So Long Been Dreaming (3 page)

“But –”

“This one’s damaged. If you train intensely, you’ll make up the lost time and go down to Jubilee with the rest of us.”

Or she might be able to delay and wind up part of Thad’s settlement instead.

As if he’d heard her thought, Unique added, “I wouldn’t wait, if I were you. I’d ask for – no, demand another body – now. Soon as you can.”

“Because?”

“Because your chances of a decent one will just get worse, if this is a radiation-induced mutation. Which I have absolutely no proof of. But if it is.”

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept. . . .” The pool reflected music, voices vaulting upward off the water, outward to the walls of white-painted steel. Unlike yesterday, the words were clear, because everyone was saying the same thing. Singing the same thing. “For the wicked carried us away. . . .” Wayna wondered why the trustee in charge had chosen this song. Of course he was a prisoner, too.

The impromptu choir sounded more soulful than it looked. If the personalities of these clones’ originals had been in charge, what would they be singing now? The “Doxology?” “Bringing in the Sheaves?” Did Episcopalians even have hymns?

Focusing on the physical, Wayna scanned her body for symptoms. So far this morning, she’d felt nothing unusual. Carefully, slowly, she swept the satiny surface with her arms, raising a tapering wave. She worked her legs, shooting backwards like a squid, away from the shallows and most of the other swimmers. Would sex underwater be as good as it was in freespace? No, you’d be constantly coming up for breath. Instead of constantly coming. . . . Last night, Doe had forgiven her, and they’d gone to Thad together. And everything had been fine until they started fighting again. It hadn’t been her fault. Or Doe’s, either.

They told Thad about Wayna’s pains, and how Unique thought she should ask for another clone. “Why do you want to download at all?” he asked. “Stay in here with me.”

“Until you do? But if –”

“Until I don’t. I wasn’t sure I wanted to anyway. Now it sounds
so
much more inviting. ‘Defective body?’ ‘Don’t mind if I do.’” Thad’s icon got up from their bed to mimic unctuous host and vivacious guest. “‘And, oh, you’re serving that on a totally unexplored and no doubt dangerous new planet? I just adore totally –’”

“Stop it!” Wayna hated it when he acted that way, faking that he was a flamer. She hooked him by one knee and pulled him down, putting her hand over his mouth. She meant it as a joke; they ought to have ended up wrestling, rolling around, having fun, having more sex. Thad didn’t respond, though. Not even when Wayna tickled him under his arms. He had amped down his input.

“Look,” he said. “I went through our ‘voluntary agreement.’ We did our part by letting them bring us here.”

Doe propped herself up on both elbows. She had huge nipples, not like the ones on her clone’s breasts. “You’re really serious.”

“Yes. I really am.”

“Why?” asked Wayna. She answered herself: “Dr Ops won’t let you download into a woman. Will he.”

“Probably not. I haven’t even asked.”

Doe said “Then what is it? We were going to be together, at least on the same world. All we went through and you’re just throwing it away –”

“Together to do what? To bear our enemies’ children, that’s what, we nothing but a bunch of glorified mammies, girl, don’t you get it? Remote-control units for their immortality investments, protection for their precious genetic material. Cheaper than your average AI, no benefits, no union, no personnel manager.
Mammies
.”

“Not mammies,” Doe said slowly. “I see what you’re saying, but we’re more like incubators, if you think about it. Or petri dishes – inoculated with their DNA. Except they’re back on Earth; they won’t be around to see the results of their experiment.”

“Don’t need to be. They got Dr Ops to report back.”

“Once we’re on Amends,” Wayna said, “no one can make us have kids or do anything we don’t want.”

“You think. Besides, they won’t
have
to make people reproduce. It’s a basic drive.”

“Of the meat.” Doe nodded. “Okay. Point granted, Wayna?” She sank down again, resting her head on her crossed arms.

No one said anything for awhile. The jazz Thad liked to listen to filled the silence: smooth horns, rough drums, discreet bass.

“Well, what’ll you do if you stay in here?” Doe asked. “What’ll Dr Ops do? Turn you off? Log you out permanently? Put your processors on half power?”

“Don’t think so. He’s an AI. He’ll stick to the rules.”

“Whatever those are,” said Wayna.

“I’ll find out.”

She had logged off then, withdrawn to sleep in her bunkroom, expecting Doe to join her. She’d wakened alone, a note from Dr Ops on the mirror, which normally she would have missed. Normally she avoided the mirror, but not this morning. She’d studied her face, noting the narrow nose, the light, stubby lashes around eyes an indeterminate colour she guessed could be called grey. Whose face had this been? A senator’s? A favourite secretary’s? Hers, now. For how long?

Floating upright in the deep end, she glanced at her arms. They were covered with blonde hairs which the water washed into rippled patterns. Her small breasts mounded high here in the pool, buoyant with fat.

Would the replacement be better-looking, or worse?

Wayna turned to see the clock on the wall behind her. Ten. Time to get out and get ready for her appointment.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Wayna.” Dr Ops looked harassed and faintly ashamed. He hadn’t been able to tell her anything about the pains. He acted like they weren’t important; he’d even hinted she might be making them up just to get a different body. “You’re not the first to ask, you know. One per person, that’s all. That’s it.”

Thad’s right, Wayna thought to herself. AIs stick to the rules. He could improvise, but he won’t.

“Why?” Always a good question.

“We didn’t bring a bunch of extra bodies, Wayna,” Dr Ops said.

“Well, why not?” Another excellent question. “You should have,” she went on. “What if there was an emergency, an epidemic?”

“There’s enough for that –”

“I know someone who’s not going to use theirs. Give it to me.”

“You must mean Thad.” Dr Ops frowned. “That would be a man’s body. Our charter doesn’t allow transgender downloads.”

Wayna counted in twelves under her breath, closing her eyes so long she almost logged off.

“Who’s to know?” Her voice was too loud, and her jaw hurt. She’d been clenching it tight, forgetting it would amp up her inputs. Download settings had apparently become her default overnight. “Never mind. You’re not going to give me a second body. I can’t make you.”

“I thought you’d understand.” He smiled and hunched his shoulders. “I
am
sorry.”

Swimming through freespace to her locker, she was sure Dr Ops didn’t know what sorry was. She wondered if he ever would.

Meanwhile.

She never saw Doe again outside freespace. There’d still be two of them together – just not the two they’d assumed.

She had other attacks, some mild, some much stronger than the first. Massage helped, and keeping still, and moving. She met prisoners who had similar symptoms, and they traded tips and theories about what was wrong with them.

Doe kept telling her that if she wanted to be without pain, she should simply stay in freespace. After awhile, Wayna did more and more virches and spent less and less time with her lovers.

Jubilee lay in Amends’ Northern latitudes, high on a curving peninsula, in the rain shadow of old, gentle mountains. Bright-skinned tree-dwelling amphibians inhabited the mountain passes, their trilling cries rising and falling like loud orgasms whenever Wayna took her favourite tour.

And then there were the instructional virches, building on what they’d learned in their freespace classes. Her specialty, fiber tech, became suddenly fascinating: baskets, nets, ropes, cloth, paper – so much to learn, so little time.

The day before planetfall she went for one last swim in the pool. It was deserted, awaiting the next settlement group. It would never be as full of prisoners again; Thad and Doe weren’t the only ones opting out of their downloads.

There was plenty of open fresh water on Amends: a large lake not far from Jubilee, and rivers even closer. She peered down past her dangling feet at the pool’s white bottom. Nothing to see there. Never had been; never would be.

She had lunch with Robeson, Unique, and Jawann. As Dr Ops recommended, they skipped dinner.

She didn’t try to say goodbye. She didn’t sleep alone.

And then it was morning and they were walking into one of
Psyche Moth
’s landing units, underbuckets held to the pool’s bottom, to its outside, by retractable bolts, and Dr Ops unlocked them and they were free, flying, falling, down, down, down, out of the black and into the blue, the green, the thousand colours of their new home.

Andrea Hairston
is a Professor of Theatre at Smith College. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio and Public Television. The flash of spirit in West African and Caribbean performance traditions has offered her much wisdom and inspiration. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting. Since 1997, her plays produced by Chrysalis Theatre,
Soul Repairs
,
Lonely Stardust
, and
Hummingbird Flying Backward
, have been science fiction-themed.
Archangels of Funk
, a sci-fi theatre jam, garnered her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003. She recently completed a speculative novel,
Mindscape
, excerpted in
Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction edited by Sheree Thomas and published by Warner Books in 2004. “Double Consciousness,” a story from
Mindscape
, will appear in
Future Females of Colour
, edited by Marleen Barr, to be published by Ohio State University Press in 2005. She is currently working on a new speculative novel,
Exploding in Slow Motion.