Clones Page 8

  So, Gray inspected Batch D, which were now just over nineteen years old. They regarded him with their usual idiotic, friendly expression. He wondered, not for the first time, if any of the Extras ever realized that he was their clone-brother, too. They never seemed to respond to him any differently than they did to other humans—and yet a fraction of a gram of fetal brain tissue was all that had kept him from being one of them. Even Batch A, his "contemporaries," showed no sign of recognition. If he had stripped naked and mimicked their grunting sounds, would they have accepted him as an equal? He'd never felt inclined to find out; Extra "anthropology" was hardly something he wished to encourage, let alone participate in. But he decided he would return to visit Batch D in his new body; it would certainly be amusing to see just what they made of a clone-brother who vanished, then came back three months later with speech and clothes.

  The clones were all in perfect health, and virtually indistinguishable. He finally chose one at random. The trainer examined the tattoo on the sole of its foot, and said, "D12, sir."

  Gray nodded, and walked away.

  He spent the week before the transplant in a state of constant agitation. He knew exactly what drugs would have prevented this, but the medical team had advised him to stay clean, and he was too afraid to disobey them.

  He watched D12 for hours, trying to distract himself with the supposedly thrilling knowledge that those clear eyes, that smooth skin, those taut muscles, would soon be his. The only trouble was, this began to seem a rather paltry reward for the risk he would be taking. Knowing all his life that this day would come, he'd learnt not to care at all what he looked like; by now, he was so used to his own appearance that he wasn't sure he especially wanted to be lean and muscular and rosy-cheeked. After all, if that really had been his fondest wish, he could have achieved it in other ways; some quite effective pharmaceuticals and tailored viruses had existed for decades, but he had chosen not to use them. He had enjoyed looking the part of the dissolute billionaire, and his wealth had brought him more sexual partners than his new body would ever attract through its own merits. In short, he neither wanted nor needed to change his appearance at all.

  So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality. As his parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A whole new body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than replacing individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And a whole new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than waiting until he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish him off.

  When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally, prepared. The chief surgeon asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have said no, and she would not have blinked—not one of his employees would have dared to betray the least irritation, had he canceled their laborious preparations a thousand times.

  But he didn't say no.

  As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered a moment of absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain of a grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but his brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of moments of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of ambitions that, given time, might change the course of civilization.

  He tried to visualize one of his favorite paintings, to provide an image he could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the essential Daniel Gray had survived the transplant. That Van Gogh he'd bought last year. But he couldn't recall the name of it, let alone what it looked like. He closed his eyes and drifted helplessly into darkness.

  When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or make a sound, but he could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might have been hours, or might have been days—punctuated as it was with stretches of enervating, dreamless sleep—he was able to identify his surroundings. A white ceiling, a white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the corner of one eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted, mercifully keeping his gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldn't move his head, or his eyes, he couldn't even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost interest in the view. The light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only relief from the monotony. After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken many times, before he had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark the occasions in his memory.

  Later he could hear, too, although there wasn't much to be heard; people came and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could tell, to him; in any case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to care about the people, or to fret about his situation. In time he would be taught to use his new body fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right now, he was happy to oblige.

  When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly helpless and humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he had no control, no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to receive sensations from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going on, but since his head just lolled there, he couldn't watch what they were doing to him, and they made no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought he was still deaf and blind, perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage were freak effects that had not been envisaged. Before the operation, the schedule for his recovery had been explained to him in great detail, but his memory of it was hazy now. He told himself to be patient.

  When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it, with great effort, into his field of view.

  It was his arm, his old arm—not the Extra's.

  He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out.

  Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing them to cancel the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the Extra's life-support machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasn't impossible—as his parents' deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He suddenly felt unbearably tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of his very own body; for all he knew, the newly forged pathways across the wounds in his brain might require as much time to become completely functional as they would have if the transplant had gone ahead.

  For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express his rage to the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and grimace—he couldn't speak, he couldn't even gesture—and they paid no attention. How could his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through months of trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up exactly where he'd started?

  But when he'd calmed down, he told himself that his doctors weren't incompetent at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world. Whatever had gone wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He decided to adopt a positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky: the malfunction might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he was in the care of experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he would still, eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success all the more of a triumph—personally, he could have done without the setback, but the media would lap it up.

  The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then his motor control, were restored to more and more of his body, until, although weak and uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To experience familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment, and several times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish sentiment at the joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On these occasions, he swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be faithful to his own body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically reminding himself of all his reasons for proceeding in the first place could he put this foolishness aside.

  Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began to grow impatient for the speech therapists to sta
rt work. His hearing, as such, seemed to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the people around him, and he could only assume that the connections between the parts of his brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which carried out the lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by whatever ingenious regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished they'd start soon; he was sick of this isolation.

  One day, he had a visitor—the first person he'd seen since the operation who was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was a young man, dressed in brightly colored pajamas, and traveling in a wheelchair.

  By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man approaching, surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognized the doctors; every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all smiling proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so long to appear; until now, he'd presumed that they were waiting until he was able to fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realized how absurd that was—how could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why did they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject?

  Then Gray realized that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra, D12. And yet he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic laughter.

  The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and spent several seconds staring into Gray's face. Gray stared back; obviously he was dreaming, or hallucinating. The Extra's expression hovered between boredom and mild amusement, just as it had in the dream he'd had all those years ago.

  The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through his body. Of course he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be?

  Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all.

  Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained enough of his memory and personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray. Unless the brain function studies that had localized identity had been correct, but incomplete—unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness were redundantly duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain.

  In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays.

  One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence. Ten thousand servants. And now, at last, immaculate health.

  And the other? He had one thing only.

  The knowledge of his helplessness.

  It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft but dry.

  He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the people around him. He knew he would never master speech, and he couldn't even manage to convey meaning in his gestures—the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available to him, and he could no more plan and execute a simple piece of mime than he could solve the latest problems in grand unified field theory. For a while he had simply thrown tantrums—refusing to eat, refusing to cooperate. Then he had recalled his own plans for his old body, in the event of such recalcitrance. Cremation. And realized that, in spite of everything, he didn't want to die.

  He acknowledged, vaguely, that in a sense he really wasn't Daniel Gray, but a new person entirely, a composite of Gray and the Extra D12—but this was no comfort to him, whoever, whatever, he was. All his memories told him he was Daniel Gray; he had none from the life of D12, in an ironic confirmation of his long-held belief in human superiority over Extras. Should he be happy that he'd also proved—if there'd ever been any doubt—that human consciousness was the most physical of things, a spongy gray mess that could be cut up like a starfish, and survive in two separate parts? Should he be happy that the other Daniel Gray—without a doubt, the more complete Daniel Gray—had achieved his lifelong ambition?

  The trainer yanked on his collar.

  Meekly, he stepped onto the path.

  The lush garden was crowded as never before—this was indeed the party of the decade—and as he came into sight, the guests began to applaud, and even to cheer.

  He might have raised his arms in acknowledgment, but the thought did not occur to him.

  OUT OF COPYRIGHT

  Charles Sheffield

  One of the best contemporary "hard science" writers, British-born Charles Sheffield is a theoretical physicist who has worked on the American space program, and is currently chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. Sheffield is also the only person who has ever served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. He won the Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, "Georgia on My Mind." His books include the bestselling nonfiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother's Keeper, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader's World, Proteus Unbound, Summertide, Divergence, Transcendence, Cold As Ice, Brother To Dragons, and The Mind Pool, and the collections Erasmus Magister, The McAndrew Chronicles, and Dancing With Myself. His most recent hooks are the novels Godspeed and The Ganymede Club, and a new collection, Georgia on My Mind and Other Places. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

  Here he slyly suggests that finding the right tool for the right job is more than half the battle—particularly if you're smart enough to know which jobs are really the important ones . . . and just what kind of tools you need to do them right.

  Troubleshooting. Alendid idea, and one that I agree with totally in principle. Bang! One bullet, and trouble bites the dust. But unfortunately, trouble doesn't know the rules. Trouble won't stay dead.

  I looked around the table. My top troubleshooting team was here. I was here. Unfortunately, they were supposed to be headed for Jupiter, and I ought to be down on Earth. In less than twenty-four hours, the draft pick would begin. That wouldn't wait, and if I didn't leave in the next thirty minutes, I would never make it in time. I needed to be in two places at once. I cursed the copyright laws and the single-copy restriction, and went to work.

  "You've read the new requirement," I said. "You know the parameters. Ideas, anyone?"

  A dead silence. They were facing the problem in their own unique ways. Wolfgang Pauli looked half-asleep, Thomas Edison was drawing little doll-figures on the table's surface, Enrico Fermi seemed to be counting on his fingers, and John von Neumann was staring impatiently at the other three. I was doing none of those things. I knew very well that wherever the solution would come from, it would not be from inside my head. My job was much more straightforward: I had to see that when we had a possible answer, it happened. And I had to see that we got one answer, not four.

  The silence in the room went on and on. My brain trust was saying nothing, while I watched the digits on my watch flicker by. I had to stay and find a solution; and I had to get to the draft picks. But most of all and hardest of all, I had to remain quiet, to let my team do some thinking.

  It was small consolation to know that similar meetings were being held within the offices of the other three combines. Everyone must be finding it equally hard going. I knew the players, and I could imagine the scenes, even though all the troubleshooting teams were different. NETSCO had a group that was intellectually the equal of ours at Romberg AG: Niels Bohr, Theodore von Karman, Norbert Weiner, and Marie Curie. MMG, the great Euro-Mexican combine of Magrit-Marcus Gesellschaft, had focused on engineering power rather than pure scientific understanding and creativity, and, in addition to the Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev and the American Nikola Tesla, they had reached farther back (and with more risk) to the great nineteenth-century English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He had been one of the outstanding successes of the program; I wished he were working with me, but MMG had always refused to look at a trade. MMG's one bow to theory was a strange one, the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, but the unlikely quartet made one hell of a team
.

  And finally there was BP Megation, whom I thought of as confused. At any rate, I didn't understand their selection logic. They had used billions of dollars to acquire a strangely mixed team: Erwin Schrodinger, David Hilbert, Leo Szilard, and Henry Ford. They were all great talents, and all famous names in their fields, but I wondered how well they could work as a unit.

  All the troubleshooting teams were now pondering the same emergency. Our problem was created when the Pan-National Union suddenly announced a change to the Phase B demonstration program. They wanted to modify impact conditions, as their contracts with us permitted them to do. They didn't have to tell us how to do it, either, which was just as well for them, since I was sure they didn't know. How do you take a billion tons of mass, already launched to reach a specific target at a certain point of time, and redirect it to a different end point with a different arrival time?

  There was no point in asking them why they wanted to change rendezvous conditions. It was their option. Some of our management saw the action on PNU's part as simple bloody-mindedness, but I couldn't agree. The four multinational combines had each been given contracts to perform the biggest space engineering exercise in human history: small asteroids (only a kilometer or so across—but massing a billion tons each) had to be picked up from their natural orbits and redirected to the Jovian system, where they were to make precise rendezvous with assigned locations of the moon Io. Each combine had to select the asteroid and the method of moving it, but deliver within a tight transfer-energy budget and a tight time schedule.