The Bradbury Report (24 page)

“Anna. I haven't given this any thought, and even I can see there's a hitch here.”

“There are a lot of hitches,” she said. “We're guessing.”

“Okay, but you put enough chickens in the coop and they'll get aggressive. In addition to all those medical people, your guess would require a great many others, originals, working inside the Clearances in supervisory and security positions, folks who know what goes on there, who've seen the clones, engaged with them. How does the government make sure none of these people talks?”

“We don't know what the mechanism is,” Anna said, “but given that whatever goes on in there has been going on for more than twenty years without a hint of disclosure, it must be pretty near foolproof. Besides, we assume the clones are kept tractable by other means, and also that the clones, themselves, are used as guards, as police.”

“It would only take one.”

“It hasn't happened yet,” she said. “Sadly.”

“Well, somebody screwed up.”

“What do you mean?”

“The clone is out,” I said.

“Yes. He's out. Will you give me a second?” Anna said. “I need a sip of water.” She got up off the bed and went into the bathroom. I stood up and stretched. I went to the window and looked out. The view was dismal: on the opposite side of a dark alley a line of derelict sheds.

“I'm almost finished,” she said when she came out.

I sat back down on the bed. “Take your time. I'm interested.”

“They closely examined your clone,” she said, “and found no tracking device. In case you were worried.”

“I wasn't worried,” I said. “Not about that.”

“Anyway, when a clone is used, and if, after surgery, the clone remains viable, still able to provide spare parts, he is not returned to his original residence. This is true, whether or not the loss suffered by the clone is conspicuous and disfiguring, or unobtrusive, as in the removal
of a kidney or a lung, where only an incision scar is visible. In all cases, the clone is taken to one of many special residences, postsurgical holding pens, set apart. For a clone who is intact to see a clone who has been harvested is to confront his own destiny. For obvious reasons,” Anna said, “an unused clone must never know what he has been made for.

“When an original dies, his or her copy is summarily put to death, no matter what its age. Everything that can be used for spare parts is salvaged and banked. What happens to the body of that clone? What happens to the body of the clone who can no longer survive repeated surgical diminishment? Or to the body of the clone who dies of ‘natural' causes? Is it buried? Burned? Our current thinking about this is that it is composted, fermentation in some way accelerated so as efficiently to produce methane, which, converted to methanol, the government exports beyond the Clearances and sells at enormous profit.”

“Waste not,” I said.

“As you may not know, Ray, those who could not afford hospital birth, or those unable to pay the steep original cloning fee, were, from the start of the program, ‘permitted to opt out.' Despite the strong correlation between poverty and the need for serious health care, it was rationalized that the poor—we're talking here about a quarter of the population—would not have the means to afford a procedure that required a replacement part and, thus, could make no use of a clone.

“As human beings, the clones would have an instinct and congenital capacity for language. In any human society, the rise of language is pretty much unstoppable. In any case, the clones would require a minimal language for their work, and for simple communication having to do with exercise and eating and rest. The government's problem is that once the clones get this much language, they would inevitably develop more. Would a clone dialect evolve in spite of the government's efforts to prevent it? What if a language of feelings was to appear? A language of desires? We had thought the government might be compelled to cut out the clones' tongues. Now we have empirical evidence they do not, and we wonder why. I have not yet heard your clone speak. I heard him moan and grunt and howl.
Not quite animal sounds, but not quite human. I heard him cry. But I heard nothing from him that even approximated language. Do clones talk to one another, or is verbal communication, outside of what is needed for work, proscribed? It would be far easier to prohibit access to information and knowledge than it would be to stop the spread of language and speech. And with language, ineluctably, comes thought and, possibly, understanding.

“Right there, for the clones,” Anna said, “is the hope, and the horror.

“The clones get no education. They are trained to do only the work they are assigned. Once a month, male and female, adult and child, they are given haircuts. Male clones shave once a week. Clones brush and floss their teeth twice a day, and the water they drink is heavily fluoridated. Menstruation is a significant problem for the government: of the ten thousand post-pubescent female clones in any residence, most get their periods on the same day.

“Do clones love? Do they know love?
About
love? Do they have a word for love, or any sense of the concept? We couldn't even begin to speculate about this.

“Here's the catch,” she said. “The government's cloning operation is still in its infancy. What I've drawn for you is the shape we think things will take inside the Clearances if the program is allowed to continue, as all indications suggest it will be. You wouldn't need to be a mathematician to have figured out that most of this could not have happened yet. The ‘mandatory' program for all new births began in 2049, the year you signed up for CNR. Your copy, Ray, will be, give or take a year, among the oldest copies in existence. Except for the relative few made prior to the government's institution of the process, no clone will be older than twenty-two. This first generation of clones will have been produced without human mothers. There will have been no female copies old enough to carry the cloned fetuses. Until there was a sufficient number of female clones of child-bearing age, another method of incubation would have been found. The generation of clones to which your clone belongs was gestated in synthetic womb environments. The more ‘natural,' less expensive gestation
process will have been in place, now, less than ten years. There would have been no female clones old enough to care for your clone as an infant or young child. We don't know who raised your clone, or if he was cared for at all. In every meaningful sense, he, like his coevals, was born without parents. Orphans all. Adams and Eves. It is possible that, until he came to me, your clone had never even seen a woman. If anything, your clone's life inside the Clearances, lived in the main before things had coalesced, might well have been worse than it would be were he to be born there today.”

I
n the more than a year, now, Anna and I have spent with him, we have not learned from the clone enough about his life inside the Clearances for me to say how close Anna's group was in its speculations to being right. By the time the clone had acquired language skills necessary for him to speak usefully about his experience, he was unwilling—maybe still unable—to do so. Who could blame him? Judging by his behavior early on, and from several things he said in less guarded moments—later in the year, when he'd grown more comfortable speaking to us, especially to Anna—I can say that on at least two counts, in their efforts to think as the government thinks, Anna's group did not go far enough to get the details—where the devil, indeed, was—quite right.

To take one instance of their coming up short: Anna's group imagined there would be special, separate, segregated residences for clones that remained viable after being harvested for parts. The group assumed that, thinking pragmatically, towards the end of keeping the clones oblivious and docile and manageable, the government would not incur the risk of inciting the clones by letting them live among their counterparts returned from surgery. From what Anna and I were able to gather, there are within the Clearances no such special residences. However mutilated, used clones are sent back to live among
their unused fellows, who, seeing the disfigured, maimed, to varying degree diminished clones in their midst, could think only: “This is what happens to some of us from time to time.” Having known no other order, no other world but theirs, they would have no way of knowing, of imagining why it happened to them, or what it meant, no way of conceiving the single reason for their existence. The effect of this grisly, ruthless practice, which would certainly have been calculated, would be—far from riling the clones, provoking in them protest or rebellion, or even revelation—to dispirit the clones, to bring them to a kind of apathy and despair, in which state, as the government would surely know, the clones, used and unused alike, would be all the more subjugateable.

A second instance: Anna's group believed there would be regularly administered to the clones, to the adult males at least, a course of psychotropic drugs meant to suppress their sexual—in the circumstances, specifically homoerotic—impulses. It would appear—we were to infer this from the clone's behavior as much as from anything he said—this is not the case. Whether it was that the government saw in the clone's sexual impulses and behavior no meaningful threat to its dominion, or that the government saw some practical advantage in withholding its intervention, pharmacologic and otherwise, choosing instead to let sexual activity among the male clones take its natural course, is impossible to know. But after several months of watching and listening to the clone, Anna and I were convinced that homosexuality was rampant among the male clones, and that in practice it was, normatively, brutal. We were convinced that my clone had from a young age—say thirteen—been routinely sodomized by, and made to perform fellatio on, bigger, stronger clones. And that, as he got older and stronger, he had routinely sodomized, and been fellated by, clones younger and weaker than himself.

 

We drove away from the Bonsecours at noon—we were embarrassingly obedient—and headed west towards Ottawa. It was Monday, August 24, the day on which I would meet my clone. Outrageous I persist in calling him that, though it at least connotes responsibility,
complicity. We tried using the name the group invented for his driver's license. So far as we could determine, until he came to us he'd had no name. It was possible he knew no one who was named, knew no proper names at all, did not know what a proper name was. Like an infant, in this regard. Though he already knew the names for certain things. (Isn't this different altogether from the business of human names? The difference between “chair,” even “Morris chair,” and, say, “Bud.” The difference—I'm no philosopher—between “What is this?” and “Who is this?”) At the start, we made a concerted point of saying the name to him, Alan Grey, as much as we could, so that should he wander off, and then be found, he would give to whomever found him the right name. We did what parents do, so I assume, with their babies. We pointed to ourselves and said our names. I pointed to Anna and said, “Anna.” She pointed to me and said, “Ray.” I pointed to myself, etc. The clone was able quickly to learn our names. (The clone would have borne a latent genetic capacity for naming.) Not Anna and Ray, or Oliver and Jane, but our real names, the names we called each other in his presence. (Anna suggested—but only once—inasmuch as we were posing as a family, and to give the clone, as she said, “a surer sense of belonging,” that we refer to ourselves also as “Mother” and “Father.” I rejected this idea.) We pointed to him and said, “Alan.” I'm sure he understood what we were proposing, but we could never get him to point at himself and say, “Alan.” We had trouble, too, thinking of him as Alan, or Al, though we were absolutely unable to come up with a name that seemed right and natural. At one point, Anna tried to revive the name “Sonny.” A few times, unpremeditatedly, I called him “Sport.” Both names were eminently unsuitable—“Sport” was so wrong it was funny—and neither stuck. For occasions that involved the clone with other people (there were several of these), we continued to use the name Alan Grey.

I think he did not, or could not, think of himself as sufficiently individuated to warrant a name. He didn't object to being called Alan, or Sonny, or even Sport; he seemed not to care what, if anything, we called him. Neither did he care, when we urged him to do it, to choose a name for himself.

What was
my
problem? Wasn't it that, no matter how I might have wanted otherwise, I couldn't think about him as fully autonomous, fully human? This is deplorable, beyond a doubt, but one can almost be forgiven feeling this way at the very start of things. He had no name.

Going forward, I will call him Alan.

I was determined to drive. The day was overcast. By noon it was already hot, the air soggy. The green car—we'd gotten a bum deal in the swap—was tinny and cramped, and the air-conditioner just barely worked. I missed the stalwart comforts of Anna's truck. We'd been told to make no stops on the way, but after a monotonous hour of highway driving in the heavy air I was sleepy and needed to close my eyes. I pulled off onto the shoulder, and Anna and I switched positions. We did very little talking en route, for which silence I was grateful. We observed no one following us.

We made it to Ottawa in less than two hours. It took us a while to find Friel Street and the building in which we were to live the next three months, but we were sitting in the car outside the place at least half an hour before the stipulated time. I was for going in anyway, the time be damned, though by now both of us knew my bluff was merely that. To help me save face—something she was good at, God bless her—Anna suggested we drive around the neighborhood to get a sense of what might be available to us nearby.