Chapters Four and Five

“I’d say it’s time we had a chat, wouldn’t you?”

Both the voice and the hand on my shoulder stopped me in my tracks.  I winced, cursing inwardly—myself for sneaking out for a latte and him for not being in the lab.  “Eran.”

“None other,” he drawled, turning me to face him.  “You’ve been avoiding me, Red,” he accused softly.  Since there was no denying it, I didn’t try.  “Let’s go to my place, shall we?”

“Not today.  I have to—”

The fingers on my shoulders tightened warningly.  “You look bloody awful,” he muttered under his breath.  “Either you talk to me now, or we both talk to the nearest psych adjuster ten minutes from now.  Take your pick.”

No pick to it.  I wanted to avoid psych adjusters like the plague.  “Your place,” I sighed.

He herded me into the nearest elevator.  “Deck Two,” he said.  The doors slid closed and the elevator started down.
I kept my eyes glued to the indicator lights, wondering if the weightless lurch in my belly was a product of dread or the descent.  Neither of us said a word as we emerged on the lower level after a brief, fluid glide.  We made our way to his portal, and he touched his finger to the genomic lock.  The sensors recognized his helix, the portal opened soundlessly, and closed the same way behind us.

“Have a seat,” he suggested with a nod toward the sofa.  “I’ll just pop into the galley and open a bottle of wine.”

I nodded mutely as I sat, my nervous gaze straying around the salon.  Eran’s furniture tended toward low-slung:  brown-leather sofa and two matching broad-backed chairs;  rectangular walnut coffee table balanced on gently flared legs and topped by a long, shallow brass tray.  To say I was desperately trying to come up with a way out of the trap would be the understatement of the century.

Eran smiled sardonically as he ambled back into the salon and handed me a glass. “Thinking of running out on me, Red?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

“Good, because you’re not going anywhere until you explain what’s going on,” he announced in no uncertain terms.  “We’ve already discussed the alternative,” he added, reminding me of his threat to drag me off to an adjuster for my own good.  He sat next to me, leaned back, stretched out his legs, and sipped his wine, expectant gaze locked on my face.  I stared at him in mute dismay.  He nudged my foot with his.  “Well?”

I shook my head in defeat.  “Give me a minute, all right?  I have to figure out where to start.”  I took a drink, hardly tasting the Chardonnay as I focused on gathering my thoughts.

“Of course you know,” he drawled, “after this suspense-filled build-up, I expect this revelation of yours to be nothing short of bloody spectacular.”

Bloody spectacular I could promise him.  The question looming large in my mind was, what would he do with the cat, once I let it out of the bag?

Mentally crossing my fingers, I gave into the inevitable.  “Have you ever seen a twentieth-century stereogram?”

Eran blinked in surprise, but recovered quickly.  “Not yet.  Am I going to?”

Relieved by his apparent willingness to play it my way, I allowed myself a slight smile.  “Maybe,” I conceded.

Ever since the two of us were kids, I had been hauling him into my room—or after we both moved out of Maya’s place on Deck Three, to my quarters—to show him some artifact or other.  And ever since we were kids, he had been letting me.

When his friends teased him about it, he would shrug like an indulgent older brother.  “What can I do?  I’ve got to humor her.”  But he dropped the attitude the moment we got off by ourselves.  Eran Symon was curious about every live-long thing, up to and including historical relics.  It didn’t matter if I showed him a twenty-first-century Identi-chip or the hologram of a 1958 Edsel, he was fascinated.

“I’ll look forward to it,” he said now, “but in the meantime, what do I need to know about stereograms?  What were they?”

“Pictures.  Actually, each one was two pictures.”

“Hence, the stereo.”

“Hence, the stereo,” I agreed.  How I suddenly sounded so cool, calm, and collected when my insides were still coiled like a spring, I didn’t know.  Trying to relax, I leaned back,  tucked my legs under me, and tasted my wine again before continuing,  “One picture was obvious, usually busy and repetitive:  a leafy hedgerow or a series of Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example.  Anything that would engage both the eye and the mind.”

“And the other picture?”

“Embedded in the superficial.  The catch was, you couldn’t find the hidden image by looking for it.  You could only see it when you let the other picture slip out of focus.  A lot of people couldn’t do it.”

“They couldn’t see the concealed picture?”

“No.”

His eyes scanned my face.  “But you have?”  I nodded slowly.  “Bad?”

Oh, yeah.  “I think it could be.”

Eran, always one for the practical solution, suggested, “Then don’t look at it.”

“It’s not that easy.  Once you’ve seen the concealed image, you can’t look at the stereogram again without seeing it.”

He considered this briefly.  “Right.  Well, what can’t be ignored has to be faced, put into the proper framework, and dealt with.”  He gestured go-ahead with his glass.  “Tell me about it, and no more analogical beating about the bush.  Straight out.”

Straight out.  How else?  This was Eran, after all.  He wanted to help and was calmly confident he could, because there weren’t many challenges his intellect couldn’t meet.  I wasn’t sure about this one, but I loved him for trying and badly wanted him to succeed.  The problem was, his definition of success might involve saving me from my “delusions,” a cure that would involve a process even more painful than my current condition.  My only hope lay in persuading him of the truth.

“Do you remember that night I was talking to Lu about?” I asked, leaning sideways to set my wineglass on the coffee table.

“Which?”

“The night we all listened to Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Ah, back to Ella again, are we?  No, don’t get het up, I remember.”

“After the mix, everyone was feeling pretty mellow.”

“Everyone but you,” he recalled.  “You’re never mellow afterwards.  That night, as I remember, you wriggled off the bed and into that garish lime-green robe you know I detest, babbling something about a real treat.  The next thing we knew, the bedroom was bulkhead-to-bulkhead music.  Lu was right, you know, when she said Fitzgerald had a wonderful voice.”

“Yes.”  But now that I was resigned to telling, I was raring to get to the crux.  “Remember what Zivon said?”

“About Ella?”  I nodded eagerly.  His eyes narrowed as he thought back.  Finally, with a slight shrug and a small shake of his head, “Sorry, but no.  Something philosophical, no doubt.  Was it profound?”

“No.  Well, indirectly.  He said, ‘She’s magnificent, Kai!  Did they have many singers like her back in the twentieth century?’”

Eran scratched his head.  “Red, I can’t for the life of me see where this is going, but the suspense is killing me.  I believe the next line is mine:  What did you say?”

“I said ….”  I paused, breathless, a jumper poised for the leap.  “I said, ‘They had a lot of good ones, Ziv, but there was only one Ella Fitzgerald.’”  I shivered as I repeated those historic words, but kept my eyes locked on his face, because I didn’t want to miss the light when it dawned.

His expression didn’t change until he realized I had finished.  Then his brows drew together.  He lifted his free hand, palm up.  “And?”

And? Struck dumb by the conjunction, I could only stare.  The truth had been immediately, blindingly clear to me a split second after I had first spoken those words.  But he didn’t see it, and my heart dropped like a stone.  Doomed to utter aloneness was the melodramatic phrase that leapt to mind.  For the first time in my span, I felt utterly hopeless.  I ducked my head and fought a ridiculous urge to cry.

He gave a soft exclamation of surprise.  A moment later I heard him move, heard him set his glass on the table, and felt the gentle upward nudge of his curved finger under my chin.  “Kai.  Look at me.  Please.”  I didn’t want to, but I let him lift my head.  “I’m trying to understand, really.”  He smiled crookedly and drew back his hand.  “You know, in some circles, I’m considered quite perceptive.  I’m sorry if I’ve gone dense at precisely the wrong moment, but don’t give up on me.”

Clearly, he sensed he had let me down when I needed him most.  That soothed, then shamed me.  What did you expect, Kai-Lee?

What did I expect?  Simple.

We were two people so in synch we completed one another’s sentences.  That being the case, I expected him to immediately pick up on my line of reasoning.  I wouldn’t have to go into painful detail, and he would come up with the right answers to all my questions.  When he didn’t do his part, I overreacted.  My expectations had been unfair and all about me.

“Give me another chance?” he asked.  “Maybe your point should be incredibly obvious, but I’m afraid it’s not.”  He gave me one of his penetrating, perceptive looks.  “We’re back to the hidden picture, aren’t we?  So far, I can’t pick it out.”  He leaned toward me, his left arm coming up to rest on the back of the sofa, his right hand taking mine.  “Help me, all right?  I want to see, too.”

Unfortunately, the comforting veil of selfishness had parted.  I was completely aware of him now and experienced the first steely shaft of conscience.  The danger from my point of view was that he wouldn’t believe me.  The danger from his point of view was that he would.  He didn’t know what he was asking.  I, on the other hand, did; and being the sadder-but-wiser party, I would be personally, profoundly responsible for his misery, if I decided to fess up.  Our positions reminded me of a folktale I once read in an extremely ancient manuscript:

And when the woman saw the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.  And the eyes of them both were opened ….

I could almost picture it:  The woman had eaten the fruit first.  The forbidden knowledge was hers; she instantly comprehended fantastic but unspeakable possibilities.  So there she was, her mind crawling with an awareness it was never meant to possess.  And there he was, still innocent and serene, everything right with his God and his world.  Ah, but her days in Paradise were numbered; there was a barren lot in Wasteland with her name on it, and the prospect of living in exile alone with her inescapable thoughts was too much.  She couldn’t afford to spare him, because she had never needed him more.  So she impulsively enticed him to eat, to know, to share her curse.

Okay, fine.  But who elected me the latest poster child for innocence irretrievably lost?  Why did I have to wrestle with that no-win situation, i.e., to live alone with what I knew or drag Eran down with me?  What was fair about this?  I never asked to know!  But asked for or not, the knowledge was mine, the guilty verdict had been handed down, and with it my only choice:  self-preservation or self-sacrifice.

The past few weeks were only a taste of things to come if I chose the nobler course.  That alternative would cost me everything, and I would be a long, bleak lifetime in the paying.  Still, the woman I had always believed myself to be wouldn’t have hesitated to take the high road, no matter the personal toll.  The fact that I couldn’t quite bring myself to take that road now sent a fresh shockwave through an already crumbling self-identity.  As I wavered between concern for Eran’s welfare and fear for my own, I had to admit I might have been fairly judged after all.

“Kai?”

There was no conscious decision on my part, only impulse.  Whether that was motivated by love or a sudden panicky desire to preserve some small spark of Kai-Lee Fox, I didn’t know and couldn’t afford to ask myself.  I let the brave words tumble out before second thoughts could silence them.  “Eran, forget it.”  His face went slack with surprise.  He started to speak, but I cut him off with a slash of my free hand and jerked the other from his grasp.  “I mean it.  Let it go, it’s nothing.  Maybe I’ve been working too hard.  I’m tired, I’m ridiculously over-emotional, and I’m over-dramatizing.  You were absolutely right,” I rushed on, as I shot to my feet, “about the supplements, I mean.  All I need is one good—”

“Friend,” he interjected firmly, snagging my wrist as I started to back away.  “One who knows you too well to let you tuck and run.  A fellow like me, for instance,” he beamed, but his eyes glinted and his hold was unbreakable.  His smile faded as he tugged on my arm.  “Sit down, Kai-Lee Fox, and tell me what it is you’re suddenly so bloody determined to handle all by yourself.”

Ω

Chapter Five

All by myself? My burst of altruism died between one breath and the next.  Hollowed out on the spot, I wilted back onto the sofa, wondering numbly if this was how it had been for the woman in the fable.  A feeling of kinship welled up in me … followed by an acid wave of guilt, because although I was every bit as desperate as she must have been, I wouldn’t be acting as impulsively when I offered this fruit to Eran.

“Come on, darling, out with it.”

His face began to swim as my eyes filled.  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.  For what I’m about to do to you, Eran Symon, I’m very, very sorry.

“Heavens, woman,” he muttered brusquely.  “There’s no need for tearful apologies.”  His fingers brushed awkwardly at my cheeks.  “Just tell me what’s going on in that delightfully convoluted mind of yours.”

I sniffed and steadied myself, had to clear my throat, which was tight with self-loathing.  “I was talking about Ella.”

“Right.”  He released my wrist and leaned back, clearly relieved to escape an emotional quagmire and get back to solid facts.  “You were saying there was no vocalist quite like her.”

“Actually,” and this was important, “my exact words were, ‘There was only one Ella Fitzgerald.’  That’s when I understood.”

“The hidden picture,” he guessed with evident satisfaction.

I nodded.  “History’s hidden picture.  I still can’t believe,” I murmured, mystified all over again, “I didn’t see it before.”

“Didn’t see what?” said Eran.

“Hmm?”

“You said, ‘I still can’t believe I didn’t see it before.’  What didn’t you see?”

“Oh.”  I forced my attention back to the conversation.  “The people.”

His brows rose.  “I beg your pardon?”

“People were the hidden picture.  Individual people,” I held up an index finger for emphasis, “not one of whom was ever repeated.”

He frowned in obvious disappointment.  “That’s hardly news, Kai-Lee.”

“Yes, but did you ever stop to wonder if it was important?”

His brows drew together.  “Well ….”

“Trust me, it’s important.  That’s what I suddenly understood.”

Before that night, I had always read history like a play in so many acts—the Dark Ages, the Industrial Revolution, the Dawn of Replication.  As far as I was concerned, the play was the thing—plot, turning points, resolutions.
They say history repeats itself, and it obviously does.  Mankind recycles ideas, trends, fashions, political movements, and I’m sorry to say, mistakes.  But that night I saw people had never been recycled; there hadn’t been a single repeat among all the faceless billions born to walk the Earth.  Instead, there had been an ages-long procession of individuals—some light, some dark, some neutral, but each one unique.  One Aristotle.  One Adolf Hitler.  One Great Sage Sagar … and one Ella Fitzgerald.

Eran frowned.  “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying there was only one Ella Fitzgerald for a reason, Eran.  History is more than the big picture.  It’s not just the saga of man’s journey through space-time from then to now, from a grubbing existence in filthy caves to life as we know it here aboard the Janus.  It’s more elemental than that.  History is about every single person who ever lived.”

Silence.  “And if there had been another Ella Fitzgerald?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know.  I don’t think anyone can know for sure at this point.  But ask yourself this:  What if every single life, no matter how insignificant, isn’t only part of the historical process, but integral to it?  Suppose both the beginning and end, birth and death, are key triggers in the mechanism?”

His gaze turned pensive.  I waited, knowing I had done my worst; he was beginning to see and already grappling with it, trying to reason it through.  Maybe he would succeed and save us both.  Yes, I had made my choice, but it left me even more of a stranger to myself.  I felt gravely, authentically guilty.  The decision to initiate him had been unforgivably selfish, but not nearly as selfish as the relief washing over me now that he knew.

“If you’re right,” he began slowly.

“I am,” I insisted, refocusing on the discussion.  “It was always the way of things.  We know that.”

“It was,” he allowed reluctantly.

“What we don’t know is, what happens if someone tampers with the process, puts it in a … a kind of holding pattern.  What does it mean to history?”  What does it mean to us?  But I didn’t ask the second question out loud.  He would get around to that wrinkle on his own soon enough.

“You think limited instances of ‘tampering,’ as you call it, impact human history as a whole?”

I answered him with a snatch of Donne that had been looping through my mind:  “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent …. I am involved in mankind.”

“So my actions have consequences for all mankind?  A sort of butterfly effect?  Never thought of it that way, but if it’s true ….”  He broke off to consider.  Then he sighed, rubbed his jaw and continued, “By the Sage, Kai, if that’s true, the repercussions could be ….”

“Yes.”

He raked a hand through his hair.  “Bloody hell!  Well, I did ask to see your hidden picture, didn’t I?  Trouble is, now that I see it, I’m not entirely sure what to do with it.  One thing’s certain, we can’t simply close our eyes and pretend it isn’t there.”

“No, we can’t.”

Expelling a heavy breath, he surprised me by standing.  “Look, I want to chew on this for a while.  I’ll walk you home.”  My reaction must have shown on my face, because he bent to ruffle my hair.  “No, don’t look betrayed.  I’m not abandoning you, Red, word of honor.  We’ll sort it out.”

He left me outside my quarters.  I watched him walk away—a tall man dressed in blue slacks and a white, collarless, long-sleeved tunic—head bent, hands clasped behind his back.  Recognizing the posture, the couple who passed him in the corridor didn’t bother with a greeting.  They knew he wouldn’t hear.

I was turning to unlock my portal when my attention was caught by the dimly lit passageway.  There was something … well, creepy about it.  It took me a few seconds to pinpoint what it was:  In the eerie half-light, bottomless shadows crept down the bulkheads to pool here and there along the deck.  Holed as it was by darkness, the corridor appeared to be disintegrating.

Now, I was no mystic and put zero stock in so-called “visions,” but something uncomfortably like forewarning brushed up my spine, raising the fine hairs on my nape.  I hastily reached back to rub it away.  Tired or not, enough was enough.  Still, I couldn’t lose the goose-bumps or the sudden trancelike sensation of being in my surroundings but not part of them.  Sounds and images, like scraps of dreams, materialized then receded:  murmuring silhouettes passing in the intermittent gloom; familiar faces illuminated in the quick, bright blaze of an open portal;  laughter, voices, and pleasure sounds spilling into the corridor, abruptly cut off as portals closed.  I experienced it all like someone inhabiting an overlapping but discrete dimension.

Was Eran struggling with this bizarre sense of membranous separation from everything and everyone else?  Not yet, I guessed.  I turned back toward the portal and closing my eyes, gratefully leaned my forehead against its reassuringly cool, solid smoothness.  He doesn’t feel it yet, I reminded myself, but he will.

The sound of approaching footsteps scattered the fog of unreality and jolted me into action.  Anxious to avoid an encounter, I straightened quickly and touched my right index finger to the genomic lock.  “Messages,” I said as the portal closed behind me.  The command was given more out of habit than any real desire to know.

“Welcome home, Kai-Lee Fox,” answered a pleasant baritone.  “You have no new messages and thirty-three saved messages.  Personal reminders:  transcribe Antiquitas meeting notes.  Twenty-one days overdue.  Review seminar proposal, ‘The Chromosome According to Twentieth-Century Earth Psychology.’  Seventeen days overdue.  Edit rough draft of—”

“Oh, be quiet,” I groaned wearily.  The last thing I needed was a litany of everything that had gone undone since I started to unravel.  Fortunately, dealing with unpleasant reminders was easy.  “Delete all tasks and messages.”

“Twenty-four tasks and thirty-three messages deleted,” answered the disembodied voice agreeably.

Guilt fluttered, but feebly.  This article or that meeting … who cared?  I only had two tasks now.  First, I had to be there for Eran.  All right, I couldn’t entirely regret opening his eyes.  But I did feel bad about the grief it would cause him.  Rank hypocrisy?  I didn’t know, but I was determined to remind him he wasn’t alone.  That I could and would spare him.  The second task, tackling the truth and figuring out how to live with it, would be the furnace that tried us both.

Moving into the salon, I objectively surveyed the place I had always called my own.  The deck was layered with burgundy Moroccan carpets, the near bulkhead veiled in gauzy white fabric.  Two divans faced one another—low and plump, upholstered in bold splashes of burgundy, gold, blue, and green.  Both were strewn with pillows and round bolsters.  Between the divans, on a squat, octagonal, carved wooden table, Crusaders battled Saracens across an ornate chessboard.  A small collection of books lined two climate-controlled, backlit shelves set into the bulkhead opposite the entryway.  The shelf below those two was bare except for a wooden Babushka doll, brightly painted and surrounded by offspring; and a diminutive bronze barefoot boy, lips pursed in a soundless whistle, hands buried happily in the pockets of his short pants.

I crossed to the bedroom, a space dominated by a massive round bed frosted in shimmering striped brocade—white and royal blue, edged in gold.  An elaborate brass headboard scrolled to a peak halfway up the pale blue bulkhead.  To the left of the archway hung a four-foot-square tapestry depicting an ancient Greek warrior, steely-eyed and lantern jawed.  He had a nose like a blade and dark hair that fell down his nape in ringlets.

The delicately scrolled floor-length mirror mounted on the bulkhead to the left of the archway was one of my most prized possessions, but its charm was lost on me as I moved to stand in front of it, peering at the petite woman framed in brass.  I searched her indigo eyes, examined the oval face set in a cloud of short fiery curls, the porcelain-pale complexion, the freckles dusting the bridge of her nose.  Her lips formed what the ancients called a Cupid’s bow.  I tilted my head.  The woman in the mirror did likewise, as if she, too, were studying her reflection:  the narrow, small-breasted torso, the too-full hips, the soft white arms and graceful hands.

Was I the woman I had been engineered to be?   If not, who was I?  This was the wrinkle I hadn’t mentioned to Eran.

I was no expert in genetics, but cloning hadn’t been reserved for experts in ages.  Decades before the Alphas took ship in search of a dream that lay beyond the closest stars, every school kid above the age of eight was cloning something.  It was part of the required elementary science curriculum. The art had come a long way since those first, clumsy twentieth-century nuclear transfers that destroyed more material than they copied.  Undeveloped blastulae, grotesque still births, and fatal genetic mutations were horrors of the past.  Once the Universal Replication Cell, or URC, had been coaxed out of its hiding place near the central sinus in bone marrow, noninvasive cloning had been perfected.  Animals could be recreated with genetic exactitude using just one of these totipotent stem cells.  But no matter how flawless the replication process, genetic sameness never yielded absolute sameness.

Call it man’s second impassible threshold.

The theory making the rounds before liftoff blamed phenotypical differences on the dynamics of protein groups expressed by genetic material under certain cellular environmental conditions.  Apparently, these dynamics involve tens of thousands of transformations triggered by flash-fire signals from both inside and outside the cell, all still largely mysterious, and thus, beyond human control.

Whatever the reson, science had advanced to within a nanometer of clone uniformity, but according to thousands of comprehensive case studies, each replicant was still subtly different from its parent.  The question that must have hung heavy, if unspoken, among the Alphas was, “How different?”

They didn’t leave us an explicit record of their thoughts, but judging by their actions, they must have convinced themselves any differences would be unimportant, minimal at best, and could easily be addressed by the protocols they had put in place.  And as near as I could tell, for more than four centuries their safeguards had worked better than anyone could have hoped.  As a matter of fact, in my social circle—individuals in their Gamma or Delta spans—everyone lived like there were no differences between us and our Primes.  It wasn’t hard.  Since none of us had ever seen a real, live Alpha, it was easy to pretend that second impassable threshold didn’t exist.  So far, I seemed to be the only one hit with the reality check on this score.  Wonderful.

As I stood staring holes through my reflection, I reasoned it out this way:  If I hadn’t been identical to my Alpha Parent to begin with, there had already been an essential change through no fault of my own, right?  Ergo, I had no reason to feel guilty about the psychological chain reaction unleashed by the Ella Revelation.  This perfectly logical argument didn’t make me feel much better.  Knowing you didn’t choose to jump off the cliff might absolve you of blame; it doesn’t change the fact that you’re falling.

“You’re getting weirder and weirder,” I warned the woman in the mirror.  Turning my back on her, I told myself to let snowballing issues be for now, but in the stillness of my quarters my mind kept circling back to them.  What I needed was a diversion.  “Access music database,” I said.

“Accessed,” the computer responded amicably.

“Eighteenth century.  Mozart, K525.  Play.”

“Playing selection Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major, more commonly known as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”

The strings stole in, shyly at first, then with confidence, their melodies intertwining.  I let them soothe as I removed my tunic and dropped it to the deck.  I toed off my shoes, stepped out of my slacks.  As the violins began a playful minuet, I scooped up the soft tangle of yellow and black fabric at my feet, dropped it into the transport duct, and touched the screen, sending everything to the laundry.  My next touch opened the walk-in closet.  After a quick survey of the brightly colored garments hanging inside, I opted for a silken caftan in electric blue and slipped it over my head, savoring the cool whisper of fabric as it slid down my body.  I inhaled deeply, a calming trace of lavender.

Later, cocooned in darkness and nestled among the cushions, I floated along the edge of consciousness as my now nightly dose of Somazine started to lift me away from it all.  I thought I saw Eran trying to navigate a disintegrating corridor, but the image dissolved before I could be sure, so I let myself be drawn off.  My troublesome thoughts grew distant, flickered, faded.  Gradually, sleep claimed me.

Ω

Kathy DiSanto, 2009, all rights reserved