Swans and Klons (5 page)

Gradually, she became aware of the other art in the room and stopped staring at the ceiling. A lot of it was incredibly creepy and sad. Anguished faces, too-realistic hearts covered with boils and scars. The most striking thing, in the center of the room, was a large sculpture of a slaughtered unicorn, its mangled limbs and entrails souping onto the floor. She wasn’t sure what material the unicorn was made of.

“Wow,” Rubric managed to say. Stencil Pavlina’s early art—what Rubric had seen before—had been so lighthearted. What had happened to her? Whenever Rubric had pictured meeting her mentor for the first time, she had imagined they would chatter happily together and they would understand each other perfectly. She had never envisioned being intimidated and puzzled by her mentor. Or being completely tongue-tied.

“Is this all recent work?” she asked.

“I haven’t really been working on anything lately. The muse has not called on me.” She gestured to the slaughtered unicorn. “So what are you experiencing when you look at this piece?”

“I don’t know,” Rubric said. She felt thicko. “I don’t know what it’s about.”

“Go on, take a stab,” Stencil Pavlina encouraged. “There’s no right or wrong. I’m just curious what you get out of it.”

“Um, I guess a unicorn is a symbol of happiness and girlish innocence,” Rubric hazarded. “But a unicorn is an extinct animal.”

“Mythical, actually,” Stencil Pavlina said. “They were never real.”

“Oh.” Rubric felt even more thicko.

“Please, keep going!”

“Since the unicorn has been killed, I guess that means…um, whatever it is, it’s not good.”

“That’s wonderful,” Stencil Pavlina enthused. “You’ve really hit the nail on the head. The dead unicorn is my metaphor for the emptiness, betrayal, and ultimate sterility of art.”

“That’s pretty chilling,” Rubric said slowly. “For me, art is an unending fountain of happiness and inspiration. I don’t see how it could cease to be the greatest delight of my life.”

“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 success 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.