Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (33 page)

“I’m still surprised your language hasn’t changed more,” he says one day to Connie during their exertions in the gym.

“Oh, we’re very careful about that.” She climbs at an angle beside him, not using her hands. “It would be a dreadful loss if we couldn’t understand the books. All the children are taught from the same original tapes, you see. Oh, there’s faddy words we use for a while, but our communicators have to learn the old texts by heart, that keeps us together.”

Judy Paris grunts from the pedicycle. “You, my dear children, will never know the oppression we suffered,” she declaims mockingly.

“Judys talk too much,” says Connie.

“We do, for a fact.” They both laugh.

“So you still read our so-called great books, our fiction and poetry?” asks Lorimer. “Who do you read, H. G. Wells? Shakespeare? Dickens, ah, Balzac, Kipling, Brian?” He gropes; Brian had been a best-seller Ginny liked. When had he last looked at Shakespeare or the others?

“Oh, the historicals,” Judy says. “It’s interesting, I guess. Grim. They’re not very realistic. I’m sure it was to you,” she adds generously.

And they turn to discussing whether the laying hens are getting too much light, leaving Lorimer to wonder how what he supposes are the eternal verities of human nature can have faded from a world’s reality. Love, conflict, heroism, tragedy—all “unrealistic”? Well, flight crews are never great readers; still, women read more. . . . Something
has
changed, he can sense it. Something basic enough to affect human nature. A physical development perhaps; a mutation? What is really under those floating clothes?

It is the Judys who give him part of it.

He is exercising alone with both of them, listening to them gossip about some legendary figure named Dagmar.

“The Dagmar who invented the chess opening?” he asks.

“Yes. She does anything, when she’s good she’s great.”

“Was she bad sometimes?”

A Judy laughs. “The Dagmar problem, you can say. She has this tendency to organize everything. It’s fine when it works, but every so often it runs wild, she thinks she’s queen or what. Then they have to get out the butterfly nets.”

All in present tense—but Lady Blue has told him the Dagmar gambit is over a century old.

Longevity
, he thinks; by god,, that’s what they’re hiding. Say they’ve achieved a doubled or tripled life span, that would certainly change human psychology, affect their outlook on everything. Delayed maturity, perhaps? We were working on endocrine cell juvenescence when I left. How old are these girls, for instance?

He is framing a question when Judy Dakar says, “I was in the crèche when she went pluggo. But she’s good, I loved her later on.”

Lorimer thinks she has said “crash” and then realizes she means a communal nursery. “Is that the same Dagmar?” he asks. “She must be very old.”

“Oh, no, her sister.”

“A sister a hundred years apart?”

“I mean, her daughter. Her, her
grand
daughter.” She starts pedaling fast.

“Judys,” says her twin, behind them.

Sister again. Everybody he learns of seems to have an extraordinary number of sisters, Lorimer reflects. He hears Judy Paris saying to her twin, “I think I remember Dagmar at the crèche. She started uniforms for everybody. Colors and numbers.”

“You couldn’t have, you weren’t born,” Judy Dakar retorts.

There is a silence in the drum.

Lorimer turns on the rungs to look at them. Two flushed cheerful faces stare back warily, make identical head-dipping gestures to swing the black hair out of their eyes. Identical . . . But isn’t the Dakar girl on the cycle a shade more mature, her face more weathered?

“I thought you were supposed to be twins.”

“Ah, Judys talk a lot,” they say together—and grin guiltily.

“You aren’t sisters,” he tells them. “You’re what we called clones.”

Another silence.

“Well, yes,” says Judy Dakar. “We call it sisters. Oh, mother! We weren’t supposed to tell you, Myda said you would be frightfully upset. It was illegal in your day, true?”

“Yes. We considered it immoral and unethical, experimenting with human life. But it doesn’t upset me personally.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful, that’s great,” they say together. “We think of you as different,” Judy Paris blurts, “you’re more hu—more like us. Please, you don’t have to tell the others, do you? Oh,
please
don’t.”

“It was an accident there were two of us here,” says Judy Dakar. “Myda
warned
us. Can’t you wait a little while?” Two identical pairs of dark eyes beg him.

“Very well,” he says slowly. “I won’t tell my friends for the time being. But if I keep your secret you have to answer some questions. For instance, how many of your people are created artificially this way?”

He begins to realize he
is
somewhat upset. Dave is right, damn it, they are hiding things. Is this brave new world populated by subhuman slaves, run by master brains? Decorticate zombies, workers without stomachs or sex, human cortexes wired into machines? Monstrous experiments rush through his mind. He has been naive again. These normal-looking women could be fronting for a hideous world.

“How many?”

“There’s only about eleven thousand of us,” Judy Dakar says. The two Judys look at each other, transparently confirming something. They’re unschooled in deception, Lorimer thinks; is that good? And is diverted by Judy Paris exclaiming, “What we can’t figure out is, why did you think it was wrong?”

Lorimer tries to tell them, to convey the horror of manipulating human identity, creating abnormal life. The threat to individuality, the fearful power it would put in a dictator’s hand.

“Dictator?” one of them echoes blankly. He looks at their faces and can only say, “Doing things to people without their consent. I think it’s sad.”

“But that’s just what we think about you,” the younger Judy bursts out. “How do you know who you
are?
Or who anybody is? All alone, no sisters to share with! You don’t know what you can do, or what would be interesting to try. All you poor singletons, you—why, you just have to blunder along and die, all for nothing!”

Her voice trembles. Amazed, Lorimer sees both of them are misty-eyed.

“We better get this m-moving,” the other Judy says.

They swing back into the rhythm, and in bits and pieces Lorimer finds out how it is. Not bottled embryos, they tell him indignantly. Human mothers like everybody else, young mothers, the best kind. A somatic cell nucleus is inserted in an enucleated ovum and reimplanted in the womb. They have each borne two “sister” babies in their late teens and nursed them awhile before moving on. The crèches always have plenty of mothers.

His longevity notion is laughed at; nothing but some rules of healthy living has as yet been achieved. “We should make ninety in good shape,” they assure him. “A hundred and eight, that was Judy Eagle, she’s our record. But she was pretty blah at the end.”

The clone-strains themselves are old, they date from the epidemic. They were part of the first effort to save the race when the babies stopped, and they’ve continued ever since.

“It’s so perfect,” they tell him. “We each have a book, it’s really a library. All the recorded messages. The Book of Judy Shapiro, that’s us. Dakar and Paris are our personal names, we’re doing cities now.” They laugh, trying not to talk at once about how each Judy adds her individual memoir, her adventures and problems and discoveries, in the genotype they all share.

“If you make a mistake it’s useful for the others. Of course you try not to—or at least make a
new
one.”

“Some of the old ones aren’t so realistic,” her other self puts in. “Things were so different, I guess. We make excerpts of the parts we like best. And practical things, like Judys should watch out for skin cancer.”

“But we have to read the whole thing every ten years,” says the Judy called Dakar. “It’s inspiring. As you get older you understand some of the ones you didn’t before.”

Bemused, Lorimer tries to think how it would be, hearing the voices of three hundred years of Orren Lorimers. Lorimers who were mathematicians or plumbers or artists or bums or criminals, maybe. The continuing exploration and completion of self. And a dozen living doubles; aged Lorimers, infant Lorimers. And other Lorimers’ women and children . . . would he enjoy it or resent it? He doesn’t know.

“Have you made your records yet?”

“Oh, we’re too young. Just notes in case of accident.”

“Will we be in them?”

“You can say!” They laugh merrily, then sober. “Truly you won’t tell?” Judy Paris asks. “Lady Blue, we have to let her know what we did. Oof. But
truly
you won’t tell your friends?”

He hadn’t told on them, he thinks now, emerging back into his living self. Connie beside him is drinking cider from a bulb. He has a drink in his hand too, he finds. But he hasn’t told.

“Judys will talk.” Connie shakes her head, smiling. Lorimer realizes he must have gabbled out the whole thing.

“It doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “I would have guessed soon anyhow. There were too many clues . . . Woolagongs invent, Mydas worry, Jans are brains, Billy Dees work so hard. I picked up six different stories of hydroelectric stations that were built or improved or are being run by one Lala Singh. Your whole way of life. I’m more interested in this sort of thing than a respectable physicist should be,” he says wryly. “You’re all clones, aren’t you? Every one of you. What do Connies do?”

“You really do know.” She gazes at him like a mother whose child has done something troublesome and bright. “Whew! Oh, well, Connies farm like mad, we grow things. Most of our names are plants. I’m Veronica, by the way. And of course the crèches, that’s our weakness. The runt mania. We tend to focus on anything smaller or weak.”

Her warm eyes focus on Lorimer, who draws back involuntarily.

“We control it.” She gives a hearty chuckle. “We aren’t all that way. There’s been engineering Connies, and we have two young sisters who love metallurgy. It’s fascinating what the genotype can do if you try. The original Constantia Morelos was a chemist, she weighed ninety pounds and never saw a farm in her life.” Connie looks down at her own muscular arms. “She was killed by the crazies, she fought with weapons. It’s so hard to understand. . . . And I had a sister Timothy who made dynamite and dug two canals and she wasn’t even an andy.”

“
An
andy,” he says.

“Oh, dear.”

“I guessed that too. Early androgen treatments.”

She nods hesitantly. “Yes. We need the muscle-power for some jobs. A few. Kays are quite strong anyway. Whew!” She suddenly stretches her back, wriggles as if she’d been cramped. “Oh, I’m glad you know. It’s been such a strain. We couldn’t even sing.”

“Why not?”

“Myda was sure we’d make mistakes, all the words we’d have had to change. We sing a lot.” She softly hums a bar or two.

“What kinds of songs do you sing?”

“Oh, every kind. Adventure songs, work songs, mothering songs, roaming songs, mood songs, trouble songs, joke songs—everything.”

“What about love songs?” he ventures. “Do you still have, well, love?”

“Of course, how could people not love?” But she looks at him doubtfully. “The love stories I’ve heard from your time are so, I don’t know, so weird. Grim and pluggy. It doesn’t seem like love. . . . Oh, yes, we have famous love songs. Some of them are partly sad, too. Like Tamil and Alcmene O, they’re fated together. Connies are fated too, a little.” She grins bashfully. “We love to be with Ingrid Anders. It’s more one-sided. I hope there’ll be an Ingrid on my next hitch. She’s so exciting, she’s like a little diamond.”

Implications are exploding all about him, sparkling with questions. But Lorimer wants to complete the darker pattern beyond.

“Eleven thousand genotypes, two million people: that averages two hundred of each of you alive now.” She nods. “I suppose it varies? There’s more of some?”

“Yes, some types aren’t as viable. But we haven’t lost any since early days. They tried to preserve all the genes they could. We have people from all the major races and a lot of small strains. Like me, I’m the Carib Blend. Of course we’ll never know what was lost. But eleven thousand is a lot, really. We all try to know everyone, it’s a life hobby.”

A chill penetrates his ataraxia. Eleven thousand, period. That is the true population of Earth now. He thinks of two hundred tall olive-skinned women named after plants, excited by two hundred little bright Ingrids; two hundred talkative Judys, two hundred self-possessed Lady Blues, two hundred Margos and Mydas and the rest. He shivers. The heirs, the happy pallbearers of the human race.

“So evolution ends,” he says somberly.

“No, why? It’s just slowed down. We do everything much slower than you did, I think. We like to experience things
fully
. We have time.” She stretches again, smiling. “There’s all the time.”

“But you have no new genotypes. It is the end.”

“Oh, but there are, now. Last century they worked out the way to make haploid nuclei combine. We can make a stripped egg-cell function like pollen,” she says proudly. “I mean sperm. It’s tricky, some don’t come out too well. But now we’re finding both Xs viable we have over a hundred new types started. Of course it’s hard for them, with no sisters. The donors try to help.”

Over a hundred, he thinks. Well. Maybe . . . But, both Xs viable, what does that mean? She must be referring to the epidemic. But he had figured it primarily affected the men. His mind goes happily to work on the new puzzle, ignoring a sound from somewhere that is trying to pierce his calm.

“It was a gene or genes on the X chromosome that was injured,” he guesses aloud. “Not the Y. And the lethal trait had to be recessive, right? Thus there would have been no births at all for a time, until some men recovered or were isolated long enough to manufacture undamaged X-bearing gametes. But women carry their lifetime supply of ova, they could never regenerate reproductively. When they mated with the recovered males, only female babies would be produced, since the female carries two Xs and the mother’s defective gene would be compensated by a normal X from the father. But the male is XY, he receives only the mother’s defective X. Thus the lethal defect would be expressed, the male fetus would be finished. . . . A planet of girls and dying men. The few odd viables died off.”