Cloned Lives

by Pamela Sargent

  He turned to Ahmed. “What about Jane? Did she make it?” He regretted the question almost immediately. He should have waited for Ahmed to volunteer the information.

  Ahmed, however, did not seem perturbed. “No, but then I knew she would not. She was not ready for it. She accepted the news far better than I would have, and she is making plans to work on Mars next year. I imagine I shall see a lot of her there when we’re going through our training.” The young Arab sighed. His dark brown eyes reflected sadness and resignation. “It was not meant to be. I met an old friend today, Bader Hassan. She is vacationing here. I almost married her years ago, and today I find that she will be going with us, with the anthropologists. Perhaps, when the memory of my dear Jane fades in my mind, my love for Bader will flower once again during our expedition. Perhaps my old impulse was the correct one.”

  Menachem took a drink from his bottle. “Remember when we were at school in Beirut, Ahmed?” he said, trying to cheer his friend. “We used to tell everybody we might someday be going on a journey like this one, and they would smile and tolerate our insanity.” He chuckled. “I hope they’ve all heard the news.”

  Someone pulled at Al’s sleeve. He turned and faced a tall brunette woman. “Albert Swenson?” she said to him in heavily accented English.

  “Yes.”

  “I am Gudrun Permaneder. If you are able, Simone Tran wishes to speak with you.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Outside of this room. I will show you. These several days she has been with me.”

  Al excused himself. “I’ll try to save you some scotch,” Menachem said, “but I don’t know how successful I’ll be.”

  “I’ll buy the next round,” Al replied. He followed Gudrun Permaneder through the crowded room. As he passed the miners, he noticed that their bottles were almost empty. One of the women caught his eye and motioned to him with her hand. He smiled and shook his head. She shrugged and, turning away, gestured to a tall blond fellow nearby.

  Al pressed past a group of Chinese by the door. They were celebrating quietly, sipping sweet wine from shot glasses. They had abandoned their simple costumes for the night; the men were dressed in silken blue tunics, the women in tight flowered gowns. Behind him, someone began to laugh uproariously and he could hear fragments of a German folk song. He almost stumbled over the feet of a multi-national group seated on the floor outside the restaurant, excused himself, then followed Gudrun Permaneder down the hallway.

  Gudrun gestured toward an open doorway, then disappeared down the corridor. Al walked inside.

  Simone sat alone in the small room, feet tucked under her. She held out her hands to him. He took them and sat next to her on the small beige sofa.

  “I wanted to see you, Al, to congratulate you,” she said quietly. “I just could not bring myself to go into the restaurant. I hope you understand.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I was a bit foolish, I know,” she went on. “We can still have time together before you go, and I can continue my work here. In the course of time, we might have parted anyway. I shall eventually become reconciled to this, as Dinh grew to accept my leaving him. It only takes time.”

  “I don’t want to leave you,” he said softly as he put his arms around her. She rested her head against him.

  “Stay with Liu Ching for a while,” Simone said. “She, too, is leaving someone behind. It will make things easier for you both, and for me as well. We must both make our plans now. Then, when we do part, it will be as friends who may meet again after your return.” She smiled briefly. “You know that I would have done exactly what you are doing if it had come to that, so you must never feel guilt or regret that you have left me. Liu Ching will be a good friend to you, whether or not you part on the voyage.”

  Al was silent. Why was it that doing the sensible thing, being rational about this situation, should be so painful? He felt dangerously close to tears. Simone had always been more sensible, more controlled. He had never seen

  her cry, not ever, but she had consoled his tearfulness more than once. He had to restrain himself this time. He could not help feeling that if he gave vent to his feelings now, he would see Simone’s tears for the first time.

  Even though he knew he would regret such an action forever, he wanted to make the grand and irrational gesture, declaim to her that there was nothing in the heavens for him without her, that he would turn the opportunity down, that if he left he would be carrying to the stars a void within himself as black and empty as the space between suns. That, the irrational gesture, was somehow more emotionally fulfilling, more aesthetically satisfying than the reasonable path Simone wished him to choose.

  Strangely enough, he found himself thinking of his brother Jim at this point. He felt almost as if he at last understood his brother’s tormented and irrational life. It had somehow satisfied Jim, that tortuous and erratic path, that life made up of a rejection of the orderly, the reasoned, the scientific. Jim’s life had a compelling, almost insane beauty about it that his own seemed to lack. Its very self-destructiveness was somehow more intense than an orderly life; its suffering weaved a pattern that could draw one on, forcing one to confront human desires, emotions, and finally death. Al felt he could be drawn into such an intensity of experience if he followed his own desires at this point.

  He began to wonder if he had in fact been like Jim all along, pursuing his studies because of an underlying irrationality, drawn on by the awesome and terrible beauty of suns; the inexorable development of galaxies; the dazzling thought of supernovae, dying suns screaming out to the universe in one last expenditure of energy, burning out all life on the planets near them; the face of death in black holes, those singularly terrifying collapsed stars where time and space had run out.

  He would have to leave Simone if he was to continue along the route he had chosen for himself. Perhaps this rational path was really the irrational one, calling upon him as it did to reject her love and friendship for a voyage of indeterminate length with an unknown destination. He looked into her dark eyes and wondered what it would be like, how he would feel when he at last looked at them for what might be the last time.

  “There is a story going around, many rumors,” she said as he watched her. “The story concerns your father. It is said that he rests in the hospital after being dead for many years, that he has been there for several days and more. Some have seen him there, or his room. No one has verified it officially, no one has denied it. I imagine the rumors have reached Earth by now.”

  “It’s true,” he said. He remembered the man he had seen lying in the bed, that frail, uncertain person called Paul Swenson. “The announcement will be made as soon as he’s better.”

  “Perhaps I shall see him with you some day. The story made me happy somehow. I became certain we would meet again. I may be deluding myself, but it helped to hear it.” She patted him on the cheek. “You will not escape me so easily, mon ami. You will find me here when you return.”

  “I hope so.”

  “We shall have a celebration for you, I and my grandchildren.”

  He held her more closely.

  “He seems better,” Lilo said to Mike as they walked along the hospital hallway. “He was more talkative, and he looks a little younger and healthier too.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Mike muttered. “The treatments should rejuvenate him to some extent.” As they passed the hospital cafeteria, he stopped. “Let’s get a cup of coffee.”

  Lilo nodded and they entered the room. Mike walked over to the console on the wall, punched two buttons, took out the coffee, and handed a cup to Lilo. He preferred not to think about the lonely resurrected man he had just seen. The entire notion had been a mad one, and he could not understand why Kira, whom he had thought of as sensible, had sought to actualize her idea. How am I supposed to treat this man? It was not Paul he had visited, but an aged child. He tried not to remember that once he and the others had been a mad idea of Paul’s and Hidey�
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  They sat down at a table near the door. The cafeteria was practically empty, for good reason, Mike discovered, when he tasted the coffee. Kira had mentioned to him that most of the medical personnel ate elsewhere when they could, though the food was not much better anywhere on the moon.

  Lilo made a face as she sipped her coffee. “God, this is terrible. I haven’t had a decent, meal since we got to this rockpile.” Her tan had faded and she looked more subdued today, wearing a brown shirt and slacks which matched his. Her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. “Well, I guess there are some compensations. I could have sat with that observatory telescope forever. You can see everything with it. I could see Mars close up, with dust storms and everything.”

  “Lilo,” Mike said, “forgive me for saying this, but I don’t understand something. You still don’t seem to realize what’s happened to Paul, what Kira’s done. You’ve been treating it almost as an everyday occurrence.”

  “How do you want me to act? I don’t know what he was like before. I don’t see him the same way you do.” She looked down at the table, then back to him. “I know you think I’m kind of dumb about a lot of things, you’ve never said so, but I can tell from the way you treat me. You may think this is strange, but I always knew something like this would happen. I could tell from the little I knew, a long time ago I figured they would thaw out one of the long-term freeze cases, I figured they could do it as soon as I knew they sometimes froze people temporarily for different kinds of operations. I knew it was just a matter of time and finding the right person.”

  “Well…” he started to say.

  “Please don’t interrupt me, just this once. The people I knew, sometimes they’d talk about something like this happening. It isn’t really any stranger than that replicator thing you’ve been working on, or whatever it is. I guess I just grew up knowing inside that the world would be different, that things would change, that maybe, if we put our minds to it, we could have almost everything we wanted someday. Maybe I would have been smarter if my father hadn’t died when I was little. He used to tell me how things might be. He wasn’t so bright either in certain ways, but he had an instinct, he could tell how things might change. That’s how he made his money.” She shrugged. “So I’m not really surprised. You may not realize it, but I listen to people and I learn. I learned from your friends, even if you think it’s just an act. I always liked people who were doing different things, and I would listen to them so I could learn and maybe figure out what I’d like to do someday. A lot of times they’d patronize me, sort of, think I was funny for asking simple questions, but I found out what I wanted to know, so I didn’t care.”

  “Well, did you find out what you wanted to do?” Mike asked, trying to repress the bite in his voice.

  “No.” She glared at him as he snorted. “But I will. Even if it takes me a long time. I like working with children but I don’t know if that’s what I really want. When we get back home, I can study. The computer’s always there. I can tune in lectures and enroll in some courses.”

  “That ought to keep you occupied for a couple of months.”

  “Goddamn it, Mike,” she almost whispered in a tone of voice he had not heard before, a steady determined tone. “I wish just once you’d treat me as a person or take me seriously instead of thinking I’m an amusing child or something. You’re a bully sometimes, you know that? You keep away from people, you don’t open up to them, or you like to dictate to them, have them dependent on you in some way without giving them anything back. Maybe that’s why you married me, I don’t know. I wish you would open up to me, be what I know you are. I know why I married you. Part of it was that I had this infatuation with you, I’ll admit that, but part of it was that I really loved and admired you and I could see what you really were underneath that cold surface. I wish you would let me see that more often. I wish I could feel that I was more important to you, and that you wanted to help me in whatever I decided to do, that I wasn’t just a pretty toy.”

  Mike stared into his coffee. He felt vaguely threatened by her words, and afraid of her. This had not been part of the bargain, these entangled emotions and ambitions. He could feel himself drawing back from her.

  Yet he knew he did not want to lose her. He knew that he was perhaps more dependent on Lilo than she realized. He valued her interest in his work, her curiosity, and her affection. He would have to learn to value her newfound assertiveness, too, if he were not to lose her.

  He reached across the table and took her hand. “Give me some time,” he said at last. “I can’t change overnight, you know, but I can try.” He was forcing his words out. “I really do love you, Lilo. Maybe I haven’t been fair to you. Just give me a chance.”

  She smiled. “Maybe some of it’s my fault too, Mike. There were times I figured I didn’t have to do much, that it was enough to be with interesting and creative people, but I guess I’m starting to realize I want something of my own. It probably won’t be anything really tremendous, like what you and the other clones are doing, but at least it’ll be mine.”

  “Well, you just find it and do it then, whatever it is.”.

  She nodded and held his hand more tightly. In a way, he was almost relieved to hear what Lilo had said. He had not honestly respected the narcissistic girl he thought he had married; she had been just an amusement. He should have seen the clues when he first arrived here. Kira and Al, those two who had been so startled by their marriage, had got along well with Lilo after meeting her. He should have realized they would not have felt that way about the person he once thought Lilo was. What he had taken for a lack of discipline or a short attention span had been simply a young person’s desire to explore different things and find her own goals.

  He could almost flatter himself now with the thought that somehow, unconsciously, he might have sensed this in Lilo or he would not have married her.

  “We’ll go home,” he said, “and you think about what you want to do, and maybe you can visit Kira and Hidey for a while. You could probably help Paul too. You seem to be the only one of us that could just accept it right away.”

  “I think I’d like to do that.”

  “I wanted you to meet your grandson,” Ed said.

  Paul’s bed had been cranked up and he sat there, nodding politely at Ed’s statement. For a moments Ed was afraid of what Paul might say to Isaac. The older Swenson was still trying to recover his memory and catching up on their activities over the past twenty years. He was also, with the aid of the medical computer next to him, catching up on world affairs and scientific developments. The computer, which was still monitoring Paul’s bodily functions, could also provide print-outs on various topics, linked as it was to the central computer bank on the moon. A hypnotherapist was helping him recover his memories; Ed did not know how well that effort was going.

  Paul did look healthier. There were traces of brown in his gray hair and his gaunt face was beginning to look rounder. The intravenous feeding tube had been removed and he was taking mild exercise, walking through the hospital corridors and having short sessions in the nearby gymnasium. One of the technicians was instructing Paul in simple biofeedback techniques so that he could eventually monitor, his own functions. At the time of his death, such techniques had been in more primitive stages, used primarily by athletes, the chronically ill, and those who spent a lot of time in space.

  Isaac too seemed a little uneasy at this meeting. The boy stepped forward and took Paul’s hand. “Hello,” Isaac said, glancing at Sheila for an instant, then turning back to his grandfather.

  Paul was staring past the child. “Ed,” he said quietly, and Ed could not tell if his father was addressing him or Isaac. “So much time,” Paul murmured, and Ed realized suddenly how much he must have resembled Isaac as a child. Paul must feel as estranged from them as they did from him. It was not the unknown adults who gathered uncomfortably around his bed who would evoke his feelings. It was Isaac, who mirrored what they once had been.
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br />   “You don’t look like a grandfather,” the boy said. “You look older than grandfathers I’ve seen.”

  Ed could see Sheila wince slightly at Isaac’s frankness. Fear flickered for an instant on Paul’s face, then faded. “I’ve been told,” he said, “that people don’t age as rapidly as they did when I…you see, I had to be an old person before I could get anti-aging injections, but apparently that isn’t true now.”

  “Did you really die?” Isaac asked.

  “Yes, I did, at least technically.”

  “What was it like?”

  Paul shook his head. His bewildered eyes settled on Ed. “I could accept it. That happens, you become…” He grew silent. Ed sensed a feeling of loss in his father, and wondered what he had experienced. He suddenly understood Paul’s dilemma. He might regain all his memories in time, only to find himself dislocated and removed by years from all he had known and loved; or he might recover so little of his identity that he would be, in effect, another person, as innocent as a child.

  “Tell me about your interests,” Paul said to Isaac, “what you like to do.”

  “I play the violin, so I practice most of the time. I’m going to audition for Julius Riggs this summer and if I’m good enough, I’ll be able to go to his school in London next year and study with him.”

  “Aren’t you very young to go so far away from home?”

  “He has the legal right to make his own decisions,” Sheila said sadly, “plus one advantage over adults. He can-come home any time he wants and just be a kid again.” She gazed hopefully at her son, who was ignoring the remark.

  “Sheila’s old-fashioned,” Ed said gently, trying to reassure his wife with a smile. “She comes from a very close-knit family.” He paused, realizing how shocking this attitude toward children must seem to Paul. As his father watched Isaac, Ed recalled an adolescent boy, years before, who had desperately wanted Paul to give up his trip to the moon.