The Only Ones (32 page)

She just gives me a look, like that is really going to happen. Then she gets on the Armory van and off she goes.

I still can’t get through to Rauden. I am really suspicious he put a jam up on his system.

Summer is over. She came home with a Note saying she must be more careful with her swipe. She was caught trying to destroy it with some scissors in Art.

Here we go again. What is it with the swipe?

At first she wouldn’t say but finally it comes out. After the biting thing, the tests came back and when they checked hers against spit code it came up she was twelve years old and lives in Bucharest.

I just tell her it is an anomaly.

But as soon as she went off on the Monday van, I rushed to the City Line hole early for my job and sneak into the public Board they have there that reads pure code. I run my own pure code to see what happens. It says I’m twelve years old and live in Bucharest.

I wipe the reading out with my regular swipe ID, take a walk, and try again.

It says I’m twelve years old and live in Grozny.

I wipe that out with my regular swipe, take a walk, and try again. This time it doesn’t say anything. It’s just access denied.

The cheap Reader I already got from working overtime? I try to reach Rauden on it, while I am up scrubbing Mrs. Arular’s Dome. That doesn’t work. To kill time I am fiddling with Search and put in Bucharest.

I just fix it with Mrs. Arular to get the rest of the day off so I could go to the Farm right away.

I head for the Bronx, get lucky with a sailbus, MagLev/ bridge/local hybro/farmer vehicle all the way to the Farm. I’m not even giving Rauden the heads up. I’m suspicious if I let him know I’m coming, he is going to slip away—and that’s if I even managed to get through.

“I!” Rauden says, when I finally get up the dirt road where leaves is falling from the trees and he finally opens the door. He looks a little different but it’s so long since I saw him, I honestly don’t know what was different, Rauden or me. His hair is totally gray. His face is white, white, white. “This
is
a surprise.”

I just ignore how he looks and go, “As far as I could tell, to reach you these days, R? Surprise is the only way I even had. Come on.” I just headed back to the Box Room without even saying hi. “How’s your pure code software working these days?”

He is slow on the uptake but shows me where the slides are for the scanner, and it didn’t work at first but after an hour or so I got Bucharest. “Want to see a map?” I said.

So he’s just sitting there. Man! He is tired.

“R, wake up. It worked.”

Then he’s putting his head in his hands like he used to.

“R! It’s the Santa Sofya lot, has to be.” I pull up my Reader beside him and show him the map on the screen. “Look how close it is. Maybe they have tanks there too or better virgins or Compatibility, all I know is, we got a track record. R! I know we could be in trouble but we could make a killing here. It goddamn worked!”

He is just looking around while I am pitching. Look how many new Waves of Epi there is overseas. There are serious Epis in some of those overseas Stans and even in other places, Uruguay, Uganda, whatever, and, man, with the Santa Sofya lot track record, we could really move viables!

Finally he gets himself together. “Let’s talk, I.”

Come on! What is there to discuss?

“Sit down, I.” And he brings me to the kitchen, where there are some chairs near the window.

I’m going, “R, please. Let’s move some viables.”

Maybe it’s because he is right at the window, with light right on him, I notice he really is looking different. Like, his gray hair is so thin. His skin is thin too. You could almost see through it when he finally sits on a chair and faces me.

I go, “What?”

He just holds his hands up. They are swollen.

“What?”

They are shaking bad. His neck shakes too. His whole self is shaking. I never saw him shake like this before. Finally he says, “I can’t do it any more.” He just keeps his hands in the air, shaking. “I just can’t do the work.”

I’m staring at the hands, and then it hits me. Boom.

So that’s what Henry meant Rauden should tell me.

He just starts to cry.

“Since when?”

He’s just crying. Oh, come on, R.

“Since when, R?
”

What is this? He’s like he’s thirteen years old. Everyone I know is crying.

“The birthday was the last time that it worked.”

I’m just sitting there.

“I can hardly even take a tissue sample, let alone somatic fucking nuclear Transfer.”

“The tenth birthday? R! That’s more than five years!”

“I’m sorry, I.”

So then I’m like, “I can’t believe you never told me. You let me make my plans around the sales.” “I’m so sorry, I.”

So. I’m like, I’m almost going to have another Episode, breathe deep. Whoa. “So what about Henry? Henry could do it.”

He shook his head. “Henry doesn’t have the hands for it. He never did. You saw how Dookie turned out.”

“So Lucas could.”

He shook his head.

“Mariah Delize.” I don’t even know why I said it.

Neither did he. “I’m really sorry, I. It’s over.”

So we’re both just sitting there in the kitchen, on chairs.

“I can’t believe you never told me.”

So what is going to happen with Armory Prep? She hates it. She is going to be expelled again. She’s going to end up selling hardy product on the Mound—teeth, nails, piss. The next thing I knew, I hit the roof.

“You fucking show me how to do it.”

He puts his head in his hands.

“She hates her school! She needs the Education! Maybe I could find her a school where she is safe but happy too—a really good school—but I need more bucks! We have a track record! We could do this! You fucking show me now!”

After a while he looks up and says, “I suppose it could work.”

“It goddamn will work!”

He seemed to get a little energy here, goes off to the sink and turns the taps on, always a good sign. He comes back dripping wet and says, “You have to do what I say, though. Exactly what I say.”

I don’t even know what he means. “What else would I do?”

“Like I even know,” he says, and laughs. It is a long time since I saw him laugh like that. Pretty soon I’m laughing too.

The room where Rauden used to do nuclear Transfer is where it used to be, down those three steps, but it is a real mess. He hasn’t even done SCNT for livestock all this time, he is in such bad shape. I get out mops and water and, hello? I am the expert here.

We take a break, and I walk around outside, where leaves are falling from some trees on those old green steps we sat on that first time, so long ago. When I came back in, he already went hunting in the freezers and got four cryoPaks. We go to the room. We suit up.

This time I will be in the room and he will talk me through it by mic from the viewing closet after he sets things up first. The ova is already out of the Paks, in dishes. He quik-thawed them and put one in the machine with a viewing scope and a gizmo to work the, you know, stick. You don’t need steady hands just to thaw and set things up. So that part he could do. Then he goes out and I go in and he shuts the door. I’m in the room alone, in the semi-dark, on the chair with wheels he used to sit on to do this, himself.

He’s already in the little viewing closet, on the stool, gets the mic to work, which takes a little doing. He tells me where everything is. Then I hear him say, “Sit tight.”

So I sit tight. I guess he sits tight too. We are face to face through the glass, and his eyes are closed.

“When I give the word,” he goes, “gently poke the egg with the stick. NOW!”

I poked the egg.

It didn’t work.

“Harder! But gently. Poke it harder!”

I poked it harder. But gently.

“Harder!”

This time I poked it really hard. But gentle too. It worked! The stick poked through the outside circle to the inside circle. After that, it’s easy to make the stuff inside skoosh up the stick, then do it with the, you know, somatic nucleus thing, and finally skoosh that back in.

It worked!

I almost forgot about the shock. But Rauden forgot nothing and told me what to do. It was easy.

We didn’t have Sonny Rollins later, nothing. We just do the work. We don’t sit on the steps and have a cigarette. When it’s over, we don’t sit around at all, we have to race to get me to my ride to the last MagLev so I could get to my cleaning job early the next morning. He’s going to let me know if it works, and if it works, I’m coming up next week to do it again. I make it to the Mag just in time. But there is the usual Bronx problem and by then it is the middle of the night and by the time I make it through the City Line hole it’s morning and I’m late to the early job, I’m fired. I needed the work. Why did I do this. I’m never doing this again.

But when I head home from the afternoon job I didn’t lose, when I get back to the empty garden apartments, when I walk in our empty unit and start missing Ani really bad, I start to think something else.

Did it work?

It’s all I can think. Did it work?

It did work.

It worked. It worked.

For three of them. One didn’t make it.

It’s like how I felt when Rini Jaffur let me know it worked, the very first time, so long ago. It’s like I’m floating.

And maybe you’re thinking, hello? I just committed a crime against nature with my own hands so my daughter could go to a really good school. Doesn’t it bother me at all?

I’m not saying that it didn’t. I’m not saying that it did.

I’m just saying I wanted to do it again. It was all I could think about. Suit up, go in the room, sit, get the stick ready to poke, NOW! Skoosh! I just wanted to do it again. And again.

And again.

6 T
HE
H
ERITAGE

THE WAY I DO THE WORK—WELL, FIRST OF ALL, I got to fix my schedule of Nassau County jobs. It’s better if I could work at the Farm say three days straight on a weekday while Ani is at school and time that around a Harvest—then I don’t need two separate trips, but it is a problem because you time Harvest from your period, and mine is not that regular these days, and neither are the roads—with the latest flu Alerts, some road is always caution-taped off. You never know how long a trip is going to take. Some say this latest one will be as bad as Luzon Second.

Meanwhile, Rauden is working on sales. You do not need a steady hand for that. He lost his old contacts so he got to advertise. We check out other hardy or Life product sites. People was not afraid to go public now—you could even offer viables as such if you watch your language. They sometimes will post the Donor’s picture, and I notice some Donors that bill themself hardy are missing teeth. So I’m not the only hardy who had sold teeth. I think I am the only one pitching hardy viables this pure, because what are the chances anyone but us cloned the Original? Even so, we aren’t going to risk going public with that. A quiet One on One with a client or broker, we could go into more detail.

Some of them post a picture of a kid the Donor had, supposedly—an Example, how the kid could turn out.

I am really not putting Ani up there.

Henry puts up a picture of me. The main thing is to make the contact with the client, then feel out the situation. There could be a problem with a picture of Ani anyhow, because she is starting to look so much like me, that could raise questions we rather avoid until we are sure who we are dealing with. Unlicensed Life sales are not such an issue these days because everyone’s doing it, ethical or not, especially overseas. But clones are always going to bother someone. I mean Ani doesn’t look exactly like me. She is narrow like me but not as narrow so, ok, the eyes? Because the face is not so narrow as mine it stretches the eyes so they are not so close and beady like mine, also she is smooth generally. I am not smooth. The hands are, you know, familiar but smooth. The hair, I don’t know how my own hair looked when I was fifteen years old. Hers sticks out. Mine is more flat, even when I fluff it. And the knees? I know she is skinnier than me, but where does she get those knees? And, come on, the teeth. That is a difference right there.

I’m not posting her up there though.

Even with the new lesser flus locally, the big sales in hardy product go on at auctions overseas, like Berlin or Istanbul, and that is out of the question because of the fare, but there are some new alternatives. Like they are working out a shipping route to Reykjavik and setting up an auction there. It turns out that auction is serviced by floating markets, they call them Lifeboats. It is like a convention of brokers on boats. It would not be hard for me to go on one of these Lifeboats with our product. To tell the truth, I am the only one of us who could, because Rauden is shaky, Janet Delize is, you know, she’s Janet Delize so that is not going to work, and, what are we, going to hire our own broker?

To prepare me for the floating market, they have to fix me up with lipstick and an outfit like when I first met Rini Jaffur, but don’t worry about the teeth, that is practically a Proof, itself. I was a little nervous getting to the Lifeboat, because it doesn’t dock in Queens. I have to get all the way to Red Hook with the cryoPaks in a carrier, then ride some little paddleboat out to sea—by now it’s November, man, the wind is off the charts—and then the way the crew is looking at the Paks, I have to look right back at them like, you try to take this Life away, I will goddamn take yours with it. Once I’m on the Lifeboat though, it all went great. It was full of brokers. I show my old Proofs and Ani’s Proofs from the Mumbai years. The Proofs have details about Ani’s age when she was in quarantine, and that makes it all seem more bona fide. Some brokers carry the portaLens, that could check the viables, be sure they are alive. They are alive. Some are asking for a picture of how the kid could look, but no way, Jose. One of these guys, I think I could tell him the truth. I mean, they are all shady but you never know if one of them is going to turn you in. But this guy seems like, I don’t know, like he has something in common with Rini Jaffur? You know, the open mind.