Clone

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Alvin is a clone. One of four, all raised separately, all with unnatural powers. Terrified by their potential, their creator attempts to wipe their recent memories, their knowledge of the talents. But the process goes wrong, and all four are left with no memory at all. They see the world with brand new eyes. Sent to a remote research station, kept under the guidance of an intelligent ape, Alvin begins to recover his memories. Desperate to rediscover his brothers, he sets off to London in a desperate search for their creator. But when he is kidnapped by criminal apes, the trouble really begins.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 186

Sample

AT 12.30 HOURS on September 3rd, 2072, Alvin had an eidetic hallucination. Since it was the first he had experienced the effect upon him was wholly unprecedented. He sat down on the stump of the Forsythe spruce he had just felled, clasped his hands across his chest and began to shiver uncontrollably.

Observing the lad’s strange behaviour, his companion Norbert, a thirty-two-year-old Antaen-hybrid chimpanzee, switched off his laser trimmer and came over to see what was the matter. In the normal way Norbert was an ape of few words but he was extremely fond of Alvin and felt protective towards him. He rested his left hand on Alvin’s right shoulder and gripped him reassuringly with his prosthetic thumb. ‘You feeling all right, son?’ he enquired.

By this time the severest of Alvin’s tremors had abated a little. He swallowed manfully and blinked his eyes. ‘I saw…’ he began, and then shook his head.

Norbert peered round at the muddy ground all ribbed and churned with the imprint of their plastic boot soles. Alvin’s saw was lying where he had dropped it. It had switched itself off. ‘What about the saw?’ he said.

Again Alvin shook his head. Unclasping one arm from his rib cage he raised his hand and appeared to grope, somewhat hesitantly, at the empty air about eighteen inches in front of his nose. ‘I saw this girl,’ he said slowly, ‘as real as you are, Norbert. I swear I did.’

Norbert frowned. Pushing back his helmet he scratched his deeply furrowed brow. ‘“Girl”?’ he repeated dubiously. ‘What girl, son?’

‘She had green eyes,’ murmured Alvin dreamily, ‘and dark brown hair.’ He sighed. ‘Oh she was as pretty as myosoton aquaticum, Norbert. Even prettier.’

The chimp realized that it was his duty to call up Control and report the matter, but something in Alvin’s rapt expression restrained him. He consulted the timeteller strapped to his left wrist and said: ‘We’ll take our break now. You wait here and I’ll go and fetch our packs from the buggy.’

He gave Alvin’s shoulder a comforting squeeze, then knuckled his way crabwise across the slope and vanished among the trees by the water’s edge.

All alone Alvin sat gazing out unseeing across the reservoir with an expression of near-idiotic bliss on his round, guileless face. Two large, happy tears gathered along his lower eyelids, brimmed over, and trickled unheeded down his chin.

Norbert returned five minutes later. He handed Alvin his lunch pack and sat down beside him on the trunk of the felled tree. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Maybe it was Doctor Somervell.’

‘No, Norbert,’ said Alvin firmly, ‘I’m sure it wasn’t anyone I’ve ever seen here.’

The chimp selected a sandwich from his own pack, peeled back a corner to expose the peanut butter filling, smacked his lips appreciatively and then took a healthy bite.

‘Besides,’ added Alvin reflectively, ‘Doctor Somervell isn’t pretty.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Norbert. ‘She pinks up pretty good.’

‘This girl,’ said Alvin, ignoring the observation, ‘had green eyes. Doctor Somervell has brown eyes.’

‘Maybe she changed ‘em,’ shrugged Norbert, unscrewing the cap of his boiler flask and raising it to his lips.

‘It wasn’t Doctor Somervell,’ insisted Alvin with some heat. ‘After all, Norbert, I ought to know! I saw her!’

‘No offence meant,’ said Norbert wiping his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Eat up, son.’

Alvin undid his pack, extracted an apple and took a moody bite out of it. For a minute or two he chewed away in thoughtful silence, then, swivelling round on his tree stump till he was facing the chimp he said: ‘It could be from Before, couldn’t it, Norbert?’

‘“Before”?’ echoed the chimp. ‘Before what?’

‘Before I was here.’

‘There’s no such thing,’ said Norbert uneasily. ‘You know that, Alvin. Hey, if you don’t want that core, I’ll have it.’

Alvin passed across the apple core and helped himself to a sandwich. He knew Norbert was speaking the truth simply because his earliest memory was of waking up in the Station’s sick bay and seeing Doctor Somervell and Doctor Pfizier bending over him. That was when Doctor Pfizier had given him his name—’Alvin’. Later, of course, he had acquired a whole host of other memories, but that was the first and it had always been Alvin’s favourite. He found it quite impossible to express adequately either the gratitude he felt towards the good, grey-haired old Hydrologist who had introduced him to his identity, or the sense of almost dog-like devotion with which he recalled those early talks the two of them had had. ‘Now you be good, Alvin,’ the gentle old scientist had enjoined him, ‘and let the others be the smart cookies.’ How often Alvin’s eyes had misted over as he recollected the fervent tremor in his own voice as he had replied: ‘Oh, I will, sir! I will!’ ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, Alvin. Don’t you ever forget that, my boy.’ ‘I won’t, sir! Believe me!’ ‘Women are a snare and a delusion, Alvin.’ ‘Even Doctor Somervell, sir?’ ‘Mo’s the worst of the lot, but don’t say I told you.’ The old man’s wisdom had flowed like a pellucid, inexhaustible fountain and young Alvin had drunk deep.

If he had so far been unable to test the validity of many of the good doctor’s precepts it was for the simple reason that adequate opportunity had never presented itself. Since the complement of the Aldbury Hydrological Station was restricted to Alvin, the two scientists and thirty-two prosthetized apes, the boy’s temptations were minimal, and until the incident already described, he had not even felt anything that could be classed as curiosity about his origins.

His cognizant life having been passed mainly in the company of the chimps, whom he had found to be in all significant respects immeasurably his superiors, Alvin felt none of the anti-anthropoid resentment that was still to be met in other less enlightened areas of the world. For their part, once the problem of his union membership had been sorted out, the apes accepted him in a brotherly way and had been happy to relieve him of the contents of his slender wage packet whenever he sat in on one of their Saturday poker schools. Eventually Norbert had felt constrained to call a branch meeting—from which Alvin had been tactfully excluded—and had told his fellow apes that it was a shame to take advantage of such a nice guy. Since then Alvin’s regular losses at the card table had diminished remarkably and, once or twice, much to his amazement and delight he had even won a small pot.

The Station on which Alvin worked was part of the vast complex of artificial freshwater lakes that had been created towards the end of the 20th Century to supply the ever-increasing demands of the London Conurbation. Some hundreds of square miles of rich agricultural land had been inundated and more would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate had not a series of increasingly violent earthquakes finally persuaded the government of the day that the money spent on re-building devastated towns might be more advantageously invested in de-salination plants.

The Aldbury Station was responsible for Lake Tring and Lake Gaddesden together with that area of the Chilterns which constituted their catchment area. Its principal duties were to monitor erosion, nutrient salt balance and biological productivity. Among its peripheral concerns were re-afforestation, tree culling, maintenance of fish stocks, hire of pleasure craft and management of the two refreshment centres. These tasks were left entirely in the hands of the apes who had also, on their own initiative, organized a round-the-clock, summer rescue service.

It was Alvin’s most dearly cherished ambition to become a helmsman of one of the two Skeeto rescue boats. In his daydreams he sped up and down the ten-mile stretch of Lake Tring, his tangerine-tinted Zyoprene wetsuit glittering like a goldfish as he swooped to rescue beautiful maidens from watery graves. Unfortunately an inherent inability to distinguish between port and starboard at moments of stress seemed likely to preclude him from ever realizing his ambition. Bosun, the grizzled old ape who was in charge of the rescue service, had given strict orders that Alvin was never to be allowed near the Skeetos unless he was accompanied by a fully qualified chimp.

Alvin did not allow himself to become despondent. By dint of assiduous coaching from Norbert he could now average five correct port and starboard calls out of every ten, which, as he was quick to point out, was already half way there. Meanwhile he occupied his weekends in assisting the female chimps to run the refreshment centres or, from time to time, in puttering round the lakes in the Station’s Platypus with Norbert to check on anglers’ licences.

At the time of his eidetic hallucination Alvin had been at the Aldbury Station for three years and four months. Biologically speaking he was then exactly eighteen years and two months old. Five foot five inches tall, with straw coloured hair, protruberant, pale blue eyes and remarkable ears that stuck out like pink handles almost at right angles from the sides of his round head, he was not perhaps the most handsome of youths, but he possessed something far rarer than mere masculine good looks, namely a truly beautiful character. There was something so undeniably saintly about Alvin that even the apes were moved to wonder. He appeared to live only to please others and they had soon wearied of sending him off to fetch them left handed lasers and cans of spotted paint because he was so obviously upset at being unable to gratify their wishes. He would return forlorn, his periwinkle blue eyes large with unshed tears and confess his failure in such abject tones that their laughter died on their lips and they patted him on the shoulder and told him not to take it to heart. Since that was so obviously just where Alvin did take it and since the apes, by and large, were a kindly lot, the game soon lost its appeal, and many of them agreed in private with Norbert who gave it as his opinion that God had sent Alvin to them to make them all better apes and to awaken the essential apeishness which slumbered within them.

From this it will be immediately evident that Norbert himself was no run-of-the-lab anthropoid but as much a unique individual in his own way as Alvin was in his. Early in life Norbert had ‘caught religion’ and though the initial fever had burnt itself out he had never been the same since. He now believed that everything had been put on earth for some divinely inscrutable purpose and that to those who kept an open mind and gave due reflection this purpose would one day be made apparent. He had been quick to perceive how well Alvin fitted in to this theosophical system and had gone out of his way to assist the youth towards the realization of his true potential. The happiest moment of Norbert’s life so far had been when Alvin had turned to him one day and said: ‘Norbert, with you and Doctor Pfizier around I know I’ll never need to worry.’ At that instant Norbert had his Pisgah revelation. His life’s purpose was to shelter Alvin from the rough buffeting of a hostile world until one day, hand in hand and side by side, they would enter the Promised Land.

Alvin’s vision of the girl with green eyes had disturbed Norbert more deeply than he cared to admit to the lad. Later that afternoon, when they had returned to the Station, he made a point of seeking out Doctor Somervell and laying the problem before her. He felt obscurely that this was a case for a woman’s intuition and he was greatly relieved when she said: ‘I’m glad you’ve told me this, Norbert. It’s high time young Alvin was put straight on a thing or two. Send him along to see me after supper. Oh, and tell him to have a shower first.’

Confident that he had acted in Alvin’s best interests Norbert bowed and left the room.

AT 42 MAUREEN SOMERVELL possessed the sort of Junoesque physique which, a hundred years before, might have led to her being referred to in awed tones as ‘all woman’. By profession she was an analytical chemist and, as such, in charge of the water analysis at Aldbury. Although the daily sampling of run-off and its subsequent assessment was an automatic process in the control of a computer, ‘Mo’ Somervell was renowned for what she herself liked to call ‘getting back to basics’. In the summer months she could frequently be observed, clad in a scarlet bathing suit, her splendid hams sheathed in a pair of transparent waders, dipping around with a sampling funnel on the marshy edges of Lakes Tring and Gaddesden.

Bent low over her work she presented an impressive expanse of bare pink buttock to the world at large and to the male apes in particular. At such moments atavistic impulse tended to re-emerge from the depths of the anthropoid hypothalamus, elbow its way through the Zobian-cultured cortical tissue, and flaunt itself vividly in the anthropoid anatomy, while across the simian faces conflicting emotions of wonder, doubt and despair flitted like shadows.

In their private discussions the younger apes maintained that she must be doing it on purpose, but most of the older ones held that it was just a happy accident. It only remains to be said that none of the chimps ever overstepped the bounds of propriety and that Doctor Somervell was never short of volunteers to help carry her equipment when she set out on one of her summer forays.

Her own attitude towards the apes resembled that of a kindly but authoritarian primary school teacher towards her pupils. Although the average anthropoid I.Q. was in the upper 120’s she could never quite bring herself to believe it. ‘I like to think of them as children—happy children,’ she once confessed to a visitor. ‘I daresay that’s a pretty old-fashioned approach but it seems to work very well in practice.’

Her relationship with Dimitri Pfizier was a different matter. She herself had once described it as ‘like the waters of Lake Tring—basically stable but liable to seasonal variations’. The stable elements were her admiration for Dimitri’s professional expertise, a thwarted maternal instinct and pure habit; the variables her need for something more sexually satisfying than her temperamental, ten-year-old, Mark 3 nutatory paramour, and her subconscious outrage at Dimitri’s recently expressed preference for the companionship of Zinnia, a six-year-old chimp with an affected lisp and a penchant for embroidery.

A recent attempt to programme her paramour with a retrospective approximation of Dimitri’s physical co-ordinates had been grievously frustrated by the temperature moderator going on the blink at the critical moment and drastically reducing the degree of tumescence. By the time the anthropoid service engineer had diagnosed the fault and put it right she had temporarily lost interest in surrogation. Since then she had been looking around for some direct method of re-kindling Dimitri’s waning fire. Norbert’s news seemed to offer just the opportunity she had been waiting for.

When Alvin, fresh from his shower and wearing his best zip-suit, knocked on her door and obeyed her summons to come in, he was slightly taken aback to find that she was not wearing her customary white overalls but a sort of semi-transparent, fluffy, pink and white knee-length garment that made her look as though she was swaddled in candy-floss. Her feet were thrust into a pair of pink, sequin-dusted powder-puff slippers. These, as far as Alvin could tell, were all she was wearing.

He closed the door carefully behind him. ‘Norbert told me you wished to see me, Doctor Somervell.’

She smiled at him and patted the pneumatic couch. ‘That’s right, Alvin. Come over here and sit beside me.’

Alvin moved forward obediently and took his place at her side.

‘My, you smell good!’ she observed, leaning over him, flexing her nostrils and inhaling deeply.

Alvin blinked. ‘Do I, Doctor Somervell? I’m glad you like it.’

‘I certainly do, Alvin. But let’s drop the “Doctor Somervell”, shall we? You know my name’s “Maureen”, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Doctor Somervell.’

Doctor Somervell chuckled tolerantly. ‘Well, perhaps one thing at a time, eh? Now what’s this old Norbert’s been telling me about you and some girl or other?’

‘Oh, yes, Doctor Somervell!’ Alvin’s moon face became luminous with reminiscence.

‘Well, go on.’

Alvin clasped his hands in his lap and sighed. ‘She had green eyes, Doctor Somervell—the colour of duck-weed—and peat brown hair. . .