“Wait-wait-wait,” she mumbled, shaking Mrs. Lea’s hand off of hers, and waving one forefinger in Jasnur/Badru’s pasty-pale face, “I heard you when you said the clone is out for a transplant. And I know this equipment which will let you regrow fingers and small...stuff like that is locked in the cargo section. Hey, we’re just Boog’s, so what’s a missing finger? Wait a few years, and it’ll be back next time, right? So which one of us donates a limb, huh?”
“None of us. But I think we have something on board which...might work. For a while, at least. In form, if not in function—”
“You sound like a freaking intern, again, Jas—listen, Annemie, did Duncan tell you about what Ophile and Koenraad found when they took the shuttle to that planet in the Delta Pavonis system, the fourth one from the star, a heavy-g, dense planet with a minimal axial tilt, and a 79% nitrogen/20% oxygen, 2 % mixed argon/carbon dioxide/nitrous oxide atmosphere? The one with the ocean, and carbon-binding life forms—”
“Now you’re sounding like a Teaching Assistant—listen, Annemie, they found life forms there. And brought some back—Duncan never told you? I’m not surprised, it was something new for a change—where Ophelie/Rabiah’s been keeping them alive in her lab—”
“Sentient beings?”
“No, love, no wise tribal types who can magically cure Duncan, but it is a carbon-based life form, which—”
“—naturally binds with the hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur in any living organism,” Jasnur/Badru continued, his words merging effortlessly with those of his wife, “regardless of the host organism’s inherent suspension medium, until a bond forms between the two organisms...a form of symbiosis, which lasts indefinitely—or at...least until Ophelie/Rabiah peeled the life form off a sheet of cloned skin cells in a tray. Anyhow, this creature is part of the chordate phylum, or something damn close to it, with a notochord—” noticing her open-mouthed confusion, he backtracked, “—which means a flexible rod-like ‘spine’ in its back. Anyhow, it has a radial shape naturally, somewhat like a starfish back home, and its cephalized...all the sensory organs, such as they are, are in one location. But in terms of physical structure, it’s an endicara, too...on Earth, such creatures were sort of...quilted beings, consisting of layers of cells in long ribbons, flat cakes, or sheets. So this...thing can mold itself into a variety of basic five-limbed configurations. Plus physically bond to a host-being—”
“—and as it bonds, and...feeds, it can grow. And change shape, in a semblance of aggressive mimicry, to more closely match the appearance of the host organism. Once Ophelie laid one of them on that sheet of her own cloned skin cells, it started to look like her—”
Gradually, what the Leas were describing began to become real in Annemie/Rabiah’s mind...while she’d had no idea the others had an alien organism on board, thanks to Duncan/Badru’s choke-hold on her every waking free moment, what they were telling her about stirred memories of all the biology courses she’d taken while an Alpha, and suddenly she blurted out, “Are you suggesting I allow this...endicara—whatever to...to bond with my Duncan? How can that be of any help to—?”
“Annemie, listen, you know Duncan better than any of us, perhaps as well as he knows himself. Now do you honestly believe that he will be able to actually live as either a double amputee, or as someone with no real feeling in whatever limbs we are able to give him down the line? You know yourself, even transplanted limbs take months, sometimes years, to generate feeling. This organism responds to stimuli, so we suspect it has a sense of touch. Which may well transfer to the host organism. In time, it will begin to look like his flesh. We can develop armatures which will take the place of his bones, and this organism will surround them, if they’re organic-based cartilage. In zero grav, the ability to make the leg weight-bearing will be moot. And the arm will function well enough for him to continue with his share of the workload. The creatures have no real brains; they’re not advanced enough for that. And they seem to need to attach themselves to something, anything, on a primal level. Ophelie/Rabiah has ten of them in her lab...more than enough to mimic the muscle/flesh ratio on his limbs, to keep him roughly symmetrical. Don’t look away, this is crucial—before I amputate, I’d like to have everything in place, to begin reconstruction or augmentation or whatever you want to call it to make yourself comfortable with this decision; so...will you allow me to do this? Or would you rather I bring him out of sedation so he can make the decision? I have him on the same type of cooling catheter as our Alphas, to minimize further damage, and he’s on massive doses of painkillers...which I’ll have to stop for awhile before he can give any consent. I won’t operate on a doped Boog’s say-so...but you can decide for him, spare him the pain, and shock—”
“Do I have to look at him? Before I decide?”
“Not...if you don’t want to have that memory passed from Boog’ to Boog’. And not if you want to remember him as he was this morning. As he will be, again, in a few years...what’s in the lab is not the same Duncan you’ve known. You can if you want to—I can’t stop you. But personally...I wouldn’t. Bad enough his paradigm’s gonna be shifted around at least 180° when he finally does come to. This will blow his /Mosi awakening out of the freaking water....”
Overlapping memories of each Duncan’s unchanging form filled her mind; from the plushy bristle-haircut, to the unvarying tattoos and piercings, to the habitual poses he’d strike after uttering the changeless platitudes and rote words of carbon-copy affection, all of them virtually indistinguishable from Duncan Alpha all the way down to Duncan/Badru (the number four must be so, so unlucky—); but all that mental symmetry was gone, ripped asunder and patched together just a tad off center, like trying to tape together a piece of paper torn across the jagged, against-the-grain center. There was no way to reconnect the edges cleanly. Her Duncan, her Duncans, were gone.
For this segment of her stop-and-start-over life, at any rate.
She felt the Leas watching her, waiting, and before the thought actually registered in her mind, she heard herself say, “Do whatever you have to do. As long as those...things won’t be harmed. Or torn apart. If they’ll stay on him, put them there. Just...leave me alone until he heals, if he heals. Don’t tell him I gave permission until I can tell him myself...” and then propelled herself along the corridor for a few feet, until she thought of something and worked her way back to the waiting Leas.
“Don’t cut his hair while he’s recuperating, OK? Just tell him—just tell—oh, the hell with it. Don’t tell him anything. Just don’t do it, OK?”
If the paradigm is going to shift, let it be a huge shift, she found herself thinking, as she grabbed jutting handstrap after handstrap along the corridor, moving in a slow bobbing motion, like hair floating in a cryo tank....
III.
presque vu (“almost seen”)
PESSIMIST: The Glass Is Half Empty
OPTIMIST: The Glass Is Half Full
ACCOUNTANT: Does the Glass Really Need All That Water?
PHILOSOPHER: If No One looks at the Glass, Who’s To Say How Full or Empty It Is?
ENGINEER: The Glass Is Twice As Big As It Needs To Be
QUANTUM PHYSICIST: The Glass Has a 50% Probability of Holding Water
CLONE: No Matter If The Glass Is Full or Empty—It Was My Alpha’s Glass, Not Mine
—Augmented inscription on a tee-shirt belonging to Dr. Jansur Lea (Alpha)
During the twenty-four hours it took for Dr. Lea and the fourth Mila Demkakova to work on Duncan/Badru (doing what amounted to experimental surgery no doctor back on Earth would have even begun to consider...but Alpha human doctors and fourth generation Boog’ doctors were not at all the same animal, Annemie/Rabiah began to realize), Veronica/Rabiah and Colin/Badru took turns sitting with her, attempting to explain what the creatures found on that fourth planet looked like, since she adamantly refused to go to Ophelie/Rabiah’s lab to see them for herself:
“Remember starfish? Imagine one that’s soft
, tender to the touch, like sun-burned skin, and longer, tapering limbs, only flatter, with a darkish vein or cord running just under the dermis on one limb...sort of an off-golden russet color—”
“But the cord, could it be a brain? Are you sure it isn’t sentient?”
“No, we’re not sticking something onto him which doesn’t want to be there...there’s no neural tissue in it, anywhere—Ophelie cut up one that was already dead on the planet, not any of the living ones. They simply have this way of adapting, physically, to whatever they attach themselves to. Like an inchoate need to merge with another organi7sm. They feed by exposure to sunlight plus submersion in whatever chemically nutrient-loaded liquid they could find on the planet, which included puddles of the planet’s precipitation. They don’t actually crawl from place to place, but sort of...ooze is the best way I can describe it. Really, you should come see them...they’re sort of beautiful, in a...slippery sort of way—”
But what Veronica/Rabiah, she of the artistic hobbies and throw-back hippy-Earth-Mother-free-love aesthetics, thought was weirdly beautiful, Colin/Bardu merely considered a means to a somewhat dubious end:
“Once these things are bonded to Duncan’s stumps, they’ll be self-sufficient. Along the terminus, cellular bonding will occur. These things latch onto virtually anything organic. Once they’re on, my mate and the doctor will secure them with temporary braces and bindings, until they adhere to the artificial bone armatures. If we had the equipment in storage, they could attempt to re-grow the remainder of both limbs, but there’s no use taking things our Alphas will need on the colony planet out for use on a fungible clone. Besides, this is mostly a cosmetic surgery—I’m sure Duncan could do most of his duties with no prosthesis at all...all he does is push buttons, and he can learn to do that left-handed...personally, and I must add, this is just my opinion, what I’d do if Mila were in Duncan’s predicament would be to amputate, rehabilitate, and do the same thing to her Next that was done to the Manu/Pili clones...accelerate them just enough to fill in the age gap between our first sets of fully age-accelerated clones, and the natural maturation of the Mensah/Ottah series. Considering that the last three sets of clones haven’t even been started out yet from their embryonic states, all Dr. Lea would need to do is change the clone-gestation schedules—”
Listening to him, Annemie/Rabiah recalled the discussion she’d had with Duncan while they were both Alpha, back when they’d first signed up for the government-sponsored colony-ship program, while Duncan was still teaching, and she was working toward the graduate degree she never quite finished on Earth...prospective candidates were initially screened, much like prospects for those computer dating services which had been around for over a century...when they got the e-mails saying they’d made the first round (that round consisting of over fifty couples from all over the country), her Alpha had wondered aloud, “Why are they planning to narrow this down to only four couples? That can’t provide enough genetic diversity once the colonists arrive, and start makin’ babies—”
“You didn’t read your Heinlein, did you? That’s why it pays to take more electives, whether you need them or not...Professor Moussaieff’s Science Fiction 405 should’ve been a must for you last semester. I’ve audited it five times over the years...anyhow, in Stranger in a Strange Land, the fictional Mars mission included four couples, since that was the number of people best thought to be able to stand being with each other on a long space journey, without ending up killing each other along the way. Less or more than that was deemed unsuitable. Of course, fiction being fiction, complications are needed, and all eight people end up dead anyhow, but I suspect this mission’s crew compliment has more to do with storage of food and fuel for a rotating eight-man crew than anything else. Besides, I heard that they’ll be taking along a sperm and donor-egg bank’s worth of genetic material. Which will take care of the genetic diversity aspects of the project. I just don’t know if I can stand playing day-care operator for at least eighteen years once we get there—”
“If we get there…and I thought you said you wanted kids? My kids—”
The discussion had petered out that rainy afternoon back in Boston, mainly because Duncan had started taking her clothes off, but partly because Annemie hadn’t wanted to somehow jinx their chances of making it into the final four couples. Of getting the opportunity to be with Duncan for over a century without actually aging herself...at the time, it had seemed so wondrously magical, an almost endless time to get to know each other like few couples had the opportunity to really know each other, and all without having to actually grow old along with that person.
What she hadn’t counted on was the discovery that knowing Duncan meant merely that...knowing, not understanding. Like never being able to progress beyond nodding at a passing neighbor in the apartment house hallway day after day, without advancing to exchanged pleasantries or an exchange of names....And the most annoying thing under these genetically-contrived circumstances was the fact that all four couples had been specifically chosen for a single factor above and beyond great genes—they were hopelessly, inherently, unshakably hard-wired as a couple to stay a couple. None of them were philanderers by nature, and in four lifetimes of cloned “life” none of them had swapped mates. So there would be no chance of them cheating (the very thing which caused the deaths of the crew in that Heinlein novel, which all of her clones eventually did get around to reading), no infighting, and no leaving one’s soul-mate. Even if one’s current mate was a being whose status as a being with a soul was in philosophical doubt....
“Colin/Badru, how long do you think Duncan/Badru will be able to live with his injuries? Long enough to prevent his Next from being accelerated?”
“Uhmmm...the doc would know for sure, but from what Mila’s told me...this might knock a few years off due to the ongoing stress, and of course, the missing four feet of his intestine might play hell with his ability to absorb nutrients, no one knows for sure, but he should hold out for probably most of his projected lifespan. But I’d prepare myself for lasting longer than he does this time around, definitely. I’m thinking depression alone will subtract more than a year or two—”
“Just how old are our Nexts? Chronologically, to the year?”
“Jansur/Badru keeps track of that, but I’d guess around twelve-thirteen for yours, and about fourteen-fifteen for—”
Age of consent was usually sixteen in most states, back on Earth. Give him another year, and make it a safer seventeen. Given that she now realized that Duncan’s emotional age was somewhere just shy of post-adolescence, that somehow seemed right. And from what she recalled of previous /Alula-/Pili-/Ottah visits to the tanks with Duncan, he’d been a gorgeous teen, less buff but somehow more physically vulnerable than he’d trained himself to become as an adult. Every Duncan who’d stood beside every Annemie had commented on how he loved seeing the “raw potential” of his younger selves, before going on to subtly criticize his pre-Emerge-ation self...gradually, after repeated visits, and the quadruple reiteration of the Duncans’ unguarded, spontaneous utterances upon seeing his latest Next, she’d figured out what Duncan found so appealing, yet so repellant, about his pre-birthed yet fully-formed future replacements: they were free of a lifetime’s worth of rigorous self-improvement, body modification, and protective layers of emotional and intellectual self-defense. Their bodies weren’t scarred due to years of risk-taking, dare-devil physical abuse, nor were they decorated with artificial colors and holes in the most unscholarly places. They were pure potential, unmarred by his layers of past life unwaveringly pre-repeated. They were Change incarnate, albeit destined to be turned into Continuations of a life now put on cold, century-long Hold.
“Thanks, Colin,” she mumbled, before getting to her feet and heading for the corridor access point, and it wasn’t until she’d almost made it to her cabin that she remembered forgetting to add the appropriate Clone-name to his given one. He hadn’t corrected her, so perhaps it didn’t really matter to him?
Duncan was always so stringent on that point, drilling it into her about the importance of always, always, identifying the others by their proper nomenclature. True, Colin/Badru had used the name when speaking about Jansur/Badru, but was that for his or her benefit? An attempt to make her feel comfortable in the temporary loss of her by-the-book mate?
Regardless of what Colin/Badru did or didn’t have in mind, the fourth clone of twelve projected clones fell asleep the second her aching head hit the pillow which still faintly smelled of her damaged lover’s sweat....
* * * *
“He’s still under the influences of the drugs we pumped into him during the surgery, so if he says anything, it probably won’t make much sense...or it’ll be off the top of his head, and lacking...forethought or restraint—”
Which was Dr. Lea’s way of saying Duncan/Badru might blame her for his current kluged state of being, especially if the full implications of being a hybrid, chimera-like clone were to have hit him already.
He’d been conscious for over a day, long enough to have been told what happened (at her insistence), but not long enough to have regained the ability to move around, or utilize the brace-like devices the Leas cobbled together during the month he’d been in a medically-induced coma. A month in which the ship actually ran as relatively smoothly as it did while he was up and about; everyone had had to take on odd shifts doing his work, sometimes after studying computer-stored texts to catch up on his skill-set, but his presence wasn’t so much missed as accounted for. They’d moved him from the medical ward to the Emergence Chamber, and removed his coverings, so Annemie/Rabiah could see him (again, at her AMA insistence) as he now was, and would be until his time to surrender his presence on the ship to his Next. Doped or not, he seemed to be aware that he was uncovered, vulnerable, for the first thing she noticed when she entered the chamber was that he was trying to pull covers which weren’t on the mattress over his body with his left hand, while his bleary, half-open eyes kept darting down to look at himself, then darted up to stare at the low ceiling, then rolled slowly down to stare at himself, or what was left of Himself—
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