Swans and Klons Read online

  “I suppose that could be true,” Salmon Jo said slowly. “How would we really know?”

  “But some of the stories about the Land of the Barbarous Ones being paradise seem too good for true,” Picker Klon said. “Like, they say there are trees that grow hot buttered toast with honey, and waterfalls that have vodka instead of water.”

  “Preposterous,” Salmon Jo muttered.

  Picker Klon smiled at her. “You are like Panna Castle Mattea, except not so cracked up in the head.”

  It bothered Rubric that Salmon Jo was able to talk to Picker Klon so easily. And Rubric kept thinking about how much she had liked Salmon Jo when she had first talked to her and wondering if Picker Klon might feel the same way. Yup, that was a recipe for paranoid thoughts. What if Salmon Jo liked Picker Klon more than she liked Rubric?

  “Also, some of the stories say that in the Land of the Barbarous Ones you Pannas will have to wait on us hand and foot while we Klons lie down on the softest pillows and listen to music,” Picker Klon told them.

  “This is all assuming we can get past the fence,” Salmon Jo said severely. Rubric could tell she didn’t like the idea of being a slave any more than Rubric did. It seemed none of the stories about the Barbarous Ones mentioned Klons and Pannas living in harmony together. “Should I tell you what I know about the fence?”

  “If you would, Panna Salmon Jo,” Picker Klon said. “Our stories about the fence are very vague. They say you need special shoes which I don’t have.”

  “First of all, the fence extends fifty feet in the air and is invisible. There’s a condenser that’s charged by a polycrystalline device—”

  “S.J., please, skip the boring part,” Rubric asked.

  “I am skipping the boring part,” Salmon Jo said. “You have no idea.”

  Picker Klon smiled and ducked her head to hide it. Rubric had never realized how ineffective that strategy was until she saw someone else do it.

  “What you really need to know is that the fence itself doesn’t exist in a solid state, but when a living thing makes contact with it, they receive an electric shock. Until just a few years ago, the shock was lethal. They had colored flags near the fence to warn people not to wander into it. But deer and elk were always getting cooked. Then a few years ago, there was a rash of human suicides. Lovelorn young Pannas, all copying each other. They put up a big brick wall all along the fence, about fifteen feet high, to stop the suicides.”

  Picker Klon nodded. “I know someone who worked on that wall. Her back was never the same afterward, and she had to become a Chef Klon, at our dorm.”

  “The thing was, the locals didn’t stop killing themselves. It just became more of a challenge to get over the wall. Now it wasn’t lovelorn young Pannas anymore, but middle-aged Pannas. You know how sometimes people have a bit of a crisis, and they get jaded and think their lives are empty and have no meaning?”

  “I remember this,” Rubric said. She had always been afraid this could happen to her when she became middle-aged. The tales of the bored suicides had been exquisitely painful to her.

  “What thickos!” Picker Klon said. “If I were a Panna human, I would never throw my life away.”

  Rubric bristled. How could her Jeepie Similar be so insensitive?

  “They had to change the voltage in the fence to a nonlethal amount,” Salmon Jo said. “So that’s good news for us.”

  “Some Klons say the current is off to save energy,” Picker Klon said. “Other Klons say the fence is only deadly to Klons because of the chips we wear.”

  Salmon Jo shrugged. “It depends whether you believe the main point of the fence is to keep out the Barbarous Ones. Either way, they can probably track you down if you’re wearing that chip.”

  “I’m going to slice it out tomorrow morning,” Picker Klon said.

  “What about tunneling under the fence?” Rubric asked.

  “Negative,” Salmon Jo said. “They have metal plates underneath the earth all along the fence, to carry the current.”

  “That’s what my friend who worked on the fence said too.”

  “I wonder if there’s a way to turn off one section of the fence,” Rubric said.

  The others shrugged.

  “We’d better go to sleep, so we have the strength for all this slicing chips and jumping walls and getting zapped,” Rubric said. She was cross that they had to navigate this dangerous fence and go to the Land of The Barbarous Ones just to please Picker Klon. And it disturbed her how sketchy and contradictory all the information was.

  “Okay,” said Picker Klon immediately, unrolling the sleeping bag Rubric had lent her. “Dream of butter!”

  Salmon Jo smiled. “We say, sweet dreams.”

  Picker Klon smiled back. “That’s sort of my nickname, Dream. Because I’m always having a dream of something better.”

  Me too, thought Rubric, but she didn’t say anything. She crawled into the two-person tent she and Salmon Jo were sharing and hung her flashlight from its ceiling. The tent was starting to smell sort of like a pungent combination of herself and Salmon Jo. She liked it. Maybe they really would live in this tent for ever and ever.

  Salmon Jo crawled inside. “I hope she’ll be okay out there,” she said. “She’s never slept outdoors before.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Rubric said. She pictured the first night she had ever slept outside, in the front yard of her first dorm, when the Nanny Klons had organized a campout. She had loved gazing up at the stars.

  They spread Salmon Jo’s sleeping bag over them like a blanket. Rubric snuggled up to Salmon Jo and started kissing her. But after a minute Salmon Jo pulled away. “I don’t want her to hear us,” she whispered. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Fine, be like that,” said Rubric. She just let her hand rest on Salmon Jo’s belly. She was getting skinny.

  Salmon Jo sighed and put her face in Rubric’s neck. “You know what I wish?”

  “What?”

  “I wish we could go in the airship you designed. If only we were allowed to have air travel, we could just fly over the fence and go to the Land of the Barbarous Ones that way.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was late afternoon of the following day when they arrived at the fence. It had taken them longer than they had projected, mostly because Dream/Picker Klon extracting the chip from her belly had proved to be a more grisly affair than any of them had expected. Salmon Jo said it was normal for the fat on your abdomen to bleed a lot, but Rubric had the impression she was just making that up to calm Dream down. Dream had been very brave, cutting the chip out herself without screaming or crying, but afterward, she threw up copiously.

  It was a desolate area, almost desertlike. Salmon Jo said when the fence was put up generations ago, Klons had been told to scorch all the plant life out of the area because if brush touched the fence, it could start a fire. They had to spray the area with pesticide to keep weeds from growing back. And without the plant life, the area experienced soil erosion and became dusty.

  Rubric had never been to a place before that was neither settled nor a nature preserve. Despite the emptiness of the landscape, there was something so open and wild about it. They parked the electric bikes, stolen days ago just outside of Velvet City, under a tree near some rubbish that had been left there. They looked moderately inconspicuous, or so Rubric hoped. All their surroundings had an abandoned quality.

  “I’m surprised no one guards this border,” Rubric said.

  Dream snorted. “What would stop Security Klons from taking off, over the wall and through the fence?”

  “Yeah, and we Pannas don’t want to stand around in the hot sun,” Salmon Jo joked.

  “There might be occasional patrols, though, so let’s be fast,” Rubric warned.

  The wall that protected the fence was intimidating itself. Rubric remembered how hard it had been to scramble up the wall and out the window in the basement of the library, and this was probably twice as high. Although the wall was only bui
lt a few years ago, it looked ancient.

  “What about if Dream stands on my shoulders and clambers over the wall?” Salmon Jo said.

  “How am I supposed to get on your shoulders?” Dream asked.

  “Stand on Ru’s back,” suggested Salmon Jo. Rubric got down on her hands and knees.

  “Sorry, Panna,” Dream said and placed a dusty slipper on Rubric’s back. There was a period of grinding into her spine, and then Dream was up on Salmon Jo’s back. Rubric got up and helped Dream stand on Salmon Jo’s shoulders. But, try as she could, Dream couldn’t get up to the top of the wall or anywhere near it. Then Salmon Jo’s knees buckled, and they were both on the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dream, panting. “I don’t think I can do that. Wow, those bored suicides were in good shape.”

  It made Rubric feel better to see that Dream was as clumsy as she was. She had been told all her life it was genetic. Clearly, it was.

  “It would really help if we had a rope,” Salmon Jo said. “I guess we could slice up the tent, but I hate to do it.”

  “Oh. I have a rope,” said Dream. “It’s in my bag.”

  Being a thicko must not be genetic, Rubric thought meanly. But she reflected that Dream had actually brought a rope. What had Rubric brought? A vid camera.

  Salmon Jo tied knots in the rope every foot or so. She then emptied her own bag, and they all gathered stones. They put the stones in the bag, tied the rope to the heavy knapsack, and tried to toss the knapsack over the wall. The bag turned out to be too heavy. After they took a few stones out, when Salmon Jo stood on Rubric’s back, she was able to toss the knapsack over the wall, keeping a tight hold on the other end of the rope. Rubric was tired of being stood on.

  Salmon Jo grabbed the rope and pulled herself up. Before she reached the top, the knapsack slithered back over the wall, but Salmon Jo was able to grab the top of the wall. When she swung one leg over, she seemed to lose her balance a little bit, and for a few seconds it looked like she was going to fall over the other side of the wall. But she steadied herself and then raised her arms in a victory pose.

  They ferried all their possessions over the wall. Now was the hard part. Rubric and Dream glanced at each other, and for the first time they shared a moment of pure communication. Communication of fear.

  “After you, Panna?” Dream asked hopefully.

  Salmon Jo dangled the rope down, sitting on it to anchor it securely and gripping it tightly. Rubric stood on Dream’s back to give herself a head start and then began to climb the rope.

  It was perhaps the most nightmarish experience of her life. Half the time she was just hanging there, but even that was more work than her arms and legs were used to. Pulling herself up to each knot was agony. Once, her feet slipped off the rope knot, and she was hanging by her hands. She began to slide and almost let go. Only the awareness that she would have to do it all again gave her the strength to get her feet back onto the rope and continue shimmying up.

  At last, she was high enough for Salmon Jo to grip her under her armpits and help her scrabble to the top of the wall. Groaning, Rubric lay along the wall’s narrow top, gripping its sides with her quivering arms and legs. She felt she would be happy to lay there until the end of time.

  When she next looked up, Dream was climbing the rope. She looked like a defective snail, writhing her way slowly along. When Dream reached about halfway, she began letting out a string of curses, some of which Rubric had never even heard before, and she didn’t stop until Ru and Salmon Jo had pulled the rope up high enough so she could reach the top of the wall.

  “Damn this pregnant male scheiss-for-brains wall! I should have brought a ladder!” Dream said and fell off the other side of the wall.

  “Are you okay?” Salmon Jo called.

  A groan, and then, “Uh-huh!”

  Ordinarily, jumping off a wall wouldn’t put a song in Rubric’s heart. But compared to climbing up, it seemed positively easy. She slithered off the wall and let go. The fall was short.

  “How we doing?” Salmon Jo asked softly. “No broken bones?”

  Rubric’s legs throbbed a little, but she could walk without limping. “I’m okay,” she said, and the others echoed her.

  “We are so lucky,” Salmon Jo said. “For the moment, we’re covered in myrtle!”

  They picked up their knapsacks. They tried to evaluate the invisible fence before them. Rubric wondered where it was exactly. Then she thought she could see it shimmering, like the air on a very hot day. “When I look hard, I can almost see it,” she said. “It’s like a translucent rainbow.”

  “Did you fall on your head?” Salmon Jo asked.

  “I don’t see nothing,” Dream said.

  Rubric still thought she could see something shining with a tremulous light. But it was easy to believe she was imagining it. Through the fence, Rubric could see the Land of the Barbarous Ones. Not surprisingly, it looked very similar to the land of Society. In the distance, it became lush and green, but Rubric saw no sign of human habitation.

  She realized they had all been staring at the fence for a while.

  “So I guess we just run through it,” Salmon Jo croaked. She cleared her throat.

  Rubric sighed. It was such a low-tech plan.

  “Have I mentioned I have a fear of electric shocks?” Salmon Jo said.

  “I’ll go first,” Dream volunteered. “I mean, I am a Klon. I am genetically programmed to do things that could potentially save a human’s life.”

  “No, you’re not,” Rubric said. “That’s not actually true.” She was so annoyed that she was able to pelt forward at full speed.

  The pain was horrifying. She felt a buzzing in every muscle in her body, hot and yet numb at once. She screamed only a little, a short, strangled shriek. Then it was done, but her heart was beating funny. Could that strange feeling be her very bones aching? Rubric was lying on the barren ground, gasping. She started to feel better as she breathed in air that felt very cold. But the veins in her wrists were throbbing, as if her pulse was trying to escape from her body. She hoped they didn’t burst open.

  She looked up. Through the fence she could see Salmon Jo and Dream. They looked sort of wiggly. She couldn’t tell if it was seeing them through the fence that made them wiggly or if it was her brain being fried that made them wiggly. Maybe she was actually still vibrating inside?

  Salmon Jo and Dream didn’t look eager to race through the fence. Perhaps watching her go through and listening to her scream had not been inspiring. They were talking. They were close enough that Rubric should have been able to hear them, but she realized there was a ringing in her ears. Then the ringing went away, and Rubric decided she felt basically fine.

  “It’s not that bad!” she shouted. Salmon Jo and Dream were running toward the fence full tilt. Dream grabbed Salmon Jo’s hand.

  Rubric knew it wasn’t going to be fun to watch them go through the fence, but she wasn’t expecting that horrible scream from Salmon Jo. Dream kept running, but Salmon Jo flopped to the ground. Her body was convulsing, shaking so hard her teeth rattled. Rubric scrambled over to her side. Salmon Jo’s eyes were wide and staring, but she locked glances with Rubric. She looked terrified. Then her eyeballs rolled back in her head.

  “Salmon Jo, Salmon Jo!” Rubric screamed. “Are you all right?” A thicko thing to say. She clearly wasn’t all right. Salmon Jo couldn’t respond. She touched Salmon Jo’s shoulder gently. She smelled piss, and she saw that Salmon Jo had a dark stain on her leggings.

  Dream was beside her too. In the background, Rubric thought she saw another figure hurrying toward them, but she had no time to process this information.

  “I think she’s having a seizure,” Dream shouted.

  “What do I do?” Rubric said.

  “Put a stick in her mouth,” Dream said. “She might bite her own tongue off or choke on it.”

  “A stick?” Rubric couldn’t tear her eyes from Salmon Jo’s shaking face long enough to look around.
“You look for a stick.”

  Rubric cupped her hand behind Salmon Jo’s head. She didn’t want Salmon Jo to hurt her head. “It’s okay,” she told Salmon Jo. It sounded like a big fat lie. “You’re going to be fine.” She wasn’t sure if Salmon Jo could hear her.

  Dream was at her side again, waving a stick. Then another woman was there. She looked dirty, like a menial Klon, but spoke sharply and confidently.

  “Don’t put anything in her mouth,” the woman said. “That won’t help. She’ll stop shaking soon. I know it’s scary, but this will be over soon.”

  It didn’t feel soon, but Salmon Jo did stop shaking and seemed more alert. “Just roll her on her side,” the woman said. Without waiting for Rubric, the woman gently turned Salmon Jo onto her side.

  “What is her name?” she asked.

  “Salmon Jo,” Rubric said.

  “What weird names they have,” the woman muttered. “Salmon Jo, you’re going to be just fine. This was a seizure you had.”

  “Can she hear us?” Rubric asked.

  “Probably,” the woman said. “It’s always wise to act as if they can.”

  “Are you a Doctor?” Dream asked.

  “I don’t really know what that is, so probably not,” the woman said.

  For the first time, it struck Rubric that this woman was a Barbarous One.

  “Hey, S.J., can you hear me?” Rubric stroked her clammy forehead. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “That was brutal,” Salmon Jo said thickly. “I think I pissed myself.” She stretched a bit and reached for Rubric’s hand. Then she closed her eyes.

  “She is going to be very tired now and may even take a nap,” the woman said. “Don’t worry, that’s normal. It doesn’t mean anything bad. Having a seizure takes a lot out of you.”

  Dream had taken a cloak from her bag and folded it, and now she put it under Salmon Jo’s head for a pillow.

  “Is she really going to be okay?” Dream asked in a low voice.

  “Most likely,” the woman said, even more quietly. “It does sometimes happen that people suffer brain damage. But that’s rare.”