Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  * * *

  He undresses me slowly; he undresses teasingly.

  Like the children in those vids at the crèche, we explore each other’s body like we’re unwrapping Christmas gifts, savoring the suspense as much as the discovery of what’s really inside.

  And then we make love, slowly, slowly. We make love. Not screw and grunt, not pump and jerk. Love. Slow. In every permutation.

  Afterwards we lay together, in each other’s arms.

  * * *

  “I was hoping you’d get me again,” I said, as I lean on his broad, sweat-slick shoulder, and smell the scent of worn out male, the scent of love making thick in the air.

  He looked up at me, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion.

  “Me and not one of the other Marilyns,” I said, nuzzling his neck, at the edge where the soft skin became rough with closely shaven beard.

  He blinked. “I was looking for you.”

  For me. I’d dreamed of that, but it was nonsense. “You couldn’t have been,” I said. “We’re all alike. All the Marilyns.”

  He grinned. “No, you’re not. I know the way you walk, your expressions. That’s learned. Not what you get from being someone’s clone.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. No one who hadn’t worked with clones knew we were different from each other at all. Or different from the originals. “You know a lot about clones. What are you? A genetic engineer at one of the fancy labs around here?”

  He laughed. He laughed a long time, and then had trouble recovering his breath. When he did, he said, “No. No. I’m just visiting town. I’m not from around here.”

  Afterwards, I called myself several kinds of idiot. What genetic engineer would use a disposable credit gem with only what he must pay for a doxy service? Engineers were rolling in credits, had expense accounts on company credigems.

  * * *

  He didn’t come back the next night, nor the next. It was just the regulars, the other Johns, who emerged from those egg-like multicolored cars, and bumped and ground by the hour.

  Then one night, two months after, a dusty, travel-stained car stopped, near me, and as I turned, swaying my hips and smiling, he emerged.

  “John” I said.

  He smiled. “You remember me.”

  He had enough for the night.

  * * *

  We make love like castaways on an alien shore, who grasp each other in desperation. We cling and writhe in the sweaty bed, the sanitation band broken, the sheets wrinkled and thrown onto the floor in haphazard joy.

  * * *

  “Where did you go?” I asked him, laying spent beside his golden, sweaty body. “Where did you go?”

  He laughed, a laughter that betrayed joy, not amusement. “Missed me, babe, did you?”

  I nodded.

  “I went…. To other places. I’m…. I lecture… In schools,” he said.

  I thought that explained the retro suit, and I didn’t say anything.

  Later in the night, though, he asked me how old I was.

  “Twelve,” I said. “Seven years out of the crèche, two years to go.”

  He looked grave, serious. “How do they do it?” he asked. “How do they do it, when they choose to end you?”

  “When senescence sets in, they give us a lethal injection,” I said. “It saves us the pain of aging and the troubles of old age.” Straight out of the book from the crèche.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Bullshit. It saves them the trouble of feeding you, of looking after you in your old age. You make them all the money they want, and then they just put you down, when your tissues start degenerating, as the tissues of clones will.”

  I looked at him, surprised. Humans don’t usually care that much.

  He took a deep breath. He looked like a drowning man. “I am fourteen,” he said. “They put us to death by shooting us. By recreating his assassination. Big to do in Dallas. Every year.”

  * * *

  His features fall into place with an almost physical sound, an almost physical pain. That’s who he is, I think, Jack.

  * * *

  I blinked at him.

  “Just another clone, you’re right,” he said. “Just another clone.”

  “But….” I said. “The credigems, the car….”

  He grins. “I take them. I figured out how to glitch the system long ago. We sleep in these temporary buildings, while we’re touring, and I have figured out how to tamper with the alarm.

  How to tamper with the computer, too, so that the sensors on my bed tell them I’m still there.”

  “But….” I said. What company would put up with it? They paid big money for the tissues of the people they cloned. Probably a lot bigger money for his than for mine. They would have to get their money’s worth, right?

  He shrugged. “I’ve heard them talk once. They say its in the baseline personality that I’ll break the rules. So they have to put up with it.” His eyes filled with tears, as he turned to me—his eyes like the sea rising. “Do you still want me? Do you still want me now that you know what I am?”

  I shrugged. “You’re nothing I’m not.” I buried my face in his hair and nibbled at his ear.

  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 ca
r, 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.

  Lin sighed. He reached into the pocket inside his broad left sleeve and retrieved three copper cash, which he flung at the man. “She is now.”

  The imbalance of currencies was so great that such a meager tip made the man bow three times. “Certainly, certainly, mister, miss.”

  But, as he walked with the girl towards the elevators at the far end of the lobby, past the potted plants and strangely granitic sofas, Lin could feel the man’s eyes on the back of his skull, analyzing him, wondering what a well-dressed, up and coming Chinese businessman could want with a scruffy, dirty piece of baggage such as that.

  Lin wondered too.

  * * *

  It was the newspaper, he decided later.

  Had she asked for soap, or money, or offered herself, Lin would not have given her a second thought. But her odd blue eyes—Lin still couldn’t think of blue eyes but as being odd full of greedy speculation, while she asked for the newspaper that he carried folded atop his briefcase. That had disturbed his thoughts.

  Later he sat in the restaurant of the hotel, across a grease-smeared table from the Englishwoman and watched her greedily turn the pages of the newspaper, while the steak he’d bought her lay forgotten in its chipped plate, at the side of the table.

  “You’re not eating,” he said.

  He himself had scant appetite. Beef in England always smelled spoiled and was a color only slightly lighter than gunmetal grey. The result of being imported over who knew what distances.

  But he knew how scant meat of any kind was in England and what a treat the locals considered it.

  Strange, he thought. He’d come in with Dragon Clouds Unlimited, a cigarette factory. Unable to sell cigarettes in the free world where doctors had made the ill effects of tobacco too well known, Chinese cigarette companies preyed on Europeans and, instead of the many things Europe needed, exported this one vice, this one bad habit, this added bit of pollution.

  She looked up at him, glanced at her steak, cut a piece of it and ate it quickly, then returned to the paper.

  “It says here,” she said. “It says here that students have rebelled in France. That the government conceded and agreed to the right to free elections.”

  Lin nodded, fascinated at her reaction. “You didn’t know?”

  “One hears….” She shook her head. “Rumors. But one can’t be sure. Can never be sure. The news never mention it.”

  “But” Lin started. Oh, sure, Europe had been in the grip of communism for almost fifty years, and communications had been severely restricted. But now things were different. It was the 1990s, as the Europeans counted time, from the death of their crucified God. “It’s been happening everywhere. Surely you know that? France, and Iberia, and Germany. One after the other, their governments have collapsed, and free elections….”

  “Free elections!” She looked like a child hearing mention of a forbidden sweet. Her eyes sparkled, and her mouth opened in wishful desire.

  Her eyes looked the color of the sky over Hangchow, his native town, he thought. He smiled at her, though he fancied that at her words there had been a lull
in the conversations around them, a stop in the chatter of businessmen and hookers at the other too-close together tables.

  She laughed at his smile. “My name is Emily Dorset,” she said. “I probably should have told you that before.” She looked down at her steak, smiled at him. “Since you bought me dinner and everything. My friends call me Emma.”

  “Mine is Yu Lin,” he said. “I come from Hangchow, a provincial city in central China.”

  Just the thought of home, the thought of houses not pressed together, the thought of houses that weren’t rabbit warrens in the monolithic cement of totalitarian countries, brought with it a wave of longing. He thought of sailing on the reservoir of Hangchow, and sighed.

  He’d given it all up to come to England. It had seemed such a good idea. Go to England. Introduce them to free enterprise.

  Instead, he was working for a monolithic corporation in exile amid the barbarians.

  And he smiled at that, because that was exactly what his ancestors had called the rest of the world. Barbarians. And Yu Lin who’d thought himself so modern had, over the last year, come to think of them just that way.

  He’d thought Englishmen were just like Chinese, only with different customs, religion and politics. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  He wasn’t so sure there wasn’t something wrong, servile, subservient, at the bottom of the European soul.

  Emma was smiling into his abstracted expression. “You’re thinking of home, aren’t you?”

  He felt himself blush, a heat on his cheeks.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I often feel that way too, only I have no home to return to, except….”

  “Except?” Lin prompted. Her sky-blue eyes had darkened, as though a cloud passed over them.

  “Nothing. I was going to say if I had a home, it would be a home more like China, with human rights, with vote, with freedom.”

  Now Lin was sure of it, an almost palpable listening silence in the hotel.

  England was supposed to be freer now. England couldn’t touch him. But what would they do to Emma?