The Clone Ranger: Episode 12

Jack Unit 382 is a clone — one of a thousand identical Jacks laboring in the textile mills of Raven 5, a world his kind can never leave. Each night he journals the days since the treaty. But 382 has begun to suspect he is different from his brothers: he dreams, he wonders, and he wants things no Jack is supposed to want. This is his story.

Journal Entry 726

I went back to the magnolia tree today, the way I promised myself I would in yesterday's entry. I keep my promises to this journal, and this one I kept to ZX98 as well, though he never asked me to make it.

He was already on the bench. A petal was caught in his copper hair and he did not brush it away, the way a man does not brush away something he has decided to live with.

"I brought the question underneath the question," I said, and sat down beside him.

"The one you said you would bring," he said.

"Choosing must have had a moment," I said. "A husband and a wife did not simply become so in silence. A number is issued in silence. A name must be spoken. So I want to know: what did two people say, on Mon Scarab, when they chose each other?"

ZX98 looked up at the tree for a long time. When he looked back at me, there was something in his face I had not seen there before, and it took me a moment to name it. It was not his usual calm. It was embarrassment, plain and honest, the way a man looks when he has carried a question for thirty years and only now noticed he never asked the second half of it.

"382," he said, "I never asked that part."

I waited, because I have learned that his silences are not empty. They are rooms he is deciding whether to open.

"The old Bird told me the words for the two," he said at last. "Husband. Wife. He told me they belonged to each other the way a name belongs to a person. But the choosing itself, what was said, and where, and who stood near enough to hear it, he never told me, because I never asked him. I was younger then, and I thought the word was the thing. I have had thirty years to learn that it is not."

He picked up a fallen petal and turned it over in his fingers, the way he always does when the wanting sits close.

"I believe," he said, and I heard the guess in it, the way he always lets me hear the guess, "that it was said aloud, and not alone. A choosing that no one witnesses is only a thought, and thoughts are easy to carry quietly. I chose the quiet, 382. I do not know whether the old ones did."

That stayed with me all the way back to the mill, past the grey walls and the grey sky, past the shift bell and the looms. Said aloud, and not alone. I thought of the shape folded behind my bunk, the soft nameless curve my hand drew without my mind teaching it, and I understood something that made my hands go still on my work: I have spent weeks learning words. Husband. Wife. Home. Family. I have learned them the way you learn the names of rooms in a house you have never entered. But learning is not doing, and I am tired of standing outside the house.

So tonight, after the lights went low, I did something I have never done before. I took the slip from behind my bunk, and I unfolded it, and I looked at the shape, and I said the word aloud.

"Wife."

Only that. One word, spoken to no one, in my own small room. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, too small for the room and too large for it at the same time. The shape did not answer, because a drawing cannot answer, and the woman it stands for is not here and may never be. But the word, once spoken, did not go back into silence the way a thought does. It stayed in the air a moment longer than I expected, the way a petal stays on the bench after the wind has passed.

I folded the slip again, and I put it back, and I lay down with my heart beating the way it beats when the weekly ship climbs and I watch it go.

I do not know what the old ones said when they chose each other. ZX98 does not know either, and for the first time that does not frighten me. It frees me, a little. If no one alive can teach me the words, then the words will have to begin with me, not the whole choosing, not yet, only the first small act of it, spoken where another person could hear.

Tomorrow I will find 754. He used the word "family" carelessly once, as if it were nothing, and I let it pass because I did not yet know what words were for. I want to know what he meant by it, and whether he has ever said a word aloud and meant it to be heard. He is the only Jack I know who has ever spoken of such things without being asked, and a third voice may know what two voices have missed.

United are we. But tonight I am a number who spoke a word aloud to an empty room, and the room did not stay empty in quite the same way afterward.

Thanks for reading Clone Ranger: Episode 12. I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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