Near + Far (37 page)

They didn't say anything, just gestured him to a seat. The shuttle was mostly unoccupied seats, twenty in five rows of four, the center set facing inward as though quizzing each other, an oval window set between each pair. He settled into one of those and stared at the unpersoned window across the aisle from him. Towards the front, a couple of heads sat. He couldn't tell anything about them. They bent together as though conferring, and then one rose slightly, turned in their seat to look back.

Their face was the same as the card-players, and the mirroring effect was disorienting somehow. They glanced at him, gaze skittering across his face, then flushed, slid back into their seat, leaned over to speak with their partner again.

He leaned back against the paper-thin cushions and tried to relax. His kit was tucked under his feet. He braced them against it as the shuttle jolted into motion and the snowy vista outside was replaced with more snowy vista.

The station was just an impression of more snow before he was bundled into a squat building, its walls a pistachio green intended to be soothing. He followed the shuttle crew through a green hallway into a green room.

The woman in front of him was burly and muscular, broad shoulders suggesting life in heavy gravity, hair cut short and sensible. Broken capillaries scattered her face with fretwork as she said, "Sean Marksman?"

He nodded, setting his case down and rising again. He felt an absurd desire to stoop, reduce the difference in their heights.

She didn't seem to notice. "I'm Ghira Connell. Company rep on base. I'll give you the tour, show you where to drop your gear."

At least he had his own room, twice the size of his ship berth, a cot bumping into a small metal dresser, a fold-down two-in-one desk/com unit, a window the size of his fists pressed together, cloudy glass showing more snow.

He shoved his things under the cot, followed Ghira through more hallways.

"The clone bunks." She tapped the glass window of a door. He peered through the slit to see a space barely bigger than his own, six chest-wide bunks.

"They're all working now."

"Laying the tunnels?"

"That's the section of the project we're on right now, yeah. You've done your homework, Marksman." She studied him like a specimen, then turned. "C'mon, I'll take you to the canteen."

"How many personnel on base?" he asked, following her.

"Sixteen of us, eight hundred clones. They're not really clones, per se, of course. Created beings, straight from the pump and chump machines."

He blinked. "Is that the usual ratio?"

"No. We're worker-stressed. So we want to get you up to speed as soon as possible." She paused. He almost bumped into her.

"Look," she said. "I need to warn you, no preachy stuff."

"Huh?" he managed.

"Last guy we had from one of the fundie planets, he pissed everyone off, trying to convert them. He kept printing out lists of helpful suggestions on how they could find God, pinning them up. People didn't mind too much at first, but it got tiresome when he got to talking as well."

"Oh," he said. "That's not my sort of thing at all. I don't really believe, it's why I left." Still, it was hopeful people had tolerated difference, up to a point. They'd be patient with him as he adjusted. "You said people didn't mind too much, though?"

"Course not," she said. "Always need new toilet paper, good to have extra handy."

Before the canteen, they visited the green infirmary. All of the clones there had the features he'd noticed on the shuttle.

Something odd with one on a table towards the back. He went over to it, pulled the sheet down over the face—they left their dead in the open here?—and was appalled.

"This man has four arms!"

The chest swelled unnaturally with extra muscles. The flesh around the lower limbs looked diseased, raddled. He noted that only the upper pair had patches of hair underneath them.

"Some of the handlers experiment—they call it sculpting," Ghira said. "Most of the staff don't do it. It's a complex, time-consuming process. Most often the results aren't viable, like this one."

He stared at the body, repulsed and fascinated.

Ghira went up to a cot that held a live clone.

"How are you doing?" she said to it.

The face stared up at her. "Where are the rest?" it asked. "Are we broken?"

"You will be all right," she said, and patted its shoulder. She beckoned and Sean followed her out into the green hallway.

"What did it mean, broken?" he asked.

"Teams break when they don't have a full complement. We have to add substitutes, but it's tricky. That's one of the reasons we requested you. Your doc file says you have experience with pheromones, scent alteration? That's how we get them to accept each other."

"It's only a hobby," he said.

"We're giving you a full team, just one to start with, but you can help with the other teams, fixing them. We supply two other bases with clones—new teams go out each week."

They entered the canteen. He faced a phalanx of hostile stares. Whoever he was replacing had not been liked, and they expected the same of him. So he sat in a corner and watched for now. Should he try to make friends? Ghira seemed congenial enough, but everyone seemed to like her. Perhaps she'd be his passport to acceptance.

In the days that came, though, he didn't find himself making friends. It was his background. They all assumed he'd disapprove of their words and actions, pre-emptively dismissed him. At night he tried to replicate the scents of home, cleanser and Abraham's slightly sweet, old-man smell but none of them were right.

His clones, oddly enough, were the closest he had to friends. They called him sir, and did whatever he asked, cheerfully, uncomplainingly, six identical faces. He tried to give them names, but the concept seemed unfamiliar to them. Come evening, they ate and changed, and then piled into their tiny room. Sometimes they shared bunks, not so much for sex, as far as he could tell, but for the sake of skin against skin, like puppies in a pile. It seemed a human urge to him, but he knew they were not human. Just things, things that mimicked humanity.

After a week, he found himself slightly more accepted by the four men who called themselves Sculptors, themselves regarded as odd by the others. Social misfits together. Their leader, Pat Brig, showed him creations as though daring him to protest, things worked in flesh that were not human so much as furniture. He steeled his face, did not recoil, even when Pat showed him what he called "a sleeve." The machine could be used to create the humanoid clones or it could create beings like this, all flesh and no soul.

"Use that to satisfy yourself," Pat said. "Self lubricating. Better than a woman, doesn't talk back."

He thrust it towards Sean, who took it reluctantly, a baby sized cylinder of flesh, its surface blood-warm.

"Absorbs light and a feeding mist," Pat said. "You can have that one. I'm working on a better." He patted the machine beside him. "Put in a clone and the right instructions, and you can make them into whatever you want. You don't need to worry, I took all the brain out of that one, left only the autonomous functions."

Sean searched for excuses, finally said, "I want to keep my quarters sterile, when I'm working on scents. Thanks though."

He passed it back to Pat, who stood looking at it. Sean could tell he'd failed some test.

"Man needs satisfaction some way," Pat said. "Everyone here's paired or hooked up that's going to be."

It was true that he was frustrated. At night when he was showering, he touched himself and let his fantasies play out. The spaceship pilot, yielding to him in curlspace. Ghira, showing him exactly how friendly she could be. Women back home, the few he'd known.

Sometimes, he thought about the clones. Their skin, vat fresh and taut. Muscular and lithe. He thought some of the others might use them that way, but if so, it was kept secret. Something everyone knew but didn't talk about. Or maybe they talked about it, but not to him. The outcast. The religious. They thought he'd disapprove.

He had weekly letters from Abraham, hand-written, although printed out on plas. They always started with a Bible text, then related it to what had been happening at home. Crops failed because God was testing them. A girl was stoned because she was suspected of being a witch. At Exalted, a cabin of boys caught fire and they all died. More of God's tests. Always ending with an exhortation to pray, to ask God what He wanted of Sean.

He tried, he really did. He would sit down at a canteen table and make conversation, but it was always stilted. They talked about recent vids, but he had no vid unit—they were forbidden on God's New Promise, and he had never acquired the habit. He watched some in the common area, and they just bewildered him. A wealth of flesh seemed to be the only coherent theme.

He talked to Pat, not about the vid, but the sculptures. "Why do you make them into new things?"

"It's a way to pass the time," Pat said. "I make ... well, you've seen the sort of things I like to make, conveniences. Vonda tries to make them beautiful. Avram wants to see if different shapes are better adapted to this place. And Lilo, he just likes to play."

So he spent time working on the scent work. It was solitary, but it was useful, and the others approved when he succeeded on fixing a team, making a clone smell right to the others, letting them accept it as part of them. He was good at it, in a way the others were not—he could smell an individual and then replicate the scent.

Pat liked it; he made two flesh sleeves that would interact with each other, drawn by the scent.

"It's as though the team bond was instinctual," he said, watching them bump into each other. "Maybe that's part of the make-up. What do you think?"

But Sean didn't reply. He was thinking about last night. He had stopped one of his clones before it went into the chamber.

"Would you like to sleep in my quarters tonight?" he had whispered, feeling shame burn along his cheekbones. When he was a boy, he'd made money doing this for older men. Abraham would have killed him if he'd known. But he'd needed components for his perfumes, and the men paid well.