Swans and Klons Read online

  “Oops,” said Salmon Jo from the ceiling.

  Chapter Two

  Before she had started dating Salmon Jo, Rubric had thought there was only one problem with her life: she knew everyone. Sure, it was a close-knit community in the dorms and at the academy, but it was hard to find a schatzie. How could you get romantic about someone if you had known her since before puberty and remembered the time she threw up in the cafeteria, or how she used to pretend she was a pony? You just couldn’t. Rubric had always wanted to meet a beautiful, brooding stranger. And it had finally happened. Sort of.

  She had known who Salmon Jo was. But they had always lived in different dorms and moved in separate circles. Rubric respected her in an abstract way because Salmon Jo was well-known for being a science head. Of course, science was boring, but at least the girl cared about stuff other than parties, gossip, who was whose schatzie, and what the coolest clothes were. Beyond that, she never thought about Salmon Jo at all.

  Until six months ago in the Sky Room. The Sky Room was Rubric’s favorite place, even though it was just a small room on the top floor of the Rec Building. She liked it because it had so many windows and a huge skylight. Rubric liked to bring her handheld screen and draw there. It was rare for Rubric to have the room all to herself. It was funny to think now that she had actually been disappointed when Salmon Jo came in. Salmon Jo didn’t bother her, though; she just took out her own screen and started reading.

  Rubric was making up a graphic novel about an airship that traveled around the world, its people living happy and fulfilled lives. It was just like real Society, except the people had to keep everything they needed on the ship. She couldn’t exactly come up with a plot, since she had made their lives perfect, so she was sketching the airship. She wanted it to be constructed of modern transluminum but to be powered like the zeppelins of the ancient past.

  She had drawn two balloons filled with helium and was working on the engine, when Salmon Jo spoke.

  “Excuse me, but I think you should house the engine cars outside the hull to reduce the chance that the hydrogen gets ignited by the exhaust flame or some kind of spark.”

  Rubric had never even seen Salmon Jo glance up from her screen, let alone examine the drawing. For that matter, Salmon Jo was barely looking at her now. Her eyes kept flitting away. “It’s helium, not hydrogen,” Rubric said. Why was this girl criticizing her drawing? That was totally veruckt!

  Salmon Jo shrugged. “Either way. I think hydrogen would give you more lift, though.”

  Rubric realized the girl had understood exactly what she was drawing without having to be told. So it must be a pretty good picture. Rubric really didn’t want to have to start all over, just to put the engine cars in a different place.

  “Of course, I shouldn’t just point out all the mistakes without saying what a mouthwateringly good drawing it is, but there is just one more thing. I mean it’s really lovely—”

  “Oh, just spit it out,” Rubric said.

  “The swimming pool. It’s a bit unrealistic. A swimming pool must weigh hundreds of tons. It would be way too heavy.”

  “This is a huge ship. You can’t see the scale from the drawing.”

  “It could be huge, but it still couldn’t hold that much weight.”

  “I think it could,” Rubric said. If the people were going to be happy, they obviously needed a swimming pool. She sniffed and turned away from Salmon Jo.

  “This is just a question of fact,” the girl persisted. “It’s not a matter of opinion.”

  “There are no facts here,” Rubric said. “This is an imaginary airship we’re arguing about. I mean, the swimming pool is the least of your worries here when it comes to plausibility. But it’s my imaginary ship so I’ll have a swimming pool on it if I want to.”

  She was immediately embarrassed at her own childishness. She looked over at Salmon Jo and saw that she was biting her lip to keep from laughing. Then Salmon Jo snorted, appallingly loudly.

  “I’m sorry,” Salmon Jo said.

  “Probably all the water would slosh out of the pool every time the airship made a hard turn,” Rubric admitted. She noticed that since the last time she’d really looked at Salmon Jo, Salmon Jo had gotten a new haircut that made her short corkscrew curls look very cute. Salmon Jo had nice eyes, a golden color that reminded Rubric of agave nectar. Salmon Jo was shorter than Rubric, but her sinewy frame and abundance of energy made her seem tall.

  “Actually, I have an idea for an airship too,” Salmon Jo said. “Instead of hydrogen or helium, a vacuum would make it float. It would be shaped like a diatom.”

  “A what?” Rubric asked.

  “It’s a kind of phytoplankton,” Salmon Jo explained. “The kind I’m thinking of is sort of in the shape of a ribbon. Very pretty.”

  Rubric wondered why she hadn’t just said the ship would be shaped like a ribbon. Who thought about the shapes of phytoplankton? And thought they were pretty? Salmon Jo, apparently. Rubric was going to ask what a phytoplankton was but thought better of it.

  “The ship would require elements and sheets with tensile strength,” Salmon Jo said, warming to her subject. “Ideally, a frictionless material, which of course doesn’t actually exist. My airship might implode, but it definitely wouldn’t burn. So that would make a nice change from hydrogen.”

  “I don’t understand a word you just said, except for and and the,” Rubric said.

  “Okay, well, if you think about the basic physics—”

  “I never took physics,” Rubric said. “I don’t have time for that kind of tripe.”

  “You…never…took…physics,” Salmon Jo said. “You’re sixteen years old and you never took physics? You’re one of those humanities girls. I don’t believe it. I’ve never had an intelligent conversation before with a humanities girl.”

  “What makes you think you’ve ever had an intelligent conversation, period?” Rubric snapped.

  Salmon Jo laughed, revealing neat white teeth.

  “I’m going to narrow my focus to what we have in common,” Salmon Jo said, touching Rubric’s arm lightly. “We both like airships. And the idea of flying, in general?”

  Rubric nodded. “Did you ever do the trick of levitating someone?” she found herself asking.

  “Yeah, at a dorm party,” Salmon Jo said.

  “You want to try?” Rubric asked.

  “I’m not sure if it will work with just us,” Salmon Jo said. “I mean, you need a whole lot of people to create the illusion of—”

  “Sssh,” Rubric said. “Turn off your science brain.”

  “Have you noticed you keep interrupting me?” Salmon Jo grumbled, but she lay down and wriggled a little closer to Rubric. Salmon Jo closed her eyes, and Rubric slipped her fingers under Salmon Jo’s neck. Salmon Jo seemed tense at first, but then Rubric could feel her muscles relax.

  “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” she intoned. Since Salmon Jo had her eyes closed, she could examine her face as much as she wanted. Her eyelids themselves were beautiful. Rubric was already imagining Salmon Jo as her future schatzie, even though they’d never kissed or been on a date.

  Four or five giggling girls slammed into the room, but Salmon Jo didn’t open her eyes. Rubric kept cradling her head in her hands. She was positive Salmon Jo liked her.

  Chapter Three

  The foyer outside the auditorium was jammed with girls, but Rubric’s friends had pulsed her with instructions to meet them under the huge engraved Golden Rule on the wall. She found them by the big OTHERS in DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WANT THEM TO DO UNTO YOU. Salmon Jo kissed her distractedly, half on the lips and half on the cheek, and squeezed her hand. Rubric was immediately drawn into the excited chatter of her friends.

  “Rubric, I know who my mentor will be,” Banner insisted. “I can just feel it.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rubric scoffed, even though she felt the same way about Stencil Pavlina.

  “My future mentor has the largest collection of
shoes in the city,” Banner said. “Maybe in all of Society. She’s really glam!”

  Rubric couldn’t even count the number of times Banner had told her this. She also couldn’t believe this was the last time they would have this conversation because in just a few minutes they would find out the truth.

  “I think I just saw my future mentor in the “Cream Of Society” column,” Filigree Sue said. “Look!” She brought up the article on her handheld screen and showed it to them.

  Rubric could see that the beautifully coiffed Panna bore no resemblance to Filigree Sue. But she didn’t want to burst her bubble.

  Banner had no such qualms. “Good gravy!” she said. “You’re turning into another Hollyhock!”

  Hollyhock had lived in Maroon Dorm. About a year ago, she had started saying a lot of veruckt stuff, almost like hallucinations. And kind of vulgar. She was saying that she was in love with the Chef Klon in her dorm. Then Doctors had come to take her away because she needed a kidney transplant. Adults needed kidney transplants all the time, but kids didn’t, usually. So that had been exciting because Rubric had never seen a Doctor in the flesh, except at her annual physical exam. It was cool to see the beautiful Doctor stride in, wearing her special saffron-colored robes, surrounded by a retinue of blue-robed Klons. Ever since then, her group of friends called you a Hollyhock if you were acting particularly veruckt.

  “What do you mean?” asked Filigree Sue.

  “There’s no way that Panna is your Jeepie Similar, you thicko. She looks nothing like you. Look at her tiny upturned nose.”

  Filigree Sue put her hand to her nose. “I think she looks like me,” she said in a muffled voice and glanced back at her screen.

  Salmon Jo was staring at a screen too, but she was reading about Cretinous Males.

  “I don’t know who mine will be, but I’m going to have so much fun with her,” said Concept. “She can show me what colors look best on me. And show me all around the city.”

  Rubric wondered what her friends would have to give their lives meaning. She had art and Salmon Jo had science. Maybe Banner, Concept, and Filigree Sue would be happy spending the rest of their lives watching edfotunement and doing their hair. That must be a quality of their Jeepie Types. She couldn’t picture them as being among the tiny cohort of girls who were selected to be Doctors or to have careers.

  “She’ll take me to real parties! And all the spectacles!” Filigree Sue said. “Isn’t it going to be amazing when we can leave campus any time we want? All the fifteen year olds are going to be on their pathetic annual trip off campus, all wearing the same color tunics and being herded by their teachers and Nanny Klons. And I’ll be strolling along all alone, or maybe with my mentor. Sipping a chicory coffee.”

  Rubric tried to imagine herself walking around the city all alone but failed.

  Salmon Jo looked up from her handheld screen. “Filigree, you always loved the annual trip.”

  “I did, but I’m so past it now. Did you find your scientist mentor?” Filigree Sue asked.

  “I didn’t waste my time on that,” Salmon Jo said. “When I filled out the form, I explained that I wanted to be matched with someone who’s working on the Cretinous Male issue. It’s only the greatest unsolved mystery in all of history, why they became cretinous. I’m sure it took the teachers about three minutes to find the right scientist for me.”

  Concept giggled. “Salmon Jo wants to hatch a Cretinous Male!”

  “No, Salmon Jo wants to give—to give—” Banner couldn’t talk for laughing. She finally spat out the taboo phrase. “She wants to give birth to a Cretinous Male!”

  “Maybe Salmon Jo should go live with the Barbarous Ones,” Concept sang out. Salmon Jo rolled her eyes as Concept and Banner laughed, but she didn’t seem angry. Rubric was angry for her. Well, maybe at her. Salmon Jo didn’t seem to understand what a big deal today was.

  “Why do you like Cretinous Males so much?” Banner teased. “Is it the hair covering their entire bodies? Or is it their spiny peanuts hanging off them?”

  “Penises,” Filigree Sue corrected. “Not peanuts.”

  “Were they really spiny?” Concept asked. “I never heard that.”

  “Yeah,” Banner said. “Like male cats. There’s a pack of feral cats in the courtyard behind Blue Dorm, and they scream every night, all summer long. Because the male cats have spiny peanuts, and it hurts the cats when they have sex. Male humans were the same.”

  “I’m not sure how similar human anatomy is to cat anatomy,” Salmon Jo said.

  Rubric thought she might throw up. This talk of Cretinous Males was not helping her nervous state. As far as she was concerned, all the girls were Hollyhocks.

  Other girls were going into the auditorium. “Let’s go in,” Rubric said. “I want to get good seats.”

  “What’s the rush?” Salmon Jo asked. “It’s Panna Lobe. She’s going to talk for half an hour about irrelevant details before she tells us who our mentors are.”

  “Still,” Rubric said and headed for the door. The others followed. Salmon Jo grabbed Rubric’s hand as they entered the room. One of the things Rubric was beginning to learn about Salmon Jo was that large groups of people made her nervous. And all the sixteen-year-olds from all the different dorms were there, about fifty girls. They only had all-class assemblies a few times a year. Banner and Concept grabbed the last two seats in the front row. Rubric and the others sat right behind them. Feeling hyperalert, Rubric found herself noticing every detail of her surroundings, like the initials someone had carved into the arm of her chair.

  Panna Lobe, the head teacher, stepped up to the podium. She was a tall woman with a regal bearing who wore her hair in an old-fashioned, flower-entwined coronet braid. From her experience in the academy musical, Rubric knew that Panna Lobe was strict but had a good heart. There was total silence as Panna Lobe began speaking.

  “You are embarking on one of the most special transitions in a girl’s life,” she said. “You are growing up, from girls into Pannas, and having a mentor is one of the most important parts of growing up. The moment when you meet your mentor for the first time will be a symbol of the entire history of Society.”

  Rubric didn’t want to hear about the history of Society. She wanted to hear the name of her mentor.

  “Cast your mind centuries back in time, to the founding of Society. At that time, the world was beset by poverty, inequality, and genetic randomness. The advent of universal cretinism in males seemed to spell doom for the human race. At the final moment, Doctors saved humanity by discovering how to create human life without the animalistic and outdated method of sexual reproduction. The Doctors chose three hundred specimens of exquisite womanhood to be the templates for all future generations to come. And thus Society was born, and in this great nation called Society we have three hundred Jeepie Types. Every Panna in Society is one of these three hundred Jeepie Types, and we are all replicated from those three hundred long-ago women. Later, scientific advances allowed the Doctors to create nonhuman Klons, subtly different from humans on a molecular level, and of course, they too are taken from the same three hundred Jeepie Types. I hope none of you ever forgets that the origin of the word Jeepie is G P—Genotype Phenotype.”

  Salmon Jo shot Rubric a look. As expected, Panna Lobe was maundering on about stuff they all knew already. Rubric was too anxious to respond.

  “Up until now, none of you has ever met your Jeepie Similar—someone of your Jeepie Type. Think how carefully Society is designed, just to ensure that you will never come across a Jeepie Similar until you are ready! But now it is time.

  “You have each heard so much about your Jeepie Type. Your Jeepie Type determines all your attributes: your looks, your tastes, your aptitudes, your weaknesses, and your personality. And now, at last, you will meet a mentor who is genetically identical to yourself.”

  She paused, and Rubric was sure she was going to read the list. But instead she went on. “A word of caution! Not every moment with
your mentor will be embroidered with leaves of myrtle. Sometimes conflict arises, precisely because you and your mentor will be so similar.”

  Nanny Klon had talked about Salmon Jo’s Jeepie Type having trouble with mentors. Maybe this was what she meant.

  “And, of course, you must remember that you will not grow up to be completely identical to your mentor. There is a slight degree of originality among Jeepie Similars that is the very spice of life!”

  Just read the list, Rubric silently pleaded.

  As though she had heard, Panna Lobe picked up her screen. “I will now share the matches with you.”

  The list was not alphabetical, so Rubric was on the edge of her seat with every name. “Filigree Sue. Matched with Panna Autumn, owner of unique poodles.”

  It wasn’t the woman Filigree Sue had been talking about, but Rubric had heard of her. Filigree Sue was clapping her hands. Rubric gave her a hug and congratulated her. She didn’t recognize the names of the Pannas that Banner and Concept were matched with, but they squealed with pleasure and hugged each other. She sent them pulses with graphics of balloons, flowers, and shoes.

  It seemed as though most of the girls had been covered before Panna Lobe finally read, “Rubric Anne. Matched to Panna Stencil Pavlina, artist.”

  Rubric grinned. She couldn’t wait to meet Panna Stencil Pavlina. Her screen filled up with congratulatory pulses. But there was still a trace of fear in her stomach. She realized she was more worried about Salmon Jo’s match than her own.

  “Salmon Jo, matched with Panna Madrigal Sue, Hatchery scientist.”

  “Wait, what do you mean, Hatchery?” Salmon Jo blurted out, frowning.

  Rubric was embarrassed. No one else had interrupted.

  “Panna Madrigal is an eminent scientist at the Hatchery,” Panna Lobe said. “She is closely involved with the creation of all our city’s Hatchlings and coordinates with other cities’ Hatcheries. She probably helped create every girl in this room.”