BOOG’/4 AND THE ENDICARAN KLUGE, by A. R. Morlan
I.
déjà vécu (“already lived through”)
“Yes, I know you! You know me, too!”
—Bernann McKinney, owner of cloned pit bull “Booger” upon seeing the five puppies cloned from his cells, 8-5-08
“Panta rhei, oudenmenei” (“Everything flows, nothing stands still”)
—Heraclitus (c. 540-480 B.C.)
Turning over onto his left side, so that he could nudge the back of his newly Emerge-ated partner with his bare abdomen, Duncan/Badru Tearlach whispered into Annemie/Rabiah Egidius’ freshly pierced ear, “Let’s go down to Deck Six, see how they’re growing…. I need to see how Duncan/Anum’s doing.” Without moving, or acknowledging his persistent body-slams against her buttocks, Annemie/Rabiah thought, You said exactly the same thing when you were still ’woomed on Deck Six…of course, you were Duncan/Mensah then, and wanted to stare at Duncan/Badru, just as I was Annemie/Ottah. And in a few years, once we’ve gone through Dissolution, and we’re Duncan/Anum and Annemie/Layl, we will have this same conversation yet again, as you use my behind like the wall of a racquet-ball court....
Funny, how each of their successive cloned incarnations felt the same; each time Duncan pushed his abdomen against her bare skin, it never felt different. The texture of his skin was a constant, as much so as his predictable post-lovemaking prattle. Always just slightly rough, richly textured, as if he were still deeply tanned and wind-chapped from rock climbing shirtless, or windsurfing for hours on end, while she’d sat waiting patiently on the beach, watching him with that first rush of pure, undiluted longing she’d felt during their Alpha existence, four Boog’ lifetimes ago. No, not really lifetimes, more like life segments ago. Out here, far between planets, far between major star systems, the lifetime of a Boog’ was less than a decade, depending on how much prolonged weightlessness and cosmic radiation a particular Boog’ could stand.
In the case of each of the Annemie’s, starting with /Alula, and going through /Pili and most lately /Ottah, her Boog’s could stand about nine years’ worth of the worst the galaxy had to offer a human (or cloned-human) body, before bone degeneration and widespread cancers weakened each installment of her never-ending young adulthood, and her lifepartner Duncan/Whatever, who’d been Emerge-ated (Boog’ slang for Emerged/Reintegrated) between two to three years before her latest version, would stay by her bedside while she was Rested (more Boog’ slang, for Terminated, Killed, Put to Clone Pasture), then greet her during the post-Emergence stage, when her previously blank mind was absorbing the engrams and biochemical data-dump from not only her Alpha memory, but each successive set of memories. Just as she would do the same for each new Duncan/Whoever, during their Overlap periods.
As much as Duncan/Et Al. seemed to relish their Overlaps, for the renewed opportunity each one gave him to literally start their relationship exactly where it left off the last time, down to him ordering each version of Veronica Lea to make sure that the newly de-woomed Annemie had exactly the same piercings and tattoos in precisely the same spots on each new body, plus her hair had to be cut and styled exactly the way it was when her Alpha was placed in Cryo-Storage, deep within the bowels of their spacecraft. And since Duncan’s Alpha had had an inkling that his little soulmate, his once-student/now lifemate/forever partner might not be so concerned about making sure that each and every new Duncan resembled Him-As-He-Began, he’d left explicit, specific, and do-it-or-freaking-else instructions as to how his latest clone was to be prepared for Emergence: all head and body hair trimmed to a precise quarter-inch in length; left ear lobe pierced twice, right once; “Gra anois agus go deo” tattooed in Midnight Black 4-Ever ink across his heart, and “Annemie Always” along the crease of his left thigh, where it met his pelvis; and three scars, of unvarying length, placed on his right knee, left forearm, and right underside of his chin, in honor of significant sporting accidents.
So every time when her latest clone bade farewell to the space-aged Duncan in the Dissolution Chamber, she knew that the next Duncan to occupy the Parthenogenesis Chamber (the official name of what they soon dubbed the Emergence Chamber) would be absolutely, undeniably, mind-numbingly the same as the old one whose carcass was slowly being absorbed in the Deck Ten Fertilization Pit, turning into food for the worms used in the Bio-fuel lab. Which rendered their initial meetings déjà-vu-like in their sameness—
Just as he had done before, and before and be-freaking-fore, Duncan pulled her close to his body, forcibly spooning, as he whispered more loudly into her ear, “Let’s go, OK? See the new kids? They won’t know—”
“—we’re looking at them,” Annemie/Rabiah finished for him, as she wiggled out of his encircling grasp, and sat up on their bed, staring down at Duncan/Badru’s clearly puzzled face, trying to remember just what it was about him that had made her decide to do this in the first place. In the Alpha time, when they were originals back on Earth, he her former professor of Applied Quantum Physics, and she his TA/turned lover turned lifemate, when the twenty-year age difference between them was a real thing, and not merely a trick of the memory arbitrarily imposed through successive cognitive downloads in his now-younger body.
He placed a hand on her left thigh, the one with the newly-applied tattoo of a white rose over his first name (this latest tat was by far the closest to the one her Alpha had received months before they found out that they’d both passed the endless medical tests, physical, psychological, and most importantly, genetic, prior to being cloned; clearly, this latest Veronica Lea was improving as a tattoo artist), but she gently pushed it away, saying, “Why do you always ask the same question? It’s been less than a week since I was ’woomed, and you want me to go look at the next ’woomed me. In all her uncomprehending glory...untouched by Veronica’s artistic ministrations—”
Duncan pulled his legs under himself, Lotus-style, and began fingering the small hoops in each ear-lobe with both hands while he cocked his head to the left (a sure sign he was genuinely puzzled), and said, “Why wouldn’t you want to see her? I never get tired of seeing my successors...all of them lined up, each in a different stage of growth...I can’t think of anything more beautiful to behold. Remember Heraclitus? We flow from one form to another, yet always end up the same—”
“I seriously doubt that that’s what the good Greek meant at all. I took it to mean that life constantly changes, which enables our eventual growth and transformation...not an endless cycle of growth, culminating in a repeat of what was before—a deliberate repetition of our former selves, I must add—”
“Is this about your hair? It is, isn’t it? Before we left, you loved it, and I distinctly remember, after four neuro-transfers, that you adored the way mine looked, too—”
She pulled her legs up close to her body, hiding her intimate parts from him, and covered the sides of her head with both hands, before closing her eyes. He would think it was just about their hair, of all the trivial things. Four neuro-transfers later, she did recall that uninhibited evening when they’d gotten the news that both of them had made the cut, been accepted for the colony ship mission, out of hundreds of applicants across the country, when they’d eaten at that Eastern Chinese restaurant, ordering all the extra spicy things on the menu, then wandered off to a neighboring bar to cool down with a few beers, and during the walk back to their apartment, they’d passed that barber shop, the slightly punk one which stayed open until ten, and Duncan had suddenly remarked that between his growing bald spot and the increase in gray hairs along his temples, perhaps it was time to do something permanent about it, even though he’d soon be in cryo suspension once the clones were harvested from his body, and the condition of his hair would be a moot point. Looking at the sun-blued posters of various hair styles (or hair removals, depending on one’s point of view) a drunken Annemie had teased, “Why not get rid of it?” Ever the literalist, Duncan had pushed open the door, and told the lone stylist in the shop, “Take o
ff everything above the Adam’s apple but the eyebrows,” before plopping clumsily into the nearest chair.
She remembered exactly what she’d thought that evening, sitting there across from Duncan, seeing him free of professor-foliage for literally the first time since they’d met five years before—he looks so much younger, and so sexy. Like a student, not a teacher....
Which, in quadruple retrospect, should’ve been a warning sign, but she was young, buzzed on MSG and good German beer, and when Duncan suggested that she get what he dubbed a “Pixie-cut”—something he’d had to explain to the Mohawked barber who’d just shorn him—Annemie had willingly hopped into the chair, and allowed herself to be draped, but she did recall how she’d flinched and kept on flinching when the clippers peeled away layer after layer of her honey-amber hair, until she was left with close-cropped sides and a short-banged thatch of barely-enough-to-comb hair on the top and back of her head. Closer to a Fauxhawk than what Duncan called a Pixie, but once she saw it in the mirror, she’d told herself she loved it, because of the way Duncan was beaming at her. But another thing she remembered, when they were being officially cloned in that lab a week later, their cells harvested by tyvek-clothed labtechs, was that she kept telling herself it would all grow back once they were on the colony planet....
She’d never said as much to Duncan, but when Annemie/Alula finally wore out, eight years into the first leg of the voyage, the last thing she had thought before closing her eyes was When I’m Annemie/Pili, the Pixie’s gone…only to awaken, and groggily reach up and feel close-cropped hair, under Duncan/Manu’s approving stare. To keep peace with him while both of them were active, she’d kept the hairdo he claimed to love so much, at least during the first cloning period, but once she awoke pre-clipped, she realized that Duncan and change were incompatible concepts....
“You never griped about seeing them before,” Duncan/Badru pouted, as he quitted the bed, and began pulling on his tee shirt and pants, while she continued to sit curled up on the bed, silently watching him. Easing on the slipper-like shoes all the Boog’s wore (once they were outside any cabins or work areas, where near-Earth gravity was maintained, it was pretty much free-float and grab onto whatever hand grips were available, a situation which made wearing hard-soled shoes inadvisable, least someone float into another person feet-first), he continued “I’m surprised they don’t fascinate you anymore. What was it you said the last time? ‘It’s like watching myself grow up all over again.’ And once we’d watched them for awhile, we came back here and—”
“Annemie/Pili said that. Not Annemie/Ottah. By the third time, seeing myself enter puberty, again, was more depressing than stimulating.”
“Puberty depressing? I never thought I’d hear you say that...how old did you say you were when you first—?”
“Not me, Alpha Annemie. Ever since her, I’ve lost my virginity at the relatively ripe age of twenty-five. What she did when she was thirteen is a moot point, now. She’s still twenty-five and holding, and she’s the one who lost it less than half her life ago. I don’t remember my puberty...I don’t remember anything, because I was only half-alive. Same as your clones—”
For a few minutes, Duncan/Badru stood near the pocket doorway, arms folded, lower lip pushed out, eyes narrowed, watching her, as she remembered how all of the colonist/crew members visited their Next Bodies at least once or twice in the years following their most recent Emerge-ation, either singly or in groups; but to keep visiting one’s own Next long before it was to be needed was a sign of almost unforgivable vanity and hubris, a form of mirror-gazing that would’ve bored even Narcissus after a while. Damn Duncan and his insatiable self-love, she found herself thinking, as the object of her growing bitterness abruptly shrugged and said, “Stay here if you wish, I just have to see Duncan/Anum. I’m going to stay long enough to see if his eyes move under his eyelids. That’s a sign he might be dreaming.... I read once that babies and even chicks in the shell dream. I wonder what he might dream of....” Duncan/Badru let his voice trail off in a false show of Hey-everything-will-be-OK-fine-if-I-keep-filling-her-silences-with-happy-prattle. Something Duncan/Manu had started, of that she was sure.
Once he’d quitted their cabin, she got up and pulled on her own tee shirt and pants; all of the Boog’s had stopped wearing underwear two body changes ago—living in space, one’s sweat and body oils tended to cling to one’s body, and the officially-issued coveralls they’d been given to wear were like body-soil traps which didn’t let their skin breathe properly, and underwear only exacerbated the problem. Thankfully, Jansur Lea Alpha had crammed dozens of tee shirts into his allotment of personal items (whatever fit in a standard, ten-gallon plastic tote), so once the second clones decided that not only were their uniforms uncomfortable, but that they never did rinse out well in what little non-drinking/non-bathing water they had available, they all began wearing whatever tees each subsequent Jansur grew tired of, along with his surgical scrub bottoms. Glancing down at what was written on her shirt, Annemie/Rabiah had to laugh:
If you knew what I was thinking,
you’d be very disappointed.
It might even be worth following Duncan/Anum down to Deck Six just to see his face when he emerged from the Gestation Chamber and saw what her shirt had to say to him during her tense silence.
As she bent down to toe on her slipper-shoes, Annemie/Rabiah unexpectedly found herself on her palms and knees on the grubby, low-napped felted “carpet,” her slipper shoes inches away from her nose, as the ship shook and rolled around her; and then she was on her back, her right side slammed against the side of the bed, and her stomach felt as if it had actually parted company with the rest of her body, and was free-floating somewhere in the walkway beyond the cabin she and the Duncans shared. The ship’s usual smooth gliding motion (less nauseating than a multiple-story Earth elevator ride, thanks to the craft’s combination of nuclear engines and solar-sail propulsion) was now erratic, wrenching, but the lack of any unusual sound was disconcerting. The ship’s hull was well-insulated, but surely one of the other Boog’s had to have been walking from one deck or another, or out in the corridor, or found him or herself out away from their cabin, caught up in the rolling motion—she knew that if she weren’t in her cabin, she’d be screaming and yelling, and every one of the Veronicas were noisy as hell under any circumstances, so not hearing anyone say anything was disconcerting....
(Oh god, please don’t let them be dead, she thought, beseeching a non-specific deity, since she and all her crewmate Boog’s were nonbelievers by happenstance, not by selection...no deeply religious sorts had passed the would-be-colonist psych exams, but in this instance, she unconsciously proved the atheists-in-foxholes adage to be more or less true.)
Then, as unexpectedly as it had begun, the rocking, jarring motion stopped. Wondering how many minutes the ship had been in rough flight, she pulled herself up onto the bed, and inched her way across it lengthwise, so that her still bare feet were hanging off one side. Let Duncan/Badru waste his time taking navel-gazing to new extremes. She doubted that he’d even bother to read her tee shirt’s inscription—none of the Duncans, from the Alpha on down to his fourth clone, could look at her for more than a few seconds without his eyes wandering down level with her nipples....
She didn’t realize that she’d dozed off until she heard the muffled pounding on the cabin door, something unusual in that no one ever bothered to actually knock—the walls within the ship had poor soundproofing on the corridor end, and all anyone had to do was speak loudly with their mouth close to the door to be heard—so initially Annemie/Rabiah thought she was dreaming after waking, until she heard Mila/Rabiah Demkakova, the Med-Tech who worked in the Clone Gestation Chamber yelling, “Annemie? You in there? Open up, now…I’ve got...some news for you,” only there was something in the way she said “news” that made Annemie/Rabiah realize that she wasn’t asleep anymore—nor would she be able to sleep for what might be a long, terrible time.
II.
jamais vu (“never seen”)
“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
—Goethe
All the while Jansur/Badru Lea was speaking to her, after she’d warily left her cabin arm-in-arm with Mila/Rabiah (at the latter’s insistence; despite years spent together in various incarnations of the same body, the two women barely knew each other), who brought her to the cabin shared by the married Leas, all Annemie/Rabiah could think about was the lecture on Paradigm shifts she’d heard while still an Alpha, once she and the first Duncan had arrived at the space center for their cloning. It was then that she’d learned for the first time that none of the Alphas would be awake during take-off—thanks to some Nobel prize winner earning his award for figuring out how to cure a rare but horrifying childhood genetic illness called progeria, the genetic team who’d be doing their series of clones could create a first round of clones which would mature to the physical equivalent of early adulthood within less than one calendar year—the main problem with these clones would be an extremely short, intense life span—within a decade, they’d literally wear out, due to the genetic acceleration brought about by a combination of deliberate genetic mutations which mimicked certain elements of progeria, plus changes in the teleomeres within each cell of the clones’ bodies. Thus, a clone would mature at a hyper-fast rate, only to physically peak for a double handful of years, then rapidly age and expire.
Once Upon a Future Page 6