New Title 2, page 14
You can clone flesh and bone, but you can not clone talent, or memories. We knew who this man was. But he did not know. This man was as lost as he had been when for five days he had disappeared, perhaps in a drunken stupor, on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland in the year of 1849 AD.
One of Mr. Kaji’s guests, a movie producer, had once asked him if he might borrow this clone, so that it might help script a film for him. Imagine the selling hook in such a project! But my boss had only chuckled and wagged his head. Even if he had been willing to make known to the public the unlicenced cloning of this man, the creature was simply not capable of writing so much as his own renowned name.
“Hello, my man,” I said to him softly, the Scimitar .55 hanging down by my leg. There was enough room for me to point it through the gap in the wall of mortared brick, but I did not raise it yet.
It was not illegal, technically, to clone a dead man. But any cloning for personal—rather than industrial—use was against the law. Though clones did not possess the rights of us “birthers,” there were still too many sticky areas of the legal ground. There were groups that cried out in protest at the mistreatment of clones, at any use of clones. One could not legally clone himself in the pursuit of immortality, and surely Mr. Kaji hadn’t, or else why even kill himself in the first place?
Unless that had been a sham to throw off the authorities. Perhaps the hanged man was the clone. Perhaps Diego Kaji, the Diego Kaji with a mind and with memories, was already in another city, another colony on another world.
Yes, I thought. Though I had not been a friend to the man, a close associate, not even a butler or bodyguard or chauffeur, I felt I knew him well enough that this was a real possibility. It rang true to me. I knew the man not so much by his words to me, but through his taste—his environment, his possessions. His possessions such as this clone. This human being.
Regarding the man in the tomb, as he regarded me, I thought again of the works of his I had read and been so impressed by.
Squeezing and unsqueezing the handle of the gun resting against my thigh, I said aloud, as if to remind an amnesiac of these words, as if teaching them to a child for the first time: “He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel…”
I paused, as if to gauge whether these words moved the cell’s occupant in any way. He appeared not to have even heard them, however. He seemed deaf, no matter how intense his stare upon me. I felt suddenly uneasy, as if he were the one observing a prisoner, as if I were the one behind this brick wall gazing out at freedom. As if he were taking mental notes so as to pen a story about me at some later date. As if it were he considering my ultimate fate.
I could not bring the gun up. If only he had grunted, animal-like, as the other clone had. If only his eyes had been less clear, however shrouded in their darkness. If only I hadn’t read his stories.
I swore under my breath, very softly, as I unsealed the door that was hidden skillfully within the wall of brick. I swung it open, and gestured to the man at the table with my free hand—still gripping the pistol in the other should he come flying suddenly toward me with his arms extended, his fingers like talons. I remembered the occasion when Mr. Kaji’s bodyguard had had to shoot an undrugged clone who had gone berserk at one of his masquerades. This female clone had attacked her master himself, who was dressed as a kind of robot, I guess, that night—a man of tin. The clone had been a person named Judy Garland, cloned just to the age of a young girl in pigtails. Poor child. I had been relieved to hear that she had been returned to the ether, in a sense.
After several long moments, the man rose from his chair. I gestured to him again, and at last he came shambling toward me. Out through the narrow doorway into the dimly-lit hall. He allowed me to take him by the elbow, and guide him back through the passageway toward the locked library.
As we walked together, as if to train him, I said, “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne…in a strange city lying alone…”
In the vaulted, balconied library, I unlocked that glass cabinet and removed the copies of The Stylus and the Pioneer, and I stuffed these yellowed crackling magazines into my companion’s jacket, as he submitted dumbly like a child having a winter coat pulled on. Then, I unlocked the library doors of violet Ramon wood and peeked out into the hall. When I thought it was safe, we emerged. We moved thus stealthily while we made our way to one of the doors that exited the mansion built atop the Turquopise Tower in Beaumonde Square in the colony city called Punktown.
The man and I descended to street level in an elevator. With my hand still on his arm to guide him, we continued along the avenue. Finally, we came to a little café and went inside for coffee and pastries. It was an upscale café and the man’s stink attracted the disgusted eyes of neighboring patrons but I ignored them as my chewing companion did. After we had eaten, we returned to the street, and I tucked a hundred munits in bills into the man’s pocket, though it was mostly a gesture for my own sake. I wasn’t convinced he would know what to do with them. I even considered giving him my gun, but that was too unrealistic a gesture so I kept it in my shoulder holster.
And it was on the street that we parted ways. I clapped him on the back, as a cowboy in an old movie might slap a horse to get it moving away on its own. Stumbling a few steps, the man glanced back at me. And then I watched him as he staggered along, until his famous bobbing head became only one of many anonymous bobbing heads, and I lost sight of him down at the end of the great avenue. Swallowed in the flood that Diego Kaji had sought to rise so high above.
Sometimes I think of the man pushing a crumpled bill across a counter to buy himself a drink at a bar, a bottle at a store. Most often, I think that his body must be lying in its own filth in an alley, its skull bashed in and its pockets turned out. Or perhaps he isn’t dead yet, not yet, but lies there starving and sick, muttering unintelligible words—like a young bride dying of tuberculosis as her grieving husband helplessly watches. Muttering garbled words like a dreamer suffering fevered nightmares and talking in his sleep, as if to convey those nightmares to whoever will listen.
In his delirium, clutching his magazines against his breast. And I hope they are soaked in spilled wine. Stained with vomit. Caked with congealing blood. Because I know it would agonize Diego Kaji to see those prizes defiled in that way. He, who would think nothing of defiling a clone of Jayne Mansfield, would have cried out in horror just to know that I had removed them from their case.
If Diego Kaji did indeed escape into the world alive, he should have thought to take those publications with him. But perhaps he had been afraid to give his greatest secret away by doing so…the secret that he, too, walked the streets still breathing when he should really be a dead man.
In any case, those objects were in the hands of the man to whom they truly belonged. And if those pages crumpled, and those hands decayed, then that was the way things belonged, too.
Forge Park
There was still a row of factories that cast long blue shadows over the tracks at the train stop called FORGE PARK, which had once been the name of this industrial complex before most of the companies relocated their operations to the Outback Colonies, where labor was cheaper, crime and vandalism less rampant than it was here in the Earth-established colony dubbed Punktown.
Most of the plants were abandoned, sealed up, but one—Polymorph Sprayform—had been turned into a nest of inexpensive apartments/studios for artists, called the Forge Park Artists’ Collaborative, with the help of government art grants.
It was apparent even from the outside which of the factories had been thus converted. Most of the jagged chasm wall of buildings was bleak gray, blighted with long scabbed streams of red and green corrosion, with windows either shuttered over or—if impervious to the stones and bullets of vandals—simply black and gaping like the mouths of fishes stacked in a Tikkihotto market. Fans still twirled idly in vent ports at the stirring of the wintry breeze, and pipes thin or thick ran across the sides and faces of several factories like the roots of ancient trees grown around a coffin. Rhodes Bioflux Implants, formerly tiled in gleaming white, now shed its scales to drop and shatter. Small factories rode piggyback atop larger plants like symbiotic organisms, which had not been able to keep each other alive. A barracks for workers had once rested atop the old Occhipinti Gelplasts building, but it had burned down to a charred and spiky crown atop the head of that deceased Tikkihotto company. There were arching sprays of graffiti, red as blood — and some of it was blood. But that was the work of amateurs, compared to the embellishments of the Artists’ Collaborative.
Their building, toward the far right end of the looming row, narrow and five floors in height, had been entirely painted a pale banana yellow color. Gelatin molds had been affixed to the outside surface of the plant, at the ground level, before the painting had taken place, so that they seemed like exotic tumors in the form of smiling fish and bunches of grapes. Bordering each of the front windows on the second floor, also added before the painting, rows of baby doll heads had been attached. Their blankly open eyes and cherubs’ lips shone a contented banana yellow. A lacquered ten-foot long rifuubi fish, with its vast sail and sleek eyeless head, was fixed at about the third level, its crimson skin now a calming yellow. At the fourth floor, the graceful yellow arms of female manikins reached out into the air as if to test for rain. And finally, at the fifth level, long yellow banners hung from short flagpoles, and snapped in the gusts of wind. Each bore some interesting pattern or design, white against the yellow fabric and thus easy to miss. Some looked like stylized stars, others almost like calligraphy.
««—»»
Edwin Cribbage couldn’t have drawn a stick figure with a HoloStudio 9.0 program to do the work for him—but he still had a critic’s eye for beauty, and found that most of what the hand could painstakingly render still did not compare to the blind juxtaposition of cells that nature used as its pallette. Nothing painted, sculpted or holoformed in the building he tended and serviced could compare to the work entitled Jessika Inkster.
If her name was a pretentious fabrication, her appearance was not. She had the good sense to leave her charms as given—there were none of the fiber tattoos glowing like neon below the skin, temporary henna tattoos obscuring pretty faces like black veils, hair spray-coated in plastic or lightweight metal. Most of the young women who lived at the Collaborative used themselves as canvases. But Jessika was, in Cribbage’s limited range of reference, a soft Renoir amongst sharp-cornered Picassos.
He now crouched at the heater unit in the fifth floor hallway, with its worn carpet and a dissonance of blended music blaring from various open doors. A similar barrage of smells assailed him—paints, chemicals, both legal and illegal smoke. His breath misted before him as he labored at the heater. The whole fifth floor was out; a dozen angry calls had summoned him this morning. They blamed him, no doubt, as the tenants saw him more frequently than they did Mr. Ythill, who managed the Collaborative and collected the rent.
He was spreading more tools out in front of him on the floor like surgical instruments when he glanced up for the twentieth or thirtieth time at the closed door to Jessika Inkster’s flat, and almost bolted up from his crouch like an animal startled to flight when he saw Jessika padding toward him, a heavy blanket draped around her like a cape.
She was smiling. It wrenched his heart like one of his tools, as if to dislodge it. She smiled often, though, he noticed. At all these younger men. These talented young men. He had had to admit to himself that it was no special blessing meant for him. But that didn’t make it any less effective. Perhaps, as natural as her prettiness might appear, she had perfected these smiles in the mirror for long years, in a subtler command of body art. Her smiles creased her normally large brown eyes to gleaming slits. Her face was oval-shaped and narrow — framed by long straight hair of an unremarkable brown but with the sheen of youth — with a high forehead and a tapered point of a chin. She was not beautiful. Not gorgeous. He would call her cute. Pretty at best. Achingly cute. Heart-stoppingly pretty.
She was small—came just to his shoulder—and delicate as a bird. He thought it possible to gently close his hand around her slim neck. But he had noticed, whenever he had opportunity, that her breasts were almost disproportionately large for her slender frame. Yet they were not falsely firm and globular, again were a soft and natural gift granted by an oblivious nature. In the summer, he had come as often as Mr. Ythill had allowed to repair the cooling systems. Jessika had favored tight shirts that clung to her heavy breasts, and which more often than not were cut to expose her smooth midriff. She had worn shorts to reveal sleek legs, sandals to bare pretty childish toes. She was nineteen. A flower. He was only twenty-nine, but he felt as old as the rustiest of the factories in Forge Park.
But here she was now, unmistakably coming toward him, her smile meant for him at least at this moment.
“Hi, Ed,” she said cheerfully. Weren’t artists supposed to be angst-ridden? Weren’t repairmen supposed to be as contented as grazing livestock? “Why did you shut the heat off on us?”
He wanted to joke back to her, “So I’d have a reason to come see you again,” but instead he fumbled several half-started sentences before settling on, “Mr. Ythill should really have this whole system replaced.” There—at least he had properly distanced himself from his boss.
“Well, we know that will never happen.”
He noted that despite her bulky wrapping, her ankles and feet were bare. He wondered if she were naked beneath the blanket, but of course he knew better.
He said, “Mr. Ythill is supposed to be coming out here in two weeks, with some business associates from his world. I think they want to look into buying some of the other properties in Forge Park.”
“Really. Oh no…I hope they don’t try to build this up into some kind of shopping mall or something, and drive us out. It’s not like Ythill makes a lot of money on this arrangement.”
“I know. I hope not,” he aped foolishly.
“Where are they from again? For a long time I didn’t even know he wasn’t an Earther—though I guess he is a little too pale, even for a pale human. You don’t see many nonEarthers that are so human looking. The Choom, of course…the Kalians. A few others. It’s amazing.”
“It’s a planet called Carcosa. In the Aldebaran system.”
“I think some great past race sowed species from planet to planet from one original handful of seeds, you know?”
“Like—a god?” Cribbage said, looking up at her as if she were his deity.
“Something like that.” She nodded at the heater unit. “When you’re done with that, come down the hall and see my latest painting. I’ll make you a cup of tea to warm up. Okay?”
Cribbage continued to gaze up at her. He was less prone to smiling than was Jessika Inkster. But he smiled now.
“Okay.”
««—»»
As he headed down the hallway toward her door, he saw one of the yellow banners thrashing in the air outside the window at the very end, like an angry yellow ghost.
He knocked at her door, hoping that no one else would see him waiting here, see into his transparent head with its simple and antiquated gears and pistons. He wants to mount her, the generally younger tenants here might scoff. Of course that was true. But having sex with Jessika could not begin to approach his ache to absorb her into his very being. He wanted to possess her, consume her, and utterly worship her. He was a fool, but no more than any groveling acolyte, he reckoned—and then she suddenly opened the grimy door, and it was like heaven’s own gate parting. “Hey!” his god chirped. He went in.
Her paintings, and those of her friends, hung everywhere. Actually, he had seen some of her work before, as she carried it through the halls, but he had never been inside her rooms before. He wouldn’t dream of telling her that he found her work to be childish. It was an expression of her childlike appeal, he tried to counter. But the kindergarten-bright colors hurt his eyes. He had to admit that he had seen much better work from some of the less friendly tenants.
She waved at her latest piece, still on its easel, with a flourish. It was a nude child, crudely rendered, little more than a stick figure itself, crouched over a pool in which its face was reflected as the sun. The child’s still wet flesh was a garish yellow. She explained, “This place just screams yellow, I guess.”
Cribbage angled his head toward her windows, which looked out on two more of those rippling banners. “What do those things mean, speaking of yellow? Are they just designs, or do they say something?”
“Hector Kahlo was the one who came up with the designs for the flags, then Maria and Amie actually made them. Hector said he saw every one of those designs in a dream, and he kept a pad by his bed so he could sketch them as soon as he woke up.”
“Hector. He was that kid…”
Jessika nodded sadly. “Yeah. Poor guy. I guess he had a bad relationship with his family and everything. He hung himself, right outside his window on the other side of the building. Thank God I didn’t see it. Poor, poor Hector.”
“Yeah,” Cribbage said inadequately. “Um…so what’s it called? Your painting?”
“Oh—On the Shore of Hali.”
“Where’s that?”
“No place…I guess. Maybe I heard it somewhere, but I just liked it.” Crinkled eyes. “You know, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to paint you some time. Your portrait, I mean, not your body.” His heart fluttered—was that a flirtation, or a message that she hadn’t meant to sound like she was flirting?
