Trinity II: Manchester
The following is the sequel to Trinity, beginning over fifty years after the invention of the Clone Banks. Written by C. Nicholas Walker.
THE CLONE RIGHTS Movement wasn't just another misguided annoyance of a group that picketed for anyone in particular anymore. Behind the signs and statements they had a following of millions, whether the Science Council wanted publicly to admit it or not. The disappearance of the Cleric, who had first taught them the ills of the Clone Banks, only motivated the cause that much more. There was a battle brewing between the activists of the Clone Rights Movement and the government of Earth, and the battle was only gaining strength and speed. Soon, its forceful energy would be unstoppable to all the People of Earth, both politicians and protesters.
Raymond Manchester was not going to let the recent riots in Washington, D.C. ruin his wedding. As far as he was concerned, the "Clonies" could all move to Europa where there were no Clone Banks to complain about. Including his mother. Why they wanted to stay on Earth, causing riots and killing people, he couldn’t tell. She never participated in the riots and she never killed anyone, of course, but his mother was an avid activist for the group nonetheless. Raymond had tried to talk her out of herself, but that proved impossible; his mother was as stubborn as he, and without some life-changing event she wasn’t going to change her mind unless she wanted to.
“But they’re alive, Ray. They’re people,” she’d say to him. “How do you not see how inhumane those banks are? They hold bodies, for God’s sake! Did you know the clones don’t even know what’s happening while they’re getting ripped to pieces so that you can live better?”
“Well, what’s the problem, then?” he would say back to her, “If they don’t know the difference and it makes me feel better, eh?”
She didn’t like his sarcasm, but it was all in good fun. Raymond knew she was just going through a phase, a kind of mid-life crisis. It happened to all mothers, and even in the twenty-third century it still happened the same way, and some things never changed. But God love her for trying, he thought.
Everyone knew the wedding was going to be beautiful. Held outside in the middle of a southern spring, Ray and Laura would say their vows from underneath a white arbor he had built himself. Fresh roses covered everywhere they stepped, and in the mist of the heat and flowers and roses, well, it was a spectacular sight to see.
They said their vows that day and the pictures flowed like wine. For once in her life his mother had nothing to say, and during the reception and rice tossing she simply stood back and watched with an empty smile on her face, like a hollow shell of a woman whose insides have been carved out of herself.
They flew to Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles across the electromagnetic highways that stretched across the heavens of Earth to a room made of bamboo and straw and porcelain and steel, and the night was all it could have been. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, he knew that his mother had shown him the perfect woman in the perfect time of his life, almost as if she knew just what he was needing. She was always in touch with him that way, knowing what he wanted ever since he was too young to talk. As he lay in bed with his new wife, he thought of the first time they had met.
Raymond’s work had just begun to decline, and though he hardly left his house, when he did it was in a great depression. People thought he was strained, that the constant bombardment of the interplay between life and work was tearing him apart from the inside out, and that he only needed an escape. They thought that work was becoming life, that one was assimilating the other, and soon he would not know the difference between the two, and the result would be he would have no life, only work. Well, all work and no play makes Ray a dull boy.
“You need a companion,” his mother would say. If only anyone were good enough for you, mother, Raymond thought to himself. All the women in the world were too nice, or too emotionally involved, or too protective, or too adventurous, or anything that a woman could ever possibly be too much of. Anything, Raymond thought, to stop him from being happy.
Of course, she surprised him when she invited him out to dinner with the family, to “unwind,” she said, and although a night with his family wasn’t quite the quintessence of pleasure, he admitted that he needed something, anything, to take his mind off his work.
And the night was wonderful.
After a few drinks, the lights of the bar where his parents and brothers and sisters sat and ate melted together, the greens and neons and reds lit into a bowl and poured onto a canvas of brick and peanuts and mirrors where his mother stood, laughing, her hair knotting and her teeth glaring at him like a mischievous sprite, her laugh ringing deep into the shot glasses and wine bottles hanging from the ceiling of the place. And then, there she was, the epitome of beauty and elegance, walking through a background of wild colors and perfumes that, like a drugged and rabid dog, no one else could perceive. She glowed in the light of the bar.
“Hello,” she had said to him, “My name is Laura, and I’m a friend of your mothers.”
Laura, he whispered to himself. His mother introduced them properly, speaking barely of Raymond and mostly to Laura in words he never could remember, even almost a year later.
“Did I ever tell you,” Raymond said to Laura, his new wife, as she lay sleeping in the bed, “that the first time we met, in that bar with my family, I fell in love with you with no second guesses? It’s odd, really. It was love at first sight if there ever was such a thing, Laura. And I still love you. For some reason I know I always will. You’re perfect for me, just like my mother said. You’re perfect.”
And then, from out of her bosom there rang an all too familiar tune that stretched the memories of Raymond Manchester back into the days before he ever thought he could remember, back into the days when all was right with the world and the worries were few and far between. Asleep, resting silently into his words on love and devotion, her lips sprang forth a song like trickling water through the dirt, building a stream of mire and mud too small to notice. There were no words, merely a tune of notes that played along in the air so quietly it was difficult to hear, but with that song she sang, Raymond saw and heard things his body had not sensed in years, not since he was a child being cradled in the arms of his mother when she was still strong enough to hold him with only her arms as supports.
“Laura? Laura, what is that song you’re singing?”
His voice was heavy and sweaty, as if he never wanted to ask the question. But there was no answer, and his voice dissipated into the sound of his own breath.
“Laura?”
She’s asleep, he thought, she’s singing that song in her sleep...
And then...he remembered. Like a simple word that struggles on the tip of your tongue to come into creation, he realized where he had heard this song before, years and years ago.
Mother? he thought, oh so quietly to himself. That’s the song mother wrote the day that she had me. I remember now. She sang it to me every night when I was a baby, and even when I was older than that, just learning how to walk and talk. But she never told anyone about that song. Never. It was just her and me...a song she had made up, right out of her own brain. Just a song.
Raymond was sweating now, shaking, unable to control his own perspiration as he stared into his sleeping wife, still humming his mother’s song to herself. Still singing...still singing. He peeled the covers off of his body and rolled out of the bed, trying to calm the thud from his feet smacking onto the wooden floor, and moved with a panic to the dresser drawer on the other side of the room. As he screeched open one of the doors and pulled its shelf out, he began to wonder what he was looking for and why he felt like he was melting. Because it couldn’t be true. Because what he was thinking was impossible. (Still singing...still singing.) Because it just couldn’t happen.
But when he found the picture, the room blurred away into a realization of the world around him so sharp that it hurt to think.
A wedding present from his aunt. He looked at the shiny silver frame, moving it in and out of the light, then into the picture; an old digital one from before his time. It was a picture of his mother and her sister, still in their young twenties, standing alone on the beach in the sunshine and laughing. And there she was, as clear as the daylight.
“Laura...it’s Laura!” he said in trembling words.
When he looked back at his sleeping wife, still singing -- her song making him sick now -- he thought very hard about how his mother had done it. He wondered how she had gained access to her Clone Banks, and how she had manipulated the middle clone’s DNA into producing a brain in the first place. He wondered how much of a chance it must have been that his mother’s clone began singing a song that only she had written, and how connected and analogous their two brains must have been. And most of all, he wondered how sick and demented his mother must have become to decide that the only woman in the world good enough to be with her son...was her.
But that didn’t matter to Raymond anymore. His face twisted against the sound of rain falling on the room, a rain that had begun to pour violently and cold as he looked at the picture, and thunder shook the ground as he lost all account of rational thought—could hardly even see in the light of his own rage against that evil, iniquitous woman whom he called mother, and now Laura. I believe it must have been at that very instant, as he stared into the face of his mother’s clone, that the last remnant of sanity in his mind snapped away into the darkness.
And as the lighting blared in through the window, and as the thunder struck the ground around him, Raymond Manchester picked up the nearest thing his fingers could find and smashed it deep into the mind of his wife, his hair knotting and his teeth glaring, smiling at the silence of the song.
THE CLONE RIGHTS Movement wasn't just another misguided annoyance of a group that picketed for anyone in particular anymore. Behind the signs and statements they had a following of millions, whether the Science Council wanted publicly to admit it or not. The disappearance of the Cleric, who had first taught them the ills of the Clone Banks, only motivated the cause that much more. There was a battle brewing between the activists of the Clone Rights Movement and the government of Earth, and the battle was only gaining strength and speed. Soon, its forceful energy would be unstoppable to all the People of Earth, both politicians and protesters.
Raymond Manchester was not going to let the recent riots in Washington, D.C. ruin his wedding. As far as he was concerned, the "Clonies" could all move to Europa where there were no Clone Banks to complain about. Including his mother. Why they wanted to stay on Earth, causing riots and killing people, he couldn’t tell. She never participated in the riots and she never killed anyone, of course, but his mother was an avid activist for the group nonetheless. Raymond had tried to talk her out of herself, but that proved impossible; his mother was as stubborn as he, and without some life-changing event she wasn’t going to change her mind unless she wanted to.
“But they’re alive, Ray. They’re people,” she’d say to him. “How do you not see how inhumane those banks are? They hold bodies, for God’s sake! Did you know the clones don’t even know what’s happening while they’re getting ripped to pieces so that you can live better?”
“Well, what’s the problem, then?” he would say back to her, “If they don’t know the difference and it makes me feel better, eh?”
She didn’t like his sarcasm, but it was all in good fun. Raymond knew she was just going through a phase, a kind of mid-life crisis. It happened to all mothers, and even in the twenty-third century it still happened the same way, and some things never changed. But God love her for trying, he thought.
Everyone knew the wedding was going to be beautiful. Held outside in the middle of a southern spring, Ray and Laura would say their vows from underneath a white arbor he had built himself. Fresh roses covered everywhere they stepped, and in the mist of the heat and flowers and roses, well, it was a spectacular sight to see.
They said their vows that day and the pictures flowed like wine. For once in her life his mother had nothing to say, and during the reception and rice tossing she simply stood back and watched with an empty smile on her face, like a hollow shell of a woman whose insides have been carved out of herself.
They flew to Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles across the electromagnetic highways that stretched across the heavens of Earth to a room made of bamboo and straw and porcelain and steel, and the night was all it could have been. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, he knew that his mother had shown him the perfect woman in the perfect time of his life, almost as if she knew just what he was needing. She was always in touch with him that way, knowing what he wanted ever since he was too young to talk. As he lay in bed with his new wife, he thought of the first time they had met.
Raymond’s work had just begun to decline, and though he hardly left his house, when he did it was in a great depression. People thought he was strained, that the constant bombardment of the interplay between life and work was tearing him apart from the inside out, and that he only needed an escape. They thought that work was becoming life, that one was assimilating the other, and soon he would not know the difference between the two, and the result would be he would have no life, only work. Well, all work and no play makes Ray a dull boy.
“You need a companion,” his mother would say. If only anyone were good enough for you, mother, Raymond thought to himself. All the women in the world were too nice, or too emotionally involved, or too protective, or too adventurous, or anything that a woman could ever possibly be too much of. Anything, Raymond thought, to stop him from being happy.
Of course, she surprised him when she invited him out to dinner with the family, to “unwind,” she said, and although a night with his family wasn’t quite the quintessence of pleasure, he admitted that he needed something, anything, to take his mind off his work.
And the night was wonderful.
After a few drinks, the lights of the bar where his parents and brothers and sisters sat and ate melted together, the greens and neons and reds lit into a bowl and poured onto a canvas of brick and peanuts and mirrors where his mother stood, laughing, her hair knotting and her teeth glaring at him like a mischievous sprite, her laugh ringing deep into the shot glasses and wine bottles hanging from the ceiling of the place. And then, there she was, the epitome of beauty and elegance, walking through a background of wild colors and perfumes that, like a drugged and rabid dog, no one else could perceive. She glowed in the light of the bar.
“Hello,” she had said to him, “My name is Laura, and I’m a friend of your mothers.”
Laura, he whispered to himself. His mother introduced them properly, speaking barely of Raymond and mostly to Laura in words he never could remember, even almost a year later.
“Did I ever tell you,” Raymond said to Laura, his new wife, as she lay sleeping in the bed, “that the first time we met, in that bar with my family, I fell in love with you with no second guesses? It’s odd, really. It was love at first sight if there ever was such a thing, Laura. And I still love you. For some reason I know I always will. You’re perfect for me, just like my mother said. You’re perfect.”
And then, from out of her bosom there rang an all too familiar tune that stretched the memories of Raymond Manchester back into the days before he ever thought he could remember, back into the days when all was right with the world and the worries were few and far between. Asleep, resting silently into his words on love and devotion, her lips sprang forth a song like trickling water through the dirt, building a stream of mire and mud too small to notice. There were no words, merely a tune of notes that played along in the air so quietly it was difficult to hear, but with that song she sang, Raymond saw and heard things his body had not sensed in years, not since he was a child being cradled in the arms of his mother when she was still strong enough to hold him with only her arms as supports.
“Laura? Laura, what is that song you’re singing?”
His voice was heavy and sweaty, as if he never wanted to ask the question. But there was no answer, and his voice dissipated into the sound of his own breath.
“Laura?”
She’s asleep, he thought, she’s singing that song in her sleep...
And then...he remembered. Like a simple word that struggles on the tip of your tongue to come into creation, he realized where he had heard this song before, years and years ago.
Mother? he thought, oh so quietly to himself. That’s the song mother wrote the day that she had me. I remember now. She sang it to me every night when I was a baby, and even when I was older than that, just learning how to walk and talk. But she never told anyone about that song. Never. It was just her and me...a song she had made up, right out of her own brain. Just a song.
Raymond was sweating now, shaking, unable to control his own perspiration as he stared into his sleeping wife, still humming his mother’s song to herself. Still singing...still singing. He peeled the covers off of his body and rolled out of the bed, trying to calm the thud from his feet smacking onto the wooden floor, and moved with a panic to the dresser drawer on the other side of the room. As he screeched open one of the doors and pulled its shelf out, he began to wonder what he was looking for and why he felt like he was melting. Because it couldn’t be true. Because what he was thinking was impossible. (Still singing...still singing.) Because it just couldn’t happen.
But when he found the picture, the room blurred away into a realization of the world around him so sharp that it hurt to think.
A wedding present from his aunt. He looked at the shiny silver frame, moving it in and out of the light, then into the picture; an old digital one from before his time. It was a picture of his mother and her sister, still in their young twenties, standing alone on the beach in the sunshine and laughing. And there she was, as clear as the daylight.
“Laura...it’s Laura!” he said in trembling words.
When he looked back at his sleeping wife, still singing -- her song making him sick now -- he thought very hard about how his mother had done it. He wondered how she had gained access to her Clone Banks, and how she had manipulated the middle clone’s DNA into producing a brain in the first place. He wondered how much of a chance it must have been that his mother’s clone began singing a song that only she had written, and how connected and analogous their two brains must have been. And most of all, he wondered how sick and demented his mother must have become to decide that the only woman in the world good enough to be with her son...was her.
But that didn’t matter to Raymond anymore. His face twisted against the sound of rain falling on the room, a rain that had begun to pour violently and cold as he looked at the picture, and thunder shook the ground as he lost all account of rational thought—could hardly even see in the light of his own rage against that evil, iniquitous woman whom he called mother, and now Laura. I believe it must have been at that very instant, as he stared into the face of his mother’s clone, that the last remnant of sanity in his mind snapped away into the darkness.
And as the lighting blared in through the window, and as the thunder struck the ground around him, Raymond Manchester picked up the nearest thing his fingers could find and smashed it deep into the mind of his wife, his hair knotting and his teeth glaring, smiling at the silence of the song.
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