Swans and Klons Read online

  “Yes, I felt like that at your age too,” Stencil Pavlina said. “Nurture that feeling. Keep it alive as long as you can.”

  Rubric felt an icy finger of doom trace across her heart.

  Stencil Pavlina pulled on a bell rope that dangled from the ceiling. A Gerda appeared.

  “More lemonade for our guest, Gerda,” Stencil Pavlina said, stroking Gerda’s arm. Her gesture gave Rubric the creeps. It seemed almost sexual. Aside from the ick factor, how could a Klon be capable of consenting to sexual stuff with a human?

  Gerda bowed and left the room.

  “The Gerdas are a great consolation to me,” Stencil Pavlina said. “It is sad that art and literature are all our Jeepie Type has to cling to. And yet they are not enough to get us through this life.”

  Could this be some kind of test, Rubric wondered. Was Stencil Pavlina deliberately tormenting her?

  “You may find that to be the case for yourself,” Rubric said with as much dignity as she could muster. “But things will be different for me.”

  Panna Stencil Pavlina blinked. Gerda returned noiselessly to give Rubric her lemonade. Rubric took a big gulp. She had forgotten the big bird-shaped ice cubes, and some of the lemonade dribbled out of the sides of her mouth.

  “I’m glad you have such strength of character, Rubric. I respect that,” Stencil Pavlina said, with a hollow, artificial laugh.

  Rubric didn’t feel like she had strength of character, not with lemonade all over her chin. She wiped it with the back of her hand. Her hand was shaking. She stuffed it in her pocket, but the hand holding the glass was rattling it with her tremors.

  Get a grip, Rubric told herself. Don’t be intimidated by the Panna. She’s really weird, and you don’t have to take her seriously. But then Rubric was swept by a wave of disappointment more desolating than any feeling she had ever known. For if Panna Stencil Pavlina was just a big weirdo, what was the point of this?

  Stencil Pavlina was saying something about the amazing work they were going to do together. Rubric concentrated on nodding and looking interested even though her mentor’s words were just flowing meaninglessly by her. The birds on the ceiling caught her attention again. They were really something. At the very least, Stencil Pavlina was a master craftswoman. Rubric didn’t have the first clue how to make stuff like that.

  “Are the birds on the ceiling made of resin?” Rubric interrupted.

  Stencil Pavlina nodded. “Good eye.”

  “And what material is the unicorn?”

  “I sculpted it from a polylactic acid block and then spackled it.”

  “I’d like to learn how to do those things,” Rubric said.

  “Then I will teach you, my dear,” Stencil Pavlina said. Could it be that she seemed a little relieved to have a specific agenda? “I would very much like to collaborate with you. I have so much to share with you, and your youthful presence will inspire me.”

  For the rest of the visit, Panna Stencil Pavlina was pleasant to Rubric. She confined her conversation to describing the properties of different materials. By the time Rubric left, she had learned a lot of useful information. And her hands had almost stopped shaking.

  Chapter Six

  It had been Rubric’s perfect day. She loved being on the loose in the city with Salmon Jo. They were both embarrassed to be using their maps of the city, a dead giveaway of being sixteen-year-old academy students, brand-new to leaving campus. There were a lot of other girls out today, clutching their maps. So they tried to navigate without the maps, and they didn’t mind getting lost. They did all the tourist things first and ate their packed lunches by the Singing Fountain. They had seen a key-exchanging ceremony taking place on Karela Bridge, with two resplendently dressed Pannas exchanging vows of undying love. Salmon Jo had smiled and squeezed Rubric’s hand, and Rubric couldn’t help wondering what kind of dress she would wear if she and Salmon Jo ever exchanged keys someday. She had taken her schatzie to her new favorite place, the art-materials center. It was known as Pearl, probably because it was in an opalescent spherical building in the Uterine Celebratory style of forty years ago. Rubric loved everything about Pearl. By tradition, all the wares were laid out without rhyme or reason, so artists could browse and become inspired. If you wanted something specific, you went to the appropriate desk and a Klon would fetch it for you. Rubric couldn’t really get anything with her piddling student rationing credits, but it was fun to window-shop.

  Now they were at the Comfort Station downtown because they weren’t ready to go back to campus yet. There were Comfort Stations sprinkled throughout the city, every few miles. They all had the same big glowing sign, a luminous tube in the shape of a piece of toast. The Comfort Station served unlimited tea and toast to all humans, and there were cots in the back if you were traveling and needed a place to sleep. It was really designed for rash, intemperate Pannas who used up all their rationing credits before the month was over and had nothing to eat. But it was open twenty-four hours, so it was a great place for young people. Even though the furnishings and the decor in the Comfort Station were sort of minimalistic, Rubric thought it had a great atmosphere. It made her feel very worldly to be out late at night at the Comfort Station with her schatzie.

  The big screen in the Comfort Station was showing Who Shall Be My Schatzie?, the popular edfotunement show about a Panna who has to choose between sixteen women, all the same Jeepie Type. But it was obvious who she was going to pick, so Rubric and Salmon Jo had stopped watching.

  “Everyone at the Hatchery has memorized all the Jeepie Types by number,” Salmon Jo said. “When one Panna met me, she said, ‘Oh good, another forty-two. We love forty-twos.’”

  “Weird,” Rubric said. “What number am I?”

  “You’re eight. Apparently eights and forty-twos are perfect for each other.”

  “I guess you really like it at the Hatchery.” Rubric was trying not to sound bitter, but just a little bitterness leaked out.

  Salmon Jo didn’t even notice, she was considering the question so deeply. “I like some things about it. The people are all very smart, and they don’t mind taking the time to teach me stuff. It’s interesting but not really my kind of thing.”

  “What is your kind of thing?” Rubric teased.

  “You,” said Salmon Jo. “You are my kind of thing.” She kissed Rubric on the ear. “But I wish they would let me see the proprietary data on how they engineer the Klons to be nonhuman. I need more data, to understand certain things.”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s totally classified. What if you told the Barbarous Ones?”

  Salmon Jo snorted. “The Barbarous Ones are happy living in trees and giving birth. They don’t care how to make Klons.”

  “I can’t believe that. If they had Klons, they could have such happy lives. What are the Barbarous Ones doing all day? Doing their own laundry and cooking food, like great big Klons, right?”

  “They’re too thicko to even want happy lives,” Salmon Jo said. “And how could anyone tell them any secrets? You’d have to pass through the fence to their Land.”

  “Okay, fine, but the Hatchery still isn’t going to give an academy student that kind of information.”

  “All I really want to know is who’s in charge of that process. And no one seems to know. Or they’re all lying.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Rubric said.

  “I asked twenty-one of twenty-one people working in that office. They all say that’s not their area, and they don’t know whose it is. So whose area is it? Why all the secrecy?”

  When Salmon Jo started worrying about a problem, she was a dogged little terrier until she solved it. It didn’t seem to matter if the problem was big or small. She could obsess over a missing jar lid, or what to wear, or the meaning of life, or the Four Color Problem. It was all the same to her.

  “And then there are other things that no one can explain to me,” Salmon Jo said. “Like, why is the success rate for hatching humans one hundred percent? And the succ
ess rate for Klons is so low?”

  Rubric rolled her eyes. “It’s ten o’clock at night. It’s too late to talk about numbers. Try me another time.”

  “Oh, am I boring you? We could go on an adventure.”

  “What kind of adventure?” Rubric asked.

  *

  Forty minutes later, Rubric and Salmon Jo were breaking into the Hatchery.

  “It’s not breaking in,” Salmon Jo insisted. “They put access on my card.”

  They were standing in front of the entrance, which was a rust-covered revolving metal gate in the shape of an egg slicer.

  “It’s possible this is a bad idea,” Rubric said. She was trying not to giggle. Being anxious made her giggle, and she was trying to break that habit. She had noticed that Stencil Pavlina, for all her faults, never lost her cool. Rubric wanted to emulate that one habit.

  “No rule but the Golden Rule,” Salmon Jo quoted flippantly. “Right?”

  “This might be breaking the Golden Rule,” Rubric said.

  “Absolutely not. If I had a Hatchery, I wouldn’t mind if people visited in the middle of the night.”

  “Did they tell you that you could bring your schatzie here?”

  “No,” Salmon Jo said.

  “Did they tell you not to bring your schatzie here?” Rubric asked.

  Salmon Jo swiped her card in the reader. There was a click from inside the revolving gate.

  “Okay, squish up to me,” Salmon Jo instructed.

  Rubric pressed herself against Salmon Jo’s back. Salmon Jo was shorter than her, so it was like stacking a tablespoon on a teaspoon. It was a tight squeeze for Salmon Jo and Rubric to both fit inside the gate’s compartment. They shuffled around until they were released on the other side. Now they were standing in a dimly lit atrium.

  “As I see it, if they wanted to keep people from bringing their schatzies in, they would make it harder,” Salmon Jo said.

  “They just never expected anyone could be as strange as you,” said Rubric.

  “They should. They created me. Panna Madrigal told me the original of our Jeepie Type was something called a hacker, and that’s why I am the way I am.”

  “What is that?” Rubric asked. “Some kind of butcher? A killer? Some other social deviant?”

  “I don’t know,” Salmon Jo admitted. “I was afraid to ask.”

  They walked into the hallway, and Salmon Jo flipped on the light. The floor was industrial-grade rubber linoleum. The walls had grubby white paint up to eye level, and then a pretty robin’s egg blue going up the rest of the wall. Salmon Jo gestured to different doors as they passed them.

  “This is the lab where they insert the Jeepie Type nuclei into the enucleated ova and apply a shock to make the cell divide. That’s the most fun part, obviously. I only got to tour that lab once. They said after I’ve been here a few months, I can help out in there. My card doesn’t open that door so I can’t show you. The zygote freezer is over there. Wow, do they get mad if you leave the door open by mistake!”

  Salmon Jo pulled open the heavy metal door, and a cloud of cold air roiled out. Rubric shivered and peered inside. Disappointingly, it looked like any walk-in freezer. Its wire shelves were lined with metal canisters labeled with arcane numbers. There was also a tub of ice cream.

  “Panna Madrigal has a sweet tooth, just like me,” Salmon Jo said. She closed the freezer door and checked it twice to make sure it was really shut. They passed another revolving metal gate. “That leads to the nurseries. As soon as they decant the Hatchlings and examine them, they whisk them right in there where Klons start taking care of them. Now, that room is where Doctors examine the Hatchlings. It’s boring, just a bunch of tables and scales and cabinets. I saw a Doctor in there once, though! This chute in the wall leads to the high-heat compost unit. The defective Hatchlings they have to put down are disposed of there. Okay, this room is totally cool! You’re going to love the fetus room!”

  Salmon Jo swiped her card and they entered the fetus room.

  Chapter Seven

  The fetus room was like a different world. The lighting was soft, unlike the harsh, flickering overhead in the hallway. Gentle music was playing. The temperature was toasty. Abstract art in bold primary colors hung on the walls. A profusion of plants filled the room, so that at first Rubric hardly noticed the bubbling gestation tanks.

  “Oh!” she cried, and ran up to one of them. Inside the spherical tank, in a fizzy blue fluid, was a fetus. Its head seemed too big for its body. It was all curled up, and its little eyes were squeezed shut, but its tiny fists shot out. Every now and then the tank rotated slightly, and the fetus adjusted position.

  “That one is seven months,” Salmon Jo said. “Aren’t they amazing? I can’t decide if they’re more creepy or more cute.”

  “I’ve seen pictures, but it’s so different to see one in person,” Rubric said, awed. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she blinked them away. Salmon Jo took her hand.

  “Is it human or Klon?” Rubric asked.

  “I don’t know,” Salmon Jo said. “The tanks aren’t marked, and no one will explain it to me. Maybe the Klon process happens later, and at this point they’re all on track to be human?”

  The little fetus kicked. Then its hand opened and closed.

  “It’s waving!” Rubric said. “It’s waving at me!”

  “Talk to it,” Salmon Jo said.

  “What?”

  “Talk to it,” Salmon Jo said. “The scientists say it’s good for the fetuses if we talk to them. That’s one of my jobs. I have to talk to them for an hour every day. To a different one every day, so I don’t develop a false rapport which could be unhealthy.”

  “You never told me that! That’s the most interesting thing I’ve heard about your job. Okay, here goes. Hello, fetus!” She felt shy. “You’re doing a great job growing. I bet you’ll become a magnificent girl! Um, I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Yeah, I have that problem too,” Salmon Jo said. “I read to them a lot. Sometimes I sing.”

  Rubric giggled. Salmon Jo had a terrible singing voice. “You’re probably warping their development.”

  “These ones will be decanted in just a couple of months. That should be exciting. Come look at some of the others,” Salmon Jo said.

  Some of the fetuses were just froglike blobs. Salmon Jo said they were called embryos. A few of the tanks looked empty, but Salmon Jo insisted they contained something really small called blastocysts. Rubric was surprised to see a glossy black cat curled up under one of the tanks, sleeping.

  “They say being around pets is good for the fetuses,” Salmon Jo said. “I can’t see how, but there’s a lot of data supporting the claim. And the cats like to lie under the tanks because they’re so warm.”

  “I’m surprised they don’t need someone monitoring the tanks at night,” Rubric said. “What if something happened?”

  “Actually, someone comes in every three hours,” Salmon Jo said. She checked the watch hanging around her neck. “So maybe we should move along.”

  Rubric put her hand on the nearest tank, which held a jellyfish-like glob with a barely recognizable head and dots for eyes. “Good-bye, little thing,” she cooed. It was amazing to get to see the fetuses, to watch the miracle of life in action. She thought this should be part of academy students’ annual trip.

  They closed the door of the fetus room behind them. “One more stop,” Salmon Jo said. “The office. It’s pretty boring, but it’s where I spend most of my time.” They went through the last door in the hallway. As Salmon Jo had warned, it was just a large room with hexagonal areas enclosed by bamboo screens to give people private space. Every desk and table was cluttered with terminals, handheld screens, and other equipment. The walls were covered with graphics. A lot of the chairs seemed to be held together with electrical tape. In short, the office was a mess.

  “So what is it that people do here?”

  “Planning. They crunch a lot of numbers to see how man
y Klons and humans they need to hatch to keep the city’s population steady, and what Jeepie Types. And how many blastocysts they should create to get that number, since a lot of Klon fetuses lose viability in the tanks. And a lot of the Klons are hatched defective and have to be put down.”

  For the first time, Rubric became interested in Salmon Jo’s boring numbers problem. “Really? It’s just the Klons that are hatched defective?”

  “Yeah. No one told me, I figured that out myself from running the numbers. Literally all the humans are perfect. And all the defective ones that are put down and composted are Klons. Only around forty percent of Klons are healthy, nondefective Hatchlings that are brought to the nursery. It seems like someone should be working on that problem. There must be some kind of design flaw.”

  “Hmm, when do the fetuses become Klons?” Rubric mused. “Is it when they stick the nucleus into the ovum or whatever you said? The thing they do in the lab?”

  “No. They use the same genetic material for both Klons and humans. They told me that much.”

  “Maybe they know which ones are going to be Klons, but they’re keeping it a secret.” Rubric felt like there was something obvious that was eluding her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “What would be the point of that?” Salmon Jo said.

  “Oh!” Suddenly it was all illuminated for Rubric. “It’s very simple, you see! They’re just not designated Klon or human until after they fail or succeed. That would explain everything. Perfect Hatchlings, automatically human. Everything that goes wrong, automatically Klon. Any perfect Hatchlings that they don’t need for humans, they can become Klons too.”

  Salmon Jo just laughed. “That’s thicko, Rubric. By the time they’re hatched, the alteration, whatever it may be, has been done. They have to be decanted either as humans or Klons.”

  Rubric didn’t like being laughed at. She stubbornly stuck by her idea. “Maybe the alteration is done after they’re decanted from the tanks. Since you can’t figure out when or what happens, that makes sense. They just inject some of the Hatchlings with something, and presto, they turn into Klons.”