Year Zero (31 page)

She didn’t agree. She didn’t disagree. “You wanted something,” she said.

“That,” he said. He had to remember so far back. It pleased her. The night had taken off with him, too.
So close.
“It was about the Year Zero clones,” he said.

“Yes?” Business, indeed.

“I don’t know what all has been done to them,” he said.

“Do we need to talk about that tonight?”

“No. It’s just that they’ve been turned inside out in search of the plague. I mean these guys look like a butcher shop or something.”

She let out a deep sigh. He was going to hector her about the abuses. Condemn her for their birth. They would argue. She would order him to leave. They needed to go through the ugly motions. “Yes,” she braced herself.

“Well, I started wondering,” he said. “Has anyone ever just asked them?”

She paused. “About the plague?”

“It was just a thought,” he said. “Who knows what they might have to tell us?”

T
HE
R
EST OF
A
UGUST

I
need to see their eyes,” he told her next day. She made him follow her through the hallways. “They need to see mine.”

She was fiercely protective. “They’re patients as much as inmates. They’re wounded, even the ones who were never touched. Just by being brought back. They’re in shock. When you said talk to them, I thought you meant to use the intercoms.”

“The guards tried that once. They said the clones acted like it was the voice of God. They were in a state of terror for days.”

“You want contact,” she clarified.

“Yes.”

“That means they’ll need to be inoculated,” she said. “Two thousand years of disease have evolved since they died. Their blood is pure. We’re lucky Tara survived you.”

He chased her. “This needs to be done outdoors,” he added. “In the sun.”

She resisted. “What if one escaped? One did. He almost killed himself getting loose.”

Nathan Lee was ready. He showed her his pencil sketch for a courtyard with high walls. “We can make it in the parking lot on the side of Alpha Lab. It’s empty. There’s a tree in the middle. The housing department has prefab concrete slabs, thirty feet tall.”

“Who is this for?” she demanded. “You or them?”

“They need a little freedom. A little patch of sky. I know what I’m talking about.”

His persistence aggravated her. “What about your daughter?” she threw at him.

It took his breath. He stopped.
What was he doing?
Grace was here, in Ochs’s keeping, but she was out there, Ochs or not. Had he strayed, justifying the Year Zero men as a means to his end, a way to outwait his enemy?

Ahead in the hallway, Miranda had stopped, too.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.

But she had, and that was good, he thought. He needed the hurt. Nothing macho. It simply kept him close to himself. “We’re fine,” he said.

“What else do you want?” she asked.

“I should think about this,” he said.

“Bull,” she retorted. “You were talking about the clones. I was a little overloaded, that’s all. You’re onto something. Keep going. What else will you need?”

He tried to put Grace from his thoughts again. “They need to be together,” he said. “Every day. All of us mixed in with each other.”

“They’re used to being handled like animals. They might kill each other. Or you. You’re the first one they’d go after, their captor.”

“I’ll be one of them.”

“A clone from the year zero?”

“They’ll never know the difference.”

“You don’t speak their language.”

“And so I need a translator.”

In the end, she agreed to everything.

While the yard was being built, and the clones’ immune systems were getting boosted into the twenty-first century, a matter of seven days, Nathan Lee prepared his time machine.

Above all, he needed the right translator. Once the word spread of what he was doing, it turned out Los Alamos held hundreds of Hebrew speakers. For part of the a week he interviewed volunteers ranging from Israelis and emigres from the old Soviet bloc to bar mitzvah kids from the Bronx and Cleveland Heights. Not all were Jewish. A number of Mormons—the sciences teemed with them—turned out to be fluent in Hebrew, too, from either their missionary work or Bible scholarship.

But two thousand years ago, the binding language of the Levant had been Aramaic, now considered a dead language. That was the language commoners would have spoken on a daily basis in the towns and countryside of Judea and Samaria and Galilee. In a sense, Aramaic was the language of captivity, for it had displaced Hebrew during the Jews’ long exile in ancient Babylon. Well into the second century, synagogues had provided Aramaic translations, or Targums, of Hebrew scripture to the uneducated masses. It was the language the clones murmured in their cells.

During his field research in northern Syria, Nathan Lee had learned of a small community of
Suriani,
or Syrian Orthodox Christians, who had been expelled from Turkey in the late 1970s and ended up in a remote village above Aleppo. He had made the journey a few times just to listen to them speaking an extinct tongue. Now, to his surprise, Los Alamos contained a scientist who had been born in that very village.

His name was Ismail Abouma Symeon. He spoke with a heavy Scottish accent, the product of his university training in Edinburgh. His experience with mammal cloning had brought him to the Hill. “Call me Ishmael,” he solemnly declared on their first meeting.

Nathan Lee went along with it. “Ishmael,” he repeated with the same grave dignity.

Immediately a smile cracked the man’s black beard. “Kidding,” he said. “You Yanks. Izzy will do.”

Izzy was a find in more ways than one. Besides his Aramaic and good humor, he was a natural. More than any of the Hebrew speakers, who leaned towards the urban and intellectual, Izzy had the soil and times in him. Family lore connected him to Simeon Stylites the Elder, a hermit who’d gotten tired of being pestered by the masses and spent the last thirty years of his life on top of a pillar.

“Old Simeon,” Izzy called him. “He kicked off a whole movement. It spread across Europe, monks building higher and higher pillars. Reminds me of that Everest mania back in the nineties, all those hard men acting like they wanted no damn thing to do with the masses, but perching themselves in public view where you couldn’t miss them. Same thing, the stylites. They’d die up there from hunger, exposure, lightning. When they finally came tumbling down, pilgrims would fight for pieces of their bodies. Martyrs. Always some fool ready to believe.”

Nathan Lee told him about his plan to infiltrate the clones and mingle with them. “I’m not sure how they’ll behave,” he warned. “We’ll have to disguise ourselves. It could be dangerous.”

“I’m good for it,” said Izzy. “Gone half blind from the microscope. Be nice, some sun. Can’t wait to meet the lads. Let’s see where they lead.”

A
T NOON OF THE DAY
of first contact, August 20, the clones emerged into the courtyard one by one. Each wore the same rubber shower sandals and white hospital bathrobes without the sashes. Nathan Lee had begged the clothing from the commissary, all of a kind, none better or worse than the others. It was simple for now, something to cover their nakedness, nothing with zippers or buttons.

Izzy was near the front of the column of men, Nathan Lee next to last. There were thirty-eight of them; Miranda had picked up a few more. They surfaced into direct sunlight. Blinded, they halted in a knot just outside the door and held their hands to their eyes.

The air smelled of pines and sagebrush. One of the men moaned, a long stream of lunatic rapture. When he stopped to take a breath, his moans went on echoing off the polished walls. Otherwise they stood silent.

It was strange to be standing among them. For over a month now, Nathan Lee had been observing them over a black and white TV monitor. He knew some of their names, and how long they had been alive this second life. He had some idea of the experiments they had been used for, and how and where they had most likely died two eons ago. He could have shown each one of them the bits of bone and mummified flesh from which they’d been born. For all he knew, one night, years ago, he had even helped tear some of these very men from the dirt of Golgotha while Ochs shined a flashlight down on him. Now they pressed against his shoulders. He could feel the heat of their living bodies.

He waited near the back of the bunched men for whatever came next. He looked across their little sea of heads, and their hair was black and russet and sandy, thick, thinning, curly, and straight. They didn’t smell like men. Every day for months the ceiling nozzles had sprayed them with disinfectant, and it coated their pores. The smell reminded him of anatomy lab.

He tried to see through their eyes. The hard blacktop would seem to them mysterious with its fading white stripes. The walls towered. Boxlike cameras swiveled on metal joints high above their reach. A fire awaited them by the big evergreen. At least that much would be familiar, he hoped. After a few minutes, his plan worked. The crackle of flames and the sweet white piñon smoke drew them over.

First one, then another let loose of the doorway. They staggered and shuffled, even the barrel-chested men with jaws like horseshoes. Their bodies were feeble. Nathan Lee copied their slow, awkward gait. Some of the men’s surgery scars had healed to the bone, and they crossed the ground bent or hitching with pain. It was less than a hundred feet to the fire, but they acted like it was a mile. One man fell. No one reached down to help him. Nathan Lee noticed that. They did not connect to the tribe of their rebirth yet. Each took care of himself.

In terms of pure ethnography, the anthropologist was supposed to observe, not shape, especially at the outset. Copying the others, Nathan Lee walked past the struggling invalid. The man lay on the warm black-top, groaning. When Nathan Lee looked back, he was trying to crawl to join the group. But the clones’ flesh was soft from captivity. The skin on the man’s bare knees ripped like tissue. Blood smeared the asphalt.

The clones gathered near the fire. Those who bothered to notice their fallen brother merely watched. Their skin might be soft, but their eyes were hard. Nathan Lee understood, or thought he did. They were repelled by the man’s weakness because it exposed their own weakness. Their fraility was strange to them, and so they shut out this frail stranger. In the space of ten feet, the man’s white robe had become filthy with oil and dirt. He tired quickly. After another minute, he gave up and simply lay in the middle of the parking lot.

Nathan Lee glanced around to see who was still watching, and was startled to find one of the clones watching him. It was the fugitive, his scarred face a patchwork of expressions. One eyelid, sewn back in place too tightly, suggested fury. The razor wire had caught him across the mouth, and one side drooped, while the other side curved in a goofy smile. Nathan Lee nodded at him, and the fugitive’s plastic eyelids blinked in what could as easily have been contempt as a greeting.

The clones gathered around the crackle and spit of the flames. No one spoke. On the far side of the fire, Izzy shot a confused glance at Nathan Lee. Had they misjudged? Were the clones more damaged than they realized? Over half the men had never uttered a sound in their cells. Nathan Lee had imagined traveling with them through their once-upon-a-time landscapes. But maybe he was wrong. The years of isolation and medical torture might have broken their minds. Or they may never have had real minds. The skeptics could be right. The act of cloning might have created only the shapes of men. Their murmured words could have been just so many neural twitches, a jumble of ancient syllables and nonsense. Maybe they were just animals with names.

Except for the fallen man’s mindless sobbing out there in the parking lot, their silence stretched on for another ten long minutes. Nathan Lee looked from Isaiah to Matthew and the tall John and the John with thick ankles and wrists, and at all the rest of them. Except for the mutilated fugitive, they had not seen the sun nor smelled a forest nor felt the heat of a fire in two thousand years.

At last Nathan Lee couldn’t bear listening to the man’s groaning and weeping. It wasn’t his pain or self-pity that was so disturbing, but the indignity of his situation. Maybe he didn’t have any conception of dignity anymore, but it still bothered Nathan Lee. The man was weak, that was all, as blameless as the lepers who had once taken care of him. If for no other reason than that, a bit of sentimental payback, he stepped away from the gathering.

Nathan Lee knew it would make him conspicuous, but he walked across the parking lot anyway. He placed a hand on the man’s back. His cheekbone was scraped raw. A puddle of urine surrounded his body. His eyes rolled at the touch.

“Come on, let’s get you on your feet,” Nathan Lee murmured in English. He got his hands under the man’s armpits and hoisted him off the ground. The clone began moaning, then flailing. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. To him, all of this was probably a bad dream, awake or not. Either way he didn’t want to be rescued. He fought, feebly.

From behind, Nathan Lee clutched at the slippery body. The man twisted in his embrace. He spit and bucked and babbled. Nathan Lee heard laughter from the fire. He was part of the spectacle. He’d created the spectacle. This whole thing was his doing, the yard, the sun, the taste of freedom. A dumb mistake. Just the same, he held on.

Finally the man quit struggling. He rested his head on Nathan Lee’s shoulder and began crying softly. Nathan Lee got one arm over his shoulder and they finished the walk to the fire. The others didn’t make room at first. It wasn’t hostile, more bovine, herdlike, unthinking. He shoved at them and they separated. Holding his passenger upright, Nathan Lee stood in the sweet, white smoke. He looked around and some of the men were eyeing him, weighing his act. Plainly they thought he was a fool. Now he was soiled with a madman’s spit and urine. The fugitive stared at him with that seamed monster mask. There was no reading his serpent smile.

Nathan Lee lifted his chin and squinted into the smoke and fire.
Screw these guys.
He was angry with himself. Already they had him pegged as a bleeding heart.

But they seemed to come alive after that. One of them picked up a green pine needle with his fingertips, and broke it. He smelled it, and touched it to his tongue.