Swans and Klons (6 page)

“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 many 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.”

Salmon Jo looked troubled. “No process like that could exist. By the time the Hatchling humans are decanted, they are as developed as a human newborn can be and are therefore human. Even if there was a way to reverse development and stunt a human into a Klon, that would be totally unethical. Anyway, Klons are specially engineered to have certain strengths, like the ability to work harder than a human, and weaknesses, like not being as intelligent or emotionally evolved as humans. You can’t do all that with a shot. It has to be done while they’re fetuses in tanks.”

Rubric threw up her hands. “You just showed me how the fetuses in the tanks are all the same, and now you’re saying they can’t be the same. And you’re supposed to be the logical one! You’re as thicko as a Klon.”

Salmon Jo licked her lips. “Your theory, veruckt as it seems to be, is the only one that fits the facts.” She went into the biggest hexagonal area. After a moment, Rubric followed her. Salmon Jo was rooting through a desk, pulling out handheld screens.

“Is this your desk?” Rubric asked. It seemed too big and with too much equipment for just an academy student being mentored.

“No, it’s Panna Tensility’s. As far as I can tell, she’s the smartest one here and knows the most about everything.”

Now Rubric was truly shocked. Salmon Jo ought not to go through other people’s property. “The Golden Rule—” she said helplessly.

“The cause of science is a higher rule,” Salmon Jo muttered. She was looking at a handheld screen, paging through its documents.

Higher rule, rubbish, Rubric thought. Salmon Jo was just a snoop.

“No, I can’t understand it,” Salmon Jo said. Her voice cracked in the middle of the sentence. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“Let me see,” Rubric said. Salmon Jo showed it to her. But the screen only showed a spreadsheet that was a meaningless jumble to her. How could a spreadsheet make anyone so upset?

“This shows when the fetuses are designated Klon or human,” Salmon Jo said. “According to this, it’s not any time when they’re in the tank. The Doctors designate the freshly decanted Hatchlings to be human or Klon when they examine them, in their first minutes of life.”

“So what’s the secret process that makes some of them Klon?” Rubric asked. She didn’t have a good feeling about this.

Salmon Jo clicked through other documents for a long time. Finally, she said, “It seems to be that the Doctors put either a blue tag or white tag on the Hatchling’s toe. If they get a white tag, they’re human. Blue tags are for Klons.”

Her words felt like a slap. Rubric gasped.

“So there’s no difference between humans and Klons?” Rubric asked. She had a curious feeling, as if she were floating just above her own skin.

“Except for the tag,” Salmon Jo said.

Rubric stared into Salmon Jo’s amber eyes. Salmon Jo looked as troubled as Rubric felt.

“There must be another explanation,” Salmon Jo said. “Something we’re not thinking of.”

But she couldn’t come up with one.

After a while, Rubric said, “We better get back to the dorms. I don’t want to get caught in here.”

On the way back to the dorm, Rubric had a funny feeling. She didn’t even know how to name it. It was something akin to unease. Disquiet. Rubric felt as if all her trustfulness had been washed away. Their nighttime adventure now seemed much worse than just sneaking into the Hatchery.

Chapter Eight

Rubric stayed over in Salmon Jo’s room in Maroon Dorm. Rubric thought she would never fall asleep. But she must have, at some point, because she woke up to Salmon Jo shaking her.

“I’m going to the refectory,” Salmon Jo was telling her. “Do you want me to bring you something to eat?”

“Some fruit,” Rubric said thickly, still half asleep.

“I’ve been awake for hours, thinking. I’m sure now that Klons and humans are the same. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

This woke Rubric up like a bucket of cold water being dumped on her head.

“But they’re not like us! They’re thicko and less self-aware and don’t have complex emotions. We can see their primitive—” Rubric faltered and fell silent. She couldn’t think of any actual examples to support her case.

“I think we just see them as less than human because we’re told to see that,” Salmon Jo said. “Maybe they are not as smart because they don’t grow up the same way as us. Or maybe they are as smart. What is smart, anyway?”

“We can’t jump to conclusions,” Rubric protested. “We could have misinterpreted the whole thing. Maybe there’s one piece of evidence we don’t know about that explains everything.”

“What does it mean to be human anyway? I’m not sure anymore what a human is,” Salmon Jo said. Her thin, muscular body was vibrating with tension like the string of a musical instrument.

“I do,” Rubric said crossly. “I’m a human, and so are you. You’re just making it too complicated.”

“I don’t know,” Salmon Jo said. “I don’t know.” She repeated herself three or four more times as she fastened her running shoes. “I’ll get you some fruit. I just don’t know.”

Rubric was left alone with her thoughts. Suddenly she couldn’t stand lying in bed anymore. She got up and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. She tried to think of everything she knew about why Klons were Klons and how they got that way. It seemed she didn’t know anything, no more than she knew why the sky was blue.

She took her handheld screen out of her cloak pocket and sat down at Salmon Jo’s desk. She looked up
Klons hatched
and
origins of Klons
and
how Klons not humans
. All the results were simple texts for children, with lots of graphics but little content. The information was scanty and repetitive. Over and over, she read:

Klons are engineered to be different.

Klons are so different from humans.

Klons are engineered to complement us.

Nothing explained how they were different or how they were engineered. Finally, she found a more advanced text, one she remembered reading a few years ago for academy. It had no graphics and was a history of Society. She read:

During the Gendered Period of human history, male humans conspired together to subjugate the females and institute a system known as
patriarchy
, where males were in control. Because of their hormonal and neurological differences, males were typically brutal, non-nurturing, and emotionally underdeveloped, and had poor social skills. These hormonal differences also caused males to wage war, a violent conflict between societies that led to countless deaths and injuries, and poor quality of life.

Women were forced to imitate animals in order to reproduce. Like other mammals, when a male and a Panna shared a sexual experience, the Panna might become
pregnant
, meaning she would grow a fetus inside her own body, inside the uterus organ (now vestigial in women of Society). Humans were unable to control the timing of these
pregnancies
. The only way to further the human race was to share sexual experiences with men, so no matter how distasteful this was, the majority of women continued to do so. The females excreted their Hatchlings, which they called
babies
or
infants
, through a painful and dangerous process known as
childbirth
. Many women suffered serious injuries or even death during
childbirth
. In addition, in most cases women were forced to be the sole caregivers for their own young, leading to exhaustion, depression, and an unhealthy bond between
mother
and child.

The advent of Cretinous Males took the world by surprise. In 2043, the world first took note of the afflictions visited on male children, although the problem may have manifested prior to that. There is still no satisfactory explanation for the advent of the Cretinous Males, although leading theories of the day focused on the possible effects of environmental toxins on DNA. It seems the Cretinous Males suffered from a mitochondrial disorder, causing every cell in their body to have trouble producing energy, leading to both mental and physical problems. The last specimen of a non-Cretinous Male, Chien-Yeh Hwang, died in 2149, living out his final years in a combination folk museum and laboratory habitat.

The loss of male humans has only led to evolutionary improvement. In the twenty-second century, Doctors perfected the form of SCNT (Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer) that is still used today, thus ensuring the survival of our species. And so Society was created. Panna Charity Navrilova was the lead scientist on this breakthrough, and she has been immortalized by having her DNA included in our three hundred Jeepie Types. All humans alive today are genetic copies of extraordinarily healthy, notable, and well-adjusted women. Three hundred women were chosen to be the Jeepie Types that all humans in Society are replicated from. Each Jeepie Type is intelligent, thoughtful, kind, creative, and beautiful in its own way. We can all be proud of who we are. We have made war and conflict things of the past. In Society, we use discussion to solve problems and look to our Doctors for leadership.