu were nothing more than leftovers from the previous day, sterilized and served again. The beverages, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, were equally nondescript; they and the drinking water here were largely recycled urine. Some food was imported from Earth, and the cost of transporting it was reflected in the high prices next to such dishes on the menu. Across the room, Mike noticed two bearded men eating what looked like an imported meal of fish and wine. It could be a synthetic meal, but somehow he doubted it. The two were consuming it with too much obvious enjoyment.
A man walked through the entrance behind the two diners and stood for a moment surveying the room. He was a tall bony fellow, with a closely trimmed beard flecked with gray hairs. His yellow shirt was rumpled and part of it dangled over the loose brown slacks which hung on his hips. He was slumped over as if carrying a heavy weight; the deep shadows under his eyes seemed almost cavernous. The man’s green eyes met Mike’s.
It’s Jim. Mike tried to rise and found that his knees had locked. He was becoming nervous. What do I have to say to this man, this wasted creature? Jim began to walk toward their table and Mike felt a momentary wave of panic. I should-n’t have come here, I knew it was a mistake. He wanted no part of this misbegotten reunion, t
hese parts of himself.
He suddenly hated them all, hated them for being his relations. He found himself slipping into the role of sibling again, having to spend time with people who had nothing in common with him except genes. Every meeting and conversation with them threatened his sense of identity, every family gathering erased years of effort and made him an awkward boy again, part of them yet alienated from them. He would rather be with his colleagues, those men and women who knew only the side of him he chose to reveal, whose bonds with him were based on friendship, mutual respect, and shared ideas and goals, not this herd of strangers who remembered the boy of eight or eighteen that he thought he had escaped forever. Now they would sink their tendrils into him again, and Lilo as well. He should never have brought her here, exposing her to the strands of the family web. Her parents, thank God, had been dead when he met her and she had no brothers or sisters, a fact he had regarded as fortunate. Now she would latch on to the others to replace her lost family, and he would never be rid of them. They would infect his life again. That’s a family for you, absent when you need them, ever-present when you don’t want them around.
Mike felt a flush of guilt at his angry thoughts. Yes, they can make you feel that too. Why is it that you can choose not to see a friend or acquaintance for a while and never feel that kind of guilt, that sell-accusation? They made him hate himself. They made him hate what he was. He would get through it somehow, and then never see them again, these reflections that made claims on him which acquaintances would never make, demanding love because of a shared genetic strain.
Now he had to meet this stranger he had not seen for years and show him a depth of feeling he would not show even to his closest friends.
Jim sat down between Al and Isaac. Al reached over and flung an arm over his brother’s shoulders. He began to talk to Jim and the words he murmured became an indistinct blur to Mike. Jim’s eyes, gazing past Al, met his again and Mike knew that Jim was thinking the same thing he had thought moments before. We’re all trapped.
Cloned Lives Page 30