He sighed. “I don’t have much time,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll come back to L.A. again. Another month, at most, and then they’ll put me down. Before I show signs of aging.”
He tells me he read about them, Marilyn and Jack. He, the original went by Jack, which is why John calls himself John. Or Johnny.
Like me, he doesn’t know if it’s true or not, about the originals; if they ever got together. But my Johnny is alone. He was the only one cloned of all of Jack’s family. He didn’t even have clone-twins. Jack is cloned at the rate of one a year. They move through the crèche system, through their appearance-tours one at a time, one succeeding the other. And he needed something, some human anchor.
He chose me because I looked older than the others.
He says there’s a difference in the walk, a difference in the oh-so-practiced smile.
He tells me loves me.
“You don’t need to go back,” I said. It was close to dawn and we’d had sex countless times. Now we lay together in each other’s arms. “You don’t need to go back. You’ve stolen the car. We should run. My clients tell me there are still wilderness areas. We could get lost in one of those. No one would ever find us there. No one would. They wouldn’t even look. Too expensive for two models near the end of their cycle.”
“They get a lot of money from the to-do in Dallas,” he said. He pulled gently away from me and sat at the edge of the bed, putting his shirt and pants on. “Lots of nuts get to dress up and reenact it all—to be assassins and policemen. I read about it. I cracked their system. The other one, the younger one of me is ready to leave the crèche.”
He put his cuff links on. Cuff links. I’d only seen them in vids before. But for some reason, those little pieces of jewelry look incredibly sexy, very masculine. The embodiment of a by-gone era. He snapped them on, without looking, like he did that every day.
He probably did.
“Besides,” he said. “The sensor I rigged will tell them if I’m gone after dawn. I couldn’t rig it that far. They know my proclivities, and they work around them. And you’ll be missed.”
I looked at the dot on my finger. The dot indicated how many hours I had left on my shift. It pulsed, one, two. One, two. “We have two hours. I won’t be missed for two hours. We could get lost in some wilderness in two hours. I know we could. There’s a place called Death Valley. I’d rather die there, than you dying somewhere without me.”
He laughs, and takes me in his arms, and twirls me around and around the small space in the room. “Let’s. Let’s. Life is short, and I’m tired of doing what I have to do. Let’s. It might be doomed, but it’s worth a try.”
A try was all we got. They spotted us by the ID box of the car, before we even flew out of L.A.
They seemed to think our attempt was very funny.
They took Johnny with them, took me back to the offices and the dorms. They put an ankle marker on me, that will tell them if I leave the part of the street assigned to me.
Every night I walk, and I smile, and I wave.
Last week, I asked a client about the thing in Dallas—and he showed me the whole show on his pocket newsy.
Bullets tearing into the golden flesh, ripping into the soft brown curls.
It hurt me, as if they’d ripped into my heart, but I forced myself to watch it all, to watch it to the end.
I could run again, force them to kill me. But what’s there to run to? Soon my own end will come, in less than two years. There will be the cold bite of the injection on my arm, and then nothing.
The church people say my kind has no souls.
Life is short, and then you die.
But for a couple of months I was alive. For a couple of months I had my dear John.
Johnny, Johnny, I hardly knew you.
Trafalgar Square
This story came while researching for a Chinese Fantasy novel which, of this writing, is still not finished. The misfortunes of China make interesting reading but in the situation just before the Mongol invasion—the ascension of a middle class, the falling in disuse of old ways, I caught a glimmer of the same type of situation before the French revolution. I wondered if the very concept of freedom as we hold it was an accident of history that might never have existed at all. Or might have existed in quite a different way. Since what I was reading was—of necessity—written in the nineteenth century, I started getting very tired of references to the mysterious oriental mind. Being convinced that human races have cultures but human individuals do not inherit these by birth, only by raising, this statement annoyed me. I wondered if, perhaps, things had gone differently, the Chinese might not be more like us than we might be like ourselves….
“Please, Mister.” The girl slid up to Yu Lin, as he entered the London Liberation hotel. “Please Mister. May I read your paper?” She spoke awfully accented Mandarin and reached a small hand towards the Chinese newspaper that he carried, rolled, atop his briefcase.
Yu Lin stopped, his business-casual long green tunic rustling around him.
He’d heard it all in his year and a half as a business executive in London. Please Mister, do you have soap? Please Mister, have spare cash? Please Mister, I’ll go up to your room and make you feel good.
He was sick and tired of London, the misery of London like a sore, infected wound upon the face of the world. He longed for home, with a near physical desire.
But that, May I read your paper? was a new one.
He forgot his last business meeting, the ever-present question of when he’d get to go home, and looked wearily at the girl.
She wore dark blue peasant style loose pants, and the type of tunic that used to be called a worker’s tunic. Both had the uneven shine of polyester much in need of washing. Her lank blond hair fell to her shoulders in unwashed clumps.
Around them, the would-be sumptuous hotel bristled with early evening activity. Business men, mostly Chinese, but a few Russians also, walked past in groups or alone, talking loudly of new ventures, capital transactions amid the scraggly potted palms, the sagging plastic-looking sofas, the already-flaking faux marble columns.
Which explained how this English girl had managed to sneak in here. Doormen were usually better than that at keeping locals away.
Had to be, what with the skinheads and radicals forever ready to murder the businessmen they considered interlopers in their native homeland.
“You,” One of the two doormen a too-thin, too pale Englishman in a too large grey uniform, approached running. “You.” He pointed a finger at the girl. “You, get out of here. You don’t belong here.”
“No.” Lin stood in front of the girl, conscious of her smell of rancid sweat and dirty clothes. “No. She’s with me.”
The guard stopped, confused. “With you?” he asked, in the very bad mandarin such people spoke.
“With me.” Even as he said it, Lin wondered about his mental health. He’d never before tried to protect an Englishman. He didn’t even like Englishmen.
He wanted to go home to China.
The girl looked startled, then smiled, showing crooked teeth.
“She’s not registered to practice here,” the doorman protested, at the same time casting Lin a puzzled glance, as if wondering what Lin could see in such a creature.
Prostitutes, like everything else in Europe, were registered, accounted for. And paid a fat fee to be allowed to practice in hotels where foreigners congregated.
Everyone else, the amateurs who offered themselves every ten steps, practiced in alleys, behind garden walls or in their own communal apartments, with all the neighbors looking on.