Anna To The Infinite Power (3 page)

Anna’s hand rose to a small dark birthmark to the right of her mouth. “You even have a mole like mine, and in the same place.” Then she noticed one difference and pounced upon it. “You’re taller than I am.”

Relief sounded in the girl’s voice as she said, “You’re right. I’m much taller.”

In the next moment, Anna followed the girl’s glance as it traveled down to their shoes. The girl wore heels, Anna flats. “You’re not taller,” Anna murmured.

Rowan said, “I’ve heard of
doppelgangers
, but this has got to beat any of them.”

Doppelganger
. Anna remembered that in German the word meant a ghostly double. Was it possible for two unrelated people to look so much alike? “What’s your name?”

“Anna Smithson. What’s yours?”

It can’t be, Anna thought. That was really straining the laws of probability. “I’m Anna Hart,” she said, then told herself that this just had to be some eerie coincidence. She couldn’t yet come to terms with a situation that was threatening her uniqueness. Undoubtedly her likeness to the girl ended with physical appearance. And even though they had the same first name they had different last names, different families. Anna felt a sudden need to pursue their differences. But where to start? From the beginning, of course. That was the logical place, and Anna was always logical. “My full name is Anna Zimmerman Hart. What’s your full name?” From the stricken look on the girl’s face Anna guessed the answer. She said in a small voice, “Anna Zimmerman, too?”

The girl nodded.

Anna’s eyes shot to Rowan in desperation. There was something awfully wrong. Tell me it’s some kind of joke, she silently asked him. His answering gaze held only mystification. Anna glanced back to the girl, suddenly afraid to probe further.

The girl must have felt the same. She edged away from them, saying, “I think I’d better go now.” She glanced quickly at her wristwatch. “I’ve got to meet my mother in five minutes.” She turned and fled down the aisle, in her rush, almost smashing into the glass exit doors. She caught herself up just as the automatic eye began to move them, then when the opening was just wide enough to accommodate her, dashed through.

“You’d think someone was chasing her,” Rowan said.

In a worried voice, Anna said, “What’s it all about, Rowan?”

He shrugged. “Beats me. You not only have a
doppelganger
, but you’re both named Anna Zimmerman Something. That’s a big coincidence.”

“You don’t know how big.” Anna’s mind was already figuring the odds and all they told her was that something was very wrong.

“Come on,” Rowan said. “Let’s go home and see what Mom and Dad have to say about it.”

Anna wasn’t sure she wanted to find out, but she followed him, lost now in her own thoughts. On the long trip home she said hardly a word, too caught up in the disturbing dilemma to think of anything else. She was a twin. There was no other explanation. Whether she was a Smithson twin, a Hart twin, or the twin of unknown parents, she had no idea. Someone had given her away at birth. Either that, or the Harts had given away her sister. Or someone else had given away both of them. Yet why did they have the same first and middle names? Had someone mixed them up? And there was something else that bothered her, something about the girl’s looks, something she’d heard about identical twins but couldn’t quite put her finger on. Her mind refused to work properly. And that was unlike her. It was also unlike her to feel so threatened.

Before any other emotion could steal in upon her, numbers began flooding her head, gigantic columns of them to add, subtract, multiply, divide, enough to keep her busy for the whole journey home. Her riches. An embarrassment of riches. Anna felt a little better. Almost safe.

“I suppose I’ll have to tell you the whole story now,” Sarah Hart said to her daughter as they talked privately in Anna’s room. “I was going to wait until you reached puberty. We felt you would understand better then. That was when I was supposed ... when I was going to tell you.”

“What’s puberty got to do with anything? And I already know what you’re going to tell me. I’m a twin.” Anna had the feeling that she didn’t want to hear what was coming. Had it not been for Rowan she might have never even mentioned the experience in The Greenwich. At least she would have thought about it longer before saying anything. Rowan hadn’t even waited until Dad came home. I hope he’s dying of curiosity now, Anna thought. Her mother had excluded him, insisting on talking to Anna first and alone.

“Did you say twin?” Sarah Hart asked, sounding as if she was stalling, giving herself time to think.

“Yes. I saw her.” Somehow Anna couldn’t warm to the idea of having an identical sister. At the moment, she had no wish to see the girl again. It occurred to her now that the disturbing feelings she experienced so often always left her with something she’d thought of as a sense of incompleteness, as if there were cloudy flashes of memory that never quite came into focus. Could that possibly have anything to do with her birth? Had she always carried deep inside her the knowledge that somewhere she had a twin? It was almost like having another self, a missing self.

Sarah Hart turned Anna’s desk chair around and sat down on it. She leaned forward and patted the edge of the bed. “Sit here, Anna, where I can look at you. I’ve got so much to tell you, and I want to be sure you understand.”

“Maybe I don’t want to hear it.”

Her mother sighed. “I’m afraid you must after today. Don’t be frightened. What I’m going to tell you will make you feel proud.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re very privileged. You’re part of a unique experiment.”

“An experiment?” Anna shifted uneasily. “What kind of experiment?”

“Now, let me tell it in my own way. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’ve practiced this in my head so many times, yet it doesn’t seem to be coming out right. Well, I’ll just start from the beginning.” She took a deep breath and settled back in the chair. “Before you were born there was a woman named Anna Zimmerman.”

Another Anna Zimmerman? A relative? Or only a namesake? Now Anna gave her mother rapt attention.

“She was a brilliant physicist who was doing terribly important government work when she died accidentally in a laboratory fire. They pulled her out but were too late to save her, as well as much of her work.”

“Did you know her?”

“No, I didn’t. But I knew of her and of her work.”

“I don’t understand what all this has to do with me. Why do I have her name?”

“I’m getting to that. I told you she was doing important work. When she died, she was supposed to be close to a real breakthrough that would have made a fantastic replicator possible.”

“A replicator?”

“Yes, a machine that could produce food from basic elements--nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen--or produce any other three-dimensional object ... a machine that could even duplicate itself so that everyone could have one.”

Yes, that certainly would be important, Anna had to admit, but right now her mind was too concerned with the mystery of herself to focus on an idea that, ordinarily, would have seemed exciting to her. “I still don’t understand where I come in.”

“I’m coming to that. You’ve heard of genetic engineering.”

That wasn’t the branch of science that really interested Anna, but she was aware that scientists, for years, had been experimenting with living cells in the hope that they might someday find cures for inherited diseases or improve plant or animal life. “Of course I know what genetic engineering is,” Anna said. “They haven’t gotten too far with it, though--at least, not as far as people are concerned.”

“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong, Anna.”

“What do you mean?”

“A little more than twelve years ago scientists duplicated their first human being from body cells only, an asexual reproduction.”

Anna’s stomach tightened. Her mother had to be mistaken. “It’s not in any of the science books. My teachers would have mentioned it if that were true.”

“Your teachers don’t even know about it. Only the few people involved know. There was such a clamor against genetic engineering that the government deliberately kept it secret. No one could be sure of how it would turn out. Anything could have gone wrong. It was an experiment. They were breaking new ground. They had to move cautiously until they were certain it worked. With this kind of knowledge, there are as many possibilities for bad as there are for good, you know. Everything has to be weighed no matter how long it takes.” She leaned forward, took both of Anna’s hands in hers, and stared deeply into her eyes.

Anna braced herself.

“You and I are a part of that first experiment. We should both feel proud.”

Anna’s mind refused to take it in. She had to hear the words spoken. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m trying to tell you that after her death scientists took the nuclei from cells in Anna Zimmerman’s body, injected them into human eggs, and then into the uteri of certain chosen women.”

“They cloned her?”

“Yes, and as you’ve probably guessed, I was one of the women who carried her clone. They selected Anna Zimmerman for the experiment purely because her work was so important, and it was lost to everyone when she died. They hoped that her clone or clones could go over the same ground and unlock the same mysteries.”

Anna was stunned. Now she realized what it was she couldn’t put her finger on when she’d stared at the girl she had thought was her twin. It was the mole near the girl’s mouth, and on the same side as her own. Identical twins were mirror images of each other. If one had a mole on one side, the other had it on the opposite side.

No, she was not a twin, she was a clone. Oh, she knew theoretically what a clone was, but what was it really? She understood about cells, how every one of the countless cells in a human body carried a complete blueprint for reproducing that whole person. The scientists must have taken a cell from Anna Zimmerman, removed that blueprint, substituted it for whatever genetic material was in the egg they used, then planted it inside her mother’s body. Her mother . . . “That means you’re really not my mother. And Dad isn’t my father. And Rowan isn’t my brother.”

“I may not be your genetic mother, but there are other ways of being a mother. Remember, I bore you and raised you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re my child and --”

“If you’re not my genetic mother, who is? Anna Zimmerman’s mother? Is her father my father?” In her agitation, Anna’s voice was rising. “Or don’t I have any parents? Can you tell me that? Can anyone tell me?”

“Anna, you mustn’t upset yourself. Try to realize that you are a very special person with a very important destiny. Anna Zimmerman was considered a near-genius.”

“How many others are there?”

“I don’t know, Anna. For all I know, there may be only two--you and the girl you saw today. But that’s why we had to be so careful about checking with INAFT whenever you left the complex--to avoid something like this happening.”

Even INAFT, a machine, knew. If anyone had asked it if Anna Zimmerman Hart could visit The Greenwich on that day, at that time, it would have claimed there were dangerous demonstrations en route or riots in the street or anything except the truth, which was the clones must never run into each other. Then another thought dawned on Anna. “That’s why I have to go for a physical checkup every six months. It’s not because of my allergy at all, it is?”

Sarah Hart smiled. “I admit it. That’s why you go. And that’s how we know the experiment is proving successful. Anna, just think of what this means. It means genius does not have to die--or talent or beauty or health--not when we can clone an Anna Zimmerman or a new Einstein, should there ever be one. Why, we even have the potential now to produce embryonic replicas of everyone and freeze them away as a source of replacement organs for transplants. Imagine, if you need a new heart, there it is, and your body can’t reject it because it comes from an identical twin.”

As Sarah Hart went on excitedly, Anna asked herself, What am I? Who am I? It was all too much to understand. She needed time to think about it. A very special person, her mother had said. A unique experiment. New ground.

And all those words meant clone.

The numbers began to pour into her head, nice neat rows of them to arrange and rearrange, to work up and down and across, to crowd out words. Lots and lots of numbers and no words.

Rowan sat in class, facing Ms. Dupont, the new music history teacher, yet not seeing her because his thoughts were on Anna. It was mind- boggling. Absolutely mind-boggling. His mother had had to explain all of the physical details before he could even understand exactly what a clone was. And what was even more mind-boggling was that his father didn’t know anything about the experiment. Nothing!

“And you mustn’t tell him,” his mother had said. “I’ll tell him in my own time and in my own way. But for now, it’ll be our secret--yours, mine, and Anna’s. I’ve already told her she’s not to say anything.”

“I can’t understand why he wasn’t in on it in the first place,” Rowan said.

He thought she looked a little guilty as she said, “The requirements were quite rigid, and I understood they were having trouble finding people. And we were perfect--one of us had to be a physicist, the other, something in the arts, preferably music. I was even doing lab research on the same kind of replicator Anna Zimmerman was working on. And the idea was so exciting. Then I sounded out your father. Well, you just can’t imagine how opposed he was, even in theory. In the end, I simply forged his name to the paper we were both supposed to sign.”

Rowan gave a low whistle. “I’d say that was going a bit far even for the cause of science.”

“I know. Believe me, I’ve had more than one moment when I’ve regretted doing things that way. But I was a bit younger then and very dedicated. I felt there were some things that were more important than individuals, particularly this experiment, because it could mean so much to the future of humanity. I really believed then that I knew what was best for everyone, including humanity. Now I’m not so sure about anything.”