Your One & Only(8)

The laughter stopped as abruptly as it’d started, and even from a distance Jack could tell that smiles had spread across their faces as if they’d all heard the same joke at the same time, though nothing had been said. There were no words in this game. Another eruption of laughter ran through the group in eerie unison.

Sam had once tried to describe communing to Jack. He’d had difficulty finding the right words, like describing colors to someone who’d never seen them. He said communing was like a murmuring, a sort of whisper of emotions passing from one clone to another when they touched or were close. They didn’t know each other’s thoughts, but they sensed each other’s feelings.

Jack couldn’t commune, of course. He could never play their strange, silent games, and maybe they’d never let him participate in their rituals and ceremonies. But why shouldn’t he be in the Declaration? It only happened once, and then they could send him back to his room in the labs and forget again that he ever existed. What harm would it do to let him be part of the community in this small way? He hadn’t asked to exist. He’d heard the Council talk. They called him an experiment, like one of their genetically modified cows. They called him a de-extinction project, and maybe they called him an accident, but they had created him.

Earlier that morning, the jagged cliffs in the distance had been covered in gray mist, now burned away. They’d looked like prehistoric beasts hiding under the earth. Jack wondered, as he always did, what lay beyond those hills.

“I could leave,” Jack said. “Grab supplies, go to the jungle. Nobody would care anyway.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Sam said, puffing out his cheeks, “you would die in the jungle. You can’t survive out there alone. I’ve kept you safe here because Inga-296 asked me to. I’m not going to stop now. She said we needed you.”

“That’s a joke, Sam. No one here needs me.”

Sam’s eyes lingered on the baseball that had fallen idle in Jack’s hands. “I know you come here because of the Inga. I know you miss her.”

Jack touched the bead around his neck. He was surprised Sam had mentioned her. Inga-296 had called herself Jack’s mother, even though mothers didn’t exist in Vispera. Jack hadn’t cried about her in years, not since he was little, because early on he’d sensed too keenly Sam’s discomfort with Jack’s emotions at losing her. It was one of the many things that kept Jack apart from everyone else. The clones didn’t miss anyone. They saw themselves as the countless iterations that they were. A part of a whole. Replaceable. But Inga, his mother, had been different from anyone else in Vispera. She’d been different from the other Ingas. She had loved him.

“Of course I miss her. She was my mother.”

“Yes, your mother.” Jack noticed how the word mother rolled in Sam’s mouth, foreign and strange. Not unpleasant, just something to work his tongue around, like a sour candy. “I didn’t agree with her using that term, but she’d taken charge of the experiment, so I didn’t argue. Now I think perhaps I should have.” Sam spoke more to himself than to Jack. “And maybe it was a mistake for her to give you all those books.”

Sam was talking about the human books. The ones Sam never read. Jack had learned about humans by reading those books, and one of the things he’d learned was how, even though the humans couldn’t commune, they still cared about each other. Maybe it would never be enough to tell Sam how he felt and Sam was capable of caring about someone only if emotions emanated from them like a cloud of reeking smoke.

Deep down, even Jack sometimes wished his mother hadn’t given him the books. According to Sam, she’d been the one who wanted to raise him in the cottage on the edge of the jungle, outside the walls of Vispera. She’d wanted to raise him the way his original might have been, the way a human boy would have been raised in human times—with a home, parents, with human books and games and his own bedroom instead of a line of beds in a dorm. She’d raised him to give him some sense of who he was as a human, when really all he wanted was to be like everyone else and have friends his own age. Sometimes he resented all the ways his mother had made him different. And then, in the process, she’d made herself different too, and that had ended in the worst possible way.

“I’m sorry you won’t be part of the ceremony, Jack. But listen, I do have good news. The Council has agreed to let you have an apprenticeship. We’ll meet with you after the ceremony, and they’ll let you Declare.”

“Declare an apprenticeship?” Jack hadn’t considered this possibility that they might let him have a job in town, serve some useful purpose. He stood. “I’ll show them my music,” he said, thinking of the instrument Sam had given him years ago that was tucked away in the lab.

It’s a guitar, Sam had said back then. At least, that’s what the catalogue in the Tunnels called it. As a child, Jack had built a crude wooden box with strings pulled across the top, trying to mimic the sound of the human recordings his mother had given him. Once Sam had figured out what he was trying to do, he’d brought Jack the guitar from the Tunnels. From the beginning, Jack had been entranced.

“I can tell them how it works,” Jack said. “I’ll explain the history and play for them.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Sam said, eyeing him worriedly. “They won’t understand. I don’t even understand it, and I’ve been listening to you play for years.”